Marx’s Early Critique of Political Economy 

Political economy had supplanted philosophy and theology as the primary object of critique. Presupposing an equilibrium of supply and demand, economists sought to explain the economy-wide pattern of relative prices-exchange values-by the same law which governed the class distribution of revenues between landlords, capitalists, and wage laborers. Following Engels, Marx concluded that they were unable to provide a coherent account of the inter-relationship between the economic oppositions within which their theories revolved- cost/price, supply/demand, labor/capital, etc.- because they could not grasp the historically specific dynamic of development that stemmed from the social relations that imposed exchange dependency on producers. In all its variants, the discourse of the wealth of nations presupposed private property in the exchange value form and therefore the distribution of revenues into wages, profit, and rent. Marx noted that it did not, however, explain private property’s historical origins and structural logic of its development. “Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement which gave them birth.” The real order of determination between these categories of political economy could only be adequately grasped in the unity of a self-undermining logic of development that its equilibrium assumptions concealed.

Marx’s dissertation had offered an internal critique of Hegel’s conception of necessity in the form of laws by way of reconstructing Epicurus’s critique of determinism. The basic conceptual pattern of an inversion in which an apparently self-contained system of laws was shown to be the alienated form of an underlying chaos subject to the compulsions of atomistic strife-compulsions which were, to be sure, also laws, but ones with explosive antagonisms at their core- was extended into his critique of political economy.

“Mill commits the mistake, like the school of Ricardo in general, of stating the abstract law without the change or continual supersession of this law through which alone it comes into being. If it is a constant law that, for example, the cost of production in the last instance – or rather when demand and supply are in equilibrium which occurs sporadically, fortuitously – determines the price (value), it is just as much a constant law that they are not in equilibrium, and that therefore value and cost of production stand in no necessary relationship.”

Its abstract laws equating supply and demand, production costs, and market prices asserted themselves in the accidents of the exchange-dependent intercourse of individuals and expressed the subjection of individuals to the alienated results of their own intercourse operating as blind market compulsions. The laws of political economy presupposed the continual deviations and disruptions of these laws. But these deviations were themselves systemic in nature, although political economy could not explain this unfolding dialectic of law and exception. The competition of exchange-dependent individuals engendered their division into warring classes, and yet, political economy proved itself incapable of thinking through the consequences. Marx followed classical political economy in recognizing competition as the ultimate law of civil society, but imparted to it a brutal, cumulative logic of development.

Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in mecw vol. 6, New York 1976, p. 162.

2. Karl Marx, ‘Comments on James Mill’, in mecw vol. 3, New York 1975, p. 211.

“This is the law that grants it no respite, and constantly shouts in its ear: March! March! This is no other law than that which, within the periodical fluctuations of commerce, necessarily adjusts the price of a commodity to its cost of production.”

The tendency of supply and demand to adjust to one another would eliminate the temporary profits made by capitalists over their own costs of production, but, in reality, this equilibrium state was perpetually deferred by the expansionary economic dynamic unchained by the social relations of alienated labor. The influx of profit was thus the harvest of the expropriation of competitors and the displacement of laborers with machines- “these relations produce bourgeois wealth only by continually annihilating the wealth of individual members of this class, and by producing an ever-growing proletariat.” The forward march of the accumulation of capital presupposed the dispossession of the growing legion of those unable to compete and their reduction to an expanding multitude of pauperized proletarians.

The social relation of alienated labor- the exchange dependency resulting from the separation of labor from the means of labor- was predicated on a permanent excess of the supply of laborers over the demand for them.

“When political economy claims that demand and supply always balance each other, it immediately forgets that according to its own claim (theory of population) the supply of people always exceeds the demand, and that, therefore, in the essential result of the whole production process – the existence of man – the disparity between demand and supply gets its most striking expression.”

