Teaching Marx to newbies, redux

“Not that I mind being called one, or think that being one is something to be ashamed of. ”

Way to indict yourself in the first paragraph. You OUGHT to mind being called a Marxist, and be ashamed of having been one, after the 20th century. And, why not ” go on about Pol Pot or Stalin”; Might as well talk about fascism without going on about Hitler and Mussolini.

No need to get into the little matter of death camps and genocide? No, I think there is every need.

I would very much mind being called a Marxist (not that I could easily imagine anyone doing so)– but when I teach *Marx* I think it’s very important to teach the 19th century, not the 20th. I *mention* the 20th, but there are ideas in there worth wrestling with, and that’s the reason to teach the work. Wrestling with the ideas is almost always impeded by thinking too much about what came later. It is usually an obstacle to engaging with important texts and their ideas to have Rousseau-Robespierre, Locke-genocide and expropriation of Indians, Locke-Jefferson, Augustine-Crusades, Kant-Rawls, Locke-Nozick, Marx-Lenin, Marx-Stalin, Machiavelli-Richelieu, Smith-19th century industrialism, Montesquieu-Angell, etc., etc., front and center in students’ minds. If the authors are worth teaching and thinking about– and Marx is one of those who is– then they’re worth the effort of teaching and thinking about without the fog of later history obscuring their ideas.

(My core teaching texts are On the Jewish Question, Critique of the Gotha Program, 18th Brumaire, and the Manifesto, though under the influence of my colleague Will Roberts’ work on Capital I’m planning to approach it with fresh eyes and try to get enough in control of it to add it to my teaching repertoire.)

#1

Oh, quite! And how hypocritical it is to discuss Don Quixote without mentioning its famous author, Pierre Menard.

I should have written “how British imperialists used Benthamite utilitarianism….”

Brad DeLong has a good reading list at
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/12/2014-12-18-th-oaeg-atwm-reading-about-marx-thursday-virtual-office-hours.html.

OP is, of course, snotty about being accurately described, so refuses to link to the post like a six-year-old.

The last couple of years I’ve been teaching a Freshman seminar on the good life, and when we discuss the role of work, I have them read the alienated labor section from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It’s gone over very well: the students find it accessible (well, once you explain to them what “species being” is!), and some get pretty excited by it. As far as I can tell, all of them come away with a pretty good understanding of how and why Marx thinks that labor under capitalism prevents many people from living fully human lives.

When I teach Marx (which isn’t often), I try to do so very much with Jacob Levy (#3)’s admonition in mind: the ideas are worth struggling with themselves, and if you set up those ideas in such a way as to directly connect them with state socialism and Soviet and Maoist totalitarianism from the beginning, then there’s almost no way any serious engagement with what Marx actually wrote will take place. So, no, you do not deny how Marx was used, but also, no, you do not serve either the history of ideas or your own students well but introducing Marx from the get-go as a thinker of tyranny.

As for texts, I’m very much an early, Hegelian Marx type of guy, and so the only essentials for introducing Marx, as far as I’m concerned, are “The Jewish Question” and the Manifesto. I have occasionally brought in parts of Gotha Programme, but I’ve never tried to do anything out of Kapital, and I don’t think that’s been much of a loss. Patrick O’Donnell’s (#14) recommendation of the Wolff book is also a good idea.

As for myself, I don’t introduce myself as a Marxist, and when someone calls me that I insist on qualification and elaboration, but I admit that “Marxist” sometimes is a useful, if not especially accurate, shorthand for “structurally-minded, anarcho-socialist, egalitarian populist democrat,” so the label doesn’t offend me much.

“I think you’re done in this thread Brett Bellmore.”

Had to be said, before you got on with discussing Marxism as though there were no piles of skulls, but it only needed to be said the once, so I really don’t have anything to contribute to this thread.

So, no problemo.

OP is, of course, snotty about being accurately described, so refuses to link to the post like a six-year-old.

OP, more plausibly, has had to deal with what can only be described as an obsession on the part of Brad DeLong who has, over the last number of years, written a series of posts that suggest that BdL is simply incapable of reading OP’s posts in a rational way, leading him to make some quite extraordinary claims. OP is very plausibly trying to defend himself while not getting sucked back into a direct confrontation with someone who has repeatedly behaved very badly indeed towards him on the Internet.

“Theobald Schmitt”/”Theobald Smith” is reminded of Crooked Timber’s comments policy, which inter alia requires that:

Commenters should normally provide a valid, working email address. Such addresses are only visible to members of the CT collective (and not to casual readers). Commenters who provide addresses like noone@nowhere.net may find their comments deleted without warning.

Should “Schmitt”/”Smith” continue to comment without providing such an email address, he (and I strongly suspect it is a ‘he’) will indeed find his future comments being deleted.

The first thing I would do is distinguish between the different constructions of Marx and his work. That is, the different prevailing major constructions. These must be wide-ranging, for even I have been called a ‘Marxist’, which is pretty funny. Outside the realm of humor, I’ve encountered a number of seemingly serious one-volume or less-than-one-volume considerations of the subject(s), such as Michael Harrington’s in Socialism (now doubtless out of print and in the black hole of modern copyright, but used copies are around).

I should maybe add that the actual differences between BdL and CB on questions of economic politics are real, but not that enormous. BdL is a partially repentant neo-liberal economist who is highly skeptical of the left, but appears to have left some of his ideological baggage behind post-2008. CB is a former Marxist who was and is highly skeptical of neo-liberal economics, but also interested in aspects of left thinking (e.g. analytic Marxism, which are not a million miles from economic reasoning). This is not an actual intellectual argument, but the relicts of a personal spat from several years ago, which has since degenerated into an entirely one sided grudge match on BdL’s part.

Holy Crap. The US is moving to normalize relations with Cuba!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/17/us-cuba-talks_n_6340468.html

Republicans are going to shit a brick.

/Anyone feel like a cigar?

I really don’t have anything to contribute to this thread.

Came to that realization a post late, I’d say.

If someone wants to include a 19th century critique of Marx’s ideas that anticipates later critiques without anachronism, they might want to include a little bit of Bakunin. The advantage is that Bakunin argued with the actual Marx, not with Marxists; the disadvantage is that Bakunin was notoriously bad at producing finished texts.

In the Western-thought survey course where I was assigned Marx, in college (he was probably on the syllabus for Sociology I, as well), the professor lamented that Marx, without whom all of modern social science would be unthinkable, had been “hijacked” for political purposes. But to pretend that hadn’t happened would be counterproductive.

As someone taught Marx by Postone, I’ve got to push back hard on this. Marxism is all about human freedom: the Hegalism is crucial, and there is no early/late split. The best writers about this are from the Second International, which OP dismisses as necessary to understand Marx.

Marx was a revolutionary. The whole point of Marxism was 1917. Missing even from the economic discussion above is socially necessary labor time, the class struggle as originating in production, the anarchist-Marxist split, the nature of social domination, etc.

The idea that we can talk about Marx without revolution is as nuts as thinking we can talk about Hobbes without Charles I, or Locke without 1668.

I think you mean 1688, unless you think that Locke was substantially inspired by the Buckingham-Shrewsbury duel, or the birth of John Eccles.

Alex K. Marx is the best of the Young Hegalians. His account of social domination as originating from control of the means of labor, the account of human nature, the comparative newness of capitalism, recognition of social transformation with industrialism. Smith imagines a society of eternal trade, with no industry beyond specialization: he doesn’t know the power loom.

A lot of this interest in academia has to do with Adorno and the Frankfurt School’s Marxism. It’s not entirely separate from the political legacy, but distinguishable enough to probably be an answer to your question.

Salem, you are correct. I did mean 1688

Also, I had The German Ideology assigned for a History of Science/STS course, though probably not read in the ordinary way, as the readings included Thomas More, Condorcet, and Mary Shelley, none of them known for being among the great political thinkers. I don’t remember how Marx fit into the class, after so many years, but then I don’t remember quite how Hobbes fitted into it either.

To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupied men’s minds at the time, and to have deduced from them clear practical directives without creating obviously artificial links between the two, was the principle achievement of Marx’s theory. The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense.[25]

—Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment 1937

Marx is to all of the social sciences as Newton is to physics or Descartes/Leibniz are to calculus. The difference between Comte/Spencer and Weber/Durkheim, to mention only one discipline, is Marx and the difference between speculative philosophy and empirical science in social being. Which was his point.

I am not sure we can teach Marx anymore, he has become immanent. I don’t think we need to.

(I glanced around, but couldn’t find a quick answer. Was Conditions of the Working Class in England a very important early work of observational sociology?)

Now back to Appadurai, Sennett, Arrighi, and Asian Film studies based on conditions of transnational production.)

33: “The idea that we can talk about Marx without revolution is as nuts as thinking we can talk about Hobbes without Charles I, or Locke without 1668 [sic].”

Even with your subsequent correction to 1688, these are not especially good choices for your analogy.

The most influential interpretation of Locke over the last half-century places the critical moment of his political intervention (and target) as the Exclusion Crisis, which occurred between 1679-1681, and dates the writing of his Second Treatise to well before the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That interpretation might be wrong, but as I said, it’s probably the most influential. Not that influential interpretations can’t be nuts, but that one has some empirical data working for it.

Likewise for Hobbes: Quentin Skinner — in, again, probably the most influential interpretation of the last half-century — locates Hobbes’s moment and target and context as the Engagement Controversy, when former loyalists to Charles I were asked to give up their allegiances and submit to Cromwell. In Skinner’s interpretation, the whole point of Leviathan is that English subjects are now obligated to swear loyalty to Cromwell. Charles I is really neither here nor there. And certainly when Hobbes says that the sovereign can be a monarchy or a democratic assembly (though he prefers a monarchy), that kind of undercuts the “this is all about Charles I” argument.

This is an interesting and useful thread for me, since I too teach Marx fairly regularly. I usually have at most a week or two to introduce him; sometimes it’s just a guest lecture in a colleague’s course. I’ve thought a lot about what is truly central to Marxian thought, enough to get students going in a reasonable direction. Of course, the “center” shifts, depending on the context. If Marx is surrounded by contemporary economics, that’s one thing. If it’s history, another. Political ecology? Cultural studies? International relations?

I originally came to Marx long ago, through Hegel. Marx’s attempt to wed science and empiricism (materialism) and therefore controllability to a deep conception of inner freedom seemed to me to be his primary attraction. The illusion that these strands can truly be fused is the source of much of his error. (Bakunin said this too in his own brilliant/sloppy way.) I do believe the disasters of the 20th century are relevant, because their explanation, in part, takes us back to this same hubris.

But Marx the historian was stupendous. I agree with other comments that recommend historical writings. My favorite, FWIW, is his discussion in capital on the transformation of work during the industrial revolution. Always ahead of his time, Marx even anticipated in some ways the recent interest in “industrious” revolutions. And he has the critique as well as the observation. What I say in every introduction to Marx, whatever the context, is that he gave the better part of his life to a deep, solitary study of British history from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and the closer any topic is in space and time to that place and era, the better his theory works. A large part of British historiography since then is a dialogue with Marx.

However, I agree with Brad DeLong that Marx’s life project was to locate the dialectic he signed on to as a young man in economics, to create an analysis that was simultaneously economically precise (with whatever algebra he could muster), empirically supported and expressive of his philosophical commitments. But as economics it lives or dies by its economic validity. Sraffa has been brought into this thread, and I agree. The refutation of the falling-profit-rate hypothesis is critical, in my opinion. (Okishio.) This despite many fine insights Marx generated along the way. The bottom line: whatever else I say about Marx, I always say that he believed he had uncovered the central economic contradiction of capitalism, which was equally the expression of its contradictory role as a moment in the dialectical unfolding of human possibility, and he was wrong.

From an intellectual point of view, Marx’s great weakness was his isolation. He tested his ideas against Engels, but hardly at all against any other thinker. He didn’t publish enough during his lifetime to get responses from other serious, powerful minds. This exposed him to embarrassing error, which sits side by side with dazzling brilliance. Students should understand that not responding to Marx about X says little about what they will get from Y—even though Marxism presents itself as an integrated system. Just about everything he wrote is worth reading for something.

I teach about two or three weeks of Marx in an “Intro to Sociological Theory” course, every year (for about 10 years), and I’ve also taught (once) a third-year course on “Marx and Social Theory”. The third year course was, as noted in comment 14, based around Wolf’s “Why Read Marx Today?” and McLellan’s collection. Marx readings were split into:
“Marx the humanist”: Theses on Feuerbach, On the Jewish Question, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts;
“Marx the historian and revolutionary”: The German Ideology, the Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire;
“Marx the economist”: Preface to Critique of Political Economy, Capital vol 1
Then we looked at a few branches: Hartmann’s “Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” Gramsci, Raymond Williams, David Harvey. Good times!

Thirty Seconds To Marx

Dorman and others were good, Rakesh was inspirational.

as well as for why such a tendency cannot be but a mystery to the practical consciousness.

Remarkable that Marx grants that what actors may rightly believe may still be (apparently paradoxically) false or misleadingly true for the social scientist who grasps the interrelations of the totality. It’s a bit more than the application of the fallacy of composition to the practical reasoning of an individual capitalist.

I have been accused at CT of methodological obscurantism.

Spent about an hour googling “Okishio’s theorem”, found a longish thread with Rakesh, Kliman I think, other names I recognize. Visited Michael D Roberts. Not going to worry about it. I actually did read Carchedi, apparently with little utility gained. Just some reassurance.

I have read a great deal of Marx, but I would still contend that with a short life or period of study, that Marx is better served by reading the “secondary material,” (as if Hilferding or Lukacs or Hobsbawm are minor writers) and so seeing the 150 year social conversation that Marx generated and is still generating.

So, although I am far from a teacher, I might like a course that took material that students were already familiar with and excavate the Marx from within it. Your pick, as Dorman hints in his first paragraph.

I don’t understand why the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy isn’t on the short list, nor Theses on Feuerbach (both versions.) Of course I agree with the inclusion of the Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Program. I think Civil War in France and Eighteenth Brumaire might round off the essential introductory Marx reading list. Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State might be optional. It might be by Engels but it rather clearly shows the determination to draw from the best empirical knowledge available, something commonly asserted to be untrue of Marxism.

The thing is, I’m not at all convinced that a Marx reading list is all that it takes to understand Marx. It’s not like Marx invented revolution in the British Museum reading room. Nor did he invent the Enlightenment. I don’t see how you could understand Marx absent some knowledge of British Chartism and Saint Simon and Fourier and Guizot and Adam Ferguson and John Millar as well as Feuerbach. And in particular, I don’t think Marx and Marxism can be understood apart from the failure of the revolutions of 1848. In particular, evaluations of Marxism that assume the painless inevitable triumph of democracy (despite any number of aberrations,) are wholly ideological, in the pejorative sense.

PS As to Marx on economics, maybe Value, Price and Profit contrasted to selections from Smith and Ricardo; Henry George and Rodbertus; Menger and Jevons would set his work into contrast.

Second PS: Marx did quite well in trying to publicize his economics work to orthodox academics and intellectuals and by and large they no more would accept the political baggage then than now. The most notable exceptions were the Austrians, but frankly I doubt the good judgment of people who think the Austrians “won.”

Response to 55: Most of Marx’s economic analysis was in the form of notes unpublished at the time of his death. They were edited by Engels into volumes 2 and especially 3 of Capital.

There is good stuff in vol. 1 on the theory of the firm and business cycles, but to my knowledge it was long after his death that their economic significance was recognized.

And I tend to suspect a lot of what passes for academic Marxism (especially on the Internet, and in non-academic circles where people were exposed to it in college) is basically really ‘too much sociology’.

@60 – you are probably going to have to do just that….

But is Marxism something that can be understood just by reading books about Marx? Or is it something that can be understood by understanding a social movement?

Can a MRA guy understand feminism? Can a Klansman understand racism?

I think this is what got me accused of “methodological obscurantism” Based partly on Lukacs, I think the theory says that only a consciousness committed to and acting towards social revolution can even see the class struggle (or LTV or TFRP). Praxis informs theory.

59: There has been 2 generations of brilliance trying to understand what to do and how to think, or perhaps more accurately the changes in objective social conditions, after the failures of May 1968. (And the 70s in Italy.) Just as Marx adjusted after 1848 and 1870.

Rakesh @ 48 also intrigued me, especially the bit about the Galileo of the social science of capitalism, which is what I’d always understood him to be, despite being ignorant of much of the literature being bandied about here. My reading more recently has of necessity been eclectic, as I lack the formal background in economics to be more systematic in my choices, but every now and then in the course of that reading, I encounter a passage which makes me think that the dismal science might not so dismal as it-s cracked up to be. Rakesh’s 48 was one such, and here is another, from a 2002 paper by Alan Freeman, Marx After Marx After Sraffa, p.20:

For me the two most essential properties of the neoclassical view, and those which are most ardently ideologically supported by capital, are on the one hand the idea that the market is a relation between things rather than people; that what happens in trade is not the exchange of human labours but the exchange of mere objects; and secondly, the idea that such a system cannot produce crisis from within itself.

This is essentially the way that neoliberal economics regards the capitalist market. For neoliberalism the market is by definition perfect. If therefore it develops cycles or inequalities this cannot be the result of the market; water is curved because somebody bent it; the communists, the unions, bad government, incompetent monetary regulation, stupid and lazy people, corruption, terrorists – anything at all, except the market itself, is responsible for the failure of the market to follow its static course.

For me, one of the profoundest weaknesses of the Sraffian system, as a system, is that it does not contain within itself the necessary ontological and conceptual elements to overcome this most decisive characteristic of the neoliberal view and, to the contrary, it actually reenforces it.

This, I want to insist, neither leads me to the conclusion that the system should be omitted from consideration nor to the conclusion that anyone who believes it is ideologically committed to capitalism. It does, however, lead to the conclusion that Sraffians are doing no service either to themselves or to Marx by continuing to slam the door on alternative ways of thinking.

62: My impression is that from that generation Gramsci is for academics, and the street reads Trotsky and/or his followers. Or you could google Podemos.

64? 65: Resnick and Wolff 2012, are decent on the ontological presuppositions of competing political-economic systems.

Italics should have been carried through the entire quote above. Must’ve screwed up the tag somehow.

Because of the way html handles whitespace, the submission engine has to auto-detect paragraph breaks and add p tags, which has the side-effect of ending any formatting you’ve added in the first paragraph [because tags have to be properly nested and paragraph tags are tags]. If you check the source you’ll see only the first paragraph is i-tagged; if I had to guess, I’d say that the engine “corrects” the html by closing unclosed tags and deleting unmatched closing tags.

Probably no real solution.

Anderson @ 62

Why Gramsci?

#60 mdc

Question for the crowd: what’s the best text of Marx’s to read with students on the crisis of overproduction and the falling rate of profit, if you’d rather not awkwardly excerpt passages from vol 3 of Capital?

Marx made complicated multi-dimensional simulations of an economy, and not having a computer he had to run them in his head.

Then to show them to other people he had to describe them in human language, a medium which is notoriously bad for that sort of thing.

Wouldn’t it be better to show students a simulation model which does what Marx said, and let them play with it?

Can anyone suggest a freeware simulation program that models Marx’s ideas about the crisis of overproduction and falling rate of profit? Preferably one that lays out the inter-relations clearly, and that various people agree actually fits Marx’s thinking….

My advice: Pretend this is the USSR circa 1963.

Basically, boiled down. If someone tags “socialism, communism or Marxism” with deaths due to famines, wars, purges, etc. etc. . . . then they must also tag capitalism with genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, wars, famine, purges, etc. And just the Late Victorian Holocausts alone bring famine totals for the capitalist world up as high as 60 million.

That said . . .

One person’s take, Richard D. Wolff, is that Marxism is a critique of capitalism, not a particular form of government or a way to organize society — though there is a bit on that as well. Not much. But some. He sees its importance in a very modest way — judging from his writings and public speaking. It’s a necessary counter to cheerleader economics, though he is too polite to use those words.

As in, if you want to really learn about a family, you don’t just ask the kid who says he loves everything about it. You ask all the kids, including the one who is very critical. That very critical kid is “the Marxist” in that dynamic.

I was tout

Oh well, fate’s a bitch

This Brett Bellmore is quite the stalinist in terms of discourse. The discussions here would be more interesting to read without the recurring BB sideshow.

I have no problem in calling myself broadly marxist in a sociological sense. Or more precisely accepting a social theory with components most prominently explored and developed in the marxist tradition. See Erik Olin Wright for an intro http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/621%20&%20929%20-%202014/lecture-week-01-2014.pdf But such a position can also be described without the word marxism. As for normative theory the marxist tradition and contemporary libertarianism share a commitment to variations of a fundamentally mistaken labor theory of rights to property.

DeLong has on other topics written many insightful, clear and what I think are true things. Some of his writings on Marx are good too. But he has a weird, scary and factually mistaken fetisch for clamping down on CB. DeLong’s substantive sorting and itemizing of the aspects of Marx is useful but mistakenly downplay the sociological parts. He writes that “active working-class consciousness as a primary source of loyalty and political allegiance was never that strong; nation and ethnos seem to trump class much more often than not.” National and ethnic constructs are powerful forces in human psychology, true. But so is class and work related social constructs. Not as (increasingly) strong as Marx forecasted. But a real force in the world that any social theory should take into account. Even in the US.

Finally a juletime wish for 2015: that the CT team deploy techniques for the comments section to curb some of the ills listed here
http://blog.codinghorror.com/what-if-we-could-weaponize-empathy/

Chris @81,

Could you flesh out your thoughts on “full fruits of labor” from above?

To me, that’s a key aspect of Marx and Marxists, and an essential reason why I, personally, see capitalism as immoral to the core.

Basically, the pre-capitalist guy who builds chairs him/herself and sells them all on their own, no workforce, etc. etc. . . would pay themselves X+ amount. But if they hire workers, become capitalists, they would pay their workers far less for the same or more productivity, even factoring in additional costs. They would pay <X, or <<X, and increase their own compensation the bigger their workforce got in relative terms to them. They would make money off their workers, not from their own production, even after you factor in their costs and their managerial time. They might then limit even that by hiring managers, etc. etc. Eventually, they might have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of production, other than paying for labor to make the commodities for money (M-C-M, etc.)

Again, I find this immoral to the core.

Does the world make us, or do we make the world? An ancient, honorable, and seemingly eternal question. Marx’s answer, it seems to me, is that both are true, and that the political project should be first to identify in as much detail as possible how this dual truth actually functions, and then to use the knowledge gained to provide a reliable measure of justice to everyone in human society.

Neoliberals, with their market supremacy fetishism on the one hand, and their professed belief in a democratic political process on the other, also appear to believe both that the-world-makes-us, and that we-make-the-world — granting that their belief in a democratic political process is sincere, which I admit I often doubt. What makes their influence so malign, it seems to me, is that they see no need whatsoever to reconcile the two, as though having a left hand that knew what the right hand was doing would pose an intolerable threat to their freedom of action.

Marx opposed the idea that capitalism satisfies the “iron law of wages.” What is important in his theory of value and distribution (and in classical economics) is that the wage be given.

The wage need not tend towards physical subsistence. The given wage can reflect norms about what a respectable and decent person must consume. Those norms might slowly change, in a process of hysteresis, if the market wage persists over the natural wage for a long time period. J. S. Mill, among others, wrote about this.

Chris B. @81
Thanks for the reply re CGP. I’m going to have to re-read it at some point. I think I’ll still end up disagreeing fairly strongly with certain aspects of it as I did when I read it a long time ago as a student, but definitely worth revisiting (with your comment in mind).

Thanks, Chris

That makes sense. I was thinking about it in its pre-tax sense. A fair and progressive tax distribution could “fix” the latter problem. And there are other alternatives beyond taxation.

As in, there could be full worker democracy in place, the economy could be fully democratized, workers would be in co-ops, and the co-ops would work together . . . . and part of the surplus would be set aside for those who can’t work, etc.

The workman is worthy of his hire.

Isn’t it more that the marginal worker must obtain, at least subsistence. This doesn’t mean that all or even many workers are only getting that. If you are a great deal more productive than the marginal worker you can do a great deal better than that. If your job requires a scarce skill it is entirely possible for everyone willing and able to do that job is earning a great deal more than that.

An employer is trading cash for labour while the employee is trading labour for cash. The trade only makes sense if both benefit. For jobs where productivity is hard to measure a sizeable proportion of workers can have negligible or even negative marginal productivity.

Plume seems to believe that most workers have a large positive marginal productivity. Given that most businesses operate in a competitive environment this seems implausible. As by cutting profit margins you could undercut your competitors and gain market share. Large profit margins are an indicator of weak or absent competition.

Marxism 101

“”There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the “horrors of the… momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution,
in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”

Have I misunderstood Okishio’s theorem as demonstrating that a general equilibrium (i.e., non-crisis) condition for a continued rise in the general rate of profit is constant real wages for the workers? And if so, how is this a refutation of Marxism rather than a criticism of capitalism?

As to the applicability of this theorem to the real world, trying to abstract from the difficulties in using any equilibrium analysis of economy that seems rarely to be in equilibrium…it seems to me that we can’t generalize very much even within a single nation, much less the whole capitalist system. In the US real wages appear to have been rising post-war to mid-seventies, then slowly declining since. The Sraffa or Okishio type systems appear to ignore real world phenomena like structural unemployment, immigration, emigration, offshore production, etc.

Back on topic: If someone wants to emphasize Marx the philosopher Poverty of Philosophy.

#105 stevenjohnson

Have I misunderstood Okishio’s theorem as demonstrating that a general equilibrium (i.e., non-crisis) condition for a continued rise in the general rate of profit is constant real wages for the workers?

