The definition requires some refinement. For example, if I am taxed for the benefit of those unable to work, I will be exploited by the above definition, but this is not what the definition of exploitation was intended to capture. Worse still, if there is one person exploited much more gravely than anyone else in the economy, then it may turn out that no-one else is exploited. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to adjust the definition to take account of these difficulties, and as noted several other accounts of Marx-inspired accounts of exploitation have been offered that are independent of the labour theory of value.
Many of these alternative definitions add a notion of unfreedom or domination to unequal exchange of labour and goods Vrousalis The exploited person is forced to accept a situation in which he or she just never gets back what they put into the labour process.
Now there may be, in particular cases, a great deal to be said about why this is perfectly acceptable from a moral point of view. However, on the face of it such exploitation appears to be unjust. Nevertheless, we will see in the next section why attributing such a position to Marx himself is fraught with difficulty.
The issue of Marx and morality poses a conundrum. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never directly says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he directly say that communism would be a just form of society. In fact he frequently takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works.
The puzzle is why this should be, given the weight of indirect moral commentary one also finds in his writings. There are also separate questions concerning his attitude to ideas of justice, and to ideas of morality more broadly concerned.
This, then, generates four questions: a Did Marx think capitalism unjust? These are some of the questions we consider in this section. The initial argument that Marx must have thought that capitalism is unjust is based on the observation that Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker.
How could this fail to be unjust? Allen Wood is perhaps the leading advocate of the view that Marx did not believe that capitalism is unjust.
Wood argues that Marx takes this approach because his general theoretical approach excludes any trans-epochal standpoint from which one can comment on the justice of an economic system.
Even though it is acceptable to criticise particular behaviour from within an economic structure as unjust and theft under capitalism would be an example it is not possible to criticise capitalism as a whole. Marx claims that juridical institutions are part of the superstructure, and that ideas of justice are ideological. Accordingly, the role of both the superstructure and ideology, in the functionalist reading of historical materialism adopted here, is to stabilise the economic structure.
Consequently, to state that something is just under capitalism is simply a judgement that it will tend to have the effect of advancing capitalism.
According to Marx, in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; the core of the theory of ideology. Ziyad Husami however, argues that Wood is mistaken, ignoring the fact that for Marx ideas undergo a double determination.
We need to differentiate not just by economic system, but also by economic class within the system. Therefore the ideas of the non-ruling class may be very different from those of the ruling class. Of course, it is the ideas of the ruling class that receive attention and implementation, but this does not mean that other ideas do not exist. Husami goes as far as to argue that members of the proletariat under capitalism have an account of justice that matches communism.
First, it cannot explain why Marx never explicitly described capitalism as unjust, and second, it overlooks the distance Marx wanted to place between his own scientific socialism, and that of other socialists who argued for the injustice of capitalism.
Nevertheless, this leaves us with a puzzle. Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is, once more, from G. Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was unjust Cohen In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have perfect knowledge of his own mind.
In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view. But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language. Such an interpretation is bound to be controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts. Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live.
Points made in his early writings remain present throughout his writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfilment and freedom. People do not relate to each other as humans should. Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not? Capitalism impedes human flourishing. It is hard to disagree with the judgement that Marx.
Roberts Marx, though, once more refrained from making this explicit; he seemed to show no interest in locating his criticism of capitalism in any of the traditions of moral philosophy, or explaining how he was generating a new tradition. There may have been two reasons for his caution. The first was that while there were bad things about capitalism, there is, from a world historical point of view, much good about it too.
For without capitalism, communism would not be possible. Capitalism is to be transcended, not abolished, and this may be difficult to convey in the terms of moral philosophy. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need to return to the contrast between Marxian and other forms of socialism. Many non-Marxian socialists appealed to universal ideas of truth and justice to defend their proposed schemes, and their theory of transition was based on the idea that appealing to moral sensibilities would be the best, perhaps only, way of bringing about the new chosen society.
Marx wanted to distance himself from these other socialist traditions, and a key point of distinction was to argue that the route to understanding the possibilities of human emancipation lay in the analysis of historical and social forces, not in morality. Hence, for Marx, any appeal to morality was theoretically a backward step.
