Introduction To Marx And Engels: A Critical Reconstruction,

Introduction to Marx and Engels

Dimensions of Philosophy Series Norman Daniels and Keith Lehrer, Editors Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction, Second Edition, Richard Schmitt Political Philosophy, Jean Hampton Philosophy of Mind, Jaegwon Kim Philosophy of Social Science, Second Edition, Alexander Rosenberg Philosophy of Education, Ne! Noddings Philosophy of Biology, Elliott Sober Metaphysics, Peter van Inwagen Philosophy of Physics, Lawrence Sklar Theory of Knowledge, Keith Lehrer Philosophy of Law; An Introduction to jurisprudence, Revised Edition, Jeffrie G, Murphy and Jules L. Coleman FORTHCOMING

Philosophical Ethics, Stephen L. Darwall Philosophy of Science, Clark Glymour Philosophy of Language, Stephen Neale Philosophy of Cognitive Science, edited by Barbara Von Eckardt Normative Ethics, Shelly Kagan

Second Edition

Introduction to Marx and Engels A Critical Reconstruction

Richard Schmitt BROWN UNIVERSITY

westview press A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Dimensions of Philosophy Series

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, induding photocopy; recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright© 1987,1997 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group. Published in 1997 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Bowlder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 HJd's Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schmitt, Richard, 1927Introduetion to Marx and Engets : a critical reconstruction / Richard Schmitt.—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8133-3283-4 (pbk.) 1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883- 2. Engels, Friedrich, 1820-1895. 1. Title. HX39.5.S266 1997 335.4—
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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American. National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials 239.48-1984.

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Contents Preface to the Second Edition Abbreviated References

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INTRODUCTION

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1 HUMAN NATURE

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Marx and Engels on Human Nature, 13 Species Being, '17 for Further Reading, 21 Notes, 21 2

AGAINST INDIVIDUALISM

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Tlie Varieties of Individualism, 24 Marx and Engels' Opposition to Individualism, 25 Marx and Engels' Opposition to Collectivism, 28 What Is the Position of Marx and Engels? 30 For Further Reading, 31 Notes, 31

3 HISTORY

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History as the Transformation of Human Nature, 32 Writing History, 36 For Further Reading, 37 Notes, 37

4 THE DIALECTIC

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Hegel's Dialectic, 38 Tlie Marxian Dialectic, 41 Historical Explanation, 42 Dialectical Explanations, 45 For Further Reading, SO Notes, 50

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5 HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

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Forces and Relations of Production, 55 Why Take Historical Materialism Seriously? 61 For Further Reading, 62 Notes, 62 6

MATERIALISM AND IDEALISM

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Base and Superstructure, 64 The Sources of Self-Evidence, 67 For Further Reading, 69 Notes, 69 7

IDEOLOGY

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Wart Is Ideology? 73 Ideology and Science, 76 Fetishism, 78 Marx and Ethics, 80 False Consciousness, 84 For Further Reading, 84 Notes, 84

8 CAPITALISM

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What Is Modern Capitalism ? 91 Other Characteristics of Capitalism, 93 For Further Reading, 99 Notes, 99

9 CAPITALISM AND EXPLOITATION

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Exploitation, 102 The Classical Marxian Theory of Exploitation, '104 Contemporary Versions of Marx's Theory of Exploitation, 107 For Further Reading, 112

Note,112

to ALIENATION Alienation in Marx's Early Works, 11,4 Worker Alienation, 115 Alienation in the Later Works, 117 Alienation and Freedom, 118 For Further Reading, 124 Notes, 124

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11 THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM AND ITS FAILURES

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Hour Reliable Are the Predictions of Marx and Engels? 128 The End of Marxism? 132 What Is Wrong with Capitalism: The Unseen Hand Is Inept, 133 What Is Wrong with Capitalism: The Threat to Freedom and Democracy, 137 For Further Reading, 143 Note, 143

12 WHAT ARE CLASSES?

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Ttiree Meanings of "Class," 145 Class Consciousness, 151 For Further Reading, 158 Note, 158

13 CLASS STRUGGLES

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What Is Class Struggle? 160 Class Struggle and Political Action, 165 The Primacy of Class Struggle, 167 For Further Reading, 172 Motes, 172

14 THE STATE

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The State as Manager of the Affairs of the Bourgeoisie, 174 Tlie Executive Committee of the Bourgeoisie, 175 The independent State, 177 The State and Civil Society, 180 Class Struggle in the Democratic State, 183 For Further Reading, 185 Notes, 185

15 UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM

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Utopian Socialism, 187 Scientific Socialism, 191 What We Can Learn from the Critique of Utopianism, 195 Motes, 199

16 SOCIALISM The Socialist Gonls, 201 Socialist Institutions, 207

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ContentsRevolution, 211 For Further Reading, 216 Notes, 216

Bibliography About the Book and Author Index

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Preface to the Second Edition This new edition differs in several ways from the first edition of the Introduction to Marx and Engets. Rereading this book over the years, I marked passages that seemed to me to demand clarification or to require a better argument. I have now made those changes. I have also taken account of the steady stream, of new books and articles on Marx and Engels and have tried to incorporate some of these new and interesting interpretations. Other revisions were needed because my own interpretation of Marx and Engels has changed as I have continued to read and rethink Marx and as historical conditions have developed. In 1987, when the first edition appeared, the looming presence of the Soviet Union provided the background for any reading of Marx and Engels. In the official version of Marxism current in the communist countries at that time, Marxism was a science delineating social processes that shaped all our lives. The understanding and activities of people played a small role in that science. Events in the world were the outcome of impersonal social processes. The social order inspired by that view of Marxist science was bureaucratic and oppressive: A world regulated by processes unaffected and impervious to the thought of all but the experts seemed to justify government by specialists that neglected the wishes of ordinary citizens. In opposition to that version of Marxism, the previous edition of this book stressed—onesidedly, I believe now—the role played by human understanding and self-understanding in the unfolding of history. In this present edition, although I still hold that human self-understanding is of signal importance in Marx's theories, I emphasize that this self-understanding often bears the imprint of complex social processes that are not always transparent to the observer. As a consequence, this book is very different from the first edition, even though some passages remain unchanged. Since 1987 the Soviet Union and other communist countries have massively repudiated their previous economic and political systems and have eagerly embraced some form of capitalism. In the process they have also ix

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repudiated Marxism. In a new introduction, I reconsider Marxism in the light of these historical changes and, thus set out what one can reasonably expect to learn from Marx and Engels and how reading their works continues to be important, My understanding of Marx derives from many sources. Associates in various political projects taught me a great deal, as did many friends, both inside and out of the Radical Philosophy Association and the Marxist Activist Philosophers and their successor group, Sofphia. I owe particular thanks to Bruce Brown, Lisa Feldman, and DaYid Schweickart as well as an anonymous reader for reading portions of this manuscript. Justin Schwartz and Karsten Struhl made important suggestions for this revised edition. I learned much from the members of the faculty discussion group at the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador and from. Dr. Manuel Salgado, director of the Partido Socialists de Ecuador. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Alex Pienknagura of the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito, Spencer Carr, past editor for Westview Press, has been unfailingly supportive. Lucy Candib has shared in the writing of this book, as she shares most everything else—particularly the enduring confidence that we can remold this world of oppression and exploitation into one in which mutual respect and concern animates the relations among free human beings. I dedicate this book to my children, Addie and Eli, who rather reluctantly came with, us to Ecuador, where most of this book was written. \ hope that in later years they will remember what they saw in Ecuador: If capitalism may appear to do well at least for some people in the United States, its inability to provide a good life for all people is painfully evident outside of the United States. The thoughts of Marx and Engels remain essential if one wants to understand this terrible failure of the capitalist system. Richard Schmitt Quito, Ecuador

Abbreviated References CI CII CIII CGP CM CSF CW 18th EPM G GI OF SUS T WLC

Capital, vol. I (Marx) Capital, vol. II (Marx) Capital, vol. Ill (Marx) Critique of the Gotha Program (Marx) Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels) Class Struggles in France (Marx) The Civil War in France (Marx) The Eighteenth Bmmaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx) Crundrisse (Marx) The German Ideology (Marx and Engels) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Engels) The Marx-Engels Reader (Tucker, editor) Wage Labor and Capital (Marx)

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Introduction FOR 150 WARS, THE ECONOMIC and political theories of Marx and Engels were closely associated with a number of important political movements. In the fifty years before World War I, Marxism was the theory that officially guided the policies of the German Social Democratic Party—for a number of years the largest electoral party in Germany—and of Socialist parties in other European countries. From 1917 to 1989, Marxism was the official theory of the Soviet Union and the countries in Eastern Europe. From 1949 to the 1980s, it was the guiding theory in China, It remains of major importance in Cuba. Now the Soviet Union is no more. The countries in that once mighty empire, as well as the Eastern European countries, are all rushing toward capitalism in one form or another, as is China. One-third of the people who lived under systems that derived in various ways from the writings of Marx and Engels have rejected what they knew under the name of "socialism" or "communism" and have opted for capitalism as they understand it. The collapse of Soviet communism has shown that capitalism is in the long run more productive, more innovative than were the command economies of relatively underdeveloped countries in Eastern Europe and Asia, In the early years of the Bolshevik revolution, after 1917, the Soviet command economy managed to produce impressive growth rates in the effort to modernize a backward, mainly agrarian country. This growth contrasted significantly with the stagnation of capitalist countries during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s, Similar successes were recorded, in the reconstruction of the Soviet Union after the devastation of European Russia by German armies during World War II. But by the 1970s the Russian economy slowed down and became progressively less efficient. Many observers believe that as the economy recovered from the ravages of World War II and began to expand the production of a wider range of consumer goods, the central planning mechanism turned out to 2

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Introduction

be inadequate, A fairly simple economy may well be centrally coordinated. But in the Russian case, once the range of goods produced grew in number and complexity, central coordination failed. Some take these momentous changes in the formerly communist countries (specifically, the failures of their command economies) as a complete refutation of Marxian theories. Others believe that the truth of the theories of Marx and Engels remain untouched. They maintain that the end of the Soviet, Chinese, and other communist systems does not invalidate the Marxian theories. These theorists remind us that Marx and Engels had always insisted that a socialist revolution could succeed only in countries where capitalism, was fully developed. Neither in Russia nor in China was that the case. Their revolutions occurred when those countries were seriously underdeveloped. Hence those revolutions were not in fact socialist revolutions, even though the revolutionaries appealed to Marxian theory and imposed their version of Marxism on their populations as the correct theory to guide political, economic, and social life. In addition, the socialism Marx and Engels advocated and worked for was definitely a democratic socialism. It was to be an economic system that required widespread participation in directing the economic life of each nation. The ultimate goal of Marx's socialism was the abolition of class differences. A hierarchical society was to be replaced by a society of cooperation and interdependence in which, as Marx said, "The full development of each is a necessary condition for the full development of all" (CM, T 491). Socialism in the Soviet Union and China, in Poland, Hungary, and Romania was not democratic. It was totalitarian, bureaucratized, and often terribly inhumane. It did not move in the direction of abolishing classes in its seventy years of existence. Many readers of Marx therefore think that the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's embrace of capitalism leave Marxism unscathed: Those revolutions were not the revolutions Marx and Engels predicted— they came too early. In addition, they lacked the democratic features of the Marxian revolution. Neither of these perspectives is acceptable. It is not plausible that Marxist theory could emerge unscathed from the worldwide collapse of regimes that appealed to Marxist theory. Nor does this collapse refute Marxism, once and for all. It is true that socialism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, or China was not the form of socialism Marx and Engels described. Many Marxists in the United States and. Western Europe had been aware of that for decades. Ever since the show trials in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, it was clear to them that the Soviet Union had become a bloody dictatorship. But even Marxists who understood that remained confident that these early failed attempts at a socialist order would evolve toward democratic control of the economy and toward the classless state. The hope

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was that as the originally underdeveloped countries attained a higher standard of living and improved universal education, workers would demand the democratic rights and participation withheld from them by the ruling bureaucracies. Bureaucratic socialism would transform itself into democratic socialism. This democratic socialism would continue to be as productive as the Soviet Union had been in the period between the two World Wars and thus eventually would challenge the capitalists on their home territory. Socialism would spread to Europe, the Americas, and all around the globe. This confidence rested on one of the central tenets of traditional Marxist theory, namely, that the advent of socialism, was certain. Long before the Russian Revolution in 1917, which brought the Russian Communists to power, Marxists believed that socialism was inevitable. There was no question that sooner or later capitalism would fail and would be replaced by socialism. They had no doubt that socialism was a genuine alternative to capitalism. Only the time at which this change would begin to occur was uncertain, as was the form it would take. Marx and Engels were quite sure of that, and so were their followers in the German and other socialist parties before World War I, Many capitalists have also believed in part in this inevitability of communism—that socialism, unless resisted vigorously, might well replace capitalism. The anticommunist agitation of the past 150 years was not always a cover for resisting advances of the working class or for great power politics. Some defenders of capitalism did take Nikita Khrushchev's threat to bury capitalism literally because they regarded it as a real possibility. In some way everyone, whether Marxist or anti-Marxist, believed that socialism could overtake capitalism. The collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the transformations in China have undermined the belief that socialism threatens existing capitalist institutions. A range of different socialist schemes have come to an end—the Soviet command economy. Polish communism with farreaching private ownership in agriculture, the Hungarian experiments in market socialism, and the Yugoslav attempts at worker-controlled enterprises, Chinese communism did not collapse, but the Communist Party of China replaced it with a state-sponsored capitalism. Capitalism has all the while flourished, at least by comparison with the formerly communist countries. It is much more difficult to believe that it will inevitably disappear to make way for socialism. As a consequence, it is much less obvious that a socialist alternative to capitalism is even possible. The idea of socialism is still enormously attractive, but can it be realized? That question now requires an answer. As long as socialism, was considered inevitable, its possibility was not in question. If we deny that socialism is inevitable, we must ask whether it is even possible.

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The belief that socialism is inevitable, that it is a real alternative to capitalism, has lost much of its persuasive power. Today any serious reader of Marx and Engels must take a long and careful look at the arguments for the inevitability of socialist revolutions. Historical events do not refute Marx's and Engels' theories. But the actual events of the past half century are sufficiently different from what they predicted to compel a close reexamination of the theories that yielded those predictions. Too many of the predictions of Marx and Engels do not seem to have quite worked out, Socialism came, but it was not the socialism Marx and Engels had worked for and it eventually disappeared. Capitalism, instead of collapsing, materially transformed itself. Private property in the means of production as well as economic systems driven by the pursuit of private profit are still the dominant institutions. When we take another look at the arguments for the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism as well as of the coming of socialism, we will find that the Marxian predictions of a capitalist collapse were not as well founded as Marx and Engels believed. In addition to a theory of historical change, the doctrines of Marx and Engels provided a political program. The capitalist societies, divided between the workers and those who live off the fruits of the workers' labor, would be overthrown when the workers take power for themselves to run a new kind of society in which all will flourish to the greatest possible extent. This image of the workers united and taking power for themselves to build a more just society has been very powerful. It inspired generations of political activists all over the world to struggle selflessly for a better social order. It inspired the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 and the Chinese Communists in their long war against the Chinese Nationalists and against the Japanese until the Communist victory in 1949, The same image sustained the Vietnamese in their decades of fighting first against the French and then against the United States until victory in 1975. And it galvanized the Algerians in their war against France in the 1950s and 1960s. The Marxian revolutionary rhetoric was a powerful political force in the period of decolonization after World War II. But like the Marxian theory of history, these political ideas have not kept their promise, China is as authoritarian a country' as ever, and the Vietnamese did not reap the fruits of their victory in the form of democratic socialism. Neither did the Algerians gain freedom for all in their liberation struggle. The Marxian political program that promised free institutions to the common people who wrested power from the rich, the colonizers, and. the middle class who sided with the rich or the foreigners—that program has been proven a failure. It has not kept its promise. All that is left of the socialist political program is the ideal, of a society in which all citizens share political power with one another, in which everyone has the chance to develop as fully as possible, where equal opportunity for all is a reality, not just political

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rhetoric. That ideal remains as attractive as ever. But the road toward its realization is not so obvious as it seemed to Marx and Engels and. to generations of their followers. Marxism as a theory that draws the outline of historical change and Marxism, as a political program for popular liberation have both been seriously compromised by historical events in the past fifty years. If Marxism is to be of any use to us at all, it can no longer be a complete, if very general, theory of history. Its political program must be rethought and reworked in fundamental ways. This requires that we reconsider the theories of class and of their progressive transformation and that we rethink the Marxian conception of political change contained in the theory of revolution. We will find that both are much more fragmentary and incomplete than many generations of Marxists thought. But many people believe that it is too late for such reexamination, that Marxism has been refuted outright. Others think that the events in Eastern Europe, while not an outright refutation of Marxism, have shown it to be irrelevant to our world and its problems. Socialism is not on the agenda in the immediate future, if ever. Capitalism is not facing imminent collapse. Instead, these theorists add, there are a multitude of problems that do threaten our world, problems of environmental degradation, racial and gender inequalities, violence, the resurgence of bitter and bloody nationalist divisions. But Marx and Engels do not seem to have addressed these issues at all, or only peripherally. The problems they focused on are not ours. Their theories, it seems to many belong in a museum with all those other ideas that were once very influential but have little bearing on our world and its problems. But it is too soon to consign Marxism to oblivion. We need Marxism in order to be able to understand our present institutions, their history, their strengths and weaknesses. The institutions under which we live face serious difficulties. The triumph, of capitalism trumpeted by its defenders is hollow. The capitalist world is stalked by poverty and violence, by injustice and alienation. There is no hope of alleviating these difficulties unless we subject the basic principles on which our institutions rest to close scrutiny. Marxism is the most important source available to us for such a critical self-examination. That is the reason for the continued interest in Marxism and its influence. Western democracies are guided by liberal theory. It originated in seventeenth-century England, where it served to protect the interests of a rising capitalist class against the absolute monarchs of the day. Hence this theory has two central tenets: 1. Every human being has certain rights that no other person and no government may infringe on. These rights are of several kinds: civil

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rights, such as the right to free speech and conscience; economic rights, such as the right to private property; and political rights, such as the rights to vote and to run for public office, (These last rights are more recent additions to the original list.) 2, Economic life should be regulated by the government as little as possible. Uncoerced economic transactions between private parties in the marketplace are the best method for coordinating the economic affairs of a nation. In this century? liberalism split into two branches. The traditional liberals, now called "conservatives," put their main emphasis on the autonomy of the marketplace from government regulation. Those who have become known as "liberals" are willing to compromise the freedom of the marketplace to some extent in favor of extending economic, educational, and health-care rights to all citizens. Modern liberals come down on the side of extending the list of rights to include such items as the right to reasonable economic security, rights to education and medical care, and the rights of children to get a good start in life. Conservatives restrict rights to the more traditional ones—"Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"—for the sake of keeping government small and the economy as little regulated as possible. Marx and Engels always had a complex relationship to liberalism. On the one hand, they were agitating for a free society where differences in wealth or talent would not oppress those who had less but where all would be equally free to develop their capacities to the fullest. The first task of the working class striving to liberate itself, they say in the Communist Manifesto, is "to win the battle of democracy" (T 490), They not only supported demands for the familiar human rights but in addition demanded rights that the traditional liberal would not accept, such as the right to economic decisionmaking and economic security. On the other hand, Marx and Engels were passionately opposed to the second tenet of traditional liberalism: the belief that a capitalist marketplace is the preferable economic system for all industrial, nations. Although they were fully aware and appreciative of the enormous power of capitalism to innovate and to produce wealth, they were also keenly aware of its shortcomings and vocal in their criticisms of the free-market system. Foremost among the problems of capitalism is its inability to distribute its blessings fairly. The wealthiest countries in the world harbor abject poverty. In the period since World War II, one of the most astonishingly productive periods in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, inequalities in the United States steadily increased.1 Liberal theory, with its central commitment to free-market mechanisms, can understand these inequalities only as minor malfunctions of an inherently optimal system. But from Marx we learn

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that capitalism inevitably produces major inequalities because the wealth of the few depends on the poverty of the many. Only major modifications of free-market capitalism can hope to alleviate existing and increasing inequalities. Some of the new inequalities in the United States are the result of legislation. Since the 1970s, changes in the tax laws have favored the richest 1 percent of the population by cutting their taxes while increasing the taxes on the poor and the middle classes.2 Facts like these raise serious questions about the working of democracy in the United States. We can hardly claim that the wishes of the majority rule our political institutions if the elected representatives consistently favor the very rich at the expense of the majority of the population. The elected representatives of the majority steadfastly further the interests of the wealthy minority to which most of them belong. Such observations suggest that all is not well with our democracy, but liberalism, once again, can neither explain these failures of democracy nor prescribe effective remedies. Neither changes in voter registration procedures nor attempts to regulate campaign financing have done much to return power to the majority of the electorate. For answers to these questions about our democracy, we need to turn to Marx's class theory and his theory of the state, which suggest how capitalism, and democracy work at cross-purposes or how capitalism defeats the goals of democracy. Marx and Engels were certain that capitalism and democracy are not compatible in the long run, and many of their reasons for that position are still very important for us to consider. Other challenges of Marxism to ruling liberal ideas are more abstract but no less important In the chapters that follow, we shall see Marx's challenge to the liberal assumptions about human nature, assumptions about the relations among individuals and their social context in families, voluntary institutions, and nations. We shall find that liberalism cannot make sense of important Marxist concepts like alienation and that it denies that capitalism rests on exploitation. Those who grow up and live in capitalist countries frequently hold beliefs that are patently false, such as that every person can become a millionaire, that all it takes is hard work in order to make a good living and have a good life, or that competition by and large brings the most competent players into the top positions. One does not need to be a reader of Marx to see through these half-truths. For every winner there are many losers, and the success of some is usually bought at the expense of others whose lot deteriorates. The statistics about income inequalities show an increase in the "working poor" families who remain mired in poverty although every family member works, often more than one job. Hard work will not help everyone under capitalism. Nor does competition always favor the most able. Sometimes it favors the most ruthless, at other times

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the most opportunistic or well-connected. It may benefit either the conformist who does not rock the boat or the charismatic but not necessarily competent individual. Unlike liberalism, Marxism explains why, especially in a society like ours, such patent misconceptions are so widely held. The theory of ideology is complex, interesting, and essential for any understanding of how our society works and maintains itself. Careful reading of Marx and Engels, the most perceptive and insightful critics of liberalism, particularly in economics, gives us a grasp of our own problems. But the Marxism that will help us here is not the prophetic Marxism that predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism and its replacement by a victorious proletariat. It is not the revolutionary Marxism that inspired a great deal of heroism in the past. It is, instead, a critical Marxism that consists of the rich insights, some carefully developed, others mere suggestions, that shed much light on our existing institutions and still have much to teach us. The writings of Marx and Engels remain indispensable. Marx and Engels are by no means the only critics of the social and economic structures under which we live. But as voracious readers, they summarized a wide range of criticisms of capitalism that had been written before their lifetime in the middle of the nineteenth century. Social critics since then write in their shadow. Critical reflection about our world is not possible without a thorough acquaintance with Marx and Engels.

