Karl Marx: Capitalism's Weirdest Fanboy
Why Marx was a big believer in Capitalism
Before I studied Marx I thought his vision of a Communist society was a wholesome communal world that had done away with all the evils of capitalism. I thought it was a utopian vision following in the footsteps of Rousseau and his idea of the noble savage — the idea that humans in a state of nature are wonderful but we are corrupted by society and culture; or as Rousseau put it
"Man is born free but is everywhere in chains."
But I was wrong. This isn't Marx's vision at all. Maybe it's the vision of some Marxists but this shouldn't be confused with the views of the man himself. Marx's views are much stranger and more vague but also much much more interesting.
If this "harmony with nature" vision is like the fantasy genre then Marx's vision is a bit more sci-fi. His vision of Communism isn't a regression from capitalism but a diving in and digesting — a fulfilment and transcendence of capitalism. And that is much more interesting.
The Hegelian Marx
From 1859 onwards, Marx lived in exile in London having been cast out of Continental Europe for his radical agitating. The Marxs lived in a state of utter poverty which was so bad they lost three kids to the conditions they were living in. There were overdue debts and whenever they had visitors they had to take everything that wasn't nailed down to the pawn shop just to save face. It was a time of immense lack and stress.
What sustained Marx through this time was his faith. This wasn't a faith in one of the big world religions but in Communism. You see Marx wasn't just agitating for a revolution that he wanted to happen or that should happen. Rather, he believed it was inevitable. He believed it was fate. Over the next thirty years in exile, Marx and his lifetime collaborator Engels made no fewer than 40 predictions of imminent revolution.
As the years wore on this hope began to fade though it was never totally extinguished.
This Marxian faith derived from the core influence behind Marx's thinking — the source of his whole dialectical worldview. That source was Georg Wilhelm Hegel and he was the most influential philosopher of the 19th century and the greatest systematiser in the long tradition of philosophy. All the other giants of 19th-century philosophy had a lot to say about him: Schopenhauer hated the man calling him a flat-headed charlatan; Kierkegaard's existentialist faith was a reaction against the dominance of Hegelian thought in Denmark; Nietzsche felt his first book The Birth of Tragedy was too Hegelian and then there's Marx.
Of all these names Marx has the most ambivalent relationship with Hegel. He found Hegel's emphasis on Spirit as the guiding force of history to be utter nonsense. He was far from keen on Hegel's politics or worldview. But he adored and fully adopted the Hegelian methodology.
This methodology was called Dialectics and it's not be confused with the dialectics of Plato and Socrates. That ancient dialectics was the belief that the truth could emerge from the point and counterpoint of two conversational partners sparring. Dialectics for Hegel (and for Marx) was a much grander occurrence than mere conversation. For them, it was the canvas of history. It was the developmental pattern of human civilisation.
This Hegelian Dialectics saw history as comparable to an acorn or a caterpillar. They believed there's a natural pattern that guides the transformations of history. There are a set of forces within the acorn that lead it inevitably in the direction of the oak just as there are developmental forces at work in the caterpillar that lead to its transformations into a butterfly.
Each believed that they had found the master pattern. Hegel believed he had found it in the realm of Spirit but Marx didn't go for any of that. Instead, he was a Materialist and he could see the developmental pattern of history in the evolution of our material conditions. This view of Marx is called Dialectical Materialism.
The material conditions that Marx believed were key were in the economic sphere. He saw history as one long story of class struggle — in the same mould as Hegel's master/slave dialectic. This tension between different classes in history is what has driven the evolution of society's modes of production from the Primitive Communism of tribal peoples to the Slavery of the Ancient World into the Feudalism of the Medieval and now into the modern era of Capitalism.
These transformations were as inevitable for Marx as the acorn becoming the oak and the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. History is a dialectical process — that is to say a developmental process — and as Marx saw it we are very close to a whole new transformation. Just as Slavery gave way to Feudalism and Feudalism gave way to Capitalism so it is inevitable that Capitalism will give way to the next stage of society's evolution. Marx called this stage Communism.
This faith in the dialectical arc of history is the reason Marx and Engels had such faith that the revolution was coming any day now. It's what sustained Marx through the arduous years of exile. And it's also the reason why he loved Capitalism.
Why Marx Loved Capitalism
In a move that would appal many of his adoring fans today, Marx was full of praise for Great Britain in his essay The British Rule in India. He wrote that the British empire was "the unconscious tool of history" and while he wasn't mad about the horrendous atrocities they committed he concluded his essay with the following:
Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:
“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”
He expressed similar sentiments about the European colonisation of the Americas. For Marx, it was no more possible for these people to skip to the end of history than it was for a caterpillar to spontaneously turn into a butterfly. Before water hits the transformational point of 100ºC it has to heat up.
And so, for Communism to become possible Capitalism is necessary — it is a desirable force of history. Communism is only possible on the foundation of Capitalism. For most of his life, Marx was immovable on this point but when there was no sign of a revolution in Europe and the Russians came courting asking him if there was really no hope of revolution in Russia he softened a little but this is a departure from decades of his own theorising in the name of what seems to have been opportunism. In the end, I'm sure most Marxists would agree today that he was wrong to do so given how Leninism played out.
And so for the Marx we have in all of his writings, we see that without the industrialisation of Capitalism there is no Communism. And that's because this new stage in history isn't a return to the Primitive Communism that Rousseau adores so much but instead a whole new mode of production built on the foundation of the Capitalists.
Hence why he writes in the Communist Manifesto:
“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”
He also expressed great admiration for what Capitalism has done:
“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. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”
And so, despite being known as the most ardent enemy of Capitalism, Marx was in fact its weirdest lover. His vision of Communism was all built on the foundation of Capitalism. Capitalism was so incredibly productive that it made possible a world where we no longer have to struggle to survive but we can develop fully as humans and truly flourish. And from there who knows. Communism was not the end of history for Marx, merely its next stage. What might await beyond Communism only the dialectical weave of history could tell — the pattern of unfolding that saw the acorn of primitive communism mature thus far into Capitalism and now Communism. Unfortunately predicting the pattern of history is a labour fraught with difficulty as the subsequent history of Capitalism and Marxism amply attests to.