“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”
Overall summary: Given the rise of socialism in recent years, now seemed like an appropriate time to review the Communist Manifesto. At times I felt that Marx’s writing was keenly insightful, at other times I felt he was in ignorance of basic facts and at other times I felt that he held views that were reasonable at the time, but for which the flaws are now obvious. In particular, I found the first-half much more engaging than I expected because, say what you like about Marx, he’s an engaged and poetic writer. Towards the end, the focused shifted into particular time-bounded political disputes for which I neither had the knowledge to understand nor the interest to acquire. At the start, I felt that I already had a decent grasp of the communist impulse and I haven’t become any more favourable to communism, but reading this rounded out a few more details of the communist critique of capitalism.
Capitalism: Despite being its most famous critic, Marx has a strong appreciation for the power of capitalism. He writes about it sweeping away all the old feudal bonds and how it draws even the most “barbarian” nations into civilisation. He writes about it stripping every occupation previously admired of its halo into its “paid wage labourers”; and undoubtedly some professions are affected far too much by market concerns, but this has to be weighed up against the increase in access that has been brought. He even writes that it has accomplished “wonders far exceeding the Egyptian Pyramids, Roman Acquaducts and Gothic Cathedrals” and his willingness to acknowledge this in such strong terms increased my respect for him. Marx can’t see capitalism as anything, but exploitation; for those who would answer that it lifts all boats, I don’t think he has a strong reply apart from denial that this occurs. To steelman him, even if people are better off financially, they can be worse off overall if they are now working only the simplest, most monotonous jobs. That would have been a stronger argument when much more work was in factories, but with increasing automation, these are precisely those jobs that are disappearing. Another argument would be that over time the capitalists who survive will be those who are best at lowering wage costs, by minimising the use of labour and ensuring that the work is set up to use as much unskilled labour as possible. So even if people were financially better off in the short term, they might be worse off over the long term. However, history seems to have shown the opposite, with modern wages far greater than in pre-industrial, pre-capitalist times.
Class warfare: Marx made several interesting comments on this. How the bourgeoise were often empowered by the monarchy to limit the power of the nobility. That the proletariat should be thought of as a new class, separate from the peasants, since their interests diverge with the later more likely to try rolling things back than to support creating a new order. How the bourgeois would seek help from the proletariat against aristocrats, dragging the proletariat into the political arena. How the proletariat were not unified in Marx’s time, but how improved communication provided the means for national unification. And that a section of the bourgeois who were threatened with falling into the proletariat would join with the proletariat. I definitely think class analysis has value, but I worry how Marxists often don’t be able to see things in any way other than class. We are members of classes; that is true; but we are also individuals and no one way of carving up the space captures all of reality. For example, Marx includes masters/apprentices in his oppressor/oppressed hierarchy, even the though most of the later will eventually become the former
Personal property: It was interesting hearing him talking about abolishing personal property as that is an element of the original communism that seems to be de-emphasised these days, with the focus more on seizing the means of production. I expect that this is related to a change in context; Marx was able to write that private property is done away with for 9/10s of the population, I don’t know how true it was at the time, but it certainly isn’t true today. Nonetheless, I found it interesting that his desire to abolish bourgeois property was similar to the bourgeois desire to abolish feudal property; both believe that the kind of property they want to abolish is based upon exploitation and unearned privilege.
False consciousness: For Marx, the ideas that are dominant in society are just the ideas of the elites. Law, morality and religion are just prejudices of the bourgeois. People don’t structure society based upon ideas, rather the ideas are determined by the structure of society and what allows society to be as productive as possible. Marx doesn’t provide an exact chain of causation, but perhaps he believes that the elites benefit from increases in production and therefore always push society in that direction, in order to realise their short-term interests. The question then arises: if everyone else has a false consciousness why then doesn’t Marx also? Again speculating, perhaps Marx would say when a system is on its last legs, the flaws and contradiction become too large for the elite ideology to remain cover up. Alternatively, perhaps it is only the dominant ideas in society that are determined by the structure of society and other ideas can exist, just without being allowed any real influence. I still feel Marx overstates the power of false consciousness, but at least I now have an answer to this question that’s somewhat reasonable.
