The ‘New Left’ and the Working Class

[p020] “ The ‘New Left’ and the Working Class Cliff Slaughter Many others in Britain today besides contributors to LABOUR REVIEW are consciously trying to make a Marxist theoretical contribution to the socialist move- ment. Those connected with the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review number avowed Marxists in their ranks and some of their work is of great value. However, in the belief that theory is very important, indeed basic, to the building of a Marxist working-class leadership—and we assume that the editors of those journals agree that this must be the primary aim of all of us—we think it vital to state sharply where we differ on basic questions of theory and method, as well as genuinely to try to find areas of common ground in research and common fronts in current political struggles. The aim of this article is to open the columns of LABOUR REVIEW to an outspoken debate on basic theoretical positions, as well as to joint research on present-day problems. It follows from the meeting of university teachers and students held in London on April 13 to discuss the universities and the Labour movement. The examples given in this article are largely confined to the issue of Universities and Left Review devoted to the theme of ‘culture and commun- ity’, not only because this is easily referred to, but also because it seems to me to exemplify some dangerous trends in the present thinking of Left intellectuals.! Lapour Review and The Newsletter come under fire from Universities and Left Review quarters for supposedly embracing a rigid dogma of pre-Stalin Marxist gospel, and behaving politically as though 1 Universities and Left Review, no. 5, Autumn 1958. nothing had changed since then. Norman Birnbaum refers in Tribune to the ‘mindless militancy’ of The Newsletter? This implies that our militancy is derived from an over-simplified model of capitalist society divided into employers and workers, in which the struggle of the latter against the former must be inten- sified aboveall, ‘mindless’ of all else. While one suspects that Birnbaum was concerned more with a nicely rolling phrase than with precise meaning, it might nevertheless be worth while pursuing his critic- ism a little further. If The Newsletter advocated the simple and single pursuit of the maximum militancy in each partial and local struggle, then of course it could justifiably be criticized. _ But surely the persistent call of The Newsletter has been for a unified strategy in industrial struggles, as the only answer to the employers’ strategy. One reason for advocating such a single strategy, with a rank-and- file movement as its only instrument, is to prevent partial disputes from being bitterly fought to the end in isolation. Such fights usually lead to temporary cynicism, bitterness and loss of confidence in the efficacy of working-class action. Indeed, our criticism of union officialdom is that by confining struggles like the London bus strike to one section of workers they expose those sections to defeat and disillusion and weaken them for future battles. Was it then ‘mindless militancy’ to call for support from London Transport electricians and underground workers? The task of our critics is to show that the ideas behind this call, 2 Tribune, March 27, 1959. 49

[p021] LABOUR REVIEW ideas of class strategy, were wrong, not to pretend that there were no ideas there at all. In fact the ‘new Left? has put forward nothing in the way of working-class industrial strategy. Stuart Hall complains that he is tired of hearing since the war that the great slump is around the corner;? people made similar remarks when at the end of 1957 we warned of the growth of the employers’ offensive. Somehow we were out of date; we were foolish enough to think that the employers would consciously gang up against the workers. The famous document of the engineering employers,* the closing of pits, the co-ordinated policies against inflation which led to a halving of the rate of wage increases in 1958—were these not an employers’ offen- sive, despite all the differences over policy which certainly divide sections of the ruling class? Our talk about industrial struggle naturally did not sound as new-fangled as ‘A Sense of Classlessness’ or The Uses of Literacy> But we submit that for the time of day it was a bit more to the point. One more point is worth making here on the ‘mind- fulness’ of The Newsletter’s militancy. At the April 13 Lapour REVIEW meeting Ralph Samuel made a very interesting remark reminding Gerry Healy that ‘the industrial struggle is not the decisive thing—what is decisive is the fight for political power’. We shall certainly return to the importance of the struggle for power; meanwhile let us dwell on the interrelation of the industrial and political sides of the class struggle. This is a theoretical question, a historical question, and one on which intellectuals should be constantly working in order to arm the working class. I suggest that a building worker, Brian Behan, showed himself a long way ahead of Samuel when he wrote last year of the need for Victory for Socialism to concern itself with industrial struggles: “There can be no “victory for socialism” if decisive sections of the working class are defeated industrially." This