More on #Marx200's acceptance today

Following up on the various Marx's-200th-birthday articles and posts in recent months, especially on Saturday, the actual birthday here's a paragraph from Oliver Nachtwey (Im Fahrstuhl nach unten: Marx und die Abstiegsgesellschaft Blätter 5/2018) that looks at how Marx is understood in very different ways in the West 200 years after his birth. For ease of reading in this blog's format, I've added two paragraph breaks with my translation to English afterward:

Zu den Haupttatsachen des Gegenwartskapitalismus gehört auch die zentrale Bedeutung der Finanzmärkte. In der spezifischen Tauschform der Finanzsphäre werden keine Waren, sondern nur noch fiktive Geldtitel gehandelt. Aus Geld wird darin mehr Geld, was bereits im Marxschen Akkumulationsschema der vervollkommneten Selbstvermehrung des Kapitals zum Ausdruck kam. Der dabei von Marx entwickelte Begriff des „fiktiven Kapitals“ und seine Einlassungen über das Kreditwesen wurden deshalb zur Grundlage für eine Reihe substanzieller Beiträge zur Analyse der Finanzkrise 2008.

Seit dieser globalen Krise erlebt Marx sogar eine kleine Hochkonjunktur. In der Öffentlichkeit und an den Universitäten wurde der Begriff des Kapitalismus (zuvor sprach man in der Regel nur von Marktwirtschaft) wieder zu einer legitimen analytischen Kategorie. Eine Referenz auf Marx erntete nunmehr ein vorsichtig zustimmendes Nicken statt des obligatorischen Kopfschüttelns. Eine geschichtsmächtige, sich auf Marx beziehende soziale Bewegung ist bisher jedoch nicht wieder entstanden, und wahrscheinlich erscheint die Bezugnahme auf dessen Ideen genau aus diesem Grund heute kaum mehr subversiv.

Marx schafft es mittlerweile sogar regelmäßig in die Debatten jener Kreise, die historisch gesehen zu seinen Gegnern zählen. In seinem Denken sehen diese offensichtlich keine Gefahr mehr, sondern primär eine Chance zur Analyse einer hochgradig widersprüchlichen Zeit. Und das aus gutem Grund: Denn anders als in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften, die trotz aller Eleganz ihrer mathematischen Systeme immer noch an der Annahme festhalten, dass Märkte im Grunde zu einem Gleichgewicht und Stabilität neigen, ist Marx’ Theorie geprägt von der Perspektive innerer Widersprüche, Instabilitäten und Krisen.

[One of the main things about present-day capitalism is also the central significance of the financial markets. In the specific exchange form of the finance sphere, it is not goods but only fictive money instruments with which they deal. Money thereby becomes more money, which already found expression in the Marxist accumulation schema of the fully developed accumulation of capital. The concept that Marx developed for that, "fictive capital," and its discharge through the credit institutions thereby became the basic concept for a series of substantial contributions to the analysis of the financial crisis of 2008.

Since that global crisis, Marx has even experienced a small boom. In the public sphere and in the universities, the concept of capitalism (before one normally spoke about market economy) has become a legitimate analytical category again. A reference to Marx now produces careful agreeing nod instead of the obligatory shaking of the head. No historically powerful social movement oriented to Marx has yet emerged again, and probably the reference to his ideas is hardly subversive anymore precisely because of that.

Meanwhile, Marx has even managed to get into the debates of those circles who historically counted among his enemies. They clearly see no danger any more in his thought, but instead primarily a chance for analysis of a profoundly contradictory time. And for good reason: Because unlike in the business sciences, which despite the elegance of their mathematical system still hold on to the assumption that markets basically tend to a balance and stability, Marx' theory is characterized by the perspective of internal contradictions, instabilities, and crises.]

Karl Marx at 200 #Marx200

May 5 isn't just Cinco de Mayo in the United States. This year, it's also the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth. Which has been the occasion for a number of what-is-Marx's-relevance-now feature stories.

I've never had a phobia here at this blog talking about Marxism and some of the effectively infinite number of issues related to it. Like my posts last year on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

But I've had a hard time thinking of anything to say on the topping that seems to fit meaningfully into a 200th-anniversary observance.

When I attended business graduate school and a Jesuit university, literally my first homework assignment included readings from Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Because both in substance and symbolism, those two represent the classic justification for the capitalist system in Smith's case and the classic critique of it in Marx's.

The now-common term capitalism was not in wide usage until the second half of the 19th century. The OED Third Edition (March 2012) cites an English usage as early as 1833, but it was in very restricted use prior to that. So, ironically, from today's viewpoint, the most iconic theorist of capitalism, Adam Smith, didn't actually use the term "capitalism."

But I'm going to make some attempt, anyway.

Here is Marx' birth house in Trier, Germany in 2014 (from Von Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33626216):

It is currently the Museum Karl-Marx-Haus run by the SPD-associated Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. It has a Twitter account, of course: @marx2018. They are opening a new exhibit there on May 5 for the 200th birthday.

Sam Seder recently interviewed Richard Wolff on Why It's Cool To Talk About Marxism Again The Majority Report 03/24/2018:

Any description of a broad subject like the enduring significance of a 19th-century thinker has to perate from some kind of framework of the various historical settings for the reception. Marx very directly affected the early Social Democratic movement in Europe. There was a major split in the movement over the First World War and a more consequential one in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 which produced distinct and competing "brands" of Communism and Social Democracy.

With the founding of the Soviet Union, the reception of Marx began decades in which state propaganda and counter-propaganda mixed with political activism and scholarship in shaping the Marx reception in all parts of the world. The broad post-World War II trend that came to be known as Western Marxism gave a great deal of attention to the problem of why the capitalist system in the advanced countries was able to secure such seemingly broad and deep public acceptance. And until the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxism was still widely perceived in the West as the Other of the capitalist system.

For the advanced capitalist countries, I would use the following major periods as a guideline for the context of criticism of the capitalist system as such:

• Golden Age of Capitalism, 1945-1973. That was certainly not a common label during those years, although there is never a shortage of boosterism for capitalism
• Post-Bretton Woods, beginning in 1973: As Yanis Varoufakis ably describes in The Global Minotaur (), the was a major inflection point for recycling the world's capital surpluses, when the currency-management system of the capitalist countries that had acted as a stabilizer in the postwar years was dramatically ended when the Nixon Administration broke the link of the dollar to gold.

In the decades after 1973, dogmatic "free market" neoliberalism rose to to dominance. Chile and Argentina under their military dictatorships that took power in the 1970s were major testing grounds for this approach. With the governments of Ronald Reagan in the US and Maggie Thatcher in Britain US, it surged in the advanced capitalist world. The fall of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union brought what Francis Fukayama famously called the End of History, and the worldwide dominance of neoliberalism, after the "shock therapy" introduction of Herbert Hoover economics in Russia and eastern Europe.

After the fall of the Soviet bloc and rapid liberalization of regulations on the international movement of capital, we had a series of spectacular financial crises. And eventually the Great Recession of 2007-9 (National Bureau of Economic Research dates for the US) and the slow recovery that followed. Wolff in the above interview pegs that as an inflection point for interest in Marxism, and more broadly in renewed critical thinking about the fundamentals of capitalism as an economic system.

In Europe that manifests itself in the current shifts in political parties, the most important of which has been the collapse of social democracy as a center-left party. Olaf Scholz, the current German Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister just presented a budget on behalf of the Grand Coalition of which his SPD is the junior member. Wolfgang Munchau writes (On the madness of Germany's investment cuts Eurointelligence 05/04/2018):

The idea is that Scholz wants to go down in history as the Red Hawk, as they call him, the biggest deficit hawk in modern German history. We would like to add to this observation that the SPD supported the austerity policies chancellor Heinrich Brüning in the early 1930s. The SPD embraced Keynesian policies in the 1940s and until the 1970s, but has now returned to its pre-Keynesian roots.

Karl Marx can legitimately claim to be a co-founder of the SPD, though they prefer these days to reserve that designation for Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). Strictly speaking, though, during the Great Depression the leading Marxist economists like Rudolf Hilferding also thought austerity policies for the governments of capitalist countries was an appropriate response to recessions.

