After four years, it had sold a thousand copies, and it was not translated into English until Marx had spectacularly bad handwriting; Engels was one of the few people outside the family who could decipher it. The unfinished Paris manuscripts, a holy text in the nineteen-sixties, did not appear in English until Marx seems to have regarded none of that material as publishable.
To the extent that those movements were reformist rather than revolutionary, they were not Marxist although Marx did, in later years, speculate about the possibility of a peaceful transition to communism. With the growth of the labor movement came excitement about socialist thought and, with that, an interest in Marx.
After , communism was no longer a utopian fantasy. Marx is a warning about what can happen when people defy their parents and get a Ph. Hegel was cautious about criticizing religion and the Prussian state; the Young Hegelians were not, and, just as Marx was being awarded his degree, in , there was an official crackdown. So Marx did what many unemployed Ph. There is a story, though Sperber considers it unsubstantiated, that once, in desperation, he applied for a job as a railway clerk and was turned down for bad handwriting.
In the eighteen-forties, Marx edited and contributed to political newspapers in Europe; from to , he wrote a column for the New York Daily Tribune , the paper with the largest circulation in the world at the time. When journalistic work dried up, he struggled.
He depended frequently on support from Engels and advances on his inheritance. Sperber contests this. Marx had less money to waste than historians have assumed, and he accepted poverty as the price of his politics. He wrote and published articles offensive to the authorities, and, in , he was kicked out of Cologne, where he was helping run a paper called Rheinische Zeitung.
He went to Paris, which had a large German community, and that is where he and Engels became friends. Engels, who was two years younger, had the same politics as Marx.
Engels hated the work, but he was good at it, as he was at most things. Engels eventually became a partner, and the income helped him keep Marx alive.
In , Marx was expelled from France. He moved to Brussels. Three years later, though, something happened that almost no one had foreseen: revolutions broke out across Europe, including in France, Italy, Germany, and the Austrian Empire. When unrest reached Brussels, he was suspected of arming insurgents and was evicted from Belgium, but he returned to Paris. Rioters there had broken into the Tuileries and set the French throne on fire.
He got the phrase from Engels. Bonaparte eventually declared himself Emperor and ruled until , when France lost a war with Prussia. The Paris Commune was a by-product of that war. So in Marx was forced into exile once again. He fled with his family to London.
He assumed that the stay would be temporary, but he lived there for the rest of his life. The impressive bronze bust you see on his tombstone today was placed there, in , by the Communist Party of Great Britain.
What was Marx like? The number of first-person reports is not large, but they tend to agree. He was, in some respects, a caricature of the German academic which he had once expected to become : an imperious know-it-all with untamed hair in a misbuttoned frock coat.
In professional matters, he was forbidding. He was a cogent speaker but had a lisp and was a poor orator; he knew it, and rarely addressed a crowd. He was ruthless in print, made enemies of many friends and former allies, and did not suffer fools—a large subset of his acquaintance, in his view. Still, he commanded respect. His hair was black; his eyes were black; his complexion was swarthy. In private, he was modest and gracious. When he was not sick—he had a bad liver, suffered from bronchitis, and grew fist-size boils, which Sperber thinks were caused by an autoimmune disorder but which may have been a symptom of his liver disease—he was playful and affectionate.
He loved Shakespeare, made up stories for his three daughters, and enjoyed cheap cigars and red wine. His wife and daughters adored him. He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, also from Trier, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-two. To be remembered was the wish, spoken or unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book….
For the many, there is a hardly concealed discontent. Nora Watson [an interviewee] may have said it most succinctly. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people. For Marx, a prime aim of socialism would be to eliminate the miseries of work and the way of life arising from capitalism. But, as is well known, he devised no blueprint for such a society. The future would be shaped in the process of revolution, influenced by historical circumstances and in response to the experience gained by the working classes as they engaged in the revolutionary transformation of state and society.
Nevertheless there were features that would be essential to the revolution by the exploited: the abolition of classes and private property in the means of production in favor of social control of production. This necessarily implied, in the Marxist framework, the dissolution of all forms of the division of labor that were created by and integral to the existence of private property and classes.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals under the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished, after labor has become not merely a means to live but has become itself the primary necessity of life, after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Critique of the Gotha Program. This problem has become clearer as a result of the experience of those countries that have undergone social revolutions. It is now evident that the persistence, after the revolution, of the division of labor between intellectuals and workers, between administrators and the masses, and between city and country leads to the perpetuation of conflicts of interest between sectors of society along with the spirit of competition and individualism.
