As a conterpoint to the simplistic version of Marx presented by the Bloomberg article, I thought I'd post the Guardian series from a whole back.

Karl Marx, part 1: Religion, the wrong answer to the right question

Marx thought that to understand religion correctly would allow one to understand the whole of human history


Marx famously said that all criticism begins with the criticism of religion. This is often taken to be the starting point of a position that ends with the slogan that "religion is the opium of the people". However, as with most thinkers, this reduction to slogans does not do the ideas behind them justice. The critique of religion as a social phenomenon did not connote a dismissal of the issues behind it. Marx precedes the famous line in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right with the contention that religion was the "sigh of the oppressed creature in a hostile world, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions" and that an understanding of religion has to go hand in hand with an understanding of the social conditions that gave rise to it.

The description of religion as the heart of a heartless world thus becomes a critique not of religion per se but of the world as it exists. What this shows is that his consideration of religion, politics, economics and society as a whole was not merely a philosophical exercise, but an active attempt to change the world, to help it find a new heart. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it," he wrote in his famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach, the phrase carved on his gravestone in Highgate cemetery.

Even though understanding and action were tightly linked in Marx, we can trace his understanding back separately, through two German earlier philosophers, Hegel and Feuerbach.

In Hegel he finds the concept of the idealistic dialectic as a means of understanding historical change but he uses Feuerbach's materialism as a tool for understanding it correctly. That's why he called his system dialectical materialism.

Hegel's dialectic is not at all materialistic. It is based on the existence and importance of ideas, which are conceived of as almost independent of the people who have them. We are merely their puppets. It was essentially an attempt to explain change in history during the period of revolutionary upheaval around the French revolution. Why do revolutions happen, he asks, and what happens to them? Why do things not stay the same and why is some world spirit (Weltgeist) constantly changing its mind about the way it wants the world to be and introducing a new "spirit of the age" (Zeitgeist)? Taking his cue from Kant, adding in some Spinoza and a dash of neo-Platonism, Hegel maintained that change happened in the world because it was immanent in a growing development towards something as yet incomplete but which had at its core the unfolding of the idea of human freedom. History thus became simply a vessel for this unfolding, a totality which was constantly changing and completing itself through a series of constructive negations.

The dialectic is a theory of motion which posits that within every given situation there exists its own negation. The tension and interplay between the situation and its negation, produce constantly new and emergent forms of social existence. Of course there are difficulties in deciding what exactly is the negation of any particular situation. I will deal with those later.

Marx took this Hegelian and idealistic dialectical approach and added in a materialist grounding from Feuerbach who was in many ways a sort of political Ditchkins of his day. For him religion "poisons, nay destroys, the most divine feeling in man, the sense of truth". His insight was that all forms of religious expression were merely the abstracted vague longings of the human species translated into deities and their hangers-on, or in other words a god delusion.

Marx's real synthesis of the debate between Hegel and Feuerbach is to agree with both of them but to turn them both upside down (or back on their feet as he would have it) and locate their ideas in concrete historical situations. Hegel's idealism and Feuerbach's materialism had one thing in common and that was their abstraction from real concrete conditions. Hegel's dialectic was indeed a way of understanding change in the world but it failed to recognise that change emanated from prevailing material conditions rather than from the workings of the Weltgeist. On the other hand Feuerbach's materialism dealt only in abstract form with the way people perceived religion and did not locate the form that abstraction took in the way that people, above all classes, interacted with each other historically.

By 1848 Marx was thus able to open the Communist Manifesto with the contention that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". This, for Marx, was the real motor of history; real struggles between real classes which produced real historical outcomes which in turn went on to become new struggles as the process of the negation of the negation – "the old mole" as Marx called it – carried on burrowing away, all the time throwing up new ways of thinking which themselves went on to negate and change the world.

What I shall do in coming weeks is to look at how all of this actually works, how Marxists took up the baton and what the consequences of it all were. I shall also ask whether Marxism still has any explanatory power today, in a new age of revolutionary upheaval, or whether we have, in Hegel's and Fukuyama's terms, reached The End of History.

