The Materialist Karl Marx

13-1e Vindication

At forty-two, Marx was considered an old man. Poverty and exile had worn him down, and his influence over revolutionary thinkers had begun when he was so young that he was seen as a member of the old guard. His influence grew, however, with the emergence of the militant German Social Democracy party. After Marx became their authority on socialist theory, his financial condition improved. Then, in 1864, the International Workingmen's Association was established by revolutionaries in France and England. They, too, turned to Marx, and he came to dominate their general council. He tolerated no deviance from his views and used any means necessary to defeat those who dared challenge him. During this time Marx began Das Kapital. The first of its three volumes appeared in 1867. This massive work established Marx's reputation as a philosopher. It eventually became what is sometimes referred to as "the Communist Bible," probably because of its nearly mythical status, and possibly because more people claim to give their allegiance to it than have actually read it. The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, so far as I know, with assuring the triumph of freedom and justice. — Albert Camus As his health declined, Marx was unable to devote the same care and attention to the two remaining volumes of Das Kapital that he had to the first. In fact, he never finished them. What we know as the second and third volumes were extensively edited by Engels in 1885 and 1894, after Marx's death. In many ways, they are inferior to the first volume. (What is called the fourth volume was ultimately compiled later.) In 1881, Marx's wife Jenny died after a long and painful bout with cancer. The death of the woman who had stood by the exiled, reviled philosopher through poverty and the loss of three children broke his spirit. He lived for fifteen more months in a state of grief and despair. Karl Marx died sleeping in a favorite armchair on March 14, 1883, two months after the death of his oldest daughter. His funeral was attended by his family and a few friends. At the funeral of his old friend, Engels said: The state is not abolished, it withers away. — Friedrich Engels Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of the development of human history: the simple fact that man must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before he can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate means of subsistence, and consequently the degree of economic development of a given epoch, form the foundation on which state institutions, legal conceptions, art and even religious ideas have evolved and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained. Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalistic society, and to the liberation of the proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and needs. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity, and a success few could rival. His name will live through the ages, and so also will his work.

13-5 Commentary

Although Marx may have confused the evils of industrialization with capitalism, his critique of the excesses of capitalism has much to teach us about the relationship of the material conditions of people's lives to the ideas and beliefs they hold. His assessment of the evils of "the bourgeoisie" reminds us of the dangers of class disparity and the harm that can come from separating reward from performance and from determining human worth in monetary terms. Overall, his cultural critique raises important questions about the meaning of work and human dignity that are, if anything, as pressing in this era of downsizing and global conglomerates as they were in Marx and Engels's time. I confess that I am conflicted about the strong strain of resentment and bitterness that runs through contemporary political Marxism and its socialistic cousins. On the one hand, a certain amount of resentment is understandable, given the disparities between the laboring classes of the world and the nonlaboring classes that control enormous pockets of wealth. But anger alone—even righteous, justified anger—cannot construct a healthy or just society. Ironically, but predictably, since his death, Karl Marx has become a successful commercial product whose image, like those of Elvis Presley and Lady Gaga, adorns posters, coffee mugs, and T-shirts. In 2008, a wax effigy of the great critic of capitalism went on display at the Berlin branch of Madame Tussauds's wax museum—where, for the cost of a few euros, he could be seen along with effigies of Gaga, Shrek, and Britney Spears. Steffen Kugler/Getty Images The philosopher, who is himself an abstract form of alienated man, takes himself as the yardstick of the alienated world. The whole history of alienation . . . is . . . nothing but the history of the production of abstract thought. — Karl Marx On the other hand, I am dismayed at the lack of sustained "middle-class" anger about inequitable social conditions and the egregious disparities between the treatment of corporate CEOs and their workers. One only needs to think of the scandals of recent years involving financial institutions and the collapse of the housing market and the declining percentages of fully employed citizens. Losses are anything but evenly distributed across the workforce. Marx did not allow for the possibility of societal self-correction, serial social revolutions, and consciously guided change, nor could he fully anticipate the shape of the modern economy or the positive features of postindustrial capitalism. Nor did he, nor could anyone, imagine the effects of the great technological revolution we are living through. Indeed, its full effects are probably beyond our comprehension, too. Finally, despite his genuine concern for the alienated, degraded worker, Marx himself seems to rob individuals of any significant capacity for self determination. Marx's emphasis on classes and class struggle does not, it seems to me, pay enough respect to the individual. One of the major problems with political Marxism is its tendency to sacrifice the individual for the good of the collective. In his zeal to stress the causal properties of the material substructure of society, Marx grants too little importance to the role of ideas and individuals as agents of social progress. It seems to me that in the final analysis, Marx romanticized the proletariat and vilified the bourgeoisie, thereby oversimplifying relations between those two classes. Treating human consciousness and behavior as inevitably determined by economic and material forces absolves one class (the proletariat) at too a high cost for me. But then again, if Marx is correct, my thinking is typical of co-opted members of a doomed class (the bourgeoisie). Still, Marx's vision of a fuller, better life places him among the champions of the oppressed and exploited. Like a prophet, Marx calls us to account for our sins; like a prophet, he indicates a general direction for our future. Perhaps that is enough. The rest, in any event, is up to us.

