Yes, that was the sum of what I learned. :rolleyes:
Look, I believe you. But, I’m not sure I would lead with that observation in the future. Opening your contribution to a conversation on Karl Marx with “Marx was smelly! LOL!” doesn’t really inspire a lot of confidence. Just a pro tip, izall.
Oh for crissakes. The description was, “Marx was seen, at the time, as a harmless, if annoying, old crank who hung out in libraries and annoyed people.” Not that “Omigawd, Marx STANK!!!”
Read the rest of my post, then snark all you want.
It’s been years since I read The Communist Manifesto, so I’ll have to go and look it up. But again, Marx did NOT see it happening in Russia. And he DID diagnose the problem in the current working society correctly. But his solution, well, “stank.” 
Some points:
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There is no One True Marx. He wrote over a time span of decades. The Marx of 1848 is not the Marx of 1867. Marx himself never said he had created some entirely cohesive system; indeed, he said that if he knew one thing, it was that he was not a Marxist. (By the end of his life, Marxist ideology had already ossified in the way anyone debating a Marxist knows all too well.)
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Particularly, there’s a huge division in Marx’s thinking that’s been ignored in this thread: before and post 1848. One is the idealistic young Marx, a bright youth who by and large bought into typical reforms offered by the “Left” then. The Communist Manifesto is a sample of this period. You can see the beginnings of a materialist study of history here, but looking at the program, it’s just progressive reforms lifted straight from the 19th century. Public education, abolition of child labor, estate and income taxes, a national bank, public ownership of utilities and public transit, even suburbanization (yeah, confusing). As you’re reading this, if you’re thinking “wait a second this is hardly Bolshevik” you’re right. Needless to say, there were some other ideas that seem off the wall now–abolishing land ownership, for instance–but they’re a minority.
The biggest break anyone might see is a call for revolution instead of gradual reformism. Even today though, a large majority of Americans would look happily on some revolution in Iran, where most people are better off and better represented today than nearly any country in the world, except maybe England. (Ironically, that revolutionary impulse against Iran has roots in Trotsky.)
(3) After that is the Marx of Das Kapital. Embittered by the failings of 1848, he turned very heavily to theory and analysis and away from any particular policy proposals. He purposely said very little on what socialism and communism would look like, for the obvious reason that planning an economic system that can handle the complexities of the modern world is very, very hard.
(4) Says ralph124c
Capital is a very dull book that’s worthless as far as correct analysis goes, but you can hardly say it ignores the role of markets. Its entire argument is to analyze markets to show that they will inevitably break down. And if you accept his initial premises, it’s likely a good model of what would happen. The big issue is that he relied on the labor theory of value, which has a strong history in economics. Names like Smith and Ricardo are attached to it; it’s not embarrassing to have believed in it, though it was already a bit dated by Marx’s time. But it was wrong, and building his magnum opus on it is like coming up with a theory of chemistry based on phlogiston. No matter how smart you are, starting from there isn’t going to lead anywhere useful though it’s very possible to stumble upon some surprisingly correct things along the way.
(5) So I think you’re oversimplifying Marx’s thoughts significantly, smiling bandit, and letting loose a bit of rhetoric instead of analysis (how Marxist of you! Marx himself would have never have claimed to “love” or have any affection for workers, and although we can guess as to his subconscious motivations (I would probably agree with you), he would similarly have derided “zeal for a perfect world.”
(6) Also, you say
I’m curious as to whether you mean any attempt at implementing Marxist-inspired socialism in Russia, or any attempt at it more generally. If it’s the former, I can sort of understand your argument: Russia had very few institutions of civil society, and I personally believe those institutions are very important to creating a society worth living in. Because of that I think it’d take an exceptionally skilled person to end up playing a major role in politics without resorting to the lowest common denominator.
But if you’re applying your statement more broadly, history belies it. For instance, the German Eduard Bernstein was heavily influenced by Marx, and put forward a program that attempted a reformist vision of Marxian socialism. And by attempted, I mean wildly succeeded: his party ran Germany until last year, and the programs it put in place are pretty much sacrosanct in German politics and have many emulators all around the world.
Not a bad end, for a school of thought that inevitably ends in Stalinism.
Well, I guess we’re even, then - I’ve been studying Leninism and Marxism for the last 20 years of mine.
pulls it off his bookshelf OK, I’m ready to go. Quotes, please?
That’s true, and one could make a case that not even attempting the project was the most intellectually honest choice Marx could have made at the time. Nevertheless . . . that most glaring omission is also open to the interpretation that Marx was so zealous for his ideas that he took it on faith that if only society were re-ordered on the right general principles, the details would just take care of themselves, to produce an optimally just society and an optimally efficient and productive economy.
