Marx and the State of Nature

Marx and the State of Nature STANLEY MOORE I THROUGHOUT HIS CRITIQUES of political economy Marx makes the claim that bourgeois economists, when discussing certain crucial issues, offer in place of theoretical analysis only imaginary history. In the earliest of these critiques, The Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, he writes: Let us not resort to a fictitious primordial condition, as the political economist does when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing. The question is merely pushed back into the grey and nebulous distance. What the theorist is supposed to deduce-for example, the necessary connection between division of labour and exchange--he assumes in the form of facts, events occurring in the past. In like manner theology explains the origin of evil by the fall of man: what ought to be explained is assumed as a fact of history.1 In later critiques this criticism is repeated and elaborated. The standard procedure of classical economists, Marx claims, is to start with the myth of the independent , self-sufficient, individual producer. The second step is to introduce a second myth, the classless economy of independent commodity producers. And the third step is to provide a pseudohistorical account of the transition from this classless economy to the class economy of capitalism. Discussing the problem of method in his Introduction to the Critique o] Political Economy, he writes: The single, isolated hunter or fisher with whom Smith and Ricardo start belongs to the fantasies of the eighteenth century. Such Robinsonades do not by any means represent, as historians of culture believe, a reaction against overrefinement and a return to an erroneously conceived natural state. They represent such primitivisim as little as does Rousseau's social contract, which brings individuals who are independent by nature into intercourse and association through express agreement. Instead they are reflections of that civil society which, starting its development in the sixteenth century, had made giant strides toward maturity in the eighteenth. In that society of free competition the individual seems freed from the bonds of nature and the like which in earlier epochs made him an appendage of some definite, limited, human conglomeration . Before the prophets of the eighteenth century, upon whose shoulders Smith and Ricardo still stand, this individual of the eighteenth century--a product, on the one hand, of the dissolution of the social forms of feudalism, and on the other, of the development of new productive forces since the sixteenth century--hovers as an ideal whose existence belongs to the past. He seems to them, not the result of history, but its starting point.2 1Marx, "0konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte," Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, div. 1, III (Berlin: 1932), man. 1, sec. 4 (Entfremdete Arbeit), para. 5. Cf. Hegel, Phdnomenologie des Geistes (Leipzig: 1937), chap. 7, div. 3, para. 28. For convenience in using other editions, all passages are identified by paragraph number. .. 2Marx, "Einleitung zur Kritik der politischen ~)konomie," Zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Berlin: 1951), sec. 1, para. 2. For further references, see my The Critique of Capitalist Democracy: An Introduction to the Theory of the State in Marx, Engels, and Lenin (New York: 1957), chap. 2, sec. 4, note 3. [133l 134 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Discussing, in his Critique o] Political Economy, Smith's theory of value, Marx writes: Adam, it is true, determines the value of commodities by the labour time they embody; but he relegates the applicability of this principle to pre-Adamic times. What seems clear to him with respect to simple commodities becomes unclear when he considers more complex forms, such as capital, wage labour, and ground rent. So he asserts that the value of commodities once was measured by the labour time they embodied in a lost paradise where men dealt with one another, not as capitalists, wage workers, landlords, tenants, moneylenders, and so on, but only as simple producers and exchangers of commodities.* Discussing, in the first volume of Capital, the origins of capitalism, he writes: This original accumulation plays the same role in political economy as does the fall of man in theology. Adam bit the apple, and as a consequence sin fell upon mankind. Supposedly the source of sin is explained by relating an...