Germany receives Marx statue from China. Why?
If it was a statue honoring Groucho Marx, I could understand it, but Karl Marx? Why on earth would China lay a statue of Marx on Germany? Is it meant to be an insult? Thoughts?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44009621
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44009621
Comments (91)
M
China is communist after all, and most tourists to Marx homeplace are from China.
Isn't it obvious..
China likes to pretend it's brutal version of Capitalism, is still wedded to Communist ideals.
As the article in the OP mentioned, the gap between rich and poor in China is growing due to its embrace of capitalist practices. So I don't think it's a cheese situation.
Maybe, but why not celebrate Marx in China? Surely they can find a spot somewhere. Why bestow the statue on Germany?
The ulterior motive is good PR, rather obviously. China is trying to build something called the One Belt Road or something like that, that would create a corridor of trade between Europe and China, and they are trying really hard to appeal to the world in a positive light.
Quoting frank
That's something the current leader of China is trying to solve. I don't follow the news in China that much; but, from what I gather Xi Jinping wants to go back to or appeal to communist ideals for the poor last I remember.
... because Marx is a German author, and his influence on the history of the last century exceeds the influence of any single book ever written, with the exception of the Bible or perhaps the Koran.
Yes, Marx is Modern Jesus. Deal with it. :cool:
Really? If it was meant as a symbol of a bond between Germany and China, why not a Beethoven statue? I sense something other than plain good will.
Like what?
Really? What's the shared history of China and Beethoven (besides the trillion of great chinese pianists?). Perhaps are you just having too much of a hard time wrapping your head around the idea that for many, Marx was a great intellectual (and not Leftist-Hitler)?
I like China. They actually build bunkers for citizens in case of a nuclear war, instead of for politicians. And, I don't think they're lunatic like the presidents we had in the US. Not to portray them in a shining light of gold and silver; but, they've come along from the tendencies of Mao.
If it was merely a goodwill gesture, China could have chosen a statue that wouldn't have resulted in protest marches in Germany. I'm sure the Chinese know Marx is a controversial figure. Beethoven isn't.
Was Marx a great intellectual in your view?
As a German citizen I can attest to the fact that Marx is not a four letter word in Europe the way it is in America. Not saying we all love him. But it's not the knee-jerk rejection of anything to do with him and his ideas that you get in the states.
They have 1.37 billion people. That's a lot of bunkers.
Hey, will I give them an A for effort instead of adopting MAD policies of holding your enemies population hostage and exclusively saving the same people who profess such an ideology.
What do you mean "holding your enemies population hostage?"
In MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), you hold your enemies resources, population, buildings, land hostage, and so does your enemy to prevent nuclear war. That's the penalty for breaching the rules of the game. Thing is it just takes one lunatic or simple mistake to end everything that you hold dear. The premise of the whole game is that you hope your enemy is as rational as you are.
Too high a price to pay to maintain such a strategy, as I've always thought.
What else could it be? It's not Trojan Horse waiting to disgorge an army of chinese contortionnists...
Quoting frank
Why would China care for that?
Quoting frank
Not so controversial for anyone with an historical, economical or philosophical education, or someone who hasn't had their mind rotten by the american school system.
Quoting frank
Yes, indubitably. You don't have to shill for someone to recognize that he is one of the great ones.
Yeah, living in fear is no fun. Glad we ended up lucky in the end.
Well it was 15 ft tall. Somebody should probably check.
Quoting Akanthinos
He arose from global angst. His thought was global revolution. Others imagined attacking the problem one small piece at a time. The names of the moderates are not as well known, but they won in the end. Look at China's economy for proof of that.
Yep. :up:
Xi gave a speech last week in front of delegates at the Great Hall of the People honoring Marx's life and legacy. Marx still has propaganda and ideological value for the Communist Party, even though China's version of state capitalism is something Marx would have probably criticized.