Karl Marx was bom in Trier, Germany, on May 5, 1818, the descendant of a long line of rabbis. His uncle was then the chief rabbi of Trier. Marx's father, Heinrich, had converted to Christianity when new legislation that excluded Jews from government service threatened his livelihood as a lawyer. Neither his immediate family nor Marx himself identified themselves as Jews. Marx's wife, Jenny, came from a Protestant family in the Prussian civil service. Sent to the university, first at Bonn, then in Berlin, to study law, Marx immersed himself in philosophy and earned a Ph.D. in 1841 in the hope of obtaining a teaching position at the University in Bonn. But he and his friends spent a good deal of their energy attacking religion and criticizing the autocratic political institutions of Prussia—criticisms that were fully justified. At that time Prussia was ruled by an absolute monarch whose power was not limited by a constitution, let alone by popularly elected representatives. The freedoms of speech and religion were not guaranteed. The government exercised strict censorship on publications and on what was taught in the state-run schools. Under those circumstances, Marx and his friend Bruno Bauer, who attacked religion and argued for

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democratic rights for all citizens, had no chance of getting teaching jobs in any Prussian university. Throughout his life, Marx supported himself by his writing. For two brief periods, in 1844 and again in 1848, he was the editor of a paper; later he earned some money as correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and a number of other publications. For most of his life, he also depended on financial help from his friends, primarily Friedrich Engels. Even with this help, he lived in extreme poverty for many years. The biographer of Marx's daughter Eleanor writes: "Mrs. Marx, who was also often unwell, spent a good deal of her time running to the pawnbroker to pledge the linen and plate, her own and her family's personal belongings and attire, and all such household objects as were not immovable,"3 Marx's poverty was, to be sure, aggravated by his inability to use wisely the money he did have, as well as by the need to keep up a minimal appearance of being middle class. In the main, however, Marx was the victim of the illiberal government of his native Prussia, which made it impossible for him to take up any of the careers for which he was suited—as teacher, lawyer, or journalist—and instead forced him to leave Germany. France and Belgium gave him temporary refuge but then expelled him., at the urging of the Prussian government. Only England, where he lived after 1850, allowed him and his fellow German political refugees a place in which to work and scrape together a living as best they could. Married in 1841, Marx and his wife, Jenny, had six children. Only three reached adulthood. The letters that Marx and Jenny wrote to friends reporting the death of the other three children remain heartbreaking. Marx and Jenny were genuinely devoted to each other, even though he had an illegitimate son. It was also a very unequal relationship. Jenny transcribed her husband's virtually illegible hand into neat copy, went to meetings and collected articles for him, and supported his political and scholarly work in other ways—all in addition to bearing six children and caring for them, often under hard conditions. She died in 1882. Marx followed her within the year. Marx and Engels first met in 1842, when Marx was twenty-four and Engels twenty-two. Marx was the editor of a newspaper, Engels a journalist with an already growing reputation. Born into a fairly well-to-do business family of staunch Protestant persuasion, Engels had not gone to university but was self-educated. In many respects, Marx and Engels were very different men; Whereas Marx was mercurial, Engels was even-tempered; whereas Marx was careless with money and his appearance, Engels was an astute businessman who was impeccably groomed; whereas Marx was a family man, Engels, although capable of deep and lasting attachments (for twenty years he had lived with Mary Burns and was

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deeply shaken when she died) never married or had children. Whereas Engels had the greater facility as a writer, Marx was clearly the deeper thinker. Both were gifted polemicists, but Marx's prose style at its best is unmatched by anything that Engels wrote, Although Marx was very frosty at their first meeting in 1842, by 1844 he had read a piece by Engels entitled "Outline of a Critique of Political Economy" that made a deep impression on him. When they met again, they spent ten days together in conversation, and from that time on they were allies and close friends until Marx's death in 1883. They wrote two books together in the next two years. The second of those, the German Ideology, is of major importance in their thinking. The Communist Manifesto of 1847 was written, by Marx, but its ideas were demonstrably those of both men, Marx's heavy dependence on Engels' financial support sometimes put Engels himself in serious straits, but he always came through for his friend, Marx also owed a good deal to Engels intellectually. As a young man, Marx was still fighting mainly philosophical battles when Engels, whose family textile business took him. traveling to England, had begun to study economics and had gained a firm grasp of the condition of working people. It was most likely Engels' "Outline of a Critique of Political Economy" (1843) that gave Marx the impetus to take up the study of economics in earnest. Similarly, Engel's Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) had a significant influence on Marx's thinking. On occasion Engels provided intellectual and financial support at the same time, Marx was commissioned to write for the New York Herald Tribune when he was still somewhat unsure of his English. Engels wrote the first set of articles published under Marx's name. Their friendship was a source of continued strength for both men. By the time Marx died, only the first volume of Capital had been published; many versions of the second and. third volumes, none of them complete, were contained in Marx's notebooks. Engels chose the material for the second and third volumes of Capital from those notebooks and edited them, into the form in which we now know them. Engels wrote about eighty pages of volume 3. Both Marx and Engels were seriously involved in radical politics. During the 1847-1848 revolutions, both returned to the Continent from, England, and Engels actually took part in some of the fighting in Germany, They were active in the Communist League founded in 1847, for which they wrote the Communist Manifesto, They were members of the First International, an international socialist organization founded in 1864, in which Marx soon came to occupy a position of leadership and to which he devoted the bulk of his time for the next six or seven, years. In his later years, Engels, besides working full time in his family business in Manchester in order to keep the Marx family and himself going, spent much

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energy publicizing Marx's ideas. He also developed them in directions probably different from those that Marx would have chosen. Their thinking diverged, it seems, but as neither gave any indication of being aware of that divergence, we possess no authoritative account of their agreements and disagreements. How one interprets the differences between the two men depends on how one reads those later writings. As a consequence, the precise relation between Marx and Engels as thinkers has become a source of controversy among interpreters. Some see one unified body of doctrine—namely, the thought of Marx-and-Engels; others, in an equally untenable position, see Marx as the deep, humanistic thinker and. Engels as the shallow, positivistic popularizes In fact, the work of neither thinker is of one piece. Marx had more than one opinion on a large range of issues, and his opinions are not always consistent. The views of the later Engels clearly have their roots in some of the positions Marx held. It is also true, however, that Engels tended to develop only one side of Marx's very complex thought, and not always the side that proved in the long run to be the most defensible one. But to ascribe all the errors in the Marxist tradition to Engels, as some readers have done, is to exaggerate Marx's genius into infallibility and seriously to underestimate the contribution of Engels.4 They were different men, their talents were different, but both of them made major contributions as part of their many years of close collaboration. Notes 1. Lawrence R. Mishe! and David Frankel, The State of Working America (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1,991). 2. Lawrence R. Mishel and jared Bernstein, The State of Working America (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1994). 3. Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, vol. \ (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), p. 27. 4. One example of that reading is Norman Levine, The Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels (Oxford: Clio Books, 1975). Readers interested in a more detailed discussion of the relations between Marx and Engels will find a balanced account in Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

1 Human Nature THERE ARE A NUMBER OF different ways to gain entry into the theories of Marx and Engels, I will begin with their view of human nature—the question of what differentiates human beings from animals. Although that question is not often discussed, assumptions about human nature underlie a number of widely held economic and political theories. Adam Smith was the first great theorist of capitalism and of the institutions we refer to as the "free market." He explained the existence of the free market by reference to a human "propensity to truck and barter."1 The existence of the free market is the effect of human nature that makes us always ready to trade and exchange goods ("truck"). This explanation has interesting consequences: If we live in a market society because we have certain human traits that we share with, all other human beings, we can be confident there will be a free market until human nature changes. We can then reject, with similar confidence, any claims that capitalism can come to an end. or can be replaced with a different economic system,. Similarly, as we look back over history, we see that however different the economy of hunters and gatherers appears to be from modern capitalism, they must be the same in important respects because human nature is no different today from what it was then. We share with hunter-gatherers our common human nature and thus the "propensity to truck and barter." Smith asserts that free-market institutions are an essential aspect of all human societies because they result from universal human traits. That claim rests on a particular conception of human nature. Capitalism is often defended as being particularly well suited to human nature. It is thought to be the preferred economic system because human beings are acquisitive; they always want more; they are "greedy." Others claim, that human beings are competitive or that they are usually only interested in benefiting themselves and those closest to them. These claims about human nature are not only used to explain why capitalism 12

Human Nature

13

exists at all but also to argue that capitalism is good or better suited to human nature than other economic systems. In more restricted forms, appeals to human nature are used to defend social stratification: We say that the traditional position of women is Justified because women have certain unchangeable characteristics: They are weak; they are emotional; they are better caretakers than men, who are aggressive and competitive. Similarly sweeping claims are often made about persons of color to justify their greater rates of poverty, low-wage jobs, and high rates of incarceration. Here the appeal is not to alleged facts about the nature of all human beings but only of some important groups of human beings. But the central structure of all these arguments is the same. Certain institutions are explained and justified by reference to a set of traits that some or all human beings are said to possess regardless of the particular society in which they live: Men cannot help lording it over women, and women's nature just fits them for their position. White people, it is claimed, are indeed superior to persons of color because white human nature is different from the nature of persons of color. In similar ways the appeal to human nature justifies political institutions: Thomas Jefferson, one of the great theorists in the liberal tradition, rested important features of the American political system, on the claim that all human beings have innate rights, (Animals are presumably different—they do not have rights,) Other liberal theorists have made similar claims, saying that human beings possess rights by their very nature. Those rights in turn determine what a good form of government is: Democracy respects human rights; dictatorship does not. Hence democracy is good and dictatorship is not. The basis of that claim, is, once again, a conception of human nature, In the eighteenth century, in the writings of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, the appeal to human nature, with its innate rights, provided an argument for more democratic institutions and for freeing commerce from government supervision. In the nineteenth century many socialists argued, against capitalism by asserting that human beings are by nature cooperative. In our time portrayals of human nature tend to justify social and economic conditions as they are. Arguments regarding human nature have been used to defend the status quo as well as to attack it. Marx and Engels on Human Nature Marx and Engels had no use for conservative arguments that purport to show that the world as it is now is as it ought to be because it conforms to human nature. Nor did they want to press for change by appealing to claims about universal human nature as did the great eighteenth-century

14

Human Nature

political and economic theorists. They refused to get involved in arguments about whether human beings are by nature cooperative or competitive or whether greed or generosity is the more powerful motive because they were extremely skeptical about such broad assertions about the essential traits of all human beings, past, present, and future. As evidence, most people who make such claims point to the people they know. But that does not suffice to establish generalizations about human beings in different places and in different periods of history. We need to compare the behaviors, the values, the socially approved practices of human beings across time in order to form some reliable generalizations about human nature. But once we consult history, we see that our predecessors did have very different traits and lead very different lives from ours, that indeed "all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature."2 The claims that particular authors made about all human nature are at best true only in their own culture. There are very few if any human traits that belong to all human beings at all times and. places. But history shows us more. The changes in human life and personality have been closely connected with the ways in which people produced the means necessary for their continued existence. As groups, tribes, and nations developed new ways of feeding, housing, and perpetuating themselves, their ways of being and their "natures" changed. History not only documents those changes but also shows that human beings have an important hand in bringing them about. 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 (GI, T ISO).3

Traditionally, philosophers have taken consciousness or religion to define the essence of human beings. These are the unchanging characteristics of human nature that supposedly differentiate us from animals. Marx and Engels, by contrast, chose as essential the fact that humans produce. But if we read beyond the passage quoted, we begin to see that this choice has rather unusual implications: By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. The way in which men produce their means of subsistence . . . is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definiteform,of expressing their life.... As individuals express their life, so they are. (GI, T150)

This paragraph goes through a number of steps: 1. In, producing the particular goods that a group needs, its members produce the particular ways in which they go about meeting their

Human Nature

15

material needs; they produce "their actual material life," Thus, for example, people who farm not only create farm products but also determine their worklife to be that of farmers. 2. But this worklife determines their entire way of life. Farmers are different from urban dwellers not only in that they farm, rather than working in offices or factories; they are different in all sorts of other ways. Country life as a whole is different from city life and breeds different people than does city life. The pace of life in the country is slower, and the people who live there tend to be relatively conservative and resist change. The pace in the city is more frenetic; urban dwellers are likelier to welcome change and are less rooted. 3, People who live differently are different people: "As individuals express their life, so they are." So it makes no sense to claim that all human beings are greedy or competitive, for people who live in situations where people regularly compete with each other will turn out to be competitive. People living in societies organized around different customs will turn out to be different Elsewhere Marx connects kind of personality to kind of technology. In a famous aphorism he asserts that "the handmill gives you the society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist" (Marx, 1963, 109). Different technologies demand different sorts of social organizations. Societies with low productivity where all work is done by hand tend to be societies where people manage to meet their minimum needs without producing much of a surplus. Trade and markets are not central to such societies because there is very little left over to trade after each family has met its minimum needs. In such societies the people who live off the work and products of others must resort to force to take from others what they produce. In feudal society, for example, the kings, princes, and knights used force to get products from the peasants and coerced them to work to maintain the kings and nobles. In a capitalist society, in contrast, the availability of machinery ("the steam-mill'") raises the level of productivity. Because people produce more than a subsistence minimum, there is need for trade and markets. The powerful in a capitalist society do not use naked force to get what they want; they use commercial mechanisms. A successful feudal lord needs to be a particular kind of person, a skilled fighter who values honor and bravery. Such qualities were important to feudal lords because for them war was a primary occupation. What is more, war was of a particular kind, involving hand-to-hand combat with sword and shield—not shooting missiles at an unseen enemy miles away. Hand-to-hand combat requires a certain kind of courage. Capitalists, too, must be risk takers who need a certain kind of courage, but this courage is different from the raw

16

Human Nature

physical courage of the feudal lord, "Honor" is a word not much in use today because it no longer counts for much. Instead we talk about "credibility," Being honorable does not matter in the commercial world as long as people think they can trust you. The appearance of trustworthiness is more important than actually being honorable and trustworthy. Thus various levels of technology are at the root of various kinds of societies and call for various types of personalities and systems of values. Without doubt Marx's aphorism oversimplifies the connections between technology and social orders and their dominant personality types, but the basic claim is worth taking seriously: In different societies with different levels of technology and therefore contrasting forms of social organization, people have diverse values and think very differently about what sorts of individuals they want to or ought to be.4 Early in his work, in his "Theses on Feuerbach," Marx wrote that the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In, its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. (T145}

This passage is usually understood as denying that there is any such thing as a universal human nature. Marx is said to have rejected the concept of an overarching human nature. But that, of course, does not make any sense. In the discussions I have quoted in this chapter, Marx repeatedly distinguishes between animals and human beings and makes any number of claims about human nature. Marx and Engels do not deny that there are continuities in human development or that if we describe human traits broadly enough we may find some that belong to all human beings. They are even willing to say that what distinguishes human beings from animals is their ability to determine what it means to be a human being. The method of historical comparison that Marx and Engels advocated for studying the history of human nature does make use of some generalizations about human beings. Human beings, for instance, have needs, and their actions are in part driven by these needs. But of course these needs vary from society to society. Human beings plan and think, but how they go about doing that depends upon the culture in which they live. Insisting on the variability of human nature as well as on human self-creation does not foreclose the possibility that there may be some universal features of human beings.5 But by comparing human beings in different historical periods, we see that what are usually thought to be universal traits are specific characteristics that belong only to persons in a limited span of human history.6 Private interest is itself already interest shaped by a society. It can only be attained under conditions laid down by the society and with means the society provides. (G, 74)

Human Nature

17

The upshot of these observations is that human beings not only produce things but they produce themselves as well, and as people produce their livelihoods in different ways, so they make themselves into different people. People are endlessly different from one another, although they are all humans. Their differences are not fortuitous; they result from processes under human control and are produced by these human beings themselves. As a consequence, claims about universal human nature, about traits possessed by all human beings in all cultures, are not likely to be true. If there is a universal human essence, it is not at all clear what it consists of. Hence we must be skeptical of political arguments meant to show that some particular economic, social, or political system, is the best because it is best suited to universal human nature. It is far from clear what the process of human self-production looks like. Several chapters of this book will, be required to explicate this conception. We will need to see that human beings do not make themselves into who they are individually but only in large groups. We will also need to see that the process of human self-creation is only rarely a conscious one. Instead, it results from individual and group actions undertaken for purposes other than creating a particular form of human society and the sorts of people that make such a society flourish. Finally, we shall see that the effect of human beings on their social environment is reciprocal; the environment also affects human beings in important ways. Species Being From these reflections emerges a concept of human nature that Marx summarizes by saying that humans are "species beings"; Human beings are species beings, not only because in practice and in theory they adopt the species as their object.., but also because they treat themselves as the actual, living species.... The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Human beings make their life-activity itself the object of their will and of their consciousness. (EPM, T 7-5-76) Marx here distinguishes human beings from animals. Animals belong to a species, but human beings are "species beings." Human beings do not merely belong to the human species; they also make the species "the object" of thinking and action. That means, to begin with, that human beings (sometimes) act only after deliberating. An animal simply is what it does; human beings act with forethought: Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it itnmedi-

18

Human Nature ately needs for itself or its young.... It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst human beings produce even when they are free from physical need. (EPM, T 76)

Animals build their dwellings and do whatever else they do compelled by need; human beings act even when they are not compelled by need but because they first thought about the action and then chose to perform it. Later, in the first volume of Capital, Marx makes that point much more explicitly: A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells, But what distinguishes the worst architect .from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (CI, T 344)

One can read these passages to say that Marx distinguishes animals from human beings by the fact that human beings plan their actions before they perform them, whereas animals act from instinct.7 That is no doubt what the passage says. But is that all that it says? This interpretation does not tell us what Marx means by "species being." It is incomplete. Other commentators add, that, according to Marx, human beings create their own needs: "The satisfaction of the first need . . . leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act" (GI, T 156). Human beings are species beings because they are able to change themselves—for instance, by creating new needs.8 The passage does not explain further what is meant by "the production of new needs," but elsewhere Marx speaks of it in very modern terms: Under private property their significance [viz. of human needs] is reversed: every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to... place him in a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of gratification and therefore economic ruin, (EPM, T 93)

Long ago, new needs may have arisen as a consequence of climactic change: When a series of droughts occurred in a region, its inhabitants needed either to move or to develop a system of wells and cisterns to collect the scarce rainwater. At other times new inventions, such as the invention of the printing press, created in more people the need to read and write. But in a society such as ours, new needs do not arise haphazardly as the consequence of other changes but are deliberately created by manufacturers who want to sell their commodities. Advertising is a deliberate form of creating new needs. Thus "creating needs" involves very different goals and activities in different historical periods, but it is always a feature of human existence.

Human Nature

19

Acting with foresight, human beings not only plan their lives and actions but also change human nature, for example, by creating new needs, But we also change human nature in other ways, for instance, by accustoming people to work by the clock rather than by the sun and the seasons. Marx quotes Dr. Ure, an economist contemporary with Marx, discussing the invention and introduction of mechanical spinning machines: The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism [viz. an industrial machine]... as in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton,'

Medieval peasants worked from sunup to sundown during harvest time and worked much less in the winters. Their work habits were "desultory."10 Modern industrial workers punch in by the clock and punch out by the clock, and their supervisors make sure that they work when they are supposed to. They do this year-round, regardless of weather or the seasons. Their different rhythm of work, determined by the "unvarying regularity of the automaton," changes their habits, heightens the importance of clocks and clock time as opposed to the time kept by seasons and the sun. There is a further aspect to this talk about species beings; Human beings decide—differently at different times—what it means to be an adequate or a good human being as well as what is a life fit for human beings. Certain actions are abhorred as "inhuman"; certain persons are said to be "dehumanized" by suffering; certain conditions of life are said to be unfit for human beings. These standards in turn affect how people live, how they rear their children, and what standards they set for their own behavior in their moral codes, their laws, and customs. Human beings "in theory as well as in practi.ce adopt the species as their object" because questions concerning what makes us human, what sort of life is appropriate for human beings, are of theoretical concern for us—we think and disagree about them. But they are also a practical concern when we praise someone as a fine human being, a particularly admirable example of our species, or condemn certain practices as "inhuman." We regard certain persons as models for all of us and. urge our children to imitate them. We regard others as bad, immoral, or evil and proscribe certain behaviors as illegal and punish them. In these ways our beliefs about what it means to be human are translated into actual behaviors, and we make ourselves into certain sorts of human beings different from the human beings that flourish in other societies. The question, What is peculiarly human? is answered differently by different groups of people because they live different lives. But they

20

Human Nature

themselves made their way of life what it is in a variety of ways: They adapted to their physical surroundings by producing what they needed in specific ways. They organized their societies, developing structures of government and social relations, and created systems of beliefs about the universe, setting up moral beliefs and practices. As a consequence, we may well say that human beings determine what it means to be human— that is, what it is that makes their lives human lives. This self-creation is done as a consequence of thinking and planning rather than being driven by instinct. Humans therefore also determine what it means to be human by virtue of their intentional actions. It is important, however, to be clear on this point: Although Marx believed that humans, unlike animals, act with a purpose and for reasons, he also recognized that not everything their actions bring about is intended. Depending upon the situation, humans develop various ways of meeting their needs, which requires thought and inventiveness. Such changes in ways of life are intended. But not all the effects on human nature that often result from these deliberately instituted changes are intended. Human beings do not set out deliberately to change human nature itself. They do sometimes consider what is properly human as they set about solving their day-to-day problems. Some solutions to problems are not acceptable because they are not fitting for human beings; others are preferred because they are particularly humane. But some changes in human nature are the unintended consequences of other changes made deliberately. The definition of "human being" is the result of intentional actions and their unintended consequences. As we shall see in Chapter 16, Marx and Engels also believed that in the future it will be possible for human beings to define human being deliberately. Human nature has changed along with ways of producing what human beings need to maintain themselves and as new technologies have come into existence. But what are the causes of historical change? Marx and Engels have two apparently very different answers to that question. On the one hand they tell us that "human beings make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please" (18th, T 595). Here historical change appears as the product of human actions, if not always of explicit human choices. But on the other hand Marx also tells us elsewhere that "the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life" (T, 4). In the second quotation, we do not hear about human beings' shaping history but only about complex economic processes' affecting social conditions and human thinking. Marx holds both views and. believed that they are not inconsistent—as they appear to be on the surface. We will explain the complex interactions among human

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21

beings, their societies, and their sodoeconomic systems in the chapters that follow. What we have seen so far is only one side of the complex theory of Marx and Engels. That theory rests on historical comparisons of human beings and their societies at different times. It raises a strong challenge to ordinary assumptions about human nature—such as that all human beings are greedy and competitive or such generalized claims as that all human beings are born with inalienable rights. These generalizations are not supported by detailed examinations of human life in different historical periods. The other side of Marx's theory of history stresses the important role the environment plays in shaping human beings and producing and maintaining a particular kind of human being. We shall discuss those ideas much more in subsequent chapters. For Further Reading Vemon Venable, Human Nature: The Marxian View (New York; Meridian Books, 1966), chapters 2, 5, and 6. Notes 1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modem, Library, 1985), p. 17. 2. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York International Publishers, 1963), p. 147, 3. All quotations from. Marx and Engels, unless otherwise stated, have been taken from Robert C. Tucker, ed,, The Marx-Engels Rtader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W, Norton, 1978). References to this book, abbreviated "T," appear in parentheses along with the appropriate page numbers; preceding each such reference is an abbreviation indicating the name of the work by Marx and/or Engels in which the quotation was originally found. For a list of these abbreviations, see the front of this volume, 4. There is a further premise implicit in this claim that Marx does not argue for: Human beings—their very nature—are shaped, by their beliefs about what it means to be a human being. That belief is discussed in more detail in the subsequent section in connection with Marx's assertion that humans are "species beings." 5. Peter W. Archibald, Marx and the Missing Link: "Human Nature" (Atlantic Highlands, N.JL: Humanities Press, 1989). 6. Thus the pursuit of private interest is said to animate economic activities in a capitalist society, Marx does not deny that. In a capitalist society, interests are usually the interests of separate persons. But Marx also points out that this feature of capitalist society is itself a social fact—a fact about how our society is organized, What is more, the pursuit of private interest is possible only in a social system where there is a market, with exchanges and prices set by supply and demand. 7. John McMurtry, Tfx Structure of'Marx's World-View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), chapter 1.

