Karl Marx may have been crap at economics, but he was a polemicist of rare distinction. What gave his theory salience was the failure of the German Social Democrats to oppose the First World War. A 'proletariat' which serves an Emperor is clearly counter-revolutionary. Its leaders might rise to displace the Cavalier Aristocracy or the managerial bourgeoisie. But there would still be an Emperor. The odd thing was this is exactly what happened under Stalin and Mao. Marx- because he wrote in an opaque, practically meaningless, style and because he didn't know shit about econ- provided the necessary fig leaf.
The irony here is that a fratricidal war between Emperors put an end to the fraternity of the revolutionaries. They would soon slaughter and Gulag each other with greater zeal and efficiency than any Okhrana.
The German General Staff helped Lenin (who belonged to a minority faction even though the word 'Bolshevik' means majority) to get to Russia. But it was Kerensky's stupidity which enabled Lenin to take over. Trotsky turned out to be a good military organizer while Stalin, who had escaped plenty of times from Siberia, gave Russia the biggest and most effective penal/secret police system it had ever seen. Karl Marx suddenly became internationally famous because of these strange twists of fate. Many Bengali and other Indian Revolutionaries- e.g. M.N Roy- went to Russia and became Marxist Communists. However, it was Stalin's victory in the Second War and the victory of Mao in China which turned Marxism into a holy cow for Indian intellectuals. But this was a cow which feasted on blood and shat out terror.
One young Bengali who decided it was safer to appear a bit Marxist, while being too useless to be worth recruiting into the Party, was Amartya Sen who recently told the New Statesman
We do live in a world that values actions as well as contemplation.
Sadly, this is not the case. Some actions are rewarded by the market. Contemplation is merely a type of action which may or may not be valued by anybody.
And that combination is certainly important as you are rightly pointing out. Karl Marx was indeed emphatic on the need to combine the two.
This was because he thought he himself had done so to some good effect. Such delusions of grandeur are not uncommon among crap economists.
But it is important to recognise how much of a theorist Marx remained even when he was involved with assessing the types of action we needed.
This is like saying 'it is important to realize how much of a Catholic the Pope remained even when he is involved in saying Mass.' Marx had achieved nothing in actual politics. His reputation rested solely on his theoretical work- which was shit. Engels says that Marx was afraid the 'Gotha program' would be taken to be a reflection of Marx's views. In particular, Bakunin might spread this canard. Marx also hated Lasalle, Liebknecht and every other Commie nutter except Engels on whom he depended financially.
For example, in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1891), in which he is very critical of the German Workers’ Party (SDAP),
He had died 8 years previously. The thing was published posthumously around the time SDAP adopted Kautsky's 'vulgar Marxism' as embodied in the Erfurt Program. The thing has scarcely any content and can only be of interest to genuine Marxist nutters.
Marx detects in the writings of the SDAP a confusion between payment according to work and that according to need.
Everybody already knows this difference. No detective work is required. It is obvious that a jobless drug addict needs lots of money but won't get it because he is unemployable.
He also emphasises the importance of “nature” in production (not just labour and capital),
because he was pretending that the Gotha program was stooooopid. That's what theoreticians do. They pretend everybody else does not understand the difference between wanting money and having money. Also, clever artisans don't actually fabricate pineapples using icing sugar. The thing is a fruit. It grows on a plant. Plants are part of Nature. Lasalle didn't get this coz he was a fucking petit bourgeois scoundrel. As for Bakunin, the fucker is Slavic! Seriously, them Rooskis are as stupid as shit.
and particularly on the need to see distinctly each of the different identities any person contingently has.
This is Sen's own invention. Marx may have been a drunken kook but he wasn't as crazy as Sen. Contingently, we have only one identity. I am not a Beyonce impersonator because of certain contingencies- example my being fat, ugly, talentless and not actually having watched any of Beyonce's videos. Everything about me is contingent- the fact that I'm a man not a woman, low IQ rather than a genius, have read read Gramsci only in the original Italian because I don't know Italian and only a fucking cretin would read Gramsci save for shits and giggles- and the reason these contingencies define my identity is that all identity is singular. Sen confuses 'predication'- i.e. things which can be said of something- with identity which simply means that which coincides with, or is substitutable for itself. Consider 'genidentity'- persistence through time. There may have been a time when I was a cute baby whom people would have liked to pick up and cuddle. My legal identity may still be that of the baby but nobody would want to pick up and cuddle me. However, my little grandson would be a perfectly acceptable substitute for that purpose.
