And what is it that we need to know? You’re cryptic as the Delphic oracle, man!
I do rather like your last formulation, though. “The inevitable facts of the universe.” You certainly can’t get any higher than that, eh? That must…prove?..something?
Kidding aside, Blake, I’m sure you won’t mind if I don’t reply again to you until there’s something substantial to talk about? I’m shodaning you, if you will.
Well, let’s say it does. It probably won’t, since some places will have natural resource finds or civil wars or whatever, but suppose it does.
So what? That would be great, wouldn’t it?
I’d be curious to see this bizarre claim defended with some sort of methodological rigor. Colonialism existed before capitalism and has been rather noticeably on the wane in the last three generations despite there being just as much capitalism around as there ever has been.
Quite great, yes. Then we’ll have to deal with the income inqualities amongst societies, but it’d be quite great.
You can start with Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism, I suppose–it’s rather rigorous, and fairly convincing, and of course the grandfather of Marxist analyses of imperialism. The best historical analysis to my mind is Immanuel Wallerstein’s Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750. It’s rigorous, detailed, and historically and theoretically informed. Colonialism did exist before capitalism (I never said anything to contradict that), and yet it is a way for capitalism’s drive towards accumulation and growth to manifest itself–one of many ways, but, for all that, a historical way. There’s a short, very careful analysis in Chris Harman’s Zombie Capitalism, too–ends up saying that an analysis that necessitates imperialism as a form of capitalism cannot mathematically be proven, I believe.
With due respect to Mr. Lenin, I have my doubts his examination of history touches upon much of the last ninety years of it, and thus is an arrestingly incomplete examination of the history of modern capitalism, since he missed half of it.
Lenin was truly an expert on imperialism given his first-hand experience.
Soviet Russia under Lenin seized Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. If I had to bet a dollar, I’d guess he said, “It’s not my fault! Capitalism made me do it!”
Exactly. That’s a small list, and they didn’t even manage to accomplish all three things. That’s why millions starved to death. Their later reliance on grain imports was also puzzling and strange for a country with as much arable land as they have.
This is not a good example of a system “working”, even by generous standards for that word. Czarist Russia could feed itself. It just couldn’t fight a war because the czar, bastard though he was, wasn’t quite a big enough bastard.
That wasn’t an outright seizure. It was a use of eminent domain, where lessees were allowed to purchase their homes for a state-sanctioned price. The people who took possession already had a “claim” to the resources in that they were currently living there. The prices were naturally beneficial to the purchasers, but the owners were still paid for their land. The government didn’t just swoop in and take property from some people above an arbitrary cutoff to redistribute willy-nilly to others.
If someone owns wealth in excess of the arbitrary cutoff, then which assets are seized? The house? The other house? The private jet? The primary bank account? The money market fund? The local stocks? The international stocks? The local bonds? The foreign bonds? Commodity rights? Other titles to land? What about property covered by foreign jurisdictions? Different currencies? Some institution has to decide what gets seized and what not, how the seizure is legally and physically accomplished, and when one piece of property exceeds the limit, somebody has to “auction” that property – or whatever other stupid technique they think up – in order to seize the proper amount. A mass vote on every petty little decision would be utterly impossible. All of this takes an extraordinary amount of central administration. You can’t just tell the “other social classes” to take the first fifty million and then pretty please stop right there don’t take anymore. People given free rein have no incentive to stop.
There’s no market involved anywhere in this. There is no way to determine who gets what in the “other social classes” without an administration because the new assignments are completely arbitrary by the fiat of the government, rather than by clear rights of possession being earned and transferred voluntarily. Nothing takes care of itself because the very foundation of exchange has been totally destroyed, and it must be replaced. And shit, that’s only the beginning.
It’s a terrible idea on every level. Fractal wrongness.
Starting with the last comment first:
I meant that one paragraph, in response to one particular comment of mine, was insubstantial. You have to admit that Measure for Measure’s response to that particular comment of mine was more robust.
I wasn’t saying your entire post was insubstantial. I don’t think much of your worldview, and I hold your definitions, such as they are, in contempt, but many of your questions are relevant and deserve answers.
Then workers in the developed world will have better bargaining power.
That’s pretty much it. That is what will happen. That’s not the super-long-term answer but super-long-term is a much harder question to answer.
You advocate confiscation and redistribution for people above an arbitrary threshold.
You don’t advocate “bad results”. Nobody advocates bad results.
But some policies have a marked tendency toward prosperity, and others toward bad results. If we look at the most prosperous countries, they tend to share many noteworthy characteristics. An apparent indifference to these characteristics is not a good sign.