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8. Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1982), pp. 27-28. 9. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 141. 10. Missionaries in the Amazon rainforest report that the indigenous people get up at 3 A.M. and then sit and talk until about 9 before they go to work in their gardens. Often they interrupt their work to sit down for long conversations. Jose ArnaJot ("Chuint"), Lo Que los Achuar me han Ensefiado (What the Achuar have taught me) (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1992).

2 Against Individualism HUMAN BEINGS HAVE ALWAYS adapted to change by devising new ways of meeting their needs. As a consequence of these adaptations, human nature has changed. It is tempting to think that these changes are due entirely to the actions of individual persons and to read the Marxian claim that human beings produce themselves as meaning that human beings produce alterations in human nature individually. "Human beings create themselves" is often, read as, "Men and women, individually make themselves what they are." This is taken to mean that persons who are successful may rightfully take pride in their success because they themselves made that success happen. Conversely, persons who suffer are thought to have brought that suffering on themselves. In the United States this thesis is often expressed as, "Everyone can advance him- or herself." Whether someone is doing well or not depends only on his or her own enterprise, hard work, and, perhaps, luck. The social conditions under which we strive have no effect on the outcomes of our efforts. The idea that individual human beings make themselves who they are is often, referred to as "individualism.." Marx and Engels were quite critical of individualism. They devoted a good deal of energy to arguing that in a capitalist economy working people, the poor, and the unemployed suffer even though, they are as intelligent and work as hard as people who are much better off. Unemployment, according to Marx and Engels, is created by employers (as a class) to hold down wages. A certain level of poverty is encouraged for the same purposes. Hence they do not want the claim about human self-creation to be read as applying to individual human beings separately, making each person responsible for his or her existence as either a pauper or a captain, of industry. But their views, like those of many other theorists, are easily misunderstood because they use "individualism" in several senses. It is best to list 23

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Against Individualism

those different senses before summarizing Marx's and Engels' reasons for rejecting individualism. The Varieties of Individualism The term "individualism" is used in at least three quite different senses. It is often a label for value judgments about the rights and the importance of individual persons. I will call this normative individualism. It makes one of three assertions: 1. Every human being is valuable, has certain rights, and deserves respect from other human beings merely by virtue of being human. As such, each individual has the right to develop his or her abilities to the fullest That society is best which furthers individual self-development the most. 2. Individual persons are important in their own right and need not yield to the demands of the group—whatever the group may be in any given case. The idea that, on the contrary, the needs and interests of groups must take precedence over those of individuals is often referred to as "collectivism.." 3. Human beings, however dependent on family and social groups they were in their youth, are able to and therefore ought to emancipate themselves from the tutelage of their society. Each person should think for him- or herself, form his or her own life-plan and moral values and live by those. Individualism here asserts that human beings should be autonomous. But often individualism does not involve value judgments, It is instead a thesis about the basic building blocks of the social world. Individualism in such a case asserts that the social world is made up of individual persons and that all social groups and institutions are nothing but aggregates of such individual persons. Groups, nations, ethnic groups, corporations, states, bureaucracies, and so on are all composites of separate individuals. The characteristics of these different groups are simply the characteristics of the individuals that compose these groups. Strictly speaking, social entities such as governments, corporations, and universities have no characteristics of their own but only those of the individual persons that make up those institutions. The actions and vicissitudes of states, or of nations, are thus the acts or experiences of individuals. Histories of groups are no more than the llistories of its individual members. I will call this social individualism, because it asserts that social groups are nothing but aggregates of individuals. The opposing view is social collectivism, which holds that groups have identities and characteristics separate and distinct

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25

from those of the individuals that make up any group. The greatness of a nation depends not only on its leaders but also on the excellence of its institutions. The history of a nation is not only the history of its citizens and their leaders but the history of the exploits of an entire people, the accomplishments of its governments, the splendors of its culture. History records the deeds not only of individuals but also of collectives, such as states, cultures, and peoples. A third kind of individualism is methodological. That means that we do not worry about the building blocks of social life but only ask what a complete explanation of any historical event would look like. The methodological individualist believes that "all social phenomena . . . are in principle explicable in ways that involve only individuals."1 The opposite view, methodological collectivism, maintains that when we explain social events our explanations need to refer not only to the characteristics, actions, and beliefs of individuals but also to the social structures in which alone the actions of individuals are possible or make sense, Marx and Engels' Opposition to Individualism In a very famous passage, Marx tells us The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the 18th century,.,. The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [soda! animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. (G, T 222-223) This passage is often, read as Marx's rejection of individualism on the grounds that individuals always exist in social contexts. They are born into societies, nurtured and raised, in them, and, learn how to live as adults from other adults in their society. Individuals are always social; they always depend on their social context for their identity. The isolated individual is a pure fiction. But if that is Marx's intention here, he is attacking a view that no sane person would ever hold. Of course human beings can exist only in society. Of course children need the nurturing of family or other social groupings. (And so, of course, do many animals.) Of course humans raised in isolation or by animals turn out very strange. We all know that. On the most common interpretation of this passage, Marx offers a set of familiar platitudes as an argument against individualism. But no one, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo (the two great English economists on whose work Marx builds his own economics), would defend individualism as Marx characterizes it here. On, such a, reading of this passage, Marx would refute a view that no thoughtful person holds.

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At issue is not whether individuals exist "outside" of society—very few do, and those who do will not flourish. The issue is either whether groups have characteristics distinct from the characteristics of individuals or whether once individuals are born, nurtured, and educated in a particular society they can transcend the opinions, prejudices, and limited perspectives of their society of origin and become adults who think for themselves and see the world clearly, undistorted by the preconceptions of their native environment. Marx and Engels do not believe that humans are able to emancipate themselves fully from the ideas and practices of their native environment. They follow G. W. R HegeJ in their view that cultures are fully conscious of their particular characteristics only in retrospect, once they have ceased to innovate and flourish and look back on their earlier glory. Most of the time, the people in a particular culture cannot fully articulate their specific assumptions and outlooks, their particular ways of going about daily life or confronting the great events in human existence. And one cannot transcend ideas, customs, and values of which, one is not even aware. Marx and Engels, as much as anyone else, insisted that one should try to think for oneself, which means, in part, trying to be critical of the ideas that one grows up with and takes to be self-evident until one subjects them to critical examination. But they do not believe that one can emancipate oneself completely from the preconceptions of one's time and culture. They understand the complex ways in which the ideas or actions of any group of human beings are conditioned by the social practices and institutions of their society. Those connections between what one thinks and the social world in which one lives are often so complicated that they are intelligible only to the historian who studies that society later. Accordingly, in the preceding chapter we saw how Marx objected to theories that explain economic behavior and the functioning of capitalist economies exclusively in terms of the interests of private economic agents: Private interest is itself already interest shaped by a society. It can only be attained under conditions laid down by the society and with means the society provides. (G, 74)

The desires and interests of human beings cannot be taken at face value but are themselves shaped by the prevailing social structures. Here the debate is not over whether only individuals exist but over the correct explanation of economic behavior and, economic systems. The debate moves from normative or social to methodological individualism. Taking a historical view, Marx finds methodological individualism indefensible. Much social theory, then and now, explains what happens in a given society exclusively by the actions, beliefs, interests, and desires of individual persons. But Marx and Engels believe that in one's explanations of eco-

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27

nomic systems one cannot stop with the interests of individuals because those interests themselves have a history. This history is not just a history of individual persons but a history of institutions or large groups and their practices. One can understand why individuals have certain interests only if one studies the history of the social institutions in which those individuals live. The modern tendency to explain social processes in terms of individual interests and desires has its own history. Methodological individualism is a fairly recent development. It became popular only with the rise of capitalist society because that society attenuated the connections between the individual and, the social whole. Society is now organized differently from how it was organized in feudal times; individuals are more or less independent of the social context. The individual who is what he or she is, largely independent of his or her social setting, is a modern phenomenon. Human beings have not always thought of themselves as "individuals" and have therefore not always been individuals in the sense in which we who live in a capitalist society are individuals. The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family, and in the family expanded into the clan; then later in various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. Only in the 18th century, in "civil society/' do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. (G, T 222-223)

The term "civil society" refers to the capitalist economy, the sphere of private economic activity, competition, and pursuit of profit and wealth. In this particular social setting, individuals are indeed distinct from one another because each is in competition with the other. Family ties, social connections, and traditions are for the individual so many "means towards his private purposes" to be used and manipulated. They are no longer of the essence of what that person is. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds, etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. (G, T 222)

In earlier times the very identity of a person was constituted by social connections. Property ownership consisted of membership in a community. In those times methodological individualism—the belief that individuals, their characteristics, actions, and beliefs can yield complete explanations of social phenomena—would have made no sense whatsoever. We encounter here one example of the thesis that all of human history

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consists of a change in human nature or that human beings, in the course of their history, create themselves. Human nature changes with respect to the relative independence of persons from others, with respect to the extent to which any person is separate from other persons. In the past there was little social mobility, but today we can move from one social, group to another more or less at will. We form our own identity independently of family or social group. We are motivated by self-interest instead of by the demands of the group to which we belong. Individualism, in its various forms, is intelligible only against the background of our social system. The plausibility of methodological individualism is the product of our particular social order. It is not a universal truth but, on the contrary, one of the misconceptions that arises in a society like ours. Marx was quite explicit: Methodological individualism is false. Marx and Engels' Opposition to Collectivism Many theorists believe that if you reject individualism., you must endorse collectivism. They have therefore accused Marx of being a collectivist. We need to consider what that accusation amounts to. The Hegelians against whom Marx and Engels were arguing in the late 1840s tended to treat society as if it were a superperson. They were unabashed social collectivists. Following Hegel himself, they talked about the state as if it were a superperson that acted, decided, and so on. Since then others have talked about "the people" or "the nation" as if thev were such superpersonal subjects, and many politicians in the United States today talk about "the American people" in the same way. They say that "the American people" believe this, will not accept that, or will never agree to something else. By itself, social collectivism is probably no more interesting than social individualism. But it gains in importance because it seems to validate the corresponding normative view, namely, normative collectivism, the view that the whole—the social group, the nation, the army, the party, or even the family—counts for more than the individual who belongs to any such grouping. The political rhetoric that ascribes the characteristics of persons to social entities has, from the days of Hegel to the present, served regimes that suppress individuals and their freedoms. It is easy to see how that happens: If the "nation" asks me to go to war, what value can my pacifism, have or the need of my family for me in the face of the demand of the whole people? If the "state" demands something from me, how can I, a single individual, resist? To the extent that the political rhetoric that elevates social groups or institutions to the role of superpersons is accepted, the needs, beliefs, and moral stances of individuals pale by comparison to those of the state, the people, and humanity. Social col-

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lectivism often provides the political rhetoric for oppressive regimes that violate individual integrity. But Marx emphatically rejected collectivism in its normative sense; He believed normative individualism to be all-important. His persistent criticism of capitalism, was that it cripples people: The division of labor produces persons who can do only one thing (CI, T 409) rather than being fully developed in as many respects as possible. In an ideal society, the individual would be fully developed (G, T 287, 290; GI, T 160). Proletarians in a capitalist society lack freedom because their work is under the control of the owners of the workplace and because political power is in the hands of the owners of the means of production. (For a further discussion of that point, see Chapters 11 and 14.) In the good society, work will be under the control of everyone together. The workers will be free because they control the means of production and therefore their worklife (GI, T 191). They will have political freedom because they will run their lives democratically. The goal of the revolution that Marx and Engels work for and advocate is full individual human freedom (CIII, T 441). The wellbeing of individual persons, their full and all-sided development, their freedom are the highest values for Marx and Engels, Accordingly, they were also hostile to social collectivism because it frequently gives support to normative collectivism. Just as society itself produces human beings as human beings, so is society produced by them,.,. What is to be avoided above all is the reestablishing of "Society" as an abstraction vis a vis the individual. (EPM, T 86)

Unfortunately, Marx was not always sufficiently cautious in his expression. We already cited the following sentence in the preceding chapter; But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. (T 145}

Thus states the "Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach," one of a set of notes in which Marx first articulated his disagreements with Ludwig Feuerbach.2 The passage seems to tell us that a person is nothing but the product of social relations, and it has often been interpreted in that way. The individual vanishes as insignificant; social relations appear to be what matters. This is certainly an example of social collectivism. But most likely Marx overstated his position in these aphorisms, which received a more moderate formulation in the German Ideology; We do not mean it to be understood... that, for example, the rentier, the capitalist, etc. cease to be persons; but their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relations. (GI, T 199}

Marx's more carefully considered position seems to be the following: Every person is unique, and so, of course, is the capitalist. But in order to

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be a successful capitalist, one needs to be competitive, aggressive, and dedicated to the work of making money. Anyone without those personality traits will fail. Hence the particular personality traits found most often among capitalists are determined by the work they do, by the social setting in which they spend their lives. Methodological individualism ignores the fact that what it means to be an individual is essentially determined by the social setting in which persons live and that, for the same reason, being an individual person has had significantly different meanings throughout history. But it is nevertheless true that different individuals fill their social roles in different ways. Not all capitalists are indistinguishable from one another; in fact they vary enormously because they are such different persons with different histories and thus exemplify the general traits of capitalists in quite different ways, What Is the Position of Marx and Engels? But are Marx and Engels contradicting themselves here? Sometimes they reject individualism; that seems to commit them to collectivism. But at other times they reject collectivism just as vigorously. In order to understand what seems to be a glaring contradiction we need to return to the distinctions between the kinds of individualism and collectivism: Marx and Engels do reject social collectivism because they reject the Hegelian normative collectivism,. They do not believe that the social or political whole is more important than its individual members. They agree that social groups do not literally speak because they do not have bodies to speak with and, for the same reason, do not literally act in other ways. Societies and other groups are not superpersons; they do not have values or beliefs. They do not produce anything. To that extent Marx and Engels reject social collectivism.. But when we come to methodological individualism and collectivism— to the question of what explains the actions of individual persons—they side with the collectivists. They reject methodological individualism. The rejection of social collectivism (the idea that societies and groups are superpersons) does not imply that we cannot and, indeed, must not refer to groups to which individuals belong when we want to understand and. explain the actions of individuals. The actions of individuals are shaped by the society to which those individuals belong. If capitalists are particular kinds of persons because they are capitalists, then their typical patterns of action are shaped in part by the society in which they live, in which it is possible to be a capitalist. Thus, although it remains true that only individual persons can act in a literal sense, it is equally true and important that when it comes to explaining those actions we need to talk not only about individuals but also about the social settings that shape them.

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When Marx and Engels say, therefore, that we human beings create ourselves, the "we" does not refer to you and. me as distinct and separate individuals. Marx and Engels insisted that "individuals . . . do not make themselves" (GI, T 164). But neither are Marx and Engels treating social systems as superpersons. They are saying something much more modest: People's beliefs and actions are molded in significant ways by the practices characteristic of their societies. For instance, persons living in competitive societies that value individual initiative are likely to think of themselves in much more individualistic terms than persons living in a society where collective action and responsibility shape daily practices. But individuals are not Just the passive recipients of social influence. To a significant extent we can be aware of and consider critically the influences of society on each of us. The practices and institutions of any given society that shape its members are themselves maintained and altered in the day-to-day activities of these members. Often they do this without being aware of these consequences of their actions. At other times they set about deliberately to change institutions or practices. These actions are, of course, the actions of individuals, but they affect practices or institutions only if they are done by many individuals over long periods of time. In Chapters 4 and 5 we will discuss in much greater detail how social settings influence the actions and thoughts of individual persons. We will see that nothing said so far implies that human choices are necessitated by social contexts or that human beings are not free agents. Then, in Chapter 16, we will explore the conception of socialism in Marx and Engels, which gives an important place to the development of the individuality of all persons. Marx and Engels never reject normative individualism—the ethical appreciation of individual worth. They affirm without reservation that all individual persons are valuable in their own right. But first we need to say more about history, in the course of which human beings determine what a human life is. For Further Reading Shlomo Avineri, Tfc? Social and Political Thought of Karl Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), chapter 3. Notes 1. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5. 2. Feuerbach was a contemporary of Marx whose critiques of Hegel made a major impression on Marx in the early 1840s.

3 History THE WORD "HISTORY" REFERS both to past events and to our reconstruction of past events. In this chapter I discuss history in both senses. History as the Transformation of Human Nature Our conception of human nature affects our view of what the past was like. For the individualist, who hopes to explain human history by reference to the actions of individual persons, the history of groups becomes the history of its members and, more likely than not, that of its illustrious members. The individualist, therefore, finds in history primarily the acts of monarchs and conquerors, tyrants and individual saviors. History, as the reconstruction of the past, reports on the acts of individuals. If we adopt Marx's position that human beings jointly define what "human being" is, history begins to look quite different. History now comes to be, as Marx puts it, the process of human self-transformation. In the discussion of individualism in Chapter 2, we saw some examples of that process of self-transformation. Here are others: In the change from a feudal society to capitalism, people acquire an entirely different relation to their work. The limited commerce and the scant communications between the individual towns, the lack of population and the narrow needs did not allow of a higher division of labor, and therefore every man who wished to become a master [of some craft] had to become proficient in the whole of his craft. Thus there is found with medieval craftsmen an interest in their special work and in proficiency in it, which was capable of rising to a narrow arfisttc sense . . . Every medieval craftsman was completely absorbed in Ms work . . . to which he was subjected to a far greater extent than the modern worker whose work is a matter of indifference to him. (GI, T 178} 32

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The medieval craftsman "was completely absorbed in his work"; to the modern worker, work is "a matter of indifference." Today work is what you get paid for; if, in order to make a living, you need to do different work from what you have been doing, that really matters very little, as long as the pay is better at your new Job. The role that work plays in defining a person's identity is different under capitalism from what it was in a feudal society. Under capitalism, what one does is not a defining characteristic of a person as it had been under feudalism; the nature of being a person changed with the rise of capitalism. For medieval craftsmen to adopt the name of their occupation as their own name—smith, carpenter, wright, shoemaker, and so on—made sense because what they did—and most likely what their fathers did and their sons were going to do—was of central importance to them. What we do is not of comparable importance to us today. With capitalism, competition, and social mobility arises a new conception of the person as a separate individual, relatively independent of her or his social setting. In a feudal society, a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner always a commoner. ... The accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves, (GI, T199)

In a feudal society, personal identity consists to a significant extent of one's social station. Social mobility is thereby restricted, for a person could not change his or her social condition and still be the same person. Many generations have remained in the same circumstances because those conditions have defined who they were. In capitalist society, by contrast, the person becomes quite separate from his or her social or class position. If a tycoon goes bankrupt, he is still the same person. He may find the transition to working difficult, but his personal identity is unchanged. But what, then, is a person's identity? In past societies one's family, place of origin, trade were important determinants of personal identity. In a capitalist society, relations to family, tribe, and trade have been loosened. One can leave one's family, change one's residence and occupation, without being a different person. External facts about oneself no longer determine identity; identity has become "personal." It is no longer social to the extent that it once was. As a consequence, what one thinks about one's identity comes to be much more important, and identities can now be manufactured. Since they are no longer constrained by external, social facts that are not easily changed, such as who your father was or where you were born, identities tend to become commodities, made to order. Identities to that extent can be purchased, and money becomes important

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in determining who someone is. Under capitalism, money figures extensively in the production of identities: That which is for me through the medium of money—that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy)—that am f, the possessor of money.... I am stupid, but money is the real mind of all things and how then should its possessor be stupid? Besides, he can buy talented people for himself, and is he who has power over the talented not more talented than the talented? (EPM, T103-104}

In a capitalist society, where anything you might want you can buy, the identity of a person is determined by money. You can go to the plastic surgeon, the hairdresser, the public relations expert to turn you into a different person. New clothes, new interests, new fads, new ideas can easily be adopted and make you over into a person quite different from what you were only a short while ago. This process of identity formation is totally different from what persons in feudal societies experienced. The nature of moral codes has also changed: During the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie, the concepts freedom, equality, etc. [played the central role]. (GI, T173)

In a feudal society, war, fought with swords and shields, was the business of the upper classes. Political relations between king and nobles, between landowners and peasants were based on personal relations, rooted in relations between families. For the warlike, honor was a supreme value. In the relations between persons that rested in the relations between families, loyalty and steadfastness counted for a great deal In a highly mobile society like ours, where many of the relations are exchange relations between people who do not know each other at all, neither honor nor loyalty has an important place. But the transactions in the marketplace presuppose certain kinds of freedom and equality. Those conditions are therefore much more important than honor and loyalty. Needs are similarly subject to historical change: Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. (G, T 230) Discussions about basic human needs tend to be very abstract. In actuality, the need for food is always embedded in the concrete practices concerned with providing, preparing, and eating food. In any given setting, people are not simply hungry; they are hungry for particular foods prepared and served in specific ways. Travelers in foreign countries will go for a considerable time with little food rather than eat strange food under conditions that seem unappetizing to them. They are "not hungry." In similar ways needs for shelter or for love and companionship change sig-

