| Historical Economics Essay, Research Paper
[ Introduction to Marxism ]
Introduction to Marxist theory
on history
Historical Materialism: the marxist view of
history
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,
lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word,
oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to
each other, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the
mutual ruin of the contending classes.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto
Section A: How society works
1. Making sense of history: looking behind the ’story’
The ruling class portrays history as the doings of “great men”, the role of
governors and explorers, lists of wars and invasions and other “important
events”. History in school books is like a story – a succession of events
without any general pattern.
Marxists say that in order to make sense of the story of history – what
people, famous or not, actually did – we have to understand the overall
economic and social context to show why they acted in the way they did.
Take for example the American Civil War of 1861-65. What do most
people know about this war? Northern Americans, the Union, fought against
the Southern Confederates; Bluecoats fought Greycoats. Why?
Most people would say, well, it was about slavery. The Union president,
Abraham Lincoln, was against slavery, while the southerners were in favour
of it. That’s the myth; the northerners fighting slavery out of the goodness of
their hearts. But Marxists would say there was a lot more to it than that. In
fact the northern industrialists behind the Union were in bitter conflict with
the big southern farmers who owned the slaves; most of these industrialists
were racists and not very sympathetic to black slaves. The basic causes of
the war were in this economic conflict between the to different sections of
the US ruling class.
Let’s take the example of the English civil war of 1641-49. Most people
know it was cavaliers against roundheads, parliament versus the crown,
Oliver Cromwell versus Charles 1. But why? Who did parliament represent
– whose interests? And who backed the king, and why? When we
investigate this, we find that different class forces were involved. So, a
Marxist analysis of the English civil war would try to explain the story of the
war in terms of the class interests involved.
This method of looking at things to discover the real class and social interests
involved in events, of course is relevant to more contemporary events. Why
did the US president George Bush start the Gulf war? To defend plucky little
Kuwait against the monster Saddam? Marxists say no, this was just the
propaganda; Bush started the war to defend the economic and political
interests of the US, including the oil supplies from the area. Another example
of how we try to look behind the surface events at the real story.
So this is the first idea: Historical materialism is about discovering the class
interests which determine how people act in history. Now read the following
quote about the English civil war from someone who fought in it, and think
how it relates to what we have discussed so far:
“A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of
England … adhered to the King. And most of the tenants of
these gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the
people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the
gentry and ere for the king. On the Parliament’s side were
(besides themselves) the smaller part of the gentry in most
of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and
freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in those
corporations and counties which depend on such
manufactures”.
(Colonel Baxter: Autobiography)
What Baxter is saying here is that the conflict was between the king and the
aristocracy (supported by those most dependent on them) on the one hand:
and the rising middle classes on the other. This of course is exactly the
Marxist explanation of the Civil War. (See Christopher Hill: ‘The English
Revolution 1640′).
2. Different types of society
The type of society we have now – capitalism – only started to come into
existence about 350 years ago, first in Holland and England. But human
society existed for hundreds of thousands of years before that. In societies
before capitalism, the way people lived was different to what we know now.
Before capitalism, in Western Europe and in China and Japan before the
arrival of the Europeans, the system which existed was feudalism. Instead of
today’s capitalists who own firms and employ workers for a wage, under
feudalism the ruling class was the aristocratic nobility – the lords – based on
large estates in the countryside. The oppressed class, instead of workers
earning a wage, were the peasants (serfs) doing agricultural work on the
lord’s estate. They had their own plots of land, but they had to work for the
lord for part of the week or give part of their own produce to the lord.
In Europe, before feudalism the predominant form of society was slavery -
the type of society of classical Rome and Greece. The majority of people
were literally owned by the ruling nobles, doing manual labour on the land
(although some slaves worked in the towns), having no rights of their own.
From these few examples we can see that as society evolves, as it gets
richer, the way it is organised changes. The examples we gave here are all
examples of class society, where there were rulers and ruled. However,
before slavery there were other forms of society where there was no ruling
class – something which the capitalists today don’t like to think about.
Marxism tries to analyse each society in terms of how it began, how it
worked and how it was replaced by another type of society.
The basic form of organising any society, the way its economy works,
Marxists call the mode of production. Below we will try to explain this a bit
more.
