JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 128

REVIEW ESSAYS

RECOVERING MARX FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Sean Creaven

Marx. By Andrew Collier. Oneworld: Oxford, 2004. 170 pp. 1-85168-346-1

paperback £9.99.

Andrew Collier has written an outstanding introduction to Marx’s thought.

His book offers lucid, thought-provoking and concise commentaries on the
chief themes of Marx’s work: anthropological (humanism and alienated
labour); historical and sociological (modes of production, the class struggle
and capitalism); political (scientific socialism, the state, and revolutionary
democracy); and philosophical (dialectics and materialism). The book kicks
off with a brief account of Marx’s life and character, then moves on to
discuss his ideas about politics, economics and socio-historical science, before
concluding with a discussion of both the paradoxes and contemporary
applications of his thought. As always, Collier’s writing style is lively, engag-
ing, and above all accessible, devoid of academic jargon. He succeeds
admirably in the difficult task of communicating ideas with clarity but with-
out loss of analytical rigour.
Collier’s treatment is no mere exposition of Marx’s thought as part and
parcel of the ‘history of ideas’ tradition. Rather, his fundamental purpose
is to demonstrate the capacity of Marx’s ideas to make sense of the con-
temporary world. This gives the book an urgency and relevance that makes
it an utterly compelling read. Collier’s discussion of Marx’s contribution
to social theory and political philosophy is (of course) sympathetic, but this
is accomplished without a hint of dogmatism. His endorsement of the essen-
tials of Marx’s socio-historical science and political and ethical commit-
ments does not encourage him to shy away from elucidating what he sees
as the shortcomings of Marx’s thought. At the same time, he strips away
all the misconceptions about Marx’s ideas that have become institution-
alised in the western academy in the context of Cold War politics and ide-
ology, and which in the post-Cold War era stubbornly refuse to lie down

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 JCR 4.1, 128-166

Also available online – www.brill.nl
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 129

  129

and die. Collier has little trouble demonstrating that many of the ‘para-
doxes’ of Marx’s thought dissolve on closer inspection.
These strengths place this book amongst the first rank of introductory
texts on Marx. In the analysis that follows I discuss in a little more detail
what I find the most interesting and insightful aspects of Collier’s discus-
sion, and also draw attention to those elements of his interpretation and
argument I find more problematic. I focus on five main themes: §1 the state,
social democracy and socialism; §2 humanism and alienation; §3 historical
materialism; §4 capitalism; and §5 the contemporary relevance of Marx.

1. The State, Social Democracy and Socialism

1.1. The state, social democracy and socialist revolution
Perhaps the most important strength of Collier’s book is that it draws atten-
tion to the fact that Marx’s commitment to socialism and the cause of
proletarian revolution was animated above all else by his commitment to
social democracy. ‘Marx’s commitment was as part of the movement for
democracy, which grew throughout that century and bore fruit in the twen-
tieth century in widespread parliamentary democracy, and occasional exper-
iments in more radical forms of democracy.’ (p. 2) Collier points out that
Marx was a radical democrat before he became a socialist and proletar-
ian revolutionist. This commitment to democracy was all the more remark-
able in that it was unique amongst great German philosophers with whom
Marx can be compared (Liebniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Husserl and Heidegger). Marx’s commitment to socialism stemmed logi-
cally from his commitment to democracy, because he recognised that ‘polit-
ical emancipation was not enough without economic emancipation’. (p. 3)
Social democracy, if it was to mean anything, must go beyond mere formal
democracy and embrace substantive democracy.
But Marx’s commitment to revolutionary socialism was also entirely con-
sistent with his social-democratic politics. Collier rightly argues that for
most of Marx’s life (an era in which citizenship rights were severely cur-
tailed in every European country), it was quite rational for him to draw
the conclusion that social democracy could only be achieved through the
agency of socialist revolution—the forcible overthrow of the bourgeois state
by the labour movement. Marx was committed to revolutionary politics
for practical rather than doctrinal reasons. He recognised that, in most of
the European countries of his day, there existed powerful hierarchical state
apparatuses, unelected civil and military bureaucracies, which would attempt
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 130

130  

to destroy any fledgling social democracy at birth by all available means.

‘To be a democrat, in Marx’s time, was to be a revolutionary.’ (p. 2)
But Collier notes that, in his later years, Marx toyed with the idea that
certain countries—such as Britain and the USA—could achieve social
democracy (socialism) without having to resort to revolutionary violence.
This was because in these countries, according to Marx, there existed ‘pure’
bourgeois states, that is, non-interventionist ‘nightwatchmen’ states, lacking
powerful civil and military bureaucracies, which could be used against the
workers’ movement. By contrast, on the continent (with the possible excep-
tion of Holland), where the minimalist non-bureaucratic state did not exist,
Marx reckoned that the workers would have to resort to revolutionary vio-
lence to achieve their social-democratic goals. This in itself illustrates that
Marx was a social democrat above and beyond being a champion of rev-
olutionary violence.1
Collier rightly suggests that, whatever the merits of this analysis in Marx’s
day, it has obvious limitations today. The problem is, as Lenin noted in
1917, there are no states today without ‘militaristic cliques’ and unelected
full-time bureaucracies. Indeed, Britain and America today possess the most
militarised state apparatuses in the western world, the thuggery of which
is daily played out on our TV screens in Iraq. Furthermore, with the
advantage of hindsight, we can see that Marx’s suggestion that there may
be a parliamentary road to socialism in the Britain and America (and per-
haps Holland) of his own day was probably misguided. After all, Britain
was then consolidating and indeed expanding the largest territorial empire
since that of Alexander the Great. Meanwhile, the US was beginning its
own imperial adventures in its own sphere of influence.
Marx’s optimism was doubtless informed not simply by his over-esti-
mation of the power of universal suffrage to bring capitalism to account
but also by his belief that the growth of the free market would mean an
inexorable decline in the power of the nation state and of the role of mil-

1
However, it should be noted (in a way that Collier does not) that Marx also thought
that revolutionary violence could itself have positive virtues, not least because waging
class war prepared the downtrodden for the task of making a new world themselves,
rather than relying on people they have elected to do it for them. As Marx himself put
it: ‘the revolution is necessary [. . .] not only because the ruling class cannot be over-
thrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revo-
lution succeed in ridding itself of the muck of ages and become fitted to found society
anew’. (K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1965, p. 53).
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 131

  131

itary conflicts between states in world affairs. As we shall see, there is a

sense in which Collier appears to share Marx’s view that the development
of global capitalism is undercutting the autonomy and competence of the
nation state. However, Collier sees Marx as erring inasmuch as he sees
this process as unfolding within his own lifetime, whereas in fact we have
only begun to experience the working out of this tendency over the past
30 or so years. This is actually rather contentious (more on it later).
Nonetheless, Collier is right to point out that any attempt today by the
labour movement to introduce social democracy through peaceful parlia-
mentary means alone will simply not suffice. ‘No one listening to what
some leading British Conservatives have said about Pinochet’s coup can
doubt that they would be in the forefront of a similar coup if a socialist
(as distinct from a Labour) government was elected in Britain.’ (p. 113)
Marx’s initial instincts have been proven to be correct. Now, as always, a
commitment to social democracy entails a commitment to socialist revolution.
But what kind of a social democrat or socialist was Marx? Collier draws
out very well the influence on Marx of Rousseau’s political philosophy.
Rousseau is all for popular sovereignty—the subordination of the state to
society. But, for Rousseau, there is a tension between popular sovereignty
and centralised government. Governments will always strive to usurp sov-
ereignty (the right to legislate) from the people if the opportunity presents
itself. So there is always a danger that the state will make itself superor-
dinate rather than subordinate to society. Rousseau recommends institu-
tionalised measures that would safeguard popular sovereignty from the
encroachments of central government. As Collier remarks, his argument is
that ‘whatever can be done by the whole people should be—for example,
a people’s militia should replace standing armies’—and that all specialised
government officials should be elected and should act as mere functionar-
ies of the popular will. But Rousseau also recommends a ‘minimal state’,
in the sense of a minimal centralised apparatus of government, in contrast
to the classical liberal conception of the minimal state as minimal legisla-
tion. (p. 104)
For Marx, as for Rousseau, ‘Freedom [. . .] consists in converting the
state from an organ superimposed on society to one completely subordi-
nate to it.’2 In his writings on the experience of the Paris Commune (The
Civil War in France), Marx develops and expands on Rousseau’s idea of

2
K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works [SW ], vol. 2, Moscow: Progress, 1973, p. 25.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 132

132  

‘democracy against government’, and of the virtue of the ‘minimal subor-

dinate state’. Marx commends the Paris Commune as ‘the political form
at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of
labour’.3 For him, the manifold democratic virtues of the Commune included:4
– its ‘suppression of the standing army [. . .] and the substitution for it of
the armed people’;
– its selection of municipal councillors by universal suffrage (who were
‘responsible and revocable at short terms’);
– the placing of a range of other public officials (police chiefs, judges, mag-
istrates, etc.) under the direct authority of the elected commune;
– the placing of all elected public officials on average ‘workingmen’s wages.
The significance of these measures, for Marx, was that they undermined
the separation of the state from control by the popular will. The division
between legislature and executive, characteristic of bourgeois states, was
destroyed. By stripping away the permanent unelected civil and military
bureaucracy of government, and by making all elected officials subject to
immediate recall, the Commune made ‘cheap government’ a reality and
rendered the state no longer ‘a unity independent of, and superior to, the
nation itself ’.5
The key difference between Marx and Rousseau, of course, was that
Marx thought that this process of making the state subordinate to society
marked the beginning of the end of state power itself. The moment the
state is converted into fully representative government in all its aspects it
ceases to be state in the ‘proper sense of the word’. This is why, as Collier
points out, Marx refers to the Paris Commune as ‘a revolution against the
state itself ’, as ‘break[ing] the modern state power’.6 This perspective is, of
course, informed by Marx’s understanding of the state as a structure of
class domination. As Marx puts it: ‘Political power, properly so called, is
merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another’.7 So, for
Marx, once the state power is stripped of its essential function of class
oppression, it ceases to be a state.

