Allowing Rufo and Lindsay to speak in their own voices,

_{kairosfocus

January 3, 2023

Academic Freedom, Culture, Ethics, rhetoric}

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again, as a certain objector here has accused:

Right-wing grifters like Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, and Christopher Rufo make a lot of money selling these lies to the gullible fools who get their worldview injected into their brains by downloading Fox News propaganda

I have not previously heard of these two, but — courtesy YouTube — it is only fair to let them speak for themselves.

Rufo:

Lindsay:

(He was here giving a workshop, and onward sessions here and here may be helpful.)

I trust that in future, commenters will refrain from such intemperate language. END

F/N: William S Lind interviews Roger Kimball in the 1990’s on culture form marxism and political correctness:

Similarly, this discussion of the labour theory of value vs the marginal revolution, will help clarify thinking on Marx’s exploitation thesis:

The calculation of value challenge:

These two videos on economic issues will help to clarify underlying issues. Ponder, if titanium would make excellent grills, why is it never used for that?

(Why is it primarily used for aerospace work, and why do old cooking gas containers sometimes end up adapted into grills? What was the advantage to the UK c 1943 to take thousands of worn 12 cylinder, V-block Merlin aero engines, take off their superchargers etc and convert them into Meteor Tank engines, going from 1300 – 1600 HP to about 650 HP? A diamond would make a useful stone for a slingshot, or could be used as an industrial abrasive or could even be burned as fuel, why then are certain clear or attractively coloured diamonds reserved for making jewels? Why is water so much cheaper than diamonds or gold or titanium? A certain sheet of paper with $100 printed on it could be used to light a fire, why would we regard this as foolish waste? Hint, what is the next best use of the metal, or the worn engine, or the diamond, or the water, or the sheet of paper, and what price would someone be willing to pay? This is the opportunity cost principle of value, pivoting on the principle of scarcity.)

U/D Jan 10 23: On a more dynamically and historically based political spectrum, using the Overton Window to show how lawless agendas can undermine lawful government:

