Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld
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- Crisis and End Times
DISCOVERIES` The Terrible MissileIn 1879, at the request of the Hohenzollern Princess Victoria, the liberal Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff met Marx at the Devonshire Club at No. 50, St. James Street. Founded in 1874, the establishment was a favorite meeting spot for energetic, mostly younger Whigs. Grant Duff, as fully bearded as Marx, was supposed to provide the princess with an authentic portrayal of the former “Graand Chef” of the International, for the liberal daughter of the British king—married to Friedrich, the future heir apparent to the German throne—had political notions that were decidedly her own, running in some respects counter to Prussian traditions. After the meeting, the emissary of the Hohenzollern court wrote to the princess that his counterpart had impressed him as a “well informed, nay, learned man,” who, in his opinion, advocated sound ideas when talking about the past and the present. But, according to Grant Duff, Marx became “unsatisfying when he turned to the future.” Marx spoke extensively about the tremendous scale of the Gründerkrise, ongoing for over five years now. He expected, and in this respect agreed with Grant Duff, that inner political turbulence would soon lead to an overthrow in Russia, and both were worried about the increasing danger the arms race posed to Europe. Marx placed his hopes in a revolt against the Prussian military system once Russia had collapsed. Grant Duff, the perfect gentleman, did not follow his view completely and asked him politely how he would get from the expected republic to his final objective. The republic was just a step along the way, Marx replied: “all great movements are slow.”1 Marx had become noticeably more cautious about his prognosis. Above all, he no longer expected the great crisis to have the same catalytic effect he had predicted earlier. In the best-case scenario of a Russian collapse, the crisis could increase dissatisfaction and lead to a republican situation—as actually would happen in a certain way in 1918. But he had evidently abandoned the hope that a crisis would reveal the capitalist system’s inability to survive and thus im- mediately lead to a proletarian uprising; he now entertained vague prospects of a slow, growing movement. But basically, demonstrating the necessary connection between crisis and revolution was the content of his entire life’s work, which he continued now as he had before. Marx’s lifetime coincided with the greatest transformation humanity had witnessed since the Neo- lithic period. Far more than other theoreticians before him, he was overwhelmed by the scope and speed of the Industrial Revolution’s upending of an entire world in such a short time. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, just prior to the Industrial Rev- olution; David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy was published in 1817, when it was still in its infancy. Marx, whose Capital was also an intense engagement with both of these classical economists, was poised to become the most important theoretician of this secu- lar transformation. To use the words of Immanuel Kant, he found himself in the middle of the fog instead of being able to view it from the outside. Grandiose sharp-sightedness was therefore almost inevitably accompanied by irrational expectations of redemption, especially since these, coming from other sources, were transferred to the mighty time machine that was seizing Europe and the world. His antinomic thinking misled him above all to declare contradic- tions that could have been resolved through trial and error to be fundamentally unsolvable. But this does not mean the contradic- tions Marx discovered in the modern world never existed. Even enthusiastic visionaries can make lasting scientific dis- coveries. The most famous example is perhaps the hermetist Isaac Newton, who alongside his exacting studies always found himself searching for an alchemical doctrine regarding the general coher- ence of the whole, and whom alchemy frequently inspired to de- velop sustainable scientific hypotheses. Did the same also apply to Marx? In the eyes of Joseph Schumpeter, for one, he was a first-rate economist, and in light of his considerable detailed economic re- search, the philosophical garb of his doctrine was something that could safely be ignored.2 Thomas Nipperdey thought that his politi- cally eschatological will was precisely what made him more clear- sighted than his contemporaries and predecessors.3 Significantly, Marx was not a theorist of economic equilibrium or theologian of the market place—merits that the financial magnate George Soros, of all people, valued highly in him.4 His most decisive economic discovery, according to Charles Taylor, was the identification of capitalism as the most innovative and creative economic system in human history—and simultaneously also the most destructive. But, Taylor maintained, he should have remained satisfied with this in- sight instead of losing himself in the hope that complex chaos could resolve itself into a new harmony and simplicity.5 Richard Sennett supposed that Marx’s vision of a fleeting modernity also had some- thing to do with his origins in a world of Biedermeier tranquility and the nostalgic feeling for the ancient rhythms of the countryside that still lived within him,6 as was especially vividly demonstrated by his familial Sunday excursions to the hills of Hampstead Heath, singing songs and reciting Shakespeare.7 By April 1864, two inheritances had enabled Marx to move from Grafton Terrace to a comparatively comfortable row house with a winter garden in Maitland Park between Camden Town and Hamp- stead Heath. His neighbor was the concierge of the House of Lords, Henry Goddard. Here, in a first-storey study with a picture window overlooking the park, the better part of his main work was born. Bookshelves stood on both sides of the fireplace and lined the walls, and in the middle of the room stood two tables crammed with pa- pers, books, and newspapers. Next to his work desk was a leather sofa in which he occasionally