The Opium of the Intellectuals (2005)

https://www.newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/the-opium-of-the-intellectuals

by danielam • 8 years ago

79 46 8 years ago

extralego5• 8 years ago

This is a distillation of Roger Kimball’s (and many others’) accusations that Marx was an intellectual’s intellectual. He mentions Raymond Aron publishing the same idea in a 1955 book.

I’m not sure anyone would argue with the drier thesis. It’s what isn’t mentioned which guides the dishonesty. Marx’s commitments and adorations were always to the working class, and his proper legacy was won exclusively through the working class. He was a strictly anti-authoritarian democracy absolutist, for the record.

The article is a strategic smear for a target who knows literal nothing about the history of Karl Marx, because all the facts will check out true.

But is this only a cheap framing of Marx’s work as hype? I get a sense there is an additional mythical context I’m missing out on. Can anybody explain why this is compelling to it’s audience?

jack_pp2• 8 years ago

This article is very little about marx himself.

extralego5• 8 years ago

Exactly my point! It’s almost entirely peripheral trivia mounted around a cheap smear. No elaboration, no explanation, no evidence beyond references to past claims.

darkmighty• 8 years ago

I can't comment much about Marx as I don't know the details of his claims or how they relate to implemented politics.

What I enjoyed very much was the claimed position of Raymond Aron's w.r.t. intellectualism:

"Aron’s generosity of spirit was a coefficient of his recognition that reality was complex, knowledge limited, and action essential. The leitmotif of Aron’s career was responsibility. He understood that political wisdom rests in the ability to choose the better course of action even when the best course is unavailable--which is always.

The subject of politics, Aristotle noted, is “the good life for man.” What constitutes the good life? Aron cannily reminds us that the more extravagant answers to this question are often the most malevolent. They promise everything. They tend to deliver misery and impoverishment."

I think this is a great thing to be reminded of, constantly -- in particular for intellectuals and scientists. It is almost too easy to be fooled in thinking the scientific principles or intellectual ideals will apply nicely to humans, the complexities of the real world; that we can be certain about what is truly good or the true nature of reality.

It's not that we shouldn't investigate political systems, moral systems, economic theory, metaphysics, etc; it's that we should be specially skeptic about grandiose claims that go against common sense or personal freedom.

And quoting the recent Aaronson AMA:

"(...) partly it's because I take it as almost an axiom of rationality that, if a metaphysical belief leads you to do "obviously insane" things with your life, then it's probably time to look for a better metaphysical belief. :-) (I wouldn't say the same about scientific or mathematical beliefs.)"

TheOtherHobbes• 8 years ago

Is a cult of “personal freedom” that creates its own extinction event and alters the climate of its own planet to make it less habitable more or less insane than Marxism?

extralego5• 8 years ago

This actually builds on my point. In the abstract, I can certainly appreciate the ideas here. But in the abstract it is fairly unobjectionable (still useful!) wisdom.

So, what purpose do the wisdoms serve in this context? For you, they served the entire takeaway value of the article. But their relation to the thesis was something like philosophical fortune cookies. They operate in that future space where the thesis has been auto-accepted and the audience is now advised by the author how they can prevent falling victim to the threats they are now afraid of.

johnalamos• 8 years ago

You're the kind of intellectual this article is about

extralego5• 8 years ago

Doubt it. I went to community college.

imbokodo4• 8 years ago

This is a distillation of Roger Kimball’s (and many others’) accusations that Marx was an intellectual’s intellectual

I don't even see why it matters. I myself am not an expert on gravitational waves. If Neil Degrasse Tyson or Michio Kazu read a scientific paper by Rainer Weiss on gravitational waves and then break it down for me in layman's language, I don't see why that takes any shine off Weiss's Nobel prize.

As it is, Marx wrote some work for the public like the Communist Manifesto (although 170 years later where the names Metternich and Guizot are less familiar than Merkel and Macron, it may seem more obscure), as well as more dense works like Capital.

It's an silly argument - if Marx went over things lightly, his ideas would be more easily attacked and he would be called lightweight. If he writes densely and goes over each argument thoroughly to make it airtight he can be accused of being difficult for the layman to understand with light reading. I guess Marx preferred making his arguments more airtight than worrying about accusations of being a chore to read.

oblib• 8 years ago

"The primary target of Aron’s polemic was fanaticism."

I believe this is as relevant to our current social/political divisiveness as it ever has been. I'd like to read more of what he wrote about that.

Animats• 8 years ago

"Even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist" - Keynes.

