Marx’s notion of alienation and CasP

I think part of the appeal of Marx is his unreserved boldness. Simply put, he is brilliant at formulating convincing rhetoric.

Case in point, his claim: “We proceed from an actual economic fact.”

It’s just a brilliant way of silencing critics, and along the way, convincing the reader that Marx is going to describe real evidence. But then he goes on to describe a hypothesis — that workers are (and will) becoming poorer at the same time that society is becoming wealthier.

Sometimes I dream of rewriting Capital such that all of Marx’s ideas are framed as tentative hypotheses. My feeling is that had Marx written such a text, it would now be lost to history, since it would be obvious to modern readers that the ideas were wrong.

There are laws and there are tendencies. This might sound like a flippant reply intended to rescue Marx’s position. It is intended to rescue Marx’s position, somewhat, but it is not flippant. In a complex system with feedbacks, the operation of any law can be countervailed by opposing and feedback forces. The law then manifests as a tendency in the system, not as a unidirectional arrow of historical determinism. Dogmatic Marxists and (dare I say it) opponents looking for strawman arguments are equally likely to misinterpret the basic expression of a law (so-called) as a prediction that the real historical tendency of the entire system will be simple and unidirectional; in a word deterministic.

Of course, the whole issue of what a “Law” is, is fraught. What is meant in science by the term “Law” is a “Fundamental Scientific Law” of nature. What was meant, even in Marx’s time, generally was a mechanistic and deterministic Newtonian view of fundamental scientific law.  As a philosopher and political economist Marx was paradoxically attempting to both harness the uses of mechanistic law thinking (including causal determinism as an a priori principle and reductionism as a method) and yet to transcend such simple determinism in order to arrive at a material dialectic capable of deeper and more complex explanations and predictions. “Dialectical Materialism”, a term coined by Joseph Dietzgen, not Marx, is essentially a proto complex systems theory. This waswell before Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy and general systems theory so Marx was a trail blazer, acknowledged or unacknowledged.

The issue of what a fundamental scientific law actually is cannot be ignored, especially from our modern perspective. A Fundamental Scientific Law is an expression of a relation (between two or more observable objects, forces or field values as variables) that is universal in all experimental observation thus far and invariant in manifestation under observation, to a standard of 5-sigma certainty, for the hard sciences. A Fundamental Scientific Law is a (useful) human artefact no less than a functional piece of pottery. This is not to denigrate or devalue either. Both a Fundamental Scientific Law and a pottery piece are made out of real stuff; their “shape” is cast from real stuff. In the case of the pot the shape is concrete (the material is fired clay to avoid any appearance of misstatement) and in the case of the Fundamental Scientific Law the “shape” is abstract and almost invariably mathematicised.

Hard science derives much of its theoretical and applied power from radical modelling simplification (reductionism if you like) of the systems it observes. This is clear even when we begin to look at the issue of the “three-body problem” or “n-body” problem after Newton had solved the two-body problem for us. The path of radical (and mechanistic) modelling simplification is not open to the honest philosopher nor to the honest social scientist of political economy. I will come back to that in this or my next post. Even hard science does not operate without a priori assumptions. This might seem an absurd or paradoxical claim but it is not and this reality does not prevent science making theoretical and practical advances. Indeed simplifying a priori assumptions assist the process.

Newton employed a number of a priori assumptions to develop his Newtonian mechanics. The central ones were the assumptions of;

(a) pure empty space;

(b) a universal inertial system; and

(c) the action of force over distance through pure empty space.

Even as expressed, we can perhaps begin to see the internal and external contradictions in and to Newton’s assumptions. The near contemporary philosopher (their life spans overlapped), one Bishop George Berkeley, certainly saw these contradictions and wrote “De Motu” (full title in English “On Motion: or The Principle and Nature of Motion and the Cause of the Communication of Motions”) as a critique of the assumptions of Newton’s physics. Berkeley’s critiques were and remain prescient in the light of modern physics. Berkeley arrived at his prescient critiques via the path and methods of monist immaterialism. The immaterialism was not material (forgive the joke) for reasons I will not go into here, or yet. The monism (as an a priori assumption of substance consistency through the system) was central, perhaps adventitiously so, to Berkeley’s deductions essentially prefiguring some of the discoveries of modern physics.

Berkeley essentially deduced that, in a material system, (also a presupposition of Newton’s);

(a) a pure empty space could not exist and to propose such was an ontological contradiction;

(b) a universal inertial system could not exist and have effects on material bodies if it were immaterial, as pure empty space; and

(c) the action of force over distance through pure empty space lacked a transfer or transmission mechanism or medium for the operation of said force over a distance of pure, empty space.

These deductions appear very prescient in the light of modern physics. Space is not “pure” or empty. It is a scalar field (the modern term) with scalar field values and vacuum energy. The scalar field is something, not nothing, and it must fulfil the role of being the containing inertial system. (I am not so confident of this inertial field claim and of course will accept correction from card-carrying physicists). Einstein solved “how” gravitational force could operate over distance by re-casting it as a (four-dimensional) bending in space-time detectably induced by the presence of massive objects.

