Ep. 359: Karl Marx’s Project (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 359, part 2. We've been discussing Karl Marx. We finished with his theses on Feuerbach. We've now moved to the Grundrisse, also called Foundations of a Critique of political economy from 1857. And we were getting into just this holistic explanation that these British political economists that he is responding to had a notion of an isolated individual, tried to sort of give that as the cell that then develops into, you know, with the division of labor into more sophisticated systems. And he wants to say, no, actually all these things are in a very Hegelian way, moments in the same process.

The predominant moment is production. But production, consumption, distribution and exchange are all part of one big thing. They all slide through history together. And if you pretend that you are analyzing just the primordial, he, Marx does say that yes, we have a primordial relationship to nature such that we have to work. He acknowledges some things come free from nature. You could just pick fruit off the trees, but for the most part, we have to work nature. And that is what gives sustenance. But everything. And even the division of labor within a tribe, within a family, there's sort of natural things sort of given by biology of like, okay, you're going to be, you're smaller, you don't have to lift the heavy stuff.

I'm gonna, we're hunter gatherer sort of stuff. That's all very natural. But to then think that the capitalist system itself, with its division of labor within a factory, you're going to do this one little thing and you're going to do this one little thing and that's going to be your whole life. And you're going to be dehumanized to defend all that as being just, oh, it's just how nature just rolls. We're just, it's just this current instantiation of nature is crazily misguided.

2:04 Wes: Still on in this first section, we were talking about the isolated individual. I think that's the way we ended last time. And he wanted to say that, that the further we go back, the less isolated, the more dependent people are on family, on tribe, on community. And so if you conceive of, if you try and conceive of economics in terms of people pursuing their private ends, that is not a good starting premise because that is really the way bourgeois society works, but it's not the way these other societies work. In fact, the, you know, as we said, the isolated individual is, quote, one of the most highly developed social relations it's not a premise for anything.

And then. So the larger point is that if we want to talk about production, we have to talk about the social relations related to it. And we got to talk about the historical epoch. So this is on page 22 to 23. We have to talk about a definite stage of development by social individuals in a certain epoch.

3:10 Seth: I was going to quote just in support of what you just said from page 18. So it says the epoch which produces the standpoint of the bourgeois society, that the individual is a means towards his own private ends. He says that only appeared after the most highly developed social relations. Historically it says man is a political animal or social animal in the most literal sense. He's not only a social animal, but an animal that can isolate itself only within society. Production by an isolated individual outside of society, something rare which might occur when a civilized person already dynamically in possession of the social forces, is accidentally cast into the wilderness, is just as preposterous as the development of language without individuals who live together and speak to one another.

So again, it's a twofold criticism, one of the specific idea of the Robinson Crusoeian individual in the state of nature, self producing and coming together with other self producers. But also just the bias of taking our historically developed and historical perspective and thinking that it making it universal and eternal.

4:28 Wes: On page 23, he will admit that these, all these different epochs have something in common. Right. So what are the general truths? There's a need for instruments of production, for instance, even if it's just our hands. And there's a need for accumulated past labor. It doesn't have to be machines, it could just be skill that we've built up over time. These are forms of capital.

4:55 Dylan: So this is the part where I started appreciating Marx a little bit more than I had in the past. Even in the stuff that we've been reading. Because I really got a sense, even though he's kind of long winded, is he's very detail oriented in trying to pull apart things that are inherently related. Production and distribution and exchange. All these things are, as you said earlier, Wes, moments of the same kind of activity. And he will just go through this process of trying to pull apart, well, what is production and what are the components of it.

And then come back to how it's, well, the things that are produced are exchanged, or the things that exchanged are produced and try to make sense of all of that while maintaining all of the connections between those things. Which I thought was just as a comment I appreciated that he was trying to do this. He wasn't trying to start with a free entity kind of interactions. He's starting with it being complicated and still trying to talk about it.

5:59 Wes: And this is a pivot point from traditional economists where he thinks that they are. And then looking at page 24 here, he thinks they are focused on treating production as distinct from distribution. And as I said before, so they treat distribution as arbitrary. The account that he get that I was talking about with slavery, that's what he does here on this page. Distribution is not just an arbitrary, historically contingent thing unrelated to production. Production is historically contingent as well. And the two go together.

6:33 Seth: Yeah, but there's. I gathered from comments and also reading the footnotes extensively and some of the others. There must have been a current debate and the other schools of economists were. Some people were trying to say that production is prior, and some people trying to say consumption is prior and distribution is, like you said, just a kind of post hoc arbitrary way. And because of what he's trying to build, talking about how everything is related and that production actually structures human labor in society. And the whole concept of human labor, that is very critical.

