Karl Marx (1818–83)
GWF Hegel caused an intellectual ferment in nineteenth century German intellectual culture. Was his thinking radical, even revolutionary, due to its historical relativism, or was it drearily conservative? After all, he did recommend the Prussian state, which was absolutist, patriarchal and religiously stuffy. Then again, as a philosophy professor in Berlin, he may only have been trying to avoid trouble with the authorities!
Most famously, though, Hegel had a mind-expanding impact on a young philosophy grad called Karl Marx.
Hegel’s dialectical historicism meant that nothing is fixed, not even so-called ‘human nature’, and that truth was not to be found in one side of a politically polarized debate at the expense of the other. Instead we should look within the contradiction itself and for the historical purpose towards which it was a motive.
Hegel’s big idea was the Idea (with capital I). Human history was made out to be a spiritual journey towards freedom, as the Idea unfolded and became conscious of itself. But Marx was going to radically overturn Hegel’s philosophy too.
Writing in 1848, a year when revolution spread across European cities, Karl Marx, not the Marx seen on social media, stood against centralised government: ‘The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (Marx & Engels, 2008 [1848], p. 36). The forces of the state defended the property of the rich and oppressed those with nothing to sell but labour-time. Ideological falsification gave ordinary working people to believe that the capitalist order was ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’. For example, if you’re objectively overworked and underpaid, and you say it’s because you didn’t try hard enough to get ahead, then it would appear you’ve fallen for those ‘ruling ideas’ that focus on individual merit rather than political economy. You haven’t yet identified with a class of similarly exploited workers. To critically understand this kind of falsification, Marx observed that the 19th century’s industrial capitalist mode of production was neither natural nor inevitable: it had a history, and hence it must have a beginning, a middle and one day an end. All of history was, moreover, a history of class struggles – not, as Hegel would have it, struggles for recognition.
Inspired nonetheless by Hegel, Marx saw history as a dialectical process: a constant turning and overturning and superseding of the past, motivated by contrary forces, in which every individual has a role, but none has any power to direct.
But Marx turned Hegel’s dialectic ‘right side up again’ (Marx, 1995, p. 11). For Marx, the fundamental struggle is social antagonism over the means and ends of economic production. To turn the things of nature into things that are useful to us, or commodities, we humans must collaborate and compete, and the social relations of economic production differ at different times and places in history. Tribal societies, slave societies, feudal societies and industrial capitalist societies have correspondingly different class structures and social values. Up to this point, by the way, Marx is only extending a kind of analysis of class conflict already found in Aristotle’s Politics, but of course Marx has much greater historical knowledge available to him by the nineteenth century and so he sees the potential for dynamic change in society.
The big political question for Marx would be: who has ownership and control of the material means of economic production? This concern encompassed physical things and tools, but also the labour process and the things produced and sold. In the mid-nineteenth century, the most advanced industrialized societies, notably England, saw entrenched divisions between landed gentry and tenants, the industrialization of agriculture, and a growing urban divide between owners of industry and propertyless wage-labourers. The dramatic inequalities produced by this new mode of production must, he reasoned, result in another historical transformation. How would this come about?
Now, without useful labour, ‘there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life’ (Marx, 1995, p. 19). And every thing of useful life-sustaining, or even simply enjoyable, value is produced by physical and mental labour. Marx would put great emphasis on the value-producing power of labour; indeed I’d argue that his whole project is an effort to liberate and dignify labour and hence to free humanity. But sadly, according to Marx, the historical development of the capitalist mode of production has entailed alienation of labour in four basic ways. First, labourers produce things that others will own and exchange for profit, rather than things that they use for their own benefit or share with others. They can’t see the process through to the final product, nor can they appreciate its exchange-value in the market. Second, most labourers must work under the orders of others, so they don’t control their own labour-process. Third, mass industrial work tends to be specialized, individualised and competitive, so the labourers are socially divided as a class or alienated from one another. And fourth, workers are alienated from themselves, or from the fulfilment of their own potential as productive and creative beings. Their labour-power is reduced to a mere commodity. Working hours are often exhausting and excessive; wages are often insufficient for a decent life. Capitalism alienates us from the potential to be fully human or to develop our ‘species-being’ or essence.
Slaves could clearly see how they were exploited; the modern industrial labourer’s exploitation is concealed by the wage-relation, or ‘wage-slavery’. Given the dreadful conditions suffered by the working-class in nineteenth-century industrial cities, compared with the power of employers and the excessive wealth of the owners of capital, it was reasonable to think that this mode of production had created a conflict between the property-less proletariat and the propertied bourgeoisie that was destined to explode into revolution and social transformation (Engels, 1993 [1845]).
Marx never fully explored what a post-capitalist epoch would be like. Indeed, if he had been strictly true to his Hegelian roots, he would have made no predictions at all. According to Hegel, the thinker is only ever wise about a historical epoch once it has faded into the past. But Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels (1820–95) made a few remarks about what they thought (or hoped) would happen in their immediate future in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. But first, we note that this text was a political intervention into the revolutionary events unfolding in Europe at the time.
