Marx’s judgment, if true, must call into question the legitimacy not only of capitalism but modern Western order in general, which largely justifies itself on the very grounds of individual freedom. The seriousness of his allegation thus demands an equally serious inquiry into its validity. Is it true that individual freedom in liberal capitalist society is mere illusion or delusion? Is it true that relentless coercive pressure forces upon every individual the involuntary servitude of a slave, that is, compulsory labor, performed without volition or choice?
The attempt to answer such questions must begin with restatement of the definitions of freedom and coercion that historically informed the development of Western political and economic order, particularly its Anglo-American expression. Freedom, as we have seen, involves the ability to act in the absence of coercion. Coercion exists whenever one human being attempts to determine the consequences of another human being’s choice in such a way that the victim will act as the coercer desires rather than as the victim himself desires. Any act of coercion (and thus any violation of freedom) necessarily involves the existence of at least two conscious and willing human beings—the coercer and the coerced. The exercise of coercion further entails intentionality, that is, the coercer must deliberately aim to induce another person to act, not as he himself wills, but rather as the coercer wills.
Marx’s critique of freedom fails to meet such conditions. Such failure is immediately apparent upon posing the relevant question: Who in the Marxian scenario is exercising coercion, that is, is deliberately forcing upon the individual the awful choice of work or die? Who is the identifiable human actor who holds both the intention and power to determine the consequences of another individual’s choice—either work and survive or do not work and die—such that the latter will choose to act as the former wishes (work) rather than as he himself wishes (not to work)? A moment’s reflection reveals that no such person exists in a free society. No human being possesses either the intention or the power to force another human being to work if he does not voluntarily choose to do so. Slavery is legally prohibited in modern liberal society, and capitalism, as we have seen, legally prohibits the use of force in market exchange.
We recall that freedom in the Anglo-American tradition is a specific and qualified kind of freedom, namely, the ability to act in a voluntary manner. A person is free provided that no other human being possesses both the intention and power to prevent his voluntary choice of belief or action. Such freedom does not involve the ability of the person to do whatever he desires, such as live without working. Individual freedom, as we have seen, is rather conceived as a negative value secured by the absence of a particular condition, namely, intentional coercive action on the part of another human being. The fact that human beings must work to survive does not violate human freedom so conceived. Such violation would require the existence of an identifiable human being deliberately exerting coercive pressure on another human being toward a specified end. Such a condition, as said, is absent in the Marxian critique. No one is coerced to work in a free society because there is no identifiable, or even conceivable, human coercer.
Marx’s critique is plausible but fallacious. His reasoning, like that involved in most fallacious conclusions, does embody an element of truth, namely, in a free society, a person who voluntarily chooses not to work will eventually perish (assuming, again, no other source of support). His conclusion—the denial of the reality of freedom in liberal capitalist society—however, is false, because such a consequence does not result from human intentionality and power, a necessary condition for the violation of freedom. Existence in a free society does make stringent demands on every individual, even to the extent of Marx’s “work or die.” Such demands, however, derive not from morally or politically meaningful human coercion but rather from the nature of things. They derive, that is, from the kind of world inhabited by human beings, a world characterized by the fundamental fact of scarcity. The human necessity to work is “caused,” so to speak, by the fact that the goods required for human survival and flourishing do not exist in unlimited supply.
In such a world, the only conceivable agent that could be charged with coercion—intentionally forcing individuals to work on pain of death—is the agent responsible for creating the kind of world in which such a choice is necessary. In the minds of most members of Western society, that agent could only be the transcendent God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the maker of heaven and earth. Such was undoubtedly the view held by the majority of Marx’s nineteenth-century contemporaries. God, the omnipotent creator of the world ex nihilo, is ultimately responsible for the nature of things, for creating the kind of world in which man is forced to work in order to survive (“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food . . . ” [Genesis 3:19]).[51] The necessity to choose between work and death cannot be attributed to human design or intention; obviously no human being is or can be held responsible for the nature of things. For such reasons, the coercer implied in the Marxian critique can be none other than God, a conclusion supported by Marx himself. As he says in the well-known foreword to his doctoral thesis, “[P]hilosophy makes no secret of it. Prometheus’ confession ‘in a word, I hate all gods’, is its own confession, its own motto against all gods in heaven and earth who do not recognize human self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”[52]
Marx’s critique of the free society, cast largely in economic terms, penetrates far more deeply than economics. It represents a radical critique of Western civilization in general and its religious tradition in particular. Indeed Marx played a leading role in the profound existential drama enacted in Western society throughout the nineteenth century, what Albert Camus famously characterized as “metaphysical rebellion” against the God of the Bible and correlative elevation of “Humanity” (“man’s self-consciousness”) to godlike status.[53] The existential and metaphysical thrust of Marx’s mission has been described by various scholars as the attempted “self-divinization” of man, a mission pursued not only by Marx but other major thinkers of the era as well.[54] The modern ideological movements inspired by Marx and fellow travelers cannot be comprehended apart from their profound and mutual rejection of transcendent religion, a subject extensively explored in Volume III of this study.