When you get to Das Kapital, he's got a really, I think, elegant and beautiful kind of Hegelian way of talking about. He says that this is production, distribution, exchange and consumption are a syllogism. He uses that term and he talks about the universal and the particular and that they're all implicated in each other, not possible with each other, conditioning each other and doing so specifically from within that historical relationship. So in Das Kapital, he's going to talk about value, that a value exchange that only makes sense while you're in the relationship of exchange and outside of it not making any sense.

And I think it's the same thing here. He's saying to talk about production and consumption independently just wouldn't even make sense because they really only come to their full meaning and full understanding when they're in relationship with each other.

8:04 Wes: Yeah, and we'll see why. He'll give examples of that later on in this reading, what it means for these things to overlap. We get a lot of examples, but here he's focused on this critique of earlier economists. So, for instance, on page 25, he wants to reject the idea, the traditional economic idea, that property is a condition of production, or it's not that he's rejecting that per se, but he's calling it a tautology. And then he'll say it's ridiculous to treat private Property as a condition. Common property is in fact the earlier form. So this is towards the bottom of page 25 where he'll say history shows, on the contrary, the common property, for example, among the Indians, Slavs, ancient Celts, et cetera, is the earlier form, a form which in the shape of communal property continues to play a significant role for a long time.

So again, this is another concrete example of how you as a bourgeois economist might proceed on the assumption that private property is sort of a foundation for understanding economics in general. But au contraire, private property is associated with a specific historical stage and something else comes before. And then the other point he's making here is that this is regarding two. He says at the bottom of the page is that there's a. This is Marx's famous superstructure, right? The forms of production produce their own legal relations and forms of government.

So you can't even separate forms of government and social relations from forms of production. They sit on side of that. And then he says some very mean things about how production proceeds more smoothly under club law. So the bourgeois economists have only in view that production proceeds more smoothly with modern police than for example, under club law. Okay, I was getting that a little bit wrong. They forget, however, that club law too is law and that the law of the stronger survives in a different form even in their, quote, constitutional state.

So what he's. Overall, he's trying to say, though the rule of the stronger and the principle of might makes right actually gets enshrined even in so called liberal constitutions.

10:29 Seth: Right, because the state sanctioned violence is the way you order the society of

10:35 Wes: state monopoly on violence.

10:36 Seth: State monopoly on violence, yes, but also it protects.

10:39 Wes: Right, there's a lot of protections for private property. So these societies are organized. The critique goes around protecting private property. That's what a lot of law is for. And so it privileges the wealthy, it privileges the elites and upper classes ultimately and serves to protect them.

11:00 Dylan: Yeah, that's the criticism you'd write of Leviathan, right? Yeah, save my stuff.

11:07 Mark: Right. We're going to get into this with labor theory of value. I had, I think when this came up, when we were talking about Marx a couple episodes ago, I had attributed this to Locke because Locke has something that looks like it, that he shares this idea with Marx that yes, nature is there, but until we work it so it's the value that we add to it that makes it makes property possible, in fact. But then for Locke, it sort of, well, naturally, if you work the land, and he was focused on land, right. This is Something that Marx thinks that old economists are obsessed with. It's just nature comes naturally from land. But if you work the land, it becomes yours. Whereas of course, that's not the way it works under capitalism. Even if you think that somehow labor is adding the value, well, the laborer doesn't get to keep that value because of the initial distribution.

11:59 Wes: So the final point, I guess before we move on to two, section two, is just that changes in social conditions of production lead to disturbances and production. Right. So production in a way helps define social conditions and social relations. But there's a, there's a backward effect as well. We'll see this kind of as a. Presages the idea that class conflict and internal social contradictions could lead to changes in the form of production.

12:32 Dylan: Just as a point of reflection here, is there a notion of stability for Marx, like, are these historical epochs, do they correspond to, to use an evolutionary argument, punctuated equilibria. That even if there's kind of the underlying everything is evolving, there are these inherent stability points. Is he saying that that's true or not?

12:59 Wes: I don't know. I think so. I mean, feudalism was around for hundreds of years, right.

13:03 Dylan: So.

13:03 Wes: So yeah, I think he does think that. And that's part of the dialectic. Right. So you have these stages within a stage.

