This article positively presents Classical Marxist Theory as one part of Classical Marxist Leninist ideology. I hope it will introduce the conceptual system and simultaneously show why it has the appeal it does to those who may not fully know its features.
It is a chapter from the book What Is To Be Undone that I wrote as the Sixties were winding down to consider whether to go forward we should adopt a classical ideology from the past or develop something new. At times in the presentation, I may interject a thought or two I have as I read it in 2026, because the same choice exists today.
That is, some current commentators say the ideology we need is at hand and has been for ages. It is Marxism, Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, and/or Maoism. Should we take their advice to choose our future ideology from among those of the past? Or are those commentators wrong? Should we do more than double down on past ideologies? So here is what I thought in 1974.
Even the briefest readings of Karl Marx show him a very impressive revolutionary thinker. Regrettably, however, most people’s readings never get past that first cursory stage. The real Marx is reflected through what the reader wants or takes Marx to be which is often based on what the reader has heard Marx to be, on what use the reader has of Marx, or on what assault the reader wishes to make upon Marx.
Marx’s writings are so extensive that with enough rummaging about one can discover most anything desired, and this has historically occurred to such an extent that people calling themselves Marxists have continually been at one another’s throats, disagreeing on scores of critical issues. Some have even drifted so far from revolutionary commitments as to support even the most heinous of “mother country” or “mother party” crimes.
In Arthur Rosenberg’s book History of Bolshevism we read:
“The suggestion has been made, and its irreverence does not make it irrelevant, that Marxism as a religious system, has its bible, its orthodoxies and heresies, and its exegeses, sacred and profane…. Marxian Socialism was never rigorously or even systematically formulated as a canon or dogma… various social groups in their attempts to dominate the scene, claimed the authority of the founder for their expositions and interpretations of his teachings…. It seemed necessary not only to wage bitter battles against those who ignored or challenged ‘Marxism’ but also to engage in fratricidal struggles over its correct meanings. Marx, weary of the epigones who took his name, was moved to exclaim that he was not a Marxist, but the debates and disputes continued.”[1]
To assess Classical Marxism Leninism we first have to clarify what it is. And to clarify what Classical Marxism Leninism is, we have to clarify what Classical Marxism is, including a discussion of its historical context, and of its theories of dialectics, human nature, human consciousness, materialism, history, classes, capitalism, socialism, and revolution.
Classical Marxism evolved amidst scarcity, in reaction to metaphysics, and in pursuit of revolutions to eliminate feudalism in favor of democracy. Europe between 1840 and 1880 was a place where knowledge of technology was minimal, the nature of government was primarily dictatorial, scarcity was a predominant force in thought and action, and human material need was the only obvious motive force behind going to work each day.
Classical Marxism set out to counter two great metaphysical sins, that of working in a practical vacuum and that of basing most conclusions on self-interested speculations. According to Classical Marxism, metaphysics ignored reality and viewed things as lifeless and isolated rather than as parts of an interactive whole. As Engels put it, metaphysics was a world view which exhibited “natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things; and therefore not in their motion, but in their repose: not as essentially changing but as fixed constants, not in their life, but in their death.”[2]
The day’s doctrine, idealism, said that reality arose out of people’s conceptions. Classical Marxism said the opposite: people’s conceptions arose out of concrete conditions of reality. In this context, Marx worked toward understanding history and society in order to alter their courses for the better. His theory of dialectics aimed at determining the causes of historical change, so revolutionaries could better understand and affect history.
The theory is never actually made explicit and can only be gleaned from a study of Classical Marxism’s more analytic descriptions of actual historical occurrences. Nonetheless, as Marx himself said, “Dialectics is the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought.”[3] Did Marx actually believe that? Or the rest of what has become Classical Marxism? I have no idea but I sincerely doubt it, and it is beside the point. Activist Classical Marxists assert it.
The heart of Classical Marxist dialectics is essentially the assertion that significant historical changes are not matters of straight-line, progressive alteration but of rupture, not matters of evolution but of revolution, not matters of continuations of flows but of resolutions of spiraling contradictions.
Dialectics is the assertion that real changes are due not to factors outside a system in question and imposed upon it, but to factors within a system only slightly affected by conditions imposed from without. It is the assertion that history does not change by the effects of some absolute, or in pursuit of some absolute, but rather in accord with its own internal contradictions and their continuously evolving resolutions.[4]
At least in its Classical formulations, dialectics is a very general, loose methodological assertion that to understand historical situations one must understand the contradictions they embody and most specifically those contradictions whose eventual resolutions entail overthrow of the original situation’s defining characteristics. That is, one must understand situations insofar as by their intrinsic natures they toss up against themselves the forces of their own dissolution.
