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Episode 10.6: True Liberty, True Equality and True Fraternity

Last time we did the life of Mikhail Bakunin, the professional Russian revolutionary who began his career as a pretty standard issue socialist and nationalist, but who then returned from a long period of confinement, and one circumnavigation of the globe, as a committed anarchist. Today, we are going to discuss the basic tenants of Bakunin’s anarchism, how he came to hold these ideas, the end state he was working towards, and the means by which he hoped to achieve it, leaving off for next week the main compare and contrast session between Bakunin’s anarcho-collectivism and Marx’s scientific socialism.

Okay. So the first thing we need to do is establish what we mean by anarchism and anarchy. Well, it is a word constructed using some good old fashioned Greek, which is what we always love to do when it comes to political terms. Where monarchy is rule of the one, and oligarchy is rule of the few, anarchy is rule of the none. It can be literally translated as the absence of a ruler.

Now because anarchy means absence of a ruler, it is common to use the term as a synonym for chaos or disorder, but this is not what anarchists mean by anarchy. And they will tell you, frankly, that if you think absence of a ruler necessarily means violent chaos, then that means that you have been brainwashed by the ideological heirs of Thomas Hobbes, who believed that absent the iron hand of Leviathan, life will be nasty, brutish and short.

Anarchism does not mean disorder and chaos. Anarchists are not opposed to associations or organizations or administrations, quite the opposite. They just don’t want any more rulers. No more hierarchies, no more inequality, no more exploitation, no more bosses.

Anarchism emerged from the attempt to answer the social question in the wake of the French Revolution. Running from the early utopian socialists through Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was the first to call himself an anarchist, these early anarchists believed that the real problem was coercive hierarchies, whether political, economic, or social. That the unequal distribution of wealth and power led to a few being masters while everyone else was a slave.

So they wanted to create new forms of economic and political organization that stressed voluntary association and mutual cooperation, where all the members would be free and equal. No one person could own all the means of production or claim the lion’s share of the produce; instead, everyone would share equally in the bounty of their collective labor.

Now there’s a branch of anarchism that runs from this guy Max Sterner through Benjamin Tucker that is called individualist or egoist anarchism, but that’s not the branch we’re going to be talking about today. We will instead be dealing with the communitarian branch of anarchism that Bakunin was a part of.

Though these guys stressed the fundamental sovereignty of the individual, they believed that the proper place of humans was in a group, mutually cooperative and sharing in the burdens of producing and distributing the necessities of life. And Bakunin’s version of anarchism designated as anarcho-collectivism, is going to be a major influence on all the anarchists who are active in the Russian Revolution. And that is why we are focusing so much on him in particular.

So to open this up, I want to go back to the French Revolution. The failures and disappointments of the French Revolution pop up repeatedly in Bakunin’s writings, and especially the failure to truly realize the mythical triad of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And so I want to start here by framing his theories as an earnest attempt to reconcile the contradictions and unfulfilled ambitions of this mythical triad.

Bakunin’s diagnosis of what went wrong in the French Revolution is very similar to Karl Marx’s: that the rising capitalist bourgeoisie had engaged in a great revolution in pursuit of their own political liberty, but that when they achieve this political liberty for themselves, the quote unquote equality that followed came only in the form of equal political rights and the equal application of the laws, that is, no more feudal privileges. Then they dusted their hands and said, right, we’ve done it, everyone is now free.

But by ignoring the social and economic relations of society, these bourgeois revolutionaries made liberty and equality impossible for the vast majority of the population. Because where was liberty to be found in a world of economic exploitation? Where was equality to be found in a world where so few had so much and so many had so little? This in turn made a mockery of fraternity, which Bakunin calls a naked lie. He says, I ask you whether fraternity is possible between the exploiters and the exploited, between oppressors and oppressed. What is this? I make you sweat and suffer all day and night, and when I have reaped the fruit of your sufferings and your sweat, leaving you only a small portion of it so that you may survive, that is, so that you may sweat and suffer a new for my benefit tomorrow, at night, I will say to you, let us embrace, we are brothers?

But Bakunin still wanted Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. He just wanted it for everybody, and was serious about trying to figure out how to get it. And one of his most basic principles is that true liberty is only possible if everyone is free, that if only a few people have liberty, then liberty does not exist, only privilege exists. He expresses the sentiment all over the place and it was central to his whole philosophy.

He says, “If there be a human being freer than I, than inevitably, I become his slave. If I be freer than he, than he will be mine.” He also said that, “Man is truly free only among equally free men, that slavery of even one human being violates humanity and negates the freedom of all.” So this is a fundamental condition of liberty: that it must be shared and equally. Even one unfree person negates the freedom of the rest.

To achieve this universal liberty, you thus need some measure of equality. For Bakunin, mere political equality was not enough to guarantee true liberty only economic equality could do that. Because for Bakunin, poverty is slavery. A hungry person is not a free person. He believed people must realize that and I’m quoting now, “the first condition of their real emancipation or of their humanization is above all a radical change in their economic situation. The question of daily bread is to them justly the first question. For as it was noted by Aristotle, man, in order to think, in order to feel himself free, in order to become man, must be freed from the material cares of daily life.”

So it becomes essential to guarantee equality of economic means, to liberate people from the slavery implicit in a life lived on the knife’s edge of poverty, where all manner of degradation and enslavement must be endured to acquire simple bread and shelter.

So to create equally free individuals, to create universal liberty, you must eradicate the unequal distribution of wealth. For Bakunin, the connection between liberty and equality, and the thing that would guarantee both of them was the third part of the triad: fraternity. To achieve universal liberty and economic equality, communal fellowship cannot be paper thin lies that cover up exploitation and injustice, but the real cement that guarantees our healthy, free and equal flourishing. He says this solution, which is so greatly desired, our ideal for all, is liberty, morality, intelligence and the welfare of each through the solidarity of all; in short, human fraternity.

About this fraternity, Bakunin agrees with Marx that going back to the dawn of time, humans have been fundamentally social and cooperative creatures, always working in groups. Bakunin despised Rousseau, who he called the most malevolent writer of the past century in part for helping popularize the insane notion that a free person in the state of nature was just all by themselves. Bakunin believed arguments that idealized and lauded egocentric individualism were ignorant of nature and history. For Bakunin, Rousseau’s idea that the act of coming together in a social group was the moment humans lost their liberty was preposterous. Bakunin says society, far from decreasing their freedom on the contrary, creates the individual freedom of all human beings. He says, society is the root, the tree, and liberty is the fruit.

But how can this be? Surely in coming together, we limit some measure of our own individual autonomy. Well, Bakunin says, imagine a person endowed with the most inspired powers by nature, cast out from all human society into a desert since infancy. If they do not miserably perish, which is the most probable result, they will become nothing but a bore, an ape lacking speech and thought.

So the individual outside of society is not living a life of free liberty, they are most likely already dead, and if not, they are ignorant brutes slaves to mere instinct and hunger, without the ability to form complex thoughts. Bakunin says only in society can they become a human being, that is, a thinking, speaking, loving, and willful animal.

So to wrap up this section, Bakunin says, what we demand now is the proclaiming anew of the great principles of the French revolution, that every human being should have the material and moral means to develop all their humanity. And that what he wants is to, and I’m quoting here again, to organize society in such a manner that every individual, man or woman, should find upon entering life, approximately equal means for the development of his or her diverse faculties and their utilization in his or her work.

So Bakunin has no problem with the unequal distribution of talent or intelligence or gifts. He does not expect or want people to become hive insects. I mean, he’s an anarchist, that’s not what he wants at all. He in fact wants to eliminate political, economic and social inequality because those things tend to prohibit the free exercise of all those individual talents and gifts. So what Bakunin wants for every individual person is to live in a society of universal liberty, made possible by economic equality, working in a spirit of human fraternity. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. This is the essence of his anarcho-collectivism.

So we move now to how Bakunin hopes to bring this about. What needs to happen, what needs to be torn down, and what needs to be built up in its place? To start this discussion, we need to go back to Bakunin’s early student days, and his initiation into the mysteries of German philosophy. As I said last week, Bakunin discovered Hegel while he was still a student in Moscow. And he was so taken, that he was the first person to translate some of Hegel into Russian. Then Bakunin went off to Berlin in the early 1840s to dive even deeper into the mysteries of German philosophy, but he wound up, like his slightly younger contemporaries Marx and Engels, following the more progressive and radical path of the young Hegelians.

Now there’s just too much to say about all this, but I want to draw out two main points: first, again like Marx and Engels, Bakunin was specifically influenced by their slightly older, philosophical, contemporary Ludwig Feuerbach, and came away a convinced materialist atheist. He believed the material world and its physical and social manifestations were the key to understanding everything. So Bakunin is a materialist.

The other point is that like Marx and Engels, Bakunin also emerged strongly influenced by dialectical reasoning, but he was mostly fascinated with the second step of the process: the negative, the negation, the antithesis. And he came to associate the existing conservative states of Europe with the positive thesis, and revolutionary, such as himself with the negative antithesis.

He also disagreed with Hegel and Marx on one critical point: both Hegel and Marx presumed that the concluding synthesis would retain elements of the conflicting thesis and antithesis, that there would be some measure of preservation. Bakunin did not. He believed there conflict would result in the mutual destruction of both with something wholly new emerging from the aftermath.

So his was a dialectical process of mutual destruction, allowing for the emergence of a transcended novelty that preserved nothing of either. For Bakunin the process of destroying the inert immobile and oppressive political and economic regimes of Europe must be total. As long as any detritus or fragment of the old world remained, the new world could not be born. And he assigned to himself and his followers, the historical task of being this all obliterating antithesis.

So part of Bakunin’s desire to wipe the world clean of all existing political, economic and social structures comes from this early Hegelian philosophy, but it also comes from his materialist and proto sociological understanding of society.

He believes that quote, every human individual is the involuntary product of a natural and social environment within which they are born. And Bakunin very much believes that the existing social environment within which humans are currently born is very bad. See, Bakunin has this optimistic view of humans. He did not believe that humans were inherently wicked. He saw wickedness, such as it existed, as being the result of the unjust, hierarchical, and oppressive social institutions within which we are forced to live. And on this one very specific point, he agrees with Rousseau’s famous declaration that man is born free, and everywhere is in chains. Though for Bakunin, the problem was not society, which he viewed as natural and necessary, but structural inequalities of wealth and power. He is in fact, so generous with his understanding of the plight of individuals within these oppressive institutions that he doesn’t even blame the oppressors for what they do.

