Keynes and the crisis

Here's a column I wrote on Keynes a few weeks ago in Socialist Review. The original is here: http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=12099. To be honest, it's largely derivative of Chris Harman's writing on Keynes, especially his excellent piece from the mid 90s called The Crisis of Bourgeois Economics, which can be read here http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1996/06/bourgecon.htm

The ideas of John Maynard Keynes are back with a vengeance. This has been a consistent theme in the past few years, from the corridors of power to the pages of the Financial Times. After 30 years of deriding Keynes's ideas many are now reconsidering the economic remedies he prescribed.

But Keynes didn't solve the Great Depression. What he did was powerfully polemicise against the idea that the market was best left to its own devices and cutting workers' wages would reduce unemployment.

In the early 20th century mainstream economics was in a muddle. Economists had inherited insights about capitalism from earlier theorists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, which largely rested on the labour theory of value - the idea that the value of commodities derives from the labour time taken to produce them. But they struggled with the implications of this theory, which seemed to suggest, rather dangerously, that the root of all profit was the robbery of workers, who were paid less than the full value of their labour. This is what led Karl Marx to deride capitalism as a system based on exploitation.

To avoid embracing a radical critique of capitalism, mainstream economists looked for an alternative theory that justified the system.

Following John Stuart Mill and Jean Baptiste Say, "neo-classical" and "marginalist" economists decided that, since every buyer was also a seller, economic slumps based on overproduction were logically impossible, because there was always enough money in the system to buy everything that was produced. This is known as "Say's law". They argued that value wasn't an objective measure, but merely an expression of people's subjective estimation of the usefulness or "utility" of goods on the market. If, in reality, all goods were not sold, this must be because greedy sellers were over pricing them.

In their view labour was no different to any other commodity on the market. Unemployment (ie not all labour being sold on the market) was the result of workers demanding too high wages. The solution to unemployment was for workers to accept lower wages and to remove any "artificial" factors pushing up the price of labour, like trade unions or state benefits.

Although Keynes had accepted much of the "neo-classical" position in the 1920s, the slump of the '30s pushed him to attack these theories.

Say's law states that wages and profits paid out after production are equal to the amount needed to pay for the goods produced. But Keynes pointed out that in the real economy profits (and wages to a lesser extent) are not necessarily put to use buying goods or investing: they may simply be saved or hoarded.

Keynes argued that, although reducing money wages could boost a single firm, in the whole economy the effect would be to depress demand for consumer goods, as workers had less money to spend. Workers typically spend more of their income than bosses do, so redistributing income away from workers was likely to further decrease effective demand.

Keynes proposed two alternative remedies. Firstly, governments should drive down interest rates, providing an incentive for the rich to spend more, so expanding demand and stimulating investment. Secondly, governments should enact their own big expenditures, paid for through borrowing. These projects should pay for themselves as the economy grows and tax income increases.

At times Keynes sensed there might be a deeper rot at the heart of the system. He spoke of a decline in "the marginal efficiency of investment". Marx had argued something somewhat similar - that there was a long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This meant there was a tendency for the system to spiral into crisis that could not be arrested by tweaking government spending or interest rates - but this was a conclusion Keynes could not accept, so he shied away from fully investigating the fundamentals of the system.

Even so, the proposals Keynes did advance would have required huge government intervention in the economy to be effective. At one point he suggested that "a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment." But he held back from arguing for this. He tailored his policies to the psychology of capitalists, because if government actions frightened them they wouldn't invest. Some of Keynes's speeches were spiced with radical rhetoric, but his practical policies were painfully timid.

Nevertheless a version of "Keynesianism" became dominant after the Second World War. This was a doctrine stripped of any of the radical implications of Keynes's work, so that it could now be married with elements of "neoclassical" thought.

Keynes was right to argue against cutting workers' wages and to sneer at the sanctity of the market. But his attempts to explain the system were limited by his loyalty to bosses' interests. He tried to save capitalism from itself - and failed.

Tame sexism? Shakespeare, oppression and us

Last week I went to see the Globe’s production of The Taming of the Shrew. By the end of the play, I sensed that a question lingered on the lips of many in the audience: can performing this play really be justified nowadays? 

On the face of it, the story is irredeemably tainted by chauvinism and sexism. Katherina, daughter of the extremely wealthy Baptista, is headstrong, mouthy and rude, while her younger sister Bianca appears to be demure and modest. Baptista insists he will only allow Bianca to marry after Katherina has. Enter the swaggering (and slightly unhinged) Petruchio, who vows to tame the shrewish Kate in order to obtain her substantial dowry, much to the delight of Bianca's competing suitors. Petruchio, half dressed, literally drags Katherina to the alter. On their honeymoon he deprives her of food and sleep, and insists she agree with everything he says, including calling the sun the moon. This “taming” eventually succeeds: Kate proves herself to be a more deferential wife than her tricksy sister.  

