this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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I've got to say, philosophers in general, and Marx in particular, are very non-rigorous in their works. In particular, these passages make no sense if read literally.
Also, on this note, I have started going over Marx' works in my 'spare' time, and have begun making notes regarding how poorly he writes. I'm honestly not sure why I don't see anybody else criticise him for saying stuff like 'a commodity is a use-value' or 'a commodity is an exchange-value' and related things. This stuff, if read literally, is contradictory to other things that are said in the same paragraphs, and makes understanding what he means more difficult for no good reason.
The former (kind of - if memory serves, philosophers at least kept doing so after Wittgenstein). I am not at all calling Marx especially bad. Marx is singled-out because he's important when it comes to topics related to socialism and, well, given who we are, he's important when it comes to our views.
How are those contradictory? Or what other things do they contradict?
Those statements do not contradict each other directly, but it's very clear that a commodity is not its own use-value, nor is a commodity its own exchange-value. Use-value is very clearly meant to be the property of a commodity to satisfy a need, and exchange-value is meant to be a property of a commodity to be exchanged for something in a given context. That obviously makes use-value and exchange-value in the latter senses not synonymous with the term 'commodity', nor with each other.
No, at least some of the issues are in the original German as well.
I'm honestly not sure why philosophers, while claiming to use logic, refuse, or at least, refused 100 years ago to structure their works the way mathematicians do, with very clearly outlined definitions and propositions.
A major issue is that the amount of propositions and definitions is immensely huge. If you want the type of philosophy you're asking for, it's just analytical philosophy. But that loses a ton of its value. Marx was writing at a time when most people who would read his works had some familiarity with the argument style of the German idealists and were familiar with Kant and Hegel. The definitions, propositions, and argument structures that are missing are culturally defined and flexible, purposefully.
And I believe this is a strength. Playing with language as it exists is useful to convey an idea. Using "is" to mean equal in content or form next to each other is a great use of language for philosophy though it's inherently "contradictory." But isnt that precisely the point of his dialectic?
Making something too abstract (and here I mean, further from the way that one's rationality works on a daily basis) takes one further from what can be understood and be useful. Analytic philosophy (the pure analytic stuff, don't catch me with that claim that Marx was half-half) is mostly shit for this reason. Maybe it's possible to be as analytically rigorous and still make useful philosophy, but I'm yet unconvinced.
None of this is saying it's easy to understand or something, but the difficulty and working through the flexibility to find a complete concept is part of the philosophy itself
I apologise if I come off as hostile. I did employ some sarcasm and I suppose I am harsh on not using language in a clear way when communicating complex messages, but I hope this will not register as me having any animosity towards you.
Every time I engage with a work of philosophy, it ends up being a lot less dense than the works of math that I deal with on a daily basis, and yet, the works of philosophy lack the relevant outlining.
Furthermore, philosophers seem to be supposed to have their terms compiled in various encyclopediae, but at least the Stanford one, and the one on marxists.org are incomplete and often don't actually provide the definitions in their entries. I maintain that philosophers have no excuse and are/were just being lazy and non-rigorous.
In the case of Marx, he could have started 'Capital' or 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy' with something like 'economists recognise something called "commodity". Understanding of what a commodity is, and what its properties are, will be important for this study. [\newline] Definition: A commodity is...' and then provide a definition for what a commodity is, then give the relevant definitions for use-value, exchange-value, etc.
Also, I do have an issue with the non-outlined definition of what Marx calls a commodity, as he contradicts it very quickly, as soon as he tries to claim that things with use-value can be non-commodities, that all commodities have exchange-values, and also that commodities are themselves use-values and exchange values (which means that terms 'use-value' and 'exchange-value' are synonymous, despite that clearly not being the intention), etc. Very poorly written, which makes understanding what is meant by that harder.
That just reads as if they aren't defined and the reading has to be vibes-based, basically, and the reader has all the freedom to project what they want onto the text, which happens very often.
Furthermore, this introduces the issue that it's impossible to be reasonably sure that you understood the author correctly, as everybody can just project what they want onto the text, and there isn't going to be any way to disprove many of such claims.
It requires the reader to reread the same piece of text multiple times in order to make a bunch of what are essentially vibes-based guesses on what the author actually meant, instead of just having complex messages clearly communicated to you the way, for example, mathematicians manage to just fine.
But how is it good in any way for the purpose of conveyance that something is actually a property of something else?
You are making a statement that is false, and ask the reader to do additional work to decipher what it is that you actually meant instead of just directly and clearly communicating what you want to say.
Furthermore, a commodity is obviously not 'equal in content or form' to its use-value and/or to its exchange-value, at least on the very simple basis that a commodity may or may not be a material thing (i.e. it may be a good or a service), while use-value and exchange-value are non-material things, so this argument doesn't work in this particular case.
I very much doubt that the point of his dialectic is to make false statements and obscure meaning of messages in written speech.
I apologise for the sarcasm, but I genuinely do not see how his dialectic is relevant.
I'd argue that making unclear statements with deliberately-obfuscated meanings of words when supposedly talking about complex topics is far worse than being direct and clear in your messaging.
Like, for how many people do you think his text is understandable? One moment he's saying that a commodity is 'a commodity, in the language of the English economists, is "any thing necessary, useful or pleasant in life", an object of human wants, a means of existence in the widest sense of the term'/'A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another', but then a few sentences later he goes, ' We cannot tell by looking at it that the diamond is a commodity. Where it serves as an aesthetic or mechanical use-value, on the neck of a courtesan or in the hand of a glass-cutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity. To be a use-value is evidently a necessary prerequisite of the commodity, but it is immaterial to the use-value whether it is a commodity' (taken from 'A Contribution to the Critique...'), which contradicts what he previously said, including that a commodity simply has to satisfy a need, and it's not even explained why a diamond is not a commodity in those examples - it clearly satisfies a need in both cases. Furthermore, what does it mean for something to have a use-value, but to also not actually
I maintain that clear language, even if used in complex ways is much more understandable when communicating complex ideas than trying to use words in a faux-colloquial way in ways that contradict each other within the same piece of text.
Imagine if math textbooks said things like 'an angle is its cosine, and its cosine is something that is realised in the length of one of some triangle's sides', or 'a limit of a sequence of real numbers is something which the real numbers get closer and closer to'. Good luck divining what is actually meant and actually calculating a cosine of an angle and a limit of a sequence in accordance with the actual definitions if all you are given is this stuff that is not actually representative of those in any way.
On that note, I am yet to actually find any use in philosophy, no matter how hard I try to engage with it. Every time I attempt to study it to change my mind, I am hit with works that can't properly use even their own terminologies, and disciplines where the argument 'god is the most perfect imaginable being, and a perfect being has to exist, therefore god exists' arguments are considered seriously (despite the fact that they can be very easily and rigorously refuted).
And yes, you might contradict me and bring up Marx, but I'd argue that actually useful stuff from Marx doesn't require understanding of philosophy, and a relevant work could be made from the standpoint of, for example, economics.
I'd also like to argue that there isn't really much use in a field that makes claims that are both not rigorous from the standpoint of logic, and also not tested empirically.
If you would like to challenge me on this stuff, I'm all ears for examples of results from philosophy that are employed in practice, which couldn't be achieved within a different field (I'd argue that communist ideologies could just be developed through understanding of economics, without much input from philosophy), and which are not things that are employed in order to harm the working class (like, for example, nationalist philosophies used by states that engage in colonialism, in order to justify colonialism).
And no, I do not think that the field of ethics has any sort of serious applications, as things like courts of law do not actually work in accordance with morality - they work in accordance with the wishes of the ruling class, the wishes of the people responsible for the courts directly, and the sources of law and their interpretations (I'd argue, in that order), the latter of which is not the same as a system of ethics.
