A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  Marx and Engels not only gained enemies for their new, hard line, but also a number of enthusiastic adherents. Some of them were in their immediate proximity in Brussels. The most important of them was Wilhelm Wolff, called ‘Lupus’, who would come to be the closest to them of all. In contrast to Marx and Engels, Wolff had painful personal experiences of the mercilessness of class society. His parents were smallholders in Silesia; in practice, serfs subordinate to a harsh landowner. Despite opposition from above, Wolff succeeded in studying and at long last becoming a private teacher. Latin and Greek were his specialities; here, Marx and he could meet in a lifelong interest in the classics.

  But Wolff’s path continued to be thorny. For several years, he was imprisoned in a fortress during the so-called ‘persecution of demagogues’ that was mainly directed against radical students and academics during the 1820s and 1830s. He came to Brussels fleeing a Prussian prison sentence, and soon became an important member of the Correspondence Committee. He had something that both Marx and Engels were in great need of after settling accounts with Weitling: an ideal combination of lower-class background, solid and multifarious knowledge, and a good ability to express himself in writing. He remained a loyal supporter until his death in 1864. Engels wrote a series of articles extolling him in the 1870s; they were also included in the edition of Wolff’s collected works that Franz Mehring published in 1909 on the 100th anniversary of his birth.72

  One of Wolff’s works lives on indirectly, in the history of literature. He was the one who wrote the account of the weavers’ uprising in Silesia, his home province, that Gerhart Hauptmann built his drama Die Weber on.

  Another name that should be mentioned is that of Georg Weerth. Weerth was born in 1822 and was still a young man when he turned up in Brussels. He was the son of a priest, but, when his father became ill, Georg could not continue his studies and went into commerce. Cotton became his speciality. Through his occupation, he learned French and English, and supplemented his education with diverse university lectures. He entered literary circles and was encouraged in his writing. For a period, he worked in England, where he got to know Engels personally. He had already become a communist by the time he turned up in Brussels, and distinguished himself as the foremost poet of the new movement. For Marx, who so bitterly missed the literary social life of Paris, having him close by was a comfort.

  The remainder of Weerth’s short life was turbulent. Like Wolff, he was extremely active in the revolution of 1848–9, thrown into prison for his writings, and came out a crushed man who abandoned both poetry and politics. He sought refuge in the Caribbean for new business there, and died in Cuba at the age of thirty-four. On his tombstone in Havana, it says he was a close friend and fellow thinker of Marx and Engels.73

  Through people such as Weerth and Wolff, Marx and Engels built a small community for their activities. Weerth, who was constantly travelling for his profession, became especially useful because with his personal warmth, he could keep the spirit alive among sympathizers in other towns.

  The Correspondence Committee could thereby also better serve its ultimate purpose, namely to imbue the Bund der Gerechten with Marx and Engels’s ideas and to make the organization ripe for their type of communism.

  How this succeeded is the subject of the next chapter. But before we get that far, we must stop to consider a work that Marx was writing at the time – because in the middle of all the turbulence, he managed to develop his critique of society and of economics a great deal further in Brussels.

  The book is called Misère de la philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy) and it was written in French.

  The Poverty of Philosophy

  Pavel Annenkov, the Russian who reported, wide-eyed, Marx’s fit of rage against Weitling in 1846, wrote a letter to Marx from Paris six months later, on 1 November. Annenkov had just read Proudhon’s 1846 book Philosophie de la misère (The Philosophy of Poverty), and he was of two minds. Of course, he saw that the book contained a great deal of dross about God, about Providence, and about the contradiction between intellect and matter. But the economic portion of the book was rich in interest. Never before had Annenkov seen, in black and white, how civilization could not abandon what had been won through the division of labour, machinery, competition, and so on. But, when it came to the disadvantages of the system, which Proudhon also convincingly pointed out, the remedy he proposed was again one of his own old dogmas. Annenkov could not follow him there, and therefore he now asked Marx for guidance.

  He concluded the letter with a long and eloquent farewell of the type possible only in French. It concerned Jenny Marx, who had received him – a foreigner whose only merit was ‘loving and respecting you, Monsieur Marx’ – with such hospitality.74

  Marx did not respond before the end of December. At first, he had had difficulty getting hold of the book, and now he had still only managed to skim it. His response was as might be expected, he said – but that response was ten pages long and already provided the outline of the reckoning he would soon publish in book form.75 The manuscript of the book, entirely in French, was begun at the same time as the response to Annenkov and was completed in early April. Marx thus was not disturbed by his otherwise quite inhibiting demands for perfection. Perhaps it was the polemic which now – as it did both previously and later – made it easier for him to bring it to a close. As we have seen, where personal reckonings were concerned he was quick to send his manuscript to print.

