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Episode 10.3: The Three Pillars of Marxism
Before we get going this week. I want to thank you everyone who came out to Waterstone last Tuesday night, it was fantastic. I had a great time, hope you did too, and then I want to remind everybody that I will be flying to New York in a couple of weeks to take part in a really cool event called Intelligent Speech, which is bringing together a lot of podcasters and specifically history podcasters to talk about what we do, why we do it, and maybe how you can do it too.
This is all happening at the Center for Social Innovation in Chelsea on Saturday, June the 28th, 2019, the details are at intelligentspeechconference.com and I put a link to it in the show notes. And I hope to see you there because I’ll be there all day talking about what I do and why I do it and how maybe you can do it.
But getting back to the show. Last time we talked through the lives of Marx and Engels. Long story short, they were would-be revolutionaries whose revolution came and then went and then deposited them in exile. In England, Marx lived in London, writing articles and continuing his study of political economy.
Engels lived in Manchester, working for the family business. Ostensibly he had given up his radical ways, but he too continued to research and write. Marx and Engels maintained an almost daily correspondence where they further discussed and elaborated the basic ideas they had come up with in the 1840s. And their work in the 1850s and 1860s and then into the 1870s was about fully developing and proving those ideas, ideas that coalesced into the philosophic, economic and political system that is today known as Marxism.
Today, we are going to talk through some of Marxism and it will almost certainly wind up being an inadequate introduction, but we have to start somewhere. Now, since we are moving towards the Russian Revolution, I thought I might start by borrowing an idea that Lenin promoted to frame our discussion of a few of the more important Marxian ideas. Lenin says that Marx quote was the genius who continued and consummated the three main ideological currents of the 19th century as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general, end quote.
So we might call these the three pillars of Marxism. German philosophy, specifically the German philosophy operating in the aftermath of Hegel, English economics in the classically liberal tradition though, really it’s British economics because the Scot Adam Smith looms so large, though Marx is most often grappling directly with David Ricardo, and then finally French utopian socialism, saint-Simone, and Fourier, who were dead by the time Marx was encountering them in the early 1840s, but also Prodhoun and Louis Blanc, who were very much alive and working.
And the thing here is that Marx being Marx, he was not going to build his own philosophy by simply taking what he had found and then continuing to build in the same direction at his predecessors. Instead he would challenge, critique and attack them. They were the thesis. He was the antithesis. Marxism was the synthesis.
So first we have the German philosophy component, which as you know, from last week was Marx’s first passion. He was for sure, aiming to become a professor of philosophy until the ideas he embraced and the friends that he kept made him toxic to the German universities. As we also talked about last week, young Marx, like every philosophy student in Germany at the time, was working in the shadow of Hegel.
But specifically Marx was working in one part of the shadow, amongst the young Hegelians who were rejecting many of the conclusions that have been reached by the great old man. The biggest conclusion Hegel had reached that Marx thought wrong became the most basic component of Marx’s philosophy.
Hegel was an idealist, and Marx was a materialist. Idealism here does not refer to a belief in lofty morals and ideals, but rather the philosophic position that what we encounter as existence is not actually a world of things, but a world of ideas. Everything comes down to ideas and the ideas we have about those ideas. The material world, if such a thing, even exists, is entirely secondary. For an idealist like Hegel, the mind and objects of the mind are the central subjects, not just a philosophy, but of existence itself. That what the thinking mind thinks is real life is really just a manifested projection of some ideas held by the thinking mind. But a branch of the young Hegelians started to turn this upside down. To say no, wait a minute. The material world is really primary and all of our ideas about it are secondary.
They come as sense impressions or reflections on those sense impressions. Even ideas themselves are the product of matter acting upon matter in the neurochemistry of the physical brain. It’s all physical, it’s all material substance. They believed in the centrality of the material world and Marx from a very young age was a confirmed materialist. And it became the great building block upon which he piled a bunch of other building blocks.
