By J. CHRISOSTOMO DE SOUZA*
According to Marx, our essential humanity, our being-for-each-other, which is not yet realized, is in our generic productive activity, work.
For Fernando Haddad[I]
This text seeks to suggest, based on a look at Karl Marx's thought, something about entrepreneurship, a topic of our time, which basically has, like the nonsense about “right-wing poor people”, both a material dimension and an ideological dimension — even a theological one.
Let us begin by examining Marx’s historical perspective on the emancipatory human in terms of relations of production and property. From there we will see his praise of self-employment and productive personal property, as opposed to wage labor. Finally, we will point to the relevance of these considerations in our complicated time and context, for the inclusion of the popular classes, more than just “in the budget”, in the construction of the country.
To begin with, let me say something about what is progressive, emancipatory, and humane in Marx in terms of labor and property relations: a greater flourishing and sustainable self-provision of people, dignified by their better access to better means and skills. This is Marx's historical-materialist humanism in a nutshell, even improved a little. But there is still more to say (see my The Other Side of Marx.
According to Marx, our essential humanity, our being-for-one-another, which is not yet realized, lies in our generic productive activity, labor. Our human essence is precisely the relationships in which it places us, according to the level of development of the so-called productive forces — precisely means, skills, conditions, forms of cooperation, etc. And, in its normative, ideal, maximum sense, this essence will only be realized at the end of our “prehistory,” in communism, as a communal essence.
This essence, you see, is assumed by Marx from the Feuerbachian “translation” of Christianity, loving, but still subjectivist, individualistic — even selfish, as in Protestantism, more than in Catholicism. From the translation of Christianity into a communal humanism, a kind of neo-Christianity, without those defects accentuated in modernity. Through the conversion of the transcendent, traditional divine, the personal God of Christianity, into a new divine (or supreme being), completely human, immanent in history: the “generic man”, humanity.[ii]
To better understand Marx’s humanist progressivism, however, it is necessary to take the social relations of production not only as a communal human essence, read from religion, to be realized later as an “immanent telos” or “solved enigma of history”. It is also necessary to see them within their dialectical becoming, in a course of history; to see them as, in each concrete circumstance, better or worse, emancipatory and progressive relations, or, on the contrary, relations of backwardness and dispossession, dependence and subjection.
For Marx, however, this does not mean seeing/evaluating such relations in terms of “altruism” and “love,” even if he, in his youth, did not escape, as he admits, Ludwig Feuerbach’s “apotheosis of love.” The normative dimension of his materialism/historical humanism is not in what is best, as relations of production, in terms of the most “loving,” “natural,” “communal,” “Catholic,” etc., outside of history and particular contexts—material, but also, as Fernando Haddad would say, symbolic. Let us see.
Marx's perspective on relations of production in emancipatory/progressive terms.
The most central aspect of Marx's normative strategy is to translate/resolve the ideal, the normative (even speculative, mystical, religious) into social/material, political, and for his progressivism to truly be historical, together with consequent materialism, it is necessary to say more than what we have seen above. It is worth “going back” to what would be Marx's most basic historical materialism, according to a more general dialectic of relations, means, competences and circumstances, even of the construction of subjectivities, in order to then be able to “advance” in political concreteness in this area, as seems indispensable to me today.
Beyond Marx’s well-known historical and schematic sequence of modes/relations of production, and in the face of varied contexts, diverse national paths, distinct “social formations” (a notion that Vladimir Ulyanov was very fond of), and also in the face of extraordinary changes within the very capitalism of our time, it is worth noting that, in Marx, the human-emancipatory and the inhuman opposite, its negation, are notions that can vary in content, according to different labor and property relations, in the same way that they can vary in the ideological discourse of different social segments. This is so that we do not fall into a universalist, abstract essentialism, a rigid, binary schematism, nor into moral preaching, and, mainly, into a disastrous “political disconnection” in relation to the effective, concrete reality.
Marx's most general criterion (in his own terms) will be, in this field, that of more and less “broad” or “favorable” relations, for a new development of the productive forces, in terms of greater satisfaction, inclusion, empowerment of the human beings involved.[iii] The notions of human-emancipatory, superior, now refer, in particular social formations, to “more satisfactory”, “humane”, “progressive” relations, in comparison with older, “narrower”, more “exclusionary” relations and conditions. Again, not by any criterion beforehand, moral, religious, external to history, superimposed on concrete circumstances.