  But, in content and substance, The Poverty of Philosophy is a more serious work than both The Holy Family and The German Ideology. What Marx had won through his previous account with German idealist philosophy was a kind of philosophically imprinted method, and he used it now both in his criticism of Proudhon and of the economic theory in general. Even in the letter to Annenkov, certain main points can be divined. Society, Marx said, is the result of people’s ‘actions réciproques’ (their reciprocal actions). Different societies had different forms; these forms could not be freely chosen, but the former presupposes the latter. Productive forces constitute ‘la base de toute leur histoire’ (the basis for their entire history).

  The latter is an interpretation he would come to modify later on in his life.

  In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx follows Proudhon’s work closely. After a brief, ironic foreword there follows an initial chapter on ‘a scientific discovery’ and a second on ‘the metaphysics of political economy’. The tone is sharply polemical, and sometimes condescending. It is a text that must have wounded the victim of the attack.

  Proudhon evidently had great ambitions with his Philosophie de la misère. On the one hand, he claimed that he was bringing an original economic theory. On the other, above all, he wanted to develop a method under inspiration from German idealist philosophy, in particular Hegel.76

  Marx completely rejects the results that Proudhon had achieved. Not a word of praise escaped his lips. It was a frontal attack.77

  Marx mobilizes both his enormous and rapidly growing reading and his great analytical ability to interpret complicated texts. He could show that Proudhon’s bright hopes of a speedy transition to a society without injustices and poverty had already been proposed by several authors in England, chief among them John Francis Bray with his 1839 Labour’s wrongs and labour’s remedy. Bray had the same idea as Proudhon that a condition of equality, decency, and contentment was within reach if only people would make full use of the resources that contemporary development offered. With a few simple arrangements, people would be able to switch work efforts fairly.

  Marx objected that Bray’s societal ideal was only ‘the reflection of the actual world’ and asserted that ‘therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is only an embellished shadow of it’.78 Marx’s metaphors in these lines deserve to be remembered: base, shadow, and reflection are all here. Optical images were and remained important for Marx. And we will return to the word ‘base’.

  A metaphor that faces
an entirely different direction is ‘Robinson’, after Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, in which the shipwrecked Robinson builds up a rudimentary civilization step by step on a deserted island. Proudhon, like many leading economists, was trying to make large, complex contexts intelligible by bringing them down to the individual level. As individuals functioned in their everyday context, so also in principle did all of society. Without further ado, he adds a ‘collaborator’ to the solitary person Proudhon first introduced. Marx likens the trick to Defoe’s. In order for Robinson to be able to complete his societal project, he also needs another person; conveniently, an ideal servant – christened Friday – appears.79

  According to Marx, we must always presuppose society. Without society, there are no individuals; consequently, no people either. People live in structures they take over from previous generations, and to which they change through their own activity. Even at a somewhat higher level, Marx opposed what we could call Proudhon’s reductionism. Based on the division of labour in the factory, Proudhon could side with the division of labour in the whole of society. Marx objected that it was the affair of management to divide labour in the factory, while competition pushed forward degrees and types of specialization in society at large.80

  Another important difference between Proudhon and Marx concerned the view of the interaction between production and need. According to Proudhon, they both condition each other; he seemed to assume that there was a natural tendency towards an increase both of production and of human need. Marx, on the other hand, asserted that it was collective production that changed the conditions for human life. People produce something new that would not have existed without their work. New and growing needs are the result of more diversified production. Needs, in other words, are a dependent variable, according to Marx; on the other hand, production is an independent variable.

  No product is useful in and of itself except that it is useful for a consumer, he said. Consumer stands against producer. Consumers always have to be convinced that they need what is being produced. If supply and demand are not at all in balance, the result will be shortage or surplus.81

  Proudhon asserted that producers and consumers were free in their activity. No, Marx said. As long as the producers are subject to the division of labour, they are compelled to sell. In the same way, consumers are bound to their means and their needs. A worker who buys potatoes and a mistress who buys lace can imagine that they are free, but are acting only in accordance with their social position.

  Proudhon claimed he was making an original contribution to economic theory. Marx found that the results were merely a number of abstractions of small explanatory value, and plays off a long line of British and French economists against him. He placed special importance on the contributions of David Ricardo. Proudhon polemicized against Ricardo, calling him a cynic. Of course, Ricardo was cynical, Marx said – cynical and clear. The costs of buildings and machines were no different from the expenses for the workers. It was a cynicism that lay in the thing itself, and not the words. Proudhon tried to get away from the mercilessness of capitalist production with dreams about a ‘revolutionary theory’ of proletarian emancipation. In fact, he had only stopped at the formula for ‘the present enslavement of the worker’.82

  Out of Ricardo’s theories, Proudhon seemed to draw his own conclusions that the present society was heading towards increasing equality. This was due to a fundamental mistake, Marx said. He was confusing the value of the labour required to produce a given object and the value of that same labour on the market. In short, he did not see the difference between the use value and the exchange value of the labour. For example: if a given amount of grain costs two working days instead of one, this did not mean that the amount of nutrition doubled – on the other hand, the amount of labour did.