No doubt Mao Tse-tung was deeply impressed by this experience, since he repeatedly emphasized the need to pay attention to the elimination of the major differences among the people if socialism is to progress. But what about the ultimate vision that Marx left to us?
Is it within the realm of reason to hold on to such an ideal? I would like, however, to point out that behind this vision lie two assumptions, one that is dealt with in the writings of Marx and Engels and another that to the best of my knowledge they ignored. A basic assumption of the realizability of the communist goal is that human nature is not constant for all time: that acquisitive drives, individualism, and competition are not biological givens.
The support for this proposition comes from a study of history and especially from investigations of anthropologists. A frequently met objection to the communist vision is the claim that people will work only if driven by an economic motive. Yet this notion is refuted by many of the primitive societies we know about, where non-economic work incentives predominate: social responsibility, tradition, desire for prestige, and pleasure in craftsmanship.
But involved here is a second assumption concerning the nature of the needs of the people—a subject to which Marx and Marxists have paid little heed. If the needs of the people are limitless, and especially if they generate a passion for consumption such as that which characterizes the advanced capitalist nations of the West, then it would seem that the prospects for achieving the higher stage of communism are very poor indeed.
Limitless expansion in search of an ever higher material standard of living on a world scale could only result in the replication of the worst features of class society. The drive for an incessant increase in production of an ever wider assortment of goods would entail, among other things, continuation of a rigid division of labor, concentration of manufacturing in large enterprises and huge cities. At the same time, equality in distribution would have to go by the board. What all this adds up to is that a necessary condition for a truly communist society is a total departure from the culture of capitalism and consumerism.
This would mean a wholly new approach to the design of cities and villages, transportation, location of industry, technology, and much more.
In a sense this book can be considered an answer to Edward Bellamy. In this part of his scheme, therefore, Mr. Bellamy worries himself unnecessarily in seeking with obvious failure some incentive to labor to replace the fear of starvation, which is at present our only one, whereas it cannot be too often repeated that the true incentive to happy and useful labor must be pleasure in the work itself. The Commonweal [January 22, ], as cited in A. He does not provide a complete prescription for all aspects of the new society, nor does he pretend that his is the only and necessary shape of the future.
Rather, it is an expression of a personal preference for the kind of world he would like to live in. Yet, in contrast to Bellamy, Morris displays a sense of history, an understanding that social transformations come about as the result of bitter class struggles, and an awareness of potential changes in human nature and social relations. What is of special interest in the present context is his emphasis on the satisfaction that can be derived from work.
But this can be realized only in an environment of a simplified way of life and a release from the pressures of artificially stimulated wants. Production itself is an active alienation of man. This is why the worker feels that he is himself only outside of working hours in the process of labour he feels he is estranged from himself.
He is himself when he is not working, and when he works he is already not himself. So the workers labour appears as his loss of himself. A worker approaches his own work as something not belonging to him. Alienation of the product and labour itself predetermines alienation of man from man. This is why the relationship established between them is one of domination and submission with hostility and class struggle as the natural state of such relationship.
Moreover, according to the calculation of specialists, the portion of time for which an American labourer, for example works for the capitalist has increased from 40 to 66 per cent. Marx related the overcoming of alienation to the liquidation of private ownership of the means of production, replacing it with social property, by means of revolution.
At the same time, as the example of the USSR and other socialist countries has shown, the strength of socialist property and the power of the people, are the firm basis for successful economic growth, and the development of a socialist type of life, culture and a high consciousness of the people.
It is no longer possible to refute the fact that due to the assertion of social property, society has changed into an association of free workers in which all the social wealth material and spiritual is used in the interests of all workers for the development of their abilities.
Naturally this distribution can be carried out for the better or worse; there may be serious mistakes and miscalculations. However it is important to underline that in the prevailing conditions, and the given distributional relations, there is no contradiction of interests of antagonistic classes, as when the exploiting classes appropriate the labour of the exploited. Problems and complications move to the plane of searching for the best methods of stimulation and distribution of production, better calculation of the quantity and quality of the labour performed, the variety of interests of the groups and the different members of the society.