He says all the revolutionaries, the oppressed, the sufferers, victims of the existing social organization, whose hearts are naturally filled with hatred and a desire for vengeance, should bear in mind that the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are evildoers who are not guilty. Since they too are involuntary products of the present social order.

So this is very hate the sin, not the sinner stuff. And the sin is power, inequality, the state, the church, and the institutions that support them.

So this puts Bakunin in an interesting place, because as he has made this diagnosis, that humans are basically good, but the social hierarchies are evil, he aimed all of his revolutionary energy at the social institutions that bound everyone together in an unjust system, not the people who benefited from those systems. And he was actually critical of those who wanted to aim their revolutionary energy at people, not institutions. He saw this as immoral, unfair, counterproductive, and not even historically sound. In a discussion of the violence in the course of the French Revolution, he says, in general, we can say that carnage was never an effective means to exterminate political parties. It was proved particularly ineffective against the privileged classes since power resides less in men, themselves than in the circumstances created for men of privilege by the organization of material goods. And then he says further, the dreadful guillotine of 1793, which cannot be reproached with having been idle or slow, nevertheless did not succeed in destroying the French aristocracy. The nobility was indeed shaken to its roots, though not completely destroyed, but this was not the work of the guillotine. It was achieved by the confiscation of their properties. And I don’t think he’s wrong about this. The confiscation and redistribution of the national land, which became such an issue after the Restoration, did far more to undermine the feudal aristocracy than the guillotine, which we must also remember was usually used against peasant and middle-class rebels, not the high nobility.

So Bakunin concludes from this, to make a successful revolution, it is necessary to attack conditions and material goods, to destroy property and the state. It will then become unnecessary to destroy men.

So this means there are a lot of institutions that need to be destroyed. And he lists them in various manifestos and programs. And I’ll just give you a full stream blast of all of this, and then pull out two particular points for special attention. So when the revolutionaries begin their run of institutional destruction, Bakunin says we must tear down all governments, all existing criminal, civil, and legal codes, any centralized bureaucracy, all permanent armies and state police. We must put an end to established religion in all forms, and if churches exist, they ought not have political rights, tax exemptions, nor be given control of education. Bakunin called for the abolition of what he called the legal family, which was built around oppressive and unjust systems of marriage and inheritance.

He called for the mass cancellation of private debt, the abolition of all taxes, he wanted to burn all property titles and deeds of inheritance. He wanted to confiscate the means of production, all church property, all state property, and any precious metal held by individuals and families and hold all of that together in common ownership. Anything that contained any seed of coercive hierarchical relations had to be destroyed.

So that’s uh quite a list. But I want to highlight two things, one economic and the other political. On the economic front, a big thing that Bakunin harps on is the necessity of abolishing inheritance. He says, quote for so long as inheritance exists, there will be hereditary economic inequality, not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes. And the ladder will always beget hereditary inequality in the development and shaping of mind, continuing to be the source and consecration of all political and social inequalities.

So for Bakunin, if there was a critical moment in history that undermined the natural equality of humans, it was surely that moment in misty prehistory when some stronger or more ruthless families started not just hoarding a disproportionate share of the wealth, but passing it down to their offspring intact. This created perpetual states of generational inequality. And I think if you ask Bakunin, look, you can’t have everything all at once, just pick one thing you would do that would do the most to accomplish your ultimate goals, he would say: abolish inheritance. This one simple change would negate the possibility of generationally entrenched economic inequality, and go the furthest towards realizing his dream of true liberty, true equality, and true fraternity.

Politically, I must point out that Bakunin bore a special hatred for this thing called the state, which he saw as the abstracted political power structure that pretends to be simply an expression of communal society, but is in fact a thing unto itself with its own interests. He saw all presently existing states in Europe as a form of monarchy, that is, rule by the one, because the state itself, whether an authoritarian, dictatorship, or a liberal parliamentary democracy holds all power and course of authority, and then ruthlessly steamrolled everyone in pursuit of its own interests.

Bakunin says there is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been, or is not daily being perpetrated by, the representatives of the states. Under no other pretexts than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible, for reasons of state.

For Bakunin, states were criminal enterprises, they were founded by crimes. They were perpetuated by still more crimes. And even a post French Revolution society that had created the concept of citizens and civil rights, that was still no good, because Bakunin saw citizenship as an artificial designation that negated true humanity. He called it mere citizenship. By forming itself only of citizens and caring only about its obligation to people as citizens, the state denied its duty to people as human beings, and certainly took no moral interest in them at all, if they were not citizens. So for Bakunin, the state, therefore is the most flagrant, the most cynical and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on earth and bring some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving the rest. So Bakunin hates the state. He hates state power. It’s why an alternative name for his program is stateless socialism. And it’s part of the crux of his coming beef with Marx, who Bakunin believed was a proponent of state socialism.

So we’ll end today with what Bakunin thought the alternative to all this was. What an anarcho collectivist stateless socialism would look like, once all the old systems of power had been destroyed. And he did have a number of thoughts about this, most succinctly sketched out in the revolutionary catechism and the program of the international brotherhood, which were both written in Italy in the 1860s.

To begin with, because top down authoritarian structures were the problem, the new order must be built from the bottom up from, summit to base. So the core unit of an anarcho collectivism was the autonomous commune, formed voluntarily by the capital P People. These anarchic communes, really just the existing cities of Europe, would cease to recognize all existing authority and law and reform themselves on the basis of collective ownership, collective labor, and collective decision-making.

Bakunin believed these anarchist communes would have direct elections of functionaries by universal sufferage from both sexes. And as you can imagine, Bakunin was very, very excited about the Paris Commune, which we’ll talk about next week, because Bakunin was a very involved in revolutionary events in France in 1870 and 1871.

Bakunin thought these autonomous and anarchist communes would then federate with each other into larger networks, but all the while recognizing no higher authority than themselves. And eventually. They would federate all the way to a national and international level though those terms would become meaningless. What would emerge from these voluntary linkages and alliances would be an inverted pyramid power structure where power rested not with a minority ruling class ensconced in some far off capital, but, with the individuals in their local communities. Anyone to sent off to work on these larger connections and alliances would be trusted servants, never powerful authorities.

These communes though, could not operate properly if they did not respect individual liberty, nor if they did not provide equally for all its members. Remember, liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. So there would be a vast array of social and political rights, for example: the right of every man and woman to upkeep, clothes, food, shelter, care, guidance, and education.

Since Bakunin is naturally an enemy of patriarchy and the subjugation of women by men, he emphasized all the time that there would be equal political, social, and economic rights as well as equal obligation for women. He also hated the tyranny of adults over children and believed in equal rights for adolescents, though they would be naturally guided while children. There of course must be freedom of movement, association, press, speech, morality, conscience, with no coercive prohibitions beyond public approbation and condemnation. So he says, for example, to combat charlatans who spouted lies or pernicious associations that might threaten the commune, that would be the special affair of public opinion.

Most importantly, a member of the commune would have the right to leave or secede at any time. No part of the new federation of anarchist communes could keep or hold or prevent a person’s desire to remove themselves and depart if they were dissatisfied with how things were being run. Economically, these new anarchist communes would have already seized the means of production and property and held them collectively, hence the name, anarcho collectivism. The commune would be required to, as I say, provide upkeep, clothes, food, shelter, care, guidance, and education to its members. But, and this is really important, these rights would only be available to those who provided labor. An individual member would only be able to enjoy the fruits of the community’s labor only in so far as they contributed to the creation of those fruits. This was a measure aimed at non laboring landlords and aristocrats and capitalists who sat around doing nothing while the wealth created by other people’s labor piled up in their coffers.

But this sets Bakunin up for a contrast with the later anarcho communism of Kropotkin. Kropotkin does not agree with Bakunin’s formula to each according to their labor. Kropotkin believes, in to each according to their needs. This labor requirement also opened up all kinds of problematic questions about how to quantify and evaluate the amount and type of labor being provided. Bakunin thought that a new system of labor notes, replacements for bourgeois money, would be issued that could then be converted in some market of exchange for the necessities of life.

But this raises a bunch of other issues. Who gets to decide the quality and quantity of labor necessary to acquire access to their rights as members of the commune, or determine what the value of different types of labor are? Digging a ditch is quite a bit different from being an astrophysicist. So Bakunin suggests maybe some democratic committee would be in charge of those decisions, except whoops, now you’re vesting authoritative power in some small group who is deciding who is worth what. This is the kind of thing anarchists are still arguing about to this very day.

Now, everything I just said raises a million and one objections. Every one of Bakunin’s suggestions have sparked debate, mockery and argument from the moment they were proposed. And I am here just trying to give you a very brief and very imperfect summary of what Bakunin thought came next when theory was put into practice. The devil was always in the detail in these things, and Bakunin is always a bit better when he’s giving the object towards which everyone should aim, rather than some detailed schematic they needed to follow. Especially because in the end Bakunin’s own philosophy was so much based on people working out solutions to problems in mutually satisfactory ways, rather than slavish following a list of suggestions from some bushy headed Russian revolutionary. But Bakunin definitely envisioned a network of voluntarily linked autonomous communes built from the bottom up and rejecting the authority of anyone over anyone else. Then they would share in the collective fruits of their collective labor.

And we can sum this up by asking Bakunin what he wants. And he says, first of all, the end of want, the end of poverty, and the full satisfaction of all material needs by means of collective labor, equal and obligatory for all. And then, as the end of domination and the free organization of the people’s lives in accordance with their needs, not from the top down as we have with the state, but from the bottom up, an organization formed by the people themselves, apart from all governments and parliaments, a free union of associations of agricultural and factory workers, of communes, regions, and nations, and finally, in the more remote future, the universal human brotherhood triumphing over the ruins of all states. That is the dream that Bakunin dreamed.

Next week, we will close out this little prologue section of the Russian Revolution with Marx and Bakunin both in the International Working Men’s Association, where they were both dreaming the same dream, but arguing, fiercely over strategy and tactics, methods, organizations, and then ultimately, personalities.

It was an argument they would still be having right up to the moment of their deaths. Their dreams never realized, but also not dying with them.