I think so, based on a Wikipedia explanation. It looks like constant real wages plus some other assumptions can allow continuing rise in general rate of profit. I see no reason to think that’s a necessary condition, and it looks like the model would allow wages to rise some and still allow profits to rise also.

And if so, how is this a refutation of Marxism rather than a criticism of capitalism?

As i understand it, a simple misreading of Marx would say that profits must fall no matter what, so if there can be a model where profits do not fall, that refutes one thing that Marx is claimed to have said.

Wikipedia says that Okishio said that he didn’t think this refuted Marx.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobuo_Okishio

Okishio worked to clarify the logic of Karl Marx’s economic system, offering formal and mathematical proofs for many Marxian theorems. For example, in 1955, he gave the world’s first proof of the “Marxian fundamental theorem”, as it was later named by Michio Morishima, which is the theory that the exploitation of surplus labor is the necessary condition for the existence of positive profit. Concerning Marx’s Falling Rate of Profit, Okishio considered that his famous theorem would not deny it.[clarification needed]

Surely there have been many simulation models created which more-or-less fit Marx’s german-language model and which behave more-or-less the way Marx predicted they would. Which of them would be best to present to students?

No, I obviously intend the much more obvious point that in all of these quotes he is talking about routine political violence in the wake of a revolutionary civil war. The kind that has happened countless times before and will happen countless times again.

No serious socialist would believe that such a revolution could come about without forms of violence and repression – as nearly all revolutions inevitably do. Even rightists, when they aren’t solemnly quoting The Black Book of Communism, understand that violence and war are sometimes necessary, that ”freedom isn’t free”. They just want to circumscribe the situations in which violence is acceptable (like in Pinochet’s Chile) and when it is not (anything pinko).

btw,

Thanks for the links provided here, all. I enjoyed some of the articles suggested. Had not read Joan Robinson’s open letter, for instance. But we get a better context for it when we also read the Jacobin article discussing her evolution after that. DeLong doesn’t discuss that.

If this article was already linked to, apologies. It’s Mike Beggs on the idea of Zombie Marxism, which I found really interesting.

Personally, I don’t hold any text, from anyone, ever, anywhere as “sacred.” I much prefer the left-anarchist motto of no gods, no masters, and that would include Marx. I don’t see the bible as sacred and inerrant, or our constitution, or our founders, or badges, titles and uniforms, and I honestly don’t understand people who do. Basically, when I hear people screaming about “what the founders wanted,” I’m appalled, really. Why on earth should we give a shit? It would be no less strange to pattern our life (or polity) after the wishes of some long ago dead ancestor we obviously never met. It seems even stranger to base our lives on the words of ancient texts 2000-2500 years ago.

I feel the same way about Marx, though I do ID as a Marxist in a sense. A non-orthodox, non-doctrinaire Marxist, who is still learning and evolving . . . etc. etc. With a long way to go.

If anything is “sacred” in my life, it’s great art, music, literature. And that’s obviously not in the same way as a person might adhere to a political philosophy, etc. etc.

Good night, all.

@dave

>No, I obviously intend the much more obvious point that in all of these quotes he is talking about routine political violence in the wake of a revolutionary civil war.

You might be able to make this argument, though it is hard to stomach given when he was writing. the problem is that marx repeatedly speaks not merely of violent conflict but revolutionary terror, and in the context of the mid 19th century, that can only be a reference to the mass murder that followed the french revolution.

> They just want to circumscribe the situations in which violence is acceptable (like in Pinochet’s Chile)

There was not a single communist revolutionary that did not kill many times more people than pinochet did, and the only ones who were ever tried for their crimes were those stalin put up. really, the pearl clutching that leftists do around him is embarrassing.

@plume

>From my research, however, I’ve seen tallies for death due to capitalism as high as 1.6 billion, with the low end being several hundred million, and that’s not even counting deaths due to capitalist products like cigarettes, which kill many millions a year — which means well over 100 million since they first sold them.

Rarely have I read anything more absurd. the USSR, of course, sold cigarettes as well, but I’m sure that capitalists are somehow to blame for that as well. even the absurd black book of capitalism only manages to get to 100 million in the 20th century by attributing nearly 60 million dead in both world wars to capitalism. the 100 million deaths for communism is not just deaths, it’s murders. If you are accounting for “excess deaths,” then you must also include all the excess deaths that the failure of communist economies to become as rich as the west must have caused, given how closely LE and national GDP per capita track.

”You might be able to make this argument, though it is hard to stomach given when he was writing. the problem is that marx repeatedly speaks not merely of violent conflict but revolutionary terror, and in the context of the mid 19th century, that can only be a reference to the mass murder that followed the french revolution.”

And? The French Revolution is generally only regarded as this unspeakable horror in the minds of European continental conservatives in order to shore up their Burkean (or god forbid de Maistrean) worldview.

In one of those quotes he was specifically responding to a situation in which counterrevolutionary terror was being used in Vienna. It was little more than a ”We’ll get you next time!” verbal parry. Context matters.

”There was not a single communist revolutionary that did not kill many times more people than pinochet did, and the only ones who were ever tried for their crimes were those stalin put up. really, the pearl clutching that leftists do around him is embarrassing.”

It isn’t a numbers game. It isn’t ok if Pinochet kills and tortures 30,000 and not ok if Stalin does it to 30,000,000.

”the question at hand is not “was the french revolution a good thing” but “did marx advocate mass killing” he did. repeatedly.”

Then your entire aside was irrelevant to begin with. You haven’t even come close to proving the initial point – Marx did not advocate ”death camps” or ”genocide”, he advocated successful revolutionary war.

”Pinochet killed 3000, not 30,000”’

Tortured 30,000.

”but yes, it is a numbers game”

No it isn’t. I will not respond further. Adults are talking.

(Sorry… German keyboard pushed enter without my consent)

I usually tell people, when asked about my politics, that I’m a “Groucho Marxist” (unless I think that they’ve studied economics, in which case I’m an anarcho-Keynesian) and I have had to explain Marx in academic settings (and right now to some degree in a commercial setting, since I am pushing activity theory as a development strategy for software), which isn’t quite teaching it. But one of the first things I have to explain to new readers of Marx is the semantics of his use of the words “subject” and “object”, which pose an enormous barrier to people who aren’t familiar with the period terminology.

Second, I try to emphasize the importance of reading Marx’ revolutionary aspirations in a context where nothing like modern democratic values or modern human rights law existed. He has to be read in the framework of the Europe of the mostly failed 1848 revolutions. He was a 19th century figure and to see him as some sort of transcendent thinker in order to condemn him is no better than the kind of socialism that quotes his works the way evangelicals use the Bible.

I would suggest that labels like “Western Marxist”, “Marxist-Leninist”, “Marx-Lenin-Mao-Zedong-thought” (马克思列宁毛泽东主义) have no real present-day value in thinking about Marx and have not had any value since 1990. There is a Marxist intellectual tradition. It includes a lot of people with a lot of ideas. They can be understood in context and evaluated on their own merits and demerits. Sectarian terminology is only really useful in a historical sense.

Fanon:

“Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.

Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe? The West saw itself as a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the spirit, in the name of the spirit of Europe, that Europe has made her encroachments, that she has justified her crimes and legitimized the slavery in which she holds four-fifths of humanity.”

etc.

@100: “Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”
Someone has to point out that this quote is not a call for genocide, but a critique of the cost of the industrial revolution, in an article discussing mass Irish emigration in 1847-53, where he posits that that industrial revolution, capitalism and imperialism, are a historical necessity (“which must be submitted to”) that comes with extremely high human cost. Including this quote in your list is a very nice way of pointing out the extreme violence of 19th century capitalism:
“But with modern compulsory emigration the case stands quite opposite. Here it is not the want of productive. power which creates a surplus population; it is the increase of productive power which demands a diminution of population, and drives away the surplus by famine or emigration. It is not population that presses on productive power; it is productive power that presses on population.
Now I share neither in the opinions of Ricardo, who regards ‘Net-Revenue’ as the Moloch to whom entire populations must be sacrificed, without even so much as complaint, nor in the opinion of Sismondi, who, in his hypochondriacal philanthropy, would forcibly retain the superannuated methods of agriculture and proscribe science from industry, as Plato expelled poets from his Republic. Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. But can there be anything more puerile, more short-sighted, than the views of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords? In Great Britain the working of that process is most transparent. The application of modern science to production clears the land of its inhabitants, but it concentrates people in manufacturing towns.”

No, Cassander, the numbers reached by conservatives do not count “murders.” They get most of the way to their total from famine. And they exaggerate those totals to arrive at their magic 100 million. And, again, they include Hitler, who was a staunch right-winger, put into power by conservatives like themselves, and someone who absolutely hated Marx, socialists, communists, etc. etc. and slaughtered them by the boatload. And they, in turn, fought him to the death — and fought Franco before him, etc.

And if it makes you feel better, take Soviet cigarettes out of the mix, though they’re still a product of capitalism’s evilness, and by rights should go into the Black Book of Capitalism. But, again, they were never counted in those totals. So why be so defensive? And why apply a methodology to “socialist” nations that you refuse to apply to capitalist nations?

Beyond that, socialist and communist theory, if it were actually followed, would end famine, and end ruling classes, so you wouldn’t even have centers of power strong enough to get to those numbers. The inherent logic of socialism and communism lead to peace and prosperity for all, with full democracy — the real thing — in place. The inherent logic of capitalism leads to wars, genocide, slavery and the concentration of monopoly power, oligarchy and plutocracy.

Marx knew this. Marxists know this. But capitalists and their cheerleaders are blind to the horrors of the system they love.

I always like to teach ‘On The Jewish Question.’

Students often come in with a pre-conceived notion of the way that Marx understands the relationship between ideas and economic power. Namely that the former are some kind of epiphenomenon of the latter. On The Jewish Question, for all its faults, offers an extraordinary rich account of how our ideas might be effected by our psychological responses to social pressures. It’s thus a great gateway into grasping central Marxian notions like ‘ideology’ and ‘false consciousness’ in a way that isn’t reductive and conspiratorial.

To return (before the thread closes) to Critique of the Gotha Programme, parts of which I was briefly re-looking at. I note these sentences: “The capitalist mode of production…rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, viz., labour power. Once the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically” (emphasis added).

First, there is the at least questionable “results automatically,” with its implication that political action cannot change the distribution of the “means of consumption” as long as “the material conditions of production” are owned by capitalists. Second, a question (to anyone): Did Marx acknowledge somewhere that this description of ‘the capitalist mode of production’ is an ideal type? Marx obviously knew about the existence of other people (or classes) than ‘pure’ proletarians owning nothing but their labor power and ‘pure’ capitalists expending no labor power at all, but did he discuss the ‘intermediate’ classes, e.g. shopkeepers, anywhere beyond some dismissive references to the petit bourgeoisie? (I assume the answer is probably yes, but I don’t remember where offhand.)

“Again, I cited marx calling for the destruction of whole classes and races, the definition of genocide.”

Didn’t a few people already explain to you that you misunderstand the piece you quote?

Cass, I have a reply awaiting mo d.

Will try a very short one without the links.

I didn’t add the ciggies. I said that the totals I found didn’t include them. It’s a straw man for you to then concentrate on that. I think they should be added. But they don’t need to be in order to take the Black Book of Capitalism many hundreds of millions beyond the other black book.

And, again, if you see famine as forced and as murder, then that is also the case in capitalist nations. And famines under capitalism were more numerous and devastating overall. If you count them in one column, you have to count them in the other.

Anarcissie @134,

I wouldn’t blame “liberalism” for those famines. I think the logic of capitalism leads to slavery, famine, hunger, poverty and genocide. Liberalism acts as a slight mitigating factor, but nearly enough of one. Capitalism without liberalism would be even worse than it is with it. And it’s still monstrous even with the liberalism.

I’m not finding 马克思列宁毛泽东主义 on the internets, although I’m finding 马克思列宁主义 and 毛泽东思想-

主义 is often translated as “ism” and 思想 as “thought.”

I have a quote somewhere from one of my HUAC colleagues about how Stalin is less evil than Trotsky because he’s not Jewish. Available on request, in case anybody’s getting bored with the present direction of this thread.

When you start writing things like “How convenient” about Sen’s work, then we get out of the area of 19th century Marx pre-advocating for bad regimes, and into the realm of contemporary Marxists post-defending bad regimes. That’s a much more important reason to be dismissive of Marxism and its failures than whatever was said in the 19th century.

Rich, do you have a link for Sen’s review of LVH? Is it available online? Would love to read it. Thanks.

I have Sen’s The Idea of Justice at home, and read a bit of it, and then had to put it down. It was lacking, IMO, in real-world ties, and seems to float in the air, without any grounding in lived experience. The abstractions he did employ were mostly fine as they were, but I just couldn’t stick with his thought. It didn’t have objective correlatives, etc.

Should probably go back to it and give him another try.

My comment was in regard to the short paragraph posted above, and just that paragraph of his review. Perhaps the problem was in the selection, not with Sen himself, and I should read much more of him.

But the point still stands. There was widespread famine in capitalist lands and their colonies. Mostly the latter. It’s completely absurd to count famine only in so-called “communist” countries and not give at least equal weight to those in capitalist countries.

The vast majority of it was preventable, and in wealthy capitalist countries much moreso. Capitalism concentrates wealth, income, resources, power, access, etc. etc. at the top. This naturally leads to impoverishment, hunger and famine elsewhere. Which is why, right now, the richest 20% of the world consumes 85% of all resources. If resources were distributed in an even remotely egalitarian way, there is virtually no hunger, poverty, etc. etc.

To me, it’s just pure home-team-cheerleading to ignore that. The older I get, the more frustrated and impatient I get with that kind of blindness.

Rich,

Reread what you wrote. It’s absurd, for a host of reasons:

When you start writing things like “How convenient” about Sen’s work, then we get out of the area of 19th century Marx pre-advocating for bad regimes, and into the realm of contemporary Marxists post-defending bad regimes. That’s a much more important reason to be dismissive of Marxism and its failures than whatever was said in the 19th century.

One person, on a bulletin board, writes “how convenient” regarding one paragraph of a review, and that’s enough for you, apparently, to dismiss Marxism out of hand.

Come on. You obviously dismissed it all long before I wrote those two words. But if you didn’t, that tells us everything we need to know about how very little it takes to change your mind, or change it again, and how Marxist texts themselves are irrelevant to you. Two words from a comment on a bulletin board? Who wouldn’t be completely changed by that?

And last comment on the issue:

I despise the Soviet system, and the Chinese system of the time in question through today.

What is it about some people that they think any criticism of capitalism must mean the critic is in favor of the USSR or China, etc.? It’s a bizarre and silly assumption. There have been hundreds of thousands of Marxists over the years who were/are even bigger critics of those systems than diehard capitalists. As Chomsky says, they just made it nearly impossible to implement real socialism, as opposed to their perversion of it, their state capitalism, etc. The USSR and China set back the cause of real socialist, emancipatory, egalitarian, truly democratic thought and goals by a century by NOT implementing them in any way, shape or form. Those thoughts and goals get the black eye, because too many people believe they were implemented and failed.

Speaking just for myself, I want a stateless, classless society to be our future, and for us to move in that direction as quickly as possible. I’m an anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, radical democrat (not Democrat), and despise any semblance of autocracy. Which is also why I’m an anti-capitalist.

G’day, all.

“[India] had, in terms of morbidity, mortality and longevity, suffered an excess in mortality over China of close to 4 [million] a year during the same period [of the Great Leap Forward]… Thus, in this one geographical area alone, more deaths resulted from ‘this failed capitalist experiment’ (more than 100 million by 1980) than can be contributed to the ‘failed communist experiment’ all over the world since 1917.”

-Amartya Sen

I agree that that is what Amartya Sen wrote, engels. Which is why it’s so pathetic that all I have to do is quote one paragraph in which he criticizes both capitalist and communist regimes and get Khmer Rouge apologetics @ 149.

@Anarcissie

I’m perfectly happy to address the irish famine. the British spent a centuries beating down the irish, forcing them into tiny plots of terrible land for reasons that were largely political and religious. This jim crow esque system starts to get repealed in the early 19th century, but by 1845, most of the irish were still crowded onto tiny, marginal plots and less than a generation removed from hardcore feudalism. So when a blight hits, these people are royally fucked. the british government responded with some meager efforts at aid. Now, let us compare to the USSR. when collectivization ordered by stalin made the most productive farming region in russia less productive, he ordered seed grain seized from the peasants by force. when people started to die, Stalin denied that there was a problem, refused to send relief, refused to allow international relief, and sent soldiers to prevent the ukrainians from fleeing to areas where there was more food. how people do not see that the latter was much more deliberate, and thus much worse, is beyond me. as for the bengal famine, it was caused by the japanese invading the region from which bengal imported its rice and eating it themselves. relief was largely impossible because of the u-boat war. it cannot meaningfully be called a consequence of capitalism.

@stevenjohnson

>I have no idea why Sen would imagine either Cambodia under Nixon’s bombing was not an unfortunate part of the US domain,

the famine under the khmer rouge wasn’t caused by bombings, it was caused by the khmer rounding up and executing millions of people, including a fair number of the farmers. It is absurd to blame the US for people who starved in a famine that took place years after their involvement in the region, under a government that came to power with the support of its enemies.

@plume

>But the point still stands. There was widespread famine in capitalist lands and their colonies. Mostly the latter. It’s completely absurd to count famine only in so-called “communist” countries and not give at least equal weight to those in capitalist countries.

No one is suggesting we do this, please stop beating up on straw men. the famines that happened in capitalist and even colonial countries were, on the whole much less bad and much less frequent than in communist countries. famines were, in fact, endemic in human society before the advent of capitalism, and as capitalism has spread their number and severity have declined. Facts are stubborn things.

>What is it about some people that they think any criticism of capitalism must mean the critic is in favor of the USSR or China, etc.? It’s a bizarre and silly assumption

Because fellow travellers like you keep insisting on defending the record of the USSR and China.

>As Chomsky says, they just made it nearly impossible to

chomsky defended the PRC during the height of the cultural revolution, a decade after the disaster of the great leap forward was well know. After world war two, anyone who was even vaguely associated with fascism became persona non-grata in polite society, and rightly so. the same treatment should be meted out to those who spent the cold war apologizing for those tyrannies. If Carl Schmitt said that hitler didn’t implement real naziism, he’d be laughed out of the room, chomsky’s musings should be giving a similar level of respect.

@engels

india openly proclaimed itself a socialist state complete with 5 year plans during the period in question. to call it a capitalist experiment strains credulity. More generally, Sen’s comparison of india to china ignores the fact that china was engulfed in one the largest civil wars in history from 1920-49 and on top of that was invade the japanese. He essentially give Mao credit for lives saved by the end of a war for which he was a prime instigator. And despite that he still feels compelled to admit that communist famines were worse.

mcmanus 157
I do need to read more about India

Try Naipaul, An Area of Darkness and A Wounded Civilization; that should get your blood moving.

[Note to the humor-impaired: This is a j-o-k-e.]

Yechh rikaichan! I am always doing that.

Googling finds “cantofish” based on rikaichan.

google translations also romanizes Japanese. I guess automated translation from Mandarin is harder because the grammar rules are so simple and loose, and meaning so dependent on context.

@150 “I despise the Soviet system, and the Chinese system of the time in question through today.”

Out of curiosity: does this mean that you prefer liberal capitalism to authoritarian socialism (post-stalinist Soviet/Cuban kind)?

Ze Kraggish,

You’re kind of asking me if I prefer liver or sardines — allowing for the radical difference in importance, etc. etc.

I despise both capitalism and all other authoritarian systems, including the USSR and Chinese State Capitalism. They’re all anti-democratic.

But, given the choice between the USSR under Gorbachev, and the capitalist kleptocracy that followed, which entailed a murderous transition to that system which killed at least 15 million Russians and many more millions in the Soviet Bloc . . . . I’d take Gorbachev.

A lesser of two evils choice.

Cassander @159,

The period in question — the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries — was under British rule. India couldn’t have proclaimed itself anything. It was a conquered nation and a part of the British Empire. The famines happened while the capitalist British ruled the roost, after they had come in and destroyed the indigenous commons, privatizing these, selling off the land to capitalists.

And we can curse the Brits for being the primary launching pad for the horror that was and is capitalism in the first place. Read The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman for a play by play. It’s helpful to read books about American capitalism along with it, especially with regard to slavery.

THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is a good place to start.

J Thomas,

Anyway, all this history doesn’t tell us about Marx any more than the history of christianity tells us about Jesus.

That is very true.

Cassander, I missed it the first time. Sorry, but Chomsky never “defended the PRC” under Mao. You’re just making shht up.

Cassander,

It’s not quite a bit of a step down. We were just talking famines. And it’s not dramatically less. Famines under so-called “communist” countries doesn’t come close to that mythical 100 million.

The 1.6 billion figure includes many other sources of capitalist carnage. Not just famine. It includes genocide, slavery, yearly hunger stats, wars, coups, etc, etc. You keep shifting the goal posts within your own posts, and sometimes within your sentences.

@J Thomas

>But that first year was partly ours.

my understanding was that most of the deaths in cambodia took place a few years into the reign, not right away. And the cambodians were unique in that their ratio of executions to starvations was nearly 1:1. But if I’m wrong on that, please correct me.

>Anyway, all this history doesn’t tell us about Marx any more than the history of christianity tells us about Jesus

cambodia by itself tells us very little, cambodia in combination with all the other communist states tells us a lot. If every national single government established by christians rapidly turned into, by the standards of its day, an aggressively murderous, totalitarian state, I would definitely start to cast aspersions about jesus, or at least about his philosophy. Every government national established by communists has turned into such a state, so I cast aspersions about Marx.

I’ve got a Marx-Engels Reader that I hadn’t looked through very much, and I’ve found the suggestions that were made a while back helpful.

Plume, you cannot prove 15 million deaths from a statistical correlation between a privatization index of dubious utility and the short term death rate of men from 15-59, the most volatile segment of the population. you especially can’t do it when 15 million extra people haven’t actually died.

Marx never wrote anything regarding how to set up and structure a socialist society. He never put down any blueprint for it. The vast majority of his writings were nothing but analyses of capitalism. But when he did write about other matters, it was about maximizing human potential and social justice.

Pinning totalitarian systems on someone whose core philosophy was emancipatory in nature, and all about maximizing human potential . . . is a bit like blaming fire-fighters for the arson they battle.

>Given that the USSR and China had absolutely nothing to do with socialism, much less “communism” — which is the absence of the state after real socialism becomes so integrated and so naturalized, the state apparatus is no longer needed — it’s ridiculous to blame Marx for systems and results he would have opposed with every fiber of his being.

this claim is simply offensive. Every single communist regime had socialists and communists in the west proclaiming that they were true socialists and communists. few ever recanted these beliefs. When fellow socialists like Orwell pointed out monstrous crimes these regimes committed, they were shouted down and denounced as traitors to the cause by other socialists and communists. Those to Orwell’s right were, of course, labeled selfish reactionary running dogs for capitalism. It is not ridiculous to blame on marx what millions of marxists around the world spent decades calling marxism in action.

Plame, I want to ask you a personal favor. Would you please stop responding to Cassander for a couple of days on the topic of whether the “communist” authoritarians were even worse than the “capitalist” authoritarians?

I am not interested in this question. I suspect you are not really interested in debating this question with Cassander. I suspect nobody here but Cassander is interested, though I could be wrong about that and maybe somebody else will want to argue with him.

There have been some people saying interesting things, and maybe they’ve been driven out by the smell of this dead horse, and possibly if you stop beating it they might come back. Or maybe they were done.

I have participated in similar travesties, not like I have a right to ask you for that and expect you to go along. I’m just asking on the chance it might do some good.

cassander @182
It is not ridiculous to blame on marx what millions of marxists around the world spent decades calling marxism in action.

Of course it is ridiculous to blame on Marx what millions of (self-proclaimed) Marxists around the world spent decades calling Marxism in action — if there is evidence that Marx would have disapproved of a lot of what such people did, and there is such evidence, in Marx’s own writings. For heaven’s sake, just glance at the description of the “higher phase of communist society” in Critique of the Gotha Program. Glance at The German Ideology. Look at the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Have you ever read anything Marx actually wrote, or have you just gone on the interwebs and ripped a couple of things completely out of context, as you did earlier?

Sorry, messed up the close-italics tag.

@Plume

>But by no means were they the norm.

Yes, they were. Fucking pulitzer prizes were handed out for peddling stalin’s lies. Obituaries like this were written when he died. Praise of the USSR and company was ubiquitous until the end of the cold war.

>— in every case, they had revolutions against dictators or tyrants of one kind or another

and in every case they were worse than what they replaced.

>that it should be in mature capitalist economies only, and done in conjunction with dozens of other nations.

this argument would be more compelling if the world’s marxists did not drop it immediately in 1917, and proceed to cheer the USSR on for decades of tyranny.

>Best way to make a country far more autocratic is to endlessly threaten it with “regime change” in one form or another.

the communist regime in russia did not become autocratic, it was that way from the second lenin seized power.

>Marx can’t be judged in a vacuum

I agree. I think he should be judged on the basis of the results produced by people who claimed to be his followers. it is you who seeks to judge him in a vacuum, as if his theories had never had any real life implications. But I give up, you don’t just willfully ignore history, you willfully ignore math that contradicts your world view. What am I to do with some so utterly convinced of his own brilliant righteousness?

@lfc

> Have you ever read anything Marx actually wrote, or have you just gone on the interwebs and ripped a couple of things completely out of context, as you did earlier?

