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Happy Birthday, Karl Marx!

On May 5th, 1818, Karl Marx, hero of the international proletatiat, was born. His revolution of Socialist theory reverberates throughout the world carries on to this day, in increasing magnitude. Every passing day, he is vindicated. His analysis of Capitalism, development of the theory of Scientific Socialism, and advancements on dialectics to become Dialectical Materialism, have all played a key role in the past century, and have remained ever-more relevant throughout.

He didn't always rock his famous beard, when he was younger he was clean shaven!

Some significant works:

Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Civil War in France

Wage Labor & Capital

Wages, Price, and Profit

Critique of the Gotha Programme

Manifesto of the Communist Party (along with Engels)

The Poverty of Philosophy

And, of course, Capital Vol I-III

Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don't know where to start? Check out my "Read Theory, Darn it!" introductory reading list!

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212 comments

  • Is it? I'm pretty sure private property and ownership was a thing in the middle ages. People selling stuff to make a living, merchants... Isn't the oldest known text some babylonian dude complaining about the faulty products of a merchant?

    • Trade has existed for as long as humanity has existed, correct, but trade isn't Capitalism. Capitalism specifically emerged from Feudalism. The historic ability for a class of property owners to employ wage laborers was only made possible through advancements in production.

      To give an example, the feudal peasant largely produced most things they used, from clothes to housing. They would produce excess for their feudal lord, and some small handicraftsmen and guilds formed specialized labor. These were not Capitalist formations, but pre-Capitalist.

      Eventually, technological advancements like the steam engine appeared. This revolutionized production, and gave huge rise to a class of owners that could purchase this new machinery, and employ workers in wages to create commodities. The barrier to entry is progressively lowered skill-wise, while the barrier to entry in the market as a Capital Owner raised, as firms began to solidify into factories. This coalesced into a marketplace of wage laborers selling their labor power to various Capitalists, eventually becoming the Capitalism of the time of Marx.

      Does this all make sense? Engels, in Principles of Communism, summarizes it as such:

      The proletariat originated in the industrial revolution which took place in England in the second half of the last [eighteenth] century and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world. This industrial revolution was brought about by the invention of the steam-engine, various spinning machines, the power loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole previous mode of production and ousted the former workers because machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than could the workers with their inefficient spinning-wheels and hand-looms. These machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered the workers' meagre property (tools, hand-looms, etc.) entirely worthless, so that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry.

      Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metalware industry. Labour was more and more divided among the individual workers, so that the worker who formerly had done a complete piece of work, now did only part of that piece. This division of labour made it possible to supply products faster and therefore more cheaply. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to a very simple, constantly repeated mechanical motion which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell one after another under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done. But at the same time they also fell into the hands of the big capitalists, and there too the workers were deprived of the last shred of independence. Gradually, not only did manufacture proper come increasingly under the dominance of the factory system, but the handicrafts, too, did so as big capitalists ousted the small masters more and more by setting up large workshops which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labour. This is how it has come about that in the civilized countries almost all kinds of labour are performed in factories, and that in almost all branches handicraft and manufacture have been superseded by large-scale industry. This process has to an ever greater degree ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have come into being which are gradually swallowing up all others, namely:

      I. The class of big capitalists, who in all civilized countries are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the raw materials and instruments (machines, factories) necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.

      II. The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labour to the bourgeoisie in order to get in exchange the means of subsistence necessary for their support. This class is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.

      • What would you call employing people for wages around 0AD? I don't think it's feudalism.

        • Can you give an example? It could be small manufacturing, the small handicraftsman, guild work, etc. Being paid money for labor isn't exclusive to Capitalism.

          • Ceramics (roof tiles and pots) were manufactured on an industrial scale in Rome for example. They employed workers and produced massive numbers of products.

            What is your distinction between employing people for money and capitalism?

            • Very interesting example! I'd say it's definitely a proto-Capitalist example, undoubdtedly. I wouldn't call it Capitalist out right, however, for a few reasons:

              1. Ceramics manufacture was relatively unique among the entire Roman economy. The Roman economy was largely slave-driven.
              2. Ceramics manufacture itself was technologically limited. The vast majority of what went into creating a pot, for example, was human hands, the Kiln was really the largest technical instrument. As a consequence, there wasn't continuous iterative improvement at voracious scales as is characteristic of Capitalism.

              I would classify it closer to a large version of manufacturing workers, but certainly could have expanded into Capitalism had the Roman society at large developed similar structures, giving rise to a dominant bourgeois class and the abolition of slave labor in favor of wage labor proletarians. The context of the entire economy is critical.

              I think I answered the differences between paying people in general and Capitalism specifically, but I also recommend Engels' Principles of Communism, the first few pages go over what makes Capitalism distinct from pre-Capitalist economic formations.

              • I was asking to clarify, because it sounded like your definition of capitalism was something like 'uses industrial machinery to allow for unskilled work.' By that definition, I agree that by definition capitalism didn't exist till after the industrial revolution, since industrial machinery didn't exist yet. But I disagree that capitalism requires industrial machinery.

                • Feudalism also employed some industrial machinery (water wheels for milling grain is one example). But the primary energy source was still muscle power, the primary product was agricultural produce, and the workers were peasants tied to the land, not mobile wage workers producing consumer goods.

                  Marxists consider these important distinctions that define entire historical periods, even if they're still both examples of class society.

                  • Great points, kicking myself that I forgot to mention the key aspects of production being largely agricultural, and workers largely immobile, especially. The ability to set up factories in cities with close cooperation is what took the sparks to a blaze.

                • That's not quite my definition. In order for Private Property to become the dominant aspect of society, technological advancements needed to be made to allow a small class of people to dominate society through ownership of the Means of Production. Marx explains it quite simply here:

                  The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

                  Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

                  Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

                  We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

                  • But you'd say that capitalism requires the technological advancements of the industrial revolution by definition?

                    • I'd say the formation of Capitalist production depends on the development of certain technologies to allow for the creation of large industry and division of society into classes of bourgeois and proletarian. Engels sums it up in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

                      Prior to capitalist production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, small-scale production generally prevailed, based upon the workers' private ownership of their means of production: the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf, and the handicrafts in the towns. The instruments of labour -- land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the hand tool -- were the instruments of labour of single individuals, adapted for individual use, and, therefore, of necessity puny, dwarfish, circumscribed. But for this very reason they normally belonged to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day was precisely the historic role of the capitalist mode of production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In Part IV of Capital Marx gives a detailed account of how the bourgeoisie has historically accomplished this since the fifteenth century through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture and large-scale industry. But as is also shown there, the bourgeoisie could not transform these limited means of production into mighty productive forces without at the same time transforming them from individual means of production into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the hand-loom and the blacksmith's hammer were replaced by the spinning machine, the power-loom and the steam hammer, and the individual workshop by the factory commanding the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. Like the means of production, production itself changed from a series of individual operations into a series of social acts, and the products from individual into social products. The yarn, the cloth and the metal goods that now came out of the factory were the common product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that, this is my product."

            • Also, the surplus in nearly all the periods of ancient Rome, was still largely an agrarian surplus, extracted either from slaves, or from feudal workers / colonates in the territories outside the city.

              The city / empire survived not by its own products and a commodity-producing economy, but by feeding an agrarian surplus off its many colonies.

    • Free market trade has existed and changed shape throughout most of human history. Advice with how to deal with it is in the Old Testament. how often or consistent it revolved around a common currency is/was constantly changing, though

212 comments