◆ The
nineteenth-century philosopher’s ideas may help us to understand the economic
and political inequality of our time.
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| Karl Marx ✆ Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich |
Louis Menand
On or about February 24, 1848, a twenty-three-page pamphlet
was published in London. Modern industry, it proclaimed, had revolutionized the
world. It surpassed, in its accomplishments, all the great civilizations of the
past—the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman aqueducts, the Gothic cathedrals. Its
innovations—the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph—had unleashed fantastic
productive forces. In the name of free trade, it had knocked down national
boundaries, lowered prices, made the planet interdependent and cosmopolitan.
Goods and ideas now circulated everywhere.
Just as important, it swept away all the old hierarchies and
mystifications. People no longer believed that ancestry or religion determined
their status in life. Everyone was the same as everyone else. For the first
time in history, men and women could see, without illusions, where they stood
in their relations with others. The new modes of production, communication, and distribution
had also created enormous wealth. But there was a problem. The wealth was not
equally distributed. Ten per cent of the population possessed virtually all of
the property; the other ninety per cent owned nothing. As cities and towns
industrialized, as wealth became more concentrated, and as the rich got richer,
the middle class began sinking to the level of the working class.
Soon, in fact, there would be just two types of people in
the world: the people who owned property and the people who sold their labor to
them. As ideologies disappeared which had once made inequality appear natural
and ordained, it was inevitable that workers everywhere would see the system
for what it was, and would rise up and overthrow it. The writer who made this
prediction was, of course, Karl Marx, and the pamphlet was “The Communist Manifesto.” He is not
wrong yet.
Considering his rather glaring relevance to contemporary politics, it’s striking that two important recent books about Marx are committed to returning him to his own century. “Marx was not our contemporary,” Jonathan Sperber insists, in “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life” (Liveright), which came out in 2013; he is “more a figure of the past than a prophet of the present.” And Gareth Stedman Jones explains that the aim of his new book, “Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion” (Harvard), is “to put Marx back in his nineteenth-century surroundings.”
The mission is worthy. Historicizing—correcting for the
tendency to presentize the past—is what scholars do. Sperber, who teaches at
the University of Missouri, and Stedman Jones, who teaches at Queen Mary
University of London and co-directs the Centre for History and Economics at the
University of Cambridge, both bring exceptional learning to the business of
rooting Marx in the intellectual and political life of nineteenth-century
Europe.
Marx was one of the great infighters of all time, and a lot
of his writing was topical and ad hominem—no-holds-barred disputes with thinkers
now obscure and intricate interpretations of events largely forgotten. Sperber
and Stedman Jones both show that if you read Marx in that context, as a man
engaged in endless internecine political and philosophical warfare, then the
import of some familiar passages in his writings can shrink a little. The
stakes seem more parochial. In the end, their Marx isn’t radically different
from the received Marx, but he is more Victorian. Interestingly, given the
similarity of their approaches, there is not much overlap.
Still, Marx was also what Michel Foucault called the founder
of a discourse. An enormous body of thought is named after him. “I am not a Marxist,” Marx is said to
have said, and it’s appropriate to distinguish what he intended from the uses
other people made of his writings. But a lot of the significance of the work
lies in its downstream effects. However he managed it, and despite the fact
that, as Sperber and Stedman Jones demonstrate, he can look, on some level,
like just one more nineteenth-century system-builder who was convinced he knew
how it was all going to turn out, Marx produced works that retained their
intellectual firepower over time. Even today, “The Communist Manifesto” is like a bomb about to go off in your
hands.
And, unlike many nineteenth-century critics of industrial
capitalism—and there were a lot of them—Marx was a true revolutionary. All of
his work was written in the service of the revolution that he predicted in “The Communist Manifesto” and that he was
certain would come to pass. After his death, communist revolutions did come to
pass—not exactly where or how he imagined they would but, nevertheless, in his
name. By the middle of the twentieth century, more than a third of the people
in the world were living under regimes that called themselves, and genuinely
believed themselves to be, Marxist.