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nificantly as shelter changes from caves to big-city apartments or as romantic love replaces the companionship in marriages arranged by families for dynastic reasons. The idea that human beings define themselves goes hand in hand with the idea that human beings are historical beings. This is not to say merely that human beings live under changing conditions but, as Marx said in The Poverty of Philosophy, that "all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature."1 Human beings are historical in that being human itself has a history and changes throughout history. That is, the concept of humanity changes. History consists of more than the deeds of individual persons, particularly of the high and mighty, of princes and of popes, or of the more complex process in which the circumstances surrounding the lives of men and women have changed. It is now the process in which human beings repeatedly define and redefine what human beings are. But as we saw before, this process of redefinition is not always deliberate. Human beings do not gather together periodically to consider what it has recently meant to be human and to change that definition, in the way in which fashion designers get together annually to redefine what it means to be well dressed, The redefinitions of human nature often flow indirectly from the changed ways in which people solve their concrete material problems and from the needs that arise as a consequence of the development of new techniques and the attendant changes in social organization. That is, human beings resolve the problems they find in their day-to-day activities and try to keep their ways of living unchanged. The consequences of these attempts to solve problems are rarely understood at the time; attempts to preserve existing conditions often have the opposite effect of bringing about changes in prevailing institutions. But at the same time, of course, as human beings think about particular ways of solving their problems, relevant considerations are, for instance, that certain measures would be "inhuman" or that certain solutions proposed are more "humane" than others. We do not consider solving the problem of poverty by executing or exiling all poor people because that is not in keeping with our idea of what it means to be a human being. (That is not to say that all the ways in which we actually deal with problems such as poverty are always humane.) The ends are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended, or ... they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended,2 Human beings transform what "human being" is not simply by engaging in philosophical discourse about the meaning of being human but more frequently in the course of solving their day-to-day problems. But as we think about daily problems, we also think about what solutions our

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humanity demands or forbids. The concrete problems are solved intentionally; the attendant redefinitions or transformations of human nature are often unintended. Writing History Implicit in the disagreement between Marx and the proponents of individualism is a disagreement about the study and writing of history. The methodological individualist insists that we must always try to explain events by providing accounts of individual persons and their behavior and thought. The Allied victory over Adolf Hitler in World War II is essentially the history of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin; the history of capitalism is the history of, say, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford. Events that cannot be accounted for by the actions of singular individuals are explained by natural conditions or disasters: geography and climate, droughts or typhoons, Marx counters that we cannot understand the contributions of individuals unless we also understand the effects of the socioeconomic system on them. History must study the acts of individuals as well as the effects of the social settings on these acts. It must also study the transformation of entire social systems. Marx and Engels do not think that the methodological individualist's history is false but that it is incomplete. Of course individual action accounts for a great deal in history. Individuals go about solving their everyday problems. They also make plans for the future and try to learn from their past. These lessons affect their plans, and all of that accounts for what human beings do. Often the problems to be solved result from geography and climate and natural disasters. All of this individual effort accounts for a great deal of what happens in history. We cannot write history without writing the history of the actions of individual persons. So far Marx and Engels' approach to historical explanation is no different from those offered by individualism. But the individualist stops here, whereas Marx and Engels want to raise additional questions. Speaking very generally, human beings have similar problems in different historical periods: They need to provide food and shelter for themselves and. their families. But in different periods they go about solving those problems in very different ways. In order to provide food for my children, I need money. If I need money today, I may try to find a job or to borrow money or to go and hold up a bank. For a feudal serf the options were quite different: There were no banks and hence borrowing from a bank or stealing from it were not options. Neither was hiring yourself out for work because the society did not have the institution of working for pay. Money did not play as important a role in economic life as it does today, so that the serf who needed more food probably did not primarily think, "I need more money." He might have tried to steal food or to work

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harder on his plot of land and spend less time working for the feudal lord that owned the land—if he could get away with that. In different historical settings the problem of getting more food looks different. Because people live under different social systems, their problems take different forms and so, therefore, do their attempted solutions. Hence if we want to understand history, we need not only understand what individual persons do but how the social system in which they live defines their problems and provides a limited range of options to solve those problems. Historical explanations are incomplete if they refer only to the forces of nature and to the actions of individuals. But that disagreement with an individualist approach to history brings with it further questions. Explanations of historical events require that we take account of different historical systems. But how do we identify social systems? Marx differentiates historical systems by the methods and. organization of production; Capitalism differs from feudalism because it uses other technology and the process of production is organized in other ways. But historians identify historical periods according to various criteria: They talk about the pagan and Christian eras if they think that people's actions at those times are best understood as an outgrowth of their religious beliefs and. practices. Others identify historical periods by the peoples who dominated them: Antiquity was dominated by the Greeks and then the Romans, feudalism by the Holy Roman Empire, the nineteenth century by Britain, and our present century by the United States. In each of these periods, historical explanation refers us to the dominant peoples and to the peculiar characteristics of their civilization. We will see in Chapter 5 how Marx divides history into periods, Other questions have to do with how we explain the rise and fall of these different civilizations or historical periods. There are two questions here: The first is a general question about the way in which we should frame explanations of historical events. Marx touches on that in his scattered remarks about the "dialectic." The second is about the specific causes that account for the rise and decay of civilizations. Marx's answer to that is contained in his doctrine that is usually referred to as historical materialism. I discuss the dialectic in the next chapter and historical materialism in the chapter after that. For Further Reading Vernon Venable, Human Nature: Tin* Marxian View (New York: Meridian Books, 1966), chapter 7,

Notes 1. Marx, TIte Poverty of Pkilosojjln/ (New York International Publishers, 1963), p. 147. 2. Frederick Engels, Lmiwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York; International Publishers, 1941), p. 48.

4 The Dialectic THE DIALECTIC IS THE MOST obscure aspect of Marx's and Engels' wri.ti.ngs. Many commentators either ignore it or reject it outright as an unfortunate hangO¥er from Marx's interest, when he was a very young man, in Hegel's philosophy. They read Marx as if he had never employed the dialectic. But Marx himself tells us that he did use a dialectical method, and, what is more, he is proud of it: "I openly avowed myself the pupil of this mighty thinker [Hegel]" (T 301). To be sure his dialectic is different from Hegel's in important ways. But Marx's thinking about history and historical explanation owes a great deal to Hegel. In order to understand Marx's dialectic, we need to look first at Hegel's. Hegel's Dialectic Hegel's dialectic served a specific philosophical purpose—namely, to reconcile religion, specifically Christianity, with science as it was rapidly developing. In the past basic questions about nature had been given religious answers: What is the origin of the universe? Answer: God created the heavens and the earth in six days. What keeps the planets in their precise orbits? Answer: God maintains the universe from moment to moment. What accounts for the different kinds of plants and animals? Answer: God created each kind. And so on. But the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo, and Isaac Newton provided an alternative answer to the question about the planets. This answer was based on observation and did not presuppose the existence of a deity. The origins of the earth and the multitude of species of plants and animals were soon to be accounted for in similarly secular terms. It was clear to Hegel that the harmony between the knowledge of nature and religion, which had lasted for a long time, was about to collapse. Science and Christianity were coming into conflict. 38

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Hegel's philosophy is dedicated to restoring this harmony between scientific knowledge and religion in addition to preserving the supremacy of the di¥ine in the universe. Science is incompatible with, the conception of a transcendent God who creates the world. In the scientific worldview, there is no room, for a God who created the universe. Natural science offers alternative explanations for the development of the moon and the stars, of plants and animals to those offered by various religions. In order to effect the reconciliation of science and religion, Hegel denies that God is the creator in a literal sense or is a God beyond this world. Instead, he considers all of creation a manifestation of God. The transcendent deities of traditional Christianity and Judaism are replaced by a sophisticated form of pantheism. God and the world are one. This God of Hegel's is not from eternity to eternity all-knowing and all-powerful but is in the process of becoming. The different sides of the infinitely complex divine nature are realized, one after the other, in the long history of the universe, Both nature and human history are stages in God's development, Hegel's God, instead of being an uncreated, creator, creates the world and, himself at the same time. God is coming into existence, and the different episodes in natural and human history are episodes in God's development, The process of God's development follows a complex pattern: 1. The world is not completely identical with God, but it is divine insofar as it is a manifestation of the divine. Thus any particular phase in the history of nature or of human beings is not simply God but a particular aspect of the divine nature, 2. The world changes, and, in its changes God develops, 3. The development proceeds through a complex set of stages. 4. Each stage represents one aspect of the divine nature, but insofar as it represents only one aspect, it is incomplete and hence defective. 5. Each stage is therefore replaced by a new stage that develops what was lacking in the preceding stage, 6. The stages, as they follow one another, are in opposition to each, other, for each provides what was lacking in the preceding one. 7. Successive stages are therefore at the same time opposed to one another and are not just similar but identical. This claim, more than any other, gives readers of Hegel trouble, as we shall see shortly. 8. Oppositions between two stages are resolved in a new stage that preserves what is worth preserving in the two preceding ones and surrenders what should be surrendered. This pattern of historical development is one of the chief characteristics of Hegel's dialectic. But the reconciliation between religion, and science, as Hegel proposes, still must deal with some major problems: To begin

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with, God is infinite; the world in which we live is finite, God is perfect; much in our world is defective. God is good, but there is a great deal of pain and evil and ugliness in our world. What is more, the explanations science offers are just as incompatible with a religion that tells us of a God indwelling in the world whose history is world history as they are with the more familiar religion, with its transcendent God. Any explanation of, say, the origin of the solar system or the evolution of Homo sapiens that explains those as acts of God are incompatible with science. Hegel's move from a transcendent, forever complete God to an indwelling God that is developing does not suffice to smoothe over the contradictions between science and religion. Here a second characteristic of the dialectic comes in. For Hegel, the dialectic is a kind of logic that is superior to the more familiar, formal logic. In formal logic statements such as "God created man in his own image" and "'Human beings evolved from monkeys" are contradictory because one asserts that God is the creator and the other asserts implicitly that God is not the creator. According to the rules of ordinary, formal logic only one of these statements can be true. But if Hegel is going to reconcile science and religion, he has to make room for acceptance of both of these statements. Hegel attempts to do that by regarding the scientific view of the world as one more perspective, one more stage in the history of God. It is important to understand the term "perspective" properly, Hegel does not merely assert that science has its point of view as does religion. (That is the sort of thing some so-called Creationists say today—that people have their different points of view and it is inappropriate to ask which one is true.) No, Hegel claims that these perspectives are both true though logically incompatible. Implicit in such a claim is a purely logical claim, namely, that contradictory statements-—"God created humans" and "God did not create humans"—can both be true under some conditions because they represent different perspectives on the same matter. The first statement comes out the religious perspective; the second out of the perspective of science. Hegel refers to this logical doctrine as "the identity of opposites." Such an explanation of the compatibility of religion and science is acceptable from the dialectical point of view (in Hegel's sense of dialectic) but not from the point of view of natural science. Looked at from the scientific point of view, the story of the creation is not an earlier scientific hypothesis, later replaced by the theory of evolution in biology and the big bang theory in cosmology. The story of creation is not science at all; it is a religious myth. Even less acceptable to the scientist would be the view that natural science is itself a limited view of the world that from, a different perspective, could be seen as one very partial manifestation of the divine history—for on that account science would be an imperfect version of Hegel's religious view of the universe.

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It still appears that natural science cannot be fitted into the dialectic because the explanations it gives are not dialectical. Science sticks strictly to formal logic where statements are either true or false. It does not accept the claim that contradictory statements may be reconciled once they are understood to be different perspectives on one and the same subject. Hegel recognized that difficulty and distinguished between the formal logical thinking of science and the dialectical thinking of speculative philosophy. In the interest of his reconciliation of the divine and science, Hegel claims that formal logic is, to be sure, the logic of science; but from the point of view of the whole—that is, from the divine point of view—we see that what science regards as distinct and irreconcilably contradictory perspectives are in fact only dialectical contradictions, imperfect views that in the future will be reconciled. The concept of contradiction is being redefined here. In formal logic a contradiction consists of two sentences that cannot both be true or both be false (at the same time, in the same respect) because one is the denial of the other. In the Hegelian dialectic, two contradictories may both be true because each, being only a one-sided view of divine reality, is only partially true anyway. Thus dialectic is, indeed, a logic different from formal logic and one that is, according to Hegel, superior to formal logic. In this way science is assigned its place in the grand philosophical view of the universe as a partial view of that universe. The Marxian Dialectic Marx rejects Hegel's claim that the world is no more than a manifestation of divine thought. In fact, he is hostile to religion. "Religion is the opium of the people" is one of his most famous statements.1 So whatever we might make of Marx's dialectic, we can be sure that it is not a religious one. Accordingly, most readers of Marx have described Hegel's dialectic as "idealist" and Marx's as "materialist" In this common understanding of Marx's views about dialectic, Hegel's dialectic is idealist because Hegel believes that the world is ultimately spiritual. Because it is divine, it cannot be anything else. But Marx, rejecting religion, is a "materialist"; he believes that ultimately reality is made of matter, inanimate and animate. Such interpretations rest on Marx's saying that Hegel's dialectic "is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell" (CI, T 302). This interpretation assumes that M,arx's dialectic is like the dialectic of Hegel in being a logic that is in competition with and superior to formal logic.2 But that is a mistake. Marx's dialectic is not a logic, The claim that dialectic is a logic superior to formal logic is not compatible with another claim that Marx often makes, namely, that he is a scientist and that his work does for the study of society what Newton's did for the study of physical nature. He explains in the preface to the first edition

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of Capital that like a physicist he is trying to discover "the natural laws of capitalist production . . . working with iron necessity" (T, 296). Unlike Hegel, Marx is not doing philosophy; his work is meant to be science. Even Hegel did not believe that one could tolerate contradictions in science. It is clear that Marx did not believe that either. If Marx is a scientist, he cannot use dialectic as a logic that supplants formal logic. But if we adhere to the common view of dialectic that it is, for Marx as well as for Hegel, a logic superior to formal logic, and if Marx as a scientist cannot use such a logic, however superior it may be outside of science, then Marx's use of dialectical turns of phrase would be of no significance. Hence it is often said that Marx sounds like a dialectician at times, but that this form of expression represents only his fondness for a certain kind of language that he acquired as a young man and was never quite willing to give up. In this view his use of dialectical turns of phrase has no substantive significance. One can ignore them and therefore also ignore Marx's assertion that he adopted some form of dialectic from Hegel. A number of interpreters of Marx take this position. They think that the less one takes Marx's apparently dialectical forms of expression seriously, the closer one comes to grasping what is of real value in his work. Such writers are likely to use the word "dialectical," if they use it at all, as a pretentious term to refer to reciprocal relations.3 They claim that things or institutions are "dialectically" related if each has some effect on the other. That, however, is not Marx's use of the term. Marx himself is reasonably explicit about what dialectic meant for him. It was for him not a logic that replaced the formal logic one uses in science, but it provided patterns of explanation for social science. Social science, like physics, is looking for laws of development But the laws of social science are different from those in physics. "The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry" (T, 301). Instead, social systems are more like natural organisms. Marx's social science "regards every historically developed social form, as in fluid movement, and. therefore takes into account its transient nature no less than its momentary existence" (T, 302). Marx thought that Hegel was the first to understand the complexities of explanations in social science. One needs both to provide explanations for the institutions of the society as they are today ("in its momentary existence") and to understand that they are transformations of earlier forms of these institutions ("as in fluid movement"). Historical Explanation In the voluminous notebooks for Capital that were published in the 1930s under the name of Grundrtsse ("basic plan"), Marx entered some sketchy

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comments about his method. Science, he believed, must construct models that explain observed phenomena. Model building involves extracting the most general features of a set of observed phenomena and showing how those general features account for the phenomena in the world around us. That is a familiar understanding of scientific procedure that few would quarrel with. In Capital Marx dearly tried to build such a model by beginning with very few concepts and assumptions and slowly adding more complications to the primitive model of a commodity-producing society until he had a model sufficiently complex to account for actually observed economic phenomena and for the behaviors of economic agents. If you build a model to explain your observations, Marx argues, your concepts will be drawn from what you have observed and what appears to you most suitable for describing and explaining the world you are observing. Constructing models is a slow and laborious process because it takes a long time to discover the crucial characteristics that must be represented in your model. At the beginning you take the most obvious features of the observed world and incorporate them in your model. But after a while you discover that what is observable is often not coherent: In order to explain the world as you observe it, your model must incorporate less obvious features of the world and sometimes even objects or events that you do not observe at all. The light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of the optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. , . . After the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered. (Cl, T 321, 323}

We do not observe directly the changing electrical potential along the optic nerve as it transmits visual stimuli from, the eye to the brain. But we need to include that electrical potential in our model in order to understand how we see objects. A complete explanation of what we perceive often includes objects and processes not observed directly. Only a considerable effort yields models that contain not only concepts of what is observable but also of what we cannot observe—the functioning of the optic nerve, the composition of the air we breathe, the movement of the earth around the sun even though the sun still appears to us to rise in the east and set in the west.4 When we come to building models in social science, we encounter the same difficulty. Again we need to explain what is observed by what is not at all observable or is much less obvious than what strikes the observer initially. For example, Marx points out that in ordinary commercial transactions, the value of a commodity appears as an intrinsic characteristic of the commodity. Of course its price will fluctuate with fluctuations in sup-

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ply and demand, but these fluctuations will be limited to a particular range—new cars will not sell for a dollar or candy bars for a million (except under extraordinary circumstances, such as hyperinflation). The prices will fluctuate in relation to the cost of producing a certain commodity, its value. But this value is not, as it ordinarily appears, an intrinsic characteristic of the commodity but depends on "the social character of men's labor" (CI, T 320).5 Commodities have value only under the specific conditions of a capitalist society, in which goods are produced for exchange and have value only if they are in fact exchanged. (We will return to this in Chapter 7.) The model we need to construct in order to understand prices and values must not only make use of such concepts as price and value but must in addition introduce the concepts of economic systems in general and of the capitalist system in particular. But building models in social science is more complex than building models in natural science. The capitalist system is intelligible only if we study it historically. We can appreciate the specific characteristics of capitalism only if we compare it with the system out of which it developed and that it replaced—feudalism. But that means that we need a model of feudalism as well and a description of the process of development in which capitalism developed out of and in opposition to feudalism. In our world it makes sense to think of capital as means of production—machines, factory buildings, tools. Since human production has always employed some sorts of instruments (even some animals use sticks to dig up grubs and ants, for instance) one might conclude that capital exists in all forms of society. But tools, sheds, and wagons are not capital under any circumstances. They become capital only in a certain social system in which some people own all the tools and productive resources and others own only their ability to work.6 A cotton jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold itself is money or sugar the price of sugar. (WLC, T 207)

We can see how objects become capital under certain social conditions only if we undertake some historical comparisons. We need to observe, for instance, that in different periods people solve apparently similar problems in different ways. Capitalists trying to increase their income have a number of options, such as introducing a new product, introducing new technologies, or lowering their production costs by cutting wages or moving their production to an area of the world that has lower wage costs. But all of these will require investing some new capital. In order to make more money in a capitalist society, you need more capital. Not so in a feudal society. In feudal societies the powerful, extracted wealth from the peasants who farmed their land. To get more income, the

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feudal lord needed more land. But he could not buy that land because land was not for sale. He could only conquer it by going to war. Hence feudal kings, princes, and knights tried to increase their resources by employing military power. More capital would not have been of much use because there was no land that new capital could have paid for, nor were there additional wage laborers waiting to be hired with this new capital.7 If we are to understand the reasons for the capitalists' strategies, we need, Marx believes, to understand the reasons for the very different strategies used by kings, popes, and princes in feudal systems. A complete understanding of capitalism requires not only a model of fully developed capitalist economies but an understanding of the history of the transformation of feudal into capitalist economic and social institutions. Dialectical Explanations In order to gain such a historical understanding of the antecedents of capitalism, we need some general ideas about the ways in which institutions change over the course of many years as well as how they maintain themselves in the midst of change or why they do not change faster. Here Marx leans heavily on some of Hegel's insights about the gradual transformations of institutions that are not brought about deliberately but are the consequences of the actions of individual persons or small groups in the process of trying to solve everyday problems'—hence Marx's open avowal of his use of the dialectic. The preceding chapters have provided the basic ideas of this dialectical understanding of the maintenance and /or change of institutions. On the one hand, we saw that Marx and Engels insist that human beings make their own history. The history of human beings is not made by institutions or God or some superindividual entities like economic systems, providence, destiny, or national character. It is made by human beings. I discussed at some length what Marx and Engels meant by that claim. On the other hand, we also saw that what human beings can do, at any particular moment, is limited by the institutions that emerged as a consequence of the choices and actions of previous generations and that structure the lives of the persons living. We have seen many examples of that: The choices of individual actors are limited by the tools and techniques of production available to them. We have seen in the preceding chapter how changes in the modes of production tend to bring about changes in the relation to one's work, changes in values, and changes not only in the identities of people but even of what personal identity consists. How do institutions come to be and change? The explanation must always consist of telling stories of what particular people did. How did early cities arise? Some people found a convenient harbor and built their

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houses there because they traded up and down the coast. Other cities grew up at convenient fords over a major river or in places where runaway serfs found relative security and work. In all of these different ways, because particular persons did particular things, cities came to be, and the people who lived in cities developed, their city ways and urban institutions. These new institutions were not set up deliberately. Serfs did not run away from their lord's manor in order to found cities or make them grow. That was an unintended consequence of their choice. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one intended.8 But why did their actions have these particular consequences rather than very different ones? After all, the movement front the countryside to the city continues into our time. In many developing countries, the mechanization of agriculture and the introduction of new seeds, fertilizers, and techniques reduces the need for agricultural laborers and therefore brings with it massive movements of the population from the countryside to the big cities. But these developments today do not give rise to flourishing cities but to large shantytowns that breed misery and disease. Contemporary urban migration does not make cities more splendid but less manageable, more dangerous, and unhealthful. Thus urbanization takes diverse forms and has diverse consequences according to social and economic context. A complete explanation of historical events thus must not stop with explanations of the actions of individuals and their consequences but must also include references to the institutional framework necessary for understanding why these individual actions have these particular consequences. Urbanization in late-twentieth-century Central or South America looks nothing like apparently similar movements in twelfth- or thirteenth-century Europe. In order to understand the differences between them we must understand the actions of individuals in their institutional contexts. Why do institutions have these particular effects on individuals and their actions? Institutions are not causes. They do not determine the actions of individuals in the ways in which the laws of nature determine the movements of planets, the behavior of chemical compounds, or the functioning of the human body. Our explanations of the ways in which institutions shape human actions and their outcomes cannot be causal explanations. That is an important implication of the claim, that "human beings make their own history." If institutions caused human actions, then human beings would not make their own history; institutions would make that history instead. Thus the claim that human beings make their own history commits Marx and Engels to explaining the impress of institutions on human action noncausally.9 They do this by applying a dialectical analysis to those relationships.

