Resurrection [of Marx] — Ernesto Estévez Rams

I suppose some people wonder why I keep coming back to Marx. Here is the reason.

  This is how very influential - and not at all communist - Jacques Attali once described him, "He was the first to grasp the world as a whole, which is at once political, scientific and philosophical. From that point of view, he is, as the communist historian Eric Hosbawm said, “the recognized founding father of modern thinking about society.”...

There is also a return that implies greater practical persistence. Marx sought a different, rational way of seeing the world as a whole, and for that purpose created tools of analysis to reassess, not only the legacy of philosophical, economic and humanist thought before his time, but also that of the future. So much so that Nobel Laureate in Economics – and no communist at all – Sir John Hicks, admitted, “Most of those who wish to design a general history course would use Marxist categories, or a modified version of them, since there are few alternative versions available.”

Marx is a member of that sparsely populated Parnassus along with Newton, Darwin and Einstein, who have been so uncommon as to create frameworks which have been universally useful in human intellectual action....

Marx was a comprehensive thinker, the first person to combine the major disciplines that were becoming scientific in the 19th century. The 17th century had seen the enormous rise of natural science under Newton, but it was still largely under the sway of the theological and philosophical approach that had dominated Western thought since the ancient Greeks.

However, the 19th century saw the rise of chemistry, biology, and social science to complement the advances in physics made in the 18th century and physics made its own strides in the 19th century as well. Mathematics correspondingly grew to meet the challenges of quantitative expression.

As result, the work of not only Newton is regard as seminal but also Darwin in biology, Freud in psychology, and Marx in social science. Marx was solidly in the tradition of Aristotle in attempting to make philosophy "scientific" in the sense of observational and quantitative as much as possible.

Just as all the other disciplines have come a long way since their founders; so too with Marx. However, physics is still physics, chemistry is still chemistry, etc. But the social sciences split into different disciplines — anthropology, sociology, economics, behavioral psychology, social psychology, etc. Moreover, much more sophisticated mathematical and statistical capabilities were developed to express these disciplines scientifically.

But no single person has come along to match Marx in the scope and depth of his approach. One reason for this is that until the 19th century it was possible to know all about everything, so to speak, because the knowledge base was still rather limited. Owing to the explosion of knowledge and information, that is no longer possible.

The result is a knowledge based that is fragmented based on disciplines and specialties. The consequence is that overarching views tend to be ideological rather than integrated. The result is alternative world views that can clash with each other, with no way to decide objectively, since criteria are hidden assumptions in implicit models of reality.

Thus, Marx can still teach us how to see the world scientifically in a way that integrates the scientific approach based on many disciplines in a "meta" way. A problem now is with modeling this tractably. General systems theory, complexity theory, chaos theory, fuzzy logic, etc. are attempts to synthesize knowledge based on "consilience," that is, a view that integrates the findings of all the sciences. But the big picture still eludes us.

The economics profession has not yet awoken to this challenge, at least for the most part, and so most approaches to economics are intellectually and scientifically puny, while many are pseudoscientific, adopting the veneer of "science" without actually doing science in a way that is consilient, or even exhibiting awareness of other sciences.

Marx made a valiant attempt and whether one agrees with his analysis wholly or partially, one can profits by understanding how it went about doing what he did.

Three "economists" stand out in this regard and significantly none of them was an economist by training. Adam Smith was a philosophy professor. Karl Marx was a philosopher chose to pursue philosophy as a game-changer, and John Maynard Keynes was a polymath trained as a mathematician. They are all still worth reading.

Th only other philosopher-economists that have approached the big picture and deserve recognition for it are the "Libertarians," broadly speaking for want of a better word — Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and Nozick, for example. Interestingly, both Marx and the Libertarians were anti-statist, from different angle, left and right. Both strive to be scientific as well. But that is another subject.

A third big picture approach that is not given its due, in my view, is Catholic social teaching. That this teaching is more traditionalist than liberal probably accounts for this.

But these are schools. I don't think there is a single individual that was as comprehensive in approach as Marx, although I would argue that Marx really is properly viewed as Marx-Engels.

MR Online
Resurrection
Originally published: Granma English by Ernesto Estévez Rams