This is my blog, God dammit, and I want you folks to stop this puerile feuding. If you don't cut it out I'm going to start deleting your comments. Now shape up.
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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
My Stuff
https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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- SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI
- THE WONDERS OF MODREN SCIENCE
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- BY WAY OF EXPLANATION
- BACK FROM PURGATORY
- THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS BECOME A DEATH CULT
- OK I HAVE DECIDED
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- A QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION
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- I TRIED, I REALLY DID
- FROM MY FALL BREAK
- FALL BREAK
- THAT'S ENOUGH
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- BUT I REPEAT MYSELF
- A BIG DEAL
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- JERRY
- A SOURCE OF INNOCENT MERRIMENT
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- NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
- A WORD OF THANKS
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About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
33 comments:
A little light censorship might not be amiss. Several sites I used to enjoy have collapsed because the tenor of some of the remarks became unsupportable. and at least one site I still enjoy does allow the poster to block certain sorts of comments, though I sometimes worry that the blocker was being too heavy handed.
Anonymous of Nov 14, 2020 @ 1:53 PM: what other blogs do you follow? Aside from this blog, Leiter Reports and Policy Tensor (an academic ronin who occasionally lapses into academese--it's understandable), I find myself at a loss where to outsource my thinking and opinionating.
I can see that you've never stood up in front of a class of 30 hostile high school students.
The best way to maintain order when you face a disorderly class (or blog, I imagine) is to be arbitrary. Don't fire warning shots, don't read the riot act, throw someone out for almost no reason at all. That always works.
Enam . . .
I find Crooked Timber is often informative and the discussions on it are often quite interesting. I also like opendemocracy which tends to cover a lot of international territory. https://publicseminar.org/ out of The New School is worth a look, I think. And should you be interested in foreign policy, try https://foreignpolicy.com/author/stephen-m-walt/ but keep in mind that it emanates from within a particular IR school of thought. Hope that helps. By the way, Crooked Timber is the one which most clearly censors the outrageous.
A little roundabout back and forth is not always so bad. Can become a bit tiresome, true---especially when off point. Anyway, yours is a blog I truly respect and will follow faithfully---can't promise, though, that I won't Comment sometimes irritably. (Man, is "irritably" a word? Smoked way too much weed tonight).
A few of the regular, long winded, and aggressive commentors who have taken over the discussion on this blog represent themselves as experienced lawyers, having earned their JDs many years ago. So they might not be surprised to learn that today's law students have a name for people like them who attempt to dominate class discussions with useless off-topic commentary and self-aggrandizement. Law students call people who do that "gunners", and law students sanction gunners with social ostracization and contempt. And it would appear that gunners get ridiculed in the blogosphere the same way they do in the legal academy.
There's nothing at all wrong with, and much to recommend in, deleting comments. You might also want to enforce a simple word-limit (around 250?) for comments. If someone wants to make a longer comment, they could post it on their own social media (Facebook, their blog, or whatever), and simply put a comment here with the link. In any case, I've learned from and enjoyed a great many comments on the blog, and have even developed a mild interest in Chilean politics thanks to the always interesting contributions of Mr. Wallerstein; and for the most part I simply don't read the longer ones or the ones that induce or continue the feuding.
That's true about s. Wallerstein, who may be considered a blog co-author. Identifying such blog co-authors in virtue of their comments will become a vigorous area of academic specialization by 2075...
Anonymous and Enam el Brux,
Thank you both very much.
I want to make a point, and it will be my final comment, not just for this thread. Prof. Wolff called for an end to the “puerile feuding,” The rebuke was occasioned by my exchange with jeffrey g. kessen’s remark that my briefs are full of “honking and braying,” when, surely, he has read none of them, and I daresay, has probably never read any brief. I responded caustically. And now Mr. Kessen seeks to exonerate himself, and pacify Prof. Wolff, by saying, gee whiz, I was only kidding, can’t you take a joke. And then others, in response to Prof. Wolff’s request to stop the “puerile feuding,” submit comments taking me to task for posting what they regard as long-winded, irrelevant comments. And Ridicsuloussiculus stigmatizes me as being akin to self-centered, aggressive law school students called “gunners” (which, by the way, was a term used even when I went to law school, and I was not one of them). And everyone offering these comments writes with a tone of self-satisfied vindication. Now, I will admit that some of my comments were lengthy, and some made deviating references to cinema or poetry, and some were perhaps unduly acerbic, but, judging from some of the responses to some of my comments, some thought some of my comments offered a substantive contribution to the subject at hand. There is a term in American football called “piling on,” and while it is considered an unavoidable part of the rough-and-tumble of the game, when it occurs in what is regarded as more genteel and sophisticated circles, it is rather unattractive.
