Annotating Peter Singer on Marx
It’s Karl Marx’s 200th Birthday! As the historical and ideological climate has evolved, the ways to read Marx have also evolved, as is true for any influential philosopher. While the key idea behind Marx’s critique of capitalism has been the same: alienated labour, private property, class struggle, the emphasis has changed: during the Soviet Era, the historical materialist and determinist approach (‘stages of development’, etc) held sway, while since the 70s, Western intellectuals have found new ways, bringing, for example, early texts like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (but published posthumously in 1932) into focus. Marx wrote with a lot of depth and nuance, and one can focus on what’s important and useful to the current political climate.
Utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer reads Marx in the old USSR historical determinist style, but with a different objective — to prove that he is irrelevant today. In this piece I shall try to contrast Singer’s claims about Marx with quotations from Marx, hopefully showing him to be a more varied and prescient thinker than Singer gives him credit for. And if you want to explore this more complex picture of Marx, ‘Marx’s Concept of Man’ by Erich Fromm is a good start.
- How would communism work?
Singer says Marx never depicted a communist society:
Marx’s reputation was severely damaged by the atrocities committed by regimes that called themselves Marxist, although there is no evidence that Marx himself would have supported such crimes. But communism collapsed largely because, as practiced in the Soviet bloc and in China under Mao, it failed to provide people with a standard of living that could compete with that of most people in the capitalist economies.
These failures do not reflect flaws in Marx’s depiction of communism, because Marx never depicted it: he showed not the slightest interest in the details of how a communist society would function.
There are reasons for Marx’s reluctance to depict communist society, for (dialectically speaking) things are only concretised in the process of being created. Any depictions by Marx would invariably be limited by the society he lived in — a reasonable caution if one considers, how Marx’s 19th century depiction might have skewed (for example) in favour of patriarchal norms, even in spite of himself.
But it is not true that Marx held no opinions on the shape of the coming society. The Paris Commune, a genuine worker’s revolution that was soon brutally crushed by the ruling classes, happened during his lifetime, and he had nothing but praise for its reforms (and it’s useful to contrast this praiseworthy society with Soviet Russia):
2. Human Nature
Singer:
“Instead, the failures of communism point to a deeper flaw: Marx’s false view of human nature.
There is, Marx thought, no such thing as an inherent or biological human nature. The human essence is, he wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, “the ensemble of the social relations.” It follows then, that if you change the social relations — for example, by changing the economic basis of society and abolishing the relationship between capitalist and worker — people in the new society will be very different from the way they were under capitalism.”
Later in the article he states his own view of human naturre:
Most humans, instead of devoting themselves to the common good, continue to seek power, privilege, and luxury for themselves and those close to them.
But Marx did have a notion of human nature. Indeed, his concept of ‘alienation’ (that is, the analysis of what the problem is with a society where work is always dictated by one’s superiors) is hard to understand without starting from some idea of what workers are being alienated from (namely, their need to express freely their own creativity and individuality in their work). Marx’s view of human nature is most openly expressed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, although it is hard to get a succinct quote, so I’ll quote other sources. From Wikipedia:
Norman Geras gives a schedule of some of the needs which Marx says are characteristic of humans:
…for other human beings, for sexual relations, for food, water, clothing, shelter, rest and, more generally, for circumstances that are conducive to health rather than disease. There is another one … the need of people for a breadth and diversity of pursuit and hence of personal development, as Marx himself expresses these, ‘all-round activity’, ‘all-round development of individuals’, ‘free development of individuals’, ‘the means of cultivating [one’s] gifts in all directions’, and so on.
The most important aspect of human nature, for Marx, concerns our needs about work. From Socialist Worker:
Marx held a consistent view that our human nature was expressed in a drive to spontaneously and creatively produce products in a manner that is conducive to social and individual satisfaction.
Human nature is multi-faceted, and it is not true that a system which accentuates the freedom- and creativity-seeking parts of our nature, but not our power- and wealth-seeking urges, cannot exist. A system which accentuates the latter, but not the former, does exist, for example — Capitalism. Communism, for Marx, is a society in which the intrinsic drive to create and express oneself freely is given its full expression.
3. Soviet Russia
Singer:
The Soviet Union proved that abolishing private ownership of the means of production does not change human nature. Most humans, instead of devoting themselves to the common good, continue to seek power, privilege, and luxury for themselves and those close to them.
