Marx and Education

Robin Small

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138255821
• eBook ISBN: 9781351919609
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Marx and Education is the first assessment of the educational thought of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and its later influence, in the light of developments at the close of the twentieth century. It provides a new perspective, in which many aspects of Marx's ideas are seen clearly for the first time, freed from misleading associations and outdated prejudices. Marx's thinking on education touches on many still current issues: about personal development, the nature of learning, and the ultimate aims of education, as well as the relations between the school and society. Robin Small explores Marx's approach to each of these issues and in relating them to later developments brings the story up to the present day.

I
Educational Theory

Chapter 1
Human Nature

Every educational theory implies, whether it recognizes it or not, some concept of what human beings are and what they can become. That this is also true of Marx can be seen in the passage of Capital in which he speaks of a future system of education as ‘the only method of producing fully developed human beings’ (Marx and Engels, 1975–, vol.35, p.486. Hereafter, references to this edition are given in the form CW35:486. A few minor alterations have been made to these translations). This expression suggests that Marx has some particular idea of what it means to be a human being, and of what the full development of a human being would consist in; and that his philosophy of education, if it is not simply based on this model, at least must refer to it. This is not to say that he ever spells out his model in detail. We have to come to our own view of it by looking into various aspects of his theories, not just about education, or even about human nature, but about other things as well.

Thinkers about education have appealed to various models of human nature. One traditional concept uses the idea of rationality as its guiding theme. Another regards human beings as essentially social beings, and accordingly sees education as concerned with the development of the social aspects of individual personality. Some approaches use an idea of human nature to answer educational questions by setting up an ideal which is to be aimed at through education. Others use it as a guide to the practice of education, providing a theory about how we learn and develop. To some extent Marx, like other philosophers of education, uses both of these approaches. But if Marx does have an idea of human nature, it is not a simple one, and our discussion must therefore look into several aspects of his conception, without making any claim that everything worth mentioning has been covered.

History and Human Nature

First of all, Marx’s approach is an historical one. He writes: ‘All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature’ (CW6:192). This is already a radical departure from most approaches to human nature, and it raises questions about the possibility of any general theory of education. How, on this assumption, can there be some single set of principles and ideals about education applicable to people in all societies at all times? Must not we confine ourselves to speaking of education in the context of some particular social setting, for example, that of Western industrial society? We shall see that this is not quite what Marx thinks; but it is an important point which must be kept in mind.

The historical approach to human nature is often used by Marx as a way of criticizing other writers. He thinks there is a common tendency to look at social questions (including those about education) in an unhistorical way. On his view, it is simply wrong to talk about human nature without reference to any particular society. He also thinks that such theories are really not as unhistorical as they seem, for the model of human life which they describe is usually taken from some particular society, in any case – usually the society within which the theory is put forward. In other words, the view that this society takes of itself is turned into a model of human life in general. A good example, and one that Marx often refers to, is the modern utilitarian attitude. Here human beings are regarded as separate individuals whose main motive is self-interest, and the main social problem is seen as the task of reconciling their conflicting aims. This is a task for education in particular. Hence one arrives at a theory like that of Robert Owen, which is primarily concerned with the problem of individual interests and the common interest. Owen accepts the doctrine that human behaviour is motivated purely by self-interest. Education, he considers, cannot alter this psychological truism; what it does determine is whether self-interest is pursued in a rational, ‘enlightened’ way. The rational individual realizes that his or her own interests are best served when pursued in harmony with the interests of others. And this insight is what education can bring about.

Marx regards this whole theory as misguided. Instead of saying something about human nature in general, it represents – accurately enough – the society in which it arose. This was the period of the first beginnings of modern capitalism, in which older social ties were loosening and individuals were indeed forced to see themselves as separate beings, in a way that would have seemed far less plausible in an earlier setting. But it is simply naïve to suppose that such a model is applicable to all societies, past and future, since in other contexts human beings might behave in different ways, have different motives and face different problems.

So it seems that Marx’s historical approach might prevent him from having anything to say about human nature, apart from the simple claim that it is different in every historical period. However this is not wholly true. Marx does not think that people in one society have nothing at all in common with people in another society. Some facts about human beings do apply to all societies: for example, the fact that they are always social beings, or that they exist by interacting with the world around them, in particular with the world of nature. However Marx would comment that these common features do not amount to anything very enlightening or useful. To make the point in a stronger way: he would say that what these remarks mean, if they mean anything, differs historically. What does it mean to say that we are ‘social beings’? Social relationships take very different forms in different societies and therefore the social nature of people in a modern society is very different from an ancient society, or again from some future society. Similarly to say that human beings exist by interacting with nature and by producing the means of their existence means one thing in one historical period and another in one with a different mode of production. So while it is not false to make these general claims about human nature, we must recognize how little they amount to. They are really only starting points for further descriptions, which would be more concrete and enlightening only by turning into investigations of human life in some particular historical period.

