For the partisan of deadly nonsense, the person on the other side is neither right nor wrong, since rightness and wrongness are never to be discussed: the person on the other side is merely a jackass, a bigot, ignorant, uninformed, pathetically stupid, Neanderthal, reactionary, bitter, a yokel, a class-traitor, and racist, racist, racist, and racist.
If you are arguing with someone, say, who has a better education than you, a higher I.Q., with perhaps a doctorate in law and a career as a journalist and a published series of books on his resume, that does not matter. The mere fact that he comes to different conclusions than the Party line indicates that he is stupid uneducated Nazi bigot, and a stupid bigoted fascist racist moron.
This is argumentum ad cloaca —— ratiocination via offal. Whatever the loudest donkey laughs loudest at, you take to be untrue. Since that was the way (admit it!) you yourself were convinced, O ye of little mind, it is the first, usually the only means, to which you resort to convince others: the volume and clamor is what matters, not the content.
The reason for the inadequacy of these condemnations, the reason why they are so unimaginative, is because of the paucity of the moral vocabulary of the Left. They do not have words to express outrage, so they sneer and yodel. They are like creature struck dumb, and only able to act out their condemnation by means of antic pantomime.
The more closely they follow Marx, the more impoverished their moral vocabulary becomes. You cannot call someone evil once you accept the proposition that all standards of good and evil are merely genetically-determined group survival behaviors, or merely culturally determined artifacts, or merely ideological superstructures meant to promote class interests. Your concept has lost its referents: it can be used only metaphorically, or ironically.
Likewise, you cannot call someone damned if you don’t believe in damnation. There is no such thing as blasphemy if there is nothing sacred, supernatural, or divine.
Likewise again, you cannot call someone illogical if logic is no longer the standard used to separate self-consistent from self-contradictory statements: because then you would have to argue the merits of the case, and rely on reason, like Adam Smith, rather than on verbal fetishes, like Karl Marx.
Our Progressive detractors have to call the object of their scorn a racist (or a parallel word, such as sexist, lookist, homophobe, capitalist, colorist, agist, whateverist) because that is the only arrow in their quiver. That is the only thing they have to shoot, so they shoot, and do not care how short of the target the dart falls.
John C. Wright, “The Crazy Years and their Empty Moral Vocabulary”, John C. Wright, 2019-02-18.
March 19, 2022
QotD: The sterility of partisan political argument
February 13, 2022
QotD: Marx’s labour theory of value gets tenure
At last, we know the answer to the question almost no one was asking: What happens when Karl Marx’s labor theory of value gets tenure?
The labor theory of value is very popular on the Left, probably because it makes no sense. Marx — who never labored once in his entire life — proposed that “labor” has inherent value, that “if we disregard the use-value of commodities, they have only one property left, that of being products of labor.”
I assure you it sounds even stupider in the original German.
The short version is that “labor” determines a product’s value, not the competitive marketplace.
It’s a crackpot theory, easily demolished.
Take the example of a skilled pastry chef and … me.
Give a few dollars worth of flour, sugar, butter, etc., to that chef and after a couple of hours of his labors, he can sell you a gorgeous and tasty cake that you would be happy to pay a lot of money to buy.
I don’t bake and have no interest in baking. Let me labor on those same ingredients for the same two hours, and you’ll get a hot mess worth less than the value of the ingredients that went into it.
(Apologies: This is not my example, but I can’t find an online resource listing the original author. [I first encountered this in a Robert Heinlein novel, but he may have been paraphrasing someone else])
It’s not the “labor,” it’s the results.
Now we’re supposed to apply this same thinking to grading English papers.
We’re supposed to accept that one student’s craptaculently-written essay has the same value as another student’s beautifully written paper because they both put the same amount of labor into writing them.
What Inoue wants college instructors to do is apply crackpot Marxist theory to those who will be disadvantaged the most if they aren’t taught proper English.
Stephen Green, “Fight ‘White Language Supremacy,’ Prof Will Grade on ‘Labor’ Not Results”, Vodkapundity, 2021-11-10.
