Reading Marx and Engels: May 2013

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Ready for the revolutionary wave

Todd Chretien

Marx and Engels saw 1846 and 1847 as a time of preparation for the struggles ahead.

http://socialistworker.org/print/2013/05/29/ready-for-the-revolutionary-wave

May 29, 2013

MARX AND Engels could feel revolution in the air in 1846 and 1847, and they had no intention of being caught flat-footed. The two launched a Communist Correspondence Committee, availing themselves of the cutting-edge technology of their day--overnight mail delivery--to dash off hundreds of letters in to win over fellow activists and excoriate foes. They also joined an international political organization called the Communist League to give their theories life.

As Engels explains in "On the History of the Communist League" [2]:

Now, we were by no means of the opinion that the new scientific results should be confided in large tomes exclusively to the "learned" world. Quite the contrary...As soon as we found we had become clear in our own minds, we set to work. (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Volume 26. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975, pp. 318-19)

This "work" consisted in winning a hearing for their views among a radical substratum of revolutionaries scattered across several countries. Many boasted a decade or more of political organizing, up to and including organizing strikes and unions, failed insurrections and underground societies. As Marx and Engels were newcomers to the scene, their influence was by no means a given. Engels remembers back to London in 1843:

They were the first revolutionary proletarians whom I had seen, and however far apart our views were at that time in details--for I still bore, as against their narrow-minded egalitarian communism, a goodly dose of just as narrow-minded philosophical arrogance--I shall never forget the deep impression that these three real men made upon me, who was still to become a man at that time. (CW, Vol. 26, p. 314)

Their plan was straightforward. As we have seen, Marx and Engels believed that capitalism was rapidly creating an urban proletariat who would become conscious of its own interests against those of their bosses. Revolutionaries ought not short-circuit this process by fomenting secretive conspiracies; rather, they must participate in the practical struggles of working-class people.

To that end, they set about winning over adherents in various organizations and announced a plan at a mass meeting in London for a "congress of nations," which would bring together working-class delegates from across Europe in order to chart a course toward revolution. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 619)

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Revolution in the Air

At the time, they left little doubt as to their understanding of the nature of this coming conflagration.

First, revolution led by the bourgeoisie would sweep away all the aristocratic remnants, as in 1789 in France. During this phase, they argued, that the working class should ally itself with all of those in society, regardless of class, who favored genuine democracy. However, capitalism was developing with such force that almost immediately, this first phase of the revolution would be replaced by a working-class uprising. Engels sums up their analysis in an essay called "The Events of 1847," [3] writing:

We are no friends of the bourgeoisie. That is common knowledge. But this time we do not begrudge the bourgeoisie their triumph...They are so shortsighted as to fancy that through their triumph the world will assume its final configuration. Yet nothing is more clear than that they are everywhere preparing the way for us, for the democrats and Communists; then that they will at most win a few years of troubled enjoyment, only to be then immediately overthrown. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 528)

Previously, I have referred to Marx and Engels' tendency to mistake the generalities of their dialectical categories for the concrete balance of forces, so I will only note here that Engels is persisting in this error. After all, since he wrote those words, the balance between enjoyment and suffering has fallen decidedly in the bourgeoisie's favor. But at least this point of view focused their energy on the need to prepare practically for the upheavals to come, whatever their specific nature.

As I discussed in my last column [4], Marx wrote a book challenging the French anarchist Joseph Pierre Proudhon's ideas, The Poverty of Philosophy, and Engels himself went to Paris to participate in the practical movement. The other two groups to which Marx and Engels turned their attention were the English Chartists and an underground organization of German revolutionaries named the League of the Just.

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Free Trade and the English Working Class

The Chartists were a truly mass phenomenon in the British working class. Their name derived from the charter of six reforms that they demanded from parliament, centering around universal male suffrage. In 1842, the movement gathered some 3.5 million signatures (all without Facebook!), but it was coldly rebuffed by the ruling-class parties, which permitted only 15 percent of adult men to vote in parliamentary elections.

By 1846, Engels had established a close relationship with Julian Harney, the radical editor of the Chartist newspaper The North Star, for which Engels wrote regularly. Marx and Engels were incredibly enthusiastic about the Chartists, believing that if the they won their demands, it would open the door to revolution in England and communist ideas would proliferate.

One of the key ideological questions confronting the Chartists was the question of free trade. In the wake of NAFTA, global justice protests against the World Trade Organization, the Great Recession and a growing movement to unionize Wal-Mart, it might seem odd to us today that free trade advocates could win a hearing among the poor in Britain in the 1840s. However, at the time, free traders posed as friends of the workers, promising lower food prices and more jobs.

In his pamphlet On the Question of Free Trade [5], Marx writes, "Everyone knows that in England the struggle between Liberals and Democrats takes the name of the struggle between Free Traders and Chartists." (CW, Vol. 6, p. 450)

Here, Liberals and Free Traders are the bourgeoisie, while Democrats and Chartists are the proletariat. Marx wants to purge any remaining political influence the bosses have over the workers. To do so, he demonstrates why the economic arguments of the free traders, who promise greater employment, can only mean greater exploitation suffered by the working class. Marx explains that free trade did increase England's national wealth, but [6]:

[t]he reward of labor is less for all, and the burden of labor is increased for some at least. In 1829 there were, in Manchester, 1,088 cotton spinners employed and 36 factories. In 1841 there were but 448, and they tended 55,353 more spindles than the 1,088 spinners did in 1829. If manual labor had increased in the same proportion as productive force, the number of spinners ought to have risen to 1848; improved machinery had therefore, deprived 1,400 workers of employment. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 460)

This argument remains as valid today as it was back in 1847. Not only does it expose the supposed benefits of free trade for the working class, but it also points out that, in our context, most jobs are not "shipped overseas," but lost to technological development and increases in productivity.

