Marx: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Peter Singer

For much of the second half of the 20th century, nearly four out of every ten people on earth lived under governments that considered themselves Marxist and claimed to follow his ideas in deciding what policies they should implement. In these countries Marx was almost a secular deity.

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.

Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818.

Marx had an opportunity to make his own ideas the basis of communist activities when he went to London in December 1847 to attend a Congress of the newly formed Communist League. In lengthy debates he defended his view of how communism would come about, and in the end he and Engels were given the task of putting down the doctrines of the League in simple language. The result was The Communist Manifesto, published in February 1848. It was to become the classic outline of Marx’s theory.

Marx sees economic life, not religion, as the chief form of human alienation.

Now Marx insists that it is neither religion nor philosophy, but money that is the barrier to human freedom. The obvious next step is a critical study of economics.

‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ 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.

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, supplant the criticism of weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory, too, will become material force as soon as it seizes the masses.

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.

‘As philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons.’ He then puts it more explicitly: ‘Philosophy cannot realize itself without transcending the proletariat, the proletariat cannot transcend itself without realizing philosophy’

The property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves, but in doing so, they would not win freedom for all human beings. In maintaining their own property rights, they would be excluding others from the freedom they gain. The propertyless working class, however, possess nothing but their status as human beings, and thus can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity.

His reasons for placing importance on the proletariat are philosophical rather than historical, economic, or scientific. 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 began his critical study of economics in 1844. It was to culminate in his greatest work, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, the first volume of which was published in 1867,

Marx explains, is to show that according to classical economics the worker becomes a commodity, the production of which is subject to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. If the supply of workers exceeds the demand for labour, wages fall and some workers starve. Wages therefore tend to the lowest possible level compatible with keeping an adequate supply of workers alive.

Capital is nothing else but accumulated labour. The worker’s labour increases the employer’s capital. This increased capital is used to build bigger factories and buy more machines. More sophisticated machinery increases the division of labour, thus putting more self-employed workers out of business. Now the formerly self-employed workers have no option but to sell their labour on the market. This intensifies the competition among workers trying to get work, and lowers wages.

Marx, in other words, wants to give a deeper explanation of the meaning and significance of the laws of economics.

the more the worker externalizes himself in his work, the more powerful becomes the alien, objective world that he creates opposite himself, the poorer he becomes himself in his inner life and the less he can call his own. It is just the same in religion.

The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object and this means that it no longer belongs to him but to the object

Ideally the objects workers have freely created would be theirs to keep or dispose of as they wish. Under conditions of alienated labour, workers must produce objects over which they have no control, because the products of their labour belong to their employers.

Because workers are no longer able to produce freely in accordance with their imagination—and that was, Marx thought, what distinguishes us from non-human animals—workers are alienated from their species-being.

Instead of humans relating to each other cooperatively, they relate competitively. Love and trust are replaced by bargaining and exchange. Human beings cease to recognize in each other their common human nature; instead they see others as instruments for furthering their own egoistic interests. They are alienated from their common humanity.

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.

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.

All human senses, he claims, are degraded by private property. The dealer in minerals sees the market value of the jewels he handles, not their beauty. In the alienated condition caused by private property we cannot appreciate anything except by possessing it, or using it as a means. The abolition of private property will liberate our senses from this alienated condition, and enable us to appreciate the world in a truly human way.

These are the essential points of ‘the first Marxism’. It is manifestly not a scientific enterprise, at least not in the sense in which we understand science today. Its theories are not derived from detailed observations or factual studies, nor subjected to controlled tests or observations.

engraved on Marx’s tombstone in Highgate Cemetery. It reads: ‘The philosophers have only

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.

‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (P 425).

Human beings cannot be free if they are subject to forces that determine their thoughts, their ideas, their very nature as human beings. The materialist conception of history tells us that human beings are subject to forces they do not understand and cannot control. These forces are not supernatural tyrants, forever above and beyond human control, but the productive powers of human beings themselves. These productive powers, instead of serving human beings, appear to them as alien and hostile forces. The description of this state of alienation, along with the more detailed explanation of its origins and the form it takes, is the materialist conception of history.

