What should we change in terms of Marxism? First, the reduction of societal epochs to a strict base-superstructure model. It's a crass economism that really has little historical justification, and if it does, it is stretched. Second, the labor theory of value that Marx espoused is innacurate and I don't think any economists, except hard line Marxists, have taken it too seriously in the last century. Third, the "scientific" justification for transcending capitalism into communism. Fourth, the assumption that through the method of dialectical materialism one transcends ideology. There are several others, but I think these are pertinant. Perhaps a good question is what is to be salvaged from Marx--and I do think there is alot--and what does a Marxist outlook look like when making these adjustments?
I've seen discussions in regards to the debate as summarized by
Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff that assert that the base-superstructure problem has arisen out of accepting non-Marxist epistemological positions (Rationalism or Empiricism) and that they posit the two as separate where they exist in a unity in Marxism.
https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613281/index.pdfIt should also be noted from the outset that Marx’s epistemology cannot be handled in traditional epistemological terms. In their article “Marxist Epistemology: The Critique of Economic Determinism”, Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff indicate that traditional epistemology operates as if there are two separate realms: “independent subjects seeking knowledge of independent objects” (Resnick and Wolf, 45). In contrast to traditional epistemology, Marx does not see theory and reality as belonging to two distinct spheres. Rather there is a “circular process” in the production of theory where “theory begins and ends with concretes […] the concrete which determines theory is conceptualized as the ‘concrete real’ [the real concrete] and the concrete produced by thought is the ‘thought-concrete’ [concrete for thought]”( Resnick and Wolf, 43).
I don't fully comprehend this, in part because I'm also unfamiliar with Hegel's work which influence's Marx conception in both its similarities and differences from Hegel. But I think the point is that the base-superstructure framing makes a duality that isn't amicable to Marx's thoughts.
Which has emphasized the economic side disproportionately due to debates with figures who rejected it's influence in the day of Marx and Engels, but doesn't close off a more nuanced reading as more likely held in Marx's perspective than that conceived in his readers.
And following this I think might contribute to a concern about the agency of human subjects which would fulfill the side of humans not being subject to a strict detereminism which is of great significance not for a status of being a science but theoretical clarity for class struggle.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=853142#p853142https://monthlyreview.org/press/interview-lebowitz-ozcan-erdagi/In the above link, is an interview with Michael Lebowitz which as I understand it, brings up of how Marx's Capital is largely unfinished (as clear with the expectation of doing several volumes) and that to advance Marxism, theorizing about how the wage labourer exists when not merely reduced to a wage laborer for the purposes of capitalist production and I believe considering the agency of workers.
Thus, we see the wage-labourer first as a distinction within capital, as capital’s opposite, and as the mediator for capital in achieving its goal of growth. However, we must also consider the other side, the side about which Capital is silent—the worker as a being for self. Once we consider the side of the wage-labourer in its sphere of circulation (where the sale of labour-power occurs) and in its sphere of production (where use-values are consumed to produce the worker able to re-enter the sphere of circulation), we see that the wage-labourer has her own goals and struggles to achieve them. Class struggle from the side of the worker is present once we consider the worker as a being for self. Nevertheless, as wage-labourer, capital is a necessary mediator for the worker: she is dependent upon capital within this relation to achieve her goals. The dialectical moment here is the recognition of the unity of capital and wage labour in capitalism as a whole, a totality characterised by two-sided class struggle.
Once we now consider the worker as subject, we have moved far beyond the determinism which often passes for Marxism. Now, we necessarily must bring within this theory of capitalism as a whole the way workers transform themselves in their struggle. One-sided Marxists, though, call a halt to the theoretical project and declare that whatever is in Capital is theory and whatever is not in Capital is politics or lesser levels of abstraction. They think they can take Capital by itself. As I argue in my chapter on ‘One-Sided Marxism,’ however, by failing to develop the side of wage-labour, they understand neither capital nor wage-labour; in short, they do not understand capitalism as a whole.
