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Understanding of Karl Marx
Critics of Marx once observed that true believers in democracy were not so much opposed to Marx’s ideas as to the emotional associations of the words with which he clothed them. Unfortunately for the accuracy of his remark, the critic forgot to consider the possibility that the words had acquired their associations because of the ideas they expressed. But there is one essential principle of Marx’s political philosophy to which, to some extent, the remark applies. This is ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Dictatorship in popular parlance is used synonymously with terms like despotism, autocracy and absolutism. And yet historically there have been dictatorships directed against absolutism and autocracy, as illustrated in the rules of Cromwell and Robespierre. The popular conception carries with it the connotation of illegality. Yet the constitutions of the ancient Roman Republic and of the modern German Republic make ‘legal’ provisions for a dictatorship; and even the coup d'état of Napoleon the Great, as well as that of the Lesser, was confirmed by a popular plebiscite. A dictatorship, it is said, is essentially personal, yet history knows of dictatorships by triumvirates, religious organisations and political parties. None of these popular notions can serve as a clue to what Marx meant by the principle of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. It must be considered as an integral part of his philosophy of history and theory of the state.
I: What Is Proletarian Dictatorship? The key to Marx’s conception of proletarian dictatorship is given by Marx himself in his letter to Weydemeyer, 12 March 1852:
As far as I am concerned the honour does not belong to me for either having discovered the existence of classes in modern society or their struggles with one another. Bourgeois historians had long before me shown the development of this struggle of the classes and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of classes. What I added was to prove: (i) that the existence of classes is only bound up with certain historical struggles in the development of production; (ii) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; (iii) that this dictatorship is itself only a transition to the ultimate abolition of all classes and to a society without classes. [1]
Here it is clear that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is the domination not of an individual, group or party but of one class over another. Its opposite is not ‘democracy’ but the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’. The political forms by which dictatorships are imposed are varied, but what all dictatorships have in common is the possession of the state authority which is used on behalf of the dominant economic interest. The ultimate basis of the state authority, as we have seen, is physical power; its specific function, the preservation of the economic order. A dictatorship then, in Marx’s sense of the term, is not recognised by the name with which its jurisconsults baptise it, but by the objective signs of repression in its social and political life. Wherever we find a state, there we find a dictatorship. Whoever believes in a proletarian state, believes in a proletarian dictatorship. This is Marx’s meaning.
Is it adequate to the facts of political life? Does it not overlook important differences between the various forms of ‘bourgeois dictatorship’, for example, differences between monarchy and republic, limited suffrage and universal suffrage? Marx does not deny the existence of these differences nor their importance for the day by day political strategy of the proletariat. He maintains, however, that the differences are irrelevant to the fundamental facts of social inequality which are common to all political forms of bourgeois dictatorship. In order to see why, we must look at Marx’s analysis of ‘bourgeois dictatorship’ a little more closely.
II: The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie: In a class society, social equality is impossible; and without social equality, only the political form, but not the substance of democracy can exist. In bourgeois society, the most important matters which affect the lives of the working masses – the social conditions under which they live, their opportunities of employment, their wages – are determined, for the most part, by extra-political agencies. The bank, the factory and the market control the very right of the worker to live, for they control his means of life. This control is not malicious and deliberate but is an automatic consequence of existing property relations. [2] ‘Representative’ political institutions cannot control them in turn because within the frame of the capitalist mode of production (i) political institutions cannot be ‘truly’ representative, since they do not provide for democratic control of economic life; (ii) the tendencies towards centralisation of industry and concentration of wealth are not consequences of political rule but of inherent tendencies in the economic order and cannot be checked; and (iii) the possession of economic power gives almost complete domination over the leadership, programme and activities of political parties through the control of campaign funds, the organs of ‘public’ opinion, and the national budget. The result is widespread indifference among the working population to political processes except on spectacular occasions once every few years when they are given an opportunity ‘to decide which member of the ruling class is to represent them in Parliament’ (Marx). [3] Politics becomes an annexe to business and the principles of public morality are derived from successful commercial practice.
