The accused killer in the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington may have chanted ‘Free Palestine’ during his arrest, but his political sympathies appear to be with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Marxist group that ‘stands in solidarity’ with ‘oppressed people around the world’. The animating principle of the PSL is ‘resistance’ to ‘capitalist exploitation’ and ‘imperialist domination’.

While anyone who has spent time on campus is accustomed to these idealistic-sounding slogans, they are the battle cry of a worldview that sees murderous violence as a morally legitimate tool for social change. Having spent 15 years at North American universities, including York University (home to the ‘Toronto School’ of Marxism) and Harvard University—I watched with alarm as ideas that were once confined to the classroom spread throughout society.

The fashionable theories that decorate faculty lounges—critical race theory, postcolonial studies, gender theory—are traceable to the patron saint of social justice himself. This is paradoxical because Marx’s theory of theory of human history and his critique of capitalism are logically flawed and empirically false. Applied Marxism and the Cold War it inspired may be over, but the Culture War rages hot as ever, fueled by Marx’s ideas. This begs the question: do we understand the motivations for Marxism?

Notes from the Marxist underground

Marxism attracts young idealists with a promise to address some of life’s core problems. The world is laden with suffering and injustice. Poverty, exploitation, and discrimination contaminate social life. Institutions which protect can also oppress. Part of the Marxism’s appeal lies is in its Biblical call to care for the poor and the marginalized. From the temptation of the apple, through Jesus’s ministry to sinners, tax collectors and the prostitutes, to his flipping the table of the moneychangers, Marx echoes the Bible in warning that worship of material goods and the supremacy of the ego are corrupting of the soul and dissolving of social relationships. And like Martin Luther, who railing against the authority of the Catholic Church, Marx’s spirit protests corrupt institutions.

Take the issue of resource allocation. In Marx’s communism, private property is abolished, replaced by shared ownership where resources flow ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’. Sound familiar? It’s straight out of the Acts of the Apostles ‘And all that believed were together, and had all things common… Neither was there any among them that lacked… distribution was made unto every man according as he had need’. Young people are drawn to a vision that expresses concern for the poor, stands in solidarity with the persecuted and the marginalized, and is egalitarian in its orientation. Lurking behind these high-minded ideals, however, is a less savory assortment of motivations that are ancient in their origins.

‘A better world is possible’ (disgust)

The sentiment adorned on the placards of protestors that ‘a better world is possible’ is not wrong: suffering is real and should be alleviated. However, in noticing that the world is ‘problematic’ the activist succumbs to the temptation to blame other people. The demand for a ‘better world’ is often camaflouge for a rejection of the current world and its inhabitants.

Like Rousseau before him, Marx presupposed that human beings are naturally free, good and equal. The servitude, selfishness and inequality he bore witness to repulsed him. This left Marx to explain social behaviour without recourse to human nature, arguing that poverty and inequality are the byproduct of ‘class-divided society’. People are contorted into the ugliness of possessiveness and selfishness through ‘bourgeois’ institutions, private property chief among them. Rather than conclude that people suffer because they are limited, Marx concludes they suffer because they are inadequate. The difference is subtle, but important. Seeing people as frail inspires mercy and compassion; viewing them as flawed generates disgust. And disgusting things can be eradicated with a clean conscience.

Idealistic youth, untempered by experience and blind to life’s complexities, overlook these distinctions. Whereas Marx blamed suffering on the capitalist ‘superstructure’, students protest against ‘patriarchy’, ‘settler colonialism’, and ‘white supremacy’, failing to notice that suffering and inequality are built into the structure of human life itself and are traceable, in part, to human agency. In their eagerness for change, the young crave revolution while missing the reality of destruction.

‘Poverty is produced alongside wealth’ (resentment)

The central claim of Marx’s economics, and his most politically incendiary claim, is that capitalist profit is extracted from the unpaid wages of workers. Whereas all previous economists had seen income in terms of productive effort and free exchange, Marx claimed that profit is rooted in exploitation. Workers create everything of value—cars, clothes, food, homes—while capitalists appropriate ‘surplus value’ through ownership. When campus activists chant that ‘capitalism produces poverty’, when they slam the ‘one percent’ for their ‘power’ and ‘privilege’, they channel Marx.

Contrast this with Nietzsche, who saw ideas springing from emotions, not economics. For Nietzsche, one emotion in particular—resentment—drives human history. Whereas Marx saw human history as an elaborate con job by the strong to chain and oppress the weak, Nietzsche saw civilization as the triumph of the vengefully weak to subdue and neuter the strong. Christianity’s worship of the suffering victim—think Jesus on the cross—elevated weakness to the pinnacle of moral virtue. But if weakness, poverty, failure, and suffering become markers of virtue, then strength, wealth, success, and happiness can be contorted into vices. And with this moral calculus, Nietzsche reasoned, victimhood can be weaponized.

By loudly proclaiming ‘solidarity’ with the downtrodden, the activist projects compassion. Concern for the poor is not enough, though, because it does not provide the ammunition to prosecute the rich for the ‘crime’ of their success. This created a problem for Marx: suffering generated disgust; success generated resentment. Marx dealt with both problems simultaneously through a cognitive slight-of-hand. By attributing the misery of the poor to the happiness of the rich he could explain the former by indicting the latter. The motivational power behind this diagnosis cannot be overstated.

After all, the story is plausible. History is full of parasitic elites exploiting the masses. Ironically, Marxist regimes were the worst offenders. Marx’s narrative also undermines personal responsibility, since poverty is severed from discipline and effort. Worse still, those who have managed to build wealth can be indicted for their ‘greed’. Poverty itself becomes a marker of virtue while wealth becomes proof of vice, perversely. And if the elevated status of the rich comes through exploitation of the poor, it’s morally justifiable to dispossess, humiliate, and dispense with the rich with a clear conscience.

Marx’s entire theoretical edifice—from ‘unpaid wages’ to ‘surplus value’ to ‘exploitation’—were not analytical tools in the service of description and understanding; they were moral cudgels to accuse and punish. While Marx failed in his mission to prove that capital is unproductive, that profit is confiscation, and that the free economy is camouflaged slavery, he succeeded in stoking revolutionary resentment. In scapegoating those atop status hierarchies, blaming them for the ills of society through an elaborate pseudoscience, Marxism ranks as the most sophisticated philosophy of resentment ever produced.

Today’s campus slogans—’privilege’, ‘settler’, ‘whiteness’—echo this. These are not descriptive terms used by truth-seekers to enlighten; they are accusations meant to intimidate and vilify. Steeped in self-pity and revenge, these concepts are used to justify illiberal, censorious activism.

‘Resistance’ (moral license)

As we’ve seen, the motivational logic moves from problem identification (suffering) to root cause analysis (corrupt institutions), demanding a ‘better world’ by targeting the ‘one percent’. It sounds compassionate, but masks disgust and resentment. The next is political action. Marx’s famous line—‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’—lit a fire under revolutionaries, calling them to move beyond thinking to activism.

Given all the social upheaval over the past decade, one may wonder how property destruction, intimidation, and riotous violence could be justified in liberal democratic societies that enshrine legal and political equality, prohibit discrimination and are governed by the rule of law. More nefariously, how could the planned, murderous violence of, say, a genocidal terrorist group be justified through recourse to ‘resistance’?

The objective of Marx’s political program was for the oppressed classes to seize power not through lawful or democratic channels, but through violent revolution. Once the working class becomes aware that its subjugation is unnatural and that all institutions and moral norms secretly protect the power and privilege of the ruling class, the barriers to political insurrection dissolve. And with Engels claim that ‘morality has always been class morality’ and Trotsky’s demand that we ‘put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life’, the traditional prohibitions on violence are lifted. In harrowing language, Marx and Engels coldly conclude that ‘society can no longer live under bourgeoisie’ and that ‘its existence is no longer compatible with society’. History demands revolution, and revolution demands decapitation, metaphorically and literally, of socio-economic hierarchy.

In the present tense, if the ‘system’ serves those atop status hierarchies at the expense of those below, and if it actively ‘oppresses’ and ‘exploits’, it’s possible to morally justify defensive aggression. After all, the security, wealth, and prestige enjoyed by those atop status hierarchies comes at the expense of the insecurity and poverty of those below. Marx’s bullseye was capitalism, but in the universities the ‘systems’ and ‘oppressor’ groups multiplied to include ‘patriarchy’, ‘white supremacy’, ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘settler colonialism’. From woke to jihadist, today’s campus activist has been saturated in a worldview that sees violence as not only permissible, but progressive.

‘Equity’ (epistemic arrogance)

With the ‘oppressor’ liquidated and the old system in ruins, the Marxist dream is of an egalitarian utopia. But what principles should guide this new world? Enlightenment figures had seen the emergence of freedom and equality as the culmination of a moral awakening that developed across centuries. When J.S. Mill argued ‘the only freedom which deserves the name’ is ‘pursuing our own good in our own way’, he was articulating one of the defining features of liberalism, namely state neutrality when it comes to ends of life. In separating church from state, America’s Founding Fathers created a pluralist society in which citizens define the ‘good life’ for themselves free from the demands of state and the mob. Western societies also enshrine multi-dimensional equality, underpinned by Christian universalism, including equal rights, equal voting, and equality of opportunity.

Marx rejected all of this. Instead, the nature and destiny of humanity points to a society without socio-economic distinctions of any kind. ‘Bourgeois equality’ is a mirage that’s just as flimsy as ‘bourgeois freedom’. By holding diverse individuals to an equal standard—liberal equality—we guarantee inequalities in wealth and status. Marx argued that granting equal rights creates a ‘right of inequality’ because it ‘recognizes unequal individual endowment’ and unequal ‘productive capacity’ as a ‘natural privilege’. Holding diverse individuals to an ‘equal standard’ ignores differences in capabilities and needs. To remedy these ‘defects’, in communist society rights ‘would have to be unequal’. In the demand to eliminate all socio-economic hierarchies, permanently engineering equality of outcomes for individual and groups, active discrimination (‘unequal rights’) is required. The modern demand for ‘equity’ repackages one of the central pillars of Marxian communism.

At the heart of all totalitarian ideologies lies the presumption that there is one final understanding of human nature and one correct way to live. Marx presumed that his understanding of the human condition was complete and unchallengeable. Epistemic arrogance—a totalizing understanding of the world—lends itself to the temptation for totalizing control. Intellectuals are naturally drawn to the idea of a centrally planned society because they presume that their superior intellects make them uniquely suited to hatch the plan. If people are left free to prioritize certain values they may make the ‘wrong’ choice. If the ‘goal’ of human history is equity, whether people accept this vision or not, anyone who objects can be compelled to do so. And since liberal equality is a lie, anyone who opposes equity only does so because they support the corrupt systems that produce disparate outcomes in the first place.

Heroes or villains? (Messianic impulse)

The line separating heroism from villainy is difficult to spot. Moses was an outlaw, Socrates a blasphemer, Jesus crucified as a seditious criminal. Mandela, Parks and King were jailed for opposing racial hierarchy. Rightly, we call them heroes. Now compare Marx, Lenin, Guevara—all exiled revolutionaries—and Hitler, who wrote Mein Kampf from a Bavarian prison. This latter list is populated by mass murderers, some of whom are idolized to this day. Lawbreaking and violence don’t separate heroism from villainy, so what does? The key difference is to be found in the state of the soul: the hero seeks the good (‘heaven’), while villains sow destruction (‘hell’), cloaking their hatred in ‘resistance’ to ‘oppression’ or supposed care for the downtrodden.

Take Socrates and King, who share biographical similarities. Socrates was the most just man of his era, according to his student and biographer, Plato, but by the standards of democratic Athens he was a criminal. At his trial, Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth and of failing to worship the gods of Athens (charges resembling those levelled at King). Writing from a Birmingham jail, King marched in Socrates’ footsteps by reflecting on the laws, concluding they are unjust. Following his conviction, Socrates’ friends presented their plan to free him from prison and evade his death sentence. He refused. He allowed himself to be held to account by unjust laws, just as King did.

While the villain runs roughshod over the law to wreak havoc, sow anarchy and acquire power, the hero breaks the laws of society for moral elevation—as an important corrective to the law’s incompleteness, exclusions and deformations. The hero utilizes just means in pursuit of ends, unwilling to violate the rights of others, and is willing to be held accountable for his actions. In Socrates as in King, we see humility and a reverence, albeit not uncritical, for tradition. Just as Jesus had claimed, Socrates and King did not ‘come to destroy the law … but to fulfil’. There was no vilification of others, no scapegoating, and no evasion of personal responsibility. This cannot be said about the Lenin’s, Castro’s, Mao’s, or Hitler’s of the world.

Youthful idealists are apt to confuse the distinction between heroism and villainy. The young already have the rebellion instinct sewn into them through sheer inexperience, which makes them fodder for a storyline in which they play a leading role in a heroic ‘struggle’ against an oppressive ‘system’. This Messianic storyline is false, but for the uninitiated attaining heroic status without the discipline is an alluring offer.

The God of Destruction

Marx called for a ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’. He trashed religion as a placebo which delivers fake happiness, insisting humans should orbit themselves as their own ‘true Sun’. He claimed that the human essence isn’t to be found in individuation, but in group identity, which he split into oppressors and oppressed. He slammed ‘bourgeois’ society for exploiting the many for the few, declaring it unfit to exist. His solution? Workers must seize power, overthrow old systems, and use force as the lever of revolution.

The movement towards ‘emancipation’ starts by disavowing God. This is the crucial first step. Only then can we destroy ‘bourgeois property’, ‘bourgeois independence’, ‘bourgeois freedom’, and the ‘bourgeois family’. From the rubble of that immense destruction, Marx envisioned a ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’—unlimited power base on force, not law, as Lenin acknowledged. True freedom emerges when labour isn’t about survival, but becomes ‘life’s prime want’, with ‘socialized man’ controlling nature rationally. In the communist utopia, class divisions vanish, and work becomes everyone’s passion, and this applies to everyone, everywhere, forever. Leaving no room for skeptical doubt, Lenin concluded that the ‘Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true’.

Picture this: Marxists reject God, morality, and private property, seize power through violence, and then obliterate church, family, and free markets. They erase the line between state and society, controlling every facet of life. They craft a ‘rational plan’ to deliver humanity to a paradise free of illusion and suffering. But then, horror strikes: escorted to the gates of heaven, people refuse to cross the threshold, disobediently clinging to their private life, their possessions, their family and their faith. At that point, to paraphrase Lenin, what is to be done?

One option: humbly rethink the diagnosis, admitting the possibility of error. The other? Assert with arrogant and totalitarian certainty that the problem—nay, the blame—belongs to humanity.

In Christianity, a creative and loving God who had also offered an eternity of paradise takes mercy upon human beings for their limitations. While the God of Love ultimately dies for His children, the God of Destruction looks upon humanity with disgust and contempt, indicts them for the wretchedness of their limitations, and takes revenge on them for the crime of their existence.

So a god has snatched from me my all. In the curse and rack of Destiny. All his worlds are gone beyond recall! Nothing but revenge is left to me!

On myself revenge I’ll proudly wreak, on that being, that enthroned Lord, make my strength a patchwork of what’s weak, leave my better self without reward!

I shall build my throne high overhead, cold, tremendous shall its summit be. For its bulwark-- superstitious dread, for its Marshall--blackest agony.

And the Almighty’s lightning shall rebound from that massive iron giant. If he bring my walls and towers down, eternity shall raise them up, defiant.

- Karl Marx (1837)

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.

- Isaiah 14:14

Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.

He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

- 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4

This sequence begins with deicide—killing God, the ultimate good. Free from moral chains, the revolutionary topples the status hierarchies of society (regicide) and then justifies murder (homicide) to ‘emancipate’ the subjugated classes. The prize? Heaven on earth, as long as everyone unquestioningly submits to the revolution. Yet, humans stubbornly cling to faith, family, and property—markers of ‘bourgeois’ sin. So, the cycle that began with deicide and proceeded through regicide and homicide ends in genocide, as those deemed ‘unworthy’ of paradise are judged to be an irredeemable obstacle to its realization.

Karl Marx dispensed with God and proceeded to occupy His throne. From that lofty perch he looked down on the human condition and found it wanting. The suffering he bore witness to repulsed him. More troubling were those who, despite living behind a veil of tears, managed to nobly strive upward, realizing an ideal. The attainment of an ideal, however incompletely, sets a terrible precedent because it provides a window into the transcendent truth he rejected. By attributing suffering to institutions, Marx attempted to solve the problem of evil by casting it onto other people. Evil and suffering are to be permanently banished from human history through revolutionary violence. His followers repeat this, railing against ‘settler colonialism’, ‘patriarchy’, and ‘white supremacy’, attributing suffering to these imagined ‘systems’ and projecting evil onto those who they presume sit atop them.

Marxism and the professoriate

Why are so many professors attracted to Marxism? You’d think they’d know better, but ignorance plays a big role. Many professors in humanities or social sciences never encountered a conservative thinker—their mentors were all liberals or radicals. Having spent 15 years in academic circles, I concluded that the professors are drawn to Marxism out of discontent with their social status. Like Marx, many radical academics desire an elevated status for themselves and a diminished status for the ‘mere money-making’ capitalists (‘mere’ because the intellectuals cannot match the capitalists in this regard).

Since the time of Plato, radical intellectuals imagined that a truly ‘just’ society is one in which the intellectuals are summoned to rule over the money-hungry masses. Problem is, a society in which intellectuals are calling the shots can only happen once capitalism is toppled. Admitting this power grab is ugly so they hide behind a false concern for the oppressed. What’s more, revolutionary activity requires courage, so they outsource the danger to workers (or students). Irreparably contaminated by common sense, most workers reject the academic fantasy of ‘revolution’ and ‘class struggle’.

That said, there is a viable working-class politics that is egalitarian-liberal in its orientation, not Marxist. This politics, which is universalist, not relativist, is Rooseveltian New Deal in its policy dimensions. It respects the rights of individuals and, using the democratic process, harnesses the productive power of capitalism to increase security and opportunity. Many of the programs in the West are associated with this outlook, including universal public education, public health care, employment insurance, and public pensions. These programs provide benefits for people who would otherwise be unable to afford them and are funded by a public treasury that is largely financed by the maligned rich (in Canada the top 0.1% income group pay nearly double the income tax of the bottom 50% despite making far less market income).

Know thyself

In calling for a ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’, Marx conveniently omitted one crucial thing: himself. Marx never questioned his motivations or scrutinized the animating spirit of his worldview. He saved his criticism for others. The work of actual criticism—which centres on teasing out causal relationship in a manner that generates understanding, humility, and tolerance—was entirely lost on Marx.

The errors of Marxism will continue as long as individuals disavow the most of ancient of injunctions: know thyself. Blaming society—really, other people—for life’s suffering fuels a vengeful urge for revolution. Genuine education exposes these errors and explores their bloody history on the world stage, while indoctrination dresses them up as virtues.

My call to Marxists is this: abandon your anger. Retire your resentment. Once you do so, the analytical architecture of Marxism will crumble. Resist the authoritarian impulse to ‘change the world’ by changing other people. Redemption comes through self-transformation, not revolutionary activism. There is no ‘class struggle’ with an ‘exploitative bourgeoisie’ (or ‘patriarchy’ or ‘settler colonialism’). The real battleground takes place within the confines of your own soul as the noble and base aspects of your character contend for mastery. The fate of your soul and that of the wider world will be determined in that struggle. Free yourself from the grip of a malevolent doctrine. You have nothing to lose but your ideological chains. You have a world of meaning and moral purpose to win.

Jordan Brennan was, formerly, Chief Economist at Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector labour union, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School.

We live in paradoxical times. As a framework for economic analysis and as a political program, Marxism is dead. Economists either ignored or jettisoned Marx’s ideas long ago and the mass political movements that once bore his name have vanished onto the pages of history. And yet Marxism is omnipresent in our culture. Until recently, Marx’s thinking was confined to Campus, specifically the softest of social sciences and the humanities. However, with waves of graduates pouring out of the ‘cultural studies’ wing of the university and funneling into the workforce, especially the newly-baptized DEI functions, without ever being explicitly named, Karl Marx’s ideas increasingly permeate many of the major institutions of society.

The first installment in this three-part essay series took the reader on a guided tour through the conceptual house that Marx built, having explored the three main levels of his intellectual scaffolding including his theory of history, his criticism of the emergent liberal order and his commitment to revolutionary socialism. While these aspects of Marx’s corpus are significant, both theoretically and historically, it is his criticism of ‘bourgeois’ political economy and his analysis of capitalism that stands at the centre of his writing and his historical influence. As such, the present essay will assess the logical foundations that Marx laid in building his criticism of the liberal political economy before transitioning into an empirical investigation of the major testable hypotheses that emerged out of those theoretical foundations.

A common criticism of Marx is that his writings are pseudo-scientific. This is false. While the scientific status of any economic theory is open to debate, if we accept Karl Popper’s formulation, namely that the line demarcating scientific from pseudo-scientific activities is falsifiability, then on account of the testability of its form, Marxism can be classified as a scientific theorem. What is the epistemic status, then, of that theorem?

1. The Grammar of Marxian Economics

Marx spent years reading the classical political economists, including figures like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Frédéric Bastiat and J.S. Mill. As he saw it, these economists had singularly failed to take seriously the historical specificity of capitalist social relations. In their search for timeless ‘economic laws’, the ‘bourgeois’ political economists had projected backwards into pre-capitalist settings legal arrangements, institutions, behaviours, customs and motivations that were unique to capitalism.

Take capital, for instance. In the Grundrisse, Marx noted that capital is customarily defined as an ‘instrument of production’ or tool, including complex tools like machinery, equipment and structures. Under this definition, ‘capital would have existed in all forms of society and is something altogether unhistorical’, the implication being that capital ‘would be only a new name for a thing as old as the human race’ and must therefore be thought of as ‘a necessary condition for all human production’. For Marx, this falsity is rooted in historical ignorance. As money, capital becomes embedded in the means of production, yes, but it is also a complex and historically specific social relation.

Private property generally, and private ownership of the means of production specifically, led to a situation in which a social super minority, ‘capitalists’, monopolized control over the means of production and came to politically dominate and economically control the super majority who, owing to their propertylessness, were compelled by force of social circumstance to sell their labour power or risk starvation. As Marx put it in Volume I of Capital:

Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.

Different modes of production are characterized by differing legal relations and forms of property. To assume that capitalist property relations are the default economic arrangement is a major error.

If capital is central to capitalism, and if it is not merely the instruments of production, then what are its particularities? In Volume III of Capital, edited and published by Engels after Marx’s death, Marx provided an answer:

Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It becomes an alienated, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist's source of power.

