Introduction To Marx And Engels: A Critical Reconstruction,

Introduction to Marx and Engels

Dimensions of Philosophy Series Norman Daniels and Keith Lehrer, Editors Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction, Second Edition, Richard Schmitt Political Philosophy, Jean Hampton Philosophy of Mind, Jaegwon Kim Philosophy of Social Science, Second Edition, Alexander Rosenberg Philosophy of Education, Ne! Noddings Philosophy of Biology, Elliott Sober Metaphysics, Peter van Inwagen Philosophy of Physics, Lawrence Sklar Theory of Knowledge, Keith Lehrer Philosophy of Law; An Introduction to jurisprudence, Revised Edition, Jeffrie G, Murphy and Jules L. Coleman FORTHCOMING

Philosophical Ethics, Stephen L. Darwall Philosophy of Science, Clark Glymour Philosophy of Language, Stephen Neale Philosophy of Cognitive Science, edited by Barbara Von Eckardt Normative Ethics, Shelly Kagan

Second Edition

Introduction to Marx and Engels A Critical Reconstruction

Richard Schmitt BROWN UNIVERSITY

westview press A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Dimensions of Philosophy Series

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, induding photocopy; recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright© 1987,1997 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group. Published in 1997 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Bowlder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 HJd's Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schmitt, Richard, 1927Introduetion to Marx and Engets : a critical reconstruction / Richard Schmitt.—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8133-3283-4 (pbk.) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883- 2. Engels, Friedrich, 1820-1895. 1. Title. HX39.5.S266 1997 335.4—
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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American. National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials 239.48-1984.

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Contents Preface to the Second Edition Abbreviated References

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INTRODUCTION

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1 HUMAN NATURE

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Marx and Engels on Human Nature, 13 Species Being, '17 for Further Reading, 21 Notes, 21 2

AGAINST INDIVIDUALISM

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Tlie Varieties of Individualism, 24 Marx and Engels' Opposition to Individualism, 25 Marx and Engels' Opposition to Collectivism, 28 What Is the Position of Marx and Engels? 30 For Further Reading, 31 Notes, 31

3 HISTORY

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History as the Transformation of Human Nature, 32 Writing History, 36 For Further Reading, 37 Notes, 37

4 THE DIALECTIC

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Hegel's Dialectic, 38 Tlie Marxian Dialectic, 41 Historical Explanation, 42 Dialectical Explanations, 45 For Further Reading, SO Notes, 50

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5 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

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Forces and Relations of Production, 55 Why Take Historical Materialism Seriously? 61 For Further Reading, 62 Notes, 62 6

MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM

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Base and Superstructure, 64 The Sources of Self-Evidence, 67 For Further Reading, 69 Notes, 69 7

IDEOLOGY

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Wart Is Ideology? 73 Ideology and Science, 76 Fetishism, 78 Marx and Ethics, 80 False Consciousness, 84 For Further Reading, 84 Notes, 84

8 CAPITALISM

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What Is Modern Capitalism ? 91 Other Characteristics of Capitalism, 93 For Further Reading, 99 Notes, 99

9 CAPITALISM AND EXPLOITATION

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Exploitation, 102 The Classical Marxian Theory of Exploitation, '104 Contemporary Versions of Marx's Theory of Exploitation, 107 For Further Reading, 112

Note,112

to ALIENATION Alienation in Marx's Early Works, 11,4 Worker Alienation, 115 Alienation in the Later Works, 117 Alienation and Freedom, 118 For Further Reading, 124 Notes, 124

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11 THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM AND ITS FAILURES

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Hour Reliable Are the Predictions of Marx and Engels? 128 The End of Marxism? 132 What Is Wrong with Capitalism: The Unseen Hand Is Inept, 133 What Is Wrong with Capitalism: The Threat to Freedom and Democracy, 137 For Further Reading, 143 Note, 143

12 WHAT ARE CLASSES?

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Ttiree Meanings of "Class," 145 Class Consciousness, 151 For Further Reading, 158 Note, 158

13 CLASS STRUGGLES

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What Is Class Struggle? 160 Class Struggle and Political Action, 165 The Primacy of Class Struggle, 167 For Further Reading, 172 Motes, 172

14 THE STATE

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The State as Manager of the Affairs of the Bourgeoisie, 174 Tlie Executive Committee of the Bourgeoisie, 175 The independent State, 177 The State and Civil Society, 180 Class Struggle in the Democratic State, 183 For Further Reading, 185 Notes, 185

15 UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM

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Utopian Socialism, 187 Scientific Socialism, 191 What We Can Learn from the Critique of Utopianism, 195 Motes, 199

16 SOCIALISM The Socialist Gonls, 201 Socialist Institutions, 207

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ContentsRevolution, 211 For Further Reading, 216 Notes, 216

Bibliography About the Book and Author Index

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Preface to the Second Edition This new edition differs in several ways from the first edition of the Introduction to Marx and Engets. Rereading this book over the years, I marked passages that seemed to me to demand clarification or to require a better argument. I have now made those changes. I have also taken account of the steady stream, of new books and articles on Marx and Engels and have tried to incorporate some of these new and interesting interpretations. Other revisions were needed because my own interpretation of Marx and Engels has changed as I have continued to read and rethink Marx and as historical conditions have developed. In 1987, when the first edition appeared, the looming presence of the Soviet Union provided the background for any reading of Marx and Engels. In the official version of Marxism current in the communist countries at that time, Marxism was a science delineating social processes that shaped all our lives. The understanding and activities of people played a small role in that science. Events in the world were the outcome of impersonal social processes. The social order inspired by that view of Marxist science was bureaucratic and oppressive: A world regulated by processes unaffected and impervious to the thought of all but the experts seemed to justify government by specialists that neglected the wishes of ordinary citizens. In opposition to that version of Marxism, the previous edition of this book stressed—onesidedly, I believe now—the role played by human understanding and self-understanding in the unfolding of history. In this present edition, although I still hold that human self-understanding is of signal importance in Marx's theories, I emphasize that this self-understanding often bears the imprint of complex social processes that are not always transparent to the observer. As a consequence, this book is very different from the first edition, even though some passages remain unchanged. Since 1987 the Soviet Union and other communist countries have massively repudiated their previous economic and political systems and have eagerly embraced some form of capitalism. In the process they have also ix

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repudiated Marxism. In a new introduction, I reconsider Marxism in the light of these historical changes and, thus set out what one can reasonably expect to learn from Marx and Engels and how reading their works continues to be important, My understanding of Marx derives from many sources. Associates in various political projects taught me a great deal, as did many friends, both inside and out of the Radical Philosophy Association and the Marxist Activist Philosophers and their successor group, Sofphia. I owe particular thanks to Bruce Brown, Lisa Feldman, and DaYid Schweickart as well as an anonymous reader for reading portions of this manuscript. Justin Schwartz and Karsten Struhl made important suggestions for this revised edition. I learned much from the members of the faculty discussion group at the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador and from. Dr. Manuel Salgado, director of the Partido Socialists de Ecuador. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Alex Pienknagura of the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito, Spencer Carr, past editor for Westview Press, has been unfailingly supportive. Lucy Candib has shared in the writing of this book, as she shares most everything else—particularly the enduring confidence that we can remold this world of oppression and exploitation into one in which mutual respect and concern animates the relations among free human beings. I dedicate this book to my children, Addie and Eli, who rather reluctantly came with, us to Ecuador, where most of this book was written. \ hope that in later years they will remember what they saw in Ecuador: If capitalism may appear to do well at least for some people in the United States, its inability to provide a good life for all people is painfully evident outside of the United States. The thoughts of Marx and Engels remain essential if one wants to understand this terrible failure of the capitalist system. Richard Schmitt Quito, Ecuador

Abbreviated References CI CII CIII CGP CM CSF CW 18th EPM G GI OF SUS T WLC

Capital, vol. I (Marx) Capital, vol. II (Marx) Capital, vol. Ill (Marx) Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx) Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels) Class Struggles in France (Marx) The Civil War in France (Marx) The Eighteenth Bmmaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx) Crundrisse (Marx) The German Ideology (Marx and Engels) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Engels) The Marx-Engels Reader (Tucker, editor) Wage Labor and Capital (Marx)

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Introduction FOR 150 WARS, THE ECONOMIC and political theories of Marx and Engels were closely associated with a number of important political movements. In the fifty years before World War I, Marxism was the theory that officially guided the policies of the German Social Democratic Party—for a number of years the largest electoral party in Germany—and of Socialist parties in other European countries. From 1917 to 1989, Marxism was the official theory of the Soviet Union and the countries in Eastern Europe. From 1949 to the 1980s, it was the guiding theory in China, It remains of major importance in Cuba. Now the Soviet Union is no more. The countries in that once mighty empire, as well as the Eastern European countries, are all rushing toward capitalism in one form or another, as is China. One-third of the people who lived under systems that derived in various ways from the writings of Marx and Engels have rejected what they knew under the name of "socialism" or "communism" and have opted for capitalism as they understand it. The collapse of Soviet communism has shown that capitalism is in the long run more productive, more innovative than were the command economies of relatively underdeveloped countries in Eastern Europe and Asia, In the early years of the Bolshevik revolution, after 1917, the Soviet command economy managed to produce impressive growth rates in the effort to modernize a backward, mainly agrarian country. This growth contrasted significantly with the stagnation of capitalist countries during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s, Similar successes were recorded, in the reconstruction of the Soviet Union after the devastation of European Russia by German armies during World War II. But by the 1970s the Russian economy slowed down and became progressively less efficient. Many observers believe that as the economy recovered from the ravages of World War II and began to expand the production of a wider range of consumer goods, the central planning mechanism turned out to 2

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Introduction

be inadequate, A fairly simple economy may well be centrally coordinated. But in the Russian case, once the range of goods produced grew in number and complexity, central coordination failed. Some take these momentous changes in the formerly communist countries (specifically, the failures of their command economies) as a complete refutation of Marxian theories. Others believe that the truth of the theories of Marx and Engels remain untouched. They maintain that the end of the Soviet, Chinese, and other communist systems does not invalidate the Marxian theories. These theorists remind us that Marx and Engels had always insisted that a socialist revolution could succeed only in countries where capitalism, was fully developed. Neither in Russia nor in China was that the case. Their revolutions occurred when those countries were seriously underdeveloped. Hence those revolutions were not in fact socialist revolutions, even though the revolutionaries appealed to Marxian theory and imposed their version of Marxism on their populations as the correct theory to guide political, economic, and social life. In addition, the socialism Marx and Engels advocated and worked for was definitely a democratic socialism. It was to be an economic system that required widespread participation in directing the economic life of each nation. The ultimate goal of Marx's socialism was the abolition of class differences. A hierarchical society was to be replaced by a society of cooperation and interdependence in which, as Marx said, "The full development of each is a necessary condition for the full development of all" (CM, T 491). Socialism in the Soviet Union and China, in Poland, Hungary, and Romania was not democratic. It was totalitarian, bureaucratized, and often terribly inhumane. It did not move in the direction of abolishing classes in its seventy years of existence. Many readers of Marx therefore think that the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's embrace of capitalism leave Marxism unscathed: Those revolutions were not the revolutions Marx and Engels predicted— they came too early. In addition, they lacked the democratic features of the Marxian revolution. Neither of these perspectives is acceptable. It is not plausible that Marxist theory could emerge unscathed from the worldwide collapse of regimes that appealed to Marxist theory. Nor does this collapse refute Marxism, once and for all. It is true that socialism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, or China was not the form of socialism Marx and Engels described. Many Marxists in the United States and. Western Europe had been aware of that for decades. Ever since the show trials in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, it was clear to them that the Soviet Union had become a bloody dictatorship. But even Marxists who understood that remained confident that these early failed attempts at a socialist order would evolve toward democratic control of the economy and toward the classless state. The hope

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was that as the originally underdeveloped countries attained a higher standard of living and improved universal education, workers would demand the democratic rights and participation withheld from them by the ruling bureaucracies. Bureaucratic socialism would transform itself into democratic socialism. This democratic socialism would continue to be as productive as the Soviet Union had been in the period between the two World Wars and thus eventually would challenge the capitalists on their home territory. Socialism would spread to Europe, the Americas, and all around the globe. This confidence rested on one of the central tenets of traditional Marxist theory, namely, that the advent of socialism, was certain. Long before the Russian Revolution in 1917, which brought the Russian Communists to power, Marxists believed that socialism was inevitable. There was no question that sooner or later capitalism would fail and would be replaced by socialism. They had no doubt that socialism was a genuine alternative to capitalism. Only the time at which this change would begin to occur was uncertain, as was the form it would take. Marx and Engels were quite sure of that, and so were their followers in the German and other socialist parties before World War I, Many capitalists have also believed in part in this inevitability of communism—that socialism, unless resisted vigorously, might well replace capitalism. The anticommunist agitation of the past 150 years was not always a cover for resisting advances of the working class or for great power politics. Some defenders of capitalism did take Nikita Khrushchev's threat to bury capitalism literally because they regarded it as a real possibility. In some way everyone, whether Marxist or anti-Marxist, believed that socialism could overtake capitalism. The collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the transformations in China have undermined the belief that socialism threatens existing capitalist institutions. A range of different socialist schemes have come to an end—the Soviet command economy. Polish communism with farreaching private ownership in agriculture, the Hungarian experiments in market socialism, and the Yugoslav attempts at worker-controlled enterprises, Chinese communism did not collapse, but the Communist Party of China replaced it with a state-sponsored capitalism. Capitalism has all the while flourished, at least by comparison with the formerly communist countries. It is much more difficult to believe that it will inevitably disappear to make way for socialism. As a consequence, it is much less obvious that a socialist alternative to capitalism is even possible. The idea of socialism is still enormously attractive, but can it be realized? That question now requires an answer. As long as socialism, was considered inevitable, its possibility was not in question. If we deny that socialism is inevitable, we must ask whether it is even possible.

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The belief that socialism is inevitable, that it is a real alternative to capitalism, has lost much of its persuasive power. Today any serious reader of Marx and Engels must take a long and careful look at the arguments for the inevitability of socialist revolutions. Historical events do not refute Marx's and Engels' theories. But the actual events of the past half century are sufficiently different from what they predicted to compel a close reexamination of the theories that yielded those predictions. Too many of the predictions of Marx and Engels do not seem to have quite worked out, Socialism came, but it was not the socialism Marx and Engels had worked for and it eventually disappeared. Capitalism, instead of collapsing, materially transformed itself. Private property in the means of production as well as economic systems driven by the pursuit of private profit are still the dominant institutions. When we take another look at the arguments for the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism as well as of the coming of socialism, we will find that the Marxian predictions of a capitalist collapse were not as well founded as Marx and Engels believed. In addition to a theory of historical change, the doctrines of Marx and Engels provided a political program. The capitalist societies, divided between the workers and those who live off the fruits of the workers' labor, would be overthrown when the workers take power for themselves to run a new kind of society in which all will flourish to the greatest possible extent. This image of the workers united and taking power for themselves to build a more just society has been very powerful. It inspired generations of political activists all over the world to struggle selflessly for a better social order. It inspired the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 and the Chinese Communists in their long war against the Chinese Nationalists and against the Japanese until the Communist victory in 1949, The same image sustained the Vietnamese in their decades of fighting first against the French and then against the United States until victory in 1975. And it galvanized the Algerians in their war against France in the 1950s and 1960s. The Marxian revolutionary rhetoric was a powerful political force in the period of decolonization after World War II. But like the Marxian theory of history, these political ideas have not kept their promise, China is as authoritarian a country' as ever, and the Vietnamese did not reap the fruits of their victory in the form of democratic socialism. Neither did the Algerians gain freedom for all in their liberation struggle. The Marxian political program that promised free institutions to the common people who wrested power from the rich, the colonizers, and. the middle class who sided with the rich or the foreigners—that program has been proven a failure. It has not kept its promise. All that is left of the socialist political program is the ideal, of a society in which all citizens share political power with one another, in which everyone has the chance to develop as fully as possible, where equal opportunity for all is a reality, not just political

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rhetoric. That ideal remains as attractive as ever. But the road toward its realization is not so obvious as it seemed to Marx and Engels and. to generations of their followers. Marxism as a theory that draws the outline of historical change and Marxism, as a political program for popular liberation have both been seriously compromised by historical events in the past fifty years. If Marxism is to be of any use to us at all, it can no longer be a complete, if very general, theory of history. Its political program must be rethought and reworked in fundamental ways. This requires that we reconsider the theories of class and of their progressive transformation and that we rethink the Marxian conception of political change contained in the theory of revolution. We will find that both are much more fragmentary and incomplete than many generations of Marxists thought. But many people believe that it is too late for such reexamination, that Marxism has been refuted outright. Others think that the events in Eastern Europe, while not an outright refutation of Marxism, have shown it to be irrelevant to our world and its problems. Socialism is not on the agenda in the immediate future, if ever. Capitalism is not facing imminent collapse. Instead, these theorists add, there are a multitude of problems that do threaten our world, problems of environmental degradation, racial and gender inequalities, violence, the resurgence of bitter and bloody nationalist divisions. But Marx and Engels do not seem to have addressed these issues at all, or only peripherally. The problems they focused on are not ours. Their theories, it seems to many belong in a museum with all those other ideas that were once very influential but have little bearing on our world and its problems. But it is too soon to consign Marxism to oblivion. We need Marxism in order to be able to understand our present institutions, their history, their strengths and weaknesses. The institutions under which we live face serious difficulties. The triumph, of capitalism trumpeted by its defenders is hollow. The capitalist world is stalked by poverty and violence, by injustice and alienation. There is no hope of alleviating these difficulties unless we subject the basic principles on which our institutions rest to close scrutiny. Marxism is the most important source available to us for such a critical self-examination. That is the reason for the continued interest in Marxism and its influence. Western democracies are guided by liberal theory. It originated in seventeenth-century England, where it served to protect the interests of a rising capitalist class against the absolute monarchs of the day. Hence this theory has two central tenets: 1. Every human being has certain rights that no other person and no government may infringe on. These rights are of several kinds: civil

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rights, such as the right to free speech and conscience; economic rights, such as the right to private property; and political rights, such as the rights to vote and to run for public office, (These last rights are more recent additions to the original list.) 2, Economic life should be regulated by the government as little as possible. Uncoerced economic transactions between private parties in the marketplace are the best method for coordinating the economic affairs of a nation. In this century? liberalism split into two branches. The traditional liberals, now called "conservatives," put their main emphasis on the autonomy of the marketplace from government regulation. Those who have become known as "liberals" are willing to compromise the freedom of the marketplace to some extent in favor of extending economic, educational, and health-care rights to all citizens. Modern liberals come down on the side of extending the list of rights to include such items as the right to reasonable economic security, rights to education and medical care, and the rights of children to get a good start in life. Conservatives restrict rights to the more traditional ones—"Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"—for the sake of keeping government small and the economy as little regulated as possible. Marx and Engels always had a complex relationship to liberalism. On the one hand, they were agitating for a free society where differences in wealth or talent would not oppress those who had less but where all would be equally free to develop their capacities to the fullest. The first task of the working class striving to liberate itself, they say in the Communist Manifesto, is "to win the battle of democracy" (T 490), They not only supported demands for the familiar human rights but in addition demanded rights that the traditional liberal would not accept, such as the right to economic decisionmaking and economic security. On the other hand, Marx and Engels were passionately opposed to the second tenet of traditional liberalism: the belief that a capitalist marketplace is the preferable economic system for all industrial, nations. Although they were fully aware and appreciative of the enormous power of capitalism to innovate and to produce wealth, they were also keenly aware of its shortcomings and vocal in their criticisms of the free-market system. Foremost among the problems of capitalism is its inability to distribute its blessings fairly. The wealthiest countries in the world harbor abject poverty. In the period since World War II, one of the most astonishingly productive periods in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, inequalities in the United States steadily increased.1 Liberal theory, with its central commitment to free-market mechanisms, can understand these inequalities only as minor malfunctions of an inherently optimal system. But from Marx we learn

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that capitalism inevitably produces major inequalities because the wealth of the few depends on the poverty of the many. Only major modifications of free-market capitalism can hope to alleviate existing and increasing inequalities. Some of the new inequalities in the United States are the result of legislation. Since the 1970s, changes in the tax laws have favored the richest 1 percent of the population by cutting their taxes while increasing the taxes on the poor and the middle classes.2 Facts like these raise serious questions about the working of democracy in the United States. We can hardly claim that the wishes of the majority rule our political institutions if the elected representatives consistently favor the very rich at the expense of the majority of the population. The elected representatives of the majority steadfastly further the interests of the wealthy minority to which most of them belong. Such observations suggest that all is not well with our democracy, but liberalism, once again, can neither explain these failures of democracy nor prescribe effective remedies. Neither changes in voter registration procedures nor attempts to regulate campaign financing have done much to return power to the majority of the electorate. For answers to these questions about our democracy, we need to turn to Marx's class theory and his theory of the state, which suggest how capitalism, and democracy work at cross-purposes or how capitalism defeats the goals of democracy. Marx and Engels were certain that capitalism and democracy are not compatible in the long run, and many of their reasons for that position are still very important for us to consider. Other challenges of Marxism to ruling liberal ideas are more abstract but no less important In the chapters that follow, we shall see Marx's challenge to the liberal assumptions about human nature, assumptions about the relations among individuals and their social context in families, voluntary institutions, and nations. We shall find that liberalism cannot make sense of important Marxist concepts like alienation and that it denies that capitalism rests on exploitation. Those who grow up and live in capitalist countries frequently hold beliefs that are patently false, such as that every person can become a millionaire, that all it takes is hard work in order to make a good living and have a good life, or that competition by and large brings the most competent players into the top positions. One does not need to be a reader of Marx to see through these half-truths. For every winner there are many losers, and the success of some is usually bought at the expense of others whose lot deteriorates. The statistics about income inequalities show an increase in the "working poor" families who remain mired in poverty although every family member works, often more than one job. Hard work will not help everyone under capitalism. Nor does competition always favor the most able. Sometimes it favors the most ruthless, at other times

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the most opportunistic or well-connected. It may benefit either the conformist who does not rock the boat or the charismatic but not necessarily competent individual. Unlike liberalism, Marxism explains why, especially in a society like ours, such patent misconceptions are so widely held. The theory of ideology is complex, interesting, and essential for any understanding of how our society works and maintains itself. Careful reading of Marx and Engels, the most perceptive and insightful critics of liberalism, particularly in economics, gives us a grasp of our own problems. But the Marxism that will help us here is not the prophetic Marxism that predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its replacement by a victorious proletariat. It is not the revolutionary Marxism that inspired a great deal of heroism in the past. It is, instead, a critical Marxism that consists of the rich insights, some carefully developed, others mere suggestions, that shed much light on our existing institutions and still have much to teach us. The writings of Marx and Engels remain indispensable. Marx and Engels are by no means the only critics of the social and economic structures under which we live. But as voracious readers, they summarized a wide range of criticisms of capitalism that had been written before their lifetime in the middle of the nineteenth century. Social critics since then write in their shadow. Critical reflection about our world is not possible without a thorough acquaintance with Marx and Engels.

Karl Marx was bom in Trier, Germany, on May 5, 1818, the descendant of a long line of rabbis. His uncle was then the chief rabbi of Trier. Marx's father, Heinrich, had converted to Christianity when new legislation that excluded Jews from government service threatened his livelihood as a lawyer. Neither his immediate family nor Marx himself identified themselves as Jews. Marx's wife, Jenny, came from a Protestant family in the Prussian civil service. Sent to the university, first at Bonn, then in Berlin, to study law, Marx immersed himself in philosophy and earned a Ph.D. in 1841 in the hope of obtaining a teaching position at the University in Bonn. But he and his friends spent a good deal of their energy attacking religion and criticizing the autocratic political institutions of Prussia—criticisms that were fully justified. At that time Prussia was ruled by an absolute monarch whose power was not limited by a constitution, let alone by popularly elected representatives. The freedoms of speech and religion were not guaranteed. The government exercised strict censorship on publications and on what was taught in the state-run schools. Under those circumstances, Marx and his friend Bruno Bauer, who attacked religion and argued for

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democratic rights for all citizens, had no chance of getting teaching jobs in any Prussian university. Throughout his life, Marx supported himself by his writing. For two brief periods, in 1844 and again in 1848, he was the editor of a paper; later he earned some money as correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and a number of other publications. For most of his life, he also depended on financial help from his friends, primarily Friedrich Engels. Even with this help, he lived in extreme poverty for many years. The biographer of Marx's daughter Eleanor writes: "Mrs. Marx, who was also often unwell, spent a good deal of her time running to the pawnbroker to pledge the linen and plate, her own and her family's personal belongings and attire, and all such household objects as were not immovable,"3 Marx's poverty was, to be sure, aggravated by his inability to use wisely the money he did have, as well as by the need to keep up a minimal appearance of being middle class. In the main, however, Marx was the victim of the illiberal government of his native Prussia, which made it impossible for him to take up any of the careers for which he was suited—as teacher, lawyer, or journalist—and instead forced him to leave Germany. France and Belgium gave him temporary refuge but then expelled him., at the urging of the Prussian government. Only England, where he lived after 1850, allowed him and his fellow German political refugees a place in which to work and scrape together a living as best they could. Married in 1841, Marx and his wife, Jenny, had six children. Only three reached adulthood. The letters that Marx and Jenny wrote to friends reporting the death of the other three children remain heartbreaking. Marx and Jenny were genuinely devoted to each other, even though he had an illegitimate son. It was also a very unequal relationship. Jenny transcribed her husband's virtually illegible hand into neat copy, went to meetings and collected articles for him, and supported his political and scholarly work in other ways—all in addition to bearing six children and caring for them, often under hard conditions. She died in 1882. Marx followed her within the year. Marx and Engels first met in 1842, when Marx was twenty-four and Engels twenty-two. Marx was the editor of a newspaper, Engels a journalist with an already growing reputation. Born into a fairly well-to-do business family of staunch Protestant persuasion, Engels had not gone to university but was self-educated. In many respects, Marx and Engels were very different men; Whereas Marx was mercurial, Engels was even-tempered; whereas Marx was careless with money and his appearance, Engels was an astute businessman who was impeccably groomed; whereas Marx was a family man, Engels, although capable of deep and lasting attachments (for twenty years he had lived with Mary Burns and was

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deeply shaken when she died) never married or had children. Whereas Engels had the greater facility as a writer, Marx was clearly the deeper thinker. Both were gifted polemicists, but Marx's prose style at its best is unmatched by anything that Engels wrote, Although Marx was very frosty at their first meeting in 1842, by 1844 he had read a piece by Engels entitled "Outline of a Critique of Political Economy" that made a deep impression on him. When they met again, they spent ten days together in conversation, and from that time on they were allies and close friends until Marx's death in 1883. They wrote two books together in the next two years. The second of those, the German Ideology, is of major importance in their thinking. The Communist Manifesto of 1847 was written, by Marx, but its ideas were demonstrably those of both men, Marx's heavy dependence on Engels' financial support sometimes put Engels himself in serious straits, but he always came through for his friend, Marx also owed a good deal to Engels intellectually. As a young man, Marx was still fighting mainly philosophical battles when Engels, whose family textile business took him. traveling to England, had begun to study economics and had gained a firm grasp of the condition of working people. It was most likely Engels' "Outline of a Critique of Political Economy" (1843) that gave Marx the impetus to take up the study of economics in earnest. Similarly, Engel's Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) had a significant influence on Marx's thinking. On occasion Engels provided intellectual and financial support at the same time, Marx was commissioned to write for the New York Herald Tribune when he was still somewhat unsure of his English. Engels wrote the first set of articles published under Marx's name. Their friendship was a source of continued strength for both men. By the time Marx died, only the first volume of Capital had been published; many versions of the second and. third volumes, none of them complete, were contained in Marx's notebooks. Engels chose the material for the second and third volumes of Capital from those notebooks and edited them, into the form in which we now know them. Engels wrote about eighty pages of volume 3. Both Marx and Engels were seriously involved in radical politics. During the 1847-1848 revolutions, both returned to the Continent from, England, and Engels actually took part in some of the fighting in Germany, They were active in the Communist League founded in 1847, for which they wrote the Communist Manifesto, They were members of the First International, an international socialist organization founded in 1864, in which Marx soon came to occupy a position of leadership and to which he devoted the bulk of his time for the next six or seven, years. In his later years, Engels, besides working full time in his family business in Manchester in order to keep the Marx family and himself going, spent much

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energy publicizing Marx's ideas. He also developed them in directions probably different from those that Marx would have chosen. Their thinking diverged, it seems, but as neither gave any indication of being aware of that divergence, we possess no authoritative account of their agreements and disagreements. How one interprets the differences between the two men depends on how one reads those later writings. As a consequence, the precise relation between Marx and Engels as thinkers has become a source of controversy among interpreters. Some see one unified body of doctrine—namely, the thought of Marx-and-Engels; others, in an equally untenable position, see Marx as the deep, humanistic thinker and. Engels as the shallow, positivistic popularizes In fact, the work of neither thinker is of one piece. Marx had more than one opinion on a large range of issues, and his opinions are not always consistent. The views of the later Engels clearly have their roots in some of the positions Marx held. It is also true, however, that Engels tended to develop only one side of Marx's very complex thought, and not always the side that proved in the long run to be the most defensible one. But to ascribe all the errors in the Marxist tradition to Engels, as some readers have done, is to exaggerate Marx's genius into infallibility and seriously to underestimate the contribution of Engels.4 They were different men, their talents were different, but both of them made major contributions as part of their many years of close collaboration. Notes 1. Lawrence R. Mishe! and David Frankel, The State of Working America (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1,991). 2. Lawrence R. Mishel and jared Bernstein, The State of Working America (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1994). 3. Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, vol. \ (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), p. 27. 4. One example of that reading is Norman Levine, The Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels (Oxford: Clio Books, 1975). Readers interested in a more detailed discussion of the relations between Marx and Engels will find a balanced account in Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

1 Human Nature THERE ARE A NUMBER OF different ways to gain entry into the theories of Marx and Engels, I will begin with their view of human nature—the question of what differentiates human beings from animals. Although that question is not often discussed, assumptions about human nature underlie a number of widely held economic and political theories. Adam Smith was the first great theorist of capitalism and of the institutions we refer to as the "free market." He explained the existence of the free market by reference to a human "propensity to truck and barter."1 The existence of the free market is the effect of human nature that makes us always ready to trade and exchange goods ("truck"). This explanation has interesting consequences: If we live in a market society because we have certain human traits that we share with, all other human beings, we can be confident there will be a free market until human nature changes. We can then reject, with similar confidence, any claims that capitalism can come to an end. or can be replaced with a different economic system,. Similarly, as we look back over history, we see that however different the economy of hunters and gatherers appears to be from modern capitalism, they must be the same in important respects because human nature is no different today from what it was then. We share with hunter-gatherers our common human nature and thus the "propensity to truck and barter." Smith asserts that free-market institutions are an essential aspect of all human societies because they result from universal human traits. That claim rests on a particular conception of human nature. Capitalism is often defended as being particularly well suited to human nature. It is thought to be the preferred economic system because human beings are acquisitive; they always want more; they are "greedy." Others claim, that human beings are competitive or that they are usually only interested in benefiting themselves and those closest to them. These claims about human nature are not only used to explain why capitalism 12

Human Nature

13

exists at all but also to argue that capitalism is good or better suited to human nature than other economic systems. In more restricted forms, appeals to human nature are used to defend social stratification: We say that the traditional position of women is Justified because women have certain unchangeable characteristics: They are weak; they are emotional; they are better caretakers than men, who are aggressive and competitive. Similarly sweeping claims are often made about persons of color to justify their greater rates of poverty, low-wage jobs, and high rates of incarceration. Here the appeal is not to alleged facts about the nature of all human beings but only of some important groups of human beings. But the central structure of all these arguments is the same. Certain institutions are explained and justified by reference to a set of traits that some or all human beings are said to possess regardless of the particular society in which they live: Men cannot help lording it over women, and women's nature just fits them for their position. White people, it is claimed, are indeed superior to persons of color because white human nature is different from the nature of persons of color. In similar ways the appeal to human nature justifies political institutions: Thomas Jefferson, one of the great theorists in the liberal tradition, rested important features of the American political system, on the claim that all human beings have innate rights, (Animals are presumably different—they do not have rights,) Other liberal theorists have made similar claims, saying that human beings possess rights by their very nature. Those rights in turn determine what a good form of government is: Democracy respects human rights; dictatorship does not. Hence democracy is good and dictatorship is not. The basis of that claim, is, once again, a conception of human nature, In the eighteenth century, in the writings of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, the appeal to human nature, with its innate rights, provided an argument for more democratic institutions and for freeing commerce from government supervision. In the nineteenth century many socialists argued, against capitalism by asserting that human beings are by nature cooperative. In our time portrayals of human nature tend to justify social and economic conditions as they are. Arguments regarding human nature have been used to defend the status quo as well as to attack it. Marx and Engels on Human Nature Marx and Engels had no use for conservative arguments that purport to show that the world as it is now is as it ought to be because it conforms to human nature. Nor did they want to press for change by appealing to claims about universal human nature as did the great eighteenth-century

14

Human Nature

political and economic theorists. They refused to get involved in arguments about whether human beings are by nature cooperative or competitive or whether greed or generosity is the more powerful motive because they were extremely skeptical about such broad assertions about the essential traits of all human beings, past, present, and future. As evidence, most people who make such claims point to the people they know. But that does not suffice to establish generalizations about human beings in different places and in different periods of history. We need to compare the behaviors, the values, the socially approved practices of human beings across time in order to form some reliable generalizations about human nature. But once we consult history, we see that our predecessors did have very different traits and lead very different lives from ours, that indeed "all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature."2 The claims that particular authors made about all human nature are at best true only in their own culture. There are very few if any human traits that belong to all human beings at all times and. places. But history shows us more. The changes in human life and personality have been closely connected with the ways in which people produced the means necessary for their continued existence. As groups, tribes, and nations developed new ways of feeding, housing, and perpetuating themselves, their ways of being and their "natures" changed. History not only documents those changes but also shows that human beings have an important hand in bringing them about. Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence (GI, T ISO).3

Traditionally, philosophers have taken consciousness or religion to define the essence of human beings. These are the unchanging characteristics of human nature that supposedly differentiate us from animals. Marx and Engels, by contrast, chose as essential the fact that humans produce. But if we read beyond the passage quoted, we begin to see that this choice has rather unusual implications: By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. The way in which men produce their means of subsistence . . . is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definiteform,of expressing their life.... As individuals express their life, so they are. (GI, T150)

This paragraph goes through a number of steps: 1. In, producing the particular goods that a group needs, its members produce the particular ways in which they go about meeting their

Human Nature

15

material needs; they produce "their actual material life," Thus, for example, people who farm not only create farm products but also determine their worklife to be that of farmers. 2. But this worklife determines their entire way of life. Farmers are different from urban dwellers not only in that they farm, rather than working in offices or factories; they are different in all sorts of other ways. Country life as a whole is different from city life and breeds different people than does city life. The pace of life in the country is slower, and the people who live there tend to be relatively conservative and resist change. The pace in the city is more frenetic; urban dwellers are likelier to welcome change and are less rooted. 3, People who live differently are different people: "As individuals express their life, so they are." So it makes no sense to claim that all human beings are greedy or competitive, for people who live in situations where people regularly compete with each other will turn out to be competitive. People living in societies organized around different customs will turn out to be different Elsewhere Marx connects kind of personality to kind of technology. In a famous aphorism he asserts that "the handmill gives you the society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist" (Marx, 1963, 109). Different technologies demand different sorts of social organizations. Societies with low productivity where all work is done by hand tend to be societies where people manage to meet their minimum needs without producing much of a surplus. Trade and markets are not central to such societies because there is very little left over to trade after each family has met its minimum needs. In such societies the people who live off the work and products of others must resort to force to take from others what they produce. In feudal society, for example, the kings, princes, and knights used force to get products from the peasants and coerced them to work to maintain the kings and nobles. In a capitalist society, in contrast, the availability of machinery ("the steam-mill'") raises the level of productivity. Because people produce more than a subsistence minimum, there is need for trade and markets. The powerful in a capitalist society do not use naked force to get what they want; they use commercial mechanisms. A successful feudal lord needs to be a particular kind of person, a skilled fighter who values honor and bravery. Such qualities were important to feudal lords because for them war was a primary occupation. What is more, war was of a particular kind, involving hand-to-hand combat with sword and shield—not shooting missiles at an unseen enemy miles away. Hand-to-hand combat requires a certain kind of courage. Capitalists, too, must be risk takers who need a certain kind of courage, but this courage is different from the raw

16

Human Nature

physical courage of the feudal lord, "Honor" is a word not much in use today because it no longer counts for much. Instead we talk about "credibility," Being honorable does not matter in the commercial world as long as people think they can trust you. The appearance of trustworthiness is more important than actually being honorable and trustworthy. Thus various levels of technology are at the root of various kinds of societies and call for various types of personalities and systems of values. Without doubt Marx's aphorism oversimplifies the connections between technology and social orders and their dominant personality types, but the basic claim is worth taking seriously: In different societies with different levels of technology and therefore contrasting forms of social organization, people have diverse values and think very differently about what sorts of individuals they want to or ought to be.4 Early in his work, in his "Theses on Feuerbach," Marx wrote that the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In, its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. (T145}

This passage is usually understood as denying that there is any such thing as a universal human nature. Marx is said to have rejected the concept of an overarching human nature. But that, of course, does not make any sense. In the discussions I have quoted in this chapter, Marx repeatedly distinguishes between animals and human beings and makes any number of claims about human nature. Marx and Engels do not deny that there are continuities in human development or that if we describe human traits broadly enough we may find some that belong to all human beings. They are even willing to say that what distinguishes human beings from animals is their ability to determine what it means to be a human being. The method of historical comparison that Marx and Engels advocated for studying the history of human nature does make use of some generalizations about human beings. Human beings, for instance, have needs, and their actions are in part driven by these needs. But of course these needs vary from society to society. Human beings plan and think, but how they go about doing that depends upon the culture in which they live. Insisting on the variability of human nature as well as on human self-creation does not foreclose the possibility that there may be some universal features of human beings.5 But by comparing human beings in different historical periods, we see that what are usually thought to be universal traits are specific characteristics that belong only to persons in a limited span of human history.6 Private interest is itself already interest shaped by a society. It can only be attained under conditions laid down by the society and with means the society provides. (G, 74)

Human Nature

17

The upshot of these observations is that human beings not only produce things but they produce themselves as well, and as people produce their livelihoods in different ways, so they make themselves into different people. People are endlessly different from one another, although they are all humans. Their differences are not fortuitous; they result from processes under human control and are produced by these human beings themselves. As a consequence, claims about universal human nature, about traits possessed by all human beings in all cultures, are not likely to be true. If there is a universal human essence, it is not at all clear what it consists of. Hence we must be skeptical of political arguments meant to show that some particular economic, social, or political system, is the best because it is best suited to universal human nature. It is far from clear what the process of human self-production looks like. Several chapters of this book will, be required to explicate this conception. We will need to see that human beings do not make themselves into who they are individually but only in large groups. We will also need to see that the process of human self-creation is only rarely a conscious one. Instead, it results from individual and group actions undertaken for purposes other than creating a particular form of human society and the sorts of people that make such a society flourish. Finally, we shall see that the effect of human beings on their social environment is reciprocal; the environment also affects human beings in important ways. Species Being From these reflections emerges a concept of human nature that Marx summarizes by saying that humans are "species beings"; Human beings are species beings, not only because in practice and in theory they adopt the species as their object.., but also because they treat themselves as the actual, living species.... The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Human beings make their life-activity itself the object of their will and of their consciousness. (EPM, T 7-5-76) Marx here distinguishes human beings from animals. Animals belong to a species, but human beings are "species beings." Human beings do not merely belong to the human species; they also make the species "the object" of thinking and action. That means, to begin with, that human beings (sometimes) act only after deliberating. An animal simply is what it does; human beings act with forethought: Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it itnmedi-

18

Human Nature ately needs for itself or its young.... It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst human beings produce even when they are free from physical need. (EPM, T 76)

Animals build their dwellings and do whatever else they do compelled by need; human beings act even when they are not compelled by need but because they first thought about the action and then chose to perform it. Later, in the first volume of Capital, Marx makes that point much more explicitly: A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells, But what distinguishes the worst architect .from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (CI, T 344)

One can read these passages to say that Marx distinguishes animals from human beings by the fact that human beings plan their actions before they perform them, whereas animals act from instinct.7 That is no doubt what the passage says. But is that all that it says? This interpretation does not tell us what Marx means by "species being." It is incomplete. Other commentators add, that, according to Marx, human beings create their own needs: "The satisfaction of the first need . . . leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act" (GI, T 156). Human beings are species beings because they are able to change themselves—for instance, by creating new needs.8 The passage does not explain further what is meant by "the production of new needs," but elsewhere Marx speaks of it in very modern terms: Under private property their significance [viz. of human needs] is reversed: every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to... place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of gratification and therefore economic ruin, (EPM, T 93)

Long ago, new needs may have arisen as a consequence of climactic change: When a series of droughts occurred in a region, its inhabitants needed either to move or to develop a system of wells and cisterns to collect the scarce rainwater. At other times new inventions, such as the invention of the printing press, created in more people the need to read and write. But in a society such as ours, new needs do not arise haphazardly as the consequence of other changes but are deliberately created by manufacturers who want to sell their commodities. Advertising is a deliberate form of creating new needs. Thus "creating needs" involves very different goals and activities in different historical periods, but it is always a feature of human existence.

Human Nature

19

Acting with foresight, human beings not only plan their lives and actions but also change human nature, for example, by creating new needs, But we also change human nature in other ways, for instance, by accustoming people to work by the clock rather than by the sun and the seasons. Marx quotes Dr. Ure, an economist contemporary with Marx, discussing the invention and introduction of mechanical spinning machines: The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism [viz. an industrial machine]... as in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton,'

Medieval peasants worked from sunup to sundown during harvest time and worked much less in the winters. Their work habits were "desultory."10 Modern industrial workers punch in by the clock and punch out by the clock, and their supervisors make sure that they work when they are supposed to. They do this year-round, regardless of weather or the seasons. Their different rhythm of work, determined by the "unvarying regularity of the automaton," changes their habits, heightens the importance of clocks and clock time as opposed to the time kept by seasons and the sun. There is a further aspect to this talk about species beings; Human beings decide—differently at different times—what it means to be an adequate or a good human being as well as what is a life fit for human beings. Certain actions are abhorred as "inhuman"; certain persons are said to be "dehumanized" by suffering; certain conditions of life are said to be unfit for human beings. These standards in turn affect how people live, how they rear their children, and what standards they set for their own behavior in their moral codes, their laws, and customs. Human beings "in theory as well as in practi.ce adopt the species as their object" because questions concerning what makes us human, what sort of life is appropriate for human beings, are of theoretical concern for us—we think and disagree about them. But they are also a practical concern when we praise someone as a fine human being, a particularly admirable example of our species, or condemn certain practices as "inhuman." We regard certain persons as models for all of us and. urge our children to imitate them. We regard others as bad, immoral, or evil and proscribe certain behaviors as illegal and punish them. In these ways our beliefs about what it means to be human are translated into actual behaviors, and we make ourselves into certain sorts of human beings different from the human beings that flourish in other societies. The question, What is peculiarly human? is answered differently by different groups of people because they live different lives. But they

20

Human Nature

themselves made their way of life what it is in a variety of ways: They adapted to their physical surroundings by producing what they needed in specific ways. They organized their societies, developing structures of government and social relations, and created systems of beliefs about the universe, setting up moral beliefs and practices. As a consequence, we may well say that human beings determine what it means to be human— that is, what it is that makes their lives human lives. This self-creation is done as a consequence of thinking and planning rather than being driven by instinct. Humans therefore also determine what it means to be human by virtue of their intentional actions. It is important, however, to be clear on this point: Although Marx believed that humans, unlike animals, act with a purpose and for reasons, he also recognized that not everything their actions bring about is intended. Depending upon the situation, humans develop various ways of meeting their needs, which requires thought and inventiveness. Such changes in ways of life are intended. But not all the effects on human nature that often result from these deliberately instituted changes are intended. Human beings do not set out deliberately to change human nature itself. They do sometimes consider what is properly human as they set about solving their day-to-day problems. Some solutions to problems are not acceptable because they are not fitting for human beings; others are preferred because they are particularly humane. But some changes in human nature are the unintended consequences of other changes made deliberately. The definition of "human being" is the result of intentional actions and their unintended consequences. As we shall see in Chapter 16, Marx and Engels also believed that in the future it will be possible for human beings to define human being deliberately. Human nature has changed along with ways of producing what human beings need to maintain themselves and as new technologies have come into existence. But what are the causes of historical change? Marx and Engels have two apparently very different answers to that question. On the one hand they tell us that "human beings make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please" (18th, T 595). Here historical change appears as the product of human actions, if not always of explicit human choices. But on the other hand Marx also tells us elsewhere that "the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life" (T, 4). In the second quotation, we do not hear about human beings' shaping history but only about complex economic processes' affecting social conditions and human thinking. Marx holds both views and. believed that they are not inconsistent—as they appear to be on the surface. We will explain the complex interactions among human

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21

beings, their societies, and their sodoeconomic systems in the chapters that follow. What we have seen so far is only one side of the complex theory of Marx and Engels. That theory rests on historical comparisons of human beings and their societies at different times. It raises a strong challenge to ordinary assumptions about human nature—such as that all human beings are greedy and competitive or such generalized claims as that all human beings are born with inalienable rights. These generalizations are not supported by detailed examinations of human life in different historical periods. The other side of Marx's theory of history stresses the important role the environment plays in shaping human beings and producing and maintaining a particular kind of human being. We shall discuss those ideas much more in subsequent chapters. For Further Reading Vemon Venable, Human Nature: The Marxian View (New York; Meridian Books, 1966), chapters 2, 5, and 6. Notes 1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modem, Library, 1985), p. 17. 2. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York International Publishers, 1963), p. 147, 3. All quotations from. Marx and Engels, unless otherwise stated, have been taken from Robert C. Tucker, ed,, The Marx-Engels Rtader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W, Norton, 1978). References to this book, abbreviated "T," appear in parentheses along with the appropriate page numbers; preceding each such reference is an abbreviation indicating the name of the work by Marx and/or Engels in which the quotation was originally found. For a list of these abbreviations, see the front of this volume, 4. There is a further premise implicit in this claim that Marx does not argue for: Human beings—their very nature—are shaped, by their beliefs about what it means to be a human being. That belief is discussed in more detail in the subsequent section in connection with Marx's assertion that humans are "species beings." 5. Peter W. Archibald, Marx and the Missing Link: "Human Nature" (Atlantic Highlands, N.JL: Humanities Press, 1989). 6. Thus the pursuit of private interest is said to animate economic activities in a capitalist society, Marx does not deny that. In a capitalist society, interests are usually the interests of separate persons. But Marx also points out that this feature of capitalist society is itself a social fact—a fact about how our society is organized, What is more, the pursuit of private interest is possible only in a social system where there is a market, with exchanges and prices set by supply and demand. 7. John McMurtry, Tfx Structure of'Marx's World-View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), chapter 1.

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8. Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1982), pp. 27-28. 9. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 141. 10. Missionaries in the Amazon rainforest report that the indigenous people get up at 3 A.M. and then sit and talk until about 9 before they go to work in their gardens. Often they interrupt their work to sit down for long conversations. Jose ArnaJot ("Chuint"), Lo Que los Achuar me han Ensefiado (What the Achuar have taught me) (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1992).

2 Against Individualism HUMAN BEINGS HAVE ALWAYS adapted to change by devising new ways of meeting their needs. As a consequence of these adaptations, human nature has changed. It is tempting to think that these changes are due entirely to the actions of individual persons and to read the Marxian claim that human beings produce themselves as meaning that human beings produce alterations in human nature individually. "Human beings create themselves" is often, read as, "Men and women, individually make themselves what they are." This is taken to mean that persons who are successful may rightfully take pride in their success because they themselves made that success happen. Conversely, persons who suffer are thought to have brought that suffering on themselves. In the United States this thesis is often expressed as, "Everyone can advance him- or herself." Whether someone is doing well or not depends only on his or her own enterprise, hard work, and, perhaps, luck. The social conditions under which we strive have no effect on the outcomes of our efforts. The idea that individual human beings make themselves who they are is often, referred to as "individualism.." Marx and Engels were quite critical of individualism. They devoted a good deal of energy to arguing that in a capitalist economy working people, the poor, and the unemployed suffer even though, they are as intelligent and work as hard as people who are much better off. Unemployment, according to Marx and Engels, is created by employers (as a class) to hold down wages. A certain level of poverty is encouraged for the same purposes. Hence they do not want the claim about human self-creation to be read as applying to individual human beings separately, making each person responsible for his or her existence as either a pauper or a captain, of industry. But their views, like those of many other theorists, are easily misunderstood because they use "individualism" in several senses. It is best to list 23

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Against Individualism

those different senses before summarizing Marx's and Engels' reasons for rejecting individualism. The Varieties of Individualism The term "individualism" is used in at least three quite different senses. It is often a label for value judgments about the rights and the importance of individual persons. I will call this normative individualism. It makes one of three assertions: 1. Every human being is valuable, has certain rights, and deserves respect from other human beings merely by virtue of being human. As such, each individual has the right to develop his or her abilities to the fullest That society is best which furthers individual self-development the most. 2. Individual persons are important in their own right and need not yield to the demands of the group—whatever the group may be in any given case. The idea that, on the contrary, the needs and interests of groups must take precedence over those of individuals is often referred to as "collectivism.." 3. Human beings, however dependent on family and social groups they were in their youth, are able to and therefore ought to emancipate themselves from the tutelage of their society. Each person should think for him- or herself, form his or her own life-plan and moral values and live by those. Individualism here asserts that human beings should be autonomous. But often individualism does not involve value judgments, It is instead a thesis about the basic building blocks of the social world. Individualism in such a case asserts that the social world is made up of individual persons and that all social groups and institutions are nothing but aggregates of such individual persons. Groups, nations, ethnic groups, corporations, states, bureaucracies, and so on are all composites of separate individuals. The characteristics of these different groups are simply the characteristics of the individuals that compose these groups. Strictly speaking, social entities such as governments, corporations, and universities have no characteristics of their own but only those of the individual persons that make up those institutions. The actions and vicissitudes of states, or of nations, are thus the acts or experiences of individuals. Histories of groups are no more than the llistories of its individual members. I will call this social individualism, because it asserts that social groups are nothing but aggregates of individuals. The opposing view is social collectivism, which holds that groups have identities and characteristics separate and distinct

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25

from those of the individuals that make up any group. The greatness of a nation depends not only on its leaders but also on the excellence of its institutions. The history of a nation is not only the history of its citizens and their leaders but the history of the exploits of an entire people, the accomplishments of its governments, the splendors of its culture. History records the deeds not only of individuals but also of collectives, such as states, cultures, and peoples. A third kind of individualism is methodological. That means that we do not worry about the building blocks of social life but only ask what a complete explanation of any historical event would look like. The methodological individualist believes that "all social phenomena . . . are in principle explicable in ways that involve only individuals."1 The opposite view, methodological collectivism, maintains that when we explain social events our explanations need to refer not only to the characteristics, actions, and beliefs of individuals but also to the social structures in which alone the actions of individuals are possible or make sense, Marx and Engels' Opposition to Individualism In a very famous passage, Marx tells us The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the 18th century,.,. The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [soda! animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. (G, T 222-223) This passage is often, read as Marx's rejection of individualism on the grounds that individuals always exist in social contexts. They are born into societies, nurtured and raised, in them, and, learn how to live as adults from other adults in their society. Individuals are always social; they always depend on their social context for their identity. The isolated individual is a pure fiction. But if that is Marx's intention here, he is attacking a view that no sane person would ever hold. Of course human beings can exist only in society. Of course children need the nurturing of family or other social groupings. (And so, of course, do many animals.) Of course humans raised in isolation or by animals turn out very strange. We all know that. On the most common interpretation of this passage, Marx offers a set of familiar platitudes as an argument against individualism. But no one, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo (the two great English economists on whose work Marx builds his own economics), would defend individualism as Marx characterizes it here. On, such a, reading of this passage, Marx would refute a view that no thoughtful person holds.

