Why Read Marx Today? PDF

Why Read Marx Today? Jonathan Wolff OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS  Why Read Marx Today? Jonathan Wolff is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He is author of An Introduction to Political Philosophy (OUP) and Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal Stat...

Why Read Marx Today? Jonathan Wolff OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS  Why Read Marx Today? Jonathan Wolff is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He is author of An Introduction to Political Philosophy (OUP) and Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State (Polity), and co-editor of Political Thought in the Oxford Readers series.  Why Read Marx Today? Jonathan Wolff 1  3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto with an associated company in Berlin Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Jonathan Wolff 2002 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published in hardback 2002 First published in paperback 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–280505–3 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in New Baskerville by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc  Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 Marx’s life and works 4 The plan of this book 9 1 Early Writings 13 Introduction 13 Religion 14 The philosophy of historical materialism 21 Labour and alienation 28 Money and credit 37 Liberalism 40 Emancipation 45 Conclusion 47 2 Class, History, and Capital 48 Class 48 History 52 v  contents The economics of capitalism 66 The transition to communism 82 The nature of communism 92 3 Assessment 100 Introduction 100 Early Writings 102 Theory of history 109 Economics 113 Communism 118 Human nature 122 Conclusion 125 Guide to references and further reading 127 Index 131 vi  Preface In 1986 I took up a lectureship in philosophy at University College London. The duties of the post included lecturing on Marxism, within a course initially set up by my teacher, Jerry Cohen, who had recently left UCL to take up a Chair in Oxford. I enjoyed reading and thinking about Marx, and so was happy enough to take this on. But I also thought that the course probably would not survive for long. I could under- stand that students would like to be taught Marxism by the leading Analytical Marxist of the day, but I thought that with Jerry’s departure interest in Marxism would wither away. Well, I was wrong. The teaching of Marxism in the Philosophy Department at UCL survived Jerry’s move. It also survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and has flourished in the face of the alleged deradicalization and careerism of today’s students. The course is now more popular than ever, especially with US students in London for their Junior Year Abroad. This book—written at the suggestion and invitation of Shelley Cox—is based on the lectures that I have delivered over the years. The very first draft of the book was written not in a villa overlooking Lake Como, or in a prestigious US Institute of Advanced Research, but on the London Underground: spe- cifically the Northern and Victoria lines, scribbled into little notebooks as the trains juddered between ‘non-station stops’. I can recommend the practice: it is liberating to have a vii  preface reason to want the train to be delayed. And it is a want very often satisfied. Several friends read much later versions of the text, and I am particularly grateful to Terrell Carver, Jerry Cohen, Jon Pike, and Rajeev Sehgal, all of whom made valu- able written comments and saved me from embarrassing errors. Writing this book has rekindled my appetite for going back again to read more and more of Marx’s writings (a never-ending task). I hope that those reading this book will understand why. viii  Introduction In 1907 the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce asked ‘What is living and what is dead in the thought of Hegel?’ Every decade or so, someone or other gets the idea of asking the same question about Marx. Well, now it is our turn. At the start of the twenty-first century how much, if anything, will escape the funeral pyre? My answer is: more than one might think. In recent years we could be forgiven for assuming that Marx has nothing left to say to us. Marxist regimes have failed miserably, and with them, it seemed, all reason to take Marx seriously. The fall of the Berlin Wall had enormous symbolic resonance: it was often taken to be the fall of Marxism as such, as well as of Marxist politics and economics. But in celebrating the end of the ‘evil empire’ we forgot that the thinkers who inspired Eastern European commun- ism were not evil people. On the contrary, they saw them- selves as our saviours. At huge personal cost they sought to liberate humanity from what they believed to be an inhumane economic and social system: capitalism. They were fired both by a vision of how society ought to be and an account of what was wrong with existing, bourgeois, society. The positive vision turned into a nightmare (although, as we shall see, whether communist regimes were an authentic interpretation of Marx’s ideas is another question). But the failure of communism does not mean that all is well with 1  introduction Western, liberal, democratic capitalism. And it is Marx, above all, who still provides us with the sharpest tools with which to criticize existing society. We can think of Marx as the great-grandfather of today’s anti-capitalist movement. Of course, much has changed. For example, Marx seems to have assumed that natural resources were inexhaustible, and thus he has a much more limited ecological perspective than one would expect today. But on the other hand Marx portrays a world in which the capital- ist market comes to permeate society, putting a price on everything and crowding out non-economic forms of value. Businesses grow ever-larger, becoming more ruthless and exploitative—more vampire-like—in the process. Under cap- italism progress comes at a high price. As Marx himself put the point in 1856—in a speech at the anniversary of the People’s Paper: In our day everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and over- working it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine except on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seems to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (M. 368) (For an explanation of the referencing 2  introduction system adopted here, see Guide to References and Further Reading.) These, and many other, points will be explored in more detail over the course of this book. Today’s critics of capital- ism will still find Marx’s writings to be a rich vein of source material. Now it is one thing to be able to identify the faults in capit- alism, but is quite another to be able to say what we should do instead. (It is reported that one demonstrator at a recent anti-capitalist demonstration held up a banner reading ‘Replace Capitalism with Something Nice’.) Marx the cre- ative thinker was hugely optimistic, sometimes mistaken in his arguments and assumptions, often infuriatingly vague about the details, and in consequence has little to tell us now about how to arrange society. But his criticisms of late nineteenth-century society have enormous relevance even in the early twenty-first century. We may have no confidence in his solutions, but this does not mean that the problems he identifies are not acute. This, at least, is what I shall argue here. Reading Marx, though, is a task to be handled with care. Although sometimes regarded as a great stylist—and perhaps he is by the standards of contemporary economists and social theorists—reading the texts can be dispiriting. His great mas- terpiece, Capital Volume 1 begins with page after dry page on the definition and nature of the commodity (although patience is eventually rewarded). His early essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, which is possibly one of most important 3  introduction and influential works of political philosophy of the last two hundred years, is virtually incomprehensible to those without some knowledge of the surrounding philosophical and polit- ical context. Perhaps The Communist Manifesto, jointly written with Engels, is his most widely read work. This is much more accessible, but its polemical tone does not do the depth of Marx’s thought real justice. It may be true of many great thinkers, but it is certainly true of Marx, that his texts are best read when you already know, roughly, what they are going to say. Reading them with this knowledge allows one to appreciate the detail of his ideas, and often the almost breathtaking originality and qual- ity of his mind, even in work that was left as an unfinished first draft. But at this stage you will have to take my word for it. Many of the texts I shall discuss here are available, usually in abridged form, in the volume Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan. Wherever possible I shall give page references to the second edition of this collection, marked as, for example (M. 123). If, as I hope, on reading this book you become inspired, if only for the moment, to read some Marx, the McLellan collection is where to start. Marx’s life and works Marx was born in 1818, in Trier, in the German Rhineland: a part of Germany which previously had been occupied by the French under Napoleon, but more recently had been 4  introduction assigned to Prussia. Marx’s father, a lawyer, was born a Jew but converted to Christianity when the anti-Jewish laws of 1816—laws which undid Napoleonic liberalization— required him to give up either his profession or his religion. Marx was a precocious schoolchild, and even some of his schoolwork has been republished in the huge Marx/Engels Collected Works, and in the amazing internet archive www.marxists.org. Thus one may read the seventeen-year old Marx on ‘A Young Man’s Reflections on the Choice of a Career’, either in the original Latin or translated into most major languages. After an extended and rather florid reflec- tion upon ambition and the importance of being suited to one’s chosen career, the essay ends: If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experi- ence no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetu- ally at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people. (www.marxists.org) A famous early letter to his father, written aged nineteen, when a law student in Berlin, is the earliest of his better- known work. In it Marx provides an astonishing account of his work of the term: his poetry (‘these are characteristic of all the poems of the first three volumes that Jenny [Jenny von Westphalen, his wife-to-be] has received from me’); his trans- lations from classical languages; his 300-page philosophical treatise on law; his dialogue unifying art and science; and the barely believable quantity of law and philosophy he has read. 5  introduction Thus, he says, ‘during my illness I got to know Hegel from beginning to end, together with most of his disciples’. As an aside he reports that he is starting to teach himself English and Italian. The letter ends with a postscript, the first line of which has stayed with me for the twenty or more years since I first read it: ‘Forgive, dear