What Marx and Marxism offer Today?

Marx died in 1883 so we’re talking 150 years of the spread of his thinking and writing literally to every country on Earth with loads of people contributing their varying interpretations of what it all means. But I want to focus on the U.S. today, particularly, and ask that question what does the Marxian approach to thinking about society offer us? I think, of course, that it offers good things, otherwise I wouldn’t be taking your time or mine to talk about this. It’s a question that should have been asked much more in this country than it has been, but anyway, I want to ask it, and I want to begin to answer it.

Number one: Marxism offers a way out to people who have had enough of capitalism. It is a critical approach. Marx’s entire life was devoted to criticizing capitalism into which he was born and in which he lived his life. By having died in 1883 he never lived long enough to see any actual attempt to establish something that wasn’t capitalist. His was a critical effort, his basic idea was we can, and we should do better than capitalism. So, it is a theory, it is a body of writing for people who share that view, who’ve had it with capitalism are able to think that way and pose that to themselves. And here’s a thinker, who had that idea too and here’s what he came up with as a way to go about this.

The second thing: those Marxian writings and the Marxian tradition offer, is an understanding which follows from the first thing. I just said that capitalism is itself transitory, it’s not perpetual and this is something that is no minor matter that capitalism like slavery and feudalism and ancient tribal village economies. It has a history, it’s born, it evolves over time, and then it passes away to be replaced by something else that has happened to every other economic system. And Marxism insists, that it’s going to happen to capitalism too. And at least he insists in such a way as, to kind of provoke us, he says isn’t the burden on those of you who want to imagine it will last forever rather than the burden on me who imagines it’ll be like every other system we’ve ever had in the history of the human race. Pretty good point and then he goes a little bit further, and he says I’m going to show you how the different systems go about handling the same basic problem and then he said I’ll be able to show you what it means to say we can go better than capitalism so here’s the problem every economic system has to solve – says Marx – not the one you might think, although he admits that’s part of it, producing the goods and services without which we cannot feed, clothe, shelter ourselves, have a decent life, share our relationships with other people, and so on.

He agrees with all of that, but he takes it a step further: he says, there’s something else that every society, every economic system has to do. He says, in every society not all the people work. This is a remarkable insight. It’s kind of obvious, once you hear it, but that’s like a lot of great truths you didn’t get it until someone said it and then you said, oh, that’s obvious. Well, it is, but takes time to figure it out. Here’s his idea. In every society of human beings some people work, that is they use their brains and their muscles, and they transform nature into useful products. A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater, and so on, but it’s always true, Marx says, that not all the people do it. All the people sit on chairs, all the people get and need sweaters and food and everything else, but they don’t all work. And what that means – Marx says – and I’m going to use his language: is that a portion of the working class, that is a portion of the people that do the work produces more than they themselves consume. In other words, we don’t produce just enough to feed, clothe and shelter the ones who are doing working, because that would leave out all the others who don’t do work and they survive. And they have shelter, and they have food, and they have clothing, and so the only way to figure this out Marx says, is there has to be a mechanism, a way in which those who do the work produce an extra over and above what they themselves consume and they pass that to the people who don’t do work, so that they can survive too. The obvious examples are easy: children. Children that are too young to work, I mean it’s not a human society if we simply take all those children and chuck them in the woods, right, we don’t do that. We maintain them, we feed them, we clothe them, we shelter them, we consider that a basic part of what it means to be human. So, there has to be a surplus. This is Marx’s word: a surplus what workers produce over and above

what they themselves consume to feed the children but then again children aren’t the only ones are they what about sick people what about elderly people there are a whole part of every society your human history has any record of there are all kinds of people who don’t work who don’t help produce but who consume and if there are people who consume but don’t produce then the people who do produce have to produce extra in order for those who don’t work to consume. That’s true in every human society. Marx tells us what distinguishes human societies is how they organize this. How they decide who’s going to be a worker, who’s not going to work, who’s going to live off the surplus that the working part of the population delivers to the rest. And let me give you an example from the United States. Right now, we say the population of the United States is 330 million people more or less. The size of our labor force according to the United States Labor Department is about 150-155 million.

In other words, half in our society, half the people are producing a surplus big enough to sustain the other half. Nor is that unusual, so, every society does it, but they do it differently. And here comes the interesting part. How does a slave society do it? Very interesting. It makes one group of people, the slaves, do all the work. They produce a surplus but the surplus they produce is big enough that not only can it take care of the slave babies and the slave sick people and the slave elderly, but the surplus is big enough that another group of people, not babies, not sick, not elderly, but masters can take it for themselves. In fact, the way slavery works everything the slave produces, even the slave is the property of the master. The master gets it all and then gives back to the slave enough to reproduce the slave, keeping the rest the surplus for the masters and they can live quite a life. If you’ve never seen it, go watch that famous American movie Gone with the Wind and it’ll give you a lovely display of how that worked in the American south. But it’s common to all slaveries, so you can have a large number of people producing a surplus for a small number who live very high on that famous hog. In feudalism – Marx says – it’s kind of different but similar. It’s different in the sense nobody’s a slave but it’s the same because a small number of people, the lords, the feudal lords get the surplus produced by the mass of the workers who are called serfs and now Marx draws the implication for us capitalism. He was very critical of slavery before. Here in this country, we fought a war in which capitalism denounced slavery and defeated it in the American south. Freeing all the slaves that’s quite a blow.

