Karl Marx – Capital.
Rating: 2/10
I did earnestly try to read Capital on about three separate occasions in my early twenties, before I wised up and stopped wasting my time on a pointless historical relic.
At a basic level, Marx is just a very poor writer, and I say this as someone who read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Friedrich List’s National Economy from cover to cover. And to preempt accusations of ideological hostility, I also read Friedrich Engels’ Origins of the Family – and consider him by far the better and even deeper writer (if only because it was easy to understand what he was getting at).
Marx is another matter. To read his works is to struggle through pages upon pages of laborious explications of utterly banal concepts. It is to wade through a morass of shifting definitions, seemingly authoritative but unsubstantiated statements, long-winded and often irrelevant anecdotes, and imprecise verbal descriptions that confound any attempts to construct a rigorous economic model.
One supreme irony is that Marx’s sole contribution to scientific economics was a balanced growth model of a two sector economy under capitalism. Meanwhile, the apocalyptic prognostications about falling rates of profit and mounting crises of overproduction that he is far better known for went unfulfilled.
Had there been no Russian Revolution, whose success was a historical fluke, then Marx would be regarded as a 19th century graphomaniac, and warranting just a few paragraphs in the annals of philosophy. As it was, his dreary tome was foisted on a third of the world’s population as a latter day Bible.
Falling rates of profit certainly turned out to be false, and Marx himself ought to have recognized this himself given his dictum that, Capitalism tends toward monopoly. What kind of self-respecting monopoly loses money?
The falling rate of profit as an explanation for the business cycle is also very wrong. Corporate profits are nearly always highest at the peak of the business cycle. Minsky is the one who got this one right. The Austrian Business Cycle Theory also has some value, though one needs to completely remove their bizarre, religious hatred of central banks and the dreaded FIAT money from it to get any kind of predictive power.
That said, there are some interesting analogues. Declining EROEI in energy extraction (and related dynamics in mining) and scientific productivity come to mind.
It is funny – I have a very distant, foggy memory of flipping through a few pages of some very turgid book – but I can’t definitely recall whether it was Das Kapital or Mein Kampf. I’m guessing neither one was much read compared to its fame.
On the other hand, I think The Road to Serfdom was written fairly competently, but with the caveat that Hayek made the obvious mistake of attributing too much of the influence which shaped world events to minor intellectuals, who, only in their wildest flights of fancy, might have desired to write as turgidly as Marx and Hitler, or be read 1/10,000 as much.
I think history is driven much more by instincts, personalities and circumstances, than anything else. Marx, for instance, was more important as a symbol than as someone who had written a book. If his name had a glottal stop, a fricative or ten syllables (like certain Hawaiian names), there would not be a single statue of him today.
Thank you for this review. Those of us who have not read the book (we must be legion) but have been subjected to the worship of it and its author thank you. Our college professors sometimes managed to convince us that Marx had the answers to history’s problems, but some things never seemed quite right.
The ideas taught to us as having come down from Capital , or from Marx at least, seem built upon the flawed assumptions that Man’s nature can be changed for the common good and that the community or state can somehow be in charge of that change. Contrary to that, we today see plenty of evidence, both scientific and historical, that those assumptions are false.
Human nature is heavily biological. The motive to own private property and to profit from one’s work and trade is part of that nature and cannot be removed. To do so is to destroy Man and his motivation. To give the community or state the power over this is simply to enable a select group of flawed human beings to become even more corrupt than they already are by nature.
To read now repeated accolades to Marx in American newspapers is disheartening. To see the continued false teaching in American colleges is depressing. To watch how critics of our culture try to cram everything from art to entertainment to recreation into Marxist categories is laughable.
Adam Smith is actually surprisingly readable for an English-language author of the 18th century.
It is funny to read his put-downs of the New World civilizations too: they weren’t so great because they didn’t have real money.
Lots of writing from that period (excluding novels, at least in English) is very good and still readable today, Gibbon being the best example in English and Diderot in French.
Karlin savages Marx more than is merited, likely because of the dire consequences for his native land.
Historical materialism, Marxian class analysis, class struggle, labor exploitation, and commodity fetishism are all novel, interesting, and useful concepts.
Honestly, it’s a lot worse than that. The central idea of Marxism is that the creation of a socialist economy would eliminate economic classes and thus conflict, and therefore the state would disappear. It’s really a Godless millenarian heresy.
Marx also bizarrely believed that ordinary laborers could form the ruling class of society, a patently absurd idea. Workers are dumb proles and are workers for a reason, and the idea that meritocracy didn’t exist before the 20th century is patently false. Even in the medieval period, when theories about nobility and commoners being different species were popular, there were cases of peasants becoming archbishops.
The Bolsheviks themselves obviously figured this out in practical terms as evidenced by their Vanguard strategy.
