An introduction to Marx by Peter Singer. First published in 1980, reissued in the “Very Short Introduction” series in 2000, and revised in 2018.

Preface

Marx was born on May 5, 1818. Two hundred years have now passed (as of the revised edition’s publication in 2018), making this a good time for reassessment. Is he a nineteenth-century philosopher influential in the twentieth century but now outdated, someone like Darwin or Einstein who discovered something still valid, or somewhere between? Answering this is the book’s first aim.

The second is to explain his central ideas briefly and clearly. Peter Singer says no book had yet made the vision running through Marx’s many writings accessible to general readers. The revised edition also incorporates recent scholarship. Indeed, later sections briefly discuss Capital in the Twenty-First Century, artificial intelligence, and universal basic income.

Chapter 1. A Life and Its Legacy

Marx’s influence

He compares with Jesus or Muhammad. In the latter twentieth century, 40% of the world’s population lived in countries claiming to follow his ideas. He was venerated there, politicians sought interpretations supporting their own positions, and defeated opponents were treated like religious heretics.

His influence extended beyond communist societies. Conservative, liberal, and social-democratic governments introduced welfare to prevent Marxist revolutions. Mussolini and Hitler readily united conservatives and gained power because they seemed effective opponents of Marxism. Even countries such as the United States, where Marx had little influence, used the existence of Marxist rivals to justify restricting human rights, increasing military spending, intervening abroad to overthrow governments, and joining the Vietnam War.

His ideas became an indispensable foundation for discussing society, class, and economic forces’ social roles, profoundly influencing history, sociology, philosophy, literature, and the arts. In that sense, we are all Marxists.

Birth, study, and marriage

Marx was born in 1818 in Germany’s Rhineland (west of the Rhine, near the German–Belgian border). Both parents were Jewish. His father became a lawyer in 1814, but after Napoleon’s defeat, the Rhineland passed from France to Prussia, where Jews could no longer practice law, leaving him poor. The family’s religious and political outlook was reportedly liberal.

He began law at the University of Bonn at 17, but spent his time drinking, fighting, and writing love letters rather than studying, so his father transferred him to the more serious University of Berlin. Against his father’s wishes, he switched to philosophy. To continue without paternal funding, he wrote a dissertation seeking a professorship. It compared the natural philosophies of ancient Greek Democritus and Epicureanism. He considered this ancient dispute relevant to interpreting Hegel, then enormously influential in political philosophy.

(Both ancient philosophers were atomists and materialists. Epicurus reportedly sought to explain morality and happiness through atomism, perhaps influencing Marx’s materialism. Hegel taught at Berlin for many years but died ten years before Marx arrived. —ak)

In 1841, he completed the dissertation but received no professorship offer. Turning to journalism, he contributed social, political, and philosophical pieces to the new Rhenish Gazette, gaining popularity and trust and becoming editor in 1842 at 22. As the paper prospered, his writing attracted the Prussian government’s attention. Harassed by censorship, he resigned.

Penniless, unemployed, persecuted by the government, and needing to marry his fiancée of seven years, he nevertheless took unemployment as leisure to begin critically studying Hegel’s philosophy of law. An offer to coedit the new German-French Annals then provided money. He moved to Paris and married in 1843.

Revolutionary ideas

On reaching Paris, Marx left his new spouse to herself and developed his central ideas among radicals and socialists. Paris was then a socialist and communist haven. His articles attracted more attention from Prussia than the public. Prussian pressure cut off funding and closed the journal. An arrest warrant made him a political exile unable to return home without arrest. Fortunately, his shares in the Rhenish Gazette, which he had edited, brought in a substantial sum.

He spent much of 1844 organizing his philosophical ideas—philosophy broadly encompassing politics, economics, and history. He began calling himself a communist, reportedly unremarkable in Paris then.

He also became close to Engels, born into a German industrialist family and influenced by the same German intellectual circles. Engels contributed to the German-French Annals, profoundly affecting Marx’s economic thinking. Visiting Paris, he naturally met Marx. They became friends while coauthoring Marx’s first book, The Holy Family.

Prussia pressured France to deal with German communists in Paris, and Marx’s family (now including a daughter —ak) was expelled. Only after promising Belgium to abstain from politics could they enter and settle in Brussels. He immediately broke the promise, founded the Communist Correspondence Committee, and spent three years exchanging international correspondence. (Brussels lies between France and Germany. Formerly French, then German, it has been Belgium’s capital since 1830. It currently hosts NATO and EU headquarters. —ak)

He began what would become Capital during this period. A contract for 1845 publication collapsed when he missed the deadline, leaving him with the advance. Engels’ support allowed the family a comfortable life. Although his spouse was pregnant with their second child, he and Engels traveled alone to England to study the Industrial Revolution.

Returning, he postponed Capital to publish The German Ideology, criticizing fashionable rival theories, but several publishers rejected it. It appeared only in 1932, after his death.

He spent much time criticizing French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who might have become an ally. According to Peter Singer, Marx was so convinced of his theory’s importance that he could not tolerate the slightest disagreement.

Settling in London

He intended to return to the continent when a proper revolution began, but remained in London until death. His spouse Jenny, who had borne their third child in Brussels, was now pregnant with their fourth, while Marx remained active in the Communist League.

Despite substantial financial help from Engels, the family remained poor. Peter Singer suspects poor money management rather than insufficient support. Family tragedies continued: the third child died at eight, the fourth shortly after birth, and the fifth after a year.

Regular contributions to the New York Tribune for ten years from 1852 improved their finances. Some were written by Engels under Marx’s name. Jenny’s inheritance around then improved matters further. Marx was reportedly a good father at this time.

Between 1857 and 1858, he wrote prolifically, producing an 800-page draft of Capital in six months. It covered more ground than the final version. In 1859, he published selected material as A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which attracted little attention.

Another episode followed. Marx accused left-wing politician and editor Karl Vogt of taking French government money and became embroiled in litigation. Although ultimately proven right, he lost money and eighteen months of writing. Election to the general council of the International Workingmen’s Association (First International) also renewed his political commitments and kept him busy.

He finally published the first edition of Capital in 1867, initially to a poor reception. Engels did some promotional “work,” sending different reviews to seven German newspapers, and recognition gradually grew.

In 1871, a workers’ uprising occupied Paris for two months. The First International was blamed, bringing Marx fame, although it had not actually organized it.

The International subsequently weakened as dissenting factions rose. At the 1872 congress, Marx recognized his loss of control. His proposal to move the general council to New York narrowly passed, but he knew that placing a continental organization’s council in the United States effectively dissolved it.

The last ten years

Now 54 and in poor health, Marx spent his last decade relatively quietly, living comfortably in a large house, educating his daughters, traveling, and even profiting from stocks. He nevertheless kept requesting financial help from Engels, who continued providing it.

