Why I'm Not A Marxist, or: The Poverty of Marx's Philosophy

Introduction

The purpose of this is to explain, in comprehensive terms, why I think Marxism, even if I grant it all the premises, cannot generate the results it is trying to reach, and why I cannot in good faith be a Marxist. I want to keep this strictly immanent and internal, not external critiques of the results of Leninist, Maoist, Guevarist, etc regimes (beyond where I think they proceed from Marx’s and Engels’ basic convictions). Nor do I want to spend any time externally critiquing Marx by bringing up “human nature”. Credit where credit is due to Alan Carter, whose excellent book “Marx: A Radical Critique” I highly recommend.
For clarity, I am a mutualist (maybe anti-civ) anarchist and more broadly a left-libertarian/libertarian socialist. This may explain some of the critiques I’ve decided to focus on. I offer more of an immanent critique than a positive alternative, but I hope you find this interesting regardless.

I firstly want to clarify and define various Marxist terminologies to prevent any misunderstandings or accusations of misuse of terms. Settling definitions is a very important thing when discussing Marxism. Here are at least most of the terms and concepts used in this critique, defined:
1. Productive forces: physical/technical components of production, comprising the means of production (raw materials, machinery, infrastructure, technology, tools) and human labor power (skills, technical knowledge, the physical capacity one possesses to work).
2. Relations of production: Social and legal relations that govern ownership, control, access to the means of production; this dictates how surplus labor is specifically extracted and distributed. Some obvious examples are master/slave, lord/serf, or capitalist/worker.

3. Mode of production: The historically specific synthesis of productive forces and relations of production that characterize an economic epoch
4. Economic base: Economic basis of society formed by the unity of productive forces and relations of production.
5. Superstructure: Legal, political, ideological, and cultural institutions that are built from and upon the economic base, which stabilize and reproduce existing production relations.

6. Use-value: Quantitative utility or physical property of a commodity that satisfies a specific human need/want.
7. Exchange-value: The quantitative proportion in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another; an “outward phenomenal form” through which value manifests in market transactions, so to speak.
8. Value: The magnitude of abstract socially necessary labor time congealed within a reproducible commodity.

Furthermore, like any thinker who lived as long as him, there are various schools of thought with regards to the interpretation of Marx. The general schools of thought are as follows:
1. The primacy of productive forces is emphasized; the “mechanistic”/”technological determinist” school.
2. The primacy of the dialectical relationship between the forces of production and other elements in the social structure is emphasized; the “interactionist” school.
3. The primacy of the economy as a driving force is emphasized; the “economistic” school.
4. The primacy of class struggle as being the central dynamic of social change; the (obviously) “class struggle” school.

I will attempt to address all of theses in this post.

Marx on History

The underlying explanatory mechanism and philosophical underpinning of Marxism is historical materialism. In Marx’s own words from the 1859 preface:
"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." In other words, “being determines consciousness”. The economic “base”, forces and relations of production, forms the “superstructure”, the legal, ideologies, politics, and culture. There’s an obvious problem with this I will address later. For now, we will discuss the mechanistic and interactionist interpretations of historical materialism.
The strict mechanistic school, first of all, is a bit problematic as an entire encompassing interpretation of historical materialism, as Marx also has said that “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society” in the Communist Manifesto. So, the forces of production are developed due to bourgeois relations of production; social elements must act back on the productive forces. It isn’t enough to just say productive forces continue to develop (through a stimulus of their own), but we must say that their development is related to economic relations. Furthermore, the mechanistic school fails to account for crucial aspects of the Industrial Revolution. David Dickson notes that, as an example, handloom merchants were brought into the workshops so that merchants could exercise greater control over the markets, along with minimizing embezzlement; “many of the new machines were developed and introduced only after the weavers had been concentrated into the factories”. Marx appears to be aware of this phenomenon in Capital Volume 1, so the most likely option is that the purely technological determinist interpretation is erroneous and contradictory to actual history. As a revision, the analytical Marxist G.A. Cohen allows for economic relations to influence the productive forces; the basic explanation being that “If the relations suit the development of the forces, they obtain because they suit the development of the forces”. Essentially, society picks whatever relations best develop technology. But this is pretty problematic in that it is unfalsifiable. Any society where technology has advanced can be purported to have “picked” the right relations. The revision then loses its explanatory power and becomes empty.
Cohen’s other revision comes with a “rationality thesis”; the motivation behind the development of the productive forces is the wish to reduce undesirable toil. In his words, “Here is what we understand by scarcity: given men’s wants and the character of external nature, they cannot satisfy their wants unless they spend the better part of their time and energy doing what they would rather not do, engaged in labour which is not experienced as an end in itself.” This becomes problematic with militaristic and expansionist Nazi Germany. How are we to characterize this? Certainly we cannot say it was chosen precisely due to its functionality for the development of productive forces. It was driven by cultural (superstructural) needs. The development of the “base” was driven by this. This presents two problems, neither of which historical materialism has a clean answer for; either it is falsified, or Nazi Germany provides an example of historical materialism in action, and it is thus not a promise for liberation. With regard to the rationality proviso, we can simply argue that if one identifies with a class or nation or ethnicity instead of with humanity, then conquest can be seen as fitting the thesis since the conquerors can force the conquered to work longer hours while the former suffer less toil because of it.
“But,” you may say, “historical materialism only describes epochal change. Nazi Germany and fascism wasn’t a new epoch.” Chere pote, retreating to this as an explanation means any event since the dawn of capitalism isn’t a new epoch. The problem of unfalsifiability has now been rendered unsolvable, not solved.
Now turning our attention to the interactionist school, we shall see if it can avoid the problems presented by the mechanistic school. The philosopher Georg Lukacs noted while examining the transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages that, crucially, change in the direction of technical development was based on a change in the economic structure of society; that being, labor potentialities and conditions. To Lukacs, development of productive forces were only one moment of social change. While development of productive forces do shape society, the new productive forces being developed and implemented depends on the existing social relations in society. There is thus a dialectical interplay between forces and relations of production; only productive forces considered suitable for the ends of the ruling elite are introduced. Lukacs’ interpretation is also more “liberal” in the sense of admitting that superstructural elements such as legal/political institutions are capable of affecting the “economic base” of society. This fits history better than the mechanistic school; certain technologies are often not introduced because of beliefs about their social/political/economic implications. Engels’ later letters, such as one to Joseph Bloch:
“If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure-the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems-all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (that is, things and happenings whose intimate sense is so far removed and of so little probability that we can consider them non-existent, and can ignore them), that the economical movement is ultimately carried out. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of any simple equation. We ourselves make our history, but, primarily, under pre-suppositions and conditions which are very well determined. But even the political tradition, nay, even the tradition that man creates in his head, plays an important part even if not the decisive one. The Prussian State has itself been born and developed because of certain historical reasons, and, in the last instance, economic reasons. But it is very difficult to determine without pedantry that, among the many small States of northern Germany, precisely Brandenburg has been destined by economic necessity and not also by other factors (above all its complications with Poland after the Prussian conquest and hence, also, with international politics-which, besides has also been decisive in the formation of the power of the Austrian ruling family), to become that great power in which are personified the economic, linguistic, and-after the Reformation-also the religious difference between the North and South. It would be mighty difficult for one who does not want to make himself ridiculous to explain from the economic point of view the existence of each small German State of the past and present, or even the phonetic differentiation of High German which extended the geographic division formed already by the Sudetti mountains as far as the Faunus.
In the second place history forms itself in such a way that the ultimate result springs always from the conflicts of many individual wills, each of which in its turn is produced by a quantity of special conditions of life; there are thus innumerable forces which cross each other, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces, from which is derived one resultant-the historical event -which in its turn again can be considered as the product of an active power, as a whole unconsciously and involuntarily, because that which each individual wishes is prevented by every other, and that which results from it is a thing which no one has wished. In this way history runs its course like a natural process, and has substantially the same laws of motion. But, because of the fact that the individual wills-each of which wishes that to which it is impelled by its own physical constitution or exterior circumstances, i.e., in the last analysis, all economic circumstances (either its own personal circumstances or the general conditions of society)-do not reach that which they seek but are fused in one general media in a common resultant, by this fact one cannot conclude that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to produce the resultant, and is contained in it.”
Ultimately, it is reduced to the economy, but this strongly supports the interactionist school. However, a difficulty raises its head with this interpretation, in the 1859 Preface Marx says: “In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.” The superstructure cannot act back on the base while being indeterminate without creating problems for the accurate prediction of historical change. The contributory factor(s) cannot be measured with any degree of certainty.
A problem for this school and many strains of Marxism in general is that all elements are intricately related, meaning that meaning and significance themselves are derived from an element’s place in the total configuration. But then this means that nothing can be known or explained until all is known; everything reacts to and falls back on everything else. The main explanatory tool of Marxism becomes nothing more than a synonym for the social structure itself.

With all of the faults of the two schools pointed out, what can we actually conclude is the basic problem with historical materialism? Let’s reconstruct it; changes in material conditions result in changes in the superstructure, and the base has an impetus for change which the superstructure lacks. The base is, well, “basic” because it changes under its own dynamic, superstructural elements are either static relatively or are a result of transformations in the base, and lag behind them, per Marx’s analysis of the French Revolution, the basis of this model. Even with the previously mentioned interactionist school, if the base and superstructure do interact, the whole structure can be changed by a relatively independent propulsion from the economic sphere.
Marx came to the conclusion that economic factors rather than consciousness are necessarily of prime importance. “Being determines consciousness”. Here we arrive at the flaw that unravels the foundation of Marxism; Marx famously stated “humanity must eat in order to think”, and this indeed is true… but so is vice versa. For human society to “reproduce” itself people must plant crops, build houses, etc, which require planning and thought. This itself is done with certain conceptions in mind and within the confines of certain social practices; these practices being social or religious in addition to being economic. In short, if mental preconceptions themselves are necessary for humanity to feed, shelter, and clothe itself, why should these not be the “substructure” the economic base is founded? Marx stated that if humanity reproduces itself and its society it must engage in material production, out of this necessity material production determines the nature of society.  But society is also reproduced through ideological and political practices, and furthermore, in order for there to be material production and exchange that makes up an economy, parties must agree or be forced into terms of exchange and production in the first place, and this itself is parasitic on legal, political, and cultural ideas; the “superstructure”. Critically, this unravels the entire “base -> superstructure” distinction and makes historical materialism incoherent. In order for us to agree to give you a basket I weaved for fish you caught with tools, there has to be a pre-existing legal, political, and cultural context we exist in. Is it legal or illegal to use certain materials in the basket? Who owns what, and how? What if we’re all pescatarians? And so on. Thus Marx’s a priori arguments for the primacy of the base fail. Historical materialism is incoherent.

