Posted by John, June 4th, 2011 - under Socialism, Socialism from below, Socialist Alternative.



“Socialism is a great idea, but I can’t see it happening,” is a phrase that socialists regularly hear from people who are appalled by capitalism, but think it’s utopian to believe that another world is possible.

But socialism is not an idea that’s been invented by a bunch of intellectuals seeking to impose their wish-list on the world. Today’s theory of socialism, a legacy of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, among others, has been developed out of real struggles of the working class, the clashes of social forces that have taken place whenever masses of people resist the bitter material realities of austerity and oppression that capitalism imposes.

Before the growth of the working class across the globe, ideas of socialism were just utopian dreams. Nineteenth century utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier set up “ideal” communities based on notions of equality between men and women, common ownership and cooperation, and the right to education.

Inevitably these small, rarefied communities – islands of “socialism” in a capitalist world – were unable to sustain themselves. But they did inspire a degree of admiration, as well as sharp criticism, from Marx and Engels who thought that although these early social experiments were fatally flawed, they at least “correspond[ed] with the first instinctive yearnings of [workers] for a general reconstruction of society”.

The utopians, however, never saw workers as anything more than “the most suffering class” – they rejected Marx’s analysis of the working class as collectively powerful and the first class in history with the potential to create a world free of exploitation and oppression.

By 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, those who wanted to operate only in the utopian realm of ideas were left to wilt as the world, and socialists’ theory and practice on how best to change it, moved on.

Marx and Engels argued that socialism was never achievable by small groups of the “enlightened”; it is instead the rightful project of masses of ordinary working people whose labour fuels society and who become capable through their collective struggles of creating a new, genuinely democratic world.

And working class struggles are not a set of disparate, spontaneous eruptions throughout history, but rather a product of the material contradictions of capitalism – an insane system of chaotic, competitive production answerable only to the demands of profit, and never to people’s needs. To survive, to live decent lives, to exercise any control at all, workers have to struggle together. Understanding this dynamic is key to understanding how the working class has the capacity to move beyond just ideas about changing the world to actually start changing it.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, his classic explanation of Marxism, Engels explains historical materialism, the Marxist view of history which asserts that social changes happen because of the interaction of real forces in society, and not solely because of changed ideas about the world. Historical materialism, says Engels,

seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.

Today the legacy of Marx and Engel’s ideas are not a set of crumbling blueprints for a “perfect” world that gather dust in history books and museums. They are a practical framework that can still explain why we live in a world defined by economic crisis, continuing war, and a new round of vicious attacks on working class living standards – and that point to what we can do about it.

Engels’ explanation of capitalist crisis, written more than a century ago, seems eerily prophetic in today’s bleak economic climate:

In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting.

But Marx and Engels were not prophets – they simply knew that they needed to analyse and confront the grim reality of capitalism, and understand its characteristics, in order to figure out how it could be smashed. In this process they discovered three important things that still resonate today.

They discovered that capitalism’s insatiable appetite for growth and accumulation transforms production, creating a powerful global working class that has the capacity to challenge the demands of the system.

They discovered that capitalism is always prone to crisis and never able to provide for everyone’s needs, which means that workers are sometimes forced to act collectively and struggle to defend their interests, regardless of whether socialist ideas are popular or current.

And they discovered that workers’ struggles can quickly lead to glimpses of a new world, so that a society which seems utterly impossible one day can shift to within our reach the next.

This article, by Alsion Hose, first appeared in Socialist Alternative in Decemebr 2010.