Bourgeois dictatorships may express themselves in different forms of government. For agitational purposes these differences are of no little significance to the working class. Everywhere a struggle must be waged for universal suffrage – not because this changes the nature of the dictatorship of capital, but because it eliminates confusing issues and permits the property question to come clearly to the fore. ‘Nowhere does social equality obtrude itself more harshly’, wrote Marx as early as 1847, ‘than in the Eastern States of North America because nowhere is it less glossed over (übertünscht) by political equality.’ [4] Twenty-five years later in his criticism of the Gotha Programme, he repeats: ‘... vulgar democracy... sees the millennium in the democratic republic and has no inkling of the fact that the class struggle is to be definitely fought out under this final form of state organisation of capitalist society.’ [5]
The existence of a formal political democracy is accompanied by sharper expressions of the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, for now there is only one issue on the agenda of history – whether man shall serve property or whether property, for the first time since the rise of traditional civilisation, shall serve man. In the course of the class struggle the bourgeoisie is compelled to abandon its own formal political guarantees whenever the sanctity of private property and the authority of the state are endangered. The dictatorship no longer remains veiled, but comes into the open. Martial law is proclaimed; freedom of the press and assemblage is suspended; minorities are unprotected, unless they accept bourgeois rule; the hemp rope is substituted for the cord of gold as a measure of repression. In the absence of the objective social presuppositions of equality, the formal possession of political equality – although it must be used to the utmost – turns out to be inadequate for any fundamental social change.
Bourgeois democracy is not the opposite of bourgeois dictatorship; it is one of its species. It is a dictatorship of a minority of the population over a majority – a minority defined not by the number of votes cast but by the number of those who own the instruments of social production. Bourgeois democracy may be parliamentary, and yet still be a dictatorship; it may be parliamentary, and still be, as Marx said of the French Republic of Louis Napoleon, ‘a government of unconcealed class terrorism’. [6]
True democracy, according to Marx, is possible only in a society where class divisions do not exist, where by virtue of a common administration of the means of production, an objective social morality harmonises the interests of men and establishes the goals of the social process. True democracy, therefore, cannot be bourgeois democracy (dictatorship) nor proletarian democracy (dictatorship). But how is it to be achieved? Only by substituting for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which declares itself to be the perfect enduring expression of democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which regards itself as transitional and paves the way towards communism.
III: The Tasks of the Proletarian Dictatorship: In his critical analysis of the Gotha Programme, Marx wrote:
Between the capitalist and communist systems of society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other. This corresponds to a political transition period, whose state can be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. [7]
Communism does not spring full born from the shell of capitalist society, for the latter can only create the presuppositions of communism. The proletariat must do the rest. When a revolutionary situation arises, it seizes power with the aid of other oppressed groups of the population. After it seizes power, it must organise to hold it against the practically certain attempts which will be launched, from within and without, against it. It uses its power to carry out the measures of socialisation and cultural education which lead to communism. The organisation of power is known as the proletarian dictatorship.
The proletarian dictatorship, like all dictatorships, is based on force. But it is not lawless or irresponsible. Its acts are strictly determined by the dictates of revolutionary necessity. It justifies what it does by principles which, in the course of time, it proceeds to codify – as all other states do. In the eyes of those who suffer by their application, these principles are regarded as spawned of hell, infamous and unnatural – a judgement often uttered before by those who have lost power. [8] But if anything, revolutionary principles make a greater and more sustained demand upon the integrity, courage, strength and intelligence of those who profess them than the principles they have replaced.
