Kevin B Anderson. The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory. Cambridge University Press. 2020.
Dialectical Groundings
Over the past century, the concept of dialectic has loomed especially large in discussions of Marx’s work. His immediate successors like Karl Kautsky stressed his materialist approach to history and society in the somewhat narrow sense of materialism vs. idealism, a perspective that founders of sociological theory like Weber found less than compelling. However, with Georg Lukács in 1923 and V. I. Lenin a bit earlier, in 1914-1915, the dialectic began to gain a more central place in Marxist theory. Lenin devoted his wartime studies to Hegel’s Science of Logic, concluding that intelligent idealism was closer to dialectical materialism than was crude materialism, and writing later in a programmatic essay that Marxists should become “materialist friends of the Hegelian dialectic” (Anderson, 1995: 116). Lukács, who had studied with Weber before becoming a Marxist and then a Leninist, wrote of the dialectic as the defining feature of Marxism and criticized no less a figure than Friedrich Engels for a “contemplative” form of dialectic that ignored subject-object relations and therefore tended toward positivism and mechanical materialism (Lukács, 1971: 3). This critique of Engels earned Lukács the opprobrium of the Communist International in 1924, around the time of Lenin’s death. In other, more academic and intellectual quarters, however, the dialectic has been taken up as a central problematic by the Frankfurt School in Germany and the United States, by Antonio Gramsci in Italy, by Henri Lefebvre and the existentialists in France, by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the United States, and by newer social theorists like Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson.
Dialectic originates with the Socratic dialogues, wherein a potentially endless search for truth takes the form of a conversation among philosophers and their students, most of them drawn from the top layers of society. This kind of dialectic tends toward forms of radical idealism, preoccupied with outlining visions of an ideal society as an abstract goal. But as Herbert Marcuse pointed out, the ancient form of dialectic nonetheless employed critical reason in abstract to attack an unjust reality. This contrasted with the instrumental reason of modern positivist social theory, which too remained within the confines of the existing social order (Marcuse, 1964).
Developing the ancient dialectic further, Hegel perceived dialectical contradictions not only in thought, but also in social reality. Thus, in his famous dialectic of lordship and bondage in his Phenomenology of Spirit, often referred to as the master-slave dialectic, Hegel contrasted the consciousness of slaves or bondsmen with that of masters. For slaves, the shattering experience of capture and loss of freedom, “for whom everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations,” prompted greater reflexivity, leading toward their attaining a higher level of consciousness than members of the master class (Hegel, 1977: 117). Another experience of slaves, that of performing physical labor, resulted in positive self-recognition due to contemplating the results of that labor. In this way, the pathway toward a more developed human consciousness passed through the minds of the slaves, not those of the complacent and socially unreflective masters.
This is an example of what Hegel termed “negation of the negation.” In this framework, slaves—in a first negation—experience the loss of freedom, but then—in a second negation—negate that previous negation and create something positive, at least at the level of self-consciousness. This process of double negation, with a positive emerging out a negative, which Hegel also termed “absolute negativity” in his Science of Logic (Hegel, 2010: 89) is what the young Marx extoled as “the moving and creating principle” of Hegel’s philosophy, this in his 1844 “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic” (1961: 176). Louis Althusser (1969) saw this kind of indebtedness to Hegel as confined to the young Marx. But in the penultimate chapter of Capital, Vol. I, published over two decades later, Marx also drew from this core aspect of Hegel’s dialectic, characterizing the working-class communist revolution he envisioned as the “negation of the negation” (Marx, 1976: 929). In this context, the first negation (primitive accumulation) was the dispossession of the working people of their land and other means of production by early capitalism, while the second negation (communist revolution) was the organized revolt by the industrial workers (modern counterparts of the dispossessed peasants and artisans), a revolt that results in a positive transcendence of the capitalist social order.
The concept of contradiction is closely related to that of double or absolute negation. For Hegel as for Marx, contradiction takes the form not only of arguments among philosophers, but also of social and cultural cleavages. Contradictions are always present, even in seemingly unified social wholes, like states, communities, or families. This position is of course opposed to organicism. However, these contradictions may reside below the surface, failing to appear for long stretches. In such cases, one can speak of a social institution as a unity of opposites. At other times, contradiction rises to the surface, and propels social change. Yet social change itself can be contradictory, as Marx sees it, with progressive and reactionary elements coexisting, again in a unity of opposites.
Other core concepts of Marx’s dialectic include universalism and totality, conceptualizing the social world as interconnected in ways that allow one to generalize from a particular form of oppression (a brutal slave master or supervisor) to viewing this in the context of the capitalist system as a whole and its drive for surplus value and profit. Thus, Marx characterized slavery under modern capitalism as the most oppressive form of slavery ever created, because it combined ancient forms of brutality with the relentless logic of capitalist value creation on a global scale. For Marx, such totalities are not meant to absorb and merge all difference and particularity, however. Here again, Marx takes over an aspect of Hegel, that of opposition to abstract universalism, that is, forms of totality that deny difference, as seen in his ridicule of a “night in which all cows are black” (Hegel, 1977: 9).
Marx also takes over from Hegel the notion of subject-object reversal, in which human constructs come to dominate the very humans who built them (Hudis, 2012). This theme runs through the Phenomenology, where successive forms of consciousness negate earlier ones, only to construct, unwittingly, new barriers to human freedom.
