“I am not a Marxist” - Karl Marx
December 11, 2018 9:56 AM Subscribe
“What Marxism teaches us is simply to approach questions of society from a material basis: how does human life persist? Through production of the goods and services needed to live. How are these things produced under capitalist society? Through exploitation of the labor of the working class, that is, by requiring one class of people to sell their labor as a commodity to another class to produce values. What is the result of this system? That workers are “alienated” from their labor, meaning from much of their waking life, constantly required to produce more and more with an ever-precarious access to the means of subsistence.” What It Means to Be a Marxist (Jacobin) “ If we want to avoid the mistakes of the 20th Century, we must not drive away those who largely agree with us over small ideological distinctions.” I’m A Socialist But Not A Marxist (Midwestern Socialist)
Next on Dr Who: Cage Match between Marx and Malthus.
See who starves first.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:35 AM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
See who starves first.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:35 AM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
Fairly straightforward, but relevant considering contemporary Marxist dogmatism.
Reminds me of this quote from Bertrand Russell on Lenin: "Absolute orthodoxy: he thought a proposition could be proved by quoting a text in Marx and he was quite incapable of supposing that there could be anything in Marx that wasn't right, and that struck me as rather limited."
posted by Hume at 10:55 AM on December 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
Reminds me of this quote from Bertrand Russell on Lenin: "Absolute orthodoxy: he thought a proposition could be proved by quoting a text in Marx and he was quite incapable of supposing that there could be anything in Marx that wasn't right, and that struck me as rather limited."
posted by Hume at 10:55 AM on December 11, 2018 [8 favorites]
I've explained to people that my view is that Marx's criticisms of Capitalism are accurate and valid, but not everything about his proposed solutions is valid. We can take the parts of Marx that are accurate and the parts of his solutions that have been shown to work, and build from those.
All this has ever resulted in is dirty looks from everyone else.
posted by SansPoint at 11:02 AM on December 11, 2018 [32 favorites]
All this has ever resulted in is dirty looks from everyone else.
posted by SansPoint at 11:02 AM on December 11, 2018 [32 favorites]
Whether we like it or not, the way commodities are produced under capitalism will always require struggle between the classes; workers want more, capitalists want them to have less and less.
This is not a complicated idea to understand, nor to detect by your own observation.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:03 AM on December 11, 2018 [5 favorites]
This is not a complicated idea to understand, nor to detect by your own observation.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:03 AM on December 11, 2018 [5 favorites]
Marx was wise enough to know that his own bombastic rhetoric should not be taken as any kind of dogma.
Whether we like it or not, the way commodities are produced under capitalism will always require struggle between the classes; workers want more, capitalists want them to have less and less.
And every time you go to the store to buy something you didn't make, you take off your worker hat and put on the capitalist hat. To reconcile your interests as a consumer versus your interests as a worker, you have to act as a citizen. If the result is boring Scandinavian social democracy, well, there are worse fates, and we appear to be heading towards one.
posted by ocschwar at 11:19 AM on December 11, 2018 [17 favorites]
Whether we like it or not, the way commodities are produced under capitalism will always require struggle between the classes; workers want more, capitalists want them to have less and less.
And every time you go to the store to buy something you didn't make, you take off your worker hat and put on the capitalist hat. To reconcile your interests as a consumer versus your interests as a worker, you have to act as a citizen. If the result is boring Scandinavian social democracy, well, there are worse fates, and we appear to be heading towards one.
posted by ocschwar at 11:19 AM on December 11, 2018 [17 favorites]
> And every time you go to the store to buy something you didn't make, you take off your worker hat and put on the capitalist hat.
So in marxian terms that's a misreading. Consuming commodities doesn't make you a capitalist. Living off of income derived from owning capital rather than income derived from doing work is what makes you a capitalist. Unfortunately the vast majority of us don't have enough productive property under our control to simply take off our worker hats and put on our capitalist hats.
The first few chapters of Capital are super dry, but they're useful for understanding what you're doing when you, a worker, buy stuff under capitalism. You're taking some amount of the money commodity and exchanging it for other commodities. How did you get an amount of the money commodity in the first place? You got it by selling your labor time as a commodity.
Marx identifies this as the "C-M-C" circuit; you sell a commodity C (your labor time) for money M, then you use M to buy some other commodity C (food, shelter, fuel, transportation, televisions, whatever).
Capitalists operate in what Marx identifies as the M-C-M' circuit. You start with the money commodity M. You use M to buy some other commodity C. You then sell that commodity for more money than you bought it for — call this quantity M'.
note: if you are an industrialist, the commodity you're buying is labor time, which in combination with the productive machinery/real estate you own can be used to produce other commodities that you can sell for more than the cost of the labor time used in production, the cost of the other commodities used up in production, and the cost of the wear and tear on the physical capital.
There's a couple of important distinctions between the C-M-C circuit and the M-C-M' circuit. First is that in the case of C-M-C, you really care what the commodities are, because howeversomany televisions you own, you're still going to need food and shelter to keep yourself alive. In the M-C-M' prime circuit, you don't really care what the commodity in the middle is, so long as you can find a way to sell it for M' > M.