At its core, then, capital is a source of social power wielded by capitalists against society at large. From the Manuscripts, capital is the ‘governing power’ of society. Marx makes it clear, too, that this power is not derived from the personal qualities of those who wield it; instead, it is rooted in the legal status of the owners of the means of production, which implies that it is intertwined with, and ultimately supported by, state power.

This power manifests itself as the capacity for the owners of capital to yield a profit through the exploitation of wage labour. The grammar of Marxian economics, then, is power-laden. Economically, in the domain of production and exchange, exploitation is the effective power, while in the political domain, when it comes to the legislative and coercive authority of the state, oppression is the effective power. 

2. The Logic of Marxian Economics

When conducting his analysis of the capitalist economy, Marx made a number of explicit and implicit theoretical assumptions. Many commentators, including his critics (see Thorstein Veblen, for example), have noted that Marx rigorously and consistently derived conclusions from his underlying premises, so if those premises prove to be false, that falsity will be preserved, necessarily, in his conclusions. Three such clusters of theoretical presuppositions and assumptions are worthy of attention.

2.1.  Appearance-Essence Dichotomy

As many in this era would have seen it, Marx included, the task of science is to penetrate below the realm of surface-level phenomena to disclose the underlying ‘substance’ or essence that sits beneath it. From the Greek, ta phainomena or ‘that which appears’, the task of science, or scire, from its Latin roots, is to ‘separate one thing from another’ and ‘distinguish’ the immaterial from the substantive. For Marx, this meant going beyond the realm of mere appearances to an underlying essence, which, in the absence of scientific investigation, is concealed from plain view.

Cartesian rationalism holds that there are two types of knowledge: a posteriori, or that which is derived from sensuous experience, and a priori, which is non-experiential and is generated through pure ratiocination. Given the unreliability of the senses, which can only apprehend things as they appear, rationalists like Marx suppose that pure reason is a safer and more direct route to travel in reaching the truth.

For example, Marx had some awareness that his claim about the power underpinnings of capital accumulation would seem far-fetched. After all, insofar as appearances go, the capitalist economy is predicated on freedom and equality, not coercion and domination. Freedom prevails in the capitalist marketplace insofar as economic actors are prevented from resorting to compulsion in their dealings with others. Negotiation and mutual advantage govern exchange, leaving the capitalist and the worker alike ‘constrained only by their own free will’, as Marx remarked. What’s more, the ‘system of [free] exchange’, appears as a domain of equality insofar as it is impossible to find ‘any trace of distinction’ or ‘even a difference’ between capitalists and workers, he posited. Both groups are equal insofar as they bring whatever property they own to the marketplace, including the mere capacity to work, in search of a trading partner.

One of Marx’s central claims—and it is his most politically incendiary claim—is that the source of capitalist profit is the unpaid wages of workers, a fact that is hidden from plain view (from Volume I of Capital):

… we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists…the universal value-creating element [of useful labour]… is beyond the cognizance of the ordinary mind.

Whereas all previous political economists had seen income formation in terms of productive effort and free exchange, Marx claimed that the ‘secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people’s unpaid labour’. Marx’s mission was to dig beneath the realm of appearances and harvest the essence of the phenomena, which entailed not only disclosing ‘how capital produces, but how capital is produced’ and in that undertaking unearth the ‘secret of profit making’. While appearances are suggestive of freedom, equality and social harmony, Marx’s analysis would disclose a hidden world of coercion, domination and conflict. Or so he thought.

The conception of science that Marx held was pre-Darwinian, deeply flawed and would not survive scrutiny from contemporary social scientists. For the purposes of categorization and classification, we still follow Aristotle’s procedure for defining entities, namely by specifying the property of a thing that it holds in in common with other like things and the property of that thing which distinguishes it from every other object in its genus. However, there is no underlying ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ beneath the veil of ‘appearances’. Whatever properties or attributes a thing possesses are the product of natural selection and are based on localized adaptive advantages. Organisms, including social organisms, evolve and therefore change over time according to environmental pressures.

The task of science is to impose order on phenomenon by disclosing causal relationships, not penetrate beneath the realm of appearances to some unchanging, metaphysical ‘substance’. From a scientific perspective, the ontological distinction between appearance and essence is invalid, which makes Marx’s methodological enterprise fundamentally unsound.

2.2  Labour Theory of Value

In complex societies, economic activity tends to be mediated by market prices. Any encompassing model of the economy, or even a narrow theory of income formation, must explain how market prices are formed and why they fluctuate over time. A theory of value is a metaphysical assumption about how market prices are generated. The labour theory of value that Marx developed originated with John Locke (‘labour puts the difference of value on every thing’), was developed by Adam Smith and finally systematized by David Ricardo. Marx merely took an idea that had been kicking around for two centuries and pushed it to its theoretical limit.

Marx’s labour theory of value formed the bedrock of his economic analysis and contained multiple component parts, each of which is irreparably flawed. Treated as a whole, his theory of value is incoherent. Because Marx rigorously and consistently derived conclusions about the structure and functioning of capitalist economies from his theory of value, his conclusions preserved the errors that were present in his premises.

The first logical error pertained to the definition of a commodity and the associated dynamics of market exchange. As Marx saw it, capitalism is system of wealth production that manifests itself as a vast array of commodities. Understanding the ‘commodity form’ was crucial to Marx’s theoretical undertaking. The first explicit step in Marx’s analysis was erroneous: he presupposed that if a commodity is exchanged in the marketplace it must possess an underlying property or ‘substance’ that gives rise to its exchangeability. There is no good reason to assume this. Market exchange dates back to the Greek Dark Ages. It emerged spontaneously and by convention to satisfy human needs. Market exchange unfolds in those societies in which property is privately owned and money is widely used. The mismatch between individual economic need, on the one hand, and the ability of the economic agent (individual, household) to satisfy that need, on the other, underpins economic exchange, not some mystical metaphysical ‘substance’.

In his (rationalistic) examination of the ‘commodity form’, Marx found that it possesses three underlying attributes: first, commodities are directly and quantitatively comparable through their ‘exchange value’ or market price; second, on account of their physical properties, which are qualitative in dimension, commodities satisfy some definite human want and thus possess ‘use value’ or utility; and third, all commodities are the product of human labour in the abstract (meaning a general exertion of effort). Marx rejected utility as the basis of exchange value. Because the usefulness of commodities cannot be directly and quantitatively compared, utility cannot serve as the foundation of exchange value. That left the labour expended in the production of a commodity, which could be directly and quantitatively compared, as the basis of market prices.

As Marx would have it, a commodity possess exchange value because it embodies stored up, ‘dead’ human labour. The entire scaffolding of prices in a capitalist economy, then, which comprise the domain of ‘appearances’, is underpinned by the ‘substance of value’, which is in fact a quantitative ‘social substance’, namely productive human effort. From Volume I of Capital:

The labour… that forms the substance of value is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power… Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society… that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is… socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

For the time being, leave aside questions about the homogeneity of human labour, ‘average labour power’, ‘socially necessary’ labour time, ‘normal conditions of production’ and ‘average degree of skill and intensity’. For Marx, a commodity has its particular properties, and therefore its use value, because of the variegated forms of human effort involved in its production. However, a commodity possesses exchange value because it embodies some generic quantum of human effort. Labour is ‘stored’ in the thing and the thing’s market price is a reflection of the magnitude of the labour expended in its creation. As Marx put it, ‘the value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other’.

Marx’s second logical error, then, was to reject utility as the basis of market price, opting instead to root prices in labour time. It is clear that need and want form the basis of market price, not labour. The fact that uncultivated land, which does not possess any ‘embodied labour’, can fetch a market price proves that ‘abstract labour’ is not the source of exchange value. Undeveloped land can be priced in the marketplace, but only when and insofar as someone is willing and able to pay for it—a willingness that reflects the possible usage of the land, not its embodiment of human effort.

At roughly the same time that Marx was codifying his particular take on the labour theory of value, it was being demolished by a variety of neoclassical economics thinkers, namely Stanley Jevons, Leon Walras and Carl Menger, whose ruminations about the role of ‘marginal utility’ in decision-making would come to dominate economic thinking for the next half-century. Whereas Ricardo and Marx had rejected utility as the basis of value, these latter thinkers sought an explanation for prices in the relative usefulness of, and thus demand for, commodities (even if the ‘use’ of an object is merely to acquire and signal social status, as is the case with diamonds, for example).

Marx sought an objective theory of value, which led him into the domain of production with a focus on the input side of the process, ultimately landing on labour as the source of value. The neoclassical solution to the problem of value is to use a subjective lens (not objective), with a focus on the domain of output and consumption (rather than input and production), which implies that human need (and increasingly, desire) ultimately explain the relative magnitude of prices. In rejecting a subjective, utility-based theory of value, focusing instead on an objective, labour-based approach to market prices, Marx’s entire enterprise was doomed and it led him into a cascading set of theoretical absurdities.

There is no underlying ‘substance’ which gives a commodity its value. Commodities are inter-subjectively assigned a value through the desires of consumers as they manifest themselves in free purchase decisions. Commodities do not (and cannot) possess a value independent of what other people are willing to pay for them. For example, when entering into the real estate market, agents are often unhesitant in their claim that, apart from the market price of a house, its ‘actual’ value is higher (or lower) than the sale price. This is an untenable claim. The price of any given commodity can have a historical average and fluctuations around that average, but any distinction between the ‘true’ value of a commodity and its market price is entirely fictitious. There is no way to determine what something is worth apart from what someone else is willing to pay for it.

Now, it certainly the case that a commodity has a cost of production, but that was not what Marx was after. For Marx, beneath the surface phenomena of prices, costs included, lurked another domain of value that was objective, production-centred and labour-embodied. No such domain exists. The ebb and flow of market prices are explainable in the short term through consumer demand, relative scarcity, market structure and a host of other economic factors. In the long-term, market prices are shaped by changes in technology and associated improvements in productivity. Marx’s labour theory of value is an explanatory dead end (though it has considerable motivational appeal for radical political activists, as we shall see).

Marx’s third logical leap was to distinguish ‘useful’ labour from ‘abstract’ labour. Useful labour creates the particular qualities and properties of a thing and is thus generative of its utility. In the assembly of automobiles, for example, the specific activities of welders, electricians, millwrights, etc., creates the qualitative dimensions of an automobile, which gives it a particular usefulness. For Marx, abstract labour—the generic and undifferentiated exertion of human effort—gives a commodity its exchange value, but ‘abstract labour’ is an entirely fictitious concept. There is no ‘thing’ or process coterminous with it in the world. Not all types of human effort can be reduced to some generic quantum. It is a cognitive fiction that Marx was compelled to invent in order to defend his notion that labour is the ‘substance of value’. Human labour possesses different qualities (namely, skill-centred actions) and quantities (duration, intensity), but there is no way to ‘abstract’ from these particularities in a manner that grounds out in some base unit, and there is certainly no way to then use that base unit to explain the entire architecture of market prices.

Marx’s fourth logical error was to assume that, in terms of labour time, skilled labour could be considered a simple multiple of unskilled labour. If human beings were mere clones of each other, with all differences in productivity grounding out in the quantitative terms of duration and intensity, then this would may have been a plausible assumption. While complexity can have a quantitative dimension, qualitative complexity, by metaphysical definition, cannot be directly reduced to some quantitative unit. People are different. Those differences manifest themselves in the economic domain through radically unequal distributions of talent, aptitude, interest, intellect, values and a host of other factors. Marx leapfrogged the problem of (qualitative) complexity by assuming that, if Worker A earns twice that of Worker B on account of some difference in skillset, then those differences can be reduced to the amount of time it took to acquire the added skill. From Volume I of Capital:

In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labour-power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount. This amount varies according to the more or less complicated character of the labour-power. The expenses of this education… enter pro tanto into the total value spent in its production.  

This is clearly untrue. While the hourly/annual earnings in any given occupation are directly and quantitatively comparable, the skillset of those working in high-income occupations cannot be considered a simple multiple of those found in low-income occupations.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks median hourly earnings across hundreds of discrete job classifications. Fast Food Counter Workers rank near the bottom of the list, at $10.70 per hour, while Surgeons rank near the top, at $123 per hour. It is nonsensical to presume that the ratio in the market price of each type of labour is a direct reflection of the difference in time it took to acquire the skills needed for each job. For starters, it is almost a certainty that most fast food workers could not fulfill the academic requirements needed to gain acceptance to, and proceed within, medical school. The cognitive requirements associated with some very high-paying occupations are very steep and the degree of difficulty of the work, combined with its importance, and the scarcity of those who are willing and able to capably perform it, drives the rich compensation witnessed in upper echelon occupations. The number of people who have the capability of acquiring the skillset of a surgeon, with all this entails in terms of study, clinical practice, bedside manner and the sheer grit involved in performing a high-pressure operation for hours on end without rest, is extraordinarily small. The people who are capable of performing this work are rare and their relative scarcity is reflected in their rich compensation (as is the time, resources and sacrifice needed to acquire the skillset).

If we accept Judeo-Christian assumptions, specifically those found in St. Paul’s letters, then all people are created as moral equals. If we accept Enlightenment assumptions, then all people should be treated as legal and political equals, with further equality of opportunity in the marketplace. ‘Equality’ can mean ‘sameness’ or it can mean ‘equity’, that is, equal treatment despite individuation (read: differences). It is clear that not everyone is created equal when it comes to the creative domain of human existence. There is wide variation when it comes to talents (artistic, athletic, academic, entrepreneurial, managerial, commercial), intellect, aptitude, interests and values. These differences, which are individually and socially significant, are reflected in the economic output and the rewards that individuals experience. Marx was clearly wrong to assume that all complex forms of human labour are reducible to a simple multiple of unskilled labour. Some forms of labour are beyond the reach of even those who are interested in them and who vigorously pursue them, to say nothing of the masses of people who have no interest in a given occupation.

The remaining three components of Marx’s theory of value are not strictly false; rather, they are meaningless. In the absence of specification, ‘socially necessary labour time’, ‘normal conditions of production’ and the ‘average degree of skill and intensity’ lack precision and are therefore analytically useless. It is clear that different enterprises can widely differ in terms of the skillset of the employees, the technological sophistication of the implements, the efficiency of the production processes and the wider company culture that motivates, engages and inspires the various stakeholders. To collapse all these differences into some ill-defined social average was a fool’s errand because it brought Marx no closer to explaining the architecture of prices, which is the very phenomena requiring an explanation. Taken as a whole, Marx’s labour theory of value is illogical.

2.3  Equivalence in Exchange and Zero-Sum

Marx explains why labour forms the basis of exchange value in a series of observations about the various forms of market exchange. His reasoning for the production-centeredness of market prices was both astonishingly simple and one-sided, but it is important to understand because it underpins his claim that the source of capitalistic profit is the unpaid wages of labour (i.e., exploitation). The following discussion is heavily indebted to Hunt and Lautzenheiser’s History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective. They not analyze Marx’s thinking in great detail, but they simplify the presentation of Marx’s arguments. I draw on their presentation in what follows.

Marx began by noting that in pre-capitalist settings, market exchange obeys the following formula:

(1)  C-M-C

Where C stands for commodities and M for money. People bring the commodities they produce to market, they exchange those commodities for money and then use that money to acquire a different set of commodities. The procedure is selling produced commodities in order to buy other commodities for consumption. In capitalism, however, Marx noted that this formula was inverted for one segment of the population:

(2)  M-C-M

Capitalists bring money to the marketplace, exchange that money for commodities and then sell those commodities for money. Capitalists buy in order to sell. Marx noted that this inverted formula would be pointless in the absence of financial gain, meaning capitalists buy in order to ‘sell dearer’, with ‘M prime’ exceeding ‘M’ in value:

(3)  M-C-M’

Marx called the difference between M and M prime ‘surplus value’. Surplus value, which is intimately connected with Marx’s labour theory of value, formed the foundation of his economic analysis. Marx believed that the entire capitalist system is driven by the need to accumulate ever-larger sums of surplus value, which he described in the following terms:

The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M, becomes [the capitalist’s] subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser… Production of surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labour-power is only saleable so far as it preserves the means of production in their capacity of capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and yields in unpaid labour a source of additional capital.

Apart from the hyperbolic and pejorative tone, Marx was simply reiterating that profit-centred growth drives the capitalist system. This statement is incomplete, but not false. If surplus value drives the capitalist system, how is it generated?

Marx began by seeking the origins of surplus value in the ‘sphere of circulation’, that is, market exchange. Marx reasoned that the actual value of any given commodity is the labour time necessary for its production. In terms of exchange, then, there are only three possible options: a commodity can be traded at its value, above its value or below its value. If a commodity is exchanged at its value, then equivalents are exchanged and no surplus value is generated. If a commodity is exchanged above its value, then the seller’s gain is equivalent to the buyer’s loss (and vice versa, if it were sold below its value), with no net increase in surplus value. If equivalents are exchanged, then no surplus value arises. If non-equivalents are exchanged there is still no net increase in surplus value. Marx concluded that the mere exchange of commodities could not lead to surplus value. He turned, necessarily, to the sphere of production in search of the source of surplus value.   

While the M-C-M’ formula captures the rough dynamic of capitalism, its strict application is to merchant capital. Marx viewed both merchant capital and interest-bearing capital as parasitic insofar as they did not engage in the process of production, even indirectly. Industrial capital, which was engaged in production and, in Marx’s time, had become the dominant form of capital, obeys a more elaborate formula:

(4)  M-C…P…C’-M’

The dots indicate an interruption of the process of circulation in favour of the process of production, with M’ and C’ exceeding M and C in equal proportions. Capitalists pay to have structures built and equipment installed. They then purchase raw materials and employ workers who, through the process of production, transform the raw materials into finished products. At the end of the process, the capitalist owns a set of commodities that are qualitatively different and quantitatively more valuable than the pre-production inputs. Those commodities are then sold in the market, yielding a profit to the capitalist (in the form of surplus value).    

For Marx, it was clear that C’ and M’ were of greater value than C and M because of P. In the act of production itself, the capitalist ‘consumed’ or used up three different sets of commodities: raw materials, machinery and equipment and the labour of workers. Whereas raw materials and tools merely transferred pre-existing value into the finished product (in quantities determined by the amount of abstract labour embodied in those commodities)—a fact that modern accounting still accepts insofar as standards around depreciation and amortization signal a gradual depletion in the value of fixed assets—these types of commodities do not generate any new surplus value. Instead, they merely transfer pre-existing value. Clearly, there is only one commodity in the marketplace that generates new surplus value and that commodity is labour power.

Workers do not actually sell their labour in the marketplace. They sell their capacity to work (the amount of actual work performed is another question). Marx’s ruminations led him to the conclusion that labour power is unlike other commodities because it alone is capable of generating surplus value, which is the difference between the value of labour power as a commodity (read: compensation) and the value of the output, which embodies some definite quantum of abstract labour. In other words, the consumption of labour power by the capitalist has the potential to create a value large enough to cover both its value as a commodity (in the form of daily compensation) while yielding surplus value (profit) to the capitalist. How?

The amount of actual labour output depends upon the length of the working day, with a longer day translating into enlarged output. However, capitalists only pay for labour power—the capacity to work—and the price of that commodity is determined by the amount of labour time necessary for the production (or reproduction) of the commodity in question. Assume, hypothetically, that a worker requires the equivalent of six hours of labour time for its subsistence—a quantum Marx referred to as ‘necessary labour time’. This implies that the first six hours of the working day sees the worker generate output which she herself will receive in the form of wages. However, if the working day ends after six hours then no surplus value is generated. Thus, the capitalist will insist on a longer (and ever elongating) working day.

‘Surplus labour’ and ‘surplus labour time’ refer to the labour and labour time beyond which the worker generates surplus value for the capitalist. Hypothetically, then, a capitalist may insist on a 12-hour work day, with the first six hours of labour covering the cost of the worker’s wages and the remaining six hours devoted to the production of surplus value for the capitalist.

In Marx’s reasoning, it is clear that ‘profit’ is nothing other than the ‘unpaid wages’ of the worker, with the ‘degree of exploitation’ captured by the following formula:

(5)  Degree of exploitation = s / v = (surplus labour) / (necessary labour)

The degree of exploitation, which equals the rate of surplus value, distils the amount of labour time expended producing profit for the capitalist relative to the amount of labour time worked producing the means of working class subsistence. In the example above, a 12-hour work day is divided between six hours of necessary labour and six hours of surplus labour, making the degree of exploitation equal to 100 per cent.

Once the production process is concluded, capitalists take the transformed commodities, C’, and sell them on the market for an equivalent value, M’. Throughout the entire process of circulation—including the acquisition of raw materials, machinery, tools, structures and the employment of workers—commodities of equal value are exchanged. Marx assumed that market participants are only be able to exchange commodities, via money, if they are equivalent in value. Absent the principle of equivalence in exchange, one party to a transaction would stand to benefit in direct proportion to the other participant’s loss. There simply would not be a market transaction if items of unequal value are traded.

This is why Marx referred to the source of profit-making as a ‘secret’. The entire circuit of capitalist activity proceeds through the exchange of commodities that are equal in value, and yet the capitalist ends up with surplus value at the conclusion of the process in the form of profit. Insofar as appearances go, the capitalist system is predicated on free association between equal economic actors, with commodities of equal value trading hands. Beneath the realm of appearances, however, lurked a hidden world of domination, exploitation and confiscation. The free economy, for Marx, is a more sophisticated version of the slave economy.  

As already disclosed, there is no good reason to accept Marx’s labour theory of value. Commodities do not possess an objective value that, while being physically concealed from sensory apprehension, is metaphysically accessible through scientific rationality. Different economic actors will value the same commodity differently, depending on their economic situation, their tastes and preferences and a host of other motivating factors. Marx got it exactly backwards. It is not the case that market exchange will only unfold if equivalents are exchanged; instead, economic actors will engage in exchange only when and insofar as (they believe) they will benefit from exchange. It is not the objective worth of a commodity that determines exchange; instead, it is the subjective assessment of a specific economic agent that creates the basis of exchange.

The zero-sum conclusion that Marx drew was entirely a product of a series of cascading logical errors. There is no objective method to determine the value of a commodity. There are only subjective assessments, which makes it nonsensical to assume that a commodity can be exchanged ‘above’ or ‘below’ its ‘actual value’. To explain the phenomenon of exchange requires a subjective and inter-subjective lens, with each party to a transaction seeking to improve their economic situation. The zero-sum contest in which one person’s gain is another person’s loss is a major error in Marx’s theoretical edifice. If exchange takes place in the context of freedom (as opposed to coercion), both parties to an exchange tacitly and implicitly behave as if the exchange is beneficial, or at least less detrimental than non-exchange, which amounts to the same thing. Both parties to an exchange implicitly behave as if they gain from it, otherwise the exchange would not take place.

It is clear that when we explore the major and minor assumptions underpinning Marx’s theoretical edifice, they are built upon illogical foundations. What, then, are we to make of his empirical hypotheses? In what follows, eight of Marx’s major testable hypotheses are assessed to determine their scientific standing.

3.  The Scientific Status of Marxian Economics

While Marx’s conception of science is irreparably flawed, that does not mean his body of work lacks a scientific character. If scientific propositions are fundamentally classifiable on the basis of their form, namely testability, falsifiability and refutability, then Marx’s body of work may be viewed as scientific. This is so because it is possible to state an event or trend or relationship that should not happen, assuming the correctness of Marx’s conjectures. ‘Science’ here does not mean ‘stable knowledge’ or ‘truth’, but instead signals the process by which truth-claims are generated, assessed and modified. Those claims may end up being false, which would undermine their epistemic validity, though they possess a scientific character on account of the refutability of their form. There are many testable propositions in Marx’s work, but this essay will concentrate on eight of the more theoretically and historically significant hypotheses. As will be made clear, in every case the historical facts refused to support Marx’s predictions; instead, the very opposite of what Marx predicted unfolded. Given the logical incoherence of Marx’s theoretical assumptions, this should not come as a surprise.

Finally, a note about the foregoing data. Even though Marx was writing in England, he often referred to the United States. As the dominant capitalist country over the past century, if not longer, and due to a variety of data limitations, the United States will serve as the experimental testing grounds for Marx’s predictions. The data below comes from a multiplicity of identified sources. In all cases I plot as much historical time series as the data source contains and as my access to the source allows. There are different periodizations of data in the foregoing analysis. In all cases I opted to maximize presentation of the underlying data. Limitations in data availability and data access control the periodization of the data.

3.1  Lengthening of the Work Day

Marx posited that a waged labourer’s working day is divided between ‘necessary labour’ (the output of which covers the worker’s wages) and ‘surplus labour time’ (which was devoted to the production of surplus value for the capitalist). Given the drive to accumulate ever-larger sums of profit, the capitalist is incentivized to lengthen the working day towards its upper limit, collecting ever more ‘unpaid labour’ and increasing the ‘degree of exploitation’ in the process. In characteristically hyperbolic language, Marx posited:

Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility… The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus labour), produces thus, with the extension of the working day, not only the deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical conditions of development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself.

Since ‘profit’ as a category of income is nothing other than the unpaid wages of the working class, and since wage levels are set at subsistence levels, Marx posited that one aspect of a wider class struggle was a contestation over the ‘establishment of a normal working day’, with capital always opting for a longer day. The resulting degree of exploitation, then, reflects how much unpaid labour capitalists are able to extract from workers, with Marx claiming that this ratio would be driven towards its upper limit.

This is a testable hypothesis insofar as a ‘normal’ working day could be elongated, shortened or left the same. Has Marx’s scientific prediction survived refutation? Figure 1 captures the weekly hours of work of U.S. production workers in non-agricultural activities from 1870 to 2018. The hours of work for the American working class have sharply and steadily fallen over time. In 1870, the average work week was 62 hours. As of 2018, the average weekly hours of work have been nearly halved, having fallen below 34 hours. American workers have more leisure time, not less. Marx was clearly and unambiguously incorrect in his prediction.

As will be disclosed, American workers have worked fewer hours while enjoying a higher standard of living, not lower. Furthermore, Marx’s prediction that the length of the working day would be elongated, intensifying the ‘degree of exploitation’ (as manifested in the ‘rate of surplus value’), is also statistically false. There is no long-term statistical relationship between the length of the working day and the rate of capitalist profitability.

3.2  Rising Organic Composition of Capital

As Marx would have it, the capitalist stands atop of the capitalist system and the motive force of his action is the amassment of ever-larger sums of surplus value. Even if, subjectively, a capitalist were not motivated to maximize profit, he would be compelled to do so lest competing capitalists elbow him out of the market. There is no ‘choice’ to maximize profitability; one either adheres to the requirements of profit maximization or one perishes. Recall: much of Marx’s ruminations were not concerned with the empirical realm of prices—mere ‘appearances’—but instead with the ‘substance of value’ that resides beneath the appearances, which is registered in units of socially necessary abstract labour, not prices. However, it was clear that Marx could not ignore prices completely. The problem, then, was how the ‘substance of value’ was transformed into the appearance of a market price.

Marx defined capital as the sum of the produced means of production, which embodied the ‘dead labour’ involved in its production, and variable capital, or the ‘living labour’ expended by workers in the production process:

(6)  C = c + v

Where C equals capital, c equals constant capital and v equals variable capital. In practice, Marx argued that capitalists use markup pricing, adding up the costs of the raw materials used in production, including fixed assets (‘constant capital’) and employee compensation (‘variable capital’) before tacking on a socially average profit markup (‘surplus capital’, ‘r’). The general formula for capitalist pricing, then, is:

(7)  p = c + v + (r * (c + v))

Marx’s reasoning led him to spot a tension. The source of capitalist profit is the unpaid wages of workers (‘surplus labour’). However, in search of greater profitability capitalists are incented to lengthen the working day to its upward maximum. However, the capitalist also has an incentive to increase the productive power of labour while reducing the overall size of his wage bill (through dis-employment), since the ‘battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities’.  It is here that Marx believed he spotted a major contradiction.

As capitalists automate the production process, introducing labour-saving technology—augmenting the productive power of labour and reducing labour costs—they simultaneously reduce the potential amount of surplus value generated, since only living labourers, through their surplus labour, create surplus value. ‘Constant capital’, which takes the form of raw materials, tools and equipment, merely transfers pre-existing value into the finished commodities. Thus, as market competition advances, capitalists are incentivized to eliminate the very source and origin of profitability by rendering unemployed the workers whose labour creates surplus value. Marx captured this dynamic through a key term: the organic composition of capital, which he expressed formulaically as:

(8)  Organic composition of capital  = (c / v)

With c denoting constant capital and v denoting variable capital. This ratio captures the amount of tools and machinery per unit of labour and stands as a proxy for the overall technological sophistication of a production process.

Marx posited that, owing to market competition, capitalists would introduce ever-more labour saving technology, which would displace the living labour of workers with the dead labour of machines. Historically, the exact opposite happened, as Figure 2 makes plain. Between 1929 and 2018, the series captures the dollar value of private non-residential structures and equipment (constant capital) relative to total employee compensation (variable capital). Despite the fact that America’s national production processes are a good deal more mechanized and automated than in Marx’s era, the demand for American labour power (and its relative value) by American-based corporations increased at a faster rate, driving the organic composition of capital down, not up. Once again, subsequent events not only failed to affirm Marx’s prediction; instead, the exact opposite unfolded.

3.3 Increasing Concentration of Capital

As capitalist competition intensifies, Marx posited that firms would become ever-larger owing to the process of consolidation. As large firms absorbed rivals through mergers and acquisitions, their absolute and relative size would increase and competition would, at lease temporarily, subside. From Volume I of Capital:

It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals… Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration… The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller… with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.

Using a non-Marxist framework, I have explored the topic of market structure and its relationship to mergers and acquisitions and market power in both Canada (here and here) and the United States (in academic format here and here and in popular format here and here). While it is possible, in some periods, to establish linkages between corporate consolidation, concentrated market structures, market power and the distribution of income, this does not imply that Marx was correct in his predictions.

Marx specifies four related tendencies. First, as the process of competition unfolds, there should be fewer small and medium-sized firms, owing to the fact that they are swallowed up or crushed by their larger rivals. Second, there should be an increase in the ‘minimum amount’ of ‘capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions’, since competition leads to the smaller players being absorbed by larger, more productive firms. Third, the corporate sector should concentrate, as ever-more assets are owned by ever-fewer firms. Fourth and finally, corporate ownership should become increasingly centralized in fewer hands, not dispersed.

These propositions are empirically falsifiable, but administering proper tests is complicated and requires large amounts of data. If Marx’s predictions were correct, however, over the long-term we should not see an increase in the absolute number of small firms, nor should we see a shrinkage in the size of the largest firms, nor should we see a less concentrated market structure nor should we bear witness to a dispersion of corporate ownership. What do the long-run trend lines indicate?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States is home to nearly six million firms. Nearly 90 per cent (some 5.3 million) of these firms have fewer than 20 employees and are therefore classifiable as ‘small’. Some 540,000 firms have 20-100 employees (nine per cent), putting them in the small-to-medium size range. A further 90,000 firms have 100-500 employees. Fewer than 10,000 firms have 500-10,000 employees, leaving roughly 1,000 firms with more than 10,000 employees (0.018 per cent of the total). Clearly, capitalist competition has not destroyed the universe of small firms. The corporate universe remains populated predominantly by small and medium-sized enterprises. Large, stable firms are extremely rare owing to the difficulty associated with attaining commercial success and maintaining it across time. A majority of new businesses fail within one year. A super majority will fail within five years. And it is certainly not the case that those existing beyond five years will grow and thrive. In commercial endeavours success is the exception, not the rule, and that rule only grows more stringent as time passes. Marx’s prediction that the small would be crushed or absorbed by their ‘conquerors’ is false.

The second prediction pertained to the ‘minimum unit of capital’ required to conduct business, which should rise over time. As capitalist competition rages and as large firms absorb or crush their smaller rivals, in order to compete firms must continually increase the productivity of labour, which Marx argued is dependent on ‘the scale of production’. Here again, the facts refuse to obey Marx’s predictions. Recall that Marx sub-divided capital into a constant component (comprised of fixed assets) and a variable component (comprised of labourers). Figure 3a plots the fixed assets (net property, plant and equipment) of the largest publicly-traded U.S. firm each decade, beginning in 1950. For three plus decades, AT&T remained the largest U.S. firm by assets and its asset base continually grew (in inflation-adjusted terms). However, a combination of factors, including the electronics revolution, automation, globalization and the emergence of the ‘knowledge economy’, saw a major disruption to the corporate sector. Firms like IBM, GE and Apple rose to corporate dominance while having a fixed asset base that was much smaller than their predecessors. Amazingly, despite being a much more valuable company, in 2018 the value of Apple’s fixed assets were smaller than that of AT&T’s in 1950. Marx was clearly and definitively wrong about the need for an ever-larger ‘minimum unit of capital’.

Likewise, Figure 3b plots the employment level for each firm across the same time scale, with similar results. After steadily rising from the 1950s through the 1980s, with the onset of automation and the knowledge economy, fewer workers became necessary to generate market-dominating firms, undermining Marx’s claim about the need for an ever-larger minimum unit of capital. Once again, with a fraction of the employees, Apple was (and is) able to generate much more in the way of revenue, profit and market value than fallen titans such as AT&T. Not only has Marx’s prediction failed to come true; the very opposite unfolded. Corporate dominance can emerge from a shrinking unit of capital. The reason for this is the goods and services being produced over time have become less dependent upon physical processes (like an assembly line) and more dependent upon the technical, specialized knowledge that resides in the minds of a small minority of American knowledge workers in the tech sector.

The third prediction pertained to market structure, which Marx hypothesized would become increasingly concentrated. By capturing the overall position of large firms in the corporate universe, aggregate concentration is simplest way of capturing market structure and therefore the degree of concentration. Figure 3c plots the level of concentration by capturing the share of physical assets held by the top 100 publically-traded firms from 1950 through 2014. The chart measures the net property, plant and equipment of the 100 largest firms, ranked annually by market capitalization, as a share of the fixed assets of the corporate universe. From year to year or even to decade, concentration levels can go up or down. However, the trend line captures the overall level of concentration in the U.S. corporate sector over six plus decades. Contrary to Marx’s forecast, the capitalist economy does not have a tendency towards concentration; instead, the long-term trend suggests capital assets become more dispersed, not more concentrated. It should be noted that if we plotted the top one per cent of listed firms (therefore capturing relative concentration as opposed to absolute concentration) the pattern would be similar.

3.4 Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

Marx divided capital into its constant and variable components; the means of production and the workers using them to generate output. The ratio of constant capital to variable capital Marx labelled the ‘organic composition of capital’, which he theorized would rise over time as capitalists introduce labour-saving machinery. A rising organic composition of capital, he hypothesized, would have the effect of driving down the rate of profit. How?

Constant capital can only transfer existing value, not create surplus value. Working class labour is divided between necessary labour, which covers the cost of wages, and surplus labour, which is the sole source of surplus value. As capitalists introduce labour saving technologies, substituting workers (and therefore surplus value-generating surplus labour) for machinery and equipment (driving up the organic composition of capital), the rate of profit tends to fall. Formulaically, Marx disclosed the rate of surplus value this way:

(9)  Rate of surplus value = s / (c + v)

Where s equals surplus value, c is constant capital and v is variable capital. Note that the rate of surplus value is benchmarked against both constant and variable capital. Marx believed that capitalists would compare the profit generated in any given period with the entire capital stock (which is generated over multiple periods). The rate of profit, then, is adapted from the rate of surplus value by dividing the numerator and denominator in Equation 9 by variable capital, yielding:

(10)  Rate of profit = r  = ((s / v)) / ((c + v) + 1) =

(rate of surplus value) / (organic composition of capital + 1)

Marx measured the rate of profit as the rate of surplus value divided by the organic composition of capital plus one. Thus, the rate of profit, which anchors the capitalist system, is subject to two tendencies that work at cross-purposes. Efforts to increase surplus value by increasing the length of the working day, for example, will increase the rate of profit, but this tendency is in tension with the tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise as capitalists seek to reduce their wage bill through investment in fixed assets (dispensing with the source of surplus value in the process), pushing the rate of profit down.

If the rate of surplus value remains constant while the organic composition of capital rises, the rate of profit will diminish, pushing the entire capitalist system into crisis. In Volume III of Capital, Marx posited a tendency toward a ‘gradual fall of the general rate of profit’, though he also argued that capitalists have multiple options available to counteract a depression in profitability, including lengthening the working day, intensifying labour and restricting wage levels below subsistence levels, among other methods. Nevertheless, Marx posited:

Since the mass of the employed living labour is continually on the decline as compared to the mass of materialised labour set in motion by it, i.e., to the productively consumed means of production, it follows that the portion of living labour, unpaid and congealed in surplus-value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus-value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall.

Is this true? Figure 4 captures the rate of profit in the U.S. between 1929 and 2018 by dividing the rate of surplus value (corporate profit as a share of labour compensation) by the organic composition of capital (private non-residential structures and equipment as a share of labour compensation) plus one. Year-to-year, decade-to-decade, the rate of profit increased or increased, but the general tendency across the past century has not been a gradual fall; instead, it rose from the early 1930s to the mid-1940s, then declined from the 1950s through 1980—driven, importantly, by strong increases in labour compensation—followed by another gradual rise after 1980.

Marx acknowledged that between the various forces and counter-forces could push the rate of profit up or down, but he also claimed that ‘after long periods’ the effect of these counteracting forces would ‘become strikingly pronounced’. More than a century after his death, we can conclusively say that there is no long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall. If there is a ‘tendency’ with respect to the rate of profit, it is not that of a gradual decline, but instead that of a periodized rise. Yet again, Marx’s hypothesis was not only false; the very opposite unfolded.

3.5  Increasing Immiseration of the Proletariat

Marx’s theory posits that the value of any given commodity is determined by the amount of labour time necessary for its production. The value of labour power, according to his subsistence theory of wages, is determined by ‘the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the labourer’. Marx argued that wages would not rise above subsistence levels for a variety of reasons. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall meant that capitalists would always need to reduce the costs of production. Owing to the division of labour and resulting specialization, the introduction of labour-saving technology, in combination with competition between workers in the labour market, would create and maintain an ‘industrial reserve army’ of unemployed workers whose destitution would exert relentless downward pressure on the wage base. From Volume I of Capital:

That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value.

While the dimensions of ‘subsistence’ are culturally conditioned to an extent, and therefore can potentially rise as technology changes and the standard of living improves, Marx also made it clear that there was a bio-physical threshold to ‘subsistence’, which implies a natural downward limit:

The capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries, by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced, and new labourers are begotten. Within the limits of what is strictly necessary, the individual consumption of the working class is, therefore, the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in exchange for labour-power, into fresh labour-power at the disposal of capital for exploitation.

There is some academic dispute about whether Marx believed wages would actually be driven down (as opposed to rising at a slower rate than other income groups, thus exacerbating relative poverty), but what seems clear from a balanced reading of the texts is that Marx expected the standard of living for the working class to deteriorate as capital accumulated. From his early analysis in the Manuscripts:

In the economic system under the rule of private property, the interest which an individual has in society is in precisely inverse proportion to the interest society has in him… The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things… So much does the realization of labor appear as loss of reality that the worker loses his reality to the point of dying of starvation. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects he needs most not only for life but also for work… the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital.

The economic ‘law’ Marx claims to have unearthed would have it that as the process of capital accumulation progresses, the standard of living for the working class worsens. From his late analysis in Volume I of Capital, Marx posited:

… an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.

The production process itself would degrade the working class and, necessarily, lead to a worsening standard of living for workers and their families. With some poetic flare, Marx described it thus:

… within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.

There is undoubtedly some truth in the notion that, in the early phase of British industrialization, as cities formed and as the factory system spread, the absence of any regulatory oversight—be it labour standards, housing codes, public health, etc.—would have led to a miserable situation for large segments of society. However, when confronting Marx’s writings in the present tense one is struck by the overwhelming probability that we are dealing with an unbalanced mind. These passages read more as a subjective confession of how Karl Marx viewed modern society than as a detached, impartial ‘analysis’ of the condition of the English working class. These passages constitute a projection of Marx’s psychological state onto society at large. Whereas others saw a free economy, social cooperation and gradual, albeit uneven, progress, Marx could only see oppression, exploitation and misery.

Rather than viewing poverty as the default state of humanity (which it clearly is, owing to the fact that, in the absence of productive effort, there is no wealth) Marx posited that the poverty of the working class was produced alongside the wealth of the capitalist class. From Volume I of Capital:

If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have… The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals itself only when the economic laws are known… the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable… the working-people.

These are incendiary claims, but are they true? With the development of capitalism and concomitant accumulation of capital, has the standard of living for the average worker decreased? Even the most uninformed reader intuitively knows this claim is false, but the historical facts are unambiguously at odds with Marx’s proposition. In fact, the opposite is the case.

Figure 5a plots average hourly earnings in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, from pre-revolutionary times to the present, with an inset chart covering Marx’s active intellectual life (1843-1883). The data clearly shows two things. First, with few exceptions average wage rates for unskilled labourers steadily increased over time. Ignore the fact that market prices cannot register every qualitative improvement in the standard of living (e.g., compare the quality of automobiles in 1960 and in 2018, or pharmaceuticals, or televisions). The sheer quantity of the goods an average worker enjoys today is much higher than it was in Marx’s era.

The second thing to note, which is more difficult to discern from the chart, is that the rate of improvement has been highly uneven. For example, from the beginning of the series in 1774, it took 53 years for real wages to double (by 1827), then it took 74 years for wage levels to double again (1827 to 1901), then 33 years (1901 to 1934), then 23 years (1934 to 1957). Not only did the standard of working class living improve, contrary to Marx’s hypothesis, but the rate of progress accelerated after Marx’s death. Multiple factors conspired to drive wages downward from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, including stagflation, automation, deindustrialization, offshoring and deunionization, among other factors, but with the onset of liberalizing measures in the 1990s wage growth resumed and nearly all of the losses have been recouped.

Marx was writing Volume I of Capital in the early 1860s. In four short years, U.S. wages plummeted by 27 per cent. It took nearly one generation (22 years) for U.S. wage levels to return to their level in 1860 (the U.S. Civil War and a worldwide Depression contributed to deteriorating wages in this period). Despite the sharp decline, wage levels rose during Marx’s adult life. Marx took a momentary phenomenon, wage depression, and made inferences about the economic future. His inferences about wage levels, and the theories that informed them, have been clearly and definitively falsified.

Marx also made a wider claim about the co-accumulation of capital and misery. Apart from the level of wages, the overall condition of the working class would deteriorate as capital accumulated. Here again, the facts refuse to obey Marx’s theory. Figure 5b contrasts the U.S. capital stock (from 1850 to 2018) against a historical index of human development (from 1870 to 2015), which combines indices that capture life expectancy, education and the standard of living. As the capital stock increased (i.e., as the wealth of the capitalist class increased) the average level of human development increased alongside it. Workers were not immiserated as capitalists grew wealthier. Increasing levels of wealth in capitalist society, despite being privately owned, translated into higher levels of human development. Over time, more people gained access to primary education (and ever-higher levels of education) and led more secure, healthier, richer lives. Once again, Marx was not only wrong in his prediction. The opposite of what he predicted unfolded.

And finally, Marx argued that, over time, as market competition intensifies, capital would concentrate into larger units and would centralize into fewer hands—a consequence of the destruction of many small and medium sized capitalists—and that this would exacerbate social polarization. An ever-smaller number of ever-richer capitalists would come to dominate the economy, and in the process, would push many in the middle class (the petit-bourgeoisie) down into the ranks of the proletariat and push some of the proletariat down into the ranks of the lumpenproletariat, or underclass, hollowing out the middle class in the process. Has this happened?

As is well-known through expert documentation by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty (beginning here), the top income share in the U.S. fell drastically during the Second World War, declined gradually in the postwar period, but rebounded around 1980, soaring back to ‘gilded age’ levels since that time. America has become much more economically unequal, but has the middle class been made poorer or been hollowed out?

Figure 5c documents median household income for the first, second and third U.S. quintiles from 1967 through 2017 (a quintile is 20 per cent of the population). Together, these three quintiles roughly constitute the underclass, the working class and the lower middle class (the third quintile represents median U.S. household income.)  The data only covers half a century, but two things are clear. First, the bottom 60 per cent of U.S. households have seen an inflation-adjusted increase in their annual incomes over time: the median of the second quintile has experienced a 24 per cent increase, the lowest quintile is up 29 per cent and the third quintile is up 35 per cent since 1967. Americans in the underclass, working class and lower-middle class have gotten richer, albeit at an uneven and cyclically-sensitive rate. The middle class grew richer; it wasn’t hollowed out.

