Karl Marx: Socialism as Secular Theology, Part II
These are the concluding chapters 9–12 plus the afterword & bibliography of my late mother’s work.
Contents, cont.
9. Scarcity and Necessity: The Technological Leviathan
10. The Proletarian Dictatorship
11. The Necessity of Labor in Communist Society
12. Sociology and Social Theory
9. Scarcity and Necessity: The Technological Leviathan
Marx’s thesis that the world society of classless communism could not be realized until material scarcity had been abolished is a major aspect of his philosophy of the future. He never abandoned his emphasis on the importance on material abundance. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1975) he said that the evolution of socialism from its early stages to the fully developed period of classless communism would require an expansion of material production and of labor productivity beyond the level that existed at the beginning of the socialist era:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving sub ordination of individuals under division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour, from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
This chapter will focus chiefly on Marx’s early writings, those in which the personal, subjective elements in his freedom philosophy were most in evidence. He was then utilizing the work of Hobbes to demonstrate the non necessity of any form of ego-restrictive, inhibiting social authority in the future post-capitalist age. The emphasis on the need for abundance appears in its most radical form in the earlier works.
THE LOGICAL POSSIBILITY OF CIVILIZATIONAL COLLAPSE
In The German Ideology Marx declared that neither State, law, nor the bourgeois private property economy, could be abolished safely until an adequate replacement had become available. The communist revolutionaries must not call prematurely for the abolition of the capitalist state and the system of private property. An alternative control system must first have developed:
… so long as the productive forces are still insufficiently developed to make competition superfluous, and therefore would give rise to competition over and over again, for so long the classes which are ruled would be wanting the impossible if they had the “will” to abolish competition and with it the State and the law (1).
Marx gives his readers the impression that a future society of communism might collapse like a house of cards unless a condition of economic want were not continuously forestalled by the production of sufficient material supplies. The spectre of scarcity, as a logical possibility, seems to be haunting the society of the future, threatening it with instant dissolution:
… this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical instead of local, being) is absolutely necessary as a practical premise; firstly for the reason that without it only want is made general, and with want the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced… (2).
A few pages earlier, he had listed a number of conditions that would have to co-exist along with the high development of the productive forces if communism were to achieve its aims. Prior to the development of capitalism
. . . the abolition of private property was impossible for the simple reason that the material conditions governing it were not present. The setting-up of a communal domestic economy pre supposes the development of machinery, of the use of natural forces and of many other productive forces — e.g., of water- supplies, of gas-lighting, steam-heating, etc., the removal of the antagonism of town and country. Without these conditions a communal economy would not in itself form a new productive force; lacking any material basis and resting on a purely theoretical foundation, it would be a mere freak and would end in nothing more than a monastic economy… (3).
The reader is left to wonder what would happen to this future non- monastic way of life if the new economy were to encounter a serious material shortage, or have to operate in a contracting economic situation. The economy is to be a means for sharing wealth, not a means for sharing common poverty and hardship. The inhabitants of the future society are not expected to cope with problems of decreasing rather than increasing abundance. The possibility of economic contraction on a socialist economic foundation is excluded both in the earlier and later writings. Marx never again referred, in a direct way, to the theoretical possibility of civilizational collapse. But he established a moral dependency of the society on the material power of social production which was analogous to the dependency of Hobbes’s political citizens and subjects on the Leviathan State, the State instituted through the social covenant. The Hobbesian myth was being supplanted by another kind of rationalistic construction. The “abstract” individuals who are to become collectively united and sovereign in the classless age combine together for the purpose of appropriating and gaining control over the productive forces. The appropriating association becomes thereafter radically dependent on the operation of these forces, just as the citizens of the Leviathan convenantal state, once having installed the Sovereign, are reduced to a condition of radical political dependence.
In Hobbes’s conception of the Leviathan State, the dependency of the subjects on that state, once it has been instituted, is so great that there can be no temporary lapse of a personal kind of authoritarian continuity, such as might arise when the office of state has been left vacant by the death of an incumbent sovereign. The citizens cannot be relied upon to elect a human replacement and to keep the functions of government going. In Leviathan, chapter 10, Hobbes wrote that
… the death of him that have the sovereign power in propriety leaves the multitude without any sovereign at all; that is, without any representative in whom they should be united, and capable of doing any one action at all; and therefore they are incapable of election of any new monarch.
It appears that there has been some kind of regression, a loss of rational capacity that had been present at the beginning, at the time when the multitude of future subjects had recognized the need for a political authority and had combined voluntarily to install that authority.
According to Hobbes, individuals in modern political societies are elevated above a frightful condition of primitive savagery, a way of life in which “every man is an enemy to every man.” The outbreak of civil war in post-barbaric political societies could bring on a relapse into the primitive condition:
… it may be perceived what manner of life there would be where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life, to which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government, use to degenerate into, in a civil war (4).
In Marx’s system, there is a possible relapse into a vaguely conceived competitive and anarchical condition below the level of civilization attained in capitalist society. But once the necessary power has been appropriated, previous “natural limitations” can be set aside. In the appropriating act the individuals regain powers of which they had been deprived in the private property economy:
. . . standing over against these productive forces, we have the majority of the individuals from whom these forces have been wrested away, and who, robbed thus of all real life-content, have become abstract individuals, but who are, however, only by this fact put into a position to enter into a relation with one another as individuals … in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all…
Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations… With the appropriation of the total productive forces through the united individuals, private property comes to an end (5).
The emancipation of the productive forces from the limitations of the capitalist economy is also the emancipation of the individual from the restrictions imposed by various specialized roles which Marx associated with the division of labor. The division of labor had been imposed by historical necessity. All formerly unavoidable unfree forms of labor will be eliminated in community society (6). In The German Ideology Marx was referring to society as it would operate after the division of labor had been left behind. In this context he used the term “society” in two ways. It was a voluntary association of “abstract” individuals. It was also an impersonal regulating power which operates in an automatic way to free these individuals from their former limiting situations and from the need to engaged forms of work that are imposed by necessity:
… 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… while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive ‘sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and 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, shepherd or critic (7).
Marx had said that competition would become superfluous only when the productive forces had been sufficiently developed. Once their development has reached an optimal point, State and law can be eliminated, This optimum coincides with the abolition of the division of labor and the disappearance of those forms of necessary labor needed in earlier, pre-communist societies:
… the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State (8).
THE ADAPTATION OF HOBBES’S THEORY OF COMPETITION
In his early writings, Marx had been making use of Hobbes to demonstrate the non-necessity of political law and government in a future society of absolute material abundance. Marx did not refer to “absolute abundance.” I am using the phrase to mean that condition of freedom from material want which is sufficient to maintain the future classless society in a condition of conflict-free unity, and to avoid the possibility of civilizational and rational regression.
Marx appears to have accepted certain of the arguments that Hobbes had used to demonstrate the necessity of laws relating to the establishment of private property rights. These rights were decreed by the State. They did not exist in the “state of nature.” Their enactment and enforcement was one of the most important functions of the Leviathan State. The rights of private property were basic to the maintenance of civilized order in the internal life of each of the Christian Commonwealth nations.
It is possible to infer from Hobbes’s arguments in support of these rights, that an absolute sufficiency of material supply would eliminate the need for such laws. That Marx did indeed make this inference is demon strated by the nature of his social and economic logic, as given in the economic and political essays of 1844 as well as in The German Ideology.
In chapter 24 of Leviathan, entitled “Of the Nutrition and Procreation of a Commonwealth,” Hobbes gives the impression that the sovereign State in some way gathers up the total wealth of the nation, derived from resources of land and sea, and then distributes it to the people of the nation. But the sovereign does not really distribute in this way. Hobbes recognized that the State legalizes the presently existing status quo, whatever that may be.
In Hobbes’s political economics, private economic activities were the chief means for increasing national wealth. One of the important functions of the state was to establish a uniform currency and standard of exchange. Money was “the blood of the commonwealth.” By circulating within the nation, and also in transactions between nations, money”… nourisheth by the way every member of the body of man.”
Propriety, i.e., the principle and power of governmental restraint, was identified with laws protecting individual property owners from the violent encroachments of other individuals, now deprived, who feel equally entitled — in a human sense — to the benefits derived from possession. Hobbes stressed the benefits to all, not the economic deprivation of some or of many, which result from the legal protection of private property rights:
The distribution of the materials of this nourishment, is the constitution of mine, and thine and his: that is to say in one word propriety: and belongeth in all kinds of commonwealth to the sovereign power. For where there is no commonwealth there is, as has1already been shown, a perpetual war of every man against his neighbour, and therefore everything is his that getteth it, and keepeth it by force; which is neither propriety, nor community, but uncertainty …
Pre-political “natural rights” of individuals living in a state of nature include the right to appropriate the property of others by force. This right must be surrendered ort entering into the social covenant. Henceforward, property transfers are to take place in the internal life of the nation by legal and peaceful means, by buying and selling, not by force. In particular, industrial and commercial wealth produced by individual work effort is to be protected. People are to have a legal right to retain what they have worked for, and to be safeguarded from economic aggression by others.
Material “scarcity” seems to be the primary cause of those economic aggressions that must be proscribed and penalized by the power of the State, which protects the security of those who have some property to defend. But it was not material scarcity as such, but scarcity relative to the natural sense of human equality and equal natural right that had been responsible for a good deal of the violence and insecurity of the ungoverned condition. In chapter 13 of Leviathan Hobbes wrote that
Nature hath made men so equal in faculties of body and mind; as that… when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend, as well as he…
Natural equality creates an “equality of hope” in regard to the secular goods of this world:
From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attainment of our ends. And therefore if any two persons desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies, and in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavor to destroy, or subdue one another.
According to this account, relations of caste inequality that existed in the feudal system in England had developed out of an earlier, more natural equalitarian condition. Hobbes had defended the existing feudal system and the formalized inequalities of power and of status that divided individuals from one another in that society. Nevertheless he had been, as Marx perceived, primarily a philosopher of the early bourgeois age of commercial and industrial expansion. Post-feudal forms of wealth and property were becoming increasingly important. Sentiments of “natural equality” among the expanding middle classes contradicted and partly undermined attitudes fostered by the feudal system. Once the feudal relations had been completely undermined, there was nothing to prevent all persons from becoming psychologically and morally a part of the competitive open class system. The new economy, however, could not provide equal satisfactions and equal opportunities for all.
In his theory of natural equalitarian competition Hobbes stressed the inherently social nature of some of the “passions and appetites” that were generally more powerful than reason. The desire for honor and glory was emphasized and tied closely to the economic system. Glory means special personal distinction. Wealth brought power and honor and was desired for these reasons as well as for the material amenities it made possible. People were by no means all alike in what they wanted, and some were more competitive and acquisitive than others. But all desired security, and all would like to “live well” in a material sense as far as they can. The composite situation was summed up by Hobbes in such a way as to suggest that modern civilization is consumed with restlessness and driven by the need to expand:
So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power; but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is, that kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavors to the assuring of it at home by laws, or abroad by wars; and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire: in some, of fame from new conquest; in others, of ease and sensual pleasure; in others, of admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art, or other ability of the mind (9).
Marx’s society of communism was to be in a condition of status and power equality. The “equality of hope” to which Hobbes had referred would have been transformed into an equality of fulfillment. Marx associated the bourgeois revolution with the rise of equalitarian sentiments and demands for the destruction of caste privilege. The individuals who united politically in a struggle against feudal privilege were on their way up. They had refused to be impressed by the claims of the aristocracy. In the months during which he was making the transition to communism. Marx had begun by identifying the working class movement as an extension of the bourgeois revolution. In October 1843 he wrote and published an article in the Rheinische Zeitung of which he was editor. He cited a passage from a speech delivered by a radical French scientist at a scientific congress which had just been held in Strasbourg. The speaker had said that
The position of the middle estate today resembles that of the nobility in 1789; at that time, the middle estate claimed for itself the privileges of the nobility and obtained them; today the estate that owns nothing demands to share in the wealth of the middle classes, which are now at the helm.
A conservative critic had accused the Rheinische Zeitung of communistic leanings because it had publicized this address. Marx replied, in a subsequent article, that the statement in question was simply a reporting of the facts:
That the estate that today possesses nothing [the proletariat] demands to share in the wealth of the middle classes is a fact which, without the talk at Strasbourg, and in spite of Augsburg’s silence, is obvious to everyone in Manchester, Paris and Lyons (10).
He soon broke with this interpretation of proletarian aspirations. He labelled it “crude communism” in his essay on “Private Property and Communism” (1844), where he was referring to stages in the development of the idea of communism. The demand to share in already existing material wealth would result in regression below the bourgeois level, not in advance, since it was not aimed at appropriating the means of production and the resources of culture and civilization:
How little this overcoming of private property is an actual appropriation is shown precisely by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, the reversion to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless man who has not gone beyond private property, has not yet even achieved it (11).
Marx is here accepting Hobbes’s premise that during the time of scarcity, “private property” is essential to the maintenance and advancement of civilization.
An intermediate stage in the development of the idea was free of the defects of the crude first stage. It included an awareness that an ultimate stage which would eventually be reached, but also the necessity of a pre ceding transitional stage, which may be
… (a) still of a political nature, democratic or despotic; (b) with the overcoming of the state, but still incomplete and influenced by private property, that is, by the alienation of man. In both forms communism already knows itself as the redintegration or return of man to himself, as the overcoming of human self alienation…
When the “return to self” has been accomplished, possessiveness, greed, and envy are to disappear. There will also be no need for government or for any kind of restricting, prohibiting and censoring authority. Hobbes had said that numerous individuals were competing for a limited supply of material and social assets. The State had therefore to establish and enforce private ego-claims to various forms of acquired personal property. Economic inequality was unavoidable, but at least the state could curb economically motivated acts of aggression by preventing individuals from taking what they wanted by force from other persons. In Marx’s post-alienated society of absolute plentitude, the condition which he called “ultimate communism,” there will be no incentives to this kind of aggression and violence. There will be no need for a social authority with the function of establishing “propriety” in the Hobbesian sense, i.e., of establishing distinctions between what is “mine,” “thine,” and “his.” In the ultimate society, these distinctions will no longer exist. There can be no encroachments on private property rights because there will be no need for such rights. Marx describes a situation in which each person will have a direct, socially unmediated access to an unlimited source of material supply. All persons draw on this common source. No matter how much any one takes, there is still plenty left over. Material goods are consumed by individuals but are not retained for any length of time as personal property over which the individual might establish an ego-claim, a right to hoard, or to reserve the use of the product or consumable object for a later time. In such a case, another person might want to appropriate and to use immediately what is being retained and saved by the first party. There will be no public agency with functions of saving, with holding, and setting aside for future use. There will be no process or power that might mediate between the single individual and his free appropriation of whatever he might need or want. Such need satisfying activities will not have to be curbed by a public agency on the grounds that the supply might be exhausted at a given current level of consumption. Nature constitutes the open, inexhaustible reserve. There need be no other socially maintained reserve. The only mediating power between the individual as a dynamic, self-affirmative object-appropriating center of needs and wants and the unlimited resources of Nature is the social technology. This appears to operate automatically, with no need for a personal labor input to keep it going (12).
The elimination of labor eliminates the need for any kind of economic exchange. That is, individuals do not have to receive from a public consumption fund a certain allocation of material goods in exchange for a contribution of working time. There will likewise be no material trade exchanges among individuals. People will associate with others for enjoyment, companionship, and the like. The emphasis is on consuming, utilizing, enjoying, experiencing. There will be no need for a science of political economy, which is a science of asceticism, i.e., of scarcity:
This political economy — despite its wordly and voluptuous appearance — is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis (13).
Exchanges in which an individual has to give up something in order to get something else he wants and does not have are in essence monetary exchanges. In the alienated society of private property, lack of money stands between the individual and the realization of his needs and powers:
The difference between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the idea which merely exists within me and the idea which exists as a real object outside of me (14).
When private property is abolished, there will be no obstacle — temporal, social, or moral — to impede the immediate translation of a merely subjective, and ineffective, wish, passion, or need into an objectively experienced and possessed actuality. In bourgeois society, socially produced objects desired by an individual can be obtained by him legally, without force, only if something else is given in exchange. In this legal exchange transaction the individual alienates a part of himself. He ought not to have to alienate, i.e., to give up anything at all. Each of the produced material objects is part of the individual’s own universal nature. He can therefore claim them as his own, while at the same time not denying the equal claim of others:
Apart from the situation of force, what causes me to externalize [alienate] my property to another person? Economics answers correctly: need and want. The other person is also a property owner, but of another object which I lack and which I neither can nor want to be without, an object which to me seems to be some thing needed for the redintegration of my existence and the realization of my nature… For the need of an object is the most evident and irrefutable proof that the object belongs to my nature and that the existence of the object for me and its property are the property appropriate to my essence (15).
The needs and wants of “my nature” are expressions of my “generic nature,” my humanness as a needing and wanting being, which is social, while the objects desired are also social, produced by “generic activity.” This does not mean that I and other persons have precisely identical wants, but it means that all such wants are equally valid and will be equally fulfilled in communist society. Desired objects cannot become “my property” in such a way that they do not also belong to all other persons who desire them in the society of absolute abundance.
The evil of egoistic greed, the desire to acquire possession, for oneself, of something which another must do without, will disappear. There can be no conflict between the desire to keep for oneself and the impulse to respond to the need (or demand) of another by sharing or giving away what is possessed by the self, i.e., by alienating property which is presently mine but not also that of another. Nor can a moral tension arise in connection with a desire to cut oneself a. larger than average portion of a total communal pie, leaving less for the rest. The amount available on the communal level will expand in proportion as individual needs expand.
In the 1844 essays, the society of communism was conceived as being beyond forms of competition that could not be classed as merely economic. Both Hobbes and Marx had stressed the importance of economic competition, but Hobbes had referred also to competition for social assets that were often the by-products of superiority of economic position and power. Economic goods, according to Hobbes, are sought after quite justifiably, for their own sake. Poverty as such is undesirable. But there is also an inequality in the distribution of supra-economic, social assets. Superior status and esteem in the eyes of the world, the possession of forms of personal honor and distinction not available to others, is an important aspect of the general scarcity situation. These social assets are by definition always in short supply, in the competitive society. They are available to some only because others are excluded. No purely economic remedy, no sufficiency of material goods, could eliminate those forms of social competition that were not just a competition for economic property.
Marx seemed to be reducing Hobbes’s theory of competition to purely economic dimensions when he placed such a major emphasis on the appropriation of the forces of production by the great mass of individuals presently excluded from power. But communism was to provide an absolute sufficiency of supra-material goods. In the post-competitive society, individuals who have equal access to an unlimited material abundance will also have equal access to a fully adequate human status. Their own sense of personal worth will be derived from their membership in a transcendental equalitarian society. The economy of abundance will underwrite the personal psychological and moral security of every one who participates fully in the life of that society.
