Great Minds - Part 4 - Marx and the Problem of Alienation and Ideology

[Music] marx's contribution to philosophy is one of the most important achievements of the 19th century and what's important about it is the fact that he's attempting to do what may well be impossible to synthesize in this case not the tradition of athens in jerusalem marx's project is to synthesize and unify the disparate elements in a number of different philosophical trends but his most important consideration is synthesizing the english tradition of skeptical empirical political economy that comes from hume and adam smith and unifying that with the hegelian tradition of idealistic interpretations of human history as a

progressive series of developments and he connects those two elements up with a third element french utopian socialism the kind that gets developed by compt and other early 19th century writers who were interested in fundamental changes in the structure of society marx read and was conversant with all of these trends and he wanted to synthesize in a way that wasn't unacceptably eclectic the disparate elements elements which at least in part appear to be so disparate that they resist synthesis in the first place marx makes borrowings from english political economy when i lectured on adam smith it

was very clear that there were some elements in his interpretation of the industrial revolution and the division of labor and the effect of the of the machine age on human society that i described as proto-marxian let's think of a few of these proto-marxian elements in smith the parts of smith that marx incorporates into his own views first is the labor theory of value smith of course borrowed the labor theory of value from lock but the labor theory of value the idea that the value of a commodity is directly related to the amount of work that

goes into acquiring that commodity it is a fundamental borrowing that marx makes from the english tradition of political economy you find the labor of theory theory or value in both smith and in locke and marx thinks that it's a good idea it's a sensible way of interpreting the nature of value because it is essentially naturalistic in its orientation what marx likes about the english political tradition is it is very this worldly it tries to avoid metaphysical formulations it tries to steer clear of mysticism it tries to eliminate mythology from their interpretation of both science and

society marx likes that hard-headed essentially realistic skeptical element that you find in adam smith in addition to that marx borrows from adam smith the idea that the division of labor divides society into antagonistic social classes i talked at some length in the lecture on smith about the consequences of the division of labor one of them being or perhaps the most important of the consequences of the division of labor is the fact that society fractures along lines of economic status the fracture is between those who own the means of production what adam smith calls the masters

or the employers and the wage laborers the people who are employed by these masters they have different interests in society and smith recognized that fact saw that the potential for social tension was there marx incorporates that idea into his theory of historical development he thinks it's one of the great contributions that smith made in in in addition to the fact that smith derived or developed the theory of the division of labor and its significance for society so there's a clear borrowing from english political economy and not just from adam smith one of the things that

marx borrows from the english intellectual tradition is the naturalism the naturalistic orientation that we find in someone like hume hume doesn't like metaphysics doesn't like to drift off into area abstractions which is so characteristic of for example of some parts of the french and almost all of the german enlightenment mark says this world a naturalistic approach to ontology is the ori is the basic orientation he wants to take so all of that gets borrowed from adam smith and from the english political and intellectual tradition as a whole he borrows from french utopian socialists the idea

that a radical change in society is both possible and necessary that society develop to the point where it is practically possible to institute fundamental social change based upon a pre-arranged plan for reorganizing society most of the utopian experiments in socialism in the early part of the 19th century were dreadful failures marx believes that these were failures not because the idea itself is absurd the idea of a fundamental and immediate restructuring of society marx thinks that there that they failed because they lacked what marx can offer them a scientific theory of history professor stalloff in the

last lecture made clear the scientific elements in marx's theory of history marx believes that when this scientific conception of human development is added to the mystical or utopian elements in french socialism that you have established the potentiality for radical and immediate social change the third element in marxist philosophy the third important borrowing is the tradition of hegelian historical investigation or the hegelian treatment of history many people who are writing at the time that marx was were arden critics of hegel and there are many good reasons to criticize hegel marx himself was one of the leading

critics of hegel but he was also willing to state that many of the critics of hegel did not completely appreciate or understand his conception of history and marx said let me say it now in public in print i am a follower of that mighty thinker so marx thinks very highly of hegel but he thinks that hegel has made some profound mistakes in his conceptualization of human history and of human social development hegel takes history to be the progressive realization of the idea the geist the spirit of human freedom and rationality in that respect hegel is