Now, if capitalism normalised property, and yet the labouring class lacked property, then the dialectical outcome would be the normalisation of ‘property-lessness’ – or an end to private property itself. The exception would become the norm, based on the fundamental economic power of labour. And then production would be ‘concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation’. To get there, the proletariat (the class of exploited workers) would realise itself as a class and sweep away by force the bourgeoisie, its mode of production and the very conditions for class-conflict. The proletariat would temporarily act as a ruling class to seize the forces of production, but it would ‘thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class’ (Marx & Engels, 2008 [1848], pp. 65–6). The state would self-destruct; workers would take control of the factories. Marx and Engels hoped that abolition of private property and inheritance rights would result from the uprisings that swept Europe in 1848. That didn’t happen. But they also called for progressive income-tax, a state-owned central bank, free public education for children and abolition of child labour, all of which did become normal policy, even in capitalist countries. A syndicalist and anti-capitalist workers’ movement in New Zealand led strikes especially in 1912–13, and members of that workers movement went on to form the government after the 1935 election. Can you name any?
But Marx anticipated neither the ability of capitalism to co-opt its opposing forces (aptly symbolized by Che Guevara T-shirts) nor the potential for the capitalist state to contain class antagonism by addressing workers’ demands for social and economic security, especially following World War II. Perhaps Hegel was right after all in suggesting that we shouldn’t make predictions!
Getting back to the nineteenth century, though, The Communist Manifesto was not Marx’s best work, although it is the best known. His most important theoretical work is the imposing 3-volume Capital – Das Kapital in German – subtitled ‘critique of political economy’. If you feel up to reading any of it, I recommend the one-volume abridgement published by Oxford University Press.
The basic unit of Marx’s political economy is the commodity. A commodity is a thing outside of us that satisfies our wants – be they basic life-sustaining needs or aesthetic desires. It may be a physical good or an ephemeral service. And labour itself can be a commodity. A commodity has both a use-value (in that someone actually consumes it) and an exchange-value (in that it is made to be exchanged with someone else for their use). Something I do or make purely for my own good is not a commodity as it is not meant for anyone else. The air we breathe has use-value and is consumed by us, but is not a commodity, except in special circumstances such as a breathing apparatus.
The one thing that all commodities have in common, regardless of their greatly varying use-values, is that they are all the products of labour. If we exchange two commodities, then they are theoretically of equal value, as determined by the labour expended in their production. The labour theory of value is rather complex, but at least note that the exchange-value of a commodity is related to but not the same as the price fetched in a market. The relationship between value and price is not well explained by Marx. But then, I’m not sure if anyone has explained it adequately since. But Marx does make it clear that value is not inherent in the commodity on its own; value appears in the relations between commodities (or what one thing is worth in terms of another) and in the amount of abstract labour congealed in it.
Labour itself, however, can be a commodity in the form of labour-power sold to someone else for their use, as seen daily in employment and wages. As a commodity, the value of labour-power, in turn, is the labour-time necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of the labourer. And it doesn’t take a genius to observe that many people’s income from labour is insufficient to sustain and reproduce themselves as labourers. This was as true in Marx’s time as it is today.
Normally, if we exchange two commodities by means of barter, the parties consider them, in the moment at least, to be of equal value. To understand why labour is often under-rewarded as a commodity, such that the value of the labourer’s labour does not reflect its value, or the labour-time necessary for its sustenance and reproduction, we need to take account of one special feature of labour that no other commodity possesses: the unique use-value of labour is that it is the source of value itself.
Buying and using labour-power and selling the products of that labour are the source of profits. But this is where Marx departs from the standard political economy of his time and things get simply political. Capital, whether it’s measured in terms of money or property (such as machinery or arable land), does not in itself produce value. Only labour does. Machines and land produce no commodities without labour.
To explain the sources of the capitalist’s profits, then, Marx invented a radical, if not dangerous, idea: surplus-value.
Surplus-value is the value produced as an excess during an unpaid portion of the labourer’s working day. All free labourers in a capitalist market, even those who do earn enough to make a decent living, are producing surplus-value. That is, they go on working, beyond the time necessary for the value of their labour, to work a surplus labour-time the value of which is appropriated by their employer. This excess produced in, but made invisible by, the wage-relation is surplus-value. It is the source of profit, but is not the same as profit. Profit is only realised once the products of the labourer’s labour-time are sold in a market. It’s possible that surplus-value could be appropriated by the employer but the employer then makes a loss if prices are lower than expected.
The proletariat are that class of people who have no other commodity to sell than their labour-power. The often violent historical transformation by which rural communities of peasants, due to mechanization and land-enclosures, were forced out and suffered pauperism, and were absorbed into the cities as a new class of industrial workers, was well understood by Marx. These new labourers were characterised as free (as compared with slaves or feudal serfs) but their choices were forced choices: sell your labour-power or starve. Hence we now have the idea that the modern welfare state de-commodifies labour (Esping-Andersen, 1990).
