MARX TWO

In the situation of primitive communism there is little excess time, or labor value, left over. But as the group divides labor and becomes more efficient more time is freed up. Marx' insight is that when such time becomes free it does not generally get evenly distributed. That is, as soon as group efficiency produces free time and with that surplus goods, certain group members will differentiate themselves. They do so in order to gain control of both time and physical surpluses. And they accomplish this in the manner I sketched out in class. The 'Sopranos' principle applies here: those who become religious professionals and/or nobles-warriors learn how to persuade their fellows that they possess special skills that are necessary for the group's survival. They will defend the rest from external enemies, and/or they will propitiate the gods and spirits and in both cases they will make life possible for the group. In exchange the group 'pays' these so-called experts in time and goods. They need time to do their special duties and while they are so employed they cannot themselves produce food for themselves, or shelter. 

Thus begins, for Marx, the classed society based on exploitation of one group by another. Here, Marx is describing feudal society or, in amore general sense, a society in which certain subgroups -- the priest class and the noble class -- take the surplus product and time from what becomes the lower class and use it up. Keys to this analysis are that (i) those now in control spend part of the time and energy they steal from the others to create justifications and defenses for their privileged position. This is what Marx calls ideology, that is, accounts crafted to defend and justify what is ultimately an unjustifiable class position. The idea here is that all such narratives - national histories, religious stories, myths, even fiction and film - express a dominant ideology, a set of values that suggests that the way things are right now, in economic and social terms, is exactly the way things ought to be. Second, those in power cannot, on some level, fully understand what they are doing. The rulers believe the stories as much as their victims, and get stuck in that story as if it will always remain true.

But the secret to Marx' dialectical  materialism is that this class situation, in which one or two self-creating groups seizes time and surplus and creates a story to justify the theft, is never as stable as the ruling class, especially, imagines. Instead, class relations are inherently dynamic; they are changing in ways that the ruling class has protected themselves from understanding. Ideology blinds them to the emerging truth, and the marriage of such changes with ideological blindness inevitably dooms the ruling class to extinction. 

How does this happen? Well, the priests and warriors are not all that busy; they have free time and surplus goods, not all of which they can consume, especially as peasant agricultural practice and populations develop. More people making more things more efficiently means greater leisure and prosperity for the ruling class. So, the inevitable human tendency to get better at things makes the rulers richer and freer. 

This produces something new: the rulers and priests begin wanting to translate their agricultural and cloth surplus, for example, into other kinds of objects, things that will make their lives both easier and more pleasant. So, the rulers begin to need folks who can do more than raise a rutabaga. They need stoneworkers and woodworkers to build their castles and manors; weaponers to produce swords and shields and such; they need chefs and kitchen workers and wine stewards and estate managers and saddlers and on and on. Priests needs church builders and housekeepers and cooks and vestment weavers and buys who make chalices and so forth.  

To get all this stuff many of the farming peasants have to be transformed, at least part-time, into other kinds of workers and, eventually, some of these people become permanent non-peasants and begin to live, for convenience' sake, right around the ruler's manor and priest's church. Thus grow up small towns and cities, all of whose inhabitants haver to be supported by the agricultural surplus and the free time that produces. 

This set of developments puts further pressure on the people on the bottom rung of the social ladder and they become more oppressed and more alienated. But unnoticed by the rulers their hungers have done something no one could have predicted: they have inadvertently created another class, the bourgeois, which means people who live in towns and cities. The rulers still see these folks as peasants, because their ideology has no place for a class between peasant and priest/ruler.

But just such a class is emerging. These people live in a different world than the peasants and the rulers. They do not work the land. They make objects to please the priests and kings, and they get paid for their work. Since this is who they are, and since their survival depends on doing their work and getting paid, they develop a distinctive set of values based on hard work, prudent saving, and the accumulation of what is now called 'capital', that is, the money that in this represents the surplus labor of the peasantry mingled with their own labor. 

Here is where things get interesting. As a class the rulers and priests are pointed in a single direcftion: it is their self-appointed 'job' to spend the surplus they get from the lower class. They are not there to save or invest or develop. They exist to spend, whether it be in war or in rich living or in building magnificent cathedrals. Their 'vocation' is to exhaust the surplus they extract from those beneath them, And it is very hard for them to do anything else; they are trapped in their own self-description and self-understanding. Nobles and warriors do not work and save; priests and bishops accept donations, but they spend all they are given. 

Inevitably, says Marx, the tastes of the rulers and priest runs ahead of their ability to pay for these tastes. Just as the easy availability of credit led middle class Americans to run up unmanageable debt during the past 20 years, so the easy surplus available to the ruling class led them to overspend that surplus. The effect of this overspending was to provoke a crisis: in order to bankroll their excesses the rulers had to alter their relationship with their town dwelling artisans. They either failed to pay, which alienated the artisans, and /or they borrowed heavily from the townspeople, who saved their money carefully. This borrowing and non-payment, as well as the increasing taxes the rulers imposed on both peasant and townsperson, led to an eventual collapse of the ruling class into poverty on one hand and oppression on the other. As they got poorer they got more rapacious and violent, and eventually the townspeople, the new middle class that the rulers had never seen as a separate class, rose up and overthrew their creators and onetime benefactors. The new middle class deposed the bankrupt rulers and themselves became the ruling class in a series of bourgeois revolutions starting with the Dutch revolt against the Hapsburg Spanish, the British rejection of absolute monarchy in the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution against the British Crown and the most famous and radical of them all, the French Revolution of 1789. In all these revolutions traditional monarchs were repudiated as were, in many cases, the equally oppressive religious establishments associated with them.