John Kilcullen
Copyright (c) 1996, R.J. Kilcullen.
Marx was born in 1818, Engels in 1820, both in Germany. Marx's father was a lawyer, and he went to Bonn and Berlin universities, at first to study law, then philosophy (a flourishing subject in German universities at the time). Engels was not a university man. He went into business. From 1850 to 1870 he managed his family's firm's cotton mill in Manchester. Engels had first-hand knowledge of the English capitalists: he was one. After retiring from the cotton industry he lived on in England. From 1849 Marx lived in England, supported by Engels. His political activities had got him into trouble in Germany and in other parts of Europe, and in the 19th century England received many political refugees. Marx worked in the British Museum studying the English economists and writing Capital. He corresponded constantly with Engels, and after Marx's death Engels edited volumes 2 and 3 of Capital from Marx's manuscripts. He also wrote works of his own, and wrote prefaces to republications of Marx's works. Engels was Marx's collaborator and his first and most influential interpreter.
German philosophy in the first part of the 19th century was dominated by the ideas of Hegel. I can give you only a second hand account of Hegel, but something must be said as background to the Marx-Engels materialist philosophy of history. Hegel had produced an idealist philosophy of history. Idealism is the theory that the world of physical objects around us in fact consists of 'ideas', either ideas in our own mind or ideas in some other mind (e.g. God's): that matter is really spirit. This is not as implausible as you might at first think. The leading German philosopher before Hegel, Immanuel Kant, had asked how is it possible that we can know certain general truths about physical objects and events - for example, that whatever happens will have some cause, that no event will just happen without anything leading to it - how can we know such truths with certainty and in advance of experience (a priori)? His answer was that the only possible explanation is that the human mind imposes order, laws like the law of causality, on what he called the 'manifold of experience': that there are a lot of different sensations, colours, sounds etc, coming at us from we don't know what, and our mind organizes them into coherent objects and sequences of events. The reason we know with certainty and in advance that every event will always have some cause is that this is a law of our own mind's activity: our mind organizes the manifold of experience always in accordance with the law of causality. It is a simple step from this to say that if we don't know what is the source of the jumble of sensations the mind organizes, then we have no justification for postulating any source, certainly any set of material physical objects. Our assumption that there are material objects out there is simply an instance of the mind's determination to find a cause for everything. According to Kant we can't say anything about things as they are in themselves: and sometimes he acknowledges that we can't even say that there are things of any sort 'out there'. All we can know is the order of our own sensations.
So that is one version of idealism, and I suggest that it is not completely implausible or crazy. According to Hegel our own minds are themselves not ultimately real - not independently real. Underlying not only physical objects but also separate minds there is one Absolute Spirit: the world is this spirit's representation of itself to itself. Hegel says that the absolute spirit 'alienates' itself: that is, makes itself something other than itself, something alien to itself. Another word for alienation is estrangement. Although our minds and other things are ultimately this spirit, we meet one another, and other things, as strangers, not recognising ourselves and one another for what we are. And Hegel relates this to social conditions: instead of living cooperatively and in a friendly, fraternal way, people are estranged from one another, hostile and competitive. Now according to Hegel the course of history, in the widest sense of the term - including the history of the physical universe, as well as human history - is a process in which the Absolute Spirit externalizes itself and then overcomes its self-alienation. (This is in fact an old theme in philosophy. The Neoplatonist (Plotinus, Porphyry and others) wrote of the world emanating from the One and then returning.) History will therefore exhibit rationality: it is not just a succession of accidents, but a thought-process, so to speak, the Absolute Spirit thinking itself out to a satisfactory conclusion. Human reason will have some possibility - especially in the later stages of history - of seeing the rational meaning of the sequence of events. And the Absolute Spirit's overcoming of alienation will involve overcoming the alienation of human beings from one another. Political and social history will have a rational meaning, and move toward an un-alienated state of mankind, in which we will live not competitively but in fraternity.
Let me say again that my account of Hegel is second-hand. I do not wish to put any weight on the details. But it seems to me that there is an interesting parallelism between Hegel's language, and his underlying optimism about the rationality of history and our progress toward a happier state, and what you will have been reading in Marx and Engels.
