Marx was useless on the socialist future, but he offered conceptual models for understanding the recent capitalist past that were useful even if you rejected them. For example, his book "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Brumaire" on Napoleon III's career is both analytically sophisticated and quite funny political journalism.
As an economist, Marx was stuck with certain wrong dogmas of the classical era of economics, such as Adam Smith's mistaken labor theory of value (Marx wrote before Marshall's marginal revolution). and with his own lack of interest in thinking about the future in all the but the haziest terms (he would have made a terrible science fiction writer).
But as a sociologist, he made major progress in coming up with a basic model of class that remains relevant.
I wonder if this very short introduction was too short to make clear Marx's striking self-contradictions that were manifest in the Marx biography by Sperber: viz.,
"Writing in the Rhineland News in 1842 in his very first piece after taking over as editor, Marx [.....] declared that the spread of Communist ideas would “defeat our intelligence, conquer our sentiments,”and “practical attempts [to introduce communism], even attempts en masse, can be answered with cannons.” As Sperber writes, “The man who would write the Communist Manifesto just five years later was advocating the use of the army to suppress a communist workers’ uprising!”
Nor was this an isolated anomaly. In a speech to the Cologne Democratic Society in August 1848, Marx rejected revolutionary dictatorship by a single class as “nonsense”—an opinion so strikingly at odds with the views Marx had expressed only six months earlier in the Communist Manifesto that later Marxist-Leninist editors of his speeches mistakenly refused to accept its authenticity—and over twenty years later, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Marx also dismissed any notion of a Paris Commune as “nonsense.” "
I really didn't think I'd so much enjoy an article about a crank with an axe to grind who happens to write well (Singer) writing about a crank with an axe to grind who happened to write well (Marx)!
Marx's pedantic philosophy in the tradition of Kant and Hegel is pretty dire, but his opinion journalism for Horace Greeley's New York newspaper in his third language is impressively readable after 160 years.
The core issue with anticapitalist economics is that everything they write about capital/money, insofar it is even true, straightforwardly can be generalised to power in itself. Money is of course a part of the power of a person, but often not even the most important. There is social power, such as of the influencer, legislative power, judicial power. Even personal qualities such as intelligence, ingenuity or strength of will are arguably a separate kind of power. The same goes, of course, for the narrow social justice framing of power applying only to a limited number of favored groups.
Once you view policies through this lens, handing power from individuals or even companies to the state becomes an obviously terrible idea - the state is already the larger and more powerful institution and thus should be, if anything, defanged.
It would be interesting for someone to go through the fundamental anti-capitalist and social justice literature, throw out everything that is plainly wrong, and apply the rest to power fully in general instead. I think the result would lean rather libertarian, though probably not full anarcho-capitalism. Maybe some hard separation between state and economy, where the state is only allowed to make very general rules to allow the market to work, a la ordoliberalism? Sortition instead of voting (or a combination), to avoid the lock-in of a political elite (same possibly for the judicature)? Automatic splitting and separation of large institutions? The possibilities are endless.
Also, a bit closer to the content of this article, Marx is imo one of those leading thinkers where the more information about his life you have, the less you like the ideology. Of course an unrepentant gambler and drunkard, who has depended on others all his life despite having no disabilities or other barriers keeping him from productive labor, wants to create a system safeguarding his interests! Just like Rousseau, who gave away all his kids to foster homes but wants to tell us how to conduct familial (and political, etc.) life.
Superb distillation of Singer's review. The eusociality point really nails why Marx's vision of human natrue malleability was doomed from the start. I ran into the same wall reading Dawkins back when I was into left politics, and that biological constraint basically ended my flirtation with hardline redistribution. What still bugs me tho is whether there's a workable middle path that accounts for our selfish wiring without letting corporations steamroll everything.