As for the first relationships — the so-called “better” ones — it is not a question of being more socialist or communist, much less of being more “Christian” or “loving”, but of corresponding, for the subordinate and ascending classes, to better possibilities of life, given by new productive forces and conditions of production. On the other hand, for other classes and segments, generally dominant, the “new relationships” would tend to be considered inhumane, even criminal, while the “old relationships” would be human and normal, in accordance with a fixed, eternal human essence.
This is Marx's contextualist relativism, which, however, has nothing relativist about it, but everything materialist and historical, which seeks to account for the valuation of a diversity of labor relations and the disputed social uses of these terms. This is so that no one naturally believes themselves to be the owner of their meaning, outside and above determined social and historical circumstances, manifest aspirations, etc.
Marx's praise of entrepreneurship and productive personal property, as opposed to wage labor.
With that in mind, let's now look at The capital,[iv] as Marx celebrates independent production and self-employment, oriented toward prosperity, wealth, personal fulfillment, based on “personal private ownership of the means of production” — a “mode of production and appropriation” that he praises as more consistent with “democracy.”[v] In his praise of independent production, Marx even seems to evoke something of what he says about non-alienated labor, in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, as a realization and expression of oneself, involving another relationship with the object, etc. — while wage labor means exploitation, underutilization of human capacities, etc.
Marx praises the beneficial personal, social and political consequences of “independent work” as diametrically opposed to those of “wage work” of dependence and subjection. For him, under certain circumstances, there are two antithetical types of work and private property, modes of production and appropriation, in conflict.
Means of production owned by the direct producer are not means of capitalist accumulation; they can be the opposite. This is precisely what Marx understood, understanding that this producer, “owner of his working conditions,” can become “a competitor of the capitalist,” or even “a competing capitalist.” Through a natural transition from wage earner to independent producer and from there to “competitor of his former bosses.” Well, Marx, you see, seems to have nothing against the “oppressed” becoming “oppressor,” just as he does not seem to be interested, without further ado, in the color (ideological, loving, communal) of the cat, as long as it catches mice.
The “bourgeois political economists,” Marx observes, complain that this autonomous production makes the centralization of capital and cooperative labor impossible, while they surrender to the idea that it creates “a prosperous, independent, enterprising and educated people.” For such economists, however, it makes the social development of labor, the application of machinery on a large scale, the transformation of means of production into capital impossible. Perhaps a modern-day classical, socialist and Marxist developmental economist from the BNDES would not see it much differently. After all, according to Marx’s grand historical narrative, the development of large-scale capitalism is the material, social, and even ethical-disciplinary prerequisite for socialism and communism.
Beyond Marx's commitment to communal/communist, state/utopian anti-capitalism.
It is true that Marx, a communist, can show all this enthusiasm for autonomous entrepreneurship because he counts, on the other hand, on the fact that, according to his Grand Narrative, personal private property will be completely suppressed by capitalist development itself, which is concentrated, wage-based, and homogenizing. A development that will ultimately impose the nationalization/statization of large means of production, thus centralized planning, without a market, and, in the future, the final Communism, “Heaven taken by storm” — as the only solution for all social and human afflictions.
However, it is interesting to note that Marx’s commitment to the ultimate realization of man’s generic, communal essence, together with his denunciation of the magical fetishism of the commodity, can go hand in hand with his firm willingness to evaluate things concretely, in concrete circumstances, in a, let’s say, “non-ideological” and “non-moralizing” way. To do so in terms of viable property relations, and their social, even political, consequences at a given time or context.
This is a commitment and a denunciation that go hand in hand with a firm interest in the affirmation, exuberance, and enrichment, both social and personal, of human beings. Not an interest in “denial” and “resistance,” in romanticized primitivism and shared poverty, in poverty, in crumbs, in victimhood, in state welfare, in sentimentalism and humanitarianism, which are so popular today on our “left.”
Our historical materialist thus offers us a non-metaphysical idea for the foundation of the values of the emancipatory human, neither essentialist nor transcendentalized, nor binary, in social and institutional relations that are freer and more expansive, more productive and expressive, “more satisfactory.” This is, as we say elsewhere, his “practical materialism” (the term is Marx’s), almost a philosophy of praxis as poiesis, without determinism, dualism, sentimentality, in favor of human affirmation and exuberance, for a material citizenship, associated, in the most general way, at any level and in various possible ways, with access to the most advanced and sustainable means, skills and conditions.