January 25, 2022
The fantasy of a modern economy without money
Jon Hersey and Thomas Walker-Werth consider the claim that we’d all be better off without money in a truly modern, egalitarian society:
Capitalism, to the extent it has existed, has been incredibly successful at lifting most of humanity out of poverty, incentivizing the creation of incredible, life-enhancing technologies, such as those Maezawa used to make his fortune — not to mention, travel to space. But it’s long had its critics, and he is far from the first to propose a sort of Garden-of-Eden world where everything is plentiful and free. Karl Marx envisioned a similar utopia. Communism, he said, ultimately would bring about a world without money:
In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.
And although “society distributes labour-power” — meaning government planners tell people what to do to ensure that things (such as “free” Ferraris) get made — workers could also all pursue whatever hobbies or occupations strike their fancy. “[I]n communist society,” Marx explained,
where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
[…]
Although Marx considered himself a social scientist and economist — and although his ideas are still some of the most widely taught — they aren’t much taught in social science or economics departments, except as foils. That’s because virtually all of Marx’s hypotheses have been debunked. For one, who’s going to build the free Ferraris that Maezawa has dreamed up, never mind tackle more mundane tasks, with no incentive? But for those who don’t find such commonsense thought experiments convincing — or who think, as Marx did, that human nature will somehow mysteriously change — the impracticality of Marx’s moneyless state was demonstrated by what Austrian economists have come to call the calculation problem. Ludwig von Mises once explained the problem as follows:
If a hydroelectric power station is to be built, one must know whether or not this is the most economical way to produce the energy needed. How can he know this if he cannot calculate costs and output?
We may admit that in its initial period a socialist regime could to some extent rely upon the experience of the preceding age of capitalism. But what is to be done later, as conditions change more and more? Of what use could the prices of 1900 be for the director in 1949? And what use can the director in 1980 derive from the knowledge of the prices of 1949?
The paradox of “planning” is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark.
In short, without prices, people have no relatable, quantifiable means of comparing and contrasting options about how to spend time and capital, which is vital for determining how best to use these naturally scarce resources. “New Scientist magazine reported that in the future, cars could be powered by hazelnuts,” said comedian Jimmy Fallon, in a skit that captures this point hilariously. “That’s encouraging, considering an eight-ounce jar of hazelnuts costs about nine dollars. Yeah, I’ve got an idea for a car that runs on bald eagle heads and Fabergé eggs.”
July 29, 2021
In The Shadow of Napoleon – The 2nd French Empire Before 1870 I GLORY & DEFEAT
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Published 12 Jul 2021Support Glory & Defeat: https://realtimehistory.net/gloryandd…
After Napoleon I had conquered and then lost Europe, France went through multiple revolutions. In 1851, Napoleon’s nephew and French president Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte took control and in 1852 crowned himself Emperor Napoleon III. The new French Empire wanted to regain the glory of Napoleon’s uncle and together with his wife Empress Eugenie he ruled a state known for lavish balls and spending.
