The "I can't believe my eyes" comment of the day...
I've been following this Bizarre Post today at Economist's View. It's a strange article about Marx and what is left of his legacy. The writer of the article, Ronald Suny of the U of Michigan, laments the way Marxism has been used and misused throughout the 20th Century and unable to realize its full potential. It's a bizarre, though long, read. Don't ever wonder why Marxism won't totally die. Such professors keep the torch flickering at all costs.
But anyway, being a Left-leaning site, the comments are not surprisingly a little sympathetic to Marxism. It does make for interesting reading for someone like me who thinks Marx was wrong at the very core of his beliefs...regardless of how misconstrued his ideas have been by those who have purported to implement them in failed economies like the USSR.
Among the comments, this one stuck out as especially egregious.
Socialism is the abolishment of all forms of authority, including the traditional State.
The entire pretense of this comment being true is so wrong...so wrong that entire books, The Road to Serfdom (Hayek) and The Fatal Conceit (Hayek) and Economic Calculation in the Social Commonwealth (Mises) 
Nothing about the essential premises of these books as ever been refuted. EVER. It's true.
Socialism, acknowledging reality, cannot exist as intended. It is simply impossible economically to do what it purports and it is even more impossible to do with a large and inevitable corrupt government that must control far too much for the idea of "no authority" to exist. In fact, Hayek demonstrates this on an economic level like Mises and on a political level as well in the The Road to Serfdom. Such ideas are flawed and cannot work. the process ofg dissatisfaction will eventually lead to dictatorship and atrocity.
The one man who supposedly refuted tenet of Mises, Oskar Lange, actually did no such thing. He side-stepped Mises's central idea that rational economic calculation of prices could not be achieved through socialism (thereby debunking its viability at the source) but suggesting that a panel of government bureaucrats could achieve this result through trial and error. This half-baked and silly idea was the "Well, I guess that's settled!" excuse to ignore Mises when he wrote his inconveniently truthful book in the early 20th century.
In fact, Murray Rothbard, in a speech , showed how Lange had to painfully retreat from original ideas and acknowledge Mises's fundamental truth in praxeology. In doing so, he puts himself into dilemma from which he is unable to lucidly escape with Marxism in tact, for the painful acknowledgement of the universal validity of praxeology does NOT leave room for the central tenets of Marxism to be true. The outrage of this devastating fact in Marxian circles is virtually ignored to this day.
Rothbard:
Far less known, however, is a parallel retreat from Marxist economic theory in Oskar Lange's last years, a retreat, furthermore, made in long strides toward the economic theory and the methodology of none other than his old opponent. Mises' most distinctive contribution to economics was his concept and elaboration of economic theory as praxeology (or praxiology), the formal, general logic of human action, of human purposive activity using scarce means to achieve the most preferred ends.
Oskar Lange devoted a great deal of time to the painful acknowledgement that economics must encompass praxeology as well as Marxism. The particular irony is that Lange devoted a great amount of attention to an economic theory of his old antisocialist rival which still remains almost unknown in conventional Western economic thought.
Lange:
“the rationalization of economic activity within the capitalist enterprise, the practice of proceeding according to the principle of economic rationality, and especially the consciousness of this principle in human thought, all constitute an achievement of historic significance ... on a par with the imposing advance in material technique made within the capitalist mode of production ... itself closely connected with the application of the principle of economic rationality in enterprise.”
Rothbard then notes:
our Marxian was willing to go with praxeological economics. But here Lange confronted a precipice even steeper than before: for just as it was important for him to deny that praxeology might be confined to economics, so it was still more important for him to deny that all of economic theory is a subset of praxeology. For if that were really the case, where would that leave Marxism?
Indeed, the speech shows that Lange, seeing the enormous problems and implications of this concession to Mises, spends much time contradicting himself on the most basic philosophical necessities of Marxism and is left with nowhere to gracefully retreat. The acknowledgment is a virtual "checkmate" that cannot exist with Marxism. Lane tried, painfully, to do this but Rothbard gleefully shows how "perfunctory" and contradictory this was. Matches between expert chess players are considered over once one player makes a fatal move from which there is no hope of coming back. Continuing the game is a mere exercise in the inevitable. Rothbard called "checkmate" on Lange but we're still playing it out.