relaxed. The wall over the fireplace was adorned with original wallpaper from the study of Leibniz, the great philosopher of the rationality of a world with inherently contradic- tory dynamics, with whom Marx incidentally shared an interest in calculus.8 Enthroned on a mantel was a bust of Zeus from Otricoli. For the first time, Marx was working in an atmosphere befitting a private scholar. But no sooner had he settled in than the room became a regu- lar meeting place for commissions from the General Council of the International, which always interrupted his work on Capital. Over almost twenty years Marx had attempted many times to finish his work on economics. In 1866, a clean copy of the manuscript of the first volume of Capital was finally ready. He would be sending the first pages to his publisher in Hamburg next month,9 he informed a friend in mid October; after it had gone into print, he wrote: “It is without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included).”10 Using all scientific means, the terrible missile was supposed to prove to the bourgeoisie that its world order was finite and fleeting. Without his precursors in the field of economics, Marx’s thought was just as inconceivable as it would have been without Hegel or the theories of early communism and socialism. In this field, like everyone else of his era, he was a labor-value theorist. “The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually con- sumes,” read the first sentence of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; and elsewhere Smith wrote: “Labour, therefore, it appears evidently, is the only universal, as well as the only accurate measure of value, or the only standard by which we can compare the values of dif- ferent commodities, at all times, and at all places.”11 The engage- ment with Adam Smith comprises a large part of Theories of Surplus Value, sometimes referred to as the fourth volume of Capital, which was published from Marx’s estate by Karl Kautsky between 1905 and 1910. Marx accused Smith of theoretical inconsistencies and contradic- tions, but above all, by long habit, he treated him phenomenologi- cally, as an unfinished step along the way to an actual self-awareness of the modern—the revealed economic law of motion of modern society12 on which Marx was working. This also applied to David Ricardo, who likewise was among the labor-value theorists. They represented unfinished stages, due in part to the unfinished temporal stages in which they were produced, in part to the methodological limits of their theoretical approach, and in part—and, according to Marx, most importantly—the limitations of their bourgeois hori- zons. The crux of the matter for him was perhaps demonstrated most emphatically in a letter he wrote to a friend in Hanover: Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively de- termined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific propor- tions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social pro- duction; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws as- sert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribu- tion of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the intercon- nection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products. Where science comes in is to show how the law of value asserts itself.13 Neither Smith nor Ricardo had managed to do the latter because, influenced by Isaac Newton’s theory of causality, they were thinking one-sidedly in terms of quantitative categories and fixed substances.14 Marx, however, was concerned with the inner organisation of the capitalist mode of production, with the analysis of capital in its basic structure,15 and therefore with qualities, structures, and determined social forms—with the life of the subject matter,16 as he put it, fol- lowing Hegel. The influence of Hegel’s logic, especially his distinc- tions between inner causes, external requirements, and reciprocal actions,17 is noticeable throughout Capital. For Marx, the law of value implemented an unconsciously unifying principle of societal labor,18 which guided the regulating mechanisms of the modern mar- ket19 economy and was unique to that economy. It proceeded from the simple assumption that value is added to available raw materials only and exclusively through labor, and that nothing except this added value can be allocated for distribution. Supply and demand admittedly regulate prices, which sometimes deviate significantly from value, but overall and in the long term they can only oscil- late around the level of value—the “annual labor,” in Adam Smith’s terms. Because that is the case, and because the regulating principle functions unconsciously in the market economy, this level violently reestablishes itself in periodical crises—which also represent correc- tions of value. Marx’s book is the representation of an ideal type, not an em- pirical description of capitalism. Moreover, it is not a treatise on national economies but rather, according to its claims, a theory of global economic relationships and their general principles. Marx believed that this subject could be accomplished only with a theory that in all its details always maintained a view of the overall coher- ence. For him, as for Hegel, the truth was the whole, a rich totality of many determinations and relations.20 This view determined his methodological approach. Here is a central quote: The 17th-century economists, for example, always started with the living whole, the population, the nation, the state, several States, etc., but analysis always led them in the end to the discovery of a few determining abstract, general relations, such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less clearly deduced and abstracted, economic systems were evolved which from the simple [concepts], such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, advanced to the State, international exchange and the world market. The latter is obviously the correct scientific method. The concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse. In thinking, it therefore appears as a process of summing-up, as a result, not as the starting point, although it is the real starting point, and thus