[tt] [technoliberation] David Brin: The Enlightenment Strikes Back (i.e. the continuing relevance of Marx)

[Perry E. Metzger]

>    * SHOULD WE -- SERIOUSLY -- HAVE A FRESH LOOK AT OLD KARL MARX?
>
>    Do you, as an educated 21st Century man or woman, know very much about
>    the controversy that transfixed western civilization for close to a
>    century and a half?

Yes. I suspect I'm one of the few "normal" people around to have
actually read "Capital". Let me say, up front, that I see nothing of
value in the work. It is junk. It should be treated more or less with
the same contempt people hold for other "brilliant" works like Mein
Kampf.

>    Were our ancestors - both those who followed Marx and those who
>    opposed him - stupid to have found him interesting or to have fretted
>    over the scenarios he foretold?

They were ignorant. Also, Marx plays up to many base human emotions,
including envy and hatred of people who are more accomplished, as well
as to the Christian obsession with poverty as saintliness, so he
was quite well received.

I'll point out that lots of smart people decided to become supporters
of Fascism at one time, a theory that contradicts Marxism. Lots of
smart people once worshiped the "medical" work of Anton
Mesmer. History is filled with smart people grasping on to stupid
ideas. That some smart people once believed an idea no reason to take
it seriously yourself.

>    I often refer to Marx as the greatest of all science fiction authors,
>    because -- while his long-range forecasts nearly all failed, and some
>    of his premises (like the labor theory of value) were pure fantasy --
>    he nevertheless shed heaps of new light and focused the attention of
>    millions upon many basics of both economics and human nature.

The "heaps" of "light" were at best false light. Many people are
entranced at many completely false systems of thought, and find the
"light" shed by them fascinating even if it is completely
worthless. That's no reason to pay attention.

>    As a story-spinner, Marx laid down some "if this goes on"
>    thought-experiments that seemed vividly plausible to people of
>    his time, and for a century afterwards. People who weren't
>    stupid.

At one time, people who weren't stupid were searching for the Caloric,
for the Aether, and earlier for the Philosopher's Stone. Many of these
people were brilliant. However, I wouldn't bother spending any time
looking for the Caloric Fluid even if it seemed like a good theory
once. Loads of smart people became Nazis. Loads of smart people became
Catholics. Loads became Hindus. Loads of smart people once thought
Malaria was caused by poisonous gases emitted by swamps. Do we have to
resurrect all discredited ideas just because someone smart once was
silly enough to believe?

The logical flaw here is Argumentum Ad Hominem. "Because some smart
people believed Marx, we should pay attention." No, we shouldn't. We
should forget about him, because his belief system has been repeatedly
falsified by experience. It is the falsification that is important,
not the number of former adherents with high IQs.

>    As virtually the inventor of the term "capitalism," Marx ought to be
>    studied (and criticized) by anyone who wants to understand our way of
>    life.

I utterly disagree. I've spent far too many hours of my life on
St. Karl, since I was, at one time, one of those "not stupid" people
who was entranced by him before I understood how worthless he was. I
would like all those hours back. They bought me very little other than
the ability to argue with Marxists and win because I know the holy
books of their religion better than they do.

It really is little better than religion, especially when you include
the insane Hegelian "Theory of History" that Marx decided to adopt. In
Marxism the package goes by a fancy name, "dialectical materialism",
but many cults have fancy names for their ideas.

Brin, in this little essay, claims that Marx was only "50% wrong" --
but I'd disagree. I can't find terribly much at all that I can agree
with in the whole lot, and I've read most of the lot.

>    What's been forgotten, since the fall of communism, is that the USSR's
>    `experiment' was never even remotely "Marxism."

I remember telling myself that over and over when I was a young
Marxist. Funny, though, I never actually found out what the real
Marxism consisted of. (This is because Marx never bothered explain
what the "real Marxism" would look like.)

>    Marx's forecasts seem to have failed not because they were off-base in
>    extrapolating the trends of 19th Century bourgeois capitalism. He
>    extrapolated fine. But what he never imagined was that human beings
>    might intelligently perceive, and act to alter those selfsame powerful
>    trends!

Marx's forecasts failed because they were based on a wholly
inaccurate theory of economics. The fact that he didn't see that
people might react to things around them and behave differently as a
result was not an accidental side feature -- it was near the core of
his fallacies.

Marx's theories about how economies work have no predictive power. The
ones of the mainstream economics community have predictive power. I'll
stick to oxidation over phlogiston in explaining why things burn, no
matter how much "value" someone "smart" might see in phlogiston, and
I'll stick to the people who can tell me what will happen to the price
of eggs if I cut the supply over someone who wrote thick book after
thick book without ever once being held back by the facts.


-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com