Two notions are constantly drummed into us from early on: first, that great ideas are the product of great individuals who plucked them out of their heads; second, that these ideas are the motive force of history.
The Marxist tradition argues the opposite: that ideas don't exist in isolation from the conditions in which people live and from the struggles in which they engage. The ideas developed in different historical periods are, therefore, intimately related to people's real, practical social and economic lives. As Marx put it, 'It is not consciousness that determines being, but social being that determines consciousness.'
The problem with the claim that it is ideas that change society is that we can still ask: where do those ideas come from? For example, the dominant ideas current today are ideas that defend capitalist society. But if that is the whole story, how did socialist ideas come into being?
The character of modern society was defined by the three great revolutions of the late 18th century: the American Revolution against British colonial rule, the great French Revolution against absolute monarchy and feudalism, and the industrial revolution. Both the American and French revolutions destroyed the old order but ended in a new form of class domination, that of industrial capitalism whose material basis was created by the industrial revolution.
The two great revolutions against the old order exercised a decisive influence on the ideas of their time. History was now thought of in a new, much more dynamic way. The German philosopher Hegel saw history as the arena within which opposing forces struggle with each other in an unceasing search for freedom. History moves forward through the conflict of opposites and the resolution of those opposites at a higher level. But for Hegel these conflicts remained purely theoretical.
However, Hegel's vision shared two ideas with that of Marx: that human beings have to fight in order to gain freedom and that modern society contains barriers which prevent the full development of human potential. Both these ideas were inspired by the great revolutions of the late 18th century.
According to the dominant economic theory of the time the classical political economy, put forward by Adam Smith and David Ricardo competition on the free market must reign supreme.
Smith and Ricardo also argued that labour was the source of all wealth, a view which fitted the needs of the new industrial capitalists. It encouraged them to try to abolish remaining restrictions on the free movement of labour imposed by the state and the old landowning and merchant classes. At the same time, Ricardo argued that workers received in wages the full value of their means of subsistence food, clothing, shelter and that market forces would prevent them from receiving either more or less.
Working class politics were dominated by middle class 'utopian socialists', such as Robert Owen. The utopians believed that to overcome poverty and injustice, it was necessary to persuade enlightened members of the ruling class to reshape society according to rational and just principles. Their elitism led them to dismiss the idea of workers' self emancipation.
The working class was still too small, its social and economic role too undeveloped, its class consciousness too embryonic, for it to be able to leave a decisive mark on the outcome of the great struggles of the late 18th century.
Although the American and French revolutions showed that the masses could act to alter the course of history, they resulted in the rise of a new, capitalist ruling class and a new form of exploitation. It was for that reason that Hegel could not raise his interpretation of history and its conflicts above an abstract level. It was still necessary and possible to dress up the historical process in mystical clothing.
For the same reason, as a young student, between 1838 and 1843, Marx was a member of the radical Young Hegelians, revolutionary democrats whose aim was a political struggle to overthrow the autocratic Prussian monarchy. But in 1843 he wrote an article in which for the first time he identified the working class as the means 'to actualise philosophy' and achieve 'full human emancipation'.
In the following years he argued unrelentingly against the Hegelians, that ideas in the abstract weren't the driving force of history, but people, organised in social classes that struggle against each other that ideas are rooted in the material reality of human society. Against the utopians and reformers he argued that history wasn't made by great individuals but by the masses.
What had enabled Marx to make the leap? With rapid industrialisation, especially in Britain but to some extent in France, Germany and the US, by the late 1820s we can speak of a new working class with a level of class consciousness.
What had created the new class consciousness? Since the late 18th century, the formerly independent small tenant farmers and artisan masters had been compelled by the capitalists to abandon their small plots or workshops in order to work for wages in the new urban factories. They were subject to the most hideous exploitation and oppression. If they refused to work there, they starved.
The new working class's revulsion against the new urban factories into which they were herded was so great that laws were enacted against 'vagabondage' to keep workers in the factories. But from the outset they fought back. They combined in trade unions, and repelled the capitalist government's attempts to outlaw these through the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800. The combinations survived despite harsh laws and prison sentences. From the Luddite riots in 1811 and 1812 to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the general unionism of 1830-34, the new working class organised and fought back. These fightbacks won the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824.
Workers had discovered a new power, being together in a place forced on them by the capitalist employer. They were united and disciplined by the very instruments of production which coerced them. The French silk weavers in Lyons rose up in 1831 and 1834. Ten years later, in 1844, German linen weavers in Silesia revolted against their new masters.
