In his lifetime, Karl Marx witnessed the establishment of capitalism as an all-encompassing, global system, and with it the international working class—a force capable of radical social transformation. As this system of exploitation and ruthless competition developed, Marx studied it closely, becoming well known for his theories of class, exploitation and value. 
The power of Marx’s economic writing means that frequently, and sometimes deliberately, his political insights are overlooked. But Marx was, first and foremost, a revolutionary, an activist and a radical. Coupled with an understanding of his economic insights, the evolution of his political writings demonstrates most clearly how Marx became a Marxist, and founded a movement that continues to fight for radical social change more than 140 years after his death.
In February 1848, Marx published The Communist Manifesto with collaborator Frederick Engels for the Communist League, a recently formed revolutionary party based in London that both were part of. The manifesto was a bold call to revolution and an assertion that it was the working class that must lead it. Immediately, historical events provided a test and, ultimately, vindication for the manifesto.
The 1840s were racked with mass hunger and poverty for those at the bottom of society. At the top, rifts and ruptures were emerging between the rulers—the old nobility and the conservative bourgeois states—and the liberal bourgeois reformers who were challenging them. 
In 1848 a wave of popular uprisings and revolutions crashed over Europe. Beginning in France, upheavals went on to rock the Habsburg, Russian and Prussian empires. It was the last radical gasp of the emerging bourgeoisie.
The uprising in France began in February 1848. Initially successful, it toppled the unpopular regime of Louis Philippe through an alliance of the liberal reformers and radical workers in the cities. It ended only a few months later when the capitalist forces turned on the workers and drowned their struggle in blood. The capitalists installed a military dictatorship with a liberal veneer, and in so doing laid the basis for the brutal dictatorship of Louis Napoleon that followed. The workers, although outnumbered and outgunned, erected barricades and fought heroically in the streets of Paris.
In the German principalities, the bourgeoisie were far more acquiescent to the old nobility. They undermined their own nationalist project of uniting Germany into a modern capitalist state by refusing to confront the German kings and princes. They abandoned the working-class forces, leaving them vulnerable to brutal defeat.
Marx and Engels were keen observers of these developments and were closely involved in the German uprisings. Engels fought to the bitter end in south-west Germany, while Marx participated in the Rhineland with the Communist League.
Marx was engaged in debates about strategy and organisation within the league at this time, and emerged from these heady days with two key insights: first, that the bourgeoisie was no longer a revolutionary class and could not be relied upon to confront the old feudal ruling classes; and second, that the working class must organise independently as a class.
After experiencing the brutal backlash of the old order in alliance with the new capitalist ruling classes, he concluded that the liberal bourgeoisie was not willing to pursue democratic reforms, including those they themselves would benefit from as a class, like political freedoms. He compared the approaches of the French and German bourgeoisies in an article written in November 1848: “In France it [the bourgeoisie] played the part of a tyrant and made its own counter-revolution. In Germany it acts like a slave and carries out the counter-revolution for its own tyrants”.
Following from these revelations were organisational implications, namely, the urgent need for working-class independence. He argued that the working class must act in its own interests and needed independent organisation to do so. He was beginning to see what this could look like as he took inspiration from nascent forms of working-class organisation, from the Silesian weavers’ strike to the Chartists in Britain and the workers’ clubs in Paris. 
He outlined these arguments most clearly in his Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1850, known as the March Address. He explains, “[T]he workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organisation of the workers’ party ... the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence”.
As the 1848 upheavals were crushed, Marx and Engels were exiled to London. There, they found themselves at the heart of the British Empire—the centre of industrial capitalism—and surrounded by the most developed working class in the world at the time. This working class was, by the 1860s, rallying for abolition of slavery in response to the US Civil War and in support of Irish independence. Much of Marx’s political life was preoccupied with how the working class could develop the political consciousness necessary to take power, and the 1860s provided an opportunity to better understand this through close observation of the workers’ movement happening around him.
Civil war broke out in America in 1861. On one side was the Confederacy, fighting to secede in order to maintain slavery in the interests of the southern landowning elite. On the other side was the northern bourgeoisie, the Union, for whom industrial development was key and slavery dispensable.
The British ruling class came down on the side of the Confederacy, certain sections pushing for Britain to intervene. Slavery provided Britain and Europe with cheap cotton and was an integral part of industrialisation and world trade. It’s estimated that the livelihood of one quarter of Britain was based on the cotton industry. On the other hand, European and English workers by and large supported the Union, even those in Lancashire, who were devastated by the cotton famine.
