REPLY TO A COMMENT

Once again, there has been a flurry of interesting comments while I was away, mentally, struggling with a new book on Marx [early days – we shall see whether it has life.  At this point all I have is a Preface, less than 3000 words.]  Here is a question from TheDudeDiogenes:

“I just read this quotation from an interview with philosopher Allen Wood (via Prof. Brian Leiter's blog), and wondered if you had any thoughts in response, Professor Wolff:

"Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history. It has taken me a long time to realize where I most disagree with Marx. His assessment of capitalism is far too favorable. He took its instability, inhumanity and irrationality to be signs that it was a merely transitional form, which had delivered into humanity’s hands the means to a much better way of life than any that have ever existed on earth. Marx could not bring himself to believe that our species is so benighted, irrational and slavish that it would put up with such a monstrous way of life. He thought that it was inevitable that people would find a better way. We now see that this was not so. Capitalism has not proven to be a transitional form, a gateway to a higher human future. Capitalism now seems more likely a swamp, a bog, a quicksand in which humanity is presently flailing about, unable to extricate itself, perhaps doomed to perish within a few generations from the long term effects of the technology which seemed to Marx its greatest gift to humanity. Capitalism has proven to be a far more terrible system than Marx could ever bring himself to imagine. Those who are so deluded as to find something good in it, or even feel loyalty toward it, are its most pitiful victims."”

Wood is of course correct that Marx views capitalism as a revolutionary force unleashed on the world, but I think he makes the mistake [common to many writers] of construing Marx as a moralist.  What is more, Wood is, I believe, simply misreading Marx when he says:  “He took its instability, inhumanity and irrationality to be signs that it was a merely transitional form, which had delivered into humanity’s hands the means to a much better way of life than any that have ever existed on earth. Marx could not bring himself to believe that our species is so benighted, irrational and slavish that it would put up with such a monstrous way of life. He thought that it was inevitable that people would find a better way.”  Marx did not take capitalism’s instability, inhumanity, and irrationality as signs that it was merely a transitional form.  That is the kind of rootless abstract moralizing that he rightly condemned when he encountered it in the writings of those he called “Utopian Socialists.”

Marx was indeed wrong in his analysis of the forces at work in capitalism that would lead to socialism – I have written about this at length in my essay, “The Future of Socialism.”  [On box.net.]  But not because he somehow underestimated capitalism’s awfulness or our willingness to put up with it.  Were he alive today, Marx would encourage us to study capitalism as it now is [very different from the capitalism of Marx’s lifetime] and to discover the forces at work within it that are changing it [once again, something I tried in a small way to do in that essay].  He would ask whether there are developments within capitalism that could conceivably be the early structural formation of a system of social relations of production different from, and perhaps even preferable to, those of capitalism.  He would also ask us to figure out what we could do to seize on those developments and build on them a movement for change [whether revolutionary or evolutionary – Marx was open to both.]

I understand that his words spring from a deep despair, but Wood is wrong to write in this moralizing way about the “benighted, irrational and slavish” nature of “our species.”  Those are the words of a moralist of a preacher, not of a hard-headed social analyst in the style of Marx.

WEIRD

From time to time I check to see whether anyone at all is visiting my other blog, the one on Formal Methods in Political Philosophy.  Usually Google records anywhere from a dozen to two dozen visits in a day.  Yesterday, there were 96, and already today there are 68.  And where in the world are the majority coming from, according to Google's little map?  Russia!  What is that about?

STAYING SANE

We have now gone down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, politically speaking.  It is two months until the Republican Convention and six months until the election.  If you believe, as I do, that the election of Donald Trump as president would be a disaster, you will have many anxious moments between now and then.  Reading speculative pieces by pundits about the ways in which Trump could win or the reasons why Democrats are foolish to feel confident is guaranteed to give you a permanently acid stomach.

The antidote is facts, data, statistics.  Your best bet is to bookmark Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium on your computer and check it from time to time.  Wang is a Princeton neuroscientist who, in his spare time, crunches poll numbers and runs computer simulations.  He had a spectacular record in 2012, predicting the outcome of the presidential election extremely accurately and also correctly calling virtually all of the senatorial races.

His work differs from that of Nate Silver at 538.com essentially in relying entirely on statistics rather than on a combination of statistics and general political wisdom.  It turns out that statistics alone actually are better predictors.

At the moment, six months out from the election, Wang gives Clinton a bit better than a 70% probability of winning.  We will know a good deal more in the weeks and months to come.  

One of the most interesting statistical tidbits I have found during my obsessive surfing of the web is this:  If you add up the extremely unfavorable, unfavorable, favorable, and extremely favorable poll numbers for Trump and for Clinton, in each case the total is very close to 100%.  In other words, almost everybody in America already has a strong positive or negative opinion about each candidate.  This means that both of them are astonishingly well known, which in turn implies that the campaign is going to change very little [since there is a great deal of evidence that confirmation bias tends simply to strengthen already existing opinion.]  There will be endless commentary about the impact of speeches, gaffes, debates, endorsements, and the like, but none of that, in all likelihood, will make much difference.  Since Clinton is now rather strongly favored to win, she will probably simply increase that likelihood as we get closer to the election [since the percentage estimate is a function of closeness to the election as well as poll numbers.]

I await Bernie's call to support an on-going progressive movement.

ANOTHER DAMN'D THICK, SQUARE BOOK! SCRIBBLE, SCRIBBLE, SCRIBBLE, EH! MR. GIBBON?

[Attributed to the Duke of Gloucester, on the occasion of his receiving a presentation copy of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.]