a metaphysician and hegel makes demands upon our credulity that in the mid 19th century marx is not willing to accept so what he wants to keep from hegel is the idea that history represents a progressive development that it has a telos telos is greek for purpose what that means is that it has an end it has a point to which it is going to which it is developing and marx thinks like hegel that he can discern that point again this is one of the characteristic difficulties of all philosophers that want to be philosophers of history

it always leads up to them so marx believes that he knows what the end of human history is and the end of human history in this case turns out to be the end of alienation and the end of social injustice based upon the organization of society with regard to production and consumption in other words marx thinks that the industrial revolution has created the technological practical capacity for the elimination of the problem of scarcity and that that means that the real problem in establishing just rational free in again the german idealist conception of freedom free social

relations is the problem of distribution is the problem of paying back to labor that which labor produces now let's take some extrapolations from these uh these borrowings instead of making his main theme the thinkers in a given society as hegel does marx chooses an alternative set of people as the universal class as the most important set of people in every society instead of focusing on the thinkers the way hegel did marx is going to focus on the doers the people who actually make the things that allow people to survive and exist the ones that create

the satisfaction of human needs and this is the working class for marx the working class is that segment of society that comes into being at the division of labor who produce all the things that the people in the society need but who get back only a fraction of what they produce this is the idea of surplus value this is an extrapolation from the labor theory of value that we found in the english tradition the idea of surplus value is basically this that all the things well it actually comes fro it's a way of stating what

king lear says to the fool that nothing comes from nothing what marx is saying is that all the good things in human life come from work none of them appear there magically on their own you have to go get them if you want a hamburger you must make it if you want something else you must go get that it involves activity work on the part of human beings in order to satisfy their natural biological desires so nothing comes from nothing and what that means is that all the good things in life come from work which

is a fairly common sensical idea actually the problem is this in the earliest stages of human development at i guess the hunting gathering stage of human development there is no division of labor everybody's just cruising around looking for roots and berries and whatever it is that hunter-gatherers live on at some point in time there's a break from that hunting gathering tradition and sedentary agricultural life develops and one of the key elements in the development of human society and the development of human productive forces is the division of labor which comes in very early in history

and what this means is that there is a hierarchical set of producers and exploiters in all human societies from the earliest and most primitive division of labor on into the middle of the 19th century and marks himself as writing in other words the division of labor is nothing new as adam smith more or less suggests in his book in fact the division of labor is a very early thing but because of the fact that it's not backed up by machines and technology and of course since the market is so small the division of labor can't

continue on very far what that means is that although the division of labor is very old in terms of the increase in productivity that it creates at least in its earliest phases it's negligible the really important part about the division of labor is the fact that it creates hierarchical social structures some people do the stuff that needs to be done in order to put food on the table and clothes on your back and some people stand around and watch them the group of people that do the exploiting and what we mean by exploitation is taking

from the socially produced goods and services that a society generates taking what you need and giving back to the actual producers only a fraction what the exploiters are doing in that activity is extracting what marx called surplus value the idea is something like this because surplus value is really central to marxism the product of human labor is the total amounts of good amount of goods and services that a society can generate but the laborers in a society after hierarchical social structures are created after the initial division of labor the laborers in a society regardless of

whether they're slaves or serfs or wage laborers in every case they produce everything that people live on they produce all the goods and services because nothing comes from nothing and at the same time social relations are established hierarchical social relations in fact that prevent the laborers from getting back everything that they produce in other words they produce a hundred percent of the stuff that we have and they get back something less than a hundred percent the spread or the gap between what labor gets back of its product and the total amount that they produce is

called surplus value the ruling class of every epoch skims off the cream of society's productivity and keeps it for itself without actually contributing anything to that productivity they sit around and watch the slaves work so the idea then is that hierarchical social relations relations in this case of oppression are built into every human society that has the division of labor which means to say which is to say that oppression is a concomitant of the division of labor insofar as it allows the extraction of surplus value marx wants to know his primary concern then is what