The Civil War signalled new political possibilities after a decade or so of retreat following 1848. Meetings of workers in support of the Union were called by the London Trade Union Council. This renewed internationalism became the precursor to the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the First International, which Marx helped found in 1864. The International brought together unions and radical political currents from across Europe.
Unlike many other radicals at the time, Marx landed firmly on the side of the Union. He understood that slavery needed to be opposed because the presence of slavery anywhere undermines the conditions of labour everywhere. In his words, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”. Although Abraham Lincoln and other conservative Union leaders initially denied the war was about slavery and refused to promise abolition, Marx identified that a Confederate victory would mean an expansion of slavery. He could see that the war was a contest between two economic systems, and only one side could win out. 
In a similar vein, the Irish struggle for independence from the yoke of British occupation gave Marx an opportunity to deepen his understanding of how political questions were central to working class self-emancipation. In the 1860s, Fenianism, a radical expression of Irish nationalism, emerged, inspiring many Irish workers and English workers to take up the cause.
A high point of this was the campaign to save the Manchester Martyrs in 1867. Three Irish nationalists were put on trial and publicly hanged for the death of a police officer. The ruling class whipped up a hysterical campaign to inspire anti-Irish sentiment. A campaign for the release of all Irish political prisoners was then spurred on.
Although Marx and Engels criticised Fenian terrorist tactics in private letters to one another, they championed the Irish cause and pushed for the International to take up the fight. Marx fought the more conservative union leaders to his right and the ultra-lefts around Bakunin, who were hesitant to support Irish independence. He argued that the impoverishment of Ireland was a great source of wealth for the British Empire, and that anti-Irish sentiment amongst English workers undermined working conditions and their ability to fight the English ruling class. He urged, “[I]t is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland ... to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation”.
Marx and Engels’ enthusiasm for and affinity with working-class struggle is captured in Engels’ words to Marx in a letter the day after the execution of the Manchester Martyrs in 1867: “To my knowledge, the only time that anyone has been executed for anything similar in a civilised state was the case of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. The Fenians could not wish for a better precedent”.
Marx first articulated a theory of working-class self-emancipation in the 1840s. Decades later, in 1871, this theoretical assertion became a reality. For 71 days, Paris was under workers’ control, a heroic experiment in radical democracy and the first of its kind.
In The Civil War in France, a pamphlet Marx wrote in June on behalf of the International, Marx describes it as a “glorious harbinger of a new society”, one of many emotive descriptions throughout.
The backdrop to this uprising was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. France was losing, and Adolphe Thiers, the head of the new French republic, refused to defend Paris if it meant arming the working class. He sent soldiers into the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville at dawn on 18 March to disarm the National Guard, a workers’ militia. By midday, the soldiers had fraternised with the guardsmen, barricades were erected, General Vinoy—who was leading the operation—had fled Paris, and crowds of men, women and children were taking to the streets in anger and building barricades. The Paris Commune had begun.
Over the subsequent months, workers constructed a new state out of radically democratic institutions, with recallable, elected delegates of the working class. Workers envisioned and enacted radical change in every aspect of society, from the family to the workplace. Everything was up for debate, from political strategy and defence of the commune to science, the church and even the arts. Marx got to see, if only briefly, humanity flourishing under workers’ control. He wrote: “For the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and ... without any police of any kind”.
In order to re-establish bourgeois rule, the ruling class carried out a brutal massacre. Thirty thousand Communards were killed within a week. The privileged classes and their newspapers delighted in the torture and imprisonment of countless more.
Marx responded to the counter-revolution with equal parts rage and theoretical clarity about the need to smash the capitalist state in order for workers to take power and create a socialist society. He explained that the working class in power naturally meant the abolition of exploitation. The Commune was “the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.
The Paris Commune showed, Marx argued, that workers couldn’t simply take hold of the existing state. There needed to be new radical forms of democracy. And the capitalist state must be confronted—his only criticism of the Commune was that they took up arms too late; they needed to defend their fragile, embryonic institutions of self-government against the might of the bourgeois state.
Marx’s political legacy offers invaluable lessons for us today. He developed and refined his theory of social revolution by engaging in the debates of his time and by taking part in the most important struggles of the day. This approach—learning and developing theory through the practical experience of the working-class movement—remains the guiding principle of the Marxist movement today.