3
K. Marx, The Civil War in France [CWF ], Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975,
p. 72.
4
Marx, CWF, pp. 67-70.
5
Marx, CWF, p. 69.
6
K. Marx, The First International and After [FIA], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974,
p. 106 (cited in Collier, Marx, p. 106).
7
K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works [CW ], vol. 6, London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1976, p. 505 (cited in Collier, Marx, p. 103).
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 133

  133

This is the meaning of Marx’s (and Engels’s) argument that the devel-
opment of socialism will bring about a ‘withering away’ of the state.8 Of
course, as Collier points out, representative and participatory democracy
will not ‘wither away’; on the contrary, it is their massive expansion that
gives rise to the demise of the state. (p. 110) Obviously, organised gov-
ernment remains, and this will doubtless involve a measure of centralised
administration, albeit under the direction of elected representatives of the
community. But Marx also believes that a lot of legislative and executive
functions of government can be devolved to local and regional levels (e.g.
boroughs and workplace councils, and today we might add professional
and consumer associations), and that many aspects of self-government can
take the form of direct participatory democracy (as is the case with the
replacement of the standing army with a workers’ militia).
But at what point in the development of social democracy, according
to Marx, does the state cease to be a state? Or, to pose the question a
little differently, when does the state become ‘fully democratic government’,
an administration not of people by a separate group of people but of things
by the whole of the people? Collier elegantly steers us through this par-
ticular controversy. We can, he observes, discern two stages of the demo-
cratic socialist revolution. The first stage involves the revolutionary act by
which the proletariat seizes control of the state and transforms it at once
into an instrument for expropriating the capitalist class of the means of
production. Marx suggests in The Communist Manifesto that this prior stage
might involve initially a centralisation and concentration of economic
resources in the hands of this new ‘workers’ state’ (the idea of state own-
ership of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, perhaps under an
elected parliament). At this stage of the democratic revolution, the state is
obviously no longer a bourgeois state, but it is nonetheless still a state,
because it remains a structure of class domination—the domination of those
people (and their hangers-on) who have been stripped of their private own-
ership or control of the means of production.
This state (the political organisation of the working class as a force for
subduing the capitalists) is necessary in order to prevent a counter-revolution
aiming to restore capitalism. Its democratic credentials consist of the fact
that it is a class of the overwhelming majority on behalf of the overwhelming

8
K. Marx, The Revolutions of 1848 [R], Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973, p. 108;
F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow: Progress, 1969, p. 333 (cited in Collier, Marx, pp.
107-8).
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 134

134  

majority (rather than of a class of an exploiting minority of the popula-

tion), and it is the first stage of the abolition of state power itself. If, for
Marx, this workers’ state involves, at first, the centralisation of economic
power (the initial task of expropriating the expropriators), it does not involve
a corresponding centralisation of political power. For, as we have seen, in
his account of the Paris Commune, Marx recommends a thoroughgoing
democratisation of all public functions. As Collier rightly observes, for Marx,
the workers’ state (as the state of the majority class) entails the extension
of democracy ‘at the expense of the hierarchic state apparatus’. (p. 109)
The second stage of the democratic revolution unfolds organically as,
with the defeat of counter-revolutionary attempts to restore capitalism, the
working class no longer has to organise itself politically as a state to pro-
tect the gains of socialism. In the second (‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ stage
of socialism), state coercion is no longer needed to preserve the class rule
of the proletariat, because with the distribution of allocative resources on
the basis of need, and with a thoroughgoing democratisation of authori-
sation, classes themselves have disappeared, to be replaced simply by the
collective or co-operative worker. Presumably, with the final defeat of cap-
italism, and with the supersession of classes, centralised control of the ‘com-
manding heights’ of the economy is no longer needed either. This seems
a plausible interpretation of Marx’s view (i.e. bottom-up associationist indus-
trial democracy instead of the mere election of a central committee to
administer and co-ordinate national production on behalf of society), because,
without it, there is always the danger that those who administer these vast
concentrations of economic resources will attempt to usurp popular sover-
eignty, paving the way for a new period of class rule, and hence the restora-
tion of the state itself. As Collier points out, this second stage of socialism
is the stage where ‘freely associated labour’ reaches its fruition, which ‘sug-
gests that democracy is to be inherent in real, ongoing functional organi-
sations, rather than in general elections every five years—a “democracy all
through” model, not a “democracy at the top” model’. (p. 112)9

9
In contrasting Marx’s ‘scientific socialism with ‘utopian socialism’, Collier rightly
commends Marx’s approach to politics for basing socialism on the developmental ten-
dencies and contradictions of capitalism, rather than utopian visions ‘from nowhere’.
This, he suggests, makes Marx the greatest of political philosophers. However, Collier
concludes from this that Marx’s reluctance to speculate about the ways a developed
socialist society might be organised follows necessarily from his scientific approach to
politics. This is going too far. For it is legitimate to offer ‘blueprints’, if these are fea-
sible given the state of development of the productive forces left over from capitalism
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 135

  135

So Collier makes the telling point that, for Marx, the workers’ state is,
above all else a transitional state, in the sense that at the moment of its
constitution, it is already in the process of self-cancellation. The workers’
state does not go on expanding its control over society until the moment
of its transcendence is nigh (Stalin’s position), since this makes a mockery
of the whole idea that the state withers away. Collier says that, ‘oddly
enough’, it was Lenin who grasped this better than anyone else after Marx.
For Lenin ‘makes it clear that the transitional state can begin to wither
away from day one, since it only has to suppress a small minority, and
must be so constituted that it inevitably withers away as long as it exists’.
(p. 110) I am not sure why Collier finds it ‘odd’ that Lenin follows Marx
on this issue, especially since he admits that Lenin’s failure ‘to deliver a
state that was inherently withering away’ was ‘mainly because of causes
outside his control’. (p. 110) Perhaps it is because Collier feels that Lenin,
unlike Marx, was not terribly interested in socialist democracy. But, in fact,
Lenin was passionately committed to a particular model of democracy—
decentralised multi-party soviet democracy, not the ‘top-down’ hyper-cen-
tralised bureaucratic command economy and polity championed by Stalin
under the slogan of ‘socialism in one country’.
Is the idea of the state ‘withering away’ in a socialist society a realistic
possibility? Collier argues:
It seems to me quite plausible that there should be a state in which more
and more public functions were performed by autonomous associations rather
than central government, in which less and less coercion was necessary, in
which the state apparatus was getting smaller and smaller. I doubt that this
could lead to an end product in which there was no state at all; but it might
approach it asymptotically. (p. 111)

Now this is deeply question-begging. I agree with Collier that the mean-
ing of Marx’s socialism is thoroughgoing social democracy, and that this
is perfectly feasible. But, if Marx is correct in his understanding of the
state as a mechanism of class domination, how is it possible for a socialist

(and freed from the constraints of capitalist relations of production), precisely because
these would not be plucked out of thin air. Moreover, offering ‘blueprints’ does not
commit post-revolutionary generations to sticking to them, or discourage them making
their own democratic choices. At the same time, they have the obvious political advan-
tage of offering the oppressed and exploited a concrete and practical vision of how
socialism would improve their lives and overcome the pathologies of capitalism whilst
preserving its progressive aspects.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 136

136  

society to preserve the state? Either Collier is identifying the mere appa-
ratus of central government with state in a developed socialist society (which
would mean, for him, that the state is more than a product of inter- and
intra-class antagonisms). Or he is denying that a classless society, a soci-
ety not founded on class domination, is possible, which strikes at the very
heart of the Marxian political project (and incidentally cuts against the
grain of Collier’s book). I happen to believe that a stateless society is pos-
sible, although I have no doubt that a modern society cannot do without
a measure of democratic political centralisation (at the local, national,
regional and international levels). However, despite these ambiguities, what
cannot be doubted is that Collier has powerfully re-stated the social-demo-
cratic credentials of Marx himself. Contrary to academic and popular
stereotypes, ‘if Marx is to be given his due in the twenty-first century, it
is as the philosopher of economic democracy, not as the philosopher of
state control’. (p. 110)

1.2. Marx’s ‘blind spot’ on nationalism

I have said that Collier draws attention to what he sees as the problem-
atic aspects of Marx’s theory and politics. The chief problem of Marx’s
account of bourgeois society, according to Collier, is his ‘massive under-
estimation of the power of nationalism’:
This affects his social theory, not just his personal attitudes. When he analysed
the capitalist economy he was quite clear about the fact that to understand
the behaviour of the capitalist firm you had to recognise two struggles in
which it was necessarily engaged: with its workers, to keep their hours long
and their wages low; and with other capitalist firms, for a larger share of the
market. But when he analyses the state, he considers only its relations with
its own people. Yet he should have known as a Hegelian scholar, or indeed
from observation of current events, that a state is also defined by its relations
with other states, and huge portions of the state apparatus exist because of
these relations of diplomacy, war, trade, and so on. (p. 113)

Collier is quite right to identify this as a ‘blind spot’ in the Marxism of

Marx himself, although more recent work on the terrain of the Marxist
theory of imperialism, starting with the contributions of Lenin and Bukharin,
have, I think, shown that nationalism can be conceptualised within the
framework of Marxist concepts.10 Collier is also quite right to draw atten-

10
See especially J. Rees, ed., Marxism and the New Imperialism, London: Bookmarks,
1996.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 137

  137

tion to what he describes as the ‘virulent power of nationalism’ (p. 115)

to cut across and counteract class consciousness, with disastrous historical
consequences. I believe that Collier is probably right as well to identify
Marx’s neglect of nationalism, particularly as an obstacle to socialism, as
resulting from his internationalism—his positive faith in the capacity of the
workers of all countries to see through the ideology of nationalism—and
from his belief that the economic globalisation of capitalism (brilliantly pre-
dicted in The Communist Manifesto) would itself dissolve national divisions
and antagonisms.11
However, Collier wants to discover a deeper reason for Marx’s ‘blind
spot’ on nationalism, which seems to me rather more contentious. It is
necessary to quote him at length:
I think that it is partly due to the fact that, despite his internationalism, he
was affiliated to a political and philosophical tradition which was itself nation-
alist, namely the tradition that starts with Enlightenment political philosophers
like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Rousseau and finds its climax in the French
Revolution. In economic terms this movement is capitalist as against feudal,
and in political terms individualist as against organicist; in ideological terms,
it is nationalist, as against [. . .] Christian [. . .] The assumption of Spinoza
and Rousseau is that, if everyone gives their allegiance to the state, all the
religions within the state can tolerate one another. But this misses the point
that no religious believer can give his or her first allegiance to the state. So,
instead of a prescription for universal tolerance, it is a prescription for per-
secution of all religions. On this rock the French Revolution crashed: a rev-
olution that had the consensus of the Third Estate behind it became a revolution
resisted by the Catholic half of the people, and consequently a revolution that
had to live by terror [. . .] In the Enlightenment and the French Revolution,
secularism and nationalism were a unitary phenomenon, negative and posi-
tive sides of the same thing. In inheriting the negative side of this only, Marx
cannot see the positive side because he is at once too outside it to share it
and too inside it to observe it. Hence he stitches together a mismatched gar-
ment in his conception of bourgeois society: capitalist in economics, individ-
ualist in political thought, religious in ideology. He does not see that in
bourgeois society at least, not religion but nationalism is the opium of the
people, the dominant ideology that enables the bourgeoisie to keep the work-
ers loyal. (Today, perhaps even this is becoming outdated: consumerism is the
new opium of the people.) (pp. 115-16)

