How Marx became a communist

so KL Marx is almost certainly the most famous communist of all time and if anyone talks to you about communism most likely there'll be some connection between what they're talking about and Marx's ideas but as Keelan just said Marx wasn't born a communist um and communism in general existed quite a long time before Marx was even born so how is it that Marx became a communism first of all but perhaps more importantly how did he change communism forever um so I'm going to start with by giving a little bit of a historical context into the the world in into which um Marx was born Marx was born in Tria in West Germany in on the 5th of May 1818 now Tria had experienced the storm and stress of the French Revolution the Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars it had been occupied by French forces but then had actually Fallen under the rule of the Kingdom of Prussia after the defeat of Napoleon and the reestablishment the restoration of absolutist rule in Germany of course in Russia under the holy Alliance and the restoration of the old borbon Dynasty in France um this meant that Marx was born into a period of political reaction repression censorship at the same time Germany didn't EXA exist in a vacuum and you had the rise of industrialization and liberalism in countries like England France the 1830 Revolution was watched with Sympathy by a number of German middleclass liberals including Marx's own father Heinrich um father had his Marx's father had converted from Judaism to prantis in order to avoid repression under the Prussian absolutist State and he actually held a private celebration for the July Revolution in 1830 only a private one though because he didn't want to draw too much unwanted attention so he had a period in which under the surface of apparent stability semi- feudal stability he still had feudal property in much of Germany he still had surf them in parts of the country and this gigantic absolutist bureaucracy um ruled over by King Frederick William IV of Prussia but under the surface you actually start to have Economic Development and transformation just beginning to take place certain economic reforms like the the formation of all German Customs Union and tariff barriers to protect just the emerging nent German industry has started to create a a Bourgeois proper although this was small and scattered around the country but this Bourgeois was starting to look with sympathy to the more advanced countries trying to basically appropriate their ideas um but this was in conditions of of relative to Europe at the to the more advanced capist countries um extreme backwardness Mark marks jokes that Germany shared the restoration that is the counterrevolution of the modern Nations without sharing its revolution it hadn't achieved any of the tasks of the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution it was only on the threshold of capitalist development and yet it had a restored absolutist monarchy and the repression that all of the countries were going through so this was a a great contradiction really that marks GR grew up with as a child at the same time the the increasing power of the market was starting to intertwine with feudal property the feudal Lords were enclosing peasants lands and then using the Law to force peasants who were stealing from their lands stealing from their land to work on their lands like a new form of serfdom capitalism and feudalism were starting to intertwine and Marx again witnessed this Marx's own father actually represented defended peasants who were been prosecuted under these laws and it must have had an impact on the young marks so this was also the the but at the same time that the the German middle class was looking to places like France and England looking to liberalism but without the class basis to actually apply this in a political movement there were no there wasn't even a Bourgeois political party liberalism was only really just coming into being in Germany and so Marx makes the point that actually all these ideas aren't in digested as political ideas they're not put into practical application instead they're received in their kind of pure form in the form of philosophy and he actually said that hegel's philosophy of right of the state was simply this it was taking foreign liberalism and expressing it as this kind of pure absolute moral idea this is the intellectual environment into which Marx uh emerged really he first started going to University in Bon it's where he also began his relationship with Jenny Von vestarin but uh he was he was obviously enjoying the student life a little bit too much and eventually was sent to University in Berlin this is the University of Hegel and hegelianism interesting fact is initially Marx didn't like Hegel he resisted Hegel because he complained about the craggy Melody of his writing so it seems that Marx found as difficult to read as the rest of us did and he resisted it and instead he he he took up other famous German philosophies philosophers like K and there's a fascinating letter that he writes to his father at the age of 19 in November 1837 in which he says he talks about there are moments in one's life which are like Frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new Direction at such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the Eagle Eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position and I quoted that in full because this is something that Marx comes back to this is a process that Marx goes through several times throughout his life you have you you see these important staging posts in his journey if you like towards revolutionary communism and Marxism which I'll try to draw out in this introduction but at this staging post Marx talks about how he threw himself into his studies and what he tried to do he was studying law he tried to compile a complete system of law and what that meant in Germany in the early 19th century was a metaphysical system first he just produced a number of logical categories that apply to all legal systems of all time the essence of law if you like um he then researched thoroughly um you know cases legal history he tried to absorb the subject matter which is again a constant throughout Marx's life he dives into the subject matter and he tries to make the facts that he's just learned fit to this system that he just developed in pure thought and he writes to his father basically saying it was all rubbish everything I'd done was rub you can see the despair in his writing he'd spent a year written 300 pages and he said it was just complete nonsense uh he and but he discovers already at this young Ang he discovers the limitations of idealism he says that um here above all the same opposition between what is and what ought to be which is characteristic of idealism stood out as a serious defect the mistake lay in my belief that matter and form can and must develop separately from each other every time he was trying to apply this metaphysical method that he himself said was inspired by K he was getting nowhere and so reluctantly he had to turn to Hegel and he says in a period in in a period of long illness he read all of Hegel that's when he dived into Hegel maybe that's the best way to read Hegel and he was completely convinced but what I find fascinating so Hegel was also an idealist but Marx is approaching Hegel from the standpoint of rejecting idealism and metaphysics what he took what he was inspired by in Hegel was this idea of seeking the idea in reality itself there's a famous expression from Hegel the truth is concrete so Marx who was not yet an explicit materialist was approaching Hegel to a certain extent in materialist fashion wanting to actually dive into and understand reality and