I will have to put reading your sources into a backlog, though, as I still have a lot of very dense stuff to go through in order to start working on academic research that I want to get published.
Can philosophers please stop deliberately obscuring the meaning of what they write?
The difficulty to understand what they write is an artificial element of their works, as far as I can see, i.e. it can be reduced by a lot if they simply start writing with more clarity, using practices that are already widely-adopted elsewhere.
EDIT: A word that I forgot when writing all that: 'literal'/'literally'. I think that philosophers should, like academics of other fields, write their works literally. There are reasons why mathematicians don't make another Yevgeniy Onegin with their every work.
I'm not going to reply to most of this, it's too long for that and I think I can get my point across is minimal points.
I think your cosine example is precisely what I needed to know I am right (I apologize back for snarkiness, I'm not angry at you either but I do think you're representing a position we must work through as a movement).
The first time you learned what a cosine was, how did your teacher explain it? Was it a mathematical proof listing the assumptions of number theory, 2-D planes, and simultaneously capturing it's geometric, graphical, and algebraic representations in one big swoop? I can guarantee you it wasn't. You learn cosine first in one of the ways (usually simple geometry as the relative lengths, and the teacher shows a triangle and doesn't explain its limitations to 2D because you're still learning), then says "and here's how this looks algebraically, and lastly "now let's plot the values of it" sometime later and you learn about trigonometry as graphical representation. And it's utility in calculus comes years later.
What was the point of this exercise? Why didn't your math book just make a 1 A-4 length list of assumptions, graphs, and images to get you up to speed in 10 minutes?
If you want to create that for a philosopher, do it! It's a great exercise in your knowledge. But that's not what the philosophers are doing, they're being the teachers. (Please understand I'm speaking well of philosophers in general, though I mean good ones specifically.)
If Marx just threw out at once every contradictory way that commodities exist and his "synthesis" of what that means they are in 1 definition, nobody would have a goddamn clue what was happening. His writing tries to get you to follow the thought process, through the contradictory stuff, to the kernel of truth represented by each of them are to greater concept. For your development as a person and thinker, it's much more useful than throwing out only "empirically proven" lists of claims.
I unfortunately think that the position you're staking is strongly correlated to the Western anti-intellectial and pro-STEM-lord bent that is preventing development in a lot of areas. If you have to go and argue with others about what is meant, that is better than just being able to accept/dismiss everything on an "empirical" whim. In fact, it's also the point. Argue that it's empirically false, even, and see how the pushback you'll receive isn't at the level of empirics but at the level of philosophy of science. Then empirics has nothing to say til we decide what proof looks like. Philosophers can pre-empt this by staking their claims in that realm, where rationality is our only tool. The Real is Rational and the Rational is Real, as Hegel liked to say.
And a small point: if you think philosophy isn't needed to be a good Marxist, you're in disagreement with every famous good Marxist I know of. Lenin fuckin loved Hegel and hated his idealism simultaneously.
I should also add: I think a handy reference list isn't a bad thing, it's just not a priority when you're Marx trying to just get the main body of work out before you die. I also think it's easier now than when he was developing his methodology simultaneously with applying it. That doesn't lend itself easily to such simplifications for easy congestion.
'The cosine of a non-right angle in a right triangle is the ratio of the length of the cathetus adjacent to the angle to the length of the hypothenuse'.
That is a perfectly workable definition for that case, and it allows you to actually find cosines of non-right angles in right triangles. The faux-definition that I provided in the previous message doesn't actually allow you to find what people call 'cosine' in any situation that I can conceive.
A definition is not a proof (roughly speaking).
It was a definition that satisfied as much rigour as it could in the context of pre-tertiary education where you don't get to learn fundamentals of geometry.
I'm not sure why you are bringing up covering a lot of topics aside from the definition 'in one big swoop'. The basic requirement for clarity is to outline the definitions that you are introducing, and to be literal when you are introducing them.
