Naturally, we trace the origin of Marxism-Leninism to the theories of Karl Marx. The science of revolution bears his name, after all, together with Lenin’s. But of course we should understand that Marx wasn’t born a Marxist. This brings us to the question, which of Marx’s theories can we say are representative of Marxism? In other words, when did Marx become a Marxist, and why? By answering this, we not only proof ourselves against the dogmatist error or thinking Marxism is “whatever Marx wrote,” but we also come to a clearer understanding of what distinguishes Marxism as such.

First, let’s agree that by the time of The Communist Manifesto in 1848, we are presented with the basic ideas of Marxism. This point is not controversial. So, let’s take a look at what Marx was writing and doing before that and see if we can discern when Marxism emerged within Marx’s work. Marx’s writings in the first volume of the Marx/Engels Collected Works begin as early as 1835 when Marx was 17 years old, but nobody thinks those earliest writings are representative of Marx’s scientific socialism. 

The question arises in earnest in his early philosophical works from 1843 and 1844, from The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. These were written before Marx began his lifelong friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Engels.

The Manuscripts bear little resemblance to the later Marx. They don’t concern themselves with class struggle, revolution, or exploitation. Absent are the categories of historical materialism, such as mode of production, productive forces, ideology, and so on. Instead, the 1844 Manuscripts base their critique of capitalism on the concept of “alienation.” This is an idea drawn from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Feuerebach’s The Essence of Christianity. Hegel argues that God alienates himself in man, and Feuerbach argues that man alienates himself in God. Marx then argues that the worker is alienated in capitalism – from what the workers produce, from the act of production, from nature, and from themselves and others. The work is full of idealist philosophical jargon like “species-being” and “life-essence.” Nevertheless, the solution, Marx says, is communism. But it is an idealized and abstract communism. As Marx puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts, 

“Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e., human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.”

This is very abstract! There’s no real program, no way to get there, beyond the call for the reclamation of the human essence. Marx has not yet made the leap from “interpreting the world” to changing it. 

Meanwhile, Engels, also prior to his collaboration with Marx, wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was published in 1845. This book, examining in meticulous detail the facts of working class life at the heart of the industrial revolution, is entirely concrete, and it had a tremendous impact on Marx, who read it later in 1844 prior to its publication. After reading Engels’s book, Marx abandoned his The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts altogether.

Shortly after that, Marx and Engels began their partnership in Paris to work on the book The Holy Family. In 1845 Karl Marx was expelled from France and moved to Brussels, Belgium.

While in Brussels, he produced, together with Engels, one of the most important works in the history of the international communist movement, The German Ideology, written from 1845 to 1846. This was followed not long after by Marx’s book The Poverty of Philosophy. These texts, The Holy Family, The German Ideology, and The Poverty of Philosophy, play an important role for Marx and Engels, in that their goal is to challenge the Young Hegelians, the so-called “True Socialists,” and Proudhon and his followers. This served to clear the way, ideologically, for Marxism to take its place in the workers’ movement. By 1846 Marx and Engels formed the Communist Correspondence Committee, with the goal of organizing a proletarian socialist party. The Committee was a precursor of the Communist League, for which the Manifesto was written on the eve of the Revolutions of 1848.

In all of this work prior to 1848 The German Ideology stands out. Interestingly, it was never published during Marx’s lifetime. And yet, today, it is widely recognized as the principal text in which Marx and Engels developed historical materialism. It wasn’t published until 1932 by the Marx-Engels-Lenin institute in the Soviet Union. Understanding the role The German Ideology played in the development of Marx’s thought is crucial. We can see a number of important differences between Marx’s thought prior to his partnership with Engels and after. 

Prior to 1845, Marx was himself a Young Hegelian. The Young Hegelians were a group of left-leaning philosophers strongly influenced by G.W.F. Hegel and his student, Ludwig Feuerbach. The ideas of the Young Hegelians were still thoroughly liberal and idealist. After reading The Condition of the Working Class in England and beginning his work with Engels, Marx’s entire outlook shifted profoundly to emphasize class struggle at its very core. Almost immediately, his focus in 1845 became the critique of idealist and metaphysical philosophical trends in the socialist movement – trends to which Marx himself was previously sympathetic. 

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write that the Young Hegelians are “sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves,” and “their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class.” 

“Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men,” write Marx and Engels “… it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness.” How does Marx, who until only recently considered himself a Young Hegelian, break from this? He writes that “It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.” So, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels do exactly that. They then set out to outline their materialist conception of history, how ideas arise from real material processes, and how class struggle functions as the motor of social change. 

Thus Marx broke firmly with the Young Hegelians and established the theory of historical materialism. Furthermore, he came to see historical change as a law-governed process that could be understood scientifically. The French Marxist-Leninist philosopher, Louis Althusser, beginning in the early 1960s, makes the point that The German Ideology represents the key work of what he refers to as Marx’s “epistemological break.” 

