When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.
Office Hours 2
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Moral Foundations of Politics
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Marxism, Its Failures and Its Legacy
This module on Marx's Enlightenment theory focuses on the foundations of capitalism theory and its major weaknesses.
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Ian ShapiroSterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
[MUSIC]
Anna, hello.
I've been looking through the forms and
see a huge amount of activity about the Marxism lectures and a lot of questions.
So we'll get to them soon but maybe we should just do some housekeeping first.
>> Yeah I have a few announcements so the first is that they're going to be,
the next section is the social contract tigid-,
tradition.
There'd going to be seven lectures, those are Lectures 12 through 18 and
the students are going to be able to see lectures 12 through 15 starting on Friday,
February 6th.
And then Lecture 16 through 18, the second half of the section is going to
become available on Wednesday, February 11th.
And finally the quiz is going for the Social Contract section is going to be
on due on Sunday, February 22nd so that's the deadline for the quiz.
And then one more thing just to mention that the students should keep their
eyes on the forums because you may be posting a question or
two at some point into the forums for them to discuss.
So they should, they should watch out for that.
>> Okay. Good.
>> So lots of questions this week.
So, I'm going to dive right in.
I'll start with some general ones first, that we had and clarification questions.
So, one we had that was interesting, since there's been so much economic material,
was somebody wondered why not Adam Smith, you know?
He's, he wrote about moral philosophy, he's also the kind of father of.
Classical economics, so, so why not, why not Adam Smith in the course?
>> So it's a good question.
the, it's, it's, it reminds me of, when my son was about,
five years old, and one day he said to me, one morning he said.
Daddy how come there's exactly the right amount of news to
fill the newspaper everyday?
>> [LAUGH]
>> So that's part of the, part of the answer.
There's only, you know, there are only so many pages in the newspaper.
In fact you could make an argument that in general the, I give shrift to the Scots.
In this course.
After all, it's not just Smith, but the whole Scottish Enlightenment.
>> Mm-hm. David Hume, who we deal with
glancingly, was a major utilitarian thinker,
among other things, but I chose to use Bentham instead because.
His view of utilitarianism is so much more dramatic than Humes'.
And, you know, there are other Scottish enlightenment thinkers, like,
Adam Ferguson who don't get a mention at all.
And so, so, you know, one coud make the point,
I should say it's not exclusively English.
The Irish are going to get their due.
Edmond Burke.
>> Oh, yeah. >> Was an Irishman and we'll, we'll see
some contemporary Irish thinkers when we do the Anti-Enlightenment tradition.
Such as Lord Devlin was also Irish.
But Adam Smith so.
That the, the truth about Adam Smith.
In many ways, he is the father of classical economics.
Although, as we've seen, the labor theory of value is really not his innovation.
It, it starts in the 17th century with Hobbes and William Petty.
It's then systematized by Locke.
And, in fact, recent scholars have found many other of the central concepts of
classical economics being developed by 17th century thinkers like Munn and
Milton and others.
I think that Smith really is, is important for two ideas.
One we do talk about which is the division of labor and
his famous pen factor and all of that.
We was the first person really to talk about the division of labor.
And then the second thing, which we don't talk about at all in
this course although I've dealt with it in the past in other courses in the past.
Is if you look at the 17th century economic theorists,
English economic theorists versus the 17th century theorists.
The one big idea that's Smith brings that's missing in
the 17th century is the idea of equilibrium.
And that means starting to think about the economy as a system and
what other rules that govern it.
And that's his big innovation and it's, it's not that it's unimportant but
it, it it doesn't connect to
the political enlightenment in any way that makes it central to this course.
>> Okay great, so the next question is about just a clarification about
what exactly the definition of a working class person is or who falls within that.
So it's somebody who's dependent upon someone else for
their, for their living who's paid a wage for labor.
So one person asked about whether entrepreneurs, people who work for
themselves, what category they fall into and then like so,
are all entrepreneurs out of the working class?
And what about like, retired people who are not getting a wage anymore?
>> Mm-hm, so it's a good question and I think that.
For Marx, now we are talking about a class in itself.
I know there were questions about a class in itself and a class for itself.
>> Yes. >> We will get to that part,
that one as well.
But so, this is the objective definition of class, a class in itself.
Who, who is working class,
whatever they believe about the matter according to Marx.
And it really comes down to the issue of compulsion.
So, it, it's not whether you work for somebody else but
whether you must work for somebody else in order to survive.
