
Keith Richards, Karl Marx, and the satisfaction of genuine work - chrismealy
http://slackwire.blogspot.com/2010/12/satisfaction.html
======
TomOfTTB
I’m in no way a fan of modern day liberalism but having said that I think this
author misunderstands it and accuses it of something it’s not guilty of. He
says…

 _This is what liberals, who think that human wellbeing consists in the
consumption of goods and services, cannot understand. Capitalism piles up
consumer goods but deprives more and more of us of the satisfaction of genuine
work. A good trade, when it's a question of meeting basic needs. But once they
are met -- they are met; they are finite; tho liberals, from Mill to DeLong,
deny it -- all the bacchanals in the world are no substitute for the knowledge
that one has produced something worthwhile by one's own free efforts._

The problem with that statement is it’s based on a straw man argument that
modern liberals are all Marxists. In my experience the modern liberal has
evolved beyond Marx’s theories to a hybrid Captalistic/Marxist philosophy that
understands the necessity of Captialism but seeks to equalize the resulting
wealth created by it.

So modern liberalism is concerned with the rewards of one’s labors where as
Marxist theory was concerned with both that and choosing which labor people
undertook. Meaning liberals really don't want to rob anyone of satisfaction in
one's work they simply want to redistribute some of the compensation one gets
for said work.

(and in fairness Marx only advocated a planned society in which people’s
abilities were assessed and applied in a way that was best for society. So
while a government using that policy might force you to do the work they
wanted it should, in theory, have been something you excelled at and could be
satisfied in)

~~~
joe_the_user
Huh?

My reading of the text was that he was praising Marx's concept of work and
more or less attacking liberals for not having it. He claims old Karl agree
that creative, productive activity is superior to consumption. I see not
mention of the Marxist concept of a planned economy in the text either.

There are strong indications that B. Traven was a revolutionary German Marxist
who escaped the failed Sparticus rebellion after WWI, btw.

~~~
TomOfTTB
Honestly you're probably right when put in that context (I had no idea who B.
Traven was) but if that's the case this post is kind of odd. It ignores the
end result of every government based on Marx's theories that has ever existed
in the history of man.

I mean really, does anyone think people living in communist Russia and being
assigned an occupation based on an aptitude test weren't "alienated" from
their work (to use Marx's term)?

Also it's odd to quote Jesus while defending Karl Marx (who famously called
Religion the opiate of the masses and claimed true happiness could only be
achieved when religion was abolished)

Anyway, as I said, you're almost certainly right I'm just saying my mistake
wasn't entirely stupid ;)

~~~
forkandwait
> It ignores the end result of every government based on Marx's theories that
> has ever existed in the history of man.

Marx wrote a brilliant critique of capitalism, but failed miserably when it
came to designing what the replacement would be. He believed that an almost
supernatural rationality would evolve out of the inherent contradictions of
capitalism and the worker/ owner conflict; organizing society rationally from
the top down is really the only thing of his that made it into _supposedly_
marxist regimes.

Don't judge Marx by Russia -- read Marx. Or, well, don't pretend to know what
Marx said...

He also believed _very_ strongly that "communism" could only appear in a
society after it had gone through its capitalist stage thoroughly -- he was
hoping for Great Britain to become communist, and the idea of an agrarian
society like China or Russia becoming communist was just goofy.

Marx also never foresaw the compromises that would happen in an increasingly
wealthy and unionized society, and which have forestalled any revolutionary
drive (as the builder of the first tract home developments said: people with
mortgages and a postage stamp worth of land don't join the CP.)

Also "liberal" here refers to liberal as in "neo-liberal": those who support
the freeing up of regulation and tradition in the support of capitalism. You
may be using "liberal" in the current usage of "leftwing and sort of
socialist" which it never meant originally. This liberalism very much is tied
up with "utilitarianism", which basically thinks that everything can be
reckoned in terms of consumer utility; the idea that we are driven by
consumption and pleasure (as in "the pleasure principle") pervades our
society, but is not necessarily the basic scientific principle that economists
and Freudians pretend it is; meaningful work or prestige might be
contenders...

~~~
lionhearted
> Marx wrote a brilliant critique of capitalism

Not really, because he makes a fundamental mistake. He thinks those that hold
capital use violence and oppression against the masses.

But he's got the cause and effect wrong - the people who use violence and
oppression wind up seizing capital.

What's the difference? Well, look at history. It's not the merchants and
traders and inventors and builders that oppress people - it's the people with
swords and guns. Marx's prescription to that is that the oppressed people grab
swords and guns and raise some hell, and take over, and then... whoops.

