Karl Marx and the anticapitalist tradition of the West

Karl Marx was an interpreter of historical process. His intention in developing that theoretical narrative which neo-Trotskyists call ‘’marxism’’, was not the invention of a secular post-liberal religious dogma (like Trotskyism) but the survival of (1) the German idealist legacy as exemplified by social liberal interpreters of Hegel and (2) the political tradition of the Jacobin and left-Jacobin currents emanating from the French revolutionary period - at its most radical in 1792-3 during the mandate of Roberspierre’s Committee of Public Safety. It is NOT that Karl Marx ‘’combined’’ the above with British classical liberal political-economy and the result was ‘’marxism’’. What Karl Marx did accomplish was the creation of a theoretical anti-thesis for classical British economic liberal ideology. As British economic liberalism was an ideology that justified the objective interests of the ruling social elite, Marx logically based the analysis pertinent to his anti-thesis on the objective interests of the socially marginalised and exploited elements of society (i.e the proletariat). This theoretical anti-thesis of Marx was developed as industrialisation impacted the growing working class of his time (mid 1840s to mid 1860s) and radically transformed the technological basis and economic dynamic of British society.

Why did Marx choose to focus on the working class? Because he understood that the brutal process of industrialisation he was witnessing was going to create a large number of industrial workers that would want to revolt against it. What Marx proposed was to approach this potentially rebellious social element and convince them that socialism was the solution to their oppression. Marx understood that only the working class (i.e. the social aggregate of those who sold their labour to industrial employers), in motion and organised to act against capital would have a chance at overturning the capitalist class order and its horrors. He understood that the anti-thesis to Bourgeoisie dictatorship over the Proletariat (the political economy of capitalism) was Proletarian Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie (the political economy of socialism). The anti-thesis to the irrationality of deregulated market fluctuations was economic law and order (rational planning). The anti-thesis to rule by an oligarchy of financiers and industrialists was to be the rule by the workers organised. The workers would only be free of the horror and misery of the mines and factories and slums that capitalist industrialisation created IF they collectively organised to seize the means of industrial production and create the foundations of a workers state – which would embody the institutions that would serve as instruments for the class rule of the proletariat. Karl Marx’s considered that (historically); the first actually existing example of the beginnings of social movement towards a workers state was the 1871 Paris Commune.