Part 3 (1/2)
”Feudalism, too, had its proletariat--the villeinage--which contains all the germs of the middle cla.s.s. Feudal production, too, had two contradictory elements which are likewise characterised as the 'good'
and 'bad' sides of feudalism without regard to the fact that it is always the 'bad' side which triumphs ultimately over the 'good' side.
It is the bad side which calls into being the movement which makes history, in that it brings the struggle to a head. If, at the time of the supremacy of feudalism, the economists, in their enthusiasm for knightly virtues, for the beautiful harmony between rights and duties, for the patriarchal life of the towns, for the flouris.h.i.+ng home industries in the country, for the development of industry organised in corporations, companies and guilds, in a word, for everything which forms the finer side of feudalism, had set themselves the problem of eliminating everything which could throw a shadow on this picture--serfdom, privileges, anarchy--where would it all have ended?
They would have destroyed every element which called forth strife, they would have nipped in the bud the development of the middle cla.s.s.
They would have set themselves the absurd problem of blotting out history.
”When the middle cla.s.s had come to the top, neither the good nor the bad side of feudalism come into question. The productive forces, which had been developed under feudalism through its agency, fell to its control. All old economic forms, the legal relations between private individuals, which corresponded to them, the political order, which was the official expression of the old society, were shattered.”
”Those Socialists and social revolutionaries who regard the hards.h.i.+ps and struggles of society as an absolute evil and plan the construction of a society comprised solely of good elements, have not grasped the meaning of the history of mankind. They think abstractly.
They misjudge both the past and the present.
”Hence to form a correct judgment of production under feudalism one must consider it a method of production based upon contradiction. One must show how wealth was produced within this contradiction, how productive power developed contemporaneously with the antagonism of cla.s.ses, how one of these cla.s.ses, the bad side, the social evil, constantly increased until the material conditions for its liberation were fully ripe.
”Does that not show clearly enough that the means of production, the conditions under which productive power is developed, are anything but eternal laws, that they rather correspond to a definite stage in the evolution of mankind and of its productive power, and that a variation in the productive power of mankind necessarily brings about a variation in its conditions of production?
”The middle cla.s.s begins with a proletariat, which in its turn is itself a remnant of the feudal proletariat. In the course of its historical development the middle cla.s.s necessarily develops its contradictory character, which on its first appearance is more or less veiled, existing only in a latent form. In proportion as the middle cla.s.s develops, there develops in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat; and a struggle arises between the proletarian cla.s.s and the middle cla.s.s, a struggle which, before being felt, observed, estimated, understood, acknowledged, and finally openly proclaimed on both sides, issues in the meanwhile only in partial and transitory conflicts and acts of destruction.”
In a special chapter Marx shows the necessity and the historical significance of the Trade Unions, which in spite of all the apprehensions and warnings of Utopians and Economists the workers have gone on establis.h.i.+ng and perfecting, in order to be able to withstand the domination of capital. That means the gathering together of the divided interests and activities of the workers in a vast cla.s.s movement, standing in opposition to the middle cla.s.s; which, however, does not exclude the possibility of conflicting interests within the cla.s.ses themselves, though these shall be put aside as soon as cla.s.s is brought against cla.s.s:
”From day to day it becomes clearer then that the conditions of production, among which the middle cla.s.s moves, have not a simple, uniform character but one which involves conflicting elements; that the same conditions which produce wealth produce also poverty; that the same conditions which tend to the development of productive power develop also the power of repression; that these conditions only create bourgeois wealth, i.e., the wealth of the middle cla.s.s, at the cost of the continued destruction of the wealth of individual members of this cla.s.s and the creation of an ever-increasing proletariat.”--(”Poverty of Philosophy,” 1885, pp. 116-118, 177 sq.)
