 Greetings comrades! Welcome to the Q&A video for our first series on Marx's views on human development, freedom, alienation and communism. We got a bunch of useful questions in the comments, most of which we try to answer there. But we thought it would be useful to bring some of the main ones together into one video. Since we didn't get many questions on the videos on impersonal domination and alienation, this Q&A will focus on the questions we got for the videos on human development, freedom, communism and the video discussing how altruists views on the early and late Marx relate to ours. So, let's go through some of the most important questions we got on each video and our answers to them. Part 1 – Human Development When Marx thinks that human development is valuable in itself, isn't he making a normative claim that we should maximize human development? Isn't that basically having a conception of morality, or at least justice? Let's do this in two steps. First, how is it not a claim about morality? That depends on what you mean by morality. What we think Marx and many others have in mind when they talk about quote-unquote morality is something that's first and foremost about individual behavior. In particular, rules governing good, bad and permissible, impermissible actions. For example, thou shalt not kill, never lie, etc. We're saying that what Marx thinks is valuable in itself, i.e. not on the basis of or derivable from anything else, is human development and that he uses this loose and open-ended kind of commitment to evaluate things. This is not the same thing as saying that we ought to maximize human development or that, for example, one should always follow the maxim, always act so as to maximize the total human development. That would be a claim about morality in the narrower sense, but it's not what we think that Marx is doing. And we think that this misunderstanding is, furthermore, something we tend to do a lot because there's this tendency in our contemporary capitalist society to turn everything into rules or standards that you, the individual, needs to measure up to. For us, it's become very natural to take certain commitments about what is good or valuable, say, x is valuable in itself, and turn them into rules and imperatives, always act so as to maximize x, you ought to maximize x. However, the former kind of thing, human development is valuable in itself, is not the same kind of thing as, and does not entail, the latter kind of thing, that you must or should always act so that you maximize x. For one, the latter first and foremost says something about how an individual person should act, whereas the former does not. Marx, as far as we can tell, never does the latter. He is interested in saying why capitalism has certain shortcomings. It restricts human development relative to what we would now be able to achieve without it. He's not really interested in laying down rules for people to follow, and as such, he just isn't very concerned about morality, in his and our sense, in his political thinking. Now the second part. Why isn't this a claim about justice? That depends on what you mean by justice, which today is typically used in a much broader way than it was in Marx's day. If by justice we mean practically anything to do with normative aspects of society and or politics, then what Marx is talking about definitely counts. But this isn't what we're denying, or what we think that Marx is denying, when he says that socialism and his arguments for it aren't based on the notion of justice. If, however, you mean something more specific by justice, such as some general principles that tell us how goods ought to be distributed, or which rules should govern individual interactions, then things are a bit different. We try to be really careful with how we phrase this in the human development video, because what Marx is doing is something very different from how lots of us do, and those who went through universities typically are trained to, think about these things. Note first that Marx doesn't say that everyone ought to have equal access to human development. That certainly sounds like a principle of justice of a standard sort, a kind of rule governing the distribution of some good. But that's not what we think that Marx is doing. Marx himself writes that he isn't. For instance, in the Critique of the Gotha program he criticizes German social democrats, many of whom consider themselves Marxists, writing that it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principle stress on it, because any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. In fact, Marx goes further to argue that focusing on the distribution of goods and services in political theory, what we today call a focus on distributive justice, is a capitalist confusion that gets in the way of good socialist theory. He writes that, Valger socialism has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production, and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again? So if he's not doing this, what is Marx doing in his discussion of human development? Marx is taking human development and using it to critically diagnose a problem about capitalism that socialism can and will solve. You can do all of this without having to base it on some rules of justice of the kind that everyone should have equal access to human development or so on. You can argue, as we think that Marx does, that capitalism is inferior to socialism because it's unfree and therefore restricts human development without turning human development into a rule-like kind of principle of justice. In the same way, you can compare and evaluate cars according to how fast they drive or buildings according to how well they keep the rain out without having to appeal to some rule about, say, what the perfect speed of a car is or some rule about how fast cars ideally should be. Question. Wouldn't Marx's notion of human development always be or have to be based on some pre-established yardstick? Different societies typically have different standards for what they consider to be important or essential. A medieval peasant isn't really expected to be able to drive or assemble Ikea furniture while a modern office worker is really expected to be able to harvest barley. First of all, it is possible to tie a conception of human development to various such pre-established yardsticks. So you can have certain limited, typically highly contextual, conception of human development based on particular yardsticks, say what you, as an ancient Greek or contemporary American, might think of as a desirable kind and degree of human development for the relevant time, place, etc. This, in practice, is what people do in many contexts. However, when Marx values human development, it's not a conceptual human development tied to any such particular yardstick. Rather, what he is doing is evaluating certain things based on an open-ended commitment to human development in general. In other words, he is judging certain social arrangements as better or worse based on the way in which they enable and facilitate human development in general. And as we see in the episode on freedom, Marx thinks that one thing, not the only thing, but one thing that's very important for enhancing human development is freedom. What is the relation between the labour theory of value and Marx's thinking on human development and freedom? Basically, this is a complicated question and it's the kind of thing that we could discuss for hours to get all the details right. Since that would be a bit much for one video, we'll make a couple of brief points that we hope will suffice. The literature on this is basically a mess, partly because Anglo-American philosophers since the early 1970s have been doing political philosophy in a very specific way, focusing overwhelmingly on abstract and rule-like principles of justice. And as a result of this, there's been a whole cottage industry trying to find bits of Marx they can shove into that mould. The problem is that Marx never really uses rule-like principles of justice, like people like Rawls or Nozik do. So they end up doing a lot of very weird and creative theorizing to come up with something they can use, usually with fairly little basis in Marx's work. They often try to use Marx's accounts of the theory of value and exploitation to backwards reconstruct some principles that exploitation violate. None of this really seems to fit Marx's repeated statements that it doesn't think socialists should base their views or arguments on any theories of distribution, which we talked about in the human development video. So let's turn to the question of how these things connect to the labour theory of value, the LTV. Basically, we think there's very little connection between the LTV and Marx's views on freedom. This might sound weird, since isn't freedom a value and so on, but it becomes less weird once we remember what value means in the classical political economy that Marx is building on and his language he is drawing on. Classical political economy is based on an assumption. We think that even though actual prices fluctuate continuously, they tend to fluctuate around certain rough equilibria. They then abstract away from the noise and focus on explaining changes in equilibrium prices. Classical political economists, like Smith, Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, use theories of value to explain how equilibrium prices shift from one equilibrium to another one. While we, sort of modern people, use value to talk about things like what we want, what we think is worth having or being, or what we would say that we value, classical political economists instead use that word to refer to the thing that underlies and explains shifts in equilibrium prices. However, when they talk about what really matters, what's really worth having and so on, they instead talk about wealth. So for example, clean air or the clean water in an unknown river would, for a political economist, be examples of wealth, because they're good for us to have, but not value, since they don't have any price, much less an equilibrium price. So when Marx uses the concept of value in his political economy, he is using it like Smith, Ricardo and so on. He is using it to explain changes in equilibrium prices and through that the laws of motion of capitalism. By contrast, Marx, like Smith and others, when he wants to talk about what matters in a more normative way, he talks about them as wealth instead. As when, for example, he talks about true wealth consisting of human development and flourishing, as we saw in the video on human development. This means that the LTV is part of a descriptive analysis of capitalism, not any sort of ethical or normative critique. In other words, it's part of Marx's theory of how capitalism in fact works. It's not something that he uses to criticize capitalism with. Instead, Marx is criticizing capitalism for not being able to increase true human wealth, human development, in the ways that socialism or communism can, given the current development of industry and technology. If you want to learn more about the labor theory of value and the basics of Marx's political economy, we cannot recommend Michael Heinrich's an introduction to the three volume of Karl Marx's capital highly enough. It is very clear and by far the best introduction to Marx's political economy, starting with this theory of value and what it means. Part two, human nature and freedom. Question. Marx has a positive concept of freedom, but didn't Isaiah Berlin show that such positive concepts of freedom can be used to justify totalitarianism? If being free is defined as living or acting in a certain way, doesn't this mean that it becomes possible for someone else to know better than you do how you must live to be free? If so, can't they then force you to live in exactly the way you need to in order to count as free? Doesn't this justify things like churches or states or parties forcing everyone to live like they say, because only doing that can make everyone free? I'd like to start by pointing out that of all the people Berlin talks about as having a positive concept of freedom, first, none of them have the same one exactly, and some of them, like Rousseau, have a republican not the positive concept of freedom at all. Secondly, literally everybody who is an expert in any of these thinkers that I've talked to about this, thinks that Berlin is wrong for their thinkers, not just about its conclusions or critiques, but about the basic theory of freedom he attributes to thinkers like Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and so on. This may or may not mean very much, but it is worth noting that Berlin's interpretation of virtually all of these thinkers is widely rejected today. With that out of the way, let's talk about how his argument doesn't work for Marx's concept of freedom. The first part is pretty obvious. If freedom is self-directing your own activity, anything that prevents you from directing your own activity necessarily makes you less free. That means that if something or someone else, like the state or the church or a powerful corporation, forces you to act or live in a specific ways, controls and directs your activity in any way, then you are necessarily made unfree for Marx. In other words, they can't force you to be free because their very act of forcing you to act and live in certain ways by definition makes you unfree according to Marx. Here's a response you might be thinking of based on Berlin's argument. What if we assume that the right person or institution, say the right party or government, is the true or real you and that whatever it does and says is therefore something that you yourself do or say in some way? If we accept that idea, then the party or state's actions are yours in some sense, and when they force you to act and live in a certain way, you're not being forced to these things by something else or someone else, but by yourself instead. And forcing yourself to do things doesn't make you unfree, so it again becomes the case that you can be forced to be free by the right kind of party or state. But look at what's happened here. What made the difference here wasn't the concept of freedom, but the separate and very weird theory of the self. It basically shows that if you identify a person with a distinct institution, then what the institution forces them to do doesn't make them unfree. Why? Because it would just be them doing it to themselves. But this doesn't work just for positive concepts of freedom, it works for negative ones like the one Berlin argued for as well, although Berlin doesn't see it. For Berlin, negative freedom consists in the absence of restrictions on possible courses of action, so when someone else restricts or interferes with possible courses of action, you are made unfree. But if the state counts as you in some way, then the state restricting what you can and can't do no longer counts as reducing your freedom. Why? Because it's no longer someone or something else interfering with and restricting you, but instead you restricting and interfering with yourself. In other words, the problem here isn't any one concept of freedom at all, but a very specific theory of the self. Now, Marx would never adopt this very odd theory of the self, and there's no basis in anything that he writes to think that he did. As a result, this is nothing but a strawman argument that simply doesn't work as a critique of his concept of freedom. Question. Isn't Marx's conception of consciousness as a single undivided thing that separates human beings from other animals a bit implausible in light of what we now know about the cognitive capacities of other animals, in particular other primates? Basically, yes. Marx's writings on this are, we think, in need of further testing, development and elaboration, especially in light of the major advances done in the study of human and non-human animals since Marx's day. We're not going to try to do this now, of course, since we'd have to do a lot more reading first, much less actual research, but we can make a couple of general points. In general, we do think that Marx underestimates the behavioural variation and plasticity of at least some non-human animal species, and that a contemporary version of Marx's view would probably need to take a more precise and graded view of what consciousness is and how what humans have of it differs from what non-human animals have of it. Interestingly, however, we also don't think that this causes problems from Marx's arguments, because, unlike many other thinkers, Marx doesn't base his concern for human beings on whether they have consciousness, and because it doesn't affect his claim that human's consciousness is what enables us to be free. Part 3. Communism. We got one question in particular on this video that we thought was very important. We responded to it, but the poster then removed the question, and although we managed to note down the question itself, we didn't keep a record of our response, since we thought that this would start a discussion. Part of the very long and very impressive comment was about developing consciousness and the role of the revolutionary party. Since that's not something we talk about in the video, we're leaving that aside here. But the comment did have some important stuff to say about the role of the working class in developing communism according to different strands of Marx's theory, and we think that's very worth talking about in this Q&A. Here's a chunk of the question. At 4 minutes 22 seconds, contrary to what you are implying here, Kowski's conception of social democracy as the historic merger of the socialist and working class movement, C.F. Kowski's The Class Struggle, is not at all elitist and is in line with Marx's teachings. It's simply a historical fact that socialism predates the emergence of the modern proletariat, that the working class movement wasn't consciously socialist at the beginning, and that scientific socialism was synthesized by Petit Bourgeois intellectuals, i.e. Marx and Engels. This is the core of Lenin's critique of economism in what is to be done, and is very much based on a Marxist understanding of class consciousness. Georg Lukacs gives a very good elaboration of this idea in his tailism and the dialectics. The question goes on, but we've skipped a few bits in between. As Lenin explains in what is to be done, correct class consciousness, he used the term social democratic consciousness here, would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, and that means conviction of the necessity of organizing as trade unionists, i.e. the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. However, this is a historical process, and the spontaneous element is the germ seed of a conduct that is conscious of its aims. Moreover, the transition cannot take place elementally. In spite of this, there is, of course, a dialectical interrelationship between this from without and the working class. For while Marx and Engel stem from the bourgeois class, the development of the droctine is nevertheless a product of the development of the working class, of course not in any immediate way. So, much of the stuff that's being claimed here, we agree with. More so than I think the poster perhaps thought. From at least Kowski onwards, the so-called merger thesis was a staple component of Orthodox, state-centered, second and third international Marxism. It was not entirely uncontroversial, but it was definitely a staple. From the social democratic Kowski, it filtered through to people like Lenin, Lukacz and others, who became part of the third international. And, as Lars Lee has shown, this is probably rooted in an analysis of how the Marxist social democratic party merged with German labour movements in the 19th century and have a similar dynamic seemed to take place in Russia. Basically, their view is that what they call social democracy, which at the time referred to their kind of Marxist ideology, was essentially developed by people they consider bourgeois intellectuals, i.e. Marx and Engels. It was then brought to the workers' movement from outside by intellectuals in the party, and the resulting movement, the party and trade unions, were a result of this merger. Note that they are first and foremost talking about the body of theory or ideas here, namely social democratic Marxism or social democratic consciousness. However, we think that this is not something that Marx comes up with, and as far as we can tell, he never says anything quite like it. We also think that to say otherwise is to underestimate the further development of Marxist ideas by later Marxists. For one, Marx never really talks about how social democratic or Marxist ideas come to the working classes at all. In fact, at one point he angrily declares in a letter that is not a Marxist. He does, however, talk about communism, but as we can tell from his criticism of other communists, he doesn't think that that's just him or his ideas. So Marx's talk of communism does not refer to the same kind of thing as Kowski and Lenin's talk of social democracy or Marxism. Since when Marx uses that term, he includes thinkers and ideas that he disagrees with. Also, although there are ideas that are part of it, unlike Kowski and Lenin's discussion of Marxist ideas or social democratic consciousness, Marx doesn't define communism in terms of ideas or ideology at all. Instead, he defines communism as the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. As far as we can tell, Marx never really says anything like the merger thesis. That is, he never says anything about how the correct Marxist ideas were developed outside the workers movement and has to be brought to it from the outside. We would, however, be very interested to see if anyone could find a place where he says something like that, because it's always possible that we've missed something. We got another kind of question on the communism video. In that, we said that the Soviet Union wasn't what Marx called communist. Isn't that heresy against any true Marxism? Basically, we don't think that it is, and even if it were heresy, the question isn't whether it fits with what some people think, but whether it's true. Here, we should remember that all of Third International Marxism, i.e., most forms of Leninism, all forms of stylism, Maoism, and so on, despite often disagreeing on many things, all agree that the Soviet Union definitely wasn't communist. According to basically all Orthodox Leninist theory, socialism is supposed to be the first step to communism, still has a state, and so on, while communism comes afterwards, and is properly free, stateless, and so forth. That's why they always called countries like the Soviet Union socialist, not communist, because they thought that these countries were at an earlier stage, not a later stage. They were not, in other words, what Marx called communist. These countries only got called communist in the US and Europe, basically as a downstream effect of capitalist propaganda, often by people who didn't know what they were talking about. So in other words, if you're outraged that we say that the Soviet Union wasn't communist, you disagree with basically all of Marxism, and you're weirdly agreeing with western anti-communist propagandists. But even if that wasn't the case, what we should care about is whether it's actually true that, for example, the Soviet Union was or wasn't a communist in Marx's sense. We made the point that the Soviet Union wasn't a communist according to Marx's conception of communism, because it didn't have what Marx said a communist society would have. For example, it didn't distribute the means of subsistence according to need, and wasn't based on the free association of workers. This is just a fact, and anyone who knows how the Soviet Union worked would concede that point. Workers also, of course, didn't self-govern the economy. Now, you might think that that would be much too much to expect of these societies given, say, the state of the world, their state of development, the western aggression they faced, and so on. But those are explanations for perhaps why they didn't or couldn't develop into full communism, or didn't do so yet. They are not explanations for them being communists in Marx's sense. And that's all the point we're making there. Part 4. Alterser and the Epistemic Break To be honest, from the people that disagreed with us, there weren't a lot of good arguments that were backed up by evidence. In fact, we got virtually nothing that was both directed at what we actually argued in the video and based on anything that Marx wrote or did. But we will mention a couple of things that came up. One thing that came up was Marx's quotes, where he talks about human species being. Of course, we're aware of these quotes, and quote a number of them ourselves. But the fact that Marx mentions human species being, or species essence, in the German, Marx uses only a single word that is quite vague and covers both. Doesn't mean that he's necessarily thinking about it in an a historical or transcendental kind of way. We've argued that he doesn't do so in his later or earlier works, and nobody seemed to be able to challenge our arguments or our analysis of the texts. Some people found one or two quotes where Marx criticizes other thinkers for having a static and a historical conception of the human essence. They then said that this is Marx criticizing himself. The main problem with this is that it's at best misleading. Marx criticizing other thinkers for thinking about human nature in a static and a historical way is not the same thing as, and does not mean that, Marx himself ever thought about human nature in this way. Criticizing someone else for doing something doesn't mean that you're criticizing yourself for having done it in the past. Now that our first series is finished, we think we have shown that there's a bunch of evidence and argumentation for there being a fair bit of continuity in at least some of Marx's ideas, properly understood, especially on the things we've covered so far. This is not so for many of his other ideas, which we'll discuss in our next series, and there we'll be focusing squarely on the later Marx. But if anyone wants to take some time and give us some arguments about Marx's development, properly based in an analysis of what he wrote, we'd love to see it and respond. That's it for now. We hope you've enjoyed this series. Our next series will look at Marx's theories of praxis, history and social change. In other words, his dialectical and historical materialism. But before that, we'll do a special episode on democratic socialism and some response videos to some widespread misrepresentations of Marx by the right on the internet. Have a good day.