Materialism: Marx and Engels

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels couldn’t have disagreed more with Thomas Carlyle. To Carlyle’s assertion that history was nothing but the biography of great men, Marx and Engels riposted that the history that mattered was mostly devoid of great men. Or small men. What counted were classes. “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles,” they wrote in 1848.

Marx and Engels were German emigres living in London while revolutions rocked the capitals of several other European countries. They employed the moment to produce a manifesto of a new party called the Communists. Their statement doubled as an outline of an alternative theory of human history, one based on the never-ending struggle for control of the material means of human sustenance and enrichment.

Classes were the key to unlocking the human past. “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes,” wrote Marx and Engels.

In each era, the class struggle took a shape characteristic of the age. Lords and serfs were the contenders when agriculture supported Europe. In the 1840s, as machines replaced muscle in the production process, owners of capital faced off against industrial workers. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”

The bourgeoisie was a revolutionary force dissolving the social bonds of the preindustrial era. In this it was a driver—a harsh driver—of history. “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

It was in the nature of the class struggle that the dominant class in any era created its opposite. The bourgeoisie was producing the proletariat. “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself,” Marx and Engels wrote. “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”

The proletarians wouldn’t abide their oppression forever. Other theories of history were projectable forward. Augustine’s providential history would advance generation by generation toward the city of God. Per Carlyle, new heroes would arise to carry humanity through new crises. But neither of those theories forecast a future as specific and imminent as that of Marx and Engel’s materialism.

“Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist,” they wrote. “Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.”

Workers at first were unorganized. Their defensive efforts were unavailing. But industrialization eventually consolidated the proletariat. “With the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.”

The workers discovered their common interests. “The workers begin to form combinations (trades unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.”

The violence intensified and the solidarity of the workers grew. They realized they could improve their condition only by seizing the means of production. “All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.”

Augustine’s Christian vision posited an end to history at the second coming of Jesus. In the materialist thinking of Marx and Engels, history would end when the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie and destroyed the system of private property. Everything would be held in common. The class struggle would be over at last.