Second is that the C-M-C circuit is finite. There's only so much you can eat in a day, only so many televisions you can watch, only so many cars you can drive, and so forth. The M-C-M' circuit, however, is apparently infinite — you turn the crank once, yielding M' > M, you plow that M' back into production, producing a new M'' > M', and so forth and so forth and so forth ad infinitum — or rather, until the earth runs out of resources or the air heats up enough for us to all die in climate wars.
As you can observe, the M-C-M' circuit tends to concentrate wealth, since the main thing determining the magnitude of the M' that a capitalist accrues is the magnitude of the M that they started with. Also as you can observe, the M-C-M' circuit that capitalists live in is bottomlessly rapacious in a way that the C-M-C circuit that workers live in can't be.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:25 PM on December 11, 2018 [64 favorites]
So in marxian terms that's a misreading. Consuming commodities doesn't make you a capitalist. Living off of income derived from owning capital rather than income derived from doing work is what makes you a capitalist. Unfortunately the vast majority of us don't have enough productive property under our control to simply take off our worker hats and put on our capitalist hats.
The first few chapters of Capital are super dry, but they're useful for understanding what you're doing when you, a worker, buy stuff under capitalism. You're taking some amount of the money commodity and exchanging it for other commodities. How did you get an amount of the money commodity in the first place? You got it by selling your labor time as a commodity.
Marx identifies this as the "C-M-C" circuit; you sell a commodity C (your labor time) for money M, then you use M to buy some other commodity C (food, shelter, fuel, transportation, televisions, whatever).
Capitalists operate in what Marx identifies as the M-C-M' circuit. You start with the money commodity M. You use M to buy some other commodity C. You then sell that commodity for more money than you bought it for — call this quantity M'.
note: if you are an industrialist, the commodity you're buying is labor time, which in combination with the productive machinery/real estate you own can be used to produce other commodities that you can sell for more than the cost of the labor time used in production, the cost of the other commodities used up in production, and the cost of the wear and tear on the physical capital.
There's a couple of important distinctions between the C-M-C circuit and the M-C-M' circuit. First is that in the case of C-M-C, you really care what the commodities are, because howeversomany televisions you own, you're still going to need food and shelter to keep yourself alive. In the M-C-M' prime circuit, you don't really care what the commodity in the middle is, so long as you can find a way to sell it for M' > M.
Second is that the C-M-C circuit is finite. There's only so much you can eat in a day, only so many televisions you can watch, only so many cars you can drive, and so forth. The M-C-M' circuit, however, is apparently infinite — you turn the crank once, yielding M' > M, you plow that M' back into production, producing a new M'' > M', and so forth and so forth and so forth ad infinitum — or rather, until the earth runs out of resources or the air heats up enough for us to all die in climate wars.
As you can observe, the M-C-M' circuit tends to concentrate wealth, since the main thing determining the magnitude of the M' that a capitalist accrues is the magnitude of the M that they started with. Also as you can observe, the M-C-M' circuit that capitalists live in is bottomlessly rapacious in a way that the C-M-C circuit that workers live in can't be.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:25 PM on December 11, 2018 [64 favorites]
So in marxian terms that's a misreading. Consuming commodities doesn't make you a capitalist
Consuming commodities aligns your interest towards lowering their price, meaning (also) lowering the wages of the people who brought them to you. Close enough.
posted by ocschwar at 12:39 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Consuming commodities aligns your interest towards lowering their price, meaning (also) lowering the wages of the people who brought them to you. Close enough.
posted by ocschwar at 12:39 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Again, though, that's not true. When you live by selling your labor time as a commodity and purchasing other commodities, you have an interest in raising the price paid for labor time and lowering the price charged for other commodities. If you live off of productive capital that requires you buy labor time, you have an interest in lowering the price paid for labor time and raising the price charged for other commodities. When analyzing someone's interests you've got to analyze their interests at each stage of the circuit, not just at the stage where they buy commodities.
As you've observed, there's a point where the interest of capitalists and the interest of workers (sort of)align; capitalists want to lower the cost of whatever package of goods is required to support one laborer at the minimum socially acceptable standard of living, since this results in the cost of labor time going down, while workers want to lower the cost of the commodities required to live at what they consider an acceptable standard of living, so that we can save up and get off the treadmill.
However, It's easier to reduce the cost of the goods required to support one worker at the minimal socially acceptable standard of living by lowering the standard of living than it is to reduce it by actually producing the same quality and quantity of commodity at genuinely lower prices. In practice, this results in a shared race to the bottom; capitalists are incentivized to sell workers shoddy crap, workers have to buy shoddy crap because everything that's not shoddy crap gets priced as a luxury, capitalists are incentivized to produce more shoddy crap more quickly (because although the price of labor is falling, the profit from each unit of shoddy crap sold is falling as well), and so forth and so forth and so forth.
The way to break this cycle is to actually (and not just rhetorically) end the (very real) distinction between people who work for a living and people who own stuff for a living, by transferring control of productive property away from private capitalists and to democratically controlled institutions.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:52 PM on December 11, 2018 [32 favorites]
As you've observed, there's a point where the interest of capitalists and the interest of workers (sort of)align; capitalists want to lower the cost of whatever package of goods is required to support one laborer at the minimum socially acceptable standard of living, since this results in the cost of labor time going down, while workers want to lower the cost of the commodities required to live at what they consider an acceptable standard of living, so that we can save up and get off the treadmill.