His ideas finally began spreading widely. Popularity in Russia brought a Russian translation in 1872, soon followed in France. The English translation appeared after his death. Corresponding with European revolutionaries, he worked on volumes 2 and 3 but never finished. Engels completed them. A fourth volume was planned but never started.

His final important work appeared in 1875. Attempts to unite Germany’s socialist parties (the Gotha Programme) excluded Marx and Engels. Furious, Marx circulated Critique of the Gotha Programme among leaders, outlining his own ideas for communism’s future organization. Initially little influential, it was later reassessed.

Despite late fame, family misfortunes prevented happiness. His grandchildren died young, and his spouse Jenny von Westphalen died in 1883. Marx himself suffered bronchitis and died on March 14, 1883.

Chapter 2. The Young Hegelian

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind

Hegel taught at the University of Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831. (Marx, born in 1818 and arriving in Berlin at eighteen, never heard him lecture. —ak)

Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind in 1837 deeply influenced Marx, who called it “the true birthplace and secret of Hegel’s philosophy.” Understanding Marx therefore starts here.

German Geist translates as mind or spirit. (English “mind” corresponds to Korean 마음 or 정신, and “spirit” to 정신 or 영혼. —ak) Hegel uses it for the universe’s spiritual aspect. Every conscious being’s mind is a limited part of world spirit. Whether this means a Christian God or something pantheistic is much debated.

The Phenomenology concerns world spirit’s development, from individual minds that are conscious but neither self-conscious nor free to a unified world spirit that is free and fully self-conscious. This process is neither purely historical nor purely logical, but a strange combination.

For Hegel, history is not merely a succession of events but progress along a logically necessary path world spirit must traverse to its ultimate goal.

World spirit develops dialectically. Marx’s philosophy is commonly called dialectical materialism; its dialectical element comes from Hegel. Hegel’s account of the master–slave dialectic illustrates this well and informs Marx’s view of capitalist–worker relations. In summary:

Two individuals do not know they are parts of world spirit. Clashing over power, they regard each other as rivals. This is unstable. Eventually one dominates the other, establishing master and slave, but this too is unstable. Initially the master appears to have everything and the slave nothing, yet the slave actually works and changes the world. The slave begins recognizing this, while the master grows increasingly dependent. Ultimately the slave is liberated and the original conflict resolved.

The Phenomenology of Mind traces world spirit through such resolutions of contradiction and opposition. World spirit is essentially universal, but limited individual minds fail to recognize this universality or their place within it. Hegel calls world spirit alienated from itself. Individuals consequently treat others as separate or hostile. Alienated world spirit cannot be free or exercise its inherent infinite power to organize the world according to its original plan. Its dialectical development moves toward freedom. The Phenomenology is thus a grand philosophical narrative of world spirit coming from its initial condition to recognize itself as the world’s master.

Yet the individual mind Hegel became aware of world spirit through writing The Phenomenology of Mind. Since individual minds are parts of world spirit, world spirit achieved its goal of self-awareness through Hegel, placing him at history’s leading edge. A more modest author might have hesitated to say this, but apparently Hegel thought precisely that.

This may sound absurd today, but it was taken seriously in Marx’s youth.

The Young Hegelians’ reinterpretation

Recognizing that much of The Phenomenology of Mind remains valuable without world spirit helps us understand Marx. Reinterpreting world spirit as roughly “the sum of human minds” turns it into a theory of humanity’s progress toward freedom.

In the decade after Hegel’s death (1831), the Young Hegelians reinterpreted him this way. Hegel sometimes said things like “the Prussian government embodies world spirit.” They accused him of betraying his philosophy for government money (his Berlin professorship’s salary —ak).

They treated Hegel’s surface formulations as concessions to the contemporary Prussian government, reinterpreting his central idea of world spirit overcoming alienation as humanity coming to understand itself fully and discover its true self.

Marx was then influenced by Bruno Bauer(1809-1882), Berlin theology lecturer and Young Hegelian leader. Bauer called religion an obstacle to the human mind overcoming alienation and finding its true self, with philosophy the weapon to overcome it. God, he said, was humanity’s creation, not humanity God’s.

The Young Hegelians used Hegel to criticize and reinterpret Hegel. His ideas were excellent but mythological and incomplete. They sought to remove mythology and recast them in materialist terms. Instead of world spirit, the aggregate of human self-consciousness; instead of world spirit’s full development as history’s purpose, humanity’s complete liberation. This required dispelling religious illusions.

Chapter 3. From God to Money

Feuerbach’s criticism of religion

Ludwig Feuerbach(1804-1872) was more radical than Bruno Bauer. Engels praised his Essence of Christianity enthusiastically. Like Bauer, Feuerbach saw religion as alienation of the human mind. Wisdom, love, and mercy are human qualities; people externalize and project them onto God, making themselves miserable. Theology, he said, was merely misdescribed anthropology.

The Essence of Christianity appeared in 1841, two years before Marx and Engels met. Having already sampled milder religious criticism through Bauer, Marx was not greatly impressed. Feuerbach’s next book, Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy, strongly influenced him, however. It went beyond religious criticism to criticize Hegel using Hegel. Hegel saw world spirit driving history and humans as limited parts of it. Feuerbach considered placing humanity’s essence outside humans alienating, just like religion.

More generally, Hegel and other German idealists regarded soul, mind, God, and infinity as true reality, and matter—humans, animals, stones—as limited, imperfect expressions of a spiritual world. Feuerbach reversed this: philosophy must begin with matter. Existence precedes thought, not thought existence. (The moment Hegel’s idealism turns into materialism. —ak)

Turning toward economics

During his brief Rhenish Gazette editorship (1842), Marx, following Feuerbach, began applying Hegel’s philosophy to censorship, divorce, law, and economic conditions. Prussian persecution returned his attention to political philosophy, now grounded in a deeper understanding of reality.

In 1843, he was closer to liberalism than socialism, believing that changing consciousness alone could improve society. But On the Jewish Question shows a shift toward material and economic conditions, later recognized as his first move toward the materialist conception of history.

Contemporaries generally interpreted the Jewish question through religion. Marx instead traced it to society’s association of Jews with bargaining and finance. Resolving it required reorganizing society to abolish money and its accompanying bargaining. He did not, however, question the prejudice against Jews itself.

Here Marx identifies economic life, rather than religion, as human alienation’s central form. The following resembles his writing from a year or two earlier, substituting money for religion.

Money is the universal, self-established value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, including humanity and nature, of its value. Money alienates the essence of human labor and existence; this alienation dominates humans, and humans worship money.