13-1a Marx's Hegelian Roots

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was clearly the dominant thinker being read in every major German university when Marx was a student. Though Hegel was primarily a philosopher, his influence spread across intellectual and artistic disciplines. In those days, one was either a Hegelian or an anti-Hegelian, but no serious German intellectual could ignore Hegel's philosophy. Hegel's works include The Phenomenology of Mind (or Spirit) (1807), Science of Logic (1812, 1816), Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), and Philosophy of Right (1821). G. W. F. Hegel was the dominant German intellectual of his time and a major influence on Marx's thinking. Istockphoto.com/Steven Wynn Hegel was influenced by Kant's attempt to answer Hume's assault on reason. Hegel pushed Kant's claim that the mind imposes categories (concepts) on experience to a different conclusion. Rather than appeal to unknowable noumena to avoid slipping into Humean skepticism, Hegel argued that Kant's categories of thought are actually categories of being. (See Chapter 11.) According to Hegel, it is contradictory to assert that noumena are unknowable because to do so, we must somehow know that noumena exist—and whatever exists is knowable. For Hegel, Kant's categories exist independently of any specific individual's mind. They are mental processes and objective realities. In Hegelian philosophy, Reality is referred to as Absolute Thought, Mind, Spirit, or Idea. Hegel believed that it is the unique task of philosophy to discover the relationships of particular aspects of Reality to the Whole, which is a single, evolving substance known as Absolute Spirit or Absolute Mind. "History" is the all-encompassing Absolute Spirit self-actualizing into perfection. Known as absolute idealism, Hegel's philosophy holds that the only way Mind can be recognized is as "continuously developing consciousness." The pattern that all consciousness follows constitutes a "dialectical process." As Hegel uses the term, dialectic refers to a three-step pattern in which an original idea (thought or condition) known as a thesis is opposed by a contrary idea (thought or condition) known as an antithesis. The interaction or struggle between the thesis and antithesis produces a new idea (thought or condition) that combines elements from the others, known as the synthesis. Once established, the synthesis becomes the thesis for a new cycle until everything is realized in the infinite synthesis of Absolute Spirit. Each resulting level of consciousness includes its predecessors. According to Hegel, the ongoing dialectic represents the actual structure of reality: the unfolding thought of the cosmic Geist (Mind, or Spirit). Hegel believed that it was possible to construct a complete picture of reality, a grand system that would incorporate all of philosophy, science, theology, art, history, and such. In fact, he insisted that it is impossible to understand anything except as it relates to the Whole. Thus, for Hegel, everything is always developing according to the dialectical process. To be sure, labor produces marvels for the wealthy, but it produces deprivation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It displaces labor through machines, but it throws some workers back into barbarous labor and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but for the worker it produces imbecility and cretinism. — Karl Marx According to Hegel, previous philosophers were unaware that they were working with a particular stage of the development of Reason as it unfolds in history or that they themselves were products of the Zeitgeist, the "spirit of the age." Failing to recognize the dialectical process of which they were a part, earlier philosophers mistook something "abstracted" from the Whole for a fixed, independent entity. But things can only be understood when they are experienced in relationship to the Ultimate Synthesis toward which all history is unfolding. History does not "just happen." It is the rational development of progressively inclusive stages toward realization in Absolute Spirit. Hegel was a grand systematizer—some would say the grand systematizer. He thought of history as the unfolding of the Absolute Idea of God (Absolute Spirit). He saw philosophy as the attempt to construct a comprehensive picture of everything as it relates to everything. The young Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel, from whom he derived the crucial concept of alienation and the notion of historical evolution as an ongoing struggle.

13-1c The Wanderer

Like many other social reformers and agitators, Marx paid a price for his outspoken concern for the downtrodden and his vehement attacks on those he saw as their oppressors. After Marx wrote a series of bitter editorials criticizing the Russian government, the rulers of Prussia—afraid of offending their powerful neighbor—shut down Hess's journal. This was April 1843, the same year Marx married Jenny von Westphalen. Having a wife and no job, and no longer a Hegelian, Marx sought what he hoped would be a freer intellectual climate: He and Jenny moved to Paris. One of the social and political hubs of Europe at the time, Paris attracted thinkers and doers from around the world with its unique atmosphere of openness and encouragement. Naturally, such a climate attracted the most intense and talented freethinkers and radicals. It was not long before Marx felt right at home. The very idea of distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance. — John Stuart Mill In Paris, Marx discovered another congenial group of radical thinkers, this time centered on the economic ideas of the Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Saint-Simon was especially interested in the emergence of a powerful new middle class, known as the bourgeoisie. He concluded that economic conditions determine history. More specifically, Saint-Simon argued that historical change is the result of class conflict: Those who control the material necessary for production are in a perpetual struggle with those who do not. This idea, as we shall see, had a major impact on Marx's thinking. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite! — The Communist Manifesto Marx also befriended various revolutionary groups of exiled German workers. These workers were influenced by an organized group of French laborers who agitated for radical changes in the conditions of workers and in the relationship between workers and owners. Because they demanded that property be held in common and shared by all, they were known as communists. Members of this group helped Marx develop a keen sense of the proletariat, or working class. He now possessed the seeds of his own philosophy. Within a year of moving to Paris, Marx was expelled from the city, and from 1845 to 1848, he and his family lived in Brussels. While there, he helped organize the German Workers' Union, which became part of an international Communist League in 1847. Its first secretary was Marx's friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels wrote the official statement of beliefs and doctrines of the Communist League, which was published in 1848 as the Manifesto of the Communist Party (now known simply as The Communist Manifesto). It may be the most important and influential revolutionary tract ever written. Marx next went to Cologne to help agitate for a revolt in Germany. His timing was poor, however, as a more conservative tide was sweeping across France and Germany. Marx was formally expelled from Germany by the government, and he returned to Paris. Not yet thirty-two years old, he was already perceived as a dangerous revolutionary. He had barely returned to Paris when the French government again made him leave. In August 1849, Marx's friends gave him enough money to move to London. Despite the flaws Marx and Engels would find in its class structure and capitalist economy, England proved a haven of freedom of thought and expression. Thus, in one of the ironies of history, the great critic of capitalism found the freedom to criticize capitalism only in a capitalistic environment. 41 Maitland Park Road, Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, England, where Marx spent the last years of his life. Rosemary Matthews/Hulton Archive/BIPs/Getty Images Marx never left London. For almost a decade, he spent long days in the reading rooms of the British Museum, researching some but mostly writing. After returning home, he often continued working late into the night. He and his family lived a hand-to-mouth existence, moving from one shabby apartment to another, unable to pay rent. One time they were evicted without anything when the landlord confiscated their few possessions in lieu of rent. Food and medicine were always scarce. Their poverty was so dire that two sons and a daughter died in childhood.