is the fate of industrial society now that we are in the machine age we're in the age of technology which creates a new and unprecedentedly productive set of social relations what sort of political or social hierarchy will be generated from that and in addition to that how should we think about this is it possible to improve the human condition so that we can eliminate the exploitation of one set of human beings by another and what marx wants to do what he sees as the end of history is the end of the exploitation of one human

being by another he thinks that human beings should pull together in a sort of common effort to exploit exclusively nature to satisfy their desires and what marx means by oppression or the technical term is hegemony domination what he means by oppression is the extraction of surplus value by a ruling group that doesn't actually produce anything he believes that in every epoch the class that rules the society is in fact a parasitic group of people who live off the real doers and they exploit these people in order to satisfy their own desires and not only that

in every case the ruling ideas of an epoch here we hear echoes of hegel and the idea of the geist in every age the ruling ideas of each dominant class are in fact those ideas which reinforce the social relations which allow this kind of exploitation to continue so it should come as no surprise for example in the ancient world when the dominant social relation of exploitation is the relationship between master and slave that someone like aristotle believes that there are some people are natural masters and some people are natural slaves his entire political theory is

orga or not the entire political theory but a large chunk of his political theory is organized around legitimizing hierarchical social relations and remarkably enough he comes from a society that's dominated by hierarchical social relations and remarkably enough he benefits from these hierarchical social relations so in other words marx thinks that there's an element of heteronomy there's an element of passion which distorts people's thinking in favor of legitimizing social relations that benefit them and that the entire history of human consciousness has been a gradual movement from one conception of a right political order and a right

morality to another conception of political order and morality and that these changes are not arbitrary or not chaotic and they do not come from some metaphysical geist they come from a change in the mode of production what he means by mode of production is the characteristic way of producing things and as a consequence of that there is a characteristic way of extracting surplus value in the ancient world the mode of production was called slavery and the societies were divided into the free and the enslaved masters and slaves and amazingly enough in the political theory of

the ancients slavery is taken to be basic and a fine institution it turns out that that's in the interest of those who created the intellectual activity of the ancient world and what marx is saying is that that's a distortion that that is ideology in the pejorative sense of the term that these people are alienated what we mean by alienation is necessarily false consciousness in defense of class interests in defense of the interests of the people that have a parasitic relationship to the real workers in the ancient world aristotle tells us that slavery is natural and

we should anticipate it in any well-regulated social order when we come to the middle ages if we look at someone like thomas aquinas we'll find that there's a divine sanction a divine support for the monarchs of the middle ages god creates some not not for all of them but for at least the righteous monarchs there is in fact divine sanction there are some monarchs that breaks god's law we can make exceptions for that but generally speaking political order is legitimized in the middle ages by referring to the will of god and by saying that aristocrats

are aristocrats because god wants them to be why else would he have made them aristocrats the king is the king because well the king rules by god's dispensation the serfs in fact almost everybody else are serfs because that's the way god organized the world aquinas in other words in his political theory is legitimizing the particular exploit of social relations characteristic of the society he just happens to be living in marx says that this is no accident that the ruling elite in every society is never going to support and encourage and make possible the extension and

elaboration of political theories which and moral theories social theories that undermine the organization of society which benefits them what that means is we have a sort of feedback loop here between the economy and culture there's a connection a connection of heteronomy of self-interest not again on the basis of individuals although that's sometimes the case but we go back to the german idea of the collective subject for marx the collective subject are social classes the bourgeoisie has an interest the slaves have an interest the serfs have an interest they form a sort of collective subject so

the history of economic development the movement from slave labor to serfdom the movement from moving from serfdom to wage labor carries with it changes in the productive forces of society and as a necessary concomitant of that changes in the structure of society and as a necessary content of that changes in the way in which societies are legitimized in the age of slavery political theory established slavery in the middle ages we established serfdom in the age of adam smith in the age of english political economy what did at least in marx's view what did the english

