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> We hopefully have learned a few thing since. I think we've mostly learned that Marx was right. You seem to be thinking of Marx from the sort of popular fict

> We hopefully have learned a few thing since. I think we've mostly learned that Marx was right. You seem to be thinking of Marx from the sort of popular fiction of someone that protests capitalism as some great injustice. Marx's logic, at least in Capital, isn't that Capitalism is a moral evil, or that Capitalists are bad people (in fact he argues pretty clearly that the moral character of individual capitalists is irrelevant). Marx's central point is that Capitalism is a system filled with internal contradictions that will continually manifest themselves as crises. These crises will continue until the system finally becomes unstable an collapse. Marx's vision of course was that it would collapse into socialism, but his utopia solutions can be viewed quite independently from his theory of capital. Marx predicted a fairly large portion of our world today: the increasing globalization of capitalism, growing interdependence of labor and capitalist classes, increasing fragility of the labor class, the development of the credit system and financial system to temporarily resolve some of these contradictions. If there is a good critique of Marx it is that he failed to predict the ecological and environmental damage that capitalism would bring. He failed to fully understand the way that these contradiction work with resource use.

kylestlb 6y ago
Thanks for posting this so I didn't have to. I think if contemporary dialogue about Marx focused more on Capital and less on The Communist Manifesto we'd have less confusion about what Marx was trying to say. I think it's perfectly okay to agree with his concept of dialectical materialism and also disagree with the statist solution put forth in the manifesto.
- gmtx725 6y ago
  Exactly, the communist manifesto is a short throwaway propaganda pamphlet that is for some reason held up as the apex of his work. Whereas Das Kapital, a mammoth 3-volume serious academic undertaking, and his real magnum opus, is ignored.
QuesnayJr 6y ago
We've mostly learned that Marx was wrong. The fact that capitalism was prone to crises, i.e. the business cycle, was a familiar fact by the time Marx wrote Capital. Marx argued that these derived from the fact that in capitalism capital could only come from impoverishing workers, and once capitalism ran out of workers to impoverish, time would run out and the whole system would collapse. Pretty clearly that's not what happened, and whatever the many flaws of capitalism it led to rising living standards. Even now, when inequality has increased in the US, living standards have risen for large sectors of the work force (software developers, for example) while it has stagnated for others. So the central prediction of Marx has failed to come to pass. We also understand the business cycle in a way that Marx didn't. It's not really his fault -- Capital is 150 years old -- but we have much better explanations of the business cycle, thanks to John Maynard Keynes. We now know that money and banking is central to the cycle, and that the government can act to ameliorate the cycle. The financial crisis of 2008 essentially recreated the starting conditions of the Great Depression, and even though the government response was far from optimal (there was lots of talk of "expansionary austerity"), we had nowhere near the disaster of the Great Depression. We also understand economic growth better than Marx did. In Marx' day, the idea was that capitalists would steal from the workers to build factories, and then once this process was over the final crisis would hit. He did not know the endless march of technological advance that would follow. (To be fair, how could he? No one can see the future.) We know from Robert Solow's research on growth theory that most of the rise in output is not from building factories, but from technological advance. Marx also didn't really understand the role of finance in the economy. Since capital can only come from worker exploitation, there's no role for savings or investment. You can see how the communist economies struggled with this. The only idea they had for funding development was expropriation, so they would just have the state do the expropriating. (This is the source of the criticism of the Soviet Union and Maoist China for being "state capitalist"). There's no role for people saving for the future. TIAA/CREF and the Norwegian wealth fund cannot exist. There's no role for investors trying to diversify risk. There's no role for entrepreneurs trying to raise money to fund future technological advance. That is why when China switched to capitalist development, it averaged 6% economic growth for like 50 years. Strikingly, they still teach Marx in schools in China, but they didn't become the world power they are today until they started ignoring him.
biomene 6y ago
Thank you for bringing up the point that Capitalists aren't evil, or that Capitalism should be rejected for moral reasons, I think many people miss that. But I'm not sure we can talk about a central point in Capital. Capital is a description of a system based on private commodity production, for exchange. It has many points, and one of them is the one you mention about the inevitable replacement of the capitalist mode of production with communism, and it comes at the end of Vol 1. Funnily enough, I believe it's the only point he asserts without arguments, and it's, as we know, thoroughly wrong. If I had to highlight one important point from Capital, I think Marx's explanation for why the mass poverty of workers is an inescapable necessity for the capitalist mode of production would get my vote (chapters 4, 5, 6 of volume 1). It's an argument he was the first to develop, and that many people still refuse to acknowledge. You are very right to point out that Capital does indeed predict many phenomena that we see today. In general, Capital holds up as a description of how the capitalist mode of production works.

