Revolutions 10-3 The Three Pillars of Marxism

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Markson engles maintained an almost daily correspondence where they further discussed and elaborated the basic as they had come up with in the 18 forties. And their work in the 18 fifties and 18 sixties, and then into the 18 seventies, was about fully developing and proving those ideas, ideas that coalesced into the philosophic, economic and political system that is to day known as marxism. Today we are going to talk through some of marxism, and it will almost certainly wind up being an inadequate introduction, but we have to start somewhere. Now, since we are moving towards the russian revolution, i thought i might start by borrowing an idea that lenin promoted to frame our discussion of a few of the more important marxian ideas. Lenin says that marks was the genius who continued and consummated the three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century, as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind, classical german philosophy, classical english political economy and french socialism, combined with french revolutionary doctrines in general. So we might call these the three pillars of marxism, german philosophy, specifically, the german philosophy operating in the aftermath of hegel english economics in the classically liberal tradition, though really its british economics, because the scot adam smith loomd so large, though marks is most often grappling directly with david ricardo.

Speaker 1
And the thing here is that, marks being marks, he was not going to build his own philosophy by simply taking what he had found and then continuing to build in the same direction as his predecessors. Instead, he would challenge, critique and attack them. They were the thesis. He was the antithesis. Marxism the synthesis. So first we have the german philosophy component, which, as you know from last week, was mark's first passion. He was for sure aiming to become a professor of philosophy, until the ideas he embraced and the friends that he kept made him toxic to the german universities. As we also talked about last week, young marks, like every philosophy student in germany at the time, was working in the shadow of hegel. But specifically, marks was working in one part of the shadow, amongst the young hegalians who were rejecting many of the conclusions that had been reached by the great old man. The biggest conclusion hegel had reached that marks thought wrong became the most basic component of mark's philosophy. Hegel was an idealist, and marks was a materialist. Idealism here does not refer to a belief in lofty morals and ideals, but rather the philosophic position that what we encounter as existence is not actually a world of things, but a world of ideas. Everything comes down to ideas, and the ideas we have about those ideas.

Speaker 1
Hegel was an idealist, and marks was a materialist. Idealism here does not refer to a belief in lofty morals and ideals, but rather the philosophic position that what we encounter as existence is not actually a world of things, but a world of ideas. Everything comes down to ideas, and the ideas we have about those ideas. The material world, if such a thing even exists, is entirely secondary. For an idealist like hegel. The mind and objects of the mind are the central subjects, not just of philosophy, but of existence itself, that what the thinking mind thinks is real life is really just a manifested projection of some ideas held by the thinking mind. But a branch of the young hegalians started to turn upside down to say, no, wait a minute. The material world is really primary, and all our ideas about it are secondary. They come as sense impressions, or reflections on those sense impressions. Even ideas themselves are the product of matter acting upon matter. In the nero chemistry of the physical brain. It's all physical, it's all material substance. They believed in the centrality of the material world. And marks, from a very young age, was a confirmed materialist. And it became the great building block upon which he piled a bunch of other building blocks.

Speaker 1
But though he was starting from the opposite clusion about the very nature of reality, by his own forthright acknowledgments, marks drew very useful structures and tools and vocabulary from hegel, even if ultimately marks thought hegel had everything stood on its head. For example, we have dialectics. You have probably enc er dialectics at some point, even if you don't know it. It's an adversarial system of progressive reasoning that passes through three stages, usually described as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Its the formula i used just a minute ago to foreshadow where we were headed. First a thesis is presented, then comes the antithesis that would seem to negate that thesis. And then the tension is resolved by a conclusion, the synthesis, which is the transcendent union of the apparent opposites, keeping the good shaking loose the bad. It's a dynamic form of construction, deconstruction and re construction. Now, a few necessary caviats about this. This dialectical form of reasoning and investigation goes way back to the beginning of recorded history and enjoys wide use in both ancient and mediaeval philosophy. So dialectical reasoning is not some brand new thing that was invented by hegel second. Hegel himself, nor marks for that matter, really ever used the terms thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

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Everything was put in a specimen jar and labelled. This was done not just for things in the mat real world, but also for ideas and concepts. They divided them up yes and no, true and false, positive and negative, cause and effect. But they struggled because sometimes a thing is not just one thing. At a time. It was many different things, and often apparently contradictory things. Cause s were effects, effects were causes. They couldn't be stuck permanently into separate specimen jars because they were infused with the essence of many different things. Then those who supported dialectical reasoning said these metaphysicians made the further mistake of trying to get everything to stop moving, so that property and things and ideas could be described once and for all in their rigid, fixed and eternal ways. But nothing is ever rigid, fixed and eternal. The universe and everything in it is in constant motion. Its forever changing, evolving, interacting, appearing and passing away. Grappling with a constantly anging, constantly in motion universe is not a problem for dialectics, nor was it concerned about the myriad and troublesome contradictions. In fact, it positively thrived on those contradictions. Dialectics say, yes, not only are these things opposite and contradictory, but their opposition brings them into union.

Speaker 1
But nothing is ever rigid, fixed and eternal. The universe and everything in it is in constant motion. Its forever changing, evolving, interacting, appearing and passing away. Grappling with a constantly anging, constantly in motion universe is not a problem for dialectics, nor was it concerned about the myriad and troublesome contradictions. In fact, it positively thrived on those contradictions. Dialectics say, yes, not only are these things opposite and contradictory, but their opposition brings them into union. The apparent redictions are needed to advance, develop, evolve and change, to take the simple and make it complex. And so we as humans need to understand the dynamic dialectical process of unfolding transformative conflict between opposites as the path to understanding the true nature of existence. Marks then took his materialism and these dialectics and combined them with another of hegel's big ideas, and then really ran with it, that the confrontation, an conflict between apparently contradictory forces, was the driver, not just of philosophical advancement, but of human history. So now we have the foundational concepts that allowed marks to develop the corps philosophy that underlay all his future research and political activism.

Speaker 1
So now we have the foundational concepts that allowed marks to develop the corps philosophy that underlay all his future research and political activism. Dialectical materialism. Shut out of the ivory tower and forced into the grubby world of being a political journalist and activist, marks took his terialism and these dialectical patterns of reasoning and applied them to the grubby world within which humans actually lived. And in so doing, he started having epiphany after epiphany. First, thanks to his understanding of flux and change, becoming and passing away, he advanced beyond the materialism of guys like newton, who were always trying to fix and pin down immutable laws for eternal bodies. Mark's materialism, on the other hand, embraced flux and growth and change, birth and death and evolution. Were going to spend a whole episode on this next week. But marks believed he had cracked the secret of history, that the underlying economic structure of society the means by which humans produce the necessities of life tofind everything else. And that you could not understand the world, and certainly not change the world, unless you understood how the material economic substructure operated and how conflicts within it were the fundamental drivers history.

Speaker 1
And though in the modern popular imagination, adam smith and karl marx are considered polar opposites, never the two shall meet. But marks, for one, did not think of himself as the enemy of adam smith. And most of marxian economics is working in the tradition of smith and ricardo, even if, as in all things, marks was aggressively critical of every one who came before him. So this transitions us from marks the philosopher to marks the economist, from the german philosophy pillar to the english economics pillar, as marks attempted to understand the material substructure of civilization. And when you read marks the economist, you get hit with a lot of jargony concepts, most of which sound indistinguishable from some of his other jargony concepts. Mode of production, factor of production, means of production, means of labor, subjectof labor, instruments of labor. How is one to tell all these things of production and things of labor apart? Well, marks himself is never a hundred % consistent in his usage of these terms. But they can be arranged in to what i like to call the tree of labors and productions. And it's important to pick through this, mostly so you have a clear idea of what marks means. By the umbrella concept mode of production, which is very important to his historical materialism, and thus very important to the russian revolution.

