Prometheus says: “I shall never exchange my fetters for slavish servility. ’Tis better to be chained to the rock than bound to the service of Zeus.”(Quoted by Marx)
Workers are confronted by a hodge-podge of ideas, a mish-mash of movements every one of basically saying “we” will bring salvation to the people and lead them to the promised land. In contrast the Communist Manifesto’s message is that “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.”
The classic formulation of the self-emancipation principle is in 1864 Rules of the First International – “CONSIDERING, That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves....”
It proclaims that we no longer want deliverers, that we no longer wished to serve as instruments of others , and that we have knowledge to understand our interests as much as any other.
Marx went further explaining in an address to the National Labour Union in the US :
“On you, then, devolves the glorious task to prove to the world that now at last the working classes are bestriding the scene of history no longer as servile retainers, but as independent actors, conscious of their own responsibility.”
When Marx denounces the shooting of Belgium strikers he declares:
“[the Belgian capitalist was so liberty-loving] that he has always indignantly repulsed any factory law encroaching upon that liberty. He shudders at the very idea that a common workman should be wicked enough to claim any higher destiny than that of enriching his master and natural superior. He wants his workman not only to remain a miserable drudge, overworked and underpaid, but, like every other slaveholder, he wants him to be a cringing, servile broken-hearted, morally prostrate, religiously humble drudge. Hence his frantic fury at strikes. With him, a strike is a blasphemy, a slave’s revolt, the signal of a social cataclysm.”
Marx is contemptuous of the attitude of the ruling class “we will grant but you must ask.” The General Council meeting after it had adopted its well-known address to Abraham Lincoln, which was to be presented to the US embassy, The minutes record:
“A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a MP with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members who said working men should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid.”
The motion that was passed limited the delegation to Council members. Marx related to Engels:
“.. part of the Englishmen on the Committee wanted to have the deputation introduced by a member of Parliament since it was customary. This hankering was defeated by the majority of the English and the unanimity of the Continentals, and it was declared, on the contrary, that such old English customs ought to be abolished.”
The great thing about the Paris Commune for Marx about the Commune was that it was the working class who took over:
“It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last sixty years, about Emancipation of Labour, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society...”
He goes on to explain:
“That the revolution is made in the name and confessedly for the popular masses, that is, the producing masses, is a feature this Revolution has in common with all its predecessors. The new feature is that the people, after the first rising, have not disarmed themselves and surrendered their power into the hands of the Republican mountebanks of the ruling classes, that, by the constitution of the Commune, they have taken the actual management of their Revolution into their own hands and found at the time, in the case of success, the means to hold it in the hands of the People itself, displacing the State machinery, the governmental machinery of the ruling classes by a governmental machinery of their own. This is their ineffable crime! Workmen infringing upon the governmental privilege of the upper 10,000 and proclaiming their will to break the economical basis of that class despotism which for its own sake wielded the organized Stateforce of society! This is it that has thrown the respectable classes in Europe as in the United States into the paroxysms of convulsions ..the government of the working class can only save France and do the national business, by working for its own emancipation, the conditions of that emancipation being at the same time the conditions of the regeneration of France.”
Neither Marx or Engels commented at length about how a socialism would operate. It is not possible to foresee under what particular concrete social conditions the revolutionary process might unfold. Socialist society is an economic system based upon conscious planning of production by associated producers. Nowhere does Marx say by the state. There is no room for a “socialist state” in socialism, even though there may be the need for a central direction of the socialised economy, which, however, is itself a part of the organisation of associated producers and not an independent entity set against them. Marx had no notion of a ‘workers’ state’ replacing the capitalist state. In communism, communal decision-making becomes a part of collective productive life. How repugnant to Marx would any idea have been that ownership of the means of production by a bureaucratic state machine would constitute ‘socialism’.
This is all made possible by the abolition of private property of the means of production. As soon as that private property is completely abolished, goods produced cease to be commodities. Value and exchange value disappear. Production becomes production for use, for the satisfaction of needs, determined by conscious choice of the mass of the associated producers themselves.
To be human is to be both social and at the same time a particular individual, a person. Indeed, Marx’s conception of socialism was founded on the possibility of ‘the free development of individualities’. Marx concentrated all his work on the achievement of a truly human society ,and. therefore of the notion of the truly human individual. Marx did not believe that there was a fixed, eternal ‘human nature’. He knew that there was no human essence given in advance, a ‘human condition’ chosen for each human by God, or by genetic inheritance. Instead, he thought that we ourselves have produced human nature and by joint (communal) activity human individuals have made and remade themselves and their mutual relations. No human individual is an isolated entity.
The social form of human life in which we live sets people against each other. In a society based upon self-interest, how can anybody take ‘the standpoint of socialised humanity’? The social whole confronts each of us as our enemy. The whole process, both the relations between people and the relation of people to nature, is hidden, distorted and mystified. The relationship between each individual human and the society in which they live is a great problem, pondered by philosophers, psychologists and political scientists. Somehow, amidst all the corruption and fragmentation of the modem world, we have remained – not much, not always, generally unknown to ourselves and with many mistakes and distortions – human. At the back of our minds, we still know it.