I'll mention a few examples of evaluations of Marx on his 200th birthday. This is a Facebook entry from Kontrast, an online news service close to the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ):

They present a pretty anodyne Marx, "Seine Theorien haben Millionen Menschen inspiriert, für bessere Arbeit und ein besseres Leben zu kämpfen." ("His theory have inspired millions to fight for better work and a better life.") Karl Marx the tepid self-help guru.

Then there's Karl Marx the business adviser, here from the Economist via Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat:

When even the Economist admits that the rulers of the world should read Karl #Marx200https://t.co/AhnNMYhhjN

— Srećko Horvat (@HorvatSrecko) May 4, 2018

The Economist article takes a stab at dialectics, "the very failure of his ideas to change the world for the better is ensuring them a new lease of life." The pitch of his article is, "The chief reason for the continuing interest in Marx ... is that his ideas are more relevant than they have been for decades." (Rulers of the world: read Karl Marx! 05/03/2018)

Camila Vallejo Dowling, a Communist Party deputy in the Chilean Congress who became world-famous several years ago as the leader of student protests in Chile, presents a comment and video on her Facebook page on Karl Marx, the militant democratic reformer.

Marx fue un gran pensador que nos dejó un tremendo legado. Creer que ninguna clase debe oprimir a otra es también creer y luchar para que podemos convivir sin opresiones de género, color de piel o religión. Porque todos y todas podemos aportar al colectivo desde el desarrollo de nuestro máximo potencial. Partial translation: "Marx was a great thinker who left us a tremendous legacy. To believe that no class should oppress another is also to believe and fight so that we can live together without oppressions of gender, skin color, or religion. Because absolutely everyone can contribute to the collective good with our maximum potential." (Maybe a touch of Marx the feel-good carreer coach, too.)

There's a #Marx200 hashtag on Twitter. It's like a performance of the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant tale. This may be my favorite:

Do you know what are the last words of Karl Marx before he died?

"Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."

Ganorn. #Marx200

— Menchani Tilendo (@menchongdeee) May 4, 2018

Jacobin offers some balls-out defense of Marx: Andrew Hartman, Marx’s America 5/05/2018; John Bellamy Foster, A New Marxian Century 5/05/2018; Marshall Berman, Adventures in Marxism 05/05/2018; James Ledbetter, Marx the Journalist 05/05/2018.

Here's a nice, safe commemorative documentary from Deutsche Welle English, Who was Karl Marx? 05/05/2018:

After seeing this in the DW documentary, I don't think I'll be able to live without a Karl Marx piggy bank:

The ZDF German channel also has a documentary, Karl Marx-der deutsche Prophet 02.05.2018

The German-language press featured various stories on Marx, including:

• Zum 200. Geburtstag von Karl Marx Neue Züricher Zeitung 03.05.2018
• Raubtier, Teufel oder Gott TAZ 05.05.2018
• Franziska Augstein, Mit Marx die Welt verstehen Süddeutsche Zeitung 04.05.2018
• Dietmar Bartsch, Plädoyer für eine kritische Marx-Debatte Neues Deutschland 04.05.2018
• Björn Becker und Mona Jaeger, Festaakt in Trier: „Marx ist wieder in“ FAZ 05.05.2018
• Susanne Höll, Trier ist durchaus stolz auf seinen umstrittensten Sohn Impressum Süddeutsche Zeitung 04.05.2018
• Henrik Müller, 200. Geburtstag von Karl Marx: Der Kapitalismus geht zugrunde Spiegel Online 29.04.2018
• Lisa Nienhaus, Marx war zu schlau fürs Grundeinkommen Zeit Online 05.05.2018
• Philip Plickert, Karl Marx: Bewunderer und Verächter des Kapitalismus FAZ 04.05.2018
• Ronald Pohl, 200. Geburtstag: Karl Marx lesen heißt ihm unrecht geben Standard 05.05.2018
• Stefan Trinks, Marx-Austellung in Trieri: Odysseus der Ökonomie FAZ 05.05.2018
• Richard Wiens, Der lange Schatten des Karl Marx Salzburg Nachrichten 05.05.2018

The thesis-antithesis-synthesis mystery

Well, it's been a mystery to me, anyway.

Dialectic(s) has been a part of philosophy at least since Heraclitus (circa 500 BCE) and remains so today.

Some of the more notable dialecticians included Socrates (469–399 BCE), Plato (circa 429–347 BCE), the Stoics, Kant (1724–1804), Hegel (1770-1831), Nietzsche (1844–1900) and, of course, Karl Marx (1818–1883). The great Christian theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) carried on a debate with his friend and colleague Hegel over dialectics.

The most common way most people have heard about dialectic in in some connection with Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism as the official doctrine of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, and for a long time that of the People's Republic of China, was called. And the most typical description description involved the triad thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

David Riazanov (1870-1938) then head of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, writing in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (English edition, 1927), describes Hegel's dialectic this way:

To comprehend the circumambient phenomena, one must not only study them as they exist, but one must understand how they have been developing; for everything about one is the result of a past development. Furthermore, a thing may appear at first glance as being in a state of immobility which on closer scrutiny, however, will disclose within itself incessant movement and conflict, numerous influences and forces, some tending to preserve it as it is, others tending to change it. In each phenomenon, in each object, there is the clash of two principles, the thesis and the antithesis, the conservative and the destructive. This struggle between the two opposing principles resolves itself into a final harmonious synthesis of the two.

This is how it was expressed in the Hegelian idiom. [my emphasis in bold]

Except it wasn't.

That is how the dialectic functions in Kant, for whom it was a part of formal logic.

For Hegel, dialectic was a description of how all of the natural world works. And he described it as reality developing from one positive state through a negation of the positive state to the Aufheben (sublation) of the negation, Aufheben implying that the previous state is cancelled while being preserved and lifted up to a higher state. In this view, a seed is a positive reality. It contains it's own negation, its own internal drive to become something different, a not-seed, and it grows into a tree. As a tree, it achieves its full development (Aufheben) in which it still contains an essential part of the seed, as well as its negation in growing beyond a seed, and achieves the higher state of becoming a full-grown tree.

I finally looked up a source that explains the origins of this particular twist of Hegel's dialectics, Gustav Mueller in The Hegel Legend of "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" Journal of the History of Ideas 19/3 (June 1958). Mueller refers to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad as "Fichtean terms." referring to the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), who understood his philosophy as a further development of Kant's. "In all the twenty volumes of Hegel's 'complete works' he does not use this "triad" once; nor does it occur in the eight volumes of Hegel texts, published for the first time in the twentieth century," Mueller writes.

So how did this description of the Hegelian dialectic become so embedded in the teaching of philosophy? Especially from Marxists who had no particular reason to read Hegel through a Kantian perspective?

It turns out that it was Marx himself that picked up that reading of Hegel from a Kantian:

In the winter of 1835-36, a group of Kantians in Dresden called on Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel, to lecture to them on the new philosophical movement after Kant. They were older, professional men who in their youth had been Kantians, and now wanted an orientation in a development which they distrusted; but they also wanted a confirmation of their own Kantianism. Professor Chalybäus did just those two things. His lectures appeared in 1837 under the title Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel, Zu näherer Verstdndigung des wissenschaftlichen Publikums mit der neuesten Schule. The book was very popular and appeared in three editions. In my copy of the third edition of 1843, Professor Chalybäus says (p. 354): "This is the first trilogy: the unity of Being, Nothing and Becoming . . . we have in this first methodical thesis, antithesis, and synthesis ... an example or schema for all that follows." This was for Chalybäus a brilliant hunch which he had not used previously and did not pursue afterwards in any way at all. But Karl Marx was at that time a student at the University of Berlin and a member of the Hegel Club where the famous book was discussed. He took the hunch and spread it into a deadly [?], abstract machinery. Other left-Hegelians, such as Arnold Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner use "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" just as little as Hegel. [my emphasis]

Mueller notes that Hegel:

... refers to " thesis, antithesis, and synthesis " in the Preface of the Phaenomenology of Mind, where he considers the possibility of this "triplicity " as a method or logic of philosophy. According to the Hegel-legend one would expect Hegel to recommend this "triplicity." But, after saying that it was derived from Kant, he calls it a "lifeless schema," "mere shadow " and concludes: " The trick of wisdom of that sort is as quickly acquired as it is easy to practice. Its repetition, when once it is familiar, becomes as boring as the repetition of any bit of sleight-of-hand once we see through it. The instrument for producing this monotonous formalism is no more difficult to handle than the palette of a painter, on which lie only two colours. . ." (Preface, Werke, II, 4849).