This matters because one of Marx’s key principles was that
theory must always be united with practice. That’s the point of the famous
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers
have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point
is to change it.” Marx was not saying that philosophy is
irrelevant; he was saying that philosophical problems arise out of real-life
conditions, and they can be solved only by changing those conditions—by
remaking the world. And Marx’s ideas were used to remake the world, or a big
portion of it. Although no one would hold him responsible, in a juridical
sense, for the outcome, on Marx’s own principle the outcome tells us something
about the ideas.
In short, you can put Marx back into the nineteenth century,
but you can’t keep him there. He wasted a ridiculous amount of his time feuding
with rivals and putting out sectarian brush fires, and he did not even come
close to completing the work he intended as his magnum opus, “Capital.” But, for better or for worse,
it just is not the case that his thought is obsolete. He saw that modern
free-market economies, left to their own devices, produce gross inequalities,
and he transformed a mode of analysis that goes all the way back to
Socrates—turning concepts that we think we understand and take for granted
inside out—into a resource for grasping the social and economic conditions of
our own lives.
Apart from his loyal and lifelong collaborator, Friedrich
Engels, almost no one would have guessed, in 1883, the year Marx died, at the
age of sixty-four, how influential he would become. Eleven people showed up for
the funeral. For most of his career, Marx was a star in a tiny constellation of
radical exiles and failed revolutionaries (and the censors and police spies who
monitored them) but almost unknown outside it. The books he is famous for today
were not exactly best-sellers. “The
Communist Manifesto” vanished almost as soon as it was published and
remained largely out of print for twenty-four years; “Capital” was widely ignored when the first volume came out, in
1867. After four years, it had sold a thousand copies, and it was not
translated into English until 1886.
The second and third volumes of “Capital” were published after Marx died, stitched together by
Engels from hundreds of pages of scrawled-over drafts. (Marx had spectacularly
bad handwriting; Engels was one of the few people outside the family who could
decipher it.) The “Theses on Feuerbach,”
which Marx wrote in 1845, were not discovered until 1888, when Engels published
them, and some of the texts most important for twentieth-century Marxists—the
cobbled-together volume known as “The
German Ideology,” the so-called Paris manuscripts of 1844, and the book
entitled the “Grundrisse” by its
Soviet editors—were unknown until after 1920. The unfinished Paris manuscripts,
a holy text in the nineteen-sixties, did not appear in English until 1959. Marx
seems to have regarded none of that material as publishable.
In Marx’s own lifetime, the work that finally brought him
attention outside his circle was a thirty-five-page item called “The Civil War in France,” published in
1871, in which he hailed the short-lived and violently suppressed Paris Commune
as “the glorious harbinger of a new”—that is, communist—“society.” It’s not a
text that is cited much today.
One reason for Marx’s relative obscurity is that only toward
the end of his life did movements to improve conditions for workers begin
making gains in Europe and the United States. To the extent that those
movements were reformist rather than revolutionary, they were not Marxist
(although Marx did, in later years, speculate about the possibility of a
peaceful transition to communism). With the growth of the labor movement came
excitement about socialist thought and, with that, an interest in Marx.
Still, as Alan Ryan writes in his characteristically lucid
and concise introduction to Marx’s political thought, “Karl Marx: Revolutionary and Utopian” (Liveright), if Vladimir
Lenin had not arrived in Petrograd in 1917 and taken charge of the Russian
Revolution, Marx would probably be known today as “a not very important
nineteenth-century philosopher, sociologist, economist, and political
theorist.” The Russian Revolution made the world take Marx’s criticism of
capitalism seriously. After 1917, communism was no longer a utopian fantasy.
Marx is a warning about what can happen when people defy
their parents and get a Ph.D. Marx’s father, a lawyer in the small city of
Trier, in western Germany, had tried to steer him into the law, but Marx chose
philosophy. He studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, where Hegel once
taught, and he became involved with a group of intellectuals known as the Young
Hegelians. Hegel was cautious about criticizing religion and the Prussian
state; the Young Hegelians were not, and, just as Marx was being awarded his
degree, in 1841, there was an official crackdown. Marx’s mentor was fired, and
the Young Hegelians became academic pariahs. So Marx did what many unemployed
Ph.D.s do: he went into journalism.
