A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (34 page)

The later Marx

We have already moved closer to the reformulation of Marx’s philosophical critique of the institutions of private property. This reformulation attempted to separate the theory of history from the theory of human nature and endow both with the scientific character suggested by their ‘materialist’ pretensions. The aim is to give substance to the claim, made in
The German Ideology,
that ‘consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness’. Hence Marx wishes to give a systematic theory which will both explain, and in explaining undermine, the illusions which uphold the moral and political order of capitalism.

In his later writings Marx made little use of the concept of alienation, and, although the theory of fetishism was to survive in
Capital
(in the ideas of commodity and capital fetishism), the immediate connection with what one might call the ‘unhappy consciousness’ was broken. The term now becomes part of a scientific theory which ostensibly disdains all reference to the happiness or misery with which economic relations are experienced by those who participate in them. That experience is criticised not as happy or unhappy, but as true or false. The concept of alienation gives way to that of ‘false consciousness’, a false consciousness being one that makes, not particular errors of judgement, but universal errors in its perception of the social world. The burden of Marx’s critique of capitalism comes to rest on an ingenious and scientifically phrased theory of exploitation. This theory only tangentially makes contact with observations as to how the state of man under capitalism is experienced. False consciousness may not be a form of unhappiness: but its evil lies in the fact that it inevitably endorses exploitation, through its inability to perceive the exploitation that is there.

Part of the reason for this shift of emphasis was the important insight that Marx was able to obtain into the theory of history, once he had replaced the Hegelian representation of its movement by a theory that was more scientifically inspired. This new theory of history, in a version due partly to Friedrich Engels, has been called ‘dialectical materialism’ (by G. V.Plekhanov (1856-1918), one of the founding fathers of Russian Marxism). It is unclear whether the word ‘dialectical’ is correctly used to describe it: for this seems to imply that Marx, like Hegel, believed that history proceeds by the successive resolution of ‘contradictions’. What is undisputed, however, is that the theory is a form of ‘materialism’. Hegel had seen history as the development of consciousness. Marx argued that the fundamental things that develop, and so bring about the movement of history, are not features of consciousness at all, but ‘material’ forces. The development of consciousness is to be explained in terms of the material reality, and does not explain it. Thus, in the famous phrase of Engels
(Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy)
quoted above, Marx’s theory of history ‘sets Hegel on his feet’. Moreover, the theory was held to validate, as a prediction, the original view that capitalism would be superseded by a more humane social arrangement. Having faith in this prediction, it seemed less important to Marx to provide a description of man’s unhappiness. For it is redundant to give reasons for bringing about what is inevitable.

The theory of history begins from the distinction between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. Marxist philosophers who have wished to hold on to the Hegelian antecedents of the theory (for example, George Lukacs and certain philosophers of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’) have criticised or underplayed this distinction, believing that a truly
philosophical
Marxism must found itself, like the theory of alienation, in an understanding of human consciousness. The purpose of Marx’s distinction, on the other hand, was to show human consciousness as an offshoot of a deeper social and economic reality. Consciousness is something to be explained, in terms that may not be recognisable to the conscious being himself. One may say that, in moving to the scientific theory of history, Marx also takes a step from the first-person to the third-person point of view, a step which inevitably takes him away from the standpoint of the agent, towards that of the observer.

The base of all human institutions is that upon which the forms of consciousness are built, and in terms of which institutions (and the consciousness which derives from them) are to be explained. This base consists, for Marx, in two parts: first, a system of economic relations, secondly, certain active ‘productive forces’. The existence of any particular system of economic relations is explained in terms of the level of development of the productive forces. These forces consist of labour power, and accumulated knowledge. As man’s mastery over nature increases, the productive forces will inevitably develop. At each level of development a particular system of economic relations will be most suited to contain and facilitate their operation. Hence we can explain, rather in the manner of Darwin (with whose theory of evolution early Marxists compared the theory of Marx), the existence of any given economic system in terms of its suitability to the productive forces which, were they at a different stage of development, would either not require, or else actively destroy it.

Upon the system of economic relations rises the superstructure of legal and political institutions. These serve to consolidate and protect the economic base, and are therefore similarly explicable in terms of their sustaining and protective function. Finally, the political institutions generate their own peculiar ‘ideology’. This is the system of beliefs, perceptions, values and prejudices, which together consolidate the entire structure, and serve both to conceal the changeability, and to dignify the actuality, of each particular arrangement.

There are roughly five economic arrangements: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and communism. The last is distinguished by the fact that the necessity for a legal, political and ideological superstructure now vanishes, and the state, together with all its apparatus and the ‘false consciousness’ which surrounds it, finally withers away. Under communism, men live in a state of unmediated fellowship, on equal terms, neither exploited nor exploiting in a world where each gives according to his ability and each takes according to his need. This state of communism Marx saw as inevitable, simply because productive forces were bound to develop beyond the point where capitalism could contain them. Having developed to that point, the ‘fetter’ of capitalism is broken asunder, and communism, which is the only economic arrangement suitable to the enormous level of development which will by then have been achieved, must necessarily come in place of it. This transition, however, will be impossible without a violent revolution, such as had supposedly attended the transition from feudalism to bourgeois mercantilism in eighteenth-century France.

In the course of developing this theory, Marx provided various elaborate descriptions of the capitalist and feudal arrangements. He tried to show the essential differences between them, and the precise way in which they generate contrasting systems of law. His investigations led him towards the vexed problems of political economy, in particular the problems of value (or price). Nothing can have value except in relation to human activity. Use-values can be explained simply as the relations which hold between objects and the needs which they satisfy. But what about exchange-value? What accounts for the fact that a particular commodity exchanges at the particular price that it commands? Secondly, how does surplus-value arise, in other words, how is it that a particular person (the capitalist) is able to
accumulate
exchange-value through the operation of the market?

