Marxism, p.2
Marxism, page 2
Marx credited the "classical economists"—a term he coined—with delving below the surface, however inconsistently. He coined another term, "vulgar economists," for those whose analysis "deals with appearances only" and "seeks plausible explanations fo the most obtrusive phenomena."[29] As Marx outlined his own projected work on Capital in a letter to Engels, he pointed out that only in the third volume would he reach the "forms of appearance which serve as the starting point in the vulgar conception."[30]
As Marx was preparing to publish the first volume of Capital, Engels pointed out that "the philistine is not accustomed to this sort of abstract thought"[31] and that "the points here established dialectically" might better be presented some other way, in order to avoid some "terribly shallow" objections that would be made.[32] Marx replied that changing the presentation in order to silence all objections based on misunderstandings of his abstract approach would "ruin the whole dialectical method of development." Some people would indeed misunderstand, he agreed, because "only the immediate form in which relationships appear is always reflected in their brain, and not their inner connection." If it were possible to see directly the inner connections (the essence), then "what would be the need for a science at all?"[33] After Capital was published and the objections predicted by Engels began to appear, Marx said of one reviewer:
...as against the disclosures of the inner connection, he proudly claims that in appearance things look different. In fact, he is boasting that he holds fast to appearance and takes it for the last word. Why, then, any science at all?[34]
Ethics
In the early days of Marx and Engels, when they expected revolution at any moment, they were preoccupied with polemical writings in anticipation of a new society. Decades later, after many disappointments, there was time for leisurely discussions of basic philosophic questions. By this time, Marx was physically spent and unable to complete his magnum opus, Capital. It was, however, one of Engels' most fruitful periods, continuing on past Marx's death, so that much of the philosophical—including ethical—writings of Marxism are by Engels. This raises the question already alluded to in Chapter 1, whether or to what extent Engels' writings at this period distort the basic ideas of Karl Marx.
Fortunately, Engels' most extensive discussions of ethical issues occurred in his Anti-Duhring, a book whose manuscript he read to Marx in its entirety, and to which in fact Marx contributed a chapter.[35] The issue of a possible deviation by Engels is thus minimized for this particular work, one of their last joint writings, though published solely under Engels' name. Perhaps more to the point, the ethical views expressed in Anti-Duhring are completely consistent with other views expressed by Marx and by Engels in other writings.
In a lecture delivered in 1865, Marx declared: "What you think is just or equitable is out of the question." According to Marx, the question is: "What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production?"[36] Later, in the first volume of Capital, Marx asked, "what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity?"[37] Though he made the criticism of capitalism his life's work, Marx also saw a "transitory necessity for the capitalist mode of production".[38] The individual capitalist had to be judged morally within the framework of this stage of history:
My stand-point, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.[39]
Engels provided a systematic exposition of the principles behind such statements. "The great basic thought" of Hegel, according to Engels, was that "the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes."[40] Once this central notion of dialectics is grasped, "the demand for final solutions and eternal truths ceases."[41] Engels said:
Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. but in the face of new, higher conditions, which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses its validity and justification... For it (dialectical philosophy), nothing is final, absolute, sacred.[42]
Historical justification is thus only justification—the supreme ethical principle—in Marx and Engels. The concept of historical justification runs throughout their writings.[43] Even slavery and incest were considered to be historically justified—at given stages of history.[44] Adam Smith's method of economic reasoning, though severely criticized by Marx, was nevertheless considered by him to be historically justified:
He is justified in doing this because—if we except a few of his special enquiries such as that into money—his task was in fact a double one: on the one hand, to attempt to penetrate the inner physiology of bourgeois society: on the other, partly for the first time to describe the living forms in which this inner physiology manifests itself outwardly, to show its relations as they appear on the surface, and partly also to find a nomenclature and the corresponding abstract ideas for these phenomena, and therefore partly also for the first time to reproduce them in language and in the process of thought. The one task interests him as much as any other, and as both proceed independently of the other, the result is a completely contradictory way of looking at things—one that more or less directly expresses their intrinsic relations, the other with equal justice and without any internal relationship—with no connection at all with the other way of examining the subject—expressing the relations in their outward appearance.[45]
But because Adam Smith was considered to be historically justified in 1776 does not mean that his followers in the middle of the nineteenth century were still justified in continuing these inconsistencies.[46] Similarly, early socialist writers like Robert Owen, Fourier, and St. Simon were highly praised by Marx and Engels,[47] while the latter-day disciples of these "utopian socialists" were unmercifully castigated.[48] Scathing Marxian criticism of later utopian socialists among their contemporaries have misled some modern interpreters into concluding that Marx and Engels had "contempt" for Owen, Fourier, and St. Simon. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Engels said:
If in Saint-Simon we find the breadth of a genius, thanks to which almost all of the ideas of later socialists which are not strictly economic are contained in his works in embryo, in Fourier we find a critique of existing social conditions, which, typically French in its wit, is nonetheless penetrating.[49]
Robert Owen was likewise "a born leader of men,"[50] according to Engels, Utopian socialists "were Utopians because they could be nothing else at a time when capitalist production was as yet so little developed."[51] They were historically justified. In looking back on them, it is possible to "delight in the inspired ideas and germs of ideas which everywhere emerged through their covering of phantasy."[52]
In much the same vein, the Communist Manifesto spoke of the original utopian socialists as "revolutionary" but of their latter-day followers as "mere reactionary sects."[53] In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels spoke of Fourier's "masterly observations" on education[54] and of his theories in general as containing "a vein of true poetry" but dismissed his "orthodox disciples" as "the antipodes of Fourier."[55] By the middle of the nineteenth century, utopian socialism was no longer considered historically justified.
