IV.

The Mature Writings

Marx was laying the foundation for his view of the evolution of society, what he called the materialist conception of history or historical materialism. The key passage where such view was expressed was in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He explained that the relations of production men enter into are the real basis of society. These relations are independent of their will and conditions social, political, and intellectual life: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Over this foundation, or base, rises a legal, political, and ideological superstructure that ensures the continuing reproduction of the economic relations. Each historical epoch is characterized by a specific mode of production to which corresponds a particular system of power and, consequently, a ruling class in constant open or hidden conflict with an oppressed class. Thus feudal society is dominated by a feudal mode of production in which the class of landlords extracts a surplus from a rural population bound to the land. This requires also a political and ideological system that holds the serfs in the belief that no other mode of existence is possible. The transition from feudalism to capitalism occurred when the forces of production (labour power and the actual means of production such as machines) could no longer develop within existing relations of production—that is the relations between classes.

For example, capitalist market relations started to develop within feudal society. Eventually feudal relations acted as fetters on the capitalist growth. Capitalism needed an expanding working class but feudalism maintained traditional legal and ideological arrangements that tied serfs to the soil. Capitalism also needed institutional and legal arrangements that would favour its own advance. When an alternative to the feudal social order is both conceivable and possible, a period of social revolution begins paving the way for the development of a capitalist economic structure and a corresponding superstructure. In Marx’s view, the history of humanity has progressed from primitive communism to slave society, then to feudalism, before reaching the present capitalist stage. In turn capitalism paves the way for communism, a society in which there are no classes, no private property, and hence no legal and political superstructure.

The strong deterministic element implicit in this view of history was the basis of subsequent disputes among Marxists. It was reinforced in Marx’s preface to the first edition of the first volume of Das Kapital where he wrote that: “The country that is more developed industrially shows the image of its future to the less developed.” In reality this theory of historical stages remains barely sketched in Marx’s subsequent works, since his main efforts went into analysing capitalist society rather than the mechanism of its collapse or the formation of a socialist or communist society.

Das Kapital should be regarded as a work in progress since Marx only succeeded in seeing the first volume to publication; the other two volumes were unfinished and published after his death. Most of the first volume is devoted to the discussion of the central concepts of capitalism.

In capitalism the fundamental relation, the wage relation, is based on a contract between juridically equal parties: the owners of capital (capitalists) pay the workers (the proletariat) wages in return for an agreed number of working hours. This apparently “fair” contract disguises a real inequality: the capitalists “cheat” the workers by appropriating far more than they pay out in wages and other necessary production costs. This special and statistically unquantifiable appropriation, or “surplus value”, gives the owners of capital great wealth and control over the economic development of society. They thus appropriate not simply wealth but also power. A complex political superstructure, consisting of laws and ideologies of various types, regulates and reinforces these social relations. In effect, by being in charge of the surplus that results from accumulation, capitalists can determine the overall direction of society. However, they cannot do as they please: the commodities produced by capitalism must possess “use-value”, otherwise they would not find buyers, but they must also have exchange-value—they are not needed for the capitalist’s own consumption but only to be exchanged for money. Thus capitalist production is primarily production for exchange and not for needs.

Competition drives inefficient capitalists into bankruptcy and leads to concentration and monopolies. Markets, however, are constantly expanded while techniques of production and forms of exchange are ceaselessly revolutionized. Crises are central to capitalism. Capitalists are driven to try to increase the length of the working day, its intensity, or the productivity of labour to counter the historic tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Workers, if appropriately organized, will offer resistance. Capitalists try to enlarge their markets while paying their workers as little as possible. Yet if they all succeeded, workers’ consumption and consequently their demands for goods would decrease, markets would shrink, and capitalism would enter into a crisis. Crises, however, are part and parcel of capitalist development, a kind of regulatory mechanism that enables the further growth and concentration of capital: “One capitalist always kills many.” Capitalism, moreover, also brings many benefits such as co-operation in the work process, the practical uses of science and, as Marx wrote in the concluding section of Das Kapital, “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime”, something Marx regarded as a positive development.