Marx

Question 1

What does Marx see as “fundamental to human life” according to Joseph O’Malley?

Answer 1

Social-economic processes

Question 2

What, in Joseph O’Malley’s view, are the two fundamental, interacting elements of social-economic processes that Marx identified?

Answer 2

• ‘Forces of production’
• ‘Relations of production’

Question 3

What is another name for the Forces of Production?

Answer 3

Productive forces

Question 4

What are the forces of production (in Joseph O’Malley’s words)?

Answer 4

“the creative capacities of human beings, which they exercise in order to meet their needs, and which they further develop in the course of that exercise”

Question 5

How does Joseph O’Malley describe the Relations of Production?

Answer 5

“the social relationships in and through which human beings exercise and develop their…forces of production.”

Question 6

What does the development of productive forces in society evenutally lead to?

Answer 6

A conflict between the forces of production and relations of production - relations become a ‘fetter’ on the advanced forces.

Question 7

What is it that facilitates the development of the productive forces in society as a whole and of individuals?

Answer 7

The relations of production - but only at first.

Question 8

How does Joseph O’Malley summarise the conflict between relations and forces of production?

Answer 8

“The antagonism is between forces that grow and relations that do not change.”

Question 9

How is the antagonism between relations and forces of production resolved in Joseph O’Malley’s words?

Answer 9

“a social revolution out of which come new relations of production, a new social-economic form consonant with the enhanced productive forces prepared by the old, now-superseded social form.”

Question 10

How are those caught in revolutionary change likely to interpret it?

Answer 10

Purely political or other ‘ideological’ terms.

Question 11

What is actually happening in revolutions?

Answer 11

Human creative energies and capacities are bursting through, throwing off, ‘abolishing’ or ‘superseding’ the outdated social-economic relations.

Question 12

When does one social-economic form give way to another?

Answer 12

When it has generated the enhanced
productive forces of which it
is capable. Those forces are what burst through the old relations,
which had become their ‘fetters’, and lay foundations for the new.

Question 13

What represents the full development of capitalism?

Answer 13

The world market

Question 14

What was capitalism destined to do as part of its nature?

Answer 14

Become the dominant world system

Question 15

What does capitalism’s triumph simultaneously represent in Joseph O’Malley’s words?

Answer 15

“at once its fulfillment and the beginning of its supersession”

Question 16

How is capitalism’s fulfilment and immanent downfall manifested?

Answer 16

The ‘crises’ that plague the world-system of capital

Question 17

How does Joseph O’Malley describe the crisies of capitalism?

Answer 17

“They are the marks of the fatal antagonism within the system, and they are the harbingers of the revolution which will abolish it”

Question 18

Why does Joseph O’Malley not see the fall of the Soviet Union as the triumph of capitalism?

Answer 18

“the ‘triumph’ of capitalism - if what we are witnessing is indeed a triumph - is an event predicted by the materialist guideline formulated in his early writings”

Question 19

What utopian elements does O’Malley identify in Marx’s early writings?

Answer 19

• the ‘abolition’ (or disappearance) of the state
• the abolition of the division of labour, of labour itself
• abolition of private property
• the achievement by human beings, for the first time in history, of control over their own, and external, nature, and over the conditions of their lives.

Question 20

What must happen for true democracy to exist? (O’Malley)

Answer 20

“Democracy, therefore, requires that individuals recognise a ‘genuine’ common interest and make an ongoing effort to resolve the ‘conflict’ between that common interest and their particular interests.”

Question 21

How and the common and particular interests be reconciled?

Answer 21

They will become the same thing - a “synthesis of universal and particular” as Joseph O’Malley puts it.

Question 22

Why is modern society not truly democratic?

Answer 22

People are wholly focused on their particular interests. “the lack of ‘even the semblance of a universal content’ that makes modern civil society a ‘war of all against all’.”

Question 23

What would the post-bourgeois society be for Marx?

Answer 23

The first truly democratic and human society.

Question 24

Why does Marx not see a republic as truly democratic?

Answer 24

Because its democratic arrangements do not operate within, do not ‘permeate’, the social-economic order of life.

Question 25

What does the republic state have that we might see as democratic but Marx does not?

Answer 25

Democratic political arrangements: elected legislature and executive, and a democratic form of government.