Would communism be a just society? Communism is described by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme , as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need.
This certainly sounds like a theory of justice, and could be adopted as such Gilabert If we start with the idea that the point of ideas of justice is to resolve disputes, then a society without disputes would have no need or place for justice. We can see this by reflecting upon the idea of the circumstances of justice in the work of David Hume — But Hume also suggested that justice would not be needed in other circumstances; if there were complete fellow-feeling between all human beings, there would be no conflict and no need for justice.
Of course, one can argue whether either material abundance or human fellow-feeling to this degree would be possible, but the point is that both arguments give a clear sense in which communism transcends justice. Nevertheless, we remain with the question of whether Marx thought that communism could be commended on other moral grounds. On a broad understanding, in which morality, or perhaps better to say ethics, is concerned with the idea of living well, it seems that communism can be assessed favourably in this light.
But beyond this we can be brief in that the considerations adduced in Section 2 above apply again. Quite possibly his determination to retain this point of difference between himself and other socialists led him to disparage the importance of morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical necessity. There are, of course, some famous quotations, not least from The German Ideology manuscripts.
The point should not be exaggerated, but these striking images notwithstanding, there is no clear and sustained discussion of ideology in the Marxian corpus. Many commentators maintain that the search for a single model of ideology in his work has to be given up. Marx does not view ideology as a feature of all societies, and, in particular, suggests that it will not be a feature of a future communist society. This stability is not permanent, but it can last for extended historical periods.
This stability appears puzzling to Marx because class-divided societies are flawed in ways which not only frustrate human flourishing, but also work to the material advantage of the ruling minority.
Why do the subordinate classes, who form a majority, tolerate these flaws, when resistance and rebellion of various kinds might be in their objective interests? Such societies might often involve the direct repression or the threat of it of one group by another, but Marx does not think that this is the whole story.
There are also non-repressive sources of social stability, and ideology is usually, and plausibly, considered one of these. Other factors might include: dull economic pressure, including the daily grind of having to earn a living; doubts—justified or otherwise—about the feasibility of alternatives; sensitivity to the possible costs of radical social change; and collective action problems of various kinds which face those who do want to rebel and resist.
Marx does not think individuals are permanently trapped within ideological modes of thinking. Ideology may have an initial hold, but it is not portrayed as impervious to reason and evidence, especially in circumstances in which the objective conditions for social change obtain.
And they are social in that they directly concern, or indirectly impact upon, the action-guiding understandings of self and society that individuals have. These action-guiding understandings include the dominant legal, political, religious, and philosophical views within particular class-divided societies in periods of stability MECW Not all false or misleading beliefs count for Marx as ideological.
Honest scientific error, for example can be non-ideological. And ideological belief can be misleading without being strictly false. Perhaps the only reason I believe something to be the case is that the belief in question has a consoling effect on me. Arguably such a belief is held ideologically, even if it happens to be true.
Nevertheless paradigmatic examples of ideology have a false content. For example, ideology often portrays institutions, policies, and decisions which are in the interests of the economically dominant class, as being in the interests of the society as a whole MECW 5: 60 ; and ideology often portrays social and political arrangements which are contingent, or historical, or artificial, as being necessary, or universal, or natural MECW In addition to false or misleading content, ideological beliefs typically have at least two additional characteristics, relating to their social origin and their class function.
Ideology stems, in part, from this deceptive surface appearance which makes it difficult to grasp the underlying social flaws that benefit the economically dominant class. Marx portrays the striving to uncover essences concealed by misleading appearances as characteristic of scientific endeavour MECW 37, And, in this context, he distinguishes between classical political economy, which strove—albeit not always successfully—to uncover the essential relations often concealed behind misleading appearances, and what he calls vulgar economy, which happily restricts itself to the misleading appearances themselves MECW 37, In response critics often see this as just another example of sloppy functional reasoning—purportedly widespread in the Marxist tradition—whereby a general pattern is asserted without the identification of any of the mechanisms which might generate that pattern.
