Posts Tagged ‘marxism’

‘Historical Materialism’

September 26, 2024

This is a (hopefully) fairly simple explanation, rather than the full deal, and like most simplifications probably has major failings

Historical materialism

Historical materialism is the theory that history is primarily driven by material forces rather than by ideas or ‘great men.’ The theory that history is the working out of ideas alone can often be called something like ‘historical idealism’

Marxism asserts Ideas arise out of the human conditions of life and are generally spread by ‘class representatives’. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. The ideas of the ruling classes get promoted and distributed, whereas other ideas tend to be persecuted or ignored. However, in conditions in which the ruling class is destroying itself, or a new class is rising, alternative ideas can arise out of existing class conflict. Hence Marxism itself was supposed to be able to challenge capitalist ideology, through the rise of the working class and through expressing their understandings and experience of life.

It seems to have failed dismally as, nowadays, most people have no idea what Marxism stands for or argues, they simply know what their rulers and the rulers’ representatives tell them about it 🙂

Important factors in history

Important factors in material history include the ways that people gain survival through the “organization of the means of production.” So the fundamental questions for a Marxist are:

  • How do societies produce food and other products?
  • How do they distribute or trade food and other products?
  • What groups of people does this organization allocate control over the distribution?
  • Who does the system allow to accumulate more than other people?
  • How is this inequality preserved?
  • How does this organization protect itself and enforce itself?
  • How does this organization undermine or destroy itself? These ways of self-destruction are usually called “contradictions.” Marxism implies that contradictions are binary (the “dialectic” because of Hegel :), but there is no reason to assume this is correct. Contradictions could involve multiple forces acting at the same time.

In capitalism, capitalists (deliberately?) confuse capitalism with exchange and trade, which are universal. For Marxists capitalism is a particular set of forms of organization of production, technology, labor, trade, distribution, allocation of prosperity, power and so on. Capitalism is not trade in itself. Otherwise bureaucratic state communism would have to be classified as capitalism, which is not useful, even if both are oppressive in often different ways.

Example: the history of capitalism

The capitalist idea of history is that people become rich because they, or their ancestors, worked hard, were virtuous or brilliant having great ideas. This set of ‘ideologies’ (ideas justifying a particular social organization) feels right to capitalists and makes capitalism ‘good’ which is pleasing to them. It is well known and well distributed. Every American, Britisher, European, Australian has probably heard this ideology repeated over and over until it sounds like common-sense.

Marxists would tend to argue that capitalism arose through violent theft of land by those in power (aristocrats), and through expansion of the aristocracy in the UK to include people who owed their wealth directly to the crown through services they performed. Many of these people used that land to accumulate capital, and start investments in newly invented operations like corporations. These people had the military power and technologies to continue their plunder throughout the world, moving on when they had destroyed land, stealing valuables like labor (slavery), gold. silver and other resources, often with the co-operation of other powers (such as local rulers).

This process of dispossession and investment, created a working class in the UK and elsewhere, who could no longer support themselves through their own food production and farms, craft or traditional labor. The self-reliance of the people was destroyed by capitalism and turned into reliance on transactional capitalist bosses. Eventually traditional aristocrats had to move into business or marry into business, because their lands no longer brought in enough income to live at the level required by their culture and forms of social power.

The State acted to support the rising capitalists and enforce this dispossession and impoverishment. This allowed the workers to be exploited in factories often with working and living conditions so bad, that capitalists were also stealing the health and lives of the workers as they were with slavery.

Eventually this similar experience lead to the working class unifying and struggling against bosses who extracted riches from them, and forming unions, fighting for political rights, political participation and decent working and living conditions

Marx expected these processes to lead to revolution and the abolition of capitalism and its State. There is no capitalism without a capitalist State. Marx rather naively seems to have thought that Communism without the State, would have few contradictions.

However, the processes in the West first led to the post war semi-socialist welfare State, as a defense against the possibilities of revolution, but capitalists fought back, and restored their dominance, as their control of wealth production enabled them to support ‘free market’ ideas through sponsored think tanks, fund politicians, persuade the State to make union life much harder and to repeal the taxes which allowed the welfare state to exist.

This set of pro-corporate political and economic actions is often known as ‘Neoliberalism.’ Some say this counter-revolution happened because capitalists were still afraid of workers’ revolution or the political influence coming from the new freedoms of people to participate politically, or because capitalism had become less profitable. I don’t know what is the case.