13-3b Co-Option and Class Struggle

Marx and Engels were among the first modern philosophers to recognize the plight of women in modern society. When physical strength became less important, employment opportunities expanded for women and for men unable to do strenuous manual labor. But the work available and the pay offered were often substandard. Garment factories, for example, paid (and still pay) low piecework wages: The less skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex no longer have any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. According to philosophical Marxism, workers are exploited, even if they do not realize it. The fact that a powerless group submits to economic exploitation "willingly" does not alter the nature of the exploitative relationship. Just as abused spouses or children may lose the ability to perceive reality and hence mistakenly see themselves as somehow causing or deserving abuse, so too exploited workers, after generations of capitalistic conditioning through schools and the media, may fail to recognize their actual social condition. We have already seen how working-class and middle-class people can come to identify with the possibility of acquiring wealth rather than with their actual chances of doing so. In other words, we may identify with the system rather than with our true role in it. Marxists refer to this as being co-opted. You are co-opted when you are tricked, seduced, or somehow convinced to further interests that are to your ultimate disadvantage—and think that you do so willingly. The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. — Karl Marx All history, according to Marx and Engels, is the history of a class struggle in which the bourgeoisie forges the instrument of its own destruction as it grows smaller but richer and more powerful. In our own time, social scientists are discussing the "shrinking middle class," the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Unstable housing prices keep more and more working-class families from owning property. Two-income families alter childrearing practices and family interactions. As the divorce rate remains high, people suffer the economic (not to mention psychological) cost of supporting two separate households. Unmarried mothers of young children face the dilemma of working and paying high child-care costs or not working and living at or below the poverty level on state assistance or often inadequate child-support payments. Despite recent efforts to alleviate the problem, medical insurance is likely to remain costly or limited for so many working- and middle-class people that many observers still despair of ever finding a fair, affordable way to provide adequate care to all Americans. Marx and Engels predicted that such conditions will not change until the proletariat becomes fully aware of itself, until people whose class interests are identical see that they are identical. Presently, however, . . . the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union with the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies . . . every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie. Under capitalism, it is in the bourgeoisie's short-term interest for different ethnic, gender, age, and religious groups to distrust and despise one another, Marx and Engels point out. So, for instance, a Marxist might argue that the bitter debate over racial, ethnic, age, and gender inequality serves the bourgeoisie by obscuring the fact that most people of all backgrounds are being kept out of the wealthy classes. Indeed, for the bourgeoisie as a class, nothing could be better than for "token" members of all disadvantaged groups to become publicly successful through education and hard work. This will co-opt others in those groups to "behave" and work hard while dreaming of "making it." Real change will come only when the exploited identify with one another and not with their ethnicity, religion, gender, or age, say Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto: This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. ... The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. As capitalism becomes increasingly efficient, it produces more than it can consume, and its technological progress renders large numbers of workers obsolete. Marxists say the result is an overburdened welfare state that provides barely enough sustenance—and no dignity—to its displaced workers: The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population or wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie . . . is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under the bourgeoisie; in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. ... The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. — The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels predicted that more and more workers would suffer as the bourgeoisie acquired capital at their expense, and that the workers' unhappiness, frustration, and indignation would erupt in violent revolution. After the revolution a new social order would emerge, from which all class distinctions, private ownership of the means of production, and exploitation would disappear forever. For Deeper Consideration As you analyze Marx's critique of capitalism, reflect on the complexities of "class consciousness. " Some of the most vocal champions of the proletariat and critics of capitalism make enormous (bourgeoisie?) incomes. In 2012, for instance, the president of the AFL-CIO labor union earned $558,218; the president of the American Federation of Teachers earned $556,981; and in 2014, the head of the Laborers' International Union earned $618,000. Is there any inconsistency in this? If capitalism corrupts, does the personal accumulation of capital corrupt? Must advocates for the proletariat be poor? What about proletarians who support capitalism? What happened? Is the revolution behind schedule, or is it not going to come at all? To address this issue, we need to look at one of the most important aspects of Marxist theory, one that is often overlooked by capitalistic critics of Marxism.

