The Opium of the Intellectuals (2005)
newcriterion.com
newcriterion.com
That's the trouble with looking backward to Marx or Smith for guidance. Both predate the Industrial Revolution reaching full speed. The basic problem of their era was making enough stuff, just as it had been for millenia. Today's basic problem is that we don't need that many people to make all the stuff. Neither Marx nor Smith addressed that problem. Keynes said it might be a problem for generations after his. Well, we're there.
We've also conquered scale. One of the assumptions of capitalism is that lots of people working for their own self-interest would outperform a central planning system. It looked that way in the days of the USSR. Big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. General Motors, once the biggest company, had to operate as a bunch of independent companies under one corporate umbrella just to make the thing manageable.
That's no longer true. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Apple, FedEx, UPS, AT&T, and WalMart are all very centralized. It doesn't seem to hurt their performance. They don't compete on price - they define markets and platforms, and dictate terms. They're able to change rapidly compared to monopolies of the past - each of those companies is quite different than a decade ago. Computers and networks have made this possible - deployment at scale works far better than it did even twenty years ago. Even for companies with physical products.
Economics for the 21st century needs to start dealing with these issues, not rehashing the 19th century.
I don't disagree that AT&Ts monopoly control over the local loop in California, the Midwest and the South, or its oligopolistic control of cell signals have hurt their performance. It has hurt consumers, it has hurt US productivity. One just need to look at some of the other industrialized countries to see how their network access and cell signals can function unfettered by such monopolies.
A decade after the taxpayer TARP bailout of the major "too big to fail" banks, it's stunning to see someone claim that corporate America has finally itself licked centralization and monopoly.
And that level of centralization and oligopoly is leading to the exact kinds of problems predicted by economists for the last century: poor service, increased cost, lack of real innovation. Centralization is still as bad as it’s always been. Nothing has changed on that score.
Firstly, your examples are self-contradictory. WalMart doesn't compete on price? Really? Amazon doesn't compete on price? Come on now.
GM (~225,000 employees) had to split itself up to be manageable, but you claim just decades later the much smaller Google (~88,000 employees), Amazon etc have "conquered scale".
Yet Google has been forced to split itself up: what do you think Alphabet is, if not Larry and Sergey accepting/admitting that Google had become a place where innovation could no longer happen due to its size and low energy levels? Most of Google's most interesting projects now hang under Alphabet as separate companies e.g. Waymo, or in semi-autonomous subsidiaries like DeepMind. Google proper is still able to do a few interesting things with AI research but when was the last time they launched a truly interesting or new product that became essential in our lives? The Google of 2006 was in many ways far more effective and innovative than the Google of 2018, despite/because of its much smaller size.
Facebook has a similar problem. Facebook's growth has been coming from acquisitions like Instagram and WhatsApp that continue to operate rather autonomously. The core company has grown hugely but what do they do all day?
Apple hasn't actually changed in size much over time when you eliminate their retail employees (i.e. focus on the parts where risks are taken and new things are made). That's why they can pack most of the company into a giant doughnut in a single city.
All of these companies seem to be poster-children for the problems that come with size and success. Googlers seem to spend most of their energy fighting social justice wars or rewriting things from one language to another. Facebook has to buy up successful companies to stay ahead of the curve. Microsoft stagnated for years under Ballmer and only now is it being turned (slowly) around - largely by letting go of the tight central control and adherence to a unified product strategy that previously typified the company (e.g. everything must integrated with Windows).
The basic underlying insights about human nature that separate right wing capitalist thought from left wing socialist thought aren't so trivial that they fundamentally change when you make communication faster. Knowledge is still scattered, power still corrupts, reality is still too large for any one person or group to comprehend, the way forward is often unclear and "picking winners" is therefore a strategy doomed to fail.
> This class struggle that is commonly expressed as the revolt of a society's productive forces against its relations of production, results in a period of short-term crises as the bourgeoisie struggle to manage the intensifying alienation of labor experienced by the proletariat, albeit with varying degrees of class consciousness. This crisis culminates in a proletarian revolution and eventually leads to the establishment of socialism—a socioeconomic system based on social ownership of the means of production, distribution based on one's contribution and production organized directly for use. As the productive forces continued to advance, Marx hypothesized that socialism would ultimately transform into a communist society; a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership and the underlying principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
Marx fantasized about what is called a democratic post-scarcity economy today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
Compare with classic socialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_each_according_to_his_contr...
