Everyone’s Talking About Karl Marx!
In response to this dispute between Chris Bertram and Brad DeLong I think I agree that a professor who doesn’t mention Stalin or Pol Pot in his introduction to Marx is only drawing more attention to the issue. I think the correct reply is to observe that a lot of 20th century political movements had roots in Marxist or Marx-influenced 19th century parties. Not just Stalin but also many of Stalin’s opponents in the USSR, to say nothing of the Social Democratic parties in Germany and Scandinavia and the Netherlands and Spain and the “Eurocommunists” of France and Italy as well as to some extent the Anglophone Labor parties and the French socialists. From this you see that (a) Marx was an influential thinker who’s worth studying, and (b) there aren’t obvious and unequivocal connections between things written in the 1860s and actual political outcomes decades later.
Meanwhile, both The Atlantic and Foreign Policy have new articles out on Marx, suggesting a resurgence of middlebrow American interest in the man. Both pieces, however, seem to me to be merely playing at transgressiveness. The big point both make is that Marx wrote a long time ago about how financial crises were endemic to capitalism. It’s both true that Marx wrote this and true that financial crises are endemic to capitalism. But while this was pretty far-sighted at the time Marx wrote it, the passage of time has rendered, I think, a bit banal. At any rate, this is hardly high up on the list of Marx’s distinctive ideas.
After all, Marx believed a lot of stuff that’s not incredibly controversial today, like that children should be guaranteed free education and the government should control the national transportation infrastructure. He also believed in some other ideas like heavy taxation of estates that are controversial but hardly shocking.
Meanwhile, both pieces are illustrated with sort of weird pop art portraits of Marx. While nominally the articles are supposed to reflect our present-day worries about the viability of capitalism, all the atmospherics and the rhetoric (look at me! talking about Marx!) seem almost as if they’re exhuming the corpse in order to demonstrate to the village that it’s still dead. Not to explore our doubts about capitalism, in other words, but to quiet them by making it seem as if Marx doesn’t have anything to say that we don’t already know.
At any rate, the part of Marx that recent events have reminded me of is the stuff about ideology—how the wealth and power of the banking class caused us to forget all kinds of things that we once knew, and start rewriting not only the laws and policies but also our understanding of economics and even social understandings about ethics.
54 Responses to “Everyone’s Talking About Karl Marx!”
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April 23rd, 2009 at 8:42 am
Marx’s lasting contribution was to show that capitalism was not, as Adam Smith would have it, the logical product of human propensities, but rather an evolved product and not necessarily a final culmination. Ironically, for all of the talk of Marxism as a rigid determinism, it was an antidote to determinism, not to mention triumphalism. While the operational details of Marxism economics are nonsense, the general idea that there are modes of production, each one implying a certain sociopolitical superstructure, and that the motor of change from one mode of production to another is class struggle (or whatever less-loaded phrase you prefer), is as accurate a representation of the Big Picture of world history as you’re likely to find in 50 words or less.
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:48 am
Well said. Not to mention that Marxist ideology is key to understanding a lot of strands of thought in a variety of disciplines, from sociology to media studies — it’s always fascinating to me to see his tentacles reach into so many areas.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:04 am
Rich in PA put it better than I could.
I’ll only add that another key insight of Marx is his view of accumulation as the source of crisis. Specifically, over-accumulation, and the lack of productive uses of capital over time as the problem. The crisis itself, where infrastructure or whatever gets degraded is ultimately the correction to this problem. See WWII, where we all destroyed a bunch of stuff, and then had to rebuild it – got us out of the great depression. Contrast this with the prevailing view that trillions of dollars sloshing around financial markets on a daily basis, without being put to actually producing anything, as somehow something to be celebrated.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:10 am
To sum up Rich’s observation at #1 and Matt’s point about ideology, you might say that Marx’s enduring contribution is historical materialism: a view of history that emphasizes economic structures and class interests, and (at least) raises a skeptical eyebrow at stories about big ideas. You don’t have to believe in Marx’s particular version of the dialectic to see that this approach is a valuable tool to have.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:15 am
One more thing…DeLong’s lecture shows a pretty superficial understanding of Marx. His discussion of the commodity fetish descends into the ridiculous. See also, he’s pissy posts on David Harvey, where he clearly doesn’t understand Harvey’s argument, and somehow thinks he’s refuting him by throwing out some theorem that’s not even relevant to what Harvey was saying. It was a typical example of the intellectual autism of economists.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:21 am
Getting back to Matt’s opening topic (DeLong vs. Bertram on whether to mention the murderous Marxists of the 20th century), I’d say two things. First, DeLong is naive to think that not mentioning Stalin and Pol Pot in an undergraduate discussion of Marx only draws more attention to them; US undergraduates, by and large, don’t know who Stalin and Pol Pot were, and even if they know them as by-words of mass murder and tyranny, they don’t know they were Marxists. You’ll never go broke underestimating the historical knowledge of even nominally bright US undergraduates.
