False consciousness - 0 views
www.economist.com/...st-century-false-consciousness
consciousness marx marxist influence economics theory
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Marx’s works, including “The Communist Manifesto”, written with Friedrich Engels in 1848, may have had more impact on the modern world than many suppose. Of the manifesto’s ten principal demands, perhaps four have been met in many rich countries, including “free education for all children in public schools” and a “progressive or graduated income tax”.
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Mr Stedman Jones’s book is above all an intellectual biography, which focuses on the philosophical and political context in which Marx wrote.
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Marx did not invent communism. Radicals, including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) and the Chartist movement in England, had long used language that modern-day readers would identify as “Marxist”—“to enjoy political equality, abolish property”; “reserve army of labour” and so forth.
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Far more significantly, he attempted to provide an overall theoretical description of how capitalism worked
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in many parts the author is highly critical. For instance, he points out that Marx displayed “condescension towards developments in political economy”
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More damning, the “Grundrisse”, an unfinished manuscript which many neo-Marxists see as a treasure trove of theory, has “defects [in the] core arguments”.
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The author encapsulates a feeling of many students of Marx: read the dense, theoretical chapters of “Capital” closely, and no matter how much you try, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there is plenty of nonsense in there.
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The real value of such a work, in Mr Stedman Jones’s eyes, lies in its documentation of the actual day-to-day life faced by the English working classes.
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He did not pay enough attention, for example, to objective measures of living standards (such as real wages), which by the 1850s were clearly improving.