Reviewing Karl Marx

Review of Peter Singer's Karl Marx, a very short introduction

By whatever accidents of history, the otherwise obscure German Jewish Karl Marx became an internationally known hero and villain (depending on your view). I was somewhat familiar with his ideas though not by having studied them directly, but I didn’t really know much about his life. So I decided to read a biography, since I saw there was one written by Peter Singer. I’ve always liked Peter Singer’s writing since I was a philosophy student. It’s this one:

Quotes are from the book, commentary from me. His life begins:

Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818. His parents, Heinrich and Henrietta, came from Jewish families. Heinrich qualified as a lawyer in 1814, when the Rhineland was under French administration. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 the Rhineland came under Prussian rule, and Jews were no longer allowed to practise law. Heinrich and his family became Lutherans, at least nominally. The family was comfortably off without being wealthy; they held liberal, but not radical, views on religion and politics.

Marx’s intellectual career began badly when, at the age of 17, he went to study law at the University of Bonn. Within a year he had been imprisoned for drunkenness and slightly wounded in a duel. He also wrote love poems to his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen. His father had soon had enough of this ‘wild rampaging’ as he called it, and decided that Karl should transfer to the more serious University of Berlin (see Figure 1).

For those not familiar, when Napoleon conquered various political entities, he brought with him anti-Aristocracy reforms, which came with meritocracy effects such as removing various legal barriers for groups based on the French ideology. For this reason economists have studied the benefits of getting conquered by Napoleon. For instance, this study claims, somewhat dubiously, that a lot of the north Italian advantage is getting Napoleonic reforms which brought school reforms and thus literacy. Probably more famous is this Acemoglu study claiming various benefits for mainland European countries:

The French Revolution of 1789 had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. The French Revolutionary armies during the 1790s and later under Napoleon invaded and controlled large parts of Europe. Together with invasion came various radical institutional changes. French invasion removed the legal and economic barriers that had protected the nobility, clergy, guilds, and urban oligarchies and established the principle of equality before the law. The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth, especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion. Our interpretation is that the Revolution destroyed (the institutional underpinnings of) the power of oligarchies and elites opposed to economic change; combined with the arrival of new economic and industrial opportunities in the second half of the 19th century, this helped pave the way for future economic growth. The evidence does not provide any support for several other views, most notably, that evolved institutions are inherently superior to those ‘designed’; that institutions must be ‘appropriate’ and cannot be ‘transplanted’; and that the civil code and other French institutions have adverse economic effects.

Given the author one has to take it with some skepticism, but nevertheless may be true to some extent. Meritocracy does work after all.

Anyway, back to Marx:

In Berlin Marx turned from law to philosophy. This did not impress his father: ‘degeneration in a learned dressing-gown with uncombed hair has replaced degeneration with a beer glass,’ he wrote in a reproving letter (MC 27). It was, however, the death rather than the reproaches of his father that forced Marx to think seriously about a career—for without his father’s income the family could not afford to support him indefinitely. Marx therefore began work on a doctoral thesis with a view to getting a university lectureship. The thesis itself was on a remote and scholarly topic—some contrasts in the philosophies of nature of Democritus and Epicurus—but Marx saw a parallel between these ancient disputes and the debate about the interpretation of the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, which was at that time a meeting ground for divergent political views in German thought.

The thesis was accepted in 1841, but no university lectureship was offered. Marx became interested in journalism. He wrote on social, political, and philosophical issues for a newly founded liberal newspaper, the Rhenish Gazette (Rheinische Zeitung). His articles were appreciated and his contacts with the newspaper increased to such an extent that when the editor resigned late in 1842, Marx was the obvious replacement, even though he was only 22 years old.

So Marx was doing relatively useless university studies and living off family welfare. But then money got tight and he wanted a job, so... journalism! Actually, Marx lived off the welfare of others his entire life. Ironically, he was subsidized by Engels who had money from his father’s success in capitalism.

Regarding Marx’s economic determinist (almost?) theory of history:

After Marx died, Engels denied that Marx had said that ‘the economic element is the only determining one’. He and Marx, he conceded, were partly to blame for this misinterpretation, for they had emphasized the economic side in opposition to those who rejected it altogether. Marx and he had not, Engels wrote, overlooked the existence of interaction between the economic structure and the rest of the superstructure. They had affirmed only that ‘the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary’. According to Engels, Marx grew so irritated at misinterpretations of his doctrine that towards the end of his life, he declared: ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist.’