Speaking of Einstein, one of his own papers explicitly shows his use of an a priori justification to commence his scientific reasoning in order to develop a testable hypothesis. His a priori justification meets the philosophical definition as follows “A priori justification is a type of epistemic (knowledge) justification that is, in some sense, independent of experience.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Online.) The paper in question is “ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES By A. EINSTEIN June 30, 1905. The passage in question is:

“We have not defined a common “time” for A and B, for the latter cannot be defined at all unless we establish by definition that the “time” required by light to travel from A to B equals the “time” it requires to travel from B to A.”

This definition amounts to an a priori assumption. It’s a very reasonable one and has, one would think, good general ad specific epistemic justifications. But strictly speaking it is not and can never be provable by deduction or empirical experiment. The Youtube video titled “Why No One Has Measured The Speed Of Light” by Veritasium illuminates this issue. Apologies, this has been a long but necessary digression.

To return to the issue of Marx’s use of the terms “laws” and “tendencies”. A “law”, even in Marx, we probably may take as an expression or claim that there is a fundamental scientific law in question. If this so, I don’t think Marx is always right on this score. Some “laws” he identifies appear to me to be axioms rather than laws. They are “axioms of capitalism” in the sense that setting the axioms (rules) of capitalism in prescription, and then in practice, as given constructions of private property, given operations of financial rituals and so on, instantiates these axioms in the system and gives them a superficial fundamental law appearance. The capitalist system in this sense is a man-made system of prescribed axioms. I think Marx was continually grappling, in a dialectal manner, with the “real real” and the “socially fictive and instituted real” in both their actualities and appearances as continually reflected in a material dialectical, that is feed-back, system. He was doing this with the tools of his day, then inventing his own new tools,  and the results are astonishing albeit understandably still somewhat confused, at least in exposition and maybe fundamentally. To this day, the entire “bifurcatory” nature of political economy has not been fully resolved (to my mind) despite the enormous step of seeing capital as power and solving the “value controversy” at a stroke. But an enormous, and brilliant, step is not a new and comprehensive system of thought entire, if I may be permitted to say this. There is still a great work to be done. I will try to come back to this matter in some subsequent post. By the way, I do not think I am the one to do this great work but I feel I perceive the need for it to be done.

In examining Marx’s great and personally unfinished crowning work, Das Kapital Vols 1, 2 and 3, we have to understand that Marx himself understands he is entering into the exposition of an essentially monistic and complexly interrelated system with multiple and iterative feedbacks: a system which proceeds dynamically and complexly in full physical extent through its full evolution in time. He also understand or continually discovers as he goes on (this can be seen in the Grundrisse for example) that he is examining an enormous complex with inadequate tools and methods and inventing his own new tools and methods as he goes. He is dealing with realities and appearances, and their multiply iterative interactions, for even the appearances humans create (both their reasonably accurate models and their illusions and delusions) still interact with material realities through the agency (actions) of physically real humans.

In this context, where does one begin, both in terms of analysis and in terms of exposition? This is the problem Marx faced in Das Kapital. The entire system is a monistic, complexly evolving, whole existing all at once in any instant in monistic or holistic totality and emerging and evolving over time: a vast and protean target for analysis. How can it be made the subject of reductionist or even linear exposition? For exposition is language is unavoidably linear. Every sentence is linear and the whole text is linear, relying on “looping” back to concepts and on the parallel exposition of topics in sequential chapters which topics must then be fused dialectically in further exposition.

The answer to the question of “how?” must be by a plunge “in medias res” somewhere in the circuits of extant capitalism. That the commodity is chosen is not to fetishize the commodity as the essence of capitalism. The “essence” of capitalism is its totality in any point in time and its potential to emerge and/or evolve new aspects over time. The commodity is chosen for historical reasons and exposition reasons. This perhaps hints at a (positive not negative) informed critique of Suaste Cherizola’s, ‘From Commodities to Assets’, but this is not the intent of this post. Rather, we must still deal fully with “laws and “tendencies” in Marx.

As my ass is getting sore from sitting too long, I will need to post a second part to this.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by Rowan Pryor.

Please see Part 1 above first.

Part 2 – The issue of “Laws” and “Tendencies” in Marx.

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra.

This is a fraught area, not just in Marx but in science and the philosophy of science, including Humean style empirical philosophy. It might be clear from my part 1 that I view a basic scientific law as NOT precisely an expression of event or process regularity but as a point-in-time regularity in a system, formally defined as closed, which regularity can be sequentially confirmed by further point-in-time observations. This is as in “A Fundamental Scientific Law is an expression of a relation (between two or more observable objects, forces or field values as variables) that is universal in all experimental observation thus far and invariant in manifestation under observation, to a standard of 5-sigma certainty, for the hard sciences.” Admittedly, this definition left open the question of point-in-time stasis versus time-in-process dynamics (taking the “arrow of time” from the net entropy process in the cosmos as ultimate closed system).

