Marx in 60 Minutes

Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes

Walther Ziegler

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783741227691
• eBook ISBN:
  9783741230110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Never before or since has a single philosopher produced such a tremendous effect as Karl Marx. His great vision of a society without private property was heeded worldwide and had huge historical effects. Allegiance to his ideas was proclaimed by revolutionaries, parties, governments and states. Marxism spread all around the globe. Marxist revolutions occurred in countries as different as Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua and Mozambique as well as many others, until at one point almost a third of humanity were living under communism. But some hundred years after Marx's death the communist world that he had inspired fell apart. After the fall of the Iron Curtain many claimed that Marx had been entirely in error and that the sole viable economic system is really capitalism after all. But the global economic and financial crises of recent decades have profoundly shaken belief in the power of the market to regulate itself. It has become ever clearer that capitalism does indeed display the structural flaws that Marx described in his main work, "Capital". Certain of Marx's predictions, such as the forming of powerful economic monopolies and the ever-growing gulf between rich and poor, have already come true. His acute critique of capitalism is, then, more relevant today than ever. There is no question but that Marx still has a lot to say to us. The book "Marx in 60 Minutes" explains in clear and perspicuous terms, using some seventy key quotations from Marx's works, such topics as the materialist philosophy of history, the doctrine of "base and superstructure", Marx's critique of religion, and the analyses developed in Capital of "surplus value", capital accumulation, and the immiseration of the workers. In the second part of the book, entitled "Of what use is Marx's discovery to us today?", Marx's insights are applied to the present situation. The book forms part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

Marx’s Central Idea

Man’s Basic Material Needs

Marx’s philosophical starting point is of appealing simplicity, and basically uncontestable. Every human being needs food and drink. To be without these for a long time is to die. Marx writes:

This is why every philosophy must take these basic material needs as its point of departure. It makes no sense, Marx argues, to begin a philosophical theory with thoughts about God, justice, or even human reason, since none of these things would be possible without the taking of nourishment, that is, direct material exchange with Nature. For Marx, therefore, there stands at the beginning of philosophy, and of human history, the simple fact that Man must work in order to satisfy his material needs:

This initial historical act of the production of the means of existence is one which we continue to perform even today. Because a caveman breaking open a nutshell with a stone to get at the nut, a farmer using a tractor to bring in his crop, or a molecular biologist using genetic engineering to increase future crop yields are all instances of Man acquiring something from Nature or, as Marx puts it, “appropriating Nature”:

Man, then, is not, primarily, anything spiritual or divine. His needs, Marx argues, are above all material. Just like an animal, Man appropriates the material things he needs. However, there is a decisive difference which sets human beings, at a certain point in their evolution, off from other animals:

An animal does not actually produce its means of subsistence. It finds its nourishment directly in Nature and can consume it directly without help of any sort. The buffalo simply eats the grass on the plain. And even predatory animals that hunt down their sources of food remain, in their life-activity, in harmony with inner and outer Nature:

In Man’s case the process of appropriating Nature is much more complex, ramified and comprehensive. The farmer produces the means of subsistence, but someone else the fertilizer, yet a third person the machines with which the harvest is brought in, a fourth the fuel for the farmer’s tractor and for the other machines. A fifth person builds the refinery which manufactures the diesel oil; a sixth runs the fleet of tankers which transport this oil; a seventh makes the headframes at the wells. And all this is only the beginning. In fact, a very long series of work-steps is required for the farmer to harvest his wheat and just as long a series before bread can be baked from it and be laid out, packed, on supermarket shelves.

In contrast to animals, then, Man survives only through the division and specialization of labour. Indeed, even once they are in the supermarket, people cannot simply take products off the shelves but must have earned the money to pay for them:

Here one might object that animals too must work for their food and shelter. Do beavers not build dams in order to regulate the water level in front of their lodges? But Marx had already asked himself this question:

Man’s universal production is indeed impressive. Today there are more than 14,000 different professions by which human beings earn their living. Ant and bee colonies have, indeed, their “workers”, “sentinels” and “queens”. But a division and specialization of labour as complex and ramified as that of human beings is found nowhere in the animal kingdom.

