/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

What Young Marx actually thought about personal wealth and standard of living:

<A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls. An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.

- Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847), Chapter 6

Basically he is saying that being well-off isn't just about what you have, it's also about what everyone else has. If your income goes up but rich people's wealth increases much faster, you may actually feel poorer compared with them. Humans naturally compare themselves with other people, so our idea of what we need depends partly on the society we live in.

<The thoughts of every piece of private property as such are at least turned against richer private property in the form of envy and the desire to level everything down; hence these feelings in fact constitute the essence of competition. The crude communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to level down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited measure. How little this abolition of private property is a true appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor, unrefined man who has no needs and who has not yet even reached the stage of private property, let alone gone beyond it. (For crude communism) the community is simply a community of labor and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist. Both sides of the relation are raised to an unimaginary universality – labor as the condition in which everyone is placed and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community. […] The first positive abolition of private property – crude communism – is therefore only a manifestation of the vileness of private property trying to establish itself as the positive community. […] By reducing the worker's needs to the paltriest minimum necessary to maintain his physical existence and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement. In so doing, the political economist declares that man has no other needs, either in the sphere of activity or in that of consumption. For even this life he calls human life and human existence. By taking as his standard – his universal standard, in the sense that it applies to the mass of men – the worst possible state of privation which life (existence) can know. He turns the worker into a being with neither needs nor senses and turn the worker's activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. Hence any luxury that the worker might enjoy is reprehensible, and anything that goes beyond the most abstract need – either in the form of passive enjoyment or active expression – appears to him as a luxury.

- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Third Manuscript, Private Property and Labor (1844)

Marx is pointing out that making everyone equally poor isn't real freedom. If you eliminate private property as an institution of class society, but give everyone only the bare minimum, you've solved inequality by making everyone live with less. Human beings need more than food and shelter, they also need culture, enjoyment, creativity, education, and opportunities to develop themselves.


Our idea of being well off depends partly on how other people live, and he thinks both extreme wealth and extreme attempts to eliminate personal property can reduce human freedom and satisfaction. Two different things can be true at once. Extreme inequality can make people dissatisfied even when their material lives improve. Simply making everyone materially equal isn't enough if people are denied the ability to develop themselves and enjoy life. Human well-being is more complicated than simply counting how many possessions someone has. A person can have more stuff than they had before and still feel relatively poor. And a society can make everyone materially equal without necessarily giving people a rich, fulfilling human life. This is why bourgeois propaganda about how you should be grateful because you have better medicine than a bronze age king or a lower mortality rate than a feudal peasant falls flat. People aren't comparing themselves with the past, not even the very wealthy people of the past. This is also why workers in the imperial core aren't comparing their standard of living with the workers of the periphery, instead they compare their standard of living with the wealthy from their own societies. It is more visible and more obvious. Nobody working at McDonalds in Alabama is going to say "I have it so good compared to a in Indian in New Delhi, I should be happy with this."

Now compare the Young Marx of these passages with the older Marx of Capital Volume 1, all you like, but also compare this Marx with the popular idea of Marx inherited through conservative criticism of Marx and the shortcomings of historical projects like the USSR. Those people believe in a Marx who thinks everyone is equally poor and the government owns everything and everyone in a permanent prison panopticon. Marx's actual writings are a 19th century critique of capitalism, alienation, class relations, and private property. Marxism developed by later thinkers like are related to this but not identical. Marx actually thinks “luxury” can be part of human development. Marx isn't simply arguing that equality = happiness.