The distinguishing feature of the modern corporation is the separation of ownership and control. The vast majority of corporations have diffuse stockholders who exercise no meaningful control over the corporation, which is run by hired managers who are a self-perpetuating clique. I own a lot of shares of Union Pacific, but if I walked into a Union Pacific hump yard I’d be arrested for trespassing on the private property that I theoretically own part of.
The success of these corporations, along with wartime economic planning success, convinced a lot of people that socialism was not only possible but would outperform capitalism. Lenin described the Imperial German war economy as a planned socialist economy subordinated to “Junker bourgeois imperialism”.
Skin in the game is of course extraordinarily useful, but the real reason capitalism outperforms socialism is routine entry and exit of firms. Planned economies don’t have much entry of new firms, and there’s no hard budget constraint to discipline existing firms. During wartime of course you generally don’t want a lot of entry/exit, and you have something even more motivating than money.
Absolutely not. Marx is not a moralist, like utopian socialists he rightly skewers. Read at least the Communist manifesto, it is short and concise, if you want to talk about Marx and Marxism.
Marx fancied himself as scientist like Newton, and claimed to discover laws of human society, like Newton discovered the law of gravity. The development of human society from primitive communism through slavery, feudalism and capitalism into fully advanced communism was supposed to progress according to inevitable law of nature. Human action could slow or speed up this development, but not to change it’s course. This belief in historical inevitability, the absolute certainty that “history is on our side” was the strength of Marxism.
Marx himself was strong HBD believer/neanderthalist racist (choose what you prefer). If IQ science existed in his time he would be ardent IQ-ist. And he saw no contradiction with his theory, because Marxism is not about biology.
Marx was a racist (as all people should be), but otherwise this claim is dubious.
What kind of HBD believer thinks that the working-class is capable of running the state and the economy?
They might still do a better job than the parasites and incompetents currently running things. At least a lot of working class people have genuinely valuable skills which are necessary for the running of civilization…I doubt the same can be said of hedge fonds managers. They might also not be as prone to delusional beliefs and overly abstract theories as many “intellectuals”.
You’ve written before that you intend to enter politics at some point…I don’t think open denigration of the working class will be useful for that goal. It kind of repels people, especially on the nationalist/populist right.
I found a book in the library once which has short essays or extracts from Marx. I remember reading some pages on topics like how money makes a man more attractive. He seemed certainly a very intelligent writer, far more than modern writers are.
The system of thought he created – with classes of people who are enemies of history and so on, – has something evil, and historical consequences support this. But he is nonetheless the most intelligent left-wing or socialist writer of his era.*
I’m trying to think of other intelligent left-wing writers. In the 19th century, there is also Herzen, much more moderate and less systematic, but also very smart.
I guess in the 20th century, there was Sartre, who is radical in the Western left-wing tradition. At the same, a very intelligent man, but with ridiculous ideas in practice.
*These kind of short writings are very clever (you can instantly from some of the sentences, that he is more intelligent than people who write in our time, or on the internet of today).
But his thought system is sophistical and full of tricks – requires very sane and steady people like von Hayek to really break down this worldview in the public mind.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm
Steve Sailer had a good post about this: the funny thing is, Marx was quite capable of powerful, simple, quotable rhetoric, like “workers of the world, unite!” And many of his quips, like “religion is the opiate of the masses” and “history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce” have remained highly popular over time. But early-mid 19th century German philosophers really liked being as obtuse in their writing as possible.
Marx was clearly extremely intelligent, but for bizarre and cultish (you could say evil) goals.
I can read today some of his text, and you see in the sentence many careful and subtle qualifiers (because he is carefully building up a theory). His way of thinking contains far more layers, than a normal writer (or anyone writing today). It’s writing in the way of ‘4D chess’.
At the same time, the end result of his theory is something quite evil.
You can see his argument against money below.
He’s arguing in an extremely clever and multi-layered way, for an extremely bizarre and idiotic conclusion.
We talk about IQ on this page. And Marx’s arguments are like a religious or cult sermon, aimed at tricking people with a high-IQ into following his point of view. The point of view itself is an extremely bizarre one, but watching his argument constructed, is like watching professional chess players.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm
A golden retriever would do a better job of running things.
Very little of the working class has any talent for organization and management, which is why they’re in the working class.
Hedge fund managers are on the way out as they largely no longer generate alpha and thus do not merit their exorbitant compensation (traditionally the famed “2 and 20”–2% of assets and 20% of returns). UHNW individuals and families are exiting hedge funds, and even public pension funds (who are complete dopes) are starting to second guess.
That said, nearly all successful hedge fund managers have a very important skill: salesmanship.
A substantial minority of hedge fund managers are expert mathematicians and programmers. Robert Mercer is one such person.
And since hedge fund managers are not one-man shows, most hedge fund managers are skilled in organization, management, recruitment, employee retention, setting compensation, and providing motivation and incentives. Those are precisely the skills you need to run things.