Question 26

What type of democracy is a republic and is it a true democracy?

Answer 26

It is a political democracy which is not a true democracy because it does not affect social-economic relations.

Question 27

In short, what is Marx’s ‘true democracy’?

Answer 27

‘economic democracy’ - determination of social-economic processes and relationships by democratic procedure instead of the free market. People will exercise control over conditions and relations of existence.

Question 28

What two assumptions did marx make according to Jon Elster?

Answer 28

“He seems to have proceeded on two implicit assumptions: First, whatever is desirable is feasible; second, whatever is desirable and feasible is inevitable.”

Question 29

What is derived from the fundamental feature of human life as Joseph O’Malley puts it?

Answer 29

Political processes - the institutions, procedures and modes of thinking proper to law and government - are secondary and derivative.

Question 30

What does marxism signify to people in the east?

Answer 30

“Among intellectuals in Eastern Europe, with few exceptions, “Marxism” is a dirty word. To them it signifies not the liberation but the oppression of man.” (Elster)

Question 31

How does Elster describe Marx’s scientism?

Answer 31

“His scientism - the belief that there exist “laws of motion” for society that operate with “iron necessity” - rested on a naive extrapolation from the achievements of natural science. “

Question 32

What happens in historical materialsim according to Elster?

Answer 32

“In historical materialism, “Humanity” appears as the collective subject whose flowering in communism is the final goal of history…In Hegel’s and Marx’s secular theology, mankind had to alienate itself from itself in order to regain itself in an enriched form.”

Question 33

What had capitalism done for humanity according to Marx but not for Man?

Answer 33

“He appreciated that class societies in general and capitalism in particular had led to enormous advances in civilization, as judged by the best achievements in art and science. Yet this process was the self-realization of Man rather than of individual men, who had, for the most part, lived in misery. Indeed, only by the exploitation of the many could class societies create the free time in which a few could contribute to the progress of civilization.” (Elster)

Question 34

How do people adapt for Elster?

Answer 34

“The oppressed often end up accepting their state, because the alternative is too hard to live with. Yet we know little about the limits within which this mechanism operates and beyond which revolt becomes a real possibility.”

Question 35

Are workers and capitalists free agents for Marx?

Answer 35

“Marx often emphasizes that workers and capitalists are not agents in the full sense of the term: free, active choosers. Rather, they are mere placeholders or, as he put it, “economic character masks,” condemned to act out the logic of the capitalist system. Workers are forced to sell their labor power, and the idea that they have a free choice in the labor market is an ideological construction. As consumers, their choice between different consumption plans is restricted by low wages. Similarly, capitalists are forced by competition to act as they do, including the inhumane practices of exploitation. If they tried to behave differently, they would be wiped out.” (elster)

Question 36

How does Elster describe dialectics?

Answer 36

"”Dialectics” is a term that has been used with a number of meanings. Common to almost all is the view that conflict, antagonism, or contradiction is a necessary condition for achieving certain results. Contradiction between ideas may be a condition for reaching truth; conflict among individuals, classes, or nations may be a necessary condition for social change.”

Question 37

What is the dialectical process according to Elster?

Answer 37

“Dialectical processes in the world have similar stages. The most important example of a dialectical process in Hegel and Marx is probably the following three-step sequence, briefly mentioned earlier. Society, they argued, begins as a primitive, undifferentiated community. Persons are essentially similar to one another, without distinctive character traits or different productive functions. The community dominates the individual, who is left with little scope for free choice or individual self-realization. The next stage, the negation of the first one, occurs with the emergence of alienation (Hegel) or of class societies (Marx). It is characterized by an extreme development of individuality and by an equally extreme disintegration of community. The third stage, the negation of the negation, restores community without, however, destroying individuality. It is in this respect the synthesis of the two previous stages.”

Question 38

What 3 flaws did marx find in capitalism?

Answer 38

“Marx found three main flaws in capitalism: inefficiency, exploitation, and alienation. These play two distinct roles in his theory.” (Elster)

Question 39

Why did Marx want communism?

Answer 39

“Marx valued communism above all because it would abolish alienation, in several senses of that term.”

Question 40

What is alienation according to Elster?

Answer 40

“Alienation can be described, very broadly, as the lack of a sense of meaning. “

Question 41

Did capitalism allow self-realisation for people?

