Archetypes of WisdomArchetypes of WisdomDouglas J. SoccioDouglas J. Soccio

Chapter 13Chapter 13

The Materialist: Karl MarxThe Materialist: Karl Marx

Learning Objectives

On completion of this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What is bourgeoisie?What is the proletariat?What is the “Dialectical Process of History”?What does Marx mean by Mystification?What are the three elements of the material basis of society? What is the difference between the superstructure and substructure of society?What is capitalism?What is “surplus value”?What does it mean to be co-opted?

The Prophet

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, Germany, and proved early on to be highly intelligent and obsessively interested in everything.

He entered the University of Bonn to study law, then transferred to the more serious and prestigious University of Berlin.

This move proved to be crucial to his later philosophical growth, as it epitomized the modern city of the nineteenth century, with intellectuals, radicals, and social agitators.

Marx’s Hegelian Roots

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was the dominant thinker when Marx was a student.Hegel’s philosophy, known as absolute idealism, holds that all consciousness follows a pattern, or a “dialectical process.” This is a three-step process in which an original idea (thesis) is opposed by a contrary idea (antithesis), the interaction of which produces a new idea (synthesis).Hegel said that previous philosophers were unaware that they were working at a particular stage in the development of Reason, and that they themselves were products of the zeitgeist.Zeitgeist refers to “spirit of the age,” that is, a part of “History,” which for Hegel amounted to the march of Absolute Mind or Spirit in the process of Self-Actualization.

Ludwig FeuerbachMarx’s admiration for Hegel was altered by an article called “Theses on the Hegelian Philosophy,” by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). Feuerbach was a materialist who challenged Hegel’s idea that the driving force behind historical eras was spiritual.Feuerbach argued that any given era was the accumulation of the actual, concrete, material conditions of the time – not some abstract “spirit of the age.”So important were material conditions, according to Feuerbach, that they controlled not just the way people behave, but also how they think.Different material conditions result in what we think of as different cultural eras.

The Wanderer

In 1843, Marx married Jenny von Westphalen and the journal for which he wrote shut down. With a wife and no job, Marx moved to the freer intellectual climate of Paris.There he discovered a congenial group of radical thinkers, centered around Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Saint-Simon argued that historical change results from class conflict, that those who control the material necessary for production perpetually struggle with those who do not.Within a year, Marx was expelled from Paris, and moved from there to Brussels, where he lived from 1845 to 1848.He next moved to Cologne, Germany, to help agitate for a revolt. In August of 1849, his friends gave him the money to move to London (which he never left).

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) went to Paris to meet Marx. The meeting changed the lives of both men forever, and they remained friends until Marx’s death.In 1844, Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. He then went on to write a series of attacks on the most important English economists of the day, accusing them of rationalizing the abuses the upper and middle classes heaped on the poor.Engels had a gift for acquiring the hard facts that Marx needed to support his arguments, and for making Marx’s often difficult and obscure thinking easier to follow.The two worked together for over forty years.

Vindication

In Brussels, Marx had helped to organize the German Workers’ Union, which became part of an International Communist League in 1847. Marx and Engels wrote its official statement of beliefs and doctrines, published in 1848 as The Communist Manifesto. It became perhaps the most important and influential revolutionary tract ever written.In 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association was established. Marx published Das Kapital in 1867. It set his reputation as a philosopher, taking on a nearly mythical status as “the Communist Bible.” His health declined, and he was unable to finish two more volumes (later edited by Engels).

The Death of Karl MarxIn 1881, Jenny died after a long and painful bout with cancer. The death of the woman who had stood by him in exile, through poverty, and the loss of three children, broke his spirit. He lived for fifteen months in a state of grief and despair.On March 14, 1883, Marx died sleeping in a favorite armchair, just two months after the death of his oldest daughter.At the funeral of his old friend, Engels said, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of the development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of the development of human history.”

Creating a Philosophy

From Hegel, Marx took the ideas that there is only one uniform reality and that history is an evolutionary cycle governed by an internal dialectical process.

From Feuerbach, he concluded that reality is material, and that material conditions of life control history.

And from Saint-Simon, he learned to observe the relationship between the owning class and the producing class.

Dialectical Materialism

Combining these three elements, Marx developed his dialectical materialism: the theory that history is a struggle between the bourgeoisie (middle class) and the proletariat (working class).

The bourgeoisie consists of those who produce nothing yet control the means of production.

The proletariat consists of those who produce goods and services, and yet do not own the means of production.

Dialectical Materialism

Marx took Hegel’s concept of the dialectical process and applied it to history, arguing there were five epochs that constituted the dialectical development of history:

(1) Primitive/communal.(2) Slave.(3) Feudal.(4) Capitalist.(5) Socialist/communist.

As each epoch develops, its economic structure matures and the conditions under which people live change. According to Marx, ideas, values, and thinking itself are shaped by material conditions and social relations.