For instance, 80 years ago, there were more than 700,000 coal miners in the United States. Today, there are around 80,000, and they produce twice as much coal. Additionally, global markets and transportation systems today are developed to such an extent that capital can seek out cheaper labor costs, creating a race to the bottom for wages. The horrifying tragedy in Bangladesh is only the latest example of the "virtues" of free trade.

Marx then comes to a seemingly bizarre conclusion:

Generally speaking, the Protective system in these days is conservative, while the Free Trade system works destructively. It breaks up old nationalities and carries antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the uttermost point. In a word, the Free Trade system hastens the Social Revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I'm in favor Free Trade. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 465)

Insofar as protectionism is often no better than free trade from the point of view of workers, Marx is here trying to point out that neither of these policies can permanently solve the problem of exploitation. That is a valid enough point. Yet I think it also suffers form a certain one-sidedness which I will return to below.

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Love and Capital

Turning to their German audience, Marx and Engels took aim at a trend called "True Socialism." Over the course of 1846-47, both wrote long articles carefully analyzing German literature promoting these ideas--this was a popular way of getting political ideas past the censors.

Honestly, it's difficult to read today, but if you must, try Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality [7]. I will concentrate on one short piece called the "Circular Against Kriege," [8] in which Marx and Engels and their closest allies denounce a series of articles written by a German emigré living in the United States by the name of Hermann Kriege.

Marx and Engels ridiculed Kriege as "an apostle of love" because he asserted a universal humanism--reaching back to Feuerbach's philosophy--especially emphasizing the role that femininity would supposedly play in softening social contradictions. Kriege writes that, "We have no wish to lay hands on the private property of any man; what the usurer now has, let him keep; we merely wish to forestall the further pillaging." (CW, Vol. 6, 39) Marx and Engels and the other signatories of the Communist Correspondence Committee attacked this notion as replacing the necessity of class struggle with a sort of religious appeal to the rich to reform themselves--the "confusion of communism with communion." (CW, Vol. 6, p. 45)

Kriege's economic plan for communism supported the American National Reformers, a movement which principally demanded the provision of 160 acres of Western lands to any workingman, but also called for the abolition of slavery and the standing army, and a 10-hour working day. Marx criticized the agricultural aspects of this plan as merely postponing the inevitable development of class conflict in the United States, arguing that even if all the land were to be shared out on the basis of small private farms, population growth would soon make land scarce, and competition would revive.

But what really got Marx's goat was Kriege's conception of enlightened leaders and passive followers. Kriege writes, "[O]ur aim will be to unitemankind by love, our aim will be to teach men to work communally and enjoy communally until the long-promised kingdom of joy eventually comes about." (CW, Vol. 6, p. 47) If you remember Marx's third thesis on Feuerbach [9], where he answers the question of "who will educate the educator" by asserting the need for revolutionary practice, you will see why Marx objects so strongly to Kriege's formulations here.

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Just Plain Wrong

These essays on True Socialism demonstrate the power of the insights Marx and Engels achieved with their method of "materialist history" and their political strategy of proletarian revolution. But they also created some problems.

As we have seen above in the pamphlet On the Question of Free Trade, Marx insists that "Free Trade hastens the Social Revolution." This is far too categorical a statement. First, it leads him to see the "destructive" work of capitalism penetrating into new areas--for example, India, and the corresponding ruin of its social relations--as almost entirely positive, as it lays the basis for future workers struggles. Second, he seems almost entirely ignorant of how this "destruction" takes place in terms of the annihilation of indigenous peoples. Third, he ignores the potential democratic struggles for national self-determination that may arise in resistance to capitalism's offensive. Finally, he cannot yet imagine how capitalism can proceed "destructively" without simultaneously producing massive centers of proletarian resistance. In fact, it did so ingeniously for long periods, leaving only destruction.

Marx is so taken with one aspect of capitalism that he sees developing before his eyes--that is, the rapid creation of urban centers of proletarian resistance as a product of the development of capitalist industry in Northern Europe--that he expects it to spread evenly to all parts of the world. He has no idea of how contradictory that process will be. Hence, he is "[i]n this revolutionary sense alone...in favor Free Trade."

Engels underlines this error, writing approvingly of the French army's defeat of anti-colonial forces in Algeria [10]:

Though the manner in which brutal soldiers have carried on the war is highly blamable, the conquest of Algeria is an important unfortunate fact of the progress of civilization...and if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that the same Bedouins were a nation of robbers." (CW, Vol. 6, p. 471)

And in "The Events of 1847," he proclaims:

In America, we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will in the future be placed under the tutelage of the United States. The evolution of the whole of America will profit by the fact that the United States, by the possession of California, obtains command of the Pacific. CW, Vol. 6, p. 527)

Since some people like to claim that Engels sometimes said foolish things, but Marx never did, it's worth pointing out that Marx signed off on a very similar claim in the "Circular Against Kriege," which champions the American Reform Association's claim to Western lands in the United States with no thought at all to the Native Americans then living on the vast majority of that territory. While he does not celebrate capital's victory, as Engels does in the case of Algeria and Mexico, Marx is either entirely ignorant of the centuries-long struggle against the white settlers or he does not consider it worthy of consideration.

At the same time, Marx and Engels were sympathetic to certain rebellions for national self-determination. In 1846, an uprising took place in Kraków, Poland against the domination of Tsarist Russia [11]. Both Marx and Engels hailed this movement because, in Marx's words, it identified the "national cause with the democratic cause and the emancipation of the oppressed class."

