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Plato to Marx - Idealism to Materialism

Political Science (University of the Punjab)

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POLITICAL STUDIES

POL2002S
Student Name: Tim Geschwindt
Student Number: GSCTIM001
Tutor: Michael Marchant
Tut Number: 9
Assignment: Ancient to Modern; Plato to
Marx

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POL 2002: Political Theory

Essay 2: Political Thought, Ancient and Modern

5. From Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Marx’s Critique of Commodity Fetishism: The
allegory of the cave (in Plato’s Republic) is an attempt to explain the sources of political
illusion. According to Plato, the only remedy is a philosophical education in the form of
the good. Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism in Capital is historically more specific.
It attempts to explain how consciousness is formed by the contradictions of capitalist
society, in which relations between people appear as relations between things. Does Marx
provide a solution to Plato’s problem?

To understand the topic historical context is imperative, and provides a solid place
to begin. Before Plato’s Republic was the domination in Ancient Greek political thought
of the Pythagoreans who believed in the objective reality of numbers and mathematical
logic.1 Following the philosophy of Pythagoras, primacy was placed upon the ideal that
numbers existed independently of the sensible world – the world we perceive with our
senses. Due to the decline in Athenian democracy, Plato set out in the Republic to attempt
to solve the problem of social antagonism and state response as enlightenment from
political illusion.2

Plato agreed with Pythagoreans that there was an objective reality that held truth;
and that the realm of senses was subjective and essentially a political illusion if one did
not transcend to the realm of forms. The realm of forms replaces a world of mathematical
reality and expands it to incorporate a world of ideals – completely objective of
humanity’s misperceptions.3 To Plato a tree in the material world is a changing concept
that does not subscribe to the unchanging fixed ideal of a tree that exists in the realm of
forms, but exhibits the characteristics of what the ideal describes as the ideal tree at some
point in its material existence.4 To Plato when we are presented with a chair, to know that
the object is a chair requires prior knowledge of an ideal conception of what a chair is. It
is the realm of forms and Plato’s expression of his idealism that leads to his solution to
the problem of political illusion he allegorises beautifully in the Cave.

In the cave prisoners are chained facing the cave wall without the capacity to look
anywhere but forward at the shadows cast from the central fire. The prisoners are society,
the fire represents truth, and the shadows are the illusion of reality that can be created and
manipulated.5 The shadows reflected the movements of the captors, and the reality for the
prisoners became the shadow-realm. In The Matrix Morpheus describes the illusion to
Neo, “… you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into
a prison that you cannot smell or touch or taste. A prison for your mind.” 6 In the Cave a
1
Clark Butler, “The Dialectical Method: A Treatise Hegel never Wrote,” Humanity (2011), p. 7.
2
R. K. Elliott, “Socrates and Plato’s Cave,” Kant-Studien (1967), p. 138.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid, p. 139.
5
Ibid, p. 133.
6
Robin Hanson, Was Cypher Right? Why We Stay In Our Matrix (New York: 2013), p. 3.

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prisoner manages to escape and through a difficult and uncomfortable process adjusting
to the reality of the sunlight outside the cave – and the outside world. The process of
leaving the cave, and the discomfort caused represents the difficult in achieving this
enlightenment of the truth. Struck by the deception of the prisoners’ existence in
falseness, the enlightened prisoner attempts to rescue the others. In the Matrix the
Oracle’s decision that Neo is the One replicates Plato’s decision to have a chosen escapee
return to liberate the others.7 In the dark cave the enlightened man, now adjusted to
sunlight, seems less aware in his stumbles than the prisoners accustomed to their own
oppression. The prisoners reject the version of an alternate reality they cannot imagine as
madness. Neo attempts to do the same, fighting against the system to try to emancipate
the rest of humanity from the illusion. In the Cave Plato is highlighting how Athenian
society is wary of philosophy and the answers it possesses, as in The Matrix the actions
of Cypher to try to return to the Matrix shows how some individuals prefer comfortable
illusion over difficult truths.8