Marx himself referred to the Hegelian dialectic with the thesis-synthesis-antithesis triad in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), his polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's book, Philosophy of Poverty:

If we had M. Proudhon’s intrepidity in the matter of Hegelianism we should say: it is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this mean? Impersonal reason, having outside itself neither a base on which it can pose itself, nor an object to which it can oppose itself, nor a subject with which it can compose itself, is forced to turn head over heels, in posing itself, opposing itself and composing itself – position, opposition, composition. Or, to speak Greek – we have thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For those who do not know the Hegelian formula: affirmation, negation and negation of the negation. That is what language means. It is certainly not Hebrew (with due apologies M. Proudhon); but it is the language of this pure reason, separate from the individual. [my emphasis]

Mueller treats this passage and other of Marx's comments about Hegel in the same chapter this way:

The legend was spread by Karl Marx whose interpretation of Hegel is distorted. It is Marxism superimposed on Hegel. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, Marx says in Das Elend der Philosophie [The Poverty of Philosophy], is Hegel's purely logical formula for the movement of pure reason, and the whole system is engendered by this dialectical movement of thesis, antithesis, synthesis of all categories. This pure reason, he continues, is Mr. Hegel's own reason, and history becomes the history of his own philosophy, whereas in reality, thesis, antithesis, synthesis are the categories of economic movements. (Summary of Chapter II, Paragraph 1.)

Mueller, in the fashion of "respectable" Cold War scholarship, is careful to note his distaste for Marx, e.g.:

But "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" is not the only Hegel legend fabricated by Marx. Brutal simplifications are Marxistic specialties. "Thesis, antithesis, synthesis" is said to be an "absolute method" of Hegel's alleged "rationalism." Marx says: "There is in Hegel no longer a history in the order of time, but only a sequence of ideas in reason." Hegel, on the con- trary, says: " The time-order of history is distinguished from the sequence in the order of concepts" (Werke, XII, 59).

Mueller's own account quoted above of how Marx very likely got the idea from Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus would seem to give Chalybäus rather than Marx the claim to having fabricated the triad into the "Hegel legend." But it's safe to say that Marx having incorporated the triad into what became a canonical criticism of Hegel was far more influential in promoting the idea than Chalybäus' little-known work.

Mueller also makes these points about a couple of major works of Hegel scholarship:

In the first important book about Hegel by his student, intimate friend and first biographer, Karl Rosenkranz (Hegels Leben, 1844), "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" are conspicuous by their absence. It seems Hegel was quite successful in hiding his alleged "method" from one of his best students.

The very important new Hegel literature of this century has altogether abandoned the legend. Theodor Haering's Hegels Wollen und Werk (2 vol., Teubner, 1929 and 1938) makes a careful study of Hegel's terminology and language and finds not a trace of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis." In the second volume there are a few lines (pp. 118, 126) in which he repeats what Hegel in the above quotation had said himself, i.e., that this "con- ventional slogan" is particularly unfortunate because it impedes the understanding of Hegelian texts. As long as readers think that they have to find "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" in Hegel they must find him obscure - but what is obscure is not Hegel but their colored glasses.

But outside the specialized Hegel literature, the Marxist tradition's view of Hegel through Marx's writing insured that the thesis-antithesis-synthesis would endure as a misunderstanding of Hegel's central concept of the dialectic.

José Pablo Feinmann on capital and "Capital", Philosophy Here and Now (Temporada 1-10) (Spanish-language video)

This is Chapter 10 of the first season of Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann's public TV series Filosofía aquí y ahora, "T1 CAP 10: El Capital” Encuentro n/d Filosofía y Praxis YouTube 02/05/2013:

Here Feinmann discusses Karl Marx's economic theories as elaborated in his famous work, Capital.

Isaih Berlin and the dream of reason

The New York Review of Books website is running a speech that liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin gave  on 11/25/1994, A Message to the 21st Century 10/23/2014.

I'm not that familiar with Berlin's work. But if this speech is representative, a simplistic anti-Communism was a big part of his worldview.

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997)

I've discussed before the "From Luther to Hitler" position that tries to trace Nazism back to major figures in German intellectual life going back to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. See, e.g., Anthony Quinton on Hegel's metaphysics 10/11/2010.

Berlin's argument in that 1994 speech, he takes what could be called a from Fichte To Hitler And Mao Zedong Too approach:

Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted. ...

They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. ...

[Heinrich Heine] predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers — Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism — would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child's play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached. [my emphasis]

Much of what Berlin says there fits so well with stock Cold War rhetoric that many of his hearers and readers may take this speech as a statement of the obvious.

But it's worth asking about those "men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience." He's describing psychopaths and sociopaths there, people who seem to have no conscience.

Is there any such evidence that such characteristics emerge "under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached"?

The short answer would be, no.

Psychopaths and sociopaths may gravitate to causes that allow them to exercise power over others. Police departments try as well as they can (or at least they're supposed to!) to screen such people out. But they aren't necessarily especially linked to totalizing ideologies, much less a quest to reach perfection.

Fanaticism can lead people to do ugly things. Cult environments can create conditions in which people set their consciences aside. But those kinds of things typically happen with certain kinds of leadership. Cults are characterized more by the prevalence of an authoritarian (and often psychopathic) type of leadership.

Training in normal national armies focus not only on teaching particular skills but on building team spirit and group cohesion.

If we ask the general question, "Do ideas matter in peoples' conduct?", of course the answer is, yes.

But do they matter in the way Berlin describes in this speech? Let's take one of his bogeymen, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Fichte was a philosopher who considered himself a disciple of Kant, continuing Kant's work on transcendental idealism. He developed the subjective side of Kant's theory, emphasizing the ways in which the ego constitutes the external world. Put that way, it sounds like a religious mystical dogma. Or a philosophy of autism. But there is much more to it than that. For instance, he had a more radical theory of the social contract than Kant.

But where is there an identifiable train of thought that leads from Fichte to Hitler? Or to Stalin? Fichte was one of the heavies of classical German philosophy, now usually regarded as a transition figure between Kant and Hegel. That classical German philosophical tradition formed the intellectual background for figures as diverse as Bruno Bauer, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others. Around 1850, the leading philosophical trend in Germany was toward materialist philosophies and away from both Hegelians and Romanticism of thinkers like Schelling (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling).

It's a long and winding road indeed to get from Fichte to Goebbels!

Fichte is probably a good topic on which to ask whether Berlin's notion of a totalizing idea is well-defined enough to be meaningful. Fichte looked for a unifying point for all of scientific knowledge. But does that translated into developing an idea by which people "know perfection can be reached" in the here-and-now? Fichte wrote about political theory. But he was engaged in a philosophical project, not cooking up an ideology for a cult to use to kill people in order to touch of the final struggle that would bring on the Last Days, or whatever.

I'm assuming that Berlin also realized that a variety of material factors - sociological, economic, psychological, military - played an enormous role in those situations he describes. But did the particular ideologies themselves create the brutality he describes?

In Hitler's case, Nazism was a specifically anti-liberal ideology. That is to say that it was a radical, reactionary philosophy that rejected democratic and republican ideas of the modern era and wanted to construct a different kind of modern state and society in the guise of returning to old values and traditions. Those values being the alleged virtue of the Aryan race. Unlike Western democracy or Communism, Nazism specifically valued racial discrimination and glorified brutality and militarism.

However, the horror we now know as the Holocaust took place in the context of war and annexation. The mass roundup of Jews began in Austria after the Anschluss (annexation) of early 1938. Historians like Christopher Browning have combed through the evidence to establish a timeline on the decision to initiate mass killings. And it's clear that the decision came in 1941 around the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Now, Hitler's determination to get rid of the Jews in Europe was one of the two core ideological points the Nazis consistently took seriously, the other being gaining "living space" by invading and conquering the USSR. So ideology played a part. But the fulfillment of the first point was dependent on the conditions of full-blown war mobilization required by the second. And we have to ask if an ideology which had those two points at its core actually counts as one that made its followers think they were reaching for perfection in the immediate future.