The second thing to note is that the median income of households in the bottom quintile grew faster than the second and third quintiles for four straight decades and only fell behind the third quintile during the Great Recession of 2008-09. As opposed to immiseration and polarization, the U.S. economy has witnessed synchronized enrichment. As the U.S. economy grew and as capital accumulated, the lower and middle classes grew richer, not poorer. It is true that the top income group—the exalted/reviled ‘one per cent’—has pulled away from the rest of society, but even as their income surged, that of the lowest income groups continued to grow. Once again, Marx was clearly and definitively wrong.

3.6  Increasing Frequency and Severity of Economic Crises

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall was one reason for the crisis-prone nature of capitalism, but Marx identified other reasons for the capitalist cycle. Over time, a disequilibrium would develop between labour compensation, which converges on subsistence levels, and increasing labour productivity as a consequence of the introduction of productivity-enhancing technologies. Imbalances would build, then, between enlarged labour output and insufficient consumer demand. Workers would generate a higher volume of output, but because the of the existence of the ‘reserve army’ of unemployed workers, wage levels would not rise enough to enable them to purchase the additional commodities they create, leaving them to build up in the form of inventory for capitalists. This is why Marx posited that capitalist societies were the first in human history to experience a crisis of overproduction. The discrepancy between excess commodities and insufficient consumer income meant that imbalances would eventually generate economic crises.

Since Marx’s time, have economic crises become more frequent and more severe, as he predicted? Figure 6a depicts all the instances of negative annual GDP growth in the U.S. from 1840 onward, plotted on an inverted scale. While recessions are technically defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, inadequate data compels the usage of annual figures. Since 1840, when Marx began studying political economy, the U.S. has had 37 years of negative annual GDP growth (out of 178). If we periodize the data into Marx’s era (1840-1883), the subsequent era, which lasted until the end of the Second World War and the demobilizing aftermath (1884-1947), and the postwar era (1948-2018), what do the facts tell us about the frequency and severity of economic crises?

The table embedded in Figure 6a conveys the story. In Marx’s era, the U.S. experienced negative annual GDP growth every 6.1 years, on average, with an average GDP contraction of 2.0 per cent. In the period after Marx’s death, the frequency of downturns doubled to 3.2 years, as did the severity of the crisis, which deepened to an average contraction of 4.7 per cent of GDP. However, in the postwar era both the frequency and severity of economic crises significantly diminished, having lengthened to an average of every 7.2 years, on average, with an average contraction rate of 0.7 per cent. These latter, periodized facts serve to falsify Marx’s prediction that capitalism would tend toward more frequent and severe crises.

The other way of measuring an economic crisis is the proportional loss of employment. Figure 6b replicates the format of Figure 6a, substituting employment for GDP from 1890 through 2018 (also plotted on an inverted scale). In the period after Marx’s death, the U.S. economy experienced negative annual job creation every 4.3 years, on average, with average proportional job losses amounting to 2.9 per cent of total employment. In the subsequent postwar era, these figures diminished by roughly half, with the time between negative annual job creation lengthening to 6.2 years and the average annual employment contraction falling to 1.6 per cent of employment. Here again, the trend line is the opposite of what Marx predicted.

Over time, with the maturity of capitalism, economic crises became less frequent and less severe, not more. The rise of modern macroeconomic management, including counteracting fiscal and monetary policy tools, has made capitalism more stable and less crisis-prone. Marx’s scientific prediction has been empirically falsified.

3.7  ‘The Expropriators are Expropriated’

To recap: as capitalism developed, workers would be increasingly impoverished, society would polarize between the affluent few and the indigent many, and crises would become more frequent and severe. Marx hypothesized that the poverty and insecurity produced by capitalism would compel the working class to seize control of the means of production in a revolutionary overthrow of the system. From Volume I of Capital:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

By spatially organizing the disparate, fractured members of the working class into a single establishment, imposing productive discipline on them, workers would eventually develop consciousness about their class position and concomitant class interest. Market competition had conditioned workers to see themselves in individual and antagonistic terms, but with each successive economic crisis, it would dawn on workers that the unemployed amongst their lot need not remain destitute, nor should the employed segment live a chronically insecure existence. The ‘source’ of their suffering was the capitalist, who himself remained hostage to the requirements of a system meant to serve his interests. The need for profitability, and the continual failure of the system to deliver it, meant that the system itself and its enabling political structures must be revolutionarily rejected, root and branch.

Importantly, Marx did not believe that workers would overthrow capitalism for normative reasons. It was not ‘unfairness’ or ‘injustice’ that would propel workers to abolish capitalism. As Marx saw it, production and distribution are inter-dependent. The legally-backed social categories of ‘capitalist’ and ‘worker’ determine that one group receives ‘profit’ while the other fetches ‘wages’. And that law stipulates that it is just for capitalists to receive profits and workers their wages. There is nothing ‘unjust’ about the radically unequal distribution of income and wealth.

This point bears emphasis because many contemporary progressives, who treat Marx as their Patron Saint, live under the spell that economic inequality is ‘unfair’. In response to the contemporary social justice Left, who echo the social democratic left in 1870s Germany (whom Marx ridiculed in the most unsparing terms), Marx would argue:

I have dealt more at length with the "undiminished" proceeds of labor, on the one hand, and with "equal right" and "fair distribution," on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists… it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it. Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself… If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism… has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?

The ‘retrogress’ and ‘vulgar’ attitude of contemporary progressives, with their relentless championing of a ‘fair distribution’ of income is ‘obsolete verbal rubbish’ and ‘ideological nonsense’ about justice. As a staunch positivist, Marx viewed the ‘just’ and the ‘lawful’ as coterminous, which makes any protest about an ‘unfair’ distribution of income fundamentally confused (assuming ‘fairness’ means ‘justice’). To be clear, Marx did not make any explicit overtures to justice when concocting his apocalyptic political predictions. Instead, the working class would be compelled to seize the means of production on account of the ironclad ‘laws’ of capitalism, which themselves are nested in wider ‘laws of motion’ of human historical development.

Marx’s prediction, then, was one of (i) emergence of working class consciousness, (ii) growth into revolutionary consciousness, (iii) followed by proletarian revolution in (iv) the most advanced capitalist countries, namely the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany. Did the pattern of international socialist revolution fit any of the particularities of this nested hypothesis?

Firstly, yes, the working class developed a consciousness about itself as a class. The evidence in support of this claim is the multi-generational, legal, institutional and cultural growth of the trade union movement. In the United States, the rate of union density increased from one per cent in 1880 to an all-time high of 29 per cent in 1954. Trade unions became an important part of a complex industrial relations system. They also became active players in the formal political process and in the wider cultural fabric of society. However, every other prediction Marx made about proletarian revolution and the ‘death knell’ of capitalism is false.

The working class did not develop a revolutionary consciousness. Most trade unionists in the advanced capitalist countries were practical men and women, not rigid ideologues. Trade unions fought for healthier and safer workplaces, higher wages, health benefits, paid vacation, retirement security and a host of other industrial and social changes. Despite the occasional resort to hyperbolic rhetoric, trade unions have embodied a program of reform, not revolution. Many trade unions in Europe, for example, disavowed the pathologies of the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s, although there were, to be sure, formal and inform pacts between some trade unions and both Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party and Stalin’s Communist Party.

The principled pragmatism of men like Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, was profoundly irritating to some Marxist intellectuals, who envisioned themselves as heroic champions of the downtrodden workers. Karl Kautsky, for example, the middle class Marxist theoretician, condemned Gompers as ‘enemy of the proletarian class struggle’. Gompers’ was a Jewish-Dutch immigrant who learned German so that we could read Marx. Upon reading him, Gompers, who was highly class conscious, rejected revolutionary socialism, which he believed was unmoored from the realities of working class life.

In the present tense, most trade unions appear positively conservative insofar as they are resistant to modern technological and economic developments, which are being driven by actual industrial and commercial revolutionaries whose radical innovations in technology (Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs), commercial distribution (Bezos), communication (Zuckerberg) and transportation (Kalanick and Camp) are changing the way work is performed and society is organized.

Most unions today are trying, understandably, to hold onto structures and policies of a bygone era—namely, the postwar ‘golden age’ of controlled capitalism—when economies were national, jobs for unskilled labour were plentiful, wages steadily rose, benefits were rich, retirements were secure and the state was the dominant economic force in society. The globalized knowledge economy has exerted tremendous pressure on the institutions and policies of this era, which has compelled unions to try to preserve the vestiges of an increasingly archaic system of industrial relations.  Working class consciousness, as opposed to the consciousness of radical intellectuals, was not revolutionary; it was reformist. Marx was wrong.

Marx was also wrong in his prediction that there would be an outbreak of proletarian revolution in the most advanced capitalist states. Workers never really became revolutionary; it was the intellectuals who became revolutionary and they spearheaded revolutions in traditional, agrarian, pre-industrial societies with disastrous results. If one looks at the history of Marxism, both from the standpoint of political revolution and intellectual activity, one is struck by its aristocratic character, not its proletarian character.

Begin with Marx himself, who, in a time when higher education was extremely rare, had training in law and a doctorate in philosophy. Marx’s adult life was spent in poverty owing to his staunch refusal to take up gainful employment. However, his father was a lawyer and he came from a long line of Rabbi’s, signally both financial security and an intellectually elite status. Despite a lifelong commitment to the overthrow of capitalism, Engels’ inherited a fortune from his parent’s cotton mills. Lenin’s family was lower nobility in Tsarist Russia. Mao’s father was a wealthy farmer. Castro’s family were large landowners with interests in sugar cane. Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) read Rousseau and Marx in Paris, which put him in ranks of a tiny elite compared with the illiterate masses in his native Cambodia. And so on.

Marxist intellectuals are similar in having lived a life of affluence and privilege (to use the fashionable term). György Lukács, the founder of Western Marxism, was the son of an investment banker. Theodor Adorno was a classical music prodigy whose father ran a successful wine business. And on it goes. Marxism was never a movement by and for dispossessed workers. Sociologically, what united (and continues to unite) its adherents is a life of privilege, comfort and affluence.

If Marx’s political vision centred on the working class, why did the working class refuse to become Marxists? Thorstein Veblen, who was one of Marx’s great critics and who wrote in his immediate aftermath, was able to discern why revolutionary socialism a theoretical fantasy, not a practical reality. Marx had fundamentally misunderstood human motivation. Workers do not want to liquidate the capitalist class, as Marx had hoped, much less the capitalist system. Instead, they want to be capitalists, at least from the standpoint of consumption. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen noted:

…the end sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison with the rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength. So long as the comparison is distinctly unfavourable to himself, the normal, average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his present lot; and when he has reached what may be called the normal pecuniary standard of the community, or of his class in the community, this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless straining to place a wide and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and his average standard. The invidious comparison can never become so favourable to the individual making it that he would not gladly rate himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the struggle for pecuniary reputability.

Different motivational energies manifest themselves across the social hierarchy. The invidious comparisons attached to wealth predominant on the upper end are distinguishable from the physical comforts attached to things on the lower end. When it comes to accumulation and acquisition, Veblen was among the earliest to note that in a consumer society, the denotation of economic ‘need’ in bio-physical terms has been gradually displaced by a more complex set of motivations that have more to do with status than any classically-defined economic need.

Contrary to what Marx hoped and believed, it is not revolutionary animus that drives the capitalist economy. Instead, ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘status emulation’ are key economic motivators. The revolutionary animus that Marx’s theories advocated for is largely restricted to a disaffected intellectual elite. Most morally normal people do not want to abolish; they want more—more income, more job security, more status, etc. They want to rank higher than they presently do, in materialistic or non-materialistic terms (or both), thus winning the repute and esteem of their peers.  

Furthermore, outbreaks of socialist revolution were led by aristocratic intellectuals, not workers. Revolutionary socialism was never proletarian, nor did it unfold in the advanced capitalist countries. The fact that revolutionary socialism emerged in Russia, China, Korea, Cuba, Cambodia and elsewhere doe not fit the Marxian narrative. The only encounter with Marxism in the advanced capitalist countries—which had been democratized, politically liberalized and were becoming increasingly affluent—was in the universities. Marxism never had a political home in the capitalist West and the only place that Marx’s ideas are still treated with any seriousness are in those corners of the Academy (publicly subsided by capitalist affluence, ironically) with the least purchase of methodological validity, philosophical sophistication, historical accuracy or moral legitimacy.

Marx was wrong. The working class never became revolutionary. Radical aristocratic intellectuals were drawn to, and led, international socialist revolutions. And these revolutions only unfolded in comparatively underdeveloped societies. In the most economically advanced societies Marxian socialism was roundly rejected, save the radical intellectuals.   

3.8  Absence of Socio-Economic Conflict, Withering Away of the State

Seizing the means of production in a localized act of sedition, the working class would be compelled to radically restructure the entirety of social relations. Transitional socialism, with its temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, would eliminate class division and the dehumanization, misery and exploitation associated with capitalist production. This would pave the way for full communism, which would be characterized by rational planning, economic cooperation and social harmony. Owing to the fact that all political power is the power of one class for oppressing another, Marx reasoned, with the abolition of class division the state itself would become redundant and eventually perish.

In terms of international relations, there are two related implications to Marx’s thinking about revolutionary socialism. First, there will cease to be geo-strategic conflict between socialist states. Domestic social conflict, which eventually spills over into international conflict, is rooted in class division and material deprivation. Under socialism, these two features of ‘bourgeois’ society will be superseded by egalitarian social structures and a radical redistribution of resources. Inter-state rivalry ultimately reflects the incompatibility of economic interests between national ruling classes, according to Marxism, who must rely on militaristic foreign policy to pursue their commercial interests. With full communism, there will cease to be a ruling class with a distinct material interest, thus eliminating the material and sociological basis of rivalry between socialist states. Socialist states will be peaceful and cooperative (amongst themselves). Or so at least the theory goes.

The second alteration to international relations will be a cessation of imperialistic behaviour and colonial domination. With a falling rate of profit and increasingly frequent and severe economic crises, the bourgeoisie is driven to seek surplus value in foreign markets. However, the bourgeoisie in all advanced capitalist states find themselves in the same situation, with constant crises of accumulation compelling the search for profitable foreign markets. The competition between national ruling classes over foreign trade will eventually spill over to colonial domination. The economic need to control foreign markets and protect trade routes, both of which require a heavy dose of military power, will cease once the bourgeoisie has been liquidated.

Have any of these predictions been supported by subsequent events? Was transitional socialism characterized by the elimination of class division? Was there ever a dictatorship of the proletariat? Was full communism characterized by social cooperation and democratic planning? Were socialist states fundamentally peaceful, especially vis-à-vis other socialist states? In the quest for surplus value, have advanced capitalist states resorted to ever-more intense forms of colonial domination? And finally, as full communism progressed, did the state whither away, leaving people to spontaneously cooperate in a non-hierarchical anarchist utopia?

The answer to all these questions is a resounding and definitive ‘no’.

There was never a proletarian revolution. All socialist revolutions were led by affluent aristocrats and disaffected intellectuals. Revolutionary socialism has always been a political ideology that appeals, predominantly, to a cognitive and socio-economic elite. Socialist revolutions broke out in traditional agrarian societies and were always the produced by devotees of Karl Marx.  

Where socialist revolutions did take hold they were not characterized by cooperation, social harmony or democratic planning. Instead, a vicious and lawless tyranny took root that was worse than anything that proceeded it. Political power was concentrated in the Party and centralized into the decision-making in the organs of the State. After denuding civil society of all the organic forms of human association that make reliance on state power unnecessary, the populace in socialist states became the private property of the Party, with all the pathological dependence this entails. Revolutionary socialism has never been democratic in its dimensions (and it has certainly never been liberal). Socialist revolution has been characterized by totalitarian social control and authoritarian decision-making structures.  

The competition and rivalry between Stalin and Mao proves that socialist states were prone to the same geo-strategic tensions as non-socialist states. The need to defend territorial integrity, the temptation to acquire new territory and to dominate neighbouring states, setting up modern satraps, characterized the more powerful Marxist-Leninist states. Ironically, the Sino-Soviet split between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union was driven, in part, over doctrinal differences in interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. Neither the PRC nor the USSR co-existed peacefully with its neighbours. If anything, socialist revolution increased bellicosity (which is consistent with Marx’s claim (read: desire) that socialist revolution become an expansionary, international force).

Likewise, in the post-1945 era the capitalist West underwent a long period of decolonization, often driven by the colonies themselves, that resulted in a radical decrease in imperial rivalry. Since 1945, the West has been comparative peaceful, not militaristic. It appears that as public education expands and as societies become more productive—resorting to economic trade with partners, not military rivalry with enemies—these societies have tended to become more peaceful. Our World in Data tracks global deaths from military conflicts over the long-term (adjusted for population), including military conflict between Great Powers and other forms of state and non-state violence. Violence is part of the human condition, but in the capitalist West it has tended to decline over the past two centuries. As non-Western societies embraced liberal democratic political structures, the rule of law and the market economy, and as a bi-polar world gave way to global capitalism, the world-wide decline in violence has accelerated.

As for the hypothesis that the state would wither and die, this clearly failed to happen. After a revolutionary seizure of power, socialist governments quickly prohibited most civil institutions, concentrating social power in itself and making the underlying population dependent on that power. The state grew ever-more powerful following the outbreak of socialist revolution, not less, and never showed any signs of disappearing.

On all scores, Marx was wrong. Socialist revolution was never a working class movement. It had virtually nothing to do with democratic planning or social harmony. Domestically, socialist revolution tended to be followed by a greater reliance on intimidation, coercion and incarceration. Internationally, socialist states were constantly at war with their surrounding environment, through hot or cold military conflict, terrorism, espionage, assassination and all the other unsavoury tools associated with combative international relations. And far from disappearing, the state grew in its coercive dimensions and in its reach. Instead of being subordinate to an underlying citizenry, it came to dominate society, creating a universal class of dependent serfs.

From the Latin, propheta, a prophet is one ‘who foretells’. In 1948, Eric Arthur Blair issued a prophecy. Having interacted with radical intellectuals for much of his adult life, and having lived inside socialist ideas for decades, and having fought in Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, Orwell was able to glean not only what motivated the adherents of revolutionary socialism, but what socialist revolution was destined to become. In a passage that, perhaps better than any other on the subject, offered a stunning summary of the twentieth century in all its maniacally ideological dimensions, Orwell (vis his character, O’Brien) had this to say:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'

There is something highly suspicious about the motivation behind a revolutionary reconstruction of society, which Orwell rightly pinpointed. The notion that there is something wrong with ‘the world’ and that this something is the thoughts, beliefs and behaviour of other people should give us pause. If the program is to ‘change social reality’ by changing other people, in practice this simply means using violence to make other people more like us (or, because hypocrisy and politics are often intertwined, to use force to fit other people into a mould of our choosing). The impulse to ‘improve’ social conditions by improving other people, not through force of argument, but through force of revolutionary arms, simultaneously absolves the revolutionary individual of personal responsibility and indicts the other. A revolutionary reconstruction of society, even in the name of democracy, is surest path to dictatorship.

As a self-conscious exponent of revolutionary socialism, Orwell’s character, O’Brien, was able to state with stunning clarity, prior to the outbreak of Marxian revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba and elsewhere, what the source and origin of socialist revolution is (and is not). Marxian intellectuals and their followers claimed to be concerned about the well-being of the working poor. Their stated political goal was ‘emancipation’ and ‘liberation’. However, because this goal was pursued through a program of revolutionary destruction and uncontested political domination, we must understand that the goal was vengeful destruction and domination all along.

The ‘bourgeoisie’ did not need to be eradicated to ‘emancipate’ the proletariat. The bourgeoisie’s destruction was sought for the sake of its destruction. Political power did not need concentrated, centralized and wielded without restriction for the sake of ‘socialist revolution’; instead, power was unlawfully seized and wielded for its own sake (and for the self-glorification and perverse joy associated with wielding unconstrained power). Malicious intent requires moral cover, hence the attempt to broadcast some altruistic goal while working towards an extreme form of political narcissism.

4.  Taking Stock

In his attempt to address problems arising from Popper’s falsificationism and Kuhn’s skepticism of paradigmatic progress, Imre Lakatos, the Hungarian mathematician and philosopher, advanced a novel vision of what science is and how it can be distinguished from ignorance and pseudoscience. Contra Popper, science cannot be demarcated, nor does it advance, through a process of conjecture and refutation. Contra Kuhn, we can validly speak of scientific progress.

Science centres what Lakatos labels ‘research programs’, which are comprised of three broad components: (i) a ‘hard core’ of unfalsifiable claims; (ii) a flexible ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary, but refutable hypotheses; and (iii) a ‘heuristic’ or ‘problem-solving machinery’ to assist with irregularities and respond to anomalies. In assessing a scientific research program, it is not testability or refutation that serves as the ultimate criterion of satisfaction, but the discovery of novel facts. In a ‘degenerative’ research program, facts must be forcibly fit into the mould of the old theory. In a ‘progressive’ research program, old problems are solved in new ways and novel or ‘undreamt of’ facts are discovered, Lakatos argues.

Since his death, Karl Marx’s followers have exerted tremendous intellectual effort concocting ‘rescue hypotheses’ for their Master, as the various components of Marx’s theory have come into conflict with emergent facts. These rescue efforts have failed. Marxism and Neo-Marxism cannot produce an internally consistent, empirically valid picture of social reality (and they certainly cannot produce a morally valid guide to political action). Marxists have ceased to discover novel facts. Instead, they forcibly fit incongruent facts into the Marxian worldview, despite its obvious and undeniably outmoded scientific standing.

According to Lakatos, ‘in scientific reasoning, theories are confronted with facts and one of the central conditions of scientific reasoning is that theories must be supported by facts’. Virtually all of Marx’s major hypotheses and predictions are at odds with the historical facts. For the better part of a century, workers became richer, the middle class expanded and the share of national income going to the top income group contracted. In the post-1945 era, economic crises became less frequent and less severe, leading to the longest period of trans-cyclical economic growth on historical record. In general and on average, workers in the advanced capitalist world became healthier, better educated, richer and happier. Furthermore, revolutionary socialism was never working class in its dimensions, nor was it democratic. It was led by radical aristocratic devotees of Karl Marx and the dictatorship it embodied was permanent, not temporary. Marx’s predictions not only failed to materialize; the very opposite happened, making Marx a falsum prophetam.

Given the logical incoherence of Marxian economics and the litany of falsified predictions, to say nothing of the socially catastrophic outcomes associated with Marxism-Leninism, why do the writings of Karl Marx continue to inspire admiration and attract adherents, especially on Campus? What are the motivations behind the demand for a revolutionary restructuring of society? The purpose of Marxian revolution was (and is) to gain power for those who cannot not acquire it through lawful or democratic means. To what end is power sought? These questions are addressed in the final installment of this essay series.

