THE NEW GENERATION

I got back from San Francisco late last night, and I am ready to resume my Marx tutorial, but first, a story about my granddaughter. Athena is two and a half. She talks a blue streak, and is totally pulled together, but she is tiny -- standing tall, she doesn't even come up to my waist, and I am of what used to be called middling height. Yesterday morning, she came downstairs after she got up, dressed in a darling red and white bunny suit, carrying an oblong black object. "What is that, Athena?" I asked. "Daddy's IPad," she said. She proceeded to put it on the living room table, contemplate the array of Ap logos for a bit, and then select a monkey game -- an interactive puzzle game with a talking monkey who sets you a variety of puzzles and awards you stickers when you get them right, which you move with your finger onto a white sheet of paper -- all of this on the screen of the IPad. As I stood there mesmerized, looking down at Athena and the IPad, she proceeded to work her way through the entire game [obviously something she had done before.]

I mean, SHE IS TWO AND A HALF!!!!

By the time she is old enough to go to preschool, she will undoubtedly have an email address and an IPhone and lord knows what else.

It took me a week to learn how to use my IPad, and I am seventy-seven years old.

As Gwyneth Paltrow says, in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, the morning after her first night with Shakespeare, "It is a new world."

GREETINGS FROM SF

OK FOLKS

Thank you all for the encouragement. This is a bit like Peter Pan. if nobody applauds, Tinker Bell does not exist. :) I am off to San Francisco tomorrow before dawn to see my grandchildren, but as soon as I get back, I will launch into an exposition of Marx's economic theories. Over the weekend, everyone should read Adam Smith's WEALTH OF NATIONS, David Ricardo's PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND TAXATION and Volume One of CAPITAL. [Just kidding.]

JUST CHECKING

At this point in my tutorial on the thought of Karl Marx, I am due to start talking about Marx's economic theories. This is an enormous subject [he wrote about 5000 pages on economics, all of which I have read]. I have written two books about it, and I can promise you that once I start, it is going to take many more posts even to skate over the surface in a systemtic fashion. This tutorial is now 7000 words long, so before I launch into the economic theories of Karl Marx, I would like to know whether anyone out there really wants me to go on. I am willing, despite teaching two courses and all, but let me know.

While I have your attention, here is an odd fact. I just discovered that the state of North Carolina, to save money, is not sending out tax return packets this year. We must either download the forms or go to some obscure office somewhere to pick them up. Now, am I the only one who thinks that the money they save this way is only a fraction of the money they will lose from people who fail to file? I mean, if these were American Idol ballots, I could see it.

THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX PART FOUR

In the essay on estranged, or alienated, labor can be found some of the most powerful lines Marx ever penned. I will not try to summarize the entire essay. My summary would too long, and inevitably would be like a prose summary of a poem -- never a good idea. Please read it for yourself if you have not already done so. The central idea is captured in this phrase from the very beginning of the essay: "the object which labour produces -- labour's product -- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer." Marx is here, and elsewhere throughout the essay, trying to get some conceptual clarity about one of the most puzzling aspects of the new capitalism, namely the fact that as capital becomes ever more productive, spewing out goods in enormous quantities, the workers who produce those goods remain impoverished and ever more powerless. Capital -- the factories, machines, farms, mines, and also the techniques embodied in the machines -- is, after all, brought into existence by the effort, the labor, of the workers. How can it be that they become more and more enslaved by what they themselves have produced? It had not always been this way. In previous stages of human history, an especially good harvest, a boom year, resulted in better times for all, if only momentarily. While the rich remained rich, the poor enjoyed some measure of the success of their efforts. But under capitalism, strong profits simply enlarge the power of accumulated capital to fire adult workers and substitute children, to bargain down the wage, to entrap the workers in endless penury.