11
However, Collier’s argument is weakened somewhat by a persistent conflation of
the concepts of ‘nationalism’ and the ‘nation-state’, this leading him to assume that the
alleged decline of the nation-state entails a decline of nationalism. But, of course, it is
quite possible that a weakening of national state power could give rise to a renewal of
‘defensive’ nationalisms.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 138

138  

Now I have a number of problems with this analysis. First, it exaggerates

the unity of Enlightenment thought, as based on the binary opposition of
nationalism and secularism. The essence of Enlightenment was simply the
idea that society ought to be organised on more ‘rational’ (i.e. scientific
and democratic) lines, which meant overthrowing the authority of tyrants,
whether landowners, monarchs or bishops.12 The origins of the movement
lay in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, which generated
a new confidence amongst intellectuals that modern civilisation was uniquely
rational, therefore represented a sharp ‘break’ with the past, and would (if
freed from the grip of tradition) eclipse the accomplishments of the ancients—
in knowledge, ethics, aesthetics and institutions.13 But by no means were
all the Enlightenment philosophers secularists or anti-Christian or anti-reli-
gion. In fact, many of the Enlightenment philosophers retained a religious
sentiment and many activists of revolutionary France were in fact lower-
ranking Catholic clergy (e.g. the Gallicans).14 For the more radical Enlight-
enment philosophers (Helvetius and D’Holbach), anti-clericalism was motivated
not so much by nationalism as by their belief that official religious ideol-
ogy (especially in its doctrinal Catholic form) was a bulwark of traditional
feudal institutions and inherited privileges, and by their endorsement of a
rationalism based on the revolution in science.
Second, to argue that the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies were dynastic and nationalistic rather than religious, though true in
substance, misses the point that the plasticity of religion, plus its messian-
ism, is what allows it to be used as an ideological weapon on all sides of
national, class and other struggles. Collier’s analysis lets Christianity off the
hook rather too easily. The essence of religion is that faith and revelation
is privileged over theoretically and empirically supported knowledge. This
is one good reason for wanting to see its influence in politics undermined.
This is why Marx and radical Enlightenment thinkers opposed clericalism.
Third, I very much doubt that the liberal-democratic project of the
Enlightenment necessarily entails universal religious persecution. This was
not the rock that shipwrecked the French Revolution. The Enlightenment

12
P. McGarr, ‘The great French Revolution’ [GFR], in J. Rees, ed., Marxism and the
Great French Revolution, London: Bookmarks, 1989, p. 19.
13
H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1983; J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge MA: MIT,
1987.
14
McGarr, GFR, p. 18.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 139

  139

philosophers were supporters of the idea of the ‘social contract’, whereby

national governments are legitimate only insofar as they safeguard the civil
liberties of the citizenry, including their right to practice a religion. Of
course, the French revolutionaries were nationalists, inasmuch as they
wanted a unitary national community (the Republic) that was emancipated
from ‘local particularism, superstition and identification with Rome’.15 But
they were not national chauvinists. Nationalism was Republicanism: the war
against the external enemies of the revolution was clearly articulated as
being fought against the champions of absolutism and aristocratic power,
not foreign nationals.
The persecution of the Catholic authorities in revolutionary France was
not the result of the failure of the clergy to place loyalty to the state above
loyalty to God. Rather, it was because the bishops (mobilised by the pope)
rejected the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and then reneged on a
prior agreement to allow all clergy to be funded by the state (this being
necessary to resolve a fiscal crisis of the Church brought about by the
confiscation of its feudal estates and the abolition of tithes levied on the
peasantry).16 The upper echelons of the Catholic clergy were an integral
part of the feudal ruling class. This made them implacable opponents of
the revolution. Their opposition to state funding of the clergy was moti-
vated by the wish to prevent lower-ranking clergy identifying with the state.
It was part and parcel of a systematic campaign to undermine the revo-
lution and restore feudalism and landlordism. This resistance drove the
revolutionary government to impose the new constitution and to insist on
the clergy taking an oath of loyalty to the new republic, in order to weed
out the progressive priests from the counter-revolutionaries.17
Unsurprisingly, virtually all the bishops along with half the priests refused
to take the oath, which did not require rejection of the faith. The more
liberal and progressive elements of the clergy (by and large the lower-rank-
ing priests) remained with the revolution. Indeed, the Jacobins’ support for
a new ‘natural’ civic religion in place of the alternative poles of thor-
oughgoing de-Christianisation and Catholicism was an attempt to preserve
a popular base amongst religious progressives without strengthening the
influence of counter-revolutionary bishops and priests amongst the peasantry.18

15
Ibidem, p. 68.
16
Ibidem, pp. 38-9.
17
Ibidem, p. 39.
18
Ibidem, p. 69.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 140

140  

The subsequent Jacobin Terror was not the consequence of religious intol-
erance and persecution uniting Catholics against the regime, but ‘arose out
of the fact that a minority of the population [the ‘middling sort’ of the
lower bourgeoisie] [. . .] was imposing measures to defend the Republic in
a situation of internal and external war’.19 Marx himself was well aware
of this. This led him to commend the Jacobin leaders as ‘the real repre-
sentatives of revolutionary power, i.e. of the class which alone was truly
revolutionary’.20 This also led Marx to endorse Jacobin methods during
the 1848 revolution, on the grounds that ‘there is only one means by which
the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes
of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated—and that
is by revolutionary terror ’.21
Fourth, there is no evidence that Marx did not endorse nationalism as
the positive pole of secularism because he was German and he would have
had to have been French to do so. This does not even seem plausible.
Marx’s internationalism was informed by his socialism, which was based
on the proletariat, not the nation state. His underestimation of the grip of
nationalism was the product of his view that modes of production are ‘in
the final analysis’ decisive in shaping systemic outcomes, which in this case
was emboldened by his understanding that the contradictions of real life
structured by class relations would undercut the nationalist and racist divi-
sions that obstructed working class unity across national lines. Marx did
accept that nationalism was a force that obstructed proletarian unity—that
was why he was an internationalist. But he undoubtedly believed that the
intensifying contradictions of capitalism would force the workers to tran-
scend nationalism as ideology. There is, I think, as case for saying that
Marx’s underestimation of the power of nationalism was partly shaped by
his own ‘outsider’ status in relation to the world of national borders. As
a German Jew, Marx shared with his people the ambiguous status of ‘uni-
versal strangerhood’22 (of being nationless in a world of nation states). This
placed him outside the grip of national ideology.
Finally, it is over-simplifying the ideological terrain of contemporary cap-
italism somewhat to suggest that nationalism (and indeed consumerism)
have supplanted religion as the opium of the people. Consider the so called
‘war on terror’. This is often legitimised with appeal to religious rather

19
Ibid., p. 52.
20
Marx and Engels, CW, vol. 5, p. 178.
21
Marx and Engels, CW, vol. 7, p. 506.
22
Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity, 1989.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 141

  141

than nationalist symbols. This is because nationalism is ill equipped to do

the job. The point of nationalism is that the nation state has the undis-
puted right to administer (or maladminister) its own territory, so appeals
to a higher authority and value system other than nationalism are needed
to justify imperial adventures. So we are told by the Christian fundamen-
talists in the White House that the ‘war on terror’ is a ‘clash of civilisations’,
a war to uphold tolerant western Christian ‘values’ against ‘fundamental-
ist’ Islamist values (which are seen as dogmatic, anti-democratic, intoler-
ant, and so on), a fight between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Perhaps these zealots
believe their own propaganda. Certainly, many of their supporters do, and
of course many of their opponents do, only in reverse. Of course, the real
foundations of these struggles are non-religious, but it is still the case that
religious symbolism (being what it is) can mobilise masses of people behind
imperial projects or resistance to imperialism. As for consumerism as ide-
ology, this is unlikely to achieve anything like either religion or national-
ism as a mobilising or binding force. Materialism works only so long as
the system delivers the goods. The problem is that the system is no longer
delivering the goods (or is delivering at too high a cost), and for growing
numbers of people in the West, never mind the rest of the world.

2. Humanism and Alienation

A second important strength of Collier’s book is that he elegantly debunks
two myths about Marx: ‘(1) that he does not take account of human nature;
and (2) that he believed that there is no such thing as human nature’.
(p. 26) He points out that Marx denies ‘human nature’ in a certain sense,
inasmuch as he wishes to reject the bourgeois universalisation of ‘calcula-
tive man’ throughout the human historical record. For Marx, because pre-
vailing social and cultural conditions shape the personality characteristics
of human beings, it is obvious that people will differ in their ‘human nature’
in different societies or historical periods. Therefore, in a capitalist society
organised around free-market competition, people have to be selfish and
egoistic (up to a point) in order to ‘get by’ or ‘succeed’. However, in a
different kind of society, such as a hunter-gatherer community organised
around collective decision making and egalitarian food sharing, here peo-
ple have to be co-operative and altruistic in order to ‘get by’ or ‘succeed’—
indeed, if they are not, they are quickly cut down to size.23

23
R. Lee, The !Kung San, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 244.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 142

142  

Nonetheless, Marx is also affirming the existence of a common human

nature in another, deeper sense. It is, he believes, the nature of human
beings (irrespective of time or place) to be able to transform their social
and material circumstances by means of collaborative labour on the phys-
ical environment in order to meet and expand subsistence and to possess
a range of other ‘species’ capacities and forms of behaviour. He himself
mentions consciousness, abstraction, self-identity, language and behavioural
and attitudinal flexibility, but we might add other things, such as culture,
the imperative to attribute meanings to ourselves and our world, morality,
joke-telling, the giving and receiving of gifts, and so on, all of which have
a universal existence and salience in human affairs.24
So, as Collier rightly suggests, ‘to discover how people will behave, one
must look at two things: human nature in general, and the way a given
society will affect human nature. For of course the nature of anything
includes not only the properties it always manifests, but its tendency to
manifest this property in these circumstances and that in those.’ (pp. 26-
7) This distinction between, if you like, ‘human nature’ and the ‘nature of
humanity’, is an essential component of Marx’s thought, because it allows
him to undercut the ‘socialism is contrary to human nature’ argument,
without falling into the disastrous error of regarding people as the simple
products of the prevailing society and culture in which they are situated.
The theory has the scientific virtue of being able to account for the com-
plex combinatory of human behavioural and cultural diversity and same-
ness across the historical record, and of being able to specify what human
beings must possess in common if society and history are to be possible at
all.25 Moreover, Marx’s humanism supports a kind of moral realism in pol-
itics. As I have pointed out elsewhere, unless one can specify human needs
and capacities and interests, irreducible to the imprint of society, which
are capable of being oppressed or frustrated by social forces or conditions,
one denies oneself the intellectual resources to articulate a critical social
theory.26 As Collier remarks: ‘A proletarian is a proletarian because of his
or her position in society, but if proletarians did not also have individual
needs and capacities not assigned them by society, they would never find
it necessary to rebel against capitalist society.’ (p. 124)

