Chapter 12. The Marxian System 1. Historical Materialism and the Class Struggle
1. The Marxian Strategy
Marx desperately sought a materialistic dialectic of history, a dialectic that would account for all basic historical change and would lead inevitably to communist revolution.
Lacking a Burmian nissus or mystical inner drive to serve as motor of the dialectic,
Marx had to fall back on class conflict embedded in historical materialism.
But it was characteristic of Marx that this crucial area of the Marxian system, along with other important discussions,
was presented not systematically, but in the course of fugitive paragraphs or even passages,
Here and there throughout the writings of Marx and Engels, the system has to be constructed
out of these widely separated passages.
As a result, or perhaps from the inherently grave weakness of the argument, Marx's terminology
is invariably vague and fuzzy, and his allegedly law-like linkages of the dialectic virtually
non-existent.
And they are mere unsupported assertion.
As a result, the Marxian system is not only a tissue of fallacies, but of flimsy fallacies
and linkages as well.
No economic or social theory is obliged to come up with correct predictions in the sense
of forecasts of the future.
But the Marxian doctrine is different.
Like pre-millennial pietists who are forever predicting an imminent Armageddon, Marx claims
Marx seems to come up with laws of history, which according to him are scientific rather than mystical.
Well, if he knows the laws of history, then Marx had better come up with correct predictions of such allegedly determined laws.
Yet all his predictions have proved utterly wrong.
At this point, Marxists invariably fall back on changing the prediction or pointing to some offsetting factor,
are seen only in hindsight that temporarily delayed the prediction from coming true.
Thus, as we shall see further below, one of Marx's predictions, crucial to the inevitable
workings of the road to socialism, was that the working class would suffer increasing
poverty and immiseration.
When the working classes, in contrast, obviously continued to gain spectacularly in living
in the Western World, Marxian apologists fell back on the assertion that Marx meant only poverty relative to the capitalist class.
It is doubtful, however, whether bloody revolution will be waged by a proletariat for having only one yacht, while capitalists have a dozen each.
Relative misery is a very different kettle of fish.
Marxists then came up with the view that Western workers' standards of living were rising because
of a temporary delay brought about by Western imperialism, enabling Western workers to be
capitalists relative to the exploited third world.
The fact that Marx and Engels were themselves in favor of Western, particularly German imperialism
as a progressive force is usually passed over in silence by Marxian writers.
On theoretical matters, the strategy of Marxists is similar.
Increasingly, as crucial Marxian doctrines become evidently too absurd to be held seriously,
for example, technological determinism of all life or the labor theory of value, they
They are abandoned by the Marxists, who then proceed to maintain stubbornly that they are
still Marxists and that Marxism essentially still holds true.
But this is the attitude of a mystical religious adept, rather than of a scientific or even
a rational thinker.
One crucial weapon wielded often by Marxists and by Marx himself was the dialectic.
Since the dialectic allegedly means that the world and human society consist of conflicting
or contradictory tendencies, side by side, or even within the same set of circumstances,
any prediction can then be justified as the result of one's deep insight into whichever
part of the contradictory dialectic might be prevailing at any given time.
In short, since either A or non-A can occur, Marxians can safely hedge their bets so that
no prediction of theirs can ever be falsified.
It has been said that Jerry Healy, the absolute leader of the left-wing British Trotskyite
movement until scandal brought him down in recent years, was able to maintain his power
or by claiming the power of exclusive insight into the mysterious workings of the dialectic.
And an outstanding example of hedging one's bets by Marx himself was described in a letter
to Engels.
Marx writes to Engels that he has just forecast something in his column for the New York Tribune.
He adds cynically and revealingly,
It is possible that I may be discredited, but in that case it will still be possible
2. Historical Materialism
There is no place in his system where Marx is fuzzier or shakier than at its base. The
The Concept of Historical Materialism, The Key to the Inevitable Dialectic of History
At the base of historical materialism and of Marx's view of history is the concept
of the material productive forces.
These forces are the driving power that creates all historical events and changes.
