Community, Cooperation, and the Division of Labor

A famous passage from the first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations:

Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! how much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brick-maker, the brick-layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill-wright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchen-grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him perhaps by a long sea and a long land carriage, all the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing those different conveniencies; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that without the assistance and cooperation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. 

In the next chapter, Smith writes that unlike the other animals, man "stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons."

We are dependent creatures. We depend on the labors of others. In a commercial society, everything we own is  the product of the unknowing cooperation of thousands of people across the world. Trade and self-interest unite their efforts to produce the most mundane of our possessions.

This image of the unifying, cooperative power of commerce is often celebrated by classical liberals. Riffing off Smith, the libertarian economist Leonard Read writes an autobiography of a pencil. Milton Friedman made the essay famous in his "Free to Choose" TV program. As he puts it: "There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil." Human communities of different religions, languages, and races are unknowingly cooperating to manufacture everything we own. Self-interest and the price system produce this cooperation, not genuine affection or benevolence.

Karl Marx detests this vision of social life. Quoting Carlyle, he laments that the only bond to connect modern bourgeois citizens is the "cash nexus," the bond of private interest. Far from free cooperation or community, the division of labor and exchange produce a condition of alienation and unfreedom. From The German Ideology:

The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.

Friedman, Read, and Smith celebrate the coordination of market activity as a form of emancipation. It is a miracle that the price system can induce such cooperation. It is liberating to depend not on the will of a master, but on the involuntary cooperation of anonymous, toiling thousands. To Marx, the experience of "I, Pencil" is not one of relief, but of misery. What could be more tormenting than the thought that our actions are dictated not by rational, intentional, decision, but by the amorphous movements of grand market forces? What Smith et al. have described is "a completely illusory community," a mask for brute, class warfare. True community, Marx explains, isn't involuntary cooperation, but deliberate, collective, rational decision:

The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with the others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. ... The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.

In illusory community, social life is experienced as accidental. Basic life for the proletariat is determined not by an act of will (be it from a feudal master or a collective decision), but by the apparently exogenous laws of supply and demand: "the condition of their existence, labour, and with it all the conditions of existence governing modern society, have become something accidental, something over which they, as separate individuals, have no control, and over which no social organisation can give them control."

I like this contrast between two concepts of community. There is "illusory community" held together by involuntary, self-interested economic cooperation. And then there is "real community" built on collective, deliberate decision.

Here's Engels in his Principles of Communism (an early draft of the Manifesto) outlining again the real community of human association communism offers:

Above all, [the new social order] will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society. It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.

The powerful Smithian rejoinder is that even democratic political decisions will not be experienced as authentically collective choices, but as yet another imposition by an alien force, the state. Marx agrees on that charge with respect to all existing states. That is core to his rejection of the language of politics itself--the political state will always be alienating. But the hallmark of a free, communist society will be the reality as well as the feeling that the fundamental questions of our common life are truly decided on together: "All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers." and later: "Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when it is controlled by all."

Carlyle's Dead Sea Apes

From Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present:

Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,—verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore.

Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all 'changed into Apes;' sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner; gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable Humbug! The Universe has become a Humbug to these Apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest[Pg 191] universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it; and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew:—truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls.

Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall-in with parties of this tribe? Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day.

Cf. Wallace Stevens' "Gubbinal:"

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
and the people are sad.

Walter Lippmann Against Monism

A nice passage showcasing Walter Lippmann's pragmatism, and his disdain for monistic, theoretic approaches to political reform. From Drift and Mastery:

Closely related in essence, though outwardly quite different, is what might be called the panacea habit of mind. Beginning very often in some penetrating insight or successful analysis, this sort of mind soon becomes incapable of seeing anything beside that portion of reality which sustains the insight and is subject to the analysis. A good idea, in short, becomes a fixed idea. One group of American socialists can see only the advantage of strikes, another of ballots. One reformer sees the advantages of the direct primaries in Wisconsin: they become the universal solvent of political evil. You find engineers who don't see why you can't build society on the analogy of a steam engine ; you find lawyers, like Taft, who see in the courts an intimation of heaven ; sanitation experts who wish to treat the whole world as one vast sanitarium ; lovers who wish to treat it as one vast happy family; education enthusiasts who wish to treat it as one vast nursery. No one who undertook to be the Balzac of reform by writing its Human Comedy could afford to miss the way in which the reformer in each profession tends to make his specialty an analogy for the whole of life. The most amazing of all are people who deal with the currency question. Somehow or other, long meditation seems to produce in them a feeling that they are dealing with the crux of human difficulties. 