Between Hegel and Marx came Feuerbach, who suggested that Hegel had got the universe upside down. It is not that Absolute Spirit alienates itself, and we are unconscious expressions of it: rather, we alienate ourselves, fabricating Absolute Spirit - or, more traditionally God - as expressions of our own nature, which we do not recognise as such. When Christians say, for example, that God is love, they are alienating a human attribute, not properly realizable in our competitive society, and setting it up as an independent real being - more real, they imagine, than themselves: and are then prepared to sacrifice some of the possibilities of love between human beings to this God. Feuerbach wanted to do away with God so that people would make a real effort to realize love among mankind.
Feuerbach, and lots of Germans after Hegel, liked to play with Hegel's language, and use it to say things opposed to Hegel's meaning. Hegel says that our minds are absolute spirit alienated: well, let us use his term alienation, but what we should say is that Hegel's Absolute Spirit is the human spirit alienated, made stranger to itself, turned into something it can't recognise. Marx and Engels play this game too. And some of the things they say are allusions to points of Hegelian philosophy familiar to Germans of their time. For example, Hegel says that philosophy must be 'presuppositionless' - it must not assume premises that really need proof, but build from rock bottom. So Marx and Engels say: 'This method of approach [i.e. their own] is not devoid of premisses. It starts out from the real premises, and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation or abstract definition, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts, as it is with the empiricists... or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists' (CM, p.38c). And on the next page: 'Since we are dealing with the Germans, who do not postulate anything...'. A lot of the things that may puzzle you in the German Ideology are ironical allusions to details of Hegel's philosophy.
Still, Marx and Engels share Hegel's hope that history will be rational, intelligible, and that it is leading toward a happy conclusion. But the sort of intelligibility they look for is different. Hegel thought that history would make sense if we took it as the working out of the implications of ideas in the Absolute mind. Marx and Engels do not think that the exploration of ideas will cast much light on history. Instead, they say, we should set out to understand human history from the fact that human beings are material bodies, and that they need material bodies (food etc.) to maintain themselves in existence. The basis of historical development is the development of material production. This is an emphatic rejection of idealism, a materialist philosophy of history.
At the time there were a lot of people trying to work out a philosophy of history. These days that term often refers to a branch of philosophy dealing with questions of historical methodology: see for example W.H. Dray (ed.), Philosophical Analysis and History. What are historians trying to do? What is an historical narrative? What is an historical explanation? Is historiography in any sense a scientific activity? and so on. Some of the people interested in the philosophy of history during the 19th century were interested in such questions - J.S. Mill and Engels for example. But the main effort at that time was to see a pattern in the past, and to use it to predict development in the future: to discern a trend. This is relevant to political activity. If what you want to see happen in society is in harmony with the trend of history, there is a better chance of succeeding. It is futile to swim against the tide of history, if there is one. During the 19th century political philosophies tended to be accompanied by, or to develop out of, philosophies of history in this sense. This is obvious with Marx, but it is also true of J.S. Mill and other exponents of liberalism. The liberal political philosophy was a theory about the conditions most likely to foster social progress. Mill thought that history could be divided into stages that show a rational progression, that there has for a long time been a trend toward social equality, and that democracy and then socialism are the next stages. Weber is also much interested in the causes and meaning of historical development, and although one of his messages seems to be that there is no simple pattern, no hopeful trend, he does seem to make one important prediction, and that is that bureaucracy will continually increase, and will leave less and less room for individual freedom. Most of the political theorists of the nineteenth century associate their political predictions and prescriptions with some view of the general course of history.
