capitalism

Marxism 319
both his social theories and the revolution that they
entailed. Many others had argued for communal property,
but the enormous influence of Marx’s thought guaranteed
that modern communism will always be most closely associated
with him and his system, especially in light of the
fact that his economic theory of social ownership was predicated
on the prior development of an industrial society.
Marxism is an intellectual descendant of German idealism,
and particularly of Hegelian thought, which held that
history is the story of the gradual development of man’s
spirit through a series of stages, each one more advanced
than the last. Hegel viewed man’s mind or spirit as progressing
through a series of conflicts and resolutions, and
he viewed the outward manifestation of this process as
identical with “history” in its more conventional sense.
Hegel argued that inner conflicts, present within the leading
men and leading societies of any age, were ultimately
the driving force of economic, political, and cultural
change. These conflicts within the life of the mind in turn
produced the various stages of human history, complete
with their governments, beliefs, arts, and economics.
Marx, however, argued that the conflicts of intellectual and
social life found their ultimate origin in conflicts over
scarce resources and over the ownership of the means of
production for any given epoch.
History, in other words, was fundamentally an economic
phenomenon, not an intellectual one, and economics provided
the key to understanding all the rest. In a famous
phrase of Marx’s, “The hand-mill gives you society with
the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial
capitalist.” More precisely, Marxist thought holds that the
feudal system was predicated on the ownership of land and
the extraction of agricultural land rent as the most important
means of economic production. Because this form of
extraction was the most profitable one available given the
stage of material development at the time, it necessarily
benefited the landlords, whose tastes, cultural values, and
ideas, shaped, as they were, by economic circumstances,
also were the ones that determined the culture of the era. To
a Marxist, feudal forms of government, religion, philosophy,
and art all reflected this basic economic reality.
The end of the feudal period, Marx held, was marked
by revolution, as was the end of any stage of economic
development. Marx believed that this revolution had
occurred in England in the 1640s and in France beginning
in 1789. Marx and his followers explained this transformation
as essentially a transfer of power from the old ruling
class to a new one, the bourgeois or capitalist class. With
the advent of a new stage of economic development, the
bourgeoisie became the chief owners of the means of production
of the new era, and it was their values that predominated
in all other areas of life. Bourgeois government,
religion, philosophy, art—and even science—were held to
be the results of this system of property ownership. As the
Communist Manifesto put it, “The modern bourgeois society
that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has
not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established
new classes, new conditions of oppression, new
forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
Capitalism, for Marx, like all stages, contained the seeds
of its own destruction. In support of this conclusion, Marx
had recourse to the labor theory of value—the notion that
the value of a product is ultimately reducible to the amount
of labor required to produce it. Although in the end Marx
viewed capitalism as destructive, it had at least shown to
the world the nature of this relationship: “Man is at last
compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of
life, and his relations with his kind,” he claimed. These
relations, under capitalism, were merely pecuniary and
increasingly exploitative. Capitalism was based on the theft
of the value of goods, produced by labor, a value exploited
from laborers.
The proletariat, or the working class, Marx believed,
would face ever-increasing poverty and more onerous
working conditions. Capitalists, who held ever more economic,
cultural, and political power, would oppress them
until they reached a breaking point—and then would
come a communist revolution. In this final phase of history,
the proletariat would appropriate the means of production,
namely the entire industrial capital of the world.
It would thereby crush the capitalist class, ending the capitalist
phase of history. At that point, the workers would
set up a socialist society, which would spread the benefits
of industry to all.
The benefits of communism were said to be enormous.
For example, the Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky offered
the following grandiose vision of human enrichment under
communism:
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which
the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he
may carry his technique. Social construction and psychophysical
self-education will become two aspects of one
and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama,
painting, music and architecture will lend this process
beautiful form. ...Man will become immeasurably
stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more
harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice
more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically
dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights
of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.
These are noble-sounding ideals, yet, despite Marx’s
voluminous writings, it is never quite clear how they are to
be achieved. Marx disdained incremental reforms; he
scoffed at the so-called Fabian socialists, who advocated
achieving socialism through gradual legal reforms. He likewise
mistrusted those labor unions that negotiated peacefully
with employers for improved working conditions and