Marxian Socialism

and
The Earlier Socialist Thought

Amy Elangbam, Jungdinaro Sanglir

B.A (Hons) History
Third Year
Roll.No. 637, 559

Lady Shri Ram College for Women

14th October, 2019.
Abstract: Marxism is a multifaceted term, it works commonly as a political and
economic theory of Marx and his followers. It aims at the abolition of private
ownership of means of production. It anticipates work and subsistence for all. It
also anticipates the rule of the mass society and its welfare. In this paper, we have
addressed the various intellectual currents of Marxism and the history of pre-
marxian socialism. Emphasis has also been given to the thoughts of Karl Marx and
the historical and social context of it. The paper concludes with the differentiation
between Marx’s socialism and early socialist thoughts.

Keywords: Karl Marx, Marxism, Socialism, communism, pre-marxian socialism.

Introduction
Marxism is a general theory of the world in which we live, and of human society as
a part of that world. It takes its name from Karl Marx (1818-1883), who, together
with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), worked out the theory during the middle of last
century. Marxism, according to Hobsbawm, is the most practically influential
school of theory in the history of the modern world and is both a method of
interpreting and of changing it. Lenin described his work as a synthesis of all that
was best in German philosophy, French socialist thought and English political
economy. The only communistic component of the Marxist system is its ultimate
ideal, while the means proposed for its achievement are an unstable mixture of
elements from the state socialist and the insurrectionist traditions.
Marxism, being the product of a specific historic situation, was inevitably
developed and modified in the light of its changes, that is, of the larger
transformations of history, of changing circumstances, of the discovery of new
facts, the lessons of experience and the changes in the surrounding intellectual
climate. Most of these changes cluster together chronologically. The period before
1848-1850, is set as the period of origin of socialism and the formation of Marx’s
thought. It coincided with the first major crisis of growth of early industrial
capitalism and with the revolutionary crisis which culminated in 1848. This period
witnessed no Marxist movement even with the active and prominent participation
of Marx and Engels. The period from 1850-1875/83 is considered the classical
period of nineteenth century capitalist development. There was rapid growth of a
world system of liberal capitalism, the first stages of major industrial development
in the major ‘developed’ countries of the West and the resultant construction of an
international system of national capitalist states, the emergence of a working-class
movement on the European continent—the First International; the first crisis of the
underdeveloped countries. This period also coincided with the mature development
of Marx’s thought, however, no Marxist movement of significance as yet existed
and Marx’s influence was trivial. The immediate background for the period from
1883-1914 was the second crisis of world capitalist development, the period of
crisis and tension, out of which emerged a new phase of capitalism, that is,
imperialism, with new technological, economic, social and political characteristics
and as a result, new strategic perspectives. This was also the period of the Marxism
of the Second International. Mass working-class parties, increasingly under the
hegemony or leadership of Marxism grouped in the Second International. The
period of 1914-1949 was the period of the Marxism of the Third International. This
was the period of capitalist ‘general crisis’ (war, revolutions, economic breakdown,
fascism) of the October Revolution and the creation of the first socialist country
and the spread of Marxist movements into the colonial and semi-colonial world as
part of the Third World revolution. Since 1949, this is the period of de facto, and
later de jure polycentric Marxism. It is the period of international capitalism since
1914, the triumph of the anti-imperialist revolution in the Third World, of which
the establishment of communist states marks the most advanced point. The triumph
of communism in China is by far the most significant development in this aspect.
This is also the period when the USSR extended its type of socialist system to a
number of European countries and developed into the great second great power.
This period can be probably best seen as a period of major expansion.

