Dragons and Tigers
It is of course usual in Philosophy for ideas to ‘grow’ in the misusing. One philosopher has an idea, and another comes along, and by misapplying that idea, breaks open some of its hidden implications, and drives the thought elsewhere. It is however often rather difficult to trace all the intricacies and subtleties involved within this process. The process is often rather indirect and hidden, and almost more present in implication than in simple traceable reality. One such relationship is surely between Machiavelli and Marx (who knew his Machiavelli well).
Everyone these days of course thinks they know Machiavelli, when they have read or at least heard of his first book ‘The Prince’. In this book, Machiavelli starts from two assumptions. On the one hand, stable government is always better than chaos. The implication then being that anything that promotes stable government is good, no matter what. This first assumption is of course the very stuff of realpolitik. It is better to oppress, police or occasionally torture others (including one’s own citizens) if through that process, ‘peace’ is maintained. On the other hand Machiavelli takes it as a working assumption in ‘The Prince’, that ultimate power must be wielded by one individual, a prince, who alone is charged with making all the ‘executive’ decisions which keep the show moving forward.
The implications of these two assumptions are obvious enough. Not only can a prince not behave according to the norms of conventional morality; but also, and even more importantly, as the fate of the state is tied up with their own personality, they must enhance at all times their own reputation, and thence their power and influence over the state as a whole. The Machiavellian prince is therefore every inch a modern media ‘savvy’ politician. Princes and Politicians are aware that they are reliant on certain ‘forces’ (colleagues or journalists) to act at all; and yet these same forces will at a moment’s notice turn against that politician, and politically (if not actually) rend them limb from limb. It is only a politician’s ‘extended’ personality, that is, Blair’s smile and charm or George Bush’s ‘homeliness’ (a quality lost on the British) that save them from this fate, and does so only as long as that face is maintained. Politicians therefore act fiercely to defend their own image, and regularly confuse that image with government itself.
None of this really should come as a surprise. Machiavelli’s political society and ours are really rather similar, in that in both, political power is wielded by a relatively small clique (for him the Prince, for us the politicians and political journalists), who know of each other intimately. Power is therefore is both cases, the game of using the relationships within these cliques (where image is defined) to gain a legitimacy beyond it. This legitimacy then confirms one’s status within the clique itself (a popular politician is unassailable, an unpopular one is no longer viable). It is no wonder that the media look at Machiavelli’s Prince with such foolish delight: For it seems to justify their very soul.
However in this foolish wonder, the same journalists forget (or else never knew) that Machiavelli wrote a second, far more difficult book. In this book on democracy, ‘Discourses on Livy’, Machiavelli considers the potential powers and pitfalls of running a country not by supreme executive power, but rather through plebiscite and mass participation. Such a state is beset with problems of dissention, which restrict its size, and composition (the people must all be able to agree). And yet if this state could be made to work, Machiavelli thinks it clearly has a very great internal power of its own. For an entire people acting together en masse, can achieve things no prince could dream of. In history the obvious example is revolutionary France. Here was a state that appeared down and out. Defeated by Prussia and Austria in war and gripped by starvation and internal rebellion at home. And yet in the matter of two years (1792-1794) the entire situation had been turned around. France had an army of two million citizens, who, acting together routed the professional invading armies, and suppressed all internal dissention. In more modern times one need only to think of Vietnam or Iran to see similar examples, of a state in the midst of revolutionary turmoil defying the odds and beating back the forces of reaction.
Machiavelli presents us with a profoundly dualist account of political power. Power is either in the hands of the prince and their court (or politicians and their journalists); or genuinely in the hands of the people. It is therefore either concentrated within a single locus, and effective as long as that point of focus remains, or is spread evenly throughout a state, and across numerous different interconnected loci. It is then this duality that Marx essentially takes up and develops in a way that is quite his own. However one needs considerable caution here, that one finds within Marx the correct duality to develop. Marx’s duality might be said to rest on a double mismatching of powers, - the second mismatch originating and growing out of the first (in a way that is to a degree at least, dialectical).
To understand this fully, one needs to start with the pre-industrial world. This was of course a world which Marx, coming as he did from rural Germany, felt he knew so very well. In this world, employment has two rather distinct characteristics of its own. Firstly there are those traditional jobs which everyone or anyone might do. Building wattle and daub houses or ploughing a field were not ‘specialisms’. Most peasants could do a large number of things. Additionally in all these occupations, a peasant used the existing forces of nature to aid their endeavours. Nature is therefore very much a part of the peasant’s world. The peasant lifestyle was surely what Marx had in mind when he claimed that in his communist society a man might be a farmer, a hunter, a fisherman or a critic, and yet be none of them. It was a world where occupation was multi-focus, and volatile. The strength of the peasant lifestyle was that each person was many things. And yet the same lifestyle was of course not only utterly caught in a trap of poverty but also of social exclusion. To be a peasant was to be caught up in production, and never to be able to escape that lifestyle. This restriction is all the more absolute as the forces of nature which the peasant uses are only those that are ready at hand: a peasant has no ability to modify or mitigate those forces, and must rather remain their subject. A peasant might be as multi-focused as they like within their peasanthood, and yet could never move beyond being a peasant. The power of a people to do many things, and act in many ways, was therefore very firmly locked in place.
Secondly, following Adam Smith, Marx saw that the initial way out of peasanthood actually reduced what people could do. In becoming the specialist or artisan, in dividing up labour into small repeatable and rational tasks, one could move beyond the single orbit of a life. Each task (be it pin making or stitching a jacket) could be individually improved and the technique advanced. There was therefore nothing delimiting the exact amounts of goods that could be produced (or their costs). Thence the world of the artisan might sacrifice the profound universalism of the peasant, and yet it gained the ability to advance and progress, through specialisms.
