by Andreas Peglau

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Individual scope

For those who, in the second half of the 19th century, still mostly worked more than 10 hours a day for little money, there was indeed little energy and opportunity left to rise above their circumstances. For this reason alone, and because of the power imbalance, the responsibility of an individual proletarian for the capitalist economic system was minimal.
But throughout history, people have broken out of their circumstances. In 73 BCE, for example, the slaves who liberated themselves in the Spartacus uprising did so – an example that Marx was familiar with.[1] Since then, countless people have committed themselves to other people, to a wide variety of goals and ideas, even when they knew that they were putting their physical integrity or their very existence at risk. During the lifetimes of Marx and Engels, this was already happening in the struggle for liberation from capitalist oppression, as in the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. During its suppression, up to 35,000 people were massacred and thousands more were later deported.[2]

In the same year, Marx commemorated the „self-sacrificing pioneers of a new and better society“ in his work The Civil War in France.[3] Had these pioneers not cast off their „character masks“? Weiterlesen →