Marx: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Peter Singer

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. They must take the terms the capitalists offer them, or starve; and capitalists will only employ them under terms that allow surplus value to be extracted from their labour. This is not because capitalists are cruel or greedy—though some may be—but because of the economic laws inherent in capitalist production which, through free competition, coerce individual capitalists just as they coerce individual workers.

Near the end of the first volume of Capital the gloom lifts. 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 is a painting of capitalism, not a photograph.

Engels said that although the materialist conception of history and the doctrine of surplus value were Marx’s crowning theoretical discoveries: Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat …

Describing Marx as ‘a revolutionist’ indicates that Marx believed a revolution would be required to overthrow capitalism. That is the clear message of The Communist Manifesto:

Later, however, Marx did not rule out the possibility of a democratic transition. According to newspaper reports of remarks he made during a visit to Holland in 1872, he acknowledged that in some countries—he mentioned America, England, and possibly Holland itself—workers might be able to obtain their goal by peaceful means. Engels also described Marx as having thought that in England the revolution might be both ‘peaceful and legal’. (See Figure 9.)

It is therefore worth noting that Marx was not opposed to attempts to get better conditions for workers, even when they fell far short of communism, but better conditions were not his real goal. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels refer to the successful battle for legislation limiting the working day to ten hours, and say that the ‘real fruit’ of such struggles is that they help to form the workers into a class and a political party (CM 252).

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 in which everyone works happily together and no one has to live in poverty.

Marx condemned conspiratorial revolutionaries who wished to capture power and introduce socialism before the economic base of society had developed to the point at which the working class as a whole was ready to participate in the revolution.

He saw his role as raising the revolutionary consciousness of the workers and preparing for the revolution that would occur when conditions were ripe.

Marx saw communism as the answer to every problem, and indeed as a virtual paradise on earth.

How did Marx think the opposition between private and communal interests could be overcome? Obviously the abolition of private property could play a part—it is not so easy to feather one’s own nest if one doesn’t own any feathers, or a nest. But the change would have to go deeper, for even without private property people could pursue their own interests by trying to get as much as they could for themselves (for immediate consumption if the abolition of private property made hoarding impossible) or by shirking their share of the work necessary to keep the community going, especially when the work is arduous or dangerous. To alter this, nothing short of a radical transformation of human nature would suffice.

In The Communist Manifesto, for instance, morality is listed together with law and religion as ‘bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests’ (CM 254).

Marx proposes the celebrated principle of distribution for a communist society: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. The principle is not original to Marx, and Marx places little emphasis upon it. He refers to it only in order to criticize those socialists who worry too much about how goods would be distributed in a socialist society. Marx thought it a mistake to bother about working out a fair principle of distribution.

Production will be cooperatively planned for the benefit of all, not wasted in socially fruitless competition between individual capitalists for their own private ends. There will be no crises of overproduction, as there are in unplanned economies. The reserve army of unemployed workers required by capitalism to keep labour cheap and available will be employed and become productive. Mechanization and automation will continue to develop as they had developed under capitalism, though without their degrading effect on the workers, and presumably with a drastic reduction in the hours of necessary labour. No longer will surplus value be extracted from the workers to line the pockets of the capitalists. The working class will receive the full use-value of its labour, subject only to a deduction for future social investment. We will control our economy, instead of being controlled by it.

Relieved from oppressive conditions that bring their interests into conflict, people would voluntarily cooperate with each other.

Marx did not make scientific discoveries about economics and society, however, what did he get right?

He predicted that: While capitalists get richer, workers’ wages will, with a few short-lived exceptions, remain at or near the subsistence level. More and more independent producers will be forced down into the proletariat, leaving a few rich capitalists and a growing mass of poor workers. The rate of profit will fall. Capitalism will collapse or be overthrown because of its internal contradictions. Proletarian revolutions will occur in the most industrially advanced countries.

More than a century after Marx made these predictions, most of them are so plainly mistaken that one can only wonder why anyone sympathetic to Marx would attempt to argue that his greatness lies in the scientific aspects of his work. In industrialized countries, workers’ real wages have risen far above bare subsistence. Rates of profit rise and fall in different times and places, but the long-term decline that Marx predicted has not eventuated. Capitalism has gone through several crises, but nowhere has it collapsed or been overthrown as a result of internal contradictions. Communists have taken power in less developed nations, rather than in the more industrialized ones.

A scientific theory that yielded predictions as far astray as Marx’s predictions would have to be abandoned, or at a minimum, heavily revised. It is better to think of Marx as a philosopher—in the broadest sense—than as a scientist.

As a philosopher, Marx’s work endures. It has altered our understanding of our history and our social existence, and deepened our grasp of what it is to be free. Freedom was Marx’s central concern—paradoxical as this may seem when we look at the regimes that have professed to follow his ideas.

Defenders of capitalism can readily admit that some capitalists may be greedy, but they can also point out that no one is forced to work for or buy from any individual capitalist. So the greed of individual capitalists is not a reason for condemning the free enterprise system.

Marx saw that within its own terms this defence of capitalism is coherent; but he also saw that from a broader, historical perspective, the liberal definition of freedom is open to a fundamental objection. An everyday example illustrates this objection. Suppose I live in the suburbs and work in the city. I could drive my car to work, or take the bus. I prefer not to wait for the bus, so I take my car. Fifty thousand other people living in my suburb make the same decision. The road to town is choked with cars. It takes each of us an hour to travel ten kilometres.

We have all chosen freely, for no one deliberately interfered with our choices; yet the outcome is something none of us wants. If we all went by bus, the roads would be empty and we could be at work in twenty minutes. Even with the inconvenience of waiting at the bus stop, we would all prefer that. We are, of course, free to take the bus, but all the other cars on the road slow the bus down, so none of us has a sufficient reason to do so. We have each c...

Where those who hold the liberal conception of freedom would say we are free because we are not subject to deliberate interference by other humans, Marx says we are not free because we do not control the social and economic arrangements that dominate our lives.

In an unplanned economy, human beings unwittingly grant the market control over their lives. If we all plan the economy cooperatively we will, in Marx’s view, be reasserting our freedom as a community or even as a species.

The alternative conception of freedom Marx espoused does, however, face a difficulty: how do we obtain the cooperation of each individual in the joint endeavour of controlling our economy and our society? This unsolved—and largely unaddressed—problem in Marx’s critique of liberal freedom is one of the threads that link his theory with the murderously authoritarian regimes that subsequently purported to follow his ideas. Return for a moment to our example of the commuters. They hold a meeting. All agree that it would be better to leave their cars at home. They part, rejoicing at the prospect of no more traffic jams. But in the privacy of their own homes, some reason to themselves: ‘If everyone else is going to take the bus tomorrow, the roads will be empty. So I’ll take my car. Then I’ll have the convenience of door-to-door transportation and the advantage of a traffic-free run.’ From a self-interested point of view this reasoning is sound. As long as most take the bus, a few others can free ride on the socially minded behaviour of the majority, without giving up anything themselves. What should the majority do? Should they leave it up to the conscience of each individual to decide whether to play their part? If they do, there is a risk that the system will break down—once a few take their own cars, others will soon follow, for no one likes to be taken advantage of. Or should the majority attempt to coerce the minority into taking the bus? That can be done in the name of fr...

Though his own personality had an authoritarian streak, there can be little doubt he would have been appalled at the power Lenin and Stalin wielded in his name, and if, miraculously, he had been alive and living in Russia in the 1930s, he would surely have been a victim of Stalin’s purges.

Marx expected the abolition of private property and the institution of common ownership of the means of production and exchange to bring about a society in which people were motivated more by a desire for the good of all than by a specific desire for their own individual good. In this way individual and common interests could be harmonized. Coercion would be unnecessary because communism would end the conflict between individual interests and the common good. The state, as an agent of coercion, could then wither away, leaving only administrative functions to be run by the workers.

Marx shattered the assumption that our intellectual and spiritual lives develop independently of our economic existence. If ‘Know thyself’ is the first imperative of philosophy, Marx’s contribution to our self-understanding is another reason for ranking him highly among philosophers.

Human nature is not as pliable as Marx believed. Egoism, for instance, is not eliminated by economic reorganization nor by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new ‘needs’ emerge. In our society, people want not simply clothes, but fashionable clothes; not merely shelter from the weather, but a house to display their wealth and taste. Granted, capitalist enterprises spend billions of dollars trying to persuade us that we need things that we really do not need, but we cannot put all the blame on advertising. Desires to own and consume items that are not necessary for our physical health and well-being emerge in the non-capitalist world as well, often in the face of disapproval from the official ideology. Unless rigid uniformity is imposed—and perhaps even then—these desires will find an outlet.

No society, no matter how egalitarian its rhetoric, has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled. Nor has any society succeeded in making this distinction merely a matter of who leads and who follows: to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges.

During the era of Soviet communism, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens. Before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy (and their families). Throughout the ‘communist’ nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and lifestyle came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. (George Orwell brilliantly satirized this process in the changing lifestyle of the ruling pigs in Animal Farm.) In the end, hardly anyone believed in the Soviet form of communism.

Early in his career, Marx formulated his view of human nature in one of his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’: ‘… the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’ (T 172). That statement involves an important insight—human nature is affected by the prevailing social relations, and so is different in different kinds of society—but it is misleadingly one-sided. There are elements of human nature that are inherent in most (if not all) human individuals. Changing the social relations, or the economic basis of society, will not eliminate them. Marx’s mistake about human nature helps to explain the failures of several forms of communism that have claimed to be Marxist.

