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Monday, August 23, 2021

DUH!

As I was walking this morning, I found myself imagining, as I have so often in the past, that someone was asking me what Marx thought socialism would look like. I observed, in this imaginary conversation, that Marx wrote vast amounts about capitalism and almost nothing about socialism. In my mind I quoted again, as I have so frequently, the famous tagline from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, to the effect that the new order grows in the womb of the old. Then I referred this imaginary interlocutor to my essay The Future of Socialism, in which I invoke that tagline while explaining why capitalism has moved beyond the point at which the market can be relied upon neutrally to set prices.

 

But then a new thought occurred to me, and after it popped into my mind it seemed to me so obvious that I could not explain to myself why it had never occurred to me before. Socialism, for Marx and also, I might add, for me can be defined simply in seven words as “collective ownership of the means of production.” Is there some sense in which collective ownership of the means of production has begun to develop within capitalism?

 

At this point, figuratively speaking, I struck my forehead with the palm of my hand and said “duh!” (I do not ever actually strike my forehead with the palm of my hand but allow me a little literary license.) Of course there is a sense in which collective ownership of the means of production has begun to develop within capitalism: the stock joint publicly traded corporation.  Almost all modern corporations are collectively owned – privately collectively owned. They are owned by the shareholders.

 

In almost all cases – but perhaps not in the most famous cases – those who manage the corporations and make the investment decisions own at most tiny fractions of the total number of shares the collectivity of which constitutes the financial representation of the capital of the corporation.

 

To be sure, in many cases the managers of a corporation, who are technically speaking employees and whose salaries are listed as part of the costs incurred by the corporation, manage legally to steal a portion of the profits of the corporation and to award it to themselves in the form of inflated salaries, stock options, and other perquisites. But nevertheless, a transition from private ownership of the means of production to collective public ownership of the means of production has already been achieved by means of the intermediary stage of collective private ownership of the means of production.

 

There may be many arguments for capitalism and against socialism but one argument that cannot be made is that collective ownership of the means of production is unworkable, because in fact modern capitalism already exhibits collective (private) ownership of the means of production.

 

Well, I was so pleased with myself when this obvious thought occurred to me that I turned my attention back to where my feet were going – a constant necessity for someone suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Still and all, obvious though it is, this thought strikes me as important enough to lay before you for your consideration and comment.

35 comments:

Ridiculousicculus said...

Apologists for capitalism have been making that point - often in classrooms - for decades, often pointing to 401(k) plans and pension funds as evidence that the stockmarket does in fact reflect market-based collective ownership of the economy.

What this ignores of course is collective (democratic) ownership of the right to allocate resources.

Richard said...

Didn't Mortimer J. Adler argue, somewhere (I am separated from my library for the summer) that at least something like the collective ownership of which you speak is the way to go forward?

M.Reinhard said...

There is a chapter in Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution the (roughly) first ten paragraphs of which may touch on a tangent to this point: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch06.htm

LFC said...

Like, I think, Ridiculousicculus, I find it hard to believe this is what Marx meant by collective ownership. The divorce of ownership from management/control leaves most shareholders, except in fairly rare cases of successful shareholder campaigns, quite powerless vis-a-vis management.

Howard said...

In religious communities such as traditional Judaism, the community, known as the Yishuv, belongs to the whole community, perhaps including the means of production- that might be one explanation of the appeal of Marx for some from the Jewish community in modern Europe- that and the appeal of revolution

Ridiculousicculus said...

LFC - you are of course right that this is not what Marx meant by collective ownership of the means of production. But it's a fairly common rhetorical strategy employed by those who want to assert that America is already as "socialist" as it ought to be - especially in contrast with state-planned economies like the Soviet Union.

DJL said...

