Today we're going to finish talking about Marxism, and we're going to focus particularly on his failures as a economist and as a political economist, but more importantly on his legacy for our larger concerns with the moral foundations of politics. And before getting into that, I want to bring our attention back to our discussion last time when we talked about Marx's defining economist Utopia as a society in which the principle of distribution would be from each according to his ability. To each according to his need. And we didn't really talk about what's meant by need. This is a very central concept from Marx and it has a plays an important part in thinking about the limitations of this theory. So, I really want us to just spend a few minutes at the beginning getting clear on the difference between needs which intuitively people understanding one way and once, that they understand differently. So when I say the word need what is it that comes to mind? >> What comes to mind are the basic survival needs. >> Basic survival needs like what? >> Like food, shelter. >> Yeah water that kind of thing. >> Okay oxygen, food, shelter the basic so those are definitely needs what else, what else do you think about when we talk about needs. >> There are other considerations to needs that you can think of outside the basics. Things like love which are arguable and respect that, that kind of thing. >> Okay, love an affection, respect. yap, we could consider all of those things possibly as needs. Some of those will become a little bit debatable, we'll see, but most people would become pre-dysfunctional if they had nobody who loved them and had no affection and if, if they couldn't command any respect. We'll come back to the notion of respect later. What about wants? What, what is clearly a want? >> Well, I would say to want something is not really essential for your survival and it's not, your life is not dependent on it. >> How about a Porsche 911 turbo? [LAUGH]. >> It's a want. >> It's a definite want, is not a need. >> If you're only available options for a vehicle are Porsche's then it's a need. >> Okay, but think about what we, we just said a minute ago about respect. If all your peers have, have high end cars and you don't have, you don't have a high end car then you're not going to have their respect perhaps. >> It's debatable, but you're not going to die. >> Okay. >> And some people might respect you for choosing not to gamble. >> Okay, so you, you think it's really about survival. >> Mm-hm. >> Needs are about survival. So porches 911 turbo is a want, if, okay. And so that would suggest respect is also really not about survival. Okay what about a car in order to get to work. If you couldn't get to work you would loose your job. >> Mm-hm, well it depends also on the job, but it's not basic survival need so I would say it's a want. >> Okay. So it's possible, but if you couldn't get to any job without a car, and then it might become a matter of survival at some point, right? And that's what Marx had in mind, I mentioned last time, when he said that subsistence is in parts socially and historically conditioned. So, we could certainly imagine a world in which not having a car was fairly, made, made it impossible for you to meet your needs. Though certainly, it's a long way before we'd say not having an, a 911 Turbo was in that category. Okay, we'll come back to these issues shortly. Once we get into Marx's overall failures. I would say that when we're thinking about Marx's failures and legacies, some people might say, well why not just, just say look he was a bad economist. He got a lot of things wrong and leave it at that. And I think several reasons to not take that path. In one respect it's a bit like saying that Newton was a bad physicist. Well, Newton wasn't a bad physicist given the, the challenges and conceptual tools of his day, Newton did as well as anybody at, at dealing with them. In the, in the same way, Marx took over problems in classical political economy from Adam Smith and David Ricardo. And actually did a pretty good job of dealing with them, with in the framework of classical economics. That framework, had some real problems, that we're going to go in to, today. But at least at a, as a matter of the history of ideas he's an important figure. But more importantly, Marxism has had a huge external impact when we talk about looking at doctrines externally. It was the main historical competitor to utilitarianism, which we've already investigated at some length. And to the social contract theory that we're going to be investigating next. And it's important to understand why even if it's built on, on sand conceptually Marxism had those effects. And then thirdly I think we're going to see it wasn't entirely built upon sand because there im, some enduring insights about power that flow out of Marx's theory of exploitation, that we're going to take continuing account of as we go on our merry way after we leave Marxism behind. So let's talk now about the overall failures. Obviously Marx's historical predictions were all wrong. He thought that commerce revolutions would come about in the advanced capitalists countries. When in fact the revolutions baring his name came about in peasant societies. And the advanced capitalist societies didn't fall apart either in the 19th century when he was expecting them to or the 20th century, or indeed the 21st, at least so far. And, and the formally communist countries like China and the Soviet Union have now become capitalist countries with a vengeance in a way that would surely have shocked Marx. So his historical predictions were all over the place. And his teleological view of history is heading for some sort