As Althusser puts it in For Marx, “There is an unequivocal ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work which does in fact occur at the point where Marx himself locates it, in the book, unpublished in his lifetime, which is a critique of his erstwhile philosophical (ideological) conscience: The German Ideology.” Althusser goes on to say that “This ‘epistemological break’ divides Marx’s thought into two long essential periods: the ‘ideological’ period before, and the scientific period after, the break in 1845.” In other words, this is the point where Marx’s epistemology matures.

Epistemology in philosophy refers to how we know what we know. In this way, it was a conscious and intentional break from bourgeois ideology, which had until then permeated Marx’s thinking. As Althusser later puts it in his 1974 book, Essays in Self-Criticism, “Theoretically, he wrote these manuscripts on the basis of petty-bourgeois philosophical positions, making the impossible political gamble of introducing Hegel into Feuerbach, so as to be able to speak of labor in alienation, and of History in Man.” 

On the other side of this break, we have the development of dialectical and historical materialism, the critique of political economy, and the elaboration of scientific socialism. Even after the break, “long years of positive study and elaboration were necessary before Marx could produce, fashion and establish a conceptual terminology and systematics that were adequate to his revolutionary theoretical project,” Althusser explains. In other words, after the break from bourgeois ideology, Marxism didn’t immediately burst upon the scene complete but was elaborated and developed over a period of time. 

To think of this break as a purely theoretical exercise, producing immediate theoretical results, would itself be idealism. The break was driven by the practical demands of the growing revolutionary movement. As Engels says in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, “the Revolution of 1848 thrust the whole of philosophy aside as unceremoniously as Feuerbach had thrust aside Hegel. And in the process, Feuerbach himself was also pushed into the background.” By philosophy here, Engels means idealist philosophy. In any case, the most important takeaway here is that Marx’s works prior 1845 are working within the framework of bourgeois ideology, not Marxism. 

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were translated into English for the first time in 1959 and immediately caused quite a stir among the revisionists as well as among academic “Marxists” in the West. The timing here is significant. These two groups, the revisionists and their academic fellow-travelers, were interested in rebranding socialism as a kind of “humanism” in the wake of Khrushchev’s “destalinization.”

At the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, Khrushchev set out to “revise” Marxism, stripping away its revolutionary essence and its fundamentally proletarian class character. With the notable exception of Albania and China, most parties followed along. This revisionist rebranding of socialism as humanism would later find expression in the 1989 counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe. There, as history has shown, the slogan “socialism with a human face” truly meant bourgeois liberalization and the embrace of individualism. It is to Althusser’s credit that he immediately saw this trend for what it was and struggled against it. In this context, there is a very clear reason that these revisionists and academics were so taken with the work of the early Marx: it isn’t Marxist. 

As Marxist-Leninists today, this helps us clarify a few essential points. First, Marxism isn’t just whatever Marx said. That’s dogmatism. And that kind of dogmatism can also be put into the service of Marxism’s enemies. On the contrary, Marxism is the proletarian revolutionary science of social change, founded on a fundamental break from bourgeois ideology, idealism, and metaphysical thinking of all sorts. Marx’s ideas developed and changed over the course of his career. The important thing is to master Marxism-Leninism as a science. 

Second, Marxism's purpose is not simply to understand the world, but to change it. Theory and practice are inextricably linked. Revolutionary practice depends on Marxism to be successful, and Marxism, as a science, is enriched and developed through practice. It was through building the socialist movement, organizing the Communist Correspondence Committee and the Communist League, and then through participating in the upheavals of the 1848 revolutions, that Marxism grew out of abstraction to an engagement with the real world in concrete terms. As revolutionaries today, always faced with the modern challenges of dogmatism, revisionism, and all kinds of bourgeois academic ideas masquerading as some kind of Marxism, these lessons are as important as ever. 

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

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In 1848 a great revolutionary upsurge spread through Europe. These revolutions swept through Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Ireland and other parts of Europe. By and large, these were democratic revolutions against feudalism, waged by the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. In the midst of this wave of revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels joined the underground German Communist League. Marx and Engels were tasked with writing the program of the Communist League, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, a document that would explain the organization's analysis of the situation and its plan for how to move from that situation to revolution and socialism. 

Lenin writes of this period: 

“The revolution of 1848, which broke out first in France and then spread to other West-European countries, brought Marx and Engels back to their native country. Here, in Rhenish Prussia, they took charge of the democratic Neue Rheinische Zeitung published in Cologne. The two friends were the heart and soul of all revolutionary-democratic aspirations in Rhenish Prussia. They fought to the last ditch in defense of freedom and of the interests of the people against the forces of reaction. The latter, as we know, gained the upper hand. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. Marx, who during his exile had lost his Prussian citizenship, was deported; Engels took part in the armed popular uprising, fought for liberty in three battles, and after the defeat of the rebels fled, via Switzerland, to London.”

