Joseph Heath, a philosophy professor in Canada, writes in substack
Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world.
In 1979, my tutor at the LSE asked me to write an essay on the Marxist theory of history. I thought this was that Marx believed all countries would industrialize on the British pattern and this would bring about similar political and social changes. The problem was that though Britain's rise as a capitalist industrial power may have been unplanned and the arrow of causation may have been from the economic substructure to the political superstructure, other countries might take the opposite approach- i.e. the superstructure might deliberately change the substructure. In Germany, this was the notion of the 'Sonderweg' or 'special path' imposed from above which would move the country to a Liberal type of Socialism before there was any 'pressure from below'.
An alternative, more Marixist path, might commence with a 'revolution from below' which deliberately chose a technocratic path to industrialization undertaken by giant state run enterprises. Indeed, this is what we thought Stalin had done- viz transform a backward, superstitious, mainly agricultural country into a ultra-modern 'worker's paradise' which might soon build colonies on the Moon and other planets. The attraction of Marxism was that it claimed to be a purely scientific discipline which could allocate resources efficiently and thus eliminate 'wasteful competition'. Planning would enable Man to take charge of his own Destiny. Soviet men would be as Gods. Once stupid, greedy, capitalists and feudalists and those addicted to Religion's opium had been gently but firmly told to fuck the fuck off, all of humanity would unite to claim its destiny amongst the stars. Scarcity, of course, would disappear. Till then, as Marx said we would have to pay workers according to their contribution. Indeed Soviet factories had a complicated system of working out how much each should be paid. Stakhonovites, who over fulfilled their quota, gained special perks- e.g. Gorbachev, a strong farm worker, got permission to study Law in Moscow. Sadly, he didn't understand that the Soviet economy would collapse if the Party released it from its control. There would be a 'scissors crisis'. The nomenklatura would figure out that the spot price of Russian commodities was higher than whatever 'shadow price' Kantorovich's kooks might calculate. Thus, if they could get 'control rights' over Russia's vast mineral wealth, they would be richer than the Tzars. That story is still unfolding. However, in China, the Party retained 'control rights' (though this was not obvious to optimistic Western observers) and thus it could continue to pursue the older Communist dream of my parent's generation. We don't know for certain if China can move beyond 'catch up growth' but it is certainly possible. What is certain, however, is that the West is too sclerotic to pull itself together and plan for a brighter future. That is the reason the Western Marxist is just a crotchety fellow similar to the crazier type of Feminist or more paranoid type of Religious or Racialist crank.
In my essay for my tutor, I focused on how a Marxist theory of history could accommodate a reversal of the arrow of causality from substructure to superstructure. Sadly, this involved ignoring the one decent thing about Marx's labor theory of value- viz. the stipulation that the labor numeraire could not fall below the social subsistence level. Obviously, as Stalin's Gulags proved, it could do so for long periods. In other words, Man could indeed take charge of his own Destiny provided a large section of the population was worked to death under horrible conditions.
A more benign possibility was that historically more literate and educated Societies could do Listian 'catch up growth' such that they more quickly gained economies of scope and scale in new technologies. In this case they might develop different 'Tiebout models' (i.e. tax/public good mixes) and this would be reflected in different ideologies and institutions of a more or less technocratic kind.
Reading my essay, my tutor quickly decided I was an imbecile. Apparently, what I should have been doing was engaging with G.A Cohen's defense of the Marxist theory of history which had come out the previous year. But, it was stupid shit. Marx's determinism had to do with the substructure as defined by relations of production not the technological production possibility frontier. After all, his Doctorate was in Law. In any case technological determinism was off the table because new tech is a 'hopeful monster'- i.e. it can't change the substructure as it is being built up. The superstructure could directly intervene, through Listian protectionism & state backed investment, to set off not just a 'catch up' revolution but also the creation of new industries which would ab ovo have 'acquired advantage'. The problem here is that the thing was stochastic. Some might succeed, many would fail.
It wasn't just that Cohen did not understand that Marxism is an economic theory. Philosophically, his enterprise was oxymoronic. You can't have an 'analytical' treatment of dialectical thought because the latter is comfortable with unstable extensions for intensional terms. The latter is founded on stable extensions. I was not then aware of Lawvere's attempt to give a category theoretical treatment of Hegel's dialectic but this would not have mattered. Cohen's error was to think that there is a functional relationship between production relations and the types of technology which can flourish. This was obviously not the case as Stalin's Russia had shown. The case of Japan was equally interesting. We were fortunate to have, at the LSE, Michio Morishima who represented the Japanese Marxist tradition in all its bizarre glory. He did drum the importance of 'duality' into us- i.e. we understood that a modern sector could coexist with a traditional sector- but we understood this as market segmentation or 'discrimination'. Only later on did I understand that there are regret minimizing reasons why coordination games or pooling equilibria would give rise to discoordination games. But this also means more path dependence. There is ergodicity at the global level but I doubt its dynamics could be captured at the local 'political' level. That's why there is little point being ideological.