Answer 41

“Marx believed that the good life for the individual was one of active self-realization. Capitalism offers this opportunity to a few but denies it to the vast majority. Under communism each and every individual will live a rich and active life.” (Elster)

Question 42

What is self-realisation for marx?

Answer 42

“Self-realization, for Marx, can be defined as the full and free actualization and externalization of the powers and abilities of the individual. Consider first the fullness of self-realization. It was one of Marx’s more utopian ideas that under communism there will be no more specialized occupations.” (Elster)

Question 43

What is self-realisation not compatible with?

Answer 43

“The ideal of self-realization is not compatible with society’s coercing people to develop socially valuable talents at the expense of those they want to develop. “ (Elster)

Question 44

Does self realisation mean anyone be whatever they want to be?

Answer 44

“A more charitable reading suggests, however, the weaker notion of freedom as lack of coercion. People might have to choose second-best or third-best lines of self-realization if they cannot find the material resources for their preferred option, but it would still be their choice, not someone else’s.” (elster)

Question 45

What does capitalism do for self-realisation?

Answer 45

“Marx placed almost exclusive emphasis on the lack of opportunities for self-realization in capitalism. He also emphasized, however, that capitalism creates the material basis for another society in which the full and free self-realization of each and every individual becomes possible. Communism arises when this basis has been created.” (elster)

Question 46

How is capitalism depersonalised?

Answer 46

“Industrial societies, however, are depersonalized in two ways that combine to render it implausible. The social nature of production makes it impossible for any individual to point to any product as his; also, production for a mass market breaks the personal bond between producer and consumer.” (Elster)

Question 47

How do people view each other under capitalism according to Elster?

Answer 47

“Even more importantly, in his eyes, markets operate by arm’s-length transactions that subvert communitarian values and make people into mere means to one another’s satisfaction. In The German Ideology Marx refers to this as “mutual exploitation.””

Question 48

What is Elster’s criticism of Marx’s view of capitalism?

Answer 48

“Marx concluded too rapidly that all the ills he observed in capitalism were due to capitalism. In reality, some of them are due to the nature of industrial work, others to biological facts about human beings, still others to problems inherent in coordinating complex activities.”

Question 49

What is living and dead labour?

Answer 49

“He distinguished between living labor and dead labor - the first being the labor expended by workers during the production process, the second the labor embodied in the means of production. The produced means of production thus form a link between past, present, and future generations of workers.” (Elster)

Question 50

What are the two stages of capitalism domination of labour? (Elster)

Answer 50

“Marx distinguishes between two stages in capital’s domination of labor. In the first stage there is a merely “formal subsumption” of labor under capital. The capitalist exploits the worker through his ownership of the means of production but does not extend his domination to the process of production…In the second stage, the “real subsumption” of labor under capital, the capitalist moves into the process of production itself. This development culminates in factory production, in which the worker is reduced to an appendage of the machinery”

Question 51

What is the relationship between alienation and exploitation?

Answer 51

“Alienation adds to exploitation a belief on the part of the workers that the capitalist has a legitimate claim on the surplus, by virtue of his legitimate ownership of the means of production. The ownership, in turn, is seen as legitimate because derived from a legitimate appropriation of surplus at some earlier time. “ (Elster)

Question 52

What if fetishism?

Answer 52

“The capitalist economy secretes illusions about itself. There is the illusion that workers are free to escape exploitation, the illusion that capitalists are entitled to their ownership of the means of production, and the illusion that commodities, money, and capital have properties and powers of their own. The last Marx refers to as fetishism, with a reference to the religions that endow inanimate objects with supernatural powers.” (Elster)

Question 53

What was commodity fetishism?

Answer 53

“Commodity fetishism is the belief that goods possess value just as they have weight, as an inherent property. To the unmystified mind, it is clear that a commodity has exchange value only because it stands in certain relations to human labor and human needs. In the bewitched world of commodity fetishism, however, goods appear to exchange at a certain rate because of their inherent values. “ (elster)

Question 54

how did Marx seek to eplain price?

Answer 54

“Like most of the classical economists, Marx tried to explain price formation by a labor theory of value. The rates at which goods exchange against each other are explained by the amount of labor that has gone into their production.” (Elster)

Question 55

What is the labour theory of value?