Karl Marx, part 1: Religion, the wrong answer to the right question | Peter Thompson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Karl Marx, part 2: How Marxism came to dominate socialist thinking

The unique selling point of Marx's ideas, he argued, was their basis in scientific fact rather than notions of freedom, justice, fairness and equality


The question this week is how Marxism came to be the dominant theoretical apparatus of socialist thinking from the late 19th century onwards. Indeed, despite being constantly pronounced dead, it still manages to maintain itself in political, theoretical and academic debate in much of the world. It could be argued that whereas Marx himself said that all criticism starts with a critique of religion, all criticism today has to start with a critique of Marx.

As arrogant and dogmatic as it sometimes sounds to our ears now, Marx's USP was that his and Engels' approach to understanding history was the first to be based on truly scientific socioeconomic analysis. With a nod towards Darwin, Marx and Engels contended that their analysis of history was akin to a theory of evolution based on the concrete evidence of material facts. They argued that the theories of their rivals, the utopian communists and anarchists as well as the Hegelians and liberals, were based in idealist moral abstractions which dealt in notions of freedom, justice, fairness and equality in what they called the political superstructure of society, while theirs were based on an objective and scientific understanding of the real but largely invisible forces at work in the socioeconomic base.

Marx and Engels saw change and revolution as historical necessities emerging out of material contingent reality driven by socioeconomic forces. They saw their task as unmasking those forces, subjecting them to radical critique and proposing a possible way forward. Everyone else, they thought, was essentially carrying on in the idealist tradition, which saw the motivating force behind history as the unfolding of abstract human freedom as an idea, will or imagination.

For Hegel history was the Absolute Spirit moving towards absolute self-consciousness through a process which moved from the way things were, via rising conflict and tension, to a newer, "higher" stage. This process of negation and the negation of the negation produced new outcomes and new forms of social organisation which would only come to an end when the final liberation of humanity was achieved.

In Hegel this was the full coming to consciousness of the Absolute Spirit/Idea. In Marx it could only be achieved with the "withering away" of all the social antagonisms associated with class society. The higher stage would be the "naturalisation of man and the humanisation of nature" that would take place in a future communist society. However, Marx never provided a blueprint for that future society, and it is unlikely that he would have been a supporter of the regimes which did emerge based on his ideas – plenty of Marxists weren't. As he once said when reading some particularly reductionist French interpretations of his own economic theories: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist."

From Hegel, Marx had taken not only the dialectical method, which stated that history moved in a certain way because of its inherent antagonisms, but he also took the pattern and chronology of history too. Both Hegel and Marx maintained that human history began with the hunter gatherer, moved through an "Asiatic" and a slave-owning mode, out of which emerged feudalism, which in turn produced capitalism.

On some readings of Hegel the story ends there, in the post-reformation "Germanic" world, whereas for Marx this happy ending was only the end of human pre-history, or as Churchill might have put it, the end of the beginning. It was only after capitalism had been transcended, in a way as yet impossible to conceive, that true history could begin and socialism could emerge as a transitional stage on the way to the sunlit uplands of communism.

For Marx the motivating force behind history was the struggle for the control over material resources. It is the emergence of classes based on the ownership of a surplus and the means to produce it that kick-started history and allowed it to become a self-generating system of movement. Very soon ideologies began to emerge in every epoch which posited that those who had the surplus were specially selected, somehow naturally entitled to that surplus and were therefore entitled to hang on to it. From this, in Hegel, the concept of the master-slave dialectic emerged in which the idea plays itself out in reality via a constant struggle for recognition or thymos. For Marx, on the other hand, this master-slave dialectic was simply another way of describing class conflict – a basic struggle for control of the means of production.

Any existing order can continue for any given length of time, he says, but as long as there is class antagonism, it cannot last for ever. At some point both the material means of accumulating the surplus and the ideological justification for hanging on to it start to crumble and we move forward into a period of radical change in which the world turns upside down and the old subaltern class becomes the new ruler.

This is a constant and universal process but revolution can only come to the fore, let alone be successful, when both the objective material conditions and the subjective political conditions are ripe for it. This, then, was how Marx saw his theory of history as scientific, driven as it was by the material and political conditions of production and not by the working out of abstract ideas and spirits. Next week I shall address the traditional objections to the claims of scientific rigour which Karl Popper raised, as well as the charge that Marxism is simply a quasi-religious teleology.

