essay on karl marx

8/8/2019 Essay on Karl Marx

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Political Sociology

Question: According to Marx, in a communist society, power will be more

equally distributed amongst the whole of the population since the means of

production will be communally owned rather than owned by the individual.

How far do you agree?

October 2010


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Table of Content

Foreword

1. Human Nature and Production

2. History, Class and Alienation

3. Attempt at Theoretical and Historical Evaluations of the Communist Solution

4. Concluding Notes

Bibliography.


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Foreword

Nothing is more legitimate for man than to aspire to freedom from oppression and external

constraints. Nothing is nobler for him than to wish the same for his fellow human beings and work

towards its concrete realization. Society is the proper spheres of private and communal interests- a

sphere in which they clash and yet support and enrich one another. Should the two sets of interests

be forcibly reconciled, or should one set be subordinate to another, or should both of them be

recognized and allow to develop side by side? This is a dilemma that constantly faces not only social

scientists, but also politicians, judges and public officials in the discharge of their respective duties.

How is the integrity of both private and public spheres both guaranteed- should it be guaranteed at

all? In the following lines, we will see how Karl Marx sets out to answer these questions and others

in his own particular way. When one studies a thinker as Karl Marx, one has to put constantly before

the eyes of one's mind, the thinker's philosophical background. In this case, Marx's use of Hegelian

dialectics and his own reformulation thereof constitutes such premises as will need no special

explanation except where absolutely necessary. His theories of historic materialism is taken as a

given at the beginning of this essay, and will be subsequently criticised together with 'economicdeterminism' with which it is intimately bound in the Marxian system. The irony of history has been

that Marx's prediction concerning socialisation of production has not materialised into enduring

socio-political realities. In the second part of the essay, therefore, a brief sketch on the application of

his economic ideas is investigated. Finally, a winding up of the argument is provided.


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1. Human Nature and Production

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx says of private property that it is the

product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labour, of the external relations of theworker to nature and to himself1. This quotation encapsulates many of the tenets of Marxism, not

least among which, the concepts of labour, production, human nature and alienation. These concepts

are essential for an understanding of Marx's views on ownership and private property. According to

Marx, what demarcates man from the other animals was his productive capacity, that is, the ability

of man, by his own labour, to produce what he desires and needs. Thus, the process of production,

or more broadly, the economic organization(i.e. means, modes, processes of production, distribution

and exchange) pertains to the primary conditions of human life. Man, however, is not endowed with

this exceptional productive faculty on its own- man is above all a social being, and the nature of

production is, or should be, essentially social or communal. What also further demarcates man from

the other animals is not merely his ability to produce and organize production, but above all, in theever changing nature of this economic organization. Whereas the other animals are passive agents of

history, man is an active one, due to his mastery of his environment and the evolution of productive

processes.

2. History, Class and Alienation.

History, according to Marx, is the history of evolving forms of economic organizations and the

social relations which derive from them. Marx's endeavour was therefore to seek in history the

mechanism for explaining social change with respect to the economic structure prevalent at

particular periods in history. His account of the emergence of private property relies on the evergreater division of labour experienced by societies throughout history and the labour theory of

value. Classes arise whenever the division of labour is such that the accumulation of surplus product

is appropriated by groups of individuals, leading to their assuming control over the economic

organization of society. Social relations become antagonistic between the propertied classes and the

propertyless classes, between those who control the productive processes and those who produce.

Relations of production become essentially relations of inequality and exploitation. The latter, the

proletariat of capitalist societies, become mere means to satisfy the ends of others- their labour no

more serves to their own subsistence or fulfilment. Labour and man are separated, in that, labour

acquires a value independent of man, the labourer, himself. Private ownership of the means of

production destroys the unity of man's social life and alienates him from his true nature. The

labourer stands dispossessed of the basic power that would have allowed him to express himself and

satisfy himself in his work, namely, the power to control what, how, when, where, and even why he

produces. This power is wrested from him in a particularly violent manner in the capitalist system

where he is no more protected by guilds, feudal grants, etc., and where he must sell his labour

because he does not own that which would have enabled him to realise his productive potential.

For Marx, alienation had existed since the very first emergence of private property and has

continued to expand at each stage of historical development, but it reached its paroxysm in the

capitalist society where the separation of man from his nature is rendered a necessary condition of

his life. Alienation is thus also for Marx a perversion of the natural order of things. The State,

through its complex of laws and institutions, enshrines this inequality of men with respect to theproductive processes and tries to compensate it through equality before law. Thus political

1 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.


