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Title: Goodbye Mr. Marx
Author: Darren Allen
Date: 5 Oct 2021
Language: en
Topics: marxism, post-marxism, technocracy, critique
Source: Retrieved on 21st October from www.expressiveegg.org

Darren Allen

Goodbye Mr. Marx

The great mistake of the Marxists and of the whole of the nineteenth

century was to think that by walking straight on one mounted upward into

the air.

Simone Weil

Marx’s theories are well known enough to need little more than a

summary. He starts by defining the value of commodities as a function of

the work necessary to produce them. This labour, the source of the

worker’s dignity, is the only ‘commodity’ which he has to sell. Once the

capitalist has bought sufficient labour to meet his own needs he then

exploits the worker—through direct oppression or through indirect

improvements to ‘efficiency’—for profit. This profit accumulates, making

capitalists more and more powerful, until the middle-class has been

absorbed into the working-class and the whole miserable, degraded mass

revolts and create socialism. This process is, for Marx, both necessary

and inevitable, which is why he extolled capitalism, and the bourgeois

state, which he believed prepared the conditions for the superior mode

of production of socialism. It’s also why he worshipped production

itself, the machinery of society, to which he believed that man must

submit until the day it ceases to destroy him. Then, says Marx, all

social antagonisms will magically cease. Marx’s proletariat is,

therefore, a kind of Christ in mass form, ‘redeeming the collective sin

of alienation’[1] through its historically necessary suffering. How much

suffering? It doesn’t matter. As the proletariat-Christ will bring

heaven down to earth, ‘ending the quarrel between man and man’ and

‘solving the mystery of history’, any act which serves this messianic

expectation, no matter how coercive or cruel, is morally justified.

Because the God of History decrees it.

Marx celebrated the dignity of work, he endorsed independent working

class action, he criticised the state and he bitterly opposed unearnt

privilege but, as Camus put it ‘the reduction of every value to

historical terms leads to the direst consequences’; to precisely the

degradation, dependency, statist oppression and repulsive privilege

which Marx ostensibly opposed. This happens because he located the moral

quality of his prophecy in bare facts; which have no meaning. His

materialism compelled him to banish everything which does not serve the

material needs of perfected society; the objective fact of ‘life’ which

we are forced to preserve. Love, beauty, truth, dignity, independence,

fellow-feeling, all must be sacrificed to this greater good, this

rational, utilitarian ‘life’.

Marx’s economic and social theories were based on a rationally

apprehensible, law-like universe, a continuation of Western

civilisation’s perennial endeavour to found reality on factual-causal

laws, which began with the Greeks and Jews of the Iron age, and reached

its modern fulfilment in the work of Hegel (the law of history), Darwin

(the law of nature) and Freud (the law of mind). This project is flawed

from its foundation, for the facticity and causality it is founded on

cannot be located in reality—they are conceptual tools, phenomenally

useful, but no more foundationally real than numbers are. Establishing a

philosophy on a universe of caused facts, or mind-isolated things,

condemns the individual to alienation from the reality of that universe,

that which is ‘beyond’ the representations that the mind presents of

it.[2] a mind is incapable of even perceiving what ails it—it is

conditioned by its own activity—let alone remedying its problems through

fiddling with the rational-material-economic structure of society.

Philosophically speaking, the inherently alienating activity of the

rational mind comes in several varieties, all of which entail gross

fallacies and, to the extent they govern the lives of men and women,

monstrous violence. The ‘varieties’ that Marx held to were rationalism

and materialism which (just like their ostensible opposites, empiricism

and idealism) ignore what the non-rational and the immaterial have to

teach us, forcing the story of humanity into an essentially mechanical

process which can only be explained by artificial, rational laws. Marx,

like all rational managers, had no interest whatsoever in the ineffable,

in the paradoxical, in the ungovernable, in the elusive, or in the

individual which embodies such qualities. He was only interested in the

quantitative, material mass, motivated by entirely mechanical,

utilitarian ends; the satisfying of material needs which must be met

before any other airy-fairy value, like freedom for example, or peace of

mind, is attended to. For Marx ‘freedom’ and ‘peace’ must begin with the

rational domination of nature and must find its fulfilment in the

development of industrial technology, the only way, according to Marx,

that the war against ‘scarcity’ can be won, the unquenchable lack that

all humans are born with.

