They're VERY Conservative. Can't recall exactly. Fiscal responsibility, which I'm afraid will be greeted as a led balloon these days. Those only two I remember.
IMHO, the poorer end of any sphere, those called the working class, are gonna be the source of great hope. Very few data points, granted, but BELIEVE they're the ones who won't be troubled by doing actual WORK to make themselves better off. Hope being they're idealistic enough to wanna help give others a leg up the same way.
I spend some time on the intelligent Conservative substacksI can find. Most of the posters there don't like and distrust the government, hate the MSM, fear big corporations and are pretty meh about organized religion. These aren't that far from my own leftist anti-authoritarian stance. They have a lot of confused ideas about what Socialism. No doubt the relentless propagandizing all of us Americans get from the earliest ages has had some effect here. But there is a chance to organize.
When I hear "organize" I hear mob rule. The woke? PLENTY organized. Am I wrong?
As to rest, Yah. What You see as left and right is what I call "the center." "The core." The people who fear POWER getting accumulated in the Fed Government for what it IS. And for good reason, AFAIK.
Various communists and Marxists will undoubtedly claim that this is not true when communism/Marxism is done correctly. But since they refuse to write down the laws that would actually govern their paradise, we outsiders have no idea what's true and what isn't about what they want or plan. (Of course they themselves don't know either; if they knew they would write it down!)
There are none because it violates basic laws of human nature.
Communism works fine on a small scale. We use it in my family, from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
But at a larger scale not at all. I'm very willing to bust my but to help my children. My desire greatly diminishes after that. I'm simply not going to work that hard for society as a whole. Me getting to keep the fruits of my labor and capital (and later give it to my children) is what motivates me.
Yes, I completely agree. Your point about family organization being communist is a good one, and illustrates very clearly why communism fails on larger scales.
Marx apparently believed that "class" could substitute for "family", but this was (I claim) obviously wrong even in his time.
I don't think Marx argued that 'class' would replace 'family', as class relations would disappear under Communism. Rather, all human beings could meet all their basic needs from society's production, and be freed to engage themselves in fulfilling tasks, such that the distinction between labour and leisure would disappear.
YMMV though on whether such a state of affairs is possible. My take is that it isn't until technology and production has advanced to the point that scarcity is no longer a problem. Some people on the Left argue that we've already reached this point, and whatever scarcity in modern society is artificial and created by the capitalist system, but I think any attempt to realise socialist relations of production when scarcity still exists is bound to result in all the problems associated with the 'real existing socialism' of the old Soviet bloc.
I don't think scarcity will ever "not be a problem" for the simple fact that many goods are positional goods. They achieve a lot of their value because other people don't have them.
Not to mention very important things like housing. We moved out to the country where we could a ranch with 20 acres plus a big house for long winters.
There's also limited beach front property etc.
Not to mention, competing for the most desirable mate.
The world will always be filled with scarcity. As long as the allocation of those things are through competition, and not through a rigged game (government, or crony capitalism) I'm, ok with that
"I don't think scarcity will ever 'not be a problem' for the simple fact that many goods are positional goods. They achieve a lot of their value because other people don't have them."
Goods don't have to be exclusive to be positional, either. If a lot of others *can* have the good, and you can't, for some reason, people judge you as morally deficient for not having it.
This is most obvious in health care. The very fact that modern medicine can work so many miracles makes it harder to accept that any residual medical limitation is really limiting. Bodies that are different, but reliably so, or which are made reliable through medicine, grit, and willpower, can be accommodated. This is a phenomenal human achievement. The residuum of bodily unreliability keeps shrinking, praise God!
But this creates a resentment among those stuck in the residuum precisely because there's now more justifiable skepticism than ever toward their claim they can't realistically help being stuck there. So, while life has never been materially better for the infirm, and there never was some halcyon period of human history where infirmity wasn't suspected by someone of being a mark of sin, rather than innocent suffering that can't be helped, the more people who can be included in the circle of manageable medical problems, the more alienated those who still feel excluded feel.
Manageable health doesn't cease being a positional good just because it becomes ever more inclusive. I doubt health is unique in this, either.
I actually think You have some GREAT ideas. Would point out that Convention of States group would like to see term limits on Congress-people. Baby step, but there it is.
"why would anyone want to put in the often massive extra effort to be a surgeon or dentist if you end up with no extra reward for it"
The vast majority of us won't. I know I certainly won't. I work as hard as I do to get my family ahead. If I'm not able to capture a large portion of the extra work, then why bother.
As for rotational power, why or how would that work?
I start a business, it starts to grow, become successful then someone else just gets to come in and run it? Again, I'm working hard to leave something to my children. Not give it away to someone else.
Most importantly, any other system is predicated on force. People with guns coming and taking from those that created and produced, and saying here person designated by the government (which I'm sure will be entirely fair) this is yours now.
None of this is to say you can't have government rules of the game to prevent monopoly, anti-competitive behavior etc. Or to have a basic safety net for that matter.
But the further you get away from the free market, the more inefficient things tend to get. And the more wealth tends to be destroyed.
Unlike the American Revolution, which did not involve the systematic harassment, oppression, assault, and murder of loyalists at all. Nope, that never happened.
>It’s OK to demand an end to capitalism and imperialism and to not be a Marxist. It is OK to be the left wing of the left wing and to not be a Marxist.
See, I don't think it actually is, because so many of the definitions accepted as the default coin of the realm on the Left are derived, one way or another, from some branch of Marxism. Hell, try to find an explicit socialist movement today that takes literally zero ideological inspiration from Marxism-Leninism or Trotskyism -- just ignores them completely. You mostly can't! Everyone from the demsocs to the anarchists is working with a vocabulary taken mostly from 20th-century actually-existing Left movements that considered themselves heirs of Marx in one form or another.
