The Partisan Divide on Issues

[David Horn]

(02-03-2021, 12:32 PM)Einzige Wrote:

Quote:  Keynes is vastly more modern than Marx, who had an industrial focus.

Marx anticipated the integration of computers into the economy and the transition to an Information Economy through his correspondence with Charles Babbagee (c.f. "Fragment on Machines", Grundrisse. Moreover, there were advocates for fiat money-financed social spending before Keynes, and Marx dealt with them often - e.g. the Lassalleans.

Quote:There is a diversity in today's economy that vastly exceeds anything either man contemplated.

Again, Marx speculated about the computerization of the economy four years after the American Civil War.

Quote:Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

... But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.

Labor is labor. We still exist in an industrial economy; the idea of a "service economy" is a myth. The only distinction is that industry is now computerized, and the workers are conscious linkages between machines.

Quote:Ownership can remain in private hands if it is distributed widely and fairly, and opposed by a public sphere that keeps it in check.

It can, but it won't.

Quote:Integrating all that under one umbrella guarantees tyranny (e.g. the Soviet or Maoist models) or chaos and bedlam (if the state 'withers away').  Let ownership devolve to a sovereign wealth fund, created by taxing corporations through stock rather than money.  Small mom-and-pop operations would be more hobby than business, why bother with them?

Because this is all basically deterministic. Small mom and pop shops play no role at all in the real economy.

Feel free to shout, but it makes no noticeable difference.  What we call productivity today is only lightly tied to actual physical production.  Marx had an industrial-centric view of the economy that is no longer truly valid, and his  sociology is simply unworkable.  Full credit: he understood that all value originates from labor.  That may be changing now.