Tag: Marx

30. Marx and the Market

Marx defined dialectics as thought which

includes, in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things…also the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because [such thought] regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and hence takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Marx, Capital, Morse & Aveling 1906: 26

This is a far more useful definition than the standard three-step straw man of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that Stalin used to “prove” that the society he controlled was the wave of the future, and that Western philosophers and economists still prefer to knock down when they think about dialectics at all.

It is true that even Marx’s good definition conveys a misunderstanding, for it allows him to try and use dialectics to make predictions. In Hegelian terms, dialectics is a way of organizing social memory, not a predictive device (# 26). What Marx is trying to do in predicting the death of capitalism is a form of future-oriented dialectics: Marx sums up the premises of a contemporary capitalist economy, negates just one of them—individual ownership of the means of production (i.e. factories) —and draws the conclusions. But in fact, as Hegel would point out, there are many such premises, and just which one (or ones) will get negated is not for philosophers to predict. Nor can they tell how the negation will proceed: Marx thought the negation of individual ownership of the means of production would transfer the ownership to the workers, via the revolution; in fact, it was transferred to the investor class, via the stock market.

As to markets in general, as far as I can tell, Marx has little to say. He thinks they are chaotic, but we all know that. His main complaint about free markets, I think, is that they don’t stay free. The moment one participant gains even a temporary advantage over another, they will seek to convert it into a permanent one, and from there into a monopoly. Sometimes they do this by direct action against the competition; sometimes they use the state as a weapon, calling in government regulators to act in their favor (see Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal, Harvard 22019).

None of this is news to anyone (though Philippon’s revelations of the extent of it came as a surprise to me). What made Marx special is that he did not view market consolidation, the evolution of a market from freedom to monopoly, as a series of unfortunate accidents. It is what markets are: a free market is to a monopoly market as an acorn to an oak. This insight is part of his overall critique of political economy, the previous generation or two of economists (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, etc.) who, in Marx’s view, tried to determine how the major components of the economy functioned without asking where they came from. Thus, they asked about how private property works, but not how there came to be such a thing as private property in the first place. They thereby eternalized it.

They, and their descendants. also failed to see needed distinctions. Private property for Marx originates in the appropriation of others’ labor. Nothing, then, could be further from Locke’s account of an individual enclosing and working on a given piece of land. Compared to Marx’s compelling and empirically-grounded account of the genesis of capitalism, Locke’s story seems like an idle thought-experiment; and yet things such as he presents have in fact happened, if only rarely. So there are two kinds of property: private property, which has immoral origins, and what we may call personal property, which does not.

Now suppose I go into a store and buy a toothbrush. I am buying something that was produced, let us say, by eight-year-olds working in a factory somewhere very far from the store I am shopping in. Their labor is being appropriated, but not by me; I have appropriated no one’s labor, and my toothbrush belongs to me as personal, not private, property. I benefit from the alienation of the childrens’ labor in that far-off factory, and this gives me certain moral obligations toward the people whose labor has benefitted my oral health, but it does not make me an exploiter or a capitalist; even in capitalist countries, socialists are allowed to buy toothbrushes.

The difference between private property and personal property lies in the path by which each come to be: they are path-dependent. Ignoring this led some defenders of capitalism to claim that Marx wanted to expropriate peoples’ toothbrushes, or clothes, or houses; but that is an idea he justly ridicules.

One thing that Locke and Marx have in common is the deployment of ousiodic structure in their accounts of private property. For Lock, one person enclosed a territory—gave it a boundary—and then, in laboring, ordered it so as to produce goods which he then controlled: ownership consisted in boundary, disposition, and initiative exercised by a unified agent over a limited space. For Marx the capitalist controls the boundary of his factory (or factories), determining who is allowed in (hiring) and who is expelled (firing). Within the enterprise, he sees that the individual jobs are done and allocates resources, ordering the whole, to that end; and he controls the output: boundary, disposition, and initiative are the three axes of private property.

The major difference is that for Locke, the ousiodic structure of individual ownership is a good thing; indeed, it provides the ontological framework for its justification. For Marx, such ousiodically-structured ownership is evil, and needs to be replaced by communal ownership—which I would argue, is not “ownership” at all. But that is a different story, a different path.

