One hundred and seventy years ago
On the 200th anniversary of his birth, several articles have been published about Karl Marx and his theories. Born in Trier on 5 May, 1818, the third of nine children, he was brought up in a comfortable middle-class family. He was expected to follow his father into the legal profession, began his studies in law in Berlin, but then was seduced by Hegel’s writings, and never looked back: philosophy, and later political economy, were to be the loves of his life.
As is the case with other influential thinkers, I am torn between exploring Marx’s biography, or choosing to restrict my focus to what wrote. I do know he was a less than exemplary man: he never sought employment for long, was unkind (to put it mildly) to his wife, ignored his children and lived off the generosity of his friend Friedrich Engels. All that allowed him to work away at his writing, leaving the world a huge corpus of often densely argued books and papers. That said, if today’s interest is in Marx and anniversaries, as far as I am concerned a rather telling one is 170 years ago, when Marx, with Engels, published a pamphlet, ‘The Communist Manifesto’.[i] It is not a philosophical document of great importance, but it speaks with a clarity and passion many of his more detailed works fail to achieve. Like the proverbial English ‘bad penny’, it keeps on popping on, as much a focus of attention today as at any time over the years.
It is a pamphlet. A call to arms, the promise of a better and somewhat mysterious future to be realised through revolution. The proletariat is on the verge of overthrowing the yoke of oppression, pushing aside the bourgeoisie, and by that means getting rid of the centuries of exploitation of workers by the owners of capital. Whatever else you might want to say about Karl Marx and his co-author Frederick Engels, together those two could write. It is a tract packed full of memorable and evocative phrases. Just look at how they begin: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Interested? Read on!
“The bourgeoisie has played a most revolutionary role in history.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors, ” and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom–Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
I could happily just keep on quoting, but I will restrict myself to one of the more vibrant passages, as they turn to the impact of capitalism.
“The bourgeoisie during its rule of scarce one hundred years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground–what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? … Modern bourgeois society with it relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
All this speaks to the world in 2018. Of course, in other ways Marx and Engels blew it. Like most over-excited analysts, they were convinced the moment had come: “The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all are its own grave diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
This is the paradox, of course. Analytically Marx and Engels were perceptive (we don’t have to explore how far dialectical materialism provides the only useful lens to make sense of economic history and our political woes, but most would agree it is a useful one, nonetheless); but they had to take that next step, and predict the future. The trick they missed had been evident for a long time: capitalists need markets, they need consumers to buy their products and services. Screw down wages too much, crush the proletariat, and you have also killed your business.
You have to wonder how many of the early 20th Century’s businessmen read The Communist Manifesto, and thought about its conclusions. For sure, smart business titans made sure they paid wages high enough to ensure a continuing market for their products; and treated workers well enough to ensure their continuing employment, albeit at the lowest wage they could get away with. If Marx and Engels saw this as a war, it might be better thought in terms of a symbiosis: capitalists and workers need each other. The fight is not so much about a total revolution, one overthrowing the other, but about getting the balance right.
That said, how is the battle going? Here in little North Carolina, we have just received the latest update on CEO salaries in our state.[ii] The data are compelling. We can begin with the CEO of Wells Fargo, that sterling banking behemoth, that has just agreed to payments of $1bn and $0.85bn to settle malpractice in various area (all of which expense is more than adequately covered by the Trump government’s tax cuts!). Timothy Sloan receive a total compensation just over $17.5m in 2017, 291 times greater than the median worker compensation of around $60k.
That pales into the trivial when we turn to two other two big winners, both in clothing of one kind or another. The CEO of VF Corp received just over $13.7M in 2017, 1,353 times that of the median worker compensation of $10,151; and for Hanesbrands the figures are just over $9.5m for the CEO, a multiple of 1,830 over the median worker compensation of $5,237. Those workers get paid so little? Yes, casual workforces on pitiful wages dominate industries like apparel – and similarly dreadfully low figures for the fast food industry. Just for comparison, the poverty level in the US is $13,860 for a single person, $28,290 for a two child family.