In the sentence 'why capitalism has moved beyond the point at which the market can be relied upon neutrally to set prices', 'neutrally' seems to be in the wrong place. I take it that 'neutrally' is meant to modify the setting of prices, and if so then it should be either 'to neutrally set prices' or 'to set prices neutrally'. In fact, where the adverb is now is most certainly not modifying 'set prices', but 'the market can be relied upon', and to my mind such a meaning (the actually expressed reading as opposed to the intended meaning) is nonsensical. Seems to me the odd phrasing may be the result of following the entirely unsupported injunction of avoiding splitting infinitives, but the result in this case is a much worse type of writing than what is supposed to be salvaged by following such a prescription.

DJL said...

Yes, I think there's a case of trying to avoid splitting infinitives here; later on we read 'manage legally to steal a portion of the profits of the corporation', where once again 'legally' is supposed to modify 'steal' but it is not actually doing so because it is placed after 'manage' and before the preposition 'to' and thus it can only modify 'manage' - and again, to 'manage legally' is nonsensical. The professional linguists at Language Log have discussed ad nauseam what nonsense such an injunction is, and in this case it just results in bad writing.

John Rapko said...

As many, including most recently the professor, have noted, Marx wrote "almost nothing" about what socialism concretely would look like. There is the remark noted that it would feature "the collective ownership of the means of production." I would think that if anyone wanted to advance further on the topic in a manner sanctioned by Marx, though certainly not specified and elaborated by him, one would want to foreground two further marks: (a) the slogan from The Critique of the Gotha Program, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"; this principle would have to be seen under socialism as guiding the production and distribution of resources under conditions of collective ownership of the means of production; and (b) develop the remarks from the Grundrisse (and that are prima facie in tension with other remarks of Marx) that suggest (along the lines of the recent interpretations by Moishe Postone and Martin Hägglund) that (as, ahem, I put it in a review of Hägglund's book) "overcoming capitalism fundamentally involves replacing the criterion of value as labor with a criterion appropriate to a post-capitalism democratic socialism. This latter criterion of value would be socially available free time." The aim of maximizing 'socially available free time' would then be a kind of spiritual criterion, appropriate for finite beings like ourselves, governing the application of the principle of 'from each/to each'. So, however vaguely sketched, 'Marxist' socialism = collective ownership guided by the from each/to each principle in the service of the ethico-spiritual aim of maximizing generally free time.

David Palmeter said...

The big difference is that with government ownership of the means of production, ownership is confined to a single entity. Private corporations (no matter how broad the ownership) are subject to competition from other corporations. This allows for innovation and growth. With a single owner, innovation and growth would likely be reduced if not all but eliminated. A Bureau of Typewriter Production, and it's Congressional allies, would likely have blocked computers. The Bureau of Film Production, and its Congressional allies, would have looked askance at digital photography.

aaall said...

Even Carnegie had partners. Walmart is a publicly traded company but the family still holds more then half the stock. That's the case with not a few corporations. Boards and management listen to major stake holders, others not so much. It seems to me that in a world with sovereign funds, mutual funds, ETFs, hedge funds, venture capital groups, etc. the idea of "collective ownership" has long passed its sell-by date. The administrate state and taxation (i.e. social democracy) is one road, fascism and kleptocracy the others.

Another Anonymous said...

DJL,

I believe you are mistaken. Regardless where you place the adverb, the clause means the same thing.

1. “why capitalism has moved beyond the point at which the market can be relied upon neutrally to set prices”

means the same as

2. “why capitalism has moved beyond the point at which the market can be relied upon to neutrally set prices”

which means the same as

3. “why capitalism has moved beyond the point at which the market can be relied upon to set prices neutrally”

The result of each assertion is the same - that neutral prices will emerge from the process.

Similarly, saying, “He managed savagely to close the door” equals “He managed to savagely close the door” which equals “He managed to close the door savagely.” They all mean that the actor acted savagely in closing the door.

The reason that grammarians prefer not placing the adverb between the preposition and the verb is that, grammatically, the verb is the infinitive – to be or not to be …, not just “be.”
The rule not to split infinitives is still preferred and has not become archaic. See

https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules-and-tips/split-infinitive-grammar-rules-and-tips.html

Ahmed Fares said...