What is Marxism?
Marxism consists originally three interrelated ideas - philosophical view of man, a
theory of history and an economic and political programme. During his time, Marx
attempted to maintain consistency and coherence among these ideas. However,
after the death of Marx, many new interpretations became a part of this doctrine.
What uniquely characterizes the thought of Marx is that, instead of making abstract
affirmations about a whole group of problems such as human nature, knowledge,
and matter, he examines each problem in its dynamic relation to the others and,
above all, tries to relate them to historical, social, political, and economic realities.
The history of Marxism cannot only be the history of what Marxists, beginning
with Karl Marx, have thought, written and discussed. It must also deal with the
movements inspired, or claiming to be inspired by the ideas of Marx and with the
revolutions in which Marxists have played a part, and with attempts to construct
socialist societies by Marxists who have been in a position to make such attempts.
Marx distinguished four historical-social formations, corresponding to successive
levels of economic development: the primitive communist, the servile, the feudal
and the bourgeois. The fifth and final phase lay ahead, as feudalism had superseded
slavery, as bourgeois capitalism was progressively liquidating feudalism, just as
surely would socialism grow out of and forcibly replace capitalism. Marx argued
that capitalism contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
The historical and social context
Karl Marx’s writing was assertively influenced by what he observed in 19th
century Europe, that is, the intellectual changes of the enlightenment, the
technological developments of the industrial revolution, the political struggles in
the aftermath of the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions, and the
development of global trade and empire dominated by Europe. Marx was born into
a Europe whose intellectual landscape had been entirely reshaped by the
Enlightenment. Europe was a theologically conceived and ordered regional society,
prior to the Enlightenment and was based on hierarchy and divine authority. By
contrast, the Enlightenment replaced these with the principles of universality,
equality and democracy.
Historians of Britain classically apply the term industrial revolution to the period
1750–1850. The steady advance of agriculture and the more dramatic development
of manufacturing industry gave rise to an increasingly wealthy, urbanized society
geared to progress and change. The result was sufficient food to sustain population
growth, the disappearance of the traditional peasant, and the availability of surplus
labour to meet the growing demands of construction, manufacturing and industry.
These improvements in agriculture spread to continental Europe. Extractive
industries grew and manufacturing became much more specialized and productive.
Most of the capital required to initiate the self-sustaining growth of the Industrial
Revolution had been accumulated by trade and by overseas plantations manned by
slaves. Lastly, there were waves of revolution in the western world between 1815
and 1848. In the end it was not successful and heralded the gigantic economic leap
forward after 1851. All these developments were underway during Marx’s lifetime.