Most of this work was being done under the banner of “analytical Marxism” (aka “no-bullshit Marxism”),
it was all bullshit and no fucking Marxism. Why not pretend that Karl Marx was actually Santa Claus and Engels was a flying reindeer?
following the publication of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (and his subsequent elevation to the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Philosophy at Oxford).
The current occupant is the even more cretinous Amia Srinivasan.
Meanwhile in Germany, Jürgen Habermas’s incredibly compact Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus promised to reinvigorate Marx’s analysis of capitalist crises in the language of contemporary systems theory.
German pedants can't invigorate shit. 'State Capitalism' or a 'Mixed Economy' doesn't have a problem with legitimacy. It has a problem with incentive incompatibility. Bureaucrats and politicians have an incentive to yield to the most obstreperous bunch of nutters they are faced with. Allocative efficiency goes out of the window. Public sector enterprises- e.g. British Leyland- become loss making while Unionized workers are featherbedded. But this meant that the working class's own pocket was being picked by the tax-man so as to pay zombie enterprises to stay in business. The working-class rebelled against 'stagflation' and voted for Reagan and Thatcher.
It was an exciting time to be a young radical.
Not in England. Your pals who dropped out of skool at 16 to work in the City were driving Porsches while you could scarcely afford a pint of beer and a packet of pork scratchings.
One could say, without exaggeration, that many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description.
They weren't smart. They were stupid and boring. Marxism was cool when Castro and Che Guevara and Mao were kicking ass and taking names.
So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals.
The actual Marxists had been saying they were nothing else all along.
Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs,
universal basic income means our people won't take 'dirty' jobs. But voters won't want to extend this benefit to immigrants who do take those jobs. So, you end up with guest-workers. Congrats! You've just turned your country into Dubai! Why stop there? Why not insist our women not form sexual relationships with those dirty foreigners? How about a nice little system of apartheid?
John Roemer,
a mathsy guy. His Class Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP), states that individuals who optimize by hiring labor are necessarily exploiters, and those who optimize by selling labor are exploited. So retired people are 'exploiters'. Kick granny's head in!
His approach to 'compensation' falls down because it can be gamed and is likely to be adversely selective. It was probably a mistake to disguise unemployment as disability.
Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.”
i.e. they wanted to be very liberal with other people's money. Still, I'm sure they set a good example by sharing their own salaries with the custodial staff.
Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.
In other words, they were saying 'guys who vote for Reagan and Thatcher don't want lower taxes. They want everybody to get the same amount of money as the unemployed. Amartya Sen went the extra mile and said that they wanted less money than the unemployed person because the poor bloke might be a drug addict who could only get hard if two hooker urinated on him. Drugs aren't cheap you know. Also only Vassar graduates have the special skills necessary to pull off a double golden shower. They have to charge a lot of money because they are carrying a lot of student debt.
If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.
The Chinese had already discovered that what Marx actually said was 'to each according to his contribution'. This meant that control rights over property should be aligned with entrepreneurial ability. However, since the Party (unlike in Gorby's USSR) retained control over everything, these control rights might disappear. But this led to capital flight.
This is not quite right though, because what they actually discovered was that the new, modernized, reinvigorated liberalism propounded by Rawls was both expressively and rhetorically superior to the reconstructed Marxism they had been trying to defend.
But it cashes out as saying 'be nice to the poor. There but for the grace of God & c'. That aint liberalism. It is Churchy pi-jaw. Not the cool Televangelist mega-churchy pi-jaw- which is about having had sex with a male prostitute and blown millions of dollars of Church money at Las Vegas but claiming to have been absolved of all sin by Lloyd Jesus who has washed you in the blood of some lambs. This is boring Episcopalian pi-jaw.
So they switched allegiances (sometimes with fanfare, more often without).
To be fair, there was a time when it was safer to appear on campus as a Lefty or a fellow traveler or a usefully useless idiot. Then, people realized that kids want to get laid and get high in Collidge. But they also want to get rich and thus give artsy-fartsy pi-jaw the go bye unless they are disabled Bleck Lesbians from some shithole country and hope to rise on the basis of affirmative action and a credential in Grievance Studies.
I sometimes teach a seminar course in which we read all three of the books that Rawls published during his lifetime.
