Das Kapital

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1867

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Part 4

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Background

Philosophical Context: Enlightenment Philosophy and Marx

Marx’s philosophy was a product of three developments that took place before he was born in 1818: the Enlightenment, the beginning of modern economic thought, and the emergence of European socialism.

The philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries who contributed to the Enlightenment opened the way for Marx in several respects. Overall, the philosophers of the Enlightenment challenged the older, dominant philosophical view of first principles, which is the theory that knowledge is best found by going back to a fundamental law or concept. Instead, they argued that knowledge is only achieved through experience and observation, which is called empiricism.

Another key theme from the Enlightenment was the idea that the quest for happiness is an important part of human nature. Instead of being innately wicked, fallen creatures, as the traditional Christian view held, humans only seek comfort and happiness. Finally, some writers of the Enlightenment expressed the view that governments are meant to reflect the will of its citizens. Altogether, these concepts shaped the idea that governments and societies should strive to guarantee the happiness of their peoples as much as possible. Furthermore, states can be changed to help the people through ideas and reforms that are determined through reason and scientific observation.

In the same era, Enlightenment writers were also pioneering the modern field of economics. Although writers had written about economics since antiquity, the concept of economics as a science started to form with the Enlightenment. The Physiocrats, an 18th-century group of French intellectuals, proposed that the wealth of a nation could be scientifically measured and that state policies could be determined through reason to improve that wealth. They were also among the first to propose the idea that the value of products is in labor. Unlike Marx, though, they believed the only products that had real value were agricultural products.

In Britain, there was Adam Smith (1723-1790), a forerunner to Marx who also sought to understand capitalism. Called the “Father of Capitalism” by modern commentators, Smith notably argued that the self-interest of business owners could benefit and add to the wealth of a nation. At the same time, though, Smith recognized the dangers if one group of capitalists came to organize and have a disproportionate influence over an economy and a government. To combat this, Smith supported regulations on businesses.

Smith, the Physiocrats, and other early economists thus bequeathed to Marx several key ideas: that economies can be scientifically studied and measured, that labor generates the value in products, that state regulations are necessary for protecting an economy and the public from abuses, and that business owners can exploit an economy to their own benefit. It should also be noted that Marx was far from the first socialist. European ideas on socialism evolved in the 18th century alongside the Enlightenment and economic thought. British socialists like Robert Owen (1771-1858) in Britain and Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797), Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) in France proposed ideas like communal ownership of land, the organization of society so that people would only have to hold jobs based on their talents and interests, measures to prevent poverty, and cooperation between workers.

However, the most direct influence on Marx was the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). A major concept in Hegel’s writing was dialectics, the idea that history changes when contradictory ideas confront each other and are overcome. For example, Hegel might say that the contradictions between the United States’ belief in individual freedom and the existence of a system of slavery in the United States caused conflict that was eventually overcome, leading to a new epoch in American history. These ideas would deeply shape Marx’s own concept of history as driven by contradictions in social relations and different modes of production emerging, co-existing, and declining.

Historical Context: The Rise of Capital and the Industrial Revolution

Much of Marx’s Capital is a response to not only the 19th-century Industrial Revolution but also the economic and social changes that had unfolded in Europe during what some historians call the early modern era (circa the late 15th to the early 19th centuries).

Three major factors unfolded that led to the economic transformations of the early modern era. By destroying so much of the European population, the Black Death put farmers and workers in high demand, which enabled them to try to demand higher wages and better treatment. It also ended serfdom in most of western Europe, a system where serfs were legally bound to work the land belonging to a feudal lord. The second factor was the rise of the Italian city-states, many of which depended on trade between the different Christian and Islamic states around the Mediterranean. Since different currencies flowed through Italy, these cities developed complex banking systems to handle the exchange rates. Finally, the colonization of the Americas, beginning in the late 15th century, brought in massive amounts of gold and silver and created new trade networks. This made Europe’s economy much more complex and global. However, it also drove up inflation and inequality between the rich and poor, specifically by causing land rents to rise. By the 17th century, the trade and exploitation of natural resources from colonization also led to the development of the first international corporations, such as the East India Tea Company, and the first stock markets in the Dutch Republic and England.

These economic factors also enabled technological developments to translate into industrialization. Efficient and commercially viable steam engines, improvements in iron production, mechanized agricultural technology, and the invention of manufacturing machines like boring machines were available in Britain by the beginning of the 19th century. By the lifetime of Karl Marx (1818-1883), Britain had become the world’s first industrialized economy, meaning that more of the economy was dependent on industry than on agriculture. Industrialization was also spreading across much of the world over the course of Marx’s life.

The Industrial Revolution completely transformed the economics of British society, while also having a number of other sociopolitical effects. One of the most salient effects was the rapid urbanization of the British population: As cities expanded and factory production intensified, more and more people left behind the countryside to find work in the urban centers. Oftentimes, the enclosure of common lands for factory yards spurred people to move to urban centers, leaving rural people with little recourse for survival but to seek work in cities. As Marx details in Capital, the working conditions for the new urban working class (often referred to as “the proletariat” in Marxist theory) were frequently harsh and exploitative, with workers—including young children—forced to work long hours for little pay and no security.

Meanwhile, the rise of capital and mass production led to the development of a new mercantile class, in which great fortunes could be made through industry. The growing strength and wealth of the mercantile class—which Marx and later communist thinkers would term the “bourgeoisie”—in turn challenged the traditional hierarchies of British society, which had long been rooted in a landed aristocracy. All of these changes had a strong influence on Marx’s thought, with Marx critiquing the growing power of the capitalist bourgeoisie and predicting the eventual takeover of the proletariat.

Critical Context: Marx’s Legacy

Karl Marx is undoubtedly one of the most controversial thinkers of the 19th century. In his own time and since his death, some of his ideas had been criticized by conservatives, liberals, and even other socialists and left-wing intellectuals. In particular, economists have challenged Marx’s analysis purportedly demonstrating that capitalist profit can only be achieved through exploitation of workers. Liberals have questioned the need for a revolution of workers, while leftist intellectuals have warned of the dangers of a post-revolutionary state bureaucracy taking actual power away from workers.

The ideas expressed in Capital have also been altered and built upon by other leftist writers, including Leon Trotsky (Our Revolution), Joseph Stalin (Foundations of Leninism), Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital), Mao Zedong (On Contradiction), and Louis Althusser (For Marx and Reading Capital), among many others. This has led to numerous offshoots of Marxism, such as Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, libertarian Marxism, and Marxist humanism. Marx would also influence diverse intellectual fields, including philosophy, history, sociology, political science, literary and film studies, anthropology, and more through his ideas of dialectical materialism and emphasis on economic modes of production as a controlling force of cultural developments. Marx has been associated with the rise of communist governments in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere, with Marx sometimes blamed for the actions of those governments.

In the United States particularly, because of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, Marx remains a figure of notoriety among US politicians and commentators. However, even in countries that did not adopt communism and including the United States, ideas supported and popularized by Marx, such as the eight-hour workday, left an impact on politics and legislation. Outside politics and economics, Marx was also a pioneer in the area of activist journalism, where journalists do not aim for objectivity but instead use research, data, and interviews to argue for a social or political cause.