Cork Public Meeting: The Revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx

cork | anti-capitalism | event notice Saturday October 31, 2009 10:29 by Cork Socialist Worker

Public Meeting
The Revolutionary Ideas of Kark Marx
Speaker: Kieran Allen
Victoria Hotel, Patrick Street
Thurs November 5th 8pm

In 1867, Karl Marx published his famous book, Capital. He began research a decade earlier after a banking crisis collapse in New York triggered a major economic depression. The book revealed the real workings of capitalism in a way that no conventional economist has ever done since. When read against the background of the current economic depression, it sounds almost prophetic.

But what was his alternative?

At first sight, it might appear that Marx only offered a critique. During his early years of political activism, he engaged in debates with the ‘utopian socialists.’ These were figures such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier who devised great plans for a future socialist society, without asking: who would bring it about?

To his credit, Owen set up large communes – including one in Ralahine in Limerick – to show how co-operation was superior to competition. But these communes were dependent on his large inheritance which he generously shared. Fourier, by contrast, had to advertise for a benefactor to meet him in a Paris café to fund his plans. Of course, none turned up.

Marx’s was disdainful of intellectuals who thought ‘they had the solution to all riddles lying in their writing desks’. He was against any dogmatism which claimed a knowledge of the one True Path. While fellow students in the Young Hegelian movement called themselves ‘The Free’ and launched searing attacks on religion, Marx took up the struggles of weavers in Silesia and peasants in Moselle who wanted to gather firewood from forests owned by landlords.

He summed up his approach as follows:

‘We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles out of the world’s own principles.

‘We do not say to the world see your struggles: Cease your struggle, they are foolish – we will give you the true slogan of struggle.

‘We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness it something it has to acquire, even if it does not want to’.

This method differed from two other approaches that were popular then – and now – on how to bring change.

The first assumed that the mass of people were too indoctrinated by the old regime to be capable of bringing about change. They had to be led by an enlightened minority who worked behind the scenes to foment revolution and install themselves as a ‘revolutionary dictatorship’. In Marx’s time, these ideas were represented by Bounarroti, a supporter of a secret society known as the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’. Elements of this conspiratorial method can be found in the Irish republican tradition.

The second approach advocated early French communists was ‘education of the masses’ through a continual stream of propaganda. But, for Marx this begged a further question: Who teaches the teachers? How did they come by the knowledge to be able to ‘educate the masses’?

Marx’s argued that the working class had to emancipate itself through struggle that came up against the limits of capitalism. Workers might join these struggles without knowing how the system worked or what traps it set if they wanted change. But it was only in the course of such struggles that the working class could become aware of itself as a distinct class whose interests were opposed to their rulers. In other words that ‘consciousness is something it has to acquire, even if it does not want to’.

Let’s apply this method to contemporary Ireland.

Vast numbers of people are raging with the government and are joining in struggle. But to win, they will need to develop an awareness that it is not just Brian Cowen or even the bankers who are causing their problems but the capitalist system itself. If they are not to be ‘sold out’, they will have to learn how union leaders or the Labour Party can talk radical – but only to head off the struggle. That consciousness arises more quickly when socialists promote revolutionary ideas and while they also learn from the movement.

Marx also believed that the seeds of a future socialist society are laid from the way in which working people must organise themselves to impose their will on society.

Think again about contemporary Ireland. According to every official spokesperson, we have to undergo four more years of ferocious cuts that will be twice as bad as those we are witnessing today. To stop these attacks, workers need a general stoppage – most probably built from below. But that can only occur, if there is a profound democratic spirit in the workers movement.

Those who want to turn the current wave of anger into a sad, passive cynicism will try to avoid mass meetings and will suggest leaving matters to union leaders. If mass meetings occur, they will try to mystify people with formalities. They will use people’s inexperience to preach trust in TDs’ who will set up very important meetings in Dail Eireann.

Socialists, by contrast, promote a real grassroots democracy so that an open contest can be conducted between workers’ fears and their enthusiasm for action. They want to elect leaders who are made accountable so that they cannot be co-opted behind closed doors. They want to send delegates to other workplaces to co-ordinate action from below.

Through such activities grassroots organs are built within the shell of the old capitalist society – but these same organs can lay the basis for a profound extension of democracy in a new society.

Significantly Marx’s writings on the political structures of a socialist society only appeared in The Civil War in France, a short pamphlet rushed out in support of Paris workers who took control of their city in 1871 after they were faced with an invasion of the Prussian army.

That experience showed that the working class ‘ cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield it for its own purpose’. Instead, it had to rule society through the new organs it had created during its struggles.

This form of workers’ democracy differed fundamentally from the limited form of parliamentary democracy which fitted with capitalism.

Representatives were elected for short terms and could be re-called by their electorate. ‘Cheap government’ was made a reality because they were only paid average working wage. The ‘sham independence’ of judges or higher civil servants, which was used to protect privilege, was unmasked and they were made subject to popular control. Instead of a parliamentary talk shop which debated ideas and then transferred power to unelected state official to implement them, the legislative and executive functions were be integrated through mass popular democracy.

Marx’s vision of socialism therefore implied a deeper form of democracy, whose very seeds grew in the struggles of working people today.