So if you're a retired person and you've been putting money in your, you know,.
501 K plan or your life and buying stocks from it and so forth.
If you have enough in there to live off your,
your investments, then you're not working class according to Marx.
>> Okay.
>> But if you have, you know, we all have a little bit of money in our, in our,.
Save, in our, in our retirement accounts.
And but what it really comes down to is whether it frees you
from the compulsion to work for others.
So, if, if it doesn't then you're, then you're still working class.
And likewise, with an entrepreneur.
If, if they're successful entrepreneur and then they can live from the returns to
capital that they accumulate, then they're not working class.
If they fail, then they are working, they, they'll fall down, they'll have to go and
get, you know, if, if,
if there would be entrepreneur who are in fact putting bread on the table by.
Working as a waiter or waitress at then they're in the working class.
Yeah. >> But
the successful entrepreneur's kind of, is the, is the prototypical capitalist.
>> Mm-hm. >> In some sense.
>> Yeah. >> They're the person who's,
who's really the capital.
>> Yes.
>> Okay so
in the first video you talk about Marx becoming disillusioned and, and not-
>> Yeah. >> And not having hope for
the revolution at some point.
And someone pointed out that the year that the communist manifest was
published was the year of, of hu, a huge year of revolutions in Europe.
So, in 1848.
So, where did the, where did his disillusion come from?
>> Oh, he wasn't disillusioned then.
In fact, I mean, in,
both in 1830, when we had revolutions across Europe, and in 1848.
When there are again revolutions across Europe.
Marx thought this might be the beginning of the end of capitalism.
>> Hm. >> So he was, he was very.
It was, it was after that, after by, you know,
by 1851, the revolutions across Europe have failed.
The, the monarchs are back pretty much everywhere.
Reaction sets in again.
And that's when he starts to, he then gets also.
He gets kicked out of Euro.
He is. When he moves to the U.K..
Settles in London.
And starts to become more disillusioned at
the possibility that revolution is going to come in his lifetime, and
that's when he really digs into economics, and that's when he
starts working in the basement of the British Museum during the research.
That's when he starts reading Adam Smith in a serious way and
David Ricardo in thinking he can refine their theories, and
really wants to get a grip on the much deeper dynamics of capitalism than he'd,
than he had really thought about in a systematic way in the 1830s and 1840s.
And he, he starts, you know, in the 1850s and later, starts
to toy with the idea of the parliamentary road to socialism because it seems like
the workers have not risen to the barricades in the way that he wanted, and
so then he starts to think, well, maybe they could do it through the ballot box.
But it's, it's the last decade of his life, really,
that the real disillusionment sets in.
>> Okay, and we are going to have more questions about the kind of
other alternatives to the full revolution.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So I have a question about the labor theory of surplus value.
>> Yeah.
>> The question we got, was that so if according to that
theory labor is the only source of value and otherwise equivalents are exchanged.
>> Mm-hm. >> So how would Marx explain
non-manufacturing businesses and how they make profit, like, where would the,
the surplus value come from when there's no labor, per se, involved?
>> Well, when, why did.
>> There's no factory.
>> What makes you say there's no labor?
>> Well, I guess that's the assumption.
>> But there is labor.
I mean it, it,
when you say, when you say service industries, you mean waitressing, making-
>> Yes, yeah, maybe service industry or
we could even maybe think of like a, what about a tech company?
>> What it's, I mean it's certainly true that Marx was looking at factories.
>> Yeah.
>> Because that's what they were in the 19th century and Britain, but
I don't think there's anything in principle different when you're
talking about a tech company or, or somebody doing service provision.
Again you know the key thing is,
is, is there a capitalist buying some of their labor time,.
>> Okay. >> Consuming it, and
then walking away with a profit?
And if there is, then it's a capital labor relationship, if there isn't, it isn't.
You know, so I th, you know, if its a co-operative restaurant and
they're all sharing the profits then it's not a capital le, labor relationship,
but if, if it's, you know, in principle it makes no difference tha, the,
the work the worker is producing only that it gets sold and
that it ha, you know, whether it's service in a restaurant or,-
>> So we could imagine, like, programmers putting in their time and
getting paid a wage to program, and then their product is being sold.
>> Yeah.
>> To create products.
>> Yeah. >> Okay.
That makes sense so I have a bunch of questions about class.
>> Yeah.
>> The first one is pretty general.
So you know Marx lived in a very different time and classes are different today.
