“All I know is that I am not a Marxist”

Daniel Little wants to have it both ways: on one hand, he wants to argue that the work of Karl Marx, after being buried for the umpteenth time, is relevant once again; on the other hand, his interpretation of Marx’s theoretical framework is so deterministic it’s a wonder Marx is relevant at all.

If this is Marxist theory, “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.”*

I don’t have the time to go through Little’s interpretation in detail. So, let me choose just his first point: materialism.

Social change is driven by material circumstances, the forces and relations of production. This encompasses the property system and the ensemble of technologies present in a given level of society. Materialism denies that ideas and thought drive social change; so religion, patriotism, nationalism, and ideologies of patriarchy are epiphenomena rather than originating causes.

Here, Little defines materialism as a kind of economic determinism, specifically property ownership and technology. And adds that, in his version of Marxian materialism, ideas and thought play no role.

That certainly is not my interpretation of materialism, which emphasizes historical and social explanation: the idea both that social phenomena emerge historically (and therefore change and develop over time, in a complex and contradictory fashion) and that each and every social event is the conjunctural result of all aspects of society (cultural as well as economic and political). Materialism is therefore counterposed to idealism, which means that social explanation cannot be reduced to an ideal or rational order (such as you get by focusing on the causal primacy of any one order of society like the economy).

In my view, it comes down to a distinction between discursive and causal priority. Marx focuses on the economy—and, within the economy, on class (which, to make a further distinction, is not the same as property)—not as a claim that the economy is the cause of everything else, but instead as a discursive entry point, a way of focusing attention and making a particularly Marxian sense of what is happening in society.

So, there’s a determinist Marx and a nondeterminist Marx, two very different interpretations of Marx’s writings. And Little and I clearly disagree in our interpretations. But that raises a second issue: anyone who puts forward a particular understanding of Marx also has to explain that there’s a large scholarly debate concerning Marx’s method, including a debate between more or less deterministic versions of Marx. Unfortunately, we don’t get any sense of that debate from Little’s list of “key theoretical frameworks.”

All of which leads me to say, if Marxism is reduced without debate to economic determinism, I am not a Marxist.

 

*According to Friedrich Engels, “Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French “Marxists” of the late [18]70s: ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist’.”

What do capitalists do?

Robert Venturi, Fire Station No. 4

I often invoke Columbus, Indiana in my lectures.

One reason is to suggest to my students that they might shed their prejudices about Indiana and explore some of what the state has to offer—instead of staying on campus and complaining there’s nothing to do except attend football games.

The other reason is to encourage them to question what it is that capitalists actually do. When I ask them, the usual response—consistent with the neoclassical theory that has been presented to them as the only economic theory worth considering—is: “capitalists maximize profits.” (That’s equivalent to the neoclassical rule concerning consumers, that they “maximize utility.”)*

Well, no: capitalists do lots of different things. They do make profits (at least sometimes, but over what timeframe are they supposedly maximizing those profits?). But they don’t follow any single rule. They also seek to grow their enterprises and destroy the competition and maintain good public relations and buy government officials and reward their CEOs and squeeze workers and lower costs and build factories that collapse and. . .well, you get the idea. In other words, they appropriate and distribute surplus-value in all kinds of ways depending on the particular conditions and struggles that take place over the shape and direction of their enterprises.

And Cummins Engine Company is a good example, since it has distributed a good chunk of the surplus it’s managed to appropriate over the years to subsidize the design of gems by a litany of important American architects: I. M. Pei, Harry Weese, Robert A. M. Stern, Richard Meier, Kevin Roche, Robert Venturi, Cesar Pelli and others. In Columbus, Indiana of all places!

My point to the students is not that Cummins is an example of a “good capitalist” as against other “bad capitalists.” No, the idea is that capitalists—whether in the United States or Bangladesh—do lots of different things, and presuming they follow a simple rule means missing out on the complex, contradictory dynamics of capitalist enterprises and therefore of capitalism itself.

 

*It’s also equivalent to what one hears from many so-called radical economists, that “capitalists accumulate capital.” Again, no. Accumulating capital (that is, purchasing new elements of constant and variable capital) is only one of the many possible forms in which capitalists distribute the surplus-value they appropriate from their workers. Sometimes they accumulate capital, and other times they don’t. The presumption that they always seek to accumulate capital is the heroic story proffered by classical economists (so that, in their view, capitalist growth would take place), much as neoclassical economists today presume that capitalists maximize profits (so that, in their view, an efficient allocation of resources will result). Marxists presume neither that capitalists maximize profits nor that they always and everywhere accumulate capital.

