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But Marxists don't care about winning or losing "the argument". What they want to do is change the rules by which the argument itself is conducted. They want a wholesale reevaluation of what it means to "win" or "lose" "the argument" in the first place.
If your politics is based on "whoever is producing the most goods most efficiently is the winner", then Marxists would consider that to be, to use one of Zizek's favorite phrases, "pure ideology". That belief is an ideological effect of capitalism itself. It's not a natural or obvious conclusion. You could conceivably hold a different belief instead.
This is not to say that Marxists must necessarily adhere to a degrowth ideology of course. Rather they would say that, whatever historical epoch comes after capitalism, the way in which inhabitants of that epoch think about concepts like "production" and "efficiency" will be as incomprehensible to us as the capitalism vs Marxism debate is to hunter-gatherers. Marxism at its core is a theory of history, and how contradictions in social relations drive historical change (e.g. the contradiction between the formal freedom of neoliberal free trade, and the fact that this formal freedom can paradoxically result in less actual freedom as globalized hypercompetition forces homogenization). Your historical epoch plays a role in shaping what counts as a "winning" or "losing" argument to you, what counts as a "reasonable" political aim, etc.
Sure.
But for being so big on "Material Conditions," they should notice that if material conditions are more favorable in the other system, that's going to supercede their clever wordplay.
If we're talking about a "satisfying human desires" contest, that seems pretty fair.
I think even the Hunter-Gatherers were playing that game, and could probably grasp that a tribe that was bringing home more meat and berries and could use its surpluses to make things like fur coats and better tools and weapons were 'winning' in some meaningful way.
Capitalism's great "insight" was that you didn't have to go over and raid and pillage the neighboring tribe to benefit from their bounty. Instead you can identify things you have, that they want, and trade such things for mutual gain, then use those gains to bolster your productive capacity again. At some point someone invents 'money' and its off to the races.
Not sure what Marxism's great "insight" was, or at least what insight they have that improved people's lives since it was implemented.
They want to CLAIM things like "the five day work week" or "liberation of slaves" or "unionization/collective bargaining," but I think even their own theories support the materialist interpretation that such things only ever came about because Capitalism made us productive enough to spare more resources for leisure and alleviation of suffering, and to give workers the leverage to demand better compensation for their labor.
But human desires are malleable. They are not static across history. That's the point.
A century ago, not wanting to have kids was seen as much more eccentric than it is today. Now there's a whole "childfree" movement and the birthrate is dropping precipitously. Biology didn't change that fast. A change in material and social conditions caused a change in desires. So before you say "well this is the best way to satisfy human desires", you have to ask whose human desires.
Of course almost everyone is going to want to be assured of their basic survival and security. That one is pretty hard to get around. But even then! There have been plenty of people who chose to live an ascetic life and managed with very little.
I mean, were they? What is "winning"? Is the winner the one with the most weapons, or are the weapons just a means to some other win condition?
Are you using the system of production as a means to your own ends, or is the system of production using you as a means to reproduce itself? (Marxists of course think that under capitalism, it's the latter.)
This is not how Marxists use the term "capitalism". Not the intelligent ones anyway.
The sophisticated Marxists recognize that there's no single identifying feature that separates capitalism from other "economic systems" in previous historical epochs. Money, trade, wage labor, private property, and even financial speculation have existed essentially since the beginning of human civilization (I believe Max Weber talks about this in the preface to The Protestant Work Ethic). "Capitalism" for Marxists essentially means "industrialization", or perhaps more specifically, "the contradictions in liberal humanist social relations engendered by industrialization".
Yes, that is literally just the orthodox Marxist position.
Capitalism is not an aberration or a mistake. It's a necessary phase of development; albeit one that contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is in fact the only thing that can give us the tools to go beyond itself. It is always and only the master's tools that dismantle the master's house (if you believe Hegel).
Natural biology didn't change that fast. Chemicals that changed people's biological makeup in subtle but drastic ways probably did, I'd wager. Lot of social changes downstream of that, though, which of course we've discussed.
If the Marxist critique was more limited to "Capitalism generates feedback loops that can spin off and have 'unexpected' effects that harm more people than they benefit in the medium term" I'd not push back hardly at all.
But we've had a theoretical solution to that issue for decades. Marxism didn't generate that solution.
The weapons can make them more efficient hunters (or maybe the weapons are more durable and so can be used more than once) so as to increase their surplus, in this case.
