Collier - Marx: a beginners guide

Marx

A Beginners Guide

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A Oneworld Book

First published by Oneworld Publications
as Marx: Oneworld Philosophers, 2004
First published in the Beginners Guide series, 2008
Reprinted in 2012
This ebook edition published in 2012

Copyright Andrew Collier, 2004

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781851685349
ebook ISBN 9781780741673

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For various reasons I have used different editions and translations of Marxs works for different quotations. All sources are stated in brackets in the text, and publication details are listed in the Bibliography. For biographical information I have relied mainly on David McLellans Karl Marx, though I have also used the biographies by Franz Mehring and Francis Wheen, Alex Callinicoss The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, and the reminiscences of Marx by his son-in-law Paul Lafargue and his disciple Wilhelm Liebknecht.

I would like to dedicate the book to my students in the courses on Marx and Engels and on Marxist thought, whose questions have helped to stimulate some of the arguments in this book.

Towards the end of his life, Marx wrote the following words in the opening to the programme of the French Workers Party:

Considering,

That the emancipation of the class of producers involves all mankind, without distinction of sex or race;

That the producers can only be free when they are in possession of the means of production;

That there are only two forms in which the means of production can belong to them:

1. The individual form, which was never a universal phenomenon and is being ever more superseded by the progress of industry,

2. The collective form, the material and mental elements for which are created by the very development of capitalist society. (The First International and After, p. 376)

The introduction goes on to state the need for a workers party to use universal manhood suffrage (which had recently been established in France) to secure common ownership of the means of production. There follows a minimum programme of demands for democratic liberties, the eight-hour working day, equal pay for women, and so on.

The statement of the conditions for workers freedom sums up Marxs political commitment very well. It can be expressed in two words: workers democracy. Marx is best known as the greatest thinker and writer in the working-class political movements of the nineteenth century, but these movements should be seen in a wider context: as part of the movement for democracy, which grew throughout that century, and bore fruit in the twentieth century in widespread parliamentary democracy, and occasional experiments in more radical forms of democracy. Marx himself was committed to democracy before he became committed to working-class political movements; in all his struggles within those movements his politics was more democratic than that of his opponents the utopians, the conspiratorial revolutionism of Blanqui, the anarchists, the Lassallean trend in German social democracy.

It has become commonplace since 1917 to contrast democratic with revolutionary socialism. This contrast misleading even today would have made no sense in the nineteenth century. Until relatively late in Marxs life, manhood suffrage existed only in some American states (not all slaves could not vote, and some non-slave-owning states had a property qualification for voting). It existed also briefly in France from the revolution of 1848 to May 1850. Nowhere could women vote. The first fully sovereign state with genuinely universal suffrage (women as well as men) was Australia in 1901, eighteen years after Marxs death. When T.H. Green, the great liberal political philosopher, went to Oxford as a student in the 1850s, he was asked to join the rifle club on the grounds that there might be a repetition of Chartism (a mass movement for democracy) and presumably students would be expected to go out and shoot democrats. To his credit he replied that he would join and, in that eventuality, desert to the side of the people. In 1848, Marx could sum up the immediate aim of his projected revolution as winning the battle of democracy, which he saw as equivalent to raising the proletariat to the position of ruling class. To be a democrat, in Marxs time, was to be a revolutionary.

Marxs espousal of democracy is all the more striking in that it is unique among first-rank German thinkers. Leibniz lived before democracy was on the agenda; Kant and Hegel were advocates of constitutional government, but not universal suffrage; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were frankly antidemocratic; and in more recent times, Frege wanted to disfranchise Jews, Husserl showed no interest in politics, and Heidegger flirted with the Nazis. Which leaves Marx as the sole democrat among the great German minds.

But what distinguished Marx from most other democrats was his belief that political emancipation was not enough without economic emancipation. The above quote makes it clear that, for the workers, emancipation means democracy in the workplace, not just in the state. Today, when the global market has stripped national parliaments of their economic power, this argument is more relevant than ever.