The first task the proletarian dictatorship must accomplish is to crush all actual or incipient counter-revolutionary movements. Otherwise, it cannot survive and goes down in a blood-bath which, as historical experience indicates, surpasses anything the proletariat is capable of. Marx cherished the lessons of the June days of 1848, the October days of the same year in Vienna and, bloodiest of all, the May days after the fall of the Commune in 1871. Revolutionary terrorism is the answer of the proletariat to the political terrorism of counter-revolution. Its ruthlessness depends upon the strength of the resistance it meets. Its acts are not excesses but defensive measures. Its historic justification is the still greater tragedies to which it puts an end. It was as the result of his studies of the successful French Revolution of 1793, which could never have been won without the Terror, and of his experience of the unsuccessful revolutions of 1848 and their bloody epilogue, that Marx wrote:
The fruitless butcheries since the June and October days, the protracted sacrifice-festivals of victims since February and March, the cannibalism of the counter-revolution itself, will convince the people that there is only one means by which the tortuous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth-pangs of the new society, may be shortened, simplified and concentrated – only one means – revolutionary terrorism. [9]
The suppression of the counter-revolution is the first of the tasks which must be accomplished by the proletarian dictatorship, but it is by no means the most important. The problems of economics and educational reorganisation are far more fundamental. Although the material bases of the new social order will already have been laid under capitalism, only mechanical Marxism – which is the obverse of fantastic Utopianism – can understand this to mean that when the revolution occurs, the maximum socialisation of the processes of production will have been achieved, that adequate mechanisms of distribution will necessarily be at hand, and that all small independent producers, peasants and craftsmen will have disappeared. Were this ever to be the case, there would be no need of revolution; capitalism would collapse of its own internal weight. But that collapse would be a far cry from the inauguration of socialism. For before capitalism could have developed to such a point, it would have long since crushed out of existence an active independent working-class movement. Its collapse would mean absolute social chaos.
Having assumed power with the help of the discontented petty bourgeoisie and peasantry, the proletarian dictatorship carries the tendencies of capitalist production to completion in such a way as to secure the foundations of the socialist society. In the process of reconstruction it must watch very carefully to see that the political tendencies of its allies – whose intermediate position in production has generated an ideology which is anti-capitalist rather than pro-socialist – does not flower into a programme demanding small independent production, complete administrative decentralisation, and other non-socialist measures. Concessions to these groups must, of course, be made but only with an eye to their ultimate withdrawal, or more accurately, with relation to a programme of social activity which, by nullifying the anti-social effects of these concessions, render them in time superfluous. Here the exigencies of the specific situation, together with first principles, dictate what is permissible and what is not.
The force of habit is stronger and more insidious than the force of arms. After the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm has subsided, the traditional habits of the old order, which have been made part of the unconscious by the educational agencies of capitalism, reassert themselves. In the long run the processes of social reconstruction will effect a psychological transformation; meanwhile the obstructive consequences of anti-social motivation may result in serious obstacles to carrying through the programme. A strenuous effort must therefore be made to overcome the cultural and psychological lag of the masses. New incentives to conduct must be fostered; new moral values made focal. Consciousness of the creative possibilities of a socialist order must be furthered and the educational system remade in the light of new social objectives.
The relative difficulty of these tasks will vary with different countries, but if Marx’s guess is right, they cannot be accomplished anywhere in less than a generation. The proletarian dictatorship, in order to survive, must carry on a struggle on all fronts. Lenin, who not only studied the theory of proletarian dictatorship but tested it in practice, wrote:
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a resolute, persistent struggle, sanguinary and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, pedagogic and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old society. The force of habit of the millions and tens of millions is a formidable force. [10]
IV: The Organs of Proletarian Dictatorship: The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a despotism. It expresses itself through representative institutions whose fundamental pattern was first revealed in dim outline in the political organisation of the Paris Commune. The constitution of the Paris Commune showed that Marx said:
It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour. [11]
The representative institutions projected by the Commune – which served as the forerunners of the Russian Soviets of 1905 and 1917 – distinguished themselves from the representative institutions of bourgeois democracy in several important ways. First, since the means of production, land and capital, were to be socialised, the government was to be a government of producers. All administrative functions were, therefore, to be performed at workmen’s wages. Second, all delegates to representative bodies could be recalled at any time by those who had elected them. Third, the commune was to be, in the words of Marx, ‘a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time’. This would make officials more sensitive to the needs of those whom they represented, and more capable of checking and coordinating their administrative functions with the processes of production. Fourth, the source of power was to be ‘the nation in arms’, and not a special army. [12]
The logic of this scheme was completed in the Soviet system of 1917 in which the unit of representation was shifted from a territorial to an occupational basis – an idea already expressed by Daniel De Leon in America in 1904.
Despite all this, the Commune or the Soviet is still a state, that is, a dictatorship. It exercises its repressive powers against those elements of the population which resist the transformation of society into a cooperative socialist commonwealth. It is therefore not yet a true democracy. Nonetheless, it more closely approaches true democracy than any previous political democracy in that it is a dictatorship of producers over non-producers, and, therefore, of a majority over a minority. Within the ranks of the producers the principles of true democracy prevail. Further, its activities are directed to making its own repressive functions superfluous. This is the justification of their use.
But in a society where there are no classes, will there not be conflicts between the majority of the population and the minority? How will these be solved? By force? But, by definition, the state – the organ of repression – no longer exists. Peacefully? Then why cannot the conflicts between the majority and minority be solved without acts of repression even before the state has disappeared? These questions overlook again the distinctive character of class oppositions. The proletarian state does not set itself up to be a true democracy. It frankly asserts that no true democracy is possible where a majority represses the minority. In a true democracy – due to the homogeneity of interests produced by the absence of economic class divisions – the minority, after discussion and decision, voluntarily subordinates itself to the majority. In a class democracy – bourgeois or proletarian – the presuppositions of social homogeneity are lacking and society is divided into two inarbitrably hostile camps. Since the subject class cannot be relied upon voluntarily to subordinate itself, the state power is necessary. If ever a time comes when in a class democracy the group which controls the state uses it in the interests of the class which its economic institutions oppress, or if ever in a true democracy a situation arises in which a minority resorts to force to overthrow the decision of a majority – the Marxian theory will have to be revised.
One further question. What guarantee is there that after the class enemy has been eliminated from the social scene, the proletarian dictatorship will disappear, or that it will not give way to a new type of dictatorship – the dictatorship of the leaders over those whom they lead? May not one form of oppression then be substituted for another? Robert Michels has developed this point into a system of sociology. [13] The nature of every organisation – especially political organisations – is such that they cannot function without leaders. In the course of time, oppositions arise between the leaders and those who are led which are analogous to the oppositions between classes. The power of the leaders, derived from control of the party machine, enables them to constitute themselves into a virtual oligarchy which is self-perpetuating. Where democratic forms prevail, the leaders, due to their control of the strategic positions in the political bureaucracy, can get themselves ‘legally’ voted into power again. If they are overthrown by organised mass protest or revolt, then the leaders of the revolt – those who have rallied the masses – take their places. A new bureaucracy arises and the process continues for ever. Michels calls this the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ and holds that it is valid for all societies. He, therefore, concludes that ‘socialists may be successful but socialism [true democracy] never’. History is the succession of one set of politicians for another.
That personal abuse of power will always be possible is undeniable. But what Michels overlooks is the social and economic presuppositions of the oligarchical tendencies of leadership in the past. Political leadership in past societies meant economic power. Education and tradition fostered the tendencies to predatory self-assertion in some classes and at the same time sought to deaden the interest in politics on the part of the masses. In a socialist society in which political leadership is an administrative function, and, therefore, carries with it no economic power, in which the processes of education strive to direct the psychic tendencies to self-assertion into ‘moral and social equivalents’ of oligarchical ambition, in which the monopoly of education for one class has been abolished, and the division of labour between manual and mental worker is progressively eliminated – the danger that Michels’ ‘law of oligarchy’ will express itself in traditional form, becomes quite remote. In addition, the organisation of the communes or soviets demands that all producers in the course of their work be drawn into the ‘social planning activities’ of society. Of necessity they must become politically conscious. And where political consciousness is widespread and the means of production held in common, bureaucracy cannot flourish. For limited periods, especially in the period immediately after the revolution, evils may appear, but it is impossible to predict in advance what specific form they will take. This bare and abstract possibility, however, is much too weak a foundation for the heavy sociological structure which Michels builds upon it.
V: Communism and Democracy: Hostile critics of Marxism have often designated it as the last system of Utopian socialism. Marxism, they have said, envisages the social order of the future as one in which there are no material lacks and no political constraint, in which human beings are moved only by altruistic motives. This is a millenary dream. From an opposite quarter, their fellow critics have protested that Marxism is the last theoretical expression of capitalism, that it assumes the same values and motives of human behaviour and gives no indications of the criteria of a desirable society. The same evils, they remind us, may be produced by different causes. Unless mankind is guided by a more adequate schedule of ethical values than those illustrated in the class war today, the meanness, cruelty and vulgarity of contemporary culture will reappear in a different guise in the culture of tomorrow.
Both criticisms – cancelling one another though they do – fall wide of the mark because they share two theoretical presuppositions which are utterly foreign to Marxism. Both assume that ethical values are relevant and meaningful in independence of a concrete social and historical context. The first school of critics, on the basis of the patent hollowness and inapplicability of all past schemes of ‘universal’ and ‘truly human’ morality in class society, argue that no objective system of social morality will ever be possible. [14] The second school desire to work out now, and to propagate in full detail, a system of morality which can only be realised and understood after social conditions have been changed. Both schools further assume that communism springs into existence immediately after the revolution, and overlook the gradual interactive effects between human ideals and social existence which result from the activities of socialisation. They do not view social experience as an educational and transformative process in which, by the control of social institutions, human motives and ideals are themselves changed.
According to the Marxist philosophy the content – the very meaning of moral ideals – is a function of a concrete situation in the process of historical development. Ideals must be redetermined from time to time in relation to what the forces of production make possible and what human beings will as desirable. Marx, therefore, never invoked a natural rights theory of ethics. The only formal ethical invariant he recognised, was man’s desire for ‘the better’. In class societies there are to be found only class moralities, for just as the ‘good’ of one class is the ‘bad’ of another, ‘the better’ of the first is ‘the worse’ of the second. This is most obviously true of such political shibboleths as liberty, equality and democracy. Just as soon as we give a concrete content to these terms we find that what is liberty for one class is wage-slavery for another; what is democracy for one class is the formal cloak of dictatorship for another.
After the socialist revolution, social morality will only gradually lose its antinomic character, for classes will not have been immediately abolished. But class divisions will not be relevant to the overwhelming majority of the population since it will consist of producers. The chief consideration now which determines the principles of justice, in accordance with which social wealth will be distributed, is the level socialised production will have reached. Even under communism, then, abstract principles of justice by themselves will not be adequate to settle the specific problems of distribution.
It is in his discussion of the principles which are to guide the distribution of the social product under communism that Marx appears at his realistic best. He avoids the abstract morality of the Utopians and at the same time transcends the morality of the status quo. This question is bound up with the problem of democracy. Since there can be no social equality without ‘just distribution’, and since political democracy, according to Marx’s earlier critique, is an empty form without social equality, his analysis of ‘just distribution’ is part of his analysis of democracy. This discussion will be found in his Critique of the Gotha Programme.
The ‘right to the full product of one’s labour’ had always been an agitational demand of the Utopian socialists. Due to the influence of Lassalle’s thought, a variant of this demand had slipped into the platform of the German Social-Democratic Party. It called for a system of society in which ‘the proceeds of society [Arbeitsertrag] belong to all the members of society, unabridged and in equal right’. The presupposition of their demand is that the social revolution has just been accomplished.
