Chris Dillow gets THE fundamental issue facing the world today, freedom, how Marx understood it, and why it is fundamental. The primary drive of human beings is freedom, which is the criterion of a fully developed human being and why history has a liberal bias.
This drive cannot be met in a system which excludes self-determination and self-actualization for a large portion of the society. The result of this is alienation.
The question then becomes whether is freedom possible in the current system. The answer Marx came to was, not under capitalism, which as Dillow observes is necessarily crony capitalism in a democratic republic where representation is for rent.
Failure to understand this is failure to understand the basis of Marx's thinking and why it is still relevant.
Stumbling & Mumbling
MARXISM & FREEDOM
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)
Failure to understand this is failure to understand the basis of Marx's thinking and why it is still relevant.
Stumbling & Mumbling
MARXISM & FREEDOM
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)
19 comments:
Freedom for whom, and in the name of what?
What is most missing today is the knowledge of true principles, let alone their application.
What has gone from the globe is a profound sense of the Real. As a result we witness what has been predicted by every single major religion regarding the end of a cycle: corruption everywhere; "wars and rumors of wars"; intellectual chaos; a blind science that threatens humanity with extinction but promises with its siren song an earthly technical paradise and even immortality. All this and more constitutes the "strong illusion" of the times.
"The question then becomes whether is freedom possible in the current system. "
Tom,
Perhaps consider whether the 'freedom' you seek is possible now during what Paul called "the present wicked eon" and "man's day" ... like you perhaps surmise, it may not be possible for humans to (successfully) achieve the type of 'freedom' you are talking about during this present wicked eon imo... rsp,
All points well taken, Henry.
There are basically three levels of freedom: freedom from, freedom to, and freedom for.
Freedom from is the sine qua non of pursuing the other aspects of freedom. The most salient aspect of freedom form is not freedom from constraints, as often supposed, but rather, freedom from ignorance.
Freedom from constraint results in freedom to. Freedom to be, feel, think, express, and do iaw choice (free will).
Freedom to involves informed choice and responsibility for consequences. We are free to choose our actions — thoughts, words and deeds, but not the consequences of those actions. Freedom to choose involves the responsibility of "right" choice. The limbs of Buddda's eight-fold path all begin with the term samyak, which means "right." "Right" in this sense encompasses the deontological (duty), transcendental (virtue) and consequentialist (leading to maximum utility).
Freedom for is freedom for self-development and self-actualization. Here freedom from ignorance and freedom to inform ourselves is paramount. The wise of all times and places have taught that freedom is for self-development and self-actualization holistically in order to unfold one's full potential as a human being and as individual. They have also taught that full potential includes spiritual freedom and is epitomized by it.
As a result we witness what has been predicted by every single major religion regarding the end of a cycle: corruption everywhere; "wars and rumors of wars"; intellectual chaos; a blind science that threatens humanity with extinction but promises with its siren song an earthly technical paradise and even immortality. All this and more constitutes the "strong illusion" of the times.
See Meher Baba's Call.
Matt, according to many wise people, that period is coming to an close and a new period is about to begin. In fact, it is has already begun and is in progress although this is not as yet perceptible to most.
Tom,
Are you familiar with Amartya Sen? I recently ordered a bunch of books, and his Development as Freedom is one of them. I don't think I'll get to reading it till this summer though.
I know about him but have not read his work. I like hsi angle of addressing social choice theory but it's not an area that I have looked at from the POV of Arrow's work.
Development is a tricky area. Jeff Sachs has a good heart, but his economics is awful.
The Marxist notion of freedom is antithetical to the Anarchist impulse to have the freedom to pee in your pants if you want to. By contrast, as an outgrowth of German critical philosophers like Kant and Hegel, Marx's notion of freedom was more like an imperative linking Freedom to Necessity.
For Marx, Freedom was the power to make a positive contribution to the process of Universal Labor which unleashes humanity's potential to develop its capacity to reproduce itself at higher levels from one generation to the next. How else can one's life be truly meaningful and not all be for nothing?
Intrinsic to this process was dialectical interplay or yin/yang if you prefer between Labor and Capital. Adam Smith and Karl Marx had something very important in common which is that human progress is predicated on the accumulation of Capital which is the essential element in promoting human Freedom.
By necessity this means that from one production cycle to another, the ratio of capital applied to labor must increase. This is the basis for increasing labor productivity and raising living standards for the broader population from one generation to another over time.
In this context, politics is the practice of attempting to strike a balance between the development of the quality and power of Labor as reflected in living standards vs. the development of the means of production, or Capital.