In Germany Hegel was the chief philosopher of history, but there was at the time much interest in this subject in France. In both countries it went along with a new sympathy for the middle ages. Eighteenth century historians had regarded the middle ages as a barbarous regression, a deplorable episode. The nineteenth century historians looked at it with a new sympathy. They were looking for general trends in history, so were disposed to expect that the middle ages would form an indispensable stage in historical development: a stage that could not have been skipped, a stage that contributed something to the story. They were in the habit of dividing history into periods, and looked for the inner coherence of each period: they tried to look at each period in its own terms, to see what sense their life made to people at the time, and how that period prepared for the next. An influential school of French historians and social theorists were the Saint-Simonians: they spoke of organic periods and periods of transition. There would be a relatively organized and stable social state, in which all the institutions and customs added up satisfactorily; but this would eventually break down, there would be a confused transition state, and then another stable state would form. This might remind you of Marx's division of social history into periods, this one being the capitalist age, and his account of the revolutions that transform one social state into another - the bourgeois revolution in which feudalism was replaced by capitalism, the proletarian revolution in which capitalism will be replaced by socialism. Socialism was in fact a French idea: the Saint-Simonians and many other schools of thought in France at the time called themselves socialists. (For a survey see J.S. Mill's 'Chapters on Socialism'.) What the French meant by socialism was not necessarily state ownership of the means of production, but more generally a contrast with 'individualism', competitiveness. A socialist society would be a friendly, fraternal, cooperatively organized society. Some of them regarded state ownership as a possible means to such a condition.
The scientific socialist, on the other hand, realizes that socialism was not practicable until capitalism had developed fully. Then 'Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes the proletariat and the bourgeoisie... Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex in thought of this conflict in fact.' (Engels in Feuer, p.8991).
Socialism 'has often been dreamed of... as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become an historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were there... it becomes practicable not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc, not by mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions' (Engels in Feuer, p.107).
Notice the reference there to economic conditions. This is the contrast between historical materialism and Hegel's idealism. The fundamental fact to keep in mind in thinking about the philosophy of history is that human beings are material bodies that require other material bodies (including the cooperation of other human beings) to stay alive, and that history is a succession of generations - new human beings have to be produced too, as material beings, to keep history going. So the key to the patterns of history will be found by considering matters concerned with material production. The invention and spread of ideas, and conflicts of ideas and political conflicts, and other historical phenomena, depend upon underlying economic conditions: 'It was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period' (Engels in Feuer, pp. 88-9).
Some passages to illustrate Engel's use of the ideas of base and superstructure:
'In every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange and the social organization necessarily following from it form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch' ('Communist Manifesto' in Feuer, p.4).
'In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society the real foundation, on which rest legal and political super-structures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence determines their consciousness' (Marx in Feuer, p.43).
'The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and next to production, the exchange of things produced is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of each particular epoch' (Engels in Feuer, p.90).
'This much, however, is clear: that the Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why in one case politics, and in the other Catholicism, played the chief part' (Marx, Capital, p.94n).
'If our juridical, philosophical, and religious ideas are the more or less remote offshoots of the economic relations prevailing in a given society, such ideas cannot in the long run withstand the effects of a complete change in these relations' (Engels in Feuer, p.66).
'What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class' ('Communist Manifesto', in Feuer, p.26).
'Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life' (The German Ideology in Feuer, p. 247).
Why are economic arrangements the basic determinants of everything else? Because 'men must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make history"... the first historical act is thus the production... of material life itself' ('The German Ideology' in Feuer, p.249). This need not mean, as you might suppose it does, that the members (or rulers) of every society give first priority to the production of enough food to keep all its people alive. In fact they might give first priority to non-material ideals and despise material things, and accept as normal and inevitable the death of many members (high infant mortality, high death-rates among the poor, for example). Or it might give higher priority to the survival of some, and low priority to the survival of others (e.g. whites, aborigines). The point Engels seems to be making is this: unless men and women survive they do not make history. The history of a society is the history made by those who survived, and it is in part the history of how they (rather than others) survived; its culture is the culture they handed down, and that culture influences who survives and which of those who survive make and hand down culture. In many societies what is produced is not enough to ensure the survival of all members of society. In such societies there may be conflict between those whose survival is best assured and those whose survival is more precarious. Even if non-material values have first priority, there will still be conflict if those whose life is precarious care about surviving. In such societies history is made by those who survive long enough to make some, and it will be coloured by the forms that the conflict takes. For example, the question which values should get top priority will be a point of conflict. The belief that physical survival is not everything may be part of the defence of the position of those whose survival is assured. Not that belief about values need be deliberately constructed and propagated by the privileged class to defend itself; we need not assume any theory of how or why ideas are thought of and propagated. The point is that unless ideas are adopted by those who make history those ideas will not figure in the history of ideas - unless some who believe them survive the ideas do not survive. As in Darwinian biology it does not matter much how variants happen, the main thing is the process of selection, so in this theory it does not matter how thoughts originate, what matters is that they will not have a history unless those who think them survive.