Apart from a few small book advances, journalism was Marx’s
only source of earned income. (There is a story, though Sperber considers it
unsubstantiated, that once, in desperation, he applied for a job as a railway
clerk and was turned down for bad handwriting.) In the eighteen-forties, Marx
edited and contributed to political newspapers in Europe; from 1852 to 1862, he
wrote a column for the New York Daily Tribune,
the paper with the largest circulation in the world at the time.
When journalistic work dried up, he struggled. He depended
frequently on support from Engels and advances on his inheritance. He was
sometimes desperate for food; at one point, he couldn’t leave the house because
he had pawned his only coat. The claim that the author of “Capital” was financially inept, and that he and his wife wasted
what little money came their way on middle-class amenities like music and
drawing lessons for the children, became a standard “irony” in Marx
biographies. Sperber contests this. Marx had less money to waste than
historians have assumed, and he accepted poverty as the price of his politics.
He would gladly have lived in a slum himself, but he didn’t want his family to
suffer. Three of the Marxes’ children died young and a fourth was stillborn;
poverty and substandard living conditions may have been factors.
Marx’s journalism made him into a serial exile. He wrote and
published articles offensive to the authorities, and, in 1843, he was kicked
out of Cologne, where he was helping run a paper called Rheinische Zeitung. He went to Paris,
which had a large German community, and that is where he and Engels became
friends. An earlier encounter in Cologne had not gone well, but they met again
at the Café de la Régence, in 1844, and ended up spending ten days together
talking.
Engels, who was two years younger, had the same politics as
Marx. Soon after they met, he wrote his classic study “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” which ends by
predicting a communist revolution. Engels’s father was a German industrialist in
the textile business, an owner of factories in Barmen and Bremen and in
Manchester, England, and although he disapproved of his son’s politics and the
company he kept, he gave him a position at the Manchester factory. Engels hated
the work, but he was good at it, as he was at most things. He went fox hunting
with the gentry he despised, and made fun of Marx’s attempts to ride a horse.
Engels eventually became a partner, and the income helped him keep Marx alive.
In 1845, Marx was expelled from France. He moved to
Brussels. Three years later, though, something happened that almost no one had
foreseen: revolutions broke out across Europe, including in France, Italy,
Germany, and the Austrian Empire. Marx wrote “The Communist Manifesto” just as those uprisings were getting under
way. When unrest reached Brussels, he was suspected of arming insurgents and
was evicted from Belgium, but he returned to Paris. Rioters there had broken
into the Tuileries and set the French throne on fire.
By the year’s end, most of the revolutions had been crushed
by monarchist forces. Many people who were or would become important figures in
European art and literature—Wagner, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Turgenev, Berlioz,
Delacroix, Liszt, George Sand—had been caught up in the revolutionary
excitement, and the outcome led to a crisis of faith in politics (the subject
of Flaubert’s novel “Sentimental
Education”). The failure of the 1848 revolutions is what Marx’s line “the
first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” refers to. (He got the phrase
from Engels.) The “tragedy” was the fate of the French Revolution under
Napoleon; the “farce” was the election of Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon
Bonaparte, whom Marx considered a nonentity, to the Presidency of France, in
December, 1848. Bonaparte eventually declared himself Emperor and ruled until
1870, when France lost a war with Prussia. The Paris Commune was a by-product
of that war.
So in 1849 Marx was forced into exile once again. He fled
with his family to London. He assumed that the stay would be temporary, but he
lived there for the rest of his life. That is where, day after day in the
Reading Room of the British Museum, he did the research for “Capital,” and it is where, in Highgate
Cemetery, he is buried. The impressive bronze bust you see on his tombstone
today was placed there, in 1956, by the Communist Party of Great Britain.
What was Marx like? The number of first-person reports is
not large, but they tend to agree. He was, in some respects, a caricature of
the German academic (which he had once expected to become): an imperious
know-it-all with untamed hair in a misbuttoned frock coat. He once described
himself to one of his children as “a machine condemned to devour books and then
throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.” He wrote all night
in clouds of tobacco smoke, books and papers piled around him. “They are my slaves,” he said, “and they
must serve me as I please.”
