by Scott Soames
Later German philosophers tried to do better. In “On the Dignity of Man” (1794), Johann Gottlieb Fichte undertook the emancipation of man, as spirit, from (seeming) determination by nature. Man, he proclaimed, should think of himself as “independent of everything outside him”; he “exists absolutely in and through himself … and by his own strength.”50 This hortatory statement was offered as a guide to action, rather than an objective description of independent reality, which post-Kantian German philosophy had convinced itself can’t be meaningfully spoken about. Since unknowable Kantian things-in-themselves have no reality for us, they can be ignored. The pressing practical question was, how should man use his freedom to fulfill himself by shaping his destiny through action? Human history is, Fichte thought, the course of our attempts to do so.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) cut the Gordian knot, telling us, in effect, not to flee from, or struggle against, unknowable Kantian reality, but eliminate it by recognizing consciousness itself as the sole reality. But what, one wonders, does that mean? There is more to reality than the individual. Nor can humanity exhaust the whole of reality, can it? No, Hegel said, it can’t. But Reality, the universe and all it contains, can be spiritual; it is a single, evolving divine mind of which human minds are integral parts. From this perspective, all history on earth, especially all human history, is the struggle of Reality itself—the World Mind of which we are parts—to perfect itself.
Although history appears chaotic and purposeless, in fact it follows a purposive rational dialectic—of progress, opposition, and overcoming of opposition in a higher, more encompassing, synthesis, followed by further cycles of the same sort. All aspects of this dialectic transcend the motives of individuals. Since this evolution results from Laws of Reality, it cannot be thwarted, hurried, or modified by human will. Human freedom comes, paradoxically, to be identified with understanding, and reconciling ourselves to, this necessity. As civilization progresses, human freedom expands as one adjusts one’s own interests and aspirations to the general will of all, which is embodied by the laws, institutions, and directives of the governing state.
The state itself may be democratic, but it need not be, since Hegel never regarded the general will to be a mere sum of the wills of individuals. Rather, he took the general will to represent the highest level of perfection achievable by the World Mind at the time. Although this may sound like, and indeed may be, an excuse for tyranny, Hegel didn’t think of it that way, because he imagined that the gradual replacement of individual wills by the general will would, in the end, be voluntary. He did not deny that coercion exists at early historical stages. Being the highest level of World Reason at any given time, the state must, at that time, be the final arbiter of any conflict between it and its subjects. This means that in immature states coercion might be widespread. Nevertheless, Hegel believed that it would gradually disappear as the state progressed to higher levels of perfection. This is the outline that Marx took over and modified.
Like Hegel, Marx believed that the laws of history would eventually bring about complete human freedom, when the general will becomes the will of each individual—thereby removing all sources of conflict and any need for coercion. Unlike Hegel, Marx didn’t believe in the state as the repository of the general will, or in the individual’s ultimate absorption by it. For Marx, the state always represents the interests of the dominant class, from which it follows that true emancipation will occur only when both the state and all social classes disappear, thereby eliminating all causes of conflict, domination, and coercion.
Like Hegel, Marx also believed that history moved by a recurring dialectic of progress, opposition, and overcoming of opposition by a new synthesis, bringing humankind closer to ultimate emancipation. Unlike Hegel, he didn’t see the route to foreordained perfection as a gradual process of discernible improvement. Instead, he recognized that conflict, suffering, and violence were unavoidable, and he thought that the final step, needed to destroy rather than merely transform the state, would require increasing misery and culminate in a cataclysmic convulsion.
Marx also followed Hegel in recognizing that although human will can play an instrumental role in moving history forward, the general course of history was immutable. However, he differed from Hegel in taking conflict between social classes to be the chief instrument of historical change. For Marx the history of humankind is the history of our struggle to wrest what we need from nature, by means of our labor. The forces driving history are, therefore, economic, being concerned with how the products we require are produced and distributed. The struggle for power throughout history is the struggle for control over the processes of production and distribution of valued products. Different social classes, occupying different positions in the structure of production and distribution, at different periods, are the protagonists. Their interests, values, beliefs, and ways of life are fundamentally shaped by the economic positions they occupy.
Marx also rejected Hegel’s conception of Reality. Whereas Hegel took it to be Pure Spirit advancing toward a state of perfect self-consciousness, Marx resisted taking any metaphysical view about things in themselves. Instead, he insisted that all our knowledge of nature and ourselves is ultimately practical, answering to our needs, to our social lives, and to our place in history. There was, he thought, no need for a transcendent standpoint, abstracted from our day-to-day struggles, from which we might view the world as it is in itself. In this respect, Marx was more naturalistic than Hegel.
However, his naturalism wasn’t as empirical as it might at first seem. This can be seen in one his most important concepts, the value of useful products available for exchange in an economic system. To understand Marx on this subject, one must recognize that price and value were, for him, utterly distinct. The former is determined by supply and demand, which he saw as heavily influenced by the unjustified political and economic power of certain individuals and the dominance of certain classes. This he contrasted with the “real value” of a product in satisfying genuine human needs of free and equal individuals. According to Marx, the real value of an economic product is, as Kołakowski helpfully puts it, “the average amount of time necessary to produce a given article at a particular historical stage of human ability and technical progress.”51 According to Marx, products that have the same labor value in this sense have the same real value, no matter how different their uses, no matter how intensely the public wants or needs them, no matter how much knowledge or skill of various kinds the labor requires, no matter how scarce that knowledge or skill may be, no matter how hazardous or inherently disagreeable the work needed to produce the products, and no much how much capital is required for production and marketing.
Because of all this, products of different so-called “real labor value” in Marx’s sense certainly can differ widely in price. What is problematic is whether his definition picks out any genuine type of value at all. Surely, there is no all-encompassing value of products that ignores everything Marx excludes. At most, his concept identifies one type of, or contributor to, total value. But even that is dubious. To be told simply that two unrelated products require the same average time to produce is to be told next to nothing about the real value of the products, unless we are also told about all the various factors Marx ignores. Finally, his innocent-sounding concept, average labor time required to produce a product p, is likely to be unmeasurable, when one considers all factors needed to come up with a number.
What would those factors be? In addition to (let us say) factory time in production proper, we would need to add (i) the labor time required to produce all tools used in p’s production (plus tools for making those tools, and so on ad infinitum), (ii) the labor time required to provide training and education for those involved in planning and organizing the production and marketing of p (and for the education and training of those providing that education and training, and so on ad infinitum), (iii) the labor time required to construct all infrastructure necessary for
transportation, storage, and sale of p, and (iv) the labor time required to secure necessary financing for every aspect of the production and marketing of p. Surely there is no way of measuring all of this, if, as Marx insists, we can’t rely on prices in the computation of every item that goes into the production and marketing of a product. Thus, his concept, average labor time required to produce a product p, is useless in formulating empirically testable laws capable of explaining past events and predicting future ones, of the sort Marx claimed to provide.
His insistence that the real value of any economic product is its labor value was tied to his conviction that the capital involved in producing it adds nothing of value. From this, his desired conclusion—that return on capital is a form of theft, depriving workers of the fruits of their labors—followed by stipulative definition. But how, one may ask, can he have taken the definition to be justified? After all, he knew that the use of capital to improve the means of production increases worker productivity, thereby adding to social wealth. The answer is that he took the role of capital to be parasitic. Capitalist investment in machinery to increase the productivity of workers in a given industry is, he seemed to think, merely the purchase of the labor of those who made the machines. Thus, the resulting increase in wealth, though real, was, in his mind, entirely due to the workers involved, directly or indirectly, in producing the product.
This argument suffers from several flaws. First, the investment of capital is inherently risky, and so will rationally be undertaken only if there is a reasonable expectation of reward. Second, successful investing, which generates real social wealth, requires not only time and effort, but also unusual skill and highly specialized knowledge that must be compensated, if the value invested capital makes possible is to be realized. Third, although one can imagine a benevolent deity with the knowledge and good will needed to make wise investments for a society, no individual or human institution could possibly possess the vast knowledge, or the selfless benevolence, that would be required to match the performance of decentralized capital markets. In short, capitalist investment is, on the whole, not theft, but a major contributor to real value.
Marx didn’t recognize this. For him, the return on capital was the appropriation by capitalists of surplus value from the workers—defined as the amount of value workers created in producing a product minus the amount of compensation required to sustain them in their present state. Although Marx recognized that capitalism greatly increased worker productivity, thereby making genuine social abundance possible for the first time in human history, he also believed that capitalism required ever larger appropriations of surplus value, increasing the relative impoverishment of workers (in relation to the value they produce) and exerting continuing pressure to keep their compensation near subsistence levels.52 Because capitalist markets are ruled by competition, he reasoned, no level of investment or technology could ensure a permanent advantage for any enterprise. To stay afloat, new improvements, higher levels of investment, and further expropriation of surplus value from the workers must always be the order of the day.
In addition to leading to permanent poverty and ever greater inequality, the dynamic Marx thought he discerned could only result in an increasingly degraded and alienated working class. A few passages from Capital illustrate what he means.
