PyramidHead
Contributor
For the benefit of those who might be interested, here's my limited understanding of the basic ideas espoused by Karl Marx. I'll try to keep it simple, but there are some important concepts that are obviously not in the brains of most people who think they know what Marx said or what socialism is supposed to be. I will do my best to lay them out here. Where there are places that refute extremely common misconceptions, I'll try to call those out in bold.
Marx's major contribution to political economics was to highlight an aspect of society that was not seriously looked at by anyone prior to him. Class struggle had been talked about for a thousand years by everyone from Plato to Adam Smith, but the determinants of class were always either wealth or political power. Rich versus poor, nobility versus peasants, powerful versus powerless. Marx didn't deny that these were useful distinctions to make, but he wasn't interested in them. Marx was not interested in dividing people into classes based on their wealth or their political power. The contemporary "1% versus the 99%" is not a Marxist notion in the slightest; it is closer to a classical French idea than anything Marx wanted to look at.
No, Marx had a different breakdown of class, and he set it up around something else entirely. To understand what that was, I'll give you a rundown of the insight that he started from, the piece of the puzzle he claimed was left out by everybody else at that time.
He says, in every community of human beings, regardless of size, be it a family, a town, a country, an industry, or a tribe, you will find the following things are true:
1. There are people who make or provide the goods and services that humans need and want for their survival and pleasure
2. These people are easily able to produce more than they themselves are able to consume, thus creating a surplus
3. There are also people who don't produce anything, and live off the surplus created by the first group of people
There are no exceptions to be found anywhere in history to this, at least after the agricultural revolution. Before then, it was harder (but not impossible) to create a surplus. In terms of demographics, the people who benefit from the surplus could include young children, the elderly, the sick, tribal elders, bosses, managers, politicians, and any other social function that consumes necessary goods and services, none of which they produce themselves. Marx then makes the following claim. He says, what differentiates one economic system from another is what happens to this surplus. That is, what is the fate of the stuff that is produced by people above and beyond what they need to sustain themselves? He gives five examples.
I. Communism. The people who make the surplus are the same as the people who claim it and distribute it. This was the norm for many tribal systems, for instance.
II. Ancient. Richard Wolff would call this "self-employment". I make shoes all day, and the shoes I make are used by myself and my family, but also traded with others who don't make shoes, in exchange for things I don't make, like bread. Still, the surplus of what I produce is controlled by me, not anybody else, and I don't have a boss who tells me how or when to make shoes.
III. Feudalism. The people who make the surplus live on land owned by others, who don't make any of it, but they own that surplus and keep it for themselves. This went down in a few different ways, in practice. For instance, maybe three days out of the week I work on my apportioned plot of land to make necessities for my household, and the next three days I work on the big estate farms making a surplus for the lord. Either way, I'm tied to the land and I surrender the excess of my productive output to somebody else, who did not himself actually produce it.
IV. Slavery. Masters take all the surplus produced by slaves, who they own and provide a meager portion for as they see fit.
V. Capitalism. Employers start with money, and in order to generate more money they buy materials, equipment, and labor to produce something they can sell. They hire employees to use the materials/equipment according to the employer's wishes, producing a product or service that belongs entirely and instantaneously to the employer, who sells it for more money than it takes to repeat the production process, and subsequently decides what to do with the surplus.
Notice two things. The first is that out of all these systems, only the first and the second place the appropriation and distribution of surplus output directly under the control of its producers. The third, fourth, and fifth are situations where the surplus is produced by one party and appropriated by another party who uses it as they see fit. Marx's term for this latter relationship is "exploitation". Exploitation does not refer to the kindness of the employer, the working conditions, or the generosity of the compensation. For Marx, ANY system in which the producers give up their surplus output to non-producers is exploitative, not due to any personal defect on the part of those involved, but as a feature of the system in its structure.
The second thing is that the form of the surplus under question changes in capitalism compared to the other forms. Under feudalism, for example, the surplus is literally an excess of some quantity of stuff, like grain or wool, that is taken directly from nature. Under capitalism, the surplus is represented by money, since that's what initiates the process: a capitalist uses money to buy raw materials, equipment, land, etc., and hires labor power to transform those things into a commodity he can exchange for more money. Of course, if the value of the commodity was the same as what he began with in terms of materials and labor costs, he would be back where he started. In order to accumulate more money, the commodity must therefore be sold at a higher price than what it cost to make it.