Another important problem with capitalism is the skilling/deskilling of workers along with centralization of technology. This is particularly problematic, considering Marx encourages the development of productive forces as a railroad into socialism/communism. Marx essentially says that capitalism provides within itself the productive base for post-capitalism. How do the forces of production develop in capitalist society act as the precondition for a proletarian society? It may be so that communism may come to utilize a liberatory technology; a technology which doesn’t require specialist technologist, expert administrators, and is controllable by the workplace. But the precondition for something like this is the development of the productive forces within capitalism. How do the forces of production developed within capitalism act as the material precondition for a desired post-capitalist society? Two ways are possible:
1. existing machinery and its accompanying work relations might provide the material basis for post-capitalism, or
2. the scientific and technical knowledge embodied in existing technology might provide such a basis
But capitalism provides neither basis for the ideal libertarian socialism Marx says will be the “last stage of history”.

One problem is that the underdeveloped nations will not develop the industrial material base which is the prerequisite for a transition to socialism. There are also problems with the prospect of revolution in the developed world with further development of technology. The interactionist school says: technology not only shapes society but also influences the introduction of technology. Grahame Lock says: it seems empirically true of technological innovations under capitalism that they were introduced with their applications in mind, this fact not being accidental has to do with the division of labor under capitalism, between tasks of planning and execution. Along with this, innovations-in-use are not to be explained by any reference to abstract “human rationality” (contra Cohen), but only in terms of the specific rationality of the capitalist system, which includes the need to retain control over the working class. Innovation may be introduced for this reason, rather than merely being more efficient. Generally, the most important respect in which technology is shaped by economic/political relations is the way in which those relations influence the research into and subsequent implementation of novel technologies. Features characteristically accompanying those technologies favored by the capitalist mode of production are vast centralization and a corresponding labor process. Mercantile capitalism arose without a labor process specific to it; prior to the industrial revolution laborers were subsumed under capital, legally separated from the means of production and have to sell their labor-power in order to live; but the subsumption is merely formal because they are legally dispossessed, not technically dispossessed, they still have a large degree of actual control over the labor process by virtue of the fact that the instruments of production depend for their use on their skill and strength; they use the instruments of labor. Centralization of production into workshops + productive surplus going to the bourgeoisie = struggle rising between the bourgeoisie, whose struggles are served by stepping up production, and the proletariat whose interests were not.

Furthermore, the historical record shows that the bourgeoisie used overt disciplinary measures to enforce increases in productivity; this was to change as capitalists found a technical solution to control the workforce and further extraction of surplus. This lied in the creation by capital of a technical base adequate to it, essentially in the introduction of the machine proper in place of the tool.  Workers no longer used tools, the machine uses them. The accumulation of surplus no longer was restricted by the physical constitution of workers; they became dispossessed legally and technically. The simplification of combined with lower running costs of capital intensive forms of production mean that, in order to be competitive with other firms, innovation (that increases surplus and reduces production costs) is forced upon the capitalist.

In addition to this, high division of labor means specialized skills to be employed solely in skilled work; rather than having to employ workers who are able to perform all the tasks required in producing a commodity, capitalist hires one set of skilled and another set of unskilled workers, outcome is that machinery controlling manual labor and the confinement to a growing proportion of the workforce to unskilled work. So this creates a growth of highly skilled and specialized tasks restricted to a technical elite on one side and an unskilled lower class on the other.

Essentially left without specialization the capitalist had no essential role to play in the production process; if each producer could himself integrate the component tasks of pin manufacture into a marketable product, he would soon discover that he had no need to deal with the market for pins through the intermediation of the putter-outer. He could sell directly and appropriate to himself the profit that the capitalist derived from mediating between the producer and the market. Nowadays the capitalist plays the role of a supplier of a large quantity of capital necessary for most production processes to take place. He hires managerial stratum. Their position is consolidated by the increase in specialized technical knowledge of the work process which that stratum comes to acquire.
This aspect of work relations extends to the implementation and running of the technology employed where “knowledge of the machine becomes a specialized trait”, while among the mass of the working population there grows only ignorance, incapacity, and a fitness for machine servitude. Thus if the material base of post-capitalism is to be understood as the existing technology, it is hardly appropriate as a basis for direct workers’ control when the work relations and technology are more often than not opaque to the workers and only transparent to the emerging techno-bureaucratic class. Marx thinks the transition of socialism requires an alliance of all workers who, under monopoly capitalism, constitute the “collective productive workers”, those whose individual labor “combines to form the overall productive machine” when socially combined, such as manual workers, foremen, supervisors, engineers, managers, technologists, etc.
His failure to conceive of a techno-bureaucratic class may be do to a stress upon property relations rather than work relations. The crucial point is that, such an emerging class may have an interest in a post-capitalist society, but not the sort that facilitates workers’ control; instead it might be interested in a post-capitalist society where the residual power of the capitalists (particularly financial control) has been removed and the production process is completely in the hands of the techno-bureaucracy; a class with the claim to be most suited to managing the productive forces, and which could also claim to do a better job were it not for the vagaries of capitalist investment. If he isn’t committed to this view of managers, workers, technologists, etc having a shared interest in post-capitalism, capitalism hardly provides the material basis for communism when it develops a production process which is obstructive to direct workers’ control.

In response to this, it may be claimed that technical knowledge itself provides the productive basis for proletarian control. This begs the question of: who possesses the relevant knowledge? Not the proletariat, but the emerging techno-bureaucracy. Why should it use that knowledge to develop technology which leads to workers’ control, rather than techniques which enhance its own social position? Why should it apply its knowledge to the economic emancipation of the laborer?

As for the centralization of technology, Marx acknowledges that centralization of the workforce into factories preceded the introduction of certain forms of mechanization. Due to the centralization technologies were introduced that were appropriate to it. But once they were fully developed, not only technical but also geographical centralization was encouraged. Marx notes: “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns; it has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable population from the idiocy of rural life”. Capitalism researches into, develops, and introduces capital and energy intensive technologies which encourage centralization/are suited to already centralized societies. Firstly, geographical centralization isn’t without social implications; the town means the necessity of administration, taxes, police, politics, and so on, which is especially true today. Second of all, if one lives in a small decentralized society which has as its power source a field of small windmills, then there would be little need to restrict access to that power source. Anyone could wander amongst that community’s power supply without any more risk than that of causing damage to windmills, which would be relatively easy to repair. A society based on nuclear power where anyone could wander as they pleased is not as feasible. The technology itself demands a nuclear police. Many faux-socialist countries developed a mode of production initially formulated within a capitalist framework, and introduced forms of social organization and control that are essentially capitalist in nature to make effective use of it. Essentially, capitalism cannot be trusted to develop a material base appropriate to a decentralized society.

Marx on Economics

Marx’s main concern is showing how it is that one particular economic class in society which itself is not a producer of its means of subsistence somehow manages to accumulate most of or all of the wealth produced under capitalism. He is led to the process of production as an explanation; society has a limited total quantity of labor to expend in producing its requirements, but without any economic planning, capitalism manages to distribute labor such that different quantities of it are exerted in different industries, ensuring that all the goods which a society needs to reproduce itself are made. Marx considers the underlying mechanism to operate through the form which the products of labor take when they are exchanged. He focuses on the collectivity when he directs his attention to the form that the products of labor take under capitalism. Meaning, in the words of CJ Arthur, “the commodity form of the product of labour gives rise to the diremption between the concrete labourers and their abstract essence, and expresses the essential unity of social labour as an abstract totality”. Marx’s aim is thus to explain how this abstract totality of social labor divides itself into different particular forms of useful labor. He achieves this by observing that goods in capitalist society are produced to be sold; what becomes apparent is that this fact forms the basis of an explanation of the mechanism which ensures that society’s labor is distributed into different sectors of production. So, if a good cannot be profitably sold, some of the producers of that good will move into a different sector and produce goods which can be sold; this is how the requirements of society are met. However, goods can be sold only if there are people who can buy them, and such people will only be able to buy goods if they have produced something else of value to be exchanged. How are different goods to be exchanged? Marx says that goods which are produced for exchange, commodities, possess a value which allows exchange to take place. “...it is not the exchange of commodities which regulates the magnitude of their values, but rather the reverse, the magnitude of the value of commodities which regulates the proportion in which they exchange.” Furthermore, Marx goes on to state that the value of a commodity comes from when it is exchanged for another commodity:
“Whatever the exchange relation may be, it can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron, for instance 1 quarter of corn = x cwt. of iron. What does this equation signify? It signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things, in 1 quarter of corn and similarly in 1 cwt. of iron. Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third thing.”
This “third thing” cannot be use value, as if two objects had the same use value, there would be no point in exchanging them. The only relevant factor located by Marx is production; all commodities produced under capitalism has been labored upon. Thus Marx’s conclusion is that labor embodied is exchange value, and since each laboring is different from one another, the common factor is abstract labor; labor in general.
But as Bohm-Bawerk says, the same evidence on which Marx formulates his verdict of exclusion against the value in use holds good with regard to labor. To put this in simpler terms, if one cannot regard use value as a common factor because use values of different, the same is true of labor itself, because the labor of a carpenter is qualitatively different from that of a welder. It doesn’t at all help to observe that mechanization tends to make all labor the same. Furthermore, if Marx can equate qualitatively different labors as abstract labor, why not equate use-values and abstract labor as abstract use-values and make that the factor common to all commodities? In addition, if exchange is equalization, which equals common factor of the same amount, the common factor must be what is sought in every species of goods which is brought into exchange, not only products of labor but also in gifts of nature. To exclude such exchangeable goods which aren’t products of labor in this search for the common factor is a grave error.
Defenders may claim that Marx’s starting point is the “totality of labor in society”, and as it is obvious that this must be distributed, the amount of labor in a commodity determines how that commodity will be exchanged. A failure to exchange results in a producer’s labor going elsewhere. The value of wood, for example, is the labor expended in planting, cutting down trees, and so on. Virgin land must, these defenders may say, be explained in terms of a monopoly rent, which is not commodity exchange. Social labor having to be distributed is not proof that it is the labor itself which determines how it is distributed. Marx also clarifies that “socially necessary (abstract) labor time” (hereafter referred to SNLT/SNALT) determines value, to avoid the mistake he pointed out in David Ricardo (that is, slow workers producing more valuable goods than an efficient worker because of more labor time/quantity of labor). SNLT means labor time required to produce any use value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in that society. SNLT is also restricted to production of goods which are in demand.
The problem with this, along with the claim that “exchange values of all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labor-time”, is that SNLT as something congealed in a commodity is a bit implausible. Let’s say I produce a good yesterday, and try to sell it then when it was demand. It would have SNLT. But if I sell it today and there is no demand, it no longer contains SNLT. If demand comes back tomorrow it contains it again. See the problem?
Getting back to Marx himself, a question he answers is, if labor time is equivalent to all value, how does the bourgeoisie become rich? Marx says in capitalism the worker has nothing to sell but their labor power, and this becomes a commodity offered for sale on the market. Unlike any other commodity, labor power has the unique property of being able to produce value. The worker sells their labor power for an amount that enables the reproduction of that labor power (historically specific cost of subsistence). During part of the working day, the worker produces value that equals this cost, but the rest of the day produces a surplus-value, and this is appropriated by the capitalist who owns the means of production. Marx’s labor theory of value can be explained in this manner.

A reading could say that Marx is analyzing theoretically an existing process; in exchange, individual labor becomes social labor, and thus, value comes into being. What is meant by value? Abstract and reified form of social labor. Value that arises in exchange is reified as the universal equivalent, which becomes money. Money as capital then expands itself through the production process; M-C…P…C’-M (M = money, C = commodities, P = a productive process). Due to surplus labor, M’ is larger than M. But one of the commodities which is purchased at the beginning of each round of this process of capital accumulation is labor. Abstract labor comes to be reified, and in its reified form it comes to rule over its non-reified self; capital dominates labor. But this presupposes value is reified abstract labor as understood by Marx. If this is not so, then Marx’s economic analyses do not necessarily follow. Marx’s understanding of value is an objectification of a quantity of SNALT. But everything breaks down if value and SNLT are not equivalent. Alan Carter says of Marx’s account of the self-development of abstract labor: “In the exchange process money comes into being in order to facilitate that process. Money is accumulated, and its bearer comes to hold power over labourers. But none of this establishes that abstract labour has any relevance. That money has come to dominate society few would deny; that abstract labour has is a different claim. If a value is a quantity of socially necessary abstract labour-time, this must be demonstrated. Marx has not engaged in an empirical study of the labour-time embodied in each commodity, which is precisely why he employs a priori arguments in order to demonstrate that value is equivalent to labour time.” Instead, he does unconvincing a priori arguments.
There is one last attempt to save Marx’s labor theory of value originating from Ernest Mandel’s 3 “proofs”:
1. Analytic proof: if a price of a commodity is broken down into its constituent parts, the costs tend to reduce to labor. But this won’t do as a proof; if entire costs are reduced to labor, then this could only be visible in terms of labor costs (sale-price is not visibly due to labor time because of the mechanism whereby value is not transformed into price). If in the production of raw materials, say, labor-time over and above the time taken for the laborer to produce their own labor costs (surplus-value) is not paid to the laborer, how can it be observed that the entire costs of a finished product requiring such raw materials reduce to labor? If the entire costs of a finished product do tend to reduce to labor costs, how is it that profit in the production of raw materials is due to the difference between labor costs and labor-time expended? Difference between labor costs and sale-price appears throughout the production of raw materials, energy, distribution, etc, in which case, it is not at all obvious that the entire costs tend to reduce to labor. WRT raw materials, same costs to those utilizing them in the production of commodities must be due to the profit previously realized by other members of the capitalist class. How do we know this is determined by labor time expended?
2. Logical proof: logical proof; labor time expended is the only common quality which isn’t physical
3. Proof by reduction to the absurd: what would happen if human labor were completely eliminated from the production process?

We will return to the last two in due time.

Let us now talk about the falling rate of profit. From the standpoint of his LTV Marx divides production costs into 2 components: a capitalist invests their capital into the means of production (constant capital) and into wages for the workforce. The workers produce surplus-value. The capital invested in this component is called variable capital. The relation between surplus value produced and variable capital invested is the rate at which workers are exploited, the rate of surplus value. The capitalist invests only to make a profit so they will be concerned to maximize the profit in relation to the investment. This relation is termed by Marx the rate of profit, and is measured by dividing the surplus value by the summation of the constant and variable capitals. Capitalists will attempt to realize the maximum amount of profit possible; if one sector of production realizes a greater rate of profit than another, then some capitalists will withdraw capital from the less profitable sector and invest it in the more profitable one. Increased competition in this sector means prices falling, prices falling means an equalization of the rate of profit throughout all sectors of the economy, this leads to the average rate of profit.

Rate of profit can be increased if rate of exploitation is increased; one way of doing this is developing the means of production. This as Marx believes will entail an increase in the proportion between constant and variable capital, this proportion he calls the organic composition of capital. However other capitalists, in order to compete, will also modernize their means of production, and when they have done so the first innovating capitalist’s profits will be driven back down to the average rate. This = relatively constant rate of exploitation, but an increasing organic composition of capital as the forces of production are developed. But as rate of profit = surplus value divided by the sum of constant capital + variable capital, if the constant capital increases relative to both variable capital and surplus value, then the long term tendency of capitalist development is, according to Marx, for the rate of profit to fall, thus the days of capitalism are numbered. Sounds good, right? Mandel expands this by saying capital will be drawn from areas with a high organic composition of capital to areas where the organic composition of capital is lower, this is because the rate of profit will be higher in those areas. This is how ground-rent is accounted for, Mandel says, as “material factors of production could be produced and reproduced by capitalism itself, and produced at a price relatively or absolutely lower and lower, in agriculture, the basic material element of production, the land, is given, in limited quantity, once and for all. It constitutes a natural monopoly.”
But this is insufficient to explain the nature of ground rent, low organic composition of capital in agricultural production is also required. Mandel states that “rent on least fertile land comes from the wheat produced being sold not at the price of production but at its value, and the latter exceeds the price of production because the organic composition of capital is lower in agriculture than in industry, whereas the monopoly of landed property prevents the free flow of capital in and out of agriculture, so that agricultural capital is thus prevented from sharing in the social equalization of the rate of profit, giving up the part of the surplus value created in its sphere to the general share-out of this surplus value”. In other words, Marxist theory requires the sphere benefiting in this manner to enjoy a relatively low organic composition of capital.

A good contra to this is Alan Carter’s formation of Twin Earth. I won’t reproduce all of it here, but the gist is this: Twin Earth has two continents; a northern and southern land. There is the north economy, they evolved to have only two spheres; capital-intensive production by means of complex technology (hi-tech), and labor-intensive production (lo-tech). There are structural barriers preventing capital from freely going from the lo to the hi tech sphere. In the past what are now spheres of hi- and lo-tech production formerly had the same composition of capital. If we consider the investment of 100 value units during this period, then 60 units were taken up in constant capital (5 units being used up in the production process), and 40 units mobilized the variable capital. Both sectors of the economy enjoyed a rate of exploitation of 100%. Hi-tech producers introduce advanced technology, drastically raising their organic composition of capital while drastically reducing the labor-time required per worker. According to orthodox Marxist economics, because surplus value originates strictly from human labor, an increase in the organic composition of capital must result in the economy-wide rate of profit to decline over time. What happens on Twin Earth? Because hi-tech workers require far less labor time to reproduce their wages, rate of exploitation in the hi-tech sector skyrockets. Because capital cannot enter the hi-tech sector to introduce competition and drive down market prices, hi-tech goods continue to sell at their value. The result is that total surplus value and total profits increase across the economy despite the significant rise in constant capital relative to labor.

Now it may be objected that profit cannot have increased on Twin Earth in this manner, because for it to have done so the total quantity of value in the system must have increased, and this must be impossible. However the contrary is true; it is something that happens all the time. If, in a branch of production, one producer were to increase the productivity of their factory by the introduction of new technology, then their products would not fall in value. This is because their value would be determined by the amount of labor required for the average manufacture to produce the good in question, and the conditions of production normal for that society would not have changed. As more goods were now being produced at this value, the overall value in the system must have increased; what would subsequently happen is that other producers would be driven to introduce similar technological improvements, the rate of exploitation would then equalize, and the total value in the system would return to the previous quantity.
But this will only happen when other producers are in a position to introduce similar technological developments; why assume that when a single producer occupies a sector of production, their rate of exploitation should be the same as the average for the whole system? Until their profits were driven down by competition, there would be no reason for their rate of exploitation to fall. The prices on Twin Earth before innovation is consistent with the Marxist LTV. However, after innovation, there was nothing to bring the prices down in the hi-tech sector below their original level even though there was a reduction in the total labor time employed. So on Twin Earth the total quantity of value does not equal the total quantity of SNLT. It is as a result difficult to see how the latter determines value. Rent is not an explanation as for it to be the case it must arise because value is being transferred from the lo-tech sector, but this entails a reduction in the total quantity of value in the system. As no such reduction has taken place, rent will not be an explanation.

With the mobility of labor, the wages in both sectors will be the same. With less labor required in the innovative sector and the prices remaining the same, the rate of exploitation must have increased even though there was no reduction in wages. So the equalization of the rate of exploitation is conditional upon the mobility of capital, because only when others can invest in the area of production concerned will the rate of exploitation fall to the average. Twin Earth doesn’t allow this. As a consequence, the rate of profit has not fallen with an increase in the organic composition of capital. So we can be confident in asserting that a tendency for the rate of profit to fall cannot be guaranteed if the following does not obtain:
1. Capital must be able to move from each sector of production to the other.
2. There must be free competition within each sector of production.
As for the first one, the reason why that is not irrelevant today is that hi-production on Twin Earth could be regarded as analogous to capital-intensive production in the First World here on Earth, and lo-tech production on Twin Earth could be regarded as analogous to labor-intensive production in the Third World. Capital in the Third World is often insufficient to introduce, say, robot plants (which would be necessary to compete with First World producers), then, rather than assume that value is transferred from the Third World to the First, it may be claimed instead, following our argument, that the capital-intensive technology of the West increases the overall quantity of value in the world economic system. So even if there has been a transfer of value from the Third to the First World, it cannot be taken for granted that a failure to perceive a fall in the rate of profit in the First World can be explained away by the supposition that a transfer of value from the Third World must have been of such a quantity that an overall fall in the rate to profit has occurred. It might be instead that the overall value in the system has increased. Let’s go back to the Twin Earth example and say southern lands aren’t planned by Marxist economists. There are just two sectors of the economy. Similarly to the north, capital cannot move into the hi-tech sector from the other. A similar technological development took place in hi-tech production as well. The major difference is, while northerners had allowed a price change determined by Marx’s principles for transforming value into price, the southern capitalists who own the means of hi-tech production, realizing they had a monopoly in that form of production, refused to allow surplus value to be equalized throughout the economy. Increase in total surplus-value (80 to 140 units) was completely appropriated by hi-tech industry. This was achieve simply by the demand for hi-tech goods ensuring that they be sold at their value, as there was no alternative and cheaper producer who could compete and lower the market price. As with the northern landers, overall profits increased even though the organic composition of capital also increased; but the rate of profit would fail to fall not only because capital couldn’t move from the lo to hi-tech sectors, it would also fail to fall because there was no effective competition within the latter. This leads us back to 2, increase in the rate of surplus value = fewer workers must have been employed, and therefore there must be fewer people to buy the hi-tech commodities produced; some of those commodities must have gone unsold, and not all the surplus value could have been realized. Hence some of the value in our calculations must have been surreptitiously smuggled in, as it could not have resulted from SNL.  Profits must have fallen and capital lain idle. But a closer examination shows that this objection is actually invalid; according to Say’s Law, when all value is produced by labor, all value must accrue to either the workers or the capitalists. As long as the extra value goes into products consumed by the capitalist, there can be no problem concerning the rate of profits.