For Classical Marxists, systems necessarily undergo fundamental change whenever they embody the contradiction of trying to perpetuate themselves while at the same time undermining themselves.
Classical Marxists interested in understanding and affecting historical situations follow a clear methodological imperative to constantly uncover how systems simultaneously foster their own continuation and their own demise. They study motions of conflicting tendencies and forces precisely in regard to those critical contradictions and precisely so as to find how to most beneficially help along the factors favoring revolutionary resolutions.
But such efforts obviously require prior understanding of many important and prevalent real-world systems including productive mechanisms, social groupings, institutions, laws, and perhaps most importantly, human beings as they are in actual settings.
In the Classical Marxist view human nature is something that constantly changes and steadily develops—it is neither mechanistic, nor idealistic, but dialectical. As Marx wrote: It is a “variable in an interactive context.”[5]
I interject from 2026 into the excerpt: I remember strenuously arguing with a very prominent Marxist teacher of mine that his assertion that there was no fixed human nature was literally ridiculous, as he strenuously clung to it. What seems to us part of an ideology that we adopt dramatically affects what we can even think. I used to wonder, would Marx agree with this interpretation of his claims? I thought not. And yet, it persists.
The excerpted chapter continues: People can think and need safety, food, shelter, and sex and strive to get each. But people exist in a time and in a context. And so, writes Marx, “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual, in its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.”[6]
For Classical Marxists, people are what they do—if at different times in history people act in different ways it is because their very natures have changed. Most importantly, people interact with their environments, change them, and are in turn changed by them. Central to the whole process is the formation and development of consciousness.
And yet before discussing the formation and effects of consciousness we should point out that Marx’s own actual understanding of people, and Marxist theory’s understanding, contain a kind of tension between two pictures, the Classical one as expounded above, and the more humanist one found throughout many of Marx’s own earliest writings and many of the most recent formulations of his whole thought.[7]
In that second view, people are still dialectical processes but they are understood in more depth. They are viewed as having emotional, spiritual, cognitive, aesthetic, and creative as well as sexual and physical potentials. They are understood in their tensions with society. Society can either thwart or foster their natural potentials.
With an increasing domination of nature comes an increasing play of human capacities. People create their own environments and the ones first encountered are not always the best possible. There is a societal progression and a parallel development of human potentials. History is alienated from people precisely because the environments it presents to us are not as well suited to human capacities as they might be.
Out of this second orientation toward human nature and being, there naturally flows the Marxist theory of alienation and a number of other results often encompassed by the label Marxist Humanism. Although historically important and desirable to study to help us go beyond Classical views, Marxist Humanism is not immediately relevant to this chapter’s task.[8] Historically, Marxists engaging in practice have had no very effective ways to make links between their broader views of human interaction and their actual day to day efforts to affect reality. There has been no theory of motivation or personality linking subtle views of given human potential with concrete strategic needs in the field. Thus, though Marx himself had a broader understanding than that drawn from his work by the Classical Marxists, even he, in strategic practice, tended to work only with those views that were sufficiently understood to be pragmatically employed.
Thus Marx’s own thoughts and writings can still sometimes serve as useful references for efforts to go beyond Classical formulations. At the same time, however, we are not in any way short changing Classical Marxism Leninism by attributing to it a weaker understanding than Marx’s own. Rather, we attribute to it exactly the conceptions it actually used and uses in its concrete practical efforts.[9]
As we understand it, the dialectical theory of knowledge puts practice in the highest position. Practice leads to knowledge and then determines its worth. Theory is based upon practice and serves it. Consciousness emerges from practice and creates the conditions for its future improvement. It is real-world events that are in the first place the roots of insight and not vice versa. Knowledge is thus a reflection of reality.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that people’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, people’s consciousnesses, change with every change in the conditions of peoples’ material existence, social relations, and social life?
“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed?,” writes Marx. “When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that, within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.”[10]
The Classical view says that all consciousness is reflection but that it need not always correspond precisely to what it reflects. To the extent it does, it is good; to the extent it does not, it is bad. Evaluation comes by means of practice.
The Classical view says human knowledge depends mainly upon productive work since it considers such work to be the basis of all practice. True, we learn of others and of relations between people by way of culture, art, study, and politics, but as we’ll see more fully shortly, Classical Marxists believe that the most important extra-work way of people learning things is class struggle, which in its turn, is also totally and irrevocably intertwined with the nature of productive work. And so Classical Marxism decrees, again as we’ll understand better later, that if production is backward it will hinder all human knowledge and development.