People love to resort to cheap bashing of the financial sector because they simply don’t understand it. The original premise of hedge funds is described in the name–it allowed investors to grow their portfolios while hedging against downturns. Later on they evolved into alpha-chasing vehicles, and quite of few of the early ones did, especially the quant funds. In the 00s they began to degenerate into a racket.
But that’s common in the investment business. The old joke on Wall Street is, “Where are the customers’ yachts?” And the reason is just human nature. Investors are greedy and overrate their own competence. Good luck fixing that problem.
None the less the investment business remains a necessity, and frankly it is developing in a good direction with the new focus on low costs, indexing, and rebalancing.
Sure, that’s like the old Bill Buckley line that he’d rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phonebook than by the Harvard faculty. The solution, however, is not putting the double digit IQ crowd in power (if such a thing were even possible). It’s the complete replacement of the existing Cathedral.
No disagreement here, but that doesn’t mean I have to delude myself or entertain falsehoods about the working class. And to be clear the working class has genuinely been victimized by the complete disappearance of noblesse oblige in the past half-century and is now falling apart.
The reason is because everything he writes fits into, and is for the purpose of persuading people to, an overall theory.
Therefore, every sentence and conclusion has to be modified and qualified many times, so that it doesn’t contradict the underlying theory (the theory itself is like a well designed computer virus).
99.9% of people of the world do not have a ‘theory of everything’, that when they are writing they are trying to fit everything into. Therefore, they can be free to write sentences with not modifying and qualifying every word.
This is the case, for example, of Herzen.
Herzen is someone, for example – I enjoyed reading his book for pleasure, even 200 years after his birth. It is a good writer, and sensible and normal figure, much more easy to read than Marx (who is very painful to read). But Herzen impact on history was very minimal, as he had no ‘theory of everything’ – while Marx had a very cleverly designed and powerful ‘theory of everything”, that he managed to elaborate in all his texts, and spread like a virus (in fact it was designed exactly to spread like it did, and succeeded exactly as designed).
Marx – I would say he was like a brilliant computer hacker, who designed a genius virus with several zero-day exploits, to shut down and reboot a society.*
—
The role of Lenin and Hitler, etc, is much more like script kiddies, which are using programs that had already been introduced, more or less recently into public circulation.
You are underestimating Marx’s influence on the German social democrats, the most important social democrats Europe’s.
Speaking of Herzen and Marx
https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/984853727726026752
https://twitter.com/_arrgrr_/status/984857705054703617
I agree with this. Swedish academia has a concept called “idea history”.
The only other person in history equivalent to Marx would be Mohammed, though Mohammed exceeds Marx since he was also a political and military leader.
I can’t even place Jesus Christ in the same rank as them, as Christ had considerably less to say about temporal affairs.
Next rank would probably be various “Enlightenment” cranks like Locke, Rousseau, Paine, etc.
The only thing I read from Marx is the Communist Manifesto and I thought it was alright. I don’t ever plan to read Das Kapital. As far as the manifesto is concerned, I do think he got some stuff right and at the very least the manifesto is a good introduction to the materialist conception of history for an intro poli sci course. The idea that the development of history are due to the change in productive forces probably didn’t start with him, but he did articulate it. This idea is incredibly popular today, except “productive forces” is changed into “technology” but the underlying idea is the same. His theory that the only reason violence exists in the world is because of class warfare and that after the proletariats rise up there will be peace on earth is so obviously ridiculous it is more a religious belief than anything else. Regarding overproduction, it is quite clear monopolies are not going to randomly produce an infinite amount of stuff until they bankrupt themselves. That being said, it is the case today that supply vastly exceeds demand due to the augmentation of productive forces. So he was accurate about some stuff despite coming to some ludicrous conclusions.
I always thought it was quite humorous and edifying how many former communist officials in East Germany joined the SD, once the Wall fell. Of course, it was the Greens taking power that served as the textual prelude to the movie Red Dawn.
The difference in genetic potential for intelligence of the working and upper classes was also almost certainly lower at that time, as is implied by the initial burst of social mobility once barriers to advancement were removed.
It is interesting to read those who still idolize Marx today. Many put such broad and reaching interpretations on the text to serve new and different purposes as could be compared to certain new age churches citing scripture. This aligns somewhat with my perhaps dismissive view of Marx as serving the generic purpose of being a vague authority to appeal to, to burnish one’s own power credentials, or to end a debate, as many agnostics will cite God, or some more atheistic people will speciously appeal to science, in a way that is often at best tautological.
On the other hand, these people having the same basic instincts as Marx may indeed be speaking for him, if he were not transplanted through time, but rather born today.
Read Gregory Clark’s research.
In almost every society he studied he’s found social mobility to be about the same as far back as records go.
The major exception is India, where there has apparently never been any significant social mobility at all (lol).
CNBC article on the original paper: https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/30/whats-in-a-name-wealth-and-social-mobility.html
2013 paper is available here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Neil_Cummins/publication/260387815_Surnames_and_Social_Mobility/links/00b49530f4cbf0f685000000.pdf
Preindustrial social mobility is invisible to us as the era before mass schooling, corporations, etc. is foreign to us. A good example is the New Men in England during the end of the Middle Ages. Richard Empson, one of the most powerful men in the realm, was allegedly the son of a sieve maker and smallholder.