father, the illegible handwriting and bad style; it is almost four o’clock. The candle is burnt right down and my eyes are sore’ (M. 9–13). One feels that Marx had already, by this time, adopted a way of working that would not change for the rest of his life. On completion of his studies in law Marx undertook a doctorate in Philosophy, presenting a comparison of the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus. But although hoping for an academic job, the intellectual company he kept was too radical, and, as an atheist to boot, there was no hope. Turning to journalism Marx continued to pursue rad- ical and anti-governmental lines of thought, and, by 1843 was effectively forced out of Germany, moving to Paris, where he wrote some of the most important of his early writings. Dur- ing this time Marx first encountered Engels, who was travel- ling between business in Manchester and home in Germany. By now known as a subversive and revolutionary, Marx was expelled from Paris, at the request of the Prussian author- ities. With his wife and infant daughter, Jenny, he moved to Brussels in 1845, continuing his writing and developing some of the ideas about history and economics that would come to dominate his later writings. In late 1847 ‘a spectre [was] haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism’. Or at least this is how Marx and 6  introduction Engels opened The Communist Manifesto (M. 245). (The first English translation rather spoilt the effect, beginning ‘A frightful hobgoblin is stalking Europe’.) Indeed by the time the work was published, in early 1848, revolutions had begun and Marx returned to Germany to play an active role, at least through his journalism. But as events played out the revolu- tion failed and the counter-revolution soon set in. Marx returned to Paris, and then on to London in 1849, where he settled for the rest of his life. As is well documented, Marx’s life at this time revolved around his scholarly work, his involvement in political intrigue, and the basic necessity of feeding his expanding household. Sadly, only three of his six children survived infancy. Francis Wheen’s recent biography is especially good on how Marx struggled to work, buttressed by credit, loans, and hack writing. So, for example, in the 1850s Marx became the London correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Many have remarked on the irony of New Yorkers receiving their analysis of British events through Marx’s eyes, although by all accounts he (or rather, in many cases, Engels in Marx’s name) did an excellent job. From the mid-1850s he concen- trated on the economic analysis of capitalism, and after pro- ducing several published and unpublished manuscripts, finally published his masterpiece, Capital Volume 1, in 1867. From then on Marx continued to combine economic theory with political agitation, although his personal economic struggle had been somewhat alleviated by a legacy received in 1864. However, as his health deteriorated, and he engaged in increasing controversy with people who were potential allies, 7  introduction Marx was unable to complete further volumes of his eco- nomic work, even though much was already drafted. At his death, in 1883, he left a vast mass of manuscripts. The most important of these were eventually published as Capital Volume 2 (1885) and Volume 3 (1894), both edited by Engels, and as three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value edited by the Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky and published between 1905 and 1910. How faithful these edited works are to Marx’s own thought continues to occupy scholarly debate. The definitive edition of Marx and Engels’ work, if it is ever to be completed, is the aptly named MEGA 2 edition (Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe) in which all works are planned to be printed in their original languages. More than 100 large volumes were initially announced. An earlier, more concise, German edition runs to a mere 41 volumes. The English Language version, still in process, has already spread to more than 50 volumes, each of around 800 pages or more. It is a life’s work just to read this stuff. So it is with some amusement that one reads Marx, in a letter of 1858, con- cerning some economic writings, saying: ‘If I had the time, leisure, and means to give the whole thing the necessary fin- ish before I hand it over to the public I would greatly con- dense it, as I have always liked the method of condensation’ (M. 562). Incidentally, it tells of the context in which Marx wrote that in the same letter he says ‘The presentation... is wholly scientific, hence not in violation of any police regulations in the ordinary sense’ (M. 562). Marx’s works have gone through an uncountable number of editions and translations, many of which were for a long 8  introduction time printed and disseminated in astonishingly cheap edi- tions produced by Soviet and Chinese state publishing houses. Now the capitalists have got in on the act too. For the centenary of Marx’s death, in 1983, a rash of publishers pro- duced new editions of The Communist Manifesto, hoping to cash in on the publicity, and briefly it was a best-seller. Cur- rently more than a dozen English language editions are still announced as in print. But all sorts of editions of the works exist. I once saw an American illustrated version of Capital Volume 1, produced, I think, in the 1940s, in which sixty selections were each accompanied by an expressionist woodcut, although, sadly, the challenge of producing sixty engaging images of Marxist economic theory was one the illustrator failed to meet. All of the important, and many of the minor, works are now available in free, electronic editions, from www.marxists.org. Could it be that more pages of Marx have been printed than that of any other writer of non-fiction (with the exception, perhaps, of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)? I’ll have to leave that question to others, but I’d like to know the answer. The plan of this book In his speech at Marx’s graveside (1883), Frederick Engels, his lifelong friend, collaborator, and, sometime patron pro- posed that Marx’s immense achievement was to make two discoveries which transformed our understanding of the social world. First, ‘just as Darwin discovered the law of 9  introduction organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of the develop- ment of human history.’ This is the theory of historical materialism. Second, ‘Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of produc- tion and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem... [on] which all previous investiga- tions... had been groping in the dark.’ This, then, is the theory of surplus value. Rudimentary versions of these two ideas—theories of his- tory and of economics—begin to appear in some of Marx’s early writings, composed in the 1840s when Marx was still in his twenties. They were refined and developed throughout Marx’s entire working life. These, we shall see in more detail, dominate his mature thought. But Marx’s early writings contain much more. His ambi- tion, and interest, was immense, and in these writings we see Marx discussing topics, such as religion, barely mentioned later. Although Marx seemed to lose interest in some of the topics he raised this doesn’t mean that we should too, and, in fact, some of the most stimulating themes are developed in these pages. Of the works that are usually referred to as the ‘Early Writings’—those written in and before 1845—only a small proportion were published in Marx’s lifetime. One important group of unpublished writings, variously known as the 1844 Manuscripts, the Paris Manuscripts, and the Eco- nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts—names which tell us all we need to know about place and date of composition and broad subject matter—are a combination of Marx’s reading 10  introduction notes and subsequent reflection, apparently written in a state of great intellectual stimulation and agitation. Though largely aimed at self-clarification, they are for us a treasure trove. Marx’s Early Writings will be the subject of Chapter 1 of this book. Here we will see Marx’s depiction of bourgeois society as a world of alienation. Chapter 2 takes up the ideas identified by Engels; Marx’s economic analysis and his theory of history, which includes his prediction that capitalism must come to an end. These, as I said, are at the centre of Marx’s mature system. Chapter 3 takes stock, attempting to answer our central question: why read Marx today? Here I will argue that while we must abandon Marx’s grand theories, there is still much to be learnt. It is worth remarking, though, that the version of Marx I shall present is much influenced by Engels’ understanding and presentation of Marx’s work. As well as works written solely by Marx, I shall be making use of some jointly written texts (The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto), as well as one important text written entirely by Engels (Social- ism: Utopian and Scientific). And indeed, as we have already seen, I have taken my account of Marx’s greatest achieve- ments from Engels’s speech at Marx’s graveside (itself taken from a somewhat longer article on Marx written by Engels a few years earlier). Understanding Marx through Engels’s eyes is nothing new, for it began in Marx’s own lifetime, and hasn’t stopped yet. However, scholars have always found dif- ferences between the views of Marx and Engels, and for myself I accept that the works that Engels wrote after Marx died provide little real guide to Marx’s own thought. So the 11  introduction interpretation of Marx is still, in a sense, open. But we must start somewhere, and it is the ‘Engelized’ Marx—the trad- itional reading—with which we shall be most concerned here. 12  1 Early Writings Introduction he dominant theme of Marx’s Early Writings is that T the capitalist society of his day is not properly fit for human consumption. It crushes the human spirit, denying the vast majority of people any chance to develop their real potential. No existing theorist, Marx thinks, has diagnosed the human malaise correctly, and thus no one had been in any position to outline a genuine cure, although this had not stopped them trying. Marx is confident that he can do better. In tracing out Marx’s thought here we will start by looking at the criticisms of religion made by Marx’s immediate philo- sophical predecessors, and see how Marx transforms them into a more systematic critique of society, through the development and application of the ideas of alienation and alienated labour. Along the way, we will also come to an understanding of why labour took on the importance it did for Marx. Finally, we will see why Marx thought that granting people rights of the sort we hope to enjoy in liberal regimes is not enough to bring about a truly human society. Thus, 13  early writings essentially, we can see three related aspects of Marx’s Early Writings: his diagnosis of the ills of contemporary society; his critique of the state of existing theory; and his own attempts to provide a solution to the problems he has identified. Religion One reason why the works of the young Marx are so hard for us, at least at