Marx- A Complete Introduction

by Gill Hands

  What all these definitions of imperialism have in common is that some form of exploitation is taking place. Imperialists are often criticized for economic exploitation. The dominating power often makes use of other countries as sources of cheap labour and raw materials and as markets for manufactured goods they have produced. The concept of imperialism amounting to exploitation can be traced back to Marx’s original thinking on the subject of colonialism.

  Marx was ideally placed to observe and comment on the way that the British ran their colonies, for he wrote Das Kapital in London – one of the great centres of world trade at the heart of the Victorian British Empire.

  Spotlight

  There was a saying that ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’; this was because it covered so many countries in the major continents that it straddled the world time zones. At one time the British Empire was so vast that it contained the North American continent (including Canada), Australia and large parts of Asia and Africa. The empire had almost died out in the early nineteenth century until industrialization gave it a new lease of life.

  Historians divide imperialism into periods of time or epochs:

  • Mercantile capitalism This is the first stage of imperialism. It began in the sixteenth century when explorers discovered new continents and plundered them. Large companies became the governing power in countries where they settled.

  • Colonialism This is the second stage of imperialism. Capitalist countries took over governing power from the companies set up under mercantile capitalism. Where the local population would not accept this rule, armed force was used.

  Marx and Engels wrote a good deal about the position of the British in relation to one of their most profitable colonies, India. During the 1850s they regularly wrote articles in the New-York Daily Tribune on the subject of colonialism in India and the dominance of the East India Company. Marx believed that the British rule in India had destroyed the Indian communal village system in a greedy and destructive manner, but although he acknowledged that the way it was done was wrong he felt that the British had inadvertently brought about progress. This was not because he believed capitalism was superior to the former system but because he believed it was only a stage on the way to a society where classes were completely abolished.

  Case study: The East India Company

  The East India Company already had a long history before Marx began to write about it, as it received a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600. It traded mainly in India and China and dealt in basic commodities such as cotton, silk, tea, salt and even opium. The British government only had indirect control of the company as the majority of shareholders were aristocrats and prosperous merchants. The company played a very successful part in the annexing of the Indian subcontinent on behalf of the British Empire. Beginning as a company with a monopoly in India it soon changed from being purely a trading company to ruling India with the help of a large private army, a private navy and a huge administrative operation. After the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and the subsequent Government of India Act in 1858, its territorial holdings became the property of the British crown and the company was finally dissolved in 1874.

  Marx and Engels wrote many articles on the ‘Indian question’ as it was called. Here Marx is discussing the renewal of the East India Company charter in an article for the New-York Daily Tribune in 1853.

  ‘They want to renew the old Indian Charter for a period of 20 years. They avail themselves of the eternal pretext of Reform. Why? The English oligarchy have a presentiment of the approaching end of their days of glory, and they have a very justifiable desire to conclude such a treaty with English legislation, that even in the case of England’s escaping soon from their weak and rapacious hands, they shall still retain for themselves and their associates the privilege of plundering India for the space of 20 years.’

  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/09.htm

  Articles by Marx and Engels on Indian independence and the East India Company, written for the New York Herald Tribune, can be read at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/india/index.htm

  Anyone interested in searching the archives of the East India Company can do it through the British Library at http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelpregion/asia/india/indiaofficerecords/indiaofficehub.html

  Marx saw the globalization of capitalism as inevitable.

  ‘The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.’

  Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts: Grundrisse, 1857, pp. 401–50 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.htm

  He believed profits under capitalism would fall and that one short-term way of slowing down the rate at which profits fell was by opening up new markets. This meant the capitalists had to export their goods into other countries. Colonialism meant there were excellent protected markets for manufactured goods. Even where former colonies became self-governing countries, such as Australia, they often had economic and trade agreements that meant they were still dependent on Britain.

  In the early nineteenth century Britain was really the only fully industrialized nation and was known as ‘the workshop of the world’ as it produced about 30 per cent of global industrial output. By the end of the nineteenth century other European states and America were able to enter the world of capitalist exporters. They made things very efficiently and flooded the world markets with cheap goods that meant they could undercut any of the opposition. The markets for these cheap goods were often developed at the expense of local industries. Historians believe millions of villagers died of starvation in India because their traditional textile industry was ruined by imports of cheap manufactured cotton from Lancashire. India and other countries were turned into suppliers of cheap raw materials for British industry.

  Spotlight

  In a reversal of this situation many workers emigrated from India to work in the Lancashire cotton industry in the 1960s.

