Lecture 9: The Marxian Challenge

What this lecture covers

This lecture opens the course's second Enlightenment tradition, Marxism, by arguing against the common view that Marx broke entirely from thinkers like Bentham and Mill. Professor Shapiro makes the case that Marx shares the Enlightenment's two commitments: grounding politics in a scientific theory, and treating individual freedom as the central value. It also explains why Marx supported capitalism as a necessary stage of history rather than opposing it outright.

The lecture then turns to the intellectual background Marx worked from: the project of classical political economy started by Adam Smith and refined by David Ricardo. By the end, you should understand what "natural price," the labor theory of value, and commodification mean for Marx, and why the question "where does profit come from?" organizes the whole of Das Kapital.

Key ideas

• Dialectical materialism: Marx adapts Hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis view of history, but argues change is driven by material and economic interests rather than ideas.
• Base and superstructure: for Marx, the economic base drives politics, culture and beliefs, which he calls superstructure.
• Marx was not simply anti-capitalist: he saw capitalism as the most productive mode of production yet devised, and a necessary precondition for socialism.
• The workmanship ideal: Marx's theory of exploitation borrows from Locke's idea that people are entitled to the fruits of their own labor.
• Natural price vs. market price: classical economists distinguished the long-run equilibrium price (explained by the labor theory of value) from short-term prices set by supply and demand.
• Use-value vs. exchange value: use-value is an object's usefulness; exchange value (or "Value" with a capital V) is what the labor theory of value explains.
• Commodity: something produced for exchange rather than for the producer's own consumption; under capitalism, Marx argues, even labor becomes a commodity.
• The origin of profit: classical political economy needed to explain how a capitalist ends up with more money than they started with, even though equivalents exchange for equivalents.

Walkthrough

Marx as an Enlightenment thinker (2:16)

The lecture opens by rejecting the idea that Marx and Mill work from incompatible paradigms. Both are Enlightenment figures committed to a scientific account of politics and to individual freedom. Marx's version of science is the materialist conception of history, borrowed and inverted from Hegel: history moves through cycles of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but the engine is material interest, not ideas. The lecture also addresses the common misconception that Marx opposed capitalism outright; instead he saw it as a necessary, temporary, self-undermining stage that had to precede socialism.

Marx and individual freedom (11:30)

Professor Shapiro argues that Marx is better understood as a believer in freedom than as a pure egalitarian, pointing to Marx's own phrase that "the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all." This connects to Marx's theory of alienation: people cannot be free until they are at one with their productive natures, something Marx believed no social order before communism allows. The lecture ties this back to Locke, arguing Marx's labor theory of value is a secular version of Locke's workmanship ideal, where people are entitled to what they produce.

Marx's intellectual biography (16:40)

A brief account of Marx's life explains why the course focuses on the "mature Marx" rather than his early writings on Hegel. After the failed European revolutions of the early 1830s and 1848, Marx grew steadily more pessimistic about an imminent communist revolution and shifted to systematically analyzing capitalism from exile in London, producing Das Kapital. Only the first of a planned twelve volumes was published in his lifetime; Engels compiled the rest after Marx's death, and Marx's mature political theory has to be pieced together from fragments.

The project of classical political economy (21:42)

Marx is presented as a follower of Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than a radical outsider. The lecture explains Smith's pin-factory example of the division of labor as the engine of productivity, and introduces the classical search for theories of natural (long-run equilibrium) prices, wages, rents and profits, as distinct from market prices set by supply and demand. Classical economists, unlike modern neoclassical ones, believed in a labor theory of value: that labor is the ultimate source of value, as opposed to land (the physiocrats) or trade.

Use-value, exchange value, and the origin of profit (34:03)

The lecture defines use-value as simple usefulness and exchange value ("Value") as what the labor theory of value explains. A commodity is anything produced for exchange rather than consumption; under capitalism, commodification extends even to labor itself. The lecture closes on the central puzzle of Das Kapital: since equivalents exchange for equivalents in every transaction, how does a capitalist end up with more money than they started with? Answering that question, the lecture notes, requires understanding the source of value, which the next lecture will take up.

Before you watch

• Familiarity with the course's earlier discussion of utilitarianism (Bentham and Mill) helps, since the lecture repeatedly contrasts Marx with them.
• Some background on Locke's theory of property and the workmanship ideal is useful, since Marx's labor theory of value draws on it.
• No prior knowledge of Hegel is assumed; the lecture explains dialectical materialism from scratch.

Check your understanding

1. Why does the lecture argue that Marx should be classified as an Enlightenment thinker rather than as a fundamental break from Bentham and Mill?
2. What did Marx actually think about capitalism, and why did he consider it a necessary stage before socialism?
3. What is the difference between the "natural price" and the "market price" of a commodity in classical political economy, and what role does the labor theory of value play?
4. How does Marx define a commodity, and why does commodification extend to workers under capitalism?
5. What puzzle about the origin of profit does Marx set out to solve at the start of Das Kapital?