Involuntary unemployment was the most glaring premise of the capital-wage labor relation, although its very existence was denied by the economists. Just as the separation of coercive power from the sphere of exchange-based economic relations was what constituted the division of state from civil society, so too the competitive laws of motion of civil society arose out of the separation of producers from any direct access to means of their subsistence.

3. Karl Marx, ‘Wage Labor and Capital’ [1849], in MECw vol. 9, New York 1977, p. 224.

4. Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW vol. 6, New York 1976, p. 176.

5. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in MECW vol. 3, New York 1975, p. 314.

“The concentration of the instruments of production and the division of labor are as inseparable from each other as are, in the political sphere, the concentration of public powers and the division of private interests.”

When Marx asserted that private property was derived from alienated labor, he meant by the latter a social relation of production between human beings subject to the following separations and therefore exposed to the laws of competition: a) the separation of the laborer from his product b) the separation of the laborer from the means of labor c) the separation of laborers from each other d) the separation of individuals and entire peoples from humanity as a whole. Political economy could not conclusively resolve its own theoretical problems because it did not understand the historical logic of development, the law of accumulation arising from these separations by which labor as self-activity gives rise to its opposite- capital, and capital comes to immiserate and displace labor: “labor, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labor as exclusion of labor, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction – hence a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution.”

His distillation of what he understood to be the logic of development implicit in Ricardo’s ‘one-sided’ labor theory of value came to underpin his conception of history, one which was turned on the coming into existence of the antithesis of capital and labor, leading to either a revolutionary resolution or the decline of civilization. In contrast to the circular causality of Smith and Say whose systems failed to establish an order of determination between production costs and consumer demand Marx came to embrace Ricardo’s ‘one-sided’ focus on production costs reducible to labor quantities as the most adequate expression of an industrial revolutionary pattern of development that continually surmounted the limits imposed by any given level of demand, by expanding markets through the reduction of prices. (Marx rejected Ricardo’s own interpretation of this law of value, in which demand automatically adjusted to supply; he maintained that this equilibrium.

6. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in MECw vol. 6, New York 1976, p. 187.

7. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in MECW vol. 3, New York 1975, p. 314.

8. Tbid., p. 294.

Assumption obscured the socio-economic dynamic that unfolded in anarchic disproportions between the two, obeying a relentless, self-undermining law of accumulation.)

📰 Check the main article here

Marx on the Jewish Question 

While in their own idiosyncratic way, some Young Hegelians briefly came to see themselves as Jacobins, the view that Germany was a belated nation condemned to undergo a derivative, ‘catch-up’ revolution was an anathema to them. One could say that they were patriots of a coming two-fold Franco-German republic. While they scorned the mythical Gothic past of the Romantics, they nonetheless all partook in a discourse of national exceptionalism according to which the current generation of German radicals was called upon to make penance for their country’s infamous role in defeating the French Revolution. On this point of honor, they would show their mettle by appropriating and working out the final consequences of the latest advances of Western European thought. The German critique of religious consciousness had adopted the old Voltairean motto écrasez l’infâme and was now eager to expand the war on theology to its political and social corollaries. But repeating the passage from Enlightenment to Revolution was understood to entail transcending the limits of the French Revolution, uprooting the obstacles of religion and atomistic egoism on which it had crashed. Young Hegelian Germany would be the standard bearer of an atheistic revelation, adorned with Saint-Simonian notions of social reconstruction.

The leading lights of this scene all sought to occupy the vantage point of the absolute critique of the status quo and the falsely conceived alternatives to it, resulting in some memorable sectarian polemics. This eagerness to draw the most radical conclusions, to break with views that one just upheld, led Marx to call into question the scenario of political emancipation as a gateway to social emancipation that he had just been working through in the context of his unfinished work on Hegel. After the failure of the Young Hegelians to galvanize the public with their manifestoes and editorials, Marx’s earlier mentor, the theologian Bruno Bauer abandoned in 1842 the cause of liberal political opposition to the Prussian state, and his essays, later published as a book, rejecting the symbolically highly charged demand for Jewish civic equality provoked a number of determined rejoinders from his former allies. Marx’s break with liberalism radically diverged from Bauer’s and came into extreme opposition to it. 

