What does this passage from Marx mean?

In my opinion, here Marx is simply pointing out that this book he is describing individual capitalists and landlords just in terms of their economic role, as representatives of an economic type, even though - as individuals - some might have ideas and aims that are outside the norm.

It is an interesting sentence in that Marx is often taken to be describing what he calls a 'natural history' of society. That society has to be the way it is because it is governed by laws of economics. But if that was the case, then how could we ever change things? Marx wants us to be free, but also sometimes seems to be arguing that we are slaves of history. There is a discussion of this by Adorno (History and Freedom Lectures). (You will find it if you put the paragraph you quoted into Google.)

Quoting Londoner

Marx wants us to be free, but also sometimes seems to be arguing that we are slaves of history.

This is the inevitable problem with any philosophy that attempts to make evolution mechanical in nature. They call upon people to act against the inevitable?

Reply to Dezcarts87
I think you have the sense of it.
Marx views economic history as a deterministic process making individuals near to powerless; that for any given instance of the process we are pawns in the game of evolution, able to recognise our situation but as individuals have limited power to change. Collective action on a wide scale is necessary to offer the fruits of labour to be shared to the benefit of the many. Against this there is a tide of the power of capital whose natural tendency is to enrich an increasingly small group of beneficiaries to the detriment of the few and to whole economy.

It makes Marx a hypocrite, doesn't it? After all, he was in the non--working class, yet, he claims to have been able to identify with them. According to Marx, this should have been impossible. Marx also called for armed revolution, but, why bother if everything is predetermined anyway?

Quoting LD Saunders

It makes Marx a hypocrite, doesn't it?

No, not in any way.
Marx lived in extreme poverty.

Charleton: Marx lived off of hiss capitalist friend, Engels, and also played the stock market, which are two more signs of his hypocrisy. You never addressed my points though: Since Marx claimed that everything was predetermined, then why claim a revolution was needed? Also, if people are merely a product of their social class, then how come he and Engels, especially Engels, a wealthy capitalist, were communists?

Reply to LD Saunders
He did not claim everything was predetermined. What he argued was that systems are not stable, so the current economic system was inevitably going to turn into something different, just as previous systems have done. He had no illusion that this must result in communism, or that a successful revolution was inevitable; he had after all seen several failures in his own lifetime and wrote studies on historical examples. Nor do I think Marx thought of himself as being a member of the working class.

Quoting LD Saunders

Charleton: Marx lived off of hiss capitalist friend, Engels, and also played the stock market, which are two more signs of his hypocrisy. You never addressed my points though: Since Marx claimed that everything was predetermined, then why claim a revolution was needed? Also, if people are merely a product of their social class, then how come he and Engels, especially Engels, a wealthy capitalist, were communists?

At one point Marx was so poor he pawned his clothes.
He did not believe that every thing was PRE-determined. All determinists recognise that ACTIONS lead to consequences, and Marx believed that historical change required a struggle.
Quoting LD Saunders

come he and Engels, especially Engels, a wealthy capitalist, were communists?

Stupid question.
Engels was a communist because he saw what tragic lives the workers in his father's factory lived.

Reply to Dezcarts87 Marx also said that class conflict is one of the features of existing societies:

[i]The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.[/i]

Marx, the Communist Manifesto

Why was Marx poor? Well for one, he wasn't welcome in his homeland or in Paris. London accommodated all sorts. For two, his trade was philosophy and writing. He made a little money off his journalistic efforts. He spent much of his time in the round, glass domed reading room of the British Museum researching and writing Das Capital.

You can have a self-supporting tradesman or a financially dependent philosopher. With one you get his labor until he dies an early death; with the other you get philosophy that shook the world. Which one is the better deal? (Not everyone will agree the latter was better.)

There are a few different things going on in this selection and the text as a whole. You're probably not wrong to say we're "swept along" in a natural process but there are a few caveats that accompany that. The first of which would be simply to say "yes", but only on that basis that humans are naturally productive animals and, insofar as that is the case, engaged with process of production to such an extent that history is driven forward naturally rather than through direct input. In otherwords: it isn't as though we could simply decide history will go another way and thus it shall.