again this is an absolute constant um throughout his life while when he encounters hegelianism he also encounters what he refers to as adoptor Club what we know as the young hegelians or left hegelians these were some some older than marks but these are students people have already acquired their doctorate essentially I mean really liberal academics what made them left toal was not that they were socialists or Comm certainly not Communists it was that um in contrast to the kind of official right galens who were on on behalf of the Prussian State trying to Force Hegel hegel's philosophy to support the state Church the absolutist bureaucracy saying that this is basically the end point of all historical development the young hegelians were saying no actually in hegel's philosophy there is a a a constant change and a transformation politically though they weren't revolutionaries they were in favor of a constituent um constitutional monarchy and the way they wanted to carry this out was that they would get jobs in universities in the state bureaucracy which was extremely large and fruitful area of employment at that time and they would mold the nation they would trans form the nation through thought and marks him he writes to his father saying that's the career I want to take unfortunately for him but fortunately for us the prian state did not agree with that career path and the the sensor prevented all of the young hegelians from getting Prof Professor positions which meant that the young still I would say liberal marks decides to take up journalism and he gets involved in the Rhiner zong that is the the reinland times which he eventually becomes the editor of the this is at the age of about 23 in 1842 and at this time again he's not a communist you describe him as a radical liberal or maybe a left liberal he talks about free speech he writes a free speech the Free Press it's the characterful rational moral essence of Freedom not really the marks that we know still very hegelian in its treatment but you can still see his Sympathy for the poor and his indignation at the the grasping Looting of the landowners and the rich he writes an article about uh the debates in Parliament about W laws over the the Ste the picking up of wood that's fallen from the landowners forests and at that time it's clear that he has encountered some socialist ideas and he's probably read prudon what is property which was released in 1840 at this point because he says if every violation of property without distinction without a more exact def definition is term theft will not all private property be theft he starts to talk about how the rights of the land owners are really just a kind of uh irrational but imposed by the state whereas the rights of the poor are rational natural but are neglected by the state but he's still a liberal at this point and this time he's trying to mold and transform um Society through journalism through public opinion a very common liberal idea at the time but again this Prussian censor pops up and um puts pressure on the paper tries to censor the paper over this wood article this this was the controversial article Marx refuses to back down or tone down his material the shareholder start to panic and Mark Marx actually resigns from the rhines shitong rather than accept any censorship one thing I should mention before we move on is that Mark there's an interesting article in which marks as the editor of the paper explicitly rejects communism somebody accuses the paper of communism because they published another article by a communist writer and marks in this he says um that the Rhiner Shan zitong does not admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality and therefore can't even consider it possible but he adds we will sub these ideas to a thoroughgoing criticism and it was that thoroughgoing criticism that led to Marx eventually becoming a communist effectively in his intellectual development um and so being being blocked by the Prussian censor again another we see this um intellectual conscientiousness wanting to dive into and grasp reality we see this indignation at the the suffering of the oppressed and the robbery of the property owners but we also see this iron determination which never leaves him that every time he encounters a block and and a limitation rather than just accepting or backing down if anything he becomes more determined and more belligerent to overcome that limitation as a result he leaves Prussia he he spends a short period of time in Switzerland and then ends up in France in October 1843 and it's at this point that we can speak of Marx U becoming a communist of sorts and embracing communism but when I say Marx becomes a communist I don't mean he becomes a Marxist what I mean is that he encounters the various schools of French communism and socialism that were exploding onto the scene in the 1840s there was a really vibrant scene if you like it reminds me a little bit there's one parallel in the the current popularity of the word communism at least and communist ideas now millions of Youth all over the world are embracing communism in one form or another well in the 1840s you had papers Journal pamphlets circulating amongst hundreds of thousands of people in France especially in the working class concentrated not only but concentrated in Paris the most popular communist probably in the world at that time was a guy by the name of eten cab eten cab was a a classical utopian communist explicitly he said he wanted to found a Utopia he was inspired by reading Thomas Moore's Utopia when he spent time in England he also read Robert Owen I'm not going to be able to go into detail Robert Owen I'm going to confine myself to the friendship a bit but he actually he his his communism called aarian communism because he wrote a novel it was a fictional account about a traveler who discovers an Undiscovered island called Iaria where everyone lives under communism very much like mors Utopia if if you have read it but he started publishing an almanac but a journal exp expounding these communist ideas which had a circulation of about 500,000 in in 1843 so this is popular stuff but still of quite a mystical utopian nature but on the front page of this um of this Almanac I thought you'd be quite interested to learn that the the main slogan that he put forward was from each according to his ability to each according to his need you might recognize that from Marx's critique of the goto program where he explains that the the Absolut the end principle of the higher phase of Communism is precisely that cab coined that phrase he didn't come up with the idea though because French communism has an even longer pedigree than that a guy by the name of moraly um in the mid 18th century actually took Enlightenment ideas about the state of nature natural law and so on and came to the conclusion that the natural state of human beings is communistic and therefore private property is against human nature is wrong and the correct natural moral way to live is a communistic way in which he started to put forward the idea that everyone would contribute what they can everyone would be maintained by the the public good and there would be no private property whatsoever except for the Fulfillment of personal needs you know your food your toothbrush that kind of thing many of these ideas will be familiar to these are the basic ideas of Communism however this communism it had an idealistic character is human nature is communistic therefore we must have communism there's no real Social Development there's no question of the productive forces at this point um it also has yeah it has a utopian moral element and it also has a Spartan element and we see this this these ideas develop after the French Revolution