Marx

The Alternative to Capitalism

Kieran Allen

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786802026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

If we are serious about finding a different way to run the post-credit crunch society, we must start by introducing alternatives to undergraduates. Kieran Allen begins the task with an accessible and comprehensive look at the ideas of Karl Marx. Dispensing with the dryness of traditional explanations of Marx, Allen shows how Marx's ideas apply to modern society. The first section briefly outlines Marx's life and the development of his work, then goes on to clearly explain his key theories, including historical materialism and surplus value. The second section examines alternatives to capitalism, the concept of 'anti-capitalism' and provides concrete, contemporary examples of Marx's theories being put into practice in today's world.

1

Rebel with a Cause

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, an old city on the banks of the River Moselle. His father was a lawyer who had converted from Judaism to Protestantism in 1824 to avoid anti-Semitic laws that prevented Jews having a public career. Marx’s initial love was not politics but poetry. However, as he developed as a literary critic he found that his own creations were not up to his standards.¹ In his teenage years he moved to Berlin to study philosophy, completing a doctorate on two ancient Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus.

From an early age Marx came up against a deeply repressive society. After a rally for free speech in a nearby town, the police raided his school and removed seditious literature. Two years later, the mathematics and Hebrew teachers were arrested and charged with the crimes of ‘atheism’ and ‘materialism’.² This repression produced in Marx a burning desire to rebel and debunk authority. His doctorate on two Greek classical philosophers might seem like a dry-as-dust subject, but Marx’s opening page displayed an unusual passion.

As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering and totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: ‘Impiety does not consist of destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd’. Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus – ‘In one word, I hate all gods’ – is her profession, her own slogan against all gods in heaven and earth who do not recognize man’s self consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.³

This sentiment was directed not just against the gods but against all those who oppressed the masses to promote their own greatness. He stuck with it for the rest of his life.

The Confederation of Germany in which Marx grew up was a loose association of 39 states, dominated by Prussia and Austria. Its towns were tiny and bounded by walls and gates that were closed at night. Just eight years before Marx was born, serfdom – the obligation to provide free labour to aristocrats – was formally abolished but, as a concession, the aristocrats were allowed take more common land as their private property.⁴ This old imperial nobility had special privileges and sometimes their landed estates effectively amounted to states within states. In Prussia, there was no constitution and the king could rule as he pleased. The only concession to wider representation throughout Germany were provincial parliaments where seats were reserved for the Church and the aristocracy. The property qualification for voting was so high that only 70 people qualified in the duchy of Nassau.⁵ Censorship, bans on political discussion and adherence to the official religion of Christianity were the order of the day.⁶

In this extremely repressive society, philosophy was one of the few areas where there was no regulation and standing at its pinnacle was the towering figure of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had died in 1831. In his youth, he supported the French Revolution and privately welcomed Napoleon’s invasion of Germany, hoping it would bring greater liberty.⁷ By liberty he did not mean freedom for the individual against society but rather ‘a recovery of society where men are free and undivided ... in which public life is a common expression of the citizens rather than being imposed by unchallengeable authorities on subjects’.⁸ This was a more radical vision than that held by other Enlightenment writers who saw society as a collection of independent, atomised individuals. The defeat of the French Revolution and the restoration of absolute monarchy in Germany formed the backdrop to Hegel’s philosophy.

Although it was extremely complex, a brief summary is necessary to understand Marx’s own development. The radical aspect of Hegel’s outlook was that change, process and development were at the heart of human experience. These did not occur randomly and history was not a story of disparate battles, betrayals and individual foibles. With some justice, Hegel argued that things could not be seen in isolation but must be viewed in their relationships. Everything that was had to be produced – it did not appear from nowhere. The state, cultural practices, political ideas had all emerged from somewhere and were in a process of birth and eventual decay. Change, however, could only occur because of division and contradiction. There was first a unity, then a split and finally a reconciliation at a higher unity. Through these mechanisms there was a pattern in history – it was a march towards freedom. ‘The history of the world,’ Hegel wrote, ‘is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom’.⁹

While there was a revolutionary kernel to this outlook, the weakness of the progressive forces in Germany meant that Hegel saw history as a mystical process. Philosophy has traditionally divided on the question: What exists? For a materialist matter exists and all forms of consciousness must be rooted in the life process of the brain or the wider social community from which we derive language and culture.¹⁰ For an idealist it is Spirit (or God or Thought) that really exists and human society is but an expression of it. The most radical idealism was Plato’s philosophy where men were imagined to live in caves, watching shadows on a wall that were faint traces of a higher Spirit that lay outside, shining through one of the cracks.

In his idealist outlook, Hegel was not far removed from Plato because he thought Spirit (Geist) was at the origin of all existence. This Spirit had become alienated from the world it created and so had to ‘go through a cycle, a drama, a division in order to return to unity’.¹¹ This sounds like a retelling of the Christian story of the division between God and the world but with one important difference. Whereas in traditional religion God stood alone in the heavens in all his perfection, Hegel had the temerity to suggest that ‘Without the world, God is not God’.¹² The Spirit has to make the journey back to an identity with the world and so man became ‘the vehicle for Geist’s spiritual journey’.¹³ Or to put it more scandalously, history is the autobiography of God.¹⁴

The progress of the Spirit towards the world, or in Hegel’s language, self-awareness, was manifested in the unfolding of human history. Hegel had a brilliant, encyclopedic mind and drew on examples from religion, art, law and politics to show that there was a certain unity in the culture of any particular society. This unity was an expression of the journey of the Spirit at a particular stage. However, the ‘mole of history’ only moved through great contradictions and clashes before it could advance to a new stage. Its end point was a universal state that rose above all the divisions of civil society and offered freedom to all its citizens. The state was, for Hegel, the embodiment of reason and bestowed on man whatever value he had. Civil society was just ‘society as a human herd’¹⁵ where each individual treated everyone else as a means to an end.

After Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon in 1806, the monarch, Frederick William III, was forced to embark on an era of reform and appoint liberal ministers such as Baron Von Stein and Baron Altenstein. Economic tariffs between the provinces were lifted, Jews given some civil rights and the political interests of the middle class championed.¹⁶ As part of the liberalisation, Hegel was given the post of university professor in the newly established Berlin university where he championed the reforming administration. But he went further and argued the reformed Prussian state was the final reconciliation of the Spirit with the world, the end of human history. Which is why, not surprisingly, he was proclaimed Germany’s official philosopher.

This was clearly a conservative and absurd conclusion. Even before his death in 1831, the reactionary clique around Frederick William III undermined the reforms and restored the absolute monarchy. A young left Hegelian movement emerged using a radical version of the philosophy to attack the state. They focused on Hegel’s method rather than his wider system because this allowed them to make connections between different aspects of culture, thinking of them as a ‘totality’. So religion, philosophy and art all had a certain unity as an expression of a particular society. But each totality was made up of the unity of opposites and would undergo change through great clashes. No society would persist for more than a limited time and would eventually be surpassed as History continued its march towards freedom.

One typical Hegelian approach was to argue that ideas and social practices were not wrong but that the need for them had been surpassed. David Strauss’s book The Life of Jesus, published in 1835, provides a good example of this. This treated the Gospels as another text and showed, through its inconsistencies, that they were an expression of the collective consciousness of early Christian communities. By ignoring the debate about whether or not the Gospels were true, Strauss’s book was even more devastating because it treated them merely as a cultural expression that had been surpassed.

The radical implications of this method were particularly dangerous. If history was a journey towards Reason and Freedom, then the existing society could be criticised as falling short and all social institutions could be measured against the possibility of a society where ‘the rational was real and the real was rational’.¹⁷ Viewed from this standpoint, monarchy and aristocratic privileges were soon-to-be relics that should be swept aside to speed up the march of history. Even if the older Hegel shrank from these conclusions, his Young Hegelian followers were determined to press the point home.

When Marx first began to study philosophy in Berlin in 1836, he rejected ‘the harsh, grotesque, melody’ of Hegel’s philosophy¹⁸ but later he joined the Doctors’ Club, a group of Young Hegelians who took the radical content of Hegel’s doctrine seriously. They accepted Hegel’s view of history as moving towards an ideal state but did not think that the Prussian state had reached that stage. In particular, they believed that its development had been stifled by the links between the state and the Church. The task of philosophy, they believed, was to liberate the state from religion and to promote ‘Critical Criticism’.¹⁹ By this they meant free thought in a free society.

Initially, the Young Hegelians had high hopes in Friedrich Wilhelm IV who ascended to the throne in 1840, but the new king proved to be as reactionary as the old. He suppressed the Young Hegelian journal, the Hallische Jahrbucher, and appointed Hegel’s arch-enemy, Friedrich Schelling, as Professor of Philosophy at Berlin, with instructions to root out the ‘dragon seed of Hegelianism’.²⁰ In 1842, Bruno Bauer, the leader of the Young Hegelians, was sacked from his academic post for promoting atheism after which Marx gave up all hope of being appointed a lecturer.

The philosophers who were driven out of the lecture halls then sought positions in the editorial offices of newspapers. Fortunately, the Rheinische Zeitung, which had been founded by liberal businessmen in Cologne who distrusted Prussian domination, began to employ a number of the Young Hegelians. One of their number was Karl Marx and in October 1842 he became the paper’s editor. Marx’s first published article was a vociferous attack on censorship of the press and, in a sign of things to come, he also attacked the half-hearted liberals who did not wage a strong enough fight. He suggested that ‘the absence of freedom of the press makes all other freedoms illusory. One form of freedom governs another, just as one limb of the body does another.’²¹ His opposition to censorship and his contempt for the bureaucratic Prussian state turned him into an extreme democrat who despised all suggestions that the people had to be guided by their superiors. Rule by the people might bring all sorts of mistakes but Marx replied to paternalistic arguments for restricting freedom:

For [the advocate of paternalism] true education consists in keeping a person swaddled in a cradle all his life, for as soon as he learns to walk he also learns to fall, and it is only through falling that he learns to walk. But if we all remain children in swaddling clothes, who is to swaddle us? If we all lie in a cradle, who is to cradle us? If we are all in jail, who is to be the jail warden?²²

Marx displayed an equal passion in opposing state bureaucracy. He rejected Hegel’s celebration of the Prussian state and denounced the pretension of all bureaucracy to represent the common good of society:

The bureaucracy is a magic circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is the hierarchy of knowledge ... . [It] degenerates into ... passive obedience, the worship of authority, the mechanism of a fixed, formal action, of rigid principles, views and traditions. As for the individual bureaucrat, the purpose of the state becomes his private purpose, a hunt for promotion and careerism.²³

When some suggested that the problem of bureaucracy could be solved with better leaders, he wrote that ‘hierarchical organisation is itself the principal abuse and the few personal sins of officials are as nothing compared to their necessary hierarchical sins’.²⁴ All of this put Marx far in advance of classic liberal writers who advocated more freedom but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rebel with a Cause
• 2 A for Profit Society
• 3 Alienation
• 4 Social Class
• 5 Gender and Race
• 6 How We Are Kept in Line
• 7 Historical Materialism
• 8 Crash: How the System Implodes
• 9 Utopia or Revolution
• 10 After the Revolution
• 11 The Economics of Socialism
• 12 Into the Beyond
• Notes
• Guide to Further Reading
• Select Bibliography
• Index