BobKKKindle$
21st March 2009, 02:13
"Why was Marx so critical of other schools of socialist thought?"
Marx's relationship with other schools of socialism is one of the main subjects contained within The Communist Manifesto, and is important for modern scholars as it allows us to evaluate the extent to which Marx saw himself as original and distinct from other socialists of his epoch, and, if so, why he was distinct. Marx's criticisms of other thinkers are also useful because they can give us greater insight into his own ideas, as the ideas put forward by other socialists that Marx identifies as worthy of criticism and the manner in which he criticizes these ideas reveal his own philosophical and political background. This essay will argue that the schools of socialist thought Marx criticizes are united by the fact that they all adopted a philosophical basis that contradicts Marx's own philosophy, and especially Marx's understanding of history, and the place of capitalism within this understanding, and it is this underlying contradiction that gives rise to disagreements on political and economic questions. Marx also saw several of these schools as the ideological manifestation of hostile class forces, and this perspective will also be examined. In seeking to explain Marx's views with reference to philosophy, this essay will also refute Carver's argument that philosophy occupied only a small space in Marx's thought.1 Therefore, in order to understand Marx's criticisms, we must trace Marx's own intellectual development, and understand the roots of his own philosophy. This, in turn, requires us to survey the intellectual environment of Marx's era.
However, before we begin this task, a qualification must be made. The expression “so critical” in the essay title may lead us to believe that Marx rejected other schools of socialism in their entirety and saw nothing of value in their ideas, but in reality this was not the case, as Marx identified the utopian socialists in particular as having made an important impact on his own political development. In 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific', Engels openly acknowledges that modern (i.e. scientific) socialism developed from the ideas of the utopian socialists in France during the initial stages of capitalist development before it became rooted in material reality and economic facts, and he praises the utopian socialists as “extreme revolutionists” on the grounds that they were willing to subject all existing ideas and institutions to scientific scrutiny in order to develop artificial communities (such as Robert Owen's New Lanark) based on rational and humane principles. Later in the same text, Engels hints that Saint-Simon may have anticipated the materialist conception of history by acknowledging the links between economics and political institutions, and Engels also notes that Owen recognized the role of material conditions in shaping human behavior. Marx even acknowledged the positive features of “middle-class socialism”, by showing that the proponents of this school had fought against the mystification of capitalism's social institutions and economic dynamics.2 This should not surprise us, as both Marx and Engels always drew from a range of intellectual sources to develop their own ideas even when these sources would not have agreed with their eventual political conclusions, and subsequent Marxists such as Lenin and Cohen have followed this example by utilizing theories and methods from outside the Marxist tradition. However, Engels ultimately described the utopian socialists as being “independent of historical development”, and herein lies the source of disagreement. For Marx and Engels, other schools of socialist thought were not scientific in their outlook and conception of history.
In order to understand the meaning of this, it is first necessary to understand the intellectual environment in which Marx operated, at the centre of which lies Hegel, a German philosopher who sought to explain the course and eventual destination of human history. and had a lasting impact on the study of philosophy. Avineri shows that Marx first discovered Hegel's ideas when he was studying at Berlin University in 1837 as a result of his involvement with the Doktorenklub, and shortly after this discovery Marx reportedly wrote a letter to his father explaining his decision to change to philosophy instead of continuing to study law as he had previously intended. As Cohen notes, Hegel's originality lies in the fact that he was one of the first philosophers to argue that history is not merely a series of random events which have no underlying meaning or connection with each other, but a a steady increase in the self-awareness of what Hegel described as the world-spirit. Hegel contended that historical events and progress are the result of the world-spirit, or the absolute, projecting itself onto material reality, and becoming aware of itself, and as such the Hegelian understanding of history is based not on empirical reality, but on the notion of an idea which exists as an independent subject outside of our material existence.3 In essence, Hegel was an idealist. Hegel built on these assumptions by arguing that in each historical epoch the development of the absolute is manifested in religion and the state, and so the direction of human history is towards Christianity, and constitutional monarchy, both of which formed the basis of religious and political life in Prussia.4