References: Parts I-III

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Netflix’s short-lived, three-season drama is about the checkered history of a Florida Key family, the Rayburns. The storyline is built around the archetype of the hostile brothers. John Rayburn, played by Kyle Chandler, is a devoted family man, a local law enforcement official and a pillar of the community. The apparent serenity of John’s life is interrupted when his older brother, Danny — a career criminal played by Ben Mendelsohn — returns to his family’s sanctuary-like bed and breakfast.

On the face of it, Bloodline is a story about a beautiful environment punctuated by a querulous, deceptive and ultimately murderous family. But it’s about much more than that. Heavy Biblical references and mythological themes play themselves out in this extraordinary drama. Prior to any encounter with the plot the viewer is given numerous interpretive clues about the show’s Biblical origins.

Begin with the title. Bloodline is a double entendre: it denotes the intimations connecting the murder of Danny Rayburn by his younger brother, John, and it refers to the genealogy linking the various individuals together in a family lineage. There is a third potential meaning to the term, bloodline, which reveals the mythological foundations of the story: bloodline captures the psychological motivation behind the human proclivity towards violence and deception as such.

It turns out that Bloodline is not about the murder of Danny by his younger brother, John. Instead, it is about the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. The hostile brothers are not part of Rayburn family; instead, they stand in as emissaries of the human family. In a nutshell, Bloodline is an inversion of the Cain and Abel story.

In Genesis, Cain and Abel are the hostile sons of Adam and Eve. Cain rises up and slaughters his younger brother in an act of murderous vengeance, and in so doing, introduces violence into human history. Cain’s offspring go on to invent the weapons of war, birthing not just inter-personal violence but socially-organized warfare (see Jordan Peterson’s fascinating psychological investigation of this story here and here). Significantly, Abel is the good, law-abiding and altogether successful brother who is murdered by his resentful and vengeful older brother, Cain.

Bloodline inverts this storyline: the younger brother, John, slaughters his older brother, Danny. John is a law enforcement official and so doubles as the personification of lawful order and noble upholder of justice. John is also a faithful husband, a devoted father and a dutiful son. He is ‘successful’ in pretty much every way a middle class American would conceive of success, which makes him an ideal candidate for the position of Abel.

Danny, on the other hand, is a lifelong criminal. Rather than acting as a bulwark against chaos and social disintegration, Danny’s criminal activity undermines the social contract and threatens the foundations of lawful order. Danny is estranged from his family, is jobless and does not appear to be governed by any overarching principles save self-interest and expediency. Danny is also a resentful, conniving ingrate, which makes him a shoo-in for the role of Cain.

The inversion comes when the (seemingly) good and law-abiding family man, John, murders his older brother in cold blood. Rather than fess up to his crime, John goes to great lengths to conceal his nefarious act. He also manages to rope his younger siblings in along the way (who are only mildly apprehensive about participating in John’s morally reprehensible scheme).

The plot has some interesting twists and turns, including the portrayal of a father (played by Sam Shepard) who is serene, loving and peaceful, but also unforgiving, violent and remorseless. That father, who eventually assumes a ‘heavenly’ or otherworldly position, looms over the storyline insofar as it was his actions that set in motion the fate of his family.

As an adolescent boy, Danny was badly beaten by his father. Danny’s younger sister drowned in a boating accident, and because Danny had been captaining the boat and the time of her death, his father blamed him for the tragedy. After the vicious beating inflicted on Danny, the other siblings (at the behest of the matriarch — melodramatically depicted by Sissy Spacek) lied to the police about the ordeal in an effort to protect their father.

This episode in the family’s history signalled two things. First, the Rayburn family’s betrayal of Danny represents the ‘original sin’, insofar as it set in motion the string of events which led to the disintegration of the family unit and the end of an otherwise paradisiacal state. That disintegration, which began with one lie but quickly multiplied into a veritable pantheon of fabrications, ends with the murder of Danny by John. Second, this act of familial betrayal transformed Danny from the heir apparent (insofar as the first born male typically assumes the family’s property and status) into the scapegoat. In an effort to shield a violent father from justice, the family offered their eldest son up as a sacrificial victim.

Another clue to the mythological foundations of Bloodline — perhaps the clearest indicator, in fact — is the opening credits. I have never seen a depiction of the opening passages of Genesis in cinematic and imagistic form. The portrayal therein is empirically brilliant. The opening lines of Genesis are a phenomenological account of the creation of reality through a series of speech acts by God. Those speech acts create many of the dualisms that form the bedrock categories of human experience.

‘In the beginning’ was the pre-cosmic chaos — a ‘formless void’ — and ‘darkness covered the face of the deep’. God said ‘Let there be light’ and this speech act demarcated darkness from light, separating night from day. On the second day God cordons off the heavens from the earth, bifurcating the celestial and terrestrial spheres. The water is then separated from the land, and so on. The final demarcation takes place on the seventh day when God rests, thus creating the labour-leisure dichotomy.

The title sequence of Bloodline captures this dynamic. The opening shot is situated on a beach overlooking the sea and, beyond that, the cavernous sky. The sun is soon displaced by the moon, as day becomes night. It takes but 20 seconds to lay out the light-darkness, celestial-terrestrial and water-land dichotomies. The tide moves in an out, which alludes to the cyclical rhythms of nature — the patterns and regularities which underpin any coherent account of reality.

The scene then cuts to a series of ominous clouds, which signal the coming storm, before rays of light pierce through the thick grey cloud cover. In the foreground, five shadows with a human form appear on the beach. The image then cuts to a black screen. White letters, which initially appear blurry and out of focus, begin to sharpen and eventually come into focus, reading ‘bloodline’.

There is a four-part transition at play here. The viewer is brought from the scene on the beach, where all the phenomenological dichotomies were birthed, to the emergence of human shadows, then to the sharpening of visual focus on the letters ‘bloodline’, and finally, the show itself. I read this as the transition from the story of creation (Genesis chapters 1–2), to the creation of the human family in the form of the shadows. Next, the scales fall from their eyes and they awake into self-consciousness (imaginatively depicted using the change in focus on the title line). History begins thereafter with the story of Cain and Abel (played by Danny and John), which is the subject-matter of the show.

The first season of Bloodline was captivating, though the quality of the plot deteriorated in the second and third seasons. Despite the decline, the show worthy of attention. I remain ambiguous about the moral message of the program, however. The Biblical story of Cain and Abel depicts human behaviour as falling on a spectrum, with good and evil forming the polar extremes within which all of human life takes place. The mode of being adopted by Abel points in the direction of the good (‘heaven’), while that embraced by Cain points in the direction of evil (and the creation of ‘hell’).

Bloodline appears to blur this distinction, if not obliterate it entirely. John stands in for Abel insofar as he is an upholder of the law, a devoted family man and a defender of the social fabric. But John is also Cain: he is deceptive, wrathful and homicidal. Danny is not much better. He may not be a murderer, but he is hardly a saint. The other siblings are too weak and/or incompetent to muster the type of evil that John imbibes, but weakness is not a moral virtue, so where does that leave things?

The human characters that make up Bloodline, to paraphrase Nietzsche, are all-too-human, but there is a marked lack of moral virtue among them. I don’t know what to make of this other than as a statement that human beings are irredeemably bad.

The final scene of the final episode has John (who at this point has elevated deception beyond the status of a science into an art form) confront Danny’s son, Nolan. The two men square off on the pier adjacent to their family’s home. Despite the fact that neither character utters a single syllable — all they exchange is glances — the closing scene is rife with meaning.

John and Nolan confront each other on a pier, which is to say they are not on solid ground. They stand suspended above the primordial waters of chaos. In the background Nolan is flanked by the sea, which represents the chaotic potential out of which the world is made (good and evil, truth and falsity included). The sea was also the ‘weapon’ that John used to kill Nolan’s father (the former forcibly drowned the latter on a beach), so there is an allusion to what has taken place (actuality) and what may yet take place (potentiality). Will John do to his nephew what he did to his brother?

In contradistinction to Nolan, John is flanked by his family’s property and the house (of lies) they erected. John is surrounded by the concrete (as opposed to the abstract), the past (rather than the future) and the actual (vs potential). Will John confess his sins, chief among them that Nolan’s father was murdered by his brother? The question is left open-ended.

It is clear that John has become a prisoner to his lies and to his guilty conscience (personified by his dead brother’s ghost, who continuously haunts him), but will he finally speak the truth? The Gospel of John (8:32) is unequivocal: uttering the truth leads to spiritual freedom. Will John heed it?

I am inclined to say ‘yes’, but that is speculative. The viewer is not given any reason to think that John, who at this point has been given many opportunities to speak truthfully, will finally come clean. In other words, the audience is deliberately denied the knowledge of his choice and must resort to a leap of faith in assuming which direction he will choose.

Will John speak the truth in an effort to bring about the good or will he continue to deceive, and in so doing, perpetuate the hellish nightmare of his family’s bloodline for another generation? This was a brilliant way to end an otherwise noteworthy show.

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Image courtesy of Hosein Emrani.

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Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche announced the Death of God. The German philosopher’s commentary, which has been interpreted as prophetic, hyperbolic and much in between, has been nothing if not unforgettable.

Nietzsche’s idea is multi-layered. On one level Nietzsche observed that, with the onset of modernity in all its dimensions — urbanization, the expansion of public education, technological advancement, the industrial economy and, most importantly, scientific rationality — it had become more difficult, if not impossible, to believe in a transcendent reality.

His remark also amounted to a theory about why science emerged when and where it did. Some may be tempted to believe that the scientific revolution was a random development, emerging spontaneously in time and place. Nietzsche thought that science grew out of Christian doctrine.

The scientific method was an attempt to hedge against the human mind’s proclivity for error and omission, paving the way for genuine knowledge. It took human beings eons to develop a reliable method to parse truth from falsity. By making God coterminous with the Truth, Nietzsche argued, the Catholic Church had disciplined the European mind. The scientific method, formalized by Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century, which gave rise to the Enlightenment, was the outgrowth of that cognitive discipline.

Those same Europeans who developed the scientific outlook then took their new tools and turned them on the very religion that had spawned their emergent science. Hereafter they began to dissect the Christian religion with their new scientific instruments. Modern science killed off the theology that had spawned it, leaving the centerpiece of that theology — God Himself — a superfluous and empirically unverifiable entity.

Finally, Nietzsche’s commentary on the Death of God was prophetic, since it pointed to a metaphysical mutation that had vast psycho-social implications. With the death of the Judeo-Christian God, society at large lost its metaphysical anchor. In the absence of that divine anchor, the European mind would rush to the polarities of nihilism and totalitarianism. The twentieth century experimented with totalitarian ideologies of the far right (National Socialism) and far left (international revolutionary socialism) with disastrous consequences. In the twenty-first century, we are flirting with nihilism.

In the twenty-first century, then, is God Dead?

Ironically, the Christians predicted Nietzsche’s idea nineteen centuries before he penned it. Having grown up in a devoutly Christian household and having received a thoroughly Protestant education, Nietzsche must have been aware of the obvious rejoinder to his morbid observation.

The Christian answer is embedded in the Easter plot line. Were God to come down on a rescue mission to save humanity from sin (moral error), He would certainly be put to death, but not before He was betrayed, publicly humiliated and tortured. Nietzsche was right about the first part — if we haven’t killed God already, we would certainly try if given half the chance.

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, however, while we may have killed God we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves by planning for His burial. Despite His death, the Christians believe He has risen. We may have expelled Him from our world, but He has returned. Despite our best efforts to erase Him, He has reappeared. His death was an illusion that no science could pierce through.

What does this mean?

God has multiple definitions in the Judeo-Christian Bible, including Truth, the Supreme Good and Love, so does it mean that, no matter how hard we try, we cannot rid ourselves of these concepts?

Perhaps it means that, whether we like it or not, we must forge a relationship with the Truth, difficult as that is. There are uncomfortable truths and soothing falsities, to be sure. The human effort to deny the truth, suppress it or turn away from it is hardly surprising. However, it reappears despite our best efforts, often with harsh consequences. Perhaps God is like that.

Christians also define God as Love. Is love not the most powerful force in the universe? A force strong enough to compel people to sacrifice everything else they value, including their own lives?

Certainly, the idea of God has not perished. In China, some 75 years after the communist revolution, there are more Christians than there are members of the Communist Party of China. The Christians only have a book and the ideas it contains. The CPC has the coercive apparatus of the state at its disposal—legislation, regulation and brute force—and it controls the sense-making institutions of society, including education and the media. The pen is mightier than the sword, as the saying goes.

God remains present in the twenty-first century, and not just in those societies that are traditional in their fundamental orientation. So who is right: Nietzsche or the Christians? An Easter-themed question.

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Dr. King’s 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a masterpiece of logical rigour, historical reference and moral clarity. Read it. You will not be disappointed you did.

Two things stand out for me. First, the philosophical references to Socrates are uncanny, since they closely mirror the situational and biographical particularities of King himself. Second, the connection between love and politics. King invokes the Christian revolution, which was (and is) a call for permanent revolution, though not a political revolution; rather, a spiritual revolution, a revolution of the heart. And while many Christians conceive of their religion as being fundamentally apolitical, spiritual revolution has unavoidable ethical and behavioural (read: political) consequences.

This raises an interesting question. How do we draw the line separating heroism from villainy? King was writing from prison, which is an institution that confines those who break society’s laws (the ‘unjust’, by legal definition). There is clearly a difference between the hero and the adversary, but adherence to the law does not appear to be that difference. Both the hero and the villain break the laws of society and are therefore ‘unjust’ by convention.

My sense is that there are two key attributes separating the hero from the villain. One is the reliance on just means in pursuit of any given end. The other is the willingness to be held to account for one’s actions. My mind stumbled upon these notions more than ten years ago, but until I read King’s letter I did not realize that these were his views as well.

While the genuine hero is sometimes compelled to break an unjust law, he does so using moral means and is willing to held responsible for his actions. The adversary morally justifies immoral means through recourse to the ‘justness’ of the ends and is unwilling to be held to account for his actions.

While the villain runs roughshod over the law to wreak havoc, sow anarchy, acquire power and inspire a nihilistic vengefulness, the hero breaks the laws of society for the purpose of moral elevation — as an important corrective to the law’s incompleteness, exclusions and deformations.

Consider the life of Socrates, who was the most just man of his era, according to his student and biographer, Plato. By the standards of democratic Athens, Socrates was an outlaw and a criminal. At his trial, Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth and of failing to worship the gods of Athens (read: corruption and impiety — charges that resemble those levelled against King).

Socrates was sentenced to death for daring to philosophically reflect on justice and use those reflections to interrogate the laws of Athens — a practice his young students imitated to the great consternation of their aristocratic parents. Ditto for King. While the laws of Athens ultimately condemned Socrates as unjust, Socrates wielded his philosophical weapons to conclude that the laws themselves were unjust. King does the same to Jim Crow America.

In the Platonic dialogue, Crito, which takes place following in Socrates’ prison cell following his trial and conviction, Socrates’ friends present their plan to free him from prison and thereby evade his fate, death by hemlock. Socrates refused. Though he found the grounds of his conviction unjust, he insisted on obeying the very laws which had nourished him throughout his life. In other words, Socrates pursued the good to the point of unlawfulness, but was unwilling to commit an injustice by fleeing from his conviction. He allowed himself to be held to account by unjust laws, just as King did. That, incidentally, is why Plato believed that an ideal political community would have philosophers rule. Not only would power be subordinated to wisdom, but the genuine Philosopher King would rather die than participate in even a minor injustice.

From King’s letter:

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.

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In the great expanse of history, very few intellectuals explicitly altered the trajectory of human affairs through the application of their ideas. At the time of his death in 1883, Karl Heinrich Marx had an international reputation as a political economist, journalist, public intellectual and exiled revolutionary. Despite being a known commodity at the time of his passing, one short century later—after a wave revolutionary activity swallowed the people of Russia, China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia and Angola, among others—some 1.5 billion people (one-third of humanity) lived in a Marxist-Leninist state, making Karl Marx one of the most consequential people to have ever walked the face of the earth.

For many, the collapse of the Soviet Union after an intensely repressive and bloody history served as a refutation of the Marxian vision. Three decades after the conclusion of the Cold War, however, Marxism remains perplexingly present in Western culture. On Campus, Marx has outsized presence in the curriculum of many academic departments, especially in the ‘cultural studies’ wing of the university. Marxist ideas routinely appear in the pronouncements of socialist politicians. The implosion of the Venezuelan economy, for example, is being overseen by a government that makes official appeals to Marxism. Marx’s ideas fuel much of the energy coming from the radical left in the culture wars, too. The relentless focus on ‘oppression’, the claim that ‘systemic x-ism’ conditions all of social life, calls for ‘allyship’ and the demand for ‘equity’ are all derived from Marxian concepts and assumptions.

Given the foregoing, there is a pressing need to revisit Marxism if we are to understand the intellectual and moral status of the ideas that are increasingly grafting themselves onto our civic and political culture.

At his graveside in Highgate Cemetery, Friedrich Engels delivered a funeral oration for his late companion in which he stated that Marx’s ‘name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work’. Among the many predictions that Marx and Engels jointly made throughout their writing partnership, this one has the notable distinction of having survived refutation. This three-part essay series endeavors to explain why Marx’s ideas continue to attract adherents in the twenty-first century.

The first installment provides a wide-ranging overview of the major arteries passing through Marx’s body of work and critically reflects on some of the major blockages therein. It does so by analyzing his theory of human historical development, his analysis of liberal political theory and his commitment to revolutionary socialism. Marx had a great gift for theoretics and there is much in his body of work that is potent and illuminating. Despite his intellectual prowess, there are major errors, omissions and shortcomings.   

The second installment zeroes in on Marx’s political economy and assesses both the logical coherence of his theoretical assumptions and the empirical validity of his accompanying hypotheses. Here again, there is a fair amount in Marx’s political economy that is salient and illuminating—more than many of his critics are willing to admit—however, the conceptual foundations that he laid are incoherent. What’s more, the major testable hypotheses that emerge out of these foundations have been falsified by subsequent events. As a scientific theory, Marxism has been definitively refuted.

In practice, the implementation of Marx’s political program has been shockingly ruinous, having produced tens of millions of corpses over the twentieth century, which makes it one of the most destructive political banners in history, rivalling Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party.

If there is no logical, empirical or moral justification for Marxian socialism, it becomes imperative to sort out the enduring appeal of Marx’s vision, in part to inoculate younger generations from the totalitarian temptations nested within it, but also to explain the behaviour of those who remain animated by revolutionary socialism. To understand the continuing appeal of Marxism, we must enter into the realm of speculative psychology and theology. The essay series closes by reflecting on the multiple sources of motivational energy that draw people toward Marx and compel them to realize his vision. These motivations are ancient in their origins and are likely inextinguishable, which helps explain Marx’s continuing appeal.

1.           Three Currents in Marx’s Thought

Marx’s career as a scholar, public intellectual and revolutionary spanned the early 1840s through his death in 1883. His intellectual output was tremendous, comprising some 50 volumes, and covered a wide range of topics, including philosophy, history, economics, sociology, political commentary and even mathematics. The core of his intellectual work falls into three categories: (i) an encompassing theory of human historical development; (ii) a criticism of the ‘bourgeois’ social order, including its liberal political theory and capitalist economy; (iii) and a political commitment to a revolutionary international socialism. A summary of each of these components is required to prepare the reader for the assessment that follows.

1.1         The Evolution of Human Society

Marx developed a model of human society which delineated its fundamental structure and the processes by which its various sub-structures interact and are transformed. For Marx, the fundamental fact of human existence is the biophysical need to sustain and reproduce life. In all complex or ‘class-divided’ societies, production is a deeply social undertaking. Work, labour and the coordinating mechanisms that channel productive effort—economics, in short—are what define the entirety of social relations, including ostensibly non-economic areas of life such as civil association, politics and religious worship. The most direct path into Marx’s thinking about the development of human society—the ‘guiding principle of his studies’, as he put it—comes from the ‘Preface’ to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which is quoted in three parts:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

The Marxian model of human society contains four core parts which are organized in an ontological hierarchy: (1) the ‘forces of production’ or technology, which comprise the tools and methods used in the production process; (2) the division of labour and associated forms of property, which separate people into antagonistic social classes; (3) the legal system and government emerge out of the economic base to provide law, order and a mechanism for adjudicating disputes, as well equipping the ruling class with the means of subjugating the producing classes; and (4) the moral order, including mythology and religious belief, which codifies the outlook, interests and sensibilities of the ruling class—sensibilities which are assigned a cosmic and eternal universality despite the fact that they are the most ephemeral aspect of society.    

The hierarchy is ontological in the sense that the most real thing—the forces that exert casual pressure—are the material facts of life, which are comprised of the tools humans use to transform the natural world and the socially useful objects that emerge as a consequence. The resulting relations of production, political forms and religious beliefs are all conditioned in a causal sequence of dependence (1 conditions 2, and 1 & 2 together condition 3 & 4). Marx neatly summarized this outlook when he said ‘the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist’.

Marx wrote his Doctoral Dissertation on the atomic theory of reality first posited by Democritus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, who held that the universe is comprised of indivisible, physical atoms which are eternally in motion in an otherwise empty space. For Marx, ultimate reality is coterminous with matter in motion, which implies that social structures and the contents of consciousness, including human values, are reducible to physical objects. In the subject-object duality, Marx assigns primary significance to the objective. (Contrast this with the metaphysical vision outlined in book of Genesis, for example, which assigns divine consciousness and speech a place of primary significance in the ontological hierarchy insofar as they partake in the construction of reality at the beginning of time, instead of being a byproduct of it.)

Having outlined the structure of society, Marx continues in his ‘Preface’ with the processes that govern social change:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure… In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

History is a dynamic process of social change. As human knowledge grows, so grows the implements and methods used in the production process. New techniques of production and the people using them develop in social structures which pre-date the novel technology. Social and political structures emerge to facilitate those needs and provide support for those production processes. However, while the economic base of society tends to be organic and dynamic, the superstructure tends to be rigid and static. The mismatch between a dynamic base and an inflexible superstructure is what creates the ‘contradictions’ that lead to social change.

That is the ‘why’ of social transformation. The ‘how’ and the agency behind social change is explained through the dynamic of class struggle. The division of labour and associated forms of property allot people into social classes. These classes are arranged in a hierarchy of status and power—‘oppressor’ and oppressed’ as Marx and Engels put it in the Manifesto. Human relations are fundamentally defined in terms of the separation between subordinate classes who work with tools (or are themselves tools) and superordinate classes who control production. As a previously subordinate social class wielding a novel technology grows in its productive power, the needs of this new class come into conflict with a legal, political and religious order that supports the old technology. The old ruling class, whose social status and worldview has become ossified on account of the altered economic conditions, is usurped by a new ruling class in a revolutionary reconstruction of society.  