Canadians still read books. They truly are the most boring people on the planet.
I always start by cautioning students that the biggest challenge in reading Rawls’s work is figuring out why it is so important – because it seems incredibly dull (normie, basic, etc.).
Rawls is very funny. The cunt didn't get that when faced with uncertainty you go in for risk-pooling- i.e. you buy insurance. You don't agree to share everything with homeless alkies or socioproctologists.
My best suggestion for overcoming this challenge, when reading A Theory of Justice, is to go into it thinking “this is the book that killed Western Marxism,”
did you know that Nixon was a Communist? Rawls's book led directly to his impeachment.
One might ask whether Blair and Brown had read Rawls. Was that why they abandoned Clause IV (which called for common ownership of industry)? The short answer is no. They just wanted to reassure voters who had bought their council houses and invested in shares in BT etc, that Nationalization was off the table.
and then focus on figuring out how it managed to do so. (The fact that Rawls never directly criticized Marx adds to the mystery.)
Capitalists won't hand over their property unless they are compelled to do so by Commissars with guns. However, we can pretend that if they were really rational, they would voluntarily agree to have the same income as a drunken hobo. This is like pretending that what all heterosexual men really want is to suck you off.
To make this long story short, one must start with the most important piece of bullshit in traditional Marxism. Marx always insisted that the major difference between his view and that of the “utopian socialists” was that he was not engaged in any sort of moral criticism of the capitalist system, nor was he claiming that capitalism was unjust. He was merely predicting the downfall of the capitalist system, based on his scientific understanding of the laws of historical development.
He wrongly believed that the rate of profit would fall to zero. The fact is, even if it is negative, there will still be entrepreneurs, with control rights, tapping into Society's fund of savings.
So, for example, his use of the term “exploitation” was not intended to imply any sort of moral condemnation, it was merely a technical term used to describe the extraction of surplus value from labour.
Morishima's fundamental theorem of Marxism states that so long as at least one enterprise makes a profit- exploitation exists. The Feminist version is, so long as even one dick enters a vagina, all women are incessantly being raped. Obviously, both these views are false. The fact is, so long as there is even one Iyengar, Iyers are being mercilessly persecuted- e.g. by Leo Varadkar's refusal to allow us to reclaim Iyerland from the fucking leprechauns.
This was obvious bullshit – indeed, at various points where Marx makes this claim, he sounds like he is, as the British like to say, “taking the piss.”
Not really. By the 1880s many large agricultural estates in England had become loss making. What if the same thing happened to industry? There might be a 'general glut' and 'deflation'- which would lead to what Keynes would later call a liquidity trap. Indeed, that's how the Great Depression was interpreted.
Nevertheless, early Marxists (and Marxist-Leninists) found it a useful claim to keep around, in order to avoid getting into certain arguments that they didn’t want to get into.
No. At that time, it looked obvious that Capitalism would begin to die if it stopped finding new markets. That's why many agreed that 'Imperialism is the final stage of Capitalism', but since Emperors were bound to fight each other to death, Bolshevism might soon overrun the world which might make everything sweet and nice.
Over the course of the 20th century, however, the claim became increasingly less useful, because the prospects for the collapse of capitalism came to seem increasingly remote.
No. What changed was that people kept running the fuck away from Communist countries. Also, guys who raved about the Worker's paradise seldom showed any burning desire to move there themselves.
Most importantly, workers did not become “immiserated,” as Marx predicted, but rather experienced robust wage growth, so that by the beginning of the 1970s it was really not obvious to anyone that workers had reasons of self-interest to support socialist revolution.
Nobody minds getting even richer or enjoying more leisure and better amenities.
By this time most Marxists had also realized that they needed a moral critique of capitalism, because the whole “predicting its downfall” angle had basically outlived its usefulness.
Also the capitalist was actually the worker's pension fund or insurance company. Institutional investment was like 'common ownership' except management had to stay on its toes
So the number one piece of bullshit that got purged, at the very first meeting of the no-bullshit Marxism group, was the claim that Marxism could get along without a normative critique of capitalism.
Kantorovich had got a Nobel prize. The hope was that a bunch of networked computers could allocate resources more efficiently than financial markets. Sadly, the incentive was lacking. By the end of the Seventies, the reverse game theory of 'mechanism design' had made 'incentive compatibility' central to economic thinking. People realized that the Social Contract must be 'incomplete' because of Knightian Uncertainty. Thus Rawls had been barking up the wrong tree.
One of the tasks that the group set itself was therefore to offer an analysis and defence of such a moral critique. The obvious place to start was with the concept of exploitation. So they set out to answer a series of questions: what is exploitation?
