340 From Prophecy to Prediction

From Prophecy
A serialised survey of the movement
to Prediction
of ideas, developments in predictive
fiction, and first attempts to forecast
the future scientifically.
3.2. Programme for the proletariat : Karl Marx
John Sanderson
MARX had always wanted radical
change. Well before he developed his
characteristic doctrines, we find him
described as a devil of a revolu-
tionary. Marx remained throughout
his career a devil of a revolutionary;
but his concept of revolution became
more sophisticated and more empiric-
ally-based with the development of his
economic studies which he began in
1843, to some extent at the instigation
of Engels who had already written at
length on capitalism in Britain.
Soon, having gained some first-hand
experience of the industrial working
class in Paris and of its philosophical
protagonists, Marx specifically identi-
fied the proletariat as the agency
which would bring revolution to mod-
ern society. Thus in The German
Ideology (1845) he wrote of a class
which has to bear all the burdens of
society without enjoying its advan-
tages, which, ousted from society, is
forced into the most decided antagonism
to all other classes: a class which forms
the majority of all members of society,
and from which emanates the conscious-
ness of the necessity of a fundamental
revolution, the communist conscious-
ness, which may . . . also arise among
other classes too through the contem-
plation of the situation of this class.
Although Marxs view of the proxi-
Mr John Sanderson is Lecturer in Politics,
Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK; author
of An Interpretation of the Political Ideas of ktarx
and Engels (Longmans, 1969), and of a forth-
coming essay on the Marxist interpretation of
the English Civil War. This is the second part
of his contribution on Karl Marx to this series,
edited by I. F. Clarke.
mity of the workers revolution was
subject to revision, the idea that the
proletariat in the nations of Western
Europe must emancipate itself from the
bondage and misery engendered by the
capitalist system remained his
leading political idea, which he sought
unceasingly to realise. His real mis-
sion in life, Engels declared in his
Speech at the Graaeside of Marx, was
to contribute, in one way or another,
to the overthrow of capitalist society
. . . and to the liberation of the modern
proletariat, which he was the first
to make conscious of its own position
and its needs, conscious of the condi-
tions of its emancipation. As Engels
indicated, Marx not only regarded a
proletarian revolution as morally desir-
able: he also believed that there were
good, empirical reasons for regarding
such a revolution as historically inevit-
able in societies where the capitalist
mode of production had struck root.
And it is this powerful empirical
element which has made his theory
attractive to those opponents of capita-
list society who have sought to confront
it with something more than moral
condemnation.
Marx prefaced the first volume of
Capital (1867) with the assertion that
the ultimate aim of the work was
to lay bare the economic law of
motion of modern society; and it was,
of course, Marxs perception of this
law of motion that convinced him
of the inevitability of proletarian revo-
lution. Broadly, the revolution would
have two main causes. In the first place,
the very modus operandi of the capitalist
FUTURES August 1874
. . . given what Marx called the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses
From Pro$tecy to ~redi&~~o~ 343
system compelled the capitalists to
exploit and oppress ever more cruelly
the proletarians in their employ, there-
by alienating them (along with the
unemployed) to the point of what
Marx called a life and death struggle
against it. Secondly, Marx believed
that no form of society could persist
indefinitely in which the forces of pro-
duction and the relations of production
were in conflict, where (that is to say)
mans creative abilities were fettered
by his social and political organisation.
Now it was precisely this tension
between the forces and relations of
production which Marx saw develop-
ing apace in bourgeois society, and
again it was the modus operandi of the
capitalist system which was the causal
factor involved.