Marx tried to explain these two things (class interests and mode of
production) in the following passage – one of the most famous in all his
writings. Read it a couple of times and try to get the gist (NB. Marx and
Engels, in common with their contemporaries, always talk about “men” rather
than “people” – we should make the translation).
“In the social production of their life, men enter into
definite relations which are indispensable and independent
of their will, relations of production which correspond to a
definite stage of their material productive forces. The sum
total of these relations constitute the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and
political superstructure and to which corresponds definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the social and intellectual life
process in general. It is not the consciousness of men which
determines their being but on the contrary, their social
being which determines their consciousness.”
(From the Preface to ‘A Critique of Political Economy’ of
1859)
3. The mode of production of hunter-gatherer society
So far we have seen that Marxists say the following things:
1.History has to be analysed according to the different social and class
interests at work,
2.There are different types of society, and that society changes
over time,
3.The basic way that society is organised is called the mode of
production.
Let’s think about point 3) in a bit more detail and try to relate it to the quote
from Marx. If you understand this bit, you’ll have Marx’s key to
understanding human history in your hands.
Marx says that in order to produce their livelihood, people enter into
“definite relations” and these are “indispensable” and “independent of their
will”. All peoples through history have lived in societies and co-operated
with one another to produce the food, clothes and shelter they need to
survive.
As far as the politicians and social engineers of today are concerned, society
is just made up of individuals and their families. The A.L.P. don’t believe in
the existence of the working class – only this or that kind of voter; the
sociologists divide people into income brackets, but have no idea about
social organisation. But, even when the first humans were tribes roaming the
African plains in search of food, they had a definite form of social
organisation and collaborated with one another to gather and hunt.
But the fact remains that hunting and gathering is a hard way to earn a living -
the whole tribe had to work every day to eke out a living. There was no
room for slackers. The only division of labour was based on gender and age,
and indeed, the early tribes were extended families.
If Kerry Packer dropped out of the sky and landed in a hunter-gatherer
society, he’d have to go out and hunt with the rest of the tribe or he’d go
hungry; and if he tried to set up a firm and make a profit from other people’s
hunting he’d be sorely disappointed, because after the hunters and their
families had been fed, there’d be nothing left over by way of profit and he’d
still go hungry.
Let’s suppose that the land in a particular country is particularly bountiful or
the hunters particularly skillful and the hunters and gathers produce enough
to keep themselves and their children and old folk and have a little over to
spare.
We know that under these conditions special roles developed in tribal
society – there were priests and chiefs that had the time to study the stars
and the seasons, have fine clothes made for them, carry out social and
cultural affairs etc., and these people all enjoyed a privileged position by
being free from labour and became “mini-rulers” of one kind or another.
If a sociologist from a university were to come across such a society, they
might write learned papers about the customs and religion etc., or any
number of things, but the key to understanding what is going on in such a
society is not these kind of things, but the way they organised themselves to
produce their livelihood – and that little bit extra.
Imagine if a group of Militant members were to find themselves living in
such a society; no doubt they would share everything equally, work
cooperatively, making all decisions with discussion and voting, etc., and form
what we could call a “primitive communist” society.
But their choice would be very limited. One thing they couldn’t do, even if
they wanted to, is set up a capitalist society.
The fundamental wealth of society, the productive technique and division of
labour are not sufficiently developed. With a small number of people simply
hunting and gathering, you can’t have firms, banks, shareholders, capital or
capitalism. The productive forces are just not sufficiently developed.
This hints at another important point we shall come back to: the social
relations, the type of society, has to “fit” the level of development of the
productive resources.
4. Classes and exploitation: the Neolithic Revolution
In Section 1 we talked about three different types of society which have
existed in western Europe during the past 5000 years: slave society,
feudalism and capitalism. In other words, very different types of class
societies have existed during this period. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism
are all characterised by having a ruling class which owns or controls the land,
materials, equipment etc. used for production, what Marxists calls the means
the means of production. Through their ownership or control of the means of
production, the ruling class is able to exploit the labour of the oppressed
class, whether these are slaves, serfs or proletarians under capitalism.
But before slave society, for hundreds of thousands of years, people had
organised themselves into clans and tribes which had no ruling class
exploiting the others. Of course, many of these clans and tribes had chiefs
and elders with authority: but they were not an economically privileged social
layer, not a class. Stable social classes, which involves exploiters and
exploited, are a product of the great change which took place in human
society about 6,000 years ago. This was the most fundamental change in
human history, called the Neolithic Revolution. What happened?