Chris Dillow, who writes a blog titled "Stumbling and Mumbling" wrote an article titled "CLASS". For those who don't know who Chris Dillow is, this from an article in the Independent:

The man who is easily the most insightful economics blogger in the UK, Chris Dillow, is a proud Marxist.

There is often more striking insight (and indeed more mainstream economics) in a single Chris Dillow blog post than can be found in a typical month of economics reports from the big TV broadcasters.


In any event, in the article I mentioned, he talks about the blurring of lines between workers and capitalists. Here is a quote from the end of the article:

* A more awkward type for Marxists is what Wright (whose work I commend) called “contradictory class locations (pdf).” Bosses and investment bankers, for example, are working class in the sense that they sell their labour, but are capitalist in that they get a chunk of the proceeds of others’ labour and so are exploiters. I’m not sure how this invalidates the Marxian scheme though: a taxonomy can be useful even if some people are members of more than one set.

The quote above contains links which you can see in the original article which I link to below:

Class

LFC said...

Agree w first part of AA's comment @5:47, but an occasional split infinitive doesn't bother me and I've done it myself in writing occasionally. (Sometimes it depends on how formal or not one wants to sound.)

Another Anonymous said...

LFC,


I agree. Often not splitting the infinitive sounds awkward and stilted. I will split an infinitive when it reads more naturally. I don't think most judges care.

Sonic said...

Time for me to talk about Cryptocurrency again!

In the crypto space, a lot of really funny finance dudes and tech dudes came together, and they've invented something they're calling a "Decentralized Autonomous Organization." These DAOs are governed similarly to a joint-stock corporation, but with two unique characteristics. The execution of decisions voted upon by stock holders is executed automatically by code programmed into the unhackable blockchain. This is a "trustless" organization. That results in the second important characteristic: There is no CEO. There's no bureaucratic relationship between the owners and the decisions being made. Everything is a direct vote.

When you talk about how "the new order grows in the womb of the old," it's something I see very distinctly in the cryptocurrency space. Maybe I am just seeing vague shadows of possibilities. Still, the people in this space always seem to creep closer toward Marxist conclusions about how their new economic system should be governed. Their language is different, but it rhymes.

DJL said...

@Another Anonymous: I'm not mistaken.

First of all, I didn't say that the rule not to split your infinitives was archaic, I said that it was completely unsupported and that no-one should follow it, let alone strictly. And it is certainly false to say that splitting the infinitive is the preferred choice; in fact, it never has been, and that's precisely the point: it has been a regular feature of English for at least a couple of centuries, it has been used by all famous writers in all time periods, and it's the most common construction of the two possibilities in speech.

Here's a couple of links from an actual professional linguist explaining some of the basic facts about the matter (with further links):

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/splitinf.html

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4680

The link you include yourself simply repeats a rule that was arbitrarily introduced in the 19th century and that's hardly an argument either way (and that post is most certainly not the work of a professional linguist, anyway). I mean, you could at least have had a look at the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive

As for the examples you list, you miss the point. There is a difference between the intended meaning of a sentence and the actually expressed meaning, as there is a matter of fact regarding how sentences are hierarchical structured. The two links I have added offer some details, but the basic point is that if the modifiers are placed before the 'to', then it will modify the previous verb and not the verb after the preposition - it has nothing do with anyone's preferences, it simply the way languages works. That you are able to 'construct', or more properly, in fact, 'recover', the intended meaning doesn't mean that the sentence does express that meaning, that is simply a reflection of the fact that a hearer is able to use the context and other information to work out the right meaning. But my point most certainly remains true, and this is the case of your examples too: only two of your triplets mean the same thing. You are simply conflated two different things: the results of your language comprehension skills and the actual structure that the sentences have.

And the bottom line of my posts remain true too: the two sentences I identified from the post DO NOT mean what Wolff intended them to mean, and I am afraid that's just an example of incompetent writing (and of following a stupid rule).

Another Anonymous said...