I doubt that the author of the book tried to understand Marx because he wrote this:
> Why is it, he wondered, that certain intellectuals are “merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines”?
and
> He quotes the French writer Simone Weil’s sly reversal of Marx: “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. . . . [I]t has been continually used . . . as an opiate for the people.”
Marx wanted the opposite:
- Marx wanted power for the people. I guess Marxism and Stalinism is the same for many people although they are opposites.
- Marx wanted a revolution and not soothed tranquilized workers.
And your claim is wrong too:
> Today's basic problem is that we don't need that many people to make all the stuff. Neither Marx nor Smith addressed that problem.
Regarding:
> Economics for the 21st century needs to start dealing with these issues, not rehashing the 19th century.
IMO some of today's economic, social and political concerns and proposed solutions seem similar to those in the 19th century.
He didn't write it about Marx, he wrote it about the Marxists of his day (mid-20-th century France) -- people who were justifying Stalinism crimes and so on.
>Marx wanted the opposite
What Marx wanted is not really relevant. As Marx himself said, you don't judge a man by what he thinks himself to be. Similarly, you don't just whether Marxism has been used as an opiate for the people by whether Marx wanted that to happen or not.
Ideas leave the hands of their creators. To see how they end up and what kind of influence they have, we must examine them in actual use, after they spread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism
The words Communism and Marxism are quite meaningless without context after mid 20th century.
Granted, I am not a historian and most people who called themselves Marxists or Communists in the mid 20th century might have defended Stalinism.
This isn't a very nuanced view of even those Marxists, who were not justifying Stalin at all - in fact, the matters of May '68 were almost entirely inspired by a new kind of Marxism, much further from Stalinism. It was an expression of dissatisfaction. It's extremely curious to me that the author doesn't once bring up the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals writing since the 1930s on the failure of both Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism. Rather, Marxists (all of them) are painted with a broad Stalinist brush, which is very ignorant of the movements even during the time the author of the book was alive. Unfortunately the 2005 article has done very little research into the Marxist movements past and present of that year.
http://praxeology.net/BT-SSA.htm
Many of them seem to have come to pass in the century since Tucker's writing.
So what did Karl Marx want?
"Until its complete extermination or loss of national status, this racial trash always becomes the most fanatical bearer there is of counter-revolution, and it remains that. That is because its entire existence is nothing more than a protest against a great historical revolution... The next world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but also entire reactionary peoples, to disappear from the earth. And that too is progress."
-Karl Marx, 1849, Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
You might want to read Hegel and then reading other works by Marx and Engels for context if you are interested in Engels’s theories about history, popular movements, etc.
And maybe studying a bit about European history. You could start with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848_in_the_Aus...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848
(Admittedly these Wikipedia articles are not the best sources. I’m sure you can find better books about the Austrian empire in the mid 19th century and specifically 1848–1849 if you hunt around.)
For that matter, you might want to just read this whole essay instead of quoting two random partial sentence out of context, along with some innuendo that readers who come along will be shocked to learn some deep secret about Engels’s motivations by reading two sentences.
Here’s an machine-produced (google translate) translation of the first bit in its surroundings; I'm sure a human translator would do a better job but you can get the basic idea. Sorry for the extended quotation, but I feel that a shorter bit chopped out is more likely to lead you to misunderstanding.
""" [...]
The year 1848 brought at first the most terrible confusion to Austria, releasing for a moment all these different tribes, hitherto intermarried by Metternich. Germans, Magyars, Czechs, Poles, Moravians, Slovaks, Croats, Ruthenians, Romanians, Illyrians, Serbs came into conflict with each other, while in each of these nations the individual classes also fought each other. But soon order came into this jumble. The warring parties divided into two large army camps; on one side of the revolution the Germans, Poles and Magyars; on the side the counter-revolution the rest, all the Slavs except the Poles, the Romanians and the Transylvanian Saxons.
Where does this divorce come from, what facts underlie it?
This divorce corresponds to the whole history of the tribes in question. It is the beginning of deciding the life or death of all these great and small nations.
The whole earlier history of Austria proves it to this day, and the year 1848 has confirmed it. Among all the nationalities and monasteries of Austria are only three who have been the bearers of progress who have actively intervened in history, which are still viable - the Germans, the Poles, the Magyars . Therefore, they are now revolutionary.
All other great and small tribes and peoples have the mission to perish in the revolutionary world-storm. Therefore, they are now counterrevolutionary.
[...]
Pan-Slavism did not arise in Russia or Poland, but in Prague and Agram. Pan-Slavism is the alliance of all the Slavic nations and monks of Austria, and secondarily Turkey, to fight the Austrian Germans, the Magyars and possibly the Turks. The Turks just come in by accident and, as a run-down nation, can not be left out of the question. Panslavism, in its basic tendency, is directed against the revolutionary elements of Austria and therefore reactionary from the outset.
Pan-Slavism immediately proved this reactionary tendency by a double betrayal: by sacrificing the only Slavic nation to date, the Poles , its petty national peculiarities and selling itself and Poland to the Russian tsars .
The direct purpose of Pan-Slavism is to produce a Slavic empire from the Ore Mountains and the Carpathians to the Black, Aegean and Adriatic Sea under Russian imperial jurisdiction, an empire that is approximately the same except for the German, Italian, Magyar, Wallachian, Turkish, Greek and Albanian languages a dozen Slavic languages and major dialects. The whole thing is held together not by the elements that used to hold and develop Austria, but by the abstract nature of Slavism and the so-called Slavic language, which, however, is common to the majority of the inhabitants. But where does Slavdom exist in the minds of some ideologues, where the "Slavic language" is more in the minds of Messrs. Palacky, Gaj and Co., and almost in the Old Slavic litany of the Russian church, which no longer understands Slavs? In reality, all of these peoples have the most varied degrees of civilization, from the advanced level of modern industry and education of Bohemia (by Germans ) down to the almost nomadic barbarism of the Croats and Bulgarians, and in reality all these nations have the opposite interests. In reality, the Slavic language of these ten to twelve nations consists of as many usually incomprehensible dialects, which can even be reduced to different main tribes (Czech, Illyrian, Serbian, Bulgarian), by the complete neglect of all literature and the rudeness of most peoples became pure patois and with few exceptions always had a foreign non-Slavic language as written language. The Pan-Slavic unity is thus either a pure enthusiasm or - the Russian Knute .
<172> And which nations should go to the head of this great Slavic kingdom? The very same one which for a thousand years has been shattering, splintering, impelling others, non-Slavic peoples, their supply of vital and viable elements, saved by the victorious weapons of non-Slavic peoples from submergence in Turkish barbarism, small, mutually separated, impotent tribes deprived of their national strength from a few thousand to not two million! So weak have they become that, for example, the tribe, which was the strongest and most dreadful in the Middle Ages, the Bulgarians, now known in Turkey only for their gentleness and feebleness, and putting their fame in it, dobre chrisztian, good Christian call! Where is one of these tribes, not excepting the Czechs and Serbs, who has a national historical tradition that lives in the people and goes beyond the smallest local fights?
The period of Pan-Slavism was in the 8th and 9th centuries, when the southern Slavs still occupied the whole of Hungary and the East and threatened Byzantium. Could they not resist the German and Magyar invasions, could they not gain independence and form a durable empire, even as their two enemies, the Magyars and Germans, mutilated each other, how do they want it now, after a millennial subjugation and denationalization?
It is not a country in Europe that does not possess, at any angle, one or more peoples' ruins, remnants of an earlier population, pushed back and subjugated by the nation, which later became the bearer of historical development. These remnants of a nation which, as Hegel says, are relentlessly trodden down by the course of history, these peoples' trashes are always, and remain until their utter obliteration or denationalization, the fanatical carriers of the counterrevolution, as their very existence is in itself a protest against a great historical revolution ,
So in Scotland the Gaeles, the pillars of the Stuarts from 1640 to 1745.
Thus in France the Bretons, the supports of the Bourbons from 1792 to 1800.
So in Spain the Basques, the pillars of Don Carlos.
Thus, in Austria, the Pan-Slavic Southern Slavs, who are nothing more than the peoples of a very confused millennial development . That this likewise very confused peoples' tragedy sees its salvation only in the repentance of the whole European movement, which for him should not go from west to east, but from east to west, that the liberating weapon, The band of unity for him is the Russian Knute - that is the most natural thing in the world.
The Southern Slavs had thus clearly expressed their reactionary character before 1848. The year 1848 made him open to the day.
When the February storm broke out, who made the Austrian revolution? Vienna or Prague? Budapest or Agram? The Germans and Magyars or the Slavs?
It is true that among the more educated southern Slavs there was a small democratic party that, while not giving up its nationality, wanted to put it at liberty. This illusion, which also succeeded in arousing sympathy among the West European Democrats, sympathies that were fully justified as long as the Slav Democrats fought against the common enemy - this illusion was broken by the bombardment of Prague. From this event, all South Slavic tribes, after the Croats' act, made themselves available to the Austrian reaction. Those leaders of the South Slavic movement, who still further fiddle with the equal rights of nations, democratic Austria, etc., are either nailed-down enthusiasts, such as many newspaper writers, or villains like Jellachich. Their democratic assurances mean nothing more than the democratic protestations of the Austrian official counter-revolution. Enough, in practice, the restoration of the South Slavic nationality begins with the most brutal rage against the Austrian and Nagyan revolution, with a first great service of love, which they prove to the Russian Tsar.
The Austrian camarilla found, apart from the high nobility, the bureaucracy and the soldiery, only support from the Slavs. The Slavs decided the fall of Italy, the Slavs stormed Vienna, the Slavs attack the Magyars from all sides. At their head as spokesman the Czechs under Palacky, as swordsmen the Croats under Jellachich.
This is to thank for the fact that in June the German democratic press sympathized everywhere with the Czech Democrats when they were carted off by Windischgratz, by the same Windischgrätz, who is now their hero.
[...] """
Extermination of what ?
> The next world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but also entire reactionary peoples, to disappear from the earth. And that too is progress."
Clearly his prediction failed because the next world war was not about Marxism. Although Hitler might have gained some popularity by speaking against the global capitalist rentier elite and financial system; I do not know.
IMO WW1, WW2 and the Cold War should be considered as 3 parts of the same nuclear world war.
At least there is much more democracy after "the war" and old power structures have been replaced by more modern power structures.
Most annoying brain virus at the moment are the walking libertarian cuckoo clocks that appear to have infested every online comment section. The contemporary version of the new age hippy marxism of the sixties and seventies, just on the opposite side of the spectrum. Much like the Marxists, they’re completely impervious to the facts, and you’ll get the exact same excuses (“that’s not real capitalism!”). And then there’s blank slatist culture warriors vs biological determinists, techno utopians vs climate defeatists, ...
The same theme - why do so many intellectuals find themselves supporting dictatorships long after the rest of the world has understood their true nature - has been extensively explored by Sowell in books like Intellectuals & Society, and a Conflict of Visions. He finds similar explanations:
* Difficulty in accepting that individuals are inherently limited and corruptible, and that ideas are often worthless when tested in the forge of reality. After all, intellectuals are almost by definition people whose value to society comes from production of ideas and who see themselves as unchained from the normal moral and mental limits most people slave under.
* That reason, reflection and debate are limited tactics that can't yield that much insight about the world.
* That to believe in intellectuals as a concept is almost inherently to disbelieve in the notion of democracy, because if insight and wisdom were really so compressed into a few moralistic bookworms and if most people really had none to share, then voting itself is pointless or even harmful. Instead the best outcomes would be yielded by a dictatorship of intellectuals (which is what communism is, in effect).
So you end up with academics, writers, some kinds of politician ... the people who would these days be called the 'elite' or 'globalists' ... having a distinctly lukewarm relationship with markets and votes throughout history.
Yet because they are fundamentally wrong about human nature, where their ideas are put into practice things inevitably go wrong. The intellectuals who end up in charge don't create a utopia. Their 5 year plans turn out to be not that well planned, their price-fixing turns out to create other problems elsewhere, and their profound belief that most people are too stupid or immoral to rule turns into an oppressive dystopia. And so the wheel turns.
If you're interested in these ideas or philosophies, this video interview with Sowell is a good place to start:
I believe this is as relevant to our current social/political divisiveness as it ever has been. I'd like to read more of what he wrote about that.
I’m quite left-leaning in my views, and I agree with many of the criticisms levelled at capitalism, but I don’t see why people support Marxism.
