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“Marx and Political Theory”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Robert J. Pranger
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Extract

This is a political world of power and competition for power, together with, hopefully, the legitimate authority that goes with such power; a world where ability to dominate the will of others is prized either in itself or for other ends. Politics is associated with the quest for power, as an end or means. It is not surprising, therefore, that in looking at those thinkers in the past who have focused on human relationships and organized associations, commentators should be facinated with how they looked at domination, and also, secondarily, how they viewed freedom from such domination (for example, the limits of power). In the measure that these thinkers dealt with politics, one might say, they concerned themselves with power, authority, leadership, and, coincidentally, with freedom. put another way, what is typically “political” about their views about the “political system”; that is, how they looked at the process whereby valued goods are allocated authoritatively. This “system” includes formal, publlic institutional arrangements, such as the “State”, and processes within these institutions, such as “conflict” and“conciliation”.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , April 1968 , pp. 191 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1968

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References

1 Lasswell, Harold D.and Kaplan, Abraham, Power and Society (New Haven 1950)Google Scholar, , Chap. V; Loewentein, Karl, Political Power and the Governmental Process, (Chicago, 1965), p. 3.Google Scholar

2 On the “political system” see Easton, David, A Framework for Political Analysis, (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), p. 50.Google Scholar

3 see for example Bottomore, T. B., and Rubel, Maxmilien (eds.), KarlMarx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, (London, 1956), Part Four.Google Scholar

4 Aristotle, Politics III, viii;Google ScholarLipset, Political Man (Garden City, 1960), Passim. Harrington and Madison developed this theme before the advent of the modern social sciences, but the exploration continues into the present.Google Scholar

5 Cicero, Republic I, xxv, 39, trans. Keyes, C. W. (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, 1951), pp. 75–77.Google Scholar

6 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Art of War, ed. by Neal Wood (Indianapolis, 1965), p. 12.Google Scholar

7 Obligation and the Body Politic, (New York, 1960), p. 10.Google Scholar

8 Marx: “The clearer and more vigorous political thought is, the less it is able to grasp the nature of social evils.” Bottomore and Rubel, loc. cit., p. 217;Google Scholarand Marx, “First Manuscript” in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), ed. by Bottomore, T. B. (London, 1963), pp. 156–158(here-after cited as EPM, followed by Roman numeral for manuscript number).Google ScholarAlso, Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Garden City, 1958), pp. 101ff;Google ScholarWolin, Sheldon S., Politics and vision (Boston, 1960), pp. 416–418.Google Scholar

9 The expression “economy of violence” is used with reference to Machiavelli by Wolin, op. cit., pp. 220–224; the emphasis here is on economy or thriftrather than on the inevitability of some violence in politics.Google Scholar

10 There are some interesting parallels here to the famous discussion of the “two cities” and man's “pilgrimage” as a stranger through the earthly city in StAugustine, , The City of God, Book XIX.Google Scholar

11 The “proletarian” is “one who lives, without capital or rent, simply from labour, and from one-sided, abstract labour merely as a worker”. Marx, EPM I, p.76.Google Scholarsee also Capital, Vol. I (1867), 4th., trans. Moore, Samuel and Aveling, Edward, (New York, 1906), Part II, Chap. VI (hereafter cited as Capital—all references are to Volume One).Google Scholar

12 Marx defines “capital” as “stored-up labour,” EPM I, p. 85.Google ScholarA more extended analysis of this process of storing up labor, including “surplus value,” is found in Capital, Parts II–III. See Marx's statement in Capital that the capitalist “proceeds to consume the commodity” (laborer), p. 205, and also at pp. 257, 339.Google Scholar What follows this statement in Capital is a lengthy documenttation of this figurative cannibalism: for instance, “Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. Ibid., p. 257.

13 For Marx's comments on money, with citations of Shakespeare and Goethe, see EPM III, pp. 190–191. A more elaborate analysis may be found in Capital, Part I, Chs. 11–111, with the passage from Shakespeare's “Timon of Athens,” cited in the EPM, quoted again on p. 148 n. 1.