'According to the materialist conception of history the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure... also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents... the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary.'
This 'finally' needs interpretation. The following passage seems to provide the best explanation: 'With all the other accidents, and apparent accidents, of history... the further the particular sphere... is removed from the economic sphere... the more will its curve run zigzag. But if you plot the average axis of the curve you will find that his axis will run more and more nearly parallel to the axis of economic development the longer the period considered and the wider the field dealt with' (Engels in Feuer, p.412).
'The philosophy of every epoch presupposes certain definite thought material handed down to it by its predecessors, from which it takes its start... Here economy creates nothing anew, but it determines the way in which the thought material found in existence is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for it is the political, legal, and moral reflexes which exert the greatest direct influence on philosophy.'
The ideologist 'works with mere thought material, which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, and does not investigate further for a more remote source independent of thought... [The ideologist] thus possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through its own independent course of development in the brains of these successive generations... It is above all this semblance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every separate domain that dazzles most people.'
'Every ideology, once it has arisen, develops in connection with the given concept material, and develops this material further; otherwise it would not be an ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws. That the material life conditions of the persons inside whose heads this thought process goes on in the last resort determine the course of this process remains of necessity unknown to these persons' (Engels in Feuer, p.237).
Marx distinguishes various elements within the base. There are the productive forces - including existing buildings and machines, and workers with their labour power. There are the productive relations - social relations between people insofar as they affect the use of the productive forces. ( There is some controversy about what comes under these heads.) The most important of the productive relations in Capitalism is that of ownership: the tools and materials, products and the right to use the workers' powers are the capitalist's property. But the definition and maintenance of property rights is a matter for the superstructure. Ownership is not just physical possession: it is a moral right legally sanctioned.
Force may be used to plunder: 'Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. But when people live by plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for them to seize; the objects of plunder must continually be reproduced. It would thus appear that even Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently an economy, which just as much constituted the material basis of their world as bourgeois economy constituted that of our modern world' (Marx, Capital, p.94n).
But is it not possible that the reproduction took place in the neighbouring countries, and not by the labour of the Romans themselves? A cynical view of Roman history (cf. Montesquieu's Considerations on the Rise and Decline of the Romans): the Romans traded with their neighbours (e.g. the Egyptians), paying for their imports with precious metals, partly got by plunder; then raided or invaded to get their money back, and used it again in trade. Roman wealth attracted other looters. The Roman army held the frontiers against the Germans and others who wanted to raid the Romans; but the Roman army and its tax-gathering bureaucracy eventually charged so much for its protection that the civilian population came to prefer the barbarians. Roman labour - including slave labour obtained by raiding - did produce some of what the Romans consumed, but no more than a fraction: the rest was produced by the people of neighboring countries and plundered, or bought with plunder. Cultured Roman city dwellers did not see it all that way, and the modern historians who adopt their viewpoint do not either: they see Roman civilization as embodying various important ideals. No doubt ideals embodied in the culture of the cities influenced and to some extent restrained the greed of the soldiers and their bureaucrats. But essentially - on this cynical view - Bastiat was right. But whatever the historical truth about the Romans, it seems possible for a society to live by plunder indefinitely. Again, military force, rather than the forces of production, is the determining factor. (Yes, but the society that is most productive materially will produce the best weapons and supply their army best. Unless the predators take them over!)
Another passage that suggests a high degree of rationality in the course of historical development: 'At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production... From forms of development of the productive forces these relation turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution... No social formation ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or at least are in the process of formation' (Marx, 'Preface' of 1859, in Feuer, pp.43-4).
This suggests that possibilities of increasing production are not, in the long run at least, wasted; every social formation develops all its productive forces before it is replaced, and when it has developed them there is another social formation ready to carry the process further.
But why is history so economical and efficient? Suppose a society in which non-material values have highest priority; why will that society develop its productive capacities to the full? Perhaps Marx thinks that if there is a possibility of increasing production, eventually someone will notice it and take it up, even if the society gives material values low priority; and that those who take such opportunities will gain in power even in such a society. It is as if the possibility of producing material things has an irresistible corrosive effect upon non-material values.
