Rotten Fruit

Karl Marx did not invent the working class struggle. He did not invent the word “socialism” or the socialist movement. The industrial working class was already struggling by the 1830s, and there were, to use Hal Draper’s phrase, lots of “existing socialism” on the scene already. What Marx did do was ground the socialist movement in the very bedrock of bourgeois society. Class society is riddled with contradictions. These contradictions - between socialized production and the private accumulation of social surplus (capital); between the promises of bourgeois society (freedom and self-actualization through labor, fair exchange on the market) and the reality of industrial society (permanent unemployment, destitution, and death by overwork) - were and would continue to compel the working class to act. And when it did act, it had the potential, if organized into a political party and guided by socialist theory, to do nothing less than begin human history.

Capitalism, understood Marx, is pregnant with socialism. If capitalist society appears sick, it is because socialism’s birth is long overdue and the midwife, the working class, had yet to deliver the child. If in 1848 Marx thought that capitalist society was like a ripe fruit in that it had fully developed all the necessities for life under socialism, then Trotsky, observing how Stalin had betrayed the revolution, saw capitalism as a now rotten and putrid fruit still hanging on the branch. Taking it a step forward, one could say that instead of being picked by the hand of socialism, the fruit has in fact fallen and now, in its putridness, poisons the ground below.