I do agree with you on the need to have clarity in linking together ideas and praxis, but one of the things that I find quite striking in the works of Marx, but also of Tagore,
why not add David Icke or Donald Trump to this list?
is the extent to which the clarity of ideas is powerfully used to illuminate the type of practical actions that are needed.
What Marx said in the Gotha program is that the Left must not try to redistribute income to help the less productive. Everybody should be paid an amount equal to their contribution. That's why the Soviet Union wasted a lot of resources on measuring work product. Managers had to find workarounds so that essential workers whose 'marginal product' was not measurable got some sort of reward. In the Twenties, the Tata steel company had a 'piece-work' system of this type. Productivity actually went up when Management came round to the workers view that this system was unjust and arbitrary. This is an example of the Coasian firm internalizing externalities which the market would find difficult to measure. This is the sort of 'practical action' which Sen chose to remain wholly ignorant of. Tagore, by contrast, knew what was happening at Jamshedpur because the clerical workers were Bengali and turned to Bose for help. The problem with Marx is that he thought markets were frictionless, open, and not subject to Knightian uncertainty. In other words, he was making the same mistake as Arrow-Debreu and Sen's stupid 'capabilities approach'. The problem with 'contribution' is that like 'entitlements' or 'capabilities', you can only be sure about what they were after the fact. Even then you'd have 'confirmation bias' because you don't know the actual configuration space. You are merely guessing.
The Marxists did great damage because of their absurd economic model. Arrow-Debreu securities too could be 'weapons of mass financial destruction'. But volatility by itself is not a bad thing. The market can confine this type of risk to a class of market makers most of the time though there will be periodic 'shake-outs' against which the working and vulnerable classes can be insured to a considerable extent. By contrast, Marxist or Sen-tentious mistakes represent pure waste and humanitarian disasters of an avoidable type.
What Marx wrote was that Communism would first mean more inequality between working people because some were smarter, worked harder, were more skilled and, crucially, some had fewer or no dependents. He did go on to promise pie in the sky but that pie in the sky would arise anyway even without any Communist takeover provided the economic substructure, thanks to new technology, changed such that scarcity disappeared and people only worked because they wanted to in which case they'd just give away what they produced for free to whoever asked for it. The trouble is, nobody would give me anything because I have a horrible personality. Thus I'd be worse off in a Marxist paradise because nobody would need the money I use to pay for stuff.
Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
So the 'Rights-based approach to Development' is hooey. But Indians have discovered this for themselves. RTE did not magically create quality Education.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor,
There is division of labor within a family or between people who are organizing a picnic or a party. No fucking enslavement is involved. Indeed, but for the 'division of labor' involved in the military sphere, we'd have been enslaved long ago.
and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but itself life’s prime want;
Marx was stupid enough to think that human beings may have a 'prime want' to clean the sewers and do other such horrible jobs.
after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
Sen says shite like the above is about the 'long-run superiority of distribution according to needs'. This is not the case. Marx was a historicist. He was describing what he thought would be an inevitable progression. Obviously, once we have sufficiently advanced technology all 'needs' will be met as a matter of course. Even more obviously, people who don't have the right sorts of 'needs' which can be conveniently accommodated would have gone extinct. Also, ability would be what those with power thought it ought to be. Beating and raping and killing 'class enemies' is too an ability. Those with it need lots of champagne and caviare and super-yachts to relax in. Everybody else genuinely needs to starve to death in a Gulag unless they get with the program.
Another 'Marxian idea' which Sen thinks to be sound, is “objective illusion”(from the German Ideology)
Marx, poor fellow did know about the division of labor but did not understand that it is based on the concept of opportunity cost- i.e. your next best choice- which explains the theory of comparative advantage (stuff like why a billionaire who is a great cook might still employ a chef because he has many other things he can do with his time) and is at the heart of economics.