East Germany was run by the SED, a fusion of SPD and KPD and the latter, the communist party of Germany was founded and run by former SPD members.
The theory fits together in the very systematic (systematically wrong) way though. It is like a religious theology, but very doctrinaire one – in which people are for the following century, elaborating on the holy texts, or painfully admitting (like in Lenin’s case) when they are adding something not contained in Marx’s texts.
Ideological ‘blue screen of death’, on a third of the human race, for the majority of the century after he lived.
Herzen’s memoir chronicle really needs a wider reading audience in all parts of the political spectrum.
In general, these 19th century writers were of vastly higher and more interesting standard, than of today.
I absolutely loved reading it (the first two volumes at least) when I was 16 or 17. Someone had especially given very nice copies to my school library.
In a agricultural society, is not most of the social mobility downward though? I thought that was the major premiss of A Farewell to Alms Basically, the poor were getting smarter, since the rich had more children on average than the poor. The corollary to that is that economic opportunities are quite limited in an agricultural society. The number of landowners are generally quite few. have large estates, and many are forced to be tenants at will, without a lease or the real possibility to invest in land.
In my view, it is easy to understand how a lot of people got carried away with feelings of universality, both before Marx and afterward. Even observing the stupid and acknowledging heritability, it was perhaps not obvious then what the average potential of man was.
There were many other avenues of opportunity than land ownership.
For instance, one could join a monastic order, which vast numbers of Europeans did during the high middle ages. Some monastic orders entered into trade and manufacturing to support their activities and were very successful. The Cistercians for instance were renowned in brewing and commerce. This also allowed one to become literate, and thus potentially very useful
There was always the option of becoming a soldier, and a valorous (and vicious) man at arms would see his social position rise and gain opportunities for enrichment through plunder. If sufficiently successful he himself might become a noble.
Then there were of course the trades. You could attempt to convince a tradesmen to take you on as an apprentice. There were many instances of peasants apprenticing with blacksmiths of course, and then they themselves ultimately became master blacksmiths rather than mere peasants. Medieval society needed blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, swordsmiths, masons, brick layers, sculptors, carpenters, glaziers, armorers, shipwrights, teamsters, cobblers, tailors, actors, playwrights, painters, accountants, lawyers, glass blowers, jewelers, furriers, milliners, bakers, butchers, and so on.
By the high middle ages substantial international commerce had returned to Europe, so there was the opportunity join a merchant house or become a sailor.
While not exactly what is ordinarily meant by social mobility, one could become a criminal. The Middle Ages had a lot more crime than we do today. Medieval Paris was more dangerous than modern day Detroit and East St. Louis if you can believe it. Highwaymen, brigands, thieves, pirates, outlaws, etc. could and did gain wealth and even fame.
Lastly of course, there was always the opportunity to emigrate to some sort of frontier zone. Marcher lords always needed more soldiers and subjects to keep hostile conquered populations in check. How do you suppose it ended up that so many Germans ended up East of the River Elbe, and even in the Baltic States?
I imagine similar opportunities existed in preindustrial China, Japan, and the Islamic world.
The whole idea that meritocracy only exists in the modern era results from the unprecedented industrial transformation of society, and perhaps the influence of America and communism.
The big social structure difference between preindustrial times and modern times is that the middle classes are now much larger than they were historically, which incidentally was not foreseen by Karl Marx. Orwell has a good essay on this, I’ll try to find it. Also today upper classes largely owe their position to commerce rather than war.
Some further additions to this.
The inequality of wealth in modern societies is far higher than the inequality of income. Gini coefficients for wealth inequality are generally double the income inequality limits.
In the United States for instance, which has the most unequal wealth distribution of any Western country (along with Sweden lol), the top 10% own 75% of all assets in the country. The top 1% about 40%. The top 0.1% has 25%…so more than both 90% combined.
So we’re really not looking at anything very different from preindustrial times. Marx’s observation that capitalism tends to monopoly was in fact not novel, because the exact same thing occurred in preindustrial times.
What is novel in modern society (ignoring industry, science, etc.) is joint-stock corporations and financial markets.
Feudalism of course involved quite a bit of coercion, but let’s not pretend capitalism lacks coercion. The chains of debt are very powerful. There were also many ways for peasants to free themselves of their feudal obligations–depending on their lord and other factors of course. The rapaciousness of the Lords Temporal was powerfully checked by the Lords Spiritual throughout medieval times.
I think this is Marx’s argument in ‘Communist Manifesto” novella. The issue is that industrial process of development, transforms labour to becoming the homogeneous mass, removed of differences and with capacity of a class/revolutionary consciousness.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
Marx can be most simply regarded as a Bullsh*t Artist because he
claimed to know what was unknowable in the 19th century, and remains
unknowable today – how the economies of the world operate. Contemporary
economists, when they are in a charitable mood, give him a grade of D
for his contributions to economics. And economics, as everybody knows but
few are willing to admit, is not a science. How many Nobel Prize- winning
economists predicted the 2007-8 Great Recession? None. The so-called
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences should be abolished because
to use the same word “science” in reference to physics, chemistry, and …
economics is a sacrilege, and I say this as a scientist. Science is still in a
fairly primitive stage. We have a very approximate level of understanding
of simple systems such as those addressed by physics or chemistry.
We don’t understand complex systems such as economies or societies at
all. Physics can’t even solve the 3-body problem except in simple cases.
How can anyone claim to understand and predict the future of a system
consisting of, say, a million individuals?
Freud (or Dr. Fraud as he is known today) was another example of a
B.S. artist because, just like Marx, he claimed to know what was
unknowable in 1918 and remains unknowable a century later – how the
human mind operates. He had the chutzpah or shameless audacity
to make that claim without knowing anything about brain science
or genetics. No wonder Freud at American universities has
been relegated to literature departments.
If somebody like Marx or Freud were alive today, we’d tell them
“Karl (Sigmund), you shmendrik, you forgot to take your meds
again!” My thesis is that Marx (or later Freud) were taken seriously
because people in the 19th century were essentially stupid and
ignorant – levels of literacy and numeracy were extremely low by
today’s standards. We have only become more sophisticated
and therefore more skeptical since WW II. System making along
the lines of Marx or Freud has gone completely out of style. We
know today that Nature does not easily yield her secrets. Systems
are typically nonlinear, and not linear like we’ve been assuming
for 500 years. It’s a hard slog. Progress is glacial at best.
One of the hallmarks of communism is that the revolution always has happened in places where the literacy is relatively low, below a certain threshold. This is one of the reasons I question the influence of Marx.
Do intellectuals have a disproportionate influence in places where the literacy is lower? It’s quite possible, but it does not seem parsimonious.
Here is different take on Marx also lightweight as this anti-review:
Marx Was Right: Five Surprising Ways Karl Marx Predicted 2014
People don’t practice medicine 19th century-style anymore either. But the ideas of Freud’s heirs or other analysts are still taught at the better medical or graduate schools. Jordan Petersen, a Jungian, is at the University of Toronto.
Although the mean level of intelligence is higher now than it was then, in the 19th century the literate and educated classes were probably more intelligent than their modern counterparts, but the masses who outnumbered them were far more ignorant and illiterate (but perhaps, on some level, wiser – as Celine noticed, prior to mass literacy people wouldn’t have voluntarily gotten themselves slaughtered by the millions for the sake of some national flag as they did in the early 20th century). Freud makes for much better reading than does Marx. The masses weren’t the ones interested in his stuff in the 19th century, it was educated upper middle class people.
I am not claiming that Freud was completely or even mostly right, but dismissing him as a total fraud and ascribing his popularity to ignorance and stupidity is incorrect.
Here from Harvard Business Review Was Marx Right?
https://hbr.org/2011/09/was-marx-right
Immiseration, Crisis, Stagnation, Alienation, False consciousness, Commodity fetishism
I honestly can’t work out what he’s trying to imply. What does the fact that Walmart and McDonald’s have to do with false concsiousness? How is stealing video games fetishistic? Does he think that the blacks stealing them made shrines to them, rather than putting the discs into their Playstations?
Please.
People today argue seriously that race does not exist and that the only reason blacks don’t perform well is sorcery and witchcraft (though this has been renamed “institutional racism” or something).
In fact people even claim that shitbulls aren’t inherently more aggressive than other dogs and agitate for laws to prevent local communities from prohibiting shitbulls.
Maybe because people in a grip of a fetish do not see it as fetish and often the false consciousness has something to do with their lack of insight.
English literature of the 18th century is perfectly clear and readable, especially if you compare it’s usage of the time to German or French.
Can you please tell me then, or is there something about this knowledge which means it can only be communicated through obscure implication?
The passage you chose to quote is very interesting because of how thoroughly wrong it is.
The most fundamental error is the idea that society was developing into merely the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. That turned out to be completely false, and all the gradations within classes Marx observed are replicated in newer classes. Machinery created in fact more classes of laborer. Certainly no one in Marx’s time had heard of a CNC operator, a programmer, or an electrician.
Then Marx proceeds to get many other things wrong.
In most of Europe the bourgeoisie was not, in fact, opposed to the nobility. It saw the nobility as a model to emulate and a rank to aspire to. The bourgeoisie wanted political representation of course, but it often got that (e.g. the Free and Imperial Cities Marx alludes to, or of course Britain’s House of Commons). This is often cited by English historians as a reason for British industrial decline for instance. And in Marx’s native Germany the nobility actively participated in industry and commerce. Being a Jew barely removed from the ghetto he probably didn’t know this.