In general then, people’s conceptions evolve in parallel to their work and work-associated situations. Consciousness of all kinds has roots in practice, expands through testing by practice, and has value really only insofar as it can guide practice to effective ends. Consciousness is simply a reflection and has value to the extent it reflects accurately.
The essence of Classical Marxist understandings of people and of people’s consciousnesses entwines with the dialectical method at root of the historical materialist view of historical change. People must survive. They must produce and reproduce the conditions of their own existences. To that end they band together and form societies.
Their consciousnesses exist and develop in accord with their necessary and fundamentally historically determined life activities. The world of ideas thus derives from the world of productive interrelations rather than vice versa. It changes in accord with changes at the material level, and those changes, by our dialectical understanding, result not from steady evolutionary flows, but from the fact that the methods of production and reproduction of life’s conditions of existence always toss up the forces of their own furtherance as well as of their own dissolution. Thus there is a dialectical flow at productive levels and a reflection at ideological levels—this is the basic historical materialist awareness before refinement into a more completely defined and fuller theoretic structure.
Classical Marxism’s theory of history rests on foundations we’ve already unearthed: the Classical theory of dialectics, human nature, and human knowledge. The derivative theory of history emerges the way any theory must. Marxists observe the phenomena of their times, develop perceptions about those realities, then form concepts, engage in practice to further those concepts, and finally logically put all their learnings together into a theory to explain the whole historical reality around them. Over a longer or shorter time that is how various Marxists have developed the theory that people now interpret as Classical historical materialism.
In the Classical view, historical development corresponds to the increase of human powers to satisfy human needs. It is constructive in the sense of being a product of human activities, though not necessarily of intentional human activities.
All historical theories accept the premise that people make science and also material goods. Social idealism says, roughly, the concrete world of events is the realization of our ideas, reason grows autonomously, and the rest follows. Social materialism says, to the contrary, causal primacy is at the material-development level, with ideas following from that.
Classical Marxist historical materialism turns Hegel’s dialectic upside down, putting the primary motion at the level of material aspects (forces and relations of production as we’ll soon see) with ideas following along in the wake of class struggles based on those changing primary aspects.
Classical historical materialism revolves first around a belief in the primacy of material production. It asserts that production determines the ways men live and the nature of their consciousnesses. It says that social and economic organization flows through four possible stages until it finally reaches the last stage of advanced communist society. It says, as Marx put it, that:
“Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we cannot judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production…. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.”[11]
Classical historical materialism says that changes occur dialectically and that specifically changes from one mode of production and social organization to another occur through revolutionary ruptures. Further, the theory develops the concept class, and explains how classes evolve naturally from the dialectical interactions of people with their environments, and how classes become the motive actors of all history.
Finally, the theory explains how a society has a structural “base” that is fundamentally economic, and a “superstructure” that is political and cultural; how these two levels interact, how the base is almost always primary, and how the class struggle is the major factor contributing to the nature of the superstructure. The theory has value precisely to the extent it explains history’s flows, including an understanding of why history has been beyond people’s control, an understanding of how it will change in the future, and an understanding of how individuals and groups can affect the ways it will look.[12]
I interject: some might be reading this and wondering not only what Marx himself thought, but also what the author of these paragraphs thought, when they were written, or now. Please remember, these paragraphs are attempting to honestly and positively present not Marx’s personal views, and not my own views, but Classical Marxism’s views. Later assessment requires that.
The chapter from 1974 continues: To begin, then, Classical historical materialism says that since people always strive for survival and material reward, production and reproduction of the necessities of life determine labor, and labor is necessary and conditions people’s interactions with their environments and with one another. It says, with Marx, that labor conditions human character so that: “to live men must labor” and that labor is a “process in which man, through his own activity, initiates, regulates, and controls the material relations between himself and nature,” thus essentially creating and defining himself collectively alongside and inevitably in interaction with his fellow producers.[13]
To exist any society must produce goods enough for its own survival needs. To maintain its defining characteristics, and especially its characteristic divisions of wealth and power and thus the interests of its ruling classes, any society must also reproduce its relations of production and never sacrifice those relations to desires for more goods or greater technical efficiencies—those can both be sought and indeed must be, but only within the bounds of never disrupting the social relations that give the ruling groups their dominance and make the search worthwhile in the first place.
Thus to survive any society must have a productive core and to maintain its overall power relations any society must simultaneously produce enough to ensure survival of the producers, enrichment of the rulers, and continuation of the divisions between the two, in ways non-disruptive of those same divisions.
Classical Marxism sees labor and human nature inevitably determined by four factors: humanness, social organization, technique, and nature. As Marx wrote: “The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the actual means they find in existence and have to reproduce.”[14]
So production depends upon and is determined by the tools and the nature that people encounter and must act upon. As Marx wrote: “…In production men not only act upon nature but also on one another… They enter into definite social relations.”[15]
Social relations between producers as well as the human characteristics of laborers are thus also determinants of production, and in consequence, of any society’s historical human nature.