In some ways, this is also Marx critiquing a certain type of political arrangement and a series of capitalist assumptiond about productive enterprise (you likely saw this in the portions just after this quote, but it's clear within the book as well). Humanity is often understood in terms of labor power and the types of formative rations that labor takes within a political economy. This is, however, fairly problematic when taken in isolation as it disabuses us of the historical interaction between the means and modes of production in favor of placing the burden to impel history forward upon the capitalist individual (or set of individuals - labor unions or something). Marx supposes this is manifestation of capitalist modes of production - it disenfranches the laborer by turning them into divided individuals who, upon being burdened with the expectation of making political changes atomistically, must bind together in certain acceptable organizations in order to make micro-alterations that, in the end, still benefit capitalism.

None of this is classic Marx delivering a polemic mind you. I would wager, as this is his preface, this was more just offhanded commentary on some of the broader notions addressed in the book.

Charleton: Well, you can make up false claims regarding Marx all day long. In fact, every Marxist I know has never read his works. Marxism is bullshit on steroids. Marx did specifically state that capitalism, socialism and communism had unique historical roles to fulfill. This is a religious claim. No scientist would ever make such a claim, it's absurd. It's like theists who claim humans are the ultimate goal of creation. Marx was not a member of the working class, played the stock market, and lived off of capitalist profits from his buddy, Engels, who was filthy rich. So the whole claim about economic class determining one's beliefs, which is a Marxist claim, is undermined by the very outlook of both Marx and Engels. Marxism ha failed miserably every time it has been tried too, so it's amazing anyone today is a Marxist, when it's not just theoretically a bunch of shit, we have empirical evidence that it leads to mass destruction and death.

Reply to LD Saunders That's probably not true. A lot of Marx's thought is incredibly systematic, rigorously historical, and well thought out. The piece referenced in this post is quite brilliant - "Capital" not to mention smaller works like "...Jewish Question" and "Critique of Hegel..."or his annotated work with Engles (e.g. "Origin of the Family") are all excellent books. I would be cautious when importing biographical notes about Marx into his work as there are too many conflicting accounts and much of his personal history has been bound up in the political movements that have followed him. Equally as important is that there is nothing about Marx's work that would preclude him from, let's say, playing the stock market (again, assuming that biographical footnote is true in the first place).

I think the tendency is for people to read the first section of the Manifesto and react in a similar fashion as you are. There are numerous problems with that, but among the more important are: (1) texts like the Manifesto are for political pamphleting purposes and in no way provide an accurate conspectus of Mark's work, and (2) Marx, with the exception of a political call to action like Manifesto, did not spend a tremendous amount of dealing in the "faith" oriented claims you are talking about. While it's true he was not a "scientist" by modern standards (whatever that means) but he was an excellent scholar in the fields of political philosophy, history, and political ecomomics.

Reply to LD Saunders John Michael Greer, a blogger, ecologist, science fiction author, "Arch Druid" and so forth says this about Marxism:

Think of any currently popular political or religious ideology, and you’ll likely find at its center the claim that one and only one story explains everything in the world. For fundamentalist Christians, it’s the story of Fall and Redemption ending with the Second Coming of Christ. For Marxists, it’s the story of dialectical materialism ending with the dictatorship of the proletariat. For believers in any of the flotilla of apocalyptic ideologies cruising the waterways of the modern imagination, it’s another version of the same story, with different falls from grace ending in redemption through different catastrophes. For rationalists, neo-conservatives, most scientists, and many other people in the developed world, the one true story is the story of progress.

***
For fundamentalist Christians, no matter what the problem, the solution is surrendering your will to Jesus (or, more to the point, to the guy who claims to be able to tell you who Jesus wants you to vote for). For Marxists, the one solution for all problems is proletarian revolution. For neoconserva-tives, it’s the free market. For scientists, it’s more scientific research and education. For Democrats, it’s electing Democrats; for Republicans, it’s electing Republicans, and so on.

from [u]The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age[/i] Chapter 2, The Stories We Tell Ourselves