So what are these material productive forces?
This is never made clear.
The best that can be said is that material productive forces mean technological methods.
On the other hand, we are also faced with the term mode of production, which seems to
be the same thing as material productive forces, or the sum of, or systems of, technological
methods.
At any rate, these material productive forces, these technologies and modes of production,
Uniquely and monocausally create all relations of production, or social relations of production,
independently of people's wills.
These relations of production, also extremely vaguely defined, seem to be essentially legal
and property relations.
The sum of these relations of production somehow make up the economic structure of society.
This economic structure is the base which causally determines the superstructure, which
includes natural science, legal doctrines, religion, philosophies, and all other forms
of consciousness.
In short, at the bottom of the base is technology, which in turn constitutes or determines modes
of production, which in turn determines relations of production, or institutions of law or property,
and which finally in turn determine ideas, religious values, art, etc.
How then do historical changes take place in the Marxian schema?
They can only take place in technological methods, since everything else in society
is determined by the state of technology at any one time.
As Marx put it in the clearest and starkest statement of his technological determinist
In his first view of history, in his Poverty of Philosophy,
in acquiring new productive forces, men change their mode of production,
and in changing their mode of production, their means of gaining a living,
they change all their social relations.
The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord,
the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist.
The first grave fallacy in this farrago is right at the beginning.
Where does this technology come from, and how do technologies change or improve?
Who puts them into effect?
A key to the tissue of fallacies that constitute the Marxian system is that Marx never attempts to provide an answer.
Answer.
Indeed, he cannot, since if he attributes the state of technology or technological change
to the actions of man, of individual men, his whole system falls apart, for human consciousness
and individual consciousness at that would then be determining material productive forces
rather than the other way round.
As von Mises points out, we may summarize the Marxian doctrine in this way.
In the beginning there are the material productive forces, that is, the technological equipment
of human productive efforts, the tools and machines.
No question concerning their origin is permitted.
They are, that is all.
We must assume that they are dropped from heaven.
And we may add, any changes in that technology must therefore be dropped from heaven as well.
Furthermore, as von Mises also demonstrated, consciousness, rather than matter, is predominant
in technology.
A technological invention is not something material.
It is the product of a mental process, of reasoning and conceiving new ideas.
The tools and machines may be called material, but the operation of the mind which created
them is entirely spiritual.
Marxian materialism does not trace back superstructural and ideological phenomena to material roots.
It explains these phenomena as caused by an essentially mental process, namely invention.
Machines are embodied ideas.
In addition, technological processes do not only require inventions.
They must be brought forth from the invention stage and be embodied in concrete machines
and processes.
But that requires savings and capital investment, as well as invention.
But granting this fact, then the relations of production, the legal and property rights
System in a Society, help determine whether or not saving and investment will be encouraged
and discouraged. Once again, the proper causal path is from ideas, principles, and the legal
and property rights superstructure, to the alleged base. Similarly, machines will not
be invested in, unless there is a division of labor of sufficient extent in a society.
Once again, the social relations, the cooperative division of labor and exchange in society,
determine the extent and development of technology, and not the other way around.
In addition to these logical flaws, the materialist doctrine is factually absurd.
Obviously, the hand mill which ruled in ancient Sumer did not give you a feudal society there.
Furthermore, there were capitalist relations long before the steam mill.
His technological determinism led Marx to hail each important new invention as the magical
material productive force that would inevitably bring about the socialist revolution.
Wilhelm Liebknecht, a leading German Marxist and friend of Marx, reported that Marx once
attended an exhibition of electric locomotives in London, and delightedly concluded that
electricity would give rise to the inevitable communist revolution.
Engels carried technological determinism so far as to declare that it was the invention
of fire that separated man from the animals.
Presumably the group of animals to whom fire somehow arrived were thereupon determined
to evolve upward.
The emergence of man himself was simply a part of the superstructure.
Even granting Marx's thesis momentarily for the sake of argument, his theory of historical
change still faces insuperable difficulties.