This is uncontroversial and is agreed upon by any economist, at least on a basic level. However, what Marx did was to ask a question that had never been seriously considered. Where does that extra amount included in the price of a commodity, relative to what it took to produce it via labor power and raw materials, actually come from? There are two immediately obvious options. Either:
a. Raw materials, equipment, land, etc. costs (say) $100, labor power costs (say) $100, the final product is therefore worth $200, but the capitalist overcharges the customers by charging $250.
b. Raw materials, equipment, land, etc. costs (say) $100, labor power costs (say) $100, but the final product is worth more than $200[/U], so the capitalist charges what the product is worth by charging $250.
Marx is adamant that scenario B is the case. When a pile of wool sitting next to a complicated machine in a building somewhere is transformed into an article of clothing, it GAINS value. When computer hardware, cooling equipment, and a coding environment is transformed into a software application, it YIELDS extra value compared to what it started with. The soil on its own, in combination with some seed pods and a bucket of water, doesn't have as MUCH value as an edible vegetable. In all cases, the end product is enhanced in some aspect, more than the sum of its parts, and the source of this extra value is obvious to Marx: it's the work that somebody did to make the raw materials into an item with an actual use. I'm greatly simplifying this, but in essence Marx is saying that Adam Smith and David Ricardo were right: the value of a thing is determined by the labor that went into making it. Marx did not originate this idea of value, nor did he use it in his theory without modification. For Smith and Ricardo, the value contained in a product is what was directly added by the concrete labor of whichever particular worker made it using his or her hands. Marx did not see value in these terms. He was more interested in the aggregate, society-wide, abstract labor (something like: the portion of available time and energy in a community that is allocated to making X instead of Y) for his analysis of value.
So, while societies tend to include people who work and people who don't, and the people who work make a surplus that sustains the people who don't, under capitalism this surplus passes through a form that differentiates it from the tangible, edible, wearable stuff that characterized the surplus for a feudal lord or a slave-master. In capitalism, the surplus is the value that a productive worker creates that is not recuperated in wages.
That is, in an hour on the job getting paid $15, since I would not be able to stay employed if I only made $15 worth of widgets (or less than $15 at that!), I am obliged as a condition of my employment to make more than $15 worth of widgets. If you like, you could imagine this demarcated in time. For 45 minutes each hour, I make $15 worth of widgets, whose value is recuperated in my wage; for the last 15 minutes each hour, I'm working for free. In Marx's view, it has to be this way. It's not a matter of my boss being greedy, or some companies being more egalitarian than others. Regardless of all that, an industrial capitalist MUST underpay his workers relative to the value they create. The entire operation depends on having more money at the end than at the beginning, and the only thing that adds value to raw materials, equipment, and human bodies in a room together is the goal-oriented productive labor that transforms them into commodities people need or want. As a consequence, the capitalist system is necessarily exploitative, even where it is regulated and progressively taxed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marx also spent a lot of time talking about how capitalists use the surplus they acquire through production. Importantly, the capitalist system does not maintain itself. It requires a constant influx of money as credit, a perpetually available pool of labor, a segment of the population with a monopoly on deadly violence (police, military, private security), and above all else a sustained campaign of education and indoctrination to keep workers in the position they are in. Apart from those extrinsic concerns, there are also workers whose job it is to continually recreate the conditions for production to happen: managers, secretaries, human resource specialists, bookkeepers, and all the others that Marx called "unproductive" labor (in that they do not literally produce anything, but merely help set the conditions for production). All of these needs can variously be met by capitalists through taxes, expenditures, dividends to shareholders, accumulation to expand the enterprise, grants to universities, lobbying, donations to charities and churches, and direct campaign contributions. Marxism says it's never as simple as "capitalists don't like government". When they have the surplus to pay for it, and they need it more than they need something else, like advertising, they are more than happy to utilize the government to protect their factories through police patrols, or to make their shipping costs cheaper by nationalizing the means of transportation--which is Amtrak.
