Marx Season 1 QnA | Red Plateaus
Channel: Red Plateaus
Date: 20/10/2019

This is the QnA video for season 1 of our series on Marx's thought.

We keep the QnA fast and loose to let us focus on new content.

Questions (thanks to RURK2 for timestamps):
Q1 (0:45) When Marx thinks that human development is what’s valuable in itself, isn’t he making a normative claim that we SHOULD maximise human development, perhaps that all people should have equal access to human development, or something like that? Isn’t that basically having a conception of morality or at least justice?

Q2 (6:53) Wouldn’t Marx’s notion of human development always be, or have to be, based on some pre-established yardstick? Different societies typically have different standards for what they consider to be important or essential. A medieval peasant isn’t really expected to be able to drive or assemble IKEA furniture, while a modern office worker is rarely expected to be able to harvest barley.

Q3 (8:27) What is the relation between the Labour Theory of Value and Marx’s thinking on Human Development and Freedom?

Q4 (12:57) Marx has a positive concept of freedom. But didn’t Isaiah Berlin show that such positive concepts of freedom can be used to justify totalitarianism? If being free is defined as living or acting in a certain way, doesn’t that mean that it becomes possible for someone else to know better than you do how you must live to be free? If so, can’t they then force you to live in exactly the way you need to in order to count as ‘free’? Doesn’t this justify things like churches or states forcing everyone to live like they say, because only doing that can make everyone free?

Q5 (17:24) Isn’t Marx’s conception of ‘consciousness’ as a single, undivided thing that separates human beings from other animals a bit implausible in light of what we now know about the cognitive capacities of other animals, in particular other primates?

Q6 (19:29) Contrary to what you are implying here (at 4:20 in the video on communism), Kautsky's conception of Social Democracy as the historic merger of the socialist and working class movement (cf. Kautsky's The Class Struggle) is not at all elitist and is in line with Marx's teachings. It's simply a historical fact that socialism pre-dates the emergence of the modern proletariat, that the working class movement wasn't consciously socialist at the beginning and that scientific socialism was synthesised by petty-bourgeois intellectuals (i.e. Marx and Engels). This is the core of Lenin's critique of economism in What is to be Done? and is very much based on a Marxist understanding of class consciousness. Georg Lukacs gives a very good elaboration of this idea in his Tailism and the Dialectics (…). 
As Lenin explains - in What is to be Done?: 'Correct class consciousness' (he uses the term social democratic consciousness here) 'would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, that mean conviction of the necessity of organising as trade unionists, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.' ( What i to be Done?, CW 5, p. 375). However, this is a historical process, and the spontaneous element is the germ seed of a conduct that is conscious of its aims (ibid.). Moreover, the transition cannot take place elementally. In spite of this, there is, of course, a dialectical interrelationship between this 'from without' and the working class. For while Marx and Engels stem from the bourgeois class, the development of their doctrine is, nevertheless, a product of the development of the working class - of course not in any immediate way. 

Q7 (24:16) We got another kind of question on the communism video. In that, we said that the Soviet Union wasn’t what Marx called communist. Isn’t that heresy against any true Marxism?

Full season playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfqdvDnX3lbCtADtZDCg0HQB3Nime4rVS