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https://realtimehistory.net/podcast – interviews with historians and background info for the show.» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Kriegs erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018Arand, Tobias/Bunnenberg, Christian (Hrsg.): Karl Klein. Fröschweiler Chronik. Kriegs- und Friedensbilder aus dem Krieg 1870. Kommentierte Edition. Hamburg 2021
Gouttman, Alain. La grande défaite de 1870-1871. Paris 2015
Herre, Franz: Eugénie. Kaiserin der Franzosen. Stuttgart, München 2000
Rieder, Heinz: Napoleon III. Abenteurer und Imperator. München 1998
» SOURCES
Bonaparte, Prince Napoléon-Louis: Des Idées Napoléoniennes. London 1839Marx, Karl: Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon. Hamburg 1869
Maupassant, Guy de: Bel-Ami. Paris 1901
N.N. (Hrsg): Fontane, Theodor. Aus den Tagen der Okkupation. Eine Osterreise durch Nordfrankreich und Elsaß-Lothingen 1871. Berlin (Ost) 1984
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Cathérine Pfauth, Dr. Tobias Arand, Jesse Alexander
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May 31, 2021
“For four generations our culture and education has been in the hands of an unholy hybrid of Marxism and Rousseau’s Romanticism”
In the most recent edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt regrets not learning some traditional — manual — skills when she was younger, and how children today are even worse served by the education system:
… there are are other things. I mean, husband and I to an extent were thrown in to the world with no clue how to do the most basic things, like home maintenance or how to clean with proper products, how to take care of clothes, how to do anything with our savings other than let it sit in the bank, how to organize and sort files and records. It goes on. (I do still tend to use bleach for most things. It’s cheap. I have at least learned what it will damage.) Our first ten years of marriage would make a good sitcom, as they had a repeating pattern: figure out we need to do something; extrapolate how it can be done; invest untold amount of time and effort into doing thing; find out after that it can be done in a simpler and cheaper way. And then people wonder why I curse.
And so many times, we just come up on something that must be done — even now — and have no clue how to get to the place where we can even think about how to do it. Teaching the kids what we never learned has been fun, too.
Heck, even in my religion — and I taught it was a young woman — I keep coming across these massive gaps where no one ever taught me what to do or why. As for the education my kids got: pfui.
In the same way, I’ve spent most of my adult life learning history, grammar, natural science and the basics of things that I supposedly learned the advanced form for with my degree, but without anyone ever teaching me the fundamentals.
Kind of like part of my degree is the study of literature but until I read Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer I’d never realized that books are composed of conflict and reaction units. (No, not physical conflict, though heck, you could sell that.) Instead I tried to fit them into the structure of plays and wondered why it wasn’t working.
Because no one had ever taught me the basics. I mean, I knew how to do a lot of advanced things, even as a beginning writer. I just had no clue how to do the basic things. And it showed.
For four generations our culture and education has been in the hands of an unholy hybrid of Marxism and Rousseau’s Romanticism. (The two are related in that both believe that natural man left to his own devices creates paradise.)
I can understand how those scarred by the long war of the 20th century would decide that they were going to ditch all the evil bad things in civilization and let the children grow up “naturally” so they would be sweet and innocent angels. (Spit.) I understand but I don’t forgive. If they thought what they saw in the war was the result of Western Civilization, they’d never studied other civilizations or for that matter hid in a playground and watched the children be “natural”.
Then the cascade started. People who only half learned could only half teach. On top of which the doubts instilled in them about the purpose of civilization made them teach less than half. And the next generation knew less. And then less.
More than once, as an inquisitive student, I’d go to my teacher and ask why something worked the way it did or didn’t work the way they said, only to be given a glib explanation I knew was wrong. I must have been 11 the first time I realized the teacher had no more clue than I did. (This was a good thing. It set me on a path of researching and investigating on my own.)
By the time my kids were in school it had become more so, partly because to justify themselves, and abate the feeling they were incompetent, people derived entire theories on why they shouldn’t learn the basics, learning the basics was bad, and you could be so much better by learning naturally.
I don’t have enough words to revile the “immersion” method of language learning, particularly was applied in our schools. Yes, sure “but the military used it” – yeah, but the military could enforce LIVING in the language. It also — which seems to elude most people — does teach people grammar and vocabulary in formal classroom settings.
[…]
Part of the unlearning are people who never learned enough to realize what works and what doesn’t trying to do things in ways that only work for a very few highly gifted individuals. That’s how we got whole word, new math, total immersion, whateverthehelltheyretryingnow all of which involved “less work for teachers” and the vague hope that unschooled children, or children who learned “naturally” were just somehow “better”.
Kind of like what would happen if I decided my digit dyslexic, half-baked way with wood meant my making, say, a table that was lopsided and wobbly made the table better and more authentic.
