Understanding Marxism

Geoff Boucher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317547464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Marxism as an intellectual movement has been one of the most important and fertile contributions to twentieth-century thought. No social theory or political philosophy today can be taken seriously unless it enters a dialogue, not just with the legacy of Marx, but also with the innovations and questions that spring from the movement that his work sparked, Marxism. Marx provided a revolutionary set of ideas about freedom, politics and society. As social and political conditions changed and new intellectual challenges to Marx's social philosophy arose, the Marxist theorists sought to update his social theory, rectify the sociological positions of historical materialism and respond to philosophical challenges with a Marxist reply. This book provides an accessible introduction to Marxism by explaining each of the key concepts of Marxist politics and social theory. The book is organized into three parts, which explore the successive waves of change within Marxist theory and places these in historical context, while the whole provides a clear and comprehensive account of Marxism as an intellectual system.

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Marx before Marxism

Marx’s social philosophy is a theory of freedom in the spirit of the Enlightenment, which holds that only the rational society makes the good life possible. By linking moral independence and individual fulfilment to rational conduct and reasoned debate, the Enlightenment inaugurated critical social theory, the study of the degree to which the social conditions necessary for rational living have been achieved. Marx’s innovation in this programme is to have seen that the achievement of reason in society means that social theory must issue in political strategy if it is not to become an apology for the unreasonable conditions it detects (Marcuse 1999: 252–7). Marx’s social philosophy accordingly developed a theory of the historical sequence of modes of production, which matured through several phases, as his research turned from practical politics to political economy and back again. Throughout, it is the relation between praxis, structure and history that guides Marx’s conception of social struggles and political freedom.

This chapter explores the central ideas of Marx – alienation, the labour theory of value, the contradictions of capitalism, the state and ideology, classes and revolution – as the essential background to understanding Marxism. I trace Marx’s development from the materialist inversion of Hegelian philosophy of the young Marx to the more scientific theory of the “mature Marx”, indicating breaks and continuities between the “two Marxes”. I close with an extended reflection on the tension between descriptive-explanatory and normative-evaluative accounts in Marx. I propose that these are crucial for grasping the impact of historical experiences and intellectual challenges that arose after Marx.

Dialectical philosophy

The dialectical philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was a major intellectual inspiration for Marx. The most important descriptive meaning of “dialectics” is that Hegel’s philosophy focuses on the idea of historical development through social and intellectual contradictions, where the contradiction between antagonistic forces is eventually resolved by means of revolutionary change. The basic schema operating in Hegel’s model of history is that social evolution begins from a primordial unity, then divides and becomes alienated, opposing individuals to the society, before finally reconciling the individual to society. Every stage of development involves both increasing antagonism between the individual and society, and expanded possibilities for individual self-realization. The final social form retains the individuality that alienation made possible but resolves the contradictory divisions which generated alienation. Because for Hegel freedom means the ability of individuals to self-realize under conditions of moral autonomy, he describes the historical process as a series of stages of progress in the consciousness of freedom (Hegel 1956: 19). History, from Hegel’s perspective, has an underlying built-in goal (or “teleology”), which operates independently of individual intentions, consisting of a final stage of history in a free and rational society. For Hegel, capitalism is the “end of history” (Hegel 1956: 103, 442), which mandates the reform of capitalism rather than anti-capitalist revolution.

Although the complexity of Hegelian philosophy means that it defies quick summary (see Sinnerbrink 2007, also in this series), its normative core can be economically stated. Hegel thinks that the social conditions necessary for moral autonomy and individual self-realization, which together he calls freedom, have developed historically. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined moral autonomy as individual self-determination through rational reflection on norms of action. Refusing to be dictated to by authorities, the morally autonomous individual would test practical actions for their universality, and in this way become a rationally self-legislating person guided only by universal principles. This Enlightenment ideal is crucial to the liberal vision of a social contract involving “negative liberty”, that is protection of the freedom of autonomous individuals from interference and representative government.

Although there is no doubt that Hegel was a sort of liberal, he found Kant’s philosophical execution of this programme extremely disappointing. Hegel argued that Kant’s idea of the autonomous subject failed to understand its social and historical conditions (Hegel 1977: 355–74). Further, socio-historical alienation is still present in the Kantian picture. Notoriously, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (theory), Critique of Pure Practical Reason (practice or morality) and Critique of Judgment (art) have significant tensions between them. For Kant, theoretical reasoning about the natural environment regards the world as determined by natural laws, while practical (moral) reasoning about social action considers the world as an arena for free self-determination. Kant’s aesthetics, intended to resolve the potential contradiction between freedom (practical reason) and determinism (theoretical reason), only demonstrated that the idea of teleology provided a possible way out of the impasse, but went no further. Furthermore, at the heart of Kantian moral autonomy lurks a split between virtue and happiness, between doing one’s universal duty and satisfying the basic human end of attaining wellbeing. That undermines the motivations of the self-legislating rational agent supposed to support the social contract and representative government. Unless it could be shown that general prosperity resulted from the same conditions as those that mandated action according to universal principles, Hegel reasoned, many would conclude that the road to human happiness lay through irrational and immoral behaviour (for example exploiting others).