Where the Young Hegelians saw religion as alienation’s source, Feuerbach went further, including all thought prioritizing spirit over matter. Marx went further still: money, not philosophy or religion, blocked human liberation. The natural next step was critical analysis of economics.

But first we must interrupt this trajectory to examine another central element of Marx’s thought that we have left out.

Chapter 4. Enter the Proletariat

Philosophy’s material weapon

After Prussian pressure forced him from the Rhenish Gazette, Marx moved to Paris in 1843 and concentrated on criticizing Hegel’s political philosophy. In 1844, he contributed Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction to the new German-French Annals, which he coedited. Only the introduction appeared then, the full manuscript posthumously, but it marked an important milestone.

It begins by summarizing Bauer and Feuerbach’s religious criticism. Here appears “religion is the opium of the people,” subtler in context than its familiar reading as a simple attack on religion.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Marx saw religion as a response to oppression and heartlessness, but an inadequate one: it numbs suffering instead of challenging oppression.

This also first argues that philosophical criticism alone is insufficient.

The weapon of criticism cannot replace criticism by weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory too becomes a material force once it grips enough of the masses.

On the possibility of liberating the German people:

It lies in the formation of a class with radical chains … a group whose universal character is universal suffering … whose complete loss of humanity can be redeemed only by humanity’s complete recovery. Society dissolved into a particular class: this is the proletariat.

In ancient Rome, the lowest citizen class was the proletariat. Marx adapted the term to industrial society’s working class: people without property, living by selling their labor.

Reinterpreting Hegel, he discovered this class’s central role.

As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy. … Philosophy cannot realize itself without transcending the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without realizing philosophy.

The propertied middle class might liberate itself without liberating everyone. But workers possess nothing except their humanity, so their liberation means universal human liberation. Since Marx had not described this role before 1844, Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction is an important turning point.

The proletariat’s dialectical role

At this stage, Marx’s argument rests on philosophy rather than economics, history, or science. Human alienation is universal, not confined to a class, so its solution must be universal too. This universality derives from workers’ complete deprivation.

Containing the seeds of one’s own dissolution, joy emerging from despair’s depths: these form a recurring pattern across humanity’s salvation through Jesus’ crucifixion, Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, and Marx’s capitalist–proletarian dialectic.

Soon after moving to Paris, Marx lived with leaders of French socialist workers’ organization The League of the Just, who influenced him. The “Introduction” therefore combines two processes: 1) adapting the proletariat to his philosophy, and 2) adapting his philosophy to its revolutionary potential.

Chapter 5. The First Marxism

Criticizing economics

Marx has now developed two important ideas.

The central form of human alienation is economic, not religious or philosophical, rooted in how we satisfy material wants.
Under capitalism, the working class supplies the material force for human liberation.

The next step is a systematic worldview based on these ideas, surpassing Hegel’s framework and all its variations. This begins in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and continues throughout Marx’s life, informing his great 1867 work Capital.

The 1844 Manuscripts appeared only in 1932. Incomplete and missing sections, they nevertheless reveal what Marx was attempting.

The preface praises Feuerbach. Marx then examines wages, profit, and rent through classical economics, including Adam Smith, to show how it turns workers into commodities subject to supply and demand. When labor supply exceeds demand, wages fall and some workers starve, tending to drive wages down to bare subsistence. Capitalists accumulate wealth through workers’ labor by continually appropriating part of the value workers produce. Capital is therefore accumulated labor; workers’ labor increases employers’ capital, invested in larger factories and more machinery. More sophisticated machinery deepens the division of labor, reducing more self-employed people to workers. The additional labor supply intensifies competition and lowers wages further.

These conclusions all follow from classical economics’ assumptions; Marx was not himself writing as an economist. He sought larger questions economists had not asked: “What does reducing humanity to abstract labor mean for human development?” Abstract labor here means working simply for wages. Making shoes because you need shoes is not abstract labor; making them merely because you need wages is.

(Almost all modern labor is abstract labor. This seems connected with ecofeminism’s criticism that modern society increases consumption to suit production rather than producing to meet needs. —ak)

Alienated labor

Marx sought a deeper explanation of economic laws’ meaning and significance. What would that entail? The section titled Alienated Labor in the 1844 Manuscripts seems to answer, paralleling Feuerbach’s religious criticism.

The more the worker externalizes himself in his labor, the more powerfully he is alienated. His inner life grows poorer and he can call less his own, so the objective world he creates stands opposed to him. It is the same with religion: the more one puts into God, the emptier one becomes. The worker puts his life into objects, so it belongs not to him but to them. … Externalizing labor in its product means not only turning labor into an object, an external existence, but making it independent and alien outside the worker, powerful enough to oppose him. The life he lends the object affronts him; the object becomes hostile and alien.

This is the larger picture behind Marx’s critique of classical economics. He sought a broader historical view. Private property, competition, and individuals maximizing wealth are not timeless, self-evident premises but specific features of human alienation. Economists treated them as essential and permanent; Marx saw a necessary but temporary stage of human development.

Next comes his diagnosis of humanity’s alienated present. One premise is that humans are “species-beings,” a concept originating with Hegel and modified through Feuerbach and Marx.

Hegel originally posited world spirit. Feuerbach made it less superstitious: humans differ from animals by recognizing other humans as the same species and seeking participation in the species’ perfection. What humans mistook for “God” was humanity itself. Marx transformed this again: “productive life is species-life.” Production reveals human species-being. Animals, he argues, produce only for immediate needs (spiders’ webs, for example), while humans produce according to universal standards.

Humans make things without immediate need, limited only by imagination and aesthetic sense. Labor for free production is central to human life, and what one makes is always one’s own. Products of alienated labor are not. Unable to produce freely from imagination, workers suffer repression of the central characteristic distinguishing humans from animals. Alienated workers cease to be species-beings.

He describes three forms of workers’ alienation.

Alienation from the products of labor
Alienation from laboring activity itself
Alienation from species-being

These yield a fourth: workers submit to capitalists in a hostile relationship, making capitalists alien beings.

Alienation between capitalist and worker

What then? Higher wages mean better slavery, not a solution. Restoring workers’ dignity requires abolishing wages, alienated labor, and private property.

Communism is … the true resolution of antagonism between humans, and between humanity and nature. It truly resolves conflicts between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, individual and species.

He gives no concrete account of what communism should look like, only expectations of how different it would be. Private property, he argues, degrades every human sense: minerals are valued for market prices rather than their own beauty. Alienated by private property, people see value only in possessing things or using them as means. Abolition alone will let us see the world properly. Just as only someone understanding music can appreciate it, only unalienated social humans can properly appreciate the world.

Early Marxism’s importance

By today’s standards, Peter Singer calls these claims unscientific: lacking detailed observation or evidence, and not controlled experiments. More realistic than Hegel, Marx nevertheless remains highly speculative.

