According to Marx, in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; the core of the theory of ideology. Ziyad Husami however, argues that Wood is mistaken, ignoring the fact that for Marx ideas undergo a double determination. We need to differentiate not just by economic system, but also by economic class within the system.
Therefore the ideas of the non-ruling class may be very different from those of the ruling class. Of course, it is the ideas of the ruling class that receive attention and implementation, but this does not mean that other ideas do not exist. Husami goes as far as to argue that members of the proletariat under capitalism have an account of justice that matches communism. First, it cannot explain why Marx never explicitly described capitalism as unjust, and second, it overlooks the distance Marx wanted to place between his own scientific socialism, and that of other socialists who argued for the injustice of capitalism.
Nevertheless, this leaves us with a puzzle. Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is, once more, from G. Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was unjust Cohen In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have perfect knowledge of his own mind. In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view.
But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language. Such an interpretation is bound to be controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts.
Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live. Points made in his early writings remain present throughout his writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfilment and freedom.
People do not relate to each other as humans should. Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not? Capitalism impedes human flourishing. It is hard to disagree with the judgement that Marx. Roberts Marx, though, once more refrained from making this explicit; he seemed to show no interest in locating his criticism of capitalism in any of the traditions of moral philosophy, or explaining how he was generating a new tradition.
There may have been two reasons for his caution. The first was that while there were bad things about capitalism, there is, from a world historical point of view, much good about it too. For without capitalism, communism would not be possible.
Capitalism is to be transcended, not abolished, and this may be difficult to convey in the terms of moral philosophy. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need to return to the contrast between Marxian and other forms of socialism. Many non-Marxian socialists appealed to universal ideas of truth and justice to defend their proposed schemes, and their theory of transition was based on the idea that appealing to moral sensibilities would be the best, perhaps only, way of bringing about the new chosen society.
Marx wanted to distance himself from these other socialist traditions, and a key point of distinction was to argue that the route to understanding the possibilities of human emancipation lay in the analysis of historical and social forces, not in morality. Hence, for Marx, any appeal to morality was theoretically a backward step. Would communism be a just society? Communism is described by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme , as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need.
This certainly sounds like a theory of justice, and could be adopted as such Gilabert If we start with the idea that the point of ideas of justice is to resolve disputes, then a society without disputes would have no need or place for justice. We can see this by reflecting upon the idea of the circumstances of justice in the work of David Hume — But Hume also suggested that justice would not be needed in other circumstances; if there were complete fellow-feeling between all human beings, there would be no conflict and no need for justice.
Of course, one can argue whether either material abundance or human fellow-feeling to this degree would be possible, but the point is that both arguments give a clear sense in which communism transcends justice. Nevertheless, we remain with the question of whether Marx thought that communism could be commended on other moral grounds.
On a broad understanding, in which morality, or perhaps better to say ethics, is concerned with the idea of living well, it seems that communism can be assessed favourably in this light. But beyond this we can be brief in that the considerations adduced in Section 2 above apply again. Quite possibly his determination to retain this point of difference between himself and other socialists led him to disparage the importance of morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical necessity.
There are, of course, some famous quotations, not least from The German Ideology manuscripts. The point should not be exaggerated, but these striking images notwithstanding, there is no clear and sustained discussion of ideology in the Marxian corpus.
Many commentators maintain that the search for a single model of ideology in his work has to be given up. Marx does not view ideology as a feature of all societies, and, in particular, suggests that it will not be a feature of a future communist society. This stability is not permanent, but it can last for extended historical periods. This stability appears puzzling to Marx because class-divided societies are flawed in ways which not only frustrate human flourishing, but also work to the material advantage of the ruling minority.
Why do the subordinate classes, who form a majority, tolerate these flaws, when resistance and rebellion of various kinds might be in their objective interests? Such societies might often involve the direct repression or the threat of it of one group by another, but Marx does not think that this is the whole story.
There are also non-repressive sources of social stability, and ideology is usually, and plausibly, considered one of these. Other factors might include: dull economic pressure, including the daily grind of having to earn a living; doubts—justified or otherwise—about the feasibility of alternatives; sensitivity to the possible costs of radical social change; and collective action problems of various kinds which face those who do want to rebel and resist.
Marx does not think individuals are permanently trapped within ideological modes of thinking. Ideology may have an initial hold, but it is not portrayed as impervious to reason and evidence, especially in circumstances in which the objective conditions for social change obtain.
And they are social in that they directly concern, or indirectly impact upon, the action-guiding understandings of self and society that individuals have.
These action-guiding understandings include the dominant legal, political, religious, and philosophical views within particular class-divided societies in periods of stability MECW Not all false or misleading beliefs count for Marx as ideological. Honest scientific error, for example can be non-ideological. And ideological belief can be misleading without being strictly false.
