Notes on Marx and Revolution

S. Saks
The question I am addressing is: were Marx's hopes invested in the economic collapse of
capitalism, or in political revolution?
Marx began to hope for revolution ever since he lost faith in the republican aspirations of the
Young Hegelians in 1843. Over the course of his life, though, he predicted this revolution from a
number of different causes. Initially he believed philosophy should help activate the proletariat, yet
while calling for a revolution The Communist Manifesto (1848) at the same time argued that this
revolution would be the work not of ideas or individual agents but an inevitable economic process.
The economic determinism suggested in the Manifesto was elaborated in Capital vol. 1 (1867).
However, I will argue that even there, Marx's faith was not invested in the economic analysis for its
own sake but because this now seemed the surest guarantee of political revolution, displacing
previous philosophical arguments which were intended to reach the same goal. Indeed, towards the
end of his life Marx began to believe that a revolution could be achieved more quickly on the basis
of the Russian village commune rather than Western capitalism. While many were impressed with
the scientific prophecies of Capital, the economic collapse of capitalism was not, in the end, the
only path to revolution that Marx envisaged. What mattered was the revolution itself.
As one of the Young Hegelians in the early 40s, Marx shared their belief that the state could
embody reason and freedom as Hegel had claimed. But when the Prussian state closed down
opposition newspapers, including Marx's Rheinische Zeitung, in 1843, the voices for reform were
stifled without any significant public protest (Stedman-Jones 2002). This spurred Marx towards a
vision of communism, to be achieved by revolutionary means. In The Communist Manifesto (1848)
Marx and Engels called for the violent overthrow of bourgeois rule as the culmination of a
political class struggle (ch.2). The proletariat were to take over the state apparatus, seize
bourgeois property, and pave the way to a classless society. Once class antagonism had vanished,
it was claimed that the public power would lose its political character - what Marx elsewhere
described as the withering away of the State. The Manifesto had little to say on how a stateless
society would emerge or function indeed Marx was never very explicit about this, whether
because he thought utopian prediction was philosophically invalid (Geuss 2011), or because his
attempts to construct a working model of modern communism ultimately failed (Stedman-Jones
2002, ch.12).
Regardless of its supra-political aim, what the Manifesto describes is in the first place a
political revolution by the proletariat, the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense
majority. Marx initially thought that philosophy would play a key role in revolution by activating

the masses it would be head to the heart of the proletariat (Stedman-Jones 2002). While the
Manifesto seems to be playing precisely that function, however, it itself denies that the Communists
seek in any way to shape or mould the working-class movement. They do not base their theoretical
insights on ideas or principles... invented by any would-be reformer, but on understanding the
actual relations springing from an existing class struggle (ch.2). In other words, Marx and Engels
are introducing the claim that revolution ultimately arises from an economically determined
process, and not from ideas or individual actions.
Is Marx, then, really founding his hopes not on the superficial event of political revolution
but solely on the deeper economic process? The claim appears to clash with the agitational nature of
the Manifesto, as well as with Marx' earlier belief in the efficacy of ideas. In part, it can be
explained by his reaction to the criticisms of Stirner, who attacked Marx's Feuerbachian belief in the
normative character of man's species-being as quasi-religion. At that point Marx had begun to
look for a foundation for communism in economic factors, and Stirner's criticism impelled him to
jettison the role of ideas entirely which was perhaps more extreme than he really believed.
In the Manifesto, Marx suggests two ways in which the demise of capitalism is economically
determined. The first may be called the immiseration thesis: as the polarisation of society into two
opposing classes proceeds, the proletariat will literally be reduced to starvation, and the bourgeoisie
will fall because it cannot guarantee an existence to its slave within his slavery (ch.1). The second
argument is that the increasing centralisation and sophistication of capitalist production will lead to
the revolutionary combination of the proletariat by association in trade unions (ch.1). We might
think that the latter provides necessary but perhaps not sufficient conditions for revolution, in the
absence of political ideas. But as Marx was keen to exclude the independent role of ideas here, he
assumed that trade unions inherently tend to form a revolutionary network once the proletariat
exists, its self-consciousness will necessarily arise at some point, in Hegelian fashion.
If the political and economic aspects struggle for primacy in the Manifesto, however, the
first volume of Capital (1867) seems to decidedly emphasise the priority of economic factors. Both
of the arguments outlined above recur in Capital, in an extended analysis of the workings, historical
genesis and future of capitalism. The political side is downplayed, and the immiseration and
combination of workers in increasingly complex systems of production is no longer described as
leading to a violent overthrow. Rather, the expropriation of the expropriators which occurs is
presented as incomparably smoother than the brutal and protracted series of events that led to the
establishment of capitalism. It is merely the final episode whereby capitalism begets its own
negation, with the inexorability of a natural process. (Capital, pt. 9. ch.32).
To really judge whether Marx in Capital has come to see things exclusively in terms of
economics, however, we need to examine the particularities and the roots of his analysis of