April 25, 2021
They don’t call it “neo-Marxism”, but that’s what Critical Race Theory really is
In City Journal, Christopher Rufo explains why Critical Race Theory is a natural child of orthodox Marxist thought:
Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s and built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions over the past decade. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human-resources departments, in the form of diversity-training programs, human-resources modules, public-policy frameworks, and school curricula.
Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, critical race theorists explicitly reject equality — the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA law professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth, and redistributing them along racial lines. Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”
One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since, according to Kendi, “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In other words, identity is the means; Marxism is the end.
An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of “anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation: critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.
April 24, 2021
QotD: Marxism and the teenage mind
That’s why the worst thing a teenager can think of is “unfair.” It’s wrong because it feels wrong, and anything that’s wrong must be somebody’s fault — again, how could it be otherwise? Parents can’t afford to let their kids learn big lessons the hard way. Literally can’t afford it, in that teenagers can’t see why, for example, you can’t take that turn at 85 mph on an icy road. You can explain it to them until you’re blue in the face, but as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers knows, there’s a large subset of them that will simply refuse to get it. Alas, those tend to be the brighter ones, and so a large part of the subtle art of teenager management is setting up smaller, less catastrophic situations for them to fuck up, such that they hopefully learn by analogy. Which is still, of course, the grownups’ fault …
A big part of growing up, then, is: realizing that not everything is someone’s fault. Every effect has a cause, that’s a simple truth of logic, but not every event has a cause. The real world, grownups know, is what Buddha said it is, a nexus of causes and conditions. Even the simplest event has innumerable proximate causes, necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions, and so on. If you want to argue, in terms of pure logic, that every event is an intersection of a long series of causal chains that are all, in theory, perfectly discoverable, go nuts, but for all practical purposes, shit just happens. Accepting that is one of the foundation stones of adulthood.
From that perspective, one’s youthful Marxism seems silly, and nothing seems sillier than Marx’s endless ranting against the perfidy of “the capitalists.” Just as your parents aren’t really the capricious tyrants you thought they were when they wouldn’t let you use the car on Friday night, so even the biggest of businessmen are just people. Marx paints them as cartoonishly evil, but though a guy like Andrew Carnegie was a real bastard in his youth, no doubt about that, he too grew up, becoming a staunch philanthropist and anti-imperialist. So, too, with the labor theory of value, which is the closest thing to the quintessence of the teenage mind ever put to paper — those Air Jordans are “overpriced,” no one denies that, but it’s simply not true that selling $5 shoes for $200 is “exploitation.” There’s this thing called “demand,” and … well, you get it.
Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.
April 16, 2021
The continued evolution of the Marxist class struggle – “Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class”
Arthur Chrenkoff provides some background on the evolution of Marxist thought as they abandon efforts to rouse the working classes of the west against their capitalist oppressors and switch to attempting to rouse the “wokeing class” against their deplorable racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist white male cisgendered oppressors:
In developing his philosophy, Karl Marx posited human history as a struggle of two sections of society: the minority who hold the all power and the powerless majority. In Marx’s time, the minority was termed the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, or simply The Capital, those controlling (owning and benefitting from) the means of production, while the majority was called the working class, or the proletariat, the masses who sell their labour, and whose collective toil makes the capitalists rich. The essential dynamic of a society is one of power: who has it and who doesn’t, and how it’s exercised (or as Lenin said, “who whom?”). It’s a zero sum equation: all or nothing, the one or the other, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressors and the oppressed. There is a moral dimension to this dichotomy: the former, by virtue of their position, are the villains, the latter the virtuous. It’s also absolutist: the individual doesn’t matter and individuality is an irrelevant illusion; you are the class to which you belong.
One of the most important aspects of this group dynamic is that the dominant class uses its position and power to shape the society in accordance with its needs. Thus, all the institutions, laws, traditions and phenomena reflect the interests of the ruling class; they are designed to benefit them and only them and keep their power entrenched. And what benefits one class invariably harms the other: the masses. You can thus say that in a capitalist society everything’s classist.