However, It's easier to reduce the cost of the goods required to support one worker at the minimal socially acceptable standard of living by lowering the standard of living than it is to reduce it by actually producing the same quality and quantity of commodity at genuinely lower prices. In practice, this results in a shared race to the bottom; capitalists are incentivized to sell workers shoddy crap, workers have to buy shoddy crap because everything that's not shoddy crap gets priced as a luxury, capitalists are incentivized to produce more shoddy crap more quickly (because although the price of labor is falling, the profit from each unit of shoddy crap sold is falling as well), and so forth and so forth and so forth.
The way to break this cycle is to actually (and not just rhetorically) end the (very real) distinction between people who work for a living and people who own stuff for a living, by transferring control of productive property away from private capitalists and to democratically controlled institutions.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:52 PM on December 11, 2018 [32 favorites]
You're talking about two different things. oschwar is talking about the simple act of purchasing goods and already concedes that earning capital for most is on the C-M-C circuit. Reclusive is talking about how a given individual goes about earning capital, and how that method varies between individuals based on where their primary source of income is.
It's a logical instinct for everyone, no matter how capital is earned, to want to spend less of it per good obtained, which is oschwar's point. But in the larger context of an entire economy, how capital is earned has a dramatic difference on an individual's impact on the larger economy, which is Reclusive's point. Both of you can easily be right.
posted by Punkey at 12:58 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
It's a logical instinct for everyone, no matter how capital is earned, to want to spend less of it per good obtained, which is oschwar's point. But in the larger context of an entire economy, how capital is earned has a dramatic difference on an individual's impact on the larger economy, which is Reclusive's point. Both of you can easily be right.
posted by Punkey at 12:58 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
I mean, not exactly. It seems like ocschwar is arguing that the marxian distinction between working class and capitalist class is invalid (or otherwise not useful) because sometimes the interests of capitalists and workers are aligned. Whereas really, if the interests of capitalists and workers weren’t at some point aligned, the system wouldn’t work at all.
The problem is that the individual small-scale rational decisions made by individual players of the game (worker or capitalist) yield large scale irrationality — exploitative and abusive work conditions for most workers, the need for colonialism and imperialism to secure new markets, and the looming threat of ecological catastrophe. If we established a system without the same tendencies toward infinite production and infinite wealth concentration, we could prevent some of those harms. However, if you’re in the capitalist class, you personally in the short term will find your life worse under economic democracy than under capitalism, despite most people finding economic democracy much less painful or suicidal than capitalism.
This is where class distinctions become especially significant.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 1:14 PM on December 11, 2018 [11 favorites]
The problem is that the individual small-scale rational decisions made by individual players of the game (worker or capitalist) yield large scale irrationality — exploitative and abusive work conditions for most workers, the need for colonialism and imperialism to secure new markets, and the looming threat of ecological catastrophe. If we established a system without the same tendencies toward infinite production and infinite wealth concentration, we could prevent some of those harms. However, if you’re in the capitalist class, you personally in the short term will find your life worse under economic democracy than under capitalism, despite most people finding economic democracy much less painful or suicidal than capitalism.
This is where class distinctions become especially significant.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 1:14 PM on December 11, 2018 [11 favorites]
I mean, not exactly. It seems like ocschwar is arguing that the marxian distinction between working class and capitalist class is invalid (or otherwise not useful) because sometimes the interests of capitalists and workers are aligned.
No. I am saying the interests of individual peoples move in and out of alignment in different contexts, making the theoretical classification of people as working class and capitalist class a perfect example of how Marx's writings can be turned into ossified and meaningless theory.
Coalescing into a working class thorough unionism or partisan politics in order to push for policies is a good thing. But it takes effort. It is not something inherent to the social order.
posted by ocschwar at 1:26 PM on December 11, 2018
The explanation was really helpful but I don't get the author's separation of morality from correctness or truth. We can surely say that anthropogenic climate change is not a moral, but a scientific and empirical question. But on the meta level, all questions are inherently moral, because they presuppose they are the right question to ask. Asking a question is an action. Formulating a question entails moral motivation and sensibility; we are not free of that. So it confuses me how the author is emphatically demarcating the morals versus epistemics of class conflict. Is a critique of political economy, say constituted by the volumes of Capital, moralistic? I think all critique involves morality in some way. So I could be mistaken but the author's account of the role of morality wrt post-Marxism is confusing and unclear to me.
posted by polymodus at 1:29 PM on December 11, 2018
posted by polymodus at 1:29 PM on December 11, 2018
Marx: Rich People are Assholes.
posted by ovvl at 5:23 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by ovvl at 5:23 PM on December 11, 2018 [4 favorites]
Marx was wise enough to know that his own bombastic rhetoric should not be taken as any kind of dogma.
It's worth remembering that Marx was a party leader as well as a philosopher, and a lot of his bombast was the stuff of rancorous inter-Leftist debate, a space where there wasn't much oxygen for people who weren't willing to push themselves and their ideas forward relentlessly. The first time I encountered his stuff I didn't really know that and he seemed like a tremendously egotistic and unpleasant person. Reading Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion last year was pretty eye-opening in that regard (I've heard that A World To Win: The Life and Work is also quite good, but I haven't found the time yet).