Yes, I have. And you can go on as much as you like about marx’s vision of a stateless society, that doesn’t change the fact that he said you needed revolutionary dictatorship and terror to get there. You guys like to leave that part out, but there is nothing in Lenin that Marx did not presage.

If I wanted to hear what they had to say, I could go to Politico or Fox News or Yahoo News. This is supposed to be a leftish academic blog and the comments don’t really reflect that anymore. It is a disrupting tactic that the moderators are letting this handful of posters get away with.

“there is nothing in Lenin that Marx did not presage”

this is, of course, not at all true, and would have been laughable if spoken to an assorted group of self-described Marxists in 1914. This notion that Leninism is a simple extension of Marx’s own writings is not an accurate characterization of the literature. this ready association between Marx and Lenin was only won through a combination of revolutionary violence, state repression, and historical circumstance. people who make this ready association are themselves – usually unknowingly/unwittingly – buying into Soviet propaganda of the highest order.

the historical fact that Lenin was the most successful interpreter of Marx from a political standpoint has little bearing on the hermeneutic point, unless you have an ideological axe to grind. which it is obvious you do.

Furthermore, the notion that any state could coherently embody an intellectual doctrine – as if the state form itself did not have its own proclivities as a sociological entity – is quite frankly absurd. this hearkens back to Cold War thinking: the idea that there were two states, embodying differing ideologies, competing on the world stage.

The fact that the observed behavior of these two states was in many ways highly similar was lost on the ideologues and Cold Warriors. Yet both of these superpowers were actively suppressing populations domestically, expanding state bureaucracies, concentrating power and wealth into the hands of a credentialed elite, fostering a military-industrial complex, subverting local rule around the world in service to their geopolitical objectives.

It is almost as if these are behaviors natural to states, and especially superpowers, regardless of the principles espoused by their romanticized mythic ‘founders’.

Would it make sense for me to impugn the notion that ‘all men (sic) are created equal’ with the fact that the US continues to have extreme racial disparities in wealth and in the justice system? Would you accept the argument: the idea that people are guaranteed the rights of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ is dangerous because the US was founded on those notions and the US has the largest prison population in the world?

Surely those are bad arguments against those political ideas. We should engage them on their own ground, or explore how the particular form of US society has fallen short of these founding ideals, rather than just write those notions off as dangerous.

Yet you make a similar argument against the political ideas of Marx using the USSR? Pray tell – how is this latter case so much different?

Very well said, Gianni,

All of it. But especially here:

The fact that the observed behavior of these two states was in many ways highly similar was lost on the ideologues and Cold Warriors. Yet both of these superpowers were actively suppressing populations domestically, expanding state bureaucracies, concentrating power and wealth into the hands of a credentialed elite, fostering a military-industrial complex, subverting local rule around the world in service to their geopolitical objectives.

This is also Chomsky’s point, when he notes, correctly, how both superpowers distorted and propagandized the word “socialism” for quite different reasons, obviously.

And on that note, I bid all a goodnight.

>The fact that the observed behavior of these two states was in many ways highly similar was lost on the ideologues and Cold Warriors.

Equally, one could say that the differences in observed behavior are lost by those like you. the US did not starve millions of its own citizens to death. this strikes me as an important difference.

>It is almost as if these are behaviors natural to states, and especially superpowers, regardless of the principles espoused by their romanticized mythic ‘founders’.

Again, whatever you think of the present United States, its crimes pale in comparison to those the communist states committed. the equivalency you create is false. I am happy to admit that the modern US is imperfect, that does not mean the USSR, and all other communist states, were much worse.

>Would it make sense for me to impugn the notion that ‘all men (sic) are created equal’ with the fact that the US continues to have extreme racial disparities in wealth and in the justice system?

If those disparities were deliberately created in service to the creed “all men (sic) are created equal” then yes, it would. Particularly if there were a couple dozen such countries founded on said creed and all of them deliberately set up similar disparities for the same reason.

@ plume

>Three billion humans live on less than $2.00 a day, and, as mentioned, just the richest 85 humans hold more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion.

I believe what you meant to say was the lowest share of the population in history is living on less than 2 dollars a day. But anyone who quotes klein has a very tenuous connection to reality.

#200 StevenJohnson

The political purposes in black propaganda about socialism is why the supposedly dead horse will continue to be beaten.

Yes, I see.

Plume, I was wrong that it was only a digression between you and Cassander. There are enough others to continue debating him that it clearly won’t do any good for you to quit. So do whatever you want, and I’ll just accept whatever happens.

Plume: “But, given the choice between the USSR under Gorbachev, and the capitalist kleptocracy that followed, which entailed a murderous transition to that system which killed at least 15 million Russians and many more millions in the Soviet Bloc . . . . I’d take Gorbachev. ”

You can’t take both the USSR and Gorby, because Gorby was the guy (as much as we can credit one person for this sort of thing) who destroyed the USSR (instead of reforming it). He destabilized it, and then gave it up, capitulated, pretty much unconditionally. What followed in the next decade (call it capitalist kleptocracy or simply looting by the conqueror) clearly demonstrated that the Cold War was a real war, a war for survival, at least on their part. Of course this is just one interpretation of the events, other interpretations exist, but since we all here are so concerned about the untimely deaths: I think I read somewhere a few days ago that this year is the first one since 1990 (or 91?) with a positive natural population growth in the russian federation.

For instance. If we’re honest with ourselves, and we really, really look at our history, and we don’t just dismiss things out of hand, and we don’t just view things from the POV of “middle class white guys,” it’s pretty much impossible to brag about our past, even in relation to the USSR.

We had 250 years of slavery (and then 100 more of Jim Crow), which goes hand and glove with capitalism. They’re actually THE perfect fit. Capitalism is the purchase of human labor (as a commodity) for the purpose of producing goods and services which result in surplus value, which is then appropriated (exploitation) by the capitalist for him- or her- self. Our current form also uses the model of unpaid labor, just like slavery. It pays for part of the work day, though, unlike chattel slavery. But that’s an innovation from the base of slavery, not some radical departure. And capitalism gets the “credit” for slavery on its watch, in its territory.

Okay. So, again, we had 250 years of slavery, with millions of deaths and untold oppression and horror due to that system. Then 100 years more of ugly, horrific treatment of the now supposedly “free” former slaves and their descendents. For sustained brutality, cruelty, racism, sadism, etc. etc. . . . the USSR can’t compete with that.

And then there’s our genocide of Native peoples, starting in the 1600s and going on for nearly three centuries. The death totals vary, depending upon the researchers, but it’s at least in the tens of millions, and all the colonial powers in Europe had their millions in genocides across the Americas, Africa, Australia and so on as well. Congo alone is more then 10 million. Chalk those up for Team Capitalism as well.

And we have the treatment of indigenous peoples who weren’t technically enslaved, and escaped genocide, but were treated sometimes worse than slaves, and sadistically as a matter of course. Death in life, basically. In the Americas, Africa and Asia. Team Capitalism gets the notch for that evil as well, and the US had its share of the exploitation and mass cruelty.

Wars, coups, “regime change,” following the orders of some corporation pissed off at X, Y or Z country for refusing admittance? America would send in the marines.

Shock doctrine, shock therapy, etc. etc. Millions dying in transitions to capitalism. And tens of millions more due to pollution created as a necessary byproduct of capitalism.

On balance, as horrible as the USSR was, we’re worse. Sorry if it hurts the feelings of the home teams cheerleaders, but we’re worse, and for far longer.

J Thomas,

That’s odd. I had a couple of my posts in mo d. But I think it’s because of too many links. Not sure. I don’t think there was anything offensive in them.

Anyway, your initial suggestion was fine. I, too, would rather hear from the folks (teachers, scholars, etc.) who have spent many years studying Marx, and want to explore his actual writing/thinking, etc. etc. . There is much for me to learn, and I appreciate the posts from people who have in depth knowledge of the subject. Their suggestions for further reading are most welcome.

No, it wasn’t the quote. I wanted to ask what happened there. What made Gorby surrender to the USA? Whatever it was, why did it stop working? How come the new guy is acting up now?

#212 Plume

Again, I think a 4 to 1 ratio is a very good balance between some hierarchy and pure egalitarian results. It allows for differences in experience, enhancement/advancement of skills, time on the job, educational pursuits, work complexity, etc.

I’m kind of sympathetic to that idea. I want to imagine how it could happen. Of course, nobody has an obligation to work out details of how it could happen ahead of time — people could and would use a lot of trial and error to find out just how to make it work, as they do with everything else. But….

Imagine that at some time in the future 99% of the people agree with you on the principles. Maybe 99.9%. There’s no question about fighting over it, the inevitable small minority of crackpots who disagree will not get in the way much. In practice people tend to try to impose new ideas when maybe a third agree and a third are apathetic, but let’s say that a pacifist egalitarian movement has held out and persuaded, and hardly anybody is trying to stop it.

What should they do to get it working?

And one quick alternative concept before I go:

We have a very strange system when it comes to taxes. Taxes really aren’t needed at all. There is really no reason why government should print money, sustain it, support it, make treaties concerning it, and then send it out to the private sector and wait for small portions of it to come back again.

An analogy: You want to build a house. You already have all the resources you need in hand. But, because of the system, you can’t build that house. You have to send your resources to central banks and other gateways, who distribute those resources elsewhere, and then, eventually, down the road, you get back a small portion of what you originally had in hand.

It makes far more sense to me to build that house up front. Build what you need to build up front. Waiting for months or years or decades for a return of the resources you had initially strikes me as absurd — even though it’s the norm and is the soup we swim in.

Anarcissie,

That’s true. Real socialism is just common sense and logic.

Capitalism relies on “collectivization” too. But it’s the most ridiculous and irrational kind. With capitalism, the collective works to make a few people rich. It works on behalf of others — for just a few others, not the collective itself.

Socialism just means the collective works on behalf of the collective, and what could be more logical?

Your point about apathy is important. Liberal capitalism gives just enough to just enough people so they believe they’re doing okay, and propaganda about all other alternatives makes them think they can’t do better under different systems. That’s kind of the capitalist dance. Paying just enough, creating conditions that are just enough to keep people from marching on the Bastille. Not more than that. Just enough to prevent actual revolution.

And, this scenario tells us that “human nature” isn’t all about greed and the desire to compete or conquer — as sociopaths and alphas would have us believe. If it were, we’d see far more revolutions, and far more frequent revolts. They would likely be endless. Human nature, really — to whatever degree that exists outside the nature/nurture dynamic — is far more likely to lead us toward peaceful coexistence, cooperation, etc. etc. It’s only a small portion of humanity that has the internal compulsion to lie, cheat and steal its way to hoarding wealth and power.

Most people really just want to live in peace, eat, rut, sleep and make merry. Most humans don’t ever want to be Alexanders, or Larry Ellisons.

Capitalism doesn’t fit “human nature” at all. Socialism does.

Bruce,

It won’t be me proposing to do anything with them. They will no longer have the means, the system, the tools or the power to do as they wish. For the first time in modern world history, the people won’t have to just accept being trounced by sociopaths and alphas. For the first time in modern world history, full democracy would empower everyone and the logic of superior numbers (plus democracy, plus cooperation) will overcome the irrationality of allowing the few to dominate, control and force the many to do their bidding.

In short, there won’t be any avenues open for sociopaths and alphas to achieve their desires, their lust for control and dominance. They won’t have any choice but to be one among many, with equal shares of resources, power, access, etc. etc. They won’t have (and won’t be able to get) insanely disproportionate amounts of the above. And they’ll have to live their lives without the ability to lord it over everyone else. They won’t be “boss” any more, in short.

The people will see to that. The new constitution will see to that. Real democracy, including the economy, will see to that.

#214 Plume

Starting with our current system offering more and more non-profit, all public, in-house-run goods and services. Give the people the choice. Actually offer real alternatives. And those alternatives would be based on a foundation of human rights, completely eco-friendly, fair trade, etc. etc. Workers in that part of the economy would be in that 4 to 1 ratio, which wouldn’t be that much different from current government ratios.

Again, I don’t think you have any responsibility to have everything worked out ahead of time. But if you had two different nonprofits, and both of them paid its members in a 4:1 ratio but one of them paid its members 10 times as much as the other, should somebody do something about that? Who should decide whether something needs to be done and what needs doing?

If one co-op provides a vital service that people have traditionally paid a lot for, while the other does something marginal that just doesn’t bring in much, how can we ensure that both co-ops pay the same? I can see paying a boss at one place 4 times as much as workers beginning their training, but how do we make sure that it’s across the board?

J Thomas,

Again, that would all be decided democratically. My own input would be that we should establish wage and prices and lock them down for a steady-state economy. I’d also break the link between sales and wages, completely, forever. No one would be paid based upon how much the co-op sold. It wouldn’t matter. Compensation would standardized, and in the form of points, distributed from a central pool, which we all owned. Compensation wouldn’t be derived from sales/prices. You wouldn’t have to sell X amount in order to meet payroll. The “money” would be distributed from the Commons, completely, utterly, absolutely divorced from sales. It would be a completely separate stream, from a totally separate pool — an infinite pool as well. Tracked, accounted for, audited, but never empty.

Debit cards. You’d fill up your card with points for hours worked. You’d use the debit card in the commonly held stores. Certain things would be literally free, without the need to use the debit card. Free education, healthcare, public transport and free housing. If someone wants to use their debit card for non-public housing, they could. There would be plenty of that as well.

No profits. No actual physical currency. Just debit exchanges for certain goods and services, plus free public options as stated above. And anything the community needed, it could petition for those infinite funds. No taxes. No debt. No reason not to build that house up front, as the earlier analogy showed.

“What made Gorby surrender to the USA?”

Well, duh: He reached the point where keeping the empire together would have required killing a lot of people, and lacked the stomach to do it. So he let it fall apart, instead. Putin has no trouble in that regard, so he’s trying to put the empire back together.

“It won’t be me proposing to do anything with them. They will no longer have the means, the system, the tools or the power to do as they wish.”

How exactly does that work? In your worker’s paradise, some people over there decide to contract with each other in a capitalist manner, and it magically just doesn’t happen, without any enforcement mechanism?

Tub,

This is true. Conservative cheerleaders for capitalism have this very bizarre belief that they can go about their business without the eternal protection and support of the State. They can’t. And they couldn’t start one single business, ever, without that state supplying all of the infrastructure, the treaties, the currency, the trade agreements, the court protections, patents, the police, the wars, the military to keep the shipping lanes open, the R and D, etc. etc.

And, once started, they could never sustain themselves without the endless taxpayer bailouts for capitalism — which total more than 100 just since 1970, to the tune of many, many trillions.

We the people would simply no longer provide capitalists with legal protections, infrastructure or any other form of externalization which enables them to start up and keep going.

There is no need to use “coercion” or any semblance of force. They just don’t exist, and can’t exist, as far as the legally constituted non-state state is concerned. We don’t recognize them. They’re not really there. We don’t help them get started. We don’t fund them or sustain them in any way, shape or form. And we don’t supply them any legal tender, etc.

Problem solved.

“Problem solved.”

Being an idiot is not virtue.

Bruce,

Bruce Wilder 12.20.14 at 9:27 pm

“Problem solved.”

Being an idiot is not virtue.

I quite agree. And you should seek help for that. Please. I’ll support your climb up and out of idiocy in any way I can. And I think you should also get some help for that bad little habit of yours. Attacking others personally without provocation.

J Thomas,

My input would be that these operations wouldn’t even start up unless the community wanted them. They would be based on need, use value, not exchange value. No profits. No need to produce things just to make someone rich. No need for endless marketing to try to get us to believe we want or need something. Communities would decide that upfront, in conjunction with other communities, regions, nationally.

And that would radically reduce wasteful competition. There wouldn’t be the cycles of “creative destruction” to go through, with competition heating up and ending up driving all too many operations out of business. The weaker, the smaller, the ones with less money to weather the downward pressure on prices, etc. We’d be cooperative, not competitive, and radically reduce waste.

As for encouragement: Four labor tiers. Working toward moving up from one to the next. Could be a system of “extra credit” involved as well. Lots of possibilities there for alternatives.

#234 Plume

And capitalists have never, ever gotten anywhere without immense state support.

Consider the various mafias. They have never had any official state support, but they have mostly survived. The Irish groups survived until they got respectable enough to stop doing crime. The Italian Mafia likewise, and they still have a few criminal edges. The chinese tongs. The korean gangpae. The vietnamese mafia whose name I don’t know how to spell or pronounce.

Are they capitalists? They do loansharking and sell drugs etc. They also do their own contract enforcement, enforce their own labor laws, collect their own taxes, etc. They have absorbed enough government functions to get by without official government support, although they get some unknown amount of unofficial support through bribery, blackmail, etc.

I expect they could survive in your system provided there are enough illegal jobs for them to do that people want done. Would there be illegal things that people wanted to do? That’s partly a social question. We might easily still make some things illegal that people want to do. And that’s an in for capitalist organized crime.

3236 Anarcissie

But the state and its class system don’t fall from Mars. They are replicated and sustained by the daily life of the people. It is easy to say they could do something different. It is much harder to get them to actually do anything substantially different.

That’s true, we’ve probably been doing it since neolithic times. A lot of momentum.

But if we get to the point where 99+% of the people want it different, they might be ready to actually make it different. I’m not ready to say it can’t happen.

We already have some other models. Industrial psychologists for many years have said that managers can get better work out of their employees cheaply by praising them for doing good, and giving them opportunities to be creative and get results. People often want praise more than they want more money. The results are often pretty good — there’s a lot of time visibly wasted but more work gets done — but it never lasts past the beginning of the next recession. Then it’s “Do your job and don’t let me see you goofing off. The only perq you get is this month’s paycheck”. I don’t know how well they’d do if the recession didn’t come. If people had a lot of freedom to choose their jobs, maybe some would want to be responsible, some would want a job where they could just follow orders and not have to think about it much, and possibly some would want to lift heavy loads while foremen encouraged them with whips. There are a lot of different people, and I can’t predict what they’d do if they got to choose.

Plume, your problem is that you can’t face the fact that the system you want can’t exist in practice without somebody threatening anybody who tries to act outside your system. In fact, you would have bosses, and enforcers, and all that. More of them, even.

You complain about concentrations of power, and propose instead a system that won’t exist without… concentrations of power. You complain about inequality, and propose instead a system notorious for producing… inequality. You want all the animals to be equal, and want people to just ignore that has always involved the pigs ending up more equal than the other animals.

The problem is that you’re proposing an alternative that’s been tried, and always turned out horrible. And so you’ve got to deny that it’s been tried. Because Marx never fails, I guess, the people just fail Marx.

I think the most cogent remark I’ve ever heard about Marxism was Wilson’s, “Wonderful theory, wrong species.” Humans are a hierarchical species, we will naturally form hierarchies. Try to impose their lack upon us, and you’ll need to create a hierarchy to do the imposing, and if will have to be a worse hierarchy, because it will be working against our nature, not with it.

I’m an engineer. We have to work with nature as it is, not design things for imaginary materials and physical laws. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” You don’t want to obey nature, you want to deny it, so it won’t be commanded by you. But your sort can harm a lot of people in the futile effort, anyway.

So, in the end, the piles of skulls did get discussed, anyway, they were too blatant to ignore. Let’s not stack up more of them.

Yes, Marx should be taught, as Lysenko should be taught, as every false and failed theory should be taught: As an object lesson in failure, as wrong.

Brett,

It wouldn’t need to threaten others. Not at all. Our current system can’t survive without a police state and government perpetually propping up and saving capitalism from itself. Our current system incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation, and requires endless wars to defend and expand its markets. You, of course, ignore all of that.

And I know this is useless, because you’ve already made up your mind to ignore all the facts. All of them. But the system I describe is clearly 100% opposed to the Soviet system. Marx’s own writings were opposed to any system resembling it, and have nothing in common with it. And my own ideas are an amalgam. They take a bit from Marx, a bit from William Morris, a bit from the Parecon movement, a bit from Chomsky, Mondragon, Wolff’s WSDEs, the Spanish anarchists before Franco finally crushed them, etc. etc. It’s an eclectic mix, with my own personal stamp on it.

But, since you’ve convinced yourself that all alternatives to capitalism must always be just the Soviet system repeated forever . . . . since you have such an incredibly narrow range of perspectives, and can only see black and white, nothing I can say will change your little mind.

As the young kids used to say, whatever.

Anarcissie @242,

Very true.

A few examples:

Marinaleda

WSDE

Gar Alperovitz

Mondragon

Anarcissie,

I have a reply echoing yours in mod. I probably put in too many links (four). They were to Mondragon, Gar Alperovitz, Wolff’s concept of WSDE, and the village of Marinaleda.

Brett,

No. The system I advocate for doesn’t force everyone to be a socialist anymore than our current system forces everyone to be a capitalist. The vast majority of people in capitalist societies aren’t capitalists. They don’t want to be or can’t be. Capitalists are tiny minorities in every capitalist nation, which is one of THE biggest reasons for its immorality and destructive nature.

Also, the idea of the small, family unit can logically be extended to the community, and from the community to the region, and from the region to the nation. There is no reason why we can’t live cooperatively, instead of competitively. Those small units would cooperate with each other, and the overall society would consist of those small cooperative groups, working together, instead of at cross-purposes.

The goal is the end of the class system, entirely. The end of concentrations of power. The dispersal of power into 315 million bodies, everyone with equal rights, equal shares of power and equal access to the fruits of society.

Oh, the horror!!

Arguments from ‘human nature’ require the arguer to have a complete, accurate description of human nature, something I have yet to see.

If one believes that hierarchy is necessary to human societies, one has at least two problems: one is that anthropology has discovered many viable non-hierarchical social orders; another is that the locally dominant social order, liberal capitalism, contains many non-hierarchical social processes and arrangements within its framework.

Anarcissie,

I think it’s helpful to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary hierarchies, while allowing that there is gray area between the two.

But a rule of thumb is the larger the group the more need for some forms of authority.

@241 ” Humans are a hierarchical species, we will naturally form hierarchies.” Except when they don’t. Falsifying anthropology and biology is good conservative thinking. Nonetheless imaginary facts only convince the faithful.

@251 “Humans lived communally for our first 250,000 years.” No matter what the evolutionary psychologists want to tell us, human nature is not a biological decree sanctified by millennia of evolution. The apparent non-existence of “hierarchy” before the material conditions of existence permitted its emergence tells us precisely nothing about what’s natural for humanity. Much as I prefer Plume’s attitudes, facts are not an act of will. Also, shocking as it may seem, the evidence can still be read as showing that we, modern humanity, only finally separately emerged as recently as 70 000 years ago.

Hi Plume,

Hope you are well also! Just a few thoughts-

Humans lived communally for our first 250,000 years.

How much do we really know about this? How much of history is knowable? Especially the deep past. For example, how commonplace was euthanasia in primitive cultures? It is rather easy to imagine that survival of the group may have sometimes necessitated such practice. How much do we know about cruelty in enforcement of social norms in primitive societies? To me it seems dubious to look at the deep past through ‘rose colored’ glasses.

And the other point I want to make is simply that hierarchies can be voluntary, they can be a source of efficiency and thus improvement in living standards for all.

What happens if the newest member of a jazz ensemble demands equal time for his/her ideas? Probably a quick exit from the group.

What happens if management of a business is rotated without regard for competence? Almost assuredly production will suffer, and probably morale too.

No one is preventing you from running a co-operative. Several large business in Britain are co-ops. Firstly their is the Co-op movement itself, there is also the John Lewis Partnership (a retailer) and the Nationwide building society (a mutual society owned by its members is one of Britain’s largest mortgage providers). There also a number of smaller building societies and some other mutuals within the financial sector. The financial sector also has a few major part nationalised players; RBS and Lloyds.

On the whole they are quite capable of existing and competing in the market. As an ownership structure it neither has a huge advantage or a huge disadvantage relative to more conventionally owned businesses.

Capitalist societies have no problem with having businesses organised on socialist lines and indeed in the financial service sector one of the major players is owned by its savers and borrowers.

You can start a co-op or some other form of voluntary socialist organisation if you want. Just don’t stop other people from organising themselves on a more commercial basis.

Brett,

Capitalism has resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths and the continued suffering of billions of human beings. Its internal structure and logic lead naturally to genocide, slavery, apartheid, massive inequality and our eventual demise as a species due to endless consumption, waste and pollution.

It’s not a matter of me wanting to have my own little co-op. It’s a matter of me and millions of others recognizing the immorality and evilness of the capitalist system, and wanting its end. I know that I’ll be dead and gone before we finally end that evil. So it’s not about me. It’s not about my personal desires for my own life. It’s about the recognition of the suffering of others, and how to radically reduce that, if not end it entirely.

“You can start your own co-op” is a copout. It solves nothing.

I think moving that parenthesized bit made that one sentence harder to read. I think I’ll put it back like it was…

“And it seems to me that part of the reason that cold-war-era “communist” countries were more-or-less brutal dictatorships (aside from the direct influence of Stalinists, miscellaneous causes specific to each country, and yeah, probably some of Marx’s ideas that seem unwise in retrospect) is that the most brutal dictators were the most effective at surviving the coups, assassinations and wars our side tended to support. So we were good at toppling the nicer ones, and those who survived got meaner.”

Neoclassical economics hides from economic hierarchy, public or private. They are as determined as Plume to ignore this most salient feature of the modern world. Even if they are not nearly as gleeful as Plume in triumphantly proclaiming their wilful ignorance, wilful ignorance is at the core of their reasoning.

