Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 19, 18 March 1933, p. 3.
Originally published in Russian in Prosveshcheniye, No. 3, 1913.
Translated by Max Eastman.
There is another translation in the official Collected Works.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Throughout the whole civilized world Marxist teachings draw upon themselves the extreme hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both governmental and liberal). It sees in Marxism something in the nature of a harmful “sect”. No other attitude could be expected, for an impartial social science is impossible in a society founded on class struggle. In one way or another every governmental and lib-oral science defends wage slavery, and Marxism has declared ruthless war against this slavery. To expect impartial science in a wage-slave society is rather stupidly naive – like expecting owners to be impartial on the question whether to raise the workers’ wages at the expense of the profits of capital.
But never mind that. The history of philosophy and the history of social science offer abundantly clear proof that Marxism has nothing similar to “sectarianism” in the sense of a shut-in, ossified doctrine standing apart from the main road of development of world civilization. On the contrary, the very genius of Marx lay in the fact that he gave the answer to those questions which the most advanced thought of humanity had already raised. His teachings arose as a direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.
The teaching of Marx is all-powerful because it is true. It is complete and symmetrical, offering an integrated view of the world, irreconcilable with any superstition, with any reactionism, or with any defense of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate inheritor of the best that humanity created in the 19th century in the form of German philosophy, English political economy, French socialism.
Let us dwell briefly upon these three sources and therefore constituent parts of Marxism.
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout modern European history, and especially at the end of the 18th century in France, where a decisive battle was fought against all kinds of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism proved to be the only consistent philosophy, true to all the teachings of the natural sciences, hostile to superstition, bigotry, etc. The enemies of democracy tried therefore with all their might to “refute”, undermine and slander materialism, defending various forms of philosophic idealism, all of which come down one way or another to a defense or support of religion.
Marx and Engels defended philosophic materialism with the utmost determination, and many times explained the profound error of any departure from this foundation. Their views are expounded most clearly and in the greatest detail in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Duehring, works which, like the Communist Manifesto, are everyday books on the table of the class conscious worker.
But Marx did not rest on the materialism of the 18th century. He made an advance in philosophy. He enriched materialism with the acquisitions of the German classic philosophy, especially the system of Hegel which had led in its turn to the materialism of Feuerbach. The chief of these acquisitions is the dialectic – that is, the understanding of evolution in its fullest, deepest and most universal aspect, the understanding of the relativity of human knowledge, which gives us a reflection of eternally evolving matter. The most recent discoveries of natural science, radium, the electron, the transmutation of elements, have admirably confirmed the dialectic materialism of Marx – all the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers, with their “new” ways of returning to an old and rotten idealism, to the contrary notwithstanding.
While deepening and developing philosophic materialism, Marx carried it through to the end, extending its mode of understanding nature to the understanding of human society. The historic materialism of Marx is one of the greatest achievements of scientific thought. The caprice and chaos reigning up to that time among opinions about history and politics were here replaced by a strikingly whole and symmetrical and scientific theory, showing how out of one set-up of social life, another higher one develops in consequence of a growth of the productive forces – capitalism for example out of feudalism.
Just exactly as a man’s knowledge reflects a nature existing independently of him – matter, that is, in a state of development – so also the social understanding of man (that is, his various views and teachings, philosophical, religious, political, etc.) reflects the economic structure of society. Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation. We see, for instance, how the various political forms of the contemporary European states serve as a reinforcement of the rulership of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
The philosophy of Marx is that finished philosophical materialism which has given humanity in general, and the working claiss in particular, the greatest of all instruments of understanding.
Having seen that the economic structure is the basis upon which the political superstructure arises, Marx gave most of his attention to the study of this economic structure. His chief work Capital is devoted to a study of the economic structure of contemporary – that is, capitalist-society.
The classic political economy up to Marx’s time had been formed in England, the most highly developed capitalist country. Adam and Smith and David Ricardo in their investigation of the economic structure had laid down the principle of the labor theory of value. Marx continued their work. He firmly established and consistently developed this theory. He showed that the value of any commodity is defined by the quantity of socially necessary labor time involved in its production.