How’s that Marx-is-mostly-wrong stuff workin’ out for ya?

Yesterday, Brad DeLong confidently posted the text of his 2009 talk on where he thinks Marx went wrong. But, four years hence, even Matt Yglesias—who confidently claims his own identity as “not a Marxist”—has to admit DeLong’s claims look a lot weaker.

In particular, DeLong says that Marx the political activist was too pessimistic about the idea that the ruling class would agree to make economic growth pareto optimal within the context of a market economy:

[T]hat even though the ruling class could appease the working class by using the state to redistribute and share the fruits of economic growth it would never do so. They would be trapped by their own ideological legitimations–they really do believe that it is in some sense “unjust” for a factor of production to earn more than its marginal product. Hence social democracy would inevitably collapse before an ideologically-based right-wing assault, income inequality would rise, and the system would collapse or be overthrown. The Wall Street Journal editorial page works day and night 365 days a year to make Marx’s prediction come true. But I think this, too, is wrong.

To me that unquestionably looked wrong as of 2009. But in the interim, those Wall Street Journal editorial page tendencies have grown much stronger. You see a rising tide of Rand-inflected moralism about market outcomes and a reduced emphasis on Friedman-style pragmatism. You also see a sharply reduced emphasis on belief in any kind of macroeconomic stabilization policy, in favor of a “let them eat cake slash move to North Dakota” moralism about unemployment. Last but by no means least, it really has become the conventional wisdom among American elites that the appropriate policy response to fiscal imbalance in a time of high and rising income inequality is to restore balance by reducing the scope and generosity of social insurance programs.

In the end, I guess you just can’t trust those capitalists to prove Marx wrong.

“Offbeat” economics department—really?!

 

Given the awful track record of the economics departments at Harvard and elsewhere, it’s a bit strange that the economics department at the University of Massachussetts Amherst is referred to as “offbeat” [ht: ke].

Not to mention the fact that the fundamental errors in the now-infamous Reinhart-Rogoff study were first identified by Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at UMass.

It used to be called a radical economics department. In more recent times, it’s often referred to as heterodox economics. Yet, even after the “radical package” was hired back in 1973, the department only ever included a minority of nonmainstream economists. (In the video above, Don Katzner, Sam Bowles, and the late Stephen Resnick discuss some of that history. Matthews’s article also includes links to two other sources: Katzner’s book and a 2007 Nation piece by Chris Hayes.)

But that’s how it is in economics, even now five years into the Second Great Depression, which of course was precipitated by following the policies advocated by mainstream economists: having even a smattering of non-believers is enough to identify the department as something out of the ordinary—whether radical, heterodox, or simply offbeat.

Laws of economics don’t exist!

source

Zachary Karabell [ht: gh] is right on two counts: First, the “laws of economics” are often invoked to rule out policies and strategies, including alternative institutions, to solve pressing economic and social problems. And second, “laws of economics” don’t actually exist.

Referencing “the laws of economics” as a way to refute arguments or criticize ideas has the patina of clarity and certainty. The reality is that referencing such laws is simply another way to justify beliefs and inclinations. I may agree that the war on drugs is flawed, but not because it violates “laws of economics,” but rather because it fails in most of its basic goals. The test of whether government spending or central bank easing is good policy should be whether they succeed in ameliorating the problems of stagnant growth and high unemployment, not on what the “laws of economics” erroneously say about certain future outcomes.

But the so-called laws of economics don’t exist because people aren’t rational or because economics is based on a limited amount of information. Laws in economics are only artifacts of particular models and theories, and therefore particular sets of assumptions. You only get a law of the sort “if x then y” (e.g., if demand decreases, then price falls or if the government runs a deficit and debt increases, then all hell will break loose and we’re on our way to Greece) because of particular sets of assumptions (often unannounced and overlooked) buried in particular models, which are themselves products of particular economic theories.

Thus, we can have neoclassical laws and Keynesian laws and Marxian laws—but not laws of economics in general.*

The real problem, however, is the invoking of economic laws to stunt the discussion of policies and strategies, of options that might be chosen but are then taken off the table. And that’s part of a more general “economizing” of political debate within contemporary capitalism, especially by the Right. The right-wing within politics and the right-wing within the discipline of economics. (I know, the Left also often invokes laws, which in my view is a problem, but they’re less of a player in contemporary debates.) We as a society can’t do something—tackle poverty or unemployment, tax the rich or create democratic enterprises—because, right-wing politicians and economists say, it would violate the so-called laws of economics.

That’s subordinating society to economics, a product (in Karl Polanyi’s language) of disembedding the economy, of reducing society to obeying the so-called laws of a self-regulating market system.

