Neither Marx nor Engels wanted to be referred to as philosophers. Marx claimed he was a “Man of Science” and saw Capital as a scientific work tracing out the movements of “the self-expansion of value” or “capital in motion”.
And it was Engels who drew the important distinction in Anti-During between utopian Socialism and scientific socialism; although the expression “scientific Socialism” had already been used in 1873 by Joseph Deitzgen in a book of the same name. With the discovery by Marx of the Materialist Conception of History and theory of surplus value, Socialism, for Engels, became a science.
Marx, of course, started his career as a philosopher writing his doctoral dissertation (1841) on the difference between the philosophies of nature of the two Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus. In particular, Marx’s main interests were the atomism of Epicurus and his critique of teleology (a theory of first causes) and determinism on the one hand and his philosophy of freedom on the other. (Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and tr. by L. D. Easton and K. H. Guddat, Anchor Books, New York, 1967).
Marx referred to the approach he took to his work as his “method”. In fact, he did not give a name to his method of enquiry into political economy. Marx nowhere used the expressions “the materialist conception of history” or “the Labour theory of value” to describe his theory of history or analysis of the commodity although the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (1859) was cited by Marx as “a guiding thread” to his studies. Marx refers to his book Capital as “the only scientific method” to track the movement of capital in history.
And Marx took his scientific work seriously. Writing in the Preface to the French edition of the first volume of Capital he stated that:
There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
It was not until 1886, after Marx’s death, that Engels wrote of “…this materialistic dialectic…has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon…” (Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach. Section IV, Selected Works, Moscow 1970, III, p. 362).
Engels also wrote:
I use ‘historical materialism’ to designate the view of the course of history, which seeks the ultimate causes and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, with the consequent division of society into distinct classes and the struggles of these classes.
(Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/int-mat.htm
And at Marx’s funeral, Engels drew a comparison between Darwin and Marx:
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/dersoz1.htm
Marx merged a lot of different ideas together from the works of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, and the French Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot and D’Alambert and the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach. He also developed ideas from writers on Political Economy such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the Ricardian Socialists John Bray, Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson and John Gray, and those who he and Engels were to refer to as “Utopian Socialists” such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, although he grounded his method within the real historical world of facts and experience.
Marx’s Method
Many commentators have been critical of Marx for not leaving a book entitled “method” and unfairly attacked Engels for departing from Marx’s scientific framework. But few scientists leave works called “My Method” and Engels knew more about Marx’s way of thinking than anyone then or since. In fact, Marx was going to write an account of his method of working but like several of his other projects he never had the time to begin and complete such a work. He wrote
“If there ever be time for such work again, I should very much like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence – in two or three printer’s sheets – what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism…” (Marx to Engels in Selected Correspondence, 1844 – 1895, January 14 1858, p. 93).
In a letter to Joseph Dietzgen in 1876, Marx writes of Hegel what he had earlier had written to Engels:
“When I have shaken off the burden of my economic labours, I shall write a dialectic. The correct laws of the dialectic are already included in Hegel, albeit in mystical form. It is necessary to strip it of this form” (Quoted in Sidney Hook: From Hegel to Marx. Ann Arbour 1962. p. 61).
How did Marx develop his method? As Antonio Labriola pointed out in his 1896 Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, the ideas of Marx was part of the process of history and not something that floated above it:
The truth is that the real precursors of the new doctrine were the facts of modern history, which has become so transparent and so explanatory of itself since the accomplishment in England of the great industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and since the great social upheaval took place in France
(Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, 1896, Kerr edition quoted in (http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/marx/labriola.html)
Marx had already observed that:
… philosophers do not grow out of the soil like mushrooms, they are the product of their time and of their people, whose most subtle, precious and invisible sap circulates in philosophical ideas. The same spirit that builds railways by the hands of the workers builds philosophical systems in the brain of the philosophers. Philosophy does not stand outside the world any more than man’s brain is outside of him because it is not in his stomach…
(Marx and Engels, On Religion, pp. 30-31)
Marx developed his scientific method in the 1830’s and 1840’s largely as a result of an engagement with Hegel one of the most philosophically dense and impenetrable of writers. The joke has often been told of philosophers who have entered into Hegel’s philosophical system but have never come out the other end again; similar to the fate of someone passing through a black hole.