Marx does not yet have a theoretical understanding of how this happens. For that we must wait for CAPITAL, twenty-three years later. But he understands perfectly the human cost of the capitalist mode of production. [Whether this cost is an inevitable consequence of industrial production, not specifically of capitalism, as John Halasz seems to suggest in one of his comments, will have to wait until later in this tutorial.]

The alienation is multi-dimensional. First of all, the worker, as we have seen, is alienated from the product of her labor, which appears to her as an enemy controlling her and depriving her of freedom. The worker is also alienated from fellow workers who are, or ought to be, colleagues and comrades in a collective undertaking. Since jobs are scarce and there is an endless pool of men and women desperately seeking jobs [the "reserve army of the unemployed," as Marx famously called them], each worker sees the others as enemies, threatening to take one of the scarce jobs. The capitalist, who is the real enemy, is misperceived as a benevolent figure graciously offering a subsistence job and allowing the worker to survive for another day. The worker is alienated, as well, from the labor process, which becomes mechanical, painful, constricting, enslaving, rather than fulfilling, graceful, natural, human. And finally, the worker is alienated from herself, from her true nature or, in the language of the day, her "species being." In what is surely one of the most moving passages in the entire socialist literature, Marx writes:

"The worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague."

Each time I read this passage, I am reminded of a scene in that wonderful old Peter Sellars movie, I'M ALL RIGHT JACK. Sellars plays a British communist union leader of the old school. The union has successfully protected some of its members from being fired as superfluous, and the men thus kept on spend their day sitting behind a stack of wooden pallets playing cards. At one point, Sellars calls a strike, and the men at the factory down their tools and walk off the job,. The four men playing cards suddenly realize that everyone is on strike, whereupon they drop their cards in the middle of a hand and rush off. One can only assume that when they get home they will -- play cards!

Over the next several years, Marx made several efforts to return to Germany before finally going into exile in London with his wife, Jenny, and their young family. In 1848, while still on the continent, he and Engels published the most famous political tract ever written: THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. I am going to assume that everyone reading this tutorial has read, or will now immediately read, the MANIFESTO. Like Plato's REPUBLIC and WAR AND PEACE, it is one of those documents familiarity with which is the mark of literacy. In the MANIFESTO, we see Marx beginning to develop the theories of economic development that we know as Historical Materialism. The economic theory is still rudimentary, but the theory of stages of development, and the crucial thesis that the law, politics, culture, and philosophy of an age are a reflection of the way in which the economic activities of the society are organized, is beginning to be worked out.

The MANIFESTO, in its ebullient, aggressive optimism, is very much the statement of young men. "A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of Communism," it begins ominously. Immediately, the authors announce the central thesis of their doctrine: "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." And off they go. In my opening remarks to this tutorial, I tried to sketch the political situation in Europe when Marx and Engels were young, as a way of explaining why they were so optimistic about the near-term prospects for a communist revolution. They were not, after all, deluding themselves. In 1848, the year the MANIFESTO appeared, Europe exploded into workers' uprisings, most prominently in Paris itself. We know, with the benefit of a century and a half of hindsight, that the hopes of Marx and other revolutionaries were doomed to be dashed, but it cannot have looked like that to them at the time.

The failure of the 1848 uprisings had an interesting theoretical effect on Marx, I believe. I observed earlier that there was indeed a break between the young Marx and the mature Marx. It concerns the theoretically very significant issue of mystification. Originally, Marx took the typical enlightenment position that in the Middle Ages, the real roots of clerical and monarchical power were mystified by religious superstition and the fiction of the divine right of kings, but that under capitalism, the clouds of mystery had been blown away by the cool breezes of reason, so that it was immediately apparent to nineteenth century Europeans that the power of church, state, and capital rested upon force alone. But the failure of the revolutions seems to have persuaded Marx that Capital's power was itself mystified, by the doctrines of laisser-faire and free trade, so that it was not at all easy to understand how the ever-greater productivity of industrial capital served to strengthen its ability to defeat all challenges. By contrast, feudalism was relatively transparent. It was obvious even to the peasants themselves that the wealth of their feudal masters came from the days of labor service that they were forced to provide on the lord's lands.

