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Marx and Genesis of Poverty

III. Marx and Genesis of Poverty Marxian theory of the historical process of development of the human society gives an excellent account of the genesis of poverty and inequality. From economic standpoint Marx divides the process of development of human society till his time into four major stages: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism and capitalism. He predicts that capitalism would be replaced by socialism, which again will ultimately dissolve into Communism, a Classless Stateless society. At the first stage, during primitive communism, poverty in the modern sense did not exist (poverty in the modern sense is meaningful only when its opposite, viz. opulence, exists). It was simply limitation of amenities, applicable to all members of a clan, because of limited knowledge to explore natural resources to meet human demand. These clan societies were characterized by equality. To quote: "The household was communistic, comprising several, and often many, families. Whatever was produced and used in common was common property: the house, the garden, the long boat" (Engels 1884, Ch-IX, P.155). Man-nature conflict gradually led to improvement in methods of production-man gradually having more and more command over Nature with its increasing knowledge. With acceleration of this process by increasing social division of labour, surplus over and above consumption requirements started emerging. And at the same time human values pertaining to fellow feeling and equality started degenerating into slavery-oppression of one class of people by another. To quote: "The increase of production in all branches-cattle breeding, agriculture, domestic handicraftsenabled human labour power to produce more than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time, it increased the amount of work that daily fell to the lot of every member of the gens or household community or single family. The addition of more labour power became desirable. This was furnished by war; captives were made slaves. Under the given general historical conditions, the first great social division of labour, by increasing the productivity of labour, that is, wealth, and enlarging the field of production, necessarily carried slavery in its wake. Out of the first great social division of labour arose the first great division of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited." (Ibid. P. 157) "The continued increase of production and with it the increased productivity of labour enhanced the value of human labour power. Slavery, which had been a nascent and sporadic factor in the preceding stage, now became an essential part of the social system" (Ibid. P. 159). "The distinction between rich and poor was added to that between freemen and slaves-with the new division of labour came a new division of society into classes" (Ibid. P. 160). With the emergence of money as the most convenient medium of exchange and the emergence of the parasitic merchant class, the process of property ownership and accumulation of wealth by a few and the consequent poverty and inequality were further crystallized. To quote: "Here a class appears for the first time which, without taking any part in production, captures the management of production as a whole and economically subjugates the producers to its rule; a class that makes itself the indispensable intermediary between any two producers and exploits them both." (Ibid. P. 162) "The commodity of commodities, which conceals within itself all other commodities, was discovered; the charm that can transform itself at will into anything desirable and desired.

III. Marx and Genesis of Poverty Marxian theory of the historical process of development of the human society gives an excellent account of the genesis of poverty and inequality. From economic standpoint Marx divides the process of development of human society till his time into four major stages: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism and capitalism. He predicts that capitalism would be replaced by socialism, which again will ultimately dissolve into Communism, a Classless Stateless society. At the first stage, during primitive communism, poverty in the modern sense did not exist (poverty in the modern sense is meaningful only when its opposite, viz. opulence, exists). It was simply limitation of amenities, applicable to all members of a clan, because of limited knowledge to explore natural resources to meet human demand. These clan societies were characterized by equality. To quote: “The household was communistic, comprising several, and often many, families. Whatever was produced and used in common was common property: the house, the garden, the long boat” (Engels 1884, Ch-IX, P.155). Man-nature conflict gradually led to improvement in methods of production – man gradually having more and more command over Nature with its increasing knowledge. With acceleration of this process by increasing social division of labour, surplus over and above consumption requirements started emerging. And at the same time human values pertaining to fellow feeling and equality started degenerating into slavery – oppression of one class of people by another. To quote: “The increase of production in all branches – cattle breeding, agriculture, domestic handicrafts – enabled human labour power to produce more than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time, it increased the amount of work that daily fell to the lot of every member of the gens or household community or single family. The addition of more labour power became desirable. This was furnished by war; captives were made slaves. Under the given general historical conditions, the first great social division of labour, by increasing the productivity of labour, that is, wealth, and enlarging the field of production, necessarily carried slavery in its wake. Out of the first great social division of labour arose the first great division of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.” (Ibid. P. 157) “The continued increase of production and with it the increased productivity of labour enhanced the value of human labour power. Slavery, which had been a nascent and sporadic factor in the preceding stage, now became an essential part of the social system” (Ibid. P. 159). “The distinction between rich and poor was added