In my Modern Philosophy course we focus on the younger Marx and discuss Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. One question we raised is why Marx and Engels reject achieving socialism by democratic and reformist methods. Why the insistence upon violent revolution?
Here’s Marx in an 1848 newspaper article: “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
One set of reasons is about impatience with political change in a democracy or republic. To be successful in those systems, socialists must first get organized. But that will take time, and they will lose elections. Finally, they’ll win some elections, but still be a minority in the lower legislative chamber. After more time, they’ll get a majority in the lower chamber, but legislation will be vetoed by the upper chamber. Eventually the socialists may also get a majority in the upper chamber, but their bills will be vetoed by the president and/or the judiciary. At the same time, the education and journalism establishments will be against socialism or become reformist slowly. Even if socialists overcome all of the above obstacles, the rich bourgeoisie will bribe whomever to stay in power. Or they’ll use the police and military to suppress threats. Who has the patience to endure all of that?
But for Marxism there is stronger philosophical reason that rules out democratic reformism: environmental determinism. Marx holds that except as a malleable potential, there is no human nature — “the human essence has no true reality,” wrote the early Marx. Consequently, humans are plastic and shaped by their circumstances. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their lives,” Marx wrote, “but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
The word “social” is important in that quotation: the determining circumstances are fundamentally social. Marx sees individuals as vehicles of collectives and not as autonomous individuals:
“Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are a social activity and social mind.” And again: the individual “exists in reality as the representation and the real mind of social existence.”
Further, it is their economic circumstances that are the fundamental social-environmental forces. In Marx’s words, for example:
“As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”
So Marxism is committed to collective, economic determinism. Anyone’s belief system is a necessary consequence of their economic social being. What we think is true, reasonable, and good is determined by the economic circumstances in which we are raised.
What of the capitalist economic system in particular? Marx holds that capitalism divides people into polarized economic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Members of the two classes are born and raised in fundamentally different and opposed economic circumstances.
“In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole.”
This set of economic circumstances combined with environmental determinism means that the bourgeoisie are conditioned to one set of truths about what’s reasonable and good while the proletariat are conditioned to an opposite set of truths about what’s reasonable and good.
Given their conditioning, there is no way for individuals of different classes to communicate effectively with each other, to understand the other’s position, to change the other’s mind. Each side has been molded to embody an opposed set of beliefs.
It follows that for Marxism the democratic process is a pointless sham. Democracy presupposes the effectiveness of reason — that individuals can observe, think, and judge for themselves, that they can learn from experience, be open to argument, and change their minds. Marxism, however, rules that out on epistemological principle: knowledge is conditioning, not rational judgment.
In final consequence, it follows that when differently-conditioned individuals meet, the conflict can be resolved only by force. Socialists cannot argue capitalists into socialism. They cannot objectively present reasons or appeal to reason. They can only take over by violence and remove their social enemies. As Engels put it longingly in 1849:
“The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.” (Source: “The Magyar Struggle”).
That’s also a big part of the explanation for the post-Marx-and-Engels socialist tradition of violence: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guzmán, Hobsbawm, and the rest of that long, long, list. Often, philosophy drives politics.
Related: “The Crisis of Socialism” [pdf]. Chapter Five of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. My close reading of Marx and Engels’s 1848 manifesto:
Many readers will be familiar with this quote but it bears repeating in this context. Those confident of their logic do not typically feel the need to undermine it with subterfuges like polylogism.
“Marxism is a revolutionary doctrine. It expressly declares that the design of the prime mover will be accomplished by civil war… The liquidation of all dissenters will establish the undisputed supremacy of the absolute eternal values. This formula for the solution of conflicts of value judgments is certainly not new. It is a device known and practiced from time immemorial. Kill the infidels! Burn the heretics! What is new is merely the fact that today it is sold to the public under the label of ‘science.’”
– Ludwig von Mises, ‘Theory and History’, p. 51
Reply
You seemed to have ignored that Marx observed that violence was very much required in the previous transitions too. Monarchy to feudalism, feudalism to capitalism
Reply
It’s an issue of focus, Bharath: the post’s question is why Marx believed violence was necessary for his preferred system. Whether other systems embody necessary violence is an interesting question, but it is not on topic.