It is not obvious to me from reading the text whether you are aware of the distinction between “private property” and “personal property” in Marxism. So, just to make sure: “private property” refers to the means of production (e.g. a factory), and “personal property” refers to things that are not means of production (e.g. a house where you live, clothes, food, toys).
The ownership of “private property” should be collectivized (according to Marx/ists), because… simply said, you can use the means of production to generate profit, then use that profit to buy more means of production, yadda yadda, the rich get exponentially richer on average and the poor get poorer.
With “personal property” this effect does not happen; if you have one table and I have two tables, there is no way for me to use this advantage to generate further tables, until I become the table-lord of the planet.
(There seem to be problems with this distinction. For example, things can be used either productively or unproductively; I can use my computer to create software or browse social networks. Some things can be used productively in unexpected ways; even the extra table could be used in a workshop to produce stuff. I am not a Marxist, but I suppose the answer would probably be something like “you are allowed to browse the web on your personal computer, but if we catch you privately producing and selling software, you get shot”.)
Marx was able to write that private property is done away with for 9/10s of the population, I don’t know how true it was at the time, but it certainly isn’t true today.
So, is this the confusion of Marxist terms, or do you mean that today more than 10% of people own means of production? In which sense? (Not sure if Marx would also count indirect ownership, such as having your money in an index fund, which buys shares of companies, which own the means of production.)
Did Marx actually argue for abolishing “personal proprety” (according to his definition, i.e. ownership of houses or food)?
For many people nowadays, their own brain is their means of production, often assisted by computers and their software, but those are cheap compared what what can be earned by using them. Marx did not know of such things, of course, but how do modern Marxists view this type of private ownership of means of production? For that matter, how did Marx view a village cobbler who owned his workshop and all his tools? Hated exploiter of his neighbours? How narrow was his motte here?
I once talked about this with a guy who identified as a Marxist, though I can’t say how much his opinions are representative for the rest of his tribe. Anyway… he told me that in the trichotomy of Capital / Land / Labor, human talent is economically most similar to the Land category. This is counter-intuitive if you take the three labels literally, but if you consider their supposed properties… well, it’s been a few decades since I studied economics, but roughly:
The defining property of Capital is fungibility. You can use money to buy a tech company, or an airplane factory, or a farm with cows. You can use it to start a company in USA, or in India. There is nothing that locks money to a specific industry or a specific place. Therefore, in a hypothetical perfectly free global market, the risk-adjusted profit rates would become the same globally. (Because if investing the money in cows gives you 5% per annum, but investing money in airplanes gives you 10%, people will start selling cow farms and buying airplane factories. This will reduce the number of cow farms, thus increasing their profit, and increase the competition in the airplane market, thus reducing their profit, until the numbers become equal.) If anything is fungible in the same way, you can classify it as Capital.
The archetypal example of Labor is a low-qualified worker, replaceable at any moment by a random member of the population. Which also means that in a free market, all workers would get the same wage; otherwise the employers would simply fire the more expensive ones and replace them with the cheaper ones. However, unlike money, workers are typically not free to move across borders, so you get different wages in different countries. (You can’t build a new factory in the middle of USA, and move ten thousand Indian workers there to work for you. You could do it the other way round: move the money, and build the factory in India instead. But if there are reasons to keep the factory in USA, you are stuck with American workers.) But within country it means that as long as a fraction of population is literally starving, you can hire them for the smallest amount of money they can survive with, which sets the equilibrium wage on that level. Because those starving ones won’t say no, and anyone who wants to be paid more will be replaced by those who accept the lower wage. Hypothetically, if you had more available job positions than workers, the wages would go up… but according to Malthus, this lucky generation of workers would simply have many kids, which would fix this exception in the next generation. -- Unless the number of job positions for low-qualified workers can keep growing faster than the population. But even in that case, the capitalists would probably successfully lobby the government to fix the problem by letting many immigrants in. Somewhere on the planet, there are enough starving people. Also, if the working people are paid just as much as they need to survive, they can hardly save money, so they can’t get out of this trap.
Now the category of Land contains everything that is scarce, so it usually goes to the highest bidder. But no matter how much rent you get for the land, you cannot use the rent to generate more of it. So, in long term the land will get even more expensive, and a lot of increased productivity will be captured by the land owners.
From this perspective, being born with a IQ 200 brain is like having inherited a gold mine, which would belong to the Land category. Some people need your for their business, and they can’t replace you with a random guy on the street. The number of potential jobs for IQ 200 people exceeds the number of IQ 200 people, so the employers must bid for your brain. But it is different from the land in the sense that it’s you who has to work using your brain; you can’t simply rent your brain to a factory and let some cheap worker operate it. Perhaps this would be equivalent to a magical gold mine, where only the owner can enter, so if he wants to profit from owning the gold mine, he has to also do all the work. Nonetheless, he gets extra profit from the fact that he owns the gold mine. So it’s like he offers the employer a package consisting of his time + his brain. And his salary could be interpreted as consisting of two parts: the wage, for the time he spends using his brain (which is numerically equivalent to how much money a worker would get for working the same amount of time); and the rent for the brain, that is the extra money compared to the worker. (For example, suppose that workers in your country are paid $500 monthly, and software developers are paid $2000 monthly. That would mean that for an individual software developer, the $500 is the wage for his work, and $1500 is the rent for using his brain.) That means that extraordinarily smart employees are (smaller) part working class, and (greater) part rentier class. They should be reminded that if, one day, enough people become equally smart (whether through eugenics, genetic engineering, selective immigration, etc.), their income will also drop to the smallest amount of money they can survive with.
As I said, no idea whether this is an orthodox or a heretical opinion within Marxism.
IANAM[1], but intuitively it seems to me that an exception ought to be made (given the basic idea of Marxist theory) for individuals who own means of production the use of which, however, does not involve any labor but their own.
So in the case of the village cobbler, sure, he owns the means of production, but he’s the only one mixing his labor with the use of those tools. Clearly, he can’t be exploiting anyone. Should the cobbler take on an assistant (continuing my intuitive take on the theory), said assistant would presumably have to now receive some suitable share in the ownership of the workshop/tools/etc., and in the profits from the business (rather than merely being paid a wage), as any other arrangement would constitute alienation from the fruits of his (the assistant’s) labor.
On this interpretation, there does not here seem to be any contradiction or inconsistency in the theory. (I make no comment, of course, on the theory’s overall plausibility, which is a different matter entirely.)
Book Review: Communist Manifesto
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”
Overall summary: Given the rise of socialism in recent years, now seemed like an appropriate time to review the Communist Manifesto. At times I felt that Marx’s writing was keenly insightful, at other times I felt he was in ignorance of basic facts and at other times I felt that he held views that were reasonable at the time, but for which the flaws are now obvious. In particular, I found the first-half much more engaging than I expected because, say what you like about Marx, he’s an engaged and poetic writer. Towards the end, the focused shifted into particular time-bounded political disputes for which I neither had the knowledge to understand nor the interest to acquire. At the start, I felt that I already had a decent grasp of the communist impulse and I haven’t become any more favourable to communism, but reading this rounded out a few more details of the communist critique of capitalism.
Capitalism: Despite being its most famous critic, Marx has a strong appreciation for the power of capitalism. He writes about it sweeping away all the old feudal bonds and how it draws even the most “barbarian” nations into civilisation. He writes about it stripping every occupation previously admired of its halo into its “paid wage labourers”; and undoubtedly some professions are affected far too much by market concerns, but this has to be weighed up against the increase in access that has been brought. He even writes that it has accomplished “wonders far exceeding the Egyptian Pyramids, Roman Acquaducts and Gothic Cathedrals” and his willingness to acknowledge this in such strong terms increased my respect for him. Marx can’t see capitalism as anything, but exploitation; for those who would answer that it lifts all boats, I don’t think he has a strong reply apart from denial that this occurs. To steelman him, even if people are better off financially, they can be worse off overall if they are now working only the simplest, most monotonous jobs. That would have been a stronger argument when much more work was in factories, but with increasing automation, these are precisely those jobs that are disappearing. Another argument would be that over time the capitalists who survive will be those who are best at lowering wage costs, by minimising the use of labour and ensuring that the work is set up to use as much unskilled labour as possible. So even if people were financially better off in the short term, they might be worse off over the long term. However, history seems to have shown the opposite, with modern wages far greater than in pre-industrial, pre-capitalist times.
