What is your understanding of socialism and/or communism?

asdasd

Again, back to an earlier point... Why so much argument on recovering or portraying a true Marxism?

one would assume that a science has only one interpreation. Either Marxists want a proletarian revolution or they dont. What Marxist party does not want the takeover by the State of all industries ( and anarchism is not Marxism either).

The whole point of dialectical presentation was to understand from the point of view of process not component.

No idea what this means. if it is a technical language translate it into English, as I would were I translating topics of physics.

The capitalism of Marx's analysis has changed beyond his initial scope, not in terms of the fundamental units, but the global economy is far more nuanced, dependencies have developed, the consequances have reached beyond human exploitation etc...

Cool, feel free to abandon the "science" that did not get this change. The "science" that predicted the immiseration of the proletariat, and the sublimination off the petit-bourgeois into the proletariat seems to be disproved by empirical events. No real science survives empirical opposition - for instance were newtons laws to suggest that hitting a cannonball at any speed at all would send it into space we would have abandoned Newton's law. instead, at low velocities, Newtons laws work perfectly. so we keep them

Utopian, revisionist, fundamental have all made their contributions, in their context, and of their time.

to what, astrology? why should outsiders care given that all of it is a horses-ass.

In that sense,

this is the typical non-sequitor of a typical social scientist. In that sense what exactly? You are leading on from the types of Marxisms. Should we expect the next sentance to follow logically?

Capital is not something that should be read politically, trying to situate it is completely counter-intuitive both to the structure of the argument and the method of presentation.

No, we shouldn't. Capital is a mere list of statistical problems in England , most of it out of date when he wrote it. Most Marxist have not read it. I have. It's ****e.

And citing the communist manifesto is completely inappropriate considering both the political nature of the document, and the difference in approach (not to mention content) between that and the publication of Capital

Marxists are political. and most have only read the communist manifesto - and subsequent Marxists ( like Adorno).

In any case not only is Marxism clearly political, it is clearly economic. And where is the Marxist economics. By which I mean the body of work equal to "bourgeois" economics which explains - mathematically, and verififably - why bourgeois economics - the actual science - is wrong.For instance: supply and demand. Must be wrong. Explain why?

Otherwise this is mere mumbo-jumbo as far from real science as astrology is from astronomy.

and worse, since astology has not killed millions.

I am tired of the Marxist whine of "never been tried". what exactly would you do differently. Seize the assets of the Kulaks, the small businessmen, the middleclasses etc. but do it nicely? Any Marxist State needs the utter control of all economic and civic activity, and it needs to take over that private wealth violently ( for people wont give it up otherwise); without this initial violence it is not Marxist.

Kama

asdasd wrote: »

one would assume that a science has only one interpreation.

Please to tell if quantum mechanics or relativity is the correct interpretation. Is individual or group selection in evolutionary theory 'correct'? Social science is not a natural science, this monological view is dated within hard science and near irrelevant outside; there can be multiple plausble interpretations, whose research programs produce evidence, and you can compare between em. Typically this leads to a wider, more nuanced view than 'individual selection/Keynesianism/Marxism/whatever is right and everything else is pseudoscientific baloney'

If you think of interpretation in science as approach-perspectives rather than one 'big view' then pluralism is quite coherent, and probably more fertile than a hurrah-boo binary approach.

asdasd

if quantum mechanics or relativity is the correct interpretation.

They operate in different spaces, one macro the other micro.

Is individual or group selection in evolutionary theory 'correct'

Both are complentary.

This is the argument that Intelligent Design makes too, by the way. Your theories are not quite certain yet, so how can you criticise ours? We can criticise, even if scientific understanding is imperfect, any pseudo-scientific doctrince which fails emprical tests,ignores the entire corrpus of real academic work ( evolutonary pscyology, neru-science0 and economics, and has been theorectically and practically demolished.

So bye bye Marxism. Dont let the door hit you on the way out.

Kama

Indeed, both are complementary; if so in harder science, even moreso in softer social sciences. I'm not a great fan of Marx, but I do appreciate some of the work has come out of Marxism as a research program. Marxism nowadays is a recognised academic perspective, and you're tilting at windmills with the 'amagad Stalinism' approach.

Even in hard science, an empirical refutation often just causes auxiliary hypotheses to be deployed. Methinks you have an over-pure concept of how science works in practice; the old Kuhnian joke that 'research programs don't die, their advocates do' comes to mind...

Btw which economics is the 'real' economics? Is Austrian in, or out? Keynes? Henry George? Was Myrdal or Hayek 'wrong' in the 73 Nobel prize, or were they complementary? Who is in or out often reflects more on the ideological position than on empirical merits alone.

Ostrom

asdasd wrote: »

one would assume that a science has only one interpreation. Either Marxists want a proletarian revolution or they dont. What Marxist party does not want the takeover by the State of all industries ( and anarchism is not Marxism either).



No idea what this means. if it is a technical language translate it into English, as I would were I translating topics of physics.



Cool, feel free to abandon the "science" that did not get this change. The "science" that predicted the immiseration of the proletariat, and the sublimination off the petit-bourgeois into the proletariat seems to be disproved by empirical events. No real science survives empirical opposition - for instance were newtons laws to suggest that hitting a cannonball at any speed at all would send it into space we would have abandoned Newton's law. instead, at low velocities, Newtons laws work perfectly. so we keep them



to what, astrology? why should outsiders care given that all of it is a horses-ass.


this is the typical non-sequitor of a typical social scientist. In that sense what exactly? You are leading on from the types of Marxisms. Should we expect the next sentance to follow logically?



No, we shouldn't. Capital is a mere list of statistical problems in England , most of it out of date when he wrote it. Most Marxist have not read it. I have. It's ****e.



Marxists are political. and most have only read the communist manifesto - and subsequent Marxists ( like Adorno).

In any case not only is Marxism clearly political, it is clearly economic. And where is the Marxist economics. By which I mean the body of work equal to "bourgeois" economics which explains - mathematically, and verififably - why bourgeois economics - the actual science - is wrong.For instance: supply and demand. Must be wrong. Explain why?

Otherwise this is mere mumbo-jumbo as far from real science as astrology is from astronomy.

and worse, since astology has not killed millions.

I am tired of the Marxist whine of "never been tried". what exactly would you do differently. Seize the assets of the Kulaks, the small businessmen, the middleclasses etc. but do it nicely? Any Marxist State needs the utter control of all economic and civic activity, and it needs to take over that private wealth violently ( for people wont give it up otherwise); without this initial violence it is not Marxist.

I am no Marxist


And Capital is not about right or wrong


The piece you mentioned about out of date statistics is exactly why it needs a neutral reading - it is a limited product of its place and time. I have no immediate political interests so I am staying out of that debate...

As for the presentation of argument, the point to Capital was a critique of political economy, and through the other volumes, an outline of the Capitalist mode of production, (for better or worse) but starting from the abstract unit of the commodity

Ostrom

brianthebard wrote: »

Good points efla. However there are basic very wrong assumptions about what socialism is that needs to be addressed imo. People think that it means the state controls everything, or the state produces everything and you have no choice of products, and that's not necessarily the case. Definitely agree with what you say about reading Capital.

Definately, but my own history is far from extensive so I will say no more.

