Karl Marx is Back

[Fake Boris]

If he foresaw so little, why should we give so much weight to any of his predictions?

I'd rather see more theorists build on his work to adequately assess 21st-century circumstances than have Marx be "back."

I think most Marxists would agree with you on that. Some fundamentals remain fruitful; other things have to be rethought. A good example of newer marxism is the analysis of society through the prism of the 'small bourgeoisie', i.e. the workers with no capital selling services.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I think most Marxists would agree with you on that. Some fundamentals remain fruitful; other things have to be rethought.

Far better than basically making Marx into some godly figure. Some dumb-ass free market types try to do the same with Adam Smith, of course totally ignoring that later capitalist economic thinkers have rethought some of the fundamentals and will continue to do so.

[chequita guevara]

There's the rub. For so many Marxists, questioning Marx is like questioning God. Yet, one of the most important things Marx ever wrote is not applied to Marx himself, "question everything!" Marx himself wrote that his earlier writings had been superseded by time. In his introduction to the Communist Manifesto in 1873, he wrote that much of the Manifesto was obsolete, but that as it was an historical document, he had no right to change it. Given that it was a programmatic statement of an actual political organization, Marx is correct, but it would have been nice for him to do it anyway. No one remembers the Communist League anymore. Everyone still knows who Marx was.

[Imran Siddiqui]

It tends to happen when people refer to themselves by the name of the founder of the movement .

Christians, Marxists, etc.

[Straybow]

If he foresaw so little, why should we give so much weight to any of his predictions?

Reasonable people don't. Unreasonable people are more interested in his "dictatorship of the proletariat" to buttress their own ambitions.

[Fake Boris]

I don't buy into that. Politically, being a marxist is such an uphill battle that the 'ambitious' have deserted communist ranks a long while ago.

[Cort Haus]

Damn right, OB. Not sure when the last time was that proselytising for the dictatorship of the proletariat was a sound career move.

[Saras]

Marx schmarx. The "west" had a heavily-government influenced housing and financial sector born in US, and exported that to everyone willing to buy the new-new-new paradigm. EP sums it up best:

http://equityprivate.typepad.com/ep/2008/12/death-of-cook.html

Some gems:

You had legislators and executives from both parties (Newt Gingrich was an adviser to IndyMac, for instance) telling the market “I want a huge spike in debt-funded home ownership for low income households short-term, and here are positive and negative incentives to accomplish that.” The Federal Reserve is telling the economy “Nope, nope, no recession today. I want lots of borrowing, and, since I’m making your returns of safe instruments vanishingly small, I want that cash to flow into more speculative instruments.” Paradoxically, regulators were also telling everyone in the market “You better watch how much risk you hold in any one entity.” The market dutifully complied. Homes “owned” by poor quality borrowers skyrocketed in the short-term, just as our brilliant leaders wanted them to. Underwriting became divorced from the mortgage writing process because none of the incentives created by government intervention rewarded careful underwriting and several incentives created by government intervention explicitly penalized careful underwriting. What exactly did everyone expect? Disneyland?

[Barnabas]

There's the rub. For so many Marxists, questioning Marx is like questioning God. Yet, one of the most important things Marx ever wrote is not applied to Marx himself, "question everything!" Marx himself wrote that his earlier writings had been superseded by time. In his introduction to the Communist Manifesto in 1873, he wrote that much of the Manifesto was obsolete, but that as it was an historical document, he had no right to change it. Given that it was a programmatic statement of an actual political organization, Marx is correct, but it would have been nice for him to do it anyway. No one remembers the Communist League anymore. Everyone still knows who Marx was.

I am being sincere

I think that the problem for communists is that all they have to offer is the proletarian dictatorship with economies planned by the state.

The state will never disappear and the ideal communist society will never be reached. Those are the most kingdom of heaven/religious aspects of marxism.

If I were a commie I would look at the soviet experience and think, what could we have done better to make the "soviet" citizens happier? Ang go from there (spend more in consumer good, give them freedom of religion, etc)

[Unimatrix11]

Well, it IS astonishing, how Marx´s thoughts have been utterly dismissed by the popular economists that followed him.

A while ago, i had a class about ressource economics and we read a couple of articles. One author declared he wanted to rake through the most famous economists to see, what they could contribute to the matter. He dismissed Marx right away, for he didnt say anything about extraction industries or ressource economics in general, he claimed. Now anyone, who read Marx, knows that this is a blunt lie. Not only does he cover things like mining and farming and such, he even brings up the topic of recycling (i study environmental sciences, so this was of particular interest) - and that in the 1870´s or so. Had i not pointed that out to the class, giving quotes and everything, all of them would have totally bought the articles´s author´s ´dissing´ of Marx.