For Marx, history was a teleological, or purpose-driven, machine, the

purpose being a classless society to which the various antagonisms

within society must inevitably terminate in. Such a paradise is

essentially no different from the standard Judeo-Christian heaven he

rejected; promised, but continually deferred. To this end, Marx

continually praised the development of capitalism — even when it

resulted in the utter degradation of working people. Following the

quasi-fascistic nationalism of Hegel, he praised England’s ruin of

India, writing in his essay ‘The British Rule in India’, that the

British empire was ‘the unconscious tool of history’ and that we might

not be happy about the crimes of the British, or the crumbling of an

ancient empire, but that we can console ourselves with the knowledge

this grotesque torture ultimately ‘brings us greater pleasure’. He was

equally sanguine about the European colonisation of the United States.

Such events were ‘necessary stages’ in the linear, law-like process of

history which he was committed to.

For Marx only mechanical, rational processes were of any interest. He

entirely ruled out consciousness (timeless or otherwise) as an agent in

history. Later Marxists attempted to sneak it, or its manifestation in

culture, belief, law and so on, through the back door, or they sought to

understand society as a whole; undermining, in both cases, Marx’s

cast-iron determinative laws and the foundations of Marxism itself. Marx

himself had no interest in exploring non-historical, non-causal and

non-factual realities which is why, beyond his penetrating analysis of

the alienating effects of capitalist economics on the human psyche, he

had almost nothing to say about love, art, death, reality, morality or

anything else of vital interest to human beings. His vision of

revolutionary change, a mechanical, utilitarian process which must

follow the direction of history, was a betrayal of free human nature.

The utilitarian need to meet material needs, for Marx the determinant

factor in human affairs, manifests as the economy, the mechanism by

which such needs were met at scale. For Marx, thought, awareness,

instinct, belief, inspiration are, first of all, subordinate to the need

to eat, sleep and keep warm, and then, as societies grew, to the need to

plant crops, build houses, manufacture trousers and so on. Apparently,

we don’t first of all need to be aware, to think, to believe, to have

instincts and to be inspired to hunt, cook, make fire, fire clay, write

books, tile floors or run restaurants. Not that material needs and the

economy don’t explain much of the world, or shape man’s attitudes —

obviously they do[3] but positing material-economic facts as the sole or

primitive determining factor in man’s life reduces him to a component in

a material history machine, which isn’t just a morally repugnant

conception of humanity, but intuitively false — at least to anyone

conscious enough to experience their own inner reality — logically false

— as all economic relations are founded on an original conception of

property and on a coercively maintained assumption of scarcity — and

empirically false — what actually happens simply doesn’t bear out Marx’s

predictions. He was confident, for example, that the immiseration of the

proletariat would compel it to revolt against the bourgeoisie. As we

know, that didn’t happen and doesn’t happen; man enters the capitalist

world in a submissive state which only gets worse as he is stupefied by

poverty (particularly in the third-world), crippled by professionalism,

domesticated by technology and pacified with the various sops offered to

him by the welfare state — a quasi-socialist mechanism perfectly

consonant with capitalist self-perpetuation.

The so-called ‘real basis’ (Engel’s words) on which Marx established his

laws of history led to four disastrous interconnected consequences;

statism, reformism, technophilia and professionalism. Statism —

attempting to create a socialist state (or ‘nationalist capitalist’

state) which will then be overthrown by the proletariat — was, according

to Marx, an indispensable step on the road to communism. This is why he

made the almost unbelievable demand that ‘the bourgeoisie must first

come to the helm’. As with many socialists and communists to follow, he

made vague gestures towards the state one day withering away, but like

the constantly deferred freedom of all tyrannous authority, it could

only be effected by first granting power to experts (such as Lenin’s

‘vanguard party’) who will manage the state-mechanism for the ‘good’ of

the people. That this party might (and time and time again did) manage

the state in its own interests didn’t seem to occur to Marx, nor that

the technological progress that he demanded as a prerequisite for

meeting the needs of such a state would further bloat it with a

centralised techno-bureaucracy, again with its own interests.