But though he was starting from the opposite conclusion about the very nature of reality, by his own forthright acknowledgements, Marx drew very useful structures and tools and vocabulary from Hegel, even if ultimately Marx thought Hegel had everything stood on its head. For example: we have dialectics. You have probably encountered dialectics at some point, even if you don’t know it. It’s an adversarial system of progressive reasoning that passes through three stages usually described as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It’s the formula I used just a minute ago to foreshadow where we were headed.
First, a thesis is presented. Then comes the antithesis, that would seem to negate that thesis, and then the tension is resolved by a conclusion: the synthesis, which is the transcended union of the apparent opposites, keeping the good, shaking loose the bad. It’s a dynamic form of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction.
Now, a few necessary caveats about this: this dialectical form of reasoning and investigation goes way back to the beginning of recorded history, and enjoyed wide use in both ancient and medieval philosophy. So dialectical reasoning is not some brand new thing that was invented by Hegel. The second, Hegel himself, nor Marx for that matter, really ever used the terms, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, that’s just the way we conceive of it today. And then finally, we must say that Hegel did not think dialectics needed to be universally applied in rigidly dogmatic ways. And in fact, he derided those who wanted to rely on mechanical formulas to answer every problem.
But still, dialectical reasoning was imported from Hegel to Marx, and from Marx into Marxism. This re-innovation in dialectical reasoning was exciting to early 19th century German philosophers, because it seemed a necessary antidote to what had built up during the Renaissance and the enlightenment and the scientific revolution when philosophers started relying on different methods of investigation and experimentation. These new methods isolated and examined individual variables to understand all the different little bits that made things what they are. They collected, separated and analyzed. They arranged things into orders, classified them into complex schemes, and then took the component parts of the component parts and further isolated and documented those. Everything was put in a specimen jar and labeled. This was done, not just for things in the material world, but also for ideas and concepts. They divided them up, yes and no true and false, positive and negative, cause and effect. But they struggled, because sometimes a thing is not just one thing at a time.
It was many different things. And often, apparently contradictory things. Causes or effects, effects or causes. They couldn’t be stuck permanently into separate specimen jars because they were infused with the essence of many different things Then those who supported dialectical reasoning said these metaphysicians made the further mistake of trying to get everything to stop moving, so that properties and things and ideas could be described once and for all in their rigid, fixed, and eternal ways. But nothing is ever rigid, fixed and eternal. The universe and everything in it is in constant motion. It’s forever changing, evolving, interacting, appearing, and passing away. Grappling with a constantly changing constantly in motion universe is not a problem for dialectics, nor was it concerned about the myriad and troublesome contradictions. In fact, it positively thrived on those contradictions. Dialectics say, yes, not only are these things opposite and contradictory, but their opposition brings them into union. The apparent contradictions are needed to advance, develop, evolve, and change to take the simple and make it complex. And so we, as humans need to understand the dynamic dialectical process of unfolding transformative conflict between opposites as the path to understanding the true nature of it existence.
Marx then took his materialism and these dialectics and combined them with another of Hegel’s big ideas, and then really ran with it. That the confrontations in conflict between apparently contradictory forces was the driver not just of philosophical advancement, but of human history. So now we have the foundational concepts that allowed Marx to develop the core philosophy that underlay all of his future research and political activism: dialectical materialism.
Shut out of the ivory tower and forced into the grubby world of being a political journalist and activist, Marx took his materialism, and these dialectical patterns of reasoning, and applied them to the grubby world within which humans actually lived. And in so doing, he started having epiphany after epiphany. First, thanks to his understanding of flux and change becoming and passing away, he advanced beyond the materialism of guys like Newton, who were always trying to fix and pin down immutable laws for eternal bodies. Marx’s materialism on the other hand embraced flux and growth and change birth and death and evolution. We’re going to spend a whole episode on this next week, but Marx believed he had cracked the secret of history. That the underlying economic structure of society, the means by which humans produce the necessities of life, defined everything else. And that you could not understand the world and certainly not change the world unless you understood how the material economic sub-structure operated and how conflicts within it were the fundamental drivers of history.