His thought can be summarized:

History develops toward a goal: humanity’s complete liberation.
Humanity is currently unfree, unable to reorganize the world satisfactorily and develop its true capacities.
The human-created institution of private property dominates and enslaves humans.
Nevertheless, true liberation is historically and philosophically necessary.
Revolutionary theory must identify the present stage in the dialectical movement toward liberation, enabling us to encourage the next stage and achieve it.

All his writing after 1844 largely reworks, varies, improves, or expands themes of the 1844 Manuscripts.

Chapter 6. The Development of the Materialist Theory of History

The Holy Family

Marx’s first published book, The Holy Family, criticizes articles in the General Literary Gazette, coedited by his former teacher and colleague Bruno Bauer and Bauer’s brother. Soon after meeting Engels in 1845, they wrote fifteen pamphlet-sized pages together. After parting, Marx expanded them into a 300-page book. Written in 1845, The Holy Family reveals his transition from the 1844 Manuscripts toward a fuller materialist conception of history.

The following, supporting French socialist P. J. Proudhon’s criticism of private property, still uses alienation.

Both the propertied class and the proletariat experience self-alienation. But the former finds confirmation, good, and power in it; the latter, annihilation, powerlessness, and an inhuman reality.

The next passage, however, clearly contains the seeds of the materialist conception of history.

Private property drives itself toward its own dissolution. This unfolds only as its nature produces people independent of it, placed in that position against their will and without awareness—that is, as it creates the proletariat—and thus destroys itself. … We must ask not what a particular proletarian, or the entire proletariat, presently aims at, but what the proletariat is and what, by being what it is, it is compelled to do. Its goal and historical action are plainly indicated in its conditions of life and the whole structure of contemporary bourgeois society.

This is Hegelian. Private property and the proletariat are antitheses, necessarily generating contradiction. Private property cannot exist without propertyless factory workers. Reduced to misery by private property, proletarians are compelled to abolish themselves, requiring private property’s abolition. Both will disappear.

In Hegelian terms, this is thesis, antithesis, synthesis: transcending existing contradictions into a new synthesis. This is the early materialist view of history, identifying necessary consequences of private property’s existence.

The Theses on Feuerbach

According to Engels, the first document expressing Marx’s materialist conception of history was not The Holy Family but the hastily jotted Theses on Feuerbach of 1845. (Full English translation)

The 1845 Theses comprise eleven brief notes distinguishing his position from Feuerbach’s views. But contrary to Engels’ claim, Peter Singer finds them generally little different from earlier writings.

Marx criticizes early materialists such as Feuerbach for treating objects and our perception passively, unlike Hegel, who saw mental activity shaping our perception of the world. Marx sought to combine Hegelian idealism’s active, dialectical aspect with Feuerbach’s materialism—hence dialectical materialism, although Marx himself never used the phrase.

Emphasizing activity means theoretical problems require practical human activity for their resolution. Marx repeatedly expressed similar views before the 1845 Theses.

On the Jewish Question (1843) proposed reorganizing society to abolish bargaining.
The 1844 Introduction argued that philosophy cannot be realized without the proletariat’s material weapons.
The 1844 Manuscripts proposed communism.

The 1845 Theses are often cited for Marx’s principle of uniting theory and practice.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

This eleventh note is inscribed on Marx’s gravestone. Some interpret it as calling for philosophy at the barricades; others as demanding consistency between values and life (Why live rich while advocating equality?). Peter Singer rejects both. The final note of the 1845 Theses must be read as a materialist reinterpretation of Hegelian dialectic. Philosophical problems cannot be resolved merely by interpreting the world; the world containing those contradictions must change. Philosophy therefore has the important role of identifying what must change.

The German Ideology

The materialist conception of history gives practical human activity greater weight than thought. Its most detailed exposition is Marx and Engels’ next major work, The German Ideology.

Here Feuerbach too becomes a target.

The premise of all human history naturally begins with living human individuals.… Humans are distinguished from animals by consciousness, religion, and so forth. They begin distinguishing themselves when they start producing their means of subsistence, a step conditioned by their physical organization. Producing subsistence, they indirectly produce their actual material life.… In contrast to German philosophy descending from heaven to earth, we ascend from earth to heaven. We do not begin with what humans say, imagine, or think, or what they are said, imagined, or conceived to be. Starting from real, active humans and their actual life-process, we show the development of ideological reflexes and echoes. Phantoms formed within humans are necessarily sublimations of their material life-process, empirically verifiable and constrained by material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and other ideology, with their corresponding forms of consciousness, therefore lose their independent appearance. Ideas have no history or development. Humans developing and transforming their material production and intercourse, and with their existence their thinking and its products, have history and development. Life is not determined by consciousness; consciousness is determined by life.

This provides a comprehensive, clear introduction to Marx’s theory. Details change in later works, but The German Ideology contains his fully mature materialist conception of history.

It may seem his interest in alienation has yielded to a more scientific approach, but not so. Historical evidence increasingly replaces philosophical reasoning, yet alienation remains central. Humans are alienated, but the alienating force is neither supernatural nor permanent: it is their own productive power.

Chapter 7. The Goal of History

What does the materialist conception of history really say?

Having traced the materialist conception of history’s development, we can examine its content. Peter Singer begins by asking whether Marx, as Engels claimed, discovered “scientific laws of human historical development,” comparable to Darwin’s theory of evolution.

A clear statement appears in the preface to 1859’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

In socially producing their lives, humans enter necessary relations independent of their will: relations of production corresponding to stages in the development of their material productive forces. Their totality forms society’s economic structure, the real foundation, upon which … a legal and political superstructure arises, corresponding also to particular forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions social, political, and intellectual life generally. Consciousness does not determine human existence; rather, social existence determines consciousness. At a certain stage, society’s material productive forces conflict with existing relations of production—or, in their legal expression, property relations. From forms of productive development, these relations become fetters. An era of social revolution begins. Changes in the economic foundation rapidly transform the enormous superstructure. We must always distinguish material changes in production’s economic conditions, determinable with natural-scientific precision, from the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophical—in short, ideological—forms through which humans become conscious of and fight out this conflict.

Marx is commonly said to divide society into economic base and superstructure, but a close reading reveals three divisions.

Material productive forces
Relations of production and economic base
Superstructure

Productive forces include labor power, raw materials, and machinery. A miller’s hand-mill is a productive force. These forces generate relations of production, between people and between people and things. The miller may use their own hand-mill or borrow a neighbor’s: ownership and borrowing are production relations. One person employing another is a person-to-person production relation. These relations, not productive forces themselves, form the economic base, on which the superstructure arises.