“Real extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are real extremes.”

This dictum did not just apply to conflicts with a hated status quo but also to divisions emerging within the camp of opposition. Marx’s polemics within the disintegrating provincially German Young Hegelian scene established the mold of later relations with friends, allies, and enemies in the wider world of European politics.

Bruno Bauer held that an unenlightened Christian-German monarchy simply could not grant emancipation to religiously observant Jews, nor could the latter ever emancipate themselves as long as they remained in thrall to their old god, willfully separating themselves from their Gentile hosts. Marx retorted that Bauer remained within the horizon of the liberalism he professed to reject by conflating the abolition of feudal-era status and religious privileges– the civic republican ideal- with the overcoming of new social forms of unfreedom rooted in the laws of exchange. Bauer’s Limited

“See Bruno Bauer, ‘1842’ [1844] and ‘Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik’ [1844], in Streit Der Kritik Mit Den Modernen Gegensätzen: mit Beiträgen von Bruno Bauer, Edgar Bauer, Ernst Jungnitz, Zelige U.a., Charlottenburg 1847. Marx, ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in mecw vol. 3, New York 1975, p. 88″. Theological form of criticism naively equated ‘human’- alternately ‘social’- emancipation with the establishment of a state in which the intelligentsia would be free from the tutelage of clerics and philistines. The liberation of an educated public sphere was the furthest point to which Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness could go. Against its ascetic ideal of the modern scholar-critic fighting heroic battles against an incorrigibly retrograde public- ‘the mass’- Marx proclaimed that only a humanism attuned to bodily need and suffering of ordinary people could lay bare the social basis of both religious alienation as well as its secular successor- the pseudo-community of modern citizenship. From the vantage of true human, more precisely social emancipation, political democracy could be seen as a sphere in which society only imagines itself as self-determining, a mystification corresponding to, yet concealing the subjection of the individual to new forms of socio-economic compulsion.

Europeans of republican convictions often regarded the United States of America as the long foretold republican Atlantis, an opinion which Bauer seems to have shared in part. Marx referred to his former mentor back to Tocqueville’s characterizations of the God-fearing Americans. First-hand observation of life in America had revealed that religion and egoistic self-interest do not wither but, on the contrary, flourish when stripped of their legally privileged status, relegating them to the sphere of civil society where they become the generalized forms of consciousness of atomized competitors. Even in the most democratic modern republic, the real life of the individual would unfold in the miserable trenches of civil society, with collective politics of the citizen as an occasional diversion. Arguably, Marx was prophetic here in foreseeing that a democratic republic would turn out to be the best shell of bourgeois society, even though over most of this early period, he subscribed to the then more widely held view that universal suffrage would open the door to social revolution.

The stark contrast of political and human, alternately social emancipation that distinguishes the thesis of this essay from the argument he advanced in the manuscript of The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (which tended to see the second as a continuation of the first) raised a new problem of the nature of the transitional period between the two. Did bourgeois-democracy represent an incomplete stage in the long transition from the utter bondage of Christian-feudalism to full human emancipation, or was it rather a new and higher stage of the alienation and self-mystification of man, an impasse and not a passageway to emancipation? The so-called Jewish question was not simply a matter of the legal status of a non-Christian people within a Christian polity, nor of the constitutional forms separating state from civil society. What was at stake was also the sequence of stages through which human emancipation had to pass.

