Marxism in struggle and what that means

What does it mean to be a Marxist today? Harry Holmes explores the depth and breadth of Marxism – not just as a theory, but as a living tradition shaped by revolutionaries, workers and movements across history. This article is adapted from a talk. 

This is an adapted speech, which was given to a group that had read from the three texts – March Address, 18th Brumaire and Engels Postscript to the Civil War in France

The depth and width of Marxism

Marshall Berman in Adventures in Marxism liked the idea of ‘adventures’ because:  

It evoked Marxism as a special kind of human experience, different from ordinary life, joyful, liberating, thrilling, but problematic, scary, dangerous. It was open-ended: it suggested a future that could offer more Marxist adventures. 

I really appreciate this way of approaching Marxism. Let’s go on an adventure together. However, to do that, you have to ‘nail your tent pegs in properly’, grasp some of the basics. There is, however, a real difficulty in establishing ‘the basics’. Marxism has a width and a depth to it, that makes such a conversation difficult. What do I mean by width and depth? 

Marxism, as the body of ideas mainly articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels across the later half of the 1800s, didn’t just inspire workers and revolutionaries then. It inspired Bolsheviks who were the key party in the October Revolution of 1917, anti-colonial revolutionaries like the Palestinian PFLP, cultural critics of the mid 20th century, Indigenous movements in Abya Yala, African revolutionaries like Cabral and Sankara and so on. Marxism has inspired people organising their workplace, poets and artists, trans communists, armed guerrillas, and maybe now us. All these people, activities and traditions have claimed to be Marxist and to practice and develop Marxism – it has become a world in itself. 

For Marxism’s depth, Berman tells another story, that of the Bavarian thinker Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau was reminiscing about an anecdote about the impact of the Communist Manifesto from  childhood: 

Morgenthau’s father, a doctor in a working-class neighborhood of the town of Coburg (mostly miners, he said), had begun to take his son along on house calls. Many of his patients were dying of TB; a doctor in those years couldn’t do much to save their lives, but might help them die with dignity. Coburg was a place where many people who were dying asked to have the Bible buried with them. But when Morgenthau’s father asked his workers for last requests, many said they wanted to be buried with the Manifesto instead. They implored the doctor to see that they got fresh copies of the book, and that priests didn’t sneak in and make last-minute switches. Morgenthau was too young to “get” the book, he said. But it became his first political task to make sure that the workers’ families should get it.

To be a Marxist is to actively position yourself in a tradition of revolutionary activity which contains people like this – who felt Marxism with such depth. What does it mean to put yourself in a tradition that people died for, killed each other over, and took on the really hard work of organising against the brute forces of state and capital? This is not to demand weird self-sacrificial macho politics, or that we don’t have fun – as Cabral, an anti-colonial African revolutionary once stated: 

Nothing of this is incompatible with the joy of living, or with love for life and its amusements, or with confidence in the future and in our work.

But with the depth of Marxism, what I’m talking about is seriousness in the sense of really thinking about changing the world and how you want to do that with other people – the responsibility of standing on the shoulders of giants. That means we’ve got to learn from each other, discuss, and try to intervene in the world. No single one of us can read everything, or do everything, that’s why we work together – but we each can individually curate a real intention to be self-reflective, interrogating and changing the world. 

Masses and classes

The 1850 March Address, the opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire, and Engels’ postscript to the Civil War in France were all based on two revolutionary moments. The revolutionary wave of 1848, where people rose up against monarchies and for radical change across Europe. Then, the Paris Commune of 1871. These texts are read today as historical writings, not directly works of philosophy, or the critique of political economy – that’s because they are writings on current affairs by Marx and Engels as participants in revolutionary moments. Through this they reveal so much about their methods and ideas. It is really easy to get lost in the particular historical aspects, but I want to tease out three things that I think emerge here and are at the core of a Marxist politics. 

First, class struggle within mass struggle. The contexts that Marx and Engels analysed are complicated. The 1848 revolutions included everyone from bourgeoisie to small producers to the working classes. Some demanded an end to monarchy and a limited vote, others, particularly workers, demanded not just universal suffrage but radical change to how capitalism was organised. Think of Marx’s phrase from the Brumaire – often popular ideas in a revolutionary moment are cloaked in the language of ‘dead generations’, the previous revolutions like the French of the late 18th century. Similarly, in 1871, we’re talking about a city revolting as its own nation is fighting another nation which is at the same time using that war to merge into a larger nation. As with all history, these moments see various mediated political expressions, class forces and alliances, and activities. 