I think the above relates well to work done by Soviet thinkers such as Lev Vygotsky, Evald Ilyenkov and others in trying to consider how our consciousness develops in relation to the world.
http://www.isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/evald_ilyenkov.htmlEvald Ilienkov worked out an original conception of ideality which was a creative development of Marx's theory of consciousness. It is well known that Marxist tradition has always insisted that knowledge derives from praxis. Following in that tradition, Ilyenkov suggested defining specific components of practical activity which directly form general impressions and abstractions. There are invisible schemes of praxis or operations, stereotypes and instructions of common human activity. Such components carry general information from things to mind. According to Ilyenkov, ideality is a form of human activity that is caused by forms of things which are drawn into the 'anthroposphere'. Thus, he strived to advance the principle of materialism and deduced a property of ideality from certain aspects of material praxis. As a result, ideality is an material-immaterial phenomenon that is born in the external material activity of people and corresponds to the facts, but at the same time ideality or schemes of activity do not contain materiality. Material praxis, by means of inner structures, takes a thing's measurements and carries this general information from the physical world into the world of human spirit. Ilyenkov's conception of ideality partially resembles Bridgman's conception of operational pragmatism.
Ilyenkov does a good job in explaining his sense of the
ideal. But I won't ramble more on that, but it would seem to me that theoretical clarity needs to be developed about workers.
In regards to the labor theory of value, it still holds significance though it is ignored in a lot of modern economic schools as they perhaps abstract in narrow ways as to avoid the relations between things. I'm not educated but its my impression that marginal utility theory seems primarily concerned with exchange much to the neglect of production's relation, which is where Marx went to find where he thought value was created as it wasn't in market exchanges.
That the ideology of capitalist class is based on a formalized sense of equality thought based in the formal equality of people coming to the market as equals for exchange whilst ignoring the substnative conditions that underpin how people come to market. Hence libertarians talk of voluntary exhcange of people selling their labour whilst completely ignoring how workers being deprived of property and of communal means of production coerces them to sell their labour power to subsist and thus don't meet as equals and that such equality rests on a substantive inequality.
Basically, it seems that a lot of economics is but apologetics for capitalism and naturally avoids investigating such things as it need not be a science to understand as much as it's required for Marx's project to understand capital.
To which there's an
member who made an interesting post where he quotes from a book that explains some points as to why one might want to believe in LTV whilst acknowledging that it doesn't argue for the valdity of the LTV. In fact, the member whilst considering LTV to be attractive, is conservative in their judgement and accepts that LTV isn't conclusively proven but believes that many dismissals and attacks on it have been inadequate.
I'm yet to read it, but I think
Andrew Kliman's Reclaiming Marx's Capital might be a fruitful book on this point of rejecting the critiques of Marx's LTV on the basis of the
transformation problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_KlimanKliman, much like the point made by Resnick and Wolff, claims that many Marxists even have accepted readings of Marx's work that simply aren't amicable to the sort of philosophy that was implicit to his work and that by reading Marx in a way that is charitable (allows for internal consistency), Marx's claims aren't as absurd as often interpreted and not readily subject to the critiques made.
And the LTV is of prime significance for Marxism I suspect if some of those that write about it are correct that a big impediment to the transition to communism would be the failure to dissolve the Law of Value.
This is a good brief
piece to think about the dilemma.
In looking at a dissertation on
Marx and Morality, I think it might help clarify the position that Marx adopts which he perhaps inherits from Hegel if this piece is to be correct in it's
summary.
As I understand it, Marx has a kind of naturalist ethics where what is good and right is based on the realization of that which best suits the nature of human beings (which I believe helps explain his theory of alienation).
Instead of focusing on the intentions of actors or the consequences of actions, virtue ethicists insist that the key ethical question should be, “What kind of person ought I be?”
...
Just as Aristotle sought to base his ethics on a model of human essence, Hegel insisted that ethics must start from a model of “what human beings are”. It is only when they are so grounded that it is possible to say “that some modes of life are suited to our nature, whereas others are not”.39 He followed Aristotle in assuming that the goal of life is self-realisation, but he broke with him by arguing that it is only by way of freedom that this is possible. Whereas Aristotle insisted that happiness is the end of life, Hegel believed with Kant that the end of life was freedom.40 But unlike Kant, who counterposed freedom to necessity, he insisted that to act freely was to act in accordance with necessity.41 He thus criticised “Kant for seeing dichotomies in the self between freedom and nature…where he ought to have seen freedom as actualising nature”.42 Moreover, he believed that moral laws, far from being universal in some transhistoric sense, are in fact only intelligible “in the context of a particular community”, and can be universalised only to the extent that “communities grow and consolidate into an international community”.43
And I think this is an interesting notion, that after developing a concrete abstraction on the essence of humans, one is able to then see how things are against the well being of people and the flourishing of a healthy development.
