tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post1804725385705759795..comments2024-03-29T03:19:09.227-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX PART FOURRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-57346958414748686742011-01-20T01:57:36.305-05:002011-01-20T01:57:36.305-05:00I'd also rather tend to disagree with the acco...I'd also rather tend to disagree with the account of Marx' critique of ideology presented in this post. I think it's right that the "early" Marx is far more "immanentist" in his proclamations than the "later" Marx, though there is no simple and absolute "break" between the two characters. Younger Marx is keen to declare "communism" as the "end" of history, (in contradistinction to Hegel's "end", which he partly misunderstood and partly one-upped), and to distinguish his thinking from "utopian" socialism. Older Marx has settled in for the long haul and his earlier accounts become much more complicated and focused on the critique of capitalism and the prospects for a transition to socialism, (which he nonetheless only roughly adumbrates).<br /><br />But there's really no change in his account of ideology. Ideology is not simply a matter of that old couplet in political thinking, force or fraud. Rather it involves a more or less "global" need to provide a legitimation for prevailing social relations, which requires disguising the elements of force and fraud behind a more-or-less convincing account of those relations. IOW ideology contains normative contents, elements of "truth", which are misrepresented and distorted in their actual conditions of application, but which also are to be "recovered" through criticism, which is what accounts for the "force" of its critique. Ideology is at once required "functionally" to maintain prevailing relations-of-production,- ( and partly actually articulates those functional requirements),- and contains claims which exceed those functional requirements, which is partly what Marx is relying upon in his critique.<br /><br />It's important to recognize that Marx doesn't have or conduct a critique of religion, (as opposed to idealism), but rather critiques the critique of religion, (i.e. Feuerbach et alia). Traditional religion might have been functional and "necessary" to the feudal mode-of-production, but is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the capitalist one, which "functionally" is dissolving its basis and credibility. ("Everything solid melts into air"). Hence Marx uses religious terminology mockingly,- parodically or satirically,- in his critique of bourgeois ideology. For Marx, such terms have already become "ghostly", and are vestigial remnants, which bourgeois ideology only deploys as a patch-work, even as it instrumentally undermines and violates those terms. Religion is only professed in bad faith, even as the new secular ideals of the bourgeoisie are merely formal and short-circuited in their actual "substantive" terms of application.<br /><br />In short, I don't see any basis for claiming that a complex account of ideology is not already worked out in Marx' seminal early work and applied further in his latter work. Marx might be broadly aligned with "Enlightenment" thought and its basic project, (and shared somewhat in its historical over-optimism), but he rejected much of its over-simple assumptions.<br /><br />Of course, the foregoing account means that ideology is "true" and "false" at the same time. And something of the same conundrum applies to much else in Marx. That violates the dictates of analytic logic and canons of "reason" based upon it. Whether that's a "problem" or not requires further consideration.john c. halaszhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06674692969448923049noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-72257896441218263992011-01-20T00:10:15.772-05:002011-01-20T00:10:15.772-05:00But then again the commodification of labor is &qu...But then again the commodification of labor is "necessary" to capitalism and the increased material surpluses it generates. "Free" labor as a commodity is one of the prime historical-logical conditions of possibility for the development of the capitalist mode of production. To be sure, the expansion of impoverished misery amidst increasing plenty is also one of the prime and most obvious of those famous "contradictions" of capitalism.<br /><br />But if craft labor is displaced by machinery and such workers driven into unemployment and impoverishment, they are also re-employed eventually in producing further means of both production and consumption. The expansion of proletarian immiseration is also the expansion of capital accumulation, (and rendered "necessary" by the latter), such that actual and potential material production increases. Indeed, Whiggish types will claim, not without reasons and evidence, that in 19th century England, the prime "laboratory" here, per capita output and living standards, including "real" wage-levels, rather steadily increased. But Marx' case doesn't and can't rest upon the claim of "absolute immiseration" of the working class. Rather he acknowledges the case of "relative immiseration" together with the "absolute" kind, that wages can increase, even above "value" during boom times and living-standards are relative to "culture" and can and do rise, which needs to be brought into relation to other distinctions, such as that between absolute and relative surplus-value, (i.e. increased "exploitation" by increased hours of labor of the same productivity vs. by increased productivity reducing the "necessary" hours to reproduce labor). It is only as a result of crises and ensuing depressions that absolute immiseration predominates and the "contradictions" intensify.<br /><br />On the other hand, agricultural labor remains partly outside the cash-nexus and incompletely commodified, such that subsistence can be maintained, even though there is "zero marginal product" to such labor in aggregate. But that's obviously no bulwark against the expansion of the commodification of labor and the cash nexus. Rather the organization of production comes to be increasingly re-constituted in such terms and labor increasingly dependent on them. (Formal vs. real subsumption in the jargon).john c. halaszhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06674692969448923049noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-23841551813078242192011-01-19T23:07:42.982-05:002011-01-19T23:07:42.982-05:00Does Marx feel a need to replace markets by democr...Does Marx feel a need to replace markets by democratic planning? Is this his answer to alienation? <br /><br />Many policy analyst are looking at a Basic Income Guarantee, whereby every citizen is simply secured a grant. If that grant were large enough, it would be much easier to say no to jobs that are poorly compensated. Time between jobs would not be as rough. <br /><br />I am interested in Marxist reasons to praise or skewer such a proposal. (There are more proponents than one would think and they come from the left and the right.)Murfmenschhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00031877154740991965noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-48746817067599495922011-01-19T23:02:05.594-05:002011-01-19T23:02:05.594-05:00"[Whether this cost is an inevitable conseque..."[Whether this cost is an inevitable consequence of industrial production, not specifically of capitalism, as John Halasz seems to suggest in one of his comments, will have to wait until later in this tutorial.]"<br /><br />Oh, dear. I'm not aware of having left any such implication. Does it derive from the "wholeness" comment or the "objectification" comment? With respect to the former, I'll just remark that the "organic"/holistic side of Marx' thought needs to be kept in mind, various objections to it notwithstanding, since otherwise it too easily reduces to a sheer functionalism, (which economic thinking tends toward anyway), which misses much of Marx' basic aims or project. With respect to the latter, it might be relevant to this particular post to remark that the notion of "objectification" is ambiguous or "contradictory". Such doubleness or two-sidedness of Marx' concepts is not a bug, but a feature, (and, when brought into relation with other concepts, they quickly can become many-sided). That's part of what "dialectics" means. So "objectification" can mean to realize oneself and one's capacities and needs by externalizing them a "work", which is the product of one's labor/activity. Or it can mean to be reduced oneself to the status of an object, which is what happens to labor and laborers under capitalism, when they become commodified, reduced to the status of just another commodity on the market, a "thing" amongst things, just another means for the production of the very means that they produce. So there is "good" objectification and "bad" objectification, but the good kind already contains the possibility of the bad kind and the bad kind the potential means of restoring the good kind.john c. halaszhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06674692969448923049noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-53117732114307752572011-01-19T14:11:59.756-05:002011-01-19T14:11:59.756-05:00Good God, no. But I have read all three volumes o...Good God, no. But I have read all three volumes of the Theories of Surplus Value, and virtually all of the letters. They were fun [which shows you what a dork I really am.]Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-12343644562613046082011-01-19T14:03:27.518-05:002011-01-19T14:03:27.518-05:00Have you read literally every volume the man has p...Have you read literally every volume the man has produced, including the infamous notebooks of surplus value...Chrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08250295324149056708noreply@blogger.com