My posts are a bit unhelpful in the context of your topic, I'm more concerned with 'value free' reading I suppose, so apologies for cutting in

brianthebard

efla wrote: »

Definately, but my own history is far from extensive so I will say no more.

My posts are a bit unhelpful in the context of your topic, I'm more concerned with 'value free' reading I suppose, so apologies for cutting in

No I'd like to hear more, you haven't really outlined what you think socialism should be, but you've said some interesting stuff so far.

nesf

Kama wrote: »

Hmm, I was actually trying to be sarcastic with the delusional bit; to be more direct, cooperation in groups, reciprocal altruism etc are hardwired into us on an evolutionary level. We didn't get to where we are now as self-interested loners, we did it as cooperative groups. Now, you can make an argument that 'that's a delusion, it weas *really* selfish all the time' on lines like Public Choice theory, or Howard Blooms Lucifer Principle for a true longue duree and so on.

But I'm yet to be convinced that human sharing, compassion, and togetherness is just the epiphenomenon of a self-interested value maximiser. Regard that as a bit of a delusion myself. Like a conspiracy theory or religion, or doctrinaire Marxism or Dawkinsism there's a gnosis, that you know how it really works, and everyone else is 'deluded' with their 'False Consciousness'. Which reeks ideological to me.

I don't really buy the Public Choice theory argument as truth but it's an important one to keep in mind I think. Altruism does exist but it's not the rule and the base principle of socialism is that altruism can become the rule in a sense which I'd be very sceptical of. The difference is that the self-interested value maximiser is a modelling tool (in standard economics anyway) rather than an attempt to describe reality in an encompassing way. The self-interested value maximiser is a fairly good predictor of human behaviour in some situations, it's wholly inaccurate in others.

Kama wrote: »

While kinda true in a 'well being altruistic is just part of your utility function' way, it's still a reductionism to an ontology of selfishness. To me, this is force the person to fit the model, rather than vice versa. You can flip it, as Adam Smith famously did, and say 'if you define it right, selfishness can be in the interest of the group', or talk about the utility of masochists. With moral development, we tend to see a greater proportion of people viewed as 'self' or 'like self', and treat them as such; this is the goal in much spirituality, or enlightened morality. Yes, you can reduce that and say 'well Gandhi was just selfishly trying to help everyone because that is his selfishness', or 'that inner-school teacher is just doing it because he gets off on helping angry kids' but the point, and lived reality, is lost enroute.

The purpose of a model is to be a black box into which we put data and get out a reasonable prediction that we can trust rather than any of the bits in the black box actually looking like what the real system looks like. My point about defining is that we're trying to get the model to work rather than trying to describe reality exactly. The actual causality can be as complex as you want, so long as the end result is the same as the prediction that our self-interested automaton as far as our model is concerned.

Kama wrote: »

Agree with this, and I think the neuro-bio and behavioural and game-theory results back it up. In one-offs, cheating is higher. With proximity and repeat play, cooperation increases. Which has an interesting reflex, that if you think of yourself as a self-interested mobile monad then cheating makes more sense to you, on both a basic-intuitive and a game-rational way, and if you have a context distancing and anonymity are high, structurally it's imo more likely.

To me, this is where the cultural element comes in; lots of historical cultures had mechanisms which extended the inclusiveness of the 'close' circle to take advantage of this 'urge to help' which evolution has fairly hardwired in co-operative mammals such as ourselves.

We have an urge to help and we can be altruistic and I wasn't trying to imply that we weren't but it's balanced by our equally strong desire not to be cheated to encourage the first we need some group (like the State or a charity like the Samaritans) to act as intermediaries to see the money/help is well spent/used.

The game theory point is interesting in that it's usually the Prisoners Dilemma that's used to show the self-interested non-altruistic "person". A key point that's been shown by economic experimenters is that the result of "defect-defect" is dependent on the two prisoners being unable to communicate, leave them both communicate and they quickly agree to both co-operate. There is altruism of a sort hardwired into us but it's not a simplistic mechanism and it's quite nuanced.

Kama wrote: »

I'd agree with this, that's my general position, but have a critical point; the State has been progressively giving up these functions, as have corporations. The state function as a welfare-maximiser (in my view) has been on the way out during neoliberalism, towards a role as an opportunity-maximiser, in line with the self-interested theory 'traders' advocate. (I'm drawing a bit on Bobbitts theory of market-states here). The socialist supplement or synthesis which underlay the world economy in the core states post-war was ideologically rejected in favour of more pure market-based approach, where welfare-maximization is presumed to occur from opportunity-maximization. Perhaps this point seems pedantic, but I don't think these necessarily equate.

Personally I think it's just part of the political cycle. We're approaching the peak of neo-liberal small statism and will start back on the road to socialist big statism soon enough. The point being both peaks being unwanted and annoying. The US is slowly starting to move back towards the left, the present financial crisis almost guarantees it. After a decade or two things will have gone too far the other way and we'll see a reversal and some new rebranded form of neo-liberalism will start to gather support.

Kama wrote: »

Welfare-maximising (to me) seems more characteristic of post-War consensus social democracy, which has been retrenched during the last quarter-century, from Reagan-Thatcher through Bush-Blair, which has emphasised opportunity but denied welfarist rights-based aproaches. When welfare rights are introduced, which don't fit in a market schema, it's called 'socialism', or that's my current naive reading. Opportunity maximising in conditions of inequality imo trends towards an aristocracy of money.

The problem is that welfare rights calls are often populist rather than actually good for the economy or the people in the long run. Opportunity is very much necessary and suppressing it too much (i.e. it needs to be suppressed to some degree) is as bad for the people as removing too many welfare rights. The two are intimately intertwined and that is to an extent the problem of "capitalist/socialist false dilemma" debate. It's polarising and simple to preach sure but it often fails to capture the reality of the system.

Kama wrote: »

So it can happen, it's not against 'human nature'. We didn't get this far purely by hunting and killing, hugs and loves were key. Overemphasising either to exclude the other seems flawed, which is what I hear when the 'it's human nature' argument is thrown around, human evolution isn't that simple a story, for all that it sounds pleasantly macho and 'realist' it's wrong.

I certainly agree, and you'll note that I never said that altruism was against human nature. Exploitation is as "natural" as helping for free at cost to yourself those in your close social circle. We unfortunately have a tendency to both look out for ourselves and our families, even to the extent of taking advantage of other families. We are both altruistic and "selfish"* and no amount of wishful thinking will change that. We can, on the other hand, use both these tendencies to generate welfare, both by encouraging our natural tendency towards altruism (by rewarding charity through tax breaks or whatever or by taxing selfishness by taxing inheritance or income etc). We still need to be careful that we don't overly tax or reward either though for fear of overly distorting incentives in a way that damages welfare in the long run.


Sorry for the delay in replying, I'd forgotten totally about this thread.


*selfish here isn't necessarily negative. For instance, I would provide for my son before I'd even consider donating to charity and if I had to make a choice between helping a family member and a random guy off the street both having the identical problem I'd help the family member first even if it meant not being able to help the other person. Most people would be similar if push came to shove I imagine. Who you are in relation to me makes a very big difference about whether and how I would help you. Part of it is reciprocal intentionally but much of it is instinctive on my part at least. I'd help a friend before a stranger and a close family member before a friend and so on.

