Productive forces reflect the actual capability of men in the process of creating wealth for society and ensuring human development. In any society, in order to create wealth, both workers and means of production are needed. Without instruments for the labor process, men cannot create wealth. That development provides us with more convincing practical evidence to continue affirming Karl Marx’s precise view of the productive forces, and at the same time requires us to supplement and develop his view on this issue inconsistent with reality. In the current context of globalization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is essential to clarify all the practical capabilities used in the production process of the society over the world’s development periods to promote social development. Therefore, this article clarifies the basic arguments to analyze Karl Marx’s view on the productive forces and see the need to refresh and supplement Karl Marx’s theory in the current situation.

In order to survive and develop, men must work to create material wealth. It is this process that makes the difference in each era. As an expression of the relationship between men and nature, productive forces are constantly moving and developing in the production of material wealth. Today, the modern science and technology revolution with dramatic strides is having comprehensive impacts on the economy of each country as well as the world. The world economy has been profoundly and strongly changing in terms of structure, function and direction of operation. Therefore, in their development process, productive forces have also changed(Kien; 2020a). G A Cohen in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense pointed out the values of Karl Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism with his contributions to the productive forces. According to him, the new productive force manifests its existence through the new relations of production in which salaried workers use the capital created (Cohen, 2020). The article clarifies mistakes in perceiving and refuting the Marxist theory. The values left behind by Marxist theory about the change of social modes in each era are due to the decisive role of productive forces(Shimp, 2009).

In this article, the authors clarify Karl Marx’s view of productive forces as a central concept of historical materialism. A study on the connotation of this concept is the basis for understanding the entire movement and development in the production of the material wealth of human society. The article has systematically studied Karl Marx’s works on productive forces. Karl Marx, by explaining arguments of historical materialism, pointed out the connotations of productive forces in his works, including “The German Ideology”, “The poverty of philosophy”, “Wage Labor and Capital”, “Value, Price and Profit”. Especially, in “Capital”, the connotation of productive forces is further elucidated by Karl Marx and F. Engels with more insights. It is also the scientific basis for understanding the nature and dynamics of socio-historical development through the labor of men(Marx Karl and Friedrich Engels, 1998). The quantity of production is expressed through the bourgeois economic system in the following order: capital, rent, wage – labor; State, foreign trade, world market(Marx, 2010).

The starting point in Karl Marx’s study on history and society is the production of material life by men’s practical activities. According to him, men began to be distinguished from animals when they produced the means of subsistence to serve their essential needs. He wrote: “Men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’ But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself”(Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2002b; Vygodskii, 2002). So, the first premise for human existence is the production of the means to satisfy needs. It is the very production of material life. Simultaneously with that process, men also create aspects of social life. Karl Marx wrote: “The production of the direct means of subsistence and each certain stage of economic development of a nation or an epoch create a base for the development of institutions, rule-of-law viewpoints, art, and even religious notions of men”(Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2002a). Friedrich Engels wrote that Marx “discovered the law of development of human history” in much the same way that Darwin discovered the law of development of organic natures, with the argument of productive forces in the production of material life, Karl Marx affirmed his complete materialist conception(Marx Karl, 1983).

However, the movement and development of productive forces will not be as pointed out by Karl Marx, because the development of science and technology will change the subjects and means of labor. It also requires workers to change in all aspects. However, within the limited scale of research, this article cannot fully cover the development of science and technology from the time of Karl Marx to date, nor does it discuss the relationship between productive forces and relations of production or clarify influencing conditions such as environment, geography, population or production methods. The above factors still interact and directly affect the development of productive forces(Shaw, 2020).
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The highlight of this article is that through the development of the production of material wealth, the productive forces in the time of Karl Marx and today are clearly understood and systematically presented. At the same time, after the death of Karl Marx, up to now, productive forces have changed and transformed in the development process of human history.

In this article, the authors clarify the arguments about productive forces from Karl Marx’s point of view to prove the values pointed out by him in the movement and development of society. On that basis, the article clarifies the structure of productive forces with their constituents, i.e. workers and means of production. To clarify the development of productive forces, the article explains the arguments about productive forces mentioned by Karl Marx’s theory from his time to the present, i.e. from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century.
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To shed light on the development of the productive forces, the article deploys methodology of dialectic materialism, which are a system of viewpoints and principles that determine the scope and applicability of requirements and methods in a reasonable and effective manner to explain the relationships between productive forces in the development of their constituents and in the movement and development of society. These methods are the basis for understanding the development of human history, first of all the history of production development, as well as the process of human development in different historical periods. Specifically, with the principle of comprehensiveness, the study must identify productive forces in the production of material wealth, demonstrate the objectivity and inseparable attachments of the constituents of productive forces in their organic relations with each other. Moreover, those relations are extremely rich, diverse and complex, including both essential and non-essential, natural and accidental, primary and secondary relations between productive forces. Also, the article uses the principle of development to point out that in this process, the movement of each subject always goes from low to high, from simple to complicated, and from imperfect to perfect.
The historical principle is specifically understood as productive forces in the process of existence, movement and development under specific space and time conditions from the time of Karl Marx to the present, with direct influences on the properties and characteristics of the subject. If the same object exists under specifically different conditions of time and space, its properties and characteristics will be different, and its nature can even be changed completely.

From the methodology, the article uses a mixed research method combining qualitative ones with the understanding of historical methods to find out the origin, process of development and transformation of productive forces in order to discover their nature and laws. This method of research is used to analyze existing theoretical documents in order to detect trends and schools of research, thereby clarifying the history of researching productive forces. Analyzing means dividing the whole into simple parts, aspects and constituents in order to study and discover each attribute and nature of each factor, i.e. workers and means of production, thereby understand the subject of the study more coherently, systematically, richly and diversely.

The view on productive forcesThe concept of productive forces has been proposed by many scholars before Karl Marx but interpreted in an idealistic way. This concept was only scientifically explained for the first time in March 1845, when Karl Marx wrote the “Draft of an article on Friedrich List’s book: System of Political Economy”. Here, Karl Marx pointed out the idealistic thought in List’s theory and exposed its bourgeois characteristics. Karl Marx pointed out that productive forces are not some “spiritual essence” as thought by List, but material forces. He wrote: “In order to destroy the mystical radiance which transfigures ‘productive force”, one has only to consult any book of statistics. There one reads about water-power, steam-power, manpower, horse-power. All these are “productive forces”(Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2002 -a). Thus, from the point of view of Marx, it can be understood that productive forces are a concept used to refer to the combination of workers and means of production to create a certain productive force.

The constituents of productive forces in Karl Marx’s point of view

When discussing productive forces, Karl Marx also pointed out the basic elements that constitute them, namely workers and means of production. And when analyzing the elements of productive forces, he used many different ways of classification, such as classifying into means of production and labor power according to the uses of productive forces. Means of production also includes: means of labor, instruments of labor and subjects of labor. Productive forces can also be classified into natural forces and human forces based on their creators. Karl Marx emphasized: “Men, as a productive force, not only create material wealth, but together with natural productive forces become a revolutionary force that promotes the development of society.”(Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2002 -b)

With the two ways of classification stated above, Karl Marx wanted to clarify the relationship and development of productive forces as well as their constituents. Within the scope of this article, the authors follow the first way of classification to clarify the factors constituting productive forces. On that basis, the article explains the following points:

Regarding workers: Workers participate in the productive forces as a commodity of labor power. Karl Marx said: “Labor power or labor capacity is the totality of physical and mental capabilities existing in the body, in a living person, and used by that person when producing a use value”(Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2002 -c).

Regarding means of production, this was clarified by Karl Marx with their constituents being subjects, means and instruments of labor. In which, subjects of labor are material forms capable of being created into items according to purposes and requirements to meet certain needs of men, and only when being impacted, exploited and improved by men do they become subjects of labor. Karl Marx said: “While all raw materials are subjects of labor, it cannot be said that all subjects of labor are raw materials. Subjects of labor are only to be understood as raw materials if they have already passed through the labor process”(Karl Marx, 2002a, 2002b)

Instruments of labor are objects used by men to directly impact subjects of labor to produce material wealth. This proves the practical capabilities of men in the process of transforming the natural world. Men use labor instruments to influence the natural world and create material wealth to serve their essential needs. Also in that process, men grasp the laws of nature and turn nature from a wild and simple place into a “second world” with the participation of their hands and brains. Material production is always changing, so productive forces are a dynamic factor and a process that is constantly being innovated and developed. It is also the basic criterion to assess social progress in a given historical period. Therefore, in “The German Ideology”, Karl Marx asserted: “History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity”(Karl Marx, 2002c)

Regarding the relationship between the subject of labor, the instrument of labor and workers, according to Marx, in order to transform the natural world to create material wealth, workers need to have a synergy. First of all, it is the strength of the body and the mind – the factors that make up men’s ability to work. He wrote: “In order to possess natural things in a form useful to his own life, man makes use of the forces of nature in him: the arms and legs, the head and hands”(Karl Marx, 2002d). However, if it just stops there, the process of material production cannot take place. In addition to himself, man also uses other factors, such as “using the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of objects to act on other objects according to his purposes”(Karl Marx, 2002d). These objects are called “instruments” by Karl Marx, which helps workers to extend their hands and make the process of affecting nature more effective. If the means of production are a necessary condition for material production, then the workers are the subjects who play a decisive role in the development of production. Thus, according to Karl Marx, without men to build and use instruments of labor to affect the natural world, there will be no production of material wealth.

Regarding means of labor, these do not directly create products but have a great influence on production. Means of production affect social production efficiency, because these factors contribute to increasing or reducing transaction costs and costs for transporting materials and preserving products, which are also taken from the value of products.

In the production process, productive forces in the relationship with workers and means of production will change the production of the society; the workers have a crucial role in making contributions to the production process through their productiveness. According to K. Marx, productiveness is the production capacity of specific productive labor. It reflects the results of men’s purposeful production in a certain unit of time.

Therefore, according to Karl Marx: “Apart from the social form of production, the productiveness of labor depends on the natural conditions under which the labor is performed … The external natural conditions, from the economic point of view, split up into two great classes: natural wealth in means of subsistence—i.e., a fertile soil, waters well stocked with fish, etc.; and natural wealth in the instruments of labor, such as waterfalls, navigable rivers, wood, metal, coal, etc. In the beginnings of civilization, it is the first class which is decisive; later on, in a more advanced society, it is the second”(Karl Marx, 2002e).

However, Karl Marx emphasized that natural productiveness does not play a decisive role in progressive development (i.e. development by increasing social productivity); on the contrary, “Too generous nature will hold the hands of man and walk him like a toddler. It does not make human development naturally inevitable”(Karl Marx, 2002e). Thus, Karl Marx appreciated men’s productiveness. He wrote: “It is the need for social control over a certain force of nature to use it economically, the very need to take it or to master it with large-scale works built by human hands, – it is that necessity that has plays a very decisive role in industrial history”(Karl Marx, 2002e). Productive forces in the relationship with workers and means of production, with the highlight on the role of means of production, are manifested through the development of science and technology in the production process, which Karl Marx thought as immediate productive forces.

Karl Marx highly appreciated the role of science and technology in the process of material production in general and the development of productive forces in particular. Through scientific research, he made the judgment that: “The development of constant capital is an indication of the extent to which general social knowledge is transformed into an immediate productive force, thus it is also an indication of the extent to which conditions of the life process have been submissive to the control of popular wisdom and improved to suit that process; to which productive forces are created not only in the form of knowledge, but also as direct social practice agencies of the real life process”(Karl Marx, 2002f). According to the above argument of Karl Marx, scientific knowledge transformed constant capital such as factories and machinery used in production, and to a certain extent they become an immediate productive force.

In other words, scientific knowledge is applied and materialized into machinery and instruments of production, which are used by workers in the production process, thus becoming an immediate productive force. The conditions for scientific knowledge to become an immediate productive force have been determined by Karl Marx as follows: “The development of machinery system on that path only begins when the great industry has achieved a higher level of development and all sciences serve as capital, while the existing machinery system itself has tremendous resources. Thus, invention becomes a special profession, and for that profession, the application of science to immediate production itself becomes one of the decisive and simulating factors”(Karl Marx, 2002g).

Thus, standing on the historical materialist point of view, Karl Marx affirmed that productive forces represent the practical capability of men in impacting the natural world to create material wealth. Therefore, productive forces also measure the development of the material production of men in each certain socioeconomic form.

By clarifying the factors that make up productive forces, Karl Marx believed that, when considering the process of labor abstractly without depending on its historical form and as a process between men and nature: “In terms of results, i.e. using products to assess the whole process, both means of labor and subjects of labor are means of production, while labor itself is productive labor… This definition of productive labor is from the point of view of a simple labor process”(Karl Marx, 2002h).

The development of productive forces in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Today, our living conditions have many new and different things compared to the era of Karl Marx. Science and technology have made great advances, contributing to the creation of a productive force that humanity has never seen before. General social knowledge is becoming an immediate productive force, just as Karl Marx predicted; and productivity, as a result, increases rapidly. Productivity is measured by the number of products made in a unit of time, or by the amount of time spent to produce a unit of product. Through that, productivity reflects the effectiveness of the use of labor. In essence, it measures the output value generated by a worker over a certain period of time, or the amount of time it takes to produce a unit of output. Thus, productivity reflects the relationship between the output (product) and the input (labor) measured by working time.

Currently, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by the combined use of hardware, robots and information technology software. It is the combination of advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), social networks, cloud computing, mobility, big data analysis (SMAC), etc. to transform the entire real world into a digital world at a very fast pace and very large scale, integrating many fields with multi-dimensional interaction(Kien; 2020b).

Productive forces today have far exceeded those in the time of Karl Marx. Karl Marx developed his doctrine during the second industrial revolution (the first revolution was marked by the advent of the steam engine, the second one by electricity). Meanwhile, humanity is near the end of the third industrial revolution with digital instruments (computers) and is entering the fourth revolution to open up the era of artificial intelligence.

The achievements of modern science and technology have directly impacted the development of all constituents of productive forces: means of production and workers. Especially, in the fourth industrial revolution, men mainly use means of production being natural resources and machinery to create products. The fourth industrial revolution is changing the way of production and manufacturing, and is strongly influential on all factors of productive forces. Therefore, Marxist socioeconomic theory in general and view on productive forces in particular, despite having many sustainable values, are not without room for development. V.I.Lenin, who relentlessly defended and developed Marxism, also emphasized: “We do never consider Karl Marx’s theory as something that is complete and untouchable; on the contrary, we believe that the theory only lays the foundation for the science that socialists need to further develop in all aspects if they do not want to become obsolete”(Vladimir Lenin, 1978).