According to Engels, Marx grew so irritated at misinterpretations of his doctrine that towards the end of his life, he declared: ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist.’

for Marx the productive life of human beings, rather than their ideas and consciousness, is ultimately real. The development of these productive forces, and the liberation of human capacities that this development will bring, is the goal of history.

a question we might have asked Marx, if we had had the opportunity: ‘Since you believe that the productive forces will finally assert themselves, why did you bother to spend so many evenings going to meetings of the International Workingmen’s Association, rather than relaxing at home with your family?’ Marx might have answered that he enjoyed being the tool of history. More reasonably, he might have believed that although the productive forces would finally assert themselves anyway, the transition to the new communist era would come sooner if he helped the workers to get organized—and since capitalism causes so much unnecessary suffering, the sooner it is replaced, the better.

Marx regarded Capital as his masterpiece. In it, he presented his economic theories to the public in their most finished form.

Under capitalism workers are forced to sell their labour—which Marx regards as the essence of human existence—to the capitalists, who use this labour to accumulate more capital, which further increases the power of the capitalists over the workers. Capitalists become rich, while wages are driven down to the bare minimum needed to keep the workers alive. Yet in reducing so large a class of people to this degraded condition, capitalism creates the material force that will overthrow it.

Marx starts with labour. Labour is described as ‘the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life’. Yet it becomes, under capitalism, a commodity the worker must sell in order to live.

His real life only begins when his work ceases, ‘at table, in the public house, in bed’ (WLC 275–6).

Marx then asks how wages are determined and answers that the price of labour is determined like the price of any other commodity. It may rise or fall according to supply and demand, but the general tendency is for wages to level down to the cost of production of labour, that is, a subsistence wage that pays no more than what is necessary in order to keep the worker alive and capable of working and reproducing.

Commodities are items which can be exchanged against other items—for instance, a pound of sugar may be exchangeable for two pounds of potatoes, or half a pound of strawberries. They therefore have exchange-value.

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.

Use-values therefore exist independently of a market or any other system of exchange: exchange-values do not.

Now capital is really a sum of commodities, that is, of exchange-values.

Poverty and affluence are affected by the wealth of our neighbours because, Marx says, our desires are of a social nature. They are produced by our life in society, rather than by the desired objects in themselves. Thus even steadily rising wages do not produce greater satisfaction if the standard of living of the capitalist has risen even more—

Capital increases its domination by increasing the division of labour. This occurs because competition between capitalists forces them to make labour ever more productive, and the greater the scale on which they can produce, and the greater the division of labour, the more productive labour is.

The worker, Marx writes: sells labour itself as objectified labour; i.e. he sells labour only in so far as it already objectifies a definite amount of labour, hence in so far as its equivalent is already measured, given; capital buys it as living labour as the general productive force of wealth; activity which increases wealth. (G 307)

What does Marx mean by this distinction between objectified and living labour? Objectified labour is the predetermined amount for which the capitalist pays—for instance, the worker’s labour for one day. This is labour as a commodity. The exchange-value of this commodity is the amount needed to produce it, that is, the amount needed to keep the worker alive and reproducing, so that there will be a continuous supply of labour. But there is a dual nature to the exchange of labour and capital. The capitalist obtains the use of the worker’s labour-power for the prescribed period—say, one day—and can use this labour-power to produce as much wealth as he is able to get out of it. 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.

Increasing the fruitfulness of labour therefore increases its use-value but not the exchange-value of its output. 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. If in pre-capitalist times people had to work for twelve hours to produce the necessities of life, doubling the productivity of their labour ought to mean that they can now choose between an extra six hours of leisure, twice as many useful products, or some combination of the two. 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.

Since wages tend to fall to a subsistence level, the overwhelming majority of human beings gain nothing from the increased productivity of human labour. That, at any rate, is Marx’s view.

But what happens to the increased productivity, if it does not improve the lives of the workers? Marx’s answer is that it is skimmed off from the worker’s output in the form of surplus value. The capitalist obtains the use-value of the worker’s labour-power, and pays only the exchange-value. Because labour-power is a commodity that can be used to produce more value than it has itself, the capitalist is able to retain the difference between the two.

The fact that the worker obtains only the exchange-value, rather than the use-value, of his labour, means that in order to earn enough to support himself he has to work a full day—say, twelve hours—whereas his labour produces the use-values of th...