Marx after communism

The Economist ^ | Dec 19th 2002

[cornelis]

How is one to explain this? What, if anything, remains valuable in Marx's writings?

MR. NIXON: What influenced you to join the Communist Party originally?

MR. CHAMBERS: It is a very difficult question. As a student, I went to Europe. It was then shortly after the First World War. I found Germany in chaos, and partly occupied; northern France and parts of Belgium were smashed to pieces. It seemed to me that a crisis had been reached in western civilization which society was not able to solve by the usual means. I then began to look around for the unusual means. I first studied for a considerable time British Fabian socialism, and rejected it as unworkable in practice. I was then very much influenced by a book called Reflections on Violence, by Georges Sorel, a syndicalist, and shortly thereafter I came to the writings of Marx and Lenin. They seemed to me to explain the nature of the crisis, and what to do about it.

THE CHAIRMAN: Well, I can understand how a young man might join the Communist Party, but will you explain to us how a person who has made a real living in this country, a person with a large income, some of the witnesses we have had before this committee, over a period of time, what, in your mind, would influence them to join the party here in this country?

MR. CHAMBERS: The making of a good living does not necessarily blind a man to a critical period which he is passing through. Such people, in fact, may feel a special insecurity and anxiety. They seek a moral solution in a moral confusion. Marxism, Leninism offers an oversimplified explanation of the cuases and a program for action. The very vigor of the project particularly appeals to the more or less sheltered middle-class intellectuals, who feel that there the whole context of their lives has kept them away from the world of reality. I do not know whether I make this very clear, but I am trying to get at it. They feel a very natural concern, one might almost say a Christian concern, for underprivileged people. They feel a great intellectual concern at least, for recurring economic crises, the problem of war, which in our lifetime has assumed an atrocious proportion, and which always [weighs] on them. What shall I do? At that crossroads the evil thing, communism, lies in wait for [them with] a simple answer.

[goldstategop]

Marx's main contribution was to provide a method of analysis for looking at the deeper currents underlying the surface of human activity. That's about the only part of his legacy that's continued to have profound influence. His economic theories were based on an incomplete appreciation of the evolving nature of 19th century capitalism and the solutions he proposed have turned out to be far worse than the disease he wanted to treat. More to the point, his adherence to blind determinism and a rejection of the importance of human agency in history have been contradicted since many times. There's no question Marx believed the capitalism of his day had to be changed by force if necessary. Yet if Marx were alive today he would see a world far different from the one he had been born into and would reconsider whether his apocalyptic predictions about it were correct. The irony is that is exactly the kind of reassessment the Left has refused to engage since to them there's never a penalty for being wrong. Since Marx's death in the late 19th century, much of the extreme and post modern Left has paid homage to the founder by giving a dogmatic cast of thought to ideas that when he was alive, were at least open to the possibility of reconsideration. Whatever the man's views regarding the scientific process of inquiry into man's social condition might have been, its considered a heresy in Marxist and post Marxist circles today to question what has become a Leftist religion. Considering Marx was an atheist, he of all people would most appreciate the irony of being worshipped.

[Askel5]

Thanks Cornelis. No doubt he (and my sixth-grade teacher Georgia Brunton) put me on the road I travel today. (God bless them both.)

Witness

Chambers also addressed in part the phenomenon that was Ayn Rand. Talk about the "simple" answers ... she had 'em all. I still think she's the gateway drug to corporate communism and surely a Doctor of the church where the "saving graces of western materialism" are concerned.

Big Sister is Watching You

Thanks for reminding me about Nixon. It's time I revisited the exhibits to the ACLU's appeal on behalf of Hiss.

[Migraine]

Bill -- your essay is most enlightening. Thanks for taking the time to have written so thoughtfully. I concur with your reasoning (who can fault it?).

I would add these observations of my own:

I have always considered Marx's most serious and debilitating flaws to be concerning human nature:
1) he tacitly asserts that man is basically good (in contravention of Judaeo-Christian axioms about man's fallen-ness), and
2) he posits that man truly thrives on work and loves to be about it.

Now, since all of his deliberations and prognostications were predicated upon his model of human nature, it is not surprising to me that he got it so wrong. Fundamentally, man is covetous, prideful and rebellious. And it is NOT because he is corrupted by institutions; it is because he is born needing redemption. Civil constraints have happened, historically, because of these tendencies. Only the redemptive qualities engendered by the knowledge of the holy have successfully mitigated against them -- and it is these very qualities that Marx vehemently denied, thereby decapitating his hope of ever being correct. Wrongly assess man, wrongly assess man's future.
And as for man "loving work", that is the very calumny which most singularly brought Russia down (they had their famous "zero unemployment", and everybody got paid [not much, though; in fact, I heard a cute little joke when I was over there in 1987: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us"]; it's just that nobody bothered to show up, and if they did, they goldbricked the days away) -- because, given the opportunities (and how we do search for them), man will sometimes work harder to get OUT of doing work than he would have had he actually done the work itself.
Those are the facts. Any thinker who fails to deal with them has his head in the clouds, or some place where the sun doesn't shine.