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We can consider institutions—cities, communities, feudalism or capitalism, schools, colleges, and so on—from two aspects. Institutions have a certain structure. Those are their most general and abstract characteristics. But such characteristics are always embodied in specific, concrete institutions—in this bank or this college. Concrete institutions, in their turn, consist of a lot of people doing particular sorts of jobs. An empty building with "Bank" inscribed over the entrance is not a bank. For that you need tellers, executives, owners, stockholders, depositors, government regulators, and a host of other people who all do their particular jobs in the complex institution we call "banks." A particular bank incorporates the abstract characteristic of banks by virtue of the ways in which the particular members of the institution do their Jobs. The structures of institutions affect the actions of individual people insofar as those people act out the roles that the structures define. Bankers make money by lending and borrowing money, by keeping careful track of money and putting it to work in a number of specified ways. They cannot, for instance, take the money of their depositors to the racetrack, but they can gamble on the future behavior of stocks and bonds. Banks do change, of course. Bankers today do what their predecessors would not have dreamed of doing. Over time institutions change because the individuals in them fulfill their roles in new ways and thus embody the abstract structure in new ways. Changes in institutions are also due to the actions of individuals as they do their jobs in new and different ways. Consider how baseball or football has changed in the past fifty years because players, coaches, owners, spectators all have changed their behavior in relation to one another and in relation to their sport. Big league football is very different from what it was, but it is still football. Modern multinational banks are very different institutions from the small-town bank of a century ago, but they are still banks. An institutional structure may be embodied in different concrete institutions. The historian must clarify how the actions of concrete individuals, as they go about solving their day-to-day problems, affect the structures of the institutions under which they live. These institutions shape the sorts of problems people have, limit the options available for solving any given problem,, and provide the vocabulary used to think about problems and their possible solutions. But there is a complex interrelation between institutions and individual actions: The institutions shape and limit what individuals can do, whereas the individual actions, in their turn, serve to maintain or alter these institutions. Consider an example: The beginnings of capitalist society are accompanied by the claim, made on behalf of the newly developing capitalist class that all human beings are free and equal. Thus John Locke, and after him Thomas Jefferson, begin their political theory with the assumption that "all men are created equal." But clearly that was not a truth about all

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human beings, since Greek slaves or feudal serfs were not in any intelligible sense "created equal," Instead, Marx sees this freedom, and equality as one aspect of the institutions peculiar to capitalism—a system of producing and exchanging commodities. The exchange of commodities in the capitalist marketplace takes place under the presupposition of equality and freedom. What is more, Equality and freedom are not only respected in exchange of exchange values, but the exchange of exchange values is the productive, the real basis of all equality and freedom.1"

Equality and freedom exist because we live in a commodity-producing and exchanging society. Capitalism is the precondition for equality and freedom. But only in a very simple and early stage of capitalism were all members of the society, all participants in the market, free and equal. This was a capitalism where the majority of the producers were economically independent of one another. They worked their own farms; their livelihood was under their control and did not depend on the actions of others. The main threat to their freedom and equality came from the king or the church: government. If they were protected against government infringements on their liberty, they were indeed free. For the independent producers, that was all the freedom they needed. For later generations of wageworkers, this freedom from, government interference was, often, important, but it was not sufficient to enable them to be free men and women. But capitalism developed. Its development was not haphazard but depended on the "latent contradictions" of the market institutions that are typical of capitalism (CI, 86-87). Among the original individual capitalist farmers, some accumulated considerable wealth. They managed to acquire more land. In order to use that land, they needed to hire agricultural workers. Others invested their new wealth in early pottery or textile factories. In order for those to produce, their owners hired factory workers. All of these workers were economically dependent for their jobs, and thus their livelihoods, on their employers. Now, on the one hand, the worker and the capitalist as they struck their bargains in the labor market were still both free and equal. Their bargain, was not constrained by government interference; they were not forced to hire or to get hired. They were also equal because the market sets the same prices for everyone. The king of England or the president of the United States does not get a better price than the lowest of the low. The market is no respecter of persons. But on the other hand we must recognize that the worker's economic situation places him under constraints unknown to the capitalist. Unlike the capitalist, the worker is not economically independent of others. He is not self-sufficient but needs the capitalist to give him a job before he can

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make any money to stay alive. The worker needs work in order to buy food and pay rent. He is thus under considerable economic pressure to accept the bargain the employer offers. Once employed, he needs to hold onto the job and thus has little recourse if the employer wants him to work faster and longer hours or even wants to cut his pay. In this perspective it certainly looks as if employer and worker are not equal. The worker's freedom is severely limited by his economic condition. The conflict—Marx would say (somewhat incautiously, it turns out) "contradiction"—between the freedom and equality, on the one hand, and the unfreedom and inequality, on the other, are different developments of the same set of institutions: Capitalism begins with participants in the market being free and equal—but in a very restricted sense of "freedom" and "equality." "Freedom" refers to absence of government restraint, "equality" to the fact that social privilege does not serve to secure better prices in the market As capitalist institutions develop, there come into existence different classes of people, those who have a great deal of economic power and. those who have very little. In that situation, it is implausible to claim that workers and employers are equal or that workers are as free as their employers. Capitalism now takes on a new form, but it is still capitalism,. What is more, the changes are, in an intelligible sense, consequences of the structure of capitalism. Institutions, we see, develop by taking on different forms (analogous to the way in which frogs begin their life as eggs, then tarn into tadpoles and then into frogs), and these different forms may well be at odds with each other. In earlier forms of capitalism, where exchanges are mostly between persons who are economically independent of each other, there are genuine freedom and equality. Under a more developed capitalism, different classes of people come into existence. Transactions are still free and equal in the limited sense indicated, but since workers are economically dependent on the members of the employing class, freedom and equality in a more generous sense no longer exist. Capitalist economies now experience conflicts unknown before, not only conflicts between employers and workers but also conflicts between the independent producers of the earlier capitalist era and the much larger productive units of more developed capitalism. These earlier producers form a new class fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of the bourgeoisie. . . . [They] are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition. (CM, T 493) Those conflicts, Marx thinks, are productive. They are intellectually productive because they show us, for instance, that the original understanding of freedom and equality in our example is excessively narrow and that what we want is freedom and equality in a much broader sense.

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But they are also historically productive because they give rise to the struggle for a larger freedom and equality in the form, for instance, of a demand for universal suffrage (a struggle that is not yet completed in the United States because the rules laid down by the Voting Rights Acts of 1964 are still being evaded by local jurisdictions). As a consequence of such struggles, capitalism continues to develop. Only individuals act, but their actions are constrained by the institutions under which they live. These institutions are not the causes of individual actions, but they do set certain limits on what most people will do most of the time. But these institutions also change. We have seen many instances of that. What makes those institutions change? Marx is committed to answering that question again by referring us to the actions of individuals. At the same time, though, he denies that institutional change is the intended effect of human actions. On the contrary, many institutional changes result without anyone's intending those changes or even liking them when they come about. People may pursue fairly concrete goals and only afterward, often quite a bit later, do they realize that those particular actions had further consequences that they did not originally intend and that they do not welcome. What those further, unintended consequences are can only be understood when we look to the structure of the ruling institution of any given historical period. This interplay between individual actions and the institutions that form the framework for individual acti.cn is what Marx means by dialectic. In this dialectic the unintended consequences of individual actions produce changes in the institutional framework as circumscribed by that framework itself. Thus historical institutions change. The scattered comments Marx makes about the method of the social sciences are too fragmentary to constitute a complete theory of social science. But given the fairly chaotic state of theory in social science, Marx's observations deserve to be taken more seriously than they usually are.11 We will be able to develop in the next chapter what we have learned in this one when we consider Marx's main theory of history, historical materialism.. For Further Reading Tony Smith, Dialectical Social Theory and Us Critics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) and Daniel Little, Tfw Scientific Marx (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Notes 1. But rarely does anyone cite the entire passage, which is much more sympathetic to religion and to religious persons than is its final sentence quoted in isolation. The entire passage reads as follows:

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Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness and self-awareness as long as he has not found himself or lost himself again,,,. Religion is the general theory of the world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form.... Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (T 54)

2. Most recently Bertell Oilman, Dialectical Investigations (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. John McMurtry, T!« Structure of Marx's, World-View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 66, 4. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967)/ p. 316, 5. It is not the specific value of a particular commodity that depends on the "social character of men's labor" but the very existence of value itself. Commodities have value—that is, a range within which their prices fluctuate—only where there are prices established by a market Only in a society where markets are in constant use and where labor is itself a commodity can labor itself have value. Value of labor exists only under very specific social conditions, 6. Marx, Grundrisse (Frankfurt; Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.}, p. 169, 7. Robert Brenner, "The Social Basis of Economic Development," in John Roemer, ed,. Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 22-53. 8. Mttfx-Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow; Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 395. 9. This may well appear to be a controversial, claim because many philosophers believe that all explanations are causal. For a different view of explanations, see Milton Fisk, The State and Ju&tice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 10. Marx, Grundrisse, p, 156, 11. Much of the responsibility for this neglect of Marxian dialectic falls on the philosophers who are excessively anxious to conform to the current, practices of actually existing social science. They would do a more' adequate job of discharging their responsibility as philosophers if they managed to be more critical of the practices of social science.

5 Historical Materialism AS REVOLUTIONARIES, MARX and Engels wanted to bring about historical change. That motivated their scholarly interest in understanding the ways in which social change comes about But change cannot be understood unless one also understands what forces maintain existing conditions and what forces resist change. Why, one may ask, is there not more change than occurs already? One can give a number of different kinds of answers to that question; One can talk about human nature or about universal laws of history or economics. But Marx had learned from Hegel to use the concept of what we would call "social structures." These are social systems that have the capacity to maintain themselves by adjusting when external forces threaten to disrupt them. Such systems are complex wholes that are able to maintain a certain normal state, A simple example of a mechanical selfmaintaining system is a ball attached to a post by a rubber band. Kick the ball and it will return to its original place but not without a number of oscillations, back and forth. Other examples of mechanical self-regulating systems are heating systems with thermostats that maintain a certain set temperature. The human body is another, more complex self-regulating system. In similar ways social systems are thought to maintain themselves by adjusting to changes brought about by war, natural disaster, fluctuations in populations or the weather, new inventions, and so on. At times Marx refers to such social systems as "organic systems" in clear analogy to human bodies.1 Many historians look at history as the history of these social structures. But there are serious disagreements about what sorts of structures are fundamental in history. Some regard structures as merely self-adjusting systems that exist indefinitely unless destroyed by some major external catastrophe. Others, and Marx and Engels are among those, believe that the capacity of historical systems to adjust to changes is limited, and 52

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therefore so are their life spans. Social structures may last for long periods, but sooner or later they are replaced by other structures. The dialectical explanations examined in the preceding chapter are examples of the process of development and replacement of historical systems. In response to changing conditions, human beings change their ways of solving everyday problems. Those small changes eventually produce changes in the social system. But each system has limited capacity for change. At a certain point, changes transform a given social system into a new and quite different one. Human history is thus a sequence of different social systems. But that view of history as displaying a series of different structures only raises new questions; What are the decisive characteristics of different structures? How do they maintain themselves? And how do they change? In addition we want to know to what extent forces for change are generated by the structures themselves and to what extent their change or their maintenance is due to forces and events outside the structure. As political actors, Marx and Engels also want to know, of course, to what extent changes in structures are the result of deliberate human effort or whether they are all the effect of forces not under human control. If we think that human action has a significant effect, we want to know to what extent historical changes are the effect of deliberate action that aims at change or whether historical changes in structures are mainly the unexpected consequences of actions that had different and/or more specific goals. Marx and Engels had definite answers to most of these questions. It is not clear from their writings to what extent they believed that change results from intentional actions and to what extent they thought that it was an unintended consequence of actions. Marx summarized their views in the following passage: In. the social production of their life, human beings enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production..,. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. (T 4—5)

Elsewhere Marx summarizes this paragraph less forbiddingly:

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Historical Materialism. In acquiring new productive forces, men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing their way of earning their living, they change all their social relations.2

History, Marx tells us, consists of different modes of production, the different structures that dominate different periods of human history. Modes of production differ from each other by having different "forces of production" as well as different "relations of production." By forces of production he means, at least, land, raw materials, tools, buildings. In agriculture forces of production are land and cattle, tools like plows, farm buildings, and so on. In factory production they would be factories, machines, trucks, and railroads for transportation. But clearly nothing gets produced unless someone is doing the producing. Someone plows and reaps, milks and slaughters cattle. Someone tends machines and. builds them in the first place. Thus work performed by human beings is an important force of production. Whether or not Marx includes the organization of work, for example, the particular kind, of division of labor in use among the forces of production, is a matter of controversy,3 "Relations of production" refer to the ownership of land and machines, the control, of work, and who profits. Sometimes Marx, puts the emphasis most clearly on the question of who profits, as when he writes that what really matters about relations of production is "how surplus is pumped out of the producers."4 At other times relations of ownership of tools, land, machines, and so on seem to be central. The connection between relations of ownership and "pumping out of surplus" is discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. Marx and Engels believe that the study of history allows us to frame some general hypotheses about what makes for the stability of these structures over long periods of time and what, at other times, makes for their collapse and replacement by other structures. Both when accounting for stability and when looking to explain the replacement of one structure by another, the passage cited tells us that we must pay attention to the relations among forces and relations of prod.ucti.on. Social structures remain stable and can maintain themselves in the face of serious opposition as long as the relations of production are in some sort of harmony with the forces of production-—"correspond" is the term, used in the passage quoted—so that the forces of production can continue to develop. Here Marx and Engels lean on an obvious observation that in the past few thousand years of human history productivity has tended to increase: Agriculture has gradually improved techniques for growing food; we have learned to make human efforts more productive so that far less work produces far more goods. As long as the relations of production—who owns what and who has power over what goods and or persons, and who gets a large share of the social product and who gets very little—

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do not get in the way of the improvement of the forces of production, a social structure will tend to be stable. But once it appears that the relations of production inhibit improYements in the forces of production, conflict ensues, and eventually revolutions occur that replace what have become obsolete social structures or modes of production by newer and more suitable ones. Forces and Relations of Production Relations of production "correspond" to the forces of production. The general claim being made here is clear: The way in which the production process is organized changes in response to the means by which production is carried on. New technologies, for instance, require new work organizations: These social relations into which the producers enter with one another ... will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production. With the invention of a new instrument of warfare, firearms, the whole internal organization of the army necessarily changed; the relationships within which individuals can constitute an army and act as an army were transformed and the relations of different armies to one another also changed. Thus the social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, change... with the change and development of the material means of production. (WLC, T 207)

Medieval armies fought hand to hand with sword and halberd, requiring a close formation in which soldier stood, close to soldier and all moved in one body. Such a military formation is the worst possible once people start shooting at each other from a distance. Firearms lead to trench warfare, a form that would have been impossible when wars were fought with swords. This seems to be a clear example of the way in which changing tools (weapons in this case) changed the organization of an activity. In analogous fashion, Marx and Engels claim, the transformation of the tools in the production process bring about different organizations of that process. There is a significant difference, though, between the way in which work or military organizations are organized and the relations of production, namely the rights of ownership and control. The above example shows how the forces of production affect what Marx often calls "the technical relations of production," that is, the way the work process is organized. But those technical relations of production must be distinguished from, the relations of ownership and thus from the rules determining who gets to keep what of the total product of this work process. Capitalist relations of production have remained the same, whereas the

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technical relations of production have changed very significantly since the 1700s. The changes in military tactics and. the organization of military formations in response to innovations in weapons do not show that the development of the forces of production, of technology and the organization of work, will bring about change in property relations. The evidence for that claim is much less specific: It is often argued that the more complex and highly developed technology of industrial capitalism was not compatible with slave labor because slaves, being always coerced, were unwilling workers and because education was deliberately withheld from them.5 Hence the improvement of productive technology led to a replacement of slavery. But there is historical, evidence that slaves performed quite well as industrial workers,6 What is more, the observation that industrial technology requires a free work force does not account for the transition from, the slavery of ancient Rome to medieval feudalism.. It is simply implausible that the rise of feudalism was the result of a rise in productivity. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels are quite explicit that change in the forces determines change in the relations of production. The beginning of changes in relations of production always comes with the development of the productive forces. This thesis is often referred to as the "primacy of the forces over the relations of production." Conversely, relations of production promote the development of forces at some times, while at others they retard the further development of forces of production. When, that begins to happen, Marx and Engels believe, the relations of production are due for replacement That much is clear. But this thesis of the primacy of forces of production is not only poorly supported by evidence, its more precise interpretation is also controversial. The dominant interpretation is, and has been for a long time, that historical materialism enunciates a number of causal laws that account for social change by establishing necessary conn.ecti.ons between changes in forces of production and the relations of production. That interpretation is plausible; there are many passages in the writings of Marx and. Engels that seem to support it. Most readers of Marx and Engels, moreover, take the generalizations enunciated by historical materialism as universal laws that govern historical development everywhere. But later in life M,arx and Engels were quite emphatic that the "historical inevitability" of this process is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe..,. Thus the analysis given, in Capital does not provide any arguments for or against the viability of the village community [in Russia].7

In the '1870s Marx and Engels began to think that a direct transition to socialism from the traditional Russian village communities might be possible. Marx was sufficiently interested in these Russian institutions, so very different from, what existed in Western Europe, that he learned Russian in

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order to be able to read the relevant source material. He seemed quite certain that the "laws" of development of historical materialism applied only to countries in Western Europe that were similar in their history to England, which provided the empirical material on which Marx based these generalizations.8 But there are a number serious difficulties in that understanding of historical materialism, even in this very restricted form. The most notorious of them is that this causal account of historical change seems determinist: It makes it seem that the changes in history, such as the change from feudalism to capitalism, are produced by impersonal forces, namely the development of human productive capacity without any significant contribution by the efforts of individual persons or groups. Historical materialism seems to slight the contribution of human beings to social change. But if that is what Marx and Engels believed, why does the Communist Manifesto begin with the line, "The history of all hitherto known societies is the history of class struggle" (T, 473)? Whatever happened there to the development of the forces of production? Marx and Engels seem to have two different views of the course of historical change: One stresses the actions of human beings in struggling against their exploiters; the other talks about impersonal processes such as the effect that developing productivity has on social relations. The apparently determinist character of historical materialism is a real embarrassment also insofar as Mara and Engels, as revolutionaries, exhort their readers to political action. There is no point in telling the "workers of the world" to unite if their uniting has no effect on historical change. If human action, organized human action, does not contribute to historical change, why did Marx and Engels tell their readers again and again that they must organize, and why did they themselves spend a significant amount of time building actual organizations? A third difficulty arises once we look closely at the more specific historical sketches that occur throughout Marx's writings. We find any number of different explanations, for instance, of the transition from feudalism to capitalism that either mention causes not included in historical materialism or reverse the order of forces and relations of production asserted by historical materialism, The theory of historical materialism ascribes social change primarily to the development of productive resources. But in his actual accounts of historical change from feudalism to capitalism, Marx sometimes insists that much of social change is brought about by brute force. The divergence of forces and relations of production does not figure in this story: They all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode,... Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with, a new one. (Q, T 436)

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In this passage political power is an important lever of change in the relations of production. Tt is not clear from the context whether Marx offers that as an alternative to the explanation of historical change involving forces and relations of production or whether Marx thinks that political force is used when the relations of forces and relations of production have reached an impasse. But at any rate there are other causal factors besides the development of forces of production. The passage seems to suggest that the forces/ relations of production explanation of historical change is at least incomplete, if not entirely mistaken. While historical materialism asserts the primacy of the forces of production, Marx's actual explanatory sketches often reverse that order and suggest that what changes first are the relations of production, and only afterward is there a change in the forces themselves. The transition to capitalism from feudalism, for instance, was complex and had many component processes; the transformation of agricultural rents from labor rent— where peasants worked for the landlord for free in exchange for using Ms land—to money rent; the introduction of large-scale sheep farming to replace small farms; the expansion of trade within the country and between countries; the expanded role played by money; the plunder of the New World after 1492 and the wealth that it brought into Europe; and so on. It is not at all clear that all of these are instances of improving the forces of production. An important component in the transition to capitalism, was the replacement of the craft guilds and their workshops that produced tools, clothing, and such for medieval consumers by what Marx and his contemporaries called "manufacture." These were the precursors of today's factories where many persons worked under one roof. In this earliest form of the factory, the workers still did the same work they had done before in their own workshops. But once these previously independent workers were assembled together, after a while a new division of labor was introduced where each person did only one of the many jobs he had done before in order to produce a finished product. This new division of labor significantly improved the productivity of these early manufacturing establishments. Marx comments The handicraft period bequeathed us the great inventions of the compass, of gun-powder, of type printing and, of the automatic clock. But on the whole machinery played that subordinate part which Adam Smith assigns to it in comparison with the division of labor. (T, 391)

The passage explains the increase in productivity achieved in the period of manufacture not by the introduction of new machinery, new forces of production, but by the introduction of two factors; a new relation between employer and employee and the division of labor.

