Wednesday, September 20, 2006
(9:44 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Some Thoughts on Marx
It's hard to know what to say about Marx. On the one hand, one must always admit that he was wrong -- his prediction of where capitalism was inevitably heading was incorrect. Now capitalism appears to have changed into a form that is not as easily analyzable in terms of the standard Marxist labor theory of value. Although I'm not much of an economist, his failure here seems to me to be based on a certain lack of imagination regarding the ways that finance would be incorporated into the capitalist system to give it an extremely high degree flexibility -- some may even say a nearly infinite flexibility.This complicates Marx's model of what communism might mean, as well. For Marx (at least the earlier Marx I have read so far), it seems to be a matter of "cashing in." Capitalism has generated all this technology that means that less and less labor is needed to meet the basic needs of humanity; if the workers take possession of that technology and pool their resources, they can create a situation in which people have more and more freedom. The point is not to create a kind of "workerism" where everyone proudly labors all the time, but rather to follow the worker's natural instincts and work as little as possible. What would they do then? I don't know -- what would you do if you only ever needed to work a few hours each week and never had to worry about basic necessities, and all your friends and all the friends you might make in the future were in the same situation as well? I daresay I could come up with something.
That is a very attractive model, and the philosophical anthropology underlying it is deeply attractive to me as well. The empirical aspect of Marx's project is certainly "out of date" to some degree, but I don't think the basic hope can ever be. At least I hope not. It was admittedly a hope that could only arise in the circumstances in which Marx was writing -- and in fact, his basic scheme for how communism could've come about has a basic plausibility for me, enough even to give it the character a missed opportunity.
Maybe another opportunity like that won't come along for a long time now -- maybe we're all in exile, being punished for not having known how to cast down the idols of death, to give up that worship of capital that endlessly impoverishes us. Perhaps now we can at least learn how to hope, so that if another chance should arise, we won't let it pass us by again.