The accumulation of resources (private property) and voluntary exchange
(capitalism) aren't problems. Violence, coercion, oppression is the problem.
Unfortunately, Marx gets the cause and effect backwards. He sees violent
people holding capital, and blames the capital instead of the violence. He
then says the people without capital should use violence to seize it... with
predictably bad results.

Marx didn't understand capitalism - he never did productive work in his life.
The cause of oppression stems from violence and coercion, not accumulation of
resources and voluntary exchange.

~~~
forkandwait
> Not really, because he makes a fundamental mistake. He thinks those that
> hold capital use violence and oppression against the masses.

You will disagree, I would imagine, but Marx would argue that one of the most
important features of capitalism is that it _appears_ to be an abstract
relationship of buying and selling sans violence, even as it is very much a
system of oppression of one class over another. He doesn't forget that the
swords are put away (though they come out when necessary to sustain the market
relationships), he just disagrees with you that forcing a whole lot of people
to trade their labor on the market (at a low-ish price, since they don't
control the market environment) is any less oppressive than telling a peasant
explicitly to till the soil or get killed.

No offense, but he understood capitalism a lot better than you -- he just
didn't believe capitalists when they said "it's not the merchants and traders
... that oppress people"

------
pygy_
_when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than
ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create._

— Why The Lucky Stiff

------
iwwr
"A good trade, when it's a question of meeting basic needs. But once they are
met -- and they are met; they are finite, _tho liberals, from Mill to DeLong,
deny it_ "

We should be thankful that our ancestors were not content to just live at a
bare subsistence level.

------
seanmcq
This is an honest question: When did "liberal" come to mean "who think that
human wellbeing consists in the consumption of goods and services"

I presume this is a new political meme that I'd not heard. Where did it come
from?

------
lionhearted
I'm pretty well-convinced that sooner or later, quoting Marx and quoting
Hitler will have the same levels of social respectability. They both advocated
a lot of nonsense and violent insanity.

Just like a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut, the advocate of violent
nonsense occasionally has a decent quote. Still, you can find better sources
of quotes on anti-consumerism than Marx, just like you can find better sources
of quotes on helping people than Hitler... too much violent insane nonsense
attached to those blind squirrels, even if they occasionally stumble on a nut.

~~~
_delirium
If you compared Lenin or Stalin to Hitler, sure, but comparing Marx to Hitler
is pretty strange. If anything he's notoriously silent on how exactly one
would organize a communist society, and was politically ineffectual. He spends
most of his time as a theoretician of how capitalism works, with some pretty
vague ideas of what would replace it. A closer analogy might be comparing Marx
and Ayn Rand: theoreticians most at home critiquing the social order they
_don't_ like, with some very idealized notions of how their preferred version
would work, and a flair for manifesto-writing.

~~~
lionhearted
I haven't read any of Rand's nonfiction, so correct me if I'm wrong - but I
don't think she advocated violence as a means of change.

Hitler and Marx both did. Marx advocated violent overthrow and takeover by the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" - and when it was tried, it worked really,
really badly, leading to much destruction and death and misery.

Marxist-inspired philosophy and governance have been a wasteland of insanity
and destruction... for the last 100 years, nothing else even comes close in
terms of destruction. Fascism comes in a distant second. I don't think any
Randian philosophy of individuality has stacked up millions of bodies in the
same way, but I'm open to being corrected on that.

~~~
forensic
Rand believes in force. Remember Ragnar Danneskjöld, the philosopher turned
pirate?

Rand doesn't believe force should be used to create a utopia. She believes
that force should be used in self-defense when it is rational to do so - and
this includes defending your property from collectivists. So basically she
believes it is morally acceptable to violently defend your property from tax
collectors, as long as in doing so you are not sacrificing some greater good
such as your happiness and well-being.

~~~
iwwr
Well, force is an underpinning of the individual. Without the ability to exert
force (or to express opposition), an individual ceases to exist.

------
javert
I agree with most of this post - the part about the value of good, solid work.
I disagree with this, which the blogger just presents as a given and does not
justify:

 _Capitalism piles up consumer goods but deprives more and more of us of the
satisfaction of genuine work._

In fact, I believe capitalism allows more people to have good, solid,
enjoyable work than any other system.

~~~
forkandwait
I think you are right for about 30% of the population -- those who manage the
society, even if they don't own it. We (I am a member of the 30%, luckily) get
to build organizations, create processes, develop stuff; even if we are doing
it for a paycheck and our employers own our patents, it is still fun. However,
for the 70% that work as cogs in the machine, capitalism sucks -- but then so
did feudalism or state industrialism like the USSR.

The 70% who are cogs in the US generally don't know they have any options,
though they do (let me give a hint -- start at community college....). If they
all figured it out at once, there would be chaos as all the forklift drivers,
fry cooks, and widget assemblers would say (basically) "fuck that" and walk
away.

