A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  When the state Marxist traditions collapsed or disappeared into impotence, it became much easier to concentrate on Marx’s texts without the risk of various official interpreters interrupting. But the dark tradition that signed a contract for Marx over a large part of the twentieth century inevitably raises the question of what there is in his works that could inspire such a catastrophic development. That question will soon also be asked here. But, like the question of what is still useful and capable of development in his works, this will require a careful study of the texts.

  The Sum Total of Marx

  Marx built no system. He was, on the other hand, constantly working on his grand theory of society. This theory occupied him for almost forty years, and he still was reshaping it at the end of his life. In the foreword to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy from 1859, he formulated what he called his ‘thread’ through the research. Many of his followers made this thread a guiding principle. This entailed a great change. Threads are followed to find a way out of the labyrinth of society. But many of Marx’s followers seemed instead to find a map that they could then supplement and change (or ‘develop’) more or less arbitrarily.

  Marx warned against temptation of finding a formal schema in his work. Only careful study of the full diversity of reality provides real knowledge. He himself became a major specialist of the capitalist epoch as far as he managed to follow its development.

  Capital stands at the centre of this work. It is not, as many believe, simply a work about economics, but deals with society in its various ramifications; it is just as much sociology and modern history, and to a certain extent also political science and cultural history. Through the term ‘character mask’, it contains an important bit of social psychology; in Marx’s opinion, it does not matter if the capitalists are greedy, but the system drives them to act as if they were.

  The concept of class was at the centre of Marx’s interest early on. The rhetorical flourish in the Communist Manifesto that all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle was not simply a slogan, but a powerful exhortation to realize the crucial significance of social classes and class antagonism in history. The class relations that Marx studied in detail are those specific to capitalism, or more precisely the relationship between the three classes that dominate the means of production: landowners, capitalists, and workers. The power of the landowners dates back to earlier historical stages, but changes character in this new society. Owing to their power over the land, they reap a portion of the profits, of which the capitalists run off with the lion’s share. The workers create profits through their labour, and receive wages that make it possible for them to survive and reproduce themselves. By associating in trade unions, they can secure a somewhat larger share. This pushes the development of the forces of production, as does legislation forbidding inhuman working conditions. The workers can thus produce more in a shorter time. For this reason, technology must be developed and scientific research must be engaged.

  Rapidly increasing productivity is the chief achievement of capitalism. The dark side is the lack of freedom and the destitution it brings the working class. Even the capitalists are victims of the compulsion to constantly guard their positions and to continuously rationalize production. All other occupational categories in society are affected as well: ‘All that is solid melts into air.’

  Capitalism creates its own world of illusions. Marx calls this commodity fetishism; this means that passive objects – commodities – appear as living, while people (that is, those who produce these commodities) on the contrary seem inactive. Commodity fetishism is capitalism’s own religion. Like all religions, it is humanity’s spontaneous way of both making sense of and finding comfort in a world that otherwise seems as mysterious as it is threatening. What was once called Fate or God is called the Market in capitalism.

  Humanity’s relationship with nature is changed as a result of the capitalist mode of production. It is itself a part of nature, living off what nature produces, at the same time as it exceeds nature, extracting more and more through its creative power. But capitalism creates a widening gap between humanity and nature; nature is treated so that its products become maximally profitable without regard to the conditions for its continued existence.

  According to Marx, there is also a self-destructive dynamic in the capitalist system. Capital appropriates the surplus value that labour creates, but surplus value is at the same time a growing burden that allows dead labour (labour that has already created value) to encroach upon living labour. The past weighs ever heavier on the productive present. The system must finally be crushed under its own weight.

  Marx is speaking of a tendency here, but makes no predictions. He can, if anything, be compared with a geologist who declares that a major earthquake must occur sooner or later somewhere along the San Andreas Fault in California. In practice, Marx prepared himself for the fall of capitalism as soon as the clouds of crisis piled up over larger or smaller parts of the world. So it was in 1848–49, and again in 1856–57. His life in the 1860s was devoted to research and the International, but the Paris Commune in 1871 readied him once again for the great metamorphosis.

  Marx was no politician. He saw politics as a changeable form for the actual content of society; his ideas about its possibilities were also quickly changeable. Only those who made him a system builder have padlocked him into certain statements he made in definite situations and transformed them into dogmas. He used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ both around 1850 and in connection with the Paris Commune. The idea was that the working class that had seized power in a revolution would safeguard it against all possible competitors during a brief transition period in order to prepare the way for a new classless society. During the more than twenty years between the revolutions of 1848–49 and the Paris Commune, the concept faded away. Marx was then more interested in the opportunities that universal suffrage could open for the rapidly growing working class.

