Marxists

"To be a Communist is to be a partisan and artisan of Marxism-Leninist philosophy: of dialectical materialism."

"The number-one philosophical battle therefore takes place on the frontier between the scientific and the ideological. There the idealist philosophies which exploit the sciences struggle against the materialist philosophies which serve the sciences."

"The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History."

"Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. ... To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated; the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized."

"To become 'ideologists of the working class' (Lenin), 'organic intellectuals' of the proletariat (Gramsci), intellectuals have to carry out a radical revolution in their ideas: a long, painful and difficult re-education. An endless external and internal struggle."

"You know what Lenin says about 'intellectuals'. Individually certain of them may (politically) be declared revolutionaries, and courageous ones. But as a mass, they remain 'incorrigibly' petty-bourgeois in ideology."

"The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’ but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology. ... It is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power."

"Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite."

"While speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on ideology."

"For you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary ‘obviousness’ (obviousnesses are always primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc.). Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have a meaning’ (therefore including the obviousness of the ‘transparency’ of language), the ‘obviousness’ that you and I are subjects – and that that does not cause any problems – is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are ‘obviousnesses’) obviousnesses as obviousnesses."

"The proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, state apparatus, then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the state."

"The basic sources of the defects in Lange's theoretical analysis are the emphasis on formal structure, the attempt to generalize without first specifying in detail the facts to be generalized, and the failure to recognize that the ultimate test of the validity of a theory is not conformity to the canons of formal logic but the ability to deduce facts that have not yet been observed, that are capable of being contradicted by observation, and that subsequent observation does not contradict. In consequence, these defects are found in much economic theorizing that is not taxonomic in character. They are, however, especially likely to arise when the taxonomic approach is adopted, as their presence in the writings of so able and careful a theorist as Lange testifies."

"Mathematical programming assisted by electronic computers becomes the fundamental instrument of long-term economic planning, as well as of solving dynamic economic problems of a more limited scope. Here, the electronic computer does not replace the market. It fulfils a function which the market never was able to perform."

"In my essay I refuted the Hayek-Robbins argument by showing how a market mechanism could be established in a socialist economy which would lead to the solution of the simultaneous equations by means of an empirical procedure of trial and error. [...] Were I to rewrite my essay today my task would be much simpler. My answer to Hayek and Robbins would be: so what’s the trouble? Let us put the simultaneous equations on an electronic computer and we shall obtain the solution in less than a second. The market process with its cumbersome tatonnements appears old-fashioned. Indeed, it may be considered as a computing device of the preelectronic age."

"Human needs, although originally derived from biological necessity, are thus a result of the existence of society and are conditioned by the stage of development which society has reached."

"Capitalism operates only on the basis of private costs, only private costs are rewarded and repaid, and not social costs. And even in a competitive capitalism where competition forces producers to sell at cost price takes into account only private costs and not social costs."

"Planning and the market do not exclude each other. Planning may utilise the uniformity of behaviour patterns of units operating in the market as one of the means of influencing their decisions. This happens, for instance, when the planning authority imposes tariffs or pays subsidies in order to influence the quantities bought or sold. Sometimes regulation—a special method of planning—is necessary in order to enable the market to achieve co-ordination of the units' decisions. The two methods of co-ordination co-exist with each other. However, in different historic societies, one or the other of these methods plays the preponderant role and appears as the chief means of co-ordinating all the units in the economy. The development of economics as a science is closely connected with the growing preponderance of the market in modern times. The co-ordinating operation of the market and, at times, the failure of the market to achieve co-ordination of decisions have posed the intellectual problems which have led to the emergence and growth of economic science."

"The existence of an ideological element in each science has caused some representatives of the sociology of knowledge to deny the objective validity of scientific statements, particularly in the domain of the social sciences. Such a conclusion is unwarranted. The validity of scientific statements can be ascertained with impersonal objectivity through an appeal to facts. Predictions derived from scientific statements are or are not borne out under the test of verification. The outcome is entirely independent of human motivations, conscious or subconscious; it depends entirely on the correctness of the scientific procedure applied in establishing the statements."

"Our conclusion about the objectivity of economic science may seem startling. Economists are rather notorious for being unable to reach agreement and for being divided into opposing "schools of thought," "orthodox" and "unorthodox," "bourgeois" and "socialist," and many others. The existence of profound disagr ment among economists, however, does not refute our thesis about the objectivity of economics as a science."