So armed with these concepts from German philosophy, when Marx arrived in Paris in 1843, he was ready to start a thoroughgoing investigation of European political economy to understand that economic sub-structure. This is a project that would remain ongoing for the rest of his life until his death in 1883. When he was doing his work in political economy, Marx was grappling with correcting and expanding the work of the classical liberal economist, Adam Smith, and Smith’s disciple, David Ricardo, as well as contemporaries like John Stuart Mill. And though in the modern popular imagination, Adam Smith and Karl Marx are considered polar opposites, never the two shall meet, but Marx for one did not think of himself as the enemy of Adam Smith. And most of Marxian economics is working in the tradition of Smith and Ricardo, even if, as in all things, Marx was aggressively critical of everyone who came before him.
So this transitions us from Marx the philosopher to Marx the economist, from the German philosophy pillar to the English economics pillar, as Marx attempted to understand the material substructure of civilization.
And when you read Marx the economist, you get hit with a lot of jargon-y concepts, most of which sound indistinguishable from some of his other jargony concepts, mode of production, factor of production, means of production, means of labor, subjective labor, instruments of labor. How is one to tell all of these things of production and things of labor apart? Well, Marx himself is never a hundred percent consistent in his usage of these terms, but they can be arranged into what I like to call the tree of labors and productions. And it’s important to pick through this mostly so you have a clear idea of what Marx means by the umbrella concept mode of production, which is very important to his historical materialism and thus very important to the Russian Revolution.
So as befits Marxian analysis, we will start at the bottom and move our way to the top. And we shall begin with the marriage of the instruments of labor and the subjects of labor. The instruments of labor are just what you think they might be: the tools of labor in the ordinary sense. Hammers, lathes, needles, just the ordinary tools that one might need to produce some product.
And in the larger sense, this also includes infrastructure and factories. But those instruments are used on what? Correct: they are used on the subject of labor, which you would consider the natural resources or raw materials: wood, metals, textiles, the stuff a product is made out of. And if you take the instruments of labor, and you use them on the subjects of labor, you can make a thing. You can produce a product. Then if you take those two concepts, the instruments of labor, plus the subjects of labor and put them in a box together, you would label that box the means of production. And spoiler alert, who owns the means of production is a very, very, very important question to answer
But, okay, the means of production is just a combination of the instruments of labor and the subjects of labor, but it does not include the labor. The means of production are inanimate and are not productive in and of themselves. You need animate energy provided by a human being to produce the product. And when you combine those inanimate means of production with the animate human labor, you get the concept of forces of production or productive forces, or sometimes factors of production. So again, this combined mix of the tools to do the work, the raw materials, the work will be done on, and the workers who will be doing the work are the forces of production. We can now really produce a product. So far, so good.
But this does not get us all the way to the top of the tree of labors and productions. To get to the top, we need to combine those forces of production with something called the relations of production, which can be described, and I’m quoting here as, “the sum total of social relations that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce the means of their life.”
Now, the relations of production are very important because they don’t just include things like the division of labor in a factory, or how a corporation’s org chart is drawn up, it includes the totality of the social relations that swirl around the forces of production. Some of these relations are entered into voluntarily, some of them are compelled and involuntary. They involve hierarchical relations, political relations, family relations, social and economic class. Basically all the myriad ways humans come to relate to one another to employ the forces of production to produce the means of their subsistence, and then distribute it to the members of society. Now, Marx and Engels themselves mostly deployed this term in service to their political and economic analysis. Who owned what specifically the means of production, what the law said about who owned what, who controlled who, who was the boss, what were the social classes, where was their cooperation, where was their competition, where was their conflict? Their totality of all these relations of production constituted, a society’s social structure, and it was the part that determined how income and products and assets would be distributed. And according to Marx, this was all ultimately rooted in servicing the forces of production, whatever those happened to be. But to take a step back for one minute, beyond the economic and political implications, the analysis of the relations of production was a fairly profound and novel idea, and it opened up vast exploratory possibilities, and made Marx one of the founders of a whole new field of social science called sociology.