first, is that they assume that the reader is thor- oughly immersed in the German politics and philosophy of the early nineteenth century. No longer a safe assumption, I fear. We have seen a sketch of the German political situation in the account of Marx’s life in the previous section. But, unfortunately, the German philosophy of the day was that of Hegel and his immediate followers. Hegel has a thoroughly deserved reputation as the most difficult of the major Western philosophers, and many scholars never emerge from the thickets of his thought. So you will be as relieved as me that this is not the place to attempt to summarize his entire system. By way of introducing the necessary background to Marx we need consider, for the moment anyway, only one aspect of Hegel’s thought, and how this was taken up in the writings of a group of philosophers, many of them friends and col- leagues of Marx, known as the Young Hegelians. These thinkers took inspiration from Hegel to pursue highly rad- ical themes, which may well have been very far from Hegel’s own intentions. In particular we need to pay attention to 14  early writings what has become known as the ‘Young Hegelian theology debate’. We start with a question from traditional theology. Why did God create the world? In fact, this is better put as the impertinent question: why did God bother to create the world? The world, after all, is full of wickedness and suffering. If God is perfect, and self-sufficient, why did he go to the trouble of creating anything at all outside of himself, let alone something so imperfect as the world? Theologians had struggled with this question. Hegel proposed a novel answer. God simply would not be God without the world. This is not the trivial logical point that a ruler needs someone or something to rule over in order even to be a ruler. Rather the point is based on a general theme in Hegel’s philosophy. In many cases agents cannot come to self-understanding unless and until they encounter ‘the other’. Thus God, like other agents, needs to define himself in terms of an external object, which is not God. Only by engaging with and interacting with the world can God come to gain knowledge of himself. Accordingly the story of human history is equally the story of God coming to self- awareness. The Hegelian notion of ‘Geist’, roughly ‘the spirit of the age’, is also, broadly speaking ‘God’s current level of self-understanding’. Part of Hegel’s story is that, as he is writing, the process is nearing its completion, for it is only this fact that allows him to understand the truth. Earlier thinkers were not in a pos- ition to think the thoughts that Hegel was having, for God’s self-consciousness was insufficiently developed. This also 15  early writings means that while other religions, such as Judaism, were obso- lete hangovers from a previous immature era, Christianity is depicted as absolute truth (when suitably understood). Consequently, Hegelianism seemed to imply a type of firm religious commitment. The Young Hegelians could not accept these claims for Christianity. The first major move was The Life of Jesus, written by David Strauss, published in 1835, and translated into English, like some other works of the Young Hegelians, by Mary Ann Evans, better known as the novelist George Eliot. Against the Hegelian doctrine that Christianity, and hence the gospels, represented absolute truth, Strauss shockingly proposed that the New Testament should be read on the model of the Old. That is, as a set of foundation myths. Strauss’s idea was that the gospels, in their similarities and differences, represented attempts to write down an oral tradition. Consequently, the gospels were not historical narratives, but folklore. Strauss’s work sparked much debate, but the knife was twisted further with the publication of Bruno Bauer’s Kritik der evangelischen Geshichte der Synoptiker (3 vols.: 1841–2). On the basis of close textual scholarship Bauer concluded that the gospels were not even folklore. Rather, he argued, the other gospels were all derived from Mark’s. So instead of evidence of an oral tradition, we have three attempts to rewrite a single written story, and then the four were later brought together. If this is true then it seems that Christianity is simply an illusion, and those who believe it, dupes. 16  early writings But if an illusion, why did it catch on so well? Ludwig Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity (1841) (also trans- lated by George Eliot), delivered the explanation and the killer blow. Reviving a well-worked theme, Feuerbach argued that the reason why human beings resemble God is not that God created us in his image, but that we created him in ours. Although an argument known to the Ancient Greeks, it was pleasingly developed by the French Enlightenment philosopher and legal theorist Montesquieu, in his satirical Persian Letters (1721), which is a fanciful account of conversa- tions between Persian travellers and their French hosts. In a memorable passage one Frenchman recounts a story of trav- elling through Africa, and being shocked to see that African art and sculpture depicted God as female, fat, and—heaven forbid—black. The implication is that the Africans should surely have known that God is an elderly white Frenchman, in flowing robes with a white beard. (But didn’t Montesquieu know that God is an Englishman?) His friend remarks that ‘it has been well-said that if triangles had a God it would have three sides’. This, essentially, is Feuerbach’s point. In Feuerbach’s view we human beings have taken the powers that belong to human beings, raised them in thought to an infinite level, and then invented a being outside of us who embodies all these perfections. This God, then, is all- knowing, all-powerful, and all good (as distinct from human beings who are a little bit knowing, a little bit powerful, and a little bit good). But we bow down before this figment of our imagination rather than appreciating our qualities for what they are, and attempting to enjoy them for ourselves. This, in 17  early writings Feuerbach’s view, by diverting our attention and creative powers, prevents us from leading a truly human life, or creat- ing a truly human society. Thus, according to Feuerbach, going beyond previous thinkers, we should abandon religion and replace it with a radical humanism: an understanding, enjoyment and celebration of our truly human powers, which will allow us for the first time to create a genuine community on earth. This was the point the debate had reached as Marx was writing, and is the reason why, in 1843, he was able to open his work Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Intro- duction with the words ‘the critique of religion is essentially complete’ (M. 70). All this, of course, was common know- ledge to the readers of the young Marx, who saw no point in going into the details, merely saying ‘Man has found in the imaginary reality of heaven where he looked for a superman only the reflection of his own self.’ Without knowledge of Strauss, Bauer, and Feuerbach, though, we cannot make sense of that claim. Marx, then, accepted without question Feuerbach’s con- tention that man has invented God in his own image. This is one of those claims that seems obviously true, and a dazzling, liberating, insight to those disposed to believe it, but a crude, insulting and subversive misrepresentation to those who do not. But we can be clear that Marx’s sympathies are with those who wish to ‘debunk’ religion. And we should note that the significance of this debate extends far beyond academic theology. For to attack religion was also to attack the con- temporary political authority which took itself to be founded 18  early writings on religion. This is why the atheism of the Young Hegelians posed such a threat, and why, as individuals, they could not be tolerated. However, Marx was not content with Feuerbach’s position. Once the truth was revealed, and religion exposed for the sham it is, Feuerbach felt that largely his work was done. The truth would be passed from person to person, and religion could not survive this intellectual assault. It would disappear, and human beings would be able fully to enjoy their ‘species-essence’—their truly human qualities—without the distraction, and indeed the barrier, of God. Marx believed this to be a superficial analysis. Although Feuerbach had understood the phenomenon of religion, he had not addressed its causes. But without knowing why religion had come into existence, how can we know how it can be made to disappear? Marx argues, essentially, that human beings invented religion only because their life on earth was so appalling, so poverty-stricken. This is the context of his notorious remark that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ (M. 72). Now for certain modern readers, this may make religion sound not too bad at all. But we have to remember that in the nineteenth century opium was a painkiller. Though, no doubt, it also had its recreational uses, its prime function was as a solace. For example, in the later work, Capital, Marx comments a number of times that nursing mothers coped with their early return to the production line by stupefying their hungry babies with opiates. In one particularly disturbing footnote, Marx describes the visit of a Dr Edward Smith to Lancashire 19  early writings to report on the health of the cotton operatives, who were unemployed owing to a cotton crisis caused by the American Civil War. Dr Smith reported to the government that ‘the crisis had several advantages. The women now had the leisure to give their infants the breast, instead of poisoning them with “Godfrey’s Cordial”’ (an opiate) (Capital 518). In another footnote, a couple of pages later, Marx quotes a Public Health Report of 1864, which says that infants who received opiates ‘shrank up into little old men’, or ‘wizened like little monkeys’ (Capital 522). In sum, then, to understand this metaphor we have to understand three features of opium. First, it produces some feeling of euphoria in those that take it. Second, its common use is as a solace or relief from illness, pain, hunger or other forms of distress. Third, its regular use is very destructive; at the least it prevents the user from flourishing or thriving in a normal human way. To understand the application of the metaphor we also need to understand the ills from which religion is to bring relief. This is the torment of everyday life; consequent on industrialization which promises so much but extracts from the worker such a terrible price (as we shall soon see, in detail). Essentially, Marx tells us that while Feuerbach has noted the symptoms of a deeper malaise, he has done nothing to understand that malaise itself. The invention of religion was not simply an unfortunate mistake, but a response to the miseries of life on earth. Removing the opium leaves us only with undisguised pain. We still need to understand and remove the defects in the world, the ‘secular base’. Marx 20  early writings himself, in his hastily scribbled ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, puts the point I have just explained thus: Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self- contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. (M. 172) We will never rid ourselves of religion, and religious alien- ation, until we first understand, and then remove, the condi- tion on earth that gave rise to it. Once the cause is removed, and the disease is cured, the symptom religion will wither of its own accord. This is a vital point. Religion is not to be suppressed or abolished as such. Under the right conditions it disappears on its own. The cause, the disease, Marx argues, is alienation of a different sort, primarily alienated labour. But before we can sufficiently understand this we need to uncover a little more of Marx’s philosophical background. The philosophy of historical materialism To understand the philosophical view that Marx adopted in his Early Writings we need to take a long run up, and through territory that might at first seem quite unconnected. But indulge me. We will cover the ground very quickly. 