But a self-regulating market system, just like the laws of economics, doesn’t exist. The real problems arise in the attempt to create such a system, by invoking the laws of economics to eliminate any and all constraints on economic activity. That’s what got us into the current mess in the first place. And following the so-called laws of economics, whether neoclassical or Keynesian, won’t get us out of it anytime soon.

*Although, to be clear, on my interpretation, there are no laws of economics (or, for that matter, of history) in Marx. The laws we find, for example, in Marx’s Capital were actually promulgated by the classical political economists, which Marx then showed were the result of endogenous tendencies within capitalism—rather than, as the classicals tended to argue, the product of an exogenous and transhistorical condition. And, of course, as with the tendency of the general rate of profit to fall, Marx then proceeded to demonstrate how a set of counter-tendencies might move things in a different direction. So, no iron laws, just tendencies, which themselves depended on a particular set of economic and social conditions.

On the antisemitism question

In all honesty, I don’t know if Karl Marx was an antisemite. And I don’t know if the charge of antisemitism is in Jonathan Sperber’s new book or is just an old shibboleth that reviewer Jonathan Freedland decides to focus on at the end of his essay. But it’s certainly long past time that we put to bed the idea that “On the Jewish Question” provides evidence of Marx’s “straightforwardly anti-Semitic” views.

Read the actual text (in either English or German). And then consult some of the scholarly literature (including the biography by Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, which remains after all these years one of the best, precisely because Mehring combines insights into Marx’s character with a sophisticated reading of Marx’s writings).

What you will find is not an essay that is antisemitic, whether straightforwardly or otherwise, but a critique of Bruno Bauer (and, implicitly, of Hegel) and an early argument in favor of “general human emancipation” as against merely “political emancipation”—an application of Ludwig Feurerbach’s notion of alienation, articulated long before Marx “discovers” communism and materialism.

In the first part, Marx criticizes Bauer for focusing on one aspect of emancipation (“Who is to emancipate? Who is to be emancipated?”) and forgetting about the other (“What kind of emancipation is in question? What conditions follow from the very nature of the emancipation that is demanded?”) and explains that political emancipation from religion (in the transition from the Christian state such as in Germany to the political state in its “completely developed form,” such as in North America) leaves religion in existence as a purely private matter, within civil society, based on the “rights of man.”

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves. . .

Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business.

In the second part, Marx proceeds to contest Bauer’s reduction of Jewish emancipation to a purely religious question and to transform it into a fully social question.

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

Far from providing evidence of Marx’s antisemitism, “On the Jewish Question” is precisely an argument in favor of social emancipation, for moving beyond a society in which “alienated man and alienated nature” have been converted “into alienable, vendible objects subjected to the slavery of egoistic need and to trading”—in other words, beyond capitalism.

Economist of the day

I was reminded today of Paul Baran (Marxist economist and author of The Political Economy of Growth) upon reading Chris Hedges’s essay on how and why liberal intellectuals sell out.

Here’s Baran (from a talk he gave in 1960) on the commitment of the intellectual:

What is an intellectual? The most obvious answer would seem to be: a person working with his intellect, relying for his livelihood (or if he need not worry about such things, for the gratification of his interests) on his brain rather than on his brawn. Yet simple and straightforward as it is, this definition would be generally considered to be quite inadequate. Fitting everyone who is not engaged in physical labor, it clearly does not jibe with the common understanding of the term “intellectual.” Indeed, the emergence of expressions such as “long-haired professor” and “egghead” suggests that somewhere in the public consciousness there exists a different notion encompassing a certain category of people who constitute a narrower stratum than those “working with their brains.”. . .

The desire to tell the truth is therefore only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead, to undertake “ruthless criticism of everything that exists, ruthless in the sense that the criticism will not shrink either from its own conclusions or from conflict with the powers that be.” (Marx) An intellectual is thus in essence a social critic, a person whose concern is to identify, to analyze, and in this way to help overcome the obstacles barring the way to the attainment of a better, more humane, and more rational social order. As such he becomes the conscience of society and the spokesman of such progressive forces as it contains in any given period of history. And as such he is inevitably considered a “troublemaker” and a “nuisance” by the ruling class seeking to preserve the status quo, as well as by the intellect workers in its service who accuse the intellectual of being utopian or metaphysical at best, subversive or seditious at worst. . .