I might be grasping at things I don't understand, but it almost sounds kind of Daoist, about things being done according to their nature, which isn't passive but the wisdom in understanding the nature of things and not unnecessarily struggling against reality but working with it.
http://ramblingtaoist.blogspot.com.au/2010/05/happiness-of-fish.htmlHow, then, does Zhuangzi know the happiness of fishes? The answer, in part, is to be found in how he describes what it is in which that happiness consists: The minnows swim about so freely, following the openings wherever they take them. These fish are simply doing what fish do, and this is their happiness. It’s that simple.
This falls within what Zhuangzi calls the Illumination of the Obvious, the rightness of each individual thing within its own perspective. This is not simply a matter of the rightness to itself of its own opinions, though this too applies, but is something much more organic, namely, that the expression of its nature, being what it is, is its rightness. This is obvious. And it instructs us. This may not be what we, as humans, think of as happiness, but that is because happiness for humans is generally conceived as something altogether different, humans being, in some sense, altogether different.
How are we different? What we do is to choose what to do and our choices seem almost inevitably to result in something other than ‘happiness’. Indeed, it would seem that the ability to choose, something as innate to us as swimming freely is to fish, is the source not of our happiness, but of our unhappiness. And this, of course, refers us back to the heart of Zhuangzi’s project, namely, to return us to the spontaneous, pre-cognitive expression of the up-welling of Life within us. This is true human happiness — surrender into the flow of life, freely following along with wherever it takes us, just like fish. In other words, Zhuangzi would have us return to being like fishes, though, being human and self-aware, that spontaneity would be expressed in an altogether different way.
Through his level of abstraciton, Marx is able to identify the universal thing/process that underpins all of humanity, their labor, which is inherently social from the earliest stages of civilization. From this arises all the historical particularities that we find in humanity's different tendencies and expressions, its through activity/labor that people transform themselves as well as the world. It's likely more nuanced than I comprehend, but I get a sense of some sort of teleology in regards to human labor being part of our nature and a realization. And by having the product of our labor alienated from us, owned by capitalist, we come to lose the sense of ourselves that is found through our productive relations.
Mankind is reduced
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdfIn this description of the character of labor, Marx turns his attention from the worker's product as accumulated or “dead” labor, to the character of the labor process itself. Labor, Marx thinks, is in reality the essence of free human activity and a process through which human nature can be fully realized. However, under capitalism, labor is so odious that the worker performs labor only because through the sale of his labor-power he can satisfy his private needs. Insofar as the worker's labor-power is not his own, and belongs to a foreign power (the capitalist), labor appears as a denial and a sacrifice of the worker's existence, and as something to be studiously avoided whenever possible.
Because labor takes on such an unattractive character, instead of recognizing the labor process as the essence of human activity, workers feel that they are truly themselves and truly human only when they are at leisure or satisfying those needs which they have in common with animals.
As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.
Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW 3:275)
I recommend
Evald Ilyenkov's The Universal to see how Marx thinks of the unviersal as a real existing thing that gives rise to everything else instead of being about identifying the property/attribute shared by all in their form or what ever. It being the difference between focusing on appearances and developing a taxonomy of plants and animals, or an adequate conception of change and developing Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
Supplementary texts to help understand this thinking:
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/&
http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/2014/04/16/ilyenkovs-dialectic-of-the-abstract-and-the-concrete-ii/The sources i provide might do better to explain in detail how realization of our human nature and the inadeacuy of capitalism serves as part of the moralistic foundation to Marxist's critique which isn't morality in the typically abstract sense. As Marx seems to, according to the interpretation in the disseration, arrive at kind of objective morality based on a extensive analysis of the real world conditions and relations.
To which, once again, Evald Ilyenkov has a wonderful piece on examining the tension between means and ends/ is and ought/
Humanism and Science. WHich also explains why morality can't be a set of maxims but requires an analysis of the world and following Marx's thought, one is propelled into a sense of agitation rather than complacency, that one must be transform things rather than accept them they are. That his morality necessarily follows his quite of transforming the world, not merely interpreting it.
And in regards to the dialectical method, my impression of Marx's use of ideology is precisely that which the dialectical method avoids. Which has to do with how Marx abstracts, which goes through many developments as it does with Hegel I believe.
He seems to begin from the 'real concrete' which is the material relations between people and he abstracts from to identify essential relations temporally and from different perspectives of abstraction before its brought back down to the 'concrete for thought' which seems to be abstractions that capture the relations of a thing and are closer to the mediated existence of a thing than one pulled away from the real world.
The earlier links talking about Resnick and that in the quote is a useful text that examiens Hegel's and Marx's Epistemology.
But I think these two quotes might be useful to help frame this point as well.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03p.htmOne of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3If I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.