The Marxian model, then, posits a type of determinism insofar as religious belief and political structures are reducible to a technologically-driven economic development. The history of human society is teleological, too, since there is a developmental direction that explains how the ‘bourgeois’ mode of production grew out of the ashes of the feudal mode of production and how, in turn, capitalism will give rise to socialism. Again, from the ‘Preface’:   

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production… the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

Marx and Engels believed that capitalism was the most revolutionary form of social organization in history (From the Manifesto: ‘the bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together’). In all previous modes of production—Asiatic, ancient and feudal—the ruling class legally confiscated whatever modest surplus was generated by the producing classes. However, in all pre-capitalist societies some measure of social deprivation was inevitable because the economy did not create enough output to satisfy everyone’s needs. On account of its tremendous productive power, capitalism had made any level of scarcity socially unnecessary. The problem was that, under capitalism, poverty is produced alongside wealth. In the future socialist society, ‘rational planning’ of economic output will be synchronized with the genuine needs of everyone, eliminating human want altogether.

Marx never published anything on the pre-history of humanity, but after his death, Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which explored the ‘primitive community’ and its disintegration following the introduction of private property. The pre-history of humanity, Engels concluded, provides something of a blueprint for the future of humanity, in which class division and class rule will disappear, as will the state, once private property is abolished. This will enable society to ‘reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers’. The future classless society will overcome the antagonisms that characterize human history, including political oppression, economic exploitation and the suffering associated with material deprivation.

If the Marxian vision is true—if in every human society there exists a small cloistered minority who oppress and exploit the remaining majority—how have the former succeeded in subjugating the latter? The coercive apparatus of the state is one part of Marx’s answer, but as Thomas Hobbes formulated the problem in his Behemoth, ‘what shall force the army’ to obey the law? Marx and Engels’ theory of ideology, elucidated in The German Ideology, provides the answer.

As they would have it, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’. Ideology is necessary because the continual resort to force as a means of controlling the oppressed classes is inefficient. It would be far easier to manage the direct producers if they believed their social position was natural and beneficial, both to themselves and to the wider society. After all, the likelihood of rebellion decreases if the subordinate classes accept their subordination as natural and just. Ruling class ideology also explains why the dominant class enjoys its power and privilege. The social function of ideology, then, is to provide both the oppressor and oppressed classes with the justification for their social position.

For this to happen, the economic and social relations of society cannot be viewed as arbitrary arrangements, nor can they be seen as serving one group at the expense of other groups. Instead, the social order must be rooted in forces that are beyond human control, whether those forces be ‘nature’ or ‘the will of God’ (think of Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery or St. Paul’s remarks in his Epistle to the Romans that ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’—an exhortation that called on Christians to obey their political rulers even when they are despotic).

In order to provide ideological rationalization for its position, the ruling class must ‘represent interest as the common interest of all members of society… and represent [its ideas] as the only rational, universally valid ones’. How does it do this? As Marx and Engels remark: ‘the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production… those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it’. Though socially affective, an ideology is a set of false beliefs, then, insofar as they fail to accurately represent the relationships between individuals and groups.

What are we to make of the materialist conception of history? It forms the basis of Marx’s analysis of ‘bourgeois’ society and the accompanying predictions about the historical inevitability of socialism, so if it is incomplete or false then those omissions or errors will taint subsequent analysis.

On this score, Marx must be given his due: elegant in its simplicity, the materialist conception of history possesses considerable explanatory power. Although he did not invent the notion that society progresses through stages of economic development—the credit there belongs to the Scottish Enlightenment, notably Adam Ferguson—his formulation is persuasive and sophisticated in its depiction of the various sub-structures of society and how their interaction produces epoch-making change.

What’s more, Marx’s conception of history has permeated Western culture. When it is said that a society is ‘developing’, what is often meant is that it is becoming more technologically complex and economically productive, instead of referring, say, to the growth of consciousness. In his masterpiece, Guns, Germs and Steel, arguably the most successful work of trans-disciplinary history of the past generation, Jared Diamond does not refer to Marx, and yet in proposing an environmentally deterministic theory of civilization Diamond follows in his footsteps. It is neither human agency nor cultural factors that shape the trajectory of human affairs; instead, the material world that diverse people find themselves in conditions the growth of society.

Marx’s theory helps explain why, for example, the first societies in history to abolish slave labour were those that were transitioning away from agriculture, wherein production was largely powered by living organisms, human and non-human, in favour of modern industry, which relies on hydrocarbons to power production. For Marxists, it is no mere coincidence that the capitalist societies of Western Europe and North America disbanded slavery at roughly the same time that a deep pool of wage labour became socially available. Marx’s theory also explains why, for example, the economic emancipation of women developed most rapidly in societies that moved away from agriculture and heavy industry toward a service-based economy, the occupations of which are less dependent on physical strength. Then there’s the birth control pill—a radical technology with massive socio-economic implications. And so on. Western notions of ‘freedom’, ‘fairness’ and ‘fulfillment’ appear to have co-evolved with the restructuring of the economy, at least to some extent.

Part of the persuasiveness Marx’s theory of history rests with the soothing narrative that underpins it. In replicating the quadripartite narrative of the Christian Bible, the Marxian storyline may be classified as a comedy. In the Judeo-Christian meta-narrative, the first stage has Adam and Eve—the mythological representations of the masculine and feminine—dwell with God in the Garden of Eden. Humanity is seamlessly integrated into nature through immediate identification with ultimate reality (in Marxism, this translates into primitive communism, with its classless society and natural sociality).

Stage two, the encounter with chaos, is represented by the eternal serpent lurking in the garden. The serpent entices humanity to break its commitment to ultimate reality by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (novel technology, material surplus, private property).

Stage three, the ‘Fall’ into self-consciousness, entails the loss of immediate identification with nature and the subsequent distancing of humanity from ultimate reality. Humanity is cast out of paradise and is condemned to dwell in suffering-ridden history (class division, class conflict, alienation).

The final stage appears in the closing chapters of the Book of Revelation, in which humanity is reconnected with the Water of Life and Tree of Life, which had been lost in the Fall. Hereafter, humanity lives in harmony with being, symbolized by co-habitation with God (full communism in the Marxian narrative).

For Marx, our natural sociality was lost with class division. The unbearable present, characterized by the master-slave dialectic, is a negation of our ‘species-being’. Proletarian revolution will remove the blockages that separate human beings from their natural sociality by creating a society of freely associating autonomous producers. That which is of ultimate value will be restored and the suffering of human history will be redeemed.

For all his atheism and political secularism, the narrative structure Marx erects bears the unmistakable markings of Judeo-Christianity, from its messianic overtures to its apocalyptic objectives. Running the risk of being simplistic, one could substitute the scientist for the messiah (both of which are revolutionary subjects), the problem of emancipation for injustice, History for God, the revolution for the apocalypse, entrance into the realm of freedom for the reign of justice, and Communism for the City of God, and the two intellectual schemes—Marxism and Judeo-Christian monotheism—run side-by-side (see Table 1).

Marx’s storyline also draws on the Romantic tale spun by Rousseau, who posited linkages between private ownership, social stratification and social conflict. When Rousseau wrote:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’…

He was expressing a stunningly contemporary attitude about modern society, one in which suffering and injustice are entirely the product of social institutions, leaving no explanatory room for nature. While Rousseau was a counter-enlightenment romantic, Marx was a progressive child of the enlightenment. Marx saw humanity’s fallen condition as being remedied once people freed themselves from their illusions and came to rationally understand their true place in the cosmos. That said, for Marx as for Rousseau, history remains an elaborate con job in which the ruling group manages to deceive everyone outside its social boundaries into accepting ideas and arrangements which are philosophically invalid.

While Marx’s theory of history is analytically powerful, it remains incomplete, unproven and in conflict with key historical developments. The claim that the immaterial emerges from the material is striking, plausible and surprisingly contemporary, but Marx never supplied the evidence or detailed argumentation to conclusively demonstrate it. We simply do not find any detailed analysis in Marx’s writings about how it is, precisely, that religious phenomenology is conditioned by economic relationships or how moral values ground out in material objects. While the propositions are plausible, Marx left them dangling in the air, unverified.

As for the incompleteness of the claims, the Marxian storyline would have it that economics—work and money, in short—is the engine of human history. To be sure, economic needs and aspirations are powerful motivators, but most people do not treat money or career as the supreme value in their lives. It would be more accurate to conclude that there are multiple ‘spheres of value’ (see Scruton’s, How to be a Conservative) in which people find meaning. Work and career is one sphere, but other spheres include family, religious worship and leisure. To rank the economic domain above the other domains is arbitrary, even foolish.

In private life, when push comes to shove most morally normal people put family ahead of career. In civil society, many rank religious worship and friendship above money. Even in the political realm, many people do not vote in favour of their so-called ‘material interests’. Some billionaires vote for tax-cutting conservatives, yes, but others cast a ballot for welfare state-expanding liberals. Likewise for the working class, who seem just as likely, if not more so, to vote for republican conservatives than for communitarian liberals.

Money is not the supreme force in human affairs, love is. Love for family, for community, for ‘homeland’ (however defined) and, at the deepest level of analysis, a love for life (i.e., God’s Creation). Love compels people to sacrifice everything else they value, including their own lives. Love, not money, is the engine of human history.

Can the materialist conception of history withstand refutation? According to Marx’s theory, the reason that different societies have differing legal and political structures is because their economies are structured differently, with economic differences grounding out in technological differences. But were we to compare the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the postwar period, for example, we would find a scenario in which the Marxian theory is at odds with the historical facts.

Despite having similar levels of technology (both were space age, nuclear powers) and similarly structured economies (urban industrial landscape with large manufacturing sector manifested in the factory system), the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had very different ‘relations of production’ (private ownership vs. state ownership), legal orders (judicial independence vs. judicial subordination), state structures (representative democracy vs. one party dictatorship) and ideological systems (individualist liberalism rooted in Biblical worldview vs. collectivist socialism rooted in Marxian atheism).

According to Marxism, similarity in the ‘forces of production’ should give rise to similarities in the ‘relations of production’ and the accompanying superstructure. If technology and production processes drive the division of labour and if the latter conditions the legal, political and moral orders, then a similar economic base should not give rise to radically different superstructures. This was manifestly not the case when it came to the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Ironically, the historical experience of Marxist-Leninist states undermines the Marxian theory of history.    

Now consider Marx and Engels’ theory of ideology, which still manages to hypnotize large swaths of the intellectual class. The student of political philosophy will recall the comments made by the sophist, Thrasymachus, who was Socrates’ sparring partner in Plato’s Republic. Marx follows the logic laid out by Thrasymachus, who insisted that justice is the ‘interests of the stronger’. In every society, the government (the politically ‘strong’, by definition) is the ruling power, irrespective of the type of society, and it makes laws to serve its interests (democratic laws, aristocratic laws, tyrannical laws, etc.). The ruling group also controls the educational institutions of society and so enculturates in the young the belief that obedience to the law is ‘just’ and disobedience ‘unjust’. Therefore, in obeying the law, the people (the politically ‘weak’, by definition) unwittingly serve the interests of the ruling group. Rebellious self-interest, Thrasymachus reasoned, against the established powers and institutions of society is a marker of genuine wisdom since it pierces the veil of ruling class ideology and liberates the individual to pursue his own interests, despite the fact that such behavior is deemed unlawful (and therefore unjust, by convention).

Once again, the application of Marxian ideas in history serves as a refutation of Marxian theory. As Marx saw it, beliefs are the byproduct of legal and political structures, which themselves emerge to support the economic base of society. But in Tsarist Russia, the adoption of Marxian beliefs worked in a reverse causal sequence of dependence: radical aristocratic intellectuals (namely Vladimir Ulyanov and Lev Bronstein) embraced Marxism, then captured the state, then outlawed dissident beliefs, including religious beliefs, before re-making the political and legal orders, which in turn, altered the property regime, the class structure and even the division of labour. In one long generation, Soviet Russia was transformed from a rural, agrarian, peasant society into an urban, industrial, space-age society, so even the technological situation was radically altered in a top-down manner.

This was not supposed to happen. If the Marxist theory of ideology is true, the processes generating social change should have grown in a bottom-up fashion from their technological underpinnings. In fact, Russian society was transformed in a top-down process beginning with ideology, proceeding through politics, the law, the class structure and even the technological foundations of society. Ironically, it is not the ‘material conditions of life’ that held developmental and explanatory primacy in Russia (and elsewhere), but the contents of consciousness, thus challenging the validity of Marx’s theory of history.

A final difficulty with Marx’s vision comes when we examine the grounds upon which Marx himself stood when delivering his philosophy of history. If morality is reducible to the economic base, then how can Marx launch any type of normative criticism of capitalism? After all, the exercise of moral judgement should only serve to reinforce the interests of the ruling capitalist class. Likewise, if all broad philosophical visions are part of the ideological superstructure, and thus change when the economic base changes, what happens to Marx’s materialist conception of history in non-capitalist setting? Marx’s philosophy itself must be a product of his society and thus hold no truth in the context of a different society. Stated differently, if the truth of a claim and rightness of an action are confined to historical circumstance, then how can Marx philosophize about history or exercise unconventional moral judgement? These difficulties pose insurmountable obstacles for anyone who strives for universal explanations while asserting the relativity of truth and ethics. On logical grounds, the materialist conception of history lacks coherence.

1.2         Liberalism: The Radical Insufficiency of Political Emancipation

It is impossible to dissociate Marx’s criticism of the emergent liberal political order from the century of revolution that connected developments in England (in 1688), the United States (1776) and France (1789). These political revolutions came on the heels of the break-up of the Universal Church in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. In the emergent liberalism that grew out of these revolutionary outbursts, three key developments attracted Marx’s attention (and his ire).

First, religious emancipation had freed people, Jews in particular, to practice their faith in a denominationally neutral political environment. However, as Marx saw it, the toleration of religious differences did not ‘free’ people from the need for religious consolation as such. The second development was political emancipation, understood as an extension of the franchise and formal acceptance of universal rights and freedoms, which opened up the political process to ordinary citizens and defended them from the encroachments of a newly forming nation-state. As Marx saw it, mere political emancipation did not free citizens from the atomism, egoism and conflict produced by the capitalist economy. The third development was the modern state itself, which had been secularized and constitutionally separated from civil society and was tasked with adjudicating the disputes between nominally free and equal citizens in an increasingly pluralistic civil society. However, the state could never act as an impartial umpire, Marx thought, because it was also tasked with upholding private property, which meant, in effect, that it would defend the propertied elite from the propertyless masses. In what follows, these three themes are briefly reviewed and critically assessed.

For Marx, religious consolation is sought because human beings are alienated from their ‘species-being’ or ‘species essence’. In the book of Genesis, we find a description of the emergence of self-consciousness through a separation of the perceiving subject and the perceived object. The subject-object dualism, which grounds out in the distinction between mind and matter, poses numerous philosophical perplexities. In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel argued that alienation is the process whereby the human mind projects itself onto an external object and then overcomes that projection by becoming self-conscious of how the mind works. Ludwig Feuerbach, the Young Hegelian, whose Essence of Christianity had a profound impact on Marx, established connections between alienation and religious belief. For Feuerbach, religious belief leads to alienation insofar as humanity subjectively projects onto an object—the cosmos—the noble aspects of its nature. In so doing, human beings become divorced from all that is praiseworthy in themselves. Creativity, knowledge, love, etc., become the exclusive reserve of God, leaving humanity to occupy a territory denuded of virtue. God, for Feuerbach, is Alienated Man.

Unlike Hegel, Marx viewed alienation as being rooted in external affairs that transcend conscious states. As he put it in his Theses on Feuerbach, ‘religious sentiment is itself a social product [of] a particular form of society’. In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx deploys some of his most intoxicating prose on the connections between social relations and the dimensions of religious experience:

Man makes religion, religion does not make man… Religious suffering is… 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, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions… Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun…

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

This passage reveals why the secularization of the modern state and mere religious emancipation are radically insufficient. The transfer of religious belief and worship from the public square to the private household, where nominally equal citizens can practice their faith in an unencumbered fashion, does not free people from the need for religious belief itself because it leaves intact the conditions which give rise to religious illusions. An alienated society supports religious illusions because those illusions, in turn, provide succor for an alienated society. But what does this alienation entail?

This is where Marx broke with both Hegel and Feuerbach, turning away from consciousness and religious belief toward an analysis of political economy. For Marx, social cooperation in the service of creative production is what characterizes the human animal. However, capitalist production transmutes our cooperative impulses into competitive and conflictual drives. In a capitalist economy, the human desire for free creativity is denied in the service of mind-numbing, often pointless, toil. Rather than realizing our species-being, capitalism undermines it.

Marx bore witness to the production of historically unprecedented levels of wealth, and yet he also saw poverty, misery and dehumanization of the very workers who produced that wealth. As he saw it, working class poverty was the naked underbelly of capitalist affluence. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx posited:

In the economic system under the rule of private property, the interest which an individual has in society is in precisely inverse proportion to the interest society has in him… The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity.

For Marx, labour is simple objectification. Human beings creatively interact with nature and produce a useful object in the process. However, under modern capitalism, simple objectification is compounded by ‘externalization’ and ‘estrangement’, meaning the object is divorced from the producing subject, stands outside his grasp, and indeed, comes to rule over him. Similar to Feuerbach’s critique of religion, which held that the more humanity invests in God the less remains for humanity, likewise, the greater and more voluminous the products of labour, the smaller and poorer becomes the labourer. Instead of work being a source of meaning and fulfillment, capitalism generates meaningless work and worthless workers. The enrichment of life for a select few comes at the cost of poverty, toil and dehumanization for the many.

As Marx saw it, alienated labour has four key dimensions (from the Manuscripts). First, alienation entails a loss of the object. Whereas the worker infuses the object with his labour, transforming matter from one state into another, that which is produced by the worker is owned by the employer. While labour produces ‘marvels for the rich’ it produces ‘privation’ for the labourer. Second, alienation in the production process itself. The de-skilling of work through a separation of ‘head and hand’ also leads to alienation insofar as the production process is external to the worker and in conflict with his nature. The worker ‘feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment—while in his human functions, he is nothing more than animal’. Third, alienation from species-being. Marx defined the human animal as that being that, in concert with others, engages in practical creativity and has the capacity to reflect on that creativity. ‘Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and consciousness’. The capitalist production process inverts this relationship insofar as it ‘turns man's species-being—both nature and his intellectual species-power—into a being alien to him and a means of his individual existence. It estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual essence, his human existence’. The final aspect of alienation is of human beings from each other. If what we produce and how we produce it appear as alien and hostile, it follows that the ‘other’ being one confronts in social life will, likewise, stand at an antagonistic distance.

Marx’s criticism of alienated labour is even more radical than the foregoing would suggest. Much of the conceptual architecture of liberal political economy that runs from Adam Smith through Alfred Marshall is traceable to John Locke. Locke’s workmanship model of private property begins from the fact of human self-ownership and natural liberty. We belong to ourselves, not to others, and by extension the fruits of our labour belong to us, too. Likewise with land and physical objects: ‘labour puts a distinction between them and [that which is] common’, says Locke. That which we mix our labour with becomes ours, such that ‘taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state nature leaves it in… begins the property… Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property’. For Locke, private property (i.e., wealth) emerges in a pre-political state of nature.

There is a two-fold problem in Locke’s formulation. If our natural condition is one of untrammeled liberty, why could ‘the turfs my servant has cut’ become the property of someone other than the servant? And why would there be any servitude at all if the state of nature is characterized by untrammeled liberty? What’s more, how could property develop independently of the organized power of the group? There can be no claim against others without there first being a plural ‘other’ to begin with, i.e., a political community. After all, the word ‘private’ is derived from the Latin privatus, which means ‘withdrawn from public life’. In the absence of the organized power of a community—politics, for short—there simply cannot be private property.

Marx makes a most striking claim in this respect. Rather than private property leading to wage labour, Marx posited that wage labour—i.e., alienated labour—itself produces private property. For Marx, wages and private property are the twin consequences of alienated labour. While Locke drew a line from self-ownership, through natural liberty to private property and wealth—connecting the free economy with private wealth production—in the Manuscripts Marx re-arranged this sequence: ‘wages are an immediate consequence of [alienated] labor, and [alienated] labor is the immediate cause of private property. If the one falls, then the other must fall too’. For Locke, economic servitude (‘the turfs my servant has cut’), private property and wealth are present in a pre-political state of nature. For Marx, these institutions and outcomes are the product of a capitalist economy. Where Locke naturalizes, Marx historicizes.    

Marx continues: ‘although private property appears as the basis and cause of alienated labor, it is in fact its consequence, just as the gods were originally not the cause but the effect of the confusion in men's minds’. Thus for Marx, private property does not exist in the state of nature, nor does private wealth. Both are the product of a historically situated society. Private property and wealth are produced by the worker and are coterminous with her poverty. That is why, for Marx, mere religious (tolerance) or political emancipation (the vote) are not enough: ‘the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production’, thus the ‘emancipation of workers’ will manifest itself politically as ‘emancipation of society from private property’. Universal human emancipation requires that private ownership be disbanded because it is the byproduct of alienated labour.

Shifting from religious emancipation to political emancipation, Marx thought the radical insufficiency of political liberalism was manifest in the schizophrenic character of modern citizenship. Despite being a unity, human beings are politically divided between free and equal citoyen in the state and unequal bourgeois in the capitalist economy. As he put it in his essay On The Jewish Question:

The perfect political state is, by its nature, man’s species-life, as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.

This distinction between state and civil society, politics and economics, leads Marx into a criticism of the liberal notion of human rights, which was beginning to be codified in constitutional documents like the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the Constitution of Pennsylvania. These documents explicitly distinguished those rights that belong to humans as humans and those belonging to citizens, but who are these bifurcated beings?

Marx’s criticism is that liberal rights treat man as an ‘isolated monad, withdrawn into himself’. Human beings are defined as private, self-seeking individuals. The catalogue of human rights that modern people enjoy reflect this view of human nature. As Marx saw it, the right to ‘liberty’ is not based on the ‘association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man’. It is the ‘right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself’. The right of private property is little more than a right of ‘self-interest’, which leads men to see in others ‘not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it’. Likewise for equality, which does not mean equal participation in the political decision-making process, but equal treatment as a ‘self-sufficient monad’. And the right to security, as Marx saw it, fails to ‘raise civil society above its egoism’, but on the contrary is the ‘insurance of egoism’. Marx concluded:

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.

