A Society of Freely Associated Producers

Marx also thinks that in general, and leaving aside many individual exceptions, the ties of class interests (in a society divided into classes) are too strong. Unless we actually cast our lot with the working class, and join in its struggle and suffer its fate, we are not reliable allies of that class. Considerations of right and justice cannot usually be relied upon to move us that much. In Marx’s view, we are normally moved by our more imperative needs, and in a class society these needs are shaped mainly by our class position. Not to recognize this is self-delusion.

To conclude: Marx might have been moved by many reasons for not saying in so many words that capitalism is unjust. But none of the reasons are such as to prevent him from having ideas of justice and sincerely thinking within himself that capitalism is unjust.

§3. Disappearance of Ideological Consciousness

1.I am now going to discuss what, in Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx thinks of as the first stage of communism, and later will take up a few questions about the second stage of full communism next time. I use the designation “a society of freely associated producers” to refer to Marx’s ideal society, a designation he uses often in Capital. How can we briefly describe it?

Perhaps in the following way: a society of freely associated producers has two stages: a socialist stage and a stage of full communism. Each stage answers to the following two-part description, each part of which I shall discuss in some detail.

First, a society of freely associated producers is a society in which ideological consciousness has disappeared. Its members understand their social world and have no illusions about how it works. Moreover, because ideological consciousness has disappeared, they have no delusions about their role in society, nor do they need such delusions.

Second, a society of freely associated producers is a society in which there is neither alienation nor exploitation.

One might question whether the first stage, socialism, satisfies these requirements to a sufficient degree. For our limited aims here, I assume that it does.

2.I begin with the first of these requirements. For Marx ideological consciousness is false consciousness of a certain kind. To have an ideology

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in Marx’s sense is not merely to have a philosophy or a scheme of political principles and values, as the term “ideology” is often used today. Unhappily, the term has been abused and has lost the original, definite sense Marx gave it. For him an ideology was not merely false, but its falsehood serves a definite sociological or psychological role in maintaining society as a social system.

In Marx’s sense, there are two kinds of ideological consciousness: illusions and delusions. As for illusions, they are real in that with fully normal powers of perception and inference we are taken in by the surface appearances of things. Similarly, we are taken in by the surface appearances of institutions and fail to see what is really happening beneath that surface. One’s beliefs are false because one is fooled by the semblances that are indeed deceptive. These cases are analogous to optical illusions.

In Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 1: §4, Marx discusses at length how, by focusing on the relative prices of commodities and fixing on the relation between prices and objects, we fail to see the significance of the fact that commodities are produced by human labor and that prices express a social relation among producers. A clearer and simpler example is what Marx says about how the wage system conceals the ratio of necessary labor to surplus labor, as opposed to the clarity of the feudal system with the serf ’s surplus labor open to view (Capital, Vol. 1, Tucker, p. 365). There is nothing in how wages are paid that alerts workers to the amount paid for necessary and for surplus labor. Workers are probably not aware of the difference in any case.6

It is in part because of these illusions that Marx thinks we need an economic theory—in particular the labor theory of value—to penetrate beneath the misleading and deceptive surface appearances of capitalist institutions. He says: “All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.” Capital, III, Chapter XLVIII: §3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 817.

In the society of freely associated producers the form of appearances and the essence of things in politics and economy do directly coincide. This is because society’s economic activities are carried out in accordance with an economic plan publicly decided upon in accordance with democratic procedures. I will come back to this.

6. See the calculations in Duncan Foley, Understanding Capital: Marx’s Economic Theory

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 46.

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A Society of Freely Associated Producers

3.The other kind of ideological consciousness is delusions. These again are or involve false beliefs; but they may also involve false or irrational values. These are values we would not espouse were we fully aware of why we hold them, or were it not for certain psychological needs that press upon us and subject us to special strains characteristic of those in our social position and role.

As is well known, Marx thought religion was a form of ideological consciousness in this sense. But Marx thought it is quite pointless to criticize religion as Feuerbach and the young Hegelians did, by maintaining that religious alienation is a fixation on an imaginary fulfillment in an imaginary world. Much of Feuerbach’s psychology of religion may be correct, but explaining it to people does not help them to overcome their religion.

The reason Marx thought such criticism pointless is that the psychological needs to which Feuerbach’s account refers depend on existing social conditions. Religion is part of people’s psychological adjustment to their class position and social role. Until social conditions are changed so that people’s true human needs can be effectively satisfied in a society of freely associated producers, religion will persist. In Capital, I (Tucker, 327), Marx says: “The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable [durchsichtig vernunftig] relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.”

