Marx- The Key Ideas

by Gill Hands

  Democritus (c460–c370 BC) was an Greek materialist philosopher who believed that the world could be explained by scientific laws, although science at the time was not advanced enough for him to be able to prove his theory. He believed that matter was made up of atomic particles, despite there being no means of him proving this. This view of the world meant that he saw that everything was in motion and in a process of change. The majority of other philosophers had the view that matter was fixed and unchanging. This fixed view of the universe continued in mainstream philosophy up until the time of Hegel and influenced the way that people thought about the structure of the world, including institutions such as the Church and State.

  Epicurus (341–271BC) was a Greek philosopher who believed that if the world operates on mechanical principles then death and the gods are not to be feared. He thought this freedom from fear would allow people to live in peaceful communes devoted to pleasure. His ideas influenced both Marx and Nietzsche.

  Aristotle (384–322BC) was a Greek philosopher, scientist and teacher. He was very well read on many diverse subjects and wrote a huge number of philosophical works. He tried to integrate all knowledge into a unified philosophical system. It was not until Hegel wrote The Science of Logic in the nineteenth century that anyone else tried to encompass everything into a system of philosophy. Aristotle saw the universe as fixed and unchanging and it was his view that was taken up by the official Church and dominated Western philosophy until after the Middle Ages. He was one of the first people to write that conflict in society often comes from economic conditions and inequality in the structure of society; something that Marx was to develop later.

  European philosophy

  There are many philosophers in a great chain connected to each other through time, each building upon those who have gone before. The connections between the thoughts of philosophers and how they have all influenced each other would be a huge book, so I can only write about a few of the philosophers who appear to have directly influenced what Marx wrote and the way in which he wrote it.

  René Descartes (1596–1650), a French philosopher and mathematician, was the father of modern philosophy. He believed that philosophy and knowledge could be unified and classified by mathematical means. This was part of the inspiration for the scientific method that Marx attempted to apply to his historical researches.

  John Locke (1632–1704) was an English philosopher and physician. He believed that religion did not hold the absolute truth and that knowledge ‘is founded on and ultimately derives from sense’. His belief in social equality – ‘we are all equal, of the same species and condition … with equal right to enjoy the fruits of nature’ – and his belief that if the rulers of society offend against natural law they must be deposed, were to be a powerful influence on the American and French Revolutions.

  Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), an English philosopher and tutor, was one of the first people to try and study society scientifically in his book Leviathan, published in 1651. He was trying to understand human nature and the laws that governed it and as he favoured the views of Galileo and Gassendi, scientists who believed that the universe was in motion and the earth was not the centre of that motion, he was called a demon by the Catholic Church. His view of society was an authoritarian one: he believed there should be an absolute ruler. He thought that people need a social structure, for life in a state of nature (i.e. before society existed) is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.

  Utopian Socialists

  The word ‘utopian’, pertaining to an imagined perfect place, came into the English language in 1515 after the publication of Utopia, a book written by Thomas More, the English lawyer, author and statesman. Utopia was the name of the ideal state More envisaged, where private property had been abolished and religious tolerance was practised. More did not think that Utopia might actually come to exist; for him it was a literary device that meant he had the freedom to discuss controversial and heretical ideas in an age of religious intolerance. The Utopian Socialists, on the other hand, really believed that their ideal societies could be built.

  The Utopian Socialists lived and wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century and observed the changes in society that were occurring around them. Many people at that time believed that industrialization and the factory system had led to changes in society for the worse. Following the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, such people wanted to return to some golden age in the past where life had been better. The Utopians totally disagreed: ‘the golden age of the human race lies not behind but ahead of us’, wrote Saint-Simon, one of the more well-known Utopians.

  There was no specific movement that called itself Utopian Socialism – Marx and Engels were the first to use the term – but as the Utopian Socialists all lived around the same time and there are similarities in some of their ways of thinking it is valuable to consider them as a coherent group.

  The three major Utopian Socialists who had an influence on Marx and Engels were Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Claude Henri de Saint-Simon. Each of them envisaged their ideal society in a different way, and they were not always clear about the way in which these societies would come into being, but they were all in agreement that the social structure of the time was unfair, riddled with inequality and needed to be changed. This was not an entirely philanthropic view; many of the proposals of Utopian Socialists were led by a very real fear of revolution following the lead of recent upheavals in France. They had seen that if the social structure was not changed by those in power it could be overthrown from below.

  Robert Owen (1771–1858) was a Welsh social reformer who believed character was formed by social conditions and that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the aim of society. Although he was a successful cotton manufacturer, he hated the factory system as it led to what he believed was destructive competition. He envisaged a whole society of ‘villages of co-operation’. In 1800, as an experiment, he built a model community with schools and good housing for his mill workers at New Lanark in Scotland.