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At issue is not whether individuals exist "outside" of society—very few do, and those who do will not flourish. The issue is either whether groups have characteristics distinct from the characteristics of individuals or whether once individuals are born, nurtured, and educated in a particular society they can transcend the opinions, prejudices, and limited perspectives of their society of origin and become adults who think for themselves and see the world clearly, undistorted by the preconceptions of their native environment. Marx and Engels do not believe that humans are able to emancipate themselves fully from the ideas and practices of their native environment. They follow G. W. R HegeJ in their view that cultures are fully conscious of their particular characteristics only in retrospect, once they have ceased to innovate and flourish and look back on their earlier glory. Most of the time, the people in a particular culture cannot fully articulate their specific assumptions and outlooks, their particular ways of going about daily life or confronting the great events in human existence. And one cannot transcend ideas, customs, and values of which, one is not even aware. Marx and Engels, as much as anyone else, insisted that one should try to think for oneself, which means, in part, trying to be critical of the ideas that one grows up with and takes to be self-evident until one subjects them to critical examination. But they do not believe that one can emancipate oneself completely from the preconceptions of one's time and culture. They understand the complex ways in which the ideas or actions of any group of human beings are conditioned by the social practices and institutions of their society. Those connections between what one thinks and the social world in which one lives are often so complicated that they are intelligible only to the historian who studies that society later. Accordingly, in the preceding chapter we saw how Marx objected to theories that explain economic behavior and the functioning of capitalist economies exclusively in terms of the interests of private economic agents: Private interest is itself already interest shaped by a society. It can only be attained under conditions laid down by the society and with means the society provides. (G, 74)

The desires and interests of human beings cannot be taken at face value but are themselves shaped by the prevailing social structures. Here the debate is not over whether only individuals exist but over the correct explanation of economic behavior and, economic systems. The debate moves from normative or social to methodological individualism. Taking a historical view, Marx finds methodological individualism indefensible. Much social theory, then and now, explains what happens in a given society exclusively by the actions, beliefs, interests, and desires of individual persons. But Marx and Engels believe that in one's explanations of eco-

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27

nomic systems one cannot stop with the interests of individuals because those interests themselves have a history. This history is not just a history of individual persons but a history of institutions or large groups and their practices. One can understand why individuals have certain interests only if one studies the history of the social institutions in which those individuals live. The modern tendency to explain social processes in terms of individual interests and desires has its own history. Methodological individualism is a fairly recent development. It became popular only with the rise of capitalist society because that society attenuated the connections between the individual and, the social whole. Society is now organized differently from how it was organized in feudal times; individuals are more or less independent of the social context. The individual who is what he or she is, largely independent of his or her social setting, is a modern phenomenon. Human beings have not always thought of themselves as "individuals" and have therefore not always been individuals in the sense in which we who live in a capitalist society are individuals. The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family, and in the family expanded into the clan; then later in various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. Only in the 18th century, in "civil society/' do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. (G, T 222-223)

The term "civil society" refers to the capitalist economy, the sphere of private economic activity, competition, and pursuit of profit and wealth. In this particular social setting, individuals are indeed distinct from one another because each is in competition with the other. Family ties, social connections, and traditions are for the individual so many "means towards his private purposes" to be used and manipulated. They are no longer of the essence of what that person is. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds, etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. (G, T 222)

In earlier times the very identity of a person was constituted by social connections. Property ownership consisted of membership in a community. In those times methodological individualism—the belief that individuals, their characteristics, actions, and beliefs can yield complete explanations of social phenomena—would have made no sense whatsoever. We encounter here one example of the thesis that all of human history

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consists of a change in human nature or that human beings, in the course of their history, create themselves. Human nature changes with respect to the relative independence of persons from others, with respect to the extent to which any person is separate from other persons. In the past there was little social mobility, but today we can move from one social, group to another more or less at will. We form our own identity independently of family or social group. We are motivated by self-interest instead of by the demands of the group to which we belong. Individualism, in its various forms, is intelligible only against the background of our social system. The plausibility of methodological individualism is the product of our particular social order. It is not a universal truth but, on the contrary, one of the misconceptions that arises in a society like ours. Marx was quite explicit: Methodological individualism is false. Marx and Engels' Opposition to Collectivism Many theorists believe that if you reject individualism., you must endorse collectivism. They have therefore accused Marx of being a collectivist. We need to consider what that accusation amounts to. The Hegelians against whom Marx and Engels were arguing in the late 1840s tended to treat society as if it were a superperson. They were unabashed social collectivists. Following Hegel himself, they talked about the state as if it were a superperson that acted, decided, and so on. Since then others have talked about "the people" or "the nation" as if thev were such superpersonal subjects, and many politicians in the United States today talk about "the American people" in the same way. They say that "the American people" believe this, will not accept that, or will never agree to something else. By itself, social collectivism is probably no more interesting than social individualism. But it gains in importance because it seems to validate the corresponding normative view, namely, normative collectivism, the view that the whole—the social group, the nation, the army, the party, or even the family—counts for more than the individual who belongs to any such grouping. The political rhetoric that ascribes the characteristics of persons to social entities has, from the days of Hegel to the present, served regimes that suppress individuals and their freedoms. It is easy to see how that happens: If the "nation" asks me to go to war, what value can my pacifism, have or the need of my family for me in the face of the demand of the whole people? If the "state" demands something from me, how can I, a single individual, resist? To the extent that the political rhetoric that elevates social groups or institutions to the role of superpersons is accepted, the needs, beliefs, and moral stances of individuals pale by comparison to those of the state, the people, and humanity. Social col-

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lectivism often provides the political rhetoric for oppressive regimes that violate individual integrity. But Marx emphatically rejected collectivism in its normative sense; He believed normative individualism to be all-important. His persistent criticism of capitalism, was that it cripples people: The division of labor produces persons who can do only one thing (CI, T 409) rather than being fully developed in as many respects as possible. In an ideal society, the individual would be fully developed (G, T 287, 290; GI, T 160). Proletarians in a capitalist society lack freedom because their work is under the control of the owners of the workplace and because political power is in the hands of the owners of the means of production. (For a further discussion of that point, see Chapters 11 and 14.) In the good society, work will be under the control of everyone together. The workers will be free because they control the means of production and therefore their worklife (GI, T 191). They will have political freedom because they will run their lives democratically. The goal of the revolution that Marx and Engels work for and advocate is full individual human freedom (CIII, T 441). The wellbeing of individual persons, their full and all-sided development, their freedom are the highest values for Marx and Engels, Accordingly, they were also hostile to social collectivism because it frequently gives support to normative collectivism. Just as society itself produces human beings as human beings, so is society produced by them,.,. What is to be avoided above all is the reestablishing of "Society" as an abstraction vis a vis the individual. (EPM, T 86)

Unfortunately, Marx was not always sufficiently cautious in his expression. We already cited the following sentence in the preceding chapter; But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. (T 145}

Thus states the "Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach," one of a set of notes in which Marx first articulated his disagreements with Ludwig Feuerbach.2 The passage seems to tell us that a person is nothing but the product of social relations, and it has often been interpreted in that way. The individual vanishes as insignificant; social relations appear to be what matters. This is certainly an example of social collectivism. But most likely Marx overstated his position in these aphorisms, which received a more moderate formulation in the German Ideology; We do not mean it to be understood... that, for example, the rentier, the capitalist, etc. cease to be persons; but their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relations. (GI, T 199}

Marx's more carefully considered position seems to be the following: Every person is unique, and so, of course, is the capitalist. But in order to

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be a successful capitalist, one needs to be competitive, aggressive, and dedicated to the work of making money. Anyone without those personality traits will fail. Hence the particular personality traits found most often among capitalists are determined by the work they do, by the social setting in which they spend their lives. Methodological individualism ignores the fact that what it means to be an individual is essentially determined by the social setting in which persons live and that, for the same reason, being an individual person has had significantly different meanings throughout history. But it is nevertheless true that different individuals fill their social roles in different ways. Not all capitalists are indistinguishable from one another; in fact they vary enormously because they are such different persons with different histories and thus exemplify the general traits of capitalists in quite different ways, What Is the Position of Marx and Engels? But are Marx and Engels contradicting themselves here? Sometimes they reject individualism; that seems to commit them to collectivism. But at other times they reject collectivism just as vigorously. In order to understand what seems to be a glaring contradiction we need to return to the distinctions between the kinds of individualism and collectivism: Marx and Engels do reject social collectivism because they reject the Hegelian normative collectivism,. They do not believe that the social or political whole is more important than its individual members. They agree that social groups do not literally speak because they do not have bodies to speak with and, for the same reason, do not literally act in other ways. Societies and other groups are not superpersons; they do not have values or beliefs. They do not produce anything. To that extent Marx and Engels reject social collectivism.. But when we come to methodological individualism and collectivism— to the question of what explains the actions of individual persons—they side with the collectivists. They reject methodological individualism. The rejection of social collectivism (the idea that societies and groups are superpersons) does not imply that we cannot and, indeed, must not refer to groups to which individuals belong when we want to understand and. explain the actions of individuals. The actions of individuals are shaped by the society to which those individuals belong. If capitalists are particular kinds of persons because they are capitalists, then their typical patterns of action are shaped in part by the society in which they live, in which it is possible to be a capitalist. Thus, although it remains true that only individual persons can act in a literal sense, it is equally true and important that when it comes to explaining those actions we need to talk not only about individuals but also about the social settings that shape them.

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When Marx and Engels say, therefore, that we human beings create ourselves, the "we" does not refer to you and. me as distinct and separate individuals. Marx and Engels insisted that "individuals . . . do not make themselves" (GI, T 164). But neither are Marx and Engels treating social systems as superpersons. They are saying something much more modest: People's beliefs and actions are molded in significant ways by the practices characteristic of their societies. For instance, persons living in competitive societies that value individual initiative are likely to think of themselves in much more individualistic terms than persons living in a society where collective action and responsibility shape daily practices. But individuals are not Just the passive recipients of social influence. To a significant extent we can be aware of and consider critically the influences of society on each of us. The practices and institutions of any given society that shape its members are themselves maintained and altered in the day-to-day activities of these members. Often they do this without being aware of these consequences of their actions. At other times they set about deliberately to change institutions or practices. These actions are, of course, the actions of individuals, but they affect practices or institutions only if they are done by many individuals over long periods of time. In Chapters 4 and 5 we will discuss in much greater detail how social settings influence the actions and thoughts of individual persons. We will see that nothing said so far implies that human choices are necessitated by social contexts or that human beings are not free agents. Then, in Chapter 16, we will explore the conception of socialism in Marx and Engels, which gives an important place to the development of the individuality of all persons. Marx and Engels never reject normative individualism—the ethical appreciation of individual worth. They affirm without reservation that all individual persons are valuable in their own right. But first we need to say more about history, in the course of which human beings determine what a human life is. For Further Reading Shlomo Avineri, Tfc? Social and Political Thought of Karl Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), chapter 3. Notes 1. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5. 2. Feuerbach was a contemporary of Marx whose critiques of Hegel made a major impression on Marx in the early 1840s.

3 History THE WORD "HISTORY" REFERS both to past events and to our reconstruction of past events. In this chapter I discuss history in both senses. History as the Transformation of Human Nature Our conception of human nature affects our view of what the past was like. For the individualist, who hopes to explain human history by reference to the actions of individual persons, the history of groups becomes the history of its members and, more likely than not, that of its illustrious members. The individualist, therefore, finds in history primarily the acts of monarchs and conquerors, tyrants and individual saviors. History, as the reconstruction of the past, reports on the acts of individuals. If we adopt Marx's position that human beings jointly define what "human being" is, history begins to look quite different. History now comes to be, as Marx puts it, the process of human self-transformation. In the discussion of individualism in Chapter 2, we saw some examples of that process of self-transformation. Here are others: In the change from a feudal society to capitalism, people acquire an entirely different relation to their work. The limited commerce and the scant communications between the individual towns, the lack of population and the narrow needs did not allow of a higher division of labor, and therefore every man who wished to become a master [of some craft] had to become proficient in the whole of his craft. Thus 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 arfisttc sense . . . Every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in Ms work . . . to which he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern worker whose work is a matter of indifference to him. (GI, T 178} 32

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The medieval craftsman "was completely absorbed in his work"; to the modern worker, work is "a matter of indifference." Today work is what you get paid for; if, in order to make a living, you need to do different work from what you have been doing, that really matters very little, as long as the pay is better at your new Job. The role that work plays in defining a person's identity is different under capitalism from what it was in a feudal society. Under capitalism, what one does is not a defining characteristic of a person as it had been under feudalism; the nature of being a person changed with the rise of capitalism. For medieval craftsmen to adopt the name of their occupation as their own name—smith, carpenter, wright, shoemaker, and so on—made sense because what they did—and most likely what their fathers did and their sons were going to do—was of central importance to them. What we do is not of comparable importance to us today. With capitalism, competition, and social mobility arises a new conception of the person as a separate individual, relatively independent of her or his social setting. In a feudal society, a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner always a commoner. ... The accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves, (GI, T199)

In a feudal society, personal identity consists to a significant extent of one's social station. Social mobility is thereby restricted, for a person could not change his or her social condition and still be the same person. Many generations have remained in the same circumstances because those conditions have defined who they were. In capitalist society, by contrast, the person becomes quite separate from his or her social or class position. If a tycoon goes bankrupt, he is still the same person. He may find the transition to working difficult, but his personal identity is unchanged. But what, then, is a person's identity? In past societies one's family, place of origin, trade were important determinants of personal identity. In a capitalist society, relations to family, tribe, and trade have been loosened. One can leave one's family, change one's residence and occupation, without being a different person. External facts about oneself no longer determine identity; identity has become "personal." It is no longer social to the extent that it once was. As a consequence, what one thinks about one's identity comes to be much more important, and identities can now be manufactured. Since they are no longer constrained by external, social facts that are not easily changed, such as who your father was or where you were born, identities tend to become commodities, made to order. Identities to that extent can be purchased, and money becomes important

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in determining who someone is. Under capitalism, money figures extensively in the production of identities: That which is for me through the medium of money—that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy)—that am f, the possessor of money.... I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid? Besides, he can buy talented people for himself, and is he who has power over the talented not more talented than the talented? (EPM, T103-104}

In a capitalist society, where anything you might want you can buy, the identity of a person is determined by money. You can go to the plastic surgeon, the hairdresser, the public relations expert to turn you into a different person. New clothes, new interests, new fads, new ideas can easily be adopted and make you over into a person quite different from what you were only a short while ago. This process of identity formation is totally different from what persons in feudal societies experienced. The nature of moral codes has also changed: During the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie, the concepts freedom, equality, etc. [played the central role]. (GI, T173)

In a feudal society, war, fought with swords and shields, was the business of the upper classes. Political relations between king and nobles, between landowners and peasants were based on personal relations, rooted in relations between families. For the warlike, honor was a supreme value. In the relations between persons that rested in the relations between families, loyalty and steadfastness counted for a great deal In a highly mobile society like ours, where many of the relations are exchange relations between people who do not know each other at all, neither honor nor loyalty has an important place. But the transactions in the marketplace presuppose certain kinds of freedom and equality. Those conditions are therefore much more important than honor and loyalty. Needs are similarly subject to historical change: Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. (G, T 230) Discussions about basic human needs tend to be very abstract. In actuality, the need for food is always embedded in the concrete practices concerned with providing, preparing, and eating food. In any given setting, people are not simply hungry; they are hungry for particular foods prepared and served in specific ways. Travelers in foreign countries will go for a considerable time with little food rather than eat strange food under conditions that seem unappetizing to them. They are "not hungry." In similar ways needs for shelter or for love and companionship change sig-

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nificantly as shelter changes from caves to big-city apartments or as romantic love replaces the companionship in marriages arranged by families for dynastic reasons. The idea that human beings define themselves goes hand in hand with the idea that human beings are historical beings. This is not to say merely that human beings live under changing conditions but, as Marx said in The Poverty of Philosophy, that "all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature."1 Human beings are historical in that being human itself has a history and changes throughout history. That is, the concept of humanity changes. History consists of more than the deeds of individual persons, particularly of the high and mighty, of princes and of popes, or of the more complex process in which the circumstances surrounding the lives of men and women have changed. It is now the process in which human beings repeatedly define and redefine what human beings are. But as we saw before, this process of redefinition is not always deliberate. Human beings do not gather together periodically to consider what it has recently meant to be human and to change that definition, in the way in which fashion designers get together annually to redefine what it means to be well dressed, The redefinitions of human nature often flow indirectly from the changed ways in which people solve their concrete material problems and from the needs that arise as a consequence of the development of new techniques and the attendant changes in social organization. That is, human beings resolve the problems they find in their day-to-day activities and try to keep their ways of living unchanged. The consequences of these attempts to solve problems are rarely understood at the time; attempts to preserve existing conditions often have the opposite effect of bringing about changes in prevailing institutions. But at the same time, of course, as human beings think about particular ways of solving their problems, relevant considerations are, for instance, that certain measures would be "inhuman" or that certain solutions proposed are more "humane" than others. We do not consider solving the problem of poverty by executing or exiling all poor people because that is not in keeping with our idea of what it means to be a human being. (That is not to say that all the ways in which we actually deal with problems such as poverty are always humane.) The ends are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended, or ... they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended,2 Human beings transform what "human being" is not simply by engaging in philosophical discourse about the meaning of being human but more frequently in the course of solving their day-to-day problems. But as we think about daily problems, we also think about what solutions our

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humanity demands or forbids. The concrete problems are solved intentionally; the attendant redefinitions or transformations of human nature are often unintended. Writing History Implicit in the disagreement between Marx and the proponents of individualism is a disagreement about the study and writing of history. The methodological individualist insists that we must always try to explain events by providing accounts of individual persons and their behavior and thought. The Allied victory over Adolf Hitler in World War II is essentially the history of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin; the history of capitalism is the history of, say, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford. Events that cannot be accounted for by the actions of singular individuals are explained by natural conditions or disasters: geography and climate, droughts or typhoons, Marx counters that we cannot understand the contributions of individuals unless we also understand the effects of the socioeconomic system on them. History must study the acts of individuals as well as the effects of the social settings on these acts. It must also study the transformation of entire social systems. Marx and Engels do not think that the methodological individualist's history is false but that it is incomplete. Of course individual action accounts for a great deal in history. Individuals go about solving their everyday problems. They also make plans for the future and try to learn from their past. These lessons affect their plans, and all of that accounts for what human beings do. Often the problems to be solved result from geography and climate and natural disasters. All of this individual effort accounts for a great deal of what happens in history. We cannot write history without writing the history of the actions of individual persons. So far Marx and Engels' approach to historical explanation is no different from those offered by individualism. But the individualist stops here, whereas Marx and Engels want to raise additional questions. Speaking very generally, human beings have similar problems in different historical periods: They need to provide food and shelter for themselves and. their families. But in different periods they go about solving those problems in very different ways. In order to provide food for my children, I need money. If I need money today, I may try to find a job or to borrow money or to go and hold up a bank. For a feudal serf the options were quite different: There were no banks and hence borrowing from a bank or stealing from it were not options. Neither was hiring yourself out for work because the society did not have the institution of working for pay. Money did not play as important a role in economic life as it does today, so that the serf who needed more food probably did not primarily think, "I need more money." He might have tried to steal food or to work

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harder on his plot of land and spend less time working for the feudal lord that owned the land—if he could get away with that. In different historical settings the problem of getting more food looks different. Because people live under different social systems, their problems take different forms and so, therefore, do their attempted solutions. Hence if we want to understand history, we need not only understand what individual persons do but how the social system in which they live defines their problems and provides a limited range of options to solve those problems. Historical explanations are incomplete if they refer only to the forces of nature and to the actions of individuals. But that disagreement with an individualist approach to history brings with it further questions. Explanations of historical events require that we take account of different historical systems. But how do we identify social systems? Marx differentiates historical systems by the methods and. organization of production; Capitalism differs from feudalism because it uses other technology and the process of production is organized in other ways. But historians identify historical periods according to various criteria: They talk about the pagan and Christian eras if they think that people's actions at those times are best understood as an outgrowth of their religious beliefs and. practices. Others identify historical periods by the peoples who dominated them: Antiquity was dominated by the Greeks and then the Romans, feudalism by the Holy Roman Empire, the nineteenth century by Britain, and our present century by the United States. In each of these periods, historical explanation refers us to the dominant peoples and to the peculiar characteristics of their civilization. We will see in Chapter 5 how Marx divides history into periods, Other questions have to do with how we explain the rise and fall of these different civilizations or historical periods. There are two questions here: The first is a general question about the way in which we should frame explanations of historical events. Marx touches on that in his scattered remarks about the "dialectic." The second is about the specific causes that account for the rise and decay of civilizations. Marx's answer to that is contained in his doctrine that is usually referred to as historical materialism. I discuss the dialectic in the next chapter and historical materialism in the chapter after that. For Further Reading Vernon Venable, Human Nature: Tin* Marxian View (New York: Meridian Books, 1966), chapter 7,

Notes 1. Marx, TIte Poverty of Pkilosojjln/ (New York International Publishers, 1963), p. 147. 2. Frederick Engels, Lmiwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York; International Publishers, 1941), p. 48.

4 The Dialectic THE DIALECTIC IS THE MOST obscure aspect of Marx's and Engels' wri.ti.ngs. Many commentators either ignore it or reject it outright as an unfortunate hangO¥er from Marx's interest, when he was a very young man, in Hegel's philosophy. They read Marx as if he had never employed the dialectic. But Marx himself tells us that he did use a dialectical method, and, what is more, he is proud of it: "I openly avowed myself the pupil of this mighty thinker [Hegel]" (T 301). To be sure his dialectic is different from Hegel's in important ways. But Marx's thinking about history and historical explanation owes a great deal to Hegel. In order to understand Marx's dialectic, we need to look first at Hegel's. Hegel's Dialectic Hegel's dialectic served a specific philosophical purpose—namely, to reconcile religion, specifically Christianity, with science as it was rapidly developing. In the past basic questions about nature had been given religious answers: What is the origin of the universe? Answer: God created the heavens and the earth in six days. What keeps the planets in their precise orbits? Answer: God maintains the universe from moment to moment. What accounts for the different kinds of plants and animals? Answer: God created each kind. And so on. But the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo, and Isaac Newton provided an alternative answer to the question about the planets. This answer was based on observation and did not presuppose the existence of a deity. The origins of the earth and the multitude of species of plants and animals were soon to be accounted for in similarly secular terms. It was clear to Hegel that the harmony between the knowledge of nature and religion, which had lasted for a long time, was about to collapse. Science and Christianity were coming into conflict. 38

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Hegel's philosophy is dedicated to restoring this harmony between scientific knowledge and religion in addition to preserving the supremacy of the di¥ine in the universe. Science is incompatible with, the conception of a transcendent God who creates the world. In the scientific worldview, there is no room, for a God who created the universe. Natural science offers alternative explanations for the development of the moon and the stars, of plants and animals to those offered by various religions. In order to effect the reconciliation of science and religion, Hegel denies that God is the creator in a literal sense or is a God beyond this world. Instead, he considers all of creation a manifestation of God. The transcendent deities of traditional Christianity and Judaism are replaced by a sophisticated form of pantheism. God and the world are one. This God of Hegel's is not from eternity to eternity all-knowing and all-powerful but is in the process of becoming. The different sides of the infinitely complex divine nature are realized, one after the other, in the long history of the universe, Both nature and human history are stages in God's development, Hegel's God, instead of being an uncreated, creator, creates the world and, himself at the same time. God is coming into existence, and the different episodes in natural and human history are episodes in God's development, The process of God's development follows a complex pattern: 1. The world is not completely identical with God, but it is divine insofar as it is a manifestation of the divine. Thus any particular phase in the history of nature or of human beings is not simply God but a particular aspect of the divine nature, 2. The world changes, and, in its changes God develops, 3. The development proceeds through a complex set of stages. 4. Each stage represents one aspect of the divine nature, but insofar as it represents only one aspect, it is incomplete and hence defective. 5. Each stage is therefore replaced by a new stage that develops what was lacking in the preceding stage, 6. The stages, as they follow one another, are in opposition to each, other, for each provides what was lacking in the preceding one. 7. Successive stages are therefore at the same time opposed to one another and are not just similar but identical. This claim, more than any other, gives readers of Hegel trouble, as we shall see shortly. 8. Oppositions between two stages are resolved in a new stage that preserves what is worth preserving in the two preceding ones and surrenders what should be surrendered. This pattern of historical development is one of the chief characteristics of Hegel's dialectic. But the reconciliation between religion, and science, as Hegel proposes, still must deal with some major problems: To begin

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with, God is infinite; the world in which we live is finite, God is perfect; much in our world is defective. God is good, but there is a great deal of pain and evil and ugliness in our world. What is more, the explanations science offers are just as incompatible with a religion that tells us of a God indwelling in the world whose history is world history as they are with the more familiar religion, with its transcendent God. Any explanation of, say, the origin of the solar system or the evolution of Homo sapiens that explains those as acts of God are incompatible with science. Hegel's move from a transcendent, forever complete God to an indwelling God that is developing does not suffice to smoothe over the contradictions between science and religion. Here a second characteristic of the dialectic comes in. For Hegel, the dialectic is a kind of logic that is superior to the more familiar, formal logic. In formal logic statements such as "God created man in his own image" and "'Human beings evolved from monkeys" are contradictory because one asserts that God is the creator and the other asserts implicitly that God is not the creator. According to the rules of ordinary, formal logic only one of these statements can be true. But if Hegel is going to reconcile science and religion, he has to make room for acceptance of both of these statements. Hegel attempts to do that by regarding the scientific view of the world as one more perspective, one more stage in the history of God. It is important to understand the term "perspective" properly, Hegel does not merely assert that science has its point of view as does religion. (That is the sort of thing some so-called Creationists say today—that people have their different points of view and it is inappropriate to ask which one is true.) No, Hegel claims that these perspectives are both true though logically incompatible. Implicit in such a claim is a purely logical claim, namely, that contradictory statements-—"God created humans" and "God did not create humans"—can both be true under some conditions because they represent different perspectives on the same matter. The first statement comes out the religious perspective; the second out of the perspective of science. Hegel refers to this logical doctrine as "the identity of opposites." Such an explanation of the compatibility of religion and science is acceptable from the dialectical point of view (in Hegel's sense of dialectic) but not from the point of view of natural science. Looked at from the scientific point of view, the story of the creation is not an earlier scientific hypothesis, later replaced by the theory of evolution in biology and the big bang theory in cosmology. The story of creation is not science at all; it is a religious myth. Even less acceptable to the scientist would be the view that natural science is itself a limited view of the world that from, a different perspective, could be seen as one very partial manifestation of the divine history—for on that account science would be an imperfect version of Hegel's religious view of the universe.

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It still appears that natural science cannot be fitted into the dialectic because the explanations it gives are not dialectical. Science sticks strictly to formal logic where statements are either true or false. It does not accept the claim that contradictory statements may be reconciled once they are understood to be different perspectives on one and the same subject. Hegel recognized that difficulty and distinguished between the formal logical thinking of science and the dialectical thinking of speculative philosophy. In the interest of his reconciliation of the divine and science, Hegel claims that formal logic is, to be sure, the logic of science; but from the point of view of the whole—that is, from the divine point of view—we see that what science regards as distinct and irreconcilably contradictory perspectives are in fact only dialectical contradictions, imperfect views that in the future will be reconciled. The concept of contradiction is being redefined here. In formal logic a contradiction consists of two sentences that cannot both be true or both be false (at the same time, in the same respect) because one is the denial of the other. In the Hegelian dialectic, two contradictories may both be true because each, being only a one-sided view of divine reality, is only partially true anyway. Thus dialectic is, indeed, a logic different from formal logic and one that is, according to Hegel, superior to formal logic. In this way science is assigned its place in the grand philosophical view of the universe as a partial view of that universe. The Marxian Dialectic Marx rejects Hegel's claim that the world is no more than a manifestation of divine thought. In fact, he is hostile to religion. "Religion is the opium of the people" is one of his most famous statements.1 So whatever we might make of Marx's dialectic, we can be sure that it is not a religious one. Accordingly, most readers of Marx have described Hegel's dialectic as "idealist" and Marx's as "materialist" In this common understanding of Marx's views about dialectic, Hegel's dialectic is idealist because Hegel believes that the world is ultimately spiritual. Because it is divine, it cannot be anything else. But Marx, rejecting religion, is a "materialist"; he believes that ultimately reality is made of matter, inanimate and animate. Such interpretations rest on Marx's saying that Hegel's dialectic "is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell" (CI, T 302). This interpretation assumes that M,arx's dialectic is like the dialectic of Hegel in being a logic that is in competition with and superior to formal logic.2 But that is a mistake. Marx's dialectic is not a logic, The claim that dialectic is a logic superior to formal logic is not compatible with another claim that Marx often makes, namely, that he is a scientist and that his work does for the study of society what Newton's did for the study of physical nature. He explains in the preface to the first edition

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of Capital that like a physicist he is trying to discover "the natural laws of capitalist production . . . working with iron necessity" (T, 296). Unlike Hegel, Marx is not doing philosophy; his work is meant to be science. Even Hegel did not believe that one could tolerate contradictions in science. It is clear that Marx did not believe that either. If Marx is a scientist, he cannot use dialectic as a logic that supplants formal logic. But if we adhere to the common view of dialectic that it is, for Marx as well as for Hegel, a logic superior to formal logic, and if Marx as a scientist cannot use such a logic, however superior it may be outside of science, then Marx's use of dialectical turns of phrase would be of no significance. Hence it is often said that Marx sounds like a dialectician at times, but that this form of expression represents only his fondness for a certain kind of language that he acquired as a young man and was never quite willing to give up. In this view his use of dialectical turns of phrase has no substantive significance. One can ignore them and therefore also ignore Marx's assertion that he adopted some form of dialectic from Hegel. A number of interpreters of Marx take this position. They think that the less one takes Marx's apparently dialectical forms of expression seriously, the closer one comes to grasping what is of real value in his work. Such writers are likely to use the word "dialectical," if they use it at all, as a pretentious term to refer to reciprocal relations.3 They claim that things or institutions are "dialectically" related if each has some effect on the other. That, however, is not Marx's use of the term. Marx himself is reasonably explicit about what dialectic meant for him. It was for him not a logic that replaced the formal logic one uses in science, but it provided patterns of explanation for social science. Social science, like physics, is looking for laws of development But the laws of social science are different from those in physics. "The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry" (T, 301). Instead, social systems are more like natural organisms. Marx's social science "regards every historically developed social form, as in fluid movement, and. therefore takes into account its transient nature no less than its momentary existence" (T, 302). Marx thought that Hegel was the first to understand the complexities of explanations in social science. One needs both to provide explanations for the institutions of the society as they are today ("in its momentary existence") and to understand that they are transformations of earlier forms of these institutions ("as in fluid movement"). Historical Explanation In the voluminous notebooks for Capital that were published in the 1930s under the name of Grundrtsse ("basic plan"), Marx entered some sketchy

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comments about his method. Science, he believed, must construct models that explain observed phenomena. Model building involves extracting the most general features of a set of observed phenomena and showing how those general features account for the phenomena in the world around us. That is a familiar understanding of scientific procedure that few would quarrel with. In Capital Marx dearly tried to build such a model by beginning with very few concepts and assumptions and slowly adding more complications to the primitive model of a commodity-producing society until he had a model sufficiently complex to account for actually observed economic phenomena and for the behaviors of economic agents. If you build a model to explain your observations, Marx argues, your concepts will be drawn from what you have observed and what appears to you most suitable for describing and explaining the world you are observing. Constructing models is a slow and laborious process because it takes a long time to discover the crucial characteristics that must be represented in your model. At the beginning you take the most obvious features of the observed world and incorporate them in your model. But after a while you discover that what is observable is often not coherent: In order to explain the world as you observe it, your model must incorporate less obvious features of the world and sometimes even objects or events that you do not observe at all. The light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of the optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. , . . After the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered. (Cl, T 321, 323}

We do not observe directly the changing electrical potential along the optic nerve as it transmits visual stimuli from, the eye to the brain. But we need to include that electrical potential in our model in order to understand how we see objects. A complete explanation of what we perceive often includes objects and processes not observed directly. Only a considerable effort yields models that contain not only concepts of what is observable but also of what we cannot observe—the functioning of the optic nerve, the composition of the air we breathe, the movement of the earth around the sun even though the sun still appears to us to rise in the east and set in the west.4 When we come to building models in social science, we encounter the same difficulty. Again we need to explain what is observed by what is not at all observable or is much less obvious than what strikes the observer initially. For example, Marx points out that in ordinary commercial transactions, the value of a commodity appears as an intrinsic characteristic of the commodity. Of course its price will fluctuate with fluctuations in sup-

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ply and demand, but these fluctuations will be limited to a particular range—new cars will not sell for a dollar or candy bars for a million (except under extraordinary circumstances, such as hyperinflation). The prices will fluctuate in relation to the cost of producing a certain commodity, its value. But this value is not, as it ordinarily appears, an intrinsic characteristic of the commodity but depends on "the social character of men's labor" (CI, T 320).5 Commodities have value only under the specific conditions of a capitalist society, in which goods are produced for exchange and have value only if they are in fact exchanged. (We will return to this in Chapter 7.) The model we need to construct in order to understand prices and values must not only make use of such concepts as price and value but must in addition introduce the concepts of economic systems in general and of the capitalist system in particular. But building models in social science is more complex than building models in natural science. The capitalist system is intelligible only if we study it historically. We can appreciate the specific characteristics of capitalism only if we compare it with the system out of which it developed and that it replaced—feudalism. But that means that we need a model of feudalism as well and a description of the process of development in which capitalism developed out of and in opposition to feudalism. In our world it makes sense to think of capital as means of production—machines, factory buildings, tools. Since human production has always employed some sorts of instruments (even some animals use sticks to dig up grubs and ants, for instance) one might conclude that capital exists in all forms of society. But tools, sheds, and wagons are not capital under any circumstances. They become capital only in a certain social system in which some people own all the tools and productive resources and others own only their ability to work.6 A cotton jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold itself is money or sugar the price of sugar. (WLC, T 207)

We can see how objects become capital under certain social conditions only if we undertake some historical comparisons. We need to observe, for instance, that in different periods people solve apparently similar problems in different ways. Capitalists trying to increase their income have a number of options, such as introducing a new product, introducing new technologies, or lowering their production costs by cutting wages or moving their production to an area of the world that has lower wage costs. But all of these will require investing some new capital. In order to make more money in a capitalist society, you need more capital. Not so in a feudal society. In feudal societies the powerful, extracted wealth from the peasants who farmed their land. To get more income, the

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feudal lord needed more land. But he could not buy that land because land was not for sale. He could only conquer it by going to war. Hence feudal kings, princes, and knights tried to increase their resources by employing military power. More capital would not have been of much use because there was no land that new capital could have paid for, nor were there additional wage laborers waiting to be hired with this new capital.7 If we are to understand the reasons for the capitalists' strategies, we need, Marx believes, to understand the reasons for the very different strategies used by kings, popes, and princes in feudal systems. A complete understanding of capitalism requires not only a model of fully developed capitalist economies but an understanding of the history of the transformation of feudal into capitalist economic and social institutions. Dialectical Explanations In order to gain such a historical understanding of the antecedents of capitalism, we need some general ideas about the ways in which institutions change over the course of many years as well as how they maintain themselves in the midst of change or why they do not change faster. Here Marx leans heavily on some of Hegel's insights about the gradual transformations of institutions that are not brought about deliberately but are the consequences of the actions of individual persons or small groups in the process of trying to solve everyday problems'—hence Marx's open avowal of his use of the dialectic. The preceding chapters have provided the basic ideas of this dialectical understanding of the maintenance and /or change of institutions. On the one hand, we saw that Marx and Engels insist that human beings make their own history. The history of human beings is not made by institutions or God or some superindividual entities like economic systems, providence, destiny, or national character. It is made by human beings. I discussed at some length what Marx and Engels meant by that claim. On the other hand, we also saw that what human beings can do, at any particular moment, is limited by the institutions that emerged as a consequence of the choices and actions of previous generations and that structure the lives of the persons living. We have seen many examples of that: The choices of individual actors are limited by the tools and techniques of production available to them. We have seen in the preceding chapter how changes in the modes of production tend to bring about changes in the relation to one's work, changes in values, and changes not only in the identities of people but even of what personal identity consists. How do institutions come to be and change? The explanation must always consist of telling stories of what particular people did. How did early cities arise? Some people found a convenient harbor and built their

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houses there because they traded up and down the coast. Other cities grew up at convenient fords over a major river or in places where runaway serfs found relative security and work. In all of these different ways, because particular persons did particular things, cities came to be, and the people who lived in cities developed, their city ways and urban institutions. These new institutions were not set up deliberately. Serfs did not run away from their lord's manor in order to found cities or make them grow. That was an unintended consequence of their choice. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one intended.8 But why did their actions have these particular consequences rather than very different ones? After all, the movement front the countryside to the city continues into our time. In many developing countries, the mechanization of agriculture and the introduction of new seeds, fertilizers, and techniques reduces the need for agricultural laborers and therefore brings with it massive movements of the population from the countryside to the big cities. But these developments today do not give rise to flourishing cities but to large shantytowns that breed misery and disease. Contemporary urban migration does not make cities more splendid but less manageable, more dangerous, and unhealthful. Thus urbanization takes diverse forms and has diverse consequences according to social and economic context. A complete explanation of historical events thus must not stop with explanations of the actions of individuals and their consequences but must also include references to the institutional framework necessary for understanding why these individual actions have these particular consequences. Urbanization in late-twentieth-century Central or South America looks nothing like apparently similar movements in twelfth- or thirteenth-century Europe. In order to understand the differences between them we must understand the actions of individuals in their institutional contexts. Why do institutions have these particular effects on individuals and their actions? Institutions are not causes. They do not determine the actions of individuals in the ways in which the laws of nature determine the movements of planets, the behavior of chemical compounds, or the functioning of the human body. Our explanations of the ways in which institutions shape human actions and their outcomes cannot be causal explanations. That is an important implication of the claim, that "human beings make their own history." If institutions caused human actions, then human beings would not make their own history; institutions would make that history instead. Thus the claim that human beings make their own history commits Marx and Engels to explaining the impress of institutions on human action noncausally.9 They do this by applying a dialectical analysis to those relationships.

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We can consider institutions—cities, communities, feudalism or capitalism, schools, colleges, and so on—from two aspects. Institutions have a certain structure. Those are their most general and abstract characteristics. But such characteristics are always embodied in specific, concrete institutions—in this bank or this college. Concrete institutions, in their turn, consist of a lot of people doing particular sorts of jobs. An empty building with "Bank" inscribed over the entrance is not a bank. For that you need tellers, executives, owners, stockholders, depositors, government regulators, and a host of other people who all do their particular jobs in the complex institution we call "banks." A particular bank incorporates the abstract characteristic of banks by virtue of the ways in which the particular members of the institution do their Jobs. The structures of institutions affect the actions of individual people insofar as those people act out the roles that the structures define. Bankers make money by lending and borrowing money, by keeping careful track of money and putting it to work in a number of specified ways. They cannot, for instance, take the money of their depositors to the racetrack, but they can gamble on the future behavior of stocks and bonds. Banks do change, of course. Bankers today do what their predecessors would not have dreamed of doing. Over time institutions change because the individuals in them fulfill their roles in new ways and thus embody the abstract structure in new ways. Changes in institutions are also due to the actions of individuals as they do their jobs in new and different ways. Consider how baseball or football has changed in the past fifty years because players, coaches, owners, spectators all have changed their behavior in relation to one another and in relation to their sport. Big league football is very different from what it was, but it is still football. Modern multinational banks are very different institutions from the small-town bank of a century ago, but they are still banks. An institutional structure may be embodied in different concrete institutions. The historian must clarify how the actions of concrete individuals, as they go about solving their day-to-day problems, affect the structures of the institutions under which they live. These institutions shape the sorts of problems people have, limit the options available for solving any given problem,, and provide the vocabulary used to think about problems and their possible solutions. But there is a complex interrelation between institutions and individual actions: The institutions shape and limit what individuals can do, whereas the individual actions, in their turn, serve to maintain or alter these institutions. Consider an example: The beginnings of capitalist society are accompanied by the claim, made on behalf of the newly developing capitalist class that all human beings are free and equal. Thus John Locke, and after him Thomas Jefferson, begin their political theory with the assumption that "all men are created equal." But clearly that was not a truth about all

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human beings, since Greek slaves or feudal serfs were not in any intelligible sense "created equal," Instead, Marx sees this freedom, and equality as one aspect of the institutions peculiar to capitalism—a system of producing and exchanging commodities. The exchange of commodities in the capitalist marketplace takes place under the presupposition of equality and freedom. What is more, Equality and freedom are not only respected in exchange of exchange values, but the exchange of exchange values is the productive, the real basis of all equality and freedom.1"

Equality and freedom exist because we live in a commodity-producing and exchanging society. Capitalism is the precondition for equality and freedom. But only in a very simple and early stage of capitalism were all members of the society, all participants in the market, free and equal. This was a capitalism where the majority of the producers were economically independent of one another. They worked their own farms; their livelihood was under their control and did not depend on the actions of others. The main threat to their freedom and equality came from the king or the church: government. If they were protected against government infringements on their liberty, they were indeed free. For the independent producers, that was all the freedom they needed. For later generations of wageworkers, this freedom from, government interference was, often, important, but it was not sufficient to enable them to be free men and women. But capitalism developed. Its development was not haphazard but depended on the "latent contradictions" of the market institutions that are typical of capitalism (CI, 86-87). Among the original individual capitalist farmers, some accumulated considerable wealth. They managed to acquire more land. In order to use that land, they needed to hire agricultural workers. Others invested their new wealth in early pottery or textile factories. In order for those to produce, their owners hired factory workers. All of these workers were economically dependent for their jobs, and thus their livelihoods, on their employers. Now, on the one hand, the worker and the capitalist as they struck their bargains in the labor market were still both free and equal. Their bargain, was not constrained by government interference; they were not forced to hire or to get hired. They were also equal because the market sets the same prices for everyone. The king of England or the president of the United States does not get a better price than the lowest of the low. The market is no respecter of persons. But on the other hand we must recognize that the worker's economic situation places him under constraints unknown to the capitalist. Unlike the capitalist, the worker is not economically independent of others. He is not self-sufficient but needs the capitalist to give him a job before he can

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make any money to stay alive. The worker needs work in order to buy food and pay rent. He is thus under considerable economic pressure to accept the bargain the employer offers. Once employed, he needs to hold onto the job and thus has little recourse if the employer wants him to work faster and longer hours or even wants to cut his pay. In this perspective it certainly looks as if employer and worker are not equal. The worker's freedom is severely limited by his economic condition. The conflict—Marx would say (somewhat incautiously, it turns out) "contradiction"—between the freedom and equality, on the one hand, and the unfreedom and inequality, on the other, are different developments of the same set of institutions: Capitalism begins with participants in the market being free and equal—but in a very restricted sense of "freedom" and "equality." "Freedom" refers to absence of government restraint, "equality" to the fact that social privilege does not serve to secure better prices in the market As capitalist institutions develop, there come into existence different classes of people, those who have a great deal of economic power and. those who have very little. In that situation, it is implausible to claim that workers and employers are equal or that workers are as free as their employers. Capitalism now takes on a new form, but it is still capitalism,. What is more, the changes are, in an intelligible sense, consequences of the structure of capitalism. Institutions, we see, develop by taking on different forms (analogous to the way in which frogs begin their life as eggs, then tarn into tadpoles and then into frogs), and these different forms may well be at odds with each other. In earlier forms of capitalism, where exchanges are mostly between persons who are economically independent of each other, there are genuine freedom and equality. Under a more developed capitalism, different classes of people come into existence. Transactions are still free and equal in the limited sense indicated, but since workers are economically dependent on the members of the employing class, freedom and equality in a more generous sense no longer exist. Capitalist economies now experience conflicts unknown before, not only conflicts between employers and workers but also conflicts between the independent producers of the earlier capitalist era and the much larger productive units of more developed capitalism. These earlier producers form a new class fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of the bourgeoisie. . . . [They] are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition. (CM, T 493) Those conflicts, Marx thinks, are productive. They are intellectually productive because they show us, for instance, that the original understanding of freedom and equality in our example is excessively narrow and that what we want is freedom and equality in a much broader sense.

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But they are also historically productive because they give rise to the struggle for a larger freedom and equality in the form, for instance, of a demand for universal suffrage (a struggle that is not yet completed in the United States because the rules laid down by the Voting Rights Acts of 1964 are still being evaded by local jurisdictions). As a consequence of such struggles, capitalism continues to develop. Only individuals act, but their actions are constrained by the institutions under which they live. These institutions are not the causes of individual actions, but they do set certain limits on what most people will do most of the time. But these institutions also change. We have seen many instances of that. What makes those institutions change? Marx is committed to answering that question again by referring us to the actions of individuals. At the same time, though, he denies that institutional change is the intended effect of human actions. On the contrary, many institutional changes result without anyone's intending those changes or even liking them when they come about. People may pursue fairly concrete goals and only afterward, often quite a bit later, do they realize that those particular actions had further consequences that they did not originally intend and that they do not welcome. What those further, unintended consequences are can only be understood when we look to the structure of the ruling institution of any given historical period. This interplay between individual actions and the institutions that form the framework for individual acti.cn is what Marx means by dialectic. In this dialectic the unintended consequences of individual actions produce changes in the institutional framework as circumscribed by that framework itself. Thus historical institutions change. The scattered comments Marx makes about the method of the social sciences are too fragmentary to constitute a complete theory of social science. But given the fairly chaotic state of theory in social science, Marx's observations deserve to be taken more seriously than they usually are.11 We will be able to develop in the next chapter what we have learned in this one when we consider Marx's main theory of history, historical materialism.. For Further Reading Tony Smith, Dialectical Social Theory and Us Critics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) and Daniel Little, Tfw Scientific Marx (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Notes 1. But rarely does anyone cite the entire passage, which is much more sympathetic to religion and to religious persons than is its final sentence quoted in isolation. The entire passage reads as follows:

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Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found himself or lost himself again,,,. Religion is the general theory of the world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form.... Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (T 54)

2. Most recently Bertell Oilman, Dialectical Investigations (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. John McMurtry, T!« Structure of Marx's, World-View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 66, 4. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967)/ p. 316, 5. It is not the specific value of a particular commodity that depends on the "social character of men's labor" but the very existence of value itself. Commodities have value—that is, a range within which their prices fluctuate—only where there are prices established by a market Only in a society where markets are in constant use and where labor is itself a commodity can labor itself have value. Value of labor exists only under very specific social conditions, 6. Marx, Grundrisse (Frankfurt; Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.}, p. 169, 7. Robert Brenner, "The Social Basis of Economic Development," in John Roemer, ed,. Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 22-53. 8. Mttfx-Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow; Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 395. 9. This may well appear to be a controversial, claim because many philosophers believe that all explanations are causal. For a different view of explanations, see Milton Fisk, The State and Ju&tice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 10. Marx, Grundrisse, p, 156, 11. Much of the responsibility for this neglect of Marxian dialectic falls on the philosophers who are excessively anxious to conform to the current, practices of actually existing social science. They would do a more' adequate job of discharging their responsibility as philosophers if they managed to be more critical of the practices of social science.

