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Personal Details

Role Name Affiliation

Department of Philosophy, University of
Principal Investigator A. Raghuramaraju Hyderabad
Bindu Puri Department of Philosophy, University of
Paper Coordinator Delhi
Amiya Kumar Bagchi Emeritus Professor of Economics, Institute of
Content Writer Development Studies, Kolkata
Content Reviewer Mrinal Miri Chairman, ICPR, New Delhi
Language Editor Abha Thapalyal Gandhi Publishing and Editorial Services Adviser,
Adjunct Faculty, Ambedkar University, Delhi

Description of Module

Subject name Philosophy

Paper Name Social and Political Philosophy

Module Name/Title
Marxist and Socialist Approaches to State and Society
Module Id 15.10

Prerequisites

Objectives

Key words Socialist, Marxist, Equality, Liberty, Industrial Revolution, State, Class Struggle,
Hierarchy, Gender, Discrimination, Civilization, Hegemony, Egalitarian Society.
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Marxist and Socialist Approaches to State and Society

1. Origins and Development: Demand for Equality and Liberty

The word ‘socialist’ was first used around the middle of the eighteenth century in order to
identify or attack thinkers who were challenging the social structure of their times. Many of
these thinkersderived their theories and proposals for reform on the basis of the idea that
human beings werefree creatures and that they were driven not just by narrow self-interest,
but also by an instinct for sociability (Venturi 1971, pp. 103-4; Venturi 1972, pp. 52-56).
They included the likes of CesareBeccaria, the Italian pioneer of penal reform. Such
personalities were attacked because they were questioning the idea that society was by nature
hierarchical and that it had beenordained by God or by nature that it should be so.

The most important early socialists of Europe were Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte
de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) andCharles Fourier (1772-1837) of France and their followers,
and Robert Owen (1771-1858) of Britain and his followers. They were impressed by the
higher productivity of modern large-scale industry and advances in science and technology,
and also the promise of that productivity for raising the standard of living of
everybody.However, they were appalled by the poverty and inequality of income and other
indices of human welfare associated with the Industrial Revolution sweeping over Britain,
France, and other European countries. Some of them wanted to retain private property and
some did not. Some emphasized individual volition and some stressed the social process that
shaped the characters of individuals. But all of them advocated specific measures to regulate
and, in some cases, abolish the marketpolicies, to bring down the inequality of incomes, and
rescue people from poverty.

Most of the socialists regarded unregulated private property as the basis of so-called
civilization (urban life, crafts and advanced agriculture) as well asinequality. That idea had
been given a classic formulation by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), one of the major
figures of the European Enlightenment:

‘THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, thought of saying ‘This is
mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.’
(Rousseau1984 [1754], p. 109).

There were also conservatives who regarded the industrial revolution as a disaster and
wanted society to revert to the supposedly egalitarian conditions of medieval Europe such as
craft production and small-scale agriculture. They included on one side Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, who was involved with the workers’ movement in France, and on the other side,
the likes of Thomas Carlyle, a philosopher, historian, and writer, and Benjamin Disraeli, the
future leader of the British Conservative Party and Prime Minister of Great Britain. In the
Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in 1848, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Frederick
Engels (1820-1895) called this romantic, backward looking variety of socialism, ‘reactionary
socialism’ (Marx and Engels1969 [1848], pp. 127-132).

As in the case of all great systems of political philosophy, there are many variations
within the broad framework of Marxist and socialist approaches to state and society. These
approaches have evolved over time, as the conditions of state and society have changed. This
module will focus on core propositions that are shared by most of these approaches, and will
point to certain alterations as the global economy and society have evolved.

Marx and Engels, the founding thinkers of the most widespread variety of socialism
from the late nineteenth century, expanded the basic idea that all human beings are socialized
creatures, and are nurtured and influenced by society from birth to death (Marx 1969[1845]
and Marx and Engels 1969[1845-46]). They are also a product and part of nature and their
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relation to nature is integral to their being. Adaptation plays a large part in determining the
structure of and change in all societies, whether human or non-human, such asfauna like ants
or birds. However, it plays a stronger role in the case of humans. (Hearn 1991; Foster 2000,
chapters 5 and 6). Because of certain distinct features of human beings such as their erect
posture, their opposable thumbs and their possession of language that can be used for
communication over increasing distances, human beings can also act creatively on nature.
This creativity can be dangerous to humansas well as to nature, the devastation caused by
human warfare, being the most glaring example.

From the time mankind invented agriculture and animal husbandry many significant
changes have occurred. With the deliberate cultivation of plants,through which edible seeds,
leaves, roots or fruits or flowers could be obtained, and the domestication of animals, such as
cattle, horses, camels, goats, llamas, sheep and dogs, there arose a division of labour between
men and men and also between men and women. In practically every society in which
numbers of surviving people grew and the complexity of human communication and
interaction increased, a hierarchy of ranks developed. Inequality became entrenched in human
societiesparticularly with the institution of property rights over natural substances such as
land as people became differentiated between those who could exercise such rights and those
who were denied those rights,.

I have already quoted Rousseau who regarded civilization as the root of inequality of
conditions among human beings. I should clarify that Rousseau really means 'civilization'
when he refers to ‘civil society’, a phrase that has acquired a more specific meaning in the
writings of other, later thinkers)This formulation distinguishes the modern critiques of
inequality in human societies from earlier thinkers who had also wanted equality. There are
many instances of religious leaders in earlier centuries preaching the essential equality of
members of the human species and creating communities which would be based on the
principle of equality. One of many examples dates back to early eighteenth-century Sind,
when the Mughal Empire was teetering, but had not yet collapsed.A Sufi pir, Shah
Inayatcreated a community, which was run on the principles of equality and of the rights of
the tiller of the soil. It was ultimately destroyed in 1716 by armed assault elicited by the
landlords of the surrounding area from the local representative of the Mughal Emperor
(Albinia, p.81).

The earlier religious leaders, such as the adherents of the Bhakti tradition in India or
many of the Sufi saints, or leaders of peasant revolts in Europe,might have assigned some
specific causes for the emergence of inequality (Hilton 1973; Bagchi 1995) However,
systematic reflection about the causes of the loss of human equality and the subjection of
large groups of human beings to others seems to date from the eighteenth century. The
structures of both state and society werespecifically identified as the leading factors
generating human inequality and human bondage. In 1793-94, in the middle of the so-called
Terror phase of the French Revolution, in which he had been an active participant, Marquis de
Condorcet (1743-1794), in hisSketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human
Mind: Tenth Epoch (Condorcet 2004(1794), p. 66] clearly laid down three principal
requirements of a society free of inequality and bondage:

Our hopes for the future condition of the human species can be reduced to three important
points: the destruction of inequality among nations; the progress of equality within each
people; and the real betterment of humankind.

Condorcet pinned his hope on scientific advance for attaining these ends. However, he did not
ponder on which groups in society would strive for the diffusion of the fruits of those
advances among all humans, including black Africans and women, the discrimination against
whom Condorcet had eloquently criticized. In the nineteenth century Marx and Engels
analyzed and published in books, pamphlets, journal articles and letters, the conflict of classes
in society and the structures of states which sustained the domination and exploitation of a
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class or classes by the dominant class and its allies controlling the state. These allies and
support systems included the bureaucracy, the army, the religious establishment and the
educational system.

1.1 Classes and class struggles

In their most famous pamphlet, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels1969
[1848], p.98), they put forward the following view of history, the core of Marxist thinking:

The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in
a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a
revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes.
The idea that society is composed of classes and its twin idea, that the state serves as the
protective cover for particular classes, were not invented by Marx and Engels. In Europe,
political philosophers from Jean Bodin in France to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had laid
the foundations of modern political thought by theorizing the nature of the state that would act
as the protector of private property rights as against the dangerous, disorderly claims of the
propertyless (Macpherson 1962).
The idea that society is composed of classes, which have conflicting interests, was
also not invented by Marx and Engels. Many seventeenth-century thinkers in Britain and
other European countries had thought along the same lines. But that idea came to the forefront
with eighteenth-and nineteenth century pioneers of classical political economy such as
Bernard de Mandeville, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Smith andRicardo divided
contemporary British society into the three classes of landlords, capitalists, and wage earners.
They also recognized that the interests of the three classes were antagonistic to one another.
In Ricardo’s theory the conflict between landlords and capitalists assumed paramount
importance. With population growth, under certain conditions, the rent of land would go up.
That would push prices of agricultural commodities up; that would lead to an increase in
wages, and hence would eat into the profits of capitalists and depress their incentive to invest.
That in turn would result in unemployment and cause wages to fall.
This theory was modified and used by the so-called Ricardian Socialists who were
active in the period when the Chartist Movement, led by old-style artisans and some workers
in the new large-scale factories, came up in England. They argued that in a world in which
capitalism had become the dominant force in the economy, the primary locus of conflict was
between the capitalists and workers.
A sharper formulation of this trend of thinking was provided by Marx and Engels
who argued that capitalism is a system under which a small group of people, ‘the capitalist
class’, owned the means of production and the vast mass of people, who had been
dispossessed of the means of production –the proletariat–had to sell their labour power in
order to earn a living. The workers were doubly free: they did not have to suffer the many
restrictions that feudalism imposed on their daily lives, but they were also free of the
ownership of the means of production, so that they were forced to sell their labour power in
order to survive. Roughly speaking, Marx defined surplus value as the total gross profit
earned by an employer from the use of the labour power of workers employed by him minus
the cost of upkeep of those workers. Since it is the labour power of the workers that generates
the surplus value, justice demands that the workers take control of the means of production
and create a workers’ or ‘socialist’ state. But the state itself is an apparatus of repression
furbished with systems of law, courts, the police, bureaucracy, and various bodies that try to
inculcate a habit of obedience that sustains that apparatus (Gilbert 1991; Miller 1991). The
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failure of the 1848 revolution in France and the establishment of the dictatorship of Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte was a crucial event insparking Marx’s view of the relative autonomy of
the state apparatus (Marx1969 [1852]). But that event and the heroic resistance of the Paris
Commune of the Parisian workers in 1871 strengthened Marx’s view of the necessity of
communist revolutionaries taking over the state apparatus. These developmentsalso led him to
stressthat the process of preparation and reconstruction required for the success of the
operation was complicated.

1.2 Marxist and anarchist thinking

Anarchists, whose pre-eminent theorist was Mikhail Bakunin, and Marxists, —led by
Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century and Lenin and Mao Zedong in the twentieth
century— shared this vision of a future society free of any repressive body protecting class
exploitation. According to the Marxists a working-class party needed to be organized in order
to throw out the exploitative controllers of the state and then to transform the state itself as a
way-station to its ultimate abolition.Anarchists, on the other hand,wanted from the very
beginning to abolish the state and base all the programmes on the basis of federations of
workers’ unions. The emphasis on decentralization was an enduring contribution of
anarchism, but its concrete realization proved to be far more difficult. It could not be achieved
through the party-based programme of class struggle crafted by the greatest follower of Marx,
namely Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (formerly Ulyanov) (1870-1924). But syndicalism, a
programme of control of the means of production and ultimately the state apparatus, was an
influential trend in countries like Spain and the former Yugoslavia (Russell 1922;
Vanek1977).
As in the case of the earlier proponents of socialism, many later thinkers continued
tothink of socialism as the regulation of production and activities guided by self-interest in the
public interest. It is in this sense, for example, that the old British Labour Party called itself
socialist. The moral imperative which led many of the adherents of this brand of socialism to
declare themselves socialist was eloquently articulated, for example, by Tawney (1922). Joan
Robinson (1969) also shared similar beliefs, although she recognized the structural constraints
imposed by the institutions and typical patterns of thinking of the old order, eloquently
analyzedby Marx ([1852], p.398):
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it
under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and
transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living.
Marx recognized that the state apparatus used by class societies sits like an incubus in every
cell of society and so it required a long preparation to root out the class bias of that apparatus.
The exploited classes also required a long preparation to rise above their narrow short-term
self-interest and could not be expected to act as a political force without such preparation. In
other words, the ideas of the ruling class had to be rooted out and new ideas of the
construction of a more egalitarian society had to become internalizedamong the exploited
classes who wanted to carry out a revolution.These differences in perspective separated Marx
and the Marxists from the anarcho-syndicalists (Hobsbawm 2011, p.61).
There was another major difference between the anarcho-syndicalists and Marx and
the Marxists. The former did not recognize that any decentralized production for the market
without a central coordinating authority was bound to lead to repeated crises of
overproduction, failure of what has been called 'effective demand' and bouts of
unemployment forthe working people.

2. Structural Features of State and Society: Economy, Consciousness and Hegemony

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Marx emphasized the material basis of social structures. He distinguished between

the forces of production and relations of production and put forward the hypothesis that basic
changes in social structure take place when the relations of production, that is, the relations
between the actual producers and the upper classes controlling them,become too binding a
constraint on the forces of production. But forces of production themselves require many
elements that are only loosely related to the physical instruments of production. Thus, for
example, education and scientific research have become essential conditions for the
expansion of production in the modern world. It hasoften been mistakenly claimedthat Marx
considered the so-called superstructure of state and society to be only a reflection or
outgrowth of the economy. He was therefore accused of being an economic determinist and a
denier of the possible autonomy of the state. Both these accusations have only a limited
validity at best.As his analysis of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and of the Paris Commune
demonstrates, he was fully aware that the so-called superstructure can influence the base of
material life, just as in the long run the requirements of the ruling power controlling the
economy are reflected in the superstructure of law and ideology of different kinds.

3. Revolution and Politics — Lenin, Gramsci and Others

Marx emphasized the need to actively develop the consciousness of the working class
in order for it to actually be able to take over the state apparatus and mould it to suit the needs
of a classless society. The sequence of changes needed in the consciousness and organization
of the proletarian challengers of the capitalist order may be summarized this way: from class
in itself to class for itself, and finally to class above itself. Lenin pointed out that under the
dominant ideology of the capitalist society, workers needed to be organized in order for them
to be able to shake off the influence of that ideology and act as a class for itself. This was
where the leadership role of the communist or socialist party had to be exercised.
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) made seminal contributions to the political theory of
socialism (Femia 1991; Hobsbawm 2011). First, the political activists who want to change the
society have to prepare themselves in their daily lives by practising democracy in their
workplaces and resisting the dominance of the ideas of the ruling class or classes. They also
have to engage with the popular media and avenues of instruction and propaganda in order to
provide a continuous critique of the ideas that legitimize the existing order. But in order to
prepare for a classless society, the exploited majority must be able to rise above their narrow
class interest and prepare for a future in which mankind will establish a relationship with
nature on the basis of free choice of every man and woman. Extending Lenin’s view to social
change to favour the exploited classes, Gramsci also stressed the necessity of an organization
and the development of an intellectual elite to encompass that end. ‘Left to their own
devices…the masses in western countries are powerless to overcome their intellectualand
modern subordination. The long and arduous process of demystification requires an external
agency:
“Critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of an
intellectual elite. A human mass does not become independent, ‘for itself’, without, in a
broad sense, organizing itself, and there is no organization without organizers and leaders”’
(Femia 1991;p. 56).

One of the promises of socialism is the abolition of gender discrimination, perhaps

the oldest and at the same time the most prevalent kind of discrimination in all known
societies. While Engels (1970[1884]) made one of the seminal contributions to the
understanding ofthe process of subjugation of women in all societies, and women such as
Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) and Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) made further contributions,
the socialist theory of gender is still developing (Kollontai 1977[1909]; Holmstrom 2002).
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4. Socialist Theory in the Contemporary World: Mankind in an Era of Unprecedented

Inequality and Climate Change

Theories of socialism and communism were developed during the period that the
industrial revolution began transforming the global economy and society. That revolution was
based on more and more intensive use of non-renewable sources of energy such as coal,
petroleum and natural gas, and exhaustible materials such as iron ore, copper, nickel,
aluminum, uranium, magnesium, silver, gold, platinum and rare earths. Beginning with Saint-
Simon, most of the socialists and the states following some kind of socialist ideal believed
that the future of every society was to follow the path of modern large-scale industrial
development as fast as possible.
In the meanwhile, corporations and countries engaged in a competitive race to obtain
non-renewable resources from whichever sources – the earth’s crust, ocean floors – they
could tap, and the race is still on. The result has been enormous increases in inequality in
every country with power, even in so-called democratic countries, resting in governments
friendly to the rich and super-rich.On the other hand, the promise of freedom or end of
alienation of peoples from their human selves, from society and from nature remains
unfulfilled (Ahmad 2014; Piketty 2014) . Almost everybody has to scramble to make a living
or acquire more andmore wealth. The unchecked exploration for, and utilization of non-
renewable materials and sources of energy has resulted in accumulation of greenhouse gases,
the thinning of the ozone layer protecting the earth from harmful radiation and finally to
climate changethat has already led to the melting of glaciers, drying up of rivers, enormous
loss of biodiversity, the melting of the Arctic ice cap, the submersion of islands, the flooding
of coastal areas,andan increase in the frequency of storms. The International Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) and many scientists have been warning us that all these changes are
cumulative, and in many cases irreversible as well, since critical thresholdshave been crossed
(IPCC 2013;Rockström , Steffen , Noone et al., 2009).Socialists must therefore aim not at
more and more industrialization of the old style, but at usingrenewable resources such assolar
power, wind power, and the power of ocean tides.They must also make the big corporations
disgorge their wealth and replace their client governments with democracies in which
everybody can make real decisions rather than being subject to decisions made in their name
by faceless bureaucrats and politicians serving the wealthy. This is the revolution that
socialists have theorized and worked for. But that programme requires an arduous and
continuous drive to replace the ideology of ‘everybody for himself and the devil take the
hindmost’ with a mindset where everybody knows that his/her interest is bound up with that
of the other members of society.