Comments

Kairosfocus @245,
Direct labour contributes but does not outright or overwhelmingly determine value reflected in product ranges in markets at price points and with good reputation tied to a customer base that is sustainably profitable.
If direct labor has the highest priority, then innovations such as “the wheel” are anti-labor, since the wheel reduced the amount of labor required for a task, impoverishing the working class as a whole. It’s actually extremely difficult to start a business and to build and maintain a good reputation in your customer base. However, Wall Street’s darlings are those executives who can monetize customer goodwill as if squeezing an orange to get the maximum short-term value from it before tossing it away and moving on to a new orange. There’s a good reason why innovation, free enterprise, talented entrepreneurs, and market competition are such a terror to capitalists!
PPS, ironically, nearly half of the investment in stock markets in the US traces to retirement funds. That is a major financial, investment interest of labour. And a key constraint on sound management, as the retirement fund is a long term issue for a firm.
And speaking of retirement funds . . . here’s an interesting read:
If you look at multiemployer plans, those people worked in coal mines, driving trucks, in bakeries — typically physical, difficult jobs, and they certainly earned the pension they were promised by their union. Now, some of them are 70-years-old and in retirement and have the terrible prospect of having their pension cut.
https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/underfunded-pensions My question is, "why is there no criminal liability in such cases?" -QQuerius_{January 25, 2023
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Q, I have long been of the view that the proper goal of the directors of a firm [= exec suite plus other board members] should be a sustainably profitable customer base. That automatically brings in the long term view, track record, present state, balance of investing in the future, trends and potential shocks, developing future product. Issues of sustainable competitive advantage lurk. Short term profit maximisation can be sub optimisation or looting and dumping the remnants. But there is a lot of pressure in the stock markets to boost an extremely short term view. The basic point is, astute entrepreneurship, investment and strategic management are highly scarce valuable productive factors that contribute to value in markets. Direct labour contributes but does not outright or overwhelmingly determine value reflected in product ranges in markets at price points and with good reputation tied to a customer base that is sustainably profitable. This even brings in brand value as an asset. And more, the labour theory in its marxian form is ill founded and an agit prop weapon that has cost not only livelihoods but lives. And, we have seen how culture form marxist thinking leads right back to the same pattern. KF PS, it is noteworthy that the accusations headlined in the OP have not received adequate substantiation. This points to the right to innocent reputation as a key point that marks a widespread failure of neighbourliness in our time. PPS, ironically, nearly half of the investment in stock markets in the US traces to retirement funds. That is a major financial, investment interest of labour. And a key constraint on sound management, as the retirement fund is a long term issue for a firm.kairosfocus_{January 14, 2023
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Kairosfocus @241,
Astute strategic guidance of firms and in making investments is a highly scarce skill, one that is a major productivity factor. Without inventions and innovators to carry them into markets, technological progress slows or stagnates.
Yes, indeed! And your observations fit well into my high-tech employment experiences, where corporate lack of investment in (if not active suppression of) continued disruptive innovation resulted in rapid obsolescence of their technology. This certainly maximized IMMEDIATE PROFITS for a while, but also guaranteed the subsequent bankruptcy of most of them in the face of the rapid changes in technology at that time. Did any of the executives or investors learn from their experience? My impression was that this was never a priority, which was simply "take the money and run." It occurs to me that, given the pathetic level of management and finance integrity, this might actually have been their most practical course of action . . . -QQuerius_{January 14, 2023
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PM1, he used that critique to justify the presence of a thesis-antithesis pair, leading to dialectic shift by revolution. The oppression thesis, in the first instance, is precisely the claim that property [of capital nature] is theft, which has had horrific consequences across the past century. Recall, expropriate the expropriators, and ponder the fate of the kulaks etc. Perhaps, you did not live through C20 and its central ideological conflict? KFkairosfocus_{January 12, 2023
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@238
it is clear from his letter to his partner in work, Engels, that he saw the labour theory of value and the oppression thesis [cf. surplus value etc] as integral and even central to his thought.