DadaKopf

nesf wrote:

The purpose of a model is to be a black box into which we put data and get out a reasonable prediction that we can trust rather than any of the bits in the black box actually looking like what the real system looks like. My point about defining is that we're trying to get the model to work rather than trying to describe reality exactly. The actual causality can be as complex as you want, so long as the end result is the same as the prediction that our self-interested automaton as far as our model is concerned.

Very interesting problem here, in light of the global financial meltdown. As I've been reading more about finance, even its champions accept a fundamental flaw: taking measurements and computing them through a model changes the measurements and the model. This happens because, in an interconnected world, measurements (however derived) instantly alter collective human behaviours, thus altering the basis of the theory applied to predict that behaviour. This is one of the reasons for how these 'risk models' have deviated so far from the 'real economy'. Models can never catch up with social reality; they are not scientific, they're social constructions. And, in times of crisis, risk models go out the window.

It's for this reason that I find your previous comment contradictory:

I don't really buy the Public Choice theory argument as truth but it's an important one to keep in mind I think. Altruism does exist but it's not the rule and the base principle of socialism is that altruism can become the rule in a sense which I'd be very sceptical of. The difference is that the self-interested value maximiser is a modelling tool (in standard economics anyway) rather than an attempt to describe reality in an encompassing way. The self-interested value maximiser is a fairly good predictor of human behaviour in some situations, it's wholly inaccurate in others.

You're right to say 'altruism does not exist', but you misunderstand it. Altruism is not a 'thing in itself', it's a social practice, that is, there is not altruism/non-altruism. The construction of altruism into an absolutist, either/or concept serves those who have an interest in undermining political principles such as redistributive social justice. It is not a case of pure altruism versus pure self-interest, it is both/and.

The game theory point is interesting in that it's usually the Prisoners Dilemma that's used to show the self-interested non-altruistic "person". A key point that's been shown by economic experimenters is that the result of "defect-defect" is dependent on the two prisoners being unable to communicate, leave them both communicate and they quickly agree to both co-operate. There is altruism of a sort hardwired into us but it's not a simplistic mechanism and it's quite nuanced.

Yes, it is nuanced. And the experiments clearly show, upon deeper examination of human agency, that humans are not purely rational (as economists assume). Humans have capacity to be rational, but also emotional, bound by habits, memory, social position, phychophysiology, as if these are some forms of defect. Your response may be: 'yes, but I'm talking about the conclusions economists can come to, not those of psychophysiologists'. So by your own adminission, the level which economic dogma has structured our social reality is unacceptable (go back above to my comments on measurement and agency).

Personally I think it's just part of the political cycle. We're approaching the peak of neo-liberal small statism and will start back on the road to socialist big statism soon enough. The point being both peaks being unwanted and annoying. The US is slowly starting to move back towards the left, the present financial crisis almost guarantees it. After a decade or two things will have gone too far the other way and we'll see a reversal and some new rebranded form of neo-liberalism will start to gather support.

Can't disagree here. The economic historian Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation theorised a phenomenon he called the 'double movement': after a period in which the market becomes 'disembedded' from society, a period where it becomes 'embedded' emerges, and back again, ad infinitum. Writing in the 1950s, his argument was precient; researchers since the 1990s have been revisiting his ideas, and we are IMO, seeing the return to a re-embedding of the market - in other words, bringing it more under political control. But I do also think we'll see the emergence of a hybrid whereby a stronger role for states in economies will be coupled with continued privatisation (or at least public-private partnerships) and the outsourcing of government. What would prevent this would be a strong, cohesive human rights/labour movement, and this is possible, but starting from much more difficult conditions where workers and the middle-class continue to be immiserated, made vulnerable and literally bored into inaction.

The problem is that welfare rights calls are often populist rather than actually good for the economy or the people in the long run.

Should society serve the economy, or the economy serve society? I would gladly sacrifice growth (untenable in any case given global environmental destruction) for equality within a strong democratic framework. No doubt welfare demands can be 'populist', but isn't that often what's right?

nesf

DadaKopf wrote: »

Very interesting problem here, in light of the global financial meltdown. As I've been reading more about finance, even its champions accept a fundamental flaw: taking measurements and computing them through a model changes the measurements and the model. This happens because, in an interconnected world, measurements (however derived) instantly alter collective human behaviours, thus altering the basis of the theory applied to predict that behaviour. This is one of the reasons for how these 'risk models' have deviated so far from the 'real economy'. Models can never catch up with social reality; they are not scientific, they're social constructions. And, in times of crisis, risk models go out the window.

Um, all science is a social construction I don't really get your "it's not science" point to be honest. The risk models are and were a mess and many economists could have told you this long before this crisis. There are strict technical reasons (mathematical in nature) for why the risk models that were so popular don't work very well.

DadaKopf wrote: »

You're right to say 'altruism does not exist', but you misunderstand it. Altruism is not a 'thing in itself', it's a social practice, that is, there is not altruism/non-altruism. The construction of altruism into an absolutist, either/or concept serves those who have an interest in undermining political principles such as redistributive social justice. It is not a case of pure altruism versus pure self-interest, it is both/and.

Eh, I said altruism does exist not altruism does not exist. Wouldn't redistributive social justice come from a beginning argument that the social practice of altruism is not our default behaviour (which is equivalent in my view to saying that altruism is not the rule)? We need a State to redistribute because if left to our own devices we won't do it enough outside of our own small personal "circle" to maximise welfare in the State while at the same time being aware of the distortions that too much redistribution brings which also negatively affect welfare in the State.

DadaKopf wrote: »

Yes, it is nuanced. And the experiments clearly show, upon deeper examination of human agency, that humans are not purely rational (as economists assume). Humans have capacity to be rational, but also emotional, bound by habits, memory, social position, phychophysiology, as if these are some forms of defect. Your response may be: 'yes, but I'm talking about the conclusions economists can come to, not those of psychophysiologists'. So by your own adminission, the level which economic dogma has structured our social reality is unacceptable (go back above to my comments on measurement and agency).

But what you're speaking of here is a naive implementation of economic theory that assumes rationality in all situations rather than testing for rationality and only assuming it in situations where it holds. Much of modern economic theory is about working past and/or around the rationality assumption that is so limiting (and which doesn't hold much of the time).

DadaKopf wrote: »

Should society serve the economy, or the economy serve society?

Is that not similar to your point on altruism above that those who want the market to to play a smaller role in society frame the question in this way to make it seem that there is a choice between the two here? That we can either serve society or the economy and not both.

DadaKopf

Um, all science is a social construction I don't really get your "it's not science" point to be honest. The risk models are and were a mess and many economists could have told you this long before this crisis. There are strict technical reasons (mathematical in nature) for why the risk models that were so popular don't work very well.

What I mean is economics treats social action as if it were natural science. Of course, it isn't natural science. But the discursive constructions of economics, and finance, continue to work on this underlying basis, despite recent strands. This thread is about Marxism, and, to go down a Gramscian line, this 'soft science' is treated as 'hard science' by those who seek to elevate economics such as it is to ideology. It is ideology that Marxists are very concerned with because such ideas actually structure our worlds, our actions, our freedoms. In any case, my point also idenfied the measurement problem so inherent in economics which undermines its claims to accurate description, or even appropriation.

Eh, I said altruism does exist not altruism does not exist. Wouldn't redistributive social justice come from a beginning argument that the social practice of altruism is not our default behaviour (which is equivalent in my view to saying that altruism is not the rule)?