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The medieval artisan in his workshop was controlled by the guild, but he was independent and owned his tools and raw materials. The worker in the early factory was neither independent nor the owner of the means of production—he had become a very early version of the capitalist worker. His productivity was greater than it was when he was still in his workshop, but that was because of the new division of labor, not because of different tools, and that new division of labor was brought about by changed relations of production (new relations of ownership). The primacy of forces of production asserted by historical materialism is here clearly contradicted in Marx's own analysis of actual historical processes. There are a range of similar examples.9 We must conclude that (1) the historical evidence for the primacy of the forces of production and hence for historical materialism is scanty; (2) even Marx and Engels limited its range of applicability in their later years; and (3) Marx himself realized that a good deal of historical change was due not to the improvement in the forces of production but to changes in the relations of production. The conclusion is inescapable: The primacy of forces over relations of production of historical materialism is plausible only under restricted historical conditions. Even under those conditions there are many exceptions and counterexamples. But such a limited generalization to which there are many exceptions is a very poor candidate for a causal hypothesis. Whatever explanatory power historical materialism may have, it cannot give causal explanations. Historical materialism, is not determinist That is fully consistent with the preceding chapters. We saw in Chapter 2 that Marx insists that only human beings act. What is society, whatever its form may be? The product of men's reciprocal action. Are men free to choose this or that form of society? By no means. (T, 136}

The social systems we spoke of earlier, we must always remember, are the creations of human beings who forge relations to one another. Those relations are not freely chosen but are determined largely by the social structures that any of us are born into. We are not free to choose our forces of production because "every productive force is an acquired force, the product of former activity" (T, 137). We cannot help but to produce with the tools and technology that our forebears left us and that we find when we first start producing ourselves. Similarly, the relations of production under which we work are inherited—they are the "product of the preceding generation" (T, 137). But that does not take away that the "social history of men is never anything but the history of their individual development" (T, 137). It is human beings who make their history, as we recall Marx said elsewhere. As we saw in the preceding chapter, however, the actions of individuals are constrained by the institutions that dominate their lives, and those insti-

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tutions themselves change because individuals change the ways in which they perform their roles. The relation, between individuals and the institutions is not causal but dialectical. Individual actions, the individual's performance of her or his role, are particular instances of the structure of the dominant institutions. The banker exemplifi.es the structure of banking, as do the other employees and patrons and owners of the bank. As they perform their roles in different ways, the structures they exemplify change. Sometimes the actions of individuals consist of innovating tools and other forces of production; sometimes they consist of changing ownership or control relations, as happened in the case of manufacture. If we see the complex transformations of human institutions as the result of the choices of individuals and small groups, we cannot seriously claim that all historical change is the result of changes in the forces of production. But if we do not refer to forces or relations of production to explain why certain changes took place, what is the role of historical materialism in the study of history? Historical materialism provides a general overview of the ways in which institutions change. Historical change is complex, and each particular historical change may well require that its own story be told in great detail. Most of these stories are a bit different from all the others. But there are some general patterns, and historical materialism gives a broad outline of these different stories. It tells us: Persons do their particular job the way they learned to do it. They use the tools and follow the rules that they inherited from their elders. But then someone comes up with a way of doing the job differently and, they think, better. A tool is modified so that it works better; a new technique is invented; work is reorganized to make better use of the available time and energy. If the changes prove indeed to be improvements, everyone will adopt them. Thus the institution that defines their activities is altered, In the early years of feudalism, productivity was very low. If some people, the knights and their retainers, were going to eat without themselves farming, they needed to keep tight control over the people who did farm. They compelled their farmers to stay on their land. Farmers became serfs. But that system developed in the slow ways already described. Productivity rose, even if not spectacularly. After a while some farmers retained a surplus, even after paying rent to their landowners. Some farmers may have hired others to farm for them. Others put their modest surpluses into trade. All of these are still feudal enterprises, but the new ways of producing strained at the limits of the feudal order. The farmers who hired agricultural laborers and the city merchants who traded internationally or bankrolled the military exploits of princes and kings were looking for less regulation of their economic activity. They were moving in the direction of very different relations of production; They were moving toward capitalist relations of production. Here relations of production

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often change as a result of innovation in the forces of production. But sometimes also, as we saw Marx recognize, the order is reversed, and change begins with a change in the relations of production. This is the story historical materialism tells if we do not read it as a causal theory. Historical materialism, as a causal theory, has been central to the version of Marxism that has dominated much of the tradition for the past hundred years. It seemed to give solid support to the predictions for which Marxism was famous, that capitalism was going to collapse and be replaced by socialism. Once we reject that reading, historical materialism is not nearly as important a theory. If we accept this more limited role for historical materialism, will we also need to give up all the predictions that have inspired Marxists with hopes and their enemies with, fear and rage? I discuss that in Chapter 11. Why Take Historical Materialism Seriously? Once stripped of its causal, pretensions, historical materialism remains important, Marx understands historical change as processes in which structures are transformed. Whatever interests us in history—the Crusades, the renewal of ancient learning, the age of discoveries, the new science, wars, or the nation-state—we must always remember that these occurrences take place against the background of a complex system of interrelated events, practices, and conflicts. What identifies structures and what maintains or changes them is a matter of considerable controversy, Historical materialism is interesting because it stresses the importance of the economic concerns of individuals both in the identifications of structure (or different "modes of production") and in understanding why and how they change. Of central importance are the level of productivity, on the one hand, and the prevailing property relations—the ways in which the powerful live off the efforts of those who are less powerful—on the other. Unless one understands the ways in which changes in productivity, changes in the ways in which the social surplus is distributed, stand in the background of, say, the great cathedrals or the new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one does not have a complete understanding of these phenomena. Historical materialism does not claim that economic concerns are the causes of individual actions. Often actions are caused by religious beliefs, by attachment to social or political tradition, and so on. But as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, Marx and Engels believe firmly that if we want to understand why people hold certain beliefs or remain attached to certain traditions, we need to understand the ways in which they go about meeting their daily needs and what sorts of problems they perceive in meeting those needs and in what ways they try to ameliorate their daily

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economic conditions. Historical materialism does not assert the causal primacy of economics, but it insists that the causal role of religion or other beliefs can best be explained by reference to peoples' economic lives, that is, by reference to the ways in which they meet their daily needs and the changes to which those economic conditions are subject. But the term "economic" needs some clarification. We commonly use it to refer to the sorts of issues discussed in economics: markets, supply and demand, firms and their internal organization, money, finance, banks, and the like. But historical materialism uses the term "economic" in a much more generous form: to refer to whatever is involved when people at a particular time and place meet their ordinary needs for food, shelter, companionship, and whatever else they consider to be essential for a good life, "In changing their way of earning their living,... [human beings] change all their social relations," Marx wrote, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter. In different cultures these "economic" concerns will be quite different; only in ours do they involve, for instance, banks and international finance. The management of slaves or propitiating the deities of fertility and rain or the internal workings of a village community were essential to economics at different times. It is economics in this very flexible sense, with different meanings in different historical periods, that Marx and Engels regard as basic to an understanding of human actions. For Further Reading Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), chapters 5 and 6.

Notes 1. Marx, Grundrisse (Frankfurt: Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.}, p. 189, 2. Marx, Ttie Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 109. 3. See Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). 4. Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 791. 5. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 91. 6. R, W. Fogel and S, L. Engerman, Time on the Cross; The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974). 7. Marx-Engels: Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 320. 8. See also ibid., pp. 292 and 293; Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the "Peripheries of Capitalism" (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983). 9. See Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),

6 Materialism and Idealism WE HAVE SEEN WHAT MARX thought about the most general patterns of historical change. We now need to take up the second part of this passage, cited at the beginning of the previous chapter, where Marx talks about the role of ideas in historical change. Marx was a revolutionary, but he was also a social scientist, a philosopher, a polemicist, and pamphleteer. He spent most of his life reading and writing. For him, the question of what role ideas play in historical change was of considerable importance. His answer in this passage is that the economic structure of society, [is] the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.... It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (T, 5)

The interpretation of this and parallel passages has occasioned much controversy. The doctrine that Marx and Engels enunciate here is called "materialism," but what, precisely, that materialism asserts has often been misunderstood. In the writings of Marx and Engels, the doctrine of materialism rejects idealism. But the term "idealism" refers to several claims. The first tells us that the universe is spiritual. It believes that the universe, including the physical universe, is merely the manifestation of God, whose essence is spiritual. In a second sense, idealism asserts that only minds are real and that therefore material objects—the plains, mountains, and rivers on the surface of the earth, for instance—are only appearances of a different, exclusively mental reality. In its third sense, idealism asserts that ideas alone can move people to action and determine what they will do. A corollary of that sense of idealism, is that we can frequently explain what people do exclusively by reference to their beliefs. An example of idealism in this last sense is a book whose title proclaims that "underdevelopment is a 63

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state of mind," that the pervasive poverty, poor health, and education that characterize developing countries can be changed merely by changing the attitudes of people in those countries.1 Marx and Engels reject idealism in these three senses. They deny that reality is spiritual because they are essentially atheists. They deny that reality is exclusively mental. But they also deny that reality is exclusively material. Engels rejects that view explicitly as a "shallow and vulgarized form" of materialism.2 They deny, finally, that we only need to change people's ideas in order to make this a better world. They argue this at great length in the German Ideology (GI, T 149ff.). We saw the reasons for this in the preceding chapter: Human beings find themselves at any moment subject to prevailing institutional structures. These institutions present specific problems and allow a limited range of options for their solution. Institutional, structures limit the problems we encounter as well as the available solutions. Changing people's ideas—education—will have an effect if the ideas have to do with the sorts of actions possible in the current situation. But since the dominant institutions in any given situation allow only certain options, the effect of education on social change is also limited. For any social or political change beyond those options, the prevailing institutions themselves need to be changed. Education alone will be ineffective. Examples are contemporary campaigns to save the environment. Educational campaigns to save the rain forest assume that the rain forest is being cut down, bit by bit, by people who do not understand the damage they are doing. Once they have been educated, it is thought, they will desist. But this strategy ignores the fact that economic pressures due to complex economic institutions move people to cut down the trees either for profit or to make new land available for agriculture. These pressures are not going to abate once people know that cutting down the rain forest causes considerable damage. The woodcutters may not have any choice. Education is not sufficient to make sure that they stop; they need a different way of making a living. Similarly, educational campaigns to urge people to recycle cans or paper are useless unless there are factories that transform recycled paper or cans into new products. Without such factories there will be no use for the recycled material. It will eventually end up in the garbage dump. But of course once the machinery is available for recycling, educational campaigns are not only useful but essential to encourage people to make use of the facilities for recycling. Base and Superstructure The materialism of Marx and Engels is usually interpreted as making an additional claim about the causes of human thinking. The passage at the

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beginning of this chapter appears to assert that human thinking is shaped by material conditions; the base determines the superstructure. While it is, of course, true that people act on their beliefs, values, hopes, and expectations and that they act in the light of lessons learned from past experience, the passage cited seems to tell us that all these beliefs and values are only the effects of "material conditions," (By that, Marx and Engels mean, roughly, the conditions under which a given group of people earns its livelihood and produces whatever goods they need.) Values change with changed economic practices; In a contpetitiYe society, one approves of competition among people. Members of other societies do not. Notice that interpreters ascribe a much stronger claim, to Marx and Engels than that material circumstances and ideas interact in complex ways, such that ideas sometimes produce changes in material conditions and that those conditions sometimes give rise to ideas. Many people would agree to that. But according to the passage cited above, what we think always arises from the way we produce and reproduce. Material conditions are the causes of beliefs. But whether that is what Marx and Engels intended to say is not at all clear. They use various terms to describe the relation between production and thought, between "base" and "superstructure," such as "determine," "condition," and "cause." These terms are by no means synonymous. Which of them conveys most accurately what Marx and Engels had in mind? Usually the term "base" is interpreted as the economic realm, whereas "superstructure" is taken as the sphere of law, politics, and ideology. By the "economic realm.," moreover, is meant impersonal economic processes that unfold independently of human wishes and desires and independently of human thinking and understanding. Base differs from superstructure in that the former is material and. distinct from human consciousness, whereas the latter is the product of human consciousness. It is clear that Engels often thinks about base and superstructure in those terms, for he also describes the problem addressed by materialism as the "relation of thinking to being." His is the most common interpretation of historical materialism, which asserts that all ideas are the effects of the processes of material production. Material production is said to be the cause of mental events. Engels summarized this causal view of the relation between social relations of production and ideas as follows: The final causes of all social changes are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into eternal truth and justice but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. (T, 701)

This view is often called "economic determinism." It maintains that the economy (the base) determines or is the cause of the superstructure.

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This economic determinism has invited a great deal of criticism. Reader after reader has pointed out that the base and superstructure, as Marx and Engels define them, cannot be causally related. "A is the cause of B" is usually read as "A is necessary and/or sufficient for B under condition C." If the powder is dry and you hold a lit match to it, it will explode. Given the requisite antecedent conditions—the powder is dry—a lit match is the sufficient condition for the explosion. But there are lit matches without explosions and explosions without lit matches; the cause is independent of the effect. If the base is the cause of the superstructure, it must be separate and independent from it. The base must be capable of existing independently of the superstructure. But, the critics point out, the base is not independent of the superstructure: Economic processes like the production, transport, and sale of goods require clear ownership of all the goods involved in these processes. Those who own the factories and raw materials, the final products of production, the trucks and the stores, must be generally known so that the right people can get paid the right amount and everybody receives what they are entitled to. The operation of capitalism presupposes a functioning legal system that determines property rights. The legal system, a part of the superstructure, is indispensable for the functioning of the process of production, the base. The process of production cannot proceed without these superstructural elements.3 But given the usual understanding of the word "cause," the base cannot be the cause of the superstructure as long as the two are not clearly separable. Besides, as many readers have pointed out, if ideas are caused by material circumstances, so are the ideas of Marx and Engels. Hence they do not have those ideas because they have good reasons for believing them to be true but simply because they lived in their particular society. If we have different ideas, that is not surprising because our society is very different Economic determinism makes nonsense of the entire intellectual enterprise of Marx and Engels. Their enormous intellectual effort to discover the truth about capitalism is undercut by the doctrine that we hold ideas not because they are true but because economic conditions make us hold them. What is more, economic determinism makes the efforts of Marx and Engels pointless. If ideas are the effects of material conditions, then what people believe and act on is not affected by persuasion, however eloquent, or by documents such as the Communist Manifesto, The ideas that material conditions produce will hold sway until material conditions change, and no amount of stirring rhetoric or ingenious economic analysis will make any difference. Ideas are at best intermediate causes in the process of political action because political events and movements are, in the end, the effects of material conditions; ideas alone are ineffectual in bringing about social change. Hence there is no point in writing docu-

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ments like the Communist Manifesto to induce the working class to organize and make a socialist revolution. If material conditions produce the same ideas in workers' minds, the Manifesto is superfluous. If material conditions produce different ideas, the Manifesto will be ineffective. These criticisms are valid. They suggest that the materialism of Marx and Engels is different from economic determinism. This suggestion gains plausibility from the fact that economic determinism—the view that the base is independent of the superstructure and is its cause—is clearly inconsistent with the views described in the preceding chapters. For if the changes in economic processes are independent of human thought, and if the transformation of human nature is a consequence of changes in the processes of production, then human nature changes independently of human thought. But then it is false to assert, as Marx does, that human history is the history of human self-definition, because human history turns out instead to be the process in which production, unaffected by human thinking, defines what "human being" is. Simply put, economic determinism, just doesn't make any sense. There are no impersonal economic processes: Production, exchange, and distribution are undertaken by human beings who think about what they are doing and act in the light of that thought. The picture of an economic process that unfolds unaffected by human thinking is unintelligible.4 We saw in Chapter 5 that a causal interpretation of historical materialism, however common, is implausible. We now see that a causal understanding of materialism, of the relation between base and superstructure, is equally unacceptable. What, then, are Marx and Engels trying to tell us about the relations between economic conditions and the thinking of the people who live under those conditions? What question is their materialism trying to answer? The Sources of Self-Evidence Materialism is traditionally thought to ask and answer a question about the contents of what people at any particular period believe. The question is thought to be, Why do people believe just what they believe? Why were the Greeks pantheists, or why did they believe in a geocentric theory of the universe? But as a matter of fact, people get their beliefs in all sorts of different ways: They take them over from other persons; they examine the ideas themselves and find, them persuasive; they adopt beliefs because they will be punished if they do not. (Think of the custom of burning witches or putting communists in prison.) For different people, there are very different explanations for why they have just the beliefs they have. Instead, Marx and Engels ask a question about the plausibility of beliefs: Why are some ideas very popular at some periods, whereas at other

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times they are regarded as odd and utterly implausible? Even in the ancient world, there were some individuals who argued for monotheism or for a heliocentric theory of the solar system, but very few people took them seriously. Similarly, the idea that governments originate in a social contract is first introduced in Plato's Republic but did. not really become an important idea until the seventeenth century—2,000 years later. The belief in human equality, that each person deserves respect by virtue of being human and that all human beings deserve to be free, had been familiar to philosophers and religious thinkers for many centuries. But only in the eighteenth century did they grip the imagination of the majority of people. The really interesting question is why those remained the odd and implausible ideas of particular individuals, whereas almost everyone, whether learned or not, accepted polytheism, geocentric theory, the idea of the divine origin of government, and human, social, political, and economic inequality. Why do ideas that have been around for centuries suddenly come to be "self-evident truths" after having so long been the quaint thoughts of peculiar people like philosophers or priests? The idea of the social contract is not significantly different in the eighteenth century from what it was in Plato's Republic. But the world in which those ideas now play an important role is certainly different from ancient Athens, Wltat changes in the world provoke those radical shifts in human thinking? That is the question that Marx and Engels try to answer with their generalization about base and superstructure. What explains this shift in human thinking in the eighteenth century, in the Western world, is the rise of capitalism. Thus Marx writes, in a passage cited in Chapter 4, Equality and freedom are not only respected in exchange of exchange values, values,

but the exchange of exchange values is the productive, the real basis of all equality and freedom.5

Only as capitalist institutions develop do the ideas of freedom and equality begin to dominate Western thinking. For capitalism involves the free and equal exchange of goods in marketplaces. Capitalism is not possible unless buyer and seller confront each other as free and equal persons in the market. Capitalism requires certain limited freedoms and limited equality. In a limited way, buyer and seller are, in fact, free and equal in the marketplace. The ideas of freedom and equality become important as actual institutions arise that require specific freedoms and specific forms of equality. As market relations gain in importance in the economy, so, too, do freedom and equality, and as a consequence the ideas of freedom and equality gain in importance in political and ethical thinking. Capitalism does not produce ideas; capitalism gives currency to certain ideas because they are already implicit in capitalist practices. The validity, clarity.

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and applicability of these ideas are, as before, open to serious scrutiny. But once certain institutions come into being, corresponding ideas take on "self-eYidenee" that they did not have before. Although they may take on the solidity of "self-evident truths," these beliefs are often inaccurate, incomplete, or seriously misleading. The ruling institutions make certain beliefs common and give them the appearance of being "self-evident." That is true of beliefs in religion, politics, much of economic theory, and most of philosophy. Marx and Engels call those unreliable beliefs "ideology." One role of human thinking is to discriminate between current beliefs that are in fact reliable and those that are incomplete, misleading, or downright deceptive. I will discuss the distinction between ideology and reliable ideas in Chapter 7. The importance of Marx's and Engels' doctrine of materialism is this: It provides us with some reasons for being particularly critical of ideas that are commonly taken to be self-evident. Ideas that fit altogether too smoothly into current institutional contexts are, above all, suspect. Thus the beliefs that governments rest on the consent of the people, that democracy prevails where people periodically participate in elections, and that truth is best pursued in a "marketplace of ideas"—all these dovetail too comfortably with prevailing economic institutions not to invite the most careful scrutiny. Of course, that they are the sorts of ideas one would expect to be popular in a capitalist society does not show that they are incorrect. They might turn, out to be true. But the important lesson to be learned from the materialism of Marx and Engels is that we must be suspicious of those ideas that seem self-evident to most people and that seem to fit most readily into the practices of a capitalist society. Everyone knows that what appears self-evident to many people is not always true. The contribution of materialism is to provide some insight into why some ideas are so self-evident at some times yet seem equally implausible at other times. It thereby suggests that the ideas that appear most plausible and seem to fit particularly well with prevailing institutions are particularly suspect. That provides us with some suggestions concerning which ideas we need to examine with particular care.6 For Further Reading Melvin Rader, Marx's Interpretation of History {New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), chapter L

Notes 1. Lawrence E, Harrison, £1 Subdesarollo Estti en la Matte (Underdevelopment is in the mind) (Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Limusa, 1989).

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2. Frederick Engels, Luditrig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), p. 25. 3. John Ptamenatz, German Marxism and Russian Communism (London; Longmans, 1954), p. 25, 4. These problems had been raised in Marx's and Engels' lifetime. After Marx died, Engels felt the need to protest that neither he nor Marx had intended to defend economic determinism. They had always understood that much as the base determines the superstructure, the superstructure in turn determines the base. All they had ever wanted to say was that the base was the "ultimately decisive" factor (T 760), Hence the doctrine is attributed to' Engels that the base determines the superstructure "in the last instance," But that qualification does not resolve the central problem of economic determinism—that it presupposes a distinction between "base" and "superstructure" that does not, in fact, make any sense. If there is a problem with claiming that the material base causes the superstructure, because base and superstructure cannot be distinguished in the ways required by a causal analysis, men that problem exists just as much if we banish this causal process to "the last instance," 5. Marx, Gmndrisse (Frankfurt; Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.)» p. 156. 6. Contemporary English-speaking philosophers often rest their philosophies on their "intuitions," what seems self-evident to them. If they take the materialism of Marx and Bngels to heart, they fulfill more successfully the traditional task of philosophy of examining critically the common wisdom of their day.

7 Ideology AFTER DISCUSSING THE LARGE-SCALE patterns of historical change and the influence they have on the dominant ideas in different epochs, Marx develops his materialism in more detail in the form of his theory of ideology. In current English "ideology" is a near synonym of "propaganda" (particularly of a political sort). "Ideology" usually refers to beliefs that no one would adopt on rational grounds, beliefs that have been instilled in people by force or deception. Alternatively, we characterize political views as "ideological" when we want to say that they are governed by abstract principles, often with total disregard for actual fact A policy is ideological if it is defended on principle even, if the facts suggests strongly that its results would be quite destructive. In political rhetoric the beliefs of our opponents are therefore often characterized as "ideologies" when they are assumed to be false—because they are imposed from above or because they are not supported by actual facts. The term, has a very different meaning in the writings of Marx and. Engels. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made 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, aesthetic or philosophic-—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from, the existing conflict between material productive forces and the relations of production. (T, 5}

An ominous passage on first reading, it seems to suggest that the outside, scientific observer is in a position to understand the true moving forces in major social and historical upheavals, while the account given 71

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by people actually participating in those upheavals is no more trustworthy than the account a person gives of Ms or her own motives and aspirations. What people say about themselves in their legal, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical doctrines is not to be taken seriously because it is ideology. It does not provide an explanation of what people are doing but instead itself cries out for explanation. This is another passage that, if interpreted carelessly, supports the interpretation that Marx and Engels were economic determinists. Many interpreters of Marx and Engels understand it in that way. The theory of ideology, they say, holds that people's beliefs are determined by their social or economic circumstances,1 But we have already seen in Chapter 6 that Marx and Engels were saying something quite different. We can see more precisely what this passage asserts if we put it side by side with another observation of Marx's in Capital. In a long footnote in Capital, Marx takes the opportunity to answer an objection to the 1859 Critique. A reviewer had written that Marx's claim that the mode of production determined social, political, and intellectual. life would seem accurate for our time but not for the Middle Ages, "in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics reigned supreme. "2 Marx replies to this criticism: This much, however, is dear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics.... For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman Republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. On the other hand, Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society.3

The Greeks and Romans, as well as the people in the Middle Ages, were not preoccupied with politics or religion to the exclusion of all other concerns. They needed food and shelter like everyone else, and they had their specific ways of solving their material economic problems. With these different ways of providing for their material needs go different values, religious beliefs, political institutions, and customs. All of these are examples of ideology. Ideologies are connected with economic institutions. When those change, so do the ideological beliefs and practices. For example, the knight errantry that flourished in the early Middle Ages became pointless or even ridiculous after feudalism had been replaced by early capitalism. But it is clear that the economic structure is not the cause of the way of life—the phenomenon of Don Quixote demonstrates that. If economic structures were the causes of certain outlooks, then it would not have been possible for Don Quixote to believe himself to be a knight errant after the end of the Middle Ages. That is shown also by the earlier examples I cited in Chapter 6, regarding ideas of freedom and equality and the social contract that were entertained by the Greeks and Romans

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but never became popular or widespread. Instead, different outlooks are the "forms in which men [and women] become conscious" of the economic conditions under which they live. The theory of ideology is an elaboration of the insights of Marx's and Engels' materialism: The ideas that are dominant in any given historical period appear self-evident because they fit snugly with the dominant economic institutions—in the generous sense in which Marx and Engels use the word "economic," But because ideas are self-evident to many people does not mean that they are true. The claims to self-evidence must be received with caution. The theory of ideology gives some more concrete content to this insight, What Is Ideology? At issue here are beliefs, values, ways of life. But not all beliefs are ideological. Some beliefs are true. Others are not only false but are known to be false. Marx recognizes the difference between ideology and plain falsehoods. People hold on to beliefs that are false and known to be false. Sexist and racist beliefs are prime examples of that. People hold beliefs even though all existing reliable evidence contradicts them,. Even though biologists and anthropologists have found the concept of "race" indefensible, claims about superiority and inferiority of certain "races" continue unabated.4 Racism is not an ideology because it is irrational, to believe in the reality of race in spite of all the available evidence. In the same manner, it is irrational for men to depend on their wives to run their families and keep their children safe and healthy and at the same time to believe that men are rational and in charge and women are not.5 But then there are beliefs that are neither true and known to be so nor false and known to be false. We hold, many beliefs, and so have men and women, at other times, for which we do not have sufficient evidence to show either that they are true or false. Such more or less unsupported beliefs, however, are the best that can be achieved given a certain level of technological development and scientific knowledge. These beliefs are ideologies. Certain ideological beliefs, such as the geocentric theory of the universe, can at some future time be refuted by science. Others, like religious, social, political, or ethical beliefs, lie outside the domain of science and therefore will always remain ideological. One difference between beliefs known to be false and what Marx and Engels call "ideology" is that it makes sense that persons should have these ideological beliefs under their specific material conditions. The religious world is but a reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values whereby they reduce the individual labor to the standard of

