Introduction
No, there's nothing salvageable in Marxism for neoreactionary purposes. It's all rubbish. It took me some time to come to that conclusion however. After telling him that I once considered myself a Marxist, my friend quipped, "Yes, everyone was once a Marxist." But it wasn't due to some kind of moral revelation, while I was morally repulsed at Marxism, I had agreed to myself long ago that I will always abide by the Socratic method of "following the argument wherever it leads." I agreed to uphold this maxim after I became a Marxist; reflecting upon the reasons as to why I became a Marxist, I realised that it was not due to accepting the conclusions of any rational argument, but rather that I was swayed by moral argumentation (it's a bit more complex than that, but to make long story short). I decided to suspend my advocacy, temporarily becoming a conditional Marxist: conditional upon scrutiny of the argumentation made within the Marxist canon. I proceeded to read the
Collected Works of Marx and Engels, including the dreadful correspondences relating details of bodily ailments. I came out of the project, taking about a year or so, not being a Marxist, having rejected the entire body of thought. This was due to incoherencies in Marx's argumentation, but while some premises were inadmissible, or the economics didn't quite add up here or there, there was a crucial premise upon which the Marxist view of the world either rested or fell. In this post I am going to relate that most crucial problem with Marxism. I will also detail some of the minor issues that further make Marxism a waste of time.
The Moral Appeal
To clarify precisely why I am bothering to discuss this matter, it is because old Marx keeps getting dug up. This is shameful in my opinion, but since I did it myself I have an obligation to do my best to bury him. Most people, in my opinion, do not have a good justification for being Marxists, including myself. Fundamentally, most Marxists I have known simply did not understand the gritty details of Marxism -- As even Ho Chi Minh claimed, "I'm a Leninist, not so much a Marxist." Many were motivated by blood lust, the boiling blood and heart pounding feeling they got from feeling subversive or from the ever present red colours and violent imagery, living a wet dream of pounding Nazis in T-34s to the sound of Священная война. Fundamentally, most Marxists, in my reckoning are doing themselves a disservice by not basing their political beliefs upon footing other than sentiment (sorry Burke), and are fundamentally extremely lazy in believing they can get by without actually figuring out what was thought by the man who was not short in facial hair. Moreover, if you have a reason to be a Marxist, it better be very good, considering Marxism is fundamentally responsible for more politically motivated murders in the past century.
Which brings me to the real issue with the popular perception and acceptability of Marxism. While the promotion of Nazis and fascism will be rapidly opposed by anyone with a brain and cerebellum to in the western hemisphere, somehow communism gets the slip - it even some how gets away by being depicted as in someway moral (which is really where I was duped so many years ago). If we count the dead, communism, however, is an order of magnitude more deadly than Fascism (
Stéphane Courtois estimates an indisputable reckoning of
at least 94 million dead as a result of communism, as opposed to Fascism, which by all accounts killed
at most under 9 million). Yet communism does some how get the slip and appears a bit fun and cool. Whitewashing and defending communism is a waste of time, and ignorant of the fact that Marxism, being fundamentally
amoral (as well as immoral) is indifferent to whether 94 million died or not. But on the left, it's entirely reasonable to suppose that
real, or
true, Marx is the Marx who can flash a peace sign and just be for equality, not all this destroying churches crap. Just as with Jesus, the liberal reader sees in Marx a reflection of what he thinks is best in
himself,
For Liberal Protestants, the inquiry was an article of faith. They sought, on the basis of their critical work, to establish the facts of the life of Jesus, which would in turn provide the fundaments of the Christian faith. The problem with this approach, according to Tyrrell, is that the Christ that results from such a quest will inevitably reflect the biases of whoever sets the criteria for what is acceptable as fact. Thus, he writes, "The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well" (Tyrrell 1909, 49). Yet, he remarks, "Whatever Jesus was, He was in no sense a Liberal Protestant" (22).
NB Sanders on the role of the historian: "It falls to the lot of the historian to be the person who subjects the gospels to rough handling. . . That is, the historian, unlike the politician, novelist or moralist, cannot pick and choose just those parts of the gospels that are noble and that can be used to inspire others. The historian selects, but on different principles: what can be proved, what disproved, what lies in between?" (E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, 8).
Complicating the role of the historian is the fact that "virtually everyone has his or her own view of Jesus, and thus has a preconception of what a book on Jesus should say" (6). Thus, if the historian at any time disallows what someone's preconception holds, the historian may well be considered heretic.
Without reading Marx oneself, and without actually investigating his own works, one can go through a library of Marxist writings without ever knowing what he thought. Can liberal progressives be blamed for this? I wouldn't say so, not everyone has time to read and investigate for themselves. This comes down to the structure of the Cathedral again. Who informs the media's representation of such matters and cui bono?