Hegel's conception of the state is of particular relevance to Marxists, as Hegel believed that the state exists in order to resolve conflicts which grow out of civil society and therefore operates independently of social and historical forces which others would see as conditioning the state in reality. Marx would later refute this abstract vision by arguing that the state cannot be separated from the rest of society, as it functions as an organ of class rule, existing to maintain the dominant mode of production and the interests of the ruling class. This partly explains why Hegel became the de-facto official philosopher of the Prussian regime, and his most loyal followers were appointed to university positions throughout Germany. It may seem at this point that there are no links between Hegel and Marx, and that Hegelian philosophy is irrelevant to the subject of this essay. However, Hegel's ideas were interpreted in a radical new way by the Left-Hegelians, the leader of whom was Ludwig Feuerbach. The members of this intellectual current argued that the Hegelian absolute is simply humanity and not connected with God in any way, and that although the state does serve as the embodiment of reason, the Prussian state did not signify the end of the historical process, and so would eventually be superseded in favor of new and more democratic political institutions. These principles form the basis of Marx's conception of history. The most important aspect of this interpretation for Marx was the emphasis on humanity and in particular the material world, and not a metaphysical idea beyond human understanding, as Hegel had previously asserted.5 Marx would later describe himself as having extracted the “rational kernel” from Hegel by turning him “right side up”, thereby allowing Marx to incorporate the notions of historical progression and dialectical conflict into his own thought on a sound materialist basis. Marx's relation to Hegel is expressed clearly as follows:
“To Hegel [...] the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought”6
This comment demonstrates Marx's materialist worldview, and also gives us an insight into his understanding of ideology. However, it is not enough to simply say that Marx was a materialist, as his understanding of history is actually far more complex than this. The starting point of Marx's analysis is the simple fact that in order to gain access to the things they need to survive humans must labour together, by entering into social relations with each other, and the degree to which we are successful in doing this determines everything else we can do. For Marx, the material interaction of human beings lies at the heart of all social change and development and if we do not begin with this premise history cannot be understood in its totality. Marx's conception of production as the basis of all human existence contains two mutually dependent components. Firstly, Marx described the technology and resources that humans have at their disposal to control the external world as the “forces of production”, and argued that these forces expand through history once class divisions have emerged within society, as the ruling class invests surplus product instead of using it for immediate consumption. Secondly, and following on from this component, Marx contended that as this process of expansion takes place, changes in the way production is organized and the relationships humans have with each other also occur, and once the productive forces have expanded to a certain point, further expansion cannot occur without a radical change in the “relations of production”, whereby an aspirant ruling class will take the place of the current ruling class, which Marx understood as a social revolution.7 In a given epoch, the sum total of the relations of production comprise the “mode of production”, of which capitalism is an example. This demonstrates that, for Marx, class struggle is the driving force behind historical change, expressed most famously as follows:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggle”8
These relations, Marx goes on to argue, then “condition” what he describes as the “superstructure”, as distinct from the “base” - the main political, cultural, and social institutions of a society. The nature of the relationship between the base and superstructure is one of the most contentious issues within Marxism but the key term is “condition” - Marx did not, as many of his critics have attempted to show, ever suggest that there was an automatic or mechanical causation. However, various interpretations remain. Callinicos roots his understanding firmly in the class struggle by arguing that, because the ruling class is economically dominant, it has the ability to shape the superstructure in a way that sustains the existing mode of production and prevents the working population from developing a revolutionary consciousness.9 Carver appears to agree with this interpretation and also draws on the notion of cultural hegemony, as well as Althusser's metaphor of a three-storey house, by arguing that the superstructure can be defined as the sphere of human activity which produces ideas, whereas the base produces material objects. However we interpret this model, it is clear that Marx put forward a dynamic and materialist conception of history.