Class warfare: Marx made several interesting comments on this. How the bourgeoise were often empowered by the monarchy to limit the power of the nobility. That the proletariat should be thought of as a new class, separate from the peasants, since their interests diverge with the later more likely to try rolling things back than to support creating a new order. How the bourgeois would seek help from the proletariat against aristocrats, dragging the proletariat into the political arena. How the proletariat were not unified in Marx’s time, but how improved communication provided the means for national unification. And that a section of the bourgeois who were threatened with falling into the proletariat would join with the proletariat. I definitely think class analysis has value, but I worry how Marxists often don’t be able to see things in any way other than class. We are members of classes; that is true; but we are also individuals and no one way of carving up the space captures all of reality. For example, Marx includes masters/apprentices in his oppressor/oppressed hierarchy, even the though most of the later will eventually become the former
Personal property: It was interesting hearing him talking about abolishing personal property as that is an element of the original communism that seems to be de-emphasised these days, with the focus more on seizing the means of production. I expect that this is related to a change in context; Marx was able to write that private property is done away with for 9/10s of the population, I don’t know how true it was at the time, but it certainly isn’t true today. Nonetheless, I found it interesting that his desire to abolish bourgeois property was similar to the bourgeois desire to abolish feudal property; both believe that the kind of property they want to abolish is based upon exploitation and unearned privilege.
False consciousness: For Marx, the ideas that are dominant in society are just the ideas of the elites. Law, morality and religion are just prejudices of the bourgeois. People don’t structure society based upon ideas, rather the ideas are determined by the structure of society and what allows society to be as productive as possible. Marx doesn’t provide an exact chain of causation, but perhaps he believes that the elites benefit from increases in production and therefore always push society in that direction, in order to realise their short-term interests. The question then arises: if everyone else has a false consciousness why then doesn’t Marx also? Again speculating, perhaps Marx would say when a system is on its last legs, the flaws and contradiction become too large for the elite ideology to remain cover up. Alternatively, perhaps it is only the dominant ideas in society that are determined by the structure of society and other ideas can exist, just without being allowed any real influence. I still feel Marx overstates the power of false consciousness, but at least I now have an answer to this question that’s somewhat reasonable.
It is not obvious to me from reading the text whether you are aware of the distinction between “private property” and “personal property” in Marxism. So, just to make sure: “private property” refers to the means of production (e.g. a factory), and “personal property” refers to things that are not means of production (e.g. a house where you live, clothes, food, toys).
The ownership of “private property” should be collectivized (according to Marx/ists), because… simply said, you can use the means of production to generate profit, then use that profit to buy more means of production, yadda yadda, the rich get exponentially richer on average and the poor get poorer.
With “personal property” this effect does not happen; if you have one table and I have two tables, there is no way for me to use this advantage to generate further tables, until I become the table-lord of the planet.
(There seem to be problems with this distinction. For example, things can be used either productively or unproductively; I can use my computer to create software or browse social networks. Some things can be used productively in unexpected ways; even the extra table could be used in a workshop to produce stuff. I am not a Marxist, but I suppose the answer would probably be something like “you are allowed to browse the web on your personal computer, but if we catch you privately producing and selling software, you get shot”.)
So, is this the confusion of Marxist terms, or do you mean that today more than 10% of people own means of production? In which sense? (Not sure if Marx would also count indirect ownership, such as having your money in an index fund, which buys shares of companies, which own the means of production.)
Did Marx actually argue for abolishing “personal proprety” (according to his definition, i.e. ownership of houses or food)?
For many people nowadays, their own brain is their means of production, often assisted by computers and their software, but those are cheap compared what what can be earned by using them. Marx did not know of such things, of course, but how do modern Marxists view this type of private ownership of means of production? For that matter, how did Marx view a village cobbler who owned his workshop and all his tools? Hated exploiter of his neighbours? How narrow was his motte here?
I once talked about this with a guy who identified as a Marxist, though I can’t say how much his opinions are representative for the rest of his tribe. Anyway… he told me that in the trichotomy of Capital / Land / Labor, human talent is economically most similar to the Land category. This is counter-intuitive if you take the three labels literally, but if you consider their supposed properties… well, it’s been a few decades since I studied economics, but roughly:
The defining property of Capital is fungibility. You can use money to buy a tech company, or an airplane factory, or a farm with cows. You can use it to start a company in USA, or in India. There is nothing that locks money to a specific industry or a specific place. Therefore, in a hypothetical perfectly free global market, the risk-adjusted profit rates would become the same globally. (Because if investing the money in cows gives you 5% per annum, but investing money in airplanes gives you 10%, people will start selling cow farms and buying airplane factories. This will reduce the number of cow farms, thus increasing their profit, and increase the competition in the airplane market, thus reducing their profit, until the numbers become equal.) If anything is fungible in the same way, you can classify it as Capital.