I thank Jerry Fresia and S. Wallerstein for their kind encouragement to me to write a short popular book on Marx, but I think I must continue with my perhaps ill-advised magnum opus.  Leaving to one side the books I edited back in the day to make enough money to pay my psychoanalyst bills, almost all of my books have sprung from some source deep within me to which I have only limited access.  In each of those books I seek to tell a story, the story of an argument or the story of an idea, and I am unable to write until the story unfolds in my mind before me.  Somewhat factiously, I have compared the stories I tell in my books to Jack and the Beanstalk, the serious point being that only when the story of the book is clear to me can I tell where it begins, how it proceeds, and where it ends.

   Because I write this way, my books tend to be short and to have few if any footnotes [a fact that used to irk my old friend, Bob Ackerman, who would spend frantic hours, when writing, searching for the scraps of paper on which he had jotted down the information for a footnote.]  Only once have I written a book on demand, as it were, and that was my textbook, About Philosophy, which I agreed to write in order to enable my then wife to take a semester off from teaching so that she could finish her important book on Edith Wharton.  It was a labor of love, one might say, but it was not fun.  I cranked it out in eight weeks to forestall the threat of having to return the advance.  [It is now in its eleventh edition and has earned me well over a million in 2016 dollars, but that is another story.]

My son, Patrick, who is a brilliant chess Grandmaster, once wrote a book on chess in the series called The Idiot’s Guide to …,” but I am afraid I would be an utter failure if I were to attempt The Idiot’s Guide to Marx.  I think such a book would be valuable and I do not doubt that it would do more to advance the cause than the book on which I have just embarked, but it is just not my thing.  Of one thing I am quite certain:  Capital itself is not such a book.  I have no idea at all whom Marx thought would be his readers.  Can he have imagined that this astonishing book, in German [!!], would be snatched up and read avidly by English workingmen?  Lord alone knows.  It is, when you think about it, a miracle that two world-historical revolutions were carried out in his name.

Perhaps if I could find a venue with a good camera and a handful of volunteers to serve as an audience, I might attempt a series of lectures on “Marx in the Twenty-first Century.”  I could imagine myself doing that.

BACK TO THE POLITICAL SWAMP

Back last July, I posted this snarky bit of satire:

"The Trump circus has been wildly entertaining, but the election is fifteen months away, and the American public is fickle, with the attention span of a May fly, so I worry.  What will keep us amused during the long Autumn and Winter, the tedious Spring, and yet another Summer, before the votes are finally cast and counted?    I have been brooding over this problem, and believe I have hit upon a solution.

I have, in the past, observed that Hillary Clinton is the smartest, most knowledgeable, most deeply experienced Republican currently running for the Presidency.  I think she needs to announce her candidacy for the Republican nomination.  She can explain that she has been deeply distressed by the partisan feuding between the Congress and the President that has brought the normal political processes to a standstill, and that she hopes, by offering herself as a Unity candidate on both party tickets, finally to bring the nation together again.  Since she has already satisfied whatever legal requirements there are for formal candidacy for the presidency, she would be good to go for the Republican nomination immediately.

In light of her sky-high name recognition and the general ignorance and stupidity of the Republican base, she would almost certainly garner enough votes in the polling to qualify for the Republican debates.  What is more, her policies are, or were at one time, mainstream Republican.  Her domestic policies are a trifle to the right of those of Eisenhower and Nixon, and she is easily as Hawkish in foreign policy as Dole or Romney.  Her dual candidacy would be a gift of great value to the bloviating Television commentariat, which is running out of faux astonishment and comic one-liners about Trump.

To be sure, the Republican National Committee could rule Clinton unfit to bear their standard, and on those grounds ban her from the debates, but then they would have to explain why Trump meets their minimal standards of acceptability when Clinton does not.

During the General Election, she could hold televised debates with herself.  I can hardly wait."

Yesterday, I read that Clinton is launching an appeal to fat cat Republican donors who cannot bring themselves to give to Trump's campaign but do not want simply to sit on the sidelines.  

The death of satire.

A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP

Well, for better or worse, I have written the first 1600 words of the Preface of the book in which I shall weave together everything I have written and thought about Marx over the past forty years.  This is going to take a while, I fear.  I will report from time to time on my progress.

Meanwhile, I fear David Auerbach was quite right.  I cannot really abstain from commenting on the political scene.  Later today, I shall have some things to say.

It is a zoo.

S WALLERSTEIN ASKS AN INTERESTING QUESTION

Here is what he [ ? ] says:

"Professor Wolff,
You refer to yourself as a "Marxist".
What exactly do you mean by that?
Someone who believes that everything Marx said is true?
Someone who believes that most of what Marx said is true?
Some who believes that Marx was right on all important issues?
Someone who believes that Marx was right on most important issues?
Someone who believes that Marx was right on more important issues than anyone else?
Or does believing in one or a few key ideas from Marx, say, the labor theory of value or class struggle, make one a Marxist?
None of the above?
Thank you."

A fair question.  Here is my answer, in five parts:

1.  Most rigorously, I mean that I believe that Marx's fundamental claim about capitalism is true, and that claim is so important that it justifies me in calling myself a Marxist.  The claim is:  Capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.

2.  Secondarily, I believe that Marx is a more insightful, penetrating, helpful guide to an understanding of capitalism than anyone else I have ever encountered, and calling myself a Marxist signals that belief.

3.  Thirdly, I believe that Marx is the greatest social theorist who has ever written, and calling myself a Marxist is an homage to him.

4.  Fourth, calling myself a Marxist, in America at this time, is a way of giving the finger to a great many economists, philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, and political figures, and it amuses me to do so.

5.  And Fifth, calling myself a Marxist is a plea, a message in a bottle, to anyone out there who might be similarly inclined, with whom I could therefore make common cause and who would, for that reason, be my comrade, wherever and whomever he or she might be.