Second, I think it’s vital to mention them because the really big meta-issue, that it would be a colossal waste not to discuss, is the relationship between ideology and action. Talk about “teaching the debate”…here the debate is between those who see Marxism as a necessary precondition for the murderousness of Stalinism, and those who see murderous tyranny as something we just get from time to time, and it’s underwritten by whatever happens to be out there ideologically. That’s the debate that elevates a class on Marxism, perhaps not important in itself to most students, into something vitally important to everyone.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:22 am
Re “how the wealth and power of the banking class caused us to forget all kinds of things that we once knew, and start rewriting not only the laws and policies but also our understanding of economics and even social understandings about ethics.”
—————-
1) Well, a lot of socio-economic theory got shut off from consideration by Americans due to our elites waging war against Communism.
2) That war, in turn, was driven by some pretty concrete events far from the influence of the bankers: Two spy rings composed of US citizens giving Stalin the atomic bomb — and hence the power to destroy America’s cities. This just after a global war which had left much of the developed world in ruins.
3) What saves capitalism time after time is not any merit of capitalism but nationalism — the closing of ranks in response to war with an external enemy. War also enrichs the capitalists — Democratic President Woodrow Wilson sent socialist Eugene Debs to prison for pointing that out.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 am
Like Freud, Marx influenced people who hate him as much as people who love him. If you’re even talking about warring ideologies of human economic behavior, you’re engaging in a Marxian dialogue. You can’t escape Karl.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:25 am
Indeed, Ted. The most notable historical materialists in American politics today are probably the libertarians.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:25 am
I don’t understand the American fixation on blaming Marx for despots who gave him lip service. In a discussion of early Islam, should Iran’s clerical state be discussed? How about Al Qaeda?
Marx seems a lot more noteworthy to me, from a philosophical context, as paving the way for non-institutional bourgeois philosophy. Like Voltaire, he doesn’t fit into an academic model (as does Sartre or Hegel) while also appealing to the middle class (rather than aristocracy). I’d say he’s up there with St. Paul in terms of turning on disinterested people to philosophy.
Marx is no boogieman, and saying that his personal advocacy of a few misbegotten political movements (which went on to become European social democratic parties, not Russian or Cambodian parties) is hypocritical in light of his contemporaries, all of whom were fucking monarchists.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:25 am
Yes, yes! Marx naturally and ineluctably led to Stalin and Pol Pot, of course. Capitalism, blameless in all world conflicts, can stand proud in its systemic avoidance of all barbarity. The unspoiled maiden of social-economic systems!
What’s that the big man says about capitalism? Between equal rights, something something?
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:28 am
1) Plus our universities are the successors of the religious orders of the Middle Ages and earlier, inheriting both the mannerisms, customs and mindset of those orders.
2) As Edward Gibbon pointed out, that class has always been on the side of power and privilege and has never been an advocate for the rights of the common citizens. It has an acute sensitivity to who is placing what in the collection plate — and trims its sails according. Just Ask Ward Churchill.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:34 am
All the Hegelian determinism seemed wackadoodle to me when I read Marx. I remember a lot of later Marxist philosophers said it wasn’t the case that Marx was an economic determinist, but I thought they were moving the goalposts (”culture,” “custom”).
But what looks more relevant is what musa describes:
“another key insight of Marx is his view of accumulation as the source of crisis. Specifically, over-accumulation, and the lack of productive uses of capital over time as the problem”
This has come to mind a number of times, and about what consitututes wealth in extremes of exchange (derivatives markets) and non-exchange (the Robinson Crusoe discussion). Is “use value” of wealth a good argument for the stimulus?