The cave is a metaphor for Plato’s theory of freedom through enlightenment and
the structure for society to best ensure social antagonism is minimal and state responses
are as good as possible. For Plato anarchy was the largest undermining influence on the
state, while the ideal state composed of harmonious social order.9 In this sense Plato has
ordered priorities, favouring an approach which guarantee’s security and stability within
anarchy – a step toward an authoritarian approach. Anarchy is created through extreme
individual liberty, while Plato arguably goes to the other extreme by embracing the peace
and order of totalitarianism.10 For Plato the cave represents a justification for re-ordering
society for the purposes of better rule, eventual freedom and to legitimise the
privatization of power for a elite. 11 Although Plato believes in the rational behaviour of
humanity and the promise that humans should be treated as equal and free – yet the
solution to political illusion for Plato is an elitist-authoritarian – the Philosopher-King. 12
The philosopher King emerges from the cave of illusion to enlightenment and serves
society by ruling with wisdom and pursuing the eventual enlightenment of all through a
philosophical education in the good. The philosopher King personifies Plato’s intention to
fuse philosophy and politics together in society, using the goodness of philosophy with
the power of politics to create a system of meritocracy that would allow the ruler to
psychologically emancipate the prisoners of the political illusion. 13 So although Plato puts
leadership beyond the average person, seeming undemocratic, he advocates for
democratic emancipation through an authoritarian process.14

In the movement between ancient political thought on the problem of

enlightenment toward Marx’s modern approach, there are many notable different

7
Hanson, Was Cypher Right?, p. 1
8
Hanson, Was Cypher Right?, p. 4.
9
Elliott, Socrates and Plato’s Cave, p. 138.
10
Peter Critchley, 2001. The Rational Freedom of Plato and Aristotle. [e-book] Available through:
Academia website <http://mmu.academica.edu/PeterCritchley/Papers. p. 16.
11
Critchley, The Rational Freedom of Plato, p. 18.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid, p. 17.
14
Ibid, p. 19.

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conceptions attempting to continually solve the problem of the conflict between social
antagonism and appropriate state response. Kant writing about Platonic dialectics in
Critique of Pure Reason began to highlight the problem with ancient political thought,
was that dialectic logic was the “logic of illusion”; with the contradictions necessary for
Greek dialectics showing the inherent futility in expecting truth as a product. 15 Kant saw
the split between objective knowledge of the world and the person knowing as
impossible, as both exist within the world.16

Marx critiqued the Hegelian idealist dialectic, which as a unified philosophical

system became a critique of the tradition of philosophy itself. 17 Marx developed the
theory of commodity fetishism which was important in relation to the Marxist theory of
alienation and the value of labour. In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx’s theory of
dialectical materialism criticizes philosophy for remaining static in abstract debates
constantly shifting in minute ways around different conceptions of how to observe the
world; whereas Marx wanted philosophers to start changing it. 18 In commodity fetishism,
Marx provided an explanation for why the contradictions in the capitalist economic
system affect social antagonism and state characteristics. In capitalism commodities have
the twin usage of having physical characteristics and a secondary value, 19 although this
value is not inherent to the commodity itself, the valuation allows for equivalency
between usually unequivalent objects. Equivalent value between commodities allows for
exchange, which leads to commodities linking people allocating resources without any
decision-making or prior planning.20 The common factor between all commodities that
allowed for this equivalency was identified by Marx as the implicit value of the human
labour behind the produce of the commodity.21 The standardised value of human labour
implicit in all commodities eliminated ranked labour; ensuring a capitalist can earn more
than a labourer. Relations between people dependent on economic class and the scale of
value placed upon the labour of the proletariat (wage labourer/exploited class) become
relations among things, among the value of commodities, rather than the social relations
of human nature.22 This commodity form of interaction allows for the illusion of profit-
making to drive the system, which should be impossible in a system based on
equivalency unless the labourers are paid less than what the labour is worth.23

According to Marx the alienation experienced from commodity fetishism is

experienced by both the proletariat and the capitalist bourgeoisie. In Marx’s words the
bourgeoisie “[…] feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises
estrangement as its own power, and has in it the semblance of a human existence”; while
the proletariat “feels annihilated […] they cease to exist in estrangement and in its own

15
Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason.
16
Ibid, p. 10.
17
Cyril Smith. ‘Marx versus Historical Materialism.’ International Socialist Forum, 3, 1998.
18
Karl Marx. Theses on Feuerbach. 1845.
19
Smith, ‘Marx vs Historical Materialism’, p. 9.
20
Eric Fromm, ‘Marx and Historical Materialism,’ in Fromm, Marx A Concept of Man (New York: 1961),
pp. 1-85
21
Ibid, p. 17.
22
Smith, ‘Marx vs Historical Materialism’, p. 10.
23
Ibid, p. 11.

