Political Philosophy Part 2.
Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
Extracts
from McLellan, D: Karl Marx: Selected
Writings,
Numbers refer to the ten points in the notes at: Marx: overview
Return
to: Index page
1.
THE DIALECTIC – a method for understanding and explaining
society and history.
I start with this because it is fundamental to Marx’s way of thinking, and most of the extracts below illustrate Marx’s use of the dialectic e.g. in 3, where ‘real happiness’ is opposed to the ‘illusory happiness’ that religion claims to provide, and philosophy identifies the ‘inversion’ of reality in order to transcend it; in 5, where ‘social being’ is opposed to ‘consciousness’, and ‘productive forces’ to ‘relations of production’. Even more clearly, in 6, Marx describes ‘particular, general and universal’ aspects of class.
See
my notes on Hegel at: Conservatism:
Burke and Hegel
However, Marx’s dialectic is MATERIALIST, and not (as in Hegel) idealist:
1.1 The
German Ideology (first published 1932) contains a
brief summary of Marx’s differences with the ‘idealists’ such as Hegel (and the
‘empiricists’), in McLellan op cit p 164 ff:
“This method of approach [i.e. the materialist conception of history,
see 5 below] ... starts out from the real premises and does not abandon
them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and
rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development
under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described,
history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists
(themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as
with the idealists.
Where speculation ends – in real life –
there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical
activity, of the practical process of development of men.
Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence.”
See point
10 in the notes: this is what Marx meant by praxis
– the union of theory and practice: philosophy must change the world not just
seek to understand it (Theses on Feuerbach).
1.2 Marx’s
disagreement with Feuerbach over materialism, from Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
– number I: “The chief defect of all
hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing,
reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of
contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, not subjectively.”
- number II, relating to Hegel and others:
... “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated
from practice is a purely scholastic question.”
2. ALENATION and REIFICATION – a humanistic view: alienation is not endemic to human nature but arises from social arrangements, and especially the division of labour, which affects property-relations:
2.1 The
German Ideology, in McLellan op cit p 160 ff:
“Men can be distinguished from animals by
consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like. They themselves begin to
distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their
means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical
organization.
...
As individuals express their life, so they
are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce. The nature of
individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their
production.
...
How far the productive forces of a nation
are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of
labour has been carried. Each new productive force... causes a further
development of the division of labour.
Marx
then illustrates how the division of labour produces conflicts of interest,
starting with town vs. country, for:
“The various stages of development in the
division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the
existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of
individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and
product of labour.
He
then describes tribal, ‘ancient communal and State ownership’, and feudal
systems of property, in which peasants stand as a class opposed to landlords,
in order to make the case that these forms are at the basis of the social
structure – and ‘morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology...’
is conditioned by this system of property. See 1 above... He discusses the
evolution of consciousness and language, arising out of the need for humans to
co-operate with each other; this consciousness is at first “mere
herd-consciousness... sheep-like or tribal” until it “receives its further
development and extension through increased productivity” leading to an
“increase in needs... and... the increase of population.” He goes on:
“With these [i.e. increased productivity and population] there develops the
division of labour... [which] only becomes truly such from the moment when a
division of material and mental labour appears”.
“... these three moments, the forces of
production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into
contradiction with one another, because the division of labour implies the
possibility, nay the fact, that intellectual and material activity – enjoyment
and labour, production and consumption – devolve on different individuals.”
“... the only possibility of their not
coming into contradiction lies in the negation ... of the division of labour.” (See 7 below on Communism).
... the division of labour implies the
contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual
family and the communal interest... And finally... as long as man remains in
natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular
and the common interest, as long, therefore as activity is not voluntarily, but
naturally divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him. For as
soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular,
exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot
escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must
remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood.” [Go to 7 below
for the continuation of this quote – life in a communist society...]
“This fixation of social activity, this
consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us,
growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations... is one of the chief
factors in historical development up till now.”
2.2 In
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (written
1844, published 1932) he writes:
“The externalisation of the worker in his
product implies not only that his labour becomes an object, an exterior
existence, but also that it exists outside him, independent and alien, and
becomes a self-sufficient power opposite to him, that the life that he has lent
to the object confronts him, hostile and alien...
