Marx- A Complete Introduction

by Gill Hands

  Marx and Engels firmly believed that the revolution would be an international one. This would mean that the army would have a purely internal peacekeeping function and money would not need to be spent on defence.

  The main writings we have on the form that a communist society would take are The Principles of Communism, written by Engels in 1847. These set out the views of the Communist League, of which Marx was a member. These are the main points of the document:

  • Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, inheritance tax and abolition of inheritance rights for the family.

  • Capitalists to be expropriated through competition with state industry and partial compensation.

  • Confiscation of the possessions of emigrants and rebels against the majority.

  • Central organization of wages for workers on the land or in factories. Competition between workers to be abolished.

  • All members of society to be equally liable for work until private property is abolished. Industrial armies to be formed, especially for agriculture.

  • Private banks to be suppressed and money and credit to be centralized in national banks.

  • State-owned factories, workshops, etc., to be developed as far as economically feasible; agriculture to be improved.

  • Education for all children at state schools, paid for by the State.

  • Communal dwellings to be built on waste land to combine the best of rural and urban life.

  • Unhygienic, badly built slum housing to be destroyed.

  • Equal inheritance rights for children born out of wedlock.

  • Transport to be nationalized.

  It was not considered feasible that all these changes could take place at once. It was felt that once one change was made others would follow and they would accumulate. The abolition of private property would be the first step and then agriculture, transport and trade would be centralized.

  Marx and Engels didn’t consider the future communist society to be a utopian one or that it was based on utopian principles. They wrote in The Communist Manifesto, ‘the theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way based on the ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer’. Engels was a great admirer of Fourier though, as can be seen in his idea of building communal dwellings combining urban and rural living.

  Marx did not want a return to some idealized rural society; he saw that technological progress was one of the main benefits that capitalism had brought to society and he believed that development of this would lead to huge improvements in society. In this way, his ideas were closer to those of Saint-Simon’s technocracy. In the Grundrisse, Marx writes that work would become ‘an automatic system of machinery’. He believed that manual labour would be reduced by a mixture of ‘social combination’ and the ‘technological application of the natural sciences’. This would allow for more leisure time and time for education. It would help society to become stateless because the working week would be shorter and everyone would be able to participate in running society. It would also lead to material abundance for all.

  Surplus labour would still exist but it would not be hidden by any kind of exploitation or fetishism. In the third volume of Das Kapital, Marx had the idea that these surpluses would be used in a kind of welfare state. Everyone who could work would have to work, but the surplus product would be set aside and divided between those who could not support themselves; those who ‘on account of age are not yet, or no longer able to take part in production’. He did not believe that anyone else should be supported by the state though, for he also wrote that, ‘all labour to support those who do not work would cease’.

  Communist society would be a hardworking and productive place, but both Marx and Engels hoped that work in a communist society would be enjoyable and not an oppressive means of survival. It was hoped that after the initial stages of communism, where people were still attached to old capitalist ways of thinking, a communist society would take into account people’s varying needs and abilities.

  ‘In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’

  Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875, Chapter I

  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

  Religion

  ‘Religion … is the opium of the people’, is one of Marx’s most famous quotations. Opium is an addictive drug that dulls the senses; Marx believed that religion had a similar function in capitalist society.

  Marx had seen some of the problems that religion caused to his own family when his father renounced his Jewish faith. Prussia was an anti-Semitic country and Jews were not allowed to hold public office. He saw that religion was a part of the state system that could be used as a form of oppression and as a part of the false consciousness that added to the alienation of the populace.

  ‘Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

  Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844, Introduction

  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

  Marx himself was an atheist and was greatly influenced by materialist philosophers and free thinkers such as Hume and Diderot, who had concentrated on finding rational arguments against religion. Being believers in scientific order and rationalism, they thought they could prove by scientific means that God could not exist. They thought that most people had a superstitious belief in God that would disappear when they were enlightened by the powers of reason.