1. Marx is developing a critique of capitalism by demonstrating the contradictions inherent in the labor theory of value. But the debate between marginalist and neoclassical economists, interesting as that it, does not affect the substance of that critique. At most it shows that contemporary Marxists should not endorse how Marx presents that critique. 2. I don't know what you mean by "the oppression thesis" and I'd rather not speculate. What do you mean by that phrase?PyrrhoManiac1_{January 12, 2023
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Q, prudence is a much neglected virtue. Just because stock markets on average return about 8 percent, does not insulate one from catastrophic potential losses when shocks happen. There are fail safes but they cannot be guaranteed. Astute strategic guidance of firms and in making investments is a highly scarce skill, one that is a major productivity factor. Without inventions and innovators to carry them into markets, technological progress slows or stagnates. KF PS, pieces of paper are memory devices, recording specifics of agreements, laws etc. Yes, contracts and the like have no self enforcing power and there is such a thing as the sword of justice that deters many from wrong, but that is rather the point. If the sword has to be resorted to even a significant minority of the time, civil society collapses in chaos as it means agreements and laws have lost support of lawful people, trust evaporates and risk has gone through the roof. Under those circumstances of disorder the cry goes out for the strong man, only to typically find that power has been handed to the lawless. Lawfulness is critical social capital and takes generations to build up, including building up a legitimate, trustworthy, capable and consistently just state. All of this, of course points to first, built in law.kairosfocus_{January 12, 2023
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Kairosfocus @233, Thank you. It seems like economic stability needs the excess weight of the equivalent of bulkheads in ships (which add around 30% to the weight of a ship IIRC), such that a "hole in the hull" won't sink the country or perhaps the entire world economy. I've also noticed that many companies streamline their operations to maximize profits by reducing expenditures that reduce risk. So, in increasing risk, they become very profitable, but become vulnerable to a bump in the market will put them out of business. Apparently, this is just fine by Wall Street investment managers. -QQuerius_{January 11, 2023
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PyrrhoManiac1, A piece of paper such as the U.S. Constitution, or the numerous treaties made with the indigenous tribes in the Americas aren't worth anything unless enforceable by the threat of the use of arms. As Mao Zedong is famously quoted to have said:
Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
For example, ask a Ukrainian citizen about the Budapest Memorandum of 1994: https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/2-23-22_ukraine-the_budapest_memo.pdf?m=1645824948 -QQuerius_{January 11, 2023
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PM1, whatever detailed debates on what Marx as opposed to marxists meant, it is clear from his letter to his partner in work, Engels, that he saw the labour theory of value and the oppression thesis [cf. surplus value etc] as integral and even central to his thought. This was in the decade before the marginal revolution. I do not have my Dad's books here, so I cannot cite verbatim on what marxists were still arguing in the 1980's at technical level, but they were using a matrix analysis that led to an overdetermined equation set forcing serious mathematical complications at that level to try to avoid outright contradictions. At more relevant level the theory fed the grand theft thesis, led to the slogan and intent expropriate the expropriators and became a gateway for lawlessness and terror. So, the matter is material. KF PS, Constitutional monarchies, even before modern republics or even general elections with adult sufferage, were successful lawful states. The issue is lawfulness and John Finnis on natural law vs positivism is material.kairosfocus_{January 11, 2023
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@236 1. There's a long-standing and complicated debate how to interpret Marx on value, and to be honest, I'm just getting into it now. So all I really know is that there's a lot that I don't know. One book I'm now reading (see here) argues that Marx doesn't think of labor as the source of all value, but rather thinks that there's a complex historical process that at once constructs the labor of free white men as the source of exchange value and devalues all other sources of use-values (ecological bounty, metals and minerals, the enslaved, and the unremunerated work of women under patriarchy). 2. You take it that the basic issue is "lawfulness restraining power". That is one issue worth discussing, yes. I would frame that in terms of the republican problem: how to both empower the state sufficient to restrain or mitigate non-state sources of domination and also curtail how the state can be a source of domination as well. But the distinction between domination and interference is crucial to my view: it may very well be necessary for the state to interfere with non-state institutions in order to prevent them from dominating.PyrrhoManiac1_{January 11, 2023
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PM1, Marxism, historically, baked in the labour theory of value, as you previously acknowledged and even expounded. I clip for reference: https://socialiststudies.org.uk/marx%20surplusval.shtml
Marx thought that his theory of surplus-value his most important contribution to the progress of economic analysis (Marx, letter to Engels of 24 August 1867):