um as a trend after the kind of the the the defeat and the disappointment of the highest phase of the Revolution with Jacobin you have What's called the conspiracy of the equals in 1796 led by a man who named himself graus after tiberious graus in ancient Roman history graus Bou this conspiracy calls called for the abolition of private property the abolition of inheritance and any basically individual privilege whatsoever and an absolute leveling an absolute equality they said that the Democratic rights of 1789 were not enough what we need was absolute equality again so the idea of extreme republicanism Revolution Insurrection communism there are Trends here that you can detect in Marxism later on but there's there's something that Mark marks rejected all these Communists that's why he said they had no re theoretical reality because there was no development here and actually the the the bists rejected things like art if they said we have to get rid of art and culture and so on in order to have equality then so be it and Marx rejected that he call it Barrack's communism in other words it it tended to have more in common common with primitive communism than it did with the modern communism that Marx eventually embraced Marx was arguably so he took he took ideas from these Communists but he was arguably more influenced by the the Socialists actually even though at this time he never called himself a socialist he always referred to himself as a communist but he was heavily influenced by socialists especially Simon and and also sh Fier now Simon and Fier were both dead by the time marks arrives in Paris they they both died in the 1820s interestingly they were not popular at all Simon was so disappointed that his ideas weren't spreading he shot himself he survived the surv suicide attempt but I think what you can get from that is he didn't lead this mass movement at all he did have a handful of disciples effectively um but he didn't have a mass movement forier stopped writing in the 1820s because he thought nobody wanted to hear it and yet these two men became probably the most influential men in French socialism in the 1840s and had a direct impact on Marx's ideas I don't really have time to go into detail which is a great shame because I actually have tons of notes on Simon in particular but one thing that there was actually something more scientific about their still rather utopian socialism than the Communists the Communists were basically like we need to live under absolute equality let's just have it either by Insurrection or by setting up communes uh you know cab wanted everyone to move to America set up Frontier colonies where everyone lives in absolute equality and they did they all failed although one actually managed to establish the oldest Winery in Illinois so there you go the heritage of of Communism in America in the United States um so it has this utopian character s Simon I know we refer to S Simon as utopian but basically s Simon took all of the science including the the the science of political economy from Adam Smith he was greatly inspired by the French Revolution the American Revolution and the works of Adam Smith and Isaac Newton in Eng in England or sorry Britain including Scotland um he referred to Adam Smith as the immortal Adam Smith he wanted to establish a European wide group he wanted to unify the European continent and he wanted to establish a European wide government which he would call the Council of Newton established by universal suffrage he basically believed in Bourgeois science and what he said is on the basis of the development of Bourgeois science you would eventually come to a point where there'd be no need for any state because the state as he explained is required for holding down the oppressed you needed that under feudalism because society and civilization as he put it was not yet mature enough he compared it to Childhood that the child needs like a parent or a teacher to instruct him the feudal state for him was like that but now in what he called industrial society you never use the word socialism industrial society you would have a situation of statelessness and basically a technocracy of enlightened industrialists artists scientists and bankers interestingly who would basically plan the economy so we're talking about a planned economy but he doesn't talk about the abolition of private property he doesn't talk about socialism in other words this and he was writing this in about 1802 I mean then he wrote later so he's writing this in a in a time when industrialization in France hadn't yet begun so he's viewing industrialization from the outside and basically rationalizing capitalism as it's coming into being in a kind of a utopian form so really this ideal society that s Simon is talking about is industrial capitalism but he thinks it's going to solve all the contradictions of capitalism his followers later on after his death I mean they split some went off in a because he he started veloping very mystical ideas about the new Christianity he also started to embrace the cause of the proletariat he said that the purpose of all this all of his ideas is to uh improve as quickly as possible the condition of the proletariat however he he explicitly rejected Revolution it was never about workers power he said I'm addressing this to you the industrialists the capitalist the bankers because you need to govern Society in order to help the proletarian so this is entirely reformist and many French liberals were directly influenced by some on his ideas contain the embryo of small state liberalism he said but not not of the that variety because he says he said you can have a small state by cutting the state bureaucracy cutting the Army to nothing and using the money to help the poor the reason that his ideas are now known as socialism is superficially because one section one section of his followers went off on a search for the female Messiah which he predict like a dune style Crusade which didn't go anywhere another set of his followers took over a liberal paper called the globe and transformed it into a simonian socialist paper and the first person at least that I'm aware of to use the word socialist is um in French at least is Paul Laro who was the editor of the globe they rejected co co competition capitalist competition and they said basically we need to have a scientifically planned economy for the benefit of the proletariat but without Revolution without workers power but so that the scientific element here is the recognition that industry lays the basis for the abolition of the state and oppression and and equality and so on not just let's just just erase everything or level everything and Marx was more keen on that idea than the utopian uh or republican Communists the utopian element is that this this is achieved under capitalism by the capitalists thinking it's a good idea to basically eliminate the source of their profit that was completely utopian and the reason it became socialist is because these ideas of industrial society were completely in contradiction with the real interests of the real capitalist class um but this had a major impact on on French socialist um another I'm running out of time already but another in very influential French socialist is charl forier now Char forier was a very talented writer and he basically dealt with all of the bitter contradictions and hypocrisies of capitalist Society one thing that he was particularly strong on was the question of the family he condemned marriage as an institution he put forward an idea of a society in which women were completely free of men you had no marriage you had Sim again similar to the ideas at least the conclusions put forward by Engles without the same level of scientific