MystificationMarx radically transformed Hegel’s dialectic by confining it to the material world. He objected to excessively abstract philosophy, referring to it as mystification.Mystification is the use of cloudy abstractions to create elaborate metaphysical systems that distract us from concrete material reality.For Marx, “material conditions” meant not just physical or biological conditions, but economic and social relationships.Marx was not a hard determinist, denying the possibility of free will or action. He was a social determinist, holding that there is a reciprocal relationship between individuals and their environment (which they are able to alter).

Economic Determinism

Marx proposed a radical view of ideas: that the economic structure of a culture creates and forms its ideas. For Marx, the term economic refers to the various social arrangements that constitute a particular social order.He assigns a crucial role to the material base of a society, collectively known as the substructure of society. This consists of three components:

The means of production (natural resources).The forces of production (technology, equipment).The relationships of production (who does what, who owns what, and the effects of such divisions).

The Superstructure of Society

According to Marx, the material substructure determines the nature of all social relationships, as well as religions, art, philosophies, literature, science, and government – the superstructure of society.The material substructure of any society produces ideas and institutions that are compatible with it, so that one might go through history and see that, in each age, the culture was a product of the material conditions of the time.The superstructure of every society depends on the material conditions of the substructure shaping it.

Critique of Capitalism

While many of Marx’s ideas are revolutionary, and though he did predict a violent overthrow of capitalism, he never made a moral judgment of capitalism.

He thought of his analysis as “pure social science.”

His aim was to describe current social and economic conditions objectively, identifying their causes and predicting the next historical change.

Critique of Capitalism

In Marx’s opinion, tension under capitalism increases as inequities of distribution destroy any correlation between how much an individual contributes and how much he or she receives.

A large pool of workers keeps wages low, and manufacturers keep prices higher than the actual cost of production.

The surplus value accumulates as capital for the owners, so that those who contribute the least profit the most.

Co-Option and Class Struggle

According to Marxism, all history is the history of class struggle. Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie forges the instrument of its own destruction in the form of the proletariat.Under capitalism, the working-class and middle-class can come to identify with the possibility of acquiring wealth rather than with their actual chances of doing so. Marxists refer to this as being co-opted.Marx and Engels predicted that such conditions will not change until the working-class becomes fully aware of its class interests.

Class Struggle

Marx was sharply critical of capitalism, which he saw as a stage on the way to a classless socialistic economy. In his view, the capitalist substructure contains a fundamental contradiction in the tension between the owner’s desire to keep wages low while prices fluctuate according to the law of supply and demand.Marx predicted that the demands of the bourgeoisie would result in an ever-growing proletariat whose living conditions would continue to decline.The proletariat, he said, would finally rise up in violent revolt and destroy the bourgeoisie and capitalism, leading to the next historical epoch – socialism.

Alienation

One of Marx’s most interesting insights centers on the concept of alienation, which occurs when the worker no longer feels at one with the product of his or her labor.

It results from the transformation of a human being into a commodity (labor).

Anyone who takes a job solely on the basis of what it pays becomes alienated in this sense, by reducing themselves to a money-making machine.

Alienation

This alienation extends to our relationship with nature.

The alienated worker sees money – rather than nature (the source of bread, milk, fruit, and wood) – as the means for life.

Unchecked capitalism uses up nature, because capitalism does not function as part of nature.

Today we know the consequences of alienation from nature on a scale Marx could not have imagined.

Species-lifeWe often identify with the system, rather than our true role in it. In capitalism, we often identify with the possibility of getting rich, while our actual chances of doing so are slim. Marx refers to this as being co-opted.Such an alienated life renders people unconscious of how distant they have become from nature – and from their own possibilities.Marx distinguished an alternative to such an existence, called species-life – a fully human life, a life lived productively and consciously with a sense of belonging, in which we relate to what we do.Marx is propounding not just an economic theory, but a sophisticated philosophy of self-realization, of concern for all hard-working individuals who make up “the masses.”

Discussion Questions

Compare kinds of contribution: Who contributes more - builders who construct houses or the developers who finance them? Who contributes more – the president of a corporation or the workers? Are such comparisons fair?

Analyze some corporate scandals of the last few years from a Marxist perspective. Pay particular attention to the enormous compensation packages paid to CEOs in contrast to the devastating pension plan and stock market losses incurred by average workers. What do you consider to be fair and just?

Chapter Review:Key Concepts and Thinkers

Absolute idealismDialecticDialectical processBourgeoisieProletariatMystificationMarxian materialismEconomicSubstructure of societyMeans of productionForces of productionRelationships of productionSuperstructure of society

CapitalismSurplus valueCo-optedAlienationEudaimoniaSpecies-lifeAlienated lifeLudwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)Hegel (1770-1831)Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)Karl Marx (1818-1883)Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825)