The materialist conception of history begins with material productive forces, with production relations corresponding to their stage of development. Manual production might generate lord–serf relations: feudal relations form the economic base, on which political and legal superstructures arise. Laws assign particular rights to kings, lords, and serfs, while religion and morality fit the structure.

The steam engine advances productive forces, prompting large factories for efficient use and concentrating workers. Feudal relations restrict serfs’ capacities, so they leave the land; lord–serf relations collapse, replaced by capitalist–employee relations. These form the new economic structure and generate capitalist legal, political, religious, and moral superstructures. Landowners lose privileges; rights such as freedom of movement appear, because workers must move freely to gather in factories.

In summary, productive forces determine production relations; those relations constitute the economic base, which generates political, legal, and ideological superstructures. Material productive characteristics give rise to ideological structures such as politics, law, and morality.

Problems of interpretation

Should we take seriously the claim that hand-mills create feudal lords and steam mills capitalists? Marx surely knew ideas produced the steam engine, and contributed as much as engines to capitalism’s emergence. Why stress only matter’s influence on ideas? Exaggeration to demonstrate novelty?

One extreme interpretation is that he seriously believed in determinism, and much writing supports this reading. Yet other claims necessarily imply the superstructure’s influence in the reverse direction. If politics and other superstructural elements truly had no influence, why did Marx work so hard politically with workers?

Engels says Marx’s language forcefully opposed those entirely ignoring economics, while accepting two-way interaction between base and superstructure. He also claims Marx said late in life, “If that [deterministic Marxism] is Marxism, I am not a Marxist.”

But accepting two-way interaction prevents claiming “productive forces determine the superstructure, rather than the reverse.” Saying one determines the other despite mutual interaction is odd.

A third interpretation: when two superstructural ideas compete, the one contributing more to productive development and the affected class’s advantage is slightly more likely to prevail.

A scientific discovery?

Interpreted as determinism, Marx’s materialist conception of history is plainly false. Allowing unrestricted interaction reduces it to the truism “everything is connected.” Between these extremes lies the probabilistic interpretation just mentioned. Does this make the theory a scientific discovery?

One approach is testing how well it fits. But we cannot create and observe enough comparable historical situations for statistically significant results, making verification difficult.

A narrower use might ask which of two competing ideas is likelier to develop productive forces, then examine how these factors affect outcomes. In this role it usefully suggests research directions. Its value would depend on the results those suggestions produce; many sociologists find it very fruitful in this sense.

Why did Marx often sound deterministic? Mere exaggeration against opponents, as Engels suggests? Possibly, but Peter Singer proposes a deeper explanation.

His belief in productive forces may be a Hegelian inheritance rather than an ordinary factual belief. If Marx reversed Hegelian causation—Hegel stressing ideas’ influence on matter, Marx matter’s on ideas—Hegel’s idealism faces the same problem as Marx’s materialism. Hegel prioritized spirit because it was real, the material world only its manifestation. Perhaps Marx similarly regarded the material world as ultimate reality. His writing supports this: The German Ideology calls material life the “actual life-process,” “actual,” “active humans,” but ideas “phantoms in the brain” and “echoes.” Such expressions recur in later Capital, not just early work. Marx thus saw productive human life, rather than ideas or consciousness, as ultimate reality, and developing productive forces to liberate human capacities as history’s goal. History merely uses the superstructure as an “unconscious tool.”

If so, the materialist conception of history is no ordinary causal theory. Rather than a modern scientific explanation of economic change’s effects elsewhere in society, it likely explains history by identifying the real forces operating within it and their goal.

This explains why Marx recognized politics and law influencing productive forces yet firmly believed their development determines everything. It also explains his work to change the working class’s situation: he acted as history’s tool, though a special one fully understanding its purpose. Productive forces necessarily develop, but through individuals consciously or unconsciously performing historical roles.

Asked “Why try so hard if it would happen anyway?”, Marx might have replied, “I enjoyed being history’s tool.” Or he might have said that even inevitable change should be hastened if it eases workers’ great suffering. Such is Peter Singer’s speculation.

Chapter 8. Economics

Tracing Marx’s economic theory

Marx regarded Capital as his major work and published it “almost” complete. Engels assembled the remaining manuscripts into volumes 2 and 3 after his death. Little work had been done on a fourth volume, Theories of Surplus Value.

Singer returns to the ideas around 1844, since understanding earlier writings illuminates the finished work. Marx then began seeing the capitalist economy as an alienated form of human life. Workers must sell their labor power. For Marx, this is the essence of human existence, making its forced sale profoundly important.

Economics therefore matters to Marx for 1) explaining how this alienation works and 2) examining how it can be overcome.

In 1847, Marx lectured on economics at the Workingmen’s Club in Brussels, publishing the material as Wage-Labour and Capital. It resembles the 1844 Manuscripts without Hegelian terminology. Understanding it makes Capital easier.

It begins with labor: workers’ life activity and expression of life, but under capitalism a commodity they must sell to survive. Life activity becomes a means of staying alive. Labor is not part of life but its sacrifice.

Next, wages: like other commodity prices, determined by supply and demand, but tending toward the minimum allowing workers to remain alive and working.

Next, capital: English classical economics defines it as raw materials, productive instruments, and means of subsistence sustaining production. Since labor creates all these, capital is accumulated labor. Marx criticizes classical economics for overlooking that this holds only within particular social relations. An African is not inherently a slave, only made one in a particular unjust society. Likewise, accumulated labor is capital only in bourgeois society.

Material products are also commodities, with exchange-value as well as use-value. An apple’s use-value includes taste and nourishment. Its exchange-value might be three strawberries or 3,000 won, determined through exchange. Use-value, he says, is independent of markets or any exchange system.

Human wants are social, making poverty and wealth relative. As Ricardo argued, wages may rise while the capitalist–worker gap widens. Accumulated capital strengthens domination over workers. This hostile power grants them only enough subsistence to help capital grow.

Competition between capitalists drives productivity through larger scale and finer divisions of work. The division of labor has several consequences.

One worker does ten people’s work, intensifying competition and lowering wages.
Work becomes simple tasks requiring no specialist skills.
Small capitalists defeated in competition become workers.
Increased output requires new markets, making crises more violent. Overproduction could previously be relieved through new markets or more thorough exploitation of existing ones, but excessive production leaves less scope for this.

One problem remains. On average, commodities exchange at their values, determined by the labor invested. Labor too is a commodity exchanged at its value. Where, then, does capitalist profit arise from buying labor to produce and sell commodities? The book does not answer this problem, also faced by Ricardo and contemporary economists.

The answer appears in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1939). The 1939 Grundrisse is a rough draft for Capital and related projects.

Interestingly, although written when Marx’s thought was mature, the 1939 Grundrisse resembles the 1844 Manuscripts in terminology and argument more than anything else written since 1844. Singer considers Capital still rooted in Young Hegelianism.