📖 View the main source here

The Hegelians 

The development of Hegel’s later philosophy of law must be situated in the context of Prussia’s ‘revolution from above’. After a crushing defeat at Jena in 1806, a group of loyalist officers and bureaucrats initiated a project of sweeping administrative reforms, establishing a new military order, a new university system, an opening for modernist currents in Protestant theology, and beginning the transformation of Junker squires into capitalist landlords. Little more than a decade later, Hegel was inducted into a loose coterie of reformist officials that included Wilhelm von Humboldt and Carl von Clausewitz. In the era of reform, Prussia acquired an enigmatic, dual nature as a self-modernizing old regime, and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right offered philosophical rationales for this German Sonderweg. The project of state-promoted modernization continued after victory over Napoleon, but came to confront ever more determined opposition from two quarters: romantic nationalists who had expected their restored rulers to grant the people more liberties in recognition of their supporting role in driving out the French, and evangelical traditionalists aiming to restore the status quo ante. The argument of The Philosophy of Right was directed at both. After his death in 1831, the fifteen-year heyday of the relationship of the Hegel School to the Prussian State began to break down, as its opponents began to prevail in the struggle for academic placement and official patronage. Hegel’s supporters still had a powerful patron in the Minister for Culture, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, but with his death a decade later, their fortunes rapidly began to sink.

What was the appeal of Hegel’s philosophy to its official sponsors in the post-Napoleonic decade of the Reform era? Speaking of the era of censorship from 1819-1830, the heyday of the Hegelians, Marx explained the context of the explosive impact of this strange new language:

“The sole literary field in which at that time the pulse of a living spirit could still be felt, the philosophical field, ceased to speak German, for German had ceased to be the language of thought. The spirit spoke in incomprehensible, mysterious words because comprehensible words were no longer allowed to be comprehended.”

Except for an inner circle of academic initiates, Hegelian philosophy was as unintelligible then as it remains to most educated people today, but its message was clear: what is real—the prosaic, individualistic modern age around us—was not a fall from some other condition—the beautiful Greek polis, the organic, pious Middle Ages—but was rational, having a raison d’etre that it was the business of philosophy to expound.

Conservative Hegelians tended to portray the gap between rational norms and the uninspiring realities of a half-modern, bureaucratic monarchy as itself rational, if in a higher, more mysterious sense. The milieu of the so-called Young Hegelians not only rejected these apologias but went on to conclude that philosophy was complicit in the perpetuation of a form of State that simply could not recognize its subjects as rational and free beings. As a serene contemplation of the rationality of what exists, Hegel’s system remained a traditional philosophy and could not provide an adequate language for the criticism and denunciation of these infamous conditions. The downfall of theology would be a prelude to the end of philosophy, and the emergence of a new kind of intellectual practice: the ruthless critique of all that exists.

1. Jonathan Toews, The Path Towards Dialectical Humanism 1805-1841, Cambridge 1980. Warren Breckman, Marx, The Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, Cambridge 2001. Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx, London 2003.

2. Karl Marx, ‘Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the Estates’, Rheinische Zeitung, no. 128, 8 May 1842, Supplement, in mecw, vol. 1, New York 1975, p. 140.

For the milieu of university graduates who came to be known as the Young or Left Hegelians, the critique of the Christian religion- the Augustinian duality of an earthly vale of tears and a promised, otherworldly salvation- formed the template of this new practice. A European world undergoing secularization was still in thrall to the ghostly remnants of religious consciousness, in philistine Germany above all. The critique of theology was intended to awaken the nation from its voluntary servitude and set in motion the dissolution of the old order in Germany. But in denouncing the Christian religion, these young scholars confronted the authority of Hegel, who held that a comprehensive scientific world view would not abolish but rather preserve this superseded form of consciousness, neutralizing the radical potentials of secularization.

In this boisterous politico-theological scene, contentions soon broke out over the essence of Christianity, the historically final form of religion, now supposedly in its death throes: for Bruno Bauer- its world view was an expression of the European world’s long journey through an abject, otherworldly self-hatred, whereas for Ludwig Feuerbach it stemmed, on the contrary, from a salutary impetus to transcend our mortal finitude by worshipping ourselves in the other. Across such oppositions, a later formulation from Marx captured the common premise of this ephemeral current.