Liberty for ordinary people, collapsed and we are now living in a capitalist in plutocracy which is slowly destroying itself by impoverishing the people, destroying the competitive market, and destroying functional ecology. The only ‘solution’ being proposed for current capitalist contradictions seems to be authoritarianism, suppression of dissent and keeping people exhausted at work. Similar solutions were previously tried in the 1930s and did not work that well. There is no reason to assume they will work now.

However, information has been shown to be important. In my experience, many people still believe that the Mueller Report cleared Trump, did not find anything wrong with his behaviour or was a fraud. That Trump is being conspired against by the establishment and the FBI. That Putin is scared of Trump and campaigns for Democrats. That Harris slept her way to the top and is a communist who organised the assassination attempts on Trump, and that a vote for Trump is a far safer and more sensible than a vote for her. This may well give the US election to Trump and have massive effects on world history and the rush to collapse. The relationship of ideas and social forces, may ultimately depend on material forces, but ideas can give victory, although a pure materialist could point out these pro-Trump ideas are driven by corporations. However other corporations oppose them.

Conclusion

Historical materialism claims the main driving factors of history are material ones: material conditions, material and social organization, the possibilities of technology, and the allocation of violence. Ideas are largely secondary to these processes. History is not the expression of Spirit, great men, or God’s will.

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Marxist Fantasy

March 23, 2024

Probably everyone is familiar with a few points of Marxist imagining of the Revolution.

Marx says

after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Marx Critique of the Gotha Programme section 1

And Engels

As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out.

Anti-Duhring

The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong–into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

Origins of the Family

Will labour stop after the Revolution, or people become parasites? This seems to be a standard capitalist response – stop workers collaborating for fear they might end up supporting others as they do now….

To be a bit simplistic, Marx believed that all value and human life itself depended on human labor, so people would always have to work. The issue was that they would not have to work and have the value of their labor taken away from them. They would work freely without compulsion, for the pleasure of it.

In capitalism a person works for a capitalist or a boss, who pays them less than their labor is worth in order to profit. On the whole capitalists conspire to make this gap as big as possible, and they also try to make sure that people cannot be self-supporting (even in small business if possible) – so most people have to have a job and compete with others for that job to keep wages down.

In feudalism, the Lord take a conventional and usually religiously sanctioned percentage of what you grow on the land, so you labor for him some of your days. Technically, the Lord cannot stop you from supporting your family, or throw you off the land, without you having committed a crime.

In a slave society, slaves work under the threat of death and violence – this can be considered to be true in capitalism, hence the idea of ‘wage slavery’: most people have to work in a job or starve.

In ‘primitive societies’ you labor for yourself, your ‘extended family’ and other people and gift what you have in excess to others, or do whatever else you like – as nobody is taking anything away from you that threatens your ability to survive, and it is recognized that ‘economics’ and profit are not the only good things in life..

Part of the reason the State exists, according to Marx, is to separate you from your labor, so that it goes to your boss your lord, or your owner, and to protect the property and power of the dominant group from popular uprising. Adam Smith and David Hume said something similar. Capitalists will always want a State to protect them.

Without the State and enforced inequality, then Marx thought that people would again labor as they did in primitive societies; “each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In more modern terms we would say that this would probably be a status economy. If you produced for others you would gain status and respect, but it would not be an accumulative economy in which inheritance preserves inequality and status, so that the untalented children of the talented would be able to rule, but those ‘useless children’ would not starve, any more than anyone else. Everyone has to actively prevent class and power groups from arising.

It would be a real free enterprise economy that would not oppress others, destroy the earth and continually undermine its own functioning in other ways.

Marx chose to let the societies to come, find their own way forward as he had no idea what post-capitalist societies would be like, or what conditions they would face.

Yep rather than spend your days laboring for someone else and having no time for your self or your family, after the Revolution and the withering away of the State, it would be up to you. You could also work to improve things that others valued.

Personally I doubt this is possible, but it serves to remind people there are better ways of living than we have now.

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Marx, class conflict and society

August 26, 2021

I’m not particularly trying to convince anyone of anything here, just to make Marx’s position relatively clear and simple.

Firstly Marx argues that what people have to do to survive in society is more important for understanding historical processes than ideas are. Popular ideas are frequently just ways of justifying the actions of the dominant classes, and the modes of hierarchy – people tend to do what they have to do.

This is why his theory of history is sometimes called ‘historical materialism’. It is primarily based on what people have to do, and the material basis of that action, rather than on what they think.

Capitalism and wage labour

Capitalism engineers a mode of life, or arises out of a life, in which the majority of people depend on wage labor for survival. In other words, capitalism destroys self-sufficiency amongst the majority of the people it encounters as soon as possible. It may dispossess people from their land, or insist upon taxes so that people have to earn money through labor.