13:11 Mark: It doesn't mean it's stable in terms of like, things are going to flow smoothly like all the time. There are advances in technology, for instance, that just. Your business is now obsolete. You have been basing this whole thing on a model. But he does really emphasize the systematic. So if you think of like, I'm going to understand economics by just thinking like, okay, I'm producing stuff on my own. Hey, what if I go and I trade something with you? No, it's. If I trade something to you the first time, that's nothing. It's only when I'm like, have adjusted my life so that I get up in the morning knowing that I'm going to trade with the market with you and other people, and that determines what I do with the rest of my day.

I have a perceived. This is what I think that my stuff is going to sell for. And so I construct that much stuff and this kind of stuff. So there has to be stability, predictability for people to produce at all.

14:08 Wes: Yeah, I mean, you know, famously Marxists and, and Marx, they think that there are all these, there are crises in capitalism. Right. Capitalism is constantly producing quote unquote crises. So yeah. What does it mean for a stage to be Stable capitalism has obviously been around for a while and will be around for a while, I think even socialists would concede. But there's supposed to be an inherent contradiction and instability due to that. And crises are right, which I guess means periods of recession or depression or other factors like that are supposed to be indicative of that inherent tension.

14:49 Dylan: Well, I guess I was trying to understand if for Marx, feudalism is a state. Even if there's a stable point in which you have basically the rules of the game for the way in which social interactions are working as well as political interactions and how individuals understand themselves all sort of in a more or less stable configuration. That doesn't mean that bad things don't happen. It doesn't mean that there aren't crises of certain sorts, but they are crises of particular sorts that aren't foundational to that system. And then you have another one that comes along that somehow evolves out of it.

That's its own transition. And then you have another kind of point of equilibrium where, say it's capitalist aside that you have the kinds of crises that are inherent in capitalism. And whether or not you interpret those crises as indicative of their needing to be an evolutionary breakthrough or not, that's another question. Maybe I'm asking the wrong kind of thing.

15:58 Wes: Yeah, I don't know the answer.

16:00 Dylan: The way I'm reading him is that a lot of his account is informed by an account of the entire. Is not exactly even a state of nature account. It's a claim to make a more fundamental account of human individual and social interactions that accounts for the entire history of economic development. It feels like that's the conceit underneath it and such that he would say, well, my model for the way in which this works, that I break down in terms of production and exchange and distribution and consumption, gives an account for how societies have evolved over time. That is more convincing. And that's why you should believe me.

16:50 Wes: That's the way it reads.

16:51 Dylan: See, he's been a scientist in this respect, right? Yeah, he's trying to be a scientist.

16:57 Wes: We don't get this text and what we've read the historical determinists to count. But the idea is supposed to be that underlying material conditions have their own dialectical logic to them.

17:10 Dylan: Yeah.

17:10 Wes: And including the relations of production. Right. And distribution exchange, just the types of things that we're talking about and will naturally produce certain social relations that go along with them and legal systems and governments and things like that. So that. But that if you focus on the superstructure, if you focus and think okay, I'm going to write a treatise that's going to change the way we think and therefore it's going to change society. Right. The theoretical approach, you're on the wrong track. Now this gets contradictory in Marx because he does seem, you know, he writes the Communist Manifesto.

There are other aspects of his writing which seem to suggest that he believes that you can change the world by changing ideas. And it's not just all about determinism. So that's a free, complicated argument scholars still have today, but that the tensions between those two parts of the system. But yeah, the materialist, determinist side says material conditions are going to unfold according to certain internal contradictions and give rise to new sorts of society. And that's going to happen historically regardless of whether we want it to happen or not.

So there are internal contradictions in capitalism that will necessarily ultimately lead to communism. And one of the driving. Well, I think the driving force, and we got this in our German ideology episode, we got a bit of this is technology. He really has a lot to say about technology and how that changes society. As the means of production become more potent as technology changes and makes work way more efficient than naturally, that's going to change things. And I think he's right about that.

18:54 Mark: I know we just can't help but talk about his overall project, his overall method. And that was part of the point of having this episode as an introductory one and then getting into the nitty gritty of capital and the next one. But I also. I think a helpful way to read him is just somebody who has his. Whether he invented them or just sort of is adapting them from others in some cases, but has a lot of individual, really cool insights that I think you could just walk away with this insight, even if you don't think Marxism as a whole project makes sense.

And so this one that we're getting into with the relationship between production and consumption, that. And he even plays with the Hegelian idea that, well, maybe just production. Production is consumption. It just is the same thing. The producer is the consumer. And he goes through this way in which you might. His ultimate conclusion is these are more alike and more related than you might think. Because when we. The production creates the consumer, a lot of consumption is in fact productive. So he says man produces his own body through consumption.

