Capital’s virtues in the eyes of Karl Marx
South Africans are assailed by frequent references – or perhaps implied references - to Marxism. Some dismiss these out of hand as anachronistic and perhaps even amusing. Others, however, take them extraordinarily seriously. It must be, after all, gratifying to think you have discovered a world view which seems to explain harsh inequality and unending hardship, to put the blame clearly upon a single factor, and, moreover, to offer a solution to intractable problems. A version of the world today in which the “evils of capitalism”, presided over by greedy, overweening Western imperialists and their local agents, are set against the virtues and suffering of the poor and working class, possibly seems to many of our local intellectuals and political parties to be particularly appropriate, with a few adjustments to local conditions, for our situation.
However the dominant South African discourses about Marxism are in fact dated and inappropriate. They depend upon a statist view of how change should happen, antiquated references to “dependency theory”, and a provincial and inaccurate assessment of the importance of industrialisation.
A great deal of this moralistic and simplistic version of how society works is not a reflection of how Marx himself saw things. This may not matter to some. However, given the prevalence in South Africa today of the Manichean version of reality, it is surely worth examining further. Marx’s insights into the nature of capitalism and inequality remain influential, while much has been written about their interpretation. Many have sought to develop and understand Marx’s thought in relation to the modern and post-modern world. What he thought is not a trivial matter but one which has exercised many in multiple fields. There is no need to become scriptural about Marx – his works are not a holy text. But he was an important and sophisticated thinker whose influence persists today.
Marx did show how capitalism’s first emergence in England depended upon what he saw as the forced and violent separation of peasants from the land and the creation thereby of a class of people unable to survive without selling their labour. And he was indeed a deep and profound critic of the resulting suffering of those thrust into cities and put to work in appalling and shameful conditions, (although the definitive work on this “The condition of the working class in England” was written by Engels and not Marx himself).
Marx also supported worker unionisation, worker struggles and what he believed was worker revolutionary potential. The “bourgeoisie” – industrialists, entrepreneurs or capitalists – were also driven by forces larger than themselves, as they engaged in a new type of production. Competitiveness, individualism, profit making, the need for expanding markets and the use of a labour force unconnected to themselves in any way other than the through a harsh economic relationship meant that this “bourgeoisie” had come to prevail. And they had done so in a system which swept away feudal relations, based on religion, kinship and obligation. So yes, a working class/bourgeois dichotomy was passionately and even at times poetically portrayed by Marx.
However, Marx’s thinking was more complex than that, and did not depend on dichotomies. His insights depended upon his notion that society was created from the operation of multiple contradictory patterns and forces. Thus, he argued, at the same time as capitalism destroyed and exploited, it also brought a creative energy and a forward momentum absent in the societies that preceded it. In the Communist Manifesto, he and Engels wrote:
“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”
Marx was in his earlier and mid-life work scathing about pre-industrial societies, suggesting that they were stagnant, marked by “slothful indolence” and “fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions”, and that the traditionalism they represented was regressive, even “barbarian”. He disdainfully called peasants a “sack of potatoes” who could not and would not be organised into a force for good. He later modified this harsh opinion of the preindustrial world, but his critique of its tendency towards stagnation remained.
How did creative destruction happen? His theory depended upon two pillars – both controversial: the labour theory of value, and the “falling rate of profit”. It was these, in his eyes, which drove capital to both innovate and to destroy. Whatever the weaknesses in these basic theories, what he ended up arguing had a powerful common sense element to it. He argued in considerable detail how the competitive cycle of production and profit-making pushed societies forward by constantly challenging industries to innovate to stay ahead. To quote the Communist manifesto again:
“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”
The growth of capitalism weakened the hold of traditionalism and stagnant social forms over the population. There is no doubt that he believed that this was a good thing. Feudalism, caste-ism and other forms of society which preceded capitalism would “inevitably” give way under the processes of creative destruction, liberating millions from the yoke of cultural traditionalism and economic stagnation. In this early polemic, the metaphor was extended to the colonised world in a somewhat linear fashion:
“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West”
What are the implications of this for poorer countries where capitalism is only partially dominant and traditionalism remains prevalent? Was Marx simply a “dependency theorist”? Or did his views of the role of capital in creative destruction relevant to the colonised world as well?
Responses to Marx in this respect over time have taken many different directions. Some have reacted by suggesting that his views are simply ethnocentric, Eurocentric and/or teleological, and not worth taking further. Others adopt a rural-focussed romanticism, to counter Marx’s opinion of the “idiocy of rural life”. Others opt for a more hard-nosed but nevertheless rural-oriented understanding of the travails and problems of poor countries trapped in traditionalism, giving little consideration to the role of capital itself. And the “underdevelopment” and “dependency” schools, following the work of Lenin rather than Marx, placed the blame for the backwardness of the third world upon the shoulders of imperialism, with its plunder of Africa, for example, for slaves, or raw materials, thus externalising capitalism’s role and casting third world countries as victims. Only some of these directions reflect Marx’s own views.
In his mature years, Marx did indeed pay detailed attention to those parts of the world where rural systems and structures were prevalent. His late work on India, China, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and even the Roman Empire, for example, drew him away from the judgmental approach, and brought him to the view that multilinear paths to development, rather than the unilinear view put forward in the Communist Manifesto, were possible. His “Ethnological notebooks” reflected a more nuanced understanding of various societies in Asia, Latin America and Africa. But his approach to rural social forms was never romantic. He did consider the Russian commune to contain “revolutionary potential”. But he was scathing about the patriarchal and class power relations in many of the societies he read about.