"No scientific law applies when its prerequisite conditions do not occur. Since the administration of scarce resources is influenced by social organisation and institutions, such organisation and institutions are among the conditions implied in economic laws. Consequently, economic laws which hold under one type of social organisation may fail to do so under another type. Most economic laws are thus "limited historically" to certain given types of social organisation and institutions. This, however, does not imply any basic difference between the laws of economics (or of other social sciences) and the laws of the natural sciences. The latter, too, are contingent upon conditions which are subject to change. Different laws of the natural sciences have different degrees of historic permanence, usually a much higher one than the laws of economics, though even this is not always the case (some laws of meteorology are less permanent than some laws of economics). The differences is but one of degree. Like all scientific laws, economic laws are established in order to make successful prediction of the outcome of human actions."

"The administration of scarce resources is influenced by the standards of civilisation and by the organisation and institutions of the society in which men live. The influence is a two-fold one. The wants which the resources serve to satisfy are produc of standards of civilisation historically developed in society. The ways in which scarce resources are procured, adapted to various purposes, distributed among different persons are all results of social organisation and social institutions. Forms of ownership, institutions like corporations and banks, technical knowledge acquired in institutes of research and transmitted by schools, regulation by government agencies, habits and moral standards all influence the ways of administering scarce resources."

"An economic system based on private enterprise and private property of the means of production can work only as long as the security of private property and of income derived from property and from enterprise is maintained. The very existence of a government bent on introducing socialism is a constant threat to this security. Therefore, the capitalist economy cannot function under a socialist government unless the government is socialist in name only."

"It seems to us, indeed, that the real danger of socialism is that of a bureaucratization of economic life, and not the impossibility of coping with the problem of allocation of resources. Unfortunately, we do not see how the same, or even greater, danger can be averted under monopolistic capitalism. Officials subject to democratic control seem preferable to private corporation executives who practically are responsible to nobody."

"The actual capitalist system is much better described by the analysis of Mrs. Robinson and of Professor Chamberlin than by that of Walras and of Marshall. But the work of the latter two will be more useful in solving the problems of a socialist system."

"The capitalist system is far removed from the model of a competitive economy as elaborated by economic theory. And even if it conformed to it, it would be, as we have seen, far from maximizing social welfare. Only a socialist economy can fully satisfy the claim made by many economists with regard to the achievements of free competition."

"The rules of consistency of decisions and of efficiency in carrying them out in a socialist economy are exactly the same as those that govern the actual behavior of entrepreneurs on a purely competitive market. Competition forces entrepreneurs to act much as they would have to act were they managers of production in a socialist system. The fact that free competition tends to enforce rules of behavior similar to those in an ideal planned economy makes competition the pet idea of the economist. But if competition enforces the same rules of allocating resources as would have to be accepted in a rationally conducted socialist economy, what is the use of bothering about socialism? Why change the whole economic system if the same result can be attained within the present system, if only it could be forced to maintain the competitive standard? But the analogy between the allocation of resources in a competitive capitalist and a socialist economy is only a purely formal one. The formal principles are the same, but the actual allocation may be quite different."

"Having treated the theoretical determination of economic equilibrium in a socialist society, let us see how equilibrium can be determined by a method of trial and error similar to that in a competitive market. This method of trial and error is based on the parametric function of prices. Let the Central Planning Board start with a given set of prices chosen at random. All decision of the managers of production and of the productive resources in public ownership and also all decisions of individuals as consumers and as suppliers of labour are made on the basis of these prices. As a result of these decisions the quantity demanded and supplied of each commodity is determined. If the quantity demanded of a commodity is not equal to the quantity supplied the price of that commodity has to be changed. It has to be raised if demand exceeds supply and lowered if the reverse is the case. Thus the Central Planning Board fixes a new set of prices which serves as a basis for new decisions, and which results in a new set of quantities demanded and supplied. Through this process of trial and error equilibrium prices are finally determined. Actually the process of trial and error would, of course, proceed on the basis of the prices historically given. Relatively small adjustments of those prices would constantly be made, and there would be no necessity of building up an entirely new price system."

