(08-19-2018, 04:11 AM)Galen Wrote:(08-19-2018, 02:11 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:(07-11-2018, 01:24 PM)Hintergrund Wrote: Yeah. To hell with marxism, Marx was a yuge fraudster and nothing more.
I would largely say that Marx was a pre-scientific sociologist. Much like Freud was a pre-scientific psychologist. Most of his theories have been debunked because new information and developments have made them obsolete.
You are right about Marx. Given the problems modern psychology has with replicating experimental results I would say most psychologists are pre-scientific even if they aren't quite as crazy as Freud was. The problem with modern economists is that they use the methods of engineering and physics where they don't apply. This is why they can't understand why increasing the size of the state impoverishes everyone except those with connections to it.
(08-19-2018, 02:11 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: As for PBR's accusation. Well I honestly don't think he's even read that book and if he did he clearly didn't understand it. Like Eric he seems to think himself more intellectually gifted than he actually is. How much of that is being a Boomer and how much of it is Dunning-Kruger effect I've yet to determine. But don't take my word for it. Look around, read his posts.
Understanding is not something that I have come to expect from PBR or Eric the Obtuse. They are true believers in the American Civic Religion with a few quirks unique to them. The one belief they have in common above all others is the primacy of the state. True believers have no questions because they have no doubt and can't be bothered to question anything.
Marx was a historian (however flawed) and not a good prophet. He predicted that the countries on the fastest tracks from capitalism to socialism were those then most advanced in capitalism (and hence exploitation). Marxism suggested that capitalists would be so inhuman and so complete in their exploitation as capitalism created both more capital and depravity that workers and their sympathetic leaders would force a revolution, with Marxist socialism accelerating the economic development by cutting out the people who take too much for their tiny contributions. Socialism would bring faster economic development and social progress than could capitalism. Instead, the first country to have a Socialist revolution in Europe was backward Russia, a country just leaving the agricultural era.
Marx failed to recognize that capitalists would find technological innovations that could be sold profitably -- if only they paid the workers well enough that they could buy the cars, telephones, electric lights, refrigerators, radios, and phonographs and gave them the time with which to use them. Capitalism saved itself by turning away from Marx' stereotype of capitalism with the aid of technology.
Primacy of the state? To paraphrase Hayek (I think) about Big Government -- everyone is for Big Government (or socialism) as long as it is his favored form of Big Government (or socialism). Note that Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes were all for Big Government so long as such created a big military build-up. Through his economic blundering, Dubya made some 'receivership socialism' (government picking up failed businesses in order to rescue them) necessary. Trump is a right-wing socialist, someone who wants government to create (at the expense of taxpayers) plenty of opportunities for sweetheart deals with crony capitalists connected to him. Donald Trump is a 'socialist' in the sense that the late Ferdinand Marcos was.
I concur with the privatization of productive assets as done in former 'Socialist' countries that got socialism without social justice. Exchanging Marxist socialism with a welfare state is necessary for the survival of people who could never get anything more than bare survival under Marxist-Leninist rule and could never get a fresh start under unfettered capitalism. American capitalism has gotten much efficiency at the cost of casting off millions. At best, this Crisis will free us of the need for extreme poverty that the Hard Right considers an appropriate incentive for getting people to work as hard and long as possible for as little as possible. In the last Crisis, the American establishment recognized that people could work forty hours a week to meet needs by a standard of the 1930s. In this Crisis we may have to turn both unemployment and wasted efforts into leisure that creates its own economic boon.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.