This ant.i.thetical character of capitalist society has for its effect that the political economists, who are the philosophers of the existing order, lose their bearings, while the Socialists, who are the philosophers of the proletariat, look round for means to relieve the distress. They condemn cla.s.s struggles,[4] build Utopias and plan schemes of salvation, whereas the only real solution, because it is the only one which arises from the actual conditions, must be to further the organisation of the oppressed cla.s.s and make it conscious of the objects of its struggles. For out of these struggles the new society will arise, and that, of course, can only happen when productive power has reached a high stage of development. Or as Marx himself proceeds:
”An oppressed cla.s.s is a vital condition of any society founded upon cla.s.s antagonism. The liberation of the oppressed cla.s.s necessarily includes, therefore, the creation of a new society. In order that the oppressed cla.s.s may be able to free itself, a stage must be reached in which the already acquired powers of production and the prevailing social inst.i.tutions can no longer exist side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive force is the revolutionary cla.s.s itself. The organisation of the revolutionary elements as a cla.s.s presupposes the existence in perfected form of all the productive forces that could in any way be developed in the bosom of the old society. Does this mean that after the collapse of the old order of society there will be a new cla.s.s domination culminating in a new political power? The condition of the emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s is the abolition of all cla.s.ses, as the condition of the emanc.i.p.ation of the third estate, of the middle cla.s.s, was the abolition of all the three estates. The working cla.s.s will, in the course of its evolution, replace the old middle-cla.s.s society by an a.s.sociation excluding cla.s.ses and their antagonism, and there will no longer be any real political power,[5] because it is just this political power which is the official expression of cla.s.s antagonism within the community.
”Meanwhile the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie is a struggle of cla.s.s against cla.s.s, a struggle which, when brought to its highest expression, means a complete revolution. And can one indeed be surprised that a society founded upon cla.s.s antagonism should, at its final dissolution, issue in brutal conflict and collision of man against man? Let it not be said that the social movement excludes the political. There never was a political movement which was not at the same time a social movement.
”Only in an order of things where there are no cla.s.ses and no cla.s.s antagonism will social evolution cease to be political revolution.
Until then the last word of social science on the eve of every general reconstruction of society must ever be: 'Fight or die; b.l.o.o.d.y war or annihilation. Thus are we confronted with the inexorable question.'--(George Sand).”
With this battle-cry ”The Poverty of Philosophy” comes to a close. It is the prologue to the ”Communist Manifesto,” which in itself is but a popular version of the positive doctrines developed in the controversy against Proudhon.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The Socialists of those times were the Owenites and the Fourierists, who condemned all cla.s.s struggles, Trade Unionist strikes, and Labour politics.
[5] Marx means the State.
III.
YEARS OF AGITATION AND VARYING FORTUNES.
I. THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT OF THE FORTIES.
Marx was a revolutionary not only in the sense that he was the representative of a new conception of society and the founder of a theory of a new economic order, but also in the popular sense of advocating the use of force, in which connection he looked to the first years of the French Revolution as a model. He had a keen ear for the revolutionary rumblings in the depths of the populace. The years during which the elements of his new conception of society were acc.u.mulating in his mind and shaping themselves into a system were involved in a revolutionary atmosphere. In 1842 England witnessed the first strike on a large scale, which threatened to extend into a general strike and bore a political revolutionary character. In 1843 and 1844 the idea of the impending revolution was widely spread in England. Insurrections broke out among the Silesian weavers in 1844.
In 1845 and 1846 Socialism spread rapidly on all sides in Germany, and Socialist periodicals appeared in the industrial centres. France swarmed with Socialist systems, Socialist novels and newspaper articles. The spectre of Communism was abroad in Europe. The convention of the United a.s.sembly by Frederick William IV. at the beginning of February, 1847, was looked upon as the harbinger of the German Revolution. The connection between these phenomena could not escape acute intellects. Hand in hand with the extension of industry and the rapid construction of railways and telegraphs came alternations of economic prosperity and crisis, poverty grew, and the workers fought with ever-increasing bitterness against the iron law of wages and against the scanty pay, which hardly allowed the proletariat to eke out a bare subsistence. The cry in England was: ”More factories, more poverty,” but at the same time: ”The greater the political rights of the ma.s.ses, the surer becomes emanc.i.p.ation.”
Whoever lived in England and France during these years and had dealings with Socialism could not help feeling that political and social revolutions were on the march.
Already in his first letter to Ruge, written from Holland in March, 1843, Marx deals with the coming revolution, and foresees, to the astonishment of Ruge, who refused to believe it, that the Government of Frederick William IV. was drifting towards a revolution. At that time Marx had hardly begun his studies in Socialism; and the further he advanced in these studies, elaborating his social dialectics and evolving the ideas of the cla.s.s struggle, the more inevitably was he driven to the conclusion that the proletarian revolution, the seizure of political power by the proletariat, was the indispensable preliminary to the triumph of Communism.