Perhaps the only reason I believe something to be the case is that the belief in question has a consoling effect on me. Arguably such a belief is held ideologically, even if it happens to be true. Nevertheless paradigmatic examples of ideology have a false content. For example, ideology often portrays institutions, policies, and decisions which are in the interests of the economically dominant class, as being in the interests of the society as a whole MECW 5: 60 ; and ideology often portrays social and political arrangements which are contingent, or historical, or artificial, as being necessary, or universal, or natural MECW In addition to false or misleading content, ideological beliefs typically have at least two additional characteristics, relating to their social origin and their class function.
Ideology stems, in part, from this deceptive surface appearance which makes it difficult to grasp the underlying social flaws that benefit the economically dominant class. Marx portrays the striving to uncover essences concealed by misleading appearances as characteristic of scientific endeavour MECW 37, And, in this context, he distinguishes between classical political economy, which strove—albeit not always successfully—to uncover the essential relations often concealed behind misleading appearances, and what he calls vulgar economy, which happily restricts itself to the misleading appearances themselves MECW 37, In response critics often see this as just another example of sloppy functional reasoning—purportedly widespread in the Marxist tradition—whereby a general pattern is asserted without the identification of any of the mechanisms which might generate that pattern.
In the present case, it is said that Marx never properly explains why the ruling ideas should be those of the ruling class Elster Yet there are obvious possible mechanisms here. To give two examples. First, there is the control of the ruling class over the means of mental production, and in particular the print and broadcast media which in capitalist societies are typically owned and controlled by the very wealthy MECW 5, A second possible mechanism appeals to the psychological need of individuals for invented narratives that legitimise or justify their social position; for instance, Marx identifies a widespread need, in flawed societies, for the consolatory effects of religion MECW 3, This broad heading—the state and politics—could cover very many different issues.
Consequently, many other important political issues—the nature of pre-capitalist states, relations between states, the political transition to communism, and so on—are not dealt with. Marx offers no unified theoretical account of the state in capitalist society. Instead his remarks on this topic are scattered across the course of his activist life, and deeply embedded in discussions of contemporary events, events which most modern readers will know very little about.
The next three paragraphs draw heavily on Elster — On this account, the state might also act against the short term, or the factional, interests of particular capitalists. The picture here is of the state as an instrument directed—presumably by a subset of capitalists or their representatives—in ways which promote the long term interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. This model gets its name from the exceptional social circumstances said to explain the independence of the state in this case.
In situations where the social power of the two warring classes of contemporary society—capitalists and workers—are very nearly balanced, the political state and especially the executive can gain independence from both, exploiting that conflict in order to promote its own interests the interests of the political caste.
On this account, the state has interests of its own, but presumably only gets to pursue them if those promises to others are plausible, finding some reflection in its policies and behaviour. Where the instrumental picture claims that the state acts in the interests of the capitalist class because it is directly controlled by the latter, the abdication picture advances an explanatory connection between the promotion of bourgeois interests and the retreat from the direct exercise of power.
There are several possible explanations of why the bourgeoisie might remain outside of politics in order to promote their own interests. To give three examples: the bourgeoisie might recognise that their own characteristic short-termism could be fatal to their own interests if they exercised direct political as well as economic power; the bourgeoisie might find political rule sufficiently time and effort consuming to withdraw from it, discovering that the economic benefits kept on coming regardless; or the bourgeoisie might appreciate that abdication weakened their class opponents, forcing the proletariat to fight on two fronts against capital and government and thereby making it less able to win those struggles.
The instrumental account is the earliest account, which he largely abandons from the early s, presumably noticing how poorly it captured contemporary political realities—in particular, the stable existence of states which were not directly run by the capitalist class, but which still in some way served their interests. That outcome is possible under either of the two other accounts. However, Marx seems to have thought of the class balance model as a temporary solution in exceptional circumstances, and perhaps held that it failed to allow the stable explanatory connection that he sought between the extant political arrangements and the promotion of dominant economic interests.
A weak definition of state autonomy might portray the state as autonomous when it is independent of direct control by the economically dominant class. On this definition, both the class balance and abdication models—but not the instrumental account—seem to provide for autonomy. Elster Only the class balance view seems to allow significant explanatory autonomy.
In his preferred abdication account, Marx allows that the state in capitalist society is independent of direct capitalist control, but goes on to claim that its main structures including that very independence and policies are ultimately explained by the interests of the capitalist class. For reasons discussed below see Section 8 , Marx declines to say much about the basic structure of a future communist society. However, in the case of the fate of the state, that reluctance is partially mitigated by his view that the institutional arrangements of the Paris Commune prefigured the political dimensions of communist society.
