Marx: A Very Short Introduction

  Once Marx has been given due credit for making us aware of the economic and social forces that may influence us, however, it has to be added that his own view of human nature is false. Human nature is not as pliable as he believed. Egoism, for instance, is not eliminated by economic reorganization or by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new ‘needs’ emerge. In our society, people want not simply clothes, but fashionable clothes; not shelter, but a house to display their wealth and taste. It is not just advertising that leads to these desires, for they emerge in the non-capitalist world as well, often in the face of disapproval from the official ideology. Unless rigid uniformity is imposed – and perhaps even then – these desires will find an outlet. And it will never be possible to satisfy everyone’s material desires. How could we provide everyone with a house in a secluded position overlooking the sea, but within easy reach of the city?

  In different societies, egoistic desires will take different forms. This does not show that they can be abolished altogether, but only that they are the expression of a more basic desire. There is, for instance, more than simple greed behind our insatiable urge for consumer goods. There is also the desire for status, and perhaps sometimes a desire for the power which status can bring. No doubt capitalism accentuates these desires. There are societies in which competition for status and power are much more restrained. There may even be societies lacking any such competition. Yet desires for status and power exist in many human beings, in a range of different societies. They tend to surface despite repeated efforts to suppress them. No society, no matter how egalitarian its rhetoric, has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled. Nor has any society succeeded in making this distinction merely a matter of who leads and who follows: to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy (and their families). Throughout the ‘communist’ nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, coupled with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall.

  I point to these failings of the allegedly communist world not in order to say that this was the kind of society Marx wanted – obviously, it wasn’t – but to ask what there is to be learnt from these historical experiments. Before answering this question, however, we should note that the prevalence of hierarchy is not limited to human societies. There are clear hierarchies among most social birds and mammals, including those species most nearly related to human beings. Farmers have always known that barnyard flocks of hens develop a ‘pecking order’ in which each hen has a rank, allowing her to peck at and drive away from food birds below her in rank, but to be pecked by, and forced to give up food to, those above her. More careful studies have shown that similar hierarchies exist among wolves, deer, lions, baboons, and chimpanzees, to name only a few of the species studied.

  14. Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), the Soviet dictator, at work in his office, with Marx’s portrait above his head

  So we have evidence that was not available to Marx – evidence of the failure of deliberate attempts to create egalitarian societies on the basis of the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and exchange; and evidence of the hierarchical nature of non-human societies. The evidence is not yet all in; but we have enough to reach the provisional judgement that it will not be as easy as Marx thought to bring the conflicting interests of human beings into harmony.

  If this is right, it has far-reaching consequences for Marx’s positive proposals. If changing the economic basis of society will not bring the individual to see that his own interests and the interests of society are the same, communism as Marx conceived it must be abandoned. Except perhaps for the brief period in which the economic structure of the society was in the process of transformation to social ownership, Marx never intended a communist society to force the individual to work against his or her own interests for the collective good. The need to use coercion would signify not the overcoming of alienation, but the continuing alienation of man from man; a coercive society would not be the riddle of history resolved, but merely the riddle restated in a new form; it would not end class rule, but would substitute a new ruling class for the old one. While it is absurd to blame Marx for something he did not foresee and certainly would have condemned if he had foreseen it, the distance between Marx’s predicted communist society and the form taken by ‘communism’ in the twentieth century may in the end be traceable to Marx’s misconception of the flexibility of human nature.

  15. Military tanks pass a mural of key communist figures in a 1974 parade in Havana, Cuba, lass marking anniversary of the Revolution

  It is both sad and ironic to read today some marginal jottings Marx made in 1874, while reading Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy. Marx copied out passages from this work by his anarchist rival from the days of the first International, and then made his own comments on each passage. Thus the jottings read like a dialogue, one section of which goes like this:

  Bakunin: Universal suffrage by the whole people of representatives and rulers of the state – this is the last word of the Marxists as well as of the democratic school. They are lies behind which lurks the despotism of a governing minority, lies all the more dangerous in that this minority appears as the expression of the so-called people’s will.

  Marx: Under collective property, the so-called will of the people disappears in order to make way for the real will of the co-operative.

  Bakunin: Result: rule of the great majority of the people by a privileged minority. But, the Marxists say, this minority will consist of workers. Yes, indeed, but of ex-workers who, once they become only representatives or rulers of the people, cease to be workers.

  Marx: No more than a manufacturer today ceases to be a capitalist when he becomes a member of the municipal council.

  Bakunin: And from the heights of the state they begin to look down upon the whole common world of the workers. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people. Those who can doubt this know nothing at all about human nature.

  Marx: If Mr Bakunin were familiar just with the position of a manager in a workers’ co-operative, he could send all his nightmares about authority to the devil. He should have asked himself: what form can administrative functions take, on the basis of this workers’ state – if he wants to call it that?