Reply
Sort of what used to be liberals now called Obama’s Demonrats? Followers of MSNBC.
Reply
People of privilege like to have their cake and eat it too. Only the bourgeoisie could feel so entitled that they would be the proponent and demographical enemy of something at the same time. Marxism has never existed in practice. In the end, it is peasants with rifles who determine what exactly Marxism is. What you get at best is Animal Farm, which is the reality of Marxism as opposed to some utopian fairy tale. It also causes brain drain. Why can’t people see that the “dissenters” are quite frequently your most talented, driven, and useful people? The only realistic equality Marxism could create is most everyone having not much of anything. This is why a peasant majority is so crucial to any Marxist movement, such as the Pol Pot model, which was basically force everyone to be peasants regardless of talent, intelligence, education, or motivation. It doesn’t work. It will never work. If you are an educated, successful American Marxist, remind yourself that a Marxist soldier would define you by what you have to “redistribute” as opposed to any bullshit coming out of your mouth. The working class interpretation of Marx is little more than a license to murder and steal from anybody who has substantially more than you. Read Animal Farm and get over this Marxist folly.
Reply
You attack the one percenters and the leader of the huge corporations as the problem. Please tell me why almost all one percenters and huge corporation leaders are in the cult of Liberalism? Why do the super rich and the freeloaders all fight for Socialism and full on hatred of Freedom. Socialism has NEVER worked anywhere EVER. Now you worthless piles of human excrement are publicly advocating the murder of the middle class? I guess the middle class need to consider a preemptive strike to preserve our lives and posterity.
Reply
I guess we should totally omit Europe casually?
Reply
Conflating Socialism and Marxism as one and the same and then using that to attribute the obvious failure of one (Marxism) as therefore inevitable for the other (Socialsim) is totally flawed. One horrendous fatal multi-vehicle highway or motorway accident does not mean you abandon vehicles and walk everywhere.
There are many forms of socialism that have nothing to do with Marx – indeed you could argue he stole ekements from the one kind that truly can succeed – Acts 2:44 socialism.
Conservatives everywhere so hate the possibility that their over-pivileged false-entitlement inequitable lifestyle, mindset system etc., might actually need fixing and might be fixable, that everything liberal or socialist has to be that ‘dangerous pinko commie sh*t’. Even attempts to make basic essential healthcare a given for all citizens gets derided as ‘commie nonsense’. The subtext there is that the poor must deserve to be the way that they are, else they would get a good job ‘like my Pa got me’ and should die in pain and misery to save me a few cents in taxes.
Here in the UK we have a vibrant, loud, messy, crazy but glorious democratic tradition (does not deserve the word system!), that mostly evolved without any proper thought or co-ordination but that we fought two world wars to protect. Like most European countries that tradition includes, amongst others, a dedicated, intelligent, well educated and democratically grounded socialist tradition that the US seems far too scared to allow iself.
Reply
The super rich went to stay in the top of everything where they are and so they are getting ahead of the curve so to speak. Marx never really worked like a real person anytime in his life and angles was the one who bankrolled him after Marx’s inheritance dwindled. These people were 1/4 centers in their day as well as the ones today who support this type of Revolution crap. If they can become the leaders like Lenin and Stalin and others of their type did then they can rule everyone else. Mao was not uneducated. For a while he was a school teacher. His father had been a landowner but of course the Communists are very careful to conceal just how much land Mao’s father owned….
Communism suits the elitists perfectly because it permits them to sniffer the poorest folks into destroying anyone in the middle who could possibly oppose the elitists. Once everyone is crushed down to the same level it begins to look like Cambodia, the film Metropolis, or 1984.
Reply
See, this is the type of person that Marx was talking about. Totally bought into a sham system and is totally willing to abandon reason. How do you “convince” this person? Marx says, don’t bother.
Reply
Non violent protests (Ghandi) evoked violence by the established power giving the victims the high moral ground and proving the violence was the establishment’s suppression of the victims. Change came short of a violent revolution. on the. part of the victims.