THE NECESSITY OF ECONOMIC EXPANSION
Marx conceived of a single universal society and economy, inclusive of all nations. The elimination of the need for the defense of personal private property in land and in movable goods against encroachments by other per sons who are either propertyless, or desire to acquire more than they have at present, will be, at the same time, the elimination of the need for national political boundary defenses against external aggression. In the nationally based Leviathan economy of Hobbes, however, there is no possibility that national territorial aggression can be averted. Each national economy is under pressure to expand. While wars are needed to consolidate internal unity under the military command of the sovereign, they are also needed for economic reasons. Some of the competitive pressures that fragment the nation internally can be alleviated on the collective economic level. While the aggressiveness of individuals with respect to their fellow citizens was to be kept in check, the economic acquisitiveness of the citizens, and their desire for material improvement and increased security, becomes a contributing cause of aggressive war. The economic gains secured at the collective level accrue to the entire Commonwealth. An increase in the national wealth, however unequally divided that wealth may be, still benefits all of the subjects. By no means all of the economic efforts to be undertaken by the Sovereign lead to war. Peaceful trade with other nations was to be encouraged. But the possibility of war always remains. The economic policies of the Sovereign must be flexible, so as not to frustrate the economic ambitions of the citizens. In spite of the great emphasis Hobbes gave to the fear-inspiring punitive power of the state, that political power depended to a large extent on voluntary support. While the Leviathan state was called “a great machine,” it was also a corporate entity. Economic commodities are called “the nutrition of the commonwealth,” Hobbes declared, in Leviathan, chapter 24:
The nourishment of a commonwealth consisteth in the commodities of sea and land. The NUTRITION of a commonwealth consisteth in the plenty, and distribution of materials conducing to life; in concoction or preparation; and, when concocted, in the conveyance of it, by convenient conduits, to the public use.
The nutritive materials are partly native and partly foreign:
And because there is no territory under the dominion of one commonwealth, except it be of very vast extent, that produceth all things needful for the maintenance, and the motion of the whole body; and few that produce not some thing more than necessary; the superfluous commodities to be had within become no more superfluous, but supply those wants at home, by the importation of that which may be had abroad, either by exchange, or just war, or labour. For a man’s labour also, is a commodity exchangeable for benefits, as well as any other thing…
In this same chapter Hobbes also declared that “the public is not to be dieted.” In his “natural capacity” as a private person, the sovereign may wish to set aside certain national resources for his own use, but because of his public function he is unable to do this if he is to retain power. The internal reserves must be opened up, if necessary, to those citizens who want to use them. Otherwise they might act to overturn the authority of the state which denies them this access. As far as possible, the state must serve, not frustrate, the economic aims of the private citizens.
If, for some reason — usually on account of poor management by the sovereign — the material nutriment available to the public should decline, the pressure on publicly owned resources of land will be intensified:
The public is not to be dieted… The nature of man being what it is, the setting forth of the public land, or· of any certain revenue for the commonwealth, is vain, and tendeth to the dissolution of government, and to the condition of mere nature, and war, as ever the sovereign power falleth into the hands of a monarch, or an assembly, that are either too negligent of money, or too hazardous in the engaging the public stock, into a long and costly war. Commonwealths can endure no diet; for seeing their expense is not limited by their own appetite, but by external accidents, and the appetites of their neighbours, the public riches cannot be limited by other limits than those which the emergent occasions shall require.
In Marx’s philosophy, the elimination of material scarcity and of inter-individual competition for limited supplies is at the same time the elimination of all pressure again internal territorial resources. The sovereign — in this case the producing system instituted by the proletarians at the beginning — functions flawlessly, subject to none of the human failings which the sovereign described by Hobbes is all too likely to possess. All the resources of the earth will of course be internal. There will be no “appetites” of neighboring countries to place limits on internal expansion. Nor will nature itself become such a limit. It appears, however, that the future public, like the public of Hobbes, is one that cannot be dieted. There is a pressure for economic expansion that nothing can counteract. The bourgeois class state has been the guardian of a class monopoly. Needed productive resources in capital and in land were being withheld from public use. The elimination of the class monopoly will open up these reserves. The economy from that time on will expand as much as needed. The pressure of increased demand will never outrun the supply. Scarcity will never recur, as long as the productive process functions as it should.
Although Marx’s views with regard to the post-capitalist economy were modified in his later works, he always stressed the importance of economic expansion on the socialist foundation, pointing out that the defeat of capitalism would eliminate those causes of modern poverty that were due to the nature of the economic system. In Volume III of Capital he wrote that
… the consuming power of the workers is limited partly by the law of wages, partly by the fact that they are used only as long as they can be profitably employed by the capitalist class. The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit (16).
The elimination of the poverty, the restricted consumption, of the masses establishes an expanding economy which resembles the middle class economy described by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right. Hegel had written
An animal’s needs and its ways and means of satisfying them are both alike restricted in scope. Though man is subject to this restriction too, yet at the same time he evinces his transcendence of it and his universality, first by the multiplication of needs and the means of satisfying them… at the standpoint of needs what we have before us is the composite idea which we call man. Thus this is the first time, and indeed properly the only time, to speak of man in this sense… The multiplication [of needs] goes on ad infinitum… to be confined to mere physic;al needs as such and their direct satisfaction would simply be the condition in which the mental is plunged in the natural and so would be one of savagery and unfreedom (17).
In The German Ideology Marx tied need expansion to a power-acquiring process which had been going on since the beginning of history. Tool making activities designed to satisfy primary biological requirements exist ing at the beginning of historical evolution are said to create additional needs which develop out of the tool-making achievement:
… men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled in order to sustain human life…
The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and thus production of new needs in the first historical act (18).
Two inseparable processes, the meeting of biological needs required for survival, and the creation of new needs, blend into a single “first historical act.” The desire to satisfy acquired needs which have developed naturally out of a previous need-fulfilling activity, becomes an incentive to further inventive activity. There seems always to be a gap between a level of need existing at the outset of a productive project and an expanded level of need that emerges during the course of the project. Man, the productive worker in nature, seems to be impelled forward by a pressure of needs and wants that can never be overcome.
A good many of the acquired needs are social. They become needs and wants for an individual because the objects that are desired are also desired by others. They have value for the self because they are also valued by others. In lectures on economics given in 1847 before a British working class audience, Marx adopted an abstract, highly positive view of a process of social and material emulation which would seem to be characteristic of a middle level bourgeois economy and society. The attitudes he described revealed the presence of social motives and social needs, demonstrating the social nature of man. To be influenced by the values of others, and even to experience emotions of envy because other persons have managed to acquire conspicuous material accoutrements of an impressive kind is better than a condition of isolated “self-sufficiency” and total indifference to the opinion of others that is apparently the only alternative:
A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a house to a hut. The little house shows now that its owner has only very slight or no demands to make; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.
A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfaction that they give has fallen in comparison with the state of development of society in general. Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature (19).
The refusal of individuals to acknowledge their material dependence on society had been associated by Marx with the evils of an isolated self-condition, and also with philosophical solipsism. In The Holy Family (1844) he had charged that the neo-Hegelian philosophers, ignoring the economic realities, were concerned only with the condition of a mythical, unreal individual who they portrayed as wholly detached and self-sufficient, independent of the material economy and therefore also independent of society:
Speaking exactly, and in the prosaic sense, the members of civil society are not atoms. The specific property of the atom is that it has no properties and is therefore not connected with beings outside it by any relationship determined by its own natural necessity. The atom has no needs, it is self-sufficient; the world outside it is an absolute vacuum, i.e., it is contentless, senseless, meaningless, just because the atom has all fullness in itself. The egoistic individual in civil society may in his non-sensuous imagination and lifeless abstraction inflate himself into an atom, i.e., into an unrelated, self-sufficient, wantless, absolutely full, blessed being. Unblessed sensuous reality does not bother about his imagination, each of his senses compels him to believe in the existence of the world and of individuals outside him, and even his profane stomach reminds him every day that the world outside him is not empty, but is what really fills.
Marx went on to say that
. . . it is natural necessity, the essential human properties, how ever estranged they may be, and interest that hold the members of civil society together; civil, not political life is their real tie. It is therefore not the state that holds the atoms of civil society together, but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination, in the heaven of their fancy… (20).
In the post-capitalist society, the real ties between human beings will be social and material. The fallacies of solipsism and of abstract philosophy will have been left behind. Individuals will then be united by ties of “natural necessity” in such a way that the withdrawn and detached ego-condition will no longer be projected as desirable. The relativity and the mutability of the needs, desires and satisfactions which “spring from society” is part of their moral value. Marx did not anticipate the development· in socialist society of individualistic forms of competitive emulation in relation to material consumption, nor did he expect that there would be radical contrasts between the “palace” and the “hut” in that society. In the cited passage from Wage Labour and Capital he shows his preference for an extroverted kind of self-condition, and for attitudes that are passively open and receptive to external social impressions. The sense of “greatness” or of aspiring to greatness that is associated with this sociality will be largely collective, a participation in the greatness of man as species. The desires and pleasures that spring from society counteract the evils of the egoistic, non-social condition.
Marx projects unceasing changes of style and form in social production rather than an unlimited quantitative increase in material production and consumption. Nevertheless the two are bound together, in his deterministic logic, in such a way that one seems always to include the other. The emphasis is on the transcendence of instinct and of nature-given tendencies that might resist absorption into the process of socially determined change. In this respect, socialist society will be continuous with the society of capitalism. Socialism will accomplish what capitalism is only striving to accomplish. In the Grundrisse, Marx had written that
… capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship; as well as [beyond] all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive of all this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.
But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it… (21).
Material expansion in socialist society is associated with labor-saving technology, and also with continuous activities of invention and innovation which bring a whole series of desirable consequences in their wake. There will be no advertising pressures, no profit-motivated stimulation of consumer demand, no deliberate attempts to create “new needs.” Marx expected that wasteful expenditures required to maintain the economy and society of capitalism, would be eliminated. But new modes of production inevitably displace earlier, outmoded forms. New kinds of consumer goods become desired as “objects” by the consuming society. The logic of the need expansion process seems to preclude the possibility that the process could ever be brought to a halt, or that the new could ever be rejected in favor of the old.
[1] Volume I, Part III, p. 358.
[2] Volume I, Part I, p. 46.
[3] Volume I, Part I, p. 40n.
[4] Leviathan, chapter 13.
[5] Volume I, Part I, pp. 82–84.
[6] The modification of his early freedom philosophy introduced by Marx in his later writings will be discussed in chapter 11 on “The Necessity of Labor in Communist Society.”
[7] The German Ideology, op. cit. p. 44.
[8] Ibid., p. 95.
[9] Leviathan, chapter 11.
[10] Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume I. Oscar Berland, in an article on “Radical Chains: The Marxian Concept of the Proletarian Mission,” has called attention to this interchange. (Studies on the Left, Volume VI, Sept.-Oct., 1966.)
[11] Translated by Easton and Guddat, op. cit.
[12] I am giving here an interpretation of the content of the 1844 manuscripts, cosmological essays of a highly abstract nature, as indicated in Chapter 2 in this book.
[13] Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume III, Economic and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844, essay on “Human Requirements and Division of Labour under the Rule of Private Property.”
[14] Op. cit., “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society.”
[15] Excerpts from notes on the economics of James Mill (1844), from section on “Money and Alienated Man,” translated by Easton and Guddat, op. cit.
[16] Chapter 30, p. 484.
[17] Op. cit., sections 190, 1n and 193.
[18] Volume I, Part I, p. 39.
[19] Wage Labour and Capital, published in 1849, reprinted in Selected Works of Marx and Engels, op. cit. Volume I.
[20] The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, op. cit., chapter 6 of “The Holy Family,” p. 120.
[21] Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., p. 93.
10. The Proletarian Dictatorship
Marx’s conception of the proletarian dictatorship is an important part of his theory of socialist revolution. It has had a good deal of historical impact, but has also given rise to much confusion and controversy. In a letter to J. Wedemeyer (March 1, 1852) he wrote that
… no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
S. Avineri is one of the interpreters of Marx who have tried to down play this aspect of Marx’s socialist theory. He argues that Marx only used the term two or three times and “… always in what is basically a private communication” (1). David Fernbach takes a different view, and he also provides useful background information on the origin of this concept. It was first formulated by Auguste Blanqui, a French communist prominent in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848. Fernbach notes that Marx had publicly endorsed Blanqui’s call for a proletarian dictatorship in 1850, and that he referred to the necessity of this dictatorship in public as well as in private communications in later years (2).
It appears, from Marx’s various statements, that all forms of working class government are classed as “dictatorships,” and also that these governments cannot disappear until the class struggle phase of history has come to an end. This implies that the dictatorship in any one country cannot be terminated until all countries have achieved political socialism, though Marx did not state this explicitly. He did, however, repeatedly emphasize the inter national aspects of the class struggle.
The period of class struggle was the period in which the workers had to be prepared, when necessary, to take up arms, either to achieve power, or to defend it once it had been achieved. In an article written in January 1873, he seemed to identify the abolition of the working class state with a condition of security that would permit the workers to “lay down their arms”:
… if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship… in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form (3).
In spite of this emphasis on the need for armed defense, Marx seems not to have envisaged a situation in which a proletarian State would find it necessary to divert a substantial part of its energies and resources to military defense. In his address on The Civil War in France (1871), he had said that a working class regime, such as that outlined but never established in the Paris Commune program, would reduce the expenses of government to a consider able extent, by destroying “the two greatest sources of expenditure — the standing army and State functionalism” (4). The people were to be armed, as a National Guard, or as a popular militia capable of defending the new social order in emergencies. In the first draft of this address he had written that
The Communal organization once firmly established on a national scale, the catastrophes it might still have to undergo would be sporadic slaveholders’ insurrections, which, while for a moment interrupting the work of peaceful progress, would only accelerate the movement, by putting the sword into the hands of the social revolution (5).
THE PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP AS A TRANSCENDENTAL CONCEPT
In his writings on the Paris Commune, Marx had been projecting his own concept of socialism into the consciousness of the future governing working class. It is a hopeless task to try to interpret his writings on political theory and on political socialism except in the light of his primary philosophical and moral concerns. His political thought is highly abstract, often obscure or ambiguous. Controversies have developed, especially in regard to the question of whether or not he anticipated the total disappearance of political government in the classless society. It was Engels, not Marx, who had said that the State would “wither away” at that later time (6).
Insofar as Marx used the terms “political government” and “State” to signify a divided condition of society, a separation between the rulers and the ruled, he did expect that the need for this duality would be eliminated in the condition of “perfected communism.”
The proletarian dictatorship is a transcendental formation. It displaces Hegel’s transcendental concept of the modern Nation-State. It is morally continuous with Marx’s concept of the world-historical working class mission. The Hegelian State possessed a corporate moral identity, an autonomy based on the existence of the nation as a legal and cultural unit. When an individual is morally and psychologically included in the corporate “particularity” of the State, this negates those evils of personal particularity (subjective individuality) which might otherwise remain were it not for the transcendental connection. A comparable type of transcendental connection was established by Marx, which applies to the period of the dictatorship. The working class government has functions of power and authority not possessed by other members of society excluded from the dictatorship. Only after the latter has become unnecessary, can society be transformed into an indivisible whole, with no special public authority that does not belong to all. The condition of unity need not coincide, according to Marx, with the eclipse of all govern mental functions, but it does coincide with the eclipse of the political movement and class struggle phase of history. In The Communist Manifesto Marx predicted that “… public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.”
The working class state is the hegemony of the advanced, vanguard section of the total working class. This vanguard is to assume command of the nation, directing its social and economic policies. Although Marx wrote in The Critique of the Catha Programme that the material conditions of production will have become “the cooperative property of the workers them selves,” the town and city sections of the proletarian class will be the initial custodians of this property.
The primary task of the vanguard is to inaugurate a national plan of economic development, one which will extend the large-scale rationalized and collectivized mode of social production established in manufacturing industries into the countryside. In a brief article on “The Nationalization of the Land,” written in the spring of 1872, Marx said that national property in agricultural land should not be leased by the working class government to individual cultivators. Neither should it be given over to a collective association of rural producers. Referring to proposals made by another socialist, with whom he partially disagreed, he wrote that. . . the social [socialist] movement would lead to this decision that the land can but be owned by the nation itself. To give up the soil to the hands of associated rural labourers, would be to surrender society to one exclusive class of producers (7).
The urban workers were to be the planners and coordinators for the entire nation. They represented the enlightened rationality of modern scientific culture and civilization. They were therefore a universal, non-exclusive class. Under their management
Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches of production, will gradually be organized in the most adequate manner. National centralisation of the means of production will become the national basis of a society composed of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan. Such is the humanitarian goal to which the great economic movement of the nineteenth century is tending.
In this same article Marx said that when class distinctions have disappeared and no one is able to live on the labor of other people “… there will no longer be any government or state power, distinct from society itself!”
The proletarian dictatorship was to be a collective rule. Monarchy, the reign of a single person as head of state, had been preferred by Hobbes. A monarch “… cannot disagree with himself, out of envy or interest, but an assembly may… “ The working class state includes but also transcends, rationally and morally, the unitary power of the Hobbesian monarch. There will be no problem of factionalism, nor of division between minority and majority opinion, within the new sovereignty system. The persons who assume command have already been united in their aims and program before coming to power. The unity had been forged in their struggle against the forces of capital.
The proletarian dictatorship was linked to the popular sovereignty concept that Marx had supported in his pre-socialist writings on state and law, at the time when he was opposing the censorship laws enacted by the Prussian government (8). At that time, he said that the people of the nation, united in spirit, were the only legitimate moral and political authority. They constitute the unity of “the ethical state.” The repressive policy of the Prussian government, aimed at suppressing internal dissent
… cancels the equality of the citizens before the law. It divides rather than unites; and all dividing laws are reactionary… In an ethical state the view of the state is subordinate to its members, even though they oppose an organ of the state or the government.
Writing many years later as a socialist, Marx said that the national economy was to be centralized and administered according to a national plan, but that the proletarian dictatorship was also to decentralize certain essential public functions outside of the category of material production. In the more advanced, republican countries it was to restore to the people in the locally based communities within the nation certain powers and forms of authority of which they had been deprived during the time of bourgeois ascendancy. The supra-local political center, the national state, would no longer operate as before.
