​     “Marx on automated industry” was posted on January 13, 2014, and it is one of the most frequently visited blog posts.  On June 4, 2016, David Taubmann, a philosopher and sculptor in Mexico, who also has more than ten years’ experience as a professional Web Developer, posted the following comment on “Marx and automated industry.”  

     Thank you very much, Dave, for your comment.  I think that I do not have a conclusion with respect to market movements.  However, I offer the following, in response to your comment.

     “Marx and automated industry” is a part of a series of eight posts on Karl Marx.  It seeks to describe Marx’s projection of a future socialist society with an economic foundation of automated industry, a projection that was rooted in Marx’s understanding of technological development as the driving force of human history.  For Marx, ideas are important as dimensions of class struggles, but revolutionary classes promote emerging technological developments that are consistent with its class interests.  Thus, revolutionary ideas are connected to real economic possibilities.  Marx advocated scientific socialism, based on observation of economic developments, in contrast to utopian socialism, which advocates new forms of human living that have no possibility of emerging from existing conditions.  

     I will focus here on the last two paragraphs of “Marx and automated industry.”  In the next to the last paragraph, I maintain that Marx discerned that the capitalist class would be so driven by the pursuit of profit that it would ignore the emancipatory implications of automation and would use its ever accumulating resources to forge a consumer society based in the acquisition of false needs.  Without doubt, Marx’s projection has been confirmed, as patterns of consumption in the societies of the North have reached absurd levels, and an advertising industry has emerged to manipulate the consumerist impulses of the people.  In other ways as well, the capitalist class has continued to demonstrate that it places its particular interests above the common good.  In the period 1865 to 1980, it developed monopoly capitalism, seeking total control of domestic production and banking, undermining economic competition; and imperialism, seeking penetration of foreign markets, undermining the sovereignty of nations.  Moreover, since 1980, it has turned to neoliberalism, financial speculation, and new forms of intervention in the neocolonized regions, undermining necessary regulation and promoting global political instability.  The global capitalist class places humanity and the earth at risk in its unrestrained pursuit of profit.

      In the final paragraph, I note that Marx believed that the working class would understand the emancipatory implications of automation, and it would act to establish a socialist society on a foundation of automated industry.  Marx’s projection has not come to be.  I think the problem was that Marx, although he understood that capitalism and colonialism are intertwined, underestimated the significance and importance of colonial domination.  This limitation in Marx’s perspective is rooted in the fact that he wrote from the vantage point of the popular movement in Western Europe of 1830 to 1871.  Marx died in 1883, before the emergence of national and social liberation movements in Africa and Asia.  Such movements had emerged in Latin America, but located in Europe, it was difficult for Marx to discern their potential as popular revolutionary movements.  Accordingly, Marx underestimated the capacity of the capitalist world-economy to use the superexploitation of the colonized and neocolonized regions as a material base for the core societies.

     The superexploitation of vast regions of the planet made possible not only the satisfaction of the genuine needs of the popular classes in the core of the world-system, but also the creation of false needs, establishing consuming societies in the core.  Thus there emerged a social phenomenon in which the people of the core have a style of life separate from and above the vast majority of humanity, generating in the peoples of the core a feeling of superiority.  These dynamics facilitated the evolution of the working class and popular struggles in the core in a reformist direction, undermining their revolutionary potential.  

    As a result, the torch of revolutionary leadership passed to the anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial movements of the Third World.  These movements were divided between reformers, who were allied with core interests; and revolutionaries, who sought to break the exploitative core-peripheral relation rooted in colonialism and to establish an alternative and more just and democratic world-system.  The Third World revolution of national and social liberation lifted up charismatic leaders who reformulated Marxism-Leninism from the vantage point of the colonized.  Thus, we can see today an evolution in the Marxist perspective: from Marx to Lenin; and to Mao, Ho and Fidel; and to Chávez, Evo, and Correa.  For various blog posts on the evolution of Marxism-Leninism, see the category Marxism-Leninism and its evolution.

    From the perspective of Marxism-Leninism as it has emerged in the Third World project, one can reformulate Marx’s projection and envision a socialist world-system, in which science and technology provide the foundation for ecologically sustainable forms of production that satisfy human needs, and in which an interstate system respects the equality and sovereignty of nations, each of which is governed by delegates of the people.  It is this reformulated Marxist vision that the revolutionary movements of the Third World today are seeking to make real.

       Please visit the series of posts on Karl Marx:
“Marx and the working class” 1/6/14; 
“Marx illustrates cross-horizon encounter” 1/7/14; 
“Marx’s analysis of political economy” 1/8/14;
“Marx on human history” 1/9/14; 
“Marx on the revolutionary bourgeoisie” 1/10/14; 
“Marx on automated industry” 1/13/14; 
“Marx on the revolutionary proletariat” 1/14/14; 
“The social and historical context of Marx” 1/15/14.

Once in the category Karl Marx, scroll down.