The division of labor in manufacture … not only increases the social productive power of labor for the benefit of the capitalist … but does so by crippling individual labourers. It creates new conditions for the lordship of capital over labour.53
The lightening of labour [due to mechanization] … becomes a kind of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer, but deprives the work of all interest.… It is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman.54
All methods for raising the social productiveness of labour … transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy any remnant of attraction in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they … subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness.… [A]ll methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law that always equilibrates the industrial reserve army [of relatively impoverished potential workers] … establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding to an accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, agony, of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality and moral degradation at the opposite pole.55
These predictions, which proved spectacularly inaccurate, were central to Marx’s conviction that capitalism would immanently collapse due to its internal contradictions, and be replaced, after a transitional period, by stateless society with no private ownership of the means of production, no enforced division of labor, no social classes, and no social conflicts. Capitalism’s chief contradiction was alleged to arise from the fact that its central economic processes—which, for the first time in history, produced sufficient abundance to meet all genuine human needs—divided society into irreconcilable classes of capitalist exploiters versus proletarian workers. As the proletariat grew and its plight inevitably worsened, it would, Marx thought, finally become aware both of its class interests and of the cause of its misery, leading it to violently overthrow its oppressors.
Marx recognized that there would then be need for a dictatorship of the proletariat. Its role would be to eliminate the vestiges of capitalism, to do the social planning needed to ensure that production is governed by real social needs, and to guarantee that workers receive the true value of their products minus only legitimate deductions for essentials such as insurance against emergencies, schools, hospitals, and the care of those unable to work.56 Later, Marx thought, when people have internalized the values of the new system and a level of production is reached sufficient for all, no enforced division of labor would be needed, the distinction between physical and intellectual work would be obliterated, and all but minimal activities of the state would wither away.57
Here Marx offers his own version of Hegel’s idealized vision of ultimate human freedom as consisting in the adjustment of one’s own interests and aspirations to the general will of all. Unlike Hegel, he imagines this occurring not within the authority of the state, but at a time in which state authority isn’t needed. It is then that the new socialist citizen, seeing no conflict between his or her own deepest desires and interests and his or her role as a worker contributing to the good of all, is imagined to fully assent to the utopian slogan “From each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s need.”
This, in brief, is the dazzling, ingenious system of thought that helped to inspire so many horrors in the years since Marx’s death. In light of that history, it takes some effort to understand how his intellectual creation could have had so great an influence. There were, I believe, three main factors involved. First, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism generated the most far-reaching changes in our individual and collective lives in the history of civilization. Although these changes were, for the most part, highly positive, they were accompanied not only by disorienting dislocations, but also by enormous increases in, and uses of, destructive power. Thus it is natural that the changes in the capitalist era were for a long time both worrisome and ill understood. It is therefore not surprising that Marx’s systematic critique of them—in the name of the traditional values of freedom, equality, and fulfillment—might have seemed compelling.
Second, although the claim that Marx correctly identified scientific laws governing social, economic, and historical change was incorrect, the idea that there are
(some) impersonal laws governing these domains is plausible; it certainly has not been disproved. Whatever else one may say about him, Marx did champion this embryonic social-scientific idea, while generating suggestive hypotheses about the role of social classes. Finally, his system—which was closer to Hegel’s philosophical humanism than to any scientific theory—provided a comforting replacement for traditional religion, complete with a historically guiding purpose, an eventual heaven on earth, and a cause to which one could be devoted. All in all, Marx’s system was, for many, a guide to the perplexed with the authority of science and the comforts of religion; of course it inspired devoted followers.
It was, nevertheless, too good to be true, which should have inspired more skepticism at the outset. Marxist thought did, of course, have dedicated critics. But it also attracted much respectful attention among European cultural and intellectual elites, as well as a fervent following among political agitators, some of whom interpreted it as a blueprint for seizing power. Did it really offer such a blueprint? The most insightful brief discussion of this question I know of is the final section, “Marxism as a Source of Leninism,” of volume 1 of Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism.
Kołakowski’s verdict is mixed. He recognizes that Marx’s philosophy doesn’t contain anything like the level of detail needed for concrete political action. For example, after his death, Marx’s followers had to decide what, if anything, they could do to hasten the inevitable revolution. Nothing in Marx’s writing definitively settled the matter.
The debate between necessity and freedom could be resolved in theory, but at a certain point it had to be decided whether revolutionary movement must wait for capitalism to mature economically or whether it should seize power as soon as the political situation permitted.… Those who relied on the gradual and automatic development of capitalism into communism, and those who stressed the creative historical role of revolutionary initiative, could both find support in Marxist writings.58
