Stuck in Second Gear

[Kronsteen]

Marxist theory seems to progress very slowly.

If you compare Marx with Freud, psychology now has so many vibrant subdisciplines, so much research and so many new discoveries, that Freud is now of mainly historical relevance. Sigmund gets used by cultural theorists - psychologists have gone way beyond him.

But with marxism, we're still quoting Marx - plus Engels, Lenin and a few others, but the point is the founding documents are still central. Marx died without completing his analysis, and since then a small number of additional terms have been added - overproduction, permanant revolution, state capitalism etc.

Modern introductions to marxism still quote Marx - archaic langauge, outdated examples and all. I can't count the number of meetings I've been to where decisions about local campaign tactics were justified by quoting Lenin - a completely different situation in a different country over a century ago.

Why is it so hard to move beyond the founding works? Why have generations of theoreticians consecrated Marx's notebooks instead of using them as a springboard to go far beyond what Marx could have imagined?

Why are we still using awkward terms like 'organic composition of capital' and 'dictatorship of the proletariat'? Why do all the introductions to marxist economics or philosophy quote from the same dozen sources?

Why, in short, does most marxist theory seem stuck at it's own starting point, 150 years ago?

[Lenina Rosenweg]

I wouldn't say Marxist theory hasn't progressed. David Harvey and Istvan Mazaros have furthered the Marxist exploration of the laws of motion of capitalism and its effects. In the 70s there was a lot of activity by academic Marxists. There have been fascinating analyisis of the Soviet Union by Hillel Tiktin and others. Chris Knight is continuing Marxist anthropology.

Two things have hindered the development of Marxist thought though. Stalinism and "official Marxism" was a big part of this. More important is the fact that Marxism , unlike the thought of Freud, has never been supported by the bourgeois."The ideas of the ruling class, etc..." The past thirty years have seen major attacks on leftist thought. Phoney multi-culturalism, post-modernism,New Age "thought" and pop culture have filled the void for people who are alienated.There are academic Marxists but its hard to make an academic career as a Marxist.

We haven't had anything like the Russian Revolution for the past 90s years. Its still an important reference point. Capitalism may be entering a crisis period similar to that of 1917-1923 . History is still important.

Neo-Freudians still quote Freud, evolutionists pro and anti-Darwinian quote Darwin. Marx developed an amazing model. Its the best model of capitalism anybody has come up with, although incomplete in areas. Its up to us to expand and continue it.

[S.Artesian]

Because in the first and last analysis, capitalism is still capitalism, and the basics of its mode of production, its need for accumulation, its expropriation of labor through value, hasn't changed.........

Doesn't mean Marxism hasn't been developed, or deepened-- uneven and combined development is perhaps the most significant and critical calculus of Marxist analysis, just means as long as capital is capital, the abolition of capital is going to require the historical, material, critique that Marx initiated.

[Hit The North]

If you compare Marx with Freud, psychology now has so many vibrant subdisciplines, so much research and so many new discoveries, that Freud is now of mainly historical relevance. Sigmund gets used by cultural theorists - psychologists have gone way beyond him.

But with marxism, we're still quoting Marx - plus Engels, Lenin and a few others, but the point is the founding documents are still central.

The comparison is unsound. Most psychologists ignore Freud for similar reasons most economists ignore Marx. If, however, you were to read a primer on psychoanalysis, then Freud would figure prominently along with a handful of others working in the field - and perhaps far fewer core contributors than you'd find in a primer on Marxist theory.

[ZeroNowhere]

Why, in short, does most marxist theory seem stuck at it's own starting point, 150 years ago?I would like to say that it was due to the invariance of the communist program, but, indeed quite unfortunately, the premise behind this question is flawed, and Marxist theory has suffered innovation, bringing up to date, renovation and revision on a more or less continuous basis. Marxism is not sufficiently dogmatic, and where it is it is not so well enough, and as such it must progress until it reaches concordance with Marx; or, to put things another way, it must progress forward to the 19th Century.


since then a small number of additional terms have been added - overproductionOverproduction? That isn't particularly 'additional'.

This does suggest that a haughty disposition is here combined with either ignorance or indifference towards the basis of the Marxist conception of crisis, which would explain several other concurrent phenomena in this specimen.


Why are we still using awkward terms like 'organic composition of capital' and 'dictatorship of the proletariat'?You may be interested in this user (http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=13895), who should be sympathetic towards the general sentiment expressed in the quoted statement.

[S.Artesian]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Hilarious!

