Critical inquiry of Karl Marx

Despite the caveat that has just been entered, Karl Marx (1818-83) must be recognised as one of the principal moulders of modem thought. Certainly, he more than anyone else has inspired and laid the foundation for the critical inquiry that obtains today.

Marx was unlike Comte or Mill or any other representative thinker of his age. He alone did what they all set out to do but failed to accomplish: he fused philosophy, history, and economics into a grandiose synthesis. The fusion may have been imperfect; it may have left some important problems unsolved or half-solved; here and there it may actually have misled his followers into an acceptance of thought patterns stemming from the ‘bourgeois revolution’ and not really relevant to the theory and practice of socialism. All these and other valid arguments can be urged against the man and his creation. No matter—there he stands, a colossus in the midst of ordinary mortals. The critic of literature takes for granted the disparity between Shakespeare and the minor Elizabethans. The historian of socialism who has taken the measure of Marx need not trouble himself unduly over his rivals. (Lichtheim 1968, p. 185)

Describing Marx as someone who succeeded in synthesising philosophy, history and economics suggests the consummate academic, a thinker withdrawn from the ordinary day-to-day pursuits of humanity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Marx was a person of action and his thought was focused on real-life women and men, society as it is experienced, and not on mere abstractions.

That he was a genuine activist cannot be doubted. In 1842, after an abortive attempt to lecture at the University of Bonn following the gaining of his doctorate, Marx became editor—and a crusading editor at that, author of many a trenchant editorial—of Rheinische Zeitung (The Rhineland Gazette) in Cologne. One year later, however, the radical stance adopted by this newspaper under Marx’s editorship led to his dismissal and to the paper itself being banned. He moved to Paris where he came into contact with German workers and French socialists and became a communist. ‘What Marx came to know in Paris’, writes Ernst Fischer (1973, p. 19), ‘was the proletariat’. He continued to criticise the Prussian government and in 1845 it prevailed upon the French authorities to expel him. This time he found refuge in Brussels where he published his first economic essay, The Poverty of Philosophy: A Reply to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty.

At the end of 1847, Marx attended the Second Congress of the League of Communists in London and was commissioned to draft The Communist Manifesto. This was completed in January 1848 with the assistance of his friend and sponsor Friedrich Engels, whom he had met during his time in Paris. A month later the February Revolution took place in Paris. Marx, who was accused of being involved in preparations for armed uprisings in both Brussels and Cologne, was expelled by the Belgian authorities and returned to Paris. Almost immediately he moved back to Cologne to organise the publication of Neue Rheinische Zeitung (The New Rhineland Gazette) and became its first editor. A short-lived editorship, as it turned out. First, the paper was temporarily suppressed during a declared state of emergency a few months after the first issue. Then Marx was accused of sedition and incitement to armed rebellion. Acquitted by a Cologne jury early in 1849, he was declared a stateless person and had a deportation order served on him in May of that year. Printed in red, the final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared two days later. Marx (together with his family, for he had married in 1843 and by now had several sons and daughters) was once more on the move. He returned briefly to Paris but in August 1849 went to England to begin what was to prove a very long exile. He died there in 1883.

The image many have of Marx during those 35 years in England is of a scholar living in poverty and busily at work in the Reading Room of the British Museum, writing hundreds of articles and creating his best- known work, Das Kapital. It is again the image of the stereotypical academic, far removed from the action for change so evident in Marx’s earlier years. The history of these years hardly bears this out. Marx did write Das Kapital (and much besides) during this period. Volume I appeared in 1867, the other two volumes being published posthumously under the editorship of Engels. And Marx did live in poverty. His wife suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and several of his children died very young—as a result, some suggest, of malnutrition and lack of proper care. But he was no armchair strategist. His activism never abated.

Hardly had he arrived in London when he found himself heavily involved in arranging support for German refugees there. A year later he was chairing weekly meetings of the London chapter of the League of Communists. In 1852 he played a key role in developing and establishing a new German workers association in London. Over this time he kept in touch with people pressing for change in a number of countries, including Hungary and, of course, his native Germany where a long-time acquaintance and founder of the General Workingmen’s Association, Ferdinand Lassalle, was busily engaged in socialist pursuits. Marx met with Lassalle in Berlin in 1861 but became increasingly critical of his views and his mode of political agitation.

In 1864 the First International was founded in London and Marx was elected a member of the General Council as the representative for Germany. At the Fourth Congress of the International in Basle, he clashed bitterly with Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Marx’s communism won out over Bakunin’s anarchism and Bakunin was expelled from the International in 1872 at its fifth (and final) congress at The Hague, in which Marx took a very active part.

In his graveside address, when Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery on 17 March 1883, Engels declared him to be, above all else, a ‘revolutionist’. As Engels went on to say, fighting was Marx’s element and he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success that few could rival.

It is not surprising, then, to find that Marx the philosopher takes a very activist view of philosophy. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways’, he wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach; ‘the point is to change it’. His starting point for such action for change is not abstract ideas about the world but concrete social reality. ‘All social life is essentially practical’ and the mysteries that we discover in it and that have the propensity to lead us towards mysticism ‘find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice’ (Marx 1961, p. 84).