On the infrequency, context, and content, of these uses see Draper and Hunt So understood, the dictatorship of the proletariat forms part of the political transition to communist society a topic not covered here , rather than part of the institutional structure of communist society itself. The character of the state in communist society consists, in part, of its form its institutional arrangements and its function the tasks that it undertakes.
Marx saw it as reflecting his view that:. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it. MECW The difficulty here is less in allowing this distinction, than in deciding what might fall into each category. On the necessary side, Marx appears to require that the state in communist society provide both: democratic solutions to coordination problems deciding which side of the road traffic should drive on, for instance ; and the supply of public goods health, welfare, education, and so on.
On the unnecessary side, Marx seems to think that a communist society might hugely reduce, or even eliminate, the element of organised coercion found in most states in the form of standing armies, police forces, and so on. First, many will be sceptical about its feasibility, and perhaps especially of the purported reduction, still less elimination, of state coercion. That scepticism might be motivated by the thought that this would only be possible if communist society were characterised by widespread social and political consensus, and that such consensus is, both unlikely at least, in modern societies , and undesirable diversity and disagreement having a value.
However, the reduction, or even elimination, of state coercion might be compatible with certain forms of continuing disagreement about the ends and means of communist society. Imagine that a democratic communist polity introduces a new law prohibiting smoking in public places, and that a representative smoker call her Anne obeys that law despite being among the minority who wanted this practice permitted.
In short, reasonably strong assumptions about the democratic commitments of individuals might allow the scaling down of organised coercion without having to presume universal agreement amongst citizens on all issues. That is certainly possible, but the terminological claim would appear to assume that there is greater clarity and agreement about just what a state is, either than is presupposed here or than exists in the world. It is well-known that Marx never provided a detailed account of the basic structure of the future communist society that he predicted.
Note that the distinction between Marxian socialism and utopian socialism is not an exhaustive one. What distinguishes utopian from other socialists is, in large part, their view that providing persuasive constructive plans and blueprints of future socialist arrangements is a legitimate and necessary activity. On the utopian account, the socialist future needs to be designed before it can be delivered; the plans and blueprints being intended to guide and motivate socialists in their transformative ambitions.
Of course, that Marx is not in this sense utopian does not rule out the possibility of additional here unspecified senses in which he might accurately be so described. It is certainly easy to find not only passages fiercely criticising utopian authors and texts, but also passages generously praising them. However, that criticism and that praise turn out to attach to slightly different targets, revealing an underlying and consistent structure to his account.
That underlying structure rests on two main distinctions. The first distinction is a chronological one running between the founding triumvirate, on the one hand, and second and subsequent generations of utopian socialists, on the other.
The second distinction is a substantive one running between the critical part of utopian writings the portrayal of faults within contemporary capitalist society , on the one hand, and the constructive part of utopian writings the detailed description of the ideal socialist future , on the other. This distinction is intended to be exhaustive, in that all of his criticisms of utopianism will fall into one of these two categories.
Non-foundational criticisms of utopian socialism are those which, if sound, would provide us with a reason to reject views which might be held by, or even be characteristic of, utopian socialists, but which are not constitutive of their utopianism. That is, they would give us a reason to abandon the relevant beliefs, or to criticise those including utopians who held them, but they would not give us cause to reject utopianism as such.
In contrast, foundational criticisms of utopian socialism are those which, if sound, would provide us with a reason to reject utopianism as such; that is, a reason to refrain from engaging in socialist design, a reason not to describe in relevant detail the socialist society of the future.
Of course, that reason might not be decisive, all things considered, but it would still count against utopianism per se. The utopians purportedly fail to understand that the achievement of socialism depends on conditions which can only emerge at a certain stage of historical development. This complaint is non-foundational in that one can accept that there are historical conditions for establishing a socialist society, and that the utopian socialists fail to understand this, without thereby having a reason to abandon utopianism as such.
Assessing the soundness of non-foundational criticisms, and their relevance to the utopian socialist tradition, is a complicated task see Leopold However, even if sound and relevant, these criticisms would provide no reason to abandon utopianism as such. Consequently, they are pursued no further here. The basic argument runs: that it is undemocratic to limit the self-determination of individuals; that providing a plan or blueprint for a socialist society limits the self-determination of individuals; and that therefore the provision of plans and blueprints for a socialist society is undemocratic.
If we add in the assumption that undemocratic means are undesirable; then we can conclude that it is undesirable to provide plans or blueprints of a future socialist society. One central reason for resisting this argument is that it is hard to identify a plausible account of the conditions for self-determination, according to which it is necessarily true that merely providing a socialist plan or blueprint restricts self-determination.