>> Yeah. >> Like you know a lot
of places it's not industrial in the way that his time was.
So in American society for
example, what, what are the different classes that we have?
Here, how could we, you know,
as a Marxist maybe identify different classes in American society?
>> Well, any, you know, truly believing hard boiled Marxist would say,
and the capitalism, they're really only two classes.
There are those who have to work for others in order to live and
there are those who don't, that's the basic division, and everything else is
confusion or ideology or some, something else, okay?
So, you know, a an aspiring bourgeois person,
who who has all the trappings of a middle class lifestyle,
but is still in this compulsion relationship with an employee's
working class, they might just be confused about it.
That's what he, that he would say.
Now, there's, there's another dimension to this which is
more problematic for Marx, I think, which is, you know, he, he argues that
wages always tend toward subsistence because labor's impermanent over supply.
He thinks as I said this is, the, the assumption that labor's impermanent over
supply's one of the empirical assumptions in Marx's argument that's valid.
I mean, labor, there's always some unemployment in market systems but, so
he's, so his, his image is that labor gets driven towards subsistence.
So then the question arises, what's subsistence?
And he says, well, there's a social and historical component to subsistence.
So what does that mean?
It could mean several things.
One is commonly accepted norms about subsistence change.
So in, sort of Dickensian in Britain there would be different norms about,
you know, what's acceptable for people to live with, and,
in 21st century United States or 21st century Britain, or 21st century
any advanced system we'd be very different assumptions about subsistence in
other parts of the world, but so, that's his point, to some extent.
However, as I said in the lectures,
there's also outward pressure on the definition of subsistence,
because of the problem of weak demand in capitalist systems.
So in order to keep the, keep the economy going, this is,
there's going to be pressure to create people who can buy what's being produced,
and so that means that the, on the one hand,
there's pressure to push wages down, but on the other hand,
there are other pressures to push wages up in order to stimulate demand, and so.
>> Or just give them credit cards.
>> Or give them credit cards, yeah.
You know, I don't think Marx thought about debt very much, so
he didn't really have a theory of debt, but yeah, but, so
that the, the, the, what counts as subsistence becomes complicated and
that means whether workers will ever get to the point where they
believe they have nothing to lose but their chains, gets cast into doubt.
Because if they've got goods and services, and they've got TV, and they've got cars,
and, and they've got other things it's not clear they will conclude that
they've got nothing left to lose ever, and so that's, that's, you know,
why woolwork has become revolutionary, it's not obvious that they will.
>> So, this might be a good place to handle in itself self-distinction, so
does that mean that the working class wouldn't be able to get to the place
where they become a class for itself could you just go over the distinction again?
>> Yes. >> And the,
because there's some confusion also about how it's translated and
what the languages of it, so it gets confusing.
>> Yeah, yeah.
So the basic idea of the forward self, and
this isn't the best way to have translated it, but the basic idea of forward self is,
is what people actually believe, as opposed to
the objective definition which depends on this idea of compulsion and I talk about.
So.
Now, if you take a step back and
look at the whole of human history in Marx's scheme, it's not just a,
it's, it's, it's all through human history, people have,
have been making history not understanding exactly what history they were making.
Okay. They didn't in,
under feudalism on his account or all of your modes of production.
People didn't understand their positions in it.
So they weren't classes for themselves, in that sense.
And what he thinks is going to be unique about the communist revolution is that for
the first time, the class in itself and
the class for itself will eventually become synonymous.
That the class for itself, the proletariat will understand
the basic system and wh, their place in it and that's why it's
going to be qualitatively different from all previous revolutions in history.
That's Marxist's belief.
Now what's going to drive it?
well, its the tricky thing we were just referring to, which is, he says that,
because, because wages are constantly driven toward subsistence at a time when
the surplus is growing and growing and growing, workers are going get angrier and
angrier because they, they are going to be suffering from immiseration.
Ira, and surrounded by opulence.
so, so that eventually's going to trigger kind of consciousness
raising about their circumstances and they're going to come to reject it.
There are two problems with that.
One is that Marx uses this term
immiseration, which makes us think of people literally starving.
>> Mm-hm.
>> But in fact all his,
all his theory shows is relative immiseration, not absolute poverty, right?
And so there's that, that issue.
And then secondly the issue I mentioned, which I,
I noticed came up in some of the forums, which is,
as it turns out peop, workers tend not to compare themselves with capitalists.
