MARXISM AS SCIENCE - 3

MARXISM AS SCIENCE

The same process
of accumulation polarizes the class structure between
capital and labor, creating a working class
that is homogenized, degraded, and deskilled. The
working class becomes a "class for itself," fist
through skirmishes at the level of the factory,
then by combination into trade unions, and finally
by forming a working class party that seizes state
power. This, at any rate, is the picture Marx and
Engels draw in The Communist Manifesto ([I8481
1978) which grew out of the English experience
in the fist half of the nineteenth century. Following
P4 (Table I), they regarded the forms of class
struggle in the transition from one mode of production
to another as contingent on political and
ideological forms. Whereas in England the process
was relatively simple by virtue of the more
advanced polarization of the class structure, in
France it was much more complicated.
In The Class Struggles in France ([I 8501 1964)
and The Eighteenth Brumaire ([I8521 1963) Marx
examined the dynamics of the political regime,
not the dynamics of the economy. In France economic
classes gained representation in the political
arena through parties that played out a system
of alliances given by the logic of the form of
state. Universal suffrage, Marx argued, unchains

class struggle by throwing classes into the political
arena where they are compelled to parade
their true interests. He viewed the rapid movement
of regimes between the Social Republic
inaugurated in February 1848 and the rise of
Bonapartism in 185 1 as the crystallization of class
struggle between capital and labor. A dictatorship,
subordinating all classes to itself but ruling
on behalf of the bourgeoisie, was to be the final
political solution before capital ism',^ denouement.
Marx thought it would not last because it couldn't
extend material concessions to the subordinate
classes, because it would puncture the illusions
of the supporting class of peasantry, and because
the state daily recreated a political threat to its
own existence in the form of the bourgeoisie.
Writing twenty years later when the Paris Commune
arose on the heels of the collapse of
Bonapartism, Marx still contended that it was
"the only possible state form in which the appropriating
class can continue to sway it over the
producing class," but at the same time it is "the
most prostitute and ultimate form of state power"([
1871] 1968, p. 56).