The fundamental issue for a lot of liberals in considering Marxism as somehow acceptable is the fact that they believe that Marx's advocacy of an equal ends (i.e. an equal ownership of the means of production) was in some way due to moral motives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Marx viewed morality as merely functioning as a construction of whatever stage of materialist development society happens to be in at any given time. Thus, prohibiting theft is not a matter of morality, or even common human decency informed by our biological wiring, but rather, is merely a function of bourgeois morals. Morality for a Communist thus is a matter of aligning oneself with that which reinforces and informs common ownership of the means of production and socially direct labour. It's a question of morality being the superstructure determined by the material and economic base. Marxist fundamentally and historically have been fine with justifying any action in order to advance so called "proletarian class interests" - and the reaction that a response to what is commonly considered immoral today is the result of some kind of innate brain wiring is simply your conditioning into bourgeois morality in a pavlovian manner, e.g. see the last post, Foucauldian approaches to propositions as being more interesting for their conditions rather than truth value is a prime example to this kind of thinking.
Yet, many Marxists still believe that revolution must be in some way innocent and non-violent - no, Marxism not only requires violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, but doesn't care about hurting people. Coming at Marxism initially with similar moral preoccupations and concerns, some of my life-long-Maoist friends at the time were shocked that I could even suggest having a degree of restraint as regards slaughtering bourgeois capitalist roaders, as if my own morality was the incorrect one: I was still, apparently, being informed by bourgeois morality, whereas they were being informed by proletarian morality. Yet, when their families or loved ones are in danger, would they really hold back from expressing sympathy? I don't know, but I believe that while you can brainwash people into doing just about anything, morality tends to continue being grounded in some semblance of natural sentiments, and property and senses of self-possession are crucially connected to these natural sentiments.
Morality for Marx:
We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for ever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history and the differences between nations. We maintain on the contrary that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed.
Morality doesn't exist for Marx, but "moralities" do. Each one of these many moralities is used and disposed of in as far as it serves the ebbs and flows of history: this is, for Marx, an amoral and impersonal occurrence. Indeed for Marx, suffering and "exploitation" are even a
good thing at times:
Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe: 'Sollte dim Qual uns qudlen,/Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt:"
I.e. "'Should we be grieved by this pain that increases our pleasure?" This is the concept that is often called "the worse the better." The more exploited, degraded, and punished a population, the closer they are to rising up in a violent proletarian revolution. If economic conditions degrade, for Marx, that's a good thing. Liberalism is really a big mistake for Marx, as is democratic socialism. One won't be achieving any revolution if one is easing the condition of the working class. One needs to worsen the condition as much as is possible. Suffering is not actually immoral if it is a means to the ends of Marx's cult of humanism. But Marxism is just about equal distribution and equal use of the means of production right? Isn't it just about transitioning to a fair world? This brings me to the main issue, the actual transition to communism, i.e. explain to me how that works. How precisely does one achieve that equality?
The Transition Problem
Marxism, i.e. communism, is defined by its ultimate goal (communism), whereas Capitalism is not defined by its ultimate goal, it is defined by its function (exchange of commodities). Without a functional component, however, the expression of an end goal is just a sentiment and empty hope. This is what Leninism is attempting to get at with the notion of Socialism being a "transitional society," or what Maoism is trying to get at by arguing that experimentation must be used to determine what must be done. Obviously the worse of these two is Maoism, since experimentation using human subjects on a mass scale can only lead to endless misery - especially if it is not clear in the first place that the experimentation is going to achieve anything. This is ironic however, in that Lenin's notion of the transitional society is not actually what Marx intended in the first place. In fact, it appears that Marx may be more sceptical of such a phenomenon than any Marxist thinker after him, the consequences of which I shall discuss later. In this sense, Marx makes some very good arguments. In fact, he's a fantastic writer and a good thinker, with some serious shortcomings that I shall point out.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Note that Marx does not claim this to be a "transition society." A society is a particular thing in Marx's thought, which is the superstructure that is a manifestation of an economic base. On the contrary, a period of "transformation" is an actual transformation from capitalism to communism. Marx only uses the term society to modify the nouns capitalist and communist - transition does not manifest a corresponding society in Marx's thought. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the process of the gear shift from communist to capitalist, not a society with a culture of its own, i.e. a revolutionary culture as that envisioned by Lin Biao. Lenin's conception in his own words,
The transition from capitalist society--which is developing towards communism--to communist society is impossible without a "political transition period", and the state in this period can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin is trying to make the whole unexplainable process easier to accept by the masses by putting something palpable in the transition, where what Marx is describing is only the dissolution of A and B taking its place. This is
the Hegelian understanding that Marx would have been familiar with:
In thinking about the gradualness of the coming-to-be of something, it is ordinarily assumed that what comes to be is already sensibly or actually in existence; it is not yet perceptible only because of its smallness. Similarly with the gradual disappearance of something, the non-being or other which takes its place is likewise assumed to be really there, only not observable, and there, too, not in the sense of being implicitly or ideally contained in the first something, but really there, only not observable. In this way, the form of the in-itself, the inner being of something before it actually exists, is transformed into a smallness of an outer existence, and the essential difference, that of the Notion, is converted into an external difference of mere magnitude. The attempt to explain coming-to-be or ceasing-to-be on the basis of gradualness of the alteration is tedious like any tautology; what comes to be or ceases to be is assumed as already complete and in existence beforehand and the alteration is turned into a mere change of an external difference, with the result that the explanation is in fact a mere tautology. The intellectual difficulty attendant on such an attempted explanation comes from the qualitative transition from something into its other in general, and then into its opposite; but the identity and the alteration are misrepresented as the indifferent, external determinations of the quantitative sphere.