Answer 55

“The labor theory of value says that the prices of goods are explained by their labor content.” (Elster)

Question 56

How does Elster describe the labour theory of value?

Answer 56

“If I spend six hours putting straws together to form a mat and you spend three hours to catch one fish from the stream with your hands, the expected rate of exchange - if there is an exchange - would be two fish against one mat. I would not be satisfied with anything less than two fish, because I could have caught that amount myself in the time I spent making the mat; similarly, you would not settle for less than the whole mat. “

Question 57

Why was capitalism not a rational way of distributing goods as it is commonly claimed?

Answer 57

“On the other hand, he argued that capitalism fails to deliver the goods even in its own terms. In particular, it is prone to recurrent economic crises that undermine any claim to being a rational way of organizing production and distribution.”

Question 58

What is exploitation for Marx?

Answer 58

“Marx’s notion of exploitation has a very specific content. A person is exploited, in Marx’s sense, if he performs more labor than is necessary to produce the goods that he consumes.” (Elster)

Question 59

What makes someone an exploiter?

Answer 59

“Conversely, a person is an exploiter if he works fewer hours than are needed to sustain his consumption. For there to be exploiters, there must also be some who are exploited.” (Elster)

Question 60

When does exploitation start in the first place?

Answer 60

“According to Marx, it typically arises because workers are forced by economic circumstances to sell their labor power. They have no land they can cultivate: neither do they have the capital necessary to set themselves up in business. Nor do they usually have the documented entrepreneurial skills that could persuade a bank to lend them money. All alternatives to wage labor - starving, begging, stealing, or the workhouse - are so unattractive that no man in his senses would choose them. The choice of wage labor is forced, although uncoerced.” (Elster)

Question 61

What is the link between exploitation and justice?

Answer 61

“The conclusion is almost unavoidable that part of Marx’s indictment of capitalism rests on its injustice. It is unfair that some should be able to earn an income without working, whereas others must toil to eke out a miserable existence. “ (Elster)

Question 62

Does Marx claim to making claims about justice in his views on capitalist exploitation?

Answer 62

“Yet Marx explicitly denies that he is advocating a particular conception of justice. He asserts that theories of morality and justice are ideological constructions, which only serve to justify and perpetuate the existing property relations. Actions are said to be just or unjust according to a moral code corresponding to a particular mode of production.” (Elster)

Question 63

Did Marx morally condemn capitalism?

Answer 63

“He believed that historical development was governed by laws of motion operating with iron necessity, so that moral condemnations were either pointless or superfluous. Communism cannot come about before conditions are objectively ready for it; and when they are, capitalism will fall away by itself. As long as exploitation is historically necessary, it will remain; as soon as its time is past, it will disappear. “ (Elster)

Question 64

Is exploitation justified?

Answer 64

“The development of the productive forces requires the relentless operation of the profit motive, at least up to the point when that very development has created the material conditions for a society in which further development can take place as part of the general self-realization of the individuals” (Elster)

Question 65

Is exploitation fair?

Answer 65

“More specifically, he frequently refers to the capitalist extraction of surplus value as theft, embezzlement, robbery, and stealing. These are terms that immediately imply that an injustice is being committed. Moreover, the sense in which it is an injustice cannot be the relativistic one. Marx insists that, with respect to capitalist conceptions of justice, exploitation, unlike cheating and fraud, is fair.” (Elster)

Question 66

What is communism in the stages of history?

Answer 66

“Communism is both the goal of history and the point at which it comes to rest.” (Elster)

Question 67

How does each mode of production change?

Answer 67

“Within each mode of production, there initially obtains a correspondence between the relations of production and the productive forces. Later the correspondence turns into a contradiction, which causes “an epoch of social revolution” and the setting up of new relations of production, which, for a while, reestablish the correspondence.” (Elster)

Question 68

What causes a change is relations of production?

Answer 68

“What causes the contradiction is the development of the productive forces that took place during the period when the relation was one of correspondence. Any mode of production stimulates a development of the productive forces that will lead to its own obsolescence. Being obsolescent, it will then be thrown on the scrap heap of history and a new one, better suited to the historical task of developing the productive forces, will take its place. A change in the relations of production occurs when and because the existing relations cease to be optimal for the development of the productive forces.” (Elster)

Question 69

What was necessary to understanding social change?