to that between freemen and slaves – with the new division of labour came a new division of society into classes” (Ibid. P. 160). With the emergence of money as the most convenient medium of exchange and the emergence of the parasitic merchant class, the process of property ownership and accumulation of wealth by a few and the consequent poverty and inequality were further crystallized. To quote: “Here a class appears for the first time which, without taking any part in production, captures the management of production as a whole and economically subjugates the producers to its rule; a class that makes itself the indispensable intermediary between any two producers and exploits them both.” (Ibid. P. 162) “The commodity of commodities, which conceals within itself all other commodities, was discovered; the charm that can transform itself at will into anything desirable and desired. Whoever possessed it ruled the world of production; and who had it above all others? The merchants.” (Ibid. P. 163) “Besides wealth in commodities and slaves, besides money wealth, wealth in the form of land came into being.” (Ibid. P. 163) Continued material progress, made possible by man’s increasing command over Nature, ultimately paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in the capitalistic or bourgeois society. Capitalism enhanced the pace of materialistic development but at the same time it facilitated more ruthless exploitation of the labour class turning them into proletariats. To quote: “With slavery, which reached its fullest development in civilization, came the first great split of society into an exploiting and an exploited class. This split has continued during the whole period of civilization. Slavery was the first form of exploitation, peculiar to the world of antiquity; it was followed by serfdom in the Middle Ages, and by wage labour in modern times. These are three great forms of servitude, characteristic of the three great epochs of civilization; open, and, latterly, disguised slavery, are its steady companions” (Ibid. P. 172). “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole population conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?” (Marx and Engels 1948, Ch-1, P. 48) “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” (Ibid. Ch-1, P. 51) Now as regards the cause of oppression, exploitation, and increasing poverty and inequality along with material progress Marx and Engels held class society and the institution of private property responsible. But because of either superficial observation or obsession with some specific motive, they failed to visualize that these are but manifestations of some deeper cause inherent in human nature. They, in fact, identified the effect as the cause and lapsed into the tautological fallacy. They also invented the concept of class struggle as the sole cause of transformation of human society from one stage to another and also found in it the ultimate means of resolving the problem. To quote: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” (Ibid. Ch-1, PP. 40-41) “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” (Ibid. Ch-1, P. 41) Marx insisted on overthrowing the existing State Machinery with the help of the weapon of ‘class struggle’, and replacing it by the rule of the proletariat class, the immediate task of which would be to abolish private property. To quote: “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties; formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of power by the proletariat.” (Ibid. Ch-2, P. 62) “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” (Ibid. Ch-2, P. 63) The class struggle would continue and ultimately end up in a classless, stateless, family- less society of eternal bliss. To quote: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.” (Ibid. Ch-2, P. 68) “The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.” (Engels, op. cit. P.170) Marx and Engels strongly asserted that their concepts had been derived from historical facts rather than invention. To quote: “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.” (Marx and Engels op. cit. Ch-2, P. 62) The conviction of Marx and Engels that class struggle had played the crucial role in every qualitative transition of human society in the past is hardly convincing – it is neither supported by historical facts nor can it be substantiated by any logically consistent theory. So is also the prediction of a stateless-classless society. Moreover their apparently factual stages of development were based mainly on the observations of the economic history of some developed European countries, especially, the United Kingdom. These stages are difficult to find in Asiatic countries like India, China etc. Now think of the so called proletarian philosophy. The depth of knowledge and introspection required to grasp the essence of the Marxian world outlook can hardly be found among the wage-earning class. Thus it is simply a world outlook invented by the speculative faculty of a highly intelligent and well read middleclass intellectual like Karl Marx who claimed it to be springing from the historical experience of the labour class. Nothing could be more ludicrous than this. Ironically, the Socialistic States, which were conceived as a means to do away with social injustice, ultimately degenerated into another instrument of human slavery (Fast 1957, Solzhenitsyn 1969, 1971, 1985). Ultimately, most of the oppressive socialist regimes collapsed during late 1980s and early 1990s4. Marx failed to realize (because of either superficial observation or myopic view or parochial obsessions) that causes of poverty, inequality, exploitation and similar maladies do not lie in private property, family relations, the state or any other visible phenomenon as such, but it lies deep in human nature, in the unethical sentiments like greed, pride, jealousy etc. So, eradication of the maladies, if at all possible, is to be accomplished by some process that would reduce the prevalence of these basic vices in human mind. There has been a misconception (which mainly sprang from the overenthusiastic observations of western authors like Joan Robinson5) that Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was such a process of moral transformation. But any deep observation of the Cultural Revolution would reveal that the Maoist method was simply the shibboleth of class struggle.