“Since Singer is a kind of leftist (a moral egalitarian), he also provides some more positive takes:”
Singer is a moral imbecile. Is this the same Singer that propose the concept of “post birth abortion”. OK, he never used that term. However, Singer “has argued controversially that the moral status of newborn infants is not automatically the same as that of older children or adults, and that in certain circumstances actions that most people would describe as infanticide could be ethically permissible…” (ChatGPT)
I've long thought that a reevaluation of Marx was in order: he was clearly wrong about many things, and governments that wrapped themselves in his name have committed the greatest atrocities in Mankind's history. That said, he doesn't seem to have been wrong about everything, and his intelligence and erudition cannot be denied. So how do we strike a balance- adequately condemning his excesses and errors without lying about his insights?
There's great dissatisfaction, especially among the young, with the state of affairs in the West right now. Evil Communist regimes have ridden such sentiments to brutal power in the past. We need to get out in front of this trend while we still can to prevent the worst from happening, and I think that starts with finding and speaking the truth.
I am struggling to see what are his unique insights? Class analysis? Not original to Marx. If anything, it's the idea that the future trajectory is caused by class conflict. Maybe there is some truth to this (e.g. capitalists want cheap labor, so they import migrants to do this, but this comes at a net loss to the welfare of most citizens and the future of the state), but he got all the predictions wrong.
The tendency for capitalists to import cheap labor irrespective of societal costs is EXACTLY what I was thinking of. There are probably more examples in this vein. Whether Marx's critiques are original to him or not, I cannot say. Again, he's certainly more wrong than right, and if he pointed out problems with capitalism, that doesn't mean his “solutions” were better. In fact they were certainly much worse. But it behooves us to evaluate him honestly.
Quoting E.K. from the book review: ........... As a matter of fact, every attempt at communism had lead to unspeakable horrors, and capitalism has generally made everything much better............
Marx was useless on the socialist future, but he offered conceptual models for understanding the recent capitalist past that were useful even if you rejected them. For example, his book "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Brumaire" on Napoleon III's career is both analytically sophisticated and quite funny political journalism.
As an economist, Marx was stuck with certain wrong dogmas of the classical era of economics, such as Adam Smith's mistaken labor theory of value (Marx wrote before Marshall's marginal revolution). and with his own lack of interest in thinking about the future in all the but the haziest terms (he would have made a terrible science fiction writer).
But as a sociologist, he made major progress in coming up with a basic model of class that remains relevant.
I wonder if this very short introduction was too short to make clear Marx's striking self-contradictions that were manifest in the Marx biography by Sperber: viz.,
"Writing in the Rhineland News in 1842 in his very first piece after taking over as editor, Marx [.....] declared that the spread of Communist ideas would “defeat our intelligence, conquer our sentiments,”and “practical attempts [to introduce communism], even attempts en masse, can be answered with cannons.” As Sperber writes, “The man who would write the Communist Manifesto just five years later was advocating the use of the army to suppress a communist workers’ uprising!”
Nor was this an isolated anomaly. In a speech to the Cologne Democratic Society in August 1848, Marx rejected revolutionary dictatorship by a single class as “nonsense”—an opinion so strikingly at odds with the views Marx had expressed only six months earlier in the Communist Manifesto that later Marxist-Leninist editors of his speeches mistakenly refused to accept its authenticity—and over twenty years later, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Marx also dismissed any notion of a Paris Commune as “nonsense.” "
--- quoting from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/05/09/real-karl-marx/
For more information on how Karl Marx, among others, lived their lives pick up Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals".
Added to my to read list. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55302.Intellectuals
I really didn't think I'd so much enjoy an article about a crank with an axe to grind who happens to write well (Singer) writing about a crank with an axe to grind who happened to write well (Marx)!
I think Marx wrote rather poorly. Maybe this is just because old writing is generally hard to read, and especially so if the author is German.
Marx's pedantic philosophy in the tradition of Kant and Hegel is pretty dire, but his opinion journalism for Horace Greeley's New York newspaper in his third language is impressively readable after 160 years.