5 Historical Materialism AS REVOLUTIONARIES, MARX and Engels wanted to bring about historical change. That motivated their scholarly interest in understanding the ways in which social change comes about But change cannot be understood unless one also understands what forces maintain existing conditions and what forces resist change. Why, one may ask, is there not more change than occurs already? One can give a number of different kinds of answers to that question; One can talk about human nature or about universal laws of history or economics. But Marx had learned from Hegel to use the concept of what we would call "social structures." These are social systems that have the capacity to maintain themselves by adjusting when external forces threaten to disrupt them. Such systems are complex wholes that are able to maintain a certain normal state, A simple example of a mechanical selfmaintaining system is a ball attached to a post by a rubber band. Kick the ball and it will return to its original place but not without a number of oscillations, back and forth. Other examples of mechanical self-regulating systems are heating systems with thermostats that maintain a certain set temperature. The human body is another, more complex self-regulating system. In similar ways social systems are thought to maintain themselves by adjusting to changes brought about by war, natural disaster, fluctuations in populations or the weather, new inventions, and so on. At times Marx refers to such social systems as "organic systems" in clear analogy to human bodies.1 Many historians look at history as the history of these social structures. But there are serious disagreements about what sorts of structures are fundamental in history. Some regard structures as merely self-adjusting systems that exist indefinitely unless destroyed by some major external catastrophe. Others, and Marx and Engels are among those, believe that the capacity of historical systems to adjust to changes is limited, and 52

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therefore so are their life spans. Social structures may last for long periods, but sooner or later they are replaced by other structures. The dialectical explanations examined in the preceding chapter are examples of the process of development and replacement of historical systems. In response to changing conditions, human beings change their ways of solving everyday problems. Those small changes eventually produce changes in the social system. But each system has limited capacity for change. At a certain point, changes transform a given social system into a new and quite different one. Human history is thus a sequence of different social systems. But that view of history as displaying a series of different structures only raises new questions; What are the decisive characteristics of different structures? How do they maintain themselves? And how do they change? In addition we want to know to what extent forces for change are generated by the structures themselves and to what extent their change or their maintenance is due to forces and events outside the structure. As political actors, Marx and Engels also want to know, of course, to what extent changes in structures are the result of deliberate human effort or whether they are all the effect of forces not under human control. If we think that human action has a significant effect, we want to know to what extent historical changes are the effect of deliberate action that aims at change or whether historical changes in structures are mainly the unexpected consequences of actions that had different and/or more specific goals. Marx and Engels had definite answers to most of these questions. It is not clear from their writings to what extent they believed that change results from intentional actions and to what extent they thought that it was an unintended consequence of actions. Marx summarized their views in the following passage: In. the social production of their life, human beings enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production..,. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. (T 4—5)

Elsewhere Marx summarizes this paragraph less forbiddingly:

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Historical Materialism. In acquiring new productive forces, men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing their way of earning their living, they change all their social relations.2

History, Marx tells us, consists of different modes of production, the different structures that dominate different periods of human history. Modes of production differ from each other by having different "forces of production" as well as different "relations of production." By forces of production he means, at least, land, raw materials, tools, buildings. In agriculture forces of production are land and cattle, tools like plows, farm buildings, and so on. In factory production they would be factories, machines, trucks, and railroads for transportation. But clearly nothing gets produced unless someone is doing the producing. Someone plows and reaps, milks and slaughters cattle. Someone tends machines and. builds them in the first place. Thus work performed by human beings is an important force of production. Whether or not Marx includes the organization of work, for example, the particular kind, of division of labor in use among the forces of production, is a matter of controversy,3 "Relations of production" refer to the ownership of land and machines, the control, of work, and who profits. Sometimes Marx, puts the emphasis most clearly on the question of who profits, as when he writes that what really matters about relations of production is "how surplus is pumped out of the producers."4 At other times relations of ownership of tools, land, machines, and so on seem to be central. The connection between relations of ownership and "pumping out of surplus" is discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. Marx and Engels believe that the study of history allows us to frame some general hypotheses about what makes for the stability of these structures over long periods of time and what, at other times, makes for their collapse and replacement by other structures. Both when accounting for stability and when looking to explain the replacement of one structure by another, the passage cited tells us that we must pay attention to the relations among forces and relations of prod.ucti.on. Social structures remain stable and can maintain themselves in the face of serious opposition as long as the relations of production are in some sort of harmony with the forces of production-—"correspond" is the term, used in the passage quoted—so that the forces of production can continue to develop. Here Marx and Engels lean on an obvious observation that in the past few thousand years of human history productivity has tended to increase: Agriculture has gradually improved techniques for growing food; we have learned to make human efforts more productive so that far less work produces far more goods. As long as the relations of production—who owns what and who has power over what goods and or persons, and who gets a large share of the social product and who gets very little—

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do not get in the way of the improvement of the forces of production, a social structure will tend to be stable. But once it appears that the relations of production inhibit improYements in the forces of production, conflict ensues, and eventually revolutions occur that replace what have become obsolete social structures or modes of production by newer and more suitable ones. Forces and Relations of Production Relations of production "correspond" to the forces of production. The general claim being made here is clear: The way in which the production process is organized changes in response to the means by which production is carried on. New technologies, for instance, require new work organizations: These social relations into which the producers enter with one another ... will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production. With the invention of a new instrument of warfare, firearms, the whole internal organization of the army necessarily changed; the relationships within which individuals can constitute an army and act as an army were transformed and the relations of different armies to one another also changed. Thus the social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, change... with the change and development of the material means of production. (WLC, T 207)

Medieval armies fought hand to hand with sword and halberd, requiring a close formation in which soldier stood, close to soldier and all moved in one body. Such a military formation is the worst possible once people start shooting at each other from a distance. Firearms lead to trench warfare, a form that would have been impossible when wars were fought with swords. This seems to be a clear example of the way in which changing tools (weapons in this case) changed the organization of an activity. In analogous fashion, Marx and Engels claim, the transformation of the tools in the production process bring about different organizations of that process. There is a significant difference, though, between the way in which work or military organizations are organized and the relations of production, namely the rights of ownership and control. The above example shows how the forces of production affect what Marx often calls "the technical relations of production," that is, the way the work process is organized. But those technical relations of production must be distinguished from, the relations of ownership and thus from the rules determining who gets to keep what of the total product of this work process. Capitalist relations of production have remained the same, whereas the

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technical relations of production have changed very significantly since the 1700s. The changes in military tactics and. the organization of military formations in response to innovations in weapons do not show that the development of the forces of production, of technology and the organization of work, will bring about change in property relations. The evidence for that claim is much less specific: It is often argued that the more complex and highly developed technology of industrial capitalism was not compatible with slave labor because slaves, being always coerced, were unwilling workers and because education was deliberately withheld from them.5 Hence the improvement of productive technology led to a replacement of slavery. But there is historical, evidence that slaves performed quite well as industrial workers,6 What is more, the observation that industrial technology requires a free work force does not account for the transition from, the slavery of ancient Rome to medieval feudalism.. It is simply implausible that the rise of feudalism was the result of a rise in productivity. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels are quite explicit that change in the forces determines change in the relations of production. The beginning of changes in relations of production always comes with the development of the productive forces. This thesis is often referred to as the "primacy of the forces over the relations of production." Conversely, relations of production promote the development of forces at some times, while at others they retard the further development of forces of production. When, that begins to happen, Marx and Engels believe, the relations of production are due for replacement That much is clear. But this thesis of the primacy of forces of production is not only poorly supported by evidence, its more precise interpretation is also controversial. The dominant interpretation is, and has been for a long time, that historical materialism enunciates a number of causal laws that account for social change by establishing necessary conn.ecti.ons between changes in forces of production and the relations of production. That interpretation is plausible; there are many passages in the writings of Marx and. Engels that seem to support it. Most readers of Marx and Engels, moreover, take the generalizations enunciated by historical materialism as universal laws that govern historical development everywhere. But later in life M,arx and Engels were quite emphatic that the "historical inevitability" of this process is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe..,. Thus the analysis given, in Capital does not provide any arguments for or against the viability of the village community [in Russia].7

In the '1870s Marx and Engels began to think that a direct transition to socialism from the traditional Russian village communities might be possible. Marx was sufficiently interested in these Russian institutions, so very different from, what existed in Western Europe, that he learned Russian in

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order to be able to read the relevant source material. He seemed quite certain that the "laws" of development of historical materialism applied only to countries in Western Europe that were similar in their history to England, which provided the empirical material on which Marx based these generalizations.8 But there are a number serious difficulties in that understanding of historical materialism, even in this very restricted form. The most notorious of them is that this causal account of historical change seems determinist: It makes it seem that the changes in history, such as the change from feudalism to capitalism, are produced by impersonal forces, namely the development of human productive capacity without any significant contribution by the efforts of individual persons or groups. Historical materialism seems to slight the contribution of human beings to social change. But if that is what Marx and Engels believed, why does the Communist Manifesto begin with the line, "The history of all hitherto known societies is the history of class struggle" (T, 473)? Whatever happened there to the development of the forces of production? Marx and Engels seem to have two different views of the course of historical change: One stresses the actions of human beings in struggling against their exploiters; the other talks about impersonal processes such as the effect that developing productivity has on social relations. The apparently determinist character of historical materialism is a real embarrassment also insofar as Mara and Engels, as revolutionaries, exhort their readers to political action. There is no point in telling the "workers of the world" to unite if their uniting has no effect on historical change. If human action, organized human action, does not contribute to historical change, why did Marx and Engels tell their readers again and again that they must organize, and why did they themselves spend a significant amount of time building actual organizations? A third difficulty arises once we look closely at the more specific historical sketches that occur throughout Marx's writings. We find any number of different explanations, for instance, of the transition from feudalism to capitalism that either mention causes not included in historical materialism or reverse the order of forces and relations of production asserted by historical materialism, The theory of historical materialism ascribes social change primarily to the development of productive resources. But in his actual accounts of historical change from feudalism to capitalism, Marx sometimes insists that much of social change is brought about by brute force. The divergence of forces and relations of production does not figure in this story: They all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode,... Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with, a new one. (Q, T 436)

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In this passage political power is an important lever of change in the relations of production. Tt is not clear from the context whether Marx offers that as an alternative to the explanation of historical change involving forces and relations of production or whether Marx thinks that political force is used when the relations of forces and relations of production have reached an impasse. But at any rate there are other causal factors besides the development of forces of production. The passage seems to suggest that the forces/ relations of production explanation of historical change is at least incomplete, if not entirely mistaken. While historical materialism asserts the primacy of the forces of production, Marx's actual explanatory sketches often reverse that order and suggest that what changes first are the relations of production, and only afterward is there a change in the forces themselves. The transition to capitalism from feudalism, for instance, was complex and had many component processes; the transformation of agricultural rents from labor rent— where peasants worked for the landlord for free in exchange for using Ms land—to money rent; the introduction of large-scale sheep farming to replace small farms; the expansion of trade within the country and between countries; the expanded role played by money; the plunder of the New World after 1492 and the wealth that it brought into Europe; and so on. It is not at all clear that all of these are instances of improving the forces of production. An important component in the transition to capitalism, was the replacement of the craft guilds and their workshops that produced tools, clothing, and such for medieval consumers by what Marx and his contemporaries called "manufacture." These were the precursors of today's factories where many persons worked under one roof. In this earliest form of the factory, the workers still did the same work they had done before in their own workshops. But once these previously independent workers were assembled together, after a while a new division of labor was introduced where each person did only one of the many jobs he had done before in order to produce a finished product. This new division of labor significantly improved the productivity of these early manufacturing establishments. Marx comments The handicraft period bequeathed us the great inventions of the compass, of gun-powder, of type printing and, of the automatic clock. But on the whole machinery played that subordinate part which Adam Smith assigns to it in comparison with the division of labor. (T, 391)

The passage explains the increase in productivity achieved in the period of manufacture not by the introduction of new machinery, new forces of production, but by the introduction of two factors; a new relation between employer and employee and the division of labor.

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The medieval artisan in his workshop was controlled by the guild, but he was independent and owned his tools and raw materials. The worker in the early factory was neither independent nor the owner of the means of production—he had become a very early version of the capitalist worker. His productivity was greater than it was when he was still in his workshop, but that was because of the new division of labor, not because of different tools, and that new division of labor was brought about by changed relations of production (new relations of ownership). The primacy of forces of production asserted by historical materialism is here clearly contradicted in Marx's own analysis of actual historical processes. There are a range of similar examples.9 We must conclude that (1) the historical evidence for the primacy of the forces of production and hence for historical materialism is scanty; (2) even Marx and Engels limited its range of applicability in their later years; and (3) Marx himself realized that a good deal of historical change was due not to the improvement in the forces of production but to changes in the relations of production. The conclusion is inescapable: The primacy of forces over relations of production of historical materialism is plausible only under restricted historical conditions. Even under those conditions there are many exceptions and counterexamples. But such a limited generalization to which there are many exceptions is a very poor candidate for a causal hypothesis. Whatever explanatory power historical materialism may have, it cannot give causal explanations. Historical materialism, is not determinist That is fully consistent with the preceding chapters. We saw in Chapter 2 that Marx insists that only human beings act. What is society, whatever its form may be? The product of men's reciprocal action. Are men free to choose this or that form of society? By no means. (T, 136}

The social systems we spoke of earlier, we must always remember, are the creations of human beings who forge relations to one another. Those relations are not freely chosen but are determined largely by the social structures that any of us are born into. We are not free to choose our forces of production because "every productive force is an acquired force, the product of former activity" (T, 137). We cannot help but to produce with the tools and technology that our forebears left us and that we find when we first start producing ourselves. Similarly, the relations of production under which we work are inherited—they are the "product of the preceding generation" (T, 137). But that does not take away that the "social history of men is never anything but the history of their individual development" (T, 137). It is human beings who make their history, as we recall Marx said elsewhere. As we saw in the preceding chapter, however, the actions of individuals are constrained by the institutions that dominate their lives, and those insti-

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tutions themselves change because individuals change the ways in which they perform their roles. The relation, between individuals and the institutions is not causal but dialectical. Individual actions, the individual's performance of her or his role, are particular instances of the structure of the dominant institutions. The banker exemplifi.es the structure of banking, as do the other employees and patrons and owners of the bank. As they perform their roles in different ways, the structures they exemplify change. Sometimes the actions of individuals consist of innovating tools and other forces of production; sometimes they consist of changing ownership or control relations, as happened in the case of manufacture. If we see the complex transformations of human institutions as the result of the choices of individuals and small groups, we cannot seriously claim that all historical change is the result of changes in the forces of production. But if we do not refer to forces or relations of production to explain why certain changes took place, what is the role of historical materialism in the study of history? Historical materialism provides a general overview of the ways in which institutions change. Historical change is complex, and each particular historical change may well require that its own story be told in great detail. Most of these stories are a bit different from all the others. But there are some general patterns, and historical materialism gives a broad outline of these different stories. It tells us: Persons do their particular job the way they learned to do it. They use the tools and follow the rules that they inherited from their elders. But then someone comes up with a way of doing the job differently and, they think, better. A tool is modified so that it works better; a new technique is invented; work is reorganized to make better use of the available time and energy. If the changes prove indeed to be improvements, everyone will adopt them. Thus the institution that defines their activities is altered, In the early years of feudalism, productivity was very low. If some people, the knights and their retainers, were going to eat without themselves farming, they needed to keep tight control over the people who did farm. They compelled their farmers to stay on their land. Farmers became serfs. But that system developed in the slow ways already described. Productivity rose, even if not spectacularly. After a while some farmers retained a surplus, even after paying rent to their landowners. Some farmers may have hired others to farm for them. Others put their modest surpluses into trade. All of these are still feudal enterprises, but the new ways of producing strained at the limits of the feudal order. The farmers who hired agricultural laborers and the city merchants who traded internationally or bankrolled the military exploits of princes and kings were looking for less regulation of their economic activity. They were moving in the direction of very different relations of production; They were moving toward capitalist relations of production. Here relations of production

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often change as a result of innovation in the forces of production. But sometimes also, as we saw Marx recognize, the order is reversed, and change begins with a change in the relations of production. This is the story historical materialism tells if we do not read it as a causal theory. Historical materialism, as a causal theory, has been central to the version of Marxism that has dominated much of the tradition for the past hundred years. It seemed to give solid support to the predictions for which Marxism was famous, that capitalism was going to collapse and be replaced by socialism. Once we reject that reading, historical materialism is not nearly as important a theory. If we accept this more limited role for historical materialism, will we also need to give up all the predictions that have inspired Marxists with hopes and their enemies with, fear and rage? I discuss that in Chapter 11. Why Take Historical Materialism Seriously? Once stripped of its causal, pretensions, historical materialism remains important, Marx understands historical change as processes in which structures are transformed. Whatever interests us in history—the Crusades, the renewal of ancient learning, the age of discoveries, the new science, wars, or the nation-state—we must always remember that these occurrences take place against the background of a complex system of interrelated events, practices, and conflicts. What identifies structures and what maintains or changes them is a matter of considerable controversy, Historical materialism is interesting because it stresses the importance of the economic concerns of individuals both in the identifications of structure (or different "modes of production") and in understanding why and how they change. Of central importance are the level of productivity, on the one hand, and the prevailing property relations—the ways in which the powerful live off the efforts of those who are less powerful—on the other. Unless one understands the ways in which changes in productivity, changes in the ways in which the social surplus is distributed, stand in the background of, say, the great cathedrals or the new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one does not have a complete understanding of these phenomena. Historical materialism does not claim that economic concerns are the causes of individual actions. Often actions are caused by religious beliefs, by attachment to social or political tradition, and so on. But as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, Marx and Engels believe firmly that if we want to understand why people hold certain beliefs or remain attached to certain traditions, we need to understand the ways in which they go about meeting their daily needs and what sorts of problems they perceive in meeting those needs and in what ways they try to ameliorate their daily

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economic conditions. Historical materialism does not assert the causal primacy of economics, but it insists that the causal role of religion or other beliefs can best be explained by reference to peoples' economic lives, that is, by reference to the ways in which they meet their daily needs and the changes to which those economic conditions are subject. But the term "economic" needs some clarification. We commonly use it to refer to the sorts of issues discussed in economics: markets, supply and demand, firms and their internal organization, money, finance, banks, and the like. But historical materialism uses the term "economic" in a much more generous form: to refer to whatever is involved when people at a particular time and place meet their ordinary needs for food, shelter, companionship, and whatever else they consider to be essential for a good life, "In changing their way of earning their living,... [human beings] change all their social relations," Marx wrote, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter. In different cultures these "economic" concerns will be quite different; only in ours do they involve, for instance, banks and international finance. The management of slaves or propitiating the deities of fertility and rain or the internal workings of a village community were essential to economics at different times. It is economics in this very flexible sense, with different meanings in different historical periods, that Marx and Engels regard as basic to an understanding of human actions. For Further Reading Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), chapters 5 and 6.

Notes 1. Marx, Grundrisse (Frankfurt: Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.}, p. 189, 2. Marx, Ttie Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 109. 3. See Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). 4. Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 791. 5. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 91. 6. R, W. Fogel and S, L. Engerman, Time on the Cross; The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974). 7. Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 320. 8. See also ibid., pp. 292 and 293; Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the "Peripheries of Capitalism" (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983). 9. See Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),

6 Materialism and Idealism WE HAVE SEEN WHAT MARX thought about the most general patterns of historical change. We now need to take up the second part of this passage, cited at the beginning of the previous chapter, where Marx talks about the role of ideas in historical change. Marx was a revolutionary, but he was also a social scientist, a philosopher, a polemicist, and pamphleteer. He spent most of his life reading and writing. For him, the question of what role ideas play in historical change was of considerable importance. His answer in this passage is that the economic structure of society, [is] the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.... It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (T, 5)

The interpretation of this and parallel passages has occasioned much controversy. The doctrine that Marx and Engels enunciate here is called "materialism," but what, precisely, that materialism asserts has often been misunderstood. In the writings of Marx and Engels, the doctrine of materialism rejects idealism. But the term "idealism" refers to several claims. The first tells us that the universe is spiritual. It believes that the universe, including the physical universe, is merely the manifestation of God, whose essence is spiritual. In a second sense, idealism asserts that only minds are real and that therefore material objects—the plains, mountains, and rivers on the surface of the earth, for instance—are only appearances of a different, exclusively mental reality. In its third sense, idealism asserts that ideas alone can move people to action and determine what they will do. A corollary of that sense of idealism, is that we can frequently explain what people do exclusively by reference to their beliefs. An example of idealism in this last sense is a book whose title proclaims that "underdevelopment is a 63

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state of mind," that the pervasive poverty, poor health, and education that characterize developing countries can be changed merely by changing the attitudes of people in those countries.1 Marx and Engels reject idealism in these three senses. They deny that reality is spiritual because they are essentially atheists. They deny that reality is exclusively mental. But they also deny that reality is exclusively material. Engels rejects that view explicitly as a "shallow and vulgarized form" of materialism.2 They deny, finally, that we only need to change people's ideas in order to make this a better world. They argue this at great length in the German Ideology (GI, T 149ff.). We saw the reasons for this in the preceding chapter: Human beings find themselves at any moment subject to prevailing institutional structures. These institutions present specific problems and allow a limited range of options for their solution. Institutional, structures limit the problems we encounter as well as the available solutions. Changing people's ideas—education—will have an effect if the ideas have to do with the sorts of actions possible in the current situation. But since the dominant institutions in any given situation allow only certain options, the effect of education on social change is also limited. For any social or political change beyond those options, the prevailing institutions themselves need to be changed. Education alone will be ineffective. Examples are contemporary campaigns to save the environment. Educational campaigns to save the rain forest assume that the rain forest is being cut down, bit by bit, by people who do not understand the damage they are doing. Once they have been educated, it is thought, they will desist. But this strategy ignores the fact that economic pressures due to complex economic institutions move people to cut down the trees either for profit or to make new land available for agriculture. These pressures are not going to abate once people know that cutting down the rain forest causes considerable damage. The woodcutters may not have any choice. Education is not sufficient to make sure that they stop; they need a different way of making a living. Similarly, educational campaigns to urge people to recycle cans or paper are useless unless there are factories that transform recycled paper or cans into new products. Without such factories there will be no use for the recycled material. It will eventually end up in the garbage dump. But of course once the machinery is available for recycling, educational campaigns are not only useful but essential to encourage people to make use of the facilities for recycling. Base and Superstructure The materialism of Marx and Engels is usually interpreted as making an additional claim about the causes of human thinking. The passage at the

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beginning of this chapter appears to assert that human thinking is shaped by material conditions; the base determines the superstructure. While it is, of course, true that people act on their beliefs, values, hopes, and expectations and that they act in the light of lessons learned from past experience, the passage cited seems to tell us that all these beliefs and values are only the effects of "material conditions," (By that, Marx and Engels mean, roughly, the conditions under which a given group of people earns its livelihood and produces whatever goods they need.) Values change with changed economic practices; In a contpetitiYe society, one approves of competition among people. Members of other societies do not. Notice that interpreters ascribe a much stronger claim, to Marx and Engels than that material circumstances and ideas interact in complex ways, such that ideas sometimes produce changes in material conditions and that those conditions sometimes give rise to ideas. Many people would agree to that. But according to the passage cited above, what we think always arises from the way we produce and reproduce. Material conditions are the causes of beliefs. But whether that is what Marx and Engels intended to say is not at all clear. They use various terms to describe the relation between production and thought, between "base" and "superstructure," such as "determine," "condition," and "cause." These terms are by no means synonymous. Which of them conveys most accurately what Marx and Engels had in mind? Usually the term "base" is interpreted as the economic realm, whereas "superstructure" is taken as the sphere of law, politics, and ideology. By the "economic realm.," moreover, is meant impersonal economic processes that unfold independently of human wishes and desires and independently of human thinking and understanding. Base differs from superstructure in that the former is material and. distinct from human consciousness, whereas the latter is the product of human consciousness. It is clear that Engels often thinks about base and superstructure in those terms, for he also describes the problem addressed by materialism as the "relation of thinking to being." His is the most common interpretation of historical materialism, which asserts that all ideas are the effects of the processes of material production. Material production is said to be the cause of mental events. Engels summarized this causal view of the relation between social relations of production and ideas as follows: The final causes of all social changes are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into eternal truth and justice but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. (T, 701)

This view is often called "economic determinism." It maintains that the economy (the base) determines or is the cause of the superstructure.

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This economic determinism has invited a great deal of criticism. Reader after reader has pointed out that the base and superstructure, as Marx and Engels define them, cannot be causally related. "A is the cause of B" is usually read as "A is necessary and/or sufficient for B under condition C." If the powder is dry and you hold a lit match to it, it will explode. Given the requisite antecedent conditions—the powder is dry—a lit match is the sufficient condition for the explosion. But there are lit matches without explosions and explosions without lit matches; the cause is independent of the effect. If the base is the cause of the superstructure, it must be separate and independent from it. The base must be capable of existing independently of the superstructure. But, the critics point out, the base is not independent of the superstructure: Economic processes like the production, transport, and sale of goods require clear ownership of all the goods involved in these processes. Those who own the factories and raw materials, the final products of production, the trucks and the stores, must be generally known so that the right people can get paid the right amount and everybody receives what they are entitled to. The operation of capitalism presupposes a functioning legal system that determines property rights. The legal system, a part of the superstructure, is indispensable for the functioning of the process of production, the base. The process of production cannot proceed without these superstructural elements.3 But given the usual understanding of the word "cause," the base cannot be the cause of the superstructure as long as the two are not clearly separable. Besides, as many readers have pointed out, if ideas are caused by material circumstances, so are the ideas of Marx and Engels. Hence they do not have those ideas because they have good reasons for believing them to be true but simply because they lived in their particular society. If we have different ideas, that is not surprising because our society is very different Economic determinism makes nonsense of the entire intellectual enterprise of Marx and Engels. Their enormous intellectual effort to discover the truth about capitalism is undercut by the doctrine that we hold ideas not because they are true but because economic conditions make us hold them. What is more, economic determinism makes the efforts of Marx and Engels pointless. If ideas are the effects of material conditions, then what people believe and act on is not affected by persuasion, however eloquent, or by documents such as the Communist Manifesto, The ideas that material conditions produce will hold sway until material conditions change, and no amount of stirring rhetoric or ingenious economic analysis will make any difference. Ideas are at best intermediate causes in the process of political action because political events and movements are, in the end, the effects of material conditions; ideas alone are ineffectual in bringing about social change. Hence there is no point in writing docu-

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ments like the Communist Manifesto to induce the working class to organize and make a socialist revolution. If material conditions produce the same ideas in workers' minds, the Manifesto is superfluous. If material conditions produce different ideas, the Manifesto will be ineffective. These criticisms are valid. They suggest that the materialism of Marx and Engels is different from economic determinism. This suggestion gains plausibility from the fact that economic determinism—the view that the base is independent of the superstructure and is its cause—is clearly inconsistent with the views described in the preceding chapters. For if the changes in economic processes are independent of human thought, and if the transformation of human nature is a consequence of changes in the processes of production, then human nature changes independently of human thought. But then it is false to assert, as Marx does, that human history is the history of human self-definition, because human history turns out instead to be the process in which production, unaffected by human thinking, defines what "human being" is. Simply put, economic determinism, just doesn't make any sense. There are no impersonal economic processes: Production, exchange, and distribution are undertaken by human beings who think about what they are doing and act in the light of that thought. The picture of an economic process that unfolds unaffected by human thinking is unintelligible.4 We saw in Chapter 5 that a causal interpretation of historical materialism, however common, is implausible. We now see that a causal understanding of materialism, of the relation between base and superstructure, is equally unacceptable. What, then, are Marx and Engels trying to tell us about the relations between economic conditions and the thinking of the people who live under those conditions? What question is their materialism trying to answer? The Sources of Self-Evidence Materialism is traditionally thought to ask and answer a question about the contents of what people at any particular period believe. The question is thought to be, Why do people believe just what they believe? Why were the Greeks pantheists, or why did they believe in a geocentric theory of the universe? But as a matter of fact, people get their beliefs in all sorts of different ways: They take them over from other persons; they examine the ideas themselves and find, them persuasive; they adopt beliefs because they will be punished if they do not. (Think of the custom of burning witches or putting communists in prison.) For different people, there are very different explanations for why they have just the beliefs they have. Instead, Marx and Engels ask a question about the plausibility of beliefs: Why are some ideas very popular at some periods, whereas at other

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times they are regarded as odd and utterly implausible? Even in the ancient world, there were some individuals who argued for monotheism or for a heliocentric theory of the solar system, but very few people took them seriously. Similarly, the idea that governments originate in a social contract is first introduced in Plato's Republic but did. not really become an important idea until the seventeenth century—2,000 years later. The belief in human equality, that each person deserves respect by virtue of being human and that all human beings deserve to be free, had been familiar to philosophers and religious thinkers for many centuries. But only in the eighteenth century did they grip the imagination of the majority of people. The really interesting question is why those remained the odd and implausible ideas of particular individuals, whereas almost everyone, whether learned or not, accepted polytheism, geocentric theory, the idea of the divine origin of government, and human, social, political, and economic inequality. Why do ideas that have been around for centuries suddenly come to be "self-evident truths" after having so long been the quaint thoughts of peculiar people like philosophers or priests? The idea of the social contract is not significantly different in the eighteenth century from what it was in Plato's Republic. But the world in which those ideas now play an important role is certainly different from ancient Athens, Wltat changes in the world provoke those radical shifts in human thinking? That is the question that Marx and Engels try to answer with their generalization about base and superstructure. What explains this shift in human thinking in the eighteenth century, in the Western world, is the rise of capitalism. Thus Marx writes, in a passage cited in Chapter 4, Equality and freedom are not only respected in exchange of exchange values, values,

but the exchange of exchange values is the productive, the real basis of all equality and freedom.5

Only as capitalist institutions develop do the ideas of freedom and equality begin to dominate Western thinking. For capitalism involves the free and equal exchange of goods in marketplaces. Capitalism is not possible unless buyer and seller confront each other as free and equal persons in the market. Capitalism requires certain limited freedoms and limited equality. In a limited way, buyer and seller are, in fact, free and equal in the marketplace. The ideas of freedom and equality become important as actual institutions arise that require specific freedoms and specific forms of equality. As market relations gain in importance in the economy, so, too, do freedom and equality, and as a consequence the ideas of freedom and equality gain in importance in political and ethical thinking. Capitalism does not produce ideas; capitalism gives currency to certain ideas because they are already implicit in capitalist practices. The validity, clarity.

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and applicability of these ideas are, as before, open to serious scrutiny. But once certain institutions come into being, corresponding ideas take on "self-eYidenee" that they did not have before. Although they may take on the solidity of "self-evident truths," these beliefs are often inaccurate, incomplete, or seriously misleading. The ruling institutions make certain beliefs common and give them the appearance of being "self-evident." That is true of beliefs in religion, politics, much of economic theory, and most of philosophy. Marx and Engels call those unreliable beliefs "ideology." One role of human thinking is to discriminate between current beliefs that are in fact reliable and those that are incomplete, misleading, or downright deceptive. I will discuss the distinction between ideology and reliable ideas in Chapter 7. The importance of Marx's and Engels' doctrine of materialism is this: It provides us with some reasons for being particularly critical of ideas that are commonly taken to be self-evident. Ideas that fit altogether too smoothly into current institutional contexts are, above all, suspect. Thus the beliefs that governments rest on the consent of the people, that democracy prevails where people periodically participate in elections, and that truth is best pursued in a "marketplace of ideas"—all these dovetail too comfortably with prevailing economic institutions not to invite the most careful scrutiny. Of course, that they are the sorts of ideas one would expect to be popular in a capitalist society does not show that they are incorrect. They might turn, out to be true. But the important lesson to be learned from the materialism of Marx and Engels is that we must be suspicious of those ideas that seem self-evident to most people and that seem to fit most readily into the practices of a capitalist society. Everyone knows that what appears self-evident to many people is not always true. The contribution of materialism is to provide some insight into why some ideas are so self-evident at some times yet seem equally implausible at other times. It thereby suggests that the ideas that appear most plausible and seem to fit particularly well with prevailing institutions are particularly suspect. That provides us with some suggestions concerning which ideas we need to examine with particular care.6 For Further Reading Melvin Rader, Marx's Interpretation of History {New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), chapter L

Notes 1. Lawrence E, Harrison, £1 Subdesarollo Estti en la Matte (Underdevelopment is in the mind) (Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Limusa, 1989).

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2. Frederick Engels, Luditrig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), p. 25. 3. John Ptamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London; Longmans, 1954), p. 25, 4. These problems had been raised in Marx's and Engels' lifetime. After Marx died, Engels felt the need to protest that neither he nor Marx had intended to defend economic determinism. They had always understood that much as the base determines the superstructure, the superstructure in turn determines the base. All they had ever wanted to say was that the base was the "ultimately decisive" factor (T 760), Hence the doctrine is attributed to' Engels that the base determines the superstructure "in the last instance," But that qualification does not resolve the central problem of economic determinism—that it presupposes a distinction between "base" and "superstructure" that does not, in fact, make any sense. If there is a problem with claiming that the material base causes the superstructure, because base and superstructure cannot be distinguished in the ways required by a causal analysis, men that problem exists just as much if we banish this causal process to "the last instance," 5. Marx, Gmndrisse (Frankfurt; Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.)» p. 156. 6. Contemporary English-speaking philosophers often rest their philosophies on their "intuitions," what seems self-evident to them. If they take the materialism of Marx and Bngels to heart, they fulfill more successfully the traditional task of philosophy of examining critically the common wisdom of their day.

7 Ideology AFTER DISCUSSING THE LARGE-SCALE patterns of historical change and the influence they have on the dominant ideas in different epochs, Marx develops his materialism in more detail in the form of his theory of ideology. In current English "ideology" is a near synonym of "propaganda" (particularly of a political sort). "Ideology" usually refers to beliefs that no one would adopt on rational grounds, beliefs that have been instilled in people by force or deception. Alternatively, we characterize political views as "ideological" when we want to say that they are governed by abstract principles, often with total disregard for actual fact A policy is ideological if it is defended on principle even, if the facts suggests strongly that its results would be quite destructive. In political rhetoric the beliefs of our opponents are therefore often characterized as "ideologies" when they are assumed to be false—because they are imposed from above or because they are not supported by actual facts. The term, has a very different meaning in the writings of Marx and. Engels. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between, the material, transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic-—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from, the existing conflict between material productive forces and the relations of production. (T, 5}

An ominous passage on first reading, it seems to suggest that the outside, scientific observer is in a position to understand the true moving forces in major social and historical upheavals, while the account given 71

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by people actually participating in those upheavals is no more trustworthy than the account a person gives of Ms or her own motives and aspirations. What people say about themselves in their legal, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical doctrines is not to be taken seriously because it is ideology. It does not provide an explanation of what people are doing but instead itself cries out for explanation. This is another passage that, if interpreted carelessly, supports the interpretation that Marx and Engels were economic determinists. Many interpreters of Marx and Engels understand it in that way. The theory of ideology, they say, holds that people's beliefs are determined by their social or economic circumstances,1 But we have already seen in Chapter 6 that Marx and Engels were saying something quite different. We can see more precisely what this passage asserts if we put it side by side with another observation of Marx's in Capital. In a long footnote in Capital, Marx takes the opportunity to answer an objection to the 1859 Critique. A reviewer had written that Marx's claim that the mode of production determined social, political, and intellectual. life would seem accurate for our time but not for the Middle Ages, "in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics reigned supreme. "2 Marx replies to this criticism: This much, however, is dear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics.... For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman Republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. On the other hand, Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society.3

The Greeks and Romans, as well as the people in the Middle Ages, were not preoccupied with politics or religion to the exclusion of all other concerns. They needed food and shelter like everyone else, and they had their specific ways of solving their material economic problems. With these different ways of providing for their material needs go different values, religious beliefs, political institutions, and customs. All of these are examples of ideology. Ideologies are connected with economic institutions. When those change, so do the ideological beliefs and practices. For example, the knight errantry that flourished in the early Middle Ages became pointless or even ridiculous after feudalism had been replaced by early capitalism. But it is clear that the economic structure is not the cause of the way of life—the phenomenon of Don Quixote demonstrates that. If economic structures were the causes of certain outlooks, then it would not have been possible for Don Quixote to believe himself to be a knight errant after the end of the Middle Ages. That is shown also by the earlier examples I cited in Chapter 6, regarding ideas of freedom and equality and the social contract that were entertained by the Greeks and Romans

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but never became popular or widespread. Instead, different outlooks are the "forms in which men [and women] become conscious" of the economic conditions under which they live. The theory of ideology is an elaboration of the insights of Marx's and Engels' materialism: The ideas that are dominant in any given historical period appear self-evident because they fit snugly with the dominant economic institutions—in the generous sense in which Marx and Engels use the word "economic," But because ideas are self-evident to many people does not mean that they are true. The claims to self-evidence must be received with caution. The theory of ideology gives some more concrete content to this insight, What Is Ideology? At issue here are beliefs, values, ways of life. But not all beliefs are ideological. Some beliefs are true. Others are not only false but are known to be false. Marx recognizes the difference between ideology and plain falsehoods. People hold on to beliefs that are false and known to be false. Sexist and racist beliefs are prime examples of that. People hold beliefs even though all existing reliable evidence contradicts them,. Even though biologists and anthropologists have found the concept of "race" indefensible, claims about superiority and inferiority of certain "races" continue unabated.4 Racism is not an ideology because it is irrational, to believe in the reality of race in spite of all the available evidence. In the same manner, it is irrational for men to depend on their wives to run their families and keep their children safe and healthy and at the same time to believe that men are rational and in charge and women are not.5 But then there are beliefs that are neither true and known to be so nor false and known to be false. We hold, many beliefs, and so have men and women, at other times, for which we do not have sufficient evidence to show either that they are true or false. Such more or less unsupported beliefs, however, are the best that can be achieved given a certain level of technological development and scientific knowledge. These beliefs are ideologies. Certain ideological beliefs, such as the geocentric theory of the universe, can at some future time be refuted by science. Others, like religious, social, political, or ethical beliefs, lie outside the domain of science and therefore will always remain ideological. One difference between beliefs known to be false and what Marx and Engels call "ideology" is that it makes sense that persons should have these ideological beliefs under their specific material conditions. The religious world is but a reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values whereby they reduce the individual labor to the standard of

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homogeneous human labor—for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, Protestantism,... is the most fitting form of religion. (Q, T 326)

Religious beliefs are not known to be true, nor are they known to be false, even though both supporters and enemies of religion claim proof for their positions. What is more, we can understand why a certain kind of society in which the uniqueness of individuals is ignored in favor of the commodity value of each one's contribution should adopt a religion such as Protestantism that concerns itself primarily with the rights and obligations of "man" in the abstract. In a capitalist society, human beings are treated as abstractions in that they become more or less exchangeable. In any given workplace, jobs are filled by a series of persons. When, business is bad, people are fired or laid off. When business improves, someone else is hired to do the job. What makes each of these persons unique is, in the economic sphere, not important. Similarly, Marx suggests, Protestantism focuses on the abstract humanity and human rights of all and puts less emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual. What matters in this example is not whether Marx does justice to Protestantism but rather the connection he draws between the capitalist system and certain ideologies. Some ideologies may turn out to be mistaken, given the evidence available to us at a later date, but it is not irrational to hold ideological beliefs. Given the prevailing conceptions of human beings as "abstract," that is, as interchangeable in the job market, Protestant thought about human rights makes sense, The Greeks believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. Given their astronomical observations, that was a defensible scientific theory. Aristarchos, a Greek astronomer in the third century B.C., however, did propose a heliocentric theory. So the available evidence did seem to support rival, theories. Why did the Greeks and, the Romans and the medievals support the geocentric rather than the heliocentric theory? The explanation uncovers the function of these beliefs that are not supported or refuted by adequate evidence. In this passage Marx calls them, "mythology": All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery O¥er them. (G, T 246)6

The existence of mythology is understandable in cultures that have little control over nature. Thus the existence of Greek mythology is explicable by the low level of economic productivity of the Greeks. Because the Greeks and Romans lacked the scientific knowledge to control nature, they developed a mythology that could dominate nature "in the imagination." But the mythology of the Romans was not exactly the mythology the Greeks developed. The Jews developed their Old Testament version

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of monotheism; the ancient Germans developed a different mythology. But the function of mythology, to stand in for more solidly supported scientific explanations of the world, does not explain why different cultures—the ancient Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, the medievals-—provided very different stories about the origin and the structure of the world in which they lived. We can account for the characteristics of a given ideology only once we look at the social and economic conditions prevailing where that ideology arises. Marx explains this idea in more detail in another passage: It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with the self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulkan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? (G, T 245-246)

The passage reiterates the point made before about Don Quixote: The Greek pantheon is out of place in the modern world, A god, Jupiter, whose power is exhibited by the use of thunder and lightning is a shabby god indeed once those natural phenomena have been understood and once lightning has become less of a menace because of the invention of lightning rods. Human beings who can set off the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will not be impressed by a little thunder and lightning. The same applies to the other personages in the Greek pantheon. The goddess of reputation, Fama, cuts a poor figure against the newspapers coming out of London's Printing House Square, and Hermes, the god of commerce, is overshadowed by the enormous power of the worldwide banking network of the Credit Mobilier in Paris. A people adopts mythological explanations that make sense in their world. The Greek pantheon was inhabited by beings whose lives were just the lives writ large of the dominant groups in Greek society—the landowners who themselves did not work, who spent their lives in war, amorous intrigue, or political activity. Mythologies reflect the social structures of the societies in which they are current. Ideologies are beliefs not provable as true or false that fit in comfortably with the economic and social practices of a given society. But at the same time, Marx insists in the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter, ideologies are open to criticism.. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material, life, from the existing conflict between material productive forces and the relations of production. (T, 5)

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This is puzzling because if we cannot tell whether the ideological beliefs of our day are true or false, how can we criticize them? But the entire project of Marx and Engels is a critical one. Several of Marx's writings contain the term "Critique" in their titles.7 Hence we need to examine on what grounds ideological beliefs can be criticized. Ideology and Science Many readers of Marx and Engels have found the concept of ideology problematic. They have assumed that the materialism of Marx and Engels commits them to the view that all people living under given material conditions must adopt its ideology because "life determines consciousness." If that is true, Marx and Engels are victims of bourgeois ideology. But since they also claimed to be doing science, which they distinguished from and opposed to ideology, they seem to have been caught in a contradiction. They appear to have believed that all people in a given culture are inevitably infected by the reigning ideology and that they themselves did science and saw through the ideology of the age. But those two views are inconsistent.8 Commentators have taken different routes in dealing with this supposed contradiction, As we saw earlier, ideologies are understood by some commentators as systems of beliefs developed intentionally in order to mislead people. Ideology is then not forced on us by material conditions and thus does not prevent us from doing real science.9 One can also hold that no one in a given society can resist its ideology but deny that all thinking is ideological. Science, in that case, may be nonideological thinking, and thus doing science and being in the thrall of the reigning ideology need not be inconsistent.10 One can also deny that science and ideology are incompatible.11 Finally, it is possible, of course, to deny that the doctrines of Marx and Engels deserve to be called science. But in that case one would rescue them from the accusation of being inconsistent at the price of degrading the product of their intellectual efforts to "ideology" or "myth."12 A good portion of these controversies appears to be misguided because they rest on a misunderstanding of the concept of science and the concept of ideology as they function in the work of Marx and Engels. I showed in the previous chapter that ideology—the dominant beliefs of an era—can be criticized and resisted. Material conditions are not causes of beliefs. From, what I have said in this chapter about ideology, it is clear that ideological beliefs are not based on reliable scientific work. To that extent ideology and science are distinct. But ideology is subject to scientific criticisms in retrospect. At the time that ideological beliefs develop, there is not sufficient evidence to show them to be true or false. In fact, they often function as substitutes for scientific information that is not available at the

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time. But later, when science develops, the earlier ideological beliefs can be criticized for being false. Thus we can criticize Ptolemaic astronomy from the point of view of contemporary astronomy. Similarly, in Capitalf Marx criticizes the views of Adam Smith and David Ricardo with respect to price and value and profits. But many ideologies, for instance, beliefs about religion, ethics, politics, and the law are not open to such criticism in hindsight. Here criticism of ideologies bases itself on the second characteristic of ideologies—namely, that they reflect the dominant institutions of the society. The possibility of a critique of ideology is narrowly connected with the fact that in class societies rival, ideologies reflect the dominant and oppositional institutions from the perspectives of different classes. Ideologies are those beliefs in a given culture that do not find adequate support or refutation by available knowledge. In a fairly homogeneous society, such ideologies are likely to be fairly homogeneous. In a class society, different classes will see the world differently and develop different ideologies. Class societies thus give rise to conflicting ideologies. In all Western societies, beginning at the latest with the Greeks, there are people whose profession is thinking and writing who are either members of or are maintained by the ruling classes. Plato was a member of the ruling elite of Athens, Aristotle the tutor of Alexander the Great. Both lived and moved among the people of wealth and power. It is no surprise, therefore, that their philosophies shared the outlooks of those in power. This has continued to this day, where the professional intellectuals either participate in governing (often as professional experts) or are supported by the wealthy because they are employed by communications media or universities or are dependent on wealthy patrons of the arts and their philanthropies. As a consequence of this dose association, the ideological beliefs of the rich and powerful are broadcast by the stratum of professional intellectuals (GI, T 158-159, 173). Hence Marx tells us more than once that "the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class" (CM, T 489). In a class society, there is thus a dominant ideology—the ideas of the ruling class. But the dominated classes have different experiences from the dominant. The reigning institutions do not solve their problems but rather create them. Hence their perspective on the prevailing social structures is different from the outlook of the rich and powerful. They develop an alternative ideology. But they have in their service fewer theorists, writers, ministers, experts; their ideology tends to be less elaborate. They also have less control over media; their alternative ideologies do not spread as easily because they have only word of mouth or alternative media available to them, to disseminate their ideas.13 In class societies ideologies are contested. The oppositional views of the less powerful classes are attacked by the authors sharing the perspective

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of the dominant class. In earlier ages the attack often took a religious form. The ideas of the poor and downtrodden were condemned as heresies. Since the days of Marx and Engels, "communism" is a favorite label for ridiculing and depreciating oppositional ideologies. In the 1990s the oppositional ideologies developed in the 1960s have been diminished and distorted by calling, them "'politically correct." The ideology of the ruling class presents itself as the true beliefs for all members of a society: Each new class that puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society.... It has to give its ideas the form of universality. (GI, T 174)

Hence the eighteenth century talks about the universal rights of man, and only if we read the small print in, for instance, John Locke's Second Treatise of Government do we see that only property owners have political rights or that the universal rights of all human beings do not compromise the father's patriarchal rights in the family. As oppositional groups develop in a given society, they can criticize the ruling ideology from their point of view. They can, for instance, point out the inconsistency between the universal principles proclaimed by the ruling group and its actual practice. The universal rights of all human beings are exercised by the powerful but withheld from the others. Fetishism One can criticize ideologies because their proponents do not practice what they preach. The defenders of universal human rights, for instance, have rarely been interested in combatting racism, sexism, or the exploitation of workers.14 Another strategy of ideological criticism is illustrated by Marx's discussion of "fetishism" in Capital. In a passage from the German Ideology, Marx and Engels describe ideology as an inverted image. Ideologies are open to criticism because they make the world appear turned upside down. If in all ideology human beings and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their lifeprocess as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical lifeprocess. (GI, T 154} 1

This picture of ideology as an inverted image returns in the discussion of fetishism in Capital. Fetishes are objects of religious worship, made by human beings, that are endowed by their human creators with supernatural powers. But the human beings forget that the powers they revere in

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their fetish were bestowed by them in the first place. In modern societies the principal example of "fetishism," the subject of one of the early sections of Capital, is the treatment of commodities in economics. Fetishism has, in the modem world, moved from religion to economics. This section of Capital begins with saying that a commodity is "at first sight, a trivial thing. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" (CI, T 319). But what makes commodities so peculiar? Commodities have intrinsic characteristics such as size, weight, and color. Prices appear to be such intrinsic characteristics of things. They are not set by particular people but come with the commodity, as one of its characteristics. When a consumer goes to the store to buy something, the commodity has a price. The careful consumer soon finds out that not all stores charge the same price. But these price variations are not the results of arbitrary decisions by store owners; rather, the prices are set in accordance with economic necessities, such as the store owners' costs and the need to make a profit. Prices are determined by market forces. The store owners merely try to read those market forces as accurately as possible. Human beings work and produce in a specific social order. They work always in coordination with one another. In all societies, even the most primitive ones, there is some sort of division of labor. The goods produced and their distribution—who gets what and in what quantities—depends on the structure of the particular society in question. But in a commodity society (i.e., under capitalism), it seems that what is produced and by whom and how it is distributed is not the result of the social order as a whole but depends exclusively on the prices of commodities. In a capitalist economy, capital is privately owned and the competent capitalist will make it grow by making a profit. Capital must therefore be invested where it will be profitable, and such decisions determine what will be produced. The profitability of certain goods, compared to that of others, decides what a society will produce. Profitability, in turn, is connected with the price at which something can be sold, compared to the cost of producing it. The decision made in a society as to what will be produced is closely tied to prices. So it appears that the general complexion of capitalist society, who is rich and who is poor, who decides where to invest capital and in what way the society will grow or decay, is not due to the decisions of individuals or groups but the result of the impersonal movements of commodities and their prices. The relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves but between the products of their labor. (Cl, T 320)

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The structure of capitalist societies, the division of labor, the distribution of resources are usually thought to be the results not of human choices but of the impersonal market forces, Human beings are, for the most part, powerless to alter the existing societies because the mechanisms of the market are not under their control. Attempts to control market forces, many theorists add today, always end in spectacular failures. But this belief in the immutability of capitalism is another example of the tendency of ruling classes to claim universality for their view of the world. Capitalists present the world as if capitalism had always existed and as if it will always exist. Market forces have been made into fetishes insofar as they appear to people to have independent powers that dominate human affairs. But there is a very different way of viewing markets—namely, as the creations of human beings. Once we consider our economic institutions in a historical perspective, we can see that commodity production, for instance, is not an immutable institution but like all other human institutions is the result—partly intended, partly unintended—of intentional human actions. All of this becomes clear as soon as we compare capitalist institutions to those that went before and those that are still to come (CI, T 324). Here ideological criticism proceeds by proposing a different perspective. The capitalist perspective sees the world as permanent because capitalist institutions benefit capitalists; they see their world as good and therefore permanent. Change, in their view, could not improve the world. It is therefore unthinkable. Hence market forces become fetishes to be worshiped because they are thought not to be under our control but, on the contrary, to control our lives. But from the point of view of workers, the poor, and people in developing countries, capitalist institutions are exploitative and oppressive (see Chapters 9 and 11). They consider change desirable, and the methods and goals of change are a matter of great import. We can see that, according to this perspective, the impersonal power of commodities, and with it the impersonal permanence of capitalist institutions, is an "inversion." It misrepresents reality" It conceals the possibility of fundamental social change.15 The oppositional ideology portrays the capitalist system, from a different perspective, one oriented toward change and an extension of rights to all members of the society. The fetish is unmasked. Neither of these perspectives is supported by sufficient arguments to show it to be true, although each has something to be said in its favor. These opposing ideologies are in conflict; ideological struggle is an aspect of class struggle. Which ideology will prove victorious in the long ran will depend on the outcome of the class struggle (as I discuss in Chapter 13). Marx and Ethics Marx and Engels consider ethical beliefs also as ideological. But this brings up a special interpretative problem; Many commentators have read Marx

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and Engels as if they rejected ethics outright. Such an interpretation is based on a number of passages. One of them, occurs in a late work, the Critique of the Gotha Program, when Marx criticized the party program of the German Social Democratic Party, In the course of this discussion, he wrote: [In the preceding pages] I have dealt more at length with , . . "equal right" and "fair distribution" ... in order to show what a crime it is to force on our Party again . . , ideas "which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish. (CGP, T 531) Marx and Engels hold definite ethical views. They believe, for instance, that transferring wealth from one group to another is, under some conditions, unjust; that it is wrong to deprive people of the wide range of freedoms that capitalism does not allow most workers; that in a well-ordered society, we will not look for reciprocity but for each receiving the conditions needed for full self-development But how can Marx and Engels hold such ethical views and at the same time claim that ethics is "obsolete verbal rubbish"? A number of solutions to this dilemma have been offered: Some authors argue that Marx and Engels did not criticize capitalism for being unjust16 or more generally did not hold ethical views about capitalism.17 Others claim that Marx and Engels were mistaken in believing that ethics is ideological.18 This entire scholarly controversy presupposes that all ideological beliefs are in some way defective. These interpreters assume that for anything to be ideological, it must be intellectually inadequate, unreliable, or not to be trusted. We already saw that that is not what Marx and Engels meant by ideology. Ideologies are beliefs that, at a given time, are neither supported nor refuted by adequate evidence. In that sense of the term, ethical views are also ideological, and as there are different outlooks in economics and politics that belong to different classes, so there are different ethical ideologies. In our culture there is the dominant ethic of the golden rule, which tells us that we should think about ethics as rules of reciprocity: Whatever behavior I expect from you I owe you in return. It is easy to see that in a culture that regards the market, exchange, and contracts as its central institutions, an ethic that puts reciprocity in the center reflects the prevailing economic institutions. But this is not the only set of available ethical ideas. Marx certainly had a very different conception of the good life from that of the golden rule. Instead of demanding that we treat others as we want to be treated, he looks forward to a society in which each person is able to develop fully and freely and where each is necessary for the others so that they, too, can develop fully and freely. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, (CM, T 491)

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Full development means different things to different people. What we will contribute to each others' lives will not be regulated by some abstract standard of equality but, on the contrary, by the different needs that each of us has for support and encouragement and resources from others. Hence in the classless communist society the principle of distribution is "From each according to his or her ability; to each according to his or her need" (CGP, 531). In their critical remarks about ethics, Marx and Engels were not rejecting all appeal to ethical rules; indeed they appeal to such rules throughout their writings. They were making a rather different point, namely, that ethics is not a good, basis for criticizing capitalist society and advocating socialism as its replacement. It is clear from the passage quoted above that Marx and Engels did not believe that ideological beliefs are defective under all circumstances, that is, that they never had any use at all. It is clear from the passage that Marx thought that the ideas of "equal rights" and "fair distribution" were legitimate parts of a political program in a certain period but were, when Marx wrote the Critique of the Gotha Program, "obsolete rubbish." The central point here is the distinction between "Utopian" and "scientific" political action, a distinction to which we will return in Chapter 15. The Utopian socialists were reformers. They were not simply interested in criticizing capitalism but wanted to replace it with a better social order. They were critical of the injustices of capitalism and were trying to develop just institutions. But there are many different ways of committing injustice. What was clearly needed was a precise understanding of the exact ways in which capitalism is unjust. But when the Utopian socialists were developing their reform plans, capitalism was sufficiently undeveloped that they could not see precisely how capitalism was unjust and what it was about the capitalist system that produced its particular injustices. They did not have a clear understanding of exploitation and of the differences in power between workers and capitalists that were the consequence of the private ownership of the means of production. As a result, their proposals for alternative economic and political systems did not address the specific injustices that capitalism produces and thus were not useful projects to remedy the evils of capitalism. The scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, in. contrast, allows us to understand clearly what needs to be changed in order to abolish the injustices of capitalism. This much seems uncontroversial. But after that we can go in two different directions with our interpretation of the Marxian view of ethics. The dominant interpretation goes as follows: Once scientific socialism is developed, we know what the key problems of capitalism are. We also know that those key problems will sooner or later destroy capitalism from within and bring about its replacement by socialism. Science does

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not make value judgments; it simply takes reality as it finds it and tries to explain its development. A "scientific" politics rests its activities on its scientific understanding. It derives from its scientific understanding of capitalism and its assessment of the state of capitalism at one particular time—what sorts of political actions are called for at that moment to hasten the inevitable end of capitalist rule. Hence ethical condemnations of socialism are now "obsolete rubbish." Ethics belongs in the prehistory of socialist efforts. Scientific socialism replaces an ethical socialism. Marx and Engels' conception of science is quite undeveloped (see Chapter 15). Whether they believed that science is "value-free" is not known. But even if they did hold that view, a different interpretation is much more plausible: Scientific socialism rests on a careful and detailed theory about the workings and presumed trajectory of capitalism. Of course the earlier ethical condemnation of capitalism still holds. It remains true, and important, that capitalism is unjust. But such condemnations are too general to have any place in a party program—which is what Marx is addressing in the Critique of the Cotha Program quoted above. Such a party program needs to speak in detail about the specific forms of capitalist injustice and the mechanism of its replacement by socialism. To go back and. talk in very general terms about injustice and equal rights in a party program is, in that context, "obsolete rubbish," Ethical judgments are of course important. A scientific socialist, who holds no ethical views that injustice must be fought and overcome, may well consider the internal mechanisms of capitalism with great interest but would not join the struggle. Marxism without ethical views makes no sense. But do not ethical views require justification? Not all ethical views are as valuable and reliable as others. The concept of ideology proves to be of importance in throwing light on that problem. Ethical views are clearly ideological, according to Marx and. EngeJs, and hence are not capable of proof or disproof. Ideological beliefs, including ethics, articulate the beliefs of a given group of people. The task of moral philosophers is not to prove that certain actions are right and certain states are good but to put into words as clearly as possible what their group believes is the good life and what their obligations are to one another. In the process of putting a given ethical view into words, we certainly compare different proposals and reject some as less acceptable, less coherent, less able to guide us in a variety of real situations. But such discussions do not aim at proving that an ethical view is true. They try to reflect as adequately as possible the best thinking about ethics in any given group. In any society there are different groups, and they have different ideologies. The ruling class has its ideology. Oppositiona) groups have theirs. The different ideologies, of course, overlap. Everyone condemns injustice; everyone asserts that all human beings have certain rights. But

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whether the existing distribution of wealth and access to shared resources is just or whether everyone has the right to a decent living and. full selfdevelopment is a matter of great controversy, Marx and Engels did not make any effort to develop a proletarian ethics. But such an understanding of injustice and the good, life is certainly implicit in their work. We will have occasion to discuss their ethical ideas further in Chapter 16. False Consciousness Ideology, especially bourgeois ideology when it is adopted by the working class, is often called "false consciousness," Marx did not, in fact, use this expression, but many commentators identify ideology with false consciousness nevertheless.19 That conception has often been associated with views that the working class is systematically deceived by the ruling class or that its desires are manipulated by the capitalists or that its family structure is the effect of traditional authoritarianisna or that its understanding of the world results from sexual repression.20 All of these suggestions are extremely interesting but go far beyond the theory of ideology as we find it in Marx and Engels. All of them are attempts to explain why workers-—contrary to Marx and Engels' optimistic expectations—have frequently been in support of their exploiters and have stood aloof from their labor unions and from class struggle. Their support for the enemies of the working class has been explained as the effect of ruling-class ideologies that confused workers and thus produced "false consciousness." In fact, though, the reluctance of workers to struggle to improve their lot does not have to do primarily with ideology but with alienation. The lack of revolutionary fervor among workers is not just a manifestation of their erroneous ideas but has much deeper and more complex causes. What appears to be lacking in most people living in capitalist societies is the burning desire for freedom that revolutionary activity demands. This lack is better explained by alienation than by the theory of ideology. We shall see in Chapter 10 that one of the questions left open by Marx's conception of alienation is the extent to which living in a capitalist society makes all of us into persons unwilling to change and to change our social system. We will take up that question once more in Chapter 16. For Further Reading Richard Liehtatan, Essays in Critical Social Theory (New York; Peter Lang, 1993). Notes I. See Nicholas Abercrombie, Problems in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: New York University Press, 1980); Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1985), chapter 8.