Marx became one of the most influential thinkers in human history. He got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. His analysis of capitalism, despite its many flaws, remains the most insightful and comprehensive one ever attempted.
What would you name as significant examples of that influence?
Have you red the Capital? Or any other of his economic texts?
And no, modern China is about as Imperialistic a country as any of the other powers. Marx nowadays might have prefered modern capitalist (read north-american exc. Mexico and Western European) to Chinese Communism based solely on the degree of social mobility being somewhat higher in the formers than the later.
The capitalism of Marx's days was a beast to be slain. Such beasts still exists today, and others have grown (like Google) that needs slayin'. Marx is still relevant.
One of my copies has margin notes written in Chinese. I got it from a used book store.
Quoting Akanthinos
Agreed.
Umm off the top of my head...
1) Marx was the major ideological figure of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cuban Revolution, to name just a few seminal events of modern history.
2) Decolonization movements in many parts of the world were led by socialist and communist parties. Marx was a major inspiration for oppressed indigenous peoples to challenge and overthrow their colonial masters.
3) Much of our foundational political and economic assumptions are Marxist. You see this all the time when people speak about the 'working class' and the 'middle class' and the this or that class. The idea that the economic foundations of society determine its major political, social, and cultural properties is widely accepted (or functionally assumed, if not explicitly recognized). Most historians nowadays basically practice some version of historical materialism in their work.
4) Over 1.5 billion people today live under governments that claim to be Marxist.
Marx is alive and well. As long as there is some kind of social conflict in the world, he always will be.
... Because sending a Sun Yat Sen statue would look weird..?
I live there currently. I'm a dual citizen.
Quoting frank
I don't know at this point whether you agree or not with the points Uber made above.
Another significant thing: Marx identified class conflict (between workers who produce wealth and the rich folk who accumulate it) as one of the drivers of history. Class conflict is a dangerous thing because it has the potential to topple political and economic structures.
One of the dominant features of the American economic and political system is and has been the suppression of class conflict. The result (so far successful) has been the sharp surge of economic inequality. During the progressive era on up to the end of WWII, when class conflict was more intense, the distribution of wealth was somewhat more egalitarian. Now we are back to the conditions of the Gilded Age of the robber barons (late 19th century).
Supposedly the campuses are infested with militant Marxists. I don't believe it. The Marxists in their ivory towers are a very, very long way from the reality of the working class. If the best our current marxists can do is riot over transsexual pronouns and other identity issues, they might as well be sent to far northern Siberian coal mines to rot.
Not too lucky: The United States and Russia still have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out civilization. (Plus what the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea have).
Marx didn't cause any of the social upheavals of the 20th Century, but I couldn't deny his intellectual influence.
Uber had suggested Marx was one of the most influential intellectuals in human history. Human history is in the range of 5000 years during which time the most influential intellectuals were those who devised the solar calendar, initiated irrigation for crops and learned to smelt copper and iron. Is Marx a member of that club? Not yet. Tune in a thousand years from now for a reassessment.
Dual citizen or resident alien? The American culture tends to drive Europeans insane. Have you suffered from that?
But my particular claim was restricted to the stereotypical version of an intellectual, the kind of person who has grand ideas about the world without any prospects for immediate application (though they could certainly be applied later). In any case, it hardly matters what standard you adopt for intellectual influence. Marx was so influential that he meets, exceeds, and then obliterates every possible standard.
In addition to this, frank assumes that the problems of global capitalism are somehow all settled and that the "moderates...won in the end." One could see this as a modified version of Francis Fukuyama's thesis that the end of the Soviet Union and the imminent spread of liberal and democratic capitalism signified "the end of history." If these bedtime stories make you feel better, by all means go ahead and recite them.