Workers rebelled against the power of the capitalist. They fought for higher wages, for factory inspection, for better conditions, for a time limit on the hours of labour. Then the workers turned against the capitalist legislators. In England from 1837-48 they fought for universal suffrage through the Chartist movement and later, through the unions, for the Ten Hour Bill.
But the early working class went even further than challenging capitalist power. From its own experience of cooperative production and collective struggle, it raised the possibility of an alternative. In 1833 a Yorkshire building worker wrote, 'The trade unions will not only strike for less work and more wages, but they will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters, and work for each other.' The idea of workers' democracy was already being floated. The same building worker went on to advocate 'a parliament of the industrious classes', or 'house of trades' delegated directly from workshops and mills: 'The lodges send delegates from local to district, and from district to national assemblies.' Based on universal suffrage and annual elections, such a body would replace parliament. The rules of a society of Yorkshire weavers formed in 1832 stated, 'The working classes have created all wealth [but] instead of being the richest are the poorest of the community.' The alternative 'is living in community on the principles of mutual cooperation, united possessions.'
At the same time, industrial capitalism brought crises. The first erupted in 1825 and the second in 1837. The ideas of classical political economy were being buffeted by crises on the one hand and workers' revolts on the other. The early struggles for higher wages and better conditions implicitly questioned the capitalist principle of 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's pay'.
Workers were asking, 'If labour is the source of all wealth, why do labourers become poorer the more they produce?' In other words, they were highlighting the reality of exploitation which is hidden under capitalism and which the ideas of classical political economy were attempting to conceal.
The 1840s was a decade of deepening crisis for the new industrial capitalism. It witnessed a rising wave of class struggle on a Europe wide front. During his exile in Paris from 1843-45, Marx was greatly affected by his encounter with militant, organised French workers. And in 1844 he met Engels, who had lived in Manchester and impressed on him the misery of its workers.
The Hegelian philosophers in Germany, who had influenced the young Marx, criticised the lack of democracy in the semi-feudal Prussian state but recoiled from the 1844 uprising of the Silesian weavers. Marx, on the contrary, was profoundly influenced by the living movement of workers and wrote, 'The wisdom of the German poor stands in inverse ratio to the wisdom of poor Germany The Silesian uprisings began where the French and English insurrections ended, with the consciousness of the proletariat as a class.'
It was during these turbulent years that Marx discovered the significance of the working class: that it is the potential bearer of a new socialist order, not simply because it is oppressed but because its role in production forces it to act collectively.
Marx was also able to go beyond liberal economics. At the heart of his socialist economic theory is the idea that the capitalist system is based on the exploitation of labour. It was easy to see that in previous class societies the labourer was exploited for example, under slavery or feudalism. But the classical economists claimed that, under capitalism, the worker was free: he or she agreed on a wage with the employer and could choose to work or not to work for this or that capitalist.
Surely this society was different, based as it was on the free exchange of labour for wages? Marx proved that under capitalism workers were exploited just as they had been under slavery or feudalism. The difference was that whereas the slave was tied to the individual slaveowner and the serf to the individual landowner, the worker under capitalism was tied not to an individual capitalist but to the capitalist class as a whole.
Marx thus developed a 'materialist' theory of history: to understand any epoch, we must look first at the way people produce their means of subsistence. This in turn is always related to definite kinds of social relations or forms of exploitation. The basic features of feudalism were, first, agricultural labour based on technically low methods of production, and, secondly, a system of social relations in which the feudal lord exploited the serf. While Marx heaped praise on the industrial capitalists who had overthrown feudalism, revolutionised traditional methods of production and, in doing so, transformed society, he argued that their greatest achievement was the forging of the revolutionary working class itself, their own 'gravedigger'. Hence, for the first time, a revolution by the majority in the interests of the majority became possible. That revolution is the only way in which workers can transform not only society but also themselves, throwing off 'the muck of ages' in order to be fit to run the new society.
The 1848 revolution was the first in which the working class appeared as an independent actor on the historical stage. The workers in Paris set up barricades and presented economic demands which were aimed not only against the king but against the capitalists as well. The capitalists, having united with the workers against the monarchy, now turned against the workers and their troops massacred them. In 1848, Europe discovered the reality of the class antagonism between capitalists and workers.
In The Communist Manifesto, published just weeks before the outbreak of the February revolution in France, Marx and Engels argued that this struggle is the dynamic of industrial capitalism, the soil in which grows the seed of socialism. A socialist society has to be international just as the revolution itself could not be contained within national boundaries.
With the defeat of the European revolution 1850, Marx spent a lot of his time in the British Museum. But he was never an ivory tower thinker. For him, theory was always linked to working class action which it seeks to illuminate in order to be a guide for future action. 'Philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it'. To the end of his days, Marx remained first and foremost a revolutionary fighter.