SHAPIRO: Debunking Karl Marx

Perhaps the single most influential book ever written is Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. The book is often radically misinterpreted, by both its supporters and its critics. Its supporters often read it as an exhortation to violence and radical change, where the book was supposed to be predictive of inevitable trends in history; its critics often read it as a purely economic theory, when in fact Marxism makes observations about human nature. In order to examine the foolishness and ugliness of Marxism, we must begin by examining its key tenets. There are five, in the main: dialectical materialism; the Marxist theory of history; the theory of surplus value and exploitation; class struggle and revolution; the dictatorship of the proletariat and communism.

Dialectical Materialism

We must begin with one of the most commonly-misunderstood aspects of Marxism: dialectical materialism. This term is made of two terms: dialectic, and materialism. Dialectics is taken from the philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, who, to radically simplify, posited that truth could be garnered in the conflict between a thesis – an idea – and its opposite – the antithesis, created by a shortcoming in the thesis. Out of this conflict, a synthesis would emerge. Internal contradictions, in Marxist philosophy, breed inevitable revolutions. 

Combine this dialectic approach with the materialism of Marx. Marx denied the Divine, and believed that material circumstances lay at the root of human motivation, and material pursuits at the end of human goal-making. In the basic notion of dialectical materialism, then, material needs, lead to a dialectical process whereby the end result is revolution.

Marxist Theory Of History

Marxian dialectical materialism provides the basis for Marx’s interpretation of history. The question for Marx was why certain economic systems gave way to other economic systems. Marx wrote in The Critique of Political Economy:

“At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution.”

New technologies and material developments progress beyond the boundaries of the existing relations between people; this conflict creates revolution, and progress. Engels was more clear:

“The ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions ought to be sought, not in the minds of men in their increasing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the mode of production and exchange…”

Ideas are, then, a sort of disguise for underlying economic interests. In reality, it is economic conditions that drive history, not ideas.

Theory of Exploitation

According to Marx, capitalism is marred by internal contradictions. In order to reach this conclusion, Marx has to redefine capital itself. Typically, capital means, according to Adam Smith, “that part of man’s stock which he expects to afford him revenue.” This means, as Marx writes, that “Capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production….Hence capital is a universal, eternal natural phenomenon.” But Marx does not see capital this way.

Instead, capital, as Marx sees it, is “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” In other words, capital is just what capital can buy – it is not an element of production, but a form of social relations. Capitalism, then, relies on a group of people who only have the ability to sell their labor, and who must sell their labor to the capitalists. Capitalists who own the means of production – say, on a farm, a plow – can force labor to generate more labor than the laborer would for his own use, and then capture that “surplus labor.” Thus, says Marx, capitalism is a form of slavery that differs from slavery “only in the mode in which this surplus labor is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the laborer.” In reality, says Marx, there is no voluntary trade. There is exploitation. The laborer has no idea when he is working surplus and when he is working for himself because he is being paid a wage rather than just living off the labor of his own hands.

To justify this notion that there is such a thing as “surplus value” in labor being expropriated by the capitalists, Marx had to posit the notion of a true value of labor as opposed to the actual market price of labor. This was not unique to Marx – both Adam Smith and David Ricardo trafficked in a labor theory of value. According to Marx, because capitalists were determined to increase profit; they would therefore have to drive down wages in order to increase profits, leading to the relative immiseration of the proletariat.

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