I suggest that those who don't like a particular person's posts, for whatever reason, not read them. Or just scan them, and leave it at that. I certainly don't read or finish reading all of the posts on this blog, but that could well be a result of my short-comings, not those of the the person who posts. In any event, why the need to resort to ad hominem? Life is short; if you don't like something, just move on and leave it for those who might find a post interesting. And for those who are the targets of a tasteless post, I'd suggest: Don't feed the trolls.
I think MS's comments have made a real contribution on at least several occasions, quite apart from whether I've agreed with him, which I often haven't. And as David Palmeter says, it's easy enough to skip things if you're not interested or you find them self-aggrandizing, "aggressive," or whatever.
Not keeping up with all this business but ban people of you wish prof. I know if I was in your position i wouldn't think twice about it if the people were just being unruly, immature and impolite.
It's not so easy to just scroll through comments you don't care to read when they are mostly by one person who just spams pages and pages of nonsense monologue that can hardly be ignored while trying to get down to an actual discussion if there is one.
Based on what I’ve read, MS is a highly experienced, knowledgeable lawyer who loves to write, argue, and debate. He writes well and I often (but not always) agree with him and understand his perspective. Sometimes he writes about topics irrelevant to the main post but I’ve seen others do that over the years. Sometimes he dominates discussions but this blog attracts many highly educated people and it should welcome, not stifle, intellectual competition. No one should be trying to socially shame others (for writing clearly and debating intensively) by calling them “gunners.”
I would encourage MS to keep contributing to this blog but perhaps scale back his tendency to dominate discussions. You need not respond to every offhand comment.
As others have said, if you don’t want to read his comments, you can just skip over them. This blog is not a discussion-based seminar where you must show up for every class and listen to everyone speaking in class.
If you have the energy, Prof. Wolff, I recommend merciless culling of comments.
It's your blog, and people usually pretty quickly get tired of having their comments deleted and move on, or stop attacking people in comments.
I enjoy the commentary on the blog usually, and since we are sitting in our own spaces with input devices rather than in a real time conversation, we surely all have the time to moderate personal attacks and concentrate on ideas.
'This is my blog, God dammit, and I want you folks to stop this puerile feuding. If you don't cut it out I'm going to start deleting your comments. Now shape up.'
This isn't actually very specific, Dog gammit. I'm reminded of the Lily Tomlin line: I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific. Anyways, whatever goals you have formed for this blog, I assure you that they are not realistic or achievable, if they are based on Marxism.
Also, over the past two years on this blog, I have seen numerous people (e.g. Jerry Fresia, Talha, MS, RFGA PhD) announce that they would no longer comment on the blog because they got into some heated dispute that often involved name-calling.
This is ridiculous. If you want to comment here and have something substantive and relevant to say, go ahead. Just be civil and respectful, and avoid personal insults. Remember that there is an actual human being behind the username and text. If you were talking to him or her in person, you would likely force yourself to be civil and respectful.
Finally, for the sake of intellectual diversity, I think it would be great if we had a seriously intelligent, intellectually honest conservative here who knew how to argue and debate and who could defend certain conservative policies. He or she could play the “devil’s advocate” on this blog by providing counter-arguments to Marxism, socialism, democratic socialism, FDR liberalism, etc. I think such conservatives do exist but they are very rare and likely would not comment here. And such conservatives may very well oppose Trump.
I am not a conservative and so I cannot authentically play this role. But I worry about this blog becoming a leftist echo chamber that has no serious intellectual pushback.
What would be wrong about this blog becoming a "leftist echo chamber"?
First of all, as you yourself point out, commenters on this blog range from FDR liberals to Marxists and even Marxist-Leninists, all on the left, but hardly likely to agree about much except their distaste for the right.
Second, maybe you could define the regular commenters as people who supported Bernie Sanders, but for a variety of different reasons which are worth talking about. That is, people who in general are to the left of the mainstream media consensus and thus, drift here because they can talk freely about issues that they can't discuss with their next-door neighbor (unless they live in Berkeley or some such leftie ghetto).