Answer 69

“When there are several organized classes with opposed interests, what will the outcome be of their confrontation with one another? Marx argued that this is the central problem in understanding social change, because he claimed that in the final analysis all social conflict reduces to class struggle.” (Elster)

Question 70

What did Marx mean by class?

Answer 70

“Marx never said in so many words what he meant by a class. “ (Elster)

Question 71

What is class not?

Answer 71

“One possible criterion can be excluded at the outset: Marx tells us in so many words that classes are not differentiated by income. Although members of different classes will, typically, earn different incomes, they need not do so; and, even when they do, it is not by virtue of this fact that they belong to different classes. He also rejects the idea that classes can be distinguished by the occupations of their members, that is, by the specific nature of the work they perform. The work context, not the work itself, is constitutive of class. Finally, we can exclude the idea that classes are differentiated by status, be it by the informal status criterion of honor or by the formal criterion of belonging to a legal order. “ (Elster)

Question 72

What is frequently said about class definitions by Marx?

Answer 72

“Most frequently, class membership is defined by the ownership or lack of ownership of the means of production. For Marx’s purpose, this definition cannot be the whole story, although it surely is an important part of it.” (Elster)

Question 73

What is Elster’s view of Marx’s idea of class?

Answer 73

“Market behavior is a more plausible criterion. The working class is made up of those who sell their labor power, the capitalist class by those who buy labor power; the petty bourgeoisie by those who do neither.”

Question 74

What is a condition of class consciousness?

Answer 74

“A first condition for concerted, collective action is that the members of the class have a correct understanding of their situation and their interest” (Elster)

Question 75

What was Marx’s criticism of the English working classes?

Answer 75

“Marx was somewhat more optimistic with respect to the capacity of English workers to form an adequate conception of their interests. Yet he was also frustrated by their lack of revolutionary class consciousness, which in part he imputed to their lack of understanding of their real interests…Because the capitalists did not themselves take political power but left its exercise to the class of aristocratic landowners, the workers were confused about the nature of their real enemy - Capital or Government? Struggling simultaneously against political oppression and economic exploitation, and not understanding that the former was only the extension of the latter, they had a very diffuse notion of where their interest lay.” (Elster)

Question 76

What makes a conclfict a class conflict?

Answer 76

“What makes a conflict into a class struggle is, first, that the parties involved are classes and, second, that the objects of the struggle are interests they have as classes, not as, say, citizens or ethnic groups.” (Elster)

Question 77

What is politics for Marx?

Answer 77

“There are two perspectives on politics in Marx’s writings. On the one hand, politics is part of the superstructure and hence of the forces that oppose social change. The political system stabilizes the dominant economic relations. On the other hand, politics is a medium for revolution and hence for social change. New relations of production are ushered in by political struggles. “ (Elster)

Question 78

Does communist revolution create a new politics?

Answer 78

“The political movement that leads up to communism does not, after its victory, solidify into a new political system but rather proceeds to the dismantling of politics.” (Elster)

Question 79

How did Marx view the state?

Answer 79

“Marx had not one but two or three theories of the capitalist state. Prior to 1848 he held a purely instrumental theory, usually thought of as the Marxist theory of the state, according to which it is “nothing but” a tool for the common interests of the bourgeoisie. After 1848, when this view became increasingly implausible, he substituted for it an “abdication theory,” to the effect that capitalists abstain from political power because they find their interests better served this way.” (Elster)

Question 80

What tasks does the capitalist state perform and give an example?

Answer 80

“Among the tasks of the capitalist state, Marx cites expropriation of private property when it is in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole; legal regulation of the length of the working day; and enforcement of competition…Marx argued that the state had to take the long view. In the long run, the viability and hence the legitimacy of capitalism depend upon the spur of competition. Similarly, he argued that the Ten Hours Bill of 1848 was introduced to protect capitalists against their short-term greed. By over-exploiting the workers, for the purpose of short-term profits, they were threatening the physical reproduction and survival of the class that formed the very condition for profit.” (Elster)

Question 81

When will the communist revolution occur?

Answer 81

“It follows from the central propositions of historical materialism that the communist revolution will occur when and because communist relations of production become optimal for the development of the productive forces.” (Elster)

Question 82

Will revolution occur because capitalism stagnates or expands?