The best points in my book are: 1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc. This will be made clear in the second volume especially. The treatment of the particular forms in classical political economy, where they are forever being jumbled up together with the general form, is an olla potrida (rotten pot of stew)
. Marx, by using his theory of value to analyse “capitalism in motion” placed capitalism within a historical context allowing him to explain why and how exploitation takes place within the profit system, the peculiarity of the class struggle under capitalism and the contradictions which bear on commodity production and exchange for profit. The origin, nature and distribution of surplus value play a central role in Marx’s analysis of capitalism. “surplus value” is the translation of the word “Mehwert” which means “value-added” and is used by Marx to explain how invested money capital brings in more money capital as profit than first invested (M> C > M1, where M is the original money-capital, C is the production of commodities and M1 the original investment plus profit).
So, he himself baked it in (as can be seen from linked ideas in his constellation of thought), writing a few years before Jevons, Meninger, Walras and co would upset the applecart through the marginal revolution. More, later. KF PS, the pivotal power issue is lawfulness restraining power, and as I drew out, that is where the trouble enters.kairosfocus_{January 11, 2023
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@282
My specific question is, “Power, whether it’s economic, socio-religious, scientific, or political seems to have a tendency to concentrate. What mechanism in your republicanism would counteract this tendency or do you think concentrations of power to be harmless?”
Republicanism would hold that power as domination is dangerous and must be limited as much as possible. The primary mechanism for restraining domination by non-state actors (e.g. corporations, universities, religious organizations) would be the state. The primary mechanism for restraining domination by the state would be democracy, i.e. the people. So republicanism (as I understand it) would require both a strong state and powerful democratic mechanisms for restricting the state -- unlike (for example) the US today, which is both a weak state with very little democratic control over it.PyrrhoManiac1_{January 11, 2023
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@231 1. I do not think that Marx assumes or is committed to a "labor theory of value", so his critique of capitalism does not stand or fall with whether or not that doctrine has been rejected by the apologists of Mammon. 2. For reasons I have already given extensively, the Soviet Union and Communist China was always lies, from the very beginning, about what Marx and Engels had called for. Lenin was at least up-front about this, at the beginning, when he talked about "state capitalism" as a step beyond bourgeois capitalism. But the Soviet Union stopped at that stage, and China under Mao was hardly much different. Neither of them came anywhere close to realizing on a large-scale the flat organizational structure of the Paris Commune, which Marx and Engels both explicitly said was their ideal for "the dictatorship of the proletariat". 3. Whether a flat organizational structure could be realized on a large scale is another question entirely. I don't think there is any point in being a Marxist today if one does not believe that a large-scale flat organization is at least possible, given future improvements in communications technology. 4. At any rate there is no reason at all to believe that the millions of victims of Soviet, Chinese, etc state terrorism invalidate or refute Marx's original critique of capitalism or the subsequent elaboration of that critique by later Marxian theorists, including Luxemborg, Sohn-Rethel, Braverman, and Postone. 5. The Frankfurt School of critical theory was not really Marxist, nor "neo-Marxist", precisely because they thought that the objective conditions for socialist revolution had disappeared. Nevertheless they made significant advances in social theory, above all in their analysis of fascism. 6. It should also be noted that most of the Frankfurt School went to work for the American government when the US entered World War II, with Marcuse (among others) working at the OSS deciphering Nazi propaganda for the Allies. I won't say that they made a decisive difference in how the war went, but I think it should be noted since there is a widespread perception that the Frankfurters were anti-American. Marcuse was perhaps the most pro-American of them, continuing to live and teach in the States until his death in 1979. 7. It should also be noted that the Frankfurt School, upon returning to Germany, made significant contributions to the de-Nazification of German society by forcing a reckoning with the Holocaust. In the 1980s Habermas entered the public debates against neo-Nazi revisionist historians who wanted to downplay the barbarity of the Third Reich and its crimes against humanity. 8. Critical race theory, in the form given by Derrick Bell and others, illuminates how structural injustice permeates US society regardless of the attitudes of individuals, whether explicit or implicit. Alexander's The New Jim Crow is precisely about how the explicit policy of "colorblindness" facilitates the emergence of a new race-based caste system. 9. None of this is to deny that "identity politics" in its current form has become something pernicious and ugly. But one can criticize identity politics from the left by seeing how identity politics has been co-opted by powerful entrenched elites as a means of keeping the powerless divided against each other. (Much as how wealthy Southern Whites after the Civil War stoked racism to prevent poor Whites and poor Blacks from banding together.) Olufemi Taiwo develops this left critique of identity politics in his recent Elite Capture.PyrrhoManiac1_{January 11, 2023