Then there is the panacea most frequently propounded by voluble millionaires: the high cost of living is the cost of high living, and thrift is the queen of the virtues. Sobriety is another virtue, highly commended, — in fact there are thousands of people who seriously regard it as the supreme social virtue. To those of us who are sober and still discontented, the effort to found a political party on a colossal Don't is not very inspiring. After thrift and sobriety, there is always efficiency, a word which covers a multitude of confusions. No one in his senses denies the importance of efficient action, just as no one denies thrift and sober living. It is only when these virtues become the prime duty of man that we rejoice in the poet who has the courage to glorify the vagabond, preach a saving indolence, and glorify Dionysus. Be not righteous overmuch is merely a terse way of saying that virtue can defeat its own ends. Certainly, whenever a negative command like sobriety absorbs too much attention, and morality is obstinate and awkward, then living men have become cluttered in what was meant to serve them. 

There are thousands today who, out of patience with almost everything, believe passionately that some one change will set everything right. In the first rank stand the suffragettes who believe that votes for women will make men chaste. I have just read a book by a college professor which announces that the short ballot will be as deep a revolution as the abolition of slavery. There are innumerable Americans who believe that a democratic constitution would create a democracy. Of course, there are single taxers so single-minded that they believe a happy civilization would result from the socialization of land values. Everything else that seems to be needed would follow spontaneously if only the land monopoly were abolished. 

The syndicalists suffer from this habit of mind in an acute form. They refuse to consider any scheme for the reorganization of industry. All that will follow, they say, if only you can produce a General Strike. But obviously you might paralyze society, you might make the proletariat supreme, and still leave the proletariat without the slightest idea of what to do with the power it had won. 

What happens is that men gain some insight into society and concentrate their energy upon it. Then when the facts rise up in their relentless complexity, the only way to escape them is to say: Never mind, do what I advocate, and all these other things shall be added unto you. There is still another way of reacting toward a too complicated world. That way is to see so much good in every reform that you can't make up your mind where to apply your own magnificent talents. The result is that you don't apply your talents at all. 

Reform produces its Don Quixotes who never deal with reality; it produces its Brands who are single-minded to the brink of ruin; and it produces its Hamlets and its Rudins who can never make up their minds. What is common to them all is a failure to deal with the real world in the light of its possibilities. To try to follow all the aliases of drift is like attacking the hydra by cutting off its heads. The few examples given here of how men shirk self-government might be extended indefinitely. They are as common to radicals as to conservatives. You can find them flourishing in an orthodox church and among the most rebellious socialists.

Lippmann on Literal and Spiritual Immigration

I recently read Walter Lippmann's wonderful Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest. The book is well-worth reading. It captures the combination of energy, confusion, and optimism that characterizes much of progressive-era political thought. Lippmann's broad theme is the contemporary condition of "drift"--a sense of restlessness and political impotence--produced by liberalism's overthrow of traditional authority and custom. The reform movements of his day understand this problem, but they all seek to restore some utopian, imagined, romantic past. Some yearn for the solidity of village life. Others for the return of non-consolidated private property and the the mom-and-pop store economy. All this is futile nostalgia for a past that will never return. The only way forward is the establishment of a new kind of deliberate, rational, scientific mastery over society. Here Lippmann still has faith that scientific mastery is consistent with democratic self-rule. Indeed, science and democracy are two sides of the same coin. It's interesting to compare this young Lippmann with the more mature Lippmann's famous critique of democratic rationality.

Lippmann says a number of interesting things about the labor movement, the managerial revolution in private industry, the stupidity of anti-trust regulation, the women's rights movement, etc. I may blog more about those discussions later.

Anyway, here's a wonderful passage from Lippmann on the condition of the modern American soul:

In Queenstown harbor I once talked to an Irish boy who was about to embark for America. His home was in the West of Ireland, in a small village where his sister and he helped their father till a meager farm. They had saved enough for a pas- sage to America, and they were abandoning their home. I asked the boy whether he knew anyone in America. He didn't, but his parish priest at home did. He was going to write to Father Riley every week. Would he ever return to Ireland? "Yes,"  said this boy of eighteen, "I'm going to die in Ireland." Where was he going to in America? To a place called New Haven. He was, in short, going from one epoch into another, and for guidance he had the parish priest at home and perhaps the ward boss in New Haven. His gentleness and trust in the slums of New Haven, assaulted by din and glare, hedged in by ugliness and cynical push, — if there is any adventure comparable to his, I have not heard of it. At the very moment when he needed a faith, he was cutting loose from it. If he becomes brutal, greedy, vulgar, will it be so surprising? If he fails to measure up to the requirements of citizenship in a world reconstruction, is there anything strange about it? 