Berlin suggests some kind of straight line influence from Karl Marx' thought to mass deaths in the Soviet Union and China in the following century. In Cold War terminology that sounds entirely plausible. Both countries called themselves "Marxist," didn't they?

But here again, we're talking about very particular structures and specific policy decisions. In both cases, the largest number of deaths directly attributable to state policy came from starvation in the wake of reforms affecting agriculture. In the USSR, it was the massive collectivization of farming in parallel to what the Soviets called the de-kulakization campaign, aimed at breaking the power of the dominant class in agriculture. The disruptions involved with that process contributed to the Soviet famine of 1932-33 that hit the Ukraine particularly hard. Similarly, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward of 1958-60 disrupted Chinese agriculture and resulted in famine, as well.

But do those events trace backward in a clear intellectual history to Marx and Fichte? It's hard to see how. Marx focused on the advanced economies of Western Europe and the US, and didn't write up any blueprints for how a soviet state would collectivize agriculture. (For that matter, the "soviet" or worker's council as a key phenomenon in a socialist revolution didn't emerge until the Russian Revolution of 1905.) And in practice, Mao's Great Leap Forward was more an attempt to jump-start industrial development than it was an agricultural reform, though it diverted many peasant farmers from farming and therefore generated famine. But the whole idea was a rejection of the Soviet blueprint for a socialist country's development. It's hard to see how one could squeeze as simple a tale of continuity out of that set of events as Berlin seems to be doing here.

And what did poor old Fichte have to do with it?

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)

Berlin's philosophical liberal argument - which shouldn't be confused with the particular American political meaning of "liberal" - is directed against what came to be called totalitarianism, though Berlin doesn't use that still-disputed term here. This portion not only elaborates his idea of that. It also raises an interesting point about the continuity of "German anti-Enlightenment thought" that he sees at work:

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used — if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any. [my emphasis]

Actually, in the real world, people believe all the time in ideal solutions, particularly religious ones, without resorting to the extreme methods Berlin specifies here as the inevitable result of such a belief. People can and do believe that there are solutions that would produce "an ideal society," or something close to it, without throwing away all moral restraints and all respect for established institutions. It may have been obvious in Cold War terms that the Other Side that "must believe that no price can be too high." Just as now Islamophobes of various sorts believe something similar about all Muslims and all forms of Islam. But it doesn't describe the real world.

The Enlightenment notions of Reason weren't the last word on philosophy, either. Even the Enlightenment had it's dark side, as Goya famously depicted in "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters":

I'd be curious to see the context of Lenin's statement about the effect of Marx's Capital on him. (Another Cold War verbal habit: calling it "Das Kapital" in an English sentence makes it sound more foreign and German.) But it also calls into question the from-Fichte-to-Stalin continuity of which Berlin is complaining. Capital is a work on political economy. And it is an imminent critique of the field it analyzes, with lots of attention paid to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, especially. These were classical liberal thinkers and also Brits. Maybe it was the influence of British liberal political economists more than German Idealists and Romantics that so influenced Lenin in that direction!

Ideas do have consequences. Including liberal ideas. Like those of the economic neoliberalism that wreaks havoc on many developing countries and has imposed brutal costs on the economies of the eurozone, Japan and even the United States. (Paul Krugman, Notes on Japan 10/28/2014)

But we would do much better looking at the dangers of dogmatism and fanaticism than to look for one evil idea to eradicate.

Berlin's broad statement of his perspective sounds good to American ears trained to regard them as truisms: "So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals."

But when it comes to real-world cases on an issue like same-sex marriage or abortion, this live-and-let-live credo often quickly gives way in practice to other forms of dogmatism and fanaticism, many of them all the while declaring their allegiance to ideals of liberal democracy.

The continuing return of "Marx"

Sean McElwee in Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback Salon 06/22/2014 jumps on the bandwagon of using the image of Karl Marx as a symbol of a recognition that neoliberal capitalism isn't the End of History or a democratic utopia.

McElwee's piece also shares the weaknesses of much of the recent popular commentary on the subject. He talks about "the left" without any clear point of reference for the reader of just who that might be. Especially for American readers, it's an awfully vague term. And he toggles back and forth in a short column between Grand Theory and political tactics. For example:

Increasingly, the left is dominated by what the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg might call Kathedersozialisten – or "professorial socialists." These thinkers, frequently drenched in academese, talk and debate in a way almost entirely designed to alienate anyone who does not already accept their conclusions. The professorial left seems to have innumerable answers for those wondering what Lacanian psychoanalysis has to offer us, but can give us little guidance as to whether the Working Families Party should support Cuomo or run its own candidate. ...

Marx failed to account for the adaptability of capitalism and left little in the way of alternatives. In the end, this void was filled by murderers and fools. Marx, a deeply humanistic thinker, would certainly have abhorred the violence in his name some half a century after his death. But rational people do not blame Christ for the Crusades, nor Muhammad for 9/11 nor Nietzsche for the Holocaust. The taboo of Marx has prevented the left from learning his most important lesson; in the words of Gil Scott-Heron, "the revolution will not be televised." [my emphasis]

Is this hipster Marxism? Hipster commentary on Marxism?

If "the left" is defined to be whatever group out there recognizes the leadership of "professional socialists" (?!), it's a tiny group for sure!

Okay, there's only so much you can say in a few paragraphs, so you have to use some shortcuts to describes the contours of what a symbol like "Karl Marx" can mean.

Here are a few guidelines I use in thinking about the image of Marx functions in political imagery in the US right now.

Karl Marx's political economy presented the classical criticism of capitalism, just as Adam Smith presented the classical advocacy for capitalism.

Both Smith and Marx are relevant to the capitalism of 2014 - as well as David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes and any number of other important economists, including living contemporaries like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. I recently read Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) for the first time. Being something of a finance geek, I actually found it interesting to learn something about 18th-century markets in corn and wool. I made a point of first reading his earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Because I wanted to understand something about his broader perspective as a moral philosopher and an important figure in what is known as the Scottish Enlightenment.

I was surprised to see that the entry for Adam Smith in the ever-respectable Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2012 is by the late left-leaning economist Robert Heilbroner, who writes:

Smith saw humans as creatures driven by passions and at the same time self-regulated by their ability to reason and — no less important — by their capacity for sympathy. This duality serves both to pit individuals against one another and to provide them with the rational and moral faculties to create institutions by which the internecine struggle can be mitigated and even turned to the common good. He wrote in his Moral Sentiments the famous observation that he was to repeat later in The Wealth of Nations: that self-seeking men are often "led by an invisible hand ... without knowing it, without intending it, [to] advance the interest of the society."

It should be noted that scholars have long debated whether Moral Sentiments complemented or was in conflict with The Wealth of Nations. At one level there is a seeming clash between the theme of social morality contained in the first and the largely amoral explication of the economic system in the second. On the other hand, the first book can also be seen as an explanation of the manner in which individuals are socialized to become the market-oriented and class-bound actors that set the economic system into motion.

Do I really need to say that an 18th-century Scottish writer doesn't offer any immediate insights into tactical considerations for New York State politics in 2014?

Like Smith's laissez faire economics, Marx's economics were part of a larger philosophy which had a major influence in the world.

It's fun for modern economists to pick out quotes from Smith's political economy, which was based on a larger psychology and moral philosophy, to make a point against some aspect of present-day capitalism driven by amoral profit considerations that are sometimes blatantly damaging to the public good.

But Marx had the fortune - whether more good or bad fortune is a matter for debate - of seeing his own doctrine enshrined as dogma by the Communist political movements of the 20th century, which included numerous governing parties. This contributed greatly to a proliferation of Marxisms that was already going on before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. To name a few: revolutionary Social Democracy, Revisionist Social Democracy, Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism (a variety of Marxism-Leninism), Maoism (aka, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought), Titoism, Trotskyism, Eurocommunism, Castroism, Guevarism.