Indeed, one might heretically think that detailed plans and blueprints often tend to promote self-determination, helping individuals think about where it is they want to go, and how they want to get there.
The basic argument starts from the assumption that to be of any use a blueprint must facilitate the construction of a future socialist society. Moreover, to facilitate the construction of a future socialist society a blueprint must be completely accurate; and to be completely accurate a blueprint must predict all the relevant circumstances of that future society.
However, since it is not possible—given the complexity of the social world and the limitations of human nature—to predict all the relevant circumstances of that future society, we can conclude that socialist blueprints are of no use.
One central reason for resisting this argument is that, whilst it is hard to deny that completely accurate plans are impossible given the complexity of the world and the limitations of human understanding , the claim that only completely accurate plans are useful seems doubtful.
Plans are not simply predictions, and providing less than wholly accurate plans for ourselves often forms part of the process whereby we help determine the future for ourselves insofar as that is possible.
The basic argument runs as follows: that utopian blueprints describe the basic structure of the socialist society of the future; and that such blueprints are necessary if and only if the basic structure of future socialist society needs to be designed.
However, given that the basic structure of the future socialist society develops automatically without design assistance within capitalist society; and that the role of human agency in this unfolding historical process is to deliver not design that basic structure, Marx concludes that utopian blueprints are redundant.
Marx is certain that humankind does not need to design the basic structure of the future socialist society, but it is not really made clear who or what does that designing in its place.
Finally, recall that Marx is less enthusiastic about the second and subsequent generations of utopians, than he is about the original triumvirate. We might reasonably wonder about the rationale for greater criticism of later utopians. It is important to recognise that it is not that second and subsequent generations make more or grosser errors than the original triumvirate. Indeed, Marx appears to think that all these different generations largely held the same views, and made the same mistakes.
The relevant difference is rather that, by comparison with their successors, this first generation were not to blame for those errors. Marx held that the intellectual formation of this first generation took place in a historical context the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which was sufficiently developed to provoke socialist criticism, but not sufficiently developed for that socialist criticism to escape serious misunderstandings Cohen Since neither the material conditions of modern society, nor the historical agent capable of bringing socialism about, were sufficiently developed, this first generation were bound to develop faulty accounts of the nature of, and transition to, socialism.
However, that defence—the historical unavoidability of error—is not available to subsequent generations who, despite significantly changed circumstances, hold fast to the original views of their intellectual forerunners. Marx maintains that more recent utopians, unlike the original triumvirate, really ought to know better.
That legacy is often elaborated in terms of movements and thinkers. However, so understood, the controversy and scale of that legacy make brevity impossible, and this entry is already long enough. All we can do here is gesture at the history and mention some further reading. It seems hard to say much that is certain about the last of these periods, but some generalisations about the first two might be hazarded.
The first smaller group of theorists was associated with the Second International, and includes Karl Kautsky — and Plekhanov. The succeeding more activist generation includes Rosa Luxemburg — , V. Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Reichstag Fire was a dramatic arson attack occurring on February 27, , which burned the building that housed the Reichstag German parliament in Berlin.
Claiming the fire was part of a Communist attempt to overthrow the government, the newly named Reich Chancellor Adolf Frederick II ruled Prussia from until his death, leading his nation through multiple wars with Austria and its allies.
His daring military tactics expanded and consolidated Prussian lands, while his domestic policies transformed his kingdom into a modern state A master strategist, Bismarck initiated decisive wars with Denmark, Austria and From November 8 to November 9, , Adolf Hitler and his followers staged the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, a failed takeover of the government in Bavaria, a state in southern Germany.
Since , Hitler had led the Nazi Party, a fledgling political group that His aggressive methods targeting Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits.
Che Guevara was a prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution who went on to become a guerrilla leader in South America. Executed by the Bolivian army in , he has since been regarded as a martyred hero by generations of leftists worldwide. Succeeding party founder Sun Yat-sen as KMT leader in , he expelled Chinese communists from the party and led a successful unification of The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.
Live TV. 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. They do it because competition demands it. 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. Capitalism is fated to self-destruct, just as all previous economic systems have self-destructed. Marx was fanatically committed to finding empirical corroboration for his theory. It was a heroic attempt to show that reality aligned with theory. 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.
Marx was clearer about what a communist society would not have. 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. 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.
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. 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 , it is harder to be dismissive. 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 a high rate of growth in the advanced economies was accompanied by a rise in incomes that benefitted all classes.
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 rebooted the economic order. 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. It can be difficult now to appreciate the degree of immiseration in the nineteenth-century industrial economy. In one period in , the average workweek in a Manchester factory was eighty-four hours. It appears that wage stagnation is back. 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.
How useful is Marx for understanding this bubble of ferment in the advanced economies? 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 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. 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.
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