also the starting point of perception and conception. The first procedure at- tenuates the comprehensive visualisation to abstract determinations, the second leads from abstract determinations by way of thinking to the reproduction of the concrete.21 Marx thus did not begin his presentation in Capital with general concepts like population, division of labor, or production sectors, which in themselves, as he saw it, only represented a chaotic, un- structured, and therefore meaningless whole. Influenced by the dis- coveries of his era’s modern biology, he focused first on what he felt represented—as in microscopic anatomy—the cell form22 of modern reality: the commodity. At the first abstract level, capitalism rep- resented a fully formed market economy that permeated the entire life of the society. Whereas his precursors had identified the com- modity as something of a fixed entity, for Marx it represented the elementary embryonic form of the unity of all of the complexities and contradictions of capitalism. Its entire corresponding economic and social system could subsequently be appropriately explained, ac- cording to his central hypothesis, only on the basis of the immanent contradictions of the commodity and its development into money and capital.23 Marx’s Capital contains three basic theses: (1) Hidden behind ap- parent objective economic conditions are actually social relation- ships; (2) the source of the acquisition of capital is the exploitation of labor; (3) the inner contradictions of capitalism lead to its col- lapse. On two and a half thousand pages in three volumes, he de- veloped around these theses a widely ramified and richly detailed theory of the production, circulation, and distribution processes of capital. It was avowedly an economic theory that was simultane- ously a social theory and a prognosis of historical development. The commodity is not only a thing. The mystery of the com- modity, according to Marx, lay in the fact that in the commodity, “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objec- tive character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is pre- sented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”24 This thought informs the whole of Capital, and leading to it was a straight path from the first theories of alienation and objectification of the early 1840s.25 But now, as his program for a Copernican revolution of humanity had required in 1843, self-alienation in its unholy form26 was exposed on the basis of what he saw as a developed positive science, based on empirical research. “As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain,” Marx wrote in the chapter about the general law of capitalist accumulation, “so in capitalistic production, he is gov- erned by the products of his own hand.”27 The critique of heaven had ultimately transformed into a critique of earth. Marx now stated that for a society of commodity producers, Christianity, with its cult of abstract humanity, was the appropriate form of religion. But for him, all this was only the expression of an inverted world in which social relations appeared as material rela- tions between persons and social relations between things. With respect to people in a market economy, Marx wrote, “To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”28 In his view the capi- talist market economy did not merely represent the delirium of an uncontrollable automatism; rather, precisely because it did, this mar- ket economy was above all a power relationship. And in contrast to earlier historical epochs like feudal societies in the Middle Ages or the slave-holding societies of the ancient world, which were based on relations of personal dependence, the capitalist market economy was a power relationship of objects over people. As a consequence, this also applied to the person of the capital- ist himself. “But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests,” wrote Marx in the preface to the first edition of Capital: “My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the indi- vidual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”29 Everything—at least everything essential for the functioning of the economic system—was, Marx held, determined not by individuals but instead by the inner organization and dynamic, the structure of the mode of production.30 His analysis concerned only the laws themselves,31 ignoring real-life psychological factors ranging from prudence and responsibility to greed and avarice, which for him were mere accidents. “Only as personified capital,” Marx maintained, was the capitalist worthwhile for the scientific analysis of capitalism.32 And as such, he was nothing but the incarnation of the material will of capitalistic relations. The actual object of his analysis was these relations, not the figure of the capitalist. It was on this basis that Marx posed his question, in the first volume of Capital, about the origins of capital profit and its con- sequences for the dynamic of the system as a whole. Even Adam Smith had divided the value that workers added to material into two parts, one pertaining to wages and the other to profits.33 Of all the contradictions that Smith otherwise entangled himself in, this was Marx’s most groundbreaking realization, in particular because Smith had demonstrated that the “newly-created surplus-value in itself has nothing to do with the part of the capital which has been advanced (as materials and instruments).”34 Smith thereby identi- fied the problem, but he did not solve it, nor did David Ricardo. According to Marx, the ambiguous concept standing in the way of a solution was the value of labour.35 Left Ricardians of the 1820s like William Thompson and Thomas Hodgskin concluded from these theories that capital itself was wholly unproductive;36 consequently they demanded the worker’s full rights to the product of his work.37 Marx, in contrast, held such talk about the unproductivity of capital to be complete nonsense,38 with one significant limitation: “One can only speak of the produc- tivity of capital,” he stated, “if one regards capital as the embodi- ment of definite social relations of production”39—not, like Ricardo and his leftwing students, as simple