And that kind of thinking led to some tragic hubris, when Lenin declared, “We shall now proceed to build the Socialist order,” blithely assuming that the Bolsheviks, a party led by intellectual ideologues with little or no experience in government or industrial management, would know how to do that just because they had the right ideology.
Well, many Fascists, Anarchists and Libertarians have been guilty of that exact same failing.
I do agree with smiling bandit as to point 4) in the OP: The fundamental conceptual flaw in Marxism is that it claims to be “scientific,” but isn’t, and in fact is derived from completely unscientific Hegelian idealism. That does not automatically make Marx’ conclusions wrong, but it does automatically make them suspect.
A secondary flaw is that although Marx’ academic training was in pure philosophy, he completely ignores the philosophical question of ethics. He nowhere makes an actual moral argument for the superior justice of socialism or communism or capitalism, or the right of the proletariat to revolt or expropriate. He seems to have regarded all that as so self-evident as not to merit discussion. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in his History of Western Philosophy, in the 19th-Century intellectual zeitgeist, history was progress and progress equated to justice. To Marx, Communism was demonstrably the Next Stage, therefore a superior stage in all respects including ethical.
A third flaw is that Marx’ general predictive theory of history contains an obvious inherent contradiction: If sociopolitical change in history is driven mainly by material/economic forces, an inescapable corollary is that history is driven by technological change. Well, Marx was obviously right on that point, in countless ways obvious and not-so-obvious. I once read a cogent argument by Isaac Asimov that the real cause of the Crusades was not ideological but technological: The invention of the moldboard plow and the rigid horse collar made European agriculture more productive, making it possible for Europeans to breed and feed a larger population – including a large population of second and third sons of knights and barons, trained for war, with no land to inherit and nothing to do but knock about getting into fights; which made the prospect of a huge war that would get them out of Europe for a while very appealing to the popes and kings. However you feel about that particular argument, it illustrates the point: Technological change affects historical events in ever so many ways.
But, technological change is inherently unpredictable. We can predict it will go on happening, unless and until civilization collapses, but we cannot predict the details, not even in their broadest outlines. Not even scientists, engineers or technicians, whose business it is, can do that. The potential of any potential technological innovation is unknown until it is actually tried; old issues of Popular Mechanics and similar magazines are crammed with gosh-wow world-changing inventions that, for one reason or another, proved impractical or impossible. (You can read about many such on David Szondy’s Tales of Future Past website.)
How could Marx have predicted, or taken into account in his theories, the socioeconomic effect of automobiles or the Internet or atomic bombs? In his day, there was no way of knowing, there was no way engineers could know, whether such things ever would be possible. In our day, we have no way of knowing whether any of the world-changing technologies discussed as part of a Technological Singularity – nanotechnology, controlled nuclear fusion, brain-computer interfaces, genetic engineering on humans – ever will be possible.
Which makes any general predictive of history an exercise in futility. I wish more Marxists could get their heads around that.
Wrong. Though he did start out studying law, he abandoned the field and ultimately got his doctorate in philosophy at the age of 23 in the hopes of an academic career. State interference in academia (against adherents of Hegel) precluded that, so he went into political journalism.
I would love to see some elaboration on this claim, which is actually quite vast, beyond a flat denial of the scientific nature of the theory (to restate your argument: How do we know that it’s not scientific? Well it isn’t. And Hegel isn’t scientific either).
Perhaps you could give at least a little adumbration of your theory of what science is, why Marx’s theory fails to meet its requirements, and why that should matter in the evaluation of his philosophy. Feel free to cite Russell’s History all you want, but you should be advised that most people with formal training in the philosophy think it’s a dreadful, slipshod work.
My response to the last time BG dragged that Bertrand Russell quote into an argument.
ETA: Marxism is not a predictive theory, but I nonetheless seem to have made an accurate prediction therein.
Yeah, that’s Jews for ya . . . It’s nudzh, nudzh, nudzh, nudzh, nudhz, “Why did you DO that?!”
I remembered that, and I was earnestly hoping that in this thread you could do much better than that, in making a case for Marxism as a science.
Tangentially relevant new thread: Is Communism a rationalist or a romantic ideology?
Wasn’t it less to do with interference with Hegelians qua Hegelians (even though Eichhorn didn’t like them), and more that, at that point, Marx was Bauer’s protege, and Bauer was being driven out for his atheism?
Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV explicitly charged his appointee to the philosophy department at the University of Berlin, Schelling, with rooting out the ‘dragon-seed of Hegelianism’. Bauer was sacked from Bonn in 1842, but this was after Marx had earned his PhD and returned to Trier. Marx’ path to academia was blocked not because of him personally or his connections to Bauer, but because he was a Hegelian like an increasing number of local academics at the time.
Wow - I wish I had said that one of the reasons the price system is popular is that its problems tend to be easier to ameliorate. Then the fact that the poor don’t starve in the US would have been relevant.