The truth is that American society, and the capitalist system that underlies everything about it, is in severe crisis. Life expectancy has declined for two years in a row. Real wages for half of American workers have stayed largely flat in the past four decades. Average real GDP growth in the US has fallen from more than 4% in the 1950s and the 1960s to around 2% in the first 17 years of this century. The US represented almost half of all global GDP after World War II; it now has just about 15% in purchasing power terms. The richest 1% of the country owns a greater share of national wealth than at any point in the last 50 years. As our position in the global capitalist system deteriorates, our political system will necessarily feel the heat, and has already suffered from it considering the events of the last three years.
In this economic and political context, Marx feels as fresh and as useful as he ever was. In other words, the fall of the Soviet Union was at best an armistice of 20 or 30 years, much like the Treaty of Versailles. Now the global system is in upheaval again, and these are exactly when Marx is at his best (ie. when describing a system in crisis, which most conventional economic philosophies prefer to ignore).
Dual.
American culture can at times be insane, but I guess being half American inculcates me against being driven insane by it. :joke:
You are probably aware that European culture was driving people insane in the 20th century -- WWI, WWII... Europe's craziness doesn't make anybody else's craziness better, but it can give you some perspective.
Does American culture drive people insane? Fromm thought so (The Sane Society, Erich Fromm).
This reminds me of the apocryphal story about Chou En Lai, Premier of the PRC between 1949 and 1975. Asked whether he thought the French Revolution was a good thing, he said: "It's too early to tell." There's no evidence that he actually said any such thing, but it is a good story.
Come now. Irrigation wasn't invented by a brilliant intellectual. Neither was smelting and alloying metal, making glass, inventing stirrups, the wheel, the plow, etc. These were collective developments made over time. Very smart, inventive people have always lived, certainly. Maybe some Neanderthal and homo sapiens geniuses both discovered the method of making a very strong pitch-glue out of birch bark, but it is more likely that this knowledge was collective. We don't know, and will never know how these technologies came about.
No western thinker in the last 5000 years belongs to the age when basic technologies were invented. There are Greece, Rome, Babylonia, Egypt -- but then there is a long hiatus. Intellectuals from the Renaissance forward belong to the current epoch, not to the classical ages.
Where does Marx stand? He stands tall among the tall social thinkers of the Enlightenment. Is Marx the greatest thinker of all time? Of course not. Neither is Adam Smith, Ricardo, the various stars of the Enlightenment, and so on.
Marx brought some new insights into history and economics. They are important. Marx was also a preacher offering a salvation program. Unfortunately, Saint Karl didn't have the opportunity to vet the evangelists who picked up his testament and ran with it. I doubt if Marx could have stomached Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. He would probably have liked someone like the American marxist Daniel DeLeon better--DeLeon wasn't interested in having a blood bath of a revolution.
While there certainly were some specific problems with European culture as a whole throughout the late 19th and early 20th century (Vienna was as much a great cultural center as a fulcrum of depression and suicide), but the mass sociopathy explanation of WWI and WWII was what Milgram wanted (and imho did) demonstrate to be false through his research.
I don't think what Europe went through in the 20th century was "mass sociopathy". Certainly there was some substantial mass sociopathy going on in Germany from 1924 onwards, but it emanated from very specific sources.
Most Europeans were not sociopathic; they were driven to a state of "craziness" by war, depression, agitation, and war again. War in Europe didn't well up from the masses, it was imposed on the masses by their various governments.
Similarly, Americans aren't sociopathic either. We, like billions of other people, are subject to the dubious policies of state and corporations, and their propaganda. Some of these policies are "crazy". Trump isn't the first president to promote crazy policies, but he is certainly doing it now in a big way.
Either pulling out of, or threatening to pull out (coitus interruptus) of Paris Climate Change Agreement, NAFTA, the Pacific area trade agreement, the Iran nuclear agreement, and so on, are all "crazy" and further destabilize social congruence. His huge tax cut (mostly for people who are already wealthy) and cuts in social spending (which benefit the poorest) are more of the same. I do not have a lot of confidence and affection for some of these agreements, but I don't like the rash way they are being threatened, ignored or exited. Brexit is destabilizing too -- to more than just British retainers.
