[ants_everywhere]

I don't agree with a lot of what you're writing here, but reading through the lines I think maybe there's some common ground.

There is a philosophy that value (including reality) is subjective and that all that matters is making people act. That's quite explicitly the philosophy of Marx. It's in strong contrast to the "philosophical bedrock of western civilization", which is the search for objective truth and objective reality. Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

I think what you're ultimately referring to is the use of ordinal utility functions by economists. It's not clear how to write equations in economics where each person's preferences are accurately expressed in well-behaved value-agnostic units. You could try using money, but not everyone values having a lot of money. And even if they did, which currency? Dollars? Euros? Gold? Bitcoin?

Because utility functions are hard to get right theoretically, Paul Samuelson proposed trying to measure them empirically by revealed preference. There are lots of things wrong with this from an academic perspective and it's reasonable to have concerns about the long-term effects if this is adopted for entire economies. But it didn't start until 1938 and it's certainly not a philosophical bedrock of Western civilization. More like a desperate hack.

> we can't measure feelings

We have several ways of measuring feelings, and we use them regularly. But you can't build a utility theory based literally on current feelings. Otherwise opium would have nearly infinite objective value. You want to use something that integrates over time, like life satisfaction. Or something that measures the current feeling, change in feeling, and integral over feeling like a PID controller. But even if you could get the measurements right, doing all the measurements for all 8.2 billion people in real time would be impossible right now. So it's not clear what the right theory is.

[walleeee]

Where in Marx do you find claims like reality is a middle-class fiction or all value is subjective? The labor theory of value is premised on an idea of surplus value as a very real thing. Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?

I'm perhaps willing to grant "all that matters is making people act" in the sense that he was far more thoroughly a revolutionist than a scientist.

But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island: he was steeped (and elements of his thought remain visible) in a diverse intellectual tradition which is by no means a monolith.

[ants_everywhere]

> The labor theory of value

This is value in the sense of "price". The labor theory of value was from Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than something Marx contributed.

> Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?

You're right that this is an apparent contradiction. Technically, Marx was making a prophecy about an upcoming revolution as being a historical inevitability. And when he was being more rigorous he was careful to clarify that this was a statement about historical inevitability (like manifest destiny) rather than something he thought was "good".

But many people have taken this to be a contradiction. Here's an essay from Michael Rosen defending the claim that his critique of morality isn't inconsistent with his condemnation of people's behaviors [0].

Marx's attitude toward morality is discussed on page 7. The basic gist is that morality claims to be objective, but it's really, to quote Rosen, "particular and relative to the society in question".

Nowadays people sympathetic to his approach paraphrase these ideas by saying that reality and morality are "socially constructed."

> But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island

This is a reasonable claim and one that has also been well-discussed. My personal take is that Marx critiqued and rejected the Enlightenment, which he saw as serving the interests of the middle class.

I group him with Rousseau and many German philosophers of his time as being overly influenced by the Romantic movement and longing for a return to a primitive way of life.

Western thought has been firmly in the direction of the Enlightenment, engineering, and science. And the romantics have generally been a conservative counter culture wanting to return to a simpler time.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/michaelrosen/files/the_mar...

[walleeee]

I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large (morality it is easier to see the argument) but I admit it has been years since my reading. I agree with you that there is a strand in Western thought which is infatuated with science/engineering to a historically novel degree but I am not so sure that enlightenment ideals fit so neatly in the same box, or that statements like "Western thought is firmly X" can be meaningfully interpreted. In any case thanks for your response and for the link, I look forward to reading and learning from it.

[ants_everywhere]

> I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large

The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.

His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk about an objective materialist universe. That point of view leads to middle class society. His own point of view isn't really coherent, but it's essentially that humans create the objective world and truth through interacting with it.

To me it feels like what he's trying to do is try to take German idealism and apply it to groups of people rather than single people. Conceptually you get a sort of Cartesian solipsism at the social scale. But you can read it and you may get a different take away from it.

[swed420]

> he most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.

One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?

[ants_everywhere]

Of course I'm familiar with it. But beyond an unfortunate name clash the ideas aren't very related.

Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite. It's the idea that there's some supernatural force guiding human history.

To quote Bertrand Russell:

> His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology.

[walleeee]

> One must have a very warped understanding of Marx

Materialism is an extraordinarily overloaded word/concept.

OP's proposing an idiosyncratic take on Marx's reading of one of his main influences seems rather more in the dialectical spirit than a no true Scotsman (no true Marxist? ;) flung without substantiation. No offense.

Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist", and given the laboriousness/verbosity of his writing, and his tendency to change his mind over time, you could argue he had merely the first in a long lineage of warped understandings of himself.

[MarkPNeyer]

> Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

Those are ideas are much more popular on, say, Harvard's campus and among its professoriate, than are the ideas that some things are objectively better than others, and that searching for truth is more important than social justice or people's feelings or racial equality or ending the patriarchy or reducing global warming etc etc. Witness, e.g. the uproar over anyone saying "men and women are different and those differences lead to different preferences which then affect the distribution of genders in different career tracks." That is a claim about objective reality, rooted in biology, measurable. It is, if you care about evidence more than feelings - most likely true. And yet it's deeply offensive to most people who work in an office. It doesn't matter whether or not it _might_ be true - what matters is how people feel about it. That's what i'm referring to as the bedrock.

The bedrock you're referring to _was_ the bedrock, of an older civilization that shared the same name as our own. Western civilization, today, is a distant relative of what it used to be 100 years ago. The bedrock I'm referring to was laid at the start of the 20th century, by the managerial class of the time, who wanted more power and authority, as elites always do. Our civilization today is as alien to that of the late 19th century americans as, say, the ancient romans were to the late-stage byzantines. There's a lineage relationship, for sure - but the mores, values, and guiding concepts are so radically different that it's properly conceptualized as a fundamentally different civilization, even if they both called themselves 'romans'.