Das Kapital: What Did Marx Actually Have to Say?

Politics in the modern world is increasingly divisive. In the US political system labels matter, and it can be the death knell for a political career to be called “socialist” in reference to your ideas.

Putting aside the fact that all federal and state-wide policies are by definition socialist, funded centrally from tax revenues, there is a reason the political right wield this word like a weapon. It has its roots in the key differentiator the US, and the western world, espoused as the difference between them and their great enemy the Soviets: capitalism vs communism.

Of course, calling someone a communist is a much harder sell these days since the fall of the Soviet Union, and no longer carries the direct accusations of treachery. Those labelled with any suggestion of left-wing politics are now traitors to US ideals, rather than directly working with the enemy.

But for the western world capitalism is and remains king. The ideas behind communism are so poisonous that it doesn’t really matter where those ideas come from, or what they mean. Better for the demagogues if their followers don’t actually understand them, far easier if they just hear the dog whistle and respond as they need to.

• Colada and Tizona, the Two Legendary Swords of El Cid
• The Komet: The Most Dangerous Warplane Ever Built?

But a moment to look at the conditions that gave rise to communism might give them pause. Wealth inequality in the US at present is far wider than it was when Karl Marx, whose critique of capitalism laid the foundations for communism, was inspired to pick up his pen. 

We would not suggest that Marx was entirely right in his assessment of capitalism, nor would we agree with his conclusions. But if you bypass the content in favor of being told what to think you risk being misguided, and indeed many politicians nowadays rely on just that. The Bible is often used in this way too, with selective distorted interpretations bypassing the message.

So, what then was Marx trying to say. What was behind his assessment of capitalism, and why did he reach the conclusions that he did?

The Thief of Time

Marx only lived to see the publication of the first volume of the three which make up Das Kapital in 1867. The other two were only published after his death, in 1885 and 1894. Together they formed his life’s work.

Nor are these particularly radical assessments of the growing prominence of capitalism, or at least Marx did not appear to think so. However his view of what capitalism actually was  cannot be argued to be a fundamental shift.

Nor was Marx wholly against capitalism, although he recognized its flaws with a clarity few before had offered. His genius was not to simply see capitalism as an economic model, but as something wider which came out of our society.

This has far-reaching implications. For a start, it means that capitalism came out of what came before: it is not a concept which stands on its own but an evolution of pre-existing market interactions, with all the imbalances already baked into the system.

His argument, in brief, is that capitalism divides society into two, those who have the capital and those who do not. His conclusion was that the former exploit the latter to enrich themselves, and that the method they use is the exploitation of their labor.

Marx’s essential central point was that, to put it bluntly, the capitalists do not generate profit but rely on their workforce to do so. Therefore, any profit that capitalists keep for themselves has come from the labor of the workforce: they did all the work and kept only some of the money.

Of course capitalists would argue that they provide the capital without which the workforce cannot generate such profits, the “means of production” as he termed it. In real terms these can be seen as the factories and warehouses, the raw materials and the like which the workforce turn into finished goods to be sold for profit. The capitalist is taking the chance, and so should get the reward.

Marx was not even the first to recognize this idea of “surplus value” whereby the workforce earn money for the capitalists. The Irish philosopher William Thompson wrote about it as early as 1824, although in a much more general fashion.

What Marx did do was to apply this idea to the world he saw around him. His conclusions, at least in terms of the endgame for capitalism, were based on an extrapolation of this trend.

He saw capitalism, crucially, not as a cycle of boom and bust but as a spiral, an increasing imbalance in the system. Even taking into account the fact that capitalists could be ruined by unwise investment of their capital, they would as a class grow richer, and the workforce grow poorer. This would become more and more acute until the system collapsed.

Marx’s famous cry that workers should “seize the means of production” or rather work for themselves collectively and remove the parasitic capitalism who took from them, turned out to be one of the bloodiest in history. Human society was gripped with destructive revolution as half the world was gripped by his idea.

There is much to regret about the history of the 20th century, and much of that can be laid at the feet of Das Kapital. It is this outcome, rather than the ideas behind it, which has increasingly led to Marx being demonized in the Western world.

But that doesn’t mean his observations were wrong. With wealth inequality in the United States at its highest in history, with millions starving while a handful own more than they can possibly use, it does seem that his idea that capitalism is a worsening cycle has merit.

Maybe, at some point in the future, his ideas may merit a reassessment, if not his violent conclusions. But it seems increasingly likely that something extreme may have to happen for that to occur. Does Marxism have a role in our future?

Perhaps not, but at this point it seems that capitalism might not, either.

Top Image: Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism in Das Kapital is one of the most influential texts in the entirety of human history. Source: Ürfan1917 / CC BY-SA 4.0.

Written by Allthathistory

1 comment