Were society to be properly constituted, we would see in each other the realization of our freedom rather than a threat to it. The problem is socially-enforced scarcity and artificially-produced, competition-driven enmity.

Given the foregoing, Marx’s ruminations on the modern state follow logically, albeit indirectly. In the base-superstructure model, the organs of the state—government, army, judiciary, penal system, etc.—facilitate ruling class domination insofar as they supply the quantity of coercion needed to guarantee the economic exploitation of the producing classes. From the Manifesto: all political power ‘is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another’. Under the emerging liberal order, by implication, ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. Political oppression is required to facilitate economic exploitation, ultimately.

However, Marx recognized that this general template was inadequate when examining the particularities of any specific society. Given the economic base of the society and the status of the class struggle, the state in any given society is bound to take a different shape because the specific needs of the ruling class will differ. The state that was emerging in modern Europe was more complicated than most because it was beginning to embody democratic features. Once again, Marx had to contend with the most important political philosopher of his era, Georg Hegel.

In analyzing modern society, Hegel began with individual consciousness and the freedom found therein and proceeded rigorously through abstract rights, including private property and contract, building towards a holistic analysis of the state and society. As Hegel saw it, private property is required for people to manifest their freedom because it enables them to execute a life plan, something that inevitably entails forming relationships with other people, including the simple exchange found in market economies. The fullest realization of that freedom leads to morality and what Hegel called ‘ethical life’. Ethical life has three aspects of an increasingly unified complexity: the family, which is ethical life in its most immediate form; civil society, including the market economy, the administration of justice and the corporate structure of society, wherein conflicts of interest emerge; and finally, the modern state, which, by mediating the conflicts produced in civil society, is generative of unity while preserving individuality. In the modern state, citizens realize something akin to Rousseau’s ‘general will’ in the sense that their autonomy is realized through obedience to laws which they themselves author.

In his early writings, Marx grappled with representative democracy and contested, in terms similar to Rousseau, whether genuine democracy could in fact be representative. For Rousseau, sovereignty cannot be delegated; one must directly participate in the political process if the resulting laws are going to manifest one’s freedom. Heteronomous societies have laws imposed on them by an external force, including those to whom political power is delegated. For Rousseau, citizens in a representative democracy are only free in the moment when they cast their ballots. In all the moments afterwards, they become political objects in relation to the actual political subjects, namely the elected officials, who rule as they please. The same held true for Marx, for whom: ‘the separation of the political state from civil society appears as the separation of the deputies from their mandators. From itself, society delegates to its political existence only the elements’.

A two-fold contradiction emerges from this. First, those to whom political authority is delegated are not in fact delegates when they govern. In the act of their selection, the delegates represent, but in their governance, elected officials rule as they see fit. Second, the delegates are elected to serve the general interest, but instead serve particular interests.

Hegel took the modern, secularized state to be an impartial adjudicator of the conflicts produced in civil society, including disputes associated with property and market exchange. Having exposed the supposed universality of liberal rights as hopelessly partial and one-sided, Marx viewed the alleged neutrality of the state as a naïve fantasy. The liberal state could never be truly impartial because it was tasked with defending private property. Even Adam Smith had recognized that ‘civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor’, so how could Hegel claim that the state could be impartial? Though nominally equal, in a substantive sense the members of civil society are highly unequal insofar as they live under the domination of vested interests. The state and political power may be nominally ‘public’, serving the general interest, but in reality wealth is private and the interests associated with it are particular, not general.

Marx’s base-superstructure model held that the material interests of the capitalist class would ultimately steer governance in the service of business interests. Rather than a separation between state and civil society, with the former legally and institutionally cordoned off from the latter, Marx saw the former as inextricably intertwined with latter. And contrary to the view that the state is the dominant institution of the society, for Marx it is fundamentally subordinate to the economic base, which must be conceived in terms of the dominance of capital.

In Marx’s more mature writings, however, he claimed to have found the various organs of the state did not automatically manifest the interests of the ruling class. In his investigation of the events of 1848 in France, Marx noted that the various state organs did not relentlessly pursue the interests of the French bourgeoisie; instead, it seemed that various sub-structures of the French state had their own interests that they were busily maintaining. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx noted:

The [class] struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally powerless and equally mute, fall on their knees before the rifle butt… The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor… Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent… And yet the state power is not suspended in the air. Taxes are the life source of the bureaucracy, the army, the priests, and the court – in short, of the entire apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical… An enormous bureaucracy, well gallooned and well fed, is the “Napoleonic idea” which is most congenial to the second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise, considering that alongside the actual classes of society, he is forced to create an artificial caste for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-and-butter question?

While the bourgeoisie did not exert political power directly, that did not mean that it was politically powerless. Depending on the balance of class forces, it might be necessary for the capitalist class to forego direct political domination in order to maintain socio-economic domination. Subsequent Marxists have claimed, taking their cue from Marx, that the modern liberal state has some level of autonomy and is not merely an instrument of class rule. However, the autonomy of the liberal state is ultimately bounded by the material interests of the bourgeoisie. As Marx put it:

As the executive authority which has made itself independent, Bonaparte feels it to be his task to safeguard “bourgeois order.” But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle class. He poses, therefore, as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless, he is somebody solely because he has broken the power of that middle class, and keeps on breaking it daily. He poses, therefore, as the opponent of the political and literary power of the middle class. But by protecting its material power he revives its political power… Bonaparte knows how to pose at the same time as the representative of the peasants and of the people in general, as a man who wants to make the lower classes happy within the framework of bourgeois society… Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from another. (Marx 1852)

It is for these reasons that democratizing the state is insufficient. A truly meaningful freedom requires that society itself be fully democratized, but this entails eliminating the separation between state and civil society, public and private, politics and economics. Formal legal and political equality, though progressive, cannot overcome the profound social inequality produced by capitalist social relations. From his Letter to Arnold Ruge, communism ultimately stands in opposition to ‘private being’, whereas the history of liberal political thought has one its major motivations the protection of the private sphere from the encroachments of the state (and the mob).

Marx’s analysis of modern society has exerted enormous influence, but are his claims true? Are the dimensions of religious experience predicated on a host of socially-induced cognitive errors? Are the modern liberties guaranteed in documents like the Declaration of Independence mere mechanisms in the promotion of selfishness? And is the modern state little more than the elbow and fist of the capitalist class? There isn’t the space to deeply examine these questions; instead, a few passing reflections are offered.

First, to claim that religious phenomenology—a human universal—is a cognitive error rooted in social stratification without the requisite argumentation or evidence is profoundly shallow. Marx’s literary gifts made his criticism of religion appear more sophisticated than it was. From a strictly materialist perspective, of course, there is no ‘substance’ coterminous with God, if God is understood as creator of the physical universe. However, the reality that human beings occupy is not merely populated by material objects. The objective, materialist side of reality is only half the story. The subjective (and inter-subjective) side of reality, which is phenomenological, not material, and is the domain of meaning, not brute fact, complicates any serious reflection on the ontological status of the divine.

In the Christian tradition, for example, God is defined as love: ‘Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love’ (1 John 4:7-8 KJV). Under this definition, many who identify as atheists are, in fact, Christian in their theological beliefs (they just don’t know it).

Furthermore, if poverty produced religiosity, then the contemporary West, wherein poverty has been virtually eradicated, should be filled with irreligious people. Likewise, the rich should be irreligious and the poor religious, if economic need drives religious fantasy. The facts do not support either hypothesis. In the United States, for example, religious belief has declined somewhat over the past eight decades, but Gallup found that 87 per cent of people believe in God, down from 96 per cent in 1944. Americans are rich, not poor, and a super-majority still believe in God. Across some dimensions, religiosity is inversely correlated to income, but in its investigation of the religious landscape in the U.S., the Pew Forum found that a super majority of both rich and poor adults say that religion is either ‘very important’ or ‘somewhat important’ in their household. The same holds true for education: 86 per cent of adults with less than high school believe in God, while 74 per cent of post-grads are believers. Neither wealth nor education have killed off God.

Marx seemed to suppose that, were people to give up their religious beliefs, scientific rationality would pour into that cognitive void. However, there is little reason to think that, were people to disavow religion, the beliefs that filled the God-shaped hole in people’s consciousness would be any more ‘rational’ than their religious predecessors. Many people make a religion out of their personal or political beliefs (Marxism, ironically, became a false religion for many radical atheists in the twentieth century). Religious writers have long warned that disavowal of God does not free people from their religious impulses. Instead, it merely redirects them toward idols, who occupy the space left by God, with disastrous consequences (as the Tribes of Israel learned on their journey to Canaan). In the case of Marxism-Leninism, state idolatry became common practice insofar as it was seen as the essential mechanism that would redeem the sins of class-divided society by enforcing full socio-economic equality (with an emphasis on force).

Cross-culturally and down through the epochs, human beings have expressed a variety of religious impulses. To search for meaning, which is a fundamental human drive, in the physical attributes of material objects may tell us something interesting about reality, but humans have also sought metaphysical explanations for the meaning of their existence as well, and those ruminations cannot be summarily dismissed without a thorough investigation of the structure and function of belief. No such analysis of our innate religions needs, whether they be psychological, moral or social, is present in Marx’s writings (though Biblical themes run throughout his work, often unconsciously, with a secular gloss).

Second, on the fundamental limitations of liberal rights, Marx’s flippant and dismissive attitude, which qualifies more as ridicule than as serious philosophical reflection, is also unconvincing. Many liberal rights grew out of Biblical precepts. The separation of Church and State, for example, is rooted in the remarks attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, namely to ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’. Some writers have gone so far as to argue that human rights themselves find their source and origin in the consciousness of individual human beings, which the Biblical writers took to be a reflection of a divine sovereignty because, like God, consciousness partakes in the process of extracting habitable order out of an underlying, pre-cosmogonic chaos.

Individual rights and liberties developed organically, across many centuries, and in a variety of cultural contexts. The catalogue of human rights that began to appear in modern political documents are premised on human frailty. Human beings are limited. Human Our knowledge is finite, our moral sensibilities are bounded, we are prone to fits of selfishness and, at times, gratuitous cruelty. Human beings can be harmed and can inflict harm, in turn. Individuals rights and liberties emerged to curtail the worst aspects of human misbehaviour while also attending to the innate sense of fairness that underpins any just political order. To dismiss the modern rights revolution as the mere ‘insurance of egoism’ is unbecoming of any serious political analyst.

When J.S. Mill said ‘the only freedom which deserves the name’ is ‘pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs’, he was referring to exactly the type of freedom that Marx ridiculed and disavowed. This wisdom in Mill, which is absent in Marx, is that other human beings are an existential restriction on our freedom because they themselves are the locus of transcendent value. The good of others, irrespective of the (class) identity or belief of said other, acts as a moral boundary on our behaviour. In no small measure, the failure of Marxists to recognize and respect that border contributed to the horrors of the twentieth century.

Liberal rights and freedoms create a private domain in which individuals and families can craft and execute life plans free from encroachments of the state and the mob. That’s the domain in which people form unbreakable attachments. It is the domain where, as Plato remarked, the separation of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ emerges. It is the domain in which people prefer one thing to another—the familiar (family) to the strange (stranger). In short, that is where individuals are created, and individuation, not social circumstance, is the genesis of human difference. Marx’s political program favours the collective domain of the political community over the individual domain of the private household. Liberal rights defend the private domain from encroachments by the state and the mob and therefore stood as an obstacle to his political program, which is why he was hostile to them.

Marx’s failure to recognize the dark side of human nature, including the human capacity for mayhem and malevolence, appears to be a shrinking away from a deeply uncomfortable truth. Like Rousseau, Marx presupposed that human beings are, by nature, free, equal and good. The problem with this belief is that individual and social behaviour refuses to obey it. If one assumes, axiomatically, that people are born with these three attributes, but then bears witness to their opposites, namely coercion, difference and impropriety, then one has a choice: either modify the presupposition to fit the facts or concoct a rescue hypothesis. Like Rousseau, Marx opted for the latter.

To defend the integrity of his presuppositions, Marx invented a conspiratorial narrative about human history: all class-divided societies are an elaborate and well-marketed pyramid scheme, in which the subordinate classes are conned into accepting status differentiation as a natural and inevitable aspect of social life. Once people read Marx’s doctrines, conveniently enough, they will free themselves from the falsity and delusion that underpins individual and social difference, which will then set the stage for a return to a natural and pre-ordained condition characterized by autonomy, equality and social harmony. Such a condition has never manifested itself in any historical society, but because all historical societies are characterized by social stratification, the unfalsifiable hypothesis that the latter causes the former can be advanced.

This brings us to Marx’s criticism of the modern state. The claim that all political power is ‘merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another’ and that the ‘bourgeois’ state is an instrument of ruling class oppression was, even in Marx’s context, not serious. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that modern government is subject to capture by special interests, formally and informally, though that was not quite Marx’s claim. His was not a narrow claim about the possibility of corruption, but a wide claim that class-divided society as such, i.e., all recorded societies, is built upon corrupt foundations. This is false.

The proper function of the state is to create a lawful order, which reduces violence. By creating the conditions for peace, states cultivate security, predictability, and ultimately the trust necessary for individuals and households to form civil associations. The buying and selling of private property that characterizes the free economy would not be possible in the absence of social trust. If the law is overly restrictive, individuals are inhibited from forming the civil linkages that are generative of an autonomously productive social order (think North Korea). Instead, citizens become dependent on state largesse. If the law is insufficiently restrictive, then crime and violence become rampant (think Somalia), which impairs the accumulation of social capital and undermines the possibility of wealth creation. Again, dependence on the state kicks in. Insofar as the England of Marx’s day was wealthy—according to Angus Maddison’s data, England had the highest per capita income in the world in 1870—in no small measure can that wealth be attributed to the proper, though imperfect, functioning of the state structures of England.

Marx looked at the major institutions of society and fixated on how they impinged upon human freedom. His diagnosis was radically partial and incomplete. The legal order, which itself is a codification of an underlying moral order, organizes diverse people into a shared framework. That framework both frees and restricts. The restriction comes in the inability to coercively interfere with others. The framework creates the conditions for freedom insofar as it enables individuals to chart a course of action in their lives—an activity that is dependent upon predicting how others will live their lives. The freedom, then, comes in our ability to autonomously craft and execute a plan of our choosing, keeping in mind the good of others.

Rousseauians may presuppose that, in the absence of state structures, people would spontaneously form peaceful associations, but the historical record suggests otherwise. The most peaceful and prosperous societies in human history have emerged in the context of limited government. Those parts of the world that lack a functioning state (e.g., Somalia) or are subject to rampant state corruption (Zimbabwe) or highly repressive government (Egypt) have tended to be unstable, insecure and poor. By creating a just legal framework, states contribute to mass prosperity. A framework of law, which is merely an expression of moral injunctions that are deeper than the edicts they reflect, serves the general interest, not the particular, though that blanket statement comes with the caveat that all states are subject to capture by special interests.

In the contemporary context, Marx’s claim that the state is an instrument in ruling class domination is laughable and would receive a failing grade were it submitted as an undergraduate political science thesis (or perhaps not, in the case of contemporary academic sophistry). The modern welfare state includes a wide array of programs and policies that trespass on the ‘material interests’ of the ‘capitalist class’. A graduated, steeply progressive income tax system, for starters, in which the rich disproportionately bankroll the cost of social and physical infrastructure, in addition to financing direct payments to the poor, is certainly not in the ‘material interests’ of the top income group.

In Canada, for instance, the richest 0.1 per cent of tax filers (some ~30,000 individuals) earn roughly one-fifth the market income of the bottom 50 per cent of tax filers combined (~15 million individuals), but pay roughly double the aggregate income tax. It may be unpopular to notice it, but the rich directly and indirectly subsidize the poor, not the reverse. They do this directly in terms of cash transfers, but also indirectly when it comes to the funding of government programs. Then there is the bevy of labour laws, including employment standards (like the minimum wage) and labour relations provisions (that facilitate unionization) that conflict with business interests.

If the modern state serves the interests of corporations and the rich, as is often uncritically recited by Marx’s acolytes, it does a remarkably good job of making it seem as if it governs in the interest of the demos. In democratic societies, to acquire and maintain power political parties must appeal to a broad swath of the electorate, which often entails governance objectives that are disfavoured by the corporate class. Marx’s ruminations on the state, which had little validity in his own era, are completely invalid in the contemporary context.

1.3         Heaven on Earth: The Historical Inevitability of Socialist Revolution

Marx did not spill much ink prophesizing about transitional socialism or the dimensions of full communism. Having spent much of his life chastising ‘utopian’ socialists for their ungrounded idealism, he presumed that his ‘scientific’ socialism, which was realistic and hardheaded, could only indicate a developmental direction. The concrete actions undertaken by revolutionary movements could not be sketched in advance by armchair philosophers. Instead, the revolution would unfold spontaneously as the class struggle reached its crescendo. And yet, we find in Marx a clear relationship between knowledge and action.

Philosophically, both materialists and idealist had claimed that there is a chasm separating the knowing subject and the known object. Neither Hegel nor the classical political economists had been able to solve this problem. In his Theses on Feuerbach, including the often-cited eleventh thesis—‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it’—Marx believed he had hit upon a new mode of consciousness that bridged this gap. With praxis, or practical knowledge, as opposed to mere theoria, a new dimension of human consciousness opens up. Through her activism, the revolutionary subject unifies theory and practice by utilizing abstract knowledge in the service of revolutionary action.

Marx’s second thesis: ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth… the reality and power… of his thinking in practice’. Revolutionary action, if guided by proper scientific theory, transforms the world in our own image—socializing nature and expressing our natural sociality—thus closing the epistemological gap between knower and known. We come to fully understand the world because we self-consciously create it according to the requirements of reason.

The transition from capitalism through socialism to full communism comes about in four stages. The division of labour and the property regime sets people into adversarial social classes. The distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ becomes embedded in things and, Marx reasoned, this is how the world of things comes to rule over humanity. Those owning the means of production control those who work the means of production. The atomization, degradation and ensuing alienation of capitalist social relations is a byproduct of the private ownership of the means of the production. Accordingly, the first stage of transformation is to socialize the means of production, bring them under common control.

Marx’s economic model posits that, as capitalism develops, economic crises will become more severe (a topic that will be explored in Part II of this essay series). The working class, divided as it is between the employed and unemployed inside and outside the factory gates, lacks an awareness of its class position. The competition for jobs pits workers against one another, leaving them fragmented. However, as the frequency and severity of economic crises increases, workers begin to develop an awareness about their social identity, which is bound up with their economic interests as a social class. One of the things Marx had noted was the fact that, for the first time in human history, it was possible to have a crisis of over-production. In all pre-capitalist settings, economic crises were driven by a shortage of some kind. Under capitalism, it had become possible to have a depression driven by a mismatch between surplus production and deficient consumer demand.

In the doldrums of depression, it dawns on workers that, rather than acquiesce to a condition in which the employed live a chronically insecure and subsistent existence while the unemployed remain destitute, if they band together and seize control of their workplaces, bringing the instrument therein under common control, production can be maintained without the constraining influence of factory owners, whose financial interests dictate the course of production. After all, technological capability and human need call for more employment and output, not less; these needs are artificially thwarted by the material interests of the capitalist class, who effectively hold the economy hostage. Since the capitalist class does not constructively contribute to the production process anyway, Marx reasoned, the only obstacles to working class control of production are political and psychological, not technical.

The first stage on the road to communism, then, is a seizure of the means of production. However, the capitalist class will not stand idly by while its factories are confiscated, nor will its agent, the ‘bourgeois state’. The capitalist state will defend the interests of employers, which is why the state, too, must be captured in a full-fledged political revolution.

The second stage unfolds following the proletarian seizure of power, which results in a ‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’, according to Marx. Why dictatorship? The charitable reading of Marx is that he was not advocating for dictatorship because he thought it morally desirable. Rather, in the context of a revolutionary restructuring of society, in which all the previous moral, legal and political constraints are dismantled, the restrictions on state power, too, would be lifted and the proletariat would, de facto, wield unconstrained state power. From the Grundrisse:

The less social power the medium of exchange [i.e., the market] possesses… the greater must be the power of the community which binds the individuals together, the patriarchal relation, the community of antiquity, feudalism and the guild system… Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons.

The classical political economists had noted that the emerging market economy was rendering traditional forms of authority obsolete (church, family, etc.), with more coordination of human activity taking place through market exchange. Marx’s observation is simply that, if we dissolve the market, something else will be required to organize human behaviour. In the context of proletarian revolution, with the traditional institutions of society being swept away, the state will remain as instrument of social control. However, Marx also thought that the proletariat was unlike other social classes insofar as its poverty testified to the fact that it lacked a material interest in the economic exploitation or political subjugation of other classes, which opened up the possibility of a benevolent dictatorship (bearing mind that this may be a contradiction in terms). 

In transitional socialism, though the capitalist class will have been dislodged from its position of economic and political dominance, leaving everyone with the status of ‘worker’, Marx posited that the emergent social order will be ‘stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges’. From his Critique of the Gotha Program, when it comes to the allocation of resources:

… the individual producer receives back from society… exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor… The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another… Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values… Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads… The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

Early socialism, then, leaves some hierarchies (i.e., wealth) and inequalities (i.e., productivity) intact, though it does flatten out the class structure by eliminating the distinction between the propertied and the propertyless. In this stage, the reigning distributive principle will be something like ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his output’. Diverse individuals will be treated equally in matters of production and distribution, but because these individuals differ in their productive powers and in their needs, the distribution of resources will remain unequal and many will still be in a condition of need. Marx goes on to explain the defects associated with formal equality:

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view… Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor… one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another… To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

Some of Marx’s critics have claimed, falsely, that he ignores individual human differences. As Marx sees it, the ‘defect’ with equal treatment is that it ignores (i) the inequality in individual talents and abilities and (ii) the specificities of human need, which also vary from household to household. It is thus generative of distributive inequality while failing to solve the problem of scarcity.

In Adam Smith’s political economy, human need anchors the economic system by throwing individual economic actors into productive activity. People work to satisfy their own needs (and those of their dependents), but in order to do so they are compelled to satisfy other people’s needs in the process. Production invariably involves cooperation and exchange, though it is a means to satisfy private economic need. In advanced communist society, which comprises the third stage, the shortcomings of transitional socialism are overcome, says Marx:

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

This passage indicates just how radical Marx’s thinking is. Since the book of Genesis, when humanity was expelled from the Garden, labour has been viewed as a curse thrust upon human beings by an angry God. After the revolutionary restructuring of society, labour will be transformed from something burdensome and undesirable into ‘life’s prime want’.