Marx ranked different forms of modern political government according to certain criteria. The republican capitalist countries were in a preferred category. Germany and countries whose situation resembled that of Germany were in the lowest category. Between the two extremes, there were various gradations. In his remarks on the political system of the United States, he indicated that the cultural and moral groundwork for a socialist popular sovereignty had already been formed in the various localities. The nationally federated governmental system allowed for a substantial degree of local autonomy in the states whose federation constituted the national union. The federated structure of the Swiss republic was in the same class. In the local jurisdictions, the people were already exercising a direct type of sovereign authority and supervisory control over the agencies and policies of the local governments.
In The Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx represented the majority of the people in the advanced republican countries as being morally qualified to take over national sovereignty, even though the bourgeoisie was still in control. This view was stated when he was condemning the German Party for advocating, in the name of socialism, “universal and equal elementary education through the state. Universal compulsory school attendance. Free instruction.” According to Marx, the Party was saying that the State was to determine the content of what was taught in the schools. It was implying that the state was especially qualified to act in an instructional capacity. This revealed a characteristic German tendency to elevate the central, national state as a special moral authority. In actuality, this elevation was an inversion of the true situation. The people of the nation, those who did not hold national political office, were morally superior to the central power:
Defining by a general law the financial means of the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teachers, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as happens in the United States, supervising the fulfillment of these legal prescriptions by means of state inspectors, is a very thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. Particularly, indeed, in the Prusso-German empire (and one cannot take refuge in the rotten subterfuge that one is speaking of a ‘state of the future,’ we have seen what that is), the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.
The people in the advanced republican countries cannot obtain power on the national level until the working class movement in these countries has succeeded in overcoming the nationally centralized political class power of the bourgeoisie, and has taken over the management of the national economy. But once this has been done, it would seem that the proletarian dictatorship in these countries can scarcely be distinguished from a populist government, i.e., a people’s sovereignty. The overwhelming majority of the people in the various localities would willingly accept the dictatorship as the only national power capable of upholding and advancing their own interests, which are also the interests of the nation.
In the working class State, social and economic policies and administrative procedures were to be decided by a process which Marx called “universal suffrage,” which was superseding “individual suffrage.” His address on The Civil War in France (1871) included a description of the system of government which would have been established by the Paris Communards if they had been able to retain power. Marx wrote that
. . . universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture (9).
Marx here uses the term “suffrage” to mean decision making and managerial power. “Universal suffrage” is collective decision making and management. The group functions as if it were a single psyche. In the Commune system, the appointment of an individual to a particular position separates him from the collective authority of which he had previously been a part. It also subordinates him to that authority. All appointees will presumably be chosen from the ranks of the people. But the people who are members of the sovereign body must exercise close surveillance over their appointed functionaries and representatives. According to Marx, the Paris Commune
… was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune…
The emphasis on the need for group control and surveillance was especially marked in relation to those policing and judiciary functions which will still be necessary in the first stages of socialism. In the Commune system
The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which has but served to mask their abject subservience to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.
The united people, in other words, were to become the supreme judging and punitive authority.
Civil liberties of the kind that had developed in the more liberal bourgeois nations were given short shrift in the government of the dictatorship. Marx’s lack of concern with civil liberties in socialist society was in contrast to the position he took when protesting against the repressive policies of the anti-liberal Prussian government. There was, however, no real contradiction involved. In protesting against repression, he had been defending the right of anti-government critics to advocate the overthrow of the existing political state authorities. He did so in the name of the people who were being oppressed by the political regime in office. He made it clear that he was not advocating anarchy, but merely the elimination of a reactionary, paternalistic type of political control. Some of these anti-censorship statements appeared in 1842, before he became a communist. Others were written in 1849, during the time when he was acting as an attorney for the defense in the Cologne sedition trials. He was himself one of the accused, and was able to win an acquittal. At that time he declared that “It is the function of the press to be the public watchdog, the tireless denouncer of the rulers, the omnipresent eye, the omnipresent mouth of the spirit of the people that jealously guards its freedom” (10).
When the workers become sovereign, they do not require the “watchdog” function that had been necessary when they — and the people — were out of power. They constitute their own defense and are guardians of the freedom of the nation in which they are, temporarily, the ruling class. There need be no explicit, socially sanctioned and legally enforceable right of the individual to dissent, to give public voice to criticism of particular policies and decisions that have been adopted by the government of the dictatorship through “universal suffrage.”
In The Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx had mentioned only one civil freedom of the bourgeois liberal era that was to be carried forward into the period of the dictatorship. This was called “freedom of conscience,” which was nothing more nor less than private freedom of religion (11).
On the question of religion in relation to the state, Marx’s theory of socialist government was in marked contrast to the theory of Hobbes. In the society of seventeenth century England, religious dissension was very much a public and political issue. The Hobbesian Sovereign was to eliminate by decree the religious differences dividing the population into warring factions. A single State religion, a politicalized Christianity, was to be established by the Sovereign for practical, political reasons. Marx, in a later age, believed that religion had become so entirely privatized, so publicly irrelevant, that it could pose no threat to the working class state. As long as it existed, however, it was a threat to the believing individual, who is less free, subjectively, than he or she would otherwise be. The worker’s party and movement is attempting to “. . . liberate the conscience from the spectre of religion,” not by political suppression, but by eliminating fears which Marx associates with religion.
In Marx’s theory of the popular-proletarian State, the individuals who exercise the sovereign power are morally elevated above the level of egoistic self-interest. The Sovereign of Hobbes’s Leviathan State, in contrast, had not been so elevated. As an individual he is morally indistinguishable from his subjects. It is his office, and the nature of his function, that confers on the State power its moral authority and legitimacy. In all socialist nations, the working class vanguard is at the helm, guiding the foreign policies and also the economic policies of the nation. As a class it is still carrying out a world historical mission. It is also merged with, and reinforced by a direct, localized authority of the people in the more enlightened modern societies, Whatever the local situation, “dictatorship” is the omnibus term Marx applies to all socialist governments that come to power in the period of transition:
Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat (12).
[1] The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, chapter 8, Cambridge University Press.
[2] Karl Marx: Political Writings, Volume III, Introduction, edited and introduced by David Fernbach, The Marx Library, Random House, NY, 1974.
[3] Article on “Political Indifferentism,” reprinted in Fernbach, op. cit.
[4] Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume II, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969.
[5] Reprinted in Fernbach, op. cit.
[6] Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics, Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1977. Miliband calls attention to the influence of Engels on the political philosophy of Marxism.
[7] Marx and Engels Selected Works, Volume II, op. cit.
[8] See chapter 7 of this book, section on “Marx’s Pre-socialist Philosophy of State and Law.”
[9] Marx and Engels Selected Works, Volume II, op. cit.
[10] Speech delivered on February 7, 1849, published the following week in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Translated by Padover, in Karl Marx on Freedom of the Press and Censorship, McGraw Hill Book Co., 1974.
[11] See. the paragraph on “freedom of conscience,” in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, quoted in chapter 7 of this book, section on “Political Conscience in the Socialist Movement.”
[12] The Critique of the Gotha Programme.
11. The Necessity of Labor in Communist Society
The philosophy of work that Marx developed in his later years included a number of remarkable features. He expected that “the division of labor” would be eliminated in the society of communism, and also that the age of scarcity would have given way to the age of abundance. In his earlier works, however, he had also assumed that labor itself, as a public necessity, would likewise have been abolished. This view was in marked contrast to the philosophy of work which appears in Capital and in other works written after 1856. Marx’s philosophy of work, and his conception of the meaning of proletarian labor, had always been linked to a great many other issues. Problems that become evident in his later views are tied in with his belief that the economy of socialism will develop naturally and inevitably beyond the first, imperfect and inequalitarian stage of the beginning until society finally reaches the fully equalitarian condition of universal abundance. In the early part of his theoretical career, Marx had implied that future progress would result simply from the material expansion that would become possible in the socialized economy. In the later works, the emphasis on material expansion is retained, but other changes relating to the allocation of work and of time, also become important.
The abolition of the “division of labor,” which was also the separation of mental and physical labor, would have to be preceded by a stage in which the proletarians of”socialist society would continue to perform the same kind of work that they had been forced to carry on for capitalist employers. Their conditions of work would be greatly improved, and their hours of work shortened, but they would retain their class and occupational identity. Gradually, as society evolved toward a classless condition, they would be absorbed into a community of universal labor. In his address. on The Civil War in France (1871), Marx said that the Paris Commune had been
… essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour… The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to• serve as a lever for uprooting the
economic foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute (I).
The industrial technology that had developed in the age of capitalism and that would be carried forward into socialism had created the need for a kind of work which Marx regarded as burdensome and unpleasant. The tasks performed by the majority of unskilled and semi-skilled workers were devoid of intrinsic interest, being repetitive and uncreative. In The German Ideology (1845–46) he seemed to expect the modern worker to welcome the deterioration of work experience with open arms. This loss was merely a prelude to a condition in which no labor of this kind would be needed, and in which the individual would also be freed from other past and present restrictions:
… there is found with medieval craftsmen an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was capable of rising to a narrow artistic sense. For this very reason, however, every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in this work, to which he had a contented, slavish relationship, and to which he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern worker, whose work is a matter of indifference to him (2).
In Capital, Marx left his readers in no doubt as to the continued. need for collectivized, routinized, mechanized labor in communist society. Subordination to the impersonal disciplines and exacting requirements of this kind of work would be required of the manual workers — the proletarians of capitalism — in the first stage of socialism. In the society of communism, this kind of subordination will be universal, required of all who are physically and mentally capable.
THE DUALITY OF FREEDOM AND NECESSITY
Marx regarded work as a moral and spiritual necessity for the individual. The personal fulfillment of the individual dependent to a considerable degree on his ability to engage in meaningful work. He objected strongly, in the Grundrisse (1857–58) to Adam Smith’s assumption that work is a curse, an externally imposed affliction from which individuals try to escape whenever they can. For Smith, a state of “tranquillity,” or rest
… appears as the adequate state, as identical with ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness.’ It seems quite far from Smith’s mind that the individual ‘in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skills, facility,’ also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquillity. Certainly labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that this overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity — and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies, and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits — hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour.
Work has indeed often been an affliction, but only when carried out under oppressive conditions:
He [Adam Smith] is right, of course, that, in historic forms as slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage-labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced labour, and non-labour, by contrast, as ‘freedom, and happiness’ (3).
When these conditions no longer exist, work can be seen in its true light. In this argument against Smith, Marx was contrasting onerous forced labor with “attractive work,” which was primarily work undertaken by the single individual on his own initiative. It is chiefly this kind of work which is a means to self-realization. Work as self-realization is a serious undertaking. It never
… becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier, with grisette-like naivete, conceives it. Really free working, e.g. com posing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion (4).
When Marx in his early writings anticipated the elimination of work in communist society, he was not declaring that self-realizing work of the “free” kind would become unnecessary. He was, however, eliminating the tension and duality, the opposition between “free” and “necessary’’ labor that appeared as soon as he came to expect that individuals in the classless era would have to make a public contribution of labor time, reducing thereby the amount of time left over for free work and other activities. In the Grundrisse manuscript, a transitional work, Marx reverted to an Hegelian metaphysical style of language and thought. Some passages are therefore difficult to decipher. He adopted a device previously used by Hegel. He declared that the contradiction between freedom and necessity could be nullified or “suspended” by an act of mental comprehension, even though the contradiction persists on the non-mental level of social and working life. In the Grundrisse Marx distinguished between “free work” undertaken on the individual creative level and necessary work, which he called “material production.” Material labor is largely physical, but it is also possible for the worker so engaged to use his mental as well as his physical powers, provided he grasps the historical significance of material production. After referring to the really free working time that is not in the “material production” category, Marx had gone on to say that
The working of material production can achieve this [free] character only 1) when its social character is posited, 2) when it is of scientific and at the same time general character, not merely human exertion as a specifically harnessed natural force, but exertion as subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as activity regulating all the forces of nature (5).
In a later passage of the manuscript, he said that under these conditions there would be a “suspension of the contradiction between free time and labor time” (6).
In Capital, Marx established a clearcut dualism. Work that is classed as “socially necessary” material production is not as free as that which can be carried on by each person on the level above this social necessity. He conceived of persons in the society of communism as living on two levels. One was the level of freedom beyond necessity. On the other, material level, they would have to devote a portion of their time to less free kinds of productive labor which had to be carried on in order to meet the subsistence requirements of the producers as consumers. In Capital III he wrote that
… the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of [the expansion of) his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favour able to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins the development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite (7).
Marx referred here to “the realm of physical necessity.” What does he mean by this? The word “physical” is being used to indicate the operation of “laws of nature” that cannot be set aside by any powers available to Man. Marx is not referring to mechanical laws, or to biological laws. He is classing social necessity as physical necessity. In the preceding volumes of Capital he had emphasized the concept of “socially necessary” labor. The examination of this concept sheds light on the term “physical necessity” as this is applied to human affairs. Wants that are in the “physically necessary” category are those which must be met by labor that is socially necessary.
Socially necessary labor, in socialist society, will be undertaken as a means to an external end. Materials goods will no longer be produced, as in the capitalist economy, on account of their exchange value, i.e., their market value, but on account of their use value. It is the use value placed upon the goods produced in the socialized economy that makes them necessary in a social as well as in a biological sense. The requirements of the standard of living in communist society that must be met by social production will be determined in much the same way that the wages of labor were said by Marx to have been determined in various societies where “free wage labor” had put in an appearance. In the socialist economy, wage labor will be abolished. Like the wage workers in times gone by, the material producers of socialism will have “natural wants,” but they will also have other “so-called necessary wants.” “Natural wants” are apparently those required to maintain the worker in a physical condition fit for work, throughout the duration of his working life:
Given the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a given quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time requisite for the production of labour power reduces itself to that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence. . . If the owner of labour-power works today, tomorrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as to health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a labouring individual (8).
Marx went on to say that
His [the wage worker’s] natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing, vary according to the climatic and other physical conditions of his country. On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the habits and degree of comfort in which the class of free labourers has been formed.
In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power an historical and moral element.
This theory that wages are automatically determined by a combination of natural and historically modified wants shows that Marx is regarding the “moral element” of custom as binding not only on the wage earners but also on the employers of labor power. Marx’s concept is similar to the “natural price” theory of wages developed by Ricardo. The natural price was said to vary considerably, when different countries were compared. Within the same country, it also varied, when different times were compared. Customs were alterable in time and place. Ricardo, however, had included in the “natural price” the cost of family reproduction:
The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution [in numbers] (9).
Marx made no specific mention of family reproduction in his wage theory. He followed the procedure adopted by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right The “abstract” individual is the activity unit who is then included within a system of economic relations and who becomes morally, socially and materially dependent on that system. His wage theory was highly abstract, and could not easily be applied to the situation of the workers in the capitalist economy. In many passages in Capital he referred to the absolute impoverishment of workers in capitalist industry. 1Jie Jive& of factory workers, including those of women and children employed in industry, were being shortened, their strength depleted, through .the combined effect of intolerably long hours, low wages, and bad working conditions. In this situation, the level of wages seems not to be determined by “subsistence requirements,” even when such requirements are confined to what Marx called the “natural wants” of a single worker, quite apart from the question of family reproduction. A major difference between the economy of capitalism and socialism will be the return, under socialism, to a determination o(living standards by a process that includes not only the natural wants but also a socially determined increment of so-called necessary wants. All workers, including those who were formerly unemployed or underemployed, the “industrial reserve army” of capitalism, and those who had been reduced to pauperdom and to dependence on public relief, will be brought up to the more adequate, socially modified standard.
In his discussion of the functions that would have to be carried out on the public level in the society of socialism, Marx assumed the existence of rational, decision-making and resource allocating public powers. A certain portion of the total material product would have to be withheld from immediate consumption. No such functions had been projected in his early writings (10). But in spite of the changes introduced in the later works, serious deficiencies in Marx’s theory of economic socialism could not be eliminated. As an historical determinist, he maintained that economic distribution of the material product to different sectors of any social economy was determined automatically by powers beyond rational control. Society was to be invested with regulatory functions, but the natural and socially modified material wants of the individuals who make up society seem at the same time to be determined by psychological and social processes, as well as by physical (i.e., biological) processes outside of rational control. The producers are psychologically compelled to meet certain material production goals which they cannot rationally appraise in the light of other goals that might, under some conditions, be given a higher priority. Yet Marx was looking forward to a future social economy in which some forms of rationality would be increased. Rational social planning to meet the needs and wants of all would supersede the irrationality of capitalism which could not provide for all. Powers of instrumental and technical reason will be adequately developed and applied. The rationality of the producers will be sufficient to provide means to the realization of ends that cannot be rationally appraised or altered except indirectly, through general processes of historical change.
A major aim of socialist economic management will be to increase the amount of private free time available to each worker. Marx refers to only one method of accomplishing this. It is a method which is bound to maximize the dependence of the society on large-scale mechanized, collectivized forms of labor in industry and in agriculture. The greater the degree of mechanization and rationalization, and the more all labor becomes collective group labor, the greater the amount of free time produced. The worker, in his free time, may produce something that is of value to himself or to others beside himself, but this personal product in no way enters into the material standard of living, which consists only of those items that have been produced by time saving rational, mechanical and collective methods. A significant reversion to handicraft production, or to non-collective small scale agriculture, would be impossible in Marx’s divided time system. His philosophy of work is notably different from the philosophy of the British socialist William Morris, who had hoped that socialist society would eventually get beyond the stage at which mechanical production was promoted at the expense of all other methods (11).
The methods of work rationalization that were developed in capitalist industries for the sake of maximizing surplus value were to be carried forward into the socialist economy. The definition of socially necessary (unfree) labor time that applies to capitalist production applies also to socialist production. Marx was describing capitalist production for profit when he wrote
. . . only so much of the time spent in the production of any article is counted, as, under the given social conditions, is necessary. The consequences of this are various. In the first place, it becomes necessary that the labour should be carried on under normal conditions. If a self-acting mule is in general use for spinning, it would be absurd to supply the spinner with distaff and spinning wheel. The cotton too must not be such rubbish as to cause extra waste in being worked, but must be of a suitable quality. Otherwise the spinner would be found to spend more time in producing a pound of yarn than is socially necessary, in which case the excess of time would create neither value nor money… labour power itself must be of average efficacy… This power must be applied with the average amount of exertion and with the usual degree of intensity (12).
Referring to what might be possible in a socialist economy, Marx wrote that
Only by suppressing the capitalist form of production could the length of the working-day be reduced to the necessary labour time. But even in that case, the latter would extend its limits. On the one hand, because the notion of “means of subsistence” would considerably expand, and the labourer would lay claim to an altogether different standard of life. On the other hand, because a part of what is now surplus-labour, would then count as necessary labour; I mean the labour of forming a fund for reserve and accumulation (13).