  (B 563)

  The tragedy of Marxism is that a century after Marx wrote these words, our experience of the rule of workers in several different countries bears out Bakunin’s objections, rather than Marx’s replies. Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.

  Note on Sources

  The quotations from Engels on pp. 16 and 23 are from ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, in K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Works (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1951), Vol. 2, pp. 365–8. The description of Moses Hess as the first to reach communism by ‘the philosophic path’ (see p. 27) comes from ‘Progress of Social Reform on the Continent’, an article Engels wrote for The New Moral World, a small English journal, in 1843; it is quoted in Robert Tucker’s Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1961), p. 107. Engels refers to Marx denying that he is a Marxist (see p. 51) in a letter to Starkenburg,
25 January 1894; Engels’ letters to Schmidt (5 August 1890), to Bloch (21 September 1890) and to Mehring (14 April 1893) also deal with the interpretation of historical materialism. All are reprinted in L. S. Feuer (ed.), Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Doubleday Anchor, New York, 1959). The expression ‘a really human morality’ cited on p. 82 comes from Engels’s Anti-Dühring, also reprinted in Feuer, at p. 272.

  The quotation from Hegel on p. 20 is from The Philosophy of History (trans. J. Sibree, ed. C. J. Friedrich, Dover, New York, 1956), p. 19.

  The contemporary economist quoted on p. 76 is Paul Samuelson, writing in the American Economic Review, vol. 47 (1957), p. 911.

  Further Reading

  Writings by Marx

  Marx wrote so much that the definitive edition of all the writings of Marx and Engels, now in the process of publication in East Germany, will take twenty-five years and a hundred volumes to complete. A more modest English edition of Collected Works began appearing in 1975, published by Lawrence and Wishart; it will eventually contain about fifty volumes. Meanwhile the English reader must make do with complete editions of the major works, and selections from others. As the list of abbreviations on pp. ix–x suggests, I regard Karl Marx: Selected Writings edited by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) as the best single-volume collection. Lewis Feuer’s Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Doubleday Anchor, New York, 1959) has a good selection of the ‘classic’ writings of the mature Marx but for a comprehensive picture it needs to be supplemented by a collection of Marx’s earlier writings, like Loyd Easton and Kurt Guddat (eds), Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Doubleday Anchor, New York, 1967).

  There are many editions of Marx’s most famous works. The Communist Manifesto is a good place to begin reading Marx. It is available in a Penguin edition, edited by A. J. P. Taylor (Harmondsworth, 1967), and is reprinted in its entirety in McLellan’s and many other volumes of selected writings. Having read the Manifesto and some selections from other texts, the reader may like to try the first volume of Capital. It is not as difficult as one might imagine, and is again available in a number of different editions, of which the Moore and Aveling translation published in Moscow is the most commonly used.

  For those who want something in between one and fifty volumes, the Marx Library, published by Penguin in Britain and Vintage in the USA, is an eight-volume collection that includes the complete Grundrisse and a good selection of Marx’s journalism and political writings.

  Writings about Marx

  If the writings by Marx and Engels take up a hundred volumes, those about Marx must run into the tens of thousands. Below is a very brief selection of some better recent books. Although older works are interesting because they enable us to see how earlier generations conceived Marx, their ignorance of his unpublished early writings and of the Grundrisse make them an unreliable guide to the basis of Marx’s views.

  For books on Marx’s life, there is little need to go beyond David McLellan’s outstanding Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Macmillan, London, 1973). A slightly less sympathetic alternative is Saul K. Padover, The Man Marx (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1978). Jerrold Seigel’s Marx’s Fate (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1978) may appeal to those who favour psychoanalytic biographies. Among older works, Isaiah Berlin’s Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (first edition 1939, fourth edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978) has lost none of its flowing style in several updatings.

  On Marx’s thought, as distinct from his life, Robert Tucker, in Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1961), was among the first to emphasize the continuity of Marx’s ideas, from his earliest Hegelian essays to Capital. Tucker’s interpretation is novel, if at times too dramatic. David McLellan’s The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (Macmillan, London, 1969) gives useful background to Marx’s intellectual development. Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (second edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977), is more readable than most works on alienation.

  To balance the Hegelian emphasis of these works, G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979) argues brilliantly for a more old-fashioned interpretation of Marxism as a scientific theory of history, an interpretation often known – disparagingly – as ‘technological determinism’. Melvin Rader’s Marx’s Interpretation of History (Oxford University Press, New York, 1979) presents a wider range of possible interpretations.

  Finally, those interested in the entire sweep of Marxist theory, from the founders through its ‘Golden Age’ to its dissolution into Soviet ideology, should not miss Main Currents of Marxism by Lemek Kolakowski (3 vols, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978).