Among the policies of the socialist president listed in your article was lowering the legal work age to ten years old and decriminalizing coca leaves. In that sense, he could be a libertarian emperor and have done the same thing. Not ideal, but legal and safer seems an improvement over what they had before. Very admirable pragmatism.
Now here’s the thing.
The spectrum hasn’t disappeared. They’ve had some genuine and praiseworthy successes, and when you start as bad as Bolivia, literally the worst in South America, it’s a great help when you finally stop hitting yourself with a hammer. Prudent government spending is another topic I should’ve listed. They were suffering hyperinflation in the 1980s. Not only have they recovered from those habits, they now have government spending well under control. That is a huge help.
The Bolivian budget situation is the best it’s ever been. They are accumulating.
They have more foreign reserves, as a percentage of GDP, than any other country in South America. It actually “helps” that they are so poor, their GDP so very low, because it means when they get something right it makes a huge difference. But if they want to keep growing at a brisk rate, rather than levelling off at a low level, they’re going to have to resist more nationalizations. They will need to give some security to the abstract holders of property that their international investments in Bolivia will be protected. Given the political climate, this might be tough. They will eventually need more foreign investment, and it will need to be encouraged.
This is one of the areas where I think the IMF is sometimes working with perverse incentives. They don’t want to open the money spigots until a government can demonstrate discipline and reforms, so instead of an approach of moderate changes – which is politically a lot more palatable – they go for an all-or-nothing ultimatum as a condition for funding. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for small countries to tell the IMF to shove it on a certain issue, even if the reform idea will eventually be good and important.
You have failed to note any distinguishing characteristics of the system.
Your definition of “capitalism” cannot be distinguished from “what people in a country always do”. People are always driven to attack other places and take over. People in a civilization are always driven to seek riches from the blood of others, because riches bring status and the outgroup is less than dirt. There is nothing distinguishing here.
When you blame “capitalism”, you’re doing nothing more than blaming human beings for not living up to your moral standards. This is easy because human beings are often terrible, but it doesn’t lead to any understanding. You look at humanity, shake your head, and wag your finger at “capitalism”. A new label for an old thing.
Your definition is vacuous. It has no distinguishing feature.
Collectivization and nationalization is an explicit part of the plan for those governments. Where Marx goes silent writing in the British Library, other people have to try to fill in the blanks.
Naturally, their books don’t indicate that such collectivization can murder tens of millions. Everyone is the hero in the movie inside their head. They tell themselves they want to do good.
And now what do we have? We have unambiguous warning sign for this kind of plan. “Here is what went wrong. Here are other things that work better.” Really, it should have been clear at the time how horribly their form of socialism would go wrong, but even if we give the naive of that era the benefit of the doubt, we needn’t extend that benefit to the present day. Today we’ve got the message. Today’s naive drag out the No True Scotsman argument and say their ideas are different. Superficialities. Economists have been writing warning signs for these kinds of arguments for a long time. Some people don’t want to listen.
Every earlier period in history. Every one.
History is writing. Since human beings have learned to gather together and write shit down – which requires enough organization and accumulation to encourage written accounts – we have been killing our neighbors to take their stuff, and then bragging about it in the histories. Every group of folks with enough sophistication to keep records has been waging war for profit. The actual distinguishing feature of the capitalist era has been that it’s the first time when people finally realized that they get even more stuff by cooperating and trading with their neighbors, rather than murdering them.
This is just how people are. Just a fact.
Our system changes, but our nature does not. The systems that survive have been those that set up a different set of incentives to guide our natures, which leads to more successful ends – with “success” here having an evolutionary tinge. Agriculturalists take the best land because there are more of them. The European navigators had bigger ships and better guns. This is pretty simple.
The numbers are clear.
Per capita violence is lower than it’s ever been. The long-term trend has been downward. Hunter-gatherers are extremely brutal, and early civilizations had not even the slightest glimmerings of respect for human life that was outside their group.
Even with our far superior weapons, we still manage to kill a remarkably smaller percentage of ourselves than any previous period. We have horrifically efficient tools for killing – which does, in fact, increase the modern variance as you are so keen to point out – and yet somehow we still manage to do less of it. The variance is not the average. Even horror has a spectrum. If the British had had Roman moral standards, Gandhi would have been crucified and the Indian population massacred until pacified. If you don’t shudder at the notion of ancient Romans with 20th century weapons, then you haven’t read anything about them.
I don’t deny the existence of that which is my primary object of study.
But business cycle fluctuations are as nothing compared to the long-term growth trend. That just pushes the next question off to one you’ve asked before, but I’m still dealing with long posts here.
