ReMarx, #4

Where am I these days in my end-of-life review of Marxism? I’m captivated by this substack from a Canadian academic with the provocative thesis that there is nothing left of value in Marx that you can’t get from John Rawls’s Theory of Justice liberal egalitarianism. OK, that’s not exactly what he says. A closer paraphrase is that when a number of Marxist scholars tried to distill what remained of value in Marx, they all ended up as liberal egalitarians with nothing more than Rawls’s ideas of distributive justice.

Heath’s post is raked over in philosophical detail that is mostly over my head at the Crooked Timber blog, which is still going strong in the post-blog era. I mentioned I would have to read and understand another four or five books to decide if he is right, and I am barely through one of them. I’ve looked at some philosophical writing that purports to debunk Marx, but I am both completely unimpressed and have to admit I have no head for that sort of text. I’ve barely scratched the surface of this literature. I’m going to keep at it.

I still want to put down notes on what I think endures in Marx, contra Heath and others.

1. Alienation. Often attributed reductively, I would say, following Kolakowski, to “the young Marx.” I’m not doing Marxology, nor trying to determine exactly what he thought. The notion that wage labor means pouring out one’s life for the sake of capital accumulation is still compelling to me. It does not depend on an immiseration thesis, which I’ve said is bollocks in any case. It is clear that under wage labor one gives more than what one receives. You do not need to decide whether that is Wrong. You only have to ask, is that what the best we can do for Humanity?

2. Surplus value. The excess of the value of output over its costs of production, called “value added” in conventional economics. Disposition of this output is the fundamental question of political economy. My little qualification to conventional versions is that capital replacement, sometimes called capital cost recovery, need not be taken as a given. A society can decide to eat some of its capital stock, if desired. There is no automatic imperative to replace and grow in net terms. Having said that, I am skeptical of the “degrowth” school and generally favor growth, of course properly measured.

3. Crisis theory. The import of crises is clearly misstated in Marx. As others have noted, problems boil over in financial markets and are tractable with monetary and fiscal policy. Crises in terms of the breakdown of civil order, a real social apocalypse, would arise from other sources. It would take a lot more than eight percent unemployment. These days it doesn’t seem to depend on employment at all. My top nomination for crises, outside of acts of God or asteroid collisions, is climate change-induced dislocation and migration.

4. Class consciousness. This has clearly became a bad joke, especially over the past fifty years, both in the U.S. and Western Europe. Increasing division of labor and productivity growth happen, but they hardly educate the working class in the necessity of its advancing to socialist transformation. There is no inevitability about revolution.

5. Historical materialism. To my untrained view of historiography, the importance of economic relations in understanding history seems to have been established by now. It’s such a commonplace that Marx’s role may be understated. In a similar vein, the idea of stages, the transitions from slavery to feudalism to capitalism seems to have taken hold, even if there is no automatic transition from wherever we are now to socialism.

6. Socialism in theory and in reality. Marx admitted to not providing any sort of detail about the next society. (Our grad school joke was “To understand capitalism, read Marx. To understand socialism, read Marshall.” The latter would be Alfred, the pioneer of standard microeconomics.) He is mostly limited to seeing the means of production being held and governed in common.

   One of my pet peeves is that there are gradations of socialization that wax and wane. We’ve been doing a lot of waning lately. There is a similar false binary applied to public ownership, which can itself take a variety of forms, some good, some not so good. The failure to see the salience of incremental changes, both good and bad, leads to ultimatist or catastrophist notions of Revolution and leads leftist thinking away from positive evolution towards better things. These days it fosters a failure to see the difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

What I find most compelling in Heath’s post is that it forced me to ask myself, what do I care about most? His implication is that what we most care about is inequality, and especially actual material immiseration for the least fortunate. Marxism in the sense I have depicted it is more like a suit of clothes. If you like it you can wear it, but you can easily get by without it. It had appeal as an instrument to get at what we care about more, or most urgently, but its utility in that regard has faded.

On balance I would say Marx still has a lot to offer. As to Heath’s idea that Rawls displaced Marx, a wag on the Crooked Timber blog mentioned that there are no Rawls clubs or political parties all around the world. Marx lives on, both in substance, in academic scholarship, and at the most base levels of political consciousness. Perhaps Rawls is the more active playground for academics. Who gives a shit.

At that base level, Marx or “Marx” still provides essential directional cues for politics. More socialization of resources, less inequality, no immiseration, the abolition of class, the freedom for all to become their best selves. Rawls doesn’t do that job. Taken together, that set of cues still promises more for the amelioration of inequality and immiseration. Reductionism on the left tends to boil things down to distributional equity, roughly following Rawls. But in Marx and in life there is much more of importance.