Introduction
I – General
“Modern socialism is, in its content, primarily the product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms prevailing in modern society between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers, and on the other hand, of the anarchy ruling in production. In its theoretical form, however, it originally appears as a more developed and allegedly more consistent extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.” (p 18)
In his, The Three Sources and Three Components Parts of Marxism, Lenin gives an extended version of this idea.
“The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.
The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.”
Day to day material reality provided the basis of socialist ideas, and of a socialist movement. In other words, the newly developed industrial proletariat found itself thrown against the newly arisen industrial bourgeoisie, in struggles over wages and conditions. Moreover, from around 1825, when the first generalised crisis of overproduction occurred, the anarchy of this form of production, where vast quantities of commodities are produced, speculatively, without knowing whether they can be sold, leads to a recognition of its irrationality.
But, recognising these material conditions does not mean a correct, theoretical understanding of their causes, or the solution to them. Natural scientists, after all, observe many natural phenomena, but, without having a correct theoretical understanding of them. Only scientific analysis, delving beneath the superficial appearance provides an ever more developing understanding of reality. Every generation must, necessarily, begin with the scientific data and theories it inherits as the starting point of its own scientific analysis. It is not only in terms of material conditions that Man creates his own history, but in conditions not of his own choosing. The socialist movement, necessarily, began on the basis of the bourgeois moral philosophy of Kant, as a response to the evils of capitalism, and with the bourgeois economic theories of Ferguson, Smith and Ricardo.
As Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, it produces the first working class theorists such as Hodgskin et al, who use the tenets of Ricardo's theories against the bourgeoisie. For example, if the value of commodities is produced only by labour, then, why is it that wages are not equal to this value, why is it that the labourer lives in poverty, whilst the non-labourers, the capitalists, live in luxury. It leads to utopian concepts such as the demand that workers receive “the full fruits of their labour”, which continue down to today in the programmes of reformists and social-democrats.
But, also, the anarchy of production, which leads to overproduction of commodities, and crises, denied by Mill, Ricardo and Say, but, undeniable after 1825, leads Sismondi to conclude that such crises can only be avoided by slowing down, or ending altogether, the development of the capitalist production whose gigantic productive power gives rise to them. Again, as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, such anti-capitalist theories are also utopian, and, thereby, in seeking to retain, or return, to some less developed stage, also reactionary.
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