Karl Marx III

Outline of the Lecture

1. Review of last Lecture
a.
b.
c.

Marx's Account of Alienation: product, labour

process, other persons and our nature
Historical Materialism
Species-being: definition and implications

2. The Communist Manifesto: "This history of

all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles."
3. From Capitalism to Socialism: The
forthcoming dictatorship of the proletariat
(Civil War in France)
4. The Communist Utopia: a social world
conducive to free self-development

Definition of Species-being
(Tucker, p. 76)
The animal is identical with its life
activity. It does not distinguish itself
from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes
his life-activity itself the object of his will
and of his consciousness []
Conscious life-activity directly
distinguishes man from animal lifeactivity. It is just because of this that he
is a species-being.

The Critique of Political Economy

(Tucker, p. 70)
When [political economy] defines the
relationship of wages to profit, it takes the
interests of the capitalists to be the ultimate
cause; i.e., it takes for granted what it is
supposed to evolve. Similarly, competition
comes in everywhere. It is explained from
external circumstances. As to how far these
external and apparently fortuitous
circumstances are but the expression of a
necessary course of development, political
economy teaches us nothing.

Historical Materialism
(Tucker, p. 474)
The feudal system of industry, under which production was
monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for
the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing
system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on
one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of
labour between different corporate guilds vanished in the
face of division of labour in each single workshop []
Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial
production. The place of manufacture was taken by the
giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle
class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole
industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

The Inevitable Decline of Capitalism

(Tucker, p. 478)
The conditions of bourgeois society
are too narrow to comprise the wealth
created by them [] The weapons with
which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism
to the ground are now turned against
the bourgeoisie itself.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

(Tucker, p. 538)
Between capitalist and communist lies
the period of the revolutionary
transformation of the one into the other.
There corresponds to this also a
political transition period in which the
state can by nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat.

The Paris Commune of 1871

(Tucker, p. 633)
While the merely repressive organs of the old
government power were to be amputated, its
legitimate functions were to be wrested from an
authority usurping pre-eminence over society
itself, and restored to the responsible agents of
society. Instead of deciding once in three or six
years which member of the ruling class was to
misrepresent the people in Parliament,
universal suffrage was to serve the people,
constituted in the Communes.

Socialism as the Prelude to

Communism (Tucker, p. 635)
[The working class] know that in order to work
out their own emancipation, and along with it
that higher form to which present society is
irresistibly tending by its own economical
agencies, they will have to pass through long
struggles, through a series of historical
processes, transforming circumstances and
men. They have no ideals to realise, but to set
free the elements of the new society with which
the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is
pregnant.

The Historical Role of the

Bourgeoisie (Tucker, p. 477)
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one
hundred years, has created more massive and
more colossal productive forces than have all
preceding generations together. Subjection of
Natures forces to man, machinery, application of
chemistry to industry and agriculture, steamnavigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of
whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of
rivers, whole populations conjured out of the
ground what earlier century had even a
presentiment that such productive forces
slumbered in the lap of social labour?

Socialism as the Prelude to

Communism II (Tucker, p. 490)
The proletariat will use its political
supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all
capital from the bourgeoisie, to
centralize all instruments of production
in the hands of the State, i.e., of the
proletariat organized as the ruling
class; and to increase the total
productive forces as rapidly as
possible.

Socialism as the Prelude to

Communism III (Tucker, p. 595)
Men make their own history, but they do not
make it just as they please; they do no make
it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances
directly found, given and transmitted from
the past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living.

Capitalism as Alienated Labour

(Tucker, p. 479)
Owing to the extensive use of machinery
and to the division of labour, the work of
the proletarians has lost all individual
character, and consequently, all charm for
the workman. He becomes an appendage
of the machine, and it is only the most
simple, most monotonous, and most easily
acquired knack, that is required of him.

The Transcendence of Alienated

Labour under Communism
(Tucker, p. 485)
Capital is not a personal, it is a social
power [] In bourgeois society, living
labour is but a means to increase
accumulated labour. In Communist
society, accumulated labour is but a means
to widen, to enrich, to promote the
existence of the labourer.

Communism and Meaningful Labour

(Tucker, p. 531)
In a higher phase of communist society, after the
enslaving subordination of the individual to the division
of labour, and therewith the antithesis between mental
and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has
become not only a means of life but lifes prime want;
after the productive forces have also increased with
the all-around development of the individual, and all
the springs of co-operative wealth flow more
abundantly only then can the narrow horizon of
bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society
inscribe on its banner: From each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs!

Communism and Meaningful Labour

II (Tucker, p. 441)
The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is
determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases;
thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of
actual material production [] Freedom can only consist in
socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating
their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common
control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of
Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy
and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their
human nature. But it nonetheless remains a realm of necessity.
Beyond it begins the development of human energy which is an
end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however can
blossom forth only with the realm of necessity as its basis. The
shortening of the working days is its basic prerequisite.