If time is reduced to a point in time, in conception, then the idea of cause must be abandoned and replaced by the idea of (“mere”) simultaneous conjunction. Laws then become not explanations of causes but merely descriptions of simultaneous conjunction to be expected (predicted to hold true) at any point in time. We expect Ohm’s Law to apply each time we test it and each time we use it in practice. I regard tendencies and trends, which are processes, as the emergent outworkings of the phenomena we attempt to capture with Fundamental Scientific Laws. There is always an explanatory gap in the emergence of tendencies and trends. Whether Marx and/or his interpreters had/have this in mind with ambiguous usages of “law”, “tendency”, “law of the tendency”, “tendential law” etc., I do not know for sure. I would view “tendency” as the predicted direction of action of a “law” provided it is not interfered with or modified by a new, confounding factor or “law”. Hence the Newtonian “law of gravity” on earth predicts all objects aloft will fall toward earth. That is the tendency of the law. But we know objects can be held up, kept aloft by aerodynamic forces and so on.

Jonathan Nitzan criticises Marx for “dialectical determinism” which “perhaps explains why many of his predictions failed to materialize.” But if someone is predicting a “tendency” based on “laws” whose inherent tendency may be modified, confounded or countervailed by other factors  or tendencies (elsewhere detailed or left as open possibilities) then that person cannot be fairly charged with simplistic determinism. The question always arises of whether it is Marx or his more simplistic interpreters who are being dogmatically deterministic. Did “many of his predictions failed to materialize”? Did some which we focus on, employing our own confirmation bias, fail to materialize? Did all fail to materialize? Did some materialize in ways WE are failing to recognise? Are some yet simply to materialize in the future since the time progress of capitalism is not over? This is a Gish gallop for sure but not entirely unjustified if we are to systemically and comprehensively examine all the overt predictions.

“(T)he rising purchasing power of workers, the creation and spread of the welfare state and the proliferation of parliamentary democracies in a many countries (which) suggested far less inevitability than Marx had hoped for” can be seen as countervailing tendencies whether predicted or unpredicted. Of course, this can be bowdlerized philosophy or motivated political economy reasoning acting like an intellectually dishonest slippery eel and putting in qualifications AFTER the event… unless we can find some hypotheses related to these countervailing tendencies in Marx’s texts. If I get both really bored and really studious (a strange confluence of characteristics!) I may check Marx for these theses of countervailing tendencies. Or perhaps they are just magical unicorns I am too optimistically hoping to find? I think maybe not but I am not sure.

Is it the case that any contention that, “the rising purchasing power of workers” is a continuous and open-ended truth which holds for whole of the capitalist era and will continue to hold, is itself too dogmatic a claim? Has it not already failed? Have not wages in the US stagnated and fallen, differentially compared to returns on capital since about 1980 and the advent of the neoliberal era? Could this not be seen as the re-establishment of the main tendency of the original law after the exhaustion of a countervailing tendency (Keynesian Welfarism) ?

I have more thoughts but must leave it at that for now. If I am well off track or out of order from a CasP theory perspective, Jonathan and others need time to exercise right of reply rather than face an endless wall of text (gibberish?) from me. 🙂

• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by Rowan Pryor.

Thank you, Jonathan, for your succinct reply. My comments tend to be discursive and prolix. I also appear to have missed the point.

The term “dialectical determinism” I will take to encompass the additive meaning of “dialectical materialism” and “economic determinism”. I accept your point that there is a problem in basing “dialectical determinism on narrow economic arguments”. Whether Marx does this in the entire body of his works might be an open question. However, the practical point is that the Marxists do it. The orthodox neoclassicals also do it.

CasP has refuted the arguments for narrow economic value measures (UTILS and SNALTs): the “value controversy” as I call it. Of course, CasP has not ended arguments about value per se and I don’t think CasP claims that. CasP has simply pushed arguments about human and human social value(s) back to where they belong, in axiology and ethics.

I agree with your point 2.

In point 3 you write “Hanging these delays on ‘countervailing forces’ is reminiscent of neoclassical ‘distortions’. A theory that claims to grapple with the fate of humanity should include any meaningful countervailing force in its core.” I agree, if the countervailing forces actually are not at the core or if the program of finding the countervailing forces is not at the core of the dialectic. There is a further problem. Countervailing forces can emerge or evolve at higher or later stages.

However, CasP again sidesteps or annuls this problem. If it finds, or reasserts the finding of, power at the core of the system, as it does, then it has fixed on a “timeless verity”, at least in the time span of human history. Power or rather social and physical power always lie at the heart of human societies (along with other basic verities to use that terminology). New forms of power can emerge and evolve and must be newly identified at the “speciation level” but power as such is a constant genus or category.

It is all too easy to slip into old habits of thought while attempting to grasp a new conceptual paradigm. I continue to make this mistake. At the same time, I take nothing on trust. Where the taking on of an unorthodox theory could entangle me in a new orthodoxy I am wary to say the least. The touchstones have to be science but not scientism and empiricism but not the settling for mere surface appearances.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by Rowan Pryor.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by Rowan Pryor.