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Understanding
Karl Marx
J. Bradford DeLong
University of California at Berkeley and NBER
brad.delong@gmail.com
http://delong.typepad.com/
+1 925 708 0467
April 20, 2009
https://tinyurl.com/dl20180331a
pages:
https://www.icloud.com/pages/0EKRB23pepHBMLHByVLO8RO5g
THE STOCK:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/understanding-marx.html
key:
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0DEmQu11yYi1vFh7t3JvZ8swQ
I. Introduction
In the beginning was Karl Marx, with his vision of how
the Industrial Revolution would transform everything and
be followed by a Great Communist Social Revolution—
greater than the political French Revolution—that would
wash us up on the shores of Utopia.
The mature Marx saw the economy as the key to history:
every forecast and historical interpretation must be based
on the economy's logic of development. This project as
1
carried forward by others ran dry. Sometimes--as in, say,
Eric Hobsbawm's books on the history of the nineteenth
century--this works relatively well.
But sometimes it led nowhere.
The writing of western European history as the rise, fall,
and succession of ancient, feudal, and bourgeois modes
of production is a fascinating project. But the only person
to try it seriously soon throws the Marxist apparatus over
the side, where it splashes and sinks to the bottom of the
sea. Perry Anderson's
Passages from Antiquity to
Feudalism
and
Lineages of the Absolutist State
are great
and fascinating books
. B
ut they are not Marxist. They are
Weberian. The key processes in Anderson's books
concern not “modes of production” but rather “modes of
domination.”
And when Marx and Engels's writings became sacred
texts for the world religion called Communism, things
passed beyond the absurd into tragedy
,
and beyond
tragedy into horror: the belief that the logic of
development of the economy was the most important
thing about society became entangled in the belief that
Joe Stalin or Mao Zedong or Pol Pot or Kim Il Sung or
Fidel Castro was our benevolent master and ever-wise
guide.
2
A. Marx’s Intellectual Trajectory
But let us go back to a time before Marxism lost its
innocence. Let us go back and look at the thinker, Karl
Marx, and what he actually wrote and thought.
Karl Marx had a three part intellectual trajectory. He
started out as a German philosopher; became a French-
style political activist, political analyst, and political
historian; and ended up trying to become a British-style
economist and economic historian. At the start of his
career he believed that all we had to due to attain true
human emancipation was to
think correctly
about
freedom and necessity. Later on he recognized that
thought was not enough: that we had to organize,
politically. And then in the fi nal stage he thought that the
political organization had to be with and not against the
grain of the truly decisive factor, the extraordinary
economic changes that the coming of the industrial
revolution was bringing to the world.
B. Marx’s Enthusiasm
At each stage Marx had the enthusiasm of the true-
believing convert: it was never the case that philosophy
alone could bring utopia, it was never the case that after
the revolution all problems will be resolved, and it was
3
never the case that the underlying economic mode of
production was the base and that its evolution drove the
shape of the superstructure.
Karl Marx never completed the intellectual trajectory he
set himself on. He tried as hard as he could to become a
British-style classical economist--a "minor post-
Ricardian theorist" as Paul Samuelson once joked--but he
did not make it: the late, mature Marx is mostly an
economist and economic historian, but he is also part
political activist--and also part prophet.
II. Karl Marx the Prophet
H
ere is a sample
of what I see as Karl Marx as the
prophet
: Marx on India:
The ruling classes of Great Britain.... The aristocracy
wanted to conquer [India], the moneyocracy to
plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it. But
now the... millocracy have discovered that the
transformation of India into a reproductive country
has become of vital importance.... They intend now
drawing a net of railroads over India... exclusive
view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton
and other raw materials for their manufactures....
You cannot maintain a net of railways over an
immense country without introducing all those
industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate
4
and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of
which there must grow the application of machinery
to those branches of industry not immediately
connected with railways. The railway-system will
therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of
modern industry.... All the English bourgeoisie may
be forced to do will neither emancipate nor
materially mend the social condition of the mass of
the people, depending not only on the development
of the productive powers, but on their appropriation
by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to
lay down the material premises.... Has the
bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a
progress without dragging individuals and people
through blood and dirt, through misery and
degradation?...
The bourgeois period of history has to create the
material basis of the new world... universal
intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of
mankind... the development of the productive powers
of man.... When a great social revolution shall have
mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and
subjected them to the common control of the most
advanced peoples, then only will human progress
cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who
would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the
slain
…
As soon as this process of transformation has
suffi ciently decomposed the old society from top to
bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into
proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as
soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on
its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour
and further transformation of the land and other
5
means of production into socially exploited and,
therefore, common means of production, as well as
the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes
a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is
no longer the labourer working for himself, but the
capitalist exploiting many labourers. This
expropriation is accomplished by the action of the
immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by
the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always
kills many.
