We wrapped up our discussion of Karl Marx in my “Classical & Marxian Political Economy” class today, and I posted what follows at Division of Labour this morning. What are we to do with Karl Marx the economist and with Karl Marx the social thinker more broadly? I rely here on the Oxford University Press edition of Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis, pages 383-392; parts of the Routledge edition are on Google Books. Schumpeter argues that the two cannot really be separated–Marx the economist relies on Marx the sociologist and vice versa. Further, he argues that someone can’t really understand Marx without a clear understanding of the German intellectual tradition in which he was writing, without reading all three volumes of Capital, and without reading Theories of Surplus Value.
Marx made several contributions that lend support to McCloskey’s thesis that he was the most important social scientist of the nineteenth century. In my reading of Marx I have found him to be a positively gripping writer, sure and strong in his convictions and fundamentally revolutionary in his rhetoric. In spite of the fact that his scientific work was virtually inseparable from his political agitation, he was fundamentally an analytical economist in the classical tradition. Discussions of Marx have been marred by unthinking religious devotion on the part Marx’s followers and by a refusal on the part of some anti-Marxists to defile themselves with his ideas (Schumpeter 1954 [1994]:385). It is, in Schumpeter’s words, “analytical by virtue of its logical nature, for it consists in statements of relations between social facts” (p. 385). At the same time, Schumpeter continues by noting that Marx’s science “was distorted not only by the influence of practical purposes, not only by the influence of passionate value judgments, but also by ideological delusion” (p. 385). Hence, Marx never developed a theory of the socialist economy but merely pointed to its alleged historical inevitability. He responded to his critics not with analysis and argument, but with ad hominem attacks that questioned the allegedly venal motives of those who dared to question his system.
A rich and well-explored irony of the Marxian system is the fact that Marx was himself “the product of a thoroughly bourgeois environment that failed to provide economic independence, and of a thoroughly bourgeois education that made him (as it makes so many) an intellectual, a radical, and a scholar–the radicalism being of the bourgeois brand of his time and the scholarship being of the historico-philosophical, as distinguished from the mathematico-physical type” (p. 386n). Marx’s revolution was a revolution that began with the intellectuals (beginning with Marx, himself ensconced in the library of the British Museum) rather than the working class. Marx was a member of the bourgeoisie writing for intellectuals, elites, and other members of the bourgeoisie. While I’m borrowing explicitly from Schumpeter and Murray Rothbard, I think this is a charitable interpretation.
So what of Marx’s economics, and what of his social theory? As I’m not a trained anthropologist, political theorist, sociologist, etc. I remain skeptically agnostic about Marx’s contributions to social theory because I’m still unconvinced that his social theory does not derive from his thoroughly exploded and refuted economic theory. Bohm-Bawerk and Schumpeter argue that Marx the analytical economic thinker was logically consistent in the construction of his system; however, his economics was totally unfounded. Here is Schumpeter: “…Marx’s system is seriously at fault. I mean only that he could have presented a comprehensive economic theory without violating logic–he would always have to do violence to facts” (p. 389).
According to Schumpeter, Marx’s “Economic Interpretation of History” was original and important (p. 389), as was his attempt to “work out an explicit model of the capitalist process” that “trie(d) to uncover the mechanism that, by its mere working and without the aid of external factors, turns any given state of society into another” (p. 391). According to a very brief hallway conversation with a political science colleague I ran into on my way to and from the coffee pot, Marx’s theories of class interest survive his exploded economics.* According to Rothbard, however, Marx slips between his “economic power” theory of class and the libertarian “political power” theory of class throughout the Communist Manifesto.
According to Schumpeter, Marx did make some important original contributions, but as I understand it these consisted largely of his pre-analytic vision rather than his analysis and conclusions. Rothbard is correct in his assessment of Marxism rather than capitalism being a system that has been “burst asunder,” and it is unfortunate that Marx’s unsophisticated “method” of criticism–don’t let ideas stand and fall on their own merits, but attack and denounce your enemies as blinded ideologues and apologists for the bourgeoisie–continues to permeate the Great Conversation.
References
Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen von. 1949. Karl Marx and the Close of His System, in Paul M. Sweezy, ed., Karl Marx and the Close of His System by Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Bohm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx by Rudolf Hilferding. New York: Augustus M. Kelley.
