resistance or dissent (Part 2)

There are certain things that have evolved in society since Marx's time. However, his words are still very much applicable and people continue to flock to it. A lot of the phrases and/or the spirit of the phrases are in more places than I even knew of before familiarizing myself with Marxism/Communism. I know now that we have been laying the foundations of communism, little by little for quite some time.

Marx claims, "the proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital...has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests". Chapter II Manifesto

The proletarian is just a tool within the bourgeois society, whose only reason to exist is in helping to maintain it. They, in reality, have nothing so abolishing this system is a matter of necessity and Communism, to Marx, is the only way to accomplish this.

Communism will "support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things." Chapter IV Manifesto

The arguments made by those in opposition to communism are that communists want:

• Abolition of private property
• Abolition of wage labour (system of wage labor)
• Abolition of individuality and freedom
• Abolition of the family
• Abolition of Education
• Abolition of nationalities and countries
• Abolition of religion, namely Christianity

This should in reality read, "Abolition of bourgeois _____________".

Religion

I start with religion for a reason. Within it, is the foundation of our very existence.

Marx came from a Jewish family but his father converted to Lutheranism due to the fact that Jews were unable to find jobs as easily. Marx, though baptized into the Lutheran faith, did not believe in God.

In The German Ideology manuscript he counters Hegel's idealism with materialism. He believed that nothing existed apart from the material world. The material world, perceptible to the senses, has objective reality. In other words, the world as we know it is all there is. Belief in God is immaterial.

Within the Communist Manifesto, of religion he states:

"The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?"

The way we think, act, believe, etc is solely based on one's environment. You change the environment, gone will be the illusions that traditional values have held and you come back to reality, to the things you can see, to the things you can touch.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. 

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions...

[It plucks]...the imaginary flowers on the chain...so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself." Critique of Hegel's Philosophy

"It is evident that the initial stage of the movement...depends on whether the true recognised life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world [between what is ideal or what is real]. Communism begins from the outset with atheism...[it at first will be abstract but once it takes absolute hold will become concrete]." 1844 Manuscript Private Property and Communism

Once mankind regains their true reality, once they embrace Communism, religion will become wholly unnecessary.

Individualism/Freedom

"In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality...the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

...The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying." Communist Manifesto Chp II

Bourgeois individualism and freedom is in what can be made and what can be accumulated.

Due to the fact that Marx believes in the material world as objective reality, we have to understand that he will always put things within that circle of belief.

Marx believed that mankind are naturally social beings and that individualism creates "self-estrangement" and it isolates the individual from his/her true place in society. 

"In Tribal Society, individual consciousness is absent, and only begins to develop on the basis of a social division of labour and in particular, the emergence of private property."marxists.org/glossary/terms

"...therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence..." 1844 Manuscript Private Property and Communism 

Really this is a battle between individuals in a society vs a society of individuals. Individualism vs Collectivism.

Individualism:

• uniqueness
• free will/agency
• self-reliance
• personal independence
• free competition
• free from government interference (rugged individualism) 
• personal responsibility

Collectivism/Commonality:

• people having the same social, economic, or educational status
• a union of interests or purposes or sympathies among members of a group
• solidarity
• an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation
• the quality of being general or widespread or having general applicability

Private Property/Wage labor

"Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system." Estranged Labour, Marx 1844 Manuscript

Bourgeois Private Property is described as anything that is used as a means in/of production. This is everything from nature to people.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis defines factors of production as being:

• Land-not only land, such as forests, but natural resources such as water, oil, copper, natural gas, coal
• Labor-the effort that people contribute to the production of goods and services; income earned by labor resources is called wages
• Capital-capital as the machinery, tools and buildings humans use to produce goods and services; capital differs based on the worker and type of work, income earned by owners of capital resources is called interest.
• Entrepreneurship-a person who combines the other factors of production - land, labor, and capital - to earn a profit; [they are] innovators who find new ways to produce goods and services or who develop new goods and services to bring to market; payment to entrepreneurship is profit; thrive in economies where they have the freedom to start businesses and buy resources freely.

As a side note, money is not included into the factors of production. It is not considered capital as defined by economists because "it is not in itself a productive resource". You can use it to buy capital, to buy the resources needed to produce, but it in itself produces nothing.

Marx writes that communism is the "positive transcendence of private property" it is the "transcendence of...human self estrangement".

