Ok, I think I figured out the source of our dispute and I’m pretty sure it has to do more with a miscommunication than anything. A miscommunication that I’ll accept blame for misleading anyone. When I say ‘scientific marxism’ I mean the view that the achievement of communism or the communizing process is inevitable. (And there are weaker claims like merely the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, not the construction of ‘socialism’, or ‘communism’, or whatever on top of its ruins.) The nomothetic explanations or universal covering laws that i was expressing skepticism about, and think are inconsistent with normativity*, are the ones that apply to history, specifically. The claims that only deal with poli econ -viz. the LTV, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, etc.-were not my target here (but I acknowledge that running together the distinction between history + poli econ is one of the big features of marxism) and I think that’s relatively clear from how I’ve implicitly treated them as entirely consistent with a ‘prescriptive’ marxism. I think my scope of intended targets here is a lot narrower here than you thought. It’s the historical inevitability strain in marxism that I take to be “intellectually bankrupt”; it’s also my impression that there aren’t too many people around anymore that subscribe to it, or at least not as many as there used to be.
*i still think that those pair of claims I outlined in my last post are indeed “incoherent”, but for two different reasons. If you just thought that communism was inevitable, there’d be no need for a normative account to explain why it’s a good thing. So 1) viewing communism as a good thing is superfluous. If you also thought that most ways of making normative statements were horseshit (and/or, particular to certain historical conditions), then 2) it’s not clear whether it’d even be possible to argue that communism is a good thing. When I say that this strain of ‘scientific’ marxism (that accepts 1. and 2.) is ‘irrelevant to political discussions over the right and the good’ I mean it in a non-pejorative sense. It’s irrelevant because this kind of ‘scientific’ marxism and, e.g. liberalism, are just categorically different kinds of claims (bundles of claims, really). Thats what I mean by them being incommensurable with each other.
My whole point is that they do say it's desirable and they've said it a million times over in the clearest possible terms, buttressed by facts they claim to be objective. Your attitude toward the history of marxist polemic is so sterile here it's incredulous.
i perfectly well acknowledge that some have said it’s desirable, and also emphasize its inevitability and also that justice, right, and morality are shibboleths. I’m saying this bundle of claims is untenable. The marxists who thought otherwise were being inconsistent. The marxists who thought that communism
wasn’t desirable but still effectively advocated for its inevitability are the ones I’m saying never really existed, because either not honest about or not aware of the actual contents of their minds. If that sounds too woolly for you, I’d ask whether it’s really that much more woolly than thinking that moral and ethical claims are all cynical illusions designed to help siphon resources up a social hierarchy.
You're way, way more familiar with this stuff than I am
im really not though. The regulars in this thread have read way more of the canonical socialist/communist authors than I have (excepting the Frankfurt schoolers). I can’t pull quotes with the same facility you guys can. And I don’t want to shit up this thread, because you guys are better at conducting it. I can really only ask: is it not the case that socialism/communism as an historical inevitability is an actual line of thought in Marxist discourse, more prominent maybe ~100 years ago? And is it not also the case that it exists alongside another trend that urges commitment to revolutionary causes? Both strains existing in the same thinker, sometimes within the same text?
Not only is this an irritating hand-wave but it's also wrong. Most political stalemates are arbitrary struggles between ideas.
i think Rawls and Nozick have substantive disagreements over the best method of distributive justice, and over which political values should be prioritized the most, and over a handful of other stuff too. I think people who argue for markets bring to bear certain facts about how markets work that are designed to “buttress” their case in pretty much exactly the same way you seem to be claiming marxists do. We can think that all of these people are wrong, but i fail to see how these are merely arbitrary struggles between ideas, or how they’re not informed by descriptive accounts of states of affairs.
"People have the right to self defense". "Everyone deserves to go to college". "We shouldn't let certain species go extinct".
well...do they? Don’t they? Shouldn’t we? If you’re taking issue with the state of popular political discourse, then I’m right there with you in viewing it as vapid, ineffectual, and unhealthy. But I don’t see how you can make these (legitimate) problems just disappear by taking away the vocabulary to talk about them. In fact, that sounds like it’d make the problems worse. I feel like I might be misunderstanding you here, though.
Descriptive accounts by comparison are so powerful they can change the terms of the entire discussion.
Are you saying that we should be attracted to purely descriptive accounts because they cut to the chaff? And because they’re more expedient means to realize desired ends? This is just old normative wine in new descriptive bottles. We care about people’s lives, livelihoods, etc. for
normative reasons. You haven’t stepped outside the sphere of moral discussion.
How much has environmentalism benefited from the science of climate change?
im deliberately remaining agnostic about how theory links up to practice. I have no idea, but I imagine that the solution is a lot hairier than most of us realize.
To reply: “it’s better because there isn’t exploitation or alienation” doesn’t work, because under this account (viz. scientific marxism) these terms are purely descriptive. To claim they aren’t would be to equivocate.
What sick son of a bitch did this to you? :'(
idk what else to tell you here. For ‘exploitation’, we could equally read “the capitalist’s taking wealth generated by the laborer”. If we accept this, then we still also need a separate normative account that says exploitation = a bad thing before we can commit to a political program that tries to eliminate exploitation. Because by itself, the theory explaining how the capitalist takes wealth from the laborer doesn’t tell us that that shouldn’t happen anymore than Newton’s third law tells us that objects shouldn’t exert an equal and opposite force on objects that hit them. Again, to reply: “whatcha mean, ‘its not a bad thing?’ It’s right there in the term: to exploit”; this is why I cautioned against equivocation. This sneaks in the colloquial sense of a word at the end of an argument after we’ve already decided that talk of right, justice, and/or morality is horseshit.
