Another Thing My Students Can't Grasp...

By -
is that Marx and Engels were, in some ways, great admirers of capitalism. No matter how many times I say that they thought capitalism was a necessary historical phase, and how many quotes I show them praising the tremendous growth capitalism had produced, when I give them a multiple choice question, they keep choosing "Marx thought capitalism should never have happened."

Comments

  1. Jim12:13 PM

    And on top of that, the claim that Marx was a ponderous, boring writer turns out to be a lie. I haven't read Capital and don't expect to, but I randomly followed a link to a passage of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon earlier this year and ended up reading the whole thing in a day because it was just that well-written. He knew how to turn a phrase, and he could be scathingly funny.

    I'm told his dispatches re the American Civil War are also excellent.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah12:17 PM

    It's their professor who is ponderous and boring, Jim.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thomas L. Knapp2:23 PM

    Indeed.

    Lenin et al, right up to at least 1905 and possibly 1917, assumed that Russia was not yet ready for a socialist revolution -- that it would have to fully emerge from feudalism, evolve a bourgeois middle class and a capitalist economy first.

    They assumed that because that's precisely how Marx and Engels envisioned things in their theory of history.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more

Against their will / we were taxing against their will / we were young and we were strong and we were taxing against their will

By -
Never one to allow a mistake to go uncompounded by a glaring error, Bob Murphy digs in deeper . He claims that "Taking money from people against their will is not akin to getting on the treadmill; it is akin to killing people against their will." Bob has introduced a largely irrelevant criterion here with his "against their will." Let us start with killing. (No, no, not killing Bob : we still love him despite his obstinacy.) The justice of a killing does not depend at all on whether the "victim" wants to be killed. If I shoot someone who is attempting to set off a nuclear weapon in Times Square, the fact that I killed him "against his will" does not make my killing immoral. And if a friend who is in despair asks me to shoot him in the head, the fact that he wants me to kill him would not make my action moral. Similarly, in taking money from people, the crucial question is whether you are taking it justly or unjustly, not whether they wan...
Read more