Marx, to his credit as a genius, didn’t ignore this most salient fact of the capitalist industrial revolution: the building of functional hierarchies, planning and coordinating at unprecedented scale. He died in 1883, in the midst of the decade, when the assembly of bureaucracies for multinational industrial corporations was, from our perspective in the great arc of history, just getting started. John D. Rockefeller had destroyed his competition in the oil business in Ohio ten years earlier, in a momentous couple of months in 1872, but the great Trust that combined disparate interests into the ancestor of Exxon-Mobil and several other U.S. oil companies was only a year old. “Scientific Management. Andrew Carnegie had already had a career as a Superintendent of the Military Railroads in the American Civil War, become a millionaire in the oil business, and invested extensively in steel production, but he was five years from buying the Homestead Works and the great Homestead Strike, marking the re-organization of large-scale factory work on bureaucratic lines was almost a decade away. Edison’s first electric utility company was a year old. Henry Ford, 20 years old, was tinkering with the Westinghouse portable steam engine on the family farm. Keynes and Schumpeter were born the year Marx died.

For the economists, these developments were buried in the accumulation of capital. The neoclassical economists insisted on capital as a synthetic factor of production, metered at the margin into output, kept it buried. Marx, though, recognized the essence of Capital to be power rooted in the appropriation of the means of production. His use of a dialectical method made it natural for Marx to identify the paradoxes inherent in the developments of the industrial revolution as antagonisms and contradictions. One thing Marx understood, if only dimly at times, is that the functional core of hierarchy used in (re-)organizing production along capitalist lines, which was happening under the accumulation of capital, was, by its nature both dynamic and transitory. The “accumulation of capital” was this re-organizing by hierarchical power. The functional core of capital was the power and (I would say) control systems necessary for creating a new system, but once that system was created and running, the need for resources in the hierarchy — in the control systems — would diminish radically. In a static end-state, the system could continue to operate and reproduce itself without so much in the way of a centralizing hierarchy concentrating power and resources, and the capitalist system would be ripe for the proletarian revolution, in which the then vestigial claims of the bourgeois class could be swept away as the vestigial claims of the feudal aristocrats had been finally swept away in the French Revolution.

For the neoclassical economists — creators and heirs of the marginal revolution that was still underway at the time Marx, a classical economist, died — the market economy was stabilized by the homeostasis of market processes, even if technological progress was constantly de-stabilizing things with entrepreneurial innovation. Capital was things — capital equipment, for example, or knowledge — that accumulated, subject to diminishing returns. Keynes clung to this vision of accumulation subject to diminishing returns, positing a marginal efficiency of capital as a controlling condition or limit in his system, and Solow’s growth model imagines an accumulating capital. It is a systematic error of understanding, to hide the creation and elaboration of hierarchical systems of control under the blanket of an accumulating capital.

For the marginalist conception to work, hierarchical control of production systems would have to be a quantity that could be substituted: more control versus less control, arriving at an optimal level of control given the costs of control. It doesn’t really work that way. And, for the Marxist conception to work, erecting systems of control would have to be work that could be finished, the instability introduced by the dynamics of innovation finally resolved into a steady state organized by some new principles appropriate to a different and subsequent age, when the abundance created by the system of production birthed and reared by a dynamic capitalism might be shared out.

Plume,

All I can say is: You BETTER be a Packers fan!!

Also, well said @ 263.

[but a key problem with a lot of modern businesses isn’t that they’re run for the profit of their shareholders, it’s that they’re run for the profit of their senior management. Shifting to coops won’t help here, and shifting to state ownership won’t help here. Coops do avoid the problems of the shareholders getting permanent income streams from a once-off sacrifice… but given the rates at which US companies pay dividends, that’s a pretty marginal problem currently. If there’s no single problem, there’s no single “best solution”, is there.]

Brett @264,

It however has created wealth on a scale unequalled by any other society.

For whom? Certainly not for the vast majority. And that’s the problem. I’ve already cited the stats. I can do it again. Just 85 human beings hold more wealth than the bottom 3.5 BILLION human beings. In America, just 400 people hold as much as the bottom 60% of the country (well over 150 million). The Walton family alone — just eight heirs to that fortune — hold more wealth than the bottom 40% of the country combined. And the richest 20% worldwide consume 85% of our resources.

The only way a person can legitimately call capitalism “successful” is by ignoring its entire history of slavery, genocide, apartheid, famine, oppression, exploitation and the complete inability to allocate resources for anyone but the richest 20%. The only way to be triumphalist about this system is to completely ignore what it does to the planet and its inhabitants.

And, by the way, it doesn’t “create wealth.” Capitalists extract wealth from workers, consumers and the planet. That old saw is absurd and requires the belief in at least two major fallacies: That something is magically “created” out of nothing, and that capitalism itself, and not the workforce or public institutions, “creates wealth.” There is nothing capitalism has ever done that couldn’t be produced by an alternative. Nothing. And Green alternatives would have the massive advantage of sustainable production, which capitalism will never achieve.

It’s strange that critiques of capitalism trigger, if not hatred, then serious levels of anger and hysteria.

Why? Why should it be off limits? Why should it be revered and held sacred?

Capitalism is immoral for a host of reasons, but for these especially. First, it is a system dependent upon economic apartheid and massive imbalances in compensation. In order to make a profit, the capitalist must sell a product for more than it costs them to make. And in order to make their own fortune, they must keep the majority of the surplus value generated by their workforce. As in, they pay themselves for the work others do for them. They don’t pay themselves for their own production alone. And they already value their own production above anyone else’s to begin with — which is illogical and irrational. They would never think of paying even one employee equal to their own production, even though they might be far more productive. And their share of that production diminishes as their workforce increases, but they pay themselves even more when it does increase. The bigger the business, the more the CEO tends to take as their personal cut, even though their own working input is less and less.

Capitalism also incentivizes the production of junk. Anything to make a buck. And we throw most of that away. We throw half of our food away, while millions of humans literally starve to death each year, and at least a billion are hungry. Walk through any Target or Walmart and ask yourself how much duplication exists on the shelves, and how much production is actually worthwhile. In the capitalist system, because the entire purpose of going into business is to make money for oneself, it doesn’t matter what crap is made. If a capitalist could sell shit on a stick, they would. We know they would. That’s the history.

So, ye champions of capitalism, I challenge you all. Look deeply at the history of primitive accumulation, of colonial empires, of slavery, genocide and the rape of natural resources all to make a few people rich. Look at capitalism’s Grow or Die imperative. Think deeply about the inequality created by a system that concentrates so much wealth and power at the top, and exploits the shit out of workers, consumers and the earth. Consider 100% of the human population — not just the richest 20% — and the loss of 50% of our wildlife just since 1970. Consider that capitalism has been bailed out more than 100 times just since that same year.

Do you still think it’s the best system for this planet? Do you still think we can’t do better?

Collin Street @271,

Businesses being run for profit is an essential problem. Take profit away and you instantly get closer to “fair.” It’s not the only necessary step. But it’s a big one. The need to make a profit means that an extra amount of money must be baked into the price and taken out of the worker’s pocket, and that money means consumers pay more than the good or service cost to make. There is zero value added for the consumer in the deal — or the workers. Obviously. They actually lose value and compensation. This occurs with obscenely high executive compensation, too, or money spent on shareholder dividends, marketing, unsold merchandise, tax avoidance lawyers, etc. etc. Consumers and and workers lose the more money kept by the business owner, or dispersed to shareholders, etc. And the higher the margin, the more padding in the price and loss for workers. Add to that an unlimited rein as far as the ratio of executive pay to rank and file and you get a double whammy for workers.

Even if there is no repeal and replacement of capitalism — which I think is absolutely necessary, or we won’t survive as a species — we should at least set a cap on that ratio. Orwell thought 10 to 1 good. I prefer 4 to 1. The public sector is typically in the 5-1 range, so perhaps something in between. But that ratio of ownership/executive pay to rank and file is where the vast majority of income inequality begins. Much of it can be solved with a cap. Inequality of wealth, access, education, health care, etc. etc. — those are still other, separate issues.

But what Plume is saying shouldn’t be controversial – the question, literally, is not whether we should continue with capitalism, but what will replace it. Capitalism cannot continue to accumulate productive forces much longer. The resources of the Earth will not support it.

I would think a doomer like Bruce Wilder could understand that without trotting out asinine capitalism apologia because he hates ”utopian” schemes.

#275 Plume

Don’t be like the NFL referee who sees the second punch, but not the first.

Sorry, I’m not a referee but just another commenter. Do whatever you want, I just wanted to say that Bruce Wilder has written some good stuff.

#278 David

I would think a doomer like Bruce Wilder could understand that without trotting out asinine capitalism apologia because he hates ”utopian” schemes.

I haven’t seen him do that in this thread. Which of his comments do you think do that?

He tends to criticise people who could be interpreted as saying “All we need to do is X and then everything will be fine” just like he criticises people who say “The system we have now is running fine and if you aren’t successful in it you should just work harder”. I haven’t noticed him defend capitalism so much as attack people who think they have simplistic solutions.

#279 Brett Dunbar

In a placebo controlled blinded experiment carried out by the Accenture management consultancy in India for the world bank managed to get a 17% increase in efficiency in one year by adopting what are standard practice in more competitive market economies

That sounds interesting. Could you provide a link?

@279
and – in rich countries as well as in poorer countries, obesity is largely a problem of capitalism – selling junk food, cars and passive entertainment – for profit.

The fast food industry does a terrific job of profiting out of making people fat. Just cos they’re good at it, doesn’t mean its a good thing to do.

Brett @279,

No, I didn’t lie. I told the truth. And that makes you and blind cheerleaders like you angry.

I keep giving you facts and figures and you keep ignoring them, because the truth is a major inconvenience to you. How did capitalists become rich? By stealing from their workers and treating them like shit. How did nations become capitalist? By stealing land from the masses and killing their ability to self-provide. Through force and coercion, so they had no choice but to go into the new factories and work like dogs. And how did capitalist nations become rich? By stealing natural resources and labor from non-capitalist countries, forcing their people into slavery and other horrors. Through imperialism, genocide, slavery and theft.

So you brag about capitalist nations being richer than the nations they crushed, exploited and stole from. You brag about capitalist nations being richer than non-capitalist nations after they’ve had popular revolutions to fight off tyrants we backed. You brag about capitalist nations being richer than non-capitalist nations, even though those capitalist nations had a century or more head start. As if they started the race at the same time. As if those capitalists nations didn’t do everything in their power to crush the non-capitalist upstarts after their revolutions.

And that wealth? Within those rich capitalist nations the wealth is and was always concentrated at the top. There is nothing to brag about when the few rule the many and the few are rich at the expense of the many. That’s not an indication of the success of a particular economic system. That’s an indication of its abject failure.

And, Val and others have mentioned, “wealth” does not equal health, happiness or quality of life. Poorer nations can and do have much better health and happiness metrics than we do.

Brett,

And your last assertion about trade? Not all trade is capitalist, obviously. It was something quite different from that for thousands of years. Capitalism is a recent phenomenon, which didn’t become widespread even in its first home (England) until the 18th century, and didn’t dominate the world until the 20th. And, no, trade doesn’t necessarily leave both parties better off, and conservatives tend not to even see beyond their narrow idea of “both parties.” In our highly integrated system, capitalist “trades” have repercussions far beyond the initial transactions, including the impact on the environment, natural resources, workers and consumers in general, etc.

I’m an anti-capitalist, not anti-trade or anti-commerce. And I’m a “Green” anti-capitalist, specifically. So while I’m 100% against all capitalist modes of production, I’m not in favor of just any old alternative. It should be egalitarian, democratic and sustainable. It should be “Green.”

Mattksi,

But Marx didn’t suggest that we do away with markets, nor have I. We need to do away with capitalist markets (and modes of production), yes. But not markets, generally.

And, Mattski, Brett does appear to be basing his entire idea of capitalism’s superiority on its ability to “create wealth.” And that it can do this better than non-capitalist nations, apparently. Though, again, he seems oblivious to other factors, like head starts, coups and embargoes and such. Why make that point if it’s not an attempt to say how important “wealth creation” is?

And he just presents too many howlers, and I’ve yet to see him supply any data or links to support his claims. Like this one:

A lot of states don’t have effective competitive markets; they tend to have much higher levels of waste.

There is no evidence that the lack of “competitive markets” leads to higher levels of waste, and we do know that America itself is the most wasteful nation on earth. We contribute nearly 33% of the total for the entire earth, and we currently throw away roughly half of our food*. And “competitive markets” are extremely wasteful. They duplicate goods and services and then try to compete, usually on price, drive each other out of business (creative destruction) over time, which leaves husks of buildings which once had tenants, unusable equipment, wasted office supplies, etc. etc. Not to mention the human disruptions.

Capitalism is set up to create massive waste, if for no other reason than it doesn’t produce to order or for need, and it wants consumers to keep buying new things (not repair the old). It produces with the hope of future sales, and its hope is tied to the effectiveness of its marketing in creating “want”. The failure rate for new businesses in America is very high, as a result. “Competition” and the absence of producing for need and to order are huge reasons for that.

*Close to $165 billion annually in food waste alone.

If it is true, as Marx says in the Manifesto, in praising the revolutionary nature of capitalism, that ‘the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society,’ — as seems to have been the case then, as now — then we can we not count on liberalism-capitalism, being a continuously dynamic system, to eventually enter a state in which it finally disposes of itself? The question, it seems to me, is not whether but when.

Of course there are many routes leading away from the present moment, and some are happier than others.

#289 Mattski

I read BD as making a narrower argument about the production of wealth

He could easily be wrong.

In recent centuries and particularly in recent decades, we’ve produced a lot of wealth. Lots of people want to take credit for that. Some people want to attribute it to capitalism, but the invention of capitalism may have been more a response to the wealth than its cause.

Some people want to say it’s militarism that’s produced the wealth. People build stuff for the military and then they figure out civilian uses. They put a lot of people to work and then those people can afford to buy stuff. It was WWII that got us out of the Depression, and it’s all the wars since that have kept the economy going. Maybe.

Scientists want to think it’s science that did it. We came up with lots of new ways to do things that were more productive, using science. Of course people invented stuff before science, using trial and error, but maybe that was slower.

A lot of it could be fossil fuels. There was a time when most of the power we had available was human muscle power. Then we got oxen etc. Fairly suddenly people were building long trenches and ramparts and putting roofs on trilithons. Because they could. Fossil fuels are gigantic wealth. With horses it can take a day to travel to the county seat and back, and when you get home you have to care for your horses. It’s tremendous freedom to go wherever you want at 50 mph. Fossil fuels give us unlimited energy until they run out.

Lots of people want to take credit for the wealth. It was probably a bunch of things that all had to work together, and when any one of them stops then it’s over.

I have heard it said that money does correlate with happiness up to income levels of 60K/yr. And that sounds eminently plausible to me.

You need enough money so you don’t have to worry about money all the time. Worrying about money all the time will take a lot of the enjoyment out of life.

BD, istm, is making the valid point that markets are the best way to generate wealth.

Do you think so? So, you make something to sell at the market and you don’t know how many will sell. People go to market hoping they’ll find what they need but they don’t know ahead of time what they can buy. Doesn’t that sound tremendously wasteful?

I expect that a whole lot of the economy has depended on long-term contracts. Both sides can sleep easy knowing their bread and butter is taken care of. Then they play the market game with their surplus, to make up for their planning failures. Of course there’s a push to get people to give up their long-term contracts and just depend on the futures markets….

Those citing the Okishio theorem need to be very careful.

If wages are fixed then any increased productivity can only go to capitalists who will move capital to equalise profits.

It is a truism to note that when wages go down in value (ie share of GNP) profits go up.

Okishio’s theorem validates Marx’s analysis for those who have an understanding of countervailing tendencies.

Okishio’s assumption was the introduction of a countervailing tendency – falling share of GNP flowing to actual producers.

Val #296,

I’m harsh only when someone strikes first.

And the thing I’ve noticed about Bruce, when he’s not too busy hurling unprovoked insults my way, is that he makes most of the same arguments about capitalism I do. He just can’t stand the idea of proposals for alternative systems. Which I find really bizarre. It’s like someone spending years and years, breaking down all of the problems with a particular car, but does nothing to replace it. He or she seemingly would rather hold onto that car so they can display their critical knowledge on that subject. They don’t actually want to get a better car. That would ruin everything!!

And on the subject of so-called “utopian projects.” My proposals aren’t utopian at all. They’re common sense, logical, rational alternatives. And they’re bottom up. According to Marx (and others), who railed against utopians, those would be top down. Hal Draper writes about that here.

> I’m harsh only when someone strikes first.

To be blunt, this is a damned fool position. It’s based on knowing that you didn’t do something to cause a response, that you didn’t unbeknownst to yourself “start” things, and you simply do not — cannot reliably — have this knowledge.

[I’m sure you think you’re justified. Everyone thinks they’re justified, that’s why they do what they do. And yet people still do wrong things: the only possible explanation is that people do wrong things thinking, mistakenly, that they’re in the right. And you’re not special here, and this is something you’re not immune to: you need to doubt your self-righteousness more.]

To be clearer on the differences between capitalist and non-capitalist markets, updated:

Capitalism is M-C-M. Money buying labor (as a commodity), to make commodities for sale, in exchange for more money. Exchange value being paramount.

We’d have to dump that and go with something like C-M-C. Produce commodities for money (or some alternative) to buy other commodities. Use value being paramount. And the production would be worker-controlled, publicly owned, not privately held. All citizens would be equal owners of the means of production overall.

Mattski @300,

I know. But I picked my sports franchises at a very young age, long before I became a leftist, and I remain loyal to them. It’s one of the few places in my life, in fact, where subsequent knowledge hasn’t forced serious reevaluation of values, etc. etc.

:>)

#302 Mattski

“He could easily be wrong.”

If you spent more time paying attention to the real world and less time paying attention to your imagination… your comments would be A LOT more interesting.

Tell me what I missed in the real world.

The real world has created a lot of wealth recently. A lot of different people want to take credit for that, among them capitalism-apologizers.

What method should you use if you want to decide which of them are right? Should you just believe the capitalism-apologizers instead of any of the others, for some reason or another? What would that reason be?

#301 Collin Street

I’m sure you think you’re justified. Everyone thinks they’re justified, that’s why they do what they do. And yet people still do wrong things: the only possible explanation is that people do wrong things thinking, mistakenly, that they’re in the right. And you’re not special here, and this is something you’re not immune to: you need to doubt your self-righteousness more.

Don’t we all!

People particularly tend to lose their doubt when they find other people who agree with them. That makes them a community enforcing community norms.

Mattski @306,

Agreed. Well said.

And further down. Which Giants team? I’m an SF Giants fan from waaay back.

Plume, if it was San Francisco it wouldn’t be hypocritical!

This David Harvey lecture is quite instructive, pardon the pun. It’s set to animation from RSA to make it “fun” in a sense. But he says, in a very short period of time, what I’ve been trying to say in far too many words, regarding capitalism’s crisis mode.

Well worth a look, if you haven’t already seen it.

The Crisis of Capitalism

#312 mattski

“What method should you use if you want to decide which of them are right? Should you just believe the capitalism-apologizers instead of any of the others, for some reason or another? What would that reason be?”

Use your judgement. Look at the facts, try to come up with a working hypothesis. You can always revise your hypothesis as new information comes in. This is the scientific method, and it’s not a bad idea.

Well see, there’s a whole lot of propaganda and not much data. If you look at nations, there aren’t all that many nations and you need a measure to decide how capitalistic they are and how successful they are. Lots and lots of confounding variables, notably that nations which get into wars against stronger nations tend to get their economies hurt, and nations which are less “capitalistic” tend to get beat up on by the USA. On the highest level we have a capitalistic world market and nations which do not fit into that tend to suffer for not fitting into it.

But we can look at specific cases. Haiti has mostly-unregulated capitalism. Their government is basicly too incompetent to interfere much. They are one of the poorest nations in the world.

Consider another example, Mali. Capitalism is very strong there. Half their people are extremely poor. 80% of them farm, largely growing cotton for export. When cotton prices are low they suffer. They also export a lot of gold. It used to be, their government thought that the gold should be mined by Mali citizens who might then spend most of the money in Mali. But then they became more capitalistic and invited foreign investors in. The foreigners use foreign machines and engineers to mine the gold very quickly. They export the gold, and then they export most of the money. They give some of it to the Mali government for the right to take the gold from Mali.

There are a whole lot of nations that haven’t done all that well under capitalism. We can argue that they wouldn’t have done any better any other way. But that’s using our ideology in place of facts.

There just is not much solid data. My own candidates for the source of our vast wealth are science plus fossil fuels. Without the science we’re mostly poor. Traditionally steel was central for industrialism, and if you look at the places that had iron and coal then WWI makes more sense. England. France’s ores clustered around Lorraine, Germany had good ore in the Ruhr and more in what’s now Poland. The USA had plenty. Sweden had some. It was hard to be a big military power then unless you had your own ore. and warships needed coal wherever they went, and you couldn’t send your warships to places you couldn’t refuel them. Important nations needed colonies to provide coaling stations.

Was capitalism the big thing that made nations successful back then? No, it was resources. You could have as much capitalism as you wanted, but if you didn’t have the resources then other nations would walk over you.

So anyway, you can use “scientific method” to decide that capitalism is the big difference that resulted in Britain and then the USA dominating the planet instead of Germany. But try to notice that to do that you’re using a lot of imagination and there isn’t much solid data.

To me, capitalism is merely the freedom to trade.

Oh! In that case I agree. People do a lot better when they can cooperate instead of having to do everything alone. Trade is a big part of cooperation. If that’s all capitalism means to you, then I’m sure you’re right.

And in that case you have no particular fondness for limited liability corporations and banks etc, right? We can get rid of all that stuff and keep the freedom to trade, and we’ll do fine.

The legend of the free labour market

I view myself as a supporter of capitalism, and wouldn’t much miss limited liablity corporations. Banks, on the other hand, do provide some useful services, if they don’t get too big. But credit unions provide them just as well.

A lot of nations haven’t done really well under capitalism, that is certainly true. The thing is, you don’t need much of an explanation for things going badly. Going badly is kind of the natural state of things, there are a virtual infinity of ways things can go badly, relatively few ways they can go well. (Which is another way of stating the laws of thermodynamics, not at all incidentally.) It’s things going well that requires explaining. Not things going badly, for which there are an embarassing excess of adequate explanations.

Banks, on the other hand, do provide some useful services, if they don’t get too big.

I think a lot of our problems would be very different if we could establish the tradition that when a corporation doubles in size it should split into two competing corporations. Like bacteria.

It’s things going well that requires explaining.

Yes, exactly! We know that capitalism is not enough of an explanation because the large majority of capitalist nations are doing poorly. The winners then must be doing something *else* right.

If someone makes their own chairs, for instance, with their own hands, with their own sweat, and they haul those chairs over to their customers (or let their customers come to them), receive payment for their efforts in their own two hands, they aren’t “capitalists.” But if they hire workers to build their chairs, and they appropriate the surplus value generated by those workers for themselves, they are.

I figure that can get blurry pretty easy. If a lot of people want your chairs and can’t get them, and you hire somebody to help you make them, that isn’t necessarily bad. If they use your tools while you show them how to do the work, why shouldn’t you get part of the money? If both agree, they could pay you to teach them and pay for the use of the tools etc, and then sell their own chairs, is that so different? And then when they can do it, they take their savings and buy their own tools and set up their own shop and you aren’t exploiting them at all.

How about if instead of teaching them to do the work, you teach them one single job and you pay them to do that. They don’t ever have a chance to be independent. There’s no good way to estimate what their work is worth. Say if it didn’t get done then no chairs would be completed, that says it’s essential like most of the other jobs. But what’s it worth?

There are various things that we like, that are easiest done by big teams of specialists. I’m not sure there’s any good way to decide how much to compensate them all. If we can find ways that people agree to, so it gets done, then good. Otherwise we have to do without.

So, who got poorer when we moved from hunter-gatherer

Anyone who works more than 2 hours 9 minutes per day

Ah, yes, one of Marx’s greater idiocies, the labor theory of value.

Actually one of Adam Smith’s ‘greater idiocies’ but don’t let that stop you spewing your know-nothing propaganda over the thread.

JT,

Just responding to last part of your 317 for now:

Basically yes, I agree that the laws governing commerce should be subject to democratic oversight. But as I have argued in the past, this is a problem of democracy and legislation rather than a problem of ‘systems’.

Boiled down:

Which would likely be more effective?

1. Democratic oversight of an anti-democratic system
2. Democratic oversight of a democratic system.

Which makes more sense as a foundation?

1. An anti-democratic economic system, which requires democratic oversight and myriad laws to ensure even a modicum of human, civil, workers’ rights (etc), along with much needed mitigation of its upward redistribution of wealth, power, access, etc. etc.
2. An egalitarian, democratized system, with social justice baked right in, which needs no countervailing, external force to mitigate for upward redistribution. It doesn’t do that, from the get go.

. . . .

As in, why choose oil and water, when you can have water and more water?

Bob @336,

Not familiar with the first two in your diagram. Or Bakardjieva. But have read the others. What would you suggest for the last on your list?

Your comment makes me think of Harold Bloom, his Anxiety of Influence and the idea of intellectual/artistic precursors.

This review sums it up well, to begin things off:

By JOHN HOLLANDER
THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE
A Theory of Poetry.
By Harold Bloom.

Poets and prophets, like magicians, learn their craft from predecessors. And just as magicians will invoke the real or supposed source of an illusion as part of the patter, or distraction from what his hands are doing, the most ambitious poets also take some stance about sources in the past, perhaps for an analogous purpose.