Inevitably it is Katherina’s closing speech that is the most uncomfortable for a modern audience to hear: 

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,

Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;

And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty

Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign; 

She concludes: 

My mind hath been as big as one of yours,

My heart as great, my reason haply more,

To bandy word for word and frown for frown;

But now I see our lances are but straws,

Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,

That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.

Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,

And place your hands below your husband's foot:

In token of which duty, if he please,

My hand is ready; may it do him ease. 

(V.ii) 

Of course, for much of the preceding action Katherina has been charging about the stage smashing lutes over the bloke’s heads, kicking them in the bollocks and so on - but this sets up the submissive resolution that follows. Petruchio succeeds in clipping her wings and, indeed, her name: imperious “Katherina” is reduced by his repeated demand, “Kiss me Kate”. 

For anyone not familiar with the play, it’s worth repeating: most of the performance isn't taken up with sexist lectures on the weakness of women, but on comedy that hinges (as so often in Shakespeare) on mistaken and misleading identities. The subplot involves Bianca's competing suitors trying serendipitously to woe her by dressing up as tutors, getting hired by Baptista to teach her. 

Why bother? 

Still, this is pretty standard Shakespearean fare – why bother with Shrew when there are so many alternatives that are not so tainted by crude sexism? Infact Shrew has been performed a lot recently. This Globe production follows an RSC production earlier this year, their fourth in ten years. Why? Surely, in a society where expressing the view that women are inferior to men is thankfully considered unacceptable by most, we can quietly shelve this play that parades the blatant sexism of a past age? 

The Globe's season brochure provides an important clue: “Shakespeare's most outrageous comedy, The Taming of the Shrew introduces one of theatre’s great screwball double-acts, a couple hell-bent on confusing and outwitting each other right up to the play’s equivocal and controversial conclusion.” 

This is a very interesting apology (i.e. justification). Petruchio and Katherina are presented here as an equal double-act: she’s going to give as good as she gets. Presumably, this should assuage our outrage at the sexist premise. But again, the ending cannot be glossed over so easily. “Controversial” seems straightforward – but surely the play is not innately controversial? Strictly speaking, no work of art, literature or drama can be innately controversial - controversy is created socially, it is a common response that cannot be abstracted from the context within which it is generated. We may find Shrew controversial, but Shakespeare’s original audience may not have done. 

Equivocation 

An answer to this is suggested by the use of the word “equivocal”. This is a very significant word, which means that something is open to multiple, possibly contradictory interpretations. Depending on the context, it can imply an attempt to deceive. The implication in this context is that, while we might find the argument for women’s inferiority “controversial”, we shouldn’t necessarily take it at face value.  

Anyone who watched James Shapiro’s recent documentary for the BBC, The King and the Playwright [1], will be aware that the word “equivocation” came into common parlance in England with the Gunpowder Plot. Henry Garnet, who was executed as a Gunpowder conspirator, was revealed to be the author of a treatise on equivocation, which argued that Catholics might legitimately make false statements when questioned about their faith, while secretly remaining faithful to God and Rome. Shakespeare uses the word in Macbeth (“Faith, here’s an equivocator” II.iii), but in truth his plays had long relied on equivocal speech and equivocating characters. This is true of virtually all drama, in which ambiguity, deception and confusion between characters gives rise to “dramatic irony” in which the audience is aware of information that is unknown to one or more characters. 

An interesting article in the Guardian a few months ago related some alternative interpretations from various directors of the plays who point to some of the more ambiguous or equivocal parts of the play which may make its conclusion easier to swallow. [2] Peter Hall thinks the cruelty of Katherina's treatment should be foregrounded because Shakespeare is "championing women's rights" by showing just how badly they were treated. Lucy Bailey thinks Katherina and Petrucio's fighting is all just foreplay, just a kinky game. Gregory Duncan and David Farr think we should pay attention to Petruchio's disturbed mental state - early on in the play we learn his father has recently died. Kathryn Hunter, who has twice play Katherina, says that we can't understand the central relationship unless we understand falconry. Pertuchio's denial of food and sleep to Katherina mirrors the methods used to socialise birds of prey. Crucially, he endures these deprivations alongside her.