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2. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 82n. 3. Ibid. 4. Kwame A. Appiah, In My Father's House (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5. The matter is actually more complex. Marty beliefs are partly ideological and partly not; some motivations for holding certain beliefs are more intelligible than others. It has often been pointed out that it makes sense for employers to encourage racism among their employees. Thus the perpetuation of certain racist beliefs has partially rational explanations in some cases. Some have argued that there are certain subterranean reasons for holding, for example, racist beliefs, such as the guilt of whites over the treatment of African Americans that easily transforms itself into an irrational, fear of what "they" will do to "us." Wilhekn Reich argued that one could understand the support of German workers for the Nazis if one looked at the extent to which, given prevailing sexual mores, men and women were forced to repress their sexual needs and desires, See Wilhelm Reich, The Mess Psychology of Fascism (New York; Noonday, 1970). 6. lit good nineteenth-century fashion, Marx talks about the relations to nature as "domination." We tend to think of our relation to nature in different terms. These differences are themselves instances of ideology. 7. Consider the following titles: "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; Capital; A Critique of Political Economy, 8. William Leon McBride, Tin* Philosophy of Marx (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970). 9. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 10. Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), chapter 1. 11. John McMurtry, The Structure of Marx's WorM~View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), chapter 5. 12. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 13. These ruling ideologies must be distinguished from propaganda—lies deliberately spread to mislead. The intellectuals associated, with the ruling class often do serious and honest intellectual work, but their outlook happens to be that of the people who support them. See Capital, vol. 1, p. SOn, 14. This has led some Marxists to attack the belief in universal human rights itself. But that is a serious error. Instead, one must criticize the deceptive uses that prevailing ruling groups make of the beliefs in these universal human rights to promote their private agendas at home and abroad, 15. It is important to notice, though, that the capitalist perspective is not mistaken. It becomes much less persuasive once we take a more historical view or if we are interested in and engaged in social change. But there is no impartial evidence to show that the proletarian perspective is true and the capitalist perspective false. The ideological criticism performed here is not retrospective scientific criticism but opposes one perspective to that of the opposing class, 16. Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

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17, Richard Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 18, R. G, Peffer, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 238, 19, Denise Meyerson, False Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 17-22. 20, On the capitalists' deception of the working class, see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), Also Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). On family structure, see Max Horklieimer, "Authority and the Family," in Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1972), pp. 47-128, See also Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism,

8 Capitalism IS CAPITALISM, AS MARX characterizes It, that different from the ways In which its defenders describe it? There is a good deal of agreement about its central features between Marx, who is fiercely critical of capitalism, and those who accept capitalism, A capitalist society is a commodity-producing society. Commodities are made in the expectation that someone will have a use for them and therefore buy them. The room that I add onto my house is not a commodity because I do not build it to sell to someone else but for my own use. But once 1 manufacture anything for sale, 1 am producing commodities. That is another way of saying that I produce for sale in a marketplace. To say that a capitalist society is a commodity society is, therefore, to say that products, including the ability to work, are bought and sold in a marketplace. Markets determine prices by supply and demand. Calling capitalism a market society says that prices are determined by supply and demand. This, too, Marx recognized quite readily. Wages, he wrote for instance, "will rise and fall according to the relations of supply and demand" (WLC, T 206), Marx, then, had no objection to calling capitalism, a "market society." Neither would he have hesitated to describe capitalism as a "free enterprise system." This description implies that under capitalism there are only minimal legal restrictions on going Into business. In feudal society both farming and the production of consumption goods by artisans were carefully regulated by law and custom; in a capitalist society, by contrast, one is legally free to pursue profit in any way one sees fit, short of defrauding others or endangering their safety. In such a society, people tend to be socially mobile: Different generations of the same family may not have the same social status or wealth, hence it is often said that anybody can become a capitalist. Again, Marx agrees:

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Capitalism The circumstance that a man without fortune but possessing energy, solidity, ability and business acumen may become a capitalist in this manner ... is greatly admired by apologists of the capitalist system. In a similar way ... the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages formed its hierarchy out of the best brains in the land, regardless of their estate, birth or fortune.l

It is often also said that everybody can become a capitalist. But that is, of course, false. What is true of each individual separately is not true of all of them together. In a footrace where the contestants are equally matched, it might be true that anybody can win. But it is clearly not true that everybody can win. The very fact that one person wins makes it impossible for all others to win. Similarly, the fact that some people are capitalists makes it impossible for others to be capitalists. Marx is not inclined to reject such characterizations of capitalism, but he does believe that they are seriously incomplete and to that extent misleading. They are clear instances of ideology insofar as they portray the capitalist system from the perspective of the capitalists. As always, he turns to history to demonstrate this: Other societies produced commodities and traded them in a market, but those societies were not capitalist Some persons in other societies accumulated great wealth, but that alone did not make them capitalists. In order to understand capitalism, more completely, we need to see what differentiates commodity production today from the commodity production of the feudal artisans or what differentiates capital accumulation today from the effort to accumulate wealth in ancient Rome. We need to understand the systematic contexts in which commodities are produced or wealth is accumulated. Medieval artisans produced "commodities." They did not merely produce, say, shoes for their own use but made their living by making shoes for anyone who could buy them. But although a capitalist society is commodity producing, not all commodity-producing societi.es are capitalist: With the urban crafts, although they rest essentially on exchange and on the creation of exchange values, the direct and chief aim of this production is subsistence as craftsmen, as master-journeyrnenf hence use-value, not wealth, not exchange value as exchange value. (G, T 275)

In capitalism the goal is to produce profits to be reinvested in more means of production. The goal is therefore to increase one's capital. The medieval guild journeyman, by contrast, simply wanted to make enough to live. Wealth,—namely, new capital—was not his goal. The reason for that was not in more detail, that medieval craftsmen had different values and therefore set themselves different goals for their lives. Rather, in the very different feudal economic system there was little point in accumulating great wealth because there was nothing to invest that wealth in. To be

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sure, there have always been people who accumulated considerable wealth. But that is not sufficient for capitalism either: The mere presence of monetary wealth, and even the achievement of a kind of supremacy on its part, is in no way sufficient for this dissolution into capital to happen. Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium, etc. would have ended their history with free labor and capital.... There too, the dissolution of the old property relations was bound up with the development of monetary wealth—of trade, etc. But instead of leading to industry, this dissolution led in fact to the supremacy of the countryside over the city, (G, T 270}

In Rome as in England in the sixteenth and. seventeenth centuries, some people accumulated great wealth. What made Roman history different from that of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when capitalism developed was the emergence in the latter period, and not in the former, of a work force of people who had no means of supporting themselves except by hiring themselves out for wages. This mass of wageworkers originated when the great English landowners dismissed their retainers, who had, together with them, consumed the surplus product of the land; when further their tenants chased off the smaller cottagers, etc., then firstly a mass of living labor was thereby thrown onto the labor market, a mass which was free in a double sense, free from the old relations of dientship, bondage and servitude, and secondly free from all belongings and possessions ..., free of all property dependent on the sale of its labor capacity or on begging, vagabondage and robbery as its only source of income. It is a matter of historic record that they tried the latter first, but were driven off this road by the gallows, stocks, and whippings onto the narrow path of the labor market (G, T 271)

Of all the changes mentioned, the rise of "free" labor appeared to Marx to be the central change in the transition to capitalism. The crucial characteristic of that new economic system, according to Marx, was the presence of two different classes of people in a capitalist society: first, the owners of the factories, raw materials, tools and machines, and all the other means of production and, second, the workers who did not own any means of production and. thus were dependent on wage labor for their livelihood. Why did Marx refuse the title of capitalist to the Roman merchant who accumulated a sizable fortune in money or to the medieval craftsman who owned tools and raw materials that he and his apprentices and laborers transformed into commodities? One can, of course, call anything "capitalism" if one so chooses, but the decisive difference between Rome or the medieval economy on the one hand and capitalism on the other seemed to Marx to be the ready availability of wage laborers in the latter and their absence in the former setting. His reasons for that are simple. In

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a society where there is little or no labor for hire, you cannot invest wealth in new machinery and raw materials because there is no one who will tend the machines to produce goods. Wealth, in a society without free labor, can be used for consumption only, either for luxury or for warfare. Moneylenders in medieval, rimes thus did not lend money to investors or to prospective industrialists but to kings and princes to support their luxurious way of life or to pay for military adventures. Only in the modern era, where there is labor for hire in a labor market, can wealth be invested, As a consequence, commodity production among medieval artisans differed from commodity production today because the setting in which it took place was quite different. Modern, commodity production aims at the accumulation of more capital. Before, the goal was more modest to support the artisan and Ms family and apprentices. Capital is money that is readily convertible into means of production: factories, tools, raw materials. But all those means are of use only to the extent that labor is available to transform the raw materials into finished products. More important, the acquisition of additional tools or raw materials is of no interest to an owner unless more labor is available. Thus, under medieval guild restrictions, an owner could hire only a limited number of apprentices anyway, and buying more tools or raw materials would have been a waste because workers would not have been on hand to do the work of transforming those additional raw materials into finished products: The rules of guilds,... by limiting most strictly the number of apprentices and journeymen that a single master could employ, prevented him from becoming a capitalist.... A merchant could buy every kind of commodity, but labor as a commodity he could not buy. (CI, T 396)

Similarly, in the countryside, acquiring new land was of no advantage unless one also acquired more people to work it. But inasmuch as people were attached to the land under serfdom, there was no reserve force of agricultural labor to be hired to till additional land. There was no market in land; land was not bought or sold. New land was acquired by warfare, which at the same provided a work force from among the conquered people to cultivate land newly acquired,2 Modern capitalism is a complex social system. Its individual components occur in other historical periods. Thus Marx notes that the Incas of Peru practiced a complex division of labor before the advent of the Spaniards. But this division of labor was not in the service of a market because the goods produced were not exchanged.3 The components of capitalism, set in a society where labor is for hire and the ability to work has itself become a commodity, take on different characteristics from what they had in previous social systems.

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What Is Modern Capitalism? We usually think of capital as money or perhaps as means of production; buildings, machines, raw materials, tools, means of communication, office equipment laboratories, and so on; Marx, too, frequently writes as if that is what he meant by the word "capital." But when he was really careful about his language, he used "capital" to refer to a "social relation of production"; A spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no inore capital than gold itself is money or sugar the price of sugar..., Capital, also, is a social relation of production. (WLC, T 207)

Means of production are "capital" only in a very specific setting—namely, when they are the private property of some members of a society while all the others own no means of production and, in fact, own little beyond their own person and their ability to work. Means of production become capital only when most people do wage labor precisely because they do not own means of production (CI, T 431ff.). Marx and Engels often summarize that characterization of capitalism by saying that under capitalism means of production are privately owned. The factories, raw materials, and capital are owned not by the community as a whole or by the government but by private individuals. More important, capital is not owned by all private individuals. The bulk of productive resources in a capitalist society is the individual property of a small minority of the members of the society. All the other people do wage labor. Wage labor is "free" in two senses. Workers are free from the serfdom that tied peasants to their land and from, the slavery that tied the slave's person to her or his owner. Unlike the serf or the slave, the modern worker can change employers if one offers better wages or conditions than another; she or he can move to a different town if there is more work there. Serfs and slaves, by contrast, were not free to make those choices. Hence labor power under feudalism or slavery was not a commodity traded in a labor market (under slavery the person, not his or her ability to work, is a commodity). Under capitalism, however, labor power is a commodity (G, T 270, 271). But workers are also "free of all property." They do not, for instance, own plots of land that would support them and their families, even for a while, allowing them to refuse work if it is badly paid or excessively arduous. Nor do they own wealth that would support them so that they can turn down work that for whatever reason they do not like. The forces of labor thus are "free" also in the sense that they are without any financial reserves and therefore must work to live. Free labor must. work.

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Marx notes several background conditions for the existence of "free" labor. One is the "free exchange relation" (G, T 254). If there is to be a labor market in which individual employers and workers contract for work and wages, there must be a legal system that enforces contracts evenhandedly—that is, a legal, system that does not apply different rules to the rich and to the poor, to the noble and to the commoner. Whatever the actual realities in particular places and times may be, capitalism does establish a legal system for the enforcement of contracts of which the central principle is equality before the law, A population of "free" labor also presupposes a commodity economy developed to the point where it can supply food, clothing, and housing to such a working population that cannot supply any of its own needs because it owns no means of production. Hence the need for rental housing near the factories as well as stores that sell clothes and food, to house, clothe, and feed this propertyless population. Marx notes that as more and more women and children were employed in the English factories in the first half of the nineteenth century, "Domestic work such as sewing and mending must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles."4 Once labor becomes a commodity also, the function of the means of production changes drastically: They become capital in the modern sense. The capitalist now has two objects in view; in the first place he wants to produce a use-value that has a value in exchange, that is to say, an article that is destined to be sold, a commodity; and secondly he desires to produce a commodity whose value shall be greater than the sum of the values of the commodities used in its production. (CI, T 351}

The capitalist wants to produce goods that sell; otherwise his effort is useless and he squanders his capital. But equally important, he wants to make a profit. If at the end of a period of work he just breaks even—that is, he has just enough left to live on after paying for his means of production and his labor—then his effort is wasted. In that situation, Property in raw materials and instruments of labor would be merely nominal; economically they would belong to the worker as much as to the capitalist since they would create value only insofar as he himself were a worker. (G, T 248)

The purpose of capitalist efforts is to remunerate the worker, to pay for the raw materials and resources consumed, to pay the capitalist for his work, and, in addition, to produce a return on capital that can be reinvested. That profit goes to the owner of the capital alone; the worker does not get a share of that. If there were no profits, the owner would be in the same position as the worker—he would get paid only for the work he does. But, normally, under capitalism capital also gets a "reward"—addi-

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tional sums for reinvestment to be added to the capital already in use, Thus the ownership of capital carries its special reward, for the owner of the original capital will also be the owner of the new sums of capital realized in any given economic transaction. The capitalist's ownership of the capital, not only brings him remuneration for his work; it also makes him the owner of the additional proceeds available for reinvestment. The capitalist's motto is Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets.... Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie,5

Capital is different from means of production or money in a society without a labor market because it is only in a society with a labor market that capital can seek to enlarge itself continually. A capitalist society is different from a commodity-producing society in which, there is no free labor because commodity production cannot yield significant profits for reinvestment unless there is free labor available to be put to work by this new capital. It is for this reason that Marx insists that capital is not just money or machines but a "social relation of production"—a shorthand way of saying that means of production come to be capital and function to produce profits and accumulation of capital only where there are very specific relations of production, namely, those that obtain in a society with free labor and private ownership of the means of production. Other Characteristics of Capitalism Some additional important points must be mentioned to round out Marx's characterization of capitalism. Once capitalists are oriented toward growth, they will attempt to increase profits. The commodities they produce are intended for sale in a market, and profits are increased by selling more commodities. Under ordinary circumstances they can do that in a variety of different ways—for example, by lowering prices and thereby capturing a larger share of the total demand for whatever they produce. In any ordinary period, the demand for toothbrushes, for instance, is fairly constant. Barring a sudden panic over bad breath or bad teeth or a sizable increase in the population over a very short period, the number of toothbrushes that sell in any given year does not change significantly. If any given manufacturer of toothbrushes wants to make more money, he or she must capture a larger market share—that is, he or she must sell a larger proportion of the total number of toothbrushes sold. Capitalists, in pursuit of greater profits, compete with each other: Except in the periods of prosperity, there rages between the capitalists the most furious combat for the share of each in the markets.6

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They can compete by having price wars but also through advertising campaigns, by redesigning products, and so on. The capitalist economy is a competitive one. Capitalists do not merely compete with one another; they also stick together and cooperate in certain respects. A prime example of that is their joint effort to maintain a relatively high level of unemployment. Capitalist economies tend to foster a certain level of unemployment, forcing workers to accept jobs that are intrinsically undesirable and, often, incommensurate with their abilities. The industrial reserve army, during periods of stagnation or average prosperity, weighs down the active labor army; during periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. (CI, T 427)

There are several causes of that: As capitalism progresses, individual capitalists compete with one another by buying new machinery that raises productivity, that is, requires less labor per unit of output. That general trend toward mechanization tends to reduce the demand for labor and thus produces unemployment (CI, T 422), Still, new capital can be invested only if workers are available to perform the necessary work. Capitalists are therefore interested in a work force that is looking for work (CI, T 423). In addition, wages are determined by supply and demand in a labor market, and as a consequence capitalists have an interest in keeping the supply of labor high and the demand for labor low (WLC, T 216). (To what extent they are able to meet those interests is a matter of controversy.) But none of that would happen unless people were willing to compete, unless making profits appeared to them to be of paramount importance. Marx notes that not all cultures valued profit-makiiig as highly as do capitalist ones. We never find the Ancients investigating which form of land ownership etc. is the most productive and produces the greatest wealth. Wealth does not appear to be the goal of production.... The question, is always which form of property creates the best citizens.... Wealth as an end in itself appears only with the few mercantile peoples . . . who live in the interstices of the ancient world, as did the Jews in medieval society.7

As we would expect on the basis of the discussions in Chapters 1-6 of this book, with changing social relations of production, human beings change also: We have here an example not only of a change of values but also of complex patterns of actions, of choices that people actually make—all of which we refer to in a shorthand way by saying that in a capitalist society people are animated by the "profit motive," Making a profit, getting rich, accumulating capital are important motivations in a capitalist society.

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They were not so in some other societies; in still others they played only a subsidiary role. This is not a point about the motivations of the individual capitalist but about the role of the capitalist. We return here to a distinction that we saw Marx draw earlier between the social role of being a capitalist and the private motives that may animate any particular person who fills the role of the capitalist (see Chapter 2), As a capitalist, you need to do certain things, obey certain norms. A capitalist who refuses to increase his or her capital will not remain a capitalist for long. Imagine that you are employed as the manager of a company. Because you pay unusually high wages or support colleges or orphanages, you do not turn a profit from one year to the next and therefore have no profits from which to pay dividends to the stockholders. You may well be applauded for your enlightened labor management relations and. your generous contributions, but you will be fired anyway because you did not do the job you were hired for, namely, to make your company grow. None of this implies that all capitalists are greedy or ungenerous persons. Some no doubt are; others no doubt are not. Certain capitalists, as is often pointed out, are probably motivated not by the desire for more money but by the desire for power. But in any case the analysis of capitalism as a social system does not explain the characteristics of capitalism by reference to the personal desires of the people who fill the role of the capitalists. To explain the nature of capitalism by reference to the psychology of capitalists would confuse the entire analysis of capitalism because it would imply that if we could either improve the moral character of existing capitalists or replace the ones we have with people who are less greedy or less power-hungry, then capitalism would be very different and probably be more benign. (This would be another example of idealism, discussed in Chapter 6.) But this is, of course, not true: Capitalists act as they do because that is what the social system demands of them. Yet this social system is easily misunderstood. Capitalism may be described as a market society, and the regularities of the market appear, like regularities in nature, independent of human activity. Prices, for instance, are not really set by buyers and sellers but are determined by the impersonal forces of supply and demand. Hence capitalism is often thought of as a quasi-natural system that grows up unplanned and separate from the intentions of human beings, perhaps just the result, as Adam Smith thought, of certain basic human inclinations. But to think of the market in that way is to fall victim to what we earlier saw Marx call "fetishism" (see Chapter 7), which regards the market as a natural force independent of human beings, something that is, in fact, a human creation. For the market mechanism as a whole is not a natural phenomenon such as gravity that exists independent of human activity and choice. On the contrary.

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markets, as we have just seen, exist only under specific historical conditions. What is more, the existence of a market system is, on the one hand, maintained by human activities and, on the other hand, constantly contested. The existence of a market in labor is challenged in the workplace in the form of demands for guaranteed employment and in labor's attempts to limit the ravages of a free labor market through legislation (for instance, through laws limiting the length of the workday). Producers try to exempt themselves from market forces or to modify the effects of the market by asking for subsidies (farm subsidies are a notorious example) or special tax legislation in their favor (such as oil depreciation allowances) or through oligopolistic practices that reduce the corrosive effects of unrestrained competition. Various groups resist the application of market forces in other areas of human life. Opponents of prostitution want to keep sexual love from, being a commodity; proponents of the traditional family object to turning childcare into something to be bought and sold in a market. Experiments with rent control try to take housing out of the marketplace; government subsidies for different groups put a limitation on other market forces. The market is a highly artificial, carefully regulated institution. It is no more natural than governments, the institution of marriage, or our educational system. Human activities and relations seent to be governed by these market forces. But the commodity society, which appears to function unregulated, following autonomous laws, is created and. constantly re-created by the actions of human beings. Capitalism is frequently identified with industry and industrial development. Here again Marx draws on history to clarify the relation between capitaltsm. and industrial modes of production. It is clear that machines play an essential role in modern capitalism. Not only are they in evidence everywhere, but they are also important tools in the competition among capitalists. In their attempt to undersell competitors, for instance, capitalists will frequently install new machines that permit cheaper production and thus allow the producer to lower prices of products. It Is equally clear from the history of capitalism., however, that its early phases preceded the development of modern technology. I discussed previously (in Chapter 5) the phase of capitalism—what Marx calls "manufacture"—that came before industrialization. In this phase workers, who were formerly artisans, worked under the direct supervision of the capitalist who, as time went on, also owned the tools and raw-materials. Industrial machinery was introduced only later (Cl, T 388-403). It was not an essential and indispensable feature of capitalism. The development of technology is the result rather than the cause of the development of capitalist social relations of production. Of course in most versions of capitalism machinery does play an important role in the relations between capitalists and workers. Mechanization gives the capitalists new avenues of control over the workers. Ma-

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chines save labor; by introducing more powerful machinery, the capitalist can often reduce the number of people working for him or her. A new machine is introduced, and some workers lose their jobs. That reminds all the remaining workers that the same thing may happen to them: New machines may threaten their jobs. Their livelihood depends on the goodwill of the capitalist. That perception serves to make workers more docile. To the extent that they feel insecure in their jobs, they will be less likely to be antagonistic at work. At the same time, machinery often replaces skilled workers with workers who are less highly trained, A good deal of machinery makes great skill unnecessary. Marx observes that weavers in India develop immensely complicated skills and become proficient in producing materials of unequaled quality "without capital, machinery, division of labor,"9 whereas workers in a capitalist workshop often need only one skill that can be acquired quickly by anyone. The introduction of the division of labor as well as of machinery means that workers need fewer skills. Industrialization enables the capitalist to replace the skilled craftsman with a more or less unskilled person. But unskilled workers not only earn less than skilled workers but also are more easily replaced, The workers with fewer skills have a precarious hold on their jobs; they cannot afford to go against their employers. Thus the introduction of machinery gives employers greater power over their employees. This illustrates one other important aspect of capitalism. Although workers and employers strike a bargain in the labor market and are to that extent free and equal, once the bargain has been concluded, their equality comes to an end and employers are much more powerful. They control the productive resources and thus can decide whether any given worker will have a job, will be able to make a living to support him- or herself and a family. The unequal power in the capitalist system is an essential feature—obscured by such common descriptions of capitalism as "a market society" or "a free enterprise society." We shall have much more to say about the issue of the capitalists' power over all other members of the society in Chapter 14. Capitalism is characterized by a money economy, commodity production, and private property in means of production. But unlike other social orders with those characteristics, capitalism has transformed the ability to do work (labor power) into a commodity as well. There is a large group of people who have no means of support except wage labor. In such a society, the pursuit of profit, the effort to increase one's capital, becomes a central motivation that pits capitalists against one another. The great contribution of that system is that it gives impetus to a previously undreamt of productivity as a result of the development of technology and the reorganization of work life.

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Commodity production has existed in other types of societies. But it is only in the capitalist society that everything, including labor power, is a commodity. To be sure, not everyone who works produces commodities. Women who keep house and raise children are a prime example. But housework and childcare are also done for money as commodity production. Similarly, virtually all occupations that do not produce commodities have an analogue in commodity production. In most countries (certainly in less-developed ones) old people live at home and are taken care of by the family, primarily the women doing housework. If everyone in the family works, the old people come along to the workplace. In such a situation, taking care of the elderly has not yet been commodified. In the United States, old people end up in nursing homes of one sort or another where paid attendants look after them. Care of the aged has become a commodity; it is something you can do for money and can buy. As capitalism develops, what once were family obligations are transformed into commodities. Other functions of the family go the same way: We hire people to do the housecleaning, engage nannies to take care of our children, hire buying services to make our purchases. You can observe the same commodification in politics: Politicians hire someone to write their speeches, to plan their campaigns, to develop their political platforms. All politicians need is money to buy all the requisite services to get elected or fulfill the demands of an office once they have been elected. In the same way, we no longer amuse ourselves but pay someone to amuse us. We do not discuss our problems with our friends but pay someone to listen to us and, if we want, give us advice. We do not buy our own furniture but hire someone to buy it for us and "decorate" our living space. Examples of spreading commodification can be multiplied indefinitely. There are no limits to what activities can become commodity production. For that reason, Marx begins Capital with an analysis of the concept of a commodity. The extreme effect of commodification is observable where, as Marx says, Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honor, etc., are' capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities,'

One's good name, one's reputation as an honest person, one's integrity are not commodities because one has not produced them with a view to selling them. But once commodification spreads, even those qualities go to the highest bidder. Lawyers defend clients they know to be guilty; physicians defend clearly harmful products or dangerous industries; academics defend racist and sexist theories. Some people will always sell their professional expertise and personal probity if the price is right. There is no limit to what may be bought and sold in a capitalist market economy.

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This account of capitalism is still incomplete, however, because I have said nothing about exploitation. In a capitalist economy, some persons own all the productive resources, and others do the vast bulk of the work. Although the capitalists usually work, the returns on their efforts are much, larger than those of the people that work for them. The reason for this disparity, Marx tells us, is that workers are exploited, I discuss exploitation in the next chapter. For Further Reading Martin Nicolaus, "The Unknown Marx," in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1969). Notes 1. Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York; International Publishers, 1967), pp. 600-601. 2. Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 487. 3. Marx, Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 60, 4. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 385, n. 2, 5. Ibid., p. 595. 6. Ibid., p. 453. 7. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 487. 8. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 340. 9. Ibid., p. 102.

9 Capitalism and Exploitation MARX AND ENGELS ACCEPT many of the descriptions of capitalism that are given by the defenders of the prevailing economic system. They acknowledge that capitalism is a market society, that it depends on the work of entrepreneurs, and that it may well be called a "free enterprise" system. But the defenders of capitalism also believe that capitalism is inherently fair, that under such a system,, by and large, everyone gets what he or she deserves: The hardworking flourish, as do those who show unusual enterprise, are willing to take risks, or have interesting new ideas. The poor, in this account, are those who have limited abilities, are often unwilling to work or to work hard, or are held back by other personal faults. Advocates of this view of capitalism argue for it as follows: A capitalist society is the stage for a large number of commercial transactions—people buying and selling goods, people borrowing and lending money, people hiring employees or hiring themselves out to others. These transactions are voluntary; No one forces you to buy your food in this store rather than that; no one forces you to borrow money or to borrow it from this lender rather than that one. No one forces you to work for this employer rather than another. All transactions are the consequences of choices made by the persons involved. From that fact many people conclude that if the outcome of your choices is not satisfactory for you, you have only yourself to blame because, after all, you could have made different choices, engaged in other transactions, and the outcome might well have been better for you. Marx and Engels are not alone in objecting to this line of reasoning, They believe that we cannot hold everyone responsible for his or her lot in life merely because people can choose where to buy, borrow, or work. They point out that work under capitalism is "voluntary" in a very weak sense of the term. Slaves could not choose whom to work for because 100

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their employer was also their owner. Feudal serfs possessed their own land and tools, but they were tied to the land, they farmed and thus had to work for the owner of that land—whoever that happened to be, (In fact, many serfs fled the land, even though that was illegal.) Capitalist workers are not so constrained. They cannot be coerced to work for a particular person. Hence they choose their work freely. But often the range of employment they have to choose from is such that they must pick the least undesirable job from among several very undesirable ones. Choices among a range of unattractive alternatives are "voluntary" in only a weak sense of that term. In many developing countries, mechanization of agriculture brings with it high rates of rural unemployment But unemployment in the cities is not much lower, especially for men (as women can do domestic service). Thus many rural dwellers must choose between abject poverty in the countryside or life in shantytowns, where they can hope to make a miserable living by begging, sending their kids to sell chewing gum in the streets, or picking food out of garbage bags in middle-class neighborhoods. The option between staying in the country or moving to a shantytown at the edge of a metropolitan area is voluntary but does not make them responsible for their poverty. Their poverty is not the result of their choices but of an economic system that does not provide opportunities for them to make an adequate living. This is surely the central point here: In a capitalist society, people can choose where to work and for whom. But many have choices only among low-paying jobs, for instance, as they do not have the requisite education, either because it was not available where they grew up or because a good education costs more money than their family could afford. In addition good jobs are scarce, and it helps to have connections to get one; people are not free to choose to be well connected. Capitalist society provides more choices than previous ones, but it does not give everyone the same choices. Some can choose the best schools and the opportunities to meet important people. Others start out, through no fault of their own, with a poor education, few skills, and without knowing anyone who could help them to get ahead. Only where people all start out with more or less the same opportunity can we blame those who come in last for their lack of success. When we choose voluntarily the most desirable of a set of attractive alternatives, we may well have to take responsibility for the outcome. Persons who abhor strenuous effort must not complain if they end up with a modest income. Those who choose relative leisure as their most desirable state of life must bear the consequences of that choice.1 But Marx and Engels believe that workers under capitalism, when they make their voluntary choices, have a restricted set of options and that the options available to the members of the capitalist class are much more extensive. Marx and Engels have several reasons for that opinion:

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1. Capitalists maintain a relatively high level of unemployment when that is at all possible. This puts pressure on workers to accept any work they can find or to hold on to the jobs they have even if those jobs do not pay well or are undesirable for other reasons. 2. Work in a capitalist society is alienating. Hence all jobs are more or less undesirable. (We shall discuss the concept of alienation in the chapter that follows.) 3. Workers in a capitalist society are exploited. In this chapter I discuss what that means and whether it is true, 4. Capitalists have more political power than workers. It is therefore easier for them to use the resources of the state to their own advantage against the interests of the workers. (I discuss that point in more detail in Chapter 14.) 5. In a capitalist society, capital is privately owned. Hence capitalists not only get paid for their work (if they work), but they also retain the profit that returns to the capital. This enables them to live better and longer and provide greater opportunities for their children than is possible for workers.

Exploitation Exploitation, in a very general sense, refers to taking unfair advantage of people. Marx and Engels thought of exploitation in more specific terms; they called "exploitation" any situation where some people work for others without suitable compensation. They did not believe that exploitation was peculiar to capitalism. Capital has not invented what they called "surplus labor"—unpaid labor. On the contrary, the history of all hitherto known societies is a history of exploitation. Capital has not invented surplus-labor. Wherever a part of the society possesses the monopoly of the meaas of production, the laborer, free or not free, must add to the working time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, whether this proprietor be an Athenian nobleman, Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus, Norman baron, American slaveowner, Wallachian Boyard [a feudal landowner in what is today Romania], modern landlord or capitalist... The comparison of the greed for surplus-labor in the Danubian principalities [Romania) with the same greed in the English factories has a special interest, because surplus-labor in the corvee [the feudal form of surplus labor] has an independent and palpable form,.,. The necessary labor which the Wallachian peasant does for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his labor on behalf of the Boyard, The one he does in his own field, the other on the seignorial estate. Both parts of the

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labor time exist, therefore, independently, side by side. In the corvee the surplus-labor is accurately marked off from the necessary labor. But [under capitalism] this [viz, surplus labor] is not obvious on the surface, (CI, T 364-365)

In a wide range of cultures that were in other respects very different from one another, we find one common component, namely, that some people worked to support other people who did not work. In Athens slaves worked to support the free citizens, just as slaves worked for the American slave owners. Feudal lords (the "Norman baron" and the "Wallachian Boyard") were supported by the unpaid labor of serfs. In the former case, the slave owner could make the slave work to support him because the slave was his property. In the latter case, the corvee (i.e., unpaid) labor of the serf was, in the final analysis, enforced by the feudal lord's monopoly on military might: He got the serf to work for him by threatening physical violence.2 In both cases the crucial fact was that slaves or serfs were not rewarded for their work. The work they did for their masters was essentially unpaid, and they did unpaid work simply because they could not avoid doing so, They did "surplus labor," Both slave and serf were, in Marx's terminology, exploited. A person is exploited when he or she is regularly forced to do work for someone else without getting paid for that work and when the products of this labor are forcibly appropriated by someone else. Exploitation thus has three aspects: (1) workers produce more than they receive in wages; (2) the surplus is appropriated by someone else; and (3) this arrangement is imposed on the workers by force. That force takes a variety of forms in various economic systems. We shall see that this formulation of "exploitation" is subject to serious difficulties and that exploitation must be understood in slightly different ways. Under capitalism,, as under feudalism, and. slavery, labor is exploited. That was the claim of the passage cited previously. But that passage makes another important claim as well: Under feudalism and slavery exploitation was very obvious; under slavery because the slave did not get paid at all and under feudalism because serfs did unpaid labor on distinct days (here "surplus labor" had "an independent and palpable form" [CI, T 364]) that was separate from, the work they did on their own land to earn their livelihood. But under capitalism exploitation "is not evident on the surface" (CI, T 365) because the worker strikes a bargain in the labor market in which (usually, at least) no one gets cheated. In certain cases employers take advantage of workers, but Marx is perfectly willing to concede that sometimes workers also take advantage of employers. On the average, he thinks, the wage bargain between employer and worker is fair in the sense that the laborer gets paid the full value of his or her commodity (labor power) just as other commodities are purchased at their full value.

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The sphere . . . within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham [Jeremy Bentham, an. English philosopher and jurist, 1748-1832]. Freedom because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say labor power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. (Cl, T 343; italics added)

The contract between worker and employer is freely entered into, and they "exchange equivalents," that is, the worker receives full value for what he or she provides for the employer. Yet at the same time, Marx maintains that labor is coerced into doing work for which it is not compensated. The employer exploits the workers by extracting unpaid work from them. There appears to be a contradiction here. Marx is fully aware of that. I discuss his proposed solution in the next section. The Classical Marxian Theory of Exploitation Marx and EngeJs subscribed to an economic theory known as the "labor theory of value." When they first began their economic studies, that was the state-of-the-art theory in economics. Not only had the two great English economists Adam Smith and. David Ricardo developed it, but all other writers on economic matters, among them Benjamin Franklin, had held it. Marx quotes Franklin extensively.3 In outline the labor theory of value asserts the following: All commodities are useful to someone (otherwise they will not sell). They have, in the classical terminology, "use value." But they also exchange with other commodities. The ratio in which they exchange with other commodities is called their "exchange value." A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, etc.,—in short for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead, of one exchange value the wheat therefore has a great many. (Cl, T 304)

The theory further assumes that in most exchanges, equals exchange for equals. In some way a quarter of wheat is equal to x blacking or y silk or z gold. But that raises a further question immediately, namely, in respect to what are a quarter of wheat and the specific quantities of other commodities equal to one another? The classical economic theory an-

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swered: with respect to the embodied labor. The value of a commodity was the labor time embodied in it Hence the labor time embodied in any given commodity determined the proportion in which this commodity exchanged with others. When people exchange commodities, they determine the ratios at which they exchange by the amount of time it took to produce the different commodities. The more work a commodity represents, the more value it has,4 No one would exchange, say, a house that took several years to build for a loaf of bread that took two hours to bake. If equals are to exchange with equals, the loaf of bread exchanges for something that also took two hours to produce, and the same is true for the house. Exchanged for bread, the house would be worth a large quantity of loaves. It took a great deal of intellectual effort to formulate the labor theory of value in ways that were not obviously mistaken, and many economists, Marx among them, made some important contributions to its accurate formulation. One of the central problems that Marx found in the theory was the problem of explaining the source of capitalist profits. The problem arises as follows; If in a capitalist marketplace equals exchange for equals, by and large, then that must also be true in the labor market. Wages must represent the value of the labor power (the ability to work) that the worker sells to the employer. If value corresponds to labor time, then the value of labor power represents the amount of work required to produce, say, a person's ability to work for a day That much was clear. If a worker was going to be adequately paid for a day's work, the wages earned had to cover the food, lodging, and so on required to enable the worker to return to work for another day. (That, of course, also included food, lodging, and so on for the worker's family.) Now let us consider the value of a commodity: The total value of the commodity must be equal to the values of the commodities that are used up in order to produce it. Included are the cost of raw materials and so on, the cost of labor, the labor time of the employer. All of these are values, that is, they correspond to labor performed. There is the labor of the worker who produces a given product. But there is also the labor of the worker who produced the raw materials consumed and the labor that went into making the machines, buildings, and so on that get used up in the process of production. But the capitalist also expects to make a profit: Where does the profit come in? As long as equals exchange for equals, the value of the commodity is identical to the amount of labor time that is expended in its production directly—the time the worker spends making it and the employer doing his or her work—and indirectly—the labor time used up in producing raw materials and overhead. The return to capital is equivalent to the cost of replacing the capital goods used up. But there does not seem to be any explanation, on this theory, of the origin of profit.

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For profit is a return over and above the replacement value of capital goods consumed in the process of production. But profit is, of course (as we saw in the preceding chapter), all-important to the capitalist. If the capitalist is not making profits in producing and selling commodities, the whole effort is useless. It is not sufficient for the capitalist to get remunerated for his or her own work. The capital invested must not only be replaced; it must in addition bear a return. At the end of a cycle of transactions, the capital invested initially must have grown. But what makes it grow appears inexplicable if we adopt the labor theory of value, Marx took great pride in having discovered a solution to this quandary. His answer was that labor is exploited in the capitalist production process. It is true, he stresses, that workers get paid the value of their ability to work. If a worker and his or her family requires a certain amount of rent, a certain basket of foods, a certain amount for clothing, and so on to enable the worker to work another day—to reproduce the worker's labor power, as Marx puts it—then the worker is paid full value if he or she receives the equivalent of all that. But now suppose that the worker has to work six hours to produce value equivalent to his or her wage. If the worker works longer than six hours, he or she does not need more food and drink and rent to reproduce labor power. Thus even if workers work twelve hours, as they did in Marx's day, they still get paid full value—the full cost of reproducing their labor power. But at the same time, the second six hours of the working day the worker produces value that does not belong to the worker but goes to the capitalist. That value Marx calls "surplus value" and the work that goes into producing it "surplus labor." That surplus value and surplus labor are unpaid in the sense that the worker does not get paid any more whether he works six, twelve, or even sixteen hours. Whatever is produced after the first six hours belongs to the capitalist, and if employers manage to lengthen the working day, they can "pump out"—another phrase of Marx's—more surplus value. This is an extremely ingenious theory with a good deal to recommend it. For one thing, it resolves a serious problem in the labor theory of value. More important, it allows us to explain a considerably important aspect of capitalism: Capitalism quite consistently does a poor job of distributing resources. In capitalist countries inequalities are very great, and in most existing capitalist countries they would be even greater if it were not for government programs that redistribute income to some extent—such as health care and special bonuses for veterans, support for small businesses, food distributions and educational assistance for the poorer layers of the population, and medical assistance for the elderly. The theory of exploitation gives one explanation for the enormous income inequalities: The rich who own means of production and employ wage labor are able to extract some of the products of their workers and appropriate them for themselves.