It may be said that I am identifying being an intellectual with being a hero, that it is unreasonable to demand from people that they should withstand all the pressures of vested interests and brave all the dangers to their individual well-being for the sake of human advancement. I agree that it would be unreasonable to demand it. Nor do I. From history we know of many individuals who have been able even in its darkest ages and under the most trying conditions to transcend their private, selfish interests and to subordinate them to the interests of society as a whole. It always took much courage, much integrity, and much ability. All that can be hoped for now is that our country too will produce its “quota” of men and women who will defend the honor of the intellectual against all the fury of dominant interests and against all the assaults of agnosticism, obscurantism, and inhumanity.

Democratic economics—now

 

Democracy Now! has been investigating democratic economics in the last couple of days.

Here’s a link to the transcript for the interview with Richard Wolff [ht: ja] above.

AMY GOODMAN: So what do you think needs to be done?

RICHARD WOLFF: A radical change in the policies. And I think it has to go far beyond simply reversing this austerity program, which, again, just for a word about history, back in the 1930s, the last time we had a breakdown of our capitalist system like this, we didn’t have austerity, we didn’t have cutbacks. We had the opposite. Roosevelt, in the middle of the ’30s, created the Social Security system, went to everybody over 65 and said, “I’m going to give you a check for the rest of your life.” He created the unemployment compensation system, giving all the unemployed for the first time checks every week for a year or two. And he created a public employment program and hired millions of workers. It’s the opposite of austerity. So any politician who says, “We must do this, because there’s no option,” has forgotten even the American history of not that long ago.

So, the first thing I would do is go in that direction—not austerity, but its opposite. But I want to go further, because I think our problem is deeper. This crisis wasn’t supposed to happen. When it happened, it wasn’t supposed to last a long time. All of that has been proven false. The problems run deep. And I think what we have to do, and what that book tries to do, is to talk about reorganizing our economy so that for the first time we can say we’re not only going to get out of this crisis, we’re taking the kinds of steps that can prevent us from having them over and over again as our unstable business-cycle-ridden economy keeps imposing on us. So, for me, it’s the more profound change that we finally have to face, painful as it is. After 50 years of a country unwilling to face these questions, I think we need basic change. And that’s what I spend most of my time stressing.

And here’s a link to a web-only interview with Wolff about his life and how Marxism influences his work.

AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times has called you “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist.” Can you talk about Marx’s influence on you?

RICHARD WOLFF: Sure. I’m a product of the elite top of the American university system. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford in California to get my master’s degree. And then I went to Yale to get my Ph.D. So, by the normal standards of this profession, I’m the elite product of these institutions.

I was always struck that as I went through these schools, studying history, politics, economics, sociology—the things that intrigued me—I was never required to read one word of Karl Marx. And I remember telling that to my father, who looked in stunned disbelief at the very possibility that an educated person going to such august universities would not be required to at least read people who are critical of the society, simply as a notion of proper education. So with a father like that, it wasn’t so surprising that I went and found ways that individuals who were on the faculty sometime could, out of the classroom, teach me, take me through the great classics of critical literature, whether it was Marx and Engels themselves or Antonio Gramsci or George Lukács or all of the other—Rosa Luxemburg, the great thinkers of the critical perspective. So, I got excited about learning that on my own.

Then I discovered that these people are full of interesting insights about our society, and I should have been asked to read them. And the more I read it, the more I realized that I wanted to be an economist, but one who had a toolbox not only with the conventional stuff that I was learning in my university classes, but also with the nonconventional stuff. And, you know, over the last 40 years in America, it’s a sort of a sad comment, but if you’re interested in Marxism, then people look at you as if you either are a Marxist, or worse, some sort of caricature of a Marxist. So I always have said I use Marxist theory, I find it very insightful, I think it’s a shame that other people don’t have it, and I think it’s made me a better economist when it comes to writing and teaching than I would have been without that. And I think that would be the same for my colleagues, and that it’s a deficiency of theirs that the education didn’t do it.

I use a metaphor to get it across. If you wanted to understand the family down the street that had mommy and poppy and two children, and you wanted to really understand that family, and you knew that one child thought it was the greatest family the world had ever seen and the other child thought it was a psychologically dysfunctional group of people, what would you do? Would you talk to only one child, or would you talk to two? Clearly, you’d make up your own mind. You’d draw your own conclusions. But why in the world wouldn’t you speak to both of them, if you wanted to understand the family? Capitalism, our system, is the same. It has the people who celebrate and love it—and I, by all means, think you ought to read what they have to say. But you also have a large group of people who are very critical, and it is self-destructive of your own understanding not to expose yourself to what they have to say.

