Heritage of Hegel:
| 1. He recognized the importance of history, and therefore also had a sense of progress. For Hegel, we are not rational individual actors first, and secondly find ourselves in a world; rather, we come to our rationality, and indeed our consciousness, through a historical process. The development is toward a more encompassing truth, rationality, and freedom. 2. There is an important role for opposition and antagonism in this process. Struggle and loss is an essential part of any move forward. 3. 1 + 2 means that human history is not the chaotic mess that it seems. There is an order underneath history 3. The attainment of the goal is by the human race, not by the individual. Since progress is historical, and since individuals cannot transcend their place in that historical movement, the goal of self-consciousness, rationality, and freedom, must be one that the race is achieving, rather than any particular individual. |
Marx accepts all these ideas, but thinks that the progress of history comes through our relationship to matter. What is matter? Not just stuff lying around, but stuff that we produce, and stuff that we consume. All we are is producers and consumers.
But we produce and consume things differently in different times. We organize our societies around our production and consumption. And that organization has an effect on us. Just as driving a car makes you into a car-driver, one who has a skill at interacting with a machine in a certain way, producing things for consumption makes us into something specific. But what? It depends on the time in history that we are talking about.
The force of producing is so strong that it determines everything about us. Even our reason is dependent on the mode of production in which we find ourselves (and, as a result, the social and political reality that we find ourselves in).
| Think of how physical reality shapes our "mental" reality. The kind and position of furniture in an office or classroom sets a certain power relationship. If someone speaks from behind a large podium, there is a sense of authority. If someone in an office has a large desk, with a large chair, and when you come in, you sit in a less impressive chair on the other side of the desk, that communicates something about power. |
Now, if our material reality creates a way of being in the world, it is even more true that our social relationships based on matter creates a way of being. Marx, like any scientist, wants to account for human action, but he regards individual human action as only a small example of overall human action, that is, our collective way of acting in relation to material things.
The bulk of Marx's writings is directed at an analysis of the particular mode of production in which we find ourselves now: the capitalist system.
Anyone who has ever heard of Marx likely knows that he does not think much of capitalism. However, he does not think it should never have happened. In fact, he thinks it is an inevitable development from previous systems of production.
Capitalism, for Marx, is fundamentally a system of inequality. It cannot operate unless some people, who have the "capital" that can support large-scale industry, invest it, hire other people who don't have the capital but have labour, and mass-produce goods that everyone buys. This means that some people "make money" due to their investment, while those who had nothing to invest are paid for their labour, but are never paid in full. This creates alienation.
| 1. The worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. The thing he creates does not belong to him, dominates him, and only serves in the long run to increase his poverty. 2. Alienation also appears in the process of production and productive activity itself. The process itself is just a means to satisfy other needs. It is not part of his real life. 3. Alienated labour alienates man from his species. In alienated labour, we come under the illusion that we are just individuals struggling against other individuals. Furthermore, relationships between people have been replaced by relationships between things. 4. Nature itself is alienated from man. |
What does alienation produce? A progressively polarized society, where the "haves" and the "have-nots" are more starkly defined as time goes on. The middle class shrinks, and those who have not become more and more miserable.
But they also come to "class consciousness". They realize that it is not their lack of initiative that is the problem, but that the system itself is stacked against them. The notion of a group consciousness is not unique to Marx. Think of feminism in the 60s. Women collectively started realizing that there was systemic discrimination. They came to "gender consciousness"
Of course, Marx thinks this is the beginning of change. Once you realize that it is an issue of class, you can change things on a new level. The march to Marx's communist state begins here.
So, what is scientific about this? Marx thought he was doing science for a number of reasons:
1. He believed he was being empirical, unlike previous political thinkers who started from "ideology", or an abstract set of ideas.
2. He believed he was describing the world as it was, using a model. The notion of falsifiability wasn't around at the time, but he thought he could verify the model. To this end, he did work on Ireland, India, France, and of course England.
3. He thought he was giving an account of the underlying order of our seemingly random and self-interested actions.