successful presentation of the relationship between these two aspects in action is in sharp contrast to Samuel’s formal and false dichotomy. Take away industrial struggle and what ‘political’ activity are you left with? Parliament? We look across the channel to France and shudder. It is just a little difficult to see what remains of the ‘Marxism’ which some in Universities and Left Review and New Reasoner circles avow. Do they regard any of the theoretical discoveries or conclusions of Marx as still valid? If so, which ones? Or do they claim that only Marx’s method (dialectics) remains valid and that the social reality of today demands completely new discoveries, using that method. One suspects that in fact the dialectic would be rather haughtily sniffed at 3 Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, Universities and Left Review, no. 5, p. 31, n. 1. 4 Looking at Industrial Relations (Engineering and Allied Employers’ National Federation, n.d. [1959]), which declared on p. 40: ‘Twice in four years the federation had been prepared to “fight it out” with the unions. Clearly, the unions’ capacity to pay strike pay was limited. Such a course, involving as it would have done the virtual closing down of the industry, might have been a worthwhile calculated risk. It was no occasion for the kind of com- promise which would inevitably emerge from a court of inquiry.’ 5 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957). 6 Brian Behan, ‘Socialists and the Trade Unions’, Labour Review, vol. iii, no. 4, p. 103, August-September 1958. 50 July-August 1959 by most of these critics as a hang-over from Hegel which old Marx could not quite shake off. Just what remains, then? ; For our part we will ‘discredit’ ourselves still further by saying that Marx’s dialectical method exposed the basic antagonism of capitalist society, the struggle of the workers against the employers and their State, reflecting the contradiction between social production and private appropriation. Stating this is, of course, no substitute for detailed and intensive research on the changes within capitalism. But these are changes within capitalism, and if they are not studied with that fact always in mind—that the changes have taken place within the constant framework of the power of Capital over Labour—then such study will be useless. By useless we mean not only ‘practically’ useless for the working class, but also scientifically worthless. The dialectical method means that the laws which govern the functioning and development of the com- ponents of a given social system are to be understood in terms of that system’s basic contradiction. Capital is the starting point for a scientific understanding of our society, not because it is historically antecedent to all sorts of other phenomena in our society, and not because the ‘common-sense’ observer would im- mediately spot its determining character, but because it is in fact the dominant power in bourgeois society. © From the specific historical character of capitalist development flows the modern class struggle. Yes, there is a growth of differentiation within the working class; yes, there is a growth of new ‘middle classes’; yes, capitalist ownership is distributed in more com- plex ways. But if these developments are viewed as things in themselves it will take their investigators much longer to appreciate their real historical signifi- cance, which is their significance for the class struggle, than if they recognized from the start the essence of Marx’s method and the central discovery he made about class society. It is around the concept of class that the drift from Marxism is concentrated, despite the lip-service paid to Marxism. There is not a scrap of Marxism in any approach to class which does not have class conflict at its core. The working class is defined basically, not in terms of status, income or any formal social charac- teristic, but in terms of its necessary antagonism to the capitalist class, deriving from and constantly developed by the proletariat’s special position in capitalist pro- duction. You can define the working class by any number of formal characteristics; it defines itself historically by the development of its organization and struggle against the bourgeoisie. Marxists in the social sciences bear the task of helping the working class to a clearer consciousness of its position and the actions necessitated by that position. At its highest point, this means playing a part in the greatest task of this historical period: the establishment of the political independence of the working class. Such is the important function of theory, and of the political and organizational instruments based on theory; it must*be the test of all theoretical contributions from Left intellectuals. Now I do not wish to be misunderstood in this respect. Such a test is not to be reduced to a narrow insistence that only agitational speeches or incendiary pamphlets, together with the occasional direct ‘lesson’ from working-class history, will do. If anyone believes