There is a great deal more to be said about Marx's writings in the period leading up to the production of CAPITAL. My English translation of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels runs to twenty thick volumes BEFORE the publication of Volume One of CAPITAL, for heaven's sake! But the economic theory is the heart of his entire life's work, and there are limits to how many blog posts I can get all of you to read, so I am going to stop here, and tomorrow begin my discussion of Marx's mature economic theory.

A BRIEF COMMENT ON THE COMMENTS

I am now involved in teaching two courses, for which, despite my more than half century of teaching experience, I do need to prepare, so these segments on Marx will not come as rapidly as they started out. In addition, I fly to San Francisco early Friday morning to see my grandchildren, so there will be a hiatus there. But the first several parts of the Marx tutorial have elicited some very long, detailed comments from readers who are obviously extremely knowledgeable about these matters, and I thought I ought at least to acknowledge them with a brief reply.

The comments divide into two parts: extended remarks about Hegel, and criticisms of Marx's account of alienated labor. I am afraid I cannot say anything at all about the Hegel comments. I freely confess that I found them all but impenetrable. I have spent my entire fifty-five year career struggling to make difficult ideas clear and complex arguments simple, so that my students or readers can see them for exactly what they are and form their own judgments about them. It may be that with enough time and effort, one could unfold Hegel's philosophy so that it could be seen as clear and coherent, but I do not have the patience, and I have never felt the impetus to try. Let me say that this has NOTHING at all to do with what is sometimes called "Analytical Marxism," as practiced by Jon Elster or Gerald Cohen. I have had some very precise and acerbic things to say about that style of Marx interpretation, which I think is wrong-headed. [See my essay, "Methodological Individualism and Marx: Some remarks on Jon Elster, game theory, and Other things" in the CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, available on-line.]

In addition, John C. Halasz has some very interesting and thoughtful criticisms of Marx's account of alienated labor. Since this tutorial is intended for readers who are not already steeped in Marx's writings and the debates about them, I have chosen not to intersperse my exposition with critique. When I have reached the end of this series of posts, if anyone is still listening, I will undertake to offer some criticisms of Marx, and at that point, I shall try to return to Mr. Halasz's comments and engage with them. I hope that is all right with everybody.

Now I must turn my attention for at least a few moments to Bentham, on whom I shall be lecturing tomorrow in the Public Policy seminar.

THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX PART THREE

Marx became involved in the founding and editing of a new journal [the RHEINSICHE ZEITUNG], got himself bounced out of Prussia by the police for his troubles, and by 1844 was living in Paris [there is a lot of history here that I am sliding over, since it would be tedious to recount it. Check Wikipedia or Siegel's biography if you want to know the details]. He was by this time connected with Engels, an association that would last until his death in 1883. It was in Paris that the two of them wrote both THE HOLY FAMILY and THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, in which, among other things, they settled scores with the Bauers, Feuerbach, and other German thinkers very close to them in political and philosophical orientation. But for our purposes, the most important of Marx's many writings from the period was a curious document that did not see the light of day until eighty years later -- the working or study notes usually labeled THE ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 but also sometimes referred to as the Paris Manuscripts. These notes were in the form of a lengthy document in which Marx worked out ideas that he was puzzling over having to do with the economic organization of society. What he did was to draw vertical lines dividing each page into three columns, which were headed Land, Labor, and Capital, the three fundamental categories of the Classical Political Economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and their lesser fellow economists. The column that has, quite deservedly, drawn most of the attention is the one labeled "Labor." The long series of paragraphs that Marx inscribed in this column have come to be referred to as "Alienated Labor," and they constitute the fullest and most carefully thought out discussion of this topic that Marx ever wrote.

