Alex Snowdon reflects on The Communist Manifesto and Marx and Engels’ conception of historical materialism in his monthly Marxism 101 column

At the core of the Communist Manifesto, published by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848, is a particular conception of history and of how historical change happens. Marxism – or historical materialism – is an understanding of society as being divided, fundamentally, into classes, with history showing us a succession of class societies. 

In every such society, there has been antagonism and struggle between the main classes. Marx and Engels write that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’

This does not mean, as it might appear, that class division stretches back to the dawn of humanity. For most of humanity’s history, there was cooperation and equality. This changed when humans began producing enough to allow a significant surplus, which would come to be controlled by an exploitative elite. Material abundance allowed some to live at the expense of others.

Crucially, the founders of Marxism saw that class society originally emerged from material advances. Subsequently it would be further material advances – improvements in tools, technology and production – that would enable new forms of class society and, ultimately, the advanced industrial capitalism that developed in the nineteenth century.

The Communist Manifesto traces this development: ‘From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.’

Early capitalism grew out of feudal society. Merchant capitalism increasingly replaced feudal relations, and in turn this grew into industrial capitalism. A new urban elite developed: the bourgeoisie. Industrial production was revolutionised. A new class – the working class – was born and grew to maturity. 

In 1844 Engels wrote The condition of the working class in England about the impact of industrial capitalism on the living and working conditions of those drawn into the newly mushrooming cities. It was an ugly and unromantic picture. Marx and Engels had no illusions about the often grim reality of industrial capitalism for the proletariat (the working class).

What they grasped, though, was how capitalism accelerated the pace of technological and economic change. This created greater opportunities for wealth, but in capitalist conditions, it was largely concentrated among a tiny class of those who owned and controlled the means of production. Yet this also created the potential basis for future social transformation and for a socialist society.

The English, American and French revolutions involved the rising bourgeois class asserting itself against the barriers inherited from late feudalism. Political revolutions, with varying degrees of success, accompanied the economic changes.

But capitalism also created the working class. It brought together large numbers of workers in factories, mills and elsewhere. This process was dangerous for the capitalists:

‘The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association… [It] cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.’

Marx and Engels are identifying here that industry turned people who had previously worked on the land, or perhaps as artisans, into workers: wage-labourers dependent on selling their labour power to the capitalist to make a living. Working-class formation is a collective process, bringing workers together in combination.

Workers’ potential power is not as individuals, but as a collective force. This collective power of workers is so potentially great that it can, through social revolution, defeat the bourgeoisie and end capitalism: a system that has paradoxically created its own gravedigger.

The historical materialism of Marx and Engels also provides a basis for charting changes in ideas. The battle of ideas – of rival ideologies – in society is conditioned by material realities. Every ruling class imagines its own ideas to be a kind of ‘common sense’: universal values, taken for granted and seemingly obvious.

In fact ideas change over time. The dominant ideology of one age may later seem antiquated. Changing ideas are shaped by material changes in the conditions of society. It is being that determines consciousness, not consciousness that determines being.

From this month’s Counterfire freesheet