Hmm. Methinks the directors doth protest too much. There is a whiff of desperation in some of these attempts to explain away Shrew’s misogyny. Perhaps the most convincing argument starts by pointing out that the misogyny in the play is by no means limited to Petruchio's abuse. Baptista can plausibly be regarded as the real villain. He is the one who insists that Bianca cannot be married before Katherina and takes for granted his right to bargain away his daughters at the right price. He places the "taming" within the context of much more deep rooted sexism, encoded within accepted common practices in society. Though of course this can reinforce the apparent horror of the "taming", it could also provide its excuse. Katherina's speech comes after the men (including Petruchio) all bet on whether their wives will appear when called for. Katherina here does seem to be knowingly playing along with the game, perceiving the situation and decided to help Petruchio win the bet. It's possible to think therefore that Katherina, having fallen in love with Petruchio, is now conspiring with him to punish her conniving family. This is the kind of ending seen in the BBC's "Shakespeare Retold" adaptation of Shrew from a few years ago; the modern Kate still says she would put her hand beneath her husband's boot, but immediately qualifies it by saying he would never ask her to, because he only expects her to do what he would be prepared to do himself. [3]

Such an interpretation is, I think, tenable in a modern performance of the original text - but only just. I'd agree with Michael Billington that the Globe's interpretation is "a broad, knockabout Shrew that doesn't g in much for psychological depth and presents Katherin's final specch of submission without irony." [4] Part of the trouble is that hints that Katherina may be ironically subverting sexism are not woven into the heart of the plot of Shrew. Though its possible to detect some unease about the sexist premise (the "taming" is technically a play within a play, the drunken dream of Christopher Sly presented in the Induction), the "taming" is not really the subject of our critical attention in the same way that the crushing of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, for example, definitely is. We're supposed to accept the "taming" frame and then concentrate on the unfolding farce. I think this is why attempts at a “progressive” rendering of the play, though they are not without some textual justification, are always likely to feel a little forced. 

Emer O’Toole, in a recent Comment is Free piece, also for the Guardian, is less generous: 

Shakespeare is full of classism, sexism, racism and defunct social mores. The Taming of the Shrew (aka The Shaming of the Vagina-Bearer) is about as universally relevant as the chastity belt. I'm sick of directors tying themselves up in conceptual knots, trying to frame poor Katherina as some kind of feminist heroine. The Merchant of Venice (Or The Evil Jew) is about as universal as the Nuremberg laws. What's that? Shakespeare allows Shylock to express the progressive sentiment that Jews are people before confiscating his property and forcing him to convert to Christianity, therefore Merchant is actually a humanist text? Come off it, sister. [5] 

Comment is free but as ever, subtlety is at a premium. O’Toole is right to be irritated by yawnsome claims for Shakespearean “universality”, and her reminder that Shakespeare’s plays have been used in the service of imperialism is true as far as it goes but doesn't support her conclusions. Sadly she can’t be bothered to deal with any sophisticated counter arguments, so simply dismisses them as sentimental claptrap. O’Toole seems to want to condemn Shakespeare not so much for being offensive as for being offensively old fashioned in comparison with our enlightened age - hence the weird objection to “defunct social mores” along with classism, sexism and racism.  

If I wrote a play about the Nuremburg laws, no doubt it would be full of classism, sexism and racism, but asserting that fact wouldn’t get you very far in assessing whether it was any good or not - and it might be a tad unfair to label me a bigot simply because I wrote a play about bigotry. Of course, it’s possible to argue that the racism, sexism and classism expressed by Shakespearean characters (some of whom are villains) is endorsed by the narrative logic of the plays – that they are a celebration, rather than an examination, of these forms of prejudice. But in reality this is a difficult argument to sustain. 

The difficulty lies in the fact that Shakespeare always resists playing the ideologue. He’s a literary thief, forever stealing and recreating old stories, histories, myths and plot structures. His ability lay in introducing huge complexity into otherwise fairly straightforward, familiar or hackneyed narrative structures. He delights in evoking sympathy for villains and encouraging critical distance from heroes.  

The social making of meaning

But I’m still repeating a conceit that we ought now to ditch. We cannot base our assessment of Shakespeare’s plays on our guesses as to his personal intentions, opinions or political inclinations, and not just because information about Shakespeare’s life and career is notoriously scant. Not only is it impossible ever to know the inner motivations of a dead writer, in fact it is not possible to arrive at a "pure" original meaning from which interpretations deviate. Even living writers are not at liberty to dictate what is and isn't a true understanding of their work. 

Even if I jot down a few ideas on a page that I never show to anyone, or speak aloud in an empty room, I am still creating meaning socially. I still rely on socially excepted codes of expression, ideas, language and communicative conventions created by human society. There is no escaping language. 

In a play this process is clearly manifest and multi-layered. The playwright, director, actors, backstage crew and audience all actively collaborate to create the meaning of the performance – though naturally this meaning can be, and usually is, both ambiguous and contested. A writer's biography might give us clues to the meaning of their texts, but the danger is always that this is taken to be the "correct" meaning - a position which obscures, and abrogates our responsibility for, the social making of meaning.  