Nothing is pushed off in my analysis. This is inherent in what I have said:
If India and China stop growing – not just from a business cycle fluctuation but flatten out over what should be expansion periods – it will mean investment has stalled, which will naturally mean no more wage pressure in the developed world. There can’t be any wage pressure in the US if international companies no longer see any new opportunities from the developing world. (This is assuming the US remains on a relatively favorable part of the spectrum.)
And “more like” is pretty simple. Europe is developed, but European wages are still noticeably lower than average US wages. (They’re on a comparatively worse place on the spectrum. Singapore is on a comparatively better place – economically, not socially – and even Singapore has some ill-advised policies.) If Chinese and Indian wages ever exceed European wages, then that would trigger my prediction. I make Europe rather than the US the cutoff because it’s developed but still not quite at the US level. That is, it’s “close enough” to remove most of the wage pressure. This is potentially unfair to myself if European growth continues to stagnate compared to the US, but it should still be close enough. If Chinese and Indian growth ever stalled before they reached the European point, and they flattened out at a growth rate consistently the same as, or less than, the US growth rate despite remaining much poorer, then that would also trigger my prediction.
In a plane, two lines must either be parallel or they must eventually cross. Either case works.
For the harder super-long-term questions, I’m going to try to address one point at a time. Here is one important point.
If we have a stable global system where the world persists with a voluntarily limited population at a tolerable, or even admirable, level of wealth for each individual… then this system will die. This isn’t economic. It’s biological.
Evolution has not stopped.
Even if the whole world gets the Japanese bug and has so many fewer babies that world population is finally decreasing, this decrease can’t last forever. There will be selection pressure. This could take a loooooong time, but there will be selection pressure, possibly cultural at first but eventually genetic. Without a resource constraint, people inclined to have bigger families will have bigger families. They will represent a larger portion of the population. Those people will then have big families, too, and that will continue until population is rising again. We are animals. Animals keep breeding until they’ve hit the limit, and although our weird cultural situation makes us unique,* we would do the same. This would, eventually, given enough time, happen to us regardless of our economic system.
One way around this would be to take direct control over breeding. That is just horrific. The stuff of nightmares.
The other way is technology. Frankly, this will probably be horrific, too, but there’s at least a chance that it won’t be. We’re not anywhere close to this point, yet it’s still easily imaginable that we will one day be able to engineer our own minds and our own drives and our own intelligence. If that happens, we can live in a stable and sustainable robo-commie paradise. But if we don’t ever learn to engineer ourselves, then we’re simply fucked. Evolutionarily fucked. The pressure will build, the agricultural constraints will become sharper, and then mass death will come.
It’s easy to think of pressure valves. New agricultural breakthroughs. Solar system colonization. A massive pandemic that conveniently and tragically reduces world population. But the basic model is simple, and the equilibrium of that model is not disputable: we’re very clever, we’re very good at reproducing ourselves, and we haven’t hit the limit yet. If we don’t figure it out, then there will be mass death. Maybe the survivors will have another chance.
Really, the most likely outcome of our current technology is probably some asshole releasing smallpox at ten major population centers across the globe simultaneously. This right here might be as good as it gets. The responsible thing to do then, is to work on the problem right in front of us. I can’t plan for a robo-commie paradise where we can engineer our own species, because as easy as it is to imagine that in a sci-fi story way, I don’t have the slightest idea of what such technology would look like if it were real. So I focus on the now. I focus on the things that have shown themselves to reduce severe poverty right here, and eventually lead to genuine prosperity. If we don’t have long before small asshole releases smallpox, then we should take advantage of this brief golden window where we’ve figured out how to provide for our wants better than any previous generation that came before us. We should pull as many of ourselves out of poverty while we can.
And after we’ve done that, if we manage to succeed, then maybe we’ll have a lot more genuine scientists smarter than me who can work on the real problem of engineering intelligence. But that’s not my field. I’m not qualified for that, so I work on what’s in front of me.
*My understanding is that our ancestors deliberately limited their population with infanticide, along with a healthy dose of murder, because they needed to keep their resource demands at a level commensurate with famine conditions, not the good years. Reaching resource limits in good years would have meant absolute disaster during lean times given the viciously egalitarian nature of those groups.
This post consists of tangents.
Actually the business cycle is a feature of modern economies, roughly speaking economies that have banking systems. Agrarian economies are subject to possible periodic famine, but aside from that extreme higher local yields tend to lead to lower prices and visa versa. That tends to stabilize farm incomes. Marx was one of the first to spot that capitalist economies are more subject to boom and bust cycles.
