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Unit 12: Karl Marx: Class Struggle and Social Change and Theory of Surplus Value

was eternal and immutable. He harnessed the rising consciousness and power among the industrial Notes
proletariat, and emphasized that it was their desire to bring about economic equality that kept
class struggle and revolutionary change alive. He summed up his own contributions to the notion
of class struggle in a letter to Josef Weydemeyer in 1852, wherein he confidently declared that
class struggles would not be a permanent feature of society, but were necessitated by the historical
development of production. Class struggle would end with the destruction of capitalism, for
Communism would be a classless society.
Class, for Marx, symbolized collective unity in the same manner as the nation in Hegel’s theory.
Each class produced its own ideas and beliefs, and operated within a particular economic and
social system. The individual was important with respect to his membership within a class, which
determined his moral convictions, aesthetic preferences and every kind of reasoning.
For Marx, ideology played a pivotal role in controlling the oppressed. There were three main
features of ideas. First, they depicted the existing order as entrenched in forces that were beyond
human control. Things were not arbitrary, but instituted by certain sections of people for their
own benefit. Second, ideas explained how the existing order benefited everyone in society. Third,
ideas depicted the existing order as beneficial in a particular way, namely to promote the interests
of the dominant economic class and protect class privileges. The actual reality was hidden, which
Marx described as “false consciousness”.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas : i.e., the class which
is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the
same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking,
the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling
ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,
the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationship which
make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of its dominance.
Ideology, along with economic determinism and class struggle, provided the strategic guide to the
working class in its efforts to bring about a social revolution.

12.2 Analysis of Capitalism

Marx defined capitalism by two factors, first, by the use of wage labour. In the Capital, he pointed
out that “capitalism arises only when the owners of the means of production and subsistence meet
in the market with the free labourer selling his labour power”. The basis of capitalism was wage
labour. The second defining characteristic of capitalism was private ownership of the means of
production, which was distinct from personal property, like household effects and home. The
ownership of the means of production was the crucial feature of capitalism, for it was restricted to
a few. Those who did not own anything were forced to sell their labour power and became wage
earners. The idea that labour was only the property of the poor was derived from William Cobbett
(1763-1835). Unlike the medieval guildsmen, they did not work for themselves but for others.
Marx observed :
The man who possesses no other property than his labour power must, in all conditions
of society and culture, be the slave of other men, who have made themselves the
owners of the material conditions of labour. He can work only with their permission,
hence live only with their permission .
In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx implied that even if the state owned the means
of production, wage labour would still continue. This was not real Socialism, but a new variation
of capitalism, namely state capitalism. Many critics often argued that the former Soviet Union was
not a true Socialist state, but a tyrannous form of state capitalism.

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