Karl Marx is Back

[FrostyBoy]

You're a non-evidencer!

[Kidlicious]

My dispute was not whether the market can fail. It was whether such a thing could be permanent ("fail for good").

And my dispute with you was your argument for that, that markets always recover because people want them to. Maybe I'm misquoting you, but that's the way I read it.

When markets do recover there is always a reason. The capitalist system goes through fundamental changes. Either consumer spending habits change for specific reasons such as bigger families, populations expand, credit expands, the economy moves away from free market dependence, or there is some other fundamental change. When the economy is in a serious crisis the economy usually does not simply recover simply because people want it to.

If Roosevelt had not convinced people that he could fix their problems, we would have had a full scale revolution in America. Several factories were occupied by workers when he took office and at least one NG unit had refused to remove them by force. Short-term price adjustments (or market failures) can disrupt distribution, but people will not let their children starve in sight of food. I actually do know quite a bit about market distortions and failures.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Are you saying that people will will the market to work, or that workers will take over the factories?

As to the dialectic (the part of Hegel's theories that actually work), pick your own name for the current monopoly capitalist system, which I called "greed." Then postulate whatever mechanism would be the opposite (original capitalism's opposite was communism and its extreme was Naziism). I am, like you, having a hard time postulating a working opposite to what is now the ruling economic regime but such thinking does or soon will exist somewhere.

Part of Marxist theory is the rich keep changing the system to increase their wealth. Since they control the system any efforts by progressives to alter the system in a more egalitarian way will be met by further efforts by the capitalists to increase their wealth, which will fall on the shoulders of either the workers or foreign people. If they can't increase their wealth through the capitalist system they will institute a non-capitalist government where they can extract wealth more forcefully.

[MrFun]

Big meh. The thing with Marx is not if he should be read or not, but how you deal with him. For some he's oh teh evil, others seem to idealize him into some allknowingneverbeenwrongguy and treat his stuff as a bible replacement.

A serious approach would concede that he offers some valuable insight into capitalism of his time. Maybe beyond, but - like with any other thinker - much of his stuff is veeery debatable, and far from being teh only truth as some orthodox communists would like to have it, because it provides them with a rather simple scheme to explain everything and re-affirms their own povs.

One of the most reasonable posts in this thread.

[chequita guevara]

As if you would know.