The twentieth century dashed the hopes of Marx’s disciples that the proletariat would revolt against and overthrow their capitalist oppressors. The working class was bought off with better working conditions and rising incomes: a house, a car, and a football game. While elsewhere communism triumphed through coups and foreign invasions, in the Western world genuine revolutions did not happen; capitalism is still around. While the working class might have disappointed and let down Marxists, the basic Marxist thinking has not changed: the society is divided into two mutually hostile groups, the oppressors and the oppressed. Now we just need to find the different oppressed and we’ll have another crack at destroying capitalism and creating our socialist utopia. Out with the purely economic divisions, in with racial, gender and sexual ones. Goodbye the working class, hello to the wokeing class.
Fast forward to 2021, and the neo-Marxist struggle continues to gather wind in its sail. On the one side the power-holders: white, male, straight; on the other the powerless: women, people of colour, other sexualities. The actors might have been changed but the essential drama remains the same: the struggle of the virtuous but powerless oppressed majority against their dastardly rulers and the system created for their benefit and everyone else’s disadvantage. Just as in the past every aspect of society was biased against and harmful to the proletariat, so now it is against the proletariat 2.0: everything’s racist – and sexist, and homophobic and transphobic. This is also why the activists describe racism as “systemic”; not because there are still Jim Crow laws in existence, and legal segregation and discrimination, but because the system created by the “white” society by its very nature must be oppressive and hostile to anyone non-white. Piecemeal fixing problems and gradual reforms are useless; the only solution is a radical societal transformation that elevates the oppressed and casts down the oppressors.
March 23, 2021
QotD: Marx was right … but not about the proletariat
Those fuckheads achieved class consciousness here in the last 30 years, and now they’re doing what Marx said the Proletariat would – making Revolution, overturning the system, causing the State to wither away as they pursue their own interests against tradition, religion, all enemies foreign and domestic. Theirs is a “Marxism” boiled down to its essence: Nihilistic, suicidal envy.
[…]
Once they achieve class consciousness, the Revolution is inevitable – Marx was right about that, too. There are only so many places in the Apparat, after all, and the number of talented, ambitious people in the Empire — even now, after a century’s worth of mandatory “education” — far exceeds the number of make-work jobs the Apparat, any Apparat, can support. Provided we survive it, it will be some cold comfort, watching the bewilderment in their faces as they’re lined up against the wall. Ever read Darkness at Noon?
Severian, “Skynet Becomes Self-Aware”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-11.
February 2, 2021
When the self-defined elites achieved class consciousness
At Rotten Chestnuts Severian adds to his ongoing series of posts identifying areas where Marx was right:
“Jay Gould’s Private Bowling Alley.” Financier and stock speculator Jay Gould is depicted on Wall Street, using bowling balls titled “trickery,” “false reports,” “private press” and “general unscrupulousness” to knock down bowling pins labeled as “operator,” “broker,” “banker,” “inexperienced investor,” etc. A slate shows Gould’s controlling holdings in various corporations, including Western Union, Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad.
From the cover of Puck magazine Vol. XI, No 264 via Wikimedia Commons.
… I liken Karl Marx to one of those bird-masked medieval Plague doctors — he sees the pathology clearly, indeed far faster and better than anyone else, but his proposed “cure” is far likelier to kill you than the actual disease. Worse, what makes Marx’s cure especially lethal is what ends up making his diagnosis essentially right: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The proletariat is achieving class consciousness, all right — look no further than the GameStop “short squeeze” for proof. But the only reason the proles are achieving class consciousness is because the “capitalists” forced them to, just like Marx said they would. The Elite and the Bureaucracy (usually, but not always, a distinction without a difference) finally achieved class consciousness through the combination of NAFTA and the Louvre Accords. Starting around 1990, then, the Elite self-consciously embraced their role as rootless, stateless, jet-setting parasites (with the wannabe-Elites in the Media, academia, and the bureaucracies signing up for tours of duty as fart-catchers, both to bask in reflected glory and in hopes of being promoted).