Bruce Wilder @ 265, 266

There are two difficulties, as I see it, with a historical extrapolation implying the evolution of human societies toward more complex forms of political and economic organization. First, there are the millions of people miserable while they lived and dead before their time who were left in the wake of this evolution. Had the process been more rational — more Marxian, if you will — perhaps these millions needn’t have been sacrificed, and we could have avoided the passed-down historical resentments which have been putting sand in the gears ever since. The second, and perhaps more imposing difficulty, is whether or not there are limits to this complexity, and if so, what those limits imply.

You speak of cycles in our institutions — growth, maturity and collapse — which I suppose can be visualized as a sort of sine wave imposed on the overall trend of increasing complexity. This seems a reasonable description, but the question I’d ask is whether these cycles aren’t in fact increasing in both amplitude and frequency. If so, might the Great Depression and Great Wars of the Twentieth Century not turn out to be a sort of dress rehearsal for something far nastier and far more comprehensive? The lens of a single lifetime is a poor instrument for gathering persuasive evidence one way or the other, and history, even very carefully studied, doesn’t offer as much additional insight as it might.

In following your comments here for some time, though, I get the impression that you’re of two minds yourself about how all this is going to turn out. Maybe it’s a matter of rational uncertainty, or one of mood, but in any event, it’s one case where I find uncertainty more persuasive than the usual assurances from the Chamber of Commerce (inclusive of, but not limited to, Krugman and DeLong.)

This has nothing to do with teaching Marx in introductory courses, I admit, or whether or not socialism will take away Brett Bellmore’s punchbowl and leave him in rags, but the successful artist — in this case, the OP — is always at least partially responsible for the value-added contributions of his audience, no?

I attempted to put in a link to a pdf of the paper, it doesn’t seem to have worked.

Anyway the final published version is at:

http://www.stanford.edu/~nbloom/DMM.pdf

Mattksi,

Briefly, before I head out . . .

The reason it’s not here already? Because the folks with all the power don’t want it to be here. Obviously. An egalitarian system would end their power and their privileges. They have very large police forces and militaries to ensure they keep those in place. To me, this is no mystery at all.

It’s not here because the ruling class is very well organized, very strong, very well funded, has control of the vast majority of the wealth and resources in the world . . . as already noted . . . and, to top it off, has spent centuries (if not thousands of years) brainwashing the masses regarding their “proper place” in life. And, as Jay Gould once said, they can hire half the working class to kill the other half.

Egalitarians, in short, lack the power and resources to get our message across, and “the people” are generally too tired from working their butts off, and too worried about losing the little they do have, to want to risk the change. Unfortunately, until enough people with the means and the media decide that alternatives are necessary, this is going to be one, very long journey toward actual social justice for everyone.

The other possibility is that the current, unsustainable system collapses again, government bails it out as usual and has to tighten the screws just a bit too hard . . . and then, finally, people said enough is enough.

Enjoy your evening.

Plume is a fanatic. Which is why he lies. And why I have no interest in debating with him.

Economics is not a zero sum game.

Capitalism is generally democratic. Political democracy and capitalism evolved along side each other. Markets are essentially anarchic and function best with an impartial legal system with low levels of corruption and civil order. Dictators often favour their cronies and engage in other activities that distort markets such as widespread corruption and favouring politically well connected groups and industries, and political disputes in dictatorships are often violent.

There are rather a lot of capitalist democracies while it is pretty hard to find examples of non-capitalist democracies.

Capitalists played a leading role in the destruction of slavery, some of the fundamental ethical assumptions of classical economics are hostile to slavery. The UK declared slavery unlawful in England and Wales in 1774, abolished it in Scotland in 1776 banned the slave trade in 1807 and phased out slavery in most of the empire between 1831 and 1838. And then bullied much of the rest of the world into doing the same.

Democracy developed as the middle classes became wealthier was able to incorporate the working class by progressively widening the franchise.

One of the functions of the limited liability listed company is that it spreads the ownership of businesses widely, which is why it has spread so much since being developed in the UK in the 1860s. While you may not own shares directly you very likely do so as part of an institutional investor such as a pension fund.

Saying that 40% of the world population own no net assets is true but very misleading. It includes the 20% of the world population who are dependent children and who tend not to own anything. A sizeable fraction of the rest are young adults who may rent or have bought a house and have a mortgage and some other debts so their total liabilities may exceed their total assets.

Walmart and other supermarkets make large absolute profits due to being very large they don’t have large profit margins. 2% or so is typical.

I’m not sure that really helps, well meaning fanatics have produced really big piles of skulls.

He could also consider what Oliver Cromwell wrote to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

I really have to start saying, “in the bowels of Christ” more often.

Anyway, I for one am not particularly worried about anything Plume says or does leading to a pile of skulls.

352

Actually, where I live small business, local organic agriculture, cottage industry of various sorts is alive and well.

We don’t need Marx to assess the perils to democracy which led to the phrase, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

Thanks, J.

Niche not-for-profits enterprises catering to different relatively small market segments can survive in the shadows of capitalism. Some will fail for a mixture of reasons.

Food coops and farmers/rural coops and credit unions are sprinkled everywhere throughout capitalism.

They did not cause the global financial crisis of capitalism.

358: The “putting-out” system and female household servants were both very important to Marx’s economics. I can’t point to the passages in Marx, but will recommend David Harvey’s brilliant book on 2nd Empire Paris which covers both well.

Niche not-for-profits enterprises catering to different relatively small market segments can survive in the shadows of capitalism. Some will fail for a mixture of reasons.

“Not-for-profits”? What are you talking about? There is PLENTY of for-profit small business in the US.

The financial crisis–glad you mentioned it–could have been avoided through legislation and regulation within the confines of “capitalism.” I suppose if you’re a hard-core ideologue this is a controversial statement…

“I worked with a food co-op for some years. Here’s what happened.”

I’ve worked for a number of co-ops too. Based on my experience, there are two general rules: #1, unless there are fairly serious controls on the money, someone will steal the money; #2, if meetings aren’t mostly about operational details, internal politics will destroy the organization. I generally think that the main advantage that ordinary businesses have is that they have a fairly toxic hierarchy built in: internal politics doesn’t get out of control, and the theft of resources can be done by people at the top who have some motivation to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs. It’s possible to have long-lasting co-ops that don’t fall because of either of these two problems and also don’t have the hierarchy, but it takes luck or serious design effort that ordinary businesses don’t confront.

LFC 12.23.14 at 2:54 am

You have to separate sociological aspects from political economic aspects when looking at some parts of Marx’s analysis.

There is a cause and effect dynamic between the mode of production and subjective consciousness, ideology, and sociology. Alienation (and crises) tempers or exaggerates the interaction(s).

This is not an area “newbie’s” would normally examine.

#363 Rich Puchalsky

I’ve worked for a number of co-ops too. Based on my experience, there are two general rules: #1, unless there are fairly serious controls on the money, someone will steal the money; #2, if meetings aren’t mostly about operational details, internal politics will destroy the organization.

I only had a lot of experience with that one. Mostly nobody stole the money, unless the GM who did the ordering arranged kickbacks with the suppliers. They sent us printed price lists but maybe they sent us the price lists they sent to businesses that arranged kickbacks. One time a 16-year-old became a manager. He was real enthusiastic. His parents were divorced and he had bounced back and forth between them, whenever he couldn’t get along well enough with one of them then he’d switch. He finally ran away from home entirely, stealing one day’s co-op income to finance the move. It was around $400. I had some further contact with him since I knew his mother. He had gotten a job at a restaurant while he was at home, and they gradually gave him more responsibility like they were training him for the profession. He went to a new city and got a restaurant job, he made friends with a chef and got a kitchen job, he worked under a variety of chefs and eventually became a sous chef and then the main chef for a fancy restaurant. When he left town with the money, people agreed that he should not have been given so much responsibility.

Mostly the money wasn’t stolen. But a certain amount of food probably disappeared. We were just starting to set up an inventory system when it collapsed.

It’s possible to have long-lasting co-ops that don’t fall because of either of these two problems and also don’t have the hierarchy, but it takes luck or serious design effort that ordinary businesses don’t confront.

It was hard for us to change procedures because a lot of people already knew how to do things and they taught new people. Nowadays you could maybe describe procedures on a wiki or something, and the problem would only be that people who already knew how wouldn’t read the wiki. When we changed things, first we got a sort of consensus that something needed to be done, and then we got eager volunteers to do it, and then we had a party. It worked within some limitations. When people were ready to do things, they did them eagerly. When they wanted to have ID cards they had the cards ready and mailed in a week after they got permission, and had the system to check IDs and make sure that people worked within another week. When they didn’t much want to do something it mostly never got done.

Once there was a problem with rats. The rats particularly liked cashews and could easily damage 20 $5 bags of them in a night. A lot of members did not want poisons to kill the rats partly because they objected to poison in general and partly because the rats deserved to live. Perhaps we could have ultrasonic devices that would drive the rats away? We looked at ways to seal up all the food at night so the rats couldn’t get it. We borrowed a humane trap that would catch rats live. Of course the second rat would learn not to go in it, rats are smart. But the first rat to get trapped gnawed his way out through the metal hardware cloth. One of the most prestigious members put out humane sticky traps that would catch rats but not kill them. After he had humanely caught some, he had no way to release the rats, and no good place to release them to. So he put the traps upside down on the parking lot and ran over them with a car. He got a whole lot of criticism for that. Finally the landlord quietly got the rats exterminated without announcing it to be criticized for.

I think a lot of my co-op’s problems came because the members tended to have very strong opinions about the right way to do things.Some of them were vegetarians, some PETA, some middle-aged hippies, etc. A lot of them were involved with a co-op in the first place because of their politics. If co-ops were more mainstream, those problems might be much less. But there could be a lot more apathy too. And more theft.

Chris Warren,

Thanks for your contributions. I tried to make the same points regarding how capitalism is fundamentally different from previous forms of commerce, trade and production modes.

Again, I think one of the main reasons people get so irrationally upset when capitalism itself is criticized — as opposed to liberals dancing around the 800 pound gorilla in the room — is that they don’t know that. They don’t understand how unique it is, or what it actually entails. So they think a serious critique of capitalism is a shot at commerce and trade itself — or, if they’re diehard cheerleaders, Mom and Apple Pie.

The American ruling class did an amazingly effective job with more than a century of increasingly sophisticated propaganda, promoting the idea that capitalism itself is synonymous (and virtually interchangeable) with America and democracy. This, even though it’s the antithesis of democracy, and it’s only ever benefited a tiny portion of the American people.

This is nothing less than a tragedy.

Engels @370,

Very true. The environment is not a healthy one for them. They are at major disadvantage in the capitalist system. So is any business which conducts fair trade, pays fair wages, or seeks to make high quality products, via serious artisanship and craft, etc. etc.

Capitalism produces mass-produced crap, with very cheap labor, so it can keep prices down. It has to keep prices down because so many people are in the “cheap labor” category, and can’t afford decent things. The so-called “democratization of consumption” is a mirage. Rich people get to buy high quality, well-crafted, durable items. The rest of us have to settle for mass-produced garbage, which we must replace over and over and over again — which is the entire point. Our landfills become mountains as a result. Our seas are filled with trillions of pieces of (observable) plastic waste.

Marxian critiques are needed now more than ever before. Green Left critiques even more so.

b. mcmanus 359:
The “putting-out” system and female household servants were both very important to Marx’s economics. I can’t point to the passages in Marx, but will recommend David Harvey’s brilliant book on 2nd Empire Paris which covers both well.

Thank you for the Harvey recommendation.

364

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
Someday our ocean
Will find its shore.

Harold,

Have you heard of the Marcora Law?

Richard D. Wolff describes it here, and I wish we had it in America:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/13/a-qa-with-richard-wolff/

Here is a specific example of a policy. In 1985, the Italian parliament passed the Marcora Law. Still on Italy’s lawbooks today, this law provides unemployed Italians with an alternative to receiving the weekly dole much like their US counterparts. That alternative is to obtain a lump sum of all their weekly unemployment payments if (a) a minimum number of other unemployed join them in making the same request, and (b) all their lump sums are pooled to serve as start-up capital for a cooperative business in which they all participate as equals. This creative approach to unemployment is part of the reason why cooperative enterprises are so much more a part of Italy’s economy than that of the US. Capitalist business groups in Italy have tried but so far failed to repeal the Marcora Law.

“The inference isn’t that co-ops collapse, it is that co-ops in capitalist societies collapse.”

If you’re a Marxist, then I guess that’s the pre-ordained conclusion, yes. As in Plume’s #371, I can refer to organizational problems and this will be heard as “They are at a major disadvantage in the capitalist system. So is any business which conducts fair trade, pays fair wages, or seeks to make high quality products, via serious artisanship and craft, etc. etc.” in other words what I write won’t actually be heard at all except insofar as it fits your predetermined belief system.

What I observe is different. I see that some capitalist countries have cultures that let co-ops succeed more of the time: for instance, the Mondragon federation of worker co-ops is the tenth largest corporation in Spain by some measures. I don’t see any particular success with the United Steel Workers attempt to bring the Mondragon model to the U.S. I don’t think that this is a matter of capitalism per se: Spanish workers have cultural resources for co-op formation that American workers don’t, and the reasons for this are much more about the historical differences between the two countries than because of capitalist propaganda itself.

If you want to talk about the problems of co-ops within global capitalism, you’re probably better off talking about not co-op formation and dissolution but about what happens to the very largest scale ones, such as with the Fagor bankruptcy.

Rich @379,

“The inference isn’t that co-ops collapse, it is that co-ops in capitalist societies collapse.”

If you’re a Marxist, then I guess that’s the pre-ordained conclusion, yes. As in Plume’s #371, I can refer to organizational problems and this will be heard as “They are at a major disadvantage in the capitalist system. So is any business which conducts fair trade, pays fair wages, or seeks to make high quality products, via serious artisanship and craft, etc. etc.” in other words what I write won’t actually be heard at all except insofar as it fits your predetermined belief system.

Actually, it’s your “pre-ordained view” that capitalism doesn’t have that impact. You observe things from a far more narrow POV than I do. I grew up in the sea of capitalism, heard all the rah rah propaganda, read the liberal and conservative cheerleading for capitalism, imbibed its media . . . . and then broke free from from it.

I still know those views as well, but I’ve added other perspectives. I’ve added leftist, critical viewpoints. I’ve broadened my perspective.

If anyone has a “pre-ordained” viewpoint, it’s the people who never included perspectives critical of the capitalist system. Not those of us who know the pro-capitalist and the anti-capitalist viewpoints.

Plume: “I still know those views as well, but I’ve added other perspectives. I’ve added leftist, critical viewpoints. I’ve broadened my perspective.”

Yes, this is familiar Marxism too. Only Marxist viewpoints are “leftist, critical viewpoints.” Your perspective is so broad that you think that of course anyone who “includes perspectives critical of the capitalist system” must necessarily come to the same conclusions as you do.

I’m an anarchist, and I don’t see anything worthwhile in your 19th century holy text or in the blinkered certainty of its devotees.

Mattski @380,

I’m saying, and I’ve said it many times before, there isn’t anything immoral about people being free to conduct trade. On the contrary, it would be immoral and ridiculous for the community to tell an individual that he/she is NOT free to engage in commerce.

Not sure why you’re still not getting this. Capitalism is unique. It has a unique structure and logic all its own. It is unlike any other previous economic system — as Chris Warren also showed. Being an anticapitalist doesn’t mean one is against commerce or trade. It means they are against capitalist commerce and trade. And I’ve explained the immorality several times, and provided all kinds of links to back that up. Others have as well.

As for the community saying you can’t do X, Y and Z. It does that now, under our liberal, democratic system. People can’t enslave their fellow humans anymore. We all recognize this is “immoral” at the very least. The community tells individuals right now that they can’t conduct “commerce” of that nature. Individual business owners can’t hire kids, or force 80 hour weeks, or discriminate on the basis of race, gender, age, etc. They must pay a certain minimum wage. They must adhere to OSHA regulations, and EPA regulations, and overtime regulations, etc. etc.

Those came about in reaction to capitalism’s naturally occurring exploitation of workers. Those came about through centuries of activism and protest. They all mean “the community is telling individual business owners what they can and can not do.”

Leftist proposals go further. They attack the root causes of exploitation. They attack economic apartheid. They seek an end to the conditions that require liberal democracies to regulate and mitigate for capitalism’s destructive effects in the first place.

The thing that really separates us is this: Leftists realize that keeping a system in place that requires so many checks and balances is beyond foolish. We realize that it’s far more logical, rational and humane to start with a system that doesn’t require all of those checks and balances and mitigation to begin with.

Rich @383,

Yes, this is familiar Marxism too. Only Marxist viewpoints are “leftist, critical viewpoints.” Your perspective is so broad that you think that of course anyone who “includes perspectives critical of the capitalist system” must necessarily come to the same conclusions as you do.

I have never said the above. Nor have I even remotely hinted the above. You’re projecting, big time.

My own leftism is quite eclectic, as mentioned several times, and includes perspectives that are harshly critical of Marx. They include libertarian socialists, for example, and the examples of anarchist Spain, along with diverse perspectives on the Marx/Proudhon battles. I have left-anarchist leanings as well, as should be apparent from the links I’ve provided and the proposals I’ve made. You’re assuming far too much after hearing “Marxist” mentioned.

Mattski @388,

Good article. And it argues against everything that the two Bretts have tried to peddle here. It also supports leftist critiques already made. Polyani was himself a leftist.

Mattski,

If you reread 264, 280, 345, 347, I think you might change your mind. Both Bretts talk as if capitalism is completely innocent, awesomely virtuous, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound while it saves the earth, ends slavery, makes all humans equal, etc. etc. And they both brought up that nonsense of “a pile of skulls.” That should be a big old “red flag.”

As for your quote. I’d like to read his response. Given his pretty obvious “market fundamentalist” approach, I would bet he’d bash the article and pretty much all of Polyani’s writings.

But I’ll happily admit I’m wrong if he doesn’t.

Rich @392,

What is your case against mine, other than sheer projection? If you’re a left-anarchist, we share many things in common. And I’ve often stated that I hold no text, of any kind, anywhere, sacred, and my own views are very eclectic and include critical stances on Marx.

What, exactly, specifically, is your beef?

Anyway, it doesn’t mean there’s no clear meaning to the term ‘capitalism’, or ‘socialism’, or that the two are not opposed, anymore than the existence of zebras means there’s no clear meaning to the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’.

I guess that’s a matter of opinion. Given that the gist of Henry’s interview on Polanyi is that neither pure capitalism nor pure socialism has ever been found or is likely to be found.

To me, “there isn’t any such thing as a free market” means capitalism and socialism are perfectly compatible, indeed, necessary aspects of functioning economy.

advocates of “socialism” will [not] even admit that a real or true socialist state has ever existed, for fear that their precious will be tagged with some crime

Oh gosh it’s the ‘if I believe that X can come about in the future but has never existed up till now, then I must be a crazy person’. Great argument, especially when combined with armchair psychoanalysis ‘ for fear that…’ Keep ’em coming.

To me, “there isn’t any such thing as a free market” means capitalism and socialism are perfectly compatible

No, it means that real existing capitalism bears little resemblance to the fantasies promulgated by some of its ideological defenders.

“What, exactly, specifically, is your beef?”

There’s a very significant disjunction between what you say you believe and how you actually write. As with #381, you’ll start saying that people you disagree with have a narrow perspective and boasting about your own broader perspective without troubling yourself to figure out what the person you disagree with is actually saying. Or you’ll “agree” but only so that you can supply a simplistic, dumbed-down and ideologic version of what someone wrote. These aren’t your personal faults: in my observation they are typical faults of people who call themselves Marxists (yes, #notallmarxists). The kind of arrogance in engels’ #386 is just another example. Imagine if I said that you weren’t a serious Marxist because you didn’t value thew writings of my favorite guru.

I think that Marxism has been a destructive influence on the left, and has led directly to the weakened state that the left is in. Marxists had control of a sizable part of the world population for many decades and succeeded only in providing horrible examples and failures that they never want to own up to, including the direct destruction of other leftist strands. I don’t think that anyone on the left should continue to treat Marxists as if they have some special knowledge or some special kind of analysis that is always useful although it always fails.

Does anyone teach Marx’s doctrine of alienation as a core aspect of his theory?

At least in my experience in philosophy departments, “Alienated Labor” (or “Estranged Labor”) is the most commonly taught Marx text in intro-ish courses. On the other hand, I think the fashion is to focus more on Grundrisse/Capital Vol. 1 at more advanced levels. Tho at least if you ask me, there’s plenty about alienation in Grundrisse.

engels 399

No, it means that real existing capitalism bears little resemblance to the fantasies promulgated by some of its ideological defenders.

What about the fantasies of socialisms believers? Let’s see your critique of that.

Do you allow that modern capitalist nations often have socialized health care? Ye gads, how did that happen?!

Mattski, please see my previous replies to you for answers to both your questions: ‘nationalised industries ≠ socialism’.

:^)

Plume, at 400+ comments I think this thread is about whatever we want it to be about. But, as I’ve said previously, I don’t consider myself a defender of ‘capitalism.’

There is plenty to criticize about the state of the world in our day and age. I’m trying to say that arguing over these idealized abstractions is futile in direct proportion to how seriously the ideas are embraced.

One last comment, Plume. Your inability to grant any beneficial effects from capitalism is a tell.

Most people would allow that, at the very least, capitalism is pretty good at producing material wealth. My links at 380 & 382 suggest there can be other, more wholesome benefits as well.

#395 Mattski

To me, “there isn’t any such thing as a free market” means capitalism and socialism are perfectly compatible, indeed, necessary aspects of functioning economy.

I really don’t see that.

If we say that “capitalism” as described in theory has hardly anything to do with any real existing economies, and that “socialism” as described in theory also has hardly anything to do with any real existing economies, I guess that means that they’re compatible in the way that the Buddhist concept of hell and the Taoist concept of hell are compatible — I don’t know anybody who’s been to either place or who can reliably vouch that either place exists, so they must get along with each other.

But since neither set of theories describe reality, whyever would either of them be necessary to a functioning economy?

“This particular thread is about teaching Marxism. It’s not about instantly trying to deflect Marx’s critique of capitalism into a critique of socialism(s). ”

We teach Darwin. We teach Lysenko. We teach them differently, because one is a mistake, while the other is merely incomplete. You can’t discuss how to teach Marx apart from whether Marx was *wrong*.

Genuine question Brett, what do you get out of repeating your negative opinion of Marx, over and over again, without giving any reasons, on a thread from which you’ve already been banned?

engels: “Just of interest, who is your favourite guru for understanding dynamics of capitalism from a radical left perspective, who is entirely unburdened with influences or intellectual debts to Marx or the Marxist tradition?”

I don’t have a guru (which is not the same thing as saying I don’t value theory). I would worry more about not having some single person who could help me understand the dynamics of capitalism if I saw any evidence that Marxists actually understood the dynamics of capitalism in any useful way.

What I see, instead, is useless Marxism — there hasn’t been an effort to do or understand anything on the left in my lifetime that Marxists haven’t tried to simplify and squeeze into their framework. Like your “Trillions of Plastic Pieces” link: there’s a lot of science that goes into finding out about that, and then environmental activism to actually change the situation, and at every stage there’s some Marxist who’s willing to tell people that it’s all about capitalism in a knee-jerk, uninformed way and try to co-opt the people actually working on the issue. Just as with famine and the unwillingness to admit that mass deaths from famine could happen in both capitalist and communist regimes that had certain characteristics, you’re not adding to knowledge, you’re decreasing it.

As for “entirely unburdened with influences or intellectual debts”, we can’t turn back history. The most intelligent thing about this in this thread was said by bob mcmanus up in #41/42. “[… ] what he got right is now taken for granted and invisible […]” No one on the left can now say “Oh, I have no influences from Marx” any more than anyone growing up in America can say “I have no influences from Christianity.” But the people who choose to call themselves Christians have to own up to e.g. Christian homophobia.

my argument is that I’m not going to argue with a solipsism, called “socialism”

Where ‘solipsism’ = denial that ‘socialism’ was realised in the Warsaw pact states? Anyone who thinks that is not worth arguing with?

“my friend Herb is an enterprising capitalist. You really should check out his burgeoning marijuana business. He’s making money hand over fist!”

Herb rents his storefront. He owns a cash register, a scale, a box of baggies, and a car with a trunk where he carries a lot of marijuana. He has a sign on the window that reads “no hash is left in this building overnight” because he doesn’t trust the store’s security. When his trunk approaches empty he buys another half-bale.

What does this have to do with ownership of the means of production?

Well, but maybe it isn’t about definitions or theory. Capitalists are just people who trade. If you’re a hermit and you make everything for yourself, then you’re not a capitalist. Since hardly any of us are hermits who never trade, we’re all capitalists and capitalism is essential to our existence. There.

Also, since almost all of us occasionally do something nice for someone besides ourselves, that means we’re all socialists too.

@Plume — Kunkel link noted, thanks

@B Wilder — re “quasi-rent”: an internet friend of mine published an article last year w/ “quasi-rents” in the title, though I’m not sure whether you’ll agree w/ how he uses the term. Link to abstract:
http://mil.sagepub.com/content/41/3/491.abstract

Rich,

at every stage there’s some Marxist who’s willing to tell people that it’s all about capitalism in a knee-jerk, uninformed way

I’ve lost track of how many times you’ve said something indistinguishable from “it’s all about capitalism,” and sidetracked discussion “in a knee-jerk way.” So how much effort do you expect me to put into reading stuff like:

No one on the left can now say “Oh, I have no influences from Marx” any more than anyone growing up in America can say “I have no influences from Christianity.” But the people who choose to call themselves Christians have to own up to e.g. Christian homophobia.

I think that Marxism has been a destructive influence on the left, and has led directly to the weakened state that the left is in.