Comments :
Socialism would work great
if it were actually true that it involved the abolishment of an authoritarian state. Voluntary socialistic self-government seems to work ok in very small groups, where the people all care about one another, but not so much on a large scale where people are asked to work towards improving "the state" and a central authority tightly controls the economy.
I do like his take on Marxism as a way to recognize areas for improvement, even if it doesn't itself provide the solutions:
Sort of like how ID can push evolutionary biology to improve even through ID offers no real scientific alternatives, maybe?
Two asides: I see robertdfeinman commenting everywhere, and I notice you rewrote the ending to this piece -- I like the chess analogy, it's snappy.
Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
thanks
Well, I wasn't really done. I rushed toward the end because I had to leave my computer for a few minutes and wanted to just post it.
When I came back I corrected a few mistakes and added more to the end. Thanks.
Yeah. Feinman is everywhere. I think he;s a little freaky. I've read his website. I think he's overly complex about many things. But that's just an opinion.
also,
I posted a link at that site hoping to get some traffic over this way. I've done that there before. It's hard to know if any new sign ups are because of it. I thought I saw a new name the other day. Not sure who.
But one last thing on the whole socialism thing, after some considerable reading, I'd come to see the flaw at a very basic level with it. And much like someone presenting a new theory or thesis, if something is flawed in a base assumption, what follows CANNOT be valid...at least not by design as a well formed piece of deductive thinking.
When I realized this about socialism in any form and to any degree applied, I renounced any sympathy to it in any way. Remember that I used to be more liberal.
My mind was shattered and I "went back to formula" as a scientist would say. Though I don't want to give the implication that I'm "done" learning (far from it!!!), my mind is quick to reject anything based on such fallacious thinking...meaning that "of Marx" is wrong.
Of course, that doesn't mean everything is black and white, far from it. BUT, one little part of the picture got a little clearer.
what is socialism/Marxism? Some history...
I think much of this discussion is based on two related semantic issues; there seems to be no definition of "Marxism" or "socialism". Since "socialism" is more general, I'll address it first.
If that's your definition of socialism, then it is different from that of many self-described socialists. The broadest definition of (utopian) socialism that I can think of involves the "legal" unifcation of all inputs to production, i.e. capital and land is all owned by those who work it. For details and examples, see my DKos article "the myth of socialism as statism
". Others have used the term "socialism" to refer to capitalism itself--focusing on the fact that production was undertaken as a social enterprise (e.g. the factory and the corporation). I think Marx/Engles used this concept in the communist manifesto--saying that communism would occur after the capitalists had socialized the means of production.
Which brings us to Marxism. I have only read the Communist Manifesto (CM), and the first fact is that the Communist countries in no way embodied the ideas of the CM. The CM was clear that communism was predicated on advanced capitalism--and could not emerge from a feudal society such as Russia or China. The idea that a communist vanguard could establish communism by way of state-capitalism was developed by Lenin/Mao. However, Marx did advocate a conversion to communism by way of expropriation of capital by the state.
This was an issue of contention between the state-communists (led by Marx) and the anarcho-communists (led by Bakunin). The anarchists believed that it was impossible for "the people" to control the state and insisted on direct transfer of economic power from the capitalists to the worker, without any mediation by bureacrats.
"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." --Frederick Douglas
come on, adam....
I think you can safely assume that I mean socialism to be a little more deep in meaning than a panel of bureaucrats.
I'm sort of engaged on several fronts at the same time and may have been a little ambiguous at times. sorry.
When I say "bureaucrats", I'm referring to Lange's answer to Mises on the topic of price calculation under socialism. Lange basically side steps Mises's assertion that public ownership of the means of production cannot rationally set prices in correct way that reflect supply, demand and other variables by saying that government bureaucrats can achieve this end through trial and error in the same way that private voluntary exchange does. believe it or not, this answer was considered satisfying at the time.
Either way, the pretense of public ownership of the means of production always implied government to handle all this anything I've read on a practical level.
As for Marxism, upon which socialism is based...regardless of the variety of socialism in question...much of it rests on the labor theory of value (Kapital, 1867??)...which I find to be preposterous. It says that goods are worth the hours it took to create them. So if item A took two hours to create, it's worth twice as much as item B which took one hour. It gets much worse from there and leads us to the theory of exploitation which says something along the lines that a capitalist makes a profit by exploiting the worker into working for less than the value of his commodity (labor power). I think you see where this is going.
