On 10/25/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com > wrote:
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> I must rise to Marx's defense! I have to confess to never being able
> to get through Capital Vol. 2, but Vols. 1 and 3 are splendid. The
> structure of his analysis is thoroughly compelling, and revealing:
> starting from the simple commodity and expanding cumulatively into
> the social system that both produces it and grows up around it - the
> factory, imperialism, finance. The antagonistic nature of capitalist
> production, the structure of classes, the control of labor, the role
> of the state, the division of surplus value into profit/interest/rent
> - that's all applicable to the world of 2006. More relevant, in some
> ways, because capitalism has pervaded almost every nook and cranny of
> the earth, and even our consciousness, far more than in the mid-19C.
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> Doug
_Capital: A Critique of Political Economy_ is one of the great works of literature. As far as a non-fiction works of literature I'd rate it along with Thucydides _History_ the Works of Aristotle, and Gibbons' Decline and Fall", for literary power. I have read it three times and intend to read it again someday. Every time I reread it I see its beauty of expression and thrill at its naturalistic view of human society. There is much to admire about the book.
I have also read the incomplete volumes, but not with much of a thrill. I think that volumes 2 and 3 show Marx's increasing realization of failure, in his ultimate project of setting the foundations of a scientific theory equal to Darwin's. There is much historical research on this and I am not an expert.
When I say that Marx came to a stop because he realized that he had not quite created the foundations of a science I believe that Marx had in mind what Engels' characterized in his famous funeral oration.
"Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
"But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark."Marx, truly thought that he could pull off what Engels attributed to him in this oration. I think Marx recognized, vaguely that Darwin's theory was a truly historical science. I think that Marx, in the composition of the following volumes of "Capital" realized that he wasn't succeeding in the precise "scientific" sense that he hoped for, and that if "Capital" was a success it was at a lower level of certainty. I think that both of us can at least agree that Marx did not create an historical science, with the explanatory depth of evolutionary biology.
Again this is an old and contentious subject and I understand your above comment to be limited to Marx's contribution to knowledge at this lower level of certainty, without any claims that Marx provided anything more than good insights, and, perhaps, a high level of perspicacity. For where Darwin was a hedgehog, Marx was a fox and Marx at least had as much historical insight as Bakunin, his main rival. But did he have more useful historical insight than the poet Yeats, in the depth of mysticism, or the novelist Tolstoy, in his apprehension of character and historical movement, or for that matter a Darwinian derived contemporary writer on past societies such as Jared Diamond? I don't think so. He probably had as much insight as these people but he no more created a testable scientific theory than they did. I contend that anyone could read, say Thucydides, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Gibbons, Adam Smith, Tolstoy, Rudlolf Rocker, Coase, and Alfred D. Chandler, carefully and thoroughly and leave off Marx and not be very handicapped in ones view of history, social relations, etc. Quite frankly, I think the notion that Marx should be privileged as a writer that we need to understand in order to understand contemporary society over, say Thucydides, or Charles Tilley, is a kind of idolatry. I am not attributing this idolatry, to you but there is a certain tendency at times to treat Marx as holy writ, and then, when one is disappointed with Marx's prognostications (or with the current historical conjuncture), to treat him as a "false idol." In fact I will push this. I think that there is as much value for understanding contemporary society in reading Alfred Chandler's "The Visible Hand" or Tolstoy's "War and Peace" or Lewis Mumford's "The Myth of the Machine", or Tilley's work on the state, as there is in reading Capital.
So what is good and lasting in Marx?
I think that one thing that is good in Marx is the urge that his view of society incorporate current science and that we view society from a naturalistic perspective. In other words, though Marx's attempt to develop a theory of capitalism in particular and of history in general may have failed, his urge to produce a view of society that was consistent with the sciences and modeled on the heuristics of the natural sciences, is correct. If we follow Marx's example without hubris, realizing that science is in the first place always approximate, never complete, and that non-theoretical naturalism is even less certain, then I think that we are on solid ground. Brian Leiter, among others has called this methodological naturalism.
Doug, you point out in your book "Wall Street" in the chapter on "Market Models" that "Economics was once known as political economy; class, power, institutions, and even a vision of how the world should be mattered at least as much as numbers." And you point out in your above note to me that a strength of Marx is that he gives a good description of "class, power, institutions." I agree and disagree. I agree that Marx provides a good number of notions and ideas that helps us to think through some of the processes of our society. You listed some of them above.
