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The Ideas of Karl Marx: A basic introduction:

By - Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh

History:

Marx’s view of history is not just about what happened years and years ago. It is a way of understanding how people think and act in general, today as well as in the past.

Marx’s starting point is that people have to produce their means of existing. Before it does anything else, a community has to produce food, shelter and the like—otherwise it wouldn’t last very long. The way people produce obviously depends on the development of their capacity to produce: their tools, their knowledge, their methods. The way people produced with axes or stone implements is very different to the way people produce with steam engines and computers.

This production takes place within certain frameworks, certain relations of ownership: some own the means of producing, others don’t and have to work for those who do. This has gone through different stages. In ancient Rome, people were physically owned as slaves and forced to work for others. In Europe in the middle ages, people were obliged to do a certain amount of work for their feudal lord every year. Since the industrial revolution, the predominant relationship is one where people hire out their ability to work for a limited time to those who own the means of production. There is a basic structure of classes based on ownership or non-ownership.

This class structure is reflected in a society’s institutions. In ancient society, the legal system justified slavery and only slave-owners were allowed a say in the political system. Today, the law says that capitalism’s methods of producing are the legal ones, while the political system excludes economic decision-making from democratic control. The same goes for ideas: the ideas that go along with a particular method of production are dominant. In feudal times the ideas of knighthood, chivalry and so on were held up as an ideal. Capitalist societies tell us that enterprise, individual effort and business acumen are things to aspire to. This class foundation underlying the institutions and ideas prevailing in various societies over the years is what led Marx to say that history “is the history of class struggles”. People act and think against this background of basic class conflicts.

This view opens up the path to really understanding fundamental events in history. We can see that the French revolution wasn’t just a row between one crowd that liked things the way they were, and another crowd that thought liberty, equality and fraternity would be cool. We can see that, within French society, a new class of merchants and industrialists was beginning to find itself hampered by the political structures that suited the aristocracy. The clash between these two class interests was at the bottom of all the ideological battles of the revolution. It’s not that the ideas people expressed are unimportant—but we need to grasp the class struggle that lay underneath them if we want to understand them properly.

You can’t take things at face value. Marx always said that, just as you don’t judge a person by their own opinion of themselves, you have to do the same with historical movements. Instead of judging the book by its cover, you have to look underneath the appearances at the fundamental interests involved.

The same can be applied to ideological battles today. For example, the idea of freedom. Everyone is in favour of freedom, but different classes understand different things by it. To Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, freedom means the freedom to buy up another airline, cut pay and conditions and sack anyone who doesn’t like it. To the people who work in that airline, freedom means the freedom to live a secure and comfortable life, and maybe the freedom to join together in a union to try and achieve that. It’s not that O’Leary is greedy or bad – he is expressing the interests of his class. Depending on your class position, very different and conflicting ideas of freedom arise.

It’s important to keep in mind that Marx was never laying down tracks along which history had to travel. His studies of Asian history, for instance, convinced him that societies there had travelled a different route than Europe. Marx’s view of history doesn’t get rid of the need to actually study what happened in specific circumstances. As he said, it’s no good trying to use Marxism as a master key to open all the doors for you. A Marxist understanding of history is the beginning of grasping matters, not the end.

How capitalism works

Marx didn’t adopt a position of outright opposition to capitalism without going into a serious investigation of how the system works. He first of all went into how exactly people work in a capitalist society. The most basic thing about people is that we consciously produce the things we need: it is the most human thing about us. So the way we do this has a huge effect on our entire life. Work is the manifestation of our abilities and capacities, the way we express our humanity.

But this is just what work is not under capitalism. Work is something we hate, something we can’t wait to escape from. It’s not an expression of our life, but the opposite: life is something that starts at five o’clock on a Friday. We only work in order to live. Instead of using machinery and technology to serve us and increase the possibilities open to us, we become slaves to the machine, starting and finishing work when the conveyor belt says so. What we produce, says Marx, becomes something alien to us. Instead of being a product of our own free creative powers, it takes power over us, ruling our lives. You can work in a factory manufacturing machines so successfully that they put you on the dole. This literally inhuman way of working was always at the heart of Marx’s criticism of capitalist society.

The basic thing produced by a capitalist economy is commodities, whether tins of beans, loaves of bread or whatever. What determines the different prices these commodities have? The answer economists usually give is: supply and demand. This is true to a point, of course. If there’s more of a commodity than people want, the price comes down; if it’s scarce, the price goes up. But that doesn’t explain things fully. What about when supply and demand are equal, and cancel each other out? Why does, say, a table cost a hundred times as much as a loaf of bread?

The answer, says Marx, is that a commodity’s value depends on the amount of labour needed to produce it. This includes all the labour from start to finish: for example, from sowing the grain to harvesting it, grinding it, milling it, baking the bread, delivering it and everything. If one commodity takes ten times as much labour to produce as another, then its value will be ten times as much. Obviously, the labour needed to produce something depends on the technological level of society: machinery and technology drastically reduces it.