Regarding workers today, when it comes to the development of productive forces in the capitalist period, he argued that the main workforce of a capitalist society is the workers, the proletariats. They are “a social class that only earn their living by selling their labor”, “a class of people who do not own any means” and “forced to sell their labor under capitalism in exchange for necessary means of subsistence(Karl Marx, 2002i).

Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution affects the number of jobs created through the replacement of labor power with machines, robots, artificial intelligence and the application of information technology to a number of industries and professions that are rapidly penetrating the workplace in the labor market. The trend of employment will shift from labor-intensive production to one that requires more knowledge and technology. The fourth industrial revolution also changes the function of humans in production: human gradually ceases to directly operate technical systems, and turn to mainly create and adjust that process.

Therefore, the working class includes not only purely manual workers but also intellectual ones. Moreover, in the current period, workers themselves have also changed significantly. In the time of Karl Marx, the workforce was mainly mechanical workers, mostly manual ones; but today, the achievements of the fourth industrial revolution have increasingly improved labor instruments; human labor is liberated, and the level of knowledge, skills and techniques of workers is constantly improved. Therefore, in many factories, the number of scientific and technological human resources directly involved in the production process accounts for an increasing proportion, which is much higher than the number of regular manual workers. The number of intellectual workers tends to increase in both quantity and quality, which has gradually changed the proportion of unskilled and highly-skilled workers. Workers need to meet the requirements of technical skills (at a medium and high level) including specialized knowledge and skills to perform specific jobs, and also need to have core, soft working skills including: the ability to think creatively and be proactive at work; skills in using a computer and the internet; foreign language skills, teamwork skills, safety skills and compliance with labor discipline, problem-solving skills, time management skills, concentration skills, etc.

Digital technologies that integrate all information regarding technology, processes, production methods, needs of industries, professions and skills, etc. and especially the ability to connect and share information around the world through technological devices will change the supply and demand structure in the labor market, eliminate the hard border between countries in the region, make the regional labor market more vibrant and promote job creation for each member country. The improvement of qualifications of human resources by applying automation to production will offer the chance to transfer workers to different active positions and train them to quickly adapt to the technology. Instead of having to do their job manually, now workers will be able to improve their skills to control machines to do those jobs for them.

Therefore, this helps workers to be more specialized and have the fastest access to modern technology. Workers are now liberated not only in terms of manual labor but also in terms of mental labor. Machines – the instruments of labor in the era of the fourth industrial revolution are not only an extension of the worker’s arm, but that arm is also “smart”. The communication between workers – high-end robots – intelligent machines… affects the introduction of new raw materials and fuels to create products according to human needs, even meeting the increasing needs for personalization of each consumer.

Instruments of labor are increasingly improved. The fourth industrial revolution frees up human labor; and the level of knowledge, skills and techniques of workers is constantly improved. In that context, production needs to be supplemented with the aspect of “man living in harmony with nature”. Instruments of labor are now represented by automation in production. Automation in production means how workers use advanced technologies in the production process to transfer a large part or all of the production activities done by human labor to machines and equipment. Thus, automated processes will not need too much human intervention, but will use different control systems to help machines operate faster and more accurately, with some processes are even fully automated. Automation in production now will become a thriving field that is shaped by the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and analytics services relating to sweeping digital changes in the production process. Thanks to this, machines operate 24/7 without having to rest or take time off between shifts like workers. Moreover, the operating speed of automated production lines is many times faster than human manual operations. Therefore, it will help factories improve productivity significantly. At that time, the development of productive forces is promoted.

The workforce today is more diverse thanks to the application of technology in the fourth industrial revolution. Resources, fuels and raw materials have become more diverse, including many with increasing knowledge content. In an industrial economy using natural resources as inputs, these resources are becoming scarcer and exhausted due to the overexploitation of men. However, the rapid development of science and technology has helped humans discover many new properties of natural resources. Many materials that were previously thought to be useless have become those of great utility, and their useful properties are multiplied with the establishment of many new industries which create new, more diverse and richer subjects of labor. New materials are, in general, lighter, more durable, recyclable and adaptable. They can be smart, self-repairing or self-cleaning materials; metals that have the ability to restore their original shapes; ceramics and crystals that can turn pressure into energy. Especially, many products are made not from traditional materials, but from nanomaterials, molecules or even atoms… In the field of digitization, a prominent feature of digital technology is the birth of the Internet of Things (IOT). This refers to the relationship between things and humans through connection technologies on different platforms (iPhone, 3G, 4G, 5G; and when the quantum Internet comes to life, it can be nG(M Skilton, 2018; Mark Skilton & Hovsepian, 2018).

Means of labor today include self-driving vehicles (airplanes, cars, ships, etc.) which have made an important step forward to reach the civil and commercial scale and level, rapidly develop and gradually popularize in countries around the world…. 3D printing technology creates a product by printing its layers according to a pre-made 3D model. All products for humans use (tools, cars, airplanes, houses and even parts of the humans body like prosthetic ears, arms, legs, etc.) can be produced by 3D printing, fundamentally changing the way of production. High-end robots, i.e. robots with artificial intelligence are being used more and more widely, making the interaction between human and smart machines a reality.

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Like many folks these days, I’ve become dependent on modern gadgetry to get through the day. I don’t leave the house without my smartphone. I don’t have much use for stamps anymore; most of my correspondence and bill-paying occurs online. I haven’t owned a camera that requires film in almost a decade. It seems that almost every aspect of my life has been replaced by a digital version, and leading this high-tech revolution is a thing called Facebook, a website I spend entirely too much time on.

Facebook has really changed the way people do things. When we throw a party, we don’t send each other invitations in the mail; we create an event on the web and invite everyone on our friends list. In fact, I’m constantly bombarded by events, including ones that are thousands of miles away, which I have no hope of ever attending even if I wanted to. But just when I thought I’d seen it all, I got one last week that was good for a chuckle.

I’d been invited to Karl Marx’s birthday party!

May 5 marks the 197th birthday of the esteemed Karl Marx, and some creative soul took the time to create a Facebook event to commemorate the occasion. I’m sure that good old Karl never imagined that people sitting in front of computer screens would be sending out invitations to his birthday celebration, the message crisscrossing the globe to friends near and far at the speed of light.

Of course, Marx was no stranger to the role of technology in society. It was he who realized that it was technology that separated humanity from the other species of our planet. Technology allowed us to rise above subsistence living, create a surplus value and a division of labor, and do more interesting things with our lives than forage for the bare necessities. He also realized that as technology became more sophisticated and the group of people who could get their hands on the latest productive property became fewer and fewer, it would push ever more people into the proletariat, the class of workers who had nothing to bring to the marketplace except labor which could easily be extorted from them. Marx saw that it was technology that carried humanity from one epoch to the next.

When you really think about it, perhaps a high-tech invitation to Marx’s birthday party isn’t so bizarre after all. But the question at the heart of the issue is whether a man born almost 200 years ago has a role to play in the era of Facebook. Have his ideas gone the way of the rotary phone?

There have been plenty of folks who have argued that the works of Marx are flawed. They say that his analyses were detached from the reality of his day and that most of his predictions didn’t come true within his lifetime. Many have pointed to the fall of Soviet socialism as an example of what they perceive as Marx’s folly. It would seem to them that there’s no room for Karl Marx in the 21st century.

I have a different opinion, however. To me, the ideas of Marxism are like a vintage wine. In many ways they’re just now coming into full bloom. If there is any kernel of truth to the claims of the naysayers, it’s because Marx, and many of those who were inspired by him during the 20th century, were ahead of their time. When we look at the defining economic phenomena of the past 40 years – globalization, corporate mega-mergers, the boom and bust economy, the decline of post-industrial America, the “proletarianizing” of the middle class in nearly every industry – we can finally see the wisdom of Marx confirmed in material reality over a century later.

Are the ideas of a 19th-century bearded guy relevant in the age of Facebook? I have no doubt in my mind that his works are more important now than ever. I just wonder what kind of embarrassing photos he would be tagged in if he had been alive to attend the party.

This article, updated this year, was originally posted in People’s World on May 5, 2010.

The philosopher Jerry Fodor is rightfully upset with some of the nonsense coming out of Academia disguised as science and dressed up in arguments purportedly derived from Darwin’s theory of evolution. Lots of nonsense put forth under the guise of “evolutionary psychology” is a good example. Here complex behavioral patterns of humans today are explained as inherited traits from our animal past or traits that we evolved when we were hunter gathers on the African savannah.

As an example, capitalism, for instance, is often justified, or explained, as a part of “human nature” [as is war, male supremacy, and “innate” racial differences in intelligence] inherited from our remote past. These claims, among others, have led Dr. Fodor to question Darwin’s theory that the mechanism driving evolution is “natural selection”.

This article will look at arguments he presented several years ago,“Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings” (The London Review of Books 10-18-07). I will try to establish that his arguments against natural selection are not convincing and are based on a mechanical interpretation of Darwin that is a characteristic of contemporary Western thought. That when Darwin is read dialectically, as he was by Marx and Engels (Cf. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature) the objections to natural selection as the main motor of evolutionary change evaporate.

Fodor tells us that natural selection “purports to characterize the mechanism not just of the formation of species, but of all evolutionary changes in the innate properties of organisms.” An organism’s phenotype [“the inventory of its heritable traits, including, notably, its heritable mental traits “ is an adaptation to its environment. 

The rub here is “mental traits.” Physical traits can be mapped on the genome and have some basis in material reality. This is much harder to do with so called mental traits. Most all of the current nonsense about evolutionary explanations of human behavior based on inherited mental traits is the result of idle speculation concerning hypothetical genes that could, maybe, be responsible for the behaviors in question. At most, however, we can only discuss the capacities that humans have inherited. The vast majority of specific behaviors are better explained by external causes, mostly of cultural and historical origin, which have nothing to do with an organism's phenotype. Nor did Darwin, I think, suggest otherwise.

Adaptation works this way. Organisms are living in an environment and competing for food and reproductive success. Some type of genetic mutation comes along [a cosmic ray zaps one of its genes say] that gives the organism a slight edge in finding a mate and reproducing. More babies carrying the new gene show up in the next generation, etc (providing the gene is inheritable). Eventually all the organisms have the new characteristic: a new species. This is very simple, but you get the idea. It doesn’t have to be a new species. It could be a gene for eye color and so you just have variation within a species, for example.

Now Fodor says that Darwin’s theory has two components. The sequence of changing phenotypes, we can see the connection phenotypically, genetically, that puts baboons in our family tree. No doubt about that. But how did that happen? It is the answer “by natural selection” that he wants to question. No, he is not a creationist. He is looking for a purely scientific answer, not mysticism, to replace natural selection because he sees flaws in that explanation. Flaws that I will attempt to show do not exist.

Fodor reports that there is something that “ails” us a species living in the contemporary world. Marxists agree and attribute it to our economic arrangements-- i.e., capitalism and its logical consequence of human exploitation for profit which leads to imperialism and war. Fodor says the Darwinists explain the problem by saying we inherited a mind adapted for life 30,000 years ago and is unequipped to live in the complex world of today. He will attack natural selection because he thinks this Darwinist answer is wrong. 

But this is not Darwin’s answer at all. It is modern misinterpretation of Darwin that has arisen as a reflection on the modern world in societies which, due to the class nature of science and education, do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing order [TINA]* and thus reject ab initio a Marxist reading of evolution. *[There Is No Alternative— British PM Margaret Thatcher’s view on capitalism]

What ails humanity is for Darwinists, according to Fodor, "that the kind of mind we have is an anachronism; it was selected for by an ecology that no longer exists." This being the case, Fodor says, "if the theory of natural selection turned out not to be true, that would cut the ground from under the Darwinist diagnosis of our malaise."

Fodor is right about that. But it is wrong to think that natural selection has provided us with an anachronistic "mind". The so-called “Darwinists” who argue that way are very far from Darwin or any scientific understanding of the human brain.

What natural selection has provided us with is a brain with the capacity to adapt the organism to many different social and cultural climates. It is no more the product of events 30,000 years ago on savannas then it is of modern industrial societies. As far as anyone can say it also has the capacities to adapt to future social and cultural conditions as yet unimaginable. There is no need to reject natural selection "to cut the ground from under the Darwinist diagnosis" because the characterization given by Fodor, while maintained by many social "scientists" and some shallow schools of "evolutionary psychology", is a totally unscientific version of Darwinism. 

But suppose as a matter of fact natural selection is still incorrect. Fodor says it has two problems that might undermine it: one is conceptual, the other is empirical ("more or less.") Let's look at these two.

I must admit, I don't really see the conceptual problem. Here is what Fodor says it is. Natural selection can be seen as holding that "environments select creatures for their fitness; or you can say that environments select traits for their fitness." But I wouldn't say that environments "select" anything. Organisms ("creatures") are born into environments and their ability to survive and reproduce depends on the traits they have. If a frog has a mutation giving it three legs it may not live to reproduce. If it has a mutation making it resistant to a virus that infects and kills frogs, that trait may allow it to reproduce better than other frogs.

Is it not confusing to talk of "forces of selection," as does Fodor? "These forces must select individual creatures on the one hand, but on the other they must select traits" since it is phenotypes ("bundles of heritable traits") "whose evolution selection theory purports to explain."

This whole discussion of a "conceptual problem", of a mechanical contradiction invalidating natural selection, is itself a conceptual problem [a category mistake], or better a terminological one. Let's get rid of needless metaphysical entities such as "environments making selections". and "forces." Next, consider that "phenotypes" are not real existing separate entities. They are intellectual abstractions that we as scientists or philosophers use to describe the workings of our theoretical explanations for what we find in nature. Only the organisms exist. 

I think, therefore, that the conceptual problem is bogus. I will therefore skip over the rest of the conceptual discussion, which concerns itself with Venetian architecture, Darwin's analogy between selective breeding techniques and natural selection (and Adam Gopnik's New Yorker article about the same), and associated problems with metaphors such as God and Mother Nature.

Let us now turn to the empirical problem. It is not so much a problem as an "issue" for Fodor. He starts by saying that as a matter of fact some new empirical explanations for evolution are being proposed that do not base the mechanism of change on natural selection. He says he can't discuss all of these new ideas but will give us a "feel" for two of them.

First, Fodor points out that "phenotypes don't occur at random"-- i.e., for me that means we don't group organisms together arbitrarily. We group them together because of the similarity we see, or think we see, between organisms. Because, for example, all the animals we see in what we call the cat family are more similar to each other in ways than they are to organisms we classify as members of the dog family. We conclude they have an evolutionary connection and their membership in the same family is non-random.