The situation where some school of thought named after a person became too caricatured even for that person is not that uncommon (you may not be surprised to learn that Nietzsche scolded his followers).

Marx had some ideas about how the division of labor would affect society:

Capital increases its domination by increasing the division of labour. This occurs because competition between capitalists forces them to make labour ever more productive, and the greater the scale on which they can produce, and the greater the division of labour, the more productive labour is. This increasing division of labour has several effects.

First, it enables one worker to do the work of ten, and so increases the competition among workers for jobs, thus driving wages down.

Second, it simplifies labour, eliminates the special skills of the worker, and transforms him into ‘a simple, monotonous productive force’ (WLC 291).

Third, it puts more small-scale capitalists out of business. They can do nothing but join the working class. ‘Thus’, says Marx, ‘the forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner’ (WLC 293).

Finally, Marx says, as the scale of production increases and new markets are needed to dispose of the production, economic crises become more violent. Initially a crisis of overproduction can be relieved by opening up a new market or more thoroughly exploiting an old one. This room for manoeuvre shrinks as production expands. Wage-Labour and Capital closes with an image of capitalism collapsing into its grave, but taking with it the corpses of its slaves, the workers, who perish in economic crises.

And all this, Marx ironically reminds us, when capital is growing—the most favourable condition for wage-labour!

The exact opposite happened. Specialized labor became educated labor and drove wages up (due to utility + scarcity). However, we could speculate that in some AI dystopia, the bolded claim may come sort of true. If AIs take over most educated work, then humans have nothing left to offer in terms of educated labor, and thus can only offer identical menial labor. I assume some current Marxists have gotten the same idea, and thus are agitating against Big AI. This is probably the most likely time they could be right. (I think in real life, though, robots will be more useful than humans, so Humans Need Not Apply).

Peter Singer provides his own evaluation of Marx’ main work:

Marx, Engels, and later Marxists treat Capital as a contribution to the science of economics. In those terms it is open to several damning objections. For instance, Marx asserts that all profit arises from the extraction of surplus value from living labour; machines, raw materials, and other forms of capital cannot generate profit, though they can increase the amount of surplus value extracted. This seems obviously wrong. Future capitalists will not find their profits drying up as they replace their last workers by intelligent robots. Instead, the profits will flow from their competitive advantage over other manufacturers who produce at higher cost because they are still paying human workers. Alternatively, if other manufacturers also turn to robots, profits will still be earned by those capitalists who are best in designing or marketing the products the robots will make.

Many of Marx’s other theories have been refuted by events: the theory that wages will always tend downwards to the subsistence level of the workers; the theory of the falling rate of profit; the theory that under capitalism economic crises will become more and more severe; the theory that capitalism will force more and more people down into the working class; and the theory that, to force wages down, capitalism requires an ‘industrial reserve army’ of paupers, people who are unemployed or irregularly employed, and living near the subsistence level.

Does this mean that the central theses of Capital are simply mistaken, and that the work is just another piece of crackpot economics—as we might have expected from a German philosopher meddling in a field in which he has not been trained? If this view seems at all plausible, Marx himself, with his emphasis on the scientific nature of his discovery, must bear the blame. It would be better to regard Capital, not as the work of ‘a minor post-Ricardian’ (as Paul Samuelson, a leading 20th-century economist, once appraised Marx as an economist), but as the work of a critic of capitalist society. Marx wanted to expose the deficiencies of classical economics in order to expose the deficiencies of capitalism. He wanted to show why the enormous increase in productivity and wealth brought about by the industrial revolution had made the great majority of human beings worse off than before. He wanted to reveal how the old relationships of master and slave, lord and serf, survived under the cloak of freedom of contract. His answer to these questions was the doctrine of surplus value. As an economic doctrine it does not stand up to scientific probing. Marx’s economic theories are not a scientific account of the nature and extent of exploitation under capitalism. They nevertheless offer a vivid picture of the kind of society created by the forces unleashed by capitalism: a society in which the productive workers unconsciously create the instruments of their own oppression. It is a picture of human alienation, writ large as the dominance of past labour, or capital, over living labour. The value of the picture lies in its capacity to lead us to see its subject in a radically new way. It is a work of art, of philosophical reflection, and of social polemic, all in one, and it has the merits and the defects of all three of these forms of writing. It is a painting of capitalism, not a photograph.