This argument does not have to lead into a pit of complete relativism. That meaning is socially created doesn’t mean that anything goes: there are not an infinite number of possible interpretations of Shrew that directors can conjure. All productions are powerfully shaped by Shakespeare’s text on the one hand and the prevailing ideological climate (or, better, structures of feeling) of the society receiving the performance, which finally manifests itself in the audience’s response, mediated by their active consciousness. Given all this it is possible to observe, as I have done above, instances where modern directors are stretching the meaning of the play, as it were, against the grain of the text, making full use of amenable ambiguities. This tendency speaks volumes about our society as well the play itself.  

Nonetheless, this reasoning does lead to the rather uncomfortable conclusion that we, audiences, are at least partly responsible for the meaning of a play like The Taming of the Shrew. 

Telling Petruchio to piss off 

In the Globe performance of Shrew I saw, the actor playing Petruchio used one of his lines to appeal to the audience, pantomime-style, to support his taming of Katherina. The vast majority of the audience, swept up in the pacey performance, responded positively - but there were also a few pointed shouts of “no!”. Does this mean that, save a few brave dissenters, most of the audience were sexist? Of course not - no more so than that an audience which cheers the coronation of Richard III are condoning the murder of small boys. 

However, I was relieved that some in the audience shouted “no!”. At the same time I was well aware that the performance wouldn’t work unless the majority of the audience consented, suspending their beliefs along with their disbelief. A show of dissent cannot dissolve the real contradictions this play plays on.  

I reckon that an audience in a society free from sexism would be unlikely to feel uncomfortable watching this play – they probably wouldn’t bother going to see it at all or find it of any interest. There’s no reason to think that any of Shakespeare’s plays will seem meaningful to audiences for ever, in all kinds of future societies. The frisson that Shrew continues to create for modern audiences is based on the fact that we recognise many of the characteristics of Early Modern misogyny in contemporary capitalist society.  

Katherina’s speech is difficult to listen to because she expresses the logic of sexism pushed to its extreme but logical conclusion – a husband’s boot crushing his submissive wife’s hand. Watching The Taming of the Shrew today is an uncomfortable experience because it reminds us that oppression has not disappeared, but endures, cloaked in new forms and old prejudices, lurking beneath both crude and equivocal phrases. 

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h23lr 

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jan/17/taming-of-the-shrew-rsc 
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvRpxPWgUPc
[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jul/05/taming-of-the-shrew-review

[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/21/shakespeare-universal-cultural-imperialism 

Explaining the dialectic

Here are my notes from a meeting I did last month at Marxism 2012. Videos of many of the meetings are online - check them out here: http://www.youtube.com/user/swpTvUk  

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that one of the themes of this meeting is going to be contradiction.

In that spirit, I’d like to begin by contradicting Lenin.

Lenin famously suggested that it is impossible to understand Marx’s Capital, and by implication it’s impossible to understand the Marxist method, without having read and fully understood all of Hegel’s Science of Logic.

Now, of course, I should point out that Lenin is making an important point in a characteristically hyperbolic way. He’s arguing that Hegel’s ideas are central to Marxism - that if we lose sight of Hegel we risk losing sight of the fundamentals of Marxism itself. He’s right.

Nonetheless, I think we should take up Lenin’s point as a kind of challenge. I think it is possible, even in the space of a short meeting like this, to grasp the dialectic, and therefore the fundamentals of the Marxist method, even if you know nothing about it at the moment.

Some of you may already have a good idea what the dialectic is all about, but I’m not going to assume any knowledge at all.

The funny thing is, even if you haven’t the faintest idea what the dialectic is, I bet you’ve used dialectical reasoning to think through a tricky argument. Conversely, you’ll have encountered people deploying very undialectical thinking - and you might have instinctively realised that they were approaching the argument the wrong way, but couldn’t necessarily put your finger on why.

Marx’s magnum opus, Capital, is often cited as the supreme application of the dialectical method. The trouble is that Marx never fully explains the methodology behind it, except in often quite cryptic asides and footnotes. The dialectical method is implicit in the whole of Capital, but it would have been easier if Marx had spelled it out more clearly. As with some many topics Marx intended to write an explanation of his dialectic method, but, rather selfishly, he died before getting around to it.

In this meeting, I’m going to try to make Marx’s method explicit. In the process, I’m going to try to make you all conscious of the kind of thought and reasoning that you might previously have applied unconsciously.

Dialogue and the dialectic

The word “dialectic” comes from the word “dialogue”. Dialogue of course simply means a conversation between two or more people.

