The Marxian Tradition
Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883. In the speech delivered at Marx’s graveside Friedrich Engels compared Marx to Charles Darwin, citing the parallels between Darwin’s discovery of the “law of development of organic nature,” and Marx’s discovery of the “law of development of human history.”[1] Engels goes on to describe how Marx’s law of history asserts that the material existence of concrete human beings is the starting point for the analysis of history, placing the production of food, clothing, and shelter as the determining factors in the creation of politics, art, religion, and science.
Whether one accepts the deterministic relationship Marx describes between the base and the superstructure, there is something fundamental afoot regarding methodology that will influence both Marxist and non-Marxist thinkers for generations to come. Marx did not seek to ground his analysis in a definition of human nature, historical teleology (at least at the origins of analysis), or national character. As a methodology, Marx sought to determine the causal linkages between what he saw as two concrete historical facts: the way in which human material needs were met and the social and political institutions that exist.
For this reason, Marx is a revolutionary, but not necessarily for the reasons most often attributed to him. There is something fundamentally different in the method regarding the conceptualization of how human beings come to an understanding of the physical environment and how that process circumscribes both the limits of knowledge and the possibilities of action.
Is Marx the final word on materialism? Such a claim could be defended only within a crude form of economic determinism, one that would not do justice to the depth of Marx’s analysis nor the significance of Marx’s contribution. Marx is an opening, a leap forward, but to treat his system as the conclusion of the development of materialist methods would undercut a larger and more valuable project, the development of a human-centered understanding of the structures which human beings have constructed.
This chapter will survey the writings of Marx for what is both stated and implied regarding materialism as a methodological and philosophical position. Particular attention will be given to the incorporation of biological and empirical elements in Marx’s socio-historical form of materialism. In the latter part of the chapter, emphasis (some might argue too much) will be placed on some of the shortcomings, implicit assumptions, and inconsistencies in Marx’s form of materialism. Marx is breaking new ground, but he lacks some of the conceptual tools to formulate a stronger materialist position. To put it another way, Marx wants to conform to the syntax of science developing in the middle of the nineteenth century. That means that he wants to employ inductive logic coupled with empirical reference points for the generation of causal statements. Such a strategy for the study of human culture is not without its limitations. The chapter will conclude with some comments about the legacy Marx left and its influence on materialist philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
As was discussed in the previous chapter, some of the foundation for the development of a materialist world-view can be found in the writings of Immanuel Kant. The materialism is not in Kant’s dualism, transcendentalism, the categorical imperative, or in his formulation of human subjectivity. It has its roots in the question. If human beings are to claim knowledge in the realms of science and morality, what conditions must be present? In doing so, Kant has made answering the question a human-centered enterprise. Further, by relying on the human-centered nature of the question to direct his inquiry, Kant also tried to address the limits on what we can know, moving metaphysics into the realm of the speculative rather than the real. “Essence” is, therefore, removed from our epistemological lexicon.
But such a state of affairs is not universally accepted. The German Idealist tradition reacted to the Kantian philosophy by reasserting the importance of the “idea” within the mind/body dualism of the Kantian system. Central to this philosophy as it comes to Marx is the figure of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Hegel wants to overcome the mind/body dualism of the Kantian system. He does so by giving preeminence to the development of consciousness as part of a teleology of reason. If our goal is to get knowledge of the Absolute, that is, the world as it “truly is,” we must understand the relationship between knowledge and the absolute.[2] To Hegel, thought and being cannot be separated as is suggested by the Kantian system. There must be a unity in order for the mind to be able to contemplate the world. That is, consciousness can only contemplate the objects which are made available to it by the level of its own development. In this way, Hegel tried to close the gap between knowledge and consciousness. This gap, as one would find in the Kantian system, would lead us to the conclusion that, “the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side . . . ”[3]
At its core, Hegel’s philosophy suggests that the world is ordered by reason and that the unfolding of our consciousness reveals the order of that reason. But Hegel is going to go further. Consciousness, nature, and reality are all ordered by spirit, an underlying rationality that moves dialectically toward self-consciousness. To Hegel, spirit stands in relationship to its opposite, matter.[4] Its sole truth is freedom.
In history, spirit reveals itself as concrete reality. Universal history belongs to the realm of spirit.[5] Spirit makes itself objective in history and the object of thought.[6] It manifests itself in the culture of people, each with its own collective character. Human history is shaped by this teleological movement that is manifested in the collective, historical monuments of human consciousness. Stages of development are negated as new levels of self-consciousness are achieved.
Like Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach was one of the Young Hegelians in Berlin during the first half of the nineteenth century. Hegel’s influence can be seen in the earliest work of Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, where he speaks of God as an outward projection of the inner character of human subjectivity. However, by his 1843 work, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Feuerbach’s materialist credentials are front and center. To Feuerbach, God is an expression of human reason, reason that expresses the expanse of its own ability to conceptualize the externalization of itself. To put it another way, the qualities given to God are the qualities of reason.[7] The doctrines of religion that express God’s essence are really expressions of human essence.[8]
For that reason, Feuerbach asserted that religion needs to be read anthropologically.[9] However, what Feuerbach was claiming is not necessarily what anthropologists today would view as the exterior study of human behavior, etics, but would be closer to an externalization of subjective experience, emics. What Feuerbach missed was the subjective character of speculative philosophy more generally and the problems it would present for a more systematic materialist doctrine.
