Week 6: Marx

Karl Marx

(1818-1883) i.e. mid to late 19th century

Marx Context: Thwarted Attempts at Political Reform in France

1814: Bourbon Restoration - associated with reaction after Napoleonic wars, reactionary political economy

  • Fuedal interest reassert their power and legislation is pursued to restore their property rights

1830: July Revolution

  • Empowerment of citizenry through the reestablishment of the national guard
  • Electoral reform
  • Religious equality between Catholics and Protestants
  • Lessening of royal authorities

1848: Year of Revolutions (Sicily, France, Germany, Italy, Austrian Empire)

  • Across Europe precipitated by economics crisis
  • All of these fail
  • Napoleon

Have mentioned a number of revolutions in this course e.g. America, Haiti

Why Study Marx?

  • Coinage and Critique of Classical Political Economy
  • Complement to Neoclassical Economics - pluralist
  • Social Relations as figuring in political economy - mainstream academic thinker -> not merely an economist
  • Dynamic rather than static processes
  • 20th century history is indecipherable without him - theory of history of capitalist economy

“Philosophers have long tried to understand the world. The point is, however, to change it.” Marx

Biography

  • Born 1818, Trier (Prussia after 1815)
  • 1841: PhD from University of Jena - borrows his physics from materialists
  • Works as a journalist after his time as a doctoral studdent
  • 1842: Meets Engels - Engels does a lot of cleaning up after Marx
  • 1843: Moves to Paris - acquaints himself with French Socialist thought
  • 1845: Expelled from Paris (Thanks, Prussians!) - Prussian state which is later unified as part of Germany is unhappy with his political activitiies
  • 1848: Manifesto!
  • 1849: Settles in London - 33 years of his life in London lot of time spent in British Museum
  • 1864: Founds International Workingmen’s Association - man of action as well

Engels: 1820 - 1985)

  • Comes from money - he’s a factory owner
  • Irony of all this is that Engels is a capitalist
    1. Military training drawn to radicals who are camping out in Berlin
  • 1842 onward. Works at Manchester textile firm owned by his family, “Ermen and Engels”
  • 1845: The Condition of the Working Class in England - sensitive portrayal of their plight (inspiration for Marx)
  • 1850-70: Living and working in Manchester to support Marx
  • 1870-95: relocated to London. Editor of volumes two and three of Capital
  • 1889: Founds Second International Workingmen’s Association

Influences on Marx

3 main influences:

  • German Idealists
  • French Radicals
  • Classical Political Economists

German Idealists

Hegal (1770-1831)

  • Reason has a history (i.e. it is embodied in human societies), the progress of Freedom
  • The absolute spirit (Geist) = infinite rational subject that comes to know itself over time
  • The world realises iteself as an infinite, rational subject
  • Reason is being actualized in the world (the rational is actual and the actual is rational)

Feuerbach (1804-72)

  • Critic of Hegel - leftist persuasion and major influence on Marx
  • Religion is an alienated form of human emotion - in Hagel religion is something society is moving away from
  • Notion of human species-being: and loss of essential community through religion over time
  • Involved in political activity - it is in the response to him that Marx famously writes “Philosophers have long tried to understand the world. The point is, however, to change it.”
  • Criticism of the mainframe of these people who are influenced by Hagel

French Radicals

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Utopian Socialists
  • Private Property as the Root of Evil (Rousseau and Proudhon)
  • Community of Property - espouse socialism before Marx and are united by the conviction that private property is a great ill in society

Classical Political Economists

  • Among them Smith, Say, Malthus, Ricardo
  • Marx describes the above as “economists who have investigated the real internal framework of the bourgeois relations of production”
  • Marx respects the CPE’s as they have some kind of framework of understanding rather than merely descriptive political economy
  • At the same time Marx is critical of the CPE’s as it belongs to a period in England when the class struggle was underdeveloped - not adequately radical

Marx acknowledges that these guys:

  • Recognises some form of labour theory of value
  • Propose that the key theoretical relations to be studied are those between elements of rent and wages in manufacturing production and socially rather than focussed on individual actors (aggregate groupings of society like Ricardo)

Ricardo: “the interest of the landlord is always opposed to that of the consumer and manufacturer.” (1817)

Theory of Historical Change → Historical Materialism

Marx is often understoof as a crude materialist - which couldn’t be farther from the truth

  • Marx is purely responding to Hagel’s ideas based sort of synthesis
  • Project becomes to turn Hagel on his head and to bring back material into that framework of analysis