In other situations, of course, capitalists would rather not be constrained by government influence, but that's not a principled objection to the idea itself of state power. It's a reaction to prevailing conditions, such as the need to automate something in order to compete with other capitalists, and not having enough surplus left over to do it after paying taxes. The stance of capitalists toward government is always relative to the freedom they have to divert portions of the surplus to various destinations as needed. If there is enough surplus to cover all the bases, they will gladly partner with any entity with the ability and willingness to renew again and again the capitalist cycle of production, and states are among the most reliable institutions in that regard. By itself, heavy state involvement in (or even ownership of) productive enterprises does not mean capitalism has been replaced by socialism. This is a myth. It has no basis in anything Marx ever wrote, and indeed he repudiated it whenever it arose. Marx was very clear that communism/socialism has nothing whatsoever to do with state ownership of production, and everything to do with the workers who produce the surplus (which non-workers live off) being in control of that surplus--how much is made, how it's made, and where it's distributed. A country where the workers surrender all of their productive output to a political party is exactly as socialist as one where they surrender it to a private owner, even if the party is transparently elected by the people, because the party is made up of people OTHER THAN the ones actually doing the work.
This is such a crucial point. No matter how democratic a representative or parliamentary body may be, as long as they have authority over the goods and services people work all day to produce, and did not lift a finger in literally producing them, socialism is nowhere to be found in the system.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To summarize, Marx believed that capitalism had failed to deliver on the promises of the French Revolution, and that it wasn't because of any defect in the morality of the people involved but a natural consequence of how surplus value is produced, appropriated, and distributed in this system. To actually deliver on the promises of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" that so many rallied behind as monarchs fell and independence was gained, Marx believed we would have to move beyond capitalism rather than continually trying to reform it. Like many others, he didn't see a big difference between being owned by a master as a slave and being rented by a capitalist as an employee. He never specified what a post-capitalist society would look like in its details, but favored actual communism--workers asserting control over the fruits of their work--as the way of arriving there, not state manipulation or authoritarian takeover. Much of what people associate with Marxism is actually Lenin's, Trotsky's, Stalin's, Mao's, or some other politician's revision of Marx to fit it into the mold of the existing bureaucracy, which Marx always opposed on principle.
Marx's major contribution to political economics was to highlight an aspect of society that was not seriously looked at by anyone prior to him. Class struggle had been talked about for a thousand years by everyone from Plato to Adam Smith, but the determinants of class were always either wealth or political power. Rich versus poor, nobility versus peasants, powerful versus powerless. Marx didn't deny that these were useful distinctions to make, but he wasn't interested in them. Marx was not interested in dividing people into classes based on their wealth or their political power. The contemporary "1% versus the 99%" is not a Marxist notion in the slightest; it is closer to a classical French idea than anything Marx wanted to look at.
No, Marx had a different breakdown of class, and he set it up around something else entirely. To understand what that was, I'll give you a rundown of the insight that he started from, the piece of the puzzle he claimed was left out by everybody else at that time.
He says, in every community of human beings, regardless of size, be it a family, a town, a country, an industry, or a tribe, you will find the following things are true:
1. There are people who make or provide the goods and services that humans need and want for their survival and pleasure
2. These people are easily able to produce more than they themselves are able to consume, thus creating a surplus
3. There are also people who don't produce anything, and live off the surplus created by the first group of people
There are no exceptions to be found anywhere in history to this, at least after the agricultural revolution. Before then, it was harder (but not impossible) to create a surplus. In terms of demographics, the people who benefit from the surplus could include young children, the elderly, the sick, tribal elders, bosses, managers, politicians, and any other social function that consumes necessary goods and services, none of which they produce themselves. Marx then makes the following claim. He says, what differentiates one economic system from another is what happens to this surplus. That is, what is the fate of the stuff that is produced by people above and beyond what they need to sustain themselves? He gives five examples.
I. Communism. The people who make the surplus are the same as the people who claim it and distribute it. This was the norm for many tribal systems, for instance.