Some people can own the means of production and the rest of us have to sell our labor to survive. The dictatorship of the proletariat just inverts this: it organizes the state to preserve the common ownership of the means of production.
I see this actually as one of the core flaws of 20th-century Marxism - the blindness to the difference between ownership and control. The pope owns nothing, but controls a vast apparatus of wealth and power. The president does not own the executive branch, but he controls it. Capitalists do not own the government in modern capitalist societies, but they exert enormous influence on it. Throughout most of the world, men have not possessed legal ownership of their wives and daughters for centuries, but virtually everywhere they wield some degree - and in a few places, overwhelming- control over what are still considered, in everything but a proprietary sense, "their" women.
In a socialist society, the proletariat can formally own the means of production in common - but that still leaves the question of who controls it. Who makes the decisions as to what is produced and how it is distributed? Elected representatives? Bureaucrats? Workers in each individual economic unit (in which case what happens to those who aren't employed)? Meritocratically selected experts? How are they chosen, held accountable, and removed? How do you avoid the formation of a New Class? It's far more difficult to design a system where control, rather than just legal ownership, is distributed widely. Ultimately delegation of some sort or another is necessary, and the levels of power required to maintain the institutional infrastructure that prevents the re-emergence of a propertied elite gives considerable scope for abuse. On the Left, anarchists have tended to put more time and energy into considering these sorts of dangers than Marxists have, but most of the solutions they've come up with are hard to scale up to the size of a modern society. The second article gets this right, I think:
While his [Rawl's] theory is liberal, it doesn’t forbid public ownership of the means of production. Rawls’ primary concern isn’t who owns the means of production, but rather what becomes of the wealth that society generates overall.
He explicitly states that both socialist and capitalist societies could satisfy his principals. Such a socialist society would require a large measure of democratic control.
I haven't read enough Rawls to know what concrete suggestions he makes (if any) as to how to create and maintain this "large measure of democratic control", involves institutions. One of the things I've noticed about the Left in this country generally is that it tends not to put as much thought into instititution-building as liberals and conservatives do. I think this is a function of the fact that the Left has rarely ever held power (in the US at least) above the municipal level, which means that most of its collective experience of institutions is adversarial. Many Leftists tend to think in terms of movements rather than institutions. But you can't govern via movements.
But on the meta level, all questions are inherently moral, because they presuppose they are the right question to ask. Asking a question is an action. Formulating a question entails moral motivation and sensibility; we are not free of that. So it confuses me how the author is emphatically demarcating the morals versus epistemics of class conflict. Is a critique of political economy, say constituted by the volumes of Capital, moralistic? I think all critique involves morality in some way.
I feel like Capital is more analytical than critical - and insofar as it is critical it directs its criticisms towards the misapprehensions of other political economists, not towards the phenomenon of capitalism itself (of course Marx gets quite florid in his criticisms of capitalism in other works). A big part of Marx's cachet, especially as his philosophy was popularized by Engels and others after his death, was that he offered a steely-eyed and unflinching portrait of reality. The absence of a moral (or at least an explicitly moral) agenda was part of the attraction. For some people a notionally amoral stance is easily mistaken for, or assumed to be necessary for, objectivity.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:25 PM on December 11, 2018 [12 favorites]
It's worth remembering that Marx was a party leader as well as a philosopher, and a lot of his bombast was the stuff of rancorous inter-Leftist debate, a space where there wasn't much oxygen for people who weren't willing to push themselves and their ideas forward relentlessly. The first time I encountered his stuff I didn't really know that and he seemed like a tremendously egotistic and unpleasant person. Reading Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion last year was pretty eye-opening in that regard (I've heard that A World To Win: The Life and Work is also quite good, but I haven't found the time yet).
Some people can own the means of production and the rest of us have to sell our labor to survive. The dictatorship of the proletariat just inverts this: it organizes the state to preserve the common ownership of the means of production.
I see this actually as one of the core flaws of 20th-century Marxism - the blindness to the difference between ownership and control. The pope owns nothing, but controls a vast apparatus of wealth and power. The president does not own the executive branch, but he controls it. Capitalists do not own the government in modern capitalist societies, but they exert enormous influence on it. Throughout most of the world, men have not possessed legal ownership of their wives and daughters for centuries, but virtually everywhere they wield some degree - and in a few places, overwhelming- control over what are still considered, in everything but a proprietary sense, "their" women.
In a socialist society, the proletariat can formally own the means of production in common - but that still leaves the question of who controls it. Who makes the decisions as to what is produced and how it is distributed? Elected representatives? Bureaucrats? Workers in each individual economic unit (in which case what happens to those who aren't employed)? Meritocratically selected experts? How are they chosen, held accountable, and removed? How do you avoid the formation of a New Class? It's far more difficult to design a system where control, rather than just legal ownership, is distributed widely. Ultimately delegation of some sort or another is necessary, and the levels of power required to maintain the institutional infrastructure that prevents the re-emergence of a propertied elite gives considerable scope for abuse. On the Left, anarchists have tended to put more time and energy into considering these sorts of dangers than Marxists have, but most of the solutions they've come up with are hard to scale up to the size of a modern society. The second article gets this right, I think:
While his [Rawl's] theory is liberal, it doesn’t forbid public ownership of the means of production. Rawls’ primary concern isn’t who owns the means of production, but rather what becomes of the wealth that society generates overall.