political economist do they legitimized the society they happened to be born into because they were intellectuals they were the hired guns of the exploiters that's what the whole history of western cult or not just western of global cultural development amounts to in every society there's a group of exploiters and a group of producers that are the vast majority of the people among the groups of exploiters there's a group of people that don't actually do manual labor that don't do the kind of labor that actually makes the world go they do intellectual labor and their function

in society is to shore up and legitimize the particular kinds of evil social relations characteristic of a society divided into exploiters and producers marx thinks that the time has come to eliminate this the time has come for the heteronomy which exploitive economic relations introduce into our political theory and into our theory of history the distortions created by alienation by necessarily false i'd thought in defense of class interest the time has come to abolish that and as you may have guessed by the connection to the hegelian system when we finally abolish alienation we will finally abolish

classes when we finally abolish classes we will have finally abolished exploitive social relations when we finally abolish exploitive social relations there will no longer be false consciousness in defense of class interests and we could finally see what we really are history as we have known it prior to this will be over we can begin the truly human epoch in human life when there is no longer false consciousness and defensive class interests alienation will be gone because the whole human family will understand that they are part of the same species that they have one interest the

human interest and that the alleged interest of one segment of society as opposed to that of another is in fact an illusion created by the education that we got growing up in a society divided into hierarchical producers and exploiters who necessarily have false consciousness in defense of an evil society in other words we are going to have the secular apocalypse this is the end of the world it's not that people will cease to exist it's just that all of human history will have turned a fundamental corner all right this goes on quite a bit in

the remainder of the 19th century and all partially the 20th century now alienation can be compatible only by adopting the position the intellectual position of the exploited in other words you have to look at human history from a critical perspective which points out the heteronymous here's a kantian element self-interested parts of the ideologies that have been generated in order to shore up these exploitive social relations this critical analysis of society this ruthless critique of everything existing is called marxism and marx believes he is the first man to penetrate the veil of maya the veil of

illusion and say what human history really is human history is a combination of our greed of our unenlightened self-interest and our credulous willingness to believe whatever fantasies are generated by a particular social structure by our unwillingness to take things to their logical ruthless conclusion so autonomy and heteronomy fundamental conceptions for marx not in the kantian sense of a kind of metaphysical freedom which we derive simply by virtue of being free rational agents he wants a this worldly rationality he wants heteronomy in this world which allows us to see that all human beings have a common

interest the elimination of exploitation which is the same thing as the elimination of injustice when we finally eliminate exploitation there'll be no longer any hierarchies everyone will be equal in the sense that everyone will be required to work and all the exploitation that we do will be the exploitation of nature through the technical advances that we get from modern natural science few social theorists have been as involved and as impressed by the development of modern natural science as marx so marx is in fact an unlikely combination of disparate intellectual traditions this idea of alienation this

necessarily false consciousness and defensive class interests is probably his greatest contribution to philosophy because it gives us the possibility over an overall critique in a somewhat more rigorous and tough-minded way than hegel offered us when we looked at the history of western philosophy marx says look beneath the surface this isn't god's plan working out its way in history this is just the human condition and human nature operating under certain contingent circumstances the plan of human history is in fact the recreation of what we were before the initial division of labor remember that for marx hierarchical

social relations as a and as a contribution to that ideology and false consciousness all that is a product of the division of labor but prior to the division of labor we have what might be described as primitive communism no conception of private property no conception of personal ownership no conception of legitimate exploitation of one person by another so marx says in other words this division of labor thing it's just a phase right we entered into it in a very early phase in our in our career as a species and the ultimate finality the final act

of this drama will be going back to that earlier primitive communism in which exploitation of one person by another is no longer allowed but it will be with the addition of an enormous amount of productive capacity it will be with the elimination of scarcity through technological means and that means fundamentally our condition will be changed we will have returned in some respects to the earlier garden of eden to the pristine moral condition of true humanity when we don't make a distinction between upper and lower classes we will go back to what we really are by