But getting back to it, when you combine the relations of production with the forces of production, which remember are just the tools, material, subjects, and labor of a society’s economic production, we have basically a total description of how a society organizes itself to produce and distribute the means of its subsistence, which is after all the point of all this. Marx called this final concept, the mode of production. And it’s very important, because there have only been a few modes of production in human history and we’re going to discuss that at length next week. But there’s the primitive mode, the ancient mode, the feudal mode and the capitalist mode. The point of Marx’s politics was to advance society from the prevailing capitalist mode of production to a new socialist mode of production. That is the great historical work to be done.
So, how does Marx start coming around to that idea? Well, as a young man, he really started taking stock of the world he was living in. And he felt that something was very wrong and off about it, and this is where the third pillar of Marxism comes into the picture because he started being introduced to French socialism and studying revolutionary French ideas, because the French socialists were also very critical of modern society. And they had developed this social question and were trying to provide answers for it. But given his dialectical materialism. Marx was none too impressed with the life of the mind utopian socialists, who were trying to establish fixed and eternal laws of justice and retreating to pure reason to solve all the world’s problems, when really what they needed to be doing is studying history, economics, and politics. How are you going to answer the social question if you don’t understand the question?
So Marx took these three pillars, German philosophy and English, economics, and French social theory, and started to try to build his own answer to the social question. It was obvious that the capitalist mode of production had serious flaws that needed to be addressed, but how to address them. What even needed to be addressed? What made this new era of modern economics different from previous periods of history?
Now we’re going to talk more about this next week, but clearly the profit motive as the central organizing principle of economic life was a defining feature of the new capitalist mode of production. The idea that the point was not just to produce the necessities of life, but to produce commodities that could be sold at a higher price than it took to produce them. And then have this profit seeking commodity exchange, not just confined to small local town markets, but to envelop every aspect of social and economic life. This led Marx to ask, well, where does profit even come from? And to answer this question, Marx developed the labor theory of value, which basically says that the root source of value and thus profit is labor.
Labor is the magical ingredient, which allows one to purchase a bunch of inanimate instruments of labor and subjects of labor, and then later sell the product that those instruments of labor had turned the subjects of labor into for a higher price. For a profit. And Marx says even more specifically and emphatically that this is a process of exploitation.
Basically he sees things going like this, at least theoretically: the cost of securing one day’s labor from a worker must at least be equal to the cost necessary to keep that worker alive for one day, the food drink and shelter and clothes. You got to keep the worker alive. But let’s say you bring a bunch of laborers together to make some shoes. And let’s say that after four hours on the clock, the workers have used the instruments of labor on the subjects of labor to produce enough shoes that when sold, will generate the revenue necessary to supply the workers with the means of that daily subsistence. This will come to them in the form of wages. But you’re not going to blow the whistle and call it a day after four hours, no, you’re only at the break even point. This is the capitalist mode of production and you want profit. So, you’re going to keep working them for another four hours, maybe another eight hours, maybe since this is the 1860s and there are literally no regulations about this stuff, another 12 hours. And all the shoes produced after those initial first four hours, this is surplus labor, creating surplus value, and that is where profit comes from. And the profit goes to the capitalist owner. Now, granted that capitalist owner has lots of costs beyond just labor, but according to the labor theory of value, the source of profit is the exploitation of surplus labor. Paying less for the labor than the labor was ultimately worth. And in Marx’s estimation, this exploitation is terrible from a social and humanitarian perspective.
Now it gets really interesting because Marx has this further insight based off of a reading of John Locke-style theories of property that were so central to the founding of modern, liberal, economic, and political theory. According to this theory, something becomes your property when you infuse it with your labor, whether it is literally a craft that you made at some home workshop, or a field that you plowed, if you worked on it, built it improved, it shaped it, it became your property. This is how the abundance of things out in the state of nature can plausibly and morally and legally be recognized as personal property.