That's the trouble with looking backward to Marx or Smith for guidance. Both predate the Industrial Revolution reaching full speed. The basic problem of their era was making enough stuff, just as it had been for millenia. Today's basic problem is that we don't need that many people to make all the stuff. Neither Marx nor Smith addressed that problem. Keynes said it might be a problem for generations after his. Well, we're there.

We've also conquered scale. One of the assumptions of capitalism is that lots of people working for their own self-interest would outperform a central planning system. It looked that way in the days of the USSR. Big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. General Motors, once the biggest company, had to operate as a bunch of independent companies under one corporate umbrella just to make the thing manageable.

That's no longer true. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Apple, FedEx, UPS, AT&T, and WalMart are all very centralized. It doesn't seem to hurt their performance. They don't compete on price - they define markets and platforms, and dictate terms. They're able to change rapidly compared to monopolies of the past - each of those companies is quite different than a decade ago. Computers and networks have made this possible - deployment at scale works far better than it did even twenty years ago. Even for companies with physical products.

Economics for the 21st century needs to start dealing with these issues, not rehashing the 19th century.

gepi793• 8 years ago

Quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

This class struggle that is commonly expressed as the revolt of a society's productive forces against its relations of production, results in a period of short-term crises as the bourgeoisie struggle to manage the intensifying alienation of labor experienced by the proletariat, albeit with varying degrees of class consciousness. This crisis culminates in a proletarian revolution and eventually leads to the establishment of socialism—a socioeconomic system based on social ownership of the means of production, distribution based on one's contribution and production organized directly for use. As the productive forces continued to advance, Marx hypothesized that socialism would ultimately transform into a communist society; a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership and the underlying principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...

Marx fantasized about what is called a democratic post-scarcity economy today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

Compare with classic socialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_each_according_to_his_contr...

I doubt that the author of the book tried to understand Marx because he wrote this:

Why is it, he wondered, that certain intellectuals are “merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines”?

and

He quotes the French writer Simone Weil’s sly reversal of Marx: “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. . . . [I]t has been continually used . . . as an opiate for the people.”

Marx wanted the opposite:

- Marx wanted power for the people. I guess Marxism and Stalinism is the same for many people although they are opposites.

- Marx wanted a revolution and not soothed tranquilized workers.

And your claim is wrong too:

Today's basic problem is that we don't need that many people to make all the stuff. Neither Marx nor Smith addressed that problem.

Regarding:

Economics for the 21st century needs to start dealing with these issues, not rehashing the 19th century.

IMO some of today's economic, social and political concerns and proposed solutions seem similar to those in the 19th century.

vixen99• 8 years ago

What Marx actually wanted? We'll take your word for it, shall we?

So what did Karl Marx want?

"Until its complete extermination or loss of national status, this racial trash always becomes the most fanatical bearer there is of counter-revolution, and it remains that. That is because its entire existence is nothing more than a protest against a great historical revolution... The next world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but also entire reactionary peoples, to disappear from the earth. And that too is progress."

-Karl Marx, 1849, Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

dnautics2• 8 years ago

I suggest reading some Benjamin Tucker. Regardless of what Marx wanted, Tucker made some predictions about what the outcomes of Marxism would be.

http://praxeology.net/BT-SSA.htm

Many of them seem to have come to pass in the century since Tucker's writing.

coldtea• 8 years ago

I doubt that the author of the book tried to understand Marx because he wrote this: "Why is it, he wondered, that certain intellectuals are “merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines”?

He didn't write it about Marx, he wrote it about the Marxists of his day (mid-20-th century France) -- people who were justifying Stalinism crimes and so on.

Marx wanted the opposite

What Marx wanted is not really relevant. As Marx himself said, you don't judge a man by what he thinks himself to be. Similarly, you don't just whether Marxism has been used as an opiate for the people by whether Marx wanted that to happen or not.

Ideas leave the hands of their creators. To see how they end up and what kind of influence they have, we must examine them in actual use, after they spread.

hn0• 8 years ago

The older I get the more I appreceate that passage from Keynes.

Most annoying brain virus at the moment are the walking libertarian cuckoo clocks that appear to have infested every online comment section. The contemporary version of the new age hippy marxism of the sixties and seventies, just on the opposite side of the spectrum. Much like the Marxists, they’re completely impervious to the facts, and you’ll get the exact same excuses (“that’s not real capitalism!”). And then there’s blank slatist culture warriors vs biological determinists, techno utopians vs climate defeatists, ...

repolfx2• 8 years ago

I dispute your notion that anything has fundamentally changed about the nature of central planning vs market economies, or the scale of firms.

Firstly, your examples are self-contradictory. WalMart doesn't compete on price? Really? Amazon doesn't compete on price? Come on now.

