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May 5, 2009 - No. 90 May 5, 2009 There Is Only One High Road
of Civilization,
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• There Is Only One High Road of
Civilization, One Way Foward
• Speech at the
Graveside of Karl Marx
- Frederick Engels, March 17, 1883
• The Three Sources and Three
Component Parts of Marxism
- V.I. Lenin, 1913
May 5, 2009
191st
Anniversary of the Birth of Karl Marx
There Is Only One High Road of Civilization,
One Way Foward
Today we are celebrating the 191st anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx at a time all the apologists of capitalism and the bourgeois order see in the crisis nothing but the crisis. They do not see, nor do they want to see, that the class struggle which is sharpening in the midst of the crisis is leading towards the creation of a new historical epoch based on abolishing the exploitation of persons by persons and all its attendant anarchy, oppression, poverty, insecurity and wars.
Marx pointed out: "and now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phrases in the development of production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) bases itself on the Marxist ideas because they reflect the objective laws of social development. They are a guide to the working class in its struggle for emancipation, a great inspiration and a vital spiritual force for the working class to accomplish its aims. Not only do they reflect the laws of social development, they are also a great material force to change the world. As the class struggle becomes more acute and the class and national contradictions sharpen, these ideas are being taken up by an ever greater number of people and are being further developed and enriched in the course of revolutionary practice.
The question of the outcome of the class struggle and the leading role of the working class in revolution constitutes one of the fundamental questions of Marxism and revolutionary strategy. Lenin pointed out: "the main thing in the doctrine of Marx is the explanation of the world historic role of the proletariat, as the creator of socialist society." Lenin stressed that it is always important to ascertain "which class stands at the hub of one epoch or another, determining its main content, the main direction of its development, the main characteristics of the historical situation in that epoch, etc." He described the negation of the idea of the leading role of the working class in the revolutionary movement as the most vulgar expression of reformism. In putting the working class at the centre of our epoch, he described the main content of this epoch as the transition of the world from capitalism to socialism and the main character of the revolution as proletarian.
To this day, the question of developing the leading role of the working class, its leadership over all the affairs which concern the society, is the decisive question which will determine the victory of our cause. To merely talk about the class struggle, recognize its existence and describe it, without recognizing where this class struggle leads, presupposes that the bourgeoisie and the working class will continue to exist forever, as two contending classes, with the bourgeoisie as the ruling class, and the working class as the oppressed class. This is precisely what the bourgeoisie wants the working class and all the oppressed to believe. This is why, while they recognize classes and the class struggle but deny the forward march of the society, they refuse to analyze, but merely describe the situation. Either they see the situation fatalistically, with no way out and they claim that the struggles of the workers and broad masses of the people lead nowhere, or they present the spontaneous struggles euphorically and applaud them, so long as they do not threaten the status quo. Either way the result is the same. As far as the bourgeoisie is concerned, it can coexist with those who recognize the class struggle, so long as they do not recognize where it leads and do not organize on the basis of this recognition.
Marxist-Leninists proceed from the real motion which is taking place in the society. They neither exaggerate nor belittle an aspect or feature of the present-day situation. They do not eliminate any of the factors which are operating -- neither the objective nor the subjective side of the movement; neither the role of the conscious factor, the Party and its Marxist-Leninists theory, nor the role of the masses as the makers of history. What distinguishes the Marxist-Leninists from all the other social forces in the society is their aims which they hold high under all conditions and circumstances. These aims arise out of the very conditions of the society. They are the conscious expression of where the society is headed and the task of the party is to imbue the working class with these aims, to make it the conscious fighter for its own emancipation and the emancipation of the society as a whole and all humankind.
CPC(M-L) takes up this work in its complexity and in its profundity in order to ensure that the working class is armed with the spiritual weapon which it finds in Marxism-Leninism while Marxism-Leninism finds its material weapon in the working class. The merging of the theory of Marxism-Leninism with the working class movement is one of the most important factors in the preparation of the subjective conditions for revolution.
This consciousness is taken by the Party to all sections of the society. When the Party talks about the independent movement of the working class, far from narrowing down the scope of the working class movement, limiting it to what are called "working class issues," the Party has in mind the movement of the working class for its own emancipation in the course of which it emancipates all of the society. While the bourgeoisie presents the working class as self-centred, with narrow aims, the Marxist-Leninist position does not change its content under any circumstances and conditions, according to whether the Party is addressing itself to the working class, or to the youth, to women or any other section of society. This is because the working class has no standing and no possibility of affecting the affairs of the society in a revolutionary way if it is separate and divorced from the problems of the society and is aloof of the problems of all the exploited and oppressed and stands away from the high road of civilization. The working class cannot march on the high road of civilization just because it is the working class -- it must have its vanguard, the most trusted and tested general staff which sees in the struggle to open society's path to progress the greatest advance of the high road of civilization. Thus the vanguard does not act by rejecting the high road but marches on it, appropriating what is best and relying on the material force which history has brought into being for the realization of this task. The working class is such an historical material force, in whose interest it is to end all exploitation of persons by persons and, in so doing it puts and end to all backwardness, all darkness and ignorance, and ushers in an entirely new stage in the development of the society, the highest advance of the high road of civilization, bringing into being the new epoch of history.
Hardial Bains, the founder and leader of CPC(M-L) until his untimely death in 1997, pointed out:
"Karl Marx discovered the law of motion of the society and the specific law of motion of the capitalist mode of production. It is because of the operation of these laws that motion has also been created in the sphere of ideas, science and theory. at the time the society split up into the two irreconcilable class, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat, the entire tradition of science and enlightenment went to that class, the proletariat, whose interest it is to end all conditions of exploitation of persons by persons. Because of the mission which befalls it, the proletariat is the only class which is not prejudiced. Science needs such a condition in order to advance. It is the discoveries of Karl Marx which provided the class with consciousness, showed it is aim, based on the direction of the class struggle, the direction in which the society is headed, and how to get there. But Karl Marx was first and foremost a revolutionist. The science which he gave rise to has both proletarian partisanship and revolutionary character and thus it is of no use to the bourgeoisie. To be a scientist, to be revolutionist, it is necessary to be the continuer of the glorious road on which stands the glorious name of Karl Marx, the road of the victory of the highest ideals of humankind. [...]"
On this occasion, TML is publishing two items which highlight the significance of the work of Karl Marx: "Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx," by Frederich Engels and "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism," by V.I. Lenin.
Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep -- but for ever.
An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.
Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.
For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorwärts (1844), the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49), the New York Tribune (1852-61), and in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men's Association -- this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else.
And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, both conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy.
His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!
The Three Sources and Three
Component Parts of
Marxism
(This article was published in 1913 in Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) No. 3, dedicated to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Marx's death. The journal was suppressed by the tsarist government in June 1914, on the eve of the First World War.)
Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of "pernicious sect." And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no "impartial" social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers' wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.
But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling "sectarianism" in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.
The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts that we shall outline in brief.
I
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to "refute," undermine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.
Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.
But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level; he enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel's system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science -- radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements -- have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx's dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their "new" reversions to old and decadent idealism.
Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops -- how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.
Just as man's knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man's social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines -- philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
Marx's philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism that has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.
II
Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx's principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.
Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man's labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.
The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx's economic theory.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.
By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social -- hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism -- but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.
By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.
Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.
And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
III
When feudalism was overthrown and "free" capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.
But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.
Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.
Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.
The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can -- and, owing to their social position, must -- constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.
Marx's philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx's economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.
Independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.
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