Marx and Engels were not simply theorists, as they are so often portrayed by bourgeois academics. They were revolutionary organizers and fighters, whose theoretical work was driven by the practical needs of the revolutionary movement. Marx’s “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League” of March 1850 outlines the practical work that accompanied the program put forward in the Manifesto and is important to look at together with it.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party

The Communist Manifesto is one of the clearest and most straightforward expressions of Marxism. As Lenin put it, “This little booklet is worth whole volumes: to this day its spirit inspires and guides the entire organized and fighting proletariat of the civilized world.” It explains the basic ideas of historical materialism and scientific socialism in a way that is accessible and inspiring. It is no wonder that this text has been a guide for revolutionaries the world over ever since, taking root first in Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution. 

In 1872, Marx and Engels wrote a preface to the Manifesto, in which they stressed that “however much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever.” They also emphasize that “the practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing.” At the same time, they note that history isn’t static, and that theory must develop along with practice. For this reason, they draw particular attention to the Revolution of 1848 in France and the Paris Commune in 1871, saying, “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’” Instead, as Marx explains in his books summing up those struggles, namely The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France, it must be smashed and replaced by new organs of working class state power. 

The history of class struggle

The first chapter of the Manifesto begins with a declaration of the central principle of historical materialism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” It explains that this struggle inevitably results in “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” In the current period, it says, these contending classes are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – the capitalist class that owns the means of production, and the working class that lives by selling its labor power to the capitalists. It outlines the historical development of these two classes, and their trajectory moving forward. 

Marx and Engels explain the contemporary, bourgeois epoch like this: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” And they emphasize, capitalism’s predatory internal logic reshapes the world in its image. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” 

Here, also, Marx and Engels put forward the basic principle of historical materialism, that social progress is driven by the contradiction in any given historical mode of production between the forces of production and the relations of production. As the Manifesto states, “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 be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.” 

Marx and Engels explain how, in capitalist society, the relations of production – that is, the class relations of ownership and power – likewise hold back the development of the productive forces, resulting in crises of overproduction:

“The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for 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 the revolutionary 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.”

Following the sweeping analysis of the first chapter, which gives a picture of the terrain of struggle and the laws of motion driving things, the second chapter explains the aims of the communists: “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” 

The Manifesto explains the goal of socialism is to abolish all “class antagonisms and … classes generally.” This is an explanation, in a very concise and sweeping form, of the transition period from capitalism to communism, which Marx elsewhere calls the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

“Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

This is the first phase of socialism, the transition from capitalism to communism, where the working class wields state power in order to systematically uproot “the conditions for the existence” of classes. By doing this it abolishes the need for a state as such, as “the organized power of one class for oppressing another,” thus making possible a new stateless and classless world. Marx elaborates on this in his Critique of Gotha Program and Lenin further develops this in The State and Revolution. 

In the third chapter, Marx and Engels distinguish scientific socialism from various forms or reactionary, conservative, and utopian socialist movements. Here, Marx and Engels are dealing with their predecessors and their contemporaries: Moses Hess, Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. 

Finally, in the last section, they distinguish the Communist League from other parties and revolutionary forces. They explain that “the Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.” They explain that in different places, they forge alliances with different class forces based on the concrete conditions in which those struggles find themselves. “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” 

The Manifesto boldly and courageously declares that “the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Many opportunists today, who insist on equivocating on their positions, would do well to remember this important principled stand. “Let the ruling classes tremble,” the Manifesto says. No attempt at liberal respectability will protect them whenever the ruling class inevitably decides to show its teeth. The capitalists know who their enemy is, and so must we. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” 

The Manifesto in practice 

In March of 1850, Marx gave his famous “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League,” where he explains the practical implications of his theory, from the perspective of the concrete conditions of the revolutionary movement at the time. In this speech, Marx ends with the call for “permanent revolution.” This is a term that has been twisted away from Marx’s intent by the Trotskyites, who only confuse things by using the slogan to name Trotsky’s theory of world-wide-revolution-or-nothing, which Lenin called “absurdly Left.” For the Trotskyites, it is a matter of the workers fighting alone against capitalism, everywhere at once. By “permanent revolution,” Marx and Lenin mean advancing the revolution from the bourgeois democratic to the proletarian socialist stage, while Trotsky, on the other hand, means revolution can only succeed by spreading immediately from one country to all countries, with the working class alone fighting against all non-proletarian classes. 