Textbook economists of the Keynesian or Friedmanite stripe acknowledge this, but think the problem can be addressed with proper fiscal and monetary policy. Marx perceived that the crises would just get worse and worse.
It didn’t look that way in 1933 or in the British Museum in 1860. Marx reportedly wrote during some of the worst labor conditions of the industrial revolution. Thirty years later the material conditions of the British and American worker had improved. Critics might note that Marx should have groked to this before he passed on in 1883.
Amartya Sen noted that communist countries tend to be better at fighting poverty while democracies are better at curbing famine. Grinding poverty isn’t news: sudden starvation is. And rulers along with voters read newspapers.
So set aside periods of famine (which can be dismissed, incorrectly, as natural disasters) and communist countries had a solid track record of improving living standards at a certain rate up to a certain point. Or close enough for foreign observers. It’s also the case that post reform China has had some of the fastest continued growth ever experienced in human history – and it wasn’t large governmentally owned industrial conglomerates that were driving matters.
I’m also wondering whether Karl Marx was sorta a prick. I mean he was criticizing the Gotha program from the right (relatively) and but I still started to sympathize with the authors of the original bullet pointed agit-prop. I kept thinking, “Fine, you don’t like what we wrote:* how would you put it Karl?*”
Well, that’s fine then. I’m glad to hear it, of course. I’m not sure how much of my worldview intruded upon these posts, and that clearly depends a little on the definition; but at the heart of my world view (and at the heart of the socialist idea) lies the emancipation of mankind. Now, one may debate what that can mean, and whether its possible, and so on; but I like to think that it’s a comparatively acceptable worldview.
Yes, I agree that that’s a hard question to answer (and would add, especially if you don’t hold with the labor theory of value). And I agree that logically, the first thing that follows (assuming nothing else changes, which given the various assaults on collective bargaining in all developed economies seems doubtful) is an improved bargaining power for labor. However, that merely begs the question: improved bargaining power means, usually, higher wages, or fewer hours; in either case, a loss of profit for employers (again, assuming nothing else changes). Marx gives an answer as to how this will (inevitably, though over an indeterminate amount of time) end.
Possibly I will need to advocate arbitrary thresholds for confiscation, though I would much rather convince the comparatively few people concerned that they might voluntarily renounce the accumulated wealth. I don’t suppose there’s much hardship involved in having “only,” say, $100 million left. I would be willing to confiscate, too, yes; but not ideally.
And again, I have no problem at all saying that capitalism increases global prosperity by the yardsticks “it itself” proposes. I have a problem that this increase is not generally judged against its depradations; not generally judged against its inevitable futures; not (and arbitrarily) judged against the destruction it has caused over the past 200 years (whereas communism, inevitably, is); and, most problematically, not judged against alternative versions of what “good” human existence is. I can look at household income and household expenses figures in Bangladesh and conclude that, since both are on the rise, this means people are “better off”. It’s possible. It’s also possible that they must spend more for basic living and that they therefore must make more money (and must be paid more, too! this is the lower limit of wages, afterall), too. And none of this speaks to the question of whether the labor that was required to rise, or not, their personal wealth, has not created much, much more wealth elsewhere, and whether it should be just that that it should do so. Nor the question how many Bangladeshi workers should die in factory fires or collapses before these deaths outweigh the gains; nor how much pollution in China outweighs China’s economic rise. In other words, an appraisal of how “succesful” capitalism must be more systemic: and in this regard I have my doubts who of us is “indifferent” to the full extent of the systemic challenge.
But he’s not. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. Not sure what the argument here is? I have my moral qualms about the legal work age issue, but I’ve been told by reportage that it’s a complicated issue in Bolivia. I don’t suppose the nationalization of the oil industry is to you “admirable pragmatism”?
I’m just letting this stand because I agree in large parts. I would point out that even if you are right, you’re right from within the system: I’m not expecting Bolivia to be able to stand against the force of globalized capitalism alone, if the Soviet Union could not do it. So your analysis will, probably, come true in the long, possibly the short run. That’s not a good thing.
No, really no. I may not (because it would have been repetitive) again have elaborated on what makes capitalism constitutively different from previous economic regimes. I have suggested a number of sources to RickJay that elaborate on why capitalism’s colonialism is a different system than, say, Rome’s empire. It’s an important distinction to make, too, because unless you do distinguish between the acquisitive regimes of Rome ca. Augustus and Great Britain ca. 1850, you are reduced to the (theoretically rather bankrupt) idea that “men will be men”.