With that out of the way, we can now talk about the relation between crises, monopolization, and automation. Is Marx’s LTV suitable in explaining these phenomena? First of all, how can there be over production of the form which Marx outlines in “Theories of Surplus Value”? In the text, Marx argues that a distinction should be drawn between the overproduction of products and the overproduction of commodities. In a period of overproduction, the workers have a real need of the products, but cannot buy them when they are offered in the commodity form. Overproduction is, according to Marx:
“...specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: production is in accordance with the productive forces, that is with the possibility that the given quantity of capital has of exploiting the maximum quantity of labour, without regard to the actual limits of the market, the needs backed by the ability to pay. And this takes place through the constant expansion of reproduction and accumulation, and therefore the constant reconversion of revenue into capital; while on the other hand the mass of producers remain restricted to the average level of needs, and on the basis of capitalist production must remain so restricted.”
So under ordinary conditions there are two major factors which lead to overproduction; the continual necessity on the part of the capitalist to reinvest; and the production of commodities which the worker cannot afford to purchase. What causes overproduction and precipitates a crisis would be the production of commodities which the capitalist does not wish to consume themself, but needs to sell to a workforce which is either too small or too poor to buy all that is manufactured. Consequently the problem is caused by mass production of the wrong sort of commodity that is not in demand by the capitalist.

But this is far from an insoluble difficulty; to avoid crises on Twin Earth, the capitalist merely produces goods which they can either sell to the workers or consume themselves. On Earth, the problem could be solved by producing more goods for the capitalist, which may involve the capitalist spending their wealth on labor intensive products which the proletariat could not afford to buy. The capitalist could buy goods with a higher labor content than those bought by the proletariat. Some capitalists might invest in the production of cheaply made mass produced cars for the workers to buy, others might invest their capital in the production of more labor-intensive and more expensive hand-built cars designed for the bourgeoisie. The problem is merely that of creating the right balance.

Another major factor in crises: capitalist is driven by competition to modernize the means of production so as to remain competitive, in such a predicament they do not wish to consume what is produced, and so the problem of having to produce for a workforce in severe penury or insufficiently numerous to purchase such good re-emerges. But if 2 does not obtain, then the capitalist is no longer driven to reinvested in modernization, and is therefore in a position to consume as much as they like or need to once production has been directed towards luxury goods, thus avoiding the under consumption it's theory of crises suggested in the Grundrisse. In which case, there is no necessity for this sort of crisis to occur in a developed, monopoly-dominated economy, or and most relevantly, the “national capitalist” economy suggested by Engels as the prelude to socialism.

In 19th century capitalism, industrial capitalists normally have fixed capitals in their production processes, making them function as a part of profit-yielding capitals. They convert surplus into capital, successively, privately, and on small scales, on the basis of their already existing means of production. This leads to high employment in a period of prosperity, which causes wages to rise. Marx believes that individual capitalists must attempt to expand their share of the market or go under, in this case it would be by capital widening. Monopolies, on the other hand, are under no such pressure. With no competition, there is no forced drive towards continued modernization of the means of production and an equilibrium of production of constant capital, production of workers’ consumables, and the production of luxury items for the capitalists can in principle be achieved, thus answering the disproportionality theories of crisis. E.g. concerning the distribution of labor time between a hypothetical Departments IIa and IIb, part of the worker’s day could be spent making mass-produced goods for their own class, and the rest of the working day could be devoted to the production of luxury goods. The correct treatment of monopolies becomes crucial to Marxism. Consider automation; a consequence of Marxian LTV is that no value can be produced if there is no labor involved in the production process. Erik Olin Wright remarks: “100% automated labor would be a disaster for capitalists since there is no surplus value and thus no profits”. Let’s assume a developing monopoly such as hi-tech production in the southern lands of Twin Earth. In 1960, 60 units invested in CC and 40 units in VC. In 65, 70 units in CC and 30 into VC, 1970 = 80 and 20 units. 75 = 90 and 10. 80 = 100 in CC. The quantity of used capital rose progressively from 5 to 10 units, keeping pace with the expansion of constant capital. Increasing organic composition of capital leads to increasing value and profits until there is no longer any variable capital employed. Then the value drops sharply and profits cease. This may be plausible if compared with the following: if laborers are necessary in the production process, the productivity of labor will increase with automation. As the plant is progressively automated, a corresponding reduction in the number of workers employed takes place. Profits go hand in hand with less workers. But at the point where no workers are employed there is no production and so profits cease.

But is the creation of value like this? Imagine, according to Mandel, that human labor has been completely eliminated from all forms of production and services. Can value continue to exist under these conditions? Can there be a society where nobody has income but commodities continue to have value and be sold? Obviously such a situation would be absurd; a huge mass of products would be produced without this production creating any income, since no human being would be involved in this production. But someone would want to “sell” these products for which there were no longer any buyers. The conclusion he comes to isn’t incorrect per se, but consider this: what if an oligopoly owned these advanced means of production, and what if their products were distributed solely amongst themselves, while the rest of society produced whatever they could? Each member of an oligopoly owns one specialized factory; could they not exchange their product with the other owners who produced different goods? According to Marx there would be no unit of exchange. What if a member of the oligopoly decided to exchange one of the products of their automated plant for something which someone outside the oligopoly possessed? Mandel: attempt to deal with this issue in the manner of ground rent. But in the case of ground rent there was a low organic composition of capital involved. And by Mandel’s and Wright’s reasoning, one of the goods would be valueless and seemingly incapable of exchange. Is this plausible? Say you owned a machine which produced things without any effort on your part which other people desired. What if it produced a drug others desperately required in order to return them to good health? According to Marxism, this drug would have no value, but you could exchange this drug for objects provided outside of your monopoly. Surely the drug is of great use-value, and surely it is of great exchange-value in that it can obviously command a high price. Would we not ordinarily say that this drug is extremely valuable, and would we not then say it has value?

If one legislates value = quantity of socially necessary labor time congealed in it, then it is analytically true that the drug has no value. But such a definition isn’t at all useful in aiding one’s understanding of economic behavior. The Marxist theory of value is thus incapable of properly explaining crises, markets (including monopolies), automation, and capitalist development in general.

Marx on Class

Marx’s theory of class is probably one of his most enduring insights. The bourgeoisie are those who own sufficient capital to live off of it, and directly or otherwise own the surplus-labor of another class. The proletariat are a bit harder to define. It may be the class which doesn’t own sufficient means of production to hire workers (which is a binary conception of “class” which would accommodate all of the population in the capitalist mode under both its terms) or the class which sells its labor (which is a non-binary conception of class, other classes could arise which either do not sell their labor or do not own their means of production, e.g. petit bourgeoisie/unemployed in a welfare state). A third class could theoretically arise that does sell their labor, but doesn’t produce surplus value (such as state school teachers or cashiers) that are distinct from the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Using all 3 of these different conceptions of “class” in “class struggle” creates major problems with the non-binary conception; as a difficulty occurs in locating the other classes within class struggle. How will they align with the bourgeoisie or proletariat? Ideological/political criteria might be required to supplement the economic, leading to a more sociological notion of “class”. The Communist Manifesto may solve this by directly saying: “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses...this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” Unfortunately, there is empirical evidence contradicting this; there can be seen a decline in the size of the proletariat and a rise in the number of those occupying a third class, the middle class provides also an area of gradations between those who dominate economically/politically/ideologically and those who are correspondingly dominated. Marx acknowledged the existence of an expanding middle class in Theories of Surplus Value: “What he [Ricardo] forgets to mention is the continual increase in numbers of the middle classes…situated midway between the workers on one side and the capitalists on the other, who rest with all their weight upon the working classes and at the same time increase the social security and power of the upper ten thousand”. Furthermore, Marx refers to 3 great classes: wage laborers, capitalists, and landowners; two of these 3 classes could be seen as fractions of one class, the bourgeoisie. But it is difficult to regard the middle class as a fraction of another class when Marx in ToSV locates it between capitalists and workers. 

As for a definition of class with regards to how Marx uses it, Hal Draper says the following:
“Classes define themselves not simply in terms of the process of production (which existed before the separation into classes and will exist after classes are done away with); they must be defined in relation to surplus production, and specifically in relation to control over the appropriation of the surplus product.”
This definition, however, lends itself to the interpretation of classes in capitalist society in terms of surplus value. Roemer: rebuts the claim that the labor theory of exploitation = those who benefit by the extraction of surplus value correspond in all relevant cases to those who own the means of production.
Roemer rejects traditional theory of exploitation, his account of class which is independent of Marx’s LTV:
“The general definition of exploitation… is a game-theoretical definition in which property relations, not the labor theory of value, is the central concept. An individual or coalition is considered to be exploited if he (or they) has (have) some alter-native which is superior to the present allocation. How we specify the alternative determines the type of exploitation which we conceive of. Formally, we think of the alternative as specified by the characteristic function of a game. If a coalition is receiving less, at a given allocation, than it would receive as its payoff under the characteristic function of the specified game, and if its complementary coalition is receiving more currently than under the alternative, then it is exploited with respect to the conception of exploitation associated with that game.”

To rule out certain anomalies, Roemer adds a proviso: as the account of exploitation stands, an invalid would be thought to exploit the rest of society. Moreover, if two islands, each with an equally skilled populace, differed in resources such that one was resource rich and the other poor, then there is exploitation of the poor inhabitants by the rich ones even though there is no interaction between the different societies. To avoid this Roemer adds the proviso that a coalition is exploited only if it is dominated by another coalition. This nevertheless is relegated to secondary importance compared to the property relations. In capitalism a member of the bourgeoisie is one who, by virtue of the large amounts of capital they own, must hire workers in order to optimize. A member of the proletariat is one who, by virtue of lacking sufficient capital, must hire on their labor power in order to optimize.

The interest of this theory comes in that it generates classes of exploiters and exploited not only for feudal and capitalist societies, but socialist ones as well; Roemer makes a tremendous advance over early Marxist approaches to the question of class by appearing to bring within the purview of Marxist theory the exploitation which occurs in contemporary socialist societies. Marx’s LTV and correlative theory of exploitation didn’t provide conceptual tools to make sense of exploitation in post-capitalist social formations; by relating the proletarian and bourgeois classes definitionally to the extraction of surplus value, Marxists have been unable to conceive of exploitation in socialist societies where surplus-value is not supposed to exist. A game-theoretical approach to exploitation and class means a possibility of conceptualizing different kinds of exploitation. When inequality is the consequence of ties of bondage which do not allow producers with their own assets to engage freely in trade = feudal exploitation, inequality arising due to unequal access to private alienable property, hindering producers’ opportunities in production = capitalist exploitation. Under homogeneous labor, the traditional labor theory of exploitation generates the correct results; Marx’s approach is a special instance of Roemer’s general theory.

