Alex Snowdon looks at a key nineteenth-century debate that still reverberates today

Marx was not born a Marxist. He became one. Together with Frederick Engels, he developed the core ideas of Marxism in the western Europe of the 1840s.  

This was a world shaped by two revolutions. One was an economic and social revolution: the Industrial Revolution, which was transforming the economy of western Europe, with Britain in the vanguard. The capitalist class accumulated great wealth from its exploitation of the growing working class, but this also inevitably brought class conflict. Chartism – the first great working-class movement – was, from the late 1830s onwards, an expression of this.  

The other revolution was ideological and political, but ultimately rooted in the social changes underway in Europe. The French Revolution of 1789-94 can be considered one of the greatest revolutions partly because of the scale of political and social transformation in France. But it was also of great consequence because it cast a long and very far-reaching shadow. It triggered political revolts across Europe and stimulated new ideas. This is the world into which Marx and Engels became radical young intellectuals.  

Utopianism 

One of the streams flowing into their new world view was a product of the French Revolution and the radicalism it unleashed: utopian socialism. This is a trend that influenced Marxism, but also one that Marx and Engels reacted against. 

The French Revolution had opened up new horizons. It proclaimed fraternity, equality and liberty. The socialists who emerged in its wake were champions of these ideals but critical of much of the harsh capitalist practises that undermined them. 

They expressed indignation at the appalling inequality that continued in France after the revolution. They criticised the social misery that went with the Industrial Revolution: poverty, overcrowding, disease, unsafe work and long working hours.  

The French Utopian socialist, Charles Fourier, was utterly scathing about capitalist ‘civilisation’. He argued that capitalism was unnatural in its denial of human needs and desires, in its anarchy and lack of coordination. He and other socialists during the early nineteenth-century also developed a vision of an alternative society – based on communities geared towards cooperation, equality and human flourishing. Fourier was also a pioneer of women’s liberation and is credited with coining the term feminism.  

The utopian socialists’ critique of capitalism and their vision of human liberation were both essential influences on Marx and Engels. However, they provided very little sense of how to get from one to the other: how to transform a capitalist hell into a socialist utopia. Their thinking tended to be shaped by idealism. They viewed history as being driven forward by the progress of the human mind.  

Socialism 

If socialism was to be brought about, it would be through education, the promotion of socialist ideals or by persuading those with wealth or power to support alternative approaches. This naively overlooked the extent to which the new industrial capitalist class had a deep material interest in sustaining the status quo. Economic competition locked capitalists into an exploitative race to the bottom. There was no material impetus to experiment with more equality or cooperation, still less to become enthusiasts for a radically different social order altogether.  

The belief that any sort of socialist advance was primarily a matter of winning a battle of ideas and not a question of class struggle unsurprisingly led to various forms of elitism. Instead of orienting on action by working-class people, it might be a matter of trying to persuade some capitalists to be benevolent.  

Revolution 

One off-shoot of this movement was the focus on small-scale revolutionary conspiracies that characterised mainly French communism by the 1830s and 1840s. Social change would come through the actions of a small number of highly organised revolutionaries. 

Marx and Engels rejected this. They had identified a social force with a material interest in ending capitalism: the working class. This potentially revolutionary class was not only numerous but had a strategic position in challenging capitalism. Workers produce the wealth that the capitalist ruling class depends upon. And it is in the factories and offices where workers have the power to combine and organise that will bring about change through collective action. 

By the 1840s, there were examples of early strikes by industrial workers to show that this wasn’t merely a theoretical notion. There was also the example of Chartism as a working-class movement fusing democratic and economic demands. Capitalism, argued Marx and Engels, had created its own gravedigger: the working class.