He personifies himself hoping we get into these examples.

20:07 Wes: Right. Production is also consumption because the individual consumes his own capacities in producing. So, right. If I'm making shoes and I have this skill of shoemaking, I'm Consuming that potentiality. Getting very theoretical and philosophical here. And the means of production are consumed as well, right? So I use the leather, I'm consuming the leather in making the shoes. And then consumption is also production, right. I produce my own body by consuming, so I was.

20:40 Mark: By consuming the shoes.

20:44 Wes: So. And you'll end up saying they're identical opposites, consumption and production, but they have a mediating movement. Production provides materials of consumption, consumption provides the subject for whom something is a product. So now we get into an even more abstract idea of the relationship between the two, which is that I can't. It's almost definitional, right? I can't define something as productive unless I'm producing for a consumer.

21:15 Seth: Yeah. And not just producing for a consumer, but producing for a specific need of a consumer. This is what I think is really, really interesting about this, right? So he says if there's no consumption, then there's no production because there's no need. So production is production to satisfy a need. Starting off with like the basics, food and what have you, but the idea that need determines production, production determines labor, and then labor determines social organization. It's like there's. It's sort of Aristotelian, right? In the sense where there's like there's a teleology, there's an end, and that end dictates all the way down. It's not just so simple that it dictates what products are created. It's not as simple as just mankind wants donuts. So we have Dunkin Donuts, right? It's that man.

22:14 Wes: Well, he wants to say it goes both ways. So on 29 he's going to make the point about the. Consumption creates the need for a new production, right? But on 30 he's going to say by producing things you can create a desire, you can create an so called need. So he wants to say it goes both ways. This is a very typical thing for Marx.

22:35 Seth: So sure, that makes sense.

22:37 Wes: So point three is production not only provides a material to satisfy a need, but it also provides a need for the material. When consumption emerges from its original natural crudeness, blah, blah, blah. The need felt for the object is created by the perception of the object. So advertising. I produce the object, I put it on a shelf or I put it in a newspaper ad and I stimulate desire, I stimulate consumption. So it's this reciprocal circular process.

23:05 Seth: Okay, that's interesting. I read that slightly differently. There's a. The consumer need drives a desire for the product, and then production is to produce the product. I thought he Was saying that production generates a need for the materials that go into the product. So like my desire for a table is not a desire for lumber, It's a desire for a finished product. But the production of table creates a need for the material of lumber.

23:32 Dylan: He says that.

23:33 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's an earlier point, but that's not the point he's making here. So the need felt for the object is created by the perception of the object. An object d'art, just like any other product, creates a public that has an artistic taste and is capable of enjoying beauty. Production therefore produces not only an object for the subject, but also subject for the object.

23:53 Seth: Okay. Makes perfect sense.

23:56 Wes: Not even. Yeah, it's very radical because it. So it's not even just that we are stimulating desire for the thing produced, but we are changing subjects. We are creating types of subjects by production. That's a pretty radical and interesting.

24:12 Seth: Totally claim.

24:13 Wes: Right. We produce a certain product environment for people and it affects them at a characterological level.

24:21 Seth: And I think it's. That's a really good example of highlighting why production and consumption are interrelated, but also putting the point home that. That this process is. Creates social structure, that it determines social organization. And because if you create a demand for something that hitherto didn't exist, you've now generated, like you said, you've changed the people, the consumers. But then you also, like, think about the first Apple, whatever, the first touchscreen phone device. Right. It changed it radically. Changed society.

24:56 Wes: My God. Did it radically.

24:58 Seth: And it was a commodity product.

25:00 Dylan: Yeah.

25:01 Wes: Smartphones are a special case because they're just like. It's like drugs too. It's like. It's not even just your average product. It's something that people are universally addicted to.

25:12 Dylan: I think there are lots of examples of this, but another one is the combustion engine in transportation. And the need for oil. To pull oil out of the ground to do that wasn't around until that was true. That particular form of industrialization.

25:30 Wes: My need to drive, actually, I don't have that need, but I did. Didn't exist. I just was comfortable with my horse and cart or walking, which is what I've become comfortable with again. And you see the results. Right. So if you do, it changes you as a person. It changes the way you look because it changes your level of fitness. If you are driving versus, you know, if you're walking versus driving.

25:58 Dylan: It also changes.

25:59 Wes: All this stuff has profound social effects, obviously.

