Most people see Karl Marx primarily as a communist thinker, and this does of course make a lot of sense. What is perhaps much less appreciated is that whereas he wasn’t a fan of capitalism, he still saw it as an improvement over its predecessor, feudalism, and a necessary stage in progress towards a communist utopia. This is also very important in how we view societies which have labelled themselves, or been labelled, communist. In this post, I intend to go into what Marx saw as positive about capitalism, and also the suggestion by many people today that we are not actually living in a capitalist society any more, but have returned to feudalism. In doing so, it might seem like I’m praising capitalism. I’m not. I’m just stating what Marx saw as positive about it.
Marx’s view of history, and this actually is substantially Friedrich Engels’ view, is that it shifts over to one side, then there’s a reaction and finally a synthesis arises out of both. This view is linked also to a fairly radical nineteenth century view of physics which later changed due to the advent of relativity, quantum mechanics and, in biology the New Synthesis. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union continued to prize dialectical materialism, which is the metaphysics behind Marxism, well into the twentieth century CE and as a result used Lysenko’s ideas about crop production and development, leading to famine. I have various thoughts about this which are not worth sharing here right now as I’m trying to stay focussed.
Before I go on, I want to outline the very clear line of progress Marx described in history. Economics and society evolve from feudalism into capitalism and then into communism, but the important thing about this with hindsight is that he saw the capitalist phase as a necessary social order before communism could emerge from it. Communism cannot, therefore, arise out of a feudal society. Russia and China were not really capitalist but feudal, and consequently the changes they underwent were not into communism, regardless of what they might say, but into capitalism. Communist rhetoric was used but although they may have attempted to impose something resembling it upon the countries concerned, there was no large industrial working class to organise and Marx would’ve predicted the next stage in those countries was not communism but capitalism. The other countries which became “communist” were spread from those pre-existing state capitalist countries. Marx probably envisaged the earliest communist revolutions occurring in the UK, Germany, the US and so forth, i.e. countries which were already fully capitalist, not in China or Russia. Finally on this point, the current “People’s Republic of China” has a stock market, which completely rules out the possibility of it being a communist country because it means goods are commodified. It’s impossible to have stocks without this. This is a definitional thing, not a political point. You can have various takes on this, including the idea that communism can never work, but the fact remains that China is necessarily not communist and Russia may have been communist for a short period of time ending by the end of the 1920s but Marx would’ve said it was impossible for it to be sustainably so, if it was at all. That is what Marxist theory actually says, and it said that before the Russian Revolution too. It isn’t changing the theory to fit the facts.
Nonetheless, counter-intuitive though it may seem, Marx did see capitalism as a good thing in relative terms, and also as temporarily necessary, mainly because it’s better than feudalism. Marx could be seen as largely morally sceptic, although he also contradicts himself about that. More specifically, he believed that one’s values were determined by one’s economic circumstances. Many say that they hate landlords but still want to be one and would behave exactly the same way if they became one. That’s Marx’s view. Therefore, in a way he could be said to be saying that capitalism isn’t evil at all. It’s just a phase society passes through as it progresses. I would also say that Marx does actually seem to care from time to time. It’s fair to say that Marx saw ethical values as determined by material conditions, so for instance he gets around the Kantian problem of universalism, where “what if everyone did the same?” is what determines right and wrong, leading to describing shoplifting food from a small greengrocer as either “depriving someone of their means of livelihood” or “providing food for one’s family” by saying it’s actually both, but means something apparently irreconcilably different to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. However, he did also clearly show sympathy for the plight of the poorest in society, which looks to me like morality.
Specifically, capitalism is better than feudalism. Peasants are tied to the land and sold with it. A worker under capitalism is, legally speaking, free to leave their employer and do paid work for themselves or someone else. However, at least back in the day, they weren’t property owners in any substantial sense.
Due to everyone being tied down, including lords and ladies, royalty and so forth, feudalism is static. Nobody is socially mobile. You’re born into your station, live in it and die without changing it. It’s about subsistence for most people, and also tradition. Capitalism isn’t like that, at least in theory. In capitalism, production has been freed from this system and is able to produce things way beyond what anyone needs. It makes industrialisation possible, technological change is promoted and there’s large scale global trade. If someone has an idea in capitalist society, it’s much more likely to be realised than in feudalism, since in the latter case the chances are the person with the idea is working from dawn to dusk and won’t be able to communicate their idea to others who will be able to act on it.
Largely, feudalism operates locally and on a small scale, and is fragmented. You can raise and grow food on the local farm, but there’s no way you can go to a distant market and produce can’t usually be brought to you from across the globe. By contrast, the global economy means that people become more cosmopolitan and accepting of others, to some extent unifying the world, people are less parochial and the basis for a global community emerges.
Relationship-wise, feudalism is personal and that’s open to corruption. There’s the lord and the vassal, the master and the apprentice. There was also religious pressure to keep these in place and there was an unchanging hierarchy in place. More was going on between people than just money – it was all personal, like the relationship between children and parents. Under capitalism this changed to contractual obligations which were written down and quantifiable, which also made it possible for exploitation to be tracked by following the money. Prior to this, whereas there might have been a vague sense of injustice, though probably diverted by religious justifications and the kind of deference one might feel towards a father figure and in British society today still towards royalty for many people. This is very different from noticing how hard you’ve worked and how long your hours are while you have an actually countable sum of money in your pay packet each week or month. That focusses the mind on the inequality, which has now been largely converted into numbers.
Once all of these things are in place, and this is where it becomes clear Marx is talking about capitalism as a transitional state, the machinery exists to bring socialism about. There has to be a proper infrastructure to enable workers to travel to and from their workplaces. Workers mainly live in cities where they can become more aware of their conditions and act together to improve them. Also, the existence of extreme wealth becomes more visible and therefore imaginable to the working class. They’re more likely to ask why other people have got their money, i.e. the money they had taken off them as profit for the owners, and it makes it possible to imagine a society where conditions are much better and more equal. This last is of course a grudging acknowledgement which entails that it’s just a phase in Marx’s opinion, but the point is that all of these things become possible when they weren’t in feudalism.
To be honest, a lot of this seems quite questionable to me and I want to do two things with it. One is to point out ways in which feudalism actually scored over capitalism. Firstly local production and consumption are very much what we need right now considering the environmental problems caused by global trade, and it would also be good to have a more personal, though also equal, relationship with other people one works for. Secondly, I’ve long imagined that I might do better in a society where I have a set place and a role, and I haven’t been ambitious for a long time. However, that’s all very well to imagine, but it would depend on that role actually suiting someone. Otherwise it would mean being trapped in a job one hates, and that job incidentally could be Queen or King and one could still hate it.
However, I also have a couple of other questions about this. One is that of the spice trade, which also applies to the likes of precious metals. Spices were being grown in the Far East and South Asia for centuries and then traded with Europe, even the British Isles. There were monasteries and castles where ginger, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg were all commonly used in cooking. This doesn’t correspond to the idea of local production and consumption painted above. The other is that peasants probably had more leisure time, or at least time off work, than factory workers, with the church imposing holidays and feast days. Work was also seasonal and there would’ve been times when it would’ve served no function and therefore wouldn’t’ve happened. These two phenomena are answered by Marx and Marxists. The spice trade was seen as the beginning of capitalism and as operating externally to the feudal system. It would still have been unfeasible for a peasant to buy a nutmeg at a local market. As for leisure time, the switch was from task orientation to time orientation, something which also connects to the infrastructure necessitated by capitalism and world trade in the form of railway timetables and navigation across oceans. Although peasants might have been freer in that sense, they would not have been able to improve their lot collectively, or at least they wouldn’t’ve done so because of other constraints, including religious and cultural ones. So it’s said, anyway.
