Marxism should have (maybe) been a Pessimism
The second installment from my class on philosophy in economics
Marx likes to dwell on what he considers the disruption of man’s essential ‘species being’ under capitalism, which he amply describes by cataloging the degrees of alienation and degradation of community relations that capital production induces. While class consciousness stands as a proposed remedy for alienated existence, the salvific mission which Marx entrusts to revolutionary politics fits strangely next to his own observations about the denatured state of the proletariat. He describes history working out in deterministic sequences, but the future he expects seems less probable than what one might otherwise infer from his own assessments. It seems to me that his optimism is, on its own terms, misplaced, and that Marx is ultimately naive to think that the perversion of man’s species being will be so easily erased or superseded by revolution.
Throughout his early writings Marx expands on and radically reworks a theme familiar to Adam Smith: that the operative logic and expansive nature of market economies fundamentally reshape the character of the human beings who participate in them. For Smith this reality, though perhaps regrettable in particular cases, is really nothing more than an incidental externality of capitalism’s overwhelmingly beneficial productive power, but for Marx this transformation is horrific in its essence and exploitative in its results. For Marx the story of all participation in liberal capitalism is one of extreme and multifaceted alienation. Man’s natural character, his “life-activity,” is in community as the maker, the producer, the shaper of nature, but when this natural action is undertaken as wage labor under a capital system, every natural relation that man as maker inhabits is sundered. Man’s labor and its products belong to another man, alienating him. Even his self-cultivated ability is not his own, as “money is the true creative power”.
Part of what is dissolved by this acid wash of alienation, Marx asserts, is man’s sense of being in community. While naturally “man’s individual and species life are not different,” Capitalism sets them in tension. By grafting competition and growth into man’s social self-understanding, capitalism incentivizes peer relationships that are primarily organized around exchange of capital. Every participant in a capital system approaches his peers with a pimp’s motive– “to seduce away the other’s very being, his money.” Relationships that don’t accomplish this are inefficient, and ethics that inveigh against using one’s fellows in this manner bring, frankly, a competitive disadvantage. So ethics and religion must retreat in the face of economic necessity. Even family ties succumb to this entropic pull, resulting in an “unlimited exploitation of children’s labor” for the benefit of desperate parents, whom Marx asserts should no longer enjoy the traditional authority over their children. The logic of capitalism has “made its exercise degenerate into a mischievous misuse of power,” perverting a caring relationship into an oppressive one by reordering it along the lines of economic necessity. Furthermore, Marx argues that reforms like the workday limits imposed in England will not be sufficient to remedy this because, like all ethical restrictions on production, they stand in tension to the motivating logic of production. Hence Marx and Engels list universal education and “abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form” as revolutionary measures to be achieved on the way to abolishing class difference, implying their realization is otherwise impossible.
But it is to this class–whose ethical motivations and sense of belonging in community are, remember, so worn down that it’s impossible for Marx to imagine that they will even stop exploiting their own children absent a history-ending revolution–that he assigns the duty to bring about such revolution. The proletariat’s very dispossession allows it to embody a truly revolutionary class consciousness, more than the petit bourgeois, whose revolutionary sentiment will be fundamentally conservative, as desire to grasp after their own disappearing privileges and stave off “their impending transfer into the proletariat,” so that the proletariat has a putative unity of purpose while the smallholders have only a sort of impotent reactionary dread. Seemingly this unity of purpose is supposed to be a remedy for the proletariat’s depravity as well as its material deprivation, as Marx trusts his putative class-conscious revolutionaries with the right and duty of making “despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production.”
But it seems to me that class consciousness is not the same as a whole and undamaged species being. Class consciousness is still alienated, still aimed mechanistically at a particular end and operating on the terms of “‘society’ as an abstraction, vis-a-vis the individual.” And class consciousness is the sort of thing that can be ginned up without restoration of the species being. Marx notes that the character of “the most natural relation,” family relations, can function as a sort of barometer to measure “how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself.” The same family relations that, by Marx’s description, seem to need not just class consciousness but fully consummated revolution if they are to be restored.
Did Marx’s diagnoses of moral and spiritual rot give him any pause when offering his prescriptions? Seemingly not–we can surmise that historical determinism is one hell of a drug–but they should have. If it’s true that “private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it,” then we shouldn’t be surprised that history showed what it seems Marx’s position might have predicted: the leaders of the revolution would fixate on power in just this same way, and the new ruling class would never “abolish its own supremacy.” Class consciousness may mobilize the working man, may even bring him to power, but it will not rebuild his moral sense or his species-being and it will not sanctify his soul. It seems to me that someone just as skeptical of capitalism as Marx might very reasonably have made his same arguments and diagnosed the ills of alienation just as he did, but might from that very diagnosis have rejected the path of revolution, judging man’s alienated character unfit to deliver anything but a shakeup of the hierarchy of oppression. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Perhaps I’ll write a follow up noting how I think this same dynamic—insightful diagnosis followed by poor prescriptions—applies even more clearly to Marx’s view of religion. The man seems to have had a talent for making startlingly insightful observations and then insistently drawing wrong conclusions.