The fundamental problem with most discussions by Marxists about the transition to communism, is that they attempt to explain the process through the creation of an alternative economic arrangement. However, all of these economic arrangements end up functioning within the logic of the law of value, whereas the model of Marx assumes the extinction of the law of value. For instance, in Marx's response to John Gray's proposal for a national bank that issues labour-time certificates in exchange for stocks in commodities, where you would exchange a commodity which took one day to make with the certificate for one day's labour, he
explains,
But as Gray presupposes that the labour-time contained in commodities is immediately social labour-time, he presupposes that it is communal labour-time or labour-time of directly associated individuals. In that case, it would indeed be impossible for a specific commodity, such as gold or silver, to confront other commodities as the incarnation of universal labour and exchange-value would not be turned into price; but neither would use-value be turned into exchange-value and the product into a commodity, and thus the very basis of bourgeois production would be abolished. But this is by no means what Gray had in mind – goods are to be produced as commodities but not exchanged as commodities. Gray entrusts the realisation of this pious wish to a national bank.
Similar ideas are still promoted by some, e.g.
Ithaca Dollars and
Brixton Pounds. If goods are produced as commodities they will naturally end up being exchanged as commodities. Labour will continue to be alienated. From Marx's point of view, these proposals are not
directly social, i.e., they do not avoid the law of value; they don't allow a good to be directly usable by society at large, and not go through exchange which requires value. Obviously, the other issue with proposals such as Gray's, is that commodities produced over a one hour period are never going to be of precisely the same value, since they will have variance in use-value, so even if you spend a year making dousing rods, they're still of no value. Value cannot be wished into a commodity, just as any old labour
cannot be wished into having value:
The dogma that a commodity is immediately money or that the particular labour of a private individual contained in it is immediately social labour, does not of course become true because a bank believes in it and conducts its operations in accordance with this dogma. On the contrary, bankruptcy would in such a case fulfil the function of practical criticism.
This is because such a bank would continually be short of goods since better producers would form a black market and the sector of the economy that is regulated by the state would keep regressing. When the state coerces the black market into abiding by its rules, the best producers will leave in a brain drain. Anyone who remains in the state will just produce as little as possible, since a single hour of half-assed work would be equivalent to a single hour of Stakhanovite work. This is the most obvious shortcoming of Socialism as traditionally understood (not Marx's notion), i.e. that there is no incentive to work. Furthermore, all production would end up becoming retarded and useless, an hour of producing a useless good would be of as much value as an hour of producing a useful one, and therefore there would be no point in investing in efficiency since it wouldn't produce any returns. These characteristics are all obvious in real-world attempts at communism. Marx actually argues against real-world attempts at communism quite effectively: those who want to get rid of money must abolish exchange-value, which requires abolishing commodities, which means the capitalist mode of production must be abolished; legislating equality doesn't legislate the capitalist mode of production (as so understood by Marxists) out of existence.
So fundamentally, if one wants to abolish the capitalist mode of production in and of itself, one needs to have a better plan to actualise that. It must be a very specific and clear plan. Treatments of revolution that focus on political rather than economic/material-base change, such as those advocated by Lenin and Mao, are pretty much regarded as rubbish
by Marx:
Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. ... Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution?
Thus, whatever standards the Gotha Programme set for "fair distribution" were standards that functioned under a capitalist logic (capitalist logic dictates that all exchange is fair, i.e. socially determined value is exchanged for socially determined value). The Gotha Programme was treating the state as an independent entity, instead of a product of the means of production, since they believed that fairness was based on the superstructure and not on the economic base. What then, if Marx rejects all of these economic and political conceptions which are roughly equivalent to what we think of as leftism, is Marx's notion of communism? That is to say, what does communism look like without a "labour-money scheme" and what does a "transformed" mode of production look like?