26:01 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. And the incentives. And I think he's implying the object is Created by the perception of the object, it changes the incentives, right? And so it makes it so the, the person producing the object has the incentive to produce it in a particular way that as it becomes clear that they, that there is a market for it, that they want to protect that market, right? So you have the same, you have exactly the analogous thing with the way in which we have the evolution of food and processed food, right? So now you have companies talking about how they are engineering their mass produced food so as to maintain the desirability in the face of GLP1 inhibitors that make it so people aren't as hungry.

So they're trying to engineer it so that even though you are less hungry in an environment because you're taking a GLP1 inhibitor, which you are arguably taking in part because the foods, palatable foods, highly palatable foods, are making it impossible. And so now you are combating that. And now that they want to combat that.

27:19 Wes: Is this a Freakonomics episode? I think wasn't there I heard something similar. I don't know if it was in the New York Times or Freakonomics episode or.

27:29 Dylan: Yeah, I just heard a little bit about it.

27:31 Seth: Something that occurs to me as you guys are doing such an amazing job of kind of explicating this and highlighting this is one thing that isn't accounted for at this point in his notes is the urge or the motivation to actually satisfy the need through production. Like what is the producer's motivation? Now we know that ultimately it's money, right? Or capital, that the producer wants to produce something to fulfill a need because either they have to create those products in order to exchange with others for products that they need, but to fulfill needs that they have, or in exchange for currency that they can then exchange for those goods that they need.

But to this point there's no mention of that. And ultimately we know that that's the answer. But it's interesting that for Marx to say we shouldn't assume things as universal and take it for granted. And it's just funny that there's kind of no explanation for what motivates the whole cycle.

28:36 Mark: Well, that is interesting that.

28:37 Seth: Right?

28:38 Mark: Is he given in just saying that production, distribution, consumption and exchange are so related. He is giving a universal thing, but he is necessarily if we want to illustrate that, then we have to talk about a particular. How it works in a particular epoch. So naturally we would only need to produce insofar as we need to consume that it. Right. It is each of these is the, the culmination, the climax of the other process. So if you were just by yourself or with your family, then you would produce only so much as you actually need and maybe store up a little for winter or that kind of thing.

But it wouldn't be this money thing that he introduces as something as we read in the. In our previous episode we read this essay on money that because everything is exchangeable into money in the capitalist system, then the appetite for that becomes money just becomes power because money can be transformed back into anything else and our urge for it becomes limitless in a way that our urge for just the goods themselves would not be limitless. So yeah, introducing money and then introducing the capitalist as the person who is just putting in money to try to get out more money introduces some perverse incentives that we wouldn't ordinarily have just through the.

The universal. Not considering that particular historical output. What is the motivation of the consumer or the producer?

30:10 Wes: So in the next. Yeah, so I'm looking at page 32 here. I'm skipping over a little bit of abstractness about the identity of consumption and production which I didn't find helpful. But in 32 distribution and production gives us a bit more insight into what he thinks traditional economists, how they define distribution and production. So right, so rent and wages and interest and profit, these are all forms of distribution. Land, labor, capital are categorized under production.

30:48 Mark: He has such contempt for rent, something that Locke and Smith considered basic that it's just whenever he talks about interest, just anything where labor is not going into it. But you think you're going to get out more than you put in just because you're delayed gratification. I could have used this money to fulfill my needs now, but instead I put it into this process that there's just something slimy and anti natural about finance.

31:18 Wes: Importantly, again, distribution is a product of production. He says on 32. So I've made this point before, but it's not separate from production and historically contingent, whereas production is necessary and eternal. So for instance, we think of it like if we're dependent from birth on wage labor, we just think that's a social law, right? We just think, ah, that's the way things work. That's the way it's always been, that's the way it always will be. He wants to say no, that's an element of distribution that in fact is dependent on the form of production as determined by it.

31:56 Seth: Yep, he says it very nicely on page 33. He says the particular mode production determines the specific forms of distribution. The form in which one shares in Distribution. So he says, to the single individual, distribution naturally appears a social law which determines his position within the system of production in which he produces distribution. Thus being antecedent to production. The individual starts out with neither capital nor landed property. He is dependent by birth on wage labor. Oh, you already said this, Wes. But I just.

32:31 Wes: No, but this is. The whole quote is good. Yeah, I'm glad you're reading it.

32:34 Dylan: Yeah.