In essence, Marx believed that, like in Ireland at the time, the rebellion, if successful, would sweep away foreign domination, so exposing the domination of the local ruling classes and opening up the possibility of a direct struggle between domestic oppressors and oppressed. (CW, Vol 6, p. 549) That neither he nor Engels could see the same potential in Algeria or Mexico or among Native Americans was, I think we have to say, based on ignorance of the forces involved and a teleological, even non-dialectical, enthusiasm for the supposedly creatively destructive work of capitalism.

Some people will naturally see these erroneous positions as evidence that Marx and Marxism are Eurocentric or even racist.

This is dead wrong, in my opinion. While Marx and Engels are way off base on these specific questions, it is not out of any allegiance to racial or cultural notions of superiority. Rather, they are badly overgeneralizing from what they see in front of them in northern Europe--and they do not yet know much, as 20-somethings, about the rest of the world. After all, Marx also supported free trade in Germany, even though it could only, in the short term, do nothing but entrench capitalist domination.

Marx and Engels were never indifferent to the suffering capitalism causes--far from it. They actively condemned it. Yet they can only imagine one way out of capitalism, and that is for everyone to be forced to first go all the way through it, and all the horrors it entails, and then overthrow it based on the social relations that modern industry will inevitably produce. They would soon realize that this model did not fit easily in all circumstances.

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Get Ready, Get Set...

Despite these very real problems in their writing, Marx and Engels soon took their radically new way of understand the world "Out of the tomes and into the streets!" to mash up Engels and an old ACT-UP chant.

The two exiles were not as well known in the political movements around Europe as either their friends or foes, but their radical journalism, their books on philosophy and economics, and their innumerable letters and personal discussions helped sharpen up the conception of the coming revolution for a growing layer of activists. And if their influence remained modest in London and Paris, they did win over a key layer of German working-class leaders in a group called the League of the Just. As Engels recounts:

We entertained no doubt that an organization within the German working class was necessary. If only for propaganda purposes...there already existed exactly such an organization in the shape of the League. What we previously objected to in this League was now relinquished as erroneous by the representatives of the League themselves; we were invited to cooperate in the work of reorganization. How could we say no? (CW, Vol. 26, p. 321)

It's hard to say exactly how many members made up the underground League and its affiliated German Workers Educational Societies, which operated publicly in Paris, London and Brussels. Probably there were no more than a couple hundred in the League and perhaps a few thousand in the affiliated Societies. Nonetheless, Marx and Engels' leadership in the League and their newly won control over a German-language newspaper gave them the biggest bully pulpit they enjoyed since Marx's Rheinische Zeitung newspaper was shut down by the German authorities in the fall of 1843.

The reorganization that Engels refers to had to do with the democratization of the League's statutes over the course of 1847, so that local organizations could elect and recall its central authority as well as the transformation of its political goals. For instance, before Marx and Engels joined the League, its opening statement proclaimed [12]:

The League aims at the emancipation of humanity by spreading the theory of the community of property and its speediest possible practical introduction. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 586)

Under Marx and Engels' influence, this was reworked to read [13]:

The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 633)

Marx and Engels also demanded a name change as a precondition of their membership. And it was for this newly minted Communist League that Marx and Engels were commissioned to draft a statement of principles to popularize the organization's ideas and recruit new members. After suffering through several false starts, that essay became The Communist Manifesto [14]. It will be the subject of my next column.

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The Manifesto itself is just 38 pages long. I suggest you tackle it all at once. Phil Gasper has edited an indispensable edition, with a treasure trove of supplemental writings--it's available from Haymarket Books [15]. You might want to take a look at a previous column I wrote about the Manifesto's continuing relevance in the 21st century [16].

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Columnist: Todd Chretien

Todd Chretien is a long-time Bay Area activist. He contributes frequently to the International Socialist Review [17] and to Socialist Workeron the topics of U.S. and Latin American politics and the ideas of the Marxist tradition.

Friday, May 10, 2013

The poverty of Proudhon's anarchism

Todd Chretien

The title of the book may have been undiplomatic, but Marx was able to offer a clear contrast of his political strategy with that of Joseph Pierre Proudhon.

http://socialistworker.org/2013/05/09/the-poverty-of-proudhon

May 9, 2013

"So when Proudhon wrote his book The Philosophy of Poverty. I responded with The Poverty of Philosophy. I thought that was clever. Jenny thought it was insulting. Maybe she was right."
-- Marx in Soho, by Howard Zinn [2]

AFTER THE German Ideology, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels turned their backs on philosophers and threw themselves into political organizing in the spring of 1846.

Marx had been kicked out of Paris the previous year, settling in Brussels with his family, soon to be joined by Engels. They hatched plans to start a Communist Correspondence Committee, aimed at establishing ties between radicals among English Chartists, German exiles and Parisian workers. Their timing was superb, as Europe experienced a rising tide of social conflict beginning in 1846.