In professional matters, he was forbidding. He was a cogent
speaker but had a lisp and was a poor orator; he knew it, and rarely addressed
a crowd. He was ruthless in print, made enemies of many friends and former
allies, and did not suffer fools—a large subset of his acquaintance, in his
view. One German exile referred to him as “an
intellectual customs agent and border guard, appointed on his own authority.”
Still, he commanded respect. A colleague, recalling Marx at
twenty-eight, described him as “a born leader of the people.” He was actually
good at running the show—as an editor and, later on, as the dominant figure in
the International Workingmen’s Association, known as the First International.
His hair was black; his eyes were black; his complexion was swarthy. Engels
called him the “black fellow from Trier”; his wife and children called him the
Moor.
In private, he was modest and gracious. When he was not
sick—he had a bad liver, suffered from bronchitis, and grew fist-size boils,
which Sperber thinks were caused by an autoimmune disorder but which may have
been a symptom of his liver disease—he was playful and affectionate. He loved
Shakespeare, made up stories for his three daughters, and enjoyed cheap cigars
and red wine. His wife and daughters adored him. A Prussian government spy who
visited Marx at his home in 1852 was surprised to find him “the gentlest and
mildest of men.”
He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, also from Trier,
when he was eighteen and she was twenty-two. Sperber thinks that a fairy tale
has grown up about the marriage, but Jenny is said to have been exceptionally
beautiful, and she was devoted to Karl. He wrote passionate love poetry for
her. The engagement lasted seven years, during which he finished his studies,
and they rarely saw each other. The relationship was mainly epistolary.
(Sperber believes that they had premarital sex. I certainly hope so.) In her
letters, Jenny calls Karl her “little wild boar.”
The one possible flaw in the domestic idyll has to do with a
child born to their servant, Helene Demuth. She was a “gift” to the Marxes from
Jenny’s mother and lived with the family. (Almost all women in
nineteenth-century Britain who could manage to retain a servant did so. Even
Miss Bates, in Jane Austen’s “Emma,” who lives on the charity of her well-off
neighbors, has a servant.) Helene’s child, named Frederick and called Freddy,
was born in 1851 and was brought up by foster parents. Marx’s daughters didn’t
meet him until after Marx’s death.
Engels claimed paternity. This was not implausible. Engels
was unmarried and had a taste for working-class women; his longtime lover, Mary
Burns, worked in a Manchester factory. On his deathbed, though, forty-four
years later, he is supposed to have named Marx as Freddy’s real father,
information that became known in Communist circles but was not made public
until 1962. Sperber and Stedman Jones accept the story, as does the author of
the standard English-language biography, David McLellan, although one of
Engels’s biographers, Terrell Carver, thinks that the evidence is not
conclusive. Demuth remained with the family; after Marx’s death, she went to
work for Engels. And the Marxes’ marriage survived.
It is sympathy for Marx that leads Sperber and Stedman Jones
to insist that we read him in his nineteenth-century context, because they hope
to distance him from the interpretation of his work made after his death by
people like Karl Kautsky, who was his chief German-language exponent; Georgi
Plekhanov, his chief Russian exponent; and, most influentially, Engels. It was
thanks mainly to those writers that people started to refer to Marxism as
“scientific socialism,” a phrase that sums up what was most frightening about
twentieth-century Communism: the idea that human beings can be reëngineered in
accordance with a theory that presents itself as a law of history. The word the
twentieth century coined for that was totalitarianism.
So, by 1939, when the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin
published his widely read and not wholly unadmiring study “Karl Marx: His Life and Environment” (still in print), he could
describe Marx as “among the great
authoritarian founders of new faiths, ruthless subverters and innovators who
interpret the world in terms of a single, clear, passionately held principle,
denouncing and destroying all that conflicts with it. His
faith . . . was of that boundless, absolute kind which puts an
end to all questions and dissolves all difficulties.” This became the Cold
War Marx.
It’s true that Marx was highly doctrinaire, something that
did not wear well with his compatriots in the nineteenth century, and that
certainly does not wear well today, after the experience of the regimes
conceived in his name. It therefore sounds perverse to say that Marx’s
philosophy was dedicated to human freedom. But it was. Marx was an
Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a world that is rational and transparent, and
in which human beings have been liberated from the control of external forces.