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

The massive dissent [against capitalism] originated with Karl Marx. In considerable measure he used the ideas of Ricardo to assail the economic system which Ricardo interpreted and described. I've used the word massive to describe his onslaught. If we agree that the Bible is a work of collective authorship, only Mohammed rivals Marx in the number of professed and devoted followers recruited by a single author. And the competition is not really very close. The followers of Marx now far outnumber the sons of the Prophet.

(I'm not sure the numerical comparison with followers of the Prophet still holds in 2014.)

Not only are there many Marxisms, each of them has their own "Karl Marx."

As the study of any famous philosopher, scientist or historical figure shows, getting to the "real" perspective of the individual is a matter of interpreting the available data. And serious researchers can come up with notably different interpretations of what the person "really" meant by this or that.

When a person becomes a symbol incorporated into official dogma, that problem is magnified. In the case of Karl Marx, by several orders of magnitude. When the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China split in the late 1950s, to take just one example, they carried out an extensive polemic over the history of the socialist movement, both sides taking Karl Marx as something like an authoritative guide on all questions involved. Pick pretty much any party or sect that defined itself as Marxist and was large and long-lasting enough to have splits and factions, and you'll find that they frequently justified their differences with highfalutin Marxist theoretical justifications.

So, when we're talking about Marxism, not only are there many varieties we could be talking about. All of them had some effect on how the life  and thought of the real existing Karl Marx of 1818-1883 was viewed.

Marx himself was a materialist philosopher and Marxist politics took place - and continue to do so - in the material world.

Marx had a philosophy of history that held social development to be driven by class struggle. If we accept the reading of his close collaborator Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) as part of the original Marxist perspective, it also assumed that the dynamic of sex roles played an equally important part.

Marx had a theory of political economy that he described in the three volumes of Capital (the last two edited by Engels and published after Marx' death), and in other shorter works. It describes the development and function of capitalism, including the system's tendency to periodic crises, which we know today as recessions and depressions.

Marx was also a key political leader in the social democratic movement in Europe. Part of that leadership role came in the form of extensive commentary on political issues of the day, in which he looked carefully at the role of particular players and the contingencies of the moment.

Each of those aspects of Marx' thought and heritage need to be evaluated differently. That's why it's a little silly to dismiss the handful of academics consciously working in a Marxist tradition in the Western world that are well-known enough to be considered public intellectuals on the grounds that their most theoretical formulations don't tell you exactly what's best to do in a particular political decision in this year, this state, and this week. Knowing the science of internal combustion engines doesn't tell you how to tune up the engine on a '57 Chevy. Nor does it give you the skills to be a champion drag racer. But obviously without the science behind it, there wouldn't be Chevy engines to tune or drag races to be run. At least not with automobiles using internal combustion engines.

Politics is politics, as Joe Stalin famously said, not long before he signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler Germany.

Politics is about grand visions. It's also about transient issues of the day. And about constituent service. And about "bringing home the bacon," however much the Tea Party may claim to reject "pork barrel" politics.

The parties in the West today that most directly draw from a Marxist tradition would be those like the Left Party in Germany, which is in part the direct organizational heir of the East German ruling Communist Party. But you don't see them promoting themselves with banners like this one from the German SDS youth group of the 1960s:

"Everyone talks about the weather. Not us."

Those faces would be Marx, Engels and Lenin.

The Left Party in Germany engages with the issues of the day. And, like all parties, they have to be able to show enough success in elections and enough ability to satisfy their constituents in terms of immediate representation and service to keep winning votes. Whether they represent some true Marxist tradition is a matter of judgment. And of polemics, of course, since their opponents are happy to stigmatize them with the old and not-much-lamented East German Communist state. The old symbols that were intensely evocative in the 1910s or 1920s are, not surprisingly, no longer so.

Except in a limited nostalgic role. I'm kind of fond of the Rote Riese (Red Giant) myself:

But like most brands, whether it's the Rote Riese or the Jolly Green Giant, his appeal wasn't forever. Whether some of the strategic perspectives or historical and economic assumptions of the Social Democratic and Communist parties that made use of the Rote Riese's image still have something useful to say to people today is another question.

As William Faulkner didn't quite say: The Cold War is never dead. It's not even past.

The actual quote is from a Faulkner character, Gavin Stevens, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Requiem for a Nun [1951], Act 1, Scene 3.)

Cold War polemics spawned a whole set of stigmas and taboos attached to Marxism. Marxism still has the virtue and defect of being on the margins of respectability. Those intellectuals McElwee mocks still find themselves these days tippie-toeing around anything to do with Marx or Marxism. And, as often as not, they seem to be stuck in the Western Cold War role of highlighting the (real and alleged) failures of Marxism. (See "Žižek, Slavoj," although he's so over-the-top in trying to sound counter-intuitive that it's hard to tell how serious he actually is.)

There's always a market for trashing Marx and Marxism. Hipster-wise, or not. Most of what is produced in that vein is pretty boring. And usually lazy.

Why do I say it's also a virtue for Marxism to be on the margins of respectability? Because it still has the transgressive appeal that the German SDS poster above invokes. And if you're trying to shake up tired ideas about conventional wisdom, a little transgressive appeal is usually required. Žižek is one who tries to combine the "transgressive" thing with Cold War respectability, which makes for an awkward mix.

Karl Marx was a man of the 19th century.

Like Adam Smith, his work can still inform us about enduring aspect of our own current situation. But if we're looking at Marx as a philosopher, economist and politician, he does need to be understood in reference to the concrete historical situation in which he lived. (Does saying that make me an "essentialist"? I wouldn't say so, but opinions may differ.)

Sam Gindin, who apparently comes out of the Canadian social-democratic tradition, makes a similar point in Unmaking Global Capitalism Jacobin June 2014:

In terms of the impact of historical defeats, it's worth noting that in the wake of the 1848 revolutions Marx's emphasis on changing the world and not just interpreting it underwent a reversal. Marx was too optimistic about the potential of 1848, and those disappointments led him to return to the importance of understanding the world as a condition for changing it. This search for a historical materialist understanding dominated the rest of his life. In light of our own defeats, it is likewise crucial for us to learn more deeply about the nature of the world we confront.

While Gindin is right about Marx giving high priority to understanding the world realistically, it's misleading to assume that he didn't prioritize changing the world in the direction he thought it needed to go. He was very much politically engaged to the end of his life and highly focused on the actual movements, parties and events that were actually pushing for the kinds of changes he wanted.

For a more substantive current look at Marx's own theoretical heritage, see Nancy Fraser's Behind Marx's Hidden Abode New Left Review 86/March-April 2014. Warning: it does not discuss Andrew Cuomo's current political situation!

Tags: karl marx, left party, marxism

Sometimes you get surprised

I recently saw a book about the "mythos" of Karl Marx referred to in a leading German philosophy journal, the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, also known to regulars as DZPhil.

The book is by Konrad Löw, Der Mythos Marx und seine Macher: Wie aus Geschicten Geschichte wird (1996). The reference was in an article by Gerald Hubmann, "Ruckkehr in die Philosophie? Neue Marx-Literatur" DZPhil 50:2002/3. Hubmann cites an article in a popular German news magazine, Focus, in which Löw grumps about how useless it is to spend money on new editions of Marx's collective works, because who cares about his stuff any more? Or something to that effect.

Hubmann notes in a sober academic tone, "Gerade aus einer solchen Tabuisierung, ja Dämonisierung aber konnte eines Tages der neue Mythos erwachsen, den Löw eigentlich verhindern mochte" ("But precisely out of such a tabooizing, even demonizing, one day the new mythos could grow that Löw actually would like to prevent.")

So I thought, oh, this might be interesting. A post-Cold War look at various ways that people have turned Marx into some kind of mythical figure. So I checked it out. I read some of the part dealing directly with Marx' biography, and saw that Moses Hess and other Young Hegelians and one-time allies of Marx criticized him, that Marx sometimes disagreed with leaders of the German Social Democratic Party, that he wrote a Critique of the Gotha Programme that expressed concerns about the official unity program the Party adopted in 1875, that Frederick Engels was an enthusiastic disciple of Marx. Big whoop. All standard parts of the old boy's biography. Löw seems to find all of it particularly damaging to Marx' reputation. But then it was obvious from Hubmann's comments that Löw was no fan. Just nothing new or particularly interesting in that part.