[Gorilla]

If psychology were of no real interest to capital, and were therefore not funded exorbitantly and was practiced primarily by autodidacts, it would look like Marxist theory does. Or, which is largely to say the same thing, it would look like the psychoanalytic theory practiced in liberal arts faculties.

The other thing is, what is Marxist theory exactly? A working definition might be something like "the field of inquiry resulting from a transcritique of political economy, philosophy and utopian thinking in the context of a revolutionary working class movement" but that's not a formation that will settle down into a stable, steadily progressive academic -ology without a radical transformation of the social basis.

[bezdomni]

Why does Marxist theory not progress? There are a number of reasons.

First, I think the tendency for communists to dogmatically draw premature lines of demarcation between their sect and another sect has disrupted the development of Marxist thought substantially. This problem is rooted in the pragmatism of the comintern and Soviet Marxism, but I think finally we have started to move past this.

Second, there are simply not very many people who are able to develop Marxist thought in a serious and meaningful way. People who are able and willing to selflessly devote decades of their life to developing Marxist thought (at the expense of leading a relatively normal and comfortable life) are few and far between.

Marx lived in poverty while he wrote Capital, barely living off an occasional stipend from Engels and pawning off his belongings as necessary. He was also kicked out from nearly every country he lived in.

An analogy to mathematics may be enlightening. Most mathematical research is basically done to "clear away the brush" (resolve some relatively small questions, gather some data, etc) so that a future Riemann may come about and easily see the road to a great innovation.

We do not have nearly enough people "clearing brush". We could never have enough Riemanns.

In fact, we do not have enough people who have a sufficiently developed understanding of Marxism or a functioning organization for these people to collaborate to even start with this ground clearing work in the first place. As I mentioned, Marxist thought has been largely poisoned by comintern dogmatism and communist-oriented organizations are so busy fighting among themselves they cannot do anything useful regarding the overthrow of capitalism or even further development of Marxist thought.

We are really not in a good place right now. There is so much that needs to be done, not enough who are able to do it and even fewer who see the necessity to do anything.

[Kotze]

Marxism is stuck because most intellectuals who refer to themselves as Marxist are like hipster indie game developers: They carpet bomb you with references to what was considered good stuff in the past, stuff that was cutting edge under constraints that don't exist anymore, but they don't do anything new. Even the references they drop don't work well, but are rather done in a tin-eared manner, because they don't understand what circumstances made the referenced things.

In the early days of video games nobody said, Hey guys, let's make a game with shit graphics. They employed many brilliant tricks to get things done under draconian hardware constraints. I do not understand what the point is when Marxists today are all like, Hey guys, let's not look at statistics and boycott any knowledge that is newer than a century when it comes to what the problems of capitalism are and what can be done with planning. Yeah, Marx didn't talk about how cars influence city structure or about computers, so why should we...

There's a big fraction of Marxist intellectuals who don't have a background in science and don't even show the understanding of an interested layperson. Marx on the other hand did show a strong interest in science, but I guess modern Marxists don't believe that technological developments have a tremendous influence on the economy and culture.

I ask RevLeft's intellectuals reading this to do me a little favour. The next time you write an essay and you are about to include a section about something that happened 100 years ago and what some dead communist wrote about that back then, please consider what motivated them to comment on that. Mayhaps it had something to do with them being alive when it happened and it has been a common hobby by people to write while being alive to other people alive at that point in time about things they live through, hmmm?

[bezdomni]

Marxist voluntarism, which likes to speak of analysis, has reduced this operation to a simple ceremony. There is no longer any question of studying facts within the general perspective of Marxism so as to enrich our understanding and to clarify action. Analysis consists solely in getting rid of detail, in forcing the signification of certain events, in denaturing facts or even m inventing a nature for them in order to discover it later underneath them, as their substance, as unchangeable, fetishised “synthetic notions.” The open concepts of Marxism have closed in. They are no longer keys, interpretive schemata; they are posited for themselves as an already totalised knowledge. To use Kantian terms, Marxism makes out of these particularised, fetishised types, constitutive concepts of experience. The real content of these typical concepts is always past Knowledge; but today's Marxist makes of it an eternal knowledge. His sole concern, at the moment of analysis, will be to “place” these entities. The more he is convinced that they represent truth a priori, the less fussy he will be about proof. The Kerstein Amendment, the appeals of Radio Free Europe, rumours-these are sufficient for the French Communists to “place” the entity “world imperialism” at the origin of the events in Hungary. The totalising investigation has given way to a Scholasticism of the totality. The heuristic principle – “to search for the whole in its parts” – has become the terrorist practice of “liquidating the particularity.” It is not by chance that Lukács – Lukács who so often violates history – has found in 1956 the best definition of this frozen Marxism. Twenty years of practice give him all the authority necessary to call this pseudo-philosophy a voluntarist idealism.