Two main arguments:
1. Hasn’t Marxism had its chance? Yes, it wasn’t “real Marxism” in a sense, but why would you think it’d turn out different if tried again? We have to consider the reality of the world we live in.
2. How many precedents are there for a complete upheaval of the economic system on that scale that have worked? I’m aware of some of the history, but I can’t think of a change that large which worked.
How do modern Marxists answer those concerns? From the outside it looks like they’re ignoring history or the reality of human behaviour.
No, the two closest things to Marxism that have been tried as alternatives to 19th century capitalism are modern mixed economies (fairly successful in practical terms) and Leninism and it's derivatives (mostly horrible in both practical and moral terms).
Both are pretty different than Marxism on fairly fundamental levels. (The first incorporates many elements of the Marxist program, including it's fundamental prerequisites, but abandons — or at least delays, as the long term arc of the modern mixed economies might be interpreted as a kind of “evolutionary Marxism” with periodic setbacks — key others; the second likewise cherry picks from Marxism, but also abandons the fundamental prerequisites.)
> but why would you think it’d turn out different if tried again?
Well, because it wouldn't be “again”, Marxism is fundamentally different than anything that has been tried before, and the nearest approximations to Marxism that have been tried have widely divergent results.
> How many precedents are there for a complete upheaval of the economic system on that scale that have worked?
The displacement of the dominant feudal economic system with capitalism and the displacement of the original system named capitalism with modern mixed economies (often called “capitalism” and retaining some key features, but distinctly different) are at or, in the former case, beyond the scale of the replacement of modern mixed economies with Marxist ones, and both were reasonably successful.
I also think there's some issue with using "Marxism" to refer to some kind of programme rather than the critique of political economy from the writings of Marx and Engels. This kind of usage lets you get away with saying that a "mixed economy" is something even close to Marxism.
Marx described Communism, with a lower and upper stage. There's not much more to it than that, unless like the Leninists you call the lower stage as "Socialism". Either way, Badiou has a pretty good overview of historical Communist societies (well, as close as one could get) such as the Paris and Shanghai communes. But I wholly disagree with GP's idea that Marx has had his chance. He most certainly hasn't, and it's becoming clearer every passing day.
I'm saying the 19th century system for which the name “capitalism” was coined was replaced basically everywhere with modern mixed economies which are a different but related system; the two share some features just as 19th Century capitalism and feudalism share some features, but they aren't the same system.
> To my knowledge, it's capitalism through and through
It's not; as many people, not least advocates of reversion to (or at least toward) the 19th Century system for which “capitalism” was coined, have noted, modern mixed economies compromise in fairly significant ways the property relations which both defenders of capitalism and it's opponents (including the ones that coined the term “capitalism” for that which they opposed) define as central to capitalism.
> I also think there's some issue with using "Marxism" to refer to some kind of programme rather than the critique of political economy from the writings of Marx and Engels.
That may be valid on some level, but even if so it's purely semantic pedantry that has no bearing on the substance of the discussion; Marx and Engels laid out a program as well as a critique of capitalism, and when we are talking about concrete economic systems that can be tried out, the program is relevant, the critique is not (it is merely the oriel motivating rationale for the concrete program.) A critique can be believed, but not instantiated.
So, if you want to mentally replace “Marxism” with “the concrete program Marx and Engels proposed to address the Marxist critique of capitalism” throughout the discussion, feel free. But don't expect the usage to catch on when the distinction between the Marxist critique and the Marxist program is generally clear from context such that no additional clarity of meaning would be succeed from making the restriction you propose to the use of “Marxism” even if I've were to agree that their is on done level a basis for that restriction.
> This kind of usage lets you get away with saying that a "mixed economy" is something even close to Marxism.
I didn't say it was close to Marxism, I said it was one of the two closest things to Marxism that had been tried (both of which are directly attributable to Marxist influence mitigated by other forces); in fact, my point was expressly that neither of those two things was close enough to Marxism to draw substantive conclusions about Marxism from either, or even both considered together.
At best, I think the only reformulation required would be to put an adjective on the front of "capitalism". Or we could talk in terms of the Spectacle, the culture industry, "the economy", ideological state apparatuses etc. But no matter what, it is economy, and thus in fundamental contradiction to Communism, the end of economy.
I was trying to get at using "Communism" or "Socialism" for their program, rather than "Marxism", which to me is the critique of political economy and out of which necessarily flows Communism.
Marx said "I will not write recipes for the kitchen of the future". As Marx refused to create a "Marxism" for someone to implement, how can Marxism have been tried? It's a question asked by someone who knows little to nothing of him. It's like someone new to computers asking which programming language to learn. There is no answer as it is a naive question. The answer is any or all languages, and they should be studying algorithms and data structures and programming language principles, not the specific mechanism for counting how many characters are in a string in a particular language.
> how many precedents are there for a complete upheaval of the economic system
The upheaval around the time of behavioral modernity. The transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture. From imperial Rome latifundias to feudalism. From feudalism to capitalism. Then the stirrings of post-capitalist systems from the Paris Commune top now. So that's quite a few changes over the past millennia.
Also Marx said these systems are not overthrown, they self-destruct. Kind of like the Great Depression - due to the internal logic of capitalism, companies will shut, evictions will rise, unemployment will skyrocket, and no internal mechanism of capitalism will have a solution to this.
As is often the case in philosophy, Marx was brilliant in critique, but lacking in his prescription. Philosophy tends to be great at asking questions, but not so much at answering them.
I suspect many intellectuals who call themselves Marxists identify with Marx's critique — which arguably still stands and a brilliant and revolutionary body of thought — but not with some of its eventual realizations.
There is both a branch of feminism that is Marxist in the strict sense, and there is the school of feminist critical theory that utilizes parallel structure to (and is largely inspired by) Marxist critical theory, swapping out the central conflict of class for one of gender, but feminism in the broad sense is not inspired by or related to Marxism, and the idea that it is is mostly one of the anti-feminist Right in the West, used to attach the negative emotional charge of Marxism with the general population to feminism.
Marx said capitalism due to its nature would lead to a cycle of wealth inequality, overproduction, debt bubbles and financial crises, and that these would get worse over time. Capitalism would collapse due to this and be replaced not by communism but socialism.
Communism would be the system that comes after socialism.
I'll address each argument.
1. As I've already responded to dragonwriter, it's incorrect to say that "Marxism" is a set of goals to be acheived or a kind of economy or a mode of production or a mode of social organisation. Marxism is simply the critique of political economy, and from that critique emerges the idea of Communism. As to the question, a lot of work has been done in Marxist (and post-Marxist) circles since about the 1950s, you may have heard of the Frankfurt School, for instance. Alain Badiou, a contemporary French philosopher, has written a book called "The Communist Hypothesis" in which he attempts to "rescue" Communism, not merely as a "less-bad" alternative to capitalism (even considering the track record in history) but as the only alternative. He uses the example of approaches to proving a hypothesis, in which each iteration the lessons learned from the previous attempt are modified. This is directly relatable to history - consider the evolution of Leninism after the Paris Commune, or Maoism after Leninism.
2. Capitalism is the greatest precedent, and feudalism too before it. Though it's worth noting that not only is Communism the "upheaval" of an economic system, it is as Gilles Dauve but it: "the end of economy". Arguably, capitalism really has worked; Marx would be the last to claim that capitalism hasn't ushered in massive prosperity and progress.
These are just my responses, but there is a whole host of diversity within modern (post 1930s) Marxist thought that stretches to this day, with various responses to your questions, obviously not so condensed. The Frankfurt School was critical of both Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism, while furthering the Marxist critique to a mass-media world. The left-communists champion a return to Marx himself rather than trying to re-formulate critique for the modern world.
But I want to disspell the idea that modern Marxists are ignorant of history or human behaviour; Marxism is relatively popular in both sociology and some history departments.
All but the most obsessively hard-line anti-communist grew up in post-war Europe accepting that the political witch-hunts conducted by Senator McCarthy and his acolytes in the 1950s were a severe assault on freedom – which indeed they were. Yet if you took McCarthyism at its most demented and placed it against the Soviet model at its most liberal – say, for instance, the Khrushchev era – the repression in the East was incomparably more ruthless and extensive than in the West. Almost no one now, except for the most zealous Stalinist, would dispute this fact. Nonetheless the litany of human rights abuses committed by the Soviet state from Prague to Vladivostok never elicited the same invective of intellectuals or protesters in the West. Two books were kept with two totally different methods of accounting. Why?
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fallout-guilty-liberal-lost-innocen...
