Amartya Sen on Marx's bicentennial

Amartya Sen asks

How should we think about Karl Marx on his 200th birthday?  

This begs the question- why should we think of Karl Marx at all? There are no Marxists left anywhere. There is the Chinese Communist Party- but it is Leninist, not Marxist. So- why bother?

His big influence on the politics of the world is universally acknowledged, though people would differ on how good or bad that influence has been. But going beyond that, there can be little doubt that the intellectual world has been transformed by the reflective departures Marx generated, from class analysis as an essential part of social understanding, to the explication of the profound contrast between needs and hard work as conflicting foundations of people’s moral entitlements.

At one time, stupid people in India thought that peasants needed to toil unceasingly so we in the cities could have rice to eat. Nobody believes that any longer. Hard work does not matter. What matters is doing useful work which someone will pay good money for.

Needs are things which motivate us to work in a manner other people find useful and will pay for. Needs also cause us to change the things we buy. One type of need- that for security in an uncertain world- causes us to buy Insurance. It also reconciles us to paying for public goods and the collective provision of a social minimum. Governments may allocate money on the basis of 'moral entitlement'- but these entitlements change unpredictably unless they are incentive compatible or represent a declining proportion of revenue.

All over the world, people have woken up to the fact that States will renege on 'moral entitlements'. Needs don't matter. What matters is if Governments, or other collective insurance schemes, have an incentive compatible mechanism to make good on their promises.

Some of the influences have been so pervasive, with such strong impact on the concepts and connection we look for in our day-to-day analysis, that we may not be fully aware where the influences came from. In reading some classic works of Marx, we are often placed in the uncomfortable position of the theatre-goer who loved Hamlet as a play, but wondered why it was so full of quotations.

So, in reading some classic work of Marx, we are often in the uncomfortable position of becoming as stupid as shit. That's a good reason not to read Marx.

Marxian analysis remains important today not just because of Marx’s own original work, but also because of the extraordinary contributions made in that tradition by many leading historians, social scientists and creative artists — from Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht to Piero Sraffa, Maurice Dobb and Eric Hobsbawm (to mention just a few names).

But these people were all shite. Sartre wrote well but understood neither Husserl nor Heidegger, who were equally shite, nor anything else. Gramsci has zero influence even in Italy. Rosa Luxemburg did not have a penis- that makes her very important because she was probably sexually harassed. Nobody reads Brecht- or, indeed, Sartre- nor are their plays put on anywhere. Sraffa achieved nothing. Dobb & Hobsbawm are forgotten in England and had no influence anywhere else.

We do not have to be a Marxist to make use of the richness of Marx’s insights — just as one does not have to be an Aristotelian to learn from Aristotle.

WTF can one learn from Aristotle? Physics? Biology? Economics? The answer is nothing- unless one is an Aristotelian in Philosophy.

There are ideas in Marx’s corpus of work that remain under-explored. I would place among the relatively neglected ideas Marx’s highly original concept of “objective illusion,” and related to that, his discussion of “false consciousness”.

Marx never used the term 'false consciousness'. It occurs only in a private letter of Engels written after his friend's death.
What about 'objective illusion'- which is Sen's own coinage?
 Sen thriftily recycles a passage from his 'The idea of Justice' which provoked the ire of actual Marxists. Why? Sen attributes a type of stupidity to Marx greatly in excess of that suggested by anyone else.

An objective illusion may arise from what we can see from our particular position — how things look from there (no matter how misleading). Consider the relative sizes of the sun and the moon, and the fact that from the earth they look to be about the same size (Satyajit Ray offered some interesting conversations on this phenomenon in his film, Agantuk). But to conclude from this observation that the sun and the moon are in fact of the same size in terms of mass or volume would be mistaken, and yet to deny that they do look to be about the same size from the earth would be a mistake too.

This is very silly. Everybody knows about perspective. Primitive man thought the Sun was much bigger but further away than the Moon because of its much greater radiance.

Marx’s investigation of objective illusion — of “the outer form of things” — is a pioneering contribution to understanding the implications of positional dependence of observations.

WTF? Marx was an astronomer was he? Where is this 'pioneering contribution'? Is it that, if I see you from afar and put my fingers in front of my eyes, then I can 'squeeze your head' like the head-crusher in 'the Kids in the Hall'?

The phenomenon of objective illusion helps to explain the widespread tendency of workers in an exploitative society to fail to see that there is any exploitation going on — an example that Marx did much to investigate, in the form of “false consciousness”.

The workers understood very well that employers could form cartels to keep down wages. That is why they joined Trade Unions and those Trade Unions financed Labour candidates in Parliamentary elections and fought legal battles and so forth with a view to create countervailing market power for workers.
Marxists thought workers would be even better off if they staged a Revolution and took over the means of production. The workers soon saw this made them worse off. It was the third rate academics and gobshite agitators who suffered from 'false consciousness'.

The idea can have many applications going beyond Marx’s own use of it. Powerful use can be made of the notion of objective illusion to understand, for example, how women, and indeed men, in strongly sexist societies may not see clearly enough — in the absence of informed political agitation — that there are huge elements of gender inequality in what look like family-oriented just societies, as bastions of role-based fairness.

Once again, there is no evidence whatsoever that women did not want equal rights to property, inheritance, voting etc. If 'false consciousness' really existed we could point to an instance of a subaltern group voluntarily asking to be relieved of a freedom available to the hegemonic group.

I may say that people suffer from 'objective illusion' and 'false consciousness' because they deny that all sentient life seeks to attain the felicity of continually making cat-like noises. Your reply would be  'Sour grapes! You wouldn't say that if people really did start making cat-like noises after reading your Das Katze mag Geräusche Theorie'

There is, however, a danger in seeing Marx in narrowly formulaic terms — for example, in seeing him as a “materialist” who allegedly understood the world in terms of the importance of material conditions, denying the significance of ideas and beliefs.

What great danger befalls us if we see Marx as other than a silly arse? After all, a man who denies the significance of ideas and beliefs- maintaining that they are the product of material conditions- is considered by us to be wholly sane and sensible.

There were some people who thought Mahatma Gandhi was a pacifist because his 'ideas and beliefs' appeared thus. But sensible people were under no such illusion in this respect. One reason was that Hindus knew that some fellow Hindu would kick his head in, or put a bullet in it, if he got carried away. Gandhi himself had learnt this lesson early on in his career- when he did a deal with Smuts to get out of Jail. The people who had beaten him most severely were Brown, not White- though, apparently, a Chinese man tried to have sex with him in prison.

This is not only a serious misreading of Marx, who emphasised two-way relations between ideas and material conditions, but also a seriously missed opportunity to see the far-reaching role of ideas on which Marx threw such important light.

What 'far-reaching role of ideas' did Marx throw light upon? Scientific ideas have far-reaching consequences. Pi-jaw does not.

Let me illustrate the point with a debate on the discipline of historical explanation that was quite widespread in our own time. In one of Eric Hobsbawm’s lesser known essays, called “Where Are British Historians Going?”, published in the Marxist Quarterly in 1955, he discussed how the Marxist pointer to the two-way relationship between ideas and material conditions offers very different lessons in the contemporary world than it had in the intellectual world that Marx himself saw around him, where the prevailing focus — for example by Hegel and Hegelians — was very much on highlighting the influence of ideas on material conditions.

Hobsbawm asked a question in 1955. We know the answer to that question. British historians were going in the direction of producing shite for the BBC. 'The History Boys' were wankers. It is hilarious to think that there was such a thing as a 'Marxist Quarterly' in 1955. It was already obvious that the future lay with Gaitskill and any attempt to deviate from that path of sanity would produce only abortions like Arthur Scargill- who, by 1993, was trying to use Thatcher's 'Right to Buy' to get hold of a swanky Barbican flat even though he already owned another property.

Marx lived in London from 1848 onward. There was a theological Left Liberal Hegelianism at Oxford but none in London or Manchester. Germany was far less developed than England at the time. Marx straightened up and tried to get empirical. No doubt, some bad Germanic habits of thought, or tricks of rhetoric, tripped him up- but it would be unfair to say that the fellow was still in thrall to 'Geist'.

In contrast, the tendency of dominant schools of history in the mid-twentieth century — Hobsbawm cited here the hugely influential historical works of Lewis Bernstein Namier — had come to embrace a type of materialism that saw human action as being almost entirely motivated by a simple kind of material interest, in particular narrowly defined self-interest. Given this completely different kind of bias (very far removed from the idealist traditions of Hegel and other influential thinkers in Marx’s own time), Hobsbawm argued that a balanced two-way view must demand that analysis in Marxian lines today must particularly emphasise the importance of ideas and their influence on material conditions.

Hobsbawm failed as a Historian. The English reject him- more particularly those who can track their own working class roots.

What possible influence- other than malign- can ideas have on material conditions? None at all. Ideas too are material. For them to occur, people have to eat and find willing ears in which to shit.

For example, it is crucial to recognise that Edmund Burke’s hugely influential criticism of Warren Hastings’s misbehaviour in India — in the famous Impeachment hearings — was directly related to Burke’s strongly held ideas of justice and fairness, whereas the self-interest-obsessed materialist historians, such as Namier, saw no more in Burke’s discontent than the influence of his [Burke’s] profit-seeking concerns which had suffered because of the policies pursued by Hastings.

Namier was right. Burke was paid for a job and did it well. But Burke's criticism of Hastings was so influential that...urm... nothing at all happened. Why? Only money mattered. Ideas? The garrets of Grub Street could supply with you as many as you liked at tuppence a pound.

The overreliance on materialism — in fact of a particularly narrow kind — needed serious correction, argued Hobsbawm: “In the pre-Namier days, Marxists regarded it as one of their chief historical duties to draw attention to the material basis of politics. .But since bourgeois historians have adopted what is a particular form of vulgar materialism, Marxists had to remind them that history is the struggle of men for ideas, as well as a reflection of their material environment. Mr Trevor-Roper [a famous right-wing historian] is not merely mistaken in believing that the English Revolution was the reflection of the declining fortunes of country gentlemen, but also in his belief that Puritanism was simply a reflection of their impending bankruptcies.”

Why is Sen quoting this fustian? It was old hat by the time I took my A levels in the late Seventies. 'Bourgeois historians' is funny- Monty Python level funny. An Englishman, or whatever rank, can no more be 'bourgeois' than he can be a 'buddhijivi'. Hobsbaum was a clever Yid who was born in Egypt. Had he lived a little longer he would have witnessed the Labour Party turn openly anti-semitic.

His was a more innocent- or parochial- era. People thought it very funny that this exotic bloom was challenging an Englishman of a certain class whose Sligger Urquhart type snobbishness was already so pronounced.

Why is Sen referencing this long forgotten comedy of manners in connection with Marx's bicentennial?

To Hobsbawm’s critique, it could be added that the so-called “rational choice theory” (so dominant in recent years in large parts of mainstream economics and political analysis) thrives on a single-minded focus on self-interest as the sole human motivation, thereby missing comprehensively the balance that Marx had argued for.

What 'balance' did Marx argue for? None. He believed that Capitalism would destroy itself as the rate of profit fell to zero. Nothing could prevent this 'final crisis'. No doubt, a Revolution might supervene and the rational allocation of resources arising out of the coordinating activity of some suitable collective body might hasten a new epoch in Human Society, but this would not require anybody 'balancing' anything in his or her mind. The thing was purely objective and wholly material.

A rational choice theorist can, in fact, learn a great deal from reading Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The German Ideology.

Nonsense! If the thing could have been done, it would have been done. There is not a single theorem, or other result in the relevant literature, to prove otherwise.

Why does Sen not quote some result of his own which owed something to his reading of the worthless tomes he mentions?

While this would be a very different lesson from what Marx wanted Hegelians to consider, a commitment to doing justice to the two-way relations characterises both parts of Marx’s capacious pedagogy.

Aha! Sen thinks Marx was a pedgogue- i.e a guy who repeats the same shite year after year and who pretends, as senility's shadows encroach, that he has helped his students to become better men and women. How? By telling them it was important to 'balance' material and spiritual considerations.

Thus, Sen's view of Marx on his bicentennial, is that we should all dash a tear from our eye and sing 'He's a jolly good fellow' as we wave Goodbye to Mr. Chips.

What has to be avoided is the narrowing of Marx’s thoughts through simple formulas respectfully distributed in his name.

Because what the fellow actually did was 'capacious pedagogy'. We shouldn't say 'Mr. Chips was a good Latin teacher- though he clung to the old pronunciation' .That would be to reduce this pedagogue to a formula. We should say instead- '

'In remembering Mr. Chips on his 200th birthday, we not only celebrate a great intellectual, but also one whose critical analyses and investigations have many insights to offer to us today. Paying attention to Mr. Chips may be more important than paying him respect.'