The socialist economy will, of course, operate from the very first within the limits of certain humane protections both as to the number of hours worked and the conditions of work, protections not voluntarily adopted by capitalist employers. Marx did not expect that productivity and total production would decline from the level attained in the capitalist economy. While the capitalist was careful to avoid waste in his own industry, the economy as a whole was extravagantly wasteful. Under socialism, waste will be avoided not only in specific industries but also on the general level of planning. There will also be rational economic conservation aimed at preserving and renewing the natural resources that must remain available to future generations. Capitalism, on the other hand, is incapable of such foresight.
THE FUTURE REALIZATION OF ABSOLUTE EQUALITY
Marx included in his idea of the future, an ideal norm of equity which applied to material distribution and also to the distribution of free time. The ideal equalization could not be attained directly through conscious moral efforts of a public kind. On this question, Marx stayed strictly within the limits of the deterministic logic he applied to all of history. He had denied that economic and political societies, considered as functionally integrated, natural-organic entities, have the power to alter the internal system of production relations, which are also relations of distribution, in accordance with an ideal norm that goes beyond the status quo. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) he described the conditions that would exist in the higher phase of communist society “after the enslaving subordination of individuals under the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished” (14). The concept of enslavement, as noted earlier (chapter 3) implied. the existence of .an oppressive system integrating power which could be eliminated only through a process of natural historical evolution. He referred also to the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” Gustice) which also could not be left behind until the higher phase had been reached.
The arguments he used to demonstrate that the ideal of. the French communists: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” could not be achieved in the early phases of socialism also reveal the meaning that this ideal had for Marx. The distributive equity that will be realized in the higher phase of communism will be a rectification of injustices that have their origin in nature as well as in society. Socialism will be able to apply, at first, only the principle of “equal pay for equal work,” which had developed in bourgeois society in connection with, a formal legalistic concept of “equal right.” In The Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx said that “… equal right is still in principle — bourgeois right, although [in the future socialist economy] principle and practice are no longer in conflict.” In the “equal pay for equal work” economy of transitional socialism, each worker will receive a certificate of consumption entitling him to draw from the public stock an amount proportional to the measurable, objective value of his material work contribution. The material inequality that results from this application of the equal pay principle is due in large part to· the fact that
… one man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because every one is only a worker like every one else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is therefore a right of inequality in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can only consist in the application of an equal standard…
Material inequality will arise also for reasons having no relation to differences of natural privilege. The personal expenses of workers may differ: “ … one worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus with an equal output, and with an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.” He said that theorists of socialism do not have to be concerned with future problems of material distribution, which will correct themselves. It must be recognized that
. . . these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined.
Initial material inequities will be eradicated gradually after the working class has taken over the ownership of the means of production:
The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, viz. labour power. Once the elements of production are so distributed, then the present day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the cooperative property of the workers them selves, then this likewise results in a different distribution of the means of consumption from the present one.
In the higher equalitarian condition, individual’s will continue to differ in degree and kind of natural ability and in family circumstances. They will then receive a personal return commensurate with their personal need. Every worker will have an equal moral claim against the socially produced material resources. Although workers will be receiving· different material amounts, according to need, they will be receiving equal amounts of another, important supra-material asset. An implicit norm of abstract, formal (bourgeois) “equal right” will apply in the distribution of the supremely valuable asset of free, private time. This equalization is not classed by Marx as a “right.” He excludes the term “equal right,” perhaps because he also excludes the concept of equal obligation or duty. Duties of a moral kind will be non existent, being metaphysically excluded from the future post-sacrificial free condition of personal and social life (15). At first, the distribution of free time will not be equitable, since all persons will not yet be engaged in material production. In the higher condition of communism, all persons will be making an equal social contribution of time and effort on the necessary work level, even though the material value of one person’s work time may be greater than that of another, and even though the material needs and the material income of individuals will differ.
Marx’s socialist economic theory, as given in Capital and in The Critique of the Gotha Programme included a transcendental moral logic. Material productivity, and therefore the amount of free time available to all persons in socialist society will be maximized when all share equally in the tasks of material production, i.e., when each spends an equal amount of time in such work. The securing of material abundance requires rational planning and management, but also other elements not reducible to rationality. The inequalities associated with the division of labor and especially with the anti thesis of mental and physical labor must be eliminated if optimum material productivity is to be attained. The optimal condition which Marx called the higher stage of communism will be reached only through the interaction of rationally planned material expansion with other processes of spiritual and general development taking place in the working class economy.
THE ANTITHESIS OF PHYSICAL AND MENTAL LABOR
The primary inequity in the first stages of socialist development is not material but temporal. All individuals will at first be enslaved and subordiated by the inequalitarian system of relations which they have no power to overturn. Certain groups of workers would not, at first, be engaged in necessary material labor. Persons who had been living at a middle class cultural and vocational level would retain their advantages The manual workers would have initial disadvantages relative to this other group. Nothing can be done, or ought to be done, about this inequality. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx made this clear when he raised questions about the wording of the German party’s recommendations regarding education. He insists that there be no cultural regression in the process of changing from capitalism to socialism. Educational opportunities available to middle class children .will at first be greater than those available to children of the working class, i.e., to the great majority:
Equal elementary education? What idea lies behind these words? Is it believed that in present-day society (and it is only with this one has to deal) education can be equal for all classes? Or it is demanded that the upper classes also shall . be compulsorily reduced to the modicum of education — the elementary school — that alone is compatible with the economic conditions not only of the wage workers but of the peasants as well.
Although Marx seems here to be thinking only of present conditions in capitalist society, he expected that these conditions would persist for some time in the socialist economy. He was not referring only to inherited class inequalities, however, when he anticipated the continuance of the “enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labour” in the early stages of socialism. He was referring also to the persistence of certain individualistic attitudes which had been widespread in the open-class society of capitalism. In Capital III he wrote that in present day society “ … a man without fortune but possessing energy, solidity, ability and business acumen” may be able to obtain commercial credit on the basis of his abilities and thus become a capitalist. The availability of this kind of opportunity is
. . . greatly admired by apologists of the capitalist system. Although this circumstance continually brings an unwelcome number of new soldiers of fortune into the field and into competition with already existing individual capitalists, it also reinforces the supremacy of capital itself, expands its base and enables it to recruit ever new forces for itself out of the substratum of society (16).
Did Marx expect that some of those who has been in the substratum of capitalist society, would continue to rise out of their class of origin, i.e., out of the ranks of physical laborers, to join those who were engaged in mental rather than in physical work? Certain passages in Capital and elsewhere suggest that he expects this might happen, but he makes no clear statements. What does come across clearly is j:J.is opposition to “hierarchy,” i.e., to the perpetuation under socialism of any special occupational stratum of cultural, social and intellectual leaders endowed with special forms of power and influence. In the middle ages, according to Marx, the Catholic Church had “formed its hierarchy out of the best brains of the land, regardless of their estate, birth or fortune.” The ruling power of the Church had been consolidated chiefly by this means (17). He added that “The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.”
Although the proletarian workers will become the ruling class in the first stages of socialism, they will rule collectively. They will have no special privileges to defend. Their accession to power does not endow them with such privileges. They remain as they had been, the essential working foundation of modern society, committed to their collective social tasks. Their rule will be neither stable nor dangerous, blocking the further advance to the fully realized condition. In the evolution taking place under socialism, the “fore most minds” of the time will ultimately be incorporated into a system of “generalized labor.” Mental and physical work will lose their antithetical character. At first, there will be a considerable minority of non-physical workers who will not identify themselves with the majority of their fellow human beings. They will not voluntarily wish to give up the occupational advantages they possess. The problem of giving up does not exist among the masses of workers, who therefore have less of a moral handicap to overcome than persons at the middle stratum level. As time goes on, persons in the latter category will be increasingly deprived of the power to avoid the burden of necessary material labor that is the lot of the majority. Marx was referring to the first stage of socialism when he wrote, in Capital:
The intensity and productiveness of labour being given, the time which society is bound to devote to material production is
shorter, and as a consequence, the time at its disposal for the free development, intellectual and social, of the individual fs greater, in proportion as the work is more and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society, and as a particular class is more and more deprived of the power to shift the natural burden of labour from its shoulders to those of another layer of society. In this direction, the shortening of the working-day finds at last a limit in the generalisation of labour. In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time (18).
The rate of advance toward the optimum condition of personal and social development will accelerate as the earlier inequalitarian condition is outgrown. In the passage just quoted, Marx did not indicate in what way the non-proletarian strata would be “more and more deprived” of their burden shifting tendencies, nor did he ever discuss this question.
In the Grundrisse, Marx referred to a process of personal self-development that would take place in the free time segment of total life time. Here he was assuming that the unity of mental and physical work was an accomplished fact. Under these conditions, an increase in free time improves total productivity. But he also emphasized the importance of economic rationalization as a means to increasing free time:
The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle, etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus,economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production (19).
In another Grundrisse passage Marx said that
The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e., time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.
It appears that Marx is referring in part to an increase in personal productivity which will take place in connection with private work projects that are not in the public material category. The saving of labor time
… can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract anti thesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like… (20).
Marx retained, throughout the years, his organic, Hegelianized vision of a future developing system in which necessity and freedom interact in a supra-rational way, just as “individual” and “society” will also interact. Necessary work includes work on the private free time level as well as work on the collective “socially necessary” level. Productivity on both levels is enhanced; wealth — material and supra-material — is increased, as more and more free time becomes available, under ideally equalitarian conditions. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme he declared that the higher stage of communism will emerge “. . . after labour, from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly… “
Marx’s equalitarian and communal emphasis created more than one kind of difficulty. He did, of course, not propose to eliminate mental labor. Nevertheless, mental work is morally subordinated to physical work, in spite of the fact that it, too, will continue to be necessary in the carrying on of material production, in general public and economic planning and administration, and in the maintenance of a variety of publicly essential functions and services.
When he discussed material production as it would be carried on in specific industries in the socialist economy, Marx expected that the production workers would administer and manage their own particular enterprises, and that they would in this way be engaging in mental as well as in physical work. But he sidestepped the problem of technical, scientific and professional specialization in these same industries. Certain functions might require specialized education and the development of aptitudes not needed by the majority. Either there will be no vocational specialization, which seems ridiculous, or else the relatively small category of mental, professional workers will be dividing their time, spending just as much of their total day in unskilled or semi-skilled forms of group work as the average non-specialist. This could mean that their. total working day would be longer than average. The time spent on the “mental work” level would count as “free time,” and not as time spent in sharing the tasks and burdens of physical work; This is indeed what Marx seems to be implying. His vision of unity and of burden sharing cannot be contained within the bounds of “common sense.”
In Theories of Surplus Value (1862–63) Marx defined “immaterial labor.” He said that economic science could disregard this kind of work, which did not belong to the sphere of capitalist production proper, which is chiefly large-scale mass production. Immaterial production
… cannot be separated from the act of producing, as is the case with all performing artists, orators, actors, teachers, physicians, priests, etc. Here too the capitalist mode of production is met with only to a small extent, and from the nature of the case can only be applied in a few spheres… All these manifestations of capitalist production in this sphere are so insignificant compared with the totality of production that they can be left entirely out of account (21).
From the standpoint of the time ca1culus to be used by economic science in the time of socialism, any kind of specialized mental labor and any kind of immaterial labor can be left out of account, treated as if belonging in the “free time” category. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx did say that some of the “proceeds of labour” will have to..be retained. at the public, social level, not only in order to accumulate a reserve fund for the replacement of equipment and for production expansion, but also for certain communal purposes that fall into a secondary, non-material category. It will be necessary to deduct from the total material product “First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production Secondly, that which is destined for the communal satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc Thirdly, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, what is included under so-called official poor relief today.” In spite of this cursory reference to “communal needs’ for a considerable variety of services that are in the “immaterial labor” category, Marx seems to adhere to his expectation that all able-bodied persons should participate in material (physical) labor at the unskilled or semi-skilled collective group level. He leaves his readers to infer that persons engaged in other occupations will be earning their keep in a moral sense only insofar as they also engage in necessary material work.
TRANSFORMATION OF HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF WAR
The freedom and necessity dualism which Marx developed in connection with his philosophy of labor can be interpreted as a transformation of Hegel’s philosophy of war, including Hegel’s conception of the way in which war relates to the economy and society of capitalism. Marx’s economic collectivism supplanted Hegel’s political collectivism. Marx had invested the proletarians in mass industry with heroic attributes. They were said to have acquired desirably social qualities and powers, and essential capacities for discipline, as a result of having been conscripted by history to work in capitalist industry, becoming a para-military industrial army (22).
Hegel was an upholder of what has been called “the work ethic” in its most individualistic form. The worker who exemplifies this ethic is a member of the middle class. He is self-motivated. His work is a testimony to his
human freedom, to his autonomous power of personal “self-making.” He receives in return for his efforts, benefits that are material, social and also moral. He develops desirable moral character traits through work, and thereby acquires an acceptable social standing and meritoriousness in the eyes of other people in the same middle class society, and also in his own eyes. For the “ethical individual,” who is by definition a member of the middle class, there is “ … the precept of action to acquire goods through one’s own intelligence and industry, — of honesty in commercial dealing, and in the use of property — in short moral life in the socio-economic sphere” (23). This same individual is also a member of a national spiritual collective. On this level he participates in a unity of action and of spirit which includes persons who are not in the middle class occupational range. The ethical individual must stand ready, at all times, to forfeit his earthly possessions, including life itself, for the sake of the nation. It is his duty to act so as to maintain “ … this substantive individuality, i.e., the independence and sovereignty of the state, at the risk and the sacrifice of property and life, as well as of opinion and every thing else naturally comprised in the compass of life” (24). Hegel denied the moral validity of any program for establishing “perpetual peace,” referring especially to Kant’s anti-war position:
War is that state of affairs which deals in earnest with the vanity of temporal goods and concerns — a vanity at other times a common theme of edifying sermonizing. This is what makes it the moment in which the ideality of the particular attains its rights and is actualized. War has the higher significance that by its agency, as I have remarked elsewhere, “the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilizing of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be the product of pro longed, let alone ‘perpetual’ peace” (25).
The ethical individual need not undergo, in reality, the total loss of his secular assets or of his life in times of national mobilization. But he must stand ready to do so. His personal fate will be determined by accidental factors that operate independently of his personal sacrificial will. It is the will that must be in accord with the divine necessity.
Hegel had excluded the industrial proletariat of capitalistic society, from the “ethical life” of independent, personal self-making. The middle class was at the moral center of the nation. The proletarians were on the periphery. Marx placed these same workers at the economic and moral center of modern universal society. They represent the great majority within the various industrial nations. The middle class strata, on the other hand, are reduced to moral and economic marginality.
Hegel’s collectivism did not nullify nationally internal, morally discriminatory class status differences except in a transcendental manner. The socially and morally marginal proletarians will be called upon .to make the same military sacrifices as the higher status groups. For purposes of military action, they are included as equal members of the spiritual whole. There is, in other words, a double standard of moral ranking in Hegel’s system. The spiritually equalitarian standard applies also in the relation of the particular individual to the law. Persons in the category of the “penurious rabble”· have the same “right” to legal punishment as persons in middle and upper groups. The class differences are to be disregarded, since the law represents “equal justice,” i.e., equal right, for all who come under the national jurisdiction. The marginal underclasses who are not, according to Hegel, upholders of the existing legal system, and who are not qualified to serve as representatives of legal authority, must endure the disadvantages of living in modern• bourgeois national society, while being denied access to the compensating benefits.
In his concept of universal participation in necessary social labor, Marx was eliminating the inequities and moral ambiguities of the bourgeois system described by Hegel. There would be equal justice for all, i.e., an equality of rank and of merit, and an equality of free personal life-time, based on an equality of effort and of time contribution in relation to necessary material labor tasks. Marx eliminated the contrast between the secular institutional routines of socio-economic life and the extraordinary interruptions of the normal routine in times of war. There need be no readiness to undergo sacrificial death for the sake of preserving society as a whole from corruption. Neither will there have to be a willingness to risk material security; In place of
the constant, voluntary readiness for total sacrifice which is required of the ethical, middle-class individual in the Hegelian system, there will be a:normal universal rendering of a voluntary work contribution. In Hegel’s system, the ethical individual who has achieved, through personal spiritual development, a complete “self-mastery,” has attained a condition in which his own will is identical with the will of the State. Conflict between self-will and the universal imperatives has been eliminated. In Marx’s system, the necessity of material labor will not be experienced by the individuals as a social or moral exaction, a limitation on freedom imposed from without, against the wishes or the will of the acting subject. Individuals who have become fully social will not have a tendency to resist such participation. In collective work, they will have acquired, in a natural and social way, a power of self-discipline which is also self-subordination to a collective group project. He (the universal worker)
… not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will… And this subordination is no mere momentary act… The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be (26).
In both systems, Hegelian and Marxist, the autonomy of the working individual is highly prized, but it is always linked to collective autonomy, the autonomy of the whole to which the individual belongs. In Hegel, autonomy on a national level already exists. The “ethical ind1vidual” participates in the freedom and autonomy of the nation, which is subject to no external moral or social authority, and to no law except that of its own internal life-development and destiny. In Marx, collective autonomy was yet to be attained by the workers. They could not be autonomous as a working association and society as long as capitalism endured:
That a capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should command. on the field of battle… An industrial army of workmen, under the command of a capitalist, requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and sergeants (foremen, overlookers), who, while the work is being done, command in the name of the capitalist (27).
After the rule of capital has ended, the formerly external command functions will be internalized and exercised collectively. The workers will become their own managers, supervisors, and directors. In his Inaugural Address before the meeting of the First International Workingman’s Association, October 1864, Marx hailed the success of experimental producer cooperatives as a demonstration of what the future could become. These cooperatives were a
… victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the cooperative movement, especially the cooperative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands.” The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands… and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart (28).
Hegel had represented the practice of war as a necessity of national spiritual autonomy. This autonomy included the freedom to embark on grand national designs which might lead to disaster, military defeat, and even to the death of the particular nation of which the ethical individual was a member. The autonomy of associated labor, as conceived by Marx, cannot lead to destruction or to the infliction of death. The work of the association is directed to the maintenance and realization of life.