Answer 82

“Marx argued that under capitalism the productive forces develop at an ever faster rate. Yet at some level of their development communist relations of production will allow for an even higher rate of their further progress. Hence, the communist revolution will be caused not by technical stagnation but by the prospect of an unprecedented technical expansion.” (Elster)

Question 83

What does experience suggest about communist revolution?

Answer 83

“Theory suggests and experience confirms that communist revolutions will take place only in backward countries that are nowhere near the stage of development at which they could overtake capitalism. Russia around the turn of the century was a breeding ground for revolution because its backwardness created the proper economic and ideological conditions.” (Elster)

Question 84

Was communist revolution violent?

Answer 84

“In The German Ideology Marx made a point that was later to be developed by the French socialist Sorel (much admired by Mussolini). A violent revolution is doubly necessary, “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” His later writings moved away from this view, emphasizing that a peaceful transition was desirable and arguably also possible. In 1852 Marx asserted that the inevitable result of universal suffrage in England would be the political supremacy of the working class, suggesting the possibility of a peaceful road to communism.” (Elster)

Question 85

What are the two stages following communist revolution (perhaps some form of political emancipation?

Answer 85

“Between the communist revolution and the full-blown communist society there lie two intermediate forms. The first is “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” a phrase that has acquired an ominous meaning that probably was not present to Marx and his contemporaries…The dictatorship of the proletariat is a stage in the political transition to communism. In the Critique of the Gotha Program Marx states that it is succeeded by an economic transitional form, which Marx refers to as the lower stage of communism. Roughly speaking, it is a form of state socialism with distribution according to labor effort. Marx has very little to say about these two intermediate stages and their relation to one another.” (Elster)

Question 86

What will the final stage of communism look like?

Answer 86

“In the final stage of communism, all political institutions disappear. What takes their place is the self-government of the community - a task, according to Marx, no more difficult than the control of an individual over himself. With the disappearance of alienation and exploitation, social relations will be perfectly transparent and nonconflictual.” (Elster)

Question 87

What is ideology?

Answer 87

“What are the forces that shape and maintain ideological thinking? The standard and, as it were, official Marxist answer is interest; more specifically, the interest of the ruling class” (Elster)

Question 88

how does capitalism give the illusion of independence?

Answer 88

“Because capitalism, unlike earlier modes of production, allows the worker the freedom to choose his own master, it may appear as if labor is more independent of capital than is actually the case. Although there is no capitalist for whom the worker has to work, he has to work for some capitalist or other. The freedom of choice obscures the structural dependency.” (Elster)

Question 89

What is the link between religion, alienation, and ideology?

Answer 89

“In religion man creates God, who appears to man as his creator. This conception of an inversion of subject and object, of creator and created, is at the origin of Marx’s concept of alienation. Man becomes the slave of his own products in economic life by the subsumption of labor under capital; in politics, by the usurpation of power by representatives or delegates; and in religion, by the subjection of man to an imaginary divine being.” (Elster)

Question 90

Why do we have religion?

Answer 90

“All class societies have religion, because religion serves certain important interests linked to class subjection and class domination. Capitalism has Christianity because of cognitive affinities between the two systems. “ (Elster)

Question 91

How did Marx’s views on the stae change?

Answer 91

“The theory for which he is best known, that the state is “nothing but” a tool for the collective class interests of the capitalists, is one that he himself abandoned early on, when it was disproved by the tum of events in the main European countries around 1850. Instead, he proposed an “abdication theory” of the state, according to which the state is allowed to have some autonomy but only because it suits the interests of the capitalists.” (Elster)

Question 92

What was Marx the fist to do?

Answer 92

“He was first to chart the staggering transformation produced in less than a century by the emergence of a world market and the unleashing of the unparalleled productive powers of modern industry…He emphasized its inherent tendency to invent new needs and the means to satisfy them, its subversion of all inherited cultural practices and beliefs, its disregard of all boundaries, whether sacred or secular, its destabilization of every hallowed hierarchy, whether of ruler and ruled, man and woman or parent and child, its turning of everything into an object for sale.” (GSJones)

Question 93

What impact has Marx’s work had?