[p022] THE that to be the only kind of thing that can help the working-class struggle, he betrays a sad under- estimation of the historical role of that class, of its role as inheritor of all the scientific achievements of civilization. Above all, Marxists should insist that the class struggle is not just a ‘side’ or a ‘facet’ or an ‘aspect’ of society, but its articulating principle. Writing in the New Reasoner, Peter Worsley referred to my review of Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People (1958),7 as trenchant, but narrow.’ I criticized Townsend for not seeing that into the tragic plight of old workers and their wives was built all the rottenness of capitalism, and that a more thorough investigation of the problem would have led Townsend to revolutionary conclusions rather than the reforms which he does suggest. Peter Worsley thinks that this is correct, but that there are still problems of what to do about old people now. Further, there will still be problems of old age under socialism, and we should therefore welcome research of the Townsend type. Of course these problems are real ones. But surely I took up the central question for Marxists: the relevance of the problem to the class struggle and to the development of working-class consciousness. The fact is that the problems Worsley raises will get no correct answers until seen in this wider (not narrower) frame- work. Further than this, to consider such problems, as Townsend does, apart from the historically vital conflict of classes, will in the end weaken the working class by encouraging the illusion that reforms, regardless of the general development of revolutionary strategy, can qualitatively alter the oppressed position of the working class. In my review of Worsley’s own book on religion in the South Seas, I was at pains to show that he had in fact made a contribution to Marxism and to anthropology because he had illuminated the relation between social conflict and the consciousness of oppressed groups.!° His acceptance of Marxism dif- ferentiated him in this way from the exciting but fundamentally static psychologizing of Norman Cohn.!! John Saville’s contribution on ‘The Welfare State’ in the New Reasoner and the discussion provoked by it illuminate the basic question very clearly. Saville showed conclusively that even a purely qualitative assessment of the Labour government’s post-war reforms gave us no reason to suppose we had anything like a ‘socialist society’. By comparison the social services dominated our culture no more than in Western Germany and many another obviously capitalist country. Dorothy Thompson, taking up Saville’s point, ex- posed very sharply the distance which many of the ‘New Left? have travelled from Marxism. The ‘institutions’ of the ‘Welfare State’-—the educational 7 Labour Review, vol iii, no. 2, pp. 61-2, March-April 1958. 8 Peter Worsley, ‘Britain—Unknown Country’, New Reasoner, no. 5, p. 55, Summer 1958. 9 Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound. A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia (1957). . 10 Cliff Slaughter, ‘Religion and Social Revolt’, Labour Review, vol. iii, no. 3, pp. 77-83, May-June-July 1958. 11 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) 12 John Saville, ‘The Welfare State: an Historical Approach’, New Reasoner, vol. i, no. 3, pp. 5-25, Winter 1957-58. ‘NEW LEFT system, the National Health Service and so on— represent for Dorothy Thompson manifestations of working-class values as against capitalist values within the capitalist system. From this flows a complete capitulation to Fabianism and the abandonment of Marxism. We must surely judge institutions and the part they play by their relation to the system of capitalist exploitation and the political power built up to defend that exploitation, not by any superficial ‘values’ and ‘attitudes’ which may possibly inspire the personnel of those institutions. But Dorothy Thomp- son’s main point is that ‘welfare’ institutions are based on the criterion of human need rather than profit, and are therefore historically part of socialism rather than of capitalism.!3 Saville’s fundamental argument, part of the answer to Mrs Thompson, was that so long as they remain within the framework of capitalist ex- ploitation and power these institutions are supports of the capitalist social and political system. The problem for Marxists is the construction of a movement to overthrow that system, not, as Dorothy Thompson suggests, a strategy which gives pride of place to ‘preserving the gains already made’. We fight to preserve those gains, in health, living standards, education and so on, but primarily in order to build the consciousness and strength of the working class for the struggle for power. Dorothy Thompson attempts a theoretical justifi- cation of her view that ‘the welfare services, and .. . the legality of trade unions and other working-class organizations . . . are objectively victories for working- class values within capitalist society’. In fact, she says, ‘new modes of production, new social relationships, new institutions and new values can always be seen growing within the old social and political framework’.'* Certainly the bourgeoisie developed its own mode of production in miniature, within the feudal system, and its role in the anti-feudal revolution was to Jay down political conditions for the domination and spread of its own particular mode of appropriation. But the working class does not have a method of appropriation which it develops under capitalism, a method which bursts the political and social bonds, requiring a new political system. The working class, because it possesses none of the means of production, cannot achieve freedom without overthowing the whole economic and political system. ‘When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as “—~- \ j j \ well as the opposite which determines it, private property.’ ; The desire to find something concrete, established, within present-day society as a solid foundation-stone for future advance is fundamentally a petty-bourgeois standpoint, a refusal to face up to the need for a radical rupture with the world of private property, a confinement to the horizons of what Birnbaum calls the ‘administrative technologist’! who lives by manipulat- 13 Dorothy Thompson, ibid. no. 4, pp. 125-30, Spring 1958. 14Tbid. p. 128. 15K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family (1956), p. 52. _ 16Norman Birnbaum, ‘Social Constraints and Academic Freedom’, Universities and Left Review, no. 5, p. 48. 51

[p023] LABOUR REVIEW ing things-as-they-are and who approximates in his social life to the bourgeoisie rather than to the pro- letariat. The busy concern in Universities and Left Review with ‘socialism in the here and now’ is the worst manifestation of these ideas. For Marxists the only contributions to socialism in the here and now are the objective tendencies of the capitalist mode of pro- duction (concentration, international division of labour etc.) and the growth of a revolutionary movement distinct from all that is respectable and accepted by bourgeois_ society, for the working class. is ‘a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal . . . which claims no traditional status but only a human status’.!7 If the concern for ‘socialism in the here and now’ amounts to the setting of tasks outside this building of the revolutionary movement, the consequences soon become in fact a support for capitalism, a retreat from the primary tasks of the working class and its intellec- tuals. Thus Charles Taylor quite deliberately ranges himself against Marxism: For Marx, the collective appropriation of the means of production was the necessary and sufficient condition to which all energies must be bent. But first, this largely ignores the need for the preparation of the new society in the here and now, except for the part of it which is incidental to the struggle itself. We have no lack of ‘Marxists’ to tell us that all such preparation is foredoomed in a capitalist. society. But, if this were true, then the change would never come, the new society would be still- born, or, if by some chance [?!] it came to birth, would be more terrible than that which it had replaced.18 Here is all the petty-bourgeois intellectual’s refusal to accept that the working class is the force for change and the basis of the new society. This refusal to commit himself to the working class gives rise in the ‘Left’ intellectual to the desire for something to cling to through the storm: otherwise who knows what shall be delivered unto us? Taylor fears that victory over capitalism without him and his coterie will perhaps come ‘by some chance’—thus the role of the working class is reduced to that of the irrational force which erupts against civilization, and must be mellowed by the nice things we build up between whiles; if not, ‘the new society . . . would be more terrible than that which it replaced’. One understands now the sympathy for Pasternak’s musty, middle-class revulsion against the October revolution. In Taylor’s writing it has not even the advantage of literary merit, but is squeezed into a desiccated Jesuit commentary on Durkheim. The editorial in the same issue of Universities and Left Review suggests that this is not merely Taylor’s personal outlook. Here we find the same call for ‘some alternative image of human and community relationships which can sustain us through and beyond the Stalemate State’; here we are told that ‘within the jungle of capitalism itself we (7?) have begun already 17K. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction. Cf. K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion (1957), pp. 56-7. 18 Charles Taylor, ‘Alienation and Community’, Universities and Left Review, no. 5, p. 17. 52 July-August 1959 to sow the seeds of the new society. What we have to do now, more than ever, is to believe in it.!9 Is this really much better than telling us to count our blessings? Taylor, however, does not think that the immediate job of socialists is quite so purely contem- plative; for him the most urgent job is therefore to rescue the old com- munities, to prevent their sinking into the amorphous mass of the surrounding conurbations, to open them out by rescuing the local theatres, art galleries and museums from financial asphyxiation, to plan the rebuilding so that the old relationships are not torn down with the condemned housing, to give their development some of the impetus that has been given to the New Towns, to associate the com- munities in their own development projects. This salvage work [!] is as important, if not more so, than the develop- ment of the New Towns.20 By way of an apology, perhaps, Taylor adds that this work ‘requires a context of socialist policy in education, and industry’. But this is only the prerequisite of ‘the most urgent