Marx’s Vision of Socialism by Brian Jones

by Brian Jones
March 4, 2009

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I have an image in my mind of Donald Trump leading a march for economic equality. Now that is utopian.

Marx and Engels were the first to bring socialism down from the clouds and put it on a real-world, scientific basis. Their starting point was not ideals, but reality:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, but those which they find existing and those produced by their activity.

Marx and Engels were the first socialists to support trade unions. Why? Because Marx and Engels were the first to see socialism as the logical end result of the class struggle that was already in progress.

We are usually taught that change is the product of enlightened, courageous minorities working on behalf of the grateful masses. Marx’s was a 180-degree change in approach. “All previous historical movements,” he wrote, “were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”

This continues to be a radical departure from the usual way that revolution (or really any social change for that matter) is conceived.

Furthermore, this “immense majority” is organized in the first place, not by people preaching socialism, but by the capitalists! As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:


Today, “the various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are …equalized” to an amazing degree. Basically, in 2009, the life of a wage laborer has the same essential features in every corner of the globe. It’s the spread of capitalism all over the globe that explains why you see people organizing unions all over the globe–from Nigeria to Venezuela, from South Korea to Canada.

Further, socialist proselytizers don’t have to convince people of the “idea” of fighting back. Capitalism forces people to do that.

When management tried to take away all of their sick days and cut pay by 25 percent, the workers who make cookies at the Stella D’oro factory in the Bronx went on strike. When the owners of the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago tried to close the factory in December and cheat the workers out of their severance pay, the workers occupied the factory.

This movement of the “immense majority” is not a utopian dream. It is a part of the real world, a struggle already in progress. Ever since Marx, it is these struggles that are the starting point for the socialist movement. As Marx wrote in a letter:



BUT WHERE is this struggle headed? What is the meaning of a strike?

Even small strikes (such as the two mentioned above) can have big implications. In effect, the owners are telling the workers how it’s going to be, and the workers are collectively saying, “No, this is how it’s going to be.”

Who’s going to decide how many sick days there will be? Who’s going to decide whether the factory stays open or closes? Who’s going to decide the hours, the pay and so on? A strike is like a revolution in embryo, because it’s the first step towards working people saying, “We’re going to decide.”

When students occupied a cafeteria at New York University to protest (among other things) the outrageous rate of tuition, their classmates gathered in the hundreds outside the building to support them, chanting, “Whose school? OUR SCHOOL!” What’s the implication of that?

Furthermore, what if the working class actually won this struggle once and for all? What if the students and teachers took over the schools? What if the nurses and doctors controlled the hospitals? What if we–the workers–controlled all of the workplaces?

If capitalism was the product of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the kings and queens, then the outcome of the new class struggle–the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat–is socialism. As Marx and Engels wrote:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its life situation, as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.

What is it that is foreshadowed? Marx is saying that a truly collective society is foreshadowed by the life of the working class under capitalism.

We already work collectively. If we struggle, we must struggle collectively or we lose. Marx pointed out that if the working class were to rule, the only way it could rule would be…you guessed it: collectively.


WHAT WOULD that look like? Marx and Engels (unlike the utopian dreamers) wrote very little on what socialism would precisely look like, because it’s not for two people sitting in a room to decide. The whole point is for the “immense majority” to remake society as they see fit.

We don’t have to draw up elaborately detailed plans for a socialist future, but we can imagine the broad outlines of would be possible if we, regular working people, ran society:

— We could provide free health care to everyone.
— We could house everyone (why not free housing?).
— We could feed everyone (why not free restaurants?).
— We could give people real leisure time, to spend with their friends and families, travel, pursue other interests.

Impossible, you say? Well, it’s happened before.

In 1871, the workers of Paris took over the city and ran it for two months. They set up an egalitarian workers’ government. They abolished the standing army, and instead armed the people. They elected representatives with no term of office and no perks, who were paid only an average worker’s wage and were recallable at any time. They opened up education for women (unheard of) and for working people in general. Marx described how:


The mass of people participated directly in the running of the Commune, and they planned to reorganize the factories under worker’s control. Crime virtually disappeared since everything was organized for the purpose of meeting people’s needs. Marx wrote that the masses of Paris had “stormed heaven,” and the wealthy classes of the world howled in protest:

It is a strange fact. In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than arises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society, with its two poles of capital and wage-slavery…The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!


Even this socialist society, Marx argued, is not some dreamland. It’s really just a first step:

The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce…They know that in order to work out their own emancipation…they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.

If you think that capitalism is an utterly corrupt system, and that our society is “pregnant” with the possibility of radical change, and if you have some intuition that we, the working people of the world, could run things in a better way, then you should join the socialist movement and help to make that dream a reality.




The return of Marx by Brian Jones

Marx becomes a Marxist by Brian Jones

The legacy of Leon Trotsky by Shaun Harkin

What Would Socialism Be Like? by Leela Yellesetty

Definitions: The Proletariat by Gaither Stewart

Definitions: The Intelligentsia By Gaither Stewart

Definitions: The Bourgeoisie by Gaither Stewart

3 thoughts on “Marx’s Vision of Socialism by Brian Jones

  1. Pingback: Can the working class unite? by Jen Roesch « Dandelion Salad

  2. Pingback: Marx’s theory of working-class revolution by Alan Maass « Dandelion Salad

  3. It seems all systems have their own seeds of destruction planted within them. The Russia revolution had its glorious honeymoon, things going right and then Lenin and Stalin.

    Surely, a system where workers own the means of production is less exploitative than capitalism with its concentration of wealth.

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