They tend to compare themselves with other similarly situated workers.
So you know now everybody's reading Piquette's book about the top 1% and
the 1.1%.
But the people going on about that are, are intellectuals and others, right?
It's not workers in, in Tennessee or
Detroit or Badsey in England who are going on about Piquette.
It's the chattering classes.
And that's exactly consistent with the sociological evidence that, you know,
blue collar workers compare themselves with other blue collar workers.
School teachers compare themselves with other school teachers.
Firemen compare themselves with police.
People compare themselves to people who are relatively close to them in this,
in the economic order.
>> So, the dispute, so there was a dispute about, about this account that you give,
which is, which we find also in the sociological literature.
But then, so one student was wondering well then how can you, so if there,
if people only really compare themselves to people in their class basically
what about for examples policies aimed at taxing super rich that,
that do exist in western Europe.
And what, and you know with the Piquette book, I mean,
there were the occupy movements, so people did get out on the streets.
Is that, is that a sign of class conflict?
And then there were other examples of new coalitions that have come about in
southern European countries, especially Greece, we see the middle and
lower classes uniting against the upper classes.
So, I, are, any of those exist,
do any of those examples push back on what you're claiming?
>> so, what I would say about them is, first of all, look at what happened to,
Hollande's proposal, to, to have a 75% top marginal tax rate.
He gave up, eventually, because there was so much opposition to it.
And he, he realized he was on the verge of, you know,
having his head handed to him in the next election, which still might happen.
So as for the occupy movement, I, you know, one of the things that's interesting
about the occupy movement is that, if you compare it to the Tea Party,
in America, I know we have a big international audience here, and
we don't want to be too America-centric.
>> Yeah.
>> I'll get to the Greeks in a minute.
if, if we compare them to the Tea Party, a lot of the people in the Tea Party,
a lot of the people who actually show up at the meetings and do the work, and
do the leafletting and, and the lobbying to
further their cause are, are not wealthy people.
They're often relatively, you know,
lower middle class people, as we think about class today, not in Marx's sense.
so, you know, and the, and the big takeaway point is that as a,
as a political movement, the Tea Party is vastly more effective then
the occupy movement was, which has largely dissipated.
And so on.
So, you know, that, that's something to tell you now.
As for the Greeks, it's going to be very interesting to see,
whether, in fact, Greece, you know, there, there's something of a game of
chicken going on now between the new Greek government and the German's government.
and, it's not clear how it'll come out.
I mean, I, I think probably the Greeks will end up leaving the Eurozone.
But they'll either end up leaving the Eurozone, or
their, their government will fall.
>> Hm-mm.
>> And they'll, they'll start printing drachmas.
And they, you know, will deal with the consequence of
that which might be a lot of inflation, and so on.
And the game of chicken is whether the, the Germans really want,
I think what they want, want to know, is whether they can contain that.
Or whether, you know, if that happens with Greece, well then,
what happens in Spain and Italy?
>> Exactly.
>> And this, this Spanish, you know, the Spanish election coming up.
And what we've seen through the financial crisis in Europe is not so
much, in my view, not so much a resurgence of the left, but
basically that because this stuff created an unmanageable situation, in,
incumbents are getting clobbered all the time.
And so, the left got clobbered in Spain last time around, but
now I think the right's going to get clobbered.
And it's basically they've, this combination that they've gotten themselves
into where, they do have control of fiscal policy and they don't have control of
monetary policy, makes their countries very difficult to govern.
And so whoever is in government gets blamed.
So there's a lot of churning, and a lot of turning over.
But it's not obvious to me that it's any kind of, in, in a, you know,
if you take a step back, any kind of revival of the European left.
>> Interesting.
>> I, I wouldn't bet a lot on Hollande's prospects, for
example, in the next French election.
>> Well the world will be waiting with bated breath, in,
in any case what goes on there.
So the last question about class consciousness is about how, so the,
so somebody wrote that Professor Shapiro indicated that
working class consciousness comes about when workers realize that their share in
the surplus of society is going down.
>> Yeah.
>> And so, one, so a question was whether the Gini
index would be one way to measure the type of.
Ineq, maybe that would be seen as a rise in inequality, or
if that, like, how would they measure that?
Or how would you, we actually be able to see that?
What does the Gini index do?
>> Well, the Gini index is a measure of inequality.
It measures the amount of the social surplus that goes to different groups.
and, and so if you have, the Gini index goes from from,
from zero to one and zero would be perfect equality and
one, all the wealth would be in, in the hands of one person.