In order to explain the two features of exchange- and surplus-value (which he believed to be mutually dependent, and together definitive of capitalism) Marx took over from the political economist David Ricardo (1772-1823) the so-called ‘labour theory of value’. This explains the exchange-value of a commodity in terms of the socially necessary hours of labour required to produce or reproduce it. The accumulation of surplus is then explained in terms of the extortion of labour from the labourer, by exchanging his means of subsistence (which serves to reproduce his labour power and is therefore the true ‘price’ of labour) for hours of labour in excess of those needed to produce those means. Marx was thus led to a theory of exploitation. It seems that the production of surplus-value must necessarily proceed through the extraction of hours of unpaid labour. Hence capitalistic relations are necessarily exploitative.

It might seem, in retrospect, that there is little in common to the various philosophies associated with the name of Marx. In fact, however, the three aspects mentioned—the philosophy of man, the theory of history and the conception of value—can be seen as separate attempts to articulate an abiding intuition. Whether we consider the nature of man, the movement of history or the structure of economic values, we are studying, if Marx is right, a single basic thing. This thing is not consciousness; it is what creates and determines consciousness. It is material, since its essence lies in the transformation of nature; it is also social, in that it exists in the relations between men. In describing this all-important thing as ‘labour’ Marx sought to return to the heart of political philosophy the concept which describes the condition not of the sovereign, the clerk, the lawyer or the property owner, but of the common person whose activity supports the ‘superstructure’ upon which they feed. Labour is the human essence, and the driving force of history. It is labour which appears in the fictive forms of market value. And it is labour which can be alienated from and restored to itself, determining thereby the happiness and misery of mankind.

Such a synthetic picture is attractive, but its parts are logically independent. Moreover they are far from uniformly persuasive. It has often been pointed out that both the labour theory of value and the theory of history have serious flaws. The first purports to explain something which it does not in fact explain; the second makes predictions which have turned out to be false. But enough of the theory of history remains to render its image persuasive. There is something almost irresistible in the idea of a social ‘superstructure’ propelled and destroyed by the movement of an economic ‘base’. Many who find themselves unable to accept the details of the theory are still driven to find the movement of history elsewhere than in the movement of human consciousness. With this outlook has come the ‘third personal’ approach to political action. This approach sees ‘ideology’, ‘false consciousness’ and economic determination where the agent himself finds values, sanctions, laws and the stuff of social life. It is paradoxical that this withdrawal from human affairs should arise from a philosophy which brought to its culmination the theory of the Kantian subject, and which attempted, in its earlier stages, to make sense of the condition of modern man in ways which would both remain in touch with his actual experience, and yet be respectful of his reality as part of the material world.

Marx’s
philosophy
recognised as the basis of all political thought the intuition that man is both object and subject for himself. From this intuition came the doctrine of ‘praxis’, according to which theory and practice must be one. The only theory that will remove the mystery from human things is the theory which can be incorporated into the practical reasoning of the agent. But this philosophy, in borrowing the credentials of science, finds itself renouncing the viewpoint which makes it intelligible, creating a barrier between theory and practice that has come to seem impassable. The attempt to show the social reality behind the tissue of human illusion ‘demystifies’ consciousness. Almost inevitably, therefore, it ends by removing the values which are the sole stimulus to social action, and so generates a new mystery of its own.

Marx’s philosophy is of lasting value, largely because of its attempt to reconcile the Hegelian vision of consciousness with an empiricist political economy. There emerged from this attempt a distinctive view of human nature which has been transformed and adopted by many who would regard the quest for a theory of history as a delusion, and who would scorn the study of political economy as pseudo-science.

The emergence of Marxism from political economy partly coincided with that of another school of thought, deeply rooted in the traditions of empiricism. This school is memorable, if at all, not for a theory of human nature, but for its attempt to describe the whole of morals and politics without one. Utilitarianism represents the will of the eighteenth century to survive into the nineteenth, and the determination of empiricism to resist for as long as possible the attempt to represent the peculiarities of the modern spirit. When this modern spirit finally prevailed, it was with the weapons of an intransigent scepticism. These weapons, devastating in the hands of Bradley and the English idealists, were soon to be turned against idealism itself, and indeed against every form of constructive metaphysics, leaving that desert-land of philosophical agnosticism, over which the logical positivists briefly ruled in empty triumph. In this chapter I shall not discuss all the aspects of the renewed struggle between empiricism and idealism. However, no history can give a picture of nineteenth-century philosophy without discussing the transference of this struggle into the spheres of ethics and politics.

Hume, in a famous essay, dismissed the idea of the social contract as a superstition, and, suggested that there could be no criterion of legitimacy in the public realm other than utility. It was a reading of this that inspired Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) to write his
Fragment on Government
(1776), a piece which attempts to introduce common sense and scientific method into the discussion of the affairs of state. At the same time Adam Smith, a philosopher deeply influenced by the moral psychology of the British empiricists, wrote his
Wealth of Nations.
This is the treatise which laid the theoretical foundations for laissez-faire capitalism, arguing that self-interest, within the confines of a constitutional government, must inevitably adjust the balance of politics; in acting for his own good, a man would act automatically for the good of the whole. Smith’s subtle work was the pioneer study in political economy, and provided for Dr Johnson’s remark that a man is never so harmlessly engaged as when making money, a philosophical support that fitted it for the optimistic and progressive spirit of the trading years.