opencopy.org

Introduction

Among the young German students who were attracted to Hegel’s thought was Karl Marx, the future writer of Das Kapital (Capital) and the proponent of modern capitalism. On the surface, Marx would appear to be at the opposite intellectual spectrum from Hegel. Instead of believing in the power of divine providence, Marx argued that the concept of god only demonstrated men’s ignorance and insecurity. Whereas Hegel believed in the power of the Idea, Marx’s focus was on material existence. Hegel proclaimed Freedom as God realizing his nature in history; Marx argued that the idea of freedom was nothing more than a reflection of the ideology of the bourgeoisie or middle class, who controlled the means of economic production. Hegel viewed the state as the highest embodiment of God’s reason; Marx called the state a tool of oppression that would wither away in a future communist society.

But we have to look no further than an essay written by Marx’s best friend and collaborator, Friederich Engels to see the enormous influence that Hegel had on Marxist thought. In an essay entitled Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels points out that Hegel’s though was critical for providing an evolutionary perspective that reconciled conflict in a transforming dialectic. While Hegel’s philosophy could justify the existing order, it was pre-eminently a philosophy of change, which meant that it could be interpreted radically as well as conservatively. It was the first philosophy that deserved to be called a truly critical philosophy of history.

As a young Hegelian, Marx seized upon the critical aspects of the Hegelian dialectic. He even called himself a critical critic in homage to Hegel. Marx went well beyond Hegel, however, by transforming Hegel’s idealism to fit a more materialist theory.

Ludwig Feuerbach on Christianity

The young Hegelians – the Germans who followed in the steps of Hegel – soon split into two camps: those conservatives who supported the Prussian state and the reformers who wanted to shape a more modern German nation. In the midst of the intellectual battle between these two scholarly camps emerged an intellectual bombshell in the form of Ludwig Feuerbach’s book The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach argued that Hegel’s fundamental error was basing his entire philosophical system on a belief in divine providence. Religion, he argued, was nothing more than alienated essence of man. What Feuerbach meant was that when men and women created their God, they created Him in their own likeness. Typically, societies adapted current and past myths in such a way as to generate a divine power that suited their particular needs and personality. God was really nothing more than ideals of social life and morality personified as an external and superior being. Men and women would only be able to call themselves free when they recognized that God was in themselves and a mirror of their own aspirations.

Feuerbach was a materialist in the sense that he believed that the concept of God was a product of a material entity – the human brain – that had no separate existence from the human mind or matter. That was about as far as Feuerbach wanted to go when he described Christ as a very human creation rather than a divine being. Christianity had its basis in the human need for love and nurturing rather than divine law. Feuerbach seems to have realized that his argument could support a materialist approach to understanding history, but he personally did not think of men and women as materialist beings. Nor did he interpret human life in such terms. Instead, he regarded humans as conscious rather than biological entities, who happened to be engaged in a world. He remained a Hegelian in that he believed in ideas as entities in and for themselves. In other words, his materialism never moved beyond the human mind.

Marx and Engels went a step further by arguing that human thought was itself a reflection of material existence. “Matter,” wrote Engels, “Is not a product of mind, but mind is itself merely the highest product of matter.” Marx and Engels found Feuerbach’s emphasis on love and nurturing plurile. History demonstrated that men and women were beings who came into conflict with one another more often than they practiced charity and that what Feuerbach praised as love was nothing more than the socialization of sexual attraction or lust. Love, sexual or brotherly, didn’t explain the material struggle for survival of the conflicting passions that motivated human beings.

Marx and Engels returned to Hegel’s more rigorous historical analysis to criticize Feuerbach. Hegelian philosophy had more to tell us in terms of the nature of change, the dialectical conflict that propelled history forward, and the aggressive struggle between classes and societies. Hegel, at least, knew the importance of explaining the evil in human life. He knew that the ideal and the real rarely corresponded in the particulars of history. Hegelian history was deep, said Marx, but Feuerbach’s was shallow. Feuerbach was not comfortable with the slaughter bench of history.

Marx moved away from the Feuerbachian cult of the abstract man practicing brotherly love. While accepting aspects of the materialist thrust of Feuerbach, Marx took his methodology directly from Hegel and gave it a revolutionary twist. He borrowed Hegel’s dialectic method, but suggested that this needed to be applied to the economic conditions of life and, particularly, the conflict between the powerful and less powerful economic players in society – economic classes. The real battle was not between different versions and refinements of the Idea of Freedom, but between living and breathing groups of men and women.

Like Hegel, Marx worshiped at the shrine of reason and progress. The dialectic remained the vehicle for the evolution of human society. That human social development was governed by laws that were as absolutely and irrevocably fixed. These laws were not simply analogous to scientific laws; they were scientific laws. Just as the individual cell of the original organism bifurcated into animal and human, so too human societies evolved from humble beginnings. The new science of society was part and parcel of the science of nature. Human nature and external nature consisted of the same materials.