In its early days Marx conceived a period of relative scarcity of a number of consumer goods and services, making it necessary to measure exactly distribution based on the actual labour inputs of each individual - labour time vouchers. But as production develops a situation that provides plenty for all any form of precise measurement of consumption will disappear.The principle that the full needs covering all different needs of different individuals will be satisfied will prevail . No incentive will be needed any more to induce people to work- 'from each according to ability to each according to need'. Work will have transformed itself into meaningful activity, making possible all-round development of each individual’s human personality. The division of labour between manual and intellectual labour, the separation of town and countryside, will fade away. Humankind will be organised into a free federation of producers’ and consumers’ communes.
Production is never individual production despite the grandiose claims of the capitalist 'entrepreneur’ . It is only the collective effort of human beings that enables them to get a livelihood from the world around them. So the central core activity – work – has to be organised socially. Every particular stage in the development of human labour demands certain sorts of social relationships to sustain it. The potential of new technology and automation makes socialism much easier, by creating the possibility of a 20-hour, 15-hour, or 10-hour working week for all. Human happiness does not depend on strenuous permanent activity, although perhaps a certain minimum amount of physical and mental activity seems to contribute to a healthy well-being including the growth of the mind. Paul Lafargue’s Right to be Lazy can be realised. The benefits of the wonders of robotics presupposes social organisation based upon co-operation and solidarity for the common good, i.e. socialism. If we don’t achieve that then the possibility is truly enslavement by machines, potentially a lot worse.
Socialists teach their fellow workers that unemployment, growing insecurity, lowered living standards and all the other afflictions of labour are not passing phenomena. Not even a future boom will eliminate these evils. The bigger the boom, the deeper, more widespread and devastating will be the consequent crisis. Only a clique of capitalist magnates stands in the way of abundance. To expand production and achieve full employment the workers have to wrest control of the factories and other major means of production from the hands of the employers and establish their own rule over industry and society. Production for profit must be supplanted by production according to a coordinated inter-linked plan determined by the needs of the entire people and directed by the associated producers themselves. This is the socialist remedy for capitalist chaos and misery.
Marx never envisage a ‘revolutionary’ process designed by some experts who thought up a new set of relations and to be brought into being by a clever bit of social engineering. Instead of forcing people to live another way, the aim is to allow them to live as they truly are. Socialism is merely removing the obstacles to a way of life in which ‘humanness’, which already exists, would be allowed to develop. Every bit of Marx’s work is based upon his conception of communist society as ‘an association of free human beings, working with communal means of production, and self-consciously expending their many individual labour powers as a single social labour power’. Individuals will freely, collectively and consciously construct their social relationships. Their productive activity, instead of conflicting with social relations which isolate them from each other, will be clearly seen to be for each other. Needs will become human needs, without the distortion which the market and exploitation necessarily bring about.
Marx in his Note on James Mill in 1844 encapsulates his argument
1. People consciously assert their individuality when they produce for each other as human individuals.
2. In this act, and in the social nature of the objects they produce, they make manifest their human character.
3. As individuals, they establish and reaffirm their social nature and their freely created social relations through the satisfaction of other people’s human need.
4. In each directly communal act of production, they realise the character of everybody involved, as social individuals.
Elsewhere he writes:
“The theft of alien labour time, which is the basis of present wealth, appears to be a miserable foundation, compared to this newly developed one, the foundation prepared by large-scale industry itself ... Production based upon exchange value collapses, and the immediate production process itself is stripped of the form of indigence and antagonism. Free development of individualities ... in general the reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, to which corresponds the artistic, scientific, etc. development of individuals, made possible by the time set free and the means produced for all of them.” [Grundrisse]
“Freedom in this sphere can consist only in this, that socialised man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control, instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; and accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions worthy and appropriate for their human nature.” [Volume 3 of Capital]
How dare some so-called revolutionary activists dismiss Marxism as dated and irrelevant. Socialism is not a dogma but a task. It anticipates a world whose social character is open, and transparent. Relationships like this have become possible because of the growth of modern industry. But socialism implies alterations in people, in their consciousness and self-consciousness. Revolution is not a matter of switching governments or even a change of state form. Nor is only getting rid of one ruling class and replacing it with another. Nor is it redefining capitalism by altering the legal form of property. Socialism is not a change of political regime, which leaves intact the obstacles to humanness. Revolution is all about people changing – people, themselves, consciously and deliberately altering their ways of living and their ways of thinking.
Those who talk about the Party making the Revolution miss the point. Marx was convinced that ‘the proletariat constituting itself as a party’. The idea that socialists would seize power and exercise a ‘dictatorship’ over society belonged not to Marx but Blanqui and later Lenin. In 1874, Engels criticized the Blanquist idea of revolution in these terms:
"From Blanqui's conception that every revolution is a surprise attack by a small revolutionary minority, there follows of itself the necessity for a dictatorship after the success of the venture. This would be, for sure, a dictatorship not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of a small number, who have made the surprise attack and who are themselves previously organized under the dictatorship of one or several individuals"
The phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ meant it was the working class en masse which would be the ‘dictator’, not some self-appointed vanguard. When discussing the Paris Commune Marx favoured the Communard notion of decentralised government and he never referred to the Commune as a state, but as a form of government which had tried to take over some of the functions of the state.
