Marxist Origins of Communism

The Attack on "Bourgeois Freedom"

Marx was a German of Jewish origin who lived much of his life in exile in France and Great Britain. He found much to object to in the prevalent political philosophy of his host countries - a philosophy then known generally as liberalism, as elaborated by such thinkers as John Locke, Adam Smith, Voltaire, and Jean-Baptiste Say. Liberals saw themselves as advocates of liberty, and by liberty they meant the right of individuals to do as they pleased with their own lives and their own property. (Today, these "liberals" would probably be called "libertarians.")

While liberalism in the modern sense of the term tends to see the freedom to live as one pleases as quite distinct from the freedom to dispose of property as one pleases, the liberals of Marx's time usually saw these freedoms as closely connected. Personal freedom, as Locke for example saw it, was nothing else than self-ownership:

[E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This No Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property...
Second Treatise of Government

Or as Robert Overton, one of Locke's predecessors explained it:

To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not be to invaded or usurped by any: for everyone as he is himself, so he hath a self-propriety... No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's; I may be but an individual, enjoy myself and my self-propriety, and may write myself no more than myself, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man's right.
An Arrow Against All Tyrants

Marx did not deny the close connection between personal freedom and property rights. Rather, he accepted their connection, and denounced both as manifestations of what he called "bourgeois freedom." The doctrine of the rights of man was faulty, according to Marx, because:

None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice... Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty to engage in business.
On the Jewish Question

To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

For Marx, freedom of religion or the freedom to own property are hollow freedoms, or at least grossly inadequate stepping stones to something better: "political emancipation itself is not human emancipation." "[B]ourgeois 'freedom of conscience' is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part [socialism] endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion." (Critique of the Gotha Program). Rather than advocating freedom for all people, liberals really value only the freedom of the ruling class of capitalist society, viz., the bourgeoisie:

But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
Manifesto of the Communist Party

Marx accuses the liberal tradition of slighting the social nature of man. "Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others... It is a question of the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself." Marx elaborates: "The right of property, is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society... It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty." (On the Jewish Question)

Innumerable social thinkers disagree with much of Marx's thought, but praise his reflections upon human freedom, the depth of his insight in contrast to the shallowness of liberalism. Yet it is difficult to understand how Marx's concept of freedom is anything more than a defense of tyranny and oppression. No dissident or non-conformist can see society as the "realization of his own liberty." And what can the attack on "the right to do everything which does not harm others" amount to in practice, except a justification for coercing people who are not harming others? The problem with "broad" notions of freedom is that they necessarily wind up condoning the violation of "narrow" notions of freedom. Under "bourgeois" notions of religious liberty, people may practice any religion they wish ("a private whim or caprice" as Marx calls it); how could this liberty be broadened, without sanctioning the persecution of some religious views?

Earlier anti-liberals directly attacked liberty as an evil. Marx adopted a different stance - to attack liberty under the guise of expanding it. In so doing, he re-packaged despotism to please modern sensibilities - a feat of intellectual marketing which would have profound consequences for hundreds of millions of people in the next century.

The Evils of Capitalism

Marx was hardly the first thinker to denounce the evils of capitalism. Indeed, anti-capitalism is at least implicit in much of the Judeo-Christian tradition, with its attacks on greed, materialism, and selfishness.

Hear this, you who trample upon the needy,
And would bring the poor of the land to an end,
Saying, When will the new moon pass
That we may sell grain,
And the Sabbath that we may offer wheat for sale,
Making the ephah small and the price great,
And falsifying the scales;
Buying the poor for silver,
And the needy in exchange for a pair of sandals,
And selling the refuse of the grain.

...reads the book of Amos, pre-dating Marx by over 2000 years.

In medieval Christian thought, hatred of capitalism was closely mixed with anti-Semitism, due to Jews' involvement in banking, money-lending, and trade. The famous Protestant reformer Martin Luther, for example, wrote that: "[T]here is on earth no greater enemy of man, after the Devil, than a gripe-money and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men... Usury is a great, huge monster, like a werewolf... And since we break on the wheel and behead highwaymen, murderers, and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill... hunt down, curse, and behead all usurers!"

What Marx did was to update and reinvigorate the slumbering anti-capitalist impulse, combining it with Hegelian philosophy and a smattering of Classical economics. To an important and often overlooked extent, Marx merely repeatedly medieval Christian accusations:

What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.

What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering What is his worldly god? Money.

Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself...

The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jews. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
On the Jewish Question

Aside from invective laced with anti-Semitic undertones, Marx made several specific claims about the evils of capitalism.

• Capitalism drives workers' wages down to the subsistence level. "The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer." (Manifesto of the Communist Party) While Marx lived and wrote during a era when the standard of living of workers was rising at unprecedented rates in the world's capitalist centers in Britain, the United States, France, and Germany. Instead of noting these remarkable advances and trying to figure out how to magnify them as much as possible, Marx simply denied that improvement was occurring. He was not so blind as to deny that capitalism brought vast economic progress; rather, he repeatedly denied that any of this economic progress improved the lot of anyone but a small minority of exploiting bourgeoisie.

• While capitalism brings enormous economic progress, it is fundamentally unstable. Marx thought that wealth would become constantly more concentrated in the hands of a small number of capitalists, which would make the antagonism between workers and bourgeoisie ever clearer and sharper. At the same time, he argued that depressions would inevitably grow more intense so long as capitalism endured. As Marx puts it, "Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument... The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." (Capital, Vol. 2)

• A society's economic system determines it culture, art, religion, philosophy, and so on. In consequence, almost all of the evils of capitalist civilization can be blamed upon the existence of the capitalist system. This is the of elastic clause in the Marxian system, which allows almost any patent evil - even evils which have existed in nearly every human society - to be blamed upon capitalism. After all, "What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class." Does religion delude the masses? It is due to capitalism. Prostitution? Due to capitalism. Envy, alienation, war... all due to capitalism. Indeed, every unforeseen social evil has an obvious scapegoat upon which it can be blamed.

The Theory of Class Warfare

Many social thinkers throughout history have noted that different groups' interests conflict. Marx's distinctive contributions were, first, to paint class conflict as a life-and-death struggle impossible of peaceful resolution; second, to treat membership in a class as essentially permanent and hereditary. The combination of these principles led him to sanction and indeed to urge "total war" against hated social classes, a war in which all methods are permissible against anyone with the wrong class background. Passage after passage in the Marxian corpus hammers home this brutal message:

[T]he antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle carried to its highest expression in a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in a brutal "contradiction," the shock of body against body, as its final denouement?
The Coming Upheaval

Marx makes it quite clear that the class war will not end merely because the proletariat has gained the upper hand.

[S]o long as other classes continue to exist, the capitalist class in particular, the proletariat fights it (for with the coming of the proletariat to power, its enemies will not yet have disappeared, the old organization of society will not yet have disappeared), it must still use a measure of force, hence governmental measures; if it itself still remains a class and the economic conditions on which the class struggle and the existence of classes have not yet disappeared, they must be forcibly removed or transformed, and the process of their transformation must be forcibly accelerated.
After the Revolution

[B]y "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible. (Manifesto of the Communist Party)

It need not be said what will be done to people who do not want to be "transformed."

Hostility to the Peasantry

Marx's hatred of the bourgeoisie is legendary; less well known is his hostility to the peasantry. "The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as factions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history." (Manifesto of the Communist Party)

It is important to understand that at the time Marx wrote, peasants made up a large majority of the population of the world, and were still a significant element in even the most industrialized nations. Indeed, in virtually every country to come under Communist control, the peasantry was initially the most numerous social class. Marx's doctrine of class war thus ultimately implied not "total revolution" against a tiny bourgeois minority, but a war against the majority of the population.

Amoralism and Moral Relativism

Marx's writings abound with moralistic condemnations. His villains are variously labeled human rubbish, hucksters, expropriators, and so on. Yet at root, Marx is an amoralist who denies the existence of any universal moral standards.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property - historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production - this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.
Manifesto of the Communist Party

One might assume that Marx is merely saying that other people's moral standards are baseless. His close associate Engels makes sure that the Marxist position will be mis-intepreted by no one:

[T]he three classes of modern society, the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, each have a morality of their own... [W]e can only draw the one conclusion: that men, consciously or unconsciously, derive their ethical ideas in the last resort from the practical relations on which their class position is based... We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and forever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations.
Anti-Duhring

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination. Manifesto of the Communist Party

But does this position have any practical consequences? Indeed it does. Marx wants to do away with any moral barriers, any restraints of conscience, that might inhibit would-be revolutionaries. In particular, he wants to disparage any theory of "the so-called rights of man" (as Marx puts it) because total class warfare and human rights will inevitably conflict.

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