He explicitly states that both socialist and capitalist societies could satisfy his principals. Such a socialist society would require a large measure of democratic control.
I haven't read enough Rawls to know what concrete suggestions he makes (if any) as to how to create and maintain this "large measure of democratic control", involves institutions. One of the things I've noticed about the Left in this country generally is that it tends not to put as much thought into instititution-building as liberals and conservatives do. I think this is a function of the fact that the Left has rarely ever held power (in the US at least) above the municipal level, which means that most of its collective experience of institutions is adversarial. Many Leftists tend to think in terms of movements rather than institutions. But you can't govern via movements.
But on the meta level, all questions are inherently moral, because they presuppose they are the right question to ask. Asking a question is an action. Formulating a question entails moral motivation and sensibility; we are not free of that. So it confuses me how the author is emphatically demarcating the morals versus epistemics of class conflict. Is a critique of political economy, say constituted by the volumes of Capital, moralistic? I think all critique involves morality in some way.
I feel like Capital is more analytical than critical - and insofar as it is critical it directs its criticisms towards the misapprehensions of other political economists, not towards the phenomenon of capitalism itself (of course Marx gets quite florid in his criticisms of capitalism in other works). A big part of Marx's cachet, especially as his philosophy was popularized by Engels and others after his death, was that he offered a steely-eyed and unflinching portrait of reality. The absence of a moral (or at least an explicitly moral) agenda was part of the attraction. For some people a notionally amoral stance is easily mistaken for, or assumed to be necessary for, objectivity.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:25 PM on December 11, 2018 [12 favorites]
If we want to avoid the mistakes of the 20th Century, we must not drive away those who largely agree with us over small ideological distinctions.
So, serious question to folks more deeply embedded into leftist politics - is there any sign that we are indeed learning from the mistakes of the 20th century? What I see online is mostly people endlessly dunking on anyone slightly less ideologically pure than them, but I'm aware that I may be seeing a skewed sample.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:18 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
So, serious question to folks more deeply embedded into leftist politics - is there any sign that we are indeed learning from the mistakes of the 20th century? What I see online is mostly people endlessly dunking on anyone slightly less ideologically pure than them, but I'm aware that I may be seeing a skewed sample.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:18 PM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
What I see online is mostly people endlessly dunking on anyone slightly less ideologically pure than them, but I'm aware that I may be seeing a skewed sample.
Not sure if I'd count as deeply embedded, but there's a notable contrast between the (rare, living as I do in Tennessee) Leftists I've run into in real life vs. those I've encountered online. The ones I meet in the flesh tend to be much less interested in sticking partisan knives in people. And I'm a liberal, so, y'know, perfect target if they were interested.
Outside of some very rare and usually highly curated electronic islands, Metafilter being one, I've come to the conclusion that the Internet is usually the worst way to get to know any given group of people, Leftists included.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:33 PM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
Not sure if I'd count as deeply embedded, but there's a notable contrast between the (rare, living as I do in Tennessee) Leftists I've run into in real life vs. those I've encountered online. The ones I meet in the flesh tend to be much less interested in sticking partisan knives in people. And I'm a liberal, so, y'know, perfect target if they were interested.
Outside of some very rare and usually highly curated electronic islands, Metafilter being one, I've come to the conclusion that the Internet is usually the worst way to get to know any given group of people, Leftists included.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:33 PM on December 11, 2018 [2 favorites]
In case it wasn't clear, I identify as a leftist and a Marxist. I still have no idea what the author means by morality. Studying Capital is a profoundly moral experience and I would even argue any Marxist who thinks Capital is merely an analysis is basically engaging in a form of self-mystification. It's like when people are in touch with their rational selves but not fully confronting their deep seated "moral being" reasons why they're studying this material and agreeing with it. So I still question the author of the piece on this point.
posted by polymodus at 9:12 PM on December 11, 2018
posted by polymodus at 9:12 PM on December 11, 2018
Everything about this thread is exactly why I've been coming to Metafilter all these years. Now who knows how to build a guillotine?
posted by Dokterrock at 12:02 AM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Dokterrock at 12:02 AM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]
Consuming commodities aligns your interest towards lowering their price, meaning (also) lowering the wages of the people who brought them to you. Close enough.
That has nothing to do with Marxism, which sees capital as a social relation between classes. Acting as a consumer does not align your interest with capital; in fact it puts you at odds with it in the circuit of capital (M-C-M’ with M being the initial outlay, C the commodity produced, and M’ the price it is sold for). Since every purchase is also a sale, the consumer receiving the commodity C wants M’ to be as small as possible. M’ has three constituent parts. M is made up of c and v. c is the cost of the means of production, v is the amount paid to the workers. M’ has a third part, s, which is the surplus value that the capitalist takes as profit. (There are technical arguments about how this happens but for Capital volume 1 purposes they are not needed.) The consumer wants M’ to be lower but neither knows nor cares whether that comes out of c, v, or s, and has no control over any of them.
