Welcome to part one of a four-part series on the work and the contribution
made by Karl Marx. We do this now because it's the 200th anniversary of Karl
Marx's birth, but of course the real reason we do it, is because we think that
that work, that criticism of the capitalist economic system, remains a
source of important insights, that can be useful for all of those who want to make
a better world out of the one we're now living in and through. Before I start, I
have to acknowledge what I'm sure you all know, that words like Marx and
Marxism, socialism, communism, and all that, have been scare words for an awful lot
of us for many years. The cold war that erupted after 1945, and pretty much the
whole time since, has been a time when words like that were associated with
scary other countries, scary dangers to various aspects of the way we live, and
so they inspired a mixture of fear and anxiety, and the way that worked out for
an awful lot of Americans, and indeed people elsewhere too, was a decision not
to pay any attention to the work of Karl Marx, not to read it, not to think about
it, and unfortunately that meant we didn't
learn from it. So let me begin by explaining briefly what it is we can
learn. Karl Marx was a critic of capitalism. He didn't like the system, and
he basically thought that the human race could and should do better, and so he
spent his adult life explaining and analyzing for all the rest of us, what it
was that he found inadequate about capitalism, where
exactly he thought we could and should do better, and to present that as clearly
and persuasively as, I think, he knew how. Why should we pay attention to the
critic? And well the answer is simple: critics have their perspective. It's
different from the perspective of people who like something, and the way an
intelligent person goes about dealing with a difficult topic, is to interrogate
and to investigate what the people believe who like it, but also what the
people believe who don't like it, and then we draw our own conclusions. It's a
little bit like wanting to understand the family that lives up the road, mama,
Papa, and the two kids that they have. Even though we know one kid thinks it's
the greatest family there ever was, and the other one thinks it's a basket case
of psychological dysfunction, if we're gonna study the family, we wouldn't
choose to talk to one child, neither the one or the other, what we would do if we
were honest, would be to talk to both children, hear what they have to say, ask
questions, and then draw our own conclusions about that family, making the
best judgment we can. Well, likewise, so it is with capitalism. We study in this
country of the United States, but in other countries too, we have plenty of
folks who help us study what's good about it, what they like about it, what's
positive. But a well-rounded understanding, an honest engagement with
the system we live in, would require us to look at critics as well. And for the
last 200 years, the leading critic has been Karl Marx, more than any other
person. He's as important on the side of
criticizing capitalism, as folks like Adam Smith, and Ricardo, and John Millet
Maynard Keynes, are on the side of those who think capitalism really is the best
thing since sliced bread. So let's jump right in.
What motivated Karl Marx as a young man growing up in the middle of the 19th
century as he did? Well the answer is: the goals of the French and American
revolutions. He said so many times. He loved the slogan of the French
Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity, brotherhood. He loved the idea of the
American Revolution, democracy, and he wanted those things to be realized in
modern society, in the middle of the 19th century Europe, where he grew up and
lived his life. But he lived at a time when he was becoming doubtful of a basic
idea, that had grown up since the French and American Revolution, and this idea
was, that we would get rid of the old systems of slavery and feudalism, masters
and slaves, and lords and serfs, was now behind us, we would have a new world, a
capitalist world, where the two players were employers and employees, no longer
unfree slaves, no longer unfree serfs. And by having capitalism replace feudalism
and slavery, we would usher in a world of liberty, equality, fraternity and
democracy. Well Karl Marx, coming fifty to a hundred years later, says, well we got
the capitalism all right, but the promise that capitalism would mean and would
deliver liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, well, it has not happened. Karl
Marx looked around the Europe of his time, in the middle of the century, and
what he saw is pretty much what was written down, for example in the novels
of Charles Dickens. He saw an enormous gap between a relatively small part of
the population, that was well-off, well educated, literate and comfortable,
and on the other a mass of workers in the industries and the factories, who
were none of those things, who were poor, who were uneducated, who were illiterate,
and who were suffering; and he felt the betrayal. It's not too strong a word.