Most social theories posit a social ideal of some kind, in which human life reaches a pinnacle of joy and fulfillment. For Aristotle, that pinnacle is attained in the contemplative life. For Catholics, it is praising God. For Marx, creative effort in all its varied dimensions will become the highest good available to humans.

In The Germany Ideology, Marx and Engels described the constraints imposed upon human creativity by the division of labour, which Marx took to be coterminous with the class structure itself. In communist society, these constraints on the development of human capabilities will vanish:

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a cultural critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

As far back as Plato, social theorists have acknowledged that complex human societies are only possible with a division of labour, and that such divisions invariably lead to social classes. The classical political economists, Adam Smith chiefly among them, had posited that differences in national wealth are a consequence of the productive power of labour, which itself is a byproduct of the division of labour and ensuing specialization. Marx appears to accept such claims, but also wants to get beyond the division of labour because ‘natural privileges’ are magnified in the context of specialization, which are generative of socio-economic inequalities. In advanced communist society, not only will the class structure be dissolved, but the division of labour will vanish as well. From The German Ideology:

… with a communist organisation of society, there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises entirely from division of labour, and also the subordination of the individual to some definite art, making him exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc. The very name amply expresses the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on division of labour. In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.

Division is a precondition for specialization, but the narrowness associated with specialization leaves other aspects of the individual undeveloped. Marx posited that specialization also leaves entire social classes undeveloped, as with the working class and their artistic sensibilities, for example. With the abolition of division and an end to specialization, the ‘all-round development’ of the individual will finally be possible. As Marx & Engels put it in the Manifesto: ‘the free development of each [will be] the condition for the free development of all’.

In the final stage of communist development, the state itself disappears. Given Marx & Engels claim that all political power is merely the capacity of one group to oppress another, it follows that, with the abolition of class division, political power itself will become redundant. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels described it thus:

When, at last, [the state] becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary… State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished." It dies out.

‘Full communism’, then, is coterminous with anarchism (which implies that anarchists are merely extreme Marxists). The class structure will have been abolished, the socio-economic landscape flattened and all political power, including the state, will wither away. For Marx, human pre-history comes to a close and genuine Human History begins.

What are we to make of Marx’s communist prophecies? The first thing to note is just how deep this strand of thinking runs in Western Civilization. Marx was not the first to posit that an ideal community would hold property in common and allocate resource according to need, not ability. The two founding peoples of the West, Greeks and Jews, each imagined something approaching communism as a social ideal.

In Plato’s ideal republic, both the ruling class (comprised of philosophers) and the guardian class (military personnel) are subject to a form of communistic organization insofar as access to private property is severely curtailed and the nuclear family is abolished (though it bears noting that the working class, who comprise the numeric majority, would continue to own property, engage in commercial exchange and organize private households). In the Biblical tradition, the Acts of the Apostles lays out some of the principles of Christian (read: Jewish) political order:

And all that believed were together, and had all things common. And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. (Acts 2:44-45 KJV)

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. (Acts 4:32, 34-35 KJV)

In this passage, we find common ownership of property and the beginnings of the distributive principle that Marx championed, namely, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’. In both Platonism and Christianity, it appears that communist principles were meant to hedge against moral and political corruption, foster social cohesion and ensure that the needs of the entire community were met.

We should pause to ask if these principles are so far removed from the organizing principles of the contemporary West. Given that the modern welfare state is financed through a progressive, redistributive tax system, the Marxian distributive principle is partially in effect. The more market income an individual generates, the more income tax is owed, both absolutely and relatively. When it comes to the use of public services, be it physical infrastructure like roads and bridges, or social infrastructure like schools and hospitals, resources tend to be allocated on the basis of need rather than the ability to pay. What makes this distributive principle operationally functional is that it is limited to the public sphere, where cooperation and need are paramount. Distribution in the private sphere has an alternative set of organizing principles, as elucidated, for example, by Adam Smith: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages’. In other words, reciprocal egoism, i.e., selfishness that accounts for the good of others, drives distribution in the marketplace.

There are other ways to salvage the principles laid out in Platonic and Christian communism. On the issue of money in politics, we appear to agree with Plato, not that the rulers should be barred from owning property, but that those who govern should not pursue or accumulate wealth while they are in power for fear that their private interests might impede the discharge of their public duties. On the issue of having children ‘in common’, this is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Plato’s communist utopia, but in Western societies even the childless pay income taxes that are used to educate (and sometimes house) other people’s children, so it would appear that the community, at least to some extent, assumes collective responsibility for the well-being of children.

The problem with Marx’s distributive principle, then, is not its content, but the scope of its application. In the public sphere and in the small, close-knit setting of the family, Marx’s distributive principle has some functional utility. Untrammeled egoism and competition make little sense in the context of the parent-child relationship, for example, or even amongst friends. In those limited settings, a distributive principle emphasizing need may be appropriate. However, in the context of a complex society in which strangers must cooperate and compete, the Marxian distributive principle is entirely inoperative.

Lurking behind Marx’s ruminations about communism is a logical tension, namely, the simultaneous disavowal of transcendent ideals and the promotion of communism as a social ideal. One the one hand, history is moving mechanistically and inexorably in the direction of socialist revolution. On the other hand, human beings are motivated to act on the basis of what they value, i.e., an ideal of some sort, even if that value is underpinned by economic considerations. This tension is present in Marx’s thinking but is left unexplored. Marx viewed his intellectual enterprise as being fundamentally scientific, i.e., value-neutral, but in chastising capitalist social relations and praising the hypothetical social relations of communism, he implicitly relied upon a moral standard, albeit one that was unacknowledged.

As for Marx’s contentions about transitional socialism and full communism, they are riddled with errors. In what follows, six such errors are examined.

First, to presuppose that the only economically productive group in society is the working class and that entrepreneurs and managers are parasitical to the production process is clearly false. Marxian socialism would dissolve nearly all of the institutions which make economic complexity possible under the assumption that workers can, spontaneously and in the absence of hierarchical structures, simultaneously replace the functions of entrepreneur, manager and marketplace. There is no evidence to suggest this is possible and plenty of evidence to indicate that it is impossible (including, most recently, the humanitarian catastrophe in Venezuela).

In the absence of hierarchy, all economic decisions must be jointly made, but by whom? Complex production requires cooperation, amongst other things, and cooperation entails decision-making. If some people are party to a decision-making process, others must necessarily be excluded. Even if the boundary separating the included from the excluded could be determined in the absence of a hierarchy, endless deliberation within the organization itself would be inefficient and would almost certainly breed animosity, as those who do not get their way grow frustrated. The problem with this form of decision-making is the absence of a locus of responsibility, which is something that individual initiative and private ownership jointly solve (this is one reason why the corporate form has spread so rapidly over the face of the earth, namely, its usefulness as a coordinating instrument). After all, for production to carry on at all, someone must own the things being worked upon. Hence the need for hierarchy, which partially reflects the responsibility for those things (‘ownership’, from late Middle English ownen, means ‘dominion’).

What about the role of entrepreneurs and managers? The attribute that classifies an entrepreneur is often the ability to decipher an economic opportunity, mainly by noticing some segment of the market that is underserved. Entrepreneurs proceed by channeling savings into the infrastructure needed to form an organization that will carry out the work of attending to the community’s needs. The second law of thermodynamics, entropy, posits that any closed system will continuously move from a condition or order to chaos. This helps explain why, for example, poverty and disorganization are the historical standard for humanity. Order requires effort. Wealth creation requires enormous effort, directly in the form of productive effort but also indirectly in the form of organizational effort. The function of the entrepreneur is to impose order by channeling human creativity in the service of economic need.

Marxist theoreticians have expended tremendous cognitive effort concocting  ‘theories’ which ‘prove’ that workers are poor because they produce and capitalists are rich because they confiscate—theories which depict great entrepreneurs as being a sophisticated versions of Tony Soprano or Kim Jong-un, namely, masters of confiscation. The real reason men like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos became multi-billionaires is because they created organizations that harness emergent technology in the service of human need. Great entrepreneurs repel entropy by creating productive, efficient organizations of human effort and their efforts are rewarded by the community in proportion to the servicing of need. There are clearly instances in which business advantages can be gleaned through monopolistic market practices or outright criminality, but these are the exceptions, not the rule.

On the function of management, in simple organizations managerial structures may be flat, but in large, complicated organizations with deep supply chains and a globally dispersed customer base, managerial oversight, which is a discrete skillset, is absolutely vital and is certainly about more than just issuing commands to subordinates. To assume, for example, that General Motors’ production workers could dispense all the tiers of GM’s management, including product development, supply chain management, sales and marketing, quality control, finance and accounting, legal affairs, government relations, etc., and seamlessly duplicate their work in the absence of any managerial training is ludicrous (and could only be made by the armchair philosopher that Marx reviled, ironically).

Complex, free economies require cooperation amongst diverse individuals who have, as Marx noted, unequal endowments and many more differences, too, including differences in values, with a clear role for those create organizations, those who manage them and those occupied in the differentiated roles that carry out production. To claim that the first two segments of this tri-partite division leech off the third is not intellectually serious (and will be more thoroughly debunked in Part II of this essay series).

The roots of socio-economic difference are to be found in individual human differences, and many social hierarchies exist because those in the lower echelons of those hierarchies voluntarily support them through their choices. For example, Stephen Curry is not the highest paid player in the NBA because he oppresses or exploits other NBA players and it would stretch credulity to claim that Curry himself is exploited by the owner of the Golden State Warriors. What’s more, Curry is not paid an exorbitant sum because the team’s owner is in an exceptionally generous individual. Curry’s salary reflects the willingness of basketball fans to pay the price of admission to watch him perform. They are willing to pay the ticket price because Curry, perhaps more than any other player in the league, helps his team win and the fans will pay handsomely to be attached to a winning team.

As a result, the owner of the Warriors can make considerable sums of money by retaining Curry’s services and Curry can, in turn, command a richer contract. His salary is indirectly ‘voted’ on by individuals through their free purchase decisions. There is no coercion or oppression, though there is clearly hierarchy and inequality, even amongst the elite athletes on his own team (Curry earns more than the bottom 80 per cent of his team members combined, which is a good example of the Pareto Principle in practice). The combination of Curry’s talents (and his effort, sacrifice and drive, to be sure) and the willingness of others to reward those talents, explains his lofty socio-economic status. The same principles apply throughout the economy, albeit imperfectly.

The preceding example is not meant to ignore the fact that individuals in the marketplace are subject to bigotry and irrational prejudice. As a medium, markets can only be as ethically good as the participants in them. If those participants hold prejudicial views, then those prejudices can act as an obstacle to the economic advancement of others. What markets have going for them is their relationship to human selfishness, which is an extraordinarily powerful force. The most bigoted business owner can refuse to higher a visible minority, but then will lose out on the talents and skills of that candidate, which is a lost opportunity for the owner (and would positively threaten her enterprise if that minority took his skillset to a competitor). Owners prefer themselves to others and have a strong economic incentive to retain those who will make them the most amount of money, irrespective of their identity.    

The second error relates to Marx’s claim that economic activity can be carried out in the absence of private property. Were society to abolish private ownership, production would ground to a halt for two main reasons. In the context of a technologically sophisticated society, to transform a physical object in an economically productive way requires interaction with many diverse individuals, but that object must be controlled before it is transformed and to control it is to make it unavailable for use by others. This exclusion is the basis of private ownership. ‘Private’ from the Latin privare means ‘to deprive’ and privatus, which means ‘restricted’. In the absence of institutionalized exclusion, there can be no control over things and so no production.

Second, in the absence of private property there is no marketplace and so no competitive price-setting mechanism. A market is a location in time and space in which the owners of property meet the prospective buyers of property to exchange property. The price attached to commodities, which mediates exchange, is determined by market actors based on localized conditions and individuated needs. In the absence of a decentralized price-setting mechanism, there is no way to coordinate the billions of transactions that take place on a daily basis in complex economies because those transactions reflect a balance between the willingness of buyers and sellers to exchange property—a willingness that is localized and specific, not national and general. A centralized political structure like the state could never make the billions of calculations that would be required to triangulate the needs and willingness of buyers and sellers.

Those with the centralized planning impulse coursing through their veins will, of course, assert that such epistemological impossibilities can be surmounted if only they held the reins of power, but there is absolutely no reason for anyone else to pay homage to their hubris.

Physical objects lack intrinsic value and must be inter-subjectively assigned a value by the community. Market prices, therefore, register and reflect the value of goods and services as they are perceived by the economic community, given available alternatives. Absent the free bargaining of individual economic actors, there is no way to determine what something is worth because the value of a thing ultimately grounds out in the ability and willingness of some economic actor to forfeit something else they value to acquire it, namely money. The implication is that, when coordination through market exchange is eliminated, the coercive apparatus of the state becomes the default mechanism to oversee production and set prices and the historical record clearly suggests that chronic shortage and inefficiency will result.

The third error in Marx’s formulation relates to the seizure of state power. Marx assumed that, were the working class to seize control of the state in a violent revolution, their class position meant that they would lack the motivation to economically exploit or politically oppress other groups. The reduction of all human motivations to economic considerations is profoundly facile. The presupposition Marx seems to have made is that the capitalist class is malicious because it must maintain its position of socio-economic dominance and that, when and where working class people misbehave in a capitalist setting, it is owing to their poverty and alienation. Were we to dissolve class differences and flatten out the socio-economic landscape, the proclivity for selfishness and malevolence would entirely disappear on both the upper and lower stratums of society, since those tensions are rooted in socio-economic differences.

Envy, resentment, vengeance and the panoply of pathological motivations go entirely unexamined in Marx’s writings (though they will be addressed in the third part of this essay series, since they are essential in understanding Marxism). These motivations and accompanying behaviours cannot be laid at the doorstep of any one social group, nor can they be attributed to material deprivation, since most poor people are peaceful and some rich people are violent. Were it otherwise, the West—on account of its poverty-eradicating levels of wealth—would have solved the problem of human misbehavior long ago. Economic motivations comprise one sub-set of a wider array of motivational energies. To assume that an entire group lack the human capacity for maliciousness is ahistorical and psychologically untenable.

Relatedly, and this is the fourth major error, Engels claim that, in advanced communism, the state will no longer serve a social purpose and thus will wither and die, is clearly false. This is a testable hypothesis that will be addressed in Part II of the essay series, but the reader must recall that, at this point in the Marxian developmental narrative, virtually none of the traditional institutions of society will remain standing, including commercial institutions, markets, religious organizations and the ‘bourgeois’ family. In advanced communism, with all the other institutions of society having been killed off, the state will become more necessary in its coordinating and constraining functions, not less. Subsequent history bears this out. Every society that implemented Marxian socialism bore witness to the concentration and centralization of state power. In the absence of the marketplace, Church, family and all the other bottom-up organs of society (which are voluntary, organic and cooperative), the coercive apparatus of the state must be strengthened if chaos is to be held at bay.

Marx’s fifth major error is his claim that, in advanced communism, the division of labour itself will disappear, leaving people ‘free’ to develop their abilities in all realms of creative endeavor. This particular aspect of Marx’s thinking shows, perhaps better than any other, that Marx was not waging war against ‘bourgeois’ society or even class-divided society; instead, Marxian socialism was at war with conditions of human existence as such. The ‘all-round development of the individual’ that Marx called for is a lofty goal, but he ignored the fact that to become competent in a single creative domain requires a lengthy developmental process that begins with initiation, graduates to instruction, proceeds through practice and repetition, and eventually leads to competence, and perhaps with inspiration, excellence. However, to pursue X implies, necessarily, foregoing the pursuit of non-X. One cannot simultaneously cultivate multiple different crafts because each craft has non-overlapping parameters that must be obeyed. Competence in any one craft has discipline as its pre-requisite and discipline entails sacrificing, among other things, the practice of other crafts.

The classical political economists had recognized that wealth is only generated in a context of hyper-specialization. Adam Smith’s famous example of the pin factory, in which a deep division of labour has each micro-task separated from all the others, illustrated why division is a precondition for productive excellence. There is no competence, excellence or wealth in the absence of the very divisions and specializations that advanced communism would eradicate.

To be fair to Marx, the all-round development of the individual is a valid goal. In Marx’s time, it was not uncommon for the working class to be employed 12 to 16 hours per day, six days a week. In that economic context, there would be almost no room to cultivate the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of human existence. With the development of capitalism, however (rough as it was), many gradual reforms made it possible to increase the dispersion of leisure, culture and wealth amongst the various classes of society. The United Nations’ Human Development Index provides a handy proxy for the all-round development that Marx referred to, including metrics on life expectancy, education and the standard of living. Not only do the societies of the capitalist West (and East) consistently rank at the top of the Index, but with the spread of the modern corporation and the creation of a global marketplace, many non-Western countries have rapidly climbed up the scale. Capitalism, with its division of labour and ensuing specialization, does not thwart human development, as Marx supposed, it augments it.

The sixth and final major category error pertains to Marx’s claim that communist society would transform labour from a burdensome necessity into life’s ‘prime want’. To elevate production and creative effort above all the other spheres of human value, including family, religious worship and recreation, is arbitrary. To claim that all people, everywhere, for all time, will hold creative achievement as the most exalted value is without any empirical or historical foundation. For many people, their primary source of identity, meaning and satisfaction will be found within the other spheres of value, no matter what the ‘economic base’ of society is.

Were this particular claim have been made by a morally normal person, it would have amounted to a comical error; that it was issued by a man who strove with the full force of his being to avoid gainful employment throughout most of his adult life, makes it farcical. Marx was financially dependent on the largesse of Engels’, who had inherited a fortune, ironically enough, from his parents’ cotton mills. Even in the decade when Marx was able to retain a job as European correspondent for the New York Tribune newspaper, he had Engels ghostwrite one quarter of his articles. Marx’s unbending refusal to take up a job of any kind and his concomitant refusal to take any measure of responsibility for his family, financial or otherwise, left them poverty-stricken and hopeless. Of Marx’s seven legitimate children, only three made it to maturity (two of whom later committed suicide), and it appears that the poverty and destitution that was their lot in life was a contributing factor to their premature demise.

In keeping with his aversion to personal responsibility, which was metaphysical in its depths, Marx had an illegitimate child with his housekeeper, Helene Demuth. To save his reputation (and perhaps his marriage), Marx asked Engels to pretend that the child was his. It was only on his deathbed, some four decades later, that Engels confessed to Marx’s daughter, long after her father had passed, that the child was actually her half-brother. Neither man ended up taking any interest in young Frederick, who led a sad, lonely, neglected existence in the home of another working class family in London. Marx did not provide anything in the way of child support and never once visited him.

For a man who, on the surface, was so preoccupied with the misery of the working class to be profoundly disinterested in addressing the misery in his own household, which he had a hand in authoring, is striking and it indicates the psychological orientation of those who would, without hesitation, burn down the world in the name of some ill-conceived ideal before they took any responsibility for their own lives. Had Marx attended to his familial responsibilities, which were screaming for his attention, with the same vigor that he cultivated his apocalyptic political fantasies, his family would have suffered much less than they did and the twentieth century may have been far less repressive, bloody and misery-stricken than it was. Instead, Marx busied himself neglecting the personal in favour of the political, all the while claiming that the political shapes the personal, which was a convenient intellectual tactic to avoid having to bear responsibility for anything or anyone. For someone of Marx’s characterological worth to claim that humanity will, once the work of political destruction has been completed, come to treat labour as life’s ‘prime want’ borders on insanity.   

The litmus test of any valid political philosophy is this: does it properly account for fullness of human frailty, including the limitations on human understanding and the temptation to avoid moral responsibility? Does it account for the dark side of human nature? Does it tame the cognitive errors that afflict human beings, including, for example, the proclivity for self-deception, the exacerbation of outgroup derogation and omitted variable bias? Does it recognize and counteract the tendency toward self-pity, envy, resentment, vengeance and other fundamentally destructive motivations? Does it engage in the politics of scapegoating, blaming others for suffering and injustice? Does it see others as an autonomous source of value or does it instrumentalize them? Does it hedge against the satisfaction that intellectual certainty, especially false certainty, can generate? Any intellectual system which claims, for example, that an ideal political order is one in which intellectuals are in charge should be treated with the utmost suspicion. Many of these cognitive errors and motivational malfunctions manifest themselves in in Marxism, which helps explain its enduring appeal.

The next installment in this essay series examines the logical foundations of Marx’s political economy and assesses the hypotheses that emerge out of these foundations. The third and final essay reflects on the motivational energy that magnetizes Marx’s adherents, attracting them to his doctrines, and seeks their origins.

Jordan Brennan was, formerly, an Economist with Unifor—Canada’s largest private sector labour union—a Research Associate of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School.

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Having formally parted ways with my Academic Self in 2018, I miss the act of exploratory and analytical writing. I write often for my job, of course, but on topics that I would not otherwise choose to write.

I will use Substack as a publishing house to analyze politics, the economy, broader cultural trends and film. It’s gonna be a hodgepodge of things, but I am excited to write again. I include by biography below for those who are new to me and my work.

I branded this Substack ‘Ideas in Motion’ for two reasons. First, for the better part of 15 years I devoted most of my time to a thorough examination of the major (and some minor) frameworks and perspectives in political theory, moral philosophy and economic thought. Second, I have cast a ballot for all four of Canada’s main federalist parties and have been a dues-paying member of the three principle parties. I have thought about, and comfortably ‘lived’, inside liberal, socialist and conservative political orientations, hence the reference to reference to ‘motion’.

I am currently affiliated with the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto as a Senior Fellow. Previously, I was Chief Economist and Vice President of Policy Development at the Insurance Bureau of Canada. Prior to that, I worked as an economist for Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector labour union, wherein I led the union’s engagements in macroeconomics and fiscal policy. In my capacity as Unifor’s lead economist, I sat on the Ontario Finance Minister’s Roundtable of private sector economists and acted as an advisor to the Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada.

I hold a bachelor degree in economics and accounting from Wilfrid Laurier University. My master’s and doctoral degrees, both in political science, were conferred by York University. I closed my academic career as a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.

Although it was a love for Plato and political philosophy that drew my to the academy, my research and writing examined long-term structural adjustments in the North American economy, including inflation, trade liberalization, corporate governance and economic inequality, among other topics. My writing appeared in academic forums and in popular media outlets, including the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, National Post, CBC News, Radio Canada International and Maclean’s Magazine.