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organization of society is made to conform to its economic organization and to reflect the social

relations particular to it. The superstructure justifies the infrastructure. In Marx's view this is an

illusion and, it should be the other way round. Hence, he views the state as the instrument of class

domination and as the means to perpetuate alienation. To the alienation of man from his labour is

here added the separation between the political and civil aspects of human life. In the capitalist

state, the true nature of power is disguised. Politics is nothing but a means whereby the conditions

of class exploitation are maintained. The state and politics are parasitic on society because the goalsof the rulers and of the ruled are different, and the rulers use the productive forces of society to

further their own ends- political ends and social ends diverge. To sum up, under the capitalist

system, coupled to the structure of the bourgeois state, the worker or labourer stands in a position of

spoliation, deprivation and alienation. He is deprived of the power to produce what he requires to

satisfy his needs, of the power to control the processes of production, distribution and exchange and

of the power to have a say in the management of the community. He himself, his labour are reduced

to the status of mere commodities.

3. Attempt at Theoretical and Historical Evaluation of the Communist Solution.In a communist society on the other hand, where the economic organization is socialised and the

production restored to its original communal function, man's labour and productive faculties will

also be restored to him, not to pursue individualistic aims- such was the hallmark of capitalism- but

communal, social ones. Everything will be collectivised, or socialised, from the use of machines to

the very consciousness of man. Hence, man will be vested with the full power to use his labour

according to the requirements of his nature. His public life will be unified in the higher social

imperative. Alienation and exploitation as well will cease- man's nature and man's work will not be

estranged any more, and collective interests will prevail. With the disappearance of classes the

utility of the state will also gradually disappear. In the words of Engels: All socialists are agreed

that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as the result of the comingsocialist revolution; that is, the public functions will lose their political character and be

transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society 2.

Given that all men will be given equal access to and control over the processes of production, then,

indeed, power will be equally distributed under such a communist society according to Marx and

Engels.

(a)While Marx's observations on the structure and running of the capitalist system might have been

valid at the time he was writing, it must be acknowledged that since then, production under

capitalism has considerably changed, and any theory critical of capitalism must be updated to those

changes. But this is not the issue. The fact that Marx's observations might have been valid does in

no way guarantee that the way he interprets them or the theoretical framework he devises to fit themin are in any sense valid. What strikes the modern reader of Marx is the dogmatic certainty with

which he asserted the centrality of production in human life and destiny, the persistent element of

determinism which makes man, ultimately, a mere puppet of productive forces. For Marx allows no

alternative to his account of the development of society in history. This deterministic element,

expressed in his enunciation of the material dialectics of history, he certainly retained from his

Hegelian days. What makes production the one social fact, activity from which all other social facts

and activities are derived? In this respect, Plamenatz3is right to say that Marx does not sufficiently

distinguish, if at all, between forms of social behaviour and features of social life. Is production a

feature of social life or an activity of the same, and if it is both, what makes it so central? A mother

does not feed her child from the motive that the child has a role to play in the economic organization

2 Friedrich Engels, On Authority, from,Marx and Engels. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy.

3 cf. John Plamenatz, Man and Society: Hegel, Marx and Engels, and the Idea of Progress, vol.iii.


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of society; rather, she feeds him because of the social bond between her child and herself, and such

a bond, a relationship cannot certainly be called a relation of production, unless we understand

thereby, with the aid of defective biology, that the mother producedher infant. Social relations are

not reducible to relations of production. Before man is a productive being, he is a moral being with

moral relations with his human and natural environment. If then production is not the primary

condition of human life, but one among others, an important one among equally important others,

man's nature cannot be explained in terms of his productive capacity alone. Emotional, affective,customary, moral bonds and relations precede relations of production. It is them precisely that make

the relations of production possible. Can economic determinism, as the only possible explanation of

world history, stand fast once production is relegated to the rank of one social activity among

others? To be fair, economic determinism by itself is not to blame, springing as it does from the

Physiocratic traditions of the 18th century. For Marx, however, economic facts and laws are used as

the material evidence for his dialectics of social conflict, and hence assume a more inflexible,

inexorable force than the Physiocrats and their followers intended.

Furthermore, can alienation be attributed a solely economic origin in our evolving societies?

Rousseau's own account of alienation4 took many more factors, besides the obvious economic ones,

into consideration. If we were to talk of determinism at all, it would most certainly be technological

determinism, whereby the basic features of a society would derive from and depend upon the degree

of technological advance made by that society. Marx certainly treats of technology, but subordinates

it to the imperatives of an inexorable economic system.

