Marx and Engel on the Proletariat and Bourgeoisies
To understand how Marx and Engels arrived at conception of either the origin or the relationship between the proletarians and the bourgeoisie as put forth, lets say in the Communist Manifesto, one has to understand the method (a combination of dialectics and materialism) discovered by Marx as Engels admitted - that the two co-authors employed in their critical examination of Capitalist society. Since the method itself, like Cohen (1978) remind us in their work titled Marxs Capital, was the product of the philosophical influences on Marx, an understanding of how Marx arrived at his philosophy is equally important (p. 11).
As a university student, Marx followed Hegels dialectical philosophy, especially the interpretation which was championed by its radical wing. Hegel argued that since reality was the outcome of an evolving system of concepts, or movement towards the absolute idea (p.19) the study of human consciousness, how ideas develop and succeed each other was the key to understanding history. Hegels position soon proved untenable to Marx largely due to his experiences in Germany (his observation of the widespread and degrading poverty in Prussian Germany where the absolute idea was supposed to have triumphed) and the influence of Ludwig Feurbach, who was a materialist (Blakely et al 2003). Contrary to Hegel, Feurbach argued that far from human consciousness dominating life and existence, it was human needs that determined consciousness (Mc Lellan 1973). For instance, he claimed that religious beliefs were actually the projections of alienated human desires and capacity religion as a psychological crutch. Marx was instantly captivated by this idea it suggested to him a way in which greater specificity could be brought to Hegelian dialectics, as well as a way in which political action could be justified.
To achieve this, he extended Feuerbachs philosophy beyond religion to ideology and peoples understanding of society in general. Secondly, he applied Feuerbachs ideas to history. The chief defect of Feuerbachs analysis, he argued, was that it was non-dialectical and ahistorical (p.74). To him, the explanation as to why human beings would hallucinate out systems of religion could only be explained by analyzing the material conditions of human existence. Thus in one of his early writing titled Theses on Feuerbach Marx argues that Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in comprehension of this practice (Marx 1845). Put differently, he realized that human consciousness can only be understood in relation to social, historical and material circumstances economics. In his essay title Preface To A contribution to the Critique of political Economy, Marx now summarized this guiding Principle as follows.
That in every historical period, the existing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social relationships that necessarily follow from it, form the foundation upon which it is built up, and from which alone, can be explained the social, legal political and intellectual history of that epoch that consequently the whole history of mankind has been a history of class struggle.
Marx and Engels stressed this position in their joint work titled Feuerbach Opposition of Materialistic and idealistic outlook (Marx and Engels, 1973, p. 59), by emphasizing the fact that the mode of production was essentially creative, or rather, that class struggle was the motive power behind human history.
The full development of Marx system had to wait for his absorption of still other currents of thought (Mc Lellan 1973), notably the writings of French socialists. In the end, Marx and Engels came to view the proletarians in dialectical terms as the future revolutionaries who will bring about the negation of the bourgeois society just as the Bourgeoisie had brought about the negation of the Feudal society. These ideas are summed up in Marx and Engels Joint publication titled The Communist Manifesto. The first part of this document sketches out the historical dynamics that led to the victory of the Bourgeoisie, and how the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians will progress towards the victory of the latter class.
To Illustrate, Marx and Engels argued that Capitalism was splitting into two mutually antagonistic classes the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. As a class, the bourgeoisie are the owners of the social means of production such as factories, offices and the machinery used in production and the proletariats live by offering their labor power to them. Thus, there existence, like Engels pointed out in his earlier writing (Principles of Communism) depended on the demand for labor which is subject to the laws of supply and demand.
The Bourgeoisie, Marx and Engel argued, advanced its interest via a series of long drawn revolutions in the modes of production or exchange. According to this argument, by engaging in constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production, the Bourgeoisie had discovered new continents, created a world market, and helped create modern instruments. In the process, it had created the proletarians who will bring about its destruction. In his later writings such as Das Kapital and Grundisse, Marx gave a detailed description of the nature and source of these contradictions. In the Communist Manifesto, however, they merely employed generalities.
All the same, the narrative is that the Capitalist make profits by exploiting the proletarians, that is, the Proletarians create value which is over and above their labor power (what Marx would later call surplus value in Das Kapital) and which is appropriated by the bourgeoisie in the form of profit. Proletarians experience increasing alienation since the purpose of their work is determined by the bourgeoisie and the product of their work is transformed into an alien force which comes to control them in the form of capital. Further, as capitalism develops, they averred, the more grows the mass of misery, oppressions, slavery, degradation and exploitation. With the advancement of modern industry the worker sinks deeper and deeper, until finally, when his sufferings have become unbearable, a revolt ensues (Mc Lellan 1972). This revolution they argued will be different from previous revolutions since for the first time in human history, the victorious class will not seek to fortify its newly acquired status instead, it will abolish the previous mode of appropriation private property (Marx and Engels, 1969, p112). In later writings, they argued that since the proletariats will not be fully prepared to live in the newly constituted society, the leaders of the proletarian revolution will exercise a dictatorship, a permanent revolution, in time when all traces of the bourgeoisie and private property had been eliminated, the coercive powers would wither away and free association (communism) would result (Mc Lellan, 1973). At the same time, Marx and Engels noted that in actual bourgeoisie societies class structure was much more complex. However, they dismissed the intermediate groups such as the petty-bourgeoisie as immaterial for their analysis. This, they reasoned, is because they had seen that
Continual tendency and law of development of capitalist production is to separate the means of production more and more from labor, and to concentrate the scattered means of production more and more in large groups, thereby transforming labor into wage-labor and the means of production into capital.
Put differently, they argued that the other intermediate classes will decay and finally disappear with the progress of modern industry.
Marx and Engels painstakingly developed world view that a proletarian revolution and the achievement of socialism are inevitable has struck some scholars as curious. In his paper, titled Class, McLaverty has questioned why Marx and Engels spent most of there time organizing proletarians into trade unions and political parties. In his opinion, there was no need to consciously organize workers into these political units if the oncoming revolution was inexorable. In regards to this, one may conclude that the two writers overplayed their hands.
On the other hand, McLellan (1973) has argued that the fact that Marx did not consider the working- class revolution as inevitable is suggested by the distinction he made between a class in itself and a class for itself in his book title The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx 1975) (p.114). Here, Marx argued that the working class (proletarians) was a class in itself simply because they shared a common position with respect to the capitalist mode of production. At the same time, he noted that proletarians had an overriding interest in transforming capitalism into socialism. If all proletarians became aware of this and worked to fulfill this goal, then the working class would become a class for itself. The move from the former position to the latter was viewed as a result of conscious political class agitation and action by the working-class, and was not seen as inevitable (p.16).
In conclusion, it can be argued that Marx and Engels arrive at their doctrines about the Proletarians and the Bourgeoisie by a rigorous application of the principle of historical materialism in the process, the doctrine they developed was this that capitalism will ultimately give way to communism.
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