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:34 am
I tend toward a, well, I hate this word, but it fits, “contrarian” approach to Marx.
When he’s totally dismissed as a figure who did nothing but lead to Lenin and then Stalin, I think it’s crucial to bring up the issues Marx actually wrote about himself, the context in which he wrote and argued and acted, and what seemed lacking in other approaches.
When Marx is treated as a completely scientific figure who wrote a near Bible predicting much of human affairs like a scientific formula (as I used to encounter from doctrinaire Marxists), then I am drawn to emphasize the contradictions in Marx’s thoughts, the justified objections and criticisms made during his time, and how a view of Marx as The Seer served as a replacement for the authoritarian religious evangelism that many were comfortable with.
And regarding the Lenin / Stalin / Mao / Pol Pot connection, it cannot be avoided, but one must make some sort of initial decision whether the locus of inquiry is on one of those figures and how in their own minds Marx figured, or if the locus of inquiry is on Marx.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:35 am
I mentioned the Robinson Crusoe discussion but I left out what it currently seems analogous to: housing market.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:37 am
Hey, what about me? I think people should also be discussing my views, at length!
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:39 am
Geez, I can’t even spell my own name.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:43 am
Sure. And dont forget to always mention Pinochet when discussing Milton Friedman.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:49 am
Sure. And dont forget to always mention Pinochet when discussing Milton Friedman.
Excellent point. At least Marx wasn’t actively providing contemporaneous assistance to any of the later monsters that claimed to cite his ideas.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:56 am
Karl bears a resemblance to Santa Claus, no?
Seriously, Karl was the first one to get a glimpse of economic equilibrium shifts, and the quantum restrictions on economic production systems. He understood the second constraint on economics that the other classics missed. Not only do we adjust demand and supply to match, but we have a second constraint, the production system has to agglomerate to share risk equally among the sectors in the supply chain.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:01 am
There is only one party you mention that I know anything about–the German social democrats (SPD). Of course, this party was never really Marxist. They were (and continue to be in very self-conscious ways) Lassallian. It would be worth remembering that Marx was a thinker of his time, that he was not the only one to influence socialist politics, etc.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:10 am
Matt must have seen the posters going up around DC now proclaiming that “Marx is Back”.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:27 am
Forget all this fancy-pants book stuff — if you REALLY want to understand Marx, you just have to listen to the Red Shadow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz6c6kaFG5E
Yes, it’s a real, and weird, band from the mid-70s. Imagine if Manhattan Transfer were a bunch of Marxist econ students. I disavow any responsibility for what happens to your brain if you click the link.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:31 am
“There is only one party you mention that I know anything about–the German social democrats (SPD). Of course, this party was never really Marxist. They were (and continue to be in very self-conscious ways) Lassallian.”
You could argue that the great Bernstein synthesized the Lassallian and Marxist positions within the SPD. It’s worth noting that both Lassalle and Marx were consciously followers of Hegel.
“It would be worth remembering that Marx was a thinker of his time, that he was not the only one to influence socialist politics, etc.”
Since socialism was frequently advocated for even in ancient Greece (in Plato’s Republic, for just one text) and Doyne Dawson makes the argument that socialism was a main thread of ancient Greek economic thought, socialism’s hardly new. More’s Utopia and Campanella’s City of the Sun both also advocate for socialism.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:33 am
Wow, Chilly.
It’s like Schoolhouse Rock, if the Cold War had gone the other way.
And now, everyone’s favorite Eastern European cat and mouse team, Worker and Parasite.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:45 am
“And now, everyone’s favorite Eastern European cat and mouse team, Worker and Parasite.”
Actually, Eastern Europeans have always been very good at animation, and there were some very amusing children’s cartoons and shows on TV in the Soviet Union (as I remember it from my now-distant early youth). I don’t remember them being particularly massively ideological – as you would expect, they had lots of animal characters, magic, witches, small boys as plucky heroes, etc.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:48 am
In the 19th century, the British starved millions in the name of Adam Smith. In the 20th century, the Soviets starved millions in the name of Karl Marx.