In short, our “Capitalists” — really, “financial-ists” or “spreadsheet gangsters,” since they don’t actually make anything, they just bust out existing firms via debt manipulation — behave exactly as Marx described factory owners behaving all the way back in the First Industrial Revolution.In my naivete, I used to think Marx’s ranting was hyperbole. I cited the example of Andrew Carnegie — a real bastard in his youth, who went on to be one of the world’s great philanthropists. That’s human behavior, I said, as opposed to the bloodthirsty caricature of Marx’s fantasies … but I was wrong, comrades. Carnegie happily would’ve sold his fellow Americans down the river, just as Bezos, Gates, and the rest of the pirates-in-neckties are happily selling us down the river now. Only two things prevented it back then: one structural, one cultural.
The structural one is simply technology, and therefore uninteresting. Britain’s “free traders” — you know, the Jardine-Matheson types who started the Opium Wars for fun and profit — would’ve happily outsourced Britain’s entire industrial base to China if they hadn’t been hampered by wind speed. By the time this was technically feasible — which is about 1860, if you’re keeping score — simple inertia had taken over. They didn’t retool until they had to, at which point instant communications and modern ships … well, you know the rest. Like I said, it’s vital, but boring.
The cultural one is much more interesting. You might be tempted to say, as I did, that Jardine and Matheson were always on the lookout for #1, of course, but were sincere British patriots for all that, just as Carnegie for all his faults was an authentic American. I doubt it, comrades. I sincerely doubt it. What kept these guys in check wasn’t patriotism, or even culture. Rather, it was fear.
January 22, 2021
QotD: The enclosure movement, in historical fact and in Marxist imagining
How this process played out all depended on extremely specific, local conditions. But on the whole it was slow — piecemeal enclosure had been happening to varying degrees since at least the fourteenth century. It’s hard to see how such a sporadic and piecemeal process could have led to such consistently and increasingly massive numbers flocking specifically to London. Indeed, the fact that they singled out London as their target suggests that this narrative might have it back-to-front. Some economic historians argue that it was the prospect of higher wages in the ever-growing metropolis that induced farmers to leave the countryside in the first place, selling up or abandoning their plots to those they left behind. Rather than enclosure pushing peasants off the land and into the city, London’s specific pull may instead have thus created the vacuum that allowed the remaining farmers to bring about enclosure. Otherwise, why didn’t the peasants simply flock to any old urban centre? The second-tier cities like Norwich or Bristol or Exeter or Coventry or York would all have been far less dangerous.
Anton Howes, “London the Great”, Age of Invention, 2020-10-20.
November 30, 2020
Cultural Marxism or cultural leftism?
In the most recent Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb discusses what British Conservatives have been warned against describing as “Cultural Marxism”:
So far as I understand him — and I write as an outsider to any school of Marxist ideology — Marx made five essential points. First, there have been, since the French Revolution, two classes — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Second, the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and exploits the proletariat through the extraction of surplus value. Third, this is an unstable parasitism, as the reinvestment of surplus value leads to periodic crises of over-production. Fourth, these crises concentrate wealth in fewer hands and expand and immiserise the proletariat. Fifth, there will be an inevitable revolution, in which the expropriators will be expropriated and a communist society will emerge. A further and perhaps optional sixth point is that the inevitable revolution can be hurried by the defection of informed bourgeois intellectuals to radicalise and form a vanguard for the proletariat.
Now, where is any of this in the present mix of climate alarmism and obsession with the alleged oppression of racial and sexual minorities? How is capitalism supposed to be overthrown by getting Sainsbury to fill its advertisements with pictures of black people eating Christmas dinner? Ditto boycotts of Israeli pharmaceuticals? Ditto arguing with or against radical feminists over the exact status of men who change sex?
The answer, of course, is the Cultural Marxist hypothesis — that the present culture wars are a product of the writings of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. These men took the Marxian concept of “false consciousness” — that the bourgeoisie keeps the workers quiet by making them believe that all is for the best — and enlarged it into a project for achieving a counter-hegemony by taking over the means of cultural reproduction.