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  Insight

  New Lanark is now a world heritage site and well worth a visit.

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  His workers enjoyed shorter working hours, after-hours recreational facilities, insurance plans and relatively safe and healthy working conditions. He also did away with child labour, but despite all this he still managed to make a profit. This made him very popular with other industrialists and New Lanark had many visits from all kinds of businessmen from around the world. The workers were still suspicious of him, for after all he was still the factory owner and he ruled over their lives in a very dominant patriarchal manner.

  Owen believed that, once people had seen the example he set, villages on his model would spread rapidly throughout the country, but he couldn’t get any financial backing privately or from the government and the experiment failed. He tried again in the USA, setting up New Harmony and several other Owenite communities, but these did not last more than a few years and they faded away after his death.

  New Lanark was not a truly communist society in any sense of the word, for it was owned and directed by Owen and his partners; the workers had no democratic representation and it was driven by private property and the profit motive. The Owenite communities contained some early aspects of communal living and central organization, such as an attempt to abolish money and replace it with an exchange of labour, that were to be become important to later communism.

  Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was a French social theorist who believed society should be reorganized into self-sufficient units or communes with communal property and consumer co-operatives for the redistribution of wealth. He totally rejected industrialization, unlike Owen who tried to improve it. Fourier was a rather bizarre visionary who had some rather strange and incoherent ideas, but among all these were some genuine flashes of insight about the human condition and the nature of society.

  Fourier does not
appear to have had any formal academic training and claims to have been bored by philosophers. Although born into a family of cloth merchants, he hated commerce, which he found demeaning, and he believed manual labour was degrading. He said that the factory system was dehumanizing and unnatural and that if God had intended us to work in such a way we would have been made to enjoy industriousness like ants or bees appear to. It was his assertion that work should be made pleasurable and enjoyable so that it became physically and mentally satisfying. Society should try to eliminate all unpleasant jobs, learning to live without products and services that no one wanted to make or do. This impressed Engels at the time and he wrote glowingly about him to Marx.

  Fourier also believed that emotional ties were important, that people needed love and friendship as well as material possessions and satisfactions. In this way he was one of the first people to talk about the alienation that was later developed by Hegel and Marx.

  Fourier’s ideal society consisted of communities called phalanstèries with exactly 1,620 people living in them. This was so that a harmonious mix of the 810 personality types he believed in would be able to live happily under the Law of Passional Attractions he had invented. His communities foreshadowed a more ‘liberated society’, including sexual freedom and polyamorous relationships, for he believed that people were sexually repressed by religious rules. He was also a feminist (he invented the word), believing that women in nineteenth-century society were no better than slaves. In his society, women would be emancipated and have the right to have four husbands at once.

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  Insight

  Modern feminists would not agree that having four husbands is in any way advantageous to women!

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  Fourier did not give much indication of how this society might come about, but he was against revolution, having seen the effects of it at first hand in France.

  Although some of his visions of the future utopia he called ‘Harmony’ are far fetched – for example there would be six moons orbiting the world and the seas would turn to lemonade – his psychological insights into the nature of work, society and alienation were an important innovation at the time that still has relevance today.

  Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was a French aristocrat who narrowly avoided the guillotine during the French Revolution. This made him a fervent believer in social progress without the need for revolution. He was a rather colourful figure who spent a lot of his time mixing with the higher social classes, intellectuals and artists. After a kind of breakdown he spent some time in an asylum for the insane. He was not a socialist but many of his followers became known as such. He believed that lessons about society could be learned from studying history in a systematic way and he was aware of the importance of class struggle throughout history. He saw that, although the aims of the French Revolutionaries had been ‘liberty, fraternity and equality’, society had become less equal as a result of the revolution, for the gap between rich and poor had widened. This was reflected in his view of society which he saw as being divided between the industriels (workers) and oisifs (the rich parasites who lived off them).

  Saint-Simon believed that the upper class of kings, nobles and priests had served a function in the past that was no longer necessary because the Industrial Revolution had made it obsolete. He welcomed capitalism because it would bring forward great scientific progress which he believed was the key to the growth of society. Both Fourier and Owen saw capitalism and the Industrial Revolution as something evil that had changed society for the worse; their utopias were an attempt to make a type of rural, communal living popular. Saint-Simon, on the other hand, welcomed the technological changes that were happening and wished to exploit them. As he didn’t have much experience of ordinary workers he believed that they were not capable of running society and his proposal for the future was to have an elite of technocrats in authority over them. The technocracy would consist of highly intelligent and creative people. After his death his followers divided up into several factions and some of them began to make his ideas more socialist in order to appeal to the workers: they advocated the abolition of the inheritance of private property for example.

  Despite his elitism, Saint-Simon’s ideas are an important step in the development of Marxism because he was the first person to fully appreciate how industrial change had transformed society and to see it as part of the whole historical perspective.

  Revolutionaries and anarchists

  Marx lived at a time of revolution; the French Revolution (1789–99) had not long ended when Marx was born and this was a pivotal period in the history of Europe. After the revolution, French society and religion went through radical changes and the whole society was restructured. Although France became a republic, then an empire, and finally returned to a monarchy in Marx’s lifetime, it was obvious that the age of the aristocrats was over and the citizens, including workers, were now a political force to be reckoned with. Marx read many of the works of the revolutionaries and met with many of them during his exile in Paris. They did not always see eye to eye, for Marx was of the belief that revolution could not be forced upon people and it would happen when the time was right. This was a major problem with his relationship with the anarchists, for although they shared the same goal of a free classless society, the anarchists believed in direct action by the masses and a rejection of all forms of government.

  Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–81) was a French revolutionary and extremist who believed in violent revolution and was the first to speak of the power of the proletariat. He spent half his life in prison because of his revolutionary activities; he was not satisfied by the results of the French Revolution and went on trying to make changes in society despite opposition. He was the person who invented the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ which Marx later used in a slightly different way from Blanqui. Blanqui believed that future revolution would never occur unless professional revolutionaries took action on behalf of the workers. They would then take charge of the country and abolish religions as their first step towards a new society. Marx could not agree with Blanqui’s elite of revolutionaries working in secret behind the scenes; he believed that the changes in society would come about as a result of the general will of the people and as a natural result of the decay of the capitalist system.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) was a French philosopher and economist, and the first person to call himself an anarchist. He was a printer and journalist with some education, but his family did not have much money to pay for books and his early poverty led to a hatred of the landed rich. After he wrote What is Property? in 1840, Marx entered into correspondence with him and they became friends. Marx came to disapprove of Proudhon’s anarchy and published vicious criticisms of him, writing The Poverty of Philosophy as a criticism of Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty. Their disagreement was one of the reasons for the split in the International.

  Proudhon rejected both capitalism and communism and he invented a form of anarchism that he called mutualism.

  This involved control of the means of production by the workers and a central bank that would give out interest-free loans. Workers would form co-operatives or be self-employed and would trade with each other freely. Factories were to be run by groups of workers under democratic principles. The state would be abolished and society would be organized by a federation of ‘free communes’.

  Proudhon is famous for the saying ‘property is theft’. This cry was taken up by revolutionary communists and is often wrongly attributed to Marx.

  Louis Blanc (1811–82) was a French socialist and a politician. He believed social equality should come about by democratic and peaceful means. He thought competition was one of the major evils in society and wanted to see a society where wages were equalized and workers were united into ‘social workshops’. These were something like trade unions. He was exiled to Britain and, like Marx, he spent a lot of time in the British Museum reading and writing. His best
known saying, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ was another cry taken up by revolutionary communists and often wrongly attributed to Marx.

  Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) was a Russian anarchist leader who eventually came into conflict with Marx. Like Marx he had become interested in philosophy as a student; he translated Hegel into Russian and travelled from his homeland to Berlin to study under him at the university. He met Marx in Paris in 1844 and also Proudhon, who became one of his close friends.

  Bakunin was imprisoned in Russia for his part in trying to bring about an uprising of the Slavs and was eventually exiled to Siberia. From there he escaped to the USA via Japan and finally became very involved in the International. It was here that he came into conflict with Marx: they had a very personal hatred of each other, each one believing the other to be arrogant. Bakunin could agree with Marx on his analysis of the class system and with his economic theory but he totally disagreed with Marx’s view of communism, believing it would only come about through revolution. He believed that communism was only the first step towards anarchism.

  The importance of Hegel and Feuerbach

  Marx was a German and so he was obviously influenced by the philosophers from his homeland, but at that time in history German philosophy was the root of a great tradition that spread worldwide. The repressive, authoritarian Prussian regime stamped out any kind of revolutionary activity but they couldn’t stop the talk in cafés and bars. Philosophy flourished and the hottest name in philosophy at that time was that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx was influenced by many different philosophers, thinkers and social reformers but the most important of them all was Hegel. His influence on Marx was profound. Lenin believed that it is impossible for anyone to understand Das Kapital if Hegel has not been read and understood first. Marx resisted Hegel’s ideas when he first went to university but he soon converted to Hegel’s philosophy, coming to reject most of it later when he developed his own ideas. However, even late in his life he said he was still indebted to the genius of Hegel.