The 1939 Grundrisse contains his mature economic theory’s essentials. Workers sell a predetermined quantity (a day, for example) of “objectified labor” at a predetermined price, while capitalists extract as much wealth as possible from the labor power purchased. What capital really buys is “living labor.” The answer lies between these.

Surplus value

At Marx’s funeral, Engels called surplus value his second great discovery: value extracted beyond labor power’s exchange-value. It is the difference between “labor time” as an objectified commodity and “labor power” as a creative productive force.

If subsistence wages are $1 a day for twelve hours’ work, twelve hours’ labor has an exchange-value of $1. Even temporarily higher wages will be forced back to this minimum through competition. But if productive development lets six hours produce the same goods, the capitalist has still bought twelve hours and can extract six hours’ additional surplus value. Workers’ productivity thus allows capital accumulation and stronger domination over them.

Capital

Capital’s subtitle is the familiar “A Critique of Political Economy.” It criticizes classical economics using its own premises, and from a broader historical and philosophical perspective. It also provides a detailed, evidence-rich account of capital’s origins.

Chapter 1, particularly its final section “The Fetishism of Commodities and Its Secret,” shows how Marx’s larger theory connects with contemporary conditions. Religious people worship products of human brains as independent beings; similarly, labor’s social character is mistaken for an objective property of the resulting commodities.

Human social relations appear as commodity values, seemingly objective and independent of those relations. Commodities are worshiped as something beyond commodities, like religious idols.

Problems begin when goods are made for exchange rather than need. Since exchange-value is proportional to labor invested, production for exchange makes labor’s value exchange-value rather than use-value. Exchanging commodities unconsciously equates all the different labors producing them.

Commodity-producing societies have a “mystical veil” over “society’s life-processes.” It disappears when we produce freely, consciously planning and regulating production. Only then do commodities’ values align with their use-values.

Classical economists such as Adam Smith partly lifted the veil, discovering commodity (exchange-)value corresponds to invested labor, but treated this as a necessary law. Marx considered it merely a feature of societies where production dominates humans.

Capital aims to tear away the veil and reveal modern society’s life-processes dominating humans. As elsewhere, Marx describes alienation: humans ruled by their own creations. Peter Singer says reading Capital this way makes all the pieces fit.

The first nine chapters explain production’s economic basis in capitalist society, arguing that even classical economics supports his account. They also lay the groundwork for surplus value, resembling the 1939 Grundrisse with less Hegelian terminology.

In summary:

Commodities have exchange-value and use-value. Labor is a commodity measured only by exchange-value, unchanged even when new machines increase productivity. This is how capitalism enslaves workers: machinery and division of labor enormously increase productivity, without benefiting producers.
Earlier societies used higher productivity for more leisure or other valuable production. Capitalist production for exchange instead lowers commodities’ exchange-values. Small producers become wage laborers, wages tend toward subsistence, and most people gain nothing from increased productivity.
Capitalists buy labor power at exchange-value and extract its use-value; the difference is surplus value. If half a day produces a day’s goods, half a day is “socially necessary labor-time.” The rest is surplus, forced labor. Unlike slavery, its coercion is merely concealed. Working to survive is not freedom. “Freedom begins only when labor is solely for necessity, without external expediency.”
Primitive societies shared property; humans were alienated neither from one another nor their products. Low productivity nevertheless required long work. Greater productivity brought feudalism: serfs worked designated hours for lords and the remainder for themselves, but remained unfree, spending most of their time on subsistence labor.
Modern productivity should increase freedom. Instead, capitalism further suppresses it: workers must accept capitalists’ terms or starve. Capitalists offer only conditions generating surplus value, not because all are wicked, but because free competition compels them.

Chapter 10’s consequences are especially striking: capitalists squeeze more labor from workers, producing seven-year-olds working fifteen-hour days. Marx argues that legal limits on working hours matter far more to workers than fine slogans such as “inalienable human rights.”

The remaining chapters offer empirical examples of divided, simplified labor turning workers into machines; industrialization destroying cottage industries and starving manual workers; and capitalism creating an unemployed “industrial reserve army” and extreme poverty.

Volume 1 ends with capitalism’s self-destruction. Competition leaves fewer monopolistic capitalists while workers face greater oppression and exploitation. Yet capitalism makes workers more numerous and well organized than capitalists, so the dam must soon break.

The resulting revolution will bring cooperation and shared land and means of production, rather than restore earlier private property. This change should be easier under capitalism, which has already expropriated all private property. The remaining task is for the masses to expropriate it back from a few capitalists.

Volume 2 treats technical aspects of capital circulation, including crises’ origins. Volume 3 mostly addresses objections to volume 1. Singer finds both less interesting than the first.

Assessing Marx’s critique of capitalism

Marx, Engels, and later Marxists call Capital a science of economics. Peter Singer finds much to criticize on that reading. He says, for example, these claims have all been empirically refuted.

All profit comes from human labor. Machines may increase surplus value, but only living labor creates profit. This is plainly mistaken: profit would remain with all labor mechanized.
Wages tend toward subsistence.
Profit rates decline.
Economic crises grow more severe.
Increasing numbers fall into the working class.
Capitalism requires an industrial reserve army of destitute unemployed people to lower wages.

Is Capital, then, merely a German philosopher’s bad theory of economics he did not understand? Singer says it may look so if read as economic science or, as some assess it, a post-Ricardian branch of economics.

But Singer judges it a good critique of capitalism, not bad economics (though not an economics book). Marx criticized classical economics to expose capitalism’s defects. Tested as scientific theories, his claims have many problems. Nevertheless, his vivid portrait of capitalist society has value, enabling us to see society entirely differently.

In this sense, his work is art, philosophical reflection, and social criticism. Capital contains all the strengths and weaknesses of such writing: a painting of capitalism, not a photograph.

Chapter 9. Communism and Revolution

How is revolution achieved?

At Marx’s funeral, Engels called him a revolutionary who regarded contributing to revolution as his mission. Understanding him therefore requires two questions.

How did Marx expect capitalism to be overthrown?
What society did he expect afterward?

The Communist Manifesto describes civil war developing into revolution and violently displacing the bourgeoisie. But a newspaper article written in the Netherlands in 1872 allows peaceful transition in countries such as the United States and the Netherlands—“peaceful and legal,” in Engels’ words.

In twentieth-century European democracies, communist parties refused peaceful reform in coalition with social democrats, believing welfare reforms would prolong capitalism and obstruct revolution. Consequently they failed to prevent Nazi parliamentary gains and Hitler’s rise.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx supported workers’ welfare measures such as a ten-hour working-day law. Welfare itself was not the goal: he hoped workers would form a class and political party, yielding the “real fruit.”