In Marx’s time dowries were still paid, so the money relations of family were well understood.
Then Marx projects the historical Iron Law of Wages, which was quite true in preindustrial times, onto the modern era. That turned out to be a whopper of an error, and was revealed very soon after Marx’s death.
Marx however is correct in noting the increasing labor value of women and the growing demise of small businesses.
I haven’t played with video games since I was a teenager (Doom II, Duke Nukem, Civilizaton I and Civ II, Dune II, Warcraft II, TIE Fighter, Prince of Persia – were these even called video games?), and I can see very little to no value to them (whenever I spent significant time playing them, I felt the time spent totally wasted), but I cannot see how people stealing it are in the grip of a “fetish.”
They steal it because they enjoy playing it, and they don’t think of time spent playing it as wasted time, because they cannot think of more productively spent time, for example reading a book or commenting on The Unz Review.
I fail to see how it’s a “fetish.”
While you’re correct that Freud mostly sold his snake oil to the educated classes, which were probably otherwise of higher quality than they are today (if only because they were a smaller, much more select group), but Freud really was a total fraud, and I think it’s a very bad thing if he’s still being taught at medical schools. (A psychiatrist guy told me some fifteen years ago that in the 1990s at university they had a book with the title of ‘What Freud got wrong’ or similar as required reading. I don’t think he should be taught otherwise.)
”I did earnestly try to read Capital on about three separate occasions in my early twenties, before I wised up and stopped wasting my time on a pointless historical relic.
At a basic level, Marx is just a very poor writer”
Let me see. Someone, who by his own admission, has never even bothered to seriously read Marx … then comes to the conclusion that he (Marx) ‘is a very poor writer’. Hmmm, that’s interesting. Could it possibly be that you are a very poor reader? Too sophisticated was it?
Perhaps a little intellectual humility is called for here.
Marx’s wife was somekind of princess in Germany, while he was bourgeois. There was a documentary about her on Russia K channel last year. After she married him, they live almost in poverty.
The quote is the chapter from the Communist Manifesto.
It’s interesting to read the whole book – I think it was the favourite text of Lenin.
Some parts in this text are very interesting and you can see all the ideas are still used by radicals today: for example one paragraph seems a kind of theory against globalization (this is still a very fashionable style of thinking against ‘multi-national’ businesses):
“All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”
Doubt it… see e.g. Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance. They were pretty enthusiastic about it.
Demographically, makes what Serbia (also highly illiterate at the time) underwent in WW1 seem quaint.
It seems that the main difference is that states back then had less organizational and resource capacity to undertake mass mobilizations. So mobilizing unenthusiastic people (e.g. for the Sun King’s wars) was harder.
While I agree this is a poor style of book review (to not read the book), I don’t blame the fact he could not read the text (it is famous for this).
The easy text to read is ‘Communist Manifesto’ (of the Communist Party) – and it is quite interesting by itself. This would be the more suitable text to review, since it is aimed at normal people, and still has many dangerous ideas that should be shown where they are wrong.
Very true.
I don’t know if Marx wrote about it or even knew about it, but another interesting fact is that during the French Revolution, it was the Second Estate (nobles) who voted the most radically; the Third Estate (bourgeoisie) were the most conservative, with the First (priests) in between.
His wife was the daughter of a baroness.
Hard to call his observations about international trade novel either given that they were written more than four centuries after the voyages of Prince Henry the Navigator.
Large scale international trade in the Baltic and North Seas was in Marx’s time at least 800 years old, and in the Mediterranean has now been going on for 4,000 years.
The Silk Road is 3,000 or more years old, and the Indian Ocean trade is 2,000 years old.
We have actual archaeological records showing things like iron extracted from Spain being turned into industrial products in Italy and from there ending up in China 2,000 years ago. Some tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs from 3,000 years old have silk in them, which was not made outside of China until Byzantine times.
Perhaps we should consider Marx the Malcolm Gladwell of the 19th century.
I’m not sure if this can be said- Estates-General was voted to dissoluted by the Third Estate itself in 1789?
But Marx was representative of this attitude himself, as he was ‘careerist’, who married a woman from a higher status than himself, and did not want his children to play with poor children.
Generally there is romanticization of a feudal world and aristocracy in many paragraphs in the Communist Party Manifesto:
In relation to the French Revolution, he writes:
Louis XIV mobilized the same share of France’s population as Napoleon did, despite not having the levee en masse. 18th century absolutist states were mainly constrained by their limited taxing power, which is one reason Britain was able to consistently punch above its weight.
The Romans suffered 450,000 casualties during the Punic Wars.
Humans have literally evolved to fight and die so this should not be surprising. Our simian predecessors also fight wars against each other.
We mimic this in more civilized ways as well by forming tribes to battle others in commerce, ideas, memes, team sports, etc.