Marx and Lenin advocated revolution in two stages, uniting with other classes, and establishing and consolidating socialism one country at a time. When Marx talked about permanent revolution in this address, he clearly intended this to mean that the revolutionary upsurge must not halt at the democratic stage, but that the working class must lead it forward into its second, proletarian socialist stage. As Marx puts it, 

“While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible … it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.”

Indeed, Marx gives us sound and practical advice that resonates today as we work to build a united front against monopoly capitalism. He says, “The relationship of the revolutionary workers’ party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it cooperates with them against the party which they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position.” 

But Marx insists on what Mao Zedong would later refer to as “independence and initiative in the united front.” The working class must be independently organized and prepared to resist the reactionary turn of the bourgeois class forces following the bourgeois democratic stage, where they will attempt to consolidate their power at the expense of the working class. Thus, in order to be prepared to carry the revolution forward to its second, proletarian socialist stage, “To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory,” Marx says, “the workers must be armed and organized.” Marx also insists that “alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments.” Marx and Engels organized to see this come to fruition, but this was first put into practice with lasting success in the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. 

The Manifesto today

Today we live in the era of imperialism. Since the 1970s imperialism has been in a state of prolonged decline. Its defeat is inevitable, but in the meanwhile, like a cornered and wounded animal, it is fighting fiercely. U.S. imperialism is waging war at home and abroad, and we are seeing powerful mass movements mobilizing against it. Militant resistance is coming from the student encampments and building occupations protesting the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people. These heroic students are facing tremendous repression with courage, knowing they are on the right side of history. Likewise, people are also organizing to resist border militarization, to oppose police brutality, to protect the environment, to stop attacks on women and LGBTQ people, and workers are unionizing and going on strike. People everywhere are fighting back. But in order to advance in a strategic way, and turn resistance into revolution, we need to build a new, Marxist-Leninist communist party. The lessons of the Manifesto and the “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League” can help us find our way forward, just as they did for so many workers and oppressed people who came before us.

The importance of the Communist Manifesto, and the “Address,” which explained the practical, revolutionary work that the Manifesto outlined in theory, cannot be overstated. We see in these works, for the first time, a truly revolutionary, working-class program, together with the struggle to carry out that program in practice. These works clearly demonstrate that Marx and Engels were revolutionaries, and studying these works ought to expose every opportunist and revisionist who argues for a reformist, social-democratic, or merely academic reading of Marx. They expose all of those who would say that Marx wasn’t a revolutionary, and that Marxists shouldn’t be either. Marxism lays bare the laws at work in history and shows the way forward, and that way forward is a revolutionary road.

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

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Karl Marx is best known in the realm of political economy for his great work, Capital. Marx is the original theorist, together with his associate Friedrich Engels, of scientific socialism. Marx wrote Capital in order to expose the inner workings of capitalism, so that workers could understand the system behind their exploitation, how this system arose historically, and the laws of motion inherent within it.

While Marx was writing Capital, he gave a lecture over two separate meetings to the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, the First International. This was in June of 1865. This important lecture was published after Marx’s death in the form of a small pamphlet titled Wages, Price, and Profit, edited by Marx’s daughter, Eleanor Marx. It has also been published under the title Value, Price, and Profit. This important text summarizes some of the key ideas of Capital that he was engaged with writing at the time. 

The purpose of the lecture was to respond to John Weston, a follower of the utopian socialist Robert Owen. In a letter to Engels from May 20, 1865, Marx explains Weston’s position: “(1) that a general rise in the rate of wages would be of no use to the workers; (2) that therefore, etc., the trade unions have a harmful effect.” He goes on to elaborate that Weston’s “two main points are: (1) That the wages of labor determine the value of commodities, (2) that if the capitalists pay five instead of four shillings today, they will sell their commodities for five instead of four shillings tomorrow (being enabled to do so by the increased demand).” Marx ridicules these points, but notes that refuting them will be no simple task. “You can’t compress a course of political economy into one hour,” he writes, “But we shall have to do our best.”

So here we will further compress Marx’s already very concise argument, doing our best to draw out the main threads of his response to Weston and show why it is important to study this important work.

Marx’s argument

Marx summarizes Weston’s views like this: “If the working class forces the capitalist class to pay five shillings instead of four shillings in the shape of money wages, the capitalist will return in the shape of commodities four shillings' worth instead of five shillings' worth. The working class would have to pay five shillings for what, before the rise of wages, they bought with four shillings.” Put another way, Marx writes that, “reduced to their simplest theoretical expression,” Weston’s arguments are simply expressed as follows: “’The prices of commodities are determined or regulated by wages.’”

How so? Basically, according to Weston’s view, an increase in wages for the working class will increase its purchasing power, which will, in turn, increase demand relative to supply, thereby raising the price of commodities alongside the raise in wages. We’ve all heard this argument before. If the working class wins an increase in wages, then capitalists will simply raise prices to make up the difference, and nothing will have been accomplished. 