Late in 1845, Engels reported on a 1,000-strong workers' meeting billed as "The Festival of Nations" in London. Representing the left wing of the Chartist working-class reform movement, George Julian Harney proclaims "that the principles of equality will have a glorious resurrection, I cannot doubt; indeed, the resurrection they have already had, [is] not merely in the shape of Republicanism, but Communism..." (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Volume 6. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 11)

Engels interpreted these speeches as signs that working-class demands for economic reforms and electoral democracy (the poor were not allowed to vote in any European country) were developing quickly into communist consciousness. As he writes [3]:

No special arrangement had been made to attract a particular kind of audience; there was nothing to indicate that anything would be expressed other than what the London Chartists understood by democracy. We can therefore certainly assume that the majority of the meeting represented the mass of London Chartist proletarians fairly well. And this meeting accepted communist principles, the word communism itself, with unanimous enthusiasm... Am I right when I say that democracy nowadays is communism? (CW, Vol. 6, p. 14)

Engels certainly was justified in pointing to the potential for international solidarity on display at this meeting. However, his assertion that "no special arrangements" had been made is more than a little disingenuous as both he and Marx had been intimately involved with its planning. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable fact that 1,000 workers cheered avowedly revolutionary and communist speeches in the heart of global capital.

How are we to assess Engels' claim that "democracy nowadays is communism?" On the one hand, I think this can safely be understood as the over-exuberance of a 25-year-old revolutionary. Anyone who has ever overestimated the number of people they expected to turn out to a protest or march can relate.

On the other hand, Marx and Engels, to put it bluntly, telescoped the process by which the complexities of nationalism, the division between skilled and unskilled, and other social realities would have to be taken up and challenged. The two tended to draw a straight line between almost any sort of working-class protest and communism. If this optimism was naïve and typical of freshly minted revolutionaries, Marx and Engels soon confronted a battleground littered with older and more popular radical ideas. They faced the question of winning a hearing.

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Engels Organizing in Paris

Back in 1844, Marx and Engels had hoped to build an alliance with popular French anarchist Joseph Pierre Proudhon and had defended some of his economic ideas in their book The Holy Family.

However, it soon became clear that sharp differences existed. In the summer of 1846, Engels went in person to Paris to win German-speaking immigrants away from Proudhon's version of anarchism as he had spelled out in his best-known work, The Philosophy of Poverty. For his part, Marx believed Proudhon's ideas were such an obstacle to the communist cause that he responded with a short book, in French, titled The Poverty of Philosophy.

If Engels made progress in winning over a handful of German activists to his basic views of class struggle and the need for the abolition of private property and a "democratic revolution by force," he did so in his own words only by "dint of a little patience and some terrorism" in competition with Proudhon's advocates. In truth, Marx and Engels' influence among the radical French workers was nearly nonexistent. (CW, Vol. 38, pp. 80-82)

Why was Proudhon so popular?

First, the ugly. Proudhon openly supported patriarchal family forms and held stridently anti-Semitic views, writing, for example [4], "The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. By steel or by fire or by expulsion the Jew must disappear."

These certainly are despicable views, but they are not what made Proudhon popular, nor are they the views he most openly popularized. Instead, he became known as a critic of private property and an advocate of workers cooperatives and credit unions. He championed the ideal of independent journeymen (of whom there were still many in France), working for themselves and receiving the full value of their products, freed from parasitic middlemen.

Proudhon hoped these reforms and institutions could grow up within capitalism and eventually replace it by a sort of decentralized reform process. If you have come across the concept of "changing the world without taking power," popularized by the authors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, aspects of Proudhon's thinking will sound familiar to you.

Marx, of course, disagreed sharply with these notions and proceeded to dismantle them on three fronts: economic analysis, theoretical methodology and political practice. If the book was not a large commercial success, it did help Engels win some sympathy among immigrant German workers in Paris and, crucially, a layer of French worker activists and intellectuals grouped around La Reforme newspaper.

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Proudhon's Economics

We saw in The German Ideology [5] how Marx was at great pains to describe the history of economic development in the increasingly complex division of labor that eventually gave rise to industrial capitalism. Marx begins his critique by arguing that Proudhon gives no sense of how labor and technology change over time, castigating him for the faulty view that [6]:

each day's labor is worth as much as another day's labor; that is to say, if the quantities are equal, one man's labor is worth as much as another man's labor: there is no qualitative difference. With the same quantity of labor, one man's product can be given in exchange for another man's product. All men are wage workers getting equal pay for equal labor time. Perfect equality rules exchanges. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 124)

On the face of it, Proudhon's analysis seems to point toward a sort of natural equality existing between all workers. There is a way in which this may be a valid moral statement, but Marx points out that it is simply not true under capitalist production in an economic sense. Instead, Marx points out: [7]

It is important to emphasize the point that what determines value is not the time taken to produce a thing, but the minimum time it could possibly be produced in, and this minimum is ascertained by competition. Suppose for a moment that there is no more competition and consequently no longer any means to ascertain the minimum of labor necessary for the production of a commodity; what will happen? It will suffice to spend six hours work on the production of an object, in order to have the right, according to M. Proudhon, to demand in exchange six times as much as he who has taken only one hour to produce the same object. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 136)

In other words, if I take a whole six-hour day to make one shirt, sewing it by hand, while you, using a sewing machine, can make six very similar shirts in that same time, when we go to market, no one in their right mind would pay me six times as much for my shirt as they will pay you for yours. That is, the conditions of production and how they change by time and place are governed by competition and technology, making labor unequal at an individual level.

Since Proudhon does not see this, he believes that an egalitarian society can be built upon the premise of equal exchanges between independent producers: whatever I make in six hours I can exchange with you for whatever you make in six hours. This would lead to intractable problems if it were ever tried in practice (in fact, it would only be a new form of inequality).