Answer 93

“For a century or more, it’s now seemingly extraordinary theory of history as a class struggle leading inevitably towards the triumph of world communism constituted a credo embraced by tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of adherents in every part of the world. “ (GSJones)

Question 94

How was Marx’s arguments presented?

Answer 94

“Enunciated not as a statement of principle or an expression of desire, but as a set of predictions” (GSJones)

Question 95

Are communist to credit with societal changes?

Answer 95

“Communists take no personal responsibility for the imminent expropriation of the bourgeoisie and even the proletariat will only be playing the role which history has assigned to it. Communists are no longer those who espouse a particular set of ‘ideas or principles’, they ‘merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes’. “ (GSJones)

Question 96

Were communsits a particular group?

Answer 96

“‘the Communists’ did not form ‘a separate party’, they pointed out ‘the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality’ and clearly understood ‘the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’.” (GSJones)

Question 97

What did Engels say at Marx’s graveside?

Answer 97

“‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature’, Engels proclaimed at Marx’s graveside in 1883, ‘so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’ “ (GSJones)

Question 98

Was communism political?

Answer 98

“Communism was political. It represented a revival of the revolutionary republican tradition, an extension of the cause of equality from the destruction of privilege into a generalized assault upon private property.” (GSJones)

Question 99

How did Sismondi define the proletariat?

Answer 99

“Proletarians, according to Sismondi (who had introduced the term in 1819), were ‘a miserable and suffering population’ that would always be ‘restless’ with ‘no affection’ for their country and ‘no attachment to the established order’.” (GSJones)

Question 100

Why did Weitling call for revolution?

Answer 100

“Weitling called for a revolution that would bring about the community of goods and the abolition of the state ‘since every state, even the most extensive democracy, requires subordination’ and subordination was incompatible with equality.” (GSJones)

Question 101

Where did the proletariat come from?

Answer 101

“The proletariat was the product of industrialization, disciplined by the factories which gave them employment and the cities in which they were congregated.” (GSJones)

Question 102

What was law, morality, and religion to the proletariat?

Answer 102

“The proletariat still lacked a country; ‘law, morality and religion’ were still to him ‘so many bourgeois prejudices’.” (GSJones)

Question 103

What would communism do to religion?

Answer 103

“But with the coming of communism, hell would no longer exist on earth, nor heaven beyond it; rather, everything that in Christianity had been represented prophetically and fantastically would come to pass in a truly human society founded upon the eternal laws of love and reason.” (GSJones)

Question 104

What was money and what had it doen to people?

Answer 104

“Money, ‘the alienated empty abstraction of property’, had become the master of the world. Man had ceased to be the slave of man and had become ‘the slave of things’. “ (GSJones)

Question 105

What was Engels confident in?

Answer 105

“Engels was confident of the ‘irresistible progress’ of the human species through history, ‘its ever certain victory over the unreason of the individual’. He wrote in 1844: ‘Man has only to understand himself [, and] to organize the world in a truly human manner according to the demands of his own nature, and he will have solved the riddle of our time.’” (GSJones)

Question 106

What was the first stage of humanity’s recovery?

Answer 106

“But pauperization and dehumanization formed the essential prelude to their recovery of humanity through proletarian revolt, beginning with crude acts of individual violence and culminating in an organized labour movement, Chartism and social revolution.” (GSJones)

Question 107

What are relations of production and forces of production?

Answer 107

“the property system (‘relations of production’) and the development of human productive power (‘forces of production’)” (GSJones)

Question 108

What is communism?

Answer 108

“the negation of private property” (GSJones)

Question 109

What is religion and economics?

Answer 109

“Religion and economics had jointly expressed the alienation of Man’s true ‘species’ or ‘communal’ being. Religion had represented the alienation of Man’s thought, private property the alienation of his practical activity.” (GSJones)

Question 110

How must communism be achieved?

Answer 110

“Communist aims, according to the Manifesto, could ‘be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions’.” (GSJones)

Question 111

Where was freedom found for hegel?

Answer 111

“The true location of ‘free subjectivity’ had changed from the church to the state. The state, as Hegel taught, was ‘the actuality of the ethical idea’; reason and freedom constituted its essence and this meant that the state must stand with science and philosophy against all forms of ‘positivity’.” (GSJones)

Question 112

What was the state and law for Hegel?