Does this mean that Smith or Marx condoned mass murder? No. Both of them had some good ideas and some bad ideas. It is our responsibility to sort them out, not take refuge in blind ideology. We cannot delegate our thinking to the dead.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:57 am
“Marx believed a lot of stuff that’s not incredibly controversial today, like that children should be guaranteed free education ”
Yes children. However, he vehemently denounced the idea of publicly subsidized universities, which he identified with the US midwest. He wrote (in the Critique of the Gotha Program) that this was the only way to make workers pay for the education of the children of the bourgeoisie). Not among those of his views stressed by CUNY students.
Oh and, while he supported universal primary education (which existed at the time he wrote in the Northern States of the Union) that doesn’t mean he opposed child labor. Being practical, he assumed the best that could be managed was to combine the two.
Many of his views seem rather extreme today, but not necessarily far left.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:07 am
#27 The ideas of Smith helped turn society on its head (remember the good old days when the banking class were called by their real name: liberals?) and the ideas of Marx were an attempt to fill the void in society that was left by the wrecking crew of liberal capitalism. Neither worked. Whenever people get around to realizing that neither liberalism (e.g. Republicans or what we call “conservatives”) nor socialism (e.g. Democrats or what we call “liberals”) will lead us back to sanity, then, maybe, we can have a real discussion.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:35 am
Hey, Chilly, send that Red Shadow link to Bill O’Reilly anonymously with a note that it’s being passed around on the Matthew Yglesias Blog at the Center for American Progress.
Bill’s always ripe for a hot expose — he will lead the HORDE to this blog.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:40 am
Aw, if you’re going to talk about early social democratic parties then you’ve got to talk about Ruskin too. And nobody wants to hear about Ruskin. Better to not talk about Marx at all.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:59 am
Just to follow up on the side thread about Soviet animation, this collection of propaganda cartoons is a must-see.
The “Masters of Russian Animation” series is also definitely worth checking out for non-political material.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Also it turns out that all those wealthy investment bankers are actually closet Marxists, who reckon their high income is entirely justified by the fact that they work long hours and take phone calls at 2am. Isn’t that precisely Marx’s Labor Theory of Value ? That a certain quantity of labor has an inherent “value” regardless of whether the results of the labor are useful to anyone else.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Blaming Marx for Stalin’s crimes is sort of like blaming Christ for the Inquisition. Stalin’s (or Pol Pot’s) understanding of Marxism was so primitive that calling him a Marxist is almost akin to calling Sarah Palin a disciple of Milton Friedman. Stalin was really a Russian nationalist who used Marx as a convenient organizing point after Tsarism had been discredited. In any case, it’s hardly noteworthy to point out that very few “Marxists”, in the political sense, have actually read Marx all the way through, if at all.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:44 pm
I would hope that it’s not about “blaming Marx” for Stalin’s crimes, but rather inquiring into what aspects of Marx’s arguments seemed to support the arguments of a Stalin or weaken the arguments of a Stalin.
There were, in fact, contemporaries of Marx who made the argument that some of Marx’s arguments or assumptions (or hazy suggestions, given that the vast majority of Marx’s writing was an analysis of capitalism and its dilemmas rather than any systematic writing about alternate forms of political-economic systems) would lead to unjustifiably authoritarian ends.
This comes back to a choice of emphasis, between Karl Marx as a historical figure, and Karl Marx as an individual, human scholar, a scholar who made arguments, and whose arguments — like those of any scholar of scientists — can be examined and found supporting or wanting.
If Stalin had made some new and innovative argument in physics which was still accepted today, it might be icky, but you don’t intellectually evaluate a particular argument based on the identity of the arguer.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:46 pm
See WWII, where we all destroyed a bunch of stuff, and then had to rebuild it – got us out of the great depression.
Or, because the feds dropped spending by 2/3, people were freed to produce wealth.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Right on target.
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
“There were, in fact, contemporaries of Marx who made the argument that some of Marx’s arguments or assumptions (or hazy suggestions, given that the vast majority of Marx’s writing was an analysis of capitalism and its dilemmas rather than any systematic writing about alternate forms of political-economic systems) would lead to unjustifiably authoritarian ends.”