[SauronOfMordor]

Marx kept saying that it was economics that determined which form of government was in control. My personal theory is that it's the form of military force which determines the form of government:

• When conflicts were decided by which side showed up with the most men with swords, you could have Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic
• When full-time professional troops could beat a larger number of part-time citizen-soldiers, the Roman Republic gave way to the Empire
• When expensively-armored knights could defeat infantry, you had feudalism
• When longbows could penetrate knights armor, and cannon knock down their castle walls, feudalism gave way to the king's nation-state
• When conflicts were once-again decided by how many men with weapons (this time, guns) showed up on the battlefield, you had republican forms of government once more
• and when groups of citizen-soldiers could be mowed down by machine-guns, tanks, and planes, you had totalitarian dictatorships

[chilepepper]

I have a very simple personal metric with which to judge Marx, or Adam Smith for that matter. What do these philosophers have to say about information, a.k.a. knowledge/wisdom/etc.

Marx talks about capital and labor but misses the profound influence of that which is more important than either, and permeates BOTH, and in fact is what sets us humans apart for the animals - human labor for example, might be no more important that the work of insects except that humans bring to bear their experience and skill in doing something - these of course are information.

Marx says NOTHING about these, of course, while Adam Smith centers his market theory on information, in explaining why one thing is more "valuable" than another: the person who is evaluating has information which affects this evaluation...

Marx does not, in my opinion, wear well with age. His description of class divisions misses a MAJOR point: the divisions are created in the mind of the beholder - those who wish to postulate the existence of those divisions may do so, but they could just have easily postulated that we are all one class, the class of human beings created equal and with inalienable rights.

Is the glass half empty of half full? The observer decides, but the most important thing is that the observer needs to realize that the way he sees it and interprets it is due to his decision.

I loath Marxism because it is what GENERATES class divisions, while claiming to DISCOVER class divisions.

[Travis McGee]

That's a very interesting hypothesis worth serious study.

We have not yet seen the form of government which results after a rebellion by hundreds of thousands of long range rifle equipped patriots against a creeping tyranny which was choking a free republic to death.

[SauronOfMordor]

We have not yet seen the form of government which results after a rebellion by hundreds of thousands of long range rifle equipped patriots against a creeping tyranny

Actually, in an insurrection against a tyrannical government, the concealed handgun would be the more effective instrument. This is because the insurrection would be more a war of ambush and assassination, directed against the supporting infrastructure.

An oppressing army is impotent without the people who issue it its orders, the people who relay the orders, the people who supply it with its fuel, food, and ammo -- ie the whole supporting civilian infrastructure without which an army and government cannot function

[Travis McGee]

You really need to read my novel. Check your freempail.

[babaloo999]

At one point in “Capital” (1867-94), he famously defines the subject of his enquiry as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” That is not only unforgettable but actually very apt, if you believe Marx's theory of value. He could express himself brilliantly when he chose to.

What does he mean by dead labour(sic)? Is it what a FReeper could conceivably construe the phrase to mean in these days of government largesse and "involuntary contributions"? Not that those are recent things.

[cornelis]

We have not yet seen the form of government which results after a rebellion by hundreds of thousands of long range rifle equipped patriots against a creeping tyranny which was choking a free republic to death.

"I give the devil the benefit of the law for my own safety's sake." --Sir Moore in "A Man for All Seasons"

[Travis McGee]

The gun owning population is like a huge deep lake, the guns are invisible but they are there close by just the same.

The anti-gun sheeple are barely aware that there are hundreds of rifles within a mile of where they are sleeping tonight.

[Bernard Marx]

Bump

[Sawdring]

Thanks for the comments Bill, I have a couple of books to read but Adam Smith will be third in line here.

[Sawdring]

I looked up chiliasm, and found it to be a belief that Jesus Christ will reign on Earth for a 1000 year period. Why would Jews perpetuate that?

[Liberal Classic]

Communism is not yet dead. (unfortunately)

[Sawdring]

But the fact remains that on everything that mattered most to Marx himself, he was wrong. The real power he claimed for his system was predictive, and his main predictions are hopeless failures. Concerning the outlook for capitalism, one can always argue that he was wrong only in his timing: in the end, when capitalism has run its course, he will be proved right. Put in such a form, this argument, like many other apologies for Marx, has the advantage of being impossible to falsify. But that does not make it plausible. The trouble is, it leaves out class. This is a wise omission, because class is an idea which has become blurred to the point of meaninglessness. Class antagonism, though, is indispensable to the Marxist world-view. Without it, even if capitalism succumbs to stagnation or decline, the mechanism for its overthrow is missing.

The author deals with your question in this paragraph.

[Sawdring]

Thanks for the post. I enjoyed this part a lot:

feel a great intellectual concern at least, for recurring economic crises

Isn't that what Communism was in its totality? A big economic crisis.

[general_re]

The problem is threefold - first, that Marx depended on economics to describe class. Neomarxists have expanded this to the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexual preference these days, none of which have anything to do directly with Marx's original model...

Oh, it's even worse than that - Marx himself explicitly rejected such things. The only true consciousness for Marx was class-consciousness. Race, gender, sexuality - these were all false consciousnesses as far as Marx was concerned. It's not a stretch at all to imagine that Marx would personally reject much of what passes for "Marxism" these days.

And therein lies the trouble for latter-day Marxists. Marxism-as-Marx-described-it is fundamentally broken, so to resurrect it, one has to heavily revise and extend his work. But in so doing, you very quickly find yourself completely at odds with the guy who's supposed to be your patron saint...

[cornelis]

But in so doing, you very quickly find yourself completely at odds with the guy who's supposed to be your patron saint...

It's okay, Marx is for the adolescent anti-intellectual, Hegel for the adult sophisticate.