A Many Sided Marx

Assessing and Rescuing the Contributions of a Really Smart Guy

Judging by much of what I see and hear from a lot of self-described socialists, Karl Marx was just a smart guy who didn’t like class inequality and who was for “the working class” in its eternal struggle against the bosses. A lot of lefties who say this seem to think that “Marxism” is about how many times one can say working class and class struggle in one online posting. And in some cases about how much one can claim one’s own proletarian bona fides regarding one’s own occupational status and/or family of origin – a sort of pissing contest about how “working class” one is.

How childish. Marx, who once said that he was not a Marxist and who never worked a day in a factory, was deeper than that. I’m glad that he stayed out of the textile mills of Manchester and was enabled by Frederick Engels to spend much of his life studying history, political economy, factory and financial reports, current events, and more in the British Museum. I’m thankful that his middling bourgeois origins in Trier, Germany put him a position to develop his dialectical materialist take on history.

Marx developed a scientific paradigm, historical materialism, to explain how historical eras need to be understood in terms of modes, that is technical forces and social relations, of production and political and ideological superstructures conditioned by and inseparably linked to those modes of production. He delved deeply into the inner dynamics of the capitalist mode and in doing so he quite properly spent more time on the battle between capitals than on just the class struggle between workers and bosses when it came to breaking down the system’s driving forces.

There was more than just the conflict between labor and capital in Marx’s understanding of capitalism’s contradictions.  There was also the ever-present struggle between capitals to appropriate the largest share of the value wrenched from workers and from nature. (Perhaps I should just say nature because human labor power is part of nature.)  In Marx’s analysis, competition between capitalists created a tendency towards an upward concentration of ownership and a related tendency for the overall rate of profit to decline.  These tendencies were intimately related to capitalism’s relentless market and spatial expansion, to the movement of surplus capital into speculative and financial investment, and to recurrent cycles of boom and bust. 

Speaking of nature, Marx’s critique of capitalism noted the contradiction between a sustainable healthy natural environment and capital’s competition-driven quest to extract, commodify, and exploit every natural resource under the sun – and to do so without concern for the fate of livable ecology. 

There was in Marx’s critique of capital the contradiction between the ever more socialized and aggregated, mass nature of production and the private appropriation of the wealth created by that giant social production, which conflicted also with the alienating and mystifying individuation inherent in the commodity form.

There was in Marx the contradiction between the democratic and general welfare pretenses of the capitalism’s leading bourgeois governments and the despotic nature of top down capitalist command in what Marx called “the hidden abode of production.”  Those pretenses conflicted also with the purely private, parasitic, and profit-based nature of the decisions made about what is produced, when and where and why it is produced.

There was in Marx’s analysis a contradiction between capitalist/bourgeois “democracy’s” claim to have opened up a world of intellectual freedom and the cold fact that under capitalism as under feudalism and during antiquity, the ruling ideas are notions that serve the class in charge of the mode of production and the political superstructure conditioned by and bound up with that mode of production.

There was in Marx’s analysis a contradiction between capitalism’s claim to raise societal living standards and capitalism’s drive to reduce the commodity value of human labor power through various means including the subdivision of tasks, the capitalist division of labor, technical displacement, and the constant maintenance of what Marx called “the reserve army of labor,” a vast contingent of humanity consigned to unemployment so as to discipline the employed with the threat of replacement.

Another key contradiction in Marx’s analysis juxtaposed capitalism’s claim to have uplifted humanity against its noxious reduction of much of life to a morally and spiritually debilitating rat-race of money-chasing alienation.  As Marx and his drinking buddy Frederick Engels put things in 1848:

‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand…has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value…The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers…The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.’

Another contradiction observed in Marx’s remarkable appraisal and denunciation of capitalism contrasted the ever more internally rational organizational and technical advancement of increasingly giant capitalist firms with the persistently irrational and anarchic, competition- and profit-poisoned purposes to which giant new business enterprises were dedicated.

There was also for Marx a contradiction between the capitalist class’s’ claim to have achieved its wealth through hard, honest, and smart work and moral rectitude and the cold realities of inherited fortunes and private accumulations achieved through government corruption, theft, and protection. Also contradicting claims of nobly attained bourgeois wealth in Marx’s analysis were capitalism’s bloody origins in imperial robbery and dispossession, war profiteering, genocide, colonial rule, Black enslavement, chattel slavery, and the critical proletariat-generating policies of enclosure – “primitive accumulation[s]” that were largely achieved through brute state force – through what the brilliant Marxian historian Sven Beckert calls “military  capitalism,” something very different from “free market capitalism.”  Further dispelling the myth of the hard-working non-parasitic capitalist was of course one of Marx’s key discoveries: the relentless extraction of surplus value from a mass of dispossessed proletarians who have nothing to sell but their commodified labor power and who are by definition paid less for that commodity than the total amount of value they create for their employers in the “hidden abode.”  (I say “by definition,” for where would the profit be in paying workers for the full value of the labor they provide to their bosses?)