To cut a long story short, in the area which is now Iraq (Mesopotamia),
people developed a settled form of agriculture. Instead of roaming around
killing animals and picking berries, they learned how to domesticate animals
and grow crops. They became farmers. Of course, at first this was a hard
struggle. But over time, they learned that this was much more economically
productive. Instead of always having to struggle just to produce what they
needed to live on, they began to produce a surplus. They started to live in
settlements, which gradually became bigger, leading to the first cities.
The surplus they produced was not of course big enough for everyone to
double or treble the amount they consumed. Gradually, a layer of priests
emerged who began to take the leading role in organising the new
settlements and taking control of and using the new economic surplus. The
priests were the core of the first ruling class, organising society so they could
snaffle the economic surplus that had been produced.
Another thing we should note about the Neolithic revolution: as society gets
richer, as the first towns and cities are built, then production gets more
complicated. As farming gets more efficient, less people have to do farming.
Others are freed up to become artisans, producing goods like pottery and
jewellery, in the towns. In other words, different types of jobs appear, things
get more specialised: Marx said that the social division of labour got more
complex.
Now another quote: it’s from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a brilliant man who
wrote Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World:
“Class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social
expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which
exploitation is embodied in the social structure. By
exploitation, I mean the appropriation of part of the
product of the labour of others… . A class is a group of
persons in the community identified by their position in the
whole system of social production, defined above all
according to their relationship (primarily in terms of their
degree of ownership or control) to the conditions of
production (that is to say to the means of production) and
to other social classes… . The individuals constituting a
given class may or may not be partly or wholly conscious
of their own identity and common interests as a class, and
they may or may not feel antagonism to members of other
social classes.”
What Ste Croix is getting at is that you can’t separate classes from
exploitation: if you have an upper and a lower class, one is exploited by the
other. And that takes place through the control or ownership of the means of
production.
5. Summary to Section A: the rulers and the ruled
At this point, you should look back at the quote from Marx. He is saying
that the basis of every society is how people organise to produce their
livelihood, and in every society this is done in a definite and specific way,
giving rise to certain relations of production. In class societies, these
relationships are about control and ownership of the productive process,
about exploitation. Exploitation in turn is about controlling the product of the
labour of others, to appropriate the economic surplus created. Here is
another quote in which Marx says the same thing in a slightly different way:
“The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus
labour is pumped out of the producers determines the
relationship between the rulers and the ruled . . . It is
always the direct relationship of the owners of the
conditions of production to the direct producers – a
relationship naturally corresponding to a definite stage in
the development of the methods of labour and thereby its
social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret,
the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it
the political form of sovereignty and dependence, in short
the corresponding specific form of the state.”
Note that in the first quote above, Matx says the economic basis of society
is the “sum total” of the social relations of productin, and that this determines
the “legal and political superstructure” and the “social and intellectual” life of
society in general. This is among the most controversial propositions of
historical materialism, which is the topic of section B.
Section B: Base and superstructure
6. How the different “bits” of society fit together
Marxists are generally accused of srtressing too much the role of economic
factors. In order the probe this point it is worth considering some concrete
examples. A goof place to start is the present legal system in Australia. If
you sign a mortgage agreement and don’t keep up the payments, either your
house will be taken back by the bank or you will be taken to court (or both).
If you are taken to court, the judge will find against you and your would be
on the street.
But why? Why doesn’t the judge say you have the right to keep your house
and not pay for it? The answer of course is that the whole of Australian law
is founded on protecting private property, and that “corresponds” with the
basic type of society we have – capitalism. If we had a legal system based
on hostility to private property, then the whole thing would begin to break
down. Nobody would be able to enforce a contract or collect any debts.
Shoplifting would be legalised, Banks and companies would collapse. A
moment’s thought shows this is obvious: the legal system has to “fit” the
property system, the existing class system.
Capitalist law is designed to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. This is
recognised in the common sense saying that “there’s one law for the rich,
another for the poor”: of course there is, that’s what it’s there for!
Now, let’s think about the political system. Look at any major capitalist
country the US, France or Germany. All the government parties in these
countries are pro-capitalist parties. The newspaper and TV channels are all
owned by big business and churn out capitalist ideas. An idea that doesn’t
make a profit for somebody, doesn’t get a look-in. The whole political
culture, with the exception of socialist parties trying to fight the system, is
pro-capitalist: the political system “fits” together with the economic system.
