Historical Vibes: Karl Marx
He once asked his best friend for money in a letter of condolence for the death of their wife. This is somewhat remediated by being of the greatest theorists of political economy in history.
This is growing long but will be considered an introduction to Marx for this blog, I will talk more about Marx and conflict theory as a vibe as well as a theory of social conflict and structure later. But please take this.
Karl Marx is pretty universally regarded, even by left-wing groups and individuals who find a lot of value in his work, as a huge dirtbag. His entire time in London he was surveilled by British intelligence. They determined he was a slovenly man who was hard up for money and lacked any kind of tact in interpersonal relationships. He was tolerated by Engels, who funded his years spent writing huge amounts of work, which was sometimes abandoned without publication, because of his immense genius.
Essentially, all debates about the evolution of capitalism and how capitalism changes labor and markets, comes back to Marx. Reading contemporary sociological works, like you might in upper-division classes at a four-year university, much of them will be impacted by conflict theory and neo-Marxist thought. Essentially even Marx’s deepest critics have to engage with his work, it is too substantial and thorough to be summarily discarded.
This was also the time where he wrote his most detailed work that sociologists, critical theorists, and radical economists find the most value in. Though most introductory sociology students will probably read the Communist Manifesto (1848) in class or in some other contexts. But Capital Volume I (1867), The Grundrisse (1857-58), and Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) all come after he left France and Germany in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolutions. Also many well known works, like Wage Labor and Capital (1847, published 1891) which is a good substitute in a course where teaching the more technical aspects of Marxist political of economy isn’t feasible, found publication in London. Many works were after his death, such as the final parts of Capital, The Grundrisse, and many other works.
Fredreich Engels spent many years collecting Marx’s sprawling correspondence and essays into publishable works of theory. The project to fully translate and collect the work of Karl Marx continues today- in German, the corpus is well over 100 volumes, and it will probably be at least a decade before much of this lesser known content is available in English.
Surveillance reports of what Marx and his house and family were like are full with interesting details, of how one has dirtbag vibes as a political theorist in mid-nineteenth century London. Here are some excerpts:
His intellectual superiority exercises an irresistible force on his surroundings. In his private life he is a highly disorderly, cynical human being and a bad manager. He lives the life of a gypsy, of an intellectual Bohemian, washing, combing, and changing his linen are things he does rarely. He likes to get drunk. He is often idle for days on end, but when he has work to do, he will work day and night with tireless endurance.
For him there is no such thing as a fixed time for sleeping and waking. He will often stay up the whole night and then lie down on the sofa, fully dressed, around midday and then sleep till evening, untroubled by the fact that the whole world comes and goes through his room . . .
When you enter Marx’s room, smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so badly, that you think for a moment that you are groping about in a cave. Gradually your eyes become accustomed to the fog and you can make out a few objects. Everything is dirty and covered with dust. It is positively dangerous to sit down.1
So Marx had the kind of lifestyle that, were it your friend, you would be moderately concerned about. But because Marx, for all his flaws, was a revolutionary genius and essential to understanding conflict theory, one of the handful of dominant sociological grand theories.
Conflict theory has undergone a lot of evolution in the past 150 years, especially by work in the post-colonial, queer, and Black perspectives which add onto or critique Marx’s work. It is best summed up with the beginning of Part I of the Communist Manifesto:
The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.2
Here are a few bullet points of Marx’s work, and the vibes he gives in addition to his real life biography as an unkempt, nap-taking, money-bumming wide-eyed political and economist theorist.
In addition, I recommend Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)3 as an example of how bad faith contemporary critics say that Marx and classical Marxist theorists did not take into account gender and hierarchies of oppression. They just are linked to the structure of the economy and the evolution of humanity into a more legalistic framework where the autonomy of women are curtailed and the family becomes a microcosm of the larger oppression throughout capitalist society.
This idea, which is called superstructure in Marxist analysis, is important. The family, religion, popular culture, and so on are reflections of the mode of production, which when Marx wrote was industrial capitalism, in a strongly nationalist framework. While today we are in a neoliberal system in which trade between nations and technology has closed distances greatly, this is still very much capitalist to its core. So all things will have to contend with how capitalism atomizes people, alienates them from their labor, and creates unjust hierarchies. The family is just a reflection of this, but so are hierarchical religious structures, and political structures that value those with capital rather than those with only their labor to sell.