The Classical Marxist view thus says that societies must inevitably produce and reproduce by way of a mode of production determined by human, social, material, and natural givens. It says changes in human consciousness and behavior come about because of changes in the overall nature of man’s interrelationship with his environment and with his fellow men, and that these in turn can arise only due to changes at the productive level of society, which is to say in any society’s core mode of production. When societies historically emerge, this view says that first an economic base or mode of production inevitably appears, and then a more or less elaborate socio-cultural superstructure follows. Or, as Engels summarized:
“Political, juridical, philosophical religious, literary, artistic, etc. development is based on economic development. But all of these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else has a passive effect. There is rather interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself.”[16]
Men enter into labor to survive and primitive communism evolves as the first societal form. There is a simple mode of production and a simple cultural and political superstructure. This is the Classical view. But why then do such simple relations disappear with time? Why do new social forms emerge? If a given society has a certain historically determined mode of production and a certain superstructure that has arisen from it, why should it transition into some new societal form? These are the next key questions the Classical view raises and must answer.
Dialectics says that change occurs only when there is contradiction. Classical Marxism says that the two aspects of the contradiction that move history are the old and the new modes of production embodied in any society at any time. The new manifests itself in what are called the forces of production, and the old in what are called the relations of production. The two aspects conflict almost continually though they may look different at different times in their histories. Their resolution through conflict, the new finally winning out over the old, is revolution.
Further, forces of production must not be understood mechanically in repose but as dynamic entities. They are not one or more of the four conditions of production but varying combinations of those four conditions; they too have internal contradictions and alter with time. “In the youthful period of a system all the elements of a mode of production—the human, the social, the natural, and the technical—are also forces of production. In its old age some of these same elements cease to be forces of production.”[17]
In every case of revolutionary upheaval Classical Marxism shows that certain relations of production cease to be productive and set themselves up in opposition to the growth of society. They then come to represent the old mode of production while the growing forces represent the new one.
We see then, as Marx wrote: “The means of production and exchange on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces, they became so many fetters. They had to burst asunder; they were burst asunder.”[18]
And so, according to Classical Marxism, productive forces grow and eventually come into conflict with their fettering productive relations. And in every non-communist society the ensuing struggle is the motive force that creates revolutionary change in the mode of production. In times of revolutionary ferment new property relations support the growth of new forces of production and a change in the whole mode. With age, however, these new forces grow so strong that they grow beyond the means of their parent property relations and eventually burst them asunder. And similarly the superstructure which is created by a change in mode first fosters the development of the new mode, and then eventually binds its continued growth. In a society’s late stage therefore, the superstructure represents the old mode and the growing base represents the new.[19]
Or as Marx wrote:“Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions of existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products but also of the previously created productive forces are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity, the epidemic of overproduction. Society finds itself put back into the state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to contain the wealth created by them.[20]
Classical Marxists understand social history as a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange, brought about by unfolding contradictions between forces and relations of production. They believe that as Marx wrote: “political relations indubitably influence the economic movement,” but also that “before they influence that movement they are created by it.” And they believe that the dialectical nature of the process and of all its involved parts insures that “no social order ever disappears 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.”[21]
Which is simply to say that for as long as new forces can develop, the contradiction between forces and relations is not fully manifest, and that until the basis of new property relations has been developed by the old processes of production and reproduction, such new relations must remain beyond human possibility.
As Engels summarized: “According to the materialist conception of history the determining element is ultimately production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists it into a statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract, and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggles and its consequences… also exercise their influence upon the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an intersection of all these elements in which, amidst all the endless hosts of accidents… the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary…. There are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant, the historical event.”[22]
If the contradiction that moves Classical Marxist history is between forces and relations of production, the question naturally arises, how does this contradiction manifest itself as struggles between people? How does it take form in real day to day relations of life, and more concretely how does it lead to revolutions?
The search to answer these questions brings the Classical Marxist to a need for understanding social groups, and especially to a need for understanding social groups of workers; for obviously if production is societally paramount, one would expect worker activities to be similarly critical.
Classical Marxism defines a class as a group of people all of whom have the same relations to the means of production of a given society.[23] It says that an individual’s consciousness is formed directly and indirectly by his class ties, and that people of any one class all have roughly the same interests and world view because they all produce and reproduce in roughly the same environments and because they have approximately the same powers, duties, privileges, and educations with respect to their fellow citizens. And Classical Marxism says that the critical factor of any group’s relationship to the means of production is the kind of ownership it has: workers own their own labor, capitalists own capital, farmers own farms, slaves own nothing, and petit bourgeoisie people own small businesses.