Fodor says the non-randomness of the phenotypes is due to the non-randomness of the environment. He tells us the "theory of natural selection in a nutshell" is if the non-randomness we see between phenotypes [i.e., organisms] and their environments isn't due to God, "Perhaps [my emphasis] it is a reflection of the orderliness of the environment in which the phenotypes [i.e., the organisms-- tr] evolved." In other words a fossil fish may indicate that there was a watery environment, and a fossil bird would suggest an environment conducive to flight.

But, Fodor says, "this is not the only possibility." "External environments are structured in all sorts of ways, but so too, are the insides of the creatures that inhabit them" [natural selection may have something to do with this-- tr]." There is another possibility, an alternative to the view that phenotypes [our mental constructions based on knowledge of real organisms-- tr] reflect the environments they evolve in, "namely that they carry implicit information about the endogenous structure of the creatures whose phenotypes they are."

"Whose" is a possessive and we should remember that it is organisms that "possess" phenotypes not the other way around. But let us grant "phenotypes" the same ontological status as organisms. Fodor has not really put forward an alternative view. This view, by the way he refers to as "Evo-Devo" (evolutionary-developmental theory). 

Darwin's theory of natural selection regarding an organism's response to the environment, and Evo-Devo, the organism's internal structure are two sides of the same coin. They are not alternative explanations, but, as Marxist dialectics would have it, they are a unity in difference. 

Gene theory developed after Darwin. So now we know that the mechanism by which natural selection's response to the environment takes place is by changes in the genetic makeup of the organism. How, or what, causes the genes to change is another question. Fodor has a reduction to biochemistry down to quantum mechanics ("for all I know.)”

This is pointless as far as the theory of natural selection is concerned. The organism either adapts to its environment and successfully reproduces itself or it becomes extinct. So when Fodor says, it is "an entirely empirical question to what extent exogenous variables are what shape phenotypes; and it's entirely possible that adaptationism [natural selection] is the wrong answer" he is way off base. The inner and the outer (genome and environment) are two aspects of the same thing-- the living organism. 

Now Fodor asks a very strange question. Granted that when we ask Darwin why two phenotypes (organisms) are similar this can be explained by common ancestry. But what if you ask "why is it that some phenotypes don't occur, an adaptationist explanation often sounds somewhere between implausible and preposterous." If you ask, that is, why some sort of organism did NOT evolve, natural selection can't give a satisfying answer. How would natural selection explain why there are no pigs with wings?

Fodor says they lack wings "because there is no place on pigs to put them." You would have to "redesign pigs radically" to have them have wings. Natural selection won't let you go back "and retrofit feathers" [of course mammals don't need feathers to fly]. For Fodor, this means there are constraints "on what phenotypes can evolve that aren't explained by natural selection." This is just so wrong.

Natural selection explains perfectly well why pigs don't have wings. Again it is pigs, not "phenotypes" that lack genes for wings. Let’s look at the real question. Why do bats have wings. Bats and pigs are both mammals and they at one time shared (with many other kinds of animals) a common ancestor. The common ancestor to bats and pigs, et al, was a much more generalized animal to any of its many descendants.

Natural selection says that mutations with positive adaptive (reproductive) values that happened to the common ancestor and its offspring gave rise to all of its descendants different mutations leading to different adaptations to the many possible environments which these animals could live in. Bats have wings and pig's don't because the organisms that eventually turned into bats and pigs had genetic changes that allowed them to exploit different parts of our common earthly environment. 

Fodor's question doesn't really make sense. Why don't pigs have wings is the same as asking why didn't pigs become bats. Or why are there pigs? Natural selection also answers the related question as to why horses don't have a single horn on their foreheads.

Fodor calls this kind of speculation "channeling." But all the restraints that have been placed on pigs to prevent them from flying have been channeled by the operations of natural selection. How would natural selection take place in order to result in a flying mammal? It is to the bat genome, not the pig genome that we should look. So much, I think, for the "feel" of the first alternative to natural selection. It really ends up supporting natural selection.

Let us look at Fodor's second alternative and get a "feel" for it as well. Fodor thinks that evolutionary traits that come about by natural selection are supposed to enhance fitness. So if a suite of traits shows up in the evolutionary record that doesn't enhance fitness, something must be wrong with the theory of natural selection.

He discusses a forty year experiment to breed tameness into silver foxes. The experiment was successful and after thirty generations of inbreeding a strain of very tame foxes was the result. But besides tameness the foxes had many other new traits as well-- floppy ears, short curly tails, short legs. etc.

He thinks this is evidence against adaptationism (natural selection). He says, "the ancillary phenotypic effects of selection for tameness seem to be perfectly arbitrary. In particular, they apparently aren't adaptations; there isn't any teleological explanation-- any explanation in terms of fitness-- as to why domesticated animals tend to have floppy ears." Domestication is artificial, not natural, selection.

In the first place these foxes did not come about by natural selection, but by deliberate breeding. All tame foxes were bred by human design so any "ancillary" traits were bred also (who knows if they would have survived by unaided natural selective processes).

In the second place, natural selection's main point is that positive traits that further reproductive success will tend to be propagated, negative traits that hinder reproductive traits will tend to be eliminated, and neutral traits may or may not be eliminated. A neutral trait like floppy ears, associated with a positive trait like tameness (in the experiment) will get a free ride as a neutral trait even without a positive adaptive function.

There is nothing strange or mysterious about this. It is standard operating procedure in Darwin's theory of natural selection. Although Fodor definitely would not agree, the floppy ears and other reproductively neutral traits are flukes.

I think nothing in his article poses either conceptual or empirical problems for the theory of evolution by means of natural selection as proposed by Darwin. As far as evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists are concerned, let them come up with specific genes located in the human genome for the characteristics they claim humans exhibit as a result of living in a primitive savanna-like environment in the prehistoric origins of the species. The springs of human behavior are not frozen in the past.

Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities”. To understand this section is to understand the whole first chapter and also to see why socialism is necessary. This article is an attempt to explain the meaning of this section and to apply its lessons to our times.

A commodity looks simple enough, says the bourgeois economist. Most bourgeois economists say it is any object with a use value that somebody wants and is willing to pay for and its value is determined by supply and demand. Nothing drives such a common sense economist more to distraction than reading Karl Marx who says a commodity is "a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." What can Marx mean? Economics is a science, even a mathematical science, what has it got to do with metaphysics and theology?

Take a wooden table, says Marx. It is just wood that human labor has turned into a table and taken to market. Wood + Labor = Table. Where is the mystery? When it gets to the market the table finds itself in the company of the stool and the chair. All three have use values, are made of the same wood, and may be in equal supply and equal demand-- yet each has its own different price.

Why these different prices? Same wood, same demand, same supply. They are all the products of human labor. What is the difference between them that justifies different prices? The prices are reflections of the underlying values of the products. Could the values be different? What does Marx say determines value? It is the different quantities of socially necessary labor time embodied in the commodities.

The table, the stool, and the chair are three "things" that are related to each other as the embodiment of the social relations and necessary labor of human beings that created them. Human social relations have been objectified as the relations between non human things. The chair is more valuable than the table but the reason is now hidden away from the perception of people.

"A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing," Marx writes, "simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relations of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour."

To find an analogy Marx tells us we have to turn to the "mist-enveloped regions of the religious world." In that world the inventions of the human mind take on an independent existence and humans begin to interact with their own fantastical creations as if they were really independently existing objective things. This is similar to the Fetishism of Commodities. All the commodities we see about us are part of the sum total of all the socially produced objects and services created by human labor in our society. People all over the world are making things which are traded, shipped, sold, resold, etc. But their use values cannot be realized until they are sold--i.e., exchanged, especially exchanged for money. But why are some more expensive than others? Why do some have more value than others? Supply and demand has a role to play in setting price but it merely causes price to fluctuate around value.

The fact that we know that value results from the socially necessary labor time spent in making commodities "by no means," Marx says, "dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves."

This is because we are so use to how the market operates under capitalism, how prices fluctuate, commodities rise and fall in prices, the working people naturally just think the values (which they don't differentiate from prices) are products of the natural world, that is, are functions of the things for sale or barter themselves. This is why "supply and demand" seems to be the basis of the value of things. They don't see it's all really the result of the socially necessary labor time expended in the labor process that is the determining factor in value

This leads Marx to say , "The determination of the magnitude of value by labor time therefore is a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities."

We are reminded that to understand the real nature of a social formation we have to reverse our knowledge of its historical development. We begin with the full fledged capitalist system and we try to figure why the prices of things are the way they are. Looking at the mature system we don't really see its primitive origins. In the same way a religious person looking at a human being fails to see an ape in the background.

This leads Marx to say of his own theory, "When I state that coats and boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident." This has been remarked upon both by the most astute of thinkers (Bertrand Russell) and the most pedestrian (Ayn Rand).

The problem is that the bourgeoisie looks upon a historically transient economic formation, its own, as an eternally existing social order. Of course prices are set by supply and demand. What is that crazy Marx talking about? As the economist Brad Delong said, he had never known anyone who thought that way.

Well, let's look at something other than the full blown capitalist system at work. Marx says, "The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production."

Marx gives the example of Robinson Crusoe. He chose Robinson because he was a popular example used in the texts of the day. Robinson has to make everything for himself, obtain his own food, and provide his own shelter. It is pretty obvious that the things that are most important for his survival are those he expends most of his labor time upon and are consequently the most valuable to him.

Marx then says we should consider a community of free people working together cooperatively to make all things necessary for their society. Whereas Robinson was just making use values for himself, in this community a social product is being created. The people have to set aside part of the product for future production, but the rest they can consume. How would they divide it in a fair manner? They would divide the product in proportion to the labor time each individual had contributed to the joint production of the social product.

This is how barter went on in the Middle Ages. Peasants knew very well how much labor time was involved in making cheese, for example, and in making a pair of shoes . If it took twice as long to make a pound cheese that to make a pair of shoes, you can be sure that no one was going to trade more than a half pound of cheese for his shoes. It is only in the complicated processes of commodity production, especially in capitalism, that the Fetichism of Commodities begins to manifest itself and the true nature of the source of value is lost.

People have confused consciousness in our world. Our alienation from our own social product, the effects of commodity fetichism, and the continuing influence of religion all work together to keep us confused and off guard. But seeing what our condition is with respect to such mental blights also tells how far along the road to liberation we are (not far) and how far we have to go (quite a distance I fear).

The world, though in a distorted way, is reflected in these distorted forms of consciousness. "The religious world," Marx tells us, "is but the reflex of the real world." And, for our capitalist society where all human relations, and relations of humans with the things they create, are reducible to commodification based on the value of "homogeneous human labor" the best form of religion is Christianity and especially Protestantism (or alternatively, Deism) and maybe for our day we can toss in Secular Humanism.

Why is this? Marx says it is because the idea of "abstract man" is the basis of the religious outlook of these systems. A religion based on an abstract view of "human nature" is just the ticket for an economic system that the bourgeoisie says is also based on "human nature." The religion reinforces the basic presuppositions of the capitalist view of abstract man and since Catholicism represents a pre-bourgeois human abstraction more suitable to feudalism it is the Protestant form that is more congruent with bourgeois conceptions.

As long as humans are confused and alienated, and ignorant of how capitalism works and are mystified by their relation to the objects of their labor they will never be free, or free from the spell of religion, according to Marx. "The religious reflex of the real world," he writes, can only vanish "when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature."

The next two sentences from Marx are extremely important as they explain, in very general terms, the failure of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the socialist world system. The first sentence describes what the Bolsheviks set out to do in 1917. "The life processes of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan."

This is certainly what was attempted-- first by war communism, then the NEP, and then by the five year plans, forced collectivization and industrialization. But why the failure? Where were the "freely associated men?"

To pull off this great transformation, the goal of communism, Marx wrote "demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development."

In other words, the seizure of power was premature. The material ground-work had not been sufficiently developed. If Lenin represented the negation of the ancien regime, Gorbachev and Yeltsin represented the negation of the negation-- brought about by the failure of that long and painful process of development to properly develop production by freely associated human beings. For all its efforts the socialist world still belonged to that world in which the processes of production had the mastery over human beings and not the other way around. So we must still put up with the Fetichism of Commodities for a while longer.

The recent crisis (2008) gives us an opportunity to educate working people about this Fetichism and how to free themselves from it. GM became 70% owned by the government and the UAW will have a stake of about 17.5%. This leaves 12.5% in the hands of the capitalists. The commodities the workers make (cars) don't have a life of their own. Their value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes workers to make them. They are extensions of the being of the working people not the capitalists who have proved themselves totally incompetent.

The working people of this country far out number the number of monopoly capitalists-- both industrial and financial. The UAW and the AFL-CIO as well other Unions should have seen to it that the government represented the interests of the working class majority. The 87.5% joint Government-worker control of GM should not have been used to put the private interests back in control, but to rationalize the auto industry by means of worker control, eliminate the capitalists and the Fetichism that keeps people thinking private interests have a role to play in production, and lay the groundwork for further nationalizations in the future.

What do you think?

​Anyone who reads Marx’s great work Capital today, and the number of new readers is growing, will find, before they hit the first chapter, six prefaces (four to German editions and one each to the French and English editions) and two afterwards (to the French and to the second German editions). Some readers just skip over these preliminary writings and jump into the text, which is fine. This is a good way to get right into the heart of what Marx has to say. But after the first chapter or so it’s a good idea to go back and read what you have skipped over. There are some very interesting remarks and comments from both Marx and Engels to be found there that, if kept in mind, will really help in understanding what Marxism is all about. My purpose here is to highlight some of these remarks that I think are particularly important and to comment on them. I invite readers to comment on this article if they think I have left out anything that should have been highlighted or have misinterpreted a passage. I am not going to go over all the prefaces and afterwards, just the ones I think are the most important.

Marx: Preface to the First German Edition, 1867:

Here we learn that the first volume of Capital is a continuation of Marx's 1859 work A Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy, and that, in fact, the first three chapters of Capital constitute a summary of that earlier work. Marx also tells us that "every beginning is difficult" in science and that, therefore, the first chapter of Capital will be the most difficult. The chapters after it will be easy and straightforward. Since many people bog down in Chapter One and abandon the reading of Capital it is encouraging to note you just have to stick it out with this chapter and the rest of Capital will be easy going. Some even recommend reading this chapter last. If you find chapter one too much you should do so. 

In this preface we also learn that the laws of capitalist development appear to be universal. Marx has studied its development in England because that country was the most advanced capitalist country. We are told that what is at issue, however, is not how capitalism may develop in this or that country but the laws of capitalism themselves.