I would agree that’s correct. But we shouldn’t ignore that the operationalized Marxism of the twentieth century was extremely heavily influenced by things like Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. Now, Marx probably made people more open to Georges Sorel than might have otherwise been the case.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Why on earth would we have to talk about Ruskin? Why not talk about Oneida too, if we want to discuss Things that Have Nothing to Do with the Life of Karl Marx?
Should I reiterate that Adam Smith was a monarchist who was against the American Revolution? And that Milton Friedman directly approved–and created–the policies of Pinochet?
I mean, we KNOW what their preferred states would look like.
Why should we feel compelled to talk about the OJ Simpson murders when we’re discussing the history of the Buffalo Bills?
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:10 pm
But we shouldn’t ignore that the operationalized Marxism of the twentieth century was extremely heavily influenced by things like Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. Now, Marx probably made people more open to Georges Sorel than might have otherwise been the case.
Second half of the twentieth maybe a little bit. But in the first half Sorel belonged to the anarchists & syndicalists and was (mis-) appropriated by the fascists, and dogmatic Marxism was and is pretty openly in theoretical opposition, with public and passionate splits in the 1st and 2nd International. Marx had some confusion at the time of the Paris Commune, but after that the argument in any theoretical Marxist circles was over. Lenin despised, and after the Revolution, slaughtered the anarchists. And then there’s Spain.
Those who were attracted to the Propaganda of the Deed had a chain Blanqui-Bakunin-Most-Berkman and maybe Debord and Autonomists. It is pretty much an anti-Marxist socialism/communism to the degree it is socialism at all.
Sorel doesn’t belong to the Marxist Left.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Okay to say that those names and movements in the second paragraph have no Marxist influences is wrong. The analyses are similar
But it is exactly in the “operationalized”, tactical and strategic theories where Sorel and most 19th & 20th century Marxists conflicted.
Personally, I am closer to Sorel than Bernstein or Lenin, but I do know the difference.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Marx said, near the end of his life: “I am not a Marxist”. He was a philosopher, maybe the last one.
April 23rd, 2009 at 3:28 pm
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/06/what_is_living_.html
Matt, this post is kind of interesting, and it’s along similar lines. Leiter is looking at the estate tax through the lens of marx.
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I really cannot understand the line of reasoning that discussing Marx requires a mention of Stalin or Pol Pot. Do we require that any discussion of Adam Smith or Ricardo require a disclosure about every imperialist and murderer who operated under the supposed ideals of capitalism? I guess every time Brad Delong writes a neoclassical screed, as he is prone, he must mention King Leopold, Pinochet or really any of the colonial operations built on resource dominance.
While I might like a mention, being the leftist I am, it is a uncessary distraction from the merits of the ideas. People who misuse ideology for poltical purposes are the culprits, not the original scholars in whose name the acts were purportadly commited in name of.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Wow, a fascinating thread, and a very intelligent one by the standard of the Yglesian commentariat. There have been several interesting questions raised here, which I’ll try to address.
Was Stalin the logical outcome of Marxism, or a faithful Marxist? The answer in logical terms is clearly no. Stalin was little more than a cynical gangster, who used Marxist economics, revolutionary millenialism, Russian nationalism and even at one point religion in order to cement his power. In America, he would have been an exceptionally effective Chicago gangland don. In Russia, the tragedy was he became its leader.
Some other tyrants, like Mao and Pol Pot were ideological fanatics more than power hungry cynics, but their ideology was (I think) based on a selective and distorted interpretation of Marx. Marx wasn’t even a big fan of the death penalty, and would have been horrified at the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward.
Clearly not every Marxist state turned into a neo-Stalinist hellhole. Yugoslavia didn’t, and Nicaragua didn’t, and at the expense of offending the Cuban and Vietnamese exiles, neither Cuba nor Viet Nam did. They were authoritarian states, certainly, but none of them characterized by the kind of random butchery, famines, or genocides that Stalin carried out. Equally as clearly, though, the malign influence of Stalin was a deep and pernicious one that in some way fatally marred most of the Eastern Bloc nations, and more than anything else helped to ensure the victory of capitalism.
