The Thought of Karl Marx
Part One

	Today I launch what will undoubtedly be a many part tutorial on the thought of Karl Marx.  Since there may only be a handful of folks out there who actually want to read such a tutorial, I will intersperse these segments on my blog with my usual commentary on the passing scene.  If anyone wishes to take this tutorial really seriously and supplement it with readings, let me begin with a few suggestions.  The most important thing, of course, is to read Marx himself.  The essential texts are The Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The Communist Manifesto, and Volume One of CAPITAL.  Among the early works, Part One of THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY is also useful.  Serious students will want to read all of CAPITAL -- the three volumes, plus the so-called "fourth volume" -- the three volumes of THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE -- but as that comes to five thousand pages of discussion of economics, I will understand if you give it a pass.
	This will be a tutorial on the thought of Karl Marx, not on Marxism, as it has come to be called.  There will be no discussion of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Max Schachtman, Rosa Luxembourg, the First, Second, Third, or Fourth Internationals, or even of the Sunnyside Progressive School, which I attended until age six.  If there is anyone for whom this multi-part tutorial is not enough Wolff, there are always my two books on Marx:  UNDERSTANDING MARX and MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY.  Some years ago, Jerrold Siegel, a Professor at Princeton, published a magnificent biography of Marx called MARX'S FATE.  I recommend it most warmly.
	So, enough throat clearing.  Let us begin.
	Marx was born in 1818, in a small town near what is now the border of Luxembourg.  Although he came from a long line of rabbis, his father had made a pro forma conversion to Christianity so that he could pursue his career as a lawyer.  Marx was a brilliant student, and his parents had great hopes for him, perhaps as a professor.  At seventeen he went off to university, studying first at Bonn [if my memory serves me -- I am doing this from memory, rather than spending time checking things in books] and then at Berlin.  He earned a doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation on the ancient Greek atomists.  I have actually read Marx's doctoral dissertation, and you can trust me that it is not the very first thing by Marx you would want to read.  Its significance for his later development is that it dealt with philosophers who espoused materialism, not -- as was then the philosophical rage in German speaking Europe -- idealism.
	To understand Marx's life and thought, it is essential to call to mind, at least in its broad outlines, what was happening in Europe when Marx was growing up.  There were two great upheavals underway, both of which had a profound effect on Marx, and, indeed, on every other important thinker of that time.  The first was the political upheaval triggered in the late eighteenth century by the overthrow of the ancien regime in France, and then by the series of military and political revolutions that were carried across Central and Southern Europe by Napoleon's armies.
	It is difficult for us, at this remove, to appreciate just how deeply the French Revolution shook the European world.  France was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in Europe.  The court at Versailles was the wonder of the European world, its wealth and elegance the model for every lesser ruler, from Prussia to Russia.  Continental Europe had not been much troubled by the overthrow and eventual restoration of the Stuarts in England a century earlier, but when the head of Europe's most powerful monarch fell into a basket, people took notice.
	Napoleon's brief conquests broke up the old Hapsburg Empire and set free cultural and political forces that transformed Central Europe.  One can see the effects in the music of Chopin and Liszt, and even in the collection of folk tales in local languages assembled by the Brothers Grimm.  Politically, Europe was aflame.  In 1830, when Marx was a boy of twelve, the Paris Commune brought the existing monarchy to an end, and though a new monarchy was quickly installed, the lesson of those three glorious days was that direct action in the streets by the common people could have dramatic revolutionary effects.
	All of this must be kept in mind when one reads THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, written by Marx in 1848 shortly before another round of political upheavals.  The optimism Marx exhibits in that early work is a direct consequence of the lessons of the previous sixty years.  If the Old Regime in France could be toppled, if the Hapsburg Empire could be shattered, if street riots could bring down kings, how unreasonable was it to suppose that dedicated communists could bring into existence the next stage of history?
	The second great upheaval was less dramatic, but Marx eventually concluded that it was much more important, and indeed was the cause of the political transformations -- I refer, of course, to the explosive rise and expansion of capitalism.  Unlike the political revolutions, this transformation matured first in England.  Even France, whose highly developed and rationalized economy was still largely agricultural, did not experience the capitalist transformation as early as did England, and in the part of Europe in which Marx was growing up, the economy was still for the most part in a late feudal stage of development.