So for instance, I actually knew most of those bold-faced bullet-points about Marxism you listed! In fact, many of those are what I *like* about Marxism. But (as you advise!) I don't really consider myself a Marxist. I would just say we should take what was right from Marxism and leave alone what wasn't right and didn't work. We should learn without worshiping.
But, and this is the tough part, IMHO to learn without worshiping demands that we do a much more fundamental rethink of Left politics and question whether we, today, should really automatically be in continuity with, well, all those Marxists (be they orthodox Marxist, ML-but-not-tankie, ML meaning tankie, Trotskyist, Marxist-socdems, Marxist-humanist, goddamn fucking Maoists, etc) who came before us.
It's not that some Leftists like "capitalism and imperialism" in so many words. But it is that without a shared theoretical framework, even the definitions underlying people's critiques and programs diverge so far from each-other that you end up with, say, left-coms and Trotskyists yelling at MLs that they're just doing capitalism, and tankies and Maoists upholding monopoly as Good Praxis while also insisting that imperialism is when you don't do what they want.
Oh, and to paraphrase Tom Lehrer's "National Brotherhood Week",
There would absolutely be happy janitors if they were paid a decent wage and weren't stigmatized. In fact, I know one from my last job (an immigrant) who was one of the nicest guys I ever met. 4 kids. He died in his 50s of stomach cancer. The CEO gave his kids an iPad in sympathy. The CEO was a millionaire probably 50 times over.
In communism markets are treated as intrinsically exploitative is the point.
Without signaling mechanism of markets you end up relying on central planning.
Absent an omniscient central planning intelligence (which is always the case) you end up with massive inefficiencies. Not only are people not sent to do what is needed but many people don't want to do what they are told, so it all inevitably devolves into authoritarianism and having people do things with guns pointed at them.
That sums it up beautifully. That's why their proposed solution assumes a fundamental change in human nature in every single citizen, thus never requiring the awful thing capitalism invented, "People doing jobs they don't enjoy."
Traditionally Marxists would argue that this alienation is due to the concept of the division of labour itself, where people lose their humanity due to being confined to only one task. Marx's famous passage in the German Ideology about hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening and criticising after dinner without becoming a 'hunter' 'fisherman' 'cattle-herder' or 'critic' expresses this view.
The idea is that in a Communist society, people are no longer defined by their roles in the relations of production, but can turn their hand to anything that fulfills them.
The issue with this is the old co-ordination problem. Who allocates tasks to ensure the necessary work of society is performed? Would it be a free democratic decision, or will there inevitably have to be some coercion involved? My guess would that the former would only be possible once technology has advanced to the point that all of the really essential tasks are automated, and the problem of scarcity is solved for good.
Steve Jobs built the roads that the semiconductor parts were transported on. Steve Jobs taught himself programming in the wilderness. Steve Jobs designed the internal combustion engine. Steve Jobs didn't need Woz's help but brought him along out of sympathy. Steve Jobs Steve Jobs Steve Jobs.
He was the idea and sales guy and the engineers and software developers were charged with executing on those ideas. And they deeply resent not being the Idea Guy.
As for the sales aspect, I once worked at a company run by developers that deeply resented that the sales guys made many multiples of what the developers made. So they decided to hire sales people and pay them a straight salary. They almost went bankrupt before hastily going back to the old system.
Counterpoint: what about Steve Jobs?!?!?! I'm just joshing you. I'm just at the point where "what about this guy who literally had thousands of people over decades figure out how to execute his ideas? doesn't that disprove the idea that laborers are important?" drives me into simultaneous despair and annoyance. There should be a word for that.
Man, this is exactly how I describe many science fiction novels.
For people who make a living communicating stories about imaginary people and worlds, a lot of fiction writers sure do seem like they've never heard another person speak.
An hour of Steve Jobs time at any point in his adult life is of more value than an hour of your time or my time is the point relative to the Labor Theory of Value.
It's not hero worship of Jobs or an attempt to make the point that he created all the value himself.
Some work is intrinsically more valuable than other work and this represents a major 'wrench' in the mechanics of all Marxist economics.
"An hour of Steve Jobs time at any point in his adult life is of more value than an hour of your time or my time is the point relative to the Labor Theory of Value."
As it's been pointed out, that's not the Labor Theory of Value, and also it's false. Steve Jobs was mostly an Idea and Marketing Guy that hit it big, he wasn't some visionary genius. That's his marketing, still chugging on even after he self-destructed in one of the stupidest ways imaginable from an easily-treated disease.
You pretty much get the same kind of "genius" from anyone with a visible platform and a bunch of STEM promises. It's almost like there's this energy out there that wants to attach to some salesman, and it's going to find one. See: Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes (who ironically patterned her shtick after Jobs), etc. Just need a little charisma and some people to try to execute on your wild ideas and you're good to go!
BTW you can see the bad faith here with everyone calling it "pancreatic cancer" and not mentioning that he had the rare kind that is very survivable if you get to it early and cut it out (which he did not do).
Job's genius in addition to marketing was his ability to predict where technology would be in x years at y price point. The Lisa and to a lesser extent the original Mac failed because they were too expensive. He would have been better off waiting six months or a year for component prices to fall. Having learned his lesson, when the iPhone came out it was at exactly the moment that component prices fell to the point that it would be a grand slam hit.