Classical Marxism says that classes emerged as important factors in history’s flow when primitive communism disappeared and ownership rights were established. From then on there were various classes in all societies and these classes were always in conflict. Further, class affiliations determined where and how people worked, relaxed, went to school, etc. According to Classical Marxism classes are primary in determining the human natures of all historical epochs since the first. Thus there is working class consciousness, slave consciousness, peasant consciousness, petit bourgeois consciousness, and bourgeois consciousness, and for Classical Marxists each of these constitutes the nexus of essentially different human natures.[24]
And so societies always divide themselves into classes including the privileged and the dispossessed, the exploiters and the exploited, the rulers and the ruled. The owning classes are always in positions to rule and to keep much of their society’s wealth for themselves.
And so Marx wrote: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, the guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”[25]
Classical Marxism says that scarcity and fairly minimal possibilities for production caused inequalities to grow in history and it says that those were then institutionalized by the development of classes with relatively consistent though very narrow world views. The ruling classes of any time owned the various existing means of production. They had a world view which included a rationale that gave them the right and even the duty to push “their” system to the limits of its productive capabilities. Under every system up through advanced communism this could only mean that the ruling class would exploit all other classes to their detriments and its own advantage. To accomplish this Classical Marxism says that ruling classes inevitably control the intellectual as well as the material resources of the societies they run. To stay in power they try to make their ideas the ideas of the whole society. And so, wrote Marx: “Each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, simply in order to achieve its aims, to represent its interests as the common interests of all members of society.”[26] And further, “The ideas of the ruling classes are in every age the ruling ideas; material control gives control of the intellectual forces as well.”[27]
The ruling classes of any time are then dominant even at the superstructural level—and even further, as we shall soon see, it is class struggle that fills out the content of most day-to-day living in class-stratified societies.
So far the Classical Marxist sees a society with some classes and with an underlying contradiction between forces and relations of production. The question we must ask is how Classical Marxists see all this leading to struggle and thus to the revolutionary transformation of the one society to a new form with a new mode of production.
The ruling classes push all other classes to accept their ideas and their leadership. The other classes try to maintain their own conceptions and further their own material security. As conflicts between productive forces and productive relations in any society become intense, the ruling class lines up with the old ways, while the oppressed classes, because they have ever-growing needs, line up with the potential new ways and with the increased productivity they promise.
Or as Marx put it: “At a certain stage of their development the material forces of production in a society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or what is but a legal expression for the same thing, with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”[28]
Since established ruling classes desire the complete development of all existing productive possibilities, they inevitably exacerbate the contradictions of the society they lead, and they create the preconditions for a new society. The whole process and historical flow is to Classical Marxists more or less inevitable. The only real question is what effects do interruptions and accidents have, and how can conscious people take advantage of them and of the momentary possibilities they create.
In summary, in any society, at any time, classes determine the division of labor and the forms of “men’s” consciousnesses. The ruling class determines the dominant ideas of the period, but each class also has its own particular world view which it seeks to strengthen. Society is class stratified: the education, advantage, work, power, and consciousness of all people are largely determined by their class affiliations. Even interpersonal relations are largely mediated by class conflict and bias and further, each class, because of its inevitable needs and views, seeks to enhance its position and struggles for its own material and political advantage. As the society’s primary contradiction becomes more and more intense the struggle heightens. The hypocrisy of ruling class claims becomes more and more evident, the potential for development under new property relations becomes clearer, and eventually the struggle leads to the defeat of the old ruling class and the establishment of a new one.
But if all this describes in outline Marxism’s view of history, what is its operational view of the particularity of capitalist society? When the forces of production in feudal society grow, a new class begins forming. The bourgeoisie develops under feudalism, forms a new consciousness and a new set of institutions, and with the help of the laboring masses, lines up with the growing forces and carries out a ‘democratic’ capitalist revolution. The bourgeoisie becomes the new ruling class.
The bourgeois revolution, though made in the name of liberty, ushers in wage slavery, private ownership of the means of production, and the manufacturing division of labor. With revolution at the base a new superstructure emerges to dominate the old; a new political edifice arises and fosters dynamics favorable to the bourgeoisie. The capitalist state becomes a tool for the maintenance of bourgeois rule and private property. And the same type of process unfolds at the intellectual and emotional level. The bourgeoisie uses its advantages to determine which ideas are good and which bad. It ‘distributes’ knowledge in accord with class backgrounds and through class-stratified educational systems.
