When History Has a Head and a Heart

            In the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes: “[w]hat else does the history of ideas demonstrate than that the products of the intellect are refashioned along with material ones? The ruling ideas of an age were always but the ideas of the ruling class.”[1] Well, no more. Marx diverges from what was at that time, the canonical reading of history and society – that is, the view that the story of human civilisation could be told through a lexicon of chance and incidence.[2] According to Marx, the history of civilization must be understood through its material circumstances, because the social and political architectonics of a moment are purposively constructed by its economic order. He submits that this material analysis indicates a progressive sociological trajectory, whose path can be mapped onto the volatile economic interests of its ruling class. Marx sets forth an analytical approach of ‘historical materialism.’ Imbricated in materialism’s historiographical and prognostic aspects, there is also prescriptive determinism, telling us what the future will, can, and should look like: the communist state.

            In this essay, I analyse Marx’s approach of historical materialism as instantiated in The German Ideology, and the nature of Marx’s state in the Communist Manifesto. First, I characterise the method and key concepts involved in historical materialism, and why such an approach radically reshapes the past. Next, I reconstruct the failings of capitalism Marx identifies, and how it designed the corresponding idea of communist state.

2.1 The Conceptual Framework of Historical Materialism

The term “materialist conception of history” sets itself against an abstract theory of how social and political formations arose in the past.[3] It emphasises the active, intentional, and explicable dimensions of how we have come to live the way we do, as opposed to a divine, aleatory, or mystical rationale for social progression. This grounded framework hinges on how resources are distributed among a population, the patterns in which individuals engage in commercial production, and uses empirical analysis to frame economic predicaments. From within the constrictions of a material foundation, Marx argues, culture, religion, education, and law emerge. In other words, and as is later expounded by several Marxist intellectuals,[4] to unravel ‘superstructures’ fabricated in ideology – art, the rule of law, politics, science, and so on – one must first unravel the mode of production: the productive forces; the relations of production.[5]

The productive forces in a society refer to the instruments, agents, and tools available as private property to the ruling class. Humans are eternally engaged in improving the way they live, and in a sense, history unfolds as an account of steadily augmenting productive forces. The term encompasses machinery, raw materials, factories, landscape, and crucially, the labour required to exploit them. Technological advancements alter the degree of control productive forces wield over civilisation. Environmental changes often introduce new dynamics to the equation, but it takes human intervention to re-organise how productive forces interact with each other. This re-organisation is social; the relations of production encapsulate how those who own the means of production engage with each other, and the productive forces. Taken together, the productive forces and their social structuring in the relations of production denote the mode of production operating at a moment in time. When Marx suggests a periodised study of history, he is describing a periodised development of modes of production.

2.2 Historicising Modes of Production

The development of modes of production over time has not been a linear, normatively enhancing evolution. For Marx, it was the contradictions and class struggles of each period that necessitated adaptation. The disintegration of the feudal order was wrought by the incompatibility of its productive forces with its relations of production. The overblown importance of the merchant class could not cohere to the political edifice of monarchy; the relations restrained rather than fostered capitalistic growth. “They had to be sprung open, they were sprung open,” Marx writes, asserting that the voracious appetite of the emerging bourgeoisie eventually swallowed up the antecedent state model whole.[6]  The history of the market, to Marx, is a history of “the revolt of modern productive forces against modern relations of production.”[7] In the tenuous modern era, the bourgeoisie – who privately owned the means of production – were inveterate in their revolutionising of the productive forces to turn a profit. Labour under such a doctrine meant putting more and more into the production of a commodity, while receiving less and less compensation. Elsewhere, Marx highlights how this results in the alienation of the worker from the final product, the process, and his humanity. However, caught in the ritournelle of optimising and bastardising the productive forces (including labour) the ruling class did not anticipate that the market had become a monster they could no longer control.

There are two strands to this line of analysis. First, that the political and other superstructural forms of social life were instrumentalised in the pursuit of bourgeois gains. As Marx notes, “the power of the modern state is merely a device for administering the common affairs of the whole bourgeois class.”[8] Second, while the ruling class had hegemonized the state and its ideological apparatuses, it had not, and could not tame the mode of production itself. This is because of the inherently unstable contradictions within the logic of capitalist economies. For instance, what we now call the boom-bust cycle leads to overproduction, a pattern of socio-political crises, and modes of production whose irreducible destructive powers are consistently increasing. Like a teetering tower built without a staid foundation, when the relations of production cannot keep pace with productive forces, we see the devastation of overcorrecting states and societies, that is, “temporary barbarism” plugged by “too much civilisation.”[9] Since the relations of production cannot contain its forces, capitalism responds by exploiting new markets and ravaging its own output.

