Scientific Self-Interest

Embedded in this theory was a radical, though indirect departure from previous theories of self-interest. First, Marx and Engels aspired to treat self­interest in scientific rather than moral terms.

Marx and Engels sharply rejected Fourier's notion that individual self­interest was a natural or inherent passion. They argued instead that men were largely the product of their own environment. Obviously, men had to meet their basic economic needs (Marx admired Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest). But economic self-interest was grotesquely amplified by capitalist development. Greed, in other words, was capitalism's unholy offspring. Marx and Engels decried bourgeois culture, which ‘‘drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.''⁵

They were joined in this view by many of the English romantics of their century, fascinated by what Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm describes as ‘‘the demonic element in capitalist accumulation, the limitless and uninter­rupted pursuit of more, beyond the calculation of rationality or purpose, need or the extremes of luxury.''⁶ Owen and Mill had both observed that human character was molded by economic circumstance, pointing to the unfortunate legacies of patriarchal, as well as capitalist power. Marx and Engels focused more narrowly on the ideology of accumulation, the claim that capitalist greed would benefit everyone.

The Marxian theory of ideology challenged the basic premise of the liberal theory of the social contract. Individuals did not only form societies they were also formed by them; and once formed, they might find it difficult to reform. The theory of ideology also rejected a traditional elitism of the educated that reflexively treated great thinkers as arbiters of the public good. Marx and Engels showed in scornful detail how prevailing economic theories served the interests of the rich and powerful.

To condemn the ideology of greed was to raise the issue of how it might be transcended in the next stage of human progress. The explanation that Marx and Engels offered here was far less compelling than their emphasis on ideology writ large. They claimed that in a society governed by a proletarian majority, self-interest would become universal interest and thus—poof!—disappear. This rabbit, pulled from the magic hat of Hegel­ian theory, proved difficult to pin down. It depended entirely on the assumption that individuals had no interests apart from those of their economic class. All would be one, and one would be all. A classless society would be without conflict, and therefore would require little attention to democratic governance or efficient management. Ricardo believed that classes as a whole had economic interests; Marx and Engels assumed, in effect, that individuals could have no interests other than those based on class. This assumption, perhaps more than any other, undermined the twentieth-century Marxist regimes that collapsed under the weight of authoritarian bureaucracy.⁷