The retention by the employer of
surplus value was the act of exploita-
tion which Marx took to be the
secret of capitalist production, and he
regarded it as being no less an act of
exploitation for being less obvious
than those involved in slave or feudal
society. But the other side of the coin
of capitalist exploitation was the ulti-
mate destruction of the form of society
within which it flourished : the inescap-
able fact of capitalist enterprise was
that it tended to produce more goods
than the society could consume, given
what Marx called in Capital I I I the
poverty and restricted consumption
of the masses. This constant tendency
for production to outrun consumption
was, Marx held, an inherent feature of
capitalist society, and he regarded
the recurrent economic crises experi-
enced in Western Europe as the only
(albeit painful) method which that
society had of overcoming temporarily
the contradictions of production and
consumption, sale and purchase. Marx
explained in the Gruttdrisse that these
contradictions lead to explosions, cata-
clysms, crises, in which by momen-
taneous suspension of labour and anni-
hilation of a great portion of capital
the latter is violently reduced to the
noint where it can go on . . . Yet these
iegularly recurring- catastrophes lead
to their repetition on a higher scale,
and finally to its violent overthrow.
Within the context of capitalist
production, the response of the indivi-
dual capitalist to competition was to
exploit his workers even more
thoroughly (by extending working
hours, for example) and to cut costs by
increased mechanisation. The tendency
of capitalist production to be repeatedly
revolutionised by technological innova-
tion was a topic to which Marx returned
on numerous occasions, maintaining
that each new machine made the divi-
sion of labour even more unbearable,
dehumanising the worker by turning
him into a fragment of a man, an
appendage of a piece of iron which
dictated the pace and character of his
activity for long and weary hours. The
way in which the machine employs
the labourer is strikingly described in
Capital I : the machine, Marx wrote,
does not free the labourer from work,
but deprives the work of all interest.
Every kind of capitalist production . . .
has this in common, that it is not the
workman that employs the instruments
of labour, but the instruments of labour
that employ the workman . . . By
means of its conversion into an auto-
maton, the instrument of labour con-
fronts the labourer . . . in the shape of
capital, of dead labour, that dominates,
and pumps dry, living labour power.
And because he believed that no surplus
value could be extracted from a
machine (however advanced it might
be), he held that an increased level of
mechanisation in production tended to
lower the rate of profit, ie the ratio of
surplus value to the total capital
advanced by the capitalist, a tendency
which once again led to an intensifi-
cation of the exploitation of the
worker. Thus the overall effect of the
several responses of the capitalists to
competition was the creation of a
united and embittered proletariat,
whose ranks were swelled by the bank-
FUTURES August 1874
344 From Prophecy to Prediction
ruptcy of less efficient capitalists;
increased exploitation and increased
mechanisation thus engendered a solid
and violently resentful working class,
ultimately capable of taking its destiny
into its own hands: What the bour-
geoisie produces . . . above all, are its
own grave-diggers.
Proletarian bitterness reached a peak
with an economic crisis when an un-
usually large number of workers would
be unemployed and the lot of those
remaining in work was scarcely more
enviable than that of those without.
Moreover, it was in an economic crisis
that the restrictive character of the
capitalist relations ofproduction became
most apparent, for when the capitalist
saw no prospect of profit, the logic of
the system obliged him to shut down
his works and to lay off his men. Marx
further insisted that it was only the
restricting rationale of capitalist produc-
tion which wastefully allowed un-
employment to be the consequence of
technological innovation. But just as
(bourgeois) man had broken through
the restrictions imposed upon human
creative potential by feudal society,
so (proletarian) man would break
through those imposed by bourgeois
society.
Although exploited and oppressed,
the workers are brought by the impera-
tives of capitalist production into close
contact with each other. This fact,
coupled with the relative ease of the
communication of ideas in modern
society, facilitates the formation of a
united proletariat as a history-making
force, conscious of its degraded position
within the system, knowing who its
class enemies are, and realising that it
can liberate itself by revolution. Indeed,
Marx writes in the Communist Mani-
festo of the organisation of the pro-
letarians . . . into a political party,
arguing at the same time that non-
proletarian men of ideas such as himself
and Engels could hasten this process
by revealing to the proletarians the
nature of the system whose victims
they were: Just as, therefore, at an
earlier period, a section of the nobility
went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a
portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to
the proletariat, and in particular, a
portion of the bourgeois ideologists,
who have raised themselves to the level
of comprehending theoretically the
historical movement as a whole.
