Marx's relevance today

Simon Kuper, whom I like a lot, says: "Marx. like Freud, has finally died." This is right in one sense. Big teleological theories of history have been discredited; the only people who believe them now are silly centrists and bosses who believe the future is foreseeable and who prate about "modernization" as if it were an uncontestable idea.

However, as you'd expect, I think Marx is still very relevant today. Take four examples:

1. Why have governments encouraged financialization rather than financial democracy? Why were they keener to bail out banks than steel firms? Why did central banks conduct QE with some inegalitarian effects rather that a more egalitarian (and effective) helicopter drop? Why has austerity borne harder upon workers than the rich? One possibility is that the state is not a benevolent agent seeking to maximize a social welfare function but is instead, as Marx said, "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

2. Why are we in secular stagnation? One possibility is that, as Marx said, the rate of profit has declined (pdf), thus weakening the motive to invest. Another (not exclusive) possibility is that the fear of future technical progress deters investment, by increasing the fear that current investments will be on the wrong side of creative destruction.

3. Both these possibilities suggest that capitalism has become an obstacle to technical progress - that, as Marx said:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.

This might be true in another way: the inequality that capitalism fosters retards productivity growth.

4. Why has the relative position of low-paid workers worsened since the 70s? A big reason is that they have suffered from technical change and globalization. As Marx recognized, socio-technical change doesn't just increase the potential for human well-being; it also has class-biased effects.

In these senses, Marxian questions are relevant today: how does social change or government policy affect classes differently? Are individual choices consistent with aggregate well-being or not? Do capitalistic property rights increases economic growth or hold it back?

I'd add something else. Marx asked, and answered, a fundamental question: what is the point of economic life? For him, it was to increase real freedom and self-realization. Capitalism, he said, doesn't do this but instead alienates us:

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it...The external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.

As Jon Elster says: "Marx himself condemned capitalism mainly because it frustrated human development and self-actualization."

Again, this is still relevant today. As Bryson and Mackerron have shown, people feel unhappy whilst they are working. Even those of us in comfortable well-paid jobs look forward to retirement, setting up on our own, or escaping from the rat race.

All this raises the question: why, then, are so many people loath to acknowledge Marx's relevance?

One answer is that Marx has been discredited by his followers - not just the barbarism of Soviet dictatorship but also the dogmatism and sectarianism of some of today's Marxists.

Another answer is that there is a tendency - popularized perhaps by Kolakowski's influential Main Currents of Marxism - to think of Marx as an obscurantist Hegelian. To some extent, he was: we are all victims of our education. But there is another Marx. If you start from Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England and start reading Capital not from the beginning but from chapter 10, another Marx emerges - one whose thinking was rooted in empirical facts about the working lives of the worst off and in an urge to improve these. It is this Marx which is still relevant today.

Comments

[Leo]

Great piece - however, one thing I find slightly odd is that you say, on the one hand, that it's the empirical Marx and not the 'obscurantist Hegelian' Marx which is still relevant today, and on the other that another reason Marx is still relevant is because he had a critique of capitalism which articulated the ways in which it frustrated human development and self-actualization. But where did he get his conceptions of human development and self-actualization from? Hegel is a huge influence there. Not the only one, for sure, but he's definitely very important. Likewise for the concept of alienation. So i'd resist any attempt to say we should jettison the 'Hegelian' Marx in favour of the 'empirical' one. There's sometimes an assumption that all Marx got from Hegel was the dialectical method, and I don't think that's true. He also developed aspects of Hegel's thought regarding the nature of freedom as self-actualisation and social alienation. These are, as you say, still relevant today.

Gareth Stedman-Jones has just written an intellectual biography of Marx for Penguin that is coming out next year and which I think will - if a talk I saw him give is anything to go by - prove very illuminating on the question of Hegel's influence on Marx, as well as the differences between Marx and Engels, which he argues are much more marked than has previously been realised or acknowledged.

[Luis Enrique]

Do you really not think that a benevolent government would bail out banks but not steel mills? How many people would have lost their jobs if the banking system had gone under

[Luis Enrique]

To clarify, I could accept it with supporting argument but it is not prima facie evidence of pro wealth bias, because recessions hurt the poor the most (via labour market)

[chris]

@ Leo - thanks. As a matter of intellectual biography, you're right that Marx got the idea of self-realization from Hegel. But its value today doesn't require Hegelian philosophy - you could simply think in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
(There's a parallel here with his theory of exploitation. He derived this from the labour theory of value, but you could ditch the LTV whilst retaining the theory of exploitation - as Roemer has done).
@ Luis - a benevolent govt would have bailed out the banks, but on more onerous terms to directors & shareholders.

[Peter Dorman]

If you deduct the specifically Hegelian aspect of Marx's theory of alienation, you are left (mostly) with the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I think that's a great way to go. There is a large empirical literature on this, and the evidence clearly points to profound benefits from a life lived primarily by intrinsic motives. Of course, we can't order all of society according to this principle, but thinking in a systematic way about how to expand the role of intrinsic motivation strikes me as an excellent modern adaptation of the "early" Marx. Economics, of course, at best makes no distinction and, depending on your interpretation, assumes only extrinsic motives constitute incentives.

[Leo]

Of course - there's plenty we can get even from Hegel without accepting 'Hegelian philosophy' either in the sense of the dialectical method or his complete philosophical system. All I was pointing out is that there's a lot in Marx which is 'Hegelian', in the sense of coming from Hegel, which is still of value - including the conceptions of freedom as self-realisation and of alienation that you mentioned. It can be profitable to read Hegel in order to understand those parts of Marx better. I think you concede too much to those, like Kolakowski, who paint Marx as a 'Hegelian obscurantist' when you say that there is much that is of value in Marx that isn't Hegelian. Of course that's right, but I think there's also plenty in Marx that is Hegelian that is also of value - and which it doesn't require our accepting all Hegelian philosophy or the dialectical method to utilise.

I'd also resist the idea Hegel is an obscurantist. He's hard to read, sure, but that's not because he's deliberately vague. He just uses concepts that are unfamiliar to us now, and which do require some acquaintance with his broader system, which is complex. However, there's now a flourishing philosophical literature on him to help readers with that. For instance, Frederick Neuhouser wrote a very good, very clear book reconstructing Hegel's theory of freedom, which argues it can be detached from his broader system and rejects the dialectical method. Neuhouser shows that Hegel has a concept of freedom which is comprehensive and useful - much more so than Laslow's or even Marx's in my view. I also understood more about freedom from reading that book than anything i've read by a modern Anglophone political philosopher trying to define it, with only the possible exception of G.A. Cohen's essays on proletarian unfreedom and the relationship between freedom and money.

[Calgacus]

Yup Leo. I cannot avoid mentioning Marcuse's great Reason & Revolution: Hegel & the Rise of Social Theory in this context.

While my guess is that KM & the mighty thinker himself might agree with later readers on what the best means of getting a headache is, here is Marx, quoted from Peter Hudis: Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Brill 2012, p.5:
As Marx stated in 1875 a passage in Volume II of Capital that Engels left out of the published version,
‘In my zealous devotion to the schema of Hegelian logic, I even discovered the Hegelian forms of the syllogism in the process of circulation. My relationship with Hegel is very simple. I am a disciple of Hegel, and the presumptuous chattering of the epigones who think they have buried this great thinker appear frankly ridiculous to me’

[jono]

"The state is not a benevolent agent seeking to maximize a social welfare function but is instead, as Marx said, "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.""

Given that we are now all part of the bourgeoisie, this seems to be exactly what we want from the State.

[mongo]

"we are now all part"? All but 99% of us.

[Theophrastus]

Today, thanks to capitalism and free-er markets more people than ever before have more opportunities to achieve self-realisation and self-actualisation. Unlike Hegel, Marx is a fourth-rate thinker who should be quietly forgotten.

[Bob]

Theo, tell that to the layed off workers in Redcar. The unemployed - deliberate permenant 5% of unemployment is required under NAIRU beliefs, who can only swap with workers outside the pool and treated like shit. The workers under centrally planned firms who cannot organise.
You're fucking kidding.

[Me]

@Jono @10/26 @11 AM

"We are all bourgeois now"

Wha?!

Please elaborate

[Me]

@ Bob @6:19 @10/26

Bob you just have to laugh off Mr. Theophrastus, who leaves a comment that as deep and substantial as a Lincoln Tech TV commercial fake-testimonial[for capitalism] then he calls Marx a "4th rate thinker..You just have to laugh and move on to the heavier subjects.