But let me list some more, that fit into what you have listed.
You point out above that capitalism " has pervaded almost every nook and cranny of the earth, and even our consciousness." I don't quite agree with the point about "consciousness" but I think that there is even stronger terms where Marx was correct. From what I gather from the Grundrisse Marx thought that commodity markets of labor, property, and money always transform areas where these markets don't exist. The descriptions are a little like a violent group confronting a non-violent group. The non-violent group in the face of violence will either disappear, be made subservient or end up imitating the violent group. This is what the commodity markets of labor, property and money are like. I think there is deep insight in Marx's notion and in the role of the state in enforcing this process. Further, a motto of capitalism that can be derived from Marx (but also some anarchists) is that whatever can be made into a commodity will be made into a commodity. Further, Marx pointed out that the commodity system transcends national boundaries, in effect cannibalizes culture. I also think that Marx's particular kind of recognition of ruling class dominance, though limited in a complex society, is generally true through historical times. Brilliant insights all and all, and even more brilliant that he put them together into a single viewpoint.
But in my view it is the singularity of the viewpoint that is ultimately an intellectual danger. All of the usual problems of confirmation bias and inference of particular causes where there may not be causal relations apply here. The slipperiness of dialectics makes it even worse. I also doubt that Marx was correct about the falling rate of profit, or the labor theory of value -- except, as far as the latter, is a general philosophical point that the origin of all artifacts comes first from nature and then from human work.
Finally, as long as Marx's view of "ideology" is taken as a common sense or everyday notion, which is inherently instable, I think that what Marx and Engels wrote in "The German Ideology" is a brilliant explication of how ideology works. But I don't think the idea of ideology should be separated in any meaningful way from other notions, such as deception and self-deception, hypocrisy, delusion, world-view, indoctrination, propaganda, etc. In other words, ideology is the "social" analog of these notions. The notion of ideology does not have the preciseness that we hope for from a scientific concept, (a preciseness approaching but never reaching that of an artificial language) but is about as loose as all other words we find in natural languages. In his view of "ideology" I don't think that Marx should be privileged. One can find similar notions thrashed out between Socrates and Thrasymachus. Marx and Engels simply brought these notions together.
What I am urging over and over again, in my annoying way, is that Marx not be privileged.
But I would like to go a step further, with a bit of tolerance from you and the list, hoping that you realize that I am not an expert on any subject, especially not this subject.
Doug you state: "The antagonistic nature of capitalist production, the structure of classes, the control of labor, the role of the state, the division of surplus value into profit/interest/rent - that's all applicable to the world of 2006."
But I wounder if this is really true. I wonder how much of our view that we live in a capitalist society is a product of our own particular ideology. Now please don't scoff, but I am not really sure that "real-existing Capitalism" is any more like capitalism, than "real-existing Socialism" was anything like socialism. I used to believe that Marx described some great portion of the reality that we live in, but I don't think it is true any longer.
What I mean is that some combination of Alfred Chandler-Charles Tilley-Lewis Mumford, along with conceiving of the major Corporations as state entities, or separate "legal sovereignties" is closer to the truth of the world that we live in. It seems to me that the world is dominated by great continents of huge bureaucratic state-like organizations, some of them sanctioned by national Governments, but semi-independent of those Nation-Governments, and some of them operated by those Governments. It seems to me that "markets" are the lakes and pools and streams of these continents and there are of course seas and oceans in between (stop that metaphor?!) but in fact the big state-like business organizations do not in fact operate in what we believe is a capitalist manner -- they are sovereignties more than they are business firms. This is where I think that Marx mainly went wrong. We moved, with many twist and turns from organizations like the British East India Company to business organizations such as Standard Oil, General Electric, Microsoft, and organizations such as those sanctioned by Japan or South Korea, and business organizations such as those sponsored by the Chinese Government, and capitalism doesn't have much to do with this process. I just don't see that Marx has very much to say about the kinds of National Governments and state-like business enterprises that seem to dominate the world political-economy today. This seems to me outside his reality.
As I said, this is very impressionistic on my part but it is where I am at as far as Marx is concerned.
Jerry