Rothbard, Murray N. 1995 [2006]. Classical Economics. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1954 [1994]. History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.
Comments and suggestions?
*I’m indebted to Arielle Goldberg for being kind enough to answer a couple of off-the-wall questions from an economist ten minutes before she had to teach a class.
Cross-posted at Division of Labour, The Beacon.
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Art, thank you very much for this note. It’s very helpful. I escpecially enjoyed the coffee pot vignette.
It’s nice to see a slight critique of Marx that doesn’t come out guns blazing with ad hominems.
This one helped me a lot: Hoppe on Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/ayrnieu/archive/2008/07/17/marxist-and-austrian-class-analysis.aspx
What’s Really Reactionary?
by Barry Loberfeld
No one ever claimed that 1993′s Rising Sun was robbed of an Oscar, but the movie did have its moments, especially one where Harvey Keitel’s police lieutenant — a tightly corked, by-the-book kind of guy who’s rattled by the looming Japanese corporate takeover of America (again, this was ’93) and the latitude he’s ordered to show Japanese nationals living here — starts to rant: “F*** ‘em if they break the law! If that brands me as a reactionary…. What does that mean anyway — ‘reactionary’? Is that a dirty word?” For those familiar with the argot of the political Left, it’s an effort to suppress a laugh.
In the most general terms, the reactionary out-Herods the conservative by not only opposing historical change, but actually wanting to reverse it (“to revert to an earlier state” — Webster’s). And to understand why that’s such a “dirty” thing to Leftists, we have to be familiar with the underpinnings of Leftism: Marxian historical materialism.
In his letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, Karl Marx insisted that “every child” grasped the reality that if a community ceased working, it would soon perish. This was indicative of his fundamental contention that material production to meet basic human needs constitutes the (economic) “structure” — the foundation — of society, “on which rise legal and political superstructures…. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.” This is a “view of history,” observes Thomas Sowell, in which “cultural differences — ultimately, differences in people’s thinking — [are] explain[ed by] … difference[s] in material advancement, rather than vice versa.” Engels summarized it thus:
As Ayn Rand once quipped, Marx’s is the notion that the “material tools of production determine men’s ‘ideological superstructure’ (which means: machines create men’s thinking, not the other way around).” For those who imagine this a burlesque, elsewhere Engels wrote:
This “mode” develops “itself by the dialectical process of its own ‘super-logic’ of contradictions” (Rand), which virtually alone turns the gears of history, the mechanics of which men cannot — and so must not attempt to — counter. Thus the metaphysic of historical materialism (which Engels applied even to itself, characterizing the ideology-qua-”science” as something that “had to be discovered”) begets an amoral “morality” of historical justification. Justice is nothing more than a question of what is “necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production” (Marx). Indeed, “what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity?” And “in the face of new, higher conditions,” the present mode of production — and every one of its “superstructures” — “loses its validity and justification” (Engels). Progress — “revolution” — emerges as Marxism’s categorical imperative; reaction — “counter-revolution” — its great evil.
How Marx and Engels themselves understood the application to human events of this historicism (when welded to their ideas of class conflict — discussed below) was made quite explicit:
This passage, easily mistakable for something culled from Mein Kampf, illustrates a militaristic and genocidal theory that more or less accurately presaged its own future.
As for the suggestion that Marx or Engels hedged here and there, Sowell reminds us:
The foregoing is the skeleton; the “flesh” begins with Marxism’s own quasi-Eden, viz., “primitive communism.” A concept the formulators of “scientific socialism” distilled from Lewis H. Morgan’s intoxicating (and thoroughly unscientific) romanticization of the “noble savage,” this is mankind’s primordial historical (i.e., economic) stage. “In these societies,” explains Robert Heilbroner,
Alas, developing cultures eventually bite the apple of private property rights and the division of labor. Consequently,
And ultimately?
And so, with this end of history — and of Marx’s deterministic historicism — we can back up to the beginning. Regarding the invocation of Darwin, one writer, Robert B. Downs, points out that by “tying his class-struggle theory of history to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Marx gave his ideas respectability and, at the same time, he believed, made them irrefutable.” More soberly, it’s a bad analogy that makes for worse science. Darwinian evolution, including ongoing human evolution, is a matter of accident; Marxian evolution, a matter of necessity. The former is open-ended, whereas the latter follows a path to a “terminus,” as reflected in Marx’s frequent metamorphosis metaphors. (Those who point to traces of accident in Marx are, again, pointing to the ad hoc.)