Unconscionable contracts. The law had already clarified what psilosophers had muddled.
why is it unjust?
monoposonistic employer's cartels were a 'restraint on trade' and per se illegal and hence unjust. The question was whether the countervailing power of Unions were enough as Galbraith suggested. The answer was- 'No! Don't be silly! Trade Union leaders can be self-aggrandizing nutters.'
does capitalism necessarily exploit workers? what would a non-exploitative economic system look like?
One where I was rich and good looking and had an above average sized dick.
Over time, however, it became clear that every attempt to answer these questions was running into massive problems. One could write an entire book explaining why, but suffice it to say that several of the greatest philosophical minds of their generation
had shit for brains because they had devoted themselves to a shitty discipline
took a crack at the problem, and none of them was able to generate a coherent critique of capitalism that took exploitation as its normative foundation. (For an accessible summary of these efforts, see van Parijs’s, “What (if anything) is intrinsically wrong with capitalism?”)
the answer was that people are offered money in return for working. Clearly, everybody should be paid for doing sweet fuck all.
For me, the watershed event was the publication of Roemer’s A General Theory of Exploitation and Class.
Suppose I promise to get you a place on a spaceship to the paradisal Planet K-Pax just before the Earth blows up provided you work for me for free for the next ten years. If I actually do fulfil my promise, you haven't been exploited. If there is no apocalypse and no spaceship, I have exploited you unless what you would have done with your time would have led to worse consequences for you. It turns out that exploitation is linked to opportunity cost. If expectations match reality and ex ante equals ex post- the equilibrium is not exploitative or intrinsically wrong. It just mightn't be something we find appealing because dicks haven't been banned even though dicks cause RAPE! Normatively, that's simply not acceptable.
For Cohen, by contrast, the problems were caused by Robert Nozick – and since Cohen’s story is the more entertaining one, I’ll focus on that.
The most natural way to specify the wrongness of exploitation is to say that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly. (This is why Marxists are wedded to the labour theory of value – because it makes this normative claim seem intuitively natural and compelling.)
The problem is Knightian uncertainty which promotes regret minimizing behavior rather than expected utility maximization. There's a reason some people prefer to be employees rather than independent contractors even if their expected earnings are much lower. Essentially, if your company goes bust, you are in the same boat as everybody else. Psychologically, this feels better than knowing you failed where others succeeded.
But as Nozick observed, if this is your view, then you can’t really complain about certain economic inequalities, such as those that arise when individuals with rare natural talents are able to command enormous economic rents for their performances (this is the famous “Wilt Chamberlain” argument in Anarchy, State and Utopia).
Marx explained that his theory only applied to goods not services.
Furthermore, taxing away any part of this income looks a lot like exploitation.
Taxing 'rent'- i.e. factors in inelastic supply- is more allocatively efficient provided the Government doesn't piss that money away. The problem is, no matter what economic regime we have, if people do stupid shit, the outcome will be shitty. But Alexander Pope had stated this obvious fact a long time ago.
This argument made Cohen extremely uncomfortable, because it constituted a direct challenge to the normative foundations of Marxism-as-critique-of-exploitation. He spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive. Then one day (as he tells the story) he decided to leave Oxford and spend some time at Harvard. Upon arriving in America, he discovered that none of his fellow left-wing political philosophers had been losing any sleep at all over Nozick’s arguments. Why? Because they were egalitarians. They didn’t care about either self-ownership or exploitation, so they simply rejected the premises of Nozick’s argument. (Unlike Cohen’s sprawling efforts, Rawls’s response to the Wilt Chamberlain argument is less than two pages long and quite persuasive.)
But a similar argument can be made for banning dicks. They are icky. Nobody should have one.
This created something of a “road to Damascus” moment for Cohen. It forced him to ask the basic question: what is it that I dislike most about capitalism? Is it that, according to some (increasingly arcane) formula, not everyone is getting paid the full value of what they produce?
If they were, they could easily pay for their own defense by buying an ICBM and installing it in their backyard.
Or is it that some people live in poverty, unable to afford the essentials of a dignified life, in the midst of a society overflowing with riches? What Nozick showed is that fixing the exploitation problem may not fix the inequality problem.
Also, fixing the exploitation problem may get your head kicked in. That's the reason political philosophers aren't rescuing sex-slaves from Mafia run brothels.
(Roemer actually proves the point more forcefully, constructing a model economy in which the poor systematically exploit the rich, and yet remain poor.)
drugs cost too much. Also hookers.
So one really is forced to choose which flaw in the system one cares about most.