Therefore, even with his materialist turn away from strict Hegelianism, Feuerbach never leaves it all behind. Feuerbach still spoke in terms of consciousness and human essence as if they are fixed and transcendental expressions. Feuerbach treats the content of reason and consciousness as if they are independent of sensation and experience, trying to free consciousness from the confines of the body. Reason wants to express itself beyond the confines of sensuality. “ . . . [T]he essence of reason is disclosed to us primarily in the infinite being.”[10] Even if that expression of the infinite is an expression of human sentiments, it still represents the externalization of the transcendent character of reason itself.
Sensation and consciousness are treated as different categories of activity in the mind. Something is real only to the extent that it exists as an object for consciousness. Hence, consciousness is the true reality.[11]
In his 1845 critique of Feuerbach, Marx stresses the problems of that characterization of consciousness. To Marx, Feuerbach is too close to the Cartesian and Kantian view in which consciousness treats the world as an object of contemplations.[12] For Marx, this position implies a passive relationship between the actions of individual subjects and the world of which they are a part. Therefore, consciousness still maintains a transcendent character within the structure of Feuerbach’s thought.
Further, by assigning so much autonomy to consciousness Feuerbach disconnects it from the world of sensual activity.[13] Such a position presents two problems for Marx. First, it allows for the creation of a definition of human essence that is not intimately connected to material and historical conditions. Second, the decoupling of sensual activity from the formation of thought and consciousness implied a disconnect between material conditions and the formation of a historical and revolutionary consciousness that is tied to production and residual activity in the superstructure. Marx’s entire revolutionary project relies on the strength of that connection.
It is my contention that Marx’s materialism has three distinct phases, the period of the 1844 Manuscripts, the period of the German Ideology, and the period of Capital. Each represents a different focus, and a different methodological approach, to the study of social phenomena. Therefore, each characterizes the relationship between material experience and the generation of knowledge about the physical world and its recurring patterns in a slightly different way. Marx is searching for laws of social development that resemble the structures of laws in the natural sciences. While the topics discussed are done so with varying degrees of materialist pedigree, the intent is always to move in the direction of natural science.
Another facet linking all three phases in Marx’s writing is the attempt to integrate the notion of “life as activity” into the analysis. I would argue that this is one of Marx’s notable accomplishments in the discussion, as it brings human beings into a dynamic process of history. Marx and Engels repeatedly criticize empiricism for approaching the study of human beings and social relations within the framework of what they see as an outdated subject/object dichotomy. Marx repeatedly states that life is activity, an interaction between the living individual and the external environment of which he or she is a part. Hence the problem that Marx confronts is to formulate a description of the process by which human beings come to knowledge within the syntax of modern science, that is, to formulate causal statements about the social world, but to do so in a way that accounts for the dynamic of living beings as part of the process of knowledge construction.
To Marx, strict empiricism does not account for the interaction of living beings with the world. Empiricism must confront the world as “object.” It operates by listing the properties of things. To do so, the identities of things must be represented as both closed and stable. Therefore, the accounts of human activity within the empiricist framework do not have the dynamic aspects of historical transformation that Marx wants to incorporate.
One of Marx’s great achievements is to begin a conversation about this very problem. While not the final word on the subject, Marx transforms our understanding of the complexity of the study of living, conscious beings that are simultaneously both subject and object. One of the arguments of this chapter will be that Marx’s own strategy seeks to synthesize the epistemological requirements of empirical science with the remnants of Hegelian phenomenology after it has been turned right side up. This formula will have a profound effect on the methods for the study of human beings well after Marx’s passing.
There is much that is appealing in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The reader gets an account of the mechanism by which capitalism exploits wage laborers, a discussion of capitalism being driven by greed and avarice, as well as pronouncements about the how the emancipation of the working class is the key to the emancipation of all human beings. However, the 1844 Manuscripts represent the weakest account of materialism in the three phases of Marx’s analysis.
The work’s most materialist passages are in the brief remarks Marx makes about consciousness and life activity and the role played by production in the securing of human needs. Introducing a theme that will be developed in later writings, Marx asserts that consciousness is shaped by activity in the world.[14] This activity may be scientific, productive, or consumptive, but all of these activities shape our understanding of the social character of our self-understanding. If our understanding of the world is the result of activity, then, the explanations for the rise of political economy that imagine “fictitious primordial conditions” to explain the origin of private property and privately held production must be metaphysical in character. Marx refers to them as “theology.”[15] The reference is clearly aimed at Locke and the contract theorists of the eighteenth century. It is surprising here that Marx is not more forceful in asserting the ideological and historical character of bourgeois consciousness in the 1844 Manuscripts, tying the emergence of liberalism with the rising political power among the owning class.
However, Marx follows this statement with what he calls “an actual economic fact” that connects individual workers to the structures of capitalist production.[16] In capitalist production the worker is turned into a commodity, such that the more productive labor power is, the less the individual worker is worth.[17] In later works, this is the point at which Marx stresses the economics of surplus value and the significance of supply and demand in the determination of wages. But in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx develops a different type of argument.
