Marx's important error | Hacker News Reader

Marx's important error

stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com

19 pointsquoderat14 comments

If you tried to achieve a 19th-century standard of living on twenty hours of work per week, you would face three problems. First, many aspects of the 19th-century standard of living would be quite cheap nowadays, but are illegal. 19th-century-quality housing, sanitation, food, and medical care can't be legally provided today. Second, if you did manage to live a 19th-century lifestyle, you would probably be psychologically unable to cope with having a lifestyle so materially inferior to the people around you. Being denied comfort and medical care enjoyed by other people when you were in distress would offend your dignity. Third, even if you did manage to cope psychologically, you would be unable to participate meaningfully in society, because other people would draw conclusions about your strength of character or mental stability.

The only way to achieve Marx's dream would be to make a society-wide decision to apply productivity gains toward leisure instead of towards the material standard of living. But guess what: most people like to work, and everyone needs to feel productive to be psychologically healthy. I'm sure that was easy for someone like Marx to overlook when pondering the plight of people who were brutally overworked, but it changes the equation quite a bit. Plus, productivity translates into power, and everyone has a certain appetite for power.

But guess what: most people like to work, and everyone needs to feel productive to be psychologically healthy. I'm sure that was easy for someone like Marx to overlook...

Actually that is Marx's point. That when people are free of labour they will fill their lives with productive work that they enjoy. The conservative anti-Marx viewpoint is that no, people are by nature bad and lazy and need to be forced to be good and productive.

work != labour

labour: doing something you don't want to do

leisure: doing something you want to do

work: being productive (orthogonal to labour/leisure)

Liking or enjoying something does not mean it cannot be labor. It is labor as long as I would rather be doing something else.

Anyway, look at the picture Marx painted: "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind." This is dilettantism, a reaction against work. Not many people would find this satisfactory as a life's occupation. This is the image of life a person finds appealing when he is overworked. Marx himself would have found such a life intolerable.

I find that, personally, if I like something, but then get paid for it, I like that activity significantly less while I'm getting paid. I think it has something to do with the obligation and lack of free-will.

The problem with this question is that there is a significant gap between pay rates for part time and full time work.

I am a contract worker for a big company right now. They expect me to work 40 hours or more a week. If I could convert this contract to 20 or 24 hours a week for the same pay, I'd do it quickly. The problem is that those contracts or jobs are hard to find, and they usually pay significantly less per hour. (We'll ignore health care for now.)

I'd love to run or work at a company where most people work 20 hours a week, with spikes only as necessary. It would mean a completely different attitude toward working.

Counter-example: I used to do contract development work at $65 - 85 / hr. At 40 hours per week, this would equate to $130k to $170k / year. But if I was to get a full-time job as a developer at my skill level, I'd probably make half of that.

I agree. However, it's more difficult to find gigs that are looking for consistent 20 hours a week, especially contracting for larger companies. If this is untrue, would you mind sharing your secrets for finding them?

This, though, raises a question. Why is it that the rise in productivity hasn’t had the effects predicted by Marx and Keynes? Why have our “needs” risen as our productive powers have, with the result that the hours we devote to employment haven’t fallen as much as Marx or Keynes forecast? Why is it that so many of us - I count myself fortunate to be a partial exception - haven’t used wealth to free ourselves from alienating labour?

There's no deep question here. Only a language game. Like "does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if there's no one around to hear it?"

Step one: replace loaded words like "needs", "wants", "labour", and "employment" with just "utility".

EDIT: side note. I used to participate in an alternative money forum and the funny thing about it was the neat division between 2 kinds of people:

1. Those who had a fear/loathing/suspicion of productivity growth. (left)

2. Those who had a fear/loathing/suspicion of macro-economics and the fed. (right)

This post is a typical #1 post.

If I'm correctly interpreting your rather elliptical response, it begs the question (in the proper sense): you subsume anything that might be considered valuable into the catch-all category of 'utility,' and then suggest that the present arrangement maximizes 'utility.'

The question raised by the original author -- does our economy properly value leisure? -- remains. You can answer 'Yes it does, and the problems you're pointing to aren't problems at all,' but that doesn't make the question a language game.

you subsume anything that might be considered valuable into the catch-all category of 'utility,'

Sort of. There's two issues:

1. Can you draw a distinction between things you "need" and things that are useful to you? "Needs" is just a rough quantification of utility. The problem is that it isn't as useful. What's the opposite of needs? The opposite of utility is disutility. Labour is disutility.

2. It's key when thinking about this kind of stuff to distinguish "employment" or "producing value" from labour. Labour is something you don't want to do. It's disutility. If you want to do it then it isn't labour. Even if you're getting paid. So it clears things up to just say "disutility" instead.

and then suggest that the present arrangement maximizes 'utility.'

I didn't do that.

does our economy properly value leisure?

That question is completely meaningless to me. First you have to explain to me how something can have a "proper" value (there's no such concept in my understanding). Second you have to explain how an "economy" can value things and what that means. I only know what it means for people to value things.

EDIT: note that my critique is only for the blogger's interpretation of Marx/Keynes. I didn't read the linked Keynes essay but I suspect I doesn't have this kind of error.

"Needs" can't rise because they are infinite. They have always been infinite and they will always be infinite.

Why have our “needs” risen as our productive powers have, with the result that the hours we devote to employment haven’t fallen as much as Marx or Keynes forecast? Why is it that so many of us - I count myself fortunate to be a partial exception - haven’t used wealth to free ourselves from alienating labour?

Because we're accelerating.

This, though, raises a question. Why is it that the rise in productivity hasn’t had the effects predicted by Marx and Keynes?

For Marx, the part about fishing in the morning was after the end of capitalism. In the interim, I think he said something about the capitalists keeping most of the fruits of all the increased productivity. Is that part looking terribly far wrong?

Yes. Statistically the percentage values that wage takes of the national income seems to be fairly stable. I.e. capitalists take/get a roughly constant share. Productivity increases do not seem to change the proportions.

Hmm,

What's your source for this statistic? I believe you and this is something that I would be very interested in having a good source for.

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