Marxism, page 17
Marx's relationship with his children and grandchildren, however, show his most happy and human side. He was a gentle and indulgent father, who amused his children with his own original fairy tales and picnicked and played with them with great relish.[827] The death of those who perished in childhood severely affected him for years afterwards.[828] Marx wrote in a letter:
Bacon says that really important men have so many contacts with nature and the world, and have so much to interest them, that they easily get over their loss. I am not one of these important men. My child's death has shattered my heart and brain, and I feel the loss as keenly as on the first day.[829]
Assessments
Marx with his children was a very different man from the Marx described by his adult contemporaries. When his father questioned whether his heart was as good as his head,[830] he raised a question that many others would continue to raise about Marx throughout his life. A fellow revolutionary said of Marx: "If his heart had matched his intellect, and if he possessed as much love as hate, I would have gone through fire for him," but "a most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away all the good in him" (emphasis added in the original).[831] Still another radical contemporary, Proudhon, wrote to Marx, "for God's sake, after have abolished all the dogmatisms a priori, let us not of all things attempt in our turn to instill another kind of dogma into the people." He said:
Let us have decent and sincere polemics. Let us give the world an example of learned and farsighted tolerance. But simply because we are at the head of the movement, let us not make ourselves the leader of a new intolerance, let us not posé as the apostles of a new religion—even though this religion be the religion of logic, the religion of reason.[832]
Carl Schurz, while still a youthful revolutionary in Germany (before his later fame as a liberal in the United States), met Marx and formed an opinion of him that accords with the impressions of many others:
I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. To no opinion, which differed from his, he accorded the honor of even a condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it.[833]
Marx liked to glare at anyone who challenged his conclusions and say "I will annihilate you!" The radicals and revolutionaries whom Marx successfully alienated over a period of forty years reads like a Who's Who of the nineteenth-century political left. Even the patient and longsuffering Engels came close to a break with Marx, whose curt and clumsy remarks on the death of Engels' common-law wife in 1863 wounded his friend. Engels wrote:
All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have shown me more sympathy and friendship on this occasion, which inevitably affected me quite closely, than I had a right to expect. You found the moment suitable for a demonstration of the superiority of your cool manner of thinking. So be it![834]
Marx's apology brought forgiveness[835] and the historic partnership continued.
The younger Marx of the 1840s presented a roe humane vision in his writings, and has become something of a refuge for modern radicals disillusioned with the more blatantly severe later Marx, who seemed to presage Lenin and Stalin. Lighthearted humor also brightened some of these earlier writings[836] in a way seldom seen in the later works of Marx and Engels. Yet it would be a mistake to ignore the authoritarian and terroristic elements that were as present in these earlier writings as in the later ones—and in Engels as well as Marx. Engels' first draft for The Communist Manifesto included compulsory labor,[837] a deliberate undermining of the family by ending the dependence "of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the parents,"[838] and the erection of "common dwellings for communities of citizens" to replace family homes. Marx's Neue Rheinische Zeitung declared on its last day of publication: "When our turn comes, we shall not disguise our terrorism."[839]
A current vogue, aptly characterized as "Engels-baiting,"[840] makes it especially important to assess Engels' role in Marxism. Engels was much more than Marx's friend and benefactor. He was one of the very few people with whom Marx had intellectual interchange, and by far the most important. For most of his life, Marx, as an obscure autodidact, was utterly cut off from participation in the world of universities, learned journalists, scholarly conferences, and other institutionalized intellectual exchange. Nor did he have any intellectual interaction, by correspondence or in person, with the leading minds of his time—Mill, Darwin, Tolstoy, Menger, or Dostoevski, for example. Marx's relationship with contemporary radical intellectuals was one of tutelage or hostility. His correspondence consisted overwhelmingly of gossip, intrigue, and passing remarks on current events and contemporary personalities. Only with Engels were serious intellectual matters discussed with even occasional regularity.
Engels' early economic writing provided the basic conception that Marx systematized and elaborated in the massive volumes of Capital. Finally, Engels' piecing together and editing of the many manuscripts for the posthumous volumes of Marx's magnum opus was a monumental work of dedication and self-sacrifice, stretching over more than a decade.
Engels was not only a far clearer writer than Marx, but often more subtly and accurately conveyed Marx's theories—especially of history—for he did not so readily indulge in Marx's penchant for epigrams at the expense of accuracy. Engels' letters on the Marxian theory of history are a major contribution to understanding what Marx actually did in his historical writings, as distinguished from how Marx tried to encapsulate his practice in clichés that continue to obscure more than they reveal.
