Mistakes In Marxism - reasonable rant
Marxism
has certainly done a lot of damage in the past two centuries, but Marx
himself insisted until his death in 1883 that he was "not a Marxist."
I've never held him accountable for the great damage done in his name
during this century, any more than I would hold Christ accountable for
the Inquisition. In the same way, John Maynard Keynes would be
mortified if he were alive today, seeing the global damage his
"neo-Keynesian" followers have done in his name. Marx was a theoretical
socialist, an intellectual giant of his time who found his ideas
twisted by the militant revolutionaries of Europe into action schemes.
All the while he objected that history could not be hurried: Capitalism
first had to outlive its usefulness, he insisted. It was not until 1913
when Rosa Luxemburg, a militant communist theoretician in Germany, was
brave enough to acknowledge that Marx left this giant loophole in his
system of thought -- which admitted the possibility that capitalism
could develop indefinitely. Marx wasn't hedging. His precise, formal
scholarship was, after all, keyed to the Hegelian dialectic, which
would permit that outcome. In addition (and before you jump on me, read Capital first! All of it!) there is nothing in his writings to suggest he thought it a good idea that the state own the means of production, as to him the state itself was the problem. To Marx, "communism" merely meant community ownership of property, to prevent the landed gentry from accumulating capital amidst the pauperization of the workers and peasantry. As policy, he advocated confiscatory inheritance taxes to keep property and society fluid. Clearly he would have been more amazed by the widescale worker ownership of land and commercial equity that he would see today in the West. His theoretical advocacy of common property was built on an assumption that a small class of capitalists would eventually accumulate all property, that capitalism could not find a way to disperse property to the masses. Revolution would occur when disequilibrium became intolerable. It was V.I. Lenin who fostered the idea of a bureaucracy that would manage the community's property. But Marx was a man of his time, and objective analysis shows this. And his assumptions are "of his time" also... and that's where he run afoul of his own wrong-headed historicity.
There are many mistakes, or just unaddressed
issues in Das Kapital (in English, "Capital"). The most egregious include:
- Innovation
– In my deconstruction “Das Kapital”, in grad school, I was struck with
the way Marx not only “assumes away” certain economic foundational
principles (scarcity immediately comes to mind) but ignores realities
of not only in economic, but human and social advancement – namely, the
role of innovation. The transfer of earned wealth that socialist
policies mandate, are a detriment to entrepreneurship and innovation.
Entrepreneurship and innovation are driven by the potential for
material rewards. If we take away or reduce the material rewards, we’ll
have less innovation. Less innovation means less of all the cool,
useful, and life-saving stuff we all love And if you don't believe
innovation matters - tell me all about the personal computer
industry... in 1888. You can't. Guess why? - Stasis –
Hand-in-hand with the exclusion of innovation, is the concept of
economic “stasis”. This is the assumption (that word again!) that all
the industrial/agricultural processes that CAN be invented or developed
HAVE been invented or developed. At the turn of the 20th century, Lord
Kelvin, the great 19th Century physicist, announced that “all that can
be learnt in physics, has been learnt... all that now remains is more
and more precise techniques in measurement...” Well, didn't work out,
did it? And it doesn't for Marx... processes are continually being
improved and re-engineered. - Enpurpled Victorian prose - An example of the problems which confront the ordinary scholar is the
phraseology '...immense accumulation of commodities-its unit being a
single commodity': one elephant = one mouse. You be the judge of this equivocation. - That
human beings MUST be predictable, and therefore, must be controlled in
order to reach the consistency of behavior necessary to make the whole
thing work. See below. - And the over-riding exclusion, a topic
Marx doesn't even touch - Where are the angels to run your system?
Where are these people to be found? Someone who won't “game” the
system? Even if one grants Marx his best possible case—that they (the
planners/ the dictatorship of the proletariat) are well-meaning,
farsighted individuals armed with complete knowledge of present and
future conditions and have the best interests of consumers in mind, as
opposed to being fools and psychopaths—from their own perspective, the
ONLY way to exclude “revisionists” and “counter-revolutionaries” is,
ultimately (when re-education and imprisonment fail), to kill them off.
Continually. There is something desperately implausible about Marx's
belief that there are simply no costs whatever to life under communism. - Ignoring the importance, nay, primacy of the individual. And
this ties in directly with the innovation factor. I believe that in
law, business, and technology individual primacy is almost absolute.