So it's certainly true that a lot people expected a high Gini
coefficient would lead to more work of militancy.
But one of the big puzzles, I want to talk about this somewhat when we get to
the lectures on democracy, so I won't anticipate it too much now.
But one of the big puzzles of modern political economy,
is why that doesn't happen.
So for instance take a country like Brazil.
It, it has a very high Gini coefficient.
It used to be, until the last decade or so, about 0.7.
Very high, one of the highest in the world.
It's come down a little bit in the last it, it, but
it's still over 0.6, which is still very high.
it's, that's in a democratic system, and you would think there would be a lot of
workers voting for governments who would be distri, who would be redistributive.
Or an even more extreme case, South Africa, my native country,.
We had, you know, we went from apartheid to democracy in 1994.
We've since had five national elections; which the African National Congress has
won usually by about two-thirds of the vote.
The Gini coefficient today, in South Africa in 2015,
is identical to what it was in 1994, and
it's one of the highest in the world for which we have data.
It's either the highest or the second highest.
Lesotho comes in sometimes ahead, or sometimes behind South Africa on this.
Now it's probably not the highest in the world because we don't have data for
countries like Saudi Arabia, which I think probably has a higher Gini, but
still, very high.
This country's gone through five democratic elections.
The top marginal tax rate is actually lower than it was under apartheid.
Big puzzle as to why you don't get pressure for redistribution.
Or in the US the Gini coefficient's gone up
from about 0.3 to about 0.4 in the last four decades,.
And we all know about what's happened with the super-rich from Piketty.
Yet we don't see pressure for downward redistribution.
We don't see that working class consciousness.
Now, you might ask why, and some of this, I think, one of the questions I
saw in the forum said doesn't this have something to do with the welfare state.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So interestingly, in the 1950s there was a man by
the name of Ralph Miliband who was an academic in the UK,
who was the father of the, the two Milibands, today in the Labor party.
Ed Miliband, who's leader of the Labor party, and
his brother David, who was Foreign Secretary in the last Labor government.
So Ralph Miliband, their father, basically wrote a book which
in the 1950s, in which he argued that the welfare state is capitalism's best friend,
because it creates the situation, it helps create the situation where workers
don't feel they have nothing to lose but their chains, by giving them a cushion.
>> Mm-hm.
>> It prevents the kind of militancy that would otherwise emerge.
>> So in a sense it, the welfare state itself might have been one of
the biggest factors in stopping the revolution that Marx was predicting.
>> That was, that was Miliband, Ralph Miliband's argument, yeah.
>> Interesting, so so, okay, so now I want to move to
some debates that are really interesting going on in the forums, and
I think one of the reasons is because we have so
many international students taking this course that aren't Americans.
We've both taught this course in the United States where
students are somewhat resistant to Marxism and, and learning about Marx.
But there's, but there's, there's I see a wider range of opinions about this and
feelings about Marx in, in the students that we have now.
So, so, maybe a way to ask the question is,
well somebody asked, why is it that in this day and
age there are still people who think that we can simply disregard Marxian thought
without ever having read any of Marx's work, or other Marxist scholars.
And, and it kind of came down to a debate about do Americans have
an inordinate amount of what somebody called Marxism phobia.
I mean is th, is this about the United States, or, where does this come from?
>> Well, so there's this a very long debate among people who study ideologies.
And you know, the, the, the sort of
heading it comes under is why is there no socialism in America?
And some scholars have argued that, it's, the lack of a powerful socialist,
impulse in American politics is to do with the lack of feudalism.
That no feudalism, no socialism.
That, there's no feudal order to have rac, reacted against, and
so, so the, the, those, like, those, that American capitalism came about in
a very different way than European capitalism.
And so that, that's, there's a huge amount of
debate among historians about American exceptionalism and so on.
And then there are, there are other historians who say well,
actually there we, there was a lot of radicalism in American history that has,
is sort of gotten lost in the shuffle and it's not that different.
But still people have said that on the one hand, and
secondly they say, by the way, there wasn't much Socialism in Europe either.
>> [LAUGH].
>> There was really social democracy in most of Europe, not socialism and
social democracy is not that different than the New Deal so, you know,
you could do another whole course kind of trying to tease all of that apart.
but, in, in our, our time I think that, I'd make two points.