research that went into it again it was a bit of a a moral idea that he saw the oppression of women he was he's thought to be the first person to coin the term feminist at least in French he called himself a feminist and he said that the basis of progress is the the the conditions of the female sex um and that had a bit a majorly influential impacts on marks and engle's ideas you'll notice that in the Communist Manifesto they talk about the abolition of the family long before Angel's origin the family it came from fer they didn't just Su it out their thumb again it was more scientific than the communist because they talked about stages in society again similar to San Simon feudalism was a necessary stage capitalism what puer called civilization is a necessary stage but inevitably there must be a stage beyond that that stage was um socialism and but the way that porier said that we were going to get there was by people setting up what he call Fallon stes and living in faanes of about 1,600 people in other communes basically it wasn't an agricultural commune it was a b building like an apartment block where everyone would C he he had very interesting I don't have time to go into it but he was he was an early Anthropologist really he studied children and he studied how their their play emulates labor you can imagine what education was like in France in the 1820s he was well ahead of his time and he he also um talked about how actually human beings he said this idea of people being idle and lazy an argument that you must have encountered when you're talking about socialism he dismisses it based on his study of society says all human beings are constantly working labor is actually a source of pleasure and development and so the purpose of society and socialism is to give people the variety of Labor to develop themselves again you'll be familiar with all these ideas because these really this is what marks and Engles are talking about when they talk about socialism however his means of getting there was completely utopian and again like the cab icarians lots of fites went over to the United States often founded colonies on Indian land fought off the Indians to to establish their socialist colony and then of course they were just absorbed into American capitalism but all of these ideas had a major impact but there's something missing there's something might have already picked up on that the role of the working class is either completely ignored and absent or the working class the proletar is treated as an impoverished Mass to be elevated by the enlightened now that reflects the times the the organized working class and a political working class movement was only just beginning to come into being at this time in France but um but there was no this this was not a proletarian revolutionary Trend at all even the Communists that talk about Insurrection it was a bit ambiguous as to who was to carry out the Insurrection really it could be a handful of just committed uh you know revolutionaries it wasn't the emancipation of the working class by itself and this was I would say Marxist contribution um and it's it's interesting that this I've mentioned this explosion of socialist ideas in France at the time the reason for that bear in mind that in the 20s the Socialists were getting nowhere it was the rise of the working class it's thanks to the working CL this also I don't have time to go into it but it shows the relationship between middle class intellectuals de develop theories and the class movement there's a dialectical relationship between these forces not because it's not that people like forier are required to give workers ideas the workers develop conscious in the course of struggle and then took slogans ideas from these intellectuals to give form to their demands a perfect um factual true example is the main demands of the workers movement in the revolution of 1848 were the organization of Labor and the right to work both of these expressions are from foer and then were popularized by the the writer Louis Blanc but Louis Blanc didn't really add very much um to these um also workers in Leon who launched an Insurrection basically took over the city it's almost like a precursor to the Paris commune more shortlived in 1834 and 1831 they wrote wrote on their Banner for the first time addressing the workers that was the first time the French working class had lifted a flag calling for the workers to struggle for their own interests the person who coined the term working class in France was s Simon but for for S simont the working class included the capitalists bankers and so on as well as the actual workers because he was opposing the working class or the industrial class to the idlers of the church and the the noble um you know the the feudal no nobility so You' seeing that the working class is basically taking these more abstract utopian ideas and actually expressing it in its own class interest and marks it's interesting that marks The Outsider from the more backward country where the workers movement didn't really exist at this time he sees what the french socialist didn't see another thing that helped marks is philosophy actually marks at this time also had encountered the ideas of lud viic fback who had an immense impact on Mark Marx when he published the the um the Fran Y in I think February 1844 when he after he arrived in France he wrote to ludic poyak first of all saying first let me express my love for you and then he said your philosop you have provided the philosophical basis for communism why what what was this philosophical basis what foak said is that religion does not determine the course of history religion does not create man man creates religion what all religion is is the alienated expression of man because we are unable to express our Essence this is the abstract way that foak put it we're not able to be ourselves effectively because of the constraints of the world and of society we therefore create an abstract perfect being that's what Christ is basically Christ is us anthropomorphizing our own alienated Essence that had a huge impact not just on marks but whole generation basically of of German intellectuals and philosophers but Marx went a little bit further he still thought he considered himself a Foy Bakin at this point but he' actually he'd already begun to go a bit further than foyb back because he said that we have to begin with man man creates religion therefore we have to Intrust ourselves with man and study man foak said that but he said man is a totality of social relations fback didn't say that fak talked about man in the abstracts it was still unclear whether he meant individual Society Marx already took another step in the direction of materialism fback was a materialist and he rejected the existence of a deity he studied the laws of the natural world but when it came to history his his kind of alternative was just that we need to find a a humanist religion that basically celebrates and worships real human beings and then we'll be all right um he kind of rejected historical materialism or rather the potential for that because it didn't exist marks on the other hand already he he raises the problem without solving he says we need to study social relations he hasn't yet embarked on a study of those social relations so he's basically a Foy bachian communist if you like at this time apparently foat was very pleased Engles wrote to Robert Owens an article for Rob Robert Owens part paper declaring that the most eminent Genius of our time ludvic fback has embraced communism and this is the most important development so this is this is the state of their ideas at this time moving forwards but under the guise of another person's philosophy um and let's see where we are it's