Marx’s dialectic also exhibits crucial differences with that of Hegel. Even though Hegel was concerned with social and historical development, singling out, for example, the twists and turns of the French Revolution as the dialectic of history in action, he focused on the development of the free human consciousness more than on the actuality of human emancipation. Thus, while Hegel’s slaves acquire a new self-consciousness that moves the human spirit forward, Hegel never discusses their slave revolts, moving on to what he sees as a higher level of consciousness, stoicism. In contrast, Marx, who does focus on slave and plebeian uprisings, takes the dialectic down to earth, to the “real corporeal human being, with feet firmly planted on the solid ground,” as he wrote in his 1844 critique of Hegel (Marx, 1961: 181).
Dehumanization, Humanism, and the Communist Free Association
As with his discussions of Hegel and the dialectic, Marx’s elaboration of the theoretical categories of alienated labor and humanism emerge most explicitly in his early 1844 Manuscripts. He differentiates four forms of alienation. The first of these, workers’ alienation from the products of their labor, is seen in how the products of labor are appropriated by capital, and that in return, workers receive wages, a paltry sum compared to the value their labor added to the raw materials. This is alienation as exploitation. A subject-object reversal in a dialectical sense also occurs here, as the products of labor enrich and strengthen the side of capital, which can then dominate the workers even more effectively than before. Alienation 2 concerns the process of labor, which is stultifying and dehumanizing. This form would still hold even if wages became very high. Alienation 3 posits human labor as that of a free conscious subject, working creatively, as opposed to the more instinctual labor of animals like beavers. But this is largely missing in labor under capitalism. The fourth and final form of alienation is alienation from other people. Strikingly, and counterintuitively for those who see Marx as a narrowly economistic thinker, he concludes that “private property” is “the product, the necessary result, of alienated labor,” thus suggesting alienated labor as the defining characteristic of capitalist civilization (Marx, 1961: 105-106).
He deepens the concept of alienation in Capital, especially in the section on commodity fetishism, where he refers to the “peculiar social character of the labor” that predominates under capitalism (Marx, 1976: 165). In the topsy-turvy world where this form of (alienated) labor is the norm, human relations become reified, no more than relations among things. Meanwhile things (commodities) are produced and then enter into relations with each other as subjects, while workers are objectified. As Karel Kosík wrote, “Not theory but reality itself reduces man to an abstraction” (1976 [1961]: 52). This subject-object reversal is no mere illusion, since social relations now “appear as what they are” under the domination of capital (Marx, 1976: 166).
Postmodernists have objected that the concept of alienation implies a fixed human essence that is or could be non-alienated (Baudrillard, 1988). To be sure, Marx projects from 1844 onwards notions of a non-alienated life, a non-alienated society. However, this is not a fixed concept of human essence, as will be discussed below under “historical materialism.” In 1859 in the Critique of Political Economy, Marx characterized capitalist society as part of the “prehistory of human society” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 29: 264), again tying his analysis of its structure to what C. L. R. James later called “the future that is in the present” (1980: 79); that is, the communist free association he projected for humanity, should it be able to progress beyond capitalism.
It is often claimed that Marx’s writings “contain virtually nothing about the post-capitalist economy” (Hobsbawm, 2004: 65). But as recent work by Peter Hudis (2012) has shown, Marx’s writings on communism and the free association of the future are actually quite extensive, if one includes not only the small number of his positive descriptions of communism, but also his very extensive critical discussions of rival theories of socialism. This can be seen as early as 1844, when Marx bitterly attacks what he calls a “crude and unreflective communism” that “negates the human personality in every sphere,” and wherein “the role of worker is not abolished, but extended to all human beings” (1961: 125) via a leveling down, both materially and intellectually. In the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels likewise attack various forms of socialism and communism, while espousing a form of communism in which “the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 6: 506).
But it is in the 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program” that Marx, in a very few pages, sketches his concept of communism most systematically. Here, under a society based upon “common ownership of the means of production,” production to create value and surplus value has disappeared, with only use values remaining (Marx, 1996: 213). In the first, already stateless, phase of communism, members of society would be remunerated based upon the “duration or intensity” of the labor they contribute to the community (Marx, 1996: 214). At one swoop, this nearly destroys the ancient privileging of mental over manual labor, with janitors or those caring for autistic children presumably on the same level of remuneration as professors or physicians. Still, because some can contribute more labor than others due to physical or familial differences, this remains an unequal society. In the second or higher phase of communism, which appears only after a long gestation period, the standard for remuneration of labor becomes fully communal, “and society can inscribe upon its banners, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (Marx, 1996: 215).
The first phase of communism is also described briefly in the fetishism section of Capital 1, where Marx writes of “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common” (Marx, 1976: 171). Again, labor is no longer performed for value creation, and labor time “serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labor, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption” (Marx, 1976: 172). But here, the stress is on how the creation of a new society in this manner strips off the commodity fetish, rendering human relations not only free and equal, but also clear and transparent as opposed to veiled and concealed.
Historical Materialism and Modes of Production
Clearly, Marx did not hold that communism could be achieved solely by a sudden leap based on strongly held ideas. It would need to wait for historical and material conditions to mature in order to form the foundation of such a development. That is seen in his insistence upon a first and second phase of communism, even after capitalism was transcended. He evokes these objective obstacles in 1852 in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he writes that human beings “make their own history,” but “not in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited” (Marx, 1996: 32).
Repeatedly, Marx described himself as a materialist and referred to his method as dialectical. However, the phrase “dialectical materialism” was coined a decade after his death by the early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, and as Gramsci later noted, this opened the door to reducing dialectic “to the level of a sub-species of formal logic and elementary scholastics” (1971: 435). Marx did not use the phrase “historical materialism” either, but that term was coined by his close colleague Engels and is therefore used here, albeit with caution.
In 1846, Marx and Engels set out their materialist point of view in the German Ideology, castigating various idealist followers of Hegel, although not Hegel himself, for ignoring the material basis of human life and history. They wrote famously that “life requires above all food and drink, shelter and clothing, and quite a bit more” before human beings can philosophize (Marx, 1994: 127). Rather than fixed, the basic human needs they theorized were changing and developing historically, expanding over time, as the satisfaction of needs led to “new needs” (Marx, 1994: 127). In this sense, Marx’s materialism differs from the relatively fixed, ahistorical notions of human needs put forth by early modern political theorists like Machiavelli and Hobbes, although it is somewhat indebted to them. The same is true of Darwinism, which Marx criticized as “the abstract materialism of natural science” that “excludes the historical process” (Marx, 1976: 494). As Erich Fromm noted, Marx aimed at a non-materialistic, communist future to be arrived at through conscious human self-activity. He saw the predominance of selfish materialism in modern society as the result not of a fixed human nature but of a particular mode of production, capitalism: “Marx’s ‘materialistic’ or ‘economic’ interpretation of history has nothing whatsoever to do with an alleged ‘materialistic’ or ‘economic’ striving as the most fundamental drive in man” (Fromm, 1961: 13).
In the German Ideology, they also set forth in preliminary terms what would become known as the theory of modes of production, large historical epochs dominated by a particular forms of technology and labor. As Marx intoned in 1847 in the Poverty of Philosophy, arguably the first exposition of his critique of political economy, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 6: 166). In the German Ideology, these are presented along Western European lines, with a stateless tribal past succeeded by the ancient Greco-Roman slave-based mode of production, and then by the serf-based feudal one, with the latter succeeded in its turn by the bourgeois or capitalist mode of production. If a mode of production based upon the communist future Marx envisioned is added, one arrives at a fivefold list: tribal, ancient, feudal, capitalist, and communist. In the dogmatic forms of Marxist theory that prevailed in the Soviet Union and China, this became something of a straitjacket, as it was applied in cookie-cutter fashion to parts of the world whose social structures differed significantly from those of Western Europe.
In later writings, Marx added a sixth or “Asiatic” mode of production (AMP) alongside these. However, this was not a chronological but a geographic category, suggesting that the Asian mode of production existed contemporaneously alongside the ancient and feudal formations in Western Europe. Over time, he came to include Russia, North Africa, the Middle East, and the whole of Asia in the AMP. As Marx saw it, the Western ancient and especially feudal modes of production were characterized by a greater degree of individual freedom and individual private property in the means of production, mainly agricultural land in pre-capitalist times. In contrast, the AMP tended toward more communal forms of landownership and social relations, and strong centralized states. Marx first elaborated these arguments at a theoretical level in 1857-1858 in the Grundrisse, a preliminary draft of Capital, where he contrasted the more individual peasant landholding of ancient Rome with premodern India, where “communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the land” prevailed (Marx, 1973: 472). In Capital, Vol. 1, where he concentrated upon British industrial development, he left the AMP to the side, although he did refer at one point to “ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production” (Marx, 1976: 172). Later, in his 1879-1882 notebooks on non-Western and pre-capitalist societies, to be discussed below, he attacked explicitly the notion that precolonial India was feudal. Probably the most important point here is not the attempt to collapse so many non-European pre-capitalist societies into the AMP as a catch-all category, for which Marx has been criticized (Lubacz, 1984). Arguably, the key issue is Marx’s move away from the notion that the successive modes of production in Western Europe were a historical model that explained the rest of the world in unilinear and deterministic fashion (Anderson, 2016).
Unlike Weber, Marx never elaborated a systematic theory of the various forms of pre-capitalist society and their differences with modern Western capitalism. Usually, he focuses on societies outside capitalism in order to define more clearly the features of capitalist modernity. At other times, he singles out aspects of still-existent non-capitalist social relations that could hasten or retard either the full development of capitalism. For example, he took up how the persistence of the British aristocracy both limited the power of capital and, at the same time, gave additional resources to a largely capitalist state in terms of military officers and soldiers drawn from a largely conservative rural population. At still other times, he focuses on how features of non-capitalist societies could furnish forces of resistance to capitalism.
Theory of Value and Systemic Collapse
The quest for the unlimited accumulation of value, surplus value, capital, and ultimately, profit, characterizes modern capitalism as a whole, as it does in no pre-capitalist society, however wealthy or pecuniary. As Marx wrote in Capital, Vol. I, “Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production” is the driving force of capitalism (Marx, 1976: 742). Part of this is due to the remarkable technological and organizational innovations that demarcate capitalism from earlier modes of production, making possible an unprecedented level of accumulation of material wealth. An equally important aspect is, in the words of Moishe Postone, the utterly impersonal character of the capitalist system, characterized by “the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute” (1993: 30).
Marx’s theory of value is indebted to the labor theory of value developed earlier by Adam Smith. As Marx notes in Capital 1, such a theory arose in the modern era, when the concept of a basic equality among human beings had become “a fixed popular opinion” (Marx, 1976: 152). This helped eighteenth-century economists to acknowledge the contribution of ordinary physical labor to the creation of value, something that Aristotle had missed, due to the class prejudices of his time. However, Marx’s theory should really be described as a value theory of labor, in that value creation, not the creation of a specific product, is the goal of capitalist production.