Posted January 6, 2014

     We have seen that the Spanish conquest of America established the conditions for the emergence of the modern world-economy and the modernization of agriculture in Western Europe, involving commercialization, consolidation, and conversion to pasture (“The origin of the modern world-economy” 8/06/2013; “Modernization of the West” 8/07/2013).  And we have seen that from 1750 to 1850, there occurred a new peripheralization of vast regions of the world (“New peripheralization, 1750-1850” 8/20/2013).   The new peripheralization stimulated a second wave of consolidation, conversion to tenant farming, and conversion to pasture in Western Europe.  The displacement of peasants from land created the phenomenon of “pauperism,” in which there emerged “a large, mainly rural lower class only just capable of keeping itself alive” (Miller and Potthoff 1986:8).  By the middle of the nineteenth century, nearly half the population was paupers.

     The new peripheralization of 1750-1850 was integrally tied to the modernization of Western industry, for the peripheralization of vast regions of the world established greater access to the raw materials of the planet, and it provided world-wide markets for the manufactured goods of the expanding and modernizing industries of the West.  The new factories of the West utilized the surplus labor produced by the consolidations of the countryside, converting displaced peasants into low-waged factory workers.  The conditions of life and work were harsh.  “Thirteen-, fourteen-, and in the 1840s seventeen-hour working days under the harshest condition, falling wages that families sought to bolster with the even lower-paid labor of women and children, appalling living conditions, and the absence of any provision against accident, illness, and old age were typical of this period” (Miller and Potthoff 1986:9).

     We have seen that industrial workers were among the popular sectors that played an active role in the French Revolution, interpreting the concept of democracy in a radical form that proclaimed the social and economic rights of all citizens (“Bourgeois revolution in France, 1787-1799” 11/25/2013; “The French Revolution in Global Context” 11/26/2013; “Class and the French Revolution” 11/27/2013).  After the consolidation of bourgeois control of the French Revolution, the popular sectors continued to be active, seeking to expand the scope of democratic rights to include the right to the social and economic conditions that are necessary for a decent human life.  The popular movement attained a renewed height during the 1840s, and it particularly was advanced in France and Germany.  A worker’s organization commissioned Karl Marx to write a pamphlet for the workers in order to help them to understand the events that were unfolding, and thus emerged The Communist Manifesto.  It began with reference to the worker’s movement:  “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”  It concluded by calling upon workers to play the role that history had conferred upon them:  “Workers of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

     Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier in what is now Germany.  Marx’s father was a lawyer, and Marx grew up in a middle class family that was not religious but Jewish by ethnic identity.  In 1836 Marx entered the University of Berlin, where he studied German philosophy, which at that time was dominated by the thinking of the great philosopher Hegel, whose work analyzed the development of ideas throughout human history.  At the University, Marx studied Hegel, and he fell under the influence of a group of intellectual rebels known as the Young Hegelians, who were anti-religious and atheistic.  Marx had intended at this point to pursue a career in college teaching.  However, a wave of reaction against the Young Hegelians emerged.  Many were dismissed from their teaching posts, including Marx’s mentor, Bruno Bauer.  This meant that Marx was not able to submit his dissertation at the University of Berlin.  So he submitted it to the University of Jena, from which he was granted a Doctor of Philosophy in 1841.  But a teaching career was closed to him.

     Marx turned to working as an editor and a writer in a newspaper in Cologne.  In October 1843, he moved to Paris in order to assume a position as editor of a new bilingual French and German newspaper.  In late 1843 and 1844, Marx encountered intellectuals, artisans, and industrial workers who were activists in the working class struggle.  He observed that there emerged from the working class movement an understanding of how capitalism works, an understanding rooted in the concrete experience of the worker.  This worker’s point of view constituted a perspective different from that of British political economy, which Marx was simultaneously studying.  Thus Marx came to understand that British political economy, while claiming to be objective and neutral, was actually written from the particular vantage point of the bourgeoisie.  At the same time, Marx understood that the vantage point of the worker also was limited, in that it was rooted in concrete daily experience with insufficient development of an historical and global perspective.  Marx therefore grasped the need to formulate a comprehensive understanding of human history and of the emerging capitalist political economic system, based on a synthesis of British political economy and German philosophy and written from the vantage point of the worker.  This was the project to which Marx devoted his life (McKelvey 1991).

       Marx’s connection to the emerging proletarian movement provided him with the experiential foundation to forge a class analysis that was a significant advance in social scientific understanding.  Marx’s class analysis included two fundamental components:  (1) understanding of the role of class exploitation in human history; and (2) awareness that political conflicts are the expression of struggles of class interests.  In 1885 Engels wrote: “It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles . . . are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that . . . these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position [and] by the mode of their production” (Engels 1963:14). 


References

Engels, Frederick.  1963.  “Preface to the Third German Edition” of Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers.

McKelvey, Charles.  1991.  Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science.  New York:  Greenwood Press. 