IIRC when reading about the fall of RIM and the Blackberry when RIM engineers tore apart the first iPhone they were shocked at what it could do for the price. They knew it was all possible but thought the tech was 18 months away.
Right but theoretically some number of hours of you playing basketball would be worth 1 hour of Lebron playing basketball. Which is of course wrong.
No number of hours of you playing basketball is equal to 1 hour of Lebron playing basketball
WRT to Marx:
If I innovate with a team of innovators and create a machine that digs up potatoes such that people no longer have to dig up potatoes, how is that labor valued?
With just this basic example, all the Marxist economics break down.
The number of potatoes you have is based on innovation and not worker hours.
Material goods aren't primarily manifest by labor in 2021.
Pedantic Marxists can quibble, but again no one takes LTV seriously anymore. It's not explanatory.
>If I innovate with a team of innovators and create a machine that digs up potatoes such that people no longer have to dig up potatoes, how is that labor valued?
The whole point of the LTV is that machinery decreases the total socially necessary labor time, but it doesn't decrease the working class's need for wages. So you end up either "creating jobs" just to have people employed (doing deeply irrational, unproductive bullshit) or dealing with crises of mass unemployment due to overproduction.
This is the contradiction the LTV exists to highlight: under-consumption arising as a direct result of over-production.
And I think that the unproductive bullshit thing is real.
But the reality is that innovation leads to much greater material wealth, wherein even if there is more inequality and less need for labor, everyone ends up having more.
I am in my mid 40s and compared to when I grew up in the 90s the poor now have much, much more materially objectively if you look at surveys of what they actually own.
You can be poor today and own a house and a car and have AC and have cable and video games, etc. etc.
I'm not saying it's good to be poor or minimizing suffering associated with poverty. But automation and technical advancement does seem to have increased what everyone gets to have in absolute terms.
I wouldn't think for a second to try to critique any significant historical thinker without first making sure I actually understood what they were saying in the first place. Do your homework and come back and say something coherent and maybe we have a conversation. But a criticism as absolutely dog shit stupid as that that the demonstrates zero engagement with the original work derseves no lengthy rebuttal.
I provided a link with a detailed explanation that you've clearly taken no time to look at and are still demonstrating no understanding of the LTV. I would encourage you to read the entire document, but specifically an understanding of use value as opposed to exchange value and even more so a concept of "socially necessary labor time" would greatly benefit you. At no point in Marx's explanation of his LTV does he posit either explicitly or implicitly that all labor imparts value equally or that digging holes and filling them back in is the same as productive labor. He even explicitly denies that understanding.
Right. My question is, how does innovation/management/knowledge factor into this?
'Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labour of society.'
In 2021 what we have materially is primarily due to innovation and not labor.
We're not in factories creating widgets or out on the family farm milking cows.
I don't understand why Marxism in 2021 is anything beyond a historical curiosity and cautionary tale.
I read that detailed explanation, too. All of it. And it did not strike me, either, as a detailed explanation of Marxist labor theory of value, but instead several topics jumbled together in which labor theory of value was incidentally — and unclearly — addressed.
The most charitable description I can give of this explanation is that, if you're already a knowledgeable Marxist, your background knowledge causes what seems like a "jumble" to outsiders to hang together in a coherent, interesting whole, and the essay reads as an illuminating summary to you, like how the last chapter of a music theory textbook entitled "Schenkerian analysis of atonality" might seem "obvious" once you've mastered all the previous chapters. That won't — and shouldn't — make it obvious to non music theorists.
Statements like "Exchange value is the phenomenal form of value. And the value of commodities is determined by the labour time socially necessary for their production" make it seem as if the labor value is deduced from exchange value anyhow. If so, how is labor value, not exchange value, primal?
Statements like "Nobody thinks that the chocolate coating to a sweet adds any value apart from its cost for the capitalist who buys it" read as if the author doesn't know anything about candy making or consumption, since it's normal to think chocolate coating adds more to the structure and deliciousness of a sweet than its purchase cost. There's a reason peanut-butter cups and chocolate-liqueur cherries are classic sweets while chocolate-covered Skittles aren't.
Anyone who's been a sales clerk, a parent, librarian, or held any other job tidying material for others so they can access it knows why, "Surplus value is $55, of which $1 goes to the immediate boss and $54 on Oxford Street rents and the pay of salespeople, who no doubt work very hard, but do not generate new values through their work," tells a falsehood about sales clerks. Plus, by the essay's own reasoning, if these sales clerks added no value, who'd miss them if they stopped their work?
Excellent post about Marxism. I learned a lot from it. Question: what is the informed opinion about the rate of profit? Over the past decade. U.S. corporate profits as a % of revenues and GDP have increased materially.
I've thankfully cut down social media a lot, but I remember reading some argument between "Marxists" and "anarchists." One side said they couldn't ally with the other because of what happened in 1930s Catalonia or 1920s Russia. It seemed pretty wild to me: completely performative identities believing they have some connection to real conflicts 100 years ago.
Personally, I do what you mentioned a later paragraph. I identify (ugh) as a socialist, with no particular leanings from there. I think labor power in the US is so dead that we need a robust welfare state and a lot more union density because we can even think about anything remotely revolutionary.
Dude, in my Trotskyist days I had friends who were anarcho-syndicalists who were annoyed with me about Kronstadt. I would often remind them it was 60 years before I was born and I had little to do with it. Your comment brought back many memories.
Embarrassed to say I didn't know a lot of this. Thanks for this post. Could you recommend a book that is a summary of Marx's thought? I know I will never make it through Das Capital.
It would be great at some point to read about how Marxism is still relevant in 2021.