How is this relevant to other schools of socialist thought? As noted at the beginning of this essay, Marx saw these other schools as having no understanding of historical development, and the role of capitalism in relation to other modes of production which precede and follow it. In particular, Marx argued that several schools of thought rejected capitalism, and aimed to maintain pre-capitalist modes of production such as feudalism. Despite his reputation as a principled anti-capitalist, Marx argues at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that capitalism is an incredibly progressive and dynamic mode of production compared with the feudal society which precedes it, as the drive to accumulate capital leads to the rapid development of the productive forces and the integration of the world into a single economic unit. This is an essential precondition for the successful attainment of a socialist society, because the abolition of class antagonisms requires that material scarcity has been overcome, and, in the absence of this precondition, a socialist revolution will inevitably be premature and therefore lead to the reemergence of hardship and social conflict. Capitalism establishes these conditions and thereby creates the possibility of allowing all humans to pursue higher goods instead of being forced to work for a privileged minority, although the fact that capitalism generates inequalities of wealth and power prevents this potential from being realized. This was expressed by Marx in highly emotive terms:
“A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise [of Communism], because without it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive”10
From this perspective, capitalism is a necessary stage in human history, albeit a stage characterized by intense alienation and exploitation, and any attempt to sustain feudalism, or overthrow capitalism before its progressive role has been exhausted, is reactionary, in the Marxist sense of obstructing historical progress. This position applies to several of the competing schools of socialist thought, and this is why Marx sought to criticize with such ferocity. In particular, Marx saw reactionary socialists, especially in their “feudal” and “middle class” varieties, as having committed this error, and Marx argued that these socialists failed to “understand the march of modern history”. However, for Marx, these were not intellectual errors, in the sense that they did not arise from unconscious misconceptions on the part of those who were putting them forward. Rather, by applying the materialist method, Marx argued that these ideas derived from the objective interests of a class, although pretending to speak from an objective position in the interests of society as a whole, and so the conflict between these ideas and Marx's signified class conflict in the ideological realm. In particular, these ideas reflected the concerns of classes which faced the danger of being destroyed as a result of capitalism's laws of motion, and therefore felt compelled to hold back capitalism, and create an ideological justification for doing so. Marx understood that, as capitalism develops, and commodity production becomes the dominant form of economic activity, landed property loses its place as the ruling class due to industrialization, and competition between rival capitals forces the petty-bourgeoisie to either become part of the bourgeoisie or join the ranks of the proletariat, and as such a defining feature of the capitalist epoch is the simplification of class antagonisms. This is explained by Marx as follows, in reference to the petty-bourgeoisie:
“The feudal aristocracy is not the only class that has been ruined by the bourgeoisie, and whose conditions of life starved and perished in modern bourgeois society”11
In addition, the gradual centralization of capital and the emergence of large units of production, combined with capitalism's inherent tendency to enter crises of increasing duration and intensity as a result of overproduction and falling rates of profit, generates a revolutionary proletariat capable of overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism in its place. In dialectical terms, this signifies the negation of the negation – capitalism (specifically, the bourgeoisie) negates feudalism, and the development of capitalism gives rise to a new force capable of negating capitalism in turn. This second consequence of capitalist development – a threat to the position of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class – is for Marx manifested as “bourgeois socialism”, through which the bourgeoisie calls on the proletariat to “cast away its hateful ideas about those conditions”, i.e. the existing social conditions of capitalist society, or through conciliatory reforms which leave “unaltered the relations of capital and wage-labour”. This is summarized thus:
“They want the existing state of society with the elimination of its revolutionary and disintegrating elements”12
It is worth, at this point, evaluating Marx's conception of ideology. Marx believed that any set of ideas reflects the interests of a social class, although ideologists must always try and present their ideas as applying to the whole of society and not just a privileged section of it in order to gain legitimacy and popular support. It is interesting to contrast this with the liberal conception of ideology; whereas liberals might argue that political action consists of someone applying their abstract ideological beliefs to the real world, for Marxists, the promotion of ideology occurs in order to rationalize the state of society and the actions of the ruling class, although ideology, once promoted, may also influence the way we interact with our surroundings and fellow human beings, as Heilbroner points out. This means that ideology is used to obscure or justify the prevailing contradictions of capitalism and thereby prevent the proletariat from grasping the injustice of a capitalist society and taking revolutionary action against their exploiters. Thus, ideology has a mystifying effect, and the role of communists, as Lenin would later argue, is to remove ideology and enable the proletariat to obtain an objective vision based on its own class interests. On connection with this, it is noteworthy that Marx praised the middle class socialists for their efforts to lay “bare the hypocritical apologies of the economists”. From this argument is is possible to draw a further conclusion – although the state, as an organ of class rule, is an important means by which the ruling class maintains power, ideology also has a key role, and the extent to which the bourgeoisie is capable of maintaining the legitimacy of its own ideology, or “cultural hegemony”, to use Gramsci's term, impacts the intensity of class struggle, and thus the stability of bourgeois rule. Marx eloquently summarized this lesson with the phrase “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. The link between class interest and politics is not limited to ideology, and Marx also applied the same argument to political organizations in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, by contending that the different factions of the bourgeoisie manifested themselves as different political currents and movements, with the “aristocrats of finance and big industrialists” being represented by the Orleanists, and so on.