Third, regular commenters here tend to be much better educated, politically well-informed and intellectually well read than the average person and thus, happy to find a group of people who are on the left as they are and have read more books and studied the issues more than most people have.
That seems an almost ideal situation given the real world alternatives: get into a screaming argument with your neighbor who believes that any vaguely socialistic policies inevitably lead to Venezuela or even sit around exchanging clichés and slogans with fellow lefties, but ones who, unlike the commenters here, don't study the issues and haven't read the literature.
So whether that was what he planned or not, Professor Wolff seems to have succeeded in getting together a rather interesting group of people to discuss the issues of the day from a leftie point of view.
Danny, Perhaps you could suggest what might be a realistic or achievable approach? But I'll have to admit I, for one, won't be able to get what you're getting at if you lard it in a lot of unnecessary rhetoric.
I have to admit that as a professor now consigned to running seminars in political theory by Zoom, I would not mind if discussions got a bit out of control. Students seem to like to remain silent while video is turned off. While I am sympathetic to Professor Wolff's requests for "civility" I do wish some of the polemical energy folks are willing to expend in a comments section would transfer over to more appropriate venues. Sheesh. Can't win, I guess!
'Danny, Perhaps you could suggest what might be a realistic or achievable approach? But I'll have to admit I, for one, won't be able to get what you're getting at if you lard it in a lot of unnecessary rhetoric.'
You are responding to my having gotten a dig in at 'Marxism'. Maybe I don't deserve the last word about 'Marxism', but it does seem relevant if we are to regard this blog in terms of its the serious political message. Or even, if it's "Here is a Marxist who is funny."
When well-known left wing economic analysts or political leaders repeat incessantly the typical phrase: “Marx got it right”, I really don’t understand what they are talking about. It is not just that Marx failed as an economist by not being able to design a system of efficient growth and progress, but instead he portrayed a system of starvation, death and misery. As a futurologist he was even (if possible) less successful, as he predicted the end of capitalism based on his theory of dialectic materialism, but capitalism has always survived. Now, a full and comprehensive critique of Marxism is far from being the purpose of this blog. I get that. But when it comes to 'why not', I don't think the answer is that something less 'puerile' is afoot here. Puerile is giving boys a bad name.
Just for fun, Danny, I put “Marx got it right” into my Duck Duck Go search engine and was interseted to see that there, right up at or near the top was a piece in, of all things, the British conservative journal of opinion, the Spectator, a review of the British miltary historian John Keegan’s book on the American Civil War. Keegan was certainly no leftist. He harboured some strange sympathies for the war against the Vietnamese and, seemingly, for the Waffen SS.
So thanks for that.
Also way up there was this
https://www.elrincondelparquet.com/news/why-marxism-failed-fails-and-will-always-fail/
And lo and behold the opening paragraph contains most of your words verbatim. Are you the author of the words you’re quoting? I won’t label what you posted if you’re not. Still it’s interesting to see that in the age of the Big Search it’s awfully easy to check on the possible origins of things students write.
PS. I didn't bother to search on puerile.
While we are clearing the air about my views..
Marxism might not seem the most relevant issue in the world, or then again it might. I approach the question thinking about the reality that radical change just isn't politically feasible, and of course, the labor theory of value is gobbldygook anyways. On the other hand, Bernie might even have been a "lock" if his policies were more moderate, even if Leftist policy won't just suddenly fix everyone's problems and fixing poverty is hard. Not that my own views are so very interesting but just, what exactly are they? I don't claim to have a lot of answers. But I do think that for instance, rent control seems like a super progressive policy that sticks it to rich landowners and adequately addresses the problem of unaffordable housing, but it's not that simple. Saying here that the reality is that you can probably get more effective affordable housing initiatives under the current market system, is for me more like an *opinion*, though it is my opinion, and that more generally, leftists can't work under the assumption that workers will just go ahead and like their policies, just because they're crafted for the worker's benefit.
'https://www.elrincondelparquet.com/news/why-marxism-failed-fails-and-will-always-fail/
And lo and behold the opening paragraph contains most of your words verbatim.'
