The Critique of Political Economy as the Scientific Foundation of Communism
The last part of the third volume of Capital, entitled ‘The Revenues and Their Sources’, closes with an unfinished last chapter called ‘Classes’, in which Marx shows the economic roots of the antagonism between wage-workers, capitalists and landowners.
Thus, at the very pinnacle of this imposing intellectual construction ‘we have the class struggle, as the conclusion in which the movement and disintegration’ of capitalist society ‘resolves itself'.88 The repeated attempts to replace Marx’s policy of class struggle by different forms of class collaboration, ranging from Millerand’s ‘government of republican defence’ to Stalin’s ‘anti-fascist popular front’ to Enrico Berlinguer’s ‘historic compromise’, show that Marx’s leading ideas have to be stressed again and again, not only against obfuscations by bourgeois ideologists, but also against the policies of the putative political representatives of the working class.But laying bare the economic foundations of the class antagonisms of present-day society was only part of Marx’s research project. Another and even more important aim was to show how the developmental tendencies of capitalism revealed it to be a transitory stage in the history of humankind, pointing beyond itself to a higher stage in which class antagonisms would be transcended. The whole of history has been one of the gradual appropriation of nature by human labour and of the progressive enslavement of the majority of humanity by an ever smaller minority of exploiters. The concentration and centralisation of the means of production, as well as the international division of labour brought forth by capitalism, have created the foundations for a new social formation, an association of free and equal producers who will exert conscious control over their production and reproduction processes and thus regulate the course of social development in order to secure the widest possible scope for the development of human personality. Only then, under genuine communism, will humanity finally be able to pass to the kingdom of freedom. Concrete labour, with which Marx began the first volume of Capital, will return from abstraction to the concrete universal of selfdetermined labour in the form of a social plan determined by the associated producers.