Heart of a Heartless Theory

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Marxism is a collection of intricately inter-related notions, and so can't be carved up neatly into discrete sections. That said, there are I suggest five broad aspects which can be identified, provided we remember they have many overlaps and connecting threads.

1) Philosophy. Hegelianism - the transformation of quantity into quality, negation and sublation, negation of the negation, the interpenetration of opposites and eternal change. Dialectical materialism.

2) Economics. The three types of value, including the labour theory. Surplus value and its declining rate. Exploitation and immiseration. Crises of over- and under-production.

3) Sociology (including psychology and culture). Labour as man's self-creation, ideology and hegemony, false and contradictory consciousness.

4) History. Classes, economic stages and teleology. The workers' revolutionary potential. Historical materialism.

5) Project. Organisation, party and activism, the need for revolution, the overthrow of capitalism and class, the establishment of communism.

These aspects could be diagrammed as overlapping in various ways. They could also be drawn as containing each other in various combinations. In particular, the economics could be regarded as a part of the history, or equally validly, vice versa.

But there are two elements which are curiously unconnected to the others. One is the political project itself, which isn't actually surprising even though the project is the point of all the theory, because the project is imperative and moral, while theory is declarative and morally neutral.

It is of course possible to accept the theory without accepting the project, or to regard the project's aims as desirable but unachievable, or indeed set the project on a substantially different theory.

The other unconnected element is dialectics. The 'materialism' part of dialectical materialism is near omnipresent, though not consistently defined. But the 'dialectics' part doesn't seem to relate at all. Or rather, it can always be made to relate, but only with constant redefinition and special pleading.

Is there a way in which the working and ruling classes 'interpenetrate'? Yes, in that there is a nebulous intermediate band between the two, composed of proxies for the rulers - workers indoctrinated and bribed with higher wages and small amounts of power, to keep the workers in line. We call this band the 'middle' class.

Or if you don't like that reasoning, you could say the two classes define each other reciprocally, much as a slave and slave owner define each other - a slave can't be a slave if someone doesn't own them, and it works the other way around too. This is of course a completely different notion of 'interpenetration', and you can chose which ever one you like, or switch between the two as convenient.

Ideology means one of two things. Either the rulers foist their own self-justifying rationalisations on the workers, who patchily internalise them into a kind of self-loathing. Or the rulers decide on a course of action, and set the middle class to invent and disseminate whatever lies they can come up with to justify it to the workers. Hegemony and propaganda, respectively.

Does ideology involve some kind of transformation of quantity into quality, or quality into quantity? It could - if you decide that hegemony has been reached when (say) >78.3% of the workers have been convinced by >23.1% of the arguments the mass media feeds them. Or you decide that there is a precise threshold beyond which a biased reporting of a true event becomes a lie.

Does it involve negation? Lies certainly 'negate' truth in one sense, by not being the same. And they 'negate' understanding in another sense, by creating misunderstanding.

Ideologies usually involve multiple, incompatible lies, which could be said to 'negate' or 'contradict' each other - which then negates the negation of the truth when the public realises the government's been telling them two things which can't both be true. Except that they can, dialectically, but let's pretend we've forgotten that for now.

How is the labour theory of value dialectical? That's easy - the labour contradicts the raw material (because one's 'living' and one's 'dead') but also penetrates and fuses with it, sublating both into a product (congealed labour). But it's got a limited shelf life because everything's constantly changing into its opposite and decayed merchandise is the opposite of new...and old things become new things when they've decayed into raw material for new labour.

Did Marx say any of this explicitly? Not to my knowledge - I just made it up. It's an easy game to play, because that's all it is. An intellectual game, of stretching and bending words until they fit - sort of, more or less - something already described.

It's no more profound or true than describing a violin as a kind of elephant. Both have a tough outer shell, both make a noise, and both need a lot of maintenance. I'm not sure whether you can tune an elephant though.

So, if the hegelian aspect of marxism is the basis of marxism, then marxism is founded on a vacuum. If it can't find another basis - game theory, its own economics etc. - then it falls right into that void and disappears.

If on the other hand the hegelianism is just a vestigal appendage of marxism, then we have both a hope and a problem. The hope is that marxist theory may be correct, and the marxist project may be possible - the evil of capitalism can indeed be overthrown, and maybe we can create a world worth living in.

The problem is that almost no marxists see it like that - and none of its major theorists. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg - they were all hegelians. Not just passively or vaguely - passionately and definitely. The very people who seemingly understood and practiced marxism best, most deeply, with the most insight and sweep...were wedded to a piece of 18th century mystical gibberish, and to the belief that it underpinned all their other beliefs, and their struggle.

Thus the great dilemma for the marxist who knows philosophy: One precondition of marxism being true is that it's not predicated on hegelianism. Therefore if all the giants of marxism are right, marxism is false. And if marxism is true, all the great marxists are wrong about marxism.

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