The Ideas of Karl Marx

A tip 'o the hat, Roger. Well worth the read, and well worth pulling
up again and again.

Carl Jarvis

On 3/1/15, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@aol.com> wrote:
> http://www.marxist.com/karl-marx-130-years.htm
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> The Ideas of Karl Marx
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> Written by Alan Woods
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> Friday, 21 June 2013
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> PrintE-mail
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> The ideas of Marx have never been more relevant than they are today.
> This is reflected in the thirst for Marxist theory at the present time.
> In this article, Alan Woods deals with the main ideas of Karl Marx and
> their relevance to the crisis we're passing through today.
>
> Marx and EngelsIt is 130 years since the death of Karl Marx. But why
> should we commemorate a man who died in 1883? In the early 1960s the
> then Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson declared that we must not look
> for solutions in Highgate cemetery. And who can disagree with that? In
> the aforementioned cemetery one can only find old bones and dust and a
> rather ugly stone monument.
>
> However, when we speak of the relevance of Karl Marx today we refer not
> to cemeteries but to ideas--ideas that have withstood the test of time
> and have now emerged triumphant, as even some of the enemies of Marxism
> have been reluctantly forced to accept. The economic collapse of 2008
> showed who was outdated, and it was certainly not Karl Marx.
>
> For decades the economists never tired of repeating that Marx's
> predictions of an economic downturn were totally outdated. They were
> supposed to be ideas of the 19th century, and those who defended them
> were dismissed as hopeless dogmatists. But it now turns out that it is
> the ideas of the defenders of capitalism that must be consigned to the
> rubbish bin of history, while Marx has been completely vindicated.
>
> Not so long ago, Gordon Brown confidently proclaimed "the end of boom
> and bust". After the crash of 2008 he was forced to eat his words. The
> crisis of the euro shows that the bourgeoisie has no idea how to solve
> the problems of Greece, Spain and Italy which in turn threaten the
> future of the European common currency and even the EU itself. This can
> easily be the catalyst for a new collapse on a world scale, which will
> be even deeper than the crisis of 2008.
>
> Even some bourgeois economists are being forced to accept what is
> becoming increasingly evident: that capitalism contains within itself
> the seeds of its own destruction; that it is an anarchic and chaotic
> system characterised by periodic crises that throw people out of work
> and cause social and political instability.
>
> The thing about the present crisis was that it was not supposed to
> happen. Until recently most of the bourgeois economists believed that
> the market, if left to itself, was capable of solving all the problems,
> magically balancing out supply and demand (the "efficient market
> hypothesis") so that there could never be a repetition of the crash of
> 1929 and the Great Depression.
>
> Marx's prediction of a crisis of overproduction had been consigned to
> the dustbin of history. Those who still adhered to Marx's view that the
> capitalist system was riven with insoluble contradictions and contained
> within itself the seeds of its own destruction were looked upon as mere
> cranks. Had the fall of the Soviet Union not finally demonstrated the
> failure of communism? Had history not finally ended with the triumph of
> capitalism as the only possible socio-economic system?
>
> But in the space of 20 years (not a long period in the annals of human
> society) the wheel of history has turned 180 degrees. Now the erstwhile
> critics of Marx and Marxism are singing a very different tune. All of a
> sudden, the economic theories of Karl Marx are being taken very
> seriously indeed. A growing number of economists are poring over the
> pages of Marx's writings, hoping to find an explanation for what has
> gone wrong.
>
> Second Thoughts
>
> In July 2009, after the start of the recession The Economist held a
> seminar in London to discuss the question: What is wrong with Economics?
> This revealed that for a growing number of economists mainstream theory
> has no relevance. Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman made an astonishing
> admission. He said "the last 30 years development in macroeconomic
> theory has, at best, been spectacularly useless or, at worst, directly
> harmful." This judgement is a fitting epitaph for the theories of
> bourgeois economics.
>
> Now that events have knocked just a little sense into the heads of at
> least some bourgeois thinkers, we are seeing all kinds of articles that
> grudgingly recognise that Marx was right after all. Even the Vatican's
> official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, published an article in 2009
> praising Marx's diagnosis of income inequality, which is quite an
> endorsement for the man who declared religion to be the opium of the
> people. Das Kapital is now a best seller in Germany. In Japan it has
> been published in a manga version.
>
> George Magnus, a senior economic analyst at UBS bank, wrote an article
> with the intriguing title: "Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World
> Economy". Switzerland-based UBS is a pillar of the financial
> establishment, with offices in more than 50 countries and over $2
> trillion in assets. Yet in an essay for Bloomberg View, Magnus wrote
> that "today's global economy bears some uncanny resemblances to what
> Marx foresaw."
>
> In his article he starts by describing policy makers "struggling to
> understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills
> afflicting the world" and suggests that they would do well to study the
> works of "a long-dead economist, Karl Marx."
>
>
> "Consider, for example, Marx's prediction of how the inherent conflict
> between capital and labor would manifest itself. As he wrote in Das
> Kapital, companies' pursuit of profits and productivity would naturally
> lead them to need fewer and fewer workers, creating an 'industrial
> reserve army' of the poor and unemployed: 'Accumulation of wealth at one
> pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery'."
>
> He continues:
>
>
> "The process he [Marx] describes is visible throughout the developed
> world, particularly in the U.S. Companies' efforts to cut costs and
> avoid hiring have boosted U.S. corporate profits as a share of total
> economic output to the highest level in more than six decades, while the
> unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent and real wages are stagnant.
>
> "U.S. income inequality, meanwhile, is by some measures close to its
> highest level since the 1920s. Before 2008, the income disparity was
> obscured by factors such as easy credit, which allowed poor households
> to enjoy a more affluent lifestyle. Now the problem is coming home to
> roost."
>
> The Wall Street Journal carried an interview with the well-known
> economist Dr. Nouriel Roubini, known to his fellow economists as "Dr.
> Doom" because of his prediction of the 2008 financial crisis. There is a
> video of this extraordinary interview, which deserves to be studied
> carefully because it shows the thinking of the most far-sighted
> strategists of Capital.
>
> Roubini argues that the chain of credit is broken, and that capitalism
> has entered into a vicious cycle where excess capacity (overproduction),
> falling consumer demand, high levels of debt all breed a lack of
> confidence in investors that in turn will be reflected in sharp falls on
> the stock exchange, falling asset prices and a collapse in the real economy.
>
> Like all the other economists, Roubini has no real solution to the
> present crisis, except more monetary injections from central banks to
> avoid another meltdown. But he frankly admitted that monetary policy
> alone will not be enough, and business and governments are not helping.
> Europe and the United States are implementing austerity programs to try
> to fix their debt-ridden economies, when they should be introducing more
> monetary stimulus, he said. His conclusions could not be more
> pessimistic: "Karl Marx got it right, at some point capitalism can
> destroy itself," said Roubini. "We thought markets worked. They're not
> working." (My emphasis, AW)
>
> The phantom of Marxism is still haunting the bourgeoisie a hundred and
> thirty years after Marx's mortal remains were laid to rest. But what is
> Marxism? To deal properly with all aspects of Marxism in the space of
> one article is an impossible task. We therefore confine ourselves to a
> general, and therefore sketchy account in the hope that it will
> encourage the reader to study Marx's writings themselves. After all,
> nobody has ever expounded Marx's ideas better than Marx himself.
>
> Broadly speaking, his ideas can be split into three distinct yet
> interconnected parts--what Lenin called the three sources and three
> component parts of Marxism. These generally go under the headings of
> Marxist economics, dialectical materialism and historical materialism.
> Each of these stands in a dialectical relation to each other and cannot
> be understood in isolation from one another. A good place to begin is
> the founding document of our movement that was written on the eve of the
> European Revolutions of 1848. It is one of the greatest and most
> influential works in history.
>
> The Communist Manifesto
>
> The immense majority of the books written one and a half centuries ago
> are today merely of historical interest. But what is most striking about
> the Communist Manifesto is the way in which it anticipates the most
> fundamental phenomena which occupy our attention on a world scale at the
> present time. It is really extraordinary to think that a book written in
> 1847 can present a picture of the world of the 21st century so vividly
> and truthfully. In point of fact, the Manifesto is even truer today than
> when it first appeared in 1848.
>
> Let us consider one example. At the time when Marx and Engels were
> writing, the world of the big multinational companies was still the
> music of a very distant future. Despite this, they explained how free
> enterprise and competition would inevitably lead to the concentration of
> capital and the monopolisation of the productive forces. It is frankly
> comical to read the statements made by the defenders of the market
> concerning Marx's alleged mistake on this question, when in reality it
> was precisely one of his most brilliant and accurate predictions.
>
> During the 1980s it became fashionable to claim that small is beautiful.
> This is not the place to enter into a discussion concerning the relative
> aesthetics of big, small or medium sizes, about which everyone is
> entitled to hold an opinion. But it is an absolutely indisputable fact
> that the process of concentration of capital foreseen by Marx has
> occurred, is occurring, and indeed has reached unprecedented levels in
> the course of the last ten years.
>
> In the United States, where the process may be seen in a particularly
> clear form, the Fortune 500 corporations accounted for 73.5 percent of
> total GDP output in 2010. If these 500 companies formed an independent
> country, it would be the world's second largest economy, second only to
> the United States itself. In 2011, these 500 firms generated an all-time
> record of $824.5 billion in profits--a 16 percent jump from 2010. On a
> world scale, the 2000 biggest companies now account for $32 trillion in
> revenues, $2.4 trillion in profits, $138 trillion in assets and $38
> trillion in market value, with profits rising an astonishing 67 percent
> between 2010 and 2011.
>
> When Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, there was no empirical
> evidence for his claims. On the contrary, the capitalism of his time was
> based entirely on small businesses, the free market and competition.
> Today, the economy of the entire capitalist world is dominated by a
> handful of giant transnational monopolies such as Exxon and Walmart.
> These behemoths possess funds that far exceed the national budgets of
> many states. The predictions of the Manifesto have been realised even
> more clearly and completely than Marx himself could ever have dreamed of.
>
> The defenders of capitalism cannot forgive Marx because, at a time when
> capitalism was in the stage of youthful vigour, he was able to foresee
> the causes of its senile degeneration. For decades they strenuously
> denied his prediction of the inevitable process of the concentration of
> capital and the displacement of small businesses by big monopolies.
>
> The process of the centralisation and concentration of capital has
> reached proportions hitherto undreamed of. The number of take-overs has
> acquired the character of an epidemic in all the advanced industrialised
> nations. In many cases, such take-overs are intimately connected with
> all kinds of shady practices--insider dealing, falsification of share
> prices, and other types of fraud, larceny and swindling, as the scandal
> over the manipulation of the Libor interest rate by Barclays and other
> big banks has revealed. This concentration of capital does not signify a
> growth in production, but quite the contrary. In every case, the
> intention is not to invest in new plant and machinery but to close
> existing factories and offices and sack large numbers of workers in
> order to increase profit margins without increasing production. Just
> take the recent fusion of two big Swiss banks, immediately followed by
> the loss of 13,000 jobs.
>
> Globalisation and Inequality
>
> Let us proceed to the next important prediction made by Marx. Already in
> 1847, Marx explained that the development of a global market renders
> "impossible all narrowness and national individualism. Every
> country--even the largest and most powerful--is now totally subordinate to
> the whole world economy, which decides the fate of peoples and nations."
> This brilliant theoretical anticipation shows, better than anything
> else, the immeasurable superiority of the Marxist method.
>
> Globalisation is generally regarded as a recent phenomenon. Yet the
> creation of a single global market under capitalism was long ago
> predicted in the pages of the Manifesto. The crushing domination of the
> world market is now the most decisive fact of our epoch. The enormous
> intensification of the international division of labour since the Second
> World War has demonstrated the correctness of Marx's analysis in an
> almost laboratory fashion.
>
> Despite this, strenuous efforts have been made to prove that Marx was
> wrong when he spoke of the concentration of capital and therefore the
> process of polarisation between the classes. These mental gymnastics
> corresponds to the dreams of the bourgeoisie to rediscover the lost
> golden age of free enterprise. Similarly, a decrepit old man longs in
> his senility for the lost days of his youth.
>
> Unfortunately, there is not the slightest chance of capitalism
> recovering its youthful vigour. It has long ago entered its final phase:
> that of monopoly capitalism. The day of the small business, despite the
> nostalgia of the bourgeoisie, has been relegated to the past. In all
> countries the big monopolies, closely related to banking and enmeshed
> with the bourgeois state, dominate the life of society. The polarisation
> between the classes continues uninterrupted, and tends to accelerate.
>
> Let us take the situation in the USA. The richest 400 families in the
> U.S. have as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the population. The
> six individual Wal-Mart heirs alone are "worth" more than the bottom 30
> percent of Americans combined. The poorest 50 percent of Americans own
> just 2.5 percent of the country's wealth. The richest one per cent of
> the US population increased its share of the national income from 17.6
> per cent in 1978 to an astonishing 37.1 per cent in 2011.
>
> During the past 30 years the gap between the incomes of the rich and the
> poor has been steadily widening into a yawning abyss. In the
> industrialised West the average income of the richest ten per cent of
> the population is about nine times that of the poorest ten per cent.
> That is an enormous difference. And figures published by the OECD show
> that the disparity which began in the US and UK has spread to countries
> such as Denmark, Germany and Sweden, which have traditionally had low
> inequality.
>
> The obscene wealth of the bankers is now a public scandal. But this
> phenomenon is not confined to the financial sector. In many cases,
> directors of large companies earn 200 times more than their lowest-paid
> workers. This excessive difference has already provoked growing
> resentment, which is turning to fury that spills over onto the streets
> in one country after another. The growing tension is reflected in
> strikes, general strikes, demonstrations and riots. It is reflected in
> elections by protest votes against governments and all the existing
> parties, as we saw recently in the Italian general election.
>
> A Time magazine poll showed that 54% have a favourable view of the
> #Occupy movement, 79% think the gap between rich and poor has grown too
> large, 71% think CEOs of financial institutions should be prosecuted,
> 68% think the rich should pay more taxes, only 27% have a favourable
> view of the Tea Party movement (33% unfavourable). Of course, it is too
> early to speak of a revolution in the USA. But it is clear that the
> crisis of capitalism is producing a growing mood of criticism among
> broad layers of the population. There is a ferment and a questioning of
> capitalism that were not there before.
>
> The Scourge of Unemployment
>
> In the Communist Manifesto we read: "And here it becomes evident, that
> the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society,
> and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding
> law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an
> existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help
> letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of
> being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie."
>
> The words of Marx and Engels quoted above have become literally true.
> There is a growing feeling among all sections of society that our lives
> are dominated by forces beyond our control. Society is gripped by a
> gnawing sense of fear and uncertainty. The mood of insecurity has become
> generalised to practically the whole of society.