Which can either free up the time and labor of some of the guys who would have been hunting to work on other things, or allow them to store up more meat for lean times like winter, and if they make good use of that surplus they'll be positioned to be even more productive on the other side of it. I think Irwin Schiff's How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesn't gets this right in the particulars.
I don't necessarily think there is any 'final win condition,' mind, at least not in an entropy-increasing universe, just the process of ensuring continued improvement as long as possible and, ideally, the continuation of your genetic line.
Well, I don't believe Hegel.
Again, I don't see this as an 'insight' of Marxism. Capitalism is a 'necessary' stage of development if humans want their desires to continue being fulfilled.
Capitalism (even if we limited it to your preferred "industrialization and its consequences" definition) continues to adapt to fulfill a greater array of human desires using the tools of 'free' trade, development of ever greater capital stock, and innovation towards more efficient use of resources. It isn't necessarily building 'towards' something or to any other new phase of existence unless, I suppose, we somehow manage to actually satisfy every human desire to the point of full contentment.
To my personal dismay, it turns out that people's desires tend to skew towards seeking pleasure and raising their own status (which makes sense, when you consider our evolutionary history) over trying to elevate the species as a whole towards controling more energy and resources than those found in the crust of our little spinny space rock.
But then Capitalism also permits the existence of Billionaires who use their surpluses to fund their own preferences, including creating really massive rockets which can be used to bootstrap further industry in outer space.
(which yes, goes towards the whole "people's desires change." If affordable flights to Mars ever become available, there's probably a lot who would take those, even if it barely crosses their mind right now).
Marxists get REALLLLLLY mad about this for some reason, that we might get "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism"... without the Communism.
I don't see any good argument from Marxists for:
A) Why we ought to go beyond Capitalism (Hume's Guillotine notwithstanding, even!). Its working well, if we assume "fulfilling human desires" is the game and is a worthy goal;
B) How Socialism/Communism is going to replace it when its a fundamentally broken system that can't coordinate human society beyond the tribal level.
Its a seeming dead end in both those respects. It can't fulfill the role they predict for it, and there's no cognizable moral imperative to try and make it fulfill the role.
So what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
I'm still a bit unclear on whether you think increasingly efficient production is a good in and of itself, or if you think it's only good insofar as it can be a means to other ends.
What kinds of other things?
What if we could hypothetically assume an eternal universe? What then?
Well, there are multiple ways to read that.
If we start talking like "the best man is the one who sires the most children", then all we've done is smuggle the same language of marketplace efficiency into a new domain.
I used to, but I do not anymore. Increasing efficiency is still pretty close to a primary goal, though.
However its a prerequisite to many, MANY good things. Some of those things result in less efficient use of resources, however (broadly speaking, leisure/leisure activities).
Have they invented the wheel yet? If so, lot of things they can work on with wheel tech available.
If not, it slightly increases the odds of someone stumbling upon that invention.
That's closer to my conception (contra Hegel et. al) of how society ends up improving changing.
From my perspective, seems obvious: develop tech as close to immortality as you can, then go travel around to see all you can see that's out there. Unless we can mathematically prove that we'll eventually saturate our desire for 'fun' and novelty, and we can't augment those desires, seems like one can make good use of eternity tooling around the galaxies looking for cool stuff.
I kind of use it in the broad sense of "there exist some people who can trace their genetic background to you (and beyond) and thus will acknowledge your existence long after you're gone."
Add in some sci-fi, and it becomes "you have descendants who might be interested enough in stuff that happened in your lifetime to run a simulation of you, assuming they can't resurrect you directly."
I dunno, I'm not trying to impose my terminal values on everyone else. To the extent people have different terminal values, increasing the amount of energy and resources available to people, and increase the efficiency with which we use them means more people can chase their preferred terminal values without stepping on each other's toes/inciting conflicts.
As I asked, what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
All the stuff I'm suggesting up there are achievable within Capitalism.
Pretty close? Is there anything closer?
You may have an answer, or you may not. It's fine to say you're not sure.
Wouldn't this just be the sort of pursuit of pleasure/leisure that you've been criticizing? Or do you not see it that way?
I'm much more interested in the way you think about value than the way you think about Marxism.
Given the quality of your questions, I'm really interested in the way you think about value
What is valuable to you?
I believe I value multiple things, as one might expect. But I suppose if I had to put my "highest" value in as concrete terms as possible, it would be "that which pays respect to the mystery":
(I recommend listening to the whole video if you have time, it's really quite lovely.)
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