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This week, I am going to recommend a book that I’m a little late to, since I’ve been busy with other things, but I finally cracked The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper and holy smokes. It’s great. It is a wonderful new addition to the 501 reasons why the Roman empire collapsed and it is by far the best and most comprehensive explanation for climatic, biological and geologic factors. It is not obtuse geographic determinism, uh, it simply lays out clearly how the natural setting of the Roman empire was an active player, not just a passive setting for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it’s just, it’s really great. I’m loving it.

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Episode 10.46: the Permanent Revolution

Last time, we talked all about the arguments and differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. But one of the things they all agreed on was the two-stage revolutionary process necessary to move the medieval tsarist empire to a future socialist republic. They also agreed that what we now call the Revolution of 1905 was that first bourgeois democratic stage. They simply disagreed about whether this stage required the social democrats to support and follow the liberal bourgeoisie, or whether in the Russian case, it could be accomplished by a coalition of workers and peasants acting as much against those liberals as against the tsar.

Today, however, we are going to talk about the novel theory proposed by Leon Trotsky, which incorporated, expanded, and at times contradicted these ideas, and which subsequently entered the lexicon as the theory of permanent revolution.

Now, just to catch up with Trotsky, since we haven’t really talked about him since, before I went on hiatus, remember that when the Revolution of 1905 broke out, he was one of the few émigré intellectuals to race back home. He then ran around doing clandestine work and wound up one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet by the end of the year. He celebrated the October Manifesto, and was then dramatically arrested in December, 1905 when the first wave of reaction came, Trotsky got tossed in prison and remained in limbo for just under a year before being sentenced to exile in Siberia at the end of 1906.

But, as these things go in Siberia, his actual confinement was very loose. He faked an illness and then bribed an alcoholic coachman to take him west. After weeks on the road, he passed through St. Petersburg on his way to Finland before anyone even knew he was gone. After reconnecting with Martov and Lenin in Finland — separately, mind you, because they were enemies, even though they were also at this point, practically neighbors — he went on to London with everybody else for the Fifth Party Congress. In London, Trotsky tried to stay detached from the Bolshevik-Menshevik factionalism — he himself was ideologically disposed towards the Bolsheviks, but was personally more connected to the Mensheviks –, but Trotsky could never simply be a peacemaker, and more often than not, he felt into the scrum is a wild card more than he elevated himself up to play the role of conciliator.

In the midst of debating all the agenda items at the congress in London, in the spring of 1907, Trotsky was at one point afforded about fifteen minutes, where he briefly outlined an idea he had been tinkering with since at least 1904, but which he fully flushed out while he was in prison in 1906. It was a rethinking of potential strategies, tactics, and goals for the party based on what he considered to be a more precise analysis of Russian historical development and the current state of the global economic and political system.

Now, this was a brief address, it was only about fifteen minutes and it had little impact on the immediate proceedings. But in time it came to loom very large, and so I want to take this opportunity to explain it all in full.

First, let’s talk about the origin of the phrase, permanent revolution. So far as I can tell, Karl Marx first used the phrase in 1844 in his book, the Holy Family, but he was using it in the concept of Napoleon’s hijacking of the French Revolution, and transforming it from permanent revolution into permanent war, and how they needed to go back to permanent revolution. But he then returned to the phrase in 1848 and again in 1850, in the context of how German workers should respond to the Revolution of 1848. Assuming that that revolution would usher in a period of bourgeois liberal rule, Marx told the workers to maintain their own independent organizations with their own leaders and their own goals. The ascendant liberal bourgeoisie would surely try to co-op the working classes, using phrases and languages of reform to coax the workers into dissolving their own groups, merging into the liberal parties and becoming merely an electorate, providing votes to liberal politicians. In this context, Marx talked about the program of permanent revolution and making the revolution permanent by maintaining their own parties and structures and goals to keep pushing the liberals through this stage to policies that tended to grow the political power of the workers and undermine the political power of the liberals, rather than the other way round. In this way, they would hasten the advent of the second socialist revolution.

But though we see this phrase ‘permanent revolution’ bandied about in the mid-19th century, this is not really the way Trotsky will be using it in the early 20th century. And to get to Trotsky’s conception, we need to briefly detour through an émigré living in Berlin, who was a leading Russian Marxist intellectual at the time, and who will eventually play one enormously pivotal role in the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917 whenever we finally get there. His birth name was Israel Lazarevich Gelfand, but in his political life, he was known by several different pseudonyms, most generally, and by me here today, as Alexander Parvus.

Parvus was a Lithuanian Jew born in 1867 and the son of a family of artisans. In the mid 1880s, he went off to university in Switzerland where he encountered socialism and Marxism for the first time. He graduated with a doctorate in political economy in 1891, but had his degree flagged and formally diminished by the university administration, who were displeased that he deployed Marxist analysis in his dissertation. After graduating, Parvus did not return to Russia, but instead settled in Berlin, where he became active in the left wing of the German social democratic party, and became good friends, allies, and collaborators with people like Rosa Luxemburg and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Evolving into an erudite, cultured, and occasionally brilliant writer, Parvus was a respected Russian socialist, both among his fellow Russians and among European socialists generally. After Iskra started, Parvus became a regular contributor, with his columns invariably featured on the front page. His reputation then skyrocketed in 1904, when at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war, Parvus predicted both defeat for Russia and resulting domestic upheavals, at a moment when everyone, conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, assumed Russia would trounce the Japanese and emerge stronger than ever. When all of his predictions came true, Parvus suddenly enjoyed the reputation of being a brilliant prophet.

Now, during the summer of 1904, as the first inkling that all his predictions were about to come true filtered back from the far east, Parvus opened his doors to Trotsky. In the wake of the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split, trotsky found himself homeless, both politically and also literally, and he moved in with Parvus in Berlin. Living together for the next several months, they conversed and debated and collaborated with each other. Trotsky left this period taking with him a few ideas imprinted upon him by Parvus that he later developed in his own creative and idiosyncratic way. One was the firm belief that European capitalism had successfully advanced to becoming a truly international force above and beyond national boundaries. Marx may have said that the struggle for socialist revolution would first be national and then international, but that was fifty long years ago, and the capitalist bourgeoisie had long since broken out of their national borders. The fight now, today, would be international, whether they liked it or not.

Parvus also seems to have given Trotsky the basic conception of what the tsarist apparatus actually was. Its nature, its origin and its purpose. Parvus argued the tsarist empire was different from western monarchies, which grew organically as expressions of the feudal estates. In Russia, the tsarist regime developed principally to resist encroachments from their more economically and technologically advanced neighbors like Sweden and Poland and Lithuania. It was thus a military bureaucracy that combined ancient Asiatic despotism with modern western armies, which as we will see in a moment becomes meaningful to Trotsky’s analysis of the nature of revolution in Russia.

Both of these notions Trotsky carried with him going forward, as both he and Parvus departed for Russia when the revolution of 1905 got going. Tossed in prison by the end of the year, Trotsky had lots of time to think more, read more, and start putting new ideas down on paper, specifically in a pamphlet he wrote in prison called Results and Prospects.

But before we get to Results and Prospects, we need to talk about one of the other big concepts that undergirds the theory of permanent revolution. And that is the theory of uneven and combined development. This is a very important concept about which entire books can and have been written, and which I will now try to sum up in like two paragraphs.

Basically the theory of uneven and combined development says that with the spread of European imperialist capitalism across the globe, a process that was clearly complete by the dawn of the 20th century, from China to Africa, to South America, it was impossible to ever again, consider national regional, or even local economic and social development in isolation. Now using quotes around the terminology employed by Trotsky and historical materialists, the spread of colonialist capitalism meant that the development of so-called primitive, or backward, or pre-modern societies would never progress along their own natural and organic paths. The encounter with technologically advanced capitalism simply precluded it.

Now what the lingo ‘uneven and combined’ means, is that societies on the periphery of the European capitalist empire, those colonized parts, now contained a bizarre mix of the very old and the very new, the very primitive, and the very advanced. You had rivers with both rafts and steamboats. Transportation networks that saw railroads chugging alongside donkeys. The latest in futuristic technology existing alongside the oldest traditional ways of life. And usually the way this played out is that specific geographic pockets of those societies would become very technologically advanced, because of the arrival of colonial capitalism was mostly about resource and raw material extraction. So areas with mines, oil fields, timber forests, or places where you could mechanize cash crop farming, would all become rapidly modernized and industrialized, while  maybe just a few miles away, people were still living just as their ancestors had lived for thousands of years. But as the specific sectors and geographic areas saw their advancement accelerated fantastically, the encounter with European capitalism would also hinder and disrupt the natural growth of other sectors as the European capitalists look to dump their manufactured goods on colonial consumers, basically pouring acid all over various nascent sectors of the local economy before they had a chance to blossom.

This also meant that in many ways, the whole course of modernization in any society that encountered such European colonial capitalism could be compressed, because all the technological components and social modes of behavior already existed. They just needed to be adopted, rather than slowly developed over time.

So now we can return specifically to Russia, because Trotsky absolutely considered Russia to be one of these colonized areas on the periphery of western European capitalism that was undergoing uneven and combined development. They were simultaneously primitive and advanced. And indeed because the Witte program of the 1890s was importing the very latest in technological advances, in steel working, in mining, and railroad construction, those parts of the Russian economy were actually among the most advanced in the whole world, because they were ordering the latest and the best out of the Western catalog. This, even as their agricultural sector was amongst the most backward on the planet. Uneven and combined development.

Trotsky believed this state of affairs meant Russia could plot a different and more direct course through the democratic revolution to the socialist revolution, which he outlined in a pamphlet he wrote in prison in 1906 called, as I said, Results and Prospects. This pamphlet was not published until much later, but it clearly spells out Trotsky’s ideas at the time, ideas that would play a huge role in the Bolshevik approach to the revolution of 1917, and so we’re going to spend the rest of today’s episode just kind of working our way, through it.

In the first sections, Trotsky lays out how the actual course of Russian history meant that the theoretical course of historical materialism could not, and would not, play out the way it had in the west. In the first chapter, Trotsky expanded on Parvus’s ideas about the history of the tsarist apparatus, that its existentially threatening encounters with Sweden and Poland and Lithuania starting in the 1500s forced the tsars to adapt, to protect their territory. The tsarist state then started gobbling up nearly all the surplus produce of its empire to feed and fund their large armies. This not only turned the Russian state into a centralized military dictatorship, it also short-circuited the development of any potential Russian bourgeoisie, because excess wealth did not accumulate in private hands, it all went to service the state and the army.

Trotsky continues this theme in the second chapter on the development of Russian cities and towns. Rather than being early centers of trade and industry and commerce like in the west, russian towns were little more than administrative outposts, either serving a military function, or as a home base for tax collection. They produced almost nothing and were neither economically creative nor producers of independent wealth. This Trotsky contrasted with western examples, where the towns created both the large bourgeoisie, the great merchants and the bankers, but also the petty bourgeoisie, the shopkeepers and artisans and small time traders, who would eventually, at least in France, fill out the energetic ranks of the sans-culottes. This just didn’t happen in Russia. And that meant that when modern capitalist development finally did take place in Russia, it was not an outgrowth of, and funded by, those commercial towns of the medieval period, it was actually financed by foreign capital. Bourgeois democratic revolution is premised on the existence of an energetic, wealthy, and ambitious bourgeoisie ready to burst out of the fetters of feudal constraint. But that class simply did not exist in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. But, Trotsky said, a class that did exist in Russian towns at the beginning of 20th century thanks to uneven and combined development was a disproportionately large class of proletarian workers. So observing the historical development of Russian towns and cities led Trotsky to the conclusion that there was now at the beginning of the 20th century, at least, a unique imbalance between the strength of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And this is key to Trotsky’s whole program.

Trotsky then proceeded to a discussion of the three big revolutionary debates that must be understood: 1789, 1848 and 1905. Trotsky in that in 1789, the very strong French bourgeoisie became the leaders of an entire national struggle against the Ancien regime. They guided this struggle, and they gave everyone national slogans and direction and purpose. 1789 is essentially the model bourgeois democratic revolution that everybody looked to.

But then when it came time for central Europe to be hit by the bourgeois democratic revolution in 1848, Trotsky found the liberal bourgeoisie wanting to be leaders of the national revolution, I mean, most of them were literally classified as liberal nationalists, but they were not strong enough or decisive enough to accomplish this task on their own. With the specter of the French Revolution hanging over everyone’s head, they both needed the urban proletariat workers, and the petty bourgeoisie tradesmen, and the peasants to make their struggle successful, but these liberal bourgeoisie so deeply feared the forces they were unleashing, that at the decisive hour they retreated from revolution rather than pursue it. In essence, Trotsky said, they feared autocracy less than the people, and so their revolution failed.

Then finally the Russian revolution of 1905 mostly followed the German trajectory, rather than the French trajectory, but even more so, because the Russian bourgeoisie was even weaker and more dependent than the Germans had been in 1848. Now true, the Union of Liberation linked businessman and professionals and workers in a cross class alliance that culminated with the general strike of October 1905, but then the bourgeoisie went into full retreat, and refused to pursue one of the most basic democratic boardwalk demands: the arming of the national guard. As we have seen many, many times over the course of the Revolutions podcast, national guards are supposed to be the shock troops for a liberal bourgeois revolutionary action against absolutism, but the Russian bourgeoisie, too few in number knew that this meant they would have to arm workers and peasants, and this they did not want to do, again, fearing the people more than they feared the tsar.

After this historical survey, Trotsky concluded that the specific nature of Russian economic, social, and political development meant that ironically enough, the late developing and relatively small Russian proletariat wielded potentially decisive weight inside the system. He scoffed at those who said the rise of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were always and inevitably synchronous. That if the Russian bourgeoisie was weak, it meant axiomatically the Russian proletariat must be weak. But as Trotsky believed he had shown, the strength of the Russian proletariat was actually untethered from the strength of the bourgeoisie, especially because most industrialization in Russia was state directed and financed by foreign banks. So the previous fifteen odd years of economic development, what we know as the Witte boom, had seen an explosion in the size and strength of the industrial workers, even as the bourgeoisie remained small and weak.

Trotsky also argued that the nature of the Russian economy at that moment, meant even though they were relatively few in numbers and still dwarfed by the rural peasantry, the Russian proletarian workers wielded potential power that far outpaced the power of the larger and quote unquote more advanced working classes of Britain and France and the United States. Their western cousins had to contend with incredibly powerful bourgeois elements who were able to push back against them. The Russian proletariat did not have to contend with any such power at all. And on top of that, even though they remained a quantitative minority, their qualitative strength was enormous. Uneven and combined development meant that with some segments of the economy very, very industrialized, the industrial workers in those segments could, if they wanted to, affect the entire operation of the Russian empire. What, after all had sparked the general strike of October, 1905? A few thousand railroad workers, who brought the entire empire grinding to a halt.

So the proletariat’s position that close to the actual gears of the Russian economy gave them enormous disproportionate power to bring absolutism crashing down. And in the absence of a bourgeoisie or a peasantry capable of carrying out the democratic revolution, they must be left to the proletariat. And then, they would simply accomplish the tasks that were always assumed to be the work of the bourgeoisie. Politically, that meant democracy, civil rights, national self-determination, and in the Russian sense, an end to tsarist absolutism. Economically, it would mean an end of medieval property relations, land reform and redistribution, and the further acceleration of industrial development to create the economic and material basis for future socialism. In Russia, the bourgeoisie could not do this, and so Trotsky said, the proletariat would have to do it.

When he takes his next step though, Trotsky starts drifting way outside of what anybody considered Marxist orthodoxy. Because what he was proposing is that the proletariat sees power directly from the tsar, and form the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But remember Marx’s concept is that this would happen only after a majority of the population had been proletarianized, and converted from rural peasants, into urban wage workers. The workers quote, unquote seizing power to create a quote unquote dictatorship was simply describing a process whereby the majority of the population would assume power over itself. That infamously misunderstood phrase dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to simply mean rule of the many, rather than rule of the few. But Trotsky is here actually proposing a small minority of well-positioned and politically conscious workers taking the lead in seizing power over the state right now, here today, not waiting until they formed a majority.

But at least in the beginning, Trotsky did not anticipate trouble, because he figured the vast majority of the population, that is the peasants, would undoubtedly support the new revolutionary proletarian government, because that government would be the entity advancing and guaranteeing what the peasants wanted most out of the revolution: the destruction of medieval property relations and the redistribution of rural land. This could and would be done by the workers on behalf of the peasants, and thus the peasants would look to the workers rather than the bourgeoisie as their liberators. Once this stage had been accomplished, the Russian proletariat seizing power directly from the tsar, we get to the permanent revolution part of the theory of permanent revolution. Having accomplished the tasks of the democratic revolution, the proletariat must not give up power. They must not hand things over to the liberal bourgeois parties and retreat, and wait until conditions were ripe for socialism. Trotsky thought that that would be an insane blunder, especially in the Russian context, where most of the capitalist and industrial development was already being directed by state forces anyway. Instead, the workers must stay in power and use that state power to advance Russia towards socialism. Instead of two discrete stages of revolution, one led by the bourgeoisie, the second led by the proletariat, Trotsky is instead proposing the proletariat make one sustained push through the creation of democracy to the further economic development of Russia, and then straight onto socialism without ever giving up power. It would be one permanent revolution.

Trotsky was not insensible to the difficulties that might obstruct this one sustained push, and in fact, addressing those difficulties was the core part of the other major component that made the permanent revolution permanent. And that was that it could never stop at the borders of Russia, it must absolutely be carried out to the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world. Trotsky saw zero chances for success of any Russian revolution, democratic or socialist, if it did not trigger socialist revolution in the west, and then get cover and support from those new socialist governments. Trotsky saw major reactionary dangers from both conservative forces that would seek to restore the tsar, but also from the peasantry, once the proletarian government moved from the democratic tasks on to the socialist tasks. Trotsky took it as an essential point that land must be collectivized, and its productive power concentrated to create the material basis of socialism and actually make Russian agriculture productive enough to feed everybody.

But this process would almost certainly lead to a breach with the peasantry. Now Trotsky advised taking things slow and piecemeal: first only collectivize large noble estates, and leave communal land and individual small pieces of property alone. He said it would be a huge blunder, in fact, if they did everything all at once, because it would just make the peasants immediately counterrevolutionary, rather than saving all that for later. But they were probably going to wind up fighting against the proletarian government one way or the other.

So Trotsky concluded Results and Prospects by taking a stab at predicting the likely course of events once the proletariat sees power in Russia and found themselves facing these two great threats. In front of them, the full force of the reactionary powers of Europe, trying to restore those are, and behind them, angry peasants, potentially furious about plans to nationalize and collectivize the land. Trotsky thought that though this put the proletariat government in an incredibly precarious position, it would only be temporary, because Trotsky was also convinced the revolution in Russia would be the first domino of European socialist revolution. It would be the signal, the starting gun, whatever metaphor you want to use. And he actually laid out exactly how he thought it was going to go: it would start with that great lynch-pin of European history, Poland. Once the tsar and his armies had been removed from the picture, you could pretty much guarantee a revolution in Poland would follow quickly. But this meant that the Germans and the Austrians would be unable to tolerate such a revolution in neighboring Poland, and they would surely march their armies to the border. This would have two effects: first, the very idea of German and Austrian armies marching east would induce the Russian armies, now commanded by a proletarian government to march west, not to conquer Poland, but to defend it. But the second effect was even more important, because once this conflict got going, socialists and workers in Germany and Austria would recognize the golden opportunity to rise up and seize power once their militaries were occupied off on the Polish frontier. So rather than enlisting and fighting their proletarian cousins in Poland and Russia, they would instead go into insurrection and overthrow their own government.

Meanwhile, the bourgeois government of the French third Republic would already be in a massive crisis, because of the Russian proletariat, having seized power in St. Petersburg would of course repudiate all the debt that Russia owed to French banks, which would crash the French economy and open up space for the French socialists and workers to seize power. So by this very simple act of the proletariat knocking over the tsar, would create an inevitably predictable sequence of events that would lead to socialist governments controlling all of western and social Europe, and then being able to return, and offer aid and support to the Russian comrades as they continued the permanent revolution onto socialism, QED.

This obviously is not how it went. Nor was it even close to how it went. Because though it appeared on paper to be an obvious straight line, Trotsky was sketching all this out in 1906 and 1907 on the assumption. An assumptions shared by all his fellow Marxists who were busy arguing strategy and tactics and alliances in May 1907, that the revolution in Russia was still very much an ongoing concern. They were shocked and horrified to discover that just a few weeks after departing London, Prime Minister Stolypin successfully launched his coup against the Second Duma, rewrote the Russian Constitution, and the Russian people hardly made a peep of protest.