Marx’s value theory of labor went through various changes, but in its fully developed version in Capital 1, the forms of value interact with forms of labor in an industrial capitalist society where commodity production is the overwhelmingly dominant economic form. Thus, almost all production is for sale rather than immediate or local use, and rather than a pre-capitalist surplus product in kind, capitalism is based upon the creation of commodities, not for their own sake, but for the accumulation of surplus value, and ultimately, of profit.
First, Marx presents the value of these commodities as a unity of opposites, divided into use value and exchange value. Use value is qualitative, multiple, and, to an extent, subjective. Exchange value cuts across all the various uses, yet it underlies a quantifiable measurement of value. The exchange value of a commodity is based upon something uniform and calculable, the quantity of socially necessary labor time (SNLT) required to produce it. This quantifies the category of scarcity, for example: a pound of salt carries less value than a pound of gold because more SNLT is required to find, mine, and refine gold. The SNLT needed to produce particular commodities tends to decrease as capitalism develops, under the ever-moving standard of “the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent at that time” (Marx, 1976: 129). On the one hand, all commodities must possess use value of some sort in order to have exchange value. On the other hand, in limited cases, use values can exist independent of exchange value, such as natural phenomena like meadows filled with flowers, or products produced for the immediate use of oneself, friends, or family. At another level, however, the key to commodity production is not even exchange value, but rather the creation of value, of which exchange value is one form of appearance. For example, capital is ultimately interested in surplus value, which leads to profit, not mere exchange value. A variety of things can become capital, if they are employed to create value: money, raw materials, tools and machinery, structures like factory buildings, land, and even labor power. Marx divides capital employed into two basic types: variable capital (labor power at the point of production) and constant capital (the other types of capital, mainly machinery).
Closely linked to the multiple forms of value are the dual forms of labor that produce commodities under capitalism. On this point, Marx claims to have made an innovation with regard to the classical political economists. On the one hand, human work can take the form of concrete useful labor, which is related to the various specific types of labor conducted creatively with a combination of our mental and manual faculties. Here, Marx contrasts the labor of other social animals like spiders or bees to human social labor, arguing that the latter operates in a context where it is the “result” of a “purpose” that is “conscious” and that involves conceptualizing the process in advance. The results may be less beautiful or symmetric than a spider’s web or a beehive, but they are the result of purposeful and imaginative rather than purely instinctual labor (Marx, 1976: 284). Such concrete labor is transhistorically human, and as Bertell Ollman notes, theorizing at this level of generality is rather an “exception” for Marx (Ollman, 1993: 59). On other hand, human work under capitalism can also take the form of abstract labor, which is quantifiable, uniform, and where the heightened division of labor that characterizes capitalism means that the worker performs less and less concrete useful labor of the sort mentioned above. Abstract labor, the predominant form of labor under capitalism, flattens out the differences among workers, especially with regard to skill. This is possible because capitalist machine production requires large numbers—at least in Marx’s time—of unskilled factory hands, as against the highly skilled labor characteristic of the earlier guild system.
The concepts of labor power and of surplus value also come to the fore here. Capital contracts labor power for a specific time period, and unlike under slavery, does not seek to own the laborer, only the product. Labor power in the context of actual production becomes variable capital, and is employed in a manner that ever more efficiently seeks to create as much value as possible during the time in which the workers are at work under the control of capital.
The resultant exploitation of the workers is partially hidden under the wage system. As Marx noted as early as the 1840s, wages are not a share of the product but tend toward the minimum workers need to exist, plus be able to propagate the next generation of workers. If workers are paid by the day, for example, capital makes sure that the value they add to the product of labor surpasses as much as possible that expended for their wages. Moreover, this ratio continually expands in capital’s favor as the system develops. Marx introduces the category of surplus labor time to describe that part of the working day that continues, even after the workers have created a quantity of value equivalent to their wages. In his eyes, this is as exploitative as was the corvée system under feudalism, but is largely hidden from view under the wage system. Labor power at the point of production is termed variable capital because its value increases dramatically during the production process, creating a surplus value above and beyond its value at the point of purchase by capital, that is, its wages.
Besides the creation of the factory itself, with its close organized supervision of labor, capital employs two basic methods to expand surplus labor time and thus to create a greater and greater accumulation of surplus value, which becomes the prime source of profit. The first of these is the creation of absolute surplus value, which results from expanding the working day without raising the daily wage. An enormous lengthening of the working day took place during the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain, facilitated through technical innovations like artificial lighting.
As this process became widely discredited due to the immense human suffering that ensued, and the state began to place the working day under stricter legal limits, the second form, the creation of relative surplus value, came to the fore. Here, machinery as a form of constant capital took on a more important role in the production process. Ever more complex machinery reduced the size of the workforce, allowing each worker to produce vastly greater quantities of value during the workday. For that reason, Marx emphasizes the preponderance of constant capital over variable capital (labor power) at this stage. With machine production, the amount of surplus labor time increases dramatically, as workers could create a value equivalent to their wages during a short period at the beginning of the workday, with the rest of their day becoming surplus labor time, leading to a greater and greater accumulation of surplus value.
In the Grundrisse, Marx sketched the possibility of an “automaton,” a production system in which there were so few workers that they were reduced to the functions of “watchman and regulator” (1973: 705). In Capital, published a decade later, he was more cautious, stressing the deleterious effects of machine production on the worker: harder work to keep up with the machine, increased alienation, and so on. He also emphasized how advanced machine production created a permanently large force of unemployed workers, even when production was ramping up, exerting economic pressures that helped capital to control labor.