In the present case, it is said that Marx never properly explains why the ruling ideas should be those of the ruling class Elster Yet there are obvious possible mechanisms here. To give two examples. First, there is the control of the ruling class over the means of mental production, and in particular the print and broadcast media which in capitalist societies are typically owned and controlled by the very wealthy MECW 5, A second possible mechanism appeals to the psychological need of individuals for invented narratives that legitimise or justify their social position; for instance, Marx identifies a widespread need, in flawed societies, for the consolatory effects of religion MECW 3, This broad heading—the state and politics—could cover very many different issues.
Consequently, many other important political issues—the nature of pre-capitalist states, relations between states, the political transition to communism, and so on—are not dealt with.
Marx offers no unified theoretical account of the state in capitalist society. Instead his remarks on this topic are scattered across the course of his activist life, and deeply embedded in discussions of contemporary events, events which most modern readers will know very little about. The next three paragraphs draw heavily on Elster — On this account, the state might also act against the short term, or the factional, interests of particular capitalists.
The picture here is of the state as an instrument directed—presumably by a subset of capitalists or their representatives—in ways which promote the long term interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. This model gets its name from the exceptional social circumstances said to explain the independence of the state in this case.
In situations where the social power of the two warring classes of contemporary society—capitalists and workers—are very nearly balanced, the political state and especially the executive can gain independence from both, exploiting that conflict in order to promote its own interests the interests of the political caste. On this account, the state has interests of its own, but presumably only gets to pursue them if those promises to others are plausible, finding some reflection in its policies and behaviour.
Where the instrumental picture claims that the state acts in the interests of the capitalist class because it is directly controlled by the latter, the abdication picture advances an explanatory connection between the promotion of bourgeois interests and the retreat from the direct exercise of power.
There are several possible explanations of why the bourgeoisie might remain outside of politics in order to promote their own interests. To give three examples: the bourgeoisie might recognise that their own characteristic short-termism could be fatal to their own interests if they exercised direct political as well as economic power; the bourgeoisie might find political rule sufficiently time and effort consuming to withdraw from it, discovering that the economic benefits kept on coming regardless; or the bourgeoisie might appreciate that abdication weakened their class opponents, forcing the proletariat to fight on two fronts against capital and government and thereby making it less able to win those struggles.
The instrumental account is the earliest account, which he largely abandons from the early s, presumably noticing how poorly it captured contemporary political realities—in particular, the stable existence of states which were not directly run by the capitalist class, but which still in some way served their interests.
That outcome is possible under either of the two other accounts. However, Marx seems to have thought of the class balance model as a temporary solution in exceptional circumstances, and perhaps held that it failed to allow the stable explanatory connection that he sought between the extant political arrangements and the promotion of dominant economic interests.
A weak definition of state autonomy might portray the state as autonomous when it is independent of direct control by the economically dominant class. On this definition, both the class balance and abdication models—but not the instrumental account—seem to provide for autonomy. Elster Only the class balance view seems to allow significant explanatory autonomy.
In his preferred abdication account, Marx allows that the state in capitalist society is independent of direct capitalist control, but goes on to claim that its main structures including that very independence and policies are ultimately explained by the interests of the capitalist class. For reasons discussed below see Section 8 , Marx declines to say much about the basic structure of a future communist society. However, in the case of the fate of the state, that reluctance is partially mitigated by his view that the institutional arrangements of the Paris Commune prefigured the political dimensions of communist society.
On the infrequency, context, and content, of these uses see Draper and Hunt So understood, the dictatorship of the proletariat forms part of the political transition to communist society a topic not covered here , rather than part of the institutional structure of communist society itself.
The character of the state in communist society consists, in part, of its form its institutional arrangements and its function the tasks that it undertakes.
Marx saw it as reflecting his view that:. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it. MECW The difficulty here is less in allowing this distinction, than in deciding what might fall into each category.
On the necessary side, Marx appears to require that the state in communist society provide both: democratic solutions to coordination problems deciding which side of the road traffic should drive on, for instance ; and the supply of public goods health, welfare, education, and so on.
On the unnecessary side, Marx seems to think that a communist society might hugely reduce, or even eliminate, the element of organised coercion found in most states in the form of standing armies, police forces, and so on.
First, many will be sceptical about its feasibility, and perhaps especially of the purported reduction, still less elimination, of state coercion.