21  early writings To begin with we need to ask a very general, even vague, question. What is the basis of the relation between the human subject and the world? One famous answer to this is Descartes’s: the human mind is characterized by thought, while the essence of the world of matter is ‘extension’; loca- tion in space. Thus, there is a radical division between the mind and the world, for you can be assured of your own existence as a thinking thing even when in doubt of the existence of everything else. But on this view how can you know anything, beyond the contents of your own mind? If the external world might not even exist, how can I gain any further knowledge? Notoriously Descartes could make pro- gress only by invoking a non-deceiving God. But if his proofs of God are rejected, as they commonly are, we seem trapped in a world of pure subjectivity. At what appears to be the opposite pole is the materialism of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes takes human beings to be simply part of the material world. On such a conception thoughts are simply ‘internal motions’. Human beings are regulated by the laws of nature, like all else, and philosophical problems become, at bottom, scientific problems. Now our topic is not whether this constitutes an answer to Cartesian scepticism, but the difficulties that arise within the Hobbesian picture itself. For once we have accepted a scientific world of nothing but molecules in motion it is very unclear what room is left for ideas of rationality, morality, and, if we want it, human free- dom. Consider Hobbes’s explanation of morality. Men call ‘good’ those things they desire, and desire is an internal movement. Hence, morality appears to be reduced to motion. 22  early writings A consistent materialist might be prepared to give up ideals of rationality, morality, and freedom, but this places the materialist social critic in considerable difficulty. Con- sider Marx’s criticism of the English utopian socialist Robert Owen, also very briefly discussed (although not by name) in the extraordinarily rich ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. Owen argued that human beings are simply products of their cir- cumstances, and so a change in circumstances is all that is necessary to change human behaviour. This view is often thought to be Marx’s view too, but as we shall soon see, this is not so. Now Owen, perhaps unique among nineteenth- century socialists, had the chance to put some of his ideas in practice. Though not a politician, he was the manager of the New Lanark cotton mill, and so had the perfect opportunity to change his workers’ circumstances, which he did to great effect. His workers enjoyed far superior conditions of work to those elsewhere, and productivity greatly increased too. His methods involved such things as decent housing, the first infant schools, and a reduced working day ( just ten and a half hours). Just as important were innovations within the factory. Here is the example of the ‘silent monitor’ (replicas of which are sometimes available in the gift shop of the New Lanark Mill, which is now a museum): This consisted of a four-sided piece of wood, about two inches long, and one broad, each side coloured—one side black, another blue, the third yellow and the fourth white, tapered at the top, and finished with wire eyes, to hang upon a hook with either side to the front. One of these was suspended in a conspicuous place near to each of the persons employed, and 23  early writings the colour at the front told the conduct of the individual during the preceding day, to four degrees by comparison. Bad, denoted by black, indifferent by blue, good by yellow, and excellent by white. Instead of punishing his employees for a black or blue per- formance, Owen had his supervisors monitor their work, and each day Owen made a point of walking through the mill, inspecting the silent monitors, but saying nothing to anyone. Sure enough the workers’ greatly improved their performance. Owen comments: Never perhaps in the history of the human race has so simple a device created in so short a period so much order, virtue, goodness and happiness, out of such ignorance, error and misery. (Morton (1969), 98–9) Owen’s modern editor remarks ‘It is often said that in this, and other ways, Owen treated his work-people as children. There is some truth in this, but it must be remembered that a large proportion of them were children.’ Nevertheless, the criticism that Owen treated his workers as some sort of lesser beings seems spot on, even if his methods did create virtue out of misery. This leads us to Marx’s own criticism. Owen wanted to change his workers by changing their circumstances, for, according to materialism, people are wholly determined by their circumstances. But how, then, do we account for Owen’s own behaviour? Surely as a creature of his circumstances—much the same as anyone else of his class—he should have shamelessly exploited his workers just as any other self-respecting manager would have 24  early writings done. So how was he, uniquely, able to break out of the shackles of determinism? Owen himself recognized the prob- lem and supposed that there was, luckily, a small class of individual geniuses, who are not subject to the same level of determinism. Yet this cannot be so, if determinism is true. Marx’s penetrating analysis is that Owen’s doctrine must divide society into two classes, one of which is superior to society, and able to change the circumstances of the masses. So Owen’s materialism is not only inconsistent, it is also, in a sense, elitist. Thus Marx rejected the crude materialism of Owen and others. Yet in fundamental philosophical terms its prime dif- ficulty is something it shares with the picture of mind and world we saw was held by Descartes. These views have in common a theory of perception: that the mind is like a camera, recording data it receives from the external world. This we might call a representative or correspondence theory of perception. Now it might seem that there is not much wrong with this. Isn’t this what the mind does? For Marx the problem is that it is essentially a passive account. It leaves out the fact that human beings are active in the world, changing nature and what they see. The vast majority of things that one sees in the world are not simply ‘there’, for us to observe. Rather they are objects which have been created, or, at least, transformed, by human endeavour in one way or another. So human beings are active in the world, not merely pas- sive receivers of the world around them. Marx congratulates the philosophical idealists, notably Kant, for being the first to 25  early writings recognize this truth and to develop it in a systematic, albeit mystified, way. We can see what Marx means by considering some central elements of Kant’s theory of knowledge. Kant’s most innovative idea is that the human mind structures the world through categories and forms of intuition which it imposes on reality. Thus, for Kant, space and time do not exist in the world outside of us, but are ‘forms of sense’ which we impose on reality in perception, in order to organize and conceptualize it. We see things as related in time and space only because the human mind is constructed to see them that way. So in this sense the human mind is active. It creates the main aspects of the world around it. To some important degree the world is a human construction. The basic insight—‘mystified’ by Kant, according to Marx—is that human beings at least in part create the world which they perceive. Yet Marx rejected Kant’s position, endorsing some important criticisms made by Hegel, and then, in turn, criticizing Hegel. Of Hegel’s various criticisms of Kant, two are most relevant here. First, for Kant, the mind has a universal, ahistoric character. The basic structure of the mind is the same in all ages and in all places. By contrast Hegel argued that the human mind developed over time, and, in different cultures existing at the same time, may have reached different levels of development. But second, and more important, the mind develops by interacting with the world. This is a ‘dialectical’ process. As the mind apprehends and tries to make sense of the world, it develops ever-richer and more sophisticated concepts. And as it produces such higher-level concepts it changes itself. But Hegel’s view is also 26  early writings a form of idealism in which the mind makes up the world. As the mind changes, so does the world. Marx thinks that Hegel has got near to the truth. The mind and the world do indeed change together. But Marx also thinks that like Kant, Hegel has mystified the real situation. For Hegel everything takes place abstractly, only on the level of thought, as the history of the development of our concepts. And this is Marx’s objection. In sum, Marx has identified and criticized two dominant philosophical traditions. Materialism, from Hobbes to Feuerbach, is flawed because of its unreflective, ahistoric character, failing to understand the role human beings play in creating the world they perceive. But it is to be praised for understanding man’s continuity with the natural world. Idealism, in its final, Hegelian, form, understands the importance of historical development, but restricts this to the development of thought. This contrast allows us to posit a rather stylized opposition between ahistoric materialism and historical idealism. Put like this, it is not difficult to see what Marx is going to take from each in order to develop a philosophy of historical materialism. Like Hegel, he accepts that man changes him- self and the world through activity in the world. But unlike Hegel this transformation takes place in the practical world, as practical activity, and not merely in thought. One key aspect of such practical activity is productive activity: labour, in other words. Kantian, and especially Hegelian, idealism is a mystified expression of the real relation between human beings and the world. Human 27  early writings beings find self-realization in nature. They change the world not merely by changing the way they conceptualize it but by physically transforming it: with picks and shovels; with ploughs and mechanical diggers; with looms and lathes. In changing the world they change themselves, by developing new skills, but also new needs. And