This was the essence of Marx’s Hegelianism. Hegel argued
that history was the progress of humanity toward true freedom, by which he
meant self-mastery and self-understanding, seeing the world without
illusions—illusions that we ourselves have created. The Young Hegelians’
controversial example of this was the Christian God. (This is what Feuerbach
wrote about.) We created God, and then pretended that God created us. We
hypostatized our own concept and turned it into something “out there” whose
commandments (which we made up) we struggle to understand and obey. We are
supplicants to our own fiction.
Concepts like God are not errors. History is rational: we make
the world the way we do for a reason. We invented God because God solved
certain problems for us. But, once a concept begins impeding our progress
toward self-mastery, it must be criticized and transcended, left behind.
Otherwise, like the members of the Islamic State today, we become the tools of
our Tool.
What makes it hard to discard the tools we have objectified
is the persistence of the ideologies that justify them, and which make what is
only a human invention seem like “the way things are.” Undoing ideologies is
the task of philosophy. Marx was a philosopher. The subtitle of “Capital” is “Critique of Political
Economy.” The uncompleted book was intended to be a criticism of the economic
concepts that make social relations in a free-market economy seem natural and
inevitable, in the same way that concepts like the great chain of being and the
divine right of kings once made the social relations of feudalism seem natural
and inevitable.
The reason that “Capital”
looks more like a work of economics than like a work of philosophy—the reason
that it is filled with tables and charts rather than with syllogisms—is the
reason given in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: the purpose of philosophy is
to understand conditions in order to change them. Marx liked to say that when
he read Hegel he found philosophy standing on its head, so he turned it over
and placed it on its feet. Life is doing, not thinking. It is not enough to be
the masters of our armchairs.
Marx thought that industrial capitalism, too, was created
for a good reason: to increase economic output—something that “The Communist Manifesto” celebrates. The
cost, however, is a system in which one class of human beings, the property
owners (in Marxian terms, the bourgeoisie), exploits another class, the workers
(the proletariat).
Capitalists don’t do this because they are greedy or cruel
(though one could describe their behavior that way, as Marx almost invariably
did). They do it because competition demands it. That’s how the system
operates. Industrial capitalism is a Frankenstein’s monster that threatens its
own creators, a system that we constructed for our own purposes and is now
controlling us.
Marx was a humanist. He believed that we are beings who
transform the world around us in order to produce objects for the benefit of
all. That is our essence as a species. A system that transforms this activity
into “labor” that is bought and used to aggrandize others is an obstacle to the
full realization of our humanity. Capitalism is fated to self-destruct, just as
all previous economic systems have self-destructed. The working-class revolution
will lead to the final stage of history: communism, which, Marx wrote, “is the
solution to the riddle of history and knows itself as this solution.”
Marx was fanatically committed to finding empirical
corroboration for his theory. That’s what it meant to put philosophy on its
feet. And that’s why he spent all those hours alone in the British Museum,
studying reports on factory conditions, data on industrial production,
statistics about international trade. It was a heroic attempt to show that
reality aligned with theory. No wonder he couldn’t finish his book.
Marx had very little to say about how the business of life
would be conducted in a communist society, and this turned out to be a serious
problem for regimes trying to put communism into practice. He had reasons for
being vague. He thought that our concepts, values, and beliefs all arise out of
the conditions of our own time, which means that it’s hard to know what lies on
the other side of historical change. In theory, after the revolution, everything
will be “up for grabs”—which has been the great dream of leftist radicalism
ever since.
Marx was clearer about what a communist society would not
have. There would be no class system, no private property, no individual rights
(which Marx thought boil down to protecting the right of the owners of property
to hang on to it), and no state (which he called “a committee for managing the
common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”). The state, in the form of the Party,
proved to be one bourgeois concept that twentieth-century Communist regimes
found impossible to transcend. Communism is not a religion; it truly is, as
anti-Communists used say about it, godless. But the Party functions in the way
that Feuerbach said God functions in Christianity, as a mysterious and
implacable external power.