Well, he was an immigrant in the literal sense. All of us are immigrants spiritually. We are all of us immigrants in the industrial world, and we have no authority to lean upon. We are an uprooted people, newly arrived, and nouveau riche. As a nation we have all the vulgarity that goes with that, all the scattering of soul. The modern man is not yet settled in his world. It is strange to him, terrifying, alluring, and incomprehensibly big. The evidence is everywhere: the amusements of the city; the jokes that pass for jokes; the blare that stands for beauty, the folksongs of Broadway, the feeble and apologetic pulpits, the cruel standards of success, raucous purity. We make love to ragtime and we die to it. We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience. You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do not concern us, bored with those that do. Is it a wild mistake to say that the absence of central authority has disorganized our souls, that our souls are like Peer Gynt's onion, in that they lack a kernel?

Rousseau and Smith on Trinkets and Baubles

The most interesting of Adam Smith's three uses of "the invisible hand" comes from the Theory of Moral Sentiments, in a famous passage where Smith defends a sort of "trickle down" economics. He argues there that Nature has providentially planted in man the deceptive belief that luxury will make us happy. (I mentioned this passage briefly before):

And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth.

So we are induced by this deception to invent and discover. It is responsible for all the wealth and power man has created for himself. Yet the wealthy are only able to consume a tiny fraction of the wealth they create. The rest they squander on luxury goods that satisfy their vanity. By wasting their money, they redistribute downward to the poor. Thus, their wealth trickles down not from investment and job creation, but from stupid vanity:

The homely and vulgar proverb, that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with regard to [the miserly, rich man]. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his deisres, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets, which are employed in the oeconomy of greatness; all of whom derive from his luxury and caprice, that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice. ... The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

This is all very famous stuff from Smith. The vain love of useless luxury leads the rich man to squander his wealth and (unintentionally) to share it with the poor.

Smith returns to these "trinkets and baubles" in the Wealth of Nations, this time to explain the way commerce destroys the rapacious feudal aristocracy. In pre-commercial societies, feudal elites spent their wealth to maintain their vassals and retainers. They used their wealth, in other words, to entrench their political power. (Their ultimate motivation in so doing is again a form of vanity, but this time the vain love of social domination).

Trade serves to destroy their social and political power because it dangles in front of them a new potential object of their vanity: Luxury goods. These trinkets and baubles provide a new way for the feudal aristocrat to distinguish himself. His vain conspicuous consumption will set him apart from the poor. Yet by buying these trinkets, he ceases to fund his retainers, thereby undermining his source of political power:

 But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. ... for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority.

Again, these are familiar passages for Smith scholars. Vain conspicuous consumption brings down the feudal elite. Luxury thus serves a historically progressive role in liberating and enriching the peasants.

Rousseau, of course, was a great critic of vain, luxury consumption. Where Smith saw it as a (surprising) driver of social progress, Rousseau took luxury to be the ultimate symbol of decadence and moral corruption.

I recently came across a very striking passage on precisely this Smithian question in Rousseau's "Considerations on the Government of Poland." (This is a very interesting text in its own right, as is its companion piece the "Constitutional Project for Corsica," which explicitly defends a system of money-less economic central planning).

The text on Poland is full of wonderful passages, like the following:

Today, no matter what people may say, there are no longer any Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen; there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same manners, for no one has been shaped along national lines by peculiar institutions. All, in the same circumstances, will do the same things; all will call themselves unselfish, and be rascals; all will talk of the public welfare, and think only of themselves; all will praise moderation, and wish to be as rich as Croesus. They have no ambition but for luxury, they have no passion but for gold; sure that money will buy them all their hearts desire, they all are ready to sell themselves to the first bidder. What do they care what master they obey, under the laws of what state they live? Provided they can find money to steal and women to corrupt, they feel at home in any country.