Answer 112

“his ‘concept of the state as the realization of rational freedom’. The bedrock of this rational state was the law. The law comprised ‘the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal theoretical existence’. “ (GSJones)

Question 113

Why did hegel champion a free state?

Answer 113

“The free press was ‘the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul’. It would recall the state to its inner principle as the embodiment of reason and freedom…Through the activity of the free press, reason and freedom would rapidly triumph over the ‘Christian state’.” (GSJones)

Question 114

What was human emancipation for Marx?

Answer 114

“Human emancipation was not a question of political forms, but of social relationships.” (GSJones)

Question 115

What was the relationship between private property and the state?

Answer 115

“Now he saw something more universal and systematic. The modern state as such was the creature of private property and this made hollow all Hegel’s claims about mediation. Private property was not simply a pillar of the constitution, but the constitution itself.” (GSJones)

Question 116

What did democracy mean for Marx?

Answer 116

“‘Democracy’ did not mean a modern representative republic based upon universal suffrage. That would only have been another version of the discredited ‘political state’, whereas ‘in true democracy the political state is annihilated’.” (GSJones)

Question 117

What would the relationship between communism and the state be after the revolution?

Answer 117

“It would be a society in which the distinction between state and civil society would have been abolished. With the removal of mediating institutions, the constitution would be brought back to ‘its actual basis, the actual human being, the actual people’. The distinction between political and unpolitical Man would be overcome. “ (GSJones)

Question 118

How did capitalism treat men in relation with each other?

Answer 118

“From the beginning, political economy treated the relation of Man to Man as a relationship between property owner and property owner. It proceeded as if private property were a natural attribute of Man or a simple consequence of ‘the propensity to truck, barter and exchange’ described by Adam Smith.” (GSJones)

Question 119

What was man’s labour

Answer 119

“His labour belonged to another and was therefore unfree. It was the labour ‘of a man alien to labour and standing outside it’, or the relation to it of ‘a capitalist’.” (GSJones)

Question 120

Was the communism the goal of human development?

Answer 120

“But although it was ‘the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate future’, communism was not as such ‘the goal of human development’. Communism was the abolition of private property” (GSJones)

Question 121

What must humanity be put through?

Answer 121

“‘The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outside world.’” (GSJones)

Question 122

What would follow the abolition of private property for Marx?

Answer 122

“In his conception, the abolition of private property would be followed by ‘the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities’.” (GSJones)

Question 123

What were the two stages of communism and socialism?

Answer 123

“The two stages of communism or socialism, the first as the abolition of private property, the second as ‘the complete return of Man to himself’ “ (GSJones)

Question 124

What sort of communism did Marx reject?

Answer 124

“Marx consistently rejected all theories of communism based upon rights. Rights, justice and the state went together. Communism, on the other hand, would not be about ‘the government of men’, but about ‘the administration of things’. Communism or socialism concerned a society in which the ‘self-activity’ of individuals would be directed towards the satisfaction of need.” (GSJones)

Question 125

What would communism give back to Man?

Answer 125

Himself

Question 126

Why did Marx and Engels praise the bougeoisie in the Manifesto?

Answer 126

“why did the Manifesto devote so much space to a panegyric extolling the achievements of the bourgeoisie? It was because the bourgeoisie was driving the world to the threshold of a new epoch of relative abundance in which rights, justice, labour, private property and the political state could be left behind, and the world could again become open to every form of human activity as it once had been in primeval time.” (GSJones)

Question 127

What had capitalism done to nations?

Answer 127

“Large-scale industry based upon the ‘automatic system’ had ‘created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society’ and therefore destroyed ‘the peculiar features between different nationalities’.” (GSJones)

Question 128

What would take the place of the state in communism?

Answer 128

“It would replace the state as ‘the illusory community’, which always ‘took on an independent existence’ in relation to the individuals who composed it, with ‘a real community’ in which ‘individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association’.” (GSJones)

Question 129

What would activity be like under communism?

Answer 129

“communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow” (GSJones)

Question 130

What would be the condition under which all lived in communism?

Answer 130

“Once the ‘gigantic means of production and exchange’ conjured up by ‘modern bourgeois society’ had been brought under human control, there would arise ‘an association, in which the free development of each’ would be ‘the condition for the free development of all’.” (GSJones)