Karl Marx, part 2: How Marxism came to dominate socialist thinking | Peter Thompson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Karl Marx, part 3: Men make their own history

For Marx, there are no iron laws, history is formed by the relationship between the material forces and social relations of production

One of the common objections that has been raised in the responses to these pieces is that Marxism itself is nothing more than a secularised form of dogmatic religious belief. It is argued that his use of a Hegelian dialectical approach belies an essential determinism at work and that the categories he lays down as ways of understanding history are actually prescriptive, in that they present history as simply a set of stages by which communism will automatically be achieved. This is a traditional liberal individualist objection to Marx and it is found most coherently expressed in Karl Popper's writings on totalitarianism and scientific falsifiability. For Popper, Marxism is nothing more than Hegelian teleology in quasi-religious clothing, in which history is seen as merely a means of reaching a pre-existing endpoint.

This view is then linked to the second most common objection to Marx and Marxism; that the belief in and the process of attaining this teleological endpoint led directly to the gulag, the Great Leap Forward, the Berlin Wall and Pol Pot's torture chambers. Marx, on this reading, is directly responsible for many millions of deaths and becomes one of the greatest, if not the greatest, mass murderers in history. It doesn't help much to counter that all previous and contemporary forms of social organisation have also caused and continue to cause millions of deaths through poverty, pillage, civil war, colonial imperialism, the accumulation of other people's wealth, genocide, pogroms, inquisitions, fascism etc. Marx has the disadvantage that his name can be put to a number, whereas the millions who have suffered and perished over the course of history to get us to the point we are now represent a sort of "vanishing mediator".

The point, however, is that Popper's description of Marxism as teleological historicism – as Popper described it – in Marxism not only misinterprets Marx, but also the Hegelian dialectic on which he based his philosophy. Even if we take the famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, often seen as one of the most determinist of his texts, we can see that for Marx the development of history emerges out of the relationship between the material forces of production (how stuff is produced) and the social relations of production (how society is organised around the production of that stuff) and not in some pre-ordained way.

Marx's sense of the development of the history of society rather than believing in automaticity is actually based on an analysis of self-generating and contingent contradictions within society. There are no "iron laws of history" applicable to all forms of human society, and the one invariant operator there is, class struggle, is itself presented as something which takes different forms and paths at different points in history.

For society to have reached the point it had, everything that happened beforehand was of course necessary, but it was not necessary in any metaphysical way. Seeking out patterns in the way human society had developed did not mean positing that those patterns were anything other than an expression of a concrete self-generating process in which the next stage would be the product of subjective political action as well as objective material circumstances.

As Antonio Gramsci pointed out, if Marx thought it would all come about automatically, then there was no need for his 11th thesis on Feuerbach, which declared that it was more important to change the world than to interpret it.

Equally for Hegel, "werden", or becoming, was the password to understanding how the "absolute spirit" not only expressed itself but, more importantly, generated itself through the process of history. The German word for unfolding – entfaltung – also means development, and the process of emergent creation, or autopoiesis, was also the process by which Hegel's absolute spirit was not only working in the world but creating itself at the same time.

Ernst Bloch, perhaps the most Hegelian of Marxists, maintained that this meant that Hegel and Marx were both talking about transcendence (in the sense of transcending that which exists) without the transcendent (in the sense of a transcendent realm – religious or social – towards which all things must move). The dialectic in Marx and Hegel can therefore be categorised as the relationship between autonomy and dependence, between voluntarism and determinism and between what is possible (Aristotle's kata to dynaton) and what might become possible (dynámei on). As Marx put it most succinctly in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte from 1852: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

Karl Marx, part 3: Men make their own history | Peter Thompson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Karl Marx, part 4: 'Workers of the world, unite!'

The main point of the Communist Manifesto is that capitalism creates the conditions for its own downfall


I finished last week with Marx's great line from the 18th Brumaire that "people make their own history but not in conditions of their own making". So what were the conditions in which he was trying to make his own history?

He was born 19 years after the French revolution. That was, of course, the great seismic event in the development of modernity and the ensuing political tsunami forced its way into every corner of Europe. The Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, the next great year of European revolution. It hoped that the shifting plate tectonics of socioeconomic change would ignite a German revolution, aid the Chartists in England and bring the growing proletariat onto the European political stage. This was Marx's communist spectre haunting Europe, a spectre before which the old order was supposed to tremble.