There’s a lot more that could be said on this topic and yes, of course, the core contradiction between labor and capital and the class struggle between workers and bourgeoisie overlap significantly with and penetrate all these contradictions I just went through.

(Here it is important, however, to note that Marx and Engels and all decent communists since were and are opposed to all forms of oppression, not just class oppression. You’d hardly know this from a bunch of the white guy socialists I’ve heard from over the years, many of whom seem to think that concerns with racism and patriarchy are just petty-bourgeois diversions from “the real issue” of class.)

Did Marx get some key things wrong? Of course he did. He had a wrongheaded pseudo-scientific and inverted Hegelian idea about the Western proletariat having an inevitable historical mission of socialist revolution rooted in its position in the mode of production.  He had an excessively Western sense of where socialist revolution would take place. He underestimated the revolutionary potential of the less industrialized peripheries of the world capitalist system. He was too complimentary about the short-lived and certainly doomed Paris Commune. He had little to say on where and how socialist proletarian revolution would take place and what would be involved in keeping such a revolution in power while at the same equipping it to inspire and assist socialist revolutions in other nations. He had if anything too positive and optimistic a view of the Western bourgeoisie and capitalism and perhaps a mistaken sense of capitalism’s future as the replication of British-style industrialism in one country after another across the planet. The capitalist future was largely one of wealthy core states in the world capitalist system systematically under-developing and otherwise subordinating a vast global periphery. Marx’s statement that the joint-stock company was “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself” was incorrect and the sort of statement that left revisionists have found useful in justifying their stand down from the necessary project of dismantling the bourgeois system.

Still, for reasons I’ll elaborate on in future writings and audios, it’s astonishing how prescient Marx’s core paradigm and analysis remains 14 decades after his death, during which time the world has seen the emergence of one remarkable and terrifying new technical, social, and historical development after another: air travel and space exploration nuclear weapons and nuclear power, the automobile, vast highways, high speed rail, air conditioning, radio, cinema, television, satellites, the Internet, automation, Artificial Intelligence, two world wars, the medical industrial complex, the military industrial complex, two global pandemics, the emergence of massive world-spanning corporations and financial institutions, the rise of a remarkably integrated yet anarchic and savagely unequal world economic and political system, the significant de-industrialization of much of the capitalist core, the complex internal and global reconfiguration and re-segmentation of “the” working class,  and the rise of an ecological crisis that places humanity’s very survival in grave and ever more imminent danger.   

Recall the line from Marx and Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto where they say that it's either "the revolutionary re-constitution of society large" or the "common ruin" of all. How prescient is that in 2023? The anarchic, growth- and fossil fuel-addicted profits system is now clearly bringing livable ecology to an end (I would include pandemicide along with ecocide as part of that reality) at an accelerating pace, not to mention fueling rising inter-imperialist conflicts (between the US on one hand and Russia and China on the other) that could well go thermonuclear. It is Das Kapital-ism that has this very year brought the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight than it has ever been,

As for Marx’s mistakes, I find them mostly unavoidable and understandable given the time in which he lived.  There was nowhere near enough data or history yet to tell him that the first true socialist revolutions would take place in predominantly peasant-based Eastern nations, in the wake of great imperialist wars between the world’s leading capitalist states.  With all due respect for the doomed ten-week Commune, no actual socialist revolution came close to occurring in his lifetime to educate him or anyone else on the real tasks involved in making and keeping a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  Marx of course died long before capitalist ideology and capitalist thought and feeling control found such powerful means of dissemination, manipulation, persuasion, polarization, confusion, misinformation, saturation, division, infantilization, atomization, and diversion as modern cinema, radio, television, mass sports and entertainment spectacle, cell phones, smart phones, the World Wide Web, and so-called social media.  The production of mass consumer durable goods including powerfully atomizing automobiles for billions of middle and even working-class people would not emerge until well into the 20th century.

Meanwhile, there was abundant data and living history in Marx’s time to suggest that the proletariat of his time was in fact destined to be a revolutionary class, the social-historical and political gravediggers of the bourgeoisie.  That was a very plausible illusion during the age of dramatically expanding British, Western European, and North American proletarianization, industrialization, and class struggle that Marx lived through --- there were a lot of good reasons to think that at the time. The full age of modern capitalist-imperialism, what Lenin would call the highest stage of capitalism, wherein the socialist revolutionary impulse clearly moved outside the industrial European core of the world capitalist system, was not quite at hand by the time Marx’s mind was dimming and before he died.  At the same time, I suspect that the large amount of time the First International leader Marx spent trying to organize the working class for revolution suggests that he knew there were no inevitable law of history marking the European proletariat as a revolutionary class. A ton of activist energy including that of bourgeois class traitors like himself and his drinking buddy Engels would be required for socialist revolution, he knew. My guess is that his notion of that proletariat having an inherent destiny of revolution was meant partly to instill revolutionary confidence in the masses and perhaps in himself – a case perhaps of invented political truth superseding real world scientific truth for Marx, an understandable mistake.