That's the key point. There have been two competing traditions in Western philosophy, going back to the Greeks. They have to do with the various finitudes that humans experience, such as ignorance, death, and suffering.
According to one view, these are illusions and not only is human understanding potential infinite, but so are all the other types of finitude that interconnect with it. Perhaps the most famous proponent of this view is Plato.
The other view, perhaps first made clear by Aristotle, is that human beings and human existence, while they can be improved in important ways, can never be made perfect because our ability to understand the world and act in it are always limited.
In the modern era, Marx thought we could abolish most or all finitudes, and have a utopia. Some liberals also think something like this, but the Anglo-American political tradition is more on the Aristotelian side, as was Aron.
I’m not sure anyone would argue with the drier thesis. It’s what isn’t mentioned which guides the dishonesty. Marx’s commitments and adorations were always to the working class, and his proper legacy was won exclusively through the working class. He was a strictly anti-authoritarian democracy absolutist, for the record.
The article is a strategic smear for a target who knows literal nothing about the history of Karl Marx, because all the facts will check out true.
But is this only a cheap framing of Marx’s work as hype? I get a sense there is an additional mythical context I’m missing out on. Can anybody explain why this is compelling to it’s audience?
I don't even see why it matters. I myself am not an expert on gravitational waves. If Neil Degrasse Tyson or Michio Kazu read a scientific paper by Rainer Weiss on gravitational waves and then break it down for me in layman's language, I don't see why that takes any shine off Weiss's Nobel prize.
As it is, Marx wrote some work for the public like the Communist Manifesto (although 170 years later where the names Metternich and Guizot are less familiar than Merkel and Macron, it may seem more obscure), as well as more dense works like Capital.
It's an silly argument - if Marx went over things lightly, his ideas would be more easily attacked and he would be called lightweight. If he writes densely and goes over each argument thoroughly to make it airtight he can be accused of being difficult for the layman to understand with light reading. I guess Marx preferred making his arguments more airtight than worrying about accusations of being a chore to read.
What I enjoyed very much was the claimed position of Raymond Aron's w.r.t. intellectualism:
"Aron’s generosity of spirit was a coefficient of his recognition that reality was complex, knowledge limited, and action essential. The leitmotif of Aron’s career was responsibility. He understood that political wisdom rests in the ability to choose the better course of action even when the best course is unavailable--which is always.
The subject of politics, Aristotle noted, is “the good life for man.” What constitutes the good life? Aron cannily reminds us that the more extravagant answers to this question are often the most malevolent. They promise everything. They tend to deliver misery and impoverishment."
I think this is a great thing to be reminded of, constantly -- in particular for intellectuals and scientists. It is almost too easy to be fooled in thinking the scientific principles or intellectual ideals will apply nicely to humans, the complexities of the real world; that we can be certain about what is truly good or the true nature of reality.
It's not that we shouldn't investigate political systems, moral systems, economic theory, metaphysics, etc; it's that we should be specially skeptic about grandiose claims that go against common sense or personal freedom.
And quoting the recent Aaronson AMA:
"(...) partly it's because I take it as almost an axiom of rationality that, if a metaphysical belief leads you to do "obviously insane" things with your life, then it's probably time to look for a better metaphysical belief. :-) (I wouldn't say the same about scientific or mathematical beliefs.)"
The fact that capitalism is able to channel and bring to productive efficiency greener solutions out of collective individual preferences for a better world in spite of the artificial rolling economic treadmill, is a testament to capitalism.
Kyshtym, Chernobyl and Aral Sea disasters have no relation to the "cult" of personal freedom in any way.
The only reason the Western / capitalist world had a greater impact on the planet is because they were able to build industrial power faster than the Marxist countries, not because they were less concerned about the environment (looking at the Soviet Union and China, I would rather say the opposite is true).
So, what purpose do the wisdoms serve in this context? For you, they served the entire takeaway value of the article. But their relation to the thesis was something like philosophical fortune cookies. They operate in that future space where the thesis has been auto-accepted and the audience is now advised by the author how they can prevent falling victim to the threats they are now afraid of.
This particular one did not feel like a smear to me as much as a presentation of an opposing perspective, one given in a calm respectful tone which contradicts your obvious tone in trying to smear the article itself.
Every article is supposed to perform however much mental gymnastics are necessary to absolve Marx et al of any fault or flaw.