You're a Marxist!

Many of you are Marxists - even though you might not realize it.

To see what I mean, consider the following:

One reason for Britain’s high costs in construction may be the result of NIMBY power. We need therefore to reduce this power, perhaps by allowing home-owners to vote (pdf) on schemes that would enable higher-density building. We also need to reform the tax system by replacing business rates with a commercial land value tax, which would be payable by the landowner, not the business. We need also to rethink intellectual property laws as the present patent system restricts growth and innovation. We must break up inefficient monopolies such as Openreach to foster more competition. And we must enforce the end-to-end and right-to-exit principles in order to weaken big tech and so foster new tech start-ups and the development of the internet.

There's a common theme behind these proposals. It's a belief that we need to restructure property rights - reducing those of patent-holders, landlords and monopolists and big tech - because existing ones constrain growth. Which is just what Marx thought happened:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

Those calling for these changes, however, don't think of themselves as Marxists: I've quoted Sam Dumitriu, Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood, Stian Westlake and Cory Doctorow*. But in claiming that property relations have become fetters on growth, they are thinking in terms consistent with Marx.

And not just on this point. They presume that their proposals are feasible. They believe therefore that when there is a mismatch between what economic growth requires and actually-existing property relations it is resolved by the latter changing rather than by us having to accept stagnation**. This is what G.A. Cohen, in his Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, called the primacy thesis: "the nature of a set of production relations is explained by the level of development of the productive forces".

This is historical materialism. I therefore welcome our new Marxist colleagues.

In being Marxist in this sense without knowing it they have an illustrious predecessor - Mrs Thatcher. The defining feature of her government was the belief that production relations had become a fetter on growth, and that these had to (and could) change. Hence the cuts in income tax - increasing income-recipients' property rights - and reductions in trade union power, which shifted the balance of power within production relations in favour of capital.

Thatcher was a better Marxist (and more successful politician!) than most of her Labour critics. Except for a short-lived sign of intelligence under John McDonnell, the party has not had in recent years a well-worked theory of how property relations must change to facilitate growth. Marxists and Stian and colleagues know something that social democrats often miss - that fostering economic growth sometimes requires more than merely looser fiscal policy.

Of course, accepting one Marxian proposition does not make you a Marxist, any more than my accepting Burke or Hayek's points about bounded knowledge and rationality make me a Burkean or Hayekian***. You can accept Marx's historical materialism which rejecting some of his other ideas such as alienation and reification; ideology; the labour theory of value; tendency for the profit rate to fall (pdf); and the centrality of economic class. I suspect you'd be wrong to do so, however, but then I also suspect that many non-Marxists haven't so much considered these ideas and rejected them so much as they just haven't thought about them at all.

Equally, of course, we Marxists aren't so confident that the incompatibility between the development of the forces of production and current property relations can be solved merely by moderate tweaks to the latter. It's possible that low profit rates (and expected profits) are stifling innovation and investment; that the crisis-prone nature of capitalism is also doing so (we're still living with the legacy of 2008); and that capitalist hierarchies are also inefficient. If so, more radical changes are needed than Dumitriu, Bowman, Southwood and Westlake are calling for. My view on this is merely empirical: we should go down their road and then see if we need to go further.

The fact that so many people are historical materialists in a loose sense does not of course make the theory true. Many of us would resile from its teleological element - the idea that it must inevitably lead to socialism. Others have questioned Marx's idea that production relations will change to enable the forces of production to develop on the grounds that it invokes functional explanations which can sometimes be suspiciously like just-so stories****: Wright, Levine and Sober's Reconstructing Marxism is good on this debate. And yet others might question whether we need big organizing theories at all: what's wrong, they say, with small-scale granular ideas of history or economics?

These are open questions. My point here, though, is to emphasize something that's often forgotten. Marxism is not just a normative theory of what should happen and it's certainly not, as Tories want to claim, some sinister conspiracy of loons. Instead, it is part of the western intellectual tradition - a set of ideas (many derived from Marx's predecessor's) which can help organize our ideas today. Non-Marxists shouldn't be so squeamish about borrowing his ideas or acknowledging his influence upon them.

OK then: some people distinguish between Marxians (those influenced by Marx's ideas without subscribing to revolutionary socialism) and Marxists. If you like this distinction, the Sams and Stian are Marxian. But, hey, why spoil a good title?

* I suspect, however, that Cory Doctorow, who advocates breaking up big tech firms, wouldn't be so surprised or alarmed to be called Marxist.

** Yes, dear reader, I am eliding here the distinction between what should happen and what does happen. But then, I'm not sure Marx wasn't doing the same.

*** Perhaps the difference between me and some others is that I acknowledge the fact that I think within intellectual traditions and make no claim to originality.

**** It's possible that the process is a little like natural selection in biology. "Goodish" production relations do eventually get selected for because people with an interest in developing the productive forces sooner or later get the power to change them. Such a process is consistent with there being long periods of tension between the productive relations and productive forces, just as somewhat maladapted species can survive for a while.

Comments

[Peter Fitzgerald]

I have explained to people the notion of historical materialism without calling it that and simplifying the language. Many deem it a reasonable explanation. They do an about turn when you mention Marx and the term historical materialism. There was a similar reaction to Spinoza. Many didn't realise they were Spinozists or knew it, but kept quiet about it.

[Jan Wiklund]

Well, Marx was a social scientist in the 19th century who "knew as much as he knew" as Immanuel Wallerstein had it. Taking some of his staindpoints and findings doesn't make one a marxist now, 150 years later, more than accepting for example Antonio Serra's notion about economies of scale makes one a serrist. Science grow by inputs from different people and some of it sticks.

Perhaps it is better to accept that some of Marx's ideas is mainstream now (while others aren't), and not need any label.

[rsm]

Can I agree with Schumpeter, who said he was as impatient with those who can't get beyond Marx, as he was with those who can not even get as far as Marx?

《we need to restructure property rights - reducing those of patent-holders, landlords and monopolists and big tech - because existing ones constrain growth.》

What if the government just buys enough land as it comes on markets to restore the Lockean Proviso so that those of us who do not want to cooperate with "growth" have the option to self-provision on commons?

[Blissex]

«Mrs Thatcher. The defining feature of her government was the belief that production relations had become a fetter on growth, and that these had to (and could) change.»

The typical tory is marxist to a fault, for example because tories and whigs are fully persuaded of the centrality of class, and also of the argument that the income of feudalists and capitalists comes from extracting surplus from the workers, and therefore their policies aim at increasing that extraction; so they label as COMMUNISM! anything that might reduce that extraction, for example Corbyn's proposed policies.

Indeed I usually quote Bernard de Mandeville (which was cited by Karl Marx) as the main tory/whig theorists of the desirability of extracting profit from workers:

“Essay on charity" (1724): “The Plenty and Cheapness of Provisions depends in a great measure on the Price and Value that is set upon this Labour, and consequently the Welfare of all Societies, even before they are tainted with Foreign Luxury, requires that it should be perform’d by such of their Members as in the first Place are sturdy and robust and never used to Ease or Idleness, and in the second, soon contented as to the necessaries of Life; [...] From what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor; [...] To make the society happy and people easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor”

[Kevin A. Carson]

Doctorow's never opposed calls for breaking up tech platforms, as such. But his emphasis is overwhelmingly on the solution of adversarial interoperability.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay