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Crunchy - Marx-as-philosopher - yes. I'm enthralled by praxis and reification, too.
More generally - and I hesitate here, because it might seem to echo jbsay - another question: is a planned economy still part of the Marxist/Socialist project?
jbsay - that was so silly that Barbelith is about to be witness to something highly unusual; Nick-for-Marx.
If theory doesnt interest you, compare the 100 years following the Jeffersonian Revolution v. the Bolsheviks. Or any of the myriad examples of basket case communist economies in south/central america or asia.
Bolshevism was not Marxism, it was political opportunism with a Socialist/Leninist veneer. Lenin grabbed power in a civil war, not a revolution, and advocated voluntarism and cadres to force Socialism rather than evolve it. It's entirely possible that the coup d'etat which brought Lenin to power retarded Socialism in Russia by a century at least, as the Bourgeois Capitalist state which should have followed Tsarism was replaced by Leninist absolute monarchs. Similarly, the kleptocracies of Asia and South America have little to do with Marx's ideas beyond a passing allegiance to centralised control and a lot of rhetoric. Marxism has never been disproven in practice because it has never been attempted - and indeed, cannot be attempted - until various basic conditions are met.
The accepted fact that Marx and Engels were not proletarians does not invalidate Marx's work; it may highlight a deficiency in his arguemntative technique, although your assessment of his responses to criticism is somewhat lacking - especially in examples. That of itself does not mean the analysis he proposed is incorrect, only that he may not have defended it as ably as he could have.
It's not clear to me that the demise of the labour theory of value would mean an end to Marxian analysis (for example: Marx might respond that this did not contradict his understanding of prices, in which sectors of the economy which have higher "capital intensity" (greater roundaboutness) have higher prices (see below). The difference, it seems, between Marx and Böhm-Bawerk concerns perspective: for Böhm-Bawerk, roundaboutness explains entrepreneurial profits on the microeconomic level, whereas for Marx, a society-wide institutional explanation is needed. To him, roundaboutness explains only those profits of the more capital-intensive operations relative to less capital-intensive ones. ref; at the same time, it seems to me that the model has merit as a component of a more sophisticated factoring of worth - increasingly so, in this age of calculation of environmental cost and so on: if a good requires labour in the form of mechanical work as well as human labour, that in turn implies an increased infrastructural investment, and with it environmental and social cost.
In any case, the issue is not whether Marx was right in every particular, but whether his case still has power, and indeed it does. He may not have ended economics by getting everything perfectly right - he'd have been a formidable prophet to do that - but modern thinkers with access to modern perspectives on complex economic models can still use his tools and his work and combine it with their own.
It's worth noting at this point that Kaustky wrote in 1904 on whether the Communist Manifesto was obsolete - it's hardly a new argument.
Let's talk for a second about one of Marx's major concepts - alienation; the separation of an individual from the product of work, and hence from the self. To me, this appears endemic in or society. More, I'd say that it has acquired new faces, that the consequences of late Modernity include alienation from the natural world, and the impossible quandries of the work/life balance and the boundaries between professional and personal - for example, the individual in the workplace may be called upon to subdue a moral judgement that the work is in some way unethical because such a feeling is unprofessional. Corporations, goverments, and other abstract systems behave in ways which are sometimes inimical to human life and to the creation of value and good life (vide the environment, smoking, the arms trade) - but these things are no more than alienated aspects of ourselves, independental functional systems from which we are so divorced that we see them as external rather than things of which we are a part.
In short, jbsay, if you want to come after Marx, you're going to need a bigger boat.
Tom:
You ask in the abstract whether Marx was a philosopher at all, and something occurs to me at this point; Marx's moral underpinning is his concept of 'human nature' as creative. This ties to recent suggestions of humans being distinct from animals as 'tool-makers' - Marx says that the architect is different from the spider because he or she first imagines the whole structure, where the spider just acts on instinct. That calls to mind Weber's distinction between rational and irrational, but the notion itself and the claim that what is natural to us is to our benefit seem to go unexamined.
Random note:
I've recently read Ruskin on Life and Art, and it seems to me that the distinction he makes in talking about church architecture between rough, individual construction and undifferentiated, almost mass-produced work as Christian and un-Christian - on the basis that the former expresses identity and the latter is enslaved - seems relevant here. |
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