Miller, Susanne, and Heinrich Potthoff.  1986.  A History of German Social Democracy from 1848 to the present.  Translated from the German by J.A. Underwood.  New York:  St. Martin’s Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marx, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, proletariat, working class

Posted January 7, 2014​

      During the period of October 1843 to August 1844, Marx experienced a profound intellectual transformation.  The cognitional theory of the twentieth century Canadian Catholic philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan enables us to understand what occurred.  Lonergan maintains that culturally-rooted assumptions constitute horizons that block relevant questions from consciousness, thus leading to ethnocentric understandings.  For Lonergan, this problem can be overcome through personal encounter with persons of different horizons, enabling a person to arrive at an understanding that goes beyond the limited, partial, and ethnocentric understanding that is rooted in his or her culture (see “What is personal encounter?” 7/25/2013; “What is cross-horizon encounter?” 7/26/2013).

     Marx experienced this phenomenon of personal encounter with persons of different horizons from October 1843 to August 1844, when Marx relocated to Paris and began listening to and taking seriously the understanding of the artisans, industrial workers, intellectuals (including journalists, writers, university professors, and medical doctors) connected to the workers’ movement.  Marx’s personal encounter with the working class movement occurred as he was studying intensely the British science of political economy, which was fundamentally different from the German philosophy that had formed Marx’s perspective prior to October 1843.  Unlike German philosophy, which focused on the history of ideas, British political economy was an analysis of the modern system of capitalism, and it was based on empirical observation (McKelvey 1991; see “Marx and the working class” 1/6/2014). 

      This simultaneous process of encounter with the working class struggle and with British political economy was the experiential bases for an intellectual transformation that provided the foundation for Marx’s intellectual and moral project: an analysis of human history and of modern capitalism on the basis of a synthesis of German philosophy and British political economy, written from the vantage point of the proletariat.  The basic outlines of the project are evident in the writings that were published after his death as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, written from April to August.  He would spend the rest of his life further developing its formulation, but its basic outlines were in place by August 1844.  Whereas his writing prior to October 1843 reflected a radical philosophy typical of German intellectuals, his double encounter with the science of political-economy and the working class movement led to what Lonergan calls an intellectual and moral conversion, such that by 1844 he was formulating the basic concepts of the new scientific perspective of historical materialism (McKelvey 1991).

     Lonergan’s cognitional theory enables us to understand that Marx formulated an analysis of the political-economy of modern capitalism that was not merely different from that of Adam Smith but was more precisely a further development of the analyses of Smith and Ricardo and a more advanced formulation, in that Marx’s formulation was a more integral and comprehensive analysis based on relevant questions that emerged from horizons defined by three intellectual and moral traditions: German philosophy, English political economy, and the emerging Western European proletarian movement.  Lonergan’s cognitional theory also enables us to understand how Marx, although a petit bourgeois intellectual, was able to write from a proletarian point of view, for it provides us with the explanation that Marx through encounter with the working class movement had discovered relevant questions that were beyond the horizon of the petty bourgeois cultural context, enabling him to move beyond its limitations.

       Marx’s achievement was to overcome the parameters of nationality and class within the context of nineteenth century Europe.  In our time, the movements that challenge the capitalist world-economy emerge primarily not from the exploited European working class but from the neocolonized and superexploited peoples of the Third World.  Just as Marx delegitimated the notion of a general interest, a concept that obscured class interests at stake in theoretical interpretations, our task today is to overcome the colonial denial, which obscures the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in the origin, development, and reproduction of the modern world-system (see “Overcoming the colonial denial” 7/29/2013).  And just as Marx’s achievement was rooted in encounter with the newly emerging working class movements of his time, our understanding today must be based on encounter with the movements from below in our time, that is, with the anti-neocolonial movements of the Third World.  What is required is a reconstruction of the classical Marxist formulation on the basis of a vantage point rooted in the colonial situation.  And such a reconstruction is underway and has today reached an advanced stage, inasmuch as Marxism-Leninism has been reformulated through adaptation to the colonial situation by charismatic leaders such as Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, and inasmuch as a further reformulation is occurring today in the context of the Chavist revolution in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.


References

McKelvey, Charles.  1991.  Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science.  New York:  Greenwood Press. 


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marx, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, cross-horizon encounter

Posted January 8, 2014

    During the twentieth century, the philosophy of science developed the idea that there is an unavoidable relation between scientific concepts and the assumptions and values that are an integral component of the society in which the concepts emerge.  And according to twentieth century philosophers of science, this relation between science and society applies to both the natural sciences and social sciences (Burtt 1954; Butterfield 1957; Kuhn 1957, 1970; Winch 1958).  In the three-volume Theories of Surplus Value (Marx 1969a, 1969b, 1972), Marx anticipated this insight of twentieth century philosophy of science in his analysis of the development of the science of political economy and its relation to economic and social development. 

     Marx began his analysis with the mercantilists, the first interpreters of the modern world, who wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the political economists.  According to Marx, writing in an epoch in which the gold and silver of Spanish America were the driving force of European economic activity, the mercantilists erroneously believed that the circulation of gold and silver was the source of surplus value.  The mercantilists were not able to understand that labor is the source of surplus value, which according to Marx, was the principal insight of subsequent political economy.

