21st century Marxism is stupid (save Groucho!)
Col. Mike Walker, USMC (retired)
All,
Do not get me wrong. Marx should be required reading for economists but in its rightful place amongst other classical writers like Smith or Ricardo or Malthus and nothing more.
He is no one’s messiah and never was.
That is the price Marx must pay when he thought the events of his lifetime provided unerring insights, a key to unlock the future.
To prove the failure of Marxism, two examples will suffice (although many more are quickly available).
Fist, let us visit volume I of Das Kapital (1867) to compare it to the arguments of James Hessen in Learning by Doing (2005) and more specifically to the now obscure case of English cottage handloom weavers.
For Marx, who was stuck in the 18th century, loom machines brutally and unjustly destroyed the handloom industry.
Their introduction by capitalists was a degradation ending with the worker as an automaton, a slave.
Similarly, protecting wagon/horse & buggy workers was better than creating many more higher paying automotive jobs in the early 20th century and in a later example, a righteous society should have kept paper file clerks on the payroll instead of replacing their jobs with superior information technology positions.
What nonsense (except in Greece).
The world is a better place when it progresses.
Hessen opines that if we are to look to the descendants of the 19th century English hand-loom workers, any objective observer must conclude that their offspring’s lives are far better off by any “quality of life” measurement: education, health care, housing, nutrition, leisure activities, old age protections, etc.’’
Plain and simply, Marx’s nihilistic assessment of free market economies was dead wrong.
That is not all. Marxist "historical determinism" also took a hit and one need only look to feudalism to see the wreckage.
His feudalistic certainty in 1860s gave way to doubt in the 20th century that forced his acolytes into tortured definitions of feudalism intended to explain away the ever growing contradictions as historical research expanded our understanding of the past.
In the end, the "historical determinism” artifice that shored up Marxist theory collapsed like a dry rotted house in a gale. And therein lies the trap Marx laid for himself.
By seeking to be immediately relevant to a 19th century audience he killed off the value of the scientific analytic process he took such pains to articulate.
His scientific method was rendered meaningless as it closed itself off to new knowledge. When Marx set in stone “eternal” diktats and prescriptions based on the limited knowledge available in the 19th century he doomed himself.
So where are we in the 21st century?
We are at the point where we must once and for all throw out the concept that Marxism holds transcendental truths.
It is a stale philosophy and a failed religion whose rigid dictums have not stood the test of time and no serious thinker should adopt such a fatally flawed treatise.
Would anyone have a home built based on an 1860s plan without electricity, using coal or wood burning heating and candles or kerosene or gas for lighting?
Would anyone send their children to a dentist who used an 1860s textbook that eschewed the cleansing of instruments and held that a good shot of brandy would take care of the pain?
Would anyone undergo surgery by a doctor who held to 1860s methodologies that used deadly metal probes in lieu of x-rays, MRIs or CT scans? Who thought sterilization silly, had no knowledge of antibiotics and thought amputation followed by leaching as an ideal technique in treating traumatic injuries?
Please read Marx but only in the context of a remarkable but outdated thesis.
Mike