Speaker 1
And when you read marks the economist, you get hit with a lot of jargony concepts, most of which sound indistinguishable from some of his other jargony concepts. Mode of production, factor of production, means of production, means of labor, subjectof labor, instruments of labor. How is one to tell all these things of production and things of labor apart? Well, marks himself is never a hundred % consistent in his usage of these terms. But they can be arranged in to what i like to call the tree of labors and productions. And it's important to pick through this, mostly so you have a clear idea of what marks means. By the umbrella concept mode of production, which is very important to his historical materialism, and thus very important to the russian revolution. So as befits marxian analysis, we will start at the bottom and move our way to the top. And we shall begin with the marriage of the instruments of labor and the subjects of labor. The instruments of labor are just what you think they might be, the tools of labor, in the ordinary sense, hammers, laths, needles, just the ordinary tools that one might need to produce some product. And in the larger sense, this also includes infa structure and factories.

Speaker 1
And it's important to pick through this, mostly so you have a clear idea of what marks means. By the umbrella concept mode of production, which is very important to his historical materialism, and thus very important to the russian revolution. So as befits marxian analysis, we will start at the bottom and move our way to the top. And we shall begin with the marriage of the instruments of labor and the subjects of labor. The instruments of labor are just what you think they might be, the tools of labor, in the ordinary sense, hammers, laths, needles, just the ordinary tools that one might need to produce some product. And in the larger sense, this also includes infa structure and factories. But those instruments are used on what correct they are used on the subject of labor, which you would consider the natural resources or raw materials, wood, metals, textiles, the stuff a product is made out of. And if you take the instruments of and you use them on the subjects of labor, you can make a thing, you can produce a product. Then if you take those two concepts, the instruments of labor plus the subjects of labor, and put them in a box together, you would label that box the means of production.

Speaker 1
And in the larger sense, this also includes infa structure and factories. But those instruments are used on what correct they are used on the subject of labor, which you would consider the natural resources or raw materials, wood, metals, textiles, the stuff a product is made out of. And if you take the instruments of and you use them on the subjects of labor, you can make a thing, you can produce a product. Then if you take those two concepts, the instruments of labor plus the subjects of labor, and put them in a box together, you would label that box the means of production. Spoiler alert, who owns the means of production is a very, very very important question to answer. But ok, the means of production is just a combination of the instruments of labor and the subjects of labor. But it does not include the labor. The means of production inanimate and are not productive in and of themselves. You need animate energy provided by a human being, to produce the product. And when you combine those inanimate means of production with the animate human labor, you get the concept of forces of production, or productive forces, or sometimes factors of production.

Speaker 1
Spoiler alert, who owns the means of production is a very, very very important question to answer. But ok, the means of production is just a combination of the instruments of labor and the subjects of labor. But it does not include the labor. The means of production inanimate and are not productive in and of themselves. You need animate energy provided by a human being, to produce the product. And when you combine those inanimate means of production with the animate human labor, you get the concept of forces of production, or productive forces, or sometimes factors of production. So again, this combined mix of the tools to do the work, the raw materials the work will be done on, and the workers who will be doing the work are the forces of production. We can now really produce a product. So far so good. But this does not get us all the way to the top of the tree of labors and productions. To get to the top, we need to combine those forces of production with something called the relations of production, which can be described, andm quoting here, as the sum total of social relations that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce and to reproduce the means of their life.

Speaker 1
They involve hierarchical relations, political relations, family relations, social and economic class, basically all the myriad ways humans come to relate to one another, to employ the forces of production, to produce the means of their subsistence and then distribute it to the members of society. The marks and angles themselves mostly deployed this term in service to their political and economic analysis, who owned what, specifically, the means of production, what the law said about who owned what, who controlled who? Who was the boss? What were the social classes? Where was their co operation? Where was their competition? Where was their conflict? The totality of all these relations of production constituted a society social structure, and it was the part that determined how income and products and assets would be distributed. And according to marks, this was all ultimately rooted in servicing the forces of production, whatever those happened to be. But to take a step back for one minute beyond the economic and political implications. The analysis of the relations of production was a fairly profound novel idea, and it opened up vast exploratory possibilities and made marks one of the founders of a whole new field of social science called sociology.