>
> The kind of mass unemployment we are now experiencing is far worse than
> anything Marx foresaw. Marx wrote of the reserve army of labour: that is
> to say, a pool of labour that can be used to keep down wages and acts as
> a reserve when the economy recovers from a slump. But the kind of
> unemployment we now see is not the reserve army of which Marx spoke,
> which, from a capitalist point of view played a useful role.
>
> This is not the kind of cyclical unemployment which workers are well
> acquainted with from the past and which would rise in a recession only
> to disappear when the economy picked up again. It is permanent,
> structural, organic unemployment, which does not noticeably diminish
> even when there is a "boom". It is a dead weight that acts as a colossal
> drag on productive activity, a symptom that the system has reached a
> blind alley.
>
> A decade before the crisis of 2008, according to the United Nations,
> world unemployment was approximately 120 millions. By 2009, the
> International Labour Organisation put the figure at 198 millions, and
> expects it to reach 202 million in 2013. However, even these figures,
> like all the official statistics of unemployment, represent a serious
> understatement of the real situation. If we include the enormous number
> of men and women who are compelled to work in all kinds of marginal
> "jobs", the real figure of world unemployment and underemployment would
> not be less than 1,000 million.
>
> Despite all the talk of economic recovery, economic growth in Germany,
> the former economic powerhouse of Europe, has slowed down almost to
> zero, as has France. In Japan too the economy is grinding to a halt.
> Quite apart from the misery and suffering caused to millions of
> families, from an economic point of view, this represents a staggering
> loss of production and waste on a colossal scale. Contrary to the
> illusions of the labour leaders in the past, mass unemployment has
> returned and has spread all over the world like a cancer gnawing at the
> bowels of society.
>
> The crisis of capitalism has its direst effects among the youth.
> Unemployment among young people is soaring everywhere. This is the
> reason for the mass student protests and riots in Britain, for the
> movement of the indignados in Spain, the occupations of the schools in
> Greece and also for the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, where about 75%
> of the youth are unemployed.
>
> The number of unemployed in Europe is constantly increasing. The figure
> for Spain is nearly 27 per cent, while youth unemployment stands at an
> incredible 55 per cent, while in Greece no fewer than 62 per cent of the
> youth--two in every three--are jobless. A whole generation of young
> people is being sacrificed on the altar of Profit. Many who looked for
> salvation to higher education have found that this avenue is blocked. In
> Britain, where higher education used to be free, now young people find
> that in order to acquire the skills they need, they will have to go into
> debt.
>
> At the other end of the age scale, workers approaching retirement find
> that they must work longer and pay more for lower pensions that will
> condemn many to poverty in old age. For young and old alike, the
> prospect facing most people today is a lifetime of insecurity. All the
> old bourgeois hypocrisy about morality and family values has been
> exposed as hollow. The epidemic of unemployment, homelessness, crushing
> debt and extreme social inequality that has turned a whole generation
> into pariahs has undermined the family and created a nightmare of
> systemic poverty, hopelessness, degradation and despair.
>
> A Crisis of Overproduction
>
> In Greek mythology there was a character called Procrustes who had a
> nasty habit of cutting off the legs, head and arms of his guests to make
> them fit into his infamous bed. Nowadays the capitalist system resembles
> the bed of Procrustes. The bourgeoisie is systematically destroying the
> means of production in order to make them fit into the narrow limits of
> the capitalist system. This economic vandalism resembles a policy of
> slash and burn on a vast scale.
>
> George Soros likens it to the kind of smashing ball used to demolish
> tall buildings. But it is not only buildings that are being destroyed
> but whole economies and states. The slogan of the hour is austerity,
> cuts and falling living standards. In every country the bourgeoisie
> raises the same war cry: "We must cut public expenditure!" Every
> government in the capitalist world, whether right or "left" is in
> reality pursuing the same policy. This is not the result of the whims of
> individual politicians, of ignorance or bad faith (although there is
> plenty of this also) but a graphic expression of the blind alley in
> which the capitalist system finds itself.
>
> This is an expression of the fact that the capitalist system is reaching
> its limits and is unable to develop the productive forces as it did in
> the past. Like Goethe's Sorcerer's Apprentice, it has conjured up forces
> it cannot control. But by slashing state expenditure, they are
> simultaneously reducing demand and cutting the whole market, just at a
> time when even the bourgeois economists admit that there is a serious
> problem of overproduction ("overcapacity") on a world scale. Let us take
> just one example, the automobile sector. This is fundamental because it
> also involves many other sectors, such as steel, plastic, chemicals and
> electronics.
>
> The global excess capacity of the automobile industry is approximately
> thirty percent. This means that Ford, General Motors, Fiat, Renault,
> Toyota and all the others could close one third of their factories and
> lay off one third of their workers tomorrow, and they would still not be
> able to sell all the vehicles they produce at what they consider to be
> an acceptable rate of profit. A similar position exists in many other
> sectors. Unless and until this problem of excess capacity is resolved,
> there can be no real end to the present crisis.
>
> The dilemma of the capitalists can be easily expressed. If Europe and
> the USA are not consuming, China cannot produce. If China is not
> producing at the same pace as before, countries like Brazil. Argentina
> and Australia cannot continue to export their raw materials. The whole
> world is inseparably interlinked. The crisis of the euro will affect the
> US economy, which is in a very fragile state, and what happens in the
> USA will have a decisive effect on the entire world economy. Thus,
> globalisation manifests itself as a global crisis of capitalism.
>
> Alienation
>
> With incredible foresight, the authors of the Manifesto anticipated the
> conditions which are now being experienced by the working class in all
> countries.
>
>
> "Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the
> work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and,
> consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the
> machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most
> easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of
> production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of
> subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the
> propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore
> also of labour, is equal to the cost of production. In proportion,
> therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
> decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division
> of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also
> increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of
> the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery,
> etc."
>
> Today the USA occupies the same position that Britain held in Marx's
> day--that of the most developed capitalist country. Thus, the general
> tendencies of capitalism are expressed there in their clearest form.
> Over the last 30 years, CEO pay in the USA has grown by 725%, while
> worker pay has risen by just 5.7%. These CEOs now make an average of 244
> times more than their employees. The current federal minimum wage is
> $7.25 per hour. According to the Center for Economic Policy Research, if
> the minimum wage had kept up with worker productivity, it would have
> reached $21.72 in 2012. If inflation is taken into account, median wages
> for male American workers are actually lower today than they were in
> 1968. In this way, the present boom has been largely at the expense of
> the working class.
>
> While millions are compelled to eke out a miserable existence of
> enforced inactivity, millions of others are forced to have two or even
> three jobs, and often work 60 hours or more per week with no overtime
> pay benefits. 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work
> more than 40 hours per week. According to the International Labour
> Organisation, "Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese
> workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more
> hours per year than French workers."
>
> Based on data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics BLS, the average
> productivity per American worker has risen 400 percent since 1950. In
> theory, this means that in order to achieve the same standard of living
> a worker should only have to work just one quarter of the average
> working week in 1950, or 11 hours per week. Either that, or the standard
> of living in theory should have risen by four times. On the contrary,
> the standard of living has decreased dramatically for the majority,
> while work-related stress, injuries and disease are increasing. This is
> reflected in an epidemic of depression, suicides, divorce, child and
> spousal abuse, mass shootings and other social ills.
>
> The same situation exists in Britain, where under the Thatcher
> government 2.5 million jobs were destroyed in industry, and yet the same
> level of production has been maintained as in 1979. This has been
> achieved, not through the introduction of new machinery but through the
> over-exploitation of British workers. In 1995, Kenneth Calman, Director
> General of Health, warned that "the lost of life time employment has
> unleashed an epidemic of stress related illnesses."
>
> The Class Struggle
>
> Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto that a constant
> factor in all of recorded history is that social development takes place
> through the class struggle. Under capitalism this has been greatly
> simplified with the polarisation of society into two great antagonistic
> classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The tremendous development
> of industry and technology over the last 200 years has led to the
> increasing the concentration of economic power in a few hands.
>
> "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
> struggles," says the Manifesto in one of its most celebrated phrases.
> For a long time it seemed to many that this idea was outmoded. In the
> long period of capitalist expansion that followed the Second World War,
> with full employment in the advanced industrial economies, rising living
> standards and reforms (remember the Welfare State?), the class struggle
> did indeed seem to be a thing of the past.
>
> Marx predicted that the development of capitalism would lead inexorably
> to the concentration of capital, an immense accumulation of wealth on
> the one hand and an equal accumulation of poverty, misery and unbearable
> toil at the other end of the social spectrum. For decades this idea was
> rubbished by the bourgeois economists and university sociologists who
> insisted that society was becoming ever more egalitarian, that everyone
> was now becoming middle class. Now all these illusions have been dispelled.
>
> The argument, so beloved of bourgeois sociologists, that the working
> class has ceased to exist has been stood on its head. In the last period
> important layers of the working population who previously considered
> themselves to be middle class have been proletarianised. Teachers, civil
> servants, bank employees and so on have been drawn into the ranks of the
> working class and the labour movement, where they make up some of the
> most militant sections.
>
> The old arguments that everybody can advance and we are all middle class
> have been falsified by events. In Britain, the US and many other
> developed countries over the past 20 or 30 years, the opposite has been
> happening. Middle-class people used to think life unfolded in an orderly
> progression of stages in which each is a step up from the last. That is
> no longer the case.
>
> Job security has ceased to exist, the trades and professions of the past
> have largely disappeared and life-long careers are barely memories. The
> ladder has been kicked away and for most people a middle-class existence
> is no longer even an aspiration. A dwindling minority can count on a
> pension on which they could comfortably live, and few have significant
> savings. More and more people live from day to day, with little idea of
> what the future may bring.
>
> If people have any wealth, it is in their houses, but with the
> contraction of the economy house prices have fallen in many countries
> and may be stagnant for years. The idea of a property-owning democracy
> has been exposed as a mirage. Far from being an asset to help fund a
> comfortable retirement, home ownership has become a heavy burden.
> Mortgages must be paid, whether you are in work or not. Many are trapped
> in negative equity, with huge debts that can never be paid. There is a
> growing generation of what can only be described as debt slaves.
>
> This is a devastating condemnation of the capitalist system. However,
> this process of proletarianisation means that the social reserves of
> reaction have been sharply reduced as a big section of white collar
> workers moves closer to the traditional working class. In the recent
> mass mobilisations, sections that in the past would never have dreamt of
> striking or even joining a union, such as teachers and civil servants,
> were in the front line of the class struggle.
>
> Idealism or Materialism?
>
> The idealist method sets out from what people think and say about
> themselves. But Marx explained that ideas do not fall from the sky, but
> reflect more or less accurately, objective situations, social pressures
> and contradictions beyond the control of men and women. But history does
> not unfold as a result of free will or conscious desires of the "great
> man", kings, politicians or philosophers. On the contrary, the progress
> of society depends on the development of the productive forces, which is
> not the product of conscious planning, but develops behind the backs of
> men and women.
>
> For the first time Marx placed socialism on a firm theoretical basis. A
> scientific understanding of history cannot be based on the distorted
> images of reality floating like pale and fantastic ghosts in the minds
> of men and women, but on real social relations. That means beginning
> with a clarification of the relationship between social and political
> forms and the mode of production at a given stage of history. This is
> precisely what is called the historical materialist method of analysis.
>
> Some people will feel irritated by this theory which seems to deprive
> humankind of the role of protagonists in the historical process. In the
> same way, the Church and its philosophical apologists were deeply
> offended by the claims of Galileo that the Sun, not the Earth, was at
> the centre of the Universe. Later, the same people attacked Darwin for
> suggesting that humans were not the special creation of God, but the
> product of natural selection.
>
> Actually, Marxism does not at all deny the importance of the subjective
> factor in history, the conscious role of humankind in the development of
> society. Men and women make history, but do not do it entirely in accord
> with their free will and conscious intentions. In Marx's words: "History
> does nothing", it "possesses no immense wealth", it "wages no battles".
> It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights;
> "history" is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to
> achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man
> pursuing his aims." (Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, Chapter VI)
>
> All that Marxism does is to explain the role of the individual as part
> of a given society, subject to certain objective laws and, ultimately,
> as the representative of the interests of a particular class. Ideas have
> no independent existence, nor own historical development. "Life is not
> determined by consciousness," Marx writes in The German Ideology, "but
> consciousness by life."
>
> The ideas and actions of people are conditioned by social relations, the
> development of which does not depend on the subjective will of men and
> women but takes place according to definite laws which, in the last
> analysis, reflect the needs of the development of the productive forces.
> The interrelations between these factors constitute a complex web that
> is often difficult to see. The study of these relations is the basis of
> the Marxist theory of history.
>
> Let us cite one example. At the time of the English Revolution, Oliver
> Cromwell fervently believed that he was fighting for the right of each
> individual to pray to God according to his conscience. But the further
> march of history proved that the Cromwellian Revolution was the decisive
> stage in the irresistible ascent of the English bourgeoisie to power.
> The concrete stage of the development of the productive forces in 17th
> Century England permitted no other outcome.
>
> The leaders of the Great French Revolution of 1789-93 fought under the
> banner of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity". They believed they were
> fighting for a regime based on the eternal laws of Justice and Reason.
> However, regardless of their intentions and ideas, the Jacobins were
> preparing the way for the rule of the bourgeoisie in France. Again, from
> a scientific standpoint, no other result was possible at that point of
> social development.
>
> From the standpoint of the labour movement Marx's great contribution
> was that he was the first to explain that socialism is not just a good
> idea, but the necessary result of the development of society. Socialist
> thinkers before Marx--the utopian socialists--attempted to discover
> universal laws and formulae that would lay the basis for the triumph of
> human reason over the injustice of class society. All that was necessary
> was to discover that idea, and the problems would be solved. This is an
> idealist approach.
>
> Unlike the Utopians, Marx never attempted to discover the laws of
> society in general. He analysed the law of movement of a particular
> society, capitalist society, explaining how it arose, how it evolved and
> also how it necessarily ceases to exist at a given moment. He performed
> this huge task in the three volumes of Capital.
>
> Marx and Darwin
>
> Charles Darwin, who was an instinctive materialist, explained the
> evolution of species as a result of the effects of the natural
> environment. Karl Marx explained the development of humankind from the
> development of the "artificial" environment we call society. The
> difference lies, on the one hand, in the enormously complicated
> character of human society compared to the relative simplicity of nature
> and, secondly, in the greatly accelerated pace of change in society
> compared to the extraordinarily slow pace with which evolution by nation
> selection unfolds.
>
> On the base of the social relations of production--in other words, the
> relations between social classes--there arises complex legal and
> political forms with their manifold ideological, cultural and religious
> reflections. This complex edifice of forms and ideas is sometimes
> referred to as the social superstructure. Although it is always based on
> economic foundations, the superstructure rises above the economic base
> and interacts upon it, sometimes in a decisive manner. This dialectical
> relationship between base and superstructure is very complicated and not
> always very obvious. But in the last analysis, the economic base always
> turns out to be the decisive force.