Capitalism promised freedom, liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy would come with their changes, and they believed it. Sincerely. But what we’ve come to see Marx said was something different from what was promised. We don’t have the liberty, equality, fraternity what we got was a new system that’s different from the old. We don’t have slaves, we don’t have serfs, but we have something called employers and employees and what that means is that a mass of people, the employees do the work and produce an enormous surplus which is in the hands of the employers who use it to live high on the hog and to hire a vast array of people that they can sustain who don’t work at all in terms of producing goods and services, the capitalist sustains, let’s take an example. The capitalist owns and operates a chair factory. Makes chairs, but the capitalist is scared that during the night people may come and take away the machinery, so he hires a person to go around and around the chair factory at night in a little jeep to make sure nobody messes with things. He takes a part of his surplus he gets from his chairmaking workers and gives it to this fellow in the jeep. The guy in the jeep doesn’t help produce chairs, it’s nothing to do with it. Completely irrelevant. How does he live if he doesn’t help produce goods and services? Answer: a part of the surplus is given to him by the people who gather it into their hands. Those are the employers, Marx says. Look at that.

That shows us that we haven’t broken from the pattern of slavery and feudalism even though we’ve changed to capitalism, we still have a mass of people doing the work, producing that surplus as happens in all societies but giving it to a tiny minority. Masters were a tiny minority, lords were a tiny minority and employers are a tiny minority, and we allow them to decide who to support with that surplus, what to do with it, and Marx says, once you understand that, you can immediately see a powerful punchline. We don’t have to do that! We don’t need a master, we don’t need a lord, and we don’t need an employer. The workers could always have done this on their own. You could have a different system. There comes the critical insight of Marx! Making clear what it means to do better than capitalism.

Marx is offering us a real alternative: a concrete way to understand change beyond capitalism that offers us a better way which at a time of capitalism disappointing and I’m being polite here a growing number of people is no minor contribution. So, let’s see what it means. If surplus is produced by workers, and that’s clear in slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, in Marx’s view then the real breakthrough, the real alternative is not another system that has a minority

appropriating the surplus into its hand that a majority produces, that was feudalism, that was slavery, and that is capitalism.

The real breakthrough, the real change the way to go beyond not just capitalism but all of such systems is to not allow that difference. Not to have a small group of people in the dominant position to direct and therefore take the surplus from the mass of people that are working, the employees in capitalism, and the way to change that is not to replace private individuals with government officials, because that doesn’t change the basic relationship. It changes who occupies the position, but not what the position is. The real breakthrough that Marx’s argument shows us is if we and, here we go now, make the workplace undivided. Not master-slave, not lord-surf, not employer-employee but to make it a community, a self-governing democratic community. Everybody has one vote and together we decide

through debate and then majority voting what we want to do in this workplace what we want to produce how we want to do it, where we want to do it and what we want to do with the total output, the revenue we get if we sell it and so on. Make a community out of the workplace rather than a divided tension-ridden master-slave, lord-serf, employer-employee, make it a community and by the way this word community, that’s what the word communism initially meant for Marx.

It had nothing to do with the government. It had nothing to do with the state. It had to do with what he was focused on, which was reorganizing the core of production in a society how the goods and services get organized in

terms of producing and distributing them, which for him became this question of how the surplus is managed, so a worker co-op which is the name given in the United States and some other countries is for Marx the logical breakaway from capitalism, the way to cure capitalism’s ills, the way to do better than capitalism. So, let’s review that. If you’re a democrat with a small d, you believe in democracy, well then Marx’s argument ought to appeal to you right off the bat, because he’s talking about effectively democratizing the enterprise. Democratizing the workplace and a commitment to democracy should never have exempted the workplace from what democracy represents and means and offers us. But there’s another dimension to this Marx points out. That all through history, ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Europe and in many other parts of the world human beings have repeatedly tried this gone in this direction. Wanted at least to explore to experiment with community production in some societies. This was done for centuries, native American tribes did that. They produced community-wise. They didn’t divide into a minority that got the surplus. No. The surplus was produced by people together and then together they decided what to do with it how to use it as a collective  community resource that surplus they had together produced so this is a way of thinking that is both critical of capitalism in important ways and, of course, I can’t go into the details here in any kind of comprehensive way with the half an hour program but it does lead me to suggest to you that one of the first and most important books that Democracy at Work produced was a book called Understanding Marxism. The short book we issued a later with a longer edition, I invite you get a hold of a copy in your library, buy one, whatever, but there you will see these arguments developed in much more detail answering the questions that no doubt is arising in your mind and that should arise in your mind. Well, let me go back.