	Marx devoted his life to analyzing capitalism, and we shall have a great deal to say, later on, about his insights and conclusions.  In these opening remarks, I want to deal, as it were, with surfaces, appearances, rather than with the underlying structure of the economy.  There were four or five ways in which capitalism thrust itself into the consciousness of social observers both in England and, somewhat later, on the continent.  First of all, there was an explosion of output.  Goods were spewed from the new factories in astonishing quantities.  In his great work, THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING-CLASS IN ENGLAND IN 1844, Friedrich Engels, Marx's lifelong collaborator and friend, describes the shop windows filled with goods, like a great cornucopia overflowing with the bounties of industry.  Marx chooses to begin the very first paragraph of CAPITAL by saying, "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities.'"  [He is quoting himself here from an earlier work.]  This sudden expansion of the scope of output worked profound changes in English, and later in continental, society.
	The second striking consequence of the advent of capitalism was the phenomenon of the "new men," factory owners who had begun life in modest circumstances as apprentices or journeymen, and made money so rapidly that in their own lifetimes they were able to marry their daughters off to impecunious aristocrats or buy themselves titles.  European society was accustomed to enormous disparities in wealth, but rich families and individuals by and large derived their wealth from ownership of land, which had been inherited from previous generations.  There were, of course, times of great trouble in the history of Europe when fighting men, by force of arms, seized great estates and catapulted themselves into the ranks of the nobles, but the newly wealthy capitalists were not buccaneers, aggrandizing themselves at the point of a sword.  Indeed, it really was not clear how they were able to become so rich so fast.
	The third great change in English society was the transformation of cities.  Huge slums sprouted up, inhabited by landless, propertyless people whose sole source of food and shelter was day labor in the new factories.  Many of these were former peasants, driven off the land by country squires who enclosed their land and turned it into sheep pastures to feed the new cloth factories' demand for wool.
	The fourth great change was the erosion of the traditional authority and position of the landed aristocracy and the clergy.  This is a complex story going back to the late Middle Ages, and it would take too long even to sketch here.  Suffice it to say that capitalism truly was, as Marx was among the first to observe, the most revolutionary force ever let loose upon society.
	Finally, it is worth mentioning that among the byproducts of the explosive growth of capitalism was the emergence, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of a large, literate class of businessmen, merchants, and their families, who became not only a market for the novel, as literary historians have noted, but also a powerful class demanding a real voice in the affairs of government, and prepared to call into question the traditional authority of king, noble, and cleric.
	All of this was taking place as the young Karl Marx went off to university in 1835.  Tomorrow, we shall have to talk about what he found when he got there.
Part Two
	As one might expect, the young Marx was powerfully shaped by the intellectual climate of the German university world in which he found himself.  The leading influence was the German idealist philosopher Georg Hegel.  Even though Hegel had died in '31, four years before Marx first went off to university, his thought remained the framework within which everyone, acolyte and critic, functioned.  Hegel had been a deeply conservative political thinker, viewing the Prussian state as the high point and fulfillment of the onward march of Reason in History, but there was a rebel group of young men who featured themselves Left Hegelians, and Marx very quickly became an important part of that informal circle.  The intellectual world was in as much of a ferment as the political and economic spheres.  In 1835, David Strauss published his LIFE OF JESUS, which created a storm of protest and controversy.  What Strauss did was to bring to bear on the Gospels the new techniques of textual interpretation and historiography then being developed by German scholars, concluding that the accounts of the miracles were mythological and could not be treated as reports of genuine events.  Six years later, as Marx was completing his doctoral dissertation, Ludwig Feuerbach stunned the philosophical and theological world with his ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY, in which he argued that the standard Christian account of Man as having been created in the image of God was exactly backwards.  Man, he said, had created God in his own image, taking the best characteristics of human beings -- their power of reason, their capacity for benevolence, etc. -- and, by raising these human characteristics to the highest conceivable level, had forged a conception of an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent deity.
	This was heady stuff, and Marx was not alone in thinking that the world of ideas was undergoing a revolution quite as dramatic as that taking place in the palaces of government and the cathedrals of religion.