So instead of striding back into Russia to become the vanguard of European socialist revolution, they all had to scatter back into their lives as émigrés. Lenin and Krupskaya wound up in Switzerland for the next decade; Martov went off to Paris and even though he was broke refused to leave; Trotsky wound up bouncing around here and there, still carrying his notion of permanent revolution in his head, and believing its two main components were still true: that the proletariat in Russia could and should seize power directly from the tsar, and then carry out one sustained permanent revolution that then must link with a wider international revolution, or be doomed to failure.

Obviously though, a lot is going to happen over the next several years to upend a lot of socialist theory, ideology, predictions, and prognostications. But Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is going to adapt, and its resiliency will carry all the way through to the Revolution of 1917, when the Marxists would get the band back together, and try again.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.5: The Adventures of Mikhail Bakunin

We have spent the last three episodes focusing on Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and the revolutionary philosophy they developed together, first as young radicals and then as aging exiles. But if you go back to episode 10.1, on the founding of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, you will remember that there were a lot of other people in the room representing a lot of other different philosophies. And that was fine, because that was the whole idea. Sure, they might disagree about some details, but everyone shared a common enemy: the conservative rulers of Europe.

This early solidarity though, would not hold together. In just a few years, the International would be doomed by an irreconcilable difference of opinion about both means and the ends of revolutionary struggle, and more specifically, between the scientific socialists and the anarchists. And though he was not in the room in 1864, did not even join the International until 1868, the anarchist faction would be led by the subject of today’s episode, who also happens to be the founder of Russian anarchism: Mikhail Bakunin.

Mihail Bakunin was born in 1814 in what is today the Kuvshinovsky district of Russia and yes, of course, God help us with the Russian pronunciation. His father was a minor noble and diplomat in the Russian foreign service, who did his time in France and Italy and who indulged in liberal politics and who would be adjacent to the circles involved in the Decemberist revolt of 1825, which I promise we will talk about. Bakunin’s mother was 24 years younger than his father, and she had older relatives who were also involved in the Decemberist revolt.

Now, though his family pulled back from politics, especially after 1825, it was a liberal and literate household that Mikhail grew up in. And he was exposed at an early age to, for example, French enlightenment philosophy. He then followed the generic path of a son of minor nobility and spent his teen years as a cadet officer in training. But his heart was not in army life. Not only did Bakunin have a terminal aversion to being bossed around, he had an active searching and curious mind. This active searching and curious mind ignited that most dreadful of passions: an interest in philosophy. Defying his father’s wish that he either serve in the army or pursue a job in the civil service, Bakunin went to Moscow in search of the truth. Diving into German philosophy, he went from Kant to Fichte to Hegel and was entranced most especially by Hegel. At some point in here, he met and became friends with Alexander Herzen, who sometimes wears the title father of Russian socialism, and whose name I think is more properly in Russian something along the lines of Alexander Keert-zen, but I’m going to go with the anglicanized Herzen. Anyway at this point, neither of them are old enough to be the fathers of anything, they were unruly intemperate kids playing with very dangerous ideas.

In 1840, Bakunin received permission to move to Berlin, to continue his studies in philosophy, and like Marx and Engels, who were kicking around the city at the same time, he fell in with the more progressively radical young Hegelians. Bakunin became drawn to the negation side of the dialectics, and he famously said in an essay he wrote in 1842, that the desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire too. So he was a budding young revolutionary.

In 1842, he moved to Dresden where he went further down the revolutionary line. He became interested in socialism, but even more, he became interested in liberation nationalism, particularly in liberating the Slavic peoples from the tyrannical hand of the Holy Alliance powers, Russia and Austria and Prussia. Bakunin’s politics derailed his chances for a university job, as he had now been identified as a dangerous malcontent by the Russian foreign service. He then moved up to Switzerland, met some exiles connected with the League of the Just, and started referring to himself as a communist. The Russian ambassador to Switzerland ordered him to return to Russia and threatened to confiscate all his property back home, and facing potential arrest, he moved to Brussels where he fell in with a crowd of Polish nationalists trying to restart the revolutionary struggle for national liberation, a cause that as I said would be close to Bakunin’s heart for the rest of his life.

After a brief stint in Brussels, he moved on to Paris in 1844, arriving just a few months after Marx and his family, and they wound up in the same social circles. At that point, Marx was working with a mutual friend they had named Arnold Ruger on a journal called the German-French Annals, which was meant to create a political and intellectual bridge between French and German radicals, but the French took very little interest in it, and all the contributors wound up being German. This included an essay from Engels, which is how Marx and Engels became truly acquainted with each other. The only non-German author published in the journal before it folded was Bakunin.

And Bakunin also forged a personal and ideological bond with Proudhon, and so the seeds of his future anarchism were planted. And if we glance at the three pillars of Marxism, Bakunin is already sharing two of them: German Hegelian philosophy and utopian French socialism. But at this point, Bakunin did not get into the third pillar, which was English economics. Indeed. Bakunin later wrote of his first encounters with Marx, as far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy. I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations. He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right. I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty. And I also was right.

In December of 1844, the tsar made another move against the wayward Bakunin, formally stripping him of his noble privileges and sentencing him in absentia to exile in Siberia. But as Bakunin had yet broken no French laws, the French did not expel him from the country.

At least not yet.

In November of 1847, Bakunin took part in a meeting commemorating the Polish uprising of 1830. And at this party, he gave a speech brazenly denouncing the despotism of the tsar and calling openly for a people’s revolution. Now considered a very dangerous element, he finally received his expulsion order from Mr. Guizot. So he moved back to Brussels where Marx and Engels and a bunch of other radicals who had been booted out of Paris wound up.

So this puts Bakunin in Brussels when the revolution breaks out in Paris in 1848. And in case I haven’t emphasized this enough, the revolution of 1848 is the seminal event for this entire generation, for liberals, for conservatives, for democrats, for socialists. I mean, it’s just a footnote these days, but at the time it was the volcanic eruption they had all either been fearing or anticipating. And no less than Marx and Engels, Bakunin was convinced, right, this is it, this is our French Revolution.

Once the revolution really got going in the spring of 1848, Bakunin supported his friends Georg and Emma Herwegh in their attempt to raise a Legion in France to go join with Friedrich Hecker’s uprising in April of 1848, we talked all about this in episode 7.20. Bakunin’s supported this effort, while Marx thought the whole project suicidal folly. It led to a minor personal falling out that contributed to future enmity between the two. Bakunin later wrote, I must openly admit that in this controversy Marx and Engels were in the right. With characteristic insolence though, they attacked Herwegh personally when he was not there to defend himself. In a face to face confrontation with them, I heatedly defended Herwegh, and our mutual dislike began then.

Using connections he had to guys who were now in the French provisional government, Bakunin secured funds to advance a project of Slavic liberation in central and Eastern Europe. He tried to get to Poland, but Prussian officials stopped him in Posen and he was forced to bounce over to Prague, where he had heard things might be heating up. Bakunin arrived in Prague just in time for the Pan-Slavic Congress that we talked about in episode 7.24, and he inserted himself as a self appointed delegate representing Russia. This meant he was also there when the Prague uprising began, and when it was immediately crushed, forcing Bakunin to flee the city, and he ultimately settled in the town of Colton. In the fall of 1848, he wrote An Appeal to the Slavs, calling for a pan-Slavic uprising to join with Germans and Italians and Hungarians to overthrow the Hapsburg Empire and the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, to replace the tyrannical Holy Alliance with democratic nation states.

But of course we fast forward just a little bit, and where are we? That’s right. We’re at episode 7.31. It’s now May of 1849 and we’re at the final uprising in Dresden. Bakunin joined his acquaintance and comrade Richard Wagner in erecting barricades in the city and doing their best in a doomed effort to fend off the Prussian army. And though there is of course mutual dislike between Marx and Bakunin at this point, Marx does comment on events in Dresden by saying that in Bakunin, the people of Dresden had a cool and competent leader. It would however later become the stuff of intersectional backbiting that Bakunin had gone and fought on the front lines while Marx fled the scenes, just as it was time to mount the barricades.

So Wagner managed to escape the uprising and Dresden, but Bakunin was not so lucky. He was captured about 60 miles west of the city and taken into custody. He would not taste freedom again for 12 long years. Sentenced to death, the punishment was suspended and he sat in prison in Saxony for the next 13 months. In June of 1850, he was transferred to direct Austrian custody, they immediately re-sentenced him to death, but again, the sentence was not carried out. Instead, the Austrians are arranged to transfer him to Russian custody in May of 1851. And at that point Bakunin was moved to St. Petersburg and received yet another sentence of death, which was also not immediately carried out. Instead, he got something quite a bit worse. He spent the next six years in the dungeons of Imperial Russia. Life was intolerably difficult. He contracted scurvy and all his teeth fell out. Bakunin begged for his life. He also begged his brother to slip him some poison.

After eight total years in various prisons and dungeons, it looked like he might be coming due to have his sentence commuted. But Tsar Alexander the Second, the Tsar Liberator, explicitly struck Bakunin’s name from the amnesty list. Only after the tireless efforts of his mother was Bakunin finally led out of the dungeons in 1857 and sentenced to exile in Siberia, forever the dumping ground for whoever happens to be dissenting against whatever Russian government happens to be controlling Russia.

He landed first in a work camp in Tomsk and did what he could to make a life for himself. He met the daughter of a Polish merchant named Antonia, and they got married. Then his prospects brightened a bit more. Bakunin’s still had sympathetic, liberal relatives, people who favored leniency and reform generally and wanted to help their revolutionary cousin. They arranged to get him a commercial job working in Irkutsk, which gave him something resembling a regular daily life after so many years of just being in prison.

Upon arriving in Irkutsk, he came to find that many of the local officials did not like the domineering attitude of the central government back in St. Petersburg. And they themselves were quite sympathetic to critiques of the regime and everyone and everything that surrounded it. So they were very tolerant of the exiled radicals. Bakunin could pretty much read what he wanted and say what he wanted, he could send and receive correspondence, and though his resources were limited and his audience was small, he was able to restart his intellectual life. And I should mention, before we move on that this is the same group of tolerant officials in air quotes, who would play a role in Kropotkin’s advancement from socialism to anarchism just a few years later, but that is a story for another time.

Though Bakunin was tolerated and even got some special treatment, he was not interested in spending the rest of his life in isolated exile. In 1861, he managed to get himself a travel pass to leave Irkutsk and travel down the river to the coast as long as he promised to be back by the time the winter ice set in. This was not a promise Bakunin had any interest in keeping. So in June of 1861, he sailed away.