>
> Property relations are simply the legal expression of the relationships
> between classes. At first, these relationships--together with their legal
> and political expression--assist the development of the productive
> forces. But the development of productive forces tends to come up
> against the limitations represented by existing property relations. The
> latter become an obstacle for the development of production. It is at
> this point that we enter a period of revolution.
>
> Idealists see human consciousness as the mainspring of all human action,
> the motor force of history. But all history proves the opposite. Human
> consciousness in general is not progressive or revolutionary. It is slow
> to react to circumstances and deeply conservative. Most people do not
> like change, much less revolutionary change. This innate fear of change
> is deeply rooted in the collective psyche. It is part of a defence
> mechanism that has its origins in the remote past of the human species.
>
> As a general rule, we can say that society never decides to take a step
> forward unless it is obliged to do so under the pressure of extreme
> necessity. As long as it is possible to muddle through life on the basis
> of the old ideas, adapting them imperceptibly to a slowly changing
> reality, so long will men and women continue to move along the well-worn
> paths. Like the force of inertia in mechanics, tradition, habit and
> routine constitute a very heavy burden on human consciousness, which
> means that ideas always tend to lag behind events. It requires the
> hammer blows of great events to overcome this inertia and force people
> to question the existing society, its ideas and values.
>
> All that revolution shows is the fact that the social contradictions
> engendered by the conflict between economic development and the existing
> structure of society have become unbearable. This central contradiction
> can only be resolved by the radical overthrow of the existing order, and
> its replacement by new social relations that bring the economic base
> into harmony with the superstructure.
>
> In a revolution the economic foundations of society suffer a radical
> transformation. Then, the legal and political superstructure undergoes a
> profound change. In each case, the new, higher relations of production
> have matured in embryo in the womb of the old society, posing an urgent
> need for a transition to a new social system.
>
> Historical Materialism
>
> Marxism analyses the hidden mainsprings that lie behind the development
> of human society, from the earliest tribal societies up to the modern
> day. The way in which Marxism traces this winding road is called the
> materialist conception of history. This scientific method enables us to
> understand history, not as a series of unconnected and unforeseen
> incidents, but rather as part of a clearly understood and interrelated
> process. It is a series of actions and reactions which cover politics,
> economics and the whole spectrum of social development. To lay bare the
> complex dialectical relationship between all these phenomena is the task
> of historical materialism.
>
> The great English historian Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and
> Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote that history is "little more than the
> register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." (Gibbon,
> The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, p. 69). In essence,
> the latest post-modernist interpretation of history has not advanced a
> single step since then. History is seen as a series of disconnected
> "narratives" with no organic connection and no inner meaning or logic.
> No socio-economic system can be said to be better or worse than any
> other, and there can therefore be no question of progress or retrogression.
>
> History appears here as an essentially meaningless and inexplicable
> series of random events or accidents. It is governed by no laws that we
> can comprehend. To try to understand it would therefore be a pointless
> exercise. A variation on this theme is the idea, now very popular in
> some academic circles, that there is no such thing as higher and lower
> forms of social development and culture. They claim that there is no
> such thing as progress, which they consider to be an old fashioned idea
> left over from the 19th century, when it was popularised by Victorian
> liberals, Fabian socialists and--Karl Marx.
>
> This denial of progress in history is characteristic of the psychology
> of the bourgeoisie in the phase of capitalist decline. It is a faithful
> reflection of the fact that, under capitalism progress has indeed
> reached its limits and threatens to go into reverse. The bourgeoisie and
> its intellectual representatives are, quite naturally, unwilling to
> accept this fact. Moreover, they are organically incapable of
> recognising it. Lenin once observed that a man on the edge of a cliff
> does not reason. However, they are dimly aware of the real situation,
> and try to find some kind of a justification for the impasse of their
> system by denying the possibility of progress altogether.
>
> So far has this idea sunk into consciousness that it has even been
> carried into the realm of non-human evolution. Even such a brilliant
> thinker as Stephen Jay Gould, whose dialectical theory of punctuated
> equilibrium transformed the way that evolution is perceived, argued that
> it is wrong to speak of progress from lower to higher in evolution, so
> that microbes must be placed on the same level as human beings. In one
> sense it is correct that all living things are related (the human genome
> has conclusively proved this). Humankind is not a special creation of
> the Almighty, but the product of evolution. Nor is it correct to see
> evolution as a kind of grand design, the aim of which was to create
> beings like ourselves (teleology--from the Greek telos, meaning an end).
> However, in rejecting an incorrect idea, it is not necessary to go to
> the other extreme, leading to new errors.
>
> It is not a question of accepting some kind of preordained plan either
> related to divine intervention or some kind of teleology, but it is
> clear that the laws of evolution inherent in nature do in fact determine
> development from simple forms of life to more complex forms. The
> earliest forms of life already contain within them the embryo of all
> future developments. It is possible to explain the development of eyes,
> legs and other organs without recourse to any preordained plan. At a
> certain stage we get the development of a central nervous system and a
> brain. Finally with homo sapiens, we arrive at human consciousness.
> Matter becomes conscious of itself. There has been no more important
> revolution since the development of organic matter (life) from inorganic
> matter.
>
> To please our critics, we should perhaps add the phrase from our point
> of view. Doubtless the microbes, if they were able to have a point of
> view, would probably raise serious objections. But we are human beings
> and must necessarily see things through human eyes. And we do assert
> that evolution does in fact represent the development of simple life
> forms to more complex and versatile ones--in other words progress from
> lower to higher forms of life. To object to such a formulation seems to
> be somewhat pointless, not scientific but merely scholastic. In saying
> this, of course, no offence is intended to the microbes, who after all
> have been around for a lot longer than us, and if the capitalist system
> is not overthrown, may yet have the last laugh.
>
> The Motor Force of History
>
> In The Critique of Political Economy Marx explains the relation between
> the productive forces and the "superstructure" as follows:
>
>
> "In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite
> relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these
> relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of
> their material powers of production... The mode of production in ma
> terial life determines the general character of the social, political
> and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that
> determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence
> (which) determines their consciousness."
>
> As Marx and Engels were at pains to point out, the participants in
> history may not always be aware of what motives drive them, seeking
> instead to rationalise them in one way or another, but those motives
> exist and have a basis in the real world.
>
> Just as Charles Darwin explains that species are not immutable, and that
> they possess a past, a present and a future, changing and evolving, so
> Marx and Engels explain that a given social system is not something
> eternally fixed. That is the illusion of every epoch. Every social
> system believes that it represents the only possible form of existence
> for human beings, that its institutions, its religion, its morality are
> the last word that can be spoken.
>
> That is what the cannibals, the Egyptian priests, Marie Antoinette and
> Tsar Nicolas all fervently believed. And that is what the bourgeoisie
> and its apologists today wish to demonstrate when they assure us,
> without the slightest basis, that the so-called system of "free
> enterprise" is the only possible system--just when it is beginning to sink.
>
> Nowadays, the idea of "evolution" has been generally accepted at least
> by educated persons. The ideas of Darwin, so revolutionary in his day,
> are accepted almost as a truism. However, evolution is generally
> understood as a slow and gradual process without interruptions or
> violent upheavals. In politics, this kind of argument is frequently used
> as a justification for reformism. Unfortunately, it is based on a
> misunderstanding.
>
> The real mechanism of evolution even today remains a book sealed by
> seven seals. This is hardly surprising since Darwin himself did not
> understand it. Only in the last decade or so with the new discoveries in
> palaeontology made by Stephen J. Gould, who discovered the theory of
> punctuated equilibria, has it been demonstrated that evolution is not a
> gradual process. There are long periods in which no big changes are
> observed, but at a given moment, the line of evolution is broken by an
> explosion, a veritable biological revolution characterised by the mass
> extinction of some species and the rapid ascent of others.
>
> The analogy between society and nature is, of course, only approximate.
> But even the most superficial examination of history shows that the
> gradualist interpretation is baseless. Society, like nature, knows long
> periods of slow and gradual change, but also here the line is
> interrupted by explosive developments--wars and revolutions, in which the
> process of change is enormously accelerated. In fact, it is these events
> that act as the main motor force of historical development. And the root
> cause of revolution is the fact that a particular socio-economic system
> has reached its limits and is unable to develop the productive forces as
> before.
>
> A Dynamic View of History
>
> Those who deny the existence of any laws governing human social
> development invariably approach history from a subjective and moralistic
> standpoint. Like Gibbon (but without his extraordinary talent) they
> shake their heads at the unending spectacle of senseless violence, the
> inhumanity of man against man (and woman) and so on and so forth. In
> place of a scientific view of history we get a parson's view. However,
> what is required is not a moral sermon but a rational insight. Above and
> beyond the isolated facts, it is necessary to discern broad tendencies,
> the transitions from one social system to another, and to work out the
> fundamental motor forces that determine these transitions.
>
> By applying the method of dialectical materialism to history, it is
> immediately obvious that human history has its own laws, and that,
> consequently, the history of humankind is possible to understand it as a
> process. The rise and fall of different socio-economic formations can be
> explained scientifically in terms of their ability or inability to
> develop the means of production, and thereby to push forward the
> horizons of human culture, and increase the domination of humankind over
> nature.
>
> Most people believe that society is fixed for all time, and that its
> moral, religious and ideological values are immutable, along with what
> we call "human nature". But the slightest acquaintance with history
> shows that this is false. History manifests itself as the rise and fall
> of different socio-economic systems. Like individual men and women,
> societies are born, develop, reach their limits, enter into decline and
> are then finally replaced by a new social formation.
>
> In the last analysis, the viability of a given socio-economic system is
> determined by its ability to develop the productive forces, since
> everything else depends on this. Many other factors enter into the
> complex equation: religion, politics, philosophy, morality, the
> psychology of different classes and the individual qualities of leaders.
> But these things do not drop from the clouds, and a careful analysis
> will show that they are determined--albeit in a contradictory and
> dialectical way--by the real historical environment, and by tendencies
> and processes that are independent of the will of men and women.
>
> The outlook of a society that is in a phase of ascent, which is
> developing the means of production and pushing forward the horizons of
> culture and civilisation, is very different to the psychology of a
> society in a state of stagnation and decline. The general historical
> context determines everything. It affects the prevailing moral climate,
> the attitude of men and women towards the existing political and
> religious institutions. It even affects the quality of individual
> political leaders.
>
> Capitalism in its youth was capable of colossal feats. It developed the
> productive forces to an unparalleled degree, and was therefore able to
> push back the frontiers of human civilisation. People felt that society
> was advancing, despite all the injustices and exploitation that have
> always characterised this system. This feeling gave rise to a general
> spirit of optimism and progress that was the hall mark of the old
> liberalism, with its firm conviction that today was better than
> yesterday and tomorrow would be better than today.
>
> That is no longer the case. The old optimism and blind faith in progress
> have been replaced by a profound sense of discontent with the present
> and of pessimism with regard to the future. This ubiquitous feeling of
> fear and insecurity is only a psychological reflection of the fact that
> capitalism is no longer capable of playing any progressive role anywhere.
>
> In the 19th century, Liberalism, the main ideology of the bourgeoisie,
> stood (in theory) for progress and democracy. But neo-Liberalism in the
> modern sense is only a mask that covers the ugly reality of the most
> rapacious exploitation; the rape of the planet, the destruction of the
> environment without the slightest concern about the fate of future
> generations. The sole concern of the boards of the big companies who are
> the real rulers of the USA and the entire world is to enrich themselves
> through plunder: asset-stripping, corruption, the theft of public assets
> through privatisation, parasitism: these are the main features of the
> bourgeoisie in the phase of its senile decay.
>
> The Rise and Fall of Societies
>
>
> "The transition from one system to another was always determined by the
> growth of the productive forces, i.e., of technique and the organisation
> of labour. Up to a certain point, social changes are quantitative in
> character and do not alter the foundations of society, i.e., the
> prevalent forms of property. But a point is reached when the matured
> productive forces can no longer contain themselves within the old forms
> of property; then follows a radical change in the social order,
> accompanied by shocks." (Leon Trotsky, Marxism in Our Time, April 1939.)
>
> A common argument against socialism is that it is impossible to change
> human nature; people are naturally selfish and greedy and so on. In
> reality, there is no such thing as a supra-historical human nature. What
> we think of as human nature has undergone many changes in the course of
> human evolution. Men and women constantly change nature through labour,
> and in so doing, change themselves. As for the argument that people are
> naturally selfish and greedy, this is disproved by the facts of human
> evolution.
>
> Our earliest ancestors, who were not yet really human, were small in
> stature and physically weak compared to other animals. They did not have
> strong teeth or claws. Their upright stance meant that they could not
> run fast enough to catch the antelope they wished to eat, or to escape
> from the lion that wished to eat them. Their brain size was
> approximately that of a chimpanzee. Wandering on the savannah of East
> Africa, they were at an extreme disadvantage to every other
> species--except in one fundamental aspect.
>
> Engels explains in his brilliant essay Labour in the Transition of Ape
> to Man how the upright stance freed the hands, which had originally
> evolved as an adaptation for climbing trees, for other purposes. The
> production of stone tools represented a qualitative leap, giving our
> ancestors an evolutionary advantage. But even more important was the
> strong sense of community, collective production and social life, which
> in turn was closely connected to the development of language.
>
> The extreme vulnerability of human children in comparison to the young
> of other species meant that our ancestors, whose hunter-gatherer
> existence compelled them to move from one place to another in search of
> food, had to develop a strong sense of solidarity to protect their
> offspring and thus ensure the survival of the tribe or clan. We can say
> with absolute certainty that without this powerful sense of co-operation
> and solidarity, our species would have become extinct before it was even
> born.
>
> We see this even today. If a child is seen to be drowning in a river,
> most people would try to save it even placing their own life at risk.
> Many people have drowned trying to save others. This cannot be explained
> in terms of egotistical calculation, or by ties of blood relationships
> in a small tribal group. The people who act in this way do not know who
> they trying to save, nor do they expect any reward for doing what they
> do. This altruistic behaviour is quite spontaneous and comes from a
> deep-rooted instinct for solidarity. The argument that people are
> naturally selfish, which is a reflection of the ugly and dehumanised
> alienation of capitalist society, is a vile label on the human race.
>
> For the immense major part of the history of our species, people lived
> in societies where private property, in the modern sense, did not exist.
> There was no money, no bosses and workers, no bankers and landlords, no
> state, no organised religion, no police and no prisons. Even the family,
> in our understanding of the word, did not exist. Today, many find it
> hard to envisage a world without these things; they seem so natural that
> they could have been ordained by the Almighty. Yet our ancestors managed
> fairly well without them.
