My developing views on Marxism: a retrospective

I have been a Marxist since my late teens. In my early twenties I was a member of the International Marxist Group, British Section of the Fourth International. I was learning Leninist-Trotskyist politics and didn't dwell on Marxist economics.

From my mid-twenties I couldn't see any prospects of a Bolshevik-style revolution anywhere in the world. Politics was put on a back-burner while marriage, family and career took centre stage. My intellectual preoccupations in these decades were maths and physics, artificial intelligence, computer science, telecoms network design and so on.

In my sixties my curiosity resumed. I've had time to come to terms with Marxism, to engage with the volumes of Capital, the many books on Marxist economics, and to investigate what Marx actually wrote and believed. I documented this journey through the posts below.

My final conclusions? Marx's methodology is good, his approach to sociology is correct. He's not in the business of peddling self-serving illusions about the way societies work. He lacks, however, a good theory of human nature, which leads him astray as regards the concept of communism. He underestimated how successful capitalism turned out to be and the myriad ways it can successfully address many human needs. Revolution is indeed off the agenda; capitalism is actually threatened by its relentless drive to total automation.

We need to integrate into Marx's general approach what has subsequently been learned about human beings: their material drives, their psychology and their differences, to develop a more profound and truthful sociology.

My summary view: From Marxism to (methodological) nihilism (via sociobiology).

---

Here are my posts on Marxist theory:

1. Workers, slaves, androids - and agency
2. Why Marxism refuses to die
3. Simple Reproduction in an Abstract Capitalist Society
4. Expanded Reproduction in an Abstract Capitalist Society
5. Blue Labour - so disappointing
6. Paul Mason and PostCapitalism
7. On the Corbyn New Left
8. Communism would be like - what?
9. And this is the best you could do?
10. Revolution back on the agenda?
11. "What Is Orthodox Marxism?"
12. Marx on Slavery
13. Marx and the Universal Basic Income (UBI)
14. 1917-2017: the collapse of the revolutionary left
15. "They dismiss the last workers from their fully automated factories"
16. Total automation under capitalism?
17. Marx: "Right about capitalism, wrong about socialism"
18. Q. "How do I get into Marxism?"
19. "The United Socialist States of Europe"
20. Why Marxists should embrace Capitalism
21. "The Socialist System" - János Kornai
22. Leon Trotsky on communism
23. Perry Anderson on Western Marxism and Hegemony
24. Perry Anderson's Marxism.
25. Advanced AI is indistinguishable from slavery
26. No communism without abundance
27. Michael Roberts: Total Automation under Capitalism
28. "The Limits to Capital" by David Harvey (2007)
29. Michael Roberts on Keynesianism & the modern left
30. The Law of Accumulation - and competition
31. Socialist Revolution in the 21st Century
32. May Day review of "Marx 200" by Michael Roberts
33. The ties that bind
34. Capitalism with total automation? In principle, sure
35. The reification/ossification of theory: Samir Amin
36. The Virus of Marxism
37. Capitalism is hard to get started
38. When Keynes comes to town
39. The LTOV including rent answers critics
40. The relative autonomy of the petty bourgeoisie
41. The Communist Party of Britain
42. Modelling total automation under capitalism (a progress report)
43. Five questions on the last days of capitalism
44. Capitalism incompatible with total automation/slavery
45. Lenin 2017: Slavoj Zizek
46. The misunderstandings of eusociality
47. Beyond capitalism: is this the best we can hope for?
48. From Marxism to (methodological) nihilism (via sociobiology)

---

Adam Carlton, co-author on this blog, wrote this story on total automation: Super-Fab.