capitalism. As Marx emphasises, capital is more than just money. It is the product of a relation of
production whereby a few (the capitalists) own the means of production and employ wage
labourers to work them. For Marx, the exchange value of an object should be understood in terms
of the average labour time required to produce it. Labour power itself has an exchange value say
that 10 hours' work produces the sustenance required to feed a worker for 15 hours' work. In this
case the labour power of the worker costs 10 units while it produces 15 units. These units of
accumulated labour power are the capital which the capitalist can use to buy more labour power,
while keeping the surplus revenue to himself.
What is interesting, however, is that the problem for Marx is not simply that the worker is
fed the bare minimum to keep him alive. In the Capital, immiseration is described in qualitative
rather than absolute terms the worker need not be constantly on the edge of starvation. While
Marx seems reluctant to accept that wage labourers could expect any significant economic benefits,
for example from trade union activity (Stedman-Jones 2002), this might be ascribed either to
dogmatism (if there is contrary evidence), or to the fact that Marx sees a more essential problem
with wage labour than poverty as such. Indeed, Marx in Capital suggests that wage labour is
inherently degrading in some way it is basically selling yourself (Capital ch. 32 p.928) . It
seems that if you have no stake in your means of production, your work will cause you misery even
if you happen to be decently fed, clothed and sheltered.
To understand why this is the case, we need to go beyond purely economic analysis and
examine Marx' unpublished Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844). Here, Marx
diagnoses the basic malaise of capitalist society in terms of alienation. The term is derived
ultimately from Hegelian dialectic, which proceeds from loss of immediacy through alienation to
reconciliation. Feuerbach critically applied this model to religion, arguing that religion performed
the alienation of human powers to an imaginary God, and then imperfectly restored them in return
for devotion. This restoration is not enough, since man as species-being finds his fulfilment in the
exercise of his powers, which demands immediacy. Marx extended this analysis to the realm of
labour. Modern labour alienates man from his powers by severing his control of the means of
production. Instead of living for his work, modern man works merely for the sake of staying alive,
and is thus deprived of his true fulfilment.
We can now see why Marx should depict wage labour as inherently degrading because it
alienates man from his essence. In the capitalist system, no one really has control of the means of
production (the capitalist himself is at the mercy of competitive pressures). The market reigns and
men, far from finding meaning in their work, do whatever is required to stay alive. Capitalism
produces misery not just because it produces poverty but because it isolates men from their essential
self-fulfilment.