So to reiterate, whereas Marx wasn’t exactly a fan of capitalism he did see it as progressive compared to feudalism. He saw progress as moving forward inevitably through feudalism and capitalism to communism, and his views also reflect the dynamism dialectical materialism sees as embedded in reality. Incidentally, it’s tempting to go on and on about dialectical materialism here but I’ll resist that. I’ve actually long thought that given the existence of the US Constitution, the fact that it’s a republic and so forth is a sign that it could’ve been expected to evolve into a communist society, and in fact that in the late nineteenth century it was probably the prime candidate for doing so. When people are genuinely patriotic about the freedom and democracy of the US, that anticipates its progress into communism, which is why it’s so bizarre that they have such a phobia of it.
Everyone reading this by now stands a good chance of being aware of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series, so forgive me if you’ve heard this in depth. My own experience is that I’ve read ‘Dune’ itself and later had my doubts about the quality of its sequels, so I didn’t read them, and also the Dune Encyclopedia. The David Lynch film is disappointing, there was also a fever dream by Jodorowsky the director trying to make a version which just failed because he was stoned all the time, and finally there’s the current cinematic adaptation which I again saw the first installment of and found disappointing, although that’s more me. It’s also a reaction to Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and the main influence on the Star Wars franchise. Its relevance here is that it describes a future feudal society spanning the Galaxy. It’s fairly complex but breaks down as follows. The Landsraad is a conglomeration of great houses, families which run the Universe and jostle for position. They’re given fiefdoms over various worlds, such as House Atreides and Caladan. Each great house has a share in CHOAM, the overriding megacorporation that does everything except transport. There’s also the Spacing Guild, which operates a monopoly over space travel based on their navigators, the mentats, who I think use the spice melange and Holtzmann engines which enable travelling without moving. This can only be done by the mentats, who are sentient humans who are mutated by the spice, because of the Butlerian Jihad, which was fought over whether AIs should exist, ending in them being banned. The Spacing Guild is in partnership with CHOAM and move everything, or rather, ensure that things and people that start out in one place end up in another. The great houses have various degrees of power. The imperial house itself, House Corrino, attempts to maintain a monopoly on violence through highly trained soldiers called the Sardaukar, originating from the prison planet Salusa Secundus and keep everyone under control, or at least apparently do. House Atreides, however, have troops of their own which may compete successfully with the Sardaukar. The Atreides are also feuding with House Harkonnen. Behind all this is a quasi-religious order called the Bene Gesserit, an all-female group expert in manipulation, who are secretly working towards breeding a female Messiah over centuries from members of the great houses. The spice melange is found only on the planet Arrakis and has a similar role to fossil fuels in the real world. As well as enabling mentats to fold space and therefore “shorten the way”, melange is extremely addictive – stopping it kills you – enables certain people to see the future and extends lifespan. Many of the more powerful people in the great houses are on spice. Incidentally, this brings the book ‘Cyclonopedia‘ to mind, so maybe there’s a link there too.
All this is easy to translate into the real world, and seems to represent Herbert’s attempt to explore the possibility that the default state of human society is neither fully automated luxury gay space communism nor capitalism but in fact feudalism. Shorn of many of its more implausible elements, the ‘Dune’ universe does in fact seem to reflect one view of how society and economics do in fact operate today. For a long time, people have been talking about “late capitalism”, but I prefer to call it “mature capitalism”, in the sense that it’s a permanent economic and social order which will change only with our extinction, but in a way, maybe the term is accurate and capitalism is in fact coming to an end, but it isn’t being replaced by communism but by what Yanis Varoufakis calls “technofeudalism”. Maybe Marx was right in predicting the end of capitalism, but wrong about what it would become, and rather than being progressive, the world is actually slumping back into something resembling feudalism.