Much of the 1844 Manuscripts is normative in character and far less materialistically oriented than many of Marx’s other major works. It is the case that directly after the discussion on the commodification of labor, Marx moves into a discussion of the estranging or alienating features of the workers’ experience within capitalism. As the labor performed by the worker belongs to another, it becomes alienated from the worker.[18] Labor loses its force as an expression of the worker and becomes an alien product to satisfy only the external needs of food, clothing, and shelter.[19] Through the commodification of labor, the worker is alienated from nature and estranged from the character of the human species.[20] The worker is also estranged from other human beings as the labor in which the worker is engaged is actually directed by another who holds control over him.[21] Later in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx adds the division of labor as one of capitalism’s alienating features.[22]
In no other place in Marx’s body of work is the topic of alienation taken up in such detail. The terms “alienation” and “estrangement” are mentioned as parts of other discussions, but nowhere with the kind of elaboration and detail as in the 1844 Manuscripts. The problem is that “alienation” is simply not part of a materialist argument. This might explain why the draft of the Manuscripts was abandoned.
To be alienated, one has to be alienated from something. In this discussion Marx repeatedly returns to the idea of human essence[23] or terms like “species life.”[24] The problem is that these are terms that do not fit very well with a materialist analysis. They imply closed objective criteria in which there are self-evident sets of characteristics. Historical analysis, especially an analysis based on the idea of an historical dialectic, would suggest that the content of such terms would be determined by the historical, cultural, and social milieu of a particular epoch.
Further, there are implicit teleological overtones to such a claim, as it is only within a different age that one would be able to decipher the alienating features of a previous one. One does not assess the alienating features of the bourgeois era within its own paradigm. Liberalism does not assess itself from the perspective of the owning class, but as a repository of freedom. Only the imposition of a teleological project can force itself onto the present from a yet undetermined future. More will be said about that later.
So although there is only a very weak model of materialism suggested by the 1844 Manuscripts, its normative components are very pronounced. Capitalism is characterized as an economic arrangement that is organized around human greed and avarice and is essentially a war among the avaricious.[25] In capitalism, money is viewed as the supreme good.[26] It is organized around swindle and plunder.[27] Everyone comes to view their neighbor’s needs as something that can be exploited for their personal gain.[28]
In such a system those who labor are simply considered one more tool, a commodity to be consumed in the production process.[29] Industrial processes turn the workers into appendages of the machine, stripping the human being of their essence and denying them their species being.[30] The division of labor fragments the complete human being to extract a sliver of their essence as repetitive labor within the industrial process of production.[31]
It is impossible to read this and not be impressed by Marx’s humanity and his commitment to the worth and well-being of the vast multitudes who toil for miniscule rewards. Such an analysis has been very influential in the humanistic schools of Marxist thought. It could be argued that this is actually the strongest basis from which Marx can launch his critique of capitalism.
However, the normative, humanistic, and essentialist claims are ultimately not the ones Marx wants to employ. He wants to identify historically valid empirical indicators in order to make causal statements about the direction of the social and political world. To do that it is necessary to look for indicators of capitalism’s dysfunction in areas other than human essence.
The epistemological model prevalent in Marx’s time rests on a subject/object dichotomy. There is an observer who categorizes the sensations given by objects, and through this process the observer generates knowledge. For Marx such a model is disconnected from the reality of human existence. It suggests that consciousness and the content of human thought are autonomous phenomena, independent of life and the dynamic character of sensual contact with the world.
Marx’s point can be seen in his comments on Hegel. In the unpublished fragment on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx criticizes Hegel for suggesting that empirical reality has a rationality “outside of itself.”[32] In discussing the rise of the state, Marx says of Hegel’s notion, “Speculative philosophy expresses this fact as the ideas’ deed, not as the idea of the multitude . . . ”[33] Consciousness is divorced from existence. Material reality is a phenomenal manifestation of universal reason.
In the German Ideology the concern with Hegel still persists. Marx makes it clear that he rejects the Hegelian idealism and its view that somehow the world is a manifestation of the absolute. Of German philosophy, he says it moves from “heaven to earth.”[34] The epistemological problem for Hegelian idealism is described in the Holy Family. In challenging the notion of causality presented by idealist, Herr Szeliga, Marx demonstrates the logical difficulty with Hegelian epistemology.
In what can only be described as a humorous passage ridiculing speculative philosophy Marx addresses the relationship between a particular entity, in this case apples, strawberries, pears, and almonds, and the general concept “fruit.” The problem is in the relationship between the existence of the real object and the generalized concept used to describe a class of objects. To Marx, speculative philosophy has the orders of appearance reversed. It must assert the appearance of particular objects such as strawberries, apples, and so on as manifestations of the reality of “Absolute Fruit.”[35] “Particular real fruits are no more than semblances whose true essence is ‘the Substance’—‘Fruit.’”[36] The real emanates from the idea. To Marx, such a scheme is backwards.