>
> The transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture and
> pastoralism constitutes the first great social revolution, which the
> great Australian archaeologist (and Marxist) Gordon Childe called the
> Neolithic Revolution. Agriculture needs water. Once it goes beyond the
> most basic production on a subsistence level, it requires irrigation,
> digging, damming and water distribution on a big scale. These are social
> tasks.
>
> Large-scale irrigation needs organisation on a vast scale. It demands
> the deployment of large numbers of labourers and a high level of
> organisation and discipline. The division of labour, which already
> existed in embryonic form in the elementary division between the sexes
> arising from the demands of childbirth and the rearing of children, is
> developed to a higher level. Teamwork needs team leaders, foremen,
> overseers, etc., and an army of officials to supervise the plan.
>
> Co-operation on such a vast scale demands planning, and the exercise of
> science and technique. This is beyond the capabilities of the small
> groups organised in clans that formed the nucleus of the old society.
> The need to organise and mobilise large numbers of workers led to the
> rise of a central state, together with a central administration and an
> army as in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
>
> Time-keeping and measurement were necessary elements of production, and
> were themselves productive forces. Thus Herodotus traces the beginnings
> of geometry in Egypt to the need to re-measure the inundated land on an
> annual basis. The word geometry itself means neither more nor less than
> earth-measurement.
>
> The study of the heavens, astronomy, and mathematics enabled the
> Egyptian priests to foretell the flooding of the Nile, etc. Thus,
> science arises from economic necessity. In his Metaphysics Aristotle
> wrote: "Man first begins to philosophise when the necessities of life
> are supplied." (Metaphysics, I. 2). This statement goes right to the
> heart of historical materialism--2,300 years before Karl Marx.
>
> At the heart of this cleavage into rich and poor, rulers and ruled,
> educated and ignorant, is the division between mental and manual labour.
> The foreman is usually exempt from manual labour which now carries a
> stigma. The Bible speaks of the "hewers of wood and drawers of water,"
> the masses who were excluded from culture, which was wrapped in a cloak
> of mystery and magic. Its secrets were closely guarded by the caste of
> priests and scribes whose monopoly it was.
>
> Here we already see the outlines of class society, the division of
> society into classes: exploiters and sub-exploiters. In any society
> where art, science and government are a monopoly of a minority, that
> minority will use and abuse its position for its own interests. This is
> the most fundamental secret of class society and has remained so for the
> last 12,000 years.
>
> During all this time there have been many fundamental changes in the
> forms of economic and social life. But the fundamental relations between
> rulers and ruled, rich and poor, exploiters and exploited remained the
> same. In the same way, although the forms of government experienced many
> changes, the state remained what it had always been: an instrument of
> coercion and an expression of class rule.
>
> The rise and fall of slave society was followed in Europe by feudalism,
> which in turn was dis placed by capitalism. The rise of the bourgeoisie,
> which began in the towns and cities of Italy and the Netherlands,
> reached a decisive stage with the bourgeois revolutions in Holland and
> England in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Great French Revolution
> of 1789-93. All these changes were accompanied by profound
> transformations in culture, art, literature, religion and philosophy.
>
> The State
>
> The state is a special repressive force standing above society and
> increasingly alienating itself from it. This force has its origin in the
> remote past. The origins of the state, however, vary according to
> circumstances. Among the Germans and Native Americans it arose out of
> the war band that gathered around the person of the war chief. This is
> also the case with the Greeks, as we see in the epic poems of Homer.
>
> Originally, the tribal chiefs enjoyed authority because of their
> personal bravery, wisdom and other personal qualities. Today, the power
> of the ruling class has nothing to do with the personal qualities of
> leaders as was the case under barbarism. It is rooted in objective
> social and productive relations and the power of money. The qualities of
> the individual ruler may be good, bad or indifferent, but that is not
> the point.
>
> The earliest forms of class society already showed the state as a
> monster, devouring huge amounts of labour and repressing the masses and
> depriving them of all rights. At the same time, by developing the
> division of labour, by organising society and carrying co-operation to a
> far higher level than ever before, it enabled a huge amount of labour
> power to be mobilised, and thus raised human productive labour to
> undreamed-of heights.
>
> At the base, all this depended on the labour of the peasant masses. The
> state needed a large number of peasants to pay taxes and provide corvée
> labour--the two pillars upon which society rested. Whoever controls this
> system of production controls power and the state. The origins of state
> power are rooted in relations of production, not personal qualities. The
> state power in such societies was necessarily centralised and
> bureaucratic. Originally, it had a religious character and was mixed up
> with the power of the priest caste. At its apex stood the God-king, and
> under him an army of officials, the Mandarins, the scribes, overseers
> etc. Writing itself was held in awe as a mysterious art known only to
> these few.
>
> Thus, from the very beginning, the offices of the state are mystified.
> Real social relations appear in an alienated guise. This is still the
> case. In Britain, this mystification is deliberately cultivated through
> ceremony, pomp and tradition. In the USA it is cultivated by other
> means: the cult of the President, who represents state power
> personified. In essence, however, every form of state power represents
> the domination of one class over the rest of society. Even in its most
> democratic form, it stands for the dictatorship of a single class--the
> ruling class--that class that owns and controls the means of production.
>
> The modern state is a bureaucratic monster that devours a colossal
> amount of the wealth produced by the working class. Marxists agree with
> the anarchists that the state is a monstrous instrument of oppression
> that must be eliminated. The question is: How? By whom? And what will
> replace it? This is a fundamental question for any revolution. In a
> speech on anarchism during the Civil War that followed the Russian
> Revolution , Trotsky summarised very well the Marxist position on the state:
>
>
> "The bourgeoisie says: don't touch the state power; it is the sacred
> hereditary privilege of the educated classes. But the Anarchists say:
> don't touch it; it is an infernal invention, a diabolical device. Don't
> have anything to do with it. The bourgeoisie says, don't touch it, it's
> sacred. The Anarchists say: don't touch it, because it's sinful. Both
> say: don't touch it. But we say: don't just touch it, take it in your
> hands, and set it to work in your own interests, for the abolition of
> private ownership and the emancipation of the working class." (Leon
> Trotsky, How The Revolution Armed, Vol. 1, 1918)
>
> Marxism explains that that the state consists ultimately of armed bodies
> of men: the army, police, courts and jails. Against the confused ideas
> of the anarchists, Marx argued that workers need a state to overcome the
> resistance of the exploiting classes. But that argument of Marx has been
> distorted by both the bourgeois and the anarchists. Marx spoke of the
> "dictatorship of the proletariat," which is merely a more scientifically
> precise term for "the political rule of the working class."
>
> Nowadays, the word dictatorship has connotations that were unknown to
> Marx. In an age that has become acquainted with the horrific crimes of
> Hitler and Stalin, it conjures up nightmarish visions of a totalitarian
> monster, concentration camps and secret police. But such things did not
> yet exist even in the imagination in Marx's day. For him the word
> dictatorship came from the Roman Republic, where it meant a situation
> where in time of war, the normal rules were set aside for a temporary
> period.
>
> The Roman dictator ("one who dictates"), was an extraordinary magistrate
> (magistratus extraordinarius) with the absolute authority to perform
> tasks beyond the normal authority of a magistrate. The office was
> originally named Magister Populi (Master of the People), that is to say,
> Master of the Citizen Army. In other words, it was a military role which
> almost always involved leading an army in the field. Once the appointed
> period ended, the dictator would step down. The idea of a totalitarian
> dictatorship like Stalin's Russia, where the state would oppress the
> working class in the interests of a privileged caste of bureaucrats,
> would have horrified Marx.
>
> His model could not have been more different. Marx based his idea of the
> dictatorship of the proletariat in the Paris Commune of 1871. Here, for
> the first time, the popular masses, with the workers at their head,
> overthrew the old state and at least began the task of transforming
> society. With no clearly-defined plan of action, leadership or
> organisation, the masses displayed an astonishing degree of courage,
> initiative and creativity. Summing up the experience of the Paris
> Commune, Marx and Engels explained: "One thing especially was proved by
> the Commune, viz. that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the
> ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes'..."
> (Preface to the 1872 German edition of the Communist Manifesto).
>
> The transition to socialism--a higher form of society based on genuine
> democracy and plenty for all--can only be accomplished by the active and
> conscious participation of the working class in the running of society,
> of industry, and of the state. It is not something that is kindly handed
> down to the workers by kind-hearted capitalists or bureaucratic mandarins.
>
> Under Lenin and Trotsky, the Soviet state was constructed in order to
> facilitate the drawing of workers into the tasks of control and
> accounting, to ensure the uninterrupted progress of the reduction of the
> "special functions" of officialdom and of the power of the state. Strict
> limitations were placed upon the salaries, power, and privileges of
> officials in order to prevent the formation of a privileged caste.
>
> The workers' state established by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was
> neither bureaucratic nor totalitarian. On the contrary, before the
> Stalinist bureaucracy usurped control from the masses, it was the most
> democratic state that ever existed. The basic principles of the Soviet
> power were not invented by Marx or Lenin. They were based on the
> concrete experience of the Paris Commune, and later elaborated upon by
> Lenin.
>
> Lenin was the sworn enemy of bureaucracy. He always emphasised that the
> proletariat needs only a state that is "so constituted that it will at
> once begin to die away and cannot help dying away." A genuine workers'
> state has nothing in common with the bureaucratic monster that exists
> today, and even less the one that existed in Stalinist Russia. The basic
> conditions for workers' democracy were set forth in one of Lenin's most
> important works: The State and Revolution:
> 1.Free and democratic elections with the right of recall of all officials.
> 2.No official to receive a higher wage than a skilled worker.
> 3.No standing army or police force, but the armed people.
> 4.Gradually, all the administrative tasks to be done in turn by all.
> "Every cook should be able to be Prime Minister--When everyone is a
> 'bureaucrat' in turn, nobody can be a bureaucrat."
>
> These were the conditions which Lenin laid down, not for full-fledged
> socialism or communism, but for the very first period of a workers'
> state--the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism.
>
> The Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies were elected assemblies
> composed not of professional politicians and bureaucrats, but of
> ordinary workers, peasants and soldiers. It was not an alien a power
> standing over society, but a power based on the direct initiative of the
> people from below. Its laws were not like the laws enacted by a
> capitalist state power. It was an entirely different kind of power from
> the one that generally exists in the parliamentary bourgeois-democratic
> republics of the type still prevailing in the advanced countries of
> Europe and America. This power was of the same type as the Paris Commune
> of 1871.
>
> It is true that in conditions of appalling backwardness, poverty and
> illiteracy, the Russian working class was unable to hold onto the power
> they had conquered. The Revolution suffered a process of bureaucratic
> degeneration that led to the establishment of Stalinism. Contrary to the
> lies of bourgeois historians, Stalinism was not the product of
> Bolshevism but its bitterest enemy. Stalin stands approximately in the
> same relation to Marx and Lenin as Napoleon to the Jacobins or the Pope
> to the early Christians.
>
> The early Soviet Union was in fact not a state at all in the sense we
> normally understand it, but only the organised expression of the
> revolutionary power of the working people. To use the phrase of Marx, it
> was a "semi-state," a state so-designed that it would eventually wither
> away and be dissolved into society, giving way to the collective
> administration of society for the benefit of all, without force or
> coercion. That, and only that, is the genuine Marxist conception of a
> workers' state.
>
> The Rise of the Bourgeoisie
>
> Trotsky pointed out that revolution is the motor force of history. It is
> no coincidence that the rise of the bourgeoisie in Italy, Holland,
> England and later in France was accompanied by an extraordinary
> flourishing of culture, art and science. In those countries where the
> bourgeois revolution triumphed in the 17th and 18th centuries, the
> development of the productive forces and technology was complemented by
> a parallel development of science and philosophy, which undermined the
> ideological domination of the Church forever.
>
> In contrast, those countries where the forces of feudal-Catholic
> reaction strangled the embryo of the new society in the womb were
> condemned to suffer the nightmare of a long and inglorious period of
> degeneration, decline and decay. The example of Spain is perhaps the
> most graphic in this regard.
>
> In the epoch of the ascent of capitalism, when it still represented a
> progressive force in history, the first ideologists of the bourgeoisie
> had to fight a ferocious battle against the ideological bastions of
> feudalism, starting with the Catholic Church. Long before overthrowing
> the power of feudal landlords, the bourgeoisie, in the shape of its most
> conscious and revolutionary representatives, had to break down its
> ideological defences: the philosophical and religious framework that had
> grown up around the Church, and its militant arm, the Inquisition.
>
> The rise of capitalism began in the Netherlands and the cities of
> northern Italy. It was accompanied by new attitudes, which gradually
> solidified into a new morality and new religious beliefs. Under
> feudalism economic power was expressed as the ownership of land. Money
> played a secondary role. But the rise of trade and manufacture and the
> incipient market relations that accompanied them made Money an even
> greater power. Great banking families like the Fuggers arose and
> challenged the might of kings.
>
> The bloody wars of religion in the 16th and 17th century were merely the
> outward expression of deeper class conflicts. The only possible result
> of these struggles was the rise to power of the bourgeoisie and new
> (capitalist) relations of production. But the leaders of these struggles
> had no prior knowledge of this.
>
> The English Revolution of 1640-60 was a great social transformation. The
> old feudal regime was destroyed and replaced with a new capitalist
> social order. The Civil War was a class war which overthrew the
> despotism of Charles I and the reactionary feudal order that stood
> behind him. Parliament represented the new rising middle classes of town
> and country which challenged and defeated the old regime, cutting off
> the head of the king and abolishing the House of Lords in the process.
>
> Objectively, Oliver Cromwell was laying the basis for the rule of the
> bourgeoisie in England. But in order to do this, in order to clear all
> the feudal-monarchical rubbish out of the way, he was first obliged to
> sweep aside the cowardly bourgeoisie, dissolve its parliament and base
> himself on the petty bourgeoisie, the small farmers of East Anglia, the
> class to which he belonged, and the plebeian and semi-proletarian masses
> of town and country.
>
> Placing himself at the head of a revolutionary army, Cromwell aroused
> the fighting spirit of the masses by appealing to the Bible, the Saints
> and the Kingdom of God on Earth. His soldiers did not go into battle
> under the banner of Rent, Interest and Profit, but singing religious
> hymns. This evangelistic spirit, which was soon filled with a
> revolutionary (and even sometimes a communistic) content, was what
> inspired the masses to fight with tremendous courage and enthusiasm
> against the Hosts of Baal.
>
> However, once in power, Cromwell could not go beyond the bounds
> established by history and the objective limits of the productive forces
> of the epoch. He was compelled to turn against the Left Wing,
> suppressing the Levellers by force, and to pursue a policy that favoured
> the bourgeoisie and the reinforcement of capitalist property relations
> in England. In the end, Cromwell dismissed parliament and ruled as
> dictator until his death, when the English bourgeoisie, fearful that the
> Revolution had gone too far and might pose a threat to property,
> restored the Stuarts to the throne.
