Marxist Theory
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.
Bibliography
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.