In, in the advanced capitalist democracies, I think it's a very different
dynamic, than in, newer democracies, and particularly,
democracies that came about as a reaction against Western imperialism.
and, and this is the reason I say it.
First of all, in the advanced capitalist democracies, a lot of the anti-communism,
first of all, was about the Cold War.
>> Hm. >> And then secondly,
although many people thought when the Cold War ended, this would be good for
the European left, and for the left in the advanced capitalist democracies,
that turned out not to be the case.
And I think the reason is that it actually strengthened the right it,
the, the resurgence of conservatism.
And the reason is that it, it's several fold, but
a big part of it is that the, the, the notion that
concessions had to be made to left-wing ideas to, to sort of buy
off the working class to stop them from being more radical went away.
So if you go back to the 1930s, for example, I recently read an,
an biography of Averell Harriman who was a kind of.
Business magnate and he was also governor of New York once, who connect,
connected o tthe Democratic Party in the, from the 30s through the 60s.
He was, he was very much of the, he, he was sort of noblesse oblige.
We should, we should provide welfare states and all these sorts of things.
But it was largely because I mean it wasn't exclusively, but
a big part of it was you know, in the 30s, in The Depression.
People thought capitalism might be falling apart.
There was another model out there and the notion was you know,
we'd better win the battle for hearts and minds.
We better make sure, when you've got 20% unemployment and so on.
Once communism is off the table, nobody thinks capitalism's going to fall apart.
You know, we talk about the Islamic fundamentalists issues, but there's no
alternative to capitalism in all of that, and they don't have a political economy.
And so then, you know, if you're being cynical about it, it's for
the capitalist to say, well move to the suburbs and build more prisons.
It's, it's much easier, you know?
There isn't the same kind of pressure to do something for, for, to, to be,
to be responsive to left wing pressure that there was during during the Cold War.
So I think on the one hand, the, the Cold War stoked it, obviously stoked it up,
anti-Soviet, but then once it was gone.
The idea that the left was going to get some dividend outta this I
think was naive, because really it didn't.
>> Hm.
>> Now in the developing world, or what used to be called the developing world,
I think Marxism became closely involved with anti-imperial struggles in Africa,
in Latin America.
It would, the two became so intertwined that Marxism became connected with
a kind of liberation from colonial impression, oh,
oppression that wasn't here, that wasn't the case you know,
say at the time of the American Revolution, which was pre-Marxian.
Yeah.
>> That, that's, I think that's a good way to explain it.
So that also makes me think that in a lot of senses the commitment
to Marxist ideals that we see today a lot of the times.
There is a Marxism somewhere in it, but it is more about maybe socialism or
even social democracy in a lot of cases.
So this, this kind of relates to another question that we got from a student who
asked, she, she says, Marxism was a fast way to end exploitation but it failed.
And she brings up Fabianism, which I don't, I don't know anything about.
And she said on the other hand, Fabianism is
a slow way to engage with a socialist world and it is still alive and healthy.
So are there, are there other political movements where I mean,
I was just you know, hinting towards that, but are there places where we can see
Marxism still alive today, and in updated or revised forms?
Like where can we find it today?
>> Well I think, you know, I,
I think Marxism produces insights about problems in, in capitalism,
but as a as a viable alternative ideology of the future, I don't see it.
I mean I think Fabian socialism is the kind of,
that was a kind of anti-statist socialist impulse that has,
I'd say, it’s a small strand today.
What, what’s left of it has become sort of incorporated into social democracy,
social democratic tradition.
and, so one question is how, how vital is the social democratic tradition?
>> Mm-hm. >> The, I think a very good treatment of
this is in Tony Judd's book, Post War, which is a history of Europe, basically.
It's not, it undersells itself.
It's really a history of Europe since the first World War,
not as he got it much of the book.
But you know, he, he points out that although in the 60s and
70s a lot of European intellectuals thought that the, the social welfare,
social democratic welfare states of Europe were kind of the new normal, in fact they
were a kind of time bound achievement that depended on the Marshall Plan,
favorable demographic trends, the, the kind of bubble
created by the Cold War and various other propitious developments.
And then went that went away, whether the, the European social democratic
model was going to turn out to be sustainable became a much harder question.
And to the degree there was pressure to,
to support it in order to head off more radical politics.
That went away as well, as we've already talked about.
So you know, the, and the, so social democracy as they,
as, as it was known in the 60s and 70s and, and 80s has sort of dissipated.
I mean there are other things that have come out of it,
like the Green Movement in Europe-
>> Mm-hm.
