Summary
Along with the myriad forms of property and labor that have existed throughout human history, there existed corresponding political and legal systems, however rudimentary. Most prior analysis, at best, considers the development of political and legal forms in isolation from other elements of the society in question as a kind of intellectual evolution. Marx and Engels, in this section, seek to lay out, in abbreviated form, the trajectory of the development of the modern state and legal code on the basis of the development of the modes of production, cooperation, and exchange.
The sequence of forms of property their analysis uncovers runs thus: tribal property, feudal landed property, corporative movable property, capital invested in manufacture, and, finally, modern capital, which is defined by big industry and universal competition, and which they label “pure private property” (186). In terms of its relationship to the state, the biggest shift in this evolution is that, whereas in the tribal system all property is, fundamentally, state property, with the advent of modern capital private property loses all appearances of a communal institution and becomes more or less free of any influence from the state.
In fact, capital, specifically the owners of capital, come to exert a determining influence on the state, rather than the other way around. The modern institutions of taxation and national debt make the modern state dependent on the commercial credit and economic production of the property-owning class, the bourgeoisie. Moreover, just as property becomes independent of the community, the state, as a result, develops into a distinct, separate entity that exists “beside and outside civil society,” that is, the general—cultural, intellectual, etc.—communal public sphere of society. In its true form, the modern state is simply the form of organization through which the bourgeoisie, as a class, protect and advance their collective interests. According to Marx and Engels, the most “the most perfect example of the modern State is North America,” while in Germany, in contrast, the “estates” (i.e., classes defined by certain legal privileges, as opposed to their relative status as owners of property) remain a political force, and thus the state has not yet become fully independent (187).
In its role as the external regulator of “civil society,” the modern state mediates, that is, participates in the formation of, all common institutions in modern society, for example the legal system, and thus gives them a political form. The consequence of the apparent “political form” of public institutions is that those institutions, from public education to the legal and political system, appear to be determined by the “general will,” that is, abstract “free will” divorced from its real bases in material conditions.
Thus the “political form” of the modern institution of civil law, which exists to protect private property, serves to present the dominant property relations as simply an expression of the “general will,” rather than the interests of a particular class. Though modern civil law is ultimately based on the Roman system, the lack of further development of the productive forces of that society meant that its form of civil law never acquired its modern form and social function. As the flip-side of its assertion of property relations as an expression of the general will of all of society, modern civil law presents also the illusion that private property is governed entirely by the individual, private will of its owner, by virtue of their formal “right” to use or dispose of it as they see fit.
Marx and Engels, however, point out that it is precisely modern property relations that make it possible for a “man to have a legal title to a thing without actually having the thing. I may, for example, legally “own” a factory, but if I don’t have the capital to hire workers, buy raw materials and machinery, and so on, I do not, in fact, own a factory in any meaningful sense.
At this point in Marx and Engels’s analysis, four pages of the manuscript are missing, and when it resumes they have taken up the subject of “natural” vs “civilized” instruments of production and forms of property. Here they elaborate in more detail the distinct elements of modern production and modern private property that give rise to the socio-political developments described above. So long as natural instruments or means of production (for example tillable land, water, and so on) are predominant, people are dependent on, or dominated by, nature; with modern industrial instruments of production, such as machinery, tools, factories, or communication infrastructure, this same subservient relationship exists with something that is a product of labor.
The first, “natural” domination corresponds to, for example, patriarchal families, tribes, or the paternalistic relationship between serf and lord, journeyman and master. Some kind of natural bond, whether familial, tribal, or otherwise personal, holds them together. What distinguishes modern production, a domination based on labor, is that the two parties involved are necessarily independent of one another, and only an exchange relationship binds them to one another. The power of the capitalist over the worker consists, exclusively, in the fact that the capitalist has capital and the worker does not.
This capital is, however, nothing but accumulated labor. An industrial machine is, for example, understood by Marx and Engels as simply the labor power and technical knowledge of human labor that has been transformed into an object, i.e., objectified. This object, and modern instruments of production generally, then confront people as something outside themselves, something that, if they are a worker, they do not control, but instead controls them. Thus shut off from the productive forces that are the collective product of humanity, labor is fragmented, circumscribed, partial; it constrains the development of individuals rather than facilitating it.
Those who perform this labor, the proletariat, must then abolish private property, that is, the ownership and control of the means of production by private individuals, in order to realize what Marx and Engels call their “self-activity,” their ability to control and shape their own lives. This, they argue, can only be accomplished through a revolution. But this revolution will differ from all preceding revolutions in that it will entail not just the replacement of the rule of one class by another (a change in the way labor is distributed among classes in society), but the total abolition of both labor and class rule themselves.
