The following continuation of my discussion with Ricardo is becoming
extremely boring and repetitive -- not to mention long. Feel free to hit
"delete" at this point. It is my last contribution on pen-l -- unless people
really want it. If Ricardo wants to continue off-list, that's fine with me.
I had written: >>rather than [Ricardo's] current emphasis on Marx's relative
degree of emphasis, [Ricardo's] earlier missive seemed to totally dismiss
any kind of study of the laws of motion of capitalism as somehow being
anathema ... while criticizing Marx for >>>no longer confront[ing]
capitalism in terms of the universal ideals of justice, equality, and
freedom...<<< But as we agreed, Marx still criticized capitalism for failing
to live up to its own ideals. <<
Ricardo now writes: >No, we don't agree. Marx's early immanent critique was
that the world had not become rational in the way Hegel had argued. He saw
no reconciliation between reality and the idealist assumptions of hegelian
philosophy.<
Right. But his early writings were still mechanical in many ways. His 1844
manuscripts are very much in the same league as Feuerbach, who he criticized
in his 11 Theses and in the GERMAN IDEOLOGY (with Engels). Feuerbach's
materialism was pretty mechanical (at least as I understand it) and Marx was
right to reject it.
>The world was not philosophical and philosophy was not worldly. Later he
drops this philosophical critique and moves to a critique of political
economy. His critique is now about the objective tendencies of capitalism
itself; it becomes a theory of crisis.<
As I've said before, I don't see him as "drop[ping] the philosophical
critique." Rather, he drops the _purely_ philosophical critique. As Karl
Korsch notes, Marx tried to abolish the artificial _division_ between
philosophy and political economy. I've already noted how Marx's
anti-alienation theme continues in CAPITAL. But he _adds_ "crisis theory"
and the critique of political economy.
The latter is an extension of his analysis of alienation, since the
political economists of his day by and large suffered from commodity
fetishism, which is one kind of alienation. Since he never repudiated the
content of his early work on alienation, the new emphasis on crisis does not
involve an subtraction of the old themes. (Similarly, he never repudiated
his early editorials defending press freedom, as Hal Draper argues.)
I had written: >> I don't know how theories of crisis could ever be "based
in" ethics. But what I said was that Marx's immanent critique of capitalism
(the contradiction between pretensions of democracy, etc. and practice) was
_intimately tied to_ the idea of laws of motion: ... an immanent critique,
e.g., of the contradiction between pretensions of equal exchange of
commodities and the actuality of surplus-value extraction is linked to class
antagonism and Marx's crisis theories. What Marx does is to refuse to leave
the issue of exploitation at the utterly abstract level of Kantian ethics
and the like. It's not just "wrong" ... but has a concrete impact on society.<<
Ricardo now writes: >Yes, but the point is the later Marx dismisses "equal
exchange" as an *ideological* pretension of bourgeois society. <
As often noted, Marx's mature conception of ideology does not lambaste the
bourgeois types for "false consciousness." Their ideology has a material
basis, in capitalist society. There actually is a tendency toward equal
exchange in capitalist society, though it's seldom realized outside simple
commodity relations. This tendency is the real-world basis for the ideology.
He criticizes the real world of capitalism _in tandem with_ its ideological
spawn.
Concerning economic crises, Ricardo had writtten: >>>The problem with
crisis-theory is that it cannot set the boundaries of capitalism beyond
which it will no longer be able to function. Why couldn't capitalism
function with 40% unemployment?<<<
Now he clarifies what he meant: >My point is that a purely objective
critique of capitalism, based on its tendencies for crises, is impossible: a
critique of unemployment presupposes certain normative standards. Can anyone
specify the objective boundaries of the capitalist system beyond which it
will collapse? <
Your point is that you keep on changing the terms of the discussion. But no
matter.
First, Marx's critique was NOT "purely objective," since he was talking
about human beings who are inherently subjective. Part of "crisis theory" is
that people's subjective aims are _alienated_, taking the form of an
"Invisible Hand" independent of any individual's conscious aims. Unlike Adam
Smith's conception, Marx argues that the IH causes people to get bad results
(crises, etc.), contrary to their intentions.
Second, though Marx had his own normative standards for criticizing
unemployment, he also pointed to the objective results of that unemployment.
Third, Marx never purported to posit a theory of collapse, though he
sometimes uses the word "collapse" to refer to what we now call a
"recession" (e.g., in the GRUNDRISSE). A full-scale theory of collapse
cannot be based solely on the objective tendencies of capitalism's laws of
motion -- and I don't think Marx _ever_ said that "crisis tendencies" were
the whole story of capitalism's abolition, even though it is part of the
folklore of crude Marxism and crude anti-Marxism that he did so.
But you'll notice that even in the MANIFESTO, one of the books often
denounced as crude Marxism, Marx and Engels mention an alternative to the
"inevitable" victory of the workers: the mutual destruction of the
contending classes. Marx _hopes_ that the workers of the world will unite,
he argues that they _should_ do so, while he even optimistically
extrapolates then-contemporary trends to predict that maybe this will
happen. But it is not the mechanistic nonsense that crude Marxists and crude
anti-Marxists love.