This is what Marx means by the “political and legal superstructure” which
rises on the economic base. The legal and political system of course are very
direct products of the economic system, in which it’s easy to trace the
infterests of the ruling class. We can go back and look at the legal system
under feudalism and the prevailing form of politics, and see how it defended
the landed aristocracy and the king.
But there are many more complicated things in society in which the
domination of the ruling class is more complicated. Marx said: “The ruling
ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class”. Is this true – and what
ideas? Let’s start with Australia in 1996. Open up a copy of any major
newspaper. They have lots of debates among themselves, but you will not
finmd a single daily paper in favour of maintaining workers’ Awards, let
alone the abolition of capitalism! Ruling class ideas are propagated by ruling
class control of the means of mass commmunication.
But direct propaganda is not the sole way that ruling class ideas are
purveyed, even in the newspapers. Ruling class ideas – what we call
ideology – is spontaneously reproduced in every section of society,
including the working class. Often it goes in the form of what is known as
“common sense”. Think of a few common sense ideas – let’s list a few:
“Men are stonger than women”
“You should get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”
“Inequality between people is only human nature”
“There’ll always be rich and poor”
“Trade unions are bad for the economy”
“Gay sex is unnatural”
These ideas fit together with the common assumptions of capitalist law and
politics: they are part of the ideology which has grown up around capitalist
society. Of course, under capitalism these kind of ideas are fought against by
socialists and sometimes by other radical groups like the Greens. Over time,
the ruling class ideas change to meet changing circumstances, and also
because of struggle against them. For example, 100 years ago the following
statements would have been widely accepted in Australia:
“It’s only natural that white people should rule the world”
“Britons are superior to other races”
“Black people are inferior”
“Men are superior to women both physically and intellectually”
Now these are not commonly accepted, althuogh there are many people
who do believe in them – but you will rarely find these ideas publicly
advocated in newspapers and by leading politicians. Why?
First, of course because there has been a struggle against these ideas. But,
vitally, material conditions have changed. The British Empire has gone.
Britain no longer rules 30% of the world. The ruling class has had to come to
terms with being a third rate power: ideas about the white man’s role and
Britain’s superiority have changed with the changing conditions. Women
have entered the workforce on a massive scale: ideas about the complete
inferiority of women no longer “fit” the changing circumstances – although of
course women’s oppression and sexism still exist.
In all the ideas we have discussed here, we can see a direct link between the
social relations of production (capitalist), the ruliong class (the capitalist class
or bourgeoisie), the legal and political superstructure (pro-capitalist), and the
ruling ideas, ideology (pro-capitalist, anti-working class, racist and sexist).
They all “fit” together. Once they no longer fit together in a more or less
harmonious way, society begins to go into crisis.
There is another aspect of ruling class ideology which we should take into
account. There are of course disagreements among the capitalist class itself -
although not on fundamentals. There are different interest groups among the
capitalists: for example those based on finance and banking do not always
have the same interests as those based no manufacturing industry. Beyond
the different interests, there are different assessments of how best to advance
the needs of the capitalist system, how many concessions to make to the
working class and so on. These sorts of differences are reflected in different
ideological trends in capitalist thinking – liberalism and conservatism for
example – and in immediate practical political differences. Sometimes these
differences can become very sharp, without ever going beyond the bounds
of capitalist ideology.
Of course, there are many ideas and fields of intellectual activity in society
which are not so easy to analyse. For example, what about cinema, music,
painting, TV dramas, pop music, the arts in general? Do they all have
pro-capitalist ideology embedded in them? This is a complicated question
and very controversial among Marxists. The answer is “yes and no” – it
depends. Let’s take an easy example – James Bond movies. These are
permeated with pro-capitalist ideology which is absolutely transparent. On
the other hand, it would be difficult to argue that the American school of
painters called the Abstract Impressionists, or a particular piece of jazz
music is a piece of “bourgeois ideology”. Nonetheless, it is possible to
explain how these forms of artistic expression grew up at this particular point
in time, and what developments in society gave rise to them. For example,
the “youth culture” of the 1960s grew up on the basis of a generation of
young people who had a lot of money to spend – “flower power” wouldn’t
have got very far in the 1930s!