The split with Hegel also encompasses the understanding of causality within politics. The Hegelian view of the state gives unity and purpose to the people residing within the whole of its organic union. In the state, the differences that manifest themselves as differences of interests and material struggles are surpassed in favor of a singular bond that binds citizens into a transcendent union. Marx rejected the mystical character of the union suggested by Hegel. Human beings do not transcend the barriers brought about by their material differences. They exist at the level of what Hegel terms “civil society.” Civil society is the reality of human intercourse. It is, therefore, the real basis of human interaction upon which our understanding of history must rely.[37]
Marx is interested in material facts as his starting point, but not in the “dead facts” of empiricism.[38] He is interested in the explanation of our self-understanding of the world but wants material premises as the starting point for his analysis. In the German Ideology, much of that interest manifests itself in a discussion of consciousness.
The starting point for Marx’s analysis is the existence of real individuals. However, their existence cannot be divorced from the activity that forms both the precondition for the material existence and the basis for the formation of their self-understanding of the world.[39] Living human beings are characterized by sensuous activity. Their connection to the world is through the senses and the ideas they form are a direct result of this activity.
Consciousness, as the formation of ideas about the world, cannot be divorced the activity performed by human beings in the world. Life is active, not passive. “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their action life-process.”[40]
The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.[41]
So the question is: how do we come to an understanding of who we are and how we have come to a particular position in history with all of the corresponding beliefs and practices? We cannot arrive at this understanding from pure thought or from teleological conceptions of metaphysics. Study must begin with the concrete existence of human beings. Further, there must be a material explanation of how they come to form an understanding of their conditions. This consciousness is shaped by their material activity in the world. For Marx, the primary material activity is production.
Production satisfies the needs of existence.[42] For that reason, it is an expression of life.[43] Therefore, production should be the starting point for any study of human beings and the conditions that have generated their ideas. Human beings distinguish themselves from other animals because they are able to engage in producing for their anticipated needs.
Production is central to the formation of human consciousness, but the conditions that shape consciousness are not the result of individual will or intentions. Production is a social and historical condition and is a reflection of stage material and technological development.[44] It is an objective, material condition that shapes the character of law, politics, religion, and social institutions. It does so by creating the ideas, or consciousness, that allow for the acceptance of particular practice.[45]
Hence there is an evolving notion of consciousness that has a central role in historical change. The sensuous contact with the world shapes the content of consciousness, which then serves as a gatekeeper for the ability of new ideas and practices to come into existence. Only when the material conditions are aligned with the ideological developments in the consciousness of human beings can history transform itself.
Ideas have material origins, but they also have material force. For Marx, the two cannot be separated. As he stated in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, material force can only be overthrown by a material force. But, Marx continues, “theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.”[46] When conditions have shaped the content of consciousness to the degree that social and political status quo is no longer consistent with the self-understanding of reality presented by consciousness, a revolutionary situation exists.
Material conditions give substance to consciousness. It is in the process of producing the condition for life that our ideas and attitudes are shaped. This consciousness represents our self-understanding of the world and our place within it. It is the totality of our understanding of the human condition.
The generation of consciousness is, therefore, a necessary condition for the construction of the superstructure, the social, political, and cultural institutions that spring from its base. However, these patterns of human association are the reflections of consciousness formed in the human mind. Therefore, they are the idealized manifestation of thought, shaped by the mode of production and turned into the material conditions in the superstructure for continued systemic reproduction. The formation of ideas is necessary for the construction of the superstructure.
In the German Ideology Marx makes clear that his method is to be distinguished from that of Kant and Hegel. He gives no independent status to consciousness. However, Marx has not abandoned the concerns regarding consciousness and its formation. Instead of an autonomous consciousness unfolding dialectically, Marx describes a material process that shapes the formation of human’s self-understanding. The unfolding of a process in history still operates. The process still moves dialectically.
Thus, the direction taken by Marx in the German Ideology is one of creating a kind of materialist phenomenology in which a teleology of history stands in for Absolute Spirit. He is still under the influence of the master when it comes to assigning history a trajectory. How do human beings direct their intentional actions in the world? How is human experience transformed into the structures that shape the social order? If the Cartesian system has failed to account for life as activity, what alternative can be constructed that is dynamic?
The answers are found within a materialist reading of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. For Marx, consciousness needs to be given a material basis, one that is dynamic and transformative. The ideas that allow us to understand our historical conditions cannot be fixed and static. Each stage of material development generates a new self-understanding that overcomes the previous one.
Consciousness is at the core of all these transformations. Consciousness is formed out of the sensuous activity of human beings as they produce the material necessities of life. The evolving dynamic of history establishes the material basis for social evolution. Each new mode of production transforms human consciousness.
Self-awareness lies at the center of these concerns. A human being must be aware of the material processes that affect the formation of their ideas, beliefs, and actions. History passes through a series of ideological moments that are represented in the social and political institutions of the time. The institutions are transformed when the content of consciousness overturns.
While this could lead one to believe that Marx was a strict determinist, a more lenient interpretation of his notion of causality could also be employed. Described in a softer way, what Marx is outlining is a method of human identity formation. Human beings define themselves in relation to their experiences and the system of rewards and punishments available to them within the social order. It is a matter of psychological conditioning that channels the formation of consciousness in a particular direction. However, consciousness can overturn the existing order only when the historical conditions are ready for such a change.
