Last week, we discussed our own memes, as we mentioned a shirt that incorporates one of the most frustrating and annoying Christmas songs out there. And while this too may feel like a song you would want to give away the next day, today’s meme features what has unfortunately become synonymous for the beginning of the holiday season. You know the one.

And while Mariah Carey has already thawed from her cryogenic state to don her killer Santa duds, it’s time to discuss what we want this Christmas. And more to the point, what Karl Marx wants in one of our topselling Christmas shirts.

So, what is the means of production and why should we want it, according to Marx? Read on to find the answer.

Manifesting Communism: Marx and the Means

While we have written on Karl Marx and many of his philosophical ideas in other posts (which you should totally, totally read), it’s time to talk about the gift that keeps on giving: Marxist communism and how we got there. 

To consider Marx’s ideas on communism, it’s important to go back to his ideas on human nature. Marx,who trained at a university like other philosophers of the time, wrote very early on about what makes us human. According to Marx in some of his early manuscripts, one of the most human qualities that makes us unique is our ability to create.

This creation can deal with the fine arts, with writing, with crafts. But it also comes into play when we create goods for sale. The human drive is to create, to produce, to make something to share with others. But sometimes this drive gets twisted.

This is where 19th century capitalism comes in. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, with factory owners using a workforce to produce items for sale at a rate that was unheard of even decades before. The use of machinery and different ideas about how to manage and use laborers made for a workforce that was ready to line the pockets of the nouveau riche.

The industrialist came into his own, taking the place of the country gentleman in both power and wealth. No longer did the majority of the poor serve on the country estate, working for the titled landowner. Instead, the working class moved to the cities, to factories, to mines, to railroads. Production became central to the work ethic, the work ethic itself formulated at this time. More and more, and faster.

So, you have Marx witnessing this in real time and shaking his head. The laborer, he says, is alienated from their work, because they are producing it for someone, and because they can never possess it for themself. Consider, perhaps, the skilled salesperson working in the designer handbag store, selling purses that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. This person, while receiving commission, will never be able to afford one of these purses.

Or think, if you will, of the person working in a car production factory, in the style, perhaps, of Henry Ford. Luxury cars are awesome for rich people, but the person at the assembly line is just not going to be able to touch one, other than to add the part to the machine. And this creates a dissonance between the laborer and their product, and hands the product off to this bourgeoisie class, a class that is very divorced from what life looks like for the much larger working class.

Everybody’s Working for the Means

And this is what Marx has to contend with when he starts his work on the Communist Manifesto. A society that is entirely divorced from the brutal reality of the working class. The wealthy manufacturer neither knows nor cares about the lives of the people working at his factory. His concern is his bottom line, the one that will make him richer. And if that doesn’t sound familiar in the 21st century, I am not sure what will.

So Marx, frustrated by the working conditions these people endure, and concerned about the perversion of human nature in the class struggle he sees between the bourgeoisie and the working class, considers how to subvert this new order. He imagines a society founded on communism.

Communism, in the Marxist sense, is not the USSR of Stalin. It is not the starving regime of Pol Pot. It is not the questionable practices of the People’s Party in China. It predates all of these, and while we intend to talk in a later post about very real and valuable criticisms of communism, especially related to such governments as these, our task now is to explain what Marx himself wrote in the OG texts. 

Marx considered a struggle between the two classes: the oppressed working class, and the oppressive bourgeoisie. A lot of Marx’s ideas on this stem from an interpretation of Hegel, taking his readings of history a bit more literally. Historically speaking, Marx argues, there are always struggles in this vein. The oppressor can only hold its boot over the neck of the oppressed for so long before the oppressed will rise up and overtake the oppressor. Consider, perhaps, the French Revolution. This is history.

For Marx, the oppressed working class should overtake their bourgeoisie masters in this struggle, to obtain a better society that would end all societies. In doing this, an essential task for the working class is to obtain for themselves the means of production. Means of production is simply defined as the materials, machines, and basic necessities that are owned by the capitalist bourgeoisie. Means of production are, for instance, the loom the factory workers use to make blankets. The assembly line the workers use to make automobiles. The coal mine where workers mine fuel for the houses of the rich. The plant where produce is processed for food. The factory that manufactures computer parts. The warehouse that ships off every product under the sun. And the materials to produce necessary items.