The above has shown that Marx saw other schools of socialist thought as the ideological manifestation of hostile class forces. However, this does not apply to the utopian socialists, and as noted at the beginning of this essay, Marx did not condemn these socialists in the same way as other schools. Despite this, the faults of the utopian socialists lie in the same category as other schools, specifically their failure to scientifically understand capitalism and what was required to overcome capitalism, and Marx also sought to root this current in material reality by arguing that utopian socialism was a symptom of early capitalism, before the proletariat had become a revolutionary force. Most importantly, Marx identified the utopian socialists as representing the
“first instinctive aspirations of the workers towards a complete transformation of society”13
This makes the utopian socialists qualitatively different from others which Marx criticized, as the faults of utopian socialism do not reflect hostile class interests. In explaining the main features of this school of socialism, Marx argued that because capitalism had not yet created the “material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat”, the utopian socialists sought to create elaborate and detailed plans. Fourier, for example, specified the exact number of people to be contained in each phalanstère, and suggested that social change would generate changes in the natural environment and even human physiology. The contrast with Marx is striking, as Marx notoriously did not specify the institutions of a post-revolutionary society, and when he did make suggestions, he did so on the basis of life under capitalism, as in Critique of the Gotha Program, where Marx argued that socialism would distribute output according to how much people worked, regardless of differences in individual need or ability, as capitalist ideology would still be dominant. In addition to confidently creating schemes of their own, Marx also criticizes the utopians for having rejected or misunderstood class struggle, as they defended the working class only because it was the most impoverished, and not because capitalism gives the proletariat a social and economic position which makes it capable of overthrowing and eventually replacing capitalism. This even led the utopians to reject the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, and to seek to prove to society as a whole that their schemes were rational and therefore advantageous. This rejection of class struggle led the utopians in turn to reject the desirability of revolutionary struggle as a means of changing society, preferring instead to create isolated experiments within the framework of capitalism (or “castles in the air”) to no avail. Marx expressed his criticism as follows:
“Thus they consistently endeavor to suppress the social struggle and to reconcile class antagonisms”14
In conclusion, this essay has shown that, in order to understand why Marx was so critical of other schools of socialist thought, we have to understand Marx's historical method, and the means by which he arrived at this method, as the source of his disagreement with these schools lies in their failure to grasp the role of capitalism within human history, and in relation to the possibility of human emancipation, as well as the importance of class struggle. Marx sought to trace the errors of opposing schools back to their class bases, and this reveals the fundamental importance of class antagonisms in Marx's thought. Whether politics can be reduced to class, and whether this is a fair description of Marx's ideas remain highly contentious issues, but in a period of impending depression, and, as some would argue, increasing attacks on working people throughout the world, Marx's emphasis on class has much to teach us.