elements of every labour process. For him, neither capital nor labor was productive in itself: it was rather capitalism that was productive. If Ricardo had spoken not of labor but rather of labor capacity or labor power, he would have discovered the key to the mystery of this system.40 The worker’s labor power was the only product on the market that had the special quality of producing more value than it was worth itself.41 Its own value—namely, that which was required to reproduce the worker himself—represented only part of the value that could be produced through the use of his labor power for a specific period of time. Marx used this division between the labor that was necessary to reproduce the worker and the surplus labor attained through the use of the worker’s labor power to explain new profits—in his terminology, surplus value. This surplus value would increase with the length of the workday; it would also increase when gains in productivity reduced the cost of reproducing labor power and the amount of time needed to produce the product. Marx called the first absolute surplus value and the second relative surplus value. At the moment that a general labor market developed, the market economy—due to the unique nature of labor power as a commod- ity—became a relation of capitalist production, which paradoxically can be based on both the principle of fair exchange and exploitation at the same time. Did Marx consider the appropriation of surplus labor theft? No, he said: considered purely in legal terms, there could be no objec- tions. Neither could such objections be raised against the right of the worker, as the seller of his labor, to limit the workday to a stan- dard length: “There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges.”42 But this applied only to the sphere of the market. The labor contract having been concluded, the worker discovered that he was not a free agent, “that the time for which he is free to sell his labour- power is the time for which he is forced to sell it.”43 In contrast to the market, the relation of production was a relation of exploitation that, with the progress of productivity, was also materialized in the labor process itself. “Being independent of each other, the labourers are isolated persons,” Marx maintained, but as part of a productive mechanism they were only a particular mode of the existence of capital.44 This development reached its zenith with the Industrial Revolution, for only machinery allowed it to become a technologi- cally tangible reality, in which the power of capital over labor could also become materially complete.45 “Capitalist production, there- fore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a pro- cess of reproduction,” declared Marx in conclusion, “produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer.”46 All this necessarily followed in a par- ticular way from the explication of the inner contradictions of the commodity, which first—through the expansion of trade relations— produced money, then—as the accumulation of money—capital, and finally—through the emergence of the labor market—capital- ism. Marx developed this genesis as a logical evolution on the basis of his theory of labor value. Yet in a preliminary excerpt in 1844, he had already presented a theory of capitalism that entirely lacked the labor-value theory and the surplus-value theory based on the former, and that in principle would also have been compatible with a theory of marginal util- ity. Even prior to his reception of the classical labor-value theory, Marx had maintained that the relation of exchange resulted in labor becoming “directly labour to earn a living,” leading to all the con- sequences that would basically also characterize his later theory.47 Regardless, Marx’s central argument—with or without labor-value theory—was that market relations cannot explain profit; rather, the explanation must be sought in the relations of production, for the market could distribute value but not create it. But what happens to the profit? And what role do the owners of capital themselves play in the production process? During his studies of economics, when he was driven by the question of how capital- ists calculate the part of their income that they themselves consume and do not invest, Marx had to pose these questions to his capitalist friend Engels in Manchester, who was experienced in such matters. “In commerce the merchant as a firm, as a producer of profits,” En- gels answered, “and the same merchant as a consumer are two en- tirely different people who confront one another as antagonists. The merchant as a firm means capital account and/or profit and loss ac- count. The merchant as a guzzler, toper, householder and procreator means household expense account.” In the balance sheet, the latter was actually a pure loss and must be “written off the profit.”48 And it was in fact the case, as John Maynard Keynes wrote after the First World War, that the nouveaux riches of the nineteenth century did not tend toward lavish expenditures, preferring the power they ob- tained through their investments over the amenities of immediate consumption.49 More important, however, was the question of whether Engels’s calculation was in fact correct. Did not the owner of capital, insofar as he was active in his own operation, also perform socially necessary labor as planner, director, and organizer of the production process? “The labour of superintendence and management,” Marx asserted, “is naturally required wherever the direct process of production as- sumes the form of a combined social process, and not of the isolated labour of independent producers.” That, too, he maintained, was a productive job, which must be performed in every combined mode of production.50 Marx was indeed not concerned with the individual capitalist but rather with the relation of capital, which remained a property and class relation even if by far the largest portion of the profit flowed into reinvestment. Marx was not a moralist. Without a doubt, capitalism was and is unjust. Yet Marx directed all of his ambition precisely toward showing that things were being done in a rightful manner in modern class society. He saw surplus