The Communist Manifesto is probably the widest read and most influential political document of the modern age, but it is also probably the most misunderstood and misquoted. Famously, the opening section is a song of praise to the modernising tendencies of bourgeois capitalist rule and it is in the manifesto that we find the insights about globalisation and the spread of capitalist modernity around the world, quotes which garner grudging admiration today for their prescience even from Wall Street and the City. The creative destruction that modern capitalist society unleashes, in which "everything that is solid melts into air", is for Marx a precondition for the development of the productive forces to a point where there is an adequate surplus generated for it to be redistributed.

Capitalism had opened the world for business and we begin to see already in 1848 a recognition of the role of imperialism as a means of capital expanding its reach to the Americas, China and East India.

"The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, ie, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."

This is one area at least where Marx certainly knew what he was talking about. In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Japan's harbours threatening military force if Japan did not open its borders to free trade, and the activities of the East India Company are well known to us. The Opium Wars – a naked move by the British state to control the drug trade – had perhaps also given Marx the idea about religion as the opium of the people.

But in political terms, the main point in the manifesto is that capitalism, apart from the process of the primitive accumulation of wealth through theft and naval power, also by necessity creates a domestic power which is both the source of wealth and also the main danger to it; namely the proletariat. This class is what Mary Shelley was writing about when she conceived of Frankenstein's monster; a gigantic, powerful beast which is the inevitable product of industry, technology and modernity but which has the potential to turn on it and destroy it once it realises the power it possesses and finds its voice.

Chapter one of the manifesto maintains that in the place of the "manifold gradations" of feudal society, bourgeois capitalism has simplified class antagonisms, reducing society down to a basic competition between a bourgeois class – who owned the means of production – and a growing proletariat – who had only their labour power to sell in order to live. The enclosure of the lands, the urbanisation of rural workers and the creation of heavy industry were all absolutely necessary to the extension of capital and yet the same process was to create associations of workers who would combine to defend their own rights.

For Marx, this was not just a political competition but an immanent structural antagonism which would "inevitably lead to the victory of the proletariat" over the bourgeoisie who, in developing the productive forces, had created their own "gravediggers". In chapter two, the manifesto lays out the "despotic inroads on the rights of property" that will need to be made by the proletariat once they take control and indeed many trace the birth of the Gulag to precisely this phrase but I would like to deal with that issue next week when we look at Marx's writings on the Paris Commune and the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat".

It is probably too early to say whether Marx's prediction of the inevitable overthrow of the bourgeoisie is correct, but the power of the combined workers to gain concessions from the state through social reform was something which Marx did not deal with in the manifesto. To give him his due, it did not look that likely anywhere in 1848 and he and Engels did begin to talk of a non-revolutionary road to socialism by the 1880s, but at this point the cry was simple: "Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!" Workers of the world, unite!

Karl Marx, part 4: 'Workers of the world, unite!' | Peter Thompson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Karl Marx, part 5: The problem of power

The Paris commune provided a model for the dictatorship of the proletariat – but sparked disagreements over how to secure the revolution


If there is one thing which separates the revisionist sheep from the Leninist goats it is the question of power: what is it, how do you take it, how do you defend it and how do you hold on to it? If we consider Marx to be the theoretician of revolution, then it is Lenin who sought to marry theory with practice. The debate as to whether there is a continuity between Marx, Lenin and Stalin, that one leads ineluctably to the other and from there straight to the cellars of the Lubyanka, is one which has raged since Rosa Luxemburg criticised Lenin and which will, probably, continue for centuries to come.

There are basically three camps: first, paradoxically, an alliance of the Stalinist diehards and anti-communists who posit a direct and logical connection between Marx and Stalin, for better or for worse; second, those who see a distinct break between Lenin and Stalin (largely Trotskyists) and third; those who see a break between Marx and Lenin and who admire the former for his analytical skills but oppose the latter's dictatorial measures. We might call this third group the platonic Bolshevists who would like to live in a different world, but are not quite sure that they like the measures taken to get there.

The emergence of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat comes from the fact that in the bourgeois epoch history had both speeded up and wised up. Marx pointed out that in the transition between the previous epochs he had outlined, from ur-communism to the ancient mode, from there into feudalism and on to bourgeois capitalism, there is an acceleration of the process of transformation as well as a growing political consciousness. The early historical stages are slow, almost organic transitions taking many centuries. Where does one system slide into the next and how does it happen? Marx, and in particular Engels, developed the idea of the dialectic of quantity into quality, small incremental changes in a prevailing system which at some point add up to more than the sum of their parts and contribute to a full transition or a sudden Hegelian leap, as Lenin put it, to something new.