But in ancient Greek philosophy the word acquired a more expansive meaning. The clashing of two opposed points of view was seem as the way of getting to the truth. No single viewpoint could be entirely trusted - instead the process of debate between different perspectives was thought to lead to the truth.

This is why many ancient Greek philosophers were also playwrights. Their plays used dialogue to explore philosophical arguments, while their philosophic tracts were often similarly structured as a contrived conversation between opposing points of view.

It’s a familiar idea to all of us that in a debate contradictions arise between different points of view and that - potentially - a more sophisticated understanding can result from this clash of ideas.

The dialectical method takes this notion much, much further. The dialectic, as developed by Marx and Engels, suggests that the clashing of contradictions can be observed not only in the evolution of ideas but also in social institutions like the economy and the state, and in the flow of history.

At the heart of the dialectic is motion, change, development. For a long time thinkers proceeded from the assumption that the world was made up of static objects, fixed ideas, unchanging social structures. A tree is just a tree; human beings have always fallen in love and fallen out with each other; the free market is eternal.

The dialectic reminds us that everything is in motion - everything is historical, everything has a past and has a future, both of which are different to the present. The tree was once an acorn and will one day wither and decay; the kinds of relationships human beings have with each other have changed radically in different historical situations; capitalism arose because of the action of human beings in particular historical circumstances - and could be abolished by a similar process. Understood through the dialectic, a “moment” is both a single point in time and a snapshot of a longer history.

If I had to some up the dialectic in a couple of sentences, I'd say this: the dialectic is the logic of change through contradiction. It is the theory of the processes involved in single totality ­ in other words, one system or one particular state of affairs ­ changing into another on the basis of its internal contradictions, of the opposing forces at work within it.

It is most significant as a method for understanding social change, change in human society.

If you've heard anything about dialectic you might have heard these expressions before: totality (which I've just mentioned), the unity of opposites, the negation of the negation, the change from quantity into quality,

Those phrases sounds like meaningless jargon - but don't be put off. The dialectic is not a way of sounding clever in academic seminars, nor is it an obscure dogma. Everyone can understand and apply it.

The dialectic helps us to unravel the most complex problems - why at certain moments, such as in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, history radically reconstitutes itself. But is also helps us to figure out more humdrum problems - how can we stop the cuts, how do we build strike action. 

This is the first meeting in the course: a rough guide to the Marxist method. 

In this meeting I’m going to mention the labour process but not fully explain Marx’s understanding of work. I’ll touch on alienation but only in passing. I’m going to highlight the significance of the dialectic for understanding history, but by no means give a full account of historical materialism.

In other words, you’ll have to stay the course if you want to get a full grounding in the Marxist method - of which this meeting is simply laying the foundations.

I think the easiest way to get to grips the dialectic is to briefly look at how it emerged so - I’m going to start by briefly explaining how the philosopher Hegel developed the dialectic in the early 19^th century.

I’ll then move on to explain how Karl Marx and Freiderich Engels adopted, but also radically altered, Hegel’s method as a basis for his revolutionary critique of capitalism.

Finally, I’ll try to draw these threads together by showing why the dialectical method is the keystone for the Marxist method of grasping the contradictions of capitalist society.

In the beginning, there was Hegel

The German philosopher GWF Hegel was born at the climax of the Enlightenment movement in Europe.

Intellectuals associated with the Enlightenment championed science over superstition, toleration over tyranny, education over ignorance.

Enlightenment ideas grew from the revolutionary advances in science and technology made in the 17^th and 18th centuries. Craft manufacture and trading were boosted by huge improvements in dying, metallurgy and navigation, while the increased use of the printing press enabled new ideas to be disseminated like never before.

Accompanying technological advance was the battle of ideas, as Enlightenment thinkers argued, explicitly and implicitly, against feudal authority derived from God, religion or tradition.

           

Hegel was perhaps the last really important inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition. He was also its most important critic, before Marx.

The French Revolution and German backwardness

The French Revolution begun in 1789 was by far the most important event in Hegel’s lifetime. It profoundly shaped his worldview.

This was one of the crucial transitions in human history. French industry, technology and science had advanced to the stage where it was probably only surpassed in England and parts of Holland. The French word for the captains of this new industry was – the bourgeoisie.

But this economic advancement was not matched by political change. The absolute monarchy of King Louis 16th, had, like his predecessors, made efforts to appease the rising bourgeoisie, but had also to contend with the formidable power of the old aristocracy. For years society continued in this way, with the bourgeoisie driving society forward but remaining evicted from political power by the entrenched feudal order. But eventually thousands of subtle changes in the economy built into a tidal wave. Revolution became the most viable way to clear the way for further capitalist development.