nature so what marx is doing then is not forcing us up to a sort of reconciliation with heaven quite the contrary and here comes the naturalistic orientation of the english political and philosophical tradition he wants to get us ultimately back to nature not nature as its red and tooth and fang but nature as human societies are before the introduction of evil social relations before the introduction of exploitation there is a yearning for a lost innocence here and it's not hard to see why marx would think that think of the time and place where he has

been living he is living in western europe moving from one place to another because he's often hunted by the agents of the state who view him quite properly as a subversive and he spends a great deal of his time in england quite a bit of time in london and england is the country that has developed the industrial revolution to the greatest extent like charles dickens and of course there are many similarities between the critique of capitalism offered in dickens something like hard times and marx the moral impulse in both dickens and marx is the same

but what marx wants to say is that the answer here is a return to nature that we can get beyond that he sees unlike adam smith primarily the downside of the industrial revolution and he's right about that i mean let's not pull any punches about the social conditions characteristic of the working class in the middle of the 19th century in england they were honestly wretched if any of you get a chance to read something like engel's piece from 1844 i think it is a the condition of the working class in manchester you'll realize that there

is a legitimate and very serious problem here and you have to be really morally obtuse to be unable to see that fact marx is full of moral passion about that and it's quite understandable starving children an enormous increase in productivity and at the same time a general impoverishment of a large percentage of the population people for the first time moved off the land in a relatively secure almost organic connection to the seasons and nature forced into urban areas urban slums grow up problems with sanitation emerge all the problems of urban industrial life are there in

full force but there is no governmental agency like for example the the welfare state to take care of the problems generated by capitalism marx in fact in fact thinks that the nature of the system the ruthlessly exploitive rationalization of society that's a con commitment of capitalism prevents the amelioration of the conditions of the working class except by a global proletarian revolution workers of the world unite what that means is that all across the world marx has one archetectonic system which allows him to offer a program of political reform at a fundamental level to every society

this has a lot a lot is a large part of the appeal that marxism had in the late 19th and for a good part of the 20th century on a global level he speaks to real both moral and political problems and he offers a solution to people that despair of ever finding a solution with and it's entirely understandable how they might think that one of the real tragedies in human life one of the real horrors about the condition we find ourselves in perhaps now is that in order to develop the comfort the wealth perhaps even

the luxury that's characteristic of contemporary american society contemporary industrial society also in western europe is that it is necessary to sacrifice two or three or four entire generations of human beings in other words there is a necessary element of exploitation in the development of capitalistic social relations and this exploitation cannot be avoided it we may be able to ameliorate it by creating things like minimum wage laws by creating health and safety regulations but it can't be eliminated because what adam smith calls profit is what marx calls surplus value and it's built right into the system

so marx thinks that this is not susceptible to gradual reform it would be nice perhaps if it was but the chances are that the ideology of the bourgeoisie which is the people that are that adam smith calls the employers or the factory owners makes them blind to the true condition of human beings as a result they have an ideological distortion they are alienated so they are unable to grasp the true human condition they are unable to dr to grasp the real trend of history so the chances of actually explaining to these people rationally marx thinks

what they ought to do to change society to make it truly human are nil he certainly underestimated the capacity of capitalism to alter its conditions to meet at least the most pressing and immediate problems capitalism as a system i would say adopted a system of what we might call berkey and piecemeal reforms first limiting things like child labor then limiting things like the labor of women then eliminate then limiting things like health and safety conditions then putting together things like minimum wage laws all things like this are attempts to kind of round off the sharp

edges of a system which has at bottom an exploitive element to it there's no getting around that fact so what marx is trying to do is explain what he thinks the future process process of human history will be it will be instead of a reconciliation of god with man we are going to have a reconciliation of one segment of humanity with itself we are going to have a reconciliation of the producers and the exploiters it may unfortunately be necessary to kill all the exploiters but the process of history is often rather grim and gruesome you