Now the big question: Was this in any way the fault of Marx? Leaving Christ aside, since He was God, this is analogous to the question of whether, for example, St. Augustine was responsible for the Inquisition. My answer is in both cases: yes, and no. Marx and Augustine share a kind of guilt, but it’s a guilt of omission, not comission. They failed to understand or foresee the evil that men would do with their ideas, and they failed to make clear the extent to which in one case justice would have to be tempered with mercy, and in the other case the extent to which a dream of a perfect tomorrow would need to be tempered by human kindness in the here and now. It doesn’t make them bad men, but it makes them tragically flawed men, whose thoughts and ideals would bring much evil as well as much good to the world.
Marx was clearly a man who loved justice, and equality, and who hated the way capitalism had distorted man’s true nature. Unfortunately, he failed to see that the virtues he loved only made sense if rooted in a deeper, comprehensive, Hellenic (or even, dare I say, Christian?) conception of man’s essential nature, which like most intellectuals of his day he denied. And that to isolate a part of the natural law and make it into a unique and self-contained system of its own is gravely dangerous, and bears potential for disaster. This was his error, and it was the tragedy of most Marxist movements in the twentieth century. They failed to see, as Peguy said, that ‘the revolution must be spiritual, or the revolution shall not be.’
Someday, though, I hope that whatever was good in the merely human socialism of Marx can be blended with the super-human socialism of Francis of Assisi. And when that happens- and if it does, it will most likely happen somewhere in South or Central America- the oligarchies all over the world will really have a reason to tremble, and Marx and Augustine will both be smiling on us from the hereafter.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
All I have to say is it’s about f’ing time that the boogeyman stigma gets removed from Marx the philosopher. He wasn’t all knowing or all-seeing but his work does have important analytical insight as a critique of certain excesses of capitalism. It’s been almost impossible to have an adult discussion involving Marx without it degenerating into some sort of ridiculous debate that has virtually nothing to do with Marx and his work.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:21 pm
As for Brad De Long, of course, he exemplifies the quintessentially shallow late capitalist cosmopolite, and doesn’t really deserve to be taken that seriously. His little blog post starts by talking dismissively about the Apocalypse of John. Er, no. If you don’t like the Apocalypse of John (which influenced and inspired Marx though he saw it as a human text rather than a divine one) then you are unlikely to like Marx; you are also unlikely to have anything very interesting to say. The Apocalypse of John, whether we read it as truth, metaphor, or human artifact, is one of the most compelling and recurring pieces of Western literature in the last 2,000 years (and arguably before then, since it recycles themes from Jewish apocalyptic), and it needs to at the very least be taken seriously even by those who disagree with it.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:26 pm
The seeds of the problems of Marxist dogmatism are to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels. They were intolerant of and ridiculed other kinds of Socialism. They had too much faith in industry and discounted the importance of agriculture and the natural environment. They were reductive and ignored the aesthetic, cultural, and local dimensions of human existence. Scientific materialism is not really scientific, etc.
That aside, Marx is a compelling moralist who thundered, rightly, against suffering and injustice.
April 23rd, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Harold,
Well said.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:03 pm
It makes sense to address Rousseau when you talk about Pol Pot, but why should anyone have to address Pol Pot when they talk about Rousseau?
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:22 pm
I’ll give credit where it’s due: Those last couple pieces from Hector were a flat out masterpiece of a trip. Most hypnotically rhythmic shit I’ve read in weeks.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:18 pm
I’d love to hear more talk about Carl Menger.
The big point both make is that Marx wrote a long time ago about how financial crises were endemic to capitalism. It’s both true that Marx wrote this and true that financial crises are endemic to capitalism.
Hmm…
How I wish it had read:
The big point both make is that Mises wrote a long time ago about how financial crises were endemic to fractional reserve banking. It’s both true that Mises wrote this and true that financial crises are endemic to fractional reserve banking.
Mmm… I feel warm and tingly all over.
April 24th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Re: Those last couple pieces from Hector were a flat out masterpiece of a trip. Most hypnotically rhythmic shit I’ve read in weeks.
Glad to please, Mr. El Cid.
April 24th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Indeed, many of Marx’s contemporaries saw the danger in his prescriptive (not so much his descriptive) writings. Mikhail Bakunin: