Hayek Versus Marx

Eric Aarons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134039449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The aim of the book is to stimulate the realignment of political, theoretical and philosophical thinking that is now beginning in response to global warming.The author provides an examination of the theories of the most prominent social philosophers of the 19 th and 20 th centuries – Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek.He does so in the belief that the work of these two thinkers, in their commonalities and differences, successes and failures, contain important indicators of the content of a social philosophy suited to today's conditions.

The book proceeds in the context of the failure of the attempts by followers of Marx, having achieved political power, to realise the objectives they took to issue from his theories, on the one hand, and of the earlier successes, but now emerging failures of the neo-liberal philosophy of Hayek to cope with the with the environmental outcomes of those very successes, on the other. In doing so, the book will incidentally critique postmodernism, because of its claim to be 'Theory' as such, which for a generation impeded genuine theoretical and philosophical work.

1 The two social philosophers

By any standard, Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek must be counted as among the greatest social and political thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What they thought, how they thought, and the successes and failures in their thinking are closely related to the current critical point in the future of humanity as global warming and the sustainability of our present economic production and consumption patterns necessarily come to dominate our concerns.

Both men were prolific in their output as well as the range of subjects with which they dealt, and both differed from their contemporaries in that early in their careers they set out to develop all-embracing projects, best described as ‘social philosophies’. This was fairly common during Marx’s lifetime but by the twentieth century it was a rare thing for an economic thinker to do. But Hayek embarked upon his project primarily because socialism presented a strong challenge to capitalism in a period when capitalist society was reeling from two world wars and the Great Depression, and also feeling the impact of a successful revolution in Russia and a number of revolutionary outbreaks in several European countries.

Their social philosophies covered economics, politics, history, law, philosophy, epistemology, values and human nature. Each developed them into what post-modern critics would come to call ‘grand narratives’, covering the past and even the future in ways that were speculative and, as I shall argue, misleading. Though I contend that a broadly integrated vision of the human situation is necessary to guide action, particularly at crucial junctures such as the present one, we should take note of the dangers involved in building complete systems, with their inherent tendency to turn partial truths into absolutes, and to transform the totality of these into sets of ideas—ideologies—that are liable to become closed and fixed, certainly in the minds of their adherents.

Naturally, neither thinker had their social philosophies, or projects, ready-made from the beginning but developed them as they studied, thought and lived their lives. In this opening chapter I begin at the point where each has just entered the path they will tread until they die. For Marx it was the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848); for Hayek it was The Road to Serfdom (1944). In these two seminal texts each first expressed the avowedly political ideals that would develop into two opposing social philosophies and which would have such a powerful influence upon how subsequent generations would come to think and act.

Marx’s project

Marx was born on 5 May 1818 in Trier, an old city of western Germany near the River Rhine, a few years after it was made part of Prussia in the general settlement that followed the defeat of Napoleon. His father was a successful Jewish lawyer who renounced Judaism and was baptised into the Christian faith. Marx never considered himself to be Jewish, seeing himself rather as a European and a German. He entered the University of Bonn in 1835, studying law and philosophy, and coming under the still pervasive influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Hegel considered that there was no world independent of consciousness. This was a form of idealism that differed significantly from the philosophical conventions of his time in taking this proposition to be an objective fact; Hegel insisted that it was true whether or not people believed it to be so. The natural world into which humans were born, was not, as modern science said, something that was objective and ‘outside’, and thus opposed to them. Rather, this was only an appearance, and humanity’s task was to find, beyond so-called objective nature, its own essential life. Once people comprehended that what was ‘outside’ them was a facet of their own self-consciousness, they would be able to transcend their feelings of alienation and become free. Placing the state at the centre of his grand narrative of historical development, Hegel argued that history was a process in which the human geist (spirit) proceeded through alienation towards perfect self-understanding and knowledge. While a radical departure from the conventional philosophical approaches to reality and humanity of the period, Hegel’s ideas also underpinned the less than radical notions of a strong central state and of the Christian religion.

By the time he was nineteen, Marx had come to doubt the soundness of this approach, especially its endorsement of the Prussian state and of the truth of Christianity.¹ He wrote a long letter to his father in which he said:

Setting out from idealism … I hit upon seeking the Idea in the real itself … I had read fragments of Hegel’s philosophy and had found its grotesque craggy melody unpleasing. I wished to dive into the ocean once again but with the definite intention of discovering our mental nature to be just as determined, concrete, and firmly established as our physical … ²

Marx developed his anti-Hegelian ideas further, drawing upon the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach who, as first to make a substantial philosophical attack on the Hegelian system which had become a mainstay of the oppressive Prussian political regime, was for a time the idol of Marx and his generation. The nature of Feuerbach’s criticisms may be gained from the following account of his teaching.