GM (~225,000 employees) had to split itself up to be manageable, but you claim just decades later the much smaller Google (~88,000 employees), Amazon etc have "conquered scale".

Yet Google has been forced to split itself up: what do you think Alphabet is, if not Larry and Sergey accepting/admitting that Google had become a place where innovation could no longer happen due to its size and low energy levels? Most of Google's most interesting projects now hang under Alphabet as separate companies e.g. Waymo, or in semi-autonomous subsidiaries like DeepMind. Google proper is still able to do a few interesting things with AI research but when was the last time they launched a truly interesting or new product that became essential in our lives? The Google of 2006 was in many ways far more effective and innovative than the Google of 2018, despite/because of its much smaller size.

Facebook has a similar problem. Facebook's growth has been coming from acquisitions like Instagram and WhatsApp that continue to operate rather autonomously. The core company has grown hugely but what do they do all day?

Apple hasn't actually changed in size much over time when you eliminate their retail employees (i.e. focus on the parts where risks are taken and new things are made). That's why they can pack most of the company into a giant doughnut in a single city.

All of these companies seem to be poster-children for the problems that come with size and success. Googlers seem to spend most of their energy fighting social justice wars or rewriting things from one language to another. Facebook has to buy up successful companies to stay ahead of the curve. Microsoft stagnated for years under Ballmer and only now is it being turned (slowly) around - largely by letting go of the tight central control and adherence to a unified product strategy that previously typified the company (e.g. everything must integrated with Windows).

The basic underlying insights about human nature that separate right wing capitalist thought from left wing socialist thought aren't so trivial that they fundamentally change when you make communication faster. Knowledge is still scattered, power still corrupts, reality is still too large for any one person or group to comprehend, the way forward is often unclear and "picking winners" is therefore a strategy doomed to fail.

imbokodo4• 8 years ago

AT&T and Walmart all very centralized. It doesn't seem to hurt their performance. They don't compete on price - they define markets and platforms, and dictate terms. They're able to change rapidly compared to monopolies of the past

I don't disagree that AT&Ts monopoly control over the local loop in California, the Midwest and the South, or its oligopolistic control of cell signals have hurt their performance. It has hurt consumers, it has hurt US productivity. One just need to look at some of the other industrialized countries to see how their network access and cell signals can function unfettered by such monopolies.

A decade after the taxpayer TARP bailout of the major "too big to fail" banks, it's stunning to see someone claim that corporate America has finally itself licked centralization and monopoly.

cirgue• 8 years ago

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Apple, FedEx, UPS, AT&T, and WalMart are all very centralized.

And that level of centralization and oligopoly is leading to the exact kinds of problems predicted by economists for the last century: poor service, increased cost, lack of real innovation. Centralization is still as bad as it’s always been. Nothing has changed on that score.

repolfx2• 8 years ago

This set of observations has been made repeatedly throughout history, albeit usually in works that sink immediately into obscurity. That's a pity because the key insights are very important.

The same theme - why do so many intellectuals find themselves supporting dictatorships long after the rest of the world has understood their true nature - has been extensively explored by Sowell in books like Intellectuals & Society, and a Conflict of Visions. He finds similar explanations:

* Difficulty in accepting that individuals are inherently limited and corruptible, and that ideas are often worthless when tested in the forge of reality. After all, intellectuals are almost by definition people whose value to society comes from production of ideas and who see themselves as unchained from the normal moral and mental limits most people slave under.

* That reason, reflection and debate are limited tactics that can't yield that much insight about the world.

* That to believe in intellectuals as a concept is almost inherently to disbelieve in the notion of democracy, because if insight and wisdom were really so compressed into a few moralistic bookworms and if most people really had none to share, then voting itself is pointless or even harmful. Instead the best outcomes would be yielded by a dictatorship of intellectuals (which is what communism is, in effect).

So you end up with academics, writers, some kinds of politician ... the people who would these days be called the 'elite' or 'globalists' ... having a distinctly lukewarm relationship with markets and votes throughout history.

Yet because they are fundamentally wrong about human nature, where their ideas are put into practice things inevitably go wrong. The intellectuals who end up in charge don't create a utopia. Their 5 year plans turn out to be not that well planned, their price-fixing turns out to create other problems elsewhere, and their profound belief that most people are too stupid or immoral to rule turns into an oppressive dystopia. And so the wheel turns.

If you're interested in these ideas or philosophies, this video interview with Sowell is a good place to start:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok

randomsearch4• 8 years ago

Might be a little off topic, but I’d really appreciate it if someone could explain why highly educated people describe themselves as Marxists.