Search for a Method, Sartre (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.htm)

[Kronsteen]

Harvey...Mazaros...Tiktin...Knight

Granted, and I've a lot of time for Harvey in particular - though I'm not sure I'd call him an innovator. More a close reader of Marx.

But we can all list names of marxists who've come up with small revisions or new applications of the method. Mikhail Lifshitz is still the name for marxist art historians to mention - largely because there aren't many others. Piero Sraffa has (so I'm told) solved the transformation problem, though I've no way of checking his work.

There's been no seismic shifts, no major re-evaluations of important concepts, no neglected figures rediscovered as sages before their time. Sectarian *****ing aside, the history of marxist theory has been quite...placid.


Marxism , unlike the thought of Freud, has never been supported by the bourgeois

True, but can you think of any field of study - with bourgeois support or not - that's been practiced mainly by dedicated amateurs since the 1800s, that retains the original vocabulary and whose new works extensively quote the first books to be written?

Espertantology (which I was involved in for several years) has kept up with advances in linguistics and its theory from even 30 years ago now looks quaint.

Even with bourgois support, does sociology continue to reference Vico on nearly every page?


We haven't had anything like the Russian Revolution for the past 90s years. Its still an important reference point.

No one's denying that, but...let me give a concrete example.

In the recent revolution in Egypt, there was disagreement among the protesting groups as to whether the police on the street could be persuaded to join them. Police brutality answered that question quite quickly, but what were the Egyptian socialists saying?

They quoted Lenin, who rightly wrote that although the police officers had class interests in common with workers, their bosses did not - and it was the bosses who gave the orders.

Lenin was right, but the Egyptian socialists seemed to think he was right because he was Lenin. If you have to back up your socialist argument by quoting a long dead socialist instead of looking at conditions on the ground, the notion that socialist is forward looking can seem questionable.


Neo-Freudians still quote Freud, evolutionists pro and anti-Darwinian quote Darwin.

Neo-freudians may still quote Freud, but they're a small minority.

Jones, Gould and Dawkins are great Darwin enthusiasts, but I've only read them ever quoting him to make rhetorical points, not as evidence. And they all have significant disagreements with Darwin - usually over his gradualism.


Most psychologists ignore Freud for similar reasons most economists ignore Marx.[quote]

You're saying psychologists are ideologically threatened by the concept of the Oedipus complex?

[quote=ZeroNowhere]Marxist theory has suffered innovation, bringing up to date, renovation and revision on a more or less continuous basis. Marxism is not sufficiently dogmatic, and where it is it is not so well enough, and as such it must progress until it reaches concordance with Marx; or, to put things another way, it must progress forward to the 19th Century.

So:
Innovation is bad.
Dogmatism is good.
Marxist theory won't be complete until it agrees with Marx.
19th century thinking is truer than 21st.

With defenders like that, marxism doesn't need enemies.


Overproduction? That isn't particularly 'additional'.

The notions of overproduction and underproduction were extracted in fragments from Marx's notebooks after his death, to put together a theory of why capitalism has periodic crises.

In other words, it's a speculation, retroactively bolted onto Capital.


You may be interested in this user

Thank you. Die Neue Zeit has already been helpful to me.


If psychology were of no real interest to capital, and were therefore not funded exorbitantly and was practiced primarily by autodidacts, it would look like Marxist theory does. Or, which is largely to say the same thing, it would look like the psychoanalytic theory practiced in liberal arts faculties.

Leaving aside the dubious assertion that psychology departments are generously funded, that is a useful comment.

If the entailment is correct, and marxism is on the same level as Lacan et al in humanities departments, then marxism is in serious trouble.

[Fulanito de Tal]

Conflict theory has it's roots in Marx and is currently used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theory#Modern_approaches

[Die Neue Zeit]

So:
Innovation is bad.
Dogmatism is good.
Marxist theory won't be complete until it agrees with Marx.
19th century thinking is truer than 21st.

With defenders like that, marxism doesn't need enemies.

A New Modern Orthodoxy is good.

Innovation is good. Revisionism is bad.
Principles are good. Classicalism, Dogmatism, etc. are bad.