But what most interested me is that Rousseau defends the EXACT OPPOSITE position from Smith in WN. Smith celebrated the nobility's suicidal destruction of their own political power in favor of useless, conspicuous consumption. He thought (not unreasonably) that the decline of feudal predation represented a major improvement. Yet Rousseau is NOSTALGIC for the power over retainers that the feudal nobility used to exercise. He PREFERS their vain exertion of domination of men to their modern, childish luxury consumption. There is something noble and exhilarating about the old form of social power. It is far superior to the decadence of the modern rich:

Where inequality reigns, I must confess, it is very hard to eliminate all luxury. But would it not be possible to change the objects of this luxury and thus make its example less pernicious? For instance, the impoverished nobility of Poland formerly attached themselves to the magnates, who gave them education and subsistence as retainers. There you see a truly great and noble form of luxury, the inconveniences of which I fully recognise, but which, far from debasing souls, elevates them, gives them sensibility and resilience; among the Romans, a similar custom led to no abuses as long as the Republic endured. I have read that the Duc d'Épernon, encountering one day the Duc de Sully, wanted to pick a quarrel with him; but that, having only six hundred gentlemen in his entourage, he did not dare attack Sully, who had eight hundred. I doubt that luxury of this sort leaves much room for baubles; and the example it gives will at least not serve to seduce the poor. Bring back the magnates of Poland to the point of desiring no other form of luxury; the result may be divisions, parties, quarrels; but the nation will not be corrupted. In addition, let us tolerate military luxury, the luxury of arms and horses; but let all effeminate adornments be held in contempt; and if the women cannot be persuaded to abandon them, let them at least learn to disdain and disapprove of them in men.

The vanity of war and feudal responsibility is to be preferred over the vanity of trinkets and baubles.

Marx on True v. Vulgar Criticism

I like this passage from Marx's "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law:"

Hegel's chief error is to conceive the contradiction of appearances as unity in essence, in the idea, while in fact it has something more profound for its essence, namely, an essential contradiction ... Vulgar criticism falls into an opposite, dogmatic error. Thus it criticises the constitution, for example. It draws attention to the antagonism of the powers, etc. It finds contradictions everywhere. This is still dogmatic criticism which fights with its subject-matter in the same way in which formerly the dogma of the Holy Trinity, say, was demolished by the contradiction of one and three. True criticism, by contrast, shows the inner genesis of the Holy Trinity in the human brain. It describes the act of its birth. So the truly philosophical criticism of the present state constitution not only shows up contradictions as existing; it explains them, it comprehends their genesis, their necessity." 

So, Hegel's error is a belief that the modern state/republican constitution only appears to contain contradictions, when in fact its essence is a united idea. (That is itself a very confusing thought which I will not attempt to unpack here).

There are two ways of criticizing Hegel. There is vulgar criticism, which consists in attempting to point out logical contradictions in Hegel's philosophy. And then there is true criticism, which attempts to discover the absurd conditions that could give rise to such a contradictory belief in the first place. (cf. my previous post on this).

This is a nice statement of Marx's method. As he says in the "Theses on Feuerbach:"

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in its practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice. 

These two passages rely on similar examples. In the first quotation, Hegel still seems somewhat Feuerbachian. He is content to uncover the mental sources of our contradictory beliefs. Philosophy is a great act of unmasking. It reveals the sort of mental distortions necessary to produce religious projections.

The revolutionary Marx of the "Theses" goes further. Intellectual unmasking is not enough. The crucial task of philosophy is to revolutionize the material conditions themselves responsible for these contradictions in thought to emerge. It is not enough to go around lecturing religious people (Dawkins style) about how it is that they've come to believe such silly things. What is needed is a revolution in the material conditions that gave rise to those silly religious imaginations in the first place.

A third striking statement of Marx's method comes from his famous letter to Arnold Ruge. (The letter famous for Marx describing himself as engaged in the "ruthless criticism of the existing order"). As he constantly does, Marx criticizes socialists who purport to have discovered an ideal of justice, and who wish to reform society to fit their ideal:

Nothing prevents us, therefore, from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics, from taking sides in politics, i.e., from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with true campaign-slogans. Instead, we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.

Again, we have here a Feuerbachian Marx. The goal is "self-clarification." By helping those engaged in revolutionary politics understand their existing, objective situation, the philosopher will contribute to the revolutionary struggle. This is different, Marx insists, from confronting the revolutionary class with some abstract, dogmatic theory of justice. The revolutionary consciousness will emerge from revolutionary politics itself.

And finally, consider this famous statement of the method from the Manifesto:

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. 

Marx on Feeling and Philosophy

Karl Marx's PhD dissertation begins from a puzzle: Democritus and Epicurus seem to defend very similar philosophies of nature. Indeed, eminent figures in the history of philosophy from Cicero to the patristics to Leibniz have all argued that Epicurus is basically guilty of plagiarizing Democritus. Yet despite appearing to adhere to the same atomistic philosophy, the two philosophers could not have been more different:

However, a curious and insoluble riddle remains. Two philosophers teach exactly the same science, in exactly the same way, but—how inconsistent!—they stand diametrically opposed in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science, and all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in general.