Many of the core precepts don't seem to hold. Not sure if 'hyper-modernism' is the right term, but it seems like with the rapid change of technology we are basically failing to come up with a vocabulary and conceptual framework to make sense of the world in general and economic relationships in particular.
The misuse of 'neoliberal' is one example of this tendency, the enthusiasm for 'Marxism,' which was an appropriate critique in the setting of 19th century British industrialization but is not explanatory of our current economic relationships, is another.
What does Marxism say about a Goldman Sachs 'wage slave' making seven figures? Versus a truck driver who owns his truck?
I am nostalgic for the Marxist-ish materialists who were old when I was in college 20 years ago because, even though they failed, they were smart and well read and wanted to argue and had a generally positive moral valence even if all of their projects ended in catastrophe. They never took their eye off the ball which was poverty and suffering due to material deprivation.
But what is the narrative for similarly oriented materialists today, if not specifically Marxists? I don't know what it is. Without out a clear class critique everything devolves into the weirdness of Gramsci, DIY indentarianism, increasing administrative and bureaucratic power, and affluent radical kabuki of the New Left/Frankfurt School.
I appreciate that the socialists and Marxists can still throw rocks (thank you WSWS), but what's actual plan, beyond midwits like Breunig branding themselves as True Socialists TM?
"...but it seems like with the rapid change of technology we are basically failing to come up with a vocabulary and conceptual framework to make sense of the world in general and economic relationships in particular."
Yah.
(IOW, I think this is the existential problem these days. And, IMHO, I believe this is an intentional outcome of a LOTTA the leftists these days. Not ALL of 'em want chaos, but enough.)
The class distinctions that I see animating people out in the world are between people who sell their labor at higher and lower prices, with more and less autonomy, more and less security, polarized around education and urbanization.
No one gives much of a shit about who owns the means of production. In fact you see this in tax / social safety net discourse all the time: yes there are a few Jeff Bezos figures out there, but we can’t build the welfare state on their backs alone; we have to get it from the urban educated workers.
No one cares who owns the means of production because our capitalist overlords have done an exceptional job of brainwashing us into thinking that it doesn’t matter.
"To be a Marxist is to believe that a sufficiently advanced understanding of the world can describe a fundamental relationship between workers, the means of production, and the owners of the means of production..."
INESCAPABLE flaw in LOGIC. There can NEVER be a sufficiently advanced understanding of PEOPLE to be able to describe what Marxism wants to describe, right?
"...which implies the inevitable triumph of the producing class over the rentier class as the internal contradictions of capitalism assert themselves."
THIS, dunno... But MEBBE possible WITHOUT Socialism. Don't see it happening if there's a broad welfare state, tho. That's just me and ICBW. Show me.
Great essay. This is something few people these days realize - particularly in the right-wing contexts I grew up in where communism, socialism, Obama-style neoliberalism, and fascism all get conflated together so that words have no meanings.
But clearly significant confusion exists on the left as well.
For me, I find the mutualism of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day more attractive than Marxism, but I recognize that the labor theory of value was an important development in economic theory even though I don't agree with the implications Marx drew from it
They're VERY Conservative. Can't recall exactly. Fiscal responsibility, which I'm afraid will be greeted as a led balloon these days. Those only two I remember.
IMHO, the poorer end of any sphere, those called the working class, are gonna be the source of great hope. Very few data points, granted, but BELIEVE they're the ones who won't be troubled by doing actual WORK to make themselves better off. Hope being they're idealistic enough to wanna help give others a leg up the same way.
I spend some time on the intelligent Conservative substacksI can find. Most of the posters there don't like and distrust the government, hate the MSM, fear big corporations and are pretty meh about organized religion. These aren't that far from my own leftist anti-authoritarian stance. They have a lot of confused ideas about what Socialism. No doubt the relentless propagandizing all of us Americans get from the earliest ages has had some effect here. But there is a chance to organize.
When I hear "organize" I hear mob rule. The woke? PLENTY organized. Am I wrong?
As to rest, Yah. What You see as left and right is what I call "the center." "The core." The people who fear POWER getting accumulated in the Fed Government for what it IS. And for good reason, AFAIK.
In the past organize means to form unions. A fair wage for an honest job, which we have little of these days.
I can imagine other ways to organize and I am sure there are ways I have not dreamt of.
Various communists and Marxists will undoubtedly claim that this is not true when communism/Marxism is done correctly. But since they refuse to write down the laws that would actually govern their paradise, we outsiders have no idea what's true and what isn't about what they want or plan. (Of course they themselves don't know either; if they knew they would write it down!)
There are none because it violates basic laws of human nature.
Communism works fine on a small scale. We use it in my family, from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
But at a larger scale not at all. I'm very willing to bust my but to help my children. My desire greatly diminishes after that. I'm simply not going to work that hard for society as a whole. Me getting to keep the fruits of my labor and capital (and later give it to my children) is what motivates me.
Yes, I completely agree. Your point about family organization being communist is a good one, and illustrates very clearly why communism fails on larger scales.
Marx apparently believed that "class" could substitute for "family", but this was (I claim) obviously wrong even in his time.
I don't think Marx argued that 'class' would replace 'family', as class relations would disappear under Communism. Rather, all human beings could meet all their basic needs from society's production, and be freed to engage themselves in fulfilling tasks, such that the distinction between labour and leisure would disappear.
YMMV though on whether such a state of affairs is possible. My take is that it isn't until technology and production has advanced to the point that scarcity is no longer a problem. Some people on the Left argue that we've already reached this point, and whatever scarcity in modern society is artificial and created by the capitalist system, but I think any attempt to realise socialist relations of production when scarcity still exists is bound to result in all the problems associated with the 'real existing socialism' of the old Soviet bloc.