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But Marx's theory also has serious problems. We need not spend much effort on this, however, because economists no longer accept the labor theory of value, and thus it is only of antiquarian interest today,5 Marx's concept of exploitation and the support for the claim that capitalism systematically exploits workers presupposed the truth of the labor theory of value. If that theory is no longer an acceptable economic theory, what happens to the concept of exploitation and the claim that workers under capitalism are exploited? As we shall see, exploitation is open to redefinition, and it is possible to devise different arguments to support the claim that capitalism, like feudalism and slavery, exploits working people. Contemporary Versions of Marx's Theory of Exploitation If we consider the distribution of wealth in contemporary capitalist societies, we find many people working very hard for very little money and some people who are extremely wealthy. Capitalism distributes rewards unequally. But it does so in two ways. The work of some people brings with it much greater rewards than the work of most others. Many people in the United States earn less than $20,000 a year; others earn more than $1 million. But in addition some people receive large sums of money as a regular return on their capital investments. The money paid out as interest is not a reward for the work done by the owners of the capital, for they receive a return on their investment even if they do not work at all. Having made that observation, we can go two ways: We can go on to say that since capitalists draw interest on money invested, even if they do not work at all, it follows that the money returned to capital results not from the work of the owners of capital but from the work of other people whose work is incompletely remunerated so that some of what they produce can be returned to the owner of the capital in the form of interest. These other persons are therefore exploited. But such an argument still seems to keep in the background a close relative of the labor theory of value, namely, the view that people have property rights only to the fruits of their labor. The claims made about exploitation presuppose that people are entitled only to what they have worked for. That principle, in turn, derives from, another assumption that was traditionally formulated as "labor creates all wealth/' another principle widely maintained by nineteenth-century economists. It was thought that all goods and all wealth flow from human labor—implying that machines or the division of labor does not contribute to the production of value. But once we say that value may also be created by machines, by efficiently organized workplaces, it is no longer obvious that just because capitalists did not work for value they receive, they are not entitled to it. As we shall see shortly, there are no good reasons for thinking that they are exclusively entitled to interest

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on capital, but the argument that capitalists are not entitled to profits because they did not work for those is weak because it rests on doubtful assumptions. If we accept the idea that we are entitled to own only what we work for, it follows that a better society would give to workers as much capital, as they might be shown to be entitled to by Yirtue of their work. In Marx's day there were many socialists who held a view like that. Under socialism, they claimed, workers would receive the full value of what they produced. But Marx saw clearly that that was an indefensible view: Surplus labor in general... must always remain.... A definite quantity of surplus labor is required as insurance against accidents and by the necessary and progressive expansion of the process of reproduction [of social wealth]. (CHI, T 440)

All societies require surplus labor to store up food and so on for a bad year, expanding populations, or a rising standard of living. Elsewhere Marx also points out that the producers cannot get all they produce for their own use because someone has to pay for common goods and services, such as roads, hospitals, and schools (CGP, T 528-529). There is surplus labor that is not exploitative. Only where surplus labor is expropriated whether workers want it or not, where surplus labor is compelled, can we properly speak of exploitation. The central objection of Marx and Engels to capitalist exploitation is that it is undemocratic.6 Workers do not choose the distribution of capital exclusively to the capitalists. In fact, they have no say in the matter in a capitalist country, even in a democratic capitalist country, as we will see in Chapter 14. Exploitation would not be remedied, however, by giving a set amount of capital to each worker, but by opening to all members of the society economic decisionmaking with respect to the use of available capital. Against that, it is often asserted that capitalism, unlike slavery and feudalism, is not exploitative. Products are made by means of various "factors of production" such as labor, raw materials, and capital. Economists offer mathematical proofs, given certain plausible assumptions, that under certain economic conditions (such as the absence of monopolies), each of these factors of prod.ucti.on is remunerated in strict correspondence to its contribution to any given product. Hence workers are paid for their work, employers receive a reward for organizing the process of production, and capital gets a return on its contribution. Everyone gets what they deserve; no one is exploited. It is not difficult to see what is the matter with that argument: Owning capital is not a contribution to the process of production. If workers did not work or worked less, there would be many fewer products or none at all. If capitalists did not organize the work process, there would most

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likely be less output. (Although Marx and Engels did not believe that.) The work of both the workers and the capitalists is essential to production and thus to producing a certain output. So, of course, is capital. Without machinery, buildings, raw materials, and so on, there would be no output either. So when we reward every contributor to the production process for his or her contribution, a certain reward needs to go to capital. Under capitalism, however, the reward does not go to the capital but to the owner of capital. But why should the owner get all the profits rather than having all the contributors to the production process share the profits in equal proportions? Marx argues that there is no justification for giving all the returns on capital to the capitalists for owning capital (holding legal title to the capital) and giving permission for its use is not by any stretch of the imagination a contribution to the production process. We can easily imagine social systems where capital is owned by no one—as the earth in the world of the Native Americans was not owned by anyone—or is owned by the state or owned by the workers who work in any given enterprise. In all of these cases, capital would play the same role in the production process that it plays now, when it is owned by the capitalists. Capital is useful and productive because it is put to work, not because it is owned by this or that person or institution. The sheer fact of their ownership and giving permission to use the capital in a particular enterprise does not entitle them to the return that capital has earned in production. But is it really true that the owner of capital contributes nothing to the production process, except to give the permission to use his or her capital? Contemporary theorists deny that capitalists do no more than give permission to use the capital they own. Capitalists, they argue, are entitled to interest on capital because they refrain from spending the money on consumption goods.7 This is an old claim that was well known already to Marx. He responds to it with this observation: The more therefore capital increases by means of successive accumulations, the more does the stun of value increase that is divided into consumption fund and accumulation, fund, The capitalist can therefore live a more jolly life mid at the same time show more "abstinence." (CI, T 608) As capital accumulates, Marx observes, the returns on capital increase. Capitalists may therefore spend more money on consumption goods, live more luxuriously and still save more for future investments. Thus as they live better and better, they are at the same time more and more "abstinent." One can agree with Marx that there is something fishy about this claim. Capital is distinct from money spent on consumption goods. Even the wealthiest men and women cannot consume all their capital. The fact of the matter is that those who lead the most luxurious lives have the most capital to invest. Precisely those who own villas and houses in exclusive places;

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who employ large staffs of personal servants, lawyers, accountants, captains and crews for their yachts, gamekeepers for their hunting preserves, and so on have the most capital to lend out Precisely the people who do not practice abstinence at all are the ones who receive returns on their capital. Poor people, in contrast, practice abstinence all the time. They save part of their weekly pay in order to pay the rent, pay for their transportation, or cover their medical bills. But their abstinence is rewarded simply by not getting hounded by bill collectors. The claim to abstinence as a defense for earning interest on capital is no more valid now than it was 150 years ago. Capitalists, in receiving interest on their capital, receive monies that are the reward for the contributions of capital, not of the capitalist.8 A different defense for giving all returns on capital to the capitalists consists of the claim that capitalists are entrepreneurs. Their ownership and control of capital is their reward for being successful entrepreneurs, for without the ingenuity and risk taking of the entrepreneurs a capitalist economy would not prosper. One can acknowledge the useful role of the entrepreneur, but one must also acknowledge that most owners of capital are not entrepreneurs at all but simply collect a return on their investment that is managed by someone else. What is more, the argument begs the question at issue: namely, why capitalists are entitled to the exclusive ownership of control of capital. The claim is that this entitlement flows from the fact that capitalists take risks with their capital. But of course workers are also risk takers. The worker who signs on with an entrepreneur takes the risk of finding himself without a job if the venture fails. Only the entrepreneur, of course, risks capital because only the entrepreneur has capital to risk. But this exclusive ownership cannot be Justified by entrepreneurs' risking their capital because the question is precisely why only the capitalists have capital to risk. The preceding arguments do not show that the workers are exploited in the sense of having some of their products wrongfully taken from them. All we have shown so far is that the capitalists receive something that they have no right to receive. Capitalists gain by virtue of their ownership of capital, and so far there is no legitimate defense of that gain.9 Once we give up the labor theory of value, we will be less likely to think of exploitation in the specific sense in which Marx and EngeJs use that term, namely, as expropriating labor from workers. Instead, we can say more generally that workers are exploited because if they lived in a system where they controlled capital, themselves, they would obviously be better off in concrete monetary terms, as they would have some capital at their disposal. The upshot is that workers are exploited because (1) the exclusive ownership of capital by the capitalists leaves the workers worse off than they might be and (2) the arguments offered to justify the capitalists' exclusive ownership and control of capital are defective.10

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Til

Many theorists believe that these two conditions of exploitation—that workers do not control capital and. that the capitalists are not entitled to control it—are sufficient for exploitation to occur.11 But other readers of Marx believe that this account of exploitation leaves out an important aspect of exploitation, specifically, that exploitation involves coercion: Workers do not have a choice whether or not to participate in the management of capital; no one questions whether or not all members of society might have a right to help manage capital. And why would workers accept the capitalists' exclusive control of capital? The answer is that their acceptance is compelled by economic coercion. But is the labor contract not freely entered into? This apparent contradiction in Marx's account of the relations between workers and employers is resolved by considering different senses of the word "free" that we examined in Chapter 4. Yes, workers under capitalism enter freely into a contract with their employers. They are not compelled by law to work or to work for a particular person or to work under specified conditions. They are not slave laborers, nor are they serfs. Hence it is perfectly true that the workers have chosen their jobs—chosen them freely in the sense that they were not compelled by the threat of violence to accept them. But they never had a choice between exploitative and nonexploitative work. No capitalist workplace puts the capital earned under the democratic control of all the workers. The fact that workers have a choice among different capitalist workplaces is not relevant to their exploitation. Besides, workers own little or no property and certainly no property that they can use to produce their means of subsistence—no land, no substantial savings that they can invest in order to live off the interest, no capital for starting a business of their own. They need to work in order to live. The very fact of not owning means of production thus compels them to work under the best conditions they can get. The worker must take one of these exploitative jobs, compelled by economic need (i.e., by the threat of starvation) even if not by the threat of physical violence. But it is clear that for the workers the threat of starving if they do not work is not so different from the threat of physical harm that the feudal lords used against the serfs. The final effect in either case is severe physical suffering. Hence, although free in one sense, the workers are truly coerced in another. It is an interesting reflection on capitalist ways of thinking that we regard threatening someone with a gun or a baseball bat as illegal acts, whereas threatening someone with poverty or unemployment is regarded as a legitimate move in the marketplace. Yet poverty, malnutrition, poor medical care, and lack of education pose as much threat of physical harm as does a gun or club. An objection that is frequently made at this point alleges that perhaps in Marx's day the worker was compelled to work by the threat of starva-

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tion, but in the developed capitalist countries governments pay unemployment insurance to address the need of the unemployed. Hence a worker does not have to work any more. Work is no longer compelled because workers can always go on the dole. Now it is true that workers without employment do not face starvation. But it is not true that the choice to work is a free one. That would be true only if working or collecting unemployment were at least equally desirable. But the levels of unemployment are always deliberately pegged below the minimum wage for the precise purpose of making unemployment less attractive than working. Only those who have never tried to live on unemployment insurance can believe that it is as attractive as drawing a wage. In a capitalist society, workers do not own means of production. Therefore (1) they need to work in order to live, and (2) someone else, the capitalist, controls access to the possibility of work. A condition of working is that the control of capital and of new capital produced in the workplace by all who work there—not only by the capitalist or the machines—remains exclusively in the hands of the capitalist. That is exploitative, and the worker must accept that exploitation by economic necessity. This arrangement gives the capitalists much greater power than the workers and thus much greater ability to shape the world to their own advantage and to the advantage of their children. Hence capitalism, even though it is a system of voluntary exchanges, is not a fair system. Some aspects, especially the limitation of control of capital to the capitalists, are not voluntary. Exploitation deprives workers of freedom in the economic sphere. Insofar as the workers have little power in the economic sphere, they have little control over what sort of world they live in and their place in it. Capitalism curtails the freedom of most human beings to determine intentionally and with forethought what sort of people they would like to be. Marx discusses lack of that kind of collective self-determination under the heading of "alienation." For Further Reading David Schweickart, "A Democratic Theory of Exploitation DiaJectically Developed," in Roger Gottlieb, eel., Radical Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), Notes 1. Even if you are fortunate enough to be able to make your choices from among desirable alternatives, you cannot always take pride in your good fortune and ascribe, say, your wealth to your hard work or intelligence; The person who can choose between working in a thriving family business or live off the proceeds

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of his trust fund is very fortunate. But he has no reason for attributing his good fortune to his own intelligence or hard work. Nor is he justified in ascribing the poverty of others to their laziness or stupidity. 2. For an interesting critique of this standard interpretation of Marx's conception of feudalism, see John E, Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983). 3. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p, 56. 4. This formulation leaves out an important qualification: The value of a commodity corresponds to the "socially necessary labor time." Commodities are sold in the market where prices are determined by supply and demand. If a certain commodity is generally produced with a particular technology, the people who employ a less efficient technique of production cannot therefore charge more than the producers operating at the prevailing level of technological or organizational efficiency. This means, for instance, that small producers who cannot avail themselves of "economies of scale" must nevertheless sell at the prices asked by large producers. The effect is often that small producers are put out of business. 5. Helpful criticisms of Marx's labor theory of value, including Ms theory of exploitation, may be found in N. Scott Arnold, Marx's Radical Critique of Capitalist Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), chapter 3, and Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 127-141. 6. David Schweickart, "A Democratic Theory of Exploitation Dialectically Developed," in Roger Gottlieb, ed., Radical Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).' 7. Arnold, Marx's Radical Critique, pp. lOlff. 8. This argument is developed in detail in chapter 1 of David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 9. A different sort of defense of capitalism and the return of interest to the owners of capital is often given at this point of the argument: Capitalists may not have contributed anything to merit interest but the capitalist system is, as a whole, the most productive, most innovative, and hence most desirable economic system known to humankind. If giving the interest to the owner of capital is part of that system, so be it. For an elaborate rebuttal of that claim, see Schweickart, Against Capitalism. 10. See John Roemer, "New Directions in the Marxian Theory of Class and Exploitation," in John Roemer, ed., Analytic Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 81-113. 11. John Roemer, "Second Thoughts on Property Relations and Exploitation," in Robert Ware and Kai Nielsen, eds., Analyzing Marxism, supplementary vol. 15, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Calgary: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1989), pp. 257-266.

10 Alienation ALTHOUGH MARX USES THE concept of alienation in a number of senses (as we will see), it Is important to notice at the very beginning that "alienation" in the writings of Marx has a different meaning from what the word means today. In contemporary usage "alienation" often refers to how persons feel. They are said to be "alienated" when they feel distant from another person or from an institution. In a somewhat stronger sense, someone is said to be alienated when, the feeling of estrangement finds expression in action. There is a good deal of talk about "alienated youth"—young men and women who do not feel that they are a part of the prevailing institutions and who therefore do not observe accepted rules of conduct. They express their alienation by dressing in ways designed to draiv attention to themselves and offend conventional sensibility and by acting in other ways that show their disregard or contempt for the rules of conduct accepted by most people. These uses of the word "alienation" are only tenuously connected with the meaning that Marx gives to the word. In trying to grasp what Marx is trying to say we must put aside current meanings of the word. Alienation in Marx's Early Works Marx's essay "Alienated Labor" (EPM, T 70-81) begins with some of the aspects of capitalism; the division of labor, exchange value, the tendency of workers to grow poorer and of capital to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and, the inevitable division of society into the two classes: property owners and the propertyless workers (EPM, T 70). These and other features of capitalism Marx associates with the concept of "private property," (Marx means by that term the private ownership of the means of production, not of consumption goods, such as the house you live in, the car you drive, or the clothes you wear.) 114

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How did private ownership of the means of production come about? In 1844 Marx was looking for a philosophical answer to the question, Why does capitalism exist? He wanted to derive the nature of the existing system from a set of concepts, But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labor, it is really its consequence (EPM, T 79; italics added)

The project is to understand capital by providing, much as Hegel had done, an analysis of the relevant concepts. Marx wanted to demonstrate "how they [viz, the laws of capitalism] arise from the very nature of private property" (EPM, T 70). In his mature work, he replaced this philosophical method of explanation, in which a situation is explained by making connections between concepts, with another method of explanation, in which one explains a social fact (e.g., capitalism) by writing its history. The method of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is not the method of Capital. Marx and Engels rethought their method of explanation in the course of writing German Ideology. They never completed the philosophical explanation of "private property"; rather, they replaced it with the historical explanation in Capital.1 The essay "Alienated Labor" remained a fragment Marx replaced his philosophical by an economic-historical method. In his mature works, it is also much clearer than in this youthful essay that there are at least two distinct concepts of alienation. The first of these, the alienation of labor, is very familiar. The second, the alienation of all persons in a capitalist society, has received less attention among commentators, I discuss these two concepts of alienation separately. Worker Alienation What is this condition of alienation? Marx distinguishes four aspects of it: 1. Human beings are alienated from the objects of their work. What workers produce does not belong to them; it belongs to their employers. But why is that a problem? Suppose workers in an automobile plant were not paid in money but were instead paid in kind, that is, they received an automobile every so often; would they then not be alienated? The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object ... but that it exists outside him ... and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him. (EPM, T 72)

The product of the worker at issue here is surplus value. The worker produces the money needed to pay wages and to reproduce buildings, raw materials, and so on. But the worker also produces surplus value that be-

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longs to the capitalists. The capitalists reinvest surplus value and thus strengthen their economic position and with it their position of power in relation to other capitalists and to the workers. The more workers work, the more surplus value they produce and the more they therefore increase the power of the capitalist. The alienation of the workers consists in the fact that in doing their work, they strengthen the power of the opposing class. 2. Why do they do that? We already know the answer to that. Because they have nothing to offer in the labor market except their ability to work, they must work in order to live. They must work whether they want to or not; they must therefore also work to strengthen their enemies whether they want to or not. Marx presents this point in discussing the second aspect of alienation, the worker's alienation front the activity of working; "His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor" (EPM, T 74). Work is not something people choose freely, for that implies the possibility of refusing to work. It is to that extent not something that is "theirs"; "it is not ftheir] own but someone else's" (EPM, T 74), and hence it is not something in which the worker affirms him- or herself. 3. But human beings, as we noted repeatedly, define what it means to be human not directly but by shaping their world to be a certain way. It is in work that human beings create what it means to be human. To the extent that that is a deliberate process, human beings are actually free (EPM, T 75). But what shall we say of people who work whether they want to or not, who have no control over what they do and how they go about it, and who therefore have no control over the sort of world that their work creates? Industry is a major source of pollution, to give just one example of what is at issue here. Insofar as people must work industrial jobs because this is all that is available to them, they are forced to produce an environment they would not choose if they had a better alternative. The implication is that the activity of working, which is potentially the source of human self-definition and human freedom, is here degraded to a necessity for staying alive. Work could be the source of a genuinely human life, but here it comes to be no more than the prerequisite for maintaining biological existence. Alienation "makes individual life in its abstract form" (viz. mere biological survival) "the purpose of the life of the species" (EPM, T 75). It precludes the question. What should life be like? The life of human beings comes to be little different from that of animals. In that sense, alienation is dehumanization. 4. Human beings are, finally, not only forced to work in ways and under conditions not of their choosing but they are also forced to compete with one another for work and are thus separated from their fellow humans. Here we encounter one sense of "alienation" that is often referred to as "worker alienation"—the situation of most wageworkers. They do dull and repetitive work that is of no intrinsic interest to them. They have no

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control over what they do and how they do it. Instead, they have to take orders and often are treated with little respect. But this suggests the beginning of another sense of "alienation" that refers to lives that appear empty and aimless. This is the sense of alienation portrayed in the works of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus. It is the state of those who work only to survive. In an affluent, First World culture, this alienation is experienced by those for whom acquiring commodities and working to pay for them is the sole content of life. Boredom and anxiety are held at bay by an ever more frantic pace of purchasing new commodities. The shopping mall is the high temple of that sort of existence. Alienation is its hallmark, Alienation in the Later Works Marx rarely uses the word "alienation" in his mature work. But it is not difficult to see the form in which the aspects of alienation already mentioned return as dominant themes in Capital, The doctrine of "relative immiseration" (which I discuss in Chapter 11) asserts that as workers keep producing profits for the capitalist class, the total mass of capital—and with it the power of capital over the working class—grows faster than the wealth and power of the working class itself. The worker's alienation from the product of his or her labor described in the early essay as the situation of individual workers returns in Capital as the lot of the entire working class under capitalism; that is, alienation only strengthens the opponent of the working class, the capitalist class. What in Marx's early piece lie calls the worker's alienation from the activity of production recurs later as the defining characteristic of capitalism—namely, that there is a large class of workers who have nothing to sell in the marketplace besides their ability to work and who therefore must sell, their ability to work. Machines, raw materials, and buildings become "capital" only when that propertyless class has come into existence and is ready to be exploited. Once sold, that ability to work is under the control of the employer, thus opening the way to exploitation. "Forced labor" becomes the precondition for forcible exploitation, The theme of "dehumanization" returns in the discussion of exploitation: Workers (as we saw in the preceding chapter) are excluded from control over capital. They are therefore excluded from thinking about, planning, and directing the ways in which their society and with it their lives will develop. For the ways in which capital is invested will determine what sort of society we live in. If capital is invested in armament factories, we get a very different society from one that invests its capital in schools, parks, and sports facilities. The activities of the exploited workers serve merely their survival and that of their families; it is not a means for building a better, genuinely human society.

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Capital stresses the divisiveness of the capitalist labor market as explicitly as does the essay "Alienated Labor": Workers must compete against one another, Marx's concept of alienation is often understood to refer to how individuals feel,2 Such an interpretation accords more nearly with how we talk today, when the word "alienation" has to do with how people feel, not about their relations to things, activities, or other persons in the world. That reading of Marx is, of course, based on the text In. his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself, he does not feel content but unhappy. (EPM, T 74) But this is a very one-sided reading, because it overlooks all the other aspects of alienation that cause this feeling of unhappiness. The word "alienation" does not refer just to the feelings of individuals but to their social condition, which may or may not cause them to be unhappy. It refers to the fact that workers are forced to accept what they do not want and are as a result forced to strengthen their enemies, at the same time becoming weakened by dissension with other workers over the opportunity to work. Whether or not workers feel unhappy as a consequence, the condition of alienation remains. It is not at all clear that feeling unhappy is even a necessary condition for being alienated. It certainly is not sufficient. More plausible but nevertheless inadequate is the frequent reading that defines alienation as a lack of self-realization. Workers, unable to choose their work, often cannot find meaningful work, have limited access to means of education, and, certainly in Marx's day, had no meaningful leisure. Hence their work and their lives present no challenge, no opportunity for growth and personal development. This interpretation most commonly takes alienation to be the failure to fully develop the human essence. But Marx, once emancipated from, his early philosophical preoccupations, does not appeal to any human essence,3 This interpretation of Marx's concept of alienation takes into account the value Marx attaches to the full development of each individual person, but it is still incomplete. It does not do full justice to Marx's claim in "Alienated Labor" that human beings are potentially free because they are species beings and that, insofar as they are not actually free, they are alienated. The same claim reappears in somewhat different words in Capital, in which the term "species being" itself is no longer used though the conception of human freedom implicit in that term remains important. Alienation and Freedom This conception of freedom is a direct consequence of Marx and Engels' conception of human nature as self-creating, in the fairly complicated

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sense explained in the first few chapters of this book. Human beings "create themselves" in the sense that their actions to solve ordinary problems affect what sorts of institutions govern their lives. Such institutions shape what sorts of persons human beings are most likely to be. Different institutions demand different typical character structures, attitudes, values, and patterns of conduct from, human beings. The sort of person who flourished in one culture might be a misfit in another. In the medieval world, one could be a monk and lead a contemplative life of prayer, scholarship, and service. Monks did not need to be competitive; being aggressive and looking out for one's own interests was in fact discouraged. The traits that would make a good monk were hardly those that make a good entrepreneur. For persons with the inclination and abilities to lead the life of a monk, there are far fewer opportunities today than there were then. But there is a much greater range of opportunities for those with personalities that suit them to be entrepreneurs. In this discussion of alienation and elsewhere, Marx and Engels use a concept of freedom, that is unfamiliar to us. Freedom in their sense belongs not to individuals separately but only to people insofar as they live under a particular social system. People are free, in this sense, if they can and do choose deliberately how to organize their social and. economic institutions with, a view to making themselves and future generations into the most desirable sorts of persons. A human being is free if he contemplates himself in a world he has created. (EPM, T 76)

In the past, Marx and Engels believe, the creation of certain personalities and behaviors was mostly incidental to various measures taken, to solve concrete social and economic problems: We have seen that the capitalist process of production is a historically determined form of the social process of production in general. The latter is as much a production process of material conditions of human life as a process taking place under specific historical and economic production relations, producing and reproducing these production relations themselves, and thereby also the bearers of this process, their material conditions of existence, and their mutual relations. (Gil, T 439; italics added)

In their time Marx and Engels believed that genuine freedom—the deliberate and thoughtful shaping of the social order and consequently of what it is to be a human being—was within reach. Once only a possibility because humans lacked the material preconditions for making use of their capacity to determine what human life could be like, freedom is now ready to be actualized. Of course freedom could not be realized in a capitalist society because of its "anarchy," because careful planning of institutions was impossible. For

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in a capitalist society the decisions about how social wealth will be employed are made exclusively by capitalists. Without exception, they make those decisions with a view to increasing profits, not with a view to improving life for all: If greater profits can be made with weapons than with hula hoops, then that is where they will invest their capital. Capitalists cannot consult the members of society whose lives will be affected by the capitalists' investment decisions. This freedom becomes unavailable under capitalism because of the very characteristic of capitalism that its defenders regard as its special virtue—namely, that every individual need only act as a rational, self-interested agent and the market will automatically take care of the work of coordination. Under capitalism., persons have to be rational utility maximizers; they have to use their resources as well as possible, given their own desires and needs. They must be certain kinds of persons. The question whether we might want to arrange our institutions differently, whether, for instance, we would like to live in a world that is less competitive or a world in which possessions—making money—are less important than they are in ours—such a question cannot even be asked. If the question were ever asked, the apostles of capitalism would certainly answer it in the negative. But in giving this answer, one gives up the freedom to shape oneself in association with one's fellow human beings into the sorts of persons one would most like to be. That sort of freedom of collective self-creation is not available under capitalism.4 The concept of freedom, Marx and Engels use here is quite specific: It means for a group to be free to make its life activity itself the object of the group's will and consciousness. But today freedom usually has a different meaning. We are accustomed to calling a person free who, individually, can do as he or she pleases, If people want to spend their time drinking, or writing thick historical novels, they are free if no one hinders them from, doing what they want. Marx and. Engels appreciated the importance of this freedom of individuals to do as they please but insisted on its limitations: This right to undisturbed enjoyment, within certain conditions, of fortuity and chance has up till now been called personal freedom. (GI, T198)

In a society, such as ours, where more individuals than in previous cultures have far-reaching personal freedom, everyone, subject to certain legal restrictions, is allowed to pursue his or her private goals. Individuals may choose to drink or to write, but they make those choices and act according to them in a social framework over which they have next to no control. The shape of the institutions under which we live is the fortuitous outcome of those individual pursuits. The shape of the capitalist system as a whole is the result not of various collectively taken decisions but of the choices made by separate individuals in competition with one

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another. The shape of the social system as a whole is therefore the result of "chance." Where there is only individual freedom and competition but no collective decisionmaking, individuals have personal freedom but, at the same time, are at the mercy of forces over which they have no control. It is possible to have "personal freedom" but to lack the other freedom that comes only with collective control over society. In this second sense, human beings are free to the extent that the group to which they belong, together, shapes its way of life as the group chooses. As people have different ideas about how best to fashion their lives, such collective decisionmaking inevitably involves discussion and the weighing of different desires and outlooks. People are free, therefore, when they collectively think about what their lives should be like and try to arrange their society accordingly. This collective decisionmaking produces what Marx and Engels called "human freedom" because the capacity for that sort of shaping of human lives is what Marx and Engels regard as distinctive in human beings. Only groups that think and act together can acquire the power to shape their social settings. Only in that way do they acquire a new kind of freedom and enhance their personal freedom. For in a society such as ours, personal freedom, is everywhere bounded, by institutional restrictions. Our personal freedom ends where the power of the separate individual ends. By joining with others for collective control, we enhance the power and thus the freedom of each of us.5 In a capitalist society, this freedom is not available. Therefore capitalism alienates both workers and capitalists: The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its awn power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement."

The collective reflection and choices of how to live and where to put energies and resources—the precondition for human freedom—are impossible under capitalism. Since there is no collective, democratic process that allows the citizens together to decide how to invest and utilize social resources, no one has control over the institutions of the society and what sort of persons they, together, choose to become. Hence both workers and capitalists are alienated. But at least the capitalists have the power over capital and thus can make life good for themselves within the limits of the prevailing economic system. The workers, because they are exploited and thus without power over capital and how it will be used, are "annihilated in estrangement." For the workers, exploitation places narrow limits on their personal freedom. Their personal freedom is mainly confined to

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their activities as consumers (see Chapter 11), Capitalism grants a wide degree of personal freedom but does not permit human freedom, because it does not permit human beings to plan their production processes with a view to what sort of society these will create and how they will affect human nature. We will be able to overcome this alienation only once capitalism has been abolished. This life process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil, until it is treated as production of freely associated human beings and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan, (CI, T 327)

We shall return to this vision of the future below. All of this is very abstract. But it allows us to make two summary statements: 1. Marx and Engels use the term "alienation" in a range of significant senses. A. "Worker alienation" refers to a whole complex of conditions at work for most people: having to take orders, being treated disrespectfully doing work that is repetitive, having no say over the way the job is done, being dependent on the employer's decisions or the vagaries of the market for one's livelihood, and so on. B. We have mentioned commodification under capitalism before and will discuss it at some length in the chapter that follows. "Alienation" often refers to the consequence of this commodification: For many people, buying and consuming goods has become the central goal of their lives. But that is not a sufficiently substantial goal to carry one through the hard periods in one's life or allow one to make hard choices. Hence, the sort of cosmic disorientation portrayed by Kafka or Camus is frequent in capitalist societies. Following Marx, many authors refer to this condition as "alienation." 2. But "alienation" also has a more general meaning. The central insight is that social conditions structure the sorts of choices we have in life—how free we are to work or not to work and. to what extent we are able to think of work as something we like and that is "fulfilling" or a dire necessity that must be done for as much money as possible. Social conditions also shape human personalities: Capitalism, tends to produce people who are competitive; other cultures have produced persons given to contemplation and asceticism. In the background of this sense of alienation is the hope that in some future society we may be able to shape our personalities and those of future generations by creating institutions that favor the development we have chosen.

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This general insight is never developed to any extent in the work of Marx and Engels. They never explore in greater detail the effects of capitalism on our personalities. With the theory of alienation, Marx indicates a whole complex and fascinating field of study, but it was not something that interested him or that, perhaps, he had any particular aptitude for. Later Marxists have made some interesting contributions to this theory.7 We will see in more detail, in the discussions of class and class struggle (Chapters 12 and 13), that Marx's theory of class did not attend sufficiently to the question of how capitalism tends to affect the personalities of those living in such a society. Good nineteenth-century liberal that he was, Marx simply assumed that people would strive to live free if the necessary economic and social conditions existed and that they would struggle to create those conditions. For the traditional view of the workings of a market society, this conception of alienation constitutes a serious challenge. Markets benefit all because they provide to all as much of what they want as possible—so goes the standard defense. But what if desires can be perverted and thus a distinction is needed between what some persons want, in particular conditions, and what they would want if freed from those conditions? Before we praise the market society for fulfilling desires, we need to ask whether those desires need not be scrutinized first. What if someone is addicted to drugs and all he desires is another hit? Are we going to praise the market for meeting that desire? Some people would, no doubt, say that what an adult person wants should be available to that person. But many persons clearly believe that there are bad desires that should not be fulfilled. Thus desires are open to criticism. The concept of alienation develops that insight by suggesting that we need to be critical of desires and therefore be critical of the social and cultural forces that promote certain desires in us while suppressing others. Hence the market is not only open to criticism because it fulfills desires we should not have—such as desires for alcohol or cigarettes—but also because the market itself implants in us desires—for greater and greater consumption, for beating the competition—that we would prefer not to have. But the concept of alienation also creates problems for Marxian theory. One of the really interesting and pressing questions raised by the preceding discussion of alienation is whether perhaps capitalism itself deprives us of the burning love for liberty that the revolutionary working class, portrayed by Marx, would, need. Implicit in what we have said so far is this worry: If institutions make us into the sorts of persons we are, and if capitalism makes us into individuals with personal freedom, primarily as consumers, but deprives us of human freedom—so much so that most of us do not even suspect the possibility of human freedom—it is extremely unlikely that many people will be animated by a burning desire for

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human freedom. Their political struggles may well be confined within the limits of the kinds of goals that we have as members of a capitalist society. But then whence comes the revolutionary enthusiasm and willingness to sacrifice that Marx and Engels count on in the working class? The theory of alienation may well possess the theoretical resources to explain why revolutionary activity has been much, more intermittent and hesitant than Marx and Engels expected. This fact is not to be explained by "false consciousness" but by alienation (see Chapter 7). The theory of alienation as Marx and Engels left it, however, is too undeveloped to allow us to explain our reluctance to fight for a better world. I take up that question in Chapter 16. For Further Reading Alan W. Wood, Karl Marx, chapters 1-4 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981} and Richard Sehmitt, Alienation and Class (Cambridge: Schertkman, 1983), chapter 5. Notes 1. For an interesting and more complex account of the shifts in Marx's methodology see Jean L. Cohen, Class and Civil Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), chapter 1. 2. Erich Fromnx The Sam Society (New Yorlc Fawcett, 1955), p. Ill, 3. And with good reason. I have argued this in some detail in chapter 5 of Richard Sehmitt, Alienation and Class (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1983). 4. Such freedom was not available in previous cultures either. But in a capitalist society, Marx and Engels believe, the material, conditions are, for the first time, available for human beings to choose from among different ways of life, different sets of institutions. Capitalism makes this freedom of self-creation impossible by choice, whereas under previous modes of production, the tow standard of living made such free choices of institutions and the attendant personalities and behavior impossible, 5. For a more detailed discussion of Marx's concept of freedom, see George Brenkert, Marx's Ethics of Freedom (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). 6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 43. 7. Of particular interest is the extended argument of Max Horkheimer that capitalism accustoms working people to submit to authority because their limited individual freedom is balanced by the inescapable power of economic necessity. See Max Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family;" in Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1972), pp. 47-,1.28. The claim is that living in a capitalist society tends to encourage personalty types that are not interested in or prepared for living the lives of truly free persons. Similar issues are raised in a book that Horkheimer wrote together with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York:

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Seabury Press, 1972), which (among other things) raises questions about the sorts of persons who grow up in modem society "where culture and entertainment have become commodities, where ideas are produced for sale by mass media and most people "consume" ideas instead of thinking for themselves. The question is once more how capitalist culture shapes us into certain sorts of persons and makes us unfit for democracy and self-government. Similar ideas are pursued in Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967) and Erich Fromm, Tlte Satie Society.

11 The Future of Capitalism and Its Failures MARX AND ENGELS ARGUED that In the infancy of capitalism, when it is not fully understood, it is legitimate for the critics to depend on ethical considerations (see Chapters 8 and 15). Once social science has discovered the full trajectory of capitalism and we know that capitalism will inevitably be replaced by socialism, we need to leave ethical considerations behind and do our political work, based on our scientific understanding of the mode of production. The claim that socialism is inevitable has played a central role in the political movements inspired by the writings of Marx and Engels. It seems clear today that such a belief was erroneous. Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness, we need to examine briefly those predictions of Marx on which the belief in the inevitability of socialism relied. We also need to look at Marx and Engels' criticisms of capitalism. Even if they were mistaken in believing that capitalism was inevitably going to disappear, they had very good reasons for trying to accelerate that process. Marx's predictions have played an important role in the past 1.25 years. The political movements that took their inspiration and, to varying extents, their theories from the writings of Marx and Engels have come to accept an account of Marx's predictions that runs roughly as follows: The central drive of capital is for expansion by means of the reinvestment of profits. Hence every capitalist tries to increase profits. Capitalists can accomplish that increase by several means: They can keep wages as low as possible. Or they can improve their position relative to their competitors by increasing productivity and decreasing costs through die use of newer and more powerful machines or by manufacturing on a larger scale. Thus capitalists are bound to try to keep their wages as low as possible, to improve their technological capabilities, and to create larger and larger companies. 126

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While all of these strategies work to raise profits/ they also have other, less desirable consequences. The pressure to keep wages low results in the progressive impoverishment of workers. That in turn limits the purchasing powers of those workers and thus tends to give rise to crises of underconsumption when there is not enough demand for consumer goods. The lack of demand causes the regular occurrence of business failures, recessions, and depressions. At the same time, the transformation of the capitalist production process into larger and more mechanized forms transforms the working class. Workers learn to work together because it is only together that they have any product—it takes many men and women to produce one automobile, for instance—and only together will they be able to exert any power against capital. The constant drive for increased productivity through mechanization tends to raise the ratio of capital invested in machinery to capital invested in wages (organic composition of capital). There is an ever greater sum invested in machines per worker. As a consequence, the amount of profit produced per unit of capital goes down because, according to the labor theory of value, only labor creates profits. The decrease in the rate of profit makes the capitalists reluctant to invest and thus leads to stagnation in the economy. The lowering of the rate of profit has disastrous effects on businesses that are marginal already. The number of bankruptcies increases and, with it, the danger of general economic crisis. With the push for larger firms, monopolistic price-fixing by large corporations tends to replace the competition of the marketplace. As a result, less efficient enterprises are preserved. Capitalism thus loses the advantage of the competitive economy, which weeds out inefficient producers. More and more of them remain in business, contributing further to stagnation and low productivity. Capitalism becomes unable to fulfill its historical role of increasing human productivity. The capitalist marketplace is, in the words of the Marxian tradition, "anarchical": Every individual seeks to increase his or her profit, but there is no plan governing the market as a whole. But often the policies that are advantageous to individual capitalists are, if everyone pursues them, detrimental to all. It is, for instance, in the interest of the individual capitalist to cut wages. But if all capitalists cut wages, the aggregate purchasing power of the workers drops and with it demand for the goods the capitalists are trying to sell. Thus the individual capitalist's drive for profits has, in the aggregate, the opposite effect of what was intended: There are more and more severe economic crises at shorter and shorter intervals. It becomes increasingly apparent that the capitalist economic system is no longer functioning properly. The working class gets poorer and poorer, but it also gets better

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organized. When it becomes clear that the inevitable breakdown of capitalism is imminent, a proletarian uprising and socialist revolution ensue. This reading of Marx seems clearly supported by some of his most eloquent statements: As soon as this process of transformation [viz. from feudalism to early capitalism] has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom ... that which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is accomplished by the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of its capital. One capitalist kills many.... Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanisms of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter on the mode of production. . . . Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (CI, T 437-438)

The capitalists' drive for profits has these consequences: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

The immiseration of the worker, The falling rate of profit. The concentration of capital. More and more severe economic crises. A more united and better-organized proletariat. The final breakdown of capitalism. The proletarian revolution.

The traditional Marxist account of these developments regards all of them as certain. The immiseration of the proletariat is "necessary," as is the final breakdown of the entire system. Marxists were certain that all of this would take place; only the precise date of the occurrence was in question. In the next section, I show that this traditional account is mistaken. Marx and Engels did not prove that any of these developments is inevitable. How Reliable Are the Predictions of Marx and Engels? Tlte Immiseration of the Proletariat

It is a matter of controversy among interpreters whether Marx and Engels believed that the working class would grow progressively poorer in absolute terms. There certainly are passages, such as the one cited above and similar ones, particularly in the Communist Manifesto, in which they predicted the progressive impoverishment of the proletariat:

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In proportion as the repuisiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. , . . The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, (CM, T 479, 500)

Similar passages occur in Wage Labor and Capital (T 215ff.). Marx and Engels put forward the immiseration thesis more than once. It would be a mistake to regard this merely as a rhetorical exaggeration calculated to stir up the working class, whom they regarded as the agent of social transformation. Both Marx and Engels had ample empirical information to show that the workers in England in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century lived under generally worsening conditions. Marx documented this fact in grisly detail from government documents in the middle portions of ¥olume 1 of Capital. Engels had described the same situation earlier, in his work Ttie Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.1 The claim about the progressive immiseration of the working class fully accorded with the facts as they existed then. Significant numbers of workers earned less than they needed to support themselves and their families; their lives were destroyed by abject poverty. But Marx and Engels took pains not only to describe the impoverishment of workers in their own time (that was obvious to anybody who wanted to look) but also to assert that the same condition would continue with only minor changes in the future. In order to establish that contention, they argued another thesis—namely, that wages tended toward subsistence. Employers compete with one another. One way of improving one's competitive situation is to produce goods more cheaply than the competition, and one way of doing that is to lower wages. Employers thus are compelled by competition to drive down wages as far as possible, to a level at which they barely suffice to keep workers alive and able to work. It is not clear that Marx and Engels managed to establish that contention. Without entering into the esoteric details of the labor theory of value, one can see that capitalism brings with it a phenomenal rise in productivity: The amount of time needed to produce a given commodity constantly shrinks, so that fewer and fewer workers produce more and more goods. Marx was well aware of that: the development of the productiveness ... of capital sets in motion an ever increasing quantity of means of production through a constantly decreasing quantity of labor.... Every single commodity... also contains less materialized labor.... This causes the price of the individual commodity to fall.2

But as goods get cheaper, the total volume of goods expands. If productivity increases faster than wages fall, then growing exploitation may well go hand in hand with a rising standard of living. Marx recognizes repeatedly that even if one managed to establish that wages tend to fall because of exploitation, it does not follow that workers will, have a progressively lower standard of living or even that their stan-

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dard of living, defined by reference to the quantity of goods consumed, will not rise. Marx and Engels sometimes seemed to assert that workers will become poorer in absolute terms; at other times they recognized that their theory did not support such a claim. But if productivity rises, that not only improves the living standards of workers but also manages to produce more profits and thus contribute to further accumulation of capital: If capital is growing rapidly, wages may rise; the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position, The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened. (WLC, T 211)

While wages go up, the total mass of capital the capitalist class controls increases even more rapidly. As a consequence, workers may not get poorer in absolute terms of their consumption of goods because their standard of living is, in fact, going up. But their "social position"—that is, their power in relation to their employer—shrinks. Where formerly they dealt with the owner of their factory, whom they perhaps knew personally, they now work in a much larger company where they deal with "management," a faceless bureaucracy. This thesis is often referred as the "relative immiseration thesis."3 That is a misnomer, Immiseration refers to the suffering of the working class. It is not clear that the working class, given the improvement in its standard of living, suffers when the total investment in raw materials, machines, buildings, and so on increases even more dramatically. Marx's point is not primarily a prediction that the standard of living of workers would fall but that they would face a capitalist class whose economic power grew day by day. Marx and Engels failed to prove that the entire working class would be progressively impoverished by wage rates kept as close to bare survival as possible. But it is true that the efforts of the various working classes around the world have continued to bolster the power of their employers, Marx and Engels knew that capitalism was an international phenomenon ("Modern industry has established the world-market" [CM, T 475]), yet the power of the multinational corporations exceeds anything that they were familiar with. For workers organized in national unions, the globalization of capital means that workers are completely outmatched by multinational corporations, which are able to move plants and resources from country to country to escape unions in the workplace and government regulations on working conditions. Tlte Falling Rate of Profit

Marx's "law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit"4 reflected his realization that there were conflicting tendencies with respect to the rate of

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profit. On the one hand, he says, there is a long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall. On the other hand, there are counteracting tendencies. This falling rate of profit is undoubtedly central to Marx's thinking about the development of capitalist society. We noted earlier that he expected capitalism to come to an end when the relations of production—the private ownership of means of production—became "fetters" on the productive process. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. The means—unconditional development of the productive forces of society—comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of limited capital.5

Capitalists pursue profit, in part, through ever increasing mechanization, the "unconditional development of the productive forces of society." But that increases the ratio of capital invested in machinery to capital invested in labor required to produce any given commodity, what Marx cais the "organic composition of capital." According to the labor theory of value, change in the organic composition of capital depresses the rate of profit because it reduces the amount of labor that is capable of generating surplus value. Once we surrender the labor theory of value, however, the prediction that the rate of profit will fall is no longer proven. In the ongoing controversy about this topic, a number of people have investigated the question whether over the past 150 years the rate of profit has indeed fallen; the results of those investigations remain controversial and ambiguous. Marx acknowledges the existence of countervailing tendencies.* He therefore speaks about a tendency of the rate of profit to fall, though he still believes that this tendency exists. Many commentators question the reasons for his belief, however. The conclusion is inescapable that Marx did not conclusively establish the law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit. The Concentration of Capital

There is no question that capital has become much more concentrated since the 1700s. It is clear that Marx was right about that. Less clear is the extent to which the centralizing trend has contributed to the stagnation of capitalist economies. Many people believe that this has occurred to a significant degree, but Marx has no well worked out theory to prove it. Increased Frequency and Severity of Economic Crises

There is, similarly, no question but that capitalism is subject to periodic crises. Marxian theorists have derived these crises from, the falling rate of profit or from the immiseration of the proletariat. But inasmuch as these two theses are not fully demonstrated, the claim that crises will be more frequent and more severe also remains unsupported.

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The first four of the seven predictions (listed in the previous section) are thus open to doubt. These claims about the inevitable collapse of capitalism are not supported by a fully developed economic model. Marx's theory of crises remains incomplete, albeit full of fruitful suggestions. The remaining three predictions are not of a purely economic nature. The increasing unity and organization of the proletariat cannot be predicted on purely economic grounds but are clearly presupposed by the prediction that capitalism will collapse and that a proletarian revolution will take place. I discuss these predictions in the next section. Marx and Engels set forth another argument for expecting the inevitable collapse of capitalism that does not depend as narrowly on economic theory. We encountered it earlier in the discussion of historical materialism. There Marx and Engels tried to show that history can be subdivided into different epochs, each with its own mode of production. Modes of production are characterized by their own level of technology ("forces of production") and their social arrangements of ownership and control of technology ("relations of production")- Modes of production develop as long as the relations of production serve to encourage the development of the forces of production. Once the relations of production become a hindrance to the development of forces of production, the mode of production collapses and is replaced by a new mode of production. Some writers have taken this abstract scheme as a causal theory: One could predict the inevitable collapse of capitalism because sooner or later—according to historical materialism—the relations of production, the private ownership of means of production, would make the further development of the industrial production apparatus impossible. At that moment, capitalism would have to make way for socialism. But as I argued in Chapter 5, historical materialism is not a causal theory. It does not allow us to predict the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Rather, it summarizes, much too briefly, a historical process that in the past was enormously complex and that we have every reason to believe will be equally complex and not predictable in detail in the future.7 The End of Marxism? In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx proclaimed that "philosophers have only interpreted the world . . . ; the point, however, is to change it" (T 145). Accordingly, Marx and Engels were not content only to develop a theory of capitalist society and of history. They proposed a political program: that the working class, with its allies among the intellectuals, should organize itself toward the goal of taking power in its own behalf. The prediction that capitalism will fail and be replaced by socialism obviously adds considerably to the persuasive power of this political program.

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But what if that prediction turns out to be dubious? Interpreters disagree about the extent of the damage done to Marx's and Engels' socialist project. In the traditional Marxist view, the socialist program requires that the economic analysis and predictions be correct. Marxist politics presupposes the necessary collapse of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg, the most gifted leader of the German Social Democratic Party before World War I, stated this explicitly in her polemic against Eduard Bernstein, the leader of the moderate wing of that party: Bernstein began his revision of Social Democracy by abandoning the theory of capitalist breakdown. The latter, however, is the cornerstone of scientific socialism, and with the removal of that cornerstone, Bernstein must also reject the whole socialist doctrine.8 Luxemburg makes a strong claim: The Marxian political program for organizing the working class with a view to replacing the capitalists in power and installing socialism ("Social Democracy") is valid only if Marxian economic theory is firmly established. If one gives up the claim that socialism is inevitable, one gives up the entire socialist project. That view was not hers alone but, on the contrary, was widely shared. Economics was considered the "cornerstone of scientific socialism"; it was in relation to social policy what mechanics is in relation to engineering: Mechanics allows us to build bridges and buildings and machines that stand up for a long time. In analogous ways, economics was thought to offer a firm foundation for making social policy, and Marx's economics was proven sufficiently valid to play that role. The phrase "scientific socialism" implies both claims: that social science is capable of the same degree of certainty as physics and that the Marxian theory of socialism had reached, or was close to reaching, that degree of certainty. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can reexamine the Marxian claims and find that the capitalist collapse is not inevitable and socialism even less so.9 Does that admission also compel us to put away Marx's writings as of mainly antiquarian value and, even more important, surrender the socialist political program? Even if the predictions of Marx and Engels are no longer credible, we must still take their criticisms of capitalism extremely seriously. Marx and Engels pointed to many significant weaknesses of capitalism. For that reason, socialism is still a desirable social order. What Is Wrong with Capitalism: The Unseen Hand Is Inept Adam Smith in a famous passage asserted that as every individual endeavors, therefore, as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry and so direct that industry

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that its produce may be of greatest value, every individual necessarily labors to render the great revenue of the society as great as he can.... He intends his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end that is not part of Ms intention,... By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it10

People—more precisely, capitalists—invest their capital so as to bring a maximum return. They do this not from any concern for society as a whole, but because of the "unseen hand" of the market, their pursuit of their "own gain" promotes the interest of society better than if that had been their intention. This belief of Smith's has become a veritable dogma in our time. But in a series of criticisms of capitalism, Marx shows that this unseen hand works very badly. He argues powerfully that the pursuit of private economic interest does not produce the greatest advantage for all economic actions but on the contrary produces poverty and inequality is a threat to political and human freedoms, produces commodification and imperialism. Poverty and Injustice

Marx and Engels were mistaken in their claim that the entire working class would inevitably become poorer and poorer because employers were forced by competition to depress wages as dose to subsistence level as possible. But they were not at all mistaken in pointing out that capitalism breeds poverty in a number of different ways. On, the one hand, the general standard of living rises, as capitalism performs its miracle of expanding production. On the other hand, in the course of that expansion of production significant groups find their living standard. lowered. There are number of different mechanisms at work here. Toward the end of Capital, Marx summarizes the early history of capitalism. One key episode was the transformation of the English peasantry—who owned some land where they produced food for themselves (even if that land consisted of no more than their use of the "common")— into a landless proletariat: The great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufacturers, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave the direct impulse to these evictions. (CI, T 434)

With the opening of an export market for wool, feudal landowners took their land from the peasants and transformed former farms into grazing

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lands for sheep. The result was, on the one hand, increased profits for the landowners, who then proceeded to invest some of that new wealth in more land or in the newly developing capitalist industries, and, on the other hand, landless destitution for the farmers and their families. Comparable processes take place today in the countryside, particularly in developing countries. The large landowners employ landless agricultural workers who in most countries lead a hard and impoverished life. Rising food production does these rural workers little good because they can't pay for more food than they currently consume. One of the bitter ironies of capitalist agriculture is that in the midst of stepped-up food production, malnutrition increases in the countryside. Frequently, however, landowners discover that if they raise an export crop, such as bananas, coffee, or cocoa in South or Central America, they can make more money. But then the land formerly devoted to raising food for the indigenous population serves to raise export crops. Food tends to become scarce, and some food must be imported. Food prices tend to rise, and the poor get poorer. In addition, the landowner, now earning more from the export crop, can afford to invest in agricultural machinery that will make production more efficient, make more money for the big farmer, and put many agricultural laborers out of work. They are definitely impoverished even, if the gross national product (GNP) of the country rises. Conversion of agriculture to export crops has deprived these farm laborers and their families of their ability to make a living in the country; they hope instead to make some sort of miserable living in the city. Hence the flood of people from the countryside who crowd into the shantytowns surrounding large urban areas in Central and. South America.11 In industry the tendency is to replace expensive labor by cheaper labor. Marx gives one example of that: The introduction of machinery dispenses with muscular power [and thus) becomes a means of employing laborers of slight muscular strength.... The labor of women and children was therefore, the first thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery. (CI, T 404)

The women and children replaced men who earned a higher wage. Similarly, new machines made formerly skillful work more automatic. The skilled worker can be laid off and replaced by one less skilled—who earns less. Work moves from high-wage areas to lower-wage areas, for example, from, the United States to Mexico or the Pacific Rim. As a consequence, wages for U.S. workers tend to drop because they are competing with workers whose standard of living and wages are significantly lower. Although it is not correct to predict an irresistible trend toward lower wages, it is also not true, as defenders of capitalism often claim, that the workers will inevitably be better off.

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Capitalism, as we saw in Chapter 8, has always tended to leave a significant portion of the population unemployed, Marx attributes this to two mechanisms: On the one hand, machines are labor-saving devices; the more powerful the machines, the lower the demand for workers. On the other, capitalism, needs to be able to invest the profits from previous production. New capital is spent on new productive facilities, but those will be useless by themselves unless there is a force of unemployed labor ready to be hired to run the new machines. Capitalism not only produces unemployment but also is unable to function without what Marx calls a "reserve army of the unemployed" (CI, T 422ff.). Most contemporary economists now acknowledge as well that capitalism, has a full-employment problem. Today economists speak of the "natural" rate of unemployment—defined as that level of unemployment below which inflation would accelerate.12 In many countries that rate of "natural" unemployment is 5 percent. For the individual worker, the permanence of unemployment at a significant rate means that her or his hold, on a job is always to some extent precarious. Workers cannot be sure that the jobs they have today will be there next week. Their companies may be bought up by another one and their jobs disappear in the process of consolidation; their companies may move production off-shore or contract out computer programming to a company abroad. Business cycles require restructuring of companies, closing of certain product lines or facilities, and so on. These are just some of the vicissitudes of business under capitalism. The result is that most jobs are impermanent, and wageworkers are therefore forever uncertain about their livelihood. Capitalism has produced astonishing growth. Marx and Engels never denied that. But the new wealth produced is not distributed evenly among all those who contributed to produce it. Labor produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. (EPM, T 73}

We have seen the systematic reasons for that For one, there is a tendency in capitalism to depress wages or to replace more expensive labor with cheaper. For another, the wealthy earn interest on their investments: They have two sources of income where the worker has only one. Thus as the capitalist succeeds in lowering wages, profits rise, as does the return on the investment. Here is the beginning of a mechanism to create permanent and increasing inequality.13 While Marx and Engels argued that the working class as a whole would be progressively impoverished by capitalism., the defenders of capitalism claim that the system inevitably improves the lot of the working class as time goes on. This second claim is as erroneous as the first.