The Thoughts of Karl Marx

‘Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins’,
according to Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. The science to which they
are referring is the materialist theory of history, whose classic statement is given in
the Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. Taken most
generally, the materialist theory of history asserts that the manner in which human
beings produce the necessities of life determines the form of the societies in which
they live. The materialist theory of history is intended as an exercise in social
science rather than philosophy.
In contrast to his relatively brief and schematic statements concerning general
history, Marx wrote very extensively about the economic system under which he
himself lived. ‘Das Kapital’, which presents Marx’s definitive analysis of
capitalism, is a work of exceptional methodological complexity. Bourgeois
economists, Marx alleges, characteristically fail to recognize that their categories
are specific to capitalism, and so they treat the capitalist mode of production as one
‘eternally fixed by nature for every state of society’. Capitalism mystifies those
who live under it, Marx believes, because it is a deceptive object.
The most detailed discussion that Marx provides about a case where the surface of
capitalism presents itself as ‘false’ is to be found in the section of Das Kapital
called “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”. Marx’s concept of
commodity fetishism is not a matter of subjective delusion or irrationality on the
part of perceivers but is somehow embedded in the reality that they face. It is not
just that the individuals who live in a society based on commodity production are
deceived by it regarding the way that it works. The way that it works is itself
criticized by Marx. The ‘social character of labour’ is made private. This is not a
misperception or false belief but a contradiction: a discrepancy between what Marx
takes to be the intrinsic nature of social labour and the way that it is in fact
organized. Capitalism, that is to say, is not just deceptive but also defective.
The question whether Marx’s theory has a moral or ethical dimension is one of the
most controversial of all issues of Marx interpretation. On the one hand, Marx has
a number of uncompromisingly negative things to say about morality. Moreover,
after 1845, he affirms that his own theory is not a utopian or ethical one but ‘real
positive science’. Yet, on the other hand, much of the language that he uses to
describe capitalism is plainly condemnatory. For the liberal, the attraction of the
idea of rights is that it presupposes nothing about individuals’ character and
personalities. For Marx, on the other hand, that is just its weakness: rights do
nothing to transform human nature. His ethical ideal is one of solidarity in which
all advance together. Hence Marx’s reluctance to use the language of justice to
condemn capitalism becomes more intelligible.
Lastly, Marx’s socialism is not based on a subjective moral demand but on a theory
of history. Marx held that there was no such thing as ‘human nature’ in the abstract,
and that men’s ideas of what is good and bad were determined by the economic
structure of the social organism of which they formed a part. He was not concerned
with the morality of individuals but with that of groups, but in his case the group
was a class rather than a nation. Marx teaches that the ethical system of any
community, like its religion and laws, is simply a part of the superstructure created
by the conditions of production, and always reflects the interest of the dominant
class. As long as the class system persists, no useful purpose is to be served by
discussing such ‘class morality’. When that system has been destroyed it will be
possible to put ethics on a sound basis. Marx criticized the French utopian
socialists for their obsession with ‘justice’. The capitalist system was doomed to
disappear for reasons which lay within its very nature and which had nothing to do
with metaphysical abstractions.
History of Pre-Marxian Socialism
Marx and Engels were relative late-comers to communism. Engels declared
himself a communist late in 1842 whereby for Marx, it was not until the latter part
of 1843, after a more prolonged and complex settling of accounts with liberalism
and Hegel’s philosophy. By the early 1840s, a flourishing socialist and communist
movement, both theoretical and practical, had existed for sometime in France,
Britain and the USA. Though modern socialism does not derive from prehistoric
figures of communist theories like Plato or Thomas More, or even from
Campanella, historians of socialism usually pay their respects to them since even
the revolutionaries like to have their ancestors.
Such works had some interest for nineteenth-century readers as one of the main
difficulties of communist theory for urban intellectuals was that the actual
operations of communist society appeared to have no precedent and were difficult
to make plausible. The name of More’s book, Utopia, became the term used to
describe any attempt to sketch the ideal society of the future, which in the
nineteenth century meant primarily a communist one. Nevertheless, the normal
procedure of the pioneer socialists and communists of the early nineteenth century
was not to derive their ideas from some remote author, but to discover the
relevance of some earlier theoretical architect of ideal commonwealths in the
process of constructing their own critique of society or Utopia.
The study of the pre-industrial European societies and the exotic societies with
which the Europeans came into contact from the sixteenth century played a notable
role in the formation of western social criticisms particularly in the eighteenth
century. Rousseau and other eighteenth-century thinkers suggested that civilization
also implied the corruption of some prior and in some ways more just, equal and
benevolent human state. It might even suggest that such societies before private
property, ‘primitive communism’, provided models of what future societies should
once again aspire to. This line of thought is certainly present in the nineteenth-
century socialism however, it emerges much more strongly towards the end of the
century than in its early decades through Marx’s and Engel’s increasing
preoccupation and acquaintance with primitive communal institutions.
Unlike the word ‘communist’, which signified a programme, the word ‘socialist’
was primarily analytical and critical. It was used to describe those who held a
particular view of human nature which implied a particular view of human society,
or those who believed in the possibility or necessity of a particular mode of social
action, notably in the public affairs. The word continued to be imprecise though
from the 1830s it came to be primarily associated with more or less fundamental
reshaping of society. Two aspects of socialism must therefore be distinguished: the
critical and the programmatic. The critical consisted of two elements, a theory of
human nature and society and an analysis of the society produced by the ‘dual
revolution’. The programmatic aspect also consisted of two elements: a variety of
proposals to create a new economy on the basis of cooperation and an attempt to
reflect on the nature and the characteristics of the ideal society which was thus to
be brought about. The first aspect of socialism was of no great interest to Marx and
Engels, the second however evidently influenced them very much.
Marx and Engels saw their predecessors, the ‘utopian’ socialists and communists,
as belonging to illuminism. They traced the socialist tradition back beyond the
French Revolution, it was to the philosophical materialists Holbach and Helvètius,
and to the illuminist communists Morelly and Malby.
Though he appears to have no direct influence on Marx and Engels, J.J Rousseau
played an important role in the formation of later socialist theory. Rousseau can
hardly be called a socialist; for though he developed what was to be the most
popular version of the argument that private property is the source of all social
inequality, he did not argue that the good society must socialize property, but only
that it must ensure its equal contribution. Yet two observations must be made about
him. First, the view that social equality must rest on common ownership of wealth
and central regulation of all productive labour is a natural extension of Rousseau’s
argument, Second, and more important, the political influence of Rousseau’s
egalitarianism on the Jacobian left, out of which the first modern communist
movements emerged, is undeniable. Therefore the history of communism as a
modern social movement begins on the left wing of the French Revolution.