To this point in the analysis of Marx’s writings, the early work was examined and found to be largely normative in nature. In the 1844 Manuscripts, greed and avarice established the causal dynamic for capitalist practice. This form of social practice was argued to contradict human essence. In the German Ideology Marx creates a materialist interpretation of consciousness tied to the historical forms of production. Sensuous activity forms consciousness, and consciousness provides the basis for the construction of human identity and the social practices within the relations of society.
Still, the articulation of central laws of history that would warrant Engels’s comparison of Marx to Charles Darwin seems to be lacking. Darwin found specific evidence of evolutionary change. Drawing on the specifics of his observations aboard the Beagle, he generated inductively drawn hypotheses about the workings of evolution. His theory of “natural selection” followed the parameters of scientific syntax. Can Marx parallel that effort? The closest Marx comes is in the arguments found in Capital and other works of that period in Marx’s writings. However, there is an important caveat.
Materialism and scientific analysis are clearly linked in the eyes of Marx and Engels. Therefore, the question as to the meaning of science cannot be divorced from the matter of materialist analysis. But is Marx engaging the scientific method outlined by Sir Francis Bacon and applied by people like Darwin? Yes, if by science one means the logical analysis of facts. However, the type of logic employed differs from what is normally meant by “science.” Bacon and Darwin are engaging induction. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is largely, although not exclusively, characterized by deduction. That is, the laws of capitalist practice, and the impact these practices have on workers, production, and the direction of capitalist activity, are largely contained within the definitional content of capitalism itself. This statement is not designed to diminish Marx’s accomplishment. The work on capital is an extraordinary elaboration of capitalism’s character. However, the explanation of its character is deduced from the internal logic of its practice. Marx’s attempts at inductive hypotheses largely centers on the fate of capitalism, the historical inevitability of which is open to question.
It must also be stated that in analyzing these writings it is necessary to distinguish between the methodology and the content. This is the case because of the inability of materialist methods to stabilize concepts or decontextualize the origin of ideas. As was discussed in chapter 1, this leads to the relativized nature of all content used in historical analysis. For Marx, therefore, capitalism is a system-level dynamic that has historical origins that are linked to the mode of production in a given society. That means that capitalism must be approached as a set of activities that are bound to a particular historical epoch, and that all of the statements regarding capitalist developments must be understood as relative to that historical period. Not only are the practices of capitalism that Marx discusses bound to the period in which he is discussing them, but the analysis in which Marx is engaged must be understood as relative to the articulation of capitalist practice in his era. Again, this point is not intended to diminish Marx’s work, but simply to state that all materialist analysis must contain a certain level of relativity and contextuality in order to maintain consistency.
While the issue of relativism is also relevant to the matter of methodology, the relativity of context would be governed by larger paradigmatic shifts in our understanding of the epistemological requirements of truth claims and the nature of scientific constructions. In the case of Marx, the paradigmatic shift had already occurred and the rules of scientific syntax were generally formed as he was developing his method. The point here being that according to Marx’s own articulated assumptions, if we are looking for what is lasting in Marx’s materialist analysis of history, it may be found more in the method than in the content. The methodological underpinnings of his logic may be of greater significance than each individual conclusion on the nature of the capitalism, as many of those conclusions may have greater relevance to his experience of the middle of the nineteenth century.
The scope of Marx’s writings on capitalism makes it necessary to divide the work into several sections. This will include a discussion of the dynamics of capitalism, its effects on the working class, the laws and contradictions Marx identifies, and an analysis of the extent to which Marx’s predictions and teleological statements disrupt his materialist efforts. Particular emphasis will be given to the causal “laws” that Marx identifies and the material nature of those claims.
People are born into sets of relations, the content of which they did not design. This is true for both the owners and the workers of the capitalist system.
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.[47]
This is a materialist view of social and political transformation. The sensuous activity of human beings, engaged in the production of the necessities of existence, is manifested in idealized form in the institutional byproducts of those practices. The institutions then regulate human interaction.
In this materialist dynamic of history, it is the method of production that has a direct causal link to the institutional order that is manifest.
The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of the conflict and fight it out.[48]
The mode of production creates a consciousness within which social practices are generated. Marx calls the aggregate of these the “relations of production.” So one of the causal laws that Marx identifies is that the mode of production determines the relations of production. This claim has led some to identify Marx as an economic determinist. However, when one is seeking laws of human behavior, it will always be necessary to engage is some reductionism in order to make statements of causality.
In Capital, Marx makes it clear that he wants to move away from the normative analysis that engaged so much of the 1844 Manuscripts. His goal is to articulate the laws that operationalized the set of relations known as capitalism. What makes capitalism different than the feudal system that came before it is that while capitalism must produce goods that have “use-value,” the systemic dynamic that drives it is production for “exchange-value.” As Marx puts it, “In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find, . . . a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value . . . ”[49] Such a commodity is found in labor power. For that reason Marx characterized capitalism as a system in which there is the domination of past materialized labor, in the form of productive capital, over living labor.[50]
Much of Capital, and the analysis of capitalism more generally, can be described as a reorientation of the reader to an understanding of the effects of capitalism on the conditions of the working class. The liberal market economics found at the nexus of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham is a manifestation of the ideology of the owning class. Capitalism had advantages over feudalism, but the contradictions within the logic of capitalism are now beginning to manifest themselves requiring a new set of human relations.
