Vulgar Marxism Is the Real Marxism

And it ain't bad

I’ve gotten some flack for distorting or otherwise mangling the true meaning of Marx and Engels’s thought. I’m sorry, but I have little interest in what M&E “really meant” or what they really said. That’s grist for academic work, not my bailiwick, not to mention the practice of those who invoke Marx as scripture in pursuit of political capital. Also known as brow-beating.

No, the Marxism that has operated in the world is what has been called “vulgar Marxism.” Truth be told, Marx can be very difficult reading. At the same time, the subjects upon which he touches could not be more urgent. Simplification is required. The people demand it, and I serve the People.

I’m still stuck on the Sassoon book I’ve been writing about. He proposes three principal tenets of vulgar Marxism that have animated the history of socialist parties in Western Europe since the time of Marx and Engels themselves. They are:

• Capitalist exploitation as embodied in the concept of surplus value is unfair;

• History proceeds in stages, from slavery to feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism;

• The working class is a coherent motive political force in society that will bring about the transition from capitalism to socialism.

The idea of surplus value founded on the “labor theory of value” to me is a fundamental insight. To keep things simple, if not vulgar, the surplus in question is the difference between what the capitalist pays his workers and what he sells their output for. We can skip past propositions that commodities trade for the labor embodied in them, or somesuch. It’s possible to get hung up on arcane details and formulae. There are furious, endless academic debates about this stuff that fills reams of paper and now gigabytes of computer memory. Guess what? Nobody reads that shit! Go away!!

A related insight that compares well to mainstream economics is Marx’s rejection of capital as a separate “factor of production.” I used to teach this treacle to undergraduates in “Principles of Economics.” Capital is better understood as dead labor. It may be impossible to measure, but that is what it is, as far as I’m concerned. Problems with labor theories of value are of a different order, though in a near tautology labor does produce everything. You could say there are many different types of labor with different productive attributes, true of course, but the fact is that mainstream economics generalizes over labor as well. One of the big models is the famous aggregate production function (sic) [Y=F(L,K)]. Not a lot of detail therein.

Without getting into what is fair or unfair, it is clear that the disposition of this surplus, in aggregate, is the fundamental economic question facing society. How much to give to those not employed, to essential service providers in the public sector or in the home, to the retired, to the indigent, and how much to invest for the future. Not to mention what to pay the workers themselves, over and above the value of their labor.

It is sort of taken for granted that some portion of the surplus must be used to replace capital used up in the production process. I would disagree. If the people want to eat the seed corn, I might think that’s unwise, but it should not be up to me.

Fairness or wisdom aside, the basic question attending the surplus is how decisions about it are made. Under capitalism, it is largely controlled by a self-interested, self-perpetuating elite outside the boundaries of democratic accountability and unconstrained by common notions of morality. The result is waste of resources, destruction of the natural environment, exploitation, and untold human suffering. Whatever experts find to talk about in Marx, to me this is the whole ball game. Without getting hung up in the philosophical question of what is fair, we can simply declare that lack of economic democracy is just wrong and we aren’t having it. We can certainly point to the dismal fruits of rule by the current elite.

Fun fact: when Chris Matthews was still on MSNBC, before his lady-problems, he mentioned the “labor theory of value” as the idea of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. Uh, that’s not quite it. Where could he have gotten that? Recently I read the same thing in Michael Harrington’s last book, “Socialism: Past and Future.” I immediately put the book down and will not soon pick it up again. There is vulgar Marx, but there is also cartoon Marx. (At some point I will do a number on Harrington’s lightweight ideas, his sterling personal qualities notwithstanding.)

The stages theory of history I have ripped on in the past. I’m no professional historian, but I’d say the slavery to capitalism sequence looks tenable. Clearly the predictive angle has not panned out, though it was a great motivator.

A political problem is that skepticism founded on honest analysis or appraisal is vulnerable to denunciation as political defeatism. If you doubt a certain desirable outcome is possible, you can be accused of opposing that outcome. As my former mother-in-law used to say, it’s thought to be “Throwing shit into the game” or as we hippies used to say, spreading Bad Vibes.

So too the rise of the working class is not working out. Or its uprising is moving in directions contrary to any ideas in Marx, vulgar or otherwise. The key angle about class is that it embodies a broad notion of Humanity. The working class includes those destined to work, those whose working lives are over, and those unable to work. It’s everyone whose well-being does not rest on accumulated wealth. Even so, the devotion of the surplus to the well-being of the working class, or humanity, is the crux of any idea of socialism. It will remain the objective of progressive economic and social policy.

Sassoon describes “the working class” as a great political invention. I think this discounts its origins in Marx and the latter’s illuminating discussion of alienation. Either way, the concept has grave difficulties, not in terms of the basic subordination of humanity to Capital, its alienation if you will, but in terms of its political potential, at least given the current historical record.

Sassoon notes an interesting fact: the advance of socialist politics did not adhere systematically to the development of industry, contra Marx. The socialist electorates in Western and Southern Europe did not conform to strict Marxist criteria. Hence, in an important sense, socialist parties created the political working class, despite its plethora of internal divisions. In the U.S., in this same respect, the Democratic Party has destroyed it. It will be up to us to recreate it. The working class is whatever you want to say it is.

In all these respects, I would say vulgar Marxism for all its limitations is pretty potent and relevant. A friend likes to quote the departed economist and labor militant Robert Fitch of New York City, may he R.I.P., to the effect that “Vulgar Marxism explains 90 percent of what goes on in the world.” I suspect he was chiefly referring to the potential for pedestrian financial corruption common to the practices of politicians, a spectacle we are about to witness in spades.

You don’t have to be a genius to profit from Marx, even if you can’t understand what the hell he wrote.