As intimated above, Marx is better compared to the Bible, as are a host of other such Us-vs.-Them collectivist ideologues who posit a Paradise, a fall from grace, and a redemptive return. Hitler (another gutter appropriator of Darwin) poisoned his soul with the dementia of Lanz von Liebenfels. His Ostara propagated the myth of Nordic ur-humans (complete with electrified organs), who spawned the “lower” races when some of their women copulated with apes and whose blond descendants must now fight these half-beasts to regain racial supremacy. The Black Muslims had a reverse mythology, wherein the first humans were black, until an evil scientist among them (“Mr. Yacub”) genetically engineered the white race that would then go on to cruelly dominate the world, a reign that would now be crushed by the Muslims themselves. And most recently, “radical” feminists have limned a history of matriarchal antiquity, its conquest by the Learned Elders of Patriarchy, and its imminent restoration — by the feminists themselves. (See Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.)
But the truly intriguing thing here is how Marxism’s “terminus” — Communism, the “[a]bolition of private property” — is in fact a return to its starting point: the absence of private property under “primitive communism.” Marxian “revolution” is not an advance toward an unprecedented stage of history, but a revolving back to the original. And how is that even possible by Marx’s own postulates? How can the stone knife and the precision laser both produce the same “superstructure” of collective ownership and uniformity of labor? How is that anything but itself reactionary?
It is the question to ask of everything Marxist — and of the entire Left.
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In my experience, if you start debating what Marx actually believed you end up in a swamp because Marx’s thought evolved, contradicted itself, and was vague on a lot of important topics. The subsequent debate among Marxists over who are the true heirs to Marx illustrates the problem.
The real legacy of Marx has not been in economics, but in the social sciences and humanities. The Economist magazine had an article in the Dec 19, 2002 issue called “The post-communist Karl Marx†which I thought was excellent. The author shows how that Marx’s class theories are used as the essential paradigm for analyzing everything, from literature to art, religion, history, politics, everything in the social sciences and humanities. It undermines debate because it teaches that objective truth doesn’t exist and every social class has a differrent set of “truths.†Reason and logic are tools of the oppressor classes. That’s why so many graduates of these programs don’t know how to discuss ideas and aren’t interested in debate, and why they attack motives (a favorite of Marx) instead of logic or facts and use emotional appeals instead of reason.
They even have their own vocabulary, so that it might seem that you are communicating with them, but you really aren’t because they have very different definitions of important words, such as freedom, justice, exploitation, etc. Their definitions are often the opposite of the commonly understood definition.
And while taking literature, journalism or history classes, the professors include enough folk-Marxist economics to convince the students that they actually know something about real economics. Then they pass on that folk-Marxism to the general public through the media.
So the task of promoting liberty in the US will require a top-to-bottom overhaul of the entire educational system in the US.
This leads me to a question: Why did Karl Marx come up with a system like that?
Also, do those who follow Marx’s ideas (If indeed, they are his ideas) ever wonder whether Marx’s background has any influence on his ideas?
Its amazing that people listen to Marx not realizing the man was a welfare case living off the money donated to him and generated from industrialization.
So, while he was sleazing off the working people, you know, the ones he says he was there to help, his wife and numerous children were starving.
Here’s a man totally out of touch with the self-industrial, moraly-responsible, self-sufficient people, which he was the totally opposite.
A prime example of and pretty close to our modern day, U.S. Gov’t personnel and officials…..
Requiem for the Left
by Barry Loberfeld
Primo
Since it’s almost become a cliché to observe that Marxism is dead in practice — that is, if you overlook its authoritarian half-life in China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam — but thriving in theory, we can at least ask exactly what that theory is, a question that returns three very different answers:
Some should get all of the pie. This is classic manual-labor theory of value Marx: Since the manual laborers produce all wealth (somehow), anyone else who has any wealth must be leeching off that labor. Every slice of the pie belongs to “the workers” who baked it, i.e., all wealth must be redistributed to the proletariat. This is why Communism eventually adopted the hammer-and-sickle as its emblem. (An embarrassing choice, by the way, for what those tools really represent is the investment of capital. A truer symbol of the manual-labor theory would have been simply a pair of dirty hands, a fact ironically reflected in the Bolshevik workers’ term of derision for the Party’s nonworker majority: beloruchki — “white hands.”)