So I thought, oh, here's a whole section of the book on Marx as "the most successful 'theologian' since the Reformation," dealing with Christianity and Marxism, Paul Tillich, Ernesto Cardenal, Leonardo Boff, all theologians of some note. In the first couple of pages, he explains that Marx' philosophical materialism and atheism was incompatible with Christian theology. (Well, duh!) But whatever the varying positions the real existing socialist countries of the 20th and 21st centuries took toward religion, surely Löw would have noticed Marx' own statement in the Critique of the Gotha Programme to which he enthusiastically refers in the earlier section, when he where Marx suggests an appropriate Social Democratic statement of principle on freedom of conscience would be, "Jeder muß seine religiöse wie seine leibliche Notdurft verrichten können, ohne daß die Polizei ihre Nase hineinsteckt." ("Everyone must be able to relieve his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in.") Obviously not very reverent. But it's nevertheless a pretty Jeffersonian definition of religious freedom from government interference.

Not only would it seem to make a better argument from his perspective to point to the anti-religious policies of later states which identified themselves as officially Marxist. But his argument suggests that the philosophical materialism of Marx' argument poisons everything else he talked about, from economics to politics to history to social theory. I thought while reading it that such an argument could be just as easily applied to, well, all of modern science, which relies on assumptions that are at a minimum compatible with philosophical materialism. I began to wonder what Löw would think about Darwinian theories of natural selection, which also don't require a divine Creator.

He then makes a argument, with a somewhat sarcastic edge, that Marxism actually has a lot in common with the Christian religion, e.g., it proposes the Proletariat as Savior. I thought, okay, this is really stretching it. And it sounds like stock Cold War cliches about how Marxism was an ersatz religion. Not an argument to be entirely brushed off. But hardly original. Nor did Löw seem to be offering any new insights.

Maybe he does later. But on the third page of this section he says - seriously - "Manches spricht sogar für the These, daß Marx ein Satanist gewesen sei." ("There is even some evidence for the thesis that Marx was a Satanist.")

Marx was a Satanist?!? What the ...? The only "evidence for the thesis" would be that fanatic fundamentalists of the Glenn Beck or John Birch Society or White Citizens Council variety think it sounds good to say.

Good grief! When Gerald Hubmann wrote that Löw was "demonizing" Marx, he wasn't being rhetorical!

At this point, I felt embarrassed that I actually had to read more than two pages to realize the writer was a blithering crackpot. I take some comfort in recalling Charlie Pierce's five-minute rule in talking to fans of the Ron Paul dynasty. Which is that you can have a perfectly rational conversation with one of them for up to five minutes. Then at precisely 5:00:01 minutes, they start sailing off into the stratosphere of Alex Jones type conspiracy theories.

The Satanist bit comes on p. 223 of Löw's book. I like to think that if I had read it from the start, I would have figured out it was hack propaganda recycled in highbrow form long before I wasted the time to read 200-plus pages.

Tags: karl marx

John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty: Karl Marx The Massive Dissent"

Today we have Episode three of John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 The Age of Uncertainty, Karl Marx The Massive Dissent.

I previously used this video in "Karl Marx" in 2013 04/10/2013.

The liberal philosopher John Gray recently did an essay on Marx in The Real Karl Marx New York Review of Books 60:8(05/09/2013 edition), a review of Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013). This is an intriguing observation of Gray's:

Marx's admiration for Darwin is well known. A common legend has it that Marx offered to dedicate Capital to Darwin. Sperber describes this as “a myth that has been repeatedly refuted but seems virtually ineradicable,” since it was Edward Aveling, the lover of Marx’s daughter Eleanor, who unsuccessfully approached Darwin for permission to dedicate a popular volume he had written on evolution. But there can be no doubt that Marx welcomed Darwin’s work, seeing it (as Sperber puts it) as "another intellectual blow struck in favor of materialism and atheism."

Less well known are Marx’s deep differences with Darwin. If Marx viewed Trémaux’s work as "a very important improvement on Darwin," it was because "progress, which in Darwin is purely accidental, is here necessary on the basis of the periods of development of the body of the earth." Virtually every follower of Darwin at the time believed he had given a scientific demonstration of progress in nature; but though Darwin himself sometimes wavered on the point, that was never his fundamental view. Darwin’s theory of natural selection says nothing about any kind of betterment—as Darwin once noted, when judged from their own standpoint bees are an improvement on human beings—and it is testimony to Marx’s penetrating intelligence that, unlike the great majority of those who promoted the idea of evolution, he understood this absence of the idea of progress in Darwinism. Yet he was just as emotionally incapable as they were of accepting the contingent world that Darwin had uncovered.

Galbraith in the companion volume has an interesting anecdote relating to Hegel, one of the major influences on Marx - or rather to Hegel's reputation:

The romantic years were now at an end; the years of Hegel began. Not only was Berlin a far more serious place than Bonn but Marx was now surrounded by the disciples of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. These young men, the young Hegelians, took themselves and their scholarly mission very seriously indeed. Recurrently in history intellectuals have been so impressed with their unique vision of truth that they have seen themselves fated to change how all men think. This was one of those moments.

What is not so easy to describe is the change the young intellectuals sought. Hegel is not a very accessible figure for the Anglo-Saxon or American mind; certainly I have never found him so. Once, years ago, I was greatly comforted by a story told me by Arthur Goodhart, the Oxford law professor and onetime Master of University College. It concerned a night in 1940 when, as a member of the Home Guard, he was deployed with a fellow professor, a distinguished philosopher at the university, to guard a small private airstrip near Oxford.

They may well have been the two most improbable soldiers in the annals of British military history. But they marched back and forth in a light mist, one with a rifle of Crimean vintage more or less, the other with a fowling piece. Occasionally, being professors, they stopped to converse. Toward dawn, during one of these pauses, Goodhart's fellow soldier lit his pipe and said, "I say, Arthur, do you suppose those wretched fellows aren't coming? I did so want a shot at them. I've always detested Hegel."

Tags: age of uncertainty, john kenneth galbraith, karl marx

Another sign of the Apocalypse?

A Karl Marx Gartenzwerg (garden gnome).

Artist Ottmar Hörl has created 500 garden-gnome size figures of Karl Marx. (Gysi eröffnet Kunstinstallation mit 500 Karl-Marx-Figuren Märkische Oderzeitung 05.05.2013; Platte Polit-Kunst: Sebastian Hammelehle, Die Vergartenzwergung des Karl Marx Spiegel Online 02.05.2013)

Tags: karl marx

"Karl Marx" in 2013

Every now and then I'm tempted to post something about Karl Marx, just for the heck of it.

But it's always a bit tricky. Because he's still a polarizing image more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. And those who supposedly are drawing directly on his tradition go all different directions with his legacy.

But, hey, if Jerry Brown can quote the old boy to the Financial Times, I can do a blog post about him (The governor of California talks about taxes, Mother Teresa and being back in charge 04/05/2013):

In those intervening years [Brown] studied Zen Buddhism in Japan, worked for Mother Teresa in Calcutta and ran for president for a third and final time when he took on Bill Clinton in the 1992 primary race for the Democratic nomination. He was elected mayor of Oakland, on the other side of the bay from San Francisco, and then state attorney-general. And now he is back in his old office – an office which was used by his father before him and, from 1967 to 1975, one Ronald Reagan when he was California governor. I ask Brown if his improbable return disproves F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line about there being no second acts in American lives and he mentions Karl Marx’s maxim about history repeating itself – first as tragedy, then as farce. "Except now I’m thoroughly enjoying it," he says. "Much more than the first time."

So let's just pretend here that I inserted a couple of long paragraphs and the split between Social Democrats and Communists, about how things have changed a lot sense the 19th century, about how theories of revolution and social change more or less stemming from Marx multiplied over the decades, how we've learned a lot from the fall of the Soviet Union and the evolution of China, and something about Cuba, and how it's all very complicated and nothing about real history resembles the crazed rambling of Glenn Beck. Also about how weird I think Slavoj Žižek is.