Ultimately, Marx notes, Weston’s argument goes nowhere. 

“First he told us that wages regulate the price of commodities and that consequently when wages rise prices must rise. Then he turned round to show us that a rise of wages will be no good because the prices of commodities had risen, and because wages were indeed measured by the prices of the commodities upon which they are spent. Thus we begin by saying that the value of labor determines the value of commodities, and we wind up by saying that the value of commodities determines the value of labor. Thus we move to and fro in the most vicious circle, and arrive at no conclusion at all.” 

In other words, Marx writes, we are left with “value determined by value,” which really tells us nothing at all about value, but rather, only obscures what is really going on. Marx stresses that the will of all capitalists is everywhere the same: to achieve the highest rate of profit. He says, “The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire into his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.”

To push beyond this impasse, Marx explains the labor theory of value, that is, the creation of value by labor. Marx here points out that we must understand commodities as “crystallized social labor.” He goes on to explain it like this. “A commodity has a value, because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production. The relative values of commodities are, therefore, determined by the respective quantities or amounts of labor, worked up, realized, fixed in them.” Marx then says that “As a general law we may, therefore, set it down that: — The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.” 

But what does this tell us about the value of labor, which is the crux of this debate? To Marx, this misstates the question. Why? “What the working man sells is not directly his labor, but his laboring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist.” The real question, then, concerns the value of labor power. Marx tells us that “Like that of every other commodity, its value is determined by the quantity of labor necessary to produce it.” In other words, the value of labor power is determined by the labor that goes into the production of the basic needs of the workers, which allows them to go on living and working. If the basic necessities of the worker aren’t met, then, obviously, the worker can’t work. Marx sums it up by stating that “the value of laboring power is determined by the value of the necessaries required to produce, develop, maintain, and perpetuate the laboring power.” 

By understanding the value of labor power in this way, Marx is able to uncover the key of capitalist exploitation: the production of surplus value. Marx notes, “The daily or weekly value of the laboring power is quite distinct from the daily or weekly exercise of that power.” It is worthwhile to quote Marx at length here as he explains the theory of surplus-value: 

“The quantity of labor by which the value of the workman's laboring power is limited forms by no means a limit to the quantity of labor which his laboring power is apt to perform. Take the example of our spinner. We have seen that, to daily reproduce his laboring power, he must daily reproduce a value of three shillings, which he will do by working six hours daily. But this does not disable him from working ten or twelve or more hours a day. But by paying the daily or weekly value of the spinner's laboring power the capitalist has acquired the right of using that laboring power during the whole day or week. He will, therefore, make him work say, daily, twelve hours. Over and above the six hours required to replace his wages, or the value of his laboring power, he will, therefore, have to work six other hours, which I shall call hours of surplus labor, which surplus labor will realize itself in a surplus value and a surplus produce. If our spinner, for example, by his daily labor of six hours, added three shillings' value to the cotton, a value forming an exact equivalent to his wages, he will, in twelve hours, add six shillings' worth to the cotton, and produce a proportional surplus of yarn. As he has sold his laboring power to the capitalist, the whole value of produce created by him belongs to the capitalist, the owner pro tem. of his laboring power. By advancing three shillings, the capitalist will, therefore, realize a value of six shillings, because, advancing a value in which six hours of labor are crystallized, he will receive in return a value in which twelve hours of labor are crystallized. By repeating this same process daily, the capitalist will daily advance three shillings and daily pocket six shillings, one half of which will go to pay wages anew, and the other half of which will form surplus value, for which the capitalist pays no equivalent. It is this sort of exchange between capital and labor upon which capitalistic production, or the wages system, is founded, and which must constantly result in reproducing the working man as a working man, and the capitalist as a capitalist.”

Marx then makes a crucial point. He writes that “although one part only of the workman's daily labor is paid, while the other part is unpaid, and while that unpaid or surplus labor constitutes exactly the fund out of which surplus value or profit is formed, it seems as if the aggregate labor was paid labor.” In other words, by means of this shell game, the capitalist makes it look like the worker was paid fairly. “This false appearance distinguishes wages labor from other historical forms of labor,” writes Marx. “On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labor seems to be paid labor.”

By increasing the amount of labor power expended beyond that which is necessary to cover the cost of the worker’s wages, the capitalist can increase the rate of surplus-value, that is, the rate of exploitation. And competition among the capitalists demands that they always strive to increase this rate of exploitation, becoming more and more efficient in their machinery and techniques, or else be devoured by those who do. 

It isn’t possible in this short article to get into all of the important distinctions and clarifications that Marx makes in regard to how this functions, but it is important to understand. In this regard, it is essential to study the text of Wages, Price, and Profit itself. But it is necessary to highlight a final point.