13-4a Species-Life

Marx distinguishes alienated life from species-life. Species-life is fully human life, life lived productively and consciously. Alienated life, in contrast, creates a sense of distance from nature and renders people unconscious of precisely how unhappy, unspontaneous, and unfulfilled they really are. In other words, alienation prevents us from being fully human. Thus alienation is anti-species or anti-human. Marx, we see at last, is propounding not just an economic theory but a sophisticated philosophy of self-actualization. He thinks that in the next historical stage, people will work to fulfill themselves, for the creative, self-actualizing joy of it. If that is difficult to believe, Marx says, it is because we are so alienated from human nature (our species) that we can conceive of work only in distorted, alienated terms. What makes something "work" is not whether it is difficult or easy but how we relate to it. If we are involved in and care about it, if, in Marx's expression, we are "at home," we do not look upon a task as work. If we have significant say over how we do something, and do it for reasons we understand and for values we hold, we may not like what we do, but we are not alienated from it. If we act from love when we cut the grass for our parents or help a friend move furniture, we are not alienated: "Automatons Cannot Love" Psychologist and socialist humanist philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980) wrote in a Marxian vein about self-actualization and love in his influential book The Art of Loving. Specifically, Fromm attempted to show how the structure of capitalistic society shapes our personal relationships. Fromm argued that alienated people cannot really love—themselves, one another, or God. Along the way he raised some disturbing questions about our society: Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. ... who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one to make good, to be on the move, to go ahead. What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man, from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons. ... man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever more things, and soon exchanging them for others. ... The situation as far as love is concerned corresponds, as it has to by necessity, to this social character of modern man. Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their "personality packages" and hope for a fair bargain. ... Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956; reprint, New York: Perennial Library, 1974), pp. 70-71, 72-73. All of Marx's major predictions have turned out to be wrong. — Roger Kimball The animal is immediately one with its life activity, not distinct from it. The animal is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself into an object of will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he immediately identifies. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from the life activity of the animal. Only thereby is he a species-being. Or rather, he is only a conscious being—that is, his own life is an object for him—since he is a species-being. Only on that account is his activity free activity. Alienated labor reverses the relationship in that man, since he is a conscious being, makes his life activity, his essence, only a means for his existence. If capitalism were destroyed, Marx thought, we would revert to species-life. Once freed from the irrational, destructive pressure to survive only at the expense of others, we would be free to develop as human beings, to actualize ourselves as productive workers who find joy and fulfillment in personally meaningful work. If we are unable to accept that vision of ourselves right now, Marx would say it is because we are living alienated lives to one degree or another. Our distrust of Marx's utopia becomes a symptom of our distorted view of human nature. What we think of as human nature—people hustling for a buck, scheming to strike it rich, and looking forward to the day they can quit working—is not human nature at all. It is alienation.

13-2a Economic Determinism

Marx radically transformed Hegel's dialectic by confining it to the material world. He objected to excessively abstract philosophy, referring to it as mystification: the use of cloudy abstractions to create elaborate metaphysical systems that distract us from concrete material reality. Marx thought that instead of clarifying ideas, Hegel and other "abstractionists" and idealists make them "mysterious" and vague. Mystifying logic, like money, does not produce anything, it merely alters relationships. Hegel's great error, and that of philosophers in general, according to Marx, is abstraction. That is why, according to Marx, most philosophy lacks substance. Like Bentham and Mill, Marx believed sweeping metaphysical systems and grand-sounding statements about human dignity and virtue pale beside the actual, concrete, existing conditions under which the poor barely survive. In the Manifesto, Marx asserts that "man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, his social relations, and his social life." When Marx talks about "material conditions," he means more than just natural physical and biological conditions. He includes economic and social relationships. Thus Marxian materialism should not be confused with scientific materialism (Chapters 9 and 10), which leads to the conclusion that all behavior is governed by strict laws of cause and effect. Marx is a social determinist, not a hard determinist. Hard determinists deny the possibility of free will or free action. Marxian materialism, by contrast, sees a reciprocal relationship between individuals and their environment. Marx criticized other forms of materialism for failing to understand just how important the role of human consciousness is in shaping society: The distinctive character of social development as opposed to the natural process of development lies in the fact that human consciousness is involved. ... Intelligent social action is creative action. ... By acting on the external world and changing it, man changes his own nature. ... The material doctrine that men are products of circumstances and a changed upbringing forgets that it is men that change circumstance, and that the educator himself needs educating. This reciprocity between individuals and their circumstances is, of course, a dialectical relationship. Marx believed that his brand of economic materialism avoids the futility and degradation he saw in scientific materialism, while still acknowledging the importance of the material conditions of our lives. Engels referred to Marx's philosophy as dialectical materialism, but Marx himself referred to it as naturalism. Both characterizations express its overall thrust. Marx's emphasis, like that of his great utilitarian contemporary John Stuart Mill, is on the here and now. Like Mill, Marx refers to what he is doing as "social science." He believed his unique mixture of idealistic (Hegelian) and materialistic principles was the only way to understand and predict the course of history: We see here how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinguished from both idealism and materialism, and at the same time constitutes their unifying truth. We see also that only naturalism is able to comprehend the process of world history. According to Marx, the process of human history is shaped by inseparable social and economic conditions, much more so than by ideas. Unlike philosophers and other intellectuals who attribute great power to ideas such as democracy or truth, Marx proposed a radical view of ideas, namely, that the economic structure of a culture creates and forms its ideas. For Marx, the term economic refers to the complete array of social relationships and arrangements that constitutes a particular social order. He assigns a crucial role to the material base of society. Collectively, this material base is known as the substructure of society. Specifically, the substructure of society consists of three components: (1) means of production (natural resources such as water, coal, land, and so forth); (2) forces of production (factories, equipment, technology, knowledge, and skill); and (3) relationships of production (who does what, who owns what, and the effects of this division on each group). The material substructure determines the nature of all social relationships (parent-child, boss-employee, ruler-citizen, and so on), as well as religions, art, philosophies, literature, science, and government. According to Marx, the material substructure of any society produces ideas and institutions that are compatible with it. Because ideas and institutions emerge from and depend on the economic structure of society, Marx refers to them as the superstructure of society. In other words, economics (the substructure) drives ideas, art, religion, and philosophy (the superstructure): In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. The relationship between the economic structure of a society and the kinds of people, ideas, and institutions it produces will become clearer as we take an extended look at Marx's critique of capitalism. Philosophical Query Analyze your education from the standpoint of relationships of production. What—and whose—values does public education really serve? Why are you getting an education? For economic reasons only, chiefly, or marginally, or not at all?