Human nature, then, is not a constant. To study it can only be to study its history, and this in turn implies a study of the development of societies and their modes of production. The history of production and industry, Marx says, is ‘the open book of man’s essential powers’ (CW3:302). This raises another question: are there general facts about the way in which this development takes place? Here Marx does have some interesting ideas to offer which are relevant to the problems of education, for he believes not only that human nature changes, but that it changes in a particular way. It is changed by human beings themselves. The process is quite different from the evolution of species or from geological processes, where things are changed by influences in their environment. Marx does not consider human development, either the development of society or of individual human beings, to be simply the result of circumstances. To explain the alternative account that he offers, we must look into his idea of human activity. As human beings act upon the world, they also act upon themselves; as they change their environment they also change themselves (CW35:187). They develop and become more complex, by coming to have both new abilities and new needs. As Marx says, ‘the producers … transform themselves in that they evolve new qualities from within themselves, develop through production new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs, and new speech’ (CW28:418). These changes amount to changes in human nature itself.

The Development of Needs

Marx’s mention of ‘new needs’ is worth noting, because it is a theme which recurs in his remarks on human nature. Human activities arise out of needs. Marx says, ‘No one can do anything without at the same time doing it for the sake of one or other of his needs’ (CW5:255). The kinds of needs we have determine the kinds of activities we engage in, as well as the kinds of satisfaction that result. So any development of new needs must make a difference to all aspects of human life. This is especially the case if it is a question, not only of acquiring different needs, but of developing a greater number and variety of needs. The development of human nature is a growth in its complexity. Only this can explain Marx’s references to ‘all-round’ development or to ‘fully developed’ human beings. Such expressions describe a relation of harmony between various aspects of the individual; and clearly this factor becomes more and more important as a greater complexity of needs and activities develops. For Marx, that historical development is an unqualified advance. The more complex human beings become, the more ‘rich’ they are in the real wealth of mankind. ‘In fact, however, if the narrow bourgeois form is peeled off, what is wealth if not the universality of the individual’s needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive forces, etc., produced in universal exchange?’ (CW28:411). Capitalism, Marx says, leads to ‘the discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; cultivating all the qualities of social man and producing him in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations’ (CW28:336). On the other hand, this advance has a darker side: people with more needs are more vulnerable to deprivation. One of Marx’s most important criticisms of modern society is that it encourages a great expansion of human activities, yet prevents any realization of the gain implied in the process, because it leaves many needs unsatisfied and many abilities undeveloped. In fact, by doing so, it leaves people worse off than they were before.

From this, we can begin to see why Marx’s attitude towards capitalism is marked by some sharp contrasts. He is a social revolutionary who wants to see the overthrow of the existing order of things; and he bases this demand on a detailed indictment of the harm done by the capitalist system to working men and women. At the same time, he recognizes its real achievements. The opening passages of The Communist Manifesto amount to a eulogy of capitalism which has seldom been equalled even by its more open apologists, yet it is a conditional kind of praise: capitalism is held up as ‘most revolutionary’ for the new opportunities it opens up, as much as for its actual achievements so far.

Marx’s belief in the historical development of human nature implies that the contrast between what is genuinely human and what is inhuman or subhuman cannot be a simple one for him. He is not like Rousseau, drawing the distinction by identifying it with the difference between the natural and the artificial. But does this mean that the category of natural or innate human needs simply disappears from the picture? Or is it that whatever natural needs we have do not belong to the human side of our nature? To answer questions like these we need to look further into what Marx is saying. In one passage he writes: ‘The production of new needs is the first historical act’ (CW5:432). This presumably refers to new kinds of needs, not just new occurrences of old kinds. After all, something which goes on in the same way day after day, either as a continuous presence or as a recurring cycle, hardly seems to deserve the label ‘historical’. Sometimes Marx seems to be overlooking this point:

But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing, and various other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. (CW5:41–2; also 31)

This is a far less satisfactory account of the ‘first historical act’ than the one cited earlier. Activities which are the same today as ‘thousands of years ago’ cannot have a very historical character, although they may well be the condition of activities which are historical. The maintenance of human life itself is rather like any process of nature which is cyclical rather than historical. And yet – one might object here – is it the case that ‘eating and drinking, housing, clothing, and various other things’ are the same today as thousands of years ago? Surely, on the contrary, both production and consumption take very different forms in different periods. Marx himself places great emphasis on the changing of modes of production as the basis of all historical change.

We can resolve this seeming dispute by recalling the point made earlier: that any description of ‘human nature’ in general can only be a starting point for historical inquiry. The fact that material production is a constant feature of human existence is not the end of the matter, but just the beginning. Marx says of the labour process: ‘it is the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase’ (CW35:194). It is true that different societies confront this condition in different ways. In most societies, there are some people who do not experience it as a condition because others engage in productive activity on their behalf. But there is no society whose members as a whole do not need to commit themselves to the production of material life.