My bad. But I think my point is valid. It's untenable to contribute to a frame of debate that preserves the altruism/self-interest dictinction. Theory is always 'for someone' and, therefore, this distinction, defended by many, serves an ideological purpose. This view is partly based on ontology, I suppose, in which case I personally do not see a real distinction between the individual and society - the boundaries are blurred and in flux. That's different to an economic worldview.

But this discussion is drifting off from Marxist political economy.

nesf

DadaKopf wrote: »

What I mean is economics treats social action as if it were natural science. Of course, it isn't natural science. But the discursive constructions of economics, and finance, continue to work on this underlying basis, despite recent strands. This thread is about Marxism, and, to go down a Gramscian line, this 'soft science' is treated as 'hard science' by those who seek to elevate economics such as it is to ideology. It is ideology that Marxists are very concerned with because such ideas actually structure our worlds, our actions, our freedoms. In any case, my point also idenfied the measurement problem so inherent in economics which undermines its claims to accurate description, or even appropriation.

True, but the question is whether we can improve on the present measurement problem in economics and social science in general (interesting stuff is going on in neuroeconomics where the basic tenets are being put to the test with experiments that are more objective than would be traditional in the social sciences. Social science can become more objective and "hard" or at least we can hope for such to happen. Within the context of Marxism, is that such basic research in fields like neuroeconomics etc can help us get to the heart of individual behaviour (hopefully) and this will be a boon to both economics and Marxism and social science in general (since, really the evidence swings both ways, neither the altruistic ideal of Rousseau nor the simple self-interested individual of naive economic theory really exist, it's something between the two that best characterises individual behaviour). This of course assumes you subscribe to the "reductionist" world-view that our minds are our brains and that by studying our brains we can analyse our minds scientifically.

DadaKopf wrote: »

My bad. But I think my point is valid. It's untenable to contribute to a frame of debate that preserves the altruism/self-interest dictinction. Theory is always 'for someone' and, therefore, this distinction, defended by many, serves an ideological purpose. This view is partly based on ontology, I suppose, in which case I personally do not see a real distinction between the individual and society - the boundaries are blurred and in flux. That's different to an economic worldview.

The economic world-view could be restated as society being the aggregation of the individuals who make it up rather than a thing in and of itself. This is an ontological dilemma and one worth teasing out because it underlies much of the fundamental disagreement between the camps though many would not be aware of it. For many Marxists society can overcome base individual desires* while for many economists society is defined by these base individual desires and we need to adopt a bottom up, aggregating approach to problems where possible. You'd subscribe more to the former and me to the latter and this initial disagreement in ontology informs much of where we disagree in "higher level" discussion.

*I'm horribly oversimplifying here for the sake of brevity rather than trying to be authoritative. Basically my point is whether we view society as a thing in and of itself or as merely the result of aggregated individual behaviour and that this basic difference informs much of the language and thinking that follows when analysing problems in a society.

DadaKopf wrote: »

But this discussion is drifting off from Marxist political economy.

It is drifting into an interesting side of things which is the modern debate on individual behaviour and its implications for Marxism and more right wing world-views. It's getting off-topic for the thread but it's useful discussion nonetheless since any present day understanding or definition of socialism or Marxism should be informed by the very debate that's been shaping its development over the past century give or take a few decades. Being able to put Marxism in a context with respect to competing theories is as important as being able define it in isolation in my opinion.


Edit: Part of the problem here is an oversimplification of both economics and Marxism. Rationality in economics isn't the unquestioned tenet that some from outside the field like to make it out to be, it is very much a live question in the discipline how to work around it because we know that people aren't actually self interested utility function maximisers running around like automatons. Equally problems like assuming perfect competition stem from a need to make the maths tractable (i.e. solvable) and this is slowly changing as better technical techniques allow more complicated imperfect competition assumptions to be used. Economics has evolved a long way from the simplistic rationality assumption that people are exposed to in basic economics courses or simplistic rants against the subject. Equally Marxism gets boiled down to the worst ills of Communism in Russia even though most well-informed Marxists are very much aware of the problems in the USSR and know that any future attempts at a socialist State would need to take account of them and try to mitigate them (i.e. the whole failure of the centralised control of all production being a key point). Modern progressive Marxists (and more right wing "economists") that I'd have more time for (yes I'm biased here but you know my political views inform this) are the ones who are looking at using both the market and the State to the best effect to realise welfare maximisation and not simply polarising populist soapboxers (from both sides!) who present the false dilemma of a choice between the two where you can have either a strong State or a free market and not have both or the middle ground.

brianthebard

Really enjoyed the debate so far, with a few exceptions its been very good. Someone suggested its gone a bit off topic though so I wanted to ask a few questions.
We have established, quite rightly, that Marxism has evolved with each generation of Marxists. What are these evolutions and what are their implications?
For instance I've mentioned the nationalism question. It was originally felt that nationalism was anathema to socialism and Marxism. Marx called for the gradual falling away of the state. However since Marxism has moved to the third world it has become anti-imperialist, while taking on nationalist tendencies. The reason for this I believe is that third world nations have not been allowed develop a post colonial national identity and are also not guaranteed autonomy (see Chile and Allende for example) therefore national pride is very important, as a means of pushing against any imperial influences. Is this a good thing? How does this affect the Marxist ideology in general? Anyone think of any other instances where Marxism has changed position or grown in the last century?
Also if anyone wants to read Marxist texts, check out www.marxists.org for a collection of socialist/Marxist essays, or www.monthlyreview.org for a very good anti-imperialist/Marxist (American) journal. This in particular will give you an idea of what Marxists are opposed to and fighting for today.

DadaKopf

Part of the problem here is an oversimplification of both economics and Marxism.

Yeah, I agree, though I think we've both made efforts to imply, at least, that things aren't so simple.

Basically my point is whether we view society as a thing in and of itself or as merely the result of aggregated individual behaviour and that this basic difference informs much of the language and thinking that follows when analysing problems in a society.

I definitely agree with you that this is one of the main faultlines dividing these opinions, but it so often goes unacknowledged. AFAIK, Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration was an attempt to build a halfway house between the two - a 'third way'. And I do see things in more constructivist terms. I use the term 'society' to refer to myriad collective social practices which give rise to identities, structures and which, in turn, influences collective social practices. I do sometimes find it an inappropriate term, it's a term that carries baggage - 'society' was a term developed by early sociologists to transform people into units for analysis (similar to economics, the application of scientific method to the study of human beings). But while the term 'society' often inappropriate (e.g. 'civil society' in the developing world), the term is so pervasive in the West that we've come to identify with it, and behave accordingly. Perhaps it's similar to the impact that British and German anthropologists had on the invention of tribalism in west Africa; African peoples weren't organised into 'tribes' when the white man arrived, but arriving as they did with their ideas of African 'civilisation' being divided into discreet tribes did end up creating the tribalism we know today. Now there's your historical materialist dialectic. Or as Anthony Giddens calls it, 'structuration'.

Modern progressive Marxists (and more right wing "economists") that I'd have more time for (yes I'm biased here but you know my political views inform this) are the ones who are looking at using both the market and the State to the best effect to realise welfare maximisation and not simply polarising populist soapboxers (from both sides!) who present the false dilemma of a choice between the two where you can have either a strong State or a free market and not have both or the middle ground.