Marxism addresses that true value is in the labor put into an object. This does not relate to its price, or even if what is created as useful (nuclear weapons take a lot of labor to construct, but they are shall we say of limited usefulness). But Marxism attempts to ground the creation of goods in something beyond price, which is a bad indicator of value. Think of houses in your neighborhood that are now twice or three times as expensive as they were in the bottom of the 2008 recession. Often nothing has changed about the house, in fact it may be less useful due to aging and parts of the house wearing down. So taking the listed sale price of houses in your neighborhood is a lousy way to evaluate things- within two years or so, a house gaining $150,000 in “value” is nonsensical.
Capitalism has inherent contradictions and tension. In the Manifesto is very clear on how capitalism, like feudalism and slave societies, has a shelf life:
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
So by dispossessing people of the land and what is held in common, in order to create landlords and force people into cities to be workers who have nothing to fall back on, is capitalism writing its death warrant. While many Marxist thinkers, such as Gramsci and Trotsky, did claim that capitalism was (as Trotsky puts it) in its “death agony”, it should be said that this a longer term process. Important things to consider when talking about the long-term status of capitalism as a dominant hierarchy:
Since Marx’s time, capitalism has used the areas beyond the core countries (the US, Canada, United Kingdom, France, and so on in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lenin writes that the colonization and imperialism of the rest of the world is a stage of capitalism perhaps less understood by Marx himself, or less elaborated on. Lenin believes that imperialism is a stage of capitalism which lengthens the lifetime of capitalism, but creates problems, especially in search of profitability.4
This leads to financialization, or the replacement with making things with banking and attempting to find profits through speculation and dubious corporate practices. Much of Lenin’s pamphlet addresses bank deposits and their role in financing ways to exploit countries for resources and to fund infrastructure in the homelands of imperialist nations. This is still ongoing, those of us in North America are seeing a huge property bubble, massive stock buybacks to juice stock price and increase profits, and many companies you think of as manufacturing actually make a lot of their money in banking. Think of it like a car dealership- selling the car isn’t hugely important, it’s not in the grand scheme of things very profitable if everyone came in and paid in cash. The money is in the financing and interest- a $20,000 car is worth what it is bought whole, but with a interest rate that may have you pay $28,000 or more, the company that sold it to you benefits greatly. Also, if you don’t pay, they get the car back and get to do it again!The sharp edges of class conflict are often smoothed by the emergence of socialist political parties and trade unions. In Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx and Engels talk about how even the earliest mass socialist party, the German Socialist Democratic Party (SDP). Its attempts at entering the political mainstream meant leaving its more revolutionary elements behind. But reforms are a delaying action, capitalist actors are in the long-term aiming to destroy the welfare state and worker protections. In Texas a law just passed forbidding cities from mandating things like water breaks during the summer for construction workers- anything that can be exploited will be.
The suspicions about the SPD proved valid as in 1914 they were part of a collection of pro-war socialist parties which could have impeded the march to war but failed to engage in international solidarity. The anti-war, communist KPD was a split.
Marx clearly saw that capitalism cannot last forever, indeed nothing can. Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction and fantasy author who often wrote about anarchism and political utopia (read The Dispossessed for an exploration of how anarchist thought interacts with a sci-fi analogue of the Cold War state of affairs). In an award speech given late in her life she said this:
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words
So Marx, dirtbag that he was, saw what Le Guin saw well over a century later. When we are within capitalism today, it is like water to a fish, it seems inevitable and the only way things can work. But society is unstable, and all forms of domination eventually erode and decay. Whether that leads to a socialist society based on human equality and the eradication of need and the amelioration of suffering remains to be seen. Marx himself rarely talked about what a socialist society would actually look like- he said that was up to the mass movements that ushered in the socialist society, how it was to be run.
Marx lived in capitalism himself, and the vision to the time after capitalism was hazy. But sociology and sociology students are best to familiarize themselves at least with shorter works (or perhaps David Harvey’s YouTube lectures to help explain Capital).
If Talcott Parsons and the structural functionalists talk about how the system works, conflict theory talks about why the system doesn’t. In sociology there needs to be a balance between explaining the present and understanding how we got here and where we may be heading.
Uetricht, M. (2017, October 7). Karl Marx was the original dirtbag leftist. Medium. https://medium.com/@muetricht/karl-marx-was-the-original-dirtbag-leftist-6ec6319545f3
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Engels, F. (1884). The origin of the family, private property and the State. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/
Lenin, V. I. (1917). Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/