I don't think scarcity will ever "not be a problem" for the simple fact that many goods are positional goods. They achieve a lot of their value because other people don't have them.
Not to mention very important things like housing. We moved out to the country where we could a ranch with 20 acres plus a big house for long winters.
There's also limited beach front property etc.
Not to mention, competing for the most desirable mate.
The world will always be filled with scarcity. As long as the allocation of those things are through competition, and not through a rigged game (government, or crony capitalism) I'm, ok with that
"I don't think scarcity will ever 'not be a problem' for the simple fact that many goods are positional goods. They achieve a lot of their value because other people don't have them."
Goods don't have to be exclusive to be positional, either. If a lot of others *can* have the good, and you can't, for some reason, people judge you as morally deficient for not having it.
This is most obvious in health care. The very fact that modern medicine can work so many miracles makes it harder to accept that any residual medical limitation is really limiting. Bodies that are different, but reliably so, or which are made reliable through medicine, grit, and willpower, can be accommodated. This is a phenomenal human achievement. The residuum of bodily unreliability keeps shrinking, praise God!
But this creates a resentment among those stuck in the residuum precisely because there's now more justifiable skepticism than ever toward their claim they can't realistically help being stuck there. So, while life has never been materially better for the infirm, and there never was some halcyon period of human history where infirmity wasn't suspected by someone of being a mark of sin, rather than innocent suffering that can't be helped, the more people who can be included in the circle of manageable medical problems, the more alienated those who still feel excluded feel.
Manageable health doesn't cease being a positional good just because it becomes ever more inclusive. I doubt health is unique in this, either.
I actually think You have some GREAT ideas. Would point out that Convention of States group would like to see term limits on Congress-people. Baby step, but there it is.
"term limits on Congress-people"
CA had tried term limits for state reps. It actually made things worse, hard to believe but true.
"why would anyone want to put in the often massive extra effort to be a surgeon or dentist if you end up with no extra reward for it"
The vast majority of us won't. I know I certainly won't. I work as hard as I do to get my family ahead. If I'm not able to capture a large portion of the extra work, then why bother.
As for rotational power, why or how would that work?
I start a business, it starts to grow, become successful then someone else just gets to come in and run it? Again, I'm working hard to leave something to my children. Not give it away to someone else.
Most importantly, any other system is predicated on force. People with guns coming and taking from those that created and produced, and saying here person designated by the government (which I'm sure will be entirely fair) this is yours now.
None of this is to say you can't have government rules of the game to prevent monopoly, anti-competitive behavior etc. Or to have a basic safety net for that matter.
But the further you get away from the free market, the more inefficient things tend to get. And the more wealth tends to be destroyed.
There is no free lunch
Unlike the American Revolution, which did not involve the systematic harassment, oppression, assault, and murder of loyalists at all. Nope, that never happened.
And, indeed, core to the ideology you are implicitly contrasting it with. Isn't this fun?
Again: what is the capitalist tradition that is not attended to by rivers of blood?
Me? Nup.
Anyone who yacks on about "absolute wrongs" has no place in politics, or in fact in the world as it really is.
The American Revolution was not about capitalism. The Industrial Revolution emerged in Great Britain for crying out loud.
Hmm you've got a few more years to go till you can call yourself an aging leftist...
please, let me have this, it's the only role I'll ever comfortably fill
I was surprised when I found out I was older than Freddie
'I still believe that no political or philosophical tradition better describes our world or its economy...'
I mean isn't this David Harvey? Marxism not as a blueprint for remaking the world, but as an epistemology for history and as a basis for critique?
Not the David Harvey of "Spaces of Hope" friendo.
>It’s OK to demand an end to capitalism and imperialism and to not be a Marxist. It is OK to be the left wing of the left wing and to not be a Marxist.
See, I don't think it actually is, because so many of the definitions accepted as the default coin of the realm on the Left are derived, one way or another, from some branch of Marxism. Hell, try to find an explicit socialist movement today that takes literally zero ideological inspiration from Marxism-Leninism or Trotskyism -- just ignores them completely. You mostly can't! Everyone from the demsocs to the anarchists is working with a vocabulary taken mostly from 20th-century actually-existing Left movements that considered themselves heirs of Marx in one form or another.
So for instance, I actually knew most of those bold-faced bullet-points about Marxism you listed! In fact, many of those are what I *like* about Marxism. But (as you advise!) I don't really consider myself a Marxist. I would just say we should take what was right from Marxism and leave alone what wasn't right and didn't work. We should learn without worshiping.
But, and this is the tough part, IMHO to learn without worshiping demands that we do a much more fundamental rethink of Left politics and question whether we, today, should really automatically be in continuity with, well, all those Marxists (be they orthodox Marxist, ML-but-not-tankie, ML meaning tankie, Trotskyist, Marxist-socdems, Marxist-humanist, goddamn fucking Maoists, etc) who came before us.
It's not that some Leftists like "capitalism and imperialism" in so many words. But it is that without a shared theoretical framework, even the definitions underlying people's critiques and programs diverge so far from each-other that you end up with, say, left-coms and Trotskyists yelling at MLs that they're just doing capitalism, and tankies and Maoists upholding monopoly as Good Praxis while also insisting that imperialism is when you don't do what they want.
Oh, and to paraphrase Tom Lehrer's "National Brotherhood Week",
Aaaaaaaaand EVERYBODY hates the socdems!
'Marxism is not antagonistic to civil liberties.'