at this point that um Marx encounters a young man by the name of Frederick Engles there's a whole other lead off in the life of development of FR Frederick Engles I'm not going to have time to go into detail but what I can tell you is Frederick Engles have been working in his father's Factory in Salford by Manchester in England there he had encountered Eng political economy was fluent English but also he'd encountered the working class and the class struggle as it was developing in England at this time he arrived in England in 1842 that's the same time as the plug plot a revolutionary general strike that gripped all of the mill districts in Lancashire and I think also West Yorkshire a revolutionary general strike of the working class raising political demands that's the charter as in votes for workers and other Democratic demands but also social demands the point of this was for the workers really to transform Society Engel saw that and heard accounts of it from chartists firsthand uh and so he was greatly influenced this is when it was on the basis of this he wrote his work the conditions of the working class in England Marx had already come to the conclusion from Foy back and from his encount marks actually encountered workers in Paris and discussed with workers as well as encountering these French socialist ideas so before he um he had briefly met Engles in 1842 but before his kind of history-making meeting with Engles in August 1844 Marx had already drawn the conclusion that the working class was going to liberate and emancipate the whole of mankind the basis you know remember he said there was no theoretical reality for communism Marx found the theoretical reality of Communism in the working class and in the proletaria the reason why he he explained philosophically was that the reason the proletar is the base of Communism is because they have the private property has already been abolished for the work for the for the working class for the proletariat he said what is required is a class that is already outside of civil society that has no property and therefore its Liberation will be the of all classes so this is a combination of his his limited experience of the workingclass movement that was beginning to rise in France at this time his philosophical understanding of foak and his interpretation of the other French socialists he meets Engles in August 1844 they realize after several days of late night discussions they are absolutely unanimous on the fundamental points and Engles has quite an important influence on marks because Engles comes to Marks with all these stories about the chartis movement and the real working classes that was developed in England they then decided to settle with their former friends the young heans that's what the holy family or the great title the critique of critical criticism is all about I can't go into detail about this but the main point that I want to draw out is this idea that they attacked idealism effectively they say that ideas on their own can do nothing they also attacked the paity and the the contempt that the young hegelians had for the masses the masses were just kind of a a stupid mob to be directed by the idea Marx explains that um that the M that he says ideas cannot carry out anything at all and he emphasizes it's the struggle of the masses and in particular the workers that are the engine of pro progress not the ideas but Revolution and the struggle of the masses and he actually says the reason we can be sure that he actually discussed with workers is because in the Holy Family he says people must know the studiousness the craving for knowledge the moral energy and the unceasing urge for development of the French and English working uh workers to be able to form an idea of the human nobility of this movement the next step for Marx in marks and engle's journey is that first Marx is kicked out of Paris again under pressure from the Prussian government um the French government of gizo who gets an honorable mention in The Communist Manifesto um it expels him from the country and marks end ends up in Brussels but he and Engles actually take a trip to England Engles introduces himself to chartists uh and also acquires works of English political economy that he had already started reading and writing about the deut Fran Fran yoka apologies actually published an article by Frederick Engles on um political economy so this is what having already identified the problem of well if we're going to understand man we need to understand social relations Marx dives into it this is where his economic and philosophical manuscripts comes from he starts to understand social relations by understanding political economy he writes later in 1859 that it's around this time that he understood that the anatomy of civil society is to F be found in the political e in political economy and the conclusions he comes to is to give a very short version of events historical materialism this is where historical materialism is born and this is where we start to see the emergence of what we would call a mature Marxist communism a scientific theory of Communism first he settles accounts with foak they had been enamored with foak they had been Foy bachans but um to clarify his own thoughts Marx writes his thesis on foak I don't have time to go into this the most famous quote from that is philosophers have only interpreted the world hither to the point is to change it what he's the point he's making there is that actually understanding of reality can only be made through trying to change it the recognition of alienation can only be solved by a radical revolution to transform conditions um but one thing that I want to emphasize from the uh thesis on foak is that he says here foak resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man so that's a step forward but the essence of man is no abstraction inherit in each single individual in its reality is The Ensemble of social relations um and this sets the stage for the German ideology a work that was never published never finished but basically is the first work of developed historical materialism in it um they settle accounts not only with foak but with other well-known now completely unknown German socialists of the time like Carl grun um in which they put forward a a scientific view not only of society but of Communism I'm just going to give you a couple of examples for for lack of time one quote from the German ideology is the social structure and the state on continual evolving out of the life process of definite individuals of but of individuals not as they may appear in their own or other people's imagination but as they really are I.E as they operate and produce materially and hence as they work under definite material limits presuppositions and conditions independent of their will that is really the same idea that is expressed later on as relations of production independence of their will we're talking about the lawful development in the German ideology they also talk about the development of manufacturing of in industry the history of the economy forming different stages in society um determining the evolution of private property so it's not just that Marx is announcing oh we have to have a materialist understanding another thing I want to emphasize is Marx's materialism was always one of Empirical research and concreteness combined with practice with this emphasis on revolutionary practice the reason Marx hadn't identified himself as a materialist up to that point is because he said materialism was passive and contemplative that basically saw the world as yes material objects but kind of material objects without their own internal life and he said that the life and the movement was given by idealism by things