The world market
When Marx and Engels thought about politics they did not take states as the starting point. Their focus from their first joint work in the 1840s was on the world market, which they saw as having a long history of development, but driven and shaped in their time by competition between capitalists, and class struggle between capitalists and workers. Although they thought that capitalist production was full of inherent contradictions that in the end would bring about its downfall, they still thought it likely that it would continue to spread, through the growing world market, until it reached a point of genuine global dominance. They saw the introduction of science, technology and machinery into the production process in the first centres of the industrial revolution as a fundamentally important step that changed the course of history. And they saw class struggle—the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or ‘capital’ and ‘labour’—as the driving force that would shape and eventually bring down the globalising capitalist regime. One of the main themes of this book is that we have reached a point, over the last thirty years or so, at which we can speak of a genuinely global capitalist world market, in which capitalists potentially have every worker in the world at their disposal. The future that Marx and Engels described as they looked ahead in time is today’s reality, not only in broad terms, but in the details of everyday life, and our everyday practice as individuals struggling to survive and prosper.
Even before he before he met Marx, and when he was only twenty-two, Engels had written that the inevitable consequence of large-scale industry would be the polarisation of the world’s population into two classes—capitalists and workers, or the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He saw some of the first signs of this in Manchester, where he arrived in December 1842, and described them in The Condition of the Working Class in England. In the first text they produced together, the German Ideology (1845-6), Marx and Engels turned their attention to the impact of ‘large-scale industry’ on the emergent world market. The most striking passage, which would re-appear in similar terms in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, read as follows:
Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good against large-scale industry) and soon after to introduce large-scale industry under protective duties. In spite of these protective measures large-scale industry universalised competition (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralisation of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc., and, where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of labour the last semblance of its natural character. It altogether destroyed the natural character, as far as this is possible with regard to labour, and resolved all natural relations into money relations. In the place of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight. It destroyed the crafts and all earlier stages of industry wherever it gained mastery. It completed the victory of the town over the country. Its [basis] is the automatic system. It produced a mass of productive forces, for which private property became just as much a fetter as the guild had been for manufacture and the small, rural workshop for the developing handicrafts. These productive forces receive under the system of private property a one-sided development only, and for the majority they become destructive forces; moreover, a great many of these forces can find no application at all within the system of private property. Generally speaking, large-scale industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar features of the various nationalities. And finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national interests, large-scale industry created a class which in all nations has the same interest and for which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted against it. For the worker it makes not only his relation to the capitalist, but labour itself, unbearable.
This was much more a vision of an imagined future than a description of the world as it was then, and it went along with a fundamental idea—that
Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them. Moreover, the mass of workers who are nothing but workers—labour-power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction [of their needs] and, hence, as a result of competition their utterly precarious position, the no longer merely temporary loss of work as a secure source of life—presupposes the world market. … In history up to the present it is certainly likewise an empirical fact that separate individuals have … become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them … a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market.
They were dashing down ideas here, and working things out for themselves rather than announcing settled conclusions. In fact, Engels recorded over forty years later that when plans for its publication failed to materialise, ‘We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose — self-clarification!’ (Foreword, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the End of German Philosophy, 1888). Even so, a clear picture emerges: competition between capitalists supported by states making temporary use of protectionist measures to enable the establishment of large-scale industry would create a world market ruled by competition, pitting a global proletariat against global capital in a single all-embracing regime. This ‘universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them’ would make possible the overthrow of capitalism and the introduction of communism, but in the meantime it would reduce the great majority of the world’s population to ‘workers who are nothing but workers’, unable to secure their subsistence and survival for themselves, permanently dependent on capital owned by the minority bourgeoisie, and condemned to an utterly precarious existence.
In important respects, the main lines of Marx’s theorisation of capital lay far ahead. But one central component was already in place. If capital ever did become totally dominant across the world, reducing the great majority of its population to ‘nothing but workers’, they would be condemned to a perpetually precarious existence. Precarity, understood as a state of persistent insecurity with regard to income or employment, was inherent from the start in the idea of a world ruled by capital.
Even before he before he met Marx, and when he was only twenty-two, Engels had written that the inevitable consequence of large-scale industry would be the polarisation of the world’s population into two classes—capitalists and workers, or the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He saw some of the first signs of this in Manchester, where he arrived in December 1842, and described them in The Condition of the Working Class in England. In the first text they produced together, the German Ideology (1845-6), Marx and Engels turned their attention to the impact of ‘large-scale industry’ on the emergent world market. The most striking passage, which would re-appear in similar terms in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, read as follows:
Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures by renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good against large-scale industry) and soon after to introduce large-scale industry under protective duties. In spite of these protective measures large-scale industry universalised competition (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralisation of capital. By universal competition it forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc., and, where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilised nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. It made natural science subservient to capital and took from the division of labour the last semblance of its natural character. It altogether destroyed the natural character, as far as this is possible with regard to labour, and resolved all natural relations into money relations. In the place of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight. It destroyed the crafts and all earlier stages of industry wherever it gained mastery. It completed the victory of the town over the country. Its [basis] is the automatic system. It produced a mass of productive forces, for which private property became just as much a fetter as the guild had been for manufacture and the small, rural workshop for the developing handicrafts. These productive forces receive under the system of private property a one-sided development only, and for the majority they become destructive forces; moreover, a great many of these forces can find no application at all within the system of private property. Generally speaking, large-scale industry created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society, and thus destroyed the peculiar features of the various nationalities. And finally, while the bourgeoisie of each nation still retained separate national interests, large-scale industry created a class which in all nations has the same interest and for which nationality is already dead; a class which is really rid of all the old world and at the same time stands pitted against it. For the worker it makes not only his relation to the capitalist, but labour itself, unbearable.
This was much more a vision of an imagined future than a description of the world as it was then, and it went along with a fundamental idea—that
Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them. Moreover, the mass of workers who are nothing but workers—labour-power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction [of their needs] and, hence, as a result of competition their utterly precarious position, the no longer merely temporary loss of work as a secure source of life—presupposes the world market. … In history up to the present it is certainly likewise an empirical fact that separate individuals have … become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them … a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market.
They were dashing down ideas here, and working things out for themselves rather than announcing settled conclusions. In fact, Engels recorded over forty years later that when plans for its publication failed to materialise, ‘We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose — self-clarification!’ (Foreword, Ludwig Feuerbach, and the End of German Philosophy, 1888). Even so, a clear picture emerges: competition between capitalists supported by states making temporary use of protectionist measures to enable the establishment of large-scale industry would create a world market ruled by competition, pitting a global proletariat against global capital in a single all-embracing regime. This ‘universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them’ would make possible the overthrow of capitalism and the introduction of communism, but in the meantime it would reduce the great majority of the world’s population to ‘workers who are nothing but workers’, unable to secure their subsistence and survival for themselves, permanently dependent on capital owned by the minority bourgeoisie, and condemned to an utterly precarious existence.
In important respects, the main lines of Marx’s theorisation of capital lay far ahead. But one central component was already in place. If capital ever did become totally dominant across the world, reducing the great majority of its population to ‘nothing but workers’, they would be condemned to a perpetually precarious existence. Precarity, understood as a state of persistent insecurity with regard to income or employment, was inherent from the start in the idea of a world ruled by capital.