Unlike the Classical school of economics (for example Adam Smith and David Ricardo) who believed in the harmony of classes, Marx emphasized the importance of class, class conflict and class struggle. In the ‘Communist Manifesto’ the class struggle was “the motor force of history”. Class was defined in an objective way with respect to the ownership or otherwise of the means of production -land, minerals, oil and gas, factories, transport and communication, distribution points and so on. In capitalism Marx considered the two major classes to be the capitalists who owned the means of life and the working class who were excluded from ownership and could only sell their ability to work as a commodity in exchange for a wage or salary.
Since Margaret Thatcher claimed that there was no alternative to the market; to buying and selling, an absurd dogma agreed with by amongst others Tony Blair and Keir Starmer, capitalism is held up as the only social system in town. Capitalism, we are told, is going to last forever.
Socialists reject the conservative dogma that there is no alternative to capitalism and that the working class is not cut-out for socialism. Capitalism is a social system with a beginning in class struggle and a potential end in class struggle through a socialist revolution. A socialist politics is a revolutionary politics using a revolutionary vocabulary or it is nothing. If servility is a vice, then so is political cowardice; capitalism is a social system not a natural state of affairs. And social systems come and go.
At the end of the crushing defeat of the rebellion in 71 BC, with Spartacus dead on the battlefield, 6000 slaves were crucified along a 2000 metre stretch of the Apia Way to Rome. Crucifixion was a cruel and painful death recently brought back into fashion by the short-lived terrorist group Isis in its feudal Islamic State. Rome’s symbolic exercise of crucifying the slaves was to demonstrate to this class the imperial power of Roman society, the power of its ruling class and the perennial glory of ancient Rome. But within a few centuries that Empire had been swept away. No Empire lasts forever and this is a fact equally applicable to countries today like the United States and Russia as it once was to Imperial Rome.
Shelley put it this way in his poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Here is another example from history. At the end of the failed Peasants Revolt in 1381, Richard II reportedly told the serfs: “serfs you are and serfs you shall remain forever”.
John Ball, on of the leading thinkers of the peasants Revolt was tried in front of the King at St Albans and then hung, drawn and quartered with the King’s retort to the failed uprising ringing in his ears. There is no blue plaque to John Ball in the old market square of St Albans where he was executed. However, his protest: “When Adam delved and Eve Span, who was then the Gentleman” lived on in the Peasants’ Song (anon) and later in William Morris’s romance ‘The Dream of John Ball’ (Lawrence and Wishart,1977). But the class to which he preached his sermons of liberation has long since disappeared – the peasants have left little or no written history of their struggles with the feudal order.
In 1539, during the Reformation, the Abbey of St Albans in which John Ball was imprisoned some two centuries earlier was dissolved. Henry VIII appropriated its income, disposed of its assets and expelled
the monks who had once thought their future secure. The chronicle against John Ball was Jean Froissart’s ‘Chronicle’, ‘The Anonimalle Chronicle’ – a detailed account mainly of Wat Tyler and his end, which is now considered mere propaganda for Richard II [see ‘Spokesman for Liberty’, ed. Jack Lindsay and Edgell Rickward]. The treasury and cloisters of the Abbey are now ruined fragments – symbolic references to a feudal order no more permanent than capitalism.
Four centuries later no serfs were to be found in Britain at all. Instead, there was a propertyless working class whose children were sent to the mills and where women were forced down the mines. Their brutal existence was described by Frederick Engels in his book ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ (1845). A different exploited class existed in place of the old feudal one; a class of workers imprisoned within the exploitive wages system and forced to sell their ability to work for a wage and salary.
Richard II was wrong. Serfs were not going to last forever neither was the ruling class who exploited them. The ruling class Richard II represented were swept away, first, in the 17th century, through a Civil War which disposed of the doctrine of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ with the swing of an executioner’s axe, along with feudal tithes and privileges. Then in the late 17th century the ‘Glorious Revolution’ which took political power from the monarchy and gave it to a cabal of landed aristocracy, City bankers, merchants, and the early industrial capitalists. With the imposition of the Reform Act of 1832 and the consolidation of capitalist political power in the reforms of the Liberal government at the beginning of the 20th century, the capitalist class became the latest exploiting class in human history.
The capitalist class came into existence through class struggle establishing “new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones” (‘Communist Manifesto’) calling into existence the working-class with a revolutionary potential to make history by becoming a class “for itself”. From the perspective of history, the working-class movement is relatively young. Its movement is not smooth and linear. Mistakes have been made and there are periods when this movement is stronger than others. At what point the working class as revolutionary force is situated with capitalism’s exploitive history, we do not know.
The working-class movement in Britain has passed through three political stages in its development. First an incoherent stage around the actions of groups like the Diggers and Levellers (1649), the Swing Riots and rick burning in the 18th century and the Luddites in the early 19th century. Second, a more coherent phase with the establishment of trade unions and workers identifying themselves as a class with its own distinct political interests such as the Chartist movement and then another phase with the formation of The First International (1864-1876) informed by the scientific writings of Marx and Engels among which was stated: “That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working class themselves” General Rules, October 1864). And third, through bitter political experience in the Social Democratic Federation, the development of a political movement of workers who became transparently aware of their class position recognizing that it could only be furthered by their own effort, without the need for leaders, democratically within a principled Party and with only one object: socialism.
This mature development was reached at the turn of the last century in 1904 with the establishment of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The Object and Declaration of Principles, drawn up by working class men and women, presented a sound Marxian critical analysis of capitalism. It also set out a practical political programme through the revolutionary use of the vote and the capture by a socialist majority of the machinery of government, including the armed forces, to achieve the socialist object; the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
As the Socialist Party of Great Britain wrote in 1949:
“In 1904 a new era in working class politics commenced with the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The Object and Declaration of Principles that were laid down by the founders of this party…have remained to this day a clear and concise statement of the basis of the organisation, admitting of neither equivocation nor political compromise with the enemy for any purpose however alluring. Here is no flirting with reforms nor false and soothing catchwords to enlist the sympathies and support of those who lack political knowledge but, instead, a straightforward statement of the essentials of the working-class position under Capitalism and the only road to its solution – the capture of political power by a working class the majority whose members understand what Socialism means and want it (‘The Communist Manifesto and the Last 100 Years’, The Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1949).
iIllustration: Bayeux Tapestry