Marx outlines many of these oppositions. First, though both philosophers are materialists, Democritus is a skeptical materialist while Epicurus is a dogmatic materialist. On Marx's use of these categories, where Epicurus insisted that all we can know is that which we perceive, Democritus was torn between the apparent unreliability of our senses. As a matter of practice, Democritean materialism leads to an obsession with scientific exploration, while Epicurean materialism leads to a "contempt for positive science." Philosophy was never enough for Democritus. He traversed the entire world in search of better science. Epicurus, on the other hand, spent his life content in his garden, eating cheese and doing philosophy. 

Democritean materialism insisted that everything was pre-determined. With enough big data, we could predict every necessary chain of events. Epicurean materialism throws up its hands and bows before chance. Epicurus never had Democritus' obsession with the principle of sufficient reason. "There is no interest in investigating the real causes of events. All that matters is the tranquility of the explaining subject." 

This final difference--which Marx insists is tied directly to their philosophies, and not merely their personal dispositions--is most clearly seen in a comparison of their deaths: “while Democritus, despairing of acquiring knowledge, blinds himself, Epicurus, feeling the hour of death approaching, takes a warm bath, calls for pure wine, and recommends to his friends that they be faithful to philosophy.”

As Marx summarizes:

the two men are opposed to each other at every single step. The one is a sceptic, the other a dogmatist; the one considers the sensuous world as subjective semblance, the other as objective appearance. He who considers the sensuous world as subjective semblance applies himself to empirical natural science and to positive knowledge, and represents the unrest of observation, experimenting, learning everywhere, raging over the wide, wide world. The other, who considers the phenomenal world to be real, scorns empiricism; embodied in him are the serenity of thought satisfied in itself, the self-sufficiency that draws its knowledge ex principio interno. But the contradiction goes still farther. The sceptic and empiricist, who holds sensuous nature to be subjective semblance, considers it from the point of view of necessity and endeavors to explain and to understand the real existence of things. The philosopher and dogmatist, on the other hand, who considers appearance to be real, sees everywhere only chance, and his method of explanation tends rather to negate all objective reality of nature.

From all this, we see something interesting about how Marx recommends we read philosophy. His dissertation is a reaction against the insistence in his own day to reconstruct the precise, metaphysical content of philosophic arguments. This is a demand very much alive in the contemporary academy. Analytic philosophy--about which I have mixed feelings, though I am certainly grateful for my analytic professors for forcing me to discipline my thinking--takes clarity as its highest virtue. "What, exactly, is the view here?!" In a world of academic bullshit, that constant demand is refreshing and helpful. It is good to be forced to clearly spell out what it is that you mean. Marx would probably have benefited from Shelly Kagan as an editor.

Yet for Marx, philosophy is only half about spelling out the view. Just as important is the general feeling of a philosophical doctrine. In his words: "it is precisely the subjective form, the spiritual carrier of the philosophical systems, which has until now been almost entirely ignored in favour of their metaphysical characteristics.” Rather than obsess over the metaphysical particulars of one argument or another, we would do well to reflect on the overall mold-of-mind that produced a particular philosophic work. To boil down Democritus and Epicurus to a set of propositions would be to ignore the profound gap between their two philosophical worldviews.

In this, we find an important clue for reading Marx himself, especially his famously complicated--some say contradictory--views about the connection between theory and praxis. As Marx learned from Hegel, feeling can be the most important part of an argument. (To paraphrase Hegel, to know what you truly believe, think about what you would die for). What matters most isn't necessarily the ideas we hold in our heads, but our deep feelings about the world. The task of philosophy, on Marx's view, is to give fuller expression of that which we feel. 

In this connection, think about Marx's notorious prediction that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. By "contradiction," Marx did not mean syllogistic error. He did not mean that the intellectual apologists of the market economy would eventually meet some argument they were unable to answer. Greg Mankiw will always formulate a response. He meant that eventually, the universal proletariat would begin to feel the paradoxical failures of capitalism. And it was that feeling which would produce revolution. 

The sentimental side of Marx's philosophy is neglected by the (still too common) reading of Marx as a vulgar economic determinist. A utopian who thinks a full, scientific understanding of the economic base is all we need to understand society. I think of this as the Ben Shapiro interpretation of Marx ("facts don't care about your feelings").