Marx emphasizes that the development of more advanced machinery and techniques, that is, more advanced productive forces, makes it possible to produce more with less labor. While this is essential to the capitalist’s survival within the system, it also has the long-term tendency of driving down the value of human labor power. This is at the root of declining wages under capitalism, and contributes to the cyclical crises that plague capitalism. Marx explains, “These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favor of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labor more or less to its minimum limit.”

Because of this, and contrary to Weston’s view, it is all the more essential for workers to organize. Marx writes, “Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital.” But, he notes, they fail over the long term against this encroachment because they limit themselves to addressing the symptoms, rather than the causes, of capitalist exploitation. The working class, Marx says, “ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady.”

Therefore, Marx stresses that while these resistance struggles are unavoidable and necessary, the working class cannot stop there. “They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!“

Wages, Price, and Profit today

Today we always hear the same arguments from those who would preserve the current class structure: the capitalists will simply raise prices to offset workers’ wages. This argument is trotted out whenever workers start to organize to fight back. But Marx explains that capitalism is governed by laws, not simply by the whims of even the most powerful and greedy capitalists. To say, as Weston did, that commodity prices are determined by wages, is a naive, superficial view that obscures what is really happening and is intended to make working class struggle for better wages look pointless. This argument does the ideological work of the bourgeoisie and helps to preserve the status quo of capitalist exploitation.

Marx stresses a point driven home later by Lenin in his struggle against the Economists in Russia: if the working class limits itself to this economic struggle alone it will always be on the defensive, fighting a valiant but losing battle as real wages continue to be driven down in a crisis-ridden system. In order to turn the tide, it is also necessary to go on the offensive, to wage a revolutionary, political struggle for working class state power and the abolition of the capitalist system as such. 

Wages, Price, and Profit is essential reading for all working people. It is an important weapon in the ideological arsenal of the working class. It is a theoretical weapon against those who say the economic struggle against capital is fruitless and in vain. And it is also a weapon against those who say that such an economic struggle alone is enough. 

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

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Today we are launching a new series on Marxist-Leninist theory, focusing on important texts from the principal theorists of Marxism-Leninism: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. In these short reviews, we will look briefly at the historical context of the text, we will break down the main argument and points, and we will talk about how the text remains relevant and applicable to revolutionaries today. We will begin with Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, by Friedrich Engels.

The pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific was published in 1890, and is extracted from a larger work on Marxist philosophy by Engels, called Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science, from 1877. That book is a response to the work of Professor Karl Eugen Dühring. Dühring criticized Marxism from an idealist and utopian position, and Engel’s book takes the opportunity to answer Dühring and explain clearly and systematically the philosophical and scientific theories of Marxism.

Paul Lafargue, a leading socialist in France and son-in-law to Karl Marx, requested that the text of Socialism, Utopian and Scientific be published as a small pamphlet. The pamphlet was immediately very popular. Engels writes in the introduction to the 1892 English edition, “I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often translated.”

The book begins with an analysis of Utopian Socialism, particularly in France. But first, in his introduction to the English edition, Engels gives us an analysis of the historical development of religious thinking among the English bourgeoisie. Here, Engels writes, “The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three great, decisive battles.” These are the Protestant Reformation, the English Revolution, and the French Revolution. He also notes the enormous impact of the industrial revolution and the social revolutions of 1848. Engels traces the role of idealist and materialist thought through these struggles. He writes that “Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution, the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion.” He goes on to note, “The more materialism spread from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism and free thought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck to its manifold religious creeds.”

Engels’ point here is to contextualize, for his readers among the English working class, the text that follows, which deals with the development of socialist thought in France.

Utopian socialism

Engels begins his analysis of the origins of contemporary socialism, writing,

“Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.”

Engels writes that these philosophers were “extreme revolutionists” who believed that “everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence.” According to them, writes Engels,

“Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.”

But Engels stresses “We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie.” Engels emphasizes an important Marxist point here: that ideology and class are bound up together, that the dominant ideas in society are determined by the dominant class in society. Therefore, “this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice … this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law … bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and … the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic.” Engels sums this point up, by saying that these bourgeois social philosophers of the 18th century “could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.”

And yet, returning to the “three great, decisive battles of the Reformation, the English Revolution, and the French Revolution, Engels points out, “in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants’ War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.“ In this way Engels acknowledges that there are two ideologies in conflict in developing capitalist society: the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie, liberalism, and the revolutionary ideology of the proletariat, socialism. This latter current of thought gives rise to the “three great Utopians,” Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen.

Engels notes that these founders of utopian socialism were also limited by the conditions in which they found themselves. “The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain.” Engels explains this further, saying

“Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.”