  Capitalism could not develop in these countries at the early stages of their exploitation as they were deliberately held back from any form of development. It was only later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that the capitalist system itself began to be exported. There was investment in the employment of industrial workers in the colonies, but only when this did not interfere with industries in Britain and the other imperialist states. This was mainly in industries that were fairly close to the raw materials: mining, food processing, etc. At this stage in history there was also a huge scramble for power between European nations over the African continent. Some modern Marxists believe these factors led the way to development of the Third World and the current stage of imperialism: neo-colonialism. The term Third World came about during the Cold War to describe countries that were not aligned with capitalist states (first world) or communist states (second world). It is often used interchangeably with the term developing world.

  Marx believed that revolution would only take place on a worldwide scale after the capitalist system had been exported. He was convinced that revolution could only take place if societies had developed to the stage of capitalism with the class divisions of bourgeois and proletariat, for it was the proletariat who would start the revolution. The revolutionary process would have two stages:

  • Firstly, there would be a bourgeois revolution against imperialism.

  • Secondly, there would be a revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

  Marx was not a trained economist and although globalization of the capitalist system did occur it was not entirely in the way that he predicted. He saw the world economic situation in a rather simple way and in reality the colonies had very different social structures that he did not entirely take into account. Their developing economies were combinations of widely different economic systems; very few were entirely capitalist in nature.

  Communist revolutions did take place in some former colonies, but Marx’s words were often distorted to fit the requirements
of anybody who wished to see a change in the political system in their country. A truly communist society, without classes, was never the result. An example of a former colony that came under communist rule is North Vietnam, which was part of French Indo-China. This ultimately led to the Vietnam War of 1954–75.

  Fetishism

  In primitive societies, and in some kinds of religion, inanimate objects are sometimes thought to have supernatural powers (for example, voodoo dolls or holy statues). In capitalist societies people suffer from the illusion that inanimate money or commodities also have powers and properties of their own. A fetish is an object of desire, worship or obsessive concern. Marx saw three types of fetishism in capitalist society:

  • fetishism of money

  • fetishism of capital

  • fetishism of commodities.

  MONEY FETISHISM

  Throughout history money has always had an element of fetishism about it, especially when it was in the form of precious metals, gold in particular. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European merchants were obsessed with gold and silver and believed that possession of large quantities of precious metals would be enough to let a country win a war. However, gold in itself is worthless. If you have ever read the book Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson you will remember the character Ben Gunn, who was marooned on a desert island with a treasure chest. The treasure was of no use to him because he could not use it to buy anything and what he really desired was a little bit of cheese. Money fetishism is an illusion that deceives workers, making them think of money as the goal of their labours and thinking of their worth in terms of money.

  CAPITAL FETISHISM

  This is the belief that capital in itself is valuable and that it does not owe anything to the labour that goes to produce it. Marx argued that capitalists felt that increased productivity was due to the capital they invested in their business and not the labour of the workers. Capitalists also feel that their money is productive when it is in a bank earning interest. Although it is making them a profit, it is not actually producing anything.

  COMMODITY FETISHISM

  One of the great points of controversy among Marxists and academics is the idea of commodity fetishism. This is possibly because Marx did not write very clearly on the subject and the idea seems a rather abstract one. At one level Marx seems to be saying that because the capitalist is exploiting the worker there is a hidden aspect to the real value of a commodity that nobody is aware of, that there is a veil of secrecy over the true worth of the products we buy. A modern-day example of this would be ‘designer labels’, where goods that are produced cheaply in Third World countries sell at vastly inflated prices in developed countries because of some false idea of their worth. It is very difficult for the buyer to know what the materials cost, who made them, how much the workers were paid, etc.

  At another level is the belief that some commodities have a kind of intrinsic value that makes them more valuable than others and is not related to their exchange-value. For example, some commodities, such as holy statues, appear to have magical properties that make us blind as to their real value and so we become alienated. This is a more difficult argument to understand and some Marxist critics believe it is an interpretation that Marx did not intend in his original writing. Whatever interpretation is placed on the idea of fetishism, it is clear that Marx believed that under capitalism people experience social relations as value relations between things and that this causes alienation. We can take the example of the pair of shoes again and look at the idea in a less abstract way. A woman might desire an expensive pair of shoes she sees in a shop and will work to have enough money to buy those shoes. In a capitalist society the money and shoes are independent from each other in a social sense. The people who made the shoes and the woman buying them are not aware of each other or of any social relationship between them. Marx believed that this caused alienation in society, because we are not in immediate relation to the products we buy. This then leads to a vicious circle where people believe they can relieve the alienation they feel by buying more consumer items.