Instead, Marx proposes to look at the question from a social, instead of individual, point of view [8]:

In large-scale industry, Peter is not free to fix for himself the time of his labor, for Peter's labor is nothing without the cooperation of all the Peters and all the Pauls who make up the workshop...What is today the result of capital and the competition of workers among themselves will be tomorrow, if you sever the relation between labor and capital [that is, if you abolish bourgeois class rule], an actual agreement based upon the relation between the sum of productive forces and the sum of existing needs. (CW, Vol. 6, p. 143, my emphasis)

Here, Marx is arguing that Proudhon's focus on equal exchange between independent producers is a utopia, and that a socialist economy could only operate on the basis of the sum total of production--and, by implication, a democratic discussion, an agreement, among all workers, no matter their particular insertion into the division of labor, as to how to direct the total social product. This is the only way that workers in vastly different jobs (teachers, custodians, factory workers, truckers, nurses, etc.) could begin to democratically plan an economy.

It is worth pointing out that Marx is still trying to figure out for himself exactly how capitalism extracts surplus value and, consequently, profits from the labor process. At this point, he does not have anything like the fully developed concepts he will use in his later economic writings and is still primarily concerned with pointing out the shortcomings of other theorists.

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Repeating Hegel's Mistakes

Marx argues that Proudhon adopted some of the worst habits in the Hegelian tradition. Insofar as this is a critique of the specifics of Proudhon's analysis, I don't think this is exactly an enduring point. However, as Marx here lays out one of his clearest critiques of Hegel's method, it's worth a brief look.

Marx explains that the basic logical pattern of Hegel's method can be described as a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis--or affirmation, negation and negation of the negation. The strength of this method is to emphasize transformation and conflict in place of static and unchanging structures. Yet in order to set up these transformations, Hegel creates abstract categories which describe a thing or a society's essence, divorced from its concrete existence--a very old philosophical trick going all the way back to Plato. As Marx writes [9]:

Just as by dint of abstraction, we have transformed everything into a logical category, so one has only to make an abstraction of every characteristic distinctive of different movements to attain movement in its abstract condition--purely formal movement, the purely logical formula of a movement. If one finds in logical categories the substance of all things, one imagines one has found in the logical formula of movement the absolute method, which not only explains all things, but also implies the movement of things. It is of this absolute method that Hegel speaks in these terms: "method is the absolute, unique, supreme, infinite force, which no object can resist; it is the tendency of reason to find itself again, to recognize itself in every object." (CW, Vol. 6, pp. 163-164, my italics)

You will remember Absolute Spirit from previous columns about Hegel [10]. Here, Marx substitutes "reason" for the spirit force that makes everything go. Marx says that this is what Proudhon does with his economic analysis (Proudhon replaces Absolute Spirit with a tendency toward equality), and this danger is latent in any attempt to employ a dialectal method which does not pay sufficient attention to concrete reality.

That is, Hegel says that his own logic--how he thinks about things and the abstract categories he uses to help him think--is itself an "infinite force," which moves history; "no object can resist" it. Marx describes the implications for Proudhon following Hegel in this error [11], writing:

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by man as linen, flax, etc.

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand mill gives you society with the feudal Lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations but these ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. (CW, Vol. 6, pp. 165-166)

In other words, if Hegel reduces history to a set of abstract categories moved along by Spirit, Proudhon does the same with economic categories and then animates them with his notion of the tendency toward equality. Neither Hegel nor Proudhon pay close enough attention to the nitty-gritty content of those categories. Rather than using those categories to help organize concrete evidence and material in order to analyze it, they mistake the categories for the concrete reality.

Worse, according to Marx, rather than recognizing the transitory nature of economic categories and the ideas that grow up within them, Proudhon wants tofreeze these developments at a certain stage--skilled production in small-scale workshops--rather than grasping the potential liberatory aspects of large-scale industrial cooperation and proletarian revolution.

Remember from The German Ideology Marx's emphasis on the necessity of having first achieved a sufficient level of productivity and technology beforesocialism is possible. Proudhon's desire to return to, or stop at, the stage of small-scale production is still very common today. I am all for shopping at your local farmers' market, but Marx would argue that this doesn't really address the problem of global capitalism.

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Proudhon Against Strikes

All of this sets up Marx's central attack on Proudhon. Surprisingly for an anarchist, Proudhon believed that workers' strikes were futile and even counterproductive, writing that [12] "it is impossible, I declare, for strikes followed by an increase in wages not to culminate in a general rise in prices: this is as certain as two and two make four."

This position flows from his belief that all products ought to exchange equally because they are created by labor that supposedly imparts equal value to them. Thus, one group of workers attaining a raise in their pay could only come at the expense of another group of workers by means of inflation.

Marx will have none of this. "We deny all these assertions, except that two and two make four." If Proudhon primarily saw exchange as taking place between independent small producers (not large corporations) with the main enemy being "middlemen," Marx emphasizes the divide between capitalists and workers: "The rise and fall of profits and wages express merely the proportion in which capitalists and workers share in the product of a day's work, without influencing in most instances the price of the product." (CW Vol 6, pp. 206-207)

Marx then reviews the history of strikes and union organization in England, noting that mainstream economists oppose union organization because it hinders profits. Surprisingly, this opinion was shared by many utopian socialists who, says Marx, "want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society they have prepared for them with so much foresight."

By contrast, Marx argues that not only are strikes and union organization a positive development because in the struggle for "the maintenance of wages, this common interest which [workers] have against their boss unites them in a common thought of resistance," and "in this struggle--a veritable civil war--all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character." (CW, Vol. 6, pp. 210-211)

Jenny Marx may have been right that the title of Marx's book was insulting, but it at least offers a clear counter-position of Marx's political strategy versus that of Proudhon.

If Proudhon centered his hopes for social transformation on a relatively homogenous layer of independent producers who could peacefully create cooperatives and credit unions as an alternative to capitalism, Marx looked to struggles of the great mass of workers against their bosses.