(b)Two aspects of the question must here come under scrutiny: (i) the intrinsic economic and

political value of collectivism, or socialism, (ii) the application of socialism in history. Once

economic determinism is shown to have very little rigorous normative and empirical credit, what

remains to prop up Marx's theory of revolution and realisation of communism? His notions of power

themselves are so limited to an economic usage, that we are at pains to know what Marx(and

Engels) thought on political power other than as a tool of capitalist manipulation of the state. Also,

Marx's distrust of politics means that he did not look into the possibility of finding political

solutions to socio-economic problems. In this consists Marx's poverty as a political thinker. If

production is not the basic fact of human social life, power cannot be reduced to terms of production

and economic organization. Communal control, or power, over the processes of production, which

we might, for convenience's sake, call collectivism does not guarantee equality. Communal control

itself is an oxymoron.-for as popular wisdom has it: If everyone rules, who shall work? Communal

control, more than individual or corporate control of modes of production requires the most

advanced organizational structure. And organization requires clear divisions and schemes of

functions and duties, persons in whom authority will be vested to execute these. The mere fact of

collectivism does not necessarily imply consensus in the community about the methods to be

employed in exercising this control, and regulating the distribution and exchange of the thingsproduced, unless consensus is imposed and dissent discouraged. The question that must further be

asked is whether collectivism is conducive to an equal distribution of power in society, and what is

the significance of power with respect to collectivist means and ends.

History has shown clearly that the apparatus of the state could not be so easily done away with as

Marx or those who sought to apply his ideas practically would have wished. After the proletarian

revolution and prior to the establishment of the classless and stateless society, both Marx and Engels

acknowledged the fact that the state, before withering away, will necessarily serve as a support for

the application of socialism. As said above, the disappearance of classes will ultimately lead to the

disappearance of the state. Now, it is agreed that it is a particular class (aided by elements of other

classes), namely, the proletarian class, organized as the Communist Party, will bring about the

4 cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality.


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revolution and work towards the establishment of communism. Eventually, at the time of the

revolution, Marx predicted that there would be a world proletarian, created by the demands of

capitalist economy, that would help spread the revolution across the globe. Marx therefore assumes

that through the struggles of one class, a classless society is to be achieved in which the means of

production will be socialised. The first problem here is one of representation, social and political.

How can one segment, one class, one party of the population, not only claim to represent the

population but to embody it as well? If one class, one party captures economic and political powerthat merely means that that class or party has displaced another or other classes and parties at the

apex of society. In other words, one class has replaced another in the control of production. The

dictatorship of the proletariat seems to be the only ultimate step to which communism has attained

to up to now.

What is first noticeable about the concrete application of Marxism, is that it did not take place, as

predicted by its creator, in technologically-advanced capitalist countries. The case of Russia affords

us a good example. There, what strikes the impartial observer who surveys the establishment and

strengthening of Communism is the human cost, or in modern parlance, the ' Human-Rights records'.

There was great resistance on the part of the peasantry(kulaks) to the collectivist measures- they

were, in large numbers5, suppressed and sent to working camps(gulags). As from the 1930's large

scale economic and industrial reforms were implemented through the Five-Year plans in the Soviet

Union. However industrialisation advanced at the expense of agriculture. In the same period, famine

broke out throughout the whole Soviet territory, and struck most harshly in Ukraine. In addition,

individual initiative, mostly in the arts and cultural departments, were consistently stifled if it did

not answer to the demands of official propaganda6. Nor did the state remain as a mere residue after

the advent of communism- it revealed itself indispensable to the new masters of the Kremlin, who

used to it carry out their economic planning policies more effectively. Within the party itself,

divergences arose, mostly on the issue of whether or not to pursue the revolution on an international

basis. This was at the core of the dispute between Stalin and Trotsky. On an ideological plane, for

practical reasons, a distinction was brought between personal and private property- the latter meantprecisely capital, while the former everything else in the person's possession. Communism it was

argued came to abolish private not personal property. The local workers' councils or soviets were

only given the illusion of economic power. Power in its entirety was effectively detained by the

Politburo, who used it ruthlessly against those whom they were supposed to uplift. One would have

thought that the socialisation of production would have brought about administrative

decentralization instead political centralization and bureaucracy came to characterise the USSR.

Eventually, due to declining growth rates, the 1965 Economic Reforms introduced certain

capitalistic measures into the management of industry, that gave companies a certain freedom from

the constraints of central planning. However, by the 1970's, the USSR's domestic industry was

thwarted by an undue emphasis on military industry and expenditure. The system was becominggreatly inefficient as bureaucratic central planning was no more able to cope with increasing

domestic demands and large-scale management. In spite of certain increases in the 1980's due to

M. Gorbachev's reforms, the Soviet economy would eventually collapse 7.

Therefore the question whether socialisation of the economy brought about economic development

in communist countries is still debatable. If China and Vietnam felt the need to adopt the so-called

socialist market economy it is mostly because central economic planning had failed to achieve a

rational distribution of resources and to increase the standard of living of citizens. The private sector

plays nowadays a very important role in the national economies of those countries. The economy of

the former Yugoslavia is also worth mentioning. It was principally a mixed economy, where public