13-1d Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), the son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer, went to Paris to meet Marx, after sending him some articles Engels had written criticizing English economists. The meeting changed forever the lives of both men and the shape of the world. They remained friends and collaborators until Marx's death. In 1844, Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. His writing was strong, practical, and effective. He went on to write a series of attacks on the most important English economists of the day, accusing them of rationalizing and justifying the abuses the middle and upper classes heaped upon the poor. He saw their economic theories as capitalistic propaganda rather than honest economic or historical research. As he and Marx discussed these essays, each realized that he had finally found someone who understood the power of economic and material conditions. It has been said that Marx was the deeper thinker, but Engels added breadth and fire to Marx's ideas. Engels had a gift for acquiring the hard facts Marx needed to support his philosophical arguments and for making Marx's often difficult and obscure thinking easier to follow. Thus Engels played a crucial role in the spread and acceptance of Marxist thinking. Engels and Marx worked together for over forty years, and Engels supported Marx and his family through the long years of poverty in London. When Marx died, Engels protected, advocated, and interpreted Marx's philosophy for the rest of the world.

13-3 Critique of Capitalism

Given the importance Marx placed on the economic structure of society, it is not surprising that he developed a detailed critique of the prevailing nineteenth-century relationship of production, capitalism. Although many of Marx's ideas are clearly revolutionary, and although he did predict a violent overthrow of capitalism, Marx never actually made a moral judgment of capitalism. He thought of his analysis as "pure social science." His aim was to describe current social and economic conditions objectively, identifying their causes and predicting the next historical change. In Marx's opinion, tension under capitalism increases as inequities of distribution destroy any correlation between how much an individual contributes or produces and how much he or she receives. There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism: The law of supply and demand determines prices, yet the large pool of workers keeps wages low. Manufacturers keep prices higher than the actual cost of production; thus, over time, workers get less and less for their effort. The result is surplus value, which the owners accumulate in the form of capital. Those who contribute the least profit the most. According to Marx, one of the bitterest ironies of capitalism is that those who suffer the most under capitalism have been conditioned to value it. The old woman in this picture may have worked very hard her entire life yet remained unable to purchase expensive clothes like those in the store window. Would Marx find that appalling? What do you think? Thomas Craig/Index Stock Imagery/PhotoLibrary The bitter irony, Marx says, is that most of the people who suffer under capitalism have been conditioned by it to support a system that favors the rich, dreaming of the day when they, too, will be rich enough to benefit from it. Yet the laws determining who is allowed to own what, and who gets to keep what, are written by those who already own. Education is controlled by that same class, so even the most deprived children grow up believing in free enterprise and "fair competition" only to be condemned to lives of poverty,—or at least constant financial anxiety. Philosophical Query Compare kinds of contributions: Who contributes more—the builders who construct houses or the developers who finance them? Who contributes more—the president of a corporation or the secretaries? Are such comparisons fair? Are ideas contributions? Analyze the concept of "contribution."

Chapter Introduction

Have you ever really resented your job, or where you live, yet felt trapped by economic circumstances, unable to improve the basic conditions of your life? Or perhaps your education is uninspiring, something you feel pressured to do in order to get a good—or just an adequate—job? Most of us probably have felt such frustration occasionally. Sometimes, our lives seem to be controlled by our jobs and the need to earn a decent living. It seems as if money determines everything. In Chapter 12, we learned how Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill hoped to reform society by applying the greatest happiness principle and an empirically based social hedonism to social problems. Mill and Bentham were not the only social reformers inspired by the great inequities of the nineteenth century's fast-moving industrialization, however. Reform movements under the general banners of socialism and communism spread throughout France and Germany. What all these reformers had in common was a clear sense of injustice and increasing inequality. Where they differed, and often significantly, was on the exact causes (and cures) of the dismal living conditions of the working class. Besides utilitarianism, another influential theory emerged at roughly the same time. We know it today as Marxism, after its founder Karl Marx. The social and political impact of Marxism warrants a careful look. But, as you will discover, philosophical Marxism is not at all what most people think of as Marxism (communism)—and it is not what today's Marxists or communists practice, either. Let's see, then, what philosophical Marxism is and what has made it so attractive to so many people.