Where the bourgeois economist had seen a relation between things (exchange of commodity for commodity) Marx discovered a relation between people. The exchange of goods expresses the connection formed between separate producers by means of the market. Money means that this connection is becoming closer, inseparably uniting in one unit the whole industrial life of the individual producers. Capital implies a further development of this connection. The labor power of man becomes a commodity. The wage worker sells his labor power to the owner of land, factories and the instruments of labor. One part of the working day he spends in order to meet the cost of supporting himself and his family (wages), but another part of the day he spends working for nothing, creating for the capitalist surplus value, the source of profits, the source of the wealth of the class of capitalists.
The doctrine of surplus value is the keystone of the economic theory of Marx.
Capital, created by the labor of the worker, oppresses the worker by undermining the small proprietor and creating an army of the unemployed. In industry the victory of large-scale production is obvious at once, but in agriculture too we see the same phenomenon. The superiority of big capitalistic agriculture increases; there is a growing application of machines; the peasant economy falls into the noose of money capital, declines and collapses under the weight of a backward technique. In agriculture the decline of small-scale production takes special forms, but the decline itself is an indubitable fact.
In outstripping small-scale production, capital leads to an increase of the productivity of labor and the creation of monopolies through the union of the biggest capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social – hundreds, thousands and millions of workers are brought together in a planned, economic, industrial organism – but the product of their general labor is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production increases, crises multiply, and therewith the mad search for a market and insecurity of existence for the mass of the population.
In enlarging the dependence of the workers upon capital, the capitalist structure creates the mighty power of united labor.
From the first beginnings of commodity economy, from simple barter, Marx followed the development of capitalism to its highest terms, to large-scale production.
And the experience of all capitalist countries, both old and new, proves clearly every year to a larger and larger number of workers the truth of this doctrine of Marx.
Capitalism has conquered throughout the world, but its victory is only an earnest of the victory of labor over capital.
When serfdom was overthrown and the “free” capitalist society saw the light of day, it suddenly became clear that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the toilers. Various socialist doctrines began to emerge as a reflection of this oppression and a protest against it. But this original socialism was a Utopian socialism. It criticized the capitalist society, condemned it, cursed it, dreamed of its destruction, drew fanciful pictures of a better structure, and tried to convince the rich of the immortality of exploitation.
But utopian socialism could not show a real way out. It was unable to explain the essence of wage labor under capitalism, to discover the laws of its development, or to find that social force capable of becoming the creator of a new society.
Meanwhile the tumultuous revolutions which accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom – everywhere in Europe but especially in France – were making it more and more manifest that the foundation of the whole development and its motive force was the struggle of classes.
Not one single victory of political liberty over the feudal class was gained without overcoming a desperate resistance. Not one capitalist country has been formed on a more or less free democratic basis without a life-and-death struggle between the different classes of capitalist society.
The genius of Marx lay in the fact that he was able sooner than others to make and consistently carry out the inference to which the whole of world history leads. That inference is the doctrine of class struggle.
People always have been and they always will be the stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics, until they learn behind every kind of moral, religious, political, social phrase, declaration and promise to seek out the interests of this or that class or classes. The partisans of reform and betterment will always be fooled by the defenders of the old regime, until they understand that every old institution, no matter how savage and rotten it may seem, is sustained by the forces of this or that dominant class or classes. And there is only one way to break the resistance of these classes: namely, to find in the very society surrounding us, to find and educate and organize for the struggle, those forces which can – and owing to their social situation must – form a power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new.
Only the philosophic materialism of Marx has shown the proletariat a way out of that spiritual slavery in which up to now all oppressed classes have been sleeping. Only the economic theory of Marx has explained the actual situation of the proletariat in the general structure of capitalism.
Throughout the whole world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa, independent organizations of the proletariat are multiplying. The proletariat is educating and enlightening itself by waging its class struggle. In casting loose from the prejudices of bourgeois society, uniting more and more closely, learning to take the measure of its successes, it is tempering its powers and growing irresistible.
The foregoing article was written by Lenin in 1913 for a Russian magazine called Education.
The translation has been done by Max Eastman. – Ed.)
Main Militant Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 23 July 2015