Marx For Morons

(Meaning myself)

I’ve been trying to read the Sage Handbook of Marxism (mercifully free download here) and having difficulty with the first two entries. I may be too addled in my old age to absorb this text, or maybe the writing is just awful. There are so many different writers and chapters in the book, hopefully others will prove more enlightening. In any case, I realized why I have this urge to keep engaging those to my Left. Marxism, as antiquated as the original texts might be, is still the foundation for seriously radical, valid criticism of Capitalism.

So here is my fundamentals of meatball marxism theory. The foundation is the idea of alienation — that workers (defined below) produce a world alien to them, one whose existence is due solely to labor, yet one over which they have no control. Forget the land-labor-capital “factors of production” nonsense I used to teach in Principles of Economics. Capital is the fruit of labor. Land and its riches belongs to whoever was able to steal it.

By my definition, ‘workers’ means nearly everyone who produces goods and services. A doctor living a lush retirement, thanks to the extravagant returns to doctoring, is still a worker, no less than the senior citizens whose low incomes compel them to work as Walmart greeters or Uber drivers. You could call all of them a class, though of course in reality, in their heads, they are atomized individuals with little trace of the sort of class consciousness celebrated in early Marxist writing.

In this sense “working class” in what we could call its raw, apolitical state is defined—by me—mostly by what it is not: those not ever compelled to work who have the benefit of rich living standards, by virtue of inherited wealth or great wealth acquired more or less by accident.

A particular privilege of a subset of these folks is the power to run everything, and they do an especially shitty job, though anyone with serious wealth can acquire some political influence. Economic output fluctuates with significant, disruptive consequences for masses of workers. The production of output, besides being chaotic, fails to take account of the risks it conveys to human survival, not to mention the harm in real time to the lives of those doing all the work.

The rub is that the wealth of the rich, not to mention those who are able to exercise political power, has absolutely no moral legitimacy. It is either the accident of birth or that of luck, the latter in the form of gaining first-mover status for a new technology, or with the benefit of an exceptional physical or mental gift. No substantive contribution whatsoever is implied. So fuck all these people. Eat the rich. That they waste untold amounts of resources towards what Thorsten Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” only adds insult to injury. The greater injury is the exploitation ingrained in the system and its implications for the planet.

It is tragic that the prevailing understanding of Marxism has escaped its socialist origins. The principal source for socialism used to be called social-democracy (N.B. both V. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg identified as “social-democratic”). Clearly definitions changed. In particular, communism denied the socialist character of non-communist socialists. Thanks to the Bolsheviks, the socialist origins in pre-World War I social-democracy were tarred with the slur of collaboration and compromise, contributing to the disasters of imperialist war and fascism.

You could not be a socialist if you failed to celebrate the Bolshevik revolution. The ideologists of the Soviet Union (before and after Stalin) rewrote the history of socialism, and wrote some of the most prominent socialists of the pre-war era out of the pantheon.

The analytical failure here was losing the context for the Russian revolution: Czarist absolutism (or for the Chinese revolution, Japanese and Western imperialism). One could hardly dispute the infeasibility of incremental reform, or what Bernstein called “Evolutionary Socialism,” in nations ruled by authoritarian regimes, regimes that delegalized the very existence of viable opposition parties. Apologetics for the Bolsheviks’ suppression of democracy are a different story.

On the other hand, where constructive reform was indeed possible, as in Germany and Austria prior to the first world war and after the second, it was insurrectionary strategy and revolutionary violence that became bankrupt. Understatement of the prevalence of democratic norms in the U.S. and Europe has inspired reckless politics that proved to be utterly self-defeating in the end.

As wild and crazy as our new Administration is proving itself to be, in my view we are still and thankfully well short of the point where nothing can be accomplished by legal means, including mass civil disobedience. We may be trending towards a closed society, but your ability to read this contradicts the most pessimistic conclusions.