Dialectical Materialism and Alienation of Labor
According to Marx, then, capitalism and supporting liberal institutions do not and cannot realize freedom, which alone provides sufficient grounds for their condemnation. The failure to realize freedom, however, is not the only or even the most problematic flaw of the market system. Capitalism must be condemned not only for its alleged violation of freedom but for an even more profound moral fault: the system itself, Marx sweepingly concludes, is intrinsically and irremediably unjust. The grounds on which he bases such a devastating conclusion must be comprehended in light of his general vision of capitalism, a subject to which we now turn.
Marx clearly recognized that capitalism is dependent upon the institution of private property. Capitalists, by definition, own the means of production—the factories, tools, machines, and other material inputs into the production process—which means that they and they alone decide if and how to employ such resources. Marx sometimes refers to this group of capitalists/owners as the bourgeoisie, conventionally translated as the “middle class.” The bourgeoisie, according to Marx, necessarily confronts a second and distinct class of human beings in liberal society, the so-called proletariat (from the Latin prole, “without issue”), conventionally translated as the “workers.” The proletariat comprises all individuals who do not own capital, who own no factories, tools, or other material means of production. Their sole possession is their own labor. Modern society, according to Marx, is thus divided into two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—those who own capital and those who do not. The two economic classes, moreover, relate to one another not in friendship and cooperation but rather enmity and antagonism.
Such mutual hostility, however
, is to be expected, for, according to Marx, struggle between contending classes (“class struggle”) has not only existed in every society known to man but indeed is the driving force of history. Class struggle, he maintains, has been a constant feature of human society, merely assuming different forms in different historical eras. In the ancient world, the class struggle pitted masters against slaves; in the feudal world, overlords and nobility against serfs; in the modern era, the struggle is between capitalists and workers. As Marx put it,
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. . . . Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.[55]
The movement of human history over time is driven by antagonism between the two historically pertinent classes. Tension between them generates conflict that demands resolution. When such a point is reached, the conflict is resolved by the emergence of new “relations of production”—the birth of a new structure of economic organization. Eventually each newly born economic structure will in turn generate tension and conflict, leading to its replacement by the relations of production appropriate to the movement of history. By such a “dialectical” process, ancient slavery eventually transformed into feudalism, which eventually transformed into capitalism. Capitalism is similarly destined to transform into what Marx regarded as the final goal or end of the historical process, namely, communism.
Many nineteenth-century thinkers held what is called a determinist philosophy of history. The course of history is conceived as an autonomous and self-directing entity that proceeds in accord with its own laws—the so-called “laws of history”—and toward a predetermined goal established by those same laws (the “End of History”). Marx was a man of his time, a fervent champion of historical determinism in general and his own version in particular, which he called dialectical materialism. History, he maintained, is not only driven by class struggle but also toward achievement of its own goal or purpose, independent of the goals or purposes of individual human beings. The march of history toward its goal is ineluctable and inevitable, determined not by human subjects but objective and immutable laws indifferent to human preference. Marx, like other historical determinists of the era, claimed to know the final goal of history, that toward which it has been striving for all time. The modern struggle between capitalists and workers is simply a necessary stage in the historical process. The resolution of capitalism’s internal conflicts will lead not only to resolution of its particular conflicts but indeed of class conflict itself, which, according to Marx, will be achieved by the final, once-and-for-all, establishment of communist relations of production. Individuals may be utterly unaware of the role they play in realizing the “end of history” so conceived, instead believing in their capacity for exercising voluntary choice in the face of historical circumstance. Such conviction, however, is more or less illusory. Every human being, in truth, is an instrument of history with no choice but to participate toward fulfillment of its final goal. The transformation of capitalism into communism is beyond human control because the laws of history are beyond human control.