The Chinese or Russians, for example, may think they are, or could be immune to the worst features and abuses of American capitalism, and maybe they could be today-- but the Marx of 1867 would not have agreed. He wrote, "it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. There may be some confusion between "iron laws" and "tendencies" so let me just say that in Marx's model of capitalism the "iron laws" are really what we would call the logical consequences that result from the premises Marx derives for his model based on an empirical investigation of English capitalism. The real world is vastly more complicated than the model which serves as a guide to its understanding. The" laws" of the model become "tendencies" when they are applied to the understanding of actually existing capitalist systems.

Once we understand the English model, Marx would have us believe that "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future." How to make sense of this? Will third world countries all develop along the path that led to US and European capitalism? Well, Japan did. But Russia industrialized under socialist motivated five year plans and the Chinese and Vietnamese are controlling capitalist development by state supervision, and by a state that is not in the control of the bourgeoisie. So things have become more complicated since 1867.

Why were the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, just to mention two, accompanied with excessive violence (or so it seems to many)? Marx said that the American War of Independence (he does not here call it the American Revolution) was the "tocsin" for the bourgeois revolutions in Europe that followed it. He thought (too optimistically) that the American Civil War was the "tocsin' that would proclaim the coming proletarian revolutions in Europe. He thought "social disintegration" was very far advanced in England and would spread to the rest of Europe.

The rising of the working class, Marx said, would be either humane or brutal "according to the degree of development of the working class itself." If Stalin or Mao appear to have been far too brutal we must remind ourselves that the development of the working class in their countries was at a very low level and that Marx had hoped that an advanced humane working class consciousness would have been possible to develop before a revolution. It didn't work out that way in those countries.

Marx thought it would be to the "advantage" of the capitalist class to help the working class develop itself! Here is what he says: "Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most important interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally removable hindrances to the free development of the working class." So it is the capitalists who should have supported EFCA (the Employees Free Choice Act, abandoned by Obama in a classic double cross) along with the unions! Why is this so? Because a repressed and resentful working class may be a violent and brutal class when it seizes power from the capitalists and you will get Gulags! The capitalists are playing with dynamite when they try to repress the working people. That is, if the working people have developed class consciousness.

As for skipping stages of economic development and great leaps forward, Marx had something to say about this as well. It is Marx's aim to discover and explain "the law of motion" of capitalist society. Even when that is done and we understand where capitalism is leading and that socialism will eventually be the outcome we can "neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of [capitalism's] normal development." The best we can do is "shorten and lessen the birth-pangs." Not knowing the difference between these two approaches is responsible for all the failures of socialist states, just as correct application of these distinctions is responsible for their successes.

Marx also wants to stress the scientific qualities of his work. Too often his followers dwell on the moral shortcomings of the ruling class. Such and such a person is evil, or driven by greed, and they are attacked personally and held responsible for layoffs, factory closings or economic downturns ('greedy bankers", etc.). But Marx says that his "standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."

Marx foresees his views will be violently attacked irrespective of their scientific correctness since they will go against "the Furies of private interest" which are "the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast."

As I said before, Marx was too optimistic with regard to the coming end of capitalism which he thought was right around the corner. It was even evident to him that the U.S. was going to be involved in radical change. He says "Mr. Wade, vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day." That would have been the success, perhaps, of radical reconstruction. President Andrew Johnson didn't really forcefully back reconstruction and it ultimately failed. Mr. Wade was not the vice-president, there was no vice-president in 1867 when Marx wrote his preface. Benjamin Franklin Wade (1800-1878) was president pro tempore of the Senate and next in line to be president if Johnson had been removed from office as a result of his impeachment. Had he become president, reconstruction might have taken a different turn. Well, so much for the preface to the first German edition. Lets jump ahead six years and discuss

Marx: Afterward to the Second German Edition, 1873:

In this afterward Marx explains why economics (political economy) can no longer be studied scientifically outside of the socialist movement, or only so studied under certain limitations.

The reason is that capitalism, as all other social formations, is the result of historical developments and has evolved certain characteristics that are historically conditioned and transient. The "laws" of physics may be eternal (e.g., the speed of light) but the "laws" of capitalist production are not. Thus if "the capitalist regime is looked upon as the absolutely final form of social production, instead of as a passing historic phase of its evolution, political economy can remain a science only so long as the class struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena."

The class struggle is in full swing today and we cannot expect bourgeois social "scientists" to be anything other than apologists for the capitalist system. The editorial writers for the Wall Street Journal, for example, cannot dispassionately write about health reform, bank regulation, workers rights, etc., in any scientific way involving a non partisan "search for truth."

In England, Marx says, the last person to treat economic problems in an objective manner was David Ricardo (1772-1823) who wrote when "the class struggle was as yet undeveloped." He is still innocent of the historical nature of the antagonistic contradictions between the classes over wages and profits, profits and rent and sees them as an eternal "social law of nature." Capitalism and its contradictions would always be there just as the sun in the sky--- TINA as Ms. Thatcher said ("There is no alternative.") How far will our bourgeois economists today go out of their way to deny these contradictions and sing the praises of a harmonious society. Regardless of the evidence we are told how business and labor have to work together to make the "system" better as it is the only "system" that really works.

Adam Smith and Ricardo lived in the infancy of the modern industrial world. The struggle between capital and labor then took a back seat to the struggle of the bourgeoisie and the feudal land owners. The first big cyclical crisis of capitalism was the crisis of 1825-- the direct ancestor of the recent (2008) economic meltdown, and the working class makes its debut as a force that actually could threaten bourgeoisdom in 1830 (cf. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, the book not the Broadway musical!) The workers, however, won't realize their potential until 1848.

After 1830, in Western Europe at any rate, the bourgeoisie was firmly in the saddle and the class struggle was underway in earnest. Marx said this "sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy." Now truth took a back seat to those Furies of private interest mentioned above. Truth became a question of what "was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not."

This has been the case ever since-- from Ivy League economic departments to Fox news by and large even, or more especially, today we have in "place of disinterested inquirers" only "hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetic." And, we must admit, our Soviet and Chinese comrades were not above apologetics since once in power they were no longer "disinterested inquirers." It will be a big challenge for Marxist leaders, in and out of power, to establish truly disinterested centers of inquiry because only by a true understanding of reality can they hope to be successful and not repeat the tragic errors of the 1930s, 60s and 80s which led to show trials, the Cultural Revolution, and the demise of the Soviet Union and eastern European people’s republics.

After 1848 there were a few bourgeois thinkers that recognized the legitimate claims of the workers and tried to "harmonize" them with the interests of capital. One of the best advocates of this harmonious society approach, Marx says, was John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) : yet he only produced "a shallow syncretism." Marx then recommends a book about Mill (Outlines of Political Economy according to Mill) by N. Tschernyschewsky ("the great Russian scholar and critic".) Don't bother trying to look this critic up under this name-- it is a terrible Cyrillic transliteration of the name of the Russian radical materialist proto-Marxist N.G. Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) the title of whose novel What Is To Be Done was used by Lenin for his work of the same name.

Now, a few remarks by Marx on his method and his relation to Hegel. Some writers, who should know better, have criticized Marx for the use of Hegelian "jargon" and the Hegelian dialectic in writing Capital. But Marx is quite clear, in the Afterward, his dialectical method is the "direct opposite" of that of Hegel. Hegel thinks in the language of German Idealism and tries to construct his dialectic around the concept of the "Idea" as the basis of reality. Marx says that he himself studies external reality to see how we come to get the concepts and ideas (including that of the "Idea”) in the first place. Completely unlike Hegel, Marx sees "the ideal" as nothing more than "the material world reflected by the human mind...."

With respect to Hegelian "jargon," Marx says he "coquetted" with Hegelian expressions a little in the chapter on value (i.e., chapter one) in order to avow himself as "the pupil of that mighty thinker" in response to the "peevish, arrogant, mediocre" critics of the philosopher who had raised their heads in Germany. Despite Hegel's mystifications, he was still the first to work out the form of a dialectical logic "in a comprehensive and conscious manner." With Hegel, Marx says, the dialectical method "is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell." I should also remark that while Marx says his method is the direct opposite of Hegel's, he and Hegel both believed in the dialectical principle of the unity of opposites. This is why Hegel is still read today but from a materialist perspective, and idealists can learn much from Marx.

Finally, it should be noted that even now, in the twenty-first century, Marx and his dialectical method are too hot to handle in most economic departments and business schools in the capitalist world. The dialectic is, Marx says, "a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors" because it does not recognize the reality of TINA (there is no alternative to capitalism). The dialectic "includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary." And, so now we move on to:

Engels: Preface to the English Edition, 1886:

One of the things Engels wants to do in this preface is to comment on Marx's use of certain traditional terms in political economy such as "rent," "profit." "commodity," "surplus," etc., which Marx has been accused of using in an idiosyncratic way. Engels agrees that Marx uses some of these terms slightly differently than they were used by his predecessors but that he is clear about when he does so and the reasons for doing so. "It is," Engels says, "however, self-evident that a theory which views modern capitalist production as a mere passing stage in the economic history of mankind, must make use of terms different from those habitual to writers who look upon that form of production as imperishable and final."

I think Engels thought the revolution to replace capitalism was right around the corner. He says the boom and bust cycles of capitalism between 1825 to 1867 "seems" to be over and we are in "the slough of despond of a permanent chronic depression" and that a future "period of prosperity will not come." Well, he missed out on recognizing the tenacity of the capitalist system. We are now in another "slough of despond" but if it is permanent or not I will not venture to guess. We still have not really answered the great question that Engels says faces the capitalists in every depression: "what to do with the unemployed?”

He thinks the unemployed might take matters into their own hands for he says "we can almost calculate when the unemployed losing patience will take their own fate into their own hands." I am afraid we can't calculate that either. But one thing is for sure. Engels says Das Kapital is often referred to as "the Bible of the working class." If the workers of the world want to come out of the ongoing crisis on top of the situation they had better start reading their Bible.

Engels in fact makes that very same recommendation in this 1886 preface. The workers might very well be able to come to power in a legal and peaceful way in advanced capitalist countries. In the 1880s England was the most developed country by far and Marx thought that in England the social revolution "might be effected entirely by peaceful and legal means." That is what advanced democratic working people should aim for wherever democracy is advanced enough to allow for it. Marx did add that even if the workers achieved victory democratically he expected the ruling class not to submit and to wage a "pro-slavery rebellion" (a reference to the US Civil War). So, maybe not so peaceful after all.

The challenge facing us now is to see how we can deal with the present ongoing world economic, as well as capitalist environmental, crisis on the basis of a modern understanding of Marx's great book.

​Although Karl Marx is not known first and foremost as an environmental theorist, in recent decades students of his work have argued that Marx had a systematic approach to environmental protection, that he recognized the key connections among labor, technology, and nature, and, according to sociologist John Bellamy Foster, that his discussions of the environment “prefigured some of the most advanced ecological analysis of the late 20th century.”   By analyzing the distorted relationship that capitalism imposes between humans and the rest of nature, Marx used developments in the agricultural science of his day to argue that by radically transforming socio-economic relations, it is possible to repair the rift between humans and nature.  A path to sustainability and environmental protection is possible.

Marx and Engels were witnesses to and keen analysts of the environmental problems inherent in nineteenth-century capitalism.  They wrote about the depletion of coal reserves, the destruction of forests, and, especially, about diminishing soil fertility, which Foster recognizes was the most pressing issue of the day.   Given breakthroughs in soil chemistry, large-scale land owners in the 1800s became aware of the value of additives like potassium salts, phosphates and guano (sea bird dung that accumulated in great quantities in South American and the Caribbean) to improve “exhausted soil.”  At the same time, farmers realized that mineral deposits that could be used for soil enhancement were expensive and in short supply.

One of the foremost agricultural chemists of his time, Justus von Liebig (1803-73), criticized agricultural practices that relied on highly limited resources like guano.  Such temporary fixes cannot restore the “conditions of reproduction” of the soil.   “Rational agriculture,” Liebig wrote in 1859, demanded a radical recycling plan that would return the nutrients of town inhabitants’ waste back into the soil of the countryside.  Only this could ensure sustainability.  Liebig called it “the principle of restitution; by giving back to the field the conditions of their fertility, the farmer insures the permanence of the latter.”

In his discussions of nature in Capital, Marx relies heavily on Liebig’s work and shows that the divide between urban and rural concerns in Liebig’s work echo the “greatest division of material and mental labor” — that is, the separation between town and country.  Capitalist production concentrates populations in cities, estranged from the natural foundations of human existence.   Capitalism, Marx wrote, “disturbs the metabolic interaction” between human beings and the planet on which they live; this is known as the concept of “metabolic rift.”  As he wrote in Capital (vol. 3):

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke and irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.

Here, Marx used the organic analogy of metabolism, referring to the biological systems in which an organism takes in nutrients from its environment and expels wastes, enabling it to grow and reproduce.   Metabolism can be used to describe regulatory processes of a single cell, an organism, an ecosystem, or indeed the whole planet.  Furthermore, Marx focused on social metabolism, in which the systems that connect humans with nature are mediated by productive forces.  The “metabolic rift” refers to the way human labor becomes alienated from its natural resources.

Marx here drew the parallel between capitalist exploitation of laborers in urban areas with capitalist agriculture’s depletion of natural resources like soil fertility in the countryside.  Large-scale industry impoverishes workers, and large-scale agriculture impoverishes the soil.  The metabolic rift on a global level is seen in the way imperialist nations rob colonized areas of natural resources, including depleting their soil.  Mining guano in Peru or collecting Chilean nitrates are temporary and false solutions to the problem of soil exhaustion. (In fact Liebig said English agriculture would need to find guano deposits about the size of English coalfields to use it effectively).

For Marx, the only lasting path to sustainability is the “conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property” – i.e. the abolition of private landed property.  Ecological sustainability is only a possibility in “a future society of associated producers,” a socialist society, which could bring about a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry.

However, a transition to socialism alone doesn’t guarantee that the antagonism between town and country will be overcome automatically.  According to Foster, Marx emphasized the need for careful planning, for a more even dispersal of people over rural and urban areas, and for recycling of soil nutrients from town to countryside.     The early Soviet Union, especially during Lenin’s time, had more deliberate concern for the scientific management of natural resources and natural preservation.  Later, other priorities would cause late 20th century Soviet leaders to pursue policies that have been characterized as “ecocide,” losing sight of Marx’s argument about the metabolic rift. A better model of the potential of a society that is not dominated by huge private corporations can be found in Cuba, whose advances in coastal management, urban farming, and sustainable agriculture are well known.  These achievements are impossible when short-term profit for private owners is the primary goal.