All societies can be divided into forces of production and relations of production:

  • Forces of production - base, technology used by society in producing material goods.
  • Relations of Production - superstructure, the rules of the game, the relations between people and things like property relations

Once the existing relations of production are no longer appropriate for the forces of production, you have revolutions

One of his criticisms of CPE is it does not account for how forces of production undermine the relations of production (e.g. technological change) → these theories do not account for things like Captain Swing Riots

Stages of History:

  • Stages of History: Primitive Communism→ Imperialism→ Slave Society →Feudalism → Capitalism → Socialism → Communism
  • First stage: Tribal form - (prologue to primitive communism as is not a full on class system) society has no social classes but it’s structured in kinship relations in hunting and gathering. Quite elementary in terms of the complexity of society - further extension of the division of labour within one family
  • Second stage: Primitive Communism - ancient communal and state ownership proceeds from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or conquest. First official class based society
  • Third stage: Feudalism - state property. Like tribal and communal ownership as is based on the community but the producing class standing over against it is not the slaves but a rather kind of small peasantry

Class Struggle as a motor of historical change - what helps move from one stage to the other

Marx’s Critique of Capitalism (critique not criticism)

Critique of Capitalism-I: Alienation

Alienation: Separation of labor from ownership of the means of production → this is a key component of capitalism

  • From products of labour
  • from the processes of work - hyperspecialisation
  • From themselves
  • From others

Why? Division of Labour

  • “The division os labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.”

What would unalienated life look like? What would communist society look like?

“While in Communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes. Society regulates the general production and that makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow. To hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic”

Basic form of freedom not equality: “The condition for the free development of each is the free development of all” Marx

Critique of Capitalism-II: Value

In pre-capitalist society, goods are produced for their use value - commodities are produced for consumption by the producers e.g. farmers

  • vs. Exchange value - in a capitalist society commodities are not produced for the producer, there is exchange in a market

Labour allows commodities to be exchangeable - what allows commodities to be exchangeable is their labour content

  • Labour power - living human labour power is the only source of new exchange value. Is a commodity like any other

A common mistake in interpreting Marx is to say that value is determined by the value of what the worker produces

  • Rather, value is determined by the cost of producing the worker - this is why the physicist is paid more than the textile worker, it costs more to produce that worker than it does to produce the textile worker who is unskilled

Surplus value = price – cost of production

Labour is robbed of surplus value because they don’t own the means of production - the capitalists own the means of production

  • According to Marx - captial has no role in creating surplus value (not necessarily a fact, is sort of up for debate)

Critique of Capitalism-III: Profits and Accumulation

What keeps profits in the positive?

  • Malthus - population increases push wages down so profits are maintained
  • Marx - reserve army of the unemployed (people, for example, who have been dispossessed in primitive accumulation) once they’re employed and wages rise, further technolgoical advance allows them to be released again back into the pool of the reserve. Continue push them out and draw them back which allows you to continue to extract that surplus value out of them and continue to have profits

But profits persist?

Mill and CPE agree on the falling rate of profit to reach a stationary state, for Marx the mechanics are slightly different

  • According to Marx, the profit rate (rather than absolute profit) depends only on labour
  • If you increase captial to increase total profit, the profit employed per unit of capital declines - profit rate declines
  • Over time this leads to a concentration in industry and a lower demand for labour
  • Why? reserve army of labour
  • Reinvestment of profits leads to accumulation

What Will Happen (According to Marx)

Capitalism will:

  • dogged by its contradictions will dissolve
  • Proletarian wages will continue to be so depressed that over time they will broadly be at the level below subsistence, at some point things will snap and they will realise their social consciousness as a class, they will come together and fight a revolution and they will seize the means of production

Socialism - in the beginning this will lead to socialism

  • incentive system - still the basis of economic activity
  • You produce more value you get more income
  • At some point the need for the state will wither

Communism - emerges from socialism

  • Monetary or material incentives won’t drive work
  • Marx’s passage - hunting and gathering and driven by curiosity
  • Under communism each contributes to their own ability and receives according to needs

Weaknesses of Marx

State - Marx doesn’t adequately think through the forms in which the state can be representative in that process of movement from socialism to communism

Teleological? - does everything really progress to this one fixed end point? Is that really how things work?

Class Analysis - can we reduce class to bourgeois and proletariat

Question of is mankind perfectible? This utopia of Marxism that we talk about is that something that might be what Marx himself would have hoped for society