THE DEVALUATION OF THE FAMILY IN THE LABOR PROCESS
Marx’s high evaluation of collective group labor went hand in hand with his devaluation of family functions and family roles. Certain parental functions were being absorbed and partly nullified in a collective process above the family level. So considered, the necessity of sharing in the burden of physical labor was also a form of emancipation, insofar as it was also a means for relieving the individual of certain other, formerly burdensome responsibilities and problems. Marx’s position on the family, in Capital, was not as negative as it had been in his early communist writings (29). The family would persist, albeit in a “higher form,” in communist society. Nevertheless, it was still being devalued. Individuals will no longer have to exercise a significant degree of personal moral and disciplinary authority over their children. Nothing in Marx’s later writings on family and society was contradictory to what he had written in The Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
In Capital, Marx said that socialism was to eliminate those forms of
parental right that led to the victimization of children. Parental economic exploitation of children was one result of the general atomization process by which all previously established familial ties and moral restraints of a protective kind had been dissolved: “. . . modern industry, in overturning the economic foundation on which was based the traditional family, and the family labor corresponding to it, had also unloosened all traditional family ties.” The British Parliament had been reluctant to pass protective laws regulating labor carried on by children in home industries, i.e., outside the factories, viewing such regulation as “ … a direct attack on the patria potestas, on parental authority.” In finally passing such legislation,the members of Parliament blamed the parents for the evils of child exploitation in the home. Marx blamed the system of capital, but he also believed that the parents, as well as the employers, had been engaging in a “mischievous misuse of power” which is the hallmark of capitalism:
… it was not… the misuse of parental authority that created the capitalistic exploitation, whether direct or indirect, of children’s labour; but, on the contrary, it was the capitalistic mode of exploitation which, by sweeping away the economic basis of parental authority, made its exercize degenerate into a mischievous misuse of power (30).
The economy that leads to this degeneration is laying the basis for a dialectical leap which will not restore the earlier, tradition-bound. form of family life. Instead, it will eliminate the possibility that parental power will continue to exist to any important degree:
However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes… Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development. . . (31).
Personally exercised functions of authority and parental control appearing in earlier forms of family life are being replaced by an impersonal discipline which regulates the activities of all in the working group. Previously existing differences between masculine and feminine functions are being minimized as much as possible. Women will not retain any special family functions and responsibilities. When masculine family authority is excluded, feminine authority disappears also.
It is hardly surprising that Marx, in his outlook on the future, made no room for a category of labor — partly material and partly mental — that was unpaid labor in capitalist society, and which was not the source of surplus value derived by capital from industrial production and paid proletarian work Marx seems to assume either that the need for domestic household functions will not exist in socialist society, or that no provision at all nee.d be made for such work, which will apparently be counted as a “free time” occupation, along with those middle class occupations classed as “immaterial labor.” Marx treats the proletarian way of life as if it included no domestic sphere at all. It is the middle class family, in which the men, women and children are not working side by side, collectively, for the capitalist employer, that is to be extinguished. He makes it clear that women will be expected to work in non-domestic, material production the same. number of hours as men, both in the political economy of the working class, and in the final classless society.
Non-domestic collective work is a character-trainh1g and character-transforming process. which adults and children undergo involuntarily, in capitalist society, if they are proletarians. This form of training will one day be universalized. The process is needed especially by children, since they no longer have a family environment. Marx objected strongly to the Gotha Programme demand of the German party, calling for «the restriction of women’s labour and the prohibition of child labour.” Women, he.said, should come under the same protective regulations in regard to the length of the working day that are suitable for men, and should be restricted only by being excluded from “branches of industry that are specifically unhealthy for the females body or are objectionable morally for the female sex.” He went on to say that
A general prohibition of child labour is incompatible with the existence of large-scale industry and hence an empty, pious aspiration.
Its realization — if it were possible — would be reactionary, since, with a strict regulation of the working time according to the different age groups and other safety measures for the protection of children, an early combination of productive labour with education is one of the most potent means for the transformation of present-day society.
In the Grundrisse manuscripts, at the time when Marx was abandoning his earlier idea that labor on the necessary level of material production might be completely eliminated in the classless society, he implied that children will be able to become adults capable of further independent self-development only if they first undergo the discipline of the group work experience:
The process [of material labor] is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time practice [Ausubung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, insofar as labour requires practical use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, [it is] at the same time exercize (32).
Both Hegel and Marx had devalued the family, along with specifically feminine functions, in their philosophies of history. Hegel, however, had attached a good deal of importance to the family as a child-caring institution. The modern proletarians, according to him, were morally deprived, not qualified for full participation in the authority of society, because their extreme impoverishment had made family life impossible for them. Non-scholastic educational and disciplinary functions taking place within middle class families were an essential preparation for later adult life:
… the right of the parents over the wishes of their children is determined by the object in view — discipline and education… this education has the negative aim of raising children out of the instinctive, physical level on which they are originally, to self-subsistence and freedom of personality and so to the level on which they have the power to leave the natural unity of the family (33).
It is only the young adult male who must take his place in the wider, supra-familial world of economic and political life. The woman’s activities, on a mature level, are still confined to the domestic sphere as she leaves her original natural family to function in a new family relation as a wife and a parent. While Hegel did not exclude women from the ethical life, they never achieve that degree of “abstract” independence and especially that degree of rationality and of intellect, which the man can achieve. Women, as adults, share in an “ethical mind” union with their husbands in regard to family matters. The bond of marriage produces a common “ethical mind” within the family domain: “The identification of personalities, whereby the family becomes one person and its members become accidents… is the ethical mind” (34). As an economic unit, the family also has a single identity. It “… has its real external existence in property,” which is family capital and which becomes “the embodiment of the substantial personality of the family” (35).
In Hegel’s dialectics, the development of Reason in history culminates in the emergence of a personal self-consciousness and a power of personal self-making which is associated with masculine identity, and which becomes, in the political sphere, a participation of the individual in the “ethical sub stance” of the State. The woman is excluded from this political relation, which is not required for the attainment of the highest level of feminine spiritual life. The family, an ethical sphere which is sub-’political, has there fore no “world-historical” significance, i.e., feminine functions as such have no world-historical significance:
In this social relation [of the family], morality consists in the members behaving toward each other not as individuals — possessing an independent will; not as persons. The family; therefore, is excluded from that process of development in which History takes its rise (36).
Marx, as we have seen, substituted character training in the collective working group for education in the middle class family. The Hegelian emphasis on the development of philosophical intellect and reason in history was subordinated to an emphasis on the development of technological power over nature. This progressive activity, like the activity of philosophy, was identified with masculine initiatives and powers. History had progressed beyond the primitive state of immersion in original nature. The mind .and will of the universal worker developed beyond the first, instinctual level, through an inter action with the materials of nature which had brought out the dormant potentialities of passive matter by inducing changes in form. In this way, Man had evolved himself. Further changes in social, economic and political institutions and structures, and in culture, had come about as a result of this primary interactivity. In Aristotelian philosophy, the vitalizing, form-developing Nous components of teleological Nature signify masculine powers. The passive, form-receptive attributes of matter are identified as feminine.
Marx associated the achievement of rational scientific power over nature, and a practical, instrumentalist attitude toward nature, with the accession of humanity to a mature, adult level of self-consciousness. Primitive communal life, in which such power had not developed, and in which the prevalent attitude toward nature, Marx believed, had been religious, was identified with childhood dependency. In the evolutionary perspective, he some times treated the human species as if it were a single super-entity changing and maturing in time. Even when the dividing line between pre-history and history had been crossed, historical individuals at a low level of development were socially in a “pre-natal” condition. Societies somewhat more advanced represented various stages and forms of cultural childhood. Full cultural adult hood — in an alienated form — was reached in bourgeois society, at which time the individuals had been freed by history from feudalistic and patriarchal dependency ties. The bourgeois break with feudal culture and with Catholic clerical authority was therefore the historical equivalent of the passage of a single person from later childhood to adulthood in the course of his personal life history. The rupture with the pre-adult past, both in personal and in social history, seemed to be complete.
In describing the social experience of the individual in modern rational society, and the way in which he acquires self-consciousness, Marx minimized and indeed almost obliterated references to childhood experience. In one of the most interesting of the many interesting footnotes in Capital he had written:
In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichteian philosopher, to whom “I am I” is sufficient, man first sees and recognizes himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo (37).
This passage is compatible with Marx’s abstract atomic theory, with his formal supposition that adults in the atomized society have no social experience which gives them a sense of identity with others, until they encounter such others in non-familial relationships of a positive kind. Obviously, he can not be referring to the early impressions received by a child who normally must relate to, and in some way become forcefully aware of, the different from-self identity of his parents, of other adults, of older and younger children and of persons of the opposite sex, to mention only some of the most obvious “non-identical” categories likely to be encountered.
When Marx excluded the family as an educational agency, he was at the same time eliminating from his own philosophy of the future the personal dialectic of negation and of the “negation of the negation” which Hegel had included when he referred to the spiritual development of the “ethical individual” who achieves a transcendental unification with the objective Spirit and Mind of the State. The individual so described also participates in the universal Reason and Mind of philosophy at the highest modern level of absolute enlightenment. This ethical individual starts out as a youth imbued with an ideal about the world and his role in it which is not compatible with the actuality. “… he feels that both his ideal and his own personality are not recognized by the world, thus the youth, unlike the child, is no longer at peace with the world.” As the youth matures, he must come to recognize that the ideal which he seeks is already present and actualized in the objective world outside of himself. He then recognizes his own activity as part of the ideal process. Only if he becomes afflicted by a “diseased state of mind” and is unable to “give up his subjectivity” will the adult man be “unable to over come his repugnance to the actual world, and by this very fact finds himself in a state of relative incapacity which may become actual incapacity.” But the stronger persons manage to overcome this subjectivity:
If, therefore, the man does not want to perish, he must recognize the world as a self-dependent world which in its essential nature is already complete, must accept the conditions set for him by the world and wrest from it what he wants for himself. As a rule, the man believes that this submission is only forced upon him by necessity. But, in truth, this unity with the world must be recognized, not as a relation imposed by necessity, but as rational. The rational, the divine, possesses the absolute power to actualize itself, and has, right from the beginning, fulfilled itself… The world is this actualization of divine Reason: it is only on its surface that the play of contingency prevails… therefore the man behaves quite rationally in abandoning his plan for completely transforming the world, and in striving to realize his personal aims, passions, and interests only within the framework of the world of which he is a part (38).
Although Hegel seems to refer to a representative middle class individual, it is only the philosopher who recognizes the “divine” nature of necessity. It is apparent that Marx proposed to transform the actuality, in such a way as to eliminate the initial period of youthful negativity and opposition to the world as it exists. In so doing, he also eliminates the breaking away period of adolescence which Hegel had described in such an interesting way. He eliminates the Hegelian contrast between the early family environment and the wider, initially alien environment of the world in which the young man must learn to find himself, and to realize himself. The society of social ism, from the very beginning, will be beyond radical, critical negation, since it will have passed through that stage. The negative action of the working class revolutionary movement in defeating the powers of capital displaces or absorbs the dialectical critical negativity of the Hegelian single self. Once the crisis is passed, actuality, even in the first, still highly imperfect stage of socialist development, will be recognized and accepted as tending inevitably toward the higher condition. In the economy of socialism, all significant relations, even those experienced by young children, will be extra-familial. The individual will be included as soon as possible in a collective work group which wil1 be his moral and social environment. This group will be composed of persons of both sexes and of nearly all ages. The individual will not pass through a period in which he becomes critical of the existing world or insecure in his relation to it.
In his political unity philosophy, Hegel had made an implicit distinction between the ethical individual who finally, after undergoing some degree of stress, achieves a transcendental unity with the State and the great majority of non-philosophical individuals who comprise the nation. The.single ethical individual had first negated this own personal critical reactions before becoming united with the Divine Reason of the State. This dialectical unification seems to be by-passed in the case of the great majority, the people who become united into a spiritual whole under the influence of political soul leaders and military heroes. The Volkgeist is a collective spirit that undercuts the level of rational critical consciousness. Persons are united sub-rationally into a collective whole, in response to external leadership and direction. This spirit is first
… in a state of unconsciousness which the great mart in question aroused. Their fellows, therefore, follow these soul-leaders; for they feel the irresistible power of their own inner Spirit thus embodied (39).
This collective spirit, guided by the leadership, is part of the history making progressive, divinely guided force that will continue to operate indefinitely in the future.
There was a less conspicuous division, in Marx’s system, between the individual who passes smoothly from childhood into maturity in the society of socialism and the collective unity of the working group of which he will also become a part. In the Grundrisse, the individual who has gone through the stage of “becoming,” i.e., a process of personal maturation, becomes mentally detached from the group work in which he is engaged, perceiving it in its world-historical perspective. Here the mind of the Hegelian philosopher reappears, without being so labelled. However, there were passages in Capital where Marx was describing the collective spirit and form of social empowerment that developed naturally and spontaneously in group labor activities. Here the group was described as being under external direction. The mentality that initiates the work project, directs and manages it, is external to the group. Something resembling the Hegelian Volkgeist develops under these conditions. The mind of philosophy, the mind of the detached knower, is wholly in abeyance. The collective spirit is social, not political, but the unifying work activity is analogous to a military activity:
Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of a regiment of infantry, is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual cavalry or infantry soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from • the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously in one of the same undivided operation… Not only have we here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of cooperation, but the creation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses.
Apart from the new power that arises from the fusion of many forces into one single force, mere social contact begets in most industries an emulation and a· stimulation of the animal spirits that heighten the efficiency of each individual workman… The reason of this is that man is, if not as Aristotle contends, a political, at all events a social animal (40).
In Hegel’s philosophy, the political collective that is being mobilized by “soul leaders” is to be aroused to a condition of enthusiasm for collective aggression, destruction, and sacrifice. There must be a readiness on the part of the male individual to sacrifice a good deal more than his own personal life and his own personal assets and interests. In spite of the fact th.at Marx, in his vision of the future society of associated labor, eliminates the family as a moral unit, his socialism was more child-protective than Hegel’s political nationalism. The “ethical health of peoples” which, according to Hegel, can be preserved from corruption only by war, requires the periodic sacrifice of family security and the security of children. Women and children, as well as men, are imperiled in the essential masculine activity of war. The duty of the adult male to the State, a duty which links him to the “divine life,” overrides any duty he might have toward his own family. The lives and security of families in those other nations which might be subjected to attack by the individual’s own nation, also count for nothing in the spiritually cleansing ritual of war.
When Marx replaced Hegel’s political collectivism with an economic collectivism, and the nationally unifying project of war with the unifying, world-universal activities of associated labor, he was including the entire family — men, women, and children — within the same life-protective and security maintaining system. He was also concerned with ensuring the maintenance and replenishment of the natural resources required by future generations. Hegel, on the other hand, had been indifferent to such concerns.
THE CONTINUING NECESSITY OF STRUGGLE
In his mature works, Marx had modified his perspective on the future. In his early period, he was ignoring the process of childhood development that all persons born into the future social economy would have to undergo. The focus was on the society of adults who were to achieve self-emancipation and autonomy, becoming free of the need for external legal and social constraint and external social authority, once they had gained control of the material means by which this freedom would be achieved. In the later works, the period of childhood is recognized. The individual who begins as a child will have to go through a socializing and disciplining process before he can become a fully mature member of society. Marx’s resemblance to Hegel was in some ways more pronounced in his later period. This was partly the result of his emphasis on non-scholastic childhood education. In addition, the continued necessity of material labor on the adult level of life guarantees the persistence of a kind of social solidarity and morale that the ‘’young Marx” had not included in his vision of ultimate communism.
In the mature works, individuals united in associated labor will be bound together by the continued necessity of struggle against a non-human external, potentially inimical power — the power of Nature. The social struggle against external Nature becomes the means by which the internal morality of the society will be maintained in future generations beyond the time of political and social class struggle.
In the early writings, the essential condition for the maintenance of peace, unity and freedom in the future society seemed to consist almost entirely in the avoidance of material scarcity. The conflict of interests and the universal competition prevailing in bourgeois society would be eliminated when scarcity was overcome. That same society, however, might conceivably disintegrate into a collection of atomistic individuals in situations of economic decline and recurring material scarcity. Individuals who natl become psychologically accommodated to a particular material standard of living might again compete against one another economically, if there were not an almost unlimited supply of material goods made continually available by a transcendental, collectively appropriated technological and social power that seemed to operate automatically.
In the later writings, the situation is not so unstable, although there is still a major emphasis on the need for ·material expansion as a means for bringing about the higher stage of communism. Marx’s basic moral outlook, throughout every phase of his career, was always connected with a meta· physical atomism. The isolated atomic individual was treated as the root source and cause of the competitive, aggressive, acquisitive and destructive potentialities of universal human nature. These are likely to reappear, and to express themselves again in action, provided there is no social environmental system which can effectively offset them. The older Marx, thinking.of the future society, begins with the child. The child is born into society as an “abstract” non-social individual, containing within himself or herself diverse potentialities, negative and positive. The disapproved potentialities will be counteracted in the socializing and training experience of the group environment. In this process, the child will become attached directly to the collective whole, and will be brought under the influence of the collective group spirit.
In the early writings, the future social individual was perceived as the member of a consuming society, not also as a material worker and producer. with a publicly necessary contribution to make. His consumer needs and wants were said to be derived from “society.” As such, they would inevitably expand, increasing and also changing as a result of unceasing technological innovations and improvements, in a situation of expanding material productivity. The socialized consumer’s expectations as to what he should rightfully get and even demand in the way of a material standard of living were deter mined by his passive, uncritical dependency on the group value system, i.e., by his readiness to accept the value judgments of other people as his own. Insofar as he is fully immersed in the ongoing “life process of society” he will be incapable of developing a negative reaction to any aspect of the ever changing material consumer need system. The process of continuous technological change testifies to the presence of higher faculties of scientific and practical reason. It is complemented by consumer passivity and by the morally desirable social irrationality of the need determining process. •
Marx’s technological emphasis was by no means diminished irt his later writings. The future social individuals are still being considered .as material consumers who are perpetually· under the influence .of socially determined needs and wants. These requirements are called “mundane.” But the mundane consumer needs system is transcended in the unity of the collective work effort. A continuous struggle with Nature is required because of the need pressure, i.e., the need to combat nature. This same work necessity is also a socially essential moral training ground for the younger generation, a substitute for the Hegelian family system.
In Capital III Marx had said that humanity would never be free from the need to “wrestle with nature” in order to satisfy his wants. In socialist society, nature will always yield a sufficiency, but only when an input of common activity, of collective discipline, and of time-sacrificial effort is being contributed. Under such conditions, there will be a unifying morale, a constantly renewed sense of common purpose, which provides a substitute for the politically unifying class struggle that has been left behind. It is also a substitute for Hegel’s activity of war. The class struggle had been a unity against a common social enemy. In the period of classless communism, there will be no external social opponent, but the necessity of material labor will maintain, in practice, a combat solidarity and an equality of moral ranking which was in continuity with Marx’s heroic ideal. The collective work endeavor which is socially necessary is a struggle not directed primarily against outer nature. It is a means for keeping a potentially troublesome internal field of “human nature” under permanent, morally sufficient control.