this, in turn, gives rise to new forms of interaction, another aspect of our practical activity. The idea that Marx finds missing in all previous philo- sophical work is that human beings have individual and collective material needs, and it is need, not individual con- templation or thought that provides human beings with their primary form of interaction with the world. In order to satisfy their needs, human beings must labour together on the world, yet in doing so they evolve evermore complex forms of production and social interaction. This engenders new needs, in a never-ending process. So a philosophical view about the interaction of human beings and nature has turned into the rudiments of a historical theory of society. And with this thought, Marx seems to believe, philosophy has finally arrived at the truth it has been striving for. Its work is done. Labour and alienation We can now begin to understand why labour is so important in Marx’s analysis, and also why if labour is alienated this is especially disturbing. For this would mean that there is 28  early writings something wrong with our ability to enjoy what it is that makes us most distinctively human. First, a quick word about the idea of alienation. In com- mon use alienation refers to a feeling, perhaps of extreme dislocation or disorientation. This subjective idea is a part of Marx’s notion of alienation, but only a small part. More fun- damentally alienation is an objective fact about our lives, and we can be alienated without even realizing it. The basic idea is that two things which belong together come apart. In religious alienation, the human essence becomes ‘detached’ from human existence. We do not exercise our most essential features; rather we worship them, in an alien form. Overcom- ing alienation is a matter of bringing the two elements back into some sort of proper relation. This is the foundation of Feuerbach’s radical humanism. The idea of religious alienation, and the associated notions of ‘self-alienation’, and even ‘alienation from species-essence’ (more on this later) were well-known in advanced Young Hegelian circles. However, through his reading of political economy Marx became convinced that the alienation also applied to labour. And, as we have seen, alienated labour is a primary cause of the misery on earth that leads us to create religion, so Marx believes. Marx’s study of accounts and translations of the Scottish economist Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (first pub- lished 1776) led him to recognize several ‘truths of political economy’ which highlight the plight of the worker under capitalism. I should emphasize that they are derived directly from Marx’s understanding of Smith, even though Smith is 29  early writings often thought to have been one of the leading champions of capitalism. And so he was, in a way, yet we see that he also was not blind to its deficiencies. From Marx’s jottings, we can draw out the following points that Marx claimed to have found in his reading of Smith: 1. Under capitalism, the wages of the workers are literally minimal. This is a consequence of the fact that the capitalist is in by far the better bargaining position, and to avoid starving the worker must be prepared to accept the very low wage that will be on offer: a wage just sufficient to keep the worker and family alive. 2. Work is punishing. For the same reason the worker must accept appalling conditions, leading to overwork and early death. 3. Labour is degraded and one-sided. As the division of labour becomes more advanced, labour becomes more machine- like, and ‘from a man [the worker] becomes an abstract activity and a stomach’ (Colletti 285). 4. Labour has become a commodity. It is bought and sold on the market like any other commodity. 5. The worker’s life has become subject to alien forces. The demand on which the worker’s life depends is founded on the desires of the wealthy and the capitalists. Marx’s innovation was to combine Smith and Feuerbach to derive an account of alienated labour. That is, the plight of the worker under capitalism is an instance of the way in which a person’s essence becomes detached from his or her existence; i.e. that workers live in a way that does not express 30  early writings their essence. Human beings are essentially productive crea- tures, but, Marx alleges, under capitalism they produce in an inhuman way. Now, to recall, the 1844 Manuscripts, in which this discussion occurs, is an unpublished first draft, and so is bound to contain some unclarity and can be read in more than one way. But I shall follow what is now the standard interpretation in which, according to Marx, there are four chief forms of alienated labour. The first aspect of alienated labour is alienation from the product. There is, initially, a very straightforward under- standing of this. The worker produces an object, yet has no say or control over the future use or possession of that object. In this sense, then, the worker, individually, is separ- ated from, or alienated from, that product. This observa- tion, of course, is rather banal and obvious. Things become rather more interesting when we start to think about the way that we collectively can become alienated from the products we create. Two key notions are mystification and domination. As we have already noted, Marx makes the point that virtu- ally everything we encounter is either created or somehow transformed by human endeavour. This includes not only obvious human artefacts—the pen with which I write, the chair on which I sit—but even the ‘natural’ landscape around us. As Marx remarks: The sensuous world... is not a given thing direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and the state of society... the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of 31  early writings the preceding one... (the result of) social development, industry and commercial intercourse. (M. 190) Consider, by way of contemporary example, the Shenandoah National Park, in Virginia, USA. A good proportion of this is now officially designated ‘wilderness’, as if human beings barely even know what is there. Yet earlier this century much of the area was farmland. It was converted to a national park in the 1920s and 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, as one of a number of public works designed to tackle unemployment in the aftermath of the depression. Now the first point is that although so much of the world is largely a human creation, we rarely think of it as such, and, in this sense, we are alienated from our products. Furthermore we often tend to take them for granted. Think of the history of engineering that was needed to make it the case that clean hot and cold water comes out of your bath taps. Yet we only take any notice when the supply has the audacity to fail. The mystification is complete when we come to reflect that so few of us really have any idea how common household objects even work. Who among us can honestly say that they under- stand how their refrigerator works, even when it has been explained to them? We human beings have created a world that we simply do not understand; we are strangers in our own world. But not only are we mystified by these products, we come to be dominated by them too. Soon we will learn about Marx’s theory that we are alienated in production. 32  early writings Production line technology is the chief culprit. But who invented this technology, and who built it? We did. Thus it is an example of a product that dominates us. Yet the idea of domination goes much deeper still. Con- sider the well-worn idea ‘you can’t buck the market’. We have become used to the idea that there are such things as ‘market forces’ and if you ignore them you do so at your peril. You are just as likely to come to grief as if you ignored natural forces—gravity, magnetism, and so on. For example, if you are a capitalist and your competitors around you start cutting prices, then you had better follow suit or you will go out of business. If your customers decide that they no longer like what you produce, then you had better produce something else, smartish. The lesson is that the capitalist economy renders some forms of behaviour rational and others irrational. So you had better do what the market mandates or you will be in trouble. Consequently we find ourselves dominated by the market. But what is the market? Simply the accumulated effects of innumerable human decisions about production and con- sumption. It is, then, our own product. From which it follows that, once more, we have come to be dominated by our own product. And even though it is our own product it is not under our control. Who, for example, wants the stock market to crash? But this happens, from time to time, as an unintended consequence of our own individual actions, each one of which may have seemed perfectly rational in its own terms. The market is like a monster we have accidentally cre- ated, but which now comes to rule our lives. As Marx puts it, 33  early writings we experience the ‘complete domination of dead matter over men’ (Colletti 319). Alienation from our product, then, is a rich idea with many strands. The next category is alienation in productive activity. This stems, we saw, from the elaborate division of labour. Now, to be clear, the problem with the division of labour is not that it splits one job into several, more specialized, tasks. Highly specialized tasks can be immensely challenging and rewarding. And whether challenging in itself or not, a task within a division of labour may also form part of joint production or teamwork, which can offer another form of fulfilment. Rather, the problem Marx discerns is that capital- ist division of labour typically leads to a de-skilling of the worker, where each individual is reduced to performing a highly repetitive, mindless task, with little understanding of their place in the total process. We become little more than machines, programmed to make the same movements over and over again. This leads us swiftly to the next category: alienation from our species-being. Now the term ‘species-being’ was taken from Feuerbach, but Marx gives it a new twist. The core idea stems from the question: what is it that is essential to human beings? What is it that makes them a distinctive kind of creature? Now Marx is not interested in biological features of human beings at this point. Rather he divides the species-essence of human beings into two aspects. First, as we have already seen, the distinctive human activity is labour, or, more precisely, social productive activity. Now, of course, other animals 34  early writings produce too. Beavers makes dams; bees make hives. But Marx points out that human beings are capable of free pro- duction in the sense that they can produce in accordance with their will and consciousness in elaborate and unpredicted ways. There is no limit to the range of things human beings may produce. Under capitalism very few people can enjoy this aspect of their species-essence. Rather than expressing our essence in our production, we produce in a mechanical, repetitive way. It is not an enjoyment but a torment: The worker who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.