I’m put in mind of esperanto, which by becoming the standard auxillary language entirely destroyed any hope of auxilliary languages actually coming into play.

[esperanto has numerous well-documented problems that make it entirely unfit for use for its intended purpose in the modern world. Particularly the way it handles gender, but there are other pretty significant problems. Esperanto will not — will never — succeed, but because esperanto is so close to synonymous with auxlangs auxlangs won’t succeed either. For reasons that have nothing to do with the idea of auxlangs, but are purely contingent issues coming from the decision to adopt as their standard what is by any measure a terribly-designed language.]

Non-profit organisations don’t just play a marginal role in capitalist economies.

Nationwide building society has total assets of around £193.3 billion (somewhat more than the other 44 building societies combined) and is one of the major players in the UKs financial services sector.

Furniture giant IKEA with assets of about €41.979 billion is owned by the Stichting INGKA Foundation the world’s largest non-profit.

Retail group John Lewis Partnership (which is owned by its 91,000 employees and distributes profits to them as an annual bonus, usually a significant addition to the regular salary). had a turnover in financial year 2013-14 of £10.2 billion (the UK financial year runs from 6 April). John Lewis owns for example Waitrose.

The claim that capitalism provides material wealth is a misdirection.

Slavery and feudalism provided great material wealth.

Economic growth using science and technology provides material and non-material wealth. Capitalism is the only form of economic production that exploits normal growth by introducing the accumulation of private capital which then leads to worsening macroeconomic instability and declining rates of wages and profits when countervailing tendencies are exhausted.

Trying to promote capitalism based on the wealth of the West which was extracted from everywhere else, is naive.

Trying to promote capitalism based on the problems of Cold War deformed socialism is also naive, and does not protect our present societies from economic and ecological apocalypse with over 25% unemployment, dispossession of workers, CO2 blanketed atmosphere and collapsing banks.

Those trying to defend capitalism do not even understand what it is they are seeking to defend.

I’m using capitalism to mean the mostly unregulated free market economic system that developed in Britain from the 1780s. Influenced by Adam Smith, Pitt the Younger began an extensive programme of de-regulation and moving over to free trade. This entailed abolition of the monopolies, regulations subsidies and tariffs favouring diverse special interests that characterised mercantilism.
Marx had interesting things to say about economic history as he could work from actually existing institutions and historical data. How we got here and where are we are questions he could provide useful hypotheses on. Whether he was right or wrong in specific argument he makes some useful suggestions.

The bit that isn’t especially useful is when he started speculating about where are we going. As an economic historian he could predict where more backwards societies were going as that was simply following the more advanced societies, possibly taking the odd short cut.

However his speculation about where advanced societies would go next was largely worthless utopianism motivated by a dislike of the more unpleasant aspects of primitive capitalism. Attempts, very determined attempts, were made to implement that utopia. You can tell how determined by the size of the piles of skulls.

He tried to predict what might replace capitalism. So far nothing has. The combination of liberal democratic politics and a capitalist economic system has proved extremly robust and adaptable. The political system has tended to bring more and more group into the system until the franchise includes essentially the entire adult population. While economic problems have been dealt with by various taxation and spending programmes. Basically the more serious shortcomings can be dealt with directly without altering the fundamental system.

Marx expected the industrial manufacturing sector to come to dominate society with most of the population employed there, it didn’t. So his speculations assumed an economic structure that never developed as he expect the continuation of some trends that had pretty much reached their peak. In a handful of countries, notably the UK, manufacturing briefly succeeded agriculture as the largest single sector, although still employing a minority of the workforce, until replaced by the service sector which now employ the vast majority of the workforce. In most countries either agriculture still remains the largest sector (the poor countries) or it remained the largest sector until directly replaced by services which come to overwhelmingly dominate employment (middle income and rich countries).

Capitalism, democracy and human rights are fairly strongly correlated. Capitalism needs rule of law an impartial legal system and a neutral bureaucracy to function effectively. Democracy is better at delivering this. China is currently trying to implement rule of law and an impartial legal system while remaining a dictatorship I don’t think this is going to be sustainable in the long run, China might see a revolution like the Indonesian revolution of 1998 the dictatorship stops delivering economic growth and discovered that the populace actually didn’t like the dictatorship very much. Rich capitalist states give their people regular opportunities to choose to try something else while Marxist run states don’t.

Plume,

I’m a market fundamentalist?? I thought I was saying that capitalism and socialism are both compatible and complimentary…

Is it fair to say that capitalism is behind rising living standards in China?

#433 Chris Warren

Those trying to defend capitalism do not even understand what it is they are seeking to defend.

Yes, and those trying to attack it probably don’t understand it all that well either.

To really understand it, you need more than a bunch of stories that kind of make sense. You need to actually look at things and observe how they work.

But mostly you can’t do that. Go to a local branch of a big corporation, and tell the manager you want to study his company so please will he let you follow his employees around and look at his books. Do you think he will give you permission? He would likely think you want to do industrial espionage, but you’re extremely naive and incompetent at it. You have no right to find out how businesses actually work.

The information you would really need to find out how the economy really works, is not available. It might be possible to get sample bits of it. Get something like half of all the anthropology departments to send their students out to get jobs, and observe whatever they can observe. Some of them would get promotions that would let them observe different things. By collating lots of reports you might learn a lot. But in the short run, the data is missing.

Why do so many people believe they know what’s going on? It’s basicly a sort of religion. It’s like religious faith. Marxists tend to believe in Marx. Capitalism-worshippers believe in other dead economists. Of course they can’t persuade each other, any more than Christians persuade Muslims or vice versa.

So I think if you want to get results, they need to be results that are kind of irrelevant to either side. If your ideas look leftist then the Right will try to stop you. If they look rightist then the center will try to stop you. They need to not fit either side.

And the beyond goes beyond just those limits. It’s extracted from workers and the their expense in the first place. Material wealth for some means poverty for many others. And because capitalism is a zero sum game, many someones pay the prices for that, all down the line . . . from the concentration of capital through primitive accumulation in 18th century Britain, on through the continued use of that method, especially in colonies. The rich capitalist countries became richer by stealing resources from poor non-capitalist countries, and enslaved colonial populations after stealing their resources. Once slavery was finally ended, they enslaved them in a different manner, through obscenely low wages and obscenely harsh working conditions.

This is still going on two centuries later.

It’s all too easy for middle class Americans to completely forget the cost of our relative material wealth, where it comes from, who pays for it in sweat and blood, its effects on the environment . . . and even more so for rich Americans, etc.

Marxism isn’t the only perspective that sees this. But it is generally the the least compromised.

Brett Dunbar 12.24.14 at 12:36 am

I’m using capitalism to mean the mostly unregulated

free market economic system that developed in Britain from the

1780s.

This capitalism was based on massive dispossession and

exploitation of Irish, Scottish, and English civilians through

clearences and enclosures and famines.

It was also based on massive international slavery and the

extermination of natives tribes.

This was all heavily regulated by a corrupted British legal

system, a corrupted parliamentary system, and brutal tactics by the East India Company and Generals such as Clive, Gage and Amherst.

Your comment that:

Capitalism, democracy and human rights are fairly strongly correlated.

is denied by all history and reality.

Capitalism only exhibits respect for democracy and human rights either after a lot of blood has been shed, or there has been a potent trade union tradition when gains were squeezed out.

Brett Dunbar @ 435

One of the central problems with re-ifying capitalism as a definite thing, that we could overthrow or exchange for some other “system” is that the industrial revolution has been such a dynamic and complex political evolution. “Capitalism” has not remained what it was in 1776 or what it was in 1826 or 1896 or 1936 or 1966.

I do not like identifying “capitalism” with trade. The most problematic aspects are not about trade, but about domination and hierarchy. This is true for 21st Century capitalism, equipped with the technologies of computing and communication revolutionizing everything, and it was true of the 20th C “socialism” that was so enamoured with planning.

J Thomas @ 437?

Your little story of the co-op had more and better economics than the whole rest of the thread. There has actually been a lot of observational of one kind or another done by sociologists and historians. It is not as if there is no data. We all live in the economy.

The problem is that theoretical and ideological dogmas filter so much out and distort the rest. Common sense is not enough, either, as people have limited perspectives without better education. Raising consciousness!

Bruce @444,

The problem is that theoretical and ideological dogmas filter so much out and distort the rest. Common sense is not enough, either, as people have limited perspectives without better education. Raising consciousness!

The problem is that you, and all too many “liberals” in general, believe you don’t have theoretical and ideological dogmas/blinders of your own to contend with, and that you’re above them. They’re only for those other people. You have them, too, Bruce. Obviously. You’re every bit as stuck in ideology as anyone else, even if you think you’re in some no-spot of common sense, pragmatics and practicality, between extremes.

It’s a bit like all too many white people in their conception of the effects of race. They honestly believe they’re “neutral” on that issue, transcend it, that they and don’t see race or see things through a racial prism. They grow up in that bubble, wondering why others can’t transcend it all like they do. It’s actually an incredibly arrogant way to see things, and its sense of certainty is unearned. As is the smugness that often accompanies it.

You’re in that bubble, Bruce. Break free!

Bruce,

The most problematic aspects [of capitalism] are not about trade, but about domination and hierarchy.

Why start with an assumption that domination and hierarchy are the children of capitalism?

Mattski @448,

Am interested in Bruce’s response on that one, too. I agree with him. But I don’t think he would frame it as “children” of capitalism, but as intrinsic to it.

Domination and hierarchy. Both are natural to capitalism. Domination was how it rose and how it spread. Domination is how it remains. And hierarchy is obvious. How is a business structured? A corporation? The pecking order among businesses and corporations? Top down. And capitalism, unlike all previous economic systems, provokes further and further divisions of labor. Adam Smith talked about that early on with his example of a pin factory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process

Adam Smith in his famous (1776) example of a pin factory. Inspired by an article in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Smith described the production of a pin in the following way:

”One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations: to put it on is a particular business, to whiten the pins is another … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which in some manufactories are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometime perform two or three of them.”

Smith also first recognized how the output could be increased through the use of labor division. Previously, in a society where production was dominated by handcrafted goods, one man would perform all the activities required during the production process, while Smith described how the work was divided into a set of simple tasks, which would be performed by specialized workers. The result of labor division in Smith’s example resulted in productivity increasing by 24,000 percent (sic), i.e. that the same number of workers made 240 times as many pins as they had been producing before the introduction of labor division.

The division of labor expands hierarchies. No previous economic system provoked as much.

#443 Chris Warren

There is a difference between religion and science.

When Marx saw the poverty of the British working class – he was not looking a a religious figment.

Sure. Nobody could deny the poverty of the British working class. It was apparent to everybody. What it *meant* though, was not so obvious. That’s something that people had to read in.

When Marx entered the British Museum and took his seat in the library he was engaged in science – not religion.

It was the 19th century version of Big Data. But what good was it, really? It’s easy to mythologize that experience, but if you had access to the same data what could you do with it?

The way I have been trained to look at it, economies are giant feedback systems. Here’s a simplified version of the problem you get looking at them. Let’s start out assuming that all the economic relationships are linear. That simplifies the math a lot. So we have 10 variables and we set up a markov chain, we look at the linear ways those 10 variables influence each other. And right away, we need to estimate 100 parameters. We can pay attention to a few big ones we think we know about, and hope all the others are small enough they don’t matter. So we try to estimate equilibrium states from real data, and we get a pretty good estimate for the most important variable, and it’s fuzzier for the next most important, and the farther down the list you go the less you can tell from the data. Even after all the assumptions.

So then you get more ambitious and you want to look at 100 variables. Now you need to estimate 10,000 parameters. It is very hard to get the data to estimate 10,000 parameters. Unless you guess.

Marx was making up JustSo stories. You see that sort of thing a lot in evolutionary biology. People see something, and they make up stories about how it could have evolved. They argue about which stories are right. But it’s just stories until you can actually find evidence.

For example, there’s DNA evidence that all over the western world, about 10% of babies have fathers other than the mother’s husband. Why is that? Male sociobiologists hypothesized that women choose the best man they can get to be a provider, and then choose the genetically best men who are willing to have sex with them to have children with. That way they get the best genes for their children, while they also get the best care they can get for them. The superior males don’t have to get tied down raising children because they get their pick of women without that.

Female sociobiologists suggested that women are afraid to be too dependent on one man so they try to get backups handy in case something goes wrong. They have sex not with “superior” men but with men who are willing to be backups, who will take care of them given the chance.

I suggested that two parents can produce only four HLA groups, and the wrong disease could disable the whole family at once. Occasional children by another male — any male who isn’t too closely related to her man — increases her family’s genetic diversity and disease resistance.

Who’s right? The one with the best story?

Male sociobiologists argued that the reason men can’t tell when a woman is ovulating is that this gives women a chance to have sex with their husbands most of the time but still sneak out when they’re fertile to have sex with somebody better.

Female sociobiologists argued that the reason women themselves can’t tell when they’re ovulating is that this makes it more likely they’ll get pregnant when they don’t want to. Evolution favors women who have as many children as they can raise successfully, not women who stop when the burden gets almost unbearable.

I suggested that lots of women can tell when they ovulate, and lots of men can tell too. It might be because they are better off knowing, and it might be a side effect of big brains and curiousity.

Marx made up plausible stories about “the economy”. What would make it science, would be to actually test his ideas and see whether the feedback loops he suggested are the feedback loops that actually happen. But I think most of this would be very hard to test, just like most of sociobiology is very hard to test.

It isn’t really science until you test it against real data. Before that it’s JustSo stories. Though some of them can be very very plausible, and they can point the way toward plausible outcomes. If a reasonable-looking model gets unexpected results, then maybe the real thing might get similar results even if it doesn’t work just like the model. If you think you know that something can’t happen, and it does happen in a reasonable model, that’s reason to doubt your certainty.

I think that Marxism has been a destructive influence on the left, and has led directly to the weakened state that the left is in.

Are you talking about SDS/Weather Underground here? I am kind of at a loss as to the causal mechanism whereby Marxism “led directly” to the weakened state of the left in the US.

mattski: Why start with an assumption that domination and hierarchy are the children of capitalism?

First of all, I am not in favor of reifying capitalism, let alone encouraging our Miss Thing to have children. Second, I’m not assuming; I am observing.

It’s my hobby horse, I suppose, to complain constantly that economists talk “markets” when there are, in fact, few actual markets, while ignoring the salient role of hierarchies in organizing modern political and economic life. This just happens to be an instance where my constant complaint shows its validity, and the reason people persist with the nonsense is also exposed.

The modern bureaucratic business corporation, like the modern bureaucratic state, emerged coincident with the industrial revolution. If we call the modern institutional order, capitalism, then these are capitalist institutions. Indeed, bureaucratic business enterprise was the quintessential capitalist institution through the entire 20th century, arguably more important, and certainly closer to the daily experience of most people in the developed world, than “markets”. Between them, the bureaucratic business enterprise and the bureaucratic state completely transformed the way people lived. Marx was witness to one of the most wrenching phases of that transformation — the establishment of the wage labor system and accompanying money economy, but not a witness to some later developments that extended those early developments and shaped the experience of the 20th century.

It seems to me that neoclassical economics sets up a meritless ideological apologia for the existing order by prattling on about “the (free) market economy”. I do not think you have to be a radical Marxist to see that “market economy” is a Big Lie, a set-up for diversionary lines of argument.

Finally, I think hierarchical authority is problematic in several ways, because it can be enormously productive and also be the framework for abuse and costly failure. It has never been obvious how we can successfully guard the guardians in any hierarchy; power corrupts, they say, and I believe them.

I’m trying to figure out where I’ve expressed “Brett’s right-wing fairy tale version of capitalism”. Was it by implication, somehow, in a, “You said my perpetual motion machine doesn’t work, so you must believe diesel engines don’t belch soot!” kind of way?

What I believe in are the laws of thermodynamics. Everything tends towards disorder, everything tends to break down. Failure doesn’t need to be explained, success does. NO system is perfect, and even a system that works at first breaks down over time.

But that’s no reason to obsess over a particularly destructive system, and prefer it to one that manages to sorta get by even as it’s turning into crap.

I would say we need a revolution here, were it not that revolutions tend to be 360 degrees, and end up in the same place with a lot of stuff broken. What we need is something a lot harder than a revolution. We need to fix things, in the teeth of people in power benefiting from their being broken. And you don’t fix things by being in love with a theory that piles up skull every time somebody tries it.

A friend of mine works in 3d printing, because he thinks the only thing that will actually help is a disruptive technology that lets people work around giant corporations AND giant governments. He might be right, he might be wrong, but I think he’s got a better chance of the former than you, comrades. Because he’s trying something that hasn’t already failed.

**On the grounds that stuff like this is routinely ignored here I’m re-posting a link.

Plume. Take a deep breath. Read this article.

So let me see if I’ve got this straight- when it comes to understanding or opposing the system of oppression we live under there is nothing of value to be found in Marx’s writings or the Marxist tradition, but 3D printers and yoga are both promising developments.

You know, if I thought the world’s political future was in the hands of half a dozen middle class white American dudes with internet connections I might have found reading this thread rather depressing.

#465 Mattski

I mean, to read you closely, at times you seem to be critiquing capitalism from the right, as when you insist that, well, there really are very few true markets! Where are our precious markets?! Why can’t we have markets?

Here are two arguments in favor of the status quo. One of them I’ve seen Brett Bellmore making, though I don’t know if he really intends it. It goes, “There are lots more ways to do things that don’t work, than ways that work. We have something that works pretty well, so let’s not make any changes until we’re sure they will work better, since most changes will be worse.” A variation on this would be “The US economy used to work a lot better than it does now. Let’s change back to the way it was in the 70’s except this time stay out of Vietnam.”

The second argument in favor of the status quo goes, “Capitalism is the only way that works, the best way. So let’s try to keep the government out of the economy. Cut down on government spending that transfers wealth. Cut down on government regulation of all kinds, particularly environmental regulation, safety regulation, interference in management/labor relations, and anti-trust action. Stop trying to regulate the banking industry, they regulate themselves better than anybody else can. Get rid of the Federal Reserve. Balance the federal budget. Free markets work better than government interference. What we have now would be as good as it gets except for government. Capitalism without government works better. If you want to make any changes that aren’t for more unrestrained capitalism, you’re wrong.”

As an argument in favor of the status quo, this sucks. You can’t argue that free markets produced our wealth when we don’t and didn’t have free markets.

Arguing in favor of free markets and the capitalism that people imagine, is like arguing in favor of communism. It sounds good in theory but there’s no evidence it would work in practice.

#464 Plume

Pretty much the entire left would recognize that those trillions of pieces of plastic in the Arctic are a consequence of the capitalist system. There isn’t any other deduction possible, if a person takes an honest look at accelerating consumption, Grow or Die, waste, consumerism, globalization, the profit motive, etc. etc. No one needs to be a “Marxist” to come to that conclusion. They just need to be honest and perspicacious.

Would it have done that if the economy was run by ecologists, who think in terms of material cycling and energy flow and who try to track where everything goes? Probably not. But that’s a new idea, developed in the middle 1800’s, that has not gotten much traction. Because even though it’s vitally important for the system as a whole, nobody in particular gets a big personal advantage from thinking that way.

“but 3D printers and yoga are both promising developments.”

Not so sure about the yoga, but enabling individuals to have a little piece of productive capital in their own home IS a promising development. I would say that one of the chief problems of modern capitalism, is that it is impossible, as a practical matter, for everybody to be a capitalist. Much of the productive machinery is just too expensive for individual ownership, making the threshold between worker and capitalist too high for any but a tiny fraction of the population to cross. Sure, you can own shares in the machinery, but that’s so easy to game.

Now you can get a 3d printer for under $k, and their capabilities are growing fast, while the costs are dropping. *Eventually* this is going to arrive at the “replicator” Von Neumann proposed so long ago, a machine which can take matter an instructions, and produce a copy of itself, or useful hardware, depending on the instructions. We could probably build a replicator today, if pushed, but it would be the size of a city. In 20-30 years we stand a good chance of being able to build replicators that fit in a closet or desktop.

How do you think it’s going to change a capitalist economy, when people can pass around productive machinery like sourdough starters? Trade designs for anything they need on the internet, and print them out right in their homes?

Gonna be a lot different from a world where building computers requires IC foundries that cost over a billion dollars a pop.

So, yes, I think 3d printers stand a better chance of changing things, once fully developed, than the theories of any political theorist.

Brett @469,

Not so sure about the yoga, but enabling individuals to have a little piece of productive capital in their own home IS a promising development. I would say that one of the chief problems of modern capitalism, is that it is impossible, as a practical matter, for everybody to be a capitalist. Much of the productive machinery is just too expensive for individual ownership, making the threshold between worker and capitalist too high for any but a tiny fraction of the population to cross. Sure, you can own shares in the machinery, but that’s so easy to game.

I like home-ownership, too. And most leftists I know, including meself, are in favor of it even in an alternative without capitalism. The means of production would be held in common, not one’s home — or personal “stuff” inside the home.

And you are correct about not everyone being a capitalist. It’s impossible. Capitalists, by definition, concentrate (in their hands) far more than their share of, um, capital, plus natural resources, workers, etc. etc. Obviously, the math doesn’t work out for anything beyond a small minority doing that — which is why the system is immoral from Day One. One of the many reasons. A capitalist, right off the bat, has already hoarded far more than his or her share of a wide array of things — wealth, income, power, access, resources, etc. — and that must be taken from others. In order for the capitalist to concentrate X, Y and Z in his or her hands, many others can’t have X, Y and Z. Again, that’s just math and physics.

Which is seen in the tiny percentage of business owners with workforces overall. In America, it’s roughly 7 million. Sole proprietors, who are not “capitalists” out of the gate, are in the 40 million range, which is also a minority. Actual capitalists make up roughly 5% of US households. Roughly.

@ 465 “There are lots more ways to do things that don’t work, than ways that work. We have something that works pretty well, so let’s not make any changes until we’re sure they will work better, since most changes will be worse.”

Would be a fairly accurate summary of my view. I’m actually quite a bit to the left of Brett Bellamore.

Combined with the observation that capitalist states in Western Europe, North America &c. are generally the most pleasant places to live. As some of the things that enable markets need to work most effectively are also good things in themselves. Rule of Law for example. Having a clear consistent independent legal system enforcing contracts and defending businesses exclusive rights to their trademarks and other property is both extremely important to the smooth operation of markets and makes the life of the ordinary citizen a lot easier than an arbitrary system as what is says the rules are and what the rules actually are is the same. In the process of transitioning from a command economy to a market economy China is attempting to bring in Rule of Law and in the process is copying large chunks of English commercial law.

I feel that the bit were Marx tries to predict what will replace capitalism is not simply incorrect it was something he had no business even attempting. He failed to do something that was simply impossible. The future depends far too much on chance. For an example of unpredictability look at brands, brand names didn’t really emerge until the Edwardian period, brands now dominate retail. What essentially happened was the middle classes had enough money to buy quality goods so branding allowed the goods of a specific manufacturer to develop a reputation for quality if you bought Lyle’s Golden Syrup or Coleman’s Mustard (both of which still use Edwardian packaging) from any shop you knew you were getting previously the shopkeeper had needed a reputation now the brand got the reputation.

Marxist economics is generally Pseudo-scientific as several important elements have been falsified, it was a reasonable hypothesis at the time it just happened to make some incorrect assumptions and used an incorrect pricing model under circumstances where the wrongness mattered. Austrian economics is worse, it isn’t even a pseudo-science, it’s theology it declared some things to be unquestionably true and then engaged in pure rationalism without comparing the deductions to reality and questioning the assumptions, indeed explicitly rejecting falsifiability. Some of von Hayak’s ideas are insightful, prices in a market as a signalling mechanism for example. The methodology used is absurd.

Competitive markets exist pretty much everywhere in a capitalist economy. For example if I want to buy food I can shop locally at ASDA, TESCO, Wm Morrison, J Sainsbury, Lidel, Aldi, Co-op all of which compete and are prevented from colluding by the state. I can buy my gas, electricity, phone service and television from a range of providers, the state by separating the infrastructure from service provision has created a competitive market (not always the most well functioning market but Britain was a pioneer in bring in competition to these areas and it is still a work in progress). Water supply and sewage is one of the few areas which is still a regulated monopoly, generally a second-best solution but for physical reasons the only available one.

Colonies are not the source of the West’s wealth the African ones were pretty much entirely a massive money sink, administering them cost a lot more than they raised in tax revenue. Britain subsidised the colonies not the other way round. India might have been profitable early on but certainly wasn’t later. Rich countries make most of their money trading with rich countries and barely trade with poor ones. Our relationship with poor countries can be summarised as “they make very little we want, we make very little they can afford”.

JT,

Employees are not investments. They work eagerly because they cost nothing and they are scared you might throw them away.

Sorry, this is egregious. Employees don’t work for nothing, and they are most definitely investments. Businesses routinely spend huge sums training their workforce. They run the very real risk that employees will leave and take that investment with them to their competitors. And this happens all the time.

Arguing in favor of free markets and the capitalism that people imagine, is like arguing in favor of communism. It sounds good in theory but there’s no evidence it would work in practice.

You have produced a marvelous pretzel of logic. What it means I have no idea. Except maybe that making any argument whatsoever is stoooopid. Is that what you mean?

You’re not bearing in mind the simple truth–I mentioned it above–that words have different uses, different meanings, and if you gloss over this you’re going to sow confusion. Which is exactly what you are doing.