[1] Selected Works of Marx and Engels, op. cit., Volume II.
[2] Op. cit., Volume I, Part I, p. 67.
[3] Translated by Nicolaus, op. cit., p. 611.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., pp. 611–612.
[6] Ibid., p. 711.
[7] Chapter 48, p. 820.
[8] Capital, Volume I, chapter 6, p. 171.
[9] Cited by Wesley C. Mitchell, in Types of Economic Theory, Lecture 19.
[10] See chapter 9, in this book, on “Scarcity and Necessity: The Technological Leviathan.”
[11] In his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) Morris, reporting from the future, wrote that “… we have now found out what we want, so we make no more than we want; and as we are not driven to make a vast quantity of useless things, we have time and resources enough to consider our pleasure in making them. All work which it would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery: and in all work which it is a pleasure to do by hand machinery is done without… there is such a vast number of things which can be treated as works of art, that this alone gives employment to a host of deft people.”
[12] Capital, Volume I, chapter 7, pp.195–196.
[13] Ibid., chapter 17, p. 530.
[14] See paragraph cited in chapter 9 of this book on p. 204.
[15] See the discussion of Marx’s moral outlook in chapters 6 and 7 of this book.
[16] Chapter 36, pp. 600–601.
[17] See also the discussion of Marx’s exclusion of ideological power from socialist society in chapter 6 of this book, pp. 125–128.
[18] Volume I, chapter 17, p. 530.
[19] Translated by Nicolaus, op. cit., pp. 172–173.
[20] Ibid., pp. 711–712.
[21] Part I, pp. 410–411, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1963.
[22] See chapter 6 of this book, section on “The Elevation of the Heroic Absolute.”
[23] Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, op. cit., section 551. See also the discussion of Hegel’s socio-economic morality in chapter 5 of this book.
[24] The Philosophy of Right, op. cit., section 324.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Capital, Volume I, chapter 7, pp. 177–178. This passage has been cited earlier, in chapter 3 in connection with Marx’s philosophy of evolution.
[27] Ibid., chapter 13, pp. 330 and 332.
[28] Selected Works of Marx and Engels, op. cit., Volume II.
[29] See also the discussion of Marx’s pre-communist approach to marriage and the family, in chapter 7 of this book, section on his presocialist philosophy of state and law.
[30] Volume I, chapter 15, p. 489.
[31] Ibid., p. 490.
[32] Translated by Nicolaus, op. cit., p. 712.
[33] The Philosophy of Right, sections 174 and 175.
[34] Ibid., section 163.
[35] Ibid., section 169.
[36] The Philosophy of History, Introduction
[37] Volume I, chapter 1, p. 52. See also chapter 7 of this book, pp. 169 and 170.
[38] Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, op. cit., section 396.
[39] The Philosophy of History, Introduction. See also the discussion of Hegel’s philosophy of national Spirit, in chapter 4 of this book, section on “The Oppression of Humanity by External and Social Power.”
[40] Volume I, chapter 13, pp. 325–326. See also chapter 5 of this book, p. 121.
12. Sociology and Social Theory
This concluding chapter will call attention to aspects of Marx’s concept of the future society of communism that are of particular interest when his socialism is regarded from the standpoint of social science. A good deal that is relevant in this connection has been discussed in earlier chapters. Some reference will be made here to what has gone before, but I will bring in materials not yet considered, drawing chiefly on his later writings, including the Grundrisse manuscripts of 1857–58.
SOCIALISM AS A RETURN TO SIMPLICITY
In the philosophical manuscripts of 1844, Marx had indicated some of the primary aspects of what can be called his evolutionary, dialectical sociology. It was clear that he was regarding the dialectical movement of history as a problem solving process. Various forms of social division that had developed naturally in the post-primitive economic systems of the pre- capitalist era and which had characterized capitalist society also, would gradually disappear in the socialist era. In addition, the movement that would carry humanity beyond capitalism would eliminate the problems that had arisen in philosophical consciousness. There was to be a return toward an earlier condition of unity which resembled the process of “return” described by Hegel: In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel had referred to the involutionary aspect of the evolutionary process in nature. Involution took place when the initial deadness of inorganic matter was nullified by being absorbed into the higher organic life forms (1). Hegel had referred also, in other writings, to the return of Spirit, at an enriched, fully actualized level, to the unity of the Idea. The involutionary phase of the natural social evolutionary process begins, in Marx’s system, with the abolition of the capitalist economy. The movement of communism, properly defined, “. . . knows itself as the reintegration or return of man to himself, as the overcoming of human self-alienation… “ (2).
It was a movement away from complexity, disunity and conflict toward a condition of higher simplicity, unity and freedom from conflict. Marx had also said that post-capitalist society would not be “ … an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. Rather, they [atheism and communism] are primarily the actual emergence and actual developed realization of man’s nature as something actual” (3 ).
The term “actual” in this passage can be understood in relation to Aristotle’s philosophy of being and becoming. Actualization is the movement from a condition of potentiality to a condition of realization or fulfillment through a temporal unfolding of potentialities inherent in the beginning. In his reference to “unnatural primitive simplicity,” Marx was concurring with Hegel in rejecting what they both considered were reactionary cults of artificial modern primitivism.
A good many years later, in a letter to Engels (March 25, 1868) he indicated that he had not abandoned this idea of return. He expected that the progressive movement of history would end by replicating, at a higher level of culture, the unity of self with society that had existed at the beginning of national life, in the remote past:
The first reaction against the French Revolution and the Enlightenment bound up with it was naturally to see everything as medieval, romantic; even people like Grimm are not free from this. The second reaction is to look beyond the Middle Ages into the primitive age of every nation, and that corresponds to the socialist tendency, although these learned men have no idea that they have any connection with it. Then they are surprised to find what is newest in what is oldest…
The future society of communism was to have a good deal in common with Aristotle’s conception of political society, even though Marx did not describe his own outlook in this way. Marx’s negative attitude toward the solipsist (the supreme individualist and anarchist) who believed himself to be independent of society, was markedly similar to the views of Aristotle concerning the “self-sufficient” individual who places himself outside of the State. The relation of the individual to the whole in the society of communism was to resemble the right relation of the individual to the political community as described by Aristotle.
Unlike Hegel, Aristotle had not defined the State as a divine institution, directly linked with God or Idea outside of nature. The Aristotelian State and the political society of the State had developed within nature, as part of a total realizing movement which included humanity. Aristotle had defined men as “political” and also as “social” animals. Society had at first been pre-political. The Aristotelian State had developed out of a more primitive, barbaric condition. The State that had so emerged was regarded in a transcendental light as a perfect (Platonic) form, actualized in history by the telic power of creational nature. The State of Aristotle was so closely identified with the society with which it was connected that the two were almost indistinguishable. To be outside of society was also to be outside of the State. It was to exist in a moral and psychological limbo, in a state of “self-sufficiency” and detachment incompatible with the life of the political community. The individual who was born into the fully developed political society could achieve the highest possible personal condition of self-realization only insofar as he was morally dependent on the order maintained in that society. His personal life could be completed only through his relation to this “self-sufficient” community. Justice in such a community was defined by Aristotle as “the principle of order.” That order corresponded to a principle of perfection (and of circular motion) that had been established in the sphere of the heavens, in the motion of the heavenly bodies. The individual who belongs to the Greek political community must conform to the norms of his society and to the laws of the State: “… he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must either be a beast or a god; he is no part of the state. He who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the ‘Tribeless, lawless, heartless one’ whom Homer denounces — the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece of draughts” (4). “War” in this context seems to mean only the aggressive and destructive anti-social actions of an isolated individual outside of the State, beyond its moral control. A transcendental sanction is given, by implication, to collective enterprises of war undertaken by a rightly ordered State society. “Heartlessness” is an attribute of an isolated individual, presumably not shared by those who are united with the order upheld by the state: “… man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all… “
Like many other social thinkers of the Judeo-Christian era, Marx eliminated a major contradiction that was so evident in Aristotle, namely the contradiction between the biological and medical frame of reference and the moral and political frame of reference. Only a limited portion of the human species could be included within the political State form, experiencing a personal self-realization based on such membership. The State co-existed with less developed forms of society and also with inferior types of individuals. The slaves that were economically subordinated, excluded from the political life of the free citizens, were said, by Aristotle, to be “naturally” inferior. As a biologist Aristotle studied mankind as a single species, but he abandoned this scientific universalism in his social outlook. The existing hierarchies and ranks of humanity were regarded as manifestations of a beneficent natural and cosmological order.
Aristotle did not deny that the State society maintained relations with group outside its own boundaries, and also with non-citizen and slave groups who were within the political territory, but it appears as though the State cannot err with respect to these relations. In Marx’s society of the future, membership in the community will no longer be restricted. It will be open to all who are members of the human species. However, the moral simplicity of the life that was lived within the boundaries of Aristotle’s political citizen society would be restored. All social relations would be internal, occurring within a single category of persons possessing an equal, and equally accept able status as human beings. The return of man from alienation and estrangement would be a return to life- in a society which would no longer have to cope with moral and practical problems of external relations, nor of relations with groups socially designated as “inferior.” A potentially troublesome category of individuals who are self-excluded, who remain apart from community life and outside of the order of society, would pose no serious problem, since these would always be a small minority, if indeed they existed at all.
Marx’s relation to Aristotle was mediated by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Geist), where the focus was on the development of a personally detached self-consciousness. This was a necessary pre-condition for the advance to a higher form of unity in which the individual would be morally at one with society, while at the same time preserving intact his personal individuality. The society of communism could not be established until the kind of personal individuality that Marx associated with the emergence of ancient and modern forms of “private property” had first appeared. Primitive communism of the “Asiatic” type was by no means to be duplicated, since individuality could not have developed in these non-Western, tradition-bound systems. The Asiatic folk societies of India were primitive communes, since agricultural land was owned by the community, not by individuals. They were said to be regulated impersonally by fixed tradition, the functional equivalent of unconscious instinct. The social and economic order was maintained and perpetuated in an automatic way, without the need for conscious-level forms of political, moral or social authority. Marx declared, in Capital:
… the law that regulates the division of labour in the community acts with the irresistible authority of a, law of Nature, at the same time that each individual artificer, the smith, the carpenter, and so on, conducts in his workshop all the operations of his handicraft, but independently, and without recognizing any authority over him (5).
The relation of the individual to the community was a primitive kind:
Cooperation, such as we find it at the dawn of human development, among races who live by the chase, or, say, in the agricultural Indian communities, is based, on the one. hand, on owner ship in common of the means of production, and on the other hand, on the fact that in those cases, each individual has no more torn himself off from the navel-string of his tribe or community,than each bee has freed himself from connexion with the hive. Such cooperation is distinguished from capitalistic cooperation by both of the above characteristics (6).
In the earlier Grundrisse manuscripts, he had said that “ … man is only individualized through the process of history” (7). Referring to the agricultural communities of India, he said that “The community is here… the first pre-condition … that substance, of which the individuals are mere accidents (Aksidenzen) or of which they form mere spontaneously natural parts… “ (8).
In societies which were post-primitive, the individual had gone beyond the “substantial,” i.e., the almost pre-natal, womb-like condition which had existed at first. The original tribal ownership of property in land and in other means of production had been superseded by individual proprietorship. This meant that individuation had taken place. The individual was no longer joined with a pre-individualized “substance.” In the developing and changing societies of the West, a specific way of life could not be reproduced indefinitely, or reconstituted in a process of almost instinctual, automatic self renewal, as the Asiatic (Indian) village communities were.said to have been able to do before they had succumbed to the final Western invasion.
Marx looked back in the direction of the city-state civilization of classical antiquity, which had been superior in some ways to the civilization of capitalism. The best features of this early form of civilization were to be restored in the age of socialism. The limitations of that earlier time were to be surpassed. Production, in the societies of classical antiquity, had not been merely economic. It had been the production, and the attempted reproduction, of an entire way of life, It had included aims that could not be reduced to individualistic economic and social status aims. Production activity in socialist society would be similarly inclusive, reinstating what had been most admirable and worthy of emulation in the earlier civilization:
Among the ancients… enquiry is always about what kind of property creates the best citizens…
Thus the ancient conception, in which man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious or political a definition) as the aim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production (9).
The community of the future was to be supra-national rather than international. Ethnic, cultural and regional localism would not disappear, but the differences would not be divisive, and the nation as a significant moral entity would no longer exist. Henri Lefebvre, in The Sociology of Marx, has tentatively concluded from his reading of The Communist Manifesto and of The Critique of the Gotha Programme, which he calls Marx’s “last political will and testament,” that “… the proletarian will do away with national boundaries, completing a process begun under capitalism.” He adds, however, that Marx was ambiguous about the future status of the nation: “Why not admit frankly that to some extent these famous texts are puzzling to us today?” (10)
At least some of the confusion arises from a failure on the part of interpreters of Marx to distinguish between the first stages of political socialism, as conceived by Marx, and the later classless phase. In his writings on the proletarian dictatorship he emphasized the importance of maintaining and strengthening national unity and national power in those countries where the workers had come to power and were seeking to establish socialism within their own limited political territory. National boundaries would gradually lose their importance in the process by which the transitional political phase of working class rule was supplanted by a classless form of social and public power. The unity of the classless future was to resemble the unity maintained in those pre-commercial, agriculturally based societies of antiquity which had contributed to the later Western advance. The return to a post-primitive simplicity presupposed the elimination of the need for certain functions that had been carried on in these earlier, territoriality limited political societies.
In the Grundrisse manuscripts, Marx had written, with respect to the city-state “communes” of Western antiquity, that
The continuation of the commune… is safeguarded by the surplus labour of its members in the form of military service, etc. The member of the community reproduces himself not through cooperation in wealth-producing labour, but in cooperation in labour for the (real or imaginary) communal interests aimed at sustaining the union against external and internal stress (11).
He included the ancient Judaic community among those societies in which the economic arrangements were regarded as a means for promoting and maintaining a total way of life, and the development of individuals as community members. He quoted with approval a passage from a history of Rome by Niebuhr, a German historian, who had said that
. . . the first preoccupation of the pious monarch was not the worship of the gods, but a human one. He distributed the land conquered in war and left to be occupied: he founded the worship• of Terminus {the god of boundary-stones). All the ancient law givers, and above all Moses, founded the success of their arrangements for virtue, justice and good morals (Sitte) upon landed property, or at least on secure hereditary possession of land, for the greatest possible number of citizens.
Marx said that under such circumstances
The individual is placed in such a condition of gaining his life as to make not the acquiring of wealth his object, but self-sustenance; his own reproduction as a member of the community; the reproduction of himself as a proprietor of the parcel of ground and, in that quality, as a member of the commune (12).
The territorial ground of the world economy is the global land territory that supports human life. Political boundaries will have no future moral significance. They have already been rendered obsolete on a material level, through the system of world-wide economic interdependency and commercial exchange which came into existence during the age of capitalist expansion. In the new age, individuals will sustain and develop the material and spiritual life of humanity, and their own personal life, through production activity.
Under the new conditions of production”… man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality… he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming.” Marx projects a cosmos that is open-ended, never completed. The creative potentialities of humanity, disclosed in the alienated age of capital ism, are unlimited. These powers will be liberated in post-alienated time:
In bourgeois political economy — and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds — this complete elaboration of what lies within man, appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form, and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied with itself, is vulgar and mean (13).
HUMANITY AS A DOMINANT CASTE COMMUNITY
When Marx wrote to Engels that socialism looks back in the direction of the beginning of each modern nation, he seems to have been referring to a time preceding the development of slavery. In the future society there will be no more domination and enslavement of human beings by other members of the same species. The dependency of humanity on nature, as mediated by modern science and technology, was to replace the former dependence of the classical civilizations on slavery. Humanity would be organically dependent on the subordinated realm of nature, just as earlier slave societies had been organically dependent on human slave labor. The future organic economy includes an essential but subordinate realm of non-social nature. It will also possess an inner moral duality, resembling the duality that had developed in the earlier caste-divided economic systems of the pre-capitalist slave societies. Humanity as species would become a new kind of dominant caste community, conscious of its separateness from, and superiority to, the subordinate realm of outer nature, to which it was organically linked and on which it will remain forever dependent.
In his philosophical writings of 1844, Marx had said that the essential nature of man was social, and that sub-social “nature” was a quasi-organic “outer body” of man. In these essays, he had blurred the distinction between “organic” and “inorganic” phenomena. In the later Grundrisse writings, this tendency is expressed in a somewhat different way. When he describes the agriculturally based slave-holding societies, he becomes something of a psychosociologist. He makes inferences about the subjectivity of those individuals who belong to what he calls the “producing community.” In this con text, this category excludes slaves and serfs attached to the land. It consists of those who belong to the dominant political-economic strata. He says that the slaves and serfs are perceived by the dominant community members as part of a natural environment which includes animals and other “organic” and “inorganic” properties of the land:
In the relationship of slavery and serfdom … what happens is that one part of society is treated by another as a mere organic and natural condition of its own reproduction… It is… labour itself, both in the form of the slave as of the serf, which is placed among other living things (Naturwesen) as inorganic condition of production, alongside the cattle as an appendage of the soil. In other words, the original conditions of production appear as natural prerequisites, natural conditions of existence of the producers… (14).
Marx implies also that members of the dominant society feel “naturally’ entitled to make use of whatever substratum resources, human or non human, have become available to them as a result of their dominating position, or as a result of their active economic and political initiative as a community engaged in external conquest and in the “labour of war”:
In general, property in land includes property in its organic products. Where man himself is captured as an organic accessory of the land and together with it, he is captured as one of the conditions of production… (15).
The individual in the subjugating group holds property by virtue of his status as a group member. The external population deprived of this property and the power which goes along with it is not part of the humanly significant social world:
The fundamental condition of property based on tribalism (which is originally formed out of the community) is to be a member of the tribe. Consequently a tribe conquered and subjugated by another becomes property less and part of the inorganic condition of the conquering tribe’s reproduction, which the community regards as its own (16).