job’—the ‘salvage work’. If it were not all so petty, one might feel almost back at one’s reading of The City of God. Stuart Hall is another who, in the tradition of Hoggart, is prepared to look at the working class from any angle except as a fighting force, and so falls into an even worse morass about ‘the most important things’. His article ‘A Sense of Classlessness’ tries to insure in advance against adverse criticism by the following cry from the heart: ‘One is not any less against the system because one suggests that, in many important respects, it has changed. That smear is a form of subtle political blackmail.’22 But the point is hardly how strongly Hall feels against capitalism; the question asked historically of intellectuals by the working-class movement is: to what extent can you arm us for the struggle against capitalism? Perhaps Stuart Hall will claim that he is pointing out com- plexities that must be taken into account for the movement to ‘establish contact with contemporary reality (to borrow a winged phrase from Norman Birnbaum). But in fact his message is so unclear that no socialist will find it of the slightest use in orientating himself in politics. Trying to find the core of Hall’s argument, I marked innumerable massive assertions which can hardly all be true. ‘Clearly there has been a major shift in the patterns of social life in this country.’ For Marxists such a statement requires precision. A ‘major shift’ could be anything. Does it mean that the basic class division has altered? Hall himself acknowledges that ‘how deep [these changed patterns] go, and whether they alter our older notions of “class” is difficult to tell’.* (For him it is a question of whether the notions are altered.) But later on we find that the changes are world-shaking. ‘The third and perhaps most crucial change can be observed in the rhythm and nature of industrial work . . . . [In the ‘technological’ industries] the very nature of work itself, the rhythm and skills 19 Universities and Left Review, no. 5, p. 30. 20 Taylor, op. cit. p. 18. 21 Thid. 22 Hall, op. cit. 23 Ibid. p. 26 (emphasis mine, here and in other quotations from Hall, unless otherwise stated—C. S.). 24 Thid.

[p024] THE ‘NEW LEFT involved, have changed out of all recognition.’5 There seems to be no understanding that the importance of wage-labour for socialists is not the quality of the labour involved but its social character as a commodity. Whether or not the post-war boom has changed the working class into something else is also an important question for Hall: ‘It is a matter of a whole way of life, of an attitude towards things and people.’ Perhaps Hall takes as read the important objective basis of class—relationship to the means of production and to other classes? No: The central distinction between working-class and middle- class styles of life has always been .. .. a distinction ‘between alternative ideas of the nature of social relation- ship’, embodied, as it were, in typical working-class institutions .... The crucial difference is that between the bourgeois notion of society as a stage upon which each individual tries to ‘realize’ himself through personal effort and competitiveness; and the working-class notion of society aS a co-operative entity.27 : Again, the idea of the working class possessing a separate culture within capitalism asserts itself: “Working-class culture, as we have experienced it, grew up as a series of defences against the encroachments— economic and social—of bourgeois society.’28 Just what is this bourgeois society outside the working class? Hall tries to be more explicit than Dorothy Thompson and succeeds only in demonstrating his failure to understand Marx: thus Marx saw the new social relationships growing within the womb of the old society itself, as men forced themselves out of the constraints which the old industrial ghettos and factories imposed, until the separate communities became a single community, and—in this sense at least—the bour- geois world was ‘proletarianized’ .... He saw an industrial working class not merely surviving into, but itself creating conditions of prosperity and abundance.29 As we have seen above, this is the diametrical opposite of Marx’s idea of the role and destiny of the working class in capitalist society. You might think we had enough ‘crucial’ and ‘central’ points by now, but on the same page we have a ‘central problem [which] concerns the different objective factors which shaped and were in turn shaped and humanized by an industrial working class’. “These primary factors have changed radically with the development of capitalism.’ Again, that could mean anything, but it turns out to be a claim for something very significant. ‘The whole nature of private property has been revolutionized’ But a few Iines later ‘“property” has gone underground.”7? Just what are we to make of this sort of language? Lack of precision in the use of what are technical terms for socialists can only be a source of confusion. On the same page Hall suggests that there have been significant changes in the rate of exploitation; in sup- port of this he quotes advances in wages and the ‘standard of living, which every socialist knows from his first lesson in political economy to be entirely beside ‘the point. Hall now reaches his conclusion: ‘Con- sumption has been so built into capitalism that it has 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Thid. . 