Capitalism had betrayed in his view, the promise that had led so many people that
he admired, to support the end of feudalism, and the end of slavery, and
they welcomed they all offered to a capitalism, because it promised liberty,
equality, fraternity, and democracy. And so he set himself a goal: what happened was
the great question for him. Why did capitalism not bring the promise? Why had
it failed to do that? And the research he undertook, which he then wrote up, is what
we have now as a criticism of capitalism, because what he basically discovered and
wrote about, was that capitalism not only wasn't the vehicle for bringing to be
into being, liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy, it was in fact an obstacle
to realizing those lofty goals, which Marx never stopped saluting and making
his goals as well. Well what does it mean to be a critic of capitalism? It means
that he found in capitalism, and this is what we're going to study in our
discussions in parts two, three, and four of this series, he found in capitalism
the elements of a system that made it impossible to have liberty, equality,
fraternity, and democracy. He felt that capitalism blocked, prevented, thwarted
whatever progress in those directions human
beings had achieved; and that led him of course to the conclusion: that in order
to get closer to liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy, we had to go to
a different kind of system, one that was fundamentally different from capitalism,
and for reasons that he will explain and would explain to us, that was for him the
task; and to summarize in this first introductory presentation, what it was he
found, it runs roughly like this: in the slavery we reject, human beings were
divided into two groups, masters and slaves. The wealth, the power, the cultural
dominance, was in the hands of the Masters. The slaves literally were
property of those other people. The society was shaped, governed run by the
masters, for the system's reproduction over time. Masters wanted to stay masters;
masters wanted their children to be masters in turn. If you were born into
that society as a slave, you were a slave, and your children would be slaves. For
Marx, this was an abhorrent system, and he rejected it. The same applies to
feudalism. There the two positions you could occupy, were either the Lord, who
owned, and operated, and ran, and dominated, much like the masters had in slavery, but
the mass of other people weren't the property of the Lord. They were free, at
least in relationship to what slaves had been. But, they were serfs. If you were
born to a family of serfs, you were ipso facto a serf too. The two positions were a
minority of lords, and a majority of serfs, like a minority of masters and a
majority of slaves. Now here comes Marx's punchline:
capitalism he said, wasn't successful in breaking out of that model. A few who
dominate, a mass who don't. All that capitalism did, he said, was to replace
the dichotomies of master/slave, Lord/serf, with a new one. It was different, and
in that difference, there's lots of important lessons. It was different
because, what? The minority, which was still there, had a new name: they were
called employers; and the majority also had a new name: they were called
employees. But, when you look closely at this system, Marx said, it's very much
like the slavery and the feudalism, which it overthrew, because the dominant role
in society, is again played by the employers. They control the politicians;
they control the direction of social development; they make all the decisions
in the workplace; they run the show; they dominated; and the mass of people are
subordinated. And so Marx said, we have to ask how and why this system of
employer-employee, which we call capitalism, was unable to realize the
liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy that it had promised. What is
it about the relationship between the employer and the employee, that
reproduces a society bedeviled by instability, conflict, tension, inequality,
the absence of fraternity, and a mockery of the notion of democracy, starting
right in the work place, where all the power to decide what to produce, how to
produce, where to produce, what to do with the profits, is made by a tiny group
of people at the top, whereas everybody who works producing those very profits,
has no say at all. That's not democracy; that is its opposite. Lastly, let me point
out, before we get into the nuts and bolts of what Marx's contribution was in
analyzing capitalism, because that's what he did in his life, let me make it clear
one other reason why it's worth looking at his contributions. Marx died in 1883,
so roughly, a hundred and forty years ago. That's not very long at historical time,
but in that relatively short period of 140 years, Marx's ideas spread to every
country on the face of this planet. People in the most completely different
economic, political, and cultural conditions, found enormous meaning in
what Marx wrote. That's why in every country, there are Marxist organizations,
Marxist unions, Marxist newspapers, Marxists societies, Marxist political
parties, and so on. For me, to be able to come before you, and say let's look at
what this man has to say, is simply to be able to say, here and now to you, what has
been effectively said to literally every peoples on this earth. If they all found
the meaning in it, my guess is we can and we will do it; and that's what this
fourth, four-part series is intended to do. Well, we've come to the end of part
one of these four parts. I hope you found it interesting and worthwhile, and that
you will join with us in taking a look at the other parts as well. Toward that
end, please be sure to visit patreon.com that's patreon/economicupdate,
our regular radio and television program. There you
will find the subsequent installments of this four-part series; and remember, we
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democracyatwork.info and rdwolff.com. Thank you for your attention,
and let's turn now to part 2.