value and exploitation as dialectic categories, not moral ones. Never, Engels insisted in 1884, did Marx base his communist demands on an indictment of exploitation. “He says only,” Engels noted tersely, “that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact.”51 Marx’s communist argument was much more that a system based on economic anarchy would, because of its exploitative character, en- counter irresolvable contradictions and thus at some point collapse. He had to make this argument because his theory, according to its own claims, dealt with the natural laws of capitalist production52 and not with moral indignation. These laws were the focus of the final chapter of the first volume of Capital and especially the chapter in the third volume about the tendency of profit rates to fall. The individual capitalist in this great game, in Marx’s assessment, was only a chess piece. His deployment was subject to pain of de- struction, for competition dictated the immanent laws of capitalistic production as external coercive laws. “It compels him to keep con- stantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.”53 For Marx, this coercive mechanism was at the same time responsible for cap- italism’s revolutionary role in world history, namely, to create at all costs a world of social wealth.54 Continuing technological innovation and increasing productive capacity of labor, as well as a concomitant increase in relative surplus value and the rate of exploitation, were the necessary consequences of this mechanism. In short, the colos- sal progress that he was able to observe in his lifetime had an antago- nistic character.55 “As the bourgeoisie develops, there develops in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat,” he wrote as early as 1847 in The Poverty of Philosophy, directed against Proudhon. “From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple, uniform character, but a dual character; that in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is also produced.”56 The same antinomic ideas were also taken up twenty years later in the chapter on the general laws of capitalistic accumulation in the first volume of Capital. But they did not exactly conform to the facts of this same period. If, for the year 1850 in France, for example, one assumed an index of 100, then for 1870 the corresponding indices would be 358 for total profits, 175 for wages, and 123 for living expenses. Things looked similar in the other industrialized countries of Europe.57 Profits had admittedly increased dramatically, but real wages had risen modestly as well. This corresponded to the figure of scissors, but hardly that of an antinomy. In 1912, when Werner Sombart took stock of Germany’s eco- nomic development in the nineteenth century, his results came as a surprise to many of his contemporaries. First, it was not true that the poor had grown increasingly poorer—not even those at the lowest levels of society who were commonly referred to as paupers. Second, the income of the middle classes had significantly increased. And third, it was not true that the number of the rich had increasingly shrunk—quite the opposite.58 In many respects this contradicted Marx’s prognosis, which along with the consolidation of wealth in an ever-decreasing number of hands also predicted the increasing proletarianization of the rest of the population. To be sure, after the first great world economic crisis of 1857 and especially after the crisis of 1873—six years after the publication of the first volume of Capital—a significant concentration and central- ization process was observable with respect to industrial enterprises and banks, and especially during the 1870s the formation of con- glomerates, trusts, cartels, and syndicates increased. But even here, the developments did not take place so clearly in terms of polar op- posites. The number of self-employed had in fact significantly de- clined during the second half of the nineteenth century, but while the trades were unable to maintain their position with respect to their share of total production, they managed to do so in terms of absolute numbers. In particular, metalworkers, construction work- ers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, plumbers, cabinetmakers, opticians, and also small business dealing with luxury goods proved quite ca- pable of surviving.59 In early July 1850 Marx himself stood fasci- nated in front of a model electric train on London’s Regent Street, enthusiastic about the prospect that the “the electric spark” would in the future be even more revolutionary than “King Steam.”60 But he never considered the potential that would accrue in particular to small-scale industry and the trades through the development of serviceable three-phase motors.61 He saw only what did not call his antinomic worldview into question. Describing a central aspect of his general law of capitalist accu- mulation, Marx wrote:
unemployed that Marx called the “industrial reserve army.” “It fol- lows therefore,” he concluded, “that in proportion as capital accu- mulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.”65 But growing along with “the mass of misery, oppres- sion, slavery, degradation, exploitation,” Marx reasoned on the basis of this antinomic coercive mechanism, was also the outrage of “the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”66 Here his language suddenly acquired the violence of Old Testa- ment prophets like Isaiah, who in his purifying judgment promised some that they would be “smoke in my nostrils” and others that the Lord would create for them “new heavens and a new earth.”67 “The knell of capitalist private property sounds,” Marx announced at the end of the first volume in the tone of a punishing World Judge: “The expropriators are expropriated,” for the capitalistic mode of produc- tion begot, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. For Marx, this inversion meant a final negation of negation:68 the rid- dle of history that he had pursued for a quarter of a century was also finally solved by means of positive science. In reality, however, this was just the explosive seduction of a logical antinomy laden with tremendous historical-theological emotions.