Hopelessness among semi-skilled middle aged workers is one of the drivers behind the opiate addiction epidemic. Pushers are doing their bit too, of course, as are suppliers.
That's the sort of thing I meant.
What of the Marxist view stands out to you as particularly significant at the present moment? The global economy isn't presently in crisis, btw. Doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow.
Good intellectuals borrow. Great intellectuals steal.
That may be true. But maybe this famous quip is more appropriate for artists. Pablo Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
Serious thinkers are people like Archimedes, Einstein, Maxwell, Feynman, Darwin, etc., etc. Mathematicians, scientists, engineers who literally shock the world with their brilliance make Marx look like a buffoon in comparison.
If Marx wasn't still relevant people wouldn't feel the need to do that.
You need to put Marx's claims about the labour theory of value into context. Yes it is true that at the beginning of Capital Vol 1 he provides an a priori argument for the labour theory of value that is (arguably) unsound. However, in the context in which he was writing, the labour theory of value was not really a point of contention amongst economists - Adam Smith held a version of it after all. What Marx did, from an a priori perspective, was draw that theory to its logical conclusion in explaining how surplus value could be generated. However, these days Marxist economists tend to regard Capital as providing the intellectual framework in which an empirically established labour theory of value has its home, and there is much empirical evidence for the labour theory of value. Marx - given his respect for science - would have been very content with the idea that the labour theory of value was in fact an empirical theory, and not an a priori principle.
Have you read volume 2 of Capital? Most people don"t bother - they just read the "potboiling" volume 1 and then skip to volume 3, but it is in volume 2 that most of the economic insights and analysis about profit and loss are to be found. Admittedly there is Engel's stamp all over the contents (both volumes 2 and 3 were put together by him on the basis of notes and manuscripts Marx left behind) so we cannot just say that it is all Marx's work, but there is a lot of content in that volume which is very far from being fictional.
You may be interested to know that many "serious thinkers," like Einstein himself, were socialists who were very much influenced by Marx.
The labor theory of value was widely assumed in the 19th century. It was not invented by Marx. Capitalist economists later switched to utility theories of value, which are, to be sure, no less fictitious than the labor theory.
Marx got a lot of fundamental things right. He may have incorrectly predicted that capitalism would not be so resilient, but he did understand the basis on which capitalism would survive and function. He predicted that corporations would fight off tendencies in the declining rate of profit by slashing worker wages and benefits. That basically describes the US in the last 40 years. He predicted that capitalism would expand worldwide in search of new markets with cheaper labor. Sound familiar? I could go on and on, but you get the point. He made a lot of fundamental insights that have come true.
Theories and values aside, to deny that some level of exploitation happens within capitalism is equivalent to denying that we need oxygen to survive.
Edit:
Just read the piece - it's a neat, if plagiaristic summary of some of Volume 1 of Capital. Shame on Albert for not acknowleding his sources, but given where he was at the time of writing, it's probably excusable :wink:
I think Marx's position on the resilience of capitalism is more nuanced than some have assumed, and let's not forget that even in Captial itself he provides models of stable capitalist economic cycles. There is also this quotation I came across in Mezaros's "Beyond Capital" which indicates that Marx was well aware of the threat of capitalism chewing up its opponents and spitting them out again (my italics).
The historic task of bourgeois society is the estab-
lishment of the world market , at least in its basic outlines,
and a mode of production that rests on its basis. Since the
world is round, it seems that this has been accomplished
with the colonization of California and Australia and with
the annexation of China and Japan. [i]For us the difficult
question is this: the revolution on the Continent is immi-
nent and its character will be at once socialist; will it not
be necessarily crushed in this little comer of the world since
on a much larger terrain the development of bourgeois
society is still in the ascendant . '[/i]
Given my affinity for game theory, I surmise that capitalism will always be the first choice (in an uneven playing field, that is to say the playing field will almost always be uneven), as is establishing a monopoly the ideal choice for any firm.