There is some truth in this answer, so far as these writings are prescribed in most university humanities departments, and many advocates of the new totalitarianism have at some time called themselves Marxists. It is, even, so a weak answer. Before about 60 AD, most Christians were Jews, and Christianity ever since has retained some Jewish religious writings among its core texts. But nothing is achieved by describing Christianity as “Gentile Judaism.” The differences between the two faiths are too essential to define either by reference to the other. In the same way, the present totalitarianism has nothing to do with the essential claims of Marxism. It lacks any interest in the analysis of surplus value, and its belief in the instability of unregulated markets derives mainly from a reading of Keynes and the welfare economists of the Cambridge School.
I prefer the term “cultural leftism.” I prefer this because the present totalitarianism is based on belief in an appearance of equality mediated by the State. It therefore has elements of socialism as reasonably defined. But it is in no sense Marxist. Its revealed preference is for a ruling class that is a coalition of politicians, administrators, policemen, lawyers, educators, plus media and business interests. So far as individuals move freely between them, these groups are mutually permeable. If they disagree over incidentals, they preside collectively over a mass of the ruled who are mostly well-nourished, but who are too atomised and intimidated by often meaningless words to combine in opposition.
Indeed, if I prefer my chosen term, I see little point in arguing against what it describes. Undoubtedly, this must be explained and opposed. But too much analysis of particulars can risk an overlooking of the much more important generality. This is that, in every time and place, there have been those who want to get on with their lives and those who want to control others. These latter will take up whatever body of ideas is most likely within the prevailing assumptions of their age to legitimise their urges.
August 3, 2020
Romanticizing the past
Sarah Hoyt points out that the past really is a foreign country and they do things very differently there … and for good reasons:
An image of coal pits in the Black Country from Griffiths’ Guide to the iron trade of Great Britain, 1873.
Image digitized by the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons.
So, quickly: The industrial revolution was not a disaster to your average peasant. It was a disaster for landowners.
Yes, yes, the conditions in the factories were terrible. By our standards. The lifespan was very short. By our standards. The anomie of the big cities, yadda yadda. When compared to what? Small villages? Ask those of us raised in them. Yes, there was child labor. As compared to what at that time? Other than the life of the upper classes?
Look, we don’t have to guess about this stuff. In India, in China, in other places that came to the industrial revolution very late, we’ve seen peasants leave the land where their ancestors had labored, to flock to the big cities, to take work we find horrible and exploitative at wages we find ridiculous.
And even if China has added “labor camp” and prisoner wrinkles to it, note that’s because China is a shitty communist country, not because the migration wasn’t there before. Also the labor camp aspects, as much as one can tell (and it’s hard to tell, due to the raging insanity of the regime) seem to have grown as the people grew more prosperous, as a result of the industrial revolution and thereby demanded higher wages, which positioned China more poorly as the “factory of the world.”
In fact, idealizing “living off the land” has been in place since at least the Roman empire, and probably before. It’s also been MISERABLE at least since then and probably before.
Because pre-industrial revolution farming sucked. It sucked horribly. And it kept you on the edge of subsistence. It double sucked when you were subjected to a Lord. Look, systems of serfdom, etc. didn’t come about because living in a Lord’s domain was so great, and everyone wove wreaths and danced around maypoles all the time, okay?
The bucolic paradise of a farmer’s life was mostly a creation of city dwellers, often noblemen, who saw it from the outside.
There are estimations that most people had trouble rearing even one child, and most of one generation’s peasants were people fallen from higher status. I don’t know. That might be exaggerated. Or it might not.
Even during the industrial revolution, it was normal for ladies bountiful to take baskets of food to tenant farmers because … they couldn’t make it on their own.
And btw, the more the industrial revolution pulled people to the cities, the more the Lords and “elites” talked about how great the countryside was and how terrible the factories/cities/new way of living were.
A lot of artists and pseudo bohemians jumped in on this bandwagon and so did Marx, who was both a pseudo bohemian, by birth “elite” (Well, his family had a virtual slave attached to him. He impregnated her too, as was his privilege), and by self-flattery intellectual.