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The standard of living of workers today is higher than that of their grandparents. But a significant proportion of those grandparents were unemployed during the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s and suffered terribly. The improvement in the general standard of living should not conceal the fact that on the way to that improvement significant groups suffered the pO¥erty and deprivation that are endemic to the capitalist system. Nor is poverty a tiling of the past. The same mechanisms that impoverished workers in the past are still at work today. Environmental Degradation

But defenders of capitalism are hopeful that a further extension of industrial production to those parts of the world that are still developing will eradicate the poverty that has been the rule in those places, and that it will do the same in the First World, where, after all, poverty also remains a permanent condition for many. In that confidence they share the belief of Marx and Engels that the progress of industrialization can continue indefinitely (whether with or without capitalism is a question that does not matter at the moment). In the past fifty years, however, we have learned that the natural resources required for industrialization are not available to provide a First World living standard for all inhabitants of the globe. There is not enough energy, not enough clean air and clean water. There are not enough trees. Hence there is no basis for the faith that the extension of First World capitalism to all corners of the globe will finally overcome the poverty that has always characterized capitalism. Marx and Engels are right: Capitalism produces castles for the rich and hovels for portions of the working class. What Is Wrong with Capitalism: The Threat to Freedom and Democracy The central mechanism in all these economic processes that produces inequality, poverty, and economic insecurity is the basic capitalist process of capital accumulation, with its constant striving for greater profits. The central mechanism of capital accumulation is exploitation, the appropriation by capitalists of the returns to capital. But as we saw in Chapter 9, this private appropriation of capital has no justification. Capitalism takes what belongs to all and gives it to some. Capitalism is unjust. Capitalism and freedom

Liberalism, which has dominated the political traditions in the West, has always demanded that each person be allowed to conduct his or her life according to the plan each chooses. Hence liberalism has supported freedom of thought and religion and far-going tolerance for different ways

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of conducting one's life, as long as one is willing to allow the same latitude for others. But Marx and Engels point out that the liberal ideals do not apply to people who work for a living, Economic necessity shapes their life-plans. They cannot live according to plans they devise freely for themselves. In a variety of ways, capitalism curtails the freedom, of the majority of people. We discussed this at some length in Chapters 8 and 9. Workers are forced to take jobs they do not like, jobs that do not do justice to their skills and abilities. Many work more than one job in order to maintain their customary standard of living. What is more, the employer subjects them to close supervision on the job. They lack autonomy at work, and they lack autonomy, the ability to run their own lives, outside of the workplace because workers are exploited. That means, as we saw, that the capital resources of the society are administered exclusively by a small class of capitalists, while the workers have no say whatsoever in investments. But different investment strategies provide very different kinds of lives for workers (Shall we invest social surplus in education or in arms production?). As long as capital is privately owned and administered, workers are deprived of substantive freedoms to determine their own lives. Still to come in Chapter 14 is the argument of Marx and Engels that capitalism and. democracy are not compatible. Not only does capitalism curtail the freedom of individuals with respect to their worklives and their lives away from work, but it also curtails their freedom as citizens. We examined Marx's various explications of the concept of alienation in Chapter 10, Alienation, too, consists of a deprivation of freedom—the freedom for a people to choose what sorts of institutions they will live under so as to encourage certain types of personalities and discourage others. Under capitalism there exists no freedom for human beings to shape deliberately what sorts of people they will be, what they will value and work for. It is not open to us to be critical of and to replace a system that encourages self-interest as a central human motive, that demands that we compete with one another, that we care more for what happens to us than what happens to those with whom we compete. Corn modified tion

As we saw in Chapter 7, the market and production for a market are important characteristics of capitalism. In a capitalist society, as Marx also often says, production is not for use but for exchange. One produces with an eye to selling whatever the product may be. This brings with it several difficulties. A society oriented toward making profits by making and selling commodities becomes a society in which everyone is pushed to buy more and more. In order to do that, everyone must make more money in order to acquire more things.

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Everyman speculates upon creating a new need in another..,. With the increasing mass of objects, therefore, the realm of alien entities to which man is subjected also increases,... Man becomes increasingly poor as a man; he has increasing need for money in order to take possession of the hostile being.... The need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economic system. The quantity of money becomes increasingly its only quality,14

In a commodity society, acquiring commodities becomes one of, if not the, most important value. Money counts for more than human excellence or powers. Human values are strongly distorted. But Marx points out that capitalism is expansive; more and more goods are turned into commodities. As long as that applies only to clothes or food, we are not troubled. If parental care for children is turned into a business and parents are replaced by paid nannies or daycare centers, some people begin to worry. When public officials are prepared to perjure themselves for money, when scientific and scholarly expertise goes to the highest bidder, we have entered a time when everything that people had considered as inalienable becomes an object of exchange. This is the time when things which till then had been communicated but never exchanged, given but never sold; acquired but never bought—virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience etc.—when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of great corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy, when everything moral or physical, having become a marketable value, is brought to the market to be assessed at its truest value.15 You must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e. useful. If I ask the political economist: Do I obey economic laws by offering my body for sale, by surrendering it to another's lust? . . , Or am I not acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans?—Then the political economist replies to me; You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with.... But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? (EPM, T 96-97)

Commodification comes into conflict with morality—and wins. We can see examples of this everywhere: corrupt politicians, manufacturers who conceal the fact that their products are a danger to consumers' health, advertisers who misrepresent their products, public relations firms that make superstars out of people with moderate talents and national leaders out of people without intelligence, academics who lend their scholarly support to the highest bidder, political operatives who work for the election of anyone who pays enough, doctors who refuse to care for poor patients, universities that will teach only the children of the rich, lawyers who get acquittals for their rich and guilty clients and watch the innocent go to jail if they are poor. Commodification does indeed produce "univer-

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sal venality." The moral value of certain actions and personal traits is replaced by its "true value," that is, what you can get for it in the marketplace. Thus personal integrity loses its value and is replaced by immorality because integrity does not pay but immorality does. Commodification corrupts the entire society, and there is no point in calling for a return to old-fashioned values, as many politicians do, while leaving capitalism unscathed. It is important to notice, particularly at a time when the virtues of the "free market" are proclaimed daily, that most societies are in fact strongly aware that not all goods should be turned into commodities. Hence we have any number of legal restrictions on what sorts of things may be sold, and the volume of these restrictions grows daily. Consider some obvious items on this list. We are not allowed to buy or sell human beings or plants and chemicals that the government regards as harmful; many states prohibit the sale of fireworks and tools for opening locks. Political influence; access to privileged commercial information; examination questions; confidential information about someone's medical, or academic history; official papers such as birth certificates and drivers' licenses; and other similar items may not be bought or sold. This suggests two interesting conclusions about commodification.. First, it suggests that we are not convinced that a free market is a good institution unless it is carefully restricted to commodities we want to see bought and sold. In addition, that legislation needs to be passed continually to stop commercial practices we regard as harmful, unfair, or immoral shows that the capitalist marketplace has the potential to spawn many activities that offend our moral senses or are clearly harmful. The ultimate outcome of the process of commodification is that personal identities also become commodities: What I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy myself the most beautiful of women.... The effect of my ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money.... I am stupid . . . [but the stupid person] can buy talented people for himself and is he who has power over the talented not more talented than the talented? ... (EPM, T 103-104)

Personal identities themselves become commodities and persons become mere facades of human beings. (See Chapter 3.) Imperialism In the days of Marx and Engels, the relations between the western European countries and the rest of the world were mostly colonial Western European nations militarily occupied large parts of Africa and Asia. They used these colonies for three purposes: to extract raw materials, to sell

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their own merchandise, and to invest the capital generated by their industries. Marx describes the effect of the British on India: They continued the "plunder of the interior," they exported British cottons to India, and they exported British capital to build railroads and telegraphs. While India was used to being plundered, the major damage was done by the import of British goods. Life in Indian villages had for centuries revolved around agriculture and textile production in the home. But those handwoven textiles could not compete with the cheaper machine-produced goods brought in from England, As a result The British intruder broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning wheel,... British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agriculture and the manufacturing industry. (T656)

British colonial rule changed the face of Indian society. Marx is willing to acknowledge that these changes were not all intrinsically evil: Indian society had not changed much for many centuries, and change may well have been necessary. But the import of British goods as well as the investment of British capital would not, Marx believed, "mend the condition of the mass of the people" because improvement for the majority required not only "the development of productive powers, but also ... the appropriation by the people" (T 662). As long as benign influences of colonialism (and the same is true of current versions of neocolonialism.) are accidental side effects of the pursuit of profit, the well-being of the majority of people will not be under the control of the colonized. Those remarks applied to colonial rule in India. But in the postcolonial era the relations between developed and underdeveloping countries show some of the same traits: Capitalist investments bring about changes in underdeveloping countries, as do goods imported from the First World. The resulting changes do not generally help the mass of people, nor do the people in the developing countries have any say in or control over the kinds of social changes that come about. The widely held belief that the condition in developing countries will improve if only capital and goods can be imported from the developed world is false: Relations of dependency rarely benefit the bulk of the people in developing countries16 and always leave their sovereignty impaired. In the postcolonial era, we still have to take Marx's criticisms of colonialism seriously. Colonial and postcolonial arrangements serve(d) the interests of the colonial and postcolonial powers. Their wealth is derived in part from the returns on their investment in the underdeveloped countries (if it does not derive from the outright theft of colonial resources, as practiced by the Spaniards in Latin America, the British in India, and the North Americans with respect to the land of Native Americans). This wealth is one of

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the underpinnings of the relatively free institutions of the richer countries. The elaborate justice system, that extends its protection to many citizens in the United States or Britain requires resources not available in poorer countries. The liberties of the citizens of the rich countries depends in part on their exactions from colonial or postcolonial peoples. Hence in a letter to Marx, Engels wrote, One can already notice here [viz, in Ireland] that the so-called liberty of English citizens is based on the oppression of the colonies.17 Capitalism and Democracy

In capitalist societies private property of means of production is of the essence. The economic life of a nation is kept distinct from its political life, In the economic sphere, each person is an independent economic agent Each pursues his or her own good as best as he or she can, and these independent economic actions are coordinated automatically by the mechanisms of the market In this private economic sphere, enlightened self-interest rules. But what sorts of citizens will men and women make if their worklives are dedicated to improving life for themselves without any thought to the well-being of others? How can there be a political community that attempts to make life good for all if each participant thinks only of his or her own good? Where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads not only in thought, in consciousness but in reality, in life, a double existence.... He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to the role of mere means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers, (On the Jewish Question, T 34)

As citizens, we are expected to think not only about what is good for ourselves but also about what is good for our country, for all of us. Certainly we expect public officials not just to make policy and administer it in order to enrich themselves but to govern on behalf and in the best interest of the people who elected them. A good deal of political rhetoric identifies some political actors as the tools of "special interests" while others have the common good at heart. In the background of that accusation is the assumption that representatives should serve the common good of all. (Without that assumption, the "special interest" accusation would make no sense.) But Marx points out that it is difficult for people to be public-spirited as citizens if as economic actors they care only for their own good. A capitalist democracy is bound to represent the private interests of the few as opposed to the interests of the large majority. Anyone who considers the political processes in developed countries today must

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admit that Marx's worries about capitalist democracy are well founded.18 Tn the discussion of the state, in Chapter 14, I discuss other reasons for being distrustful of capitalist democracy. The grand predictions of Marx and Engels have not come true because they were not as well supported as had long been thought. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels' critique of capitalism still deserves to be taken very seriously. Capitalism brings a higher standard of living for some and poverty and misery for others. In the hope of alleviating the poverty of some, it is likely to aggravate environmental crises. Capitalism is a threat to individual liberty—except the liberty to buy and sell. But that liberty gives rise to widespread corruption. It is not power that corrupts so much as the power of money. In addition, capitalism is a threat to countries that are less developed. The assumption that the pursuit of individual interest will, benefit the whole of society is unfounded. But perhaps capitalism is the best available system, even, if we accept all these strictures, Marx and Engels did not think so. We examine their alternative in Chapter 17. For Further Reading Andrew Gamble and Paul Walton, Capitalism in Crisis: Inflation and the State (London: Macmillan, 1976), chapter 4; David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapters 2, 3, and 4.

Notes 1, Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962). 2, Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 226. 3, Ernest Mandel, Marxist Ectmomic Theory, vol. 1 (New York Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 15011 4, Marx, Capital, vol. 3, part 3, 5, Ibid., p. 250. 6, Ibid., pp. 232 and 236. 7, Even if we do consider historical materialism a causal theory, its claims are open to serious question. The inevitability of capitalist collapse has not been established. See Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober, Reconstructing Marxism (London; Verso, 1992). 8, Rosa Luxemburg, "Social Reform or Revolution," in Dick Howard, ed,, Selected Political Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 123. 9, In some very general sense, we can be confident that capitalism will not last forever because no other social systems have survived centuries of change. But what will replace capitalism? We cannot be at all certain that a new and better society will take its place. 10, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into tin Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York Modern Library, 1985), p. 176.

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11. See, for instance, Alain Kouquie, America Latins, Introduccion al extremo Occidente (Latin America: Introduction to the Far West) (Mexico, D.F.: Siglo Veintruno, 1989), chapter 3. 12. David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p, 107, "Natural" unemployment is the rate at which, there is enough unemployment that workers cannot successfully demand higher wages. Once the unemployment drops below that rate, workers win higher wages and that, in turn, tends to drive up prices and increase inflationary pressures. 13. For empirical documentation of this tendency toward inequality in the United States, see the reports by Mishel cited in the Introduction. 14. Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p, 168. 15. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 34. 16. To cite just one example: When capitalist firms from the developed world build factories in developing countries, they often introduce state-of-the-art technology that is capital-intensive and thus creates relatively few jobs. But what most developing countries lack are precisely jobs. As a consequence of high unemployment and low wages, the internal market is small; there is limited demand for anything but the most essential consumption goods. Therefore new industries tend to produce for the luxury market, where there is money to be made. The mass of people thus is left outside the new industries and the new capitalist market. Their lives are not bettered by the relations to the developed countries. See, for example, Catherine M. Conaghan, Restructuring Domination: Industrialists and the State in Ecuador (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988). 17. Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 86. 18. This problem was not original to' Marx. It was first stated very clearly by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Ms Social Contract, For an interesting discussion of this whole train of thought in Marx, see Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 1 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974).

12 What Are Classes? THE CONCEPT OF CLASS IS centra! to the thought of Marx and Engels. Unfortunately Marx and Engels never provided a systematic account of what they meant by "class." The third volume of Marx's Capital breaks off in the middle of a sentence about a page and a half into the chapter on classes. All we have, aside from that, is a collection of single sentences or short paragraphs in their various writings from which their conception of class has been reconstructed. Little wonder, then, that there is a wide range of interpretations of their theory of class. Three Meanings of "Class" "Class" has a number of distinct meanings. The concept of class, in the first place, refers to the different roles in the economy of a country and the people who fill those roles. I will call that economic class. We can use the concept of class in that sense to classify people without paying any attention to their experience or their political positions. Only their economic role is relevant to their economic class position, Economic class is different from, class as a collection of people whose life experiences are similar because they live under similar conditions. People group themselves into different social classes insofar as they live under very different conditions. Thus workers who need to work, whether they want to or not, do not think of work as a "career" but as a "job." Together with that goes an attitude toward work different from the attitudes of capitalists or middte-class professionals. Similarly, women form a social class separate from that of men. Women may hesitate to be out alone after dark because of the threat of rape committed by men. The two classes have very different experiences. But the experiences and values of working-class women are again different from those of middleclass women, insofar as the latter have access to careers and have money MS

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to hire maids and nannies, while working-class women have to go to jobs and attend to housework and childcare. Similarly, the experiences of people of color are systematically different from those of white people in the United States; but the middle-class African American man has a different set of experiences from a poor African American woman. As a consequence, members of these social classes often also have different histories and therefore different values, different patterns of speech, and different traditions with respect to family and social life. Thus some social-class distinctions are connected with economic-class differences—the differences between workers, middleclass professionals, and. employers-—and some have to do with other things, such as gender and race. Finally, there are social-class groupings that have to do both with economic and other differences, such as working-class women or professional African American men. In a third sense of class, the term refers to collective political actors. The associated capitalists, organized into many organizations, have overwhelming power not only in the economy but also in politics in a capitalist society. They form an economic as well as a political class. They are probably also a social class insofar as their wealth and power allows them a set of experiences not available to the rest of the population. Workers, when they organize themselves into labor unions or parties or populist organizations likewise become political actors. They wield power, and the capitalists have to reckon with them. Such classifications help answer questions about the origins and development of our social order. Capitalism develops, as we saw in Chapter 7, when the society divides into owners of means of production and "free" laborers—workers who are neither slaves nor serfs, who own nothing but their ability to work. In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of production and of subsistence. They want transformation into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances, that center in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity possessors must come face to face and into contact: on the one hand the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other peoples' labor power; on the other hand free laborers, the sellers of their own labor power, and therefore the sellers of labor. (Cl, T 432)

The "control of the capitalist, [viz. over the worker] is in substance twofold" (CI, T 385). The capitalist functions like the conductor of an orchestra by coordinating the different activities-—"A single violin player is his own conductor: an orchestra requires a separate one" (CI, T 385). And the capitalist owns the means of production and controls the process of production. The worker does neither.

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The concept of economic class helps throw some light on the nature of capitalism and its difference from previous (and subsequent) modes of production. Capitalism—with its private ownership and control of the means of production—is possible only where there are several economic classes that differ with respect to the ownership of capital. The concept of an economic class helps us understand the general structure of capitalist societies. Capitalist society here appears to be split into two major classes: the owners of labor power and the owners of capital. Passages like the one cited above have yielded the conception of the nature of classes that has dominated traditional Marxism: Classes are groups of people characterized by their relation to the means of production. The capitalists own means of production; the workers do not V. I. Lenin provided the classical formulation of this conception of class, and it has since been repeated over and over again: Classes are large groups of people, differing from each other by the place they occupy in an historically determined system of social production, by their role in the social organization of labor and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they can dispose and the mode of acquiring it1

This conception of classes has three distinct aspects. Classes are (1) groups of individuals (2) who are united by having the same relation to something, and (3) the relations that serve to define a group of people as a class are economic relations. This concept of economic class, if defined by reference to the ownership of means of production, encounters a number of difficulties: To begin with there appear to be significant differences among people who own means of production. Marx and Engels were aware of the important difference between the capitalists proper and the owners of corner grocery stores, shoemakers, and other craftspeople who also own their means of production but do not hire labor at all or in very small numbers. Here seems to be a third economic class: those who own means of production but live mainly by their own work and. do not, or only minimally, depend on exploitation. While the capitalists exploit workers and thus accumulate more capital, the third class—the small owners—are not primarily exploiters. Marx and. Engels recognize this third class (they call it the "petty bourgeoisie") but predict that it will disappear: The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and. peasants—all. these sink gradually into the proletariat. (CM, T 479-480)

This prediction clearly did. not come true. While small enterprises tend, to be absorbed by larger ones, new small businesses keep cropping up. More important is that the economic class of all those who do not own means of production is much more heterogeneous than the traditional

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Marxian classification suggests. On the one side are the middle-class professionals, who, although they do not own means of production, have a markedly different economic role from the workers. They often manage the means of production for the capitalists or are, as we saw earlier, the capitalists' soldiers in the ideological, war over the maintenance or replacement of capitalism. Nor is it unambiguously clear that they are exploited rather than being themselves exploiters,2 On the other side of the scale are the people who are not workers but do not own means of production: These are thieves, street merchants, shoe shine boys, the people who wipe your windshield when you are stopped for a traffic light, beggars, small-time drug dealers. In developing countries often 40 percent of the population is in this so-called informal sector. The vast majority of these individuals are desperately poor; but they are not exploited by their employers, nor do they create surplus value or profits for the capitalists. Both of these groupings exemplify ways in which capitalism has changed since the days of Marx and, Engels. The middle-class professionals have become much more important. To the extent that capitalism is progressively less able to provide jobs for all, the numbers of the unemployed or underemployed grow steadily. What is more, this classification of economic classes completely ignores the differences among industrial workers and agricultural laborers and small farmers, even though in the time of Marx and Engels the majority of all people lived in the country and worked on farms. The traditional conceptions of economic class are unclear and full of uncertainty. Many authors summarily equate economic, social, and political class. Ignoring the complexities of the concept of economic class, they assume that all the members of an economic class automatically constitute one political actor: the proletariat. Marxists have often looked to all the people who do not own means of production to be, for that very reason, socialists. But this equation of economic, social, and political class often creates confusion and error.3 The members of the same economic class have a wide range of experiences depending, for instance, on their gender and race. Small proprietors have very different experiences, values, and ways of life depending on whether they have a small business in the city or whether they are small farmers. Religion plays a formative role in the outlooks of various groups, as does history. Workers of Irish extraction in the United States have a very different history, say, from Mohawk ironworkers. These backgrounds will most certainly affect their values and outlooks on the world. When the time comes for these workers with diverse histories and outlooks to unite—even if they have nothing to lose but their chains—they find many differences between them that make it harder to engage in concerted political action.

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Similarly, the equation of economic with political class is mistaken. This is most obvious when workers back extremely conservative regimes whose goal is clearly to support the capitalists against the workers; this happened in 1933 in Nazi Germany and does today in many countries. If economic class and political class are equated and we expect automatic opposition to the capitalists from the members of the economic proletariat, this political behavior on the part of workers is inexplicable. Attempts to explain the workers' support for such conservative regimes as the effect of "false consciousness" are self-defeating. If workers are so easily deceived, how can we expect them to create a better, a socialist world in which they will wield the power? The changes in working-class politics are much more easily understood if we differentiate economic from political class. We can then understand that while workers always form an economic class, they are not always a political class. The trajectory of political classes is quite different from that of economic classes. Any capitalist country has economic classes, almost by definition. But it sometimes has only one political class—the class that holds economic and political power. This is true when the working-class opposition is in disarray, as happens, for instance in wartime, when workers and their organizations suspend any oppositional action in order to support the war effort. There are no strikes. Workers' parties to do not seriously criticize the government. Workers as a political class also fade into the background under totalitarian governments when all working-class political activity is suppressed as "communist," such as in Nazi Germany or Augusto Pinochet's Chile in the 1970s, Working-class political power is eclipsed when the ruling capitalists manage to win decisive victories over the working class, as they did in the United States at the end of World War I and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Intimidated by rapid economic change and growing economic insecurity, many workers support conservative political candidates and forsake their own organizations. Those organizations become powerless for a while until they can rebuild. Economic and political classes, then, are not always identical. At times Marx and Engels were aware of these complexities. They are often explicit in stating that political classes are different from economic classes and that the latter have a very different and more difficult history. Hence they also have different criteria of identity. For political classes, class struggle, not the relation to the means of production, is decisive. Of course the two kinds of classes are connected with one another: A, certain division of economic classes is necessary for the development of a proletariat as a political actor, but it is not sufficient. It is much more likely that a member of the economic working class supports a political proletariat, but it is by no means certain. When we consider what Marx and Engels actually say about classes, we find that it is class struggle, not primarily

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the relation to the means of production, that forms people into a political class.

The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn achieves independent existence over against the individuals, (GI, T179) Here Marx cites class struggle as a necessary condition for people to form a class. Classes thus are not merely groups of people who have the same relation to the means of production; rather, they are groups of people in a "common battle" that ebbs and flows. In addition, the class develops and changes in the course of class struggle. As time goes on, it acquires permanent organizations (e.g., in the form of business associations in the case of capitalists or labor unions in the case of workers). Sometimes these organizations are very powerful, while at others they can barely survive, The small peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions, but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.... In this way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection between these small holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. (18th, T 60S) A group of people has the preconditions for forming a political class when they "live under economic conditions of existence that separate . . . [them] from, . . . other classes," that is, when they already form an economic class. But they form a class in a political sense only once their "identity of interests" generates "community" or a "national bond." People who are subject to the same economic conditions can form a political class if they unite into a national organization. Specifically, until they have become a "political organization," they are not a class in the full sense. The proletariat goes through, various stages of development... At first the struggle is carried on by individual laborers, then by the workers of a factory, then by the operatives in one trade, in one locality, against the bourgeois who directly exploits them.... At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, broken up by their mutual competition,... But with the development of industry the proletariat not

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only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in great masses, its strength grows and it feels that strength more,,., The collisions between individual workers and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trade Unions) against the bourgeois,,.. But every class struggle is a political struggle.,.. This organization of proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political, party, is continually being upset again by competition between the workers themselves, (CM, T 480-481; italics added)

Classes develop in the course of class struggle, composed of groups of people who have similar economic conditions and hence similar interests and culture, at least in some respects. The full development of classes takes place in the course of an extended and complex process in which, first, small groups struggle locally over issues of interest to them. Those struggles give rise to organizations that are initially quite ephemeral and only gradually manage to last. Between struggles, the unity crumbles and workers compete with each other once again, until a new issue sparks a new fight. The unity of the class is a hard-won accomplishment that slowly gives rise to stronger organizations, "The development of the proletariat proceeds everywhere through internal struggles," Engels wrote in 1882.4 Accordingly, the Communist Manifesto assigns communists the task of promoting the "formation of the proletariat into a class" (CM, T 484), The proletariat, earlier described by its economic conditions—working for wages and owning no property besides the ability to work (CM, T 478, 479)—constitutes an economic but not a political class by virtue of these common conditions. Only political activity, in which communists are exhorted to participate, will bring the proletariat into existence as a political class. Class Consciousness But this account of the transformation of economic into political classes leaves out important elements in the history of political classes. It leaves out the development of class consciousness, and that is not intelligible without the concept of social classes. The political activity that is necessary in order to transform economic into political class requires class consciousness and, in its turn, promotes the growth of class consciousness. But there are several interpretations of Marx and Engels' ideas about the emergence of class consciousness in the working class. All readers of Marx understand the importance of class consciousness to the development of political classes. But not all of them see that class consciousness develops only in the course of class struggle. Instead, there are two major alternative viewpoints: One Marxian tradition regards the emergence of class consciousness as pretty automatic. That view finds a

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certain amount of support in some of Marx's pronouncements. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels observe that with the development of industry the proletariat not only Increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows and it feels that strength more. (CM, T 480}

This and similar statements have often led to the view that class consciousness—when the developing working class "feels that strength more"—develops automatically with the advance of industrialization. When workers become accustomed to working in larger groups and learn that the product depends on the work of many persons, because of the division of labor, they also learn that they must depend on one another to improve their individual lot. With that recognition arises their awareness of themselves as a class. The development of class consciousness is directly linked to the development of the proletariat as a political class. But in spite of passages like the above, that was not the view of Marx and Engels. They observe that factory work under capitalism divides workers because workers compete with one another for jobs (CM, T 481), In addition, some later readers of Marx and Engels have argued persuasively that life in a capitalist country where workers are severely limited by the constraints of their economic situations tends to produce generations of persons who look to external authority for direction rather than encouraging revolutionary consciousness. Life in a capitalist society does not produce a burning desire for freedom but a willingness to take orders, I discussed that view in Chapter 10 and return to it in Chapter 15. Other readers of Marx, instead of regarding the development of class consciousness as a more or less automatic process that goes hand in hand with industrialization, believe that it is quite independent of the economic developments in a capitalist society. This was the prevailing view among the social democrats before World War I and among the Bolshevik leadership. Their position was in part tailored to actual political conditions and in part due to a misinterpretation of capitalist development. On the one hand, the German social democrats, as well as the Bolsheviks, believed that by the beginning of the twentieth century capitalism was fully developed and had started to decline. That meant that the economic conditions were ripe for a socialist revolution. On the other hand, the working class was not nearly as revolutionary as its leaders, who were often middle-class intellectuals. In view of these facts, the doctrine arose that working-class consciousness was brought into the working class "from the outside" by trained intellectuals. According to this alternative interpretation, class consciousness does not develop throughout the history of the class. Its development is independent of the economic and social conditions under which the class develops and may therefore fail to develop

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at all. Class consciousness is brought to the proletariat from the outside by bourgeois intellectuals (such as Marx and Engels themselves). In this vein, Lenin quotes with approval the views of Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party before World War I: Socialism and the class struggle arise side by side, and not one out of the other; each arises out of different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only out of profound scientific knowledge..,. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia.5

These disagreements about the concept of class consciousness divide sharply on the role of intellectuals in the radical political movement. In the Leninist view, the intellectual functions as the expert who gives leadership to the organizations of the workers. Certain passages in the writings of Marx and Engels may be used to support this reading; Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour,... a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole, (CM, T 481}

But most of the time Marx and Engels believe that the intellectuals' role is to articulate in theoretical terms the understanding held by the working class of its own situation. Intellectuals serve as mirrors to the working class rather than as expert leaders. (This does not take away from the critical importance of intellectuals.)6 Marx explains that class and class consciousness develop in one and the same process. In Class Struggles in France, he suggests repeatedly that the program advocated by the working class was not revolutionary because the class was not ready to act as a separate class against the bourgeoisie: "The Paris proletariat was still, incapable of going beyond the bourgeois republic."7 The Paris proletariat did have its own class consciousness, one that was sharply opposed to the outlook of the capitalists. The Paris proletariat also had its own political program, but it was not a revolutionary one because, according to Marx, the working class was not sufficiently developed politically and neither, therefore, was its class consciousness. The class consciousness of the working class develops apace as the class becomes a political class. It does not evolve independent of "objective" conditions. Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and the Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class . . . these theoreticians are merely Utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science.8

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Not everyone is a good theoretician. Marx agrees with Kautsky and Lenin on that. It takes a good deal of training to develop good political theory, and in a capitalist society that training is a privilege of middleclass intellectuals. But to be valid a theory requires more than that it be competently framed and argued. Theories framed in isolation from an active, fully developed working class—precisely the sort of theory that Kautsky and Lenin thought was to be brought to the workers "from the outside"—are "merely Utopian"; they are mere pipe dreams, too distant from actual political conditions or the actual experience and outlook of workers to be of any use to the developing class. The class theory that Kautsky and Lenin spoke of is not only useless, Marx believed, but positively harmful. The notion of class consciousness as the product of middle-class intellectuals ignores the fact that the only theories of use to workers are those that articulate their life experience. Class consciousness is the common sense and the common experience of a class before being articulated in a theory. Out of that life experience and the culture that comes from that life experience arises a view of the world, a set of common practices and values. The development of a political class presupposes the existence of a social class. But social class is quite different from, economic class—the life experiences and cultures and histories of different groups of workers are diverse. Hence the development of a class consciousness of workers of various backgrounds and life experiences is a long, complex process of building common organizations in which shared ideas and ideas that are different can be examined and accepted. Class consciousness is both a precondition and a result of class struggle. It can only be the creation of the working, class itself. Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct, and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of" thought and views of life. 'The entire class creates it out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations,*

This class consciousness may very well not be formulated as philosophical theory. The ruling class has its guiding ideology, which provides the "ruling ideas of the epoch." But from the life experiences of different social classes arise other, oppositional ideologies. These challenging ideologies may not be as theoretically elaborate as the ideology of the ruling elites, but they acquire in the course of time from, the experiences of social groups and from their experience of class struggle a wealth of ethical ideas, political wisdom, techniques for social organization, and hopes for the future. Consider the situation of the workers. They are members of the society at large and are socialized into it. They thus share the "ruling ideas" of

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the age that "have ever been the ideas of its ruling class" (CM, T 489), The two classes share the worlds of industrial capitalism, of technology and science, of ever increasing productivity. In this world individualism, individual freedom, democracy, and equality of opportunity are treasured concepts. The outlook and ways of life of the working class—its class consciousness—thus share important elements with bourgeois ideology, both in its practices and its ideas, At the same time, because they are not members of the ruling class, workers go about their lives in ways other than those of the capitalists, They do not invest capital and hire workers. They hire themselves out and are exploited. The ideology as well, as many of the practices of the ruling class sit uneasily with the workers' implicit understanding of their own world. For instance, the idea of equal opportunity (that everybody can be a capitalist if only he or she works hard enough) means one thing to young workers and something else to the sons and daughters of capitalists. If they are lucky, workers may become supervisors or even succeed in starting their own businesses; their chances of becoming top-level executives, corporate lawyers, or highly paid neurosurgeons are very slight. Given that political campaigns cost large sums of money and money talks loudly in politics, the idea of democracy has a different meaning for working people and for capitalists (witness the low voter turnouts in elections). And so it is with the other ideas associated with the bourgeoisie. These ideas are a starting point for the class consciousness of the working class that slowly develops in opposition to the bourgeois outlook, as the class itself develops into a class in the full sense. The class consciousness of the working class never becomes completely separate from bourgeois ideology. Instead, it gives new meanings to the concepts that play an important role in bourgeois ideology but are only imperfectly realized in bourgeois practice. The development of a proletarian class consciousness is connected in complex ways with the ruling bourgeois ideology. It is, therefore, not complete until the working class has become the dominant class and has abolished class distinctions.10 But theories that help people interpret and understand existing institutions are only one of several aspects of class consciousness. The working class must not only grasp that its condition is the result of the inordinate power of the capitalists. A class-conscious proletariat also understands that the prevailing institutions are not immutable. It understands that institutions can be changed, and—this is essential—it has the confidence that it can effect change. Without such confidence, no one will undertake political action. Class consciousness consists not only of a more or less theoretical understanding but also of hope that change for the better is possible now and that the efforts of political action are worth the sacri-

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fices they require. Change will occur when people organize themselves to bring about that change. But that takes hard work and sacrifice. No one takes on that difficult work of social change without a steady hope that their efforts will bring results, This element of class consciousness presents a problem for Marxist theory. We saw in Chapter 11 that Marx and Engels believed that they had founded a science sufficiently well established to allow them to predict without fear of being in error that capitalism would collapse and be replaced by socialism. The hope that sustained them through forty years of political effort, they believed, could be justified by their science. But I show below (in Chapter 15) that their belief is mistaken. The science they laid claim to did not and does not exist. Even if it did exist, it would not provide support for political effort and sacrifice. Hence the question how class consciousness develops remains without answer. Marx and Engels have nothing to say about how the people who need to change the dominant institutions in order to better their lives can sustain themselves through bitter conflicts and. many disappointments. Often people who are struggling are sustained by their religion. They take heart, for instance, from their understanding that Jesus, too, was a social revolutionary.11 But with their aversion to religion, Marx and Engels cannot explore that solution. Their understanding of class consciousness remains incomplete. The development of class consciousness is promoted and complicated by class struggle. As the working class consolidates its own identity in struggle with employers or with opposed political groups, it also learns to articulate its own view of the world, its needs, and its expectations for a better future. But at the same time, one of the strategies of the capitalists in the class struggle consists of trying to impede the development of working-class class consciousness. The ruling class is always attempting to retard the development of a working-class ideology. Thus ideology is a weapon in the dass struggle. The small disagreements between workers and employers are always in danger of growing larger. In a class society, there always exists the danger that full-fledged class struggle will erupt in ways that would seriously interfere with production and the perpetuation of existing social arrangements. One strategy for forestalling such serious conflict is to mask, as far as possible, the proper ideology or outlook of the workers and to cover it over with ideas more favorable to the employers. Marx and Engels were aware of this strategy and hence devoted part 3 of the Communist Manifesto to unmasking these deceptive forms of socialism. For example, one target of their criticism were the "bourgeois socialists": The Socialist bourgeoisie ... requires that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of the existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie. (CM, T 496)

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The bourgeoisie appropriated the language of socialism but turned it into a defense of the status quo in order to slow the development of the proletarian class and its class consciousness. The political implications of this class theory are important. Especially in electoral, democracies, people often think that electing their candidate will secure their goal—whether that goal be change or maintenance of the status quo. Now, within fairly narrow limits, different candidates can help their constituents reach some of their goals. The power of individual persons opens the way to some, usually minor political change. But the class theory of Marx and Engels points out that if the goal is significant change, for example, improving the condition of the poor, ameliorating the conditions of workers, providing true equality of opportunity to persons of color or to women, then we need to diminish the power of ruling groups to uphold existing institutions. It is not the power of individuals but the power of ruling classes that maintains the institutions that in turn maintain the conditions we want to change. That cannot be done by individual elected officials but only by large groups or politically organized people, that is, by classes. Political action thus can make small changes by means of electoral victories—for instance, replace the mayor in Dead Man's Gulch, But to tackle the big problems that any generation faces, we must understand the class forces that are at the root of that problem. We need to understand which existing institutions maintain a certain condition we want to change, and we need to mobilize significant class forces to effect a change in these institutions. Without an understanding of classes and their powers, a good deal of political action is misguided and a waste of valuable resources. Before the early 1930s, union organizing in the United States was illegal or beset by many legal restrictions. In 1934, as 25 percent of the U.S. work force was unemployed, the Wagner Act legalized union organizing. In the years that followed, labor unions in the United States organized at an amazing rate and became, for a while, very powerful. This important change for working people in the United States is not to be interpreted as the achievement of Franklin Roosevelt alone or of the president and some legislators. Their accomplishment was possible only because there was a burgeoning radical movement among the working class and the unemployed (that built on fifty years of previous efforts to organize labor unions), and many members of the government feared that unless concessions were made to that movement, worse was to follow.12 Despite the successes of labor organizing and of popular political movements in several periods in the past, political change is not always possible. If the oppositional class forces are in disarray, no important changes can be made. In periods when the working class is demobilized

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because of war, political repression, or failures of previous programs, opposition remains dispersed and powerless. Under those conditions elected officials all seem to represent the interests of the ruling class because the power of the ruling class is all there is. In such situations electoral politics is a waste of resources. In contrast, in times when the working class is strong, it may well elect candidates that pay significant attention to its programs and interests. Then the electoral arena is an important field of struggle. Economic classes are usually distinguished by reference to the ownership of means of production. But this characterization of economic class does not take account of the professionals who are not workers or of the unemployed and underemployed who are not workers either. Economic differences, however, are only one aspect of class; there is also social class, the different histories and experiences that are one source of class consciousness. These backgrounds and the class outlook they give rise to are important prerequisites for efforts to form a united political force—class in the political sense. In the course of this struggle that undergoes significant ebbs and surges, class consciousness develops further. And yet this account of classes is still incomplete. Classes, I said, organize themselves and gain class consciousness in the course of class struggle. In order to understand fully what classes are we must therefore find out what that struggle is. For Further Reading T. B. Bottomore, Classes hi Modem Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), chapter 2.

Notes 1. V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970-1971), p. 231. This conception of class has received a powerful defense in recent years by G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), chapter 3, section 5. 2. For years, a number of Marxists have tried valiantly to incorporate this layer of the population into a generally Marxist classification. These efforts have not been successful. See, for example, Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1985). 3. For an interesting overview of contemporary interpretations of Marx on class, see Frank Parkin, Marxism ami Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), chapter 2, See also Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chapter 6, section 6J. 4. Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 334. 5. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 150.

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6. Antonio Gramsci developed this view of the role of the "organic intellectual" in his Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 7. Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 42-59. 8. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York; International Publishers, 1968), p, 125. 9. Ibid-, p. 47, 10. The central role of bourgeois ideology in capitalism was emphasized by Gramsci in Prison Notebooks, pp. 1-14, 11. Elivia Alvarado, Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from Her Heart (New York; HarperCollins, 1987), chapter 4. 12. For documentary evidence on that point, see Studs Terkel, Hard Times (New York Pantheon Books, 1970).

13 Class Struggles A LOOK AT HUMAN HISTORY shows us conflicts over religion and territory, national pride and Integrity, wealth and its control, and political institutions. It appears that the history of human societies is the history of religious, racial, ethnic, gender, economic, and other struggles. But Marx and Engels make a much more restricted claim: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. (CM, T 473).

What shall we make of this assertion? At first, the point seems to be that all struggle in history is class struggle. But surely Marx and Engels cannot mean that. If their assertion is to make sense at all, we need to read in it a lesser claim, namely, that class struggles are fundamental in human history. What gives class struggle such a preeminent position in history? We cannot hope to answer that question unless we can state clearly what Marx and, Engels meant by "class struggle." What Is Class Straggle? In the course of their writings, Marx and Engels talk about many different struggles of the working class: The Communists fight for the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class. (CM, T 499)

They provide a wide range of examples of fights over "immediate aims": "with the bourgeoisie ... against the absolute monarchy" (CM, T 500); against the deskilling of workers (CM, T479); in support of workers abroad, such as support by British workers for the Union forces during the U.S. Civil War (T 519); against the destruction of workers' housing by what today would be called "urban renewal";1 for Irish independence;2 and so on. 160

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Are all these conflicts instances of class struggle? To start, we need to notice that Marx and Engels do not say explicitly that all these different sorts of struggles are instances of the class struggle. If we assume that they all are class struggles, then it seems difficult to say what is not an instance of class struggle. That would make the above quote from the Communist Manifesto, which seemed problematic, trivially true. If all struggles are class struggles, then the history of society is indeed the history of class struggles. Clearly, Marx and Engels were trying to say something more significant. We can conclude that not all economic or political struggles are class struggles. But what, then, is class struggle? It is tempting to say that class struggle is struggle between classes. But if we adopt the reading of Marx and Engels put forward in the preceding chapter, according to which classes create themselves in the course of class struggle, we are committed to the view that there is class struggle in which some of the participants, at least, are not classes in a full sense. As we saw in Chapter 13, such a reading certainly finds support in the writings of Marx and Engels: Every movement, in which the working class as a class confronts the ruling classes and tries to constrain them from without, is a political movement. For instance, the attempt by strikes, etc., in a particular factory or even, a particular trade to compel individual capitalists to reduce the working day, is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force through an eight hour, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers, there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say, a class movement.3

Class struggles are of different sorts. Class struggle includes a wide variety of struggles, and not all of them have a fully formed working class as their protagonist. Groups develop into classes only in class struggle; when that struggle begins, at least on one side of the struggle is a group that has not yet organized itself into a political class. It may merely be an economic class that is transforming itself into a political class by taking on political struggles—struggles that extend beyond the confines of a particular workplace. (That does not mean, of course, that political classes cannot engage in economic struggles.) But if class struggle cannot be defined by reference to the participants, we may be tempted to define it by reference to the issue struggled over: Class struggle, we may want to say, is struggle over exploitation. It is clear that a central issue between workers and employers is exploitation. It is the cause of alienation, of the many injustices of capitalism. But while it is plausible to suggest that class struggles are struggles over exploitation, that interpretation needs several modifications: In any given conflict, whether between individuals or between groups, there is a

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bone of contention—namely, what the participants, if they are still talking, talk about. In a wage conflict, the subject is wages. Offers and counteroffers concern wages; wages are the content of the negotiating sessions, But there is more at stake than what is being talked about: If the employer gives in to workers' demands, the union will gain in prestige among the workers and gain more members and more support. That will tend to make it more powerful and thus enable it to press harder for future demands. What is at issue, in that case, is not just wages (and exploitation) but power, the power to exploit workers and to maintain exploitative arrangements. Class struggle takes place where such power is at issue, whatever the overt subject of discussion may be. Conversely, wage demands and working conditions do not give rise to class struggle if the demands are explicitly framed to leave power relations unaffected, for instance, if workers make greater concessions in the course of bargaining than the employer, In some struggles that issue, the power to exploit, is out in the open; sometimes it is only implicit Throughout history "oppressor and oppressed ... carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight" (CM, T 474). In actual cases the distinction between class struggles and other struggles will, not always be easy to draw. But in principle the distinction is clear; Whatever the subject openly discussed between, the protagonists in a struggle, it is class struggle only if the power to exploit is at issue. Thus the legislation, mentioned by Marx, to shorten the working day puts some limits on the employers' ability to get more work out of people and to appropriate the value that work yields. It thereby limits the employers' power to exploit. But if class struggle is a struggle over the power to exploit, who will actually participate in that struggle? One would think that the answer must include only those members of the society who are actually engaged in wage work. But that answer leaves out children and students, older and retired people, the chronically ill, the unemployed, and everyone who works, but not for wages, such as women who work in the home. The class struggle, then, would seem to include only a bare majority or less of the population on the side of the working class.4 The power to exploit is not an isolated power; it is instead one of the powers—to be sure, a power of central importance—of the class that possesses political and economic power in a given society. The capitalist class has the power to exploit (and other powers) because it owns and. controls the means of production. It is the ruling class because it is sufficiently powerful, by virtue of owning and controlling the means of production, to arrange the society to its own advantage. Members of the ruling class hold the positions of power and importance in industry, in commerce, and, in some cases, in the government. They are influential in colleges

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and universities because they sit on the boards of trustees or give large donations to such institutions. They have a similar relation to various philanthropic foundations. They own and therefore have a good deal of control over the media. Finally, as large donors to political campaigns, they have disproportionate influence in the political arena. In those electoral democracies where elections are honest, every man and woman has only one vote. But the large contributors to political campaigns have influence that goes far beyond their votes. Not only are their ideas the ruling ideas of any epoch, but those in power are able to decide many things besides wages and working conditions. The struggle against a ruling class affects more than just working conditions and thus is carried on not just by workers. The extensive powers of any given ruling class concern the lives of everyone in the population in different ways, and thus many different groups at times participate to challenge the power of the ruling class. To give just one example of this: The capitalist class has the power to frame problems, to determine the terms in which a problem is discussed. North American society faces a problem of drug addiction. There are a number of ways of thinking about that. One can think about it as a symptom of the despair engendered by the failure of capitalism to provide a rich and secure life for all. One can think of it as one more instance of capitalist greed for profit. Tobacco and liquor companies are legitimate enterprises; by some historical quirk, the Medellm drug cartel is not. But they surely are similar in all respects except the illegality of cocaine and the legality of scotch and cigarettes. Both are for-profit enterprises; both may be considered examples of the failures of capitalism. A third perspective would be to stress that the drug traffic is one of the problems accompanying underdevelopment. The coca farmers in Bolivia do not have an alternative crop to grow for the support of their families. The only way for them to participate in the world market is to grow coca leaves. That crop is, in addition, a valuable source of scarce foreign exchange for a number of governments. If we considered the drug problem from one or more of those perspectives, we would have to find ways of alleviating the despair in poor neighborhoods of our cities; we would have to reconsider the value of the private profit motive, or we would have to construct genuine alternatives for the rural poor in certain parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia. But that would cost money and would tend to reflect badly on capitalism,. So the more usual way to frame the problem, of drug traffic is to blame the drug users. They have a problem; they need individual help. It is not their life condition but their personal weakness that makes them into addicts. It is their moral, failure, hence we send them to prison in significant numbers. The other culprits are foreign governments who are inefficient in suppressing the drug trade.

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The central fact in this discussion is that there are many ways to consider the drug problem. The citizens at large are not consulted on how best to think about these problems. The gO¥ernment, foundation-supported think tanks, university professors, clergy, professional social workers, and others develop a perspective on this problem. The power of the ruling class extends to formulating how problems will be considered.5 To reformulate such issues for public discussion, for instance, would involve struggles not only by workers but by many different groups in the population. Even more important, the power of any particular capitalist is not his or hers by virtue of the means of production he or she owns. The power of the individual capitalist rests on the support of other capitalists and even more on the capitalist institutions, such as the state (see Chapter 14). Hence challenging the power to exploit takes different forms. Workers may challenge and, for a time, weaken, their particular employer's power to exploit. But if the power of the capitalist class is unchanged and ai the competing capitalists can pay wages as low as they always paid, then the employer who was forced to make concessions will find herself in an unfavorable competitive situation. She faces two choices: She can try to take back concessions made earlier, or she can go out of business. In either case the inroads on one capitalist's power to exploit prove temporary. In the struggle to maintain control over the means of production or over the society as a whole or to maintain a certain rate of profit, each capitalist has the support of all the others. The power of the ruling class in any country is not just the aggregated power of individuals over their workers but, in addition, the collective power of the entire class. While capitalists are in fierce competition with one another in the economic arena, they form a class precisely because their power is not private property but is the power of the class. Individual capitalists are not powerful by virtue of their personal characteristics but because they own capital. If they lose their capital, if it passes into different hands, they lose the power to exploit as individuals. But the class does not lose its power. The capitalists form a class, the ruling class, because they have been able to create institutions favorable to them and because they have been able, thus far, to maintain those institutions. Those institutions, such as the division of the society into economic classes, the private ownership and control of means of production, the "free" (however carefully regulated) market. Other relevant institutions are, above all, the legal system, the governmental institutions that maintain the existing systems, and the supporting institutions in the realms of religion, education, and the media, Class struggle is characterized not by the fact that participants are classes but by the underlying issue: the power to exploit. At issue, how-

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ever, is not just the power to exploit of individual employers, for their power is limited. At issue is the power of the entire capitalist class to exploit and that, in turn, requires the power to reproduce capitalist institutions. In class struggle the power of the ruling class in its entirety to extract surplus labor is being contested, along with the power to create and maintain the institutions needed for this class to extract surplus value in just the way it does (e.g., through corvee" labor or the wage contract). Often the opponents of the ruling class are not themselves classes or are, at best, only classes in formation. We can consider these opponents to be classes only to the extent that they have been able to create their own institutions to maintain their power and their continued existence. Class Straggle and Political Action

Class struggle, we saw Marx say, is not just economic struggle in one workplace; it is political struggle. We now know that it is political struggle over the power of the ruling class to exploit. But there are many different sorts of political actions, from conflict over a traffic light at a dangerous intersection to conflict over the size of the national budget. Which of these are instances of class struggle? Not all political action is class struggle. As we noted in Chapter 12, some political efforts do not affect the distribution of power or the power of prevailing institutions at all; there follow some other examples below. Changes are made that improve the situation of some without altering the prevailing distribution of power or the institutions that maintain that distribution of power. Such political efforts are distinct from class struggle. At other times, Engels observed, groups deliberately work against the interest of their class. During the U.S. Civil War, which Marx and Engels interpreted in part as a conflict between the rising industrial bourgeoisie of the North and the slave owners of the South, the bourgeoisie in New Orleans were enthusiastic in their support for the Confederacy—on the surface a position that seems to contradict the analysis of Marx and Engels. According to their reading of contemporary history, the bourgeois should have supported the Union. Engels comments: The fanaticism of the New Orleans businessmen for the Confederacy is simply explained by the fact that the fellows have had to take a huge quantity of Confederate scrip [lOUs] for hard cash.... A good forced loan is an excellent means for ... diverting them [the bourgeoisie] from their class interests through their personal interest.6

At times oppositiona! interests can be accommodated without shifting existing class power; at other times personal interest will induce groups to strengthen their enemies. Here political action works at cross-purposes

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with the class struggle. Hence it is clear that not all political action is an instance of class struggle. Not everything the workers do is part of their struggle against the capitalists. Not every action of the capitalists is in support of maintaining the interests of their own class, Political action is concerned with both restricted, local and larger, national problems. National associations, parties, unions, protest organizations, and organizations to further the cause of women and African Americans at times have widespread support. Then such forces become a threat to existing distributions of power and to the institutions that maintain these existing distributions of power: In. real life... the revolution begins the other way round, by the great majority of the people and also the majority of the official parties rallying against the government which is thereby isolated, and overthrowing it,7

At other times these organizations are little more than an office with a small staff. In the former situation, the organizations participate in class struggle. In the latter they are a source of employment for their staffs. Marx and Engels repeatedly organized national or even, international political organizations, and they believed that some of these organizations, for instance, the International Workingmen's Association, for a time had influence in several European countries.8 But after a while the popular movements from which the International Workingmen's Association drew its strength subsided, and all that remained of the organization were a central office and small cliques of political activists in various countries. Class struggle, whether by a few large organizations or many small ones, always requires the political activity and opposition of extensive numbers of people. In periods of political quiet, there is no class struggle, even though some of the formerly powerful organizations may still hang on. With the temporary suspension of class struggle when working-class organizations lose their power comes a lull in the struggle over ideology, Previously developed working-class ideologies lose their persuasive power; the ruling ideologies become more powerful, and have, for a time, no rivals. The certainty of earlier generations of political opponents of capitalism that change is possible and is bound to come gives way to the complacent belief that capitalism is the best system there is or the despairing view that a more just society cannot be achieved until the last trumpet sounds. Once again the fetishism discussed in Chapter 7 prevails: The capitalist marketplace is taken to be as inescapable as gravity. But when class struggle resumes, so does the conflict over ideas and the effort to develop an outlook to rival the ruling ideologies. In the Marxism, that we have inherited from, the German Social Democrats and, later, the Bolsheviks, political action either contributed to the class struggle on the side of the proletariat—that was called "revolution-

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ary action"—or it served to maintain the power of the existing ruling class-—that was called "reformist activity." There was no third, alternative. Hence all political action was either revolutionary or reformist; much political polemic consisted of accusing the other side of being "reformist,"9 But we can see now that whether an action exemplifies the class struggle at all depends on the state of political movements in the society at the time. If there is an active opposition by many persons and many organizations, both large and small, the action can be revolutionary or reformist But often the only viable political efforts address local problems: "Revolutionary" action, that is, action that threatens prevailing distributions of power, is not on the agenda. Hence the "revolutionary-reformist" distinction does not even apply in such periods and should not be used. Local groups, in times of social upheaval, participate in national movements and are then participating in class struggle. At other times similar organizations work only locally, and groups elsewhere do not take similar stances on comparable issues. Such small groups are no threat to prevailing distributions of power. The class struggle is in abeyance. The Primacy of Class Struggle The role of classes, according to Marx and Engels, is more central, more fundamental than that of other large groups in any given society. Class struggle plays a role in history not played by, say, racial struggle or the struggle between men and women. But what does that mean? Surely history provides examples of all sorts of struggles: religious wars, tribal conflicts, contests for colonies. There are also the continued, divisions along race lines, as well as the struggles over domination of women by men. What can be meant by saying that class struggles are "fundamental" to these? In Northern Ireland, for instance, it would appear that religious divisions, paired with different national allegiances, form the fundamental breach. In some of the civil wars in African nations, the basic irritant appears to have been tribal rivalries rooted in a long colonial history. The oppression that whites inflict upon blacks unites whites of different economic classes against blacks of all economic classes. In similar ways women of all economic classes are dominated by men of all economic classes. It is not at all dear, therefore, what Marx and Engels have in mind when they claim that class struggles are fundamental in human history. Here are different interpretations of this claim: 1. Class struggle is fundamental because other struggles are brought about by class struggle. 2. Class struggle is fundamental in that other struggles cannot be won unless class struggle is won first.