Or why can't technology, which somehow develops as an automatic given, simply and smoothly
change the relations of production and the superstructure above it?
Indeed, if the base at each moment of time determines the rest of the superstructure,
how can a change in the base not smoothly determine an appropriate change in the rest
of the structure?
But again, a mysterious element enters the Marxian system.
Periodically, as technology and the modes of production advance, they come into conflict,
or in the peculiar Hegelian-Marxian jargon, in contradiction to the relations of production,
which continue in the conditions appropriate to the past time period and past technology.
These relations therefore become fetters, blocking technological development.
Since they become fetters on growth, the new technology gives rise to an inevitable social
revolution that overthrows the old production relations and the superstructure and creates
new ones that have been blocked or fettered.
In this way, feudalism gives rise to capitalism, which in turn will give way to socialism.
But if technology determines social production relations, what is the mysterious force that
delays the change in those relations?
It couldn't be human stubbornness or habit or culture, since we have already been informed
by Marx that modes of production impel men to enter into social relations apart from
their mere wills.
As Professor Plamenats points out, we are merely told that the relations of production
become fetters on the productive forces.
Marx merely asserts this point and never even attempts to offer a cause, material or otherwise.
As Plamenats puts the entire problem, then, all of a sudden, without warning and without
In his explanation, he, Marx, tells us that there nevertheless arises inevitably from time to time an incompatibility between them, the productive forces and the relations of production, which only social revolution can resolve.
This incompatibility apparently arises because the dependent variable, the relations, begins
to impede the free operation of the variable on which it depends, the material productive
forces.
This is an astounding statement, and yet Marx can make it without even being aware that
it requires explanation.
Professor Plaminatz has shown that part of the deep confusion is both generated and camouflaged
by Marx's failure to define relations of production adequately.
This concept apparently includes legal property relations.
But if legal property relations were at fault in this dialectical delay in adjustment, thus
and the setting up the fetters.
Then Marx would be conceding that the problem is really legal or political rather than economic.
But he wanted the determining base to be purely economic.
The political and the ideological had to be merely part of the determined superstructure.
So social relations of production, allegedly economic, were the fetters.
But this can only make sense if this means the property rights or legal system.
And so, Marx got out of his dilemma by being so fuzzy and ambivalent about the relations
of production that these relations could be taken either as including the property structure,
as identical with that structure, or else the two might be totally separate entities.
In particular, Marx accomplished his obscurantist purpose by asserting that the property rights
system was part of the legal expression of the relations of production, thus somehow
being able to be part of the superstructure and yet of the economic relations of production
at the same time.
Legal expression, needless to say, was not defined either.
As Plamenats summed up, the entire concept of relations of production, so necessary to
the Marxian thesis of material or economic determinism, serves Marx as a ghost battalion
closing a vital gap in the front of Marxian theory.
Yet in all this, there is no way that the concept of relations of production can make
economic determinism intelligible, and there is no way by which these relations can either
be determined by the modes of production, or can in themselves determine the property
rights system.
The only possible coherent chain of causation, in contrast, is the other way round.
From ideas, to property rights systems, to the fostering or crippling the growth of saving
Banking and Investment, and of Technological Development.
20th century Marxists from Lucas to Genovese have often tried to save the day from the
embarrassment of the technological determinism of Marx and his immediate followers.
They maintain that all sophisticated Marxists know that the causation is not unilinear,
that the base and the superstructure really influence each other.
Sometimes they try to torture the data to claim that Marx himself took such a sophisticated position.
Either way, they are characteristically obfuscating the fact that they have, in reality, abandoned Marxism.
Marxism is mono-causal technological determinism, along with all the rest of the fallacies we have depicted, or it is nothing.
And it has demonstrated no inevitable, or even likely, dialectic mechanism.
3.
The Class Struggle Even assuming that the unexplained incompatibility
between the productive forces and the relations of production exists, why shouldn't this
incompatibility continue forever?
Why doesn't the economy simply lapse into permanent stagnation of the technological forces?