     The Physiocrats were the founders of political economy and the first to formulate a systematic theory of capitalist production.  Writing later than the mercantilists, after the emergence of large-scale capitalist agriculture, they understood that labor is the source of surplus value.  However, writing before the emergence of modern industry, they erroneously believed that agricultural labor is the source of surplus value.  They were writing, according to Marx, from an agricultural bourgeois perspective. 

      Adam Smith, writing after the Physiocrats and after the emergence of modern industry, analyzed the economic system from the point of view of the industrial bourgeoisie.  He understood, according to Marx, that surplus value originated not only in agricultural labor, but in general social labor.  However, writing before the emergence of large-scale industry, Smith was not able to formulate a consistent theoretical system, and he often lapsed into a Physiocratic perspective.  Smith, for example, considered government bureaucrats, military officials, artists, doctors, priests, judges, and lawyers to be non-productive parasites, as a consequence of the fact that they were under the control of the feudal aristocracy of the time.  When the expanding and deepening bourgeois revolution transformed these professions, they began to serve bourgeois interests, and Smith’s definitions of productive and unproductive labor were criticized and rejected by subsequent political economists.

     When large-scale industry emerged, the science of political economy was able to formulate a more consistent theoretical analysis, as was evident in the writings of David Ricardo.  Like Smith, Ricardo wrote from the point of view of the industrial bourgeoisie.  Ricardo, however, analyzed the period of 1770 to 1815, after the emergence of large scale industry, and he analyzed England, which had the most advanced industry of the epoch.  As a result, Ricardo, according to Marx, was able to understand correctly and consistently the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and he was able to discern the tendency of capitalism to reduce the percentage of the productive population. 

     However, writing before the emergence of the proletarian movement, Ricardo was not able to understand the importance of the reduction of labor time for the development of a more just and humane society that could be established on a foundation of automated industry and that would be characterized by the reduction of labor time and by versatile labor.  Accordingly, Ricardo was opposed to the reduction of labor time.  He viewed the expansion of production as desirable, since it increased the accumulation of capital.  He was writing from the point of view of the modern industrial bourgeoisie.

     Marx, writing after the emergence of the proletarian movement, was able to understand from the proletarian perspective the possibilities established by automated industry.  He understood that the economic development of capitalism was establishing the technical foundation for an unprecedented level of production, and that this economic development was, at the same time, forming a revolutionary proletarian class, which could seize the possibilities provided by capitalist economic development to establish a society organized to benefit the great majority of persons on the planet.

      We will discuss further in subsequent posts these Marxian concepts concerning automation and the revolutionary role of the proletariat.  But to establish a clearer context for this discussion, we first will look at Marx’s understanding of human history as well as his analysis of the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie.


References

Burtt, Edwin Arthur.  1954.  The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.  Garden City:  N.Y.:  Doubleday, Anchor Books.

Butterfield, H.  1957.  The Origins of Modern Science.  New York:  Macmillan.

Kuhn, Thomas S.  1957.  The Copernican Revolution.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

__________.  1970.   The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., enlarged.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. 

Marx, Karl.  1969a.  Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. I.  London: Lawrence & Wishart.

__________.  1969b.  Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. II.  London: Lawrence & Wishart.

__________.  1972.  Theories of Surplus Value, Vol. III.  London: Lawrence and Wishart.

McKelvey, Charles.  1991.  Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science.  New York:  Greenwood Press. 

Winch, Peter.  1958.  The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy.  New York:  Humanities Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marx, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, philosophy of science, Physiocrats, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, classical political economy

Posted January 9, 2014

     Synthesizing German philosophy and British political economy from the perspective of the exploited, Marx formulated an intellectually powerful and spiritually moving vision that discerned meaning and purpose in human history.  It focused primarily on the development of systems of production and technology and the structures of domination that emerged from them.  Marx viewed technological development as tending to increase the level of domination but also as establishing new possibilities for human progress.  Accordingly, he believed that the unfolding economic and social forces of his time were creating unprecedented forms of human exploitation and alienation, but they also were establishing the conditions that would make possible a new era of human freedom.

    Marx identified five stages in human history.  He saw technological development as integral to the transition from one stage to the next: the invention of agriculture led to the transition from tribal (hunting and gathering) society to ancient society; the invasion by “barbarians” led to the emergence of feudal society; the invention of the factory established the foundation for capitalist society; and the development of automated industry would establish the conditions for the transition to socialism.  On giving centrality the development of the material forces, Marx formulated an understanding more advanced than the idealism of German philosophy and at the same time more comprehensive than the limited historical consciousness of British political economy (Bottomore 1964; Marx 1963, 1967, 1970, 1973; Marx and Engels 1948, 1965).

     But the possibilities for advances in social scientific understanding established by Marx’s work were not realized in the subsequent development of knowledge in the world of the university.  Academic structures were shaped in accordance with bourgeois interests, leading to the fragmentation of philosophy, history, and the social sciences and facilitating the marginalization of Marx’s work (see “History from below” 12/4/2013).  Thus it would be the charismatic leaders lifted up by popular movements who would further develop the important insights that Marx had formulated.  Therefore, we must turn to the writings of charismatic leaders of popular movements to find further formulation of a comprehensive historical social science, the foundations of which were established by Marx.  I will endeavor in future posts to formulate the key insights of the major charismatic leaders, whose insights constitute the evolution of Marxism as a science.