Engels in particular defended Marxism as a science. His view of science included all creation, linking the Marxist discussion of class with Darwinian evolution, the laws of cell development, and even the transformation of energy. All of these aspects of material life were governed by the struggle for survival – the dialectic; they were different forms of the same thing. Engels wrote:

Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought – two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature, and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents. Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world, and thus the dialectic of Hegel was placed upon its head; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed on its feet. And this materialistic dialectic, which for years has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon, was, remarkably enough, discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen.

Engels pointed to the worker Dietzgen as an example of a non-scholarly person engaged in real activity in the world as an example of the growing transparency of the dialectic to the human mind. Hegel, while abstractly brilliant, did not invent this dialectic. The dialectic operated on its own historical timetable.

Modern history, for Engels as for Hegel, proves that the dialectic is actually working. But it did not work in terms of the ideas embodied by nation states; it worked in terms of the conflict between economic classes. The decisive element is economic relations. Engels provides a snapshot of the Marxist interpretation of history, pointing out that bourgeois society is in a period of dramatic transition and, as a result of its own inner contradictions (dialectic) will soon be superceded by a classless society. That communist society will be able to develop the mode of production (economic processes) to its full extent. Only then will it be possible to imagine a society based on Feuerbach’s brotherly love, because only then will it be irrational and unnecessary for people to exploit one another. The Feuerbachian idea will not come true because people desire it; it will be produced by the changed material conditions of life. When it is no longer necessary to struggle for economic survival, equality will exist.

The nation state that Hegel talked about, according to Marx and Engels, was not an independent historical player. It was the tool of the dominant economic class in society. Religion or divine providence had no separate existence either. Both Luther’s and Calvin’s theology, for example, reflected the needs of economic groups at particular periods in history. Religion was not separate from material existence, but the ideological tool that classes used to promote their power of justify their opposition. Christianity, Marx argued, was both a tool of oppression and an opiate to draw the thoughts of the masses away from the suffering of material life. It would be irrelevant in a communist society.

Nothing, Engels repeats, nothing comes out of our brains that is not put there by the material conditions of life. The only difference between the evolution of human society and the genesis of plant or animal life is that we have the conscious capacity to understand the processes in which we are involved. This consciousness can never change the laws of evolution, which are as insurmountable as the laws of physics, but it does allow us to enter into, and speed up, the inevitable process.

Something to Consider

It is fascinating to observe just how dependent Engel’s analysis was on science. For Engels, the scientific nature of Marxism was its strength. However, the kind of natural and organic science that Engels and Marx referred to is no longer as intellectually acceptable as it once was. Our view of science has changed both in the particular and in our assessment of its validity as a mechanism for predicting human life and behaviour. Engels, in particular, was a truly nineteenth-century individual in his faith in the power and validity of science. But for us the connection between nineteenth century science and Marxist thought makes it more vulnerable than it perhaps needs to be.

You should understand two fundamental things about Marxism. On the one hand, it arose out of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth Hegelian system. On the other hand, it became linked to nineteenth century science. The intellectual world that Marx and Engels inhabited, therefore, was very different from out own. Many of the things that they found familiar and rational, the twentieth century individual does not. Faith in science and progress are not as dominant as they once were among intellectuals. Increasingly, Marxism is becoming a more alien form of discourse.

But this form of discourse has stood the test of time much better than some of the scientific theories on which it once depended. Class conflict has become a recognized part of historical and social analysis. Most analysts accept the contradictions and problems in capitalism. Materialist history now dominates at many universities. Marxist analysis had proven itself to be a very effective tool for promoting social justice and exposing oppression.

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach

Thus far we’ve focused on Engel’s definition of Marxism. Now it’s time to visit the great thinker himself. Marx’s particular elaboration of materialism is easy to spot in a brilliant little essay entitled Theses on Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach claimed that God was really nothing more than the alienated essence of man. In other words, the idea of God was really the sum of ideas that man had about himself. However, these ideas had been alienated from man and molded into a God who appeared to be separate from, and who controlled, mankind. For Feuerbach, human freedom implied the reversal of the alienation process and the re-incorporation of these ideas within mankind itself. What we worship as God belongs to ourselves. Hence the dignity of man.

For Marx, Feuerbach took an enormous step by realizing that religion was a human creation and effectively an idealized repository of human feelings and desires. But Feuerbach fell dramatically short because his focus was on human subjectivity – man a thinking object in a distinctly Cartesian sense. Although Feuerbach succeeding in separating the thinking object – man – from the objectified thought – God – he did not take the next step and discuss praxis. The actual practice of human beings in the world, not the ways that they conceptualized it, was the focus of Marxist materialism.

Thus, Feuerbach can be termed a materialist in the sense that he focused on real living human beings rather than ideal forms. But he was mistaken in focusing upon the theoretical man rather than the actual man engaged in what Marx called “human sensuous activity.” Most liberal thinkers, said Marx, made the same mistake. They put progress in the place of God, but they create new abstractions in the forms of human rights, freedom, and morality.