Reply
Have you wondered why Marxism/Communism not only attracted many a poor, uneducated people who claimed they were slaves because “evil capitalists” enslavement, but also educated, upper middle class intellectuals?
This brand of ideology is grounded in heroism, a form of “Supermanism”, helping the weak going against the powerful “aliens”.
Yet, Superman never encourages the “suppressed, weak, poor, pitiful” to fill themselves with jealousy, hatred, cunningness, lies, terroists’ mentalites, and use these lowest end negative emotions to fight “aliens” .
Marxism is terroism justified by utopianism, its selling gimmick being heroism.
Beware of a certain communist country which has grown rich through deceit and hidden agendas in the last 30+ years. It is infiltrating other countries, rich and poor, through corruption, sex and loans.
Reply
Conflating Socialism and Marxism as one and the same and then using that to attribute the obvious failure of one (Marxism) as therefore inevitable for the other (Socialsim) is totally flawed
The question is whether socialism relies on the same assumptions. I don’t know of any “form of socialism” that doesn’t
make the same assumption as Marx does with his concept of surplus value: That there is some value that a given group is contributing to the economy that another group is, improperly, getting most of the benefits from (Proletarians V Capitalists in Marx’s estimation). Moreover, precious few, if any, fail to include goverment as the proper mechanism for correcting this percieved problem.
“One horrendous fatal multi-vehicle highway or motorway accident does not mean you abandon vehicles and walk everywhere.”
One? Are you describing Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Poland, East Germany, Vietnam, Cambodia, Czechlosavakia, Cuba, Hungary, Bulgaria, North Korea, Laos etc as one fatality? While you wouldn’t abandon vehicles you would probably abandon highway construction that led to increasing fatalities or more appropriately you would abandon the type of decisions that led to
such fatalities as in introducing defensive driving.
Reply
Where do you see the conflation?
Reply
I see socialism and communism as the self-driving automobile thrown into the middle of ordinary traffic driven by human beings. Just as neither of these two philosophies recognizes what reality is so self-driving car is still do not recognize what people, baby carriages, dogs, cats, are. Those things run over everything in discriminately that is not a building or another automobile. The fatalities associated with self-driving automobiles have proven this already.
But then, who controls the computers that drive these things?
Reply
The conflation is in the final paragraph. “Socialists cannot argue capitalists into socialism. They cannot objectively present reasons or appeal to reason. They can only take over by violence and remove their social enemies.” If the argument was sound (which I very much doubt) the only conclusion you would be permitted to make would be that ‘Marxists cannot argue capitalists into Marxism…’ It is a rather obvious and egregious conflation of Marxism with socialism.
Reply
Ah, you’re dropping context, Jon. The article is about Marx’s philosophy, so that claim is about socialism from the Marxist perspective.
Reply
What about terror and violence to maintain the ruling class’s status quo ruling petition?
At 6:05 today (12/18/2018) a local radio station affiliate of National Public Radio reported the news that the USA’s Commonwealth of Kentucky (a coal-producing state, for those of you not familiar with it) just de-certified half the number of physicians authorized to diagnose black lung disease. The number of such physicians in the whole state is now 5–count them, five!!! Kentucky traverses about 400 miles on its longest axis [East-West]. It is also largely mountainous. mountainous. And on a larger scale: according to one report compiled earlier this year: The USA has military engaged in combat roles in 192 foreign countries. 192! Obviously violence and terror is very widely required just to maintain the present socio-economic order. I will pass overran silence how easily black males in American can be killed with impunity by law enforcement .
Reply
“Equal protection under the law?”
I’m wondering if the ends justify the means. I’m happy with any government that truly wants to protect people. That doesn’t happen when the people draw lines in the sand.
It’s a question if capital creates a higher sense of self-importance in people than anything else. It feels like it does in many cases.
Reply
Can real democracy and violence go together? In the Communist Manifesto right at the beginning we read that the coming to power of the working class signifies victory of democracy( This is because this class constitute the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority. In this case violence can only be minimal. Rosa Luxemburg underlined that a workers’ revolution does not need terror. The point is , till now almost all Seizures of power was the job of a minority which needed suppression of the opposition by force.In fact the seizures of power were carried out by the a small circle of intelligentsia IN THE NAME OF THE MAJORITY’ THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS.