And so I'll move on to what I wanted to post about, which is this article by Terry Eagleton, author of Why Marx Was Right, in Harper's Apr 2103, called The Revolutionary: Is Marx still relevant?, a review/discussion of Jonathan Sperber's new book Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013).

Since Marx is considered one of the great economists of history, even if grudgingly, along with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes - feel free to add a couple of your own favorites - as well as an important political theorist and philosopher of history, we can usually consider ourselves lucky if we get anything more than cringe-worthy stuff in a popular article, even from a noted scholar like Eagleton. Like this, in Eagleton's article: "Sigmund Freud, no friend of Marxism, held that without the necessity to labor, men and women would just spend their days in various interesting postures of erotic gratifi cation. It was the need for material survival that spurred them to forsake the pleasure principle for their banks and cotton mills."

I wish he had footnoted which of Marx' books was about how without being forced to work, we'd all be boinking all the time. In fact, I've read quite a bit of Freud and I don't really recall his saying that exactly. Hey, it sounds like a nice fantasy to me, but it's more Wilhelm Reich than Freud. Freud was was more of a mind that love and work were the two main sources of human satisfaction. If he had been around cats more, he might have added them to the list.

But I don't think Freud was averse to any realistic and humane social arrangement that would have reduced the amount of work required for the physical support of our bodies, a key concern of Marx. Also the topic of Keynes' famous essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), which is still an important but much-neglected document here 80+ years on.

Eagleton continues, "Communism for Marx was a kind of political love." Ouch! Are we talking about the German Social Democratic leader Karl Marx or some third-rank Romantic philosopher of the same name?

In fact, he even says, "He was a Romantic humanist with a passion for the sensuously specifi c." I guess Marx is so little generally known, and there isn't the academic industry there once was in publishing scholarly refutations of his theories, that lots of people can read this without blinking. In the world of German philosophy in which Marx was immersed and from which his theories emerged, he was definitely not part of the Romantic tradition of Schelling, the Schlegel brothers and Schleiermacher. There was certainly an element of his thought that was humanistic in the vague sense we use it today. But to Kant and Hegel, to whom he was far closer in time and thought than to the general popular assumptions of today, "humanism" meant dogmatic Catholic medieval theology.

It gets dumber, including (of course!) some pop psychology speculation about Marx' love life and that of his patron and collaborator Friedrich Engels. It's the kind of stuff that would be entertaining to cynical frat-boys and their older counterparts.

So this is a good place to insert this video that I recently found on YouTube of "Karl Marx The Massive Dissent" which is Episode 3 of The Age of Uncertainty, the 1977 TV documentary by John Kenneth Galbraith, the companion volume to which I quote fairly often here.

It's not often that I grump about Galbraith's presentations, but when he talks about Hegel starting at around 10:00, he uses a common but incorrect model (thesis-synthesis-antithesis) of Hegel's dialectic. That triad works for the dialectical elements of Kant's thought, but not for Hegel. Hegel worked from a model of the contradictions of opposite which were in the process of development ablated, the English word usually used for the German Aufheben, which means preserved, cancelled and lifted up to a higher level. It doesn't through Galbraith's presentation much off course, but its a chronic irritant for Hegel fans.

Karl Marx in the dramatization there looks a lot like Liam Neeson.

Despite my Hegel gripe, Galbraith's 56 minutes there is orders of magnitude more informative than Terry Anderson's article. Skipping over the rest of the frat-boy cracks, Anderson does get around to making a couple of points about what he sees as two "strikingly original contributions to human thought":

[He broke] with much previous philosophy by viewing individuals primarily as practical agents. ... What would the human narrative look like, he asked himself, if we were to start from men and women not as contemplative spirits but as self-determining individuals who create a history in common, and who need to do so because of the nature of their bodies? Is there a way of getting from the body's needs and capabilities to politics, ethics, and culture? It is not certain that there is; but to imagine so is a vastly exciting enterprise, one that Marx launched at a disgracefully precocious age in his Paris manuscripts and then more or less abandoned under pressure of his economic inquiries.

Marx’s other original move was to identify capitalism as a specific historical system, powered by its own peculiar laws.

Like many before him, Anderson seems to have constructed his own "Marx." It's fashionable in academia these days to talk about bodies in spaces. It has something to do with French literary theories that are derived in some way from some variety of existentialism. But Marx' intellectual project wasn't about updating Kant's observations in his Third Critique about the mutual relationship of humanity to Nature. Marx wasn't even especially interested in the question formulated that way. He was elaborate what he saw as laws of history and social development, not the "exciting enterprise" of imagining "getting from the body's needs and capabilities to politics, ethics, and culture." My head hurts.

And, yes, Marx did describe capitalism systematically in a way that influenced the course of economic and social thought, even among those who despised him and his goals. And, yes, he did embarrassing the system and its defenders by "throwing the workings of the system into stark relief" and disclosing "the disagreeable truth that the system represents one particular way of doing things among a range of other possibilities."

But his more specific thoughts on economics Anderson dismisses here as "some rather esoteric reflections on the forces and relations of production." Then he explains, "Marx may have shown the limits of the capitalist system, but he was by no means a fanatical opponent of it." In fact, the head of the International Workingmen's Association and co-author of The Communist Manifesto took an "admiring view" of capitalism! My head hurts worse. What is this, Marx as an inspirational figure for the Business Roundtable?

If you want clever academic parlor chat about Marx that doesn't particularly worry about, you know, actual history and stuff, Anderson's article is a good quick read. If you actually want to know something about the subject and the man then, like I said, the Galbraith documentary is orders of magnitude more informative.

Picking the relatively serious stuff out of Anderson's piece is an effort. But this one last bit is worth commenting on:

There are those who speak of democratic socialism, but this in Marx’s eyes was a tautology. For Marx, nondemocratic socialism was a contradiction in terms, rather like the phrase "business ethics." Socialism was a matter of taking democracy seriously in everyday life, rather than coming it to a purely formal, governmental set of procedures. Human beings might misuse their freedom in this respect, but they were not fully human without it.

Yikes! Contrasting "taking democracy seriously in everyday life" to "confining it to a purely formal, governmental set of procedures" actually makes some immediate sense in 2013, when apathy, passivity and de-politicization are chronic issues in the context of functioning mass democracies.

But it's a painful anachronism to read those things back into Marx' life and the Social Democratic struggles of which he was a part. As Galbraith's documentary reminds us, Marx himself was dogged for much of his life by Prussian spies. The leading German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was outlawed under Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law of 1878-1888. So the SPD, which operated under a program acceptable to Marx, certainly had to take democracy - specifically the fight for democracy, for a "formal, governmental set of procedures" incorporating democracy - very seriously in their everyday lives. As did Marx himself.

One of the great issues between the Social Democrats and the Communists, the description of which I asked everyone to imagine I gave at the start of this post, was what was meant by democracy. And this is worth more comment than Anderson's frat-boy sharing permitted him in Harper's. What the Social Democrats in Germany and the rest of Europe were fighting for was parliamentary democracy. In Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and most of Europe, parliamentary institutions were either non-existent or a sham. Suffrage was very limited and structured on a class basis in Germany. One-man one-vote was a radical democratic goal in the 19th century, and one-person one-vote even more so. The SPD in Germany and the SPÖ in Austria were the primary parties pushing for democracy, the "formal, governmental set of procedures."

This is a 1920 national election poster by Mihály Biró for the Austrian Social Democrats, featuring Biró's Der Rote Riese (The Red Giant), which became a popular and familiar figure symbolizing the left. The slogan on the poster say, "Against the Unity Front of Capitalism - the United Front of the Working People! Vote Social Democratic"

But Marx and the Social Democrats also were working off a model of revolution largely based in images of the French Revolution of 1789. They preferred to take power non-violently and working worked hard to do so. But they were also aware that revolutions happened in a non-peaceful way, as well. They viewed capitalism as a class dictatorship and they assumed that the capitalist and aristocrats aligned with them against the workers were not attached to democracy nor deeply committed to legal and peaceful means of maintaining their rule. And they were, of course, correct in that assumption.