I’m quite left-leaning in my views, and I agree with many of the criticisms levelled at capitalism, but I don’t see why people support Marxism.

Two main arguments:

1. Hasn’t Marxism had its chance? Yes, it wasn’t “real Marxism” in a sense, but why would you think it’d turn out different if tried again? We have to consider the reality of the world we live in.

2. How many precedents are there for a complete upheaval of the economic system on that scale that have worked? I’m aware of some of the history, but I can’t think of a change that large which worked.

How do modern Marxists answer those concerns? From the outside it looks like they’re ignoring history or the reality of human behaviour.

kiliantics• 8 years ago

You're conflating Marxism with soviet-style socialism. Marxism in academia typically refers to an analysis framework where social dynamics are understood as a conflict between members of different social classes.

randomsearch4• 8 years ago

Ah, so they are simply saying that they think the Marxist viewpoint represents a good understanding of the world, rather than agreeing with communism as the best system? Is that correct? Thanks.

zukzuk• 8 years ago

Marxism is widely identified as the intellectual underpinning of Communism, but Marx's philosophy has been hugely influential beyond just that particular economic model. For example, Feminism is often said to be rooted in Marxism, so it's arguable that many of those who identify as Feminists are also Marxists-by-proxy.

As is often the case in philosophy, Marx was brilliant in critique, but lacking in his prescription. Philosophy tends to be great at asking questions, but not so much at answering them.

I suspect many intellectuals who call themselves Marxists identify with Marx's critique — which arguably still stands and a brilliant and revolutionary body of thought — but not with some of its eventual realizations.

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

For example, Feminism is often said to be rooted in Marxism

There is both a branch of feminism that is Marxist in the strict sense, and there is the school of feminist critical theory that utilizes parallel structure to (and is largely inspired by) Marxist critical theory, swapping out the central conflict of class for one of gender, but feminism in the broad sense is not inspired by or related to Marxism, and the idea that it is is mostly one of the anti-feminist Right in the West, used to attach the negative emotional charge of Marxism with the general population to feminism.

randomsearch4• 8 years ago

Thanks zukzuk. Matches the sibling comment. This sounds reasonable - believing it’s a good lens to view the world through. I’m certain there’s value in that, don’t know if I agree it’s the best lens, but you’ve answered my question well.

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

Hasn’t Marxism had its chance?

No, the two closest things to Marxism that have been tried as alternatives to 19th century capitalism are modern mixed economies (fairly successful in practical terms) and Leninism and it's derivatives (mostly horrible in both practical and moral terms).

Both are pretty different than Marxism on fairly fundamental levels. (The first incorporates many elements of the Marxist program, including it's fundamental prerequisites, but abandons — or at least delays, as the long term arc of the modern mixed economies might be interpreted as a kind of “evolutionary Marxism” with periodic setbacks — key others; the second likewise cherry picks from Marxism, but also abandons the fundamental prerequisites.)

but why would you think it’d turn out different if tried again?

Well, because it wouldn't be “again”, Marxism is fundamentally different than anything that has been tried before, and the nearest approximations to Marxism that have been tried have widely divergent results.

How many precedents are there for a complete upheaval of the economic system on that scale that have worked?

The displacement of the dominant feudal economic system with capitalism and the displacement of the original system named capitalism with modern mixed economies (often called “capitalism” and retaining some key features, but distinctly different) are at or, in the former case, beyond the scale of the replacement of modern mixed economies with Marxist ones, and both were reasonably successful.

randomsearch4• 8 years ago

I disagree with your response, for the reasons I already outlined in my question, but thanks for the reply. I see where you’re coming from. Don’t want to start an argument, but I promise to read more along these lines to see if someone else can convince me you’re right.

claudiawerner4• 8 years ago

Why are you saying that "capitalism with modern mixed economies" doesn't qualify as capitalism? To my knowledge, it's capitalism through and through, and I say this going from the ways in which Marx described the capitalist mode of production.

I also think there's some issue with using "Marxism" to refer to some kind of programme rather than the critique of political economy from the writings of Marx and Engels. This kind of usage lets you get away with saying that a "mixed economy" is something even close to Marxism.

Marx described Communism, with a lower and upper stage. There's not much more to it than that, unless like the Leninists you call the lower stage as "Socialism". Either way, Badiou has a pretty good overview of historical Communist societies (well, as close as one could get) such as the Paris and Shanghai communes. But I wholly disagree with GP's idea that Marx has had his chance. He most certainly hasn't, and it's becoming clearer every passing day.

imbokodo4• 8 years ago

Hasn’t Marxism had its chance?

