Marxism argues that human behaviour arises from the way society is organised. Men’s attitudes and actions reflect the social relationships they form to produce wealth. Thus, for instance, from the Marxist standpoint, war arises from the struggle for profits and can be abolished when capitalism (the system of profits) is removed.
The capitalist class and their story-tellers cannot accept such a proposition. War for them is something apart from society, which arises from the brutal and selfish nature of man. In order to give their system an air of permanence they have to concoct myths about men being naturally greedy and war-like, so that all the violence and inhumanity can be accepted without endangering capitalism.
No other theorist has been so often debunked and has so persistently returned to be debunked again. It is a tragic irony that the very people whose cause Marx so ably championed have ignorantly mouthed the notions of their masters against him. But even this can be understood, for Marx knew that the prevailing ideas in any society were the ideas of the ruling class. The working class were bound to get caught up in the mythology of their capitalist exploiters in the process of developing their political consciousness with a view to ultimately changing society.
Any argument has seemed to suffice to down Marxism, even the fact that he lived and wrote during the nineteenth century. He must be discredited from any claim to relevance in the world of to-day. An understanding of Marx’s ideas about economics and history is a dangerous thing to the capitalist class. If those ideas can be twisted into the advocacy of Soviet-style dictatorship, or dismissed as theories belonging to the past, then Marx’s uncomfortable concept of the class struggle and the transitory nature of capitalism can be conveniently forgotten. It speaks volumes for the unscientific thinking of capitalism’s apologists, that they believe that capitalism is transitory only in Marx’s imagination and that the class struggle will go away if they pretend it isn’t there.
Marx did not invent the class struggle, he simply drew attention to it and made certain logical deductions from it. Just as the facts of evolution in biology were there to be discovered even if Darwin had never lived, so the facts of historical and economic evolution are there whether they please the capitalist class or not.
The great merit of the work of Marx and Engels is that it recognises the unity of knowledge, that is to say the inter-dependence and inter-relation of all branches of science. By making their starting point the productive activity of man in society they make it possible to understand and explain the social relationships and the ideological superstructure of any given stage of history and to link together ideas and movements which otherwise appear isolated and inexplicable.
Modern capitalism with its hideous means of mass destruction and its ever increasing contradiction between wealth and want, can only be understood when seen as a period of history, a phase which because of its own internal contradictions, will be superceded by Socialism. Here it is important to understand that Marxism does not envisage blind or abstract “contradictions” changing society by themselves. We are talking of men in society and the consciousness they develop of and in society. It is the working class whose world-wide majority consciousness and democratic political action will abolish capitalism.
Marxian economics shows that the whole structure of capitalism rests upon the exploitation of wage-labour, not the quest to “allocate scarce resources” as taught to unwary students to-day. The further economists get away from this fact and concentrate exclusively on “inflationary spirals”, share-price movements, and the like, the more mysterious capitalism seems to become.
Economics then appears as a subject for academic study in order to try to manipulate and stabilise the trends in this crisis-ridden system. The actual mechanics of the wage-labour and capital basis, are taken as natural. It all becomes a question of adjustments and regulation. The idea of getting rid of this base is not even considered.
Profits are the mainspring of capitalism. When profits clash with human interest, it is profits that come out best. It might be thought that sometimes profits retreat and human interest prevails. But the class which lives from profits knows that it can be damaging to its long-term interests if the profit motive falls into disrepute, and that it is wise to appear to concede a point and survive for greater plunder another day.
The capitalist class and its political servants are well aware of the public relations aspects of their system. A gloss has to be applied, and the myth has to be maintained, that the big business edifice of modern capitalism is there to supply and to serve us. The consumer is supreme. This is the blatant humbug dished up in the name of economic theory by the “learned” pundits whose unsavoury task is to justify capitalism.
The fact that most consumers are members of the working class, who spend their lives ekeing out their wages, is played down. Where are the modern capitalist economists who regard the wages system as a barrier, restricting the distribution of wealth to what it takes on average to maintain the wage earner in working order and provide replacements? They are so buried in a morass of market trends, charts and diagrams, and so bewildered by their own complex terminology, that they spare hardly a thought for the quality of life in terms of what is consumed.
Having coined the phrase “consumer - sovereignty” they seem quite satisfied. The fact that much of what is consumed is rubbish, or dangerous to the user, or damaging to the environment, is beside the point. It is outside the scope of the economists to busy themselves with such trifles. Let the ecologist worry about the environment. Let the psychiatrist worry about nervous and mental disorders and the soaring suicide rate. Let the surgeon or the researcher worry about the connection between cancer and food adulteration. The economist is concerned only with producing more cars and expanding the GNP ! When cancer and mental illness become so widespread that absenteeism hits output and profits suffer from lost production—that is when it becomes necessary to balance money spent on hospitals against money lost through illness.
The economists would have us believe that what is good for capitalism and its profits, is good enough for all of us. Another of their myths is that there is a ‘national interest’ and we are all in it together. Unfortunately for them, capitalism the world over abounds with examples of the antagonism between wage-labour and capitalism, and of profits having priority over human beings.
No wonder the politicians use glib phrases. To sound lofty is the best they can hope for. If the intricate workings of capitalism bamboozle the “experts”, what can ordinary workers do except abandon themselves to their fate ? This is another subtle ploy of the ruling class. The workers must always be discouraged from thinking that they themselves can effect a solution. No matter how rife the chaos and the turmoil, our lives are in the safe hands of those who know what is best for us —even if they do disagree among themselves and constantly contradict each other.
Harry Baldwin
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