Fine. Only this is not an argument, it’s just sociopolitical witnessing. Just like your extended riff on the “nature of mankind,” which, to be sure, seems to contradict your tenuous connection between capitalism and per capita violence.
Wait, I’m not following the last point. You’re arguing that the only reason for U.S. wage stagnation was the introduction of Chinese and Indian workers into the world labor market? Still, how would a cessation of Indian or Chinese growth work into this? The wages in India and China would be lower no matter what growth these countries have; in fact, we might assume that since more workers would compete for the same amount of jobs as population grows, wages would sink in China? Sorry, I’m probably being dense here.
I found this an interesting read, but I have nothing to say to it. It again reduces mankind to biological imperatives. It’s a view to take, I’m sure. I’m less sure why one would want to take that view. It also doesn’t answer the question of whether you think that capitalism will lead to this outcome–and if not, what it will lead to. I’m finding no way around the conclusion that you will have to say: it will continouosly raise global wealth, though obviously not everybody’s wealth to an equal extent, but everybody will be better off than before, even if there will be some who are “relatively poor”–isn’t that the ideal outcome we can expect from capitalism’s internal logic, and if not, why not, and what is?
True enough about 1933.
But Marx failed himself, he wasn’t failed by his environment. This is in your own cite from DeLong. Marx was using insufficient evidence. His data was unrepresentative of his own time period. He could’ve visited more places, seen more factories, gotten more evidence. He might’ve gotten a different notion from the real world, rather than just spinning fantastic theories in his head while begging Engels for cash.
People have made this sort of criticism against Marx before.
He had to gall to call people like Robert Owen “utopians”, who actually went out to do real-world experiments on socialist living. They tried first-hand. Meanwhile Marx was writing what was literally a prophecy of the future. Head stuck in books, no effort to gain representative data, no practical experience, with a prophetic theory akin to holy revelation… and he called himself “scientific”.
We either take the view that we accept basic science, or we take the view that we reject basic science. You have chosen to reject basic biology. Or at very least, you are “not quite sure” whether biology passes the socialist filter.
The core of that section was just evolutionary theory. Simple plain evolutionary theory, and nothing more. Animals will (eventually) breed to exploit all available resources. That’s it. “Evolution doesn’t apply because Marx!” is not a feasible position. I knew plenty of folks denied human nature because their worldview would crash without it, and they’d prefer their fantasies to facts, but at least now I better appreciate how far the denialism can actually go. You are expressing a temptation to toss Darwin out of your library because the conclusions offend your ideological sensibilities, because you do not “want to take that view.”
Basic biology is not a matter of personal opinion.
So yeah, in that case, I’m done. The notion that evolution doesn’t apply to humans is too ludicrous to engage. This is exactly the same reason I wouldn’t try to explain mutation to a creationist. There are others posters who have more patience on that topic.
He used data from Engels. I’m not sure how realistic your critique is though. Can you give an example of a mid-19th century economist who did your sort of broad empirical work? Marx was well read, had the Engels dataset and had worked as a journalist. I don’t recall JS Mill as an especially statistical fellow - though admittedly someone like myself is only likely to read his greatest hits. Which are apt to be general.
The real critique of Marx as I see it is that he didn’t wake up in the late 1870s: when the British workmen weren’t as revolutionary as he wanted, he should have asked himself why, and then perhaps tried to assemble some data. But instead of acting like a scientist, he turned his attention to Russia.
But in 1878 Marx celebrated his 60th birthday, and recall that people generally aged faster then. So we’re asking for a lot of personal character in this instance. Most don’t have it.