Innovation of any kind tends to arise more from a community than the individual. The fallen snow is to the snowball as random individual insights are to the Great Idea.
But how does the intellectual stand out from the crowd? What makes him/her different? Maybe a thread?
There are, apparently, game-theoretic Marxists, so I'm not sure why you believe simply being sympathetic to the use of game theory would lead one to be a capitalist. In any case, as I understand it, to apply game theory to economics you need to come with certain background assumptions about what a rational agent is, and of course for Marxists, there is no non-historical conception of rationality, and so they would perhaps be likely to suspect that if a game-theoretical model leads to capitalism as a choice of economic system, then the dice were loaded from the beginning.
Marx was also quite clear that the tendency of capitalism was towards the concentration of capital into fewer and fewer "hands" which is exactly the process of monopolisation.
You should read Marx, you might find you agree with his economic theory, if not his sociology. If you've already studied economics you'll be in a good position to get more out of volume 2 of Capital than most of the rest of us.
No, I think I was just spewing BS. Just because I spent a year in college doesn't merit what I said about Marx. I had better read him before I mount any criticisms against him.
I dispute this, probably because I have different standards for what can constitute a crisis than you do. The global economy is not in an immediate crisis of demand, sure. Global GDP will probably rise this year and will probably rise next year too. But it is experiencing a structural crisis, in which a set of converging factors acting over long periods of time are producing shifts in the balance of economic power.
The center of the capitalist system is stuck in economic stagnation. Japan, Western Europe, and the United States are all experiencing vastly lower growth rates than they had four decades ago. Meanwhile, China and India are still rapidly growing. China is already the world's largest economy in terms of purchasing power, India is third. Russia is not a major economic threat, but it is a global military power once again, conquering nearby territories, flying bombers from Indonesia and next to Alaska, sending its nuclear subs all over the world. These tectonic shifts in the global economic landscape imply that, for the first time in three or four centuries, the West will no longer control the global organization of labor and the distribution of surplus wealth. These changes will produce their own sets of military and political crises. Rarely has the fundamental structure of global power changed without wars and revolutions.
I totally agree.
Two things... #1, we aren't very good at predicting the next economic crisis. Only in retrospect have we seen crisis coming.
#2, somewhere down the line is the diminishing supply of petroleum that can be extracted by less energy than the oil itself contains. This won't be a "falling off a cliff" crisis, because the returns on drilling and extraction will taper off. The petroleum crisis will also not happen in the next 5 or 10 years. But at some point in the not-distant future, the "secret sauce" that has driven the world economy for the last century will become more and more difficult to get at a reasonable cost. The collapse of the petroleum industry will be a very big crisis. [There will be lots of oil in the ground as we slowly fade into the sunset, but economic feasibility will rule out spending $1 of energy to get 40¢ worth of energy out of the ground.]
It will be a very big crisis for two reasons: #1, petroleum and natural gas are the critical feed stock for transportation, chemicals, plastics, heating, and manufacturing of all kinds. Without inexpensive petroleum, the current world economy will pretty much grind to a halt. (Coal can't take the place of petroleum, and all the renewable energy in the world won't produce chemical feedstocks.)
Then, if that wasn't crisis enough, there's global warming, population, etc. And there are some less well known potential problems too. Peak phosphate production is about 20 years away, and without a growing supply of phosphate, everything else being equal, there won't be enough fertilizer to maintain crop production for 8+ billion people.
I'm 71, so I won't be around to see the denouement, but the interplay of these various factors -- too many people, too much heat, not enough petroleum, fresh water shortages, agriculture shortfalls, industrial problems of supply, and so forth, should produce synergistic crises that will be hell on wheels.
Whether Marx was right or wrong will be the least of our concerns.
I think I'd prefer the New York style of cheesecake, because then I could eat it with my hands like a real life savage of New York, instead of fiddling around with those pesky sticks that the Chinese are forced to use.