Sorry for trying to be smug. Now, I went back to your original question and after reading it again I feel like taking back the sorry part. Anyway, if you are a Walmart employee and think that all is swell and hunky-dori then most likely you might be in a state of false consciousness but if you realize that you are being exploited and wonder whether at least some trade unions could be established then most likely you are not. False consciousness however, offers less stress and more happiness.
You might be a libertarian who thinks that free agents enter contracts out of free will and there is an infinitude of contract available and our lives are of infinite duration to eventually arrive at the most optimal solution after infinite sequence picking and rejecting all possible options. If this is the case, do not respond.
These paragraphs in the Communist Party Manifesto of 1848, are the same as criticisms of globalization today.
Final paragraph in below quote makes me think of China’s relation with the world economy today:
A lot of the continental nobility ended up fairly radicalized in the 18th century. The fundamental cause was likely the usurpation of their traditional powers, privileges, and role by absolute monarchs. The proximate cause was of course continent-wide status competition by sponsoring “Enlightenment” cranks and digesting their toxic propaganda. The new requirements of nobles to spend endless time at court essentially doing nothing but partying destroyed the vigor of the entire class, and also set in motion the disastrous modern fertility transition.
After the Restoration the nobility tended to alternate between British (constitutional monarchy) and neo-feudal ideas. The class however was basically exhausted outside of perhaps old Prussia.
Tired: The French Revolution destroyed the nobility
Wired: Louis XIV destroyed the nobility
This isn’t a critique. It’s an exaltation.
Marx was in favor of international free trade as he hoped it would increase class consciousness.
I could be wrong, but IIRC Paraguay was a center of Missionary activity and had a surprisingly high literacy rate for its region. It was a sort of South American Prussia. This culture was mostly destroyed in the war that claimed ~70% of the male population.
Literacy in Yugoslavia (pg. 161)
In 1900 Serbian males were 66% illiterate, Yugoslav males overall were 52.5% illiterate.
There is no specific data for 1921 but Yugoslav males overall were 40% illiterate in 1921. If the drop in illiteracy was even across all areas, this would make a rate of about 56% illiteracy for Serb males. This would naturally skew towards older ones – the majority of young fighting-age Serb males was probably literate at the time of World War I. They were capable of being given nationalist propaganda.
Also, Serbia was invaded and occupied.
By all accounts mobilization of young people was enthusiastic.
I found Celine’s funny, and very true, passage:
It’s the philosophers . . . another point to look out for while we’re at it … who first started giving the people ideas . . , when all they’d known up until then was the catechism! They began, so they proclaimed, to educate the people . . . Ah! What truths they had to reveal! Beautiful! brilliant! unprecedented truths! And the people were dazzled! That’s it! they said. That’s the stuff! Let’s go and die for it! The people are always dying to die! That’s the way they are! ‘Long live Diderot!’ they yelled. And ‘Long live Voltaire!’ They, at least, were first-class philosophers. And long live Carnot too, who was so good at organizing victories! And long live everybody! Those guys at least don’t let the beloved people molder in ignorance and fetishism! They show the people the roads of Freedom! Emancipation! Things went fast after that! First teach everybody to read the papers! That’s the way to salvation! Hurry hurry! No more illiterates! We don’t need them anymore! Nothing but citizen soldiers! Who vote! Who read! And who fight! And who march! And send kisses from the front! In no time the people were good and ripe! The enthusiasm of the liberated has to be good for something, doesn’t it? Danton wasn’t eloquent for the hell of it. With a few phrases, so rousing that we can still hear them today, he had the people mobilized before you could say fiddlesticks! That was when the first battalions of emancipated maniacs marched off! … the first voting, flagmatic suckers that Dumouriez led away to get themselves drilled full of holes in Flanders!…The free-gratis soldier . . . was something really new … So new that when Goethe arrived in Valmy, Goethe or not, he was flabbergasted. At the sight of those ragged, impassioned cohorts, who had come of their own free will to get themselves disemboweled by the King of Prussia in defense of a patriotic fiction no one had ever heard of, Goethe realized that he still had much to learn. This day,’ he declaimed grandiloquently as befitted the habits of his genius, ‘marks the beginning of a new era!’ He could say that again! The system proved successful . . . pretty soon they were mass-producing heroes, and in the end, the system was so well perfected that they cost practically nothing. Everyone was delighted. Bismarck, the two Napoleons, Barrès, Elsa the Horsewoman.The religion of the flag promptly replaced the cult of heaven, an old cloud which had already been deflated by the Reformation and reduced to a network of episcopal money boxes. In olden times the fanatical fashion was: ‘Long live Jesus! Burn the heretics!’ . . . But heretics, after all, were few and voluntary . . . Whereas today vast hordes of men are fired with aim and purpose..”
He’s criticizing, but in the same time seeing it as “part of story with a happy ending” as it the disillusionment and destruction of “ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions ” that leads to eventual revolutionary consciousness (this is a religious Messianism element in his narrative).