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Q, the issue is that Economics news tends to emphasise disagreements. The zone of agreement on microeconomics is large, and includes the marginal revolution that decisively undercut the suggestion that labour is effectively the root of value. It is a major contributor but not the determinant of value. Finance, in effect a sub discipline, is another field of general agreement. Accounting intersects and though it is a bit of a crude yardstick dependent on conventions, there are globally accepted standards. On the macro side, it is now generally agreed that there are macro factors tied to aggregate effects of markets and especially to things like rates of interest, money supply etc. There is more agreement on what drives growth than the headlines suggest, and as we seem to be facing another stagflationary recession, it is worth noting that one can overheat an economy; tightening the markets for bottleneck factors -- that bids up prices and chokes off rates of growth, i.e. economies saturate and have scarcity of key productive factors. On the other side, if an event or policy move happens that significantly cuts availability of key factors such as energy, what was once an economy with breathing room is suddenly choked. Where, anticipation of the future is a related factor, the value of a firm, say, is measured by the present value of its anticipated future earnings on revenues, discounted at some relevant rate, sometimes, 7% or another rule of thumb value. Given the issue of free services, the point is, search or email services are free to you as you are the commodity being sold, i.e. market research information. So, imperfect though the state of knowledge is, it is real and significant. A problem is, politicians and activists commonly demand what will have perverse, counter productive effects, e.g. locking down energy sources constrains growth, makes the world even more vulnerable to supply shocks and can trigger stagflation. Notice, my OP's yesterday on nuclear energy. KFkairosfocus_{January 11, 2023
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PyrrhoManiac1 @230, Thank you for your interesting comments. I’ve never made the distinction between classical liberalism, republicanism, or moderate libertarianism, which I guess shows that I’m certainly not very politically savvy. Fair enough. I was interested enough in economics (I found the year 1938 to be particularly interesting) to take a college course in the subject (Samuelson), which was blah-to-mildly-disappointing. But then, it is called the dismal science for a reason. Since then, I noticed several things. 1. Economists seem to have a poor reputation with regards to, of all things, economics. 2. Two of our kids, when they were younger, participated in online open-world role playing games. They noticed that the economies of such games seemed to want to crash, even though they were under absolute control by the game company! I was proud and delighted that my kids even wrote to one of these software companies with several specific suggestions on how to stabilize their economic models. No response of course. 3. I understand that some economists studied some of these games and supposedly tried economic experiments in them. 4. I’ve noticed that given two countries with identical populations and GDPs will have different outcomes depending on whether their population spend their income on “candy and ice cream” (instant gratification) or on “productivity tools,” including practical education. I concluded that how values affect consumption is not at all irrelevant (contrary to what little I understand about Keynesian economics). A corollary is the so-called “Dutch disease” with regard to investment in an oil-rich economic environment. Any comments? My specific question is, “Power, whether it’s economic, socio-religious, scientific, or political seems to have a tendency to concentrate. What mechanism in your republicanism would counteract this tendency or do you think concentrations of power to be harmless?” Thanks, -QQuerius_{January 10, 2023
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PM1, the issue is that you have made claims about the labour theory of value that run counter to well established economics and which have for 100 years served destructive ends, sadly. Most recently, you made allusive, inviting comments about the way great fortunes are amassed, which take on a very negative colour given what else you have said, and as this is not about personalities we can extend it to the entrenched views of radical marxist thought for well over 100 years even in the aftermath of the marginal revolution. Where, let me add, theft is anti-productive, it destroys value, it does not create it, and if sufficiently material it destabilises economies and societies, it does not lead to progress. I took it up, introducing the Kondratiev wave and illustrating with the ICT wave we have seen across a generation and more now. The point is, there are indefinitely many value adding factors, including entrepreneurship, invention, innovation, financial investment etc. KFkairosfocus_{January 10, 2023