Labor puts its “vital force” into the objects it produces.[51] However, the way in which capitalism is constructed, its economic logic, disconnects the value a worker generates from the amount that the worker receives in compensation. Wages are set by the supply and demand for workers in the marketplace.[52] This means that any force that influences the availability of workers for production will influence the amount they are paid and, hence, their well-being.
This system of compensation for the workers leads to the creation of what Marx calls “surplus value.” Put simply, surplus value is profit. It is created when the sale of products exceeds the cost of production.[53] The term is used to indicate that the “surplus” is the value extracted from the workers beyond that for which they are compensated. Capitalists claim the right to surplus value as they brought the labor power and raw materials together in the production process.[54] The worker has only his or her labor time to sell and this takes place in a competitive environment with other workers engaged in the same process.
In that sense, both owners and workers operate in a market environment. However, two points need to be stressed. Even though there is competition in both realities, the experiences that owners and workers have are fundamentally different, so much so that the consciousness formed through the sensual contact with the world leads to two different and conflictual forms of consciousness. Second, the creation of liberal ideology was a historical product tied to the rise of small-scale production and the rise of a diverse owning class. It needs to be viewed as both a historical and a social product, subject to the alteration of conditions that have served as its formation.
Materialism is not synonymous with class analysis. It is more correctly considered an epistemological and ontological claim. Therefore, it is not the plight of the workers within capitalism that gives historical materialism its materialist pedigree, but the fact that Marx identifies causal connections and historical contradictions that are significant to the movement of history.
The notion of a dialectical process of historical change suggests that at specific periods in history the internal contradictions inherent in all system-level dynamics will manifest themselves and produce a transformation of conditions and practices. Capitalism is certainly no exception. The question of whether or not the contradictions in capitalism serve as a demonstration sufficient to prove the validity of historical dialectics is not the interest here. The question is one of causal sufficiency within a materialist understanding of history.
Has Marx identified enough dynamic processes internal to capitalism to warrant the label materialist? That is, are there material forces that have been identified sufficient to cause the movement of history? The answer is yes. However, it cannot be said without qualification. Most of the causal dynamics and contradictions identified are tied to two conditions of capitalism: the tendency of capitalism to create monopolies and the plight of labor under the conditions of capitalism. The role of production in determining all system-level dynamics throughout history is simply afforded too scant attention to justify the claim that Marx has demonstrated the exclusive causal role of production for all major historical changes. The mention of the historical role of production in both the Manifesto and the Critique of Political Economy is not sufficient to demonstrate such a sweeping causal statement.
However, within capitalism the explanatory power of Marx’s materialist critique is difficult to deny. The logic of capitalism traps both owners and workers in systems in which not only must surplus value be extracted from the workers but the extraction must be maximized. This is the case because part of that value is reinvested in machines that increase the productivity of labor. Productivity must be maximized or the owners will find themselves losing market share and ultimately their business will close. Machines are used to increase surplus value.[55] The division of labor is used to increase surplus value.[56] These increases could be used to shorten the workday, but this cannot occur as long as capitalist competition dominates the economic landscape.
For this reason, the amount of capital employed in production must continually increase. The use of machinery, women, children, and the division of labor will all be employed to drive down labor costs as they make the value of individual labor decline. Machines will be used to replace laborers in the factories. It is the nature of capitalism to move toward ever cheaper means of production.[57]
Marx makes it clear that there is a floor below which the wages of the workforce cannot fall. As a system, workers must have enough to survive and reproduce the workforce for succeeding generations. However, the continual downward pressure on wages is actually a byproduct of the increasing productivity of labor.
The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labor, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society—where the laborer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the laborer—undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labor the greater is the pressure of the laborers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence . . .[58]
All the methods of increasing the productivity of labor are carried out at the expense of the laborer and for the benefit of the owning class.
Owners that do not maximize the productivity of labor and minimize their expenditures for labor power will find themselves losing out to those who do. Thus, it is the tendency of capital to concentrate with the development of the means of production.[59] This situation is enhanced by the economy of scale in production.
The battle of competition is carried on by the cheapening of commodities. Other things being equal, the cheapness of commodities depends on the productivity of labor, which, in turn, depends upon the scale of production. Large capitals, therefore, get the better of small ones.[60]
Capitalists must expand production capacity in order to compete. The resources necessary to expand come from the value they can extract from the workforce. The result will be the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands and a growing class of unemployed, underemployed, and impoverished workers.
An economic system that is dependent on expanding markets and expanding consumption cannot be sustained without a population that has sufficient purchasing power to consume the products being produced. However, with capitalism, the constant need to reduce production costs, and the requirement that labor be considered as a component of cost, means that value afforded to labor to sustain itself will be pushed to subsistence levels. This will result in insufficient demand for the goods generated by industrial production. Such a dynamic generates system-level instability.
Much of the analysis of capitalism is focused on identifying its internal dynamics. Marx is attempting to demonstrate that there are laws that govern the operation of capitalism. Marx is also arguing that some of the dynamics within capitalism produce outright contradictions when followed to their logical conclusions. The analysis is complex, detailed, and extraordinary in its depth and clarity.