The same goes for the commodity that workers sell, their ability to work. Its value (the worker’s wages) depends on what it takes to produce that ability—food and shelter for the worker, obviously, but also whatever level of comfort workers have managed to win for themselves through various struggles. It also includes whatever training and education is necessary to perform the work as expected.

But, from the capitalist’s point of view, a worker’s ability to work has a very special quality: the amount it produces is greater than the amount needed to produce it. Workers produce a surplus over and above their wages. While a day’s wages might be €50, a worker will produce maybe €100 worth of commodities in that day. Even when the worker is paid and all the obligations of the labour contract have been fulfilled, that surplus €50 stays in the capitalist’s hands. This surplus value is the source of his profit.

This extraction of maximum surplus value from workers, this exploitation of the working class, is the secret of capitalist production. However high wages go, they never go as high as the amount workers produce. As long as capitalism exists, as long as wage labour is the system in which people work, that exploitation remains as the foundation of production.

The Working Class

One of the most crucial periods in Marx’s life was when he moved to Paris in 1844, and came into contact with working-class socialists. You can see from his writings of the time how impressed he was, and it confirmed for him the all-important role this class had in creating the kind of society he had begun to fight for.

The working class includes everyone who doesn’t own any means of producing things themselves, and so has to go out and work for someone who does own them. We all own something, of course—whether it’s a toothbrush or our own house—but most of us don’t own means of production: a factory or a million in the bank. Therefore we have to sell our ability to work to those who do own these things. The particular type of work done doesn’t really come into it here. The working class is created by capitalism itself. From the system’s inception and continually ever since, it drives people off the land, ruins small-scale production, forces us into capitalist workplaces to work for a wage.

But, although the working class is created by capitalism, its interests conflict fundamentally with capitalism. As we have seen, capitalism is based on getting the maximum amount of surplus value from workers, working them as hard as possible for as long as possible. The workers’ basic desire to maintain human conditions of life goes directly against this. Because the work that workers do is the source of every penny of capitalist profit, they also have the power to cut off the system’s life-blood. This can be seen on a small scale in any strike, and on a larger scale in mass general strikes. This contradiction at the heart of the system is what led Marx to say that capitalism creates “its own grave-diggers”.

Because the working class has the power and the interest to overthrow capitalism, socialism emerges from, and is based on, the class struggle of workers for their own liberation. Obviously, millions of people outside the working class are oppressed by capitalism but, because the working class hold the decisive levers of the system, their fight for freedom can bring capitalism down. As Marx says, “in their emancipation is contained universal human emancipation”.

The reason Marx put his hope above all in the working class is not because he regarded them as perfect people free of faults. All of us know from our own experience that working-class people can display the worst human qualities as well as the best, that all of society’s prejudices can be found among workers the same as anywhere else. Socialism is not based on what may be the current opinions workers hold, but on the correctly-understood interests of the working class. It is not patronising to recognise that people often fail to grasp what their own best interest is: they vote for capitalist parties, blame other workers for their problems, and so on. But the potential for workers to end capitalism is always there, once they understand that is where their interest lies.

Getting there can be frustrating, which sometimes leads people to look for a shortcut: hoping, for example, that well-meaning politicians—whether parliamentary or dictatorial—can look after workers’ interests on their behalf. But unless workers themselves put an end to their exploitation, the result is a remoulding of capitalism rather than a replacement of it. As Marx put it, “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”.

Socialist Revolution

One of the distinguishing features of Marxism is that it is clearly a revolutionary socialism. The reason Marxists describe themselves as revolutionaries is not because it sounds nice and radical, but because the transformation of society Marx envisaged was so deep that only a root-and-branch removal of capitalism from the ground up can bring it about. No tinkering with the system here and there can end the exploitation on which it is based.

But revolution isn’t just necessary because it is the only way to overthrow capitalism. It is also needed, Marx said, because the working class “can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the old crap and become capable of establishing society anew”. To build a new world, workers will have to get rid of an awful lot of prejudices—racist and sexist attitudes and the like, and also the belief that has been drummed into us from birth that we are incapable of running things, that administering society should be left to our superiors.

In a revolution, workers would prove these prejudices wrong in practice. Men who think women aren’t as good as themselves, or women who have accepted that idea, will see in reality that such divisions make no sense and only get in the way of building a new world. When workers take over the second homes of rich people in Foxrock to house families waiting for accommodation, they will see in practice that they are capable of solving Dublin’s housing crisis.

A socialist revolution would have to be international. Even in his own time, Marx recognised that the economically most advanced countries would have to create a socialist system together. Now, when capitalism is even more global, a socialist revolution isolated in one country for a lengthy period would be doomed. The capitalist world would gang up to try and crush it and, without international co-operation, the material basis for a socialist society, with enough to satisfy everyone’s needs, couldn’t be created.