Marx did not, however, provide much guidance for how a
society would operate without property or classes or a state. A good example of
the problem is his criticism of the division of labor. In the first chapter of
“The Wealth of Nations,” in 1776,
Adam Smith identified the division of labor—that is, specialization—as the key
to economic growth. Smith’s case study was the manufacture of pins. Rather than
have a single worker make one pin at a time, Smith argued, a pin factory can
split the job into eighteen separate operations, starting with drawing out the
wire and ending with the packaging, and increase production by a factor of
thousands.
To us, this seems an obviously efficient way to organize
work, from automobile assembly lines to “knowledge production” in universities.
But Marx considered the division of labor one of the evils of modern life. (So
did Hegel.) It makes workers cogs in a machine and deprives them of any
connection with the product of their labor. “Man’s own deed becomes an alien
power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him,”
as Marx put it. In a communist society, he wrote, “nobody has one exclusive
sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes.”
It will be possible “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle
in the evening, criticize after dinner . . . without ever
becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic.”
This often quoted passage sounds fanciful, but it is at the
heart of Marx’s thought. Human beings are naturally creative and sociable. A
system that treats them as mechanical monads is inhumane. But the question is,
How would a society without a division of labor produce sufficient goods to
survive? Nobody will want to rear the cattle (or clean the barn); everyone will
want to be the critic. (Believe me.) As Marx conceded, capitalism, for all its
evils, had created abundance. He seems to have imagined that, somehow, all the
features of the capitalist mode of production could be thrown aside and
abundance would magically persist.
In 1980, the philosopher Peter Singer published a short book
on Marx in which he listed some of Marx’s predictions: the income gap between
workers and owners would increase, independent producers would be forced down
into the ranks of the proletariat, wages would remain at subsistence levels,
the rate of profit would fall, capitalism would collapse, and there would be
revolutions in the advanced countries. Singer thought that most of these
predictions were “so plainly mistaken” that it was difficult to understand how
anyone sympathetic to Marx could defend them. In 2016, it is harder to be
dismissive.
“Economists today would do well to take inspiration from his
example,” Thomas Piketty says about Marx, in the best-seller he published in
2013, “Capital in the Twenty-first
Century.” The book did for many twenty-first-century readers what Marx
hoped “Capital” might do for nineteenth-century ones. It uses data to show us
the real nature of social relations and, by doing that, forces us to rethink
concepts that have come to seem natural and inevitable. One of these is the
concept of the market, which is often imagined as a self-optimizing mechanism
it is a mistake to interfere with, but which in fact, left to itself,
continually increases inequality. Another concept, closely related, is
meritocracy, which is often imagined as a guarantor of social mobility but
which, Piketty argues, serves mainly to make economic winners feel virtuous.
Piketty says that for thirty years after 1945 a high rate of
growth in the advanced economies was accompanied by a rise in incomes that
benefitted all classes. Severe wealth inequality came to seem a thing of the
past (which is why, in 1980, people could quite reasonably call Marx’s predictions
mistaken). It now appears that those thirty years were an anomaly. The
Depression and the two world wars had effectively wiped out the owners of
wealth, but the thirty years after 1945 rebooted the economic order.
“The very high level of private wealth that has been attained since the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties in the wealthy countries of Europe and in Japan,” Piketty says, “directly reflects the Marxian logic.” Marx was correct that there is nothing naturally egalitarian about modern economies left to themselves. As Piketty puts it, “There is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.”
The tendency of the system to increase inequality was
certainly true in Marx’s own century. By 1900, the richest one per cent of the
population in Britain and France owned more than fifty per cent of those
nations’ wealth; the top ten per cent owned ninety per cent. We are approaching
those levels again today. In the United States, according to the Federal
Reserve, the top ten per cent of the population owns seventy-two per cent of
the wealth, and the bottom fifty per cent has two per cent. About ten per cent
of the national income goes to the top two hundred and forty-seven thousand
adults (one-thousandth of the adult population).
This is not a problem restricted to the rich nations. Global
wealth is also unequally distributed, and by the same ratios or worse. Piketty
does not predict a worldwide working-class revolution; he does remark that this
level of inequality is “unsustainable.” He can foresee a time when most of the
planet is owned by billionaires.
