Marx: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Peter Singer

This influence has not been limited to communist societies. Conservative, liberal, and democratic socialist governments have established social welfare systems to cut the ground from under revolutionary Marxist opposition movements.

Mussolini and Hitler were aided in their rise to power by conservative forces that saw them as the most promising way of combating the Marxist threat.

the United States, where there was no real prospect of Marxists gaining power, the existence of a foreign Marxist enemy served to justify governments in restricting individual rights, increasing arms spending, and pursuing a bellicose foreign policy that led to the overthrow of...

Though theoretically opposed to what he called ‘a superstitious attitude to authority’ (MC 157), Marx was so convinced of the importance of his own ideas that he had little tolerance for opinions different from his own. This led to frequent rows in the Communist Correspondence Committee and in the Communist League that followed

Jenny’s maid, Helene Demuth, still lived with the family, as she was to do until Marx’s death. (She was also the mother of Marx’s illegitimate son, Frederick, who was born in 1851; to avoid scandal, the boy was raised by foster parents.)

Wider recognition came slowly. Marx became a well-known figure not because of Capital, but through the publication, in 1871, of The Civil War in France.

Hegel describes this as a situation in which Mind is ‘alienated’ from itself—people (who are manifestations of Mind) take other people (who are also manifestations of Mind) as something foreign, hostile, and external to themselves, whereas they are in fact all part of the same all-encompassing whole.

The orthodox interpretation of Hegel was that since human society is the manifestation of Mind in the world, everything is right and rational as it is.

For the Young Hegelians the ‘superficial expression’ of Hegel’s philosophy was his acceptance of the state of politics, religion, and society in early 19th-century Prussia. The ‘inner core’ was his account of Mind overcoming alienation, reinterpreted as an account of human self-consciousness freeing itself from the illusions that prevent it achieving self-understanding and freedom.

Under Bauer’s influence Marx seized on orthodox religion as the chief illusion standing in the way of human self-understanding.

In the Phenomenology Hegel referred to the Christian religion at a certain stage of its development as a form of alienation, for while God reigns in heaven, human beings inhabit an inferior and comparatively worthless ‘vale of tears’. Human nature is thus seen as divided between its essence, which is immortal and heavenly, and its non-essential, mortal, and earthly incarnation. Hence individuals see themselves as fulfilled only after they leave their body and enter another realm; they are alienated from their mortal existence and the world in which they actually live.

It was humans, he maintained, who had created this God that now seemed to have an independent existence, an existence that made it impossible for humans to regard themselves as ‘the highest divinity’.

The Young Hegelians were captivated by Hegel’s philosophy, but regarded it as mystifyingly presented and incomplete. To make sense of it, it needed to be rewritten in terms of the material world instead of the mysterious world of Mind.

Like Bauer, Feuerbach characterized religion as a form of alienation. God, he wrote, is to be understood as the essence of the human species, externalized and projected into an alien reality. Wisdom, love, benevolence—these are really attributes of the human species, but we attribute them, in a purified form, to God. The more we enrich our concept of God in this way, however, the more we impoverish ourselves. The solution is to realize that theology is a kind of misdescribed anthropology.

Whatever the reason, the essay shows a lack of sensitivity to the issue of antisemitism, but it does not show, as some have suggested, that Marx himself was an antisemite.

In terms of the development of Marx’s thought, the importance of the essay is that for the first time, Marx sees economic life, not religion, as the chief form of human alienation.

Marx portrays religion as a response to the oppression and heartlessness of the world; but an inadequate response because instead of challenging the oppression itself, it merely numbs the pain.

In ancient Rome, the lowest class of citizens was the proletariat. Marx applies this term to industrial society to refer to the working class, those who do not own property and live by selling their labour.

The propertyless working class, however, possess nothing but their status as human beings, and thus can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity.

Since human alienation is not a problem of a particular class, but a universal problem, whatever is to solve it must have a universal character—and the proletariat, Marx claims, has this universal character in virtue of its total deprivation. It represents not a particular class of society, but all humanity.

Marx had now developed two important new ideas. The first is that the chief form of human alienation is not philosophical nor religious, but economic, grounded in the way we satisfy our material wants; and the second is that the material force needed to liberate humanity from its domination by the capitalist system lies in the working class.

Marx rejects the idea that anything would be achieved by an enforced wage rise. Labour for wages is not free productive activity. It is merely a means to an end. Marx describes higher wages as nothing but ‘a better payment of slaves’ that does nothing to restore significance or dignity to workers (EPM 93). Instead, Marx advocates the abolition of wages, alienated labour, and private property in one blow: in a word, communism.

One might expect Marx to go on and explain in some detail what communism would be like. He does not—in fact despite the vital importance that communism has in his philosophy, nowhere in his writings does he give more than sketchy suggestions about what a communist society would be like.

Ultimate liberation, however, is not in doubt; it is philosophically necessary. The immediate task of revolutionary theory is to understand in what way the present situation is a stage in the dialectical progress to liberation. Then it will be possible to encourage the movements that will end the present stage, ushering in the new age of freedom.

Marx wants to combine the active, dialectical side of idealist thought with the materialism of Feuerbach: hence ‘dialectical materialism’ as later Marxists called it (though Marx himself never used this phrase).

For Marx the unity of theory and practice meant the resolution of theoretical problems by practical activity.

This is generally read as a statement to the effect that philosophy is unimportant; revolutionary activity is what matters. It means nothing of the sort. What Marx is saying is that the problems of philosophy cannot be solved by mere interpretation of the world as it is, but only by remoulding the world to resolve the philosophical contradictions inherent in it. Philosophy is crucial because it points to the problems that can be overcome only by changing the world.