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3. Class struggle is fundamental as the most important of all the struggles being fought out. 4. Class struggle is the most inclusive, 5. Class struggle is the only source of revolutionary change in society. Let us consider these interpretations in more detail: 1, Class struggle is fundamental because other struggles are brought about by class struggle. This first version of Marx's thesis asserts that there is, for instance, black oppression and sexism because there is class struggle between the working and the ruling class of capitalist countries. Racism and sexism, according to this view, are said, to be caused by capitalism, because racism and sexism divide the working class and thus make exploitation easier for the capitalists. Without capitalism they would not exist™ Marx is, of course, aware of the divisive role of ethnic dissension in the formation of the working class. He notes that every industrial and commercial center 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.... He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish, worker.... This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes,u

This is a complex statement: The Irish workers, working for less than the English, tend to depress the wages of the latter and compete with, the English workers for jobs. Hence the English workers hate the Irish. But, in addition, they hold all kinds of "prejudices" against the Irish having to do with religion, nationality, and way of life. It is because of those prejudices that Irish workers can or must work for less than the English workers.12 Capitalism, and the class struggle endemic to capitalism, is by no means the cause, or "root," of those prejudices. Nevertheless, capitalism, encourages ethnic (and other) prejudices because it pits worker against worker in competition for jobs and because employers find that racial divisions in the working class are to their advantage. A work force divided, along racial lines is more manageable. Racial or gender or ethnic groups ostracized as the result of prejudice have greater difficulty in securing jobs and are therefore forced to work for lower wages. The Irish worked for less because it was the only way to get work at all. Class struggle fosters racial and other conflicts but does not cause them, Marx's theoretical formulation of class struggle does not imply that class struggle in capitalism is the cause of racism. In his analyses of concrete situations, he clearly recognizes that the causes of racism lie else-

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where. Historical evidence is on Marx's side in this instance. The history of racism reaches far back, long before the beginnings of capitalism.13 2. Class struggle is fundamental in that other struggles cannot be won unless class struggle is won first. Under this interpretation, oppressed groups have been admonished to postpone their struggle for equality until the socialist revolution abolishes capitalism. Only in a socialist country, according to this view, can one hope to end oppression. Capitalism must therefore be toppled first That was dearly not the understanding of Marx and Engels. In England in the 1860s, the Irish played a role not unlike that of Puerto Ricans in the United States today. They had. the worst jobs, they were looked down upon by bourgeois and working-class English alike, and their country was nothing less than an English colony. In this context Marx and Engels say the following: The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland.... And this must be done, not as a matter of sympathy with Ireland, but as a demand made in the interest of the English proletariat If not, the English, people will remain tied to the leading strings of the ruling classes because if will have to join with them in a common front against Ireland,14

Here Marx and Engels insist that the class struggle between English proletariat and bourgeoisie cannot progress unless the issue of "racism" is addressed and, settled first. The same is true for the U.S. working class: In the United States of North America every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.15

Resolving a racist division cannot be postponed until after the socialist revolution. The development of the working class is impossible unless the racist division is closed. 3. Class struggle is fundamental as the most important of all the struggles being fought out Is class struggle the most important struggle? As we have just seen, the answer to that question has varied at different times. In the late 1860s, when Marx and Engels wrote the letters just quoted, they obviously thought that the struggle against the oppression of the Irish was the most important struggle because without it the English proletariat could "never accomplish anything." In a letter to Marx written in the same period, Engels expresses regret that the Irish had failed to understand that their "sole allies in Europe" were "the socialist workers,"16 but he does not insist that the Irish join the class struggle of the socialist workers, let alone postpone their own struggle for the sake of that of the socialist workers of Europe. It is clear that he did not believe that the class struggle

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was, at any time, fundamental in the sense of being the most important struggle. 4. Class struggle is the most inclusive. Class struggle is fundamental to all societies because there is always class struggle of some sort, whereas the other conflicts that color and shape class struggle differ widely from, one society to the next: The history of all past society has consisted of the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs, But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz, the exploitation of one part of society by the other, (CM, T 489)

The many different kinds of conflicts in any given society can be better understood if they are seen against the background of and in connection with the struggle between classes. The converse is, of course, also true: Class struggle is affected by the existence of, for instance, racial or gender struggles. But these other struggles are not as frequent or as sustained or as ubiquitous as class struggles. Class struggle is therefore fundamental inasmuch as all divisions in societies are played out against the background of class struggle, which itself is colored by those other divisions. Class struggle is the most inclusive struggle. Women have responded to this claim by pointing out that more societies are known to us in which women were oppressed than societies that exploited labor.17 Marx's and Engels' answer to this objection is contained in Engels' later work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (T 734f£), which essentially argues that the oppression of women in the family is a consequence of the development of the institution of private property—that is, of some form of exploitation. Engels maintains that class struggle is indeed the most inclusive struggle. It is not clear whether he was right about that. The anthropological evidence is scanty and open to interpretation. Fortunately, we can leave this question unresolved because this is not the only sense in which Marx and Engels regard the class struggle as fundamental. 5. Class struggle is the only source of revolutionary change in society. The flourishing and decay of different cultures is due to class struggle. Marx and Engels classify historical, periods by their mode of production and, specifically, by the way in which, in the societies known to us, the product of the many has been taken and used by the few. The "glory that was Rome" flowed from the hard work of slaves who did not share in that glory. In feudal society the work of the serfs supported a class of largely idle landowners and soldiers. The surplus produced by the serfs allowed the medieval Church to erect monumental cathedrals. The productive wealth of capitalist countries is produced by workers who do not own or control the wealth they have produced.

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Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to each other, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionaryre-constitutionof society at large, or in the common ruin of contending classes, (CM, T 474)

The great transitions in human history occur when one mode of production replaces another—transitions that are a long time in coming and leave their effect for long times afterward. But these transitions, as well as the processes leading up to them, are the effects of class struggles. The very essence of these transitions is the replacement of one ruling class, with its characteristic mode of production, by another ruling class with its different mode of production. To date that has also meant the replacement of one form of oppression and exploitation by another. All societies known so far have been exploitatiYe. By virtue of their superior political, military, or economic powers, members of one class have forced the members of another to hand over part of what they produced. This exploitation has been a constant source of friction. There have obviously been other sources of conflict, such as religious or cultural differences. But only class struggle finally puts an end to the ability of a given ruling class to exploit and thereby ends the rule of that class.. Class, struggle, of all the struggles in history, is the one that overturns modes of production and classes and puts different classes with different modes of production in their place. It is for that reason more fundamental than other struggles. Class struggle is the only source of revolutionary change. This is one of the most central claims in the thought of Marx and Engels. It follows directly from the conception of class and class consciousness developed in Chapter 12. Political classes hold power in society by virtue of an extended range of institutions and organizations supporting the prevailing mode of production. This mode of production cannot be replaced by a different one without unseating the current class in power. Hence major political, social, and economic change is impossible without class struggle. In that sense class struggle is fundamental. The revolution, when it comes, will bring an extended democracy, which in turn requires full equality for all members of the society. Can class struggle, struggle over the power to exploit, give rise to a more equal society unless, at the same time, it is a struggle against all oppressions—such as oppression by gender and race—within the respective classes? This question has stirred up an enormous amount of controversy most of it due to misunderstandings of the concept of class. If we define classes as centers of power resting in a set of institutions, then every challenge to the institutional power of a ruling class is class struggle.

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That interpretation has two implications: (1) Struggle over wages and working conditions that does not challenge the power of the employers is not class struggle because it does not pose a threat to that power (unless it strengthens the organizations that will challenge the employers' power in the future). (2) Struggles for equality on the part of women, the disabled, or people of color is a part of the class struggle it" they challenge the ruling institutions. For the prevailing capitalist institutions—corporations, philanthropies, universities, mass media—all support existing institutions even if they are sexist, racist, and so on. Although they may pay lip service to greater equality, these institutions are above all capitalist institutions interested, in maintaining the power of capitalism. The condition of a majority of African Americans is the joint result of racism and of the inability of capitalism to produce full employment. The effort to maintain capitalism commits the corporations, philanthropies, and universities to a set of institutions that cannot maintain full employment. It commits them, as a consequence, to support racial and gender divisions that are useful for retarding the development of a working-class challenge to the ruling institutions. Racial, gender, and other kinds of equality take second place to the maintenance of ruling institutions. Advances made by some individuals obscure that the posture of the ruling institutions is unchanged. Greater equality for all remains as empty a hope as always. Existing capitalist institutions cannot and will not bring equality for all. A strong push for greater equality needs to transform, capitalist institutions that maintain the subordination of white women and people of color, This chapter has, I hope, clarified what Marx and Engels mean by class, class consciousness, and class struggle, but the discussion has been rather abstract insofar as I have made no mention of the state. We cannot fully understand the relations of classes, their development, and their conflicts without considering the role played by the state. I discuss the state in the chapter that follows. For Further Reading Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979),

Notes 1. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 659, 2. Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 221ft 3. Ibid., pp. 254,255.

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4. According to Adam Przeworski, there never were any working-class majorities in any of the European countries, and in recent years, with increased industrialization, the proportion of the population that is working class has declined significantly. See Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p, 23. 5. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Barantz, "Decisions and Non-Decisions—An Analytical Framework," in Roderick Bell, David V. Edwards, and R. Harrison Wagner, eds., Political Power: A Reader in Tlwory and Research (New York: Free Press, 1969). 6. Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence, p. 119. 7. Ibid., p. 333, 8. Ibid., p. 168. 9. Rosa Luxemburg, one of the great theorists of the pre-World War I German Social Democratic Party even wrote a book entitled Revolution or Reform. See Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings, ed. Dick. Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 10. Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Re-volution, vol. 2 (New York* Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 66ff. Draper argues that capitalism is a necessary condition for racism, sexism, and so on. John McMurtry, in The Structure of Marx's WorldView (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 87, n. 19, claims that capitalism is a sufficient condition for racism and sexism,, 11. Marx-Engels Correspondence, p. 222. 12. In corresponding ways, women mid people of color are forced to accept lower wages than white workers: Because of prevailing prejudices, it is more difficult for them to get work; they can get work only if they work for less, 13. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Zed Press, 1983), part 1. The matter is complicated in that racism changes over history. Contemporary racists make heavy use of the concept of "race." "Race" as a quasi-biological concept arose at the same time as capitalism. Hence a modified version of the first interpretation says mat modem racism, which utilizes a quasi-biological concept of race, is caused by capitalism. But even that is not established. We can show only that the two—modem racism and capitalism—arise at about the same time. 14. Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence, pp. 216, 218, 15. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 301. 16. Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence, p. 218. 17. See Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds,, Women, Culture and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974).

14 The State CLASS STRUGGLE 15 THE MOTOR of history. Dominant classes exploit the subject classes and maintain their power, as well as their mode of production, by means of maintaining their institutions. Exploited classes in turn challenge the power of the dominant class to exploit them. Once they succeed, the institutions of the former ruling class lose their preeminence and are replaced by the very different institutions of a new ruling class. A new mode of production takes the place of the previous one. The major upheavals in history are therefore brought about by class struggle over the power to exploit Class struggle takes many forms. It often begins in the workplace as a conflict between workers and employers over wages, hours of work, or working speed. But when workers begin to organize themselves, employers often appeal to the law to suppress their efforts to establish trade unions. The class struggle then moves into the political arena, where it becomes a conflict over the legal right to form trade unions. The class struggle moves from the workplace into the domain of the state. Similarly, many other concerns of workers, such as housing, health, education, and political rights, are going to be fought out in the political arena. The state enters into all of these conflicts. Class struggle cannot be fully understood unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist society. The Slate as Manager of the Affairs of the Bourgeoisie By the "state" Marx and Engels mean the bureaucracy, the police, the courts, the tax office, and so on. It is the centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature ... [and] parliamentary control... the national power of capital over labor, a public force organized for social enslavement. (CW, T 629-630) 174

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The state here refers to the legislature—"parliamentary control"—and the familiar organs of the executive and judiciary branch—the courts, the army, and the police, the range of administrative agencies that collect and keep track of information about citizens, issue licenses, regulate transactions in the society, and. enforce their regulations. The "clergy" is added to take into account those countries, such as England or France, in which there was an established church. Marx and Engels wrote before the advent of public education. Today we need to add education to the other functions of the state. That is of some importance because the educational system is, surely, one of the means of spreading the "ideas of the ruling class" and thus interfering in the process of forming oppositional ideologies. We also need to add the many state organs that control the economy; the national banks, the bodies that set economic policy, and superYise the ups and downs of the capitalist economy. All of these different functions and branches of the government have a common task; to keep order, to coerce people into following the rules prescribed. The state is first and foremost a coercive institution. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the French state was "under parliamentary control," but that did not make it the organ of all the people; rather, it placed the state "under the direct control, of the propertied classes" (CW, T 630). This particular case exemplifies a more general conception of the state that Marx and Engels repeat often, namely that the state is "but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (CM, T 475). This view of the state has dominated Marxist theory: The state is on the side of the capitalist ruling class. It uses its coercive power to protect and maintain capitalist institutions. But Marx and Engels also describe the state as independent of the separate classes. Some interpreters therefore believe that Marx and Engels have several incompatible concepts of the state. 1 shall argue that these different claims about the independence of the state are perfectly consistent. The Executive Committee of the Bourgeoisie Different interpreters give rather different reasons for regarding the state to be clearly on the side of the capitalists. One common interpretation asserts that the government is separate but nevertheless closely identified with the capitalists. The reason is that the capitalists and the upper echelons of the politicians, the military, and the bureaucrats are closely linked. They are graduates of the same schools and members of the same clubs; they live in the same suburbs and intermarry. The ruling class controls the state insofar as it forms a tightly knit social class. Working people, by contrast, are excluded from the government because they are excluded from that social circuit of suburb, school, and country club. They belong to a

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different social class. There is a good deal of empirical research to show that even in our day this connection between government and the top layer of the capitalists is, in fact, often a very close one.1 Membership in the ruling class is a matter of personal relations among the members of a specific group of people. Members of this class always control the upper layers of the gO¥ernment. This view is often called the "instrumentalist" version of the Marxist theory of the state. Marx agreed that the decisionmaking personnel of the government were all members of the capitalist class. He discusses this connection in his pamphlet on the Paris Commune of 1870, the first (albeit short-lived) workers' government in human history. Before the establishment of the Commune, elections had served the sole purpose of "deciding once in every three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament" (CW, T 633). The Paris Commune did away with the existing government and substituted one in which workers, rather than members of the bourgeoisie, did government work at workers' wages. In addition, the Commune abolished, not only the privileges of the bureaucrats but also the bureaucracy as a separate social class. An important achievement of the Paris Commune was precisely that it broke the hold of the ruling class over the government by ending the practice of staffing the government mostly with members of the ruling class. But many interpreters point out that the capitalist state is on the side of the capitalists not only because the members of the bourgeoisie in effect run the government and thus can use the state in their own behalf, but also because the very structure of the capitalist state favors the ruling class.2 Capitalism, is perpetuated in part through the day to day exercises of state power on behalf of the capitalists; in addition, it continues to exist because the structure of the state supports the reproduction of the capitalist system. The concept of the "structure" of the capitalist state may be explained as follows: Capital thrives on the reinvestment of profits, but profits are the products of surplus labor that workers are compelled to perform, without pay. Exploitation is at the very heart of the maintenance of the capitalist system. But suppose the workers want to organize to resist the demands of employers, or suppose that they threaten to burn down the factory if their working conditions do not improve. It is dear that the individual employer needs the backing of all the other employers, in the form of the state, the police, the army, and. the courts, to resist those threats. Exploitation in the individual workplace is possible only within a complex social and legal order, which includes a state apparatus that formulates laws and then enforces that legislation, through the coercive power of the court system, the police, and the military. The relevant laws protect private property. But in most capitalist countries they also regulate the relations between employers and, employees: They determine whether unions are

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legal. If they are legal, the law determines whether they are legal in all workplaces. In many places public employees, for instance, may not unionize. The law determines next what forms conflict between employers and employees may take, whether they may strike, and, if so, under what conditions. The state, according to Marx's and EngeJs' materialism (see Chapter 6), belongs to the superstructure that corresponds to the prevailing mode of production. The state corresponds to that mode of production in that the institutions of the capitalist state, for instance, the legal system and the police, support capitalism by ensuring, as far as possible, its continued existence. One example of that is the set of institutions—legal and. regulatory-—that deal, with the relations between workers and employers. These institutions that support capitalism are what in this view are called the structure of the state, Other state structures, too, uphold capitalism: The worker and the employer meet in the marketplace and strike a bargain. For that contract even to be possible, a law of contract is needed; also necessary is a social order in which people who are socially and economically very unequal are nevertheless equals before the law. Employers are not entitled to break contracts or to cheat employees simply because they have greater status and wealth. Underlying capitalist exploitation is a legal system that treats all people equally, whatever their other differences may be,3 This legal system is backed by the coercive power of the state. Marx gives other examples of the complex legal and political order required as the background condition for exploitation: For example, the fact that surplus labor is posited as surplus value of capital means that the worker does not appropriate the product of his own labor; . . . This... law of bourgeois property,.,. through the law of inheritance etc., attains art existence independent of the accidental transitoriiiess of individual capitalists. (CI, T 260) In order for the reproduction of capital to occur, the law needs to guarantee that what the worker produces, including surplus value, belongs to the employer. But since employers are mortal, the continuity of capital must also be guaranteed by laws of inheritance. Exploitation, under capitalism, presupposes a complex legal order that enforces contracts and the rights of private property, including the rights of inheritance. In these and other ways, it appears that the state, by virtue of its personnel, its legal structures, and such institutions as private property, is on the side of the employers and thus is the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie." The Independent State But this is dearly a one-sided view. Marx and Engels are aware of that because they often describe the state as independent. If we look closely, we

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can distinguish five different senses in which the capitalist state is independent. 1. In ancient society, particularly in the East (in Egypt) but also in Latin America (Mexico and Peru), production in what Marx called the "Asiatic mode of production" was dominated by one person who claimed divinity, ownership of all property, and state power. That supreme ruler combined in his person the leadership of the ruling class and the leadership of the state.4 In capitalist society; by contrast, the ruling class and the state are distinct. Capitalists do not have political office simply by virtue of being capitalists. 2. The state is independent from the capitalist class also insofar as the interests of one are not identical with the interests of the other. The capitalist class represents its private interests. The state is supposed to represent the public interest. There is, for instance, a clear difference between public and private parks, schools, and art collections. The owners of the private institutions are, within legal limits, free to use these institutions according to their own interests. By contrast, public resources are supposed to be run by the government to benefit all; the government is the guardian of the public good. With the progressive elaboration of the government bureaucracy in France, every common interest was straight-away severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher, general interest, snatched from the activities of society's members themselves and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the communal property of a village community to the railways, the national wealth, and the national university of France, (18th, T 607)

The state represents the common, general interest of the nation, in opposition to the private interests of individual entrepreneurs. The publicly owned institutions are there for the benefit of all. The independence of the state consists in its being devoted to the "general interest." 3. The government does not always act in the interest of the ruling class. On the contrary, it often enforces laws that benefit working people against the interest and objections of the capitalists. Marx was perfectly well aware of that. He relates, in some detail, the struggles of employers against factory legislation and their various attempts to sabotage the enforcement of those acts once they were passed: As soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, fviz. the factory system], recovered, in some measure, its senses, its resistance began.... For 30 years, however, the concessions conquered by the workers were purely nominal. Parliament passed five Labor Laws between 1802 and 1833, but it was shrewd enough not to vote a penny for their carrying out, for the requisite officials, etc. They re-

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mained a dead letter..,. The normal working day for modern industry dates only from the Factory Act of 1833.5

Concessions were difficult for the working class to get, but they did get them. Employers cannot always have it their way; the government works for both parties in the class struggle. It does appear to do more than just the bidding of the capitalists. 4 In general, the extent to which the state will be dominated by the ruling class depends on the relative strength of the contending classes in the class struggle. Marx notes in The Eighteenth Bmmaire of LOTUS Bonaparte that during the regime of Napoleon 111 in France, between 1852 and 1871, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were equally unable to take power, so that the state of Napoleon III was fairly independent of all class pressures and, could use the peasantry as its base, France, therefore, seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall, beneath the despotism of an individual..., The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally impotent and equally mute, fall on their knees before the rifle butt*

In this passage we encounter a fourth sense in which the state may be independent—namely, if it is relatively free to operate without bowing to class pressures because the classes are equally matched and the influence of each neutralizes that of the other. This often happens in underdeveloped countries, especially in the early years after the end of colonialism, when national industry is weak and so are the classes connected with it. In that situation the state often takes over the role of developing the economy, of attracting external capital or transferring capital from the export sector to the newly developing local industries.7 5. France under Napoleon III illustrates another sense in which, the state is independent. The state acquires a state bureaucracy; it consists of different ministries, offices, departments. Often the state also acquires certain industries: railroads, communications, production of weapons, or the exploitation of natural resources such as oil, copper, or bauxite. In addition, the state builds up an army and a police force. All of these institutions have their own institutional interests: primarily to maintain themselves in existence, then to maintain or to extend their power, receive more public resources in order to fulfill their mission, and have their mission defined (by the executive or the legislature) in the way they see it. Thus the state, in the form of the state bureaucracy, has its own interests and goals, which may well differ from those of the different classes in the society. In that sense, too, the state is independent8 The state is therefore said to be independent if state institutions are distinct from class institutions and/or if the interests of the state are not au-

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tomatically identical with class interests and/or if class pressures are evenly matched so that the state can make policy independent of those class pressures. The state is also independent insofar as its constituent institutions have their own specific interests in maintaining or extending or changing their assigned functions. The State and Civil Society The state is sometimes on the side of the ruling class and sometimes independent. Many readers of Marx have thought that these two views are inconsistent. It seems more reasonable, however, to point out that all these remarks present very partial views and observations about the state. No general theory of the state is here being presented. It is a mistake to infer from the particular observations of occasions when the state is on the side of the ruling class that the state is nothing but the representative of the capitalists.9 On the other side, it is an error to believe that the state, because it is sometimes on the side of the workers, is always independent of the ruling class. The truth is that Marx had planned to write a separate volume about the state in which he would presumably have developed a theory of the state. But he never managed to do that. There is no Marxian theory of the state; there are only a series of different observations, such as that the state is at times completely on the side of the capitalists but is at other times independent In addition, neither view—that the state is on the side of the capitalists or that it is independent—does full justice to Marx's deepest insights into the nature of the capitalist state. That insight is roughly that it is not the personnel, or the structure, but the very nature of the capitalist state that supports capitalism. Even a state that supports the workers in their claims against capitalism and that therefore appears to be a threat to the perpetuation of capitalism still supports the prevailing economic and political order by virtue of its very nature. In order to understand this concept, we need to compare the capitalist state with earlier states. Exploitation is possible in a feudal or slave society because the property owners are also in control of the state and its power of organized violence. In feudal times, for instance, the large landowners were at the same time the political leaders, and the king or emperor owed his position, in part, to the ownership of more land than anyone else. The situation was similar in earlier times: In the case of the ancient peoples, since several tribes lived together in one town, the tribal property appears as state property, and the right of the individual to it as mere "possession." (GI, T 186}

Here land was owned by the community as a whole; individuals merely "possessed" their land, that is, they could use it to farm but could not sell

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it or give it away. The political power and the economic power of the community were embodied jointly in the state. As in the feudal society political power and ownership of land in the tribal society were one and the same thing. Under capitalism, however, there develops a sharp distinction between private and public concerns. Under capitalism property is privately owned and each owner is supposed to consider only private interests. Private property becomes "private" not only in the sense that it belongs to particular individuals but also in the sense that public intervention in the conduct of private economic affairs is minimized. The public is denied an interest and a voice in the sphere of private property. The state becomes quite separate from, the economy because the economy has become the realm of the purely private. The public aspects of that social order become distinct in the form of the state: out of this very contradiction between the interests of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State. ... Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest... the latter will be imposed on them as an interest "alien" to them, and "independent" of them. (GI, T 160-161)

This is a pretty sketchy suggestion, but it contains a number of extremely interesting ideas. Under capitalism society has two more or less distinct parts: the private sphere—which Marx, following Hegel, often calls "civil society"—and the state. In civil society every person is supposed to be a rational economic agent who does as well for him- or herself as possible. In civil society rational and enlightened self-interest is the primary motivation of human beings.10 But no society can meet all its needs if every individual looks after only his or her own good. There are public goods, such as security of property, the existence of a fair and functioning legal system, the possibility of entering contracts without coercion. There are public parks and recreation facilities, roads, museums, and schools or hospitals that are supposed to belong to all and should therefore be accessible to all. In a democracy we can add that fair and clean elections are another public good, as is a military that stays out of electoral politics. These public functions are fulfilled by the state and public services provided by it. The state makes the existence and functioning of this private sphere possible, but its role is, in addition, to protect the integrity of the private sphere. Through its legal system, the state protects private property, whether of consumption of goods or productive resources. In electoral democracies the political system is based on the assumption that all other things being equal, the private economic (and other) transactions of private individuals are not fitting subjects for legislation. Any regulation of

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economic transactions needs to be justified. The burden of proof is always on those who want to regulate economic affairs. The scope of electoral politics is limited by the rights to private property. Extending state regulation to the economy must always be justified. The common good is the task of a specialized agency of the society. Not all persons are expected to be mindful of or concerned for the common good at all times. On the contrary, in their daily lives all are private economic agents, attempting to do as well as they can for themselves with the resources available to them. It is not their role to serve the common good. Hence concern for the common good is "imposed on them as an interest 'alien' to them, and 'independent' of them." They do not support and further the common good as a matter of course. As a consequence, the role of the state in maintaining the common good and in providing public goods is coercive. In order to protect order and property, the state must use police forces, courts, and prisons. In order to provide for public goods, the state must collect taxes forcibly, backing its actions with the threat of fines and more serious punishment for those who do not make their required contribution to the treasury of the state. The individual freedom of the private sphere gives rise to the state's monopoly of legitimate violence in the public domain. As private persons, we pursue our own good. As citizens, we are supposedly trying to support what is good for all, but since we are at the same time pursuing what is good for ourselves, we do not freely fill our role as citizens but only under the threat of coercion. The capitalist state must be a coercive institution.1'1 This theory of the state contains a clear distinction between the power of the state, as manifested in legislation and in the selective enforcement of legislation (e.g., the early English factory acts mentioned just above) and the specific nature of the state. The power of the state is more or less in the hands of one class, depending on the balance of class forces in a society. But the nature of the capitalist state—its separation from the private realm of the economy—will always favor the capitalist class, even when the power of the state favors the enemies of the capitalist class. It will favor the capitalist class because the very limitation of the state as a specialized and coercive institution favors the maintenance of capitalism— the private pursuit of private profit and the private appropriation of that profit. The capitalist disposes of capital and its profits, the worker of labor power. The owner of capital retains all the profits because capital is, after all, private property. Investment decisions, which are also decisions over the direction in which a given, society will develop, remain in the sphere of private property. Workers therefore are and remain exploited because they remain excluded from the control of capital. As long as that separation between the private and the public sphere is maintained—by the very nature of the capitalist state—capitalism and exploitation will con-

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tinue to exist, even if workers have managed to gain sufficient political power to limit the actions of the capitalists, This is only a very rough beginning of a theory of the capitalist state. Marx and Engels did not work out the mechanisms by which capitalism shaped that state. But they were aware that the connections between a mode of production and the state are much more complex than indicated so far. There clearly is no one-to-one correspondence between a mode of production and a particular structure of the state. For instance, the really difficult point to discuss here is how relations of production develop unevenly as legal relations. Thus, e.g., the relation of Roman private law (this less the case with criminal and public law) to modem production. (G, T 245)

Roman law developed in a mode of production very different from that of capitalism, but the revival of the Roman law of property was, as a matter of historical fact, an essential step in the development of capitalism. Similar legal systems operate effectively in very different modes of production.12 When we look at the measures taken by the state, we can find evidence for its being on the side of the employers, but there is also evidence that it is independent or sometimes even on the side of the workers. Whatever states do, however, in capitalist societies they are the anchors and limits of the private sphere without which capitalist exploitation would be impossible. Thus the state supports exploitation by its very nature. Class Struggle in the Democratic State Here we must raise an objection. In Marx's day working people did not have the vote. But since that day the control of the state has passed into the hands of all the voters, and the vote of the owner of property counts for no more than that of the person who barely makes a living. It would appear that the suggestions Marx and Engels made about the state had some applicability 150 years ago but are irrelevant today. This is an important observation, but it does not contradict the claims of Marx and Engels, For they distinguished two ways in which the state supports capitalism, and the capitalist class. Depending on the balance of power in the class struggle, the exercise of state power will favor one class or another. By winning the vote (which they accomplished only after long drawn out struggles), the working people clearly came closer to the control of state power. As a result, the capitalists cannot pass laws or enforce them completely as suits their own interests; legislators must now answer to working-class constituents. But all of this day-to-day political activity takes place within the limits and structures of the capitalist system, in which the state is independent

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in the senses explained earlier. The economy is still under private control; private profit is still a powerful and legitimate moving force of economic activity. Exploitation is still the source of the capitalists' profits. The nature of the capitalist state has not changed, nor has the support that this structure provides for the continuation of the capitalist system. In the capitalist state, the economy and with it exploitation are outside the realm of politics and thus not affected by the extension of suffrage and the development of democratic political institutions. Hence the capitalist state, by its very structure, maintains capitalism. A working class that wants to put an end to exploitation must therefore put an end to the capitalist state. Not only must the existing bureaucracy be discharged and the existing structures dismantled, but the capitalist state, in the broad sense, must be abolished as well. The entire system of laws and the underlying principles must be challenged, reexamined, and, where necessary, replaced. Above all, the distinction between democracy in the political realm and exclusive control by owners in the economic realm must end. But is the economy today not in effect under democratic control? After all, the nineteenth-century notion that economic matters are not to be subjected to state control has long been abandoned. As everyone knows, you cannot be in business, you cannot enter any commercial transaction, even one as simple as buying or selling a car, without having to consult rules made by the government, without paying taxes and getting the required pieces of paper from the government to complete the transaction. It does not appear true any more that economic matters are private and untouched by government regulations. This is undoubtedly so. But the principle of privacy and private ownership remains central in this very important way: Property, whether consumption goods or productive resources, is owned by private individuals. Private ownership implies private control. The people who work in offices or factories, in schools or on farms have nothing to say about the running of their workplaces. The only way they can participate in making public policy in the economic sphere is through the extremely roundabout mechanism of electoral democracy. The individual worker has no say about how the workplace is run except by instructing the elected representative in Washington (or London or Paris or Quito or New Delhi). But that mechanism still leaves the workers without any real say where they work. It leaves them without any real say in investment of a company's profits and the direction in which a given business might develop or what the priorities of a society should be in. the use of its social capital. The worker is still exploited. In spite of all government regulation of economic affairs, the principle of private property and private control has not been breached substantially. The abolition of the capitalist state amounts to the extension of democracy to the economy. Marx customarily refers to this as "a com-

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munity of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common" (CI, T 326). This is the central idea in Marx's conception of communism, which we discuss in Chapter 16. For Further Reading Martin, Carney, Ti« State and Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), chapter 2.

Notes 1. G, William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1%7). 2. Martin Carnoy, Tfe State and Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), chapter 4. 3. To be sure, the law does not in fact treat all persons equally. There are too many examples where the law is manipulated in their own favor by persons with greater resources, 4. Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 473ff. 5. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 278-279. 6. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p, 121. 7. See F. H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Depetuienda y Desarollo en America Latitta (Dependence and development in Latin America) (Mexico, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno, 1988), 8. It is often said that the government and its bureaucracy are on the side of the capitalists because they are the big taxpayers. Bureaucracies need money and therefore tend to treat the wealthy, the large contributors to the state treasury, with more care. That supposes, of course, that the wealthy pay most of the taxes. But in many countries half the taxpayers never pay any taxes at all, and among those who do not pay the wealthy are represented disproportionately. 9. Even though there are, obviously, passages in Marx and Engels that support ascribing that view to them. 10. This does not mean that persons in civil society are particularly "selfish" or unkind. All it means is that each person may choose or not to support public welfare depending on his or her private goals. Support of the common good always is a means to some private end, 11. See Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. 1 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), p. 83. But whatever happened to the unseen hand of Adam Smith? Was it not his belief that if all people pursued their self-interest rationally, the common good would be served better than if they set out to do what is best for all? I discussed this in Chapter 11 and summarized there some of the considerations that moved Marx and Engels to be very skeptical, of the effectiveness of that unseen hand. Experience gives us many reasons for rejecting the claim that if only everyone is able freely to pursue his or her own self-interest, the public good, will be best served. Perhaps the most striking piece of evidence is

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the explosive growth of the coercive state itself in the capitalist twentieth century. The development of capitalism, of the private sphere of free individual pursuit of one's own interest, has been made possible and has required an astonishing extension of state power into all aspects of our lives. These suggestions of Marx and Engels are extremely controversial in our day. But only blind dogmatism will refuse to see that these suggestions are challenges to prevailing beliefs that require careful examination. 12. This difficulty is developed in interesting ways in Goran Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? (London: New Left Books, 1978), part 2, chapter 2.

15 Utopian and Scientific Socialism MARX AND ENGELS DID NOT coin the term "socialism." It was in vogue before they began writing, used by people with political outlooks quite different from theirs. In the third section of the Communist Manifesto, they differentiate their view of socialism from a variety of other contemporary or earlier versions. They admired some of these a great deal, particularly those of Claude-Henri Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, but were nevertheless critical of these thinkers for being "Utopian": the economic situation as they [viz. Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen] find it, does not, as yet, offer them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions. Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class-organization of the proletariat to the organization of society specially contrived by these inventors. (CM, T 497-498)

Marx and Engels called these three thinkers and, reformers "CriticalUtopian Socialists"—"critical" because they attacked "every principle of existing society" (CM, T 498), "Utopian" for more complex reasons, Utopian Socialism In current English usage, proposals are called "Utopian" if they appear unattainable. Any serious suggestion that people travel to the moon was Utopian before the invention of rockets because there was no known 187

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means of propulsion for such a distance beyond the earth's gravitational field. Similarly, thinking is called Utopian if it proposes unrealistic goals. If we look at the passage quoted above, we see that Marx and Engels use the term in a rather different way. They do not criticize the Utopians for their choice of goals—the destruction of capitalist society-—but on the contrary praise them for attacking every principle of existing society, Hence their writings are full of the most valuable materials to help enlighten the working class (CM, T 498). The problem concerns the means to transform society. The Utopians neglect "historical action" and substitute "personal" action; for "historically created conditions of emancipation," they substitute "fantastic" (i.e., purely imaginary) ones; and they substitute themselves, the inventors of these new schemes for a more humane society, for the "class-organization of the proletariat." In addition, the proposals of the Utopians are offered as "absolute truth . . . independent of time, space and the historical development of human beings" (SUS, T 693). In general terms, Marx and Engels criticize their great socialist predecessors for failing to see that societies are historical creations and that changes in societies must therefore take account of the history and the stage of development of the society. Historical change can be successful only when the requisite conditions prevail. More specifically, Marx and Engels raise five criticisms; 1. Since capitalism was hardly developed around 1800, when Fourier and Saint-Simon wrote, and in the 1830s, when Owen worked, the Utopians did not understand capitalism. 2. As a consequence, they did not understand class struggle. 3. They therefore substituted the actions of a great leader—usually themselves—for the concerted action of the proletariat. 4. The Utopians did not understand the connection between what people think and the material conditions under which they do their thinking. 5. The Utopians failed to see that social and political change is possible only when the conditions are right. They did not know that the desire for social change of many people is necessary? but not sufficient to make change possible. Before there can be major social and political change, the economic and political systems must be ready for change. Let us examine these criticisms one by one: 1. The Utopians were critical of the inequality, exploitation, and poverty characteristic of the bourgeois society that was just taking shape before their eyes, but because they did not understand capitalism, they could not understand how these evils were connected with capitalist society.

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The socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get mastery of them. It simply could reject them as bad. (SUS, T 700)

The Utopians thus also did not understand that the solution to the socioeconomic problems before them required the abolition of the capitalist system; they did not see the problems as elements in a highly complex system that needed to be abolished as a whole. Here is an important insight for political action; If some conditions require changing, you need to find out first the causes of those conditions and then the existing forces that maintain those conditions. If poverty concerns you, you need to disco¥er why there are poor people, why just these people are poor, and, most important what aspects of your society keep them in poverty. If there are poor people because there are not enough jobs that pay well, you need to find out what prevents the economy from providing enough jobs. You will discover that there are no doubt very different causes of poverty for different persons and, that therefore you must do different things to help the very old or the disabled from what you must do to help those who cannot find jobs because they are illiterate. But in the course of all this inquiry you will also find, as we noted earlier, that capitalism tends to depress wages and that capitalism consistently has trouble providing jobs for all. At that point you understand that in order to abolish all poverty you need to abolish capitalism. The Utopians did not understand that 2. Since the Utopians did not understand capitalism, they did not understand that the evils they were trying to remedy-—exploitation, inequality, poverty—were the inevitable accompaniments of the rule of the bourgeoisie. Social systems, like capitalism, include particular distributions of power. Capitalism, maintains itself because capitalists have most of the power; that enables them to sustain capitalist institutions, such, as private property in the means of production or the capitalist state (see Chapter 12). Thus the Utopians further could not know that a revolution was necessary in which one class, the proletariat, would take power from another, the capitalists. But this change could be brought about only by the proletariat as a class. The Utopians did, not understand that major transformations of capitalist society can be effected only by large numbers of people. Hence they [viz. the Utopians] reject Jill political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel. (CM, T 498)

The Utopians favored small, experimental communities run by their charismatic leaders. But these communities were not adequate to the task of transforming an entire society (as we will see in item 5 below).

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3. The Utopians misunderstood the role of the farsighted individual reformer. They believed that one such person could be the leader to build a new world. Instead, such individuals can do no more than to "fight for the immediate aims of the working class" (CM, T 499), They may try to be helpful to the working class in the work that it alone can do, but they cannot hope to do that work for the working class. The Utopians did not understand who was to be the agent of social change. Marx and Engels insisted, by contrast, that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself" (T 555). 4. The Utopians thought that our understanding about the world depends exclusively on how well we use our minds. If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been. the case only because human beings have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. (SUS, T 685)

If previous generations had not developed the proposals of Saint-Simon or Fourier or Owen, that failure must be attributed to their failure to think as clearly about the world as these three reformers did. But such a view ignores the insight of materialism, that our understanding of the world depends to a considerable extent on the world in which we live. It is impossible to understand capitalism before it has developed sufficiently to be observable. It is impossible to understand the historical role of class struggle before classes are sufficiently developed to become active politically, and so on. Lack of effort or lack of mental ability are not the only limits on human knowledge; social conditions and forces cannot be understood unless they are fully developed. In its very earliest phases, capitalism is too undeveloped to be intelligible. Of course one must think well. Marx and Engels did not underestimate the contribution they themselves made by virtue of their own scholarly efforts and exceptional abilities. But they also believed that socialist theory can be adequate only if its originators not only think well but also think under the requisite conditions—namely, when capitalism is ripe and socialism around the corner, (See the discussion of class consciousness in Chapter 12.) 5. There have been many proposals for social change that assumed that if a group of well-intentioned people would only try hard enough, they could develop alternative institutions. Examples of that are the intentional communities that have been founded in the United States ever since the early days of the Republic. But such communities, even if they lasted for extended periods (and very few managed that) remained small communities. They had little or no effect on the society at large. It was much more frequently the case that the prevailing capitalist institutions transformed the intentional communities into standard capitalist institu-

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tions. Some examples are the Amana community In Iowa and many of the kibbutzim, in Israel, Capitalism, like all other social systems, has a natural life span. You cannot abolish it just whenever you decide to do so. It needs to mature before it is abolished. Capitalism cannot be replaced as soon as people understand that it is the source of their suffering; rather, it has to run its course and develop fully before a socialist revolution is possible. The Utopians had an inadequate understanding of the process of social change because they did not see that social conditions had their roots in social systems that can only be removed at specific times, namely, when they are ready to be removed. The Utopians ignored history. They failed to see that as history changes, so do the concrete problems of human beings. They did not study their immediate environment to see what precisely the problems were, what social systems and social forces served to maintain these problems. They also did not understand what measures were needed to solve these problems or who would be in a position to do so. Hence they misdiagnosed problems; they did not understand what was possible to do in their time and what needed to be deferred; and, most important, they did not understand who was going to bring about all these transformations. Scientific Socialism According to Marx and Engels, the proper form of socialism is not Utopian but scientific, It is unfortunate that they thought the concept of science did. not present any problems and therefore never made any sustained effort to clarify what they meant by science. In all the plentiful writings of Marx and Engels, science is rarely mentioned and if so only in passing. As a consequence, there are very different conceptions of what they meant by science. Each can be supported by certain comments of Marx and Engels, In a few places Marx compares his work in economics to natural science and talks about his discovery of the "laws of motion" of economies and, more generally, of entire societies. In the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, volume 1, Marx cites with approval the review written by a Russian author. The one thing that is of moment to Marx is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned,... Consequently Marx troubles himself about only one thing . . . to establish as impartially as possible the facts. (CI, T 330)

The conception of science implicit in this passage is simple. Science has two tasks: It collects facts "as impartially as possible" and on the basis of

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those facts sets down laws. In the preface to the first German edition, Marx himself formulated this view of his project by drawing an explicit parallel between his work and physics; he claims to ha¥e discovered laws or "tendencies that work with iron necessity towards inevitable results" (Cl, T 296). In these passages Marx presents himself as the Isaac Newton of social science, as the man who developed laws of social change comparable to the laws of mechanics Newton formulated. Many commentators take utterances like these as representative of the conception of science that Marx and Engels held.1 But Marx and Engels also hold another view of science. In the same excerpt from the afterword to the second. German edition, the reviewer insists that "the old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry" (CI, T Ml)—societies are more like biological organisms than inanimate bodies. Here the analogy between economics and natural science that Marx seems to draw in the passage quoted earlier is explicitly rejected. The laws of mechanics apply everywhere and at all times, while laws applicable to social organisms change from one historical period to another. Social science regards every historically developed form as in fluid movement and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence. (CI, T 302)

Social science employs conceptual schemes that apply only under limited historical conditions. Thus the theories that help us to understand capitalist institutions are not applicable to different modes of production. For instance, the economic models that throw light on the commercial transactions under capitalism and on the development (and underdevelopment) of capitalist countries do not help us understand a feudal society or a society that rests on slavery. This social science dedicated to tracing the changes in social organisms, Marx insists, is none other than the dialectic (see Chapter 4). However difficult it may be to interpret the details of that conception of science, it is clear that it is much more complex than the earlier view that likened Marx's economics to Newtonian physics. Dialectic is needed, Marx suggests, because the same laws and the same concepts do not apply in all historical periods. Before we can even begin to investigate the facts about any given society, we require a theory that defines and links together the key concepts we need in order to describe those facts. Marx and Engels then seem to hold quite different theories of science. The first derives "laws of iron necessity" from carefully observed, facts. The second has two distinct parts, one proceeding toward the formulation of theoretical frameworks and the other investigating facts and their

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connections, all the while making use of the theoretical framework developed at some distance from the particular facts. What is more, there are different interpretations of this second Marxian conception of science. Some writers ignore Marx's comments about "dialectic" and his description of his science as "dialectical" and insist that Marx proceeds as do most scientists today, namely, by formulating models and then testing those models in relation to observation.2 Others take Marx's comments about dialectic more seriously and see in the dialectical formulation of theoretical frameworks a procedure that develops and justifies concepts independently of factual observations, by the use of philosophical argumentation alone.3 Others stress that the dialectic is not a purely theoretical method for the development of concepts but rather studies the ways in which existing structures shape and set limits to existing institutions.4 This is the view of dialectic that I developed in Chapter 4. These two different conceptions of science have at least one thing in common: Both claim, to establish "necessary" laws. Marx and Engels more than once refer to the "iron necessity" of the laws of social science. Their social science does not just deal in probabilities; it does not merely discover possible trends, the ways in which a society might develop. Nor does it merely uncover sets of alternative trajectories that a society or a set of institutions might follow in their development, without being able to predict which of those trajectories a society will actually follow.5 The social science of Marx and Engels formulates laws of necessary development. In the passage cited earlier from the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, we read that Marx... [tries) to show the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions.... For this it is quite enough if he proves at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over. (CI, T 300)

That science, however one may understand it in detail, allows one to predict that certain changes will take place once the necessary and sufficient initial conditions have emerged. Now the ability to predict future events is indeed an important ingredient in scientific knowledge. One may well agree with Marx and. Engels that knowledge that does not yield predictions is not scientific or is scientific in a less demanding sense than knowledge that does allow us to make accurate and testable predictions. But it is not clear that social science in this strong sense exists; it is certain that what Marx and Engels developed was not science in that sense. Marx and Engels and their followers believed that they were in possession of a significant beginning of such a social science. They believed that they had discovered the "laws of motion of capitalist society" and had therewith founded a secure and reliable body of knowledge about the his-

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tory and development of capitalism. Many empirical details, everyone was ready to admit, needed further study and elaboration, but the laws themselves were securely established. Hence one could know what was going to happen inevitably, at least in large outline. One could, for instance, predict with confidence that socialism would replace capitalism, even though the precise date of that event was unknown. One could predict that capitalist industry would become more and more concentrated, that the working class would grow in number and in political organization, and that capitalism would finally fail to function effectively and would then be ripe to be replaced by socialism through the agency of the organized working class. We saw earlier, in Chapter 11, that many of the predictions of Marx and Engels are mistaken. Marx and Engels did not in fact possess the scientific knowledge to which they laid claim. There is no such thing as "scientific socialism" because the science on which it supposedly rests either does not exist at all or is developed much less fully than has long been thought. Followers of Marx and Engels are not in a position to make firm claims about the laws governing the development of capitalism.6 In addition, portions of this supposed science are, we saw, unfinished. There is neither a complete theory of the state nor a theory of alienation. The theory of exploitation presupposes economic models most contemporary economists reject. Those who are still willing to defend the labor theory of value admit that it is not developed in sufficient mathematical detail. Predictions about the eventual decay of capitalism are radically incomplete; Marx and Engels do not have clear criteria for deciding when capitalism is fully developed or when it is going to stop being productive and when it will be ready for replacement. Hence they radically misjudged the extent to which capitalism in their own day was already fully developed." This Marxian conception of science has played an important role in, the Marxist tradition. It prevailed throughout the social democratic parties before World War I and in the many communist parties until the recent collapse of the Soviet Union. The belief was widespread that Marx and Engels had established a science that allowed left-wing militants to expect with complete confidence that the socialist revolution was going to take place sooner or later. Many generations of socialists and communists dedicated their lives to the political work of the day completely certain that socialism would arrive inevitably because the Marxian science had established the necessary replacement of capitalism, by socialism. This confidence, however admirable, was misplaced. There is no scientific socialism. It is not even clear that the project pursued so widely today of establishing a social science is possible. But that does not deter many intelligent and knowledgeable investigators from pursuing that goal. The same is true of the goal of establishing a just society. Marx and Engels and