Marxist materialism rejected this tendency to invent ideal forms and reasserted the importance of flesh and blood reality. Marx proposed the minute examination of material life in order to discover its laws. He wanted to rid philosophy of the dualism between thought and practice and he wanted to create a new system that blended the insights of the British empiricists (materialists) and continental idealists.

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach can be summarized as follows:

1. Human practice, not theoretical human attitudes, is the correct focus of the new materialist philosophy. Men and women are not thinking machines; they are active beings engaged in life.
2. There is no discrepancy between thought and practice, when these are rightly understood. Man proves the validity of thought through practice.
3. Man is more than a product of his environment, however. Man can change his environment through revolutionary practice.
4. Freedom from religion is the first, but not the only, step towards human liberation. The so-called secular world needs to be understood in terms of its dialectical contradictions and reconciled through revolutionary practice.
5. Humanity cannot be understood by contemplating on our senses; it must be understood in terms of the practical and historical activities of sensuous human beings.
6. The human essence is not an individual essence. There is no special human ingredient or uniqueness that the individual contains. Rather, the human essence is the sum of the social relations within which individuals act. We have identity as groups rather than as individuals.
7. Religion is not merely the alienated essence of man. It is the social and cultural product of a particular economic stage of society.
8. Social life is not primarily theoretical or cultural. Social life needs to be understood in terms of the practical activities in which a society is engaged.
9. Feuerbach’s contemplative materialism necessarily leads to the liberal view of civil society. Liberalism is the highest form of political thought that thinkers like Feuerbach can attain.
10. Marxist materialism does not rest at the stage of liberal civil society; it views humanity in terms of a socialized community. Thus it is true to the definition of human nature as a social rather than an individualistic entity.
11. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Revolutionary practice, not abstract interpretation, is the true dynamic of human life and the final focus for materialist philosophy. We have moved from lower to higher forms of abstraction; now is the time to rid ourselves of the last remaining abstraction – theoretical man – and to look at the actual lives of men and women in society.

In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx underlines the revolutionary aspects of his theory. Once the evolutionary process is understood, the point is to act in ways to change society progressively. The true Marxist, therefore, must be a revolutionary engaged in change, not an armchair critic.

The German Ideology of 1846

In order fully to appreciate the connection between Marx, Hegel and the Young Hegelians, you need to read The German Ideology. Historians and interpreters often present a monolithic picture of Marx as a serious individual with a scientific agenda. While the image is not wrong, it is misleading. Marx was a very creative thinker with a wicked wit. Once you get past the inflated language, he can be very amusing. Nowhere is this playfulness more evident than in The German Ideology.

Marx referred to Hegel and his followers (remember that Marx himself was originally a young Hegelian) as “theoretical bubble blowers” who wouldn’t know a real human being if they met one. The German ideology engaged in such a level of abstraction that it transformed the simple into the complex, and the obvious into the unintelligible. Here is the way the Germans would explain a cat eating a mouse, says Marx.

First: The cat is a product of nature.

Second: So is the mouse.

Third: Ergo, a cat eating a mouse is the consumption of nature by nature.

If we apply the German approach to historical conflicts, we get the following explanation:

First: Different societies fight each other in wars.

Second: These societies have different ideals.

Third: Societies are not the real entities in conflict; it is their ideas that are in conflict.

Four: When societies clash, one idea does not entirely dominate the other, but, to use the analogy of the cat and the mouse, one set of ideas assimilates another.

Five: The idea of the so-called loser becomes part of the mental world of the victor. It’s like the Borg (Star Trek reference that will be unintelligble to non-Trekkies) assimilating other civilizations. But in this case the Borg is not a society but an Idea.

Six: Correctly understood, there are no human beings in history (at least they are not significant); history is ideas feeding off other ideas and evolving into one big idea.

Seven: The one big idea is Freedom; if you give it a capital letter it will seem even more important.

All of this is ludicrous says Marx. Ideas don’t walk around fighting battles; humans do. Human actions or actual materialist history gives rise to ideas, rather than the other way around. Originally, human societies had to feed and clothe themselves within a hostile natural environment. The lives of members were almost completely taken up providing the bare necessities of life. Despite the fact that life has obviously gotten easier for some, providing food and shelter still remains the preoccupation for the vast majority of people. This means, in effect, that how we produce the goods to sustain our lives is the fundamental question that every historical society faces. And yet philosophers talk about ideas as if they had no relation to this existence. German philosophers act as though human beings don’t exist at all, just ideas wearing funny Hegelian pants.

Not only is the materialist world including human beings very real, but it sets strict boundaries for human self-consciousness. Thought, no matter how abstract, cannot hope to escape the material conditions of life and the social intercourse that stems from those conditions. The mode of production of any given society establishes primary foundations upon which a society’s consciousness must be based. Thought can never escape the economic base. Even when it criticizes the economic mode of production, it is only because economic life is in the process of change.