When it came to cases of actual, full-on colonialism, rather than the exploration of the nature of rural societies on their own, Marx’s preoccupation with the double-sided – both corrosive and creative - roles of capital persisted. The colonised world might have been rendered “dependent”, to use the word he uses above. But this dependency was modified in a variety of different cases by the degree and nature of the local economy. Where a strong and independent industrial base existed, and was not destroyed by competition from the colonising power, it could and did play a vital role in development.
Several theorists have taken this up and applied it to underdeveloped societies. The most well-known of these was Bill Warren, who called his book “Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism”, in a parody of Lenin’s famous “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”. Warren who took the reader through the many ways in which it was the lack of industrialisation that underlay the underdevelopment of Africa, rather than its presence. Thus Warren’s paradoxical thinking was that one of the reasons the third world is so underdeveloped is not because there is “too much” capitalism but because there is not enough, meaning that societies remain in thrall to the stagnation inherent in traditional societies.
Similar arguments have been made by many others. The power and force of traditionalism, its ability to enmesh the state in patronage relations that paralyse it, the brake it places upon modernisation and the inability of these societies to unlock the power of industrialisation have all been pointed out.
In his critique of “underdevelopment” and “dependency” theory Warren was determined to resurrect Marx’s own views from what he believed had become, by the late 1970s, the baleful influence of Lenin’s ideas over Western thought. In his widely influential book he argued that dependency theorists had been “misguided” by Leninism and “hoodwinked” by Third World nationalism - which he argued had a vested interest in focussing dissatisfaction away from itself. The left’s denunciations of “underdevelopment”, so prevalent at the time, ‘contradicted both the record of progressive socio-economic change introduced by capitalism and Marx’s own cautious celebration of this process, even when this took colonial form”, according to one recent commentary on Warren’s work.
The domination of dependency thinking had ‘reversed the views of the founders of Marxism who held that the expansion of capitalism into pre-capitalist areas of the world was desirable and progressive”. Furthermore, the dominance of dependency thinking had distorted thought across a huge spectrum. Even Western liberalism had been, said Warren, transformed “from a philosophy of forward-looking improvement based on the past achievements of capitalism to a philosophy of guilt and shame”.
How had this happened? One possibility is that neither Lenin nor Mao, nor indeed any of the 20th century revolutionaries of the East could realistically embrace Marx’s argument: the societies they ruled were extremely weakly industrialised, unwieldy and predominantly agrarian. Their only possible route to their envisaged revolution was through the state. Thus their thinking significantly modified Marx’s original ideas and emphasised rural mobilisation and/or state control and dictatorship as the means to revolution.
In addition, the “underdevelopment” thinking that invaded Western thought in the 1970s, through the work of influential theorists who took these ideas up at the time – Frank, Rodney and many others - found support amongst the nationalists and populists of the third world at the time, whose interests lay in preserving a sense of perpetual struggle with outside forces to disguise their own venality and to boost their populist power base.
Warren’s sweeping and sustained critique was not the first or the last to attempt to consign dependency theory to oblivion. A flood of criticism accompanied his work, and by the mid-1980s dependency theory was almost entirely discredited by a variety of thinkers. Its demise was accelerated by the fact that many states originally thought to be in the grip of “underdevelopment” began to emerge as increasingly developed economies. In very few places today is it regarded as a serious analytical tool for development theorists.
In South Africa, the “Marxism” we are subjected to by the EFF, the Communist Party and the ANC itself is riddled with dependency thinking. It is far closer to Leninism than Marxism, and it comes across as nearly 40 years out of date. Like the Leninist rather than the Marxist view it tends to focus on the centralised control of the state and on redistribution rather than competitive production and modernisation. This is particularly unfortunate given the fact that South Africa is by far the most industrialised country in Africa, and that it has, since at least the 1940s, had its own highly productive capitalist class relatively free from dependence on other centres of power. It does not fit the straitjacket of “dependency” theory and warrants an entirely different approach.
A strategy which followed Marx’s own ideas would be advocating a huge acceleration in industrialisation, including through the extensive support of small and medium businesses as well as the encouragement of the growth of larger productive industries, and the courting of foreign investment in productive enterprises. It would seek to curb the power of monopolies because of their anti-competitiveness, reduce state ownership of industry, and encourage competition. It would oppose nationalism and populism.
At the same time, it would encourage the decline of traditionalism. It would be looking to diminish the power of chiefs over land and the restrictions and controls over rural life, and over women, exerted by traditional law and custom.
It would refuse to continue to create a black “capitalist” class that has no productive role, but depends upon rent-seeking and cronyism provided for it via state-led legislation; and it would support a strong and vigorous trade unionism. It would favour substantial welfare systems which relieve the burden on the poor. And it would be extremely protective of the liberal rights and freedoms which the new state is meant to embody.
And given that the country is now in the 21st century and not the 1970s, it would seek to engage with, and offer its own productive contribution to, a variety of information-based enterprises, embracing the post-modern world.
The one policy of the ANC which possibly approximates to a small part of this approach is the “100 Black Industrialists” programme under the aegis of the Department of Trade and Industry – led by SACP member Rob Davies. But it remains to be seen whether industrialisation can be created by decree, particularly in an economy with a stifling state and many restrictions upon capital’s operation. It is also not clear whether Davies is pursuing this policy with a clearly non-dependency vision in mind, or if it is in fact simply another means to expand the “unproductive bourgeoisie” with plunder the real object.
Other than that, many parts of South African society seem to be in the thrall of a dated and discredited form of dependency theory, which nurtures a narrow nationalism and populism, which favours the state over all other social forces, and which endorses provincialism and traditionalism. Marx would be turning in his peaceful Highgate grave at this travesty of his ideas.