“The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being”

For the Young Hegelians, the mid-19th century was the last phase of the Christian era during which man was subject to alien powers of his own making. In their theological preoccupations, it could be said that these disciples of the philosopher fell behind the level of his conception of modern times. The latter had sought to explain how the separation of church and State- the establishment of the latter as a power recognizing no superior- prepared the way for the differentiation of the State from an emerging civil society. The Young Hegelians’ initial lack of interest in civil society was rooted in

3. Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of Law’ [1843, published 1844] in mecw vol. 3, New York 1975, p. 182.

Their militant civic republicanism. The claim that the modern spirit of commerce ruled out any return to the austere republicanism of the ancients- a judgement usually attributed to the founder of European liberalism, Benjamin Constant- was regarded with suspicion by the radicals who refused to accept the dilatory constitutional settlements of the Restoration era as in any way historically definitive. Young Hegelian Jacobinism, still lacking its own conception of the direction of history and unsure of the stature of the present within it, tended to drape its republicanism in classical attire. In conformity with this outlook, the post-graduate Marx refused to recognize any unbridgeable distance separating ancient and modern times.

“Only this freedom, which vanished from the world with the Greeks and under Christianity disappeared into the blue mist of the heavens, can again transform society into a community of human beings united for their highest aims, into a democratic state.”

When still a follower of Hegel, Marx tended to think of the atomistic individualism of bourgeois society not in the light of Hegel’s reading of modern political economy, but rather in terms of his account of the history of Roman law. Hegel’s impassioned denunciation of the inhuman formalism of Roman law, which in its classical form permitted nearly everything, including life and limb, to be contractually alienable, could easily be turned towards contemporary conditions. After all, Roman law did not seem to any of them to be an artifact from the past, for over the centuries it had become the basis of modern European jurisprudence, although progressively modified to the needs of bourgeois society. This imbrication of ancient and modern law made it possible for early.

4. Karl Marx, Letter to Ruge, September 1843, in mecw vol. 3, New York 1975, p. 137.

5. Controversies between proponents of Roman and German law went back several centuries and assumed a new significance in the ideological context of Restoration era conflicts over the principles behind legal codification. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel had denied that Roman law possessed even the minimal criteria of rationality, as its one-sided development of absolute property rights made it unable to distinguish persons from things. While Hegel came to understand modern times as in some sense a German age, in contrast to Montesquieu, he advocated the removal of all vestiges of feudal law, including the dissolution of the various forms of common property that had always existed in the interstices of the old order. For Marx, it was precisely the harsh, one-sided development of legal relations capable of accommodating both slavery and despotism characteristic of Roman jurisprudence that was ‘rational’ while the characteristically ‘Germanic’ dualism of public and private upheld by Hegel was held to be ‘mystical’. This way of conceiving the opposition between the two arguably lacked historical justification since Roman jurisprudence was surely the first to make a clear distinction between public and private law, and had a clearly developed conception of the first  – ‘publicum jus est quod statum rei Romanae’ – that was obscured in the feudal order of the Middle Ages.

19th-century German academics to conceive of bourgeois society on the pattern of the Pandects. In the Hegelian philosophy of history, Rome had arisen out of the dissolution of the classical polis, unleashing a world of unbridled subjective atoms subject only to the laws of war and contracts, one which achieved its universal scope under the despotism of the Caesars. Roman universalism was for Hegel and the Young Hegelians the crucible of Christianity, a spiritual movement falsely promising deliverance from misery, despair, and humiliating servitude.

The Young Hegelians foresaw that the coming age of emancipation would involve both a repetition and a transcendence of the Enlightenment, which they understood to be the intellectual prelude to a revolution. In a narrow sense of the term, the Young Hegelian scene lasted from the late 1830s to 1842, when its most active writers split into warring groupuscules after having lost all prospect of academic employment. But its characteristic dialectical conceptuality and polemical methods had an afterlife over this whole period, saturating the writings of both Marx and Engels, up to the early 1850s when the age of revolution seemed to have come to an end.