More importantly, this relationship of the consumer to the final price does not determine anything about the relation between workers and capital in a Marxist sense. When I buy a coat, I do not have any control over the cost of the labor needed to make that coat any more than I do over the cost of its materials or the cost of the machines it was made with. I confront it only as a fait accompli, as a coat in the world. The only thing that can actually go down is the capitalist’s profit, since the machines and workers are already paid for - so in no sense am I a capitalist, who wants to get as much money for the coat as possible. The consumer and the capitalist are in fact in an antagonistic relationship. (Note that this also puts capitalists in antagonistic relationships with each other, since the capitalist acts as a buyer of the means of production.)
If you want to really understand all of this, volume 1 of Capital is a masterpiece. It’s a difficult book to read, but Marxism is not what a shallow understanding of class relations would show it to be.
posted by graymouser at 12:18 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
That has nothing to do with Marxism, which sees capital as a social relation between classes. Acting as a consumer does not align your interest with capital; in fact it puts you at odds with it in the circuit of capital (M-C-M’ with M being the initial outlay, C the commodity produced, and M’ the price it is sold for). Since every purchase is also a sale, the consumer receiving the commodity C wants M’ to be as small as possible. M’ has three constituent parts. M is made up of c and v. c is the cost of the means of production, v is the amount paid to the workers. M’ has a third part, s, which is the surplus value that the capitalist takes as profit. (There are technical arguments about how this happens but for Capital volume 1 purposes they are not needed.) The consumer wants M’ to be lower but neither knows nor cares whether that comes out of c, v, or s, and has no control over any of them.
More importantly, this relationship of the consumer to the final price does not determine anything about the relation between workers and capital in a Marxist sense. When I buy a coat, I do not have any control over the cost of the labor needed to make that coat any more than I do over the cost of its materials or the cost of the machines it was made with. I confront it only as a fait accompli, as a coat in the world. The only thing that can actually go down is the capitalist’s profit, since the machines and workers are already paid for - so in no sense am I a capitalist, who wants to get as much money for the coat as possible. The consumer and the capitalist are in fact in an antagonistic relationship. (Note that this also puts capitalists in antagonistic relationships with each other, since the capitalist acts as a buyer of the means of production.)
If you want to really understand all of this, volume 1 of Capital is a masterpiece. It’s a difficult book to read, but Marxism is not what a shallow understanding of class relations would show it to be.
posted by graymouser at 12:18 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
Reading Capital with David Harvey
For the purposes of this conversation, the "TL;DR" is: not all commerce is Capitalism
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:14 AM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
For the purposes of this conversation, the "TL;DR" is: not all commerce is Capitalism
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:14 AM on December 12, 2018 [4 favorites]
Movements vs Muncipalism is one of the more exciting trends in modern left wing thought, the idea of building institutions that can’t be taken apart the instant your side is no longer in power - the so called sewer socialists of the early 20th century for example, and how to expand and improve that model.
Personally I think the key is worker ownership and control and the expansion of democracy into all levels of life along side things like, actually enforcing our own damn laws against the rich and powerful becoming more rich and powerful - So workplace democracy*, redistribution**, and the elimination of personal debt***.
*do you have a boss if you can vote your boss out, or if you can vote to stop being a DONGLE factory cause a WIDGET factory would be less work/more green? Is there a boss if the profits made from labor are distributed evenly?
**PAY YOUR DAMN TAXES RICH PEOPLE, and a lot more white color criminals and wage thieves need to be held accountable. Give the IRS all the money and employees it wants. Yes, some must be diminished, but those being diminished are the richest and most privileged people in the history of the world. They’ll survive.
*** Eliminate student debt via a truly free national college system, Eliminate medical debt via Medicare for all, Eliminating housing debt by removing housing from the commodity market and building good public systems, Eliminate personal debt by making it so people don’t need to get into debt constantly or at all. This means no more bail, no more payday, and a public/postal banking system accessible to everyone.
posted by The Whelk at 7:58 AM on December 12, 2018 [6 favorites]
Personally I think the key is worker ownership and control and the expansion of democracy into all levels of life along side things like, actually enforcing our own damn laws against the rich and powerful becoming more rich and powerful - So workplace democracy*, redistribution**, and the elimination of personal debt***.
*do you have a boss if you can vote your boss out, or if you can vote to stop being a DONGLE factory cause a WIDGET factory would be less work/more green? Is there a boss if the profits made from labor are distributed evenly?
**PAY YOUR DAMN TAXES RICH PEOPLE, and a lot more white color criminals and wage thieves need to be held accountable. Give the IRS all the money and employees it wants. Yes, some must be diminished, but those being diminished are the richest and most privileged people in the history of the world. They’ll survive.
