Marxism

“ Thus proletarian violence has become an essential factor of Marxism. Let us add once more that, if properly conducted, it will suppress the Parliamentary Socialists, who will no longer be able to pose as the leaders of the working classes and the guardians of order. ”

“ Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge. ”

“ Unique as an investigator of the laws of the proletarian movement, eminent and even a great pioneer as a sociologist, Marx is, in respect of economic theory, predominantly an agitator. His system, more than any other system of Socialism or of political economy, is the revolutionary expression of proletarian thought and feeling. His doctrines of value, surplus value, the economic determination of history, the evolution from Capitalism to Socialism, the political and economic class struggle, will for long have the force of truth for the masses and will continue to move them. ”

“ Reference to Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Frederick Engels, William Liebknecht and August Bebel, the titans of revolutionary socialism, and their contemporaries and successors, need not be made in these brief pages, nor to the Socialist classics which are so well known and may be read in all languages.
The immortal shibboleth of Marx: “Workingmen of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains—you have a world to gain,” is the rallying cry of the class struggle, the inspiration of the working class, and is heard echoing and re-echoing around the world. ”

“ The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. ”

“ Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. ”

“ But he knew also that the class spirit, fomented from time immemorial by class persecution, and intensified by the stupendous acts of bourgeois treachery repeatedly committed from 1789 to 1848, was highly developed in the French proletariat. In this he rightly saw the basic element of proletarian organization. Straight into that organization, more and more class-conscious, the newly discovered economic truth would naturally, irresistibly, force its way, driving out of it the fogs of sophistry. [6]
The class struggle, to be sure, is not a principle, it is a fact ”

“ And the middle classes knew that they were on the eve of a revolution, and they prepared themselves for it. They sought to obtain by every possible means the support of the working class of the towns, and of the peasantry in the agricultural districts, and it is well known that there was, in the latter end of 1847, hardly a single prominent political character among the bourgeoisie who did not proclaim himself a “Socialist,” in order to insure to himself the sympathy of the proletarian class. We shall see these “Socialists” at work by and by. ”

“ The same bourgeois mind which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation of the labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as being an organisation of labour that increases its productiveness—that same bourgeois mind denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted play for the bent of the individual capitalist. ”

“ The splitting up of the concept into contradictories, and the attainment of a higher positive through the negation of these contradictories, that was what, to Marx's mind, constituted the essence and the deepest meaning of the French Revolution and of the English Industrial Revolution. Society, the positive, split up into feudal and bourgeois, into two sharply divided contradictories, the bourgeoisie appearing as the negation, to be supplanted by the proletariat and so to make room for a Communist society, the higher synthesis. ”

“ At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class-antagonism between capital and labour, the State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power stands out in bolder and bolder relief. ”

“ Marx could see—and surely that is credit enough for one man—that the greater capitalism was the next order of the day, and that the proletarian class must remain as the only effective class with which a revolution could be made. ”

“ To interpret the labor movement means to offer a theory of the struggle between labor and capital in our present society. According to Karl Marx, the founder of modern socialism, the efficient cause in all the class struggles of history has been technical progress. Progress in the mode of making a living or the growth of "productive forces," says Marx, causes the coming up of new classes and stimulates in each and all classes a desire to use their power for a maximum class advantage. ”

“ Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state, and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.
But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. ”

“ The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves ”

“ The Marxian classification broadly and very satisfactorily divides modern industrial communities into three broad sections—the greater and dominant capitalism, which is practically in control; the smaller capitalism which has lost control but which stubbornly and incessantly maintains the fight against the greater capitalism, and the proletariat which is practically, so far, a negligible quantity. ”

“ But not alone the pressure of capital in the exploitation of great bodies of labor, but the struggle of the proletarian against this exploitation develops the psychological conditions for socialist production; it develops discipline in every way, as we have already seen, of a wholly different character and from that given capital, and this struggle develops also a talent for organization, for it is only through the unanimous co-operation of the great body of mankind that the proletariat can assert itself against capital and the capitalist state. ”

“ The other sociological theory by which Karl Marx has truly dissipated the clouds which had ere then darkened the sky of the aspirations of socialism, and which has supplied scientific socialism with a political compass by the use of which it can guide its course, with complete confidence and certainty, in the struggles of every-day [Pg 165] life, is the great historical law of class struggles. [81] ("The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels. 1848.) ”

“ The Trade Unions are not merely to be satisfied with the work of the present, but are to become the focus and centre of gravity of the proletarian aspirations which arise out of the social transformation process, and are to work for the abolition of Capitalism. The most effective lever for [85] the achievement of this object is the conquest of political power. With its aid the proletariat can consciously carry out the transformation of a Capitalist into a Communist society. ”

“ As we have seen in an earlier chapter, Marx was not the first to recognize that the secret of capitalism, the object of capitalist industry, is the extraction of surplus-value from the labor-power of the worker. ”

“ His ideas of political economy appear to have foreshadowed those of Karl Marx—that the proletariat should possess everything, and that nobody else should possess anything. Daily increasing numbers of heads should fall in the sacred names of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. ”

“ Marx, who reasoned on strictly economic lines, and placed the emancipation of the working class as the highest goal, to which all other political and economic movements are subordinated, did not mistake the economic, political, and historical rôle of the nation: this is shown by the Communist Manifesto, where the creation of the national State by the bourgeoisie is indicated. ”

“ As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. ”

“ But his abiding thought was that freedom could only come by the gradual evolution. of a properly-equipped working-class party, taught class consciousness by actual experience gained in the struggle with Capitalism, and by changes in the ownership of capitalist property forced on society by the workings of the capitalist system itself. ”

“ This antithetical character of capitalist society has for its effect that the political economists, who are the philosophers of the existing order, lose their bearings, while the Socialists, who are the philosophers of the proletariat, look round for means to relieve the [37] distress. They condemn class struggles, [4] build Utopias and plan schemes of salvation, whereas the only real solution, because it is the only one which arises from the actual conditions, must be to further the organisation of the oppressed class and make it conscious of the objects of its struggles. ”

“ Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. ”

“ Although Marx was, as I think I have made clear, and still is, the guiding spirit of modern socialism, the huge structure of the present labor movement has not been erected by any great architect who saw it all in advance, nor has any great leader molded its varied and wonderful lines. It is the work of a multitude, who have quarreled among themselves at every stage of its building. ”

“ The proletariat fulfils the judgment which private property by the creation of the proletariat suspends over itself, just as it fulfils the judgment which wage-labour suspends over itself in creating alien riches and its own condemnation. If the proletariat triumphs, it does not thereby become the absolute side of society, for it triumphs only by abolishing itself and its opposite. ”

“ Men who still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling-classes, tried to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. ”

“ History, Marx has shown, is nothing but the history of class conflicts. The division of society into classes, which made its appearance with the social life of man, rests on economic relations—maintained by force—which enable some to succeed in shifting on to the shoulders of others the natural necessity of labor. ”

“ Only in England and in the eighties did the expanding propositions of Socialism come under the influence of men essentially administrative. As a consequence Marx, and still more the early Marxists, were and are negligent of the necessities of government and crude in their notions of class action. He saw the economic process with a perfect lucidity, practically he foretold the consolidation of the Trusts, and his statement of the necessary development of an entirely propertyless working-class with an intensifying class consciousness is a magnificent generalization. ”

“ And, on the other hand, socialism did not know that the labor movement was the living form in which its spirit was embodied, the concrete practical force of which it stood in need. Marx was the most clearly convinced and the most powerful among those who put an end to the empiricism of the labor movement and the utopianism of the socialist thought, and this should always be remembered to his credit. ”