Which brings us to the Paris Commune of 1871, a violent uprising in France that was violently suppressed by the government with the connivance of Prussian troops that had just beaten them in the Franco-Prussian War; it's discussed from about 48:00 in the Galbraith video. Marx defended the revolt and praised it as a "dictatorship of the proletariat." (Proletariat means "working class"; why the German word was taken over in radical theory to English as it was, I've never known.) Lenin and the Russian Communists took that concept and applied it in the way that made it familiar in its current meaning, which was very different from the parliamentary goals that the Social Democrats continued to follow after 1917.

Since both trends claimed to be heirs to the Marxist heritage, one big question about Marx was which of the two major trends would he have supported, if either. It's genuinely difficult to say. On the one hand, the Social Democrats fought to establish parliamentary democracy and worked through it. In the language of Marx, a popular government devoted to the socialist program supported by a majority in advanced industrial countries like England, France or Germany would be a dictatorship of the working class because in his conception, the state was an instrument of class rule. But the Social Democrats of Marx' lifetime also envisioned that even a seizure of power in the eventuality of an uprising would have to be validated in a democratic process with a "formal, governmental set of procedures." On the other hand, as a student of revolution he certainly knew that a revolutionary party that had just seized power might have to practice some form of emergency rule for a period of time.

The events after the Second World War that brought the enduring Social Democratic/Communist split were not ones that Marx expected in that form. The Social Democrats accepted an invitation from the Imperial government in 1918 to form a new government to replace the de facto military dictatorship that was then running Germany. The Bolshevik government seized power in Russia, a country in which peasants were a majority and the working class a distinct minority.

One thing that was clear about Marx and the Social Democrats of his time who followed his lead is that they favored the radical democratic idea of a unitary government by the parliamentary body. A Madison/Montesquieu notion of separation of powers was not their vision. But the rhetoric of democracy persisted for both Social Democrats and Communists. Mikhail Gorbachev understood himself to be a committed Communist when he tried unsuccessfully to put the Soviet Union on track to establish an elected government that would formally have been more in the social-democratic tradition. Social Democrats in Germany, France and Spain today don't understand themselves as working directly in the Marxist tradition but they do consider themselves democrats even while they embrace the brutal austerity politics demanded by German Chancellor Angela "Frau Fritz" Merkel that damage their own base voters and directly dis-empower the working class and the democratic majority.

The 19th century was a long time ago.

Tags: jerry brown, john kenneth galbraith, karl marx

Hedge fund Marxism?

Roben Farzad in Shortcomings of Capitalism: 'Our Grandchildren Have No Value' Bloomberg Businessweek 03/01/2012 references this article, which has a somewhat different title than the Businessweek headline indicates: Jeremy Grantham, Your Grandchildren Have No Value (And Other Deficiencies of Capitalism) GMO Quarterly Letter Feb 2012. GMO is an asset-management firm.

Karl Marx is the classical critic of capitalism, just as Adam Smith is understood to be its classic advocate. Today's worshipers of the Great God Free Market would be appalled at what Smith had to say about some things, like the detrimental effects of corporations. But the symbols are well established.

Generally, when any business publication, or in this case company newsletter, invokes Karl Marx, it's usually as kind of a talisman to ward off the evil effects of critics of any failings of capitalism. But in the real world, there are recurring practical problems with capitalist economies, some of which Marx and his 19th century followers perceived even then. Grantham writes:

Karl Marx went on and on about the tendency of capitalism to so fixate on growth that in time it would forget the need to put on a friendly face for society and would drive home too clearly and brutally its advantage over labor. Ironically, in some way he and Engels looked forward to globalization and the supranational company because they argued it would make capitalism even more powerful, over reaching, and eventually reckless. It would, they claimed, offer the capitalists more rope to hang themselves with or, rather, to be hung with, in the workers’ revolution. The rope for the job, they suggested with black humor, would be bought from briskly competing capitalists, eager till the end for a good deal. Well, time marches on and it’s going to be hard to have a workers’ revolution with no workers. Organizing robotic machine tools will not be easy. However, Marx and Engels certainly got the part right about globalization and the supranational company increasing the power of capital at the expense of labor. To interfere with Marx's apocalyptic vision, we need some enlightened governmental moderation of the new globalized Juggernaut (even slightly enlightened would be encouraging) before capitalism gets so cocky that we have some serious social reaction.

But for me capitalism’s complete fixation on growth at all cost that Marx concentrated on is not as important as the other issues discussed here. Capitalism, by ignoring the finite nature of resources and by neglecting the long-term well-being of the planet and its potentially crucial biodiversity, threatens our existence. Fifty and one-hundred-year horizons are important despite the "tyranny of the discount rate," and grandchildren do have value. My conclusion is that capitalism does admittedly do a thousand things better than other systems: it only currently fails in two or three. Unfortunately for us all, even a single one of these failings may bring capitalism down and us with it. [my emphasis]

This isn't something you're likely to hear Barack Obama or Republican candidates for the Presidency say: "Capitalism, by ignoring the finite nature of resources and by neglecting the long-term well-being of the planet and its potentially crucial biodiversity, threatens our existence." This is also something that classical economics, including its Marxist variety, recognized scarcely if at all in the 19th century. They saw nature primarily as an object for human activity. Which of course it was and is.

But idea of overloading the physical capacity of the planet to support humanity was not a primary concern. The main form in which it appeared in the 19th century was in Thomas Malthus' worries about overpopulation, which were deeply flawed, as subsequent events have shown.

The rest of the statement quoted above, though, is typical business-press puffery. No, we don't have capitalism with no workers. As Keynes understood even in the 1930s, we have an economic system in the developed world that could provide necessary employment and income to everyone while requiring less working hours than are typical for the employed even today. See Keynes' Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930).

Marx and other critics of capitalism saw fairly early that capitalism had a boom-and-bust tendency, which is today commonly known as the business cycle. It's existence is fairly noncontroversial, though in today's Republican Party with its often sneering hostility to science, it would be surprising to find some people hotly disputing it. The New Deal instituted stabilizing mechanism like better regulations on banks, deposit insurance, Social Security and unemployment insurance that have even now prevented the United States from having as severe an economic downturn as the Great Depression. Although, as Paul Krugman has been pointing out, in some parts of Europe like Britain, the current one has arguably already been worse. And it isn't over yet. With the neoliberal ideology embraced by corporate Democrats and, in a more extreme form, by the Republicans, those stabilizing mechanisms here and in Europe have been seriously compromised. And if its advocates have their way, will be compromised further.

If we want to get all geeky and historical here, Marx and his 19th century followers in the Social Democratic parties did see a tendency in capitalism to impoverish the workers. And they did see the globalizing tendencies of the system, though they could hardly have foreseen the present-day role of derivatives or the International Monetary Fund. The pollution of the air and water was evident in the 19th century, but the scope of today's environmental challenges with global climate change was not yet in sight.

The notion of the progressive impoverishment of the workers was based on English political economy, and on the work of David Ricardo in particular. But Marx and the Social Democrats did see that pressure from unions and from workers parties could force the adoption of reforms that would counteract that tendency to some significant degree, even before the rise of the Revisionist movement within Social Democracy in the 1890s, which was focused entirely on reform and rejected a fundamental reorganization of capitalist economies. In Marxist theory per se, the coming to power of the working class and the transformation of capitalism into socialism was seen as the result of the internal contradictions of capitalism embodied in the class struggle between workers and capitalists. They didn't understand that contradiction as being strictly dependent on the impoverishment of the workers or the impossibility of reform within capitalist economies.

What we do see in today's globalization - a fuzzy but common term - is that, whatever theoretical frame one places it into, that the capitalist system does have a tendency to create severe inequality which produces genuine misery for significant portions of the population. And the tendency to cyclical crises/depressions/recessions/business cycles is still very much with us. That the damaging features of the system can be mitigated by reforms is not in serious doubt. That the One Percent will resist such reforms is also in no such doubt.

One thing the Occupy movement accomplished is widespread alteration in vocabulary. The opening sentences of the Businessweek article linked above are, "The top 1 percent is hardly known for its altruistic, sharing-is-caring streak. Self-interest and self-absorption are more its M.O., as illustrated in my colleague Max Abelson’s at once hilarious and terrifying look at Wall Street 'bonus withdrawal.'"

Tags: capitalism, karl marx