"It is easy to see that the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy.

This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now [with the realisation or the reality of man]. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence...

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us...

The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human.

...real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism." 1844 Manuscript Private Property and Communism

Cornell Law School defines private property as, "property owned by private parties - essentially anyone or anything other than the government. Private property may consist of real estate, buildings, objects, intellectual property (for example, copyrights or patents)".

The ownership of ones home, in my opinion, couldn't possibly escape this, no matter the incredulous responses by some, especially if one owns multiple homes and rents some of those out as a means for profit. If you look at home ownership of one over another, there are great disparities in what people are able to afford. By all accounts, how is it fair that one is able to own a mansion, while another is only able to afford a one bedroom home? This disparity doesn't jive with a communist society.

You'll find that people will say, "No, Communism won't take your homes" and I would imagine that within the first phase of the transition between capitalism and communism you may be able to, at least for a short period of time, but there is calculation in this.

I think there are a few possible reasons that this would be the case:

1. The overthrown bourgeois will never give up their homes without being forced to.
2. You allow enough time to pass for the previous bourgeois to die off.
3. You allow enough time to pass in order to raise up a new generation indoctrinated with the communist ideology. No one should want a mansion then.

Like the school uniform as a means to prevent inequality among students, how do you think a true communist society will eventually have to look in order for all inequalities to come to an end?

Division of labor

Division of Labor is "the separation of a work process into a number of tasks, with each task performed by a separate person or group of persons". Intelligence, education, sex and age are all factors in the division of labor.

The hierarchy of the labor force is also a division of labor. Managers and other "higher ups", for example, verses those who work an assembly line.

To continue using the assembly line as an example, it is believed that because those who work on the line actually manufacture the products, they should receive equally the proceeds of that labor.

In his Critique of the Gotha Progamme, he is extremely disappointed that they took the movement as a whole and turned it into what he calls "mere phrases". It doesn't go far enough in its explanations nor does it seem as though they want to move beyond the capitalist society. This is his number one issue, I think, with socialists is that they miss what socialism really is. It is communism in its infancy. It is merely the first phase.

His critique states:

"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges."

"In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor."

He gives an example of why this won't work.

"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right."

He calls this a defect.

"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. 

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

I have underlined mental and physical labor only to further define these.

Mental labor-intellectuals ie engineers, researchers, those who have general or specialized education, generally oversee those who do manual labor, managers etc.

Physical labor-manual labor that requires no such specialized training or education.

The division of labor has created competition between individuals, of both intellectual and manual labor. However, within the communist society:

"The level of general and specialized education that working people receive will be so high that there will be no need to maintain groups of individuals specializing exclusively in the management of production and other social spheres. The regulation of society and production will also exist under advanced communism, but it will be carried out by highly qualified individuals in rotation. 

Lenin predicted that in this future society 'all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing'." The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979)

How do you regulate someone's physical and mental capabilities?

Division of Labor also creates a system of wage earning based on certain criteria. Whether that is favoring those who have worked at a company longer and therefore receives more earnings and benefits or favoring the man over the woman for more physically laborious tasks or the educated over the uneducated or the experienced over the inexperienced. It is inherently an unequal system.

"the whole bourgeois conception of wages...was made clear that the wage worker has permission to work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist..." Critique of the Gotha Programme

"These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market." Communist Manifesto Chp I 

"...wage labour...and production for the sake of production are inseparably connected...In these circumstances the vast majority of mankind is obliged to sell its life - more precisely, its labour power..."International library of the Communist left, Communist Program, no.6, p.62 (September 1980)

Ferdinand Lassalle coined the phrase the iron law of wages, "which stated that all attempts to improve the real income of workers were futile and that wages perforce remained near the subsistence level." Britannica.com/topic/Iron-Law-of-Wages

Minimum wage, the basic minimum someone needs to earn in order to live. Is the raising of minimum wage a communist request?

Marx certainly took issue with those who wished to simply raise wages.

"....the raising of wages gives rise to overwork among the workers. The more they wish to earn, the more must they sacrifice their time and carry out slave-labour, completely losing all their freedom, in the service of greed.

The raising of wages excites in the worker the capitalist’s mania to get rich, which he, however, can only satisfy by the sacrifice of his mind and body. The raising of wages presupposes and entails the accumulation of capital..." 1844 Manuscript Wages of Labour

He calls these types of people, piecemeal reformers.

"What are the mistakes committed by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and in this way to improve the situation of the working class, or regard equality of wages...as the goal of social revolution?"

Marx stated in his 1865 address to the First International Working Men's Association that:

"Instead of the conservative motto: 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system!'"

When would this be?

 "When the narrow boundaries of the factory have been extended to embrace the social production of a country, of a continent, and finally of the whole world...then it will no longer be necessary for products to acquire a price...[Value/Price] will disappear completely as soon as this system includes the whole world. 

...If products no longer represent values, and if the allocation of labour power is no longer subject to the accidental laws of the market, then it is also impossible to consider labour power itself as an exchange value and to give it a market price. The members of society, henceforth undertaking collectively social labour...will no longer be «payed» for their real or alleged «services». The part of the social product destined for consumption is available to each individual as his share." International library of the Communist left, Communist Program, no.6, p.62 (September 1980)

Who decides what share each individual receives?

What is the criteria for that share?

Are we talking about equal outcome?

How would this society deal with, what he called, an unequal standard of labor?

Does it matter if you could work longer or harder than the next person, will you still each receive the same outcome?

Will that not lead the person who can do more to then do less?

Instead of being paid money for your labor, you'll receive what in exchange? Only that which is deemed "necessary" for personal consumption?

Does he ever give an actual plan?

No.

At least I can answer that question.

I am sure no doubt that those who try to implement this ideology are left with the same questions and therefore, by design it is left up to open interpretation.

How dangerous is that?

Abolition of Nationalities and Countries

Nationality and Country boundaries are one of those things that according to Marx will naturally dissolve away when private property, division of labor and individualism cease to be.

He postulates, again seeing this through the lens of materialism, that the bourgeoisie created an environment that causes not only antagonism between individuals but between towns, nations and countries because in a capitalist system we are all in a battle for the top when it comes to production. It has in essence created its own boundaries.

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production...draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation...

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life... 

Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff...

These will cease once the proletariat of every country unites to over throw their own bourgeois and then unties into one global order.

"National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually...The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end." Communist Manifesto Chp II

John Westmoreland, a former teacher at York College and trade union activist sums it up pretty well.

"Without private property relations we would be able to share the production and consumption of goods equally. A system of social entitlement would replace the vagaries of the market thereby ending poverty and social and political inequality. We would abolish all inherited wealth and prevent the growth of a dominant caste. 

National boundaries would become meaningless when we have gained stewardship over the planet. Intellectual production in terms of scientific research would be available to all instead of being hoarded by corporations and states to further their own nefarious ambitions." Marx and the Meaning of Private Property, Counterfire.org

This brings us to the final two sections family and education.

Marx said a little more on the family than on education but not much so, as a result, I will need to pull from other sources for further detail into these last two subjects.

Family

What Marx says on the subject of family is, of course, in relation to what he believes the bourgeoisie have done.

"The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation." Manifesto Chp I

Here I believe he is referring to arranged marriages among the higher classes of society. Essentially contracts, usually between the parents, for royalty, nobility, the merging of resources and even countries. These marriages typically were not built on love.

"The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production... the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production..." Manifesto Chp II

The means of production, namely the idea that women are simply child-bearers and have nothing more to contribute.

It was also, according to Marx, one of those things that would naturally fall away when you got rid of private property (women in marriage he considered to be part of private property).

"On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.

But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. 

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital." Manifesto Chapter II 

In The German Ideology he writes:

"...men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family.

The family, which to begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create new social relations and the increased population now needs, a subordinate one...

...the division of labour...is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property...

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another.

...the abolition of individual economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family...

In all respects, communism seeks to undermine the role that parents play in the raising of their children under the guise of "we are helping". Parents and children will be free of all familial obligation. Really just the women as men are not the focus in the development of the communist society.

To see this in action I must pull from an article by Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian Marxist revolutionary and a prominent figure in communist Russia (USSR). She wrote in 1920:

"Will the family continue to exist under communism? Will the family remain in the same form?...

...customary family structure has been falling apart in all the countries where capitalism is dominant...women have...been forced to seek paid work outside the family and outside the home...

