Robert C. Tucker - The Marx-Engels Reader (Chap. 2.2: "The Coming Upheaval") lyrics

The Coming Upheaval KARL MARX This concluding pa**age from Marx's anti-Proudhon tract The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) closes a discussion which takes England as the representative case of a revolution-bent country. It gives a vivid preview of the revolutionary upheaval towards which Marx believed that the cla** struggle in all capitalist countries was irresistibly moving. It was, in a way, Capital's conclusion stated in advance. Note the Hegelian terminology in Marx's depiction of the proletariat becoming, in and through the warfare of labor and capital, a cla** not only in itself but also "for itself," i.e., collectively conscious of itself and its revolutionary aims as a cla**. * * * Economic conditions first transformed the ma** of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this ma** a common situation, common interests. This ma** is thus already a cla** as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this ma** becomes united, and constitutes itself as a cla** for itself. The interests it defends become cla** interests. But the struggle of cla** against cla** is a political struggle. An oppressed cla** is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of cla**es. The emancipation of the oppressed cla** thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed cla** to be able to emancipate itself it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social reIations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary cla** itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a cla** supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society. Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new cla** domination culminating in a new political power? No. The condition for the emancipation of the working cla** is the abolition of every cla**, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders. The working cla**, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an a**ociation which will exclude cla**es and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of cla** against cla**, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of cla**es should culminate in brutal "contradiction," the shock of body against body, as its final dénouement? Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order of things in which there are no more cla**es and cla** antagonisms that "social evolutions" will cease to be "political revolutions." Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: Combat or d**h : bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put.1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes : 1. George Sand, Jean Ziska. A Historical Novel. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------