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powerlessness.”24 To Marx this class struggle driven by the contradiction between human
nature and the conditions for life is the capitalist anti-thesis; “within this antithesis the
private property owner is the Conservative side, and the proletariat is the destructive side.
The former arises the action of preserving the antithesis; from the latter arises the action
of annihilating it.”25 Honderich states of alienation in his Oxford Companion to
Philosophy, in which modern individuals are described as deprived of life fulfillment
because the proletariat is prevented from the pleasure of social interaction and
organisation.26

In the face of the contradictions in the material world, Marx merges politics and
philosophy to solve the same problem of enlightenment and the transcendence of political
illusion that the meritocratic philosopher king Plato advocated for represented. The
contradictions inherent in society cannot be overcome through idealistic philosophical
reasoning but through the pragmatic action of a socialist revolution to transcend both
private property and the State.27 In tackling the problem of enlightenment, philosophers
have been unable to create transformation through idealism, as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes,
Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel probed issues of state power and the nature of social
forms but all built upon foundations advocating an inherent need for private property and
political power.28 The division between philosophers and the people had existed,
perpetuating the systemic problems, as philosophers directed truth to fellow scholars,
Princes and many forms of aristocracy – all enhancing class boundaries rather than
facilitating the removal. In essence, philosophy’s very existence was the highest abstract
expression of the problem of alienation from enlightenment. A socialist revolution
according to Marx would abolish private property, removing the commodity form, and
state power to make possible free association and free development of all humans as
social individuals.29 This idea was the basis of what Marx termed ‘true democracy’ before
renaming it to reflect its communal nature, communism.

Crucially, does Marx’s solution work for Plato? In many ways the question is not
simple to answer due to the multifaceted outcome of Marx’s influence. In the sense that
Plato grappled with a theory of freedom, and his own produced an authoritarian-elitist
conception that tried to use reform to change society, yet ultimately did not combine the
philosophical and the political effectively because it was focused upon one individual.
Marx solves the problem by expanding resistance from the individual to the widest
community, all of the oppressed proletariat. 30 Marx combines the philosophical
conception of the good life and the self-actualisation of all human beings with the utopian
political framework for its achievement – communism. The ‘rational freedom’ of Plato
resulted in the creation of an ideal of freedom closely resembling totalitarianism; while
Marx’s communism avoids subjecting people to the abstract ideal of political obligation

24
Karl Marx, ‘Chapter 4,’ in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (somewhere: 1845), p. 167.
25
Marx, ‘The Holy Family,’ p. 167.
26
Ted Honderich, Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2.
27
Critchley, Rational Freedom of Plato and Aristotle, p. 31.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid, 32.
30
Marx, ‘The Holy Family,’ p. 170.

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to the state as a ‘higher morality’, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the communality

of the rational argument.31

However if one views the solutions for Plato in terms of outright practical action,
and Marx as presenting a theory of freedom that actually led or leads to practical freedom
is unfortunately disappointing.32 Marx’s conception of an inevitable social revolution to
overthrow the domination of the bourgeoisie is a false prophecy – in the sense that the
global system 150 years after Marx is still capitalist and still extending the tentacles of
control well beyond traditional boundaries.33 However, unlike Fukuyama’s thesis of the
triumph of capitalism and the end of history, David Barsamian notes that capitalism has
proven far more resilient and flexible than anticipated “but we still have to figure out a
way to do away with it.”34 Regardless of the change in approach, the actuality is that the
exploited proletariat is still under a system of oppression in which the solution of a social
revolution has not materialised. In the Matrix Neo fails as well, as his entire existence
and resistance on the exterior of the matrix is revealed as part of the system itself –
providing the reminder that the route to emancipation from political illusion to the
enlightenment of our true place in nature is one that we cannot go alone and requires
class collectivisation to achieve.

31
Smith, ‘Marx vs Historical Materialism,’ p. 11.
32
Critchley, Rational Freedom of Plato and Aristotle, p. 33.
33
Smith, ‘Marx vs Historical Material,’ p. 11.
34
Ibid.

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