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Stale Saltines posted:This is exactly what the New Atheists always miss. You can shout scientific facts at religious people until you're blue in the face and it won't matter because the social function religion provides is very real. What Marx is really getting at - as with most of his writing - is that material conditions have a direct effect on the surrounding social environment. It's why, in a single country with a common language and culture, you can have a Christianity that laments the suffering of the poor and curses the rich sitting right alongside a Christianity that claims that God will provide you with bountiful earthly goods if you pray hard enough.
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May 8, 2017 18:31
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The primary difference between Piketty and Marx is their respective views on the ultimate source of capitalism's problems. Marx's theory (as revealed in Capital) is that capitalism generates internal contradictions - flaws that are a consequence of its basic functioning - which eventually lead the system into crisis. These crises cannot be solved, merely delayed, because their root cause is fundamental to the operation of the system itself. Piketty believes that these crises and other issues are a consequence of external forces acting on capitalism, disrupting its smooth functioning, and that solving them is a matter of merely implementing external corrections. The positive reviews are principally because the book says what everyone already knows (that the rich are a parasitic form of baggage on society) but proposes a solution (political reforms) that doesn't require a massive upheaval of presently existing systems. I think Piketty's position is hogwash, of course, although you won't really get to what Marx considered the root of the issue until Part 3 of Capital.
Vermain has issued a correction as of 02:36 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 18, 2017 02:34
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The scale of his reforms are such that, if you ever got the political power to implement them, you may as well just go for full loving worldwide communism anyways.
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May 18, 2017 15:16
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Electric Owl posted:In Chapter 10: The Working Day we get a glimpse into the pits of huddled agony that must have first driven Marx to make that sacrifice. In addition to this, I really, heartily recommend anyone reading Capital and wondering what the bother is with all this technical mumbo-jumo to go check out Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England from the library. Engels writes with a barely contained rage - at times speaking with almost sheer incredulity - at the monstrously indifferent cruelty doled out onto the working class in the service of self-styled kings carving out their insignificant fiefdoms. The fact that these conditions have barely changed, having merely shifted location, lends the book the kind of modern relevance that lets you understand the emotions that compelled Marx to dedicate a significant portion of his life to writing a book with the breadth and scope of Capital. I think an early quote of his ("Material force can only be overthrown by material force, but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.") summarizes perfectly what he hoped to achieve by writing it.
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May 24, 2017 16:23
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Peel posted:I've been reading them on and off and it's kind of fun to get a look at the Thomas Friedmans and National Reviews of the 19th century. the more things change, the more things stay the same
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May 31, 2017 17:11
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I mean, it's truly, staggeringly mind-boggling in a certain way that an economic system based entirely on the accrual of power by private, unaccountable individuals - where the vast majority of people labour under them with no recourse against their predations, save to beg for scraps from a different master - managed to pass itself off as a system of ultimate freedom for so long.
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Jun 15, 2017 01:26
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I think the final piece of the socialist puzzle really is the transition from competition-driven production to collaboration-driven production, where goods and services are produced based upon democratically decided social need and resources allocated accordingly. I recall Orwell mentioning in his writings that organized, collaborative production that eschewed (or, at least, stamped down) the profit motive had already showed its startlingly effective face in the form of Nazi Germany's wartime economy. The challenge for socialists is to replicate that sort of organized economic success in the interests of peace and democratic justice, rather than war and totalitarian control.
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Aug 25, 2017 18:23
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Peel posted:That's a prognosis that's always worried me. If it's that unstable, how can it last, or be established in the first place? I agree. It's a difficult dilemma: I don't think waiting for a simultaneous world (or, hell, even broadly international) revolution is a feasible political program, but I'm also skeptical of the ability of an isolated socialist economy to not be squeezed to death by external market pressures, even if one were to have it in a comparatively large country (compared to, say, Cuba). More than anything, I think it highlights the continued need for more and better theory. The left has, all things considered, been quite good at critiquing capitalism, but one still finds a vast wasteland when it comes to trying to tease out what the socialist mode of production will concretely look like.
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Aug 28, 2017 03:13
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