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I feel as though I've said what I needed to say when I started this whole tangent. I'll respond to any questions anyone has about what I've said, but with regard to my political views, I don't feel a need right now to say anything else about what I believe or why I believe it.PyrrhoManiac1_{January 10, 2023
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PM1, 222:
but Marxism can offer some diagnostic tools for explaining how the super-rich got that way, how they use their power and to what ends, and what it would take to build counter-power.
An allusion to the grand theft and oppression theses. It fails for reasons already identified and there is a clear refusal to recognise the crucial importance of the lawful state [note the u/d to OP on this]. However, how, actually, do the super rich get that way? Are they parasitical thieves? Not on the whole, theft (including theft by fraud) destroys economic value, it does not create it. Instead, first, we need to appreciate Kondratiev's point, that there are generational waves in the economy, where transformational breakthroughs create a surge of global growth typically running 30 - 70 years. In our time, we have seen a major ICT wave. Those who lead such a wave surf high growth sectors, and if they are able to dominate, we are looking at tremendous rates of compounded growth tied to widespread economic transformation. They then have pools of funds that become major financial capital, which feeds into finance markets. Markets, that feed the investment driving growth. As a result of that growth, I was just speaking with someone 1,000 miles away on a digital network, both of us using phones that far outstripped the machines that ran the Moon shot or the famous s360 IBM, bet the farm breakthrough mainframe family. Where, IBM got together $5 billion in a high stakes venture that changed computing in the mid 1960's. Indeed, this is the initiative that set the byte as 8 bits. Likewise, a modest outlay of several thousand dollars can set up a pocket TV station, for streaming, teleconferencing etc. And, I just picked up a credit card pocket magnifier bought through eBay that I just could not reasonably obtain otherwise. Yes, some men made up to hundreds of billions, but this fed huge multiples of that in globally distributed wealth, development and opportunities. This was driven by valuable ideas not some crude caricature of grand theft. Yes, Mr Gates retired and set up a foundation that sought to do good but has likely made some troubling errors. But that is not grand theft or calculated enslavement [see the terms cited by SEP regarding Horkheimer et al and critical theory], he is actually seeking to give away money on the grand scale to try to do good. Meanwhile the world has benefitted from his technical and entrepreneurial innovations vastly beyond any fortune he made. (Where, as we are dealing with games of trying to trot out background facts, his bringing together IBM and the on the shelf OS that otherwise had nowhere to go was a valuable entrepreneurial initiative.) The point is, we have an outdated, toxic account of production of economic value that has a demonstrated, repeatedly, consistently massively destructive and murderous track record. It is high time it was permanently retired in disgrace. KFkairosfocus_{January 10, 2023
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PMI I see In the link you gave that there is a hypothetical example so I will read it first if I have any questions I will get back to so ignore my request. Vividvividbleau_{January 10, 2023
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PMI “2. The crucial difference between classical liberalism and republicanism is how freedom is defined. For classical liberals (such as Acton), liberty is the absence of interference: one is free insofar as no one (but especially the state) can coercively deprive one of one’s life or property. For republicans, liberty is the absence of domination: one is free insofar as one’s actions are not confined to a specific domain that has been imposed on one by some other person or institution.” This is helpful, could you give an example of a hypothetical between “absence of interference” and “absence of domination “ Vividvividbleau_{January 10, 2023
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AS,
At the end of the day, fancy concepts go out the window, and what is left is the powerful [--> here, having seized power using the oppression thesis etc] doing pretty much whatever they want.
AKA, lawless oligarchy. The gross diagnostic errors involved are: [1] failing to recognise that across the 1870's, the marginal revolution was showing the true nature of economic value, [2] failing to recognise that as lawless oligarchy is the natural state of government, establishing lawfulness and using natural law duties of justice is the sound basis for sustainable reformation. Error 1 led to failing the market-innovation test, which was directly implicated in the collapse of the USSR. The points made by von Mises in the 1920's told in the end: misdiagnosing value leads to systematic errors of resource allocation. That is why both China and Cuba have returned to the market. Where, profits are return to the risk of enterprise and investment, where it is easy to overlook the cases of losses that those that do make profits have to cover, and imagine the average profit is higher than it is. Imagining that profit is parasitical theft is disastrously counter productive and lends to the second error. Error 2 means that socialist systems are hostile to enterprise, investment and ownership of capital, physical, intellectual and financial, but huge swathes of law rightly uphold these things. So, socialist revolutionaries who gain or seize power find themselves undermining the BATNA of lawfulness. Which means, the slide into lawless oligarchy is wide open. Reigns of terror are a natural resort, and often that involves perversion of the legal system. The framing and cruel judicial murder of Milada Horakova is a telling paradigm case. We really do need to listen to the voices of 100 million victims of marxism. KFkairosfocus_{January 10, 2023