14 On capital see EPM I, pp. 85ff; ground rent, EPM I, pp. 103ff; labor, EPM I, pp. 69–84, 120–134. Also the comments in Capital, pp. 92–93. Karl Marx's father converted from Judaism to Protestantism one year before Karl's birth; the latter was raised in the spirit of enlightened, Prussian Lutheranism. Berlin, Isaiah, Karl Marx, His Life and Environment, 2nd., London, 1948), pp. 27–31.Google Scholar

15 For Marx's comments on Robert Owen see Capital, pp. 106 n. 1.Google Scholar,For Marx's comments on Robert Owen see Capital, pp. 327–328 n.4,Google Scholar 440, 552; also, EPM III, p. 156.Google Scholar

16 For a view of the “philosophical” young Marx see Gregor, A. James, A Survey of Marxism, (New York, 1965), Chap. 1.Google Scholar

17 On Early Christian religious thought as a political theory see Wolin, op. cit., Chapter Four.

18 On vertical-tall and horizontal-flat organizations in contemporary life see Argyris, Chris, Integrating the Individual and the Organization, (New York, 1964), p. 233;Google ScholarKuriloff, Arthur H., “An Experiment in Management —Puting Theory Y to the Test”, Personnel, XL 11 12 1963), 8–17;Google ScholarGoliembiewski, Goliembiewski, Behavior and Organization: O and M and the Small Group (Chicago, 1963), pp. 199–205.Google Scholar

19 Fromm, ErichMarx's Concept of Man (New York 1961), pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

20 Marx toWeydemeyer, Joseph, 03 5, 1852, in Feuer, Lewis, (ed.), Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Garden City, 1959), p. 456–457.Google Scholar

21 The Civil War in France 1871, trans. Bax, E. Belfort (Chicago, n.d.), p. 78.Google Scholar

22 Marx toDomela-Nieuwenhaus, F.op. cit.,pp. 390–391.Google Scholar

23 The Civil War in France, pp. 42–43.Google Scholar The view adopted in the present essay differs radically from the idea that Marx insisted on the need for centralization and implied the possibility of a “state” organization in the new socialist society. For the latter point of view see Bloom, S. F., “Withering Away of the State”, Journal of the History of Ideas, VII (01, 1946), 113–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 The Civil War in France, p. 48.Google Scholar

25 There exists at present no adequate treatment of this subject, but see my The Eclipse of Citizenship (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

26 The Civil War in France, p. 48.Google Scholar

27 There is some literature of Marx and leisure. For use ofThe German Ideology to corroborate the leisure thesis (footnote 30 below) see Arendt, op. cit., p. 101, and Fromm, op. cit., p.42.

28 In both EPM I, pp. 120–134 (“Alienated Labour”), EPM III, pp. 189–194 (“Money”); and in Capital, pp. 81–185 on the general “fetishism of commodities” under capitalism whereby commodities experience “alienation” as they receive a monetary value, and pp. 185–221 where labor becomes a commodity with a monetary price that expresses “the alienation of labourpower”.

29 See Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (1857–1858), trans. Cohen, Jack, Hobsbawm, E. J. (ed.) (New York 1964).Google Scholar

30 The German Ideology (1846), in Feuer, op. cit., p. 254.Google Scholar

31 To digress for a moment, Marx's early writings concentrate mainly on economic matters, just as do his later works; judging by the footnotes, most of which refer to Smith, Mill, Ricardo, Say, and other economists, the philosophical content of even the early Manuscripts is very slim. On the basis of Marx's economic analysis in the First and Second Manuscripts of 1844 he could have invented the term “alienation” himself (he uses the term in Capital also — see the references in footnote 28 above). That Hegel coined the term first, meant that Hegel had to be reckoned with, and this finally occurs in the last pages of Marx's Third Manuscript. No doubt Marx's language was more Hegelian in 1844 than in his later years, but Marx, above all persons, would have subscribed to Humpty Dumpty's reply to Alice when told by her that he could not use language any way he chose: “the question is who will be master, that's all.” It is worth noting that Marx argued in the First Manuscript of the EPM that we “begin from a contemporary economic fact” which indicates the worker is becoming poorer even as he produces more wealth and as his production increases in power and extent; that is, from the increasing devaluation of the human world as the world of things increases in value. This fact “implies that the object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer.” Hence, capitalist appropriation leads to alienation. All the indices of this alienation are empirical and economic (“a contemporary economic fact”): plainly, Marx could just as easily have derived alienation from the fact of production as an “alien being” as from any previous brush with Hegel. Further, the term “being” is probably used loosely by Marx. EPM I, pp. 121, 122.