Marx further believed that contemporary society was in the throes of the final class struggle that would culminate in communism. Such culmination, while inevitable, could nevertheless be facilitated by the so-called “vanguard of the proletariat,” intellectuals such as Marx who understand the laws of history and can guide society toward its final goal, serving, one might say, as midwives to the birth of a new world order. One aspect of such a role involves raising the consciousness of the workers. The proletariat must come to realize its oppressive condition and recognize its cause—capitalism. Having gained such understanding, workers as a whole will unite against capitalists as a whole, rise up in violent revolution, throw off their chains, and seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie. Thus begins the process whereby the final goal of history, the establishment of communism, is realized.
One of Marx’s tasks, accordingly, is to enlighten the workers regarding the injustice of the capitalist order, in which a minority of society, the capitalists, exercise exclusive control over the means of production. Workers in a capitalist society, he says, are little more than “wage slaves” controlled by the “Lords of Capital.”[56] Workers are not free; they themselves own no capital and thus have no choice but to work for their capitalist masters. Those who refuse to do so, as we have seen, will die; their very existence is dependent on their capitalist oppressors. Moreover, such work as they are forced to perform not only destroys their freedom but also their humanity. According to Marx, the nature of man, his so-called “species being,” demands free creative activity. Man is homo faber—“Man the Maker.” His nature can only be fulfilled through spontaneous exercise of his abilities, acts of production that authentically express his being and his creativity. Such fulfillment, however, requires possession of the means to engage in spontaneous creativity activity, a condition that is absent under capitalism. Instead of freely pursuing the creative expression of human being, workers are forced to expend their life force on mere drudgery, producing items over which they have no creative control and which, moreover, ultimately belong not to themselves but rather the capitalist overlord.
The labor enforced by capitalism, then, does violence to man’s species being. A worker in a capitalist economy only feels human, whole and free, when not working, during his few hours of leisure. His nature—his innate need to create freely and hold the fruits of creativity in his own hands—is starved of fulfillment. Such conditions produce what Marx calls the alienation of labor, a dreadful state of affairs in which a person’s very being—his life force—is vitiated through employment structured by capitalist relations of production. Capitalism prevents human beings from fulfilling their nature by employing their consciousness in the creative act. It forces upon them, on the contrary, the so-called objectification, externalization, or alienation of consciousness. Capitalist economic relations necessarily render a worker’s consciousness alien (“other”) to himself insofar as it is objectified or externalized in the material objects he must produce for the capitalist. The alienation of the worker’s life force involves its simultaneous absorption by the objects produced by his forced labor. In other words, according to Marx, laboring under capitalist relations of production entails the simultaneous and proportionate evisceration of the worker’s being, life force, or consciousness. Thus the more a worker labors, the greater his alienation of being; the more he produces, the greater his loss of existence. Under capitalism, as Marx says, man experiences work not as creative fulfillment but rather as “loss of his self.”[57]
Marx’s Labor Theory of Value
The violation of both human nature and individual freedom that Marx regards as intrinsic to capitalism is exacerbated, as previously observed, by its intrinsic injustice. The grounds of the latter accusation may be traced to Marx’s influential version of the so-called “labor theory of value.” Various economists prior to Marx had attempted to identify the determinants of economic value, that is, the value of any good or service exchanged on the market. Influential thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo had concluded that such value is largely if not entirely derived from the value of the labor required for its production. Economic value, on such a view, is objective, that is, intrinsic to the object and unrelated to human or subjective preference. The value of any good or service can be objectively determined by calculating the objective value of the labor involved in its production. Such was more or less the conventional view that Marx inherited from the British classical school. Marx, however, moved beyond the classical economists, interpreting the labor theory of value in a way that would lead him to denounce the capitalist system root and branch.
/> According to Marx, the entire economic value of any good or service is attributable exclusively and solely to labor. In a capitalist order, he argues, labor is performed exclusively by workers, the proletariat who possess nothing but their labor; the capitalist class contributes no labor and thus no value to any good or service. The economic value of a final or consumer good such as a wristwatch can be objectively ascertained by calculating the value of the labor involved in producing each of the components and inputs required for its manufacture and assembly. The value of each and every input at every stage of production, from initial mining of the metals to final assembly of components, is attributable solely to the labor of the workers. The final or market value of any good is nothing more than the total value of all the labor involved in its production. Such applies not only to consumer and intermediate goods but also producer goods—the tools and machines and factories that constitute the “means of production” exclusively owned by the capitalists. In other words, the means of production, while controlled by capitalists, were actually and wholly built by the workers. Labor—the proletariat—is the sole source of the value inherent in all goods, including the means of production. The non-laboring class—the capitalists—contribute zero value to any good or service.
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