Bibliography:
Avineri, S., The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
Bottomore, T., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought
Callinicos, A., The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx
Callinicos, A., Essays on Historical Materialism
Carver, T., Marx's Social Theory
Cohen, G., Karl Marx's theory of History
Heilbroner, R., Marxism: For And Against
Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
Marx, The Preface to a Critique of Political Economy
Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Ideology
Marx, The German Ideology
Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia (www.marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org))
Marx's relationship with other schools of socialism is one of the main subjects contained within The Communist Manifesto, and is important for modern scholars as it allows us to evaluate the extent to which Marx saw himself as original and distinct from other socialists of his epoch, and, if so, why he was distinct. Marx's criticisms of other thinkers are also useful because they can give us greater insight into his own ideas, as the ideas put forward by other socialists that Marx identifies as worthy of criticism and the manner in which he criticizes these ideas reveal his own philosophical and political background. This essay will argue that the schools of socialist thought Marx criticizes are united by the fact that they all adopted a philosophical basis that contradicts Marx's own philosophy, and especially Marx's understanding of history, and the place of capitalism within this understanding, and it is this underlying contradiction that gives rise to disagreements on political and economic questions. Marx also saw several of these schools as the ideological manifestation of hostile class forces, and this perspective will also be examined. In seeking to explain Marx's views with reference to philosophy, this essay will also refute Carver's argument that philosophy occupied only a small space in Marx's thought.1 Therefore, in order to understand Marx's criticisms, we must trace Marx's own intellectual development, and understand the roots of his own philosophy. This, in turn, requires us to survey the intellectual environment of Marx's era.
However, before we begin this task, a qualification must be made. The expression “so critical” in the essay title may lead us to believe that Marx rejected other schools of socialism in their entirety and saw nothing of value in their ideas, but in reality this was not the case, as Marx identified the utopian socialists in particular as having made an important impact on his own political development. In 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific', Engels openly acknowledges that modern (i.e. scientific) socialism developed from the ideas of the utopian socialists in France during the initial stages of capitalist development before it became rooted in material reality and economic facts, and he praises the utopian socialists as “extreme revolutionists” on the grounds that they were willing to subject all existing ideas and institutions to scientific scrutiny in order to develop artificial communities (such as Robert Owen's New Lanark) based on rational and humane principles. Later in the same text, Engels hints that Saint-Simon may have anticipated the materialist conception of history by acknowledging the links between economics and political institutions, and Engels also notes that Owen recognized the role of material conditions in shaping human behavior. Marx even acknowledged the positive features of “middle-class socialism”, by showing that the proponents of this school had fought against the mystification of capitalism's social institutions and economic dynamics.2 This should not surprise us, as both Marx and Engels always drew from a range of intellectual sources to develop their own ideas even when these sources would not have agreed with their eventual political conclusions, and subsequent Marxists such as Lenin and Cohen have followed this example by utilizing theories and methods from outside the Marxist tradition. However, Engels ultimately described the utopian socialists as being “independent of historical development”, and herein lies the source of disagreement. For Marx and Engels, other schools of socialist thought were not scientific in their outlook and conception of history.
In order to understand the meaning of this, it is first necessary to understand the intellectual environment in which Marx operated, at the centre of which lies Hegel, a German philosopher who sought to explain the course and eventual destination of human history. and had a lasting impact on the study of philosophy. Avineri shows that Marx first discovered Hegel's ideas when he was studying at Berlin University in 1837 as a result of his involvement with the Doktorenklub, and shortly after this discovery Marx reportedly wrote a letter to his father explaining his decision to change to philosophy instead of continuing to study law as he had previously intended. As Cohen notes, Hegel's originality lies in the fact that he was one of the first philosophers to argue that history is not merely a series of random events which have no underlying meaning or connection with each other, but a a steady increase in the self-awareness of what Hegel described as the world-spirit. Hegel contended that historical events and progress are the result of the world-spirit, or the absolute, projecting itself onto material reality, and becoming aware of itself, and as such the Hegelian understanding of history is based not on empirical reality, but on the notion of an idea which exists as an independent subject outside of our material existence.3 In essence, Hegel was an idealist. Hegel built on these assumptions by arguing that in each historical epoch the development of the absolute is manifested in religion and the state, and so the direction of human history is towards Christianity, and constitutional monarchy, both of which formed the basis of religious and political life in Prussia.4