What I suspect is the superiority of Marx's thinking is how he arrives at fuller abstractions than that found in the logic often characterized as atomistic, static, one-sided and often empty/contentless.
Both Hegel and Marx avoid traditional epistomological positions and their limitations as they value both the empirical world and the necessity of abstracting to come to a richer knowledge/understanding.
And I think for any of us to really come to appreciate the depth, complexity and insight in Marxism we really need to give a thorough run through the works that preceed Hegel such as Kant and those who precede him and even ancient thinkers like Aristotle as the height of their thought is based on building upon their works.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling2.htmTo examine this matter further, let us consider Kant’s position, a position which appears to be at the root of many misunderstandings about Capital. In an effort to vindicate scientific reason in the light of Hume’s rejection of causation and of knowledge of the external world, Kant argued that the mind is an instrument which, by its very construction, always apprehends isolated, individual facts in rational form. Kant realised that without categories, rational thought was impossible; but for him these categories have their basis in our thoughts, thought which is necessarily sundered from the material world. Sensation and the logical moments of knowledge do not on this view have a common basis – there is and can be no transition between the two. (Or as the Althusserian; would put it, ‘Our constructions and our arguments are in theoretical terms and they can only be evaluated in theoretical terms – in terms, that is to say, of their rigour and theoretical coherence. They cannot be refuted by any empiricist recourse to the supposed “facts” of history’ (Hindess and Hirst, 1975, p. 3).) Concepts, according to Kantianism, do not grow up and develop out of the sensed world but are already given before it, in the a priori categories of reasoning. These categories are supposed to grasp the multifarious material given in sensation, but themselves remain fixed and dead. ‘Sensation’ and ‘reason’ were counterposed to each other in thoroughly mechanical manner, with no connection between them. And the same was true of the content of knowledge and its forms. On this last point Rubin is surely absolutely correct when he states:
One cannot forget that on the question of the relation between content and form, Marx took the standpoint of Hegel and not of Kant. Kant treated form as something external in relation to the content, and as something which adheres to the content from the outside. From the standpoint of Hegel’s philosophy, the content is not in itself something to which form adheres from the outside. Rather, through its development, the content itself gives birth to the form which is already latent in the content. Form necessarily grows from the content itself. (Rubin, 1972, p. 117)
We shall return to this question of economic form specifically in connection with the value-form. But let us note here that it was Hegel, on the basis of his criticism of Kantianism, who attempted to resolve the problem (of the connection between the ‘sensed’ and the ‘logical’, the ‘content’ and the ‘form’) by showing that thought is a dialectical process of movement, from thought of a lower grade to that of a higher grade.
According to Hegel, concepts developed by thought ceased to be dead, a priori products of the individual mind, but forms endowed with life, the life of the movement of thought itself. This is Lenin’s point when he says, ‘ What Hegel demands is a logic the forms of which would be forms with content, inseparably connected with that content’ and Lenin notes Hegel’s attack on logic considered entirely from the subjective standpoint:
Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development ‘of all material, natural and spiritual things’, i.e. of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition i.e. the sum-total, the conclusion of the history of knowledge of the world.
In this respect there can be no doubt whatsoever that Marx adopted Hegel’s position (against Kant). In stressing the historical and objective nature of concepts, Hegel prepared the way for introducing the role of practice into human thought, even though his conception of this practice remained too narrow. Marx followed Hegel’s lead in insisting that the movement from the ‘sensed’ to the ‘logical’ was a process in which social man penetrated ever more deeply through the appearance of phenomena, deeper and deeper into their essence. It was this social practice that lies at the very heart and foundation of the development of man’s conceptual thinking. The form taken by man’s knowledge, summarised in the concepts of science, represents an index, a resume, of his education and in particular the education of his senses.
Speaking of the growth of human thought, Engels says that
the results in which its experiences are summarised are concepts, that the art of working with concepts is not inborn and also is not given with ordinary everyday consciousness but requires real thought and that this thought has a long empirical history, not more or less than empirical natural science. (Anti-Duhring)
From it will see how Marx and even Hegel come to more mediated abstractions and thus aren't ideological in the sense I believe Marx thinks of ideology as the abstract one sidedness. Which I think often universalizes itself in a way that rejects how temporal things are and the nature of change, making real world relations an obscurity. But ther eis the more expansive sense of ideology, the one in which we come to individuate our very sense of self from the external world and can't help but have a kind of symbolic relationship that is part of our sense of self. This kind of ideology will never leave us, unless one achieve Zen and is able to dissolve their sense of self and let reality flow through them rather than have consciousness mediate it or something.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics