Understanding Marxism

by Richard D. Wolff

Critics see and understand any society differently from its admirers. To understand anything, intelligent people consider society directly but also consider how others see and understand it. Thus, they consider (1) what those people believe who like it, but also (2) what those people believe who don't like it. From all those considerations, thoughtful conclusions are drawn.

"The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general." – Karl Marx

He discovered that the reason why capitalism failed to realize liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, was that its own structure and social effects were themselves obstacles to realizing those lofty goals. In making that discovery, Marx retained those goals as his own.

The master decides whether, when, how, and how much of the slaves’ output will be returned to the slave for the latter’s reproduction (food, clothing, shelter, etc.). This result can be expressed by dividing the length of the slaves’ working days into two portions: one is the portion whose products are returned to the slaves for their consumption. Marx called this the slaves’ “necessary labor.” The second portion of the slaves’ labor yields products kept and used by the master; Marx called this “surplus labor.” It was labor done by slaves beyond that necessary for whatever level of reproduction masters allowed them.

Marx referred to slaves and serfs as “exploited” laborers precisely because (and to the extent that) a portion of their labor and its products were appropriated by persons other than the laborers themselves.

Marx’s argument then hits home: capitalism remains like slavery and feudalism because (1) it too divides the participants producing and distributing goods and services into two groups (employers and employees), and (2) it too divides the laborer’s working day into necessary and surplus portions.

Capitalism, Marx said, never went beyond those economic models where a few dominate a majority. Capitalism just replaced the dichotomies of master/slave and lord/serf with a new one. A dominating and exploiting minority was still there, but it had a new name: employers.

Marx showed that one key foundation for capitalism’s failure to realize liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy was the internal organization of the capitalist enterprise. There, a tiny group of people at the top (major owners and top executives) make all the key decisions regarding what, how, and where to produce and what to do with the fruits of their employees’ surplus labor. The employees are systematically excluded from making those decisions, but they must live with the results of those decisions.

But not all people work, not all use their brains and muscles to transform nature. There are always parts of each human society – large and small – that do not work. Those parts survive if and only if the members of the society who do work produce more than they themselves consume. That output exceeding what the workers themselves consume is what Marx means by a surplus.

Marx then explains what most workers at least instinctively intuit. An employer will only pay a productive worker $20 per hour if during that hour more than $20 worth of sales revenue results. In that more, Marx tells us, lies the surplus in its capitalist form.

Marx’s conclusion follows: to achieve liberty, equality, brotherhood and democracy in any society, any exploitative production relationship must be excluded.

For a minority to appropriate and distribute the surplus produced by a majority is inconsistent with and undermines the progressive social goals advocated by the French and American revolutions and given lip service everywhere ever since.

Marxist writings have often spoken of “wage slaves.” That was not just a casual remark. It links the condition of the wage earner to that of the slave. Looking at wage earners’ freedom through the lens of Marx’s surplus theory exposes that freedom as illusory. In capitalism, most workers are trapped into being either a wage-earner producing surplus for an employer or else a wage-earner serving an employer and living off the distribution of some oth...

Capitalists likewise use the surplus appropriated from productive workers to reproduce the social relations of capitalism, the society of employers and employees. This means giving capitalists – and their delegated representatives – the dominant positions not only in the economy but also in politics and culture.

In capitalism - a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, or right now - it’s the employer class that is socially dominant. Marx’s contribution was to locate in production the fundamental mechanism whereby this domination is secured.

There was the class of surplus producers, the class of surplus appropriators, and the class of those receiving shares of the surplus distributed to them by the appropriators.

“As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.” – Karl Marx

One implication of Marx’s analysis is that the class of employers will always seek to reduce the wages paid to their hired, productive laborers. Likewise, employers will always seek to lengthen the time and pace of work.

The reasons for both pressures lie in the simple arithmetic of capitalist exploitation: the greater the value added by the laborers and the smaller the portion returned to them as wages, the greater the surplus acquired by the capitalist.

Just as earlier societies had made the inequalities resulting from slavery and feudalism matters caused rather by nature or God, in capitalism strong ideological tendencies make inherent individual variability (“human nature”) the cause. It too, like nature and God, cannot be changed by mere mortals. The passing social convention – made and changed by society – becomes instead moored and unmovable in cement. Those who rule societies need desperately to believe and have others believe their positions are permanent.

The personnel manager in a modern capitalist corporation does not labor with machines to transform raw materials into commodities for sale. Such a manager controls and maneuvers productive laborers but is not one of them. The salary and equipment such a manager uses represent costs to the capitalist defrayed by distributions of the surplus. In capitalism, as Marx makes so clear, the capitalist has to distribute much of the surplus to others in order to keep on getting surplus. Without personnel managers, the surplus-producing workers might produce less surplus or none at all.

For capitalism to reproduce itself, it requires performers and enablers, productive and unproductive laborers, but that does not mean their differences do not matter. Quite the contrary: in every exploitative economic system, the two different kinds of laborers have played varying roles in supporting or overthrowing the system, in seeking political alliances with each other or alternatively with surplus appropriators. In slavery, for example, field and house slaves exhibited varying relationships. So too did serfs assigned to agriculture versus crafts. Capitalism has had its blue and white collar employees. To Marx’s credit, his surplus theory – and the class analysis built on it – grasped the deeper, systemic importance of these differences.