Against this intellectual background, it is perhaps not surprising that Hegel hit upon the idea of a historical teleology, one that generated a series of social stages in the evolution of freedom and whose final result would be the reunification of social prosperity (i.e. human happiness) with universal principles (i.e. moral autonomy). The core driver of this process is the evolution of the social conditions for moral autonomy and social prosperity in what Hegel called “mutual recognition”, the ability of each individual to recognize the other as free and to rationally consent to the liberty of each as the condition for the freedom of all. Hegel insisted that this was not an intellectual process alone, but was instead institutionally embedded in the social structures of “ethical life”, the normatively rich arrangement of the family, civil society (meaning economic organizations and civic associations) and the state. Struggles for recognition by individuals seeking the full realization of their moral autonomy and human happiness were shaped by their institutional location in the alienated social structures of ethical life. These structures matured through a series of historical changes expressing an increasing consciousness of freedom, until finally a society emerged that self-consciously represented a de-alienated condition. In The Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel described capitalism as such a society: rational, free and universal.

Hegel’s synthesis of the social practices of mutual recognition, the social structures of ethical life and a historical teleology of the realization of freedom influenced Marx tremendously. Yet from the beginning, Marx detected a tension in Hegel’s philosophy, which Engels later spelt out in terms of a contradiction between system and method (MESW: 591). On the one side was its character as a finished system, announcing such baroque achievements as “absolute knowledge” of the “rationality of the real” in capitalism as the “end of history”. On the other side was its relentlessly historical character, as an effort to think through ever-changing social contradictions. Hegel regarded social antagonisms as a “unity of opposites”, that is as a contradiction between opposed forces, generated by the historical limitations of the situation of conflict. The dialectical method proposed that the resolution of these contradictions happened through the “determinate negation” of current limitations. Intellectually, this means the process of holistically specifying the causal determinants of isolated phenomena and abstract ideas, thereby locating them in their social and historical context. Practically, it describes the emergence and actualization of latent potentials for expanded freedom from the very core of the existing conflict situation, through concrete historical processes of struggle that formed an ascending series of higher and higher stages in the liberation of humanity. In Hegel’s philosophy, the methodology is harnessed to the system through the figure of the “negation of the negation”, the idea that the sequence of determinate negations that constitute the stages of history have a teleological goal in a final, positive society lacking all contradictions. Controversially, Marx retained the basic schema of a series of determinate negations as upwards progress towards a society free from contradiction, but insisted that because he had no blueprint for the future society, this was not a historical teleology.

Marx’s inversion of Hegel

The death of Hegel resulted in a political split among his followers into conservative “Right Hegelians” and progressive “Left Hegelians”. Among the Left Hegelians was a young Doctor Marx, who had just finished a thesis on Greek materialist philosophy. After graduating, Marx became involved with Left Hegelian and pro-democratic journals, but following important early involvement in Germany with the Rheinische Zeitung, he was forced by police censorship to shift to Paris to work on the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher in 1843. In left-wing France, Marx came into contact not only with other progressive exiles, but also with the French working-class socialist movement, which had developed as a result of the social conditions created by the industrial revolution. Here, Marx began to diverge from the Left Hegelians on two decisive points.

First, consistent with their idealist assumption that history was the progressive development of rational freedom, the Left Hegelians argued for an intellectual revolution as the key to “true democracy” (i.e. a parliamentary system of representative government). They considered religion, still used in the 1800s to justify the rule of princes, the main obstacle to democracy. The Left Hegelians’ proposals, however, went beyond Enlightenment denunciations of religious superstition in one crucial respect. They considered the core of religious ideals to be a legitimate, but distorted, expression of human solidarity. Marx adopted these ideas in his famous “Theses on Feuerbach”, but he criticized the idea that a purely intellectual grasp of what he was soon to call “ideology” was the key. The new philosophy must provide a materialist interpretation of distorted ideas about the human essence – such as religious beliefs and idealist philosophies. That meant it must concentrate on social practices in relation to the natural environment, especially material production. As Marx later wrote, this would enable a recovery of Hegelian philosophy for materialist ends: “the mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from … present[ing] its general form … [but] it must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell” (C1: 20).

