Karl Marx (1818-1883): the theorist of capitalism, the historian of economic theory, a great economic theorist. dialectical materialism was Engel’s idea.
Analytical Marxists:
- Gerald Cohen, KARL MARX’S THEORY OF HISTORY,
- Jan Elster, MAKING SENSE OF MARX
Robert Wolff: Marx considers the philosophy of a society to be a part of its ideological superstructure, along with its religion, law, and art, among other things. Moral judgments are a part of the philosophy and law of a society, hence ideological and superstructural as well. The fundamental principle of bourgeois justice is that equals be given for equals in a free and open marketplace where men [it is always men] meet one another as legal equals, none compelled by law or custom to enter into bargains with another. The ideal capitalist, Marx argues, pays a fair price for the labor he employs. He pays a price equivalent to the reproduction cost of that labor, which, as he and Ricardo would say, is equal to the labor value embodied in that labor. Now, to be sure, capitalists do not play fair. As Marx tells us in the great chapter on The Working Day, capitalists try such underhanded tricks, in their effort to extract more value from their workers, as fiddling with the clocks in the factory so as to make the workers labor for a bit longer than the contracted for ten or twelve hours. But this is not exploitation. This is just cheating.
A good deal of Volume One is devoted to discovering how capitalists manage to pull off this trick – the secret to profit. Marx’s solution – which, as I have explained at length elsewhere is in my opinion incorrect – is the distinction between labor and labor power. It is as confused as asking whether, from a bourgeois perspective, feudal laws regulating the making and selling of craft goods are unjust. Exploitation would indeed be unjust in a socialist society, just as exploitation is just in a bourgeois society.
David Ricardo (1772-1823), one of the most influential classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and James Mills.
essential readings on Marx’s thought
- The Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
- The Communist Manifesto
- Volume One of CAPITAL
- Part One of THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY
- Marx: UNDERSTANDING by Robert Wolff
- MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY by Robert Wolff
- Jerrold Siegel, MARX’S FATE
Marx’s thought not Marxism
background: French revolution, Napoleon’s wars and capitalism in England
- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) & French Revolution (1789-1799)
At that time, France was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in Europe. Continental Europe had not been much troubled by the overthrow and eventual restoration of the Stuarts in England a century earlier, but when the head of Europe’s most powerful monarch fell into a basket, people took notice. Napoleon’s brief conquests broke up the old Hapsburg Empire and set free cultural and political forces that transformed Central Europe. 1871, Paris Commune.
Napoleon’s brief conquests broke up the old Hapsburg Empire and set free cultural and political forces that transformed Central Europe.
- The development of capitalism in England: the explosive rise and expansion of capitalism. Unlike the political revolutions, this transformation matured first in England. Even France, whose highly developed and rationalized economy was still largely agricultural, did not experience the capitalist transformation as early as did England, and in the part of Europe in which Marx was growing up, the economy was still for the most part in a late feudal stage of development.
The Communist Manifesto, 1848, published in London.
- First of all, there was an explosion of output.
- “new men”: factory owners who had begun life in modest circumstances as apprentices or journeymen, and made money so rapidly that in their own lifetimes they were able to marry their daughters off to impecunious aristocrats or buy themselves titles.
- the transformation of cities
- the erosion of the traditional authority and position of the landed aristocracy and the clergy
- the emergence of a large, literate class of businessmen, merchants, and their families, who became not only a market for the novel, as literary historians have noted, but also a powerful class demanding a real voice in the affairs of government, and prepared to call into question the traditional authority of king, noble, and cleric.
part 2
- Hegel immanentized and secularized the Christian story.
The Christian story, in its outlines, recounts the succession of metaphysical or theological stages through which human beings move on their way from the beginning to the end of history. History begins with the Creation, which includes the creation of Man in the Garden of Eden. The second stage begins with The Fall, which results in mortality and the expulsion from Eden. The third stage commences with God’s compact with Abraham, repeated and deepened by the renewal of the compact [or Testament] with Noah and Moses. God gives to Man His Law, in the form of the Ten Commandments and their elaboration, and promises that if Man will keep this Law, God will make him to multiply and flourish. The entire period of the Old Testament is the period of The Law. But man repeatedly shows that he cannot keep God’s Law, which, since it is eternal and divine law, must obeyed to the last jot and tittle if at all. So God in His infinite mercy makes The Law flesh in the Person of His only begotten son, Jesus Christ. With the Incarnation there begins a new metaphysical stage in the history of Man, the stage of the Word Made Flesh. Jesus offers Man salvation if he will but have faith, which is to say believe in the truth of this Divine Promise. But this too is impossible for Man, so God confers upon some men, despite their not deserving or having earned it, the ability to have Faith, which is to say Grace. Jesus promises to return from beyond the grave, at which time the Final Judgment will determine who is saved and who damned. And Time itself will end.