Marx describes the transitioned society, with socially direct labour:
individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion ... but directly as a component part of total labor. ... the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them. ... What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. ... Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning. ... Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. ... The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
Here, the law of value has been replaced by the law of socially direct labour, where one's societal contribution is not assessed by the quantity of one's production. There is no selling of labour or buying commodities with money. This society also manages not to be a subsistence society, since the work of all contributes to society as a whole, without, somehow, there being any strict division of labour. To put it simply, this is a society in which products are directly socially, i.e. there is no money intervening (i.e. C-M-C).
Marx
claims that such a society is one in which principle is no longer "at loggerheads" with practice.
Hence, equal right here is still in principle -- bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.
This means that in capitalism, there is equality of principle (i.e. equality is the "principle" of capitalism, according to Marx) but not equality of practice (i.e. capitalism gives rise to unequal results since the bourgeoisie make a profit at the expense of one who exchanges labour value). The contradiction is that labour in capitalism is supposedly unequal in individual cases due to the law of value, which functions according to "socially necessary abstract labour time," where one's labour is usually not equivalent to another's, whereas in communism, they are equal by default because the law of value, and thus commodity production and exchange, has been abolished. People can thus be remunerated, by some mechanism, according to their actual amount of work. Therefore, Marx does not believe that the law value transforms to socially direct labour due to the beliefs of a bank, or the imposition of fiat, or the agreement of a group to count labour equally. The changes must come about through a material transformation of the means of production.
This, in the end, is what I tentatively call the
transition problem. This is a problem because no Marxist, including Marx, has ever made it absolutely clear what the social relations are wherein all labour is counted equally. Not only
how the transition takes place, but actually
what it is that is being transitioned
to has never been clearly defined. It is my contention that this is the pivot upon which the Marxist argument stands or falls. Marx's suggestions in the
Communist Manifesto are clearly asinine and childish, and suggestions that he would not have made at the mature point in which he wrote
The Critique of the Gotha Programme. The only plausible way to grasp through the dark as regards this issue is what the Maoists resort to, blind social experimentation using communal farms or the like.
This is the task at hand for all communists, and it is a metaphysically implausible task: equality in the world must be established where none really exists. No two "quanta of labour" can be equal to each other on average, this is because some will always be more or less capable. In such a world, not only is capitalism, in the strict sense of commodity exchange, not only is the only economic mode that
can exist, but the only economic mode that
did exist. This is why modern Marxists, who attempt to go beyond the economic side of things, must make it their lifelong mission to deny human biodiversity - races don't exist, genders and sexes don't exist, families and extensions thereof, nations, don't exist, etc.
Other Issues
For the sake of the argument above, which I believe is based on the pivotal premise of Marxism, I accepted for granted Marx's premise of the law of value. It is unfortunate that the law of socially direct labour simply can't exist, and the only law he attempts to posit is the law of value. It is then, even more unfortunate for Marxist thought, that the law of value strictly speaking doesn't quite seem to exist. To confess my current position at the outset, I accept the typical Austrian approach to questions of value, i.e. subjectivity.
There are, of course, lots of critiques of the law of value, and many cogent ones from the Austrian perspective. But as with the transition problem, the issue that I had as I read through the Collected Works was different from the typical critiques -- most of which, by and large, I also will admit. My problem is that for Marx, values have magnitude both in labour time and in money. Therefore, Marx can talk about the sum of values (labour time) being equal or unequal to the sum of prices (money). It is Marx's contention that the sums are equal, and that production of value precedes the receipt of value, i.e. prices in their totality are not only equal to but determined by the total value produced. So, while the value may not be equal to the price, the totality of prices in the universe is cosmically equivalent to the totality of values. Need I say more? It is my opinion that prices are determined by nothing more than a seller's desire to make a profit. Value is purely mental. In fact, Marx's own critique of fetishism applies just as well to his own imbuing of commodities with value. Value, for Marx, is a kind of quantifiable mystic force.
The issue in the end with political theorising, is what can achieve the most desirable end. If you don't even know how to define your end, let alone why it is desirable or how to get there. There's no point aiming for it. Communism is a mechanistic explanation of the world, where the end of communism will come about no matter, even if it sucks, which Marx doesn't deny: he believes it will come about regardless. As I said before, there's little reason to dig up old Marx, he needs to be buried deep, the particles of dirt upon his coffin a testament to the arguments against his theory. Most of which are the testament of human blood, the sea of which many deluded people attempt to cross in order to get at their unreachable utopia. The world, no doubt, is an ocean, and a political arrangement, no doubt, is a ship. Does one make a sociological analysis of the behaviour of sailors and argue that according to this and that unsubstantiated theory they will find the dock on the other shore? Or does one find a capable captain, the most capable captain one can, and ask him to guide and instruct us? Must we deny ourselves the right to such a captain? Unless we think the worse the better, we really shouldn't torture ourselves, poor beggars, thus.
.jpg/640px-Immanuel_Kant_(painted_portrait).jpg)