(This resembles my thinking on animal welfare. Exposing deceptive “welfare” in carnist society matters, but expanding even deceptive welfare is also necessary. As supermarket “welfare eggs” are marketed like “organic” products and become perceived as ethically better, discovering their deception and animal abuse’s reality may cause greater emotional change, potentially aiding animal liberation. Even deceptive welfare may improve animals’ lives slightly compared with none. My uncertainty is whether it might instead prolong carnist ideology. —ak)

Marx’s reluctance to describe communism

Marx expected revolution to bring communism. The problem is identifying what he concretely meant. He had reasons to avoid detailed descriptions.

He wanted to explain existing problems, awaken workers, and await historically necessary revolution. Unlike utopian socialists, he would not prejudge the future or bend history by plotting socialist government before the economic base matured.

What Marx did say about communism

That official position did not mean complete silence.

The 1844 Manuscripts call communism the solution to “the riddle of history,” resolving conflicts between humans, humanity and nature, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It resembles utopia in the everyday sense.

The German Ideology (1846) similarly describes freedom from division of labor and narrow compulsory roles: farming in the morning, contributing to newspapers in the evening, and other free activities. Individual and social interests would no longer conflict. Their conflict is not inevitable but characteristic of certain historical stages, intensified under capitalism’s emphasis on private property and division of labor.

How did Marx expect communism to resolve this conflict?

One means is abolishing private property. Yet that alone would not remove individual–social conflicts: people might seek more consumption or less work, especially arduous or dangerous work. But according to the materialist conception of history, ideas such as greed, individualism, and jealousy can change with the economic base. Marx argues they will disappear when common property and social production replace private property and privately owned productive means. A new era requires new ethical foundations.

Marx’s ethics

Many, including Lenin, call Marxism a scientific system independent of ethical judgment. But Marx says not only that communist revolution will overthrow capitalism, but that it ought to. His ethical views permeate a historical vision of complete liberation from alienation.

The claim of ethical neutrality comes from his calling morality, like religion and law, bourgeois prejudice. Yet what would Engels’ “truly human morality” be after revolution establishes communism?

Little is known concretely; we can only speculate.

Under capitalism, workers’ legal freedom to contract makes employment appear free rather than exploitative. This is superstructural distortion. Communism’s superstructure and production system would not conceal exploitation, eliminating such false consciousness. Workers’ communist revolution liberates all humanity, so the resulting superstructure would contain genuinely universal ideas. As the Young Hegelians argued, moral illusions fall alongside religious ones.

Communist morality would differ considerably from existing morality, even, Peter Singer says, from utilitarianism’s equal consideration for everyone. Marx criticized utilitarianism as other ethical theories, although not its basic premise of maximizing happiness, merely calling it “homespun … commonplace.” Yet under capitalism, asking humans to maximize everyone’s interests often asks them to act against their own. Under communism, individual and collective interests would not conflict, removing this problem.

(I understand this as saying no ideology fundamentally solves problems without changing its economic foundation. Under capitalism, even utilitarianism’s goal of maximizing total happiness sometimes requires individual sacrifice, which humans cannot tolerate. Only a communist foundation removing conflicts between individual and social interests lets utilitarianism or anything else function. For more on utilitarianism, see Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction. —ak)

Communist abundance and the withering away of government

Everything Marx says about communism rests on material abundance.

As society’s final stage, communism inherits and further improves capitalism’s productive gains. Production is cooperatively planned for everyone’s benefit: no overproduction crises, universal employment, much shorter hours, wages reflecting use-value without surplus-value extraction. We control the economy instead of it controlling us.

Abundance and changed human nature eliminate government, but not immediately. A dictatorship of the proletariat must first abolish capitalist production. Socialist production then removes class divisions and individual–social conflicts.

Political power exists for one class to oppress another, so it disappears too. The most industrialized countries become communist first, removing fears of foreign invasion. Freed from oppression and conflicting interests, people voluntarily cooperate.

The militarily based state also “withers away,” in Engels’ words, replaced by an association where each individual’s free development is the condition for everyone’s free development.

Chapter 10. Was Marx Right?

Singer has already argued Marx’s theory is no scientific discovery. Nevertheless, Marx claimed scientific status and predicted capitalism’s future accordingly, so Singer examines this further. His main predictions:

Capitalists grow richer while wages remain near subsistence.
Small independent producers become workers and capitalists grow fewer.
Profit rates decline.
Communist revolutions begin in the most industrialized countries.

Again, Singer says none proved right.

Treating Marx like Hegel, as a philosopher rather than scientist, is appropriate. As philosophy, his work remains alive.

He changed perspectives on history and social life and deepened our understanding of freedom. His contemporaries equated freedom with absence of explicit coercion, a view suited to unrestricted capitalism. Marx argues that although nobody explicitly coerces us, we cannot control the socioeconomic structures governing our lives and are therefore not truly free; even recognizing this is difficult. If he stands beside Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel as a major political philosopher, it is for criticizing liberal definitions of freedom.

His alternative also poses problems: how can individuals achieve the cooperation needed to control society and economy?

Peter Singer imagines a commuter town where everyone drives into the city, causing congestion. A meeting agrees everyone should take buses. But people prefer private cars, reasoning one extra car cannot congest roads if everyone else buses. Driving gradually increases again. What should the bus-riding majority do: trust conscience or force drivers onto buses? The former may unravel the agreement; the latter may leave nobody free, particularly dangerously if the bus company is a monopoly.

Lenin and Stalin ruled dictatorially in Marx’s name (the latter option in this example), but Marx valued freedom enormously and would have opposed Lenin and Stalin. Had he lived in 1930s Russia, he would certainly have been purged.

His second philosophical contribution concerns human nature, also connected with freedom. He thought socioeconomic conditions could change it: greed, individualism, and ambition would disappear under communism. Peter Singer values this nonscientific theory for providing a foundation to explore connections between human tools, politics, religion, and other domains, and establishing that intellectual and spiritual life cannot be independent of economic foundations. It has indeed positively influenced sociology and history.

But taking this to extremes was problematic. Human nature is less flexible than he hoped. Economic change and material abundance cannot eliminate individualism: satisfying basic wants creates new ones. People want beautiful clothes, not merely clothes, and houses displaying wealth and taste, not merely shelter. Societies express individualistic desires differently; this does not eliminate desires, only changes their expression. Communist Soviet Union had special shops for senior officers, as did other communist states.

(From his books I’ve read, Singer’s view of human nature resembles sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. This school treats human nature as too fixed. —ak)

What can we learn from attempts to create communist societies?