The archetypal example of Labor is a low-qualified worker, replaceable at any moment by a random member of the population. Which also means that in a free market, all workers would get the same wage; otherwise the employers would simply fire the more expensive ones and replace them with the cheaper ones. However, unlike money, workers are typically not free to move across borders, so you get different wages in different countries. (You can’t build a new factory in the middle of USA, and move ten thousand Indian workers there to work for you. You could do it the other way round: move the money, and build the factory in India instead. But if there are reasons to keep the factory in USA, you are stuck with American workers.) But within country it means that as long as a fraction of population is literally starving, you can hire them for the smallest amount of money they can survive with, which sets the equilibrium wage on that level. Because those starving ones won’t say no, and anyone who wants to be paid more will be replaced by those who accept the lower wage. Hypothetically, if you had more available job positions than workers, the wages would go up… but according to Malthus, this lucky generation of workers would simply have many kids, which would fix this exception in the next generation. -- Unless the number of job positions for low-qualified workers can keep growing faster than the population. But even in that case, the capitalists would probably successfully lobby the government to fix the problem by letting many immigrants in. Somewhere on the planet, there are enough starving people. Also, if the working people are paid just as much as they need to survive, they can hardly save money, so they can’t get out of this trap.
Now the category of Land contains everything that is scarce, so it usually goes to the highest bidder. But no matter how much rent you get for the land, you cannot use the rent to generate more of it. So, in long term the land will get even more expensive, and a lot of increased productivity will be captured by the land owners.
From this perspective, being born with a IQ 200 brain is like having inherited a gold mine, which would belong to the Land category. Some people need your for their business, and they can’t replace you with a random guy on the street. The number of potential jobs for IQ 200 people exceeds the number of IQ 200 people, so the employers must bid for your brain. But it is different from the land in the sense that it’s you who has to work using your brain; you can’t simply rent your brain to a factory and let some cheap worker operate it. Perhaps this would be equivalent to a magical gold mine, where only the owner can enter, so if he wants to profit from owning the gold mine, he has to also do all the work. Nonetheless, he gets extra profit from the fact that he owns the gold mine. So it’s like he offers the employer a package consisting of his time + his brain. And his salary could be interpreted as consisting of two parts: the wage, for the time he spends using his brain (which is numerically equivalent to how much money a worker would get for working the same amount of time); and the rent for the brain, that is the extra money compared to the worker. (For example, suppose that workers in your country are paid $500 monthly, and software developers are paid $2000 monthly. That would mean that for an individual software developer, the $500 is the wage for his work, and $1500 is the rent for using his brain.) That means that extraordinarily smart employees are (smaller) part working class, and (greater) part rentier class. They should be reminded that if, one day, enough people become equally smart (whether through eugenics, genetic engineering, selective immigration, etc.), their income will also drop to the smallest amount of money they can survive with.
As I said, no idea whether this is an orthodox or a heretical opinion within Marxism.
IANAM[1], but intuitively it seems to me that an exception ought to be made (given the basic idea of Marxist theory) for individuals who own means of production the use of which, however, does not involve any labor but their own.
So in the case of the village cobbler, sure, he owns the means of production, but he’s the only one mixing his labor with the use of those tools. Clearly, he can’t be exploiting anyone. Should the cobbler take on an assistant (continuing my intuitive take on the theory), said assistant would presumably have to now receive some suitable share in the ownership of the workshop/tools/etc., and in the profits from the business (rather than merely being paid a wage), as any other arrangement would constitute alienation from the fruits of his (the assistant’s) labor.
On this interpretation, there does not here seem to be any contradiction or inconsistency in the theory. (I make no comment, of course, on the theory’s overall plausibility, which is a different matter entirely.)
I Am Not A Marxist.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm
Thanks for clarifying this terminology, I wasn’t aware of this distinction when I wrote this post
Before I even got to your comment, I was thinking “You can pry my laptop out of my cold dead hands Marx!”
Thank you for this clarification on personal vs private property.