Marx never used the term ‘workers’ state’ and in reply to Bakunin’s jibe ‘There are about 40 million Germans. Does this mean that all 40 million will be members of the government?” Marx answers ‘Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities. ... When class rule has disappeared, there will be no state in the present political sense.’
Non-socialists can call themselves socialists for only so long, before their actions are found out and people discover what things really are. The “revolutionary party” is based on the idea that the working class needs a new group of leaders who vanquish the bourgeoisie for the workers and construct a new government.The working class is not yet considered fit to reorganize and regulate production. As the working class is not deemed capable of revolution, is the revolutionary vanguard, the party, which makes the revolution for it.
These ‘well-meaning’ people , the Leninists and Trotskyists cannot realise that the failure of their parties is due to the fundamental conflict between the self-emancipation of the working class through its own power and the pacifying of the revolution through a new sympathetic ruling clique. They think they are the revolutionary vanguard because they see the masses indifferent and inactive. But the people are inactive only because they cannot yet comprehend the course of the struggle and the unity of class interests. Once conditions force them into action they will tackle the task of self-organization.
Friedrich Engels, explained:
"When the February Revolution broke out (in France in 18481, we all of us, as far as our conceptions of the conditions and the course of revolutionary movements were concerned, were under the spell of previous historical experience in particular that of the French Revolution of 1789. What all revolutions up to then (the bourgeois revolutions) had in common was that they were minority revolutions. Even where the majority took part, it did so-whether wittingly or not, only in the service of a minority; but because of this, or simply because of the passive, unresisting attitude of the majority, this minority acquired the appearance of being the representative of the whole people."
Engels in 1853 guessing that on the next outbreak of revolution "our Party will one fine morning be forced to assume power" to carry out the bourgeois revolution. Then, "driven by the proletarian populace, bound by our own printed declarations... we shall be constrined to undertake communist experiments ... the untimeliness of which we know better than anyone else. In doing so we lose our heads-only physically speaking, let us hope."
Marx (and Engels).already by this time seem to have rejected this vanguardist model of revolution. They argued for open democracy, instead of conspiratorial secrecy and hierarchy, within the communist organizations they worked with; for democracy structured by mass meetings and recallability of delegates, as the basis for "proletarian dictatorship"; and, above all, for the conception that communism could not be imposed. by the will of political thinkers and activists but could only be created by a vast mass movement in response to actual social conditions.
Thus the General Rules which Marx drew up in 1864 for the International Working Men's Association, began with Flora Tristan's dictum, "That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working class themselves." The International was intended to be the opposite of a sect, in both theory and practice. It proclaimed as its business, in Marx's words, "to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinaire system whatever."And, regarding organization, Marx argued against centralism, on the grounds that a centralist structure, -though appropriate to sectarian movements, "goes against the nature of trade unions," struggle organizations of workers. Typical of his attitude is his remark in a letter of 1868 that especially in Germany, "where the worker's life is regulated from childhood on by bureaucracy and he himself believes in the authoritarian bodies appointed over him, he must be taught above all else to walk by himself." In the same spirit, Marx refused the presidency of the International in 1866, and soon afterwards convinced its General Council to replace the post with that of a chairman to be elected at every weekly meeting.
We should note the project of an "Enquete Ouvriere, " a questionnaire which Marx published in the Parisian Revue Socialiste in 1880, and had reprinted and distributed to workers' groups, socialist and democratic circles, "and to anyone else who asked for it" in France. The text has the form of 101 questions about working conditions, wages, hours, effects of the trade cycle, and also about workers' defense organizations, strikes and other forms of struggle, and their results. Though this might be described as the first sociological survey, its preface urges workers to reply, not to meet the data needs of sociologists or economists, but because only workers can describe "with full knowledge the evils which they endure" just as "they, and not any providential saviors, can energetically administer the remedies for the social ills from which they suffer." Strategy and tactics, to use the terms of more recent leftwing theory, can only be created by workers who know their concrete conditions, not by "leaders."
Intellectuals and academics can, however, play a role in the collection and transmission of information; thus, the results of the Enquete were to be analysed in a series of articles for the Revue, and; eventually,. a book. He prefaced the French serial edition of the first volume of Capital with an expression of pleasure, because "in this form the book will be more accessible to the working class-a consideration which to me outweighs everything else." The function of theory was to help the movement as a whole clarify its problems and possibilities; it did not, in Marx's view, place the theorist in a dominating (or "hegemonic," as the currently fashionable euphemism has it) position vis-a-vis the movement, but was rather what he had to contribute to a collective effort.
.jpg)
.png)
.jpg)