Marx naturally saw himself as a scientific theoretician of social evo- lution who operated on a strictly empirical basis. “Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle,” he wrote to Lassalle in mid January 1861: “One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument. Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained.”69 He did not want to say that his theory bore similarities to Darwin’s natural selection. But the idea that teleology could have a rational core had fascinated him ever since he thought he had discovered the rational core of absolute knowledge from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the communist sublation of the alienation of man.70 The difference, though, was that Darwin did not make prognoses about the future of species. He had discovered in human anatomy the key to the anatomy of other species, but his view of evolution always re- mained retrospective. Had Marx actually been the one who, as En- gels stated in a eulogy upon his friend’s death in 1883, like Darwin recognized the “fundamental law according to which human history moves and develops itself,”71 he would have contented himself with the role of Minerva’s owl, which began its flight only with the fall of dusk. There are no scientific statements about the future of his- tory, and if one seeks a general guiding criterion, at most it is the very indeterminate notion that the course of history is marked by increasing complexity.72 Even so, if one formulates the parameters as did Ernest Gellner, for example, who is beyond any suspicion of having Marxist sym- pathies, then historical materialism and the theory about modes of production were indeed discoveries. “The contention is,” Gellner maintained, “that the economic or productive base does indeed determine our problems, but that it does not determine our solu- tions.”73 Capitalism is undoubtedly a problematic system, a fact that is revealed especially by its periodic outbreaks of crisis. Even today, with respect to this problem, the science of economics finds itself in a situation comparable to that of the geologist who very well knows the dangers of California’s San Andreas Fault but does not know when the next earthquake will occur and how dangerous it could be for the city of San Francisco. In 1954, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his classical book about the Great Crash of 1929: “The causes of the Great Depression are still far from certain.”74 And Joan Robinson, a student of John Maynard Keynes, noted in 1966, shortly before a much less intense crisis: “It is impossible to understand the economic system in which we are living if we try to interpret it as a rational scheme.”75 Nothing about this has changed since then. As a leading theorist in America, Lester Thurow, once said, crises are “built into its [capitalism’s] genetic code.”76 Marx thought so too, and this insight was perhaps one of his most important discoveries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, James Mill, the father of Marx’s occasional visitor and discussion partner John Stuart Mill, had developed the thesis about the “meta- physical necessity” of market equilibrium, which was brought to the attention of the public by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Say77 and has represented the creed of all market fundamentalists ever since. The view of the tedious Say, noted Marx, “that overproduction is not possible or at least that no general glut of the market is possible” is basically founded on nothing but the naive and simplistic illusion that in a developed market economy “products are exchanged against products.”78 Pure humbug, he wrote on this occasion: as if modern capitalism was simply barter trade that had existed for eons, but only on a far greater scale. In contrast, the entire architectonics of Marx’s great economic work, starting with the commodity as a “cell form”—the “genetic code” of the modern world—and going into many individual details, was a highly complex portrait of an economic system. Not only was it not based on a simple barter system, but together with the market, it had formed an entity—always endangered and contradictory— whose determining measure was the profitability of capital and not the consumer needs of market participants. In this system there was no metaphysical equilibrium; nor could there be, for the system con- sisted of too many contradictory elements. However, without equi- librium it was not viable in the long term. Whatever was not there therefore had always to reestablish itself, in the normal case through market fluctuations and in extreme cases through violent correc- tions, marking the moment of the outbreak of a crisis. Hardly anyone has described the roots of this mechanism as precisely as Marx. His philosophical background, which elsewhere misled him into historical-theological speculation, served him well here. Making use of Hegel, Marx described capitalism as an identity of identity and non-identity,79 thus a unity of the different aspects,80 which, as a unity, must necessarily assert its inner contradictions at some point in the process of its development. As with the relation of capital itself, its periodic crises were also, for Marx, already founded in the form of the commodity. “No one can sell unless some one else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to purchase, because he has just sold,” it says in the first book of Capital: To say that these two independent and antithetical acts have an in- trinsic unity, are essentially one, is the same as to say that this intrin- sic oneness expresses itself in an external antithesis. If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete meta- morphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate con- nexion between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing—a crisis.81 Marx posited these diverging trajectories of selling and buying as the most general cell form of the crisis, the potential crisis as he formu- lated it, but without content, without a compelling motivating factor.82 They were, formulated in Hegelian fashion, its intrinsic potential form, which had to be complemented by a series of factors before it could turn into an actual crisis. Like a hidden virus, this cell form could quickly produce a veri- table outbreak of a disease once it no longer pertained merely to buying and selling but rather to the investment of capital. If such an investment became unprofitable or was even threatened with losses, accumulation faltered. The reasons for this varied, but as a rule they had something to do with general overproduction in relation to sol- vent demand,83 which could be covered for a certain time through an expansion of credit.84 Market disproportions could