The Marxists would refer to this accumulation of capital over and above what is necessary to pay for maintain and replace Labor and Capital as social surplus, whereas capitalists would think of it more in terms of profit and earnings but either way a growing ratio of capital relative to consumption as the economic pie grows larger results in rising absolute living standards. It means that there is progressively more and more investment available not merely to maintain existing plant, machinery, infrastructure and labor skills and corresponding wages but to upgrade it. Moreover, those upgrades to all these categories must expand exponentially to avoid economic stagnation and/or regression.
Are profits generally used as investment, as the Classical Economists envisioned, or are they actually 'pocketed' and used as collateral for the truer source of investment -> bank loans. And since we all recognize the Loans create Deposits…
How is our world different than what Marx imagined?
I don't know about Dillow's post. He's the sort of chap who I ought to agree with (he reads Hayek, Marx, Buchanan and Alistair McIntyre), but rarely do.
Self-actualization is really the highest (the only) good of liberalism. To the extent that Marx is for self-actualization and autonomy, then there is an obvious conflict with things like collectivism and class consciousness.
So it seems odd for someone to describe the ends of Marxism in such liberal terms. My reading of is that there is a younger, romantic, anarchistic Marx, and then there is Marx.
But Dillow's Marx is strangely modern, who's real argument is with things like "gender essentialism" and "transphobia".
If "transphobia" is to be prevented, then clearly someone's freedom will need to be limited, and equally clearly there will need to be some agent powerful enough to do the limiting: i.e., the liberal state, who wants to micro-manage your personal affinities to make sure they are politically correct.
First, Marx himself never really said that much about the end state of communism other than the state would wither away when coercion was no longer required to protect private ownership of capital and the consequential state enforced extract of rent that it involves. Marx was capitalism as liberalizing in that it got rid the hereditary aristocracies lock on power, but the fruition of capitalism defined as private ownership of the means of production as socialism defined as the public ownership of production. I believe it was Engels who explained that the objective was not the elimination of private property as such but of private ownership of the means of production enforced by the state. As Dillow points out, that just results in crony capitalism and ultimately state capture.
Secondly, Marx agreed substantially with Hegel that genuine freedom is freedom within society, not individual freedom in the Libertarian-Randian sense, which Marx thought was puerile. That type of freedom was advocated in his time by the "anarchists." For Hegel and Marx, genuine freedom is self-determination, that is, living iaw "natural law." Hegel and Marx both accepted the Kantian categorical imperative in essence, which is the Golden Rule expressed in technical terminology — act in such a way that the ethical principle on which your action is based could become a universal rule of behavior. Dumas had expressed it as the motto of the Three Musketeers, "One for all and all for one." Marx expressed it as "From each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs."
These were Enlightenment ideas expressed in Continental rather than British form. Although Hegel and Marx are considered post-Enlightenment, they are building on Enlightenment thought and reacting to deficiencies they found in the social and political philosophy.
In fact, may of the reforms that Marx and Engles called for in the Communist Manifesto are incorporated today. In addition, in their time, capitalism meant something different than it does not in that the context was very different. So in that sense, the writings of that time are obsolete, but the underlying principles are still applicable. It is manifestly obvious that today human beings are not free in anything but an idealized legal sense of the term even in the most developed societies.
How is our world different than what Marx imagined?
Marx was addressing the owner capitalism of his day, whereas we now have managerial capitalism and finance capitalism. The contexts are quite different but the rent extraction is the same.
Classical economics including Marx is very much about rent, as Michael Hudson points out. Neoclassical economics largely eliminated rent from consideration. Keynes corrects that be making money non-neutral.
That's not what Dillow is saying though. Dillow is saying that Marx is actually "libertarian"--what I would call a liberal.
Apart from the bit where you seem to equate self-determination with living in accordance with the natural law, I have to say that your Marx sounds rather conservative!
Marx had a not so small conservative bent. Jean Baudrilliard forcefully demonstrated that each of Marx's main categories or dimensions were a mirror image of capitalist society. Thus Marx's productionist/ workerist obsession was only different from the capitalists in method not kind.
Marx was a liberal on the side of human freedom a opposed to hierarchically imposed control by a privileged class, but he was but not a libertarian ("anarchist") in his day), which he actively opposed.
Traditional "conservatism" held that some people are better than others and Marx, like all good traditional liberals, disagreed with the viewpoint based on that assumption, holding it was a tool manufactured for control.
But both Hegel and Marx held what would be considered "conservative" values today, although they were not conservative in that sense in the context of the 19th century. Hegel is often considered an apologist for the Prussia state, but that is a simplistic view. Hegel's political work is about freedom as self-determination iaw the law of reason. He is simply repeating the Greeks in this, whom he correctly understood.
For both Hegel and Marx, freedom is necessity (law) in that human beings are social animals and only find full expression in an ordered society.
Freedom as self-determination is the progressive manifesting of of the full potential of human nature as consciousness develops and expresses itself in social action — no man is an island. The purpose of human beings is to become increasingly freer. Freedom is the basic drive, which is why history as a liberal bias.
It is often supposed that Hegel and Marx were opposites, in that Marx's approach to dialectic "stood Hegel on his head." That is an exaggeration. They are actually very close on most important points. Marx is in the tradition of German thought, even though he broke with German idealism, which had dominated German thought since Kant. There are two strains in German culture, rational and romantic — reason and feeling. Both Hegel and Marx come down on the former side.
I woud say that Marx attempted to make German thought "scientific." Hence his emphasis on materialism rather than the world of ideas. But Marx is ideas through and through, just as he was a member of the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat as he advocated for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.
While Marx opposed the coercive state and wanted to see it go away with rising consciousness, since it was "false consciousness" that maintained it, he held that good governance was law-based and aimed at good order. He certainly did not think that pursuit of self-interests would result in an orderly society under the rule of law as political self-determination.
Marx also held to a conception of right action based on fairness, what we would call today "solidarity" and "social justice," rather than a consequentialist relativism based purely on utility. See, for example, Peffer, Marxism, Morality & Social Justice, p. 80-81.
Marx had a not so small conservative bent. Jean Baudrilliard forcefully demonstrated that each of Marx's main categories or dimensions were a mirror image of capitalist society. Thus Marx's productionist/ workerist obsession was only different from the capitalists in method not kind.
Yes, Marx mostly wanted to get rid of the rent-seeking and thought that this was only possible by making the private ownership of the means of production public due to crony capitalism. Under owner capitalism, the haute bourgeoisie just replaces the feudal lords of the manor, the aristocracy and the crown. Marx was OK with the petite bourgeoisie as long as they did not mimic the haute bourgeoisie ("capitalists"). If there was no haute bourgeoisie that would not be an issue.
The point is that _Dillow_ thinks that "freedom" is something to do with "self-actualization", where self-actualization means the trajectory of an autonomous individual who isn't defined or limited by things like their gender, for example.
The problem with autonomy, self-determination, self-actualization and so on, is that there's nothing that operates to make sure that every autonomous individual's interests are aligned. That's why you need laws, and therefore an intrusive state, to prevent things like "transphobia" and "gender essentialism".
The laws preventing "transphobia" limit autonomy. So there is a trade-off. The less you want traditional institutions to be a material influence on people's lives, the more you need the state, either to replace the functionality or suppress the desire for it.
Marx and libertarians would argue that a (coercive) state is not necessary for ordering a society under the rule of law. Now that we are entering the digital age it is simpler to conceive how that might be possible though popular consensus democracy.
The problem with both Marx and most libertarian thinking is that the details are not specified, so it is often difficult to pin this down.
Marx wrote on social and political philosophy in his younger years, and never specified what a communist society would actually be like in any detail. To do this, he would have had to write a utopia, which he was not wont to do. Marx turned his attention in his later years to writing Das Kapital.
As a result, when his thought was taken over by actual revolutionaries like Lenin, it was just a suggestion rather than a clear guideline, let alone a plan. Marxism-Leninism was a later construct, and that was further adapted by Stalin, Mao and the petty communist dictators of smaller countries in directions that Marx could not have imagined in the context of his time.
Marx's stated view is two-fold.First, he was a proto-sociologist and anthropologist, hence, an institutionalists, who realized that cultures and their rituals and institutions develop over time and then decay when they no longer are sufficiently adaptive. This marx realized that Hegel's view of conscious development was accurate scientifically and event would tell what would happen as the future unfolded into the present.
The other Marx was an impatient activist who wanted to push the river. This Marx conjectured about the dictatorship of the proletariat (against the anarchists) and then the eventual withering away of the apparatus of the state.
Bakunin broke with Marx over the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he correctly intuited was likely to be hijacked by a faction that would use it for its own advantage.
My own view is that the first Marx had it right. As human consciousness evolves its potential, culture and society will change to reflect this. The way to push the river is by raising consciousness which is accomplished by reducing "false consciousness."
A lot of so-called New Age thought is about this. Some New Age thought is visionary but vapid, but there are many avantgarde forward thinkers with promising ideas and many experiments are underway that offer models of many varieties along the social and political spectrum. Of course, many of these would resist the New Age label, but they are all visionary and utopian to some degree.
So I don't regard this as pie-in-the-sky. It's happening.
My point here is that Marx is neither a devil nor a god. He was a thinker who wrote in the context of his time, and he still has something to tell us today that is more universal in scope. Those who avoid Marx as a devil and those who worship him as a god are equally wrong. He is one of the giants on whose shoulders the thinkers of the day stand, although many of them don't suspect it because they are unfamiliar with him. But they learn by cultural osmosis anyway.
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