Since value ultimately comes from the exercise of labor power, however, the recourse to relative surplus value via more and more machinery eventually creates a downward spiral. This results not only in stagnation within the most developed capitalist economies, but also in deep economic crises. While the immediate causes of these crises are multiple—real estate or stock market bubbles, for example—in Vol. 3 of Capital, Marx locates the underlying cause of stagnation and crisis in “a gradual fall in the general rate of profit,” which is a tendency of all advanced capitalist economies (Marx, 1981: 318). This takes place even if such a falling rate of profit is “coupled with a simultaneous increase in the absolute mass of profit.” This is because, with the increasing preponderance of machinery, there occurs a “relative fall in variable capital [labor power] as a proportion of the total capital,” as a result of the vast capital outlays for machinery (Marx, 1981: 326). In fact, the tendential decline in the rate of profit underlies the effort by capital to squeeze more out of labor, by lengthening or intensifying the working day. As Dunayevskaya noted: “What Marx is saying is that even if the worker learned to live on air and could work all twenty-four hours a day, this ever-expanding monster of machine production could not keep on expanding without collapsing, since living labor is the only source of this value and surplus value” (1958: 141; see also Grossman, 1992). Marx holds that because capitalism has no other choice but to move into an increasingly skewed ratio of constant to variable capital, and yet variable capital is the ultimate source of all value, “The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself” (Marx, 1981: 358). The various speculative schemes that can spark economic crises are examples of efforts to get around this problem. There are of course countervailing tendencies. For example, the problem can be resolved, at least temporarily, by austerity at home or recourse to labor in low-wage countries. Moreover, an economic crisis that destroys large quantities of capital—and ruins the lives of many people—allows the cycle to commence anew, so long as the system does not collapse entirely. But for Marx, the long-run outlook for the capitalism is tenuous.
As Marx and Engels wrote as early as the Communist Manifesto, capitalism was by far the most productive economic system in history, having built up the economic infrastructure immeasurably and having created at least the potential for a higher standard of living for the working population. In this sense, the system represented social progress for humanity, something they declaimed in lyrical tones. At the same time, they noted, it was riven by a deep contradiction: It was an inherently unstable system, prone to economic crisis and even collapse at the time of its greatest apparent success. In this sense, they argued, it was a doomed system, because “it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 6: 495).
Theory of Social Classes, the State, and Revolution
Marx theorizes social classes in terms of their relationship to the means of production. Thus, in his model, the positions of chattel slaves, peasants, and industrial workers differ sharply from each other, although they are all members of subordinate classes. Slaves are owned outright by the master class, as is the product of their labor. Peasants are often enserfed and obligated to turn over part of their social product in kind and to furnish labor to the landowning class, but they own or at least exercise possessory rights over a plot of land, own their tools, and have other personal rights over their bodies. Often originating as dispossessed peasants, industrial wageworkers are legally free, but without possession or ownership of their tools and other means of production. Therefore, they are compelled by economic necessity to sell their labor power to the capitalist class for a specified time and a specified wage. As capitalism develops with ever more complex machinery and technology, also creating stupendous wealth, the relative economic distance between labor and capital grows rather than shrinks, even if wages are increased.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels elaborated a theory of polarization and revolution, which they saw as the motor of human history. All history up to their time had been, they wrote, characterized by class struggle, although the social classes had changed from those in the ancient and feudal modes of production, to those of modern capitalism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 6: 482). Modern capitalist society placed the bourgeoisie—the old commercial middle class in pre-capitalist times that now owned the factories and other modern means of production—in the dominant position. As its members no longer owned their means of production—land and tools in pre-capitalist times—the subordinate class was composed of propertyless wage laborers in the factories and other modern spheres of production. Capitalism was distinctive in that “it has simplified the class antagonisms” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 6: 485). The various middle strata—shopkeepers, small landowners, and so on—were destined to fall for the most part into the working classes, with a few of them rising into the bourgeoisie. Because status divisions had receded in favor of purely monetary ones, class conflict was more open than ever before, no longer hidden by paternalism or the sense of belonging to a common religious community. Since this polarization was only a tendency, when he described the actually existing class structure of the capitalist societies of his time, Marx sometimes singled out two other older but still significant social classes, aristocratic landowners and peasants, as well as the continuing presence of the petty bourgeois classes. For example, in a fragment on social classes, he writes of “the three great social classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production” as the “owners of mere labor-power, the owners of capital, and the landowners” (Marx, 1981: 1025).
At another level, Marx traced in Capital 1 the historical origins of the two great modern social classes, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class and the proletariat or working class. A propertyless class of workers in the urban centers emerged through a series of dispossessions and usurpations over several centuries. In this process, much of the English peasantry was dispossessed of its land, as subsistence agriculture was replaced by large-scale commercial agriculture, which required far less labor. The modern working class did not go willingly into the factories of industrial capitalism, but did so only out of desperation after being thrown, propertyless, out of the old rural economy and being subjected to harsh penalties by the nascent modern state for vagrancy and other crimes of destitution. New economic forces were thus abetted by the emerging centralized modern state. Marx’s historical sketch culminated, however, not with the birth of capitalism and the modern state, but with their overthrow: “There also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.” This revolt would lead to the end of “capitalist private property.” He quickly added, “This is the negation of the negation” (Marx, 1976: 929). As mentioned above, this was a reference to one of Hegel’s core dialectical concepts.