  Marx never saw himself as the leader of a revolution. Liberation was the act of the working class itself. He would contribute clear, unbiased insight into how society worked, and what opportunities were opening up for the oppressed. The idea that a small elite of intellectuals, schooled in the craft of revolution, would lead a firmly constructed party to a socialist society was foreign to him. During his lifetime, incidentally, only the beginning of the modern party system could be seen.

  One controversial question in all Marx research is the question of alienation. In the opinion of many, the concept only belongs to a few early writings, above all the Manuscripts. As soon as Marx abandoned the idea that humanity had an essence that could be realized in the future, later talk of alienation (Entfremdung, Entäussering) became only meaningless reminiscences. This is a mistake. Marx did not say that humanity did not have an essence; he said that its essence is formed by the society they live in. Furthermore, one of his important ideas is that capitalism creates immeasurable wealth but still forces the worker into destitution. In a classless society, workers would be able to enjoy the prosperity that now only the bourgeoisie and the upper classes do. Even the people of India, he says – blessed by the British with the driving forces of modern development but at the same time deeply oppressed – have a decent existence within reach. For Marx, alienation is the distance between possibility and current reality.

  Another concept his interpreters have difficulty agreeing on is the dialectic. Here as well, many stop before a large either/or: either the dialectic must govern everything from the class struggle to water that freezes into ice at a certain temperature, or it only has a decorative function in Marx’s writings. It is not so simple. Marx said neither yes nor no to Engels’s innovation of a natural dialectic; the essential thing is that it plays no role whatsoever in his own writings despite his commenting quite a lot on both nature and the natural sciences. On the other hand, the dialectic is extremely important for the entire structure of Capital. As Hegel did in b
oth the Phenomenology and Logic, he followed the path from the simple to the increasingly complex. For the sake of historical concreteness, he also wove in sections on, for example, the working day and the development of machinery under capitalism. The totality must take on the form of a work of art, he himself said.

  Other dialectical core concepts also figure often in Marx’s texts. Form and content are central: he uses them more often than the conventional and misleading base and superstructure. Material production and the class relations connected with it constitute society. Politics – like the legal apparatus, religion, art, and the predominant way of thinking – are the forms of this content. The forms are in no way passive; it is in and through them that the conscious life of humanity is played out. But they are always dependent upon the content.

  Surface and depth are other dialectical concepts that have an important place in Marx. Use value is the sensuous surface, while (exchange) value is not visible on the outside. In the second edition of the first volume of Capital, Marx clarifies that value in turn also has depth and surface. The surface is the exchange value that the constantly changing price constitutes; under that is the value that, according to Marx, is determined by the amount of labour put into its production.

  The relationship between the forces and the relations of production can also be grasped dialectically. The capitalist mode of production pushes the forces of production towards constantly greater heights, compelled by its own hunger for surplus value. But the growth of the forces of production also exposes capitalism to increasingly harsher strains.

  The key concept in Hegel’s dialectic – Aufhebung, with its triple meaning of abolition, preservation, and lifting up to a higher level – is also important for Marx. Like Hegel, he sees every major social change as an Aufhebung of what previously existed. From first to last, a revolution worth the name is an Aufhebung. Even capitalism will someday be abolished.43

  Lastly, we can say that Marx underestimated the ability of capitalism to integrate new technologies. He himself lived to see the start of the second Industrial Revolution, fully realizing the potential of both electricity and the chemical industry. But he did not imagine that they both would give capitalism a new life. Even less did he imagine the third revolution – of electronics and biotechnology – that began in the second half of the twentieth century. This revitalized capitalism as well. It was during this same period that the Marx-quoting ‘really existing socialism’ foundered.

  The study of Capital over the last two decades has increasingly emphasized the significance of the relations of production at the expense of the forces of production. This is a major reversal from Kautsky’s belief, grounded in biology, of technological development that would soon burst capitalism from within. Die neue Marx-Lektüre – the new reading of Marx – shifts the emphasis to capitalism with its inherent ability for renewal. Attention has thus been directed towards features of his theory whose consequences Marx himself did not completely draw out. He was entirely too keen on imagining a revolution behind the next corner of development.

  Marx said he was not writing recipes for the kitchen of the future.44 On the other hand, he said that the society he was living in had to give way to an entirely different sort of society. Capitalism was not an eternal condition. It had arisen once centuries ago, and it would go under in the same way.

  His explanations of this new society are few and sporadic. The labour of the future must be universal and free, at the same time characterized by the seriousness that distinguishes freedom, he said in the Grundrisse. The realm of freedom should spread alongside that of necessity, it says in Capital. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,’ as it is written in Critique of the Gotha Programme.