There could be no individual or partial solution to exploitation under capitalism. The working class itself must develop revolutionary consciousness and overturn the totality of capitalist social relations, thereby appropriating the means of production collectively as a class, or capitalism will make a mockery of any partial attempts to reform it.

For the moment, The Poverty of Philosophy faced a generally skeptical audience and won only a small handful of followers for Marx and Engels. But it was a start.

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Next time, I will examine Marx and Engels' attitude to a very popular version of radicalism in Germany called True Socialism in a short essay of about 15 pages called "The Circular Against Kriege." [13]

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Columnist: Todd Chretien

Todd Chretien is a long-time Bay Area activist. He contributes frequently to the International Socialist Review [14] and to Socialist Worker on the topics of U.S. and Latin American politics and the ideas of the Marxist tradition.

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Series: Reading Marx [15]

In this series, Todd Chretien provides an accompaniment to the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

All articles in this series [16]

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Muck, filth, phantoms and revolution

In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels set forth nothing less than the basis of their theory of working-class revolution.

Todd Chretien

http://socialistworker.org/2013/05/01/muck-phantoms-and-revolution

May 1, 2013

MARX AND Engels wrote The German Ideology [2] in 1845 and 1846, but it was only published in full in German in 1932, and wasn't translated into English until 1961.

Yet Marx and Engels both considered it a critical work. As Marx later wrote, "We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose–self clarification."

In this article, I will only consider the first 70 or so pages, as it provides a positive exposition of Marx and Engels' views at the time on history, capitalism and their theory of working-class revolution. The rest of the book is an obsessively long polemic against Max Stirner (an ultra-individualist Young Hegelian) and German True Socialists (which will be taken up in later columns).

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Life Determines Consciousness

Marx and Engels begin with a general statement [3] about what they believe separates humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom:

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life. (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Volume 5. Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 31)

Today, we are so radically cut free from almost any relationship with nature or other animals, and that distinction is so obviously based on all the stuff we produce, this seems like common sense. What do humans do above all else? We produce and/or we consume. You can lament that we mostly produce junk, or you can celebrate the wonders of consumer society, but either way, Marx and Engel's point really can't be dismissed.

Next, Marx and Engels condense thousands of years of history into three pages with a breakneck review of what they call Tribal, Ancient and Feudal forms of property. Each of these stages is distinguished by specific property relations, which are, in turn, a reflection of the increasingly complex division of labor within each society. Both of these factors are related to the development of what they call "productive forces."

They move from a general statement about people "producing their means of subsistence" to an approximation of the variety of human societies. This historical rough draft points in the direction of studying change, conflict and transformation--in place of timeless ideas on the one hand, and simple empirical studies of economics and history on the other. Marx and Engels call this "materialist history" and summarize this insight as follows [4]:

[W]e do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive...[but] from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process, we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of his life-process. The phantoms formed in the brains of men...have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. (CW, Vol. 5., pp. 36-37)

"Ah-hah!," you say. "I knew it. Marx and Engels are economic determinists. They deny the power of human thought. See, right here in black and white: 'life determines consciousness.'"

Okay, you got them. But not really.

Perhaps they did overstate the case by saying ideas "have no history, no development." But if you put this in the context of everything we've read up to this point, it ought to be clear enough that Marx and Engels are saying our ability to think and speak is a product of our dependence on other people for the production of food, shelter, clothing and reproduction.

Even President Obama understood this when he quite correctly said, "You didn't build that," in reference to the myth of "self-made" successful small businesses. You will remember that the Republicans made him pay for this sleight against the ideology of American entrepreneurship, and he quickly retreated. Nonetheless, life, even in America, is social. If you want to call that "determinist," then there is no helping you.

Having stressed this explanation, I will only add that, yes, I think Marx and Engels do tend to expect that certain ideas ought to arise, more or less fluidly, from certain social conditions. As Marx wrote a few years earlier in The Holy Family [5]:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question ofwhat the proletariat is, and what, in according with its being, it will historically be compelled to do.

Even if now, after the Theses on Feuerbach [6], where Marx responded to the dilemma of "Who will educate the educator?" by positing the process of revolutionary practice or praxis, he still has a tendency to expect that the ideas and practice of the working class will necessarily aim to abolish capitalism. Is this true? Even if it is true, are there potential roadblocks? I will return to these questions below.

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Borrowing from Hegel

But first, how accurate is their rough sketch of human history up to this point? Keep in mind that Darwin's Origins of Species was not published until 1859, and anthropology did not yet exist as a discipline. Given these limits, how could Marx develop such a sweeping narrative of human development?

Think back to The Holy Family and Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. There, Marx critiqued Hegel's dialectical concept of historical change driven by great thought systems--starting out from Consciousness, only to be overcome by Self-Consciousness and then Reason, Spirit and Religion in turn, before finally arriving at Absolute Knowledge (as Hegel wrote in The Phenomenology of Spirit).

However, Marx did take over part of Hegel's schema, lock, stock and barrel, and began to fill it in with new, shall we say, material as best he could from the real historical and economic knowledge he had at his disposal. Hegel's Modes of Thought are replaced by Modes of Production: Tribal, Ancient, Feudal, Capitalist, Communist. These distinctive arrangements of the productive, cultural, sexual and technological moments give rise to new ways of thinking.

It's a daring vision, and we shall see in future columns how well it stands up to the test of better, more accurate, empirical knowledge. Spoiler alert: It stands up pretty well indeed, though not without problems.

For instance, Marx and Engels argue that growing forces of production, new techniques and technologies, drive historical developments forward, yet they don't explain why this should be the case. Their first guess is that it has something to do with the "natural division of labor in the family," which they describe as a kind of "latent slavery" of the wife by the husband.