Development and Alienation
In the dialectical version of an unfolding reality, the key concept is development—meaning not simply quantitative growth but qualitative transformation. Development was defined by Marx as the "transition from one form to another."[56] These transformations occur through inner pressures and stresses—"contradictions" in Hegelian jargon[57]—which realize the potential essence. Again, metamorphosis exemplifies this process. Marx said:
Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.[58]
In neither case was this production simply a matter of one-way causation. The producer transforms himself in the act of production. In the Marxian vision, the humanity of man is historically unfolded and transformed through his own productive work.[59] Communism, as envisioned by Marx, was to be "a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle,"[60] a society "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,"[61] a society that seeks for its members "the completely unrestricted development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties."[62] This was even more important than the material standard of living.[63] Capitalism was condemned as repressing such development: "If the silk worm were to spin in order to continue its exercise as a caterpillar, it would be a perfect wage-worker."[64] It was not material poverty that Marx saw as the basic tragedy of the workers under capitalism, but their stunted development. The assembly-line worker under capitalism, through "life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation," has been "reduced to the mere fragment of a man" and must in a future society be replaced "by the fully developed individual" who is given "free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."[65]
Because the inner potentialities of man are not allowed to unfold freely, according to Marx, they do not simply vanish. They appear in strange forms, unrecognized by man as his own essence. For example, the thwarted human desires for more humane, just, and loving relationships among men reappear as the characteristics of the gods, who are then perceived as independent beings rather than as projections of unfulfilled human essence. This perception was called "religious self-alienation."[66] To correct, it was not merely an intellectual problem, but more fundamentally a question of creating social conditions in which these unfulfilled human desires can be more directly achieved in the real world. "Alienation" implies not only that something human has been falsely perceived as belonging to a mere product of humans, but that that man-made product then assumes ascendancy or dominance over man, like the gods of religion or like Frankenstein's monster. Money was likewise seen as a man-made object representing wealth that dominates its own creator: "Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it."[67]
Money originally had value only because it represented the real goods it could buy, but eventually goods appear to have value only because they can be sold for money. It is this "inversion of the original relationship" that is central to the concept of alienation.[68] As capital, "the object which labour produces—labour's product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer"[69]—something that can employ him or discharge him according to its own needs as capital, rather than according to his needs as a human being. In Marx's vision, "man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him."[70] Although Marxian communism was intended to end this condition, it was not considered a condition unique to capitalism.
This crystallization of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.[71]
This Hegelian language of "alienation" tended to disappear from Marx's writings with the passing years, but the underlying concept remained.[72] In Capital, for example, Marx said: "It is no longer the labourer that employs the means of production, but the means of production that employ the labourer."[73] For producers in general, "their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them."[74] Marx wrote of "the character of independence and estrangement which the capitalist mode of production gives to the instruments of labour and to the product, as against the workman."[75] Capital thus consists of "means of production that command the producer,"[76] and "the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting and impoverishing the labourer."[77] This was inherent in capitalism, according to Marx:
It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead of on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer. As in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.[78]
That these were expressions of "alienation" without specific use of the term is further supported by Marx's Grundrisse, an earlier draft of the book that was ultimately to become Capital. Here the explicit Hegelian notion of alienation abounds in passages whose substance later reappeared in Capital.[79]
Marxian Verses Hegelian Dialectics
The reality of Hegelian philosophy is less relevant, for present purposes, than the perception of it by Marx and Engels, and the way the latter distinguish their philosophy from it. In addition to the methodological and ethical conclusions derived from the dialectical approach, Marx and Engels also referred to various Hegelian generalizations or "laws." Here as elsewhere, the Marxian conception derived from, but did not merely repeat, that of Hegel.