• The Hegelian philosophy began from the proposition: I am an abstract and merely a thinking being to whose essence the body does not belong. The new philosophy of Feuerbach began by saying: I am a real sensuous being and indeed, the body in its totality is my ego, my essence itself. Here Feuerbach importantly includes feeling, emotion and even love. Though personally possessing these attributes, in his theoretical treatment of the proletariat and its destiny, Marx saw it primarily as ‘body’, that is, as labour.³
• As Nietzsche would later, Feuerbach held that the human being has a species-specific perspective on the world. But, unlike Nietzsche, he held that the human being is not a restricted or particular being like the various species of non-human animals, but a universal one because of the unrestricted nature of human consciousness. This consciousness, he maintained, is not expressed only in reason but in the full human being which reacts feelingly and through natural science to all aspects of nature.
• Feuerbach’s criticism of religion was wide-ranging because he was primarily concerned with social and political reform, and Christianity, given an Hegelian imprimatur, was used by the Prussian regime as a weapon against change. For instance, Feuerbach held that it was wrong to deny that spirit (consciousness and thought) could arise from unconscious nature. Spirit is rooted in the brain, he argued, and it was incorrect to think of the skull and brain as originating in nature while thinking the mind to be a supernatural creation.⁴

In 1841, failing to obtain an academic appointment upon graduating, Marx became the salaried editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette), a paper voicing industrial, liberal and Protestant interests. He had to deal with the threat of censorship and with economic issues at a time when grape growers in the Moselle valley struck hard economic times and people foraging for fuel in the forests were harassed and prosecuted by the landowners. Marx’s ignorance of such matters persuaded him to study economics, and when the Prussian censor closed the paper down in 1843, he moved to Paris. Here he became co-editor of a short-lived radical journal, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbucher (German-French Yearbook). Convinced that a German revolution was approaching, he wrote to Arnold Ruge, a Young Hegelian who had helped finance the Jahrbucher, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and Feuerbach requesting their cooperation.

They all declined (and the Jahrbucher only saw one issue), but Marx, who had admired Feuerbach, then sought in Feuerbach’s philosophy what the reasons for this might have been. He found and wrote them up in a short essay widely known as Theses on Feuerbach, which were found in Marx’s papers and published posthumously by his now close collaborator, lifelong friend and financial supporter, Frederick Engels. Marx found Feuerbach’s philosophical analysis lacking, the main point being that Feuerbach saw the task of overturning Hegelian philosophy from a theoretical and contemplative perspective and failed to see the need to carry ideas into the area of real life, of practice, of political action. This had by then become the key issue for Marx—hence his famous aphorism: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’⁵

The Manifesto

It was in the spirit of combining theory with practice that Marx and Engels accepted an invitation in 1847 to join an originally secret organisation, the League of the Just, which now embraced a membership of politically active workers, especially artisans, from European countries. Its leadership generally accepted the ideas of Marx and Engels, who believed it had become a viable political vehicle for the times.⁶ They attended two 1847 congresses of the League in London, the last of which changed its name to the Communist League, and commissioned them to prepare a statement of aims, which became the Manifesto of the Communist Party.⁷ This was published just prior to the February Revolution of 1848 in which the French monarch was overthrown and the Second Republic was established.

The Manifesto set out in brief, clear terms the communists’ analysis of history, social organisation and property, as well as their intentions and policies. A brief and now well-known introduction states:

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism … Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power … It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

Its first section, headed ‘Bourgeois And Proletarians’, proclaims that ‘the history of all hitherto-existing society is the history of class struggles’.⁸ It continues:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster 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.

Then follows its main contentions which Marx, often in collaboration with Engels, would develop more fully and deeply throughout the rest of his life.

• The capitalist class has played a most revolutionary part, having in a single century ‘created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.’ The ‘bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’. It has ‘put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations … torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’. And ‘in place of the old national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations’.
• The capitalist class, moreover, 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’. It has ‘not only forged the weapons [the new productive forces] that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians’.
• ‘You [the bourgeoisie] reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend … The abolition of existing property-relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism. All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.’
• ‘[T]he first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.’
• The Manifesto outlines a number of initial concrete steps, including the abolition of private property in land, a heavy progressive income tax, and the need to centralise credit in the hands of the state. Importantly, although the word ‘planning’ does not appear, there is a reference to the abolition of markets: ‘By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also.’
• The two most important points in the final section entitled ‘Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties’ are first:

The Communists fight for the enforcement of the attainment of the immediate aims, for the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.

And second:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

After the defeat of the radical forces in the German revolution, Marx fled in exile to Brussels, returning briefly to Paris, and moving then to Cologne before finally arriving in London in August 1849. There he lived for the rest of his life, studying for long periods in the British Museum Library, and writing most of his major works including the Grundrisse, A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, and the three volumes of Capital.⁹

Political economy

Marx had begun the systematic study of political economy when in Paris, and concretised his concept of alienation based on his first-hand knowledge of the actual conditio...