Friday, November 14, 2014
The Marx Delusion
My impression with respect to Marx is that he had kind of a romantic view of human nature and thought we could get rid of capitalism and learn to share and share alike. But how we get to that stage was the hard part, and one suggestion he came up with was that a "vanguard" of the Proletariat would arise, and for a limited time have a "dictatorship" to teach people to be productive without the profit motive. Of course, to do this, the vanguard would have to do their job and then voluntarily relinquish power, and they would of course have to avoid privileging themselves. In distributing in accordance with need they were not to say that they, of course, needed the lion's share. The Party, which Lenin eagerly put in the position of the vanguard, of course did neither, and the rest is history. They privileged themselves, they didn't relinquish power, and they started eating their own. This all happened over Marx's dead body, but the Marx's lack of an equivalent to the Christian's doctrine of man's sinful nature was what ruined the "nice idea" of Communism.
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Sorry, I thought you meant this Marx Delusion.
I am convinced that one of the fatal flaws in Marx's understanding of things is that he did not and could not foresee the advancement and impact of technology.
He didn't foresee a world where the 'means of production' could change so radically, and even become ridiculously affordable. At least his criticisms make more sense in a world where the entire world is largely technologically stagnant, or at least advances extremely slow. That is not our world.
Interesting comment, Crude. It reminded me of an early Soviet slogan (from the late 1920s/early 1930s), "Kommunism, ehto sovetskaya vlast' plyus ehlektrifikatsiya vsej strany", (translation: Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.) For at least its early decades, Soviet Russia was quite conscious of the crucial role technology would play in social structures. This awareness continued right up to the launching of Sputnik and the Race to the Moon. By the Brezhnev Era, however, the utterly stagnant Soviet economy appears to have lost all focus in this area.
For at least its early decades, Soviet Russia was quite conscious of the crucial role technology would play in social structures.
I don't doubt that the soviets knew that technology was important in many ways. What I mean is that my understanding of Marx is that it seems he thought technology was forever some rare and precious thing that would either be controlled exclusively by a tiny, select group of people. This was either going to be the elite, or the common man, and that was going to be the way it was for all time.
It's a bit like looking at the utility of a computer, back when they were massive devices that cost a fortune. Then thinking, 'Look at this thing. It's incredibly rare and difficult to come by these. Should it be computing for the benefit of a mere few? Or for everyone's welfare?' And from that you can just picture centuries going by and this device is still exclusively in the hands of only the absolute wealthiest, most powerful citizens, and purely for their benefit.
It creates a narrative where Marx's program (which I think is fatally flawed anyway) can start to take off at least spiritually. That computer is, to my understanding, one of those 'means of production'. The idea that technology could broadly take the means of production and put it in the hands of a tremendous number of people for dirt cheap wrecks that narrative. It even reverses it.
I think Marx would disown his own writings if he came to realize that the 'means of production' were just another product to be sold, and that the poor were just another market, such that capitalism in many ways encourages giving the means of production to absolutely everyone, better and cheaper than it used to be. (I'm not glorifying capitalism here. It has flaws. But Marx was off-target in his critiques. Marxism as it was should be dead to any serious thinker.)
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but I'm not so sure that technology has spread to "the masses" in our era. The products of technology, sure (such as this laptop I'm typing on, my DVD player, or my telescope). But the technology itself? That has now become so complex and arcane that no one individual can comprehend it, and it takes a large corporation (or a government agency such as NASA) to create those products.
So in a sense, technology is more concentrated in the hands of the few than ever before. When technology consisted of a water wheel or a loom, it could be wielded by just about anyone. Once industrialization set in, its ownership became concentrated at first in the wealthy, and eventually in the fantastically wealthy (the Gilded Age). Now in the Digital Age, hardly anybody even understands the things they possess (my laptop might as well be a magic wand, as far as I'm concerned), and an ever shrinking percentage of the population controls an ever increasing portion of the world's wealth.
So I don't think Marxism is "dead" at all, just a bit crotchety. (And no, I am not a Marxist.)