DJL,

Okay, now the gloves are off. Your counter-comment is the kind of sophistical thinking that I indicated in a prior post pisses me off.

Your main point is that depending on where the adverb is placed determines which verb it is modifying, and in turn affects the meaning. Yet, at the same time, you acknowledge that, somehow, regardless which verb is being modified, somehow we, subconsciously, I guess, can figure out the intended meaning. This is nonsense. If in reading any version of the sentence, regardless where the adverb is placed, and which verb it “modifies,” we reach a consensus on what the sentence “means,” then THAT IS WHAT THE SENTENCE MEANS, and it does not matter where the adverb is placed, or what verb it “modifies.”

Take Prof. Wolff’s actual clause:

“why capitalism has moved beyond the point at which the market can be relied upon neutrally to set prices”

You indicate that in this instance the adverb “neutrally” is modifying the verb immediately prior, i.e., “relied upon.” I say that the clause means: “neutral prices will emerge from the process,” and that this is the meaning of the clause REGARDLESS WHERE THE ADVERB IS PLACED. Do you disagree? Are you saying that the clause as written actually means something else, but we subconsciously move the adverb from “relied upon neutrally to set prices” to “relied upon to neutrally set prices,” or, alternatively, “relied upon to set prices neutrally”? If so, what is that different meaning, a meaning that which does not coincide with the intended meaning? THEY ALL MEAN THE SAME THING, and it has nothing to do with our mentally compensating for the misplacement of the adverb to decipher the intended meaning of the author. If they do not mean the same thing, what do you claim each different iteration does mean? Does neutral reliance somehow create a different meaning than neutral setting of prices? It does not.

(Continued)

Another Anonymous said...

And neither of the two articles you cite say otherwise. The point of the first article, “The so-called ‘split infinitive’” claims that in English there is really no such thing, because in English, unlike French, for example, we do not have an infinitive verbal form, whereas in French, the infinitive form is a single word, as in “succe´der.” Well, duh (to use Prof. Wolff’s idiom), of course you cannot have a split infinitive in a language whose infinitives are always a single word. As in the tango, it takes two words in order to have a split infinitive. The critical issue is how does the placement of the adverb – before the infinitive, in the middle of the infinitive, or after the infinitive – affect the meaning, and nothing in this article says the placement alters the meaning.

The second article, titled “Economist still chicken: botches sentence rather than split infinitive,” and the example the author uses to castigate the economist is the following:

“Look at this sentence (issue of June 1, 2013, p.57):

“The main organisation, the Syrian National Coalition, was supposed to do three things: expand its membership, elect a new leader and decide whether unconditionally to attend the Geneva talks.

“What an appalling decision about modifier placement!

“They meant ‘decide whether to unconditionally attend the Geneva talks.’ The best phrasing in a case like this has the adverb immediately before the verb it modifies.”

Here again, this author, like you, does not claim that the “misplacement” of the adverb affects the sentence’s meaning. It does not. The meaning is quite clear whether you place the adverb “unconditionally” where the author placed it, or between the “to” and the “attend.” Appalling?? Give me a break. (Interestingly, the article’s author fails to take issue with the alternative spelling of the word “organization.”)

And, according to you, Prof. Wolff is an incompetent writer because he prefers to follow the rule and not split his infinitives??

Well, I have had my disagreements with Prof. Wolff on a number of issues, but I would never insult him by accusing him of being an incompetent writer. He clearly is not. It is you who are an incompetent thinker. And, despite my differences with him, he is not, by any means, an incompetent thinker.

Another Anonymous said...

Did I make a grammatical blunder?

Should it be "And neither of the articles you cite says otherwise"?

Does "says" modify "neither," rather than "articles"?

I think so.

Perhaps I am an incompetent writer.

Another Anonymous said...

As I read the second article referenced above, and came across the word “Appalling,” I had this image of the prissy character, Cecil, played by Daniel Day Lewis in “A Room With A View.”

james wilson said...