like idealist dialectics in bringing those things together we get what we call dialectical materialism but we also get the most revolutionary philosophy ever created and also a scientific theory of Communism what is this scientific theory of Communism he explains communism is for us they explain marks and Engles together is not a state of affairs which is to be established an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself self we call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things the conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence what are the premises the premises are industry and the development of production that Sanson had already hinted at and the development of a propertyless proletariat the modern working class they explain that it has to have rendered the great mass of humanity propertyless for con communism to succeed and the development of um the productive forces have to have unified the world economy and produce actually the productive basis for abundant he said otherwise one communism will just be a local event like the colonies I talked about and it will just be reabsorbed into the World Market which is precisely what happened or all the old will return excuse my language that is the word that he uses so I feel excused by by just repeating what he said which again we can see in I don't have times to go into why I'm saying this but in history we can see that without a high level of development forces taking up the best that capitalism has to offer and developing in order to produce abundance that all of the institutions of State oppression and ultimately classes will return basically everything we identify with the Marxist theory of Communism is contained perhaps to in a slightly embryonic form in the German ideology but as I already mentioned this was not published um and one thing I want to touch on is I've talked quite a lot about practice but what what did Engle marks and Engles do in practice having clarifi and it's interesting first they clarified their understanding they established a theoretical scientific basis for what they wanted to do rather than just doing things for the sake of it they then decide well we have to actually carry this into practice what did that mean what it meant first of all was the establishment of what they called the Communist corresponding correspondence committee the purpose of that was to reach out to already existing socialists and Communists like Pier Joseph prudon um and the English chartists in other words people that didn't share their ideas but generally shared their goals in order to First establish relations share information they were always in internationalists I think they were helped in this fact by the the fact that Marx was being chased from country to Country uh internationalist by necessity if you like um accident expressing necessity you might say um to establish connections with this movement to inform themselves get rid of this narrowness and chauvinism which poisoned all of the like the German socialists thought that their philosophy was best so they didn't bother with any of other other aspects they were ignorant of other things uh the French thought that the poit their politics and their socialism meant that they didn't need to study German philosophy they were trying to overcome all this but also marks in a letter to prudon on the 6th of May 1846 he says in the moment of it makes sense it will help for us all to be able to act in unison what this idea contains is the idea of international Revolution if we succeed in taking power in say France we need to be able to export the Revolution and learn the lessons already they're beginning to develop the embryo this embryo was I guess killed before it could come to fruition but at the embryo of the first International which applied the same principle but they also Engles actually went to workers communities these are German Workers German Artisans would do what was called a vava where they would travel to different places apply their trade Engles and they had educational societies this was a period of developing class Consciousness and class struggle in the 1840s they called it the hungry 40s and you had CL educational societies of hundreds of members coming to meetings of hundreds of people to debate economics philosophy science and socialism Engles was going along to these German speaking meetings and debating with followers of prudon KL gr who was basically putting forward the same projects as prudon I'm going to come up to prudon in a moment um to win them over the Revolutionary communism that he marks was putting forward and there are some interest to my opinion fascinating and quite amusing letters from Engles where he writes reports now anyone who's written who's done an intervention in a meeting to tried to win people over and then there's a written report to uh you know whatever their Branch or the the national Center will sympathize with engel's writing here he describes that he says oh these people were talking absolute rubbish I gave him the lashing with my tongue and then we had a vote at the end and I won 13 to3 and if we can organize openly I'll organize 100 of these chaps it's the optimism really leaps off the page but what we can see is marks and Engles weren't just writing books they were actually getting involved in the movement but they were always emphasizing not just doing things for the sake of it but first we have to have Clarity and we have to organize a movement on the correct basis and convince people on the strength of their ideas actually their ideas are all they had and this was recognized explicitly Engles wrote to Marks and said the theoretical side he said we must democr demonstrate our theoretical superiority over all of the trends especially the most popular and he said to Marx you need to write more because he saw Marx as you know the the pioneering genius in all this and he he said all we have is the theoretical side but that is the most important and it proved to be the most important and so in in doing this the first published work of historical materialism is the poverty of philosophy Marx's critique of prudon thought now I don't really have time to go into everything that marks had to say about prudon ISM but prudon was heavily influenced by S Simon he was also part of this trend that Drew the conclusion from the French Revolution that you should not have revolutions that it gets us nowhere and therefore what he put forward was that if you render the basis of the state obsolete it will just disappear of its own accord if you mess about trying to struggle and take the state you become part of the problem um his theory of the state and he said what we need instead is anarchy he he he is the first Anarchist the way they were going to and he said that the science ien ific basis for all this was in political economy like Marx he was influenced by dialectics I think it was Marx that actually first introduced him to dialectics um I can't remember what Mark said it was much to his detriment I introduced into dialectics he said and he he studied English political economy he was considered in France an expert on political economy Mark said that he has The Misfortune of been misunderstood in Germany he's considered a bad philosopher and a good Economist in France he's considered a good philosopher and a bad Economist uh we have to disabuse them of this illusion uh and he basically said that use value and exchange value will always exist exchange value that is the proportions in which Commodities are exchanged is based on scarcity and therefore because you will never have infinite products you always have some kind of scarcity use value is is the usefulness of the People Want it therefore because you're