*** Eliminate student debt via a truly free national college system, Eliminate medical debt via Medicare for all, Eliminating housing debt by removing housing from the commodity market and building good public systems, Eliminate personal debt by making it so people don’t need to get into debt constantly or at all. This means no more bail, no more payday, and a public/postal banking system accessible to everyone.
posted by The Whelk at 7:58 AM on December 12, 2018 [6 favorites]
Or, more strongly, the future is not just in the electorate, it’s in the workplace
posted by The Whelk at 8:09 AM on December 12, 2018
posted by The Whelk at 8:09 AM on December 12, 2018
I think there's a useful distinction to be made between "moral" and "moralizing." There's a moral to capital, a moral that's something about how if you live in a system that incentivizes people to act a particular way, people will act that way even if no one in the system actually wants what results from people acting that way. But it's not a moralizing work; it's not saying that capitalism is bad because particular greedy capitalists are inherently bad people and if they just acted better the world would be nice. If you want that kind of text, you should be looking to liberals like Dickens, rather than to socialists. And, like, don't get me wrong, there's space in the world for moralizing. I love me some Dickens. It's just, moralizing can only get you so far; if you shame one or two big capitalists into giving away their fortunes, there'll be ten more little capitalists eager to take their places.
> So, serious question to folks more deeply embedded into leftist politics - is there any sign that we are indeed learning from the mistakes of the 20th century? What I see online is mostly people endlessly dunking on anyone slightly less ideologically pure than them, but I'm aware that I may be seeing a skewed sample.
Those who actually do stuff are too busy doing stuff to yammer about it on the internet. The most effective organizers I know aren't particularly online kinda folks; generally in web fora what you find are academics and other similar blowhards. (I'm counting myself as a blowhard here).
It's rare to find spaces with folks like The Whelk, people who are both doing srs real-world organizing and also talking about it online.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:51 AM on December 12, 2018 [7 favorites]
> So, serious question to folks more deeply embedded into leftist politics - is there any sign that we are indeed learning from the mistakes of the 20th century? What I see online is mostly people endlessly dunking on anyone slightly less ideologically pure than them, but I'm aware that I may be seeing a skewed sample.
Those who actually do stuff are too busy doing stuff to yammer about it on the internet. The most effective organizers I know aren't particularly online kinda folks; generally in web fora what you find are academics and other similar blowhards. (I'm counting myself as a blowhard here).
It's rare to find spaces with folks like The Whelk, people who are both doing srs real-world organizing and also talking about it online.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:51 AM on December 12, 2018 [7 favorites]
(That I can only do in part to my position of extreme privilege)
posted by The Whelk at 9:34 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by The Whelk at 9:34 AM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
The only thing that can actually go down is the capitalist’s profit, since the machines and workers are already paid for
I think it's worth pointing out that this is not the case in a competitive market; one of the characteristics of a competitive market is that the profitability of a firm is basically fixed and will be driven down to a minimum value in the steady state. The rate of profitability depends on things like the prime interest rate and other factors.
You can argue, and I would agree, that many markets are not competitive, market failure is in fact rampant, and the political system is frequently (ab)used to try and work against the tendency of markets to drive down profits. These are valid critiques.
But there are many markets that do function quite well in this regard—many fungible commodities, low-entry-barrier industries, etc.—and various flavors of classical economics (some neo-, some not) provide not only fine explanations of why they exist, but also succeed in providing frameworks which produce testable hypotheses and verifiable predictions. Which is to say, they're more true, insofar as we can know it.
Capital is a fine piece of writing, but has not aged well as an economics text. Marx notably claimed that the rate of surplus value extraction is a constant, which leads subsequently to a prediction of uniform working hours (because in a Marxist analysis, surplus value is created by human labor). This is a predictive, testable hypothesis and one that Marx insisted was true during his lifetime. (And I wouldn't fault anyone at the time for believing him; the data was reportedly ambiguous at the time, certainly leaving room for giving him the benefit of the doubt.) But we now know he was incorrect, and other theories originating from neoclassical economics which take into account preferential tradeoffs have been more closely predictive of reality.*
It's fine to use Marx's works and analytic framework as the basis for discussion, because it encapsulates a lot of otherwise-tedious-to-explain ideas, but it's my experience that many people—many of whom should know better—fall into a trap of viewing them as a set of holy texts. Marx was a brilliant guy, but he was also just wrong about a variety of things; the political economy he envisioned in 1867 is not consistent with what seems to emerge from the collective psychology of humans, and attempts to force-fit people into it have resulted in untold suffering.
* There are a variety of places where people have evaluated Capital, and Marx's works more generally, as economics texts; the one I am most familiar with is Marx's Hypotheses on the Length of the Working Day which you can read on JSTOR if you have an account. It's from 1983 but I don't think anything really shattering has emerged since.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:54 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
I think it's worth pointing out that this is not the case in a competitive market; one of the characteristics of a competitive market is that the profitability of a firm is basically fixed and will be driven down to a minimum value in the steady state. The rate of profitability depends on things like the prime interest rate and other factors.
You can argue, and I would agree, that many markets are not competitive, market failure is in fact rampant, and the political system is frequently (ab)used to try and work against the tendency of markets to drive down profits. These are valid critiques.
But there are many markets that do function quite well in this regard—many fungible commodities, low-entry-barrier industries, etc.—and various flavors of classical economics (some neo-, some not) provide not only fine explanations of why they exist, but also succeed in providing frameworks which produce testable hypotheses and verifiable predictions. Which is to say, they're more true, insofar as we can know it.
