I should explain why I sympathize with socialism and have a critical appreciation of Marx. I don’t doubt certain premises of the defenders of capitalism. I don’t question the benefits of enterprise and competition. Yet the great apostle of capitalism himself, Adam Smith, was more critical and perceptive of its flaws than its current apologists. He knew the compulsion of proprietors to organize for their benefit and prevent workers from organizing for theirs—an impulse that now crushes entire populaces beneath the imbalance of haves and have nots. With climate crises and pandemics, that imbalance increasingly determines who gets excluded from a global life raft where the luxury accommodations of the privileged occupy a disproportionate space.
It is incontestable that whole industries and entrepreneurial titans have behaved criminally, inflicting enormous suffering, subverting democracy, and shredding the social fabric with their relentless pursuit of the bottom line. No one should be unaware of the millions of existences ruined by the 2007 financial crisis. It was brought on by the greedy and crooked machinations of investment bankers, real estate tycoons, and irresponsible insurers, after which the taxpayers rescued the fraudulent financiers who paid themselves lavish bonuses from public funds. This is well known.
Are you going to object that without their ranks the dynamic of economic expansion would be slowed? All the better! That’s exactly what we need. Every argument in favor of Neoliberalism assumes that our self-destructive pattern of growth and consumerism is a sacred end in itself. The word socialism declares that the present structure of society is not sacred, not even viable. The usual rejoinder is that socialists have no solutions. But we at least have the right questions, the Socratic wisdom of knowing that we don’t know. What we all know is that the status quo is untenable.
But my emphasis was on my critical appreciation of Marx. People have always known what greed and exploitation are. They have always rebelled against inequality and injustice and longed for a fairer society. The problem with Marxism is that after Marx it became virtually impossible to discuss class conflict or exploitation without invoking the full complement of his theories. By the same token, people have always known about the power of sexual desire; but after Freud, talking about sex entailed contemplating the Ödipus complex or the interpretation of dreams as wish fulfillment—the whole bag of Freudian guesses and gimmicks that have never rested on any rigorous empirical evidence or eased anyone’s suffering.
And yet both Freud and Marx did develop key new insights without which our existence would be less intelligible. In the case of Freud, it is the subconscious. The first years of life are surely our most formative, yet we have no recollection of them. Ergo the subconscious. Similarly for Marx. All of society including its most sublime institutions rests on our labor, manual and intellectual, a labor that is becoming ever more like a subconscious. Our digital products seem to drop free of cost from the heavens. Free they aren’t in any sense. Hence the need for the key concept of a ground of socially organized productive labor out of which the cultural-political superstructure arises, reflecting the conditions of production that make it possible. Marx contributed insights which should be applied critically—not least of all to Marx himself whose work elaborated certain intellectual materials under particular historical conditions.
Having read Adam Smith, I am now more keenly aware that Marx did not invent the labor theory of value on which so much in his thought depends. Thanks to my recent reading, I can appreciate just how much Marx owed to the British economists whose spirit was so distinct from his. This is old hat to anyone well versed in 19th-century intellectual history.
But I believe that I have a certain insight into the Hegelian wellsprings of his projections because of my Reformation studies. Few leftist scholars recognize or accept the degree to which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, including their most radical representative who was exiled in Paris and Brussels, were engaged in reinterpreting the German Reformation. But the evidence is well documented and hidden in plain sight in the manuscripts of 1843-44 in his draft introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Scholars think that that is where he first proclaimed the revolutionary dialectic which would raise the most oppressed class to power and liberate all of society from class oppression. The passage in question was written by Marx prior to his encounter with Adam Smith and the British economists. It is a reflection upon what he calls Germany’s “first revolution”: Luther’s Reformation and the Peasant War. His admirers ignore the conditions out of which his insights arose, conditions that informed the limits of his outlook and projected the unfulfilled utopias for his followers. There is after all nothing logically self-evident or empirically based about Marx’s claim that complete oppression must somehow somersault into complete liberation by way of a climactic revolution. Jesus and the radical reformers proclaimed: The last shall be made first! The notion that this biblical leap of faith is based on a “science of dialectics” is one of the richest jokes of intellectual history. I’m hardly the first to notice that Marx secularized the content of the apocalypse but retained its form. Apocalyptic thinking had a long revolutionary tradition of its own.
Once, people refused to think about how babies were made and where they came from. Now we don’t want to know how our devices were made and where they come from. True believers refuse to think about how their religion is invented. Death, sex, toil, pious invention, the hidden costs of all our free stuff and all our self-centered freedoms—these are the repressed secrets that overshadow our world and shape our personal and societal cultures. Think about what went into these magical devices in our hands! Think about how little we think about those who produce the things we use. Think, if you are middle class, how terrified you might be of becoming one of the toiling makers of those things. Consider how little we see and know of the defining human realities of drudge labor, birth, or death. The Renaissance had an adage for rubbing our noses in repressed truth: Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. Between shit and piss we are born. Think on how many levels that’s true.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 