Marxism Unmasked

[GracchusBabeuf]

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[Agnapostate]

Thankfully, the Austrian school is plagued by a well-earned marginality, even for heterodox economic schools.

[danyboy27]

.double posting,sorry

[danyboy27]

so, if i understand the whole idea of this topic, we should post stuff that show how the misean are wrong, where is the debate in this?

sould like a flamebait to attrack misean.

dont get me wrong, i hate misean, but i also hate flamebait thread.

this is the OI, not the regular forum. if you want to adress to the misean, then start a debate, not a flamebait

[mikelepore]

This main characteristic of this writing by Mises is that, one section after another, he claims that Marx believed something, he doesn't say where Marx allegedly wrote it, and then he paraphrases the supposed Marxian idea in a distorted way.

For example:

"According to Marx, everybody is forced –– by the material productive forces –– to think in such a way that the result shows his class interests. You think in the way in which your 'interests' force you to think; you think according to your class 'interests.'"

Where did Marx supposedly say such a thing? Not a word about that.

Mises writes like a kid in sixth grade who has been told to write an essay for school, so he has looked up Marxism in the encyclopedia and then thinks he's an expert.

[danyboy27]

then again, what is the whole pôint of this discussion?

and why post it in the OI?

if you want to challenge misean, well do it, but creating a thread bashing them is i think a bad idea for a debate.

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

I like how he disproves the idea that certain stages in the development of the material forces give rise to certain ideas:


What is the influence of this Marxian doctrine on ideas? The philosopher René Descartes [1596–1650], who lived in the early seventeenth century, believed that man had a mind and that man thinks, but that animals were merely machines. Marx said, of course, Descartes lived in an age in which the “Manufakturperioden,” the tools and machines, were such that he was forced to explain his theory by saying that animals were machines.Albrecht von Hailer [1708–1777],a Swiss,said the same thing in the eighteenth century (he didn’t like liberal government’s equality under law). Between these two men, lived de La Mettrie, who also explained man as a machine.Therefore, Marx’s concept that ideas were a product of the tools and machines of a particular era is easily disproved.:laugh:


The first of these two explanations, to the effect that ideas are based on material productive forces, the tools and machines, is irreconcilable with the second, namely that class interests determine ideas.Is he ignoring what he just wrote a few paragraphs up? Class relations are determined by the development of the productive forces. I'm sensing some intellectual dishonesty...


According to Marx, everybody is forced––by the material productive forces––to think in such a way that the result shows his class interests.You think in the way in which your “interests” force you to think; you think according to your class “interests.” Your “interests” are something independent of your mind and your ideas.No, the main factor shaping your ideas is how you attain the means of subsistence(class), because "mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion..."


First of all, remember that this doctrine doesn’t say men act and think according to what they consider to be their interests. It says that class is the main determinant of what they consider to be their interests. Does he just ignore what he has wrote previously?

He has another essay called The Marxian Theory of Wages where he says the basis of Marxian economics is the Iron Law of Wages, and that since this is obviously false, so to is the LTV. When I pointed out to some Austrians that Marx wrote entire books tackling the Iron Law of Wages, they started telling me how the minimum wage creates unemployment.

[ZeroNowhere]

He suggests that capitalism is made by more advanced machines and that Marx/Engels thought that bigger, better machines would bring about socialism! This is clearly nonsensical since it ignores the only factor that really determines human progress: class, i.e., the transition from feudalism to capitalism to socialism is determined by the creation of different ruling and ruled classes. In the capitalist epoch, the two dominant classes, being the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.Well, to be fair, 'Marxists' like Cohen have been promoting the technological determinist interpretation of Marx for a while, with Cohen being the most clear exponent, and many others putting it more crudely. This interpretation generally fetishizes the productive forces, but Mises is no stranger to fetishism. That is, it sees 'productive forces' as referring to technology rather than the productive forces of individuals (means of co-operation and such).


Every man’s “class” position in society, according to Marx, is determined by his relationship to the ownership of the means of production.Technically, it is determined by their relations to other human beings, rather than their 'relationship to the ownership of the means of production', whatever that means. In capitalism, this takes the form of ownership of things, in the same way social relations are reduced to the form of a metal in money. Also, Marxism is petrified philosophically? I'm sorry, as I recall it got consistently worse after Marx's death.


If it were really the solution to this problem, it would mean that in any event we could know the way everyone would react.Could, yes, if you wish. We could, but it's not something I see as ever plausibly happening.