The productive forces give rise to relations of production. Relations of production are relations between people, or between people and things. The miller may own his mill, or may rent it from its owner. Owning and renting are relations of production.

It is these relations—not the forces themselves—that constitute the economic structure of society.

So we have a three-stage process: productive forces determine relations of production, which in turn determine the political, legal, and ideological superstructure. The productive forces are fundamental. Their growth provides the momentum for the whole process of history.

They therefore have exchange-value. ‘Exchange-value’ is a key term in Marxist economics. It is contrasted with ‘use-value’. The use-value of a pound of sugar is its power to satisfy people’s desires for something sweet. The exchange-value of a pound of sugar might be, in a certain time and place, two pounds of potatoes or, expressed in terms of money, say, £1. Use-values therefore exist independently of a market or any other system of exchange: exchange-values do not.

While all capital is a sum of exchange-values, however, not all sums of exchange-values are capital. A sum of exchange-values becomes capital only if used to increase itself by being exchanged for labour. Thus capital cannot exist without hiring wage-labour.

This is what Marx means when he says that capital buys ‘living labour’. The worker gets a fixed sum, regardless of what the capitalist can make out of the worker’s labour-power.

Surplus value is the value the capitalist is able to extract from the labour-power he buys, above the exchange-value that he must pay for it. It is the difference between labour-power as a creative, productive force, and labour-time as an objectified commodity.

Thus Capital, like Marx’s other writings, is based on the idea that human beings are in a state of alienation, a state in which their own creations appear to them as alien, hostile forces and in which instead of controlling their creations, they are controlled by them.

This is how capitalism enslaves its workers. Through machinery and the division of labour, capitalism greatly increases the productivity of human labour; but this increased productivity does not benefit the producers.

Under capitalism, however, labour is geared to the production of goods for exchange. Paradoxically, under these conditions increased productivity does not lead to the production of more exchange-value. Instead, the exchange-value per item of what is produced drops.

The vastly greater development of productive forces that takes place under capitalism provides the means, Marx believes, to reduce the domination of nature over us to insignificant proportions. This huge increase in productivity should make it possible to hugely increase human freedom. Under capitalism, however, this potential increase in human freedom cannot become actual for the majority of the population, because the position of workers as a class in relation to capitalists as a class means that they are not free.

Marx sketches how the laws of capitalism will bring about its own destruction. On the one hand competition between capitalists will lead to an ever-diminishing number of monopoly capitalists: on the other hand the ‘misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, and exploitation’ of the working class will continue to grow. But the working class is, because of the nature of capitalist production, more numerous and better organized. Eventually the dam will burst.

It will not mean a return to private property in the old sense, but to property based on the gains made under capitalism, that is, on cooperation and common possession of land and the means of production. Capitalism will make the transition relatively easy, since it has already expropriated all private property into its own hands.

More important is Marx’s claim that under capitalism the rate of profit tends to fall. Marx argued that the surplus value of the past accumulates in the form of capital. Hence capital is always increasing, and the ratio of ‘living labour’ to capital is always decreasing; but since capitalists only make profit by extracting surplus value from living labour, this means that the rate of profit must fall in the long run. All this was part of Marx’s attempt to show that capitalism cannot be a permanent state of society.

For instance, Marx asserts that all profit arises from the extraction of surplus value from living labour; machines, raw materials, and other forms of capital cannot generate profit, though they can increase the amount of surplus value extracted. This seems obviously wrong. Future capitalists will not find their profits drying up as they replace their last workers by intelligent robots. Instead, the profits will flow from their competitive advantage over other manufacturers who produce at higher cost because they are still paying human workers.

Many of Marx’s other theories have been refuted by events: the theory that wages will always tend downwards to the subsistence level of the workers; the theory of the falling rate of profit; the theory that under capitalism economic crises will become more and more severe; the theory that capitalism will force more and more people down into the working class; and the theory that, to force wages down, capitalism requires an ‘industrial reserve army’ of paupers, people who are unemployed or irregularly employed, and living near the subsistence level.

His answer to these questions was the doctrine of surplus value. As an economic doctrine it does not stand up to scientific probing. Marx’s economic theories are not a scientific account of the nature and extent of exploitation under capitalism. They nevertheless offer a vivid picture of the kind of society created by the forces unleashed by capitalism:

It is a picture of human alienation, writ large as the dominance of past labour, or capital, over living labour. The value of the picture lies in its capacity to lead us to see its subject in a radically new way. It is a work of art, of philosophical reflection, and of social polemic, all in one, and it has the merits and the defects of all three of these forms of writing.

This was especially tragic in Germany, where at the last free election before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Social Democrats and Communists together won more seats than the Nazis and could have kept Hitler out of power if they had been willing to work together.

There is a reason for Marx’s reticence over the details of communist society. He believed that history owed its momentum to the development of the forces of production rather than the development of ideas.

While theory could describe existing reality in this way, however, for theory to reach ahead of its time was another matter altogether. Marx derided as ‘utopian’ those socialists who thought that the way to bring about communism is to produce a blueprint of a future communist society

Marx thought the division between individual interest and community interest was a feature of a particular stage of human development,

Here the materialist conception of history underpins the possibility of communism. According to Marx’s view of history, as the economic basis of society is transformed, so is our consciousness. Greed, egoism, and envy are not ingrained forever in the character of human beings. They would disappear in a society in which private property and private means of production were replaced with communal property and socially organized means of production.