In fact Marx had no intention of bringing down the state, he wished only

to reform it from within. This is why the concrete reforms he called for

in The Communist Manifesto, his ‘radical’ programme for revolutionary

change, called for an inheritance tax, graduated income tax and

centralization of credit and communications. Mikhail Bakunin, who, like

all anarchists worth their salt, endeavoured to do away with the state

by actually doing away with it, opposed this feeble, self-serving

gradualism tooth and nail;

Marx is an authoritarian and centralising communist. He wants what we

want, the complete triumph of economic and social equality, but he wants

it… through State power, through the dictatorship of a very strong and,

so to say, despotic provisional government, that is by the negation of

liberty. His economic ideal is the State as sole owner of the land and

of all kinds of capital, cultivating the land under the management of

State engineers, and controlling all industrial and commercial

associations with State capital. We want the same triumph of economic

and social equality through the abolition of the State and of all that

passes by the name of law… We want the reconstruction of society and the

unification of mankind to be achieved, not from above downwards by any

sort of authority, nor by socialist officials, engineers, and either

accredited men of learning—but from below upwards, by the free

federation of all kinds of workers’ associations liberated from the yoke

of the State.

In Marx’s ‘above-downwards’ reconstruction of society, nature and

human-nature continue to be dominated, only now in the name of the

people, by technocratic officials and with the deferred aim of doing

away with the authoritarian state. The embarrassing fact that

authoritarian domination persists, and continues to ruin that which it

is supposed to liberate, is pushed out of view by socialists, as is the

fact that, in essence, nothing has changed. ‘Work’, to take one critical

example, was supposed to be liberated in a communist society. The idea

was that by taking over the industrial system of production developed in

a capitalist economy, with all its specialists, and their theories, and

all its technicians, and their machines, something fundamentally

different would thereby result. In the real world this is a ridiculous

ambition. A capitalist machine which, as Marx himself told us, exercises

total control over the working man — over where he works, over how fast

he works and over what tiny specialised manoeuvres he is expected to

make — remains the same machine when governed by a communist state. It

cannot do or be otherwise. How is a furniture-factory for example (the

kind that makes IKEA flat-packs), to hand over autonomy to the

individual worker? How is the individual labourer to take complete

control of the productive apparatus of the shop floor, devised for a

mechanised, rigidly hierarchical system, and designed to mechanically

discipline the workforce? The factory was designed to produce the

maximum number of goods at the lowest cost and the highest speed; this

is what its machines are for. How then are they to be used to produce

high quality handmade goods, at the pace the individual worker chooses,

and with the individual worker able to autonomously exercise his

discriminating intelligence on the whole process of manufacture? How is

the ikea factory to be reformed, under communist governance, into a

small-scale craftsman’s workshop?

It isn’t. It can’t be. The factory, as it is, has to be destroyed. And

not just its physical architecture and machinery, but its ideological

and organisational structures; the division of labour activity into a

thousand hyper-specialised tasks, and the division of labour purpose

into the intellectual work of the manager and the submoron machine

servitude of the worker. Somehow, magically, all this can be reformed,

under communist or socialist governance, back into a dignified whole,

although nobody knows how. Marxists and socialists simply hope that all

of the scattered tasks required by, say, the mechanised industrial

cake-making system (one man on the mixing machine, one man on the baking

machine, one man on the cutting machine, one man on the boxing machine)

will somehow, by itself, dissolve into the autonomous activity of a

single baker, and that the management class will, once freed of the

pressures put on it by capitalist owners, freely join hands with the

drones who follow their orders, cheerfully re-skill each other and then

triumphantly march towards a lower-tech society that makes the

specialist skill of the manager, and the power based thereon, obsolete.