play a role in this, but the key factor was above all consumer power based on an- tagonistic conditions of distribution—that is, the buying potential of the working population, which was limited by the relation of capital itself.85 At some point, the money lay fallow, and this phenomenon of idle capital, according to Marx, usually precedes crises.86 It often found ways that only led faster to the outbreak of a crisis—for ex- ample, speculative transactions. John Kenneth Galbraith classically described this mechanism using the example of the Florida boom and other bubbles prior to the Great Crash of 1929. Marx observed it for the first time during the crisis of 1857. Uncommitted capi- tal from trade and industry moved into the stock market, allowing stock prices to rise to completely unrealistic heights. This occurred chiefly with respect to railway stocks, even though, as Marx wrote to Engels, revenues had in places dropped dramatically by a quarter. It was, he maintained, nothing but gambling in market87—a game of pure chance that at some point would inevitably collapse. In extreme conditions, a new consonance of the market, accord- ing to Marx, could be reached only by passing through the most ex- treme dissonances.88 Basically, he viewed the crisis as empirical proof of the validity of the unconsciously asserted law of value: a de facto trial-and-error process that could strikingly prove the veracity of his theoretical deductions. “The world trade crises,” he concluded, “must be regarded as the real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy.”89 There is little to object to here, even if Marx devoted only scant attention to the psychological factors that generally play a large role in overspecula- tion. An extreme early example of this was the Dutch tulip bubble of the 1630s, which burst after speculation had driven up the value of four black tulips to that of a house on the Grachtenring in the center of Amsterdam.90 But this preindustrial though nonetheless capitalistic trade crisis did not affect the entire economy. And even extreme psychological irrationalities could come into play only in a system that revealed the capitalistic genetic code observed by Marx. Even Marx’s theory could hardly predict when, under what cir- cumstances, and with what intensity a crisis would erupt. However, it is an undisputed fact that each bust to date has been followed by a boom. Marx did not see this any differently: “a crisis always forms the starting-point of large new investments,” he maintained.91 Pe- riodic “crooked dealing” was virtually a prerequisite for “respectable trade and industry.”92 Marx regarded a large crisis as not merely a violent adjustment of disproportionalities that occurred at the mo- ment when, in line with Hegelian logic, “all conditions”93—inner contradictions and external causes—required for its eruption were at hand. It also formed the privileged mechanism by which capital- ism, in correcting its immanent destructive tendencies, secured its immediate survival. Apart from that, Marx held, the periodic de- valuation of available capital through crises was a means—intrinsic to capitalism itself—to stop the fall of general profit rates and ac- celerate the accumulation of capital value through the creation of new capital.94 He did not invent this theory. Adam Smith had thought he could discern a trending decline in profit rates through the indicator of empirically rising interest rates, and David Ricardo observed that the pressure of a growing industrialized population on scarce natural resources necessarily then led to increasing food prices and rents. As a countermeasure, Smith recommended the expansion of interna- tional trade to increase profit rates; Ricardo promised similar results from free importation of cheap grain from overseas.95 Marx could not accept such solutions, first of all because they were purely national- economic in nature. For an analysis of the global economy, which was his aim, they were not applicable because over time on a global scale their effects would disappear on their own. At heart, however, his criticism pertained to the fact that neither Smith nor Ricardo wanted to view the trend of falling rates of profit as an inherent law of capitalism. They stood before a phenomenon they admittedly per- ceived, but they could not explain it because they sought external causes for something that, according to Marx, could only be found in the inherent contradictions of the system itself. As Hegel once said, just as cold or wetness could hardly be the cause of a fever,96 the reasons provided by Smith and Ricardo could hardly be the cause of the trend of falling rates of profit. Marx saw profit as a different category from surplus value. The latter indicated the relation of the value of labor power to the value newly produced by that labor power within a certain period of time. In contrast, profit represented the actual gains of capital. It was calculated on the basis of total expenses, which included above all—apart from labor power—the amortization value of the techno- logical facilities used. To be sure, these facilities in themselves did not produce any value, but they were the product of previous labor and in that respect represented a value. Marx therefore called them constant capital, as opposed to the variable capital of labor power, which produced new value. The development of technological inno- vation, however, engendered an always-changing relation between constant and variable capital in favor of constant capital—which in Marx’s terminology was the equivalent of capital’s increasing or- ganic composition of value. In this simple-to-discover relationship, he thought he had now discovered the mystery whose solution has been the goal of all political economy since Adam Smith. The actual tendency of capitalist production, according to Marx, pro- duced namely “a progressive relative decrease of the variable capital as compared to the constant capital, and consequently a continu- ously rising organic composition of the total capital. The immediate result of this is that the rate of surplus value, at the same, or even a rising, degree of labour exploitation, is represented by a continually falling general rate of profit.” The general profit rate’s progressive tendency to fall, Marx continued, was only an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production of the progressive development of the social productivity of labor.97 Sticking with Hegel’s analogy, it was neither cold nor wetness that caused the fever, but rather the virus—the relation of capital itself—whose driving force was rep- resented precisely by the profit rate. It was, for Marx, at once the driving force and the cause of disease for capitalism, and he assumed