Marx’s ideas about how the law, politics and ideas in general fit together
with the economic basis of society are not just applicable to capitalism. For
example, Marxists have analysed the role of the Catholic Church under
feudalism as a key factor in the ideological “cement” of feudal society,
justifying the rule of the landed nobility and the role of the crown,
None of this should lead us to conclude that it is possible to predict exactly
every aspect of law, politics and art just on the basis of knowing that a
society is feudal or capitalist: it can only tell us the general parameters. For
example, the French legal system is very different from the British. In France
you are (more or less) guilty until proven innocent. In Britain you are (in
theory) innocent until proven guilty. In order to explain this difference, we
have to study the history of these legal systems in detail. Thefact that Britain
and France are both capitalist won’t help us much in explaining these
differences: but one thing is noticeable. Both British and French system are
ounded on defence of private property. They both “fit” the basic relations of
production.
7. The state
One thing we have left out so far, in discussing the evolution of class society
and the legal-political superstructure, is of course the state – the entire
bureaucratic apparatus which guards the domination of the ruling class. The
role of the state is explained in a separate paper in this pack. For the
moment it is enough to note the following propositions of Marxist theory:
1.The state is an apparatus to defend the continued rule of the ruling
class.
2.The state is ultimately a body of armed people – in other words, the
core of the state when it comes to the crunch are the police and the
armed forces.
3.The state did not exist before class society, but only came into
existence with the division of society into classes.
Section C: The ruling class and revolution
8. The ruling class and revolution
How does one type of society get transformed into a completely new type
How is it that feudalism came to an end and was replaced by capitalism -
why aren’t we still living under feudalism? Marx approaches the problem this
way in the next passage from one of his writings quoted above (the 1859
Preface to the Critique of Political Economy):
“At a certain stage of development, the material
productive forces of society come into conflict with the
existing relations of production or – this merely expresses
the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations
…From the forms of development of the productive forces,
these relations turn into their fetters”.
What does this mean? Here we have to remind ourselves of the way that
society fits together.
A certain level of production technique gives rise to definite social relations
of production. Let’s think about this point. Remember the hunter-gatherer
society we talked about above. We noted that there were different ways the
people there could organise themselves on the basis of thier production,
which consists of hunting, fishing, picking fruit and a few handicrafts (the
exact details don’t matter for our purposes). However, we also said that
capitalism couldn’t exist there, because to get capitalism you need a money
economy, capital, industry, banks, a developed division of labour, etc. This
is impossible in our very under-developed desert island (so long as it remains
isolated from the rest of the world). The level of productive tecnique, or to
put it another way, the level of development of the productive forces, sets
definite limits to the type of society you can have.
In a book he wrote in 1845, ‘The Holy Family’, Marx presented this in a
very sharp manner when he said: “The hand mill (for grinding flour – Ed.)
gives you the feudal lord; the steam mill gives you the industrial
capitalist”. There is a large element of truth in this, but painted so boldly it is
an overstatement. The development of the productive forces places definite
limits on the type of social relations you cna have, but does not absolutely
determine them in detail. We know that the level of productive technique
associated with feudalism – mainy based on the agriculture of rural peasants
– in other parts of the world gave rise to a different type of society based not
on the rule of lords based in the countryside as in Britain, France and
Germany, but to the rule of a centralised state bureaucracy under a king (or
in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and North Africa, a Sultan).
But overall, the level of productive technique and the type off social relations
have to fit together more or less harmoniously, and this in turn has to fit
together with the legal, political and ideological “superstructure”. But what
happens if the “fit” begins to break down?
In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the growth of the productivity
of agriculture created the basis for sections of the peasants to move off the
land into the towns. The growth of trade and commerce began to create
merchants in the towns with huge amounts of money capital to invest: the
conquest or pillage of colonial lands like South America concentrated new
ealth, including huge amounts of precious metal like gold and silver, which
could be used as coins. The scene was set for the development of a
manufacturing, capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – developing within
feudalism. As production developed, the development of the productive
forces came into conflict with the existing relations of production – those of
the domination of the feudal lords, the landed aristocracy. As Marx notes:
“A period of revolution then ensued”.