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Jerry @
Control and abolishing freedom is the common theme. It plays out in fears such as the virus, climate, social chaos and uses nebulous ideas such as discrimination to achieve its objectives. It uses shame as a driving force. And most swallow the bait very readily.
Skillfully phrased.Origenes_{January 10, 2023
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A further thought I wanted to share about Marx and the labor theory of value. For a while, I had thought that Marx was in some sense committed to the labor theory of value, and this bothered me. I now realize that I'd been misreading Marx in this respect. Marx begins with the labor theory of value, not because he is committed to it, but because classical political economy was committed to it. His work Capital is, just as it says on the tin, "a critique of political economy". That is: it is not a work of economic theory but a critique of economic theory. A critique (Kritik) is for Marx what it was for Kant but more importantly Hegel: an examination of how the foundational assumptions of a worldview are inherently contradictory. In this case, the claim is that the labor theory of value contains contradictions that cannot be resolved within the framework established by that theory. This does raise the question of whether a Marxian critique of capitalism can be revised now that capitalism itself has abandoned the labor theory of value, and if it can be, how. But I think this challenge can be met.PyrrhoManiac1_{January 10, 2023
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Marxism can offer some diagnostic tools for explaining how the super-rich got that way, how they use their power and to what ends,
Maybe some but I doubt much. McClellan spelt it out. Individuals have different needs. It’s always been that way since hunter-gathers. Power, one of the needs for some, is an aphrodisiac. What’s new is that the US had a system to control individual power but it has been deteriorating for years. There is the famous expression- “gradually, then suddenly.” The digital world with its supposed liberating benefits has actually done just the opposite. It has found a way to control the masses voluntarily. It has led to control of elections nationally through the spending of massive amounts of money. I would look to “Bread and Circuses” or today “food and games” as the best metaphor for what’s going on.jerry_{January 10, 2023
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@221
The super-rich have other ideas and are the current puppet masters. Marxism and socialism have nothing to do with what they want and what is happening in the world.
True, but Marxism can offer some diagnostic tools for explaining how the super-rich got that way, how they use their power and to what ends, and what it would take to build counter-power.PyrrhoManiac1_{January 10, 2023
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enigmatically, the super-rich is among its loudest voices.
Why? It’s not because they care for the poor. The obvious answer is that the poor, becoming less and less throughout the world, and those who claim they want to help the poor by changing the system are the useful idiots. The super-rich have other ideas and are the current puppet masters. Marxism and socialism have nothing to do with what they want and what is happening in the world. But it generates lots of comments on UD. Control and abolishing freedom is the common theme. It plays out in fears such as the virus, climate, social chaos and uses nebulous ideas such as discrimination to achieve its objectives. It uses shame as a driving force. And most swallow the bait very readily.jerry_{January 10, 2023
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Some responses to nice points raised here by Origenes and Querius. (I'm numbering the different points just to keep them organized in my mind as I write.) 1. I somewhat disagree with Lord Acton's general observation about the corrupting influence of power, because I think that there is an important distinction between kinds of power that Lord Action might not accept. Acton was a liberal and I am not. In politics, I am a civic republican, but more specifically, I belong to a tradition of radical republicanism or social republicanism (this is also how I read Marx). 2. The crucial difference between classical liberalism and republicanism is how freedom is defined. For classical liberals (such as Acton), liberty is the absence of interference: one is free insofar as no one (but especially the state) can coercively deprive one of one's life or property. For republicans, liberty is the absence of domination: one is free insofar as one's actions are not confined to a specific domain that has been imposed on one by some other person or institution. 