Michel Foucault, 1975
‘Right-libertarianism’ is in fact almost entirely the creation of [Marxist state socialist] G.A. Cohen, who both came up with the labels ‘right-libertarianism’ and ‘left-libertarianism’ and an enormously influential reading of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia that greatly exaggerates the role and the fundamentality of self-ownership within that work and within natural rights libertarianism at large.
… Cohen says that Nozick makes the ‘blithe assumption’[4] that the earth is naturally unowned. But surely there is nothing irresponsible about beginning with non-belief in a natural right to the earth. Just as rights of self-ownership cannot properly be assumed to exist, so also original rights over extra-personal raw stuff cannot properly be assumed to exist.
Moreover, our pre-theoretical judgments on behalf self-ownership are much more powerful and inescapable than any pre-theoretical judgments that can be mustered on behalf of an original and equal right over raw extra-personal stuff. Pre-theoretical judgments on behalf of self-ownership powerfully answer to or articulate our sense that it is not merely a very bad thing for any (innocent, non-aggressing) individual to be killed, maimed, enslaved, and so on; they answer to our sense that such harmings deeply wrong those who are subject to them and that each individual has a distinct moral claim against herself being subjected to such treatment. … These pre-theoretical judgments seem to be inescapable within any rights-oriented approach.
"Eric Mack, philosophy prof at the University of Rochester writing an essay on land rights for the ongoing symposium at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (2012)
Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951)
Xavier was as dedicated as an early Christian. I have often wondered what became of him. It seemed to me even in the long run he would have done more for his Indian peons whose lives he had such a passion to uplift by painting them than by proselytizing them. Art even if it’s worthless does little harm. At its best it furnishes an immense life to the human spirit. Politics in our day, has become as destructive as religion was in the fifteenth century.
"John Dos Passos, The Best Times, An Informal Memoir (New York: The New American Library, 1966) p.171
Examples of the ‘negation of the negation’ given by Engels (Anti-Duhring) may be sound Hegelianism, but otherwise they appear rather silly. A seed of barley falls into the ground and germinates: negation of the seed. In the autumn it produces more grains of barley: negation of the negation. A butterfly comes from an egg: negation of the egg. After many transformations, the butterfly mates and dies, negation of the negation. … Marx’s summary of Hegelianism is not without entertainment value, especially so, perhaps, if left in the French of La Misere de la Philosophie:
‘Le oui devenant non, le non devenant oui, le oui devenant a la fois oui et non, le non devenant a la fois non et oui, les contraires se balancent, se neutralisent, se paralysent.’ [Yes becomes no, no becomes yes, yes becomes at the same time yes and no, no becomes at the same time no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralize, and paralyze each other.]
"Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition (London, 1946) p.300
All of Marx’s important prophecies have turned out to be false.
First, he predicted growing class polarization and the disappearance of the middle class in societies based on a market economy. Karl Kautsky rightly stressed that if this prediction were wrong, the entire Marxist theory would be in ruins. It is clear that this prediction has proved to be wrong; rather, the opposite is the case. The middle classes are growing, whereas the working class in the sense Marx meant it has been dwindling in capitalist societies in the midst of technological progress.
Second, he predicted not only the relative but also the absolute impoverishment of the working class. This prediction was already wrong in his lifetime. As a matter of fact, it should be noticed that the author of Capital updated in the second edition various statistics and figures but not those relating to workers’ wages; those figures, if updated, would have contradicted his theory. Not even the most doctrinaire Marxists have tried to cling to this obviously false prediction in recent decades.
Third, and most importantly, Marx’s theory predicted the inevitability of the proletarian revolution. Such a revolution has never occurred anywhere. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had nothing to do with Marxian prophesies. Its driving force was not a conflict between the industrial working class and capital, but rather was carried out under slogans that had no socialist, let alone Marxist, content: Peace and land for peasants. There is no need to mention that these slogans were to be subsequently turned into their opposite. What in the twentieth century perhaps comes closest to the working class revolution were the events in Poland of 1980-81: the revolutionary movement of industrial workers (very strongly supported by the intelligentsia) against the exploiters, that is to say, the state. And this solitary example of a working class revolution (if even this may be counted) was directed against a socialist state, and carried out under the sign of the cross, with the blessing of the Pope.
In the fourth place, one must mention Marx’s prediction concerning the inevitable fall of the profit rate, a process that was supposed to lead ultimately to the collapse of the capitalist economy. Not unlike the others, this prediction proved to be simply wrong. Even according to Marx’s theory, this could not be an inevitably operating regularity, because the same technical development that lowers the part of the variable capital in production costs is supposed to lower the value of the constant capitaý. Therefore the profit rate might remain stable or increase even if what Marx called “living labor” declines for a given unit of output. And even if this “law” were true, the mechanism whereby its operation would cause the decline and demise of capitalism is inconceivable, since the collapse of the profit rate can very well occur in conditions in which the absolute amount of profit is growing. This was noticed, for what it’s worth, by Rosa Luxemburg, who invented a theory of her own about the inescapable collapse of capitalism, which proved to be no less wrong.
The fifth tenet of Marxism that has turned out to be erroneous is the prediction that the market will hamper technical progress. The exact opposite has quite obviously proved to be the case. Market economies have been shown to be extremely efficient in stimulating technological progress, whereas “real socialism” turned out to be technologically stagnating. Since it is undeniable that the market has created the greatest abundance ever known in human history, some neo-Marxists have felt compelled to change their approach. At one time, capitalism appeared horrifying because it produced misery; later, it turned out to be horrifying because it produces such abundance that it kills culture.