We are supposed to imagine that the bureaucratic techno-elite demanded

by a global industrial machine will renounce its power when that machine

is taken from the hands of private business owners and given to the

socialist state, and that nuclear power plants, oil-powered container

ships and injection-moulding factories will be thereby reformed to serve

low-energy, local economies.

This idea is, to anyone able to perceive it without the distorting

ideological filters of leftism, a ludicrous, childish, religious belief.

An immense industrial factory can no more be reformed for the benefit of

man than a tractor can be repurposed to dig over a garden. And just as

the land has to be redesigned to fit the needs of the tractor, so man

has to be redesigned to fit the needs of the factory, which explains why

factory-man (including a management class which may never set foot in a

factory) is so keen on perpetuating the factory system, and resists the

idea that if man is to be in control of the factory the whole factory

has to be destroyed and rebuilt for man — and not just one factory, but

all the interlocking systems which feed into and from it. Factory-man

understands that a radical threat to the industrial system is a radical

threat to his own being, which is why he receives radical critiques of

industrial technology in almost exactly the same way as fundamentalist

believers take radical critiques of their prophets or sacred texts.

Marx’s understanding of what the full ‘development of the productive

forces’ of mankind, through technological progress and expansion,

actually entails, or what it inevitably will entail — the ruin of man

and the absorption of the human psyche into a nightmarish, self-informed

(and, ironically enough, non-material) simulacrum — was nil. He did not

understand, or did not want to understand, that a technocratic system

demands a bourgeois technocratic management elite. His analysis of

productive alienation was second-to-none, and still justly celebrated,

but his obsession with class exploitation blinded him to exploitation by

the democratic mass, by the technocratic system, by professional power

and by the abstracted hyperworld parasitically overwhelming conscious

reality. The alienating effect of having one’s capacity to freely work,

learn, speak, heal and die completely uploaded into a ‘weightless’

technosphere, or appropriated by a class of technicians (calling

themselves ‘managers’, ‘teachers’, ‘scientists’, ‘doctors’ and

occasionally ‘businessmen’ and ‘politicians’) was invisible to Marx, as

it is to all the professionals who, directly or indirectly, have

followed him up the blind alley of technological progress. Bakunin (and,

incidentally, Dostoevsky) saw the writing on the wall;

A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society

would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to

quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established

powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society

confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of

its government and direction.

We now find ourselves in the dead-end that Bakunin predicted and that

Marx and his many followers directed us towards, one where it is no

longer principally kings or capitalists, but professional, technical

experts, and the bewildering supermachine they tend, which oppress us.

The military power and property power of kings and capitalists still

exists, but it has been supplanted by the managerial power of

technicians (who, as their universal acceptance of lockdowns and the

latest bio-fascist phase of the system demonstrated, are just as happy

to see the working classes brutally disciplined as capitalists and kings

ever were) and the reality-absorbing power of virtual unculture and a

world built to serve it.

All of this explains why Marx was contemptuous of that class of society

least affected by industrialisation; namely, the peasantry. Marx (like

Plato) had zero interest in the lessons that wild nature could teach man

and advocated, effectively, the end of small-scale rural production. He

wished to see ‘modern methods, such as irrigation, drainage, steam

ploughing, chemical treatment and so forth applied to agriculture…’

along with a ‘large-scale’ cultivation of the land; what today we would

call a ‘monocultural’ farm. The extermination of bio-diverse nature and

of the conscious lives of those who lived from it didn’t, ultimately,

concern him, just as it doesn’t those who, despite much high-sounding

‘eco-friendly’ rhetoric, are still engaged in the suppression of

subsistence and of vernacular independence. Such people don’t just

include land-owning nobles and information-controlling professionals but

the very proletariat which Marx told us would create a classless

society, but who were and still are engaged, in collusion with the

bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, in the industrialisation of all aspects

of life and culture, imprisoning themselves ever more profoundly in ‘the

kingdom of scarcity’ that such activity produces.

David Cayley summarises Ivan Illich’s account of this process;

“The [working] man found himself in a conspiracy with his employer”

insofar as “both were equally concerned with economic expansion and the

suppression of subsistence.” “This fundamental collusion between capital

and labour,” [Illich] continues, “was mystified by the ritual of class

struggle.” The breadth of this claim is quite breathtaking. Marx had

asserted that the universal class in which capitalism meets its

comprehensive contradiction and potential abolition is the proletariat.

Not at all, says Illich—the proletariat is only an accomplice in the war

against subsistence, which is the real site of the contradiction. The

novelty that Marx misses or takes for granted is homo economicus, a

being who must be “distinguished… from all other human beings.” The

class struggle is no more than a ritual, and a ritual, as Illich’s

defines it elsewhere, is “a procedure whose imagined purpose allows the

participants to overlook what they are actually doing.” What the

antagonists/accomplices in the class struggle are “actually doing” is

making war on subsistence through their joint interest in

industrializing every aspect of culture and every element of

livelihood—the project that marks out homo economicus from “all other

human beings.” Marx’s “proletarians” with “a world to win” and “nothing

to lose but their chains” are, in fact, tightening their fetters by

trying to improve their position in the kingdom of scarcity rather than

fighting for a restoration of the commons. The true universal class is

the shadow workers—all those who toil “unproductively” in the shadow of

production.

Marx had no idea that the working class would become subdued and

domesticated by the ‘development of their productive forces’, that the

industrialisation of their lives would force them to surrender to the

God of Productivity, and lay waste a natural world in which scarcity

does not exist. Marx was unable to predict that eventually everyone —

meaning the individual psyche of everyone on earth — would inevitably

become a ‘means of production’, a virtual capitalist-industry of one,

working in front of, and psychologically welded to, the factory of the

screen. How can you ‘seize the means of production’, as Marx told us to

do, when this means of production is your self? Who or what is to do the

seizing? Marx had no answer to this question. Not because he could not

imagine a world dominated by, say, the internet, but because he did not

— could not — ask any critical questions of the technocratic priesthood

he was part of, and in some senses the founding prophet of.

Marx was the first stagversive, or professional radical; promising

revolution, freedom, equality and other such marvels, but, in his actual

assumptions and actions, supporting the system, and helping to develop

it. He was uncritical of technology or of the techno-bureaucratic class

of functionaries (managers, professionals, politicians, trade-union

leaders) it engendered, he was contemptuous of the power of the rural

poor and the working class (the peasantry and the ‘insufficiently

developed’ proletariat, both of which were, for Marx, dispensable before

the almighty laws of history) to manage their own affairs, he was

supportive of colonial wars, provided they worked towards his statist

revolution, and he was committed to a monstrously crude theory of human

life, history and experience with nothing of interest to say about life

beyond it. This is why he was feted by the bourgeois press, by edgy

radicals like John Stuart Mill, by company-men, by progressive

businessmen and by ‘revolutionary leaders’, of whom, several decades

after Marx’s death, Lenin was to be the most notorious, tyrannical

exemplar.

If this were all, we could safely forget about him, but in all these key

respects he is identical to the the countless socialists, communists and

nominal anarchists[4] who followed him, which is why, once we have

extracted the few observations of priceless value he made — along with

those within the indispensable critique of capitalism he initiated (e.g.

those of Braverman, Baran & Sweezy, Mumford, Ellul, Fromm, Berger and

many, many others) — why it is so important to understand and completely

reject his crude, hyper-rational theorising, his brutally insensitive

authoritarianism, his pathetically gradualist reformist — and statist —

politics, his monomaniacal worship of technological, bourgeois-managed

progress, his naked contempt for ordinary people and his celebration of

the civilising machine which makes slaves of us all.

Goodbye Mr. Marx.

An updated version of this essay appears in

Ad Radicem

, a collection of radical reflections on the system and the self.

[1] The Rebel, Albert Camus

[2] See

Self and Unself

[3] Or that hunger is caused by belief in food — obviously it is not —

or that coercive propaganda in a hierarchical economic system doesn’t

depend on that hierarchy to be accepted — obviously it does.

[4] The social-democrat Chomsky-Bookchin-Graeber-type, and the

nihilistic ‘against everything’ Sex-Pistol type.