Roemer presents this conception of exploitation under socialism:
“Socialist exploitation, the third variety, arises as a consequence of producers’ different endowments of inalienable assets, chiefly skills. The hypothetical alternative against which one tests whether a producer is socialistically exploited is one in which he would have access to his per capita share of society’s skills. Thus, feudal exploitation entails a situation where producers have differential access to freedom from bondage; capitalist exploitation exists when they have differential access to alienable productive assets; socialist exploitation exists when inalienable assets are differentially endowed. All three forms of exploitation exist under feudalism; capitalist and socialist exploitation exist under capitalism, but feudal exploitation does not, in principle; and under socialism, only socialist exploitation continues to exist, in principle. Each revolutionary transition has the historical task of eliminating its characteristic associated form of exploitation.”
Furthermore, Roemer brings up the concept of “socially necessary exploitation in the dynamic sense”. As mentioned before, Roemer shares the mechanistic view of historical materialism, forces of production develop through time and certain social relationships further their development while others fetter it. According to Marx, it was necessary for certain exploitative relationships to emerge so that technological progress could be facilitated. However, the introduction of exploitation results in the exploited being initially worse off than prior to the introduction of those relationships. But the introduction of those relationships is historically justified in that the exploited will ultimately benefit from the development of new technology, and their lot will then be better than it would have been had the new exploitative relationships not been introduced; “the exploitation is socially necessary in the dynamic sense”. Roemer’s general claim about history is that “history progresses by the successive elimination of forms of exploitation that become socially unnecessary in the dynamic sense”; an epochal transition thus occurs when the form of exploitative relation no longer aids development and alternative relations would do so.

Roemer has a concept of “needs exploitation” to explain socialist exploitation, stressing skill; any distribution which is unequal to distribution according to need (e.g. distribution according to skill) is characterized by Roemer as exploitation of the needy. What is to be made of “needs exploitation”? Is it satisfactory? We can praise a society which operates by distributing its produce to the individual needs of its members, but are we justified in calling a society which doesn’t behave in this way exploitative? No. Take two cases:
1. needs will be considered to be satiable
2. they will not
In 1; what if there were a minimum wage in a society such that the needy were catered for? If A in such a society were to build for themselves an extension to their house using their own skills, can it be said that B is exploited merely because the remuneration of their enterprise is determined by skill, even when need has already been taken care of? Roemer says: conceptions of what is exploitative alter with changes in the mode of production. But we cannot except that communist society can justifiably hold the view that every society is exploitative which allows remuneration over and above the catering of need to fall to those who applied most effort or employed most skill.

Let’s say “needs” really mean “wants”, and it can be interpreted as 2. If every demand were considered a need so that need could not be met by such a device as minimum wage;
it’d undermine Marx’s post-scarcity thesis, essential to his criticism of the desire for revolution when the forces of production are insufficiently developed. Let’s ignore this for now. What if “need” instead is marginal utility, people had different marginal utilities with regards to the enjoyment of goods? Distribution according to need is according to marginal utility; available goods are distributed to those who need them most. But it only makes sense to say that any other distribution is necessarily exploitative if we presuppose a collectivist political theory which assumes that society owns the labor of its members. This contradicts Marx’s emphasis on socialism and communism enhancing individual human freedom.
Carter makes an illuminating point I will quote here: “And there is some historical evidence for significant identification with the community in certain countries at certain times 

— in times of war, China in the Cultural Revolution, and so on. But can such identification be maintained? In small face-to-face communities the answer is that it probably can. But as it is large, centralized communities which are the progeny of capitalism, then the likelihood will be considerable that in post-capitalist societies a number will resent the lack of autonomy they will inevitably experience. In which case, the demand by the rest of such a society in the name of die society as a whole for the total enslavement of the labourer to ‘the community’ will strike him or her as oppressive, if not exploitative, even when that labour would otherwise be contributed voluntarily. (As an analogy, I might never wish to leave a town, but if I am told that I am not allowed to leave the town, then it will more than likely feel oppressive.) But such a feeling of oppression would itself reduce the utility in a society and even generate its own extra needs — for example, greater freedom or control over one’s own labour. How are these needs then to be accommodated?”

But! Surely skill can be used as a basis to exploit others. This can be if exploitation involves extracting some of the labor product of another. For example, imagine if food were produced by machinery without labor being involved and this was distributed according to how much skill one possessed, such inequality would not equal exploitation. Exploitation is instead extraction of another’s product, not unequal distribution.
Skill is not defined as assets which underlie feudal and capital exploitation. It is in principle inseparable from its owner. Roemer also says: “A coalition is socialistically exploited if it could improve its lot by withdrawing with its per capita share of society’s inalienable assets, once alienable assets are distributed equally. While carrying out such a redistribution of skills might be impossible, or at least would involve formidable incentive problems, as a thought experiment the calculations can be made.”

In principle, people can withdraw from feudal and capitalist social relations with the requisite assets but not socialist ones suggests that skill being a basis for socialist exploitation is a dubious claim; the reason why one might claim to be exploited in a certain situation is because one might in principle be able to withdraw with one’s relevant assets. One could intelligibly claim that one would be better off if one were free to “head for the hills”, but not so with skill exploitation.

I establish all of this to now move the topic over to status and dominance. Status exploitation; in socialist countries it is clear that unequal distribution does not always equal, or is proportional to, differential efficiencies and skills; it is often the position of importance which the “skilled” have in society that determines their privileged income. Roemer includes dominance as a necessary condition of exploitation but views it as the background coercion of the state which maintains property relations understood purely economically. Is this plausible? Well, according to Carter, ideological domination which those with high status possess allows them (in certain situations, at least) to extract the surplus-product of others. And even more so than with skill, to withdraw with one’s share of social status is absurd, although to withdraw so that status cannot be used to extract one’s surplus-product is not. Having high status involves the ability to dominate ideologically, and hence the ability to exploit. Dominance is too important, therefore, to be relegated to a background position in our conception of “class”. Going back to Roemer, he deals with socially necessary exploitation in the dynamic sense: “An individual will be said to be better off in state X than in state Y if he receives more income and at least as much leisure in X as in Y”. But why is dominance left out of account here? Roemer is forced to include dominance to avoid certain anomalous results; and like Marx is concerned with rooting all problems in the economic, and so political and ideological forms of dominance are reduced to minor background rules.
States X and Y with domination brought to the forefront; what if development is slower in Y but all dominance is eliminated? Is X still a better state? What if Y develops a qualitatively different technology to X such that Y’s technology inhibits the re-emergence of dominance? What if X develops a technology which inhibits the overcoming of dominance? What if Y develops a qualitatively different technology to X such that X’s technology is environmentally sound (such a factor is overlooked in X due to the interests of the dominant class), whereas that of X later comes to precipitate ecological crises because the form of that technology is determined by dominance? For example, for the state to remain in control of energy it may be forced to embark on an environmentally hazardous nuclear power program. Can we still say that an individual would be better off in X than in Y?

And unlike productive skill, status isn’t an economic category, but rather a political or sociological one. Status commands disproportionate respect, excessive remuneration, remains after the abolition of private ownership of the MoP, centrality accorded to the economy by Marxist thought should be rejected; to treat status exploitation as anything other than an anomaly is rejecting historical materialism.
On another point, Roemer speaks of self-actualization under Marxism as being beyond material:
“There are…classical arguments which examine other constraints to self actualization once the material constraint is no longer binding. First among these is self-actualization through control of one’s labour, the contention being that social-ism makes possible such control to an extent impossible under capitalism. This is not necessarily the case. Socialism may eliminate capitalist exploitation, but it is not clear that the status exploitation which appears to replace it in existing socialism is a quantitative improvement with regard to self-actualization in societies where the material constraint is no longer binding”
This passage reveals a central feature of Marxist thought; it is assumed that the material constraint on self-actualization must be dealt with first, but the development of the productive forces in a dominance-permeated society may occur in such a form that workers’ control and autonomy become precluded. It may be necessary to opt for a different type of productive force at an earlier stage of technological development if direct workers’ control is to be at all feasible and class is to be abolished. Why do I bring this up? This is of vital importance when discussing the Third World. If one holds to the direction suggested by Marxist thinking in general, then it is necessary to develop sophisticated, capitalist technology in the ‘underdeveloped’ regions before effective revolutionary activity can take place there. The result could be a dependence of the Third World worker on a class of technologists, with no achievement of direct workers’ control at all. Contrast the view of Ivan Illich: “Above all I want to show that two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the indus-trial age, by choosing right now a post industrial balance in their mode of production which the hyper industrial nations will be forced to adopt as an alternative to chaos”.

Why not go further? Carter states: “If two-thirds of mankind are to enjoy workers’ control, it may well be imperative that they avoid passing through the industrial age. Instead of supposing that the forces of production developed in capitalism give birth to workers’ control, we might suspect hat it is necessary to seize control of less developed productive forces (or choose less capital-intensive, alternative or ‘appropriate’ technology) and then, in the context of non-exploitative relationships, develop productive forces which are appropriate to direct workers’ control. To wait for the productive forces to develop first might lead to the development of inappropriate productive forces which inhibit the realization of workers’ control and hence serve to maintain class differences.”

This, of course, doesn’t occur to Roemer because exploitation encourages the development of the productive forces, and along with other Marxists he assumes the development of productive forces leads to freedom. Yet exploitation requires exploitative relations, per Roemer: “...it is relations of private property which were socially necessary, not particular individual capitalists. It is not that private property was necessary to coax certain specific individuals in possession of scarce skills to employ them (entrepreneurial activity, inventiveness); rather, it was the system of private property in the means of production which stimulated innovation”. 

Let’s go back to historical materialism. It states that revolutionary transitions occur to unleash productive forces fettered by old production relations, not to eliminate exploitation per se. Each epoch transforms the relations of production which have come to fetter the development of productive forces. But historical transitions demonstrate that power is captured by an ascending intermediary class, not the exploited. For example, in feudalism and during the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie, not the serfs, overthrew the feudal aristocracy. We also can see that under state socialism, the techno-bureaucracy and party elite, not the industrial proletariat, supplant the capitalist class. Neither were themselves exploited by the aristocracy or capitalist class. It is thus not the exploited class which sees through the current form of exploitation and carries out a “historic task”; what is more likely is that a new, arising class would simply create a new form of explanation that they find to be legitimate, and then turn around and then condemn the previous one as historically redundant. Moreover, is it clear that removing the fetters to the development of the productive forces in the socialist mode of production = the elimination of status exploitation or knowledge-based exploitation?