"The fundamental propositions of the theory of interest being obtained from a theory of production into which time does not enter as a variable, it follows that interest is not connected with time in any different way from the way in which the general theory of production is connected with time."

"Our results may be summarised as follows: (1) The superiority of Marxian economics in analysing Capitalism is not due to the economic concepts used by Marx (the labour theory of value), but to the exact specification of the institutional datum distinguishing Capitalism from the concept of an exchange economy in general. (2) The specification of this institutional datum allows of the establishment of a theory of economic evolution from which a "necessary" trend of certain data in the capitalist system can be deduced. (3) Jointly with the theory of historical materialism this theory of economic evolution accounts for the actual changes occurring in the capitalist system and forms a basis for anticipating the future."

"I have pointed out that the real source of the superiority of Marxian economics is in the field of explaining and anticipating a process of economic evolution. It is not the specific economic concepts used by Marx, but the definite specification of the institutional framework in which the economic process goes on in capitalist society that makes it possible to establish a theory of economic evolution different from mere historical description. Most orthodox Marxists, however, believe that their superiority in understanding the evolution of Capitalism is due to the economic concepts with which Marx worked, i.e. to his using the labour theory of value. They think that the abandonment of the classical labour theory of value in favour of the theory of marginal utility is responsible for the failure of "bourgeois" economics to explain the fundamental phenomena of capitalist evolution. That they are wrong can be easily shown by considering the economic meaning of the labour theory of value. It is nothing but a static theory of general economic equilibrium. In an individualistic exchange economy, based on division of labour, in which there is no central authority to direct which commodities, and in what quantities, are to be produced, the problem is solved automatically by the fact that competition enforces such a distribution of productive resources between the various industries that prices are proportional to the amount of labour necessary for producing the respective commodities (these being the "natural prices" of classical economics)."

"If people want to anticipate the development of Capitalism over a long period a knowledge of Marx is a much more effective starting point than a knowledge of Wieser, Boehm-Bawerk, Pareto or even Marshall (though the last-named is in this respect much superior). But Marxian economics would be a poor basis for running a central bank or anticipating the effects of a change in the rate of discount."

"Althusser was not a charlatan. He himself really believed that he had discovered something significant—or was about to discover something significant—when his illness struck. It is not because he was mad that he was a mediocre philosopher; indeed, the recognition of his own intellectual mediocrity may have contributed to his depressions, and thence to his loss of sanity. If there is something humiliating about the Althusserian episode in intellectual history then, the humiliation is not his alone. He was a guru, complete with texts, a cult, and true believers; and he showed occasional insight into the pathos of his followers, noting that they imitated his "smallest gestures and inflections." Althusser's work and his life, with his drugs, his analysts, his self-pity, his illusions, and his moods, take on a curiously hermetic quality. He comes to resemble some minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining. But even the most obscure theological speculation usually had as its goal something of significance. From Althusser's musings, however, nothing followed. They were not subject to proof and they had no intelligible worldly application, except as abstruse political apologetics. What does it say about modern academic life that such a figure can have trapped teachers and students for so long in the cage of his insane fictions, and traps them still?"

"Lewis has written that "man makes history." Althusser unleashes a pamphlet at him maintaining that such is not the case: "Ce sont les masses qui font l'histoire." I challenge anyone to find a social scientist outside the Marxist camp who can seriously pose a problem of this type."

"Into the 1960s the new Marx, the newly discovered Marx, was the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts. These are, as Marx once wrote to Engels in their later years, green, in contrast to the later grey of theory and the dull industrial culture of factory civilization which it sought to explain. Reading the young Marx was fun, more or less; reading Capital, in contrast, was hard work. Althusser sternly took on the duty of reading Capital, writing a very serious book called Reading Capital, and insisting that we should all read Capital seriously, in its multiple volumes, preferably in the original (Althusser and Balibar 1970). The early Marx was Marx before he was Marx, foreplay rather than the real action. Capital was taken to represent a new form of knowledge, building upon a significant epistemological break or rupture. We all became epistemologists. Nobody seemed to notice that this was a step away from practice, rather than towards it. But these were times of great seriosity, and high illusions, as well as very serious scholarship. Yet there was something important in this mission. Marx’s early writings give us the perspective of his laboratory. We can watch him thinking, and it can be an exhilarating experience. But his life’s work was Capital, and the architectonic of that work repays serious close reading. Rightly or wrongly, Marx had become convinced that the mode of presentation of this work was crucial; that there was a best way to explain capital, and that he had sorted it out. He was also convinced that capital was the privileged category, to be accessed via the logic of the commodity form. It did seem something of an irony that none, or few, of the Marxists had read Marx, because it was too hard. And this was part and parcel of the story of the fate of marxism. Engels, Kautsky (the pope of Marxism), then Lenin, and finally Stalin had reduced Marx’s theory to a series of axioms or platitudes about surplus value, historical and finally dialectical materialism. Marxists got by reciting these axioms in their daily denunciations of capitalism. Marxism had become its own caricature. Althusser blew the whistle on this state of affairs. After Althusser, it was inadmissible for Marxists to cut corners. They were now compelled to deal with their own theoretical heritage. A few clichés concerning the ubiquity of alienation and the need for revolution would no longer do."