Hegel, though, wrote under the influence of the French Revolution and it was his theory of history which Marx “turned on its head” setting out a materialist rather than an idealist starting point to human history. Marx describes Hegel’s dialectic as a “mystification” which consists in the fact that:
…for Hegel, the process of thinking… is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea…With him it (the dialectic) is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within its mystical shell” (Capital, Volume 1, Postface to the Second Edition, Penguin edition 1990 pp. 102-103).
The next development of Marx’s method came from the confrontation first with the writings a group of German intellectuals known as the Young Hegelians. The
critique of this group began with The Holy Family (1844) and The German Ideology (1845-6). The critique was extended to cover Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy (1846) and re-appeared again in the late 1880’s with the publication of Anti-Duhring (1887) written by Engels but with contributory notes by Marx.
One important influence on Marx should not be forgotten and that is the influence of Engels himself. One of the most important writings on political economy read by Marx was Engels’ Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy written in 1844.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/outlines.htm
Marx’s method in Capital began with the analysis of the commodity set within the capitalist mode of production. He then successively abstracted from the various economic categories that constitute the commodity, including labour, to finally display the real concrete reality and interconnectedness of commodity production and exchange for profit as it moves through history as “capital in motion”.
In the third Volume of Capital, Marx compared the superficial study of capitalism of the “vulgar economists” to his own method. He wrote:
Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations. It should not astonish us, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and perfect contradictions appear and that these relations seem the more self-evident the more their internal relationships are concealed from it, although they are understandable to the popular mind. But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.
(Chapter 38). http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm
Marx uncovered the reality of capitalism using his labour theory of value, materialist conception of history and political concept of the class struggle. His discovery was the generation of surplus value and he used it to explain the function of the capitalist as “the personification of value” and the exploitation of the working class. Unlike the Classical school of economists (Adam Smith and David Ricardo) whose superficial understanding of the labour market led them to believe in the harmony of classes, Marx’s theory of surplus value showed why there was class conflict and class struggle. Marx defined class in an objective way with respect to the means of production and distribution. In capitalism he divided society into two classes; the capitalist class who owned the means of production and distribution and a working class who did not but were forced to sell their labour power or ability to work to an employer.
Surplus Value
So, how did Marx show surplus value to be generated in the production process? The simplified answer is as follows. The workers sell their labour power or ability to work to the capitalist in exchange for a wage. The value of the worker’s labour power or ability to work is determined just like any other commodity that is, by the socially necessary labour time that goes into its production. For the working class this socially necessary labour time is determined by the bundle of commodities the workers and their family need to produce and reproduce themselves as an exploited class. The capitalist having paid in wages or salaries the exchange value of labour power has gained its use or “use-value”.
If the working day is taken as eight hours and it takes the workers six hours to reproduce the value of their wages, the workers just cannot stop work but have to carry on for another two hours working free for the employer. The first six hours is “necessary labour time” while the two extra hours is “surplus labour time”. The workers continue to produce commodities which are owned by the capitalists and contain additional or surplus value which is realised when the commodities are sold on the market and divided out as the unearned income of rent, interest and profit.
Marx did not write in a theoretical vacuum. He knew of the class struggle taking place between capitalists and workers notably in France, in the 1830’s and in Britain at the same time with the Chartist Movement struggling for the vote. We can read a revolutionary perspective based upon a materialist grounding running right through the Communist Manifesto in which a revolutionary working class movement develops from an incoherent mass at the transition from Feudalism to capitalism to a class that had by the 19th century become politically conscious of itself and capable of establishing both Trade Unions and a Socialist political party. And it is this movement which the science of Capital is written to assist the working class in the revolutionary transformation of capitalism to Socialism.
Nevertheless the germs of Marxism as science lay in the first tentative ideas set out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. As Labriola noted:
The Manifesto was designed for nothing else than the first guiding thread to a
science and a practice which nothing but experience and time could develop. It gives only the scheme and the rhythm of the general march of the proletarian movement (Labriola loc. Cit).
With materialism as his fundamental premise and a dialectical method rooted in science not philosophy, Marx was able to comment on historical events, lay bare “capital in motion”, frame a Socialist political programme which focused on the agents of Socialist revolution; the world’s working class.