Under socialism, capitalist exploitation is removed, but socialist exploitation (whether meaning distribution according to skill or status) remains. Roemer suspects that status may be a necessary feature of planned economies (in a historical sense), and makes his case in this way; “Under feudalism, bondage is legitimate; under capitalism, inequalities arising from private property in both alienable and inalienable assets are legitimate but personal bondage is not; under socialism, only inequalities from private property in inalienable assets are legitimate.” So, he can tentatively offer a sociology of different conceptions of justice which may provide a basis for class struggle, of which may be fueled by a rejection of perceived exploitation:
“Perhaps the exploited learn to classify feudal bondage as exploitative under feudalism, but not capitalist inequality; capitalist inequality becomes viewed as exploitative under capitalism, but not inequality due to skill differentials; and so on. Each mode of production might inculcate the beliefs in the exploited class which are necessary for it to perform its ‘historic task.’ Or perhaps the exploited are less discriminating in the kinds of inequality they struggle against (think of the egalitarian experiments which have appeared throughout history), but the only kind of inequality which can be successfully eliminated at a given point in time is the one which is not then socially necessary.”

But again, as we’ve said before, the ruling class is usually overthrown by a non-exploited third intermediary class. The bourgeoisie, the techno-bureaucracy. And in the second suggestion, it is not assumed necessarily that the exploited class overthrows the exploiters. The ascending class may, by attacking the form of exploitation employed by the current, dominant economic class, invoke the aid of the exploited, and ensure its own effectiveness. Done this way, only one form of exploitation is overthrown at a time. But as it is not the exploited class which significantly improves its position by this process, then this cannot really be a reliable model for the abolition of classes in the socialist mode of production. Nor can it be assumed that all forms of exploitation are less able to be overthrown together than ‘skill’ or status exploitation on their own, because all Marx and Marxists present is the replacement of one form of exploitation by another, not by the abolition of exploitation tout court. Exploitation certainly alters in form, but not necessarily in existence or quantity. The most we can say is simply taking this to its logical conclusion, and pointing out that if each form of exploitation is actually related to social dominance, then abolishing dominance in its coercive and ideological forms is what is required. But the Marxist model of simply destroying economic dominance, or economic dominance taking primacy, does not hold. In Carter’s words, “What, one might ask, has any of this to do with our conception of ‘class’? Well, it is our thesis that because ideology has institutional manifestations, inequality is often not confined to the economic sphere alone, but is often located in the ideological one as well. The relations within ideological institutions must be given adequate weighting when one seeks to theorize the reproduction of social inequalities. The same can be said for the relations within political institutions.”

Marx on Politics

Before we talk about Marx’s views on politics and the state, an acknowledgement of Hegel is needed. Hegel essentially says, “mind progressed from the family through civil society to the state; the state is the actuality of the ethical idea”. Conflicting interests in civil society divide people, it is through their unity in the state which is the area where public interest is pursued that their private inclinations are mediated. Marx doesn’t except the efficacy of these institutions, but as Joseph O’Malley points out “even while criticizing Hegel’s institutional conclusions, Marx remains within the general framework of Hegel’s doctrine. In fact, he formulates the basic features of his own social and political theory through a systematic rejection of the agencies for social-political unity offered by Hegel. For Hegel’s bureaucracy he eventually substitutes the proletariat as universal class; in place of landed property under primogeniture he advocates the abolition of private property; and he demands in place of the Assembly of Estates the institution of universal suffrage as the medium par excellence for the abolition (Aufliebung) of the state-civil society duality.” Overall, Marx’s political solution is very much determined by the problem as it is posed by Hegel.

Hegel posits that the way to overcome the fission of society into distinct persons with private rights is to unite them in the state. For Marx the answer is to transform radically the nature of civil society. “Private property has split society into discrete persons. To heal such a split a change is required in the economic basis of society. But the state owes its existence to this division in society, and so the abrogation of property rights seals the fate of the state. This is the economic basis of Marx’s theory of the state. Since Marx agrees with Hegel that the state exists in order to resolve the antagonisms of civil society, he takes it for granted that if the economic structure of society is altered in a certain manner (civil society being the arena of economic intercourse), then the state becomes redundant. The nature of the state is thought to be due to the nature of civil society-  that area of antagonism which it serves to mediate- and so it is easy to consider the state as merely reflecting civil society. It requires little further effort to regard the state as being the product of civil society, as being determined by it.” Furthermore, Marx points out in On the Jewish Question that “it is only… above the particular elements, that the state constitutes itself as universality”, “man [egoistic man], the member of civil society, is now the foundation, the presupposition of the political state. In the rights of man the state acknowledges him as such”. He further claims that freedom is not based on the association of man with man but rather on the separation of man from man; the right of the restricted individual, restricted to himself. The practical application of this right of man is the right to private property.

The problem is one could not justifiably claim that individuals should be allowed no freedom from other individuals merely because the freedom which the modern state espouses is that of the private property-holder. To do this would be to leave open the door for the most oppressive social order- at the very least, the tyranny of the majority would be an ever present threat. And moreover, it is not only rights in private alienable property which create an artificial separation of individuals. Gender, race, religion, status can all be used to divide humanity, and such distinctions are overlooked in an analysis which focuses exclusively on the economic structure of society (I’m seeing a pattern here!). When other factors can lead to individuals being separated from each other, merely abrogating property rights is insufficient for human unity- especially when the abrogation of private property is so achieved as to create or consolidate such other factors in the process. This is something which may happen when the state is expanded in order to employ it to redistribute wealth, because the state itself encompasses status positions.

Regardless, The current economic structure of society is clearly responsible for certain social directions which the state claims to transcend; Marx proceeds from this to argue in On the Jewish Question:
“the perfected political state is by its nature the species-life of man in opposition to his material life. All the presuppositions of this egoistic life continue to exist outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a life in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e., it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.”
He later remarks:
“The members of the political state are religious because of the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious as man considers political life, which is far removed from his actual individuality, to be his true life and inasmuch as religion is here the spirit of civil society and the expression of the separation and distance of man from man.”

The key to Marx’s attitude to the state can be seen essentially condensed in his “Theses on Feuerbach”:
“Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm is really only to be explained by the selfcleavage and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself, therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then be criticized in theory and revolutionized in practice.”

If we translate this as a critique of the state, this means just as Christianity will be abandoned only if a transformation of that social arrangement called the family takes place, the political state, likewise, will be a thing of the past only when the antagonisms of civil society are resolved. The state would have no life of its own independent of the economic structure which is considered to presuppose and give rise to that state.

The problem is thus; if someone has an incorrect or strange belief, then something in the world may well have given rise to it. But the rejection of that belief does not necessarily require a change in the structure of the world which gave rise to it. Nor is it clear that religion can be made to evaporate merely by attacking its worldly basis. To take Marx’s instance of the institution of the family, the fact that multiple communistic sects (such as the Hutterites, Anabaptists, Taborites, Diggers, Bruderhofs, etc) remained Christian suggests otherwise. And even if a critique such as Feuerbach’s, which applies to a nebulous entity such as God, might be applicable to something as ethereal as a national Geist, is it safe to apply such a critique to anything as substantive as an actual nation-state with its concrete institutions? To constitutional ideology, perhaps, but to the state itself? This is unlikely.

And it is unclear that political power solely equals antagonistic economic relations; conquest indicates that states can have at their disposal a large amount of physical power. Can this power be readily assimilated by a Marxist analysis of the state? Surely conquerors do hold political power, and so that power would have to be explicable in terms of the Marxist thesis which ties all political power to economic relations. Harold Barclay has anthropological evidence that seems to contradict such a thesis:
“In Marxist theory power derives primarily, if not exclusively, from control of the means of production and distribution of wealth, that is, from economic factors. Yet, it is evident that power derived from knowledge — and usually ‘religious’ style knowl-edge — is often highly significant, at least in the social dynamics of small societies. The Australian [aboriginal] leader derives his power by his control of esoteric cere-monial knowledge, the Eskimo shaman by his control of curing techniques and the manipulation of the dark arts. The Nuer leopard skin chief has the power of the cure as do the elders and rainmakers among the Lugbara. The foundation and legitimacy of the Anuak chief’s role is in its ritual and supernatural significance. Economic factors are hardly the only source of power. Indeed, we see this in modern society as well, where the capitalist owner does not wield total power. Rather technicians and other specialists command it as well, not because of their economic wealth, but because of their knowledge.”

But if we say Marx was right to view political power as a manifestation of economic power, what would be the solution? Feudal society -> capitalist society = change in political and economic relationships. Political power was no longer tied to feudal rights. But for Marx political emancipation is insufficient Again we look at him in “On the Jewish Question”:
“Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other hand to the citizen, the moral person.
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propre [own forces] as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed (JQ, p. 234).Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other hand to the citizen, the moral person.
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propre [own forces] as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.”

Human emancipation is what Marx seeks. Political emancipation is the first stage, and Marx says it follows as a matter of course from capitalist development. Capitalism is based upon formal rights which gives rise to a society of free property-owners related by the market. For capitalism to be consistent with itself everyone must have rights, and this entails the implementation of universal suffrage. Marx asks, rhetorically, “is not private property abolished in an ideal sense when the property less come to legislate for the propertied? The property qualification will be the last political form to recognize private property”. But this would not be so if private property were perceived by all to be legitimate. Think back to what we talked about earlier, universal suffrage does not entail the abolition of private property when property is sanctified by a politico-ideological substructure.

But the abolition of the property qualification for voting and the abolition of a “timocracy” does not of itself entail the abolition of private property, the maintenance of the property qualification is unlikely to allow the right to private property to be abrogated. If only those who hold a significant amount of property can vote, it would seem a fair extrapolation that those whom they vote into power will be unlikely to damage the interests of the holders of substantial private property. Nineteenth-century Europe, (this example used as universal suffrage is an extremely modern phenomenon) would seem to provide an example of those elected to power protecting the interests of the propertied class. To the extent that the state plays some role in maintaining civil society, an onslaught on that state would be necessary in order to realize any significant transformation of civil society. Marx, however, has one particular response to this problem, as Paul Thomas puts it: “‘National means,’ Marx argued — fatefully, as it turned out — are necessary to develop co-operative labour to national dimensions; and because ‘the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economical monopolies… [To] conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working class’.”
But surely this isn't the only conclusion that could be drawn, as one could instead conclude that it is necessary not to capture political power, but to dissipate it, to render the powerful impotent by removing the substructural basis of their power. As an example, to the extent that power arises due to everyone’s behaviour maintaining a situational logic, non-co-operation with the powerful, when generalized, can dissolve their power. This alternative approach often ignored by Marxists partly because they lack the conception of a politico-ideological substructure. Furthermore, Marx’s references to political power presupposes the state exerting a coercive force that an (in his view) imaginary God doesn’t possess, as Shlomo Avineri puts it: “Marx never loses sight of this coercive element in all political institutions, but his argument implies that this element derives from circumstances which made the historical state dependent upon civil society. Once this dependence upon civil society disappears with civil society itself, coercion will automatically disappear as well”. But if the state has coercive means, and these can be applied to those who constitute civil society, in what way is the state actually dependent upon civil society? Hegel’s analysis of the relationship of the state to civil society says the state is the result of the nature of civil society. But his analysis focuses on and is only really convincing when it limits itself to the ethical status of the political realm. Especially when one is a materialist like Marx.