Marx protests that it is obviously impossible at such time both to reward ‘all members of society’, including those who do not work, and, at the same time, to give those who do work the full and unabridged products of their labour. If it is meant that only those who work are to receive the full product of their labour, while those who do not work are to be permitted to starve, then all talk about ‘equal rights’ on the part of these two groups must be dropped. Besides, it is nonsense to demand that those who work should receive the full product of their labour, for (a) the product is social and cooperative, not private and individual, (b) deductions from the social product must be made for wear and tear of social capital, expansion of production, etc, (c) deductions must be made for administrative expenses, education, public hygiene, and (d) deductions must be made for those who are unable to work. Making allowance for all these deductions and reservations, the principle of distribution in the first stage of communist society – a society which, as Marx says, has not ‘developed on its own basis, but, on the contrary, is just issuing out of capitalist society’ – amounts to this: Each individual is to be rewarded in proportion to what he produces. What he produces is measured by his labour time:
Accordingly, the individual producer gets back – after the deductions – exactly as much as he gives to it... He receives from the community a cheque showing that he has done so much labour, and with this cheque he draws from the common store as much of the means of consumption as costs an equal amount of labour. The same quantity of labour that he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another form. [15]
But this is not yet genuine Social-Democracy or justice, Marx adds. It is, however, the best attainable in a ‘society that still retains, in every respect, economic, moral and intellectual, the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it is passing’. [16] It is not genuine justice because it makes possible inequality of wage payments. A, who enjoys natural strength, may in the same span of time produce, with less exertion, twice as much as B. If he receives in payment twice as much as B, B is being punished for his natural weakness, for which he is no more responsible than A is for his strength. Or A and B may produce the same amount and get the same reward, and yet, because B is the head of a family and A is not, inequality will result.
Both A and B are equal before the law of the new society because, together with their fellow producers, they own and control the means of production. In this there is a definite advance over capitalism. But it is not yet communism. In respect to distribution one person may acquire more wealth than another and certain groups may be able to enjoy a higher standard of living. This will not constitute a danger to the social order because the ownership of the instruments of production will be common. But the incentives and motives of the old order will have survived down to this period. The possibility of social disorder will be quite real. A certain vestigial state apparatus will therefore be necessary to keep the peace. Coercion will still have to be employed. The principle that each one has an equal right to what he produces (and not to what he needs) is just, then, only under those social conditions in which productive forces have not been developed to a point where, by purely voluntary labour, everyone’s fundamental needs can be gratified. But ‘just’ though it be under the circumstances, the principle of equal right is still a hang-over from capitalism:
Equal right is here, therefore, still according to the principle, capitalist right... The equal right is still tainted with a capitalist limitation.
However, one person is physically or intellectually superior to the other, and furnishes, therefore, more labour in the same time, or can work a longer time; and in order to serve as a measure, labour must be determined according to duration or intensity, otherwise it would cease to serve as a standard. This equal right is unequal right for unequal labour. It does not recognise class distinctions, because everyone is only a working-man like everybody else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment, and hence, efficiency, as natural privileges. It is, therefore, in its substance, a right of inequality, like all right. According to its nature, right can consist only in the application of a common standard; but the unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal ones) can be measured according to a common standard only in so far as they are brought under the same point of view, or, are regarded from a particular side only. For example, in the given instance they are regarded only as working-men; we see nothing more in them, we disregard everything else. Moreover, one working-man is married, the other is not married; one has more children than the other, etc. Hence with equal contribution of labour and, therefore, equal shares in the social consumption-fund, the one receives actually more than the other, the one is richer than the other, etc. In order to avoid all these shortcomings right would have to be not equal, but unequal.
But these shortcomings are unavoidable in the first phase of communist society, as it has just issued from capitalist society after long travail. Right can never be superior to the economic development and the stage of civilisation conditioned thereby. [17]
Marx, at this point, stops short of specific description and contents himself with indicating the communist ideal of social distribution. This is: ‘Production according to one’s capacities, and distribution according to one’s needs.’ [18] He does not say when and how it will be realised, or even assert that it is some day certain to be achieved. After all, it is an idea. But the conditions for its realisation are stated and some intimations are offered of intermediate stages in the progress towards complete communism.