	Faithful readers of this blog will know that I do not like Hegel's philosophy, but there is no denying its profound influence on every branch of intellectual activity in the nineteenth century.  Marx took over from Hegel the structure or framework within which he conceptualized the stages of economic development -- indeed even the very notion of stages of development came from Hegel.  In order to lay the groundwork for my later exposition of what Marx and Engels eventually named Historical Materialism, therefore, I must spend some time summarizing, or sketching the outlines, of Hegel's rather powerful idea.  [Yesterday evening I watched Rachel Maddow interviewing a Republican operative, and the generosity and good spirit with which she treated this man, with whom, as she observed, she had virtually no agreement on any matter of politics, set an example for me.  So I shall acknowledge Hegel's importance, and the originality and usefulness of his ideas, for all that I do not like him.  As they say in the self-help world, I am trying to be a better person.  :)  ]
	What Hegel did, if I can put it this way, was to immanentize and secularize the Christian story.  The Christian story, in its outlines, recounts the succession of metaphysical or theological stages through which human beings move on their way from the beginning to the end of history.  History begins with the Creation, which includes the creation of Man in the Garden of Eden.  The second stage begins with The Fall, which results in mortality and the expulsion from Eden.  The third stage commences with God's compact with Abraham, repeated and deepened by the renewal of the compact [or Testament] with Noah and Moses.  God gives to Man His Law, in the form of the Ten Commandments and their elaboration, and promises that if Man will keep this Law, God will make him to multiply and flourish.  The entire period of the Old Testament is the period of The Law.  But man repeatedly shows that he cannot keep God's Law, which, since it is eternal and divine law, must be obeyed to the last jot and tittle if at all.  So God in His infinite mercy makes The Law flesh in the Person of His only begotten son, Jesus Christ.  With the Incarnation there begins a new metaphysical stage in the history of Man, the stage of the Word Made Flesh.  Jesus offers Man salvation if he will but have faith, which is to say believe in the truth of this Divine Promise.  But this too is impossible for Man, so God confers upon some men, despite their not deserving or having earned it, the ability to have Faith, which is to say Grace.  Jesus promises to return from beyond the grave, at which time the Final Judgment will determine who is saved and who damned.  And Time itself will end.
	The crucial point to note here -- and this will, I promise, become central to Marx's Historical Materialism -- is that the relationship of Man to God is absolutely different from one stage of history to the next.  Old Testament farmers may cultivate their crops and tend their sheep in much the same way as New Testament farmers;  Kings of Israel may resemble Medieval kings in their styles of rulership.  Hence, early modern painters will portray the characters of the Old Testament as wearing clothing appropriate to sixteenth century Holland.  But none of that matters at all.  All that is important is whether one lives before or after the Fall;  whether one lives under the Law or after the Law has been made Flesh.   Everything is to be understood theologically, not sociologically or anthropologically.
	What on earth does this have to do with capitalism and communism?  Everything, as it turns out.  The logical structure of the Christian story is this:  A sequence of stages, each one utterly different from the others by virtue of its unique relation to God and His Law.  The Creation, the Fall, the Old Testament, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the End of Time are defined by that relationship.  There is, notice, no other order in which these stages could possibly occur.  Nor is it possible to skip a stage [begin to sound familiar?]
	Hegel took this story and translated it into a story about the unfolding in history of Geist or Spirit.  Each of the stages of human history, in his account, was defined by the degree to which reason had unfolded itself and embodied itself in thought and society.  And each stage of human history could be understood as the unfolding throughout a society of this stage of Reason's coming to know itself.  [I have no idea what that means, so let us move on.]   Thus, an entire society could be seen as the expression, or embodiment, of a unified Idea -- the Classical era, the Medieval era, the Baroque era, the Romantic era.  Hegel taught us to see the painting, architecture, sculpture, politics, even the styles of personality, as expressions of the same style or form or Idea.  Thus, when Jacob Burckhardt wrote, in his classic work, THE CIVILIZATION OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, of "the Renaissance man" whose individuality extended even to his designing his own distinctive mode of dress, he was drawing on an idea that had originated in Christian eschatology and had been secularized and generalized by Hegel.
	Very early in his intellectual development, the young Marx had the brilliant, though rather simple-minded, idea of inverting Hegel's story [inversion is another of Hegel's favorite categories].  Instead of construing the material elements of human life -- the wresting of a living from nature -- as reflections of, or embodiments of, one stage in the unfolding of the Idea, Marx undertook to construe the art, law, politics, and religion of each stage of social evolution as reflections of the way in which human beings get their food, clothing, and shelter.  This is the sense in which Marx considered himself a Materialist rather than an Idealist.  Marx retained Hegel's secular Christian notion of stages of history, and he kept too the notion that the succession of stages was necessitated, not random.
	At first, when Marx really knew very little about the actual development and functioning of a capitalist economy, he seized on Adam Smith's seminal idea of the Division of Labor and with a great rhetorical and logical flourish made that the key to the succession of stages of history.  The nice thing about division of labor is that if one does not think too deeply about it, it seems to be a unidimensional measure with natural endpoints.  One starts with a society in which there is no division of labor.  Everyone simply gets a living from nature as best as he or she can.  This stage Marx calls Primitive Communism.  With each major step forward in the division of labor, one moves on to a new stage in history.  Relying on his knowledge of European history [no one in Europe knew much about any other history at that point], and passing rather lightly over the exact ways in which division of labor advances, Marx then identified Slave Economies, Feudal Economies, Capitalist Economies, Socialist Economies, and Communist Economies as the necessary forms of the progressive further division of labor.  Just as the starting point is Primitive Communism, in which there is no division of labor, so the end of history [but not of human existence] is Communism, in which the division of labor has been carried to so complete an unfolding that no one is bound to a particular form of work.  In one of his most famous pronouncements, Marx wrote:  . ." as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."
