The Tragic Humanism of Tony Judt. Magadh, in Thursday's Souciant
I've only recently gotten into Koestler (read Case of the Midwife Toad, which is fascinating), but I plan to dig deeper. Also, this is an amazing quote: Obviously this is true of the Israel debate, but I think it's true in a much broader sense, too. It is always the knee jerk reaction of media to attack a controversial opinion simply for being outside the mainstream than to critically examine the conceptual arguments put forth. (Remember the professor in Colorado who was fired for using the phrase "Little Eichmanns" to describe those working in the World Trade Center? Similar phenomenon.) This is the intellectual antithesis of George W. Bush's "You're either with us or against us," which unfortunately seems to be the media's default position. Although I have to say that the author lost me here: Isn't the "communist orbit" the only possible result of applied Marxism? I think history has basically proven that in order for a communistic regime to operate, brutal oppression is the
only possible reality. Are there any counter examples?“You cannot help it if idiots and bigots share your views for their reasons. That doesn’t mean that you can be taught with their views. You have your views and they should be judged on their merits and it worries me that the very first thing we do when someone writes a controversial essay, whatever its academic standing, about the Israel lobby, about relations between this country and Israel, the first question is not, what is the truth or falsity of the substance of it, but how much does it come close to anti-semitism, does it help the anti-semites, should we not have said it, because of the anti-semitism issue? This seems to me to close down conversation with this country.”
Judt threw the Marxist baby out with the communist bathwater, mistaking the complexities of social structure for a refutation of the underlying force of class distinction in industrial capitalism... He had no time for versions of Marxism outside of the communist orbit, viewing them as at base polluted with the same repressive potentials that had eventuated in Stalinism. It’s arguable that this was a misinterpretation.
Marx had serious problems with people putting words into his mouth. Lenin's State Capitalism was his attempt at "a merger of capitalism and socialism," which was just about all Marx had ever said about what communism would be. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward also had little to do with Marx, other than being an attempt to capture Marx' admiration for capitalism's industry and productivity through a quite peculiar interpretation of socialism. And Stalin's purges were just paranoid politics. Marx did, at one point, suggest a dictatorship of the proletariat, but he was only talking about the state managing the socialist economy long enough for it to establish itself. He wasn't interested in surveillance states, secret courts, or show trials. For Marx, communism was just a future political-economic system which he believed to be a historical inevitability. He never provided an explanation of, and wasn't really interested in, what that system would actually look like. Marx saw socialism as the next step in history, not communism, and, in any event, Marx was far more interested in understanding capitalism than he was in describing what socialism was or what communism would be. As for countries that have adopted Marxist policy successfully, you might want to look at some of Northern and Western Europe's social democracies and social market economies. Right up until they were deregulated, they worked pretty well.Isn't the "communist orbit" the only possible result of applied Marxism? I think history has basically proven that in order for a communistic regime to operate, brutal oppression is the only possible reality. Are there any counter examples?
If they're Marxists, then I'm not.
-- Karl Marx
Well, I'm sure Jesus would have the same problem, but is the pope not Christian, because Christ denounced being rich? What Marx said, and what is meant by the common term "Marxism" aren't necessarily the same thing. Paranoid politics are all communism can ever be (whether we want to call them Marxist or not), because the system is so easily derailed (by, say, common sense). One has to expunge society of one's enemies in order for the system to survive. Certainly that wasn't what Marx intended or dreamed up, but there is no other way for such broad mind control to operate (and mind control is necessary if everyone is to buy into a highly engineered economic system).Marx had serious problems with people putting words into his mouth.
Marx advanced a theory of history that centers everything on economics.
Can anyone alive in the West in the 21st Century, steeped in what passes today for "common sense," claim that he got the center wrong? We can certainly argue about many aspects of his theory, but his take on the central role of economics was, for better or for worse (mostly the later, IMHO), dead on target. Money is in the saddle and rides mankind. Meanwhile, it seems to me a terrible idea to conflate religion and communism without giving at least nodding acknowledgement to all of the overtones of religiosity embedded in "free market capitalism." Neither faith serves the mass of the people well if left unchecked.
I won't argue about what any particular person may mean when he says "Marxism." If you wish to say that it's any school of thought heavily influenced by Marx' work, that's fine, but then you'll also have to include things like sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, history, and psychology as being Marxist. I'd say the far more reasonable definition, the one I was introduced to in a philosophy class, and the one most dictionaries list, would be the ideas of Marx (and, to a lesser extent, the ideas of Engels and Kautsky). The question you asked was, are there any counter-examples to communism as a political-economic application of Marxism? My answer was, yes, social democracy and the social market economy are examples of political-economic applications of Marxism. And, I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by mind control. If you're referring to PR or propaganda, then that's everywhere. If you're referring to dissidents being marginalized, then that's everywhere also. None of this is unique to the Eastern Bloc of the Cold War. You can say the methods sometimes differ, but this isn't related to the question at hand. I'm also not sure what you mean by a highly-engineered economy. If you're referring to the amount of infrastructure necessary, then a great deal of it is necessary for any market system, whether socialized or privatized, to function. If you're talking about regulations, then the same applies. If you're talking about planning, then this is still true. The difference between capitalized markets, socialized markets, or mercantile markets isn't engineering, it's who owns what.
I'm also struggling with this bit: "Underlying Judt’s political views was the standard dilemma of bourgeois liberalism. He knew what he was against – brutality, repression, mendacity in all its forms. But he never managed to articulate a coherent, positive principle tying together his manifold ethical concerns. Judt’s political strategy seems to amount to trying to identify the worst among a series of imperfect choices and to revile it." I've not read Judt's last book, which is clearly a necessity if this view is to be taken as a serious appraisal of his legacy. Nevertheless... One of the difficulties of "bourgeois liberalism," at least in the U.S., is that it has increasingly expended its energy on reviling the right without itself making a persuasive, constructive case for its own social and political agenda. This leaves us stuck in a descriptive mode, with no one, right or left, advancing any ideas for a way forward. This is why Judt's "throwing the Maxist baby out with the communist bathwater" is so important. At one point, Marxism was the antithesis of so-called "free market capitalism." Now though, if our intellectuals have tossed that baby out, we are left with nothing from which to craft a new synthesis. If Hegel is to be given any credit, we are going to be trapped in the current descriptive desert until someone -- why not you? -- advances some new ideas contra the capitalist's dream.
Because, if Hegel was correct, the contradictions in the current mindset (the thesis) must be recognized by society as a whole (the spirit of the age) before a mindset which negates these contradictions (the antithesis) can be recognized and advanced. Since few people believe there's anything inherently wrong with our current institutions (there's nothing wrong with capitalism!, there's nothing wrong with representative democracy!), and believe, instead, that a few bad actors are messing things up (it's the greedy bankers!, no, it's the lazy workers!, no, it's the crazy liberals!, no, it's the dumb conservatives!) any new ideas will be dismissed as nonsense by society as a whole. Only when the descriptions of what's wrong are recognized as valid (hmm, maybe capitalism is wasteful, dehumanizing, and unfair!, hmm, maybe representative democracy is too easily corrupted by sophistry and special interests!) will new ideas be considered.If Hegel is to be given any credit, we are going to be trapped in the current descriptive desert until someone -- why not you? -- advances some new ideas contra the capitalist's dream.
I appreciate your point -- but let me restate mine and add another. 1) Marx represented the last serious challenge to the capitalist's grand narrative that I am aware of. So when people like Judt dismiss Marx, they are creating an intellectual vacuum that could only intensify the excesses of "the market" -- as it seems to in fact have done. 2)You and I both, I suspect, would be more than happy -- even eager! -- to consider new ideas that might fill that dialectical vacuum. But where are they? Society as a whole can hardly be expected to recognize, much less embrace, something that isn't there to begin with. Lacking new ideas for a way forward, we regress to old ones and go backward. Some to Islam. Some to the winner-take-all capitalism of the robber barons and a sort of neo-feudalism. Most to simple despair and the perception that they are fated to be the losers in a zero-sum game. We seem to need to return to ancient fundamentals. To questions like "who should get the best flutes" taken up with an attitude that the correct answer almost certainly isn't "whoever can pay the highest price for them."
There are plenty of alternatives that are "here," from the legacy of the Romantic movement to the memories of the counter-cultural movement to the lessons history has taught us about the many different ways we used to be able to live. But, people in general will not see these as alternatives until they believe an alternative to our society would be more beneficial than a tweak to our society. They'll just see the alternatives as weird historical anomalies, or eccentric flights of fantasy, which have no relevance to them. Good luck having a society-wide philosophical debate in a society that openly mocks philosophy (what, are you going to open up a philosophy store?). Until the humanities have been restored, we're not going to have an intelligent debate about anything. We'll just have engineers telling us that 3D printers will fix everything, just like we had financiers telling us micro-loans would fix everything, and programmers telling us the World-Wide Web would fix everything, and economists telling us that trickle down from concentrations of wealth would fix everything, and electrical engineers telling us personal computers would fix everything, and mechanical engineers telling us that nuclear power would fix everything, and so on. We live in a society that doesn't understand societies, let alone people. Nothing will be fixed until that is changed.Society as a whole can hardly be expected to recognize, much less embrace, something that isn't there to begin with.
questions like "who should get the best flutes" [should be] taken up with an attitude that the correct answer almost certainly isn't "whoever can pay the highest price for them."
Engineers and scientists aren't telling you their work will "fix" everything. They're telling you they will CHANGE everything. Unlike "fix", the word "change" is less charged with a value claim. The notion that the old grand narratives (like that of the Romantic movement) offer answers that are "here" is true -- but they're answers that have been already tried and found wanting. What seems to me to be missing are NEW answers that haven't disappointed us YET. I think there's a cause for optimism. That philosophy store just might succeed one day. In the meantime, we each have to do what we can, like monks in an Irish monastery, to keep the candles lit.
An old idea will take a new form when it's transplanted into the here and now. I really don't think the problem is that we don't have enough answers. The problem is that we can't remember what questions we should be asking.What seems to me to be missing are NEW answers that haven't disappointed us YET.