3. To see the difference between interference and domination, consider a woman who lives under the influence of a dominating male partner. She might not be abused (physically, sexually, or emotionally), and yet what she can do is subject to his arbitrary authority. It is he who would decide whether she can get a job, have a bank account, see her friends, when and what she cooks, and under what conditions she is emotionally and sexually available to him. She is not being interfered with, and yet she is dominated. In other words, she has liberal freedom but not republican freedom. 4. On most issues, liberals and republicans will agree. But there are some issues where they will disagree, and specifically when it comes to property rights. One specific example is the US civil war. The greatest political philosopher of the Confederacy, John Calhoun, argued that it was the Confederacy that was the true, rightful heir of Washington and Jefferson, because it was standing up for property rights: the right to do with one's property what one wished. (Hence they cast the federal government in the role of King George.) Most British liberals, including Lord Acton, supported the Confederacy. By contrast, republicans (including a lot of Germans who had to leave Germany after the failed revolution of 1848) took up arms in defense of the Union. Karl Marx was pro-Union and wrote about the Civil War for the New York Tribune while living in London. For the republicans, slavery was an absolute wrong because the slaves were deprived of republican liberty, regardless of how well cared for they were purported to be. 5. What makes Marx a part of this radical republican tradition is that he thinks that freedom is the absence of domination. His major theoretical contribution is to show that domination need not be personal. It need not be the case that the source of domination is some specific person or group of people. Instead, it can be the case that domination is impersonal: it is a general structural feature of society that dominates, not any specific person or group of people. 6. As radical republicans, Marx and Engels looked to the Paris Commune as their example of what a transitional stage between capitalism and communism might look like. What was of particular interest to them was the relative absence of hierarchy: it had a relatively "flat" organizational structure that empowered the people. So their ideal was somewhat close to what's now called "council communism" and completely antithetical to what state-imposed communism became under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and all those who followed in their footsteps. 7. In case it is not entirely obvious by now, by Marxian lights, state communism is a contradiction in terms. What Marx and Engels wanted was a radically egalitarian social democracy (like the Paris Commune), not an authoritarian state (like the Soviet Union). Marxism is a political theory (among other things) but it is not a theory of government: it is a theory about the conditions under which it will be possible to transform government into a servant of the people rather than their master. 8. What the Soviet Union accomplished was a perversion of Marx. This can be seen quite precisely when one considers how it abolished internal markets. It replaced markets (except for the illegal markets) with bureaucratic planning. But they did not abolish money, nor did they ever have the technology necessary to abolish scarcity (which is what Marx calls for). So how did the Politburo decide what the prices of goods should be? Answer: by consulting the international prices established by capitalist markets. So they were never independent of capitalism; rather, by abolishing all internal markets, all they accomplished was transforming the entire federation into one huge, bureaucratically managed (but not profit-generating) firm. 9. In short, the Soviet Union (and other communist states) used a doctrine of non-domination to legitimize a new form of domination. This was the perversion that Orwell called out in Animal Farm and 1984 and that was denounced by Luxemburg, Pankhurst, Marcuse, and many other 20th century Marxists. 10. This does raise the nice question, "what would it take to realize the structure of the Paris Commune on a world-wide scale?" I think it is unobjectionable that Marx drastically underestimated how easy it would be, and it may be altogether impossible. This is why most Marxists today have set their sights on limiting the dominating power of markets and capital, rather than abolishing them entirely. I'll return later on to comment on the Frankfurt School and critical social theory.PyrrhoManiac1_{January 10, 2023
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Also, It's an inevitability when the state makes up the rules instead of following God's law's that things are going to degenerate, and that's where we are. Andrewasauber_{January 10, 2023
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"And they use this disingenuous tactic without having a clear understanding of the concepts of Marxism and socialism." FP, At the end of the day, fancy concepts go out the window, and what is left is the powerful doing pretty much whatever they want. Andrewasauber_{January 10, 2023
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My parents called themselves socialists. They made me aware of the contrast between the extremely rich and the extremely poor and argued that a more just society must be possible. Back then, when it was mainly focused on economics, socialism sure had a point. Now the left has ‘evolved’ into something incomprehensibly sick and insane, and, enigmatically, the super-rich is among its loudest voices.Origenes_{January 10, 2023
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