And to take just a recent example from the Revolutions podcast, at the end of the Mexican Revolution, one of the ways land could be nationalized under Article 27 of the new Mexican Constitution was if you weren’t doing anything with it, if it was just sitting there, quote, unquote unimproved or quote unquote unproductive. This is Lockean theories of property at work. You can’t own it something if it’s just sitting there and you’re not doing anything with it.
Well, what Marx saw in capitalism was a contradiction, a bastardization of this principle. Because under old modes of ancient and feudal production, the individual artisan would take raw materials, the subject of labor, use his tools, which are the instrument of labor, and apply his individual labor to take those raw materials to a finished product. In this sense, it was his or her personal property and not even a Marxist has a problem with that kind of personal property.
The problem is that in capitalism, many people are being brought together. They are doing individual little parts of the total necessary labor, but not every part. The division of labor inside a factory means that no one person can point to the finished shoe and say, that’s mine, I made it. It is in every way, the product of group effort, social labor. And this includes not just the blue collar workers, but white collar employees in the marketing department and sales department, accounting, human resources, but the profits don’t come back to these workers. They are instead held by the owner, who claimed these profits as his or her individual property by right, not because he helped make the shoe or sell the shoe, but because he owned the means of production. He owned the tools and the raw materials and the factory and thus, anything that was produced by those tools and factories. So what Marx saw is the owner still claiming the right of Lockean ownership, even though the capitalist mode of production had really moved beyond the very thing that made Lockean ownership comprehensible, that individual labor created individual property. The capitalist system had replaced that individual labor with social labor, but the ownership and the property and the profits still remained individualized. And this really chapped Marx’s hide.
Now is any of this true? Is this really how it works? Is this the final word on how value and profits are created in the marketplace? Did Marx have everything correct about the relation between labor and profit? Is this really how the capitalist system works? The answer is, kind of yes, and kind of no. I am not an economist. My habits and mindset are of course focused on political history, but I know enough to know that a strict interpretation of the labor theory of value would not just be a controversial position to take, but probably an incorrect position to take, because there’s a lot more going on. Even those working inside a Marxist tradition who are sympathetic to Marx’s theories and want to salvage them as best they can have over the past 150 years refined and updated his ideas, as you would expect. And as I expect Marx would expect, given that everyone now has 150 more years of data to work from. But there is definitely still some element of truth to all this.
The point though, is that politically, these are incredibly powerful ideas. The pitch here is that your fat capitalist owner is literally on purpose and by necessity exploiting you, the worker, that the capitalist makes you endure horrible conditions while you provide all the essential labor, which is remember the only thing that gives a commodity its value and thus creates profit, and then cuts you the worker out of that profit. The capitalist, hoards it all for himself. All you get is these piddly wages. And even the notion of the necessary labor, the stuff that precedes the surplus labor that is supposed to be keeping you alive, well that amount that you get is squeezed and squeezed. Just how little nourishment is enough to keep a human being alive? What counts as a shelter? In the lived experience of the workers, the plan always seemed to be drive down labor costs as low as humanly possible, because when you add it all up, profit comes from the gap between how low your labor costs are, and how high a price you can charge for the commodity that labor produces. And the idea is, if you explain it to the workers in just this way, that they will rise up in revolution.
Now according to Engels, this theory of surplus value and the exploitation of the worker was one of the two most important discoveries made by his friend, Karl Marx. It’s what made his system superior to the French socialists and the utopians who did not understand the realities of economic life. They did not understand the nature of economics, the factors of production, the relations of production, and so they would never understand how to change things. This is what set the scientific socialism of Marx apart from the mere utopian socialism of his predecessors. We will spend next week on the other great discovery, historical materialism. This is what makes Marx’s work not just a guide to understanding the world, but a roadmap for how to change it.