All that is important is whether one lives before or after the Fall; whether one lives under the Law or after the Law has been made Flesh. Everything is to be understood theologically, not sociologically or anthropologically.
What on earth does this have to do with capitalism and communism? Everything, as it turns out. The logical structure of the Christian story is this: A sequence of stages, each one utterly different from the others by virtue of its unique relation to God and His Law. The Creation, the Fall, the Old Testament, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the End of Time are defined by that relationship. There is, notice, no other order in which these stages could possibly occur.
- Marx built Hegel’s notion of stages of social development into the theory of economic development that he called Historical Materialism.
part 03
- alienated labor: the object which labour produces – labour’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer
part 04
crops <- time + labor: cultivation + rain + sunshine <- land
oil <- time + labor: survey, search + equipment <- land or sea
product <- time + electricity: power + labor + raw material + machine <- factory
the difference bewteen feudalism and capitalism lies in the machines as a way to transform human labor into newly created products. farming uses a natural process (sunshine + rain + time) to add value to human labor. manuafacturing uses a man-made process (machine + power: steam, wind, electricity + time) to add value to human labor. then the ultimate factory is fully-automated with the raw material as the input and final refined new products as the output.
the machines with some technologies embedded empower their operator.
The alienation is multi-dimensional.
First of all, the worker, as we have seen, is alienated from the product of her labor, which appears to her as an enemy controlling her and depriving her of freedom.
The worker is also alienated from fellow workers who are, or ought to be, colleagues and comrades in a collective undertaking. Since jobs are scarce and there is an endless pool of men and women desperately seeking jobs [the “reserve army of the unemployed,” as Marx famously called them], each worker sees the others as enemies, threatening to take one of the scarce jobs.
The capitalist, who is the real enemy, is misperceived as a benevolent figure graciously offering a subsistence job and allowing the worker to survive for another day.
The worker is alienated, as well, from the labor process, which becomes mechanical, painful, constricting, enslaving, rather than fulfilling, graceful, natural, human.
And finally, the worker is alienated from herself, from her true nature or, in the language of the day, her “species being.” In what is surely one of the most moving passages in the entire socialist literature, Marx writes:
“The worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague.”
1848, the Communist Manifesto: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
in the Middle Ages, the real roots of clerical and monarchical power were mystified by religious superstition and the fiction of the divine right of kings, but that under capitalism, the clouds of mystery had been blown away by the cool breezes of reason, so that it was immediately apparent to nineteenth century Europeans that the power of church, state, and capital rested upon force alone. But the failure of the revolutions seems to have persuaded Marx that Capital’s power was itself mystified, by the doctrines of laisser-faire and free trade, so that it was not at all easy to understand how the ever-greater productivity of industrial capital served to strengthen its ability to defeat all challenges. By contrast, feudalism was relatively transparent. It was obvious even to the peasants themselves that the wealth of their feudal masters came from the days of labor service that they were forced to provide on the lord’s lands.
part 5
- classical political economy: Adam Smith and David Ricardo
Turgot and Quesney: economic activities as an endless cyclical process of reproduction. the output of the nation at one point in time becomes the input of the productive process at a later point in time.
part 6: who gets the surplus?
kings, princes, oligarchs, pharaohs, priests, generals, landed aristocrats, tyrants – and as entrepreneurs, merchants, advertising executives, lawyers, professors, and elected politicians. Life is good for the surplus getters; not so good for those who produce the surplus.
How do the surplus getters get the surplus?
At first, this is, and is understood to be, simple theft. Then taxes. Then taxes by the state.
How do the surplus getters get the surplus in a capitalist society. in which all men are free [we pass over in silence for the moment the condition of women], and all exchanges in the marketplace voluntary and based on mutual self-interest?
part 7
three parts: rent for land, profit for business owner, wage for labor
Adam Smith: natural price (equilibrium price or value) and market price. The natural price of a good is determined by the amount of labor that is required to produce it.