What I didn’t realize was that this sort of thing operated at the micro level. I can understand someone who is an expert at analysis, but leaves prescription for someone else. There are only so many hours in the day. But the Gotha program was a statement of general principles. Now I’ve only skimmed the work on the internet, but it’s difficult to see what he would put in its place other than, “Read my book.” Compare it to Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. That community was deviating from Paul’s vision. But he didn’t just attack, he also spent some time sketching what he saw as a better approach. But from Marx you just see negativity, snarls and complaints about his fellow lefties. I mean some of the stuff that he attacked was pretty banal and arguably appropriate as a platform for, you know, a political organization. https://archive.org/stream/CritiqueOfTheGothaProgramme/cgp_djvu.txt
Another tangent
From the wiki article about one of Marx’s socialist targets, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864), deceased at the time of the Gotha letter. [INDENT]The state
In contrast with Karl Marx and his adherents, Lassalle rejected the idea that the state was a class-based power structure with the function of preserving existing class relations and destined to “wither away” in a future classless society. Instead, Lassalle considered the state as an independent entity, an instrument of justice essential for the achievement of the socialist program.[31]
Iron law of wages
Lassalle accepted the idea, first posited by the classical economist David Ricardo, that wage rates in the long term tended towards the minimum level necessary to sustain the life of the worker and to provide for his reproduction. In accord with this “Iron Law of Wages”, Lassalle argued that individual measures of self-help by wage workers were destined to failure and that only producers’ cooperatives established with the financial aid of the state would make economic improvement of the workers’ lives possible.[32] From this, it followed that the political action of the workers to capture the power of the state was paramount and the organization of trade unions to struggle for ephemeral wage improvements more or less a diversion from the primary struggle. [/INDENT] Sort of interesting. Lassalle was wrong about the Iron Law of Wages[sup]1[/sup], but it’s a theory that seems plausible to me at the time he lived (less so in 1890). It seems to me that his political program has a stronger grip on reality than Marx’s though. And we know from subsequent 20th century events that conceptual wooliness can have toxic effects. If the state is truly temporary, then perhaps breaking a few eggs along the way is appropriate. This stance and metaphor was common in early 20th century Soviet Russia.
[sup]1[/sup] Perhaps, but will Malthus have the last laugh? Would I make a 20:1 bet about regarding the year 2300? 2700? No: I’m optimistic about technological advance and population control, but I can imagine other scenarios.
Maybe I was unclear. He can’t be blamed for lacking modern statistical rigor.
He didn’t just cite data from Engels. He read magazines like the Economist, newspapers, statistical compilations, and just about everything he could get his hands on. But he only read. He didn’t go out and see for himself. I don’t make it a regular feature of my life to visit factories or talk to business owners. But I have visited factories, both in the US and abroad. I have talked with small business owners. I’ve had informal conversations from economic consultants from developing countries at the World Bank offices in DC. Nothing important in any of this, nothing fancy.
But I mean, look, if you want to be an economist, shouldn’t you be doing these kinds of things? Or their 19th century equivalents?
Adam Smith actually visited a factory. He saw how it worked. He saw how the people behaved. He saw how the system functioned. Every indication I’ve ever read is that Marx never even bothered to learn passably fluent English. There were great English economists working contemporaneously with him, and he never struck up a conversation or a debate. Maybe he figured, why bother? They represented lowly bourgeois economics. He never even visited a factory while writing, until near the end of his life. It was all a beautiful picture in his head.
At a certain point, we might want to double check whether the map we’re drawing actually seems to conform to the real territory. I don’t think we need all the safeguards of modern statistics to ask for a little more real-world curiosity. Of course, it’s possible for nearsighted Kepler to make discoveries with Tycho Brahe’s data, but I still find suspect any astronomers who never once looked up at the stars themselves.
I’ve read even worse things about him.
But tone and personal vindictiveness just don’t bother me. They don’t affect his arguments. It’s factual inaccuracy and intellectual methodology that are more important, like calling people “utopian” who tried directly to make things work. He wanted to engineer an entirely new craft of social organization, and he didn’t give a damn about looking at any prototypes. Major sin there.
I can imagine all sorts of things.
A worldwide one-child-policy. Mandatory abortions. Terror. I have no confidence in my imagination. It’s too powerful to be reliable.
But the math is clear. The equilibrium of the model is indisputable. Malthus wasn’t wrong about the idea, just the time frame. These kinds of funny connections between economics and biology go back a long way. Malthus influenced Darwin, and now present day evolutionary biologists use game theory, which was originally developed to study economic problems. We can drop the same set of people into two different games, and they behave much differently, not because their nature is different but because the game is different.
Technology could definitely change things. We’re in a race against the clock.
I meant that Marx did work off of a dataset, and insofar as the Iron Law of Wages is concerned that’s decent evidence. Today’s best economists apply multiple datasets, but there are plenty who just focus on one. I don’t see his methodology as atypical.
Ok, you say, he should have then at least spoken to various capitalists, petit-bourgeois and their apologist lackies in the economics profession. Well he was close friends with Engels and I suppose he thought that was good enough. Still: I wasn’t aware that he hadn’t visited factories first hand while writing Kapital (though I’m pretty sure that he did rub shoulders with workmen, given his tenuous personal finances throughout his life). And then of course there was his insularity even among those on his side. I see that aspect of his character as more unusual, at least outside of leftist circular firing squads.
I get the general point though. I’d say Epistemic closure was the underlying error. That was certainly a problem among his 20th century intellectual successors.
Quite. Especially since he dispensed advice freely, without studying prescriptive approaches in any sort of depth. I suppose if you have an Hegalian and non-empirical concept of knowledge or history that might not be deemed necessary. Which is a pretty damning critique of that sort of approach.