Pure capitalism, as the political philosophers speak of it, is an ideal which we don’t find in our experience. The same can be said for pure socialism. Fine. OTOH, if you look at the world we live in, and if you look at the way these words are used in common discourse, you’ll find they have sufficient meaning to be useful. Buying and selling relatively freely, accumulating wealth, most of us refer to this as capitalism. It’s colloquial usage and it’s useful. Pooling our resources as a nation and paying for public goods, most of us call this socialism or something quite near it. I certainly call it socialism. I certainly support socialized medicine, socialized infrastructure, socialized criminal justice, socialized retirement programs, socialized education, and so on. And you know what? These are all facts, realities of modern life. The US may be lagging behind other advanced nations in the social insurance business, but that is a detail.

Democracy is far, far from “robust” in our world. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. Unfortunately, I think a lot of what you write is just confused.

Plume,

But I’m not getting how this is relevant. I really don’t. Mindfulness studies are not a part of capitalism.

It’s not relevant to you because you aren’t interested in the real world that we live in! You’re interested in your stereotype of what ‘capitalism’ is. Anything else just passes you by.

Nothing personal, Plume. Peace and happy holidays.

Plume: “FDR split the difference between the left and the business establishment. It was a compromise.”

What you wrote at #474 is pretty much exactly what I meant. If some early socialist parties had their agenda adopted, it was because their agendas were already a compromise, intended to help them compete electorally.

As a sort of footnote, it also didn’t help that a good deal of left opposition to Stalin was Trotskyist. Trotskyist groups were / are famously authoritarian in their own right.

‘your meaning is the right meaning’

Thank you.

‘Pooling our resources as a nation and paying for public goods, most of us call this socialism or something quite near it. I certainly call it socialism. ‘

May you someday have coworkers who think cooperating with and respecting others, especially of lower or equal status, amounts to socialism.

Mattski @477,

It’s not relevant to you because you aren’t interested in the real world that we live in! You’re interested in your stereotype of what ‘capitalism’ is. Anything else just passes you by.

No, I’m very much interested in the real world we live in. I’m an anticapitalist because of that reality. Not because of theories. But because of observed reality, and history, and logic.

When you say, “Look, a few capitalist companies have introduced really cool things!!” you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. I’ve been in the private sector for more than forty years, and have studied it for decades. What I’m trying to relay to you — and it’s not getting anywhere, obviously — is that you’re talking about things that are external to capitalism, that come from outside it, and are needed because capitalism is structurally oppressive, volatile, disruptive and immoral . . . if for no other reason than it concentrates so much wealth, access and income at the very top.

Mindfulness, IMO, is a really cool thing, and goes back thousands of years. I practiced it, too, as mentioned. But it’s got nothing to do with capitalism. And it’s very strange that you seem to want to fold it into capitalism and give capitalism credit for utilizing it. And more importantly, does the adaption of mindfulness by some companies do anything to alter mass inequality, pollution or waste intrinsic to and endemic with capitalism? Does mindfulness alter hierarchies, domination and oppression within the capitalist system?

Please demonstrate how it does, if you believe it does.

So also the response of people like Otto von Bismarck and FDR to socialist agitation: steal their thunder.

What you call “stealing their thunder” might also be characterized either as:

1. Compromising

or

2. Recognizing the value of some of their ideas.

Rich @479,

I agree with most of that. Though I think there was much more opposition to Stalin beyond just the Trotskyites. Orwell, Silone, Betrand Russell and Camus, come to mind, among others. IMO, it’s a bit of a broadbrush to limit that to Trotskyites.

A decent breakdown about the anti-Stalinist left here . . .

js.: “That is a hilarious assertion.”

Strangely enough, I don’t see the humor in it. Maybe we should limit each ideology to one world-historical screwup, and the Marxists have had their turn.

Your co-op had competitors, food retailing is a pretty competitive market. You had a niche retailer, that can be a pretty good position to be in. You couldn’t carry as wide a range of products as a supermarket but you could be a better cheese-monger for example carrying a wider range of quality cheeses to relatively wealthy customers standard market segmentation. It sounds like if you had organised your co-op competently you actually had a viable business there.

The Co-op is the fifth largest supermarket chain in the UK with about 6.8% of the market Waitrose part of the employee owned John Lewis Partnership has about 5.1% which means that 11.9% of the market is held by explicitly socialist businesses.

After speaking with Mattski, Rich and others on this topic, I’m reminded of another aspect to the dynamic:

Prejudice.

It’s not difficult to see that the word “Marxist,” or the name “Marx,” seems to make people crazy and “pre-judge” all kinds of things as a result. All too many people here, for instance, seem to be assuming that “Marxists” aren’t people first, that they don’t live in the same world the rest of you do, that they aren’t swimming in the same capitalist soup we all swim in, and that they didn’t grow up hearing all the same messages of conformity with the status quo ante.

Speaking for myself at least, I’m a human being first, long before any reading of Marx or Marxists kicks in; an artist/poet/struggling novelist long before Marx, etc. kicks in; a secular humanist long before, etc. etc.; a Green long before . . . and I suspect most Marxists have similar personal dynamics. Contrary to the extremely prejudiced, non-Marxist view, we don’t see all things from a Marxist prism, and we don’t view anything from just that perspective. We don’t have to look through it to be critical of our current conditions, systems or likely future. All we need, all anyone needs, is to look at things with clear eyes, open minds, the willingness to question assumptions, hand-me-down conventions and authority in general.

Marxists are really, really good at that, if for no other reason than Marx and Marxism provides really great critical tools and language for that.

Those who are seriously prejudiced toward them could learn much from their example.

Rich @491,

Strangely enough, I don’t see the humor in it. Maybe we should limit each ideology to one world-historical screwup, and the Marxists have had their turn.

Though I don’t share your viewpoint regarding whom to blame, if you want to go that route, I’m fine with it. Socialist, egalitarian, democratic theory predates Marx. It doesn’t need him. I think he contributes a great deal to the mix, especially via his critique of capitalism. But we don’t really need him. So I’m fine with your concept. As long as you apply it to capitalism. Capitalists have had their turn at bat as well, and their “world-historical screwup” dwarfs anything done by Marxists. Many times over. It’s not at all close, and it’s still ongoing.

So, I’ll trade ya. No more Marxism in exchange for no more capitalism, and we replace it with truly democratic, Green, egalitarian, socialist society.

B Dunbar 473
Rich countries make most of their money trading with rich countries and barely trade with poor ones. Our relationship with poor countries can be summarised as “they make very little we want, we make very little they can afford”.

This is much less true now than it used to be, given, among other things, the existence of multinational ‘supply chains’. Cf. China, India, Brazil, all now manufacturing powers (esp. China), with btw growing middle classes (albeit still a minority of the pop., at least in India and China). Cf. also clothing manufacturing in Bangladesh and the attendant controversies over working conditions and safety conditions. There are of course still poor countries that “make very little we want,” but OTOH a relatively poor W. African country like Ivory Coast supplies, iirc, most of the cocoa the ‘developed world’ imports. Nigeria exports oil; DR Congo exports the mineral ingredient (forget the name) that ends up in cell phones (the US “conflict minerals” legislation has had unintended effects here: see S. Raghavan, “In Congo, Unintended Harm from US Law,” Wash. Post, Dec. 1, 2014.)

#493 Brett Dunbar

Your co-op had competitors, food retailing is a pretty competitive market. You had a niche retailer, that can be a pretty good position to be in. You couldn’t carry as wide a range of products as a supermarket but you could be a better cheese-monger for example carrying a wider range of quality cheeses to relatively wealthy customers standard market segmentation. It sounds like if you had organised your co-op competently you actually had a viable business there.

We marketed to a collection of small niches. We provided various vegetarian options to vegetarians, and various cheap options to poor people who needed cheap grains, etc. Quality herbs to people who wanted exotic herbal teas, etc. (A couple of the herbs had prominent signs warning women not to take them if they were pregnant, because they were powerful abortifacients.) No other retailers wanted those niches, at that time.

The indian market down the street had a couple of their employees join the co-op and go through all the training to run the herb section. Then they went back and did the same thing in their own store. Some members got upset about that but they hadn’t done anything wrong, and the result was that the herbs got somewhat wider acceptance. Also they kept going after we closed down.

I had the sense that we were forbidden to organize competently. Our dominant ideology said we should not have a hierarchy. Nobody was paid to work more than 12 hours a week, until we hired those managers. It was supposed to run without central control. Lots of people put in 6 hours a month or so. It wasn’t supposed to generate much money, it was supposed to demonstrate that we could do things cheap without sucking money out of people’s purses. So we had a lot of people doing simple jobs that didn’t take much training, because that’s how we wanted it. We had a whole lot of good will. People gave us money and stuff.

If a competent business had tried to take our niche, they could surely have outcompeted us except perhaps for customer loyalty. But nobody wanted to. They could have seen that we were bringing in a lot of money, but I guess if they had to pay $5/hour for employees to do the work ours did, they would have had to raise prices. Probably only a few of our workers got discounts that were worth $5/hour to them, though a few poor underemployed workers did very well. A real business would have needed a storefront that looked good, while we did fine with an old building that had a run-down medical imagine office, and upstairs an alternative-medicine office and pharmacy (they ran a mail-order business in alternative medicine), an accupressure office, a cheap lawyer, a tattoo parlor, and for awhile a barbershop, with a gravel parking lot. A real business would have needed to advertise, while we kept a low profile in case the health inspectors or somebody investigated us. (They did, once, and said we shouldn’t package flour in a room with hanging flourescent lights or laid linoleum tile. They gave us a gentle warning and went away and never came back.)

I guess I’m saying that a real business would have had a lot of expenses that customers would have expected them to pay, while we had a mystique that we were doing guerrilla economy or something, and people didn’t expect us to look that respectable.

So much of selling to the public is about expectations. There’s a lot of overhead in looking like the kind of business that people want to buy from. For awhile the internet looked different, all you needed to show the public was a professional looking website. But now you get respectability by paying 30% or more to the right middlemen.

I have a comment in moderation and I don’t have time to look for the bad keyword. [sigh]

Rich @501,

I’d be happy to take that deal. But really I don’t have any objection to people calling their mode of thought or analysis “Marxian”, if that’s what they want to do. In my experience, people who describe their ideas or what have you as Marxian have already taken the historical failures of Marxism seriously and decided to go on with what they find valuable in the tradition, while people holding on to “Marxist” are refusing to admit a connection that actually exists.

Glad to hear you’d take the deal. But I don’t see much difference between the words, and I use them interchangeably. Though, “Marxian” does seem to be used more often when the discussion turns to academic critique of capitalism. You hear of “Marxian economists” more often than “Marxist economists,” but I think that’s a semantic distinction without a difference. I don’t think one can draw the conclusions you’ve made from a two-letter difference. There are plenty of “Marxists,” for instance, who were and are anti-Stalin, and never saw themselves in that tradition. There are plenty of “Marxists” who teach that the USSR and China, Stalin and Mao, etc. etc. went completely against Marx’s actual writings — and they opposed them. Terry Eagleton, for instance, in his Why Marx was Right.

Anyway, I’m guessing this is what you have in mind:

Marxian economics, particularly in academia, is distinguished from Marxism as a political ideology as well as the normative aspects of Marxist thought, with the view that Marx’s original approach to understanding economics and economic development is intellectually independent from Marx’s own advocacy of revolutionary socialism.[2][3] Marxian economists do not lean entirely upon the works of Marx and other widely known Marxists, but draw from a range of Marxist and non-Marxist sources.[4]

Although the Marxian school is considered heterodox, ideas that have come out of Marxian economics have contributed to mainstream understanding of the global economy; certain concepts of Marxian economics, especially those related to capital accumulation and the business cycle, such as creative destruction, have been fitted for use in capitalist systems.

If that is the way one is defining the two words, I go with Marxian.

Brett @498: The hypothesis that the UK became rich due to exploiting colonies

Ah, I see. No, this isn’t the hypothesis I was arguing. I agree with you and the estimable JQ that colonies and wars may not be particularly beneficial, and may even be a net loss, for an imperial power. I was suggesting something different: ie, that states don’t make individual policy decisions on the basis of net benefit or national interest (in fact, I think “national interest” is a convenient fiction) but instead respond, when there are differences among the corporate/financial/military elites, to the strongest pressures, which usually come from those among the elites who have the most to gain or lose from that policy decision.

(Yes, I recognize that this might seem circular — one can always explain a given decision in retrospect by simply declaring that the strongest pressures must have prevailed. Of course decisions have to be explained one by one. That’s probably why so many internal policy documents are classified for 50 years, until they’re only of interest to a few scholars. Or why the crucial pressures are often transmitted not in written documents but on the golf links or over drinks at the club. )

Rich,

Quick refinement from above. If it helps curb any misunderstandings, I’m happy to switch to “Marxian.” No problem. But it was my understanding that the real dividing line was between “Marxists” and “Marxist-Leninists.” I’ve always opposed the latter camp in general and never agreed with them on methods, goals, rationale, etc.

But it not a big deal to me at all to update usage, if the real division is between Marxist and Marxian, Eagleton’s example notwithstanding . . . .

Geo @506,

Well said. National interest is a fiction. And, yes, I think you can validly say that the clamoring powers will push the government to do their bidding. The loudest complaint will change policy. In America’s history, even a single corporation can force covert or overt wars, coups, regime changes, etc. etc. This happened all too often in America’s back yard, especially — in Central and South America and the Caribbean.

#504 LFC

Brett D’s main argument seems to be that colonies were not sources of great economic benefit to the colonizing powers, which assertion is prob. too broad since I think it partly depends on the particular colony and time period in question.

Well, but some nations needed to sell industrial products and buy raw materials. Japan, for example — they didn’t have much in the way of raw materials themselves. Or consider Israel, for a while their main exports were oranges, plus they sold cut diamonds after they imported uncut diamonds. Now they sell advanced weapons after they import the steel and titanium etc.

It’s hard for a nation to stay independent if it can’t produce its own weapons. But this is heavy industry, and if they’re going to have their own they don’t want to import competing products. Again consider Japan. They had to be a military power if they weren’t going to be somebody’s colony, and they had to control the raw materials their military needed — iron from Manchuria, oil from Indonesia, tin from Thailand, rubber from Malaya, etc. They had to hold those places or somebody else would get control of them and deny war materials to Japan.

It hardly matters whether they would get more profit selling to somebody else. They had to have their colonies or else be a colony.

Somehow some capitalists have argued that none of that matters. Just sell whatever you can to whoever will buy it, and your wealth will be maximized. Like they don’t care whether they’re on the losing side of wars.

Science made a big difference to that. When the USA couldn’t get enough rubber because the Japanese wouldn’t sell to us, we found ways to make synthetic rubber. When Germany couldn’t get enough oil they made some synthetic oil. Etc.

Japan only found itself in a position where its access to oil and other war materials was being restricted because it was engaged in an unusually brutal war of conquest in China. The democracies, led by the USA, wanted to stop Japan committing genocide and imposed sanctions in order to do so. The main effect was that the USA banned US owned oil tankers from trading with Japan as essentially all of the big tankers were US owned that pretty much cut Japan off from oil.

Japan was a significant trading partner, a great power by any standard, far too powerful to be the target of military attack and had a pretty strong military reputation. Italy would be a softer target, it had a similar size economy and a reputation for military incompetence.

Japan was probably obviously too strong to attack by the time of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) and was certainly too strong by the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Only Britain or the USA had both a navy strong enough and bases close enough to attack Japan and neither were interested.

As a colonial power Japan was unusually brutal. In Burma, probably the worst run of Britain’s colonies. It’s where we dumped incompetent obnoxious racists too well-connected to sack. We were despised by everyone except a few favoured mountain tribes, and the Burmese welcomed the Japanese invasion, at first. After a month of Japanese rule they decided that the British weren’t all that bad after all.

Mattski @460:

Bruce, bless your soul, but for all you complain about ‘hand waving’ you are the undisputed King of hand waiving here at CT. At 457 you reiterate your stock peeves without grappling in any substantive way with my query. Clearly (I want to say CLEARLY) domination and hierarchy have been with us well before anything commonly recognized as capitalism came on the scene. Did you account for this? Slavery, war, institutionalized cruelty of every imaginable sort have been with us l-o-n-g before capitalism. Is this controversial??

This is called talking past each other. Maybe, it’s my fault for writing in a particular epigrammatic style. J Thomas @ 462 seemed to get what I was saying clearly enough.

I don’t know why you would think I was unmindful of domination and hierarchy in history. I have a couple of long-winded comments back at 265, 266, where I waved my hand over 7500 years!

There’s an ideological apology for capitalism that portrays the capitalist institutional order as one defined by voluntary market exchange. It seems to me that mattski affirmed that apology in a comment @ 380:

I’m saying, and I’ve said it many times before, there isn’t anything immoral about people being free to conduct trade. On the contrary, it would be immoral and ridiculous for the community to tell an individual that he/she is NOT free to engage in commerce.

Marx, as I understand it, challenged this apology on its own terms, by pointing out that the capitalist institutional order was founded on an appropriation of the means of production, which, in the classical framework of Smith and Ricardo, resulted in a diversion of resources into “rent”, an unearned income. Under capitalism, the community — or its ruling elite, at least — did effectively tell individuals that they were not free to engage in commerce, or only free to engage on certain, disadvantageous terms: wages for labor and the whole system immiserating the wage laborer.

I’m not endorsing the Marxist view, but I think it has merit enough to be heard. In general, I am saying that to respectfully hear any number of criticisms of the capitalist institutional order, and make sense of them, we have to cast aside these diversions into the cul de sac of primarily “market” relations.

The large-scale, bureaucratic business corporation, financed by a marketable stock, is a capitalist institution, a distinctive and novel instrument of hierarchical domination. Weber said as much, and I believe him. And, many of the most urgent criticisms of the existing political economy concern business corporations and their power. Why divert discussion of those criticisms — of the way CEO pay has driven increasing inequality for example, or the role of multinationals in subverting national foreign policies — into the never-never land of a market economy that doesn’t exist?

It’s very unlikely that India did so in 1857 for example. India financed the Indian Army (recruited in India) but didn’t finance the the British Army in India (units of the British Army deployed in India). The India office was a ministry of the UK government and the expenditure in London was funded from the UKs revenue, while revenue raised in India was spent there. Elements of the Indian army were deployed in other parts of the empire so the net effect is that India was pretty much self-financing.

#516 LFC

What I wrote, in essence, was that some colonies probably provided some economic benefits at some times to some colonizing powers; other colonies didn’t. There were range of motives for colonialism/imperialism, which was a variegated phenomenon and thus is resistant to broad, sweeping assertions to the effect that “all colonies X” or “all colonies Y.”

I certainly agree with that.

But notice that the doctrine of mercantilism had been attacked by Adam Smith but was still actively believed by lots of people throughout the nineteenth century. Colonies tended to be places where mercantilism was enforced. You buy their raw materials and sell them finished goods.

Those attitudes were implicitly kept for a very long time. Like, Brazil exported high-quality iron ore and imported steel. They wanted to make their own steel. They made plans with the USA to do it, since they would be supplying the US WWII war effort, but the US wound up dropping it and the Brazilian government built their own. By the 1960’s they were making more than 12% of their own steel. They wanted to have modern productive steel mills but nobody would sell them the new technology. Finally Germany sold them a 2 million ton plant when they wanted a 5 million ton plant. By the 1980s they were producing more than 40% of their own steel. As the US and other steel industries collapsed they expanded, and now close to half of their steel is exported, mostly to China. Why did other nations try to stop them? I think maybe they wanted to protect their own steel industries, in opposition to Adam Smith and Ricardo and all mainstream economists. In practice, people take whatever they want from capitalist theory and mix it with mercantilist theory and Austrian theory and libertarian theory and Keynesian theory and just use whatever they feel like to argue in favor of whatever they already want to happen.

@519

The welfare state deals with some of capitalism’s problems without ditching the system. Attempts to ditch the system have led to command economies which have which just don’t work very well.

One method of dealing with some of capitalism’s other problems, specifically the tendency to concentrate ownership Marx observed in early Capitalism, are the joint stock limited liability company. The UK started making it easy, quick and cheap to register them from the 1860s, replacing the previous system where each need a specific Royal Charter. The result was that over time the ownership of many corporations became much broader, In the modern UK a very large majority of the working population are shareholders, mostly via institutional investors such as pension funds. That wasn’t really the intent at the time, that was more about having continuity in contracts and avoiding the problems that occurred when a sole proprietor or one of a small number of partners died (making setting up a joint-stock company easy for the first time since the Bubble Ac 1720). A few years later parliament made obtaining limited liability easy; now when buying shares in a company you could stood to lose only that specific investment and not all your worldly goods (avoiding the problem that joint and several liability created for small scale investment). This made small investment on the side much easier. Various reforms to accounting and auditing laws made company administration far clearer gradually broadening the base of company ownership making a lot of middle and working class people into petty capitalists. This make support for revolution less likely, you aren’t going to favour appropriation of your pension by the state.

“In practice, people take whatever they want from capitalist theory and mix it with mercantilist theory and Austrian theory and libertarian theory and Keynesian theory and just use whatever they feel like to argue in favor of whatever they already want to happen.”

In a sense, capitalist theory is kind of like your doctor’s advice: Eat less, but healthy food, and exercise. But people still over-eat, and veg out on the couch. Capitalist theory has a lot to say about how to have a healthy economy, but none of it is fun: Let corporations fail, don’t subsidize industries, don’t raise barriers to entry in return for money under the table from lobbyists.

The brain knows what is good for the body, but the fat is lobbying for more calories, and watching TV releases nice endorphins. Government, too, on some level knows what’s good for the economy, but all the short term rewards are all for doing something else. So they rationalize continual deficits, debasing the currency, no repay loans to cronies, and so on, and economists, mostly paid by the government, and very good at noticing their own bottom line, manufacture suitable rationales for all of it.

Anarcissie @519,

So your point is that capitalists are evil and socilaists are saintly, to the point that even if if they institute identical programs you despise the capitalist version for what you imagine to be its motives? Well, I’m a capitalist, and I favor social welfare programs, and not out of a desire to keep the mob from my door. I actually know others who agree.

The large bureaucracy and intrusive government required can be turned to other purposes, like war, surveillance, and direct control, should the need arise.

This is laughable. Do you seriously imagine that socialist economies don’t have large bureaucracies and intrusive government? How can an economy be centrally controlled otherwise?

Bernard Yomtov 12.25.14 at 4:40 pm

‘Anarcissie @519,
So your point is that capitalists are evil and socilaists are saintly….’

Oh, come on. This is supposed to be a discussion for grown-ups.

Socialism is (in my definition) the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers. As far as I know there are no socialist states in the world. The largest socialist entities are cooperatives whose membership may be in the tens of thousands, embedded in capitalist polities which govern much of their behavior. If, by some chance, some large community came to be predominantly organized into socialist entities like communes or cooperatives, there does not seem to be any requirement that they be subjected to ‘central control’, unless, of course, they were attacked militarily, which would be a significant possibility given the imperial history of liberalism (still being enacted). Maybe they would choose some sort of highly integrated, centralized mode of interaction and governance, but maybe not. I don’t see the necessity.

Anarcissie: “Socialism is (in my definition) the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers. As far as I know there are no socialist states in the world.”

Well, hold on. The People’s Republic of China is one of the largest states in the world, either by population or by economic measures, and it has a “socialist market economy”. I know that among Marxist apologists it’s fashionable to dismiss this as state capitalism, but from an anarchist point of view the Chinese state owns the commanding heights of the economy in the name of the workers just as much, or just as little, as has happened in an socialist state. The question of whether “workers” put in charge of the apparatus of a state remain workers or speak for workers in any meaningful sense was one that Bakunin wrote adequately on. If the PRC isn’t a socialist state, then there are no socialist states, but perhaps this really implies that it’s impossible to have meaningful socialism within a state.

North Korea, China, Vietnam much of central Europe, Cuba and many other states have attempted to implement socialism since 1930, I’m not sure why that cut off is important it excludes the USSR for no obvious reason. All ended up with command economies which ended up not working very well. Most have since reverted to capitalism. North Korea remains a command economy and is a hell-hole. Every attempt to impose a socialist economy seems end up as either being abandoned and a market economy continuing. Socialist economies as Marx fantasised don’t appear to actually be a thing that can exist. It simply lacks the incentives to get people to do what is needed, it loses the signalling mechanism that leads to market efficiency.

“State capitalism” is a frankly ridiculous description it is only used about economies that are not capitalist, as they lack free markets which are an essential element of capitalism. Stalinist USSR or Maoist China were straightforward command economies and in way capitalist. Capitalism is simply being used as a snarl word.

Command economies only work either for very short periods, a war economy for example, where they only like pricing signals for fairly short periods. Or in a situation of near stasis with a very simple economy, the Inca empire for example, that is of purely historical interest,the world isn’t like that any more.

There is socialism and social-ism, AKA third-wayism.

The latter could be characterized as ‘capitalism with a human face’. It appears to be an acting role in the electoral theater. The comedy (or drama, if you prefer) has two actors fiercely antagonistic to each other, one a little bit to the left of the other. This setup allows the politics to fluctuate, to the right when it can and to the left when it must.

**Addendum: There are many people in America (I wouldn’t consider them terribly sophisticated) who spout phrases like, “Taxes are theft!” For these people the first dollar of taxation is SOCIALISM. I’m willing to grant them that because philosophically it’s a fairly consistent way of looking at things. When government takes money from citizens and spends it on public goods–seems to me–you can reasonably call this socialism. Of course, depending on which public goods get funded, it will look more or less like socialism to different types of people. Generally speaking military spending doesn’t rouse howls of protest from the right! But take that same tax money and spend it on health care for all and the perception becomes quite different.