  But what kind of statements are these? Are they of the same type as calculations of future solar eclipses? Absolutely not; they said nothing about a point in time. Nor are they appeals to action of the ‘Let us come together to create a better society’ type. If anything, one can think of the magnificent phrase in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that people create their own history – not freely, but based on immediately given circumstances. The circumstances are given, but what we do with them is not.

  How, for example, do we make use of the insight that society produces riches never before seen at the same time as the mercilessness of class society means that so many live impoverished, hard, often unendurable lives? For Marx, this insight is enough for people to join together and, under the given circumstances, create a new and better society.

  Above all, Marx was a critic of the capitalist social system. The word ‘critic’ bears Kant’s stamp. Marx wanted to lay bare the conditions for all of society, the foundations of its strength and its vulnerability. The project as such was almost too large, and given Marx’s ambitions he could not completely bring it to a close.45

  Marx completed much else. He was a brilliant journalist and author of shorter works. There, his stylistic mastery reached outstanding heights. One need only think of the first section of the Communist Manifesto, his words about religion as the opium of the people, or the chain of aphoristically incisive phrases in the introduction to The Eighteenth Brumaire.

  One important foundation for his linguistic brilliance was the wide reading he conducted early on, which reached from Ancient Greece up to the time he lived in, from Aeschylus to Balzac. He constantly scattered literary quotes in his text, preferring to do so in the original.

  His wide reading in different types of nonfiction became even more impressive with time. He was a tireless devourer of books who fearlessly dove into one technical field after another as soon as it appeared important to him for the project he was working on. This was more than diligence; it was a kind of obsession. When some time in the late 1860s he was asked his favourite pastime, he wrote ‘in Büchern wühlen’ (Bookworming).46 He submitted this information in what were called ‘Confessions’, which young women gladly harassed their families and their friends with at that time. Here, it was his daughter Jennychen who demanded his responses; her sister Laura wanted the same, and he varied his answers somewhat but not by much.

  We already know his favourite poets: Dante, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Among the prose authors, he mentions not only Balzac but also Diderot, Lessing, and Hegel. The two real-life heroes he indicates are an ill-matched pair: Spartacus, the leader of the great slave uprising of antiquity, and Kepler, the scientific genius. He takes his heroine from Goethe: Gretchen, the victim of Faust’s perfidious lust. His responses to the questions about his favourite masculine and feminine qualities run in the same style: strength and weakness. This is a response befitting a Victorian family man, but hardly Karl Marx.

  The maxim he saw as his own is classic for a humanist: Nihil humani a me alienum puto (Nothing human is alien to me). His motto could be a helpful memento for those who see a dogmatist in him: De omnibus dubitandum (Question everything).

  These ‘confessions’, of course, say nothing more than that Marx wanted to appear this way to his family. But even a self-portrait of this kind has informational value. Marx never wrote anything closer to an autobiography than these ‘confessions’.

  Marx and Posterity

  How does the historical Marx relate to the image – idol or bogeyman – that posterity has created of him? This question cannot have any definite answer. The person answering it themselves has only an image of Marx – however nuanced it may be – and that image is marked by the time and the environment that person is living in. But there is nevertheless much we can say with certainty. Once he was dead, he could no longer sum up his work himself; others had to take on the task. He can be glimpsed behind Marxism – or rather, the different kinds of Marxism.

  Long afterwards, and with access to nearly all of his work, we can compare what he and his followers asserted. We can see that he emphasized the difference between his and Darwin’s theories more powerfully than Kautsky. We can see that his views on party and pa
rty leadership differed markedly from Lenin’s. But can we then say that Marx had no presence in what either Kautsky or Lenin did?

  He did, of course. There are important elements in Marx’s works that reverberate in both Kautsky and Lenin. Despite the abundant intellectual wealth in Capital, there is a tendency in it towards ignoring the concrete problems of society that becomes even clearer in Marx’s political and journalistic work. Nationalism is a central example. It began its modern career sometime after the French Revolution; German culture was an important breeding ground. Marx condemned all this as reactionary drivel. Similarly, he was blind to the nationalist overtones in the Second French Empire. It was above all the rural masses in the countryside, otherwise untouched by the Enlightenment, who supported Napoleon III in the frequent referendums. If the occasional worker also supported the emperor, this was due to his false rhetoric that hinted at a social conscience. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the nationalist mass movements that would leave a mark on the twentieth began to take form. They competed, often successfully, with the workers’ movement on its own territory. What is more, the demand for socialism could be united with national enthusiasm.

  Marx was not solely responsible for the clumsiness – defencelessness, in fact – in the face of this nationalism. But he was one of those responsible. He and his fellow thinkers did not see that nationalism was just as natural an element in modern society as its opposite, internationalism. In 1914, nationalism commanded almost the entire political field. Even most social democrats and socialists were seized by a bloody fervour for their own countries.47