Capital is a fine piece of writing, but has not aged well as an economics text. Marx notably claimed that the rate of surplus value extraction is a constant, which leads subsequently to a prediction of uniform working hours (because in a Marxist analysis, surplus value is created by human labor). This is a predictive, testable hypothesis and one that Marx insisted was true during his lifetime. (And I wouldn't fault anyone at the time for believing him; the data was reportedly ambiguous at the time, certainly leaving room for giving him the benefit of the doubt.) But we now know he was incorrect, and other theories originating from neoclassical economics which take into account preferential tradeoffs have been more closely predictive of reality.*
It's fine to use Marx's works and analytic framework as the basis for discussion, because it encapsulates a lot of otherwise-tedious-to-explain ideas, but it's my experience that many people—many of whom should know better—fall into a trap of viewing them as a set of holy texts. Marx was a brilliant guy, but he was also just wrong about a variety of things; the political economy he envisioned in 1867 is not consistent with what seems to emerge from the collective psychology of humans, and attempts to force-fit people into it have resulted in untold suffering.
* There are a variety of places where people have evaluated Capital, and Marx's works more generally, as economics texts; the one I am most familiar with is Marx's Hypotheses on the Length of the Working Day which you can read on JSTOR if you have an account. It's from 1983 but I don't think anything really shattering has emerged since.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:54 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
Das Capital was not an economics text. So this whole argument is... problematic. It repeats the propaganda of many economists without them having to confront their own premises.
Das Capital was a logical argument and should be read as a philosophical (because, Hegel) or a theoretic critique. To demand empiricism in an attempt to evaluate--code for economists' privileged interpretation--is intellectual bad faith on the part of these economists.
To treat Marx in this context as a purely economics text is a mistake regardless of anyone's position on Marxism. Indeed, that's what capitalist ideology encourages, this kind of intellectual alienation. It's like saying that medical doctors some privileged authority on what sociologists' work. It's really problematic and I think Harvey's talks linked above make these issues of bias apparent, and I know of economists ranging from Varoufakis to my own actual economics professor teaching microeconomic theory have been willing criticize such problematic assumptions made by their peers.
posted by polymodus at 2:26 PM on December 12, 2018
Das Capital was a logical argument and should be read as a philosophical (because, Hegel) or a theoretic critique. To demand empiricism in an attempt to evaluate--code for economists' privileged interpretation--is intellectual bad faith on the part of these economists.
To treat Marx in this context as a purely economics text is a mistake regardless of anyone's position on Marxism. Indeed, that's what capitalist ideology encourages, this kind of intellectual alienation. It's like saying that medical doctors some privileged authority on what sociologists' work. It's really problematic and I think Harvey's talks linked above make these issues of bias apparent, and I know of economists ranging from Varoufakis to my own actual economics professor teaching microeconomic theory have been willing criticize such problematic assumptions made by their peers.
posted by polymodus at 2:26 PM on December 12, 2018
the political economy he envisioned in 1867 is not consistent with what seems to emerge from the collective psychology of humans
This conclusion doesn't reflect the scholarship on Marx. Richard Wolff's lectures are accessible and it's clear from his and Harvey's scholarship that they don't think Marx made hard assumptions on humans. In their view, "collective psychology of humans" is one of the key points of critique raised directly or indirectly by Marx. For example, the question of the base and the superstructure and how that inverts commonsense reasoning about thought (Harvey), ideology (Zizek), or about collective action (Wolff). Given the existing scholarship, which apparently economists do not read nor engage with, "many people" falling under the spell of Marx is a type of straw man.
posted by polymodus at 2:47 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
This conclusion doesn't reflect the scholarship on Marx. Richard Wolff's lectures are accessible and it's clear from his and Harvey's scholarship that they don't think Marx made hard assumptions on humans. In their view, "collective psychology of humans" is one of the key points of critique raised directly or indirectly by Marx. For example, the question of the base and the superstructure and how that inverts commonsense reasoning about thought (Harvey), ideology (Zizek), or about collective action (Wolff). Given the existing scholarship, which apparently economists do not read nor engage with, "many people" falling under the spell of Marx is a type of straw man.
posted by polymodus at 2:47 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
and attempts to force-fit people into it have resulted in untold suffering.
I really object, that's analogous to faulting a queer theorist for the riots at Stonewall, or Einstein (whose theories were right) for Nagasaki. I'm not the first leftist to acknowledge that there is truth in it, that there is a valid discussion and serious questions around it, but I'll point out that blaming-dismissing Marx for stuff effectively operates as a standard neoliberal canard.
posted by polymodus at 3:14 PM on December 12, 2018
I really object, that's analogous to faulting a queer theorist for the riots at Stonewall, or Einstein (whose theories were right) for Nagasaki. I'm not the first leftist to acknowledge that there is truth in it, that there is a valid discussion and serious questions around it, but I'll point out that blaming-dismissing Marx for stuff effectively operates as a standard neoliberal canard.
posted by polymodus at 3:14 PM on December 12, 2018
Wolff is also a big advocate for “workplace democracy” the worker ownership and cooperatives, which seems to be the direction a lot of practical impimentation is going
posted by The Whelk at 5:43 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by The Whelk at 5:43 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
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Should she intervene?
posted by sammyo at 10:15 AM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]