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homogeneous human labor—for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, Protestantism,... is the most fitting form of religion. (Q, T 326)

Religious beliefs are not known to be true, nor are they known to be false, even though both supporters and enemies of religion claim proof for their positions. What is more, we can understand why a certain kind of society in which the uniqueness of individuals is ignored in favor of the commodity value of each one's contribution should adopt a religion such as Protestantism that concerns itself primarily with the rights and obligations of "man" in the abstract. In a capitalist society, human beings are treated as abstractions in that they become more or less exchangeable. In any given workplace, jobs are filled by a series of persons. When, business is bad, people are fired or laid off. When business improves, someone else is hired to do the job. What makes each of these persons unique is, in the economic sphere, not important. Similarly, Marx suggests, Protestantism focuses on the abstract humanity and human rights of all and puts less emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual. What matters in this example is not whether Marx does justice to Protestantism but rather the connection he draws between the capitalist system and certain ideologies. Some ideologies may turn out to be mistaken, given the evidence available to us at a later date, but it is not irrational to hold ideological beliefs. Given the prevailing conceptions of human beings as "abstract," that is, as interchangeable in the job market, Protestant thought about human rights makes sense, The Greeks believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. Given their astronomical observations, that was a defensible scientific theory. Aristarchos, a Greek astronomer in the third century B.C., however, did propose a heliocentric theory. So the available evidence did seem to support rival, theories. Why did the Greeks and, the Romans and the medievals support the geocentric rather than the heliocentric theory? The explanation uncovers the function of these beliefs that are not supported or refuted by adequate evidence. In this passage Marx calls them, "mythology": All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery O¥er them. (G, T 246)6

The existence of mythology is understandable in cultures that have little control over nature. Thus the existence of Greek mythology is explicable by the low level of economic productivity of the Greeks. Because the Greeks and Romans lacked the scientific knowledge to control nature, they developed a mythology that could dominate nature "in the imagination." But the mythology of the Romans was not exactly the mythology the Greeks developed. The Jews developed their Old Testament version

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of monotheism; the ancient Germans developed a different mythology. But the function of mythology, to stand in for more solidly supported scientific explanations of the world, does not explain why different cultures—the ancient Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, the medievals-—provided very different stories about the origin and the structure of the world in which they lived. We can account for the characteristics of a given ideology only once we look at the social and economic conditions prevailing where that ideology arises. Marx explains this idea in more detail in another passage: It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with the self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulkan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? (G, T 245-246)

The passage reiterates the point made before about Don Quixote: The Greek pantheon is out of place in the modern world, A god, Jupiter, whose power is exhibited by the use of thunder and lightning is a shabby god indeed once those natural phenomena have been understood and once lightning has become less of a menace because of the invention of lightning rods. Human beings who can set off the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will not be impressed by a little thunder and lightning. The same applies to the other personages in the Greek pantheon. The goddess of reputation, Fama, cuts a poor figure against the newspapers coming out of London's Printing House Square, and Hermes, the god of commerce, is overshadowed by the enormous power of the worldwide banking network of the Credit Mobilier in Paris. A people adopts mythological explanations that make sense in their world. The Greek pantheon was inhabited by beings whose lives were just the lives writ large of the dominant groups in Greek society—the landowners who themselves did not work, who spent their lives in war, amorous intrigue, or political activity. Mythologies reflect the social structures of the societies in which they are current. Ideologies are beliefs not provable as true or false that fit in comfortably with the economic and social practices of a given society. But at the same time, Marx insists in the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter, ideologies are open to criticism.. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material, life, from the existing conflict between material productive forces and the relations of production. (T, 5)

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This is puzzling because if we cannot tell whether the ideological beliefs of our day are true or false, how can we criticize them? But the entire project of Marx and Engels is a critical one. Several of Marx's writings contain the term "Critique" in their titles.7 Hence we need to examine on what grounds ideological beliefs can be criticized. Ideology and Science Many readers of Marx and Engels have found the concept of ideology problematic. They have assumed that the materialism of Marx and Engels commits them to the view that all people living under given material conditions must adopt its ideology because "life determines consciousness." If that is true, Marx and Engels are victims of bourgeois ideology. But since they also claimed to be doing science, which they distinguished from and opposed to ideology, they seem to have been caught in a contradiction. They appear to have believed that all people in a given culture are inevitably infected by the reigning ideology and that they themselves did science and saw through the ideology of the age. But those two views are inconsistent.8 Commentators have taken different routes in dealing with this supposed contradiction, As we saw earlier, ideologies are understood by some commentators as systems of beliefs developed intentionally in order to mislead people. Ideology is then not forced on us by material conditions and thus does not prevent us from doing real science.9 One can also hold that no one in a given society can resist its ideology but deny that all thinking is ideological. Science, in that case, may be nonideological thinking, and thus doing science and being in the thrall of the reigning ideology need not be inconsistent.10 One can also deny that science and ideology are incompatible.11 Finally, it is possible, of course, to deny that the doctrines of Marx and Engels deserve to be called science. But in that case one would rescue them from the accusation of being inconsistent at the price of degrading the product of their intellectual efforts to "ideology" or "myth."12 A good portion of these controversies appears to be misguided because they rest on a misunderstanding of the concept of science and the concept of ideology as they function in the work of Marx and Engels. I showed in the previous chapter that ideology—the dominant beliefs of an era—can be criticized and resisted. Material conditions are not causes of beliefs. From, what I have said in this chapter about ideology, it is clear that ideological beliefs are not based on reliable scientific work. To that extent ideology and science are distinct. But ideology is subject to scientific criticisms in retrospect. At the time that ideological beliefs develop, there is not sufficient evidence to show them to be true or false. In fact, they often function as substitutes for scientific information that is not available at the

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time. But later, when science develops, the earlier ideological beliefs can be criticized for being false. Thus we can criticize Ptolemaic astronomy from the point of view of contemporary astronomy. Similarly, in Capitalf Marx criticizes the views of Adam Smith and David Ricardo with respect to price and value and profits. But many ideologies, for instance, beliefs about religion, ethics, politics, and the law are not open to such criticism in hindsight. Here criticism of ideologies bases itself on the second characteristic of ideologies—namely, that they reflect the dominant institutions of the society. The possibility of a critique of ideology is narrowly connected with the fact that in class societies rival, ideologies reflect the dominant and oppositional institutions from the perspectives of different classes. Ideologies are those beliefs in a given culture that do not find adequate support or refutation by available knowledge. In a fairly homogeneous society, such ideologies are likely to be fairly homogeneous. In a class society, different classes will see the world differently and develop different ideologies. Class societies thus give rise to conflicting ideologies. In all Western societies, beginning at the latest with the Greeks, there are people whose profession is thinking and writing who are either members of or are maintained by the ruling classes. Plato was a member of the ruling elite of Athens, Aristotle the tutor of Alexander the Great. Both lived and moved among the people of wealth and power. It is no surprise, therefore, that their philosophies shared the outlooks of those in power. This has continued to this day, where the professional intellectuals either participate in governing (often as professional experts) or are supported by the wealthy because they are employed by communications media or universities or are dependent on wealthy patrons of the arts and their philanthropies. As a consequence of this dose association, the ideological beliefs of the rich and powerful are broadcast by the stratum of professional intellectuals (GI, T 158-159, 173). Hence Marx tells us more than once that "the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class" (CM, T 489). In a class society, there is thus a dominant ideology—the ideas of the ruling class. But the dominated classes have different experiences from the dominant. The reigning institutions do not solve their problems but rather create them. Hence their perspective on the prevailing social structures is different from the outlook of the rich and powerful. They develop an alternative ideology. But they have in their service fewer theorists, writers, ministers, experts; their ideology tends to be less elaborate. They also have less control over media; their alternative ideologies do not spread as easily because they have only word of mouth or alternative media available to them, to disseminate their ideas.13 In class societies ideologies are contested. The oppositional views of the less powerful classes are attacked by the authors sharing the perspective

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of the dominant class. In earlier ages the attack often took a religious form. The ideas of the poor and downtrodden were condemned as heresies. Since the days of Marx and Engels, "communism" is a favorite label for ridiculing and depreciating oppositional ideologies. In the 1990s the oppositional ideologies developed in the 1960s have been diminished and distorted by calling, them "'politically correct." The ideology of the ruling class presents itself as the true beliefs for all members of a society: Each new class that puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society.... It has to give its ideas the form of universality. (GI, T 174)

Hence the eighteenth century talks about the universal rights of man, and only if we read the small print in, for instance, John Locke's Second Treatise of Government do we see that only property owners have political rights or that the universal rights of all human beings do not compromise the father's patriarchal rights in the family. As oppositional groups develop in a given society, they can criticize the ruling ideology from their point of view. They can, for instance, point out the inconsistency between the universal principles proclaimed by the ruling group and its actual practice. The universal rights of all human beings are exercised by the powerful but withheld from the others. Fetishism One can criticize ideologies because their proponents do not practice what they preach. The defenders of universal human rights, for instance, have rarely been interested in combatting racism, sexism, or the exploitation of workers.14 Another strategy of ideological criticism is illustrated by Marx's discussion of "fetishism" in Capital. In a passage from the German Ideology, Marx and Engels describe ideology as an inverted image. Ideologies are open to criticism because they make the world appear turned upside down. If in all ideology human beings and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their lifeprocess as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical lifeprocess. (GI, T 154} 1

This picture of ideology as an inverted image returns in the discussion of fetishism in Capital. Fetishes are objects of religious worship, made by human beings, that are endowed by their human creators with supernatural powers. But the human beings forget that the powers they revere in

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their fetish were bestowed by them in the first place. In modern societies the principal example of "fetishism," the subject of one of the early sections of Capital, is the treatment of commodities in economics. Fetishism has, in the modem world, moved from religion to economics. This section of Capital begins with saying that a commodity is "at first sight, a trivial thing. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" (CI, T 319). But what makes commodities so peculiar? Commodities have intrinsic characteristics such as size, weight, and color. Prices appear to be such intrinsic characteristics of things. They are not set by particular people but come with the commodity, as one of its characteristics. When a consumer goes to the store to buy something, the commodity has a price. The careful consumer soon finds out that not all stores charge the same price. But these price variations are not the results of arbitrary decisions by store owners; rather, the prices are set in accordance with economic necessities, such as the store owners' costs and the need to make a profit. Prices are determined by market forces. The store owners merely try to read those market forces as accurately as possible. Human beings work and produce in a specific social order. They work always in coordination with one another. In all societies, even the most primitive ones, there is some sort of division of labor. The goods produced and their distribution—who gets what and in what quantities—depends on the structure of the particular society in question. But in a commodity society (i.e., under capitalism), it seems that what is produced and by whom and how it is distributed is not the result of the social order as a whole but depends exclusively on the prices of commodities. In a capitalist economy, capital is privately owned and the competent capitalist will make it grow by making a profit. Capital must therefore be invested where it will be profitable, and such decisions determine what will be produced. The profitability of certain goods, compared to that of others, decides what a society will produce. Profitability, in turn, is connected with the price at which something can be sold, compared to the cost of producing it. The decision made in a society as to what will be produced is closely tied to prices. So it appears that the general complexion of capitalist society, who is rich and who is poor, who decides where to invest capital and in what way the society will grow or decay, is not due to the decisions of individuals or groups but the result of the impersonal movements of commodities and their prices. The relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves but between the products of their labor. (Cl, T 320)

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The structure of capitalist societies, the division of labor, the distribution of resources are usually thought to be the results not of human choices but of the impersonal market forces, Human beings are, for the most part, powerless to alter the existing societies because the mechanisms of the market are not under their control. Attempts to control market forces, many theorists add today, always end in spectacular failures. But this belief in the immutability of capitalism is another example of the tendency of ruling classes to claim universality for their view of the world. Capitalists present the world as if capitalism had always existed and as if it will always exist. Market forces have been made into fetishes insofar as they appear to people to have independent powers that dominate human affairs. But there is a very different way of viewing markets—namely, as the creations of human beings. Once we consider our economic institutions in a historical perspective, we can see that commodity production, for instance, is not an immutable institution but like all other human institutions is the result—partly intended, partly unintended—of intentional human actions. All of this becomes clear as soon as we compare capitalist institutions to those that went before and those that are still to come (CI, T 324). Here ideological criticism proceeds by proposing a different perspective. The capitalist perspective sees the world as permanent because capitalist institutions benefit capitalists; they see their world as good and therefore permanent. Change, in their view, could not improve the world. It is therefore unthinkable. Hence market forces become fetishes to be worshiped because they are thought not to be under our control but, on the contrary, to control our lives. But from the point of view of workers, the poor, and people in developing countries, capitalist institutions are exploitative and oppressive (see Chapters 9 and 11). They consider change desirable, and the methods and goals of change are a matter of great import. We can see that, according to this perspective, the impersonal power of commodities, and with it the impersonal permanence of capitalist institutions, is an "inversion." It misrepresents reality" It conceals the possibility of fundamental social change.15 The oppositional ideology portrays the capitalist system, from a different perspective, one oriented toward change and an extension of rights to all members of the society. The fetish is unmasked. Neither of these perspectives is supported by sufficient arguments to show it to be true, although each has something to be said in its favor. These opposing ideologies are in conflict; ideological struggle is an aspect of class struggle. Which ideology will prove victorious in the long ran will depend on the outcome of the class struggle (as I discuss in Chapter 13). Marx and Ethics Marx and Engels consider ethical beliefs also as ideological. But this brings up a special interpretative problem; Many commentators have read Marx

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and Engels as if they rejected ethics outright. Such an interpretation is based on a number of passages. One of them, occurs in a late work, the Critique of the Gotha Program, when Marx criticized the party program of the German Social Democratic Party, In the course of this discussion, he wrote: [In the preceding pages] I have dealt more at length with , . . "equal right" and "fair distribution" ... in order to show what a crime it is to force on our Party again . . , ideas "which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish. (CGP, T 531) Marx and Engels hold definite ethical views. They believe, for instance, that transferring wealth from one group to another is, under some conditions, unjust; that it is wrong to deprive people of the wide range of freedoms that capitalism does not allow most workers; that in a well-ordered society, we will not look for reciprocity but for each receiving the conditions needed for full self-development But how can Marx and Engels hold such ethical views and at the same time claim that ethics is "obsolete verbal rubbish"? A number of solutions to this dilemma have been offered: Some authors argue that Marx and Engels did not criticize capitalism for being unjust16 or more generally did not hold ethical views about capitalism.17 Others claim that Marx and Engels were mistaken in believing that ethics is ideological.18 This entire scholarly controversy presupposes that all ideological beliefs are in some way defective. These interpreters assume that for anything to be ideological, it must be intellectually inadequate, unreliable, or not to be trusted. We already saw that that is not what Marx and Engels meant by ideology. Ideologies are beliefs that, at a given time, are neither supported nor refuted by adequate evidence. In that sense of the term, ethical views are also ideological, and as there are different outlooks in economics and politics that belong to different classes, so there are different ethical ideologies. In our culture there is the dominant ethic of the golden rule, which tells us that we should think about ethics as rules of reciprocity: Whatever behavior I expect from you I owe you in return. It is easy to see that in a culture that regards the market, exchange, and contracts as its central institutions, an ethic that puts reciprocity in the center reflects the prevailing economic institutions. But this is not the only set of available ethical ideas. Marx certainly had a very different conception of the good life from that of the golden rule. Instead of demanding that we treat others as we want to be treated, he looks forward to a society in which each person is able to develop fully and freely and where each is necessary for the others so that they, too, can develop fully and freely. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, (CM, T 491)

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Full development means different things to different people. What we will contribute to each others' lives will not be regulated by some abstract standard of equality but, on the contrary, by the different needs that each of us has for support and encouragement and resources from others. Hence in the classless communist society the principle of distribution is "From each according to his or her ability; to each according to his or her need" (CGP, 531). In their critical remarks about ethics, Marx and Engels were not rejecting all appeal to ethical rules; indeed they appeal to such rules throughout their writings. They were making a rather different point, namely, that ethics is not a good, basis for criticizing capitalist society and advocating socialism as its replacement. It is clear from the passage quoted above that Marx and Engels did not believe that ideological beliefs are defective under all circumstances, that is, that they never had any use at all. It is clear from the passage that Marx thought that the ideas of "equal rights" and "fair distribution" were legitimate parts of a political program in a certain period but were, when Marx wrote the Critique of the Gotha Program, "obsolete rubbish." The central point here is the distinction between "Utopian" and "scientific" political action, a distinction to which we will return in Chapter 15. The Utopian socialists were reformers. They were not simply interested in criticizing capitalism but wanted to replace it with a better social order. They were critical of the injustices of capitalism and were trying to develop just institutions. But there are many different ways of committing injustice. What was clearly needed was a precise understanding of the exact ways in which capitalism is unjust. But when the Utopian socialists were developing their reform plans, capitalism was sufficiently undeveloped that they could not see precisely how capitalism was unjust and what it was about the capitalist system that produced its particular injustices. They did not have a clear understanding of exploitation and of the differences in power between workers and capitalists that were the consequence of the private ownership of the means of production. As a result, their proposals for alternative economic and political systems did not address the specific injustices that capitalism produces and thus were not useful projects to remedy the evils of capitalism. The scientific socialism of Marx and Engels, in. contrast, allows us to understand clearly what needs to be changed in order to abolish the injustices of capitalism. This much seems uncontroversial. But after that we can go in two different directions with our interpretation of the Marxian view of ethics. The dominant interpretation goes as follows: Once scientific socialism is developed, we know what the key problems of capitalism are. We also know that those key problems will sooner or later destroy capitalism from within and bring about its replacement by socialism. Science does

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not make value judgments; it simply takes reality as it finds it and tries to explain its development. A "scientific" politics rests its activities on its scientific understanding. It derives from its scientific understanding of capitalism and its assessment of the state of capitalism at one particular time—what sorts of political actions are called for at that moment to hasten the inevitable end of capitalist rule. Hence ethical condemnations of socialism are now "obsolete rubbish." Ethics belongs in the prehistory of socialist efforts. Scientific socialism replaces an ethical socialism. Marx and Engels' conception of science is quite undeveloped (see Chapter 15). Whether they believed that science is "value-free" is not known. But even if they did hold that view, a different interpretation is much more plausible: Scientific socialism rests on a careful and detailed theory about the workings and presumed trajectory of capitalism. Of course the earlier ethical condemnation of capitalism still holds. It remains true, and important, that capitalism is unjust. But such condemnations are too general to have any place in a party program—which is what Marx is addressing in the Critique of the Cotha Program quoted above. Such a party program needs to speak in detail about the specific forms of capitalist injustice and the mechanism of its replacement by socialism. To go back and. talk in very general terms about injustice and equal rights in a party program is, in that context, "obsolete rubbish," Ethical judgments are of course important. A scientific socialist, who holds no ethical views that injustice must be fought and overcome, may well consider the internal mechanisms of capitalism with great interest but would not join the struggle. Marxism without ethical views makes no sense. But do not ethical views require justification? Not all ethical views are as valuable and reliable as others. The concept of ideology proves to be of importance in throwing light on that problem. Ethical views are clearly ideological, according to Marx and. EngeJs, and hence are not capable of proof or disproof. Ideological beliefs, including ethics, articulate the beliefs of a given group of people. The task of moral philosophers is not to prove that certain actions are right and certain states are good but to put into words as clearly as possible what their group believes is the good life and what their obligations are to one another. In the process of putting a given ethical view into words, we certainly compare different proposals and reject some as less acceptable, less coherent, less able to guide us in a variety of real situations. But such discussions do not aim at proving that an ethical view is true. They try to reflect as adequately as possible the best thinking about ethics in any given group. In any society there are different groups, and they have different ideologies. The ruling class has its ideology. Oppositiona) groups have theirs. The different ideologies, of course, overlap. Everyone condemns injustice; everyone asserts that all human beings have certain rights. But

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whether the existing distribution of wealth and access to shared resources is just or whether everyone has the right to a decent living and. full selfdevelopment is a matter of great controversy, Marx and Engels did not make any effort to develop a proletarian ethics. But such an understanding of injustice and the good, life is certainly implicit in their work. We will have occasion to discuss their ethical ideas further in Chapter 16. False Consciousness Ideology, especially bourgeois ideology when it is adopted by the working class, is often called "false consciousness," Marx did not, in fact, use this expression, but many commentators identify ideology with false consciousness nevertheless.19 That conception has often been associated with views that the working class is systematically deceived by the ruling class or that its desires are manipulated by the capitalists or that its family structure is the effect of traditional authoritarianisna or that its understanding of the world results from sexual repression.20 All of these suggestions are extremely interesting but go far beyond the theory of ideology as we find it in Marx and Engels. All of them are attempts to explain why workers-—contrary to Marx and Engels' optimistic expectations—have frequently been in support of their exploiters and have stood aloof from their labor unions and from class struggle. Their support for the enemies of the working class has been explained as the effect of ruling-class ideologies that confused workers and thus produced "false consciousness." In fact, though, the reluctance of workers to struggle to improve their lot does not have to do primarily with ideology but with alienation. The lack of revolutionary fervor among workers is not just a manifestation of their erroneous ideas but has much deeper and more complex causes. What appears to be lacking in most people living in capitalist societies is the burning desire for freedom that revolutionary activity demands. This lack is better explained by alienation than by the theory of ideology. We shall see in Chapter 10 that one of the questions left open by Marx's conception of alienation is the extent to which living in a capitalist society makes all of us into persons unwilling to change and to change our social system. We will take up that question once more in Chapter 16. For Further Reading Richard Liehtatan, Essays in Critical Social Theory (New York; Peter Lang, 1993). Notes I. See Nicholas Abercrombie, Problems in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: New York University Press, 1980); Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1985), chapter 8.