>
> The French Revolution of 1789-93 was on a qualitatively higher level.
> Instead of religion, the Jacobins appealed to Reason. They fought under
> the banner of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in order to rouse the
> plebeian and semi-proletarian masses against the feudal aristocracy and
> the monarchy.
>
> Long before it brought down the formidable walls of the Bastille, it had
> overthrown the invisible, but no less formidable, walls of the Church
> and religion. But when the French bourgeoisie became the ruling class,
> faced with the new revolutionary class, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie
> quickly forgot the rationalist and atheist intoxication of its youth.
>
> After the fall of Robespierre, the victorious men of property longed for
> stability. Searching for stabilising formulae and a conservative
> ideology that would justify their privileges, they quickly rediscovered
> the charms of Holy Mother Church. The latter, with her extraordinary
> ability to adapt, has managed to survive for two millennia, despite all
> the social changes that have taken place. The Catholic Church soon
> welcomed its new master and protector, sanctifying the domain of Big
> Capital, in the same way as before the same church had sanctified the
> power of feudal monarchs and the slave owners of the Roman Empire.?
>
> A Caricature of Marxism
>
> In his classic work, What is history? The English historian E.H. Carr
> said that historical facts are "always refracted through the mind of the
> recorder" and that you should "study the historian before you begin to
> study the facts". By that he meant that the telling of history cannot be
> separated from the viewpoint, political or otherwise, both of the writer
> and of the reader and of the times they live or lived in.
>
> It is often said that history is written by the winners. In other words,
> the selection and interpretation of historical events are shaped by the
> actual outcome of those conflicts as they affect the historian and in
> turn his perception of what the reader will want to read. Despite the
> pretensions of bourgeois historians to an alleged objectivity, the
> writing of history inevitably reflects a class point of view. It is
> impossible to escape having some sort of view on the events described.
> To claim otherwise is to attempt to defraud the reader.
>
> When Marxists look at society they do not pretend to be neutral, but
> openly espouse the cause of the working class and socialism. However,
> that does not at all preclude scientific objectivity. A surgeon involved
> in a delicate operation is also committed to saving the life of his
> patient. He is far from "neutral" about the outcome. But for that very
> reason, he will distinguish with extreme care between the different
> layers of the organism. In the same way, Marxists will strive to obtain
> the most scientifically exact analysis of social processes, in order to
> be able successfully to influence the outcome. But we are not dealing
> here with just a series of facts "one after another" but rather
> willingly seeking to draw out the general processes involved and
> explaining them.
>
> From this we can see that the flow and direction of history has
> been--and is--shaped by the struggles of successive social classes to
> mould society in their own interests and by the resulting conflicts
> between the classes which flow from that.
>
> Very often attempts are made to discredit Marxism by resorting to a
> caricature of its method of historical analysis. There is nothing easier
> than erecting a straw man in order to knock it down again. The usual
> distortion is that Marx and Engels reduced everything to economics. This
> patent absurdity was answered many times by Marx and Engels, as in the
> following extract to Engels' letter to Bloch:
>
>
> "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate
> determining element in history is the production and reproduction of
> life. More than this neither Marx nor myself have asserted. Hence, if
> somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only
> determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless,
> abstract and senseless phrase."
>
> Historical materialism has nothing in common with fatalism. Men and
> women are not merely puppets of blind historical forces. But neither are
> they entirely free agents, able to shape their destiny irrespective of
> the existing conditions imposed by the level of economic development,
> science and technique, which, in the last analysis, determine whether a
> socio-economic system is viable or not. To quote Engels:
>
>
> "Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each
> person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the
> resultant of these many wills operating in different directions and of
> their manifold effects upon the outer world that constitutes history."
> (Ludwig Feuerbach).
>
> Marx and Engels repeatedly criticised the superficial way in which
> certain people misused the method of historical materialism. In his
> letter to Conrad Schmidt, dated 5 August 1890, Engels writes:
>
>
> "In general, the word 'materialistic' serves many of the younger writers
> in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is
> labelled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and
> then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is
> above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the
> manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh; the
> conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be
> examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the
> political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views
> corresponding to them. Up to now but little has been done here because
> only a few people have got down to it seriously. In this field we can
> utilise heaps of help, it is immensely big, anyone who will work
> seriously can achieve much and distinguish himself. But instead of this
> too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical
> materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order
> to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge--for economic
> history is still as yet in its swaddling clothes!--constructed into a
> neat system as quickly as possible, and they then deem themselves
> something very tremendous. And after that a Barth can come along and
> attack the thing itself, which in his circle has indeed been degraded to
> a mere phrase". (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, volume 49, p. 8)
>
> In another letter to Conrad Schmidt dated 27 October 1890, Engels,
> writes: "What these gentlemen all lack is dialectic. They never see
> anything but here cause and there effect. That this is a hollow
> abstraction, that such metaphysical polar opposites only exist in the
> real world during crises, while the whole vast process proceeds in the
> form of interaction (though of very unequal forces, the economic
> movement being by far the strongest, most elemental and most decisive)
> and that here everything is relative and nothing is absolute--this they
> never begin to see. Hegel has never existed for them". (Marx and Engels,
> Collected Works, volume 49, p. 59)
>
> Marxism does not deny the question of ideas but rather seeks to examine
> what gives rise to them. Equally it does not deny the role of the
> individual or indeed that of chance but instead puts them in their
> correct context. A car crash or a stray bullet may indeed manage to
> change the course of history but it is certainly not the motive force.
>
> Hegel explained that necessity reveals itself through chance. The
> assassin's bullet that killed Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo was an
> historical accident which served as a catalyst for the outbreak of
> hostilities between the great powers which had been building up as a
> result of insurmountable economic, political and military contradictions
> between the great European powers before 1914.
>
> Marxist Philosophy
>
> This brings us to the central question of Marxist philosophy. In the
> writings of Marx and Engels we do not have a philosophical system, like
> that of Hegel, but a series of brilliant insights and pointers, which,
> if they were developed, would provide a valuable addition to the
> methodological armoury of science. Unfortunately, such a work has never
> been seriously undertaken.
>
> There is a difficulty for anyone who wishes to study dialectical
> materialism thoroughly. Despite the immense importance of the subject,
> there is no single book of Marx and Engels that deals with the question
> in a comprehensive manner. However, the dialectical method is in
> evidence in all the writings of Marx. Probably the best example of the
> application of dialectics to a particular field (in this case political
> economy) consists of the three volumes of Capital.
>
> For a long time, Marx had intended to write a book on dialectical
> materialism, but it proved impossible because of his work on Capital. In
> addition to this monumental task, Marx produced numerous political
> writings and was constantly engaged in active participation in the
> labour movement, particularly in the construction of the International
> Workingmen's Association (the First International). This occupied every
> moment of his time, and even this work was frequently interrupted by
> bouts of illness brought on by his miserable living conditions, poor
> diet and exhaustion.
>
> After Marx's death Engels planned to write the book on philosophy that
> his friend was unable to produce. He left us a precious legacy of
> writings on Marxist philosophy, such as Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
> Classical German Philosophy, Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature. But
> unfortunately, Engels also failed to write the definitive book on
> Marxist philosophy for various reasons.
>
> First, the emergence of an opportunist trend within the Social
> Democratic Party in Germany forced him to leave his scientific research
> to one side in order to write a polemic against opportunism that has
> become one of the most important classics of Marxism. This was the
> celebrated Anti-Dühring which, among other things, contains a
> contribution to Marxist philosophy of the first order of importance.
>
> Later on, Engels returned to his preparatory studies for a comprehensive
> book on philosophy. But with the death of Marx, on March 14, 1883, he
> was again obliged to suspend this work in order to prioritise the
> difficult task of putting in order and completing the manuscripts of
> volumes two and three of Capital that had been left unfinished.
>
> Marx and Hegel
>
> Dialectical philosophy reached its highest point in the philosophy of
> the German idealist Georg Hegel. His great contribution was to
> rediscover dialectics, originally invented by the Greeks. He developed
> this to new heights. But he did this on the basis of idealism. This was,
> in Engels' words, the greatest miscarriage in history. Reading Hegel,
> one has the sensation of a truly great idea that is struggling to escape
> from the straitjacket of idealist mystification. Here we find
> extraordinarily profound ideas and flashes of great insight, but buried
> amidst a heap of idealist nonsense. It is a very frustrating experience
> to read Hegel!
>
> Time and again this great thinker drew tantalisingly close to a
> materialist position. But at the last minute he always drew back,
> fearful of the consequences. For that reason, Hegelian philosophy was
> unsatisfactory, contradictory, botched and incomplete. It was left to
> Marx and Engels to dot the i's and cross the t's, to carry the Hegelian
> philosophy to its logical conclusions, and, in so doing, to negate it
> utterly and replace it with something qualitatively superior.
>
> Hegel carried traditional philosophy as far as it could go. In order to
> carry it further, it had to go beyond its bounds, negating itself in the
> process. Philosophy had to return from the nebulous realms of
> speculation back to the real world of material things, of living men and
> women, of real history and struggle from which it had been separated for
> so long.
>
> The problem with Feuerbach and some other Left Hegelians, like Moses
> Hess, is that they merely said no to Hegel, negating his philosophy by
> simply denying it. Hess' move to materialism was a bold one. It required
> courage, especially in the given context of general European reaction
> and the repressive Prussian state. It provided inspiration to the young
> Marx and Engels. But ultimately, it failed.
>
> One can negate a grain of wheat by crushing it underfoot. But the
> dialectical concept of negation is not merely to destroy: it is to
> destroy while simultaneously preserving all that deserves to be
> preserved. A grain of wheat can also be negated by allowing it to germinate.
>
> Hegel pointed out that the same words in the mouth of an adolescent do
> not carry the same weight as on the lips of an old man, who has lived
> life and accumulated great experience. It is the same with philosophy.
> In returning to its starting point, philosophy does not merely repeat a
> long-surpassed stage. It does not become childish by returning in old
> age to its infancy, but it returns to the old ideas of the Ionic Greeks
> enriched by 2,000 years of history and the development of science and
> culture.
>
> This is not the mechanical movement of a gigantic wheel, the senseless
> repetition of previous stages, like the endless process of rebirth that
> features in certain Oriental religions, but the negation of the
> negation, which posits the return to an earlier phase of development,
> but on a qualifiedly higher level. It is the same, and not the same.
>
> However, although he reached some deep and important conclusions, at
> times drawing close to materialism (for example in The Philosophy of
> History), Hegel remained a prisoner of his idealist outlook. He never
> managed to apply his dialectical method correctly to the real world of
> society and nature, because for him, the only real development was the
> development of the world of ideas.
>
> Marx's Philosophical Revolution
>
> Of all the theories of Marx, no other has been so attacked, distorted
> and slandered as dialectical materialism. And this is no accident, since
> this theory is the basis and foundation of Marxism. It is, more or less,
> the method of scientific socialism. Marxism is much more than a
> political programme and an economic theory. It is a philosophy, the vast
> scope of which covers not only politics and the class struggle, but the
> whole of human history, economics, society, thought and nature.
>
> Today, the ideology of the bourgeoisie is in the process of
> disintegration, not only in the field of economics and politics but also
> in that of philosophy. In the period of its ascent the bourgeoisie was
> capable of producing great thinkers like Hegel and Kant. In the period
> of its senile decay it produces nothing of value. It is impossible to
> read the barren products of the university philosophy departments
> without a feeling of tedium and irritation in equal measure.
>
> The fight against the power of the ruling class cannot stop in the
> factories, the streets, parliament and local councils. We must also
> carry out the battle in the ideological field, where the influence of
> the bourgeoisie is no less pernicious and harmful by being hidden under
> the guise of a false impartiality and a superficial objectivity. Marxism
> has a duty to provide a comprehensive alternative to the old and
> discredited schemes.
>
> The young Marx was heavily influenced by Hegelian philosophy that
> dominated the German universities at that time. The whole of Hegel's
> doctrine was based on the idea of constant change and development
> through contradictions. In that sense it represented a real revolution
> in philosophy. It is this dynamic, revolutionary side that inspired the
> young Marx and is the starting point for all his ideas.
>
> Marx and Engels negated Hegel and turned his system of ideas into its
> opposite. But they did so while simultaneously preserving all that was
> valuable in his philosophy. They based themselves on the "rational
> kernel" of Hegel's ideas and carried them to a higher level by
> developing and making actual what was always implicit in them.
>
> In Hegel, the real struggle of historical forces is expressed in the
> shadowy form of the struggle of ideas. But, as Marx explains, ideas in
> themselves have no history and no real existence. Therefore, reality
> appears in Hegel in a mystified, alienated form. In Feuerbach things are
> really not much better, since Man here appears also in a one-sided,
> idealistic and unreal manner. The real, historical men and women only
> appear with the advent of Marxist philosophy.
>
> With the philosophy of Marx, philosophy at last returns to its roots. It
> is both dialectical and materialist. Here theory and practice once again
> join hands and rejoice together. Philosophy comes out of its dark and
> airless study and enjoys the sun and air. It becomes an inseparable part
> of life. In place of the obscure conflict of ideas without substance, we
> have the real contradictions of the material world and society. Instead
> of a remote and incomprehensible Absolute, we have real men and women,
> living in real society, making real history and fighting real battles.
>
> The dialectic appears in the work of Hegel in a fantastic and
> semi-mystical guise. It is "upside down", so to speak. Here we do not
> find the real processes taking place in nature and society, but only the
> pale reflection of those processes in the minds of men, especially of
> philosophers. In the words of Engels, the dialectic in Hegel's hands,
> despite his great genius, was a colossal miscarriage.
>
> He points out that Marx was the only one who could strip away the
> mysticism contained in Hegelian logic and extract the dialectical
> kernel. This represented the real discoveries in this field. Through the
> reconstruction of the dialectical method, Marx managed to provide the
> only true development of thought.
>
> While the philosophy of Hegel interpreted things only from the point of
> view of the mind and spirit (i.e. from the idealist standpoint), Marx
> showed that the development of ideas in the minds of men is only a
> reflection of developments that occur in nature and society. As Marx
> says: "Hegel's dialectic is the basic form of all dialectic, but only
> after being stripped of its mystical form, and it is precisely this
> which distinguishes my method." (Letter to Kugelmann, 6 March 1868,
> MECW, Volume 42, p. 543)
>
> What is Dialectics?
>
> Trotsky, in his brilliant little article The ABC of Dialectical
> Materialism, defined dialectics thus: "The dialectic is neither fiction
> nor mysticism, but a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it
> is not limited to the daily problems of life but attempts to arrive at
> an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes. The
> dialectic and formal logic bear a relationship similar to that between
> higher and lower mathematics."