That is, the law should do everything possible to maximize
opportunities for individuals (and, by extension responsibility) and
the community should only be important where one individuals rights are
beginning to trump others (a tough line to draw, I know). Businesses
should do the same. Institutions should do the same. So should
technology. This is how we innovate, this is show society progresses -
not by collective action, ONLY. - The mistake interpreters of
Marx make. This is the worst mistake, for Marx, the philosopher and
political theorist, has been transmogrified into a rabid polemicist by
atavistic, thuggish revolutionary opportunists like Lenin. Neither "The
Communist Manifesto", nor "Capital' are rabid calls to action- they are
social critiques. Consider - who else was a major social critic during
the period Marx was active? Charles Dickens, that's who. My contention
is that both Marx and Dickens offered the observations of two men
living in Britain who were one year apart in age. Both observed a world
that had only fifty years of rudimentary experience with industrial
commerce. They were observers in the earliest years (and most egregious
abuses) of industrial commerce. When both men came of age in the 1830's
there were no elevators to make skyscrapers, canals were just being
built for transport, horse and wagon were the main mode of transport,
bicycles hadn't been invented. Trains were virtually unknown as were
any form of telegraph. England, particularly London, had no sewer
system no bathing, no toilets and dentistry was done by barbers. Ships
had sails, but only a few masts, since square riggers were yet to come,
muskets were common as were swords and dueling. Department stores,
fixed pricing, cash registers and the notion of doctors with clean
hands were only to come in the last part of either man's life; after
most of their writing had been done. Dickens described the lot of most
people, not just poor, but most people in the foul smelling, illness
bound London. It was miserable, and Dickens saw the cause as industrial
commerce. Karl Marx saw the same thing, with the additional cause in
the rudiments of global trade. England and much of Europe were buying
global supplies with the protection of armies and navies to maintain
modest stability with local communities mostly in rebellion.
That
is the world most Marxist-Leninists (did you catch that?) still see
today. They see Dicken's poverty all around them, they see Marx's
elitist class analysis and labor theory of value based on mid-19th
Century industrial commerce. Marx's and Dicken's world had only the
rudiments of technology, rudiments of international trade, no
agricultural surpluses and no significant banking or capital
markets...certainly no government regulation of contracts, labor law,
health codes or anything else.
Dickens offers
his readers a world of cheer and evil, a world of
melodrama and pathos. To gauge the mood swings of this world, the
readers in fact need only to observe the way Dickens pictures London.
It is in his beloved city, one that he can never stay away for too
long, and one that is his best source of inspiration for his endeavors.
If London’s cityscape is upbeat and bright such as is found in The
Pickwick Papers, then England is doing good, and the mood of the
Dickensian world is happy and hopeful. This is the case with Dickens’
early phase of creativity. A gloomy London, with muddy streets and
enveloped in fog and soot and gloom such as is found in his later
novels, means England is sick and needs diagnosis. But, being a
documentarian of the age, Dickens does not rise to his level of
incompetence-he does not play the physician and say "And Now What Must
Be Done?".... Marx does offer a critique of capitalism, and certain
remedies for mitigating it's more abusive excesses. But none his work
never pretended to be a playbook ("Rules For Radicals" anyone?). that
was left to the militant revolutionaries of Europe, to transform Marx
and his insightful and penetrating social critique, into failed action
schemes
The
problem with Marx was not his diagnosis of capitalism (all too
pertinent, for the time). His problem was in his proposed solutions...
far was worse than the problem. More fundamentally he failed to
understand
that any system will get abused by powerful, motivated
people..communism failed to have a mechanism to get rid of them.
The labor movements which created safer and better-paying jobs did gain
immensely from Marx's ideas. However, Marx was wrong about a great many
things, most significantly about capitalism. Capitalism is blind, and
what is more, it is a component of human nature. Marxism, or the forced
collection and reallocation of wealth is only brought upon man by
convention and, being an ideology created by man and not by nature, it
is inherently both evil and faulty. If man is ever to prosper it is
best that he claims personal responsibility for himself and through
hard work and ingenuity raise himself to a better life.
I tend to agree with Churchill in his assessment about
democracy...terrible system, but less bad than all the others. I think
the same applies to capitalism... many faults just the least terrifying option.
By
way of commentary, let me finish with this, possibly trite, yet true
observation of all the "isms" we encounter in life. Both Marx and
Dickens and indeed, the vast majority of people, personally known to
me, view the pastiche of life as a continuum. A sort of linear spectrum
- right or left, up or down, hot or cold. In my experience, life -
social, political. economic. goofing off: is not a linear experience
folks. It;s a sphere. And like the Universe itself, the sphere is
constantly expanding - upward, outward, all over. And unlike a
polyhedron, there isn't even a flat place to land your philosophical
framework on!
It's like the study of complex systems - which extends to ALL disciplines - history, biology, economics, name it. Complex systems is a scientific field which studies the common properties of systems that are considered fundamentally complex, that is fundamentally interactive, not static. It is also called complex systems theory, complexity science, study of complex systems, sciences of complexity, non-equilibrium physics, and historical physics. The key problems of complex systems are difficulties with their formal modeling and simulation. From this perspective, in different research contexts complex systems are defined on the base of their different attributes. Since all complex systems have many interconnected components, the science of networks and network theory are important aspects of the study of complex systems. At present, the consensus related to one universal definition of complex system does not exist yet. That's how life REALLY operates... a complex system of different, yet constantly interacting systems of being, of thought, of execution. Now if that sounds like hippy-dippy drivel, consider these examples of complex adaptive systems, including the stock market, social insect and ant colonies, the biosphere and the ecosystem, the brain and the immune system, the cell and the developing embryo, manufacturing businesses and any human social group-based endeavour in a cultural and social system such as political parties or communities. Does your head hurt yet?
My personal view is that, blind adherence to any ONE agenda or belief (religiosity!) "the way", is, at best, one dimensional thinking, and at worst, psychotic... there is no "one way" guys. Constant requirements gathering and evaluation followed by execution based on those data... that, to me, is sanity.