Such a form of presentation is not unusual where Marx was concerned, for class is not a stable structure but one imbued with conflict and revolution (Holloway, 2002). Already in the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels had pointed to the possibility of class revolution by the increasingly wretched proletariat. That possibility—and that of economic collapse—formed the two bases for the notion that capitalism was a transitory, doomed system. As for the state, in the Manifesto it represented the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, although it mediated among various fractions of that class, “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 6: 486).
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx’s 1852 account of the Bonapartist state that had just emerged in France, offers what is often seen as a subtler conceptualization of the capitalist state than the Manifesto, one where the state seems at times to be suspended above the various social classes. It “restricts, controls, regulates, oversees, and supervises civil life from its most all-encompassing expression to its most insignificant stirrings” (Marx, 1996: 68). While the state draws support from parts of the peasantry, who react against the urban liberals and socialists, its true basis is the French bourgeoisie, even though their political parties are repressed by Bonapartism: “But the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are intertwined in the most intimate way with the maintenance of just that wide-ranging and highly ramified machinery of state” (Marx, 1996: 68). This complexity was more like a hall of mirrors than the more instrumentalist state of the Communist Manifesto, revealing, in the formulation of Paul Thomas, “an emphasis on the power of the state apparatus itself” (1994: 105). The Brumaire analyzes what amounted to the closest political system to modern totalitarianism during Marx’s lifetime. The Bonapartist state was riven with police spies, and also appealed in demagogic fashion to the masses, especially the peasantry and part of the urban poor. It even claimed to be a revolutionary state, while at the same time cracking down on democratic and labor movements. If Britain exemplified the most developed capitalist economy of the time, Bonapartist France represented for Marx the highest evolution of the modern state.
Fifteen years later, Marx developed two issues, the workers as revolutionary subject and the state as mediator of class conflict, this in the “Working Day” chapter of Capital 1. There, he recounted the successful mobilizations of English workers for a ten-hour working day during the 1840s and 1850s, something he termed a greater achievement than “the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’” (416). Marx saw revolutionary implications in this type of reform, in no small part because workers could not easily participate in political or civic life, including the communist movements he espoused, when working eighty or more hours per week. The English workers achieved this when the dominant classes split, with the landowner-based Tories allowing legislation establishing the ten-hour day as the legal limit to pass Parliament, over the opposition of the Liberals, who were close to the manufacturing interests. The factory inspectors, an element of the state, also brought pressure within the political system for enforcement of the new law, something capital had resisted in the courts and elsewhere. This is the most prominent place in the text of Capital 1 where Marx speaks of class struggle, here with regard to its domestic as well as international impact: “The establishment of a normal working day is therefore the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class … The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English working class, but of the modern working class in general” (413).
The Bonapartist state came crashing down in 1871, in the wake of military defeat by Prussia. In the “Civil War in France,” Marx again took up both the Bonapartist state and what he saw as an incipient communist revolution in the Paris Commune of 1871. The Bonapartist state had grown not out of reaction pure and simple, but out of the failures of the 1848 revolution in France. In a sense, it was the culmination of the various “bourgeois” revolutions since the eighteenth century, all of which had ended with the strengthening and centralization of the state. Such a state was utterly compatible with capitalism, especially during a time of social upheaval on the part of the workers, when a fearful bourgeoisie retreated from its earlier commitment to democratization.
The Commune represented an example of working-class revolution, the only large-scale revolution of this type that occurred during Marx’s lifetime. In the “Civil War in France,” he stressed the Commune’s anti-statist character, tying anti-capitalism and anti-statism closely together. In his account, the Commune abolished the standing army and the police in favor of a popular militia. It also eliminated much of the state bureaucracy, and ruled via direct election from the neighborhoods, with representatives paid an average worker’s wage and subject to immediate recall. On the economic side, he noted that some factories were occupied and reopened under democratic management by workers. All of this amounted to an incipient communist system, at least in its aspirations. He wrote that the Commune aimed at “transforming the means of production … into mere instruments of free and associated labor,” adding: “But this is Communism, ‘impossible’ Communism!” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 22: 335). He concluded that it constituted “the political form at last discovered by which to work out the economical emancipation of Labor” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 22: 334).
Communist revolution was by no means the only kind of revolution Marx championed, however. He also supported almost all democratic revolutions, as seen in his participation in the 1848-1849 revolution in Germany. It is important to note that during Marx’s life, most of the governments of Europe were semi-absolute monarchies. This was certainly a factor in his fervent support for the North during the US Civil War of 1861-1865, at a time when British establishment opinion was claiming that the impending breakup of the United States showed the non-viability of democratic forms of government. The Civil War, which in his view amounted to a revolution that was transforming an entire social order by giving formal freedom to 4 million slaves, also offered a model of revolution that differed somewhat from that of the Commune, one based upon constitutional and democratic principles and sentiments. Such a possibility was something of an exception in Marx’s eyes, however.
Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Relation to Capital and Class
As part of his rejection of abstract universals, Marx’s working class was not a unified whole, but contained various differences and particularities. This emerges particularly strongly in his writings on race and ethnicity. One key example of this was his analysis of the Civil War, slavery, and race in the United States, mentioned above. Even before the Communist Manifesto, Marx had seen slavery as crucial to modern capitalism: “Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 38: 101). During the 1850s he worked as European correspondent for the New York Tribune, the pro-abolitionist newspaper that was the journal of record of its day. As the Civil War approached, Marx hailed John Brown’s band’s attempt at sparking a slave uprising, expressing the hope that it would lead to widespread slave revolts.