I want to close this conversation, this summary conversation of what Marxian economics offers, by suggesting to you that the criticism Marx levy went after those aspects of capitalism that he felt would make people understand, that they could, and they should do better. Marx was very sophisticated. He understood that every system had in it people who believed that that system would last forever. Capitalism is not exceptional in that regard. Sure, a lot of people at various times think that this system either has existed forever or will or both. There were people who thought that about slavery, there were people who thought that about feudalism, now they were all wrong and that might make you at least begin to wonder about people who act like there’s nothing else but capitalism that they may be blind to something. Marxism makes you aware of that. Makes you ask that question and that’s an important contribution right there in and of itself, but then Marx went on and looked at the system for the things in it that were contradictory, he liked to say things that showed that this system had problems, it wasn’t likely to be able to solve.

Let me mention a couple. Every capitalist has the incentive to lower the costs of whatever it is he or she produces so, saving on your labor costs is always a big one. Getting workers at a lower wage that you have to pay them doing with fewer workers maybe because you buy a machine or making the existing workers work harder or work longer or work faster there’s countless ways to lower the amount of money that you as an employer give your workers because other things equal that’s more profit for you every capitalist understands that, every business school has courses in how to do this, but Marx comes along and says wait a minute. If the capitalists are successful in shaving off portions of what they pay their workers one way or another, the irony is this hurts them they don’t seem to get it if you don’t give money to the workers, they’re the majority, they’re your market, they’re the people who buy whatever it is capitalists produce, and if they don’t have the money from the capitalists they won’t be able to buy from the capitalists and what you gained in profit by paying them less you lose because you can’t sell your output.

This is a conundrum; this is a built-in problem when you organize society’s production between an employer and an employee and make profit a bigger issue. Very interesting, isn’t? We live in that problem, it’s never been resolved, ever. Marx makes another point. Capitalism has a built-in tendency for the tiny minority, the employers who get the surplus in their hands, to take an ever-bigger chunk of it for themselves. In other words, he explains, that capitalism has built into it a mechanism for ever greater inequality. One of the reasons Thomas Piketty back in 2014, wrote the book and the famous book he wrote and called it Capital in the 21st Century, a nod to Marx who called his great work Capital, was because he was saying the same thing. Demonstrating it with all the statistics of what has happened since Marx died, but basically showing that capitalism until the people rise up and stop it produces ever greater inequality. But that has the same problem, the richer don’t need to spend money the way average people do, so they don’t. But that means goods are not being purchased in the market because you have moved wealth away from the middle and lower class who spend it, into the hands of the super rich, who don’t. You got to work this out, otherwise it’ll cripple your economy. That’s what it’s doing in the United States right as I speak to you.

Marx figured that out. Marx gives us a way to think about that and to see how that connects to the whole notion of history moving from one system to another, it allows us to ask what are the signs that capitalism now is coming to an end are, they persuasive what are the options of where to go, how, as I pointed out in a program earlier is fascism an attempt to hold on to a system that is running out of gas. But before I end for today, I want to talk about what Marxism has to offer in terms of the United States. Today there is something called mainstream economics, it’s what I was taught in the universities I attended and it’s what I’ve been asked to teach and often have in the universities where I’ve been a professor and in that mainstream economics there is no surplus. There is no question about some people producing a surplus for others. Mainstream economics does not work like that, does not look at that idea. Ignores it. Doesn’t take it seriously. Doesn’t even bother to refute it. Occasionally, but not much, just pretends it isn’t there. And here’s very interesting to me what do they offer instead. In their view, in mainstream economics view the economy is kind of lots of individuals, you, me, him, her, they, we’re all here and we’re buying and selling whatever it is we have, some of us only have our ability to work to sell others are people who buy our ability, those happen to be employers. How do they have the money? Well, they saved it, we didn’t save it, so we can’t do that you know all kinds of wonderful stories about an economy composed of individuals and in this economy we each do the best we can, and we end up with whatever it is we can get out of this system. If we’re just a worker well, we get a wage and if we’re an employer well we get a profit and if we’re a landlord well we get a rent and it’s kind of reasonable. It’s just we each get what we contribute, we each get what we deserve, you know, what that reminds me of the role of the church in medieval Europe and the role of the church in many places to tell everybody that what you got and what you get is what you deserve. The reason is if god wanted you to be in a different place he would have so arranged matters it’s interesting argument the modern equivalent is if you have a bad job and you have a low income that’s because that’s what you deserve. It’s your fault, there is no system distributing surpluses that you can look to explain the situation. It’s really all about the individual now in this country we are afraid as a nation of the Marxian idea that’s why it isn’t taught in universities. Very rare, is not spoken about publicly by our political leaders or in the mass media that’s a loss to everybody and if I’ve done anything, my hope is to give you an idea that we ought to be talking about what Marx has to offer and what Marxism has to offer, because by not doing it we are the poorer. That’s all and we need all the help we can get with a capitalism in as deep a trouble as ours is today.

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