Thence Machiavelli’s dream of a people or a state is strangely modified. One can have a people, who are multi-focal in themselves, and yet caught up in a trap in which that power is utterly defined, and unproductive beyond its immediate orbit (a prince knows what his peasants are and what they will do, and the peasant has no ability to move beyond this fact). Alternatively one might have a world of specialisms. Each profession is therefore located in the one individual, who acts as its ‘prince’, and is able to advance his technique as he can. In this, the entire system will progress, and yet in that progression, each individual will be more and more caught up in their own specific occupation. In the first option, economic power might be held in a very real sense within a community, and yet that community is powerless. In the other, the power itself might be open, and reach beyond itself, and yet it will never be owned by any one profession or even by the people as a whole, for it is never their power. Hence Adam Smith’s phrase of ‘an invisible hand’.
It is on this world that the second set of dualities mentioned above falls, as through money and machines the entire situation is once again transformed. Taking money as the starting point: Marx famously spends the first chapter of ‘Das Capital’ considering what it is that makes capital so different from simple money. Money, he suggests, originated as a simple means to exchange goods. Thus far an artisan behaved in a way akin to their peasant forebears. They made goods, and exchanged goods to live. What changes however in capitalism, was that money itself becomes the goal of the system. A capitalist artisan produces goods only as a means to increase their overall capital.
Once this move has occurred, the possibility of improving a production technique identified above at once comes into its own, but is also distorted. It comes into its own in the sense that those artisan capitalists who have the best techniques are the ones who will make the most money. Progress is therefore directly rewarded. Moreover there is no logical termination in this saga of improvement. However at the same time, all improvements become about making money. One does not therefore improve a technique for the sake of art, or to have time off. Or rather, if one actually did so, one is put at a ‘competitive disadvantage’ with those artisan capitalists who do not do so, and so lose out to them over the medium term. Skill to challenge and change the situation might be rewarded, and yet only if it is also the skill to make money.
Money therefore at once creates a medium by which a person (and so a people) might ‘own’ the forces of production themselves (or at least be a part of that ownership). And yet the price which they pay for that inclusion is a heavy one, as the very condition of entry precludes which forces of progress can be productively improved, and which cannot, as only those improvements which can be directly fed back as profits, matter.
It is then on this system that finally machines fall. Machines gut the artisan’s power, by taking it utterly into themselves. The division of labour becomes in the process no human concern at all, but is rather the concern of the machine. The ‘mechanical’ nature of the capitalist process is directly embodied, improvements becomes solely about making money, and machines triumph over artisans as they offer a quicker and far cheaper way to endlessly improve a production process. Thence the history of capitalism, with its repeated crises, becomes the history of money and machines, through the agency of invention, excluding people from the production process itself. So that humans as a whole, lose the right to own the forces of production through the very agency (money) that initially allowed them to claim a degree of ownership to these forces in the first place. While at the same time, in the machine (which capital conjures up), humans see the end point of all their inventiveness. For machines break open the very powers of nature itself (or at least claim that they do), and these powers then, once liberated, transform the world. It is as if a Machiavellian democracy had been, through machines, expanded to include the very powers of nature itself. Even though, of course the capitalist cannot truly realize this power, which they seek to lock within the conventional language of ownership and property (the language of the prince).
It is this last restriction, which for Marx, will prove capitalism’s undoing. The entire logic of the situation undoes ownership as the capitalist understands it. For ultimately that ownership assumes that there are others elsewhere, who also own property, and are therefore able to buy whatever goods the capitalist produces. And yet the entire logic of machines (and the capitalism that drives them) is to reduce the number of such individuals, and their freedom to act merely as consumers. Machines, Marx suggests, ultimately will betray capitalism, as they destroy that working assumption of the artisan, that there are always others, other artisans or folk to sell their goods to.
This last prediction appears of course not to have come true. Capitalism learnt its lesson from Marx. It realized that it needed to produce endless new ‘non-capitalists’ be it through Empire or protectionism or currency exchange. The ‘economic system’ thereby acted to ‘put off’ the moment when it ran out of people to trade with, and thereby changed Marx’s argument from a prediction of what will happen, to a mere parameter of what might (if a certain tendency within the system were allowed to come to fruition).
Put in terms of Machiavelli, Marx, in his final vision offers a world of pure democracy, where the forces that have been liberated are no longer purely human, but also included the powers of nature itself. In creating such a world, humanity enters into a second ‘peasanthood’: A life of myriad occupations, and multiple potential points of focus. The difference of course being that this time around, as the forces of nature themselves are directly included in the system, the peasant is free to rework all their occupations as occasion and circumstance allow. Thence in the final stage of humanity, Marx sees a communist society, stripping out the last vestiges of the ‘prince’, that is of centralized control, and the true freeing up of the democratic.
However at this point there is clearly something rather wrong with this vision. On the one hand, there is the smug point made above, that Capitalists can by calling on the reserves of the executive princes, the politicians, act in such a manner, that the full import of the capitalist system is never fully realized. That is, they can act to ‘save Adam Smith’s idealism’ from the harsh (and otherwise all too true) realisms of Marx (who knew that machines by themselves shattered Smith’s theory). On the other hand, the entire issue of climate change makes one worry whether there does not remain just too much ‘humanity’, within the Marxist model. Maybe the world itself does not ‘wish’ to co-operate with a human democracy. Maybe it has power of its own, that is not to be pulled off into human concerns (or that fights back). Maybe in the final analysis, the Marxist model retains humans as the prince of an uncooperative, unquiet, and undead nature, whose full power Marx might struggle to realize. A point I will return to next week