Bernard Yomtov 12.25.14 at 9:32 pm @ 530 — What I wrote was not about virtue, it was about people acting in pursuit of their perceived interests, which is what they usually do. Rich people don’t need Welfare, and if they want to feel virtuous they can give to charity. Therefore, their interests in Welfare probably lie elsewhere — in, for instance, social stability and decent appearances, which are of advantage to them. In a more egalitarian, socialistic society, where most people were living approximately at the middle working-class level, and they were not subject to a ruling class consisting of rich people, they might see some personal interest in some kind of state social insurance for themselves, their relatives, and their neighbors, in case their coop went down the tubes. Or not — who knows? I’m just guessing. If you now will reexamine #519, you will probably see that I was not on about anyone’s virtue, but about their interests and connected behaviors.

When government takes money from citizens and spends it on public goods–seems to me–you can reasonably call this socialism.

I re-iterate: this is completely nuts.

‘When government takes money from citizens and spends it on public goods–seems to me–you can reasonably call this socialism.’

‘Is it completely nuts to say that single-payer health care is socialism or socialistic

It’s completely nuts to say that the government building roads or underwriting the court system is ‘socialism’ (which your generalisation implies, among other things). Single-payer healthcare isn’t ‘socialism’ either. Only Americans talk like this ime.

If the only acceptable usage is your usage would you concede that your “socialism” doesn’t exist in the real world?

Steven Johnson wrote a bit about this above- I don’t necessarily agree with everything he said. No socialist states exist at present but some states made advances towards it at times in the past (perhaps Russia in the 1920s). Smaller-scale institutions within capitalist states might be ‘socialistic’ to a degree, in that they point the way towards socialism, but that doesn’t make them ‘compatible’ with capitalism because in so far as they are their existence threatens and is threatened by capitalism. Merely being funded by taxation doesn’t qualify, not by a long way.

The socialist economy is a chimera, it’s millenarianist wish fulfilment not something that can actually exist.

You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but if you’re only argument for ‘X can not exist’ is ‘X has never existed before’ then it’s not founded on anything other than faith.

What you actually get is a command economy and that simply doesn’t work as well as a free market.

Ohhhhhhhhhh rilly?

Wiki: Uneven and Combined Development

The current standard package in developed countries: pensions, unemployment benefit, workforce protections, extensive state control, secret ballots, universal right to vote and so on, were all “socialism” in Marx’s time. As an ex-Soviet friend of mine said” “I was brought up believing that we were building socialism and then I came here [Australia] and found you’d already built it.”

The variations in the Soviet Union, China and so on had and have their problems, but they also had their significant strengths and achievements. The great issue in Marx’s time was whether and on what terms to bring the working classes into the political nation. While this is still a live issue, particularly in the US (where inclusion was somewhat less than comprehensive in the first place and seems to now to be being unwound) it is no longer the touchstone of politics.

Brett Dunbar 12.26.14 at 1:44 am @ 542 — I’ve excluded cases where the polity preceding the command economy was not what I would call capitalism. In the 1920s and ’30s, some capitalist European states, like Germany and Italy, abandoned liberal capitalism and turned to fascism. Those are the most recent cases I know of, unless one wants to characterize certain Latin American states as having been capitalist and also turning to fascism; as we know, that sort of thing happened more recently there, but the cases are less clear.

The notion of ‘work’ or ‘perform’ as in ‘a command economy … simply doesn’t work as well as a free market’ conceals a notion of value: to ‘work’ or to ‘perform’ in this sense means ‘to do what I want it to do.’ But different people want different things at different times. Some people live on communes and are very happy with communist life, whereas other people would prefer to live on the trading floor of the stock market, or in a war zone, or in a classroom, or whatever. In capitalist arrangements, the economy can be said to ‘work’ if it increases the power and wealth of a capitalist ruling class, even if it destroys the social and physical environment and leads to a decline in the material living standards of 80% of the population, as is said to be currently true of the US.

In any case, ‘command economy’ does not equal ‘socialism’ nor does ‘free market’ equal capitalism. And once again I must note that there is no such thing as a free market in the sort of absolute sense in which this term is thrown around.

I regret that some of my interlocutors insist on conflating socialism with Welfare; now we have no way of denoting ‘the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers’ which is radically different from Welfare.

@546 “As an ex-Soviet friend of mine said” “I was brought up believing that we were building socialism and then I came here [Australia] and found you’d already built it.””

Funny, Nikita Khrushchev wrote something very similar in his diary after visiting Sweden. Something like: ‘damn, they have all we have dreamed about, and they achieved it without any blood and gore.’

Sweden is indeed a mixed economy – and curiously with a good deal of corporatism (a form of nationalism/fascism) mixed in. Of course what they built is not socialism, but a decent standard of living and safety net for their middle class. Nice – if you’re a member of that club, that is.

engels,

Smaller-scale institutions within capitalist states might be ‘socialistic’ to a degree, in that they point the way towards socialism, but that doesn’t make them ‘compatible’ with capitalism because in so far as they are their existence threatens and is threatened by capitalism.

From my perspective you are clinging to an ideal which a) doesn’t exist and b) probably cannot exist, at least in any enduring sense. This causes you to belittle actually existing institutions which do very much good in the world. And note Peter T @ 546.

Single-payer health care does not threaten a market economy. QED.

Anarcissie,

I regret that some of my interlocutors insist on conflating socialism with Welfare; now we have no way of denoting ‘the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers’ which is radically different from Welfare.

You can use ‘socialism’ to mean whatever you want. Just explain what you mean by the word. No problem. Also, what about the word ‘communism’? Why won’t that work for you?

A fundamental problem could be–I think it is–that your ideal is unworkable. This helps explain why we don’t see it!

As I mentioned way upthread, what happens when businesses compete for workers? They try to make their company a more attractive place to work. It begins also to dawn on them that happy people are more productive than unhappy people. Do you see the beginnings of a virtuous cycle here?

Let’s focus on tweaking the market in this direction. Let’s get out of the realm of theory and step into the world we live in.

“Charles Peterson: “then later smeared by fascist regimes that mainly used his ideas as cover”

So Communism is fascist now? Why not just save time and call the regimes you don’t like doubleplusungood without bothering with this incoherent pseudo-classification. I don’t understand why people are getting on mattski’s case when he says (incorrectly) that single payer health insurance = socialism when they can’t apply or use the standard definition of socialism either.

@546″The current standard package in developed countries: pensions, unemployment benefit, workforce protections, extensive state control, secret ballots, universal right to vote and so on, were all “socialism” in Marx’s time.”

Wrong. Except for secret ballots and right to vote, Bismarck introduced the measures mentioned in order to prevent Germany from becoming socialist (under Bismarck’s top down regime the Socialist party was banned).) Pre-WW 1 England followed suit in introducing limited social insurance when it noticed that as a result of social insurance German workers were healthier and more robust therefore made better soldiers than English ones.

Productionism (and ownership is irrelevant, what always mattered was control) no longer applies, either as a boogeyman (capitalism) or as a utopia (socialism). Now the critique should look at distribution and consumption/demand. Part of the reason historians of economics are looking at Ming/Qing China is because of the merchant dominated and controlled successful economy. Think Walmart; think Comcast;think Goldman-Sachs. Producers and owners are no longer in control.

This does not mean that Marx is irrelevant, the first chapter of Capital is about the commodity not the worker or the factory. How and where does the commodity get its value (s)? I still subscribe partly to the LTV, but now wonder if the Labor is not provided by consumers, or “prosumers.”

Why the hell has it taken me three years to discover Castells?

mattski 12.26.14 at 2:42 pm @ 552 —
‘You can use ‘socialism’ to mean whatever you want. Just explain what you mean by the word. No problem. Also, what about the word ‘communism’? Why won’t that work for you?

A fundamental problem could be–I think it is–that your ideal is unworkable. This helps explain why we don’t see it!’

I have repeatedly defined socialism, probably more than once in this thread, and hundreds or thousands of times in other discussions: ‘the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers.’ (Some people might add, ‘or by the community’. Or they might write ‘social production’ because they would want to exclude vernacular or personal production for immediate use.) I don’t understand why you say it doesn’t work when there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of socialist enterprises and institutions. (I’m assuming by ‘work’ you mean ‘produces what its adherents desire’ since as I noted before ‘work’ has many meanings.)

The word communism used to mean an absence of property relations, or common ownership of everything. That does seem impractical — I would just as soon have and keep my own toothbrush. If it means ‘everyone gets equal share of aggregate social production’, that might be feasible, but it is quite different from socialism as I defined it. A socialist community might decide to distribute its production according that rule, or to have Welfare (paying certain people to be poor), or something else.

Communism is also used to denote the activities of the various Communist Parties, which is something very different from socialism as defined above. Given the way things worked out, I think Lenin’s ‘state capitalism’ was most accurate in regard to actual arrangements of production, distribution, and consumption — a big boss, a board of directors, a hierarchy of managers, fixers, cops, and spies, dire punishments for dissidents and slackers, lots of workity-work for its own sake, codependent competition with other big deals, idealistic mission statements, and much glorious propaganda.

‘As I mentioned way upthread, what happens when businesses compete for workers?’

Wages go up and working conditions improve for those who have jobs. Then, when something goes wrong, businesses stop competing for workers, and lay some of them off, while wages go down and working conditions deteriorate. Inhale; exhale.

Anarcissie,

I don’t understand why you say it doesn’t work when there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of socialist enterprises and institutions.

Hundreds of thousands? How about 2 or 3 salutary examples?

What first attracted me to “the socialist tradition” (as Alexander Gray, iirc, called it) was the emphasis on egalitarianism (in distribution). In high school I wrote a paper on Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier. As is well known, Marx denigrated them as “utopian” socialists and argued, notably in Critique of the Gotha Program, that the emphasis on distribution was misplaced and wrong. However, Marx’s own vision of socialism and “the higher phase of communism” (as he called it in CGP) remained, though attractive in various respects, rather vague (at least afaik).

Over the years there’s been some writing, from various angles, about what the concrete institutional structures of a socialist society would look like, the most promising of which seem to involve combining market mechanisms with forms of collective (but not direct state) ownership of at least large parts of the economy and/or public control over investment (though I’m aware there are non-market versions also). This would/should be coupled with genuinely democratic political forms.

One need not be — as I’m not — deeply acquainted with this literature to realize that none of these visions, even if concretely specified which probably doesn’t happen all that often, has ever been achieved on a national scale. Yugoslavia under Tito had a kind of market socialism but it was not a political democracy. The USSR tried the thing discussed in ‘Red Plenty’ (which I bought but read only bits of) which eventually failed on its own terms, and obvs. the political system was highly authoritarian or totalitarian. The Scandinavian countries today have a form of advanced social democracy and democratic political systems but I think they are still capitalist (in terms of, e.g., a lot of basic investment decisions being made privately).

Under these circumstances, what is the point in continuing to call oneself a democratic socialist, esp. say in the U.S.? One point of the designation is that it connects one to a long tradition that includes Marx (at least in certain of his moments) but isn’t limited to him. It orients one’s politics in the direction of “non-reformist reforms,” steps that can be taken within capitalism but that have the potential to point beyond it. There is no especially compelling reason to think that capitalism, a system built on (as Marx observed) the endless accumulation of capital as a kind of goal in itself, is the end-point of history, and there are respectable (if, of course, debatable) arguments that it is entering a terminal period of crisis that will extend over the next, say, century or so, but what will replace it remains open (it might be better and one can hope it will be, but it is not guaranteed to be) and will be shaped in part by social and political movements some of which have not even appeared yet.

bob mcmanus @ 558: “I still subscribe partly to the LTV, but now wonder if the Labor is not provided by consumers, or “prosumers.””

Items to be consumed may not have an absolute value, but they do have an absolute cost in terms of the ecosystem resources needed to create and dispose of them. I’ve never seen any version of left economics that still takes the LTV at all seriously come to grips with this.

Bruce, I think you’re quibbling over definitions when what is at issue isn’t overly controversial. I do apologize for not responding to your 515. Give me some time. Peace.

mattski: I think you’re quibbling over definitions when what is at issue isn’t overly controversial.

I think you are burying controversy aplenty under sloppy use of language and then projecting.

This, from your comment @ 552:

Single-payer health care does not threaten a market economy. QED.

It depends on what you mean by “market economy”. If you mean the provision of goods and services primarily by privately owned, for-profit entities, then, yes, single-payer sure does “threaten” the market economy. In fact, single-payer is advocated as embodying various means to displace private, for-profit provision. Beginning with the private, for-profit provision of health insurance, but also by strengthening the strategic options of the single-payer institution to manage the system in ways that reduce opportunities to profit — for example, by monopsony pricing for drugs and by manipulating the compensation schemes for health service providers.

Of course, a single-payer system could be administered by and for, for-profit health service conglomerates in a way similar to the way the Obama Administration’s Treasury department has been administered by Citibank, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. It’s not administrative form, but the political substance that presumably matters, though I would not concede that angels could make any system work equally well; whether form follows substance or substance follows form, I will leave to others.

Mattski: ‘there isn’t anything immoral about people being free to conduct trade’
Me: ‘There isn’t anything immoral about people trading stuff they own. ‘
Mattski: ‘Hard to know what you’re saying’

What I am saying is someone really does own private property then there can’t be anything immoral about her trading it (part of what owning something means is being permitted right to trade it). So if you can prove to me that you really own everything you claim to (you got it from A who got it from B… etc. without force, theft or misappropriation of common resources being involved at any stage) then you can trade it as freely as you wish. And good luck with that!

Quote from bob mcmanus @558

Re the conceptual interpenetration of the notions of production and consumption, of course Marx said it much better, somewhere in the Grundrisse as I recall.

you’re not a fan of “the system” we live under and… health care and food stamps etc are part of that system

I value the work in the Red Cross do work in Guantanamo Bay but I still want it to be abolished. What is so difficult about this?

@571 (not an objection to Rich particularly)

At what point did people who weren’t either socialists or paleoconservatives begin assuming that anything that didn’t weaken workers’ negotiating ability–anything that didn’t strengthen the negotiating ability only of the very rich–was forbidden? On the contrary, it’s always been taken as a support for liberal capitalism as it exists that it incorporates non-market institutions and social structures.

b. steele 577
Socialists seem to be split, from what I can see (which isn’t much) between those who accept this because hourly workers are the revolutionary class, and those who assume everything that doesn’t involve hourly workers is already taken care of by the extensive, technically trained capitalist bureaucracy we naturally have.

I don’t really follow this, I’m afraid. Perhaps it might clarify matters a bit if I said that by people who call themselves dem. socialists I had mind, say, DSA rather than the Revolutionary Communist Party (assuming there is still such a group) or the Spartacist League or Platypus or etc. I’m beginning to be sorry I posted my 564, but I guess I figured that if, e.g., mcmanus can muse autobiographically about his interest in public works during the Meiji Restoration, I can muse autobiographically about some stupid paper I wrote decades ago.

Rich Pukalsky@57,

Anything that decouples work status from health insurance status in the U.S. frees workers to switch jobs and hold out for higher wages more easily. There is a sense in which a “market economy” forces workers to always be putting their labor up to market, and it works against that sense as well.

I have no idea what you are getting at. Your first sentence is unquestionably true. But it’s relatuonship to the second is mystifying. Surely being able “to switch jobs and hold out for higher wages,” is the same thing as putting one’s labor “up to market.”

So what are you saying?

LFC, you asked a rhetorical question, “why should anyone call themselves a democratic socialist these days?”, and now you’re getting all defensive on the democratic socialists’ behalf? Did you want people to argue against you and give reasons why you were wrong to insinuate there weren’t any?

You misread me (and my intentions here); perhaps that was my fault for being unclear. Here’s what I wrote:

Under these circumstances, what is the point in continuing to call oneself a democratic socialist, esp. say in the U.S.? One point of the designation is that it connects one to a long tradition that includes Marx (at least in certain of his moments) but isn’t limited to him. It orients one’s politics in the direction of “non-reformist reforms,” steps that can be taken within capitalism but that have the potential to point beyond it.

In other words, I was saying that one reason to call or continue calling oneself a democratic socialist is that it connects one to the socialist tradition. There are also a couple of other decent reasons to do so, but that’s one that appeals to me. So if I’m “getting defensive on their behalf” it’s because I apply the label to myself (albeit not without some ambivalence or uncertainty or etc.).

Reading the LFC/bianca steele exchange was a bit strange/funny because it was immediately obvious to me what LFC meant—I suppose because if I were to call myself a democratic socialist (I don’t, because mostly I’d rather just go with ‘socialist’, say, but I have been strongly drawn to it at points), it would be precisely for the reason LFC lists.

And @mattski: This has probably been pointed out by someone already, but at the very least you want to distinguish between a market economy and capitalism. If for no other reason than that there is always the possibility of the Rawlsian type scenario where social ownership of the means of production is combined with a market economy (this is a possibility Rawls allows for a just society in his sense). Whatever you might think of this, it’s not an incoherent position, so a market economy just as such can’t be equivalent to capitalism.

Bernard Y.: “”I have no idea what you are getting at. Your first sentence is unquestionably true. But it’s relatuonship to the second is mystifying. Surely being able “to switch jobs and hold out for higher wages,” is the same thing as putting one’s labor “up to market.””

Every worker in a market economy who has not yet retired has to eventually put their labor back up to market. But by “hold out for higher wages” I meant that workers with health insurance could choose to remain unemployed longer and wait out bad market conditions, or choose to collectively bargain and jointly withdraw their labor from the market.

js.: “Reading the LFC/bianca steele exchange was a bit strange/funny because it was immediately obvious to me what LFC meant—I suppose because if I were to call myself a democratic socialist (I don’t, because mostly I’d rather just go with ‘socialist’, say, but I have been strongly drawn to it at points), it would be precisely for the reason LFC lists.”

I wonder how people can believe things like this and also take Marx seriously. Here’s the leading few sentences of LFC’s comment:

LFC: “What first attracted me to “the socialist tradition” (as Alexander Gray, iirc, called it) was the emphasis on egalitarianism (in distribution). In high school I wrote a paper on Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier. As is well known, Marx denigrated them as “utopian” socialists and argued, notably in Critique of the Gotha Program, that the emphasis on distribution was misplaced and wrong.”

So, like LFC, you want to include yourself in a line that “connects one to a long tradition that includes Marx (at least in certain of his moments) but isn’t limited to him.” I think that’s historically blinkered and kind of sad. All through that long tradition, Marx himself or Marxists in general were dismissing people like you who were attached to the idea of egalitarian distribution. At best, you were regarded as useful idiots, and at worst you were eliminated when Marxists came to power. You may have this romantic vision of one long tradition that includes both democratic, egalitarian redistribution and Marx, but it’s a fantasy.

Normally I don’t write against fantasy: I mean, if people like to believe in unicorns or whatever, fine. But this one is a particularly stupid historical fantasy because there always were leftists who were democratic socialists concerned with egalitarian redistribution. You don’t hear as much about them because in the capitalist world they felt they had to become social democrats, and in the Marxist-Leninist world they were shot. But don’t write them out of the historical fantasy in favor of the people who suppressed them.

Actually, that strikes me as an argument in favor of changing America’s *taxation* system. Since the link between employment and health insurance is an artifact of our tax system.

My proposal is to let people buy health insurance pre-tax no matter where they get it. You could argue for post-tax, but that would require a pretty big cut in tax rates at the same time.

Bruce,

It depends on what you mean by “market economy”.

Yes.

If you mean the provision of goods and services primarily by privately owned, for-profit entities, then, yes, single-payer sure does “threaten” the market economy. In fact, single-payer is advocated as embodying various means to displace private, for-profit provision.

But I wouldn’t say that is a threat to a market economy. It is a concession to the uniqueness of health care which is unlike most consumer goods. We can equally argue that socialized health care strengthens the market economy by–as Rich P points out–effectively increasing workers bargaining power. This seems in line with some of Stiglitz’s themes. (Increases in the minimum wage can have a similar, counterintuitive effect.)

I think you are burying controversy aplenty under sloppy use of language and then projecting.

If my use of the term ‘public goods’ offends you because it isn’t technically correct then how about we substitute ‘social spending’ instead. I don’t think it affects my argument one way or another.

Anarcissie,

Sure, I can google ‘cooperatives’ but that doesn’t give me a list of organizations that meet your criteria for socialism!

mattski,

Strawman argument is usually counterproductive and tends to say more about the person who invented the strawman than about the people s/he chooses to argue against.

The choice to define the opponent as “hypothetical” is a choice. There are plenty of ways to argue against socialism that aren’t “hypothetical” (which seems to assume “socialism” is a chimera that people invent because they “need” the idea to exist for some reason, not because they see people or systems in the world they want to criticize). There are books that define socialism. There are people who call themselves socialists. There are people whom historians and so on call socialists. There are institutions that define themselves as socialist, are rejected by actual, not-hypothetical non-socialists for being socialist, and so on. There’s plenty of material available, and no need to treat all ideas as “hypothetical” so that you’re free to develop the concepts in your own head from first principles or something.

Much less to corral people online into either defending your strawman or working to help you articulate your own.

engels,

OK, I’ll concede your 576. :^) But your 572,

(part of what owning something means is being permitted right to trade it). So if you can prove to me that you really own everything you claim to then you can trade it as freely as you wish.

is still quite confusing IMO. Sounds like you’re a free-trader but you want to give everyone veto power over every transaction!

RP @590:

You’ve done a quite marvelous job of reading things into my comment that weren’t there. I’m not sure what else to say.

bianca steele @595:

I’m not sure I totally understand your comment, but the point is indeed that if someone opposes capitalism, they shouldn’t thereby be saddled with a commitment to oppose a market economy as well. I brought up Rawls because it was a relatively neutral way of making the point, but there are people within what’s called ‘analytic marxism’ who who quite determinedly oppose capitalism (i.e. private ownership) without committing themselves to a market economy vs. a command economy vs. something else. And there’s nothing incoherent about this; in fact it can seem quite sensible.

mattski @599:

If what you want to do is conflate two different concepts and so introduce unnecessary conceptual confusion, then, hey, who am I to stop you.

Bruce,

but tell me what is the point of this tactic?

Here is a series of claims:

-publicly financed single payer health care can and should strengthen the bargaining power of workers (in addition to improving quality of life/health for the population at large)
-increasing the bargaining power of workers can and should increase workers share of national income
-increasing workers share of national income can and should increase aggregate demand
-increasing aggregate demand should strengthen the market economy

What do you find so objectionable about this argument that you need to ridicule it?

605,606 have a Keynesian presupposition, assuming a cooperative cohesive society at the start. Liberals also assume any lack of cooperation as a political or cultural problem, a flaw for a technocratic fix.

Neoclassical economics assumes an atomistic society of individual competitors, and Marxism assumes a society of competitive classes or class positions*.

*It is wrong in Marxist analysis to focus on an individual capitalist or firm or sector; in this way it is between Keynes and Neoclassicism.

The resistances to and/or desire/efforts to exploit healthcare in both latter cases can be left as an exercise…

There is no such thing as market economy or planned economy. It’s all mixed economy as far as I can see. In a US context, I wouldn’t say that publicly financed single payer health care strengthens the market economy. It would shift the economic mix a bit in a public, non-market direction. I agree that it would be good for the economy, but there is no reason to call this the market economy.

By the way, this is why I dislike the term “market socialism”. It puts undue emphasis on markets in what should be a mixed economy. In the worst case, it opens the door to neoliberals (i.e. people who want more markets than we have today) disguised as socialists.

1) Somebody way up above asked for a source on Marx moving away from the LTV. (Or was it Falling Rate of Profit?) In any case, Michael Heinrich appears to discuss it in An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital 2012. Controversial, and I haven’t read it.

Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi on Heinrich pdf, hardcore Marxist economics. Carchedi also counters Heinrich in Behind the Crisis

2) Michael Roberts blog is a good place to get some orthodox analysis of why Keynesianism must fail, even under good political conditions. Increasing wage share in an open economy (include “social wage”, healthcare, ss, unemployment, education, etc) must eventually decrease profits and decrease reinvestment and hasten collapse or crisis and wage suppression. Think of 70s England. If you are interested, search “Keynes” on his blog Michael Roberts The Next Recession will get you there. Prepare for charts and jargon.

I agree that [single-payer health care] would be good for the economy, but there is no reason to call this the market economy.

I chose those words because that is the aspect of the story that, here on this CT thread, seems most controversial. Everything I’ve argued has been premised on the real world, mixed economy.

While Norwegian Guy 12.27.14 at 10:10 pm has highlighted the problem with terminology, we have no alternative.

I have exactly the same concerns over “mixed economy” as this can mean a mix of markets and plans, or mix of public and private capitalist.

Market socialism can be understood as being mixed with planning and should not concern people too much. However mixing market socialism with market capitalism is anathema.

As Rich Puchalsky noted, Marx was an an egalitarian. He supported distributing wealth according to productivity under socialism, and then distributing wealth according to need under communism. Neither is egalitarian.

If there is an equality for Marxists – it is a moral equality that only arises under advanced communism.

I think Marx was wrong about a lot of things. Egalitarianism is one of them. I part ways with him there. As was his belief that worker concentration in the factories would eventually bring about great solidarity and the downfall of capitalism itself. Though, from his vantage point, from his being in the thick of things during the rise of the industrial revolution in Britain, it’s not all that surprising that he would believe that. But, overall, I think too many dismiss him because they’ve radically increased their standards of judgment just for him. I don’t know of any other figure in history that seems to need such a high batting average in order to be “taken seriously.” Marx’s standard is quite nearly 1000, it seems, when most other thinkers can get away with a ton of strikeouts and a few singles.

Marx has to be better than Ted Williams in his best year (1941), or he’s easily dismissed.