Although Marxism believes in class struggle as central to historic change, it’s not directly simple. As Lenin wrote in 1916:

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.

Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.

This is Marxism, history and revolution really grappled with like the mess it is. Revolutions, whether they merely change the form or position of governing systems, or they change the whole system of social organisation, are mass affairs. They include various class forces, demands, and uncertainties. But for a real revolution – one that goes beyond merely changing a government, or a parliament, but turns society on its head -these writings understand the working-classes to be crucial. The Brumaire summed this up beautifully: 

proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticise themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Here is the rose, here dance!

Within these revolutionary moments, Marx and Engels look for the class amongst the masses, which can exert the leadership to force such a revolution into what they call the ‘social revolution’, one that changes the mode of production: 

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past.

The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.

When the workers of 1848 demanded freedom, they didn’t just mean a parliament rather than a king, they also meant an end to the oppression of the boss in their everyday life. Content exceeds the phrase. 

Political independence

Having established revolutions are mass affairs, but that only the working class can push through to the true social revolution, there emerges the question of how you exert that leading role for the class. This leads us to the next idea, prominent in Marx and Engels’ ‘March Address’: the idea of ‘working-class political independence’. 

The 1850 Address is written in the ebbing flames of a revolutionary moment in which, predictably, the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie do not want to push the demands for freedom to their logical extreme – namely the social revolution. 

In the 1850 Address, Marx and Engels are addressing the Communist League, an international organisation who attempted in various ways to actively participate in the revolution wave of 1848. Joseph Moll, a close comrade they mention at the beginning of the Address, has recently been killed in a military manoeuvre. What is interesting about the text is the way that Marx and Engels are ‘gaming it’; they propose multiple courses of action, depending on what happens and which class forces they reckon are in play. So they say, if it looks like the revolutionaries are going to keep hitting the wall of reaction, they should work in this alliance, but if they succeed in getting a breakthrough, then a different alliance and struggle has begun. Crucially, they begin thinking through what workers are to do if there is a revolutionary breakthrough, but the other classes turn on the working class.

For Marx and Engels, ‘working class political independence’ is a prerequisite for such strategising. They argued that the working classes of Germany and elsewhere should not be led by other class forces – they are capable of their own organising. This organising must be the self-activity of the working classes. Social revolution can’t be achieved by a few revolutionaries seizing a building or attempting to ‘provide leadership’ to the wayward class. Nor can it just come from isolated deeds, just a series of sabotage or other actions. Similarly, they are clear that it doesn’t come from military action, like a coup. What social infrastructures and activities can build revolutionary levels of self-organisation within the working class?

This relates to the idea of the ‘party’. Now when we say we support a party – we don’t mean something like Labour or the Greens, nor do we mean the kind of model of small ‘micro-parties’. We argue for the party, because it allows the class to assert its political independence – it covers functions not covered before. This political independence requires not just the party but also that workers are organised in their workplaces, communities and that these two things feed into each other. Without this, both things go off kilter. 

They argue that working-class political independence means various kinds of activity – it is not a political line that defines a single tactic as the  strategy. In the Address Marx and Engels talk both about an electoral strategy and the defence of armed action through the retention of guns. These couldn’t be more antithetical for most, but not for Marxism. 

The political independence of the class, secured in all kinds of activities, at the revolutionary moment – what in general is to be done with this? What becomes crucial here is a particular kind of oppositional pushing against the forces of liberalism: 

They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme (the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks on private property.

Dictatorship of the proletariat

Finally, this is where we jump forward to the Civil War in France, which was an attempt by the Paris working classes to self-govern, to engage in ‘direct attacks on private property’ – to do this social revolution. Marx and Engels took a few lessons from this, with perhaps the most famous being the following: 

From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognise that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

This is key to Marx and Engels’ ideas about the revolutionary transition, which build on their learnings from the previous revolutionary wave. They disagree with those who think a few revolutionaries can just declare the revolution – they know the only real force is the masses and the workers in charge of it. They also end up disagreeing with the anarchists, in two senses, because they believe that working-class political independence requires a degree of organisation and participation in bourgeoise institutions in order to expose them and in the sense that they believe there is a process of transition, that they refer to as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is necessary for a revolution to succeed and become the social revolution. 