It gets much worse.
Yes, Marx assumes the switch over a capitalist economy to socialist one. and based on these ideas I mentioned above, the exploitation factor is gone, people get their real value for their labor and everyone makes the same money because all labor is equal in value and on and on.
Not only does this all "feel" wrong, it IS wrong. See Rothbard's speech on Lange's acknowledgment of praxeology. This acknowledgment, regardless of any twisting or spinning by Lange, leaves Marxism at ANY level in the dire position of not making sense on philosophical level of human action.
You know, I was discussing this tonight with a friend of mine who's a social anarchist (ala Chomsky) turned libertarian. I showed him that quote and laughed because he used to believe it.
bureacrats and government
I haven't followed all the literature (Lange, Misses, etc.) so I may have missed a few of your references.
What I was getting at was the idea that socialism doesn't require that administration of the means of production to occur on a level that is any larger than a typical corporation. In other words, socialism (by some definitions) allows for a worker-owned factory, rather than a state-owned factory.
I know that in modern English-speaking societies, we typically use "socialism" to represent the assimilation of one or more corporations into the (elected) government. All I wanted to point out is that some (perfectly reasonable) conceptions of socialism are much more decentralized, and could even be compatible with markets--as I understand the system in Communist Yugoslavia.
I never got around to listing the ridiculous ideas in Marx's theory. One of them is that each labor-hour has equal value (I'm taking your word that he believed this). This seems to be similar to the "essentialist" critique of usury--the idea that items have inherent value. Another was the inevitiability of the communist revolution. As any evolutionary scientist can tell you, the evolution of biological systems is far from predictable.
"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." --Frederick Douglas
BTW,
You might find this quite interesting:
Anarchism Left and Right
It involves Kevin Carson's book and its ideas in a debate/symposium of sorts with Austrian libertarians.
Quite interesting. Really. Our little exchange reminded me of it. Click the libertarian studies for detailed essays from various libertarians on th matter.
It's kind of like a "Cato Unbound" style discussion with a lead essay and comments and reactions.
I don't know if you've seen it but enjoy!
also, Adam
Read this socialist paper called Against Mises
.
The lower half concerns price calculation, the single biggest obstacle to socialism.
They do such a poor job of trying to explain away what even Lange could not accomplish....effective and "correct" prices with a market function. Any doubts I could ever have had that Mises might be wrong were quickly washed away after this.
Four comments
Only tangentially related to the essay (sorry)
1) Being a "New Leftist" meant interacting with "old leftists" for money at times. What i noticed about Communist Party members is that they were gray, no matter what they wore, gray in manner, gray of voice, so gray that they sucked the colour out of one's tie-dyed shirt.
And they always seemed to think that by giving us some money, they could tell us what to do with it. "Moscow would like you to....." We always said, "Sure" and did what we wanted. Fact is, they were over 30, and silly old men to us.
I felt sorry for them, actually, because those of us in the youth of radical fervor were always chiding them for straying from the path of the true revolution. And they were always apologizing and explaining. Lenin was forced to retreat to the NEP because the counterrevolutionary forces of the US and other countries were threatening the Russian revolution. Stalin was forced to allow those people in Georgia to simply starve, or to execute the multitude in the Darkness at Noon because the revolution was threatened.
It seemed that the worst sins of Capitalism, even more than the worst sins, could be justified with an appeal to the dangers of the counterrevolution. Meanwhile, it was obvious that the notion of the Dictatorship of the People was problematic, that it showed no signs of withering, and everywhere led to a cult of personality. But one didn't say this to the Communists and expect any money.
It seemed to us, steeped with American freedom, children of the prosperity after WWII, used to getting our way, that this gray communism was a long way from the radical revolution that Lenin had wanted. One reason for plunging into Marcuse, whose works were banned, after all, in both China and the USSR. Besides, Marcuse's critical philosophy was not only Marxism on a sounder philosophical base (it might be argued, that is, Kant rather than Hegel), but it was informed by Freud, at a time when one didn't earn his first coloured belt in psychology by announcing that Freud got it all wrong.
2) The man who taught Marxism in grad school was also one of the Philosophy of Science profs. This is a fairly odd combination. But this man was a gentle and thorough teacher, one of the best I've had.
One night, I asked him how he got to be teaching this odd pair of subjects.