Before you ask, I admit I picked the worst examples. For local CEOs, those whose total compensation was over $6m, the multiple was generally at least 200 times the median workers’ income (one banker was only at a multiple of 126!). Below that level, the multiple was around 40: that’s an interesting figure, too, as tradition has it that the maximum salary received by a CEO should be no more than 40 times that of the lowest paid worker (but not the median workers compensation, though). Well, those days are long gone.
Of course Marx and Engels weren’t only writing about income levels. But they foresaw what is true in the US today, and increasingly the case in Australia, which is that only money matters. What did Marx and Engels say? “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.”
True then, and certainly true now. You want to be an academic, and teach and research in a university? Wake up, you’re just paid labour, and, increasingly subject to the same levels of abuse and intimidation by affluent students and managers as are the workers in the student parents’ factories. Just as in business, the only university employees whose salaries appear to be improving are the senior administrators. The outcome remains the same, just as it was the case when Marx and Engels were writing, but now it isn’t capitalists but senior executives who exploit workers, and the same question still remains: how low can wages be pushed!
Does that mean dreams of a revolution are just that, mere dreams? Some hopeful writers still argue the overthrow of the class systems is close around the corner. David Harvey’s analysis of seventeen current contradictions in capitalism happily argues the end is coming. The book is hard work: some of it is close to unintelligible to someone like me, some of the analyses are a stretch, but there is enough meat there to keep the faithful hoping.[iii] Nearly there!
Pamphlets are wonderful things. The best usually contains enough vivid analyses and sufficient complex proposals as to engender a small industry. The Communist Manifesto is up there at the top, the source of new hermeneutic tomes appearing with steady regularity. It is easy to sound snarky about it, but to do so is to miss the point. Engels claimed that the approach would do for history what he saw had been done by Darwin’s theory of natural selection had done for biology. It is a worthwhile argument, that class struggles are the motor of history, just as ‘survival of the fittest’ provides the basis for progress in the natural world.
Engel’s introduction to the Communist Manifesto summarises the underlying logic:
“the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that, consequently, the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class–the proletariat–cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class–the bourgeoisie–without at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.”
A ‘Grand Unified Theory’ for history, to sit alongside natural selection and the almost complete model of quantum theory and elementary particles? Okay, perhaps not.
What about the future? A significant part of the Communist Manifesto is given over to a defence of what communists would do, about property (which would be owned by the state, of course); about labour and the freedom from oppression, and then on to family relations and education. Like any good pamphlet, it ends with some specific measures.
Many years later, many of the proposals seem rather irrelevant to communism as such. These include a heavy progressive or graduated income tax; free education for all children in public schools and the abolition of child factory labour; the “equal obligation of all to work”; the abolition of all right of inheritance.; and the confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. Some others are more clearly ‘socialist’: the centralization of credit in the hands of the state by a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly; the centralization of communication and transport in the hands of the state; the extension of factories and “instruments of production” to be owned by the state; and the “bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan”. However, while much came to pass without a revolution, some proposals clearly required a communist state. How about the establishment of “industrial armies, especially for agriculture” and the “gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country”? A major social planning exercise, yet to be attempted?
When all is said and done, Marx and Engels offered some useful analysis, several well-meaning objectives (and some silly ones), and the basis for an alternative way of looking at government and its relationship to ‘the people’. What wasn’t obvious 170 years ago was that communism would provide yet another path to dictatorship and the exploitation of the many by the few. The perpetual struggle between classes needed to be balanced against another part of the social and political dynamic: the desire of some men to dominate and control the lives of others, in order to allow the few to enjoy the best of everything. Despite all Marx proposed, I have the sense nothing changes: does that takes us back to my favourite topic of irreducible ‘human nature’?
[i] With all the prefaces: < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf>
[ii] Winston Salem Journal, Sunday 6 May, 2018, Section C, page C1
[iii] David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, OUP, 2014