I have suggested that this idea of alienation is very much present in Capital while it is
never mentioned explicitly, it lurks behind the depiction of wage labour as a humiliating act of
selling yourself. Marx had reason to suppress this concept, as I indicated, due to Stirner's critique
of Feuerbach. Stirner argued that the idea of species-being or the essence or calling of man is
simply a new kind of religion, the last metamorphosis of Christianity (Stedman-Jones 2002).
While Marx had previously argued that awareness of this species-being provides us with a
categorical imperative to overturn the present order of things, he had no desire to be associated
with neo-Christian moralism. Accordingly, as we saw, he decided to bury the role of ideas entirely
and employ the hard and scientific language of economics to make his case.
If I am right, then the arguments of Capital are not so purely economic as they might seem
at least not in the traditional sense. The conversion of increasing numbers of people into wage
labourers results in their immiseration, not just in terms of poverty, but because of their alienated
condition. Or even if we take Marx to have definitively replaced the language of alienation with the
language of economics, we can see that the economic argument is to some degree the
metamorphosis of the alienation argument. This suggests that the economic argument was not an
inevitable part of Marx's thought, but simply one of the ways in which he argued for the imminence
and necessity of a political revolution.
We can further confirm this by showing that, just as Marx's thought did not begin with
economics, neither did it end there. Rather than finish Capital, Marx spent the last 15 years of his
life studying primitive and archaic communes. In particular, he devoted his attention to the Russian
village commune. While initially dismissive, Marx became persuaded that this commune could
serve as the basis of a leap to advanced communism, bypassing the necessity of capitalist
development (and collapse), by means of a political revolution.
We can see Marx's thought change as he revises Capital for the 2nd German and the French
editions, explicitly restricting the story of capitalism's development to Western Europe. Writing to
the Editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski, he says that Capital has been misinterpreted as proposing a
general historico-philosophical theory, when in fact he was giving a historical sketch of
Western Europe only, perfectly aware that events of striking similarity, in different historical
circumstances, lead to totally disparate results (Shanin 1983). As to the question of whether the
Russian commune must give way to capitalist development or whether it could be used as an
immediate basis for communism, Marx replies that if Russia continues along the path it has
followed since 1861, it will lose the finest chance ever offered by history and undergo all the fateful
vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.
Even in the Aesopian language necessitated by censorship, it is clear that the finest chance
refers to revolution. Marx was a supporter of the revolutionary People's Will, and enthusiastically

expected the final trigger from the Russo-Turkish war, or from Alexander II's assassination (Wada
1983). He reiterated his views in a series of drafts of a letter to Vera Zasulich, who wrote to him on
behalf of the Black Repartition to ask whether they correctly understood Capital to say that the
village commune was fated to disappear. Marx once again emphasised that he had been talking only
about Western Europe. The commune faced two possibilites destruction by capitalism, or
development directly into advanced communism. The latter was possible because of the historically
unique co-existence of the commune with Western technology, which could be borrowed to
communist ends. But to achieve this it was essential to relieve the commune of the manifold
pressures threatening to destroy it by means of a general upheaval, a revolution (Shanin
1983).
In these drafts, Marx does not even make the implosion of Western capitalism a condition
for a successful communist revolution in Russia, which he expects independently. The statement in
the 1882 Preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto is somewhat more cautious it says that if
a revolution in Russia becomes a signal for proletarian revolution in the West, then the Russian
commune can perform the transition to advanced communism. This is supposedly the joint view of
Marx and Engels, but in light of the drafts, Wada (1983) argues that it probably reflects the view of
Engels more than Marx.
Accordingly, we can see that Marx's hopes at the end of his life rest on a political revolution
in Russia, where capitalism has scarcely begun to appear. This might trigger a proletarian revolution
in the West, or it might proceed independently on the way to communism. While Marx still believes
that capitalism is sooner or later bound for economic collapse, this is not the only way, nor perhaps
even the quickest, to the revolution that he dreams of.
I have argued that Marx' hopes are ultimately vested in political revolution, more than in the
economic collapse of capitalism. It might be said that around the time of Capital, the two were
more or less equivalent in his mind, such that the economic determinism seemed to be the deeper
cause enveloping political events. In this case, we would be dealing with a transient phase in his
thought, since in his later years, as in his youth, he was again counting on directly political means.
However, as I have suggested, even the economic arguments of Capital are not entirely freestanding they bear a strong resemblance to Marx's philosophical concerns in the Economical and
Philosophical Manuscripts. In the absence of the unpublished materials which became available
later, it is perhaps not surprising that Capital left many with an exaggerated and ultimately
distorting impression of Marx's thought as dominated by economics. It was not. Marx drew on
various sources throughout his intellectual career, but the goal remained the same all these roads
led to revolution.

Bibliography
Primary
The Communist Manifesto, ed. G. Stedman Jones, (London, 2002)
Capital; A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, ed. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth, 1976)
Part 8: So-Called Primitive Accumulation
Marx-Zasulich correspondence in T. Shanin ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road:
Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism (London, 1983)
Secondary
R. Geuss, lectures at Cambridge University
G. Stedman Jones, Introduction to The Communist Manifesto, ed. G. Stedman
Jones, (London, 2002)
G. Wada, Marx and Revolutionary Russia, in T. Shanin (ed), Late Marx and the
Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism, (London, 1983), 40-75.