Analysis
At least in part due to the missing manuscript pages, it can, at first, be unclear how the two pieces of this section fit together. But the core thread that runs throughout is an extended analysis of how the relationships between individuals, both as individuals and as members of classes, are embedded in and determined by the various material elements of the world around them. These material elements range from institutions such as the legal system to the concrete processes through which people acquire the things they need to live, and the nature of the labor they perform.
Marx and Engels take great pains to show how interactions or relationships that may appear to be isolated acts of individual will are in fact determined by, or dependent on, larger social forces and contexts. Much of this section, especially the portion dealing with civil law and the legal system, is best understood as an implicit critique of “social contract” theorists, most particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his concept of the “general will.” This is the notion that in more-or-less democratic societies, decisions are made essentially through “adding up” so to speak the “will” or desires of all the various individuals within society, which produces, as a kind of sum, the “general will.” John Locke, an influential early modern English philosopher who saw the “contract” as the fundamental social bond that held society together, is also an implicit target of Marx’s critique.
Marx and Engels’s point is not only that power, or the ability to exercise one’s “will,” is unevenly distributed in society, but, further, that a social system is not best understood as a collection of isolated individuals, and that so-called “free will” is in fact severely constrained by context. Part of their argument involves developing a distinction between what we can call “formal” or “legal” freedom and material or substantive freedom. In developing this distinction, they take aim at both the individualistic conception of ownership and that of “freedom of contract.” Though I may be a farmer in possession of everything I need to produce grain, if there happens to be an oversupply of grain on the world market such that I can’t sell it at the price required to make a profit, functionally I can’t produce grain. If I can’t farm, in what sense do I really “have” a farm?
Likewise with freedom of contract, a concept that in Marx’s time, and our own as well, economists used to describe the principle governing a huge swath of intercourse between people. A worker agreeing to work for a capitalist at a given wage is, on this view, a contractual arrangement entered into by two freely consenting individuals who happen to find this exchange mutually beneficial. Marx and Engels, however, would point out that without a job, the worker would quickly find themselves without any way to feed or house themselves or their family, while the capitalist can easily find another worker. Similarly, the worker is compelled to accept whatever wage is offered, or whatever is the “going rate,” since if he or she doesn’t the capitalist can easily find someone else who will. But the capitalist is also constrained by circumstance, since if they offer a wage substantially higher than that of their competitors, the resulting higher operating costs will quickly put them out of business.
Clearly this relationship differs from what Marx describes as “direct” or “natural” domination, such as exists under feudalism. The worker does not “belong” to any particular capitalist, but they are, structurally, in a position where they have no choice but to sell themself to some particular capitalist. Thus the power the capitalist wields over the worker is in this sense abstract and impersonal; it operates through the medium of a third party, money, or capital. And, in the last analysis, it is this third party, capital, that dominates both worker and capitalist, who is, after all, still bound tightly by the laws of the market and competition.
The last few pages of this section, leading up to Marx and Engels’s outlining of the need for, and of what is needed for, global proletarian revolution, are rather difficult, as many of their core concepts are operating on both a concrete, economic, and abstract-philosophical level, because their goal is to collapse the distinction between these two levels of thought. Thus the “productive forces” they refer to are both in some sense identical to the literal “means” or “instruments” of production, but also are meant in the broad sense of the collective accumulated knowledge and capabilities of humanity as a whole. And when they speak of the “appropriation” of these forces, by either the proletariat via revolution or by the bourgeoisie in the form of private property, their meaning cannot be reduced simply to the concept of “ownership” or the appropriation of the products or wealth created by those forces.
This is made clear in the statement that “the appropriation of these forces [by the proletariat] is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production” (191). Here, in fact, we see precisely what Marx and Engels believe distinguishes the proletarian revolution they describe from all previous revolutions. Instead of simply taking “ownership,” as a class, of the instruments of industrial production, such that the “mode of activity,” labor, would be redistributed while remaining fundamentally unchanged, this revolution entails people themselves, as individuals, re-incorporating their own capacities, which have taken on the alienated form of capital, the means of production, etc.
Rather than coming to own part or all of the “forces of production,” which would leave property intact, what Marx and Engels are describing is a revolution in which the collective knowledge and capabilities of humanity are incorporated into, become part of, each individual person. This entails the disappearance of the isolated, abstract individual as we often conceive of it. In its place, Marx and Engels imagine the emergence of a society of social individuals, whose self-activity is precisely as variegated, expansive, and powerful as the collective activity of humanity as a whole. It is a utopian vision, surely, but one they see as grounded in the material conditions created by big industry: massive productive powers, universal intercourse (brought about by the world market), and the consolidation of all the various divisions and disputes in the world into one fundamental antagonism: that of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Thus Marx and Engels provide their own trajectory of the history of “Man,” not as an abstract concept developed in thought, but a real, material being acted out in and produced by the real life-activity of the millions of actually existing men and women.