	This passage has been much quoted and commented upon, but almost nobody notices that Marx clearly meant it as a joke.  The "critical critics" were a small group of Marx's fellow Left Hegelians, led by the Bauer brothers, Bruno and Edger.  Marx thought they were pompous airheads, and he and Engels excoriated them in their very early work, THE HOLY FAMILY, written in 1844 when Marx was twenty-six.
	But be that as it may, Marx built Hegel's notion of stages of social development into the theory of economic development that he called Historical Materialism.  We shall have a good deal to say about it a bit later on.
	Next part:  The Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
Part Three
	Marx became involved in the founding and editing of a new journal [the RHEINSICHE ZEITUNG], got himself bounced out of Prussia by the police for his troubles, and by 1844 was living in Paris [there is a lot of history here that I am sliding over, since it would be tedious to recount it.  Check Wikipedia or Siegel's biography if you want to know the details].  He was by this time connected with Engels, an association that would last until his death in 1883.  It was in Paris that the two of them wrote both THE HOLY FAMILY and THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, in which, among other things, they settled scores with the Bauers, Feuerbach, and other German thinkers very close to them in political and philosophical orientation.  But for our purposes, the most important of Marx's many writings from the period was a curious document that did not see the light of day until eighty years later -- the working or study notes usually labeled THE ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 but also sometimes referred to as the Paris Manuscripts.  These notes were in the form of a lengthy document in which Marx worked out ideas that he was puzzling over having to do with the economic organization of society.  What he did was to draw vertical lines dividing each page into three columns, which were headed Land, Labor, and Capital, the three fundamental categories of the Classical Political Economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and their lesser fellow economists.  The column that has, quite deservedly, drawn most of the attention is the one labeled "Labor."  The long series of paragraphs that Marx inscribed in this column have come to be referred to as "Alienated Labor," and they constitute the fullest and most carefully thought out discussion of this topic that Marx ever wrote.
	I have a good deal to say about Marx's theory of alienated labor, but before I begin, I want to take just a moment to explain why this document became so politically important in the 20th century, more than a hundred years after it was written.  Briefly [and, inevitably, tendentiously], Lenin and Stalin and the Russian revolutionaries hijacked Marx's theories and used them as the justification for a brutal and dictatorial State Capitalism that they instituted in the Soviet Union.  The sheer geopolitical success of the Soviet regime, both before and during the Second World War, all but stifled the objection that this was not at all what Marx had had in mind when he talked about socialism or communism.  Marx's writings were elevated to the status of Revealed Truths, and were taught in Russian schools in roughly the way that the Koran is now taught in Madrassas.   So rigid and doctrinaire was the slavish adherence to the supposed doctrines of Marx that when the young Wassily Leontief approached the state economic planners with his newly conceived mathematical system of Linear Programming, which he thought [correctly] would be of use to them in planning the Soviet economy, he was told that Stalin himself had decreed that since Marx only used addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the taking of averages, the Soviet Union's economy was to be planned using nothing more.  Leontief emigrated to the United States and spent the rest of his career teaching at Harvard, eventually winning the Nobel Prize.  One of the delicious intellectual ironies of this subject is that Leontief's mathematical methods became the means by which scores of modern economists demonstrated the fundamental mathematical coherence of the theories that Marx set forth in CAPITAL [I have already written about this on my blog, and will not repeat myself].
	During the Second World War, the Yugoslav partisans, led by Marshal Tito, succeeded in driving the Germans out of their lands without the help of the Red Army, with the result that in the post-war period, the newly formed Yugoslavia was able to maintain a quasi-independence.  A number of Yugoslav philosophers and political theorists were eager to find some way of embracing Marx's theories without toeing the Stalinist line.  Casting about for writings by Marx on which they could erect an independent, humanist Marxism, they came upon the Paris Manuscripts, which had first been published in Russia in the 20s, but had then been all but ignored by the Stalinist theoreticians.  In the writings of the Young Marx, they heard a voice that called to them and inspired them.  To justify their concentration on these juvenalia, they developed the theory of a "break' between the