  Proudhon’s confusion also occurs in Adam Smith, Marx said. On the other hand, Ricardo was entirely consistent. The Poverty of Philosophy testifies eloquently that Marx had devoted an in-depth study to Ricardo since the days of the Manuscripts.

  Proudhon let slip that labour was something vague. Marx objected: ‘Labour is not a vague thing; it is always some definite labour, it is never labour in general that is sold and bought.’ But when it is sold and bought, it itself is a commodity. Marx argued that Proudhon was seized with uncertainty in the face of this double essence and sacrificed the basis of his entire theoretical construction: labour time as the yardstick of value. ‘And for the sake of life to lose the reasons for living!’ Marx added derisively, with a quote from the poet Juvenal reproduced in the purest Latin.83

  Marx’s text is scarcely intended for a proletarian reading group. But his criticism shows that he had arrived at a distinction that only several years later he would put into his own words: the one between concrete and abstract labour. In capitalist society, abstract labour is sold per hour against wages. Concrete labour is the production of a definite product, whether it is a piece of cloth or a machine part.

  Proudhon’s view of society is optimistic. Just under the surface of injustices and workers’ poverty, the possibilities of an equal and just society open up. Marx is not as optimistic: the antagonism between worker and capitalist characterizes society and is inevitable until the day the workers rebel.

  Both are agreed on one point: technological development is an awesome force that transforms humanity’s living conditions from the bottom up. But the consequences they draw diverge. Marx emphasized that the anarchic relations under capitalism have irrational consequences. Machines make it easier to produce luxuries than commodities necessary for life. He chose a topical example: hard alcohol was threatening to supersede wine and beer. Governments were fighting against pure spirits, ‘the European opium’, but ultimately it would be the economy that decided the matter.84 Marx’s example shows that he was marked by the conditions in areas where wine and beer traditionally had the dominant position but were now facing stiffer competition from distilled drinks; in countries such as Sweden and Russia that typically drank schnapps and vodka, the same changes were not taking place.

  But the example itself does not need to be examined in detail. The important thing is the critique. Increased productivity did not mean, as Proudhon thought, that things would automatically get better for everyone and that what was necessary for the lives of the poor would automatically become cheaper. There were no economic mechanisms that would result in the use values and exchange values of the products meeting. On the contrary, luxuries or items that were dangerous to health could very well be profitable. What generates profit is produced, whether it favours everyone or only a few and regardless of whether it helps or harms the consumer.

  The division of labour is another area in which Proudhon and Marx had the same fundamental assessment but held opposing interpretations of contemporary development. Both argued that narrow working tasks means that individuals were limited in their development in an unfortunate way. But according to Proudhon, mechanical development meant that everyone would at last be able to be active in a way that would do their inherent possibilities justice.

  Marx pointed out that on the contrary, the machines in England had meant an even stricter division of labour. He clarified: it was typical of modern society that it ‘engenders specialities, specialists, and with them craft-idiocy’. At the same time, it was wrong to see the machines as conductors of economic development. ‘The machines are as little an economic category as the oxen that draw the plough.’ They are both simply a productive force. On the other hand, the factory – which is built on the use of machines – is ‘a social production relation, an economic category’.85

  Once again, we see how his reckoning with Proudhon led Marx to distinctions and clarifications that were previously missing in his texts. Here, for the first time, the term ‘social relations of production’ turns up. In The German Ideology, he and Engels had made use of the broader and more indeterminate word Verkehr, which if anything corresponds to ‘traffic’ or ‘commun
ication’. ‘Social relations of production’ (rapports socials de production) is much clearer: it concerns how owners, workers, and work equipment relate to each other in production.

  It is worth recalling that the word Verhältnis in Hegel’s logic has a particular meaning, different from the related word Beziehung. Beziehung denotes any relationship at all, however temporary (for example, the one between the blossoming meadowsweet that is just now in my field of vision and white house to its right). Verhältnis, on the other hand, refers to a fixed context that changes as soon as one of its parts changes. A living body with the organs necessary for life is a good example; the relationship between parent and child is another. The parts in a Verhältnis condition and mark each other; they are part of what, in the language of logic, is called an ‘internal relation’.86

  Marx distanced himself from Hegel’s conception of the world. But these foundations of the Hegelian conceptual apparatus were crucial for his arguments.

  His reasoning involved machines being able to take on another meaning in another type of society. Through their standing in a factory owned and governed by a factory owner and served by a number of workers, they take on a particular content; they are part of a definite system. They are a part of a capitalist context that, according to Marx, is characterized by its anarchy.

  He thus said here, clearly, that machines as such – regardless of the context they are used in – are not an economic category. He gives them no designation other than forces of production. We could say that they belonged to the field of technology; in that case, an important conclusion would be that technology and economics are not indissolubly linked together. It is, in fact, a necessary consequence of the conviction that development in capitalism prepares the ground for catastrophe and opens the way towards an entirely different type of society.