Like Hegel before him, Marx claims that the relationship between human experience and consciousness can only be understood in terms of historical development. The history of social activity contains four important aspects or moments. The first is the production of the bare necessities of life. The second is the creation of new needs once the necessary ones have been provided for. The third is the familial relationship between a man, a woman and their children. The fourth, and most significant, is the mode of production, or the type of economic human cooperation that provides the goods for a given society. The first three aspects are central to all social life. The fourth takes on a particular importance as economic history evolves.

Although the first two aspects of social life are fairly straightforward, the third deserves to be examined more closely. For Marx and Engels, the primitive family appears to have been a natural entity, although it had inner dynamic, a division of labour that allowed for some (the wife and children) to become the property of one (the father). Although the family continued to exist within more complex forms of society, its nature changed and it become subordinate to the form of society within which it was incorporated. Therefore, although something like the family unit may be natural, it is inappropriate to look at the family uncritically or as an abstraction. The family must be located within the particular society. A bourgeois family, for example, is dependent upon bourgeois economic structures and associated values. In a market society, families compete against families and parents instill competitive values in their offspring. Such families will cease to exist when bourgeois society ceases to exist.

Turning from these aspects to the development of history itself, Marx points out that the human consciousness has developed in relation to the need to obtain the necessities of life. Language is a practical form of consciousness; its purpose is to allow us to communicate with others so that we can provide what we need. We can locate this connection precisely by examining primitive religion. So overpowered was the primitive by his environment, so chained was he to nature for the supply of his daily needs, that his religion was essentially the blind worship and fear of nature as an alien force, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by man. The connection between religion (abstract thought) and actual existence (praxis) could not be more obvious.

But, with the division of labour in society, those who do the thinking (the priests and scribes) removed themselves from the rest of society and from the daily struggle for survival. For the scholar, this division of labour meant the dawn of civilization. For Marx, it is the beginning of a problematic relationship between thought and action. Thought now presents itself as something pure and ideal and removed from the struggle for survival. However, it cannot go beyond the boundaries set by the social relations resulting from the economic forces of production. If you examine religion deeply, it reflects the economic stage in which it thrives.

The division of labour allowed the priests and intellectuals of a society to pass off their own ideological (i.e. self-interested ideas) interests as pure reason or theology. Ideology obscures the division of labour, the rise of private property and the development of economic classes are the real foundation of society not religious ideas or the culture of a civilization. Private property in particular creates a society in which one class or group exploits another. Those who are exploited typically discover that their labour, essentially a co-operative activity, is used against them and reinforced the power and position of the property owners. This process implied that man’s own work became a power over him. The surplus from his labour is a force that oppresses him. His work becomes alienating.

Alienation also occurs as a result of changing work processes. In order to fulfil the production and consumption needs of a complex and advancing society, the work process becomes more fragmented and the division of labour becomes more minute. The labourer who works in a modern enterprise must suppress his or her own nature in order to fit into the needs of the society (hence the term cog in a wheel). Labourers perform particular and highly repetitive tasks, from which they cannot escape, except by daydreaming or fantasizing. They cannot control or direct their own labour. This too is alienation.

For Marx, even in this early essay, alienation takes two different forms. The first relates to control over the means of production. The second relates to control over the natural rhythms of work itself. In his younger writings, Marx believed that both forms of alienation would be obliterated in a communist society. In his later writings, Marx was a bit more realistic about the nature of modern industrial work and began to focus, not on control over specific tasks and work rhythms, but over the means of production. He advocated a highly reduced workday and the increase of leisure time to discover one’s creative and unalienated side.

Private property eventually led to the development of the state that protected it by law. The state became increasingly complex as its bureaucratic divisions paralleled the division of labour in industry. Despite its seeming complexity, Marx argued that the state was really nothing more than a sophisticated vehicle whereby the few exploited the many. Or to say the same thing in Marxist language (there remained some Hegelian tendencies in Marx’s writing), the state was the institutionalization of the dominance of one class, who controlled the means of production, over the other classes who did not. All political conflicts could be reduced to the struggles between the classes that held power and the classes that wanted power.

Historically speaking, every class that took control over the state did so in its own self-interest. It only pretended to be serving the general or communal interest. The state was essentially the elevation of one economic class above all the others. There was nothing voluntary about the state. Voluntary cooperation would only occur when the state withered away, i.e. when it no longer served as an agent of social control.

In order for that to happen, two things were necessary. First, the state must become intolerable to people because of its own internal contributions. This would happen when a state founded on private property did things that left the majority of people propertyless. The result would be social revolution. The second condition for the abolition of the state was the development of technology to the point at which a communist society was conceivable. Without a highly developed mode of production, communism would simply mean equality in poverty.

Marx had absolutely no time for what he called local or primitive communism. That kind of utopian communism was backward, unscientific and unprogressive. Primitive communism was a highly artificial religion of community that made no technological sense. A genuine (i.e. scientific) form of communism could only exist in a highly advanced industrial society in a world that was developing globally.

Communism was not an ideal vision of society for Marx. Despite the traces of idealism inherent in statements like Marx’s picture of the worker philosopher in communist society, Marx’s focus was on what was really possible rather than what would be a nice community to live in. Communism was evolving, not because it was preferable to mean old capitalism or because it was a more ethical system for the distribution of goods. It was coming because it was being driven by class conflict. Communism was the highest stage in an inevitable evolutionary process.