Hmm, well... again, you can have a market under Communism, but not a capitalist market. That's where the distinction lies. I'm not all sold on Communism either, but I'm convinced that capitalism will be replaced with something. I don't see history unfolding in a deterministic way; it's just the actions of people in collectives struggling over power exercised though human actions, discourses, institutions. And that fills me with hope, but the flipside of that is pessimism. Things probably weren't much better under feudalism and there's no reason to think things are any better or worse today and tomorrow. Although it appears that we're driving ourselves to our own extinction...

DadaKopf

Really enjoyed the debate so far, with a few exceptions its been very good.

Yeah, it's actually a real debate for a change, where people respect each other and politely disagree. A first in all my years on boards.ie.

We have established, quite rightly, that Marxism has evolved with each generation of Marxists. What are these evolutions and what are their implications?

The main European/Western generations for me are:

• 1920s: Gramsci, Lukacs, Bloch, Benjamin who attempted to develop Marxist aesthetics leading to deeper understanding about the role of culture in political economy, and the nature of ideology and domination. Some, like Benjamin, interrogated modernity and its impacts on social and creative life; Gramsci contributed the theory of 'hegemony' in which the middle-class plays a role in engineering the domination of the working classes through consent (this has latterly been applied to international relations theory.
• 1940s-60s: The Frankfurt School gave us Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas who sought to advance Marxism in a clearly different world to that of Marx. They developed a 'critical theory' with which to examine social reality. Horkheimer and Adorno modified Marxism to undermine the foundational basis of Western scientific rationality; Adorno later moved to the USA and began analysing the 'culture industry' which he saw as an active tool in the domination of American society; Habermas (still alive) contributed his 'theory of communicative action' that, by reconciling Hegel and Kant and applying linguistic and early post-modern techniques, showed how saying and writing something actually changes the world. Another person important to me is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher of 'phenomenology', who looked at human experience of the world and the nature of embodied subjectivity, leading to a conclusion that the distinction between the person and the wider world (things, people) is blurred. He was a committed socialist.
• 1970s: Ralph Miliband and Claus Offe contributing to a neo-Marxist analysis of the state at a time when things were becoming unstuck; they developed their ideas at the same time the neo-liberals were developing their critiques of the state. Remarkably, there was a degree of consensus between both camps at the time.
• 1980s: Frederic Jameson's contributions to aesthetic theory (crucial in understanding Marxian political ideas) and our ideas about the 'post-modern'.
• 2000s: Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt published 'Empire' and 'Multitude'; Negri, an old guard Italian Marxist imprisoned for a crime he (probably) didn't commit wrote half of Empire, an analysis of the role of the USA in international relations and its transformation of societies across the world. Multitude, according to some, is the 'Communist Manifesto for the 21st century'; it has fused neo-Marxist principles with a re-reading of the 17th century philosopher Spinoza and the very exciting (but dead) French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari under whom Negri studied and taught. They believe that for the first time, true, democratic collective human action against capitalism and domination is finally possible due, ironically, to the expansion of late-capitalism and industrialisation to date.

I know these are all 'western' heads. Internationally, the dependentinistas in Latin America (Gunder-Frank, Prebisch) were hugely influential at the time. The Zapatistas, and particularly Subcommandante Marcos, have put forward a remarkably exciting variant of Marxism. I also think Liberation Theology (the fusing of Catholicism and Marxism) has been more influential than we know, particularly in the social movements in Latin America. Marxism, mostly of the doctrinaire variety, played a mobilising role in anti-colonial liberation struggles but ran aground vis-a-vis Marxist principles and social transformation because they were in the service of nationalism and ethnic/class domination (think Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal, Syria and much of the Middle-East, parts of India, Sri Lanka).

Oh, I'm a big fan of New Left Review. There's lots of free articles on it.

Kama

This thread just keeps getting better! I'm sure I'll spoil it...

Without trying to derail, I'd like to obliquely revisit some of nesf's points...

A key irony in the 'End of Communism' (which was severely criticised for making teleological assumptions about 'historical necessity') was its replacement with the Neoliberal 'historical necessity' of 'There Is No Alternative', in a Heideggerian-ADD 'blink'.

What to me is key is that economics in a sense is always political economy; economic structuration encodes and expresses political dynamics. Part of the disjunct between a Marxist-derived approach and the bottom-up individual aggregation would be the former being a conflict theory, which tends to be elided in the latter. To restate it more tendentiously, (neoliberal) economics has been in (normative-political) denial as a utopian-political project.

While at the more rarefied levels, the limits of rationality and the failures of markets are accepted and debated; at 'lower' levels, in general political debate, a cruder narrative is presented: valorization of market processes, denigration of statist and welfare functions, the whole deregulative ideology of 'Anglo' regimes. This has been justified with economics-as-natural-science, and many of its core assumptions (self-interested utility-maximization) have been 'incentivised' reflexively as a natural state through an individualist social ideology.

Now, I don't think this is off-topic, because (to me anyway) socialisms, or socialization as a trend involves the collectivization of the ownership of the various factors that constitute the means of production, whether that capital is coventional fixed, social, informational, whatever. Individual or bounded-discrete ownership versus shared-collective or usufructuary ownership goes to the heart of the underlying problematique, whether our point of origin is the Enclosure of the Commons, IP and patent rights, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, or public services in welfare states.

brianthebard

DadaKopf wrote: »

Yeah, it's actually a real debate for a change, where people respect each other and politely disagree. A first in all my years on boards.ie.


The main European/Western generations for me are:

• 1920s: Gramsci, Lukacs, Bloch, Benjamin who attempted to develop Marxist aesthetics leading to deeper understanding about the role of culture in political economy, and the nature of ideology and domination. Some, like Benjamin, interrogated modernity and its impacts on social and creative life; Gramsci contributed the theory of 'hegemony' in which the middle-class plays a role in engineering the domination of the working classes through consent (this has latterly been applied to international relations theory.
• 1940s-60s: The Frankfurt School gave us Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas who sought to advance Marxism in a clearly different world to that of Marx. They developed a 'critical theory' with which to examine social reality. Horkheimer and Adorno modified Marxism to undermine the foundational basis of Western scientific rationality; Adorno later moved to the USA and began analysing the 'culture industry' which he saw as an active tool in the domination of American society; Habermas (still alive) contributed his 'theory of communicative action' that, by reconciling Hegel and Kant and applying linguistic and early post-modern techniques, showed how saying and writing something actually changes the world. Another person important to me is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher of 'phenomenology', who looked at human experience of the world and the nature of embodied subjectivity, leading to a conclusion that the distinction between the person and the wider world (things, people) is blurred. He was a committed socialist.
• 1970s: Ralph Miliband and Claus Offe contributing to a neo-Marxist analysis of the state at a time when things were becoming unstuck; they developed their ideas at the same time the neo-liberals were developing their critiques of the state. Remarkably, there was a degree of consensus between both camps at the time.
• 1980s: Frederic Jameson's contributions to aesthetic theory (crucial in understanding Marxian political ideas) and our ideas about the 'post-modern'.
• 2000s: Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt published 'Empire' and 'Multitude'; Negri, an old guard Italian Marxist imprisoned for a crime he (probably) didn't commit wrote half of Empire, an analysis of the role of the USA in international relations and its transformation of societies across the world. Multitude, according to some, is the 'Communist Manifesto for the 21st century'; it has fused neo-Marxist principles with a re-reading of the 17th century philosopher Spinoza and the very exciting (but dead) French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari under whom Negri studied and taught. They believe that for the first time, true, democratic collective human action against capitalism and domination is finally possible due, ironically, to the expansion of late-capitalism and industrialisation to date.