Marxs own theoretical comprehen-
sion of history indicated that there
could be no flinching from the emerg-
ing struggle between capital and
labour, and he urged other intellec-
tuals who sympathised with the prole-
tarian cause to recognise that this
struggle was inescapable. In reality,
he wrote in The German Ideology, the
actual property owners stand on one
side and the propertyless communist
proletarians on the other. This opposi-
tion becomes keener day by day and is
rapidly driving to a crisis. If . . . the
theoretical representatives of the prole-
tariat wish their literary activity to
have any practical effect, they must
first and foremost insist that all phrases
be swept aside which tend to dim the
realisation of the sharpness of this
opposition, all phrases tending to
conceal this opposition and giving the
bourgeois a chance to approach the
communists for safetys sake on the
strength of their philanthropic enthusi-
asms. The Communists therefore
aimed not at any kind of accommoda-
tion with the bourgeoisie, but at the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
Now the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat was the outcome of the seizure
of power by the proletariat. This
hitherto oppressed mass would use
political power as it had been used in
previous eras: to coerce the enemies
of the ruling class. But the dictatorship
of the proletariat, unlike any previous
regime, would oppress only a small and
diminishing minority in society and
would gradually disappear as the
remaining enemies of the proletariat
disappeared. Thus Marx was able to
envisage a society in which (as he
FUTURES August 1974
From Propheg to Prediction/Conferences 345
puts it in the Manifesto) the public
power will lose its political character;
he believed that a society unbedevilled
by class-divisions would be able to
dispense with politics, and would evolve
non-coercive ways of arriving at, and
of implementing, the public decisions
about priorities, allocation of resources,
etc, which any modern society had to
make. As well as the elimination of
politics (as thus understood), post-
revolution society would also see the
control of all production concen-
trated in the hands of a vast association
of the whole nation, an arrangement
which would make possible a more
rational exploitation of Natures re-
sources, together with an equitable
distribution of the proceeds. From the
standpoint of a higher . . . form of
society, Marx declared in Capital III,
private ownership of the globe by
single individuals will appear quite as
absurd as private ownership of one
man by another. Production would
be expanded and would be free from
the insane fluctuations characteristic
of capitalist society. And the impact of
the division of labour would be sub-
stantially mitigated by encouraging
the worker to undertake a plurality of
functions, involving both manual and
intellectual skills, in a single day, thus
producing what Marx called in Capital
I the greatest possible development
of his varied aptitudes.
It has become a notorious paradox
that the areas where men claiming
intellectual descent from Marx have
come to power are not the economic-
ally-advanced areas indicated by his
own analysis. This analysis suggests
that in general the proletarian revolu-
tion can succeed only where the capita-
list mode of production has run its
course and exhausted its creative
potential. Thus in what is often regarded
as his definitive theoretical statement,
The Preface to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859), Marx wrote that no
social order ever perishes before all
the productive forces for which there
is room in it have developed; and new,
higher relations of production never
appear before the material conditions
of their existence have matured in the
womb of the old society itself. There-
fore mankind always sets itself only such
tasks as it can solve . . . Now it can
scarcely be argued that capitalism had
run its course in Russia in 1917, or in
China in 1949; but in these instances
history would not wait, even for the
Red Terrorist Doctor himself.
CONFERENCES
Second European meeting on cybernetics and
systems research
de Cybernetique. These occasions are
proving a useful clearing house for
trends within the systems movement as
they attract up to 200 delegates from
Europe and the Americas and cover
most aspects of systems research. Re-
porting on such a meeting is difficult
as the four parallel sessions encom-
passed nine sections ranging through
Systems Theory (General 10, Techno-
logical 13),* Biocybernetics (19), Cog-
* Numbers refer to the number of papers in each
section. A list of authors and papers mentioned
in the report appears on p. 348.
VIENNA 16-19 April 1974
Organised by the Austrian Society
for Cybernetic Studies
With commendable enthusiasm the
Vienna Systems Circle held its
second biennial European meeting
under the benign patronage of the
Federal Minister of Science and Re-
search, and in association with the
Society for General Systems Research
as well as the Association Internationale
FUTURES August I @74 E