24
S. Creaven, Marxism and Realism [MR], London and New York: Routledge, 2000,
pp. 71-89.
25
Creaven, MR, pp. 75-7, 80-1, 84-5.
26
Creaven, MR, p. 89.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 143

  143

Collier also establishes those philosophical themes introduced by Marx

in his early ‘humanist’ writings that stayed with him throughout his life:
Marx arrived [in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ] at several
of the conclusions that he was to hold throughout his life—that capitalism
exploits the workers; that it inverts the relation of producer to product, mak-
ing the product dominate the producer; that the only solution to these prob-
lems is the common ownership of the means of labour. (p. 30)

Nonetheless, despite these virtues, I think there are a number of problems

with Collier’s interpretation of Marx’s humanism. First, he downplays the
continued salience of Marx’s concepts of ‘alienation’, ‘the human essence’
and ‘species-being’ in his mature work, even asserting that these ‘disap-
pear’. (p. 30) Collier believes that there has been something of a ‘depar-
ture’ or ‘break’ separating ‘mature’ from ‘immature’ Marx. But this is far
too sweeping a generalisation. It is true that Marx does not refer explic-
itly (and less often) to these terms in his later works. Nonetheless, the con-
cepts of ‘alienation’ and ‘estrangement’ have a far from marginal empirical
presence in the Grundrisse, which constituted the rough notebooks for Capital,
and they (along with the concept of humanity’s ‘species-being’ as self-con-
scious labour) are also to be found in Capital.27 In fact, many commenta-
tors have noted that the Grundrisse is one of Marx’s more Hegelian works.28
Marx never abandoned the idea that the essence of human nature is co-
operative labour. It was in responding to textual ‘anomalies’ of this kind
that Althusser (the most famous champion of the ‘epistemological break’
position) concluded that the ‘real’ Marx did not emerge until after he had
published the first volume of Capital !29
Of course, Collier is right to claim that Marx accomplishes theoretical
and methodological tasks in his later work which he does not address in
his earlier work. He is right to say that Marx’s detailed theoretical and
historical analysis of the capitalist mode of production ‘brings about a great
gain in specificity or exactness’.30 But Marx’s claim in the Manuscripts that

27
For example: Marx, Capital [C ], vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, pp. 283-4.
See I. Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation [MTA] (London: Merlin, 1970), pp. 217-53,
for specification of the ‘humanist’ and ‘Hegelian’ passages in ‘mature’ Marx.
28
For example, S. Clegg, ‘The remains of Althusser’ [RA], International Socialism, 2
(90), 1991, p. 67.
29
Clegg, RA, pp. 66-7.
30
Collier, Marx, p. 31.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 144

144  

alienation is basically self-estrangement (loss of control of the object and

activity of labour) is not, in essentials, different from his later analysis of
how ‘dead labour’ confronts ‘living labour’ under capitalism as an exter-
nal coercive power. So, instead of Marx abandoning his youthful human-
ism in his later works, it is more plausible to see him as contextualising
and complementing it with sociological analysis, specifying the socio-his-
torical conditions or relations that have generated alienated labour, and
which allow the possibility of its transcendence.31 Notably, even in the
Manuscripts, Marx discusses—not ‘alienation’ or ‘humankind’ as such—but
alienated labour, as humanity’s self-estrangement, which he sees as having
a specific historical basis in generalised commodity production. Here Marx
is clear that ‘although private property appears to be the basis and cause
of alienated labour, it is rather a consequence of the latter’.32 In other
words, capitalist property is an accumulated store of dead labour that is
reproduced and expanded only in active exchange with living labour under
conditions where labour-capacity has become a commodity. Nowhere does
Marx actually repudiate his earlier analysis of alienated labour.
A second difficulty, I think, with Collier’s critique of Marx’s youthful
humanism is that he sees it as problematic that Marx should conceptu-
alise alienation in terms of humanity’s self-estrangement from its general or
universal species-characteristics in being forced to perform certain specific
social roles (e.g. capitalist or wage-worker or religious believer).
Marx’s early humanism contrasts our humanity with our specific descriptions
(for example, as a Frenchman, a carpenter, a husband, and so on), and sees
the humanity itself as the important thing—indeed suggests that we are alien-
ated in these roles. But someone might say: but my religion, family, state, etc.
is my social existence, that is where I am fulfilled. (pp. 31-2)

Marx, I think, would respond as follows. Of course, individuals may be

fulfilled in certain of their social roles (e.g. parenthood). But this does not
mean that humans have no general species capacities or needs (e.g. for
nutritious food, unalienated work, loving relationships, the development of
their individual abilities or talents), which cannot be blocked by certain
kinds of social roles and relationships.

31
Meszaros, MTA; E. Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, 3rd edn., London: Pluto,
1971.
32
K. Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 [EPM], London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1959, p. 72.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 145

  145

Finally, I think that Collier is on shaky ground where he argues that

Marx’s humanist philosophy commits him only to ‘shallow’ environmen-
talism by virtue of its anthropocentrism. Collier acknowledges that Marx
does demonstrate a concern for ecological issues in his youthful writings,
but nonetheless reads Marx’s commitments simply as motivated by his
affirmation of rational human interests. Collier’s evidence for this reading
is rather thin: Marx’s reference to nature as humanity’s ‘inorganic body’.
‘Certainly Marx means the idea of nature as our inorganic body to entail
care for nature rather than wilful or irresponsible use of it, but certainly
also, insofar as Marx is an environmentalist [. . .] he thinks we should look
after the environment because it is our environment rather than because
it has intrinsic worth.’ (p. 32) Now, if it were true that Marx managed
even a ‘shallow ecology’, this would be an amazing achievement, given the
historical period in which he lived, where the effects of the Industrial
Revolution remained localised, and the long-term ecological destructiveness
of capitalism was not yet apparent. That is one way of looking at it. But
another is to suggest that Marx is simply drawing our attention to the
inextricable dependence of humanity on nature, the fact that social laws are
based on natural laws.
However, I might also add that a ‘shallow’ conception of nature as
requiring care because we depend on it (‘inorganic body’ in this sense)
might offer a degree of environmental protection that a conception of it
as ‘intrinsically valuable’ may not, irrespective of whether or not nature
should be valued for its own sake. After all, it is easier to chop down a
tree than cut off one’s own arm. But there is a deeper issue. What does
it mean to say something is ‘intrinsically’ valuable anyway? Well, it means
judging something in accordance with human standards and interests. To
say something is valuable because it is ‘beautiful’ means conferring human
value-judgements of aesthetic worth onto something that knows nothing of
them; and to say something should be looked after because it has ‘natural
rights’ means conferring human conceptions of freedom and justice onto
something that knows nothing of such things. So we are back with ‘anthro-
pocentrism’. Now this kind of ethical anthropocentrism is actually a good
thing, but it is still anthropocentrism. And it is unavoidable. It is in the
nature of human beings to humanise nature, that is, confer moral and aes-
thetic meanings on the various bits and pieces of matter that make up the
physical world.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 146

146  

3. Historical Materialism
Collier’s treatment of Marx’s science of history has many important strengths.
He starts by debunking the myth that historical materialism specifies five
inevitable stages of socio-economic development. The stages—primitive
communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism—were regarded by Marx
as historical stages that had characterised European development, not stages
that all peoples were fated to tread, irrespective of their local circumstances.
Marx, despite his personal optimism about the future, did not believe that
socialism was inevitable anywhere in the world. This was despite the fact
that Marx did believe that history was determined.
Collier rightly points out that the concepts of historical determinism and
historical inevitability are not synonymous and do not logically presuppose
each other. ‘All sciences treat their subject-matters as governed by causal
laws, but none, with the possible exception of cosmology, talk of inevitable
outcomes.’ (p. 143) Marx’s historical materialism postulates the range of
developmental outcomes that are open for society, given the structural
configuration of the various modes of production. The development of feu-
dalism, for example, both enables and generates a structural impulse towards
capitalism (because it allows the development of new technologies that can
only be exploited under capitalism), but is incompatible with socialism. At
the most, Collier suggests, Marx thought that the destruction of capitalism
was inevitable, based on his analysis of the internal contradictions specific
to this mode of production.
I am not entirely convinced that Collier is right here. There is some
textual evidence that Marx did not believe even in this ‘special case’ of
historical inevitability. For example, he suggests that ‘permanent [capital-
ist] crises do not exist’,33 and that ‘the crises are always momentary and
forcible solutions to the existing contradictions’.34 In other words, for Marx,
capitalist renewal is always possible via the restructuring mechanisms of
economic crises, so long as workers are prepared to bear the brunt of
unemployment, under-employment, worsening wages and conditions, and
so on. However, if Marx did believe in the inevitability of capitalism’s
demise, his view would have been entirely defensible. For, with the advan-
tage of hindsight, we can see that if capitalism is not removed within the
next one hundred or so years, it will inevitably destroy all life on this

33
K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value [TSV ], Moscow: Progress, 1968, p. 497.
34
K. Marx, Capital [C ], vol. 3, Moscow: Progress, 1971, p. 249.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 147

