Karl Marx, one of the greatest revolutionary thinkers and champion of the working class, was born on 5th May, 1818. His life mission was to contribute to the overthrow of capitalism and to the liberation of the working class and all of society from all forms of exploitation.
Marx was before all else a revolutionary. He was driven by the recognition of the need for the revolutionary transformation of society. In his own words, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Marx carried out his work at a time when the growth of the industrial bourgeoisie in the 19th century was accompanied by the growth of the proletariat, a class of persons who owned no means of production and had nothing to sell except their own labour power. It was a time when working class organisations were emerging in several countries. The Communist League was established as an international organisation of the proletariat.
The theoretical work of Marx and his comrade-in-arms, Frederick Engels, developed in close connection with the struggle of the proletariat. Marx and Engels drafted the Rules of the Communist League, which was adopted at its Second Congress in December 1847.
Together, they published the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848. The Communist Manifesto laid down the task of the communists – namely, to provide the working class with the consciousness and organisation required to become the ruling class and carry out the transformation in ownership of the means of production, from private ownership to social ownership. It drew the powerful conclusion that the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are inevitable. It ended with the proclamation:
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
The Communist Manifesto has remained the most influential political document in the world since that time until today.
Marx was a leading personality in the First International Workingmen’s Association. He acted on his fierce conviction of the revolutionary role of the world proletariat. Marxism – the doctrine elaborated by Marx, emerged in the midst of the class struggle, as the ideological weapon of the proletariat to achieve its aim of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie, so as to liberate itself and all of society from exploitation and class divisions. It is not some idea which magically took shape in an individual’s brain.
In the words of Comrade Lenin, Marxism “is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.”
Philosophy
The bourgeois democratic revolution which took place at the end of the 18th century in France gave rise to the philosophy of materialism, rebelling against every kind of superstition and medieval thought. Marx and Engels defended and fully developed materialist philosophy in opposition to all forms of idealism – the view that this material world is the product of a grand idea, a supernatural force. They gave birth to the philosophical outlook and method of dialectical materialism.
Dialectics holds that internal contradictions are inherent in all things and phenomena. They all have their negative and positive sides, a past and a future, something dying away and something coming into being. The struggle between these opposites, between the old and the new, between that which is dying away and that which is being born, between that which is disappearing and that which is developing, constitutes the internal content of the process of development. The dialectical method of understanding nature and society is to recognise that everything is constantly in a state of motion, driven by the interaction between opposing forces. Development takes place as a result of small quantitative changes building up to a qualitative leap.
Marx and Engels applied the principles of dialectical materialism to the history of human society and elaborated the general law of motion of class society. The historical materialist analysis of the evolution of society through revolutions, from its primitive classless stage through various forms and stages of class society to its current stage of capitalism, was presented in the Communist Manifesto. Based on this analysis, the Manifesto derived the conclusion that capitalism is also a transient system which is bound to go out of being and be replaced by a superior system of communism, whose initial phase is socialism.
Political Economy
Scientific thinkers before Marx had discovered the law of value which governs the exchange of commodities in a capitalist economy. They had discovered that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human labour contained in it. However, they could not figure out the source of capitalist profit. If, on average, commodities of equal value are exchanged in the market, how is it that one class of persons is able to keep on pocketing profits and expanding their private wealth? Nobody could provide a clear answer to this question, until Karl Marx put forward his theory of surplus value.
Marx identified the source of capitalist profits in the exploitation of wage labour. Profit, interest and rent incomes are nothing but shares of the surplus value extracted by capitalist owners from the workers they employ. A wage-worker is in effect producing his own wages in the first few hours of work every day; and for the remaining hours he or she is producing surplus value for the capitalist owners.
In 19th century Europe, capitalism went through repeated cycles of boom and bust, resulting in a crisis of over-production about once every decade. The scholars of political economy could not explain why the system of production repeatedly fell into crisis. Marx identified the source of such repeated crises in the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, between the social character of production and the private character of ownership of the means of production. In their competitive drive to reap maximum profits, the capitalists as a class squeeze the purchasing power of the working class and other exploited strata, which leads to a shortage of demand in the market for the commodities on sale. This is the reason for repeated crises of “over-production” in all capitalist societies, that is, the growth of production being interrupted due to the lack of purchasing power in the hands of the population.
Marx’s discoveries led to the conclusion that for society to advance to its next higher stage, without class division and without recurring crises, it is necessary to resolve the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. This means to convert the means of social production from private into social property. That will make it possible for production to be geared towards fulfilling the needs of society instead of being geared to fulfil capitalist greed.
Scientific Socialism
The bourgeois democratic revolutions in Europe had overthrown the old feudal order but the toiling majority of people remained exploited and oppressed under the new social order of capitalism. The unfulfilled aspirations of the working people gave rise to the idea and vision of socialism, as a superior system of society that would be free of the ills of capitalism. However, the early ideas of socialism were utopian. The utopian socialists criticised capitalist society but they could not indicate which social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.
Marxism gave socialism its scientific foundation. It identified the proletariat, the class which owns no property except its labour power, as the class which alone has the interest and the capacity to carry through to completion the revolutionary transformation from capitalism to communism.
Scholars before Marx had discovered that society has developed from one stage to another through the struggle between classes with conflicting interests. Marx developed this theory to its logical conclusion — namely, that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the prelude to the end of class divisions and the emergence of classless communist society.
Conclusion
All the developments that have taken place in the world in the past more than 175 years confirm the scientific validity of Marxism. The intense contradictions that we see today in the economies of every capitalist country clearly shows that it is a decaying system. It is incapable of providing solutions to the growing poverty, unemployment and the widening gap between the minority of very rich at one pole and the vast exploited majority at the other pole.
The solution remains that which Karl Marx advocated – namely, the proletarian revolution that would dig the grave of capitalism and open the path to socialism and to classless communist society.