Hegel's conception of the state is of particular relevance to Marxists, as Hegel believed that the state exists in order to resolve conflicts which grow out of civil society and therefore operates independently of social and historical forces which others would see as conditioning the state in reality. Marx would later refute this abstract vision by arguing that the state cannot be separated from the rest of society, as it functions as an organ of class rule, existing to maintain the dominant mode of production and the interests of the ruling class. This partly explains why Hegel became the de-facto official philosopher of the Prussian regime, and his most loyal followers were appointed to university positions throughout Germany. It may seem at this point that there are no links between Hegel and Marx, and that Hegelian philosophy is irrelevant to the subject of this essay. However, Hegel's ideas were interpreted in a radical new way by the Left-Hegelians, the leader of whom was Ludwig Feuerbach. The members of this intellectual current argued that the Hegelian absolute is simply humanity and not connected with God in any way, and that although the state does serve as the embodiment of reason, the Prussian state did not signify the end of the historical process, and so would eventually be superseded in favor of new and more democratic political institutions. These principles form the basis of Marx's conception of history. The most important aspect of this interpretation for Marx was the emphasis on humanity and in particular the material world, and not a metaphysical idea beyond human understanding, as Hegel had previously asserted.5 Marx would later describe himself as having extracted the “rational kernel” from Hegel by turning him “right side up”, thereby allowing Marx to incorporate the notions of historical progression and dialectical conflict into his own thought on a sound materialist basis. Marx's relation to Hegel is expressed clearly as follows:
“To Hegel [...] the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea." With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought”6
This comment demonstrates Marx's materialist worldview, and also gives us an insight into his understanding of ideology. However, it is not enough to simply say that Marx was a materialist, as his understanding of history is actually far more complex than this. The starting point of Marx's analysis is the simple fact that in order to gain access to the things they need to survive humans must labour together, by entering into social relations with each other, and the degree to which we are successful in doing this determines everything else we can do. For Marx, the material interaction of human beings lies at the heart of all social change and development and if we do not begin with this premise history cannot be understood in its totality. Marx's conception of production as the basis of all human existence contains two mutually dependent components. Firstly, Marx described the technology and resources that humans have at their disposal to control the external world as the “forces of production”, and argued that these forces expand through history once class divisions have emerged within society, as the ruling class invests surplus product instead of using it for immediate consumption. Secondly, and following on from this component, Marx contended that as this process of expansion takes place, changes in the way production is organized and the relationships humans have with each other also occur, and once the productive forces have expanded to a certain point, further expansion cannot occur without a radical change in the “relations of production”, whereby an aspirant ruling class will take the place of the current ruling class, which Marx understood as a social revolution.7 In a given epoch, the sum total of the relations of production comprise the “mode of production”, of which capitalism is an example. This demonstrates that, for Marx, class struggle is the driving force behind historical change, expressed most famously as follows:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggle”8
These relations, Marx goes on to argue, then “condition” what he describes as the “superstructure”, as distinct from the “base” - the main political, cultural, and social institutions of a society. The nature of the relationship between the base and superstructure is one of the most contentious issues within Marxism but the key term is “condition” - Marx did not, as many of his critics have attempted to show, ever suggest that there was an automatic or mechanical causation. However, various interpretations remain. Callinicos roots his understanding firmly in the class struggle by arguing that, because the ruling class is economically dominant, it has the ability to shape the superstructure in a way that sustains the existing mode of production and prevents the working population from developing a revolutionary consciousness.9 Carver appears to agree with this interpretation and also draws on the notion of cultural hegemony, as well as Althusser's metaphor of a three-storey house, by arguing that the superstructure can be defined as the sphere of human activity which produces ideas, whereas the base produces material objects. However we interpret this model, it is clear that Marx put forward a dynamic and materialist conception of history.