Marxian economics have been criticized for a number of reasons, I did basically paste this, skimmed some websites while crafting my post. I figure it's more articulate than just me ranting in my own words about what is simple crazy, and/or total BS. Or even, which I do believe, that all building blocks on which Marx build communism ideology are wrong. Of course, Marx still lives on in modern politics in a quotidian sense where Marxist-inspired political entities are concerned about the poor and downtrodden, but I think maybe one could realize that east block countries around USSR really tried hard to implement Marx’s ideas. Marxism was taught on all schools - not only students of economy, everybody had to study Marxism. I could pass along something esle I have read, that if a person has a basic knowledge about history, business, economy and international politics, Marxism is a bunch of Bullsh*t that only make sense to children who don't understand nothing about the world. That's one way to put it, I got that off of Quora, but maybe it's a bit pugnacious to insist on putting it that way.
Just for fun, Danny, I put “Marx got it right” into my Duck Duck Go search engine and was interseted to see that there, right up at or near the top was a piece in, of all things, the British conservative journal of opinion, the Spectator, a review of the British miltary historian John Keegan’s book on the American Civil War. Keegan was certainly no leftist. He harboured some strange sympathies for the war against the Vietnamese and, seemingly, for the Waffen SS.'
I am unclear on what is the story that Keegan tells, I don't think your point is that he has to be taken on trust. Sometimes discussions of what Marx got right seem to turn on the notion of the importance of economic forces in shaping human society. Social relations are determined by the mode of production and thus, Marx was right. A related point that one encounters, in praise of Marx's insight, is that Marx understood that capitalism could not be static: given the pursuit of profit in a competitive economy, there would be constant pressure to increase the capital stock and improve productivity. And okay, the system is subject to regular and recurring crises of production, and sometimes long periods of economic depression, and thus, Marx was right. Or simply, Marx was right that what is wrong with capitalism is its failure to eliminate poverty or inequality or excessive competition or etc. And sure, captitalism has crises. These are points. They don't really get at what seems to me to be very peculiar, not to say dumb, in Marx.
Thus, I would emphasize that the Malthus-Ricardo correspondence is all at a very high and serious level, but Marx has his gloss on it (from the Grundrisse):
'This baboon thereby implies that the increase of humanity is a purely natural process, which requires external restraints, checks, to prevent it from proceeding in geometrical progression..'
Note a gag in this, about how Malthus was, and by far, the first to propose a social theory that treats human social behavior as essentially animal behavior. Note also, that his population theory is, simply, that a growing population tends inevitably to increase beyond the ability of its environment to support it. At the very least, I don't think that Malthus is always trivial, confused rubbish whenever he did try to engage in original thinking. It's not a case of 'Malthus’ ridiculous population theory'. It's a case, I think, for Marx, of 'he made his arguments to attack the notion that you could help the poor'. If you like, we can give Marx more bandwidth for his case:
'Malthus’s theory, which incidentally not his invention, but whose fame he appropriated through the clerical fanaticism with which he propounded it – actually only through the weight he placed on it – is significant in two respects: (1) because he gives brutal expression to the brutal viewpoint of capital; (2) because he asserted the fact of overpopulation in all forms of society. Proved it he has not, for there is nothing more uncritical than his motley compilations from historians and travellers’ descriptions..'
Marx continued:
'His conception is altogether false and childish (1) because he regards overpopulation as being of the same kind in all the different historic phases of economic development; does not understand their specific difference, and hence stupidly reduces these very complicated and varying relations to a single relation, two equations, in which the natural reproduction of humanity appears on the one side, and the natural reproduction of edible plants (or means of subsistence) on the other, as two natural series, the former geometric and the latter arithmetic in progression. In this way he transforms the historically distinct relations into an abstract numerical relation, which he has fished purely out of thin air, and which rests neither on natural nor on historical laws. There is allegedly a natural difference between the reproduction of mankind and e.g. grain. This baboon thereby implies that the increase of humanity is a purely natural process, which requires external restraints, checks, to prevent it from proceeding in geometrical progression. This geometrical reproduction is the natural reproduction process of mankind. He would find in history that population proceeds in very different relations, and that overpopulation is likewise a historically determined relation, in no way determined by abstract numbers or by the absolute limit of the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits posited rather by specific conditions of production. As well as restricted numerically. How small do the numbers which meant overpopulation for the Athenians appear to us! Secondly, restricted according to character. An overpopulation of free Athenians who become transformed into colonists is significantly different from an overpopulation of workers who become transformed into workhouse inmates. Similarly the begging overpopulation which consumes the surplus produce of a monastery is different from that which forms in a factory. It is Malthus who abstracts from these specific historic laws of the movement of population, which are indeed the history of the nature of humanity, the natural laws, but natural laws of humanity only at a specific historic development, with a development of the forces of production determined by humanity’s own process of history. Malthusian man, abstracted from historically determined man, exists only in his brain; hence also the geometric method of reproduction corresponding to this natural Malthusian man. Real history thus appears to him in such a way that the reproduction of his natural humanity is not an abstraction from the historic process of real reproduction, but just the contrary, that real reproduction is an application of the Malthusian theory. Hence the inherent conditions of population as well as of overpopulation at every stage of history appear to him as a series of external checks which have prevented the population from developing in the Malthusian form. The conditions in which mankind historically produces and reproduces itself appear as barriers to the reproduction of the Malthusian natural man, who is a Malthusian creature. On the other hand, the production of the necessaries of life – as it is checked, determined by human action – appears as a check which it posits to itself.'