Throughout The German Ideology, Marx reiterates the theme that man and nature are linked by economic processes within an inevitable historical evolution toward greater cooperation. If one seeks to understand humanity, one must begin by examining the ways that men and women provide the goods they need. Social relations and cultural values originate in economic arrangements. Ideas are not abstract entities, but are reflections of the productive forces of society. As such, they were not the best focus of analysis. German philosophy was merely the most extreme example of an approach that had dominated western thinking from the time of Plato. Marx found philosophy on its head (a pun on ideas) and put it back on its feet (real life).

Marx’s prose in The German Ideology is sometimes nothing short of brilliant. He sums up his argument better than anyone else has:

In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and the echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Thus, in a potent passage, Marx calls for an end to philosophy. It was no longer possible to make abstractions that were not connected to human existence. The only task left for the philosopher was to clearly delineate the stages of history as it was really lived by men and evolving towards an inevitable conclusion. And that, of course, was the next task that Marx set for himself, thereby creating the scientific socialism that has played such a revolutionary role in the modern age.

Class Struggle

Some of the clearest summaries of dialectical materialism are found in the several prefaces that Marx wrote to Das Kapital and in the essay on historical materialism composed by Engels as the preface to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892). Marx, of course, should be addressed first.

In the prefaces to Das Kapital, written in 1859 and 1867, Marx developed the threads of an argument that was extremely novel, but that had clear roots in Hegelian philosophy. He began by informing his readers that he intended to study the economy in a scientific and highly empirical way. He apologized in advance for concentrating on such seemingly minute details as the value form which a commodity takes in a bourgeois society, but he reminds his readers that they will learn much from this microscopic anatomy.

Through precisely this kind of microscopic anatomy, Marx will eventually arrive at the natural laws of capitalist production. He told his audience that he would use England as the prototypical form of a modern capitalist society, but also that the conclusions that he draws about England will apply to other countries in the future. The historical laws of capitalist development, he suggested, work with an iron necessity towards inevitable results.

Marx’s analysis of the English economy presents landlords (who live on rent) and capitalists (merchants and industrialists) in a black light. These classes are not only oppressive, he argued, but are ultimately inefficient. They are, however, worthy of serious attention because of the important role they played in the natural history of the economy. Marx only intended to look at classes, rather than individuals, not only because these were the important players in economic development (similar to Hegel’s world historical individuals), but also because they categories particular stages of economic development and distinctive modes of production.

In other words, Marx presents himself as scientific investigator. Gone are the passionate references to freedom, alienation and humanity that appeared in Marx’s earliest writings like The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts or even the more famous Communist Manifesto. The Marx of 1859 wants to be recognized as a social and economic scientist. Science, as he pointed out in the 1867 edition of Das Kapital, is only possible under certain conditions. As a neutral German analyzing economic relations in England, Marx claimed to have the scientific impartiality to investigate this bastion of capitalist progress. Like any good scientist, he would build on the word of other economists, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo, for whom he professed considerable respect. But he claimed that he would be even more objective than those two British economists who wrote at a period when the class struggle in England was fierce and who were unable to distance themselves from the political battles that waged all around them. The year 1867 was a good scientific resting-place because class antagonisms had receded and England’s political structure was, for the time being, stable.

Marx’s emphasis on the scientific character of his most important writings was neither rhetoric nor metaphor. The mature Marx was not merely posturing when he compared his work as the equivalent of discoveries in the physical sciences. While it is currently fashionable for neo-Marxists to downplay the scientific character of Marxist thought and to suggest that Engels was the science devote, there is ample evidence to suggest that Marx himself identified with the scientific role. The prefaces to Das Kapital clearly demonstrate the movement towards a scientific approach to the economy and a scientific reworking of dialectical materialism to make more compatible with natural laws.

Of course, dialectical materialism still had Hegelian roots and a mystical quality that did not seem to jive with science, and certainly not the British empirical tradition. Marx needed to demonstrate that his system had no necessary connection to German philosophy or to Hegel other than a belief in evolutionary progress through conflict. Moreover, the evolutionary struggle for survival had more in common with Darwin’s work and recent investigations into the human cell than it did to the German Ideology.

Marx recants his Hegelian heritage in the following passage:

The mystifying side of the Hegelian dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Das Kapital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre epigoni, who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification that the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

For Marx, Hegel was completely off base in his emphasis on mind or consciousness as the determinant of human existence. The real starting point of Marxian analysis is material phenomena. The confrontation that propelled economic history was not between ideas, which were merely superstructures based upon a given society’s mode of production; rather, the conflict was between one ‘fact’ and another ‘fact’.

Marx effectively reduced human social and cultural life to the economic relations that supported it. He did not deny that there might be some aspects of culture or society that could, as it were, escape economic determination. Men and women can think anything they like. But any of these mental productions were trivial and could never alter the scientific fact that social relations and cultural artifacts were essentially dependent upon material life. If one wanted to understand the deep culture or social structure of a given community, one needed to study the superordinate rather than the subordinate part. In other words, one needed to analyze economic relations over time.

