Let’s play party-games with Marx

by Kumar David

Everybody is fed up with news of impending catastrophe; covid that will not go away even in 2022, climate change that threatens to engulf both nature and Homo sapiens by mid-century, broken supply chains, inexorable price inflation and coups by military gorillas on the left and the right. In Lanka endless bickering, racial hatred and after three failed constitutions the pending fourth will be the nastiest on many counts. So my dear countrymen of all nationalities and faiths gird up your loins the worst is still to come. Our regime, licking its putrefying financial sores and the international lacerations it has suffered, is in no position to do anything for the people. So what the hell, let’s relax and take time off from this dismal reality to have fun. Let’s work through some of things Marx said or didn’t say to see what the old codger really meant. This is a lightweight piece, if you are the ponderous polysyllabic intellectual type, turn the page.

Religion

Most controversial and interesting is religion; Marx is much misunderstood. You do not need to be an atheist to be a Marxist; the old boy was not concerned with the spiritual messages of Gautama, Jesus or the Prophet, nor did he scrutinise the economic system in heaven. The famous “Religion is the opium of the people”, as the extracts below shows, says that religion is a tranquiliser which sedates man to accept this oppressive world instead of rising up against it, by promising carnal joys in paradise or exalted awareness after enlightenment.

Here are extracts from the famous text to emphasise this point – strung together with deletions in between.

“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against a world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

“The abolition of religion as illusory happiness is the demand for their real happiness. To call on people to give up illusions about this condition is a call to end a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is in embryo criticism of the vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

Base and Superstructure

In early Marx (before the Communist Manifesto) there are references to the material groundings of society (geography, resources and the production-economic systems) as the Base, and to culture, institutions and the state as the Superstructure. It was granted that influences could flow in both directions but in this structural metaphor the Base was presented as dominant. How these bidirectional influences flow cannot be theorised in the abstract but only by concrete and specific analysis. E.g. Eric Hobswam’s Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 and Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, or Kumari Jayawardena’s History of the Labour Movement in Ceylon and in many other studies. There you will find concrete explorations of how ‘Base’ and ‘Superstructure’ influence one another.

The Base-Superstructure imagery is oversimplified except in political polemics and Marx never returned to it in his major historical pamphlets of later life. A great weakness of this imagery today is uncertainty about where ethnicity, which by the late Twentieth Century has come to centre stage in many places, stands.

Materialism

Central to Marx’s philosophy are (a) Historical Materialism and (b) like all great post-Enlightenment scientists (Faraday, Darwin, JJ Thompson, Einstein, modern geneticists) Epistemological Materialism. A para on each.

Historical Materialism views the great movements of human history as impelled more by material interests than idealist beliefs. For example colonialism and imperialism transformed the world for raw materials, gold and silver, the slave trade and the export of capital for plantations, railways and mines. The Bible, bringing the heathen to god and spreading European civilisation among the savages followed in the wake of these material benefits. Another example is that big pharmaceutical companies do indeed invent and produce lifesaving drugs, but their raison d’etre is returns to shareholder capital. Unlike a mother’s ideal selfless love for her child, material interests, not idealism, drives class society and history. This I believe is now universally accepted. Historical materialism has come out with a score of 90 out of 100. The ten percent in doubt is because of the enigma of the spread of Islam. One cannot explain it like colonialism, imperialism, the settling of the Americas, South Africa and Australia-NZ, by pointing to material interests as the primary driver. When Islam surged out of Arabia and transformed the Middle East and large chunks of Central Asia the motive seems to have been entirely faith. I don’t know enough, so I keep 10% in reserve.

Epistemological materialism is pretty much the same as science; the solo nigger in the woodpile is an aspect of quantum physics but no more on that. Modern science, broadly speaking, contends that the material world really exists out there independently of our minds and our job is to examine it, experiment with it and find out how it works. The causality of material events is not a thing of our will (Newtonian gravitation, General Relativity, chromosomes, black-holes and mathematics are true or not for all, not just Christians or males). Epistemological materialists though firmly of this view of course grant we don’t

know everything now. But as science moves we will find more and turn up ever more questions – otherwise science and the pursuit of knowledge will halt. The domain of epistemological materialism does not intrude into spiritual territory; that is faith, enlightenment, heaven and hell (except man-made hell on earth). It is not concerned with the questions like “Does God exist?” or “Should you be a believer?” The philosophical domains of science and religion are separate. Richard Dawkins was silly to transgress the line though his critique of intelligent design is justified because the religious lot first transgressed the boundary and intervened in scientific evolution theory.

The Transformation Problem

This is a bit technical but I bet I can make it intelligible to most of you. If you held out this far please don’t switch off now. This is a difficulty in Marxist economics but first contrast modern quantitative economics with Marx. The former is philosophically arid. It’s about things like ‘if China raises tariffs how much will EU’s exports rise or fall’ or ‘if India changes FDC rules this way or that what will be the impact on local industry, exports or farmers”. Mechanics, calculations, that’s all; fine, leave it to PhD students and sham algorithmic Nobel Prize winners, some later convicted as crooks. A PhD now is a reward for moderate intelligence and moderate effort, it’s a training ground in research-methodology, no longer much to do with an original contribution.

The transformation problem belongs to different category from quantitative economics. It is located in the triangulated border between political practice, philosophy and economics. Kapital I is 100% grounded in the labour theory of value whose premise is that only human activity (labour) creates value. Hence the value of a commodity is inputs (raw materials and machinery) plus the average socially necessary labour newly added in its production. Of this added-value a part is used to pay wages (the average socially necessary subsistence and reproduction costs of the worker). The portion left after this Marx called surplus value. The more familiar word in economics is profit, including interest, tax and rent. This surplus appropriated by the capitalist may be ploughed back into reproduction (another production cycle) or used to expand the economy in new directions. This is how capitalism works, morality apart.

Marx recognised that value (the socio-philosophical concept) and price (market price at which commodities trade) are not the same. There is dislocation between value and price and between surplus value and profit. For example a commodity made in a plant employing lots of labour should generate lots of surplus value, but commodities produced in high-tech plants with little labour apparently generate only a small surplus. The former should then be generating high profits, the latter only a small profit! Not only is this counter-intuitive but also screws up reality. Volume III of Kapital, inter alia, is Marx’s struggle to resolve this contradiction.

He recognises that capitalism is a social system hence a plant by plant analysis is bollocks, it can only help introduce concepts. Taking society overall the rate of profit will be uniform (capital will migrate if there is a difference in profitability). But the total surplus-value of the whole production system equals the total profits of the whole economy. Then whether some activities (mines, healthcare) intrinsically needed more labour and others (robot-controlled industry) intrinsically needed less does not matter, the natural rate of profit across the economy will be the same. An average plant in each category would yield the same as the economy wide average rate of profit. So Marx first conceded that value and price need not be the same, second he postulated that the total surplus value created in production equals the total profit in the whole economy, and third he saw a tendency for the rate of profit across the economy to equalise. Nevertheless contradictions, too complex to explain here, remained. In my view this effort was pointless since the labour theory of value and market economics belong to separate though parallel philosophical domains. To attempt to map them point-by-point is as absurd as attempting to map personal psychology point-by-point to aggregated social behaviour.

Marx was a guy-and-a-half; he thundered like the prophets from Isiah to Mohamed; his damnations and exaggerations would make a second-hand car salesman blush. But my god, how many thinkers in the last two centuries produced ideas of comparable depth? Yes, Darwin – of Einstein and Freud I am not so sure. And none revealed such kaleidoscopic range – philosophy/dialectics, history, economics and revolutionary politics.