In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, or conceive, nor from what has been said, thought, imagined or conceived of men, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We begin with real, active men, and from their real-life process show the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life- process. The phantoms of the human brain also are necessary sublimates of men’s material life-process, which can be empirically established and which is bound to material preconditions . . . Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. (Marx 1961, p. 90)

In his earlier years, Marx was a member of the Young Hegelians, the more radical followers of the late idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Given the words just cited, we will not be surprised to learn that he comes to find Hegel too abstract. He accuses Hegel of being overly preoccupied with ideas, thereby turning the world, and history, on its head. He wants history to walk on its feet instead. The Hegelian philosophy of history’, he tells us, ‘is concerned, not with real, nor even with political, interests, but with pure thoughts’. It is ‘a speculative, esoteric history’ (1961, p. 72).

While attempting to turn Hegelianism right side up, Marx retains its central notion: that the succession of societal forms and regimes we find in history also represents stages in our human self-understanding. In doing this, he also retains, and valorises, Hegel’s concept of the ‘dialectic’. The notion of the dialectic is integral to Marx’s view of history. His social philosophy has come to be known as both ‘dialectic materialism’ and ‘historical materialism’.

To recognise the dialectic is to recognise that realities are never isolated entities standing in a linear, causal relationship to one another. Dialectically, reality can only be understood as multifaceted interaction. This is to paint a picture of reality, and therefore of thought, as inevitably the bearer of contradiction, forever in conflict with itself. Thus, when Marx points up distinguishable periods in human history, for example ‘ancient society’, ‘feudal society’ and ‘bourgeois (or capitalist) society’, each of these periods (‘a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a unique and distinctive character’) is to be seen as essentially at war with itself (1961, p. 156).

This inner contradiction, this perennial antagonism within every form of society, comes to be encapsulated in the term ‘class struggle’. In capitalist society Marx perceives a basic conflict between capital and labour, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and he believes there are analogues of this conflict in all earlier forms of society. Part 1 of The Communist Manifesto begins with the words, ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Marx and Engels 1937, p. 10). Thus, the class struggle of today mirrors the conflict in ancient times between free persons and slaves. Equally, it mirrors the conflict in feudal times between aristocracy or landed gentry, on the one hand, and the enserfed peasants, on the other. These are not to be seen merely as destructive conflicts. Hegel’s dialectic holds not only the notion of thesis and antithesis standing over against each other but also the notion of their interaction leading to a synthesis. Marx draws on these Hegelian notions to show how the conflict in ancient times between the free and the enslaved led to the development of feudal society. Similarly, the conflict in feudal times between the landed gentry and the serfs led to the development of capitalist society. And, in apocalyptic vein, he holds out the assured hope that the conflict today between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will lead to the development of a socialist, then communist, world, a classless society bom of an emancipatory process and offering tme freedom to all.

Driving this dialectical and, in his view, ultimately liberating process is what Marx conceives as the relations of production. Production is central to his analysis. The action of human beings on the world lies at the heart of history. It is through such action that we become fully human. Speaking of the way in which humans produce their means of subsistence, Marx states that this production ‘is already a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite way of expressing their life, a definite mode of life’. ‘What human beings are, therefore, depends on the material conditions of their production’ (Marx 1961, pp. 69-70).

It is obvious enough that the means of production that people create for themselves and have available to them differ from era to era. Marx places at the very centre of his exposition something that is not quite so obvious: that the social relations created by the means of production (‘forces of production’, Marx likes to term the latter) also differ from era to era. Marx stresses that the hand mill presupposes a division of labour different from that of the steam mill: ‘The hand mill will give you a society with the feudal lord, the steam mill a society with the industrial capitalist’ (Marx 1961, pp. 106-8). In other words, ‘a determinate mode of production, or industrial stage, is always bound up with a determinate mode of cooperation, or social stage’ (Marx 1961, P. 77).

The relationship between the forces of production and the corresponding social relations of production is an uneasy one. Over time new productive forces emerge and the social relations of production have to change in order to accommodate them. When this happens, society’s basic economic equilibrium is shattered and a different form of social relations of production must be established. In ancient times, following the move from what Marx considers to be a primordial form of communal living, the economy is characterised by landed property. At least at the start, this is communal or State property and it is essentially linked to the use of slaves. In Rome, as Marx points out (1961, p. 128), slavery ‘remained the basis of the whole productive system’. Yet slavery as practised in antiquity has inherent limitations. Maintaining it proves unworkable as new material conditions of production arise. The use of slave labour in that form comes to be a barrier to the effective deployment of the different instruments of production that come to hand. So slave labour gives way to serf labour. This has to happen because of the very nature of feudal property; that is, estates property, which has replaced the more communal forms of property of earlier times.

Like tribal and communal property it is also based on a community, but the direcdy producing class which confronts it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry . . . This feudal structure was, just as much as the communal property of antiquity, an association against a subject producing class, but the form of association and the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions of production. (Marx 1961, p. 129)

Similarly, feudalism gives way to capitalism because of changes in the forces of production and the inability of the existing relations of production to cater for them. As Marx and Engels underline, ‘the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces’. Instead, they proved to be ‘so many fetters’ and therefore ‘were burst asunder’ (Marx and Engels 1969, p. 113).