can't sugarcoat that element of it but when you consider the fact that marx like hegel is projecting this trajectory on to an infinite amount of temporality well then the sacrifice in this generation at this time of an exploitive class that really has this terrible comeuppance coming to it may be justified given the enormous benefits this will create for all of humanity throughout all the rest of human history this sort of thinking in some way attractive in some ways it is attractive is also extremely dangerous because it gives people a license to sacrifice this generation to

the next it can easily lead to things like stalinist abuses as a matter of fact it did so the danger here is that we don't sufficiently appreciate what economists call the time discount that we don't appreciate whatever wisdom burke has to offer us instead of hoping that there'll be some pie in the sky improvement that'll be permanent and wonderful and fundamentally alter human life maybe the gradual approach to the alteration of human society is in fact the wise one because the potential for abuse in a revolutionary situation has many of the qualities that burke talked

about so there is a certain wisdom to that marx ins can be thought of and i know this is kind of tongue-in-cheek but it can be thought of in some respect as the last great christian heresy in the sense that it internalizes the value judgments of christianity equality kindness to one's neighbor concern about the feelings of other people and about the the livelihoods of other people with the scientific elements of the 19th century particularly with english political economy and with the tradition of german idealism so although it's it's kind of facetious because marx is such

a rigorously atheistic thinker marx of course thinks that ideas like god our alienation our ideology are the product of a group of people that are trying to legitimize unjust social relations when we get to the global proletarian revolution to the secular apocalypse we'll be able to dispense with religious formulations of our conception of the world but marx understands himself as the harbinger as the sort of messenger of a new change in the world which will allow us to reconcile not man and god but man and man not only will it do that but in the

process of eliminating exploitive social relations connecting all of human society into one common endeavor in addition to that it will for the first time free us from our heteronymous conceptions of society free us from the illusions created by our own self-interest free us from making exceptions to the to our general moral understanding of society that apply only to us and to the class we represent marx thinks in other words that his philosophy is the system by which we can discern the truly liberating human under self understanding this is a borrowing from hegel marx is essentially

talking about the gradual development of human self-understanding of human self-consciousness but the key group the key sociological stratum in comprehending the process of human development is not the thinkers but the doers and the reason why again this is a contribution or a borrowing or an outright theft from the english philosophical tradition it's pragmatic it's practical does it work in everyday human practice mark says that practice is the ultimate standard by which we judge any theory and that's clearly not the kind of thing that he borrowed from the german intellectual tradition that's very much an english

borrowing now what are the problems with this there are lots of them in the first case it's not entirely true that ending capitalist social relations creates a unified classless society in practice in most of the as a consequence of most of the marxist revolutions of the 20th century we've changed the domination of one class for another instead of having the capitalists run things generally speaking intellectuals do very few members of marxist ruling elites lack college degrees very few of them are in fact common average everyday manual laborers they are almost exclusively not proletarians but thinkers

in addition to that the idea of a time discount the apocalyptic millennial element in marx is extremely dangerous because it gives us license to devalue the here and now because we are playing for ultimately important stakes the entire future of humanity rests upon the appropriately ruthless prosecution of our political platform right here and now it is very easy to see how this can slide over into the legitimation of totalitarian political practice in fact that is what it has done in many cases think of tiananmen square in addition to that this is implicitly teleological for all

of marx's naturalism for all his disdain of metaphysical formulations he really does think that history has a telos it has a purpose it has an end and he has discerned that in my estimation this is a mythology it is a moving mythology it is a very intriguing mythology but what it is is a holdover from the christian intellectual tradition from the idea that god has a providence but it's given a physicalistic twist which makes it more or less consistent with the tradition of modern natural science marx in other words is attempting to square the circle

he is attempting to unify meta a metaphysical intellectual tradition with an essentially physical intellectual tradition with a transcendental and a mundane intellectual tradition and the problem is i think ultimately that the tensions pull the system apart it helps explain why there are so many diverse interpretations of marxism one of the reasons is is that the ambiguity of marx's thought allows both people whose basic orientation is naturalistic and people who's basically or whose basic orientation is transcendental or metaphysical to both reed marks and think that they're understanding it as marx really meant it the real reason