32:34 Seth: He is dependent by birth on wage labor as a consequence of social distribution. But this dependent itself is the result of the existence of capital and landed property as independent agents of production. So, yeah, we keep talking about being repetitive. We keep kind of saying the same thing and giving examples of the same thing overall. But this is where I think it's worth noting. Kind of the power of the analysis. The writing is clear. Marx is being very. I think he's giving a very reasoned account. And his examples seem to reinforce his point that we take so much of the structure of our society and our place in society for granted, assuming that it's just supposed to be that way, or it always has been that way.

And he's making, I think, a very strong point that you can find reasons for the ways in which social classes exist and relate to each other and so forth and so on, based on the means of the production in the society and the very clear difference between those who are in possession of capital and. Or property and those who aren't in this specific capitalism. Right. He would never generalize that. But as an analysis of bourgeois capitalism in his time, and I think still applicable today. So you want to go on. The distribution is not just. This is very similar to consumption and production.

Distribution is not just distribution of the products. It's also distribution of the instruments of production and distribution of the members of society among the various types of production

34:14 Dylan: and distribution becomes a product. I don't know if he puts it this way, but this made me think of business. To business relations. The activity of distributing becomes its own kind of product.

34:27 Wes: Well, he talks about. On 36. 36 he talks about B2B way I put it. That's right. But you're right, he does. Well, he mentions it. Yep. He doesn't go into it, but. Well, I wanted to highlight on page. Also on page 34, this thing I've been saying. I think it's worth reading the quote where he's going to say it's absurd to treat distribution as historical and production not so top of 34. The distribution of products is obviously merely a result of this distribution which is comprised in the production process itself and determines the structure of production, I guess the distribution of the.

As Seth was saying, of the instruments and the members of society. To examine production separately from this distribution which is included in it is obviously idle abstraction. Whereas conversely, the distribution of products is automatically given by that distribution, which is essentially a moment of production.

35:22 Mark: Essentially. A moment.

35:23 Wes: Yeah, essentially. Ricardo, whose object was the understanding of modern production in a specific social structure, and who is the economist at production par excellence for this very reason, declares distribution, not production, the proper subject of modern political economy. This is added proof of the absurdity of those economists who treat production as an eternal truth and confine history to the domain of distribution. So it's historical, whether we're serfs or wage earners or whatever, but supply and demand, division of labor, that's eternal.

36:00 Seth: Yeah. And he has a nice little section. It seems like an excursion, but I thought it was really amusing when you get to page 34 and 35 where he's talking about people referring to the Romans or the Mongols or the Germanic tribes plundering and the way in which people. He says, if you're going to plunder, there has to be something to plunder, which means there already was some kind of means of production. They weren't just plundering the bare land. And he says a nation of stock jobbers cannot be plundered in the same way as a nation of cowherds. Not cowards, but cow herders. And I thought that was really funny. It is. Like, what would happen if the Mongols descended from Canada onto Wall Street, Minneapolis? Like, how would they plunder downtown Minneapolis or Wall Street?

36:54 Mark: I mean, there's a lot of good stuff to take, as we see in all the sort of Walking Dead sort of. It's plundering time. But yeah, I was also thinking of the Sopranos episode where they go to try to shake down like the Starbucks. And it's like the Starbucks as a corporate entity is no longer the thing that you can plunder in this way. You could kill me. They're just going to replace me with somebody else. It is. I don't have access to the money. I can't cook the books to give you a cut. What are you even asking of me?

37:27 Wes: Well, modern day Mongols would quickly adapt and they'd be running around with laptops and hacking into things and.

37:35 Seth: Well, but you're absolutely right, Wes, to point that out. Is that in the same way that the legal and accepted social structures change. So of course, does the inverse of that, the criminal element, like criminals have to Evolve. It's different being a pickpocket now than it was in 18th century, 19th century London. Whatever. We have different kinds of production also determines structures, the distribution of crime.

38:04 Dylan: Now there's a skit or a scene, right? Instead of it being the old guy who can't figure out how to use his remote, you have the old guy who can't make a living because he can't pickpocket anymore. He's gotta get young person to show him how to hack into somebody's bank account.

38:22 Mark: You know, in the distribution discussion there was just a reference to the distribution of people among different social roles, but really didn't say anything about the distribution of talents specifically. Which is of course what the people who object to Marxist sort of thinking are going to focus on. Including like the fact that. And Marx even refers to this. He's very dismissive of it. The work that like the capitalist does, the knowledge. Like I know where to sell this, I know how to make the deals. Like I'm actually adding something not such that I should get 90% of the.

