Tag: Karl Marx

Luxury Beliefs and the End of Scarcity

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

One of the things which struck me when I recently read The Communist Manifesto (plus two earlier drafts of it in FAQ form) was that Karl Marx seemed to believe that the industrial revolution meant the end of scarcity. When he described a never-before-seen problem of over-production, he made it sound like the problem was too many products now existing with nothing to do with them, not a bad use of scarce resources. And much of the insanity of the Communist Manifesto follows at least somewhat logically from that incorrect premise. Having said that, as I was recently cleaning up the family room, it did strike me how much junk it’s easy to accumulate in the modern world—and I mean stuff literally no one wants and you can’t give away, so all you can do is throw it out. In certain ways, if you’re reasonably well off, it can feel a little like a post-scarcity world. And this reminded me of something Rob K. Henderson talks about with regard to luxury beliefs—that the wealthy no longer show off their wealth with luxury goods, but by flaunting luxury beliefs.

If you’re not familiar, luxury beliefs are basically beliefs so stupid that you can only survive them if you’re rich enough to avoid the consequences of them. (Technically, Rob defines a luxury belief as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while inflicting costs on the lower classes.”) The basic idea, as Rob describes it, is that it used to be the case that the rich flaunted their wealth with fancy clothes, fancy cars, jewelry, and the like. But these are now too accessible, so instead the wealthy flaunt their wealth in ways which are not so accessible. In a sense, this is not entirely new. Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse’s satire of the idle rich, and his friends flaunted their wealth through being conspicuously stupid in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Even earlier, in his 1910 book What’s Wrong With the World, G.K. Chesterton remarked:

Sir William Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. “We” (that is, the aristocracy) “are all Socialists now.”

That said, I think that Rob is right that there is something peculiar to our time in the abandonment of luxury items as signifiers of status. And I think that no small part of it is the general level of material wealth. It’s true that there are still very expensive versions of common things, but they’re usually not all that much better. They’re mostly just more exclusive. An exclusive watch doesn’t keep the time better, or sparkle brighter, than a cheap watch. To know which are the very expensive handbags you need to be able to recognize logos. Gold, as in the metal composed primarily of the seventy ninth element on the periodic table, is still quite rare, but gold the shiny color is everywhere. To quote Chesterton again, this time in response to the common phrase that “not all that glitters is gold”:

All is gold that glitters, for the glitter is the gold.

That is to say, people valued gold because it’s pretty. Now that there are things equally pretty, some people cling to the exclusivity of the rarity of one particular gold-colored metal, but most people don’t really care. You can buy children’s jewelry for a few dollars that’s as pretty as anything you buy for tens of thousands of dollars in a real jewelry store—at least if you don’t pull out a microscope, and most of us don’t even rent microscopes, let alone own them. (Admittedly, the children’s jewelry isn’t as durable, since the pretty part is usually on the outside, as a paint, but the children’s jewelry is so cheap one might as well throw it out and buy new once the glitter has been worn off.)

This is true of many other things, too. Chemically synthesized pigments and plastics have made things that used to be extremely rare now universal and extremely cheap. Digital distribution of media from books to music to movies have had a similar effect. And here we come to the point about the end of scarcity: scarcity is quite far from over, but I can see how people raised in affluence and with certain kinds of tastes could mistakenly think that we’ve basically come to the end of scarcity.

To spell that out a little: affluent people tend to be raised in such a way that they think of having a job as a normal and desirable way to spend their time; they often (mostly erroneously) think that if they didn’t need to work, they’d still work anyway. So it would not be hard to ignore that they do work for which they happen to be paid well. On the other half of it, if their tastes happen to run to things that have become extremely cheap, they will tend to have the ability to get more than what they want. These are the people for whom it is very difficult to buy birthday presents because they already have everything they want. That’s not a matter of being fabulously wealthy, it’s just a matter of what they want costs $100 per month in subscriptions and maybe another $100 per month from Amazon (and their cell plan and internet bill are, to them, just basic living expenses they can easily take care of) and they spend most of their time on social media or consuming stuff they get from their subscriptions. If such a person has no curiosity about how things like the phone they use or the cell service they pay for work, I think it’s possible to see how they would, without thinking about it, assume that scarcity is over.

If a person does make such a mistake, I suspect it might easily lead them in the direction of some of the very destructive places the belief in the end of scarcity led Marx. For example: if scarcity is over, there are no question about how resources should be allocated which need to be answered. They can thus be ignored, or else whatever the answer which sounds most pleasing on the hearing of it can be accepted. Since scarcity is over, there’s no real need to motivate people to work, since you have unlimited everything anyway. Since scarcity is over, there’s no need to take care of anything since you can always replace whatever is destroyed through neglect with a new one out of the infinite supply of new ones. Since scarcity is over, the only reason anyone is lacking anything is because someone is keeping the infinite supply of things from getting to the person who is lacking.

I suspect that this illusion of scarcity having ended is a big part of why luxury beliefs seem plausible to so many people.

