The specter of Marx is haunting Harari
Why does Harari make a strawman of Marx's theory?
[Section of a lithograph by April Burke]
Part 1.2 in my critique of Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. See the full series to date.
In my first post, I argued that Harari’s Sapiens is embraced by capitalist elites because it represents elitist historiography. And in my second post, I explained some of the ways Harari’s storytelling naturalizes inequality.
Compared to the apologias of early capitalism which centered on the discipline of Political Economy, Sapiens marks a substantial shift in capitalist apologias away from the field of economics. The book is interdisciplinary—combining especially history, evolutionary psychology, and mythology—but Harari also makes arguments against materialism as well as the humanities and social sciences. As I explained in my previous essay, Harari also argues that history is too chaotic for historians to make causal arguments, including economic ones.[1]
What Harari does have to say on the topics of money, economics and capitalism is presented in idealist concepts and surface level arguments. On these topics, he emphasizes things like trust, beliefs, and creeds and tells a simple story about a baker, a contractor, and a banker. In describing the Industrial Revolution, the only mention Harari makes of industrial workers is a few sentences in his section about “Modern Time;” how modern industry “sanctifies precision and uniformity,” and how factory workers must “adhere to a precise timetable.”[2]
Harari also has a complex relation to Marx: close, yet far away; timid, yet thorny. Marx is one of the most referenced historical figures in Sapiens. After Columbus and Darwin, Marx ties Jesus of Nazareth for the most frequent references of historical figures in Sapiens, outpacing the likes of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Newton and Einstein. However, Harari’s references to Marx hardly concern his influence at all, or even the substance of his ideas. By contrast, he devotes three and a half pages to the life and ideas of Siddartha the Buddha and a page and a half to the ideas of Political Economist Adam Smith. Harari’s actual engagements with Marx, few as they are, are confused at best and straw-manning at worst.
I think this complex relation to Marx can be best understood as reflective of Harari’s broader rejection of materialism, economic theories of history, and causal arguments about history in general, all of which would serve the interests of capitalism in the throes of the Great Recession, when Harari published the book (2011, original).
In this essay, I’ll briefly compare the ways Harari and Marx think about capitalism, and then I’ll critique a couple of passages from Sapiens relevant to historical materialism: 1) a strawman Harari makes of what “Marxists tend to think” about culture; 2) an argument Harari makes against “the materialist school” in modern history.
“A merger of two commandments”
Harari doesn’t conceive of capitalism as an economic system but as a belief system about the need to invest in production, and that belief system happens to be paired with another one about the need to consume. He writes: “The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’”[3] In describing the role of these ethics, Harari gives a crude and classist take on poor people “who stuff themselves with hamburgers and pizzas” compared with the rich “who eat organic salads and fruit smoothies.”[4]
These creeds serve Harari in developing an idealist account of the maintenance of class. Indeed, he reproduces a variation of the moralist “two kinds of people” story for which Marx criticized the Political Economists before him in their accounts of the origins of capital. As Marx writes:
This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in Political Economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.[5]
Producing a moralist story similar to this simple one for which Marx criticizes the Political Economists, Harari writes:
In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need.[6]
The simplicity of this story is such that it ignores so much about the actual nature of the economy that the people following these creeds inhabit. Of course, many capitalists do boast the ethics of investing their capital, but the capitalist system gives them no choice from the start; they either reinvest in production or they eventually lose in competition on the market. By definition, capital is money that is invested and reinvested in production, but surely this doesn’t mean capitalists are not guilty of also making ridiculous personal purchases. Would Harari consider billionaires’ investments in mega yachts to be wholly rational or practical?
More importantly, there’s no concept here of the direct relation between the people who adhere to the capitalist creed and those who adhere to consumerist creed; that is, there’s no mention that a portion of the capitalists’ investments in production goes to labor in the form of wages, which “less well heeled” people use to get the things they consume. Thus, there’s also no consideration by Harari of how that direct economic relation and the conditions of it might inform our understanding of the different spending habits.
For Marx, understanding the difference between the use of money as wages and use of money as capital requires understanding the capitalist production process and the social relations on which that process is based, a process which presupposes people with capital and people with nothing to sell but their labor power, with different functions for each.
Marx understands the motives of capitalists not as primarily driven by moral or ethical creeds, but by “the immanent laws of capitalist production,” an understanding which requires a conceptual grasp of “the inner nature of capital:”
While it is not our intention here to consider the way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of individual capitals, assert themselves as coercive laws of competition, and therefore enter into the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the motives which drive him forward, this much is clear: a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses.[7]
Here, Marx describes the motives of the capitalist not as driven foremost by belief in a creed but by the immanent laws of the economic system of which the capitalist is a part. This passage is a descriptive account of the kind of economic analysis which Marx charts out in the three volumes of his major work Capital, but you wouldn’t know anything about this kind of immanent analysis of Marx if you only read Harari’s account of what “Marxists tend to think.”
“Cultures are not conspiracies … as Marxists tend to think”
In a rather implicit and roundabout way spanning two pages, Harari counterposes what he sees as the theory representing the dynamics of history, memetics, against what he apparently understands as Marxism:
Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. … According to this approach, cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others (as Marxists tend to think). Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them. This approach is sometimes called memetics. … Most scholars in the humanities disdain memetics, seeing it as an amateurish attempt to explain cultural processes with crude biological analogies. But many of these same scholars adhere to memetics’ twin sister – postmodernism. Postmodernist thinkers speak about discourses rather than memes as the building blocks of culture. … No matter what you call it – game theory, postmodernism or memetics – the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being.[8]
Here, Harari counterposes the mysterious, accidental “dynamics of history” as understood from the theory of memetics—not against the social theory of Marx, but rather—against the vaguest possible notion of some conspiracy theory he misattributes to Marxist theorists.