  147

planet. Nonetheless, there is no evidence that Marx himself had in mind

an ecological disaster when he spoke of the ‘common ruination’ of the
contending classes.
Collier argues that Marx’s theory of history views social development
and transformation as resulting from the interface of two distinct types of
causality in social systems: horizontal causality (the cumulative growth of the
means of labour or productive forces) and vertical causality (the class strug-
gle for control of the means of labour constituted by the relations of classes
to these means). ‘Horizontally, our relations with the means of labour alter
in the course of history as the means of labour themselves alter.’ (p. 36)
So, horizontal causality explains the fact that history ‘is development [. . .]
in which each stage presupposes the last and makes possible the next, not
just “one damned thing after another”’. (pp. 36-7) Vertical causality in a
sense is based upon horizontal causality, inasmuch as class relations cor-
respond ‘to stages in the development of the means of labour’. (p. 37) In
fact, as Collier points out, for Marx the nature of class relations (relations
to the means of labour) is explained by the different means of labour in
each mode of production. Feudal class relations, for example, are based
on land and certain unsophisticated agricultural tools, and cannot accom-
modate factories and machine technology.
This establishes historical materialism as a theory of both social evolution
(horizontal development) and periodic revolutionary structural change (vertical
transformation). Because vertical transformations of the relations of pro-
duction are based upon horizontal developments of the forces of produc-
tion (means of labour), this ensures that social change tends to have a
progressive dialectical structure. Workers have greater economic freedom
from want under capitalism, due to technological progress, than they did
under feudalism. ‘The superior technology itself means that there is potentially
more free time left over after society has produced its necessities.’ (p. 40)
But Marx also detects historical progress in the political and legal free-
doms of workers with changes in the vertical structure of society. Capitalism
is an advance on feudalism, because it is based on free rather than unfree
labour; feudalism is an advance on slavery, because serfs have rights to
land whereas slaves have no rights at all.
Collier goes on to offer concise and informed summaries of the key
Marxian concepts—forces of production, relations of production, class, class
struggle, base and superstructure—and to unravel the relationships between
them. I focus on his interpretation of Marx’s couplets of forces/relations
of production and base/superstructure.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 148

148  

3.1. Forces and relations of production

Marx’s forces of production, Collier tells us, ‘comprise the means of labour
(land, tools and raw materials) and the workers themselves with their var-
ious skills appropriate to specific means of labour’. (p. 41) The relations
of production, on the other hand, ‘are relations between these various
forces of production, and between them and their exploiters—relations, for
instance, between workers and means of labour (a relation of non-owner-
ship under capitalism), between capitalist and means of labour (a relation
of ownership), and between worker and capitalist (a relation of sale of
labour power)’. (p. 42) Collier points out that, in empirical reality, forces
and relations of production presuppose each other, but nonetheless they
are analytically separable, and indeed they must be separated in thought
for historical explanation to be possible. As we have seen, Collier argues
that, for Marx, ‘the nature of the forces of production in a given society
explains the relations of production in that society’. (p. 42)
Collier seems to have in mind something resembling Gerry Cohen’s
interpretation that productive forces select those production relations that
promote their further technological development. ‘The point is [. . .] when
technology in the means of labour reached a certain point, it became nec-
essary to have capitalist relations of production if the technology was to
be used. In a certain sense, society became capitalist in order that it could
build factories’ (p. 42). This is a theory of teleological causality in social
systems. ‘It is because capitalism has the consequence that technology pro-
gresses fast, that capitalism prevails.’ (p. 42) But, if Collier is right, Marx
is also committed at root to a kind of technological determinism: produc-
tive forces (‘technology in the means of labour’) selects those relations of
production that promote technological success. Collier’s Marx affirms the
explanatory primacy of the technical over the social. As Collier puts it, ‘fac-
tories make feudal relations impossible, and so give you capitalism’. (p. 42)
Now Collier’s interpretation of the constitution and interface of forces
and relations of production has the merit of simplicity and elegance, and
certainly it is consistent with some (but by no means all) of Marx’s own
pronouncements. Nonetheless I have some misgivings about whether his
interpretation is entirely in keeping with what Marx has in mind. Part of
the problem is that the logic of Marx’s theory (which also has some tex-
tual support) suggests that the relationship between forces and relations of
production is one of structural interdependence or co-determination.35 The significance

35
Creaven, MR, pp. 217-31.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 149

  149

of the forces of production, for Marx, is that they determine what is mate-
rially possible in any historical epoch (in terms of enabling the existence
and persistence of certain kinds of social and cultural structures, practices
or forms of consciousness and ruling out the existence or persistence of
others). Productive forces also exert a degree of directional guidance on
agents to establish the social relations appropriate to further their devel-
opment. The significance of the relations of production, by contrast, is that
they facilitate and stimulate development of the forces of production, yet act
as a brake or barrier on this development beyond a certain point. Relations
of production constrain and enable productive forces in the sense that they
shape both the tempo of economic development and define the scope for this
development within a particular economic organisation of society. As Marx
puts it: ‘From forms of development of the productive forces these social
relations turn into their fetters.’36 This conception of the interface between
forces and relations of production, in which each provides constraints and
impulses for the other, cuts against any simple interpretation of the pri-
macy of the ‘technical’ over the ‘social’, least of all one which regards the
former as ‘selecting’ the latter.
This brings me on to a second difficulty of Collier’s interpretation. For
Collier’s Marx, ‘the forces of production are the economic resources of
society, including “human resources” [. . .] [whereas] [. . .] relations of pro-
duction are relations between these various forces of production’. (p. 42)
This seems to me to lose some of the subtlety of Marx’s own analytical
distinctions and to offer a restrictive conception of both relations and forces
of production. I think there is a case for holding that, according to Marx,
the distinction between forces and relations is not a simple analytical con-
trast between material resources of various kinds and social relations of
various kinds. For Marx, I believe, the forces of production have material,
social and ideational dimensions to them. The forces of production are:
– materially, the instruments and objects of human labour (land, minerals,
tools, technology and workers);
– socially, the socio-technical organisation of the labour process (how work-
ers interact with nature and co-operate with each other in producing
use-vales);37

36
K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [CCPE], London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1970, p. 21.
37
Hence Marx’s claim that the concept of productive forces refer us to ‘the methods
of labour and therefore its social productivity’ (Marx, C, vol. 3, p. 791). This suggests
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 150

150  

– ideationally, the various forms of knowledge (practical and scientific) that

are developed under the auspices of improving the productivity and tech-
nological means of labour.38
So the relationships of the immediate labour process (between workers in
a technical division of labour and between workers and various means of
production) sometimes seem to be defined by Marx as part of the forces
rather than relations of production. Marx also appears to identify forces
of production as those modes of labour or wealth-creation associated with
rising social classes which have not as yet made themselves the ‘ruling’
force in the relations of production. For example, in The Communist Manifesto,
Marx suggests that the development of trade, mechanisation, scientific
knowledge, navigation and communication techniques, the workshop with
its role specialisation (pioneered by the commercial bourgeoisie), began to
corrode the old relations of production of feudalism. For him, this illus-
trates how, at a given level, the forces of production begin to pressurise
and challenge or ‘rebel against’ the property relations of a given mode of
production.
By contrast, for Marx, the relations of production are specific kinds of
social relationships involved in the production and distribution of wealth,
rather than every type of social relationship involved in the labour process.
Relations of production are the dominant economic (or politico-economic)
structures of the society in which they are embedded. They are, primar-
ily, relationships of control of the process of production and of ownership
of its means and products. Of course, where these relations give rise to
asymmetrical distributions of the means and output of the labour process,
they take the form of class relationships, that is, relations of economic
exploitation by ‘owners’ or ‘controllers’ of production of the direct producers.
The social aspect of the forces, of course, is intimately connected to the
relations of production, inasmuch as the organisation of human labour (the
relationships between workers and between workers and the instruments
of labour) is shaped by the distribution of property in the wider society.
But the forces of production (in their social aspect) are nonetheless ana-

that the ‘forces’ entail ‘a particular technical organisation of work by means of which
labour-power is combined with means of production [. . .] and a corresponding mode
of social co-operation by [. . .] which this union between labour-power and nature is
accomplished’. (Creaven, MR, p. 217).
38
Creaven, MR, pp. 217-18. Hence Marx’s claim that ‘general social knowledge has
become a direct force of production’ (Marx, C, vol. 1, p. 287).
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 151

  151

lytically distinct from the relations of production. Now accepting this

definition of the forces of production allows us to make sense of Marx’s
famous assertion that structural transformations of modes of production are
energised by the contradiction between forces and relations of production.39
If, on the other hand, we accept Collier’s definition of forces and relations
of production as referring simply to the contrast between ‘material’ and
‘social’ aspects of production, we lose (I think) the sense of this account of
revolutionary change.
Let me explain. Collier rightly says that forces and relations of pro-
duction are indissolubly bound together, so that developments in one are
always ‘bound up’ with developments in the other. ‘For of course facto-
ries did not first appear and then give rise to capitalists: capitalists had the
factories built.’ (p. 42) The point is, argues Collier, that capitalists built
the factories in order to exploit and promote certain technological inno-
vations in the means of labour. Now I agree with all of this. But, unfor-
tunately, this account is less than coherent if we stick to a definition of
forces as material existents—raw materials, workers, tools, technology—
rather than necessarily entailing social relationships. By way of illustration,
I would like to pose a question: If productive forces are the material aspects
of production, and if it is their development ‘up to a certain point’ that
gives rise to new social relations of production, then how does the ‘tech-
nology reach a certain point’, and who develops it up to that point? The
problem is having the technology of the factory and machine tools presup-
pose a class that is organising and promoting this kind of technology, that
is, capitalist forms of economic organisation. That is why we must, if we
want to preserve Marx’s thesis of productive forces ‘rebelling against’ pro-
duction relations, reserve the concept of relations of production for the
dominant relations of ownership and control that ‘rule’ a society, not all the
social relations ‘bound up’ in the labour process.