The core issue with anticapitalist economics is that everything they write about capital/money, insofar it is even true, straightforwardly can be generalised to power in itself. Money is of course a part of the power of a person, but often not even the most important. There is social power, such as of the influencer, legislative power, judicial power. Even personal qualities such as intelligence, ingenuity or strength of will are arguably a separate kind of power. The same goes, of course, for the narrow social justice framing of power applying only to a limited number of favored groups.
Once you view policies through this lens, handing power from individuals or even companies to the state becomes an obviously terrible idea - the state is already the larger and more powerful institution and thus should be, if anything, defanged.
It would be interesting for someone to go through the fundamental anti-capitalist and social justice literature, throw out everything that is plainly wrong, and apply the rest to power fully in general instead. I think the result would lean rather libertarian, though probably not full anarcho-capitalism. Maybe some hard separation between state and economy, where the state is only allowed to make very general rules to allow the market to work, a la ordoliberalism? Sortition instead of voting (or a combination), to avoid the lock-in of a political elite (same possibly for the judicature)? Automatic splitting and separation of large institutions? The possibilities are endless.
Also, a bit closer to the content of this article, Marx is imo one of those leading thinkers where the more information about his life you have, the less you like the ideology. Of course an unrepentant gambler and drunkard, who has depended on others all his life despite having no disabilities or other barriers keeping him from productive labor, wants to create a system safeguarding his interests! Just like Rousseau, who gave away all his kids to foster homes but wants to tell us how to conduct familial (and political, etc.) life.
Marx was a massive charlatan, just like Freud
Superb distillation of Singer's review. The eusociality point really nails why Marx's vision of human natrue malleability was doomed from the start. I ran into the same wall reading Dawkins back when I was into left politics, and that biological constraint basically ended my flirtation with hardline redistribution. What still bugs me tho is whether there's a workable middle path that accounts for our selfish wiring without letting corporations steamroll everything.
“Since Singer is a kind of leftist (a moral egalitarian), he also provides some more positive takes:”
Singer is a moral imbecile. Is this the same Singer that propose the concept of “post birth abortion”. OK, he never used that term. However, Singer “has argued controversially that the moral status of newborn infants is not automatically the same as that of older children or adults, and that in certain circumstances actions that most people would describe as infanticide could be ethically permissible…” (ChatGPT)
That’s a bridge too far for me.
And here I thought being morally obliged to donate 95% (or whatever) of your income would be the red line.
I've long thought that a reevaluation of Marx was in order: he was clearly wrong about many things, and governments that wrapped themselves in his name have committed the greatest atrocities in Mankind's history. That said, he doesn't seem to have been wrong about everything, and his intelligence and erudition cannot be denied. So how do we strike a balance- adequately condemning his excesses and errors without lying about his insights?
There's great dissatisfaction, especially among the young, with the state of affairs in the West right now. Evil Communist regimes have ridden such sentiments to brutal power in the past. We need to get out in front of this trend while we still can to prevent the worst from happening, and I think that starts with finding and speaking the truth.
I am struggling to see what are his unique insights? Class analysis? Not original to Marx. If anything, it's the idea that the future trajectory is caused by class conflict. Maybe there is some truth to this (e.g. capitalists want cheap labor, so they import migrants to do this, but this comes at a net loss to the welfare of most citizens and the future of the state), but he got all the predictions wrong.
The tendency for capitalists to import cheap labor irrespective of societal costs is EXACTLY what I was thinking of. There are probably more examples in this vein. Whether Marx's critiques are original to him or not, I cannot say. Again, he's certainly more wrong than right, and if he pointed out problems with capitalism, that doesn't mean his “solutions” were better. In fact they were certainly much worse. But it behooves us to evaluate him honestly.
Quoting E.K. from the book review: ........... As a matter of fact, every attempt at communism had lead to unspeakable horrors, and capitalism has generally made everything much better............
Here is a counter-argument https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIB4e8AfPcM which is, unlike those of most other Marxists, short and fairly decent.