Marx implies that persons who belong to a dominant community and who accept the prevailing norms of their own moral group actually perceive and relate to persons in the subordinated categories as if the latter were nothing more than a means to support and perpetuate the way of life that they experience within their closed community. The life that is lived within the status boundaries of their own group is the only kind of life that has intrinsic meaning and value for them. Ties of common origin, language and culture bind the individuals together, even though some of them may lose their property in land and may become proletarianized. Class inequalities may develop within the upper caste society without destroying these other social and cultural ties. The Roman citizens who became proletarians lost their property, but not their status as free Roman citizens. In writing about these political societies of classical antiquity, Marx was saying that no moral problems arose in the subjective consciousness of persons in the free citizen group with regard to subordinate slave populations, and that the community as such had been unconcerned with such problems (17). He treats this kind of exclusiveness, this dissociative tendency, as a natural and normal reaction, given the limiting conditions that had existed in the pre-capitalist past. These limitations will not exist in the society of communism. All interhuman relations will then be equalitarian. They will also be “social” in the ego-transcending moral meaning which Marx attached to this word. The genuinely social, supra-egoistic relations will prevail within the boundaries of a united, nature-subordinating status group, the human species. The individuals in this universal group will have acquired a kind of personal separateness that could not have developed in the pre-individualized societies of the remote past, and in the not so remote Indian folk communities.
THE EXTERNAL ORIGIN OF INTERNAL ALIENATION
Marx had been concerned primarily with the elimination of forms of alienation and estrangement that had developed within modern industrial societies which had already demonstrated the ability of Man to dominate and subjugate the forces of external nature. Internal forms of disunity, alienation, and class-divided systems involving relations of domination and subordination between human beings in these societies had developed within a progressive capitalist civilization that had succeeded in establishing Man as the overlord of Nature. It was within this overlord civilization that the crisis of capitalism was developing.
In his later writings, Marx introduced some ideas concerning the nature and origin of modern forms of alienation and estrangement which did not appear in his earlier works. These additions did not contradict his earlier perspective, but were fused with it, adding to the complexities of his social theory. In the Introduction (September 1857) to A Critique of Political Economy, and also in the Grundrisse (1857–58) he had linked alienation with the emergence of an “isolated individual.” He rejected the eighteenth century myth that this indivdual could have pre-existed society, but he had said that this myth described an objective condition of total atomization that could not have developed in the earlier civilizations of classical antiquity. The modern bourgeois form of alienation does not become ascendant until the form of individual proprietorship that had been the economic foundation of Roman political society and that consisted of property in agricultural land had been supplanted by a different kind of commercial and “alienable” property. This commercial property supported a class status based on the possession of “alienable” objects that could be transferred to another territory community. The historical process of individuation has not been completed until a stage is reached in which commercially alienable property becomes the predominant form. At this final stage, language becomes the only social tie that still links the individuals within a given national territory with one another. In the Grundrisse Marx was referring to the Roman political society when he wrote, regarding the individual in that society, that
His property, i.e., his relation to the natural prerequisites of his production as his own, is mediated by his natural membership in a community. (The abstraction of a community whose members have nothing in common but language, etc., and barely even that, is plainly the product of much later historical circumstances). It is, for instance, evident that the individual is related to his language as his own only as a natural member of a human community. Language as the product of an individual is an absurdity. But so also is property (18).
Marx went on to say that personal individuality had emerged out of a pre-individualized condition because of economic exchanges taking place between individuals from different tribal groups, exchanges that did not involve property in land, but property in movable products created by human labor:
… man is only individualized through the process of history. He originally appears as a generic being, a tribal being, a herd animal — though by no means as a “political animal” in the political sense. Exchange itself is a major agent of this individualization. It makes the herd animal superfluous and dissolves it. Once the situation is such, that man as an isolated person has relation only to himself, the means of establishing himself as an isolated individual have become what gives him his general communal character. In such a community the objective existence of the individual as a proprietor, say a landed proprietor, is presupposed, though he is a proprietor under certain conditions which chain him to the community, or rather constitute a link in his chain (19).
In Capital the theory of individuation through the exchange of alien- able objections was stated more simply:
The first step made by an object of utility toward acquiring exchange value is when it forms a non-use-value for its owner, and that happens when it forms a superfluous portion of some article required for his immediate wants. Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable by him (20).
Economic exchange transactions, even in the form of ·barter, cannot take place until individuals treat one another as “independent” individuals and as “private owners”:
In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners of these alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals (21).
The reciprocal exchange system, and the interdependency so established, develops apart from any other social tie. The community of origin of each of the private owners may be the same, or they may come from separate communities. Their specific identity is irrelevant to the exchange process. In capitalist society, reciprocal interdependence is both internal and external, intra-national and international:
… such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries of communities, or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become so in its internal intercourse. The proportions in which they are exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes them exchangeable is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself (22).
When external exchange becomes internal, it appears that the relations between the transacting persons in the home community become atomic and “abstract.” Persons become as aliens — as strangers — to one another, even though they inhabit the same political territory and speak the same language. Capitalist society is above all a trading society, where ‘’ … the behavior of men in the social process of production is purely atomic” (23).
THE PROBLEM OF WORKING CLASS DISUNITY
Marx had expected that the political unity of the working class in the modern industrial nations would develop as the workers learned to identify the social, political and economic causes of their class-shared misery and oppression. They could carry through a successful political revolution against capitalism in their own country only if they achieved a class solidarity that would transcend all division of race, creed, and nationality. The working class association, in other words, would have to be a universal association. It would embody and defend the unity of the nation, but the power of the nation, in the time of the proletarian dictatorship, was essentially the power of universal society, unlimited by particular, restrictive group boundaries.
In his earlier writings on the condition of the modern working class (24) Marx had recognized that class political unity might be hard to achieve. He attributed the difficulty to individualistic competition within the class. Impoverished workers, forced off the land into cities, would at first compete with one another for a chance to work and to survive under the onerous conditions imposed by capitalist manufacturers. The political class unity that could overcome the power of capital had to be inter-regional and international as well as local. While the unity of the capitalist class was both national and inter national, the capitalists were to a large extent dependent on the power of the national State to maintain their hegemony. The workers had no such national resource. Marx, however, seems to have treated the mass grouping of the workers into the large manufacturing industries as a source of class unity off setting the localized national political class unity of the bourgeoisie. The direct social experience of cooperation in the work task would give workers a confidence in their collective power, and a realization that without their social labor, modern society could not maintain itself.
When he regarded the workers as a universal class, Marx minimized and almost entirely overlooked the social and psychological obstacles to working class unity which might impede the development of working class political consciousness. These difficulties became so evident, however, that Marx in his later years was compelled to take them into account. He saw that the working class was being divided and weakened by various intergroup antagonisms. He dealt with these problems in his writings on “the Irish Question.” In the opinion of David Fernbach “Marx’s writings on the relationship between England and Ireland mark a significant new departure for his political theory” (25). This statement is open to question. These writings demonstrate his capacity for making brilliantly acute sociological observations, but he did not revise his political theory to any significant extent. He was able to interpret these problems in a way that was consistent with his abstract historical dialectic. He implied that problems of disunity within the working class could be attributed, in the final analysis, to incomplete modernization.
During the l 860s and 70s he had become increasingly pessimistic about the English working class movement. In the first part of the nineteenth century, when the radical chartist movement was still influential, it had seemed that the English workers would lead the way. This was no longer so. There were internal difficulties that only external influences and events could over come. Up until the end of 1869, Marx had hoped that the International would be able to persuade the English workers that their hostility to the Irish workers whom they regarded as competitors was an irrational reaction, contrary to their own class interest.
I have become more and more convinced — and the only question is to drive this conviction home to the English working class — that it can never do anything decisive here in England until it separates its policy with regard to Ireland most definitely from the policy of the ruling classes… And this must be done, not as a matter of sympathy with Ireland, but as a demand made in the interests of the English proletariat. If not, the English people will remain tied to the leading strings of the ruling classes, because it will have to join with them in a common front against Ireland. Every one of the movements in England itself is crippled by the strife with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England… (26).
By the following year, Marx began to doubt that efforts of the International to influence the English workers by direct argument could succeed. The situation was not hopeless, however. The English impasse could be broken by political action from the outside, i.e., by the victory of the Irish national emancipation movement. The prejudices of the English workers against the Irish workers in England were deeply ingrained. In a letter to Meyer and Vogt (April 9, 1870) he discussed the problem at some length, saying among other things that
Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as. a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude toward him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the “niggers” in the former slave states of the U.S.A. …
He had said much the same thing in a confidential communication (March 28, 1870) to the General Council of the First International:
The average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life. He regards him some what like the poor whites of the Southern States of North America regard their black slaves (27).
Marx attributed the various irrational, class-divisive reactions which he had described to the persistence of outmoded feudalistic institutions and customs in England. The English workers were not yet sufficiently uprooted and detached from the general culture of their nation. The nation itself, as a political power in the world of nations, was likewise somewhat handicapped. England was governed by a class coalition, not by a single bourgeois class. The state power was not completely bourgeois. The landlord interests and the clerical influence of the Anglican Church still had some national importance. Feudal power :could not be overthrown either by the English workers or by the English ruling classes. However, the success of the Irish revolution against British landlord interests in Ireland might speed up the pace of progressive modernizing and revolutionizing developments in England. In a letter to Kugelman, April 6, 1868, Marx had said that
… the English Established Church in Ireland, or what they call here the Irish Church — is the religious bulwark of English landlordism in Ireland, and at the same time the outpost of the Established Church in England itself. (I am speaking here of the Established Church as a landowner.) The overthrow of the Established Church in Ireland will mean its downfall in England and the two will be followed by the doom of landlordism — first in Ireland and then in England. I have, however, been convinced from the first that the social revolution must begin seriously from the bottom, that is, from landownership.
The Irish struggle for national emancipation was regarded by Marx as a struggle of the united people of Ireland against external landlord class oppression, which in this case was also oppression by an external nation. In these circumstances, national sentiments in Ireland would have a progressive effect. The united people of that country would become politically sovereign in their own land after defeating the English. In another letter to Kugelman (November 29, 1869) Marx wrote that
. . . once the affairs are in the hands of the Irish people itself, once it is made its own legislator and ruler, once it becomes autonomous, the abolition of the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the same persons as the English landlords) will be infinitely easier than here [in England], because in Ireland it is not merely a simple economic question but at the same time a national question, since. the landlords there are not, like those in England, the traditional dignitaries and representatives of the nation, but its mortally hated oppressors.
The abolition of English landlord rule in Ireland would have a favorable effect not only on the English workers, but also on ruling class policies in England:
The prime condition of the emancipation here — the overthrow of the English landed oligarchy — remains impossible because its position cannot be stormed so long as it maintains its strongly entrenched outposts in Ireland… And not only does England’s internal social development remain crippled by her recent relations with Ireland; her foreign policy, and particularly her policy with regard to Russia and the United States of America, suffers the same fate.
It appears that the persistence of a pre-modern culture is being considered as the primary cause of various particularistic group reactions and political responses that are dividing the working class into hostile segments in countries which have not completely thrown off the yoke of the past. This means that Marx’s view of the psychopolitical situation in the fully modernized countries was not in line with the social realities. The pessimism he expressed about the English working class movement was in contrast to his optimism about the potentialities of the movement in the United States, where he thought that there was no problem comparable to the Irish-English antagonism. The “poor white” hostility to the black population was confined to the southern area of the United States, where the landlords and slave owners were the ruling economic class. In spite of their proletarian status, the southern white workers, even after the civil war, continued to regard the blacks as “slaves,” i.e., as vastly inferior, as well as potential competitors. He implied that workers outside the south were unaffected by the agrarian caste situation. His optimism about the United States working class movement outside of the south was demonstrated in his decision to transfer the seat of the General Council of the First International to the United States. In a speech of September 8, 1872 before the Hague Congress of the First Inter national he announced a decision for which he and his supporters had been responsible:
. . . the Hague Congress has transferred the seat of the General Council to New York. Many people, even among our friends, seem to be surprised by that decision. Are they forgetting, then, that America is becoming a world chiefly of working people, that half a million persons — working people — emigrate to that continent every year, and that the International must take strong root in soil dominated by the working man? (28)
Marx said that the reaction of English workers was irrational, inasmuch as they could not see that their antagonism to the Irish workers in their midst was contrary to their own interest as members of an oppressed class. He also said that the English workers failed to understand that their national State could not represent their own interests. I interpret Marx’s statements regarding English working class disunity as follows: The most essential psychological pre-condition for the development of a unifying political class consciousness among the worker was their ability to perceive. their own political government as a totally alien, oppressive power. The English workers were being kept down by their tendency to be impressed by the formal rituals and trappings of the State, i.e., by the appearance that masked the reality. Upper class persons in political positions were invested, by their office, with a dignity and a status that Marx associated with feudal hierarchy and also with ecclesiatical ceremonialism. These trappings were symbols of national power and prestige. The feudalistic component of nationalism was. apparently responsible for the tendency of the English worker to feel himself “a member of the ruling nation,” a nation dominant over other national groups. He had been impressed by national symbols, signifying national greatness, participating in a sense of common national identity and dominant national .status. This identification diminished his class consciousness, his awareness of belonging to a socially inferior, powerless stratum within the nation. Deluded by the national symbols, the worker was unable to act against the State and against the national ruling classes that occupied State office.
The situation in the United States was very different. Conditions of life in the New World promoted attitudes of social equality and democratic informality in social relations. Hierarchical status distinctions, sustained by traditionalized customs, conventions and manners in England, did not survive in the freer American environment. There was no marked sense of social distance dividing the free, enfranchised citizens from persons in positions of national governing power. The workers, unimpressed by the trappings of State, were able to regard the political representatives of the nation in a dis enchanted light. The farther the culture of a nation is removed from feudal ism, the less it is encumbered by a landed aristocracy and by traditions developed in pre-capitalist society, the more favorable the psychological conditions for popular working class revolt. Economic conditions in the United States would inevitably deteriorate, because that country was involved in the general crisis of capitalism, along with other capitalist nations. When conditions became intolerable the people of the United States would not be inclined to support a government which was obviously incapable of taking steps to reverse the process of deterioration and of acting in the interests of the people.
Marx had included France in the category of the most advanced, fully modernized, post-feudal nations. In his writings on the political situation in France, he seemed to think that the majority of the people in that country had been liberated by the”gigantic broom” of the French Revolution, which had swept away “ … all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitutions.” The French working classes, and also the French middle classes, upheld the enlightened, progressive culture of modernity. Politically, the Paris Commune government had been “ … the true representative of all the healthy elements in French society, and therefore the truly national government.” It was “ … at the same time, as a working men’s government, as the bold champion of labour, emphatically international” (29).
MARX AS A SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIST
Marx is recognized as having been, to a conspicuous degree, a sociological thinker. The sociological elements are linked with his philosophical materialism, and with his philosophy of Man in relation to Nature. Henri Lefebvre, in The Sociology of Marx, hesitates to class him as a sociologist, because he is so much else besides:
Are we to view Marx as a sociologist? Such an interpretation would be just as inadequate as the others… Marx is not a sociologist, but there is a sociology in Marx… Marxian thought is simply too broad to fit into the narrow (and ever narrower) categories of latter-day philosophy, political economy, history and sociology. Nor is it correct to refer to it as “interdisciplinary,” a conception recently advanced (not without risk of confusion) — to remedy the disadvantages of a latter-day division of labor in the social sciences (30).
There are three chief aspects of Marx’s social and historical theory which justify the contention that a sociology is contained within his synthesis. 1) He focuses on group processes that cannot be reduced to processes going on at the “individual” psychological level; 2) he conceives of the “social life process of society” and the major events of economic and political history, as “naturally determined,” expressing inclinations, motives, forms of will and of energy that arise naturally under certain conditions. All manifestations of human culture, and all forms of political and ideological consciousness, are included in this naturalistic perspective; 3) social processes, systems, and structures are treated as primary, culture is secondary. Only those aspects of culture that reinforce naturally arising primary tendencies and social processes are historically significant, and have an appreciable effect on the course of history.
Marx’s theory of social change was to a considerable extent an historical sociology. Lenin, writing in 1894, believed that Marx’s interpretation of history fell entirely within the category of social science. Marx, he said, had been the only social theorist “. . . to elevate sociology to the level of a science.” He had been able to apply, more consistently than any other sociologist, the basic method of sociology, which was to focus on group actions and group relations taking place within organic systems of production relations and conditions. As a theorist Marx had “ … evolved the concept of the economic formation of society” and had been able to make important generalizations about the process of systematic historical change, ruling out as irrelevant those aspects of individual action that did not lend themselves to systematization. Actions of “living individuals” had been “ … generalized and reduced to the action of individuals differing from each other in the role they played in the system of production relations… “ He was able to formulate laws of social change by cutting below the confusions, complexities, and variabilities, separating what was important from what was not, discerning the uniformities and the recurrent phenomena of social life, which he then used as the basis for scientific prediction. He “ … applied to social science that objective, general criterion of repetition which the subjectivists declared could not be applied to sociology” (31).
Bottomore and Rubel, as contemporary sociologists, approach Marx from the perspective of a post-Marxist conception of a universal sociology that is not tied to any particular philosophical system. They believe that important aspects of Marx’s theory have been incorporated into modern sociology:
The outcome of the prolonged “debate with Marx” has become clearer with the maturity of sociology itself. A great deal of Marx’s work is a permanent acquisition of sociological thought; the definition of the field of study, the analysis of the economic structure and its relations with other parts of the social structure, the theory of social classes, and the theory of ideology. But this incorporation of Marx’s ideas entails the disappearance of a “Marxist” sociology. Modern sociology is not the sociology of Marx, any more than it is the sociology of Durkhiem, or Weber, or Hobhouse. It is a science which has advanced some way toward freeing itself from the various philosophical systems in which it originated, and with which its founders were still embroiled (32).
Certainly the sociologist of today has access to new perspectives and insights, and to more adequate anthropological information, than was avail able to Marx. But there has not yet developed, during the century following the death of Marx, a unified sociological theory which has incorporated one universally accepted general view, one preferred kind of methodology, and one philosophy of science. There have been certain predominant trends, how ever, which are academically entrenched and shared by a good many sociologists who may differ from one another considerably in their beliefs and in their views about the viability of capitalism. Marx’s sociology contains a good deal that is compatible with these now predominant trends. He seems to have anticipated certain modern developments. The influence of Hegelian philosophy has made itself felt in the United States in ways that by-passed the theories of Marx. Partly on this account, Marx’s social theory includes forms of determinism as well as a special moral focus that converged to some extent with the approach of American sociologists.
While not denying that Marx was more than a sociologist, C. Wright Mills classed him as one of the thinkers who belong to “the classic tradition” of sociological thought. He went so far as to say that “Within the classic tradition of sociology, he provides us with the most basic single framework for political and cultural reflection. Marx was not the sole source of this frame work, and he did not complete a system that now stands closed and finished.” Mills noted a resemblance between Marx’s early writings and the psycho sociology that rose to prominence in the United States more than a century after these early manuscripts were written:
Just as Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments reminds us of George Herbert Mead’s “social behaviorism,” so Marx’s 1844 manuscripts and other earlier works remind us of the most con temporary social psychology (33).
