Marx’s Teleological Class Analysis and His Materialism

Section 1

^{Against Rigid Marxist Economic Determinism and ‘Classlessness’ as a Never-Ending Humane Project}

Marx conceived of a dichotomous conception of class as the bourgeoisie and the working class, and sometimes of the petit bourgeoisie in an attempt to forge a science of society in relation to capitalism and resultant communism as a resolution of contradiction in capitalist social relations. Borrowed from and re-synthesising Hegel’s dialectical historicism, Marx held that a communist end of history is the absolute material reality that can eventuate. Class tension and conflicts of interest based on class consciousness, for Marx, was teleologically derived, to actively change the world, as the metanarrative meaning of human existence, to make it more humane, as an immutable science of political dialectical progression, writing truth to power, as an impressive and influential striving for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, he omitted public sector employees who are not subjected to surplus value extraction of their labour, and the differentials in remuneration of workers who have acquired more specialised skills in the workforce and labour market. Furthermore, for self-employed people, whilst they turn a profit, it may be humane to conceive that they are a form of wage-labourers, de facto paying themselves a wage on a return for their labour, also carrying the risk of bankruptcy in failing to sufficiently reinvest capital and capture a marketshare in competition with big business, cartels and monopolies with vast resource and labour exploitation.

In socialist organising, we should not idolise Marx. Instead, we should embrace a number of socialist and social science thinkers, and broaden our conception of class and the contradictions of capitalism.

Whilst Marx’s dialectical materialism has a real explanatory power and utility in understanding society, we need to embrace many thinkers and acknowledge the need for new theorists and theories to understand and conceptualise the post-modern society with more nuance, as well as what classes there may be in a socialist society, with the view to continually elicit more substantive equal opportunity for all social agents. This is an ongoing revolution of and in libertarian socialism.

What holds true and is in contradiction with Marx’s economic determinism, which elects the proletariat as the only revolutionary force within capitalist society, is that the achievement of sophisticated socialist means of production is in every person’s broader and holistic self-interest.

The moralisation of classlessness is an ongoing and never-ending social justice project indeed not finished with the end of capitalism and achievement of socialism. This project prioritises and elicits the ongoing equalisation of need, ability and opportunity. Individual mastery is a condition of collective mastery!

Section 2

^{The Individual and Class Tendencies}

Instead of electing the members of the industrial proletariat as the only genuine revolutionary force, we could posit class tendencies, not as an iron law of ‘class consciousness’, with the individual as the indivisible social unit, and as supreme and sacrosanct. Many petit-bourgeois people have tendencies toward socialist revolution, particularly if they are developed with political consciousness. This is particularly so with sole traders, who are not directly extracting surplus value from a worker or workers. Capitalist competition tends to have a counterrevolutionary force in the coercive impetus to compete to for profits and income, without economic egalitarianism; capitalism is a zero-sum game meaning that positive externalities from economic activity are diminished, which results in socio-political alienation.

Section 3

^{In Defense of Marx’s Class Analysis in Capitalism}

The strength of a Marxist analysis of class is positioning a collective proletariat affinity for one another as a group and collective since they share the same relationship to the means of production – i.e. they sell their labour in return for a wage in the job market. This Marxist class affinity as revolutioanry power may usurp, at times, class power and solidarity based on income earned, wherein we should acknowledge that some workers earn much more than some small business owners, for example. Whatever the class analysis humanely fits a certain situation or better represents a social reality at hand, it will take a mass movement to achieve democratic socialism, whether by reform or revolution. I am personally for reform: I am happy to discuss over coffee.

Section 4

^{Commenting On Marx’s Materialism}

Was Marx a monist materialist? I tend to be a more in–form-ed dualist¹, with the immaterial will of power primacy eliciting a correlate change in materiality or to put it another way: the material form which encases and encloses the immaterial will of power which — the will — has primacy, and is causative. Turning Marx on his head, and returning Hegel back standing on his feet: the primacy and causative nature of immateriality is congruent with Hegel’s idealist² conception of dialectical movement towards an absolute freedom in a struggle for mutual recognition by agents. The idealist conception of immaterial will may be corroborated by the free will of agents causing changes to material forms, but I do not develop argumentation here thereon; instead, I have another blog entry with some theory and speculation on this matter, linked in here below as a footnote³.

^Conclusion

Indeed, in agreement with Marx, workers’ control is the highest form human society can take. From there, endless improvements into social justice and social sophistication can occur and be realised. For example, once the direct democracy at all spatial levels — local, state, federal/national, regional, and international, with rank-and-file workers’ councils — as authentic democratic socialism, then we may move to a more resource based economy, not needing to rely on money, but keeping and developing a legal framework to regulate behaviour. This is to curtail particularly what might be the pledge to absolutist evil by individuals and/or groups, in a somewhat of a Manichean perspective, even if this — humane legal institutions — is just necessarily precautionary.

1. Willoughby, H, 22 June 2021, ‘The material and immaterial duality: a re-enchanting partialist resurrection of Descartes along with the rise of the attaching, detachable and re-attachable souls’, https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2021/06/22/the-material-and-immaterial-duality-a-re-enchanting-partialist-resurrection-of-descartes-along-with-the-rise-of-the-attaching-detachable-and-re-attachable-souls/ ↩︎
2. Idealism elevates mind/consciousness, ideas and concepts as fundamental to reality, https://www.google.com/search?q=was+Hegel+considered+to+be+an+idealist%3F&rlz=1C1GIGM_enAU511AU514&oq=was+Hegel+considered+to+be+an+idealist%3F&aqs=chrome..69i57.6839j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
   In an idealist synthesis, Hegel used the term spirit or the German term “Geist”, to designate the phenomenon of mind or consciousness, https://www.google.com/search?q=was+Hegel+considered+to+be+an+idealist%3F&rlz=1C1GIGM_enAU511AU514&oq=was+Hegel+considered+to+be+an+idealist%3F&aqs=chrome..69i57.6839j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 ↩︎
3. Willoughby, H, 6 February 2021, ‘Psychosis & Mind, Determinism & Free Will, and Parallel Universes in the Multiverse?’, https://henrywilloughbyssocialjusticeblog.com/2021/02/06/psychosis-and-mind-determinism-and-free-will-and-parallel-universes-in-the-multiverse/ ↩︎