Belle Gibson

Karl Marx: more than an economist

Red Rosa now has vanished too. 
Where she lies is hid from view. 
She told the poor what life is about 
And so the rich have rubbed her out.
—Bertolt Brecht, 1919
“You know, I hope nevertheless to die at my post, in a street-battle or in a hard-labour prison”, wrote Rosa Luxemburg to a comrade in 1917. This was not rhetorical flourish or hyperbole: Luxemburg gave everything she had to the fight for socialism. Including, in the end, her life.
The crushing of the Spartacist uprising in January 1919, and Luxemburg’s subsequent murder, demonstrate the lengths to which reformists will go to prevent workers taking power. The brutal role played by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which ultimately ordered and carried out her killing, highlights what Luxemburg argued in her 1899 pamphlet, Reform or Revolution: that reformism is not a “more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal”, but a movement with a “different goal” altogether.
During the January uprising, Luxemburg spent her days in heated discussions on the streets and writing articles for the Spartacus League newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, arguing the way forward for the rebellion of revolutionary workers, soldiers and sailors.
Luxemburg identified that, despite growing discontent with the Ebert government, the rebellion was premature and was deliberately provoked by the leaders of the counter-revolution. She argued that the struggle, in this moment, could only be defensive until they had greater support in the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, particularly outside of Berlin. Nevertheless, she stood by the rebellion until her last breath, refusing to negotiate peace with the treacherous SPD, which was trying to wind up the revolution and convince workers to settle for German capitalism only without a kaiser.
In late 1918, the SPD attempted to consolidate their rule by leading a campaign for Spartacus blood in their newspaper, Vorwӓrts. Networks of spies and agents funded directly and indirectly by the SPD attempted assassinations of revolutionary leaders. The Anti-Bolshevik League followed suit. This far-right organisation, funded by industrialists and bankers loyal to the old order, put a bounty of 10,000 marks on Karl Radek, a founding member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). By January, the bourgeoisie’s frenzied crusade for blood had reached fever pitch.
When Die Rote Fahne headquarters were attacked on 8 January, Luxemburg’s comrades eventually convinced her to take her own safety seriously. She spent the next week moving between friends’ houses in a futile effort to avoid arrest. Spies and informants followed her wherever she went.
In the late evening of 15 January, Rosa Luxemburg, along with her comrades Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Piek, was arrested on the orders of Noske, Ebert’s minister of defence. They were taken to the Eden Hotel, where they were beaten and interrogated. Rosa was then put in a car, ostensibly to be taken to a prison. She endured more barbaric treatment until finally she was shot and thrown into the Landwehr Canal. Her body was not recovered for weeks. This was the beginning of a campaign of white terror led by Noske to stamp out any hope of further revolution.
Much of Luxemburg’s body of work consists of pamphlets and polemics denouncing reformism. The events of January 1919 are a sober and poignant reminder of the unbridgeable gulf between revolutionary and reformist politics. Reformists are committed to making peace with capitalism. In times of revolutionary upheavals, this means using violence against the revolutionary masses.
The tragedy of Luxemburg’s death is not just that the world lost a committed fighter for human liberation, but also the timing of the loss. The revolutionary left in Germany was only beginning to crystalise into an independent revolutionary force after spending decades tied to the SPD. Rather than being a cautionary tale about why we should never make a revolution, Luxemburg’s death is a lesson in the need to be organised well in advance if we are going to be able to fight effectively the violent repression of forces intent on stymying revolutionary uprisings.
Luxemburg was a revolutionary capable of sober analysis and adapting as circumstances developed. She proved that being realistic did not mean compromising your vision for human liberation. Her determination to grasp things as they were, and see what they ought to be, was a vital skill that the German left sorely needed in those pivotal days of 1919, as well as, tragically, in the years that followed.