John Bellamy Foster believes that we usually don’t see Marx as an environmental theorist because our definition of environmental thought is too narrow, contrasting ecocentrism (focusing on the natural world) and anthropocentrism (focusing on humans), while leaving out the interaction between society and the natural world.   While capitalism sees nature as something separate from humanity, something that can and should be dominated by humans and that is even a “free gift” to capital, Marx advanced a more profound viewpoint.  Even soil fertility, Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy, “is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time.” The key to the mediation between humans and nature is found in technology, which is shaped by both natural conditions and social relations.  As Foster points out, advances in agricultural techniques created the new social relations that are inherently incompatible with sustainable agriculture.  What have to change are not more and different technical developments as much as change in the social relations themselves.
​
At a recent Youth Climate Strike March, a young man carried a sign that said “The only solution to the climate crisis is an end to capitalism.”  Marx would agree.  Structural change, a reining in of corporate power, will be the only effective way to protect the earth, which Engels wrote “is our one and all, the first condition of our existence.”


Citations

John Bellamy Foster. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 105, No. 2. (Sep., 1999), pp. 366-405.


Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1970 [1846]. Full text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/
​

Karl Marx 1981. Capital vol. 3. NY: International Publishers.

​Karl and Fred were talking in Karl's study about the fact that they had been friends for over 50 years--since first grade in fact.  Karl was saying “Why don’t we engage in an extended study of Chinese philosophy to see if any of it is useful in comprehending the new century”  Fred was not at all adverse to this suggestion so Karl pulled down his copy of a Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy edited by the Chinese scholar Wing-Tsit Chan.
    
“I remember that very well,” Fred said. “When we were in Hawaii in the summer of 1968 you lugged it around with you everywhere you went. Do you still remember what you read?"
     
“I most certainly do,” replied Karl, handing the volume to Fred. “Here! Why don’t you look at it and ask some questions--between the two of us we can try to find out if this stuff has any meaning today.”
    
Fred opened the book and said, “We might as well begin with Confucius--he is the first philosopher I see listed in the Table of Contents.”  
 
“So be it’” Karl replied. 
     
“Ok,” Fred said, “I have the Analects here...” 
 
Karl interrupted, “The  Lun-yu in Chinese. That's a collection of Confucius’ sayings collected by his students after his death. You know Confucius was a great teacher like Jesus, Buddha and Socrates and like them he didn’t write anything himself--his wisdom was saved for us by his followers putting it down for future generations.”
     
“Oh, so we are getting ‘virtual’ Confucius.”  
 
“Well," responded Karl, “there is probably some tampering with the text, some student misinterpretations, but also a lot of the real ideas and opinions of Confucius as well. After all, he was born in 551 BC, lived 73 years, and died in 479 BC.”
 
“That's 72 years,” Fred corrected.
 
“Ah,” Karl replied, “unlike us, in China when you are born you are considered to be one year old so when we are one a Chinese is already two!.”
     
“Anyway,” Karl continued, “He was from a small state called Lu and lived in a time of political turmoil and war because the central authority had broken down and all the little petty states were competing for power. Confucius was self educated, there were no professional teachers--he was the first--and he thought his ideas if practiced would restore the Empire to its former glory and create a just state for the people as well. Failing to do much in Lu he left it and wandered around to other states spreading his doctrines and collecting a large group of disciples who followed him. After many years he returned to Lu and died a few years later, leaving his ‘school’ behind.
    
“I see a bunch of Chinese technical terms here in Chan before we even get to Chapter One of the Lun-yu,” Fred remarked, “Have a look see!” 
 
Karl took the book. “Yes, I see. I’ll tell you which ones are the most important and we will have to memorize them as they will keep cropping up. But for the time being we can ignore them. I’ll talk about them when they actually pop up. Why don’t you begin looking at the text of the Lun-yu.” Karl handed the book back to Fred.
     
“What’s this 1:1 ?” 
 
“It means ‘Section 1, Chapter 1’-a conventional ordering.” 
 
“OK,” and Fred began to read: “1:1 Is it not a pleasure to learn and to repeat or practice from time to time what has been learned?”
    
“Very famous,” Karl interrupted. “The very first sentence. It indicates that Confucius enjoined the unity of theory and practice!”
    
Fred continued. ”What does he mean here in 1:8? ‘Have no friends who are not as good as yourself.’ If the Chinese thought Confucius was the greatest teacher and the best then he couldn’t have any friends!”
 
“He means “morally good’,” said Karl, “not the best teacher. Confucius was morally good and so were many of his disciples, so he had plenty of friends.”
     
“Well, what about this: 1:11-’When a man’s father is alive, look at the bent of his will. When his father is dead, look at his conduct. If for three years he does not change from the way of his father, he may be called filial.’?”
    
“You know the ancient Chinese were very family oriented and patriarchal with large extended families and sons were filial--meaning obedient, respectful and loyal. Very unlike today with us!”
     
“You mean they were big on the Fifth Commandment!” 
 
“They certainly would have agreed with it. Anyway, this quote just means that a son should be loyal to his father’s ideas while he is alive, and stay loyal to them thru the three years of official mourning after his death, then he can go his own way with his own ideas--he has done his duty.”
     
“What about 2:1? He says ‘A ruler who governs his state by virtue is like the north polar star, which remains in its place while all the other stars revolve around it.”
     
“Chan points out two things are going on here. One is the idea that the Ruler rules by virtue and second, as Thomas Jefferson would say, ‘that government governs best which governs least.’ Everything should fall into place naturally by the laws of virtue.”
     
“Wow! sounds like a Republican--no big government!” 
 
“Or a Marxist--’virtue’ leads to the withering away of the state!” 
 
“Hmmm. The Right and the Left can claim the old boy!” 
 
“Well, let’s wait and see on that one Fred.”
     
“O.K. Karl. 2:4 is very interesting. He says, ‘At fifteen my mind was set on learning [not Intendo]. At thirty my character had been formed. At forty I had no more perplexities [Gad Zooks!]. At fifty I knew the Mandate of Heaven (T’ien-ming). At sixty I was at ease with whatever I heard. At seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing moral principles.”
 
“T’ien-ming--’Heaven-Fate’ or ‘Nature-Fate’ the famous ‘Mandate of Heaven’,” Karl mused.  “You know Chan says the prevailing meaning of this term is what we would simply call the ‘laws of nature.’ Different Chinese thinkers in the long history of China of course meant many different things by this term--from God’s Providence to the philosopher’s ideas of moral law or fate (destiny) to natural endowment [genetic constitution].”
    
“Here is 2:11 ‘A man who reviews the old so as to find out the new is qualified to teach others’. I like that--it means a teacher has to keep reading and studying or he or she becomes stale and unfit. But what does 2:12 mean? ‘The superior man is not an implement.’ “
     
“This is the type of person who follows Confucian philosophy--the sage, the philosopher, etc. I don’t like the term ‘superior man’ and all its patriarchal suggestions, ‘exemplary person’ would be better. The Chinese term is “junzi” and you can just substitute it every time you see “superior man.” You know Fred, despite the prevailing sexism of Chinese culture in Confucius’ day, we have to see this philosophy as compatible with the equality of the sexes if it’s going to mean anything in this new century of ours. Not being an ‘implement’ only means the sage is not just a tool to be used by those in power, a sort of technical expert used to carry out plans devised by others. A true wise person would be well rounded and part of the evaluative process. The scientists, for example, that made the Atomic Bomb, for all their smarts, were just implements. How many scientists today have any real input in the decision making process regarding the use of their work? Many are hired hands. I think this is what Confucius meant.”
     
“What does he mean here in 2:18--’When one’s words give few occasions for blame and his acts give few occasions for repentance--there lies his emolument’?
    
“It’s as Chan points out--Confucianism stresses equally the importance of both words and actions.”
    
“3:17 won’t go over well today!”
     
“Read it!”
     
“Ok, Confucius is replying to one of his followers who was against killing a lamb as a sacrifice at the start of the month. ‘Zigong! You love the lamb but I love the ceremony.’ What do you think of that one?”
 
“Times change. I think by now we all agree that animal sacrifices are a pretty primitive or barbaric behavioral pattern that nowadays would be considered a pretty ignorant sort of practice--but Confucius was living twenty-five centuries ago...”
    
Fred interrupted, “But weren’t there people, teachers in India at this time, that thought that killing animals was verboten?"
     
“I think the point is, this was acceptable in Chinese culture. Confucius is trying to point out the importance of tradition and ritual, but on this point I think Zigong had a more advanced outlook--it’s too bad that Confucius didn’t rise to the occasion.”
    
“Here is another confusing saying, 4:10-’A junzi in dealing with the world is not for anything or against anything. He follows righteousness as the standard.”
     
“Hmmmm. Looks like you could not say ‘I’m for peace or I’m for social reform.’ But of course it’s confusing because it seems as if you could say ‘I’m for righteousness!’  Does Chan say anything in his comment Fred?”
    
Fred read out, “Here lies the basic idea of the Confucian doctrine of ching-ch’uan, or the standard and the exceptional, the absolute and the relative, or the permanent and the temporary.”
     
“This we should remember: ‘The Doctrine of Ching-Ch’uan’. It means don’t be dogmatic, don’t commit the fallacy of accident, maybe even be pragmatic--no, that's the wrong word. Keep an open mind and judge every situation you are confronted with in terms of its own unique problematic, but don’t break the rules of ‘righteousness.’ The big problem is of course how to determine what ‘righteousness’ is. For Confucius it seems to have been the rules of his own society seen from the vantage point of a man who looked to the past practices of an idealized former age.  Confucius would balk at being involved in a current situation that deviated too much from the past--not always, but mostly. His view or doctrine would go along with what today we call ‘situational ethics’ but with a ‘conservative’ twist.”
     
“Maybe this will help,” Fred said. “In 4:15 he tells his follower Zeng ‘there is one thread that runs through my doctrines’ which Zeng explained as ‘The Way of our Master is none other than conscientiousness (chung) and altruism (shu).’  So I say ‘righteousness’ equals chung + shu.”
     
“Not bad,” Karl remarked. “I like the idea of ‘one thread (i-kuan)’.  What does Chan say about these terms?”
     
“Chung is the full development of a person’s mind--the good aspects, and Shu is extending these good aspects to other people. Develop your own abilities and help others develop theirs--what could be more righteous than that?”
    
“Read on!”
    
“Here is 4:16--’The junzi understands righteousness(i); the inferior man understands profit’. Yikes! Our whole Global Capitalist system is based on profit!"
 
"Maybe to be a Confucian today puts you in the opposition.”
    
“ Do you really think so Karl? Confucius lived under something like feudalism. What was his attitude?”
     
“This is getting heavy. I think we will have to keep these questions in mind and read along some more in the Source Book before we try to answer them.”
 
“OK by me. Here is just some information from 6:5. We find the name of Confucius’ favorite student was Yan Hui.”
    
“I know, he died very young, in his thirties.”  
     
“What do you think of this? 6:17--’Man is born with uprightness. If one loses it he will be lucky if he escapes with his life’.”   
    
“I don’t know what this means. ‘Uprightness’ is a culturally relative term and a person learns it from his or her society, so I don’t know what it can mean to say you are ‘born’ with it. But think of ‘with’ in the sense that a person is born into a society with [i.e., which has] such a sense, then if one loses the sense of uprightness inculcated into one by the society one gets into a pickle indeed. I can make sense of 6:17 along these lines.”
     
“Well Karl, I think you must be correct. Looking back to 5:12 I found this: Zigong is speaking, ‘We can hear our Master’s [views] on culture and its manifestation, but we cannot hear his views on human nature and the Way of Heaven [because these subjects are beyond the comprehension of most people].’ So I don’t think that Confucius was talking about anything innate in humans.”
     
“I agree. What’s next?”
    
“6:19--’To those who are above average, one may talk of the higher things, but may not do so to those who are below average.’”
     
“This is sort of a philosophical rule. The Prime Directive of philosophy is to ‘Always seek the truth by means of logic and reason without appeals to faith and emotion.’ And here we have what I call the ‘Second Directive’--’don’t bother talking philosophy with people who don’t understand the importance of the Prime Directive.’” 
    
“That’s how you interpret 6:19? Where does the Prime Directive come from? I haven’t seen it in the Analects?”
     
“It’s from Socrates via Plato. But there are hints of it in the Analects.  I’ll point them out when we come to them.”
     
“Maybe there is a hint of it right here in 6:20--”Devote yourself earnestly to the duties due to men, and respect spiritual beings but keep them at a distance. This may be called wisdom.’ I think I see a hint there.”
     
“Good observation Fred. Read on!”
     
“OK, 6:21--’The man of wisdom delights in water; the man of humanity delights in mountains. The man of wisdom is active; the man of humanity is tranquil. The man of wisdom enjoys happiness; the man of humanity enjoys long life.’ “
    
“These are two of Confucius big values--activity and tranquility. They are found in the same person depending on the circumstances. By the way, Yan Hui had a short life but I doubt that Confucius did not consider him a man of humanity.”
    
“And Chan remarks that ‘courage’ was later added to the list and that Mencius grouped these first two values with his concepts of righteousness and propriety to get ‘The Four Beginnings.’”
    
“Yes, but we will get to Mencius in due time [i.e., in another discussion]. Let’s not jump the gun.”
    
“6:23--’When a cornered vessel no longer has any corner, should it be called a cornered vessel? Should it?’”
   
“We are approaching here a central and important doctrine of Confucius--the rectification of names--but we will have to wait a while for its proper development. It’s just hinted at here.”
     
“I see Chan’s brief comment:’ Name must correspond to actuality.’ The Correspondence Theory of Truth!”
     
“What’s next?”
    
“6:28--’A man of humanity, wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others, and wishing to be prominent himself, also helps others to be prominent. To be able to judge others by what is near to ourselves may be called the method of realizing humanity.’ Chan calls this ‘The Confucian golden rule in a nutshell.’ “
     
“Yes, and this passage is connected with 4:15 and the ‘one thread’ passage.”
     
“7:1--’I transmit but do not create. I believe in and love the ancients.’ Chan suggests we compare this with 2:11 and points out that he did do things that were new--’he offered education to all’--and his ideas on the junzi and ‘heaven’ were somewhat original.”
    
“That comment on education needs to be looked at, especially the ‘all’ part. I want to give Confucius his due credit. He was not a stuck-up aristocrat and if so-called common people showed an aptitude for learning or people from impoverished economic and/or social backgrounds showed talent, Confucius welcomed them as students. This was really a big step forward for the China of his day and in his own social context Confucius was an enlightened person in this respect. But he did NOT offer education to ‘all’. He had nothing to do with women and did not rise above his social conditioning with respect to their rights as human beings with the same value as males. In this respect Plato was much more enlightened than he. One wonders if women had been seen as equals by Confucius if they would have had to wait until the victory of the Marxists in 1949 for the preconditions of their emancipation.”
    
“Excellent observation Karl. I wonder why Chan missed it. Anyway, here is 7:8--’I do not enlighten those who are not eager to learn, nor arouse those who are not anxious to give an explanation themselves. If I have presented one corner of the square and they cannot come back to me with the other three, I should not go over the points again.’”
    
“A very revealing quote on his teaching methods. Compare it to 6:19.”
 
“In 7:16 he says, ‘Give me a few more years so that I can devote fifty years to study, then I may be free from great mistakes.”        
     
“This reminds me of Hume’s satire on his own death--asking Charon to grant him a leave of a few years so he might see the overthrow of religious superstition. Of course Confucius is not trying to be funny, this simply shows his modesty--yet fifty years is hardly a few!”
     
“7:20-’Confucius never discussed strange phenomena, physical exploits, disorder, or spiritual beings’”
     
“Here is one of those Prime Directive hints we were speaking about earlier.”
     
“7:22--’Heaven produced the virtue that is in me; what can Huan Tui do to me?’”
    
“This seems deterministic. Huan Tui tried to assassinate Confucius. It seems as if Confucius was a Presbyterian here. If Heaven has determined what shall be then Huan Tui really can’t do much to Confucius. There are many problems with this type of determinism which are not discussed in the Analects.” [Huan Tui was a jealous official afraid he would lose his Job if Confucius met his Lord]
     
“7:24-’Confucius taught four things: culture (wen), conduct, loyalty, and faithfulness.’”
      
“Very succinct statement showing that Confucius’ concern was with social philosophy--politics and ethics--and not religion or metaphysics.”
    
“Here is 7:29--’Is humanity far away? As soon as I want it, there it is right by me.’”
     
“It’s as Chan remarks. We are always able to act properly. Our humanity is always on call and we have no one to blame but ourselves if we fail to act upon it--unless there is a gun to your head or something similar.”
     
“Now Karl, here is a good one--more than a hint of the Prime Directive if you ask me. 7:34--’Confucius was very ill. Zilu asked that prayer be offered. Confucius said “is there such a thing?” Zilu replied, “There is. A Eulogy says, ‘Pray to the spiritual beings above and below.’” Confucius said, “My prayer has been for a long time [that is, what counts is the life that one leads].”’”
     
“I agree with you Fred, this is really a great quote. Confucius has no interest in religious mumbo jumbo. This would be especially true if he thinks Heaven is a deterministic system.  It looks like Zilu missed one corner of the square!”
     
“7:37--’Confucius is affable but dignified, austere but not harsh, polite but completely at ease.’ And Chan remarks that this is ‘The Confucian Mean in practice.’ But we haven’t talked about the ‘Mean’ have we?”
    
“Not yet, but it’s coming up. It’s more or less like the Greek notion of nothing in excess.”
    
“Now here is a very interesting description of Yan Hui the favorite disciple. Chan says it is very Taoist. It is given by Zengzi. 8:5--’Gifted with ability, yet asking those without; possessing much, yet asking those who possess little; having, yet seeming to have none; full, yet seeming vacuous; offended, yet not contesting--long ago I had a friend who devoted himself to these ways.’ And now to continue. Here is an example of elitist thinking! 8:9--’The common people may be made to follow it (the Way) but may not be made to understand it.’”
     
“This goes along with the sentiments in 6:19. Undemocratic from our point of view but quite in keeping with the feudal mentality of the times. This distrust of ordinary people seems endemic. Not only is our U.S. government designed to minimize participation by the common people but we have seen the collapse of the European socialist countries was facilitated by a similar, and in their case paternalistic, contempt of the ordinary person. The current Chinese government seems no different in this regard no matter how much better off materially the majority of the people may be.”
     
“Here comes a passage that Chan says has caused a lot of problems in the Confucian tradition. 9:1--’Confucius seldom talked about profit, destiny (ming or the Mandate of Heaven), and humanity.’  Chan points out that while ‘profit’ is discussed only six times and ‘destiny’ ten times ‘humanity’ is mentioned one hundred five times! So how can it be maintained that Confucius seldom talked about it. Chan says it is an intractable problem. Confucius had positions on all these subjects.”
     
“Well, I understand not talking a lot about ‘profit’--’chung + shu’ seem incompatible, at least if profit is elevated to the primary aim of life. ‘Ming’ [fate] is a metaphysical concept and we have already noted that metaphysics was not one of Confucius’ major concerns.”
     
“9:16--’Confucius, standing by a stream, said, “it passes on like this, never ceasing day or night!”
     
“Obviously a metaphor for time and life. This saying is very much in the spirit of Heraclitus and even the Hegelian dialectic. I hope the Chinese Marxists appreciate it!”
     
“Now we have what Chan says is ’a most celebrated saying on humanism’. Another one of those hints we were speaking of previously--a lot more than a hint actually. 11:11 Zilu ‘asked about serving the spiritual beings. Confucius said,”If we are not yet able to serve man, how can we serve spiritual beings?” “I venture to ask about death.” Confucius said, “If we do not yet know about life, how can we know about death?”’
     
“A really great quote Fred. Would that all the squabbling religious fanatics we are reading about in the papers every day might heed these words!”
   
“We have come to 11:25 A, I am going to summarize it. It is rather long but has generated a great deal of speculation as to its meaning because of what many consider to be the unusual responses in it by Confucius.  In this passage Confucius asks several of his companions what they would most like to do in the world assuming they had attained office and recognition. One replied that he would like to govern a state that was in dire straits so that in three years the people could see how he could solve all the problems. Another gave a similar answer while admitting that he was not himself a junzi. Another wanted to be a junior assistant as he was still learning. Finally, Zengxi said ‘In the late Spring, when the spring dress is ready, I would like to go with five or six grownups and six or seven young boys to bathe in the Yi River, enjoy the breeze on the Rain Dance Alter, and then return home singing.’ Now Confucius replied ‘agree with Zengxi.’ The Chinese have expended a lot of ink trying to find out why Confucius agreed with Zengxi.
     
“Well, Fred,” Karl began, “it seems pretty clear that what Confucius is saying is that it’s best to have power in a well ordered state that doesn’t require any heroics to administer. His other students didn’t get the point, obviously, of Confucius’ ideas about government. He seems to have had a lot of students he should have gone over that first corner with again.”
     
“That’s right Karl. Now here is a version of the ‘Golden Rule’ from the Analects--its in 12:2 ‘Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.’”
   
“The negative version. I used to think that the ‘Golden Rule’ was unique to our culture till I read about it long ago in the works of Confucius.”
     
“A point for anti-ethnocentrism.”
     
“Indeed!”
     
“12:22--’Fan Chi asked about humanity. Confucius said, “It is to love men.” He asked about knowledge. Confucius said “It is to know man.”’”
    
“Again the stress on moral and social subjects. Of course today knowing ‘man’ would include psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, etc., etc.  And ‘love’.... here we need a real definition of what constitutes ‘love’ of humanity. What is the real substance of Confucian Humanism.?”
    
“Is it just practicing the ‘Golden Rule’ in whatever situation you find yourself?”
     
“Maybe. But maybe it’s more action oriented than that. Maybe ‘love’ means we have to strive to change the social situations in which we find people. Maybe nowadays Confucianism can only be practiced within the Marxist framework. Sort of ‘Marxism-Confucianism.’”
    
“That sounds a little like the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. He said he had come to realize that his philosophy, ‘existentialism,’ could only be developed within a form of Marxism because the social conditions that brought forth Marxism have not been transcended. In fact, according to him, no philosophy made any sense that ignored or rejected Marxism because only Marxism addressed itself to the problems of humanity as a whole, to abolishing race and class exploitation and treating, eventually, all people as ends.”
     
“We are getting far afield. Better get back to the Analects!”
    
“13:3--here Confucius brings up the topic of ‘The Rectification of Names’. ‘If names are not rectified, then language will not be in accord with truth. If language is not in accord with truth, then things cannot be accomplished.’”
     
“You know Fred this is extremely important. This is reminiscent of Bertrand Russell and of the Analytic Philosophers and the Oxford ordinary language philosophers. The words we use to describe reality have to correspond to that reality. People are misled and misgoverned all the time by being duped by the misuse of names. Remember the Vietnam War--American troops would retreat and the military brass would call it an ‘advance to the rear’! They were just trying to mislead and confuse the American people.
    
“Like renaming the War Department the ‘Department of Defense' or calling the invasion of Iraq 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' instead of 'Operation Iraqi Oil'”
    
“I think we have another directive under our Prime Directive, or rather another rule.”
     
“That’s one directive and two rules we have then.”
     
“Yes. Rule One--don’t discuss philosophy with those who reject the Prime Directive. Rule Two--’The Rectification of Names.’  That is ‘language must be in accord with truth.’ This may be difficult to attain but we must constantly strive for it. You see, we are learning lots of stuff we can apply to our own age and culture!”
    
“Hmmmm. Here is a difficult passage I think. 13:18--’The Duke of She told Confucius, “In my country there is an upright man called Kung. When his father stole a sheep, he bore witness against him.” Confucius said, “The upright men in my country are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this.” ‘What do you make of that Karl?”
     
“I think it’s the ‘Euthyphro Problem.’”
     
“What’s that?”
     
“Plato wrote a dialog called the Euthyphro. Socrates meets Euthyphro who is on his way to report a murder his father has committed. He thinks piety requires this. This is like Kung being a witness against his father because he, and the Duke of She, think that uprightness requires this. Confucius holds the contrary view.”
     
At this point Karl walked over to his bookcase and pulled out the Oxford Companion to Philosophy. “There is an article here on this problem Fred, by Gareth Matthews. I think it will throw some light on Comrade Kung’s behavior.”
     
By all means, Karl, carry on.” 
     
“To put the problem in Chinese terms we have to figure out what does ‘uprightness’ consist of-- that is, where does the notion come from. Is it one thing in Lu, Confucius' native state, and another in She or is it constant so Confucius is really indicating that the Duke of She is wrong? I must say, I don’t have an answer to this and neither did Socrates. Here let me read this passage or paraphrase it to the Chinese context. The point seems to be that ‘uprightness’ can’t be defined as something we should do because some authority demands it of us, say God or Heaven, because then we would only be doing it because of authority and authorities differ. Nor can it be the case that God or Heaven orders it because it is right to do so because then it is an independent thing to which God or Heaven is subject. So we really can’t figure out from whence the standard of ‘uprightness’ is derived. It’s the old ‘Is it good because God wills it or does God will it because it is good’ problem. I think the Prime Directive rules out ‘God” as an explanation, so we have to say on one level ‘uprightness’ is relative to cultures, the level of cultural development and on another level we have to contextualize the circumstances of each situational act.  The Duke of She hasn’t given us enough information on this case and I think Confucius jumped the gun with his reply. Is your primary duty to your family or to the state--i.e., to a legal system which should protect all? It’s Kung’s father that is the problem but between the Duke of She and Confucius it’s not possible to definitely say one or the other is right. It seems the duty to ‘truth’ however would tip the scales against Confucius unless Kung volunteered this information in a noncompulsory environment.”
    
“14:36--’Someone said,”What do you think of repaying hatred with virtue?” Confucius said,”In that case what are you going to repay virtue with? Rather, repay hatred with uprightness and repay virtue with virtue”’
     
“Confucius means you repay hatred with proper behavior according to the circumstances.”
     
“This means, according to Chan, absolute impartiality. Confucianists mean that by ‘uprightness’.
     
“If so then Kung was being impartial in saying his father stole the sheep. Confucius should have agreed with the Duke of She!”
     
“In 15:8 he reaffirms his humanism: ’A resolute scholar and a man of humanity will never seek to live at the expense of injuring humanity. He would rather sacrifice his life in order to realize humanity.’” 
     
“Go on Fred.”
     
“OK, 15:23, a follower asks if there is one word that sums up Confucius’ philosophy. You guess Karl!”

"Well, I think it must be 'humanity' (jen/ren)."
    
“No, it’s shu or altruism, from 4:15. He then repeats the negative ‘Golden Rule’ which must be the real meaning of altruism and hence is the one-word summation of Confucius philosophy!”
    
​“So, we can boil down the whole of the Analects to this one comment. But let’s proceed anyway.”
     
“OK, 15:28 ‘It is man that can make the Way great, and not the Way that can make man great.”
    
“This is heavy Fred. The Way or Tao is the master controlling force, as it were, of the universe--”God” to Westerners! So, we make ‘God’ he doesn’t make us ‘great.’ I think this boils down to our actions in life reflect on the Way, we in a sense create it in our own image-- we can follow it positively or negatively. For example, if we ourselves are, say, homophobic or think males are higher than females, or want to control the actions and thoughts of others, lo and behold, our ‘God’ wants that too, and vice versa.”
     
“So, our religion is just the reflection of the kind of human beings we are.”
    
“Yes, and that is based on our education, our openness, and the culture we are brought up in--wide or narrow.”
     
“15:38--’In education there should be no class distinction.’”
    
“To bad he didn’t, as Plato did, add ‘no sex distinction’ as well. He would have to be against our system of public schools for the masses and elite private schools for the rich. American or European followers of Confucius have a big educational reform to fight for. Even private universities would have to go public....”
    
“Or let anyone attend. I’m not sure everything has to be public. You could have both--just that admission standards and costs have to be equalized so the rich don’t end up in one type of system and the poor in another.”
      
“I see we can have a big debate about this!”
      
“Here in 16:9 is something we can’t agree with, at least as he puts it. ‘Those who are born with knowledge are the highest type of people. Those who learn through study are the next. Those who learn through hard work are still the next. Those who work hard and still do not learn are really the lowest type.’”
     
“This is no good. People are not ‘born’ with knowledge. Also, different people learn different things. You might work hard at chemistry and not learn it but work at history or literature or physics and learn that, or music. Confucius should have recognized ‘different strokes for different folks’--this idea is an elitist throwback--a little too judgmental I think.” 
       
“OK Karl, I won’t argue with you because I think you might be right. Nevertheless, there may be something to what he says if you substitute ‘capacity’ for ‘knowledge. What do you think about this in 17:2-’By nature men are alike. Through practice they have become far apart’?”
    