By the way, on this subject, let us remember that the emancipation of slaves in the United States included the progressive promise, never fulfilled, of “40 acres [of land] and a mule” for each family to work. And our metaphorical quote: “it is better to teach someone to fish than to give them a fish” is only complete with access to “rods”, “nets”, “boats”, the respective improved “skills”, “appropriate institutional forms”, both of independence and association, the market, and more favorable national mobilization and environment, educational, cultural, and symbolic.
Productive, educational, technical-scientific inclusion/mobilization
N 'The capital, Marx is talking about autonomous production in the context of the construction of the North American, evangelical society of his time; speaking, note well, of the deliberate institutional construction of a certain democratic path of development (which, however, forgot about Indians and slaves, etc.). He is talking about the option of not importing from Europe the same relations of production, for human beings who, driven out and audacious, uprooted, arrived from there to the New Continent. For these and other reasons, Marx and Engels, in German Ideology, considered North Americans to be the most advanced individuals of their time.
In Brazil, we are not in these circumstances, nor are we in the script general historical, 19th century, of Marx, nor are we in metropolitan, wage-earning Europe, itself already hardly viable as a social-democrat. That does not mean we need to be unhappy and melancholic like the Frankfurt critical philosophers, elitist humanists of “alienation” and “commodity fetishism”. Or to execrate “right-wing poor” and abstract “capitalisms” in order to remain fixated on welfare, poverty, segmentary identity, or in other ways stuck in mitigated neoliberalism.
The popular Basil has never been a wage-earning society, and even less so now. Since slavery, it has oscillated and reproduced itself in a low, mixed, “free enterprise” — helpless, uneducated, yet hard-working — from which it forms its aspirations and from which, despite everything, a good part of our creative and productive energy springs. Among us, the informal has always been the true formal, as national censuses have shown, in which, however, one could also perceive an opportunity, I would dare say, comparable to that of the national transitions from rural to urban. Involving for this a demand for institutional recreation, according to another economic policy, in fact, even another political economy.
Successful revolutions and national constructions have always been heretical and original, even experimental, things, and the best-off countries have been those that are less economically concentrated (than Brazil), marked by a more widespread production of added value, by more advanced and sustainable ways of valuing the work and creative dispositions of their children. Together and in addition to more transformations, in a true Project, pardon the bad word, national – which, yes, is decidedly non-neoliberal.
This, however, is a development that does not seem to appeal to a “tutelary left,” sustained by the binomial occupation of the state (for itself) & social assistance (for others), adorned with pseudo-radical glitter of “cultural Marxism” – and a lot of “communal love.” As for this, we still wait, like Godot, for something worthy of the name of a National Project, democratic-popular, inclusive, transformative, which, however, a left with a contradictorily “Trotskyist-Catholic-globalist” DNA (no offense), today in a situation of decline, exhaustion, and regrettable consequences, cannot conceive. It is a shame, our Marx, a progressive, would approve.
*José Crisóstomo de Souza is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at UFBA. Author, among other books, of The other side of Marx: philosophical conversations for a philosophy with a future (Humanities Workshop) [https://amzn.to/3XGbMUn]
Notes
[I] A respectable combination of public man and restless scholar, Haddad thought – and so did I – that his The Excluded Third (Zahar, 2022) and my The Other Side of Marx (Ateliê de Humanidades, 2024) would provide a good debate on updating the fundamental concepts of our progressivism. This text aims to represent a nod in that direction.
[ii] On this, see Theses 4 and 6. ad Feuerbach, whose content Marx continues to confirm in the rest of his work. These things are developed in my Marx's reverse, but also explained in my “Marx and Feuerbachian essence”, in The Young Hegelians, D. Moggach ed., Cambridge University Press, 2006.
[iii] On this subject, see Marx, Die German Ideology (Dietz), p. 487-8, or German Ideology (Progress), pp. 417-418, which we are following here.
[iv] MARX, The capital, Nova Cultural, 1983, v. 1, chap. XXV, p. 295ff.
[v] It's interesting that here, unlike the Franco-German Annals, Marx is not concerned with disqualifying a democracy of “sovereign individuals.”
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