always going to have this contradiction between use value and exchange value the task of societ and the value of a commodity is determined by Free Will what he means by this is the seller wants to sell it for certain amount the buyer wants to sell it for a certain amount they come to an agreement this is a very common idea in contract law in French contract law they still teach this idea it's the idea of the wills the volunte and he said this is inevitable and he extrapolates from this the sense that therefore socialist relations are determined by Free Will and that Society can freely choose to organize things a different way but there's an interesting idea here that on the one hand these laws are inevitable you cannot escape the laws of commodity production and exchange but you can willfully build a he didn't call it socialist but an anarchist Society on this basis if that's confusing that's because it's confused that basically his mistake is to render Eternal the laws of Bourgeois production he says you have to have Commodities in exchange because of the division of labor but then he describes a Bourgeois division of labor in which individuals have to produce Commodities to survive that did not exist 10,000 years ago there was a social division of labor but the division of labor of manufacturing or commodity prod producers did not exist so he's historically wrong basically and what's interesting about Marx's rebuttal of this is he doesn't just say you're a reformist you're wrong he doesn't even just say say you've just rendered Eternal the laws of boura production which he does say he then goes to prove it by giving a whole history of bouro production uh much of what we see in the Communist Manifesto in that incredible history changing first part of the Communist Manifesto is a more concise poetic version of what he explains to prudon in other again the Marxist method is you identify the incorrectness of an idea the falsity of an idea you don't just say that's wrong you then explain why it's wrong where that ideas come from and give the whole course of historical development in order to establish the the veracity of your point and in terms of pran's conclusions he drew the conclusion the way that we can willfully create a society in which there's no need for a state and we don't have to struggle against a state which is s Simon's idea is unlike s Simon which was the the industrialists the bankers and the artists improve the conditions of the poor prudon based himself more on the working class to his credit that's because he had encountered the the workers of Leon and en encountered their Mutual societies which were similar to co-ops so he said that workers should save up they should establish own factories on a Cooperative basis they should exchange their products only on the basis of the cost of production the cost of materials and then a small uplift for labor cost because he said that that he basically said that Pro PR profit is what comes on top of that he didn't have the same theory of value of marks which sadly I don't have time to go into but basically if workers produce in cooperatives and then exchange their products at only the cost of production then you will eliminate all prop property Engles pointed out that that's already been tried in England and failed catastrophically because you're producing on a capitalist basis but then deliberately not making any profit thus going out of business and he was putting this forward as a Panacea that if only the workers all did this then what they do is they'd be so successful they'd buy out all the capitalists the capitalists in the state would just kind of watch this go by I suppose they buy out all the capitalists and then everything would be planned on a Cooperative basis there'd be no State and that was kind of the you know Anarchist future for mankind and as you can probably imagine that was attractive to people you're a worker especially you you can't imagine the trauma of having gone through the revolutionary period as well and people have lived through that and if someone's saying we don't have to have a repetition of all of that just set up a Cooperative do your work treat people fairly and we'll be all right that you can understand why that was attractive and so that was the M that is why Martin eel felt they had to publish a devastating critique of this because they were arguing people in Paris in particular against this these ideas the result of course with the um the poverty of philosophy now what did Mark say in contrast to this reformism U by the way prudon was skeptical of trade unions because he said if you raise wages then you'll just raise prices which was a very common idea in bouro political economy at this time incident you might have been confused I always found this interesting that in the Communist Manifesto Marx even though he says that prudon is a petty bouro thinker he doesn't include him in the section on Petty bouris socialism you might remember he includes him in the section on Bourgeois socialism even though prudon was not a bouro the reason he said he was a Bourgeois socialist is because prudon wanted a capitalism without a proletariat he wanted everyone to produce Commodities on a capitalist basis but somehow have none of the inequality and oppression of capitalism so what was what was Marx's alternative to this his alternative was s nothing other than the real development of the real working class in England in particular again he just given the history of capitalism he then gave the history of the working-class movement in chart charters in which he'd seen to an extent firsthand um he talks about how the growth of trade unionism led to the creation of a national political party the national Charter organization which fought for Democratic rights and social transformation at the same time he said that will lead directly to a Civil War the reason he put that is because You' had revolutionary General strikes you had the Newport Insurrection you had the potential for a fullscale war between the classes in England in the 30s and 40s at times so these that Bas based on the real development that he had looked at he drew the conclusion that this is the future for the class struggle everywhere that develops capitalism that's what's coming in France by the way that is exactly what happened in France in 1848 but that's another story um and therefore he counterposed this idea of workers just avoiding the class struggle by setting up businesses on their own account the real class struggle and Revolution and he said we shouldn't reject the political revolution every political revolution is a social Revolution and he says that he concludes the task of social science until the day when we've abolished capitalism class Society the task of social science will always be combat or death um taking a quote from the French novelist George Shand um so he they've announced their program and they've started trying to spread it but this I want to come back to this idea of theoretical superiority sounds rather smug and arrogant doesn't it but we we see in practice what that actually meant because Mar and Engles were theoreticians without an organization the correspondence committee was just that it was sending letters and trying to establish links but through their works and their theoretical superiority they ended up taking over a whole revolutionary organization the league of the just the league of the just was uh basically a blist organization Blan himself was a republican communist like graas babou but a more modern variety he based himself more on the proletariat his organization the Society of the seasons which was a secret organ it had to be secret in those days to be fair but it was a secret organization that tried to