  The idea of commodity fetishism is strongly reliant on the labour theory of value and the concepts of exploitation and alienation, so critics of those concepts criticize fetishism as well. Marx believed that all three kinds of fetishism were features of capitalist society that stopped people from understanding and changing the society. They are illusions that play a part in the alienation of humans under capitalism.

  Spotlight

  First editions and signed editions of books have an aura of commodity fetishism about them. Secondhand book dealers AbeBooks.com sold a first edition of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital for $40,000 in 2014, which is around £24,000 at 2014 rates. A new paperback edition costs around £5.

  Alienation

  Marx wrote a great deal about alienation and it is one of the areas of his thought that is still acknowledged as having great relevance today. Most of us are familiar with the term ‘alienation’ today: a sense of feeling outside society, or estranged from it. Following on from this is the feeling that life has become worthless, pointless or not worth living.

  The Marxist sense of alienation is more complex than this. For Marx alienation is not just a feeling or philosophical concept but an actual, concrete thing: a state of being that is a result of living in a capitalist society. To understand this we need to look at the way Marx views humanity and society.

  Marx developed his theory of alienation throughout most of his lifetime, beginning with some original notes that he made in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. These are incomplete, and in Das Kapital, written much later in his life, the idea of alienation was transformed into the idea of fetishism. This has led to much discussion as to what Marx really meant by alienation and whether his early work should be taken into account; however, this early work is integral to the understanding of the Marxist concept of alienation. These are also sometimes known as the Paris Manuscripts because Marx wrote them while living there, although they were not published until after his death.

  In the incomplete fragment ‘Alienated Labour’, a part of the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx appears to be trying to formulate a complete theory of alienation that would encompass all the different ways that the capitalist society alienates its members. He was trying to find some unifying and underlying cause. In his later work he abandons the attempt at an overriding theory, but alienation is still a large part of his thought.

  Most of Marx’s early work shows a great debt to Hegel and the theory of alienation, which can be traced from the philosophy of Hegel and its development by Feuerbach. Hegel had shown that people were alienated but believed it was due to their yearning to be part of the universal mind. Alienation for him was a religious concept. People naturally yearn to have what they perceive as a unifying and spiritual essence within themselves. Most religions (and we have to remember that Hegel was talking mainly about Western religion) say this can only be achieved by a supernatural being that lives outside the real world, and the only way humans can achieve this is by merging with this being at some level, usually after death. Hegel believed this led to a kind of false consciousness where people believe they are separate from the divine or opposed to it in some way. They are estranged or alienated from spirituality. This then leads to alienation in the sense of feeling worthless because they feel that the real world around them is no substitute for this divine experience. Their lives are spent in trying to reconcile the human spirit with the divine one and so they become estranged from the real and natural world.

  Feuerbach saw alienation in less mystical terms for he believed that ‘God’ was not outside us but a product of the human mind. The values we attribute to God are those that we ourselves possess but we project them onto God. In this way, we become alienated from ourselves. This means that we are separated from our own true essence and from each other. Feuerbach believed that if people could free themselves from religious illusion then they would be able to l
ive in harmony with each other and with their own true nature.

  Marx saw alienation in practical, economic terms and for him it is not even necessary for a person to feel alienated to be alienated, it comes as a result of living in a capitalist society. In order to understand why he believed this we need to look at the way Marx perceived the human condition. Marx did not see human nature as an abstract and unchanging thing as the philosophers before him had done. After studying the economics of society in historical context he saw human nature as a product of social relations. His historical materialism gave him the view that human nature is in a constant process of development, and that as societies change so do the needs of the people in them. That does not mean that he saw human nature as a totally abstract concept, as has been argued by some writers. Marx saw that there was some underlying common ground about the nature of humanity in all societies, despite the differences in politics and economic systems. In his writings he talks of the ‘species being’, which is the essence of humanity and a development of the ideas of Feuerbach. Feuerbach believed that the true essence of humanity was the love and harmony that brought people together in society.

  Marx, on the other hand, believed that people are labouring creatures, in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 he examines the theory that humans are basically producers and being able to work in purposeful creative activity brings us contentment. In this way we might be seen to be similar to ants or bees, but for Marx we differ greatly from them because we possess consciousness. Marx saw that humans, like animals, are a part of nature; we have similar needs for food, shelter and a desire to reproduce our species, but our consciousness means we are aware of what we are doing. We are aware of who we are and we see ourselves in relation to the rest of our species. This is important, for unless we are conscious of these things in the first place we cannot feel alienated from them. In fact some existentialist philosophers would maintain that it is precisely because we are self-conscious that we feel alienated; they argue that it is part of the human condition and it would not matter what kind of society we lived in.