5 3 million is the number cited by John Chamberlain in his 1944 Foreword to Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

6 For the whole period, see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror.

7 For economic statistics, see the barious yearbooks, e.g Statesman's Yearbook 1975-1976, Europa Yearbook, 1983.


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and private ownership were allowed to co-exist. It had a strong internal market and espoused the

practice of worker's self-management, in that, notably, planning was decentralised. Furthermore,

due to the Non-Aligned policies pursued internationally by country, Yugoslav products were

exported to both Western and Communist markets. As a result, Yugoslav economy was prosperous,

with low unemployment, high levels of education, higher life expectancy and living standards than

in most countries with socialist economies. However, starting with the 1973 Oil Crisis and the rising

inflation rates, the Yugoslav economy entered a phase of decline which culminated in the loss ofmarkets resulting from the break-up of the Federation and the beginning of the Yugoslav wars.

A purely socialist economy, in which absolute economic equality among the people is established,

has not been realised up to now. History instead demonstrates that mixed economies have more

chances to survive crises. Furthermore, we can also account the failure of classical, or orthodox

socialist systems by arguing that economic equality was accompanied by illiberal politics, that is, by

the effective dictatorship of the Communist Parties. This alone demonstrates the fallacy of

economic determinism- for economy equality did not bring about a truly democratic distribution of

political power among the people.

4. Concluding Notes.

The root problem of socialism is its subordination of individual interests to communal interests and

its claim to cater to universal needs and to represent man essentially as a worker. This is evidenced

by the omission of a discussion of liberty or freedom in Marx's writings. He was generally

distrustful of the word, associating it with Hegelian abstractions. His treatment of power is equally

scarce, and when it occurs at all, it is only to consider it as an incarnation of the laws of economics.

He also fails to consider objectively the concept of rule of law and equality before the law,

preferring, to subsume law and politics under economic categories. Yet, the edifice of economic

theory upon which he built his social theories are far from faultless. We are thinking here

principally of his so-called- Labour Theory of Value. While classical economists(e.g. Adam Smith,

David Ricardo) stipulated that Labour Theories of Values could account for economies of primitive

and underdeveloped societies and interpreted it in an individualistic, Marx applied his own version

to the capitalist economy of his time and sought to use it to demonstrate the exploitation of workers.

His Labour Theory of Value is also related to his conception of man and human nature, in that he

views labour as the essential feature of human nature. Labour is, for him, a value-creating force,

which itself is deprived of value- which is why Marx opposed wage-labour, for, in his view, man

cannot sell that which has no value, but which forms part of his nature. According to Abram L.

Harris, Marx, 'on one hand, thought of labour as the prime mover in production and thus a creator

of value. On the other, he looked upon labour as containing a meaning and a significance that

transcends its importance in production. In this last sense he considered labour to be the instrumentof a moral ethical purpose in the development of social life...Thus the chief purpose of Marx's

labour theory of value is to supply a philosophical basis for the significance he imputed to the

industrial proletariat. The theory supports an ideology. It does not explain how scarce resources

are distributed, either in a capitalist or a communist society. 8'

In fine, economic equality is a vain word if in a society that aims at applying true democratic

principles, it is not coupled to the provision and safeguards for individual enterprise. Equality

without freedom can only be a coerced condition of social life, and its other name is tyranny. As

Abram L. Harris pointed out, theory in Marx supports his ideological presuppositions and biases.

Production is not basic, primary to human life- a plurality of things are, which are perhaps

interrelated and interdependent. It would take gross dogmatism to take one aspect of human life and

8 Abram L. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Karl Marx, Ethics, vol. 58, no.3, April 1948.


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erect it as supreme to the exclusion of others. Human life, human history calls for varied and

multiple explanations because of the plurality of conditions, interests and motives that exist in all

societies. A communist society is against this very notion of plurality- people who live in such

societies are not empowered, let alone entitled, to follow their own pursuits. On the other hand, an

open society, to borrow Karl Popper's expression, provides the environment within which can a

human being will to realise the potentialities of his nature, or not. What then? Shall we conclude

with Winston Churchill that 'Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and thegospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery'?

Bibliography

Karl Marx, Grundrisse, German Ideology, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,

Communist Manifesto, Capital. Available in several editions.

Friedrich Engels, Socialsim: Utopian and Scientific,Authority. Available in several editions.

John Plamenatz, Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man(1989), Man and Society, vol. iii.(1963) Oxford

University Press and Longman Green Ltd, respectively.

Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1973.

C. Wright Mills, The Marxists. Pelican Books.

Abram L. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Karl Marx, Ethics, vol. 58, no.3, April 1948.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(online)


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