3.2. Base and superstructure

Collier mounts a staunch defence of Marx’s base-superstructure model of
social systems. He has no difficulty in demonstrating that base-superstruc-
ture is no mere ‘metaphor’, but is a scientifically rigorous concept with
real explanatory power. Collier claims that Marx’s claim that the mode of
production is the ‘foundation’ of society, upon which politics and ideology

39
Marx, CCPE, pp. 31-2.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 152

152  

are ‘based’, is no statement of economic monocausality. On the contrary,

he points out, Marx’s theory of socialist revolution would be incoherent if
he did not believe that the ‘higher levels’ (of politics and ideology) did not
have crucial effects on the ‘base’ (economic) level. So, for Collier, the ‘base-
superstructure model does not say that history is affected more by eco-
nomics than by politics or ideology, but that the way that politics and
ideology have their effects is explained by economic considerations (for
instance, politics and ideology are always class politics and ideology, and
class is defined economically)’. (p. 47)
For example, Marx admits that Catholicism in the Middle Ages and
politics in Athens and Rome, ‘played the chief part’,40 but he goes on to
say that the domination of religion and politics in these societies is explained
by the mode of production—the way people gained their livelihood.
Perhaps the fact that exploitation under feudalism is transparent, in that the
serf knows exactly how many days he or she works for the lord of the manor
and how many days on his or her own plot of land, means that the relations
of production do not seem self-justifying, as those under capitalism do to those
who believe their wages are payment for their labour. So an ideology sepa-
rate from the production process itself is required to reconcile the peasants
with their lot. Or, more simply, there is the fact that, by the end of the
Middle Ages, the church owned about a third of the land. (p. 44)

Thus, in societies based on unfree labour—i.e. where exploitation is secured

by means of extra-economic coercion—religious ideologies become impor-
tant as forces for social integration. By contrast, in societies based on free
labour, they are less important, because here the fetishism of the wage-
form generates the illusion of a ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’. This
is an ingenious argument. But, despite appearances to the contrary, it
appears in danger of inadvertently slipping into economic reductionism.
After all, even where class exploitation is legitimised by religion, it is still
class exploitation; and the class struggle here is still fundamentally a response
to class exploitation, even where the participants see themselves as engaged
in religious conflicts. Are politics and ideology always, ultimately, class pol-
itics and ideology? Engels suggests that superstructural spheres may give
rise to their own special interests and activities and may also interact with
each other to generate certain forms of consciousness and ideology.41 So

40
Marx, C, vol. 1, p. 175 (cited in Collier, Marx, p. 44).
41
F. Engels, Letters on Historical Materialism [LHM ], Progress: Moscow, 1972, p. 26;
F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Progress, 1975, pp. 398-9.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 153

  153

perhaps base-superstructure commits us to the lesser position that the mode

of production ‘makes possible’ superstructures and both constrains and facil-
itates (rather than determines) certain developments of and within super-
structures. Equally, perhaps base-superstructure commits us to the more
modest position that it is those specific forms of politics and ideology that
articulate class interests and struggles that have primacy in determining
long-term social developments and transformations (rather than that all
forms of politics and ideology express class conflicts that have these same
effects).
Collier argues that ‘the different levels have effects on the process of
history that are in no fixed proportion, but differ from society to society’.
(p. 44) But if the different levels have no ‘fixed proportion’ in their effects
on socio-cultural outcomes, how can we sustain a materialist theory of
history as opposed to a materialist theory of society? In fact, there is a case
for seeing the historical interface between base and superstructure as one
of ‘reciprocal but unequal interaction’, whereby the base has a long-run
tendency to assert its movement as ‘necessary’, even against resistance from
superstructures.42 This is because where relations of production and atten-
dant superstructures that fix or stabilise them begin to fetter forces of pro-
duction, class agents are pressurised to reform or overturn them, in order
to resolve the ensuing structural crises of society (deepening poverty, inequal-
ity, economic decline, military weakness, etc.). On the one hand, where
agents succeed in easing or resolving the crisis of society by means of
reform or revolution, the ‘dominance’ of the economic level is positively
manifested. On the other hand, where agents fail to ease or resolve the
structural crisis by these means, the ‘dominance’ of the economic level is
manifested negatively.43 In this latter scenario, we have Marx’s ‘common
ruination of the contending classes’.44

4. Capitalism
Collier offers a clear and precise guide to the key concepts that inform
Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production—his distinction between
use-value and exchange-value, the labour theory of value, his distinction

42
Engels, LHM, pp. 16, 26. For a defence of this interpretation see Creaven, MR,
pp. 65-8.
43
Creaven, MR, pp. 66-7.
44
Marx and Engels, CW, vol. 6, p. 483.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 154

154  

between labour and labour-power, and the theory of surplus-value or

exploitation that is based upon it. Collier points out that Marx’s low rep-
utation amongst modern economists (in sharp contrast to his high reputa-
tion as a philosopher, social theorist and political thinker) has little to do
with the weakness of his ideas. On the contrary, it is largely due to the
fact Marx is engaged on an entirely different enterprise to that of mod-
ern economists, which they simply do not understand. Marx’s economic
analysis is designed to reveal the innermost structure, dynamics and con-
tradictions of bourgeois society, whereas the task of contemporary econo-
mists is simply to predict the behaviour of markets with resort to supply
and demand curves.
Unusually, for a text of this kind, having introduced the theoretical com-
ponents of Marx’s analysis in Capital, Collier goes on to address its and
social and historical dimensions in some detail. Thus, he sketches out Marx’s
description of the brutality of factory conditions in England in the first half
of the nineteenth century, the resistance of capitalists to the shortening of
the working day, the development of the Factory Acts, the origins of the
system in ‘primitive accumulation’ (the enclosures, laws against vagrancy,
the slave trade and colonialism, and so on). This effectively contextualises
Marx’s theoretical concepts, and gives a lively sense of the powerful moral
sentiments that animated his political and philosophical commitments.
Collier reminds us that this aspect of Marx’s analysis has the virtue of
demonstrating that capitalism is not a ‘natural’ system (as its neo-liberal
ideologists claim), but depends upon massive prior acts of violent robbery
and fraud. As such, Marx’s account undermines the ‘genetic fallacy’ of
contemporary philosophers, such as Robert Novick, who argue that ‘cap-
italism is the consequence of a series of just transactions, and is therefore
itself just’. (p. 101) Collier also rightly observes that viewing nineteenth
century English capitalism through Marx’s eyes reminds us of where we
would still be today in the absence of a history of class struggle from below
to alleviate the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation (the gains of which
have not filtered beyond the most developed countries and which have
been eroded in the advanced West in recent decades).
However—one small note of critique—Collier does not explore Marx’s
theory of capitalist crisis, which is obviously a major omission. Moreover,
in an otherwise excellent treatment, one problem with Collier’s account of
Marx’s theory of capitalism is his denial that the labour theory of value
entails radical or socialist conclusions. It is, says Collier, ‘a bland theory
without political entailments’. (p. 81) Collier’s reason for holding this judge-
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 155

  155

ment is twofold. First, that labour is not the source of all wealth, but as
Marx himself said, nature is as much the source of use-values,45 so there-
fore it does not follow that all wealth should belong to the workers. Second,
that the labour theory of value ‘was not invented by Marx, but was com-
mon ground with such economists as David Ricardo and Adam Smith,
who were strong advocates of capitalism’. (p. 76)
Now I find this demonstration of the ‘blandness’ of the labour theory
of value rather unsatisfactory, for two main reasons. First, admitting that
nature is also the source of use-values hardly counts as a denial that, for
these to be useful, they have to be procured and cultivated by human
labour. That was certainly Smith’s view: ‘The real price of everything,
what it really costs the men who want to acquire it, is the tool and trou-
ble of acquiring it [. . .] It is not by gold or silver, but by labour, that all
the wealth of the world was originally purchased.’46 The source of wealth
is, then, according to Marx, natural resources and the productive work
that transforms them into use-values (whether goods or services). But this
provides no support whatsoever for the idea that non-workers (landown-
ers, capitalists and managers) are entitled to a cut of the economic sur-
plus. By the same token, it is at least consistent with the idea that the
collective worker and future generations of workers have full moral and
political entitlements to it. If the means of labour owned by the capital-
ists are produced by labour, and if the money-capital by which they have
acquired these means has labour at its source, this indicates that the cap-
italists are parasitic on production.
Second, Smith and Ricardo, witnessing the birth and early development
of capitalism, were concerned with furthering its success. Since bourgeois
society was not yet fully consolidated, and because the bourgeoisie had
practical interests in transforming society, this necessitated a genuinely
scientific attempt to uncover the objective workings of the new profit sys-
tem.47 The labour theory of value was the outcome of this intellectual
process. But Smith from the beginning began to compromise with his own
theory, perhaps because he recognised that it led to anti-capitalist conclusions.
So he introduced the idea that capital added its own value (‘revenue’) to

45
K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume [SWOV ], London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1968, p. 319.
46
Smith cited in C. Harman, The Economics of the Madhouse: Capitalism and the Market
Today [EM ], London: Bookmarks, 1996, p. 20.
47
C. Harman, ‘Base and superstructure’, International Socialism, 2 (32), 1986, p. 30.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 156

156  

labour, thus justifying profit-making. Smith ended up seeing the ‘natural’

price of a commodity, not as determined by the labour embodied in its
production, but as determined by the ‘natural’ rates of its components of
wages, profit and rent. Ricardo, on the other hand, refused to water down
the labour theory of value. For him, the value of a good was set by the
‘quantity of labour required for its production’.48 This allowed him to recog-
nise the fundamental incompatibility of interests between capitalists and
labourers, since higher profits meant lower wages and vice versa. Of course,
against Smith, Marx would point out that capital is no independent rev-
enue source, but is in fact previously materialised (‘dead’) labour, which is
then used to suck more value from living labour. This is the only logical
conclusion to draw from any consistent labour theory of value. In any
case, bourgeois economists after Ricardo ditched the theory, in favour of
vague concepts of ‘abstinence’ and ‘marginal utility’ to explain profits.49
This was because they lacked Ricardo’s ‘scientific ruthlessness’ to look their
own system square in the face, and were concerned more with apologet-
ics than authentic knowledge.

5. Marx Today
But why endorse Marxism today? Collier elegantly describes a number of
good reasons for doing so. First, Marx’s social theory remains the best
guide to the current behaviour and future development of capitalism on
offer. Collier rightly makes the point that Marx’s social theory does not
make prophecies about the future of humanity, but rather identifies devel-
opmental tendencies inherent in capitalism by virtue of its structure. Marx’s
error, he suggests, lay in ‘telescoping’ these tendencies, ‘that is, exaggerat-
ing the speed at which they would develop’. But, as for ‘the tendencies
themselves, he was amazingly accurate’. (p. 150) Collier draws our atten-
tion to what Marx did get right, in his view. The list is quite extensive.
First, Marx’s specification of the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism allowed
him to foresee the economic globalisation of the system, and with this the
erosion of the power of the nation state. Collier suggests that, although
Marx was wrong to write the ‘obituary’ of the nation state in the mid-
nineteenth century, ‘something of the sort is happening today’. (p. 150) In

48
Ricardo cited in A. Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Marx [RIM], London:
Bookmarks, 1983, p. 55.
49
Harman, EM, pp. 12, 22.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 157