That scepticism might be motivated by the thought that this would only be possible if communist society were characterised by widespread social and political consensus, and that such consensus is, both unlikely at least, in modern societies , and undesirable diversity and disagreement having a value.
However, the reduction, or even elimination, of state coercion might be compatible with certain forms of continuing disagreement about the ends and means of communist society. Imagine that a democratic communist polity introduces a new law prohibiting smoking in public places, and that a representative smoker call her Anne obeys that law despite being among the minority who wanted this practice permitted.
In short, reasonably strong assumptions about the democratic commitments of individuals might allow the scaling down of organised coercion without having to presume universal agreement amongst citizens on all issues. That is certainly possible, but the terminological claim would appear to assume that there is greater clarity and agreement about just what a state is, either than is presupposed here or than exists in the world.
It is well-known that Marx never provided a detailed account of the basic structure of the future communist society that he predicted.
Note that the distinction between Marxian socialism and utopian socialism is not an exhaustive one. What distinguishes utopian from other socialists is, in large part, their view that providing persuasive constructive plans and blueprints of future socialist arrangements is a legitimate and necessary activity.
On the utopian account, the socialist future needs to be designed before it can be delivered; the plans and blueprints being intended to guide and motivate socialists in their transformative ambitions. Of course, that Marx is not in this sense utopian does not rule out the possibility of additional here unspecified senses in which he might accurately be so described.
It is certainly easy to find not only passages fiercely criticising utopian authors and texts, but also passages generously praising them. However, that criticism and that praise turn out to attach to slightly different targets, revealing an underlying and consistent structure to his account.
That underlying structure rests on two main distinctions. The first distinction is a chronological one running between the founding triumvirate, on the one hand, and second and subsequent generations of utopian socialists, on the other. The second distinction is a substantive one running between the critical part of utopian writings the portrayal of faults within contemporary capitalist society , on the one hand, and the constructive part of utopian writings the detailed description of the ideal socialist future , on the other.
This distinction is intended to be exhaustive, in that all of his criticisms of utopianism will fall into one of these two categories. Non-foundational criticisms of utopian socialism are those which, if sound, would provide us with a reason to reject views which might be held by, or even be characteristic of, utopian socialists, but which are not constitutive of their utopianism.
That is, they would give us a reason to abandon the relevant beliefs, or to criticise those including utopians who held them, but they would not give us cause to reject utopianism as such. In contrast, foundational criticisms of utopian socialism are those which, if sound, would provide us with a reason to reject utopianism as such; that is, a reason to refrain from engaging in socialist design, a reason not to describe in relevant detail the socialist society of the future.
Of course, that reason might not be decisive, all things considered, but it would still count against utopianism per se. The utopians purportedly fail to understand that the achievement of socialism depends on conditions which can only emerge at a certain stage of historical development. This complaint is non-foundational in that one can accept that there are historical conditions for establishing a socialist society, and that the utopian socialists fail to understand this, without thereby having a reason to abandon utopianism as such.
Assessing the soundness of non-foundational criticisms, and their relevance to the utopian socialist tradition, is a complicated task see Leopold However, even if sound and relevant, these criticisms would provide no reason to abandon utopianism as such. Consequently, they are pursued no further here. The basic argument runs: that it is undemocratic to limit the self-determination of individuals; that providing a plan or blueprint for a socialist society limits the self-determination of individuals; and that therefore the provision of plans and blueprints for a socialist society is undemocratic.
Rather, labor works only in return for a money wage. Marx argued that because of this uneven arrangement, capitalists exploit workers. Another important theory developed by Marx is known as historical materialism. This theory posits that society at any given point in time is ordered by the type of technology used in the process of production. Under industrial capitalism, society is ordered with capitalists organizing labor in factories or offices where they work for wages.
Prior to capitalism, Marx suggested that feudalism existed as a specific set of social relations between lord and peasant classes related to the hand-powered or animal-powered means of production prevalent at the time. Marx's work laid the foundations for future communist leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin. Operating from the premise that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, his ideas formed the basis of Marxism and served as a theoretical base for communism. Nearly everything Marx wrote was viewed through the lens of the common laborer.