“Well, we can universalize this and see how contemporary Confucius' thought is. He is indicating what we now commonly think to be true, that is, that human beings are pretty much equal all over the world and it is only cultural differences which separate us. Jarrod Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel, demonstrates this thesis. It is a little inconsistent with what we have just been discussing since the differences between humans should be due to ‘practice’ so some people should not be ‘born’ with knowledge.”
 
“And we should note that what Chan says in 17:2 is ‘the classical Confucian dictum on human nature.’”
    
“All the better. This dictum is absolutely superior, from a modern perspective, to Aristotle’s views, in the Politics, about the superiority of Greeks and his notion about ‘natural slaves.’ Not even Plato, it would seem, had advanced to this Confucian idea.”
     
“You are thinking about his discussion in the Republic about the different ways Greeks should treat Greeks as opposed to barbarians in warfare?”
     
“Yes.”
    
“Now, right after this, in 17:3 he says, ‘Only the most intelligent and the most stupid do not change.’”
    
“Looks like another deviation from 17:2 but I think not. I think, as in Aristotle, we should be putting a little mental note to ourselves when we read these passages, such as ‘always OR for the most part’. This allows us to recognize that we are dealing with general principles not absolute ‘laws’. While there may be individual variation in intellectual capacity this should be a cross cultural thing. By and large within, as between, cultures ‘intelligence’ is also a social construction, therefore I don’t think there is any ultimate contradiction between 17:2 and 17:3.”
     
“Karl, do you think we have another Rule, Rule Three, with 17:2?”
     
“I don’t see why not. Rule Three: ‘All human beings are basically alike, i.e.., equal.’ Just remember the proviso that since we are dealing with a multi-cultural world this needs some interpretation.”
     
“Such as?”
     
“Such as they are ‘equal’ before the law, or subject to the same ‘rights’ as each other. Basically, we all evolved from the same blob so it has to be ‘practice’ that separates the Queen of England from Apple Annie! “
    
“Here is an excellent quote to underscore Confucian Humanism--17:19: ‘Does Heaven say anything? The four seasons run their course and all things are produced. Does Heaven say anything?’”
     
“Even after all these centuries how can we improve on this observation.”
     
“It’s not an observation, it’s a question. I think Confucius meant it to be left open.”
    
“Maybe. We don’t have to answer this now then.”
    
“We may have to retract Rule Three--look at 17:25-’Women and servants are most difficult to deal with. If you are familiar with them, they cease to be humble. If you keep a distance from them, they resent it.’ And Chan says Confucius and the whole tradition thought women to be inferior (servants may differ due to ‘practice’).”
    
I see, we put ‘human beings’ in Rule Three and Confucius had said ‘men’ so we were giving him credit for what is actually a modern idea. This universal sexism, except perhaps for Socrates, is a problem. We now know there is no scientific evidence to justify it and so women would have to be included under Rule Three whatever Confucius may have thought.  We are holding to the view that Confucius and other past philosophers would change and adapt their views to accord with what we could demonstrate to them by our modern methods to be true of the natural world. So, I think they, as philosophers, would give up an outmoded sexism just as they would the centrality of the earth in the solar system. After these considerations I think we can keep Rule Three.”
    
“This last is a quote from a pupil, Zixia, ‘So long as a man does not transgress the boundary line in the great virtues, he may pass and repass it in the small virtues.’  19:11.”
     
“That’s it?”
    
“There is a little more, but I think I hit all the major issues or points.”
    
“So, we have Confucius in a ‘nutshell’ as it were. I think we have made some progress in understanding Chinese philosophy in its infancy. We have a Prime Directive, actually derived from the Greeks, and three rules to go by. I think we can justify the view that the Confucius word view is not inherently opposed to Marxism and does not constitute an antagonistic contradiction (矛盾).

​​​​​About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.

The movement towards worker cooperative has been a growing one as of the last couple decades. Although worker cooperatives can take various forms, they generally are companies in which the workers are also owners of where they work. They practice democracy at work, and seek to produce not for the goal of private capital accumulation in the hands of a single owner or small group of shareholders, but rather the earnings of the company are distributed and invested according to principles of the common good of everyone involved in the project. It has truly been a point of unification were socialist, communist, anarchist, radical liberals, and followers of catholic social teaching have all argued in favor of it as a more just form of enterprise structure to the traditional hierarchical capitalist firm. Beyond the fact that these coops are more just, practice has shown that they are usually more economically efficient and robust; the best current example is the Mondragon Corporation, founded by Father José María Arizmendiarrieta in 1956 in the Basque region of Northern Spain.   
​
There is a common misconception by some Marxist who speak about the promotion of cooperatives as un-Marxist. Their central argument is that a struggle for worker cooperatives while under capitalism is essentially an attempt to find Narnia; a magic door which in the other side you have a fictitious world of non-exploitative relations, where the central worker/owner dichotomy is destroyed. Their problem is essentially not with cooperatives in themselves, but rather with cooperative projects (and their promotion) under capitalism. They believe these projects distract from the class struggle and seek a way to find an alterative world within the real world, instead of changing the real world towards the alternative world we envision. Thus, the problem itself is not Narnia, but Narnia existing, as a strange loophole, within the non-Narnia world. My goal in this paper is to address this misconception and demonstrate that whether within or without a capitalist structure, worker cooperatives represent a reality that can be properly labeled as socialist. To do this, I will be referring to the thought the fathers of scientific socialism had on the topic. Not as an appeal to authority on the question of cooperatives, but to demonstrate how the Marxist rejection of worker cooperatives is based on a faulty appeal to authority. I will attempt to show how Marx, Engels, and Lenin all viewed worker cooperatives, both within capitalism or as an envisaged post-capitalist reality, as socialist.

Before we begin, I feel it is important to address another false dichotomy about worker cooperatives and Marxist theorization of it. That is that it stands as an alternative to State centrally planned socialism. The phrasing of cooperatives as an “alternative” produces the idea that a socialist state can either be based on a cooperative economy, or one that is centrally planned by the state. This is not only theoretically but practically a false dichotomy. Cooperative ownership has been a major form of property in really existing socialisms. Specifically, it has had its major impact in the spheres of agriculture. During the initial loosening up of the blockade on Cuba by the Obama administration, Cuba opened up the possibility for non-agricultural cooperatives. These cooperatives instantly gained popularity and within just a year 452 of them developed,[1] playing an essential role in Cuba leading Latin America in 2015 with a GDP growth of 4.438.[2] The point is, there is already a strong cooperative past in really existing socialist states, a past which like Mondragon, helps us see the efficiency of cooperative ownership, within and beyond agricultural areas. This would demonstrate in practice that socialist experiments are not categorizable by the fixed set of categories of cooperative and state owned, given that both forms of property have coexisted successfully. It is also important to recognize this false dichotomy excludes other forms of property which are inherently anticapitalistic, and which exist and can help provide a base for socialist experiments. Such is the case of indigenous communal property, which Marx at the end of his life had already seen as having tremendous potential for the establishment of socialism in its struggle with the expansion of capitalism into those areas where those communal forms of property and mentality dominated.
​
I have given a rough overview of how in practice cooperative forms of property have already been essential for socialist experiments. Although this topic is worthy of expansion, we will leave that for a latter work. In this work, I want to emphasize how theoretically the movement towards worker cooperatives is not the Narnia option certain unread Marxist might believe. Rather, that it presents within capitalism an internal negation of the system, and outside of capitalism, a real form of socialist property.

Before we go on to discuss the framing of cooperatives by Marx and co. let us look at how American Marxist economist Richard Wolff presents the topic. In the US, Professor Wolff’s show Economic Update averages out well over 100,000 views on YouTube each episode. The YouTube channel itself, Democracy at Work, is named after their larger project and as of today is nearing the 200,000-subscriber mark.[3] His platform is without a doubt one of largest and most successful in the US (among Marxist spaces). And as can be inferred in the title of the project, the central focus is on the promotion of worker cooperatives and democracy at work as an alternative to the capitalist order.
           
In the Economic Update episode of the 24th of August, Dr. Wolff examined the relation of cooperatives, socialism, and communism, clearer than in any other episode that I am aware of. This episode, which is called China: Capitalist, Socialist or What looks at the development of socialism in the USSR and in China. Dr. Wolff here uses Lenin to state that both the USSR and China are state capitalist. He does not do so in the way in which certain western ultra-leftist do it to dismiss these experiments as non-socialist, but rather he portrays the socialist step as itself state capitalism.
           
To be clear, Lenin brings up state capitalism during the development of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which was meant to create the conditions, in an underdeveloped Russia, for the possibility of socialism under the will of a government already dedicated to the communist cause; as opposed to withdrawing from revolutionary action until capitalism had a chance to develop (the latter was the general stance of the Mensheviks and certain European communist observing the Russian uprisings). The point here is not to dive into Soviet or Chinese history and discuss whether they were state capitalist or socialist (a fixed categorizing dichotomy I believe to be inherently anti-dialectical and thus non-Marxist), but to look at how this generalization Dr. Wolff partakes in with statements Lenin made specifically for the NEP, paints the intermediary step of socialism as synonymous with state capitalism, and cooperatives as synonymous with the following communist step.
             
On this topic of the transition away from capitalism and what one can call it, I think it is important to remember that as Marx states:

​This quote and its analogy of the womb is quite intentional. It reflects the indestructible influence Hegel’s logic plays on Marx, specifically the dialectical categories of change (quantity and quality), and how every new qualitative transition never comes about from a void, it is always developed out and away from the previous qualitative structure. The comparison seems clear if we refer to Hegel’s Phenomenology, when in reference to the transition from a metaphysical world to a scientific one he states:

​The point of this short diversion from the topic of coops, is to make a point to the other part of what Dr. Wolff’s episode was stating. I believe his disregard for the name calling of socialist states as socialist, state capitalist, or first stage communism, stems overall from his awareness that anything that grows out of capitalism and attempts to be something new, will always, at first maintain some elements of the previous world. This influence of the “old world” if you wish to call it that, is especially potent considering it really isn’t an “old world”, at least not yet; rather, capitalism exists in as an expanded a form as ever. It is very clear then, that any socialist attempt, will not be some pure utopia as some western ultra-communist wish to believe, it will necessarily maintain faults from the previous system. In part because it grew out of it, and in part because it is still subject to a world dominated by the logic of that which it outgrew.

Dr. Wolff is someone who is well aware that cooperative property has and still exists in socialist states. So why does it seem such a unique project to have a Marxist centered promotion of coops? Well, I think there might be two answers to this question, each which is connected to the other.
           
​First, it is obvious to anyone who has had the time to read the corpus of Marx and Engel’s work, that there is no blueprint for what a socialist economy would look like. We know that: 

​But this isn’t really an idea of how to structure the society, it just tells us what is obvious to any socialist; that the working class must seize political power, and that once seized it must struggle to maintain it from the reactionary forces that will attempt against the qualitative leap. The most we really get is an idea of how the state transforms into an administrative force, an idea which comes from the example Marx and Engels witnessed in the Commune. As Engels states:

Here we have two transformations, the first is a democratic transformation of the representatives of the people, elected and removed through universal suffrage. This might seem to overlap with bourgeois republics, where there are elections and to some extent the masses of working people have a say. But, as Engels mentions in the paragraph right before the one previously quoted[9], this bourgeois electoralism is faulty in it being still an instrument of the capitalist class, and thus, the apparent democratically elected officials not only represent the interest of the capitalist class that funds them but also partake in politics for the sake of careerism and self-improvement. The second transformation is done in an attempt to destroy the possibility of the previous political careerism; this is done through the paying of politicians and state officials average working-class salaries.
           
Beyond this there is also the replacement of the institutions of state violence by armed groups of working people. As Marx states:

This means that the transformation of the state is the transformation from:

Quotes like the last few are found in numerous different places in the corpus of Marx and Engels’ work, the general idea is nicely summed up by Lenin as this “The transition from capitalism to communism certainly cannot but yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[12] I would add here, that history has shown us that not only does this dictatorship of the proletariat, or proletariat democracy (whatever makes you feel more fuzzy inside), can not only yield an abundance of political forms, but also an abundance of economic forms, one of which is the worker cooperative form.
           
Thus, why is there no blueprint? First, a blueprint of the structuring of socialist society would require details that would be nothing but foolish to predict. Secondly, a blueprint signifies a singular concept of socialist or communist organization. This would be an idealist generalization, that would fail to take into account the concrete material conditions in each country attempting to build socialism; in other words, a blueprint would be against the basic foundation of Marxist materialism. Thus, the only real requirement to considering a country as socialist is what is present in the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat; this is control of the state by the working class, with some aim towards a transitioning to a society based on the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”[13]The economic forms of property and political forms of structure that will develop are completely dependent on the concrete material and ideological conditions of the place where the development is coming about. Thus, we have the potential for socialism with Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, etc. characteristics. Each with their distinct variations of property forms and political structures, and to varying degrees moving away from the influences of their previous world.

My second answer to the previously stated question concerning the seemingly uniqueness of Dr. Wolff’s push for cooperative socialism is that it is tactically the best strategy for achieving a post-capitalist reality in the US. The American population has endured a century of extreme anti-communist propaganda, and even though now, after 40 years of neoliberal rule and polarization of wealth, they realize the hell they are in, the psyche sickness the propaganda machine has caused will make any attempt at convincing working class American to fight for a post-capitalist reality impossible if done by means of discussing socialism in terms of a state controlled centrally planned economy. Discussing socialism in terms of democratization of the means of production, while nationalizing basic necessities and industries proves tactically the best path towards getting working class Americans on board.
           
This is something that I have experienced as true in my practice organizing as well. If a working-class American asks me what socialism is, or why I am a socialist, and I respond by saying the dictatorship of the proletariat or a centrally planed state economy, they will never open up to the idea. In part, this is due to Americans equating anything done by the state as useless, and thus, a system run by the state just makes since that it will be no good.

From their standpoint it is hard not to see a point, all the interaction they have had with the state has been with a state which represents a different class of people than the ones they are. It is no wonder they consider it inefficient; the American state is not supposed to be efficient for them, but rather for those who use it as an instrument for their accumulation of capital. The same capitalist class that sends their kids of to die, or comeback physically or mentally injured for the sake of their profiting from the imperial sacking of other nations.

​Thus, tactically, at least at first, socialism in America must be promoted through what it really is on the level of everyday life for working class folks. This is their expansion of power, autonomy, and life. It is promoting socialism as giving them a say in their workplace; them being able to decide what is made, how, when, to who it will be sold to, and for how much. It means them not having to worry about the company being shipped over sees for cheap labor to increase the profits of their bosses, but rather they themselves being their own bosses. It means the rational solution of eliminating the unnecessary middleman. They know they make the commodities exchanged all throughout society, or that they transport them making their exchange possible; they also know they are one paycheck away from homelessness while their non-working bosses’ life is so incredibly filled with luxury they can only get an insight into it when they turn on the TV. Thus, when you approach this worker, there is nothing theoretical you can tell him he doesn’t already feel. As Bill Haywood once said, “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I got the marks of capital all over my body”.

