[kelseyfrog]

Is there any writer who criticizes Marx on his own terms?

Marx agreed that quality of life can improve under capitalism. The whole point was a ethical/social critique of mismatched incentives and power imbalances of such an arrangement.

It doesn't matter if life improves if the only choices one has in life is either live under the power imbalance of wage labor or extract value from those who do.

If folks can be blamed for commenting completely off-base takes on an article they didn't read, the author should also take heat for critiquing on a work they never read.

[Yodel0914]

I'm very much not a Marxist, but I think he is remarkably undervalued for his analysis of capitalism, particularly how specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness, the dissolution of family and social structures etc.

His plans for how to address the shortcomings of capitalism are, um, flawed. But the analysis itself is incredibly insightful.

[beezlewax]

"specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness" what does this mean? Doesn't everyone want to specialise in something?

[Yodel0914]

As Adam Smith pointed out, specialization is the engine of capitalism. The problem that Marx saw (I think, correctly) is that capitalism will continue to push for more and more specialization until the jobs people perform are all-but divorced from meaningful outcomes.

His example is a clock maker. At some point, a clock maker was a person who made every aspect of a clock. If we split the jobs up between someone making the cabinet, someone the clockwork, someone the face and hands etc, productivity will increase and more clocks can be made for less effort, and at higher quality. However it's not as fulfilling to create a component of a clock as it is to create the entire thing.

I think a better modern example is the building industry. Back in they day, people made their own houses - very labour intensively and not particularly well. But I wonder if there's much more rewarding and meaningful than literally building the house your family will live in?

With the the emergence of building as a trade, you get cheaper, higher quality houses. An individual builder still gets a ton of fulfillment knowing they built a house for someone they know to live in. As the trades become more and more specialized, there's less and less connection. Eventually you end up with someone working in a pre-fab factory making frames for a house they'll never see, for people they'll never meet.

It requires a level of comfort with abstraction to be OK with being so disconnected from actual outcomes. You either have to substitute in a secondary meaning ("I'm supporting my family") or be able to hold the whole picture in your head of how your job eventually contributes to an meaningful outcome.

[DaoVeles]

There was a saying in the ruins of the USSR. Marx was completely right about Capitalism and completely wrong about Communism.

[tim333]

What do you mean by "criticizes Marx on his own terms"? What terms are those? A problem I have is there are hundreds of pages of stuff he wrote so he's hard to pin down. Not a fan myself. He seems to do a lot of taking everyday life and splitting the people into classes who should fight each other which was then ceased upon but unpleasant people to cause 100m + deaths and much suffering. Also much of the basic content seems crap to me but it's hard to pin the arguments amongst the endless waffle.

To pick one quote though "Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably destroy itself." Not it hasn't - it's all bollocks basically and the aftershocks through Russia and the like still end up blowing up children's hospitals etc to this day. I don't think anyone in the last thousand years has been responsible for more suffering.

[kelseyfrog]

> A problem I have is there are hundreds of pages of stuff he wrote so he's hard to pin down.

It sounds like you're referring to a book? Maybe you can clarify. I read Capital Vol 1 during COVID, and I've come to realize that, without being hyperbolic, I've encountered zero people with criticisms of Marx who have read what he's written.

It's commenting without reading the article on steroids and it frankly makes the critic look foolish because they fantasize about the books content and then attack their own fantasy and then claim they haven't done so. It's not difficult to read a book and then critique it. It's just wild that this had repeatedly failed to occur.

People don't seem capable of reading things they might disagree with, and seem unable to accept that anyone might write something that has parts that are right and parts that are wrong.

Psychs call this all or nothing approach, black and white thinking or splitting and it's a defense mechanism. I think we can do better.

There's a very simple way to prove my statement wrong by contrary evidence. Someone can simply read a book they might disagree with. I actively encourage it. If someone has the desire to voice their disagreement of a thing, the least they could do is be familiar enough with the thing to make a well-constructed and relevant critique. I actively encourage folks to be better critics.

[tim333]

Well it's true I haven't read much of Marx. Glancing at Amazon the combined capital 1-3 is 1392 pages and the Communist Manifesto 176 pages and god knows what else he's knocked out and I don't much like his stuff I have read so I can't be bothered to plow through that. But when you get statements like the capitalistic system will inevitably destroy itself that seem obviously rubbish it makes me ok disliking his stuff in the same way I can dislike say Hitler without having read his book. I mean capitalism does have issues like increasing inequality but that can be dealt with democratically by taxing the rich rather than overthrowing the "capitalist class" and having the resulting nightmares seen in Russia, China, N Korea etc.

Maybe if I went through the 1500 pages I'd find some justification... who knows. But on holiday in Cambodia looking at the thousands of skulls of the educated class executed in the name of Marxist ideas is enough to put me off the whole business.

And aside from the mass murder he seems so pompous intellectually.

[thiagoharry]

I never read Nietzche. Because of this, I refrain to criticize Nietzsche, or making assumptions about the meaning of ideas that I do not fully understand.

[kelseyfrog]

Reversing this, if I said to you, "I think Adam Smith was a shithead, so capitalism is wrong, and his ideas are directly responsible for wars of imperialism, and resource control," I'd expect you to not really see how that's relevant to the ideas contained in Wealth of Nations.

[tim333]

I get that but you can kind of go off a summary of their ideas. In Marx case you have stuff like (from Wikipedia):

>For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers. Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.

My problem with him is more those kind of ideas and the problems they have brought rather than him being a shithead or similar. I think you can probably have a more meaningful discussion of ideas that can be briefly stated so everyone knows what is being discussed than referencing 1500 page works where that is not so.

Even in a short paragraph like that you can see quite a lot of ideas, some of which have worked and some not. Like in the UK the 'working class' Labour party have just gained power so that bit's ok, but not much destroying capitalism going on because their voters don't want that. It's the revolution to topple capitalism and bring communism idea that hasn't tended to go very well.

[racional]

I've encountered zero people with criticisms of Marx who have read what he's written.

So you're a fundamentalist, basically.

[kelseyfrog]

Just to clarify, What's the point you think I'm trying to make?

[racional]

That no one who has read Marx can have significant criticisms of his work.

[kelseyfrog]

There is a certain legitimacy that comes with reading a work one wants to criticize, no?

[munchler]

> It doesn't matter if life improves if the only choices one has in life is either live under the power imbalance of wage labor or extract value from those who do.

Most people choose this system, when given a vote via democracy, even when they have to live under the power imbalance. For Marx to be right, you have to argue that these people are deluded somehow, which isn't particularly convincing.

[doubleyou]

when did you choose? only 24 countries or so have full democracy (note the US and china, the largest economies, do not qualify) [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

[kelseyfrog]

For me, for Marx to be right, I just have to observe that my employer and I have different incentives that often means our priorities conflict and for the most part their priorities take precedence.

Perhaps this feeling is less common than I thought?

[ibash]

> Most people choose this system, when given a vote via democracy

Are you talking about American voting or something else? When’s the last time they’ve been realistically given this choice?

Even if your premise was true there’s a simpler explanation: after you enter this system it’s extremely hard to get out of it from within the system itself. No delusion required.

[Rury]

People don't need to be deluded, just ignorant. And you don't even need that, just having a different set of priorities would suffice.