As Mike Lebowitz argues in his BEYOND CAPITAL, a full theory of
collapse/socialist revolution involves Marx's unfinished book on Wage Labor.
Marx never wrote it, but most of the elements of such a book exist in his
writings. In this, the "objective laws" of capital lead to crisis, but it's
only when workers have developed their own class consciousness and
organizations with enough power to replace capitalism that the system
finally collapses. Absent such conciousness and organization, a capitalist
crisis purges profit-depressing imbalances from the system, so that
accumulation eventually can restart.
I had written>> Concerning Marx's adherence to and/or support for "bourgeois
values" such as freedom, Ricardo writes: >>>So, I guess you now agree with
me: the late Marx had a more cynical view of bourgeois values ("he viewed
them as hypocritical"). If so, where those his critique of capitalism come
from?<<<
I answered: >> Of course, I think that you disagree with me in agreeing with
Marx's cynicism concerning bourgeois sloganeering. You seem to take the
slogans at face value, at least [much] more than I do. The basis for Marx's
critique is expressed pretty clearly in the 1844 MANUSCRIPTS, which Marx
never repudiated [or at least not its principles -- see my comment to Ajit].
If you read CAPITAL vol. 1 carefully ... you'll see that his writing there
is largely consistent with the MANUSCRIPTS. He still talks about workers
being worn out physically and psychologically by capitalist domination in
production. His emphasis shifts -- but not all the way -- toward emphasis on
a different kind of alienation, the extraction of surplus-value from workers
(the estrangement of their labor efforts). <<
Ricardo now writes: >And that precisely is the problem in Marx. He wants to
talk about
crises and contradictions without acknowledging that such talk presupposes
certain normative criteria. So, there is an ethics in Marx which he never
explicitly recognizes, and which he does not even wish to write about.<
I don't see why crisis theory _presupposes_ normative criteria. One doesn't
have to want to change the world in order to study it (though Marx's radical
vision helped him understand the world better than the bourgeois economists
do, IMHO). Similarly, contrary to Ricardo's earlier statements, studying the
world doesn't mean that one can't criticize it.
Ricardo had written:>>>If his crisis theory is not strictly grounded in his
economics, what is the standard of his critique? His own personal sense of
morality? Wow, that's utopian!<<<
I answered: >> I don't understand this. Marx didn't separate "economics"
from "politics," "sociology," and the like the way we do. Broadly speaking,
however, his crisis theory _was_ strictly grounded in (political) economics.
He didn't finish the task of understanding crises, leaving quite an
unfinished mishmosh, perhaps because he wasn't as obsessed with crisis
theory as pen-l is ...
>> I think Marx did have his own personal sense of morality, though he never
thought it necessary or even possible to write a treatise on ethics. Cornell
West writes that Marx decided that the best he could do was the immanent
critique -- an emphasis on the contradiction between bourgeois ideals and
capitalism's actual practice. On the other hand, people like Richard Miller
.... argue that Marx's vision of morality is substantially the same as
Aristotle's. ... In that case, you could say that Marx never saw the writing
of a treatise on ethics as needed.
>> I don't understand the bit about utopianism. Is it utopian to have
personal morals that differ from the official "morality" that dominates our
society? <<
Ricardo responds:> Ethics are always inescapable, that's not the point. It
is that
Marx's critique of capitalism is NOT based on an ethical THEORY. <<
Of course ethics are inescapable. That's why Marx was no positivist and also
why bourgeois readers of CAPITAL are upset by the moral fervor of the book
(a fervor that Ricardo missed, if he ever read it).
Marx's critique of capitalism is pretty explicitly based on the immanent
critique, the contrast between bourgeois propaganda ("values") and practice.
It's also, as I said, based on his generally unclarified personal morality,
which is in the same ballpark as Aristotle's.
Ricardo had written:>>>On the other hand, bourgeois values are not utopian,
for they are already part of the public sphere; they are institutionalized!<<
I replied: >> yeah right. The positive aspects of the "institutionalized"
values were won by protracted struggle by workers and small farmers and
other groups that had gotten the short end of capitalism's stick. And that's
only in the richer countries like the US... There are lots of capitalist
places that don't even have the minimum of "institutionalized" civil
liberties. For example, here in L.A., we have the L.A.P.D.'s famous
treatment of "minorities." ... I think Marx was absolutely right to focus on
capitalism's practice as opposed to its ideologists' theories. <<
Ricardo responds: >I will agree that a critique of capitalism cannot be
based solely on
an immanent critique of the existing values of our society. But a critique
which is monological - purely subjective - makes no sense either.<
Then you agree with Marx: he never presented a "purely subjective" theory or
a critique of the dominant valeus. He was much_ more consistent than Ricardo
D., who contradicts himself quite a lot. First Ricardo wants Marx to have
totally ethical theory clinging to so-called "universal ideals," while now
he sees it as impossible.
Jim Devine