But Marx documented the lengthening of the working day and the wage-relation as the sources of surplus-value under industrial capitalism, and as the cause of the immiseration of the new industrial working class. He reasoned that the growth of the capitalist economy would only increase the size of this exploited class of labourers – and also the even more distressed reserve labour force of unemployed or under-employed persons – and that it would not relieve poverty, as the only way in which capital can accumulate and reproduce itself is through the exploitation of labour and the discovery of new ways in which to do so.
Marx would have been saddened, I think, but perhaps not surprised, to see how things that were once done voluntarily became industrialized and commodified: in the case of folk music, by sound recording, radio broadcasting, mechanization and the distribution of vinyl discs in the twentieth century. But he would be simply astonished to see us now giving up our so-called leisure time to work as unpaid under-labourers for Mark Zuckerberg as we spend our time on Facebook, which repackages our online profiles and choices as commodities for sale to advertisers.
But getting back to the nineteenth century, Marx picked up on the tradition of political economy that had already been established by famous figures such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx did understand that some forms of labour-power are more productive than others (that is, they produce more value per hour) and that mechanization does radically alter productivity. But, for the capitalist, mechanization was a double-edged sword: it reduces reliance on wage-labour in favour of a form of fixed capital, but it also reduces the extent to which the source of new value (labour itself) can be exploited for profit. The value of the machine ultimately comes from the labour expended in its production. But, as production became more mechanized, Marx reasoned, profits would decline due to the declining reliance upon labour.
The supposedly voluntary exchange of labour-time for money in the wage-relation is not a properly ‘free’ exchange of equivalent values under the capitalist mode of production, he tells us. The owners of capital and the people who own nothing but labour-time, as they meet in a market economy, have inherently contradictory interests. Just as slave-based economies and feudal tenancy were overwhelmed by the forces that were at work within them, to be superseded, or incorporated and overturned, by a new mode of production, so Marx reasoned that a similar transformation awaited the capitalist mode of production.
I hope you can see how this is a dialectical theory: it is historically dynamic, and it views contradictory social and economic forces as motors of transformational change. But such change is not the simple victory of one side over the other; it is a supersession of all that was into a completely new social structure. As compared with Hegel’s dialectical idealism, we often refer to Marx’s approach as dialectical materialism as he sees the material basis of society, and our struggle to produce, exchange and consume things of value, as the motive force of change and the basis of our ideas about who we are.
Marx’s ideas are, in turn, a product of their time. He doesn’t address many of the concerns about social inequality, economic exploitation and injustice that are important to us since the twentieth century. He certainly doesn’t satisfy today’s liberal economists, as he didn’t participate in the so-called marginal revolution in economic theory beginning in the 1860s and 70s, and he doesn’t account for the price mechanism and the dynamics of supply and demand.
On a different note, nowadays the term ‘cultural Marxism’ gets thrown around a lot. But here’s a question: how much does this term have to do with Karl Marx’s Marxism?
From the point of view of contemporary feminism, on the other hand, Marx didn’t say enough about the re-productive role of the family or about gender inequality, but his collaborator Engels did make an important contribution. Soon after Marx’s death, Engels set about writing The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in which, among other things, he associates civilization and its forms of commodity production with a historical turn towards social structures that are characterized by monogamy and patriarchy, with property concentrated in male hands, and the family regarded as an economic unit. Engels sees the state as a machine for oppressing the exploited class. But he also argues that modern industry would demand the employment and emancipation of women and hence the end of private domestic labour in favour of a public industry (Engels, 2000). Well, he got some of that right.
Contrary to what I believe is popular belief, Marx and Engels had an antagonistic attitude towards the state. Why was that?
And yet, Marx does open a door for the state to intervene. One of his main preoccupations is with the length of the working day, a key aspect of exploitation of labour. He documented excessive working hours as well as the passage of factories legislation in Britain. He suggests that, to seek protection against prolonged hours, workers should unite and ‘compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death’ (Marx, 1995, p. 182). It seems there may be a role for the state and the law to protect, and not only oppress, the working-class.
What, then, did Marx really want? His dream was to restore to every working person (be they engaged in physical or mental labour) the full freedom and ownership of the value they produce. Only thus, he said, would humanity be able to rise above the grim logic of economic necessity and to flourish in ‘the true realm of freedom’ (ibid., p. 470).
In a later episode, we will look at the theory of money, including Marx’s theory of how money is transformed into capital. And, strangely enough, it all goes back to Aristotle.
Here’s a question to ponder for now: Which cardboard cut-out figure of Marx do you prefer? Was he an evil genius responsible for millions of deaths under communist regimes, or was he a trenchant critic of real economic injustice, or was he a visionary humanist who wanted to restore life to its wholeness?
References
Engels, F. (1993). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Engels, F. (2000). Origin of the family, private property and the state. Electric Book Company.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Hegel, G. (1991). Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, K. (1995). Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marx, K., and Engels. F. (2008). The Communist Manifesto. London: Pluto Press.
Some of the above has been reproduced from:
Duncan, G. (2019). The problem of political trust: a conceptual reformulation. London: Routledge.
To gain a more lively appreciation of the real Karl Marx, I recommend the Netflix documentary: Genius of the Modern World (episode 1): Marx.
The online Encyclopaedia of Marxism is good for quick reference:
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