Basically, most of it was interesting, but wrong. It wasn’t really scientific, more of a philosophical school. This is also why Marxists spend endless amounts of time arguing about obscure (and obtuse) Hegelian philosophy. Marxism is, after all, basically Hegel’s historical mysticism applied to specific economic classes (capitalists, workers etc.). Now a days it has been generalized to every identifiable social group with problems (yes, their problems are your fault, more taxes/education needed).

But did the Marxists have at least some success politically? Singer provides a fun example of sorts:

In the 20th century, communist parties in several European democracies often refused to cooperate with Social Democrats in order to gain power peacefully. Their view was that social democratic reforms like the introduction of a welfare state would make capitalism more tolerable and so serve to postpone the revolution that would bring about communism. This was especially tragic in Germany, where at the last free election before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Social Democrats and Communists together won more seats than the Nazis and could have kept Hitler out of power if they had been willing to work together. It is therefore worth noting that Marx was not opposed to attempts to get better conditions for workers, even when they fell far short of communism, but better conditions were not his real goal. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels refer to the successful battle for legislation limiting the working day to ten hours, and say that the ‘real fruit’ of such struggles is that they help to form the workers into a class and a political party (CM 252).

The socialists were probably also not keen on working with the communists given what happened in the second Russian revolution where the hardcore communists (Bolsheviks) couped the softer ones. Since the German communists already tried a coup earlier (in 1918), there was particularly strong reason to be skeptical of any cooperation with communists, even if the alternative was Nazis. Recall that at this time (in 1933), fascist-like ideologies had not yet shown how awful they could be. Mussolini was running things OK in Italy before WW2.

About psychology and Marxism:

How did Marx think the opposition between private and communal interests could be overcome? Obviously the abolition of private property could play a part—it is not so easy to feather one’s own nest if one doesn’t own any feathers, or a nest. But the change would have to go deeper, for even without private property people could pursue their own interests by trying to get as much as they could for themselves (for immediate consumption if the abolition of private property made hoarding impossible) or by shirking their share of the work necessary to keep the community going, especially when the work is arduous or dangerous. To alter this, nothing short of a radical transformation of human nature would suffice.

...

This conclusion has far-reaching consequences for Marx’s positive proposals. If changing the economic basis of society will not bring individuals to see their own interests and the interests of society as the same, then communism as Marx conceived it must be abandoned. Marx never intended a communist society to force the individual to work against his or her own interests for the collective good—at least not for longer than the brief period in which the economic structure of the society was in the process of transitioning to social ownership, and human nature was adjusting to this change, as Marx assumed it would. The need to use coercion would signify not the overcoming of alienation, but the continuing alienation of man from man; a coercive society would not be the riddle of history solved, but merely the riddle restated in a new form; it would not end class rule, but would substitute a new ruling class for the old one. We should not blame Marx for dictatorships that he did not foresee and which, if he had foreseen them, he would have condemned. Nevertheless, the distance between the communist society Marx envisaged and the form taken by ‘communism’ in the 20th century may in the end be traceable to his mistaken conception of the plasticity of human nature.

In Marxism, people are self-interested due to purely socioeconomic factors. In a true Communist utopia people would no longer have any particular self-interest, but everybody would work for the common good. To anyone who knows about evolution, this is called eusociality and it’s very rare. Humans, however, are not a eusocial species, so this social organization is incompatible with human nature. When I was a Marxist back in my late teens, I read Richard Dawkins’ books about biology and he mentions the same issue. This is what turned me away from hard leftism. The usual funny quote given is: “Good ideology, Wrong species.” (E. O. Wilson, an expert in eusociality). As I recall it, my main concerns with capitalism was with the abuses of large companies. Learning more about history just made me realize that any anti-capitalist cure is worse than the disease it attempts to fix. It’s not that I have abandoned the view that large companies cause severe problems. There doesn’t appear to be any way around this. The only way to get people to work for something that benefits society as a whole is for them to benefit themselves. But what benefits one company may be at the cost of society. The question is really just what kind of regulation can be efficiently done to steer capitalism in the right direction.