In economist writings you can see Joe and Jack quoted, but you´d be hard pressed to find Friedman and his collegues quote Marx - despite the fact, that they occasionally come to familiar conclusions. It´s a taboo. Marx is a nono. If you are an ecomists, you either shut up about Marx, or you only quote him where he went wrong and redicule everything he ever wrote. That Marx and Smith do have a lot in common isnt something opportune to mention (and probably among marxist either).

I dont know, if there is an english translation, but i recommend for a brief overview and criticism of the various economic theorems:

´Die blinden Flecken der Ökonomie´ (´The blind spots of economics´), by Bernd Senf.

Yes, Marx had blind spots as well, and quite a few of them. The important thing to note, is not that none of the theorems are flawless, but that the theory-building in economics is not linear, but bi(at least)-linear. It´s kind of a war of perspectives. One line brings out a theory and the other shortly thereafter brings out a new one as well, not so much, because something new was evident, but merely to dismantle the other line´s arguments. But where Marx directly refered to those coming before him and said why i didnt agree with their points (and he did that very sharply sometimes, almost sarcastically), today´s economists seem to think, that the respective other line is not even worth mentioning, that their own line of thought as been long established as the only true one and then they get on going into fancy mathematics to cover up the fact, that all they are doing is wild guessing pretty much, far from any natural science they´d like to appear like, while they utterly ignore any contradicting argument, no matter how long and how big it stood in the way of their line of argument (or dont give authors credit who they base a particular point on, if that author is frowned upon by their line).

Reading Marx is not good for you. Either you dont believe what he wrote and it´s a waste of time, or you believe in what he wrote and from then on, you´ll have to watch out for what you are saying among certain people. Like Nietzsche: Read, understand and get depressed, or read, dont understand, and have lots of time wasted... (thats why i stopped after 100 pages or so of the later).

[Arrian]

I think Marx had some very interesting observations about mid-19th century capitalism. Some of those observations remain relevant today, even though we've come a long way since his time (in no small part due to Marxists/labor movements), even considering the last ~30 years of conservative pushback in the US.

Having said that, I still don't think his ideas are a good template for a society. To be fair to the guy, it's not like anyone else seems to have come up with the magic bullet either.

-Arrian

[Kuciwalker]

Marx schmarx. The "west" had a heavily-government influenced housing and financial sector born in US, and exported that to everyone willing to buy the new-new-new paradigm. EP sums it up best:

http://equityprivate.typepad.com/ep/2008/12/death-of-cook.html

Some gems:

You had legislators and executives from both parties (Newt Gingrich was an adviser to IndyMac, for instance) telling the market “I want a huge spike in debt-funded home ownership for low income households short-term, and here are positive and negative incentives to accomplish that.” The Federal Reserve is telling the economy “Nope, nope, no recession today. I want lots of borrowing, and, since I’m making your returns of safe instruments vanishingly small, I want that cash to flow into more speculative instruments.” Paradoxically, regulators were also telling everyone in the market “You better watch how much risk you hold in any one entity.” The market dutifully complied. Homes “owned” by poor quality borrowers skyrocketed in the short-term, just as our brilliant leaders wanted them to. Underwriting became divorced from the mortgage writing process because none of the incentives created by government intervention rewarded careful underwriting and several incentives created by government intervention explicitly penalized careful underwriting. What exactly did everyone expect? Disneyland?

To be fair, there is a WORLD of difference between the government using monetary or fiscal policy to create incentives that distort the free market (and thus are fundamentally dependent on the free market and the invisible hand) and state-run industry.

[Saras]

To be fair, there is a WORLD of difference between the government using monetary or fiscal policy to create incentives that distort the free market (and thus are fundamentally dependent on the free market and the invisible hand) and state-run industry.

Of course, but "capitalism is dead", "friedman is responsible for this" yells and other varieties of blaming the "free markets" for the current mess at best do not paint a full picture, and at worst attempt to whitewash what probably were the worst government mistakes in the economic area, ever.

[BeBMan]

Did you guys notice how the forum is much slower since Marx is back?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Reading Marx is not good for you. Either you dont believe what he wrote and it´s a waste of time, or you believe in what he wrote and from then on, you´ll have to watch out for what you are saying among certain people. Like Nietzsche: Read, understand and get depressed, or read, dont understand, and have lots of time wasted... (thats why i stopped after 100 pages or so of the later).

Not entirely true. You can read, understand, but still not believe it. I read the "Communist Manifesto" and Engel's "Scientific Socialism" (which is a better pamphlet, btw). I understood them. I just didn't agree with them. They brought out some good points, but I couldn't go with them to where they were going. Of course, "Capital" is the far better work.

And you don't always have to get depressed if you read and understand Nietzsche.

Well, I guess unless he burst your bubble about absolute morality .