Essay:Marxism: Philosophy and Ignorance

“Marx’s original arbitrary postulate [was] that labor was the source of wealth, and therefore of all non-labor income” — Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, Chapter 7 Marxian Value “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission” — Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

The reputed backbone of Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Marxism is his own supposed shift from the method of analysis towards a capitalist framework—called upon to establish credibility as an “ex-ideologue.” Thomas Sowell’s biographer, Jason L. Riley, writes, for instance, “Sowell would self-identify as a Marxist throughout his twenties. His senior thesis at Harvard was on Marxian economics, and his master’s thesis at Columbia was on Marxian business cycle theory. Even his first scholarly publication, in the March 1960 issue of American Economic Review, was on the writings of Karl Marx. But like many others who are attracted to Marxist philosophy in their youth, Sowell would abandon it as he became older and more experienced." His AER article, which Riley describes vaguely as “on the writings of Karl Marx”,—evoking an idea of continued adherence to Marxism with the “but like many others…” platitude following afterwards—was in actuality a polemic against Marx’s conceptions and predictions regarding alienation where Sowell repeatedly speaks of (latter-day) Marxists from the stance of persona non grata (this work was addressed by the Marxist Roland Meek two years later). Peculiarly, and I will concede this is somewhat pedantic, the Reason Magazine reprint of this excerpt contains the additional subheading: “It wasn’t until his thirties that the economist started to turn from Marxism”, with the publisher of Sowell’s biography signing off on this. Given that Sowell’s article was published in the March 1960 issue of AER, and that he was born on June 30, 1930, Thomas Sowell would have been twenty-nine years old at the time of its publication; the RM subheading is incorrect, likely to simplify the question to an even number and render the timeline comprehensible to whatever brainrotten children read “Reason Magazine.” The proof of Sowell’s Marxist history is shaky at best and might be mostly ignored if not for his own assertions clearly only meant as a self-assurance to conservatives that Marxists are merely naive children, mirroring the stories of Jordan Peterson and the like of “breaking from Marxism/socialism.”

Sowell notes in his preface: “Because the main purpose of this book is interpretation, its critical evaluation of Marxism will be saved until the last chapter.” This isn’t true, but it is correct that the final chapter is the most critical, and therefore naturally contains the most errors.

Insofar as Mr. Sowell speaks on matters of history, his analysis is worth nothing; Sowell uses in his book the same nonsense example of Pol Pot and by proxy the Khmer Rouge as socialist entities inspired by Marxism and makes no mention of the support afforded by the U.S. to the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. He specifically states: “A hundred years later, it has become all too painfully clear that it was Marx and Engels whose ideas led… to the extermination camps of Cambodia” (“Increasing Misery” of the Proletariat). How Marx and Engels’ ideas led to Pol Pot’s anti-Vietnamese extermination program is unclear (and the link between the terror of Pol Pot and that of the Paris Commune is of course non-specific). That the Khmer Rouge and CPK were by their own admission not communists—and never followed a clear communist program—is certainly never given coverage. Sowell cites U.S. Congress to support his assertion of the USSR’s supposed tendency against competition (The Marxism of Marx); he regularly hand-waves away the prospect of capitalist crises (as well as any investigation into the actual affairs of the USSR) much in the same way he disparages Marx for sneering at adversarial theories, although the former’s assertions disguise themselves as notes of established fact. He cites Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago as a display of the “practical application” of Marx’s ideas (Philosophy and History; Misery of…), declining to mention the admissions of Solzhenitsyn’s wife Natalya that she had typed a portion of the book and that it represented “not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps,” and the insights of her memoir, Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1975), in which she wrote “that she was ‘perplexed’ that the West had accepted ‘The Gulag Archipelago' as ‘the solemn, ultimate truth,’ saying its significance had been ‘overestimated and wrongly appraised.’ Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ‘'An Experiment in Literary Investigation,’' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ‘historical research, or scientific research.’ She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ‘camp folklore,’ containing ‘raw material’ which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.”

Sowell writes, “A similar process [to Soviet revisionism] is occurring in China, to which many Western Marxists transferred their hopes after disillusionment with the Soviet Union. This too is seen as simply a betrayal of Mao by Deng, rather than a nation's painful learning from experience that a key assumption of Marxian economics is false” (Exploitation). This is exactly the issue with Sowell weighing in on real-world issues: his knowledge is less than cursory, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings and over-simplifications which allow him to mold events and movements that would otherwise be difficult to fit into his epistemological drivel into nebulous puzzle pieces assumedly contributing to rather than negating his ideas. Sowell is correct of course that the method of analysis of betrayal is incorrect (although it is implied that this is not “simply” the case, i.e. might be correct but only part of a larger picture in his view). This is true for multiple reasons: first, Deng put extreme emphasis on not desecrating Mao’s influence pre-GPCR with his general slogan being, “We will never do to Mao Zedong what Khrushchev did to Stalin at the twentieth Congress of the CPSU”, and even now an image of Mao hangs above Tiananmen Square at all times (a policy supported by Deng); secondly, this “betrayal” narrative treats as interpersonal what was really a mass movement (with neither Mao nor Deng having absolute power), with the people loudly supporting the ousting of the Gang of Four; Chairman Mao was not some deity to be betrayed but a leader who made mistakes which should be condemned and contributions which should be applauded. The primary interest of the People’s Republic of China has never been pleasing Mao but protecting the Chinese people and expanding their development. Following its establishment, the PRC (from 1950-1957) had over 50% reductions in infant and child mortality and crude death compared to the old system of semi-feudalism and semi-colonialism which the U.S. attempted to enforce and uphold by financing the Kuomintang and a growth in life expectancy (from 1950-1980) which a study calls “among the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history.” It is strange that Sowell never mentioned the contributions made by the Communist struggle in China, although perhaps it wouldn’t fit into his neat image of communist failure and capitalist triumph. Note for instance that Sowell writes: “The starvation and other basic deprivations that struck millions of people in the early post-revolutionary era in Russia, China, and elsewhere part of the price of this Marxian self-assured optimism [sic]” (Philosophy and History). The basic content of this assertion is unsupported, as shown above with regards to the unmentioned vast expanses in living standards and improvements post-revolution in China—and even with regard to the Great Leap Forward, which was merely the last in a series of famines in feudal China (1907 Great Qing Famine — 25 million dead; 1920–1921; North China famine — 0.5 million dead; 1928–1930 Chinese famine — 3 million dead; 1936–1937 famine — 5 million dead; 1942–1943 famine — 2.5 million dead). Sowell knows that these nations were vastly underdeveloped and that shortages and the like actually decreased following the revolutionary period, but the sheer rhetorical power that the “starvation” paradigm has amassed is likely irresistible even to intellectual anti-communists. The Russia plagued by famines and the USSR which by 1947 had eradicated famine conditions (and with the USSR generally meeting sufficient requirements for caloric intake, which is rhetorically undermined by the constant need to compare an underdeveloped and semi-feudalist nation which had to undergo rapid industrialization to be on par with the imperialist powers and the generally developed imperialist U.S. by the same metrics).

Ah but Sowell protests! Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978, China has pursued a policy of “reform and opening up” under the banner of Primary Stage Socialism (Sowell is of course being vague, but we can sort his argument out and pull from obscurity his actual point with relation to the shift from Mao-era economic and political policies). Sowell wishes to suggest that this development reveals the permanent necessity of private property and markets and exposes a crucial flaw in Marxist theory which apparently suggests that these things are superfluous. This argument is a dead end. The introduction of private capital and investment in Special Economic Zones (SEZ) was the product of the specific conditions of China, with the general theory being laid out as such: Marxist theory and historical materialism show that society develops in stages, with changes in relations and ideas occuring only insofar as the means of remuneration and the productive forces are sufficiently developed to accommodate those relations. As the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (in China termed the “People’s Democratic Dictatorship”, following the same basic line as rule by the workers, peasantry, and urban petty bourgeoisie) was established in China following years of imperialist and colonialist subjugation and under a primarily underdeveloped and largely rural/feudalist base, the CPC was too quick to implement wholesale socialist transformation reminiscent of maps of action designated for advanced capitalist nations undergoing socialist reconstruction and should have instead transitioned into a Primary Stage Socialist system. The theory of Primary Stage Socialism (as opposed to Developed Socialism, the designation for the road of the proletariat in developed capitalist nations) suggests that underdeveloped nations emerging under the DOTP should make use of capitalist machinery, investment, and so on in order to enrich themselves and build the foundation for a shift in the culture, political life, and socio-economic relations congruent with socialist society whilst retaining the primacy of public ownership as the dominant mode. As we can see, this has nothing to do with refuting Marxism but is merely an innovation in the inroads of developing socialism under peculiar conditions which avoids mechanistic thinking. But look at all Sowell can obscure by vaguely motioning at something he does not understand and assuring himself (but not the reader, as no explanation is offered!) that this is a historical experience which profoundly falsifies a “key assumption of Marxian economics.”

Sowell has no knowledge of these names and personages, but this is not required of him. The reader (his intended reader, who has already made up their mind), does not possess this knowledge either; all that Mr. Sowell must do is name these concepts at random in order to invoke in the reader a feeling and a vague idea. As such, he generally has the liberty of assuming that the reader will take for granted the truth-content of platitudes regarding socialist nations and movements.

Sowell dismisses the labor theory of value (LTV) and surplus value (as an extension of feudal society) as such: “it was an assumption[,] and one devastated by the new conceptions and analysis introduced by the neo-classical economics while Capital was in its decades-long process of being prepared for publication” (Exploitation). How should we observe this apparent devastation? Sowell provides us with no footnotes to support his vague assertion. He begins thereafter by discussing the Marxist summary of capitalist production, sprinkled with a few “somehow”s in order to insinuate that several questions are left unanswered—it is quite perfect that these questions all deal with the origin of the capitalist mode of production itself and the supremacy of the capitalist class, which any child can observe are discussed in excruciating detail in the works of Marx and Engels (particularly in Capital and The Origin of the Family). Of course Sowell does not mean to look too far backward, since what he really hopes to insinuate is that the factors of production are provided—in the most superficial sense—by the capitalist class, which thereby deserves a certain section of the products of labor (a natural conclusion if one forgets the conditions of nature and thinks myopically with relation to the origin of factories and the tools of performing social labor just as Marx and Engels have been accused of doing). He then undoes all of this (electing to keep his “somehow”s in what appears to the unsuspecting onlooker as providing intellectual charity to Marx’s theory) and continues with a critique of the LTV: “Where there are multiple inputs, the division of output by one particular input is wholly arbitrary. More generally, making one entity the numerator and another the denominator in a fraction does nothing to establish a casual [here Mr. Sowell meant “causal”] relationship between them (though one may exist), much less a special or exclusive causal relationship” (Exploitation).

One should reply by commenting that all “multiple inputs” have as their father and mother social labor and the conditions of nature respectively. The capitalist class merely appropriates these factors. For instance, notwithstanding the development of historical relations between classes, the factories themselves are not “ready-made” for the whole proletarian class, nor are the tools of production. Certain sections are made to build the factory, while others are made to refine its material inputs from natural resources, and still more are made to do the same for tools such as looms and hammers, which will again be used to manufacture commodities by yet another group of workers. Labor is indeed subject to its own social regulation, and therefore labor inputs are only arbitrary insofar as they represent a singular labor input rather than an average, since labor is only the father of value insofar as labor produces value, which distinguishes itself from individual inputs as the product of an average (i.e. a man may produce a shirt for a company in three hours what another may produce in two, and if the shirts are identical they will not be subject to individual inputs but will nonetheless represent the product of social labor; the average labor time will govern regulation conscious social regulation of production). There exists no distinguishable “third variable”, and the necessary exploitation of labor may be discovered concretely; as Marx comments: “Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident” (1868). How can one avoid this?