Obviously, it wouldn’t be a case of overthrowing capitalism on Monday night and instituting socialism on Tuesday morning. There would be a period of transition, in which the resistance of the capitalists would be opposed, and the abolition of the remnants of capitalism would be carried out as quickly as possible. In this interval, the working class would run society.

Marx’s ideas on what shape this workers’ rule would take came above all from the Paris Commune in 1871, when the city’s workers held power for a couple of months. The Commune was thoroughly democratic. Workers elected to the Commune were paid the same as other workers, eliminating the danger of careerism. They could also be recalled and replaced by their electors whenever they weren’t doing the job right, making sure that they truly represented the people’s views.

But, for Marx, the rule of the working class would be a temporary one. The whole point of it would be to make itself redundant: the working class “is victorious only by abolishing itself”. As soon as its job was done, it would disappear in a society where there was no class of workers, because there were no classes at all and everyone worked—a society “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.

Opposing Oppression

It is obvious, looking around the world, that the oppression of the working class is not by any means the only oppression in the world today. Half the world’s population face discrimination because they are women. Racism is a feature of every society. Many peoples are denied the right to national independence, forced to live under the rule of another country. Thousands of people live under dictatorships without even the most basic democratic freedoms.

Marx was faced with such questions in his own time, and was quite clear that the working class has to take a stand against all forms of oppression. When the American Civil War broke out in 1860, workers in England’s cotton industry were badly hit by the disruption to their trade. Nevertheless, the English workers’ movement supported those fighting to end slavery in the United States. Marx hailed this as a recognition that “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”

Issues of oppression also arise within the working class. Marx wrote about the division in England between Irish workers and English workers. English workers saw the Irish as lazy, stupid competitors who lowered their wages. Irish workers paid them back in their own coin, seeing the English as dumb supporters of the British government’s policy in Ireland. Although the working class in England was large and well organised, Marx saw this division as “the secret of the impotence of the English working class”. English workers would get nowhere until they stood together with Irish workers instead of opposing them.

This went as far as supporting the Irish demands for independence, then being violently put forward by the Fenians. British rule in Ireland had enabled the government to build up an arsenal of repression that could be used against workers in Britain too. Until they supported the Irish workers against the British government, English workers would be unable to fight properly for their own interests. Supporting the Irish was not just a nice idea, an act of charity but something they had to do for their own sake as well.

The working class have to realise and make clear that their own victory means the end of all oppression. As Marx wrote, “the emancipation of the class of producers means that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race”.

Marx began his revolutionary activity in a country where capitalism was not the only obstacle workers faced. Germany at that time was ruled by feudal lords, with little democratic rights to free speech and organisation. Marx saw that Germany’s capitalists, although unhappy with the restrictions this rule placed on them, were looking over their shoulders at the rising working class, and were afraid to rock the boat in case their own power came under threat.

Therefore, it fell to the workers to get rid of the old regime, as part of winning their own freedom. Overthrowing feudal rule, he believed, “can be but the immediate prelude to a proletarian revolution”. This meant that the workers had to keep their own independence and fight for their own class interests, rather than tagging along on the end of middle-class liberal opposition groups. Such groups wanted to stop the revolution when their own aims were achieved but, said Marx, “it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent” until the workers win power.

Theory and the role of socialists

Marx famously wrote that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The intention of Marx’s theory is not to be an academic exercise, but to play a part in the struggles of people to transform society. Without theory, we only have our own experience to work from. Theory allows us to look at the experience of other people in other times and other places, and generalise to draw lessons for the struggles we face ourselves.

Marx best summed in the Communist Manifesto up the role he saw socialists playing. Socialists, he said, “have no interests separate from those of the proletariat as a whole”, nor do they “set up any separate principles by which to mould the proletarian movement”. The only difference between socialists and the rest of the working class was that socialists stand for the interests of the working class as a whole. They are “the most resolute section of the workers’ parties of every country” who have “the advantage of insight into the conditions, the course and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”.

If you look at that, it is clear that Marx actually proposes a fairly modest and humble role for socialists. He goes out of his way to emphasise what socialists have in common with other workers, not the differences. Above all, socialists are a part of the working class, not something separate: the part of the working class that understands the interests of its class, and tries to win over the rest to such an understanding. Rather than trying to force matters into their own mould, they should be showing the way matters are going, interpreting the potential dynamic towards socialist change.

This means getting fully involved in the everyday struggles of workers, not standing aside from them. It means pushing socialist politics in those struggles, not just making up the numbers. Socialists fight in the struggles of today, but try to bring us forward to the struggles of tomorrow. As Marx put it, “in the movement of the present they represent the future of the movement”. Just as Marx’s ideas were shaped and developed by the struggles of working people around the world, those ideas can come to life in the struggles yet to come.