Difference between Marx and Early Socialists

Although Marx showed an affectionate tolerance towards many of socialist and
communist pioneers, he dismissed their approach as Utopian and idealistic, in
contrast to his own scientific and materialistic views. His predecessors based their
approach on the belief in the essential goodness of man or the progressive triumph
of reason. Marx, on the contrary held that socialism would replace capitalism not
because all reasonable men of goodwill would so wish, but because of economic
determinism where, according to him, the evolution of capitalism itself would
make the change inevitable. He synthesized the elements of earlier socialist
theories which seemed to be realistic and discarded the rest as Utopian fantasy.
Marx’s vision of ineluctable historical process transcending human will and
consciousness was part of his German philosophical heritage. But unlike Hegel, he
found the moving force of history not in an endlessly evolving world soul but in
the interaction between man and his environment. Marx adapted Hegel’s form of
dialectical process of conflict by which each historical stage develops into the next
and in doing so also deleted the idealistic content and added his materialism.
According to him, the way in which a society provides for its material needs i.e.
the means of production determines the ownership of property and the class
structure, which in turn determines the system of government. Further, the
institutional and economic structure determine man’s philosophical, religious,
ethical and artistic values.
The very idea of a total, monastic explanation of human history, the attempt to find
the explanations in laws of social development and universality of laws governing
the evolution of the physical world, the unbounded optimism about the capacity of
human intellect and the future of human society, place Marx firmly in the mid-
nineteenth century. For the earlier socialists and communists of all schools, Marx
had an answer to all doubts and a solution for all difficulties. Those who were
troubled by the failure of the French Revolution to usher in freedom equality and
fraternity could learn that the revolution had served its true purpose in replacing
feudal absolutism by the rule of bourgeois capitalism, which would prepare the
ground for proletarian revolution and socialism. Similarly, those who believed that
the working class must struggle for its emancipation within the existing framework
of society and institutions could find common grounds with Marx, for he regarded
this day to day struggle as a necessary part of political education and revolutionary
training. However, he was also in qualified agreement with those who placed all
their hopes on the summary seizure of state power, for he too believed that only
revolution could affect a radical reconstruction of society through the work of
politically conscious masses and not of a conspiratorial elite.
Though his system was eclectic, its leading principles were firmly integrated. It
was with these principles, and his method of social analysis, for which Marx
claimed scientific validity. The realistic elements in Marx’s view of history and his
critique of contemporary society, the tactical flexibility which he legitimated in the
present ensured him a wider and more durable influence than any of his socialist
and communist predecessors.
One of Marx's new insights was that class division were a product of the hitherto
low level of human productivity. The socialists who came before Marx suffered
from a problem that they could not overcome. The material conditions of
abundance did not exist for the realization of their ideas. As a result, the socialists
before Marx and Engels simply counterposed their ideal society to the one that
existed. The tendency found its highest expression in the utopian socialists of the
early to mid-19th century. The earlier socialists were brilliant critics of industrial
capitalism but they did not look to the class struggle. Instead, they sought to create
socialist communities that could be an example to convince the world, including
capitalists, of the superiority of socialism. Marx and Engels were thus materialists
who propounded that ideas alone could not create social change hence the material
conditions had to exist to make the change both possible and necessary for society
to move forward.
Conclusion
Marx has had a profound impact on the historical development of the world. His ideas
have launched political upheavals and changed the way we think about society and its
development. Politics, economics and philosophy, the French, British and German
experience, ‘utopian’ socialism and communism, were fused, transformed and
transcended in the Marxian synthesis during the 1840s. It is surely no accident that this
transformation should have taken place at this historical moment. The Marxian
transformation of socialism would hardly have been historically possible before the
1840s. Nor would it have been possible within the main bourgeois countries
themselves, where both the radical political and working-class movements, and radical
social and political theory were deeply embedded in a long history tradition and
practices from which they found it hard to emancipate themselves.

It would be a mistake to suppose that pre-Marxian socialism died immediately

after Marx developed his characteristic views. Even nominally, Marxism did not
become influential in labour movements until the 1880s. The history of Marx’s
own thought and his political and ideological controversies cannot be understood
unless we recall that the tendencies he criticized, combated or came to terms with
within the labour movement, were primarily those of the pre-Marxian radical left
or those deriving from it. Pre-Marxian socialism is therefore embedded in the later
works of Marx and Engels, but in a doubly distorted form. They made a highly
selective use of their predecessors, and also, their mature and late writings do not
necessarily mirror the impact which the early socialists made upon them in their
formative period.
References:

1. Hobsbawm, Eric Jones. (1982) The History of Marxism, Volume One: Marxism
in Marx’s Day. Preface, Ch.1

2. FW Deakin, H Shukman, HT Willets. (1975) A History of World Communism.

Ch.2
3. Avineri, Shlomo. (1968) The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx.
4. Burns, Emile. (1939) What is Marxism?
5. http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ecn265/rosen_on_marx.pdf
6. RJ Ormerod, Journal of the Operational Research Society (2008) The history
and ideas of Marxism: the relevance for OR.
7. Waller, Bruce. (1990 ) Themes in modern European history 1830-90. Ch.8.
8. https://repozytorium.uni.wroc.pl/Content/40318/002.pdf