Marx, Materialism, and the Intrinsic Exploitation of Capitalism

Introduction: Capitalism, Exploitation, and Marx's Enduring Challenge

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 the comprehensive proletarian revolutions he predicted. It is indeed true that Marx's historical predictions have been thwarted — partly by the actions of proletariat- and union-driven governments, and partly by capitalists who appear to be aware of the need to placate their workers to avoid revolt. However, this observation is only significant if one understands Marx's claims solely as saying that capitalism inevitably leads to exploitation of the workers. Marx also argues that capitalism is intrinsically exploitative. Capitalism may not always lead to further exploitation in the sense of reduced living standards — in fact, it now seems likely that advanced capitalism will encourage a great deal of consumerism that easily passes for increased living standards — but Marx's critique of its exploitative nature remains legitimate because the state of capitalism is inherently exploitative regardless of whether it is immediately experienced as a harm.

Marx's Historical Predictions and the Materialist Dialectic

Before addressing the intrinsic exploitation of capitalism, it is worth examining Marx's main critique as it appeared in The Communist Manifesto: that capitalism would lead to decreased living standards and the exploitation of the proletariat. Marx argued that capitalism must constantly expand, 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 the capitalist class. As Marx writes, "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 to the destruction of the property of independent artisans and small peasants in favor of the property rights of the corporate bourgeoisie.

Marx continues to argue that capitalists regard workers as a form of capital. Once the aristocracy's noblesse oblige has been eroded and the small holdings of the peasantry and artisans have been subsumed, nothing will prevent capitalists from keeping workers on a shoestring — paying just enough to support their survival and reproduction, and preventing them from amassing capital or property of their own. This brutalization will be accompanied by inevitable overproduction as the destruction of purchasing power coincides with increased mechanization, until workers are reduced to chattel that is both increasingly impoverished and economically irrelevant. Yet these same stressors — overproduction 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 dialectical sense of historical progression, in which "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Marx). The dialectic — which held that each class and epoch carried within it the seeds of its own destruction and the creation of the next — certainly explains his conviction that the bourgeoisie would create its own grave-diggers, just as the aristocracy had done by allowing the bourgeoisie to rise to power. Of course, Marx seems somewhat blind to the fact that there may be "hitherto existing society" which is neither English, French, nor German, and which might shed light 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 sets aside the dialectic's focus on change and the typically Eurocentric blindness that discounts other histories, one may still consider the theory of historical materialism — the emphasis on economics as one of the most influential factors contributing to human civil development. This materialism suggests that the exploitation of the worker, once it reaches a boiling point, 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 proves unable to provide equality and material comfort to the mass of the people, they will surely fight back against it. The pertinent question that Marx does not fully address is: what happens when capitalism, forewarned by its own manifesto and by the increasing grumblings of the workers, takes conscious steps to address the material comfort of the working class?

Why Rising Living Standards Do Not Refute Marx

This improvement in conditions may prevent revolution — comfort and stability being inherently more appealing to the masses than the mere 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 the 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 insofar as the bourgeoisie supplies the proletariat with improved conditions, it will stave off the Revolution. When the Manifesto was re-released decades after its 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 & Engels, 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 & Engels, Preface). What principles, one asks, are still so valid today that, despite any revisions based on historical evidence, they might still stand on the foundation of materialism and fact?

The answer is that capitalism is intrinsically exploitative, even if it is an exploitation to which the proletariat has resigned itself.

Conclusion: Materialism as Both the Disease and the Diagnosis

Materialism, itself, is the ultimate child of capitalism — for only in a capitalistic society in which human beings are disconnected from the land and from the honor and joy of creation would any sane person suggest that wealth and finances are the most important aspects of life. Materialism as a flawed value system is what created capitalism, and materialism as a philosophy of comprehending the world is necessary to understand its workings, because it is, to a very large degree, the value of materialism that both sustains capitalism and threatens it. If and when capitalism fails to provide the proletariat with continued consumer comforts, it would discover what Marx describes as the power of the proletariat — enraged by the loss of the very luxury that had, until that moment, distracted their attention from the exploitation of their humanity. The enduring insight of Marx's materialism is therefore double-edged: it explains why workers tolerate their condition, and it predicts the conditions under which that tolerance will finally collapse.

Bibliography

Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. [Electronic archive, no page numbers.]

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Preface to the 1872 German Edition of The Communist Manifesto.