Oh yes, I did say that.
The reason people don’t starve is that we set up systems (minimum wages, food stamps etc) to prevent starvation happening. All of these are interventions in the workings of the price mechanism. Because raw markets have problems, just like any form of rationing.
It’s like you’re asking me for a logical proof that apples are not altar boys. All idealistic philosophical systems, from Plato onward, are unscientific by definition, in the sense of being non-empirical a priori systems. (And don’t get me started on non-empirical economics . . . :rolleyes: ). You can get away with that in mathematics and still have some defensible claim to be doing a “science”; but not in ethics, economics, politics, or sociology.
As for Marx’s system:
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It is unscientific in that it is a mishmash of idealism and trends spotted from empirical observations. Marx, substituting social classes for Hegel’s ideas, perceived a pattern of class struggles as the motive force in history operating in a thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad from classical times to the present day. In scientific terms that’s not even a theory, it’s the sort of vague, general insight you would have before even beginning to formulate a hypothesis.
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Like much in political theory, and practically any general theory of history predictive or retrospective, it is unscientific in being nonfalsifiable. Like intelligent-design theory. What hard data are even conceivable, that would prove Marx’ theory of history is right and Oswald Spengler’s is wrong, or vice-versa?
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That should matter in the evaluation of his philosophy because the Marxist political tradition is one that, almost uniquely among influential political theories, claims the status of a science. And that has had practical consequences. Marxists in power have always operated on the assumption that they can be so sure their ideology is right, to a scientific degree of certainty, that they owe no more tolerance to dissident views than astronomers owe to Flat-Earthers.
I should like to know more about that.
Which was why Marx submitted his dissertation to the University of Jena instead. But what I don’t get is that Schelling would have blocked Marx’s professorship at Berlin, but there were other universities. Jena took his dissertation, so they must have been at least tolerant of Hegelianism. So, if he was really interested in a professorship, why didn’t he look elsewhere?
Beyond me. Does it actually matter, in the grand scheme of things?
It matters a lot that he didn’t get a professorship, but as to why he didn’t, that probably doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. It just would be nice to know.
I went back and skimmed over a few relevant pages from a book called The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx by Alex Callinicos and can discuss that briefly. First off, the Hegelians weren’t just a quiet little philosophical sect doing little more than occupying itself with academic questions. They were active proponents of democratic reform, and had placed their hopes in the future Friedrich Wilhelm IV introducing them. This turned out not to be the case; upon his accession to the Prussian throne in 1840 he proved to be thoroughly reactionary, so the Hegelians turned increasingly radical in their opposition. Schelling wasn’t the only anti-Hegelian measure FW4 put into place; he also suppressed one of the main Hegelian journals and (as noted earlier) sacked Bauer from his position in Bonn in 1842, less than a year after Marx got his doctorate. Jena wasn’t part of Prussia, but it’s hard to doubt that Prussia had no influence on the political life of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach,considering their relative sizes and proximity. In any case Trier was definitely part of Prussia, and Marx started his career in political journalism there as a staunch republican and supporter of universal suffrage. That was obviously grounds for a continued battle with the Prussian state; the paper he worked for was finally shut down by the censors shortly after he resigned from it in 1843. He really was unable to work in Germany because of the censorship, and in October of that same year he moved to Paris, where he was quite prominent in political activity until the French government gave in to pressure from Prussia and expelled him in 1845. On to Belgium, where he began collaborating with Engels and fighting for leadership in an organization called the League of the Just; winning that fight in June of 1847 he and Engels transformed it from a secret society into an open revolutionary organization called the Communist League. The second congress of the League instructed them to publish a pamphlet stating the organization’s principles, which was published in February 1848 in London. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it.) The next year or so saw Marx heavily involved in political activity around the wave of revolutions sweeping Europe; after being expelled from Belgium in March 1848 he returned to Prussia, where as editor of another newspaper he agitated for the bourgeoisie there to play a revolutionary role similar to that of the French bourgeoisie in 1789. This didn’t happen - the bourgeoisie instead sought compromise after compromise with the monarchy. Marx found himself on the business end of a new wave of censorship, including two trials in February 1849, culminating in suppression of the paper and his expulsion from Prussia in May. By August he was in London, where he would remain until his death in 1883.
I know that’s a little long and far beyond the scope of Marx looking for a professorship, but I think it was necessary to fully illustrate what was going on at the time. The Prussian state was actively opposed to Hegelianism (or, rather, Left Hegelianism) which espoused the republican cause and other far-reaching democratic reforms that threatened the position of the monarchy. Marx, being originally a Left Hegelian, didn’t stand a chance. If Prussia could convince France to expel him, how easy do you think it would have been for him to find a job in Jena, in the tiny province next door?