3.1 The Communist State

“Communists can sum up their theory in a single phrase: the transformation of private property.”[10] In The Communist Manifesto, the problem is clear. The modern liberal state privileges the minority bourgeois class over the majority proletariat class. Capital is a “social product,” because it requires co-ordination with the state and society in order to manifest itself.[11] The communist state Marx is rallying for in the manifesto largely constellates itself in response to the failures of the capitalist state. If private ownership were abolished, and capital were conferred onto the collective’s ownership, capital would no longer be a nefarious force, drawing class lines, rendering society riven. Where under capitalism, labour is a site of alienation, in the communist state it would be “a means to broaden, to enrich, to promote the whole life of the worker.”[12] The charge frequently levelled against the communist state is that if the mode of production were collectively owned, workers would not labour, for they gained nothing from the toil. Marx points out that this is precisely what happens under conditions of capitalism, where the idle profit from the alienated work of the doggedly labouring paupers. In a communist state, their labour would be their own, and this would spark human flourishing.

The perspective of historical materialism teaches us that reactionary revisions to a fundamentally untenable economic system does not lead to liberation, nor happiness. It only leads to a society forever beholden to a fallacious logic of production whose successive injustices and exploitations magnify over time. When the relations of production and the forces of production as adjudicated by the ruling class are allowed to reign over individuals, the direction of history is going to only one place: proletariat revolution. Marx polemically submits that from capitalism, the trajectory of history must achieve revolution, and consequently establish a communist state. The development of industrial capitalism has built into it the template of its destruction; “it produces its own gravediggers.”[13]

Marx provides a programme of how the communist state would be instated. In the initial rumbling of resistance, workers could not launch direct attacks onto the mode of production. Instead, they fought “the enemies of their enemies,” as in Feudal times – the monarchs, and “every victory so gained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.”[14] Steadily, however, the proletariat would increase in size because of the depreciating value of labour and increased concentration of bourgeois wealth: “pauperism develops more quickly than population and wealth.”[15] The coagulating proletariat would soon form a critical mass, whose temporary wins are more about unification and the recognition of the class struggle, than about seriously puncturing the governing bourgeois order. From there, it would become clear that social and political structures are only the newest outfit of bourgeoisie interests, and that the root of the problem is the bourgeoisie themselves. To paraphrase Marx’s poetics, this would be a realisation possible when all that was solid had melted into air, and all that was holy, profaned.[16]

In the struggle to establish the communist state, Marx anticipated that members of the ruling class and middle-class might defect to the side of the proletariat, whom they sense would come out on top. However, since it would be their vested interest that brought them into the foray, they remain conservatives by his characterisation. The proletariat, on the other hand, would be in the process of enacting a revolutionary movement. For the first time in history, the emancipatory movement would not be organised around the minority’s economic will, but by a majority group who would have no venality for or attachment to the deleterious ideologies of society (such as private property, superstructures of religion and politics).

The principle upon which revolutionary war would be waged by the proletariat is utterly devoid of parasitic allegiance to the antecedent modes of production which brought civilisation to its enfeebled condition. Secondly, it would be a war waged by people whose anticipated fate in the communist state is not one of power, but of equality and collective emancipation. Marx fleshes this out evocatively in the manifesto: “in bourgeois society the past rules over the present, and in communist society the present over the past.”[17]

In Marx’s state, the economic base would be transformed. As a result, various superstructures, too, would break down. Education has also been appropriated as a functionary of bourgeois interpellation to chuff out labour, in a communist state it could allow for real learning, exploration, and creativity. The family, which under capitalist modes of production was just another unit of production, would open itself up to the possibilities of communal living with nourishing emotional relationships. On the nation, Marx agrees that since the path to the communist state would be traversed through taking control of the nation’s machinery, the communist state would be a nation – but unlike the noxious bourgeois one. Under communism, nations would encounter each other without exploitation and antagonism, just as people would do the same. “Communism abolishes eternal truths,” we are told. It throws out ossified religious and moral doctrines mottled by their bourgeois bents, and invites possibilities for new truths to be established – without private interests or alienated agents, in the lucid light of liberation.

3.2 Revolution When?

The glaring problem with historical materialism’s deterministic approach to liberation is that the revolution it predicted and promised has unfortunately not yet arrived. Embedded in the essence of his argument is a belief that deteriorating conditions of life under capitalism are socially, morally, politically, economically, and logically untenable. Conventional wisdom says that this is because his alternative vision of a state is utopian and flawed. Certainly, it is underdeveloped. Furthermore, what is known about the state (as detailed above) seems to be a conception borne on entirely negative terms – it is not whatever the capitalist state is.

Nonetheless, his description of the communist state – like all his other writings – excels in its criticality. In our everyday horrors of late-stage capitalism, this all-consuming mode of production has “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”[18] Only time and mobilisation will tell what it will take to see it collapse. 

Bibliography

Engels, Friedrich and Marx, Karl. C. J Arthur ed. The German Ideology (Students Edition).

Marx, Later Political Writings, ed T. Carver (Cambridge UP) ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ p.1-31.

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[1] Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 18.

[2] See for instance, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.  

[3] Marx, The German Ideology, 35.

[4] See, for instance, Althusser, Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and so on.

[5] Marx, The German Ideology, 40.

[6] Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 6.

[7] Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 6.

[8] Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 3.

[9] Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 6

[10] Ibid, 13.

[11]Ibid, 14.

[12]Ibid, 14.

[13] Ibid, 12.

[14] Ibid, 9.

[15] Ibid, 12.

[16] Ibid, 479.

[17] Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 13.

[18] Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 3.