🔗 Read the original article here

The Critique of Liberalism 

The Right-Wing Backlash to Mass Democracy

In the tumultuous European aftermath of the First World War, the breakthroughs of mass democracy confronted a right-wing backlash that came to adopt anti-status quo pretensions historically identified with the left. The spectacle of industrial warfare was felt to have possessed a higher world-historical significance, cruelly travestied by post-war upsurges of subaltern classes demanding social reforms bordering on Revolution.

The Culture of Heroic Resistance

In post-war Italy and Germany, the armed exploits of demobilized veterans and patriotic volunteers offered a bonding experience of collective violence, celebrated in a discourse of heroic resistance to governments of national humiliation. Spengler’s assessment of this outcome expressed the exasperation felt by men of property and education: ‘The Labour leader won the War. That which in every country is called the Labour Party and the trade union, but is in reality the trade union of party officials, the bureaucracy of the Revolution, gained the mastery and is now ruling over Western Civilization.’

The ‘Revolution from the Right’

A miscellany of opposition to the welfare state, godless Marxism, and a more nebulously conceived cultural levelling, the ‘revolution from the right’ was essentially a call to true elites to stand their ground against a worldwide revolt of the masses. Intellectuals heartened by this counter-offensive sought to give it greater spiritual meaning as a struggle to overcome the illusions of the nineteenth century, framing the current tribulations of modernity—War, economic dislocation, and class struggle—within an epochal perspective on the destiny of the Occident.

The Broader Influence of Anti-Systemic Thought

Even writers who played no role at all in these events would come to feel the gravitational force of this new problematic of the anti-systemic right. While this discourse incubated the Alternate Modernity of the Inter-War Right in the civil-war conditions of Central Europe, it resonated more broadly from London to Bucharest. Beleaguered elites often liked the sound of this ‘transvaluation’ to an extent that is now hard to fathom.

Colonial Legacies and Racial Ideology

One must recall that in this late autumn of European colonialism, a shared language of race and nation linked conservative establishments to zealots of the extreme right. The idea of white supremacy over all other peoples ran deep, although defiant voices from an outer world of native multitudes could increasingly be heard in the metropoles.

The Fear of Global Displacement

In a world-political atmosphere saturated with racial phantasms, a certain rhetoric of the decline of the West spoke to widespread fears that a wracked and drifting post-war Europe was being thrust off the stage of world history by American creditors and a Bolshevik Russia. The latter in particular was a cause for alarm. What could Christian-bourgeois Europe do before this ruthless new despotism, bent on inciting the exorbitant demands of Western workers and an uprising of ‘the coloured races’?

A Metaphysical Turn in Anti-Semitism

Responding to these perceived existential threats, there arose a new, metaphysical variant of anti-semitism that decried a single, nihilistic will to destruction operating behind these multiple fronts, one that needed to be overcome by an opposed will.

Intellectual Echoes of the Zeitgeist

The works of the most distinguished right-wing political writers of the period—Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, or Leo Strauss, for example—cannot be reduced to the semantics of this zeitgeist without effacing their conceptual specificity. But its leitmotifs do, in fact, inhere in their work, as subtext and background music. ‘The rise of the masses’, ‘the spirit of technology’, ‘the destiny of the West’—such were the distinguishing phrases of a mythological discourse infused with a visceral structure of feeling.

🔎 For the original essay and context, see: The Critique of Liberalism

Gopal Balakrishnan Unpacks the Evolution of Modern European Ideologies

To Know More About Gopal Balakrishnan click the links Below:

https://www.quora.com/profile/Gopal-Balakrishnan-14

https://www.cake.me/me/gopal-balakrishnan

https://gravatar.com/gopalbalakrishnan1