There is no way to know what Engels would have accomplished in the decades he devoted, first to earning a living for both himself and Marx, and then to completing Marx's unfinished work. But what he actually accomplished was both impressive and indicative. His Socialism: Utopian and Scientific remains the best summary of the system of thought that bears the name of Marx. How much of Marxism originated in fact with Engels is a question that may never be answered. Engels was clearly a precursor of Marxian crisis theory in economics, as Marx himself indicated.[841] Engels' letters to Marx also presage the content and title of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire.[842] But the collaborative writings of Marx and Engels and their unrecorded conversations over a period of forty years preclude any definitive disentangling of their respective contributions to Marxism.
In 1883, at the graveside of Marx, Engels painted an idealized picture that provided the stuff of which legends are made. He began: "On the 14th day of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think." According to Engels, "Marx discovered the law of development of human history," and also "the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production."[843] Innumerable slanders Marx "brushed aside as though it were cobweb," and "though he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy."[844] This was at best a highly sanitized picture of a man who personalized every quarrel and whose letters to Engels were full of spiteful gossip and petty intrigues. Finally, Engels' funeral oration ended with these words: "His name will endure through the ages, and so will his work!"[845] Marx's name has indeed become infinitely better known than when he died in relative obscurity in London a hundred years ago. How much of what has happened in the twentieth century is "his work"—and in what sense—is a much larger and more complex question. For Marx the man, he perhaps wrote his best epitaph when he said: "Nothing that is human is foreign to me."[846] Others made him an abstraction and an icon.
Chapter 10 The Legacy of Marx
Karl Marx left many very different legacies, to many individuals, groups, fields, and institutions. His intellectual legacy, especially some of his insights concerning history, are now part of the general intellectual equipment of Western man. Marx's political theories have inspired both social democrats and Communists. His approach to analyzing the dynamics of economic and social systems has reappeared in thinkers as disparate as Thorstein Veblen[847] and Joseph A. Schumpeter,[848] and the reaction against Marx's assumptions about the role of ideas is apparent in Max Weber.[849] As a distinguished philosopher has said: "Marx's contributions, in whatever modified form, have entered the consciousness of our time, affected the idiom of our language and understanding, and left an ineradicable imprint on the world of scholarship."[850]
Some of Marx's thinking, especially as regards economic and social factors in history, is in fact now so much a part of our general intellectual tradition that it makes interpretation of the original Marxian theory of history more difficult. The normal tendency to view any theory in contrast to what we already believe contains insights contributed to by Marx. For example, Marx's emphasis on the economic factor in history—in his peculiar, sociological conception of "economics"—often seems an overemphasis or a monistic explanation, simply because we already give it considerable weight vis-à-vis ideas or great men, or other factors.
Marx's legacy is not merely an intellectual legacy, however. It is also a legacy of behavior not only in content but in style. Much as Marx may have explicitly advocated the idea of a democratic workers' government, his own personal style was dictatorial, manipulative, and intolerant. Those who complain that the Soviet Union has betrayed Marx have in mind the intellectual theories rather than the actual behavior of Marx the man. Whether Marx would have gone as far as Lenin or Stalin or Pol Pot is one of the great unanswerable questions of history. But Marx's own behavior already pointed in that direction, however much his words proclaimed a proletarian democracy. Moreover, even in the intellectual realm, the long Marxian tradition of speaking boldly in the name of the workers—not only without their consent but in defiance of their contrary views and actions—made Marxism an instrument of elite domination, with a clear conscience, long before Lenin or Stalin.
While Marxian theories do not require condemnation of all holding different views—and indeed Marx's writings contain numerous expressions of respect for Ricardo,[851] Hegel,[852] and others now thought of as conservative—nevertheless, Marx's personal style with living contemporaries was one in which vituperation and contempt were standard features. It is the style that continues in modern Marxist rhetoric. While social democrats might well claim to be truer to Marxian theories, the Communists have been truer to Marxian practice.
Marx's legacy cannot be fully appreciated until it is critically examined for internal consistency and its empirical validity tested in the harsh glare of facts. Interpretation, though a major undertaking, is not enough.
Even in Marx's own time, Marxism began to acquire so many different meanings that Marx himself declared: "I am not a Marxist." With the rise of Communist nations in the twentieth century, the divisions and proliferations of varied versions of Marxism have become even greater. Leninism, Trotskyism, and Maoism are only some of the major divisions among Communists who claim to be lineal descendents of Marx. In addition, there have been social democrats who considered themselves to be purer Marxists than the Communists—notably the German Social Democrats in the era of Karl Kautsky, who challenged Lenin's credentials as a Marxist. Other socialists have also incorporated Marx's doctrines in their goals and policies, often in forms openly revised in the light of modern conditions.
Rather than attempt a fruitless pursuit of all the schools and sects of contemporary Marxism, the discussions here will be limited to (1) the Marxism of Marx and Engels, and (2) the mainstream of twentieth-century Communism, which takes Lenin as the central legitimate inheritor and developer of their tradition.