>> Is a sort of a descendent in a way of the social democratic tradition.
But what the future politics in the Green Movement are also pretty unclear, I think.
>> So another question.
So just back to the, to Marxism and how is regarded in America.
Another strand of that question that we, that I found in the forums was,
people are curious about Marxism in, in academics in, in-
>> Mm-hm. >> The ivory towers, so to say.
>> Yeah.
>> What is the status of Marxist thought for people like you in, in, or
broader, more broadly in the humanities and social sciences?
And what is related to that?
What is cultural Marxism, and
what does that have to do with academic, with the academy and the-
>> Okay. >> The traditions of the academy?
>> Okay, so let's do the cultural Marxism piece first-
>> Okay. >> And then we'll talk about the academy.
I think that cultural Marxism finds it's,
this is the kind of Marxism that is in form literary criticism.
The study of ideologies,and in more in the humanities than in the social sciences.
And I've always interpreted it, you know, looking at it as a phenomenon,
as a by-product of the failure of Marxism in the sense that Marx predicted
bourgeois ideology would go away as the kind of grinding problems
of capitalists and work themselves out and the people can, more like it.
The class for itself became more and more of a class in itself.
And it didn't happen.
And you know the first really to many Marxists, the first really shocking
message that it wasn't happening was in World War I when the Marxists
all over Europe said to the, tried to say to the working classes of Europe, this is,
this is, you shouldn't be, we shouldn't be fighting nationalist wars.
We're all on the same side against the bosses.
And it fell completely flat, and the second international and
all of that fell apart.
And so, that put you know, what World War I showed was that or
many people thought it showed, was an ideology like
nationalism is much more powerful than an ideology like class consciousness.
And so then the question was, why?
And that led many people.
To start studying, many people who were brought in the Marxist tradition,
like Karl Mannheim and well a whole,
whole strand of people eventually produced the Frankfurt School.
But they were all basically interested in the nature of ideologies.
Why, why, they're not just the superstructure.
They have a kind of life of their own and they keep going and going and going.
And so, people wanted to understand them.
And I think that's where cultural Marxism came from historically.
>> Mm-hm.
>> That Raymond Williams and
all these people, why were they interested in studying culture?
Because culture wasn't just epiphenomenal, it was culturally imported.
And so that, I think that's where it came from historically.
As for the universities, yes, in the U.S. the universities are very
disproportionately, university faculties are very disproportionately left-wing.
Now that's not true always and everywhere.
I'm, I've just been reading a new book on World War I,
for example, by an Englishmen called Alexander Watson.
And one of the first things you discover is that in Austria and in Germany in 1914,
the intellectuals were very right wing and very pro-war in Austria and in Germany.
So in the U.S., it's, it's as I say,
it's definitely true if you look at all the studies, and so on.
But one thing they miss is that the,
the conservative intellectual revival in America since the 1980s,
which has been very powerful, has not gone on in the universities.
It's gone on in think tanks.
And I did some research on this for
an unrelated project, which I won't talk about now.
But, if you look at the amount of money and the personnel and so
on in think tanks, in things like the Heritage Foundation and
the American Enterprise Institute and so on, there was actually,
actually in the 1970s a quite conscious decision about the people who
decided to fund those think tanks to not bother with universities be,
because partly they were dominated by the left.
And so they thought in terms of supporting the development of conservative ideas,
it would be much more effective to do, to go into this other forum.
And so it's true that American universities are dominated by the left,
but it's not true, I don't think, that the American intellectual landscape is
dominated by the left because these think tanks have had a huge effect on
public idea, ideas public ideologies, debates about politics and so on.
>> Great.
Okay, so just a few more questions.
One of them is about I think I know what your answer's going to be,
but somebody said you know, history's not over til it's over-
>> Mm-hm. >> So maybe Marx could still be right.
So the context of that was that somebody wrote that Marx wouldn't have
recognized the 20th century revolutions to the Communists since they took place in
undeveloped peasant societies.
And then later you talk about in a different lecture I think completely, you
talk about China's turn to capitalism as evidence of the failure of Marx's theory.
But, but there's some confusion because were they ever really truly communists in
the first place if, if the revolution came out of this Agrarian society?
So then, well if China's becoming you know, industrial and
capitalist now, maybe the revolution can still happen there.
So that was the context of maybe it's not over til it's over.
>> Yeah. >> Maybe it's still going to happen there.