Second, the Left Hegelians followed Hegel in maintaining that the state is (or should be) a neutral universal arbiter standing above society and representing the public interest. From their intellectual revolution, the Left Hegelians proposed, would flow the reform of the state, so that the state could finally achieve its philosophical goal in the representation of universal human interests. But through contact with the French socialist movement, Marx began to fully realize the limitations of the Left Hegelians. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Law” (1844), Marx contested the neutrality and universality of the capitalist state. Moral reform through an intellectual revolution was unlikely to succeed when the state defended private property.

Political revolutions patterned on the French Revolution created private individuals “separated from the community”, Marx proposed, whereas a social revolution that abolished private property would achieve “human emancipation” (MECW3: 164, 168). He proposed that the social revolution in Germany must be undertaken by the proletariat, because this is the social movement with “radical chains” whose emancipation entails the complete restructuring of society (ibid.: 186). The new philosophy is to lead this “passive element” so that “the head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat” (ibid.: 187). In a decisive encounter in 1844, Marx met Friedrich Engels and read his The Condition of the English Working Class (1843), beginning a lifelong intellectual collaboration.

By 1844, then, Marx had become a communist. Unlike the Left Hegelians, Marx’s political commitments did not remain armchair convictions but formed the basis for intense organizational work that led, with Engels, to the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The defeat of the revolutions of 1848 and the subsequent political reaction confirmed the main thesis of the Manifesto that history was the result of class struggles. This radical position meant that Marx was forced into another exile, this time in England, and an extended period of further research into political economy.

Ironically, in turning to political economy to understand revolutionary failure, Marx followed Hegel, whose “dialectic of lordship and bondage” (i.e. master-slave dialectic) is based on a reading of classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo (Lukacs 1975: 301–466). Not knowing this history, Marx saw this as a radical break with Hegel, claiming that:

My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite. To Hegel … the process of thinking, which under the name of “the Idea” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea”. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought.

(C1: 19)

There is considerable evidence that the materialist content of Marx’s critique of political economy is expressed within dialectical forms directly derived from Hegel’s philosophy (Rosdolsky 1977). Marx’s preparatory work for Capital, the Grundrisse, employs a dialectical schema taken from Hegel’s Logic (Uchida 1988), and Capital itself is best reconstructed through dialectical forms (Smith 1989). That is not surprising, because, as Marx says, his methodology is formally Hegelian, and his conception of “science” is based on Hegel’s idea of a dialectical reconstruction of the results of natural and social sciences (Zeleny 1980). Marx’s break with Hegel is also a return to Hegel.

Species being and creative praxis

Many brief introductions to Marx scarcely mention Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), the radical philosopher who inspired Marx (and Engels) to turn to materialism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach inverted Hegel by using the dialectical method together with a materialist anthropology. Instead of studying historical forms of consciousness, Feuerbach regarded “the subject” as the human animal in the natural environment. As Engels afterwards summarized, Feuerbach maintains that “nothing exists outside of nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence” (MESW: 592). The human animal projects its natural capacities onto abstract ideas and an imaginary being: divine love and Christian morality are really humanity’s capacity for natural affection and social solidarity. Christ is the “species being” of humanity in an alienated, inverted form.

According to Feuerbach’s reading, then, idealist philosophy turned out to be an alienated expression of social capacities grounded in human nature. Consequently, Feuerbach called for a radical “new philosophy [that] makes human beings (including nature, as the basis for human beings) into the sole, the universal, and the highest object of philosophy. It therefore makes anthropology, including physiology, into the universal science” (Schmidt 1971: 25, Feuerbach cited). In Feuerbach’s concept of species being, Marx found the inspiration for a new philosophy. What Feuerbach lacked, though, according to Marx, was the relentlessly historical approach of Hegel. The idealist philosopher had grasped the historical development of the human essence, but failed to understand this in terms of humanity’s natural species being. Feuerbach’s materialism had understood humanity’s natural species being, but he had imagined that this was something static and ahistorical (MESW: 29).

For Marx, the idea that human beings are natural animals, who must satisfy basic needs through the collective transformation of the natural environment in order to generate their material conditions of existence, has revolutionary implications. The human being is a labouring animal, whose species being consists in the social transformation of the natural world (MECW3: 277), so that “labour [is] the essence of man” (ibid.: 333). The human bei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Understanding Movements in Modern Thought
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Marx and Marxism
• 1. Marx before Marxism
• 2. Classical Marxism
• 3. Hegelian Marxism
• 4. The Frankfurt School
• 5. Structural Marxism
• 6. Analytical Marxism
• 7. Critical Theory
• 8. Post-Marxism
• Further reading
• References
• Index