All should get some of the pie. This is Critique of the Gotha Program Marx: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Now those slices belong, not to the bakers, but to the hungry, i.e., wealth must be redistributed from the proletariat to the poor — and other cases of “economic necessity.” (An earlier variant of this was the proposal that each should get an equal slice of the pie, with everyone working equally and compensated so.)
None should get any of the pie. This is the Marx of The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. “[W]e don’t want a communist society,” paraphrases a Green disciple, “where people greedily redistribute the wealth of capitalism; we want a society where the craving for wealth has been overcome by a more fully realized state of human being.” The pie belongs to no one, and all slices must be redistributed away from anyone and everyone. The people will no longer want (or even need?) pie either here on earth or in the sky, for their “obsession with Having” will be superseded “by a fulfilled condition of Being.”
The upshot of all this should have been obvious from the start: Marx sired a monster whose three heads each pull in a different direction. What was going to tear itself apart with “contradictions” was not market capitalism but this tripolar concept of “socialism.” We are to believe — what? That each one of these incompatible theses is an example of how “[j]ust as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic matter, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history”? That the assembler of this pile of inconsistencies — who obscurantly dismissed critical analysis as “not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy, [whom] it wishes not to refute but to destroy” — was a scientific theorist? That Je ne suis pas marxiste! was ever anything other than the cry of a schizophrenic zealot?
We cannot let it go without note that while Darwin never falsified data, Marx did — chronically. As early as the 1880s, Cambridge scholars demonstrated that Marx manipulated source materials “with a recklessness which is appalling … to prove just the contrary of what they really establish.” One example will suffice. He prophesied: “In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery … at the opposite pole.” But did the statistics for wages actually show workers growing poorer as their employers grew richer? Not at all, so in 1867′s Das Kapital he jettisoned the contemporary figures and passed off as contemporary those from 1850.
We behold in Marx a man who evidently could accept being contradicted by himself, but not by reality. So war dieser Mann der Wissenschaft. An epitaph appropriate for those who exalted him, in contrast, remains elusive.
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Pat: “Why did Karl Marx come up with a system like that? ”
Marx spent his early years promoting socialism in France and Germany before getting the boot and landing in England. But he thought much of socialism was wishful thinking. He thought he could establish a scientific basis for socialism. He never was interested in the truth. He simply wanted to promote socialism.
Socialism has a long history. Daniel Pipes in his history of property wrote that Europeans clung to a myth that in a pre-historic golden age property didn’t exist and everything was shared. In other words, the golden age was socialist. They imagined that world as being perfect with no crimes or disease or hunger. Pipes said that myth is so old no one knows where it came from. The myth included the belief that somewhere in the world people still live like that. One of the hopes in discovering the new world was that they would find such a civilization. That’s where the myth of the “nobel savage” came from when Columbus discovered the Caribbean.
The myth that there is enough well in the world that if it were shared equally we would end poverty and hunger seems to be as old as mankind. That might be true immediately after the initial distribution, but what would happen once that wealth was consumed? Someone wjould have to start producing again or everyone would starve, and the best producers (entrepreneurs) would gain the most wealth, causing inequality to re-appear if property were re-established. If property was not re-established, history demonstrates that little production would take place and the entire world would be thrown into the worst kind of poverty.
Fundamentalist: “[...]If property was not re-established, history demonstrates that little production would take place and the entire world would be thrown into the worst kind of poverty.”
That might also require a lot of people to die. In fact, some ideologies that call for a return to a hunter-and-gathering age (eg.: anarcho-primitivism) would require a large portion of the current world population to die. And their proponents don’t mind that at all.
This is what we’re up against: (note the sources)
http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_151-200/WP191.pdf
Ehmoran, I have to admit, it is funny that they would mentioned managed trade as an alternative. But, I guess that they would say all we need to do is wrestle the government from the corporations. I suppose Venezuela is something to look forward to in their opinion. Or Cuba.
Pat,
Amazing isn’t it.
They talk about all the things done in past societies (Welfare States) that have never worked in the long run. But with all their opened-mindedness and all, I guess their narcissistic ideology must be the CORRECT one.
With their plans, be comfortable with U.S. unemployment similar to the standard rate in Europe: 10 to 13%.
Now that’s prosperity for ALL!!!
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