Before I move on I want to draw your attention to two points about the description I've just offered, because it wasn't just something I copied from Wikipedia. It's an example of a dialectical analysis.

1.     As economic forces advance, old social and political relations, that had once been quite adequate, become a fetter (or constraint) on a society's further development.

2.     A gradual build up of small changes leads to a sudden, dramatic overall transformation – a tipping point.

More on both of those points later.

So, the French Revolution swept aside the remnants of feudalism that had hampered the further development of capitalism. This was not merely the transition to a new form of class society; it was seen as the triumph of freedom and rationality. With copies of Rousseau’s books in their hands, the Jacobins were putting the ideas of the Enlightenment into practice.

Hegel was delighted by the French Revolution and never lost faith with it, even in the days of Napoleon and long after. 

But Hegel didn't live in France – he lived in what is now modern Germany, but what was then a collection of petty principalities in the centre of Europe.

The various mini-states in the Rhineland, Saxony and so on, had only puny fragments of the kind of mighty industry developing in England and France. Consequently, the bourgeoisie, the class of capitalists, was small and impotent. 

It's true, the German nobility sponsored a large number of universities, which were home to a growing class of young intellectuals and students. But though many of these thinkers had received a first rate education, they lacked the power to use these fine ideas to improve their backward countries. Instead they were forced to act as servants to feudal masters who were actually quite poor compared to their English or French cousins, and were sometimes even illiterate.

So, for Hegel and his German contemporaries, the material ability to bring about the radical change being enacted in the French Revolution was manifestly absent.

It was this state of affairs that later lead Marx famously to quip that the Germans achieved in thought what others achieved in reality.

The vitalising power of ideas

As with so many of Marx's aphorisms, it is an even more accurate a description than you might at first imagine.

For the German speaking middle classes, with very little prospect of taking control of the material infrastructure of their society, it must have been very attractive to think that society could be transformed purely by the power of powerful ideas.

This is exactly what they came to believe. And none of them expressed this idealism more powerfully than Hegel.

In April 1795 Hegel wrote a letter to his friend and fellow philosopher Schelling. The letter is worth quoting at length, because it drives to heart of Hegel’s outlook. It makes explicit the connection between the revolution in ideas and the revolution in society:

I believe that there is no better sign of the times than the fact that mankind as such is being represented with so much reverence, it is proof that the halo which has surrounded the heads of the oppressors and gods of the earth has disappeared. The philosophers demonstrate this dignity [of man]; the people will learn to feel it and will not merely demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, but will themselves take and appropriate them...With the spreading of the ideas about how things should be, there will disappear the indolence of those who always sit tight and take everything as it is. The vitalizing power of ideas even if they still have some limitation...will raise the spirits.

This passage conveys one of the enduring themes of Hegel’s philosophy.

If you wanted to start a political party based on Hegel's philosophy at this time – the “New Young Hegelians” perhaps – you ought to take as your main slogan these words: “the vitalizing power of ideas”.

Hegel, then, was an idealist.

But he didn't just have his head in the clouds. In this passage, Hegel is arguing that there is a relationship between the real world and ideas.

   

But, in opposition to Kant, Hegel nevertheless insists on that there is a real world that thought can know. He sees thought and reality as opposites (a unity of opposites), he does not dissolve one into the other.

  

Hegel’s method: the Master-Slave dialectic

What crystallises from Hegel’s writing is a new philosophical method - the dialectic. This method is perhaps most succinctly described in a well known section in his book, Phenomenology of Spirit, called the dialectic of lordship and bondage - better known as the Master-Slave dialectic.

In this section, Hegel shows how the condition of servitude contains within it the latent possibility of liberation.

Hegel introduces the bondsman simply as one who “lives in fear of the lord.”

The lord and the bondsman are “two unequal and opposed...shapes of consciousness.”

The lord is the independent consciousness who exists for himself. The bondsman only exists to fulfil the needs of the lord.

But while the lord only gains a “fleeting” satisfaction from consuming the fruits of another’s labour, the bondsman, by contrast, achieves a growing consciousness of his own powers through the work that he does for the lord.

Hegel’s description prefigures Marx’s conception of the significance of work:

...in fashioning the thing, he becomes aware that...he himself exists essentially and actually in his own right...the bondsman realises that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own.

Although the bondsman was originally bound to perform alienated labour for the lord, through the process of performing that work he discovers a “mind of his own”, realising a higher form of consciousness.

The different stages of the process conform to the classic Hegelian triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

The first stage is the lord’s dominance over the bondsman. The second is the bondman's labour on the object. The conflict between these two terms leads to the emergence of a new consciousness in the bondsman.

Or, to put it another way, the bondsman and lord form a contradictory totality, a unity of opposites.