This period of revolution was of course the period of the bourgeois,
capitalist, revolutions against feudalism – most notably the French Revolution
of 1789, the English Revolution of 1641 – 9, which destroyed the monarchy
and brought Oliver Cromwell to power, the unification of Italy (the
Risorgiamento) led by Garibaldi in the 1840s. The United States has had
TWO bourgeois revolutions – first George Washington’s revolt against the
British Crown, leading to the Declaration of Independence in 1778, and
second, the Civil War of 1861 – 5, in which the northern industrial capitalists
united the country, by destroying the slave mode of production in the south,
and creating a unified country based on capitalist production relations.
By clearing away feudal and pre-capitalist social relations and state
structures, the bourgeois revolution creates the basis for extending and
ensuring the domination of capitalism. The feudal aristocracy was either
destroyed, or integrated into a reconstiuted capitaist class (as happened in
Britain). Huge sections of the serfs, the rural peasantry, are driven off the
land and forced into the towns to become wage labourers, proletarians, the
core of the new working class. The transformation from feudalism to
capitalism takes place via revolution. As Marx says: the bourgeois emerges
on to the historical stage as a most revolutionary class.
Section D: Freedom and determinism
9. Freedom and determination
According to Marx: “Men make their own history, but not in conditions of
their own making”. This has to be put together with two other statements by
Marx: that production relations are “indispensable and independent of their
(human beings’) will”, and the notion that what distinguishes human beings
from animals is consciousness.
Imagine a peasant serf in feudal England who believes in the socialist
Commonwealth and hates the system – a very advanced and far-seeing serf!
That doesn’t stop the serf being trapped in a set of feudal social relations,
dominated by his feudal lord. However, being a conscious being, het serf
could have taken conscious action: for example, by organising a peasant
uprising. But not in conditions of his own choosing – an individual peasant
could not wish away feudalism by an act of will. Human beings have choices,
they have free will: but their field of action is strictly limited by the economic,
social and political circumstances in which they find themselves.
However, despite the limitations of circumstances, history works throughh
active human agencies who have free will. People have choices. The idea of
a sociaist serf however is highly improbable, because the ideology of
socialism hadn’t been thought of. We are all products of the time in which we
live. Today, we can’t think in terms of a new ideology or theory which won’t
be developed until a thousand years from now. So we have free will, but
only within definite limits.
The problem from the point of view of Marxist theory is that, as Marx and
Engels put it, the political-ideological “superstructure” reacts upon the
economic base of society. People can try to change the existing social
relations and sometimes succeed. For example, the British deliberately kept
the price of land high in Australia to promote the development of capitalist
agriculture:
“extreme facility of acquiring land, by which every man
has been encouraged to become a Proprietor, producing
what he can by his own unassisted efforts . . . [but] what is
now required is to check this extreme facility and to
encourage the formation of a class of labourers for hire
…”
(Colonial Secretary Lord Goderick, quoted in “No Paradise
for Workers” by Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright).
This is just one example of how the development of ideas reacts with the
economic base of society. Ideas, inventions, are crucial to the development
of new productive techniques, which in turn help to transform production
relations. New ideas about equality and social justice create movements
which fight against the prevailing system. As Marx put it, ideas, when
mobilising millions, themselves become a material force.
This is especially true of the struggle for socialism. The capitalist revolution
was fought out with the feudal lords on the basis of a religious ideology.
Socialist revolution is the first revolution in human history based on a totally
conscious attempt to transform the social relations of production and bring
them under the control of the producers themselves. The way in which
production relations, the state, politics and ideology fit together will be
completely transformed.
The literature on this topic is vast, so the choice of further reading is
arbitrary. To erally get into the topic it is worth reading ‘What Happened in
History?’ And at least the first 50 pages of ‘The German Ideology’. In
addition to the works listed below, ‘The Communist Manifesto’ by Marx
and Engels, also now available as a Penguin Classic, is important to read.
Recommended reading
Basics
1.’What happened in History?’ C. Gordon Childe, Penguin Books
2.’The German Ideology’, Marx and Engels, Lawrence and Wishart
3.’Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’, Engels,
Penguin
4.’Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859′ Marx (This is
in most one-volume selections of Marx-Engels).
More difficult work
1.’Freedom and Determination in History according to Marx and
Engels’ Joseph Ferraro, Monthly Review Press
2.’Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence’ G A Cohen
3.’Making History’ Alex Callinicos, Polity Press
4.’Marxism and Anthropology’ Marc Bloch, Oxford University Press.
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