His idea goes like this:
In feudal times, land ownership and rent were the chief sources of wealth. Profit existed but it was less important, for instance it existed in the spice trade but wasn’t something the peasants could avail themselves of. Under capitalism, capitalists dominate the media, parties and banks, and in particular are expert at manufacturing public opinion and values, thereby bypassing democracy. Our current system is not based on profit but rent, i.e. there is limited access to resources not found in ownership. I’ve mentioned this before, but examples of how this happens are found in vehicle lease agreements and things like having to pay extra to turn on seat heating in BMWs – you already have the vehicle but have to subscribe for the right to warm your seats even though the facility to do so is already available. This is also found in the switch over to subscription models, such as the rental of various software packages. There’s also the cloud. We don’t own ebooks, TV programmes or music a lot of the time and the companies controlling them can simply withdraw the right to access them on a whim. If you make an app, Google Play, Apple and the Microsoft Store control access to it most of the time and the developers have to pay a subscription when in theory they could spread knowledge of it via other channels, but this is now difficult because of the next development, social media. The domination of the internet by social media is also akin to the peasants belonging to the landed gentry. It’s said that if you aren’t paying for something, it’s you who are being bought and sold, an older example being women in clubs being allowed in for free or given free drinks – this is because the club wants men to pay to get in and dance with and have sex with them. The same kind of situation exists today on Twitter, Facebook and so on. People spend most of their online time on these and streaming sites. Companies are no longer oriented towards making a profit, but make their money through subscription charges, also known as rent. Market dominance is more important than profit. It also means, practically, that money is constantly siphoned away from us to billionaires. Because it made no profit, Amazon paid no tax in Ireland, which would’ve been on profit, and deals have to be made by the producers of items to have the right to sell on Amazon, which is the main marketplace nowadays. This of course means they get their state-sponsored infrastructure, such as roads, for free because we pay for it. The same thing happens with Etsy. All this is why Varoufakis sees us as being in a new feudalism. In short, for Varoufakis there are no more open markets, but money is made instead by renting of closed digital estates. The Web used to be the Wild West but has now undergone enclosure like mediaeval land.
It isn’t just him either. There has also, for quite some time, been a view that we are entering the “New Middle Ages”, also known as Neo-Mediaevalism. This was an idea from the 1970s onward which reached its zenith in the ‘noughties. One distinctive thing about the actual Middle Ages was that it only applied to Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, an area which has also been referred to as Christendom, i.e. the Christian part of the world. It didn’t apply, for example, to the Mayan civilisation, Songhai Empire, Arab or Islamic world and so forth. Unlike that, though, the new Middle Ages applies to the whole human world, which may be important as it means there are no accessible geographical forces or assets outside it rendering it susceptible to change. No spice trade for example. In today’s world, Christendom is replaced by the New World Order, which shouldn’t be confused with the conspiracy theory. Today, the rest of the human world feels much more the influence of the US, for example. There are overlapping authorities as there were in Mediaeval Europe, but in this case they include multinationals, NGOs, those pursuing political ends violently without overt governmental permission, global trade and international organisations. This leads to a situation of various authorities to which one owes fealty, which might manifest itself, for example, in not having one’s employment rights honoured because one’s employer has more money and power than the government of one’s country. Instead of knights, we have military drones and instead of the Pope we have Elon Musk, but the power relations are the same. Instead of the Church and families having the power and money, it’s the likes of Jeff Bezos and social media. The lords own the platforms, such as Twitter, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook and Netflix, the vassals are the content creators (even this blog would count as one if it had more readers, so maybe I don’t want more readers), and the users are the peasants. People also settle back into what they idealise as a simpler place and time, when of course it really wasn’t.
Smartphones have replaced pitchforks and our new coats of arms are made by Nike and Disney, but underneath it all we seem to have gone back to the Middle Ages, which this time encompasses the world. Capitalism has indeed been superceded, but instead of moving forward, it’s going back. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about this and ultimately it probably depends on how flexible we are as a species to change our ways. Olaf Stapledon once said of the fall of Western civilisation that one could no more expect the world population to change by the time of collapse than to expect ants to assume the habits of water beetles if their nest was flooded. I hope he’s wrong.
A Box Of Chocolates 