The final part – the new consciousness of the bondsman – is the part referred to in dialectics as “the negation of the negation.” Don't be put off by that phrase if you're not familiar with it. It's still very simple: the bondsman's work on the object negated the lord’s domination over him; the new consciousness he then achieves is the negation of that negation.

It's just like in a conversation or a dialogue – the first person puts an argument, the second negates it with a contrary argument; the first person doesn't simply repeat themselves (in an ideal scenario), they develop their argument in relation to what the second person: the negation must be negated.

The Master-Slave dialectic confirms both the revolutionary implications of Hegel’s approach and its idealism.

Hegel sees the road to human development running through work. He also depicts the advance of consciousness going through the mind of the servant, not the master.

But we should note: only the bondsman's consciousness has been transformed, not his actual relation to the lord.

If any of you have ever tried this yourselves, you'll know the limits. Saying to your tyrannical boss: I've gone home and had a really good think, and it strikes me that the relation is irrational and unfair...well you're unlikely to effect a transformation in the social relations in society, although you might liberate yourself from that particular job.

So, Hegel’s contradiction is resolved only at the level of ideas. There has been a revolution in thought, but not a revolution in social relations. Hegel’s dialectic begins with the bondsman’s subservient consciousness to the lord and ends with his consciousness being transformed. Material reality – the bondsman’s labour on the object – is relegated to the mediating middle term.

Despite his radical youth, Hegel ended up supported the Prussian state and its monarchy. This was partly because in Hegel’s dialectic material reality was merely the stage through which thought travelled on it’s path to greater understanding. The “resolution” was not any real change, but merely the recognition that two contradictory aspects of a concept could be reconciled into a fuller understanding.

Thus Hegel argued that there was no real contradiction between monarchy and civil society (i.e. the bourgeoisie and the free market), as long as they were mediated through a legislature, some form of parliament.

Ultimately, Hegel's idealist approach posed no threat to a reactionary state. Hegel’s dialectic had a conservative outcome in which reality remains unchanged.

Marx and Engels’ dialectic

This is where we're going to leave Hegel, and see how the dialectic was transformed by Marx.

Marx did with Hegel's dialectic exactly what you would expect him to do:  he inverted it.

Instead of beginning and ending the dialectic with consciousness, Marx's dialectic begins and ends with material reality.

Marx realised that Hegel’s was a pseudo-dialectic. He realised that the material conditions of class society – and especially of capitalism – gave rise to real material contradictions that could not be resolved at the level of ideas.

Marx and Engels praised Hegel for recognising the importance of work – the way human beings create and recreate their own world through their labour. But where Hegel saw this as exclusively timeless intellectual labour, Marx and Engels understood it is material and historically-specific human labour.

A second important influence on Marx's thinking was another German philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach.

Feuerbach was a materialist. He criticised Hegel, arguing that ideas – including the idea of god – were a product of human activity taking place in the material world.

But there was a problem with Feuerbach’s materialism. While he rejected god and religion, he viewed human nature as something that did not change.

This is an argument that we regularly encounter today – that people are just product of circumstances.

So, although he correctly rejected Hegel’s idealism, Feuerbach had removed what was revolutionary in Hegel’s thought – the concept that society and ideas were continually changing.

Marx agreed with Feuerbach’s materialism, but was determined to preserve what was revolutionary in Hegel's system.

Marx and Engels didn’t simply substitute material reality for ideas - they think ideas are very important! Changing ideas is the crucial middle term of the dialectic - that’s why we’re here at Marxism. It’s crucial that material struggle is connected to a transformation of ideas.

Importantly, Marx recognised that humans don’t have a fixed nature.

Our nature is to labour on the natural world to meet our needs, and because, unlike in animals, this is done through conscious reflection, humans are capable of learning, experimenting, and developing. At a certain point this development gives rise to the production of a surplus and class divisions. We have a history driven by culture, not just by biology.

From their dialectical materialist standpoint, Marx and Engels argued that class society was driven forward by class conflict.

Marx and Engels adapted 3 key parts of the dialectic from Hegel:

1. the world is in a constant process of change

2. the world is a totality

3. that totality is internally contradictory

1. Motion (and quantity and quality)

I began the meeting by saying that the dialectic treats everything as being in motion.

In mainstream thinking we are encouraged to see everything as static - but in reality everything is constantly changing. Some things change over a long period of time, other rapidly.

From the standpoint of human experience, the climate of the earth seems basically stable. The sun rises and sets, the seasons come and go. These sequences seem to be circular - but are in fact more like a spiral: the sun slowly ages, the climactic conditions are slowly evolving. Every breath you take feels just the same as the one before, but in reality you're one step closer to death.