There are more than a couple problems with this notion. First, why should there be any inequality, never mind slavery, between men and women? And if, at some point in human development, inequality did arise, why did it? Doesn't calling it "natural" negate the point that Marx and Engels are making about such developments being rooted in history?

At any rate, it should be noted that, far from downplaying the role of women's oppression in the rise of exploitation, Marx and Engels here integrate an understanding of sexism as one of its original sources.

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The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism

Marx and Engels are on firmer ground tracing the rise of capitalism in Europe, although the historical sections are greatly compressed into a few pages, and they would revise some of this in later work. This process (which is hotly contested among Marxist scholars) received a tremendous shot in the arm with the discovery of the New World and the opening of trade routes to the East Indies. By 1800, the phase of machine manufacture, otherwise known as the Industrial Revolution, took off in England. At this point, as Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology [7]:

[U]niversal competition...forced all individuals to strain their energy to the utmost. It destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc. And, where it could not do this, made them into a palpable lie. It produced world history for first time, in so far as it made all civilized nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations. (CW, Vol. 5., p. 73)

Here, Marx and Engels want to stress the wrenching transformations wrought by capital. Next to the development of the world market, they argue,the Roman Empire was a lethargic and provincial form. "Universal competition" binds the entire planet together under one factory bell, wringing all specificity, all peculiarity out of individuals and whole countries alike.

So having made their general point that "life determines consciousness," then developing the approximate stages of human history, they now seek to examine in detail just how radically different all previous societies were from 19th century capitalism. If they paint a terrifying picture of colonialism, exploitation and dispossession (although they do not include New World African slavery), they also ask the question: What sorts of social formations and ideas will arise out of this whirlwind?

How accurate are Marx and Engels on the details here? As I mentioned, there is a long-running debate on the specific mechanisms on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I will leave those aside for now and simply point out that if, as noted above, they tended to collapse the complexities of the relationship between what individual proletarians think and what the proletariat is, here, Marx and Engels paint a one-sided economic description of the world that must be treated carefully. They rightly grasp capitalism's general trends (centralization, competition, world trade, colonialism, etc.), but keep in mind that the vast majority of the world's population still lived in rural zones, toiling on the land.

Marx and Engels saw what was coming more clearly than anyone, but that very clarity sometimes blinded them to the economic reality as it existed in the moment.

Moreover, what are we to make of their assertion that "all ideology, religion, morality" were destroyed by the market? This is just not true. They recognize the dangers of overstating their case themselves when they write in the very next line that, if those ideologies do survive, then they must be "made into a palpable lie." But aren't all ideologies lies to begin with? Isn't this the point of writing The German Ideology?

My opinion is that they never quite nail this down. If they are right to point out that economic transformation does squeeze the life out of certain ideas (notions of feudal chivalry and noblesse oblige and the like), then other ideologies take their place, mutating into the most bizarre species.

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Theory of Communist Revolution: Why and How

One of the chief evils of this new capitalist form of social organization is what Marx and Engels call "estrangement" or "the fixation of social activity." This may sound familiar, as Marx discussed this phenomenon under the name of "alienation" in the Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. Finely tuned by the rise of industrial capitalism, this division of labor has severe consequences for individuals, as Marx and Engels explain [8]:

For as soon as the division of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon them and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (CW Vol. 5, p. 47)

This is the first mention of communism in the book, and it's a sort of strange way to introduce it. However, by starting here, it is clear that Marx and Engels' advocacy of communism extends beyond a simple (if only it were simple!) egalitarian distribution of wealth. That is only a precondition for the real goal of communism, which is the freedom for individuals to escape the prison house of the division of labor.

Marx and Engels next move on from this "why" to the "how" of abolishing capitalism. This theory is scattered over three subsections in various chapters. For the sake of clarity, I will treat it as a whole here. Having identified, way back in 1843, the need for a revolutionary "universal class,"Marx and Engels now hone in and argue [9] that capitalism:

can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. In order to become an "unendurable" power, i.e., a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity "propertyless," and moreover in contradiction to an existing world of wealth and culture; both these premises presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development...is an absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it, privation, want is merely made general, and with wantthe struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored. (CW Vol. 5, pp. 48-49)

So not only must "the great mass of humanity" be forced to work for the capitalists in order to create a "universal class" with sufficient power to take them on, but that class must have its nose rubbed in it. It must be excluded from the "existing world of wealth culture" so that it can see thepotential for redistribution.

But just as importantly, this potential must be empirically real--that is, capitalism must not only enslave everyone, it must also employ sufficiently productive technology so that if the workers make a revolution and redistribute the wealth, there will be plenty to go around, eliminating povertyand laying the basis for an assault on the fixed division of labor. If these practical premises don't exist, then the revolution will fail (too few workers), or it will win and we will merely evenly distribute "privation, want" (too few means of production). Capitalism creates a "sweet spot" where revolution is both possible and viable.

Following this perspective, Marx and Engels add three curious sentences:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise. (CW Vol. 5, p. 49)

In one sense, these sentences are merely emphasizing their exacerbation with the Young Hegalians' endless philosophizing (as well as the True Socialists' utopian schemas). But there seems to be something more here. After all, didn't they just finish defining communism as a society which liberates us from the division of labor? Isn't that an ideal? Or do they mean that any action taken by workers--any "real movement"--is "communism?"