Among social mammals, higher-ranking individuals have advantages in reproducing and in ensuring the survival of their offspring. In these species, the tendency to compete for status is therefore likely to have been selected for during millions of years of evolution, and now to be innate. Humans are social mammals, and it would be surprising if we, or many of us, had not also inherited a desire to rise up hierarchies, whether of power, or wealth, or social status. If we have, it will not be nearly as easy as Marx thought to bring the conflicting interests of human beings into harmony.

This conclusion has far-reaching consequences for Marx’s positive proposals. If changing the economic basis of society will not bring individuals to see their own interests and the interests of society as the same, then communism as Marx conceived it must be abandoned. Marx never intended a communist society to force the individual to work against his or her own interests for the collective good—at least not for longer than the brief period in which the economic structure of the society was in the process of transitioning to social ownership, and human nature was adjusting to this change, as Marx assumed it would. The need to use coercion would signify not the overcoming of alienation, but the continuing alienation of man from man; a coercive society would not be the riddle of history solved, but merely the riddle restated in a new form; it would not end class rule, but would substitute a new ruling class for the old one.

We should not blame Marx for dictatorships that he did not foresee and which, if he had foreseen them, he would have condemned. Nevertheless, the distance between the communist society Marx envisaged and the form taken by ‘communism’ in the 20th century may in the end be...

There is one other element of Marx’s views that, with the benefit of hindsight, we may consider conducive to authoritarian forms of communism. One of Marx’s predictions, as we have seen, was that the proletarian revolutions that abolished private property would occur in the most advanced industrialized countries, in which the working class constituted the overwhelming majority of the population. Since the workers owned nothing, and were living close to subsistence, they had, as Marx and Engels famously pointed out, ‘nothing to lose but their chains’ (CM 271). They could, therefore, reasonably be expected to be enthusiastic supporters of communism. In fact, however, the first successful communist revolution took place in Russia, the least industrialized of the major European powers. In 1917, Russia’s small industrialized working class was heavily outnumbered by agricultural workers and small rural landholders. Rural areas are typically more conservative than urban areas, and rural landholders stood to lose a great deal from the abolition of private property. It is not surprising, therefore, that communism could only be imposed on Russia with the use of considerable force and, when resistance appeared, increasing brutality that led to the murder and incarceration of millions of people.

Subsequent communist revolutions were also successful in countries with little or no industrialization (at least if we set aside those countries in which communists achieved power because of Soviet influence): for example, in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, and Laos. In all of these countries the communist governments took authoritarian forms, though with varying degrees of oppression.

Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system that controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal so...

From the end of the First World War, in 1918, to the end of the Second World War, the great ideological battles were between Marxism, fascism, and liberal democracy. After 1945 the Red Army brought the Soviet version of Marxism to much of Eastern and Central Europe. China became Marxist, as did North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, and eventually a unified Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos.

Marx’s influence depends on the extent to which we judge that the communist regimes properly reflected Marx’s ideas, or were a grotesque distortion of them.

Any discussion of Marx’s relevance in the world today must start with the fact that almost 1.4 billion Chinese live under the rule of the Communist Party of China, which according to its constitution adheres to Marxism-Leninism, as well as views developed by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and more recent Chinese leaders. Officially, Marx’s ideas are regarded as the basis for all of these views, and the outcome is described as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.

It is sometimes assumed that the era of reform instituted by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, which allowed private businesses to be established, represented a decisive break with Marxism.

Deng’s economic reforms have been extraordinarily successful, pulling more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty. Today China looks and feels very much like a capitalist country, with a vigorous market economy.

at the Communist Party of China’s 95th anniversary in 2016, President Xi Jinping re-emphasized Marxism, saying, ‘The whole party should remember, what we are building is socialism with Chinese characteristics, not some other -ism.’

It would not be far-fetched to say that China’s poor record of overcoming poverty under the rigid state control of the economy that prevailed under Mao Zedong, combined with its remarkable post-reform economic growth after Deng’s opening of the economy, is itself a convincing refutation of Marxist economics. It is ironic that this refutation came about under the guidance of the Communist Party of China.

Piketty’s demonstration of capitalism’s inherent inegalitarianism is a welcome antidote to the claims of neoclassical economists that the rich have more because they are more productive or more highly skilled. On Piketty’s analysis, owning capital is enough to put one among those whose wealth will grow faster than those who live by selling their labour, no matter how highly skilled that labour may be.

Piketty advocates a tax on capital as the only workable remedy for the increasing inequality generated by capitalism. The problem is that he doubts that such a tax—which would have to be global to prevent capital flowing out of those countries that tax it—is politically feasible.

It is true that the reduction of international barriers to trade has exposed a much wider section of the world’s people to the economic reach of capitalism, but this has not united the international working class, let alone brought about a revolution capable of overthrowing global capitalism.