Why did Marx Expect the Workers to be Socialist?

 

A while ago I wrote an article on why Marx and Engels believed that it was the wage-earning proletariat in particular who, as a social force, would be attracted to the message of socialism.

It's summarised by Marx's introduction to the 1880 programme of the Parti Ouvrier:

The emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race;

The producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production

That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them

1. The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;
2. The collective form the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society;

This collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat - organized in a distinct political party;
Such an organization must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal including universal suffrage ...

What this actually meant I discuss in some detail in an article from Critique, here.

You can read the entire article, free of charge, at this website.

Here's my conclusion:

Marx argued that humans were necessarily dependent on one another, and upon nature. However, this dependence is felt by the individual as an imposition, and as powerlessness, unless it is voluntarily accepted as a means of self-realisation. For Marx, such voluntarism is only realisable when responsibility for the production of the means of life is assumed collectively. Such a state of affairs is socialism. Objectively, socialism becomes feasible insofar as production is spatially and temporally integrated under the influence of scientific knowledge and organisation. Subjectively, the modern working class becomes available as the agent of socialist transformation. Class consciousness arises from an innate desire to secure one's mode of subsistence. In history, producers have access to the means of subsistence either in a form dependent on the will of others, or independently, in the form of indefeasible property rights. Class consciousness always idealises independent proprietorship. This holds true for proletarians. However, as capitalism makes individual proprietorship impossible, only collective ownership appears to offer secure independence. This definition of Marx's theory brings into focus his examination of the problem of money wages. Income streams derived from the sale of labour power must be insecure if Marx's theory is to be robustly predictive of proletarian socialist preference formation. With this allowance made, Marx's theory is strikingly in accordance with historical data, and evidence gathered by social scientists.

 I still think it's a pretty good take on the subject! Feel free to disagree.

Georges Sorel and Two Types of Revolution

Georges Sorel had an interesting criticism of Marx's schema of social revolution. Here it is (1903 Preface to Edwin Seligman's Economic Interpretation of History [1903]; in French - apologies for my attempts at translation).

Marx had argued that as productive forces develop they press up against the integument of out-dated social and political relations, which is widely perceived as a constraint. At some point, the integument is burst asunder.

Marx, Sorel argues, based this model upon the French Revolution. (And on this revolution only; the model didn't apply to the transition from the Ancient World to feudalism, for example). It applied pretty well to France in the 1780s: clearly archaic tax and commercial codes constrained commercial relations; they simply "hindered and had no useful role in the production". Indeed (as I've noted) the French Revolution had initial support from many outside commerce, properly so-called, because all propertied classes at least could clearly see an advantage in clearing away the limits to growth.

Productive forces under capitalism, Sorel insisted, were not 'fettered' in the same way as they had been under 'feudal' social relations. There is no foreseeable end to the capacity for economic growth under capitalism. Rather, productive forces are subject to a boom-bust business cycle. They endure periodic collapse, followed at some point by renewed dynamism, but no indefinite stagnation for want of reform of social relations.

A proletarian revolution, moreover, would "exclude industrial leaders and deliver the productive forces to a [working] class without managerial experience". Revolution could not, at least in the short to medium term, emancipate productive forces.

The French Revolution in substance only required swift and fairly painless abolition of irksome remnants of 'feudalism' - famously swept away over one  night on 4 August 1789. The proletarian revolution requires a much more fundamental, protracted, and experimental transformation under the most un-propitious circumstances: "it is frightening to think of the huge quantitative difference between these two things Marx found so similar!"

One can imagine such thoughts would strike a chord with Syriza in Greece. A revolutionary crisis is not a good time to make a revolution. And who replaces the bourgeoisie?

The experience of communism seems to bear out much of Sorel's critique. Revolution in 1917 took place during conjunctural crisis - not just economic, to be sure - and the new regime was duly wracked by its unfolding. The Bolsheviks soon found that they relied upon ex-bourgeois and Tsarist experts to keep the economy running. In the long run, they trained up a new bureaucratic elite (killing much of the old) but there never clearly emerged a proletarian civil society able to rationalise the command economy. Whether a proletarian civil society can regulate a state and economy in a manner analogous to bourgeois civil society must be considered an open question.