These utopians were still working within the idealist framework they had inherited from the bourgeois philosophers who were their immediate predecessors. “To all these, Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power,” writes Engels. “And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered.”

Dialectics

However well meaning they may have been, the utopian founders of modern socialism were unable to place socialism on a scientific basis. On the one hand, as Engels put it, “To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories.” Capitalism in its infancy was based in the workshop handicraft industry, which began in the 16th century and would last through the middle of the 18th century. The period of the development of large-scale mechanized industry had only just begun when the utopians were writing. On the other hand, the utopians lacked the methodology to analyze capitalist development. Engels notes that “the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated” by metaphysics.

What does this mean? What is metaphysics? Engels puts it like this.

“To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. … For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.”

Engels contrasts this mode of thinking with dialectics, which he says, “comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending.”

In other words, metaphysics sees things as absolute, eternal, fixed, and isolated, while dialectics sees things as always in motion, developing in relation to one-another, as the result of conflict and struggle. This dialectical methodology finds its philosophical expression in the system of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel. Engels explains, “In this system – and herein is its great merit – for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process – i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.”

This was a huge step forward, but Hegel still wasn’t able to separate his dialectical method from his fundamentally idealist worldview. He still understood historical development as being driven by ideas, and ultimately, by God. It was Marx, by understanding that historical change and social transformation are driven by material processes, namely by class struggle, who put dialectics on a materialist basis. As Engels put it, “Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's ‘knowing’ by his ‘being’, instead of, as heretofore, his ‘being’ by his ‘knowing’.”

Until this point, the utopians sought to theorize socialist society in an idealist and metaphysical way. They didn’t understand the laws of motion of capitalist society, nor did they understand the historic mission of the proletariat to bring class society, exploitation and oppression, to an end. As a result, none of their theories or experiments could bear fruit.

Marx, on the other hand, was able to demonstrate, as Engels notes,

“…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both explained.”

“These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science.”

Historical materialism

The section “Historical Materialism” brings us to the culmination of Engels’s pamphlet. Here he explains the scientific conclusions drawn by applying dialectical materialism to the study of historical development. Engels gives the following general sketch of what historical materialism means:

“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 men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”

Engels explains the core terms used by historical materialism to understand this process: namely, the mode of production, and within that, the forces and relations of production. The mode of production is the way that society organizes the production and distribution of human wants and needs. The forces of production are the tools, factories, farms, and techniques of labor used in that production. And the relations of production are the concrete relationships of ownership and power that govern who does the work and reaps the profits of that work, the class relations of society.

Engels then gives us a sweeping overview of historical materialism. He explains how the division of labor under capitalism gives to the productive forces a social character, carried out by the working class as a whole, while ownership of the means of production and the accumulation of wealth remains private, hoarded by the capitalists. He explains how this fundamental contradiction inherent in capitalism drives the entire system towards crisis. And he explains that the proletariat has an historic mission to abolish “all class distinction and class antagonisms.” He explains that the state arises from class antagonism, and that by abolishing class antagonism, the state “dies out of itself,” or, as Lenin would later put it, “withers away.”

Engels writes, “Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization,” and “The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him.” Truly, this is what scientific socialism, that is, Marxism-Leninism, gives to us: an understanding of the laws that govern social development, so that we can use those laws to abolish exploitation and oppression once and for all. Thus, Engels concludes that “To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat.”

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific today

Anyone interested in social change should read this important pamphlet by Engels. Today, we see all around us various “socialists” who fail to understand the need for dialectical and historical materialism, and so are unable to make their ideas bear fruit. Like the utopians then, today we have various currents of progressive liberals, anarchists, and social democrats, all with their own condemnations of capitalism’s ills, and their own pie-in-the-sky solutions. Like the utopians, they don’t understand the laws of motion that govern social transformation, and they don’t understand that the working class, the proletariat, has a historic mission that only it can achieve. But unlike the utopians, today we have Marxism. We have the theory of dialectical and historical materialism, so we can approach the problems of revolution in a scientific way.

Our job before us today is a big one. We need to bring proletarian ideology home to the workers’ movement, to fuse Marxism with the working-class movement so that workers can get a clear picture of the methods of their exploitation, and the means by which to overcome it. And we need to build a revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist party that can carry out this historic mission to overthrow all existing social relations and build a new, socialist society. Studying this pamphlet by Engels is important to give us the theoretical weapons we need to carry out these tasks.

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

#RevolutionaryTheory #RedReviews #MarxismLeninism #Engels #Marx

Chicago, IL – Karl Marx observed over a 150 years ago that “the biggest thing happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”

According to Marx, the defining event leading up to the Civil War was not the Slaveholders’ Rebellion announced by the cannon fire on Fort Sumter but the raid on Harpers Ferry led by John Brown and Shields Green – a Black and white band of abolitionists. In other words, the movement of the slaves inspired by Harpers Ferry, and the election of a president – Lincoln – who was opposed to the unbridled expansion of chattel slavery, were the indispensable preconditions for Civil War.