Hegel states that self-subsistent individuals are associated through the state. But self-subsistent individuals do not require a state in order to live securely. The existence of acephalous societies attest to this.  Communities similarly exist side by side in peace without a higher order to relate them together. They exchange goods in a peaceful manner without any external state being required in order for such exchange to take place. The international nature of capitalism proves the point. It may be the case that common presuppositions concerning property, and so on must necessarily be shared for exchange to take place, but that is quite different from claiming a state above those wishing to enter an economic relationship must exist if such an economic relationship is to arise. The economic needs of self-subsistent individuals do not on their own explain how the modern state is brought into being. Individuals may well exchange in a manner laid down by the legal system of the state which they belong in. In such a case, the state could be considered, ala Hegel, to constitute the ethical in which self-subsistent individuals associate. But this is a grounding of the ethical and not the ontological status of the state. Without any proof of the ontology of the state resting on an ethical (as opposed to material) support, a claim that the state can only rightfully exist if there are divisions in society does not equal a conclusion where the state can only exist if there are such divisions. That the ethical justification of the state depends upon a particular divided form of civil society tells us nothing about whether or not the physical power of the state also depends on that particular form.

Marx generally claims that the state always represents the economy. But we can see a contradiction within the Bonapartist state. Marx himself at first seems to see it as representing Bonaparte in his analysis of the Bonapartist state: “France… seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back beneath the despotism of an individual, and indeed beneath the authority of an individual with-out authority. The struggle seems to have reached the compromise that all classes fall on their knees, equally mute and equally impotent, before the rifle butt.” The state appears to have genuine autonomy from the economy, which rests on its coercive nature. However, Marx writes: “Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have attained a completely autonomous position…” He continues: “But the state power does not hover in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class, indeed he represents the most numerous class of French society, the small peasant proprietors’.” In defense of his own thesis concerning the relation of the state to the economic class structure of society, Marx insists that even such an apparently autonomous state as Bonaparte’s rests upon a particular economic class. In response to this it must be pointed out that, while the “small-peasant proprietors” may well have elected Bonaparte to power, it does not follow that it is at their behest that he continued to hold power. Through this and parallel errors Marxist theory may overlook the possibility that the state is in fact more substantial than it allows. So, what is the exact nature of the “relative autonomy” of the state? Marx argues that the Bonapartist state, instead of serving the interests of the peasants, actually served the interests of the bourgeoisie, who were not capable of managing the state themselves. That Bonaparte was able to serve the interests of an economic class other than the one he “represented” suggests that the state can, at least in certain circumstances, behave independently of its ostensible class base. Moreover, the line of logic is hard to follow; why should Bonaparte serve the interests of the bourgeoisie if they did not put him into power? A satisfactory answer to this question would surely suggest that Bonaparte’s power did not in fact rest on the peasantry.

Marx’s argument is basically an equivocation involving the word “represent”. One sense of the word suggests that the way in which Bonaparte represented the peasants was by presenting their case; and we might possibly assume that this gave him power since by doing so he was backed by the peasants. The other sense we may interpret this suggests that the representation was merely nominal, and no substantive support from the peasants can be assumed to follow. But “represents” here is a bit of a confusing word. In the context, the only meaning that may be attached to it is that the small-holding peasants hoped to have their interests repre-sented by Louis Bonaparte. But this does not turn Bonaparte or the state into the mere instrument of their will; at the most, it may limit the executive’s freedom of action in some way. This seems to allow Marx the best of both worlds. Bonaparte can rely on the support of the peasants, but he does not have to pursue their interests. Such an interpretation of what Marx meant when he said “Bonaparte represents a class… the small-peasant proprietors”; it appears to explain how it is that Bonaparte held power (the peasants, hoping to have their interests represented, backed him up), yet did not actually serve the interests of the peasants. And as Bonaparte thus ‘represents’ the most numerous economic class, the peasantry, his power looks to be assured. Strangely (but not surprisingly), after discussing this “representation” in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”, Marx acknowledges that many peasants had been revolutionary; either it is the case that only some peasants are conservative or it is only their conservative side which Bonaparte represents. But Marx also acknowledges peasants rebelled against Bonaparte after he came to power; this undermines the defense of Marx’s analysis of the “exceptional” state. The account of the basis of Bonaparte’s retention of power he gives is now noticeably inadequate. Marx appears to offer an explanation of this power: Bonaparte’s power supposedly rests on the peasantry. But the later opposition of at least some of the peasantry shows that this explanation is not wholly satisfactory. The vitality of state power is attenuated in theory and the actual basis of state power is overlooked because it is assumed that it is always conjoined to the power of an economic class in civil society. The power of the state appears to be subordinate to civil society, because of the loose use of the term “represents” and the obfuscation of the two quite distinct questions “How does someone acquire state power?” and “What makes that power effective?” It is this failure to address this problem that, again, undoes Marx.

Despite this, Marx observes the state has grown to significant proportions and has done so across major social transformations:
“The task of the first French revolution was to destroy all separate local, territorial, urban and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation. It had to carry further the centralization that the absolute monarchy had begun, but at the same time it had to develop the extent, the attributes and the number of underlings of the governmental power. Napoleon perfected this state machinery. The legitimist and July monarchies only added a greater division of labour, which grew in pro-portion to the creation of new interest groups, and therefore new material for state administration, by the division of labour within bourgeois society. Every common interest was immediately detached from society, opposed to it as a higher, general interest, torn away from the self-activity of the individual members of society and made a subject for governmental activity, whether it was a bridge, a schoolhouse, the communal property of a village community, or the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France. Finally, the parliamentary republic was compelled in its struggle against the revolution to strengthen by means of repressive measures the resources and centralization of governmental power. All political upheavals per-fected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that strove in turn for mastery regarded possession of this immense state edifice as the main booty for the victor.”

The problem is that the state is not just government, or the representation of an economic class, it is a system of institutions (governments, courts, police, military, public schools, etc), and we cannot identify the state with just one of these institutions to reach a full understanding of them. Carter says, “since Marx insists that central administrative functions will remain after the revolution, one might suspect that Marx has reduced the problem of the state to that of the government. The machine which he observes previous revolutions to have perfected, rather than having smashed, is the form of government (along with its coercive apparatuses) which is taken to be the promoter of bourgeois interests. This identification may lead one to overlook certain difficulties concerning any ‘transitional’ state which may be thought a requisite following the next major social transformation.”

Of course, it is a cornerstone of Marxism that the bourgeoisie state must be smashed and then taken over by the proletariat, initiating a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (though Marx may have had a bit more of a libertarian interpretation of what that entailed than Engels and many future Marxists), but this simply begs the question: why should it be assumed that the function of the state corresponds to the interests of the dominant economic class in a social formation? Surely this is because it is assumed that the function of the state as a whole is to facilitate the reproduction of that social formation (and the interests of the dominant economic class are best served by its reproduction). Then, other institutions besides the government may similarly serve the reproduction of a social formation. If this is so, analysis by people such as Nicos Poulantzas would not support a vanguard which attempted to transform society by an alteration in the governmental institution, and yet which also maintained the other state institutions intact. And similarly, is the state itself bound to reproduce a social formation? The state may well be thought to exist in order to reproduce a social formation, but why must it do so? What is it about the structure of society as a whole which ensures that the state will carry out this function assigned to it? Without a satisfactory answer to these questions, we may fall into “superdeterminism”. His exclusive stress on “objective relations” suggests is that what the state does is in every particular and at all time wholly determined by these “objective relations”: in other words, that the structural constraints of the system are so absolutely compelling as to turn those who run the state into the merest functionaries and executants of policies imposed upon them by “the system”. But this is obviously nonsensical.

The political sphere is that level of the structure of a social formation where political power is exercised. But what exactly is political power. Some may say “class relations are relations of power”. Even if we grant this, how does it follow that all relations of power are economic class relations, as many Marxists propose? Poulantzas for example takes power to be so tied to an economic class that he designates it as “the capacity of a social class to realize its specific objective interests”. Hence, when we speak, for example, of state power, we cannot mean by it the mode of the state’s articulation and intervention at the other levels of the structure; we can only mean the power of a determinate class to whose interests (rather than to those of other social classes) the state corresponds. With this approach to power, state institutions do not, strictly speaking, have any. Institutions, considered from the point of view of power, can be related only to social classes which hold power. Consequently, the problem facing the revolutionary is how to have the interests of the working class realized. Thus, as this involves transforming the cohesive centre of the social structure- the state- such that it corresponds to the interests of the working class, Poulantzas can therefore claim that the ‘motive power of history’ is political struggle. And such political struggle is class struggle.”

This is doubly problematic:
1. it is only as Marxist as it seems if the term class = exclusively an economic category. As Carter states, “If class is determined in the way that it is by Poulantzas, namely by political and ideological factors as well as by economic ones, then to say that power is the capacity of a class to realize its interests is to say that any possible social grouping may have its interests represented (and hence have power). This is because any group can be designated by its specific economic, political and ideological features. Poulantzas’ criteria for assigning class location only concern capitalist society. He does not em-ploy them as determinants of post-capitalist classes. But we are free to do so. As state personnel in post-capitalism could be designated as forming a class if the political and ideological criteria are employed, according to the theory they would thus be able to represent their own interests. In which case, Marxist claims about the state managing the affairs of a class, rather than being apparently quite specific and interesting, would be trivial. However, the conclusions which could be derived from a study of how the interests of a class widely defined are realized are far from trivial, as the question of the exercise of non-economic power returns to the agenda. An informative Marxist claim would be that, ultimately, only an economic grouping has its interests represented by the state.”

2. The term power is defined in terms of economic interests. But what of the interests of political and ideological groupings and their influence? Military and Church oppression would not be questions of power by definition. Consequently, an economic definition of power opens the door for political and ideological tyranny.

Generally, Marxism encourages the two following claims to be made: 1. social antagonisms are resolvable by replacing a government representing the interests of capital with a ‘working-class’ administration; and 2, there can be no state when there are no classes, and ‘class’ is understood as an economic category. Both claims can be attributed to Marx. Both, however, are inadequate or just false, dangerously misleading, and the importance of this becomes clear from Lenin. Lenin’s authoritarianism, despite being more overt from Marx, proceeds from the latter’s basic convictions.