... labour is exterior to the worker, that is , it does not belong to his essence . Therefore he does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself... [labour] is not his own but someone else’s he does not belong to himself in his labour but to someone else...”
“What we have to understand now is the
essential connection of all this private property, selfishness, the separation
of labour, capital and landed property, of exchange and competition, of the
value and degradation of man, of monopoly and competition etc – the connection
of all this with alienation and the money system.
3.
CRITIQUE OF RELIGION – the heart of a heartless
world... man makes God, the idea which forms the basis of Marx’s materialism:
all ideas are the product of social conditions.
From
‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.’ (1844), in McLellan 1977 p 63 ff:
“...man makes religion, religion does not
make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-awareness of man
who has either not yet attained to himself or has already lost himself again.
But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of
man, the state, society. This state, this society, produces man’s inverted
attitude to the world, because they are an inverted world themselves...
Religion is... the imaginary realization of the human essence because the human
essence possesses no true reality.
...
Thus, the struggle against religion is
indirectly the struggle against the world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is at the same time an
expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is
the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the
soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory
happiness of the people is the demand for real happiness. The demand to give up
the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that
requires illusion.
...
The first task of philosophy, which is in
the service of history, once the holy form of self-alienation has been
discovered, is to discover self-alienation in its unholy forms. The criticism
of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of
religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the
criticism of politics.”
There
follows an appraisal of the state of German philosophy (Hegel and the young
Helegians), which is advanced as philosophy, but unable to provide a practical
political orientation: whilst the ‘practical political party in
“you cannot transcend philosophy without
realizing it.”
On
the other hand, the ‘theoretical party that originates in philosophy’ is too
tied up in ‘philosophy as philosophy’ and:
“it thought you could realize philosophy
without transcending it.” (op cit p 68) This
point is taken up again later in the same article, but now the proletariat has
become the vehicle for this transcendence – see 6. below.
“The criticism of religion ends with the
doctrine that man is the highest being for man, that is, with the categorical
imperative to overthrow all circumstances in which man is humiliated, enslaved,
abandoned, and despised...”
4. ECONOMY AND SOCIETY, and a CRITIQUE OF “BOURGEOIS” POLITICAL ECONOMY (contemporary economists) & CAPITALISM - labour theory of value, private property and the market:
4.1 from
the Communist Manifesto (1848):
“Society as a whole is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two classes directly facing
each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat...
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part... wherever it has got the upper hand, [it] has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’,
(continued...)
and has left remaining no other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’... It
has resolved personal worth into exchange value... In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted
naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the
relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch... All fixed,
fast-frozen relations... are swept away... All that is solid melts into air,
all that is holy is profaned... [The bourgeoisie] compels all nations, on pain
of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production...
... the work of the proletarians has lost
all individual character, and... all charm for the workman. He becomes an
appendage to the machine... The growing competition... among the bourgeois, and
the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more
fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly
developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious... [a] more or less
veiled civil war, raging within existing society [will break out] into open
revolution, where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation
for the sway of the proletariat.”
4.2 For
accounts of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc see especially:
Giddens, Anthony: Capitalism and Modern
Social Theory,
Berki, R.N.: Socialism, dent 1971,
especially pp 64 ff.
Goodwin, B: Using Political Ideas, Wiley 4th
edition 1997, pp 70 ff.
5. CONTRADICTIONS in society etc – the MATERIALIST
CONCEPTION OF HISTORY - economics at the “base” of social order (ideas are
part of the superstructure), concept of the mode of production, forces and
relations of production. Again, for the working out of these ideas in Marx’s
economics see the references just given.
From
Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (a
writing-up of the first part of the Grundrisse, which was written 1857 – 8), in
McLellan op cit p 388 ff:
Having
worked on a critical review of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (see the quotes in
1. above, and 6. below), Marx concluded that the law, politics etc cannot be
understood abstractly or theoretically, but “have their roots in the material
conditions of life” – which Hegel called ‘civil society’. Marx then realised
that “the anatomy of civil society is to be found in political economy” – this
breakthrough led him to “a guiding thread” for his studies, which
“can be briefly formulated as follows: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces.