This is a weird one because it sounds like Singer is criticising Marx for saying that abolishing private ownership will stop people seeking power, privilege and luxury. I don’t know if Marx ever says this, but the essay “Private Property and Communism” explicitly lays out the problems with “crude communism”, which is the form of communal ownership in which all that has been done is to abolish private property and transfer ownership of it to the state. Marx has harsh words for crude communism:
Envy, Marx says, is as big a drive to power as wealth. Of course, establishing a society where everyone works together for the common good is a recurrent theme in Marx and also in present day Marxism. But today’s Marxists largely admit that that 20th century attempts at state communism have been a failure, and look to places like the speech on the Paris Commune for a more democratic, decentralised picture of communism. Private ownership of the means of production still needs to go, though.
4. The critique of the distributionist programme
Singer:
In fact, when Marx read a proposed platform for a merger of two German socialist parties, he described phrases like “fair distribution” and “equal right” as “obsolete verbal rubbish.” They belonged, he thought, to an era of scarcity that the revolution would bring to an end.
This refers to The Critique of the Gotha Program, but it is a quite a bad misreading. And it simply won’t do to misinterpret the Critique — it is simply too important a document, in many ways more relevant today than the Manifesto. Its criticisms of demands for “fair distribution” and “equal rights” hold tremendous value in an age where “fair distribution” often means no healthcare for the unemployed, and demanding “equal rights” results in granting of free-speech rights to corporations.
So, going back to the original text, we see that Marx’s complaint was not that demanding “fair distribution” is unnecessary, but that demanding it under the current system is counter-productive:
He goes on for a few more paragraphs, discussing how demands for a “fair distribution” and “equal rights” are compromised by the nature of the economic system. They are faulty demands for a socialist party to start from. (This is the structure of the whole of The Critique.) Singer’s misreading is weird because Marx explicitly says this:
It’s laid out explicitly here: “Equal right” and “fair distribution” are “ideological nonsense”. “Ideology” in the Marxist sense is not the current meaning of “political belief system”, but means something like “the false beliefs about society that one holds due to a superficial understanding of how the economic system affects the society”.
The ideas of fair distribution and equal right, which originate in the enlightenment, are obsolete not because they will be unnecessary, but because they were rendered obsolete when Marx’s theories identified the essential aspect of capitalism as production:
Perhaps Singer, when he says Marx thinks the problems of right and distribution will disappear under communism, is referring to this famous paragraph a few lines later:
But I don’t think Marx is saying here that the problems of “fair distribution” or “equal right” will disappear under the final stage of communism, he’s saying that only then can we demand them (inscribe them on our banners), because only then do they acquire a sensible, non-contradictory meaning.
5. The ‘Springs of Private Wealth’
Singer:
Ironically, the clearest demonstration that the springs of private wealth flow more abundantly than those of collective wealth can be seen in the history of the one major country that still proclaims its adherence to Marxism.
Under Mao, most Chinese lived in poverty. China’s economy started to grow rapidly only after 1978, when Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping (who had proclaimed that, “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”) allowed private enterprises to be established. Deng’s reforms eventually lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty, but also created a society with greater income inequality than any European country (and much greater than the United States). Although China still proclaims that it is building “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” it is not easy to see what is socialist, let alone Marxist, about its economy.
But one might also look at poverty in smaller countries which transitioned from communism to capitalism, where the government couldn’t keep such a tight hold on the economy:
There’s no doubt that opening up the economy has been beneficial to the middle classes in India and China and the poor in China. But, as Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz asserts, it has also been disastrous for the poor in (especially) Africa, South-East Asia, Eastern Europe. These small countries did not have the power to deny the ‘restructuring’ demands that the IMF made of them in the 1990s (which largely involved scaling back welfare and government regulation). As a result, foreign corporations have ruthlessly torn traditional societies asunder with nothing to replace them but the rule of money:
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. ”
That’s from the Communist Manifesto, btw.
6. Irrelevance?
Singer ends by saying that
we can conclude that in politics, as in economics, [Marx] is indeed irrelevant.
I don’t think the recent loss of ground suffered by neoliberalism, and the growing support for socialism in Europe and the US, supports this diagnosis. As for the economics, I shall cede the last word to renowned inequality economist Branko Milanovic (who is not a Marxist, but quite a mainstream figure):
So long as capitalism exists, Marx will be read as its most astute analyst. If capitalism ceases to exist, he will be read as its best critic. So whether we believe that in another 200 years, capitalism will be with us or not, we can be sure that Marx will.