The profit and just give the laborer as little as possible for them to survive. But still that there is. He's very marks as a simplifying assumption. As when we get into our labor theory of value discussion next time is going to say, look, we can just consider skilled labor as. All right, fine, the skilled laborer does things twice as fast as the. The unskilled laborer. But we can just sort of mathematically reduce that and think of things, everything in terms of a homogeneous type of labor. But is this. And I know it's just a simplifying assumption to do a particular theoretical thing that he's going to do in this labor theory, value theory of the commodity section.

But do we feel like in. Even in this treatment that he is not giving. That he's giving short shrift to a sort of fundamental. What people talking about division of labor following Smith are going to focus on, which is the distribution of talent. And that's supposed to justify in the minds of the capitalist why some people rise to the top that there is social mobility because they have more capacity. I can make things faster. I can make kinds of things that you can't even make because I have such superior powers of manual dexterity or intellect or strength or whatever the thing is.

40:21 Wes: Yeah, I mean, he's giving short shrift to a lot of things. I mean, in general, I don't agree. You know, I got into trouble for saying on a nightcap that his economics is bogus I thought I was just repeating a common consensus and, and that I that was safe because it. Peter Singer said it and Keynes said

40:42 Seth: it and hey, no name dropping in

40:45 Wes: various other this is definitely the time readings as a just commonly accepted that his economic theory is not strong although I do I'm actually quite impressed with his the chapter one of Capital on this derivation labor theory value. I think that's a fascinating philosophical argument but I think in general when he says something is historically contingent because it's such a common mode of argument today, I want to, I just want to be contrary and say no, actually I just, I think that is, I think the previous economists were right. That is eternal.

It is not just the condition under capitalism. This is the way it works in large part. There's not enough detail for me to say which aspect of Right. I don't know enough and there's not. He doesn't give enough detail in this critique about what about the specific aspects of previous economists that are at stake. But I would probably be inclined to agree with the previous economists. So for instance and the account, as I remember it, Smith's account of how division of labor produces wealth because you can, I mean there is no such thing as a higher standard of living or wealth without division of labor.

That is an eternal law of economics. It doesn't happen. And that's why people do it. That's why you focus on hunting and I focus on blacksmithing and we trade. Trade arises in that way. So I don't know what he thinks

42:10 Seth: the alternative account is, but that's the eternal question, right?

42:14 Dylan: Well, yeah, but isn't there also the distinction between the capitalists and the what they call the proletariat or the owners and the workers is whether or not you believe the owners are effectively a different kind of. On a continuum of workers? Right. That's sort of what the argument Milan,

42:36 Wes: are you an owner? Are you a worker at this point? Are you two. Are you high up enough in the hierarchy that you're threatened?

42:43 Mark: He's definitely not an owner. You don't get. Well, I don't know if you have stock options or at your company, but.

42:49 Dylan: Oh yeah, it becomes difficult. Yeah. But I mean, I do think there's a certain kind of pleasant fallacy about the fact that if you own stock, you're an owner, that it's not exactly the case.

43:02 Wes: Marks, by the way, owns stock at a certain point.

43:06 Dylan: Sure.

43:06 Mark: Right.

43:07 Wes: He was largely living off Engels and then he was living off his wife's inheritance and they lived a Very nice life. And he bought stock and did all the other good bourgeois things that you're supposed to do.

43:17 Dylan: Yeah.

43:18 Mark: Yes. And since we're entering the closing, just to kind of set up what for next time, obviously we're probably only going to get through the. The assigned part of capital, but just to my own capital and the Communist Manifesto are available as a nice single credit audiobook on audible. The entire like hundred plus hours of all the volumes of capital and all the seven intros to it and stuff, and the several drafts of the Communist Manifesto.

43:48 Seth: Audible or Librivox. That sounds like a labor.

43:52 Mark: No, it is audible. It's a real professional thing.

43:54 Seth: Wow.

43:55 Mark: So I've been listening to that, you know, skipping over the redundant parts and then also this reading. Marx's Capital with David Harvey. It's a podcast, but it's just a college course. And he's not a philosopher, but he's an economic historian. And it's good and it really helps. So I've been just not taking notes on it, falling asleep listening to it at Fastbeat, but trying to get through both of those things just to really get a good sense of. Of capital and how it progresses. And this is what makes me think, obviously Marx thinks he's being scientific.

And so if you want to just say, well, is this the current science? Well, no, therefore we shouldn't read it. Or it's all bullshit, like. But I think we should not take him at his word that he's being scientific. We should take these as, you know, insightful analyses, responding to other political economists, responding to the events of his day. And we don't hold Nietzsche's genealogy up to scientific rigor. We don't hold Heidegger's account of the they up to scientific rigor. Like they're just not even admissible of that. So I think there's a lot of things about the conceptual relations like we've been talking about between these different aspects of the economic life that.