Classical Marxism sees two key capitalist institutions, the corporation and the state. They work in unison to serve the interests of the ruling classes—workers who own nothing save their bodies must sell their ability to work to the corporate rulers and pay fealty to the capitalist state. They earn wages lower than the value of what they produce and the surplus goes to the capitalist. This process is called exploitation and is upheld by the laws of the state.
The capitalist worker has the right to sell his labor for exploitative wages but he has few rights concerning the ways that labor will be accomplished or the ways its product will be used. His labor is alienated from his needs and desires and in essence he works only to survive and to enrich others.
The capitalist takes the workers’ excess products as profit. In addition, the capitalist uses the surplus to further his profit, and to maintain the conditions that allow his class to dominate all others. He changes it into new capital to create ever growing profits—he expands the base and increases the forces of production.
Classical Marxists claim capitalists must so act or the economic inequities upon which their powers are based would diminish or even disappear. Because of his competitive position and the power of his whole class the capitalist always expands existing forces of production to their utmost power and creates new ones where possible, thus furthering the conditions of his own historical demise. His very human nature as a capitalist, as well as the dictates of his competitive environment, demand it.
To change surplus labor into capital and thereby prosper, the capitalist must first use labor to enlarge his enterprises or to start new ones. But to accomplish either of these ends he requires materials, wealthy buyers, and people who are so poor that they are willing to sell their labor relatively cheaply. According to Classical Marxism, then, the whole system recreates itself at every turn, but always by creating conditions that are eventually conducive to its own overthrow.
Since buyers, materials, and workers are necessary, they are created by any effective means, and since force and deception are time-tested, they are often employed first. Capitalism inevitably spreads, eating new markets, oppressing new workers, and gouging new materials the world over. It becomes an international system Classical Marxism calls imperialism. As Woodrow Wilson put it: “Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturers insist on having the world as a market the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nation which are closed must be battered down.”[29]
Classical Marxism says that societies change due to internal contradictions between existing and potential modes of production, the former reflected in relations, the latter in forces of production. In capitalism specifically, the conflict between forces and relations is manifested in the fact that production is accomplished socially though appropriation is private and individualized. The conflict is translated into struggle by the working class which is inevitably forged into a revolutionary force.
Marx summarizes: “Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and of the bourgeois state, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful, and the more embittering it is.”[30]
And he adds: “The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins the struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the struggle is carried on by individual laborers, … But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalized…. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence on society as an overriding law…. The essential condition for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition of capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their involuntary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry therefore cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”[31]
As the contradictions between classes become more aggravated the role of the state becomes more and more important. It acts precisely as a military force to guard and further the interests of the bourgeoisie and at times it does even more. When the conditions so demand, the state tries to hold back the contradictions of capitalism for as long as it possibly can. The state creates ideological myths that support the capitalists; it buys from capital with workers’ taxes at rates that could never be established otherwise; and it finds and defends overseas markets for capital. The state helps create and recreate the conditions of capitalism by defending its relations and at the same time creating new buyers, sellers, and workers. In fact the state becomes as Marx wrote: “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[32]
Masses of laborers crowded into factories are organized like soldiers. The working class eventually opposes the capitalist system because they naturally seek to further their own interests and because the system just as naturally perpetually denies those interests. As capitalist contradictions increase, Classical Marxists claim that capitalists are forced to exploit their workers to greater and greater extents. Workers spontaneously progress from natural hostility toward their situation to organized opposition in trade unions. As matters get continually worse, workers’ conditions are made more generally equal and dismal. They are simultaneously immiserated and brought together with one another. They are literally forced outside the system by their desire for alternatives. They become open to revolutionary ideas. Their struggle with the bourgeoisie for daily betterment becomes constant and daily inflamed.
Capitalism, of course, goes to great lengths in self-defense. First it tries to forestall struggle, and then it tries to employ all powers that it can command so as to win. Classical Marxism claims as Marx writes: that the bourgeoisie’s gestures, no matter how destructive to life, are finally quite futile: “The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over this crisis? By destroying or shackling productive forces, conquering new markets, or thoroughly exploiting old ones. That is, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises and by diminishing the means whereby such crises are diminished.”[33]
The crisis which Marxism says is inevitable is overproduction—the conditions wherein there is too much surplus to be used effectively and where economic calamities then ensue. The struggle between labor and capital continues unabated until finally, in the context of severe crisis, conditions become so unbearable and the rationalizations of the capitalists so unconvincing that the working class throws off the old system and ushers in the new. According to Classical Marxism, a dictatorship of the proletariat stage exists as a transition to a classless society. The working class becomes the new ruling class and then oversees transition to a truly communist situation.