Work

Man, then, must work in order to satisfy his basic needs for food, clothing and shelter. Once we have firmly grasped this simple fact we have understood Marx’s central philosophical idea. Because the notion of work – and of the securing, through work, of basic needs – forms the foundation for Marx’s whole philosophy of dialectical materialism.

For Marx, then, Man proves and realizes his own being through the process of work, which means in turn that this being is essentially a species-being, that is to say, a being-in-community with others. For in fact it is only very exceptionally that a human being works alone. Mostly, work is done together with colleagues, be it in an office, on a building site, or in a factory. Even in seemingly one-man professions, one remains a species-being dependent on others: the artist may be alone in his studio, but he produces his works for others, sells them to them, and then himself buys food and clothes from the profits. Thus, everyone is bound into society right from the cradle on. Marx stresses how an individual is marked and formed in his deepest nature by his parents, his schooling, and above all by the work he does. For this reason, Marx goes so far as to call the individual human being the totality, or concrete co-presence, of the social relationships that make him up:

The way that a human being works within his society plays a decisive role in forming his self-awareness. A Tibetan monk, for example, who earns his livelihood tending vegetables in the monastery garden has a completely different awareness of himself than does a worker in a steel works, or someone caring for children in a kindergarten, a bank manager, a professional footballer, a musician, or a butcher. The work we do forms us:

Marx is really saying something very simple here, namely: we are what we do and how we do it. The way in which we earn our living plays such a decisive role because work directly determines human beings’ feeling and thinking:

By this Marx means not only how an individual produces but also how his whole society does. Thus, the warlike Vikings, for example, who earned their livelihood by daring raids and brutal assaults, had an entirely different sense of themselves than did, for example, nations composed of farmers who lived by the patient and careful cultivation of the fields. Marx, indeed, goes a step further and says that absolutely everything that occurs in people’s minds – their deepest convictions, their morality, and even their religion – are always only reflections of the material relations of production in which people live. In Marx’s own terminology, all ideas are nothing but a mental “superstructure” resting on their respective material “base”.

Base and Superstructure

This theory of base and superstructure is of central importance in Marx’s materialist philosophy. All that is “mental” – i.e. the apparently free thoughts of individuals and “consciousness” with its many plans and intentions – are, for Marx, only reflections of material circumstances. Here he directly contradicts the great German philosopher Hegel, who always emphasized the mental and spiritual development of Man. This, Marx argued, had been Hegel’s fundamental error. It is not consciousness and its decisions that determine our lives; on the contrary, it is material life that determines what takes place in our heads. This materialist reversal of Hegel’s view is the deeper meaning of the oft-cited Marxist dictum: ‘being determines consciousness’. Marx’s actual words in this passage are:

Thus, human societies have passed, in the course of history, through different forms of production which have, in their turn, given rise to different religious and artistic currents as “superstructures” to these material “bases”. The basis of everything, however, always remains the mode of production:

The example of the Vikings can help us to understand why, for Marx, even religion is just an after-effect of social production. So-called “predatory” nations like the Vikings gain the greater part of what they live on by attacks and raids; the god that they worship above all other gods is generally a brave and aggressive god of war. But nations whose livelihood is based on agriculture tend to celebrate harvest festivals and revere a god associated with the weather. The worship of a thunder god or a sun god who can be asked not to ruin the harvest but let it grow and ripen is, Marx claims, just the necessary superstructure to the material basis of a nation of farmers sustaining their lives through agriculture, whose very survival depends on what the harvest yields. Nations living by the sea, however, who live by fishing or maritime trade, tend to worship gods associated with the wind or the tide...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Marx’s Great Discovery
• Marx’s Central Idea
• Of What Use Is Marx’s Discovery for Us Today?
• Bibliographical References
• Already published in the same series
• Coming soon in the same series
• The author
• Copyright