This reminds us of the point of Marx’s Thesis XI—the last thesis—on Feuerbach, which says, in its entirety, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” It reminds us also of Hegel’s remark: “Once we look at the world rationally, it will look rationally back.” To this Marx adds, in effect, that we can’t look at the world rationally until we are rational; and we can’t be rational until our social world is rational. Therefore, when conditions allow, we must change our social world so that it is made rational.

4.In Marx’s view, another kind of delusion rests on the needs of the social system and on the needs of the individuals in it if the social system is to work properly. Now the capitalist system involves robbery and theft in that it involves the appropriation of the workers’ surplus product in violation of their equal claim of access to society’s means of production. Yet the capitalist mode of production has the historical role of building up the means of production so that a society of freely associated producers is possible. It is essential to the smooth working of capitalism (when it is serving its his-

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torical role) that this robbery and theft be hidden from view. This is because, seeing both capitalists and workers as decent people, capitalists don’t want to be, or to be seen as robbers, and workers don’t want to be, or to be seen as robbed. This is, as it were, part of Hegel’s List der Vernunft, “the cunning of reason.”

So in its high period, the juridical conception of justice, which Marx sometimes mocks as “the very Eden of the innate rights of man” (Capital, Vol. I, Chapter VI, Tucker, p. 343), enables all economic agents, capitalists and workers alike, to think of their position as just and their income and wealth as deserved. This, along with the deceptive appearances of capitalist institutions, smoothes the operations of the social order.

In a society of freely associated producers, these delusions are no longer needed: the workings of the economy are guided by a publicly known democratic plan and so are open to view, and this without disturbing consequences.

§4. A Society without Alienation

1. The second of the requirements for a society of freely associated producers is that there be no alienation and no exploitation. In the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, in a section entitled “Estranged Labor” (Tucker, pp. 70–81), Marx discusses four aspects of the idea of alienation:

Under the capitalist mode of production the workers are alienated, first, from the product of their labor, from what they produce. It becomes an alien thing: that is, for one thing, it is owned and controlled by others—the capitalists—who may dispose of the product of workers’ labor as they—the capitalists—decide.

But more than this, the surplus labor of the workers builds up the great mass of (real) capital, and hence it becomes the wealth of and in the control of the class whose interests are antagonistic to theirs. The products of labor also appear on the market, and the movement of prices—which are competitively determined—is not understood by the workers (or by anyone else), since there is no public democratically determined plan of production.

Thus the adjustment to market forces of the prices of what the workers produce appears to the workers as controlled by an alien power. This power is independent of them as producers, and it holds them in servitude to the products of their labor.

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Second, the worker is alienated from the productive activity of labor itself. That is, work is external to the workers, as it does not realize their nature. Their work does not exercise or develop their natural powers; nor is it voluntary, but forced, undertaken only as a means for satisfying other needs. In short, work is not meaningful.

2. Third, workers are alienated from their species and from their spe- cies-life (Gattungswesen). So likewise are the capitalists. Now the idea of spe- cies-life is offhand rather obscure. But it is characteristic of German Idealism, and it is important not to trivialize it. We trivialize it when, for example, we say that calling human beings “species beings” means that they are by nature social beings. Or that they have reason and self-con- sciousness, and that they are aware of themselves and other human beings as belonging to one species, each member of which likewise has reason and self-consciousness.

Rather, I think Marx’s idea is much fuller than this. He means something like the following: Human beings are a distinctive natural kind—or species—in the sense that they collectively produce and reproduce the conditions of their social life over time. Yet, along with this their social forms evolve historically and in a certain sequence until eventually a social form develops that is more or less adequate to their nature as rational and active beings who, as it were, create, working with the forces of nature, the conditions of their complete social self-realization. The activity by which this collective self-expression is accomplished is species-activity: that is, it is the cooperative work of many generations and is completed only after a long period of time. In short: it is the work of the species over its history. The species will enter the promised land—full communist society—but not all of its members will. (Recall Rousseau’s idea of the perfectibility of man in the Second Discourse.)

An essential part of this social self-creation of human beings over time is economic activity. To be alienated from species activity is first of all not to comprehend or to understand this process; and second, it is not to participate in this activity in a self-realizing way.

If we ask what it means for all to participate in this way, the answer is provided by the kind of economic scheme that exists in a society of freely associated producers. We get some idea of what this is from what Marx says in Gotha about the first stage of socialism. I shall come back to this.

The fourth aspect of alienation is that we are alienated from other people. Under capitalism, this alienation takes the special form given by the

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