Of course it is. Without *exploitative* market mechanisms that signal what needs to be done, who is going to volunteer to clean the toilets?
When said toilet cleaning volunteers do not show up, what happens next?
There would absolutely be happy janitors if they were paid a decent wage and weren't stigmatized. In fact, I know one from my last job (an immigrant) who was one of the nicest guys I ever met. 4 kids. He died in his 50s of stomach cancer. The CEO gave his kids an iPad in sympathy. The CEO was a millionaire probably 50 times over.
Right. You have to pay the janitors. Are you disagreeing with me?
"Communism means nobody gets paid" is an interesting take and also pretty much disqualifies you from further engagement. Take it sleazy.
In communism markets are treated as intrinsically exploitative is the point.
Without signaling mechanism of markets you end up relying on central planning.
Absent an omniscient central planning intelligence (which is always the case) you end up with massive inefficiencies. Not only are people not sent to do what is needed but many people don't want to do what they are told, so it all inevitably devolves into authoritarianism and having people do things with guns pointed at them.
This was the story in every Communist country.
Marxism always devolves to Orwell's nightmare "a boot stomping on a human face forever."
That sums it up beautifully. That's why their proposed solution assumes a fundamental change in human nature in every single citizen, thus never requiring the awful thing capitalism invented, "People doing jobs they don't enjoy."
Traditionally Marxists would argue that this alienation is due to the concept of the division of labour itself, where people lose their humanity due to being confined to only one task. Marx's famous passage in the German Ideology about hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening and criticising after dinner without becoming a 'hunter' 'fisherman' 'cattle-herder' or 'critic' expresses this view.
The idea is that in a Communist society, people are no longer defined by their roles in the relations of production, but can turn their hand to anything that fulfills them.
The issue with this is the old co-ordination problem. Who allocates tasks to ensure the necessary work of society is performed? Would it be a free democratic decision, or will there inevitably have to be some coercion involved? My guess would that the former would only be possible once technology has advanced to the point that all of the really essential tasks are automated, and the problem of scarcity is solved for good.
Under Capitalism man exploits man. Under Communism it is the other way around.
'labor theory of value' has been totally dispensed with by economists.
Digging and filling fence post holes has the same value as Steve Jobs playing around in his garage in the 70s?
Steve Jobs built the roads that the semiconductor parts were transported on. Steve Jobs taught himself programming in the wilderness. Steve Jobs designed the internal combustion engine. Steve Jobs didn't need Woz's help but brought him along out of sympathy. Steve Jobs Steve Jobs Steve Jobs.
Not sure why Steve Jobs drives some people crazy, but Steve Jobs drives some people crazy.
He was the idea and sales guy and the engineers and software developers were charged with executing on those ideas. And they deeply resent not being the Idea Guy.
As for the sales aspect, I once worked at a company run by developers that deeply resented that the sales guys made many multiples of what the developers made. So they decided to hire sales people and pay them a straight salary. They almost went bankrupt before hastily going back to the old system.
I feel like two of the most resentful groups in 2021 are academics and mid-level engineers/software developers.
I know many more of the former, and my implicit question is always, 'If you're as smart as you think you are, why do you have this job?'
Something similar with mid-level techs. If what you're doing is so hard and what they're doing is so easy, why are you doing what you're doing?
Labor theory isn't about time spent laboring. Of course an hour of Lebron James playing basketball is worth more than an hour of me playing it.
Counterpoint: what about Steve Jobs?!?!?! I'm just joshing you. I'm just at the point where "what about this guy who literally had thousands of people over decades figure out how to execute his ideas? doesn't that disprove the idea that laborers are important?" drives me into simultaneous despair and annoyance. There should be a word for that.
To be fair, this stuff happens because most lefties are terrible at explaining their ideas.
I moved left from reading Chomsky. We can debate his limitations as a philosopher, but he's a great communicator.
I think most people are bad at explaining their ideas, myself included. If you're an effective communicator we need you!
That's true. Most programming tutorials seem like they're written by someone who's never met a human before.
Man, this is exactly how I describe many science fiction novels.
For people who make a living communicating stories about imaginary people and worlds, a lot of fiction writers sure do seem like they've never heard another person speak.
I’m not sure what you mean. The idea and the management skill to execute on the idea are where the value is.
It’s like the old story of Henry Ford and the bill from the engineer. Chaulk $1 knowing where to make the X $9,999.
An hour of Steve Jobs time at any point in his adult life is of more value than an hour of your time or my time is the point relative to the Labor Theory of Value.
It's not hero worship of Jobs or an attempt to make the point that he created all the value himself.
Some work is intrinsically more valuable than other work and this represents a major 'wrench' in the mechanics of all Marxist economics.
"An hour of Steve Jobs time at any point in his adult life is of more value than an hour of your time or my time is the point relative to the Labor Theory of Value."
As it's been pointed out, that's not the Labor Theory of Value, and also it's false. Steve Jobs was mostly an Idea and Marketing Guy that hit it big, he wasn't some visionary genius. That's his marketing, still chugging on even after he self-destructed in one of the stupidest ways imaginable from an easily-treated disease.
Yup
You pretty much get the same kind of "genius" from anyone with a visible platform and a bunch of STEM promises. It's almost like there's this energy out there that wants to attach to some salesman, and it's going to find one. See: Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes (who ironically patterned her shtick after Jobs), etc. Just need a little charisma and some people to try to execute on your wild ideas and you're good to go!
I want you to think about what it means to be 'mostly an Idea' guy and what type of *value* that adds.
Also, let me ask you to elaborate on pancreatic cancer being an 'easily-treated disease.'