I have a good deal to say about Marx's theory of alienated labor, but before I begin, I want to take just a moment to explain why this document became so politically important in the 20th century, more than a hundred years after it was written. Briefly [and, inevitably, tendentiously], Lenin and Stalin and the Russian revolutionaries hijacked Marx's theories and used them as the justification for a brutal and dictatorial State Capitalism that they instituted in the Soviet Union. The sheer geopolitical success of the Soviet regime, both before and during the Second World War, all but stifled the objection that this was not at all what Marx had had in mind when he talked about socialism or communism. Marx's writings were elevated to the status of Revealed Truths, and were taught in Russian schools in roughly the way that the Koran is now taught in Madrassas. So rigid and doctrinaire was the slavish adherence to the supposed doctrines of Marx that when the young Wassily Leontief approached the state economic planners with his newly conceived mathematical system of Linear Programming, which he thought [correctly] would be of use to them in planning the Soviet economy, he was told that Stalin himself had decreed that since Marx only used addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the taking of averages, the Soviet Union's economy was to be planned using nothing more. Leontief emigrated to the United States and spent the rest of his career teaching at Harvard, eventually winning the Nobel Prize. One of the delicious intellectual ironies of this subject is that Leontief's mathematical methods became the means by which scores of modern economists demonstrated the fundamental mathematical coherence of the theories that Marx set forth in CAPITAL [I have already written about this on my blog, and will not repeat myself].

During the Second World War, the Yugoslav partisans, led by Marshal Tito, succeeded in driving the Germans out of their lands without the help of the Red Army, with the result that in the post-war period, the newly formed Yugoslavia, while part of the Soviet bloc, was able to maintain a quasi-independence. A number of Yugoslav philosophers and political theorists were eager to find some way of embracing Marx's theories without toeing the Stalinist line. Casting about for writings by Marx on which they could erect an independent, humanist Marxism, they came upon the Paris Manuscripts, which had first been published in Russia in the 20s, but had then been all but ignored by the Stalinist theoreticians. In the writings of the Young Marx, they heard a voice that called to them and inspired them. To justify their concentration on these juvenalia, they developed the theory of a "break' between the young Marx and the mature Marx.

I will argue a bit later on that there is in fact no such break as they claimed to discover. There is, actually, a break or fundamental reversal in Marx's thinking, and it is important enough so that I shall spend some time talking about it. But it does not have to do with alienated labor.

Well, let us at last turn to the teaching of the essay on alienated labor, and see what we can learn from it. I shall begin, perhaps surprisingly, by talking about the Romantic conception of artistic creativity. The painters, sculptors, poets, and composers of the medieval and classical period were thought of as artisans, skilled craftsmen who worked for patrons or for entire communities, decorating castles or churches and memorializing military victories and the marriages of princes. But a different conception of artistic creativity emerged in the early nineteenth century period that we now call the Romantic era. Artists began to be thought of -- and to think of themselves -- as lonely creators, inspired by their muses to tear works of great art bleeding from their breasts [think Beethoven rather than Bach.] Thus understood, the act of artistic creation has the following structure: First, the artist is inspired to form an idea in his or her mind, an idea of a sculpture, a painting, a poem, a sonata, an idea of beauty. Then, by exercising great skill with chisel and mallet, with canvas and brush, or with pen, the artist makes the idea real, externalizes it, embodies it in some medium, thereby producing the work of art.

This self-externalization [or selbstentausserung -- it always sounds better in German] may be achieved with great effort, leaving the artist exhausted, spent, drenched in sweat. Or it may be accomplished with blinding speed and seemingly little or no effort at all. But in either case, the completion of the act is, for the artist, a moment of triumph and fulfillment. The Idea has truly been made Flesh. The labor is a fulfilling labor, the fatigue a good fatigue. There it stands, on the page, or on the canvas, or on the podium -- what had begun as an idea in the artist's mind is realized, made real, before him or her. And the work of art is now available to all of us to see, to hear, to read, to experience and enjoy. Even those of us incapable of the act of creation can derive great enjoyment from the work, and even inspiration.