  Marx agreed with these rationalist philosophers to some extent, but his views on alienation meant that he believed a purely rationalist view of the world was not enough to change it. He was greatly influenced by Feuerbach who said the essence of Christianity was the essence of mankind itself. Marx believed that God was created by human consciousness and was a product of human minds, but he wanted to understand why people worshipped God and why their religious beliefs took the form that they did. Again, he spent many years researching and analysing societies past and present, this time to find evidence on the question of religion.

  Eventually, he came to the conclusion that religion is part of the ideological make-up of society:

  • In primitive societies, where people’s lives are dependent on their relationship with the natural world, religion helps to unite them with nature. Natural forces are worshipped as gods and the natural cycles of their world become part of the religion.

  • In more developed societies, people become freed from their dependence on nature by use of technology but they feel alienated from the society because they have little control over their daily lives. People then use religion as a means of expressing their frustrations.

  Marx believed that any fulfilment people achieved from religion was illusory because religion is just another form of alienation. People do not realize they are not free and, until they do, they cannot change society so there is little to be achieved by demonstrating a lack of science and reason in religion. In this way, he differed from the philosophers who came before him: Hegel, Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians. They believed the alienation people felt was because they did not understand the progress of the universal mind and once they saw their place in this, through philosophical e
nlightenment, they would see things clearly, as they truly are, and without any religious false consciousness. Their lives would then have meaning. Marx believed that people felt that their lives were meaningless because they were actually meaningless. Capitalism is a social system that means we are unfulfilled as human beings.

  Marx could see that religion served a very important function in capitalist society. Religion acknowledges the alienation of the individual but says this is because they are separated from God. This is useful, for it stops people questioning whether their feelings are due to the way their society is structured. They feel that alienation is a part of the natural condition of humanity.

  Religion leads people to believe that there is a purpose to their suffering which they might not understand but gives promises of an afterlife if they follow certain spiritual practices. It exaggerates the alienation of the individual and offers them a long-term cure at the same time. It also brings reassurance, for many people need their religious illusions as a prop and as a comfort in a harsh environment.

  Marx saw that merely understanding the problem was not enough; philosophy itself cannot change the world. Understanding why you feel alienated is only the beginning.

  Religion will only cease to exist when alienation ceases to exist and this cannot happen until certain classes are no longer oppressed and everybody becomes equal in a communist society.

  ‘The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions …’

  Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844, Introduction

  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

  Women’s rights and the family

  In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels take great pains to point out that the Communists are not about to introduce ‘a community of women’ and break up the family. They had been accused of this in the press several times that year. Some of their liberal views on the institution of marriage shocked staid Victorian Britain and caused a minor sensation. At that time, women in most capitalist countries did not have the vote and in the eyes of the law they were seen as possessions belonging to their husbands. A community of women implied women who would be free to give their sexual favours to anyone they chose. Marx pointed out in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie used their wives like instruments of production and feared that, as instruments of production were to be exploited, then the same fate would happen to their wives. He argued that marriage could be considered as a legalized form of prostitution and draws the conclusion that only through the abolition of the class system would prostitution, ‘both public and private’, be abolished.

  ‘Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus at the most what the communists might possibly be reproached with is that they want to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.’

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Chapter II

  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

  Much of Marxist thought on women and the family arises from the work of Engels. There are no other communist writers of that time who wrote on the rights of women as being separate from the rights of workers as a whole class.

  Spotlight

  Engels was probably influenced on these points by his Chartist lover, Mary Burns. Not much is known about her but Eleanor Marx wrote to a friend and described her as ‘a Manchester factory girl, quite uneducated, though she could read, and write a little’.

  Engels was a great admirer of Fourier, an early advocate of women’s rights who invented the term feminism and proposed a utopia of communes and ‘free love’.