So he tells me that his undergraduate degree was in science, I forget which, but he went to graduate school in philosophy, studying mostly logical and mathematical systems, and science. This was at the beginning of the "Philosophy of..." craze, where one could probably get through an undergraduate curriculum on nothing but. (You might remember that a bit later, there was a "Tao of..." and even a "Zen of..." craze.) So he got a job, and settled into the life of one teaching the Philosophy of Mathematics, and the Philosophy of science.
To expand his knowledge, he tried to read and discuss philosophy with others on the staff, and, he told me, he kept hearing that Marxist theory was scientific. And so, he said, he set out to read everything Marx wrote to see how it was scientific. Not finding it, he went to various other Marxist writers, secondary sources, and criticisms. Now, after a few years of teaching the Marx courses, under graduate and graduate, he told me that he still didn't understand how Marxist theory, even the sociological aspects, could be called scientific. (He gave me a short lecture on what makes a science, and what of that wasn't in Marxism.)
When he was done, a thought occurred to me, which i shared with him. "Perhaps," I said in all modesty, "he was using the word Wissenschaft in German, which, while often translated "science" in English, means 'any rigourous study' and does not carry the automatic connotation of natural science that 'science' does in English."
The good professor sort of staggered, sat down, and stared off into space.
To this day, I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it.
3) An old joke, I heard it in the fifties, has it that a certain Frenchman had a butler who was a member of the French Communist party, then somewhat of a minor force in French politics. He had an arrangement to have every Thursday night off so that he could attend party meetings.
It came to pass that the man noticed that his butler was staying home on Thursdays, or going to the cafe. After a while, his curiosity got the best of him, and despite a decorum that led him most of the time not to inquire about his butler's private life, he could not resist asking him about it:
Man: I notice that you haven't been going to the Communist Party meetings anymore.
Butler: No, I quit going.
Man: But you were always so fervent, never missed, carried banners in the parades, manned the lines. What happened?
Butler: Well, last month, the party secretary announced that a study had shown that if our party came to power and we put the principoles of Marx into praxis, every Frenchman would have 15,000 Francs.
Man: But that sounds wonderful, egalitarian, just what you have been preaching all these years i have known you. I don't understand....
Butler: Well, you see, I have 25,000 Francs.
4) Marxism may or may not naturally devolve to this next image, we could argue the notion, but for me, now, the tendency seems so inevitable, that this image serves me as a key to the mental safe in which i keep the history of Marxism, the actual praxis.
In the image, Joe Stalin and other high Communist Party officials are seated around a large and sumptuous table in Moscow, protected against the ferocity of the Russian winter night, feasting and drinking. There is lubricated laughter all about, and from time to time, one hears cries, sometimes in Joe's voice itself, always large with mirth, of...
"Vasily, pass me some of the people's wine, and another one of the people's fillet mignon while you're at it."
Stalin so wanted to believe that if he could enforce Communism for a generation or two, a new Communist man would be born. Lysenkoism arose from this wish, for if Lysenko's Lamarckism is true, by forcing people to act in a certain manner, their children or grandchildren would find such behaviour a natural characteristic. I believe that Joe was honest about this, that somewhere in his soul there was still the flicker of idealism of the young revolutionary, for a better society that overcame greed and other antisocial traits of men. And he saw that he himself could not overcome them. It would make his crimes justified; he was just holding the reins of government to Communism until the People were naturally communistic, communistic by nature, Communist man. It would mean that the worst evils of the capitalists, which he could see in his reveling in riches while his people ate little, could be excused because he was raised and the offspring of a capitalist man. It reminds us of the visit to Frazier's undisciplined room, indeed, his undisciplined life, in B. F. Skinner's Walden Two.
But it was not to be, about as realistic as thinking that by simply removing a dictator, the natural instincts for democracy would bring a democratic state into being virtually ab nihilo.
Yet sometimes, well over 100 years after Marx, with a ton if intervening experience, we still hear the cries of those who want to repeat the Marxist history. They will make it work. They won't fall into excesses. Oh, of course, they will do it more truly this time. They don't realize that that is just what is to be feared.
And oddly, just those who most love this ideological fantasy, that the dreamings of an old ideologue in his tower can overcome human nature, just those are first to laugh at or curse the ideological dreamings of the man who wished for a new democracy.