Neo-Marxists deplore what is called “consumerism,” or “consumerist society.” In our civilization there are indeed many alarming and deplorable phenomena associated with the growth of consumption. The point is, however, that what we know as the alternative to this civilization is incomparably worse. In all Communist societies, economic reforms (to the extent that they yielded any results at all) led invariably in the same direction: the partial restoration of the market, that is to say, of “capitalism.”
As for the so-called materialist interpretation of history, it has provided us with a number of interesting insights and suggestions, but it has no explanatory value. In its strong, rigid version, for which one may find considerable support in many classical texts, it implies that social development depends entirely on the class struggle that ultimately, through the intermediary of changing “modes of production,” is determined by the technological level of the society in question. It implies, moreover, that law, religion, philosophy, and other elements of culture have no history of their own, since their history is the history of the relations of production. This is an absurd claim, completely lacking in historical support.
If, on the other hand, the theory is taken in a weak, limited sense, it merely says that the history of culture has to be investigated in such a way that one should take account of social struggles and conflicting interests, that political institutions depend in part, at least negatively, on technological development and on social conflicts. This, however, is an uncontroversial banality that was known long before Marx. And so, the materialist interpretation of history is either nonsense or a banality.
Another component of Marx’s theory that lacks explanatory power is his labor theory. Marx made two important additions to the theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. First, he stated that in relationships between workers and capital, the labor force, rather than labor, is being sold; secondly, he made a distinction between abstract and concrete labor. Neither of these principles has any empirical basis, and neither is needed to explain crises, competition, and conflict of interest. Crises and economic cycles are understandable by analyzing the movement of prices, and the theory of value adds nothing to our understanding of them. It seems that contemporary economics—as distinct from economical ideologies—would not differ much from what it is today if Marx had never been born.
The tenets I have mentioned are not chosen at random: they constitute the skeleton of the Marxian doctrine.
—Leszek Kolakowski, “What Is Left of Socialism?” First Things (2002)
(Source: whakahekeheke)
I simply refuse to join people who show how their hearts are bleeding to death when they hear about any, big or minor, (and rightly condemnable) injustice in the US but suddenly become wise historiosophists or cool rationalists when told about worse horrors of the new alternative society.
…
This is one, but not the only one, reason of the spontaneous and almost universal mistrust people from Eastern Europe nourish towards the Western New Left. By a strange coincidence the majority of these ungrateful people, once they come to or settle in Western Europe or in the US, pass for reactionaries. These narrow empiricists and egoists extrapolate a poor few decades of their petty personal experience (logically inadmissible, as you rightly notice) and find in it pretexts to cast doubts on the radiant socialist future elaborated on the best Marxist-Leninist grounds.
"Leszek Kolakowski, “My Correct Views on Everything” in Socialist Register (1974)
Reading this rejoinder to a socialist by the prominent ex-Marxist Kolakowski, I am reminded what an incredible intellectual giant he was… and what an incredible, dripping demolition of Marxism his article and books were. Should all be required reading for the dilettante half-wits who still call themselves Marxist socialists.
I’m trying to put myself in the mindset of the advocate of a labor theory of value, and obviously LTVers don’t think everyone’s labor is equally valuable. Maybe some think that with the right environment almost all people will become essentially the same, or believe that the current differences between people within the US is primarily a result of environment, but these beliefs don’t proclaim that all have equal value of their production.
Of course the Marxist LTV argument implodes very quickly, as the value of one’s labor is determined by socially necessary labor time. See, the mud pie isn’t valuable because, while there was in fact much labor time put into making it, it doesn’t have much socially necessary labor time. And what is socially necessary is that which produces something that satisfies the subjective desires of others. Oh, no, wait, aaah!
Attempting to make some syllogistic argument for the LTV fails very plainly. So I think their pathos is analog: clearly, so they think, John D Rockefeller’s labor isn’t a billion times as great as a subsistence farmer in the Congo. Maybe ten times, maybe 100 times, but not a billion. And all of the argumentation for the LTV is just after the fact rationalization for something they “know” to be true.
Now why does a diamond sell for so much more than water? Water is much more vital than diamonds. We can live without diamonds, we cannot live without water.
And direct labor is much more vital than indirect labor. We can live without capitalists and the captains of industry, we cannot live without people actually working the fields, factories and workshops.
But water is abundant, diamonds are rare. People who can fill an assembly line, take your order, stock shelves, deliver things, are abundant. People who can create an innovation that saves more resources than it costs and is willing to risk it all for it and is able to manage whatever operation needs to be done to implement the plan, are rare.
If you were in a desert and had a shortage of water and were about to die, you would probably value a bucket of water more than a bucket of diamonds. If an area had a shortage of direct workers and people were about to go hungry, a person would make more money farming than starting a shipping company. Why, because in that situation people value the simple production of food more than a more efficient supply chain.
The capitalist-welder paradox is solved just as easily as the diamond-water paradox. And like a diamond being perhaps a million times more valuable than a drop of water, a successful capitalist can be a million times more valuable than a janitor.
Excellent explanation of a fundamental (though understandable) error committed by many leftists.
(Source: fringeelements)