the actual cause of the English economists’ anxiety over declining rates of profit lay in this inherent contradiction.98 For Marx, mean- while, the trend toward decline was for the same reason the most important law of modern political economy.99 From his perspective, this law could decisively prove that the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.100 For him it was another critical fulcrum of the scien- tific demonstration of an impending negation of the negation. In any case, that was the trend. Considering the enormous de- velopment of productive powers during the past thirty years alone, Marx cautiously maintained in the third volume of Capital, instead of the previous difficulty of explaining the falling profit rate, the difficulty arose of explaining why this fall had not occurred faster and more severely. There must obviously be counteracting influences at work, which cross and annul the effect of the general law, and which give it merely the characteristic of a tendency.101 Within the generally fragmentary third volume, the chapter on counteracting tendencies, written in manuscript in the mid 1860s, remained especially frag- mentary—as if Marx had meanwhile been gripped by the same fear he had ascribed to Smith and Ricardo when formulating his general law. He identified the predominant factors as the increase in the de- gree of exploitation and the decline of wages below the value of la- bor power, international trade, and the declining cost and increased efficiency of technology. Apart from increased productivity in agri- culture and consumer goods production, which he did not mention, the latter was actually the salient point. This namely shows, accord- ing to Marx, “that the same influences which tend to make the rate of profit fall, also moderate the effects of this tendency.”102 However, this in turn prompted the question whether technological progress actually had to lead necessarily to an increase in capital’s organic composition of value.103 Marx himself conceded that the mass of elements of constant capital could certainly increase while its value remained the same or even fell.104 And in fact, since Marx’s time capitalism’s greatest progress has been the declining costs of produc- tion techniques. What could only have been seen as an exception during his time later became the rule in industrial and agricultural development.105 For Marx, however, above all else, the periodical de- preciation of existing capital during economic crises was the actual sys- temically inherent means to reduce the fall of profit rates.106 Still, he believed, none of this would ultimately change the fact that the fall of profit rates, despite counteracting tendencies, ultimately had to lead to the collapse of capitalism. It could be no other way, without calling his entire theoretical construct into question. At the beginning of the 1880s he arrived at the conviction that the old ten-year cycle was over, and that in future intermediate cri- ses would make themselves felt at shorter intervals. Engels even saw this as evidence of the complete exhaustion of capitalism. “If, from being acute, the crises becomes chronic yet lose nothing of their intensity, what is likely to happen?” he wrote in 1886 to August Bebel: “We have entered a period which poses a far greater threat to the existence of the old state of society than did the period of ten-year crises.”107 In any event, Marx had long ago predicted the scenario that would be staged during these end times. Pronounc- ing his curse on the capitalistic market economy at the end of the 1850s, Marx wrote: “The growing discordance between the produc- tive development of society and the relations of production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, con- vulsions. The violent destruction of capital as the condition for its self-preservation, and not because of external circumstances, is the most striking form in which it is advised to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.”108 As of yet there has been no collapse, and capitalism has survived wars, great catastrophes, and thereby also the hypothesis of falling profit rates. What actu- ally occurs after severe crises has always been a new organization of capitalism at a more effective level. But Marx only saw the antinomic alternative between a dubious metaphysical market equilibrium and the idea of common, all-em- bracing and far-sighted control109 that would banished the chaos of cri- ses, transition capitalism to common property, and at the same time, by abolishing the law of value, end the domination of profit rates. The solution he had in mind was very simple—indeed, in principle, insufficiently complex—if he believed that the situation could be mastered by suspending the production relation itself which is expressed in the category of money110 and replacing it with a thoroughly planned organization of labor.111 Apparently, in 1843, while Marx was work- ing through Hegel’s political law in Kreuznach, it occurred to him briefly that such models would necessarily develop new systemic contradictions. Every bureaucracy, he noted at the time, had a ten- dency to consider the entity of the state—and subsequently the state-analogous management of affairs that Marx had in mind as a future prospect after the “death of the state”—as its private property, and every bureaucrat was thus compelled to deal with the actual state jesuitically.112 Yet he never came back to this idea. Thereafter, for the rest of his life, enchanted by the inverted his- torical theology of his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wanted to changed an inverted world by leveling complexities—instead of only interpreting the world and thereby perhaps making it control- lable within limits. A proper interpretation of the contradictions of capitalism would, in any event, have secured important advantages. Every future policy of state (and global) regulation ultimately relies on how and to what extent policy makers properly interpret what is supposed to be regulated. Marx’s theory provided important theo- retical approaches and suggestions. Equally significantly, however, and in all of his writings from beginning to end, his description of a communist future was always an unsteady walk on thin ice. Notes
(Chicago, 1976), 628, note 96.
vol. 35, 19.
28. Ibid., 85.
33. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 30, 385. 34. Ibid., 387. 35. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, in MECW, vol. 31, 252. 36. Ibid., vol. 32, 397.
40. Ibid., 37.
44. Ibid., 338. 45. Ibid., 426. 46. Ibid., 577.
MECW, vol. 3, 219.
in MECW, vol. 26, 282.
66. Ibid., 750. 67. Isa. 65: 5 and 17.
98. Ibid., 257f.
101. Ibid., 230.
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