The murder of Rosa Luxemburg

There are many things that make Victorian Socialists stand out: our unique anti-capitalist politics; our army of dedicated volunteers; our refusal to do dodgy preference deals; our rejection of the limits of parliamentary politics; and our focus on grassroots movements as a means of changing the world. But one policy in particular makes other candidates recoil in horror—the pledge our candidates take to accept only an average wage if elected.
Currently, members of federal parliament receive a base salary of $211,250 a year. On top of this, they typically receive more than $50,000 in allowances and other entitlements. The base rate alone is more than quadruple the median salary of an Australian worker. But unlike wages, politicians’ salaries do not go backwards due to inflation. Instead, they get a pay rise every year through the Remuneration Tribunal. Workers, on the other hand, have to fight for their pay rises and usually get one only every three or four years—if they’re lucky.
Occasionally, the politicians’ huge drain on the public purse comes to light in some sort of scandal. Who could forget former Speaker of the House Bronwyn Bishop’s $5,000 taxpayer-funded helicopter ride to a Liberal Party fundraiser in 2015? And yet, shortly after “Choppergate”, Bishop retired from politics on a $255,000 annual pension with a Life Gold Pass for free travel. Meanwhile, the pension for the rest of us is a measly $25,000 a year. Workers who have spent their whole lives labouring, creating millions in profits for bosses, get to the end of their working lives and are forced to live on less than the minimum wage.
Politicians’ fat salaries, while of course making for a very cushy existence, also serve a broader purpose. They encourage politicians to feel they have a stake in the system—a system of extreme inequality, wage stagnation, privatisation of essential services, underfunding of schools and hospitals and everything else that leads to obscene privilege coexisting alongside grinding poverty.
Socialists are different. We consciously reject the bribes elected representatives are offered to accept the status quo. When we are elected to parliament, we are there to serve the working class and to advance working-class struggle. Being elected as a socialist is not a chance to advance a career or rub shoulders with elites. It is a chance to elevate and be a megaphone for working-class and social struggles.
All payments above an average wage will be put towards grassroots campaigns that fight for the things we stand for. Because change really happens only when ordinary people are mobilised to fight. The eight-hour day, marriage equality and countless other reforms were won, not by well-paid politicians, but by people striking, protesting and campaigning.
In a world of career politicians who serve only themselves and their corporate mates, candidates who believe our political representatives should experience life as those they represent do are a rare thing. Victorian Socialists hope to change that.
Belle Gibson is the Victorian Socialists federal election <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BelleGibsonforGorton">candidate for Gorton</a> in Melbourne's western suburbs.