Thus Marx says
'the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.
Marx thinks the chef does not know why the billionaire isn't cooking for himself. But he does. Moreover, the chef will quit to become a salesman if that pays better. We know what our own opportunity cost is and are always on the qui vive for a better alternative. Other people are concerned with their own opportunity cost, not with ours. There is no way society can find out what our true opportunity cost is. I tell everyone at the public toilet where I work as a cleaner that I'm a millionaire author doing this job only as research for my next book. As a matter of fact, I have written several books and could have inherited money. Society isn't interested in finding out whether or not I'm lying. It is enough that I know I won't get paid unless I turn up for work.
Now, since as Ricardo showed, the division of labor arises out of people having different opportunity cost ratios, it follows that there is no way of computing what the 'common interest' division of labor would be. All we can do is either use coercion to make x do y or else allow the market to allocate labor power. Thus, even under slavery, the smart slave makes his boss an offer- 'let me trade or work on my own and I'll split the profit with you. We'll both be better off.' Indeed, that is how slaves traditionally bought their freedom. Obviously, stupid or resentful slaves wouldn't do this. Similarly there may be people who just take the first job they are offered and grumble about it for the rest of their days. But sooner or later people say to them 'look at x. He was doing the same job as you. Then he realized he could do something more remunerative. You only have yourself to blame if you showed no initiative.'
Marx didn't understand any of this. He thought people got trapped in jobs because they were stooopid. He was writing about German ideologues like himself whom he said were as stupid as shit coz history had stopped in Germany. Truly, the place was a shit-hole. But Marx's German ideology was Teutonically stooooopid. He thought he was stopping being a Hegelian and becoming a materialist. But he wasn't really. Why? Because he didn't get that humans, like most animals, have opportunity cost ratio detection modules hardwired. That's how come the neighbor's cat no longer bothers to jump through my window. I don't got tasty treats. So he jumps through somebody else's window. We are like the neighbor's cat. The fact that we currently have a shitty job does not make us a slave to that job unless we are stooooopid or passive aggressive. The fact is, if you really are a slave, you will discover it soon enough when people beat you if you tell them you want to quit. If that doesn't happen, you aren't really a slave at all. You just like whining about how you are a slave coz Mummy makes you do the washing up and there should be a nice Revolution and all Mummies will be guillotined and then you'd say to Mummy, 'see what happens if you treat your own children as slaves? You get your head cut off. Happy now?'
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.
Very true. If Mummy makes you do the washing up, that's 'division of labor' and is totes illegal coz Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves- right?
He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood;
Coz, there's this law against taking up a different profession- right? Mrs. Marx would keep saying 'Darling, why not go into business like your pal Engels? We'd have more money and a better looking servant for you to get preggers.' Karl would be all like- 'I'd love to oblige but due to division of labor I'm stuck being a critical critic who doesn't earn shit.'
while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes,
Karl could be a mathematician in the morning and a surgeon in the afternoon.
society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Cool! I'd get to perform brain surgery on Amartya Sen in the morning and hunt him by night. The opportunity cost of your letting me perform brain surgery on you is that you fucking die. That's why you will pay big bucks to get a good surgeon to do the job. You won't let me anywhere near you with a scalpel even if I offer you my comic book collection.
The opportunity cost to society of letting people do different things every day of the week is surviving and flourishing rather than very quickly collapsing.
This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.
The reverse is the case. When a bunch of dudes do shit which 'thwarts their expectations' they either stop doing that stupid shit or else they go extinct. Historical development is about dudes doing shit which fulfils their expectations. True, some people get stuck in a rut. They are still doing the same job at 70 that they did at 17 and can't retire because they have no savings. But smart people, or those with a bit of initiative, get so good at doing what they did at 17 that by 27 they run the fucking enterprise. By 37 they have branched out. They have enough to retire at 47 but don't. At 70 you might bump into them at an exclusive resort. Their wife looks not much older than 17. This is the sort of guy who contributes to 'historical development'. Marx contributed to a historical fucking nightmare.
The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.