From Marx comes the idea that capitalist profits are possible because the value is "stolen" from the workers and transferred to employers. He was, without question, one of the most important and revolutionary thinkers of his time.
Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, and at Berlin, was introduced to the philosophy of G. He became involved in radicalism at a young age through the Young Hegelians, a group of students who criticized the political and religious establishments of the day. Marx received his doctorate from the University of Jena in His radical beliefs prevented him from securing a teaching position, so instead, he took a job as a journalist and later became the editor of Rheinische Zeitung , a liberal newspaper in Cologne.
After living in Prussia, Marx lived in France for some time, and that is where he met his lifelong friend Friedrich Engels. He was expelled from France and then lived for a brief period in Belgium before moving to London where he spent the rest of his life with his wife. Marx died of bronchitis and pleurisy in London on March 14, He was buried at Highgate Cemetery in London.
His original grave was nondescript, but in , the Communist Party of Great Britain unveiled a large tombstone, including a bust of Marx and the inscription "Workers of all Lands Unite," an Anglicized interpretation of the famous phrase in The Communist Manifesto : "Proletarians of all countries, unite! The Communist Manifesto summarizes Marx and Engels's theories about the nature of society and politics and is an attempt to explain the goals of Marxism, and, later, socialism.
When writing The Communist Manifesto , Marx and Engels explained how they thought capitalism was unsustainable and how the capitalist society that existed at the time of the writing would eventually be replaced by a socialist one.
By far the more academic work, it lays forth Marx's theories on commodities, labor markets, the division of labor and a basic understanding of the rate of return to owners of capital. The exact origins of the term "capitalism" in English are unclear, it appears that Karl Marx was not the first to use the word "capitalism" in English, although he certainly contributed to the rise of its use. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the English word was first used by author William Thackeray in , in his novel The Newcomes , who intended it to mean a sense of concern about personal possessions and money in general.
While it's unclear whether either Thackeray or Marx was aware of the other's work, both men meant the word to have a pejorative ring. Still, there are some lessons that even modern economic thinkers can learn from Marx.
Though he was the capitalist system's harshest critic, Marx understood that it was far more productive than previous or alternative economic systems. In Das Kapital , he wrote of "capitalist production" that combined "together of various processes into a social whole," which included developing new technologies. He believed all countries should become capitalist and develop that productive capacity, and then workers would naturally revolt into communism. But, like Adam Smith and David Ricardo before him, Marx predicted that because of capitalism's relentless pursuit of profit by way of competition and technological progress to lower the costs of production, that the rate of profit in an economy would always be falling over time.
Like the other classical economists , Karl Marx believed in the labor theory of value to explain relative differences in market prices. This theory stated that the value of a produced economic good can be measured objectively by the average number of labor hours required to produce it.
In other words, if a table takes twice as long to make as a chair, then the table should be considered twice as valuable. Marx understood the labor theory better than his predecessors even Adam Smith and contemporaries, and presented a devastating intellectual challenge to laissez-faire economists in Das Kapital : If goods and services tend to be sold at their true objective labor values as measured in labor hours, how do any capitalists enjoy profits?
It must mean, Marx concluded, that capitalists were underpaying or overworking, and thereby exploiting, laborers to drive down the cost of production. The greatest problem facing humanity this century is arguably environmental collapse.
Here, curiously, Marx has perhaps failed to see that a proletarian revolution might give rise to a bourgeois one, where the workers come to define themselves as consumers. Marx envisioned a communist system in which high levels of industrial production would ensure a good standard of living for the entire population. His theory did not account for the issues of scarcity of resources and overpopulation; indeed they were not relevant to his epoch.
However, what Marx did shrewdly observe was that those who profit from the existing system would resist any fundamental change to it — even if it jeopardised the lives of future generations to come. The rationale of capitalism lies in the maximisation of profit: no other ends can modify this aim.
But the survival of humanity, Marx realised, clearly indicates that other strategies must be adopted if we are to avoid the worst form of dystopian future. Here Marx offers, if not comfort, at least inspiration. He is the author of Marx and Marxism Penguin Books, Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. Who was Karl Marx? Photo by Patrick Donovan via Getty Images. Read more: Did the Cold War ever really end?
More on: Europe.
0コメント