of, socialist utopia you know, perhaps the dialectical theory is true in the very, very, very, very, very long run, but it's certainly going by a sequitous path. And as somebody who we're going to talk about later today, John once said, in the long run, we're all dead. So I think for all practical purposes, Marx's teleological view of history needs to be jettisoned. But the third failure that I want us to focus on in a little more detail, which will bring us back to the discussion we were having a few minutes ago about wants and needs. Is Marx's idea that we could transcend scarcity. And remember that his contrast between socialism and communism was that a socialist society was one in which people would rew, be rewarded on the basis of their work from each according to his ability to each according to his work, was the slogan. Whereas communism was going to be a world in which need was going to be the basis for redistribution or distribution. That everyone would work according to their ability, but everybody's needs would be met. Now we had a discussion of needs, fairly rudimentary things you were confident were needs. Physiological things related to survival, and it's certainly true that Marx believed something similar. He certainly excluded, I think he would've excluded the Porsche 911 turbo but his basic idea was that capitalism's historical task was to make possible the super abundance. That would then make communism an option. And so he distinguished what we might call market consumerism, market-based, market-induced wants from genuine needs. And he certainly understood that capitalism would generate consumerism. After all we talked about the problem of weak demand. There wouldn't be enough demand for all the stuff that capitalism was reducing. So it would be important to get people to believe they always needed the next thing to, to whatever it is, a new kind of dishwashing detergent. And they would run advertising and in the induced wants of the market would be that in order to keep this system going, in order to generate the demand, in order to keep the whole thing afloat. But, Marx thought, once capitalism goes away then all those imperatives go away as well to get people to believe that they need things and that you're, to get you to believe that you're a failure in life if you don't have a Porsche 911 Turbo. All that would be gone, and we could focus on the needs that really matter to people, as opposed to the induced ones of the market. But think about this a little more deeply. You were very confident when we, we went through those examples earlier. That things that are essential to survival, physiological survival, not dying imminently, that those relate to needs, okay? But even if we define needs in terms of the essentials of survival, there is still scarcity and distributive choices to be made. Consider cancer research. Huge amounts we spend on breast cancer but the, there's an, what an economist would call an opportunity cost that every dollar that's been invested in breast cancer research, is not being spent on some other cancer research. Prostate cancer or pancreatic cancer or ovarian cancer, so there are going to have to be choices made there no matter how much wealth there is in the society and there's no getting around that. Moreover, this example is just the tip of the iceberg. Because think about if you're, if you're somebody who's in need of kidney dialysis, or somebody's who's in need of an artificial heart, or somebody who's in need of AZT, the AIDS drug, then the fact that money is being spent on cancer research means that it's not being spent, at least not in the same quantities as it's be, as would be spent on these other things. And these have to do with physiological survival, right? If, if you're about to die, because you can't get dialysis. It's surely a need by any stretch of the imagination. And so, how do we think about that? >> I think at some point, you need to make a choice, or society needs to make a choice. >> Society needs to make a choice. Okay. And the, you could, you could look at public opinion, and you could see, for example there is much stronger support for cancer research than there is for heart disease research. Although, interestingly, more women die from heart attacks than from breast cancer. A seldom known statistic. So one could get in to the world of public opinion surely. But the main point I want to make here is that Marx has no answer to this. Because he wants to define needs in terms of the essentials of survival. But we would still going to be stuck with distributive choices. The only way out would be to say, what people need to die at a certain point. You know, the Bible talks about three score years and ten as the natural lifestyle, but that's a very strange notion. I mean life expectancy is already way beyond that, even without heroic interventions like dialysis. And it's a surprisingly un-Marxist notion, because Marx thought we evolve historically as we reproduce the conditions of our existence. So the bottom line here is that scarcity is endemic to human life. And even, no matter how much abun, abundance there is, the con, his concept of superabundance, which was defined to literally make scarcity go away is incoherent. It doesn't matter how much wealth generated in a world. There is always going to be scarcity if we despide, define scarcity as somebody with if, a need, a life saving need being unable to meet that need. And the minute you concede that point, you never going to get away from the imperative, the inescapability of distribute choices being made in a society. And you will never be able to have the, the communist end state even in principle, that Marx identified.
