This is a follow-up to an earlier post, which I had hoped to provide sooner, but real life obligations intervened. Still, it is worth documenting that the quintessential moral philosopher of late capitalism--whose moralistic scolding may be the ultimate gift to the capitalist ruling class--has no business writing an "introduction" to Marx. A few examples from the interview follow; I could say more, but I want to focus on just the most idiotic statements.
Singer says: "The materialist theory of history is essentially a story of alienation. Marx talks about various kinds of alienation, but the common element is that we – that is, humans collectively – have lost control of our lives. Our means of production determine our ideas and the nature of our society."
Marx, in his moralizing youth (this seems to have gripped Singer's attention), offered a theory of human alienation under capitalism, one that presupposed a view of human nature and the conditions under which it could be realized. Marx never published these ideas (from 1844), and they played no role in his later work, though some of what he says there can be made to fit. But the idea that the materialist theory of history--the theory that historical transformations can be explained by reference to developments in productive power--is just "a story of alienation" is something out of a bad sophomore paper. It appears Peter Singer never read G.A. Cohen's 1977 book or, if he did, he didn't understand it.
Singer says: "The crucial mistake was that Marx had a fatally flawed view of human nature. Bakunin, Marx’s anarchist rival, saw that if you appoint workers to governing or administrative bodies, they cease to be workers, and start to represent the governing class. Marx rejected that criticism. He thought that if you change the economic structure of society, you change human nature. The Soviet Union proved that Bakunin was right. The abolition of private ownership of the means of production did not turn communist functionaries into selfless proponents of the good of all."
I happen to think that Marx had a mistaken view of human nature, but not for these reasons, which are silly. Marx thought that if we eliminated the conditions under which people compete for economic survival--which are the conditions under which we continue to live--then much of the avaricious human behavior we observe under capitalism would recede or disappear. Perhaps that prediction is false, but the idea that the Soviet Union showed Marx to be wrong is the kind of stuff one expects on Breitbart, not from an alleged scholar and philosopher. Marx himself was always explicit (in The German Ideology) that the "development of productive forces...is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced," which is obviously what happened in the Soviet Union and other professed "communist" states. That Singer could repeat such right-wing trash allegations against Marx is really shocking.
Singer says: "They tell us that Marx was really bad at prediction. He was wrong about the future of capitalism, he was wrong about what would happen when, after a revolution, workers took over government, he was wrong about the post-revolutionary decline of the coercive state, and he was wrong about the productivity of an economic system in which capitalism is abolished and the economy is run by the state or by committees of workers."
Marx made only one predictive mistake (that we know about), namely, about timing, i.e., about how long before the tendency of capital to displace human labor in favor of technology (which is essential to capitalism, not some accidental or odd feature) would render most of humanity immiserated. Marx seemed to think that was imminent in the 19th-century. He was wrong. About everything else he either had no predictions or none that were falsified: Peter Singer is here making things up, like a writer for the reactionary media.
Singer says: "It is ironic that the clearest refutation of Marx’s predictions about a communist economy have come from China. As long as China had anything resembling a communist economy, it was a very poor country. After Deng’s economic reforms allowed capitalism back into China, hundreds of millions of people have escaped poverty."
If Singer has read Marx--that is unclear--then he would know that in Marx's view (see the passage from The German Ideology, above) China should never have aspired to a communist society, and that Deng was entirely right (from a Marxist point of view): China needed the productive development that only capitalist relations of production could bring about.
All of this should be profoundly embarrassing for academic philosophy, if it were a cognitive discipline. Here we have a prominent academic philosopher repeating the most idiotic tropes about Marxism, straight out of the far right playbook. This has nothing to do with the other controversies that swirl around Singer, such as his apologetics for "raping" the disabled, let alone for killing them.
Marx offered a causal theory about historical transformation and about the character of philosophical reflection in particular historical epochs. His causal theory may be false, and his theory of the nature of philosophy is vulnerable to philosophical objection. But Singer's intervention on these issues is, at best, juvenile.
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