The Marxism of Marx
Exploitation
The Marxian conception of "exploitation" is the central and enduring message of Marxism. As Edmund Wilson said:
...once we have read Das Kapital, the conventional works on economics never seem the same to us again: we can always see through their arguments and figures the realities of the crude human relations which it is their purpose or effect to mask.[853]
Marx and Engels themselves likewise saw "surplus value"—the distillation of exploitation—as the major conceptual contribution of Marxism.[854] Yet this crucial concept in the Marxian theoretical framework was insinuated rather than explicitly established, either logically or empirically. As introduced in the first volume of Capital, surplus value was defined simply as an "increment or excess over the original value" invested in production.[855] From this definition, Marx glided quickly to the conclusion that labor was the factor responsible for this increment of value or of output. It was an assumption deeply imbedded in classical economics—implicit in literally the first sentence of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.[856] Still it was an assumption and one devastated by the new conceptions and analysis introduced by the neo-classical economics while Capital was in its decades-long process of being prepared for publication.
As a theoretical system, Marxian economics begins the story of production in the middle—with firms, capital, and management already in existence somehow, and needing only the addition of labor to get production started. From that point on, output is a function of labor input, given all other factors somehow already assembled, coordinated, and directed towards a particular economic purpose. Output per unit of labor is then referred to as labor's output, as was traditional in classical economics long before Marx. But longevity is not logic. Where there are multiple inputs, the division of output by one particular input is wholly arbitrary. More generally, making one entity the numerator and another the denominator in a fraction does nothing to establish a casual relationship between them (though one may exist), much less a special or exclusive causal relationship. Yet this procedure is often successful as insinuation—in many contexts[857]—especially when it transforms a plausible relationship into a scientific-looking quotient, suggesting precision or certainty.
Vulnerable as Marx's exploitation theory was, part of the marginalist economists' criticism of it missed the mark, for the marginalists argued in terms of the respective contributions and rewards of factor inputs, rather than of people as such. Land may be productive without landlords being productive. Landlords may be growing richer in their sleep, as John Stuart Mill claimed, earning an income solely because of the institutional artifacts of property ownership. Marx made essentially the same argument regarding the capitalist. The contribution of capital equipment to economic progress was not really at issue, for a Marxian revolution was not intended to abolish capital equipment but rather to abolish capital ownership by private individuals. The importance of capital equipment was implicitly recognized when Marx made its public ownership a key feature of his projected new society.
Identifying capital's contribution to the economy with capital owners' contributions is clearly invalid in an argument over the desirability of a system of private ownership of capital. However necessary and justified capitalists' revenue may be within the system of capitalism, that is hardly relevant when the issue is whether that whole system should continue or be superseded by a different system. A king may play a vital role in a system of monarchy, but that is irrelevant when debating the relative merits of monarchies versus republics.
Marx argued that capital was not in fact a contribution of capitalists but of labor—past labor. It was a collective product,[858] even if individually owned under the capitalist system. According to Marx, there is "not one single atom of its value that does not owe its existence to unpaid labour."[859] When the capitalist advances part of this capital to the worker in exchange for his labor power, he is using "only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of."[860] In other words, "the labourer himself creates the fund out of which the capitalist pays him."[861]
Marx's analysis concerned the contributions and rewards of people—classes—not impersonal inputs. Yet even within this context, he did not succeed, either logically or empirically, in establishing that present capital is simply the result of past labor. All that he did was to push back into the past the key question of the source of capital. That way leads to infinite regress, not evidence or proof. Nor is the question of the origin of capital a purely historical question. It is an analytic question concerning the ongoing sources of capital.
Once output is seen as a function of numerous inputs, and the inputs as supplied by more than one class of people, the notion that surplus value arises from labor becomes plainly arbitrary and unsupported. Factually, it is even worse off. The empirical implications of a special or exclusive productivity of labor would be that countries that work longer and harder would have higher outputs and higher standards of living. But the reality is more nearly the direct opposite—that countries whose inputs are less labor and more entrepreneurship tend to have vastly higher standards of living, including shorter hours for their workers.
Nor is this simply a matter of having more physical capital to work with. Larger transfers of physical capital to Third World countries, through nationalization and foreign aid, have often been only a prelude to the deterioration of that capital. Conversely, the apparently miraculous rise of the German and Japanese economics from the rubble after World War II demonstrated that physical capital is only a product of mental capital—organizational and scientific skills, discipline, experience, and habits of mutual cooperation. Despite the offhand assumption of Engels (and later, Lenin) that managing a business was only a trivial skill,[862] countries where that skill is rare are almost universally sunk in poverty, even in the midst of rich natural resources, while countries where such skills are more abundant are typically prosperous, even when lacking most natural resources—Japan being the classical example. Similarly, racial and ethnic groups possessing such skills have at various times in history been reduced to destitution by hostile political decisions, only to rise rapidly to prosperity again at some time or place—for example, the Jews in Europe and Chinese minorities scattered throughout Southeast Asia.[863]