Indeed. What's striking about Marxism in Europe is that it seems to be almost wholly theoretical and based on issues of society in that way-giving a voice to the unconscious every day. In contrast Third world Marxism, while having its own theories, is dedicated to the creation of revolution. Obviously there are good reasons why this should be the case in the latter but why in the former category?

I know these are all 'western' heads. Internationally, the dependentinistas in Latin America (Gunder-Frank, Prebisch) were hugely influential at the time. The Zapatistas, and particularly Subcommandante Marcos, have put forward a remarkably exciting variant of Marxism. I also think Liberation Theology (the fusing of Catholicism and Marxism) has been more influential than we know, particularly in the social movements in Latin America. Marxism, mostly of the doctrinaire variety, played a mobilising role in anti-colonial liberation struggles but ran aground vis-a-vis Marxist principles and social transformation because they were in the service of nationalism and ethnic/class domination (think Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal, Syria and much of the Middle-East, parts of India, Sri Lanka).

I've mentioned the inclusion of nationalism as a necessary policy of Marxism in the third world, what do you see as the key changes or differences in how socialism/communism/marxism is theorised now, or in the last fifty years, compared to the original? Who has been more influential, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Minh, Guevara, Castro? (if such a thing can be quantified). What does liberation theology offer that secular marxism cannot?

Oh, I'm a big fan of New Left Review. There's lots of free articles on it.

Ha so that's your source! Have I mentioned www.monthlyreview.org and www.marxists.org already? Well just for good measure there they are again.

Kama

What's striking about Marxism in Europe is that it seems to be almost wholly theoretical and based on issues of society in that way-giving a voice to the unconscious every day.

Crudely, you could say it's been domesticated; rather than a revolutionary praxis, it's an analytic tradition in social theory within Western capitalist societies. There was a joke on those lines in France about the Left, that rather than taking over government/society, they took over the academy. Disciplinary legitimacy and funding were a helpful carrot...

asdasd

Every one of these morons was a charlatan. "Oppressed" by the bourgeois State which actually supplied them with tenure - more fool it - while support Tyrannies where real decent people who were oppressed spoke out, and got tortured. It is also bollocks. It is the kind of non-analytical horse-**** which can only be believed by the two-digit IQ's who tend to flock around the pseudo-sciences. None of these people have a place in University. If any student thinks Negri. Adorno, and Marx "prove" anything they should be turfed out. The "radical" literature will exist as long as anyone wants to read it, which would be that long since noone would unless they were forced to.

Most of this ****e is designed to be unfalsifable, of course. Everybody including "scientists" manufacture reality ( and yet, planes fly). this stuff is worse than Intelligent design because while intelligent design tries to deal with science, the gnostic morons of Marxism and Critical studies just shout "bourgeois" or worse "Western" from the corners. They think this is some kind of analysis.

Adorno is an example. The "culture industry" my ass. Adorno spent no time whatsoever on how rock music, or Jazz, or sports originated as working class pastimes, he didn't even know. He spent no time on research. he was a total and utter charlatan.

For instance: Soccer originated amongst the working classes, they got materially richer and soccer got richer. In a capitalist society that means the soccer teams will form as companies. To Adorno's snobby incoherent little brain this was "Capital" imposing it's will on the working classes ( who should always be made aware of Adorno, by the way. I know of at least one far-leftist who drifted rightwards when I brought him to Adorno. He was lower middle class) This kinda of Marxism is the middle-class mediocrities wet dream. Of course, in no form of Marxism, is the proletariat consulted on what it actually believes - the uber bourgeois Marx and Engels didn't need to, and didn't meet any ( unless they were Engel's bits of the side which he latterly discarded). After Adorno we find the Proletariat really wants Avant Garde music and Art. just like the greasy heads of Marxist academe.

What a ****ing surprise that is.


I think scientists, of which I am one, give this ****e far too much leeway. We need to take it on, and show just how faulty the assumptions, how most of the "proofs" are non-sequiturs, how most of the lines are of no sense whatsoever.

I think it would be simple to take Negri's nonsense, and show that no line actually follows the next. Everything is nonsense.

There is more intelligence in the theology of the middle ages . Far more.

Also the role of the FrankFurt school in "critical theory" ( basically the destruction of all the foundations of the entire belief system of the West - from science to everything else) in modern day Political Correctness needs also to be highlighted.

We need to fight back. The lunatics have taken the asylum for far too long. Fire the Marxists and replace them with Astrologers who would be more fun and have more wit.

brianthebard

Kama wrote: »

Crudely, you could say it's been domesticated; rather than a revolutionary praxis, it's an analytic tradition in social theory within Western capitalist societies. There was a joke on those lines in France about the Left, that rather than taking over government/society, they took over the academy. Disciplinary legitimacy and funding were a helpful carrot...

Well yes it has been domesticated but why? Shouldn't someone like Benjemin, coming from Fascist Germany, be speaking about a counter revolution, rather than the angel of history? Or can't we have both, as we have in the writing of Cabral and Fanon, individuals who are willing to critique the society around them, and then seek to improve that society? Although on the other hand I don't know how much Marx himself advocated armed revolution? Or perhaps, since he was writing the Manifesto in 1848 (or thereabouts) it wasn't necessary to say revolution was needed, since it was already underway?

nesf

Kama wrote: »

While at the more rarefied levels, the limits of rationality and the failures of markets are accepted and debated; at 'lower' levels, in general political debate, a cruder narrative is presented: valorization of market processes, denigration of statist and welfare functions, the whole deregulative ideology of 'Anglo' regimes. This has been justified with economics-as-natural-science, and many of its core assumptions (self-interested utility-maximization) have been 'incentivised' reflexively as a natural state through an individualist social ideology.

This essentially is the crux of it for me. When I think of the "market" I'm thinking of a very different thing to what politicians refer to, especially with regard to market failure.

There has been, in the neo-economic era of the previous decades not worship of the neo-liberal ideal necessarily by those who implement it, there has been a section of society using it as a base to fuel their own interests. Less regulation is in the short term interest of many people in many markets and the way pay and other incentives are structured make this even more acute a problem.

You can take apart the Sub Prime Crisis for instance as a problem of incentive structures that lead to the entire mess that we're presently in. It's a simplistic analysis and a reductionist one but it does get at a core problem in the system and how it was allowed to run. At the root of it, the individual selling these mortgages had only incentives to sell and no incentive to sell to people who could pay back. Whatever about the broader cultural and structural issues of the system, this simple point about individual incentives captures what fuelled the fire without invoking any wide ranging or contentious political concepts. It is a bottom up analysis that is simple and straightforward, it doesn't cover all the issues but manages to focus in on a key problem that needs to be fixed, it doesn't matter what else we change if the individuals giving out the loans have their incentives structured in this way and as such can give some guidance as to what policy (in whatever form it takes) needs to do.

The above I think is the strength of economic analysis, but it is not what is implemented in the "Anglo" approach to economic management. The problem is that it is narrow. Just as we need to separate the more abstract work of Marx from how modern Governments implement "socialism" we need to do the same with respect to more market orientated policies.