Therefore the factories were the worst thing ever, the men who owned them, aka capitalists were terrible, terrible people — mostly because Marx wasn’t one, and probably because they laughed at him — and the proletariat they exploited horribly would rise up and —
All bullshit of course. Later on his fiction needed retconning by Anthony Gramsci who, having the sense to realize the “workers” weren’t rising up, just getting wealthier and escaping the clutches of the “elites” more made the “proletariat” a sort of “world proletariat” centered on poorer/more dysfunctional countries. This had the advantage of making the exploited masses always be elsewhere (or the supposed exploiters) and therefore made it easier to pitch group against group to the eternal profit of rather corrupt “elites.” Mostly political classes which are descended from “the best people.”
August 2, 2020
QotD: Marx’s imperfect economic understanding
We can find, if we look properly, Marx’s insistences of how appalling monopoly capitalism would be in Smith. They’re both right too, it would be appalling. But we do have to understand what they both mean by this. In modern terms they mean monopsony, more specifically the monopoly buyer of labour. What is it that prevents this? Competition in the market among capitalists for access to the labour they desire to exploit. That very competition decreasing the amount of grinding of faces into the dust they’re able to do. Henry Ford’s $5 a day is an excellent example of this very point.
Ford wanted access to the best manufacturing labour of his time. He also wanted to have a lower turnover of that labour, lower training costs. So, he doubled wages (actually, normal wages plus a 100% bonus if you did things the Ford Way) and got that labour. At which point all the other manufacturers had to try and compete with those higher wages in order to get that labour they wanted to expropriate the sweat of the brow from. Marx did get this, he pointed out that exactly this sort of competition, in the absence of a reserve army of the unemployed, is what would raise real wages as productivity improved.
Smith also didn’t like the setting of wages as it precluded just such competition and such wage rises.
Where Marx went wrong was in not realising this power of markets. He knew of them, obviously, understood the idea, but just didn’t understand their power to ameliorate, destroy even, that march to monopoly capitalism.
[…]
The thing we really need to know on this bicentenary about Karl Marx is that he was wrong. He just never did grasp the power of markets to disrupt, even prevent, the tendencies he saw in capitalism. Specifically, and something we all need to know today, the power of competition among capitalists as the method of improving the lives of all us wage slaves. You know, that’s why we proletariat today, exploited as we are and ground into the dust, are the best fed, longest lived and richest, in every sense of the word, human beings who have ever existed. Something which is, if we’re honest about it, not a bad recommendation for a socio-economic system really. You know, actually working? Achieving the aim of improving the human condition?
Tim Worstall, “Marx At 200 – Yes, He Was Wrong, Badly Wrong”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-04.
August 1, 2020
EP Thompson: The Foremost Marxist in History | Historians who changed History
The Cynical Historian
Published 1 Nov 2018Today let’s talk about Marxist historians. Edward Palmer Thompson makes perhaps the best introduction to the realm of Marxist history. His work on the English Labor Class, allows for a better understanding of the Marxist project, and how understanding class consciousness can lead to revolution.
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references:
Beard, Charles. “Written History as an act of Faith”, The American Historical Review 39, no. 2 (January 1934), 219-231.Marx, Karl. The Essential Marx. ed. Leon Trotsky, abridgment of Das Kapital, Vol. I. 1939; Mineola, N.York: Dover Publications, 2006. https://amzn.to/2MWygco
Thompson, E.P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, No. 50 (Feb., 1971), 76-136.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. https://amzn.to/2KFSESC
Special thanks to Dr. Colleen Hall-Patton for proofreading the script for this episode.
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Wiki:
Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993), usually cited as E. P. Thompson, was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry. His work is considered to have been among the most important contributions to labour history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Although he left the party in 1956 over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he nevertheless remained a “historian in the Marxist tradition”, calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists’ “confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives”. Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s. He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79, and an early and constant supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, becoming during the 1980s the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.
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