Marx did infer that when he wrote, in the context of the Silesian weavers' strike of 1844, that "however limited an industrial revolt may be, it contains within itself a universal soul." But this seems to be a serious overstatement of the consciousness which arises from most struggles under capitalism. So can we simply chalk this up to Marx and Engels' limited personal experience in actual working class struggles?

I think it is tempting to answer the question that way and simply say that they would soon gain more than their share of practical experience in the 1848 revolution. Yet there is a deeper point here that's worth considering.

There is the constant danger of making even the most revolutionary point of view into a fixed belief which no longer corresponds to "the present state of things." No matter how good an idea sounds, if you cannot connect the movement you aim to build to a "now existing premise"--that is, real social conditions--then you are divorcing ideas (even righteous ones) from the social forces (even if they are only potential) to realize them. This is a frustrating piece of advice from Marx and Engels, but one well worth remembering.

Having said this, it is clear that Marx and Engels certainly expect that workers will soon create this real movement to fight for communism. Why do they believe workers will do this? Marx and Engels give two sorts of answers. The first answer is a humanist one, emphasizing the moral rejection of injustice and inequality by workers whose "conditions of life" are "forced upon them." (CW Vol. 5, p. 79)

The second answer is a sociological and structural one [10]:

Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the development of a totality of capacities entailed by this. All earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted...Modern universal intercourse cannot be controlled by individuals, unless it is controlled by all...It can only be effected through union. (CW Vol. 5, pp. 87-88)

Thus, workers will recognize that there is no way out for them, and the logic of their position will make it clear that they cannot escape their conditions as individuals--with rare exceptions. Workers suffer a radically alienated position in the face of the "totality of productive forces," leading them to solve the problem by collective action, "effected through union." This is the essence of Marx and Engel's expectation for the growth of working-class consciousness into anti-capitalist consciousness.

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The Ruling Ideas

It goes without saying that the bosses don't sit idly by while this is taking place. As Marx and Engels point out [11]:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force...The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations. (CW Vol. 5, p. 59)

In an age dominated by corporate media, this seems almost silly to repeat. But it's worse than it might appear at first. If Fox News were the only problem, I'd bet on the proletariat against Bill O'Reilly any day. Unfortunately, capitalist ideology penetrates much more deeply because those ideas (individualism, self-help, family values, work hard to get ahead, job competition, etc.) really do express "the dominant material relations." For instance, if it were simply a "palpable lie" that there are a limited number of good-paying jobs that workers are forced to compete for, then one of the most tenacious factors in anti-immigrant racism would peel away.

Capitalists are smart. They don't generally blame job losses on obscure punk bands. Well, Russia's Vladimir Putin does, but no one in the U.S. would buy it. Instead, the bosses blame immigration from Mexico. This seems more plausible because there really is competition over jobs (although, generally speaking, not because of immigration), and this competition is a key feature of the "dominant material features" of capitalist society.

This is why liberal politicians and media outlets are committed to "comprehensive" immigration reform--i.e., the control and monitoring of immigrant labor. They accept the basic "dominant material relations" and adjust their ideas to fit within the limits set forth by capital.

How does this square with what Marx and Engels said before about the very structure of capitalism leading workers to see its oppressive structures? Here, they are making the opposite point--that is, the very structures of capitalism provide a framework for the acceptance of the ruling ideology.

So what happened to "life determines consciousness"? Remember the Theses on Feuerbach--even the educator must be educated. This can only take place in the context of revolutionary struggle--praxis, as Marx and Engels go on to explain [12]:

For the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and becomes fitted to found society anew. (CW, Vol. 5, pp. 52-53)

I think this is the most important passage in any of Marx and Engels' writings. It is the heart of their theory of communist revolution.

It's a complicated dance step to master, but the ABCs are easy enough to grasp. The capitalist ruling class, even in Marx's time and far more so today, is fantastically powerful on all fronts. Any notion of taking them by surprise, or a small group confronting them for power, is a fantasy. Only the "vast majority of humanity," the working class, has the potential social power to challenge them, not only because of our numbers, but because we are the source of all capitalist profits.

But we are subject to and divided by the "muck of ages." So the question is: How can an oppressed class which is so messed up possibly make a revolution. No doubt you have heard this objection before. Workers are too racist, too stupid, too nationalistic, too obsessed with consumer society to make a revolution. Well, here is Marx and Engels' answer. Yes, all those things are true, to a greater or lesser extent--which is precisely why only a revolution can rid workers of all (or at least enough) of that so they can see their potential power.

This grand vision inspired Marx and Engels for decades to come, and they never retreated from this position. On the last page of this section, they scribbled down the following fragment of thought: "The role of repression with regard to the state, law, morality, etc." Having disposed of the German ideologists at great length, Marx and Engels now sought answers to these questions, with regard to practical political organizing--including that heavily loaded "etc."

This will be the subject of my next columns. Marx would never again seek to publish critiques of German philosophers, and Engels would only return to consider Feuerbach at length some 40 years later. Instead, Marx wrote his next book in French in order to try to win a hearing in the most radical workers movement of the day.

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The Poverty of Philosophy [13] took aim at popular French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon's economic and political ideas. Marx spends most of the book berating Proudhon for misunderstanding Hegel, but I will concentrate on Chapter Two, Section 2 [14] and Section 5 [15] in order to show why he became so hostile to Proudhon's version of anarchism.

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Columnist: Todd Chretien

Todd Chretien is a long-time Bay Area activist. He contributes frequently to the International Socialist Review [16] and to Socialist Worker on the topics of U.S. and Latin American politics and the ideas of the Marxist tradition.

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Series: Reading Marx [17]

In this series, Todd Chretien provides an accompaniment to the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

All articles in this series [18]