The revolutionary significance of Karl Marx

May 5 is the 208th anniversary of the birth of the founder of modern scientific socialism, Karl Marx. Communists around the world will mark this day by celebrating and commemorating his legacy, and we communists in the United States would do well to look back upon his monumental contributions and take stock of what Marx has to tell us today. 

Marx wasn’t the first socialist. He was the first to set socialist theory on a scientific and materialist foundation, and to give socialism an uncompromising revolutionary orientation. As his great pupil Lenin said, 

“The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defense of bourgeois oppression. It 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.”

The important thing to understand here is that Marxism didn’t come out of nowhere. It was born out of the interplay of ideas that came before it, driven by the growth of capitalism and the revolutionary working-class movement. In other words, Marx took the raw materials of the most advanced theories in political economy, philosophy and socialist thought, and, in the crucible of fierce class struggle, forged the theory of scientific socialism. 

When we say “scientific socialism,” just what do we mean? In what way did Marx make socialism scientific? First of all, we have to understand that socialist thought, prior to Marx, was, at its core, idealistic and utopian. Simply put, this means it failed to understand that consciousness is driven and shaped first and foremost by material reality, and must make its aim changing material reality in fundamental ways. The Utopian Socialists that preceded Marx were unable to grasp this, so they created all kinds of fantasies about utopian societies with no real way to get there. 

Marx, on the other hand, understood that historical and social change is a law-governed process, and that only by understanding and leveraging these laws could we reshape society in a fundamental way. Marx understood that it is the material and economic base of society, how that society organizes the production and distribution of goods, that determines the ideas of that society, instead of the other way around. Based on material processes, Marx saw that history had moved through a series of stages, from primitive communalism to the ancient slave societies, to feudalism, and to capitalism. Further, he understood that it is class struggle that serves as the motor of historical change. He saw that class struggle is inevitable so long as classes exist. Class struggle and inevitable revolution are the result of any system where the relations of production, the class relations of ownership and power, come to hold back the development of the productive forces that drive progress. Only by freeing the productive forces from the fetters of reactionary productive relations could society progress to a higher stage. This is what had happened during every historic shift from one mode of production to the next. He thus concluded that it is the great historical mission of the working class to overthrow capitalism, seize state power through revolution, and systematically reshape society though its own socialist state. By doing this, the working class would uproot and eliminate all remnants of classes and class struggle, bringing about the communist society. This is the basic idea of Marxist materialist conception of history, or historical materialism. 

Underlying this theory of history is Marx’s philosophy of dialectical materialism, which understands that contradiction, where opposing forces struggle against one another and exchange places, is the catalyst of all change. Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism was further developed in important ways by his partner, Friedrich Engels, and later by Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Marx took his dialectical and historical materialism and applied them to the analysis of political economy. Thus, in his great work Capital, he laid bare the laws of motion of the capitalist system, how capitalist exploitation was based on a kind of robbery of the working class hidden within the mechanisms of capitalist production. 

He was able to understand the law of value, which operates at the heart of commodity production – that the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time required for its production. He explained how competition drives the capitalists to maximize profit by increasing productivity to reduce the cost of production below the social average. And he saw through the smoke and mirrors of the capitalist economists to reveal to everyone that it was through the dirty trick of surplus value, the value produced by the working class beyond and above what they are paid, pocketed by the capitalists, that the capitalists are able to do that. This is the basis of capitalist profit, leading to the enrichment of the capitalist class, the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and the impoverishment and immiseration of the working masses. From this, Marx understood that this would inevitably lead to cyclical crises of overproduction, throwing workers out into the reserve army of the unemployed, and wasting and ruining the productive forces. This is the crisis where the productive relations act as fetters to the development of the productive forces, a crushing cycle of ruin whose only resolution is revolution. 

Capital was Marx’s great gift to the working class. It laid bare the problem, capitalism itself, and the solution, socialist revolution. It diagnosed the disease and revealed the cure. But Marx was no mere theorist. He understood that it was only by organizing for revolution as a class that the workers could free themselves from exploitation and build a new society. We must not forget or downplay the fact that Marx was a revolutionary organizer. He wrote pamphlets and edited newspapers in order to educate and agitate the working class. And he founded and led revolutionary working class organizations. 

In 1846 he founded the Communist Correspondence Committee. The CCC merged with the League of the Just and formed the Communist League in 1847, which Marx led. Indeed, the fiery program of the Communist League, The Communist Manifesto, which Marx co-authored with Engels, would become one of his best known and widely read works. In 1850 Marx gave his famous Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League where he explains the practical side of the theory put forward in the Manifesto. There Marx explains that the workers must act independently in their own class interests in order to establish a workers’ government through revolution. After being exiled to London as a result of his revolutionary activity, he would help to found and lead the International Workingmen’s Association, known to history and the First International.

Marx’s contributions today

Today, capitalism has developed to its highest and final stage, what Lenin called imperialism. It is a dying system, a system in decay. It is a system beyond help, beyond reform. Whatever progressive role it once played in history is long gone. It only holds us back from building a better world. 

And in its death throes it is especially brutal and violent, trying to prolong its life parasitically from the blood of working and oppressed people everywhere. Trump’s reactionary presidency has sharpened the contradictions of capitalism, and, scrambling to hold back the tide of history which will inevitably sweep it away, only hastens its demise. 

Everything Marx has explained to us about capitalism holds true, from Capital to the Address to the Communist League, from his explanation of its laws of motion to the means of its overthrow. Indeed, it takes revolutionary organization on the part of the class-conscious workers fighting for socialism, together with oppressed nationalities who seek liberation from imperialism. As Mao Zedeong once said, 

“It is up to us to organize the people. As for the reactionaries in China, it is up to us to organize the people to overthrow them. Everything reactionary is the same; if you don’t hit it, it won’t fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.”

In other words, we must continue Marx’s most fundamental work and follow in his footsteps. We must grasp the laws of history, leverage contradictions and organize for revolution. 

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting frso.org/books

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