Is Marxism a functionalism? This is one possible interpretation of the various suggestions that historical development is rational. In sociology a characteristic is said to be 'functional' for a certain society if its effects increase the probability that the society will last in that form. Compare the notion of adaptation in biology. In the 18th century the adaptation of plants and animals was taken as evidence of intelligent design by God, and organisms were classed as higher or lower according to their place in the presumed design. After Hume (Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, part viii) and Darwin there is an alternative view: that organisms have their adaptive characteristics because individuals not adapted to the environment do not survive and reproduce, and organisms are not higher or lower but simply later or more complex or adapted to a more uncertain environment. Similarly society has its functional characteristics not necessarily by design (though some of them may be), but simply because over the generations a society will change until it settles for a while into a configuration that can endure (cf. Polybios). Marx seems to be suggesting that in a given society whatever favours the increased production of the necessities of life is functional. (Compare Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History.)
Marx and Engels divided history into periods or stages, on the basis of changing methods of production. Each period has an internal coherence and stability: the change from one to the next requires the bursting of an 'integument', of bonds which hold its elements together in a 'formation'. History is not a succession of small cumulative changes; the transition from one stage to the next is in some sense a revolution.
Each period has its own 'laws of motion', and perhaps there is a law of the succession of periods. 'modern materialism sees in [history] the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof' (Engels in Feuer, p.87); '... the discovery of the general laws of motion, which assert themselves as the ruling ones in the history of human society' (Engels in Feuer, p. 230). Capital was concerned with 'the natural laws of capitalist production... tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results' (Marx in Feuer p.135). '... it is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society' (Marx in Feuer p 136). In the preface to the second edition of Capital Marx quotes from a sympathetic reviewer who says that Marx looks for the laws of phenomena within a given historical period, and also 'the law of their... transition from one form into another... to show... the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions... the necessity of another order into which the present must inevitably pass over... whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it... But it will be said that the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion every historical period has laws of its own... As soon as society has outlived a given period of development and is passing over from one given stage to another it begins to be subject also to other laws. In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology... Social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants and animals. Nay, one and the same phenomenon falls under quite different laws in consequence of the different structure of those organisms as a whole'(quoted by Marx, in Feuer, pp. 143-4).
Apologists for capitalism, like Bastiat and other liberal economists, in Marx's opinion systematically ignore the peculiarities of capitalism, and misrepresent its laws as permanent laws of nature. (Much of the persuasiveness of Bastiat's writing does seem to come from his illustrations drawn from a society of independent producers (of 'simple commodity production'), which he applies without much ado to modern society).
Laws do not rule out thought and free choice on the part of individuals: 'In one point, however, the history of the development of society proves to be essentially different from that of nature. In nature... there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting upon one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation... In the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness... working towards definite goals... But this distinction... cannot alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws. For... the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended, or... ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance. But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws' (Engels in Feuer, p. 230-2). (Compare Mill's explanation of how human science is possible.)
Engels goes on to illustrate the claim that class conflict is the driving force in modern European history, working backwards from the recent period in which this is most obvious, and then back into the transition from feudalism: 'In modern history at least it is, therefore , proved that all political struggles are class struggles and all class struggles for emancipation, despite their necessarily political form -- for every class struggle is a political struggle -- turn ultimately on the question of economic emancipation' (Engels in Feuer, p.234).
What is the conflict between capitalism and the forces of production? 'Before capitalistic production... the instruments of labour... were... adapted for the use of one worker... [and] for this... reason they belonged... to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day -- this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production.
'But this transformation also transformed them from means of production of the individual into social means of production workable only by a collectivity of men... Production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts' (Engels in Feuer, p.92).
'But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before, i.e. as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto the owner of the instruments of labour had himself appropriated the product because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now the owner of the instruments of labour always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product, but exclusively the product of the labour of others. Thus the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests, This contradiction... contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today' (Engels in Feuer, p.94).
Engels goes on to emphasize the anarchy of the market economy, in contrast with the social character of production. Socialism will establish harmony between social production and social ownership and planning.
Socialism will also abolish antagonism between classes, and indeed classes: capitalism is the last antagonistic form of social organization.
See
Max Weber on Bureaucracy
Max Weber on Capitalism
Return to Teaching
Materials on Political Thought
Return to Home Page