I would even go so far as to say one of the reasons this crisis we’re in now is as bad as it is and is lasting as long as it does, despite everyone’s prediction we wouldn’t have this again, is precisely because the people in charge of doing something about it, Republicans and Democrats alike, have no clue about the long, critical literature. Had they studied it, they would have been aware of the flaws and the faults in the system, would have been thinking about how to fix and improve upon them. We’d be in better shape to manage the crisis of capitalism if we hadn’t blinded ourself to the whole critical tradition, the chief of which is Marxian theory.

And, finally, here’s a link to a 2012 interview [ht: ra] Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman did with Mikel Lezamiz, director of Cooperative Dissemination at the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in Spain’s Basque Country.

“I told you so”

Back in 2008, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, Karl Marx was hot. Then, as the capitalist recovery faltered and there were fears of another crisis in 2011, Marx was hot again. And now, in 2013, years after the official recovery from the crash of 2008 began, Marx’s “biting critique of capitalism” is hot once again.

The latest admission that Marx’s writings have something important to offer in terms of understanding the current trajectory of capitalism comes from Michael Schuman [ht: eo] (for, of all publications, Time!):

the consequence of this widening inequality is just what Marx had predicted: class struggle is back. Workers of the world are growing angrier and demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China, political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the 20th century. How this struggle plays out will influence the direction of global economic policy, the future of the welfare state, political stability in China, and who governs from Washington to Rome. What would Marx say today? “Some variation of: ‘I told you so,’” says Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist at the New School in New York. “The income gap is producing a level of tension that I have not seen in my lifetime.”

History, utopia, and full employment

Yes, history is important. But not only for the reasons given by Brad DeLong. In my view, history gives us the sense that things have not always been what they are, and therefore don’t have to be in the future what they are today. It offers us, in other words, the space not only for interpreting the world but for changing it.

Which brings me to the question of utopia. I’ve already had my say about Erik Olin Wright’s book, Envisioning Real Utopias. But I do want to comment on John Quiggin’s review. Yes, the Left—including Marx—does have a “long tradition of suspicion of utopianism.” But it’s not how Quiggin sees it. The Marxian critique of utopian thinking was less about imagining a different way of organizing society (since there is much to be admired in the ideas of people like Charles Fourier) and more about how to get there. That was Marx’s critique: the utopian socialists sought merely to encourage the elite to think about a different set of economic and social institutions instead of believing that real people, in their collective struggles, would make real changes in the existing order in order to create real steps toward something that today would be considered only a utopia.

And, as it turns out, it’s not just libertarians and reactionaries who have a utopian streak. All economic theories—on both the Left and the Right—are based on some kind of utopia. For example, neoclassical economists imagine a world of private property and free markets that lead to Pareto efficiency, in which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. And then the debate, among neoclassical economists, is about how close to or far away the real economy is from such a utopia—and, of course, what policies need to be adopted to get there.

Marxists, for their part, imagine a radically different utopia, one in which exploitation is eliminated, and the direct producers are not excluded from the act of appropriating the surplus labor they perform. That’s a very different kind of utopia, with a very different set of policy options and demands on the current system.

What then would be the appropriate real utopian demand today? This is how Fredric Jameson sees it:

if I ask myself what would today be the most radical demand to make on our own system—that demand which could not be fulfilled or satisfied without transforming the system beyond recognition, and which would at once usher in a society structurally distinct from this one in every conceivable way, from the psychological to the sociological, from the cultural to the political—it would be the demand for full employment, universal full employment around the globe. As the economic apologists for the system today have tirelessly instructed us, capitalism cannot flourish under full employment; it requires a reserve army of the unemployed in order to function and to avoid inflation. That first monkey-wrench of full employment would then be compounded by the universality of the requirement, inasmuch as capitalism also requires a frontier, and perpetual expansion, in order to sustain its inner dynamic. But at this point the utopianism of the demand becomes circular, for it is also clear, not only that the establishment of full employment would transform the system, but also that the system would have to be already transformed, in advance, in order for full employment to be established. I would not call this a vicious circle, exactly; but it certainly reveals the space of the utopian leap, the gap between our empirical present and the utopian arrangements of this imaginary future.

Yet such a future, imaginary or not, also returns upon our present to play a diagnostic and a critical-substantive role. To foreground full employment in this way, as the fundamental utopian requirement, allows us, indeed, to return to concrete circumstances and situations, to read their dark spots and pathological dimensions as so many symptoms and effects of this particular root of all evil identified as unemployment. Crime, war, degraded mass culture, drugs, violence, boredom, the lust for power, the lust for distraction, the lust for nirvana, sexism, racism—all can be diagnosed as so many results of a society unable to accommodate the productiveness of all its citizens. At this point, then, utopian circularity becomes both a political vision and programme, and a critical and diagnostic instrument.