The early writings to which Mills refers include an abstract discussion of the “individual” in relation to “society.” which has no direct connection with class struggle theory. Marx sets up a dichotomy which appears also in most standard American textbooks in introductory sociology. Some kind of radical tension is implied between the two units. Marx’s social theory, insofar as it is dialectical, anticipates a condition of unity that will be realized in the future, and includes a program for eliminating this tension. Non-Marxist sociologists are not as firmly rooted in the future. But they refer to a normal, ideal-type of individual who is continually being “socialized,” who is always open to peer-group influences and pressures, passively receptive and morally dependent, accepting whatever norms and moral attitudes develop in the course of social interactivity in the various groups and social situations which form the immediate social environment. Sociology in the United States has been much concerned, also, with conflict between the various groups that are included within the nation. The nation is characteristically regarded as the primary social unit. The social system, social order and social structure to which sociologists refer is nationally enclosed. As a social systems theorist, Marx was more inclusive. He stressed those aspects of the economy and social structure that were common to all capitalist societies. But in spite of this broader scope, he looked forward to a future universal society that would be in a psychological and a moral sense, the equivalent of a single nationally enclosed community. His treatment of problems of the moral life and of moral culture stayed within the limits of the “in-group” method which Ralph Linton defined as the only acceptable sociological approach:
It must be stressed that the significant units are societies, not individuals… not only is the society the unit. .. but ethical systems function only in terms of in-groups… Most groups at the tribal level limit the application of ethics to dealings with tribe members, with animals or objects which are intimately associated with the tribe, such as totems… Ethical behavior is prescribed toward and expected from all members of such an in-group. Toward anything outside it, people included, ethical rules in most cases simply do not apply… (34).
Marx was well aware of the existence of “rules of society.” When he referred to capitalist society in some of his later political writings, he also noted the contradiction between external and internal moral conduct which appeared at the national political level. This duality was regarded as one manifestation of a more general duplicity and hypocrisy that characterized bourgeois life. The contradiction between internal and external moral con duct would of course disappear in universal society. The proletarians, representing that society, were already beyond the duality. In Marx’s social theory,this kind of transcendence would be accompanied by the elimination of need for “rules of society” relating to moral conduct.
Specific, transitory customs and forms of custom-morality appeared and disappeared as part of the natural life process of society that continued on through all phases and transformations of social life. This is what seems indicated in Marx’s scattered writings. Customs developed in the material base of society, in the socio-economic system, but could also appear in the political superstructure in societies that had developed beyond the primitive condition. Some customs were incorporated into legal statutes in ancient and modern societies. In developing his concept of a future post-capitalist world order, Marx came to expect that the power of custom would persist in two forms. In Capital and in other writings on economy, he focuses on the universal economic customs that would be much the same in all countries, since all countries would have the same kind of producing system. This universal custom morality would not take the form of “rules of society.” Socially developed standards of living, consumer norms, operating with compelling effect, would play a large part in determining the kinds and amounts of material goods that would have to be produced in the socialized economy by “socially necessary” labor. Localized customs, institutions and traditions might also persist, but not in a way that would interfere with the development of the universal economic norms.
A.J. Shumpeter, in an essay on “Marx the Sociologist” regards Marx’s interpretation of history as a sociology of history, and as an outstanding achievement in this field: “… the so-called Economic Interpretation of History is doubtless one of the greatest individual achievements of sociology to this day.” He notes that this sociology was called by Marx as well as by others a “materialist” interpretation, but he thinks that the adjective, in this context, is “entirely meaningless.”
Marx’s philosophy is no more materialistic than is Hegel’s and his theory of history is not more materialistic than is any other attempt to account for the historic process by means at the command of empirical science. It should be clear that this is logically compatible with any metaphysical or religious belief — exactly as any physical picture of the world would be (35).
It is true that human beings in both the Hegelian and Marxist systems belong to the world of nature and that they could not exist as persons apart from the biological base. As social theorists, however, they both make use of abstractions to construct self-system theories which overcome “contradictions” in a way that is metaphysical and suprascientific. They are both concerned with the moral condition and situation of a universal “individual”who is involved in three primary relationships: 1) a relation to self; 2) a relation to others in the same self-status group; 3) a relation to a total society that includes all these persons. In both systems, the individual is subjectively insulated from moral concern about persons who are outside of his particular community of “identity.” In both systems, it is also important that the individual not belong to an excluded group.
Hegel had described the “essential nature of consciousness” as the awareness of a socially acceptable personal identity which could be secured only by persons who had acquired “private property” which other people would acknowledge as inviolable: “ … it is mine, which all others acknow ledge and keep themselves away from. But just in my being acknowledged lies rather my equality, my identity, with every one — the opposite of exclusion”
(36). In Marx’s system, private property cannot function as the social and material condition for being “acknowledged,” i.e., recognized by others as equal in status with every one else, a recognition that is “the opposite of exclusion.” But in both systems, the individuals participate in a “universal” relation which implicitly excludes those who are outside of certain closed group limits. In the case of Marx, there are to be no such external groups, but this does not alter the psychological situation.
Marx’s interpretation of history took account of important observable facts of human social behavior, behavior always occurring within some kind of historically developed social system. These observations provided the basis for an abstract, supra-empirical sociology of the future. There were three primary, interrelated metaphysical premises which made this construction possible. The first was his belief that the economic behavior of individuals toward one another in capitalist society was purely “atomic,” and that this indicated a solipsistic• condition in which the individual was related “only to himself.” He was thereby abstracting individuals from external psychological and moral influences arising on the group level. He was regarding classes in modern society as groups united by common egoistic interests but not also by class-particular forms of culture and convention. He then proceeds to carry out a second abstractive operation by treating a generalized sociality as the antithesis of atomism. A third step is required in order to bring about a condition in which membership in society will become, for the individual self, a means to a complete kind of security, a security which will not contra dict freedom but will be its essential condition. He detaches the atomic persons from their specific localities and cultures and also from their location in present time, relocating them in a time beyond. They will then again be open, psychologically, to group influences arising on the inter-subjective level. This restoration of sociality will re-unite persons universally, in an indivisible union.
The workers presently engaged in the struggle against capital, and who are not yet in the time beyond, are totally in the present, in a psychological sense. They have escaped from the past more completely than have their class antagonists. They have no need to refer back to the past for moral reinforcement, comparing favorably in this respect with their predecessors, the bourgeois revolutionaries who had once fought heroically against the feudal system. In the opening section of his 1853 address on “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx said that these earlier revolutionaries had not fully broken their bondage to tradition and to the past: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Even though they had seemed to be engaged “ … in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that never yet existed,” they were prone, in the period of revolutionary crisis, to “ … anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.” Marx conceded that this conjuring of the past had aided the revolutionaries in their struggle, but it was always a form of self-deception. The participants had to “ … conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and keep their enthusiasm on the high plane of the great historical tragedy”
(37). The proletarian revolutionaries, on the other hand, are actually revolutionizing themselves and things. They are not initiating a project that will fall short of the aims of revolutionary action.
Marx’s philosophy of the future includes a transcendental sociology. He is basing the societal unity of the future on “naturally arising” social sentiments which have, in the past, often served to unify individuals into particular, limited identity groups — class, ethnic, national, and religious, and also to divide persons in such groups from others outside the group boundaries. The boundaries are being eliminated from the future social universe by a process of transcendental abstraction. When the ideally atomic persons freely combine in a universal, cooperative producing association there will be association, but not dissociation, inclusion but not exclusion. There will be no problem of inter group relations, either within a nation, or between separate nations. No one would be perceived or treated by others as an outsider or as a stranger, singled out as different, or as a target for moral hostility. All persons will be equal in status, belonging to the same universal identity group. What is equally fundamental to Marx’s liberationism is the elimination of punitive, morally declassing kinds of ostracism and expulsion, directed against individuals who had originally been located within and not outside of the equal status member ship and identity group. As noted in previous chapters, Marx conceived that in the future society, the single individual would be helped by others to over come his own tendencies to self-rejection and self-exclusion. What this meant is that he was also, but without explicitly saying so, eliminating dangers that this same person might face from other people, from personal and also from group reactions originating outside of himself, which he did not share. The individual of the future will be dependent on others in a way which is totally non-threatening and which provides him with permanent security. He is being delivered not only from dangers arising from within, but also from social dangers arising from without, and from which he might not, as a single self, be able to cope. The reassuring aspects of human, social “nature” are being preserved. Other, more fearsome aspects of sociality, are being dialectically negated in the passage to the future.
[1] Op. cit., Introduction, section 252, p. 26.
[2] “Private Property and Communism” (1844), translated by Easton and Guddat, op. cit.
[3] “Critique of Hegelian Philosophy” (1844), Easton and Guddat, op. cit.
[4] Politics, Book I, Jowett translation.
[5] Volume I, chapter 15, p. 358.
[6] Ibid., chapter 14, p. 334.
[7] Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., p. 96.
[8] Ibid., p. 71.
[9] Ibid., p. 84.
[10] Chapter 5, pp. 173–174, Pantheon Books, New York, 1968.
[11] Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., p. 74.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, op. cit., pp. 84-85.
[14] Ibid., p, 87.
[15] lbid., p. 89.
[16] Ibid., p. 91.
[17] M.I. Finley has concluded that this kind of morally limited dominant caste consciousness did indeed prevail almost universally in the free citizen cultures of classical antiquity. His book on Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (Viking Press, 1980) includes a discussion of the moral attitudes which predominated in Greek and Roman civilization.
[18] Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, pp. 87–88.
[19] 19. Ibid., p. 96. There is a good deal of obscurity in this passage, and indeed in almost all those anthropological writings of Marx which deal with the evolution of modern humanity and society out of earlier conditions. In the passage cited above, he says that persons become private owners of landed property only after intertribal object-alienating changes have taken place. The land-owning individual in pre-capitalist society is also “chained” to his political society and is not as free as he will one day become in the society of communism, where he will be a member of an owning community, and will no longer be bound by the chains of the past. Land itself must first be fully commercialized, bought and sold like other “alienable” objects, before the universal earth territory can be repossessed by a-future social association of freely combining individuals.
[20] Volume I, chapter 2, p. 87.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., p. 87–88.
[23] Ibid., p. 92.
[24] This discussion must be read in connection with what has been said in chapter 5 of this book, “The Social Condition of the Modern Working Class.”
[25] Karl Marx: Political Writings, Volume III, edited and Introduced by David Fernbach, Introduction, p. 28, The Marx Library, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1974.
[26] Letter to Kugelman, November 29, 1869.
[27] Selected Works of Marx and Engels, op. cit., Volume II.
[28] This address is reprinted in Fembach, op. cit.
[29] “The Civil War in France,” Selected Works of Marx and Engels, op. cit., Volume II.
[30] Op. cit., chapter 1, pp. 21–23.
[31] From an article on “The Economic Content of Narodism,” reprinted in V.1 Lenin: Selected Works, Volume XI, International Publishers, New York, 1943.
[32] Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, op. cit., Introduction, p. 48.
[33] The Marxists, chapter 2, pp. 34 and 35, Dell Publishing Co., 1962.
[34] Essay on “Universal Ethical Principles: An Anthropological View,” published in Moral Principles of Action, compendium edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, Harper and Bros., 1952.
[35] Reprinted in Karl Marx, a collection of essays on Marx, edited by T.B. Bottomore, for the “Makers of Modern Social Science” series of Prentice Hall, Inc., 1975.
[36] The Phenomenology of Mind, Part B, section C, pp. 448-449.
[37] Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume I, pp. 398–399.
Afterword
Marx’s optimistic outlook on the future is expressed in terms of a logical dialectical synthesis which tells us a good deal about the real life problems of the historical present. Through that same synthesis, he is also able to skip over, by a process of abstraction and of exclusion, other aspects of that same situation. Misunderstandings about the nature of his predictions arise when the relation of his theory of socialist revolution to his overall dialectical synthesis is not taken sufficiently into account. This relation, discussed at greater length in the forgoing text, is being summarized briefly here.
Hegel had said, in his first, introductory lecture to a series he gave on the history of philosophy: “Philosophy is that which is most antagonistic to abstraction and it leads back to the concrete” (1). In the concrete situation, the philosopher is able, as a political citizen, to perceive his own political and economic society as one in which the meaning of history and the relation of humanity to a cosmic process outside of history, has been made manifest. The concrete is a reconciled condition which eliminates the need for the mind of philosophy to take refuge “… in a clear space of thought to create for itself a kingdom of thought in opposition to the world of actuality” (2). In Marx’s philosophy, the present capitalist society is abstract. Concreteness as a condition of society and of mind in society will be reached through a transformation which begins in the first stage of political-economic socialism. This is a process of world unification, resulting in the formation of a new social order, a world order. In the absolute, concrete phase of history, the phase of ultimate classless communism, all peoples of the earth will have been included within a supra-national world economy and a universal society, in a condition beyond war and beyond preparations for war.
The decisive break with capitalism occurs when the State-supported institution of private property in land and in the humanly created, historically developed means of production has been replaced by social property. Social property, however, is not exclusively national. Boundary lines dividing the earth territory into smaller and larger socio-economic and political units lose their moral significance in socialist economic time.
Marx’s confidence that capitalism would inevitably be superseded by socialism was sustained in part by his ability to exclude problems of modern nationalism from the socialist frame of reference. Henri Lefbvre underlines this aspect of Marx’s social theory: “In his writings, Marx frequently discussed specific national situations, but he treated them at the level of strategy rather than general theory… Nationality, he seemed to think, is already a thing of the past” (3).
This general theory is also, in a broad sense, strategic. It is directly and logically related to Marx’s views about the conditions that would have to exist in capitalist civil society before the working class socialist movement could displace the power of the national state in the advanced capitalist centers. Socialism in any one of these nations could not be established to begin with unless each national working class had been socially and morally linked with the world-historical working class movement. Nationalism as it existed in conjunction with economic capitalism, and as the political support of capitalism, would indeed have become a thing of the past. The divisive, negative, limiting aspects of nationalism would have been left behind. Yet the working class struggle and mission represented an ideal unity of social spirit, will and purpose that Marx identified with the positive, integrative, and heroic aspects of nationalism. This socially unifying universal spirit would be carried forward into the future world society.
As Marx saw it, the economically advanced nations, those best equipped with the indispensable powers of technology and of science, were also those best prepared to proceed with socialist economic development, and to surpass the level of material wealth achieved in the national capitalist economies. This did not mean, however, that these favorably situated socialist nations could move ahead into the stage of classless communism, irrespective of the political conditions existing outside of their boundaries. Furthermore, from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical logic, the capitalist nations might be the last, not the first, to achieve the initial breakthrough into economic socialism.
Marx made it clear, in Capital, that the relative economic backwardness of some countries would not prevent them from crossing over into the socialist era. No matter how they started out, they would have immediate access to universal science and to methods of production which could not be monopolized by capitalist nations. When they abolished private property in land and in capital, they would also be re-establishing the vital organic ties of humanity to nature that had been treated as non-existent in capitalist society. The less developed socialist economies would catch up, sooner or later, to the more advanced socialist level. Sooner or later, all capitalist or pre-capitalist societies would have made the change to socialism.
Through the transcendental unification of universal society with nature, the territorial limits of the whole earth were being set aside. Economic and social expansion could proceed indefinitely. The divisions between spatially separate communities do not seem to affect the operations of the world economy.
The concrete universal society would be able to maintain its moral integrity and unity without the need for abstract moral ideas. As a philosopher of history, Marx had said that ideas about what ought to be could play no significant part in expediting the advance toward the future. He had also said, in an address delivered in English at a London meeting in 1864, that it was the task of the politically conscious socialist vanguard to “… vindicate the simple laws of moral and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as rules paramount to the intercourse of nations.” This state of affairs could prevail in practice only at a time beyond the class struggle, after the distinction between international and internal, national-community relations had been obliterated, and all of humanity had been united into an indivisible world community.
Bibliography
WORKS BY MARX
I have cited both the chapter and page number of the longer works by Marx, but have omitted the page reference when citing his articles and his correspondence. All citations from his letters, unless otherwise specified in the footnotes, are taken from The Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels, Progress Publishers, Moscow, second edition, 1965.
I have used various translations of Marx, preferring some to others. The footnotes indicate which translations are being used. Most citations from Capital (Volumes I, II, and III) are taken from the current International Publishers edition (1967), Moore and Aveling translation. I have referred also to the Eden and Cedar Paul translation of Volume I, International Publishers, New York, 1929.
In addition to Capital and The Selected Correspondence, I have used the following translations of Marx’s writings:
Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Volumes I, III and IV, International Publishers, New York. 1975. These include his doctoral dissertation (1841), and the book length work, The Holy Family (1844–45), as well as many shorter writings.
The Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volumes I and II, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969.
The translation of Marx’s high school essays, by Robert B. Fulton, in Original Marxism — Estranged Offspring: A Study of Points of Contact and of Conflict between Original Marxism and Christianity, Christopher Publishing House, 1960.
Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, edited and translated by Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1967.
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by Annette Jolin and Josoph O’Malley, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Josoph O’Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Karl Marx: On Freedom of the Press and Censorship, The Karl Marx Library, edited and translated by Saul K Padover, McGraw Hill Book Co., 1974.
Theses on Feuerbach, translated by Nathan Rotenstreich, in Basic Problems of Marx’s Philosophy, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965.
The German Ideology, complete edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964.
Marx and Engels on Religion, Selected Essays, Moscow, 1957; Shocken Books edition, New York, 1964.
Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, translated by T.B. Bottomore, edited with Introduction and Notes by T.B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, 1956, McGraw Hill Book Co., 1964.
The Poverty of Philosophy, International Publishers, New York, 1963.
The Communist Manifesto (Samuel Moore translation), Monthly Review Press, 1968.
The American Journalism of Marx and Engels, A selection from the New York Daily Tribune, edited by Henry M. Christman, New American Library, 1968.
Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, selections from the Grundrisse, translated by Jack Cohen, with Introduction by Eric H. Hobsbawm, International Publishers, New York, 1964.
The Grundrisse (complete text), translated with Foreword by Martin Nicolaus, The Marx Library, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1973.
Critique of Political Economy, edited with Introduction by Maurice Dobb, International Publishers, New York, 1970.
Karl Marx: Political Writings, Volumes I and III, edited and Introduction by David Fernbach, The Marx Library, Vintage Books,Random House, New York, 1973 and 1975.
Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1963 and 1975.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, with appendices by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Inter national Publishers, NY, 1938.
OTHER WORKS CITED IN THIS BOOK
Adams, James Luther: On Being Human Religiously, Selected essays on Religion and Society, Beacon Press, Boston, 1976.
Aristotle: Politics, Book I, Jowett translation.
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