The problem comes from people confusing political applications of something like the Chicago School of thought with the actual Chicago School of thought.

This is getting way off topic but I think the above works both ways since it's about a disconnect between theory and practice so to speak.

Earthhorse

nesf wrote: »

You can take apart the Sub Prime Crisis for instance as a problem of incentive structures that lead to the entire mess that we're presently in. It's a simplistic analysis and a reductionist one but it does get at a core problem in the system and how it was allowed to run. At the root of it, the individual selling these mortgages had only incentives to sell and no incentive to sell to people who could pay back.

In the long run their incentive should be that if the whole system is based on rocky foundations there will be no future business for them; two problems with that are that people are bad long term thinkers and that they can make their money in the short run and not really be affected in the long run thanks to imperfect information - nobody knows whose "fault" this is.

Forget about their incentives for a minute though and ask yourself whether they had any power - can a salesman refuse a sale? No. Of course not. Not if he wants to continue being a salesman anyway. Once head office say it's a-okay to lend to people who can't pay back he doesn't have any real choice in the matter. Of course, this is an equally simplistic, if inverted, analysis of the situation but it gets to the root of it, in my opinion, which is that a few people really had the power to influence all this and the simplest thing to do would be not to give them that power by properly regulating the market rather than pretending it will incentivise them to do the right thing.

nesf wrote: »

Whatever about the broader cultural and structural issues of the system, this simple point about individual incentives captures what fuelled the fire without invoking any wide ranging or contentious political concepts. It is a bottom up analysis that is simple and straightforward, it doesn't cover all the issues but manages to focus in on a key problem that needs to be fixed, it doesn't matter what else we change if the individuals giving out the loans have their incentives structured in this way and as such can give some guidance as to what policy (in whatever form it takes) needs to do.

Again, I would say that it doesn't really matter what way you incentivise the individual if they don't have any power. Besides, incentive systems are notoriously difficult to construct in such a way that they encourage the desired behaviour. People find ways to game the system and the more you put in the system the more game they got. Of course, the flipside is that a truly free market ends up in a free for all; neither is desirable.

If they really wanted to encourage home ownership, which, ostensibly, is what the whole sub-prime market was supposed to be about, then they should have encouraged building of lower cost housing. If you are going to incentivise something then get as close to that something as possible and not something it is a derivative of (and yeah, I realise I just suggested an incentive system after saying they were difficult to construct but there ya go).

Also, yes, that's all fairly off topic but I think it's interesting and the thread is strong enough to survive a little off-topicness too.

brianthebard

Earthhorse wrote: »

Again, I would say that it doesn't really matter what way you incentivise the individual if they don't have any power. Besides, incentive systems are notoriously difficult to construct in such a way that they encourage the desired behaviour. People find ways to game the system and the more you put in the system the more game they got. Of course, the flipside is that a truly free market ends up in a free for all; neither is desirable.

If they really wanted to encourage home ownership, which, ostensibly, is what the whole sub-prime market was supposed to be about, then they should have encouraged building of lower cost housing. If you are going to incentivise something then get as close to that something as possible and not something it is a derivative of (and yeah, I realise I just suggested an incentive system after saying they were difficult to construct but there ya go).

Also, yes, that's all fairly off topic but I think it's interesting and the thread is strong enough to survive a little off-topicness too.

Hang on, power to the worker, incentivise work, low cost housing...have you come over to the red side???

DadaKopf

What's striking about Marxism in Europe is that it seems to be almost wholly theoretical and based on issues of society in that way-giving a voice to the unconscious every day. In contrast Third world Marxism, while having its own theories, is dedicated to the creation of revolution. Obviously there are good reasons why this should be the case in the latter but why in the former category?

Well yes it has been domesticated but why? Shouldn't someone like Benjemin, coming from Fascist Germany, be speaking about a counter revolution, rather than the angel of history? Or can't we have both, as we have in the writing of Cabral and Fanon, individuals who are willing to critique the society around them, and then seek to improve that society? Although on the other hand I don't know how much Marx himself advocated armed revolution? Or perhaps, since he was writing the Manifesto in 1848 (or thereabouts) it wasn't necessary to say revolution was needed, since it was already underway?

I wouldn't accept this if it means that European Marxist writers take their eyes of the revolutionary ball. You've got to look at each individual context. But there seems to be a pattern. Gramsci, for example, certainly asked why there wasn't liberatory revolution in Italy. Part of Gramsci's forumla was: where political rule authoritarian, power is wielded by the state explicitly through force; where political rule is (quasi-)democratic, power is wielded through more complex methods which engineer consent, but are ultimately backed up by the use of force. This dimension of the argument, therefore, means that where social injustice is radical and explicit, marxist theory is concerned with, let's say, basic revolutionary praxis; where social injustice is implicit, theory focuses on more 'mundane' aspects of everyday life which are analysed as methods of social control, but always linked to the underlying structural injustices.

This is where I greatly admire the Situationist International, those Paris intellectuals who developed ideas on the revolutionary potential of people in 1960s advanced capitalism. How can you escape a system that gobbles up all revolutionary energies into a black hole? They had a slogan: "Boredom is counterrevolutionary". Two key works emerged, Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle', and Raoul Vangiem's 'The Revolution of Everyday Life'. More recently, Hardt and Negri have updated these ideas (even if Negri is really old). These kinds of theories circulating in the 1960s were absolutely focused on revolutionary praxis; they recognised that things had changed, requiring a revision of marxist ideas. But this is the essence of Marx's ideas - theory influences practice, practice influences theory.

I've started reading Capital, and Marx starts with The Commodity - the 'elementary cell' of capitalism. Capitalism is defined by commodity-production and the specific forms of commodity-production. [I've started reading it because David Harvey has had his lectures on reading Capital stuck on his website: www.davidharvey.org]

So I wouldn't feel bad about it. It's the nature of the contest of power in the capitalist system. In any case, revolution can't happen all the time, who wants that, right. Theory and practice goes in phases. What we're living through now, the collapse of neoliberal ideology, is potentially one such moment.

To Adorno's snobby incoherent little brain this was "Capital" imposing it's will on the working classes ( who should always be made aware of Adorno, by the way. I know of at least one far-leftist who drifted rightwards when I brought him to Adorno. He was lower middle class)

I'm not sure Adorno wrote about football, but there's an interesting economic analysis by Branko Milanovic, an influential economic analyst working in the World Bank. He subjected football to an economic analysis of how free markets and controlled markets affect equality of outcomes. Anyway, he compared international football to club football. His conclusion was the rules limiting transfer of players from one country team to another led to more equal (therefore competitive and just) outcomes; teams which treated players as exchangable commodities led to increasing inequality between clubs - the richer ones consistently scored higher and won more championships/cups. It's possible to argue that the marketisation and commodification of football has led to a less competitive, less enjoyable world.

nesf

Earthhorse wrote: »

In the long run their incentive should be that if the whole system is based on rocky foundations there will be no future business for them; two problems with that are that people are bad long term thinkers and that they can make their money in the short run and not really be affected in the long run thanks to imperfect information - nobody knows whose "fault" this is.