Down at the port of Olga, he talked his way onto an outbound American ship slipping out of Russian waters and landing in Japan in August. There, he was greeted by a small community of European political exiles, but Bakunin was also not going to spend the rest of his life as an isolated exile in Japan. Instead, he secured himself passage on a ship bound for California, which landed in San Francisco on October the 15th.

But is Bakunin going to settle down in San Francisco and go off and like pan for gold? No, sir, he is not.

First, he took a ship down to Panama. Then he tracked the Overland trail from Panama city to Cologne, where he caught a ship to New York. Upon arrival in New York, he spent a little bit of time meeting back up with former comrades, 48ers who had quit Europe and moved to the United States. Now some of these old 48ers still had an eye on Europe, but many more had given up on the old country. They had gotten into American politics, abolitionism, and were now in meshed in the just months old American Civil War.

So did Bakunin join up, was his destiny there among the other German officers who served in the union army? No, it was not.

He traveled up to Boston and then took a ship to sunny old England landing in Liverpool in late December, 1861. Then he went down to London where he quite literally just showed up on the doorstep of his old friend, Alexander Herzen, in the middle of their family dinner. Between his arrest in Saxony in May of 1849 and his arrival in England in December of 1861, Bakunin completed almost a complete circumnavigation of the globe.

So it has now been just shy of thirteen years since Bakunin had been a part of the revolutionary community in Europe, and he found it very different than when he left. He remade connections from the old days, but while he had been in prison and exile, they had spent the last decade under the banal but oppressive weight of conservative government. They had seen a series of last hopes die, one by one. They saw friends and comrades emigrate or give up or sell out. But Bakunin had been isolated in prison and then banished to the other side of the world. He had survived and fought his way back, and when he came back, he discovered that his own thinking had gone quite a bit beyond even the most radical of them. Marx himself famously commented on this in a letter to Engels, approvingly remarking that when he saw Bakunin in London, on the whole, he is one of the few people who might find not to have retrogressed after 16 years, but to have developed further.

Bakunin now had some pretty funky ideas about the nature of power and authority. Possibly thanks to his prolonged imprisonment, his socialism now had a distinctly libertarian flair. The liberation of the human spirit more than anything else was now the object of his revolutionary ambitions, but he was also still committed to his nationalism, and his belief that people deserved self-determination. And Bakunin saw nation in a fact as the individual of the world stage. He wrote, I feel myself, always the patriot of all oppressed fatherlands. Nationality is a historic local fact, which like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general acceptance. Nationality is not a principle, it is a legitimate fact just as individuality is. Every nationality, great or small has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply the corollary of the general principle of freedom. But that said, Bakunin was a believer in the liberating power of nationalism, and he was always on guard against the idea that one ascendant liberated nation should be able to turn around and use their new found self-determination and freedom to oppress members of minority nationalities. So this still at the forefront of his mind, when he returned to Europe, Bakunin reconnected with those liberation nationalist roots.

During his time in Siberia, he had, for example, heard about Garibaldi, the great Italian freedom fighter, and now send him admiring letters in London. He became friendly with the now aging Mazzini, no longer the spry young leader of young Italy and young Europe, but the doyenne of emigrate democratic Republican nationalists. But Bakunin’s particular cause was that of the Slavs generally, and Poland in particular, and so Bakunin was naturally thrilled when Poland went into revolt in January 1863. He immediately made his way to Copenhagen to try to travel to Poland to join the cause, but he was unable to pass through the lines. The blow of the setback though, was lessened by the fact that his wife Antonia was finally able to get out of Siberia and join him after nearly two years of separation.

By the end of 1863, Bakunin was making plans to go off and live in Northern Italy where he hoped to promote a Slavic Italian Alliance against the Habsburgs. And when he departed in November of 1863, he carried letters of introduction from Mazzini, though they would soon have an ideological falling out. Marx somewhat anticipated this falling out, and he bid a fond farewell to Bakunin, who had this massive intellect and was a powerful force for social revolution, and Marx saw Bakunin making a headquarters in Italy as the perfect way to counteract the narrow-minded limitations of  Mazzini’s mere political revolution.

So in January of 1864, Bakunin arrived in northern Italy in what was now officially the kingdom of Italy. And it was here that Bakunin really and truly started to advance his own distinct anarchist theories. Most of the ideas we’ll be talking about next week come from this final thirteen or so years of his life, between his arrival in Italy in 1864 and his death in 1876. We’re going to talk all about it next week, but just to cut to the chase, Bakunin is now opposed to all forms of authority and coercion wherever he finds them: capitalists, the state, the church, anything that claimed coercive power over free people was the enemy of the full development of full human life.

And just to give you some flavor of where his head is at now, Bakunin will say for example, the trouble lies not in any particular form of government, but in the very existence of government itself. He also flipped one of Voltaire’s old, witty aphorisms on its head: Voltaire had said, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Bakunin meanwhile said, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

Ultimately, what Bakunin wants to do is reconcile the apparent contradiction between liberty and equality, to transcend the dangers implied by both on their own and form them into a synthetic combination. As he famously wrote, liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.

While in Italy, Bakunin founded his own organization to propagate his new anarchist principles. This group is sometimes called the International Brotherhood, the International Fraternity, or the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists. And it is the formation of this group that led to his break with Mazzini because it was from the old groups that Mazzini had cultivated that Bakunin’s started converting adherents from democratic republicanism to full-blown anarchism. In Mazzini’s eyes, Bakunin had just used the letters of introduction Mazzini had given him to steal all of Mazzini’s disciples.

The founding of this international organization is nearly simultaneous with the founding of the International Working Men’s Association up in London in September of 1864. Bakunin’s group had a more ideologically coherent program, though. It was meant to advance Bakunin’s anarchism, not be a catchall umbrella group. It was also purposefully more secretive and conspiratorial than the international. Bakunin was happy to tap into the tradition of secret societies in Italy that went back to the days of the Carbonari, and Bakunin’s program of collectivist anti-authoritarian anarchism started to find ready adherents in Italy and then across Southern Europe.

Bakunin sponsored a tour through Spain of an Italian comrade named Giuseppe Fanelli who spread this new anarchist gospel and found a ready audience, planting the seeds of what would become the largest flowering of European anarchism.

While this was all going on, tensions were rising between Napoleon the Third’s French empire and Otto Von Bismarck’s Prussia. War seemed imminent. And so a movement began to join together a bunch of different pacifist voices to try to diffuse tensions. And this became a group called the League of Peace and Freedom. The League was joined by liberals like John Stuart Mill, radical Democrats like Jules Favre, moderate socialists like old Louis Blanc and Alexander Herzen, and nationalist freedom fighters like Garibaldi. Bakunin and his anarchists answered the call and signed onto a petition by the League that was making the rounds in 1867.

Now the League of Peace and Freedom was hoping to get the International Working Men’s Association to sign up, but Marx guided the response of the central committee to say, of course, as individuals, you can go join up, and we in principle support the aims of the League of Peace and Freedom, but the whole point of the International is to be the top of all pyramids, and as an organization, we will not work in affiliated alliance with other international organizations. And Marx even said, if you really support peace and freedom, you will join us, not the other way around. But plenty of members of the International did join the League of Peace and Freedom, and there was a big congress in Geneva with many famous attendees among them, Bakunin and Garibaldi, now both legendary revolutionaries and they famously embraced each other to a thunderous standing ovation.

But though many of the radicals and socialists and anarchists who joined the league came in with high hopes, they found themselves outnumbered by more tepid political liberals and democrats who were not interested in letting this peace project be turned into a vehicle for social revolution

So disillusioned, Bakunin and his anarchists wound up seceding in 1868. And what they wanted to do now was take Marx’s advice and join the International Working Men’s Association. To do this, they formed a group called the Alliance of Socialist Democracy and petition to affiliate it with the Geneva section of the International. But the response from the central committee in London was in the same vein as their response towards the league of peace and freedom, we don’t associate with other international organizations, our whole point of being is to be the one great international organization. Everybody else joins us, that’s the whole point. And there’s actually a copy of the marginal notes Marx made when he read the organizing charter of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, where he’s written things like, what modesty! They establish themselves as the central authority, clever lads. And, they want to compromise us under their own patronage. And then bluntly, the international association does not admit any international branches. So the response was, if you guys want to join us, that’s fine, that’s awesome, let’s do it. But you have to dissolve this intermediary international committee that you’ve set up, and each section needs to join the international individually as an individual group. One central committee, one annual Congress, that’s the point.

Bakunin decided he could live with these terms and knew that the number of followers he was bringing in would give him plenty of weight to bargain about the direction, policies, and goals of the international. So in 1868, the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists dissolved almost as quickly as they had been formed, and all the national and local sections affiliated directly with the International. As too did Bakunin himself, who was now for the first time, officially a member. This meant that when you looked at the affiliated roles of the International, most of the Italian and Spanish sections were in collectivist anarchist groups operating under Bakunin’s intellectual and political auspices, rather than scientific socialists operating under Marx’s intellectual and political auspices.

So we’ll leave it off there for now with Bakunin joining the International. This also happens to be just when all those peace initiatives are failing, and the Franco-Prussian war is about to erupt. And the lightning run of events to follow — the defeat of France, the fall of the second empire, the founding of the third republic, the Paris Commune, and the Bloody Week — are going to ignite fierce debates inside the international about how to respond, what to do, who to support and why. And these years would ultimately crack the movement into and spell the end of the First International, who’s divergent and still combative heirs would have to pick up the baton in the next generation to carry the great work of social revolution forward.

But that will be in two weeks, because next week we are going to turn to the actual philosophy and programs of Bakunin’s anarcho collectivism, and Bakunin’s anarcho collectivism was different from the anarcho mutualism of Proudhon that preceded him, the scientific socialism of Marx that was contemporary with him, and the anarcho communism of his younger countrymen Kropotkin, which would be developed after Bakunin’s death. So next week it’s an anarcho collectivism, and then in two weeks, the showdown between the Red and the Black.