Firstly, Lenin states that “the art of politics (and the Communist’s correct understanding of his tasks) lies in correctly gauging the moment when the vanguard of the proletariat can successfully seize power, when it is able, during and after the seizure of power, to obtain adequate support from adequately broad strata of the working class and of non-proletarian working masses, and when it is able thereafter to maintain, consolidate and extend its rule by educating, training and attracting ever broader masses of the working people.” Furthermore, “Bolshevism was able, in 1917–20…to build up and successfully maintain the strictest centralization and iron discipline”. How is this control of the masses to be consolidated? “he immediate task…consists in being able to lead the masses to the new position that can ensure the victory of the vanguard in the revolution — this immediate task cannot be accomplished without elimi-nating Left doctrinairism; without completely overcoming and eliminating its mistakes’.” What is clear here? Lenin speaks of not a victory of the proletariat, but the vanguard; this vanguard being enshrined in the party, which is victorious when “Left doctrinairism” (which included, among other things, the call for direct democracy in the workplace and uncompromising soviet autonomy) is eliminated completely. “Lenin’s systematic stress on unquestioned direction from the top, state administration, was by no means a late development. Back in 1918 he had written that the Bolsheviks “have won Russia from the rich for the poor, from the exploiters for the working people. Now [the Bolshevik Party] must administer Russia”. Again, note well: although the Bolsheviks may intend to “represent” the poor, it is not the poor, but the Bolsheviks, who have actually “won” Russia. Lenin is, moreover, quite clear that the workers will not administer themselves: the Bolshevik Party will do so.

Because Marx believed that communism required extremely developed production capabilities, Lenin thought it necessary to increase the productive capacity of Russia significantly. What is more, he takes it to be the case that any socialist revolution will have to do the same: “In every socialist revolution…there necessarily comes to the forefront the fundamental task of creating a social system superior to capitalism, namely, raising the productivity of labour, and in this connection (and for this purpose) securing better organization of labour”. But not all methods of increasing production constitute social improvement. One such dubious method is the Taylor system. Yet Lenin is in favour of it as a method for increasing productivity: “We must raise the question of piece-work and apply and test it in practice; we must raise the question of applying much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system…” Back to Marx, he stated (quite famously) “In a more advanced phase of communist society, when the enslaving subjugation of individuals to the division of labour, and thereby the antithesis between intellectual and physical labour, have disappeared; when labour is no longer just a means of keeping alive but has itself become a vital need; when the all-round development of individuals has also increased their productive powers and all the springs of cooper-ative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can society wholly cross the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and inscribe on its banner: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”
But then Lenin’s introduction of the Taylor system cannot be assumed to be confined only to a transitional period, for it is necessary to maintain the ‘springs of cooperative wealth’ and their abundant flow. Unless one assumes the unrealistic scenario of full automation (which many Marxists have assumed) by ignoring the energy requirements and environmental pollu-tion associated with it, then the extensive manufacturing output envisaged by Marx might only be guaranteed by keeping the most productive labour techniques. These techniques may overcome poverty, but do they overcome all social ills? What freedom remains for the worker thus administered? Moreover, who is to administer the workers? And to what type of administration will they be subject? The workers will be subject to at least two sorts of administration:
A. to administration in the day-to-day running of their workplace
B. to the overall planning by administrators which situates each workplace in the socialist economy.
Who will take the decisions which affect the day-to-day running of industry? By subordinating any revolution to the professed and supposed panacea of increased productivity, socialism requires the managerial and technical staff who are capable of maximizing efficiency within an industry. The inefficiency of capitalism is not due to capitalist managers and technicians who work for a highly productive factory; it is due to the intervention in society and the rules and norms set prior to the establishment of a market and exchange happening. Consequently, there is no reason with regard to productivity for the state replacing capitalist managers and technicians. Rather, the religion of increased productivity demands their retention.

Lenin justified the “personal dictatorship” of the Bolsheviks like so:,“If we are not anarchists, we must admit that the state, that is, coercion, is necessary for the transition from capitalism to socialism… There is, therefore, absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals. The difference between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois dictatorship is that the former strikes at the exploiting minority in the interests of the exploited majority, and that it is exercised — also through individuals - not only by the working and exploited people, but also by organizations which are built in such a way as to rouse these people to history-making activity.”

I point all of this out to simply say that Lenin’s suppression of worker control and authoritarianism is not alien to Marxism. In “The Civil War in France”, the work where Marx devotes most space to the forms of revolutionary society, does not address itself to the question of direct decisions being taken by the workers themselves. True to form, the tenor is unmistakably that of representation. Planning is not actually in the workers’ own hands. Once one realizes that even elected administrators, though formally revocable, can in practice become indispensable precisely because of their administrative role; in other words, because decision-taking has become alien to the worker, and because the administrator has become the store of vital knowledge, then Marxist revolutionary organization reduces itself to a position not that unlike western democracies. Its recommendations are tantamount to the reactionary adage of “well, if you don’t like what the present government is doing, don’t re-elect it!” And not unlike that in western democracies would be the degree of powerlessness experienced by the workers.

Marx sums up his view of the relationship of the state to economic interests in The Communist Manifesto:
“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
The central confusion of Marxist political/state theories can be found to originate here. As Carter states, “If, in the first paragraph, Marx intends ‘class’ to be an exclusively economic category, and if the old conditions of production are changed so that there is no longer any private ownership of the means of production, then classes no longer exist by definition when they are defined in terms of either the private ownership of the means of production or selling one’s labour-power to the owners of the means of production. If Marx also defines ‘political power’ as ‘the organized power of one [economic] class for oppressing another’, then the first part of the argument is no more than a tautology, and is trivially true. But, then, this would add nothing of any content to our understanding of the real world.” If this is so, the 2nd paragraph doesn’t follow from the first. “We cannot conclude from the first paragraph, if it is a mere tautology, that with a condition obtaining of no private ownership of the means of production there would be no strata (we cannot now use the term ‘class’): dominant and subordinate strata, privileged and unprivileged strata; strata defined in terms of unequal distributions of administrative weight or access to knowledge. And such differences entail privileged positions whose holders do not regard the development of others as being the condition for their own development.” Thus we can see Lenin’s authoritarianism taking root in the hiatus between these two paragraphs from The Communist Manifesto. Lenin proceeds from Marx and especially Engels’ basic convictions. We also see them take place in this excerpt discussing what happens after socialist policies have been implemented: “there will be no longer any government or state power, distinct from society itself! Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches of production, will gradually be organized in the most adequate manner. Nationalization of the means of production will become the national basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan.” In Marx’s terms elaborated by Carter, “There is no state above society because there is no organ passing laws (through which the individuals in civil society are united) concerning inter alia the private ownership of the means of production. Instead, there is a state within society in as much as the administration of a ‘common plan’ involves the management of the means of production on a national level. But such management is mistakenly deemed to be unproblematic, because it escapes Marx’s analysis of class power. Here, in the failure to question the power of such management, can be found all the justification Lenin requires to lay claim to a Marxist heritage. Here, Lenin’s administrators find all the space they require in order to take their place in Marx’s theory.”

In my opinion, the reason why Marx fails to consider the possible growth of a socialist state above the workers is his early reliance on Hegel’s analysis of bourgeois society. From the moment he thought that Hegel had isolated the fundamental features of the modern state (namely, the way it stands as a professed universal above a fragmented civil society), Marx was unable to stand back and consider whether or not it is really the case that the state cannot stand without antagonisms between economic groupings. The conclusion Marx reached whilst confined to an Hegelian perspective was: remove the fragmenting basis of civil society, remove the right of a few to the ownership of the means of production which creates isolated “persons”, and the state will dissolve of its own accord. Marx believed Hegel accurately depicted the dependence of the state on the economic nature of civil society. But that dependence is, in point of fact, only ethical in nature; and a materialist such as Marx, a materialist not interested in ethical justification but in ‘real’ relationships, cannot assume that the actual existence (or rather the ontological status) of the state and the nature of its power have the same dependence. That the state can claim to exist justifiably above society and create the laws which the members of civil society must obey when, without such a state, there would only be isolated individuals lacking any social unity does not mean to say that without individuals enclosed in spheres of economically oriented rights there would be no state above society. Even if we grant that Hegel may well have correctly described the dependence of the state’s ethical validity on a fragmented civil society, that is not to say that he also correctly described the relationship between the actual existence of the state and civil fragmentation. Marx, in not recognizing the distinction between these issues while at the same time basing his theory of the modern state on Hegel’s, unjustifiably argues that the destruction of the power of a state above society can be effected by transcending the economic fragmentation of that society. The only conclusion that Hegel’s analysis of the state effectively supports is that the ethical justification claimed by the modern state is destroyed along with the removal of property relations which isolate producers. But given the attitude he professes to morality, that is not a conclusion which should interest Marx. Even if we go as far as to assume that the state has in actual fact come into existence because of fragmentation in civil society, the establishment of such a fact would prove neither that the state could only come into existence, nor that it could only continue to exist, given such civil fragmentation. It could not be ascertained a priori, nor from an empirical study of how the state arose, that such fragmentation was a necessary condition for the state’s existence, only that it was a sufficient condition. But such fragmentation is a necessary condition for the ethically justified existence of the state if one takes the view that the state can only coerce justifiably when, by doing so, it unites an otherwise divided society or prevents (further) division. This can mislead one into thinking that it is also a necessary condition for the actual existence of the state. Because in the first case fragmentation is a necessary condition, it can uncritically be thought to be so in the second case as well. Overall, we have concluded that the state has its own interests and is not “a committee for the bourgeoisie”, to paraphrase Marx, and Marx’s own failure/refusal to recognize this leaves room at best and at worst encourages authoritarianism, contrary to the goal of a stateless, classless libertarian society.

Conclusion

Overall, the picture painted of Marxism during this critique is not positive:
1. The base -> superstructure model is incoherent
2. Mechanism and interactionism don’t save historical materialism
3. Capitalist technology cannot be the basis for an emancipated society
4. Marx’s labor theory of value fails logically and empirically
5. The falling rate of profit makes no sense
6. Marx fails to adequately describe monopoly capitalism and crises
7. Marx’s class theory fails to account for actual power, because
8. Political and ideological power are necessarily prior to economic power
9. Even if we grant him this, historically revolutions are done by intermediary, non-exploited classes
10. Marx fails to account for the state, leading to authoritarian conclusions

The reason why I am not a Marxist is not because I am a capitalist or reactionary. It is because Marx fails to provide a genuinely emancipatory theory and blueprint for a revolutionary society. The economic reductionism, not unlike right-libertarianism, blinds it to non-economic forms of power, and mistakes the LTV and property as the sole roots of exploitation. Furthermore, it views capitalist industrial technology as inherently progressive, despite its trends towards centralization, skilling/deskilling of workers, and economic control. These problems are not “revisionist deviations” or authoritarian degradations; they are problems at the heart of Marxist ideology itself. Because Marx’s faulty premises do not lead him to the conclusions he wants, I cannot in good faith be a Marxist.