But as to Victor's OP, I've spent half a lifetime professionally studying the fruits of that antediluvian thinker, and for much of that time wondered at how such an idealistic philosophy, sounding so attractive on paper, could translate into the Hell on Earth that it came to be when actually put into practice. I became convinced (though I could not actually say this as a government intelligence analyst) that it was precisely the Bolsheviks' hostility to religion (specifically to Orthodoxy) that ensured the failure of Marxism in practice. (That, and the scale of the attempt. Village-sized, quasi-communist communes positively flourished in the wheatfields of Canada for much of the previous century.)
I just finished an extremely well-written autobiography, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen. She really captured the contradictions between the promise and reality of life in the Soviet Union, and I give the book my highest possible recommendation. If you have the time (and inclination) to read only one book about everyday life under communism, read this one.
As long as I'm recommending books, another truly great book about everyday life in the Soviet Union is The Ivankiad by Vladimir Voinovich, a hilarious account of the author's struggles with an insane bureaucracy during his quest for a larger apartment. It is sadly out of print in English, but you can get a used copy for as little as a penny (plus shipping) on Amazon. And it's only 131 pages long, so it's not a huge investment of either your time or your money.
Absolutely NOT!
Marx was not some lovey-dovey: he called for the abolishment of the family. Why? To destroy the hierarchy of the family and hence in society. Him and Engels both called for the genocide of reactionaries and whole people who were reactionary==read Catholic.
Marx is the devil incarnate. He is the promoter of a bloody Jewish Ideology.
Bob,
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but I'm not so sure that technology has spread to "the masses" in our era. The products of technology, sure (such as this laptop I'm typing on, my DVD player, or my telescope). But the technology itself? That has now become so complex and arcane that no one individual can comprehend it, and it takes a large corporation (or a government agency such as NASA) to create those products.
It's absolutely undeniable that technology has spread to the masses in large part. Electricity, plumbing, refrigerators, cellular phone access, computers... in countless cases, it has.
Again: the means of production are yet more products, and as products, the goal is to sell them. Which means increasingly efficient ways to make them, cheaper ways to make them, to sell to an ever widening target market. Or, in some cases, to give away for free. See: the open source market.
Sure, there are limits to this. People aren't making transistors in the privacy of their own home. But considering the cost of transistors, they don't have to.
Here's another way to think of it: if cutting edge technology really is in the hands of the few, but those few already endeavor to put it in the hands of as many people as possible due to market forces... then Marx is obsolete, because spreading the means of productions was his major gig.
But we've found another way to do that for considerable amounts of said means. And the funny part is, it's not something we invented, really. It just happened, almost naturally, as a side-effect of how markets work. Again, I stress: this is not perfect. But the imperfections of this system aren't what Marx thought they were, and largely are either unaddressed by him, or even exacerbated by him.
So in a sense, technology is more concentrated in the hands of the few than ever before.
But not in the sense that seems central to Marx.
The fact that some technology, some means of production, are always concentrated in the hands of an elite few is secondary to the trend of the means of production at large perpetually being pushed into the hands of society at large. Yes, only major players like corporations or government agencies can land rockets on comets right now. Marx can't change that, and doesn't really try. But getting those rockets in the hands of more people who want and need them doesn't require Marx. The only way this problem is 'more concentrated than ever before' is because we've pushed so hard, so fast, on so many technology fronts that the 'cutting edge' is bigger than it was. But in a tremendous number of cases, yesterday's cutting edge is today's commonplace.
So yeah, a central problem that Marx tried to solve, has been solved beautifully by other means. And insofar as that's the case... Marx is obsolete.
I've said it twice, but I want to stress:
I'm not glorifying capitalism here. I'm sympathetic to distributivism. I just think that Marx's central concern was proven radically mistaken, even apart from the failures of communist states. Marx couldn't have foreseen what we've done with technology and even the market.
He made the mistake everyone makes: he spoke in terms of certainties when he should have spoke in terms of possibilities.
"[Marx] spoke in terms of certainties when he should have spoke in terms of possibilities."
Couldn't agree more.
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