And the production relations determine the superstructure.Wait, how does this work? The ideal superstructure isn't 'determined by relations of production' except in a very loose sense. So, for example, the ideal of the political state (an imaginary community) is built upon the real state, which can only rule over civil society by allowing itself to be dominated by it (Marx compares this to religion). The state may be a relation of production, but, again, it's a very vague formulation.


After looking through his writings we find that the material productive forces are the tools and machines.Really? I'm fairly sure that Derek Sayer has looked through his writings rather extensively.

Anyways, it's a boring text.

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

Therefore, there was great confusion as to the civil liberties to be assigned to the
citizens of the socialist state. This was because Marxian ideas did not develop in countries which had civil liberties, but in countries in which the people did not have civil liberties.

This is the same kind of thinking he's attributing to Marx!

[Judicator]

How would you actually test or evaluate the claim that class relations are the key factor in determining human progress? How would you define progress so the idea that class relations are critical to progress is more than a tautology?

[mikelepore]

I am occasionally bashed by my fellow Marxists for saying this, but it my interpretation, after studying Marx for 40+ years, that Marx's premise is NOT that our class determine what we think. It is the period of human history -- the degree of development of tools, most importantly, but not exclusively -- that primarily determines what we think. For each category of "ideological superstructure" (philosophy, morality, religion, law, family relationships, art and aesthetics, scientific questions), there are hunter-gather forms, agricultural and herding forms, and industrial forms. There are feudal forms and capitalist era forms. There are city-state forms and nation-state forms. Class relationships become more determininistic is at the pivotal points when when institutions are impeding the potential for further economic progress, like the capitalists pushing out the aristocrats, or the workers pushing out the capitalists, and then the class struggle becomes a "lever" of change. But how we "think" in general terms is epochal. How we think also carries a lot of inertia and lags far behind, so that we still have many habits of thought that the Roman Empire introduced.

[GPDP]

I am occasionally bashed by my fellow Marxists for saying this, but it my interpretation, after studying Marx for 40+ years, that Marx's premise is NOT that our class determine what we think. It is the period of human history -- the degree of development of tools, most importantly, but not exclusively -- that primarily determines what we think. For each category of "ideological superstructure" (philosophy, morality, religion, law, family relationships, art and aesthetics, scientific questions), there are hunter-gather forms, agricultural and herding forms, and industrial forms. There are feudal forms and capitalist era forms. There are city-state forms and nation-state forms. Class relationships become more determininistic is at the pivotal points when when institutions are impeding the potential for further economic progress, like the capitalists pushing out the aristocrats, or the workers pushing out the capitalists, and then the class struggle becomes a "lever" of change. But how we "think" in general terms is epochal. How we think also carries a lot of inertia and lags far behind, so that we still have many habits of thought that the Roman Empire introduced.

That doesn't sound so far-fetched to me, but it may be a case of me not being as up-to-date on Marxist theory as I'd like to be. Why is it exactly you are bashed for this line of thought?

[mikelepore]

Why is it exactly you are bashed for this line of thought?

When many Marxists discuss the materialist conception of history, alias historical materialism, the class struggle is the central idea in their explanation of the theory. If you check you will see that many mention the class struggle in the first sentence. I wouldn't get around to mentioning it for several pages at least. I would talk instead about what Lewis Henry Morgan called the "arts of subsistence", the importance of pottery, the bow and arrow, the invention of horticulture, the domestication of animals, phonetic writing. Unless I were called upon to be exhaustive in covering the subject, I might not even mention the class struggle at all under the heading of the materialist conception of history. Why? Because it's not the central idea in the theory of history, when the first the 99 percent of human history didn't have any class struggle. The Communist Manifesto said, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", and only after studying Morgan did Engels suddenly realize the deficiency of such a sentence, and try to fix it with a footnote, Marx already dead for five years. To some extent this is related to the fact that many people, dictionaries included, use the word "history" to refer to the limited and imperfect written record, whereas I use the word to mean the objective process about which the written record refers.

[trivas7]

[...] Because it's not the central idea in the theory of history, when the first the 99 percent of human history didn't have any class struggle. The Communist Manifesto said, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", and only after studying Morgan did Engels suddenly realize the deficiency of such a sentence, and try to fix it with a footnote, Marx already dead for five years. To some extent this is related to the fact that many people, dictionaries included, use the word "history" to refer to the limited and imperfect written record, whereas I use the word to mean the objective process about which the written record refers.
Your post demonstrates that Marx's view of history is entirely a schematization of an a priori logic -- Hegelianism in this case -- that has little to do w/ history per se.