The Prophet

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, Germany. His father was a respected lawyer, and both parents were Jewish. Marx's father eventually distanced himself from the local Jewish community, however, and changed the family name from Levi to Marx, most likely for social and business reasons. All I know is that I am not a Marxist. — Karl Marx Early on, Karl Marx proved to be highly intelligent and obsessively interested in nearly everything. He was also very independent and hard to control. At seventeen, Marx entered the University of Bonn to study law. He enjoyed himself, writing romantic poems, socializing, spending more money than he had, even fighting in a duel—not to mention getting arrested once for disorderly conduct. His conventional father was not at all happy with his son's behavior and insisted that Marx transfer to the more serious and prestigious University of Berlin. Marx's stay at Berlin proved to be crucial to his later philosophical growth. Big, busy, and ugly, Berlin epitomized the nineteenth-century idea of a modern city. It was a magnet for social agitators, radicals, and other intellectuals. Imagine the impact such an environment would have on a bright, curious, somewhat rebellious young man from a conservative small-town background.

13-6a Summary of Main Points

Marx combined Hegel's dialectical view of history with Feuerbach's concept of a materialist Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) to produce historical materialism, the view that history is the ongoing result of a dialectical process that consists of an interaction between an original condition (thesis) and a contrary condition (antithesis) to produce a new condition containing elements of the thesis and antithesis (synthesis). Each synthesis becomes the thesis for a new dialectical cycle driven by constant tension between two classes: the exploiters and the exploited. Marx identified five epochs of history that constitute the dialectical development of history: (1) primitive/communal, (2) slave, (3) feudal, (4) capitalist, (5) socialist/communist. As each epoch develops, its basic economic structure matures and the material conditions under which people live change. According to Marx, ideas, values, and thinking itself are shaped by material conditions and social relations. Marx argued that the economic structure of a culture creates and forms its own ideas. Most important is the material substructure, which consists of three components: (1) the means of production (natural resources); (2) the forces of production (factories, equipment, technology, and knowledge); (3) the relationships of production, which constitute a complex system that shapes everything else. The material substructure produces ideas and institutions compatible with it. These comprise the culture's superstructure and include art, science, philosophy, religion, and government. Marx was sharply critical of capitalism, which he saw as a stage on the way to a classless socialistic economy. In his view, the capitalist substructure contains a fundamental contradiction in the tension between the owners' desire to keep wages low while prices fluctuate according to the law of supply and demand. Under capitalism, the two struggling classes are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie consists of those who own the means of production but do not produce anything; it views everything in terms of money and self-interest. The proletariat consists of those who produce things but do not own the means of production (including their own time and labor). Marx predicted that the demands of the bourgeoisie would result in an ever-growing proletariat whose living conditions would continue to decline until the proletariat would rise up in violent revolt and destroy the bourgeoisie and capitalism, leading to the next historical epoch, socialism. The most destructive feature of capitalism, according to Marx, is alienation, which occurs when the worker no longer feels at one with the product of his or her labor; it is a state of powerlessness, frustration, and despair. Capitalism alienates people from one another, from nature, and from work. Marx distinguished alienated life from species-life, which is lived productively and consciously. Species-life is fully human life, a product of self-actualization (which capitalism inhibits).

13-3a The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat

Marx's critique of capitalism rests on an analysis of the two classes that have emerged under capitalism. In The Communist Manifesto, he characterizes the bourgeoisie as disdainful of everything but capital. The government is nothing but "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." In other words, the government is not "of, by, and for the people," but "of, by, and for the important people." The bourgeoisie reduces everything to crude calculations of self-interest and personal wealth: What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. — The Communist Manifesto [The bourgeoisie] has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage earners. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation. Some of the complaints people express about today's health care crisis seem to support Marx's concerns. We lament the demise of the family doctor who made house calls. We resent arriving on time for appointments only to be kept waiting and then having to pay high fees for a cursory examination or a battery of tests whose chief purpose is to protect the doctor from a malpractice suit. Could these be examples of what Marx said happens when a profession is reduced to a "mere money relation"? Marx and Engels claim that the bourgeoisie, with its hunger for more, cannot rest, cannot leave any corner of the world unexploited and unspoiled: Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. ... The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. ... It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. Philosophical Query Do you think that the growth of complex, international corporations, multinational trade alliances, and Internet commerce that are fueling what some observers refer to as the "global economy" or "world village" are signs of a spreading bourgeoisie? Is the "capitalist class" creating "a world after its own image"? As modern capitalism develops, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish "professions" from "jobs." This confusion became strikingly apparent (no pun intended) in recent years as civil servants, teachers, laborers, and students from France to Greece to America protested against wage, pension, and student aid cuts. Here, members of the Los Angeles branch of the American Postal Workers Union picket against efforts to privatize the U.S. Postal Service, another in a series of efforts to resist changes to union bargaining rights for state and public employees. ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy The bourgeoisie cannot actually produce all that it needs and wants, Marx pointed out. Its enormous wealth and comfort have resulted from the exploitation of a great underclass, the proletariat. These are the people who actually provide the goods and services society requires to function. Controlled by the bourgeoisie, they are even compelled to produce frivolous luxuries whose real purpose is to generate ever-escalating production. Not only are the workers paid as little as the bourgeoisie can get away with in order to maximize profit, but they are also seduced by bourgeoisie controlled education and media to consume these overpriced, useless products. Thus, the proletarians are trapped in a never-ending cycle of debt, denied significant influence over their own work, and tricked and coerced into furthering the power and advantage of their own exploiters. As The Communist Manifesto explains it: Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians. — The Communist Manifesto In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. . . . But the price of a commodity, and therefore, also of labour, is equal to the cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. ... The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. If you have ever worked on an assembly line, or at picking fruits and vegetables, or in meat- or fish-packing plants, you will instantly understand the relationships of production that Marx and Engels are describing. Some of the most difficult and "repulsive" jobs are the most necessary to society—yet those who perform them are paid little and often respected less. Those who produce the least in Marxian terms work in air-conditioned offices, are supported by hard-working staffs, and may receive salaries, bonuses, and stock options worth hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of dollars.

13-4 Alienation

One of Marx's most interesting and compelling notions centers on the concept of alienation, a term he derived from Hegel. Marx thought of alienation as the most destructive feature of capitalism. Indeed, he thought it revealed an inherent irrationality, an inherent evil in the very basis of capitalism. Alienation occurs when the worker no longer feels at one with the product of his or her labor. An alienated individual rarely feels at home with himself or herself, or with others. Alienation is a state of powerlessness, frustration, repressed resentment, and despair. It results from the transformation of a human being into a commodity. Marx was convinced that we are happiest not when we are idle but when we are engaged in meaningful work. Meaningful work can be work of virtually any kind so long as the worker has control over its products. This is necessary psychologically, not just morally. Imagine the suffering of a designer whose boss controls what brushes, pens, and colors the designer can use; how much time can be devoted to each project; what is good enough (or not); and what happens to the designs. No matter how much such a designer produces, he or she will suffer. Being detached from the work, prevented from exercising personal judgment and applying personal standards, the artist is alienated from his or her own work. Anyone who takes a job solely on the basis of what it pays becomes alienated, in Marx's sense, by reducing himself or herself to a money-making machine. Possessions and money to buy them become more important than time to do things right, than the experience itself, and than the people involved. Soon, the alienated worker sees those he or she works for or provides services to as the means to a paycheck, not as full human beings. This is what Marx meant when he said, "The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world." And, of course, full functioning and eudaimonia are impossible in such conditions; this is a "kingdom of means," not a "kingdom of ends." According to Marx, alienation even extends to our relationship with nature (as environmentalists remind us today). Nature provides the material basis for all work. Yet unchecked capitalism uses up nature, because the capitalist does not feel part of nature. The alienated worker sees money, rather than the natural world that provides bread and milk and fruit and wood, as the means of life. Alienated from nature, we cannot see what we really depend on: According to Marx, under capitalism, we believe that money, rather than the natural world, provides our means of life. Rather than see ourselves as part of nature, we are alienated from nature and, hence, from ourselves. ©iStock.com/hsvrs The more the worker appropriates the external world and sensuous nature through his labor, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects; first, that the sensuous world gradually ceases to be an object belonging to his labor, a means of life of his work; secondly, that it gradually ceases to be a means of life in the immediate sense, a means of physical subsistence of the worker. For Deeper Consideration The concept of alienation is a central component of Marx's critique of capitalism. How does Marx link alienation to capitalism? How does alienated life differ from species-life? If you are not convinced by his arguments, does that mean that you are living in a state of alienation? That is, is there a way to reject Marx's argument that does not open you up to a charge of failing to grasp what Marx is saying because you have been co-opted by a capitalistic culture and education? Because so many of us must work to live, most of us spend a high percentage of our lives at our jobs. If we are alienated there, we are likely to be alienated elsewhere, for we cannot avoid being shaped by all those hours at work. Marx describes alienation as externalization: Work is seen as something I do, not as an expression of who I am. When I am in a state of alienation, I develop a habit of separating myself from nature and other people. I lose touch with myself, becoming alienated from who I really am, or at least from who I ought to be: Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true. — Polish proverb What constitutes the externalization of labor? First is the fact that labor is external to the laborer—that is, it is not part of his nature—and that the worker does not affirm himself in his work but denies himself, feels miserable and unhappy, develops no free physical and mental energy but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. The worker, therefore, feels at ease only outside work, and during work he is outside himself. He is at home when he is not working and when he is working he is not at home. ... External labor, labor in which man is externalized, is labor of self-sacrifice, of penance. Finally, the external nature of work for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but another person's, that in work he does not belong to himself but to someone else . . . the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another. It is the loss of his own self. The result, therefore, is that . . . the worker . . . feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his shelter and finery—while in his human functions he feels only like an animal. The animalistic becomes human and the human becomes animalistic. To the extent that Marx is correct, it is no wonder we are so interested in our weekends and vacations, no wonder that we text during class and surf the Web when we're at work, no wonder we seek escape. Only there do we feel fully free to be ourselves. We are alienated when we sell our bodies and souls out of necessity: The capitalist machine demands that we work. Marx did not believe humans are by nature lazy. Quite the contrary; he believed we want and need meaningful work. Our obsessions with leisure, our malingering and absenteeism, our efforts to strike it rich or retire as early as possible testify to the deep degree of alienation we must be experiencing in our work.

13-1b Other Influences

During this time, Marx became acquainted with a number of radical "freethinkers." These excited young people spent hours arguing the finer points of Hegelian philosophy. Marx thrived on the heady combination of intellectual stimulation and radicalism. Despite all the time spent in coffeehouses and beer halls, Marx completed his doctoral work in philosophy with a dissertation on the materialistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. He planned to be a professor of philosophy. Life had other plans, however. Marx had been living on money from his father. When his father died about the time of Marx's graduation, he left only enough to support Marx's mother and younger siblings. This would have been no real problem if Marx had been able to secure an appointment as a professor. But by now the Prussian government had grown wary of the young, radical Hegelians and issued a decree prohibiting them from university employment. Fortunately, Marx was offered a job by a liberal publisher named Moses Hess. Hess, himself a Hegelian, wanted Marx to help him edit a new, vocal "democratic journal" called Rheinische Zeitung. Even at this early age, Marx was an impressive figure. Writing about Marx to a friend, Hess said: He is the greatest, perhaps the one genuine philosopher now alive and will soon draw the eyes of all Germany. Dr. Marx is still very young (about twenty-five at most) and will give medieval religion and politics their coup de grace. He combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine, and Hegel fused into one person—I say fused, not thrown in a heap—you have Dr. Marx. Marx's admiration for Hegel was altered by an article called Theses on the Hegelian Philosophy by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). Feuerbach was a materialist who challenged Hegel's notion that the driving force behind historical eras was their Zeitgeist. Feuerbach argued that any given era was the accumulation of the actual, concrete material conditions of the time—not some abstract "spirit of the age." So important were material conditions, according to Feuerbach, that they controlled not just the way people behave but also how they think and what they believe. Different material conditions result in what we think of as different cultural eras. After reading Feuerbach, Marx retained Hegel's belief in the dialectics of history and a single reality but concluded that reality was material, not spiritual. A chance combination of events in a thinker's life sometimes has a lasting and profound effect on his or her later theories. In Marx's case, a series of articles he had been doing for Hess on the exploitation of peasants in the wine-growing Moselle Valley crystallized his understanding of Feuerbach's thesis. Observing the way the landowners repressed the workers, actively inhibiting and even punishing their efforts at self-improvement, Marx concluded that material conditions did indeed dominate all others.

13-2 Dialectical Materialism

From Hegel, Marx took the ideas that there is only one uniform reality and that history is an evolutionary cycle governed by an internal dialectical process, in which progress occurs as the result of a struggle between two opposing conditions. From Feuerbach, Marx concluded that reality is material and that consequently the material conditions of life control reality. And from Saint-Simon, Marx learned to observe the relationship between the owning/governing class and the producing/exploited class. Combining these elements with a deep concern for the conditions of workers and a keen awareness of the importance of economic conditions to other aspects of life, Marx constructed a social-political-economic philosophy known variously as Marxism, communism, historical materialism, Marxian dialectics, historical dialectics, or dialectical materialism. The German workers depicted grinding silverware in this 1887 engraving were typical of the alienated proletarians championed by Marx and Engels. Could they even afford to own the very utensils they worked so hard to produce? AKG London According to Marx's dialectical materialism, history is the ongoing result of a constant tension between two classes, an upper class of rulers/owners and a ruled and exploited underclass. From the struggle between different economic interests emerges a brand-new economic structure. Marx saw conflicting economic interests in terms of two classes, the bourgeoisie, or middle class, and the proletariat, or working class. The bourgeoisie consists of those who do not produce anything yet who own and control the means of production. The proletariat consists of all those whose labor produces goods and provides essential services yet who do not own the means of production. Marx took Hegel's concept of the dialectical process and applied it to historical stages, which he called "the five epochs of history." Named after their dominant economic system, these epochs are (1) primitive/communal, (2) slave, (3) feudal, (4) capitalist, (5) socialist/communist. Marx argued that as each epoch develops, its basic economic structure matures. Changes in the economic structure change the material conditions of people's lives. These altered material conditions eventually amount to new social structure: Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundations, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformation a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, esthetic, or philosophic—in short, the ideological forms, in which men become conscious of the social conflict and fight it out. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have nurtured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation. Socialism will never destroy poverty and the injustice and inequality of capacities. — Leo Tolstoy According to Marx, since the great injustices of capitalism (thesis) result from the private ownership of property, a new socialistic economy (antithesis) will eventually emerge in which private property is abolished. Society will at last be able to provide decent, meaningful lives to virtually everyone (synthesis). As a result, no one will need private property or wealth. Instead of having to compete for a good life, we will live harmoniously, doing creative, satisfying work that benefits us individually at the same time it benefits society collectively. There will be only one class, hence no class conflict. The economy will reach a state of balance, and history as such (not the world, just history as class struggle) will end. Philosophical Query Contemporary economists worry that although historically the American economy has been remarkably strong, the past few years have witnessed a major housing collapse, labor unrest, increasing and persistent unemployment, and declining tax revenues, along with global crises affecting the cost of health care, oil, cotton, and food. Do you think today's economic uncertainties are associated with the globalization of capitalism? If so, is this the beginning of the end of capitalism that Marx foresaw? Or are there other, better explanations?