This contradiction, so to speak, was scarcely enough to generate Marx's goal of the inevitable
proletarian communist revolution.
The answer that Marx supplies, the motor of the inevitable revolutions in history, is
inherent class conflict, inherent struggles between economic classes.
For in addition to the property rights system, one of the consequences of the relations of
production, as determined by the productive forces, is the class structure of society.
For Marx, the fetters are invariably applied by the privileged ruling classes, who somehow
serve as surrogates for, or living embodiments of, the social relations of production and
the legal property system.
In contrast, another, inevitably rising, economic class somehow embodies the oppressed or fettered
technologies and modes of production.
The contradiction between the fettered material productive forces and the fettering social
relations of production thus becomes embodied in a determined class struggle between the
The Rising and the Ruling Classes, which are bound by the inevitable material dialectic
of history to result in a triumphant revolution by the rising class.
The successful revolution at last brings the relations of production and the material productive
forces or technological system into harmony.
All is then peaceful and harmonious until later, when further technological development
gives rise to new contradictions, new fetters, and a new class struggle to be won by the
rising economic class.
In that way, feudalism, determined by the hand mill, gives rise to middle classes when
the steam mill develops, and the rising middle classes, the living surrogates of the steam
mill, overthrow fetters imposed by the feudal landlord class.
Thus, the material dialectic takes one socio-economic system, say feudalism, and claims that it
gives rise to its opposite, or negation, and its inevitable replacement by capitalism,
which thus negates and transcends feudalism.
And in the same way, electricity, or whatever, will inevitably give rise to a proletarian
and Revolution, which will permit electricity to triumph over the fetters that capitalists
place upon it.
It is difficult to state this position without rejecting it immediately as drivel.
In addition to all the flaws in historical materialism we have seen above, there is no
causal chain that links a technology to a class, or that permits economic classes to
to embody either technology or its production relations fetters.
There is no proffered reason why such classes must or even plausibly might act as determined
puppets for or against new technologies.
Why must feudal landlords try to suppress the steam mill?
Why can't feudal landlords invest in steam mills?
And why can't capitalists cheerfully invest in electricity as they already have in steam?
Indeed, they have in fact happily invested in electricity and in all other successful
and economical technologies, as well as bringing them about in the first place.
Why are capitalists inevitably oppressed under feudalism, and why are the proletariat equally
inevitably oppressed under capitalism?
In Marx's attempt to answer the latter question, see below.
If finally class struggle and the material dialectic bring about an inevitable proletarian
revolution, why does the dialectic, as Marx of course maintains, at that point come to
an end?
For crucial to Marxism, as to other millennial and apocalyptic creeds, is that the dialectic
can by no means roll on forever.
On the contrary, the Kiliast, whether pre or post-millennial, invariably sees the end
of the dialectic, or the end of history, as imminent.
Very soon, imminently, the Third Age, or the return of Jesus, or the Kingdom of God
on earth, or the total self-knowledge of the Man God, will effectively put an end to history.
Marx's atheist dialectic too envisioned the eminent proletarian revolution, which would,
after the raw communist stage, bring about a higher communism, or perhaps a beyond-communist
stage, which would be a classless society, a society of total equality, of no division
of labor, a society without rulers.
But since history is a history of class struggles for Marx, the ultimate communist stage would
be the final one, so that, in effect, history would then come to an end.
Critics of Marx, from Bakunin to Majajski to Milovanjilas, have of course pointed out,
both prophetically and in retrospect, that the proletarian revolution, whichever its
stage would not eliminate classes, but on the contrary would set up a new ruling class
and a new ruled.
There would be no equality but another inequality of power and inevitably of wealth.
The oligarchic elite, the vanguard as rulers and the rest of society as the ruled.
In order to round out his system, Marx was interested in the dialectical workings of
the past, the passages from Oriental despotism or the Asiatic mode of production to the ancient
world, thence to feudalism, and from feudalism to capitalism.
But his main interest, understandably, was in demonstrating the precise mechanism by
which capitalism was supposed to give way, imminently, to the proletarian revolution.
After working out this broad system, the rest of Marx's life was largely devoted to demonstrating
and developing these alleged mechanisms.
4.
The Marxian Doctrine of Ideology
Even Marx must dimly recognize that not material productive forces, not even classes, act in
in the Real World, but only individual consciousness and individual choice.
Even in the Marxian analysis, each class, or the individuals within it, must become
conscious of its true class interests in order to act upon pursuing or achieving them.
To Marx, each individual's thinking, his values and theories are all determined, not
by his personal self-interest but by the interest of the class to which he supposedly belongs.
This is the first fatal flaw in the argument.
Why in the world should each individual ever hold his class higher than himself?
Second, according to Marx, this class interest determines his thoughts and viewpoints and
must do so because each person is only capable of ideology or false consciousness in the
interest of his class.
He is not capable of a disinterested, objective search for truth, nor of pursuit of his own
interest or that of all mankind, but as von Mises has pointed out, Marx's doctrine pretends
is to be pure, non-ideological science, and yet written expressly to advance the class interest of the proletariat.
But while all bourgeois economics and all other disciplines of thought were interpreted by Marx as false by definition,
as ideological rationalizations of bourgeois class interest,
The Marxists were not consistent enough to assign to their own doctrines merely ideological character.
The Marxian tenets, they implied, are not ideologies.
They are a foretaste of the knowledge of the future classless society,
which, freed from the fetters of class conflicts, will be in a position to conceive pure knowledge, untainted by ideological blemishes.
Dr. David Gordon has aptly summed up this point.
If all thought about social and economic matters is determined by class position, what about
the Marxist system itself?
If, as Marx proudly proclaimed, he aimed at providing a science for the working class,
why should any of his views be accepted as true?
Mises rightly notes that Marx's view is self-refuting.
If all social thought is ideological, then this proposition is itself ideological, and
the grounds for believing it have been undercut.
In his theories of surplus value, Marx cannot contain his sneering at the apologetics of
various bourgeois economists.
He did not realize that in his constant jibes at the class bias of his fellow economists,
He was but digging the grave of his own giant work of propaganda on behalf of the proletariat.
Von Mises also raises the point that it is absurd to believe that the interests of any
class, including the capitalists, could ever be served better by a false than by a correct
doctrine.
To Marx, the point of philosophy was only the achievement of some practical goal.
But if, as in pragmatism, truth is only what works, then surely the interests of the bourgeoisie
would not be served by clinging to a false theory of society.
If the Marxian answer holds, as it has, that false theory is necessary to justify the existence
of capitalist rule, then, as von Mises points out, from the Marxian point of view itself,
The Theory should not be necessary.
Since each class ruthlessly pursues its own interest, there is no need for the capitalists
to justify their rule and their alleged exploitation to themselves.
There is also no need to use these false doctrines to keep the proletariat subservient.
Since to Marxists, the rule or the overthrow of a given social system depends on the material
It is a well-known irony, and another deep flaw in the Marxian system, that for all the
The Marxian exaltation of the proletariat and the proletarian mind.
All leading Marxists beginning with Marx and Engels were emphatically bourgeois themselves.
Marx was the son of a wealthy lawyer.
His wife was a member of the Prussian nobility and his brother-in-law Prussian Minister of
the Interior.
Friedrich Engels, his lifelong benefactor and collaborator, was the son of a wealthy
Why were not their views and doctrines also determined by bourgeois class interests?
What permitted their consciousness to rise above a system so powerful that it determines
the views of everyone else?
In this way, every determinist system attempts to provide an escape hatch for its own believers,
who are somehow able to escape the determinist laws that afflict everyone else.
Unwittingly these systems become in that way self-contradictory and self-refuting.
In the 20th century, Marxists such as the German sociologist Karl Mannheim attempted
to elevate this escape hatch into high theory, that somehow intellectuals are able to float
5. THE INNER CONTRADICTION IN THE CONCEPT OF CLASS
A class is a set of entities with one identifiable thing in common.
Thus, there is a class of bald eagles or of geraniums, and such a class can be widened
or narrowed.
For example, the class of geraniums growing in New Jersey.
A social class is a class of human beings with one thing in common.
The number of identifiable social classes is virtually infinite.
Thus, there is the class of people over 6 feet 4 inches in height, the class of people
named Smith, the class of people weighing under 160 pounds, etc. ad infinitum.
Some of these classes will be useful for certain types of social analysis.
For example, the class of people over 65 years of age with diabetes.
For medical or insurance or demographic purposes.
But from our point of view, in a study of the Marxian theory of class, these classes
are all worthless because there is no inherent conflict between them.
In the market economy, in the international division of labor and exchange of products,
there is no inherent conflict between short and tall people, people of various weights
and names, etc.
All classes live in harmony through the voluntary exchange of goods and services that mutually
benefits them all.
Furthermore, there is no reason for an individual in a free society or in a market economy to
to act on behalf of the interests of his class rather than or even as a surrogate for his
own individual interest.
Will a person, when deciding at what job to work or what investment to make, first and
foremost consult his class interest as a member of a class over six feet tall?
The very idea is absurd.
Is there no time then when social classes are in inherent conflict?
Yes, there are such times.
But only when some classes are privileged by state coercion, while other classes are
restricted or burdened by state coercion.
Ludwig von Mises perceptively used the term caste to identify groups either privileged
The Caste System in India was a classic case. The privileged or ruling castes acquired power, income and status by state coercion.
The submerged or ruled castes, for example, were prevented by coercion from leaving the lowly occupancy of the state.
and Status by State Coercion.
The submerged or ruled castes, for example, were prevented by coercion from leaving the
lowly occupations of their ancestors.
Other ruling and ruled castes or classes are not as rigid as the Indian caste system, but
still they partake of the same coercively determined status.
Thus the Brahman caste, privileged by the state, was in inherent conflict with the untouchables, who were submerged as a class by the state.
These castes then have conflicting class or caste interest, the Brahmans to maintain their privileges, the untouchable or other submerged castes to break out of their burdens.
The point is that by the use of state power, each individual Brahman has a common or class interest in maintaining his privileges,
while each untouchable has a common class interest in freeing himself from oppression.
Thus, even in less rigid cases than in an absolute caste system, the class of short and tall people, or the class of people named Smith,
Normally living in peace and harmony could become classes in inherent conflict.
Suppose for example the state decrees a large subsidy for all people over 6 feet tall, or
a special heavy tax on all those under 5 feet 5 inches.
If special privileges were heaped on people named Smith, then this would be a privileged
the demands of justice, that is, ideas or principles, higher than their class interest.
Or untouchables, who, for personal interest, willingly submit to the existing order.
There is a grave inner contradiction at the heart of the Marxian system in Marx's crucial
concept of class.
In the Marxian dialectic, two mighty social classes face each other in inherent conflict,
the ruling and the ruled.
In the first two of history's major conflicts, oriental despotism and feudalism, the social
classes are defined by Marx in what we have seen to be the libertarian or Misesian manner,
as classes privileged or burdened by the state.
Thus, in Oriental despotism or the Asiatic mode of production, the emperor and his technocratic
bureaucracy run the state and constitute its ruling class.
This class acquires privileges from the state and taxes and controls the ruled classes,
that is, everyone else, largely the peasantry but also craftsmen and merchants.
Here Marx adopts the libertarian, as we have seen advanced by James Mill's definition of
a two-class system, the ruling few who have gained control of the state, who are governing
and exploiting the ruled many.
Under feudalism a similar concept applies.
The landlord class has acquired territory through war and conquest, and has settled
All well and good.
But then suddenly when Marx gets to capitalism, the class categories change without acknowledgement.
Now the ruling class is not simply defined as the class that runs the state apparatus.
Now suddenly the original act of rule or exploitation is the voluntary market wage contract, the
very act of a capitalist hiring a worker, and a worker agreeing to be hired.
This in itself, to Marx, establishes a common class interest among capitalists, exploiting
a common class of workers.
It is true that Marx also believed that this capitalist class runs the state, but only
as the executive committee of the ruling class.
That is, of a ruling class that previously existed on the free market because of the
wage system.
So that what Marx, as analyst of Oriental despotism or feudalism, would consider ruling
class exploitation, still exists under capitalism, but only as an addendum to the pre-existing
capitalist exploitation of the workers through the wage system.
Ruling class exploitation under capitalism is unique in exercising a double exploitation.
First, on the market as part of the wage contract and, second, the alleged exploitation by
the state as executive committee of the ruling class.
It should be evident that Marx's analysis of class is, by this point, a mishmash, in
total disarray.
Two contradictory definitions of class are jammed together, unfused and unacknowledged.
Why should capitalism of all systems be able to levy a double exploitation that no other
ruling class in Marx's historical schema can ever enjoy?
But the crucial point is that Marx's definition of class and class conflict under capitalism
is hopelessly muddled and totally wrong.
How can capitalists, even in the same industry, let alone in the entire social system, have
anything crucial in common?
Brahmins and slaves in a caste system certainly enjoy a common class interest in conflict
with other castes.
But what is the common class interest of the capitalist class?
On the contrary, capitalist firms are in continual competition and rivalry with each other.
They compete for raw material, for labor, for sales and customers.
They compete in price and quality and in seeking new products and new ways to get ahead of
their competitors.
Marx of course did not deny the reality of this competition.
So how can all capitalists or even the steel industry be considered a class with common
interests?
Again, in only one way.
The steel industry only enjoys common interests if it can induce the state to create such
interests through special privilege.
State intervention to impose a steel tariff or a steel cartel with restricted output and
and Higher Price would indeed create a privileged ruling class of steel industrialists.
But no such class having common interests pre-exists on the market before such intervention
comes about.
Only the state can create a privileged class, or a subordinate and burdened class, by acts
of intervention into the economy or society.
There can be no capitalist ruling class on the free market.
Similarly, there can be no working class with common class interests on the free market.
Workers compete with each other just as capitalists or entrepreneurs compete with each other.
Once again, if groups of workers can use the state to exclude other groups, they can become
A Ruling Class as Against the Excluded Groups Thus, if government immigration restrictions
keep out new workers, the native workers can benefit, at least in the short run, at the
expense of incomes of immigrants.
Or if white workers can keep black workers out of skilled jobs by state coercion, as
was done in South Africa, the former becomes a privileged or ruling class at the expense
of the latter.
An important point here is that any group that can manage to control or gain privileges
from the state can take its place among the exploiters.
This can be specific groups of workers or businessmen or communist party members or
whatever.
There is no reason to assume that only capitalists can acquire such privileges.
In his class analysis, Marx constantly had to struggle with the fact that neither capitalists
nor workers act in practice as if they are each members of monolithic, conflicting classes.
On the contrary, capitalists persist in competing with each other, and workers likewise.
Even in their rousing communist manifesto, Marx and Engels had to admit that the organization
One of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually
being upset again by the competition among the workers themselves.
Indeed.
But there are more grave problems.
For Marx had his two-class analysis.
The essence of each titanic struggle in history is between two great social classes, the ruling
versus the Ruled, the rising class in tune with the new material productive forces, the
declining one out of tune.
But it is one thing to employ a two-class ruler versus ruled analysis, according to
libertarian or million definitions.
Since there are, indeed, common caste interests and conflicts, this concept is here a simplification,
are not an important and workable one.
But what are we to do in the complex multi-class world of the capitalist market economy?
How can we employ a two-class model there, either for market or political action?
And there is no question that Marx is committed to the two-class model, capitalists versus
Proletarians, all other classes fade away, so that the mighty, exploited, immiserated
class can and will rise up as a monolith to overthrow the capitalist class.
As Marx and Engels say in the Communist Manifesto, our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses
however this distinctive feature.
It has simplified the class antagonisms.