Malthus’s arguments, what is at issue is his basic premise: that human beings are animals and are governed by the natural “laws” of population dynamics valid for *all* animals. Everything human is natural and only natural. And, that the planet is a naturally limited environment is obvious to anyone but a Believing Christian.
This, versus Marx putatively showing how political economy is nothing other than the ideology of a ruling class -- those vulgar economists are not scientists, they are cheap propagandists and engage in selective ignorance, blatant falsification and plain lies.
Also, I figure this discussion has not been esoteric. Not even the discussion of Malthus was esoteric. But, I don’t see any down side to confronting the “more esoteric” elements of the “Marx, non-Marx, anti-Marx” arguments.
The foregoing reminds me of the George Danzig's account of his meeting with John von Neumann in 1947:
"On October 3, 1947, I visited him (von Neumann) for the first time at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. I remember trying to describe to von Neumann, as I would to an ordinary mortal, the Air Force problem. I began with the formulation of the linear programming model in terms of activities and items, etc. Von Neumann did something which I believe was uncharacteristic of him. ‘‘Get to the point,’’ he said impatiently."
That is, I'm reminded with this exception: Danzig then concisely formulated the general linear programming problem to von Neumann in under a minute.
John von Neumann was one of the greatest – and according to some, the greatest – mathematician of the 20th Century. He and Jacob Bronowski, a British mathematician and co-author of the Western Intellectual Tradition, were friends. The following is an anecdote which Bronowski wrote of von Neumann:
"There was something endearing and personal about Johnny von Neumann. He was the cleverest man I ever knew. And he was a genius, in the sense that a genius is man who has two great ideas. When he died in 1957 it was a great tragedy to us all. And that was not because he was a modest man. When I worked with him during the war, we once faced a problem together, and he said to me at once, "Oh no, no, you are not seeing it. Your kind of visualising mind is not right for seeing this. Think of it abstractly. What is happening on this photograph of an explosion is that the first differential coefficient vanishes identically, and that is why what becomes visible is the trace of the second differential coefficient."
As he said this is not the way I think. However, I let him go to London. I went off to my laboratory in the country. I worked late into the night. Round about midnight I had the answer. Well. Johnny von Neumann always slept very late, so I was kind and I did not wake him until well after ten in the morning. When I called his hotel in London, he answered the phone in bed, and I said, "Johnny, you're quite right." And he said to me, "You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I'm right? Please wait until I'm wrong."
If it sounds very vain, it was not. It was a real statement of how he lived his life. And yet it has something in it that reminds me that he wasted the last years of his life. He never finished the great work that has been very difficult to carry on since his death. And he did not really, because he gave up asking himself how other people see things. He became more and more engaged in work for private firms, for industry, for government. They were enterprises which brought him to the centre of power, but which did not advance either his knowledge or his intimacy with people - who to this day have not yet got the message of what he was trying to do about the human mathematics of life and mind."
(Not really a comment, rather a testimonial.)
Danny, if you paste something into a comment box that's fine, but please put it into quotation marks. It's not difficult, and it clarifies that you are indeed quoting something or, for these purposes, very very closely paraphrasing something. Frankly I'm not lingering over your Marx comments but someone(s) may be, and putting quote marks around what is in fact a quotation will be informative for them.
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