II. Ancient. Richard Wolff would call this "self-employment". I make shoes all day, and the shoes I make are used by myself and my family, but also traded with others who don't make shoes, in exchange for things I don't make, like bread. Still, the surplus of what I produce is controlled by me, not anybody else, and I don't have a boss who tells me how or when to make shoes.
III. Feudalism. The people who make the surplus live on land owned by others, who don't make any of it, but they own that surplus and keep it for themselves. This went down in a few different ways, in practice. For instance, maybe three days out of the week I work on my apportioned plot of land to make necessities for my household, and the next three days I work on the big estate farms making a surplus for the lord. Either way, I'm tied to the land and I surrender the excess of my productive output to somebody else, who did not himself actually produce it.
IV. Slavery. Masters take all the surplus produced by slaves, who they own and provide a meager portion for as they see fit.
V. Capitalism. Employers start with money, and in order to generate more money they buy materials, equipment, and labor to produce something they can sell. They hire employees to use the materials/equipment according to the employer's wishes, producing a product or service that belongs entirely and instantaneously to the employer, who sells it for more money than it takes to repeat the production process, and subsequently decides what to do with the surplus.
Notice two things. The first is that out of all these systems, only the first and the second place the appropriation and distribution of surplus output directly under the control of its producers. The third, fourth, and fifth are situations where the surplus is produced by one party and appropriated by another party who uses it as they see fit. Marx's term for this latter relationship is "exploitation". Exploitation does not refer to the kindness of the employer, the working conditions, or the generosity of the compensation. For Marx, ANY system in which the producers give up their surplus output to non-producers is exploitative, not due to any personal defect on the part of those involved, but as a feature of the system in its structure.
The second thing is that the form of the surplus under question changes in capitalism compared to the other forms. Under feudalism, for example, the surplus is literally an excess of some quantity of stuff, like grain or wool, that is taken directly from nature. Under capitalism, the surplus is represented by money, since that's what initiates the process: a capitalist uses money to buy raw materials, equipment, land, etc., and hires labor power to transform those things into a commodity he can exchange for more money. Of course, if the value of the commodity was the same as what he began with in terms of materials and labor costs, he would be back where he started. In order to accumulate more money, the commodity must therefore be sold at a higher price than what it cost to make it.
This is uncontroversial and is agreed upon by any economist, at least on a basic level. However, what Marx did was to ask a question that had never been seriously considered. Where does that extra amount included in the price of a commodity, relative to what it took to produce it via labor power and raw materials, actually come from? There are two immediately obvious options. Either:
a. Raw materials, equipment, land, etc. costs (say) $100, labor power costs (say) $100, the final product is therefore worth $200, but the capitalist overcharges the customers by charging $250.
b. Raw materials, equipment, land, etc. costs (say) $100, labor power costs (say) $100, but the final product is worth more than $200[/U], so the capitalist charges what the product is worth by charging $250.
Marx is adamant that scenario B is the case. When a pile of wool sitting next to a complicated machine in a building somewhere is transformed into an article of clothing, it GAINS value. When computer hardware, cooling equipment, and a coding environment is transformed into a software application, it YIELDS extra value compared to what it started with. The soil on its own, in combination with some seed pods and a bucket of water, doesn't have as MUCH value as an edible vegetable. In all cases, the end product is enhanced in some aspect, more than the sum of its parts, and the source of this extra value is obvious to Marx: it's the work that somebody did to make the raw materials into an item with an actual use. I'm greatly simplifying this, but in essence Marx is saying that Adam Smith and David Ricardo were right: the value of a thing is determined by the labor that went into making it. Marx did not originate this idea of value, nor did he use it in his theory without modification. For Smith and Ricardo, the value contained in a product is what was directly added by the concrete labor of whichever particular worker made it using his or her hands. Marx did not see value in these terms. He was more interested in the aggregate, society-wide, abstract labor (something like: the portion of available time and energy in a community that is allocated to making X instead of Y) for his analysis of value.
So, while societies tend to include people who work and people who don't, and the people who work make a surplus that sustains the people who don't, under capitalism this surplus passes through a form that differentiates it from the tangible, edible, wearable stuff that characterized the surplus for a feudal lord or a slave-master. In capitalism, the surplus is the value that a productive worker creates that is not recuperated in wages.