—does he consider this twelve hours spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary life begins for him when this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. (M. 276) The second aspect of our species-being, according to Marx, comes out in another of those ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, this time the sixth thesis, which contains the words: ‘the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’ (M. 172). I understand this to mean that human beings are engaged in an enormous and hugely complex division of labour, that goes beyond the sphere of production narrowly so called. Our artistic and cultural achievements, our material advancement, depend on co-operation that encompasses the globe and the whole of human history. In a familiar example, it is said that there is probably not a single 35  early writings person on earth who could make a simple pencil. It involves so many different technologies and knowledge of diverse materials that its production is beyond the ability of any one of us, taken alone. Consequently, although we rarely think this for ourselves, a visitor from another planet would observe that human beings are involved in an immense scheme of co-operation; making goods that will be used the world over, building on shared knowledge that has been accumulated over the ages. In any one day, a given individual may use or consume objects the production of which may have required, in the end, millions of others. This, then, reveals the social aspect of our species-essence. Now Marx argues that we are alienated from both aspects of our species-essence under capitalism. We already briefly noted the first: that we are alienated in productive activity. We can now see that this is also a way of being alienated from our species-essence. Under capitalism the vast majority of the workforce work in a way that does not engage their distinct- ively human properties. Rather than exercising their creativ- ity, their ingenuity, their ability to respond to many varying challenges and situations, they produce in a dumb, repeti- tive, single-track fashion. They produce as animals do, rather than as humans should. It has been said that for many work- ers the part of the day in which their abilities are most engaged is the drive to and from work. Thus, as we saw, Marx says many of us feel human only when we are not working. The second way in which we are alienated from our species-essence merges into the final category: alienation 36  early writings from other human beings. Here the essential point is simply that we do not appreciate our ‘species-life’ for what it is. Rather than conceiving of ourselves as members of the vast scheme of co-operation just described, we think of ourselves as people who go to work to earn money, and then go to shops to spend it. We are people with tunnel vision. As Marx somewhat obscurely puts it: we use our species-life as a means to individual life. In other words the way in which we pursue our self-interest would not even be possible if we did not have a communal species-essence. Yet we utterly disregard this communal aspect of our lives. We barely give a thought to the question of who will use the things we make, and even less to how the objects we purchase came into existence. We screen everything off except our immediate consumption decision. These are the four ways, Marx argues, in which we are alienated in our labour under capitalism: alienation from the product; in productive activity; from our species-essence, and from other people. But it doesn’t stop there. Money and credit Money is the central part of the explanation of how alien- ation from other people is possible. It acts as a screen which we rarely look behind. But this is not the only adverse effect that money has. In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx also indulges in some literary criticism, reflecting upon an extended passage from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and a shorter passage from Goethe’s Faust. Marx quotes Shakespeare 37  early writings telling us that gold ‘will make black, white; foul, fair; wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant’ (Colletti 376). Marx here makes a number of distinct but related points. First, there is a claim that money subverts and changes every- thing it touches. Money commodifies, transforms, and degrades human relations. People should be loved, for example, because they are loveable, or, perhaps, because of their family relations with others. Yet in a capitalist society, people may be loved because they are rich and others reviled because they are poor. We should admire those who com- mand respect through their actions, their vision, or their concern for others. But, once more, we tend to admire those who are wealthy, irrespective of how they became so. Second, money is corrosive, and everything, sooner or later, has its price. Things that were once done out of a sense that this is what people should do for each other—look after our chil- dren and our elderly parents for example-—we now pay others to do. The capitalistic economy is full of people paying each other to do things that were once done without thought of payment. Money, say Marx and Shakespeare, is the ‘universal whore’ (M. 118). A third claim, and the one most directly derived from the Shakespeare quotation is that ‘money turns all human natural qualities into their opposite’ (M. 118). Now clearly this is a huge exaggeration. But underlying it is the powerful thought that in a society like ours almost anything is possible for those with enough money, but for those without it life will be a frustrating struggle. In an example of enduring rele- vance Marx considers education. The greatest educational 38  early writings resources—we all agree in theory—should be given to those most able to benefit. Yet in a pure capitalist society those with talent but no money will have no access, whereas those with money but no talent can have whatever education they wish. Needs without money will go unsatisfied; whims backed with money will be indulged. Indeed, Marx says as a fourth point, this alienation even infects our language. Need is natural to human beings, and the human world depends entirely on people taking steps to satisfy each others’ needs. Yet, Marx says, under capitalism the language of needs is debased. It becomes humiliating to ask for something on the basis that you need it; it becomes imploring, or whining. And if this wasn’t bad enough, consider the credit system, which is the money system developed perhaps to its highest level of abstraction. Here, Marx says, the decision of whether to extend credit to an individual can even be a matter of life or death for them. (One wonders whether Marx speaks from personal experience.) And in this system of finance without physical money the individual becomes the unit of currency. Consequently to obtain credit it is often necessary to be ‘eco- nomical with the truth’ about one’s past and future. One has to counterfeit oneself. This, in turn, breeds an industry of spies and snoopers, devoted to record keeping and investiga- tion to see who is credit ‘worthy’. And here we see human language debased in another way. ‘What is your net worth?’ and ‘How much are you good for?’ are questions about wealth and credit rating, not about moral assessment of character. 39  early writings The final summit is the banking system and stock market. And we have already noted what that can do to us: it can crash around our ears. Liberalism Marx was not the only one of his contemporaries to criticize the contemporary system in Germany. According to Marx it was backward both politically and economically. Only in philosophy was it ahead of the game. So the need was for both great political and economic change, with political reform the more urgent. For in addition to the woes it suf- fered in common with other advanced nations, it had its own particular difficulties too. Germany, and Prussia in particular, had discriminatory laws that many of us even find hard to comprehend today. Much of the debate centred around the ‘Jewish question’, for the Jews were the subject of legal dis- crimination, and not able to enter certain professions without renouncing their religion, as we saw in the case of Marx’s father. As the young Marx was writing, the Prussian parliament had proposed reform to end anti-Jewish discrimination. Yet the reform had been vetoed by the King, and so discrimin- ation continued. Prussian liberals were understandably crit- ical, continuing to call for legal equality. Yet Marx’s friend and fellow Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, wrote two articles arguing against Jewish emancipation. Now this needs to be understood carefully. Bauer did not favour discrimination. 40  early writings However, he argued that in asking for the same rights as the Christians, the Jews were asking to join in the servility that the Christians experienced. Until both Jews and Christians gave up their religion, proper emancipation for either was impos- sible. It was impossible to have a private life as a member of a religion—as the ‘chosen people’ for example—and a public life as a citizen. This, clearly, bears comparison with Feuerbach’s argument that religion is a barrier to the enjoyment of our species-essence and must be transcended. Marx’s reply to Bauer in ‘On The Jewish Question’ is, I have already remarked, one of the great works of political philosophy, despite its apparently rather parochial concern. For Marx used the occasion to raise some fundamental issues, and this gives us the opportunity to see the depth and richness of his thought. Many of the details of Marx’s article need not concern us here. One important argument, though, is that it is patent nonsense to think that one cannot enjoy equal political rights unless religion is transcended. Marx notes that the United States gives a perfect example where religious differ- ence does not prevent equal political participation, yet religion flourishes to a degree where ‘people in the US do not believe that a man without religion can be an honest man’ (M. 51). (True in some circles even today.) But Marx’s real contribution begins with the distinction between political emancipation and something new: human emancipation. Political emancipation is a matter of enjoying the ‘rights of the citizen’ and the ‘rights of man’. Many of the rights of the 41  early writings citizen are focused on the process of political participation: freedom of speech, assembly, and the right to vote and to stand for public office. Other rights of the citizen include freedom of thought and of worship. The rights of man, by contrast, are considered more universal and are stated by Marx to include equality, liberty, security, and property. Thus to be politically emancipated is, essentially, to possess the liberal rights of the citizen and of man. What, then, is human emancipation? Infuriatingly, Marx is nothing like as explicit about this as one would like. But one thing is for sure; political emancipation is not enough. We can see this by reflecting on the point that however pure and equal in its treatment of people the law may be, discrimin- ation can nevertheless remain deep rooted in everyday life. To take an example from today, for more