Notes on Ball & Dagger reader
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848)
The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

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Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

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Chronology and Context

Marx attempts to analyze/define the conflicts of his time as being between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  His intention is to create and mobilize a political force, just as Locke's was.  Locke:  the real source of wealth and power is people who multiply the productivity of the world, i.e., the wealthy owners, not the lazy, aristocratic parasites.  Marx:  the real source of wealth & power is labor, not the wealthy.

Much rapid development of bourgeois production, more and more successful.  [Marx's "reconstruction" of history]

In 1848 the Communists were not well known, despite the claim at the beginning of the Manifesto, but Marx put them on the map both intellectually and politically.  As Locke did, Marx tries to create a political force by framing the conflict.

Philosophy of history:  not "ideas" or "Spirit" but material relations (which does not mean greed and "materialism")

Class struggles — but what is class?  Not the "social register" but rather defined by one's relationship to the means of production, specifically whether one controls it/them or not.

The proletariat work, but they only sell their labor;  they can't accumulate capital.  (Here "capital" does not mean boats and cars and toothbrushes but rather productive machinery.)  The bourgeoisie don't have to sell their labor;  their capital works for them.  (But managerial labor can be paid.)

According to Marx, capitalism is good:

• it creates necessary wealth (enormous wealth, actually)
• it clarifies issues;  inequalities;  separation of rich and poor;  disdain of the poor by the rich (and vice versa)
• it brings the proletariat together in factories, enabling them to develop class consciousness
• it eliminates old (feudal) ties

AND

According to Marx, capitalism is bad:

• First stream of critique:  injustice;  expropriation;  control (as Walzer points out in his J-Town example)
  • labor theory of value
  • small business owners work
  • concentration of wealth
  • corporations are sociopaths:  no friends;  no truth;  do whatever advantages them, no matter who it hurts
  • implies the abolition of private productive property (not, for example, toothbrushes)
  • implies ownership per se has no social function beyond self-perpetuation
• Second stream of critique:  alienation [212/3]:  this is not a human way to live.  No society.  Robert Putnam's "bowling alone".  There is no sense of accomplishment in labor:
  • from one's own labor and control over one's labor
  • none from the products one produces
  • none from other people, due to competition
  • commodification of the lifeworld:
    • ads are omnipresent
    • deceptions
    • materialism;  "bowling alone"
    • family break-up
  • business cycle due to overproduction.

Note ideology [217-218]

Proletarians and communists

• There will be a revolution.  (But none came!)
• Communists speak for all.  (But this broke down in World War II, with the break-up of the Second International!)

The Manifesto's thesis

As I mentioned previously, Marx is trying to understand history.  He wants to know why certain social, economic, and political changes occur.  If he understands them well enough, perhaps he will be able to predict them as well.  And if he can predict them well enough, perhaps he can intervene somehow to make the changes go more in the way he would like.  Marx sees the poverty and other problems in the society around him, and, like the utopian socialists, feels sympathy with the people.  But the difference in his theory is that it is grounded in a careful economic / sociological / political analysis of the forces at work, which give his sympathies a power that other approaches don't have.

Labor theory of value

Surplus value

"Class" = "control of the means of production" = "expropriation of surplus value" = "exploitation"

Capitalistic revolutionary transformation of the world;  secularization;  all is subordinated to profit calculations;  [ex:  my not preparing class because I can make more money doing research;  classes ever-larger]

Capitalism = dominance of the bourgeoisie;  two opposing camps;  no nationalism;  no religion.  (Note WWI defeat of the socialist international;  but also note the current globalism pressures.)

Marx admired capitalism, for several reasons, primary among them (1) its final destruction of feudal ties and (2) the clarity of its oppression, which permits class consciousness by the workers.

BUT:  proletarian false consciousness (including religion and nationalism)

How communism arrives:  false consciousness —> cyclical economic crises —> immiseration of the proletariat/concentration of wealth ...

[Contradiction between need for profit (==> lower wages) and need for support of the proletariat (==> higher wages);  also increasing concentration of wealth yields a revolutionary situation]

[The role of the communist party as the "vanguard" of the proletariat — the only ones who understand what is going on and have a positive way out.]

... —> revolutionary class consciousness —> revolution and seizure of state power —> the dictatorship of the proletariat —> the withering away of the state —> communism

Marx said little about communism (meaning the final state aimed at by communists, not the political position termed communism), nor shall I, except for the following:

• The USSR and the Soviet bloc countries generally are/were not communist but "state socialist."
• We need to distinguish private property (wealth, capital, used for the production of more wealth) from personal property (e.g., your toothbrush).  Marx contends that when there is no private property (with all the social relations that this encompasses) there will be no exploitation and no wage-labor.  Maybe, although I don't think the oppressive relations of the world can all be reduced to a single factor, nor is it clear how a communist system would work in practice.  This is not a claim that it cannot work, just that we haven't figured it out.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

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OTHER, MISCELLANEOUS LECTURE NOTES

Quiz question:  xx

[This is not about the USSR.

Base & superstructure

Government for the protection of property

• Madison [code words, but says pretty explicitly that government is for the protection of property]
• Marx [Says government is indeed for the protection of property and that this is unjust]  [We'll see why later.]
• Disguising the connection through (among other things) the separation of the unitary discipline of "moral economy" into the disciplines of political science, economics, and philosophy.

But why is this unjust?  Why is it "exploitation"?

The labor theory of value.  [Note that Jacquetta Hawkes's fable of the woodpeckers and the starlings has the woodpeckers build their own house.  Where are the workers in her fable?]

Pauperization;  middle class squeezed out

Social class as the basic organization and dynamic force of society

What do we do about this?  (Again, this is not about the USSR.)

Goal:  eliminate class oppression.  [Contra Marx, I believe that there are many forms of oppression, not just social class.]

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