"The class (or class alliance) in power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs as easily as it can in the )repressive) State apparatus, not only because the former ruling classes are able to retain strong positions there for a long time, but also because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to finds find means and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in struggle."

"What do children learn at school? They go varying distances in their studies, but at any rate they learn to read, to write and to add - i.e. a number of techniques, and a number of other things as well, including elements (which may be rudimentary or on the contrary thoroughgoing) of scientific' or 'literary culture', which are directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn 'know-how'."

"Marx compellingly proved it in Capital Volume Two, that no production is possible which does not allow for the reproduction of the material conditions of productions: the reproduction of the means of production."

"Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."

"All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. ... ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’"

"Much of my professional life has been concerned with the politics of who we think we are. I've been riveted by the question of how we can understand the chaos of identifications which we seek to reach somehow, 'ourselves'. Of course this arrival never occurs; we'll never be ourselves, whatever that could mean."

"The problem of ideology ... has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation."

"Adherents of formal logic may be compared to a maker of porcelain dishes who would contend that he was simply paying attention to the form of his dishes, pots, and vases, but that he did not have anything to do with the raw material."

"The materialist theory of knowledge amounts, then, to this statement, that the human organ of cognition radiates no metaphysical light, but is a piece of Nature which pictures other pieces of Nature whose essence is explained when we describe it and bring it in connection with the whole Universe as the one Reality and the real Unity. Such a description demands from the epistemologist or philosopher that he should treat his subject in the same precise way as the animal world is treated by the zoologist. Should I be reproached with not following this precept immediately, I would point to Rome which, too, was not built in one day."

"One who knows little may explain that little with more ease and efficacy than one who has his head stuffed full of the prescribed bunch of official wisdom."

"Nothing can be learned without mental exertion. If you are concerned in your further development, you will recognize the Christian word as to the curse of work as untrue. Work cannot be descended from sin, for it is a blessing. You will have experienced in yourself how elated one feels after successful physical or mental work."

"My logic deserves its proletarian qualification for the reason that it requires for its understanding the overcoming of all prejudices by which the capitalist world is held together."

"Logic aims to instruct the human mind as to its own nature and processes; it will lay bare the interior working of our mind for our guidance. The object of the study of logic is thought, its nature, and its proper classification."

"The human brain performs the function of thinking as involuntarily as the chest the function of breathing. However, we can, by our will, stop breathing for a while, and accelerate or retard the breathing movements. In the same way, the will can control the thoughts. We may choose any object as the subject matter of our thought, and yet we may quickly convince ourselves that the power of our will and the freedom of the mind are not any greater than the freedom of the chest in breathing."

"It is with logic as it is with other sciences. They draw wisdom from the mysterious source of plain experience. Agriculture, e. g., aims to teach the farmer how to cultivate the soil; but fields were tilled long before any agricultural college had begun its lectures. In the same way human beings think without ever having heard of logic. But by practice they improve their innate faculty of thought, they make progress, they gradually learn to make better use of it. Finally, just as the farmer arrives at the science of agriculture, so the thinker arrives at logic, acquires a clear consciousness of his faculty of thought and a professional dexterity in applying it."

"Much of what I have to say for my case may sound wonderful, because it runs counter to the popular prejudice, but the only witness required to prove the truth of my statements is the clear brain of my pupil, who has only to examine his own experience without preconceived notions, in order to find proofs on every hand."