In place of the idealism or mysticism of Mr. Hegel, Marx asserted materialism. Historical or dialectical materialism studied the laws of particular stages of economic society. The minute analysis of physical activity was the method for understanding human life. Human history was dynamic rather than static; thus, one needed to study the social organism as it passed through time. The principle that governed historical progress or social evolution was the same in Marx as it had been in Hegel – conflict. The conflict was not between ideas but between economic classes. Ideas were largely the ideological weapons that classes used in their struggle with one another.

In other words, the struggle between social paternalism or conservatism and freedom that dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a struggle between an aristocratic landowning class and a bourgeois or capitalist class. Those two classes represented quite different technologies for the expropriation, production and distribution of material goods. Simply put, they were competing economic systems that were run according to different laws. At any given time, one of these systems will be more progressive than the other. The progressive system will eventually win, but usually not until it has fought a long and arduous battle with the former ruling class.

Each new stage in the dialectical process was dominated by the socio-political class that developed and controlled the technological machinery of material production. Each new progressive class in turn develops the mode of production to the point where it challenges the previous system. When the new economic class achieves its victory, as it inevitably must, it also institutionalizes a new set of social relationships and promotes new and more relevant cultural values.

The dialectic is more than a convenient description of economic development; it is the natural law of evolution as it applies to human life. While Marx’s evolutionary and scientific perspective was not particularly original, his analysis of that evolution was. His account of class conflict, and his particular emphasis on the revolutionary role of the working class was extremely novel and enormously influential. Its impact on scholarship remains enormous.

Marx’s class analysis focused on the respective roles of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the working class. Engels, however, developed the clearest picture of these class roles, in his famous introduction to Socialism: Utopian and scientific. Engels suggests that, in their struggles with powerful kings, the aristocracy turned for support to the merchants and nascent industrialists. The latter had been created by the monarch and the landed classes to provide them with the luxuries that symbolized their status and power within society. But as soon as the aristocracy had leashed the power of the monarch (i.e. within a constitutional monarchy ruled by law), they dismissed the bourgeoisie (sometimes called middle class or capitalist class). Eventually, however, merchants and industrials grew more wealthy, developed a factory system, and created industrial workers. By the late eighteenth-century, they were in a position to seriously challenge the power of the aristocracy. They enlisted the workers in the struggle, educated them on the corruption of aristocratic power and demonstrated the wasted wealth and high price of provisions that was paid in the form of rent to the landed aristocrats.

Once in power, of course, the capitalists dismissed the workers and stole the benefits of cheaper wheat and farm produce by pushing down wages. But the factory system that the capitalists had created and the more educated working classes were now beginning to demand a fairer share of the wealth that they produced in English society. They were already beginning to challenge the middle class for social and economic power by demanding the vote and joining together in trade unions to demand higher wages. Eventually, argued Marx, the working class would overthrow the middle classes, just as the bourgeoisie had earlier overthrown the aristocracy. The aristocracy created its own gravediggers in the bourgeoisie and the middle class had done the same with the workers.

The formula is fairly straightforward. It obscures the fact that classes are not always homogenous and that they change and develop in subtle ways. Conflict can take place within as well as between classes. The dialectic is rich and complex. It is not the crude dichotomy that some naïve present day Marxists project. It can involve many mutual accommodations, political alliances, and shifting power dynamics that take place over long periods of time. But the ultimate victory of the working class is inevitable.

Engel’s Brief Digression on Philosophical Materialism

Dialectic and ideological conflicts explained the often-confusing changes in ideas that characterized the nineteenth century. If one had been asked to predict the country where materialist philosophy would find a safe haven, one would have had to say England. Britain had a long tradition of empirical materialist philosophy and science as epitomized in Bacon, Locke, Newton, Berkeley and Hume. The British were the first to focus on the sensory apparatus and to suggest that all we could know was given to us through the senses. During the nineteenth century, British materialism finally found its way into France and even became fashionable in the work of writers such as Helvetius and Condorcet. But England, the most progressive materialist society in Europe, shunned materialism and English philosophy after Hume palled in comparison with that of France.

Was it just that the French became smarter and the British dumber? Not at all said Engels. Materialistic and Humean philosophy was shunned for a century in Britain because it tended to deny the existence of God and mocked religion. The British bourgeoisie needed God and religion, not as a crutch to help them through life, but as a social control on the class below them. Religion was viewed by the Victorians as the only force or opiate that could moderate the revolutionary potential of the working classes.

Engel’s clever little digression on materialism, in itself not particularly scholarly, is nonetheless an excellent example of the way that dialectical materialism works to generate its own ideological support and to negate alternative intellectual paradigms. England, the home of materialist philosophy, dumped its empirical tradition when it no longer served the purpose of the dominant class.