Pancreatic cancer is basically the complete opposite of an "easily-treated" disease.
Bro, doing a Whipple procedure is as easy as giving someone a flu shot.
Just out of curiosity what did you think Jobs died of?
BTW you can see the bad faith here with everyone calling it "pancreatic cancer" and not mentioning that he had the rare kind that is very survivable if you get to it early and cut it out (which he did not do).
Ah I didn’t know that - it makes more sense now the timeline of what happened.
Right but I wouldn't say it would be easily treated - what's your understanding of what the surgical approach would entail?
Job's genius in addition to marketing was his ability to predict where technology would be in x years at y price point. The Lisa and to a lesser extent the original Mac failed because they were too expensive. He would have been better off waiting six months or a year for component prices to fall. Having learned his lesson, when the iPhone came out it was at exactly the moment that component prices fell to the point that it would be a grand slam hit.
IIRC when reading about the fall of RIM and the Blackberry when RIM engineers tore apart the first iPhone they were shocked at what it could do for the price. They knew it was all possible but thought the tech was 18 months away.
Soclialists need to write down the actual rules (laws) under which the economy would function. Until they do that, we're all just debating vaporware.
Right but theoretically some number of hours of you playing basketball would be worth 1 hour of Lebron playing basketball. Which is of course wrong.
No number of hours of you playing basketball is equal to 1 hour of Lebron playing basketball
WRT to Marx:
If I innovate with a team of innovators and create a machine that digs up potatoes such that people no longer have to dig up potatoes, how is that labor valued?
With just this basic example, all the Marxist economics break down.
The number of potatoes you have is based on innovation and not worker hours.
Material goods aren't primarily manifest by labor in 2021.
Pedantic Marxists can quibble, but again no one takes LTV seriously anymore. It's not explanatory.
>If I innovate with a team of innovators and create a machine that digs up potatoes such that people no longer have to dig up potatoes, how is that labor valued?
The whole point of the LTV is that machinery decreases the total socially necessary labor time, but it doesn't decrease the working class's need for wages. So you end up either "creating jobs" just to have people employed (doing deeply irrational, unproductive bullshit) or dealing with crises of mass unemployment due to overproduction.
This is the contradiction the LTV exists to highlight: under-consumption arising as a direct result of over-production.
I get that as an abstract concept.
And I think that the unproductive bullshit thing is real.
But the reality is that innovation leads to much greater material wealth, wherein even if there is more inequality and less need for labor, everyone ends up having more.
I am in my mid 40s and compared to when I grew up in the 90s the poor now have much, much more materially objectively if you look at surveys of what they actually own.
You can be poor today and own a house and a car and have AC and have cable and video games, etc. etc.
I'm not saying it's good to be poor or minimizing suffering associated with poverty. But automation and technical advancement does seem to have increased what everyone gets to have in absolute terms.
That is never what the LTV has meant. Read a book or an article, for God's sakes.
Do explain
My understanding of the LTV is that the value of a commodity is based upon how much labor goes into it.
The amount of labor that goes into producing an economic good is the source of value.
This is of course nonsense, and no contemporary economists believe this.
Dear god, just read like 3 chapters from Capital. That's not what the LTV means at all. You're tilting against windmills here.
Do explain
I wouldn't think for a second to try to critique any significant historical thinker without first making sure I actually understood what they were saying in the first place. Do your homework and come back and say something coherent and maybe we have a conversation. But a criticism as absolutely dog shit stupid as that that the demonstrates zero engagement with the original work derseves no lengthy rebuttal.
https://www.marxist.com/marx-marxist-labour-theory-value.htm
What am I missing? Value is due to *labor*.
This is a concept that was outmoded by the mid 20th century at latest.
I provided a link with a detailed explanation that you've clearly taken no time to look at and are still demonstrating no understanding of the LTV. I would encourage you to read the entire document, but specifically an understanding of use value as opposed to exchange value and even more so a concept of "socially necessary labor time" would greatly benefit you. At no point in Marx's explanation of his LTV does he posit either explicitly or implicitly that all labor imparts value equally or that digging holes and filling them back in is the same as productive labor. He even explicitly denies that understanding.
Right. My question is, how does innovation/management/knowledge factor into this?
'Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labour of society.'
In 2021 what we have materially is primarily due to innovation and not labor.
We're not in factories creating widgets or out on the family farm milking cows.
I don't understand why Marxism in 2021 is anything beyond a historical curiosity and cautionary tale.
I read that detailed explanation, too. All of it. And it did not strike me, either, as a detailed explanation of Marxist labor theory of value, but instead several topics jumbled together in which labor theory of value was incidentally — and unclearly — addressed.
The most charitable description I can give of this explanation is that, if you're already a knowledgeable Marxist, your background knowledge causes what seems like a "jumble" to outsiders to hang together in a coherent, interesting whole, and the essay reads as an illuminating summary to you, like how the last chapter of a music theory textbook entitled "Schenkerian analysis of atonality" might seem "obvious" once you've mastered all the previous chapters. That won't — and shouldn't — make it obvious to non music theorists.
Statements like "Exchange value is the phenomenal form of value. And the value of commodities is determined by the labour time socially necessary for their production" make it seem as if the labor value is deduced from exchange value anyhow. If so, how is labor value, not exchange value, primal?
Statements like "Nobody thinks that the chocolate coating to a sweet adds any value apart from its cost for the capitalist who buys it" read as if the author doesn't know anything about candy making or consumption, since it's normal to think chocolate coating adds more to the structure and deliciousness of a sweet than its purchase cost. There's a reason peanut-butter cups and chocolate-liqueur cherries are classic sweets while chocolate-covered Skittles aren't.