Here is another sample:
Along with the constantly diminishing number of the
magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all
advantages of this process of transformation, grows
the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation,
exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the
working class, a class always increasing in numbers,
and disciplined, united, organised by the very
mechanism of the process of capitalist production
itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter
upon the mode of production, which has sprung up
and flourished along with, and under it.
Centralisation of the means of production and
socialisation of labour at last reach a point where
they become incompatible with their capitalist
integument. This integument is burst asunder. The
knell of capitalist private property sounds. The
expropriators are expropriated
…
L
arge-scale prophecy of a glorious utopian future is
bound to be false when applied to this world. The New
Jerusalem does not descend from the clouds "prepared as
6
a Bride adorned for her Husband." And a Great Voice
does not declare: "I shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow,
nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the
former things are passed away..." But Marx clearly
thought at some level that it would: he never got to the
island of Patmos on which John the Divine lived, but
there is a sense that he got too much into the magic
mushrooms.
Marx the prophet is of interest to cultists,
and to historians of cults.
III. Karl Marx the Political Activist
As I see it,
Karl Marx the political activist
had three big
ideas:
Capitalism Drops the Mask:
In Marx’s view,
previous
systems of hierarchy and domination maintained control
via illusion an
hypno
sis. They maintained power by
somehow tricking
the poor into believing that the rich in
some sense “deserved” their high seats in the temple of
civilization
. By contrast, he believed c
apitalism would
be
different. It would
replace masked exploitation by naked
exploitation. Then the scales would fall from people's
eyes, for without its masking ideological legitimations
unequal class society could not survive. This idea seems
to me to be completely wrong. Cf. Antonio Gramsci,
7
passim
, on legitimation and hegemony. See also Fox
News.
The Capitalists Will Never Compromise:
Marx believed
to the core of this soul that the capitalist class would
always be both ruthless and stupid. T
he ruling class could
appease the working class
, avoid revolutionary pressures,
and produce a tolerable distribution of income and wealth
by using the state to redistribute and share the fruits of
economic growth
. But Marx was certain
it would never
do so.
The ruling class under capitalism
would
, Marx
thought,
be trapped by
its
own ideological legitimations
.
It
really
would always
believe that it is in some sense
“unjust” for a factor of production to earn more than its
marginal product. Hence social democracy would
inevitably collapse before an ideologically-based right-
wing assault
. I
ncome inequality would rise
.
Revolutionary pressures would build. A
nd the system
would collapse or be overthrown.
The
Wall Street Journal
editorial page works day and
night 365 days a year to make Marx’s prediction come
true. But I think this, too, is wrong.
Large-Scale Factories:
Marx was certain that
employment in f
actor
ies
was the wave of the future
.
F
actory work--lots of people living in cities living
alongside each other working alongside each other--
8
would lead people to develop a sense of their common
interest. Hence people would organize, revolt, and
establish a free and just society
,
in a way that they could
not back in the old days
.
In the old days
the peasants of this village were
suspicious of the peasants of that one
. P
easants formed
not a class for themselves but, rather, a sack of potatoes
—
which can attain no organization but simply remains a
sack of potatoes.
Here I think Marx mistook a passing phase for an
enduring trend. Active working-class consciousness as a
primary source of loyalty and political allegiance was
never that strong. Nation and
ethnos
trump class, never
more so that when the socialists of Germany told their
emperor in 1914 that they were Germans fi rst and
Marxists second.
Add to these the fact that Marx's idea of the "dictatorship
of the proletariat" was clearly not the brightest light on
humanity's tree of ideas, and I see very little in Marx the
political activist that is worthwhile today.
IV. Karl Marx the Economist
Marx the economist had six big things to say
. S
ome of
them
are very valuable even today across more than a
9
century and a half
. S
ome of
them
are not. I would call
them the three goods and the three bads
.
A. The Three Goods
Business Cycles:
Marx the economist was among the
very fi rst to recognize that the fever-fi ts of fi nancial crisis
and depression that afflict modern market economies
were not a passing phase or something that could be
easily cured, but rather a deep disability of the system--as
we are being reminded once again right now, this time
with Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Larry Summers in
the Hot Seats.
Marx
defi nitely
pointed the spotlight in the right direction
here.
However, I don't think that his theory of business cycles
and fi nancial crises holds up. Marx thought that business
cycles and fi nancial crises were evidence of the long-
term unsustainability of the system. We modern
neoliberal economists view it not as a fatal lymphoma but
rather like malaria: Keynesianism--or monetarism, if you
prefer--gives us the tools to transform the business cycle
from a life-threatening economic yellow fever of the
society into the occasional night sweats and fevers: that
10
