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KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYwomen as mere instruments of production; the present system was merely
public and private prostitution.
It was also said that communists wished to abolish countries and
nationality. But working men had no country. Modern industry was abol-
ishing national differences and, with the disappearance of class antag-
onisms, hostility between nations would also end.
Sweeping value-laden condemnation of communism was not worthy,
in Marx's view, of serious consideration. In a passage which minimised to
the point of caricature the role of ideas in society Marx asked:
Does it require intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and
conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every
change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations
and in his social life?
What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production
is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of
its ruling class.'^56Having dealt with these objections, Marx outlined the measures that
would be taken by the proletariat once it had become the ruling class:
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all
capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production
in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling
class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as
possible.^157In a section that was very largely inspired by Engels' draft, there followed
a programme which included the abolition of landed property and inheri-
tance, the imposition of income tax, the centralisation of credit and
communications, state ownership of factories, and free education. He
concluded:
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared
and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast associ-
ation of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political charac-
ter. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power
of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest
with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to
organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself
the ruling class, and as such, sweeps away by force the old condition
of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept
away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes
generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antag-