Nonsense. And some of his insights are even finding empirical support.
http://discovermagazine.com/2014/april/14-the-second-coming-of-sigmund-freud
Skip the article’s sentimental stories in the beginning and you get
Etc., etc.
:::::::::::
His wholesale rejection in some circles (not nearly as much in elite ones) is symptomatic of a general dumbing down of elite society. As is the popularity of pop versions of his ideas in the humanities.
Have you read the book by Freud “Discontent with Civilization”?
I have tried to read this, but did not finish it. (Although it seemed interesting while I was reading it).
Gregory Cochran positively hates him. I’ll find the time, someday, to read Michel Onfray’s book about him, where iirc he absolutely savages him for his scientific “input” but still finds some value in him as a philosopher.
Having had the intuition of unconscious thought carries as much scientific validity as Democritus making a lucky guess about the existence of atoms, though.
I think there are very few writers that one can appreciate through effort. Shakespeare might be one, but he was born in the 1500s and had an obvious poetical bent.
It’s a typical historical pattern. A certain worldview predominates over a generation. Later generations have to violently oppose and discredit it, in order to escape.
But that requires exaggerating a little in the other direction.
We have a similar situation with discussions of existence of racial differences in group intelligence/personality. And in questions of acquired characteristics.
Democritus had no ability to do experiments, and no systematic knowledge of the field. So it is not comparable to modern physics.
Whereas psychology has not yet made any revolutionary steps to systematic knowledge, and is still in the barbaric stage.
The main difference between Freud/Jung, and the current psychology, is that they had a terrible methodology from even a social-science perspective, using stories of individual patients as their evidence, and their own philosophical beliefs and random intuitions.
Whereas in current psychology, there is a strong belief in methodology that uses representative samples, statistical significances, etc.
The newer psychology is obviously an improvement – but it still has no real theory of consciousness, or of systematic physical correlates of consciousness, so it is still not close to approaching a (non-social) scientific standard.
This famous passage, while turgid, is powerful, and a good example of why a 2/10 grade for the whole work is unjust.
Anyone who thinks Freud intuited the unconscious has never read, or even read much about, Hartmann or Schopenhauer.
Only the highest French nobility had to spend a lot of time at court (and incidentally, only they experienced a premature fall in fertility). That didn’t apply to the great majority of the estate.
Clark’s methods are, to put it politely, unsound.
I think that would still be a huge problem, because the lower nobility often looked up to the aristocracy for guidance or ways to emulate. By causing harm to the highest status group in the country (while keeping them high status) could easily have led to lower fertility in the upper classes and later in the general population. I find it interesting that I read somewhere about lower French fertility rates already in the late 18th century.
What I read about Freud is that his ideas were either idiocies (I have read numerous examples), or things which others have developed before him (usually long before him). I’d need to read his corpus to form an independent opinion, and frankly, I’m not that interested, because I trust the authorities I read on it a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Though even if what I read is true, he might be given credit for popularizing those ideas. The problem is, by mixing it up with so much nonsense, he did probably at least as much harm as good.
Could you be a bit more specific?
Freud is (1) a matter of ethnic pride for Jews – like Columbus used to be for Italians, before the PC police came after him. And (2) he is (largely as a consequence of #1) a pop culture phenomenon.
He is, and never was, much else.
Einstein is also #1 and #2. He is more important, but doesn’t really justify being thought of as the greatest brain ever. Other than he has a funny-sounding and therefore memorable name, which isn’t true of a guy like Newton, who has a very easy to remember but humdrum name.
While I do agree that “Capital” is virtually unreadable, I don’t think it is because Marx was a bad writer. Simply, the entire idea of “political economy” is absurd & one can’t extract anything meaningful from whole conceptual framework (surplus value is a metaphysical concept, something Wolfgang Pauli would term as “not even wrong”).
Many eminent economists & historians of ideas have written about Marx’s failures, but- surprise, surprise- the best short analysis of “Capital” is, as far as I’m concerned, not in serious works of Schumpeter, Kolakowski, Austrian school.., but in gossipy Paul Johnson’s “Intellectuals”, chapter on Marx.
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=4AE5E9B2599AFE51303ACA004BA01C06
Surnames don’t mean what he thinks they mean.
No, but the gentry continued to have solid fertility when not only that of dukes had collapsed far below replacement, but a strong decline had set in even for peasants in several parts of the country.
Einstein is most important physicist in the field of theoretical physics, since Newton. Newton is still more famous.
Also everyone who studies mechanics at school should know some basic equations of Newtonian mechanics, as it remains accessible to the student.
In any list by theoretical physicists of greatest theoretical physicists, across different languages – it is:
1. Newton.
2. Einstein.
(Well sometimes, the other way round – but always these two as the top two)
This is for literature. Other fields like philosophy, science, politics, economics, etc – the style of writing should not be relevant to the content.
For example, Kant is a very bad style of writing – but it is one of the most important philosophies.
The other difficulty in reading Marx is that his work is in part a proposal or prediction, and we already have much of the history, which is naturally more interesting.