        In reflecting on Marx’s work, we must keep in mind the context and the specific purpose of Marx’s intellectual project.  Marx was writing during the nineteenth century, and his goal was to overcome the limitations of the idealism of German philosophy and the ahistorical empiricism of British political economy in order to formulate an analysis of human history from the vantage point of the emerging Western European proletarian movement.  In this blog, I am writing of course in a different historical time, and I am seeking to write from the vantage point of the movements of the neocolonized of the Third World.  As a result, my writing has a tendency to give more emphasis than did Marx to the role of conquest in human development, seeing technological development as occurring on a foundation of conquest (see “Dialectic of domination and development” 10-30-2013; “The French Revolution in Global Context” 11/26/2013).  But this is merely a difference in emphasis reflecting different historical, social and intellectual contexts. 

     Certainly Marx understood the central role of conquest in human history, as is clear from the final part of Volume One of Capital, in which he maintains that force is the secret of the primitive accumulation of capital (Marx 1967:713-74).  “In actual history,” he writes, “it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. . . .  The methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic” (1967:714).  It is a question of forcibly separating the producer from the means of production, as for example, when peasants at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth were forcibly driven from the land, thus producing the surplus labor that formed the English proletariat (1967:714-718).  Furthermore, he understood that forceful appropriation in vast regions of the planet was the foundation for the primitive accumulation of industrial capital: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the running of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.  These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation....  These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. . . .  Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.  It is itself an economic power” (1967:751).

       Accordingly, I view the perspective that I am seeking to formulate, the perspective of the dialectic of domination and development, as a Marxist formulation that shares with Marx basic concepts and orientations.  It searches for meaning, direction, and purpose in human history.  It recognizes the fundamental role of conquest and class domination in human technological, economic, and cultural development, and it sees the unfolding of these dynamics as establishing definitive possibilities for a new era of human freedom and liberation.  It views these possibilities as being seized in our time by the dominated neocolonized peoples, who act in their own defense, and in so doing, act in defense of all humanity.  What I am seeking to express is not classical Marxism, but it is Marxism.  It rejects the idealist philosophy and the fragmented empiricism that rules in higher education.  It seeks to formulate a form of Marxism adapted to and appropriate for the current phase in human development.

     Since 1850, those struggling for social justice in a variety of social contexts throughout the world have found in Marx’s writing a powerful analysis of their own conditions of exploitation, domination and struggle.  Many reformulated some of his basic concepts to adapt his analysis to their reality, thus establishing that his work would have global political implications: it would provide powerful analytical tools for those who sought to create an alternative political-economic system. 

      For those of us who are intellectuals of the developed countries of the North, Karl Marx is our exemplar.  It was he who first discovered the key to understanding the modern world: encounter the social movements formed by the dominated, combining this with study  of the most advanced forms of understanding that have been formulated by our species in its present stage of development.  He has shown us the road to the true and the right.


References

Bottomore, T.B., Ed.  1964.  Karl Marx: Early Writings.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marx, Karl.  1963.  The Poverty of Philosophy.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1967.  Capital, Vol. I.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1970.  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1973.  Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.  New York: Random House, Vintage Books.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels.  1948.  The Communist Manifesto.  New York: International Publishers. 

__________.  1965.  The German Ideology.  London:  Lawrence & Wishart. 


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marx, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, dialectic of domination and development

Posted January 10, 2014

      Marx saw the invention of the factory as the technological development that established the conditions for a fourth stage in human history, that of capitalism.  The factory, with its organization of labor into highly specialized tasks, was a more technically-advanced system of production than the feudal craft shop, and it would become the foundation for a new economic, political, and social system.    

     Marx’s approach to historical analysis was to identify classes and their particular interests.  Accordingly, he viewed the merchants as being an underdog class in the feudal system and as having an interest in promoting the newly emerging factory system and the higher levels of commerce that it would create.  The worldview and philosophical orientation of the merchants, their connection to commerce, and their network of interrelationships facilitated that they could see the potential of the new system for their own interests.  So the merchant class engaged in the new forms of production and commerce and advocated state policies in support of them, thus transforming themselves into the modern bourgeoisie and a revolutionary class that sought the abolition of feudalism and the establishment of a capitalist society. 

     For Marx, in the struggle against the feudal privileges of the aristocracy, the revolutionary bourgeoisie advocated a new concept of society, the notion that all persons had rights, regardless of their status at birth.  This meant that the economic transformation from feudalism to capitalism ultimately would require the political transformation from monarchy to democracy.  Thus the bourgeois revolution sought to eliminate or reduce the power of the monarchy, even though in some moments it was allied with the monarchy in the struggle to eliminate the privileges of the aristocracy.  In addition, the new system required a religious transformation from Catholicism, integrally tied to feudalism, to Protestantism, integrally tied to bourgeois democracy.  Thus the bourgeois revolution sought to reduce the power and the privileges of the Catholic Church.

     In his analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx grasped the importance of the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie, which acted to defend and promote its class interests.  But we can understand the transition today in a more global context.  Certainly the expansion of commerce and industry and the process of feudal re-urbanization had been developing from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries in a form that was for the most part endogenous to European society, as we have seen (“European feudalism” 8/13/2013).  However, this process of transformation was given a tremendous push forward by the Spanish conquest of America in the sixteenth century, which resulted in the acquisition of gold and silver by Spain and her use of the precious metals to purchase manufactured goods from Northwestern Europe, thus facilitating the modernization of agriculture, the expansion of manufacturing, and the origin of the capitalist world-economy (see “The origin of the modern world-economy” 8/6/2013; “Modernization of the West” 8/7/2013; “Conquest, gold, and Western development” 8/8/2013).  Marx was aware of the role of colonialism in the accumulation of capital, as we have seen (“Marx on human history” 1/9/2014).  But he did not integrate this awareness into his formulation of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism.  Today, from the vantage point of the colonized, we can formulate the transformation from European feudalism to the European capitalist world-economy in a manner that never loses sight of its foundation in the Spanish conquest of America.

       Our criticism here of Marx is analogous to Marx’s own criticism of Adam Smith.   Marx observed that Smith, writing after the emergence of modern industry, understood that general social labor is the source of surplus value; but writing before the emergence of larger-scale industry, Smith was not able to consistently integrate this insight into his theoretical system (see “Marx’s analysis of political economy” 1/8/2014).  Today, we can say that Marx, writing after the emergence of the proletarian movement, understood the role of colonial domination in the economic development of Europe; but writing before the emergence of Third World anti-colonial movements, he was not able to consistently integrate this insight into his theoretical system.


References

Bottomore, T.B., Ed.  1964.  Karl Marx: Early Writings.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marx, Karl.  1963.  The Poverty of Philosophy.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1967.  Capital, Vol. I.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1970.  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1973.  Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.  New York: Random House, Vintage Books.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels.  1948.  The Communist Manifesto.  New York: International Publishers. 

__________.  1965.  The German Ideology.  London:  Lawrence & Wishart. 


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marx, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, bourgeois revolution, revolutionary bourgeoisie

Posted January 13, 2014

     Marx viewed capitalism as a more extreme form of domination than feudalism.  In his view, in destroying work as craft and reducing workers to a specialized function, capitalism had eliminated creative expression in work, a component of life that, in his view, is fundamental to human essence.  Capitalism, in Marx’s view, was a system in which workers were alienated from the process of production, which was imposed upon the worker as an alien force.  

     On the other hand, the great strength of capitalism, for Marx, was its extremely high productive efficiency.  Constantly seeking more efficient forms of production, capitalist industries as they mature increasingly utilize machines, substituting human workers.  This process of automation is made possible not only by technological development, but also by the nature of human work during the capitalist stage.  For the highly-specialist capitalist division of labor reduces human labor to a simple repetitive task, which is exactly the kind of task that machines can be designed to do, since they are tasks that do not require human creativity.  Thus, for Marx, the industrial factory inexorably evolves toward automated industry. 

      Marx viewed automated industry as a new mode of production that would constitute the material foundation for a fifth stage in human history, that of socialism.  Marx had a long-range view of automation from the vantage point of the worker.  He saw it as establishing conditions for a society in which human beings would be freed from work in its conventional form.  Instead of laboring as a slave, serf, or appendage to a machine, human beings would now have the work of designing and maintaining machines, a form of work that is much more versatile and requires education and creativity.  In addition, since machines work with high efficiency, human societies would be able to produce their needs with less labor time.  So not only would work be more versatile, but also labor time would be reduced.  This would make it possible for human beings to engage in a variety of activities above and beyond work, such as gardening, crafting their own furniture, or studying literature.  Thus Marx viewed automation as establishing the foundation for a society characterized by the efficient satisfaction of human needs, by creative work, and by the reduction of labor time.  

     As automation emerges, the working and capitalist classes would have different and opposed interests.  Whereas the working class would have an interest in the full realization of the emancipatory implications of automation, the capitalist class would have an interest in the maximization of production in order to maximize profit.  The capitalist class thus would be driven toward what Marcuse later called the production of “false needs,” which functions as the ideological foundation of the consumer society (Marcuse 1964).  Driven by the pursuit of profit as an end in itself (Weber 1958), the capitalist seeks to maximize production and to psychologically manipulate workers to purchase consumer goods that do not qualitatively enhance human life.

      From the working class point of view, however, the truly emancipatory implications of automation can be grasped.  So the transformation from capitalism to socialism requires political action by the working class, in order that it can establish structures necessary for the transition to socialism.  Just as the merchant class during feudalism could discern its long-range interests in the full realization of factory production, the working class must discern its interest in the full emancipatory implications of automated industry.   And just as the merchant class became a revolutionary bourgeoisie, the working class must become a revolutionary class that acts politically to establish a new type of society on a foundation of automated industry.


