By S. D'Arcy
Karl Marx was born in Germany in 1818 and died in England in 1883. In those years he was able to witness and participate in many of the most important struggles in the early decades of the European workers' movement. Although educated as a philosopher, Marx recognized that philosophy only helped to interpret the world, but did not have the power to change it. He saw the burgeoning workers' movement as the key to a struggle for revolutionary change.
But the ideas in the early workers' movement about how to change the world were often remarkably weak and unconvincing, tainted by the influence of elitism (Robert Owen), utopianism (Charles Fourier), nationalism (young Bakunin), and even sexism and anti-Semitism (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Almost all socialists of that time insisted that radical social change could only be made by a minority, on behalf of the "uneducated" or "backward" majority. Marx, with his collaborator Frederick Engels, rejected such ideas completely, insisting that "we cannot ally ourselves with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic capitalists or middle class reformers."
Marx's early contacts with working class struggles in the 1840's taught him two lessons that he would never forget: first, that working class people are capable of transforming the world on their own initiative, without the intervention of do-gooders or self-declared elites; second, that capitalism is an unstable, crisis-ridden system that continually generates struggles that threaten to undermine it.
But what causes these struggles, and who can be expected to support them? Marx saw the need to develop an analysis of the dynamics of social conflict in capitalist societies -- a theory of the struggles generated by capitalism as a system of exploitation.
Marx begins his analysis of capitalism with an experience most of us know all too well: getting a job. When I get hired by a boss to do a job, me and my boss enter into that relationship for entirely different reasons. I'm trying to earn a living; but my boss is trying to do something quite different: to make a profit. In modern societies, most people participate in the "official" economy for one of these two reasons, either to get hold of the resources required to meet one's personal needs (or the need's of one's family), or to get a return on the wealth that one has invested in production (in the hope of accumulating even more wealth).
Because most people are placed in the economy in one of these two ways -- as workers or as bosses (capitalists) -- Marx describes the relationship between wage-labourers and capitalists as the most fundamental economic relationship in a capitalist society.
But it is not just any sort of relationship, Marx argues. It is an "antagonistic" relationship, which continually provokes conflict and struggle: "a now hidde n, now open fight." This is because the advantages gained by either party come at the expense of the other. Whenever workers manage to fight for and win higher wages, or more extensive social services, or better health and safety regulations, all of these gains involve diverting wealth produced by workers away from the accumulation of profits by the employer. In the same way, every advantage secured by employers comes at the expense of the workers who produce the wealth taken by the boss in the form of profits.
This antagonism between worker and capitalist is not confined to the workplace. According to Marx, it extends to the whole of political life. The basic classes in capitalist society serve to underpin two incompatible social and political agendas. The workers' agenda is based on the claim that the meeting of human needs should be the highest priority in our society. The bosses' agenda, by contrast, places capitalist profits above all other considerations, including human needs (which only matter when someone can make money off of them).
Although rooted in the division between classes, this is a struggle that takes place whenever anyone demands recognition for their needs, and insists that they longer be treated like mere functionaries to be put to use in the interest of capitalist production: immigrants and refugees demanding entry into Canada, women demanding reproductive freedom, students demanding access to education, and so on. As Marx and Engels argued in the "Communist Manifesto," the whole history of our time is the history of this struggle.
Marx was interested in class struggle not only because he wanted to understand capitalism, but because he wanted to overthrow it. Class struggle is not just a fact, but a strategy for achieving fundamental social change. This is because workers not only have a deeply rooted grievance against capitalism, which systematically subordinates their needs in the interest of promoting capitalist profit-making by an elite minority, but they also occupy a strategically crucial position within capitalist production, since they are the ones whose creativity and effort actually produces the wealth on which capitalist profits depend.
A couple of years ago, when G.M. workers in Michigan went on strike, they brought production to a halt internationally and cost General Motors corporation millions of dollars in revenues on each day the strike lasted. This is a kind of social power that other groups in society, such as students (as students) or consumers, do not have, and which is unique to workers.
The struggle for socialism is the struggle to decide the class struggle in favour of the working class, and in favour of its needs-first agenda of human emancipation from exploitation and oppression. Marx's analysis showed at the time, and still shows today, that the working class is capable of leading the struggle for its own emancipation, and the emancipation of all human beings whose needs are now sacrificed for the sake of an unjust social system.
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S. D'Arcy is a member the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