Politicians should be on a worker’s wage

American liberals denouncing those raging against injustice for resorting to violence have frequently summoned the legacy of civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr to help make their case. King, so we’re told, would never condone rioting, looting or any other disorderly form of protest. Some even went so far as to call out King’s son, Martin Luther King III, after he referenced his father’s classic description of riots as “the language of the unheard”.
King’s commitment to non-violence, however, was far from the moralistic exhortations to order and respectability spouted by today’s liberals. King’s attitude to rioting and other forms of civil disobedience shifted and developed through the course of his life. What never shifted, however, was his belief that, to see a real change in their condition, Black people needed to build the kind of movement that could pose a serious challenge to the existing order.
Again and again, King was surprised by the resistance to cautious demands and polite forms of protest. The campaign that first thrust him into the spotlight – the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 – provides an example. The demands of the boycott were consciously modest. All they asked was for Black people to be treated with some respect, and for seating on a first-come, first-served basis. They even conceded that Black people would still be required to sit towards the rear of the bus.
King was shocked when even these mild demands proved too much for the white establishment. “Feeling that our demands were moderate, I had assumed they would be granted with little question”, he later wrote. “This experience, however, taught me a lesson. I came to see that no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance.” King frequently expressed his frustration at calls for patience and moderation. In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” for instance, he wrote: 
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice ... who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’.”
Throughout the early years of the civil rights movement, peaceful protests were met with violence. The “Freedom Summer” of 1964 – a campaign to register Black voters in the southern state of Mississippi – resulted in activists being murdered, Black churches burned down, bombed buildings and thousands of arrests. And, as the 1960s progressed, the level of violence meted out by authorities across the country only increased.
From the mid-1960s, many northern cities were rocked by Black riots every summer. In this context, King began to realise the limitations of formal desegregation and spoke of the “dualism” in every city, the “two Americas”. This recognition pushed him towards an understanding of racism as being, not just something enshrined in laws and manifested in individual attitudes, but something grounded in economic and social conditions. And far from simply denouncing those rioting for breaking with the principle of non-violence, he visited the scenes of riots and learned from the young Black activists who were playing a leading role.
King’s thoughts on violence and non-violence were also influenced by the escalating conflict in Vietnam. Images of the mass death and destruction that the US army was wreaking on the people of Vietnam spurred the growth of the anti-war movement. King could see the many contradictions of the US establishment’s claim to be supporting freedom through violent means abroad, while repressing the freedom of its own people through violence at home. One year before his assassination, in a speech at New York City’s Riverside Church, King pointed to the hypocrisy of those who would denounce those rioting on the streets of the US, while remaining silent about the violence of the US empire abroad: 
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems ... But they asked, and rightly so, ‘What about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
This scathing indictment of the US government, and the link he made between racism, social class and the war, were too much for moderates to handle. An editorial in the Washington Post declared: “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people”.
Today, the US establishment claims King as one of their own. They portray him as a peaceful man of faith who would have stood side by side with them to denounce the violence of those protesting the police murder of George Floyd. What they are scared of, above all, is that today’s Black activists will learn the kind of lessons that King himself drew from the years spent fighting for civil rights: that asking nicely won’t get you anywhere, that racism is woven into the fabric of capitalism and that building a mass movement that can pose a direct challenge to the system is the only way to end oppression.

Martin Luther King would have despised today's liberal moralists

In the first week of November, Australia’s biggest mining conference, the International Mining and Resources Conference (IMARC), was held in Melbourne. IMARC was a chance for thousands of greedy mining magnates and their accomplices to rub shoulders, schmooze and scheme about the most efficient and technologically advanced ways to continue the exploitation of our planet’s natural resources.
Unsurprisingly, Jeyakumar Janakaraj, CEO of Adani Australia, was given a platform to promote his destructive and unpopular Carmichael coal mine. While Janakaraj was met with applause and arse kissing inside the conference, there was an angry protest of a few hundred outside.
The protest was organised and led by experienced environmental activists. But the real stars of the show were a group of angry and organised high school students who came to show their opposition to Adani. The students were involved in an environmental collective, one of many activist collectives that have popped up recently at their school.
Some students made fake passes and got themselves into the conference, where they harassed, questioned and taunted stuffy mining enthusiasts. Those on the outside cheered them on and wrote messages on the glass with lipstick, textas and whatever they found in their school bags (ingeniously writing the messages backwards so that “Fuck Adani” was legible for the chumps inside). Among all of this, they even dropped an enormous banner reading “Stop Adani” from a nearby apartment building.
To these students, it was a no-brainer that this craven mining boss needed to be confronted. Most were more articulate than many politicians and journalists. They understood that the planet is being destroyed for profit, that ordinary people’s interests do not line up with those of the Rineharts and Janakarajs of the world and that to fight against them you have to be willing to make some noise and get organised.
Over the next few months, activists from across Australia will blockade the mine. We also need loud and lively protests in the cities to add to the pressure.

Karl Marx: more than an economist

The murder of Rosa Luxemburg

Politicians should be on a worker’s wage

Martin Luther King would have despised today's liberal moralists

The kids are all right

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us