>
> The combination of the dialectical method with materialism created an
> extremely powerful analytical tool. But what is the dialectic? For
> reasons of space, it is impossible to explain here all the laws of
> dialectics developed by Hegel and perfected by Marx. I have attempted to
> do this elsewhere, in Reason in Revolt: Marxist Philosophy and Modern
> Science, published by Wellred Books. In a few lines I can only give the
> sketchiest of outlines.
>
> In his book Anti-Dühring Engels characterised it as follows: "The
> dialectic is simply the science of the general laws of motion and
> development of nature, human society and thought." In Dialectics of
> Nature Engels also sketches in outline the main laws of dialectics:
>
> a) The law of transformation of quantity into quality. b) The law of the
> unity and struggle of opposites and transformation into each other when
> they are taken to extremes. c) The law of development through
> contradictions, or put another way, the negation of the negation.
>
> Despite its unfinished and fragmentary nature, Engels's book Dialectics
> of Nature is very important, along with Anti Dühring, for the student of
> Marxism. Obviously, Engels had to rely on the knowledge and scientific
> discoveries of the time. Consequently, certain aspects of the content
> have a mainly historical interest. But what is surprising in Dialectics
> of Nature is not this or that detail or fact that has been inevitably
> overtaken by the march of science. On the contrary, what is astonishing
> is the number of ideas advanced by Engels--often ideas that ran counter
> to the scientific theories of his day--which have been corroborated
> brilliantly by modern science.
>
> Throughout the book, Engels emphasises the idea that matter and motion
> (now we would call it energy) are inseparable. Motion is the mode of
> existence of matter. This dynamic view of matter, of the universe,
> contains a profound truth that was already understood, or rather guessed
> as, by the early Greek philosophers like Heraclitus. For him "everything
> is and is not, because everything is in flux". Everything is constantly
> changing, coming into being and passing away.
>
> For common sense, the mass of an object never changes. For example, a
> spinning top when rotating, has the same weight as one that is
> motionless. Mass was therefore considered to be constant, regardless of
> speed. Later it was discovered that this is wrong. In fact, mass
> increases with speed, but such an increase is only appreciable in cases
> where the velocity is approaching that of light. For the practical
> purposes of everyday life, we can accept that the mass of an object is
> constant regardless of the speed with which it moves. However, for very
> high speeds, this claim is false, and the higher the speed, the falser
> is the claim.
>
> Commenting on this law, Professor Feynman's says: "[...] philosophically
> we are completely wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of
> the world has to be altered even though the mass changes only a little.
> This is a very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind
> the laws. Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes
> in our ideas..." (R. Feynman, Lectures on Physics)
>
> This example clearly demonstrates the fundamental difference between
> elementary mechanics and advanced modern physics. Similarly, there is a
> big difference between elementary mathematics, used for simple everyday
> calculations, and higher mathematics (the differential and integral
> calculus), discussed by Engels in Anti Dühring and Dialectics of Nature.
>
> The same difference exists between formal logic and dialectics. For
> everyday life, the laws of formal logic are more than enough. However,
> for more complex processes, these laws are often turned upside down.
> Their limited truth becomes false.
>
> Quantity and Quality
>
> From the point of view of dialectical materialism, the material
> universe has no beginning or end, but consists of a mass of material (or
> energy) in a constant state of movement. This is the fundamental idea of
> Marxist philosophy and it is completely supported by the discoveries of
> modern science over the last one hundred years.
>
> Take any example from everyday life: any phenomenon apparently stable,
> and we will see below the surface it is in a state of flux, although
> this change is invisible at first glance. For example, a glass of water:
> "To our eyes, our crude eyes, nothing is changing, but if we could see
> it a billion times magnified, we would see that from its own point of
> view it is always changing: molecules are leaving the surface, molecules
> are coming back." (Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics,
> chapter 1, p. 8.)
>
> These words are not of Engels, but a renowned scientist, the late
> Professor Richard P. Feynman, who used to teach theoretical physics at
> the California Institute of Technology. The same author repeats Engels'
> famous example of the law of transformation of quantity into quality.
>
> Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a state of constant
> motion. Water does not break up into its component parts due to the
> mutual attraction of the molecules. However, if it is heated to 100 ° C
> at normal atmospheric pressure, it reaches a critical point where the
> attractive force between the molecules is insufficient and they fly
> apart suddenly.
>
> This example may seem trivial, but it has tremendously important
> consequences for science and industry. It is part of a very important
> branch of modern physics: the study of phase transitions. Matter can
> exist in four phases (or states), solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, plus a
> few other extreme phases, like critical fluids and degenerate gases.
>
> Generally, as a solid is heated (or as pressure decreases), it will
> change to a liquid form, and will eventually become a gas. For example,
> ice (frozen water) melts into liquid water when it is heated. As the
> water boils, the water evaporates and becomes water vapour. But if this
> vapour is heated to a very high temperature, a further phase transition
> occurs. At 12,000 K = 11,726.85 Celsius, steam becomes plasma.
>
> This is what Marxists call the transformation of quantity into quality.
> That is to say, a large number of very small changes finally produces a
> qualitative leap--a phase transition. Examples may be cited at will: If
> one cools a substance such as lead or niobium, there is a gradual
> reduction of its electrical resistance, up to a critical temperature
> (usually a few degrees above -273 ° C). Precisely at this point, all
> resistance will suddenly disappear. There is a kind of "quantum leap",
> the transition from having a small resistance to having none.
>
> One can find a limitless number of similar examples in all the natural
> sciences. The American scientist Marc Buchanan wrote a very interesting
> book called Ubiquity. In this book, he gives a long series of examples:
> heart attacks, forest fires, avalanches, the rise and fall of animal
> populations, stock exchange crises, wars, and even changes in fashion
> and different schools of art (I would add revolutions to this list).
>
> All these things seem to have no connection, yet are subject to the same
> law, which can be expressed by a mathematical equation known as a power
> law. What this is, in Marxist terminology, is the law of the
> transformation of quantity into quality. And what this study shows is
> that this law is ubiquitous, that is to say, it is present at all levels
> in the universe. It is a truly universal law of nature, just as Engels said.
>
> Dialectics versus Empiricism
>
> "Give us the facts"! This imperious demand appears to be the acme of
> practical realism. What can be more solid than the facts? Only what
> appears to be realism turns out to be just the opposite. What are
> established facts at one time, can turn out to be something very
> different. Everything is in a constant state of change, and sooner or
> later everything changes into its opposite. What appears to be solid
> dissolves into thin air.
>
> The dialectical method allows us to penetrate beyond appearances and see
> the processes that are taking place beneath the surface. The dialectic
> is first of all the science of universal interconnection. It provides a
> comprehensive and dynamic view of phenomena and processes. It analyses
> things in their relationship, not separately; in their motion, not
> statically; in their life, not death.
>
> Knowledge of dialectics means freedom from the slavish worship of the
> established fact, of things as they are, which is the chief
> characteristic of superficial empirical thinking. In politics this is
> typical of reformism that seeks to cloak its conservatism, myopia and
> cowardice in the philosophical language of pragmatism, the art of the
> possible, "realism "and so on.
>
> Dialectics permits us to penetrate beyond the "given", the immediate,
> that is, the world of appearance, and to uncover the hidden processes
> that are taking place beneath the surface. We point out that behind the
> appearance of calm and absence of movement, there is a process of
> molecular change, not only in physics but also in society and in the
> psychology of the masses.
>
> It was not so long ago that most people thought the boom was going to
> last forever. That was, or appeared to be, an unquestionable fact. Those
> who did question it were regarded as deluded cranks. But now that
> unquestionable truth lies in ruins. The facts have changed into their
> opposite. What seemed to be an indisputable truth turns out to be a lie.
> To quote the words of Hegel: Reason becomes unreason.
>
> Using this method more than a century ago, Frederick Engels was able, in
> a number of instances, to see further than most contemporary scientists,
> anticipating many of the discoveries of modern science. Engels was not a
> professional scientist, but had a fairly extensive knowledge of the
> natural sciences of his time.
>
> However, based on a deep understanding of the dialectical method of
> analysis, Engels made a number of very important contributions to the
> philosophical interpretation of science today, although they have
> remained unknown to the overwhelming majority of scientists until now.
>
> Of course, philosophy cannot dictate the laws of the natural sciences.
> These laws can only be developed on the basis of a serious and rigorous
> analysis of nature. The progress of science is characterised by a series
> of approximations. Through experiment and observation we get closer and
> closer to the truth, without ever being able to get to know the whole
> truth. It is a never-ending process of a deepening penetration of the
> secrets of matter and the universe. The truth of scientific theories can
> only be established through practice, observation and experiment, not by
> any commandments of philosophers.
>
> Most of the questions with which philosophers have wrestled in the past
> have been solved by science. Nevertheless, it would be a serious mistake
> to suppose that philosophy has no role to play in science. There remain
> only two aspects of philosophy which remain valid today which have not
> been absorbed by the different branches of science: formal logic and
> dialectics.
>
> Engels insisted that "the dialectic, stripped of mysticism, becomes an
> absolute necessity" for science. The dialectic, of course, has no
> magical quality to solve the problems of modern physics. Nevertheless, a
> comprehensive and coherent philosophy would be of inestimable help in
> guiding scientific investigation onto the most fruitful lines and
> prevent it from falling into all manner of arbitrary and mystical
> hypotheses that lead nowhere. Many of the problems facing science today
> arise precisely because of its lack of a firm philosophical foundation.
>
> Dialectics and Science
>
> Many scientists treat philosophy with contempt. As far as modern
> philosophy is concerned, this contempt is well deserved. For the past
> one and a half centuries the realm of philosophy resembles an arid
> desert with only traces of life. The treasure trove of the past, with
> its ancient glories and flashes of illumination, seems utterly
> extinguished. Not only scientists but men and women in general will
> search in vain in this wasteland for any source of illumination.
>
> Yet on closer inspection the contempt displayed by scientists to
> philosophy is not well grounded. For if we look seriously at the state
> of modern science--or more accurately at its theoretical underpinnings
> and assumptions, we see that science has in fact never freed itself from
> philosophy. Unceremoniously expelled by the front door, philosophy slyly
> gains an entry through the back window.
>
> Scientists who proudly assert their complete indifference to philosophy
> in reality make all kinds of assumptions that are philosophical in
> character. And in fact, this kind of unconscious and uncritical
> philosophy is not superior to the old fashioned kind but immeasurably
> inferior to it. Moreover, it is the source of many errors in practice.
>
> The remarkable advances of science over the past century seem to have
> made philosophy redundant. In a world where we can penetrate the deepest
> mysteries of the cosmos and follow the complex motions of sub-atomic
> particles, the old questions which absorbed the attention of
> philosophers have been resolved. The role of philosophy has been
> correspondingly reduced. However, to repeat the point, there are two
> areas where philosophy retains its importance: formal logic and dialectics.
>
> A major advance in the application of the dialectical method to the
> history of science was the publication in 1962 of TS Kuhn's remarkable
> book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This demonstrated the
> inevitability of scientific revolutions and showed the approximate
> mechanism whereby these occur. "All that exists deserves to perish"
> holds good not only for living organisms but also to scientific
> theories, including those which we currently hold to be of absolute
> validity.
>
> As a matter of fact, Engels was far ahead of his contemporaries (most
> scientists included) in his attitude towards the natural sciences. He
> not only explained motion (energy) as inseparable from matter, but also
> explained that the difference between the sciences consisted only in the
> study of the various forms of energy and the dialectical transition from
> one form of energy into another. This is what is now known as phase
> transitions.
>
> The whole evolution of science in the twentieth century has rejected the
> old compartmentalisation, recognising the dialectical transition from
> one science to another. Marx and Engels in their day caused great
> indignation amongst their opponents, when they said that the difference
> between organic and inorganic matter was only relative. They explained
> that organic matter--the first living organisms--arose from inorganic
> matter at a given time, representing a qualitative leap in evolution.
> They said that animals, including man with his mind, his ideas and
> beliefs were simply matter organised in a certain way.
>
> The difference between organic and inorganic matter, which Kant
> considered an insurmountable barrier, has been eliminated, as Feynman
> points out: "Everything is constituted by atoms. This is the key
> assumption. For example, the most important assumptions in biology are
> that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is
> nothing living things do that cannot be understood from the point of
> view that they are made of atoms, acting in accordance with the laws of
> physics." (R. Feynman, Lectures on Physics)
>
> From the scientific perspective, men and women are aggregations of
> atoms arranged in a particular way. But we are not merely agglomeration
> of atoms. The human body is an extraordinarily complex organism, in
> particular the brain, the structure and functioning of which we are only
> now beginning to understand. This is something far more beautiful and
> wonderful than all the old fairy stories of religion.
>
> At the same time that Marx was carrying out a revolution in the field of
> political economy, Darwin was doing the same in the field of biology. It
> is no accident that while Darwin's work aroused a storm of indignation
> and incomprehension, it was immediately recognised by Marx and Engels as
> a masterpiece of the dialectic, although Darwin himself was unaware of
> it. The explanation for this apparent paradox is that the laws of
> dialectics are not an arbitrary invention, but reflect processes that
> actually exist in nature and society.
>
> The discovery of genetics has revealed the exact mechanism that
> determines the transformation of one species into another. The human
> genome has provided a new dimension to Darwin's work, showing that
> humans share our genes not just with the humble fruit fly but with the
> most basic forms of life, the bacteria. In the next few years,
> scientists will carry out an act of creation in a laboratory, producing
> a living organism from inorganic matter. The last patch of ground will
> be cut from under the feet of the Divine Creator, who will finally be
> rendered utterly redundant.
>
> For a long time scientists argued as to whether the creation of new
> species was the result of a long period of accumulation of slow changes
> or arose from a sudden violent change. From a dialectical point of view,
> there is no contradiction between the two. A long period of molecular
> changes (quantitative changes) reaches a critical point where it
> suddenly produces what is now termed a quantum leap.
>
> Marx and Engels believed the theory of evolution of species was clear
> proof of the fact that nature ultimately works in a dialectical way,
> i.e. through development, through contradictions. Three decades ago,
> this statement received a powerful boost from such a prestigious
> institution as the British Museum, where a furious debate broke the
> decorous silence of centuries. One of the arguments against the
> defenders of the idea of qualitative leaps in the chain of evolution was
> that it represented Marxist infiltration in the British Museum!
>
> However, despite itself, modern biology has had no choice but to correct
> the old idea of evolution as a gradual, linear, uninterrupted process,
> without abrupt changes, and admit the existence of qualitative leaps,
> characterised by the mass extinction of some species and the emergence
> of new ones. On 17 April 1982 The Economist published an article on the
> centenary of Darwin that said:
>
> "It will be increasingly clear that fairly small mutations that affect
> what happens at a key stage of development can cause major evolutionary
> changes (for example, a small change in the mode of operation of certain
> genes could lead to a significant increase in brain size). Evidence is
> also accumulating that many genes undergo a slow but steady mutation.