About the famous slogan:

In these comments on the Gotha Programme Marx proposes the celebrated principle of distribution for a communist society: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. The principle is not original to Marx, and Marx places little emphasis upon it. He refers to it only in order to criticize those socialists who worry too much about how goods would be distributed in a socialist society. Marx thought it a mistake to bother about working out a fair principle of distribution. He describes such ideas as ‘obsolete verbal rubbish’ and was willing to allow that, given the capitalist mode of production, capitalist distribution was the only one that was ‘fair’ because ‘right can never be higher than the economic structure of society’. Marx’s aim in this section of his critique is to show that it is ‘a crime’ to force on the Party dogmas like ‘fair distribution’ and ‘equal right’ because it would pervert the more realistic outlook he favoured. Production, not distribution, is what matters, for once the means of production are owned cooperatively by the workers, and ‘the productive forces have increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly’, distribution will look after itself (GP 615).

Marx was always short on specifics about how the communist utopia would or should look like. I don’t think communists are any closer to this 150 years later (except that other people should be working while they engage in useless writing, of course).

At the end of the book, Singer provides his own overall assessment of Marxism:

First, though, it is necessary to say a little more about Marx as a scientist; for it cannot be denied that Marx thought of his own theories as ‘scientific’, and based predictions about the future of capitalism on them. He predicted that:

While capitalists get richer, workers’ wages will, with a few short-lived exceptions, remain at or near the subsistence level.

More and more independent producers will be forced down into the proletariat, leaving a few rich capitalists and a growing mass of poor workers.

The rate of profit will fall.

Capitalism will collapse or be overthrown because of its internal contradictions.

Proletarian revolutions will occur in the most industrially advanced countries.

More than a century after Marx made these predictions, most of them are so plainly mistaken that one can only wonder why anyone sympathetic to Marx would attempt to argue that his greatness lies in the scientific aspects of his work. In industrialized countries, workers’ real wages have risen far above bare subsistence. Rates of profit rise and fall in different times and places, but the long-term decline that Marx predicted has not eventuated. Capitalism has gone through several crises, but nowhere has it collapsed or been overthrown as a result of internal contradictions. Communists have taken power in less developed nations, rather than in the more industrialized ones.

As a matter of fact, every attempt at communism had lead to unspeakable horrors, and capitalism has generally made everything much better. It’s hard to be more wrong than Karl Marx was about economics.

Since Singer is a kind of leftist (a moral egalitarian), he also provides some more positive takes:

From the perspective of contemporary thinkers sympathetic to a Marxist approach to economics, Piketty’s demonstration of capitalism’s inherent inegalitarianism is a welcome antidote to the claims of neoclassical economists that the rich have more because they are more productive or more highly skilled. On Piketty’s analysis, owning capital is enough to put one among those whose wealth will grow faster than those who live by selling their labour, no matter how highly skilled that labour may be. Marxists can also draw on Piketty’s statistics to refute neoclassical economists who argue that the tendency of capitalism to reduce inequality renders the redistributive measures of social democracies unnecessary and even counterproductive. Piketty advocates a tax on capital as the only workable remedy for the increasing inequality generated by capitalism. The problem is that he doubts that such a tax—which would have to be global to prevent capital flowing out of those countries that tax it—is politically feasible.

I don’t really see what the big problem with economic inequality in itself is. Everybody is now much nicer off than they were in the past. Does it matter the exact % of wealth that the top 1% owns? Every western country is moving towards endless socialism (markets + infinity taxes), so while the elites may accumulate the wealth, average Joe is still much better off. In fact, the welfare is so generous that they often don’t have to work at all.

Overall, I liked this book a lot. It’s short and contains a wealth of information. It’s not generally an attack piece like the typical accounts of Marxism you would read in right-wing books (e.g. Chris Rufo’s book about Wokism).

For those interested in more funny stuff on Karl Marx, there’s an obscure book full of juicy quotes called Karl Marx, Racist by Nathaniel Weyl. Weyl is a very interesting character (also Jewish), who made his own transition from communist to writing for Mankind Quarterly.