From: Gerald A. Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Sat Apr 17 2004 - 22:11:08 EDT
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jur Bendien" <bendien88@lycos.com> Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2004 1:56 AM Subject: Marx's method Hi Jerry, Just one more thing. <snip, JL> the typical quibble I have had in the past with many Marxist academics concerns the application of Marx's theory to the facts. I agree it is necessary and important to clarify conceptual distinctions, and explore the logical and quantitative implications (or logical coherence) of the different components of his theories. However, if this is done in abstraction from the empirical data, the facts of experience, rather than through abstracting from the facts of experience themselves, then: (1) the relative real importance of the conceptual issues involved may not be understood, so that we exaggerate or trivialise issues in a false way, and (2) the development of theory itself is not disciplined, informed, guided, regulated or underpinned (I don't know the best word to use, in German you might say "bestimmt") by experience. Whereas the whole point of scientific inquiry is to bring theory and what we know about the facts closer together, such that theory can indeed guide us in questions of "what to do". In order to do so, then we ought I think try to make sense of the empirical data, and by trying to apply the concepts in this way, show what their validity really is. Otherwise Marx's writings are really just equivalent to a holy icon, lovely to look at maybe, of sentimental value maybe, but in other respects irrelevant to the real life of the social classes in our own epoch. A great deal of social science these days is, in my opinion, just subjectivist or elegant metaphor. But really social science is about the objective causes and effects of the interactions of large numbers of people living in a society. "Society" for Marx meant the total of relations among people living in a community, not simply a total of individuals; consequently a "social relation" was for him a relation between people, insofar as they belonged to a group of people (including relations between groups and between an individual and a group of people). That is something you can study empirically. It's often hard work, and maybe doesn't have spectacular results straightaway. No wonder then that people then often prefer to talk about books they've read instead. As an illustration, consider Marx's discussion of "The revenues and their sources" in Part 7 of Das Kapital, Vol. 3, in which he discusses the neoclassical concept of "factors of production", gross and net output in national income, and the economic ideologies about competition. We could, with great linguistic, mathematical and philosophical ostentation, divide Marx's theorems into four square parts, and then put them back together again, for the purpose of writing a learned academic article about "Marx's method of abstraction" that few people will read, but we could also ask ourselves, how does all this work out in empirical reality ? In that case, we would be using our own brains, and doing some abstraction for ourselves, in other words, we would be operating Marx's idea, rather than talking about what his idea was - an instance of a "living Marxism" (although, as I have mentioned, I don't really like using terms such as "Marxism"). And how does it all work out in reality ? I think that is a fair question to ask. Using NIPA data and IRS data, I did a quick snapshot analysis in January this year of US resident pre-tax personal income flows for 2002, as a pilot for a study of the incomes of the various social classes, which I intend to complete sometime. I just took the US economy in this case, for the sake of simplicity (European national data do not yet conform to one standard in many respects). I am not claiming the quantities are completely accurate, because I haven't checked the nature of the base data and definitions thoroughly yet, and in addition this statistical coverage of personal income is not complete, but anyway, here's a list of items ranked in order of size (2002 US$): Private sector employee wage & salary income $4,115 billion Interest income of persons on assets $982 billion Government employee wage & salary income $860 billion Non-farm taxable proprietors' income $783 billion Old-age/survivors/disability/health insurance benefits paid out $710 billion Employee pension and insurance levies paid in $680 billion Dividend income of persons on assets $396 billion Government social insurance levies paid in $364 billion Taxable realised capital-gains income on assets $348.1 billion (2001 est.) Undistributed profit of corporate equity holders $152 billion Government unemployment insurance benefits paid out $53 billion Tenant residential housing rent payments to non-farm landlords $42 billion Profit income n.e.c. $39 billion (own estimate) Veterans benefits paid out $30 billion Family assistance benefits paid out $20 billion Royalty receipts $15 billion Farm proprietors' income $14 billion Farm property rents to non-operator farm owners $5 billion Tenant rents to owners of non-profit institutions $2 billion Rents on non-farm, non-residential properties $0.9 billion Farm tenant rents to farm-operator landlords $0.6 billion Now, just by looking at this data, it should clear that just talking about "the capitalist economy" in terms of profit, rent, interest and wages derived from the production of goods and services, as Marx does in considering, as he says, "the internal organisation of the capitalist mode of production in its ideal average" really doesn't do much justice to any real economy. Why ? It's not just because, as Althusser and Balibar philosophised, there is a difference between the concept of a "mode of production" and the concept of a "social formation"; quite simply, something like half of the personal income of US residents is not obtained from participating in production. So whereas we could have this very intricate scholastic dispute about the specificity of capitalist production, this would not do any justice to the total reality of the US economy at all, and many people might wonder about the relevance of it. If however we took the trouble to verify a few essential facts, and understand things in their quantitative proportions, then we would be far better placed to understand what that specificity was, what the real questions and issues of political economy are, as regards the political economy of the USA. Prof. Kozo Uno came to the conclusion that Marx's theory should be understood as referring to a "purely capitalist society" and corrected Marx's own presentation of the theory in various respects. The trouble though is that it is not very clear how we could ascend from this "pure theory" to the observable empiria, i.e. how specifically Uno's "stages theory" should be operated. In that case, we are left with some kind of Weberian idealism which mystifies the origin of Marx's abstractions in an analysis of the facts. A similar criticism applies to the value-form type of analysis. Antonio Gramsci remarked in his prison writings once that the method of inquiry appropriate to the object of study had to be developed from the object itself. To think that you could learn about the correct method of inquiry in separation from its application, and in separation from the object of that inquiry, was just wrong. It's like saying that there is such a thing as "the scientific method" and there isn't, there are all sorts of scientific methods, and moreover their scientificity depends mainly on how they are applied. Just because we have stated a scientific procedure, doesn't of itself mean that the application of that procedure will guarantee a scientifically acceptable standard or result, and a method successful in one context may not yield any results, or may not be appropriate, elsewhere. In the philosophy of science, it is customary to distinguish between "explanans" (that which explains) and "explanandum" (that which must be explained). By contrast, it is characteristic of ideological discourse, that explanans and explanandum are conflated and confused. In that event, it does not help a great deal to talk about "dialectics". If, however, we elaborate social theories without referring to any empirical experience in a serious and comprehensive way, then social theory degenerates into ideology and mysticism. The sad result of that in social science is then (1) that people don't really know anymore what the questions are, and where the answers should be sought, and (2) people no longer take theory seriously, and do not know how to theorise, or why you should theorise about something. That is why I don't concern myself a lot with "Marxism" these days, because I think most of it, except a few important works, is just ideology. When I was a student, Althusserian "theoretical practice" was in vogue. After that, "poststructuralism" emerged. And then hermeneutics, deconstructivism, phenomenology, "globalisation discourses", the "theory of the body" and so forth and so on. To me, this is mostly ideology, or a sort of art, not social science, it just tells me that people participating in this do not really know what social science is, and what the real questions are, and that they do not know how to apply Marx's method of scientific inquiry. It has nothing in common anymore with Marx's own research effort, which occurred on the basis of plowing through a large quantity of empirical material - this is not a joke, because e.g. when he died in 1883, at a time when a revolution in Russia was still unthinkable, his estate included several cubic metres of Russian statistical material. I think Marx's criticism of the Left Hegelians was that they sucked concepts out of their thumb, and talked in a rootless language full of sophistry which nobody had ever heard of in real life, and if he rejected the label "Marxist", that was also because entire "philosophies of history" were being fabricated in France and Germany on the basis of very little serious research at all, and Marx didn't want to be associated with that sort of exercise. By contrast, people like for example Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin made very detailed investigations of industrialisation in Eastern Europe and Russia, being concerned with the emancipation of working class at that time. I would think that if Marx was alive today that he would regard a lot of the "postmodernist discourses" and "Marxisms" as a real howler. Regards Jurriaan
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