SOCIALISAM AND COMMUNISM: MORE TO MARX
Thomas More, “Utopia”
Written more than three centuries before Karl Marx was born, Thomas More’sUtopia (1516) is a
scathing attack on private property and the evils allegedly attendant to it. It is worth noting that
More was not an atheist, but a deeply religious man who was later executed for his refusal to
compromise his religious principles, and posthumously declared a saint by the Catholic Church.
This shows that one need not be godless to find private property problematic; indeed many
Christians have thought it so, arguably going back to Jesus himself. More invented the term
“Utopia” as something of a pun, a play on Greek words that sounded the same but had two very
different meaning—one meant “good place” or “happy place,” while the other meant “no place.”
In any event, in the good place that is no place called Utopia, it is clear that all the social and
political ills flow from private property, and that happiness results from its abolition. As More
notes, following Plato, the founder of Western political philosophy, in important respects, “The
only way to promote the well-being of the public as a whole is to establish equality of all goods.
Such equality can never be found where every man’s goods are his private property. For there
every man lays claim to as much as he can get. Then, no matter how great the abundance, a few
divide all the riches among themselves, leaving the rest in poverty” (p. 190).
Robert Owen, “Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark”
Robert Owen was a nineteenth-century British capitalist who became deeply troubled by the
social side-effects of capitalism. Rather than attributing crime and such social ills as drunkenness
and debauchery to inherent defects in human nature, Owen came to see these as the effects of a
fundamentally unjust society defined by private ownership of the means of production.
Accordingly, Owen came to advocate a decentralized, cooperative system of production for
public profit, and an entirely new system of education. One of the communities founded on these
principles was at New Lanark, in Scotland, and it is to the workers of that community that the
following speech is given. The key assumption in Owen’s argument is that human character is
entirely a product of the environmental circumstances that produce it, consequently “any habits
and sentiments may be given to mankind” (p. 197). Owen therefore believed that by
reconstructing the manner in which human beings produce things, and educating them in a
radically new way, it would be possible “not only to withdraw vice, poverty, and, in a great
degree, misery, from the world, but also to place every individual under circumstances in which
he shall enjoy more permanent happiness than can be given to anyindividual under the principles
which have hitherto regulated society” (p. 197). Eventually, under cooperative socialism, he
believed that “the interest of each individual will be in strict unison with the interest of every
individual in the world” (p. 199). Such claims would later be derided by Karl Marx and his
collaborator Friedrich Engels as “utopian socialism,” a romantic vision incapable of being
implemented and of enduring very long anywhere.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”
In 1848, with the assistance of his collaborator and co-author Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx wrote
and published the Manifesto of the Communist Party.In it, Marx and Engels provided an
intentionally simplified, straightforward explication of Marx’s view of history. They also
discussed how that historical understanding led them to understand their own society, and
connected their analysis to a particular set of goals for those calling themselves communists.
The Manifesto is therefore both a brief summary of Marx’s theory and a practical plan of
political action. Marx and Engels begin the Manifesto with the famous claim: “The history of all
hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles” (p. 201). This was true in the ancient
and feudal worlds, they argued, and is equally true under capitalism. However, the distinguishing
feature of capitalist class struggle is that is has been simplified down into a battle between two
great contending classes, the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.” The bourgeoisie are the owners
of the means of production; in capitalism, these are best understood as things like factories which
make products (i.e., the “capital” in capitalism). The bourgeoisie are locked in conflict with the
proletariat, a group defined by the fact that they own nothing but their “labor power,” or their
ability to labor, which they are forced to sell as a commodity to the bourgeoisie for a wage,
merely in order to survive. The Manifesto describes how these two classes arose historically
from earlier forms of class struggle. The bourgeoisie were themselves once a revolutionary class
that arose within feudal society and eventually overthrew its “relations of property,” or existing
relations of production, built on lords, manors, and serfs. However, the process of class struggle
did not stop there, and Marx and Engels tell their readers that “a similar movement is going on
before our eyes” (p. 203). By placing the means of production, or capital—what Marx calls
“private property”—into the hands of a very small group, and relegating the overwhelming
number of people into desperate poverty, “the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself.” Moreover, Marx says, “it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those
weapons—the modern working class—the proletariat” (p. 204). And, for Marx, since the owners
of the means of production, the bourgeoisie, were only about 5-10% of the population, and the
proletariat was 90-95% of the population, the revolution that destroyed capitalism would be
fundamentally different than all others which had preceded it: “All previous historical
movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian
movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests
of the immense majority” (p. 206). Thus, Marx understood the proletariat as a “universal class”
that, by freeing itself, would thereby stop the motor of all previous historical change, which was
built on class struggle. Since there would only be one victorious class, the revolution that
ushered in communism would, he believed, be the last one. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels
describe the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat as “equally inevitable” (p.
207). All that was required was for the proletariat to unite on the factory floor, come to
understand the “objective” causes of their oppression, and act to transform their world, and thus
the world at large.
Karl Marx, “On the Materialist Conception of History”
In this brief but dense excerpt, Karl Marx tries to outline and briefly summarize his theory of
history. Marx once wrote that his philosophy of history could be read as an attempt to stand the
German philosopher Hegel, who greatly influenced him, on his head. What he meant by this was
that he thought Hegel was right in seeing history “dialectically”; that is, as a process driven by
tensions internal to particular historical moments. However, Marx thought that Hegel was wrong
in assuming that the motor for history was the tension between competing ideas that fought it out
with one another and culminated in a new and higher historical synthesis. Rather, Marx believed
that the real motor for historical change was the dialectical tension within the underlying material
world, rather than at the level of ideas. Specifically, he claims that in every society, eventually
the “material productive forces of society,” or group(s) of people with the ability to use specific
tools and technology necessary for production, ultimately “come in conflict with the existing
relations of production” (p. 214). These latter are the immediate social arrangements in which
production takes place or, as Marx calls them, “the property relations” governing a society. All
history is thus driven by a conflict between some people with the ability to use existing
technologies in the productive process (the material forces of production), and other people who
benefit from an existing set of property relationships (or relations of production). These groups
form classes and, as Marx said in the Manifesto, all history is therefore the history of class
struggle. The relations of production varied over time: the household and its slaves in the ancient
world, manors with lords and serfs in the medieval world, and a competitive marketplace with
private property ownership in the capitalist world. Nevertheless, the motor driving historical
change always remained that of class struggle. Together, the clash between the forces and
relations of production constitutes the real, material “base” or “foundation” of every society, and
the ideas that exist within any society pertaining to law, politics, morality, religion, etc., are
largely determined by the victors in that class struggle. Marx called this world of ideas and
institutions the “superstructure,” and ultimately saw it as an ideological tool used by the ruling
class in their own interest.