>> Well I, you know, I-
>> The real revolution.
>> Yeah.
Well I thought the first part of, I saw that comment as well,
the first part of it I thought was right on the money.
I mean I thought they, that it was well pointed out-
>> Mm-hm. >> That if,
if you take Marxian analysis seriously, you would expect China as its, you
know whatever the ideology the leaders had claimed to have had in the last decades,
that, as it be, started to industrialize, it would become a capitalist system.
So there wouldn't be any great surprise about that point from
a Marxian point of view.
Then the fact that they had called themselves Communists would have
neither here nor there,
because Marx wouldn't have recognized them as Communists in the first place.
>> Mm-hm. >> So I think that,
that point is well taken, and I should have noted that in the lecture.
Whether it, it means we're going to get a, a,
genuine Communist revolution in China one day, you know I, I'm pretty skeptical.
I'm a kind of contingency guy pretty much all the way down.
I, I don't think history has any necessary direction.
And there's no particular reason to believe that than to believe you know,
any one of 19 other possible scenarios we can think of, and
not to mention the hundreds we can't even think of.
Which is probably history's going.
>> [LAUGH] Okay, so let's move to our last question.
A lot of you know, studying Marx obviously goes into things that he didn't get right.
>> Mm-hm. >> But you did pull
out his understanding of power relations and exploitation as still being
a very valuable thing that we should, that we should take on from Marx, and
that we should gain, he helps us gain insight into power relations.
But, so some questions where people wanted to know what, is there anything else that
he, that he got right other than power relations that we can really take with us?
Maybe not like, the smaller details of the economic theory like the wages,
tending toward subsistence.
But are there other lessons that we might draw from Marx?
Are there other reasons to still be Marxist?
>> So, well I think there are other lessons to draw from Marx.
That doesn't mean there are reasons to be a Marxist.
>> Okay. >> I'm not, I'm not a,
I'm against isms, myself.
>> [LAUGH]. >> I don't want to be in any, but,
you know, I'm, you know, I think I said in the very first lecture,
there are no silver bullets in this course.
You take small and medium size insights where you can find it and
then you put them in your your bag of tricks to,
to help you understand bits and pieces of life as you move hopefully forward.
I, first of all, I want to say that the point about power is not small.
And it’s the reason I think it's important to, to have Marx in a course like this.
Because a lot of what he had to say that's endured you know, was about economics.
But at the end of the day this is a course about politics.
But you know, politics is basically about power.
It's about the nature of power.
We're going to have a lot more to say when we get to Nozick about just
what the nature of power is.
We haven't really focused on that at all yet, but we will.
And I think that, the you know,
junking the labor theory of value, which clearly makes no sense and so on, and
rearticulating the insight behind it as a point about power and compulsion and
people being in the power of others versus not being in the power of others-
>> Mm-hm. >> Is a very important,
enduring insight and is picked up on in the civic Republican tradition.
It's picked up on in, in, in many ways in the Democratic tradition that we,
we need to think about the management of power to
free people from the possibility of that kind of compulsion.
You don't need all the Marxian metaphysics to see that point, but nonetheless,
he makes the point in a very dramatic way with his definitions of class,
which don't depend on the later theory of value.
They depend on, this was my point.
>> Mm-hm. >> So I think that's not a trivial thing.
And I think he makes that point more effectively than anybody else in
the tradition.
Secondly I think his, his insistence that
people's conceptions of justice, of how the world should be ordered
is other regarding, other referential as I called it in the lectures,
versus the standard neoclassical assumption that we're self-referential.
You know, that you're only question is, am I better of than I was before and
have, where have I gone up and down my utility function?
Whereas Marx wants to say no, it's other referential people's conceptions of their
well being are, are intimately linked to their perceptions of how others are doing,
there's also a deep insight.
And a lot of it's picked up in behavioral psychology and economics.
But he was, he was wrong about who we compare ourselves to.
But nonetheless, it's a view of, of the human condition that I think is
more accurate than the assumption that, that people are entirely self-referential.
So he got the kind of application of that intuition wrong in an important way,
which you know, means a lot of what he,
the extract the extrapolations he made from it were, were not right.
But I think as a, as a basic view of a kind of political psychology,
it taps into something enduring.
>> Okay, well great.
That, that was wonderful.
That's all I have for now.
And, and next we're going on to the social contract, so
we'll be back with more office hours at, at that time.
>> We will.
>> All right, thanks.
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