Speaker 1
And it's very important because there have only been a few modes of production in human history, and we're going to discuss that at length next week. But there's the primitive mode, the ancient mode, the feudal mode and the capitalist mode. The point of mark's politics was to advance society from the prevailing capitalist mode of product to a new socialist mode of production. That is the great historical work to be done. So how does mark start coming around to that idea? Well, as a young man, he really started taking stock of the world he was living in. And he felt that something was very wrong and off about it. And is where the third pillar of marxism comes into the picture, because he started being introduced to french socialism and studying revolutionary french ideas. Because the french socialists were also very critical of modern society. And they had developed this social question and were trying to provide answers for it. But given his dialect cal materialism, marks was none too impressed with the life of the mind utopian socialists who were trying to establish fixed and eternal laws of justice and retreating to pure reason to solve all the world's problems, when really what they needed to be doing is studying history, economics and politics. How are you going to answer the social question if you don't understand the question?

Speaker 1
And is where the third pillar of marxism comes into the picture, because he started being introduced to french socialism and studying revolutionary french ideas. Because the french socialists were also very critical of modern society. And they had developed this social question and were trying to provide answers for it. But given his dialect cal materialism, marks was none too impressed with the life of the mind utopian socialists who were trying to establish fixed and eternal laws of justice and retreating to pure reason to solve all the world's problems, when really what they needed to be doing is studying history, economics and politics. How are you going to answer the social question if you don't understand the question? So marks took these three pillars, german philosophy and english economics and french social theory, and started to try to build his own answer to the social question. It was obvious that the capitalist mode of production had ser s laws that needed to be addressed. But how to address them? What even needed to be addressed? What made this new era of modern economics different from previous periods of history? Now we're gong to talk more about this next week. But clearly, the profet motive as the central organizing principle of economic life was a defining feature of the new capitalist mode of production.

Speaker 1
How are you going to answer the social question if you don't understand the question? So marks took these three pillars, german philosophy and english economics and french social theory, and started to try to build his own answer to the social question. It was obvious that the capitalist mode of production had ser s laws that needed to be addressed. But how to address them? What even needed to be addressed? What made this new era of modern economics different from previous periods of history? Now we're gong to talk more about this next week. But clearly, the profet motive as the central organizing principle of economic life was a defining feature of the new capitalist mode of production. The idea that the point was not just to produce the necessities of life, but to produce commodities that could be sold at a higher price than it took to produce them, and then have this profit seeking commodity exchange not just confined to small, local town markets, but toenvelop every aspect of social and economic life. This led marks to ask, wl where does profit even come from? And to answer this question, marks developed the labor theory of value, which basically says that the root source of value, and thus profit, is labor.

Speaker 1
But how to address them? What even needed to be addressed? What made this new era of modern economics different from previous periods of history? Now we're gong to talk more about this next week. But clearly, the profet motive as the central organizing principle of economic life was a defining feature of the new capitalist mode of production. The idea that the point was not just to produce the necessities of life, but to produce commodities that could be sold at a higher price than it took to produce them, and then have this profit seeking commodity exchange not just confined to small, local town markets, but toenvelop every aspect of social and economic life. This led marks to ask, wl where does profit even come from? And to answer this question, marks developed the labor theory of value, which basically says that the root source of value, and thus profit, is labor. Labor is the magical ingredient which allows one to purchase a bunch of inanimate instruments of labor and subjects of labor, and then later sell the product that those instruments of labor had turned the subjects of labor into for a higher price, for a profit. And mark says, more specifically and emphatically, that this is a process of exploitation.

Speaker 1
Basically, he sees things going like this, at least theoretically, the cost of securing one day's labor from a worker must at least be equal to the cost necessary to keep that worker alive for one day, the food, drink and shelter and clothes youv got to keep the worker alive. But let's say you bring a bunch of laborers together to make some shoes. And let's say that after four hours on the clock, the workers have used the instruments of labor on the subjects of labor, to produce enough shoes that, when sold, will generate the revenue necessary to supply the workers with the means of that daily subsistence. This will come to them in the form of wages. But you're not going to blow the whistle and call it a day after four hours. No, you're only at the break even point. This is the capitalist mode of production, and you want profit, so you're going to keep working them for another four hours, maybe another eight hours, maybe, since this is the 18 sixties and there are literally no regulations about this stuff, another 12 hours and all the shoes produced after those initial first four hours. This is surplus labor creating surplus value. And that is where profit comes from. And the profit goes to the capitalist owner. Now, grantit, that capitalist owner has lots of cost beyond just labor. But according to the labor theory of value, the source of profit is the exploitation of surplus labor, paying less for the labor than the labor was ultimately worth.

