Tuesday, Oct 13, 2020 • 10min

Marx’s vision of socialism:

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why Marx refused to draw up any detailed plan for a socialist society but saw socialism as a historical process created by the working class itself after the overthrow of capitalism

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John Molyneux

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John Molyneux

00:05

Hello and welcome to Video 14 in my series of short introductions to the ideas of

Marx

and

Marxism

00:14

In this one, I want to talk about

Marx's

concept or vision of

Socialism

. People new to

Marx

often expect that he would have laid out a plan or set up instructions for what

Socialism

should look like. And when they find out that he did no such thing, they are often disappointed and think this was rather remiss of him.

00:40

Now, in fact, for

Marx

, setting out such a plan would have been quite contrary to his whole theoretical method. For

Marx,

Socialism

Communism

was something that would emerge out of

Capitalism

as a result of the

Struggle

of the

Working Class

in a historical process, whose exact circumstances and details could not possibly be known in advance.

01:09

Precisely how housing or food distribution, for example, will be organized in the

socialist future,

will be decided not by him or any other

Marxist theorist

, but by the people of the future themselves. All that was possible, therefore, was to make some broad generalizations about what the nature of the

Working Class

and its

Struggle

would oblige it to do, and would follow from that nature, from is it, where its social being.

01:42

To repeat for

Marx

a socialist society

was not something dreamt up in his mind or anyone else's mind. It was what the

Working Class

would create and would be obliged to create as part of the logic of its own

Struggle

with the

Bourgeoisie

and with

Capitalism.

Therefore, the first step in the direction of

Socialism

for

Marx,

is the

Working Class

taking political power. What

Marx

called the

Dictatorship Of The Proletariat

02:18

Of course, this is a term that needs some explanation, especially because of the dictatorship of

Stalin

and so on, and the way it sounds today. What

Marx

meant by the

Dictatorship Of The Proletariat

was not autocratic, powerful one person, or even for some committee or

central committee

, but the collective power of the

Working Class

, able to enforce its will, the will of the majority on society, by

revolutionary

means, particularly against the resistance of the

capitalists

02:56

Moreover, the experience of the

Paris Commune

, which

Engels

had said was an example of the

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

showed that workers power would be highly democratic with all peoples representatives being elected and subject to recall and paid the average worker's wage. It would in fact be more

democratic

than ordinary

capitalist democracy

03:26

The next step would be for the

Working Class

to take over domain, industry, services, banks, and so on. Not every corner shop, but the core, the central institutions of the economy and to take them into public ownership a state ownership with, of course, the understanding that the

state

is now not the

capitalist state

we're so familiar with, but the

Working Class

organized as the

ruling class

03:55

The point about this is not the implementation of socialist

dogma

, you know, for state ownership versus private ownership, and so on, but that it is only through collective state ownership, that the

Working Class

can possibly take control of the economy.

04:12

They can't do it by dividing up the banks or the major industries between individuals, sharing them out. We'll take over

General Motors

and give a bit of it to each of the car workers. You can't do that and it can only be done collectively.

04:27

But if that is established and brought under democratic planning, by the

Working Class

, it would mean that instead of dead labor, capital dominating living labor, as has happened hitherto, that living labor will, for the first time, dominate dead labor. Production for profit and the anarchy of the capitalist market will be replaced by planned production for human need.

05:05

But this is just the first phase of a historical process leading to full

Socialism

and

communism.

In this first phase, society will be marked in many ways by the

Capitalism

from which it has just emerged.

05:23

People will be paid says

Marx

, in the main, according to the work they do. Which, as he acknowledges, is still a form of inequality, because people are not the same, people have different needs and there will still be money, still a

state

and still

class conflict

, because the

Bourgeoisie

will not just simply go away, it will still be struggling in one way or another to try and regain the power that is lost.

05:51

To go beyond this first stage, to complete the transition to

communism

, I'm using

communism

here as kind of synonymous with

socialism

, and to complete the transition to full

Socialism

or full

communism

, a number of things are necessary.

06:08

First, workers power has to spread internationally,

Marx

and

Engels

never believed you could create a socialist country, a society, in just one country. Second, the

Bourgeoisie

, the capitalists must be defeated not only politically and militarily, but also economically and historically. It will be necessary to uproot the underlying social structures that make it possible for the

Bourgeoisie

to reproduce itself and make a comeback.

06:40

Thirdly, it will be necessary to raise the level of production globally, the standard living of people globally, to the point where there can be a decent life for all. And all will be involved in cooperatively managing the wealth and life of society.

06:58

It's just generalized poverty,

Marx

believed that, "All the old crap" as he called it, "All the old rubbish" will revive class inequality and so on. There has to be a level of a decent life for all.

07:15

What this will mean,

Marx

believes is the achievement of a genuinely classless society based on the principles, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need". In which, because class and class conflict has been overcome, the state will wither away and real Human freedom will have been won.

07:42

And which would also be particularly important in the present circumstances of the world today, which will also heal the metabolic rift between human society and nature that

Capitalism

has opened up. That's something I'll be discussing later in this series.

08:06

Marx

also believed that in ending exploitation and class oppression, the

Working Class

would be tearing up the roots of all forms of oppression, including the age old

oppression of women.

Now that is a very big subject and in its own right, and one which along with the question of

racism

and other forms of

oppression

, I will return to later in this series.

08:34

It's worth saying however, that what this means, the achievement of a socialist society as understood by

Marx

, what it will mean is a world of peace and a world in which there are no longer people starving while other people are millionaires and in which children in hundreds of thousands or millions have their lives cut short by easily curable diseases or lack of clean water or lack of basic food and so on. It will be a world without all those things. Which incidentally I think is a world worth fighting for

09:18

Now, at this point I'm going to shift the focus of these videos somewhat, and switch from just explaining the ideas of

Marx

to discussing some of the developments in

Marxism

after

Marx's

death, we must never lose sight of the fact that

Marxism

is not a set of sacred texts handed down from the great man but a method and a guide to action, and a living theory which must be continually developed and renewed to take account of developments in the changing world.

09:54

And it has,

Marxism

has been developed by a whole number of different people and in many different circumstances. And I'll be looking at some of the most important developments in

Marxism

after

Marx

from here on. Thank you.

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