32 The odd concept, “species-being,” is developed only in the section on “Alienated Labour” in EPM I, pp. 120–134. However, in Capital, Part III, Chap. VI, Sec. 1, Marx proceeds in much the same manner. In 1844, man, as a “species-being,“ is a “self-conscious being, that is, his own life is an object for him, because he is a species-being,” whereas the “animal is one with its life activity,” EPM I, p. 127. (Marx does not include humans with the other animals, contrary to Arendt's argument that his theory of laborprocess coincides with the evolution and development theories of the nineteenth century, an argument encouraged by Engels' boast that Marx was “the Darwin of history,” op. cit., p. 100.) In 1867, there is much the same distinction in Marx's thought between animal and man in that “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Furthermore, in parenthetical fashion, Marx notes, “Man himself, viewed as the impersonation of labour-power, is a natural object, a thing, although a living conscious thing, and labour is the manifestation of this power residing in him.” Capital, pp. 198, 225.

33 On modern science and technology confering elite status, see Marx, Capital, Part IV, Chap. XV. A more contemporary statement is found in Price, Don K.The Scientific Estate (Cambridge 1965);Google Scholarand Morgenthau, Hans J., “Modern Science and Political Power”, Columbia Law Review, 64 (12, 1964), p. 1386–1409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 The transformation is pictured in EPM III, pp. 152–167, in the section entitled “Private Property and Communism.“ These pages are among the more difficult, abstract, and, perhaps, “Hegelian” in Marx's writings, but demand closer reading since the explicit references are to Proudhon, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Owen, and Aristotle. The “transformation,” as depicted in Capital, will be cited in footnotes 36–40 below when “The Revolutionary Education Process” in Marx's theory of factory citizenship will be discussed. Worker-centered industrialism, where the worker himself and not greater efficiency of output is emphasized, has a contemporary non-Marxist proponent in Abraham Maslow; see his Eupsychian Management: A Journal (Homewood, 1965).

35 “Money, then, appears as a disruptive power for the individual and for the social bonds, which claim to be self-subsistent entities. It changes fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, stupidity into intelligence and intelligence into stupidity.” Marx, EPM III, p. 193. To be a true man, however, a real “individuality,” argues Marx, one must relate to the world as a human world, not allowing abstract money to become the bond of social union. In Capital Marx states: “Modern society, which soon after its birth pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life” (p. 149).

36 Footnotes 36–40 are all from Capital, Part IV, Chap. XV, “Machinery and Modern Industry” which, for the purposes of this essay, must be considered central to Marx's writings. The reference to modern industry as a never-ending process involving revolutionary changes is found in Capital, pp. 532–533.Google ScholarFor Arendt's comparison of Marx's labor-process with the biological life-process, a mistaken parallel in my estimation, see op. cit., pp.84–117.Google ScholarFrom a somewhat different standpoint see the criticism of Arendt's views on Marx by Suchting, W. A., “Marx and Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition”, Ethics, LXXIII (10, 1962), 47–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Capital, p. 533.Google Scholar

38 Ibid.

One might argue that the British worker since World War II has hardly been “miserable.” But Marx clearly means by “misery” insecurity related to ignorance of the industrial and financial processes of capitalism, as well as purely economic deprivations. Since 1945 Great Britain's financial, industrial, and technological situation has surely been a fever chart.

39 Ibid., p. 534.

40 Ibid.

41 Tocqueville, Alexis deDemocracy in America, trans. Reeve, Henry (New York 1961), Part II, Book IV, Chap. VII, p. 394.Google Scholar

42 See the comments by Arendt on Marx, with reference to both Periclean citizenship and mass society, op. cit., pp. 102–117.Google Scholar

43 Marx discusses the effects of shorter hours and proportionately more pay for hours worked under capitalism in Capital, Part III, Chap. X, “The Working Day.” “The creation of a normal working day is ⃛ the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working class”.

Ibid., p. 327. But the civil war does not end with the creation of a normal working day.

44 Fromm claims that Marx would view the situation of workers in contemporary American, British, and Russian “factories” with equal aversion.

45 Concern about personal alienation has become almost frenetic, at times, in the West. Recently, the subject has also been recognized as a problem in Eastern European Communist states, particularly in relation to growing bureaucratization of daily life. See The New York Times, January 20, 1965.