Speaker 1
But you're not going to blow the whistle and call it a day after four hours. No, you're only at the break even point. This is the capitalist mode of production, and you want profit, so you're going to keep working them for another four hours, maybe another eight hours, maybe, since this is the 18 sixties and there are literally no regulations about this stuff, another 12 hours and all the shoes produced after those initial first four hours. This is surplus labor creating surplus value. And that is where profit comes from. And the profit goes to the capitalist owner. Now, grantit, that capitalist owner has lots of cost beyond just labor. But according to the labor theory of value, the source of profit is the exploitation of surplus labor, paying less for the labor than the labor was ultimately worth. And in marks mason, this exploitation is terrible from a social and humanitarian perspective. Now it gets really interesting, because marks has this further insight based off of a reading of john locke's style theories of property that were so central to the founding of modern liberal economic and political theory. According to this theory, something becomes your property when you infuse it with your labor. Whether it is literally a craft that you made at some home workshop or a field that you plowed, if you worked on it, built it, improved it, shaped it, it became your property.

Speaker 1
The problem is that in capitalism, many people are being brought together. They are doing individual, little parts of the total necessary labor, but not every part. The division of labor inside a factory means that no one person can point to the nished shoe and say, that's mine. I made it. It is, in every way, the product of group effort, social labor. And this includes not just the blue collar workers, but white collar employees in the marketing department and sales department, accounting human resources. But the profits don't come back to these workers. They are instead held by the owner who claimed these profits as his or her individual property by right, not because he helped make the shoe or sell the shoe, but because he owned the means of production. He owned the tools and the raw materials and the factory, and thus anything that was produced by those tools and factories. So what mark saw is the owner still claiming the right of lockian ownership, even though the capitalist mode of production had really moved beyond the very thing that made lockian ownership comprehensible, that individual labor created individual property. The capitalist system had replaced that individual labor with social labor, but the ownership and the property and the profits still remain individualized. And this really chapped markis hide.

Speaker 1
Did marks have everything correct about the relation between labor and profit? Is this really how the capitalist system works? The answer is kind of yes and kind of no. I am not an economist. My habits and mind set are, of course, focused on political history. But i know enough to know that a strict interpretation of the labor theory of value would not just be a controversial position to take, but probably an incorrect position to take, because there's a lot more going on. Even those working inside a marxs tradition who are sympathetic to mark's theories and want to salvage them as best they can have, over the past hundred and 50 years, refined and up dated his ideas, as you would expect, and as i expect marks would expect, given that everyone now has a hundred and 50 more years of data to work from. But there is definitely still some element of truth to all this. The point though, is that politically, these are incredibly powerful ideas. The pitch here is that your fat capitalist owner is literally, on purpose and by necessity, exploiting you the worker, that the capitalist makes you endure horrible conditions while you provide all the essential labor, which is, remember, the ony thing that gives a commodity its value and thus creates profit. And then cuts you, the worker out of that profit. The capitalist hoards it all for himself.

Speaker 1
But there is definitely still some element of truth to all this. The point though, is that politically, these are incredibly powerful ideas. The pitch here is that your fat capitalist owner is literally, on purpose and by necessity, exploiting you the worker, that the capitalist makes you endure horrible conditions while you provide all the essential labor, which is, remember, the ony thing that gives a commodity its value and thus creates profit. And then cuts you, the worker out of that profit. The capitalist hoards it all for himself. All you get is these pitly wages and even the notion of the necessary labor, the stuff that precedes the surplus labor that is supposed be keeping you alive, well, that amount that you get is squeezed and squeezed. Just how little nourishment is enough to keep a human being alive? What counts as a shelter? In the lived experience of the workers, the plan always seemd to be drive down labor costs as low as humanly possible. Because when you add it up, profit comes from the gap between how low your labor costs are and how high a price you can charge for the commodity that labor produces. And the idea is, if you explain it to the workers in just this way, that they will rise up in revolution.