  157

modern bourgeois states, he points out, power is increasingly passing from

the elected legislature into the hands of the unelected executive, which
itself is dominated increasingly by the imperatives of multinational capital.
‘National governments can no longer protect the interests of their own
people against global market forces’, (p. 150) presumably because the geo-
mobility of capital ensures that big capitalist firms can force governments
to do business on their terms. But Marx also believed that globalisation
was ‘not only inevitable, but potentially (and in the long run actually)
beneficial in uniting humankind into one economic community’, (p. 151)
in the sense that it would generalise the contradictions of capitalism across
the face of the world, and would give rise to generalised and co-ordinated
resistance by the proletariat, irrespective of national differences.
Now Collier is undoubtedly correct to laud Marx as the first to recog-
nise the global dynamic of capitalism and as a champion of globalisation
(before the word had been invented). However, I think it is necessary here
to be critical of both Marx’s and Collier’s belief that the internationalisa-
tion of market forces spells the decisive erosion of the economic power of
the nation state, and especially of the capacity of the elected legislature to
intervene against capitalism in support of domestic policy goals. First, the
structure of the capitalist state has always had this division between the
elected legislature and the unelected executive, and it is unclear that the sit-
uation has radically worsened in recent years. The trouble is not so much
that the executive has appropriated the power of the legislature, but more
that the legislature is more inclined to fit in with the strategic interests of
the unelected state and big capitalism and less inclined to oppose them.
The legislature in Britain and other bourgeois states has handed out more
powers to the executive in recent decades, but if it wanted it could take
them back. Second, it is contentious that globalisation and the formation
of multinational companies has meant that the state is economically pow-
erless. Of course, it is less powerful insofar as the state has handed a large
chunk of formerly state-owned industry into private hands and has acted
to deregulate financial markets. But the state, if it wanted, could take that
industry and those regulatory functions back, because it remains the repos-
itory of legal-rational democratic authority in the modern world.
However, it is true that economic globalisation has reduced the economic
power and political authority of the individual nation state. Nonetheless, an
alliance of the most powerful western nation states could restore it. This
is possible because multinational firms cannot function at all in a border-
less world. On the contrary, international capital requires powerful states
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 158

158  

to police the interactions between multinationals in the marketplace, to

promote and defend their interests on the global stage, to provide them
with infrastructure (transport, communications, subsidies, tax-breaks, sup-
pliers, investors) and skilled labour, and to protect their property and invest-
ments from the working class (by means of law and criminal justice).50 This
is an example of how political superstructures perform necessary functions
on behalf of their economic bases. Not many nation states can provide
these sorts of benefits on a consistent or stable basis, which gives them
enormous potential bargaining power in their dealings with multinationals.
This is why multinational companies locate the overwhelming bulk of their
capital investments and trade in their home nation, local region (e.g. North
America, the EU, the Pacific basin, etc.), or more generally in the west-
ernised heartlands of the system.51
So it seems to me that the state’s inability to resist global capitalism is
greatly exaggerated, and is in large measure an ideology that masks the
strategic alliance that has been forged between neo-liberal governments
and the capitalist elite. In fact, state power in the 1980s and 1990s, far
from passively falling into line with economic power, has aggressively acted
to extend and cultivate it—by means of policies of deregulation, trade lib-
eralisation and privatisation. Globalisation was actively sponsored and pro-
moted by powerful western governments, including and especially those of
Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in Britain.52 Despite this, however, the
most powerful nation states remain significant economic actors in their own
right, and have also developed sophisticated techniques of crises manage-
ment in recent decades.53

50
C. Harman, ‘Globalisation: a critique of a new orthodoxy’, International Socialism, 2
(73), 1996, pp.3-33; C. Harman, ‘The state and capitalism today’, International Socialism,
2 (51), 1991, pp. 3-54; M. Mann, ‘Has globalisation ended the rise of the nation-state?’,
Review of International Political Economy, Autumn 1997, pp. 472-96; W. Ruigrok and R.
van Tulder, The Logic of International Restructuring, London: Routledge, 1995; J. Stopford
and S. Strang, Rival States, Rival Firms, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995;
P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question [GQ ], Cambridge: Polity, 1996.
51
Hirst and Thompson, GQ, pp. 91-5.
52
P. Anderson, ‘Renewals’, New Left Review, II (1), 2000, pp. 11-14; A. Callinicos,
Against the Third Way, Cambridge: Polity, 2001, p. 7; M. Castells, The Rise of the Network
Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 135, 137, 140.
53
L. Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State, Ithaca NJ: Cornell University Press, 1998.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 159

  159

This process of economic globalisation is related to another tendency of

capitalist development accurately forecasted by Marx. As Collier observes:
‘Marx always argued that, as capitalism developed, ownership of capital
would become more and more concentrated, tending towards monopoly,
until not only the interests of the proletariat, but even the “public inter-
est” within a bourgeois parliamentary state would constrain the govern-
ment to take over or control great corporations.’ (p. 152) In fact, during
the post-war period, this came to fruition, with governments in both the
developed and underdeveloped world attempting to regulate and control
global capitalism by various techniques. These included, for example, state
socialism, the mixed economy, Keynesian policies of demand manipulation
and deficit budgeting, even a limited measure of income redistribution
through the taxation and welfare-benefits systems. But, of course, in more
recent decades, the centralisation and concentration of capital has contin-
ued, so we now have transnational corporations, which organise produc-
tion and trade and sales across national borders.
Marx would have been amazed to behold this development, not because
his theory of capitalism ruled it out, but because he would scarcely have
found it credible that the proletariat would have permitted the laws of
capital to unfold for as long as they have. In any case, the formation of
international money- and stock-markets and massive concentrations of indus-
trial power in the hands of transnational companies has established the
truth of Marx’s view that the market and democracy are fundamentally
incompatible:
What can be learnt from Marx here is that in the modern world the real
alignment of forces is ‘the market versus democracy’, that democracy can only
win if it becomes global, and that this cannot be done by rationalising cap-
italism, but only by abolishing it. (p. 151)

Second, Marx was also right to argue that the proletariat is the ‘coming
class’. Despite fashionable postmodernist claims that the proletariat is a
marginal force in the advanced ‘post-industrial’ countries, Collier has lit-
tle difficulty showing otherwise. On Marx’s own definition of class (as a
relationship of groups to the means of production and to other groups
within a social economy), the proletariat in contemporary Britain, for exam-
ple, still constitutes a large majority of the population. Presumably, Collier’s
point is that recent trends towards white-collar and service sector employ-
ment mark a recomposition rather than serious decline of the western working
class. This is suggested where he claims that ‘supposed de-proletarianization
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 160

160  

[. . .] means little more than that most English proletarians would now look
out of place in a Lowry painting’. (p. 62)
But, in fact, Collier suggests that there has been something of a decline
in the proletariat in the advanced countries, although this is (he says) largely
explainable in terms of a new international division of labour that has
shifted a lot of manufacturing jobs and heavy industry to the developing
world. However, in the newly industrialised countries and the so called
‘Third World’ countries, Collier observes that the proletariat is growing
rapidly. So much so that, at the start of the twenty-first century, ‘it is very
close to being the majority class of humankind’ (p. 152), poised for the
first time to overtake the peasantry. These developments are of epochal
significance, because Marx is right to believe that human emancipation
depends on the proletariat:
This is not because of any kind of mystical ‘proletarian messianism’ as is often
alleged, but because alone among oppressed classes its conditions of life make
it possible for it to unite, to resist collectively and, under favourable circum-
stances, to take over the production process. If the proletariat were really no
longer ‘the coming class’ but a passing class, the possibility of any democra-
tic reconstruction of society would be passing too. (p. 152)

Now, I agree with Collier that the proletariat in the West has been recom-
posed rather than undermined by the global development of capitalism
and that globally the proletariat is the ‘future’ class. However, one impor-
tant problem with Collier’s analysis that, if he is right in saying that the
proletariat still make up between 66-75 per cent of the population of Britain
(and by logical extension other advanced countries), it is far from obvious
that it has declined at all since its 1960s heyday. For, even when Britain
was known proverbially as the ‘workshop of the world’ in the second half
of the nineteenth century, ‘total employment in manufacturing industry
never [. . .] amounted to one half of the employed population’.54 By the
early 1900s, for example, only around 44 per cent of the working popu-
lation was employed in industry and manufacturing (compared to 30 per
cent in services). By 1961, the blue-collar industrial working class had
reached its post-war peak, but this was at just 48 per cent of the total
workforce (compared to 41 per cent in services).55 Of course, during the

54
W.D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain [CCDB], London: Routledge,
1993, p. 32.
55
Rubinstein, CCDB, p. 33.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 161

  161

1960s, lower-grade service workers (in commerce, retail and public ser-
vices) were, as they are now, proletarians. However, many workers who
are now regarded as service workers (such as transport workers, printers,
postal workers, dockers, and telephone engineers) would previously have
been seen as part of the ‘old’ industrial working class.56 Furthermore, many
other so called service jobs today involve directly industrial or manufac-
turing processes (e.g. fast-food, restaurants, laundries, cleaning and press-
ing establishments, automobile repairs, machine servicing or repair work,
computer software design) or the distribution of manufactured goods (e.g.
transportation, warehouses and supermarkets).57 Taking these issues into
account, it is doubtful that the proletariat in Britain ever comprised more
than between two-thirds and three-quarters of the working population, as
it does today.
This is an important argument because Collier argues that to ‘look to
the proletariat for emancipation is for the most part to look to the newly
industrialised countries of the Third World’. (p. 152) Whether Collier
believes that this sea-change in politics has anything to do with the rela-
tive decline (as he sees it) of the western proletariat is unclear. At times,
he suggests that it has rather more to do with the fact that western work-
ers have been integrated into consumer capitalism by rising real income
levels, partly as a result of having been made beneficiaries of the contin-
ued exploitation of the ‘Third World’. In any case, I think that humanity
can free itself from capitalism only if the western working classes are to
the forefront of the global socialist movement. This is for the simple rea-
son that, in the absence of a powerful working class movement in the
developed countries, revolutions in the ‘Third World’ are likely to disrupt
rather than destroy the major centres of capital accumulation. After all,
despite ‘globalisation’, I have pointed out that the bulk of capital invest-
ment and productive enterprises remain concentrated in the most devel-
oped regions of the world system. And the experience of the most recent
global recession at the end of the 1990s has shown that western capitalism

56
L. German, A Question of Class, London: Bookmarks, 1996, p. 29; H. Braverman,
Labour and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974, p. 360.
57
R.E. Rowthorn, ‘Where are the advanced economies going?’ [WAEG ], in G.M.
Hodgson et al., eds, Capitalism in Evolution, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001, pp. 127-
31. Rowthorn estimates that, despite so called ‘post-industrialism’, goods-related pro-
duction accounts for 69 per cent of jobs in the advanced economies. (p. 31) The
contemporary western proletariat is still predominantly an industrial class.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 162