This is nonsense. Social power is about which bunch of dudes run things. They can have you killed or incarcerated if you try to fuck with them. This is the sort of 'social power' everybody understands. They'd like to get countervailing power against it. The problem with Communist Parties is that they turn out to be worse that the bunch of dudes we all want fucked up. Still, back when Marx was writing this shit, some people may have suffered from the 'objective illusion' that 'dictatorship of the proletariat' wouldn't mean a dictator fucking over the proletariat unless they ran away to somewhere Capitalist and bourgeois.
Sen, because he doesn't understand opportunity cost, swallows the Marxist line- the following is from his memoir
The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.
This was written a couple of decades before Darwin's 'Origin of Species' which made it obvious that a materialist theory of history would have to accept that it was the fitness landscape which decided how a species would evolve. Social power, like individual power, has no magical power such that people get to control their own fate. There genuinely is an 'alien force' existing outside us. What's more, it will get the better of us- even as a species- sooner or later. We will die and our species will go extinct. That's materialism for you.
How otherwise could, for instance, property have had a history at all,
Property has a history when those who own it can fuck up those who try to take it away. The history of power is the history of property.
have taken on different forms, and landed property, for example, according to the different premises given, have proceeded in France from parcellation to centralisation in the hands of a few,
This is nonsense. Before the Revolution, the rich, the nobility, and the church owned 60 per cent of agricultural land. This had gone down to 20 percent when Marx wrote this. Parcellation increased because land was a safe investment and the French were great savers. In England, land ownership had always been more concentrated. Even when agriculture was thriving, a very small number of aristocrats owned half the land. France always had a much more numerous aristocracy and the Napoleonic Code militated for parcellation. After the agricultural depression (caused by cheap imports from the Colonies) land ownership became more concentrated. It is likely that 'half of England is owned by less than 1 percent of the population').
in England from centralisation in the hands of a few to parcellation, as is actually the case today?
Marx was simply ignorant. England had bigger estates for economic reasons. France had parcellation for essentially political and sociological reasons. The Common Market had to placate the French peasant who was a proprietor. There was no similar class in England which is why the Common Agricultural Policy meant that the UK was a big net contributor to Brussels.
Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand –
had Marx been an economist, he'd have said 'because of comparative advantage- i.e. who has the lower opportunity cost ratio- and the specialization that it promotes'
a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear –
all this is bullshit. Empires get overthrown when they stop being the tops at killing people over a large expanse of territory. Commerce can burgeon while paying off whoever is the current hegemon.
while with the abolition of the basis of private property,
by whom? It would have to be a bunch of guys who really kick ass. But what is their incentive not to turn into a 'Stationary Bandit' themselves?
with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?
There were people who set up agricultural communes back then. They all collapsed quickly enough. Marx would have to pretend to understand Econ to stay in business. Thankfully, his pal Engels was a successful businessman and could support him.
Sen writes-
Sen started studying Econ at precisely the time when his people were acknowledging the fact that getting rid of the Capitalistic Brits had worsened things. Once Bengali politicians took over control of Food, there was a big famine. Also, instead of Hindus and Muslims cuddling and kissing, there was ethnic cleansing which Sen's people had to run away from.
The 'objective illusion' of the Gandhians and Nehruvians and Commies and so forth was that Indians could run things just as well as the Brits without doing any of the sensible things the Brits used to do. Similarly, the 'objective illusion' which began misguiding Sen was that 'equity enhancing policies' could enhance equity while being utterly shite.
Sen's big discovery was that very very poor people who can derive no benefit from screaming about unfairness don't scream about unfairness. Sen could get rewarded for pretending to be affected by this unfairness. But this was only because there was an 'opportunity cost' to his doing so. People would say 'had he not cared so much about unfairness, he could have done something useful with his life. Thus we should respect him for sacrificing that opportunity so as to be a useless virtue signalling tosser.'
It's like what happens when you hear about a heart surgeon earning top dollar in New York who moves to Calcutta to work as a rent boy. You understand that the man has made a big financial sacrifice. Maybe he is a 'St. Genet' type. By taking it up the arse all day for less than the price of a pumpkin latte, the guy is performatively deconstructing an existential double bind or other such warmed up sick from the Seventies.
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