However, projecting an analysis of the present onto the future is always a dangerous task. Marx clearly identifies logical, material processes that operate within capitalism. However, when Marx projects the analysis of capitalism onto the larger frame of history to make statements he regards as “causally necessary” developments in the future of human history, the analysis begins to move away from material analysis and is muddled by his commitments to social justice for the working class and the desire for revolutionary change.[61]
Such claims move Marx away from pure materialism. The working class must inevitably come to power.[62] The proletariat must become the ruling class.[63] The working class is the multitude. Democracy demands their rule. Workers are also the class that adds their “vital force” to the production process, giving them an historical status as the class most connected to the reality generated by human productive activity.
However, at this stage in his analysis Marx has left the scientific analysis behind in favor of a political commitment to an economic class that he views as exploited. These are arguments in favor of why the working class should rule, not that its rule is inevitable. To paraphrase Hume, Marx has moved from “is” to “ought” and departed from a materialist analysis.
Marx has not transcended ideological commitments in favor of historical laws, but has generated an alternative ideological narrative to that of the bourgeois order. In this narrative, there is to be no distinction between intellectual work and physical labor. The real questions of the distribution of labor have to do with the distribution of “labor time.” The saving of labor time is the measure of social progress.[64] In the end, justice will be determined by each giving what they can and taking what they need.
These claims are indeed revolutionary, but they are part of a normative framework that is an alternative to that found in bourgeois society. They cannot be found in history because history can possess no values. The materiality of such claims, that they maintain an objective standing outside of the contextual conditions that gave rise to them, is problematic. That is not to say that such claims are good or bad, simply that they represent an ideological position that has its origins in a specific set of historical conditions and do not represent ahistorical truths.
Marx has left the discussion of causality behind and substituted his political commitment to a class he sees as oppressed and in doing so has asserted a normative claim into the discussion. Capitalism does produce a complex and systematic extraction of value out of the working class. The processes of capitalist production do produce downward pressure on wages and a logic for minimal redistributive actions on the part of governmental institutions. That argument is causal and material. However, the case for working class rule is essentialist and normative.
In assessing the materialist character of Marx’s writing it is necessary to return to the model of materialism outlined in chapter 1. As was stated, no figure in the field of social and political thought is a perfect materialist. It is impossible to escape the metaphysical character of language, as language is used to represent, even when used to critique the process of representation. Still, it is important to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the various types of materialism in order to gauge their contribution to a materialist understanding of the social world.
Marx makes it clear he rejects the idea of transcendental truth claims. Our understanding of the world is carried out through the interaction of the human being with the totality of economic, social, and cultural forces to which they are exposed. Ideas, ideologies, and consciousness are shaped by that connection to the material conditions of experience.
Less clear is whether or not there is a full rejection of all universalist claims regarding human subjectivity, even when arrived at through a material analysis of history. Even when language less overt than the essentialism of the 1844 Manuscripts is employed, there are still shadows of the harder ontological claims regarding human essence, moral imperatives, and the teleology of history. Marx’s interpreters are still discussing whether the path of history will provide the liberation of the working class or whether the values of democracy and justice will need a rebirth in order to end human oppression. Such seeming contradictions are discussed by Steven Lukes in Marxism and Morality.[65] Even though Lukes favors a more humanistic reading of Marx, his work demonstrates the problem of trying to clarify Marx’s position.
More clear, in my view, is the position Marx adopts with regard to the significance of life as animated activity. Life is action. Life involves sensuous contact with the world and through that process ideas are formed. This explains why Marx rejected what he saw as the dead materialism of empiricism in favor of placing the materiality of life at the core of his analysis. Marx’s position leads authors such as Pheng Cheah to conclude that Marx’s project contains “an ontology of organismic vitalism.”[66] Such a claim is based on the significance of living being as an intermediary between the material reality and the formation of consciousness. While Cheah makes an interesting point, the term “vitalism” conjures up such metaphysical baggage that another term might be more useful.
For this reason, the work of the German Ideology is so important. Marx is trying to incorporate both the ongoing dynamics of lived experience with the formations of ideas and consciousness that can serve as both the motivators and directors of human activity. Consciousness mediates between direct sensation and action. These ideas, held in the minds of human beings, can transform the course of history. Historical conditions are, therefore, not the direct origins of social change, but the source and initiator for the formation of consciousness which then directs of the course of history.
When it comes to human nature, many, if not most, of Marx’s comments reflect a historically and contextually constructed view of human nature. This is less the case in the 1844 Manuscripts, but since there are legitimate questions about how Marx viewed the Manuscripts their worth can be discounted within the overall assessment. Particularly in the German Ideology, subjectivity is argued to be a complex construction out of the economic, social, and political forces found in the culture. It is the role those conditions play in the formation of identity, subjectivity, and ideology that is the key to understanding the revolutionary potential of Marx’s analysis. Consciousness, and its political corollary, ideology, is continually transformed though the sensual contact of the individual with the historical conditions found in the environment and the ideological constructions that constitute the social and political milieu of a given age. These experiences are incorporated into the individual’s consciousness where they acquire their meaning and motivational potential.
Therefore, the separation of base and superstructure in Marx’s analysis is problematic to this understanding. The separation of base and superstructure, with the claim that the productive base is the cause of all the practices found in the superstructure, is overly deterministic and would negate the independence and variety of social processes that could influence the evolution of ideological formations, institutional change, and the varying rates at which they may transform. If ideas may have material force, then ideas may influence the formation of other ideas, causing the base/superstructure model to break down. Moving away from this formula allows for analysis to include a broader set of potential influences characterizing the ideological formations of a particular historical epoch.
On the positive side, Marx provides a good primer for understanding materiality of political power. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”[67] Religion, philosophy, and the cultural norms of the social order are taught and socialized into the public in a manner consistent with the maintenance of the ruling class. This provides a legitimizing feedback loop for the exercise of raw power. This means that political prescriptions have their origins in the interests found in society rather than the articulation and implementation of universal truths.
Finally, there is the question of where this analysis is intended to go. Marx indicates that the pursuit of private utility is terminated with the overthrow of rule by the bourgeoisie. When the proletariat develops a new consciousness they will throw off their chains and participate in the democracy that solves the riddle of political history. Freedom is found within the community.
But how close does such a political gesture place him to the Hegelian description of the state? Liberal capitalism is asserted to be the last antagonistic form of political association. Communism transcends the struggle over private property. Is the Hegelian state, the organic union of all of societal activities, achieved in a communist society? Is such a union Marx’s ultimate objective? From what source does freedom emerge in a teleology of human history?
What does this say about the historical nature of truth, one of the conditions of materialism outlined in chapter 1? It means that even with his outline of the dialectics of change and the transformative nature of revolutionary upheaval, that rather than purely historicizing truth, Marx is seeking to provide an alternative to bourgeois truth. He has not fully relativized truth construction, which means not fully materialized its processes. The same can be said of his normative position. He has not relativized ethics but has instead provided an alternative ethics to the liberal model founded on private property and private accumulation.
In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida discusses the debt that is owed to Marx. Marx sets the stage for the further development of materialist philosophy as he provides a critical analysis of the metaphysics and essentialist ontologies that have dominated Western social science. Derrida’s own methodological approach, deconstruction, would not be possible in a pre-Marxian environment of social inquiry. It is only in the aftermath of Marx’s critical materialism that the questions surrounding metaphysical methods, the imposition of logocentrism, the ideological character of consciousness, and hegemony of language could be addressed.[68]
Marx represents a major step in the development of materialist social science, but he is a beginning and not an end. As Derrida puts it in a work entitled Positions, “Now, we cannot consider Marx’s, Engels’s, or Lenin’s texts as completely finished elaborations that are simply to be ‘applied’ to the current situations. In saying this, I am not advocating anything contrary to ‘Marxism.’ I am convinced of it.”[69]
But that is not to suggest total agreement. Marx is too close to the Hegelian system for that. Derrida is not a dialectician. Nevertheless, the spirit of critical inquiry owes a debt to the Marxian system.
Another admiring critic of Marx’s analysis was Max Weber. Weber called Marx’s work “brilliant” and insightful. Still, he was critical of elements in the Marxian project. Weber was developing his own model of materialist analysis, one that was focused on the empirically verifiable events of history, but within a neo-Kantian framework of causality. Weber’s analysis subsumed the entire Marxian system under his methodology. Whether it constitutes a step forward or backward is open to interpretation. However, its power and influence in the twentieth century cannot be denied. It is to that system that we will now turn.
Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker, (New York: Norton, 1978), 681.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 131.
Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Mind, 133.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 17.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 16.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 78
Ludwig Feuerbach, “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future,” in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1972), 178.
Feuerbach, 182.
Feuerbach, 177.
Feuerbach, 179.
Feuerbach, 200.
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach.” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 143.
Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 144.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 86.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 71.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 71.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 71.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 74.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 74.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 76.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 78.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 101.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 85, 89.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 75, 76.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 71.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 103.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 93.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 94.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 70.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 95.
Marx, “1844 Manuscripts,” 95.
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 17.
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 17.
Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 154
Karl Marx, “The Holy Family,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985), 137.
Marx, “Holy Family,” 136.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 163.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 155.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 149, 154.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 154.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 154-155.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 156.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 150.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 154.
Marx, “German Ideology,” 165.
Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy or Right,” 60.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, edited by Maurice Dobb (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 20-21.
Marx, Critique of Political Economy, 21.
Marx, “Capital,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 336.
Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 209
Marx, “Capital,” 354.
Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital,” 206.
Marx, “Capital,” 358.
Marx, “Capital,” 357.
Marx, “Capital,” 403.
Marx, “Capital,” 400.
Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital,” 214.
Marx, “Capital,” 430.
Marx, “Capital,” 437.
Karl Marx, Capital, (New York: Dutton Publishing, 1974), 691.
That is not to suggest that social justice is not a worthy value. It is only to suggest that social justice is a “value” and therefore lends itself less to the material analysis of history.
Marx, “Capital,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 414.
Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 490.
For a discussion of the role played by “time” in Marx’s analysis see the later chapters of the Grundrisse.
Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Cheah, Pheng. “Non-Dialectical Materialism,” in New Materialisms, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 71.
Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” 489.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 92.
Jacques Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63.