Now, a note on dictatorship of the proletariat – when they say ‘dictatorship’ they are using the Roman term, which was a granted emergency rule, as part of a constitution, to an individual – not the modern term of autocratic dictatorship. One way to reformulate the dictatorship of the proletariat, is to talk about the necessity of transition. It’s about taking really seriously, that if you are having a revolutionary moment, not only are you inheriting a system (state apparatus, production, class forces) but you are going to be under attack – so you can’t just leap to the end-goal, nor can you will it into being with mass ‘mutual aid’. 

So speaking simply, there are two elements of this idea. One is defence against the repressive arm of your state and neighbouring states. This means the forming of militias, seizing of weapons and so on, which interestingly enough is where Marx and Engels talk about abolition. The other element, is the offense, the mass-democratisation of the state apparatus – where they talk about recallability and elections and planning, and so on. 

Threading that needle, of mass-democratisation and transformation, whilst defending revolutionary gains remains the terrain we got stuck on. The Paris Commune failed, Russia was isolated and collapsed in the end under its own contradictions and many more examples in between. Does this mean hope is lost?

No, however, Marx in Brumaire, talks about revolutions which ‘constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew’.  He recognised that revolutions ‘deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts.’ We should take quite seriously that we are in the midst of many first attempts, and believe we can learn and build on them – that is what it means to situate ourselves in this critical tradition. 

Marx and Engels themselves

Before we finish, I want to return to Marx and Engels themselves. Because it is common to think of these guys as academics or just thinkers, inspiring ones, but not much beyond that. Even by well meaning people. I think you will approach Marxism wrong, with that in your head. 

Of course, Marx certainly managed to get a PhD at a time when that was not really a thing anyone did. Engels malappropriated his father’s money and work to support revolutionary activity. They occupied quite unique positions in their time. However, by their mid-20s, both had begun to identify the working classes as the revolutionary agent and seriously committed to this idea.

Marx and Engels began publishing revolutionary texts in the 1840s and by 1843, Marx had been forced to leave Prussia, he was then forced to leave Paris for Brussels – a political refugee. They were active in the Communist League as militants around this time. In 1848 they were again publishing in the revolutionary wave, intervening in it with the League. Marx did briefly return home to Prussia, but the revolution failed. In the years after they were then harassed by police, they saw many of their friends dying in the wave of reaction. Engels in 1849 was part of a set of military volunteers that attempted to defend the revolution. He was again forced to flee. In the end, Marx was stripped of his citizenship and rendered stateless for the rest of his life and Engels helps put him up whilst dealing with his parents who are predictably furious. Marx and Engles spend the rest of their life mainly in Britain. Most of this has happened to them in their late 20s and early 30s. 

Marx couldn’t get work – famously being rejected for his only job at King’s Cross because of his bad handwriting. Engels is forced to work at his parents firm as a sort of financial backer. They tried to support revolutionary struggles in these years across the world, particularly through the First International. In these years they were harassed by secret police and agent provocateurs. They wrote, they talked, and they did their best. Marx lived in quite bad conditions, becoming chronically ill. Him and his wife Jenny had seven kids – they lost four of them, sometimes to preventable conditions. How could you not be furious? How could you not fight back? This experience can be found, always close, even in how he wrote his driest economic work. The actor Wallace Shawn has this great anecdote about Capital: 

One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn’t understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page.

Marxism then was not just Marx and Engels, it was their ideas they developed and argued for, as activists in struggle, in dialogue with workers, and in revolutionary battalions and so much more – that’s why these ideas still hold something. It’s also because, let’s be honest, as people who have been organising in Britain, we feel that anger. Berman talks about this:

One of Marx’s most urgent aims is to make people “feel it”; this is why his ideas are expressed in such intense and extravagant images-abysses, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, crushing gravitational force.

Marx and Engels felt, and wanted people to feel, their revolutionary energy as fellow people who tried to change the world. Their belief that the mass of the most exploited would lead, would be in charge, meets this feeling and in turn, has made their tradition grow in width and depth. 

This may be against the grain, as a thought to end on, having spoken about how important their ideas were, but Marxism is about not deifying Marx and Engels, and instead talking about their ordinariness. 

Sure, you should think about the revolutions and the ideas and the adventures, but when I think about them I also think about Marx and Engels going out in Soho and getting so drunk they are chased through the night, I think of a guy who chronically slept in, I think of Marx telling his daughters stories by the mile, as they walked through London. I think of the tedious meetings and the editorial debates and the desire to just sit in a library and read. It’s important to do that. Because if the distance between these men and us is not far, the things we can do are not too far away either. 

In this way, I want people to understand that Marxism is not just ours, it is for everyone.