So Classical Marxism sees that the material contradictions inherent in capitalist systems cannot be circumvented in any way. There are no permanent solutions to be found within the confines of the old definitions and styles: “Neither planning nor education, even if either was possible, would be any kind of solution – they would not end the conflict in capitalism that prevents what might be from being. The solution lies in changing the basis of society by changing ownership relations.”[34]
Classical Marxism says that planning under capitalism could only affect hows, never whats or whys, the major problems can never really be addressed, and thus it could never eliminate dislocations or the parallel class struggle.
Socialist revolution is abstractly like all others—it is to be carried out by oppressed classes, who, upon achieving power, install themselves as the new ruling classes. The one fundamental difference from other mode-of-production revolutions is that in the view of Classical Marxists the anti-capitalist revolution augers the final end of class struggle. The new state of the proletariat is to wither away in the sense that it will eventually administer only things and not people. Communism will then ensure that “each produces according to his ability and each receives according to his need.” All people become volitional, freedom prevails, and thus alienation is finally eliminated. History as a process coordinated by conscious people begins, precisely as the previously unavoidable class struggle ends.
And so Classical Marxists see that it is the class struggle of any country that provides the context within which people can exercise an influence upon history. As Engels puts it: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”[35]
Classical Marxism says that under the conditions of capitalism, a person is free who seeks to exacerbate the class struggle, and to take advantage of it as much as possible until there is successful revolution. It goes on to say that the revolutionary process is not totally spontaneous; it requires organization and cannot be carried off by the working class alone. They need guidance. Classical Marxism feels essentially the same about the bourgeois and the proletariat revolutions in this one respect.
The former could not be carried out entirely by the bourgeoisie—they need the help and even the leadership of the workers. Similarly, the latter could not be carried out solely by the workers—they need guidance from intellectuals and in some countries help from other strata. But in both cases the internal dynamics of the involved societies would always inevitably make all the conditions required available, revolutions would ensue, history would continue to unfold along its more or less inevitable course.
“Politely history is a by-product, in truth, it is a mere precipitate of the clash and jangle of conflicting human interests which constitute the running chronicle of class struggle.”[36] But for Classical Marxists the fact that history has been a rather ugly display of man’s inhumanity toward man, has little or no implication for its future possibilities.
As Engels wrote: “The most important historical activity of men, the one that has raised them from bestiality to humanity and which forms the material foundation for all their other activities, namely the production of the requirements of life, that is today’s social production, is above all subject to the unintended effects from uncontrolled forces and achieves its desired ends only by way of exception and much more the exact opposite.”[37]
And so man has dealt successfully with technology but poorly with social history, “because he has never been in a position to prevent the means of production from entering into destructive conflict with the relations of production…. Preoccupied with competing for his own living, man has been unable to anticipate and control the long term historical and human consequences of his productive activities…if human history, as distinct from cosmic and biologic history, is defined as the development of consciously intended relations that are appropriate to human life, human potentialities, human consciousness, and the already achieved degree of human control over nature, then there has not yet been any human history at all.”[38]
According to Classical Marxism, what there has been is “the history of class struggle” and of the resolution of economic contradictions at the base of heretofore existing societies. Classical Marxist social theory explains the nature of historical change in terms of contradictions and class struggle. It is not a complete theory. It makes few predictions about day-to-day events. It does, however, talk clearly about the overall contours of change, and about the nature of the more important social forces and how they interact. It also provides a perspective and tools for understanding more about any specific situations at the societal level than any non-Marxist theory.
As Marx summarizes: “What I did that was new [said Marx] was to prove 1- That the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historic phases in the development of production, 2- That the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and 3- That this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”[39]
And as Engels concurs: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, wrote Engels, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history. He discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, religion, science, art, etc. And that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art, and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have evolved, and in the light of which those things must be explained, instead of vice versa as had hitherto been the case.”[40]
If it has been true about all past history “that what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that nobody willed,” Classical Marxists say as Marx wrote, that it must not also be true of future history. For “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.”[41]
For Classical Marxists an individual becomes free when he or she realizes three things: that classes are the motor of history; that people will only gain ascendency over history after they eliminate class struggle; and that the road to ending class struggle lies in winning it on the side of the proletariat, pitted against the bourgeoisie.
Free Marxists are precisely those people who do not just theorize, but instead also formulate strategy, and engage in practice, trying to take advantage of all the potentialities of their times. They have an understanding of social reality, of its future possibilities, of the ways change comes about, and of their own possible roles, and they take advantage of that knowledge in their concrete activity.
And so ended the chapter of What Is To Be Undone that presented Classical Marxism. On reading this material a half century on from having written it, I can see and I hope, even though it was just a succinct chapter, that you can see the attractiveness the formulations had for someone first awakening to the need for fundamental change or even for someone having spent the better part of a life pursuing it.