28 Ibid. p. 27. 29 [hid. (emphasis Hall’s). 30 Thid. become the most significant relationship between the working class and the employing class.’3!_ Apparently capitalism’s big problem is to break down the workers’ sales resistance, derived from the days of poverty. Hall has not yet finished with ‘central paradoxes’ and ‘deepest conflicts’, but we must settle for this one— perhaps (who knows?) the nub of his whole argument: ‘Capitalism as a social system is now based upon consumption’ because ‘in their lives and their work, working-class and lower-middle-class people can realize themselves through the possession (on hire-purchase perhaps) of “alien things’’.’52 If all this is true, that property has been revolution- ized, that techniques of investment and advertising have assimilated the working class to capitalism, then of course the working-class is not the force predicated by Marx, and there is no question of theory arming the working class—it needs, not an armoury but a set of gardening tools, which will no doubt be provided by the worthy preservers of the museums and theatres in the New Towns and the salvaged old communities. While the workers cultivate their orchids or watch their colour-television, some idiots are playing about some- where at games which lead to the victory of de Gaulle, or the rape of an African colony, or the preparation of cobalt bombs. Any number of articles on ‘culture and community’ will fail to upset the generals and the ‘Insiders’. There is nothing they would like better than a working class concentrating—at the behest of ‘new thinkers’—not on their struggles, their fighting capacity, the horizons of a society freed from exploitation, but on the search for a ‘decent’ cultural environment for the volume of consumer goods sold to them by the adver- tisers. Hall at least talks about the need to overthrow capitalism, and does not seem to share with Taylor the concentration on ‘salvage work’, but even so he has nothing to say about the instrument for that overthrow, the organization and leadership of the working class; consequently his readers are left with a feeling of pessimism and confusion. He obviously cannot recon- cile the dehumanization of men under capitalism with the character of the socialism that is to replace it. But this is surely no new problem, despite the increasingly shameless, vulgar and deliberate nature of the tech- niques of propaganda and manipulation. In a long note at the end of his article, Hall suggests that a too mechanical interpretation of Marx’s model of ‘material basis and ideological superstructure’ has been the source of much confusion among socialists. This is of course true, but it is no excuse for Hall’s own misunderstanding of Marx and Engels. To suggest that his letter to Bloch—‘We make history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions’2—shows Engels in ‘significantly revisionist role’ is to show not only a surprising condescension to Marx’s thought, but also plain ignorance. In their first mature statement, The German Ideology, Marx and Engels had already formulated their interpretation of history in terms almost identical with those of Engels in the later letters: 31 [bid. p. 28. 32 Thid. p. 29 (emphasis Hall’s). 33 Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (1956 ed.), p. 498. 53

[p025] LABOUR REVIEW Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite develop- ment of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms .... Our conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the simple material production of life, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; further, to show it in its action as State; and so, from this starting-point, to explain the whole mass of different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics etc. etc., and take their origins and growth, by which means, of course, the whole thing can be shown in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another).34 Indeed this work of the young Marx and Engels contains the basic answer to all the meanderings of those who refuse to accept the role.of theory as a class weapon. ‘Communism is for us not only a stable state 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.’> It is their refusal to accept this undiluted revolutionism 34 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1942 ed.), pp. 14, 28. 35 Yhid. p. 26. July-August 1959 which leaves so many ‘Left’ intellectuals in the dilemma of Hall, Taylor and others—‘How can we get a good society from something that makes people so bad?’ The answer is not an idealized patterning of part of the existing relationships but the building of a revolution- ary movement. This was the essence of Marx’s theory of history and politics: The communistic revolution is directed against the pre- ceding mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the abolition of the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, is not recog- nized as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities etc., within present society .... Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical move- ment, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.36 36 hid. p. 69.