Okay? And? The way philosophers seem to do, or, at least, have done so is introduce cosine as something vague, like 'an angle is its cosine, and its cosine is something that is realised in the length of one of some triangle's sides'. Answer me, can you calculate what people usually mean by 'cosine' of any of the angles of the standard Egyptian triangle with sides 3, 4, and 5? I guarantee you, that you won't be able to.
Because that is not required to provide a definition in this case. I'm also not asking philosophers to do what you seem to think I'm asking them to.
I'm not at all sure why you think that literally all definitions require more than a short paragraph to provide. Here's an example of an actual well-regarded textbook giving a definition:
The definition in question is 4 sentences in total, taking up the space of a simple paragraph, with most of it just being due to separating the axioms by line.
My only guess for you assuming that definitions require a lot of space to be provided is because the reader needs to be aware of the context. In that sense, the context is provided before the definition. In the case of cosines, you usually aren't provided them the moment you step foot in school - you are first taught material that is prerequisite to understanding the topic. In that sense, you are given lists upon lists of A4 paper in assumptions prior to being given the relevant definition.
In the cases with more complicated definitions, such as, for example, when one first tries to study probability theory, one does get several relevant definitions, such as what a sigma-algebra is, or what a countably-additive measure is. That's not really an issue for students and for teachers.
Furthermore, we aren't talking about a textbook for children who are going through secondary or tertiary education. We are talking about a supposed study of economies at a high level, one which is notoriously difficult to understand. There is no excuse for not introducing clarity in your writing in this case.
Also, I'd like to ask you, consider a constructor-engineer who develops some complicated device and provides blueprints for engineers who will be responsible for making parts for the device, and for assembling the device. The constructor, however, decided to, instead of producing unambiguous blueprints, leave a lot of important proportions of the device undefined, and provided contradictory - or even obviously impossible - instructions for other parts. The other engineers now have to play a guessing game of what the constructor meant in each of those cases, which leads to an improper assembly of the device, with badly made fitting parts. I guess, I could also make a joke here about engineers splitting into several groups by their interpretation of the blueprints, with those groups calling each other 'revisionist'.
Whom are they teaching? If they are only teaching each other, then what use is this 'teaching". If they want to teach other people, they should learn to communicate better - by not lying to their students' faces and by speaking unambiguously, - and to do that, they can adopt tools that have been in use elsewhere in the academic environment.
Furthermore, teachers actually do provide outlined definitions.
No, that's not what I'm asking if you mean 'If Marx just ignored the dialectical contradictions in how commodities exist', as, otherwise, this piece of your reply makes no sense.
What is being asked is for Marx to clearly define what a commodity is, instead of contradicting himself after initially introducing what a commodity is. A commodity is initially said that it is anything that satisfies a need, which I don't see how it can be interpreted as anything other than 'a commodity is anything that has a use-value', but then, a few paragraphs later, he says that every commodity has a use-value, but not everything that has a use-value is a commodity, which is a very clear issue with what he says.
Okay, if you do have a clue what is happening here, then explain - with proof in the form of citations of Marx - what is a commodity by Marx, and how something might have a use-value but not be a commodity, but also for a commodity to be anything that satisfies a need. Can anybody do this?
It seems to me that this case is very clear - either we should accept that a commodity is anything that can satisfy a need, or that something might have a use-value - i.e. it can satisfy a need - and not be a commodity. In either case, Marx is wrong somewhere by virtue of contradicting himself.
Other academic fields manage to work with definitions just fine. Literal language, outlined structure, consistent usage of words all help to make text less ambiguous and more understandable.
It would be much, much easier if, instead of speaking in riddles, one would just clearly state what they want to state, without contradicting themselves, or engaging in other such nonsense that makes the meaning of text ambiguous and forcing the reader to play a guessing game regarding what the author meant.
Like, I have encountered a bunch of people at this point who claim to have read Capital, and it's pretty clear that they not only do not understand economics in general, they also do not understand Capital, and they also don't have a clue about how definitions work.