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their followers are not the only ones to have done battle on behalf of such a society. It is an ancient dream, to build a society where justice prevails over power, community over enmity. But no one besides the Marxists have believed that science justified their pursuit and that they could be sure of success. All those other visionaries, however, were no less dedicated to their goal and no less willing to make great sacrifices for their cause. With the realization that there is no scientific socialism, we lose the comforting certainty that our cause will be victorious. But that has never been a reason for giving up hope that a more just society is possible, nor has it been a reason for not making every effort to attain such a just society, What We Can Learn from the Critique of Utopian!§m Perhaps the most serious consequence of the mistaken belief that Marx and Engels had provided their followers with a scientific account of capitalism and its inevitable development is that they and the generations of socialists that followed believed that they did not have to worry too much what socialism would be like. For if socialism were to follow inevitably, then people would, at the time, figure out what had to be done. As soon as it has risen up, a class in which the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated finds the content and the material for its revolutionary activity directly in its situation: foes to be laid low, measures dictated by the needs of the struggle to be taken; the consequences of its own deeds drive it on. It makes no theoretical inquiries into its own task (CS, T 588)

When the time for revolution has come, everyone will know what needs to be done. What is more, raising questions about the nature of socialism smacked of utopianism; such questions were for that reason also suspect. When the Bolsheviks, for instance, came to power in Russia, in 1917, they had only the vaguest idea of the socialism they set out to construct They were certain that a socialist society would be one where the state owned all means of production. But for the rest they improvised. They were not equipped to build an alternative economic and social order; they believed that they did not need to prepare themselves for that because the changes were necessary and hence would be obvious to all when the time came. It is quite clear that they were mistaken about that. When, the time came to rebuild the economy ravaged by World War I and by the civil war following the Bolshevik revolution, the Bolshevik leaders did not have a very clear idea of what needed to be done. In addition, the false belief in a Marxian social science obscured the deeper meaning of the distinction between Utopian and, scientific socialism. I discussed this earlier in connection with the ethical views of Marx and Engels at the end of Chapter 7. Once we distance ourselves from the

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prevailing view that scientific socialism replaces ethical views about the in.justi.ces of capitalism, we are ready to understand that political action, at its best, has two sides. On the one hand, political action that works for an amelioration ol social conditions must be guided by a set of ideals of a good society-—an oppositional ideology. All great political leaders are moved and inspired by definite ideals of a good society. Socialism is in that sense an ideal also. It sets out some of the aspects of a good society. On the other hand, there are practical questions about how that ideal is going to be realized. Marx insisted in his discussion of Utopian socialism that actual, concrete political actions cannot realize the ethical ideal of socialism immediately and directly. The ideal of socialism is not a blueprint; it sketches a vague outline of the world we seek to build. It does not tell us how to go about building it Actual societies are enormously complex, their different parts connected in complicated ways to form social systems. Political action must always be understood in its context of social, economic, and political institutions. These particular institutions present us with problems and limited ranges of options for their resolution. Particular actions sometimes serve to maintain these institutions; at other times they change them. But at the same time the insti.tuti.onal contexts shape the consequences of these actions in ways we cannot always predict (see Chapter 4). These facts about political action have several consequences: Human political action always proceeds on the basis of incomplete information because human beings are not omniscient. We do not fully understand the institutional context in which we operate and how it will affect the outcomes of our actions. Hence the political actions we undertake are bound to have consequences that are not foreseen or foreseeable. Sometimes these unforeseen consequences go in the right direction; often our actions, no matter how carefully considered, have consequences that are quite undesirable. The process of building socialism must be frankly experimental. In addition, societies and their institutional structures change. Actions that might be effective and useful at one time will not make sense or have the desired results at another time. Building a socialist society is a long process. What we do at any given time depends very much on current conditions and the problems those conditions present us with, as well as the options available for resolving those problems. For instance, once we give up the certainty that socialism will come, we need to ask whether socialism, is even, possible. We can no longer ignore that question. But what is possible does, of course, vary in different historical periods. Hence the question, Is socialism possible? will not be answered once and for all but will transform itself into a very different and more complicated question: We have formulated a general ideal of a just society. Now we need to decide what steps in that direction are needed and, more important, which of those are possible today and which will be in order after that Whether

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those more remote measures will actually be appropriate and/ or possible depends on the outcomes of our present activiti.es. But the question about the possibility of socialism is transformed into many different questions, asked at different times, about whether the moves in the direction of socialism are feasible. Our actions can affect institutions, but we cannot abolish entire social systems whenever we happen to decide to do so. We can abolish, say, private o\vnership of means of production by legislative means or by decree.8 But the institution of private property brings with it a particular class structure. The class structure of any particular mode of production, moreover, involves economic, social, and political, class distinctions and class struggle. Different classes have different ideologies. We can make it illegal to own means of production, but it is going to be much harder to eliminate the corresponding class stratifications or change the different ideologies that go with the institution of private property. The ability to abolish private ownership of the means of production by decree is necessary but not sufficient. Also necessary is a fully developed working class that knows that it wants socialism, that has some definite ideas of what socialism will be like and what needs to be done to bring it about, and that has the requisite skills to do what it needs to do. There must be a working class that is ready to take power in its own right and to participate actively in running its workplaces and the political system. An uprising can, if it succeeds, take over the state offices. The working class can occupy the police station and city hall; it can surround and then take over the television and radio stations and begin to broadcast news of the uprising. Taking over the power of the state officials that occupy the offices in the police station and in city hall or the power of previous owners of the TV and radio stations is, however, much more difficult. There is a great deal, of difference between being in physical possession of government offices and being able to govern. To give a simple example of that, in 1918, at the end of World War I, the imperial German government that had lost the war collapsed and was replaced by "soldiers, sailors, and workers councils" in different cities in Germany. The workers, many of them still in uniform, took over the government offices. In the port city of Hamburg, Just four days after such, a council was set up, it received a group of distinguished visitors in city hall. Led by Max Warburg, director of one of Germany's most powerful banking and financial empires, these men represented the leading banking and commercial firms of Hamburg, Their business was unequivocal. It was clear, they pointed out, that the government of a city state of over one-and-a-half million souls could not be conducted without funds.... They generously offered to provide such necessary funds. Since, however, they were to take such large personal

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risks in the interests of Hamburg, it seemed only fair that they should have a certain voice in deciding how the funds were to be spent9

The upshot of that negotiation was that the previous ruling elites came back into the city government and soon were running the city again, gradually squeezing out the workers. The uprising had succeeded in giving the workers control of the government offices but not the power to run it. The various proletarian uprisings that Marx chronicled support the same conclusion; Taking over city hall physically does not guarantee the ability to govern the city. Here is what happened in Paris in 1848; When it came to the actual conflict, however, when the people mounted the barricades ... the republic appeared to be a matter of course,... Having been won by the proletariat by force of arms, the proletariat impressed its stamp on it.... While the Paris proletariat still reveled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened before i t . . . the old powers of society had grouped themselves, assembled, reflected, and found an unexpected support in the mass of the nation. (18th, T 600)

The revolution began with workers fighting in the streets. Their victory made them believe that they were in power. While they were deliberating on how to reshape French society, the previous ruling groups gathered together again. The outcome was a dear defeat of the proletariat. It did not win state power. Marx and Engels repeatedly insisted that the revolutionary class could not simply take over the existing state but had to transform it. A revolution requires not only a transfer of state power from one class to another but a transformation of state power, A new class will have a state of a new form. Marx was aware of that: "But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purpose" (CW, T 629). That means that the existing power cannot simply be taken over. The masses of people cannot simply take power but have to construct new kinds of power,10 But new power requires new institutions. New institutions require new ideologies, new organizations, and, to some extent, different sorts of people. This is the central insight embodied in the distinction between Utopian and scientific socialism. Politics—if it is not only self-interested, get-meelected politics—is guided by some general ideals. But the realization of these ideals requires much, more concrete actions that often do not turn out as expected because we are not omniscient; they are distorted by the complex social systems in which we act. Those social systems may be replaced, but only when they are ready, that is, when classes that are capable of replacing them have developed and are sufficiently numerous and powerful to usher in a new historical era.11 There is an important difference between the conception of a socialist society and the means that

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need to be employed at different times to move toward this society. We discuss that difference in more detail in the next chapter. Notes 1. Thus G. A. Cohen ascribes to Marx a "Victorian" conception of science, by which he presumably means a conception like that of John Stuart Mill that understands science as consisting of laws derived from carefully gathered and verified facts. See G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 329, n, 1. 2. Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York; Monthly Review Press, 1942), 3. See, for example, Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx's Capital: Replies to Hegelian Criticisms (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 4. Daniel. Little, The Scientific Marx (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 5. For a detailed discussion of such alternative conceptions of the task of social science, see Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine, and Elliott Sober, Reconstructing Marxism (London: Verso, 1992), chapters 4 and 5. 6. This has been argued in considerable detail in ibid, 7. See, for example, Marx-Engels; Selected Correspondence (Moscow; Progress Publishers, 1975), p, 223. 8. Notice that a selective nationalization of some industries is very different from abolishing the institution of private property altogether. 9. Richard A. Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg; Labor Politics in the Early Weimar Republic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 47. 10. Coordinacidn Socialista Latinoamericana, Docutnentos Basicos (Basic documents) (Quito; Coordination Socialista Latinoamericana, 1992), p. 14. 11. For very similar views, see Stephen Bronner, Socialism Unbound (New York: Rou Hedge, 1990).

16 Socialism THE REVOLUTION THAT PUTS an end to capitalism will usher in a society that Marx and Engels called "communist," Today, in popular usage, the word "communism" is identified with the economic and political system of the former Soviet Union and is frequently used as a virtual synonym for "dictatorship," whereas any kind of government intervention in the economy is liable to be called "socialistic," Marx and Engels used those terms in exactly the opposite sense: By "socialist" and "communist" societies, they meant genuinely free societies. In his 1888 preface to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto, Engels explained the terms "communism" and "socialism" as follows: By Socialists, in 1847 [the year in which Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto] were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems,... on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profits, all sorts of social grievances,.., Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions,., then called itself Communist1

Socialists were concerned with the "social" question—the stark misery of the new industrial working class—but they were not critical of capitalism as a whole. They tended to be middle-class reformers. Communism found its main adherents among working people. Communists agreed with one another that private property needed to be abolished, but because of their rather diverse conceptions of private property, they had different conceptions of communism. Hence Marx, in his essay "Private Property and Communism" (EPM, T 81 ff.), classified different versions of communism according to the different understandings its advocates had of private property, 200

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Both within and outside the Marxist tradition, the meanings of these two words have changed frequently since then. Marx and Engels themselves vacillated in their usage, calling themselves communists at some times and (as we saw in Chapter 15) "scientific" socialists at other times, in order to differentiate themselves from the Utopian socialists (SUS, T 683ff,). Given the current disrepute of the word "communism," I use the term "socialism" to refer to the better society that Marx and Engels were working for. While Marx and Engels never laid out a systematic account of a socialist society, they made many observations in passing that one can put together to get a picture of their good society. But in so doing one must be clearly aware of the distinction drawn in the preceding chapter between the ethical and political goals and the concrete means for their implementation. Most writers—including Marx himself when he was a young man—lose sight of this important distinction; their discussions of socialism resemble just the sort of blueprint of the perfect society that Marx and Engels condemned in their criticisms of Utopian socialism. The Socialist Goals The socialist goals are sometimes summarized as community and equality, "The socialist aspiration was to extend community to the whole of our economic life."2 Equality was an essential ingredient of community Other writers mention as goals the end of domination,3 the abolition of exploitation, or the abolition of alienation.4 Jon Elster introduces a different theme in the list of socialist goals: "Self-realization through creative work is the essence of Marx's communism."5 Others regard as "the basic dynamic of a socialist economy its tendency to develop its forces of production not in order to produce surplus value, but in order to reduce the amount of necessary social labor performed by its members."6 The goal of socialism is to increase the leisure of all persons so that they can enjoy their efforts at "self-realization through creative work." Freedom, finally, is often posed as the central value in socialism: A socialist society provides freedoms unknown in a capitalist society.7 This list of socialist goals may seem chaotic, but it is not difficult to show that these different goals—the end of exploitation, economic and political domination, and alienation; the full development of each human being; community; equality; and freedom—are all closely connected and are all aspects of one and the same composite ideal. The exploitation of workers is the central evil of capitalism. Workers are exploited under capitalism because all the returns to capital are appropriated by the capitalists, even though there are no plausible justifications for excluding workers from the ownership and control of capital.

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This exclusive ownership of capital by the capitalists gives them inordinate power over workers insofar as the employers control the jobs and can thus make stringent conditions for allowing people to work. One of the conditions for working is that workers accept their exclusion from the control of capital. Another condition for working is that the employer has exclusive control over the work process; work is rarely run cooperatively. The private ownership of capital allows the capitalists to perpetuate their po\ver and with it the exploitation of labor. The central socialist goal is the abolition of exploitation, of the employers' control over the work process, and the disproportionate economic and political power that employers possess by virtue of their private ownership and control of the capital of the entire society. This goal has direct implications for the structure of the society and for politics. A capitalist society is divided into separate classes, as were all preceding societies. In a socialist society, classes disappear, as does exploitation. Power is be shared by all, and no one lives in comfort, or even in luxury, at the expense of the hard work and the poverty of others. This does not mean that there are not differences among groups of people, that there are not disagreements or differences of interest or ways of life or even different access to resources. The absence of classes means just what it says: the absence of exploitation, the absence of an unjustified shift of resources from one group to another made possible by an unjustified inequality in the distribution of economic and political power. The unequal distribution of economic power brings with it unequal political power (see Chapter 14). The end of exploitation, conversely, creates the preconditions for a new and more extensive democracy. Socialist democracy is very different from capitalist democracy. Once power over work and investments is generally shared, democratic procedures must be extended to the economy, which becom.es subject to popular control through democratic procedures. But socialist democracy is very different from capitalist democracy in other ways. Capitalist democracy, we saw, allows the capitalists a great deal of power, whereas others in the society can do no more than vote. In addition, in a capitalist society politics becomes a business. Running electoral, campaigns is a business. Lawmaking involves a great deal of bargaining, as legislatures are large markets where different projects are exchanged, one for the other. Legislators are entrepreneurs who try to benefit themselves by trading their influence for goods they desire. Voting, finally, is largely an economic activity; Voters elect those who promise to put money into the voters' pockets. With the abolition of private ownership of capital, political power is more equal. With the abolition of capitalism, democratic procedures cease to be an occasion to make money. Democratic deliberation and decisionmaking take the place of

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"selling" ideas and policies or making bargains to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Democracy becomes what it was intended to be: the process in which groups reflect on and decide the important issues in their collective lives. One precondition for such a democracy is, of course, civil and political liberties for all. Thus three central socialist goals are ending the domination of capitalists over workers in the workplace, in the labor market, and in the political realm. All three forms of domination flow directly from the private ownership of the means of production that gives employers much more power than the workers within the workplace, in the labor market, and in the political arena. We can clarify the concepts of socialist democracy and socialist freedom by considering another socialist goal: the abolition of alienation. Alienation has different meanings for Marx and. Engels, as we saw in Chapter 10. Of central importance is the idea that under capitalism we may have personal freedom—a range of choices to consume or to arrange our lives as we, individually, please.8 But we do not have collective freedom to arrange our society together in order to provide the conditions for the development of ourselves and future generations in directions of our own choosing. Marx and Engels insist again and again that the prevailing character structures of human beings are shaped by the dominant institutions (see Chapters 1-4). As a consequence, human beings can create their own nature, to some extent by changing their institutions in ways that will make it easier to be the sorts of persons they choose to be. Groups have collective freedom when they are able to shape their institutions with an eye to making themselves and their children the kind of people they want to be. Such questions are not unknown in our society. Witness, for instance, the extended debate about changes in the structure of the family and the evils that supposedly follow from these changes, (Marx himself refers to the "disgusting dissolution, under capitalism, of the old family ties"; CI, T 415.) This debate centers on what we want ourselves and our children to be and what sorts of institutions will be needed to make us into what we desire. The defenders of the traditional family believe that it fosters virtues of honesty, moderate consumption, hard work. Children who come from broken families, by contrast, are thought to lack self-discipline, integrity, and the desire to work. The debate over the family shares with Marx and Engels the belief that there are only limited features that belong to all human beings across different historical periods and that we change in important ways depending on the dominant institutions of our society.9 But while many people ask these sorts of questions, they cannot answer them adequately unless they are willing to be critical of capitalism. (Most defenders of the traditional family are unwilling to do that.) Capitalism

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directly affects the structure of the family and destroys the traditional family through a number of mechanisms, such as greater social and geographical mobility and a rising standard of living that allows nuclear families to live separately from their extended families. Capitalism promotes urbanization and for a variety of complex reasons induces both parents in nuclear families to go off to work, often leaving children without proper care. But even if these questions were raised more often than they are, collective control over our institutions is impossible in this society. We cannot change our institutions in order to change human nature for the better. Capitalists, who are committed to preserving our society in its present shape, have all the economic and most of the political power. Hence we cannot consider the central problems of how we will shape our institutions with an eye to the development of the human personality because we have no way of affecting the relevant decisions. We suffer from what Marx and Engels call "alienation." Freedom—the opposite of alienation—means that we can see ourselves in a world of our own making (EPM, T 76), This is not a world each of us makes individually for ourselves, apart front others, but a world that we make together by thinking about the best use of our collective resources to make the world a better one and us into better people. We are alienated under capitalism because this freedom is not available to us. We could have this freedom only if we could decide collectively how the society's resources are to be used to the best effect. Connected with that goal of full collective freedom is another goal that I mentioned earlier (Chapters 1 and 10), the goal of having far-reaching control, over our social institutions. Marx and. Engels speak more than once of the life of a society as "production of freely associated human beings ... consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan" (CI, T 327). Once capitalism has been replaced by socialism, groups will be able to shape their social relations and their institutions according to "a settled plan." They will no longer be at the mercy of impersonal, unplanned economic processes as we are under capitalism, because of the fumbling of the "unseen hand." But what precisely Marx and Engels mean here is not altogether clear. Some commentators think that in a socialist society "technology has developed to a plane where practically everything is possible."10 But in the light of what we saw earlier (for instance, in Chapter 4), such a view is excessively optimistic. Human beings will never be omniscient; the world will always be more complex than our understanding of it, and our actions will always have unexpected consequences. What will be different, however, is that the shape of social institutions and their effects on the character of members of the society will be matters of deep concern and explicit reflection and planning. It will not be left to the vagaries of the capitalist marketplace.

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Marx and Engels had a general notion of what sorts of persons we should strive to be. Marx talks frequently about the "full development" of persons. Human beings should be as competent as possible in as many different ways as they can. (But presumably they should not be competent liars, thieves, and murderers.) One of his complaints about capitalist society with its division of labor is that people become excessively specialized: For as soon as the division of labor conies into being each man has an exclusive, particular sphere of activity which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a social critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his livelihood; while in communist society, where no one 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 everting, criticize after dinner. (GI, T 160)

Especially in his early work, Marx seems to have thought that all people should, as far as possible, be creative and should do a minimum of productive work in order to be free to paint or write or play music. "For Marx, then, Man the Producer is Man the Artist."11 But that is too narrow an understanding of the ideal of full self-development for all. Human beings have many different capacities. Some can paint or write music. Others tell good stories or invent good games for children. Some can make any plant grow, and others are attuned to animals. But there are also very ordinary capacities that, in most of us, remain undeveloped. Most people are not very observant. Their eyes miss much of what there is to see around them. Blind people often hear much better than sighted ones because their ears are better trained. We live in a society devoted to the production and consumption of commodities. What matters about the commodities is primarily their monetary value. We see, hear, smell, or touch only what has some bearing on economic value. Out senses have become impoverished. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food, that exists.... It could just as well be there in its crudest form.... The dealer in minerals sees only the mercantile value not the beauty. (EPM, T 89}

Socialism restores our capacity for a much wider range of perceptual relationships to other persons as well as to things. It "produces man in the entire richness of his being... profoundly endowed with all the senses" (EPM, T 89) The goal, moreover, is not Just for each of us separately to develop our capacities to hear, to see, to enjoy. Instead, the goal is a society "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of

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all" (CM, T 491). The development of each presupposes and is presupposed by the development of all others. This is in sharp contrast to the capitalist society that assigns resources by means of competition. In a competition there are one winner and many losers. The well-being of one person comes at the expense of many others. The success of one is not dependent on the success of the other competitors but, on the contrary on their failure,12 Under capitalism, the wealth is distributed very unevenly; the owners of capital can provide good educations for themselves and their children that are not accessible to many others. They can be art connoisseurs and collectors and develop themselves in countless other ways. But that ability is gained at the expense of many other people. They can be highly developed because others do not have access to the same resources. In a capitalist society, the well-being of one depends on the failure of another. In a socialist society, competition is not destructive; it does not reward some at the expense of others. There is to be no exploitation, and hence no (economic) classes. In such a society, people develop by learning from, others. They are induced to acquire new skills or to develop the ones they have because people are interested in their skills. In the United States today, very few people read poetry and even fewer read with any kind of understanding. It is not a society that encourages poets. A socialist society will allow all people to develop fully only if others share their goals and thus one another's accomplishments. In a socialist society, people spur each other on to greater effort not through competition but because they take an informed interest in the activities of others. Marx and Engels frequently also refer to the abolition of the distinction between "manual" and "mental" labor. In a society where all are able to develop as fully as possible, there will not be a distinct class of intellectuals or of people manipulating information while the rest do manual labor. That is a central form, of specialization in a capitalist society that socialism expects to remedy (GI, T 159). In all these ways, socialist society aims at constituting itself a genuine community by overcoming exploitation and destructive competition, by substituting a richer kind of democracy for the capitalist democracy that allows the vote to all but genuine power only to the few. In a real community, the well-being of each depends on the well-being of all the others, and thus the ancient conflict between selfinterest and interest of others tends to diminish. But are these goals attainable? For many years, Marxists did not raise this question because they took socialism to be inevitable, and what is inevitable is certainly possible. In recent years, questions about what sort of socialism is possible have begun to be raised, marking progress in thinking about socialism,. But at the same time, the distinction between socialist goals and the means to attain them has not always been drawn clearly enough: Goals are much too vague to be shown to be either feasible or

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not It is not at all clear, in detail, what a socialist democracy will be like. Will elections play the central role they play now? What mechanisms for sharing power among all the people will be developed? The notion of community is hazy. Socialist goals are not specific. But that problem is not peculiar to socialism but is common among all general goals, such as the Christian goal of a society permeated by brotherly and sisterly love, a world of peace where the lion will lie down by the lamb, or the goal of a just society'—the goal of philosophers since the days of Plato. We do not know whether those goals can be reached—they are much too general for us to decide that—but they are good guides for our attempts to ameliorate conditions as they are.13 Such general goals, because they are extremely vague, cannot be instituted immediately. That Insight was one of the important contributions of Marx and Engels in their polemic against Utopian socialism. Actual changes in economic or political institutions are very specific. Socialist goals are anything but specific. The actual institutional changes thus must be distinct from, the goals that those changes aim at You cannot institute community directly because you do not know what precisely you mean by that. What is more, for us to live in that very different society, human beings must change. But such changes are not for us to make at any moment by merely choosing to be different or by a sudden, conversion to a new political belief or religious faith. The changes in our characters are slow, depending on changing institutions and our adaptation to those new institutions. The practical question about how we should change our institutions and ourselves is quite distinct from the question about what socialist goals are. Socialist Institutions What sorts of institutions will allow us to reach these goals? In the tradition that begins with Marx and Engels, one thinks of socialism as "the socialization of the means of production" or "the taking over of all productive forces by the society itself" (SUS, T 711 n.)- Here private ownership of the means of production is abolished and with it the relatively unplanned nature of the capitalist marketplace, characterized "by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy" (SUS, T 706). Central to communism, as Marx and Engels understood it, is therefore the replacement of the individual pursuit of profit and the anarchy of the marketplace with collective control of the economy. Democracy is extended to the economy. What disappears is the distinction, so sharp under capitalism, between the political realm, where decisions are made democratically (at least in theory), and the economy, where decisions are made autocratically by private individuals or are not made by anybody because they are left to the market.

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In place of the self-regulating capitalist marketplace socialism puts the public ownership of the means of production and an economy that is planned. Marx and Engels are quite explicit about that: The "anarchy" of the capitalist marketplace must be replaced by a centrally planned economy. The social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual (SUS, T 712)

The unplanned coordination of the capitalist marketplace is replaced by a central economic plan, arrived at by democratic processes. Any economy must assign resources to different aetiYities. In a capitalist society, such an assignment is the result of market forces that express the capitalists' expectation of profitability. In a socialist society, resources would be assigned in accordance with a definite social, plan that maintains the proper proportions between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. (CI, T 326)

This belief in a planned economy was Marxist orthodoxy until about the early 1970s. It is still being defended by a number of able theorists.14 But the experience with centrally planned economies, particularly in the Soviet Union, as well as theoretical arguments against the technical possibility of running an efficient planned economy,15 have persuaded many theorists that the market must play some sort of role in a socialist society. Thus arose a project called "market socialism.": to design an economy that is not capitalist but still avails itself of the informational advantages of the market. There are different conceptions of what a market socialist economy might be like. All have a market in commodities, both consumption goods and goods needed for the production of other goods. Not all have a market in labor because some theorists fear that with a labor market will also come exploitation and hence traditional capitalist class divisions. Nor do all market socialist schemes have a market in capital because that, too, would encourage traditional capitalist modes of operation. But some market socialist schemes do make provisions for both labor and capital markets. There exist plausible theoretical arguments that market socialism, is feasible in the sense that it will not be less efficient and productive than current versions of capitalism.16 It is, in addition, very likely these versions of market socialism will give more power over the economy and thus over the development of the society to all people and will thereby diminish the difference in power and resources between different classes of the popu-

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lation. Market socialism stands a fair chance to extend and strengthen democracy. But the debate between the advocates of market socialism and democratic planning is not yet complete. We need to answer at least two outstanding questions before we can choose the economic structure of socialism, In the first place, we need to understand more fully the causes of the failure of the Soviet economy. Advocates of market socialism tend to point to theoretical economic problems of incentives, efficiency, and control in planned economies. Defenders of planned economies point to the impressive successes of planned economies in wartime Germany and the United States in the two world wars. Perhaps the failure of the Soviet economy was due to conditions peculiar to Russia in 1917. Perhaps the technical economic problems can be solved. Advocates of a planned economy, for instance, always insist that planning must be thoroughly democratic. Planning in the Soviet Union (and China) was always bureaucratic and authoritarian. Whether these defenses of a democratically planned autonomy are adequate will not be clear until we have had more discussion of the alternative schemes and developed a more elaborate explanation of the failure of the Soviet economy. The second problem about market socialism, which will require much more debate, is whether market socialism is not altogether too close to existing capitalist institutions to support the sorts of changes in institutions and people's character that are part of the socialist goal. In a socialist society, there is far-going equality of access to resources, power is genuinely shared among all people, and decisions are made in the best interest of all. That socialist ideal looks to significant changes in the common character of its citizens: They are more interested in developing their different abilities and those of others than they are in consumption; more interested in community than in winning competitions; more interested in a well-arranged society than their private interests or the advancement of their families. Gender, racial, and other differences are sources for enrichment of the community, not for hatred and oppression. Participation in political processes is a way for citizens in a socialist society to be fully human together. It is not a means for appropriating public resources for private ends or shifting burdens from one group on to the back of other groups. Marx and Engels were aware of the need for changing human beings to ready them for the very different life offered by a socialist society. That is a clear consequence of the long discussion in the early chapters of this book (Chapters 1-3) of the ways in which human character changes in response to changing institutions. In addition, the theory of alienation explains that capitalist institutions produce values and outlooks that support existing institutions, potentially making us unable and unwilling to brave the challenges of building freer institutions (as I discussed in Chap-

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ter 10). Capitalism may "well sap the love of freedom that the struggle for socialism, requires. How, then, will change take place? Tf we, as the persons we are today, institute market socialism, will it change us or subsequent generations? Will we, as we are today, be able to build and maintain these very different economic and. political institutions? Or must we fear that unless we change first, we will not be able to be good citizens of a market socialist society? These are questions to which there are, at present, no answers. Marx and Engeis are aware of the problem, but their answer is patently inadequate. Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men. on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution', this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of the ages and become fitted to found a new society. (GI, 193}

Their answer to our questions seems to be that people will change while they change their institutions. But that is too vague to reassure us that when the opportunity for socialism comes around, we will be ready to take advantage of that opportunity and to build new and better institutions. What is more, the account of dialectic in Chapter 4 made it very clear that the process of historical change is enormously complex. People find themselves in a situation where their problems and the options they have for solving them are shaped by the ruling institutions. In these concrete situations, people will try out the solution that appears best. These responses to prevailing problems bear the stamp of the dominant institutions but also serve to change those institutions. But these changes are often unintended and frequently not foreseeable. No doubt the attempts to move in the direction of market socialist institutions will have all kinds of unforeseen consequences both with respect to the actual economic and political institutions and with respect to the ways in which these institutional changes will be reflected in changes in human beings and their character. The obvious conclusion is that we need to approach the transformation of economic and political, institutions, and the transformation of human character that goes with those changed institutions, in an experimental spirit. Marx and Engeis were rightly critical of the Utopian socialists because they lacked that experimental spirit They laid down their plan once and for all and expected to follow it. They were not prepared for the complexity of actual change and the degree of caution and flexibility demanded by attempts to improve our societies. It is clear that the process of human and institutional transformation will be full of surprises and disappointments, as well as unexpected triumphs. It is equally sure that it will take a long time.

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Ideologies and their formations further complicate and delay the process of change (see Chapter 7). Not only do ruling institutions shape the character of the people whose lives these institutions structure, but they color how those people think about their lives and their society. People whose lives are completely dominated by capitalism tend, to share the ideas of the classes that rule and profit from capitalism, (An example is the discussion about the family that appeared earlier in this chapter, Many people are aware of the problems of the family. Few are prepared to look at the ways in which capitalism contributes to these problems.) Only with the growth of a pervasive oppositional movement will alternative ideologies arise. But such oppositional movements also disappear again for a time. Accordingly, we cannot take for granted the understanding of current problems and the willingness to envisage and work for radical social change. These will, wax and wane with, the growth, and decline of oppositional classes organized as political classes, Will market socialism produce these changes in human character and thereby move us closer to the ideal of socialism,? We must say frankly that we do not know the answer to this question. Today, close to the end of the twentieth century, we do not know whether a democratically planned economy is possible if attempted under conditions different from those that prevailed in Eastern Europe and China when they set up their centrally planned economies. We also do not know whether market socialism will be a useful step on the road to the goal of socialism, or whether it will block the changes in human nature that socialism requires. Doubts about the market socialist project are still justified. In the light of the Marxian understanding of the immense complexities of social change, it seems quite clear that the realization of socialist goals involves a long and unpredictable process. But the political program that Marx and Engels developed in order to move toward socialism, as they described it, displays none of that complexity; it was relatively simple, and they expected it to be completed long before now. We can see that this political program, was quite inadequate according to Marx, and Engels' own thinking on how historical change takes place. Revolution In his 1895 introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France, Engels wrote: All revolutions up to the present day have resulted in the displacement of one definite class rule by another, (T 560)

Indeed, a revolution occurs when the power over the society passes from one class to another: "The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class" (CM, T 490). As long as the members of a new government belong to the same class as the members of the previous one, a coup d'etat has occurred, not a revolution.

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How does this transfer of power take place? Marx and Engels give various answers to that question, but often they describe this transfer of power as a "revolution," meaning by that word an "uprising" or a "victorious insurrection" (T 559), Note the two different senses in which the word "revolution" is used here. In the first instance, a revolution is the transfer of power from one class to another; in the second the word refers to a particular political tactic, namely, "uprisings" or "insurrections," It is interesting to notice that Marx and Engels switch from one meaning to the other within the same page. Thus in The Eighteenth Bntmaire, Marx writes: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past" (18th, T 597), Here Marx refers to the corning proletarian revolution in which the proletariat will take power from the capitalists. The next paragraph begins with the words "the February Revolution," Here the reference is to an uprising in Paris that brought an end to the reign of Louis Philippe in 1848 but did not, in the end, transfer power to a new class. Marx and Engels use the word "revolution" in these two senses because they believed that the proletariat would, take power by means of an uprising in which it would take state power. The proletarian revolution in the first sense, the transfer of power from capitalists to proletarians, would have to employ the tactic of revolution in the second sense—an uprising—that would take political power away from the capitalists. They believed this because they thought the proletariat could not use the same means to come to power as those did the early capitalists, All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify, (CM, T 482)

The rising bourgeoisie built its own alternative institutions in the interstices of feudalism. First it built its new economic institutions and thereby transformed significant sectors of the economy from feudal to capitalist ones; only then, after it had acquired substantial economic power, did it also take political power and. become the ruling class of modern society. It is true that Marx and Engels interpreted the English Civil War in the middle of the seventeenth century as a bourgeois revolution. But that was, at best, just one episode in a long process that reached its conclusion only when the bourgeoisie took full political power over English society in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the proletariat does not own anything, and thus it cannot develop a new mode of production and a new way of running the economy while the old way—the way of the capitalists—is still in force. Some attempts at

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doing just that (that is, developing cooperative enterprises) were instructive, Marx thought, but the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however excellent in principle, and however useful in practice, cooperative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries,... To save the industrious masses, cooperative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions. Yet the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor, (T 518) The proletariat cannot build socialist or protosocialist institutions in a capitalist society and gradually overwhelm that society with its more effective proletarian institutions, because the capitalists have the economic and political power to stop these alternative institutions from becoming any kind of significant threat to capitalist enterprise. The proletarian majority needs to gain political power to protect its movement. The proletariat must take political power first and then use state power to abolish private property in the means of production by nationalizing all property in land, abolishing the right of inheritance, and instituting a steeply graduated income tax (CM, T 490). The conception of revolution, the revolutionary uprising, seemed to presage violence. But was violence inevitably an ingredient of revolution? During the earlier years of Marx and Engels, working men often did not have the vote (working women did not gain the vote until much later), and where they did, elections were clearly fraudulent (T 566). In such situations a class that owned nothing and therefore had neither economic leverage nor access to political power through the vote was reduced to street fighting in order to make its voice heard. Thus violence seemed an inevitable component of revolution. But later in their careers, Marx and Engels envisaged that with the progressive concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands, the small number of owners would realize that a civil war would be futile and extremely costly. They would therefore surrender power without a shot being fired.17 In this case the transition might well be peaceful especially if it was voted on by an enfranchised proletariat. You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration and we do not deny that there are countries—such as [the United States),.., England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland—where the workers can attain their goals by peaceful means. (T 523)m

214

Socialism.

In countries with electoral institutions with universal male suffrage, as in the United States and Great Britain of his day, Marx thought the transition to socialism would take place via the ballot box. The transition would be entirely peaceful if the defeated capitalists adhered to the rules of democratic decisionmaking. Marx and Engels had very specific ideas about the transition to socialism. The first government after the revolution was to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat." This phrase has occasioned an extended debate that is largely misdirected. Marx and Engels called bourgeois democracy a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" because even where universal suffrage existed, the capitalists had a great deal more economic and. political power than the workers. A dictatorship exists—as they use the term "dictatorship"—where one class of people can have things their way much of the time. As we have seen, there are dictatorships in that sense even in democratic countries. Calling a newly established socialist government a dictatorship of the proletariat thus indicated that it would, in its early stages, be no more democratic than a capitalist democracy. Such a new socialist government would equalize political power only after a while and then become much more democratic than a capitalist democracy could ever be. From, their observation of the short-lived worker's government in Paris in 1870 (the "Commune"), Marx and Engels derived some other ideas about the socialist democracy to come: Representatives in the Commune were elected with very specific instructions that they could not ignore; they were subject to immediate recall if their constituents were not satisfied with their performance. The Commune filled all posts—administrative, judicial and educational—by election on the basis of universal suffrage of al concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. (CW, T 628)

In addition, the Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body: an executive and legislative branch at the same time (CW, T 632). All officials were elected and subject to recall. AH policymakers were to be responsible for executing the policies they themselves made. That meant, in practice, that bureaucrats were also subject to elections and thus responsible to their constituents. According to Marx, the Commune failed because it did not extend democracy to economic institutions. He saw in it "the political form in which to work out the economic emancipation of labor" (CW, T 635). There are severe difficulties with this conception of the working class "taking power": I discussed in the preceding chapter the limited effects of concrete political action. It is easy to take over buildings. It is much harder to take over the power of the persons and institutions that occupy

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those buildings. What is more, a genuine revolution, when power passes to a new class cannot take over power but must construct new forms of power. We saw in the first section of this chapter that this process of constructing new institutions and new forms of power is much more complex and less predictable than Marx's and Engels' scenarios for proletarian revolution.19 Marx and Engels developed their concrete political program 150 years ago, under different conditions with much less information about the workings of planned and market economies, popular electoral democracy, and so on. Although many socialists, communists, and other leftists took that Marxian political program very seriously for many years, one must now see it for what it is; a political program for socialists in the last century. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels laid out immediate measures such as progressive income tax, the establishment of a central state bank, and universal education. Significant portions of that program have long been adopted in the major industrial nations and are accepted by all parts of the political spectrum. We must look at the political program of Marx and Engels in the same light: A hundred years later we must develop our own programs to move in the direction of socialism. What remains important in the political program of Marx and Engels is this: Socialism demands a revolution in the first sense in which Marx and Engels use the term; the power of the capitalists must be replaced by the power of all the people. Full democracy is not possible under the current class structure. The political program Marx and Engels developed for this purpose was appropriate to political conditions in their lifetimes, although experience has shown, as they themselves taught us to expect, that the political process is more complicated than they thought. We cannot adopt their program as ours because we live under very different conditions. It remains important to speak truth to power as they did all their lives, to insist over and over again that capitalism is unjust because it exploits, that it is bad for people because it alienates, curtails freedom, and disfigures democracy. It is even more important to build organizations that preserve and develop the critique of capitalism and agitate for changes. Marx and Engels thought that two kinds of organizations were of central importance, labor unions and political parties. We now know that both of these are sometimes forces for change and sometimes not.20 Organizations of women and of people of color have stood much more dearly in opposition to the dominant institutions and have tried in the past and are trying today to develop alternative visions of a good society and of the means to construct it. We have learned to be less dogmatic about the organizations that will move us toward socialism. The central aim of these efforts at organizing is, as we saw in Chapter 13, to continue the class struggle. In the face of repeated reverses, we

216

Socialism.

must continue to build large coalitions of groups that are firmly opposed to capitalism, with a clear sense of the alternatives they seek and using those methods of social change that, at any particular moment, seem most promising. We know today that that effort is more difficult, more complex, and much more extended than Marx and EngeJs expected. But their critique of capitalism is as powerful as ever; the goal of socialism was never more inviting. The struggle continues. For Further Reading Shlorno Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), chapters 6, 7, and 8; Bertell Oilman, Sexual and Social Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1979), chapter 3,

Notes 1. Quoted and explained in Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, vol. 1 (New York Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 97. 2. G. A. Cohen, "Back to Socialist Basics," New Left Review 2Q7(1994):3-16. 3. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 4. David Miller, "In What Sense Must Socialism Be Communitarian?" Social Philosophy and Policy 6(1989):51-73. 5. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 521. 6. David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and tfie Marxist Critique (London: Verso, 1993), p. 185. 7. George Brenkert, Marx's Ethics of Freedom (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). 8. A freedom reserved, however, only to a minority of the world's population. For the majority, who live in poverty, even personal freedom is very limited. 9. It differs from Marx and Engels in opposing the equality and liberation of women, which Marx regarded as a criterion for judging the extent to which societies have become genuinely human (EPM, T 83). 10. Bertell Oilman, Social and Sexual Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 66. 11. John McMurtry, The Structure of Marx's WorU-Vieu> (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press^ 1978), p. 26. 12. The question of competition is complex. Marx and Engels were right to be very critical, of it. But there certainly appear to be certain kinds of competition that seem useful insofar as they spur everyone to higher accomplishments. See Valerie Miner and Helen Longino, eds., Competition: A Feminist Taboo (New York: Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 1987), 13. A. different approach is possible: We can set a much more modest goat that seems reasonable—equal opportunities—and then ask what that requires. This is

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the procedure John Roemer employs in A Future for Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 14. See, for instance, McNally, Against the. Market, 15. David Ramsay Steele, From Marx to Mises (La Salle, 111.; Open Court, 1992). 16. David Schweiekart, Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 17. While it is true that economic power has become much more concentrated, it is not true as Marx and Engels expected that the ruling class would significantly shrink in numbers. I mentioned this problem in Chapter 12: The ruling class consists not only of the owners of the means of production—who may well decline in numbers—but also of its ever growing hordes of professional managers, accountants, lawyers, investment specialists, and so on. 18. See also Engels, preface to the English edition of Marx's Capital, vol. 1 (New Yorlc ln.ternatio.nal Publishers, 1967). 19. One other complication must be mentioned briefly, I discussed imperialism in Chapter 11, In our world the great capitalist powers have enormous political influence outside their own boundaries. If a socialist revolution were to take place in one country outside the developed world, the United States and others would be sure to try to squash it. Witness the cases of Nicaragua and Cuba in our hemisphere. Must the socialist revolution, then, occur in all countries at the same time? Is that feasible? These questions have been discussed a great deal, but a satisfactory answer lias not been found. 20. In the United States, for instance, the leadership of the AFL-CIO has done its part in the past fifty years to strengthen the ruling capitalist institutions to which it belonged. Sometimes the more powerful, critique of capitalism, comes from groups that are politically conservative. Some opponents of abortion oppose what they perceive as the commodiftcation of childbirth and thus of human beings. See Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives— The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

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About the Book and Author This book steers a middle path between those who argue that the theories of Marx and Engels have been rendered obsolete by historical events and those who reply that these theories emerge untouched from the political changes of the last ten years. Marxism has been a theory of historical change that claimed to be able to predict with considerable accuracy how existing institutions were going to change. Marxism has also been a political program designed to show how these inevitable changes could be hastened. Richard Schmitt argues that Marxian predictions are ambiguous and unreliable, adding that the political program is vitiated by serious ambiguities in the conceptions of class and of political and social transformations. Marxism remains of importance, however, because it is the major source of criticisms of capitalism and its associated social and political institutions. We must understand such criticisms if we are to understand our own world and live in it effectively. While very critical of the failures of Marx and Engels, this book offers a sympathetic account of their criticism of capitalism and, their visions of a better world, mentions some interpretive controversies, and connects the questions raised by Marx and Engels to contemporary disputes to show continuity between social thought in the middle of the last century and today. Addressed to undergraduate students, the book is easily accessible. It will be important in introductory or middle level courses in sociology, political theory, critical theory of literature or law. It will also be useful in graduate courses in political theory, sociology, and economics. Richard Schmitt is professor of philosophy at Brown University and the author of Beyond Separateness (Westview Press, 1995).

223

Index Action, political, 165-167,189,196 "Alienated Labor," 11,4 Alienation, 114-124, 203, 209-210 of workers, 115-117 Avineri, Shlomo, 216 Base, 64-67 Bauer, Bruno, 8 Bernstein, Eduard, 133 Bolsheviks, 1,195 Bottoroore, Torn, 158 Bourgeoisie, 155 "petty," 147 socialist, 156 See also Class, ruling Burns, Mary, 9 Camus, Albert, 117 Capital, 90, 91-93,108-109 and abstinence, 109 centralization, 131 organic composition of, 131 and risk taking, 110 Capital, 10, 42-45, 56, 72, 77, 78, 115, 117-118, 129, 134, 145 Capitalism, 12, 74, 79, 87-99,188 and the creation of needs, 18 and democracy, 108 and desires, 123 and fairness, 100-101,112 and family, 204 224

and feudalism, 15,19, 33, 57-58, 72, 87, 88,101 and freedom, 48, 69, 137-143 and inequality, 107,172 and injustice, 134-137 and poverty, 134-137, 189 and racism, 168-169,172 and slavery, 56 and state, 176-177 Capitalists, 146 and the government, 176 Carnoy, Martin, 185 Civil society, 27,180-183 Class, 77,145-158,162 consciousness, 15,1-156, 162 primacy of struggle, 167-172 race, and gender 167 -170 and revolutions, 171 ruling, 77-78,117 struggle, 80,149-151,154-156, 160-172,174. See also Class, primacy of struggle traitors, 165 working, 80, 117,127-128. See also Proletariat Classless society, 82 Class Struggles, in France, 153 Coercion, 104, 111, 117,175 Collectivism, 24, 28-30 Colonialism. See Imperialism, Commodity, 79-80, 87-88, 92, 98,117, 138-140

225

Index Communism, 1, 82,151,153,160, 200-201. See also Socialism Communist Manifesto, 6,10, 57, 66-67, 151,152,161, 215 Competition, 93-94, J16 Condition of the English Working Class, 10,129 Consciousness, 53, 65 false, 84, 124,149 Cooperatives, 213 Crisis, 127-132 Critique of the Gotha Program., 81-82 Democracy, 112, 142-143,157,171 and the capitalist state, 183-185 economic, 184,207 socialist, 202 Dehumanization, 117 Determinism, 57 economic, 65, 70{n4), 72 'Dialectic, 38-50,192, 210 "Dictatorship of the proletariat," 214 Don Quixote, 72, 75 Drug problems, 163-164 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 115, 200 Economics, 62 Eighteenth Brumain of Louis 'Bonaparte, The, 179, 212 Eisenstein, Zillah, 172 Engels, Friedrich, 9 Marx and, 9-11 Environment, 137 Equality, 48, 68,112 struggles for, 172 Ethics, 16, 34, 80-84,139, 195. See also Morality Evolution, 39-40 Exchange, 104 Exploitation, 100-112, 161, 201 and class struggle, 170

and the state, 176 Family, 27, 203 Fetishism, 78-80, 95,166 Feudalism, 60,102-103 contrasted with capitalism, 15,19, 33, 57-58, 72, 87, 88,101 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 29 Fourier, Charles, 187 Franklin, Benjamin, 104 Freedom, 48, 68,100-101, 111, 118-122, 142,182, 204 Free enterprise, 87, 97 Gamble, Andrew, 143 German Ideology, 10, 64, 78,115 Goods, public and private, 181-182 Greece, 74-75, 77,103 Growth, 93 Grundrisse, 42 Guilds, 90 Hegel, G.W.F., 26, 28, 38-41,115 Historical explanation, 45-50,115 History, 32-37 and change, 188 and class struggles, 160 as sequence of social structures, 53 the transformation of human nature, 14, 28, 32, 35 Human nature, 12-21,118-119, 209 history of, 27 and material production, 14, 30, 94-95,116, 123 unintended consequence of actions, 35 Idealism, 63-72, 95 Ideology, 69, 71-84, 88, 111, 154, 166, 175, 211 Immiseration. See Proletariat Imperialism, 140-142 Individualism, 23-31, 33, 36, 71-84 varieties of, 24-25

226 Industry, See Machines Inheritance, 177 Intellectuals, 77,153-154 Interests, private and public, 178 International Woridngmari's Association, 10,166 Investment, 89-90 Jefferson, Thomas, 13 Kafka, Franz, 117 Kautsky, Karl, 153-154 Labor, 97 division of, 58, 79, 90, 97 free, 89, 91-92 laws, 178 "manual and mental," 206 power, 91,106 surplus, 106, 108 theory of value, 104-107,131 time, 105 unpaid, 106 for wages, 89 Law, 66, 92 "Laws of motion," 191 Leaders, role of, 188-190 Lenin, V. L, 147,153-154 Liberalism, 5-6, 13, 137-138 Lichtman, Richard, 84 Locke, John, 10, 78 Luxemburg, Rosa, 133, 173(n9) Machines, 94, 96-97,107,126-128 Manufacture, 58, 96 Market, 80, 87, 96,140 "anarchy" of, 120-121,127, 208 labor, 177 Marx, Karl, 8-11 Engels and, 9 and method, 115 predictions of, 126-143 Marxism, 61,151-152 and the collapse of the USSR, 2

Index political program of, 4,132-133 varieties of, 8 Materialism, 14, 63-69, 71,190 historical, 52-62, 67 vulgar, 64 Methodological individualism, 25-30, 36 Miller, Richard, 62 Money, 36 Monopolies, 127 Morality, 16, 34, 80-84,139,195 the golden rule, 81 Mythology. See Ideology Necessary laws, 193 Needs, 18, 34,139 Nicolaus, Martin, 99 Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, The, 170 Owen, Robert, 187 Paris Commune of 1870,176, 214 Personal identity, 33, 140 Philosophy, 51(nll), 70(n6) Planning, 204, 208 Plato, 68, 77 Power, 162 of classes, 164 to exploit, 162-162, 164-165 transformation of, 198 Predictions, 126-143,193 Price, 79 Private property, 114 abolition of, 207 "Private Properly and Communism," 200 Production, 119 Asiatic mode of, 178 forces of, 53-61 and human nature, 14 means of, 207 mode of, 53-61, See also Social structure primacy of forces, 56-59

Index relations of, 53-61, 91-93 technical relations of, 55 Productivity, 97,129 Professionals, 148 Profit, 79, 92, 94,104-106, 126-127 falling rate of, 130-131 Proletariat, 128-130,135-136,148,153 lumpen, 148 See also "TDictatorship of the proletariat" Propaganda, 71, 85{nl.3). See also Ideology Property ownership, 180-181,184 See also Private property Protestantism, 74 Eace, 70(n5), 73, 146 Rader, Melvin, 69 Religion, 41, 5G(nl), 73-74, 77,148, 156, 164 Reproduction, 165,177 "Reserve Army of the Unemployed," 94, 136 Revolution, 29, 55,123-124, 211-214 and reform, 166-167 socialist, 2,128, 152, 200 taking power, 197, 212-215 and violence, 213 Ricardo, David, 25, 77,104 Romans, 74 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri, 187 Schmitt, Richard, 124 Schweickart, David, 112 Science, 38-41, 73, 76-78, 82-83 social, 42-45,191-195 Self-interest, 181 Self-realization, 205 Sexism, 73 Smith, Adam, 12, 25, 77,104,133 Social democracy, 1,153, 166, 169,194 Socialism, 82,187,195, 200-216 bureaucratic, 3 and community, 206

227 democratic, 3 as ethical ideal, 196 inevitability of, 2,126-133,156 market, 208-211 scientific, 83,133,191-199 Utopian, 83,153,187-199, 207 Socialists, 153 bourgeois, 156 Socialist theory, 180 "Socially necessary labor time," 113(n4) Social structures, 52, 64, 79, 95, See also Production, mode of Soviet Union, 1, 194, 209 "Species being," 17-21,118 State, 174-185 bureaucracy, 179 and civil society, 180-183 manager for the bourgeoisie, 174-175 Superstructure, 64-66,177 Theses on feuerbach, 16,132 Unemployment, 94, 102,136 Utopianism, 187-199 and history, 191 Value exchange, 104 surplus, 106,115-116 use, 104 Voluntary work. See Freedom Wage Labor and Capital, 129 Wages, 105,126-126, 129 Walton, Paul, 143 Wealth, 88-90 Wood, Alan, 124 Work, 33. See also Labor Workers, 115-117, 154-155 English and Irish, 168-169 skilled, 97