I'm not aware of any Marxist who thinks culture is the product of conspiracy: from the Surrealist movement to the Frankfurt School; to Gramsci and the theory of hegemony; to Althusser on ideology; to Jameson on the cultural logic of late capitalism; to more recent historical materialist theories relevant to questions of culture. The conclusion that culture is a conspiracy is one that couldn’t be reasonably derived from Marx’s theory.[9]
Marx's theory is one of political economy, of social relations or compositions, which involves formulation of dynamical laws unique to capitalist production. Marx considers appearances of wealth in society and the characters representing it—in capitalism, the worker, the capitalist, the landowner; in feudalism, the serf or peasant, the lord, the king—and works to analyze their functions within the economy, as well as the material conditions of their existence.
An accurate comparison of memetics and historical materialism would at least acknowledge that the two views are fundamentally opposed at the general philosophical level of materialism versus idealism. This underlying conflict is especially notable considering it’s one in which Harari is invested. Indeed, in a different passage from Sapiens Harari rejects the supremacy of materialism, comparing the weight of material factors against non-material factors in explaining modern history.
“We have enough documents, letters and memoirs”
With rhetorical moves similar to those in the passage on memetics, Harari authoritatively implies that idealism has been proven superior over materialism in explaining the history of the Second World War. Harari contrasts his own idealist historiography with that of “the materialist school”—arguing that, although the latter reigns supreme in ancient history, we have enough cultural artifacts to know that the war was not started by economic factors:
Scientists usually seek to attribute historical developments to cold economic and demographic factors. It sits better with their rational and mathematical methods. In the case of modern history, scholars cannot avoid taking into account non-material factors such as ideology and culture. The written evidence forces their hand. We have enough documents, letters and memoirs to prove that World War Two was not caused by food shortages or demographic pressures. But we have no documents from Natufian culture, so when dealing with ancient periods the materialist school reigns supreme. It is difficult to prove that preliterate people were motivated by faith rather than economic necessity.[10]
Certainly, “non-material factors such as ideology and culture” are important for understanding the origins of the war. However, Harari doesn’t simply advocate for consideration of such factors but goes on to make an argument about which school of historical philosophy “reigns supreme,” the one which emphasizes material factors like “food shortages or demographic pressures” or the one which emphasizes “non-material factors such as ideology and culture” as demonstrated in things like “documents, letters and memoirs.”
Harari’s argument is that the evidence of ideological and cultural motives for the war outweighs the evidence for material factors being the primary motivators that led to the war. If he was simply making the case that non-material factors should be included, it wouldn’t make much sense to look to disprove the causal role of specific material factors like food shortages based on a comparison with forms of evidence like memoirs. It only makes sense to compare the two kinds of factors that way if we’re considering which one outweighs the other in terms of importance for explaining the cause of the war. This is why he considers the question of whether the Natufian people “were motivated by faith rather than economic necessity” to be an either/or question, in which case, for Harari, the materialist school reigns supreme because of the lack of ideological and cultural evidence available for that kind of premodern example.
Considering he makes this kind of either/or comparison regarding which school of historical philosophy reigns supreme in explaining the war, the lack of acknowledgement of the Great Depression here is perplexing. I imagine even casual readers of Sapiens must find that somewhat confusing. It’s also worth noting that food shortages and demographic pressures are not the only types of material factors of crisis to consider. Building on the work of the Political Economists before him, Marx describes ways the capitalist economy produces crises out of dynamics internal to the system, as, for example, the ratio of value between machines and workers’ labor power shifts over time with the adoption of new technology. Again, ideology and culture are important, no doubt, but whether they are primary in determining the course of history is not an obvious conclusion here.
Regarding the question of which school reigns supreme, the question is not which type of factors are causal but rather which of these two types of causal factors is more fundamental in determining the course of history. From a materialist point of view, for example, the kinds of ideological investments evident in and the relative abundance of such letters, documents and memoirs can be contextualized according to socio-economic problems in society, even if individual letter writers largely didn’t understand their investment in such ideologies as being primarily determined by economic changes. For example, on the topic of the rise of fascism in the period between the two World Wars, materialists Deleuze and Guattari develop a social-psychoanalytic theory in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: “no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.” In short, for Deleuze and Guattari, without an understanding of the historical circumstances or conditions, ideology is not enough to explain the rise of fascism.
Big history vs. historical materialism
What Harari’s strawman of Marxist theory of culture hides—structural analysis; economics—is precisely that which has the capacity to undermine the uncontextualized, non-contingent theoretical framework of Sapiens. Through the course of this series, I’ll continue to compare Harari with Marx, for a more accurate comparison of their ideas will enable us to demystify the account of history presented in Sapiens and to unravel Harari’s arguments one by one.
[1]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 238-9.
[2]. Ibid, 352.
[3]. Ibid, 349.
[4]. Ibid, 348.
[5]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 873.
[6]. Harari, Sapiens, 348.
[7]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One, 433.
[8]. Harari, Sapiens, 242-3.
[9]. To be sure, Marxists broadly speaking would not deny the existence of conspiracy, and to some extent, Marxian theorists may describe the conspiring of capitalists among themselves or with the levers of the state to counteract the strength of labor, for example. However, this has virtually nothing to do with culture or the various ways in which Marxist theorists have conceived of culture.
[10]. Harari, Sapiens, 89.