For Marx, then, the ‘multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society’ (Marx and Engels 1969, p. 31). It is easy to see why he has been regarded as an economic determinist. To be sure, there are other forces at work in the shaping of any society but, at rock bottom, the economic forces are the ones that count. (Equally, there are many groupings in society other than the two classes he highlights but, at rock bottom, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are the ones that count.) Marx speaks of these other forces, for example legal and political forces, as ‘superstructures’ built on the economic structure as their ‘real foundation’ (1961, p. 67). Marx is not dismissing the importance of the superstructure. For example, he is ready to affirm that effective action for change stems from awareness of the conflict between productive forces and the social relations of production and that such awareness can occur only at an ideological—that is, a legal, political or religious—level (Marx and Engels 1969, p. 62). It remains his contention, however, that what goes on at this superstructural level derives its effectiveness from the economic forces at work (p. 33).

This contention takes the form, particularly, of asserting that economic forces determine how we think. In talking of economic forces being the real foundation for legal and political superstructures, Marx adds that there are ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ corresponding to the economic structure. In words we have noted already, Marx (1961, p. 67) is ready to claim, ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness’. The social being he refers to is, before all and above all, economic being. This means that those who hold economic hegemony are able to shape the perceptions and viewpoints of those who do not.

The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that in consequence the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are, in general, subject to it . . . The individuals composing the ruling class . . . rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age. Consequendy, their ideas are the ruling ideas of the age. (Marx 1961, p. 93)

Marx is describing an oppression that touches the entire gamut of human life and human affairs. It does not have to do just with work. It permeates the totality of the worker’s existence. It even includes, as we have just seen, a shaping of the way in which people think, the begetting of a ‘false consciousness’ and the imposition of a corresponding ‘ideology’ or system of beliefs and values, which is not seen for what it is but is taken to represent the way things really are. That all this should breed a deep-seated alienation on die part of workers goes without saying and Marx, at least in his early writings, dwelled on this notion of proletarian alienation at considerable length, painting a picture of it that is rich and multifaceted.

Alienation translates the German Entfremdung, which signifies ‘the activity or process by which someone becomes a stranger to himself (Aron 1965, p. 147). In keeping with the primacy he accords to the economic, it is economic alienation that Marx sees as the root of any other form that alienation may take. In the economic alienation inherent in the capitalist relations of production, work no longer belongs to the worker. This is, for Marx, an inestimable loss, for he views human beings as productive by their very nature. Our labour—our productivity —is our ‘species-life’. Along with ‘social life’ and ‘sensuous life’, it characterises us as human beings. The capitalist system, however, succeeds in making workers strangers to their own work. What ought to be an expression of their very being becomes merely instrumental a means of subsistence. This ‘alienation of labour’ has the effect ‘that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature, that consequendy he does not fulfil himself in his work’ (Marx 1961, pp. 176-7). This has broad and long-term implications. Marx finds himself forced to ask, ‘What is the significance, in the development of humanity, of this reduction of the greater part of mankind to mere abstract labour?’ (pp. 176-7).

The alienation Marx is describing here is a ‘self-alienation’. He adds to this yet another form of alienation, the ‘alienation of the thing’. The alienation of the thing lies in ‘the relationship of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object which dominates him’. More broadly, this is ‘a relationship to the sensuous external world, to natural objects, as an alien and hostile world’. (Marx 1963, p. 125). And there is still more. It is not just an alien and hostile natural world that stands over against the workers. There are also ‘alien and hostile men’ (Marx 1961, p. 177).

A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labour, from his life activity and from his species-life, is that man is alienated from other men. When man confronts himself, he also confronts other men. What is true of man’s relationship to his work, to the product of his work and to himself is also true of his relationship to other men, to their labour and to the objects of their labour. (Marx 1963, p. 129)

This is ‘an inhuman situation’. Indeed, ‘in the fully developed proletariat, everything human is taken away, even the appearance of humanity’ (Marx 1961, pp. 236-7). ‘All is under the sway of inhuman power’ (Marx 1964, p. 156).

Is there any way out? Yes, there is. It is the way of revolution. The proletariat ‘is forced, by an ineluctable, irremediable, and imperious distress—by practical necessity—to revolt against this inhumanity’. It ‘can and must emancipate itself (Marx 1961, p. 237). Note that Marx is not talking about others emancipating the proletariat. It must emancipate itself. This is a theme that Marxist writers, much later, will throw into bold relief. Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire is one important figure who does that, as we shall see. Another strand in Marx’s thought that Freire exploits is his insistence that the proletariat, in triumphing, does not simply substitute itself for the oppressors in place. ‘It is only victorious by abolishing itself as well as its opposite’, writes Marx (1961, p. 237). The proletariat ‘can only emancipate itself by destroying the conditions of its existence’ and it ‘can only destroy its own conditions of existence by destroying all the inhuman conditions of existence of present-day society’ (Marx 1961, p. 237).

In this way alienation is overcome. ‘Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself (Marx 1961, pp. 236-41).

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.