Anyone who's been a sales clerk, a parent, librarian, or held any other job tidying material for others so they can access it knows why, "Surplus value is $55, of which $1 goes to the immediate boss and $54 on Oxford Street rents and the pay of salespeople, who no doubt work very hard, but do not generate new values through their work," tells a falsehood about sales clerks. Plus, by the essay's own reasoning, if these sales clerks added no value, who'd miss them if they stopped their work?
Etc.
Excellent post about Marxism. I learned a lot from it. Question: what is the informed opinion about the rate of profit? Over the past decade. U.S. corporate profits as a % of revenues and GDP have increased materially.
I've thankfully cut down social media a lot, but I remember reading some argument between "Marxists" and "anarchists." One side said they couldn't ally with the other because of what happened in 1930s Catalonia or 1920s Russia. It seemed pretty wild to me: completely performative identities believing they have some connection to real conflicts 100 years ago.
Personally, I do what you mentioned a later paragraph. I identify (ugh) as a socialist, with no particular leanings from there. I think labor power in the US is so dead that we need a robust welfare state and a lot more union density because we can even think about anything remotely revolutionary.
Dude, in my Trotskyist days I had friends who were anarcho-syndicalists who were annoyed with me about Kronstadt. I would often remind them it was 60 years before I was born and I had little to do with it. Your comment brought back many memories.
I identified as an anarcho-syndicalist until I realized that no one gives a shit.
The term "lol" is overused on the internet, but this made me laugh so loudly it's embarrassing in an office environment. Well done.
Embarrassed to say I didn't know a lot of this. Thanks for this post. Could you recommend a book that is a summary of Marx's thought? I know I will never make it through Das Capital.
Just read the Communist Manifesto, it's shorter and punchier.
It would be great at some point to read about how Marxism is still relevant in 2021.
Many of the core precepts don't seem to hold. Not sure if 'hyper-modernism' is the right term, but it seems like with the rapid change of technology we are basically failing to come up with a vocabulary and conceptual framework to make sense of the world in general and economic relationships in particular.
The misuse of 'neoliberal' is one example of this tendency, the enthusiasm for 'Marxism,' which was an appropriate critique in the setting of 19th century British industrialization but is not explanatory of our current economic relationships, is another.
What does Marxism say about a Goldman Sachs 'wage slave' making seven figures? Versus a truck driver who owns his truck?
I am nostalgic for the Marxist-ish materialists who were old when I was in college 20 years ago because, even though they failed, they were smart and well read and wanted to argue and had a generally positive moral valence even if all of their projects ended in catastrophe. They never took their eye off the ball which was poverty and suffering due to material deprivation.
But what is the narrative for similarly oriented materialists today, if not specifically Marxists? I don't know what it is. Without out a clear class critique everything devolves into the weirdness of Gramsci, DIY indentarianism, increasing administrative and bureaucratic power, and affluent radical kabuki of the New Left/Frankfurt School.
I appreciate that the socialists and Marxists can still throw rocks (thank you WSWS), but what's actual plan, beyond midwits like Breunig branding themselves as True Socialists TM?
"...but it seems like with the rapid change of technology we are basically failing to come up with a vocabulary and conceptual framework to make sense of the world in general and economic relationships in particular."
Yah.
(IOW, I think this is the existential problem these days. And, IMHO, I believe this is an intentional outcome of a LOTTA the leftists these days. Not ALL of 'em want chaos, but enough.)
TY for rest, too.
The class distinctions that I see animating people out in the world are between people who sell their labor at higher and lower prices, with more and less autonomy, more and less security, polarized around education and urbanization.
No one gives much of a shit about who owns the means of production. In fact you see this in tax / social safety net discourse all the time: yes there are a few Jeff Bezos figures out there, but we can’t build the welfare state on their backs alone; we have to get it from the urban educated workers.
https://apple.news/AMPuJhGfGQPWXRMTfpuehrQ
No one cares who owns the means of production because our capitalist overlords have done an exceptional job of brainwashing us into thinking that it doesn’t matter.
For those of you shy of clicking on links the headline is “ The new Gilded Age: 2,750 people have more wealth than half the planet”
"The fundamental proposition of Marxism, above and beyond any other, is the emancipatory potential of reason."
Then, by this definition, I'm a Marxist through and through. But then not, because I understand the LIMITS of reason. https://www.amazon.com/Divided-Brain-Search-Meaning-ebook/dp/B008JE7I2M/ref=sr_1_3
I'm MEBBE more Marxist than not, but here?
"To be a Marxist is to believe that a sufficiently advanced understanding of the world can describe a fundamental relationship between workers, the means of production, and the owners of the means of production..."
INESCAPABLE flaw in LOGIC. There can NEVER be a sufficiently advanced understanding of PEOPLE to be able to describe what Marxism wants to describe, right?
"...which implies the inevitable triumph of the producing class over the rentier class as the internal contradictions of capitalism assert themselves."
THIS, dunno... But MEBBE possible WITHOUT Socialism. Don't see it happening if there's a broad welfare state, tho. That's just me and ICBW. Show me.
Great essay. This is something few people these days realize - particularly in the right-wing contexts I grew up in where communism, socialism, Obama-style neoliberalism, and fascism all get conflated together so that words have no meanings.
But clearly significant confusion exists on the left as well.
For me, I find the mutualism of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day more attractive than Marxism, but I recognize that the labor theory of value was an important development in economic theory even though I don't agree with the implications Marx drew from it