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OPTIMISM, ADAM SMITH, LIBERALS and UTOPIANS (5 of 5)

He looked back at the power of aristocrats -- a landowning class -- and he examined the new wealth of capital. He did not like what he saw. He believed that history gave rise to economic classes and he wanted a new economic class, the proletariat, to distribute power and influence to the masses: a democratic classless society, without a wealthy, ruling elite.

Karl Marx was thirty during the June Days of 1848. He had his own newspaper and had written his Communist Manifesto a few months before the June Days uprising, but his manifesto was being read by few. And in May, 1849, he was driven out of Germany. He went to Paris and was also driven from there, ending that year in London, where he was to remain until his death in 1883.

Karl Marx was the son of a Jewish lawyer who had converted to Lutherism. Karl was brought up in the tradition of the Enlightenment, and, in his graduate essay while a teenager, Marx had written that human nature was such that a person could achieve fulfillment only by working for the perfection and welfare of others. He studied philosophy at the University of Bonn and acquired a doctorate of philosophy at the age of twenty-three, and for his dissertation he compared the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus.

As had David Ricardo, Marx added class conflict to Adam Smith's world of economics. And he disagreed with John Stuart Mill about production and distribution, seeing a connection between how goods were distributed and how production was organized.

Marx denounced utopianism. Rather than a plan to be superimposed upon society, he believed, as had Proudhon, in working for social change within conditions rising out of history. Influenced by the philosopher Hegel, Marx built upon Hegel's view of humanity passing through stages of social development. He removed God from Hegelism and created historical materialism. He believed in organizing industrial workers, and he based his revolution on appealing to the new and growing class of industrial workers.

His division of society into classes was essentially a reference to economic classes. By economic classes he meant the relations of people to production -- in other words, a division between those who sold their labor and those who bought the labor of others. And there was the class who owned the land upon which others worked and those who worked for landlords.

The factory system, he believed, was a product of a history of man's inhumanity to man. He saw enough state force against people mobilized for political change that he was firm in his rejection of the view of rival socialists -- from Owen to Proudhon -- that change could be realized through peaceful discussion. 

He separated himself from religion. He saw religion as offering people "an illusory happiness" that distracted them from seeking relief from oppression. Marx believed in science. Science was popular among the "enlightened" of his time, and he tried to arrive at his conclusions about society through empirical observation, creating what was to become known as scientific socialism. Trying to be scientific he studied economic development, seeing growth in the size of companies and bigger concerns driving smaller concerns out of business. His detailed study of wages covered a period when real wages (purchasing power) were falling. Had his study extended to a broader span of time it would have indicated that real wages in the long run were rising. Believing that real wages were diminishing and adhering to Ricardo's belief in subsistence wages, Marx believed that the growing misery among working people would eventually make them want to overthrow the "ruling class." Every economic depression in a century of cyclical depressions was to be taken by followers of Marx as the coming of socialist revolution.

Marx made a detailed study of economic crises, describing the production of goods surpassing consumption. He described economic depressions as a creation of poor economic organization and a problem in distribution. Believing that economic chaos was inherent in capitalism he did not foresee any remedy to boom and bust cycles.

In a detailed study, Marx produced his Labor Theory of Value. Marx described exploitation of workers in the form of employers not paying workers wages the full value of that which they had produced, the difference being profits for the capitalist.

Marx put class struggle into his philosophy of history, in the mold of a Hegelian triad: change by one force against another force producing a synthesis. What concerned him most was the rise of industrial employers clashing with wage earners, which he thought wage earners would win, producing socialism.

With socialism, he proposed, the workers would be the power behind the state. The workers would be the new "ruling class" and there would be no exploitation because the profits from the state-owned factories would be spent for the working class.

Marx disliked anarchism. He saw need for order, at least until socialism was firmly established and economic classes faded away.

In 1852 Marx wrote:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

There was an authoritarian aspect to what was considered the initial state of Marx’s revolution. The workers were to be the new "ruling class."  The world would see this authoritarianism in what would be done in the name of that big abstraction, the working class, and in the name of history. Marx's ultimate goal was the removal of authoritarianism. Marx believed that with the working class in control of the state and with landed aristocracies and capitalists a part of the past, economic classes would fade away, making the state – an authority that compels – no longer necessary. And with advancing technology there would be enough for a distribution of goods on the basis of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This was the communism that would be the goal in Marxist China and Russia in the 20th century.

Marx, Louis Blanqui and the 1871 Revolution in Paris

Blanqui was from southeastern France and had given up on his study of law and medicine to become a political revolutionary. At the age of twenty-five he fought with distinction in the revolution of 1830, which brought to power the liberal monarch Louis-Philippe, and he won a decoration for his services. He turned against the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and spent years in prison, until February 1848. Upon his release he showed himself to be an effective organizer and leader of men, moving colleagues away from Jacobin policies to policies that were socialist, until he was jailed again in May where he remained for more than ten years. During these years, Blanqui formulated his socialist philosophy, believing as Marx did in the proletariat (urban workers) becoming the ruling class and denying the bourgeoisie the freedom to exercise its power. And he believed that organized violence was needed to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

By 1870, after eleven years of freedom, he was leading a secret army of about 4,000. In March 1871 came another uprising in Paris ( known in recent times from the musical Les Miserables). Blanqui was arrested, but his army fought alongside others at the barricades against the established order. From the failure of revolution in 1871 came a separation of those who followed Marx and those who followed Blanqui.

During the uprising Marx wrote of France's "collapsing bourgeois society" as "pregnant" with a new society. Then, with the failure of the rising, Marx denounced the repression by France's "bourgeois form of government." He wrote:

Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.

Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, continued to believe that successful revolution required a readiness for revolution by the whole of a community of workers. Blanqui's followers were not interested in waiting. They believed that a small group of determined revolutionaries could initiate a revolution at any time and succeed. Engels wrote:

If anything is evident, it is the fact that the Parisian proletariat, after the exhausting war, after the famine in Paris, and especially after the fearful massacres of May, 1871, will require a good deal of time to rest, in order to gather new strength, and that every premature attempt at a revolution would bring on merely a new and still more crushing defeat. Our Blanquists are of a different opinion.

It became Marxist ideology that Blanquism was to be avoided, that revolution by a minority would merely be an attempt at a coup and if successful would lead merely to dictatorship. A proper and a successful rising, according to Marxist ideology, involved the mass of the working class, creating a dictatorship not of a few but of the proletariat.

For his support of the 1871 uprising in Paris, Marx became known as the Red Doctor, and little respect was heeded him by the majority of political economists of his time. Marx died in 1883, almost sixty-five. His collaborator and source of financial support, the wealthy Friedrich Engels, died in 1895, also in London.

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