An honest question, again: why? What part of Marx’s analysis of capitalism do you think is flawed on account of this failure, such as it is (after all, as noted, Marx didn’t “want to be an economist,” at least not in the way that we use the word today)?
Marx did not believe in the Iron Law of Wages. But he saw passing wage gains by industrial workers as analogous to slightly better clothing and food for a slave. Two things were missing from his analysis. First he didn’t have a sense of the potential (and eventual) advances in the standard of living of free workers: his analogy to slave economies was inapt. Secondly, his concept of exploitation is pretty abstract: there’s no real sense that’s he spoken with any textile worker or even union rep, never mind polled them or conducted systematic interviews.
But Marx wasn’t an empiricist, so he didn’t feel a need to make his perceptions concrete. That sort of factually sparse methodology came from the Hegelian tradition. His analysis suffered from being unconstrained by fact or observation. Mid 19th century laborers suffered their problems, but alienation wasn’t on their top 10 list.
Here I pose 2 questions.
Quick answer: Unask those questions: they are poorly conceived.
I honestly don’t have a good grasp of 1860s notions of science. Popper noticed during the 1930s that Marxists and Freudians both claimed to be scientific, yet seemed different somehow than physicists. It was then that he thought up the criteria of Falsifiability as a method of distinguishing science from non-science. It’s not enough to just generate ideas and collect evidence. You have to generate ideas that at least in theory could be falsified if the evidence doesn’t go your way.
Kuhn (1962) would propose the idea of a paradigm, and note that such intellectual frameworks have a tendency to explain away inconvenient facts. What topples old paradigms is not new facts but better theories.
But I see from wikipedia that the scientific method has a longer history and that the hypothetico-deductive model came into the fore in the early 1800s. (Though a big work on scientific practice was written during the 1870s by Jevons of all people. Yes: the marginalist Jevons.) So I am ignorant and confused. But see below.
There were plenty of socialist intellectuals during the 1800s: how did Marx end up on top? Well, he didn’t really: what triumphed was vulgar Marxism. So what we had was an ideology with strong frameworks for both plebes and intellectuals. That’s not a critique at all: in fact it’s a feature.
According to Donald Sassoon in One Hundred Years of Socialism, The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, secondary sources describing Marx had far more circulation than works by the big man himself.[1] Vulgar Marx consisted of 3 propositions. I paraphrase.
Propostion One: The present capitalist system is unfair. Sure the wage relation is legal, but all that mau-mauing papers over an underlying ripoff. Capitalists cheat their workers by appropriating far more than they pay in wages. In doing so they accumulated surplus value and via the political system transform money into power and then power into money.
Proposition Two: “History proceeds in stages. Each state is characterized by a specific economic system to which corresponds a particular system of power and hence a specific ruling class. The present capitalist stage is not everlasting, but a transient historical phenomenon: the present ruling class will not last forever.”
Proposition Three: Workers are fundamentally an homogeneous class, whatever their superficial differences. They must organize themselves into political parties and reject attempts at division.
Set aside the target rich environment above. As an organizing principle, the above trinity hits the sweet spot in terms of complexity. It speaks of the present (1), the future (2) and a theory about the transition (3). Issues of policy are swept under the carpet. And the scientific shtick is embedded in (2): it was one of the earliest theories of history (I think - I’m not sure really.)
Papering over a set of convenient assertions about history with a scientific veneer is good agit-prop. And if you conceive of socialists as political entrepreneurs, you have to credit them with discovering a new market – the political potential of drawing a circle around the working class (or anybody who identifies as such, even if they were actually petit bourgeoise) was pretty high, demographically, organizationally and ideologically.
Sassoon goes on to present some statistics showing that the rise of socialist parties in Europe were basically uncorrelated with the level of industrialization or the size of the working class electorate. So Marxist theory was bunk. But there was a definite correlation of socialist electoral strength with …wait for it… universal suffrage. Also the extent of competing political entrepreneurs (i.e. British liberals) for the working class vote. So as an organizational framework, vulgar Marxism was golden.
That’s not just in terms of insurgency. Vulgar Marxism had documented electoral strength.
[1] Sassoon mentions Kautsky and Bebel.
My dictionary informs me that in economics, a commodity is “any article of trade or commerce”. I know this definition and thus I know what a commodity is.
Land is a commodity, according to the definition in my dictionary. The value of land is totally unrelated to labor in some cases, including the two cases I described in my previous post. This disproves the claim that commodities only have value as a result of labor.