This is honestly silly. We are talking about a supposedly-academic work of research. If a work is neither rigorous by the standards of logic, nor provide claims that are empirically tested, its academic value is that of a common kitchen talk.
If an academic work is more concerned with the reader growing as a person and a thinker, it can be structured in a better way than making itself hard to read for no good reason.
And I'd argue that that is an incorrect conclusion for a few reasons:
It seems that you meant to say something other than you intended to say here, but I'm not sure what it is that you intended to say.
Not sure what 'empirical whim' is, either. What I said when I even brought up empirical studies was that there isn't much academic value in research that is backed by neither logic nor empirical testing. We might as well accept all kitchen talk as academic research that should be published now.
If you think that it is wrong for somebody to ask what somebody else meant when what they say is self-contradictory and/or ambiguous, then I'm not sure how you can claim that philosophers want other people to grow as people, given that they do not communicate anything of note, but just provide text that other people can project their what they want onto.
--character limit--
I'm not sure why this obsession with just one part of what I said when I brought up empirical studies. Not only did I never claim that philosophers generally try to produce research backed by empirical testing - I am fully aware, that their studies are usually attempted as rational, - I also brought up rational studies, i.e. ones backed by logic. Hell, what sort of studies do you think mathematicians produce - empirical or rational?
If a work of research is not backed by logic, and is not backed by empirical studies, why should it be listened to over any two random people having a casual conversation about whatever it is they want to talk about in the kitchen?
I am both fine disagreeing with people, even if I hold them in high regard, and also fine with them not understanding what idealism is.
And yes, as a mathematical Platonist, I am an idealist. And no, I do not see that producing any sort of significant disagreement with any sort of Marxist thought. And yes, people have tried directing me to the writings of Marxist thinkers who, supposedly do claim that there are such disagreements, but what they seem to address are Renaissance-inspired idealist schools of thought. Even then, they fail to address all of such schools of thought, as, for example, by their definition(s) (they seem to all concur on one), various types of Christian idealism are not idealist schools of thought.
"I am an idealist" :he-admit-it:
But seriously, I have no real stakes in platonism, though if you ask me, platonism is just misplaced materialism because numbers very obviously exist in the interactions between themselves within material reality. But I do not care at all about this and find it entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand
I think you're entirely incorrect in thinking that philosophy isn't based in logic. Sometimes that logic is flawed, and sometimes I think someome is wrong but rational anyways, and that the useful thing is to find out how that rationality is based on something real to critique that. But this idea of a "logic" which you think just beats philosophy is sophomoric and gives away that you've never studied it outside of a math book. Taking a philosophy of science class from a non-maths professor would be useful, I think.
To clarify: you are the one requesting philosophy, including Marx, is done in some other way. I am explaining the value of the way it's done relative to your preferred method. I also have a math background, I've taken all the classes. Your idea of rigour is misplaced, though useful in maths. When a good philosopher writes, they're not speaking in riddles, it's maintaining the proper amount of specificity to not err in range of a claim while writing a NEW IDEA for the first time in the way that will lead the reader to understanding it in its totality, not within the framework which the reader had before the work. The form of an argument in math can be simplified and more easily rigorous because there are standards assumptions of number theory and such. There is no such basis in philosophy which one doesn't need to argue for simultaneously with the arguments at higher levels. Analytic philosophy assumes dialectical claims impossible "a=b and a=/=b". If we're talking about form and content, you may be able to use set symbols to get your point across, but set theory doesn't have an easy way to represent that a is in the set of b but also partially defines b through its own inclusion, and itself is different after its inclusion, as well. I'm not saying it's not possible, but the fact that the terminology isn't agreed upon by all makes your idea of rigour very difficult. It's not just context, it's arguing about what types of assumptions are even allowed and how those relate in new usages.