That is, in an hour on the job getting paid $15, since I would not be able to stay employed if I only made $15 worth of widgets (or less than $15 at that!), I am obliged as a condition of my employment to make more than $15 worth of widgets. If you like, you could imagine this demarcated in time. For 45 minutes each hour, I make $15 worth of widgets, whose value is recuperated in my wage; for the last 15 minutes each hour, I'm working for free. In Marx's view, it has to be this way. It's not a matter of my boss being greedy, or some companies being more egalitarian than others. Regardless of all that, an industrial capitalist MUST underpay his workers relative to the value they create. The entire operation depends on having more money at the end than at the beginning, and the only thing that adds value to raw materials, equipment, and human bodies in a room together is the goal-oriented productive labor that transforms them into commodities people need or want. As a consequence, the capitalist system is necessarily exploitative, even where it is regulated and progressively taxed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marx also spent a lot of time talking about how capitalists use the surplus they acquire through production. Importantly, the capitalist system does not maintain itself. It requires a constant influx of money as credit, a perpetually available pool of labor, a segment of the population with a monopoly on deadly violence (police, military, private security), and above all else a sustained campaign of education and indoctrination to keep workers in the position they are in. Apart from those extrinsic concerns, there are also workers whose job it is to continually recreate the conditions for production to happen: managers, secretaries, human resource specialists, bookkeepers, and all the others that Marx called "unproductive" labor (in that they do not literally produce anything, but merely help set the conditions for production). All of these needs can variously be met by capitalists through taxes, expenditures, dividends to shareholders, accumulation to expand the enterprise, grants to universities, lobbying, donations to charities and churches, and direct campaign contributions. Marxism says it's never as simple as "capitalists don't like government". When they have the surplus to pay for it, and they need it more than they need something else, like advertising, they are more than happy to utilize the government to protect their factories through police patrols, or to make their shipping costs cheaper by nationalizing the means of transportation--which is Amtrak.
In other situations, of course, capitalists would rather not be constrained by government influence, but that's not a principled objection to the idea itself of state power. It's a reaction to prevailing conditions, such as the need to automate something in order to compete with other capitalists, and not having enough surplus left over to do it after paying taxes. The stance of capitalists toward government is always relative to the freedom they have to divert portions of the surplus to various destinations as needed. If there is enough surplus to cover all the bases, they will gladly partner with any entity with the ability and willingness to renew again and again the capitalist cycle of production, and states are among the most reliable institutions in that regard. By itself, heavy state involvement in (or even ownership of) productive enterprises does not mean capitalism has been replaced by socialism. This is a myth. It has no basis in anything Marx ever wrote, and indeed he repudiated it whenever it arose. Marx was very clear that communism/socialism has nothing whatsoever to do with state ownership of production, and everything to do with the workers who produce the surplus (which non-workers live off) being in control of that surplus--how much is made, how it's made, and where it's distributed. A country where the workers surrender all of their productive output to a political party is exactly as socialist as one where they surrender it to a private owner, even if the party is transparently elected by the people, because the party is made up of people OTHER THAN the ones actually doing the work.
This is such a crucial point. No matter how democratic a representative or parliamentary body may be, as long as they have authority over the goods and services people work all day to produce, and did not lift a finger in literally producing them, socialism is nowhere to be found in the system.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To summarize, Marx believed that capitalism had failed to deliver on the promises of the French Revolution, and that it wasn't because of any defect in the morality of the people involved but a natural consequence of how surplus value is produced, appropriated, and distributed in this system. To actually deliver on the promises of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" that so many rallied behind as monarchs fell and independence was gained, Marx believed we would have to move beyond capitalism rather than continually trying to reform it. Like many others, he didn't see a big difference between being owned by a master as a slave and being rented by a capitalist as an employee. He never specified what a post-capitalist society would look like in its details, but favored actual communism--workers asserting control over the fruits of their work--as the way of arriving there, not state manipulation or authoritarian takeover. Much of what people associate with Marxism is actually Lenin's, Trotsky's, Stalin's, Mao's, or some other politician's revision of Marx to fit it into the mold of the existing bureaucracy, which Marx always opposed on principle.