If these valuable assets are kept by the wealthy few, the workers will continue to be constrained by their employers’ yoke, working as slaves to their meager wages, and as humans alienated from the fruits of their own labors. If these people could take control of what they use to create, and share it with others, the grip of the bourgeoisie would loosen from their necks, and they could live in a better world, where such things would be shared communally.

What Does It All Mean(s)?

Let’s go back to the 19th century, if you don’t mind. This is Dickensian London, here. The birthplace of the Victorian child. Please, sir, I want some more. 

The factory had been established by the middle of the century, and it wasn’t pretty. It’s important to know what the working conditions were like for the people working in these factories. The idea of government oversight hadn’t been invented yet. People were getting sick from the chemicals used to process the items they spent long, long hours making. Even in Elizabeth Gaskell’s romantic North and South, she writes about workers in Mr. Thornton’s factory getting sick from inhaling the cotton they process day in and day out. 

If this were the only issue here, it would be enough for outrage, but that is the tip of the Victorian iceberg. Young children were employed to operate parts of machines that were too small or fiddly for adult hands. Work with hazardous materials such as mercury or lead was just another day. And it was not uncommon for the machines themselves to malfunction and just kill the workers, as in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911).

And so, when we see such conditions and consider how angry people must have been for their family members and themselves, it makes sense that movements such as the Luddite movement might come to pass. 

The Luddites were craftspeople who took their means of production, the machines that their employer installed in the factory to make many of their own jobs obsolete, and smashed them violently. Out of desperation, these workers did the only thing they thought would be effective, and while this violence is now synonymous with anti-technology grandpas, it was, for the workers, a last ditch effort for survival for those who saw technology taking their jobs.

The idea of the means of production, and further, that of communism (the latter a concept not unique to Marx), is certainly one that we can appreciate today, even if many of us reject communism. Seeing the impossible prices of housing, for instance, or watching the billionaires sail away on their superyachts (how does that even exist?) might give you a hint of what Marx was talking about.

All We Want for Christmas

So, while it may be endearing to hear someone talking about wanting their own Christmas present to be their romantic partner this holiday, it might be more insightful to consider what we want, not only for ourselves, but for everyone. I am not suggesting seizing the means of production, but maybe at least considering what a world outside of multibillionaires would look like for us and for our friends and family.

As I write this, I spent almost all of yesterday touring the Biltmore house and its grounds. For those of you who don’t know, the house, the largest private residence in the United States, was built by the youngest son of the richest man in the world at the time, William Henry Vanderbilt.

His son, George Washington Vanderbilt II, a son of industrialists who got rich off railroads and transportation, received a massive trustfund, even though, as the youngest son, he was not the heir to the family fortune. With it, he built this massive and absurd Gilded Age property, with a dining hall that had its own cathedral-level organ, for instance. 

The house, done up in a style that mimics the chateaus in France, was built with the aspiration of being a sort of palace for an American aristocracy, the Vanderbilt family. To mimic the French aristocracy in matters of taste (or tastelessness), the industrialist family used absurd excess to convey their wealth and power.

By the mid-20th century, the Vanderbilt family had become a shell of its Gilded Age glory, members having to sell palatial residences in New York and elsewhere to stay afloat financially. The glamour that came with the power of stupidly massive wealth had left them with a classy name and “old money” aura that echoed that of what was left of the French aristocracy after the revolution: that sort of whispered reputation of a relic from a bygone era.

The Gilded Age certainly ushered in a time of wealth and ridiculous spending that you could say extended into the Roaring Twenties until the economic collapse of the Great Depression. Lavish parties, absurdly decorated homes, bigger and better. But this same era magnified the abuses of Dickensian London. This capitalism made the capitalists wealthy, but destroyed the lives of the people who made this wealth possible.

And this is something we can take with us. While many of us might feel as though we are crushed under the weight of a system that is profitable for a very few, it can be oddly heartening to consider the very ephemeral nature of wealth and money. It doesn’t last forever. The Vanderbilts spent themselves into oblivion while the United States implemented more rights for workers, such as safety measures and five day work weeks. And though Biltmore was undeniably ornate, I would rather know that everyone was able to work safely and take care of themselves and their families than see a lavish display of wealth from afar.

Here at The Philosopher’s Shirt, we want many things for Christmas, but we can see why Karl Marx would want the means of production after witnessing the daily suffering of the working class of his time. Perhaps we can take a moment to consider those with less than us and donate to organizations that help maintain and sustain the working poor in tandem with our holiday shopping.