kylestlb 6y ago

Thanks for posting this so I didn't have to. I think if contemporary dialogue about Marx focused more on Capital and less on The Communist Manifesto we'd have less confusion about what Marx was trying to say. I think it's perfectly okay to agree with his concept of dialectical materialism and also disagree with the statist solution put forth in the manifesto.

gmtx725 6y ago
Exactly, the communist manifesto is a short throwaway propaganda pamphlet that is for some reason held up as the apex of his work. Whereas Das Kapital, a mammoth 3-volume serious academic undertaking, and his real magnum opus, is ignored.

QuesnayJr 6y ago

We've mostly learned that Marx was wrong. The fact that capitalism was prone to crises, i.e. the business cycle, was a familiar fact by the time Marx wrote Capital. Marx argued that these derived from the fact that in capitalism capital could only come from impoverishing workers, and once capitalism ran out of workers to impoverish, time would run out and the whole system would collapse. Pretty clearly that's not what happened, and whatever the many flaws of capitalism it led to rising living standards. Even now, when inequality has increased in the US, living standards have risen for large sectors of the work force (software developers, for example) while it has stagnated for others. So the central prediction of Marx has failed to come to pass. We also understand the business cycle in a way that Marx didn't. It's not really his fault -- Capital is 150 years old -- but we have much better explanations of the business cycle, thanks to John Maynard Keynes. We now know that money and banking is central to the cycle, and that the government can act to ameliorate the cycle. The financial crisis of 2008 essentially recreated the starting conditions of the Great Depression, and even though the government response was far from optimal (there was lots of talk of "expansionary austerity"), we had nowhere near the disaster of the Great Depression. We also understand economic growth better than Marx did. In Marx' day, the idea was that capitalists would steal from the workers to build factories, and then once this process was over the final crisis would hit. He did not know the endless march of technological advance that would follow. (To be fair, how could he? No one can see the future.) We know from Robert Solow's research on growth theory that most of the rise in output is not from building factories, but from technological advance. Marx also didn't really understand the role of finance in the economy. Since capital can only come from worker exploitation, there's no role for savings or investment. You can see how the communist economies struggled with this. The only idea they had for funding development was expropriation, so they would just have the state do the expropriating. (This is the source of the criticism of the Soviet Union and Maoist China for being "state capitalist"). There's no role for people saving for the future. TIAA/CREF and the Norwegian wealth fund cannot exist. There's no role for investors trying to diversify risk. There's no role for entrepreneurs trying to raise money to fund future technological advance. That is why when China switched to capitalist development, it averaged 6% economic growth for like 50 years. Strikingly, they still teach Marx in schools in China, but they didn't become the world power they are today until they started ignoring him.

biomene 6y ago

Thank you for bringing up the point that Capitalists aren't evil, or that Capitalism should be rejected for moral reasons, I think many people miss that. But I'm not sure we can talk about a central point in Capital. Capital is a description of a system based on private commodity production, for exchange. It has many points, and one of them is the one you mention about the inevitable replacement of the capitalist mode of production with communism, and it comes at the end of Vol 1. Funnily enough, I believe it's the only point he asserts without arguments, and it's, as we know, thoroughly wrong. If I had to highlight one important point from Capital, I think Marx's explanation for why the mass poverty of workers is an inescapable necessity for the capitalist mode of production would get my vote (chapters 4, 5, 6 of volume 1). It's an argument he was the first to develop, and that many people still refuse to acknowledge. You are very right to point out that Capital does indeed predict many phenomena that we see today. In general, Capital holds up as a description of how the capitalist mode of production works.