Reply
Everyone seems to forget one important thing. All the countries that were violently overthrown and turned into commuist dictatorships has an unarmed citizenry who couldn’t fight back. That is not the case here, as these commuist scum will soon find out the hard way.
Reply
Great article!
It’s is a bit strange how socialists keep bringing up Acts 2:44 as if that was some kind of socialism. They fail to read the chapter to see that about 3,000 people from different cities and countries became Believer’s, and decided to stay longer than they had planned to hear more about this Gospel. They didn’t plan on staying longer, so they didn’t have provisions for extra day. 3,000 is a lot of people, so they all brought their stuff together and spread it around ONLY AMONG the Believer’s, to make sure everyone had what they needed for the next few days. As Believer’s they considered each other family, and family JUST takes care of each other. That’s not socialism, that’s just being family to family, or a good host to those staying with you.
Socialists also like to pretend that they OWN the concept of good will, gifts, offerings, helping the needy, feeding the poor, taking care of others, yet it has been the character of good humans long before socialism was a thing. One of the greatest attributes of Capitalism is free will charity. The richest 1%, sure, have some problems and there are greedy people in every social sphere, but you cannot discount all the charity and lives changed and touched by the good-will of the richest people. America would be in a much worse way if Capitalists stopped charitable giving. Socialists are morons because all their arguments are based on fallacious logic.
Marxism, despite what others claim, HAS worked. It has worked nearly every time. Just look at the evidence of the fruit produced by it every time. It has always produced very specific fruit: Segregation, Justified Violence, Weaponized jealousy, Fallacious Logic with Ad Hominem as it’s only response to authentic facts, and verified evidence to opposing views, Economic crash, Authoritarianism, Abolition of Individual / Constitutional rights, Revolution against the people in the name of the people, starvation, labor camps, genocide. — the fruit is evidence that the ideology has worked and works perfectly as it was designed.
Reply
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
-Hannah Arendt-
“For Arendt, the freedom of speech means that we will always hear other opinions, other perspectives, and other arguments than our own. Free speech is the foundation of all expansive and right thinking. ‘Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.’
The world is not something that can be true or false; it is plural and must be enjoyed and also preserved in that plurality. Freedom of speech is what defends that plurality.”
Reply
What people seem to forget when discussing Marx is that he was born in the middle of “the Age of Revolution”. Hit the wiki on this for a few examples. You had the American Revolution (1776-1783), the French Revolution (1789-1799), the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), United Irishman’s rebellion (1798), Serbian Revolution (1804-1835) and the list goes on and on and on (and the Communist Manifesto dates 1848, just to get a sense of the timeline here). The world around Marx was ablaze with revolutions, violence and overthrowing of oppressive systems by these last resort tactics. In his writings he was not proposing some revolutionary design; he was making sense of recent history and the world around him, seeking explanatory models and arguing when and why societies gravitate towards violent revolution. He and Engels anticipated more of such developments in their own world, but that is not the same as proposing them. Like others in his time, he sought to explain why populations might feel it is necessary to engage in civil war or revolution, and observed dynamics in society that could lead to a repetition of these patterns.
Unfortunately, when speaking of Marxism, people think of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and their Russian revolution (1917, 34 years after Marx’s death). The Bolsheviks considered violence quite unproblematic, as have other Communist regimes since. These groups considered the Communist Manifesto supportive of their cause, but if it wasn’t for that work, they would have found something else to justify their revolutions. These global transformative movements and revolutions started long before that manifesto was ever written, and the socio-political tensions leading to them where there despite the manifesto, not because of it.
Reply
Your analysis is substantive. In fact Marx inoculated the seed of hatred essentially as a mandatory tool. The opposite side is given by jESUS who commanded the love for ourselves and our neighbors. This is the reason why the Marxist doctrine serves to Satan and has devastated and are devastating mankind.
Satan is the father of lie. Marx is a liar and swindler.
Reply