Recent episodes in dialectical materialism also elevated the historical significance of the working class. A modern capitalist society had barely emerged from centuries of feudalism when the struggle between capital and labour became obvious. Developments that formerly took centuries were now accelerated. For this reason, Marx was confident in Das Capital that the communist revolution was just around the corner. And, in all fairness to Marx, there were many good reasons for believing this. At various points during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it seemed to everyone, conservatives and radicals alike, that revolution was inevitable. The aftermath of World War I and the Great Depression of 1929 both mirrored Marx’s outline of the boom slump cycles of capitalism that must lead to social revolution.

If we want to understand why a working class revolution did not occur, and what the prospects are for such a revolution in the future, we have to look at other analysts than Marx and Engels. Like Hegel’s dialectic, Marx’s dialectical materialism was better at telling us why thing happened in the past than in predicting the future. As Hegel himself warned “the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk” and we should not ask more of Marx than the revolution in thinking that he accomplished.

Marx Versus Other Socialists

Marx could be notoriously vitriolic, but it might surprise you to know that he saved his most scathing criticisms for those other socialists who generally admired him and wanted to work with him to create socialist communities. Marx’s criticism of these potential allies are perhaps the best proof that the mature Marx regarded himself as a scientist. His critique of other socialists rested on the unscientific aspects of their systems and their inability to appreciate the historical role of the working class. Their weaknesses were the subject of Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

Many of those who espoused socialist values based their models on the past rather than the future. They hated capitalism because it destroyed traditional communal values and eroded the paternalism of the past. Some modeled their socialist worker societies on the old medieval guilds that supported craftsmanship and gave workers a sense of belonging. They contrasted medieval society with the mechanical and alienated nature of modern factory labour.

Engels and Marx detested such backward looking individuals as utopians who failed to appreciate the positive character of capitalist development and new technology. They derided these individuals for aping the old philosophy of Feuerbach by stressing humanity and brother love. They criticized a host of other socialist thinkers for not understanding the inevitability of conflict for historical progress and for imagining a cloud cookoo land (a term originated by Marx) where everyone lived in harmony. Engels pointed out that modern scientific socialism had nothing to do with the past. It only emerged at the highest stage of capitalism. Capitalism itself was infinitely superior to the stages that preceded it. All backward societies needed to progress to capitalism before they should think about superceding it.

Most of the utopian socialist theories were generated at the turn of the nineteenth century and had their basis in a distaste for capitalist development. St. Simon, Fourier and Robert Own were among the first to condemn bourgeois society and to offer alternative social paradigms. Their mistake, according to Engels, was that they spun their social visions almost entirely out of their imaginations and completely ignored the reality of economic life. Their supposedly rational systems almost always ignored the historical accomplishments of the bourgeoisie and the historical role and significance of the working class. These utopians were not stupid men, Engels commented. St. Simon was the first to point out how the new society exploited and oppressed the poor majority. He also noted the potential for social revolution if these class antagonisms continued. Fourier was skilled at exposing the ideology of the capitalists and the way they used religion and morals to control the workers. Owen was the first manager to demonstrate that higher wages and educated workers could be more not less efficient and to emphasize the importance of the factory as a cooperative alternative to capitalist competition.

But all of these men were naïve, said Engels, because they sleepwalked through their societies without a scientific guide. They offered no mechanism for constructing a socialist society and relied on example and persuasion to convince the bourgeoisie that their models were workable. They had no inkling of the economic laws that needed to be followed to achieve success. They knew nothing of the society they criticized not even the all-important concept of surplus value that provided the key to a more efficient system. It took a scientist like Karl Marx to articulate the significance of surplus value to the emergence and transformation of capitalism.

Surplus value was already an important economic concept in the writings of Adam Smith, but it was Marx who invested it with major theoretical significance. Capitalism works, said Marx, because it appropriates the fruits of the labour of its workers. It hires labourers but does not compensate them the full value of their work. It pays them only as much as it absolutely has to. The surplus value that is thereby appropriated is what makes capitalism work and capitalists rich. But surplus value is also obtained by exploiting workers. For every hour that a labourer works, he or she surrenders a surplus value that is rightfully theirs. As a result of this surrender or appropriation the capitalist grows progressively richer with respect to the proletariat or working class.

Once workers understand the concept of surplus value, invented by capitalist economists, they realize that the interests of the capitalist and the worker are seriously in conflict. The market value of labour is not its full value. The worker has to get rid of the middleman – the capitalist – to achieve full value. Capitalists may appear to be skilled magicians who create wealth where it didn’t exist before. But their secret is merely this; they steal their wealth from the real producers. By eliminating the capitalist, the worker eliminates an individual who plays no role in the product process and who may even impede that progress by spending his profits rather than investing in improvements in productive capacity. Moreover, even when capitalists invest in their enterprise, they can be highly inefficient because their competition leads to unnecessary waste, over production, and reproduction.