Policy as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two
great classes directly facing each other, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
But in practice, in analyzing recent history or current events, Marx and Engels were forced
to talk about many classes and groups, and their interactions, thereby implicitly but
definitely betraying their own absurd two-class model.
And so we have the problem that Marx's two classes are far from monoliths, that their
members compete with each other constantly and collaborate very rarely, and also that
in capitalist society in particular it is impossible to analyze historical action by
squeezing all human actors into two classes.
In practice, however, Marx and other Marxists happily use a multi-class model in analyzing
historical events—steel capital, textile capital, armament capital, finance capital,
etc.—but they do not seem to realize that while they are being far more realistic than
when prating about capitalists versus workers as two-class monoliths, they are totally betraying
and the Marxian dialectic itself.
No inevitable revolution, for example, will ever follow from multi-class squabbling, certainly
not Marx's cherished proletarian one.
Marx himself and Marxists generally have devoted many millions of words to the concept and
use of the term class, yet in all his writings Marx never once defined it.
Or if he had attempted a definition, the stark inner contradiction in the concept, the slippage
between state creation and mere market action, would have become starkly clear, and something
would have had to give.
Thus, in Marx's theoretical magnum opus, Capital, there is no attempt at a definition
of class.
Only an incomplete Volume 1 was published in Marx's lifetime, 1867, at which point
he had substantially finished working on the book.
After Marx's death in 1883, Engels worked up, edited and published the remaining manuscript
in two further volumes, 1885 and 1894.
Only in the famous very last chapter of the third volume does Marx finally arrive at an
An attempt to define what he and Engels had been talking and writing about for four decades.
It is an unfinished chapter of startling brevity, five short paragraphs.
In this chapter, Classes, Marx begins with the classical Ricardian triad, that the sources
of income in the market economy are wages, profits and rents, and that the receivers
Marks of such income constitute the three big classes of modern society, laborers, capitalists
and landlords.
So far so good.
But then Marks adds that even England, the most highly and classically developed capitalist
country, contains middle and intermediate strata, which even here obliterate lines of
demarcation everywhere.
Marx then begins the third paragraph of this seemingly climactic chapter.
The first question to be answered is this, what constitutes a class?
Indeed, he then adds that the reply to this question follows naturally from the reply
On the second question, Marx states that, at first glance, the identity of incomes with their source of income is the same as that of the social class, and that the social class is the same as that of the social class, and that the social class is the same as that of the social class.
On the second question, Marx states that at first glance the identity of incomes with their sources constitutes the answer.
After all, workers earn wages from their labor, capitalists make profits from their capital, and landlords obtain rent from their land.
But Marx quickly warns us that this simple answer will not do.
For, however, from that standpoint, physicians and officials, for example, would also constitute
two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these
groups receiving their revenues from one and the same source.
The same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which
Which the division of social labor splits laborers, as well as capitalists and landlords.
The latter, for example, into owners of vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners,
and owners of fisheries.
Precisely.
Marx has said it very well.
His cherished two-class monolith model, or three-class, if we throw in the allegedly
and the largely declining feudal remnant, the landlord class, lies totally in ruins.
Thus Marxian class theory, and therefore Marxism, lay destroyed by its creator's own hand.
But if it is always darkest before the dawn, if the suffering of the oppressed class is
greatest just before the apocalyptic revolutionary moment, we would expect Karl Marx to step
in and triumphantly save the day. How does he do it? How does the drama unfold? In one
of the great anti-climactic moments in the history of social thought, the manuscript
ends with the lines we have just quoted. There is just a cryptic footnote from Engels. Here,
the manuscript breaks off.
The way Engels puts it implies that the master was struck down just as his pen was ready
to wield the answer that would rescue the crumbling Marxian theory of class and placech it on solid foundations.
But we know this was not true, for the breaking off occurred 16 years before Marx's death.
Marx had ample time for his dramatic and conclusive answer.
Why didn't he pursue it?
We can only conclude that he couldn't, that he was stopped, that he realized that there
was no answer, and that Marxism would henceforth have to rely on repetition and bluster to
carry it through.