Marx said "I will not write recipes for the kitchen of the future". As Marx refused to create a "Marxism" for someone to implement, how can Marxism have been tried? It's a question asked by someone who knows little to nothing of him. It's like someone new to computers asking which programming language to learn. There is no answer as it is a naive question. The answer is any or all languages, and they should be studying algorithms and data structures and programming language principles, not the specific mechanism for counting how many characters are in a string in a particular language.

how many precedents are there for a complete upheaval of the economic system

The upheaval around the time of behavioral modernity. The transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture. From imperial Rome latifundias to feudalism. From feudalism to capitalism. Then the stirrings of post-capitalist systems from the Paris Commune top now. So that's quite a few changes over the past millennia.

Also Marx said these systems are not overthrown, they self-destruct. Kind of like the Great Depression - due to the internal logic of capitalism, companies will shut, evictions will rise, unemployment will skyrocket, and no internal mechanism of capitalism will have a solution to this.

XalvinX• 8 years ago

The economic collapse has been delayed but it is still coming. The time will come where simply issuing more and more unbacked currency will stop working.

claudiawerner4• 8 years ago

Some highly educated people describe themselves as Marxists beacuse they believe, with or without caveats, that Marx's critique of political economy, contained within it Marx's sociology and philosophy, come very close to a critique of the modern state of things, i.e the current mode of production, which most would identify as capitalism.

I'll address each argument.

1. As I've already responded to dragonwriter, it's incorrect to say that "Marxism" is a set of goals to be acheived or a kind of economy or a mode of production or a mode of social organisation. Marxism is simply the critique of political economy, and from that critique emerges the idea of Communism. As to the question, a lot of work has been done in Marxist (and post-Marxist) circles since about the 1950s, you may have heard of the Frankfurt School, for instance. Alain Badiou, a contemporary French philosopher, has written a book called "The Communist Hypothesis" in which he attempts to "rescue" Communism, not merely as a "less-bad" alternative to capitalism (even considering the track record in history) but as the only alternative. He uses the example of approaches to proving a hypothesis, in which each iteration the lessons learned from the previous attempt are modified. This is directly relatable to history - consider the evolution of Leninism after the Paris Commune, or Maoism after Leninism.

2. Capitalism is the greatest precedent, and feudalism too before it. Though it's worth noting that not only is Communism the "upheaval" of an economic system, it is as Gilles Dauve but it: "the end of economy". Arguably, capitalism really has worked; Marx would be the last to claim that capitalism hasn't ushered in massive prosperity and progress.

These are just my responses, but there is a whole host of diversity within modern (post 1930s) Marxist thought that stretches to this day, with various responses to your questions, obviously not so condensed. The Frankfurt School was critical of both Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism, while furthering the Marxist critique to a mass-media world. The left-communists champion a return to Marx himself rather than trying to re-formulate critique for the modern world.

But I want to disspell the idea that modern Marxists are ignorant of history or human behaviour; Marxism is relatively popular in both sociology and some history departments.

MarkMc• 8 years ago

An excellent book on this subject is "The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence" by Andrew Anthony [1]. From the book:

All but the most obsessively hard-line anti-communist grew up in post-war Europe accepting that the political witch-hunts conducted by Senator McCarthy and his acolytes in the 1950s were a severe assault on freedom – which indeed they were. Yet if you took McCarthyism at its most demented and placed it against the Soviet model at its most liberal – say, for instance, the Khrushchev era – the repression in the East was incomparably more ruthless and extensive than in the West. Almost no one now, except for the most zealous Stalinist, would dispute this fact. Nonetheless the litany of human rights abuses committed by the Soviet state from Prague to Vladivostok never elicited the same invective of intellectuals or protesters in the West. Two books were kept with two totally different methods of accounting. Why?

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fallout-guilty-liberal-lost-innocen...

woodandsteel• 8 years ago

"The ideals in question prominently featured faith in the power of reason. Aron’s discrimination showed itself in his recognition that reason’s power is always limited."

That's the key point. There have been two competing traditions in Western philosophy, going back to the Greeks. They have to do with the various finitudes that humans experience, such as ignorance, death, and suffering.

According to one view, these are illusions and not only is human understanding potential infinite, but so are all the other types of finitude that interconnect with it. Perhaps the most famous proponent of this view is Plato.

The other view, perhaps first made clear by Aristotle, is that human beings and human existence, while they can be improved in important ways, can never be made perfect because our ability to understand the world and act in it are always limited.

In the modern era, Marx thought we could abolish most or all finitudes, and have a utopia. Some liberals also think something like this, but the Anglo-American political tradition is more on the Aristotelian side, as was Aron.

The Opium of the Intellectuals (2005)

Related Stories