Yes, I think as an abstract analysis, this is very interesting, if not actually correct. Who knows if it's actually correct, but it's definitely worth your time and intellectually enlivening.

45:19 Seth: Totally agree.

45:20 Wes: Now, which speed should we be listening to? These?

45:23 Mark: I put 1.7.

45:26 Wes: Okay.

45:26 Seth: Oh my God.

45:26 Mark: Because it's a little difficult.

45:28 Seth: Yeah. I'll say this. If you try to bracket out what you've been told or what you hear about Marx and you just focus on the text, it would be very hard not to just get engrossed in the writing is quite clear the arguments are very interesting. The criticisms are sharp and witty. And the fact that he's still a bugaboo, that it's still even in this day and age, somebody like Musk can use Marxist as a. To try to brand somebody as an outlaw. Tells you that he was doing something right. The fact that he's still relevant tells you something he's saying is. Gets under people's nerves. The fact that we now have a. Basically the equivalent of the Heritage Foundation Christian College having online courses where they're teaching Marxism in order to give you a capitalist friendly interpretation. Yeah, this is definitely worth doing.

46:28 Wes: Well, let's distinguish Marx and Marxists again because Marxists did kill tens of millions of people in the 20th century. So let's make that distinction.

46:36 Mark: I think Hitler keeps coming back into public discussion too. But that doesn't mean he was doing something right. It just means that there is something that still resonates.

46:44 Seth: You're saying that when somebody uses Marxist as a slur nowadays, they're thinking about the totalitarian.

46:51 Wes: Absolutely.

46:51 Seth: Quasi Marxist regimes and not the Marxist economic system.

46:55 Dylan: Absolutely.

46:56 Mark: Yeah. They see those as one in the same and they do not do the. This is, you know, the. It would be worth our time to spend on this book even if just. And we're not going to accomplish this, but even if know it would be a worthy goal to try to separate out those.

47:10 Wes: And they should remember these were die hard Marxists. These were people who were reading Capital over and over. It wasn't just like, oh, we're vaguely associating ourselves with Marx. These were Marx fanatics who ran these regimes and tried to implement it.

47:25 Dylan: Yeah, 1984 and the vision of the world presented there is basically a totalitarian inversion of criticism of a Marxist regime.

47:38 Wes: And Orwell was a socialist, right? Yeah, he was a libertarian socialist, maybe, maybe he was an anarchist, but he was a socialist critic of Stalinism. I don't know what he would say about Marx, but Stalinism specifically is what he opposed and what many intellectuals in his time were trying to defend. So it wasn't even just that. Right. Early on there's a die hard attempt by the intellectual left in western countries to defend Stalin.

48:05 Seth: Well, obviously. So I feel completely idiotic at this point. Like I've just been completely out of step with what's going on or completely misinterpreting. But I think in my defense, I probably am one of those leftists who is more social democrat, interprets Marx as more of a social democrat and get enamored with the actual text and the

48:28 Mark: criticism sure, that's probably a reasonable way to justify.

48:33 Wes: Well, again, Marx defines himself against social democrats and despised them. And I mean, that played out politically as well. He did not get along with social democrats just like he doesn't get along with the crude utopian communists.

48:48 Seth: Well, Wes, I'm not saying I'm right.

48:50 Mark: We got to look for common ground. The Marxists, between the Marxists and the Social Democrat.

48:55 Wes: Yeah, I just. By way of closing, I do enjoy reading Marx when he's not being cranky and attacking people in the most absurd, over the top ways. Everyone's an idiot but me. Yeah. You know, as Mark said or no, Seth, as you were saying, there's a lot of clear writing in this and I think in chapter one of Capital is quite fascinating. I mean, it seems boring on the face of it with 20 yards of linen equaling one coat or whatever it is. But when you kind of try to delve into the argument for the labor theory of value, it's quite philosophically interesting. And so that's when I say that I'm interested in Marx. Philosophically, that's what I. It's economic, but it's. I think of it as the philosophical part of his work.

49:45 Seth: A hundred percent agree.

49:46 Wes: And I'm very interested in continuing to understand that. Trying to understand that.

49:52 Mark: All right, so at least one more on Marx. Thanks everybody for listening. Email us bl partiallyexaminedlife.com if you want to give us ideas on topics to cover after this. We have some in mind, but we'd love to hear your ideas. Follow us on social media. Good night, everybody.

50:06 Dylan: Good night.