than thirty years it has been illegal in the UK to pay a woman less for doing the same job as a man. Yet statistics show that women are paid less than men in virtually every sphere of employment. As Marx puts it, ‘the state can liberate itself from a limitation without man himself being truly free of it’ (M. 51). This seems to hold for every liberal law. No law can encompass all possi- bilities. Without breaking the letter of the law people will find ways of employing people of their own social class, religion or race, or indulging their other prejudices. To drive his point home, Marx makes use of a distinction between the state and civil society. The state is the realm of the citizen. In the politically emancipated state we are all equal citizens, equal before the law, proud possessors of a rich catalogue of rights, viewing each other as fellow free and 42  early writings equal members of the state. Yet at the level of civil society— the level of everyday economic activity—things look very different. We each seek our own advantage, competing and exploiting as necessary; jealous of the success of others and determined to hold on to what we think of as ours. Thus we each live a double life: equal public citizens and atomistic private individuals. The sad truth, according to Marx, is that atomistic civil society is the level of our real existence, while the noble level of the state is merely a collective fantasy. We are now in a position to understand Marx’s difficult view that the state is a form of alienation. Essentially the point is this. As we have seen, we are essentially communal beings, producing for each other in an immensely complex division of labour. However, under capitalism we cannot live in a properly communal way, and, typically, we do not under- stand or appreciate our communal essence for what it is. Nevertheless Marx seems to believe that our communal nature must express itself in some way or other: some alienated way or other. Once religion was able to play this role. Prior to the Protestant Reformation all members of a community would be members of the same Church, praying together, and recit- ing phrases about everyone being equal in the eyes of the Lord. Yet with the Reformation, and the consequent fragmen- tation of the Church into sects, often with deep contempt for each other, religion can no longer play the role of (fake) community. But at this point the politically emancipated state comes on to the scene. Liberalism is precisely the 43  early writings response to religious difference. Though of different reli- gions, we can all be equal citizens together, and thus can express our communal essence in a new, though still alien- ated, fashion. But the fact is that this equality is, in many contexts, merely a form of words. Now we are ready for Marx’s killer blow. Not only does political emancipation fall short of human emancipation, it is a grave obstacle. Consider again the rights of man: liberty, equality, security, and property. Liberty is the right to do as you wish as long as you don’t harm others. Equality is the right to be treated by the law in the same way as everyone else. Security is the right to be protected from others, and finally, property is the right to extend this security to the enjoyment of your legitimate possessions. To be a citizen is to enjoy these rights. They are fought for and prized. Yet each of these rights, argues Marx, encourage us to view our fellow human beings as threats to us. They are rights which pre- scribe limits, separating each of us from others. The rights of man and the citizen are rights to preserve our atomistic existence. Accordingly they first presuppose and then reinforce our alienation from each other. In a properly human society we would find our freedom through our relations with other human beings. A proper human life is one which is lived, at least in part, for the sake of others. Yet in the politically emancipated state the most we are offered is protection from each other. While Marx is quick to concede that this, at least, is preferable to the situ- ation then current in Germany, when certainly not everyone received sufficient protection, nevertheless a politically 44  early writings emancipated state is still suffused with alienation. We can hope for a great deal more. Emancipation But what, precisely, can we hope for? This is one of the most disappointing and frustrating aspects of Marx’s Early Writings. We know that an emancipated world will be a world without alienation, and, furthermore, it will be organized on communist lines. But this tells us very little, in itself. Now we should not underestimate Marx’s originality and depth of analysis, even so. Marx does make some vital moves. He was not, of course, the first communist, and many such ideas had been ventured before. Typically communists would propose highly elaborate schemes, planned out in fantastic detail. Presenting themselves as the great benefactors of human kind, these Utopians would commend their ideas for general approval, yet as the same time would typically be utterly clueless about how they might be implemented on anything above the smallest scale. It is said that the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier advertised that he would be avail- able in a certain café every day, should any wealthy philan- thropist be interested in discussing how they might plan out and fund an experimental version of his particular fantasy of communist society. And indeed Fourier-based communities were tried out in the United States, although they did not survive for long. We saw that another Utopian, Robert Owen, at least had 45  early writings the opportunity to put his ideas into action, at the mill he managed in New Lanark. But even he became disillusioned. The workers may have had better working and living condi- tions, but it would have been stretching the imagination beyond breaking point to suppose they were liberated in any real sense. Owen himself admitted this, realizing that he had failed to do very much more than raise productivity. His workers remained exploited, little more than servants at his command. Against this background, Marx argues that communism is not to be achieved by the intellectuals, visionaries, and dreamers, but by the workers themselves. Revolution, not philanthropy and experiment, was the way ahead. Of course it had to be guided by ideas, but ideas are not enough. Inscribed on Marx’s gravestone in Highgate cemetery is the final, and most famous, ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’, which reads: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (M. 158). Marx further argues that the workers would not be fit to receive emancipation unless they were part of the struggle that brought it about. [Revolution] on a mass scale is necessary... not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. (M. 195) Marx was the first major theorist to propose that the workers must make their own revolution. The workers will be 46  early writings fashioned in its fire. They will come to understand their true needs and interests, yet also their real powers and their mutual reliance. If they were to remain in the sheep-like state of workers under capitalism, communism would be a disaster. Knowledge, self-knowledge, and motivation must all change. It can change, thinks Marx, through active revolutionary struggle. Only by making the revolution will people be ready to receive it. And what will the revolution achieve? We will gather together the threads of Marx’s thoughts about this later in the book once we have explored some of his other ideas. Conclusion For the young Marx capitalism is a regime of alienation through and through; spreading from religion, to the state, labour, money, human relations, and even language. Liberal political emancipation, in the end, makes things even worse in some respects, even though it does represent progress in many ways. Eventually existing society will be replaced by a communist system which ‘transcends’ our alienated state, and this will be achieved by proletariat revolution. How much of this should, and can, we believe? We will return to this in Chapter 3. 47  2 Class, History, and Capital Class e have already seen a couple of contenders for W Marx’s greatest soundbite: ‘religion is the opium of the people’; ‘the philosophers have only inter- preted the world, the point is to change it’. Here is another, this time from the Communist Manifesto: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’ (M. 246). Under capitalism, so Marx argues, society is resolving itself into the struggle between two classes: bourgeois and proletarian. The bourgeoisie are the capital owning, exploit- ing class, whereas the proletarian class are the workers. Thus, there are those who do the work and those who live off the work of others. While the precise form of this basic relation will change from society to society, it is, according to Marx, a near universal phenomenon. It is avoided only by those soci- eties that are so primitive that everyone must work in order to survive, and those so advanced that they have achieved communism. Now you may fairly ask: who are these people who are able to live off the work of others? Here, of course, we don’t mean 48  class, history, and capital the unemployed, the elderly, or dependent family members. Rather we mean those who spend the morning banking their dividend cheques and the afternoon at the gym, on the ten- nis court or at the club. Or to be even more specific, we mean those who have the wealth to do this. There is a division between those who have little but their own labour to sell, and those who have the wealth (often inherited) to buy the labour of others in one form or another, even though they may also work too, because this is how they wish to live their lives. How can it be that society has organized itself along class lines? In Capital Marx considers the question of the origin of the division of classes under capitalism. [The origin of the division of the classes] is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all, frugal elite; the other lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous liv- ing.... Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in defence of property.... In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. (M. 521) Now at the most superficial level, dividing society into class terms might be thought to be a merely statistical exercise. It 49  class, history, and capital is a matter of interest to know that people in society can be classified in this particular way; this is what we might think of as a ‘census’ conception of class. Just as we might want to know how many Hindus, or dentists, there are in the general population, we might also want to know how many members of the bourgeoisie there are. However, most researchers and social scientists will want to do more with a conception of class than this. Even retailers, who might survey sizes and place people in classes ‘large, medium, and small’ do this not out of pure curiosity, but in order to know the ideal proportions in which to manufacture their clothes. So here we are dealing with a predictive or explanatory notion of class. People are divided into classes on one basis in order to predict or explain something else. In the retail example, we classify in terms of size in the course of predicting purchasing behaviour. Market researchers and sociologists have their own, alternative, ways of dividing soci- ety to explain and predict other features, often related to consumption behaviour. The Marxist account of class is also intended to have an explanatory and predictive function, but of a far more sig- nificant and fundamental nature. The initial classification is made, we have already seen, on the economic grounds of what people own and what they have to do to achieve a living. Yet classes are said to ‘struggle’ against each other. In many cases the struggle will be a personal one: the worker wishes for higher wages and a lesser working day; the capitalist for lower wages and a longer working day. Marx observes both sides have equal right, and ‘between equal rights force 50  class, history, and capital decides’ (Capital 344). Many chapters of Capital are devoted to detailing this fight. The power lies first almost entirely with the capitalist, but with the organization of trade unions and the development of factory inspections and health and safety legislation the balance slightly shifts, although every small victory is the result of immense effort. Part of the development of the process is the awareness among members of the proletariat that they have a common interest in measures to advance their position. Similarly the bourgeoisie come to realize that, although economically they are competitors, politically they had better form alliances to protect their collective interests. So, Marx predicts, in the course of their individual struggles both sides will develop ‘class consciousness’; i.e. each person will become conscious of themselves as a member of a particular class. This now takes us to a new level, for at this point the class will be capable of acting as a class, rather than as a group of indi- viduals who simply happen to have something in common. In this sense, for Marx, classes are real agents, which dis- tinguishes them from the market researcher’s constructions. They are much more than a handy form of classification. They are the means by which world-historical change is effected. Indeed the antagonism between the classes pro- vides a mechanism for replacing capitalism with something more humane: communism. Only in communism can we transcend class differences. Communism will be, so it is claimed by Marx, a classless society. Our first task, though, is to set out Marx’s underlying theory of history: historical materialism. 51  class, history, and capital History Marx’s theory of history, according to George Bernard Shaw in his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, tells us that ‘a society marches on its stomach, and its stomach greatly influences its brains’. Clearly there is a little more to the theory than this, but it is, at least, a start. What next? Here is Engels’s attempt at a summary from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: I use the term... ‘historical materialism’, to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent div- ision of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another. (SUS 17) There are several fundamentally different understandings of this theory, and if someone else had written this book you might well be presented with a quite different account. Although frustrating, this divergence in interpretation shouldn’t be a surprise. Marx never spelt out his theory in full. Rather it is implicit throughout many of his writings, and needs reconstructing. The interpretation I shall follow takes as its inspiration just two pages in which Marx briefly sum- marizes what he describes as the ‘guiding thread’ of his life’s work; pages later described by the Austrian Democratic Socialist, and literary executor of Engels, Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), as a ‘concise and decisive’ statement of Marx’s 52  class, history, and capital views, which has ‘Never been found elsewhere with equal clearness. No important thought concerning the Marxist philosophy of history is wanting there’ (Evolutionary Socialism 3). These pages appear in a work now known as the 1859 Preface. It was written as a preface to a book on economics called Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. The essential feature of this interpretation is that it under- stands Marx as presenting a systematic account of the nature of historical development, which includes firm predictions about the future course of history. Others have interpreted Marx as rather less ambitious, with many interesting observa- tions to make about society understood historically, but with less commitment to the idea that history must follow any particular path. The 1859 Preface, however, suggests a highly systematic theory. But, you may ask, if Marx says that this is the guiding thread of his thought, why doubt its reliability as a sketch of his real view? Critics point out, however, that the Critique of Political Economy was soon replaced by Marx’s masterpiece, Capital Volume 1, and went out of print. The fact that Marx didn’t reprint the Preface has led some to argue that it should not be considered so central after all. (Although, in fairness, we should note that an abbreviated version appears as a footnote in Capital; see Capital 175.) It has also been pointed out that it can hardly have been central to Marx’s thought because it contains no explicit mention of class struggle. And the fact that this work had to be approved by the police censor adds further to the complications: might Marx have deliberately masked aspects of his ideas? 53  class, history, and capital So there is fierce controversy over whether it is legitimate to assume that these few pages should have such weight in the interpretation of Marx. Here we shall cut through such disputes by the simple expedient of not entering them, and blithely assume that Marx meant it when he said that the theory set out represented the guiding thread of his thought. Indeed most of the things Marx says in the Preface are repeated in many other works. The novelty is that only in the Preface are they all brought together. To understand Marx’s theory it is helpful to begin with a simplified picture before we enter a few complications. Marx’s leading thought is that human history is essentially the story of the development of human productive power. We human beings differ from most animals in that we act upon nature to produce the things we want and need. The driving motor of human history is the development of our methods of production, which become ever more complex, ingenious, and elaborate. In this we differ from all animals. Such devel- opment however, always takes place within some economic structure or other—slavery, feudalism, capitalism, or, one day, communism. But economic structures supplant one another. Feudalism turned into capitalism, for example. What explains this? Marx’s idea is that economic structures rise and fall as they further or impede human productive power. For a time— perhaps a very long time—an economic structure will aid the development of productive power, stimulating technological advances. Yet, Marx believes, this will typically last only so long. Eventually any economic structure (except, apparently, 54  class, history, and capital communism) starts to impede further growth. In Marx’s terminology, it ‘fetters’ further development of productive power. Technology just cannot grow within the existing eco- nomic structure. At this point the economic structure is said to ‘contradict’ the productive forces. But this contradiction cannot continue indefinitely. There will come a time when the economic structure cannot hold out any longer, for it cannot hold up progress—the development of the product- ive forces—for ever. The ruling class will begin to lose its grip, and, at this point, Marx says, the economic structure will be ‘burst asunder’ leading to a period of social revolution. Just as one form of society is replaced by another, one ruling class falls away and another becomes dominant. This is how capitalism is said to have replaced feudalism, and will be how capitalism falls to communism. Until the very end of the last sentence many readers, no doubt, will have found little to object to in the theory as depicted. It seems plausible enough that human history is the story of the development of human productive power. And plausible enough that forms of society rise and fall as they frustrate or impede that growth. But accept these inno- cent sounding claims and, it seems, you have swallowed histor- ical materialism, and in doing so have become a Marxist. Oh. Of course, nothing is quite so simple. It might, for example, be possible to accept the broad lines of the theory but question the predictions Marx attempted to draw. But we need more detail before we can assess anything. So far I have mentioned two distinct elements in Marx’s theory of history: first, human productive power and second 55  class, history, and capital the economic structure. This idea of the economic structure is best understood in terms of examples: slavery, feudalism, capitalism, communism. It is characterized by the dominant ‘relation of production’. So, for example, a society where production is carried out by workers who hire out their labour power to others who have the wealth to purchase it has a capitalist economic structure. On the other hand a society where production is carried out by people who are the legal property of others has an economic structure of slavery. The particular type of class division within a society, thus, is a mark of the type of economic structure it has. We now need to add a third element, the political and legal ‘superstructure’. This includes, naturally enough, the legal and political institutions of society, such as laws, law courts, and parliamentary procedures. Marx’s image of society is architectural. At the most basic, providing society’s founda- tions, are the ‘productive forces’; what we have so far called human productive power. At the next level up we have the economic structure (also, confusingly, known as the base), and, above that, the legal and political superstructure. With these ideas in hand we can state the central claims of historical materialism with a little more precision. First there is what has been called ‘the development thesis’. This we have already encountered. It says that the forces of production tend to develop over time (in other words human productive power tends to grow). We become cap- able of increasingly advanced production, producing more and more in less time. Next there are two ‘primacy theses’. 56  class, history, and capital The first states that the level of development of the product- ive forces within a society—its available technology—will determine the nature of its economic structure. In Marx’s famous example from his Poverty of Philosophy, ‘the handmill gives you society with the feudal lord, the steam-mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist’ (M. 219–20). Why should this be? Why should the nature of technology available to a society determine its economic structure? In Wage-Labour and Capital, Marx illustrates his point with a military example: W