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2. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 82n. 3. Ibid. 4. Kwame A. Appiah, In My Father's House (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5. The matter is actually more complex. Marty beliefs are partly ideological and partly not; some motivations for holding certain beliefs are more intelligible than others. It has often been pointed out that it makes sense for employers to encourage racism among their employees. Thus the perpetuation of certain racist beliefs has partially rational explanations in some cases. Some have argued that there are certain subterranean reasons for holding, for example, racist beliefs, such as the guilt of whites over the treatment of African Americans that easily transforms itself into an irrational, fear of what "they" will do to "us." Wilhekn Reich argued that one could understand the support of German workers for the Nazis if one looked at the extent to which, given prevailing sexual mores, men and women were forced to repress their sexual needs and desires, See Wilhelm Reich, The Mess Psychology of Fascism (New York; Noonday, 1970). 6. lit good nineteenth-century fashion, Marx talks about the relations to nature as "domination." We tend to think of our relation to nature in different terms. These differences are themselves instances of ideology. 7. Consider the following titles: "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; Capital; A Critique of Political Economy, 8. William Leon McBride, Tin* Philosophy of Marx (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970). 9. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 10. Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), chapter 1. 11. John McMurtry, The Structure of Marx's WorM~View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), chapter 5. 12. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 13. These ruling ideologies must be distinguished from propaganda—lies deliberately spread to mislead. The intellectuals associated, with the ruling class often do serious and honest intellectual work, but their outlook happens to be that of the people who support them. See Capital, vol. 1, p. SOn, 14. This has led some Marxists to attack the belief in universal human rights itself. But that is a serious error. Instead, one must criticize the deceptive uses that prevailing ruling groups make of the beliefs in these universal human rights to promote their private agendas at home and abroad, 15. It is important to notice, though, that the capitalist perspective is not mistaken. It becomes much less persuasive once we take a more historical view or if we are interested in and engaged in social change. But there is no impartial evidence to show that the proletarian perspective is true and the capitalist perspective false. The ideological criticism performed here is not retrospective scientific criticism but opposes one perspective to that of the opposing class, 16. Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

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17, Richard Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 18, R. G, Peffer, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 238, 19, Denise Meyerson, False Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 17-22. 20, On the capitalists' deception of the working class, see Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), Also Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). On family structure, see Max Horklieimer, "Authority and the Family," in Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1972), pp. 47-128, See also Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism,

8 Capitalism IS CAPITALISM, AS MARX characterizes It, that different from the ways In which its defenders describe it? There is a good deal of agreement about its central features between Marx, who is fiercely critical of capitalism, and those who accept capitalism, A capitalist society is a commodity-producing society. Commodities are made in the expectation that someone will have a use for them and therefore buy them. The room that I add onto my house is not a commodity because I do not build it to sell to someone else but for my own use. But once 1 manufacture anything for sale, 1 am producing commodities. That is another way of saying that I produce for sale in a marketplace. To say that a capitalist society is a commodity society is, therefore, to say that products, including the ability to work, are bought and sold in a marketplace. Markets determine prices by supply and demand. Calling capitalism a market society says that prices are determined by supply and demand. This, too, Marx recognized quite readily. Wages, he wrote for instance, "will rise and fall according to the relations of supply and demand" (WLC, T 206), Marx, then, had no objection to calling capitalism, a "market society." Neither would he have hesitated to describe capitalism as a "free enterprise system." This description implies that under capitalism there are only minimal legal restrictions on going Into business. In feudal society both farming and the production of consumption goods by artisans were carefully regulated by law and custom; in a capitalist society, by contrast, one is legally free to pursue profit in any way one sees fit, short of defrauding others or endangering their safety. In such a society, people tend to be socially mobile: Different generations of the same family may not have the same social status or wealth, hence it is often said that anybody can become a capitalist. Again, Marx agrees:

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Capitalism The circumstance that a man without fortune but possessing energy, solidity, ability and business acumen may become a capitalist in this manner ... is greatly admired by apologists of the capitalist system. In a similar way ... the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages formed its hierarchy out of the best brains in the land, regardless of their estate, birth or fortune.l

It is often also said that everybody can become a capitalist. But that is, of course, false. What is true of each individual separately is not true of all of them together. In a footrace where the contestants are equally matched, it might be true that anybody can win. But it is clearly not true that everybody can win. The very fact that one person wins makes it impossible for all others to win. Similarly, the fact that some people are capitalists makes it impossible for others to be capitalists. Marx is not inclined to reject such characterizations of capitalism, but he does believe that they are seriously incomplete and to that extent misleading. They are clear instances of ideology insofar as they portray the capitalist system from the perspective of the capitalists. As always, he turns to history to demonstrate this: Other societies produced commodities and traded them in a market, but those societies were not capitalist Some persons in other societies accumulated great wealth, but that alone did not make them capitalists. In order to understand capitalism, more completely, we need to see what differentiates commodity production today from the commodity production of the feudal artisans or what differentiates capital accumulation today from the effort to accumulate wealth in ancient Rome. We need to understand the systematic contexts in which commodities are produced or wealth is accumulated. Medieval artisans produced "commodities." They did not merely produce, say, shoes for their own use but made their living by making shoes for anyone who could buy them. But although a capitalist society is commodity producing, not all commodity-producing societi.es are capitalist: With the urban crafts, although they rest essentially on exchange and on the creation of exchange values, the direct and chief aim of this production is subsistence as craftsmen, as master-journeyrnenf hence use-value, not wealth, not exchange value as exchange value. (G, T 275)

In capitalism the goal is to produce profits to be reinvested in more means of production. The goal is therefore to increase one's capital. The medieval guild journeyman, by contrast, simply wanted to make enough to live. Wealth,—namely, new capital—was not his goal. The reason for that was not in more detail, that medieval craftsmen had different values and therefore set themselves different goals for their lives. Rather, in the very different feudal economic system there was little point in accumulating great wealth because there was nothing to invest that wealth in. To be

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sure, there have always been people who accumulated considerable wealth. But that is not sufficient for capitalism either: The mere presence of monetary wealth, and even the achievement of a kind of supremacy on its part, is in no way sufficient for this dissolution into capital to happen. Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium, etc. would have ended their history with free labor and capital.... There too, the dissolution of the old property relations was bound up with the development of monetary wealth—of trade, etc. But instead of leading to industry, this dissolution led in fact to the supremacy of the countryside over the city, (G, T 270}

In Rome as in England in the sixteenth and. seventeenth centuries, some people accumulated great wealth. What made Roman history different from that of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when capitalism developed was the emergence in the latter period, and not in the former, of a work force of people who had no means of supporting themselves except by hiring themselves out for wages. This mass of wageworkers originated when the great English landowners dismissed their retainers, who had, together with them, consumed the surplus product of the land; when further their tenants chased off the smaller cottagers, etc., then firstly a mass of living labor was thereby thrown onto the labor market, a mass which was free in a double sense, free from the old relations of dientship, bondage and servitude, and secondly free from all belongings and possessions ..., free of all property dependent on the sale of its labor capacity or on begging, vagabondage and robbery as its only source of income. It is a matter of historic record that they tried the latter first, but were driven off this road by the gallows, stocks, and whippings onto the narrow path of the labor market (G, T 271)

Of all the changes mentioned, the rise of "free" labor appeared to Marx to be the central change in the transition to capitalism. The crucial characteristic of that new economic system, according to Marx, was the presence of two different classes of people in a capitalist society: first, the owners of the factories, raw materials, tools and machines, and all the other means of production and, second, the workers who did not own any means of production and. thus were dependent on wage labor for their livelihood. Why did Marx refuse the title of capitalist to the Roman merchant who accumulated a sizable fortune in money or to the medieval craftsman who owned tools and raw materials that he and his apprentices and laborers transformed into commodities? One can, of course, call anything "capitalism" if one so chooses, but the decisive difference between Rome or the medieval economy on the one hand and capitalism on the other seemed to Marx to be the ready availability of wage laborers in the latter and their absence in the former setting. His reasons for that are simple. In

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a society where there is little or no labor for hire, you cannot invest wealth in new machinery and raw materials because there is no one who will tend the machines to produce goods. Wealth, in a society without free labor, can be used for consumption only, either for luxury or for warfare. Moneylenders in medieval, rimes thus did not lend money to investors or to prospective industrialists but to kings and princes to support their luxurious way of life or to pay for military adventures. Only in the modern era, where there is labor for hire in a labor market, can wealth be invested, As a consequence, commodity production among medieval artisans differed from commodity production today because the setting in which it took place was quite different. Modern, commodity production aims at the accumulation of more capital. Before, the goal was more modest to support the artisan and Ms family and apprentices. Capital is money that is readily convertible into means of production: factories, tools, raw materials. But all those means are of use only to the extent that labor is available to transform the raw materials into finished products. More important, the acquisition of additional tools or raw materials is of no interest to an owner unless more labor is available. Thus, under medieval guild restrictions, an owner could hire only a limited number of apprentices anyway, and buying more tools or raw materials would have been a waste because workers would not have been on hand to do the work of transforming those additional raw materials into finished products: The rules of guilds,... by limiting most strictly the number of apprentices and journeymen that a single master could employ, prevented him from becoming a capitalist.... A merchant could buy every kind of commodity, but labor as a commodity he could not buy. (CI, T 396)

Similarly, in the countryside, acquiring new land was of no advantage unless one also acquired more people to work it. But inasmuch as people were attached to the land under serfdom, there was no reserve force of agricultural labor to be hired to till additional land. There was no market in land; land was not bought or sold. New land was acquired by warfare, which at the same provided a work force from among the conquered people to cultivate land newly acquired,2 Modern capitalism is a complex social system. Its individual components occur in other historical periods. Thus Marx notes that the Incas of Peru practiced a complex division of labor before the advent of the Spaniards. But this division of labor was not in the service of a market because the goods produced were not exchanged.3 The components of capitalism, set in a society where labor is for hire and the ability to work has itself become a commodity, take on different characteristics from what they had in previous social systems.

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What Is Modern Capitalism? We usually think of capital as money or perhaps as means of production; buildings, machines, raw materials, tools, means of communication, office equipment laboratories, and so on; Marx, too, frequently writes as if that is what he meant by the word "capital." But when he was really careful about his language, he used "capital" to refer to a "social relation of production"; A spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no inore capital than gold itself is money or sugar the price of sugar..., Capital, also, is a social relation of production. (WLC, T 207)

Means of production are "capital" only in a very specific setting—namely, when they are the private property of some members of a society while all the others own no means of production and, in fact, own little beyond their own person and their ability to work. Means of production become capital only when most people do wage labor precisely because they do not own means of production (CI, T 431ff.). Marx and Engels often summarize that characterization of capitalism by saying that under capitalism means of production are privately owned. The factories, raw materials, and capital are owned not by the community as a whole or by the government but by private individuals. More important, capital is not owned by all private individuals. The bulk of productive resources in a capitalist society is the individual property of a small minority of the members of the society. All the other people do wage labor. Wage labor is "free" in two senses. Workers are free from the serfdom that tied peasants to their land and from, the slavery that tied the slave's person to her or his owner. Unlike the serf or the slave, the modern worker can change employers if one offers better wages or conditions than another; she or he can move to a different town if there is more work there. Serfs and slaves, by contrast, were not free to make those choices. Hence labor power under feudalism or slavery was not a commodity traded in a labor market (under slavery the person, not his or her ability to work, is a commodity). Under capitalism, however, labor power is a commodity (G, T 270, 271). But workers are also "free of all property." They do not, for instance, own plots of land that would support them and their families, even for a while, allowing them to refuse work if it is badly paid or excessively arduous. Nor do they own wealth that would support them so that they can turn down work that for whatever reason they do not like. The forces of labor thus are "free" also in the sense that they are without any financial reserves and therefore must work to live. Free labor must. work.

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Marx notes several background conditions for the existence of "free" labor. One is the "free exchange relation" (G, T 254). If there is to be a labor market in which individual employers and workers contract for work and wages, there must be a legal system that enforces contracts evenhandedly—that is, a legal, system that does not apply different rules to the rich and to the poor, to the noble and to the commoner. Whatever the actual realities in particular places and times may be, capitalism does establish a legal system for the enforcement of contracts of which the central principle is equality before the law, A population of "free" labor also presupposes a commodity economy developed to the point where it can supply food, clothing, and housing to such a working population that cannot supply any of its own needs because it owns no means of production. Hence the need for rental housing near the factories as well as stores that sell clothes and food, to house, clothe, and feed this propertyless population. Marx notes that as more and more women and children were employed in the English factories in the first half of the nineteenth century, "Domestic work such as sewing and mending must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles."4 Once labor becomes a commodity also, the function of the means of production changes drastically: They become capital in the modern sense. The capitalist now has two objects in view; in the first place he wants to produce a use-value that has a value in exchange, that is to say, an article that is destined to be sold, a commodity; and secondly he desires to produce a commodity whose value shall be greater than the sum of the values of the commodities used in its production. (CI, T 351}

The capitalist wants to produce goods that sell; otherwise his effort is useless and he squanders his capital. But equally important, he wants to make a profit. If at the end of a period of work he just breaks even—that is, he has just enough left to live on after paying for his means of production and his labor—then his effort is wasted. In that situation, Property in raw materials and instruments of labor would be merely nominal; economically they would belong to the worker as much as to the capitalist since they would create value only insofar as he himself were a worker. (G, T 248)

The purpose of capitalist efforts is to remunerate the worker, to pay for the raw materials and resources consumed, to pay the capitalist for his work, and, in addition, to produce a return on capital that can be reinvested. That profit goes to the owner of the capital alone; the worker does not get a share of that. If there were no profits, the owner would be in the same position as the worker—he would get paid only for the work he does. But, normally, under capitalism capital also gets a "reward"—addi-

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tional sums for reinvestment to be added to the capital already in use, Thus the ownership of capital carries its special reward, for the owner of the original capital will also be the owner of the new sums of capital realized in any given economic transaction. The capitalist's ownership of the capital, not only brings him remuneration for his work; it also makes him the owner of the additional proceeds available for reinvestment. The capitalist's motto is Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets.... Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie,5

Capital is different from means of production or money in a society without a labor market because it is only in a society with a labor market that capital can seek to enlarge itself continually. A capitalist society is different from a commodity-producing society in which, there is no free labor because commodity production cannot yield significant profits for reinvestment unless there is free labor available to be put to work by this new capital. It is for this reason that Marx insists that capital is not just money or machines but a "social relation of production"—a shorthand way of saying that means of production come to be capital and function to produce profits and accumulation of capital only where there are very specific relations of production, namely, those that obtain in a society with free labor and private ownership of the means of production. Other Characteristics of Capitalism Some additional important points must be mentioned to round out Marx's characterization of capitalism. Once capitalists are oriented toward growth, they will attempt to increase profits. The commodities they produce are intended for sale in a market, and profits are increased by selling more commodities. Under ordinary circumstances they can do that in a variety of different ways—for example, by lowering prices and thereby capturing a larger share of the total demand for whatever they produce. In any ordinary period, the demand for toothbrushes, for instance, is fairly constant. Barring a sudden panic over bad breath or bad teeth or a sizable increase in the population over a very short period, the number of toothbrushes that sell in any given year does not change significantly. If any given manufacturer of toothbrushes wants to make more money, he or she must capture a larger market share—that is, he or she must sell a larger proportion of the total number of toothbrushes sold. Capitalists, in pursuit of greater profits, compete with each other: Except in the periods of prosperity, there rages between the capitalists the most furious combat for the share of each in the markets.6

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They can compete by having price wars but also through advertising campaigns, by redesigning products, and so on. The capitalist economy is a competitive one. Capitalists do not merely compete with one another; they also stick together and cooperate in certain respects. A prime example of that is their joint effort to maintain a relatively high level of unemployment. Capitalist economies tend to foster a certain level of unemployment, forcing workers to accept jobs that are intrinsically undesirable and, often, incommensurate with their abilities. The industrial reserve army, during periods of stagnation or average prosperity, weighs down the active labor army; during periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. (CI, T 427)

There are several causes of that: As capitalism progresses, individual capitalists compete with one another by buying new machinery that raises productivity, that is, requires less labor per unit of output. That general trend toward mechanization tends to reduce the demand for labor and thus produces unemployment (CI, T 422), Still, new capital can be invested only if workers are available to perform the necessary work. Capitalists are therefore interested in a work force that is looking for work (CI, T 423). In addition, wages are determined by supply and demand in a labor market, and as a consequence capitalists have an interest in keeping the supply of labor high and the demand for labor low (WLC, T 216). (To what extent they are able to meet those interests is a matter of controversy.) But none of that would happen unless people were willing to compete, unless making profits appeared to them to be of paramount importance. Marx notes that not all cultures valued profit-makiiig as highly as do capitalist ones. We never find the Ancients investigating which form of land ownership etc. is the most productive and produces the greatest wealth. Wealth does not appear to be the goal of production.... The question, is always which form of property creates the best citizens.... Wealth as an end in itself appears only with the few mercantile peoples . . . who live in the interstices of the ancient world, as did the Jews in medieval society.7

As we would expect on the basis of the discussions in Chapters 1-6 of this book, with changing social relations of production, human beings change also: We have here an example not only of a change of values but also of complex patterns of actions, of choices that people actually make—all of which we refer to in a shorthand way by saying that in a capitalist society people are animated by the "profit motive," Making a profit, getting rich, accumulating capital are important motivations in a capitalist society.

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They were not so in some other societies; in still others they played only a subsidiary role. This is not a point about the motivations of the individual capitalist but about the role of the capitalist. We return here to a distinction that we saw Marx draw earlier between the social role of being a capitalist and the private motives that may animate any particular person who fills the role of the capitalist (see Chapter 2), As a capitalist, you need to do certain things, obey certain norms. A capitalist who refuses to increase his or her capital will not remain a capitalist for long. Imagine that you are employed as the manager of a company. Because you pay unusually high wages or support colleges or orphanages, you do not turn a profit from one year to the next and therefore have no profits from which to pay dividends to the stockholders. You may well be applauded for your enlightened labor management relations and. your generous contributions, but you will be fired anyway because you did not do the job you were hired for, namely, to make your company grow. None of this implies that all capitalists are greedy or ungenerous persons. Some no doubt are; others no doubt are not. Certain capitalists, as is often pointed out, are probably motivated not by the desire for more money but by the desire for power. But in any case the analysis of capitalism as a social system does not explain the characteristics of capitalism by reference to the personal desires of the people who fill the role of the capitalists. To explain the nature of capitalism by reference to the psychology of capitalists would confuse the entire analysis of capitalism because it would imply that if we could either improve the moral character of existing capitalists or replace the ones we have with people who are less greedy or less power-hungry, then capitalism would be very different and probably be more benign. (This would be another example of idealism, discussed in Chapter 6.) But this is, of course, not true: Capitalists act as they do because that is what the social system demands of them. Yet this social system is easily misunderstood. Capitalism may be described as a market society, and the regularities of the market appear, like regularities in nature, independent of human activity. Prices, for instance, are not really set by buyers and sellers but are determined by the impersonal forces of supply and demand. Hence capitalism is often thought of as a quasi-natural system that grows up unplanned and separate from the intentions of human beings, perhaps just the result, as Adam Smith thought, of certain basic human inclinations. But to think of the market in that way is to fall victim to what we earlier saw Marx call "fetishism" (see Chapter 7), which regards the market as a natural force independent of human beings, something that is, in fact, a human creation. For the market mechanism as a whole is not a natural phenomenon such as gravity that exists independent of human activity and choice. On the contrary.

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markets, as we have just seen, exist only under specific historical conditions. What is more, the existence of a market system is, on the one hand, maintained by human activities and, on the other hand, constantly contested. The existence of a market in labor is challenged in the workplace in the form of demands for guaranteed employment and in labor's attempts to limit the ravages of a free labor market through legislation (for instance, through laws limiting the length of the workday). Producers try to exempt themselves from market forces or to modify the effects of the market by asking for subsidies (farm subsidies are a notorious example) or special tax legislation in their favor (such as oil depreciation allowances) or through oligopolistic practices that reduce the corrosive effects of unrestrained competition. Various groups resist the application of market forces in other areas of human life. Opponents of prostitution want to keep sexual love from, being a commodity; proponents of the traditional family object to turning childcare into something to be bought and sold in a market. Experiments with rent control try to take housing out of the marketplace; government subsidies for different groups put a limitation on other market forces. The market is a highly artificial, carefully regulated institution. It is no more natural than governments, the institution of marriage, or our educational system. Human activities and relations seent to be governed by these market forces. But the commodity society, which appears to function unregulated, following autonomous laws, is created and. constantly re-created by the actions of human beings. Capitalism is frequently identified with industry and industrial development. Here again Marx draws on history to clarify the relation between capitaltsm. and industrial modes of production. It is clear that machines play an essential role in modern capitalism. Not only are they in evidence everywhere, but they are also important tools in the competition among capitalists. In their attempt to undersell competitors, for instance, capitalists will frequently install new machines that permit cheaper production and thus allow the producer to lower prices of products. It Is equally clear from the history of capitalism., however, that its early phases preceded the development of modern technology. I discussed previously (in Chapter 5) the phase of capitalism—what Marx calls "manufacture"—that came before industrialization. In this phase workers, who were formerly artisans, worked under the direct supervision of the capitalist who, as time went on, also owned the tools and raw-materials. Industrial machinery was introduced only later (Cl, T 388-403). It was not an essential and indispensable feature of capitalism. The development of technology is the result rather than the cause of the development of capitalist social relations of production. Of course in most versions of capitalism machinery does play an important role in the relations between capitalists and workers. Mechanization gives the capitalists new avenues of control over the workers. Ma-

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chines save labor; by introducing more powerful machinery, the capitalist can often reduce the number of people working for him or her. A new machine is introduced, and some workers lose their jobs. That reminds all the remaining workers that the same thing may happen to them: New machines may threaten their jobs. Their livelihood depends on the goodwill of the capitalist. That perception serves to make workers more docile. To the extent that they feel insecure in their jobs, they will be less likely to be antagonistic at work. At the same time, machinery often replaces skilled workers with workers who are less highly trained, A good deal of machinery makes great skill unnecessary. Marx observes that weavers in India develop immensely complicated skills and become proficient in producing materials of unequaled quality "without capital, machinery, division of labor,"9 whereas workers in a capitalist workshop often need only one skill that can be acquired quickly by anyone. The introduction of the division of labor as well as of machinery means that workers need fewer skills. Industrialization enables the capitalist to replace the skilled craftsman with a more or less unskilled person. But unskilled workers not only earn less than skilled workers but also are more easily replaced, The workers with fewer skills have a precarious hold on their jobs; they cannot afford to go against their employers. Thus the introduction of machinery gives employers greater power over their employees. This illustrates one other important aspect of capitalism. Although workers and employers strike a bargain in the labor market and are to that extent free and equal, once the bargain has been concluded, their equality comes to an end and employers are much more powerful. They control the productive resources and thus can decide whether any given worker will have a job, will be able to make a living to support him- or herself and a family. The unequal power in the capitalist system is an essential feature—obscured by such common descriptions of capitalism as "a market society" or "a free enterprise society." We shall have much more to say about the issue of the capitalists' power over all other members of the society in Chapter 14. Capitalism is characterized by a money economy, commodity production, and private property in means of production. But unlike other social orders with those characteristics, capitalism has transformed the ability to do work (labor power) into a commodity as well. There is a large group of people who have no means of support except wage labor. In such a society, the pursuit of profit, the effort to increase one's capital, becomes a central motivation that pits capitalists against one another. The great contribution of that system is that it gives impetus to a previously undreamt of productivity as a result of the development of technology and the reorganization of work life.

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Commodity production has existed in other types of societies. But it is only in the capitalist society that everything, including labor power, is a commodity. To be sure, not everyone who works produces commodities. Women who keep house and raise children are a prime example. But housework and childcare are also done for money as commodity production. Similarly, virtually all occupations that do not produce commodities