Yes we can call it an underlying instability, I agree.
I don't know if there's ever been this much agreement on a philosophy forum before. Should we pop open a champagne bottle to celebrate?
If you would allow me to address this, I believe that communism requires a level playing field for all actors on the global arena. Hence, why I believe that the communism we have witnessed already have all been premature. This begs the question if we will ever be 'mature' enough or developed enough to move onto communism, and since (in my opinion) many of the attempts at implementing communism have been premature and unsuccessful, if this has soured any future attempts at implementing it?
Furthermore, I don't think Marx saw the role of the state and private enterprise in making credit ubiquitous for the masses to engage in capital intensive tasks. Is that a common criticism of Marx?
Finally, did Marx assume a steady state economic model, if I may ask?
I'd be highly interested in a thread on Marx's Capital if you are ever interested in making one.
This hits a certain "nail on the head". Marx famously had England in mind as the country sufficiently developed enough to make socialism a reality - he was very clear that socialism would only succeed once capitalism had developed productive forces to the required capacity (he seems to have thought that only capitalism could accomplish this, but I'm not sure whether he was correct about that). Russia was way too backward economically, as far as Marx would have been concerned, to provide a viable context for socialism - and in the long run that seems to have been proven, although things may have been different if Trotsky had succeeded Lenin (far from certain). Lenin tried to adapt Marx (theoretically as well as practically) so that Russia could become a model socialist state, but arguably failed.
How about a book club on Capital? Starting with volume 1 of course. I have some side-projects to put to bed before embarking on that, but I'd welcome the opportunity to reread it whilst having an ongoing discussion about its contents. I'll try to set something up over the summer.
Yes, (was the gift a nudge from China indicating that Germany is ready for communism, one has to wonder).
Anyway, I think China learned their lesson from Russia in their own attempts at "communism". Hence, why they took a mercantilist turn with their massive population that could provide the world with most if not all their needs. I wonder about the future that the core party in China envisions for itself. Will it go back to its roots or not? Time will tell.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Yes, please. Keep me in the loop if and when you get around to starting a book club on Marx's Capital.
Thanks!
Anyone who thinks I need to read Capital Vol. II to know that Marx was completely wrong about pretty much everything he wrote about, is making an unfounded assumption. I read through a great deal of Marx, including all volumes of Capital, and spent a couple years in college wading through his collected works. Marx was simply wrong on everything. He was wrong on the reason religion exists. He was wrong to claim Jew's God is money. He was wrong in his racism. He was wrong in his understanding of capitalism, as we know workers' living standards have improved over time, and did not go to a poverty level. We know the labor-theory of value is false, and Marx never gave any coherent reason to believe in it. We know that history is not a class-struggle, as most people's political views are not even determined by their economic status, but by other factors, including political personality traits which are strongly linked to biology. This is why many wealthy people are leftists, and many poor people are to the right. The only real link between economic status and political positions is that poor people tend to be more extreme in their views, which can be extremely right-wing as well as left-wing. This is why when countries develop a middle class, their politics becomes more centered. Marx's so-called class-conflict, therefore, has zero empirical support.
Marx just made up nutty ideas as he went along. He was not even remotely close to a genius like Einstein, when it comes to his work in physics, not in a childish essay On Socialism.
The fact philosophers are even taking Marx seriously at this juncture shows that philosophy as a discipline is hardly up there with math and physics.
If you bother to look at this thing called evidence (much of which I cited earlier from reputable sources), you would know that workers are no longer making progress in Western capitalism. Half of Americans have not seen their real wages rise in over 4 decades. And even the progress they made back in the day, how did they do it? By organizing into unions and socialist parties, demanding higher wages from capital and putting pressure on governments to act. It was worker movements directly inspired by Marx that called for higher wages, better benefits, shorter work hours.