Once the war began, he sided with the North, as did most European leftists, labor activists, and liberals. Critical of Lincoln’s temporizing, Marx called upon the North to implement immediate abolition, the use of Black troops, and full political rights for emancipated slaves. In the face of appeals from leading British politicians to support intervention on the side of the South, Marx published articles hailing the internationalism of British workers for holding steadfast at numerous public meetings in support of the North, even as they faced mass unemployment in the textile mills due to the cotton blockade the North had imposed on Southern ports. He also enthused over the involvement of Black troops, which he argued, in an 1862 letter to Engels, “would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves” (Marx and Engels, 2016: 121). Overall, he regarded the war as a social revolution, not only, as mentioned above, because it destroyed a social system based upon the labor of 4 million slaves, but also because US radicals were calling for land distribution to the former slaves, something he mentioned in Capital 1. Also in Capital, he noted the new organizational strides made by the US labor movement after the war, arguing that the working class had been weakened due to divisions based upon race and slave status: “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” (Marx, 1976: 414; Nimtz, 2003).
The labor and socialist networks supporting the North extended across Western Europe and formed an important nucleus among those who founded the International Working Men’s Association or First International in 1864, and in which Marx became the decisive voice. Among the International’s first public statements was an open letter, drafted by Marx and signed by a number of labor leaders, congratulating Lincoln for his landslide victory in the 1864 elections. Cognizant of the support British labor had afforded the United States in the face of threats of British intervention on the side of the South, the Lincoln administration issued a warm public reply. A year later, however, after the conservative Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, the International issued a firm warning, in an address “To the People of the United States of America”: “As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease. Let your citizens of to-day be declared free and equal, without reserve. If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood” (Marx and Engels, 2016: 187).
Marx’s conceptualization of race, ethnicity, and revolution achieved a greater theoretical focus in his writings on Ireland, which also formed part of the debates within the International. From early on, Marx had supported Irish independence from Britain, but the Irish question came to a head in the late 1860s, with the rise of the left-wing nationalist Fenian movement, which drew its base from the peasantry, opposed Irish as well as British landowners, and was not terribly close to the Church. This involved not only the British colony of Ireland, but also the large impoverished Irish immigrant minority inside Britain, which formed an important part of the working class. Marx wrote in 1869 that he had reversed his earlier position on Ireland, now seeing Irish national liberation as a ferment that could help move British workers forward: “For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy … Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 43: 398).
Facing opposition to this position within the London-based General Council of the International from British trade unionists, Marx and several Continental European delegates won the day, getting the International to stage rallies and issue a petition to the Crown to save a group of Irish nationalists from execution. At this point, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, also a member of the International, protested that the General Council was involving itself inappropriately in non-labor issues. In response, Marx got a lengthy statement approved by the General Council supporting his position. Here one finds the argument that what came to be called national liberation movements are important potential allies of the labor movement inside the leading colonial powers. And more sharply even than he had with respect to race relations in the United States, to which he alludes, Marx here conceptualizes a dialectic of race/ethnicity and class at a complex level:
The English bourgeoisie has not only exploited the Irish misery to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen, it has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps … In all the big industrial centers in England, there is a profound antagonism between the Irish and English proletarians. The average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages … He regards him practically in the same way the poor whites in the southern states of North America regard the black slaves. This antagonism between the proletarians in England is artificially nourished and kept alive by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of maintaining its power.
(Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 21: 120)
Although Marx also wrote on gender and women’s oppression throughout his life, his own contribution has until recently been overshadowed by the monumental and somewhat schematic 1884 study by Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Marx’s discussions of gender are for the most part brief, and have received a full-scale treatment only recently (Brown, 2012). In the 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote of gender relations as a fundamental yardstick by which to judge overall social progress: “The relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Therefore, in it is revealed the degree to which the natural behavior of the human being has become human” (Marx, 1961: 126). In an 1846 essay/translation article on suicide in post-revolutionary France, he devoted most of his attention to female suicide sparked by oppressive gender relations (Plaut and Anderson, 1999).
But his lengthiest treatment of gender occurred at the end of his life, in his Ethnological Notebooks of 1880-1882, part of which formed the basis for Engels’s celebrated book. In these notes on anthropological works composed at the end of his life, Marx took up a variety of cultures, from Native Americans like the Iroquois to the ancient Greeks and Romans. These notes suggested a more nuanced, dialectical view of gender than that found in Engel’s Origin of the Family. First, while also taken with the relative gender equality among the preliterate Iroquois and similar groups, Marx expresses skepticism about the degree of that equality, as against Engels’s more idyllic treatment (Dunayevskaya, 1992). Second, where Engels held that the rise of class society and the state led to permanent gender subordination for women, a “world-historical defeat of the female sex” that could only be rolled back by a modern communism, Marx noted how aristocratic Roman women achieved greater social power than their Greek predecessors (Brown, 2012). Marx also treated Greek gender subordination dialectically, writing at one point: “From beginning to end under the Greeks a principle of studied selfishness among the males, tending to lessen the appreciation of women, scarcely found among savages … But the relationship to the goddesses on Olympus shows remembering and reflection back to an earlier, freer and more powerful position for women” (Krader, 1974: 121). While he did not live to develop these notes in essay or book form, they show a striking turn in his last years.