Forget about their incentives for a minute though and ask yourself whether they had any power - can a salesman refuse a sale? No. Of course not. Not if he wants to continue being a salesman anyway. Once head office say it's a-okay to lend to people who can't pay back he doesn't have any real choice in the matter. Of course, this is an equally simplistic, if inverted, analysis of the situation but it gets to the root of it, in my opinion, which is that a few people really had the power to influence all this and the simplest thing to do would be not to give them that power by properly regulating the market rather than pretending it will incentivise them to do the right thing.

I think both ways of looking at it are valid and both shed light on a different side of the issue. I wasn't trying to suggest that the incentive analysis was the only valid way of looking at the problem I was merely offering it as an application of a very simplistic economic framework to a complex real world problem to show that such approaches, while most certainly not the only route that should be taken, do have value. In this case our points overlap, the incentive structure for these individuals is controlled by the guys who have power, I argue that the individuals can be seen as acting "rationally" given their incentive structure and that the guys in power need to change their incentive structure to prevent this kind of behaviour. We're really just discussing different sides of the same coin here and looking at it from opposite directions, both being valid and useful ways of approaching the problem (and ideally when analysing it in detail both should be done).

Earthhorse wrote: »

People find ways to game the system and the more you put in the system the more game they got. Of course, the flipside is that a truly free market ends up in a free for all; neither is desirable.

This is the core conflict really. We know that over regulation and too little regulation are bad things in many markets, the problem is deciding where in the middle ground to set up camp. You want enough regulation to prevent people screwing over the less informed/whatever but you want to have loose enough regulation to encourage innovation in the hope that more efficiency can be realised. It isn't a simple black and white issue, though politicians love to paint it that way.

Earthhorse wrote: »

If you are going to incentivise something then get as close to that something as possible and not something it is a derivative of (and yeah, I realise I just suggested an incentive system after saying they were difficult to construct but there ya go).

I agree. I think the whole idea of packaging mortgages into a derivative is a really bad idea. Mortgages should be kept on the issuer's books, that gives them some incentive to lend reasonably, though it doesn't guarantee it.

Earthhorse

brianthebard wrote: »

Hang on, power to the worker, incentivise work, low cost housing...have you come over to the red side???

I don't like to be pigeon-holed. :cool:

DadaKopf wrote: »

But this is the essence of Marx's ideas - theory influences practice, practice influences theory.

Surely this is how most fields of study work, no?

Kama

A politely rational thread on Marxist theory wandering through Situationism, Subprime, and an outcomes-based analysis of football; we demanded the impossible, and it has arrived!

Truly, we have finally reached the Promised Thread!
Utopia is Now!

brianthebard

Earthhorse wrote: »

I don't like to be pigeon-holed. :cool:



Surely this is how most fields of study work, no?

Not really, English, History, (economics-controversial!) I'm sure if you went through each university discipline department by dept, you'd find a great many where theory and practical don't meet.

Kama wrote: »

A politely rational thread on Marxist theory wandering through Situationism, Subprime, and an outcomes-based analysis of football; we demanded the impossible, and it has arrived!

Truly, we have finally reached the Promised Thread!
Utopia is Now!

I think I've thanked you more than any other poster I thank (we must be very sad). Does an understanding of Marxism/Adorno/Benjamin (as a for instance) change how people here view the world, even if they don't necessarily conform to those views? The culture industry (and to a lesser extent problems of moral philosophy) have been hugely important to me and how I view culture and society. Wonder if anyone else feels "touched" similarly?

Kama

(we must be very sad)

Hehe truly we are a Circle (of) Jerks...


Or maybe just me...my favourite Marxist is still Zizek; I know a lot of what he writes is take-the-piss toss (he's a Lacanian, they're an odd bunch to begin with) but some is utterly excellent imo; he's a master of the comic anecdote. I've also been quite influenced by Marxist criminology like Reiman; 'hard' coercive developments are that bit more real to me than the more cultural stuff, Repressive Apparatus rather than Ideological Apparatus in the Althusserian terms, and class remains generally highly predictive of outcomes (and isn't actionable under Equality Authority as a form of discrimination).

What we're living through now, the collapse of neoliberal ideology, is potentially one such moment.

Potentially, but I'm doubtful in the short-to-medium, in the West anyway. The discrediting moved mainstream a while back before handbailout; I date it to Sarkozy saying 'we need to stop thinking of protectionism as a dirty word', but it's been in (relative) retreat imo most of this decade.

Agree we are moving away from a market-deregulatory regime, but a rejigged state-mercantilist protectionism seems a more likely lurch than one to the actual Left, vide the current American case.

Practically speaking, rather than in its ideological face, neoliberalism wasn't shy about socialising losses to begin with. Making bank guarantees and recapitalising (this ain't socialism unless you are Ron Paul) produce different scenarios depending on how/if this works out...

If contagion/failure cascades *really* hits the proverbial, it could force more legitimacy crises all the way through state bankruptcy and failure to deliver goods, or Goldman-Sachs and Warren Buffet could just consolidate their US positions, with a little help from that nice Mr. Paulson hehe.

Less regulation is in the short term interest of many people in many markets and the way pay and other incentives are structured make this even more acute a problem.

Again, tangential, but this is a reasonable summation of my main issue with most conventional economics I came across; systemic devaluation of medium-to-long, a discounted future, and perish the thought of anything after us.

Incentive structuration has been largely influenced by the players, with gaming as over-determined consequence (ratings agencies as an example); foxes for chicken coops, conflict of interest, and revolving public-private doors creating an incestuous mess of conflict of interest. Now, a fairer efficient system with the incentives 'right' could no doubt be theorised, but implementation when dominant players could lose out seems...problematic, for power reasons I suspect Marxists know only too well

DadaKopf

Yeah, good point that, at least, neoliberalism won't lose legitimacy immediately everywhere. However, it already has less legitimacy in Latin America than in 'the West', and slowly, many across sub-Saharan Africa are stregthening resistence to neoliberalism, i.e. its illegitimacy. How neoliberalism is married to power structures in these countries is another thing. (But we're in a global age. So, the ideas of Theda Scokpol who explained changes in international relations/society as occurring in 'world time', rather than 'local time' - this is when certain transformations occur nearly simultaneously around the world, e.g. nationalism. I had to write an essay for my MSc on arab nationalism, and I decided to approach it from a social constructivist perspective; it was remarkable to see this 'world time' in play.) I mean, its losing legitimacy fast, already has in local and national contexts in developing countries (with the exception the elites, but even that support will collapse when it looks as if their goose is cooked). Even economicaly, its bankrupt; global grown has continued to decline since the 1970s, proving that neoliberalism hasn't been a route out of the 1970s profitability crisis, i.e. overaccumulation crisis in Marxist parlence.

I'm a fan of Zizek, huge in fact (have you seen the documentary, Zizek!?). He's definitely Marxist, and strangely didn't consider him in my list, probably because of the psychoanalytic thing. Another I didn't mention was Pierre Bordieu (some dude up above asked about why Marxism hasn't been able to account for the tastes or cultural preferences of different classes) who explained how culture and taste are related to class and social power; he convincingly developed the concept of social capital, but in a critical sense rather than a conservative liberal sense like Robert Putnam. Another new kid on the block is Alain Badiou, some 'saviour' of French continental philosophy who is an outspoken leftist critic, and somehow fuses Hegel (and others) with advanced mathematics (getting out of the anti-analytical mode of philosophy extant in France).