Another important point that was recently articulated by Piketty in his major book on modern capital and inequality: the huge progress that workers made in the middle of the 20th century in the West was largely a consequence of the worls wars, which destroyed a lot of capitalist wealth and left workers in a more powerful bargaining position. Once that process ended in the 70s, it was back to capitalism as usual: manipulative and exploitative. That's why capital wealth keeps soaring way beyond average economic growth while workers and the poor fight over the scraps.
The labor theory of value being false does not take much away from Marx because this was not his creation. It was widely assumed at the time. The utility theory of value is also false. I don't see you condemning modern economics for it.
Marx had no influence on Einstein. Einstein used the labor theory of value, which other economists came up with long before Marx. Marx's entire theory is dependent on that theory, which has been long discarded in economics, because it makes no sense. Moreover, Marx claimed that commodities had a value, which was different from its price, which literally means that Marx was engaged in a non-scientific project, since there is no way to objectively measure his so-called "value" claims. No one interested in science would ever waste time on such nonsense.
Einstein was far more brilliant than Marx. Einstein figured out spacetime, both space and time cannot be separated, and that spacetime was curved. That idea was so far beyond anything Marx could have contemplated that comparing Marx with great minds like Einstein is foolish. Plus, Einstein's theories have the added bonus of being correct and of great value, even allowing us to have such things as GPS. Marxism, on the other hand, left millions dead.
Where does he state that? Marx recognised that real wages could go up as well as down in capitalist systems.
You may have read Marx, but you don't seem to have understood him.
We know no such thing. As I stated in my earlier post in which I questioned how much of Marx you had actually read, I said that there is empirical evidence to suggest that the labour theory of value is actually true. Sure, we can debate that evidence if you like, but the fact that there is such evidence to be debated already falsifies your claim that we know it to be false. It may not be true a priori, but that's not the same thing as being false.
To claim that Marx was wrong on everything that he predicted ignores his ideas on the global expansion of capital in search of cheap labor, his ideas on having a shorter workday from the 12 and 14-hour cycles workers experienced at the time, his ideas on ending child labor, and his ideas on establishing a national central bank to control finance. If you bother to actually read Marx, and not just some right-wing caricature of Marx, you would find that Marx got many profound things very right (as practical predictions and as normative ideals). Of course, he also made many mistakes and had some bad predictions, as I've already acknowledged with the labor theory of value and some of the issues related to it, like the transformation problem. No one here is defending every single feature of Marxism; we're just pointing out that Marx was an influential thinker who had some good ideas, and some bad ones. You're the only one who's distorting reality here.
Your blind quest to glorify Einstein because of what he got right also conveniently ignores all the things Einsten got wrong: his basic ideas on quantum physics have all been debunked experimentally, he spent the last 20 years of his career on a useless quest to unify gravity and electromagnetism. GR has been enormously successful theoretically and experimentally, but we know it's not the final word on gravity. We know solutions to the field equations yield non-sensical results in many different situations (beyond the Cauchy horizon in black holes, the moment of the Big Bang, etc). So in a strict ontological sense, even GR gets some things about gravity wrong.
This is what happens when you deal with vast intellects that did, said, and wrote a lot of important stuff. Some of that important stuff is bound to be wrong, and you hope at least some of it turns out to be useful for later generations.
Marx was wrong on everything, and it's comical that anyone would claim otherwise. In science, we ignore false claims. In philosophy, apparently, false claims are the very ones people get all excited about. No wonder philosophy has such a low rating these days as an academic discipline ---- it's less than worthless to cling to false ideas.
The source of our disagreement is that I maintain Marx's thought has a lot of merit beyond the labor theory of value. You obviously don't since you seem unaware of any other Marxist ideas.
There is still no successful theory in economics that can determine prices. Prices can vary based on supply, demand, speculation, wars, natural disasters, and dozens of other interacting phenomena.
The only comical thing here is you trolling the people on this thread who are trying to have a meaningful discussion.
Bravo!
I think LD Sanders was responding to the wrong person, and had me in mind when he threw the "theory of value is false" in your face. Having said that, I'd rather pick this up with you than LD Sanders, as I stand a good chance of getting a meaningful discussion of the idea.
I'm willing to admit that the labour theory of value cannot be proven in an a priori way, and that Marx shouldn't have wasted his time trying to do this - and let's be honest he spends hardly any time at all trying to prove it - a paragraph or so at the beginning of Capital. However, it seems pivotal to his economic theory, particularly since it underpins his explanation for the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, which is the bell that tolls the ultimate demise of capitalism. These days, Marxists economists who still hold to the labour theory of value regard it as an empirical theory that commodities exchange at prices which are determined by the role of labour in the production process, and there are some statistical studies that support this. So, whilst Marx might make sense without a metaphysically loaded labour theory of value (where exchange value is regarded as some mystical stuff) can it make sense without a labour theory of value of the kind that regards prices as determined by the function of labour in the production process? I believe some Marxists have tried to push this kind of line, but it never really made sense to me.
Second, these two things can be totally true, as objective empirical facts, at the same time:
1) The labor theory of value is false.
2) Capitalism is an economic system that very often exploits workers and the poor so the rich can accumulate more wealth.
Even though Marx bungled the first point, a lot of his critique about the second point still stands.
I'm relying on Value, Price, and Profit (K. Marx). It doesn't seem false to me. Granted, production has changed since Marx's work was written. Automation (computers, robots) have greatly reduced the amount of labor required to create wealth. A great deal of wealth is produced by the manipulation of currencies, stocks, bonds, etc. -- which went on in KM's day too, but it was more localized, wasn't instantaneous (programmed buying and selling several times a second) and it wasn't globalized on line, as it is now. Wealth from finance, which isn't very closely linked to any actual physical process, is a primary source of wealth for the 1%, as Piketty showed (haven't read him, either -- just about his book).
Still, outside of the automated factory, or the automated egg laying operation, labor is still required to produce wealth; it doesn't appear without labor being applied to material. The share of the value that labor receives is still smaller than the share of the value (wealth) created.
What is wrong with that understanding?
However, if you take the labor theory of value as a loose guide about how society organizes production, the way many Marxists do nowadays, then yeah I suppose it still has some merit.
I believe you and I are largely on the same page, but in terms of Marxist economics, one thing that bothers me about this remark is that Marx is pretty clear that real wealth (i.e. surplus value as profit) cannot be created through the mere circulation of capital and, arguably, manipulation of financial instruments is precisely and only that. It's clear that the illusion of wealth can be created in this way, but illusions that are in the end exposed for what they are (and when they are exposed, they manifest in one form of economic crisis).
Agreed, and I'm guilty of being one of the people that tend to compartmentalise Marx's economics from the rest of his theorizing. I happen to think that you can drop the historical materialism (particularly the materialism part) and retain the economic part without contradiction, although I could always be wrong about that.
The transformation problem has a number of different attempted solutions - Kliman's is the one I'm inclined to go for, if only because it seems to involve the most sympathetic reading of Marx's economic theory. There are of course, as you point out, problems with measuring the role of labour in the production process, particularly when the notion of labour in use is that of socially productive labour (and so no straightforward count of hours or calories expended is going to do the job). However, these are problems that seem in principle manageable.
As for the labour theory of value (as understood by contemporary Marxist economists) being determinisitic, the evidence for it is statistical, so it seems to be regarded as a stochastic theory rather than a strictly deterministic one.
I think LD Saunders was more having a dig at me, not you - but perhaps you just meant people like you who (I assume) hold some form or another of the labour theory of value.
For Marxists who try to eliminate the labour theory of value, apparently it is still a fairly active controversy
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/did-marx-have-a-labour-theory-of-value/
Like the blogger there, I don't really see how Marx makes sense without some form of LTV, but always worth keeping an open mind.