Dicks. They are icky. Why is Biden not undergoing gender reassignment surgery? Is it because he is a Fascist?
Why were Cohen’s American colleagues so quick to embrace egalitarianism?
Because the pay gap between an academic and a guy who uses his edumication to some useful purpose is greater in the States. Also, students you sleep with expect to get top grades even if they are as thick as shit.
Because they were Rawlsians. What Rawls had provided, through his effort to “generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract,” was a natural way to derive the commitment to equality, as a normative principle governing the basic institutions of society.
By ignoring the fact that there is an insurance industry.
Rawlsianism therefore gave frustrated Marxists an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot, by providing them with a normative framework in which they could state directly their critique of capitalism, focusing on the parts that they found most objectionable, without requiring any entanglement in the complex apparatus of Marxist theory.
In other words, they could switch off their brain.
This led Cohen to the realization that, when push came to shove, he cared more about inequality than he did about exploitation, because how we relate to one another as human beings
especially human beings in starving shitholes
is fundamentally more important than our right to exercise ownership over every last bit of stuff that we make. So he switched foundations and became an egalitarian (and – though he would have hated the description – a liberal).
Cohen was notorious for sharing his pay-packet with millions of starving people in shithole countries.
So nowadays, when kids like Freddie deBoer come along insisting that “Marxism is not an egalitarian philosophy,”
It is also not an anti-racist or anti-misogynist philosophy. Did you know that many men inherit the trait of having dicks from Dad's who had dicks? Elites pretend things like intelligence and gender aren't heritable. Why do so few babies not grow up to be ducks?
I nod my head in agreement, but I want to respond “Yes! That’s why nobody is a Marxist any more.”
Canadians don't know about a country called China.
Again, I want to emphasize that several of the greatest minds in political philosophy of the 20th century
which is like saying 'many of the sexiest actuaries'
spent the better part of two decades working the salt mines of Marxist theory, trying to make the “exploitation” critique of capitalism work and every single one of them gave up and became an egalitarian.
But lawyers continued to work on unconscionability and what equal pay laws actually mean. Economists, too, plugged away at incomplete contract theory using ideas like the folk theorem of repeated games.
Surely that should count for something! Anyhow, there’s no need to take my word for it, the library is full of books.
It is, of course, a slight exaggeration to say that no one is a Marxist anymore. Some people have not yet received the memo. There are also the “left libertarians,” who are the rump of 20th century academic Marxism (these are people who cling to the self-ownership claim, while seeking to block the anti-egalitarian conclusions that Nozick derived from it). There is also a recent mini-trend of “neo-Republican” Marxists, but they are basically just liberals, who instead of appealing to Rawls’s egalitarianism, instead want to rely on Philip Pettit’s “non-domination” norm (which I take to be just another flavour of liberalism) to reconstruct Marxism.
Why not admit that what we are really speaking of is different flavors of shit?
But beyond this, the collapse of academic Marxism – as a body of normatively motivated social criticism – has been complete.
Meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party has lifted a billion people out of poverty. In purchasing power parity terms, its GNP is about 20 percent bigger than the US. It may become militarily stronger than the US in 15 years.
Hence the fundamental unseriousness of contemporary Marxism in public discourse. Popular Marxism (along with the sort of Gramscian or “cultural” Marxism one finds in critical studies departments) has become a religion without a theology.
It has manyPopes but no parishioners.
I can understand why some people might be reluctant to read serious Marxist theory, if the primary upshot is that it turns you into a liberal,
as opposed to a woke nutter
but if the alternative is the style of aggressive, in-your-face stupidity found in Jacobin magazine (i.e. “I’m going to talk like a Marxist, even though none of it makes any sense, because you can’t stop me!”), then it seems to me a price worth paying.
but that price involves tolerating dicks. That makes you complicit in RAPE!
Some people have failed to notice these trends, unfortunately, because there was no point at which any one person “refuted” Marxism.
Because they were too busy running away from it.
Serious thinkers, for the most part, just slowly drifted away from it, the way that guests at a party filter out of the living room into the kitchen, where the conversation is livelier.
or the way smart kids abandoned Philosophy.
In this case, the conversation that they drifted toward was Rawlsianism.
actually, Rawls was 'anything goes'. You can justify any arrangement whatsoever saying the worst off would be even more miserable under any other system.
That is how Rawls wound up triumphing over Marxism – by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.
But, as Reagan pointed out, it was the L-word which dared not speak its name.
Rawlsians, by the way, are really bad at explaining any of this, which I why I thought I might try.
Sadly, Prof. Heath is still refusing to wipe the bottoms of those drooling cretins. Rawls would so not have approved.
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