launch an Insurrection in 1839 about 500 armed men took over the hotel devil the Town Hall in Paris and tried to B what they thought was the masses just like Revolutions in the past the masses would see that think great let's go and and take over the city they didn't they ignored them because that's not unfortunately how revolutions work and so they were isolated and they were arrested and had to flee the league of the just was a German organization which participated in that they were part of the Armed men that fought alongside Blan because you had quite a lot of German Workers in Paris at that time when they went off into exile to places like England they retained their communist beliefs tinged with a certain amount of apocalyptic Christianity vilhelm vling was probably their most outstanding leader he was a work he he grew up in a very poor background single mother who was a servant he educated himself and he became a revolutionary leader he ex he put forward the idea of a violent Insurrection a war basically carried out by the proletar in order to establish communism it's very very similar really to blism but he had a Messianic Christian quality as well which isn't surprising considering the tradition in Germany compared to the Republican tradition in France but I won't go into further depth what happens is a pivotal turning point in this is in 1846 if I remember right where Ving wants to persuade marks and Engles and the correspondence committee to support an invasion of Prussia from outside basically these German Journeymen these workers were to arm themselves cross over into the border and establish communism by a foreign Invasion marks Les were not convinced they have a meeting in London this is the a famous meeting where the the basically a decisive split occurred even though marks and Engles weren't even members of the league of the just Marx actually wrote for the league of the just Pacer forwards in Paris they were close to them but they never joined precisely because of this utopian Christian element anyway in the course of this discussion Engles is explaining why they don't agree with this Marx interrupts him stands up and just says explain the theoretical basis for what you're doing and what is and what will be the result he's sick and tired of hurrying action action we need action we need communism Ving I don't know I haven't been shown the actual answer he gave apparently his answer was evasive he didn't he didn't give a clear answer and and dismissive of constant theorizing and it's at that point the Marx slammed his fist on the table and said ignorance never helped anyone again this this this intellectual rigor and this rejection of activism for activism sake to to do things with a purpose and a clear theoretical basis is very apparent that sent shock waves through the league of the just um uh there was a big split emerging where you had had an anti-al anti-intellectual Trend not just vling who was sick and tired of all this theorizing and then another Trend who thought that this was going all a bit too far um KL shapper and Joseph Maul were two of the leaders of the league of the just who were influenced by Marx's position and eventually Maul actually traveled to Brussels and spoke to Engles and Marx and said we want you to come and take over the Le leue of the just we have become completely convinced of your ideas and we want you to attend a congress in 1847 in which you can EXP explain these ideas and they can become the program of the league these congresses took place in June and November December 1847 the league of the just was changed to the Communist League their slogan of all men of Brothers was transformed to working men of all Nations countries unite that you'll be familiar with and they commissioned marks to write a Manifesto the result as you all know is the Communist Manifesto the greatest work of political literature ever written arguably one of the greatest works of literature full stop ever written I don't have time to go into the content but to be fair I think I already have because really all of Marx's life up until this point and all of the ideas I've just discussed are there clear in black and white in the Communist Manifesto his history of commun of capitalism in the proletariat he'd already developed in order to write Poverty of philosophy the second SE section on arguments against communism and the demands of the communists come from the utopian socialist but also the demands of the chartists this idea of winning the Democratic Revolution by force a workers government expropriating private property they'd absorbed it all from the French socialist and from the English real workers movement the third section criticizing all the different Trends I'm sure that's that's obvious is all the different particularly German but other utopian trends that they' encountered on their way and PR on of course to differentiate themselves theoretically from the rest and in the fourth section about the real existing movements it was their revolutionary strategy their perspective for what the party is actually supposed to do in the coming period and what they said the party was supposed to do was arm and rally revolutionaries particularly German revolutionaries for the inevitable coming Revolution that was going to take place in Germany that Revolution was going to be a Democratic Revolution you still didn't have National unification you still had absolutism in the immediate tasks but the task of the Communist was in the course of this revolution even if they're fighting side by side with the bourjois don't have time to go into what really happened is to form the working class into a class capable of fighting for and winning power now the 1848 Revol and that this really is where the Story begins to be honest this really is where the story of Communism begins I don't have time to go into it but communism as we know it Marxist commun ISM the scientific revolutionary communism of Marx and Engles is born at this point clearly announced to the world now the 1848 revolution proved to be an extremely harsh testing ground for all political Tendencies including the Communist League which didn't survive it the the party that they were trying to arm and prepare for the revolution had literally a day between the publication of the Communist Manifesto in Germany and the outbreak of revolution in France in 1848 by the time it was translated in German I'm skeptical as to the number of communist League members who'd even read it by the time they went into Germany the organization just dissolved like a sugar Lum but what we have is the lessons drawn from that document of course it was on the base of those ideas that marks would go on to found the the first International to interpret the events of 1848 the Paris commune so it wasn't it wasn't all a lost cause but we have the benefit unlike Mark like Marx we are standing on the threshold of a revolutionary wave far surpassing 1848 in both scope and depth where unlike Marx the pro unlike in 1848 the prospect for the siege of power and The Total Transformation of Society on a world scale is directly before us the material basis required for communism has been prepared it's been prepared many times over actually and we stand at the at the beginning of this immense revolutionary process so it's incumbent on us to understand and grasp to dive into these ideas in the way marks did with his characteristic conscientiousness in order to arm ourselves and prepare for the harsh testing ground there is to come and on that I'll finish thank [Applause] you [Applause] than

Channel: Revolutionary Communist Party

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Length: 53min 36sec (3216 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024