1, 3 - Marx and Engels: class, history and communism

Class and capitalist production

Marx and Engels define the central division of capitalist society by people’s relationship to productive property.

Capitalism organises much production through markets, private ownership and the pursuit of profit. Social class generally describes a group with a similar economic and social position. In Marx’s account, the decisive distinction is ownership of the means of production, rather than just income, accent or occupation.

The bourgeoisie owns or controls productive capital. The proletariat lacks sufficient productive property to live independently and must sell its capacity to work for wages. A well-paid employee can therefore remain a worker in this relationship, while an owner’s class position does not depend simply on whether they currently earn more than every employee.

Marx’s concept of exploitation is structural. Owners buy workers’ labour-power, but workers create more value than the value represented by their wages; the difference provides surplus value appropriated by capital. The point is not merely that a particular employer is cruel or pays illegally. Even an orderly employment contract can preserve the relationship Marx criticises. This is the Marxist explanation, rather than an uncontested description accepted by all socialists.

Imagine a factory in which workers collectively produce goods but owners decide how profits are used. Workers may want higher pay and security, while owners face pressures to protect profits and compete. Marx and Engels treat this clash as a conflict rooted in production. They also see the state and its laws as sustaining the broad conditions of capitalist ownership, so changing one employer is insufficient to end class domination.

The economic base and social institutions

Historical materialism explains political and cultural arrangements by starting with the material organisation of human life.

The economic base includes productive forces, such as technology and labour, and relations of production, such as who owns resources and who works for whom. The superstructure includes law, political institutions, religion, culture and social ideas. In Marx’s 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the organisation of material production conditions social and political life. This challenges an explanation in which new ideas alone create a new society.

For example, a system based on landed estates gives landowners economic power. Laws of inheritance and political institutions can reinforce that position. Industrial capitalism produces a different arrangement: factory ownership, wage labour, commercial property and institutions that protect contracts. The example shows how changing production can reshape the wider society; it does not claim that every law is written personally by a capitalist.

The direction of explanation matters. A Marxist asks whose material interests an institution supports, instead of assuming that its stated purpose tells the whole story. This does not require claiming that culture has no influence. Institutions and beliefs can reinforce economic relationships, and conflict over them can contribute to change. The central claim is the explanatory priority of material conditions.

Marxism is the socialist tradition drawing on Marx and Engels. Its philosophy of history holds that capitalism’s replacement by communism is historically inevitable because of the contradictions within capitalist society. Treat that claim as part of the ideology’s argument, rather than as a prediction history has conclusively verified.

If you sit in 2027: Issue 3 gives the Marxism glossary definition in one sentence; Issue 4 divides it into two. The idea is unchanged: Marxism links its account of history to capitalism’s historically inevitable replacement by communism.

Contradictions and class consciousness

Marx and Engels argue that the forces developing inside capitalism also create pressures that can transform it.

Dialectic describes development through conflict between opposing forces. A contradiction here is a tension within a social arrangement, not simply a mistake in someone’s reasoning. Capitalist production increasingly combines many workers in large enterprises, yet ownership and appropriation remain private. The collective character of production conflicts with the private control of its benefits.

Capitalism also expands productive capacity while exposing workers to insecurity and recurring crises. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe overproduction: goods cannot be sold profitably even while people have unmet needs. Their argument is that production for profit can conflict with production to satisfy human need. These conflicts generate pressures for historical change; a crisis by itself is not a completed revolution.

Workers need class consciousness: an understanding of their shared position and interests as a class. An employee can first experience a wage dispute as a personal problem. Collective organisation can reveal that many workers face the same ownership relationship. Their struggle can develop from a local demand into a political challenge to the system that sustains it. The Manifesto traces this movement from scattered disputes towards wider working-class organisation.

This connects economic change to human action. Capitalism creates conditions in which workers can organise; workers must also develop awareness and act collectively. Revolutionary class consciousness means recognising the need to transform capitalist class relations, rather than merely asking one employer for a better bargain. The course’s account of historical inevitability should therefore not be reduced to waiting passively for capitalism to vanish.

Communism and common humanity

Communism is intended to overcome the social relationships that prevent people from developing their shared humanity.

Marx and Engels regard humans as social beings whose behaviour develops through their material relationships. Capitalist competition can make workers compete for jobs and owners compete for profit. These behaviours therefore do not prove that selfishness is an unchangeable human essence. Under communism, productive wealth is held in common and class exploitation is overcome, allowing co-operation to organise social life more fully. For Marx and Engels, true common humanity can be fully expressed only under communism, once capitalist exploitation and class antagonisms have been removed.

The intended equality is deeper than giving everyone the same cash payment while leaving ownership unchanged. It removes the division between a class that appropriates productive wealth and a class that must serve it. Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme also distinguishes stages after capitalism. In a developed communist society, distribution according to people’s needs recognises that needs differ; it is not a rule that every individual must receive an identical bundle of goods.

The state also changes. Marx and Engels envisage workers gaining political power during the transition and using it to change property relations. Once class antagonisms disappear, the coercive state understood as an instrument of class rule loses its function. Do not confuse the eventual aim of a classless society with the claim that no transitional political authority is needed.

This is a sharp disagreement with social democracy. Crosland also wants greater equality and human development, but believes a managed economy with private firms can achieve them. For Marx and Engels, a welfare improvement can be valuable without removing the class relationship that blocks full common humanity. The disagreement concerns whether capitalism can be humanised sufficiently, not whether people matter.

Reading a materialist argument

A materialist argument connects a social outcome to economic relationships and should be interpreted at that level.

Take this original paraphrase for learning: laws protect owners’ control of factories while workers must earn wages; ending workers’ dependence therefore requires changing ownership, rather than relying only on kinder employers. It summarises a Marxist line of reasoning and is not a quotation.

First identify the proposed cause: ownership gives one class control over productive resources. Then identify the mechanism: workers lacking those resources depend on wage employment, while institutions protect the arrangement. Finally identify the conclusion: transforming ownership changes the source of dependence. This is stronger source analysis than saying only that the passage is socialist.

The argument does not prove that every reform is useless. It supports the narrower claim that reforms which retain capitalist ownership do not, by themselves, abolish the class relationship. Nor can a paraphrase establish that communism has worked in every historical state claiming the name. A source expressing a theory is evidence of that theory’s reasoning, not automatic confirmation of its truth.

For a balanced argument, compare the same issue. Marx and Engels expect structural class contradictions to drive transformation; Crosland argues that democratic government can achieve social justice within managed capitalism. Both challenge serious inequality, but only the former makes abolition of capitalist class ownership necessary to the final goal. A judgement about socialist unity should weigh that shared purpose against the much larger disagreement over its economic conditions.