Although capitalists often appear as heroes and even magicians, they are not efficient wealth creators. Competition and waste greatly decrease the total sum of wealth that is obtainable within an industrial system. If surplus wealth is redirected into the pockets of the people, progress can be more natural and rapid than before. The highly scattered and irrational systems of local production can be reorganized in the social interest. Goods can be produced better and more cheaply by using economies of scale. The present anarchy in production will be negated when socialized appropriation mirrors socialized production.

While utopians like Fourier were right to object to a social system that makes a few people rich at the expense of many, he failed to realize that the exploited didn’t need his pity. They were already well on the road to becoming the masters of their own destiny. Fourier was right again, when he condemned a system where factories went bankrupt while millions of people needed the goods they produced. He was one of the most adept critics of a society that could produce goods but not distribute them efficiently. But he did not understand the historical role of the proletariat or the fact that capitalism was a necessary stage in the evolution towards greater efficiency. Only Marx had been able to tie all the elements together within a coherent system.

Marx himself was withering in his condemnation of the utopians. His prime target was a man named LaSalle who was working with Marxists to develop a statement of socialist principles in 1875 Germany. The Lassallians had worked a lot of their ideas into the first draft of this document that Marx took upon himself to attack. In particular, he wanted to crush the remnants of aristocratic and bourgeois thinking that the Lassallians espoused. If you ever get a chance to read Critique of the Gotha Program, you should be amazed at the skill with which Marx could read and pick apart sloppy thinking. Here are the points that Marx made:

1. Many of the statements in the program are too vague. They refer to things like labour and society as abstractions, rather than articulating the specific conditions that give rise to particular kinds of labour and society. This is the major failing in most socialist theories.
2. The program goes out of its way to avoid hurting the feelings of landowners and capitalists. This is because of the aristocratic and paternalist biases of these forms of socialism; they are grounded in the aristocratic critique of emerging bourgeois society rather than in a scientific analysis of capitalist development.
3. Many socialists like to talk about things like the regulation of labour and the distribution of wealth in an analytical vacuum. They fail to realize that language dealing with abstract rights is fundamentally bourgeois in nature. They also imply a distinction between the ownership of property and the distribution of goods – two things that are always intertwined.
4. The Lassallians like to talk about the conflict between the working class and all others in society. They ignore fundamental distinctions within the working class. They ignore the fact that many members of the lower middle class are sinking or will sink into the working class. They ignore the fact that the bourgeoisie are progressive and even revolutionary relative to the old feudal lords. The Lassallians are imprecise and sloppy thinkers.
5. The Lassallian emphasis on progress and worker emancipation within the framework of the present-day national state, suggests that they are nationalists who have an irrational worship of the state. In fact, these German workers actually support Bismark’s Germany against other nations. Don’t they realize that nations are governed by landowners or capitalists and that the working class revolution must necessarily be international in nature and scope?
6. While calling for the elimination of low wages in the future socialist society, the followers of LaSalle show that they really believe this is a sensible law in the present competitive environment. But such ideas are Malthusian in suggesting that there is only so much to go around. The theory of surplus value shows that there is a lot more to go around if only it is distributed properly.
7. The idea of establishing cooperative societies with government aid demonstrates complete confusion about the role of the state in bourgeois society, the revolutionary role of the working class, and the importance of taking over the existing mode of production rather than creating a new alternative. State sponsored socialism is as backward as it is unscientific.
8. Any notion of creating a free and progressive state shows a clinging to the concept of nationhood that is bourgeois in nature and effect. The bourgeois state needs to be eliminated.
9. (In the rest of the critique) Marx goes on to list and ridicule all the suggestions in the program like state reforms, government legislated education, factory inspection, a reduction in the working day as sure signs that the Lassallians don’t get it. The state is a tool of oppression. State controlled education will promote the ideology of the bourgeoisie. Marx counters the claim that we need state education with the observation that “the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.

Conclusion

In Critique of the Gotha Program and the prefaces to Das Kapital, Marx demonstrated a significant movement away from his Hegelian roots and the embracing of a more scientific approach. Many modern interpreters of Marx have suggested that the scientific character of Marxism is exaggerated and that Engels was the one predisposed to view Marx’s philosophy in rigidly scientific terms. However, the evidence suggests that Marx himself wanted to emphasize the scientific character of his mature thought.

None of this, of course, prevents us from exploring the more humanistic elements in Marx’s early writing. Nor should it obscure the important influence that Hegel’s historical and conflict oriented approach had on the development of Marx’s thought. Finally, there is no reason to turn Marx’s writings into dogmatic texts.

At the same time, Marx’s scientific exploration of the material basis of existence demonstrated an important and lasting return to the empirical philosophy that developed in Great Britain and that was encapsulated in the writings of people like Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Marx’s was the last great attempt to synthesize knowledge in a way that incorporated man and nature. It is not likely that we shall see another such attempt at Grand Theory for quite some time. While a few thinkers, such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim attempt to develop new paradigms in social science, the movement within science itself was towards specialization. A similar fragmentation took place in philosophy. The practitioners in these disciplines know a great deal about their subjects but not much else. When it comes to bringing different ideas together in a greater whole, we have clearly lost the imagination and creativity of someone like Karl Marx.