> Thus, little by little, scientists solve the ongoing controversy of
> whether species change slowly and continuously for long periods, or
> remain unchanged for a long time and then experience a rapid evolution.
> Probably both types of changes occur."
>
> The old version of evolutionary theory (phyletic gradualism) maintained
> that species change only gradually as individual genetic mutations arise
> and are selected. However, a new theory was put forward by Stephen Jay
> Gould and Niles Eldridge called "punctuated equilibrium" according to
> which genetic change can take place through sudden leaps. Incidentally,
> the late Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that if the scientists had paid
> attention to what Engels had written about human origins, they would
> have saved themselves a hundred years of error.
>
> Whole Nations Bankrupt
>
> The first phase of the crisis that began in 2008 was characterised by
> the default of big banks. The entire banking system of the USA and the
> rest of the world was only saved by the massive injection of billions of
> dollars and euros by the state. But the question must be asked: what is
> left of the old idea that the free market, if left to itself, will solve
> all problems? What is left of the old idea that the state must not
> interfere in the workings of the economy?
>
> The massive injection of public money solved nothing. The crisis has not
> been resolved. It has merely been shifted onto states. All that happened
> is that in place of a massive deficit of the banks we have a gaping
> black hole in public finances. And who will pay for this? Not those
> well-heeled bankers who, having presided over the wrecking of the world
> financial order, have calmly pocketed the public's hard-earned money and
> are now awarding themselves lavish bonuses with the proceeds.
>
> No! The deficits about which the economists and politicians are
> complaining so bitterly must be paid for by the poorest and most
> defenceless sections of society. Suddenly there is no money for the old,
> the sick, the unemployed, but there is always plenty of money for the
> bankers. This means a regime of permanent austerity. But this merely
> creates new contradictions. By cutting demand, it reduces the market
> still further, and thus aggravates the crisis of overproduction.
>
> Now the economists are predicting a new collapse, when currencies and
> governments will go under, threatening the very fabric of the world
> financial system. And despite what the politicians say about the need to
> curb the deficit, debts on the scale that have been run up cannot be
> repaid. Greece provides a graphic example of this fact. The future is
> one of even deeper crises, falling living standards, painful adjustments
> and increasing impoverishment for the majority. This is a finished
> recipe for further upheavals and class struggle on an even higher level.
> It is a systemic crisis of capitalism on a world scale.
>
> Some sophists ask: if socialism is inevitable, why should one have to
> struggle to achieve it? As a matter of fact, it is possible to be a
> convinced determinist and yet be committed to an active revolutionary
> role. In the seventeenth century the Calvinists were determinists of the
> most categorical and absolute kind. They believed fervently in
> predestination, that the fate and salvation of every man and woman was
> determined before they were born.
>
> Nevertheless, this iron determinism did not prevent the Calvinists from
> playing a most revolutionary role in the struggle against decaying
> feudalism and its main ideological expression, the Roman Catholic
> Church. Precisely because they were convinced of the justice and
> inevitable triumph of their cause, they fought all the more bravely to
> speed up its victory.
>
> The old society is dying on its feet, and a new society is struggling to
> be born. But those who have derived vast riches from it will never
> accept the inevitability of its demise. Sooner than see it sink into
> oblivion, the ruling class would prefer to drag the whole of society
> down with it. The prolongation of the death agony of capitalism
> constitutes a mortal threat to human culture and civilisation. Our task
> is to assist in the birth of the new society, to ensure that it takes
> place as swiftly and painlessly as possible, with the smallest cost to
> humanity.
>
> Contrary to the calumnies of our enemies, Marxists do not advocate
> violence, but we are realists, and we know that the whole history of the
> last ten thousand years proves that no ruling class or caste ever
> surrenders its wealth, power and privileges without a fight, and that
> usually means a fight with no holds barred. And that remains the case today.
>
> It is the decay of capitalism that threatens to unleash the most
> terrible violence on the world. In order to reduce the possibility of
> violence, to put an end to chaos and wars, to ensure the most peaceful
> and orderly transition to socialism, the prior condition is that the
> working class must be mobilised for struggle and be prepared to fight to
> the end.
>
> "All Roads Lead to Ruin"
>
> Contrary to the comforting picture that used to be presented of the
> capitalist system offering a secure and prosperous future for all, we
> see the reality of a world in which millions suffer poverty and hunger,
> while the super rich become richer every day. People live in constant
> fear of an insecure future that will be decided, not by the rational
> decisions of people but solely by the wild gyrations of the market.
>
> Financial crises, mass unemployment and constant social and political
> upheavals turn many things upside down. What appeared to be fixed and
> permanent dissolves overnight and people begin to question things they
> always took for granted. This state of perpetual unrest is what
> prepares the ground psychologically for revolution, which in the end
> becomes the only option that is realistically imaginable. In order to
> see this in practice one only has to look at present-day Greece.
>
> Everybody knows that the capitalist system is in crisis. But what is the
> antidote to the crisis? If capitalism is an anarchic and chaotic system
> that inevitably ends in crises, then one must conclude that in order to
> eliminate crises it is necessary to abolish the capitalist system
> itself. If you say "A", you must also say "B", "C" and "D". But this is
> what the bourgeois economists refuse to do.
>
> Are there no mechanisms that could allow the bourgeois to get out of a
> crisis of overproduction? Of course there are! One method would be to
> lower the rate of interest in order to boost profit margins and
> stimulate investment. But the rate of interest is already close to zero.
> Reduce it any further and we would be talking about a negative rate of
> interest: the banks would pay people to borrow money. This is completely
> crazy, but they are even discussing it. That shows that they are
> becoming desperate.
>
> The other method is to increase state spending. This is what all the
> Keynesians and reformists are advocating. In the first place, this
> exposes the bankruptcy of free market economics. The private sector is
> so feeble, decrepit, so bankrupt in the literal sense of the word that
> it must rely on the state just as a man with no legs relies on crutches.
> But even that option does not offer a way out.
>
> It is an obvious fact that the banks and big monopolies are now
> dependent on the state for their survival. As soon as they were in
> difficulties, the same people who used to insist that the state must
> play no role in the economy, ran to the government with their hands out,
> demanding huge sums of money. And the government immediately gave them
> a blank cheque. Trillions of pounds of public money has been handed over
> to the banks, totalling some $14trillion. But the crisis continues to
> deepen.
>
> All that has been achieved in the last four years is to transform what
> was a black hole in the finances of the banks into a black hole in
> public finances. In order to save the bankers, everybody is expected to
> sacrifice, but for the bankers and capitalists no sacrifices are
> demanded. They pay themselves lavish bonuses with the money of the
> taxpayer. This is Robin Hood in reverse.
>
> The existence of huge deficits means that the Keynesian argument about
> increasing state spending falls under its own weight. How can the state
> spend money it does not possess? The one avenue still open to them is
> printing money, or, as it is euphemistically known, Quantitative Easing
> (QE). The injection of large amounts of fictitious capital into the
> economy is subject to the law of diminishing returns. It has a similar
> effect to that of a junkie who has to inject himself with ever bigger
> quantities of a drug in order to get the same effect. In the process
> they are poisoning the system and undermining its health.
>
> This is a really desperate measure that must result sooner or later in
> an increase in inflation. In this way, they are preparing for an even
> deeper slump in the coming period. This is the inevitable result of the
> fact that in the previous period the capitalist system went beyond its
> limits. In order to postpone a slump, they used up the very mechanisms
> that they need to get out of the present crisis. This is the reason why
> the crisis is so deep and so intractable. As Marx explains, the
> capitalists can only solve their crises "by paving the way for more
> extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means
> whereby crises are prevented." (Communist Manifesto)
>
> In the olden days the Church used to say: "All roads lead to Rome." Now
> the bourgeoisie has a new motto: All roads lead to ruin. It is
> unthinkable that a crisis that is throwing the whole world into chaos,
> that condemns millions of people to unemployment, poverty and despair,
> that robs the youth of a future and destroys health, housing, education
> and culture--that all this can occur without producing a social and
> political crisis. The crisis of capitalism is preparing the conditions
> for revolution everywhere.
>
> This is no longer a theoretical proposition. It is a fact. If we take
> just the last twelve months, what do we see? Revolutionary movements
> have occurred in one country after another: Tunisia, Egypt, Greece,
> Spain. Even in the United States we have the #Occupy movement and the
> earlier mass protests in Wisconsin.
>
> These dramatic events are a clear expression of the fact that the crisis
> of capitalism is producing a massive backlash on a world scale, and that
> a growing number of people are beginning to draw revolutionary
> conclusions. As long as a tiny minority holds in its hands the land, the
> banks and the big corporations, it will continue to take all the
> fundamental decisions that affect the lives and destinies of millions of
> people on the planet.
>
> The intolerable gap that has developed between rich and poor is placing
> an increasing strain on social cohesion. The basis of the old Social
> Democratic dream of class peace and social partnership has broken down
> irremediably. This fact was summed up by the Occupy Wall Street slogan:
> "The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 per cent that
> will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 per cent."
>
> The problem is that the present protest movement is confused in its
> aims. It lacks a coherent programme and a bold leadership. But it
> reflects a general mood of anger that is building up under the surface
> and which sooner or later must find a way out. But they are definitely
> anti-capitalist movements, and sooner or later, in one country or
> another, the question of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism will
> be posed.
>
> Under capitalism, as Marx explained, the productive forces have
> experienced the most spectacular development in history. Yet the ideas
> of the ruling class, even in its most revolutionary epoch, lagged far
> behind the advances in production, technology and science.
>
> The Threat to Culture?
>
> The contrast between the rapid development of technology and science,
> and the extraordinary delay in the development of human ideology, is
> presented in a clear manner in the most advanced capitalist country of
> the world: the USA. This is the land where science has achieved its most
> spectacular results. The steady progress of technology is the
> precondition for the final emancipation of man, the abolition of poverty
> and illiteracy, ignorance, disease and the domination of nature by man
> through the conscious planning of the economy. The road is open to
> conquest, not only on Earth, but in space. And yet, in this
> technologically advanced country, the most primitive superstitions reign
> supreme. Nine out of ten Americans believe in the existence of a divine
> being and seven out of ten believe in life after death.
>
> On Christmas Day 1968, when the first man to fly around the Moon had to
> choose a message to convey to the American people from his spaceship,
> out of the entire corpus of world literature, he chose the first book of
> Genesis. As he hurtled through space in a spaceship crammed full of the
> most modern gadgets, he pronounced the words: "In the beginning God
> created the heaven and the earth." It is more than 130 years since
> Darwin's death. Nevertheless, there are still many people in the USA who
> believe that every word of the Bible is literally correct, and who wish
> the schools to teach the version of human origins contained in Genesis,
> rather than the theory of evolution based on natural selection. In an
> attempt to make Creationism more respectable, its proponents have
> renamed it "intelligent design." The question immediately arises: who
> designed the intelligent designer? To this entirely reasonable question
> they have no answer. Nor can they explain why their "intelligent
> designer" made such a hopeless botch of the job when he created the
> world in the first place.
>
> Why design a world with things like cancer, bubonic plague, aids,
> menstruation and migraine? Why design vampire bats, leeches and
> investment bankers? Come to think of it, why is it that apparently most
> of our genes are made of useless junk? Our intelligent designer turns
> out to be not so intelligent after all. In the words of Alfonso the
> Wise, King of Castile (1221-1284): "Had I been present at the Creation,
> I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the
> universe." Indeed, an eleven year old of average intelligence could
> probably have done a better job.
>
> It is true that the authority of the Church is in decline in all Western
> countries. The number of practicing believers is decreasing. In
> countries like Spain and Ireland the Church is finding it difficult to
> recruit new priests. Attendance at mass has suffered a sharp decline in
> recent times, especially among the youth. ?However, the decline of the
> Church has opened the door to a real Egyptian plague of religious sects
> of the weirdest varieties, and a flowering of mysticism and
> superstitions of all kinds. Astrology, that remnant of medieval
> barbarism--is back in fashion. Cinemas, television and bookstores are
> full of works based on the most brazen mysticism and superstition. ?
>
> These are only the outward signs of the putrefaction of a social system
> that has outlived itself, that it has ceased to be a historically
> progressive force and that has definitely entered into conflict with the
> needs of the development of the productive forces. In this sense, the
> struggle of the working class to surgically cut short the agony of
> bourgeois society is also the struggle to defend the achievements of
> science and culture against the encroaching forces of barbarism.
>
> The only alternatives open to humanity are clear: either the socialist
> transformation of society, the elimination of the political and economic
> power of the bourgeoisie and the initiation of a new stage in the
> development of human civilisation, or the destruction of civilisation,
> and even of life itself. The ecologists and Greens moan continually
> about the degradation of the environment and warn of the threat this
> poses for humanity. They are right. But they resemble an inexperienced
> doctor who points to the symptoms but is unable to diagnose the nature
> of the disease, or to suggest a cure.
>
> The degeneration of the system is felt at all levels, not only in the
> economic field, but in the realm of morality, culture, art, music and
> philosophy. The existence of capitalism is being extended at the expense
> of the destruction of the productive forces, but it is also undermining
> culture, boosting demoralisation and the lumpenisation of entire layers
> of society, with disastrous consequences for the future. Ultimately, the
> existence of capitalism will enter into conflict with the existence of
> the democratic and trade union rights of the working class.
>
> The increase in crime and violence, pornography, bourgeois selfishness
> and the brutal indifference to the sufferings of others, sadism,
> disintegration of the family and the collapse of traditional morality,
> drug addiction and alcoholism--all those things provoking the
> hypocritical wrath and indignation of reactionaries--are only symptoms of
> the senile degeneration of capitalism. In the same way that similar
> phenomena accompanied the period of decline of slave society under the
> Roman Empire.
>
> The capitalist system, which puts profit before any other consideration,
> is poisoning the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat.
> The latest scandal of the massive adulteration of meat products in
> Europe is only the tip of the iceberg. If we allow the rule of the big
> banks and monopolies to continue for another five decades or more, it is
> entirely possible that the destruction of the planet may reach a point
> where irreversible damage is done that will threaten the future
> existence of humankind. The struggle to change society is therefore a
> life and death question.
>
> The Need for a Planned Economy
>
> For the past two decades we have been fed a steady diet of economic
> propaganda which assured us that the idea of a planned socialist economy
> was dead, and that the "market", left to its own devices, would solve
> the problem of unemployment, bringing about a world of peace and prosperity.
>
> Now, following the crash of 2008, the truth is beginning to dawn on
> people that the existing order is incapable of assuring even the most
> basic of human needs--a job, a living wage, a home, decent education and
> health provisions, a proper pension, a safe environment, clean air and
> water--for the great majority, and not only for those in the Third World.