In a certain sense the movement of the slaves was already fermenting revolution. The secession of the slave states was really a counter-revolution before the revolution. This is precisely why Marx characterized the secession as the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion.” He understood that what the South was fighting for was the liberty to enslave Black people and to turn the United States into a slave republic.

Marx writes that “the North, after a long hesitation and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history, drew at last the sword not for crushing slavery, but for saving the union, the South, on its part, inaugurated the war by loudly proclaiming ‘the peculiar institution’ as the only and main end of the rebellion. It confessed to fighting for the liberty of enslaving other people...”

Harriet Beecher Stowe also clearly stated the aims of the slaveholders, said she: “The slave party, finding they could no longer use the Union for their purposes, resolved to destroy it.”

The slave party, in alliance with the northern Democratic Party and its precursors, had a diplomatic history of one compromise after another, from inscribing in the Constitution that Black people were three-fifths human, to the Fugitive Slave Acts, to the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, and right on up until the Union was made the “slave of the slaveholder.”

War was inevitable because the slave party was hell bent on removing every legal barrier to the expansion of slavery into the territories. The movement of slaves and their allies were uniting with the “Free Soilers” to stop the expansion of slavery. Now it became a question for the South not only to taint the democratic institutions of the North and Northwest with the stench of slavery but to overturn the democratic institutions all together. The war waged by the South was not a war of defense but a war of conquest.

Hence a new era of revolutionary struggle is born in the raid on Harpers Ferry and the blast of cannon fire on Fort Sumpter.

Marx understood, way before Lincoln or before anyone except for Frederick Douglas and the revolutionary abolitionists, that not only was this a war fought for slavery; he recognized the revolutionary role of the slaves in winning the war and ending slavery. Being that he gave detailed attention to the movement of the slaves and the program of liberation of Black people, he supported their demands for emancipation, the right to bear arms, the demands for land and social equality.

Once the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and freed slaves were inducted into the armed services, Marx and the revolutionary abolitionists knew that the death knell of slavery had been sounded – that the Civil War had went from being a constitutional war aimed at keeping slavery in the Union to a revolutionary war aimed at smashing the Slaveholders’ Rebellion, thus liberating the slaves.

I have taken the liberty of sharing Marx’s analysis of how the Slaveholders’ Rebellion had to be defeated by revolutionary means, bringing about Black liberation, because I believe this can help us in understanding what needs to be done today.

There has been a lot of popcorn analyses comparing the events of January 6, when white supremacists stormed the Capitol, with the launching of the Civil War in 1861. This is because the Civil War was also clearly a fight for the ‘liberty’ to enslave our people. And like the white supremacists then, Trump and his crew were hell bent on ignoring every barrier prohibiting them from wielding power.

Since the overthrow of Reconstruction, i.e., the ending by violence and terror the revolutionary gains of the Civil War, there is a whole other history of alliances and compromises between the old former slaveholding South and the high finance northern capitalist to continue the oppression and super-exploitation of Black people. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution – abolishing slavery, granting citizenship as a birth right, equal protection of rights and the right to vote – were kept on paper but not fully enforced ‘til this day.

The white supremacist attempted coup on January 6 had the explicit aim of overturning the presidential election of November 3, 2020 by disenfranchising millions of Black and brown voters. It is not enough that the ultra-right has already reversed affirmative action and gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they want the total use of government to enforce their extremist white racist agenda. They want undisputed power to continue police tyranny in our communities, to perpetrate mass incarceration as the New Jim Crow, to plunder the national treasury, give tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for the poor and so on. When the masses rise up and fight back not only with protests in the streets but in the electoral arena at the ballot box, the MAGA white supremacist thugs are unleashed by their commander in chief against the very government that up to now has been loyal to them and has given their leader, Trump, unprecedented executive power.

This is not 1861. This 2021, but we live in the shadow of the unfinished revolution started by the last Civil War. To go forward we must muster the masses the get Trump and his racist regime out, we must do so while at the same time firmly and unequivocally putting forth an agenda for Black, and Chicano/Latino liberation, along with a class struggle agenda for hundreds of thousands of workers who are dying and suffering from this COVID-19 health crisis and economic devastation

It is incumbent on us to demand that Congress must end this white-supremacist revolt, by fully restoring the Voting Rights Act, expanding the Civil Rights Act to mandate that Black and brown people have the right to determine who polices their communities and how their communities are policed and to defund the police. They must end mass incarceration and grant reparations for the slavery and genocide perpetrated against our people. We don't just want Trump and his cohorts held accountable, we want to end this racist tyranny with Black liberation.

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