If basic needs can take different forms, then, does Marx mean no more by ‘new needs’ than ‘new forms of basic needs’? I think this is not necessarily the case. Nor is it necessarily impossible for him to make something like the point for which the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ needs is often used. In the 1844 Manuscripts he speaks of certain needs, such as the need for money, which are created, not as part of the development of personality for its own sake, but rather by a social system which itself needs such ‘needs’ in order to function. Marx writes: ‘The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces’ (CW3:307). What is important about this new need is its effect on all the other human needs which already exist. It comes to dominate them, and in the process reduces them to a level which Marx describes as ‘a complete, crude, abstract simplicity of need’ (CW3:307).

One passage indicates what the distinction between real and ‘artificial’ needs might be for Marx. He speaks of a social organization ‘which will make possible the normal satisfaction of all needs, i.e., a satisfaction which is limited only by the needs themselves’ (CW5:256). This idea assumes that needs are limited: that is, that they are satisfied according to their own requirements, not in terms of outside circumstances or other desires. However not all needs are like this. The need for money has no inbuilt limit. There is no such thing as having ‘enough’ money, at least once the need for money exists as a separate need in its own right. The drive to accumulate wealth in this abstract form is endless, as Aristotle pointed out, because it is not a means to some further end but an end in itself (Aristotle, 1941, I.9, 1257a–1258a, pp.1137–9; and CW35:163n). This is why capitalism, which operates with such a drive as its main motive, has a character quite different from all previous modes of production, which according to Marx were ‘conservative’ in that they rested upon drives which are limited in nature. We can thus give a reason for saying that this need is ‘abnormal’. Its unlimited character not only makes it different from other needs, but brings it into conflict with them. It takes their place: instead of needing to travel, for example, one needs the money to travel. Or to take another example which Marx uses, the need for art is a need to develop the artistic side of one’s personality, to acquire knowledge and aesthetic taste; when this is turned into the need for money it too turns from a human need to a narrow and dehumanizing one (CW3:322–6).

Another class of ‘artificial needs’ which Marx mentions is typified by the need for spirits or other drugs which give the victim of oppression some solace for the misery of everyday life. What Marx finds wrong with this is not hard to see: such satisfactions are perhaps real enough, but they merely replace those which are unobtainable under oppressive social circumstances. They testify to the absence of human satisfactions by providing an inferior substitute – and one which, indeed, places the possibility of satisfying other human needs even further out of reach. In both cases, one can see that Marx is able to develop a critique of ‘unhealthy’ needs without appealing to an arbitrary idea of ‘normality’. He makes the minimal and rather formal assumption that the ‘truly human’ is a many-sided development of needs, activities and satisfactions. Needs which distort this development, or which replace it with the domination of one abstract need, can therefore be judged ‘abnormal’.

In The German Ideology (1845–6) a similar distinction is made in a description of the future of human needs in a communist society, but in a passage deleted by Marx and Engels from the final manuscript.

Communist organisation has a twofold effect on the desires produced in the individual by present-day relations; some of these desires – namely desires which exist under all relations, and only change their form and direction under different social relations – are merely altered by the communist social system, for they are given the opportunity to develop normally; but others – namely those originating solely in a particular society, under particular conditions of production and intercourse – are totally deprived of their conditions of existence. (CW5:255–6)

Certainly the argument seems to concede too much to a simple natural/artificial standard. Marx’s remarks elsewhere on ‘new needs’ created by social life and giving rise to an individual described as ‘rich in needs’ give him no right to frown upon needs merely for originating in some particular society. In later notes, he makes plain his rejection of any talk of an ‘artificial need’, when he writes: ‘By besoin factice [artificial need] the economist means firstly: the besoins [needs] that arise from the social existence of the individual; secondly, those that are not a consequence of his bare existence as a natural object. This illustrates the desperate internal poverty that is the basis of bourgeois wealth and its science’ (CW28:161).

What is more, the conclusion of this deleted passage goes in a different direction. ‘Which of the desires will be merely changed and which eliminated in a communist society can only be determined in a practical way, by changing the real, actual “desires”, and not by making comparisons with earlier historical conditions’ (CW5:256). Yet, if the previous argument were valid, such an historical comparison would indeed be a good guide to the needs encouraged by a communist society, because these would be just the needs discovered as present in every society throughout history. The opposite conclusion, that such comparisons are no guide to the future because of the ability of human nature to develop in truly new ways, is far more consistent with many of Marx’s other ideas, and in particular with his repeated refusal to predict in any detail the form of the future communist system. He does say in Capital that, under communism, the worker’s essential wants would increase, because his or her standard of life would rise (CW35:530). But he makes no attempt to say what these wants would be, and this is one of the reasons why we cannot attribute to him any speculative picture of human nature in a future society.

Materialism and Human Nature

What is meant by ‘materialism’ in relation to Marx is not a simple question, even if we restrict it to the question about human nature. Perhaps the best way to approach it is by looking into the relation between Marx and a materialist philosopher who influenced his development considerably: Ludwig Feuerbach. One can see in Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach the main outlines of his own materialism, in so far as this term can be applied to him.

What Feuerbach means by materialism has not much to do with giving an account of human life wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: EDUCATIONAL THEORY
• PART II: EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE
• Conclusion: Marx’s Educational Legacy
• Bibliography
• Index