But this act of creation has a dark side, a negative dimension, for what originally completely and indisputably belonged to the artist alone, as an idea in mind, now takes on a life of its own. The artist ages, but the work of art does not [think THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY]. At the moment of creation, the object, the embodied idea, belongs to the artist, but it may -- indeed, it most probably will -- be sold, to someone whose intentions and appreciation may be antithetical to those of the artist. There is no way that the artist can control how the public experiences the work of art, what the experts choose to say about it, what uses it may be put to, for the greater glory of a God whom the artist does not worship, a State to which the artist owes no allegiance, or a collector for whose vulgar tastes the artist has only contempt. Eventually, the artist may have to ask permission or pay an entry fee to view the work that he or she has created. Is it any wonder that Emily Dickenson resisted publishing her immortal poems?

What began as an act of fulfilling and satisfying self-externalization runs the risk of becoming an act of self-alienation [selbstentfremdung]. The term "alienation" has a double meaning on which, as we shall see, Marx plays endlessly. To make alien, to alienate, means to make an other, an enemy, something that stands over against oneself [gegen-stand]. But to alienate also means to sell, to transfer title from one owner to another. In this sense, the word is routinely used in the law. By alienating the work of art, by selling it, the artist becomes alienated from it. The work of art becomes not simply other than him or herself, but perhaps even inimical, hurtful, an enemy.

[May I be permitted a brief moment of narcissistic self-absorption? When I am writing -- indeed, as I have been writing these paragraphs this morning --I feel fully alive. My stubby fingers fly over the keys, hitting wrong letters now and again but charged nevertheless with an energy that I feel at no other time in my life. The words come as fast as I can get them onto the screen, and I know, with utter certainty, that what I am saying is right. I never revise, and I never show what I have written to another person before externalizing it, publishing it, either in print or in cyberspace. Once I have published a book, I am finished with it. I move on, perhaps I write another book. But what I have published now exists independently of me, and I cannot control how it is construed, or the uses to which it is put, by persons I have never even met. Now, I know all too well that these subjective feelings of mine do not correspond to any objective greatness. When I see AMADEUS, after all, it is Salieri and not Mozart with whom I identify. But I can at least imagine what it would be like to be Marx writing CAPITAL, or Hume writing the TREATISE. Oh well.]

Marx, with what I consider a stroke of sheer genius, takes the Romantic conception of artistic creativity and generalizes it to all of us, arguing that all human beings are capable of, indeed must engage in, an act with the same fundamental structure -- the act of production. [I am here conflating ideas taken from both the ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 and THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, which were, after all, written at roughly the same time. It would take too long and be too tedious to sort this all out textually.] Human beings, unlike animals, live by purposefully transforming nature in accordance with ideas in their minds, so as to make it into goods that can satisfy their needs. [Marx did not know about tool use in animals, but that really does not matter here.] They too first form an idea in mind -- of a stone shaped to be a tool, of a field of grain, of a stick bent to form a bow -- and then externalize it, embodying the idea in an object that can serve our needs, helping us to gain food, clothing, shelter, and other humanly satisfying goods. But unlike the act of artistic creation, the act of production is collective, social. We struggle with nature together, not alone. This act of collective self-externalization, of production, is labor.

Marx here sets himself against a long tradition in Western thought, going all the way back to the Book of Genesis, that sees labor as an evil, a painful necessity, a curse laid upon us by God for our disobedience. Recall the words of GENESIS, Chapter 3, verses 16-19:

"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

"And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed [is] the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat [of] it all the days of thy life;

"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return."

So it is that man must labor painfully for his bread, as a curse for his disobedience. And so it is that woman's bearing of children is called labor, for it too is painful, and a curse laid upon her for her disobedience.

Well, enough for today. I shall continue with this after I have prepared my lecture for Wednesday.