But in truth climate change under the influence of capitalism is likely to reach a tipping point. All the individual emissions of CO2 will gradually build up until, all of sudden, there will be a qualitative shift in our environment - runaway climate change.

This is another aspect of the dialectic - the relationship between quantity and quality.

If you blow up a balloon, puff by puff you increase the quantity of air inside. Then all at once it bursts. If you heat water one degree at a time, it will stay as water right up to 100 degrees Celsius - when it suddenly transforms into steam. Quantitative changes build up to a qualitative shift.

This process can be observed in human society.

I want to add an important caveat at this point - there is a crucial difference between dialectics of nature of human society - human consciousness and human agency. Once water in a kettle reaches 100 degrees it is certain that it will transform into steam. If dozen workers in a workplace are threatened with the sack it is not certain either that their colleagues will go on strike of that they will acquiesce - the outcome will be shaped by the conscious activity of those involved.

But with this important qualification the transformation of quantity into quality can be observed in human society. Mark Duggan was hardly the first black man to die in police custody - but his death proved to be the last straw, the last in a huge series of police provocations that sparked last summer’s riots.  

In Egypt the revolution seemed to come out of nowhere - but look deeper into that society and you could see that thousands of specific provocations from the dictatorship, the rising price of food on the world market and the growing strike waves had built to fuel the revolution.

A revolution seems impossible until it actually happens, because small, discreet pressures in society build and then suddenly explode.

2. Totality

Mainstream thought encourages us to ignore the way that individual things are connected with the rest of society.

For postmodernists in universities and neoliberal politicians and economists, society is composes of separate individuals, concepts and points of view, points of light in the dark, which are only coincidentally connected and can't be understood in the round. 

Let’s return to the example of last summer’s riots: the media tried to insist it was merely an expression of “mindless criminality”, it couldn’t be explained. Infact there were a whole series of interlocking causes - the scrapping of Educational Maintenance Allowance, increases in tuition fees, high youth unemployment, and the alienation that flows from all of these. Specific causes are anchored in the totality of capitalist society at any given moment.

If the ruling class does offer an explanation of problems in society, they typically imply the problem is external. Alfred Marshall, a key founder “neoclassical” economics suggested economic problems were caused by “sun spots” - something so external to capitalism that it wasn’t even on planet earth.

The current crisis is often characterised as being caused by overbearing state intervention - or conversely by a lack intervention in the market to stop the recklessness of bankers. In other words, whatever problems are indentified they must lie outside the free market, extrinsic to capitalism.

For Marxists the causes of crisis are intrinsic to capitalism.

3. The unity of opposites

The dynamism of capitalism, as a totality is, then, a result of it being a contradictory totality.

At the heart of capitalism’s morass of contradictions lies the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Bosses and workers form a unity of opposites. The bourgeoisie bring the proletariat into existence - the proletariat is the negation of the bourgeoisie. The workers’ dissolution of capitalism is the negation of the negation, because the working class abolishes itself, ultimately dissolving itself and the ruling class into a classless society. This is the equivalent of Hegel’s synthesis - but the contradiction is resolved in the material world, not merely in the mind.

As literary critic Terry Eagleton argued at Marxism last year, the bourgeoisie is like a tragic hero, full of boundless energy, but riven by internal flaws and contradictions that lead to its own downfall.

Agency

None of this means that abolishing of capitalism is easy or inevitable, because history of made by human beings. As Marx famously put it, “Men [which we should edit to say “humans”] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”, they do not make it under conditions of their own choosing.

Capitalism creates the conditions for its own abolition, and the class capable of carrying it out - but that doesn’t make the death of capitalism inevitable. It takes the conscious action of human beings to make it a reality.

History turning on its heel

It is received wisdom to imagine that change happens gradually and in a broadly linear fashion. Disruptive events like revolutions are just that - disruptions to the otherwise tranquil onward march of history.

This view, which is in part a vulgarisation of Enlightenment ideas, is not true. You don’t need to have read Hegel’s Science of Logic or even any of Marx to know it’s not true. Whether it’s the chaos of the eurozone crisis or the drama of the Egyptian Revolution, real life is constantly providing examples of rapid shifts in reality, dizzying reversals, history turning on its heel.

Rosa Luxemburg once wrote:

...the vital core, the quintessence, of the entire Marxist doctrine is the dialectical materialist method of social inquiry, a method for which no phenomena, or principles, are fixed and unchanging, for which there is no dogma, for which Mephistopheles’ comment, “reason turns to madness, kindness to torment,” stands as a motto over the affairs of human Society; and for which every historical “truth” is subject to a perpetual and remorseless criticism by actual historical developments.

The dialectic gives us the tools to explain the ceaseless movements of history - in order to change its course.