The family breaks down as more and more women go out to work. How can one talk about family life when the man and woman work different shifts, and where the wife does not even have the time to prepare a decent meal for her offspring? How can one talk of parents when the mother and father are out working all day and cannot find the time to spend even a few minutes with their children?

The circumstances that held the family together no longer exist. The family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole. The old family structure is now merely a hindrance. What used to make the old family so strong? First, because the husband and father was the family’s breadwinner; secondly, because the family economy was necessary to all its members: and thirdly, because children were brought up by their parents. What is left of this former type of family? The husband, as we have just seen, has ceased to be the sole breadwinner. The wife who goes to work earns wages. She has learned to claim her own living, to support her children and not infrequently her husband. The family now only serves as the primary economic unit of society and the supporter and educator of young children. Let us examine the matter in more detail, to see whether or not the family is about to be relieved of these tasks as well."

So how can communism help the working woman have it all? In summary:

"the four categories (cooking, washing, cleaning, mending) of housework are doomed to extinction with the victory of communism. And the working woman will surely have no cause to regret this. Communism liberates woman from her domestic slavery and makes her life richer and happier."

What of child rearing and education?

Alexandra answers that too:

"Communist society considers the social education of the rising generation to be one of the fundamental aspects of the new life. The old family, narrow and petty, where the parents quarrel and are only interested in their own offspring, is not capable of educating the 'new person'.

...under the supervision of qualified educators [Communism] will offer an environment in which the child can grow up a conscious communist who recognises the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective...

Communist society takes care of every child and guarantees both him and his mother material and moral support. Society will feed, bring up and educate the child...

...The state does not need the family...The members of the family do not need the family either, because the task of bringing up the children...is passing more and more into the hands of the collective.

...the worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of...communist workers...

In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades..."

You can find it in its entirety here, please read it:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm

Education 

Marx didn't really go into detail in any of the writings I have come across.

In Chapter II of the Communist Manifesto he simply said this:

"...you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. 

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour."

While Alexandra Kollontai spoke of education, I pull from another article by N.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky: The ABC of Communism to further press upon you what they really mean.

"...the Communist Party is not merely faced by constructive tasks, for in the opening phases of its activity it is likewise faced by destructive tasks. In the educational system bequeathed to it by capitalist society, it must hasten to destroy everything which has made of the school an instrument of capitalist class rule...

We must ruthlessly expel from the proletarian school all those teachers of the old schools who either cannot or will not become instruments for the communist enlightenment of the masses...

The new school forcibly expels religion from within its walls, under whatever guise it seeks entry and in whatever diluted form reactionary groups of parents may desire to drag it back again... 

The old university created a close corporation of professors, a teachers' guild...The close corporation of bourgeois professors must be dissolved... 

In the new schools, all trace of national oppression disappears from the realm of instruction, for those of every nationality are entitled to receive education in their respective tongues... 

The bourgeoisie used the school for the enslavement of all who live by labour. The proletariat will use the school to enfranchise them, to sweep away the last traces of spiritual slavery from the consciousness of the workers. Thanks to the schools, the bourgeoisie was able to impose upon proletarian children a bourgeois mentality. The task of the new communist schools is to impose upon bourgeois and petty-bourgeois children a proletarian mentality...

If the masses find it difficult to construct a communist society, this is because in many departments of mental life they still have both feet firmly planted upon the soil of bourgeois society, because they have not yet freed themselves from bourgeois prejudices. In part, therefore, it is the task of the new school to adapt the mentality of adults to the changed social conditions. Still more, however, it is the task of the new school to train up a younger generation whose whole ideology shall be deeply rooted in the soil of the new communist society... 

The attainment of this end must be promoted by all our educational reforms, some of which have already been inaugurated, whilst others still await realization...

In bourgeois society, the child is regarded as the property of its parents - if not wholly, at least to a major degree. When parents say, 'My daughter', 'My son', the words do not simply imply the existence of a parental relationship, they also give expression to the parents' view that they have a right to educate their own children. From the socialist outlook, no such right exists. The individual human being does not belong to himself, but to society, to the human race. The individual can only live and thrive owing to the existence of society. The child, therefore, belongs to the society..."

There is so much I can't quote, but please go and read this in its entirety:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/10.htm

I end Part 2 with this:

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." The German Ideology

What is the present state of things? What group of people is pointed at for making up the modern bourgeois of the 21st century?

I will answer that in part 3.