Social relations affect human nature, but nearly all humans also share innate elements that changing social relations or the economic base cannot entirely remove. Marx’s misunderstanding partly explains communist societies’ failures. His era lacked extensive scientific evidence on which aspects of human nature socioeconomic conditions affect, and how much.

He expected changing the economic base to change human nature. If mistaken, revolution merely leaves other forms of alienation. He cannot be faulted for lacking our knowledge, yet misunderstanding human nature partly explains the gap between his vision and twentieth-century communist experiments. Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot more closely embodied Bakunin’s “nightmare of dictatorship” than Marx’s vision—Bakunin being his opponent.

Moreover, Marx expected communist revolution in the most advanced industrial countries, but the first success occurred in Russia, the least industrialized major European country. Workers with “nothing to lose but their chains” consequently brutally massacred far more numerous rural landowners. Later revolutions, except some under Soviet influence, likewise occurred in little-industrialized or unindustrialized China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, and Laos. Communist governments approached dictatorship in every case.

Marx argues capitalism is wasteful, irrational, and controlling. This insight remains valid. But building a free, equal society is far harder than he imagined.

Chapter 11. Is Marx Still Relevant?

Marx’s reputation

His writings grew more famous for decades after his death. By the early twentieth century, they dominated the left, particularly in Europe. Measured by the territory honoring him, his influence peaked in 1945, declining after the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse.

The most important country now is China, an appropriate starting point for contemporary relevance. Its political ideology, officially “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” draws on Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping.

China’s 1978 reforms allowed private businesses, sometimes interpreted as Marxism’s collapse. Deng Xiaoping said a cat’s being white or black matters less than catching mice: private or state-owned enterprises need only produce effectively. This contradicts Marx. Is China’s allegiance merely verbal?

The 1978 reforms were extraordinarily successful, lifting 800 million people from poverty. China now looks nearly capitalist: vigorous markets, a stock exchange among the world’s top three, and more dollar billionaires than the United States. Wealth distribution is more problematic than America’s. Nevertheless, in 2016, President Xi Jinping gave a speech reemphasizing Marx.

Singer finds Mao’s planned economy’s extreme poverty and rapid growth after Deng’s opening compelling evidence of Marxist economics’ limits.

Inequality

The 2007 global financial crisis intensified criticism of the financial industry and discussion of regulating recursive lending. This developed into 2011’s Occupy Wall Street, whose criticisms overlap Marx’s critique of capitalism.

But the movement faded without major changes. Capitalism survived swindlers and individual capitalists’ incompetence; once again, a crisis demonstrated its resilience.

The inequality debate produced French economist Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Unlike Marx, Piketty works within mainstream classical economics. He argues that returns on capital generally exceed economic growth, tending to widen inequality.

After World War II, governments taxed the wealthy more and expanded social protection for the poor. Economist Simon Kuznets argued wealthier countries overcome inequality, but Piketty calls this a Cold War fairy tale. When American and European growth slowed in 1975, inheritance taxes fell to near insignificance and inequality worsened again. We are regressing toward Marx-era inequality, Piketty says.

For supporters of Marxist economics, Piketty effectively challenges neoclassical economists attributing wealth to greater productivity and skill. He shows theoretically and empirically that merely owning capital makes enrichment easier. His work also counters the neoclassical claim that capitalism tends to reduce inequality, rendering social-democratic redistribution pointless or obstructive. Piketty calls capital taxes the only solution.

Peter Singer cautions against overstating similarities between Marx and Piketty. Marx expected wages near subsistence; Piketty expects gradual increases, though faster capital-income growth still widens inequality. Marx expected revolution to overthrow capitalism through its contradictions; Piketty expects its persistence. Both opposing views cannot be right.

Marx in an age of globalization

The Communist Manifesto describes capitalism’s enormous power expanding beyond nations and continents. This continues today at tremendous speed, but its consequences differ sharply from Marx’s predictions.

He expected expanding free trade and global capitalism to unite the world’s workers in anticapitalist revolution. Capitalism’s worldwide reach was correctly predicted; international working-class unity was not realized.

Some Marxists say he failed to anticipate workers in developed countries exploiting workers elsewhere. More optimistic ones expect eventual recognition and unity. On this view, Marx was right; it merely takes longer.

Is this plausible? Examining whether today’s global economy involves capitalist exploitation of the poor, international aid organization Oxfam reported that in 2017, the eight richest people owned as much as the poorest half of humanity, about 3.6 billion people. Whether this wealth results from oppression, and whether poor people’s lives have worsened, needs closer investigation. Nevertheless, the global economic order is undoubtedly biased toward the rich. Singer calls capitalism unfair and cruel, but says this has little to do with Marx’s perspective. Extreme poverty as measured by the World Bank is actually declining. Marx’s prediction was wrong here, but that is good news.

Marx and the environmental crisis

Twenty-first-century humanity faces a new challenge, the climate crisis. Ecosocialists argue that capitalism commodifies everything, including nature, so preventing destruction requires overthrowing it.

Greens share these concerns but did not see Marxism as the answer. Marx said nothing about industrialization’s existing environmental damage, they point out, and socialist countries destroy nature too.

The difficulty with solving climate change through capitalism’s overthrow is that the latter seems unlikely soon. Experts say the climate tipping point is near; beyond it, even ending all human environmental destruction cannot reverse the crisis.

Marx’s theory may nevertheless help analyze capitalists profiting from fossil fuels and using political influence to preserve or expand their interests.

“The point is to change it”—but how?

(The heading comes from note 11 of the 1845 Theses: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” —ak)

Marx wrongly predicted communism’s imminent victory over capitalism and a better world, misleading millions. Even after the international communist movement’s decline, he continues influencing many.

Peter Singer notes that many still lack minimally decent lives, while effective nonprofits funded by many donors work to alleviate this. Yet many leftists still demand communist revolution instead of joining these efforts. Two problems arise.

Nobody has an idea how to overthrow the global economic order.
Nobody has demonstrated a genuinely better system. No communist economy, including small-scale experiments, has fulfilled Marx’s prediction of greater productivity and abundance than capitalism.

Karl Popper advocated piecemeal social engineering: make small changes, let others observe results and voluntarily join, then repeat. Incremental change can happen continually; communist revolution waits for the right moment to attempt enormous change at once, risking great failure.

Decades since Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, many incremental improvements have occurred: public housing, universal healthcare in most wealthy countries except America, and free public education. Experiments continue, including universal basic income trials in several countries.

Some predict robots and artificial intelligence will greatly reduce human labor’s necessity across many fields. Then Marx’s claim that economic interests influence intellectual and political life would remain valid, but inevitable proletarian revolution would not.

(How justly robot-produced value is distributed seems crucial. Present developments suggest distributive justice remains distant. Unless measures such as universal basic income take hold faster than expected, concentrated wealth and unemployment may accelerate. —ak)