>
> Such a system must surely stand condemned by all thinking people who are
> not blinded by the constant avalanche of spurious arguments, the sole
> purpose of which is to defend the vested interests of those who are
> doing extremely well out of the present set-up and cannot or will not
> believe that it will not last forever and a day.
>
> The central point of the Communist Manifesto--and herein lies its
> revolutionary message--is precisely that the capitalist system is not
> forever. This is the element which the apologists of our present system
> find most difficult to swallow. Naturally! It is the common delusion of
> every socio-economic system throughout history that it represents the
> very last word in social progress. Yet even from the standpoint of
> commonsense, such a view is clearly flawed. If we accept that everything
> in nature is mutable, why should society be any different?
>
> These facts indicate that the capitalist system had already exhausted
> its progressive mission. Every intelligent person realises that the free
> development of the productive forces demands the unification of the
> economies of all countries through a common plan which would permit the
> harmonious exploitation of the resources of our planet for the benefit
> of all.
>
> This is so evident that it is recognised by scientists and experts who
> have nothing to do with socialism, but are filled with indignation at
> the nightmare conditions in which two thirds of the human race live, and
> are worried by the effects of the destruction of the environment.
> Unfortunately, their well-intentioned recommendations fall on deaf ears,
> since they conflict with the vested interests of the big multinationals
> that dominate the world economy and whose calculations are not based on
> the welfare of humanity or the future of the planet, but exclusively on
> greed and the search for profit above all other considerations.
>
> The superiority of economic planning over capitalist anarchy is
> understood even by the bourgeois themselves, although they cannot admit
> it. In 1940, when Hitler's armies had smashed France, and Britain had
> its back against the wall, what did they do? Did they say: "Let market
> forces decide"? No! They centralised the economy, nationalised essential
> industries and introduced sweeping government controls, including
> economic conscription and rationing. Why did they opt for centralisation
> and planning? For the very simple reason that it gives better results.
>
> Of course, it is impossible to have a real plan of production under
> capitalism. Nevertheless, even the measures of state capitalist planning
> introduced by Churchill's wartime coalition were essential for defeating
> Hitler. An even more striking example was the Soviet Union. The Second
> World War in Europe was in reality a gigantic conflict between Hitler's
> Germany, with all the resources of Europe behind it, and the Soviet Union.
>
> It was the Soviet Union that defeated Hitler's armies. The reason for
> this extraordinary victory can never be admitted by the defenders of
> capitalism, but it is a self-evident fact. The existence of a
> nationalised planned economy gave the USSR an enormous advantage in the
> war. Despite the criminal policies of Stalin, which nearly brought about
> the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the war, the Soviet Union
> was able to swiftly recover and rebuild its industrial and military
> capacity.
>
> The Russians were able to dismantle all their industries in the
> West--1,500 factories and a million workers--put them on trains and ship
> them east of the Urals where they were beyond the reach of the Germans.
> In a matter of months the Soviet Union was out-producing the Germans in
> tanks, guns and airplanes. This demonstrates beyond doubt the colossal
> superiority of a nationalised planned economy, even under Stalin's
> bureaucratic regime.
>
> The USSR lost 27 million people in the Second World War--half the total
> deaths on a world scale. Its industries and agricultures suffered
> terrible devastation. Yet within ten years everything had been rebuilt,
> and without the kind of vast amounts of foreign money that were
> channelled into Western Europe by the Americans under Marshall Aid.
> That, and not Germany and Japan, is the real post-war economic miracle.
>
> Of course, real socialism must be based on democracy--not the fake formal
> democracy that exists in Britain and the USA, where anybody can say what
> they want as long as the big banks and monopolies decide what
> happens--but a genuine democracy based on the control and administration
> of society by working people themselves.
>
> There is nothing utopian about such an idea. It is based on what already
> exists. Let us take just one example. It is a never-ending source of
> amazement to the author of these lines how a big supermarket like Tesco
> can calculate precisely the amount of sugar, bread and milk that is
> required by an area of London with tens of thousands of inhabitants.
> They do this by scientific planning, and it never fails. If planning on
> such a level can work for a large supermarket, why cannot the same
> methods of planning be applied to society as a whole?
>
> Socialism and Internationalism
>
> Anyone who reads the Communist Manifesto can see that Marx and Engels
> anticipated this situation more than 150 years ago. They explained that
> capitalism must develop as a world system. Today, this analysis has been
> brilliantly confirmed by events. At the present time nobody can deny the
> crashing domination of the world market. It is in fact the most decisive
> phenomenon of the age in which we live.
>
> Yet when the Manifesto was written, there was practically no empirical
> data to support such a hypothesis. The only really developed capitalist
> economy was England. The infant industries of France and Germany (the
> latter did not even exist as a united entity) still sheltered behind
> high tariff walls--a fact which is conveniently forgotten today, as
> Western governments and economists deliver stern lectures to the rest of
> the world on the need to open up their economies.
>
> In the last few years economists have talked a lot about
> "globalisation", imagining that this was the panacea which would permit
> them to abolish the cycle of booms and slumps altogether. These dreams
> were shattered by the collapse of 2008.
>
> This has profound implications for the rest of the world. It shows the
> reverse side of "globalisation". To the degree that the capitalist
> system develops the world economy, it also prepared the conditions for a
> devastating world slump. A crisis in any part of the world economy
> rapidly extends to all the others. Far from abolishing the boom-slump
> cycle, globalisation has invested it with an even more convulsive and
> universal character than at any previous period.
>
> The fundamental problem is the system itself. In the words of Marx, "The
> real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself." (Capital, vol.
> 3, Part III) The economic pundits who argued that Marx was wrong and
> capitalist crises were things of the past (the "new economic paradigm")
> have themselves been proved wrong. The present boom has all the features
> of the economic cycle Marx described long ago. The process of the
> concentration of capital has reached staggering proportions. There is an
> orgy of takeovers and ever-increasing monopolisation. This does not lead
> to the development of the productive forces as in the past. On the
> contrary, factories are closed as if they were matchboxes and thousands
> of people are thrown out of work.
>
> The economic theories of monetarism--the Bible of neo-Liberalism--were
> summed up by John Kenneth Galbraith in the following way: "the poor have
> too much money, and the rich do not have enough." Record profit levels
> are accompanied by record inequality. The Economist has pointed out that
> "the one truly continuous trend over the past 25 years has been towards
> greater concentration of income at the very top".
>
> A tiny minority are obscenely rich, while the share of the workers in
> the national income is constantly reduced and the poorest sections sink
> into ever deeper poverty. Hurricane Katrina revealed to the whole world
> the existence of a subclass of deprived US citizens living in third
> world conditions.
>
> In the USA workers now produce 30 percent more than ten years ago, yet
> wages have hardly increased. The social fabric is increasingly strained.
> There is an enormous increase in tensions in society, even in the
> richest country in the world. This is preparing the ground for an even
> greater explosion of the class struggle.
>
> This is not only the case in the USA. Around the world, the boom is
> accompanied by high unemployment. Reforms and concessions are being
> taken back. In order to become competitive in world markets, Italy would
> need to sack 500,000 workers and the remainder would have to accept a
> wage reduction of thirty percent.
>
> For a time, capitalism succeeded in overcoming its contradictions by
> increasing world trade (globalisation). For the first time in history,
> the entire world has been drawn into the world market. The capitalists
> found new markets and avenues of investment in China and other
> countries. But this has now reached its limits.
>
> The American and European capitalists are no longer so enthusiastic
> about globalisation and free trade, when mountains of cheap Chinese
> goods are piling up on their doorstep. In the US Senate protectionist
> voices are raised and are becoming increasingly insistent. The Doha
> round of talks about world trade has been suspended and so great are the
> contradictions that there is no agreement possible.
>
> The current unstable economic boom is already running out of steam. The
> consumer boom in the USA is based on relatively low interest rates and a
> vast extension of credit and debt. These factors will turn into their
> opposite. A new crisis is being prepared on a world scale. Thus,
> globalisation reveals itself as a global crisis of capitalism.
>
> Is There no Alternative?
>
> Bourgeois economists are so blinkered and narrow minded that they cling
> to the outmoded capitalist system even when they are forced to admit
> that it is terminally diseased and condemned to collapse. To imagine
> that the human race is incapable of discovering a viable alternative to
> this rotten, corrupt and degenerate system is frankly an affront to
> humanity.
>
> Is it really true that there is no alternative to capitalism? No, it is
> not true. The alternative is a system based on production for the needs
> of the many and not the profit of the few; a system that replaces chaos
> and anarchy with harmonious planning; that replaces the rule of a
> minority of wealthy parasites with the rule of the majority who produce
> all the wealth of society. The name of this alternative is socialism.
>
> One may quibble over words, but the name of this system is socialism--not
> the bureaucratic and totalitarian caricature that existed in Stalinist
> Russia, but a genuine democracy based on the ownership, control and
> management of the productive forces by the working class. Is this idea
> really so very difficult to understand? Is it really utopian to suggest
> that the human race can take hold of its own fate and run society on the
> basis of a democratic plan of production?
>
> The need for a socialist planned economy is not an invention of Marx or
> any other thinker. It flows from objective necessity. The possibility of
> world socialism flows from the present conditions of capitalism itself.
> All that is necessary is for the working class, which constitutes the
> overwhelming majority of society, to take over the running of society,
> expropriate the banks and giant monopolies and mobilise the vast unused
> productive potential to solve the problems of society.
>
> Marx wrote: "No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive
> forces for which it is sufficient have been developed." (Karl Marx,
> Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.) The
> objective conditions for the creation of a new and higher form of human
> society have already been established by the development of capitalism.
> For the last 200 years the development of industry, agriculture, science
> and technology has acquired a speed and intensity without historical
> precedent:
>
>
> "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
> instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and
> with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes
> of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first
> condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant
> revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
> conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the
> bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones." (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of
> the Communist Party, Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians.)
>
> How true are these words of Marx and how applicable to our time! The
> solutions to the problems we face are already in existence. Over the
> last 200 years capitalism has built up a colossal productive power. But
> it is unable to utilise this potential to the full. The present crisis
> is only a manifestation of the fact that industry, science and
> technology have grown to the point where they cannot be contained within
> the narrow confines of private ownership and the nation state.
>
> The development of the productive forces, especially since the Second
> World War, has been unprecedented in history: nuclear energy,
> microelectronics, telecommunications, computers, industrial robots ...
> have meant a dramatic increase in productivity at work to a level much
> higher than could have been imagined in Marx's time, giving us a very
> clear idea of what would be possible in the future under socialism,
> based on a socialist planned economy, above all on a global scale. The
> present crisis is merely a manifestation of the revolt of the productive
> forces against these suffocating limitations. Once industry,
> agriculture, science and technology are freed from the suffocating
> restraints of capitalism, the productive forces would be capable of
> immediately satisfying all human wants without any difficulty. For the
> first time in history, humanity would be free to realise its full
> potential. A general reduction in working hours would provide the
> material basis for a genuine cultural revolution. Culture, art, music,
> literature and science would soar to unimaginable heights.
>
> The Only Road
>
> Twenty years ago Francis Fukuyama spoke of the end of history. But
> history has not ended. In fact, the real history of our species will
> only begin when we have put an end to the slavery of class society and
> begun to establish control over our lives and destinies. This is what
> socialism really is: humanity's leap from the realm of necessity to the
> realm of freedom.
>
> In the second decade of the 21st century, the human race stands at the
> crossroads. On the one hand, the achievements of modern science and
> technology have provided us with the means of solving all the problems
> that have plagued us for all of history. We can eradicate diseases,
> abolish illiteracy and homelessness and make deserts bloom.
>
> On the other hand, reality seems to mock these dreams. The discoveries
> of science are used to produce ever more monstrous weapons of mass
> destruction. Everywhere there is poverty, hunger, illiteracy and
> disease. There is human suffering on a massive scale. Obscene riches
> flourish side by side with misery. We can put a man on the moon, but
> every year eight million people die simply because they do not have
> enough money to live. 100 million children are born, live and die on the
> streets, and they do not know what it is like to have a roof over their
> head.
>
> The most striking aspect of the present situation is the chaos and
> turbulence that has gripped the entire planet. There is instability at
> all levels: economic, social, political, diplomatic and military.
>
> Most people turn away from these barbarities in disgust. It seems that
> the world has suddenly gone mad. However, such a response is useless and
> counterproductive. Marxism teaches us that history is not meaningless.
> The present situation is not an expression of the madness or the
> inherent wickedness of men and women. The great philosopher Spinoza once
> said: "neither weep nor laugh, but understand!" That is very sound
> advice, for if we are not able to understand the world we live in, we
> will never be able to change it.
>
> When Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, they were two young men, 29
> and 27 years old respectively. They were writing in a period of black
> reaction. The working class was apparently immobile. The Manifesto
> itself was written in Brussels, where its authors had been forced to
> flee as political refugees. And yet at the very moment when the
> Communist Manifesto first saw the light of day in February 1848,
> revolution had already erupted onto the streets of Paris, and over the
> following months had spread like wildfire through virtually the whole of
> Europe.
>
> After the fall of the Soviet Union, the defenders of the old order were
> jubilant. They spoke of the end of socialism, and even the end of
> history. They promised us a new era of peace, prosperity and democracy,
> thanks to the miracles of the free market economy. Now, only fifteen
> years later, those dreams are reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. Not
> one stone upon another remains of these illusions.
>
> What is the meaning of all of this? We are witnessing the painful death
> agonies of a social system that does not deserve to live, but which
> refuses to die. That is the real explanation of the wars, terrorism,
> violence and death that are the main features of the epoch in which we live.
>
> But we are also witnessing the birth-pangs of a new society--a new and
> just society, a world fit for men and women to live in. Out of these
> bloody events, in one country after another, a new force is being
> born--the revolutionary force of the workers, peasants, and youth. At the
> UN President Chavez of Venezuels warned that "the world is waking up.
> And people are standing up".
>
> These words express a profound truth. Millions of people are beginning
> to react. The massive demonstrations against the Iraq war brought
> millions onto the streets. That was an indication of the beginnings of
> an awakening. But the movement lacked a coherent programme to change
> society. That was its great weakness.
>
> The cynics and sceptics have had their day. It is time to push them out
> of our way and carry the fight forward. The new generation is willing to
> fight for its emancipation. They are looking for a banner, an idea and a
> programme that can inspire them and lead them to victory. That can only
> be the struggle for socialism on a world scale. Karl Marx was right: The
> choice before the human race is socialism or barbarism. n
> History & Theory >> Topics >> Other
>
>
> Related articles
>
> Malcolm X: "You show me a capitalist, I'll show you a bloodsucker."
> Our Cherished Freedom of Speech Myth
> A comment on Howard Zinn's "Terrorism and War"
> On the Program of the Black Panther Party: Which Way Forward for Black
> Workers and Youth? - Part two
> On the Program of the Black Panther Party: Which Way Forward for Black
> Workers and Youth? - Part one
>
>
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