Marx, Materialism, and Exploitation Marx\'s

Marx, Materialism, And Exploitation

Marx's philosophy of materialism may be said to lead to the conclusion that capitalism inevitably exploits the workers. This contention is still widely debated today; the increase in living standards for the proletariat in Western capitalist nations such as America and England has led many to argue that such exploitation in Marx's day was more incidental than inevitable, and that communism has been discredited by the passage of time which has not seen comprehensive proletariat revolutions. It is indeed true that Marx's historical predictions have been thwarted (partly by the actions of proletariat/union driven governments and partly by capitalists who appear to be aware of the need to placate their workers to avoid revolt) -- however, this is only significant as long as one understands Marx's claims only as saying that capitalism inevitably leads to exploitation of the workers, when it also says that capitalism is intrinsically exploitative to the workers. Capitalism may not always lead to further exploitation in the sense of reduced living standards (in fact, it now seems likely that --at least in the immediate sense-- advanced capitalism will encourage a great deal of consumerism that would easily pass for increased living standards), but Marx's critique of its exploitative nature is still legitimate because the state of capitalism is inherently exploitative regardless of whether it is immediately experienced as a harm.

Before addressing the intrinsic exploitation of capitalism, it might be wise to back up and face the fact that Marx's main critique of Capitalism at the first printing of the Communist Manifesto was based on the idea that capitalism would lead to decreased living standards and the exploitation of the proletariat. Marx argued that Capitalism must be constantly expanding and seeking new markets and cheaper labor, and creating social unease in order to spike consumerism and to increase the labor and resource pool available to them. Marx writes that "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones." This disturbance, Marx argues, leads to globalism (the destabilization of independent nations which he suggests is more profound even than that created by communism) and the destruction of the property of independent artisans and small peasants in favor of the property rights of the corporate bourgeoisie. He continues to argue that Capitalists consider workers as a form of capital, and after the aristocrat's oblesse noblige has been eroded from their consciousness and after the small holdings of the peasantry and the artisans have been capitalized upon and thereby subsumed, that nothing further will prevent Capitalists from keeping workers on a shoestring, paying just enough to support their survival and reproduction, disallowing their ability to amass capital and property of their own or to survive without the capitalist class. This brutalization will be accompanied by inevitable over-production as the destruction of the people coincides with a steady erosion of markets coinciding with increased mechanization, so that the time comes when people are no better than chattel which is increasingly impoverished and irrelevant. However, these same stressors (over-production and the loss of markets) are said to bring the proletariat into conflict with the bourgeoisie. "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable," Marx writes.

Marx's conviction on this point was drawn from his materialism and his dialectic sense of historical progression in which "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." (Marx) the dialectic which suggested that each class and epoch carried within it the seeds of its own destruction and the creation of the next class certainly explains his conviction that the bourgeoisie would create its own grave-diggers, just as the aristocract had done in allowing the bourgeoisie to rise to power. Of course, Marx seems a little blind to the fact that there may be "hitherto existing society" which is neither English, French, or German and which might have some light to cast on the nature of social progression. (One wonders what he would have had to say about Greco-Roman economics or, for that matter, the economy of the Iroquois) However, if one puts aside the dialectic which focuses on change and the typically European blindness that discounts any other history, one may still consider the theory of materialism. Materialism, which is the focus on economics as one of (or even the most influential of) the factors contributing to human civil development. This materialism suggests that the exploitation of the worker under capitalism, once it reaches the boiling point (so to speak) will cause a meltdown of the capitalist system and an armed revolution establishing a new, proletariat-based society. After all, if the material is so vitally important, then when the system has shown itself unable to provide equality and material comfort to the mass of the people, they will surely fight back against that system. The pertinent question which Marx does not address must be: what happens when, forewarned by your nifty little manifesto and the increased grumblings of the workers, Capitalism takes conscious steps to address the material comfort of the workers? This may prevent revolution (comfort and stability being inherently more appealing to the masses than mere equality or even the promise of a better society), but can it really address the intrinsic exploitation of which Marx also speaks?

It is worth noting that Marx actually foreshadows the rise of a more contented proletariat with higher living standards when he suggests that the bourgeoisie will eventually support education of the masses as a way to produce a better working class. "The bourgeoisie itself," Marx writes, "supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie." Likewise, Marx acknowledges that inasmuch as the bourgeoisie also supplies the proletariat with improved conditions, it will stave off the Revolution. When his manifesto was re-released decades from the original printing, he added "The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed...That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry..." (Marx & Engles, Preface to the 1872 German Edition) However, Marx also asserts here that the "general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever." (Marx & Engles, Preface...) What principles, one asks, are still so valid today that, despite any revisions based on historical evidence, might still stand on the base of materialism and fact?

In answer, on might re-assert that capitalism is intrinsically exploitative, even if that is an exploitation to which the proletariat have resigned themselves.

What, then, is intrinsically exploitative about capitalism?