is because there are tensions simple contradictions in marx's thought which never get resolved and the reason is that i think ultimately they can't be resolved ultimately you're going to have to choose either or you're going to be a naturalist or you're going to be a metaphysician it is very hard to be both if you want the naturalism you can keep the laws of history democracy and iron laws of progress that professor stalloff talked about in the last lecture that's the naturalistic element in marx if you want to believe that history has a progressive tendency if

you want to believe that history is the gradual realization of human liberation if you want to believe that there is an end point to the process of human development you can't do that without metaphysics it's implicitly hegelian and you can't jibe that idea unless you essentially believe that there is a plan either intrinsic to nature or in the mind of god or intrinsic to human nature or intrinsic somewhere that can be discerned that has some very queer ontological differences from a natural entity i think in other words we have the ghost of metaphysics of metaphysics

rattling its chains back there somewhere that's why for example it's possible to create in this century things like liberation theology a combination of christianity and marxism if you adopt the naturalistic mark reading of marx nothing could be more implausible in liberation theology it's totally incoherent on the other hand if you adopt the quasi-hegelian idealist metaphysical reading of marx what could make more sense we're really getting in touch with the geist we're really moving on to the point where everyone will be nice to each other we're going back to the garden of eden we are redeeming

ourselves history becomes the story of salvation and i've heard this before it's in the bible right so liberation theology as well as alternatives to that sort of formulation of marxism the positivistic formulation of marxism characteristic of some marxist interpreters like placanov or recently g.a cohen wrote a book which has a very positivistic slant on marxism all of these takes on marxism manage to do what they do by doing their best to shelve or to send away the metaphysical stuff by reducing the talk about freedom and alienation to the early marks the really interesting marks for

these guys is the marks that wrote capital in the grunderissa the hard linear um deterministic marks the tensions between freedom and necessity between determination and autonomy never really get resolved in marx and the reason is is that he touches upon the kantian antimonies of pure reason and he wants to have it both ways that's what makes it moving that's what makes it possible that's what makes it popular and that's also what makes it incoherent when you get down to bedrock he wants to do contradictory things that's both the strong and the weak point it appeals

to a lot of people makes it accessible and practical as a revolutionary theory the difficulty with it is that when you work out the implications of it you can't make it all jive you can have this part you can have that part but you can't make both parts work you can think of the metaphysical and the naturalistic elements and marks as being essentially something analogous to an algebraic simultaneous equation i can solve for one of these variables i can solve for the other variable but you can't solve for both variables at the same time and

marx kind of papered over these problems made gestures that's saying that someday we'll solve these problems or i kind of have solved these two variables and here's where it comes in but he never completely satisfactorily does that the reason why is i think it's impossible now i think it would be uh not entirely fair to eliminate to finish with a an elimination or a criticism of marx and elimination of marxian philosophy in practice marx has taken a thorough enough beating in the last 10 or 12 years or so so it's kind of superfluous i would

say that marx is one of the great social theorists of the 19th century first of all and that's to be said in his favor because the 19th century was a great time for social theory in addition to being one of the great social theorists of the 19th century he is almost by indirection the source of many of the progressive and i think morally praiseworthy changes in contemporary advanced capitalist society unless there existed critics on the left who saw and who were morally sensitive to the problems generated by the division of labor it seems to me

that we would have had something like this strictly classical treatment of capitalism and many people would have suffered needless and horrific hardships as a consequence in other words the development of the welfare state is homage to marx and i think that no sensible person wants to get rid of it certainly no presidential candidate wants to get rid of social security and this is a way of saying that marx was at least partially right if he exceeded his evidence if he is occasionally incoherent take that with a grain of salt he has added to the vocabulary

of our political discourse and the shape the actual form in which we put together problems of public policy and that's the kind of contribution that will not die with the particular totalitarian political systems that have been connected with it and that's the advantage to knowing something about marx you get to understand the origins of contemporary public policy and discussions about public affairs