Anti-Barker: Don't Know Much About Philosophee

Our liberal friends at The New York Times just published an apology for Marx written by an associate professor of philosophy in Seoul, Korea: Jason Barker. His piece appears  to be part of a book of essays.

But what does he argue? Let's go through his points, one by one. He starts by quoting Alain Badiou that "Marx had become the philosopher of the middle class."

I believe he meant that educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit — is correct.

Oh dear. The class struggle argument, that I thought was exploded by World War I, when the workers fought for their nations, not for their class. I thought that was why the Frankfurt School had to come up with the race struggle and the sex struggle as a replacement to justify the argument for revolution and "activism."

As for the class struggle, it hadn't really occurred to anyone until Marx invented it, in the Communist Manifesto  as a way to smear capitalists with the tar of feudal lords. In the feudal age there were lords exploiting the peasants; in the capitalist age the bourgeoisie exploited the proletarians. QED.

Only, under capitalism the daily per capita income has increased by 30 times in 200 years and 70 percent of Filipinos are now on Facebook. Some exploitation!

And oh dear, the surplus labor argument, that was completely demolished in 1870 with the marginal revolution. But you see, you will read Marxists for an eternity without encountering any economic ideas birthed later that 1865. If there is a grain of truth in the surplus labor argument it is that everywhere under capitalism people mark up prices. The chap that buys grain from a farmer marks it up before he sells it. The engineering consultant marks up the cost of labor before he bills the client. But here is the thing. Even with the markup the employer may not make a profit on his capital. Profit, you see, is not the markup on labor. It is whatever is left after paying for labor, for materials, for rent, for interest, and for paying the equity investors.

OK, what next? How about the capitalists grabbing all the wealth?

Marx arrives at no magic formula for exiting the enormous social and economic contradictions that global capitalism entails (according to Oxfam, 82 percent of the global wealth generated in 2017 went to the world’s richest 1 percent).

Are you saying 82 percent of wealth generated? Or income? Are you sure? The point is that wealth is not "generated" or "accumulated" as Thomas Piketty argues. It is discovered when, e.g., the stocks of frackers vault into the stratosphere when fracking brings down the price of oil. Or when John D. Rockefeller makes a billion by creating an oil industry that reduces the cost of illuminating oil from 89 cents a gallon to 8 cents. So consumers benefit from lower prices and investors benefit from taking a flier on a crazy kid with a crazy idea. Now that is what I call a contradiction. Lower prices and gigantic wealth!

OK how about this:

Marx and Engels wrote: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

Well, I don't think that stripping the halo off medieval guilds and their modern equivalent cabals of lawyers and doctors is such a bad thing. Nor is wage labor such a bad thing. The point about a regular hourly wage or a monthly salary is that the laborer -- or noble professor of philosophy -- trades away risk. He says: just give me a regular income and you, Mr. Employer, take the risk that my labor will have any value when you come to calculate profit and loss at the end of the year. For most of us, that is a pretty good deal, and it is echoed by Stanley and Danko in The Millionaire Next Door. How do millionaire businessmen educate their children? They educate them to the elite professions, because the regular salary of a professional is much less risky than the income of a businessman.

OK, let's proceed to the classless, stateless society. By turning Hegel on his head and substituting materialism for German idealism, plus the death of God, Marx proposed doing away with classes and with states.

The idea of the classless and stateless society would come to define both Marx’s and Engels’s idea of communism, and of course the subsequent and troubled history of the Communist “states” (ironically enough!) that materialized during the 20th century. There is still a great deal to be learned from their disasters, but their philosophical relevance remains doubtful, to say the least.

Actually, the philosophical relevance of the Communist states is clear. If you try to do away with the state you get the ultimate Hegelian negation, a state founded on brutal and unremitting terror that makes even Genghis Kahn look like a piker, and a rigid class system by which the lordly party viciously exploits the vast mass of proletarians and, as often as not, starves them into their graves, as in the Soviet Union's Ukraine famine, China's Great Leap Forward famine, and now Venezuela.

But Marx's real legacy is not philosophy, but critique, as in

"the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be."

Ah yes. Critical Theory.

Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths” of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress...

But enlightened or rational thinking is not enough, since the norms of thinking are already skewed by the structures of male privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use. Changing those norms entails changing the very foundations of society.

But, Professor Barker, there is one kind of critique that is not allowed. It is the critique of any and all liberal ideas, the ideas of the educated elite, the ideas of people like you. Because, as all the world knows, any critique of the left is automatically "hate" speech and subject to criminal sanction.

So let us rephrase your text. Let us say that the norms of thinking are skewed by the structures of liberal privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use.

In America today, and even more so in Europe, you are not allowed to disagree in public with the privileged educated elite like Jason Barker. And people know it. As Dennis Prager writes today in "Fear of the Left," he gets people coming up to him all the time and whisper in his ear: "I am a conservative."

This happens just about everywhere I speak. People whisper -- yes, whisper -- that they are conservative or they support Trump. The last time I experienced people looking around to check whether they were seen speaking to me was with dissidents in the Soviet Union.

Where is the white privilege if people have to whisper their political identity? Where is the male privilege when men get convicted in the court of public opinion for an accusation of sexual impropriety? Who gets to dominate "the language we use?" Certainly not anyone to the right of Jason Barker.

The point about the left is that its ideology of hegemony and domination is the ideology of today's ruling class. So-called "Critical Theory" is a license for the bribed apologists of the ruling class to beat up on ordinary powerless people that are not represented by the ideological militia of the ruling class such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. That is why ordinary people are reduced to whispering "I am a conservative." Because if "they" found out the truth the conservative whisperer might easily lose his job,

Some male privilege. Some "critique." Some liberation. Some emancipation.

Nothing has changed since Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution. "In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."

Only you are not allowed to say things like that. Because "hate" speech.