{"id":29075,"date":"2015-01-02T01:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-01-02T06:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29075"},"modified":"2016-09-29T10:45:29","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T14:45:29","slug":"qotd-the-co-ordination-problem-of-pure-marxism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/02\/qotd-the-co-ordination-problem-of-pure-marxism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The co-ordination problem of pure Marxism"},"content":{"rendered":"

… it is interesting to analyze Marx as groping toward something game theoretic. This comes across to me in some of his discussions of labor. Marx thinks all value is labor. Yes, capital is nice, but in a sense it is only \u201ccrystallized labor\u201d \u2013 the fact that a capitalist owns a factory only means that at some other point he got laborers to build a factory for him. So labor does everything, but it gets only a tiny share of the gains produced. This is because capitalists are oppressing the laborers. Once laborers realize what\u2019s up, they can choose to labor in such a way as to give themselves the full gains of their labor.<\/p>\n

I think here that he is thinking of coordination as something that happens instantly in the absence of any obstacle to coordination, and the obstacle to coordination is the capitalists and the \u201cfalse consciousness\u201d they produce. Remove the capitalists, and the workers \u2013 who represent the full productive power of humanity \u2013 can direct that productive power to however it is most useful. In my language, Marx simply assumed the invisible nation, thought that the result of perfect negotiation by ideal game theoretic agents with 100% cooperation under a veil of ignorance \u2013 would also be the result of real negotiation in the real world, as long as there were no capitalists involved. Maybe this idea \u2013 of gradually approaching the invisible nation \u2013 is what stood in for the World-Spirit in his dialecticalism. Maybe in 1870, this sort of thinking was excusable.<\/p>\n

If capitalists are to be thought of as anything other than parasites, part of the explanation of their contribution has to involve coordination. If Marx didn\u2019t understand that coordination is just as hard to produce as linen or armaments or whatever, if he thought you could just assume it, then capitalists seem useless and getting rid of all previous forms of government so that insta-coordination can solve everything seems like a pretty swell idea.<\/p>\n

If you admit that, capitalists having disappeared, there\u2019s still going to be competition, positive and negative sum games, free rider problems, tragedies of the commons, and all the rest, then you\u2019ve got to invent a system that solves all of those issues better than capitalism does. That seems to be the real challenge Marxist intellectuals should be setting themselves, and I hope to eventually discover some who have good answers to it. But at least from the little I learned from Singer, I see no reason to believe Marx had the clarity of thought to even understand the question.<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Singer on Marx”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2014-09-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… it is interesting to analyze Marx as groping toward something game theoretic. This comes across to me in some of his discussions of labor. Marx thinks all value is labor. Yes, capital is nice, but in a sense it is only \u201ccrystallized labor\u201d \u2013 the fact that a capitalist owns a factory only means […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,53,41],"tags":[780,967,1076],"class_list":["post-29075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-communism","tag-gametheory","tag-karlmarx"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7yX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29076,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29075\/revisions\/29076"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}