162  

can accommodate even a virtual meltdown of the newly industrialising

countries of Latin America and South-east Asia without the crisis spiralling
out of control to engulf North America and the EU.
Certainly, Collier is right to point out that Marx did not deny that
workers could improve their absolute consumption under capitalism, includ-
ing by means of trade union and government action improving wages and
the ‘social wage’. But, as Collier also observes, Marx did believe that
inequalities of wealth and income between capitalists and proletarians would
increase as capitalism got older, even if he did not hold to a theory of
absolute proletarian immiseration. If this were true, it would have long-
term revolutionary implications, since popular feelings of injustice are moti-
vated as much by inequality as poverty. Collier is absolutely right that
inequalities between richer and poorer countries have been increasing in
the new era of capitalist globalisation. This establishes beyond reasonable
doubt that Marx was right to believe that ‘inequality of wealth is not a
survival from pre-capitalist times, but a developing tendency of capitalism’.
(p. 153)
But Collier is ambivalent over whether growing inequality is a neces-
sary feature of capitalist development in the economically advanced coun-
tries. He notes (rightly) that ‘from the late nineteenth till the late twentieth
century, inequalities within developed countries became less marked, pre-
cisely because of such trade union actions and interventions by democra-
tic governments as Marx defended’. (p. 153) But he also rightly notes a
recent trend towards deepening class inequality in Britain since Thatcher.
However, it is not clear how he views the bigger picture in the rest of the
developed world in the era of ‘globalisation’. (Indeed, he suggests, quite
controversially, that American workers have preserved to the present day
their higher wages by comparison with the rest of the world.) Perhaps it
is because Collier cannot detect a trend towards deepening inequality in
the western world that he thinks that the future of socialist resistance to
capitalism has shifted from the ‘core’ to the ‘periphery’ of the world system?
Marx would say that growing income inequality is a necessary tendency
of a capitalist economy left to its own devices, which is not the same as
saying that trade unions and governments cannot successfully temporarily
resist ‘market forces’. In fact, with the onset of the recessionary pressures
and full force of globalisation since the 1980s, governments in the devel-
oped countries have reversed their policies of ameliorating the excesses of
market forces in the direction of greater social justice. Governments in
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 163

  163

Italy, France and Germany have attempted to claw back welfare and
employee rights from their working classes, and to deregulate industry.58
At the time of writing, resolute action by the working class, especially in
Germany and France, has prevented anything resembling a ‘Thatcher rev-
olution’ on the continent, but the war goes on, and unemployment has
increased right across the OECD since the 1980s, and now numbers 36
million (10 per cent in European OECD countries).59 In Britain and America,
where governments have championed neo-liberalism (i.e. unfettered capi-
talism) for decades, class inequality has risen steadily, and so too has real
income-deprivation at the base of society.60
Thus, far from American workers continuing to lead the world in terms
of real income, they now do worse than workers in comparable developed
countries, especially the more welfare-oriented societies of the EU. Average
wages for American employees working in all industries and services, other
than government and agriculture, were less in 1996 than they were in
1973.61 As a result, ‘the average real income of families was only a few
percentage points higher in 1993 than in 1973, and that largely because
so many more spouses were working’.62 By 2000, the poorest tenth of
American workers were still earning just 91 per cent of the earnings they

58
S. Creaven, ‘Marx and Bhaskar on the dialectics of freedom’, Journal of Critical
Realism, vol. 2 no. 1, November 2003, pp. 84-5.
59
International Labour Organisation, Labour Market Trends and Globalisation’s Impact on
Them, www.itcilo.it/english/actrav/telearn/global/ilo/seura/mains.htm (2002), p. 2.
60
Between 1976-99, the top ten per cent of British households increased their share
of total wealth from 57 per cent to 71 per cent, whereas the share of total wealth going
to the bottom 50 per cent fell from 12 per cent to three per cent, excluding the value
of dwellings. (Social Trends, London: HMSO, 2002, p. 102). Between 1977-97, the top
five per cent of American households increased their annual income after taxes by 43
per cent, the top one per cent by 115 per cent, while the bottom 60 per cent saw no
improvement in real income at all. (C. Collins, C. Hartman, C and H. Sklair, Divided
Decade: Economic Disparity at the Century’s End [DD], www.ufenet.org/press/archive/1999/
Divided_Decade/DivDec.pdf (1999), p. 4). Between 1979-95, the number of people liv-
ing on income below the average in Britain increased from 59 per cent to 63 per cent;
and between 1979-97, the number of people in Britain living below the official poverty
line (of less than half average earnings) increased from four to 14 million (A. Callinicos,
Equality, Cambridge: Polity, 2000, pp. 8-9). Between 1977-99, the bottom 20 per cent
of American families experienced a nine per cent reduction in their absolute income.
(Collins, Hartmann & Sklair, DD, p. 2).
61
E. Luttwark, Turbo-Capitalism, London: Orion, 1999, pp. 95-6.
62
J. Madrick, The End of Affluence, New York: Random House, 1997, pp. 16-17.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 164

164  

used to enjoy three decades earlier.63 Today there is widespread hardship

in the richest country on the planet:
The Economic Policy Institute recently reviewed dozens of studies of what
constitutes a ‘living wage’ and came up with an average figure of $30,000 a
year for a family of one adult and two children, which amounts to a wage
of $14 an hour. This is not the very minimum such a family could live on;
the budget includes health insurance, a telephone, and child care at a licensed
center, for example, which are well beyond the reach of millions. But it does
not include restaurant meals, video rentals, internet access, wine and liquor,
cigarettes and lottery tickets, or even very much meat. The shocking thing is
that the majority of American workers, about 60 per cent, earn less than $14
an hour.64

I think that Marx was right to suggest that the developmental tendency
of a free-market capitalist economy inevitably entails deepening inequality in
rich as well as between rich and poor countries. He was also right (I might
add) that capitalism entails the persistence of a large pool of poverty on
the margins of society. The Victorians had their ‘dangerous classes’; in the
1950s and 1960s we had the ‘culture of poverty’; today we have the ‘under-
class’. Therefore, I see no good reason for endorsing Collier’s view that
‘workers’ power in the rich countries [is] an unlikely prospect’ (p. 156).
Indeed, Collier’s pessimism concerning western workers does not fit terri-
bly well with his own (accurate) judgement that they are less free and less
represented today than 30 years ago.
But it is also true that tendencies towards diminishing inequality in the
advanced societies, even in the heyday of welfare-state capitalism, have
been greatly exaggerated by many commentators. Certainly, the statistics
that demonstrate a lessening of inequality in Britain and the US during
this period are misleading, and this is not simply because the rich have
become more inclined to disguise the true extent of their wealth and income
in order to avoid taxation. As we have seen, the post-war period saw the
development of a large professional-managerial class and white-collar pro-
letariat in the developed economies. This diversification of the class struc-
ture was made possible by the massive productivity gains of manufacturing
workers (of 350 per cent) during the long post-war boom of 1948-73.65

63
B. Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA [ND], London: Granta,
2002, p. 203.
64
Ehrenreich, ND, p. 213.
65
Callinicos, RIM, p. 186. Between 1973 and 1990, productivity growth in manu-
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 165

  165

This basically released the surplus product to support a proliferation of

‘unproductive’ functions in the division of labour (‘unproductive’ not in the
sense of being socially parasitic but in the sense of not directly producing
or realising the surplus value embodied in commodities). Far from declin-
ing in social significance, the manufacturing sector of the developed economies
is the most dynamic, and has provided the material foundation for the
growth of the service sector.
Now the bulk of income ‘redistribution’ that took place in Britain dur-
ing the post-war boom was mostly within the top 40 per cent, with none
‘trickling down’ to the bottom 30 per cent.66 The significant gains in terms
of absolute living standards of the poorest and most marginalised sections
of the working class were secured rather more by means of increased pro-
ductivity of the manual proletariat as a whole (which cheapened the cost
of subsistence goods) and increased taxation levied across the whole com-
munity to support social and welfare programmes rather than by means
of redistribution through the taxation system. Furthermore, a massive
increase in the rate of exploitation of ‘productive’ manual workers released
the surplus value to fund the consumption of all other workers, including
professionals and managers. To gauge the reality of wealth and income
redistribution during this period, then, one would have to measure changes
in the differentials between income from average profits and income from
average manufacturing wages, not changes in the distribution of wealth
and income right across the occupational structure. If this were done, I
rather suspect that the evidence for a significant lessening of inequality
between capital and labour would become rather insubstantial, despite the
powerful bargaining position of the organised labour movement in the West
during the boom. Even welfare-state capitalist societies, with full employ-
ment, in a booming world economy, are structurally resistant to wealth
and income redistribution. This is why the renewal of a proletarian revo-
lutionary movement in the West cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Nonetheless, whatever the ambiguities of certain aspects of Collier’s inter-
pretation of Marx’s contemporary relevance, he has successfully demon-
strated that one important reason for revisiting Marx today is that his
theory has been remarkably resistant to empirical refutation and can account

facturing grew by a further 48 per cent compared to just 17 per cent in services.
(Rowthorn, WAEG, p. 127).
66
A.B. Atkinson, The Economics of Inequality, Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1983,
p. 63.
JCR4,1_f6_128-166 4/29/05 10:34 AM Page 166

166  

for key features of contemporary capitalism. But Collier identifies a num-

ber of additional good reasons for endorsing Marxism today. I conclude
this review by briefly summarising them.
First, class remains the central oppression of modern society; indeed
class oppression is the basis of all other oppressions (such as oppression by
‘race’ and gender). This is despite the total neglect of it by contemporary
politicians and media commentators, who are only interested in oppressed
groups which have middle class members. Second, poverty and social
inequality today is not the result of chance, fate, lack of hard work or tal-
ent, but of class exploitation, the mechanisms of which Marx diagnosed
scientifically for the first time. Property really is theft. Third, if we want
to avoid an ecological catastrophe, we have to get rid of capitalism and
replace it with something resembling Marx’s socialism. This is for the sim-
ple reason that only an economy based on use-value rather than exchange-
value, and on industrial democracy rather than private ownership, gives
us the leeway to base collective decision-making on substantive rather than
instrumental or calculative rationality, and allows us to bring modern tech-
nology under rational control. Finally, if we are to preserve democracy in
the twenty-first century, we have to have collective democratic ownership
of the means of production. This, says Collier, has been made abundantly
clear in recent decades as the legislature of the bourgeois state hands over
power to an unelected executive, and as the executive converts itself into
a ‘committee for managing the common affairs’ of the global bourgeoisie.
As Collier concludes:
The message of Marx is that if humankind is to be free in the twenty-first
century—and perhaps even if it is to survive into the twenty-second—we need
common ownership of the productive resources of the planet. (p. 162)

You will not find this argued anywhere more elegantly or persuasively than
in this excellent book.