The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

In 1844, Marx became acquainted with Proudhon, another mild and idealistic revolutionary; soon Marx was trying hard to ‘purge’ Proudhon, who replied reasonably to one of Marx’s blasts: ‘… for God’s sake… let us not try to instil another kind of dogma… Let us not fall into the contradiction of your compatriot Martin Luther who, after overthrowing Catholic theology, immediately set himself the task of founding, with all the apparatus of excommunication and anathemas, a Protestant theology.’ But that was precisely what Marx was intent on doing.

At this point in the nineteenth century, history was on Marx’s side. The Church was back in power, the Jesuits were teaching again (they boasted that if they could have a child for the first few years of its life, it would remain a Catholic for ever), and scientists who taught that the world might be more than four thousand years old had to watch their step. In France, the ‘citizen king’ Louis Philippe was far from popular. The liberals were forbidden to hold meetings, but they got round this by adopting a British custom of ‘political banquets’, at which no one could forbid speeches. The government banned such a banquet on 22 February 1848, and the people became restless. A crowd set out on a peaceful protest march to the ministry of justice; troops were called out, and someone accidentally fired a shot. Then the troops fired directly into the crowd, which scattered, leaving behind dead and wounded. The church bells of Paris rang; barricades were thrown up in the streets, just as in 1830. And the ‘citizen king’, like Charles X before him, fled to England.

News travelled slowly in those days, but when it reached Austria there were riots in Vienna. Metternich was forced to flee the country. In Hungary, Kossuth led a revolution. The Czechs demanded a constitution. In Dresden, the young opera composer Richard Wagner fought on the barricades, and then had to flee the country as the police and army regained control.

Marx was exultant; at last, the revolution had arrived. He had published his Communist Manifesto in the very month of the French uprising, in which he explained that the real enemy was the ‘bourgeoisie’, the middle classes. Communism would abolish the bourgeoisie as well as property. (But he was careful to explain that in the future communist state, personal freedom would be respected.) Now Marx rushed from Brussels to Paris – only to find that the revolutionary fever was already subsiding now that the king had gone. But it had reached Germany, where King Frederick William IV had been forced to grant a parliament, a free press and a constitution. Marx moved to Cologne and set up a revolutionary newspaper. It was popular, but disappointingly, no one seemed to want to disembowel the bourgeoisie or hang them from lamp-posts. In a few months the newspaper collapsed. Marx returned to Paris, and was quickly expelled. He and Jenny left for London with their three children; Jenny was pregnant with a fourth.

From the personal point of view, the remainder of Marx’s life was a long, frustrating anticlimax. He lived in poverty – at one point they were even evicted into the street – and his baby son died. Engels, now running one of his father’s mills in Manchester, provided the money that supported them. A police spy who was set to watch Marx reported: ‘The dominating trait of his character is a limitless ambition and love of power.’ But after observing Marx for some time, the British authorities decided he was a harmless German intellectual.

Marx joined the Communist League in London, and was soon engaged in his favourite activity of trying to purge it of ‘traitors’. Two more children died, while the maidservant, Helene Demuth, became pregnant by Marx; to preserve his dignity as a revolutionary leader, Marx spread the story that Engels was the father. He became increasingly domineering, increasingly resentful. A comrade named Techow wrote of him: ‘The impression he made on me was that of someone possessing a rare intellectual superiority, and he was evidently a man of outstanding personality. If his heart had matched his intellect, and if he had possessed as much love as hate, I would have gone through fire for him… Yet it is a matter for regret… that this man with his fine intellect is lacking in nobility of soul. I am convinced that a most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away all the good in him.’ This is a perceptive summary of Marx’s chief defects. He hungered for fame, for success, for influence. And since the only circles in which he had any influence were socialist, the dominance expressed itself in the form of violent denunciations and ‘purges’.

In 1864, the field of that influence suddenly expanded. French workingmen had come to London in 1863 to see the Industrial Exhibition, and had made contact with English socialists. Someone thought of the idea of an international organisation of socialists. Marx was voted on to the committee by London’s German socialists, and, in his usual manner, he had soon taken charge. He drew up the rules and made sure the subjects discussed were dictated by himself. With bullying, effrontery and various subterfuges, he usually succeeded in getting his own way.

During all these years, Marx had been labouring on his major work, his own Hegelian system; the first volume appeared in 1867 under the title Das Kapital. Hegel was trying to demonstrate that history was moving towards the complete expression of spirit. Marx set out to demonstrate that history was moving inexorably towards communism. But how could such a proposition be sustained in view of the obvious fact that history is the story of a continual struggle for power among individuals’? How could anyone who studies the progress of civilisation from the first cities of Mesopotamia believe that mankind is moving towards the abolition of private property? According to Marx, the answer lay in a concept which he called ‘surplus value’. What is the value of, say, a table or chair? It is obviously the value of the materials, and of the labour that has gone into it. If a carpenter asks a certain sum for a table, this is what he is charging for. If the carpenter is working for an employer, and the employer pays him exactly as much as his labour is worth, then he must add something extra to the price of the table when he sells it in a shop – otherwise, he will not make a profit, and he will soon be unable to employ anybody. This ‘extra’ profit is what Marx calls surplus value. But the public are not going to pay more for the table than it is worth; if they think he is overcharging, they will go to the shop next door. The employer’s only way of making a profit is to force the workers to do more work than he pays them for – to pay a man for eight hours and make him work ten or twelve.

This method of exploitation works well enough in a pre-industrial society. But in the industrial society, most of the work is done by machines. And – here is the core of the argument – a machine cannot create ‘surplus value’. You cannot make it work longer hours than you pay it for. Of course, we do not pay a machine wages; but we have to pay for it in the first place. And the manufacturer will make sure he charges exactly what the machine is ‘worth’ in wages. So in the new industrial age, machines will gobble up all the profit and manufacturers will go bankrupt. And if the workers have been replaced by machines, who will buy the products of the machines? The result is bound to be widespread economic crisis, which in turn will bring the inevitable Revolution. The workers will take over the means of production; the profit-motive will vanish, and mankind will live happily ever after in a free communist state. In fact, it will not even be a state, for, according to Marx, the ‘state’ (i.e. the machinery of legislation) will gradually wither away as men live in perfect harmony and friendship and laws become unnecessary.

Anyone who examines the above argument closely will quickly note its central fallacy: that a machine cannot provide a profit because its manufacturer will charge as much for it as it is ‘worth’ – that is, as much as the employer would have to pay workmen to do the same amount of work. This is obviously untrue. Let us suppose I am a painter and decorator, and I employ a workman who takes a whole day to paint two rooms by hand. For his day’s work I pay him £10. At the end of the week, I have paid him £50 for painting ten rooms. Then someone invents a spray-gun that costs £50, and which will spray a room with paint in an hour. My workman can now spray forty or so rooms a week, and I have made a large profit. Moreover, I still have the spray-gun, which can be used next week and the week after that. If the spray-gun manufacturer works out that it will make me a thousand pounds profit during its working life, and tries to charge me a thousand pounds for it, I shall smartly tell him what he can do with his gun.