Marx was also not wrong about the tendency of workers’ wages
to stagnate as income for the owners of capital rises. For the first sixty
years of the nineteenth century—the period during which he began writing “Capital”—workers’ wages in Britain and
France were stuck at close to subsistence levels. It can be difficult now to
appreciate the degree of immiseration in the nineteenth-century industrial
economy. In one period in 1862, the average workweek in a Manchester factory
was eighty-four hours.
It appears that wage stagnation is back. After 1945, wages
rose as national incomes rose, but the income of the lowest earners peaked in
1969, when the minimum hourly wage in the United States was $1.60. That is the
equivalent of $10.49 today, when the national minimum wage is $7.25. And, as
wages for service-sector jobs decline in earning power, the hours in the
workweek increase, because people are forced to take more than one job.
The rhetoric of our time, the time of Bernie Sanders and
Donald Trump, Brexit, and popular unrest in Europe, appears to have a Marxist
cast. Sanders’s proposals to reduce inequality are straight out of Piketty: tax
wealth and give more people access to knowledge. Trump, since he admires
authoritarian personalities, might be pleased to know that Marx supported free
trade on a “the worse things get” theory: by driving wages lower, free trade
increases the impoverishment of the working class and leads more quickly to the
revolution. In the terms used everywhere today, on the left, on the right, and
in the press: the system is “rigged” to reward “the élites.” Marx called them
“the ruling class.”
How useful is Marx for understanding this bubble of ferment
in the advanced economies? I think we don’t yet know very well the precise
demographic profile of Brexit voters and Trump and Sanders supporters—whether
they are people who have been materially damaged by free trade and immigration
or people who are hostile to the status quo for other reasons. That they are
basically all the former may turn out to be a consoling belief of the
better-off, who can more easily understand why people who have suffered economic
damage would be angry than why people who have nothing to complain about
financially might simply want to blow the whole thing up.
Still, in the political confusion, we may feel that we are
seeing something that has not been seen in countries like Britain and the
United States since before 1945: people debating what Marx would call the real
nature of social relations. The political earth is being somewhat scorched.
And, as politics continues to shed its traditional restraints, ugly as it is to
watch, we may get a clearer understanding of what those relations are.
They may not be entirely economic. A main theme of Stedman
Jones’s book is that Marx and Engels, in their obsession with class, ignored
the power of other forms of identity. One of these is nationalism. For Marx and
Engels, the working-class movement was international. But today we seem to be
seeing, among the voters for Brexit, for example, a reversion to nationalism
and, in the United States, what looks like a surge of nativism.
Stedman Jones also argues that Marx and Engels failed to
appreciate the extent to which the goal of working-class agitation in
nineteenth-century Britain was not ownership of the means of production but
political inclusion, being allowed to vote. When that was achieved, unrest
subsided.
Voting is no longer the test of inclusion. What is happening
in the rich democracies may be not so much a war between the haves and the
have-nots as a war between the socially advantaged and the left-out. No one who
lives in poverty would not trade that life for a better one, but what most
people probably want is the life they have. They fear losing that more than
they wish for a different life, although they probably also want their children
to be able to lead a different life if they choose.
Of the features of modern society that exacerbate that fear
and threaten that hope, the distribution of wealth may not be the most
important. Money matters to people, but status matters more, and precisely
because status is something you cannot buy. Status is related to identity as
much as it is to income. It is also, unfortunately, a zero-sum game. The
struggles over status are socially divisive, and they can resemble class
warfare.
Ryan, in his book on Marx, makes an observation that Mar
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| Louis Menand |
This is probably not true of tribal societies, and it does
not seem to have been true of the earliest known democratic state, Periclean
Athens (at least, for the citizens). But inequality has been with us for a long
time. Industrial capitalism didn’t reverse it in the nineteenth century, and
finance capitalism is not reversing it in the twenty-first. The only thing that
can reverse it is political action aimed at changing systems that seem to many
people to be simply the way things have to be. We invented our social
arrangements; we can alter them when they are working against us. There are no
gods out there to strike us dead if we do. ♦
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| http://www.newyorker.com |