[Kronsteen]

we do not have enough people who have a sufficiently developed understanding of Marxism or a functioning organization [...] Marxist thought has been largely poisoned by comintern dogmatism


There's a big fraction of Marxist intellectuals who don't have a background in science and don't even show the understanding of an interested layperson.

So it's what I've long suspected: The problem with marxism isn't Marx, it's marxists.

Not enough advanced theorists, not enough uncorrupted theorists, a backward looking culture, and a willful ignorance of science. Add cultlike habits of confirmation bias and infighting, and you've got a moribund bag of squabbling dreamers who ought to be freeing the world, because they're the ones with the tools to do so.

[Rowan Duffy]

In disciplines such as mathematics people who have been working on theoretical exploration for some period of time find holes in their knowledge and holes in the general knowledge in the literature. It's often the case that these unsolved questions are posed (Hilberts 23 problems) in public, in order to expedite their solution and publicise areas where exploration might prove fruitful.

The approach taken by the Marxist community has often treated the subject material as being essentially complete, but in need of study. This has a tendency to lead to a sacred text approach - where new work is essentially Talmudic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud) in character, rather than scientific.

I think the best ways to combat this tendency is to discuss in detail which areas of the terrain are not well understood and require deeper investigation.

Some questions which I think may be pertinent - note I'm not a Marxist scholar in any sense so these questions may already have been answered, in which case people should respond to help me cure my ignorance.


* The question of risk

In Marxist theory there is a reinvestment of capital into various different industries chasing after areas of greater rates of profit than the average - on the whole this should tend to drive down areas with higher rates of profit to the average. However, what happens when ventures have risk associated with them in which case the capital
investment is partially or totally lost. In bourgeois economics this variance helps to explain the difference in rates of return in high risk areas. In seems to me that this would be potentially consistent with Marxist theory. What types of secondary effects could be found here and can we see this as another potential area for internal
contradictions.

* The question of rent

In areas where there is some absolute scarcity, for instance land near a city centre, there is the possibility of extracting rent. The ability to produce new land is not possible simply through the exercise of labour. This means that because of the equalities that ensure this extraction of value comes from somewhere, it must be appropriated from other productive sectors. Are there models for how this appropriation takes place and how can we try to understand it in greater detail.

* Organic composition of capital

In areas with extraordinarily high levels of fixed capital to labour, such as roads and rail or other infrastructural projects the ability of capital to give back at the average rate of profit is almost necessarily impossible. This would help to clarify why infrastructure is almost always highly subsidised as though it is required for the full functioning of advanced capitalism, capitalism is unable to sustain it without either appropriation of rents by monopoly or by state subsidy.

Based on capitalist development this problem should become more pervasive in extent - It would be nice to have some framework to think about this clearly and it would be useful to see empirical data regarding this.

I'd appreciate clarifications, comments, disagreements or additional points.

[bezdomni]

I'd appreciate clarifications, comments, disagreements or additional points.


You make good points. Some more "open problems" in Marxism of great importance are:

(1) The inevitability of the overthrow of capitalism. In other words, is Marx's theory of history indeterminant?

(2) The tendency for the rate of profit to decline for capitalists.

(3) What aspects of Marxism are invariant/universal?


In disciplines such as mathematics people who have been working on theoretical exploration for some period of time find holes in their knowledge and holes in the general knowledge in the literature. It's often the case that these unsolved questions are posed (Hilberts 23 problems) in public, in order to expedite their solution and publicise areas where exploration might prove fruitful.


I have suggested in other places (Kasama) that something like Hilbert's problems for Marxist theory would be immensely valuable.

[Kronsteen]

(1) The inevitability of the overthrow of capitalism. In other words, is Marx's theory of history indeterminant?

I think we can file this under 'rhetorical exaggeration'. Or "Marx said it, he may have believed it, but either way he was wrong'.

Some of us like to fudge the issue by saying the overthrow is inevitable...but can be indefinitely postponed. So it will happen...but it may never never actually get around to happening.

I think would be an improvement to marxism to jettison the inevitability claim - though it would mean fewer people would want to get involved without that promise. The price of honesty.

I also think we could get rid of the 'after capitalism, socialism or barbarism' and 'once socialism, socialism forever' promises - but the same problems apply.


(3) What aspects of Marxism are invariant/universal?

I would say the centrality of the working class, as in 'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class' is an essential (and perhaps unique) part of marxism. But some fans of Che might disagree. And indeed fans of Mao.