This process means most people have work for somebody else, starve or live a very precarious life as a beggar. In employment, they have to do as they are told – the first rule of capitalism is not liberty, but obey your boss (or ‘master’ as they used to be called in Marx’s time). Workers produce goods and ideas that legally belong to their employer. They have little to no control over what they produce, or what happens to those goods. They generally have little control over the working day, or the times they work. Holidays (or control over the worker’s own time) are relatively rare. So called flexibility, usually means the worker has to be flexible to suit their employer.

This separation from involvement in, and control over, the products of their labor and their labor time Marx, in his earlier works, calls ‘alienation’ and it usually appears to produce dissatisfaction with life.

It is a hallmark of capitalism. For example, crafts people controlled their own time, designed and made their own wares, and sold them to merchants, or other locals etc. Feudal peasants may give part of their crop to the lord, or spend some time working on their lord’s fields but generally what they grow, how they grow it, how they dispose of it, and when they work is up to them and the demands of nature. As long as they fulfil their obligations, their time and produce is their own. So while the labor set up may not be great, it is different from that in capitalism, and small farmers may have even more self-sufficiency.

Another way of phrasing this is that the imperatives of capitalism subtract from human satisfaction in work. Capitalism attempts to fill this hole, through encouraging consumption, which is capitalist materialism in action, and probably will never work for long. However, pressures to keep wages low, mean that consumption runs against limits, or encourages destructive debt.

Transfer of wealth

Capitalist, employers vary from good to terrible, but the dynamic for any employer, to help survive in the capitalist market, is to get as much labor out of the worker as they can for as little cost as possible. They may also automate production, so that they are less dependent on employee skill and crafting ability, so work becomes even more alienated, and workers more interchangeable and more disposable should they make trouble, times are hard, or whatever.

Rather than being recognised as people, the capitalist dynamic tends to make workers into impersonal energy to be used at the Master’s whim. Some employers recognise that this is not the best way to get work out of people, but they are still generally constrained by the necessity to make labor as cheap as possible.

Marx also argues the employer essentially ‘steals’ value from the the employees’ labor. That is the employee has to be paid less than their labor actually contributes to the product or service, or there can be no profit.

While this latter point may ignore the risk to the employer, and the organisational work they contribute, in general capitalism skews the market so more return goes to the owner and controller of labor than goes to the actual makers of goods. The greater this differential, the more capitalists are in charge of politics and society.

As successful businesses get massive benefits in terms of scale of production, discount sales or purchases and so on, they usually drive smaller businesses out of business, and gain even more wealth and power. You can think about what happens when a chain like wal-mart, or another big supermarket, comes to town. Independent businesses often close down, and small employers get to lose their capital and become precarious wage laborers. The same happens as agribusiness moves into a farming area. Small farmers get squeezed out.

In other words capitalism destroys small business, as well as exploits workers.

There is some argument as to whether managers, nowadays, are workers or representatives and controllers of capital. I’d suggest many try to pretend that they are part of the dominant elites, but usually end up finding out they are disposable workers. At the pinnacle, however, even incompetent CEOs get severance packages that would support normal people for a life time. The elites support their own.

Power and class war

On top of this, wealthy capitalists get to own and control the State, because wealth in capitalism buys anything from information and ideologies, to politicians. Therefore the State tends to represent their interests in keeping labor cheap, disposable and bound to employment, than it tends to represent the interests of workers, who have much less money to buy power.

Because the two classes have competing and opposed interests within the system, what we can call class warfare arises, which, in general, the powerful classes win.

Marx thought that eventually the workers would experience unity in their work experience, classify themselves as a group, and co-operate to overthrow the ruling classes, who would be weakened by the inherent tendency of capitalism to destabilise and destroy itself (which might be another blog post).

So far he has been wrong about this.

For a while between the 50s and the 70s driven by the fear of revolution amongst the dominant classes, there was an attempt to declare peace in the class war, by providing easy unemployment benefits, which allowed people to change jobs freely. This freed them from being stuck in jobs that have bad wages and conditions, and encouraged employers to share the wealth. Most countries supplied some kind of free health care, to keep workers free and functional, and they used the Keynesian insight that more money going to the workers will drive the economy. Hence we seemed to have massive growth of prosperity, social mobility and creativity in that period. With the threat of revolution gone, these ‘advances’ have gradually been withdrawn and we seem to be getting back to pure class warfare, and the concentration of employer power.

Historically, since the ascendency of capital, this full on alienation, and disposability, leads to fascism and war. That seems to be coming, but we shall have to see.

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