On first hearing, and often ever thereafter, Classical Marxism feels incredibly compelling, comprehensive, and well suited to providing theoretical grounding and guidance to those who seek revolutionary change. “We angry young radicals have questions.” “We highly literate Marxists have answers.” But did Classical Marxism provide all we needed? Were its claims accurate? Were they sufficiently complete regarding institutions and actors as well? And did I, as much as a single chapter could, fairly present it as an option available for Sixties radicals to advocate?
To decide now what we ought to think about it, Classical Marxism itself tells us we should consider its connections to the reality that surrounds us and particularly to practice that seeks to revolutionize that reality. What strategies does Classical Marxism cause us to arrive at and settle on? What practice has emerged in the past and might we expect to emerge in the future from a partnership of Classical Marxism and its derivative Strategies?
Next in our sequence presenting and then assessing Classical Ideology will come a presentation of what Classical Leninist Strategy. Hopefully it will make Leninism’s logic and its appeal evident as a second preliminary step before we continue on to Classical Marxist Leninist practice, and then to assessing the whole ideology.
But is all this worth our time? If Marxist Leninist theory, strategy, and practice demonstrate that Marxism Leninism is a worthy ideology to ground and guide our future efforts, an ideology we should become versed in and utilize, then the value of our exercise will have been to have succinctly presented the core of Marxism Leninism perhaps more fully and richly than many of us were otherwise aware of.
On the other hand, if our look at Marxist Leninist theory, strategy, and practice reveals that Marxism Leninism is very seriously and indeed devastatingly flawed, then the discussion’s value will be having provided clarity able to overcome Marxism Leninism’s attraction and instead inform its rejection. Either way hopefully, you will converse, discuss, and debate the matter sufficiently to decide for yourself.
So why is it worth our time? Because going forward we need good ideology if our practice is to be worthy and effective. And because if some ideology that beckons for our allegiance is bad, then to avoid compromising our efforts we need to avoid that ideology and arrive at better.
Footnotes
1. Samuel Hurvitz in the introduction to Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, Doubleday and Company, Garden City, New York. xv.
2. Engels quoted by Vernon Venable, Human Nature: The Marxian View, Meridian Books, Cleveland, Ohio. 35-36.
3. Marx quoted by Lenin, Karl Marx, Foreign Languages Press, Peking China.
4. Though in some sense this and the coming thoughts have to be gleaned from Classical formulations rather than directly quoted, there is to my knowledge little debate about their general descriptive accuracy, though much, as we shall see later, about their more concrete actual worths.
5. Marx quoted in Venable, op. cit. 5.
6. Marx, “Sixth Thesis of Fuerbach,” Selected Works: Volume One, International Publishers, New York. 472-473.
7. See for example Gajo Petrovic, Marx in the Mid Twentieth Century, Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, New York.
8. There are many references to Marxist Humanist studies in our bibliography.
9. Obviously this is a debatable assertion—our later analysis of Bolshevik practice in Russia will, we hope, give it convincing strength.
10. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, Monthly Review edition, New York, N.Y. 37.
11. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, International Publishers, New York, N.Y.
12. Perhaps the single most compact presentation of the theory is in Maurice Cornforth’s Historical Materialism, International Publishers, New York.
13. Marx in Venable, op. cit. 49-50.
14. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit.
15. Marx, Wage Labor and Capital, International Publishers, New York.
16. Engels quoted in Venable, op. cit. 30.
17. Venable, op. cit. 106.
18. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, op. cit. 10-11.
19. See Cornforth, op. cit.
20. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, op. cit. 11-13.
21. Marx quoted in Venable, op. cit.
22. Engels in a letter to Bloch, Marx and Engels: Selected Correspondence, International Publishers, New York. 475-477.
23. See, for example, Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, for a flexible formulation of Marxist class views.
24. Avineri, op. cit. or especially Venable, op. cit.
25. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, op. cit. 2.
26. Marx, The German Ideology, International Publishers, New York. 36-37.
27. ibid. 39.
28. Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, op. cit.
29. Wilson quoted in Michael Tanzer, The Sick Society, Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York.
30. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, op. cit. 14-15.
31. ibid. 16-18.
32. ibid. 5.
33. ibid. 12-13.
34. Venable, op. cit.
35. Engels quoted in Venable, op. cit. 149.
36. Venable, op. cit. 149.
37. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, International Publishers, New York. 148.
38. Venable, op. cit. 78.
39. Marx quoted in Venable, op. cit.
40. Engels in Selected Works: Volume One, op. cit. 16.
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