It is today impossible not to acknowledge that in socialist conditions, for the workingman, labour is not only a means of life and a source of personal welfare, but also work for the good of society and service to the people. Socialist workers drawn into the management of social work, which provides for their participation in state politics, are educated in the spirit of high civic responsibility. This removes man from the narrow circle of personal anxiety, to a wide world of social worries, gives rise to new forces and talents in him.
Participation in common work are the strong wings which lift man. Of course, for the present, the consequences of an alienation which has been dominant for centuries, persist in the form of people not always regarding social property as their own collective property, but trying to illegally to use it with the aim of personal enrichment.
This evil, which remains, is due to causes not yet eliminated, such as insufficient education, contact, etc. That is, the fact of a part of the common product being used for the satisfaction of common necessities management, education, defence, etc. The aim of similar affirmations is to blur the main differences between capitalism and socialism. To arrive at the correct position it is necessary to remember that alienation is an historical phenomenon connected with the private ownership of the means of production.
It is also necessary to see the new, which appears under socialism. The main difference lies in the fact that here the expenditure for common necessities takes place in the interests of the people and not in the interests of the monopolies, especially the military industrial complex.
Under socialism the principle from each according to his ability, to each according to his work, dominates. Different violations of this principle misappropriate, parasitism, misuse, etc.
Common needs will always be there and if expenditure for their satisfaction is acknowledged as alienation, then we return to the old theme-the ever — lasting nature of alienation.
At other times it is said that under socialism the worker does not always know what happens to the product of his labour. But the fact of alienation does not lie in this knowledge or ignorance. Under capitalism the worker may in fact know what happens to his product, and often knows that the product goes for the enrichment of the capitalist and continuation of the exploitation of his labour.
We have said above that Marx interrelated the fate of the individual with the fate of the freedom of the masses. Naturally every individual cannot be characterised without disclosing his individual characteristic.
But there is no individual without virtues. Therefore he cannot be understood without also understanding his common typical virtues. In other words, it is a question of two different ideas — the nation of the separate individual, and the notion of the social type of individual. Only the study of common for joining the common and the individual brings us to the sphere of objective laws, and the uncovering of laws is the essence and aim of scientific knowledge.
Summing up all the changes in the objective position of the workers which take place under socialism, we can say that for the first time in history, the social characteristics common to all members of society assume paramount importance and not the state, national, religious or some other group features. In the typological structure of society besides the specific and group features of people, and side by side with them, appear the common features of the common social type of individual, the new man.
The socialist individual is the ideal individual, who grasps the aims and principles of communist ideology, which puts common interests above the individual interest. In the process of socialist transformation, the difficulties in educating and re-educating people in collectivism is clearly seen. The individual, private — ownership psychology is more alive in the consciousness of some people than was thought to be the case earlier. To overcome this, more time and stronger measures are necessary.
The society could not allocate more resources for the development of education and the growth of material welfare and culture, then the international and internal circumstances permitted.
A socialist is skeptical about this. In other words, liberals think a few bad apples spoil the supply. A communist thinks that the crate itself is rotten. A communist is a socialist, but a socialist is not necessarily a communist. A communist believes that socialism is a historical phase that precedes communism and follows capitalism. Socialism is that system where the state is the full or partial owner of all property.
Communism is the collective ownership of all property. A communist wants more. A communist seeks the abolition of property, whether held by the state or private firms and citizens; they want all of us to own everything equally and become our own dictators. A communist seeks conditions to end the state entirely and have all human society collectively managed. To make his argument that the mode of production is the starting point for many of our ideas and life experiences, Marx goes back in time.
That is to say, the labor of many has ensured the comfort of a few ever since the Neolithic Revolution. This is our struggle. In a slave economy, most of us are slaves. In a feudal economy, most of us are serfs. In a capitalist economy, we become the servants of a small class of capitalists. Under capitalism today, we give a lot of our surplus to our bosses. You may earn your pay in two or three hours, and the rest of your labor is turned to profit by the firm for which you work.
If a business fails to make a profit—which it derives from the surplus provided by the worker—it will not be a business for very long. The progressive liberal believes that if we encourage business owners to be better people, this exploitation will not occur.
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