The ever-evolving world as conceived by Hegel and Marx undermined not only fixed ethical conclusions but also fixed categorical definitions, particularly of opposites. The notion of "fixed lines of demarcation and distinctions" was rejected, along with "polar antagonisms put forward as irreconcilable and insoluble."[80] As Engels observed in his Anti-Duhring:
The recognition that these antagonisms and distinctions are in fact to be found in nature, but only with relative validity, and that on the other hand their imagined rigidity and absoluteness have been introduced into nature only by our minds—this recognition is the kernel of the dialectical concept of nature.[81]
It bears repeating here that Anti-Duhring was read to Marx in its entirety before being published, so that this cannot be regarded as one of Engels' alleged deviations. Moreover, Marx in Capital likewise spoke of a "unity of differences," that poles are "necessarily" both "connected" and "opposite,"[82] that in the real world, "contradictions are reconciled."[83] This was completely consonant with what Engels said, that dialectics is concerned "precisely with the inadequacy of all polar opposites" as concepts,[84] that dialectics "reconciles the opposites."[85] In modern Marxism, this principle is often referred to as the "interpenetration of opposites" but such jargon neither clarifies nor advances the argument.
One of the polar opposites repeatedly rejected by Marxian philosophy—and Marxian economics—is that between "necessity" and "accident." A particular event may be largely accidental and yet be part of a pattern that has a certain necessity behind it. The temperature on a given day in September may be accidental, in the sense that no one could have said on the same date of the previous September what it was going to be. And yet the fact that temperatures are generally higher in September than in January is not accidental, but follows necessarily from the structure and movements of the solar system. In much the same way, Marx considered it a general necessity, under capitalism, that commodities exchange in proportion to their respective costs of production, but it was at the same time accidental whether this actually happened at a particular juncture:
The economists say that the average price of commodities is equal to the cost of production; that this is a law. The anarchical movement, in which rise is compensated by fall and fall by rise, is regarded by them as chance. With just as much right as one could regard the fluctuations as the law and determination by the cost of production as chance. ...But it is solely these fluctuations, which, looked at more closely, bring with them the most fearful devastation and, like earthquakes, cause bourgeois society to tremble to its foundations—it is solely in the course of these fluctuations that prices are determined by the cost of production.[86]
This same conception of price (and resource allocation) as being both necessary and accidental under capitalism runs throughout the economic writings of Marx, from his youthful notes of 1844[87] to his most mature work, Capital.[88] Engels merely made more explicit the thinking behind it when he said that "the accidental is necessary,"[89] that there is a "regularity inherent in these accidents,"[90] that there is an "external necessity in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents,"[91] and referred to "Hegel's account of the inner connection between necessity and chance."[92] Inherent in this approach s a rejection of determinism:
In opposition to this view, there is determinism which passes from French materialism into natural science, and which tries to dispose of chance by denying it altogether. According to this conception only simple, direct necessity prevails in nature. That a particular pea-pod contains five peas and not four or six, that a particular dog's tail is five inches long and not a whit longer or shorter, that this year a particular clover flower was fertilized by a bee and at a particular time, that a particular windblown dandelion seed had sprouted and another not, the last night I was bitten by a flea at four o'clock in the morning and not at three or five o'clock, and on the right shoulder and not the left calf—these are all facts which have been produced by an irrevocable concatenation of cause and effect, by an unshatterable necessity of nature indeed that the gaseous sphere, from which the solar system was derived, was already so constituted that these events happen thus and not otherwise.[93]
Determinism results when cause and effect are taken literally as categorically distinct opposites. But the dialectical approach rejects that set of polar opposites in favor of causation in the form of reciprocal interaction, including interaction among conscious, independent beings. Engels spurned "the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction." Of those who reasoned that way, he said:
What these gentlemen all lack is dialectic. They never see anything but here cause and there effect. That this is a hollow abstraction, that such metaphysical polar opposites only exist in the real world during crises, while the whole vast process proceeds in the form of interaction... and that here everything is relative and nothing is absolute—this they never begin to see. Hegel has never existed for them.[94]