Colonialism, Globalization, and New Forces of Revolution
In these and other notebooks during his last years, Marx again turned his gaze eastward, toward India, Russia, and other societies peripheral to industrializing Western Europe. Among Marx’s earliest discussions of colonialism is a troubling passage in the Communist Manifesto that seemed to support the 1839-1842 British Opium War against China: “The bourgeoisie … draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls” (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 6: 488). He wrote in a similar vein in his 1853 articles on India for the Tribune, painting India in Orientalist tones as a backward, static society without any real history. Influenced strongly by Hegel’s Philosophy of History, he wrote that India had been unable to mount a serious resistance to outside conquering powers due to its internal weaknesses, and that those powers broke the stasis of a civilization without any real historical development of its own (Löwy, 1986). India’s stasis was rooted in the communal forms of labor and governance in the villages, which, as against modern emancipatory communism, offered a solid foundation for “Oriental despotism” from above by exercising a very effective discipline over the peasantry. The most recent of these outside powers, the capitalist British, were beginning to mold India in their image, to good effect overall. Ever the dialectician though, Marx also alluded briefly to “barbaric” features of British colonialism and expressed support for an eventual Indian revolt against colonialism (Marx and Engels, 1975-2004 12: 221). Even in this instance, however, his notion of historical change in India remained fundamentally unilinear in 1853, with European civilization serving as an overall model of progress. During the same period he also wrote scathingly of Russia as a civilization alien to Europe, with a state based upon a form of “Oriental despotism” inherited from Mongol rule. In addition, Russian culture and society lacked the potential for a revolutionary opposition due to the collectivist forms of rule under “Oriental despotism,” and had therefore been the bastion of reaction in Europe, intervening massively in the West to defeat the revolutions of 1848-1849.
Marx pivoted away from these Eurocentric positions in 1856-1859, in writings for the Tribune about the Second Opium War in China and the Sepoy Uprising in India. By now, he fervently supported these anti-colonial uprisings against what he saw as an increasingly barbaric British imperialism. This was the same period in which he composed the Grundrisse, with its discussion of historical differences between premodern Western and Asian modes of production, and its critique of linear determinism in terms of successive modes of production. By 1858-1860, as peasant unrest accompanied moves by the Tsar to emancipate the serfs, he also began to move away from his earlier stance toward Russia.
Marx returned to these kinds of concerns two decades later. In his 1879-1882 notebooks on non-Western and pre-capitalist societies and gender, some of which were discussed above, Marx concentrated not only upon preliterate clan societies, but also on the Indian subcontinent and its communal villages. In notes on various anthropological and historical works, Marx seemed to reconceptualize his earlier views on India. He became more aware of the incessant resistance that Indians had mounted against foreign conquerors, and lauded both the anti-Mughal resistance fighter Shivaji and, once again, the anti-British Sepoy Uprising. He also devoted considerable space in these notes to the communal village structures that had persisted from ancient times, but now he stressed historical change rather than stasis, as these villages seemed to have evolved from kinship-based to residential-based communal forms of self-rule (Anderson, 2016).
During the 1870s, he also made some important changes to Capital 1 that made clear that the “primitive accumulation of capital” section was a sketch of British development and that it would be the model at most for the rest of “Western Europe,” thus leaving open the possible future development of non-Western societies (Anderson, 1983).
Most strikingly, in letters to Russian intellectuals and a new preface to the Communist Manifesto, he reversed his earlier position on “Oriental despotism,” now arguing that the communal structures of Russian villages could become the basis for a modern communism. During the 1870s, he became fluent in Russian and interacted widely with intellectuals from that country where, to his great surprise, Capital 1 had received, upon its translation into Russian, more discussion than in Germany. Many intellectuals read his description of capitalism, especially the section on primitive accumulation, as a sketch of Russia’s future.
But in these late writings on Russia, Marx denied any such intention, sometimes quoting from the French edition of his book, published too late to become the basis of the Russian one. First, he denied, in response to a review of the Russian edition of his book, that he had attempted in Capital 1 to develop “the master key of a general historico-philosophical theory” (Shanin, 1983: 136; Smith, 1995). Second, he mentioned that he had been studying Russian agriculture deeply and that his studies had convinced him of fundamental differences between the Russian communal village and its more individualized Western European counterpart. Third, he and Engels wrote, in the 1882 preface to a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, which was Marx’s last publication in any language: “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then Russia’s peasant communal landownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development” (Shanin, 1983: 139). This carefully worded statement extoled the revolutionary possibilities of Russia’s communal villages, while avoiding any notion that a technologically underdeveloped country could achieve an emancipatory form of communism entirely on its own. It also pointed to a theme developed throughout his life, the interconnectedness of the struggles of working people across geographic, national, and racial/ethnic lines. This preface, soon also published in German, was quickly forgotten by those who developed Marxism as a doctrine.
Conclusion
A century ago, academic sociologists saw Marx as a theorist of capital and class, and more as a revolutionist than a sociologist. Then, during most of the twentieth century, his social theory was tied—unjustly—to monstrous regimes in the East that governed in his name, while Western Marxists focused upon his dialectical perspective, his theory of the state, his underlying humanistic standpoint, and other aspects ignored in the dogmatic versions of Marxism propagated by the ideologists of those regimes. In recent decades, social theorists have returned increasingly to Marx’s notion of capitalism as a global system, to his theory of class polarization and of economic stagnation and crisis, especially since the 2008 crash, and to an interrogation of his theoretical corpus in light of contemporary concerns with race, gender, and the legacies of colonialism.