Do you think otherwise? If so, you’re welcome to explain logically why I’m wrong. Thus far you haven’t done so, choosing instead to point to “masses of very smart Marxist theoreticians” but not explaining how these allegedly smart folks answer to obvious flaws in their understanding of value. Believing that “very smart Marxist theoreticians” exist seems to be a matter of faith, as is believing that they aren’t just plain wrong. You’re asking me, in effect, to believe that these smart theoreticians exist and have some logical basis for the labor theory of value, but that I can’t be told what it is. Sorry; I’m not convinced by that sort of reasoning.
Let me offer another example: mining rights. The mining rights beneath my house are worth squat. 200 miles west of here, in the Bakken shale region, mining rights have enormous value. Is it because of labor? One could hire a bunch of laborers to drill for oil in either place, and it would take the same amount of labor at the same price. But drilling in the Bakken shale yields crude oil, while drilling under my house would not. The oil, and not the labor, makes mining rights 200 miles away valuable while mining rights beneath my house have no value.
I’m late to return to this, for which my apologies. I didn’t mean to ignore the reply.
I’ll be later still to return to your very well-researched next post, but as for this: it’s a misunderstanding of both alienation as a concept and of Marx’s method to suggest that anything in it was amenable to correction or modification through observation of the conditions of individual laborers. If we start with alienation, it’s not a condition that the individual experiences: in fact, you might be perfectly happy working your job, and you’d still be alienated by the capitalist system. This thread is a very good example, in fact: in Marx’s terms, alienation is a condition of existence under capitalism, not a personal feeling. You can find out nothing about it from interviews with workers–it’s a logical abstraction.
I’m not quite sure what the issue is with Marx’s analysis of wages. The point of the comparison is, of course, that no material improvement of any kind (the possibility of which Marx does not deny) will change the underlying relations: yes, a worker might be better off by being paid more, but the power relations between him and the employer haven’t changed, of course. And yes, of course the issue of exploitation is abstract, which is precisely the problem most posters here struggle with: even if you’re perfectly happy in your job, you’re being structurally exploited, necessarily exploited, by the relations of production.
But this is something you know: so the question to my mind remains, what observation of Marx’s you feel would have been changed, improved, or invalidated, by empirical observations?
No, you don’t. You know how your dictionary defines a commodity. You can read up above on how Marx defines a commodity, and, following him, Marxist theory.
Again, have you bothered to read a word of Marxist theory? I’m happy to help you out, of course, but not if you persist in simple insisting that you are right in claiming something that, for a hundred and fifty years, has been controversially debated and analyzed.
I have the feeling that nothing I can do can convince you, partially because you do not seem to read what I’m writing. That’s slightly annoying, to say the least. I’ve explained it, over and over, in the preceding pages. Can you point to a particular issue in my explanations that you’ve been unable to follow? Because this…:
…I have exhaustively covered, over and over again. You persist in equating “worth” with “value”. I’m not, Marx is not, and no Marxist theoretician is, disputing that you can sell mining rights, and for different prices, on the market. It’s speculation. But it’s very obviously wrong even to claim that the mining rights in Bakken “are” “worth” something because there is oil there–if you manage to convince any one person that there’s oil under your house, even if there isn’t, then you can make the mining rights under your dining table “worth” something–speculation, as I said.
The question is, of course, what’s usually causing the mining rights to have “worth,” and the answer is that it’s the expectation of realizing a profit through the exploitation of the natural resources to which these rights give acccess, through (hey!) the use of labor. Labor turns mining rights, as it does everything, into a saleable commodity that permits your investment to turn a profit. Speculation might render you a profit too, of course–but it’s not producing value, and it will, eventually, bust like a tulip bubble, when it’s realized that whatever price you paid for the mining rights cannot in fact be recuperated as actual profit through the exercise of your mining rights.
I’m fairly disappointed in this reply, as well as surprised; I had thought rather more highly of you. You’d like to withdraw from this debate, which is fine, although I’ve asked a few question I’m still curious about. You haven’t made your case, and now you’d like to take recurse to determining by fiat the validity of your reading of evolution (which I’m not sure I’d call myself an expert on; but it’s no surprise to me that a defense of capitalism will ultimate need to abandon the economic realm, either)–and yet I’m the one making ludicrous arguments? I’ve even conceded that your position is a stance to take; you insist that it’s the only position to take; and you feel the need to insult me (again! it’s easy to talk about how one doens’t care about tone when one’s flinging the insult oneself) with the preposterous suggestion that “evolution doesn’t apply to humans” is a stance I take.
I’m disappointed. I had expected rather more.