Big Bill’s statement still holds true today, perhaps truer now than in the last 50 years, given that the polarization of wealth we’ve seen has our society looking more like the 19th century than the 1950s. No longer are the 60s and 70s theories of the New Left, that consisted of how to make revolution without the working class because it was corrupted by its opportunist comfort viable for us today. If there was ever a time for revolution it is now. The accumulation is about to pop, the coming capitalist crisis, along with the pandemic, puts us in the ripe material conditions for this much necessary leap. As Lukacs states:

​The question is now one of praxis. Which tactics are we using in our organizing spaces? This is where I think Dr. Wolff’s focus on coops comes in. As previously stated, the emphasis of socialism from the perspective of workplace democracy, and not state centrally planned economy, must be the angle we use in the US. It is the only angle the American worker is desensitized in, the concept of democracy, a concept so corrupted by the west it is unrecognizable to what it really means; yet it is the only one our workers are not put to fear by. Promote socialism in the US as the expansion of workplace democracy, and the guaranteeing of the essential rights of our population (something the US is the only developed country to not do), and we are guaranteeing ourselves the best shot at creating the subjective conditions which are necessary in such an objectively revolutionary time. 

​It is possible that the same type of ‘Marxist’ I referred to earlier is saying that I have not yet shown how promoting socialism as coops is in any way Marxist. It is possible that they see my previous tactical argument explaining the Wolff phenomena, merely as an attempt I am making to find that Narnia door, avoiding the class struggle and taking the easy path of classless enterprises under capitalism. This section necessitates its division into two parts. The first will be the question of cooperatives under a capitalist society. The second will be the question of cooperatives under a post-capitalist society.

It might be easy to see the promotion of coops within capitalism the same way communist used to look at the hippie communes. Although the hippie commune and the coop are two completely different things, in the mind of the type of Marxist critics I have been talking about, both are clear example of escapism; a refusal to partake in the class struggle while retreating to a position in which the contradictions of capitalism are ameliorated in your everyday life.
           
Like it usually happens with all falsehoods, there is always a kernel of truth. The kernel of truth here is that cooperatives do provide a sense of ameliorating capitalist contradictions, at least for those involved in the coop. With the removal of the boss figure, you have removed the contradiction of socialized production and individual accumulation. Where does the possibility of the transcending of capitalism go if we begin to ameliorate the contradictions for a portion of the population through the promotion of cooperatives? At the end of the day, it is true that radical liberals like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey promoted these forms of firms. Could cooperatives have been the capitalist loophole Marx was unable to see? The irony of the question is that it brings to mind Karl Popper’s objection of Marxism as a science; would the coop loophole prove to be the falsifier of scientific socialism?
           
Before we appeal to Marx, I find it important to address this last point. This last point comes from a skepticism of coops’ status as socialism due to its acceptance as a form of property by those who do not necessarily seek to transcend capitalism. I think the duck test would work as a common sense respond to this worry. If something looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like one, you must be foolish to call it a chicken just because the guy next to you who has never seen a duck and is vaguely familiar with chickens, calls it a chicken. The point is, if a firm does not have the relation of owner and worker, if the process of production and distribution of wealth is taken into consideration collectively by those participating in the socialized production, and if the mentality is not the monadic rugged individualism of capitalism but rather a collective mentality in which the individual and collective interest are complimentary, then it’s a duck; to translated away from the analogy, it is not in any way, shape, or form a capitalist relation, but rather a form of production that transcends the relations and logic of capitalism.
           
To reformulate the essence of the Marxist skepticism of coops, the skepticism lies usually not in the cooperative itself. Given that many if not all are able to recognize that it is not capitalist, and that a society purely based on cooperative firms with a working-class party in power could be called socialist. Their worry stems from the comfort the coop could bring about in a sector of the working masses, a comfort which might make the struggle against capitalism non appetizing for them, given that they are not really living the capitalist reality in their workplace. Their sentiment can be expressed nicely in Che’s proverb “we have no right to believe freedom can come without struggle.”[15]
           
But what is being assumed when one states that a cooperative firm will bring the comfort to make possible the escape of capitalist conditions at work without struggle? Well, precisely this, that workers once they experience the comfort of a non-exploitative cooperative firm are going to retreat from the struggle against capitalism and enjoy their privilege condition as an anomaly within the system. This presupposes that the mentality of these cooperative workers is the same individualistic mentality capitalism promotes. The falsity here is that if there is something that worker cooperatives produces, more importantly than work without exploitation, is the fundamental mental shift away from the individualism of bourgeois society. A worker in a worker cooperative begins the epistemological transformation that would take place in the socialist phase, already within capitalism. This is a worker who is realizing his species essence as a being is dependent on the community, a being who comes to realize that:

The problem has been that many of these “Marxist” have focused a bit too much on the aspects of the economic side of Marxism. They call themselves scientific, as if in doing so they are looking down on the non-scientific or ethical based communist. They have forgotten to read the early Marx. They have forgotten that it was the humanist Marx that saw the need to study economics. They have forgotten that it was Marx the philosopher that saw the problem of alienation, traced it to its economic core, and then diverged the rest of his life to the study. So, yes, it is a science, but before the science begins we have a radical humanism, focused before anything on the abolition of the estrangement of man, and on the development of this man from his alienated condition to a condition re-united with his species being. And thus, the personal development the cooperative has on the individual, the source that refutes their conclusion of retreat from the struggle, slips the conscious of these Marxist. This is given to the fact that they have forgotten and neglected the most essential part of the development towards communism; the creation of the communist man, the man that has returned to his species being at a higher level than ever before because of the productiveness and abundance capitalism brings about[17]. This is the man the cooperative begins to develop; a man who will not only not stay put in his cooperative comfort, but who will fight with his life for his fellow man, to end their exploitation. This is a man who now has the concrete truth that a society based on equitable non exploitative productiveness is not only more just but efficient as well. Thus, the cooperative not only serves to develop the communist man that will be a secured catalyst in the struggle, but with it to develops the internal alternative that serves as a concrete possibility of the envisaging of a future beyond capitalism.

So, what is it that Marx states about cooperatives within capitalism? There is essentially two things he says. First that:

 What is Marx saying here about cooperatives within capitalism? Well, that they essentially represent an internal negation to the system, the “new mode of production naturally growing out of the old”. This should remind us of his comments on the lower stage of communism from the Critique of the Gotha Program earlier, where the first stage of communism still has the birthmarks of the womb of the old society.
           
​It is also very important to understand what is being said in the last statement. “The only distinction that the one antagonism is resolved negatively in one and positively in the other”, what does this mean? Well, to understand what this means we need literacy in Marxist dialectics. To get a direct reference to help us understand this quote, we are going to travel back to 1845 and the publishing of his and Engel’s first major work, The Holy Family. In Ch. 4 Marx states:

Here, in the beautiful poetic dialectics of the young Marx, we find the key to understanding what his later self is saying in respects to stock companies and worker cooperative. In essence, stock companies represent the positive side of the antithesis, the side which seeks to actively maintain the existing capitalist relations. Therefore, worker cooperatives, represent the negative side of the antithesis, that being the side which strives for the annihilation of the existing relations as such.
​
Thus, his view on cooperatives in capitalism is essentially that, like the proletariat itself, it represents the aspect of the dialectic seeking to abolish the condition of the existing order. It is a form of property in direct contradiction with private property as maintained under capitalism, and whose existence and growth represents a threat to capitalism itself.
           
​The second view Marx has on coops in capitalism is more so a tactical one. It comes from his Critique of the Gotha Program. His argument here is less optimistic, but when we analyze it closely, the loss of optimism about coops is one based on tactics, not cooperatives themselves. He states:

​What Marx is saying here is that if worker cooperatives are something promoted by the state or by the bourgeois class, there is no revolutionary value in them. Of course, under these conditions, the control over these experiments can very well lead to the comfort the previous mentioned Marxist might fear in coops. But, all in all, he is consistent with what he says in Capital Vol 3, by stating that if rather than being something promoted by the bourgeoisie or state it is something that grows out of the working class, then it is of revolutionary potential. This is to some extent a quite simple point, that is, only if this revolutionary action is truly an action of the revolutionary agent is it revolutionary. 
​
A sidestep to Lenin might help us better understand this point. Lenin states:

​Again, the only objection here is the promotion of cooperatives as some sort of hippy commune thing which tries to alienate itself from the class struggle. But, given that exploitation will be a reality around the cooperative workers, and given the transformation they will have in their consciousness, it is indubitable that the class struggle will remain a central focus of the cooperative worker. When coops are used as fellow instruments in the class struggle, when they play their role as the negative in the whole, and if they help achieve power for the working class; then there is nothing else one can consider them but properly socialist. As Lenin states:

What is this cultural shift Lenin touches on at the end, if not precisely the development of man, the one that develops during and with cooperative work, and which to some extent is even required before taking upon the cooperative project. Thus, Lenin states “the organization of the entire peasantry in cooperative societies presupposes a standard of culture”[23], this holds the key to understand the statement by Marx and the source of the cooperative. If the cooperative is started by workers, it is because they have already a level of consciousness, or what Lenin here calls culture, that is essential in determining the revolutionary status of the action. But, if the cooperative is promoted by another source that is not workers, the conscious or cultural element, has failed to precede the cooperative formation, and thus the formation itself cannot be deemed revolutionary. But, when one agitates workers, and helps them realize their common interest in cooperative firms, in democracy at work, and then they take up the revolutionary action of creating cooperatives and continuing the class struggle; what is this if not precisely a revolutionary action, the manifestation of the internal negative. Thus, the promotion, differs from the creation. Promoting worker coops and having workers form them can be seen as revolutionary action. While a state or capitalist formed cooperative where workers are employed cannot be considered as a revolutionary action in itself, even though it definitely can, by its very nature, develop a revolutionary potential.

This section is bound to be short, as it is obvious to any communist or socialist, that in a socialist society, a worker cooperative is in line with the ideals of the society. The difficulty was in the previous section, in address the question of withdrawal from the class struggle. Now that we have overcome that, there seems to be little rejection of cooperatives as a positive form of property under socialism. Regardless, I will fulfill my promise of providing what the fathers of scientific socialism had to say on the topic.
           
The clearest response to a fully cooperative society comes from Marx. The context of which is in discussion with he who calls a duck a chicken; that being the bourgeois political economist who promotes cooperative firms[24]. Marx states that:

The quote speaks for itself, what is a fully cooperative society? Quite simply communism. You can call it whatever you want, it is what it is.
           
​Let us turn to Engels now, as in a letter to Bebel he states: 

​He then states that neither Marx nor he had:

​We will end with Lenin, who states that:

In this work, I hope to have demonstrated the following, 1- that cooperatives within capitalism represent a negation of the system and help promote socialism in two ways. The first is by the development it produces in its workers, the second is by the example it gives to the rest of society of the “proof that the capitalist has become no less redundant as a functionary in production as he himself, looking down from his high perch, finds the big landowner redundant.”[30] 2- I hope to have shown that a society based on cooperatives can properly be called socialist. And 3- That tactically the promotion of socialism as cooperative or workplace democracy is the route we should pursue in our engagements and organizing of workers in America.

[1] Rodriguez Delli, Livia. “Cooperativas no agropecuarias: de una experiencia a una novedad en Cuba” Granma, April 30, 2014. http://www.granma.cu/cuba/2014-05-19/cooperativas-no-agropecuarias-de-una-experiencia-a-una-novedad-en-cuba?page=4

[2]GDP growth (annual %) – Latin America & Caribbean, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Cuba. The World Bank, 2015. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2015&locations=ZJ-CO-CL-MX-PE-CU&most_recent_year_desc=false&start=2015&view=bar

[3] Wolff, Richard. Democracy at Work, September 7, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/user/democracyatwrk

[4] It is important to note here that Marx uses communism and socialism interchangeably. Specifically, in this work he refers to the difference as the first or lower stage of communism and the higher stage. The higher is the state in which things would be carried out “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program” The Marx-Engels Reader (W. W. Norton & Company, 1978/1875), p. 531.

[5] Ibid., 529.

[6] Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977/1807), p.6.

[7] Marx. Critique of the Gotha Program. p. 538.

[8] Engels, Frederick. “The Civil War in France: Intro” Marx-Engels Reader (W. W. Norton & Company, 1978/1891), p.628.

[9] “Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate and powerful sections of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well known how Americans have been trying for thirty years to shake of this yoke, which has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends, and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.” Ibid., 628.

[10] Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France” The Marx-Engels Reader (W. W. Norton & Company, 1978/1871), p.632.

[11] Lenin, V. I. The State and Revolution (Foreign Language Press, 1970/1917), p. 36.

[12] Ibid., 29.

[13] Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. p. 531.

[14] Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness (MIT Press, 1979/1923), p.75

[15]Guevara, Che. “Message to the Tricontinental” Che Guevara Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm

[16] Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology” The Marx-Engels Reader (W. W. Norton & Company, 1978/1932), p. 197.

[17] Part of the reason why Marx changes his position on Europe being the center for revolution is because even at the beginning of the 1880’s he still saw the tremendous role the subjective element of man played. Thus, when studying the anthropologist at the time, Henry Morgan, Kovalevsky, etc. he realizes the potential indigenous communities have towards the building of the higher stage of communism. The potential stems from them having never lost their collective mentality. Thus, whereas the proletarian in Europe had to develop his consciousness before any material struggle could take place, the communards of the colonized global south already had that “communist consciousness” and thus from the beginning their struggle is already an ideologically conscious one.

[18] Marx, Karl. Capital Vol 3 (International Publishers, 1974/1894), p. 440.

[19] Marx, Karl. The Holy Family (University Press of the Pacific, 2002/1845), p.51.

[20] Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Program. p. 536-7.

[21] Lenin, V. I. “On Cooperation” Collected Works, Vol 33 (Progress Publishers, 1965), p.473.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] This response is believed to be an indirect jab at John Stuart Mill’s conception of capitalism heading down the road to cooperative firms.

[25] Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France. p. 635.

[26] Engels, F. 1886. Letter to Bebel, 20-23 January, in Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 47. Quoted from Jossa, B Marx, Marxism, and the Cooperative Movement. (Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2005)

[27] Ibid.

[28] Lenin, V. I. On Cooperation. p. 472.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Marx, Karl. Capital Vol 3, p.387