(continued...)
The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of development, the
material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing
relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing
– with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into
fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the
economic foundations the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly
transformed.
...
The bourgeois relations of production are
the last antagonistic form of the social process of production... at the same
time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create
the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism, This social
formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.”
6. CLASS-STRUCTURE
OF SOCIETY, CLASS-STRUGGLE AS THE DRIVING FORCE IN HISTORY, PROLETARIAT AS THE
AGENT OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE: 6.1 From Towards a Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right: Introduction. (1844), in
McLellan op cit p 71 - 3:
“What is the basis of a partial, purely
political revolution? It is that a part of civil society emancipates itself and
attains to universal domination, that a particular class undertakes the general
emancipation of society from its particular situation. This class frees the
whole of society, but only under the presupposition that the whole of society
is in the same situation as this class...
A particular class can only vindicate for
itself general supremacy in the name of the general rights of society.” For
such a partial, political revolution to occur, society must be divided into two
opposing classes:
“so that one class can stand for the whole
of society, the deficiency of all society must inversely be concentrated in
another class... So that one class... may appear as the class of liberation,
another class must inversely be the manifest class of oppression...
So where is the real possibility of German
emancipation?
We answer: in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society, of a social group that is the dissolution of all social groups, of a sphere that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings, and lays claim to no particular right, because it is the object of no particular injustice but of injustice in general. This class can no longer lay claim to a historical status, but only to a human one... It is, finally, a sphere that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating these other spheres themselves.
(continued...)
In a word, it is the complete loss of humanity and thus can only recover itself by a complete redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat...
As philosophy finds in the proletariat its
material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual
weapons...
Philosophy cannot realize itself without transcending the proletariat, the proletariat cannot transcend itself without realizing philosophy.”
6.2 From the Communist Manifesto, in McLellan p 230 - 1:
“The essential condition for the existence,
and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation of capital; the
condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on
competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary
promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to
competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The
development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very
foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What
the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers, Its
fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
6.3 From Wage Labour and Capital 1849, in McLellan p 267:
“Let us sum up: The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labour and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labour and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract...
Thus the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner.”
7.
COMMUNISM as the abolition of capitalist private
property, and of alienation – through abolition of the division of labour...
7.1 From
The German Ideology, in McLellan op cit p 171:
[Continued from the quote in 2 above] “in
communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each
can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming
hunter, fisherman, cowherd, or critic. ...
...
This alienation... can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an ‘intolerable’ power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity ‘propertyless’, and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. (continued...)
And, on the other hand, this development of
productive forces is an absolutely necessary practical premiss” [because what
will happen must be a world revolution, when these conditions, and the
proletariat itself are at a ‘world-historical’ stage of development].
...
“Communism is not a state of affairs which
to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We
call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
The conditions of the movement result from the premises now in existence. (p
171)
And if these material elements of a
complete revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existing
productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass, which
revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then, but
against the very ‘production of life’ till then, the ‘total activity’ on which
it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is
absolutely immaterial whether the idea of revolution has been expressed a
hundred times already...” (p 173)
... the communist revolution is directed
against the preceding mode of activity [not just against the distribution of
the existing mode of activity], does away with labour, and abolishes the rule
of all classes...” (p 179)
7.2 From
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (written
1844, published 1932):
“... communism [is] the positive abolition
of private property and thus of human self-alienation and therefore the real
re-appropriation of the human essence by and for man...”
8.
THE STATE AS INSTRUMENT OF CLASS RULE
From
the Communist Manifesto, in McLellan p 223:
“The executive of the modern state is but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
9.
IDEOLOGY – an inversion of reality, serving the
interests of power-holders
From
The German Ideology, in McLellan op cit p 159 ff:
“Consciousness can never be anything else
than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual
life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down
as in a camera obscura, this
phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the
inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” (p
164)
The ideas of the ruling class are in every
epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of
society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force... In so far as [the
individuals composing the ruling class] rule as a class... [they] among other
things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the
production and distribution of the ideas of their age...” (pp 176)