{"id":46072,"date":"2018-12-06T03:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T08:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=46072"},"modified":"2022-06-11T20:55:15","modified_gmt":"2022-06-12T00:55:15","slug":"marx-was-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/12\/06\/marx-was-right\/","title":{"rendered":"“Marx was right”"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting little bit of history and philosophy over at Rotten Chestnuts<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Marx was right: Society really is shaped by relations between the means of production.<\/p>\n

The Middle Ages, for instance, organized itself around defense from marauding barbarian hordes. Fast, heavy cavalry were the apex of military technology at the time; the so-called \u201cfeudal\u201d system were the cavalry\u2019s support. The system was field tested in the later Roman empire \u2014 medieval titles like \u201cduke\u201d came from the ranks of the Roman posse comitatus<\/em> \u2014 and perfected in the Dark Ages.<\/p>\n

When the barbarians had been pacified sufficiently that Europeans had leisure time to think about this stuff, they took the feudal system \u2014 at that point a cumbersome relic \u2014 as their model for society. Hobbes, Locke, et al<\/em> saw it as the origin of the Social Contract; Marx saw it as finely tuned oppression. But here\u2019s the fun part:<\/p>\n

Hobbes ends his Leviathan<\/em> with the most absolute monarch that could ever be. He starts* with\u2026 wait for it\u2026 the equality of man. Marx, on the other hand, ends with the equality of man. He starts with a frank, indeed brutal, acknowledgment of man\u2019s inequality<\/em>. As much as I love Hobbes (and consider Leviathan<\/em> the only political philosophy book worth reading), he\u2019s wrong \u2014 fundamentally wrong \u2014 and Marx is right. Marx went wrong somewhere down the line; Hobbes jumped the track from page one.<\/p>\n

Marx only went wrong when he started dabbling in metaphysics. Marxism isn\u2019t the original underpants gnome<\/a> philosophy, but it\u2019s certainly the best \u2014 not least because Marx\u2019s followers were so successful at hiding the deus ex machina<\/em> that was supposed to bring Communism about. Marx didn\u2019t just say \u201cThe Revolution will happen because that\u2019s the way all the trend lines are pointing.\u201d He said \u201cthe trend lines are pointing that way, and oh yeah, the animating Spirit of History demands<\/em> that the Revolution shall happen.\u201d This is so obviously sub-Hegelian junk that his followers dropped it as fast as they could, but to Marx himself it was the key to his philosophy. For all its formidable technobabble, Marxism is just another chiliastic mystery cult.<\/p>\n

[…] Enlightenment-wise, Hobbes was the start, Marx the end of political philosophy, and both are flawed beyond redemption. Hobbes sure sounds<\/em> like a viable alternative to Marx, because Hobbes\u2019s reasoning seems sound, and based on an irrefutable premise: That in the State of Nature, life is nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. But that\u2019s not<\/em> Hobbes\u2019s premise \u2014 the fundamental equality of man in the State of Nature is. Life in the State of Nature is brutal because<\/em> all men are equal.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong> If you\u2019ve read Leviathan<\/em>, of course, you know he starts the book itself with a long discourse on contemporary physics. Hobbes was an innovator there, too \u2014 he\u2019s the first person to put forth his humanistic ideas as the coldly logical deductions of physical science. It\u2019d be fun to taunt the \u201cI fucking love science\u201d crowd with that, except they think Hobbes is a cuddly cartoon tiger and \u201cLeviathan\u201d one of the lesser houses at Hogwarts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting little bit of history and philosophy over at Rotten Chestnuts: Marx was right: Society really is shaped by relations between the means of production. The Middle Ages, for instance, organized itself around defense from marauding barbarian hordes. Fast, heavy cavalry were the apex of military technology at the time; the so-called \u201cfeudal\u201d system […]<\/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":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,53],"tags":[1272,1076,703,576,1462,1405],"class_list":["post-46072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-politics","tag-feudalism","tag-karlmarx","tag-middleages","tag-philosophy","tag-severian","tag-thomashobbes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bZ6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46072","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=46072"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62380,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46072\/revisions\/62380"}],"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=46072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}