How is this relevant to other schools of socialist thought? As noted at the beginning of this essay, Marx saw these other schools as having no understanding of historical development, and the role of capitalism in relation to other modes of production which precede and follow it. In particular, Marx argued that several schools of thought rejected capitalism, and aimed to maintain pre-capitalist modes of production such as feudalism. Despite his reputation as a principled anti-capitalist, Marx argues at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that capitalism is an incredibly progressive and dynamic mode of production compared with the feudal society which precedes it, as the drive to accumulate capital leads to the rapid development of the productive forces and the integration of the world into a single economic unit. This is an essential precondition for the successful attainment of a socialist society, because the abolition of class antagonisms requires that material scarcity has been overcome, and, in the absence of this precondition, a socialist revolution will inevitably be premature and therefore lead to the reemergence of hardship and social conflict. Capitalism establishes these conditions and thereby creates the possibility of allowing all humans to pursue higher goods instead of being forced to work for a privileged minority, although the fact that capitalism generates inequalities of wealth and power prevents this potential from being realized. This was expressed by Marx in highly emotive terms:
“A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise [of Communism], because without it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive”10
From this perspective, capitalism is a necessary stage in human history, albeit a stage characterized by intense alienation and exploitation, and any attempt to sustain feudalism, or overthrow capitalism before its progressive role has been exhausted, is reactionary, in the Marxist sense of obstructing historical progress. This position applies to several of the competing schools of socialist thought, and this is why Marx sought to criticize with such ferocity. In particular, Marx saw reactionary socialists, especially in their “feudal” and “middle class” varieties, as having committed this error, and Marx argued that these socialists failed to “understand the march of modern history”. However, for Marx, these were not intellectual errors, in the sense that they did not arise from unconscious misconceptions on the part of those who were putting them forward. Rather, by applying the materialist method, Marx argued that these ideas derived from the objective interests of a class, although pretending to speak from an objective position in the interests of society as a whole, and so the conflict between these ideas and Marx's signified class conflict in the ideological realm. In particular, these ideas reflected the concerns of classes which faced the danger of being destroyed as a result of capitalism's laws of motion, and therefore felt compelled to hold back capitalism, and create an ideological justification for doing so. Marx understood that, as capitalism develops, and commodity production becomes the dominant form of economic activity, landed property loses its place as the ruling class due to industrialization, and competition between rival capitals forces the petty-bourgeoisie to either become part of the bourgeoisie or join the ranks of the proletariat, and as such a defining feature of the capitalist epoch is the simplification of class antagonisms. This is explained by Marx as follows, in reference to the petty-bourgeoisie:
“The feudal aristocracy is not the only class that has been ruined by the bourgeoisie, and whose conditions of life starved and perished in modern bourgeois society”11
In addition, the gradual centralization of capital and the emergence of large units of production, combined with capitalism's inherent tendency to enter crises of increasing duration and intensity as a result of overproduction and falling rates of profit, generates a revolutionary proletariat capable of overthrowing capitalism and establishing socialism in its place. In dialectical terms, this signifies the negation of the negation – capitalism (specifically, the bourgeoisie) negates feudalism, and the development of capitalism gives rise to a new force capable of negating capitalism in turn. This second consequence of capitalist development – a threat to the position of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class – is for Marx manifested as “bourgeois socialism”, through which the bourgeoisie calls on the proletariat to “cast away its hateful ideas about those conditions”, i.e. the existing social conditions of capitalist society, or through conciliatory reforms which leave “unaltered the relations of capital and wage-labour”. This is summarized thus:
“They want the existing state of society with the elimination of its revolutionary and disintegrating elements”12
It is worth, at this point, evaluating Marx's conception of ideology. Marx believed that any set of ideas reflects the interests of a social class, although ideologists must always try and present their ideas as applying to the whole of society and not just a privileged section of it in order to gain legitimacy and popular support. It is interesting to contrast this with the liberal conception of ideology; whereas liberals might argue that political action consists of someone applying their abstract ideological beliefs to the real world, for Marxists, the promotion of ideology occurs in order to rationalize the state of society and the actions of the ruling class, although ideology, once promoted, may also influence the way we interact with our surroundings and fellow human beings, as Heilbroner points out. This means that ideology is used to obscure or justify the prevailing contradictions of capitalism and thereby prevent the proletariat from grasping the injustice of a capitalist society and taking revolutionary action against their exploiters. Thus, ideology has a mystifying effect, and the role of communists, as Lenin would later argue, is to remove ideology and enable the proletariat to obtain an objective vision based on its own class interests. On connection with this, it is noteworthy that Marx praised the middle class socialists for their efforts to lay “bare the hypocritical apologies of the economists”. From this argument is is possible to draw a further conclusion – although the state, as an organ of class rule, is an important means by which the ruling class maintains power, ideology also has a key role, and the extent to which the bourgeoisie is capable of maintaining the legitimacy of its own ideology, or “cultural hegemony”, to use Gramsci's term, impacts the intensity of class struggle, and thus the stability of bourgeois rule. Marx eloquently summarized this lesson with the phrase “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. The link between class interest and politics is not limited to ideology, and Marx also applied the same argument to political organizations in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, by contending that the different factions of the bourgeoisie manifested themselves as different political currents and movements, with the “aristocrats of finance and big industrialists” being represented by the Orleanists, and so on.
The above has shown that Marx saw other schools of socialist thought as the ideological manifestation of hostile class forces. However, this does not apply to the utopian socialists, and as noted at the beginning of this essay, Marx did not condemn these socialists in the same way as other schools. Despite this, the faults of the utopian socialists lie in the same category as other schools, specifically their failure to scientifically understand capitalism and what was required to overcome capitalism, and Marx also sought to root this current in material reality by arguing that utopian socialism was a symptom of early capitalism, before the proletariat had become a revolutionary force. Most importantly, Marx identified the utopian socialists as representing the
“first instinctive aspirations of the workers towards a complete transformation of society”13
This makes the utopian socialists qualitatively different from others which Marx criticized, as the faults of utopian socialism do not reflect hostile class interests. In explaining the main features of this school of socialism, Marx argued that because capitalism had not yet created the “material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat”, the utopian socialists sought to create elaborate and detailed plans. Fourier, for example, specified the exact number of people to be contained in each phalanstère, and suggested that social change would generate changes in the natural environment and even human physiology. The contrast with Marx is striking, as Marx notoriously did not specify the institutions of a post-revolutionary society, and when he did make suggestions, he did so on the basis of life under capitalism, as in Critique of the Gotha Program, where Marx argued that socialism would distribute output according to how much people worked, regardless of differences in individual need or ability, as capitalist ideology would still be dominant. In addition to confidently creating schemes of their own, Marx also criticizes the utopians for having rejected or misunderstood class struggle, as they defended the working class only because it was the most impoverished, and not because capitalism gives the proletariat a social and economic position which makes it capable of overthrowing and eventually replacing capitalism. This even led the utopians to reject the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, and to seek to prove to society as a whole that their schemes were rational and therefore advantageous. This rejection of class struggle led the utopians in turn to reject the desirability of revolutionary struggle as a means of changing society, preferring instead to create isolated experiments within the framework of capitalism (or “castles in the air”) to no avail. Marx expressed his criticism as follows:
“Thus they consistently endeavor to suppress the social struggle and to reconcile class antagonisms”14
In conclusion, this essay has shown that, in order to understand why Marx was so critical of other schools of socialist thought, we have to understand Marx's historical method, and the means by which he arrived at this method, as the source of his disagreement with these schools lies in their failure to grasp the role of capitalism within human history, and in relation to the possibility of human emancipation, as well as the importance of class struggle. Marx sought to trace the errors of opposing schools back to their class bases, and this reveals the fundamental importance of class antagonisms in Marx's thought. Whether politics can be reduced to class, and whether this is a fair description of Marx's ideas remain highly contentious issues, but in a period of impending depression, and, as some would argue, increasing attacks on working people throughout the world, Marx's emphasis on class has much to teach us.
Bibliography:
Avineri, S., The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
Bottomore, T., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought
Callinicos, A., The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx
Callinicos, A., Essays on Historical Materialism
Carver, T., Marx's Social Theory
Cohen, G., Karl Marx's theory of History
Heilbroner, R., Marxism: For And Against
Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
Marx, The Preface to a Critique of Political Economy
Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Ideology
Marx, The German Ideology
Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia (www.marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org))