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Episode 10.4: Historical Materialism

One of my hobbies is studying historiography and the philosophy of history. I don’t like just studying history, I like studying the history of history. It’s why, for example, the first appendices in the History of Rome was about the ancient Greek and Latin historians. I enjoyed the history of history in all of its meta glory. And you can’t really do the history of history without devoting a lot of space to the Marxist historiographic revolution, which opened up a whole new theoretical approach that tied the course of history, not to great ideas or great men, or divine Providence, but rather to economics. That how a group of humans produces the material means of their biological survival, those base elements at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, food, drink, clothing, shelter, that is the base structure upon which the rest of the cultural superstructure is built. Religion arts, literature, politics, science, all of it is rooted in how we produce the means of our survival. And it is changes and conflicts in that base that determines the course of human history. That is the basic premise of historical materialism, and it is the subject of today’s episode.

Starting in the 1840s, certainly no later than his arrival in Paris, Karl Marx started considering the course of human history and what causal mechanisms might be at work. He did this because he was beginning to conceive of a new kind of scientific socialism, and he wanted to put it on a solid foundation. But because he had this fundamentally materialist philosophical outlook, when Marx went looking for these causal mechanisms, he did not plumb the depths of human reason like the utopian socialists did. Instead he studied economics and politics and the actual events of actual history going back to the dawn of time.

Marx begins with the idea that the thing that makes humans different from animals is that we come together to produce the means of our survival. We don’t just passively depend on what nature provides, we actively produce the necessities of life. We grow food, make shelter, weave cloth; that’s what makes humans human. With this idea in mind, Marx comes to believe that society is defined by the manner in which it does this production. This is the stuff we talked about last week, we’re talking about the forces of production and the relations of production, and more specifically the combination of those two concepts into the grand concept mode of production: how a society produces its material needs.

This base mode of production is what defines all the other parts of the society’s cultural superstructure. As I just said, art, religion, philosophy, politics, science forms of media, everything, and we can lump all of that stuff together and call it the ideology of the mode of production.

Now though Marx believes that the material base defines the cultural ideology, he recognizes that it’s a feedback loop between the base and the superstructure and that each maintain and reinforce the other. Just as the prevailing mode of production shapes legal, artistic, and religious institutions,  the resulting law and art and religion serves to justify and maintain the prevailing mode of production.

Now for Marx, the really frustrating part of this is that the organizing ideology of a mode of production is always synonymous with the ideology of the ruling class in that mode of production. So right and wrong, good and bad, who gets what and why, essentially all the prevailing morality is the morality of the ruling class imposed on everyone else, instilling in the exploited, a set of beliefs designed to do little more than rationalize the fact that they are being exploited and why that’s fine, actually.

The ruling ideology of a given era imprints itself and makes it seem like this is the way it’s always been and will always be. Marx further believes that humans are fundamentally conservative creatures who prefer routine habit and continuity to novelty and change, and that this social imprinting is very difficult to undo.

But for Marx history is progressive. It moves in an evolutionary way from the simple to the complex, it does change and grow and evolve. So how then do we move from one mode of production to the next, from small hunter gatherer groups walking around to these huge industrial cities linked by railroads? Well, for Marx it clearly comes down to changes in the means of production, right, those are the tools and the subjects of labor. So we invent a better bow for hunting, maybe discover a technique for preserving food in the winter, learn how to domesticate some wild plant. And this is fundamentally a concept that we would call the development of the productive forces. Which can partly be understood as a measure of human power over nature. And if you survey human history, you can trace the development of our productive forces: new tools, new techniques, new technologies, lead to new ways of social organization, all with the aim of producing more of the necessities of life more efficiently. This can happen both slowly with refinement of technique, or it can happen all at once with some breakthrough discovery or invention. But the tendency to develop the productive forces is clearly present.

Now, because he’s working in a dialectical tradition, Marx sees things evolving through a process of action and reaction, and he has this theory that changes in the forces of production developments in the forces of production will ultimately seek to create new relations of production to continue that development. This is one of the underlying tensions in history. What if the developing productive forces start slipping out from under the prevailing ideological superstructure? Put in another way, if the existing ideological and cultural superstructure starts to become a hindrance to the further development of the forces of production, then we have a major problem on our hands, and society is either headed for revolution or complete social collapse. When this happens, the inhibited forces of production will of necessity burst asunder, as Marx likes to put it, and reorganize as a new mode of production, better suited to continue the development of the productive forces. Marx thinks that these moments of revolution or social collapse occur when a society is ready to transition from one overarching mode of production to its successor. And as Marx says in The German Ideology, and I’m quoting here, at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters, then begins an era of social revolution. End quote. To use metaphors invoking industrial imagery, then, revolution is thus the motor force of history.

 One of the most important tensions and contradictions that exist in a society is how the development of these forces of production produce different classes that are defined by who is doing the labor and who is reaping the rewards, who is the laboring class, and who is the ruling class, who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. Now the development of the ruling class, freed from the drudgery of manual labor to produce the necessities of life, is not just how we come to have lords and priests, who were the first two groups to say, no, actually you work, I’ll just be over here. chillin’, it also brings us all the things we associate with that cultural superstructure: art music, philosophy, science, sports, all of it.

But for nearly all of human history, the production of culture, as we understand it, has been the province of a small minority inside or adjacent to the ruling class who do not have to labor to survive. And this tension between the laborers and the non laborers, between the oppressed and the oppressors, will naturally create tension, class conflict, and class struggle. And that class conflict is central to the course of history. Marx opened the Communist Manifesto by stating boldly, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. And then he goes on to say, freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeymen, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Now I am leaving a lot of nuance out of this, but before we move on, I want to say that Marx does not think human beings are mere passengers in history. They are not carried along by some mystical force of history outside of free will. And this makes sense for a guy like Marx, who is at heart, a passionate, energetic, revolutionary activist who doesn’t want to just interpret the world, he wants to change it. And so though sometimes he gets carried away and uses phrases like inevitable to describe the triumph of the working class, he doesn’t actually think this. But he does believe that the conditions within which humans live at any given moment limit the scope of available action. Individual humans are rooted in history. Early hunter gatherers could not invent capitalism because the technological level of their means of production simply did not allow it. It was impossible for the levelers and the diggers to usher in communism during the English Revolution, because the mode of production and level of technology did not allow it. And Marx summed this up and I heartily endorse this sentiment, by the way, he says this in The 18th Brumiere of Louis Bonaparte, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living. And that is a million percent true.

So we will now move on to the stages of historical materialism. Marx divided the eras of human history up by their prevailing mode of production. And he was here working in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment tradition. The Scottish Enlightenment guys, like Adam Smith, had come up with their own progressive stages of economic development and defined them as hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce, and so Marx has his own version of this. To keep things simple, I will keep it restricted to what is now the accepted canon: first, tribal or primitive communism, then ancient or slave mode of production, then the feudal mode of production, then the capitalist mode of production, and finally, the socialist mode of production. There are slightly modified versions of this that involve an asiatic mode and a barbarian mode that exists in the area between the tribal and the ancient mode of productions, but I will set those aside for now. The basic questions we are going to be asking ourselves are: what are the means of production, who owns or controls the means of production, what are the relations of production that surround and enable those means? Where’s the surplus production going? What is the class conflict? How are the forces of production being developed? Those are the fundamental questions. And I should stress though, before we get into this, that Marx never really grappled with East Asian or South Asian history, and he gets pretty fuzzy about everything the further you get from say the Rhine River. And so what follows amounts to mostly in accounting of European history from pre-history.

Okay. So we begin with primitive communism or the tribal mode of production, or as it is commonly known, hunter-gatherer society. Now, the first thing we should say is that for the materialist historian, the big thing that advances proto-humans beyond their initial animal state is not that they had big brains, but instead that they decided to adopt bipedal locomotion, which freed up their hands to use tools, and that is what allowed their brains to grow big and smart. Remember: always material development first, ideas second. You can disagree with that, but this is what the materialists say.

The other big things humans have going for them is cooperative labor. We always find humans working in groups together. So those early modern and Enlightenment era depictions of man as a solitary creature in the state of nature that you find in like Rousseau and Locke and Hobbes, that is all wrong. Humans were never solitary creatures. We were always in groups. Sharing and cooperative dependence are the essential survival skills of the human species, not self-reliance and independence.

So the means of production in this first mode are just rudimentary tools and available natural resources, so axes and spears, baskets, knives, they tame fire, wear simple animal skin, clothing, they live in rudimentary shelter, and both the means of production and the production itself is shared in common by the group.

The relations of production are: kinship groups, with a loose and fluid division of hunter-gatherer labor without a great deal of specialization. And since this is a very hand to mouth existence, there is no surplus to cream off that would allow a non-laboring life, so everyone is working. This means there is no class, there’s no state property, money, kings, aristocrats, any of that stuff. There was no class, and so there was no class conflict, and the forces of production basically stayed the same, that is, they were not developing, for hundreds of thousands of years. For the majority of human existence, I mean, just by sheer number of years, this primitive communist mode of production has been the prevailing mode of production.

Then about 10 or 12,000 years ago, give or take, human society underwent what has been dubbed the Neolithic Revolution. This is when the ancient aliens came down from the heavens, messed with our DNA and taught us how to be farmers. The forces of production developed from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture and animal husbandry. Our new found ability to domesticate plants and animals to produce the necessities of life changed how and where humans lived. This material change altered our social relations. Some societies stopped being nomadic and started to live in permanent settlements. Harnessing the productive power of farming also introduced a truly transformative element: surpluses. These societies could produce so much food that some people didn’t have to devote themselves to productive labor. So we have the origins of class between a laboring majority and a non laboring minority. This non-laboring minority becomes the ruling class, who initially through sheer physical intimidation are able to command and control the surplus production.

The free time of this non-laboring ruling class allowed for even greater developments in the productive forces, but also everything else we think of as culture. All the elements of what we now call civilization become present as a result of surpluses. So this neolithic revolution is arguably the single most important event in human history.

This revolution takes us from the tribal or primitive communist mode of production to the ancient or slave mode of production, which at its highest state is basically synonymous with Greco Roman civilization. The means of production now include large scale settled agriculture, the extensive use of animals for power, the beginnings of industry, mining, and craft work in cities and advanced large scale trade networks.

We also have the arrival of legal private property: this field is mine, not yours, and because we now have a surplus that can be allotted to a non-laboring ruling class, we also have advancements in the cultural superstructure. The development of the intellectual means of production: writing, cataloging, archiving, math, calendars, science, weights, and measures, all of which will be handled by a new professional class: engineers, lawyers, architects, traders, artisans, musicians, actors, and teachers. Real permanent specialization of labor starts to set in.