The Communist Manifesto is Unbelievably Bad

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently read The Communist Manifesto (in English translation, of course) since from time to time I read primary sources and I literally have great difficulty actually believing how bad it is. It does not really contain either a political philosophy or an economic philosophy; it has a few scant elements of these, and is about as much a considered work of political philosophy as is Star Trek: The Next Generation.

For those not familiar, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a TV show set in the twenty fourth century where it is a post-scarcity world in which everyone has an unlimited amount of whatever they want without effort. In TNG (as it is commonly called for brevity) this is accomplished through free energy by unspecified means coupled with “replicators” that can make anything, instantly, with no cost. (I believe various unauthoritative technical manuals suggest there is some hidden feed-stock of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but there is never any kind of limit to what replicators can replicate, and there are episodes where feed stock is clearly not required.) I bring this up not as a tangent, but as oddly similar: it is fairly clear, from TCM (as I will call The Communist Manifest, for brevity) as well as several FAQs (which Marx called a “catechism”) that Marx believed that the industrial revolution was bringing about a post-scarcity world.

TCM was published when Marx was 30 years old, and I’ve been told it’s not why he was influential—that was Capital, or Das Kapital, as it is often known, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, which is it’s full title. That book is around 1,000 pages long, and I don’t find it even slightly plausible that communists read the whole thing, so I’m still quite unsure of what to make of it. I’m willing to believe that Capital did flesh Marx’s ideas out somewhat, since they were basically only a few partial bones in TCM. Capital was published when Marx was 48, and presumably the intervening 18 years and the extra 970 pages lent themselves to a little more thought. I have trouble believing much, since the author of TCM was clearly not a thoughtful man.

It’s difficult to even critique TCM because there’s so little to it. It begins with the idea that the key to understanding history is class conflict, which is just wrong. That’s not the key. It mostly doesn’t even apply. It’s like saying that the key to understanding history is belts. I mean, yeah, you can identify belts at times and places in history, but if you think that they’re the key to understanding history you’re just a moron (assuming you’re older than fifteen; if you are fifteen you just need to think about this more). There is no single key to understanding history, because human history is as complex as human beings. And if there was a single key, interdependence would unlock quite a lot more of history than class conflict would.

Marx’s arguments are often beyond asinine, too. When he tries to address objections to abolishing the family, he starts by saying that families don’t really exist anyway so nothing will be lost. He defends all women being held in common, rather than marrying, by saying that the bourgeoisie has extramarital affairs so often that they effectively hold all women in common anyway. This is just rhetoric, not an argument, and it’s not even good rhetoric. Moreover, it’s rhetoric where actual ideas would be most natural, highlighting that there are no ideas.

To give another example of idiocy: among the general points that a communist system would have (there are only 10), Marx says that factories will be interspersed with agriculture such that there will no longer be a town/country distinction. This is only starting to become sort-of possible in certain types of manufacturing with modern high-end 3D printers in low-volume markets. In Marx’s time, when factories were enormous and required the labor of a huge number of people, this was pure insanity. Ignoring how factories would get in the way of farmers, this would require either factories so small as to be unproductive or absolutely enormous commutes to work at a time when horse was the dominant form of transportation. To say nothing of the great difficult of transporting raw materials to random locations and finished goods from them. (Factories were often on rivers because river transport is so much cheaper than overland transport; they were often near each other because one factory’s output might be used as an input by another, and not needing to transport these goods hundreds of miles was far more efficient.) If you even begin to try to work through what randomly locating factories throughout the countryside would entail in terms of transport and coordination, of the running of rail lines through farm fields and so on, it becomes immediately clear that Marx never gave a moment’s thought to what this goal would entail.

And that’s a theme of TCM. There is zero thought given to how to accomplish… anything. For example, he states that all property will be owned by the state, but he never so much as raises the question of how the state will say what will be done with its property, let alone provide even a hint of an outline of an answer to the question.

Incidentally, this is a point which a lot of people sympathetic to socialist rhetoric seem to miss: any form of socialism where the means of production are owned by The People is necessarily totalitarian, for the simple reason that if The People own the means of production, they clearly will have to say what gets done with their means of production. That computer in the apartment in which you live—that can be used to write things, so the people should get to say what their computer gets used to write. The oven in the common area of the apartment building in which you live produces cooked food, so The People should say what food their oven is used to cook.

Socialist-sympathizers will balk at this and say that all manner of things are excluded from ownership by The People, but all they’re doing is saying that what they actually want is only a little bit of socialism—often, in practice, only socialism of the things that they don’t want to own, but then most human beings are hypocrites.

Anyway, Marx says nothing in TCM about how The People (or The State) will say what happens with all of its property. He gives not a word to how this will, in his way of looking at things, only set up a new class conflict between the bureaucrats and the civilians, or between the politicians and the civilians, since clearly you can’t say what happens to everything by direct democracy. Especially since nations will fade away and there will only be one worldwide government.

A world government is, of course, a recipe for minimum accountability, but that requires some minimum of knowledge of how human beings work, which was clearly beyond Marx, or perhaps against his beliefs; but I would have expected him to at least give some vague hints about how the world government is supposed to work, even if it was beyond him to say how it wouldn’t work and what to do to correct against its failings.