  In 1884 Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In this, he argues that monogamous marriage is a social institution that exists in relation to private property and that women must be economically independent from men before they can be truly emancipated. One of the most well-known quotations from this work is, ‘The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised enslavement of the woman.’ Engels believed that all women were a slave class under capitalism, proletariat and bourgeois alike:

  ‘When she fulfils her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and cannot earn anything; and when she wishes to take part in public industry and earn her living independently, she is not in a position to fulfil her family duties. What applies to the woman in the factory applies to her in all professions, right up to medicine and law.’

  Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884, Chapter 2 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm

  Although the work seems dated today and based on very early anthropological studies that have not stood the test of time it is one of the more important works of Engels, and was the basis of much Marxist thought on the position of the family in society.

  Marx wanted everybody to be equal – men, women and children – and he believed that a communist society without private property would ensure this. He felt that relations between the sexes and relations between parents and children were corrupted by wage labour and private property. In the Communist Manifesto he wrote, ‘All family ties between the proletariat are torn asunder, children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.’

  Class divisions at that time meant that men, women and children from the working class laboured for long hours in factories and mines. They had few opportunities for health care or education. Women in the middle classes did not work outside the home after marriage and it was not always seen as necessary to educate girls. Marx believed that marriage could never be an equal partnership when women were treated as second-class citizens and men were seen as the head of the household, for this stopped women from reaching their true potential as individuals.

  In an ideal communist society, Marx believed there would be equal access for all to work and education. Adequate childcare facilities would mean that women would no longer have to be financially dependent on their husbands. Women would not be financially disadvantaged by bearing children and caring for them. Marx believed that bringing all women into the workplace was the first step into giving them equality. It would be the first step in getting them involved in planning the economy, and so changing society. It would also be the first step in abolishing prostitution, which he saw as a by-product of the capitalist system that viewed everything in financial terms.

  Marx always thought that it was not enough just to pass liberal laws giving rights to minorities if the whole structure of society and the economy remains the same. Laws can be passed to give rights to women, but it is only when the ideology of the society changes, so that women do not bear the entire burden of care of the young and elderly, that women will be emancipated.

  Feminists believe that in capitalist economies labour is divided into productive and reproductive labour.

  • Productive labour – workers produce physical goods or services and are paid a wage because their labour adds value to the system.

  • Reproductive labour – this is the work of the private sphere that is unpaid: cleaning cooking, rearing children, care of the elderly, etc.

  Marxist feminists believe that because it is generally women who do much of the reproductive labour they are being exploited into supporting the capitalist system and in many cases they are carrying a double burden of working both inside and outside the home because of the continuation of traditional gender roles. In Revolution at Point Zero Silvia Federici exam
ines these gender differences in the division of labour on a global scale.

  Feminism grew rapidly in the twentieth century from small beginnings in the nineteenth century, and although many modern-day feminists would disagree with the views of Marx and Engels and their analysis of the place of women, it cannot be denied that they were some of the earliest social reformers to look at the position of women in society in a systematic way. Marx was a product of his time of course and so the rights of women were not high on his agenda, but since his time many Marxist feminists have examined the ties between the capitalist system and oppressive patriarchy.

  Although Marxist feminism was at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s it is still a significant part of the whole feminist movement; the emphasis of Marxist feminists is mainly on the belief that capitalism is the root of women’s oppression and that women’s subordination is really a form of class oppression. A lot of their work is centred around the workplace; examining why women still have low wages and the ways in which women’s domestic work is trivialized by capitalism. Many feminists also admire the way Marx exposed how social, economic and political structures can cause alienation.

  Marxist and Socialist feminism were important factors in the early years of the modern women’s movement that began in the 1960s. Groups such as Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party in the United States gave women a voice, organized grassroots activism and publicized campaigns for wages for housework.

  Art and culture

  Marx believed art and culture was an important part of any society. He believed an appreciation of this is vital for everybody in the society, for it helps us to understand that society and also ourselves. He was very fond of using quotations from Greek literature and Shakespeare in his work; Das Kapital is full of such references. This made it difficult for ordinary working people to understand; most preferred to read Engels, who wrote in a more straightforward manner. Of course many workers at that time could not read at all because they were not educated. This illustrates Marx’s first point: