III. III

When serfdom was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately began to arise as a reflection of this oppression and a protest against it. But early socialism was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, condemned and cursed it, dreamed of its abolition, fantasised about a better order, and tried to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

But utopian socialism could not point the real way out. It could neither explain the essence of wage slavery under capitalism, nor discover the laws of its development, nor find the social force capable of becoming the creator of a new society.

Meanwhile the stormy revolutions that accompanied the fall of feudalism and serfdom everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, ever more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the class of serf-owners was won without desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country took shape on a more or less free, democratic basis without a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.

The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to draw from this, and consistently carry through, the conclusion that world history teaches. This conclusion is the doctrine of the class struggle.

People always have been and always will be the silly victims of deceit and self-deception in politics until they learn to seek out the interests of one class or another behind any moral, religious, political or social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of breaking the resistance of those classes: to find, in the very society that surrounds us, the forces which can, and by their social position must, form the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.

Only Marx’s philosophical materialism has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Only Marx’s economic theory has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.

All over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa, independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society, rallying ever more closely, learning to gauge the measure of its successes, steeling its forces and growing irresistibly.