I do not believe that you got a 1 line definition to learn cosine and that that was sufficient. It had to be explained how taking the opposite side instead wasn't correct, that we're dealing with triangles with 1 right angle (because you, like other kids, probably thought about that possibility for at least a bit), how it won't change with the size of a triangle, how it was often not a rational number but that that's fine, etc. It's drawing the entire playing field and the limits and all related concepts as they relate to it at once. Otherwise you wouldn't have learned it. Not just context, but underlying connections and to the context and about how the context shifts once you know this!
If you read Capital as a communist having read many other works, it seems unnecessarily long and doesn't just directly state what you know he wants to say, like hearing a teacher explain to a 12 year old what a cosine is for the first time. When you read it as a non-knowledgeable person on the topic, it's confusing and contradictory, and yet he seems to be claiming those things are simultaneously true..that is also how kids feel hearing about cosine for the first time. Capital isn't even the best one here for this example, I'd go with German Ideology. It's riddled with the same difficulties, but I will stick to Capital for discussion's sake.
When you work within the framework of other economic disciplines, disproving Marx is absurdly easy. Claim that value is circular logic and that Marx can't describe how price and value relate. Outside of the framework he's building, this is obvious. But he's simultaneously trying to introduce that framework, and just placing definitions that he makes up doesn't lead the reader to understand his definition. It takes some lines (in Marx, some pages) to get the concept as he is introducing it into the mind of the reader. He also pre-empts as many counter-arguments as possible for even more rigour every time he introduces a concept (this is how Germans wrote works then).
Your example of Marx contradicting himself is a great example. He's walking through every way that a commodity can be seen so that he can distill precisely what about it makes it a commodity. Is it that it has use-value? Partly, but that doesn't capture it completely, so then we go to exchange to flesh out it's more useful and true form to the topic at hand. It may be that you call a stick you found something with "use-value" but that use value has no way to connect to exchange as value, because exchanging it doesn't make it value in and of itself either. He doesn't say "that's not true!" About his own claims, because he means to say that "of course this is true, and this is true also, because I'm stemming from Hegel's methods where any other way to claim this is more confusing than this way, because the truth doesn't lie between these facts but in their interaction and movement in exchange!" Remove it from that context and it's a dumb claim. If you think we're too removed from Hegel for this method of writing to be useful, find another person who tries to translate it to modern day language, or do it yourself. It's useful and good work, but I've not found too many good translations to modern language and understanding. I'm not going to clip parts of Capital for you, sorry. Maybe another day but its nice weather and I'm reading something else.
I was not calling you a STEM-Lord, I was claiming that the reason that you think what you think is similar to the reason STEM-lords can't handle philosophy and end up anti-intellectual in the reactionary sense. Your example of taking philosophy and comparing it to engineering is an obvious case of this. Marx wasn't writing so that anything could be recreated, what would someone even be recreating??? No, he was convincing people of the way that history relates to the present and future and material reality relates to us and our creative labour.
While I understand your frustration with philosophy, the examples you bring up of marx contradicting himself aren't actually contradictory. When marx says that a commodity is a use value, and then latter that it is an exchange value, both are correct.
Commodities are members of both the use value and exchange value sets of items. It is no different from me saying that "camels are animals", then latter on saying that "camels are dessert dwelling creatures".
I think you will get a lot more out of marx if you do actually treat him literally, while being careful in remembering that the meanings of some important words have shifted over time. Marx is one of the few philoaohers who was heavily inspired by contemporary science. If you are familiar with science, and a bit of history, you will actually see a lot of parallels between marxist concepts and scientific/mathematical concepts.
For example, exchange value and labor-power are direct economic analougues of heat and horse-power. The concept of contradictions was taken from derivatives, and his reproduction schemes that he invented in volume 2 of capital are rigorous mathematical treatments of the economy that are still used today, even by bourgeoise statisticians.
Marx was heavily interested in science and maths, frequently attending lectures whenever he could. He always kept up with the latest scientific developments. He would often even do things like writing letters to people like Charles Darwin asking them for clarifications on their theories.