But the defining feature of the ancient mode of production is the arrival of the slave. With warfare now a much larger scale proposition, captured prisoners can be brought home and put to work: get them, not us, to do the productive labor. For Marx, the defining class division then in the ancient mode of production is not necessarily between ruler and ruled, but between free individual and slave. And it’s these free individuals who are gobbling up the surplus created by the laboring class of slaves who were the private property of another human being no less than the hammer or the scythe. Now, this is a very general depiction of like a thousand years or more of Mediterranean history with the ancient mode of production again just sort of being a picture in the mind’s eye of a timeless Roman empire.

Now from the materialist perspective, the big thing that wrecked the ancient mode of production was the decrease in supply of cheap slaves. From about the end of the Punic Wars up through the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest, the Roman legions steadily expanded Rome’s borders and its population of slaves. But after this, the Roman empire stopped expanding, aside from a few side projects and the ambitions of Trajan. This meant that slaves became dearer and more expensive, and eventually it’s going to make sense to stop using slaves and start using again some version of non-owned people. When this happens, the transition from slave society to feudal society oh so imperceptibly began. Now, we actually mapped a lot of this transition out during the history of Rome, right, starting with the Crisis of the Third Century, the large, broad and safe empire started to become internally isolated. Big walls along the frontiers were replaced by walls around cities. The inability of the central government to guarantee safety raised the power of local nobles. Labor was willing to send its surplus, not to some central state bureaucracy, but to the local lord, who promised to actually defend them.

And this is the origins of lord and serf. State taxes levied on commerce by the later emperors tended to make those rising feudal lords say, well, screw it, I’ll just make it myself rather than buying it on the open market. And this developed internal self-sufficiency. All of this makes late antiquity a great transition phase from the ancient mode of production to the feudal mode of production, but this is not accompanied by a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large. But rather this other thing: the common ruin of the contending classes. In this case, the ancient mode of production was tottering and decrepit. And when the great migrations came through, they swept aside the Roman Empire, and what was left was those proto-feudal relations.

According to historical materialism, this switch from the ancient to the feudal mode of production was a regression for society, it was a step back. The forces of production were still defined by agriculture manual and animal labor with some technological help from things like water mills. But the technological level went backwards, or at the very least did not advance. And this is also not happening in a huge linked together empire of trade and distribution, but rather local self-sufficiency. And more importantly, most importantly perhaps, the slaves were now gone. They were replaced by serfs out in the field, ostensibly non-owned individuals who were nonetheless legally bound to the land.

And this is the fundamental class antagonism during the feudal mode of production between the productive serfs and the non laboring nobility. In the cities, crafts were made by free artisans who eventually organize themselves into guilds. The surplus went to the new class of feudal nobles, the cast of warrior families who entered into complex reciprocal contracts with each other and claim most of the land for themselves. But it is important to note that in the feudal mode of production, the artisan owned all his own tools, the means of production, and thus the products of his labor. And the peasant, while they had to give some designated portion of the produce of their land to the local lord, the rest was theirs to live on. There was a direct relationship between the labor invested and the produce consumed.

For a long time, the forces of production were not really developing at all. In fact, they were producing less than the Roman Empire had at its height. And this went on for a thousand years. Around these feudal forces of production came a monotheistic Catholic Church and a hierarchical monarchy with divinely ordained kings that preached a timeless chain of being.

But around about 1300, something started to happen, most probably rocketed forward by the Black Death, which swept through Europe and killed a third of the population. Suddenly, the oppressed peasants could demand better pay and conditions and terms of service. Land that had previously been owned by people who were dead were claimed by people who were living, growing their landholdings and creating something like a wealthy peasant class or an emerging gentry. In the cities, the merchants and traders were able to assert more autonomy and weight against the land-based feudal aristocracy. And these guys were the burghers, basically the urban oligarchs. And it is from that title burgher that Marx dubs them, the bourgeoisie, a class that was destined to develop the forces of production more than any other group since at least the ancient aliens who taught us how to farm.

By the 1400s, you start getting real developments in modern banking techniques of pooling and investing in lending capital, the printing press is invented then the Americas were discovered — the whole world was discovered — Constantinople fell and Islamic civilization was pushed out of Spain, leading to European rediscovery of ancient philosophy and knowledge on a wide scale.

So inside late feudalism, the forces of production began to change. Industry started to become larger, more cooperative and more centralized. The old guild system came under pressure from larger scale investments based off of pooled capital, and the historical role of capitalism was to concentrate all the scattered means of production spread out across a bunch of mostly self-sufficient local regions and start producing goods on a massive scale. This goes hand in hand with a change in mentality: production now is not just for use, but for sale in a consumer economy. And that sale was meant to create a monetary profit for the capitalist investor.

Now, of course, people had always produced things that people need, but this was taken to a whole different level, and a consumer economy organized around profitable commodities produced on a heretofore unimaginable scale was born. The old feudal culture was replaced by new concepts: rationalization of processes, training efficiency, and discipline. The division of industrial labor, that is, the production of goods, rather than just food had mostly been between guilds — as in you make shoes, I do hats — this was replaced by a division of labor inside the shop itself. You cut leather. I pound nails, we can make way more stuff.

So this is clearly a major development for the forces of production. But it was running up against a feudal system that was not fit for this next stage of development. And just to take one example, serfdom was tying people to the land, and so they weren’t allowed to move to the cities to become workers, or you have archaic tax and tariff systems that inhibited the free movement of mass produced goods. So this brings us basically to the beginning of the Revolutions podcast because in the historical materialist conception, the English Revolution and the French Revolution are both major bourgeois revolutions, the forces unleashed by the bourgeoisie bursting asunder against the old funeral aristocracy. Or, if you like, the new capitalist base trying to shake off a now thoroughly ill-fitting feudal superstructure to build a capitalist society on top of the capitalist forces of production.

Now in France, things were set back a bit by the fall of Napoleon, but the July Revolution 15 years later was explicitly and nakedly a bourgeois revolution. There’s a quote from Jacques Laffitte where he says, now the bankers will rule.

So we talked about some of the hallmarks of the capitalist mode of production last week: labor has now been collected and socialized, but the means of production: the tools, the natural resources, and eventually the factories, are owned by a single individual or a small collection of investors who claim all the profit from the commodities produced. And everything is now organized around the principle of producing commodities for profit, and more specifically exploiting labor to extract profit from the produce of that exploited labor. And as Marx sees it, this upends the intuitive old style of market economics, where you sell a commodity to get some money so that you can go buy a different commodity that you need, but do not have. So you make a table, sell it for money so you can go buy some clothes.

Under capitalism, there’s a new version where you take your money, use it to make a product, so you can sell that product to get more money. And this whole new conception of reality starts to attach itself to everything, and everything becomes abstracted into a commodity that can be bought and sold inside the market. And the market used to be just this ancillary piece of society, and now it’s the whole obsessive focus. No one, certainly not the historical materialist, denies the results: once unleashed the capitalist mode of production advanced the productive forces further than all of human history put together. It is practically as significant as the Neolithic revolution.

This new mode of production created a fundamentally new class struggle. No longer between the noble and the serf, but between the capitalist and the worker, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a new class of laborers who own nothing and can only sell their labor for wages. And the etymology of proletariat, just so you know, comes from an old Roman census designation for a landless citizen who fell well short of all property qualifications for real citizenship and participation in civil society.

Now as we discussed two episodes, back Marx the young revolutionary identified a restrained bourgeois class that was both suffering under the fetters of feudalism and who had unique power, thanks to their position inside the developing forces production to stage a revolution. They were the revolutionary class. And when he went looking for a group that fit these parameters inside the new capitalist mode of production, he landed on this previously unidentified, and unknown working class: the proletariat. Their misery and exploitation was such that they would desire revolutionary emancipation, and their proximity to and position within the new capitalist means of production placed them in a unique position to have a real revolutionary impact on the economic base of society.

And Marx further believed that these proletarian forces, the forces that would destroy the bourgeoisie, had been summoned by the bourgeoisie themselves. That like the sorcerer’s apprentice, they had conjured forces they could not control. And that in the end, the bourgeoisie ultimately produced, above all, their own grave-diggers.

Now, when the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie, it would usher in a new socialist mode of production. Now I will say though, that both Marx and Engels are very vague and cagey about what this new socialist mode of production will look like. And partly this is because they don’t want to be dreamy, utopians building castles in the sky, but they do think that something is going to happen and that it will be socialism.

They hint that it will probably unfold in two stages, a lower transitionary phase and a higher stage. And this is sometimes divided between socialism and then full communism, but Marx often just uses the terms lower and higher socialism. In this new mode of production, the means of production will be owned by the workers themselves. They will be the beneficiaries of their own labor, rather than seeing it creamed off and hoarded by a small minority of exploitive rulers. He also thinks that this will bring about the end of all class distinctions, which dated back to the dawn of agriculture. Since the Neolithic revolution, every mode of production has been dominated by a minority ruling class, living off the produce of a majority laboring class.

Now that this has been upended with the majority laboring class, now the new ruling class, all class distinctions will evaporate because there will be no more oppressor and no more oppressed. All of the surplus will be shared in common. In fact, there will be such an abundance thanks to the productive powers consolidated during the capitalist mode of production, a post-scarcity society will not require oppressor or oppressed, it all becomes irrelevant. Who’s fighting for control of the necessities of life, they are in abundance. Everyone can share. From each according to their abilities, and to each according to their needs.

So that is the materialist conception of history. And that is the trajectory that Karl Marx believed human civilization is on. And this is going to be picked up by his successors, because Marx has sketched out an idea that by necessity the working class proletariat and only the working class proletariat is the revolutionary class. And that in the transition phase between capitalism and socialism, they are going to have to seize revolutionary power and impose what Marx problematically dubbed, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And so next week we are going to set Marx aside, and we are going to turn to the philosophy of people who rejected all of that, who thought that this was not the stuff of emancipation, but the stuff of further tyranny. And just as we did with Marx and Engels, next week, we will cover the life and times of Mikhail Bakunin, their ideological opponent in the battle for control of the First International, and for the revolutionary future of all of Europe.

 I will end though, by reminding everybody that I will be at the Intelligent Speech conference in New York on June the 29th, a bunch of us podcasters will be there. You can meet us. We can hang out all day. I will be doing a presentation called What is the Point of All This? And then later in the day, I’ll sit for a round table discussion about whatever we decide to round table discuss. It is going to be great, and I very much hope to see you there.

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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.