‘Need’ is an ambiguous term; ‘reward according to need’ even more so. One man’s need may be another man’s luxury. Certainly, except in paradise, not all individuals can be rewarded in accordance with their ‘fancied’ needs. During the first stage of communist society, all who are willing to work will receive sufficient for their fundamental needs – food, clothing, shelter, education, etc. But due to the inequality of wage payments, some will be able to gratify needs which are not fundamental. Later, when equality of wage payments has been established, it may be possible to redefine ‘fundamental needs’ – another elastic concept – in such a way that it will include the need for what were formerly regarded as luxuries – material or cultural. As production increases, the equal minimum wage is increased. But equality of payment in a world in which human beings are unequal, Marx showed, involved inequality. The true ideal of social equality must respect these human differences and seek to give each individual the opportunity to develop himself in accordance with his own moral ideal. The presupposition is that technology will be sufficiently advanced, and the educational processes of the new society sufficiently enlightened and effective, to make it possible that the material prerequisites necessary for a free career for all – will be produced by voluntary labour. Where this is not so, the principle of need will have to be modified by the principle of desert, that is, specific reward for individual effort.
Marx is not very much concerned with the higher phase of communism. His life-work and thought were primarily directed to overthrow the highest phase of capitalism. But he permits us to catch a glimpse of the social ideal which gave added meaning and justification, not alone to his own heroic struggles, but to the struggle of the international working-class movement of which he was a part. It is an ideal whose complete realisation is not as important as its directive power:
In the higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual under the division of labour has disappeared, and therewith also the opposition between manual and intellectual labour; after labour has become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life; when, with the development of all the faculties of the individual, the productive forces have correspondingly increased, and all the springs of social wealth flow more abundantly – only then may the limited horizon of capitalist right be left behind entirely, and society inscribe on its banners: ‘From everyone according to his faculties, to everyone according to his needs.’ [19]
1. English translation by Beer, Labour Monthly, July 1922 [available at here. – MIA
2. Even when the control is conscious the motive is not personal but arises from the ‘objective’ interest of the business corporation. Mr Grace, President of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, testifying before the Lockwood Commission, admitted that his corporation was dictating to contractors and builders in New York and Philadelphia, that ‘they could buy fabricated steel only on condition that it be erected under open shop conditions’. He declared this to be a national policy. In answer to a question from Mr Untermeyer whether he did not think such dictation on the part of the manufacturers to be arrogant, Mr Grace responded: ‘If they thought it was to protect their interest, in line with what they considered the right policy for their interest, I would not consider it arrogant but self-protection.’ (New York Times, 15 December 1920)
3. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, available here. – MIA
4. Karl Marx, ‘Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality’, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band VI, p. 309. [available here. – MIA]
5. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (English translation, SLP Press), p. 49. [available at here. – MIA
6. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, available here. – MIA
7. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (English translation, SLP Press), p. 48. [available here.] – MIA
8. ‘At present you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of nature. The property of France does not govern it.’ (Edmund Burke, Letters on the French Revolution, Works (Bohn edition), Volume 2, p. 325).
9. Karl Marx, The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna, Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Marx und Engels, Band III, p. 199. [available here]. – MIA
10. V.I. Lenin, The Infantile Sickness of ‘Leftism’ in Communism, English translation, p. 31 [“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Collected Works, Volume 31. – MIA
11. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (SLP edition), p. 78. [available at here. – MIA
12. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, available here. – MIA
13. Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (Leipzig 1925).
14. This is a generalised and illicit form of Marx’s specific line of criticism of all ‘classless’ morality in class society. Of the humanitarian Heinzen, Marx wrote: ‘... Mr Heinzen professes to be unconcerned either with the bourgeoisie or with the proletariat in Germany. His party is the “party of humanity,” that is, the noble and warm-hearted enthusiasts who champion “middle-class” interests disguised in the form of “human” ideals, without ever realising the connection between the idealistic phrase and its realistic kernel.’ (Karl Marx, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band VI, p. 321). [available at here. – MIA
15. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. – MIA
16. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. – MIA.
17. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. – MIA
18. This phrase does not appear in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. – MIA
19. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. – MIA
Last updated: 26 February 2020