  Index

  A

  ‘alienation’18–36, 39, 46–7, 60, 68, 76, 92, 97

  B

  Bakunin, M. A.99–100

  Bauer, Bruno 21–3, 25–8, 39, 43

  Berlin 3, 8, 16, 21

  Brussels 7–9

  C

  Capital 7, 10–12, 32, 38, 51, 55, 59–60, 64, 67–76, 83, 92

  capitalism, capitalists 10, 33, 36–8, 41, 48–50, 59–78, 80–93, 95–7, 100

  Civil War in France, The 11

  communism, communists 1, 6–8, 15, 27, 37–8, 43, 78–85, 92, 94–6

  Communist League 8–9

  Communist Manifesto, The 8, 50, 82, 85

  conservatism, conservatives 1

  Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A 10, 44, 47–8, 67

  Critique of the Gotha Program 15, 84

  D

  Darwin, Charles 38, 47, 53

  Democritus 5

  Demuth, Frederick (illegitimate son) 9

  Demuth, Helene 9

  dialectical materialism 17, 40–1

  E

  Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 32–8, 43, 55, 60, 64, 79, 83, 92

  economics, economists 3–7, 10, 27, 30–8, 48–56, 59–77, 81–2, 86–8, 91–2

  Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The 50

  Engels, R. 6–12, 16, 23, 27, 38–44, 47, 51–5, 74, 82, 85

  oration at Marx’s funeral 52, 66, 78

  England 7–8, 56–7, 73

  Epicurus 3

  F

  feudalism 49, 71–2

  Feuerbach, L. A. 23–8, 32–5, 41–3

  Fichte, J. G. 41

  First International, the, see International Workingmen’s Association

  France 8, 10–11, 29, 31

  G

  Germany 5–6, 9, 16–17, 28–31

  German Ideology, The 7–8, 41, 44–6, 52, 55, 60, 64, 80

  ‘Gotha Program’, the 12

  Grundrisse 51, 53, 64–6, 70 106

  H

  Hegel, G. W. F. 5, 16–27, 28–32,34–5, 37, 40–3, 54–6, 64, 70, 88–9, 92

  Hess, Moses 27

  Hitler, A. 1

  Hobbes, T. 92

  Holy Family, The 7, 39–41, 44, 60

  I

  International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) 11, 99

  J

  Jews, Jewishness, Judaism 3, 25–7, 41

  K

  Kautsky, K. 59

  L

  Lenin, V. L. 81, 86, 93

  Locke, J. 92

  London 9–11

  M

  Manchester 6–7

  Marx, Edgar (son) 9

  Marx, Eleanor (daughter) 10

  Marx, Jenny (daughter) 9, 10, 12–15

  Marx, Jenny (wife)see Westphalen, Jenny von

  Marx, Karl

  birth and parentage 3

  and communism 1, 6–8, 15, 37–8, 43, 79–85, 92, 94–6

  death of wife and daughter 15

  and economics 6–7, 10, 27, 30–8, 48–56, 59–77, 86, 91

  finances 3–7, 9, 10–12

  and freedom 25, 37, 47, 56, 72, 82–3, 89–93

  influence of 1–3, 8
6–100

  influence of Feuerbach 23–4, 34–5

  influence of Hegel 16–18, 24, 35, 64

  journalism 4–6, 8–9, 60

  marriage 3

  the materialist conception of history 38–59, 78, 81, 84, 86

  and philosophy 6, 16, 28–31, 88–9, 92, 94

  and the proletariat 28–36, 39–43, 50, 57, 85

  relationship with Engels 6–9, 11, 51

  university studies 3–5, 16, 21

  writings 6–8, 12–15, 38, 29–43, 67

  Marx, Laura (daughter) 7, 10, 15

  Marxism, Marxists 1, 28, 32, 37, 43, 51, 61, 74, 80, 85–6, 94, 99

  materialist conception of history, see Marx, Karl

  Mussolini, B. 1

  N

  nationalism 1

  O

  ‘On the Jewish Question’ 25, 29, 41

  P

  Paris 6–8, 31–2

  Commune 11

  philosophy, philosophers 2–6, 16–31, 40–3, 54–5, 57, 64, 80, 89, 94

  of history 37, 43

  Plato 80

  Poverty of Philosophy, The 60

  proletariat, the 28–36, 40–2, 50, 57, 78, 85–8

  Proudhon, P. J. 8, 36, 39

  R

  religion 3, 21–8, 34, 42–4, 49, 52–3

  revolution, revolutionaries 1, 6, 9–10, 12, 31, 43, 74, 78–9

  French 1848 8

  industrial 73, 75

  Ricardo, David 62–4, 68, 75

  Rousseau, J.-J. 92

  Ruge, Arnold 25

  S

  Say, J.-B. 33

  Smith, Adam 33, 68

  socialism, socialists 6, 12–15, 25, 43, 79, 84

  Stalin, I. V. 93

  T

  ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ 41–3