In 19th-century Europe this was increasingly the case. The workers in the major industrial countries in Europe did combine into unions and political movements and parties which were determined to improve their lot. The question was how this growing pressure could be either combated or accommodated. Under Bismarck for example, it became clear that the proletariat was a growing threat and, after the banning of the socialist party, social measures were brought in by the mid-1880s to ameliorate the situation for workers in a system that was then called a form of "state socialism".

This was a recognition that the political threat from the proletariat was real and that, if steps were not taken, the whole of Europe could go the way of the Paris commune of spring 1871, a period in which the workers in that city took power initially in defence of the republic against a Prussian offensive and in a very short span of time, were pushed by the reaction of the state and its collaboration with the Prussian attackers to seize power in their own political interests. It is out of this experience and its defeat that Marx developed further the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The term needs understanding properly here. First, abstractly, it is an expression of the fact that the working class now comprises a majority of the population but that it has virtually no political representation and power. The idea is that if the workers were to take power against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the proletariat which would emerge would, by definition, be a democratic one. Second, however, what the commune also did was to establish for the first time a democratic system of tightly controlled government from the ground up. Anyone elected to a leadership role was subject to recall, salaries were capped and there was a full separation of church and state, amongst many other measures. But the commune was defeated by a combination of the French government and the Prussian army and the ensuing bloodbath claimed the lives of between 20,000 and 30,000 communards summarily executed by the government.

Marx's criticism of the commune was that it had not been harsh enough in defending itself against the counter-revolutionaries and Lenin later said that it was the lack of a unified leadership willing to go beyond "half-measures" that led to its downfall. Trotsky too saw the commune as a prime example of how any proletarian revolution has to be permanent, had to move rapidly from limited democratic demands to the expropriation of property and the establishment of socialist structures, and in this way the Paris commune was the model for Soviet democracy in 1917. Whether the descent into Stalinism is the logical consequence of this concept is something that will no doubt be debated below.

Karl Marx, part 5: The problem of power | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of power

Marx is often accused of reducing humans to mere expendable specks of matter within the greater economic scheme of things


Having so far concentrated on philosophy and politics we now turn to what was the major part of Marx's output, namely the economics. But it is in the economics where his political philosophy begins to take on real form. There is not space enough here to cover the enormous range of his economics but there are a few basics which need to be dealt with in this slightly longer piece and which can be fought out below the line as usual.

Alan Budd, who was an economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s once made an interesting point about Marxist economic theory and government policy on the fight against inflation at the time:

"[People] did see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes – if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since."

Marx's basic starting point was that in contrast to all previous historical epochs capitalism is a system of "generalised commodity production" in which the workers' abstracted labour power itself became a commodity to be traded.

In all previous epochs, human labour had been used to create a surplus product, usually subsistence farming and a surplus used for first bartering and then trading.

Under the ancient mode and slavery through to feudalism, the product and the means of producing it was clear; food, clothing, the means of life. You worked for the master and you belonged to the master in one way or another. The German word for serf, for example, is Leibeigener; your body literally belongs to the master. Capitalism liberates you from that and turns you into a free agent, apparently able to enter into a free contract to sell your labour to whomsoever you see fit. You are cast out of your old existence and are set on the route to making your own. The second verse of All Things Bright and Beautiful – "the rich man in his castle/ the poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly/ and ordered their estate" – no longer applies. Whereas before you were a bondsman, now you are a journeyman and you can set off to make your own fortune, as the fairy tales have it.

In economic terms, what before was a tangible surplus product is now transformed into intangible surplus value. You enter into this apparently free contract with an employer but the wage you draw from that employment is only a part of the value you create. Just as before a portion of the cabbages and linen you made belonged to the master, now a proportion of the monetary value you make through the production process belongs to the employer and you will only be employed if a competitive rate of surplus value can be generated through your labour. This is at the root of Marx's version of the labour theory of value. The employer will provide the machines or tools for the completion of the task (constant capital) while the worker provides the labour power (variable capital). The employer will always be trying to improve labour productivity and can do so in various ways, but all of them boil down to improving the gap between your wage and the amount of value created by your labour power.

This means that for Marx the commodity labour power has a special character in that it is the only commodity which can be employed to increase value, while all the others are merely reified forms of dead human labour, useless without labour input. An advanced car-producing robot no more creates value than does a peasant's shovel. In theory there is no difference here to previous epochs where we accept the labour theory of value because it is measured in tons of cabbages and yards of linen but now that it becomes a commodified and monetarised relationship it also becomes a quasi-mystical one, with value apparently emerging mysteriously out of all sorts of transactions and technologies and with market mechanisms and competition wiping out and obfuscating the distinction between what it costs to produce something and its price.

On these threads, for example, a critique of Marx has emerged which posits a kind of paradoxical capitalist utopia in which we have reached 100% automation of production with no labour input at all anywhere by anyone. This reductio ad absurdum is of course as realistic as the world of Arnie's Terminator or of Joh Fredersen's Metropolis in which workers become surplus to requirements, but it does serve to illustrate a point because the further question then emerges as to how the goods produced are going to be purchased if no one is earning any wages through the productive process.

Under capitalism labour productivity may improve massively, but it can never be reduced to zero because that would remove all demand for the goods produced. You would then have to distribute commodities or vouchers to the entire population based on some sort of criteria not linked to labour input and then where do we end up? Oh, of course, at communism, in which each gives according to their ability and receives according to their need. Capitalist competition over labour productivity thus not only produces its own gravediggers but also provides the shovels (or robots) to finish the job.

Labour productivity can be increased in all sorts of traditional ways such as making workers work harder for less money, speeding up the production lines, extending the working day, getting people to work longer for the same or even less money, seeking out newer, cheaper labour sources through globalisation etc and, as Alan Budd points out, all of the above are regularly used, but for Marx they all only put off the dread day of collapse in which the workers realise that the harder and more productively they work, the smaller the proportion of the surplus value they create comes to them.

Since the mid-1970s the common way to put this off has been through enormous levels of debt, either by the state or the private individual. It is that tendency which both brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union – which over-borrowed in order to maintain full employment as a political necessity without raising productivity – and the current crisis in the west where a debt-fuelled asset price bubble in order to artificially stimulate demand has created the greatest economic crisis in a century.

But for Marx, at the root of it all is the question of how surplus value is created and distributed and, most of all, what this does to human relations and desires. The commodification of labour power also brings with it the commodification of humans and their alienation from both themselves and the products of their labour power. It is an accusation often aimed at Marx that he reduces human beings to mere expendable specks of matter within the greater economic scheme of things, but it could be argued that the opposite is the case and that the whole point of Marxist economic analysis is precisely about trying to bring about a recognition that it is generalised commodity production which has commodified people and that it doesn't have to be like that.

The final two columns in this series will go on to discuss how this process of economic alienation feeds through into religion and ideology and the means by which people manage to cope with being mere playthings of larger forces; how a sense of autonomy, faith and hope are maintained in an apparently constrained, rationalistic and futureless world. This will bring us right back to where we started: the land of Ideologiekritik.

Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of power | Peter Thompson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Karl Marx, part 7: The psychology of alienation

For Marx, rules are imposed not merely by repression but by the gradual inculcation of values

In these last two columns I want to bring us back to more speculative, philosophical and even theological ground with a discussion of ideology and of alienation. I will cover the concepts in Marx and his immediate successors and will then go on to talk about the way in which "western" Marxism evolved out of the failure of the much-heralded proletarian revolutions of the 19th century and the turn towards moderate "social democracy", the rise of fascism in the inter-war period and the descent of Soviet Marxism into reductionist barbarism. All of these developments run counter to what Marxists had largely hoped and worked for until the first world war. What Marxist thinkers since Marx have been wrestling with is the question as to why nothing unfolded as it should have done.

Marx maintains that the ruling ideology is always the ideology of the ruling class and that the set of ideas and thought patterns existing in any epoch will – "in the final instance" – closely follow the material and social relations of production. As soon as the surplus product we have been discussing emerges and class develops which has control over that surplus, then that class will require that those who do the producing learn to accept the "rules" of production and distribution.

Thus, in feudal society, for example, we will have feudal ideologies that emphasise hierarchy, God-given positions in society, stability and the divine right of kings to rule and a religious form that bolsters those requirements – in European feudalism this is represented by Catholicism and orthodoxy.

The order that prevails will always be seen for extended periods of time as the "natural law" in which the way things are is the way they should be. In bourgeois society the rules change. Stasis and hierarchy are overthrown in the name of dynamism and innovation and a breaking down of restrictive practices and you become a "self-made man" off to seek your fortune. In religious terms, orthodox Catholicism is superceded by a religion that allows you to find your personal relationship with God, or in Engels' terms, become functionally secular.

Where once the divine right of kings was seen as the natural law, it now becomes unnatural because it is surplus to requirements and is superceded by the human right to remove the head of the king if necessary. So, the rules may change, but they still have to be learned. However, this learning of the rules is not done merely by repression (although this becomes necessary at times of upheaval) but by the gradual inculcation of values.

Althusser, for example, describes these two functions as repressive and ideological state apparatuses. The former is clear, but the latter is far more insidious. It is the way in which the prevailing rules of the game become second nature to you and your obligations are turned into your desires. Antonio Gramsci similarly described this dichotomy in terms of domination and hegemony. What this means at base is that the ideas we have about society are not actually our own but are put there by a set of institutions that have convinced us there is no other way to think about the world, that it is as it must be.

Perhaps an unusual way of understanding this is through Kafka's Metamorphosis, perhaps the most famous account ever written of a man who has turned into a beetle overnight. But the real strangeness of the story is not the fact of the physical transformation (after all, he has been a bug all his working life and reality is just catching up with psychology) but of what it represents. At one point Gregor Samsa says of his family and his work life:

"The fruits of his labour were transformed into the provision of money ... and he earned enough to meet the expenses of the entire family and actually did so. They had just become used to it, the family as well as Gregor, the money was received with thanks and given with pleasure, but that special warmth was missing."

If this isn't Kafka's spin on Marx's line from the Communist Manifesto that "The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation" then I don't know what is. Gregor's metamorphosis into a bug is the outward and inward transformation of the need to earn money into his own picture of himself. This is alienation theory in a beetleshell. It is not that he was poor and therefore suffering and needed to be kept down by a police state, but that the necessity of having to work for others at a job he hates for an amorphous output which doesn't belong to him alienates him from himself and from his labour power. Kafka's power as a writer lies in the fact that he shows us characters who have no concept of what is being done to them as a result of their own alienation. Gregor's absorption of bourgeois values means that when he wakes, all he can think of is that he is going to be late for work and not that he has turned into a bug.

What happens in 20th century western Marxism is that a Marxist interpretation of socio-economic development is increasingly complemented by this attempt to incorporate a psychological understanding of the way people function in the world. Marx gets married to Freud with Kafka as the best man and the result is the pitter-patter of the tiny little feet of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Korsch, Lukacs, Benjamin, Bloch, and later Žižek and the other post-Marxists, all of whose voices we will listen to next week.

Karl Marx, part 7: The psychology of alienation | Peter Thompson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Karl Marx, part 8: Modernity and the privatisation of hope

The Arab spring is an example of the eternal desire for human liberation, which has often alighted on false utopias


In the 20th century the failure of the German revolution in 1918/19 and the degeneration of the Russian revolution into dictatorship as well as the rising power of the US as a consumerist democracy led to a serious rethink on the part of most Marxist thinkers about questions of agency, class and economics and the dogmatic certainties of the Second and Third (ie Social Democratic and Stalinist) Internationals. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when this trend started and it certainly had many disparate branches but essentially it boils down to a turn to a sort of humanist, philosophical and cultural Marxism that attempted, in Ernst Bloch's terms, to re-inject the "warm stream" of the ethics of human liberation back into the "cold stream" of what for many had become the "negative dialectic" of positivistic and scientistic systems of social control in west and east. In the 20th century the turn to an exploration of ideology and unconscious desire replaced that of an active revolutionary communism and an adherence to revolutionary communism in the west itself became in many ways no more than an expression of an internal unconscious and romantic desire for personal liberation.

Where Alain Badiou talks today of an almost ahistorical "communist hypothesis", Bloch spoke about an "invariant of direction", a mood of an eternal desire for human liberation that breaks out at certain historical points where the objective conditions allow it. The Arab spring would be an example today, whereas 40 and 20 years ago respectively it was the Prague spring and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In this context, the attraction of going back to Hegel and the early Marx immediately becomes apparent because the idea of the unfolding of human freedom as the main motivating force of history – this time properly understood as something that can only succeed if the objective socio-economic conditions are right – is taken as a given. It is not that the economic ideas of Marx are rejected but there arises an attempt to subordinate economic categories again to human needs and desires and to see parties, states, economics and science as necessary servants of humanity rather than its eternal masters.

One passage from a letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge in 1843 is often quoted in this context:

"Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work."

This implies strongly that the dreams of a better world are a constant, indeed transcendental drive behind our human activities but that the transcendence of prevailing conditions is an active and self-generating process of unmasking the "consciousness which is unintelligible to itself".

Perhaps the most significant body of thought to emerge from this tradition was the Frankfurt school of critical theory based around the sociological and cultural-theoretical works of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse along with Walter Benjamin and the psychoanalysts Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich. The main focus of their work was to try to understand how ideology works, how an ideological hegemony is established and how people come to believe the things they do about themselves and the world. This became increasingly important after the rise of fascism and Nazism because the orthodox Marxist explanation of it as only the extreme response of a bourgeoisie in trouble was simply not up to the job. The question they asked was why millions of ordinary workers turned to an ideology that was quite clearly not in their "objective" interests.

This was then compounded by their time in exile in the US where the "American Dream" of human fulfilment through consumption and wealth exerted such a pull on workers' consciousness. As John Steinbeck (a kind of literary honorary fellow of the Frankfurt school) put it, in America, the poor preferred to look upon themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".

In turn, this trend became influential again in the 1960s, when the political turmoil in the west was based not on a proletarian uprising against poverty but an intellectual and youth uprising against "false consciousness" and the grinding banality of consumerism. Society was to be changed not by attacking only the socio-economic base but, more importantly, its superstructural and ideological hegemony.

This led them and later theoreticians to talk of people in consumer capitalism living in a state of permanent alienation, or what Lacan, after Freud, would call social castration in which, as Slavoj Žižek now puts it, we are all encouraged to "enjoy our symptoms!" The dark satanic mills of the 19th century have moved to China to be replaced by the bright satanic malls of consumer delight and our collective hopes for the future have been privatised and bundled up into little gobbets of pleasure sold to us as freedom on the never never.

Of course all of this kicking against prosperity and consumerism could be just the sigh of the creature who is not oppressed in a world that is not hostile but underneath it all is a sense that excess, consumption and obsession with growth at all costs is not sustainable in either human, ecological or indeed, as the current crisis shows us, purely economic terms. Again in early Marx we find a desire for the naturalisation of man and the humanisation of nature but it is replaced by the sense that the constant desire to search for utopia has been transformed into a vicarious and consumerist attitude in which hope and utopia are to be found in the coffee shops where we can dream about unearned fame and lottery wins.

But maybe what we really want is just to find somewhere to rest after the long and tiring journey through the desert of history. Walter Benjamin maintained that this quest, even in its correct historical materialist form, always contains hidden within it a quasi-theological and messianic message of hope in which we, as the most social of all the apes, can find our place. The question is really why we are so modest. Why are we happy with our false utopias? Let's go home.

Karl Marx, part 8: Modernity and the privatisation of hope | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Quote:

This led them and later theoreticians to talk of people in consumer capitalism living in a state of permanent alienation, or what Lacan, after Freud, would call social castration in which, as Slavoj Žižek now puts it, we are all encouraged to "enjoy our symptoms!" The dark satanic mills of the 19th century have moved to China to be replaced by the bright satanic malls of consumer delight and our collective hopes for the future have been privatised and bundled up into little gobbets of pleasure sold to us as freedom on the never never.

Don't let them tell you what to think! Let us tell you what to think instead!

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Again in early Marx we find a desire for the naturalisation of man and the humanisation of nature

What does this even mean? Also, despite that other article up there, I still don't know what "alienation" means. Just hating your job? Well become a drag queen or a holiday rep or turn to drink and kill yourself, but for God's sake stop whining like it's our fault.

Quote:

Why are we happy with our false utopias? Let's go home.

There you go again - "we", "us", "our collective hopes". Yours maybe, I've got my own hopes and want nothing to do with yours.

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Thanks Contra
It's great having these all in the same place.
F

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"Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it."-- Mark Twain

"Inter arma silent Musae"--when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent.

An't nanum hearm deth, doth hwaet ye willath.

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unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

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