Can we please get back to the discussion RPW initiated respecting socialism/marxism. I suppose that discussion is just more difficult (and more consequential) than one focussing on some of the lesser concerns of grammarians.

David Zimmerman said...

"The gloves are off"?????

About split infinitives????

To what depths are we descending?

David Palmeter said...

james wilson

Good idea.

Another Anonymous said...

Okay, James, as you wish.

The form of socialism which exists in contemporary capitalist countries involves a modified form of collective ownership of the means of production. Would this form have satisfied Marx’s aspirations for an economy governed by Marxist principles? Not if what Marx envisioned was 100% ownership of 100% of the means of production by 100% of a nation’s population, and not if Marxism also require that each individual member of a given society have an exactly equal share in the means of production. While corporate stock ownership involves ownership of the corporation’s assets by its stockholders, on average, according to Gallup, in the U.S., only 56% of Americans own corporate stock. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-owns-stock.aspx.

Moreover, among those who own stock, it is not equally distributed. Control of the corporation turns on the percentage of stock owned by each individual shareholder. And there are different categories of stock, some providing greater voting rights than others. The Ford Motor Co., for example, is controlled by William Clay Ford, who owns 40% of the company’s Class B shares.

In addition, corporations send their shareholders proxies to sign, which, if signed, transfer the shareholder’s voting rights to a designated member of the Board of Directors. Many shareholders do sign their proxies, because they do not wish to attend the corporation’s annual shareholder meeting or to study the proposals which are going to be up for consideration. (I looked, but could not find, what percentage of shareholders in the U.S. sign their proxies.)

Some unions, like the UAW, for a period of time were requiring that its collective bargaining agreements provide that employees be compensated in stock ownership in order to give them some degree of participation in the company’s policies. I also have been unable to find out how many union contracts have such provisions. But even those that do, the degree of ownership by the employees is not sufficient to given them meaningful control of the corporation’s policies.

Some companies are owned entirely by their employees. Wikipedia has a list of the companies in the U.S. which are wholly owned by employees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies#United_States

While this form of collective ownership of the means of production may be entirely what Marx envisioned, it is an improvement over the Darwinian form of capitalism which existed in Europe when he wrote Kapital.


And David, please don't scoff at the seriousness of the discussion over split infinitives. Is it that much less important than climate change, the evacuation of Afghanistan and the threats facing our democracy?

Another Anonymous said...

Correction:

While this form of collective ownership of the means of production may not be entirely what Marx envisioned, it is an improvement over the Darwinian form of capitalism which existed in Europe when he wrote Kapital.

John Rapko said...

Under socialism you'll be able to really hunt in the morning, and criticize the grammar after dinner.

F Lengyel said...

Will consult the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. As I recall, CGEL argues for "to" as a subordinator, making it syntactically separate from the verb. "To boldly go," for example.

F Lengyel said...

As for the stock joint publicly traded corporation, shareholders trading on the secondary market typically have claims on dividends if these are offered and may have voting rights. Perhaps this is a step in the direction of collective ownership. So far I haven't been invited into the boardrooms of any of the companies in which I hold shares. But to the extent that I do hold shares, presumably I want them to go up, by whatever means the executives have the power to do so. But shareholders, board members, executives and others will disagree on where to allocate capital, what to do with profits, etc. There is more to be said on this disagreement, since it relates to Marx's class analysis and attempts to bring it in line with 20th and 21st century developments.

I think it's a mistake to downplay formal methods since Marx, specifically Arrow's Theorem. Already in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior it was evident that coalitions form in games with more than two players. Arrows Theorem refines this with the empirical consequence that there is no "we" or "us", only coalitions with their own interests. Likewise, there is no unitary market, but several markets, each with a mechanism design for price clearing. I'm not convinced that augmenting the Marxian class analysis from two antagonistic classes to three (working class, professional managerial class, capitalists outright) will do justice to the coalitions that must form. Whatever is gestating in the womb of capitalism, I doubt that it is a classless society. There are too many antagonistic coalitions.

james wilson said...