29. Marx and the Communists

Augustine, we saw, feared the “just now,” the modo (da me castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo, #16); Marx, as a “modern” philosopher, turns to it. The single property of the modo which provokes these opposite reactions is its position between the past and the future. For those who think the future will be like the past, the modo poses no special problem; but Augustine and Marx are too honest for such lazy platitudes. Augustine likes his playboy past, and fears a virtuous future; Marx deplores the past, which is nothing but a long history of class struggle, and sees the present moment, the modo, as the possibility of a different future.

At the moment in 1848 when Marx (along with Engels, to be sure) writes The Communist Manifesto, capitalism has cut through the kaleidoscopic disguises of feudal class oppression: instead of a motley of multiple authorities, religious and secular, and varying obligations to each, we now (modo) have just two groups in naked confrontation: factory workers and factory owners, proletarians and capitalists—or, in ancient words which still apply, matter and form.

Just those two, except for two groups of mind-workers. Non-owners who work with their minds—intellectuals—fall outside, yet victim to, the governing binary of owners and workers. Outside because they are neither proletarians (whose labor is primarily manual) nor owners; victims of it because they must align themselves with one of its two main groups. Either they become apologists for capitalism (in the tradition of the political economists of Marx’s day), or they set their allegiance to the workers and become—Communists.

So where does the Communist stand in Marx’s modo? At the center—for it is the Communist who will push the abject past into a better future. But a center is many things, and to get a grip on them we must turn to Hegel’s treatment of das Zentrum in his Logic. His dialectic is too complex to be followed out in detail here, but centers are basically classified by the kinds of agency they exhibit.

Any place where things come together can be called a “center;” on the simplest level, a center is merely a locus, such as a crossroads, and exercises no agency. Even this kind of passive center is fraught, however; for its lack of agency means an absence of exclusion, so one never knows what is going to show up. In certain versions of African-American lore, you may come across the devil himself at a crossroads.

But centers can also exercise various types of agency. The sun, through its gravitational pull, keeps the planets moving around it and serves as the center of the resulting celestial system, making it a “solar” system. Here the center exercises what we may call a “balancing” function among diverse forces (the various inertias of the planets), and so holds together that of which it is the center.

Finally, the center may also gain the power to exclude certain forces, rather than balancing all of them, as if the sun could somehow throw Neptune out of the solar system. At that point, it draws a boundary: its balancing of different forces becomes ousiodic disposition. The plenary center is an ousiodic form, which draws boundaries, controls whatever is within them, and manages interactions with the world outside.

Hegel presents these three kinds of centrality as stages of a dialectical process: to be a “center” is to be engaged in a development from mere locus to ousiodic form. A center which is going to maintain itself as a center must deal with forces converging on it which are too strong for it, and it must do this either by balancing such a force against the available countervailing forces, as the sun balances gravitational attraction against planetary inertia, or—when no countervailing force is present—by excluding a disruptive force altogether, as do ousiodic forms.

It is clear from the Manifesto that Marx took Communists to be central in the first, least active way. The Communist is the one who, not being a worker himself, is able to acquaint himself with the general characteristics of the class struggle at a particular moment in time (modo), which means knowing about the many isolated struggles that are going on just now in various factories across Europe and the world, informing each about the others. The Communist for Marx is thus a kind of teacher, like the Pullman porters who informed African-Americans in each town their train passed through about what was going on “down the line.” In this way they stitched together what eventually became one of the very few successful revolutions in human history.

Marx’s Communists inevitably had to do a certain amount of balancing, for an honest discussion of what was going on in some other town might well include the news, which in fact was a judgment, that that struggle was on the brink of success, while one’s local struggle was still unripe and should, instead of moving forward, hold off and support the others.

The balancing eventually required eliminating certain forces altogether, as unworthy of inclusion or as too dangerous for it. At first this exclusion was from the revolutionary center itself, as when the Communists excluded the social democrats (weak, unworthy) and, later, the Mensheviks (dangerous to the Revolution). Once the Bolsheviks were in control of the Russian state apparatus, exclusionary tendencies continued and were directed against the whole country: a national counter-system of prisons, gulags, and mental institutions became necessary conditions for the state, and—thus dependent on its internal enemies—it eventually, for many reasons, collapsed.

Marx, who was not good at predictions (he should have stayed with Hegel’s take on dialectics and restricted it to the past) failed to see that the Communists could not remain what he took them to be—teachers of the workers—and would have to assume, to great evil, a “leading role” in society. The Revolution could no more remain emancipatory than markets can stay free.