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

A labourer had no control over the final product of his labour. The nature of the productive Notes
process divided workers and set them against one another; they no longer conceived of their work
as a great, collective, human project. Moreover, human beings lost the ability to see their own
products for what they were, and were willing to be enslaved by them. This was what Marx meant
by commodity fetishism. All this criticism rested on an implicit Utopian premise, that individuals
were fully human only when they developed and expressed their potential through satisfying
labour. Linked with this premise was the second remarkable assumption, that the modern industrial
system afforded opportunities for all to engage in rewarding labour. In the socialist Utopia, division
of labour would be abolished ending alienation and monotony.
The early Liberals were confident that economic inequality could be obviated with constant growth,
which would percolate downwards and raise the standards of living. Marx, however, pointed out
that the gulf between the rich and poor forever widened. Capitalism encouraged inequality and
consumerism. Commodities assumed personalities of their own. Poverty and affluence were relative
categories, for human needs were by and large social in nature.
A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it
satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house,
and it shrinks from a little house to a hut... however high it may shoot up in the course
of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the
occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable,
dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.
To Marx, exploitation and alienation made possible the revolutionary transformation of capitalism.
It was the individual as a producer who rebelled against society to free himself from exploitation
and oppression. The basis for change was therefore moral. Unless private property was abolished,
the worker could not be truly free. But once this was achieved, human nature would undergo a
transformation, for a true Communist society was one of socialized humanity.
Capitalism divided society into two hostile camps. The proletariat grew larger and larger, with
their miseries and pauperization attenuated, while the bourgeoisie would become numerically
small, prosperous and well-off. With wages pushed low, small entrepreneurs were forced to join
the working class or merge with giant monopolies. The ever-increasing appetite of the capitalist
class led to an ever-increasing demand for markets, raw materials and profits, representing a
crisis within capitalism. Marx argued that the increase in productivity did not benefit the worker,
who only received exchange, and not use value. The surplus value was appropriated by the capitalist.
With polarization of society, class struggles became sharper, making a revolution on a world scale
inevitable. Marx conceived of a worldwide transformation, for capitalism was truly international
and global in impact.
Marx asserted that capitalism contained within itself seeds of its own destruction. He rallied the
working class under the call “Workers of all countries unite”, a phrase that he borrowed from Karl
Schapper. Within capitalism, increase in monopolies led to growing exploitation, misery and
pauperization of the working class. Simultaneously, as the working class increased in number, it
became better organized and acquired greater bargaining skills. This initiated a revolutionary
process, leading to a new socialist arrangement in which common possession replaced private
ownership of the means of production. The clarion call given to the workers was to unite, shed
their chains and conquer the world. In fact, it was “Marx’s journalistic eye for the short, pithy
sentence which ... saved his entire philosophy from oblivion ...”.
Subsequently, in 1895 Engels questioned the efficacy of revolutionary insurrection of society by
the proletariat, for he observed that “history has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong ...
has also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode
of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete in every respect”. This observation by Engels set the tone for
Revisionism led by Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) (Elliot 1967).

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