It’s surely misleading to generalise too much on the basis of one’s own limited experience. However, I will comment on the notion of socialism as the collective ownership of the means of production based on my early years in Great Britain.

Most of those I knew intimately certainly benefitted from the nationalisation of the coal mines, and I wouldn’t want to minimise that. On the other hand, the system of management—the control of the industry—remained pretty much as it had been: a top down system of decision making which followed the traditional economic imperatives and the traditional right to command (somewhat modified by a larger role for the miners’ union).

Similarly, I wouldn’t want to minimise the great benefits I, for one, derived from the opening up of secondary and tertiary education. But here, too, it has to be kept in mind that nationalised education was not conducted in a way that challenged the givens of bourgeois and imperial culture. (That such a challenge was, in retrospect, necessary is, to my mind, borne out by a recent essay by Richard Gott— https://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-blood-never-dries/ — which at this late date still can deplore that children are being taught “the old triumphalist history of empire”.)

There must be many more critical examples of the limitedness of the collective ownership of the means of production as practiced in one small place for a relatively short time.

What also need to be kept in mind is that the opponents of the attempt to redistribute power even to a limited degree remain relentless and well funded. Sometimes they can win in a quick assault. Sometimes—as the long ongoing destruction of the British National Health Service (the nationalisation of health care) shows, the struggle to disempower the many can be carried on over several generations.

In other words, as Ridiculousicculus and LFC, and perhaps others said near the beginning of this thread, one shouldn’t ignore the powerlessness of the many even when they own a few shares.

LFC said...

@ John Rapko

You forgot "fish in the afternoon" (or something like that). ;)

Anonymous said...

This-- https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/21st-century-gossip --makes me think that to look at productive enterprises aren't where the action is. It's the foundations, .. .

John Rapko said...

Dearest LFC: I didn't forget about The German Ideology's suggestion that soon we'll not just be hunting in the morning and criticizing after dinner, but also fishing in the afternoon. Rather it's like this: we Marxist grammarians prefer to rest in the afternoon after a vigorous morning of hunting, so that we might have the energy for vigorous post-prandial linguistic criticism. Although some of this digestive praxis involves considerations of class dimensions of the use of the infinitive, much of it is devoted to criticizing what Stalin, having defeated the Nazis and turned his attention to linguistics in 1950, cited from Marx's The Holy Family as "the spirit of mercantilism and huckstering" that pervades bourgeois language.--Let no one say that we Socialists are so authoritarian as to require comrades to fish.--On a different note, I recall a Marxist scholar (Terrell Carver?) saying that his examination of the manuscript of The German Ideology indicated that the 'hunting in the morning etc.' passage was put in at the suggestion of Engels, and that Marx went along with it as a joke and another instance of the rather heavy sarcasm so characteristic of his writings, especially The Holy Family.

s. wallerstein said...

John Rapko,

That sounds like something Terrell would say and he's probably right.

Terrell Carver was a college classmate and friend.

Another Anonymous said...

Anonymous (at Aug. 24, 8:05 PM),

Thank you for your reference to the article about foundations (even if you are the AnonyMouse who has periodically been picking fights with me). The article was very eye-opening and I encourage others to read it. I was not aware that the dividends on stocks held by a foundation are not taxable, which explains how the value of foundations continues to grow, even as the foundation administrators make what they claim are philanthropic contributions. In addition, there is no oversight on the nature of their contributions to confirm that they are, in fact, philanthropic. Moreover, as the article indicate, when they were first proposed as legal entities at the beginning of the 20th Century, many criticized them as repositories for ill-gained profits. As Balzac wrote, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”

I do have one quibble with the article, which may stem that it appears the article was translated from Italian. On the third page of my copy, the author states, “The Gates’ separation is exemplary.” The word “exemplary” does not mean, “is a good example of.” It means “serving as an excellent example.” I suspect the author was not claiming that the Bill/Melinda Gates break-up was an excellent role model for how such things should be done.