References

Bottomore, T.B., Ed.  1964.  Karl Marx: Early Writings.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marcuse, Herbert.  1964.  One-Dimensional Man.  Boston:  Beacon Press. 

Marx, Karl.  1963.  The Poverty of Philosophy.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1967.  Capital, Vol. I.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1970.  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1973.  Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.  New York: Random House, Vintage Books.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels.  1948.  The Communist Manifesto.  New York: International Publishers. 

__________.  1965.  The German Ideology.  London:  Lawrence & Wishart. 

Weber, Max.  1958.  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marx, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, automation, automated industry

Posted January 14, 2014

     As we have seen in yesterday’s post (“Marx on automation” 1/13/2014), Marx maintained that the proletarian class would be able to discern the emancipatory potential of automation, and therefore it would become a revolutionary class as automation emerges.  Marx believed that the organizing activities of the working class that he had encountered in Paris constituted the first stages in the formation of such a revolutionary proletarian movement.  He believed that the proletarian revolution would triumph, since human social evolution is driven by technological development, and since the proletarian revolution would be integrally tied to the more technically-advanced system of automated industry.  Thus socialism would be established on a foundation of advanced and automated industry; ownership of the factories would be collective; private property would be abolished; class distinctions would be eliminated; governments, which exit only to promote the interests of the dominant classes, would not be necessary; and human emancipation from oppressive forms of work and from domination of one social group by another would be established.

     The proletarian revolutions in the advanced sectors of the world-economy anticipated by Marx did not triumph.  On the other hand, popular revolutions triumphed in regions that did not have the technological conditions that, in Marx’s interpretation, would provide the material foundation for the socialist society.  As a consequence, charismatic leaders in the popular revolutions reformulated Marx’s analysis, adapting it to the particular conditions of their nations.  Among the concepts that would be reformulated was Marx’s notion of the proletariat at the vanguard of the revolution.

      In Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution, 80% of the laboring population was engaged in agriculture.  In adapting Marx to this reality, Lenin continued with Marx’s concept of a working-class vanguard, but he revised it, calling for a worker-peasant revolution led by the proletariat (Trotsky 2008:229-32, 748). 

     In his classic three-volume work on the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky maintains that there were particular factors in Russia that determined that industrial workers would have advanced political consciousness.  He notes that Russia’s industrial production, although a much smaller part of the economy than was the case in the United States, Great Britain or Germany, was much more concentrated:  In Russia, the percentage of industrial workers who were employed in large enterprises of 1000 or more workers was more than double that of the United States, Great Britain, or Germany.  This was a result of the fact that investment in industry in Russia was coming from the core region of the world-economy, and it was invested in industries that had evolved to concentrated large-scale industry in the West.  Russia thus skipped the evolution from small-scale to large-scale and moved directly to large-scale enterprises.  As a result, the Russian proletariat was a young proletariat, rapidly formed from displaced peasants who had been placed in large-scale occupational settings.  Under these conditions, the revolutionary consciousness of the Russian proletariat rapidly developed, and it became more advanced than that of the Russian peasantry as well as that of the Russian petit bourgeoisie.  Thus the proletariat during the Russian Revolution was able to provide the peasantry with leadership and a program.  Given these subjective conditions, it was necessary for the proletariat to be at the vanguard of the revolution, to lead the peasantry and the other popular sectors in the revolution (Trotsky 2008:3-12, 26-39).

     In the case of Vietnam, where the peasantry comprised 80% of the population, Ho Chi Minh continued with the Marxist-Leninist concept of a worker-peasant revolution led by a working class vanguard.  But his formulation was based on a dynamic view of Vietnamese economy and society.  He envisioned that peasants would gradually move in stages to agricultural producers’ cooperatives, and that this process of social development, accompanied by agricultural modernization, would lead to the conversion of peasants into agricultural workers.  He envisioned a similar social process contributing to the formation of political consciousness among urban workers, as they voluntarily formed cooperatives among craftsmen and other individual workers.  And he believed that intellectual workers would gradually learn manual labor, so that ultimately the difference between mental and manual labor would be eliminated.  Thus he envisioned that the nation ultimately would consist overwhelmingly of workers in agriculture and industry, who would possess increasing levels of social and collective consciousness, with some of the workers also committed to intellectual work.  On the basis of this dynamic long-range view of the economic and social development of Vietnam, Ho was committed to the formation of a working-class vanguard of the revolution (Ho 2007:155-57, 168, 170-71). 

     Like Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro was formed in the context of a patriotic anti-colonial nationalist struggle in which the petty bourgeoisie played a fundamental role on the ideological plane.  But unlike Ho, Fidel did not spend his formative years in the Soviet Union and under the direction and guidance of the Communist International.  As a result, Fidel tended to appropriate more freely from Marxism-Leninism, and he was much more inclined to speak of a popular revolution and a popular vanguard rather than a working-class revolution and vanguard, although he sometimes invoked the latter in particular contexts.

      So there are important examples of charismatic revolutionary leaders who appreciated the particular social, historical, and intellectual context of Marx’s formulation and who creatively adapted his formulation to their own national contexts.  In contrast to these creative adaptations, there is the example of the Progressive Labor Party in the United States in the late 1960s, which strictly applied the Marxist concept of the working-class vanguard, even though it was obvious to even the most casual observer that revolutionary consciousness among middle class students of the time was far more advanced than that of the working class, as a result of various factors, including the reformist (as against revolutionary) orientation of labor organizations and the ideological contradictions experienced by middle class students of the period, which provoked a student movement.  The rigid and uncreative application of Marxist concepts is one of the reasons that the Revolution of 1968 in the United States failed, a phenomenon that we will examine in future posts.


References

Ho Chi Minh.  2007.  Down with Colonialism.  Introduction by Walden Bello.  London: Verso.

Bottomore, T.B., Ed.  1964.  Karl Marx: Early Writings.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marx, Karl.  1963.  The Poverty of Philosophy.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1967.  Capital, Vol. I.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1970.  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.  New York: International Publishers.

__________.  1973.  Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.  New York: Random House, Vintage Books.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels.  1948.  The Communist Manifesto.  New York: International Publishers. 

__________.  1965.  The German Ideology.  London:  Lawrence & Wishart. 

Trotsky, Leon.  2008.  History of the Russian Revolution.  Translated by Max Eastman.  Chicago: Haymarket Books.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marx, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, proletarian revolution, working class

Posted January 15, 2015

     As we have seen in posts from 1/6/2014 to 1/14/2014, Marx forged a synthesis of British political economy and German philosophy from the vantage point of the worker.  On a foundation of encounter with the emerging proletarian movement, Marx discerned meaning in human history, and he envisioned a future society established on a foundation of automated industry and characterized by versatile work and by the reduction of labor time.  His work represented the most advanced formulation of his era, overcoming the idealism of German philosophy and the ahistorical empiricism of British political economy, and analyzing human history and capitalism from the vantage point of the exploited and dominated class.

     Writing after the emergence of the proletarian movement, he discerned what German philosophy and British political economy could not see: the role of class domination in human history; and the role of class interests in political conflicts.  But writing before the emergence of the anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial movements of the Third World, he did not discern that integrated with the axis of class domination, there is an equally powerful axis of colonial domination.  Although aware that colonial domination was important in promoting the economic development of the West, he was unable to forge a theoretical system that was based on a foundation of the two axes of domination and that therefore could keep consistently in view the world-wide process of colonial domination.

       This limitation of Marx, rooted in the historical and social context in which he wrote, led him to erroneously believe that the Western proletariat would become a revolutionary class that would act politically to establish a socialist society.  He did not foresee the capacity of the capitalist class to utilize the material benefits resulting from colonial domination to make concessions to the proletariat of the nations of the core, thus channeling Western proletarian movement in a reformist direction, nullifying its revolutionary potential.

       With the reformist orientation of the working class organizations of the West since 1875, the revolutionary torch has been passed to the colonized people of the Third World, where movements led by charismatic leaders could discern the axis of colonial domination as well as the axis of class exploitation, inasmuch as both were integral to the colonial situation.  Third World charismatic leaders thus have left an intellectual legacy that has constituted a reformulation and a further development of the important insights of Marx.  They have left sacred texts, the study of which is a necessary intellectual work, integral to the development of a more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system.

     The factors that made possible working-class reformism have come to an end.  The world-system has reached the geographical and ecological limits of the earth, and it can no longer expand through domination of new lands and peoples, as it did for nearly five centuries.  The world-system thus has entered a structural crisis, which it cannot resolve without bringing to an end the double axis of class and colonial domination, a resolution which the global elite is ideologically and politically unprepared to undertake. 

     Thus a global revolutionary situation has been established.  The Third World anti-neocolonial revolutions have been renewed, and the peoples of the earth are in movement.  It is a movement by humanity in defense of itself, and it is constructing an alternative world-system.   The Third World has taken the lead, but it will soon spread to the nations of the North.  It is not a proletarian revolution centered in the core, but a multi-class popular revolution with its most advanced expression in the Third World.  Although it has characteristics that he could not fully see, the revolutionary transformation anticipated by Marx is now at hand. 

     While the work of further developing an emancipatory and integral historical-philosophical-social science, the foundation of which was established by Marx, has proceeded in the breast of social movements seeking social justice, the Western universities have demonstrated their indifference to the advances in human understanding that Marx’s work represents.  Controlled by corporate interests, the universities have established fragmentation in the study of history, philosophy, and the social sciences, facilitating the marginalization of Marx’s work.

       Those of us who are intellectuals and academics of the North should follow the example of Marx:  seek cross-horizon encounter with the social movements of our time, that is, the social movements formed by the neocolonized of the Third World.  Such encounter would require personal emancipation from the assumptions of the academic disciplines and from the bureaucratic control of the academic departments.  Personal emancipation would enable us to prepare ourselves to fulfill the duty that history has bestowed on us: to make a necessary contribution to the emerging global revolution that will soon envelop our own lands.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marx, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, proletarian revolution, working class