Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged marx

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Cecilia Ergueta

The Revenge of Karl Marx - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind.
  • On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital?
  • The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week?
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.
  • The falling rate of profit, the tendency to monopoly … how wrong could that old reading-room attendant have been?
  • Marx is so embedded in our Western cast of thought that few people are even aware of their debt to him. Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances … “that, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness”, as Marx wrote—and that changes in the way things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory.
  • “It’s the economy, stupid.”
  • What he postulated, and what made him different from any previous theorist of materialism whether historical or dialectical, was a sharp distinction between the forces and the relations of production. Within the integument of one system of exploitation, in other words, was contained a systemic conflict that, if not resolved, would lead to stagnation and decline but, if properly confronted, might lead to a higher synthesis of abundance and equality.
  • (War between competitive capitalist states, for example, would be an instance of the negative. Seizure of power by an educated working class that understood and could transcend the logic of private ownership would be an example of human progress.
  • In my opinion, therefore, the most powerful Marxist book of the past four decades was Rudolf Bahro’s The Alternative, which showed how and why the East German state and economy were certain to implode. Communism, said Bahro—one of its former functionaries—was compelled to educate and train people up to a certain level. But beyond that level, it forbade them to think, or to inquire, or to use their initiative. Thus, while it created a vast amount of “surplus consciousness,” it could find no way of employing this energy except by squandering and dissipating and ultimately repressing it. The conflict between the forces and relations of production in the eastern part of the homeland of Karl Marx thus became a locus classicus of the sort of contradiction he had originally identified.
  • Marx was a keen admirer of that other great Victorian Charles Darwin, and according to Engels he wanted to do for the economic system what the author of The Origin of Species had done for the natural order: lay bare its objective laws of motion and thus make it possible at last to dispense with subjective and idealist interpretations.
  • The term exploitation, for example, should be not a moralizing one but a cold measure of the difference between use value and exchange value, or between the wages earned at the coal face and the real worth of that labor to the mine owner
  • there was an underlying love-hate relationship between Marx and capitalism. As early as the Manifesto, he had written of capitalism’s operations with a sort of awe, describing how the bourgeoisie had revolutionized all human and social and economic relations, and had released productive capacities of a sort undreamed-of in feudal times.
  • it does not quite explain Marx’s later failure, in Capital, to grasp quite how revolutionary capitalist innovation really was. (The chapter on new industrial machinery opens with a snobbish quotation from John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” This must have seemed absurd even at the time, and it appears preposterous after the third wave of technological revolution and rationalization that modern capitalism has brought in its train.
  • There’s also the not-inconsiderable question of capitalism’s ability to decide, if not on the value of a commodity, at least on some sort of price for the damn thing. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and the other members of the Austrian school were able to point out this critical shortcoming of Capital—no pricing policy—during Marx’s lifetime
  • John Cassidy wrote of Marx, “His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.” That would appear to mean that Marxism and capitalism are symbiotic, and that neither can expect to outlive the other,
brookegoodman

Karl Marx - Communist Manifesto, Theories & Beliefs - HISTORY - 0 views

  • As a university student, Karl Marx (1818-1883) joined a movement known as the Young Hegelians, who strongly criticized the political and cultural establishments of the day.
  • Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Prussia; he was the oldest surviving boy in a family of nine children. Both of his parents were Jewish, and descended from a long line of rabbis, but his father, a lawyer, converted to Lutheranism in 1816 due to contemporary laws barring Jews from higher society. Young Karl was baptized in the same church at the age of 6, but later became an atheist.
  • After receiving his degree, Marx began writing for the liberal democratic newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, and he became the paper’s editor in 1842. The Prussian government banned the paper as too radical the following year. With his new wife, Jenny von Westphalen, Marx moved to Paris in 1843. There Marx met fellow German émigré Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong collaborator and friend. In 1845, Engels and Marx published a criticism of Bauer’s Young Hegelian philosophy entitled “The Holy Father.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • With revolutionary uprisings engulfing Europe in 1848, Marx left Belgium just before being expelled by that country’s government. He briefly returned to Paris and Germany before settling in London, where he would live for the rest of his life, despite being denied British citizenship.
  • In it he expressed a desire to reveal “the economic law of motion of modern society” and laid out his theory of capitalism as a dynamic system that contained the seeds of its own self-destruction and subsequent triumph of communism. Marx would spend the rest of his life working on manuscripts for additional volumes, but they remained unfinished at the time of his death, of pleurisy, on March 14, 1883.
ethanmoser

What Do Trump and Marx Have in Common? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • What Do Trump and Marx Have in Common?
  • We have a word in German, “Wutbürger,” which means “angry citizen”
  • Perhaps the most powerful Wutbürger of them all is Donald J. Trump.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Karl Marx was a Wutbürger. So were Montesquieu, William Wilberforce, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the tens of thousands of Eastern German protesters who brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989.
  • Mr. Trump vs. Dr. King. Sadly, the leaders of today’s Wutbürger movements never grasped the difference between anger driven by righteousness and anger driven by hate.
  • In Germany a recent poll showed that only 14 percent of the citizens trusted the politicians.
  • Amid their mutual finger-pointing, neither populist nor established parties acknowledge that both are squandering people’s anger, either by turning this anger into counterproductive hatred or by denouncing and dismissing it. Mrs. Clinton has the chance to change, by leading a political establishment that examines and processes anger instead of merely producing and dismissing it. If she does, let’s hope Europe once again looks to America as a model for democracy.
Javier E

Opinion | Big Tech Is Bad. Big A.I. Will Be Worse. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet/Google have seized a large lead in shaping our potentially A.I.-dominated future. This is not good news. History has shown us that when the distribution of information is left in the hands of a few, the result is political and economic oppression. Without intervention, this history will repeat itself.
  • The fact that these companies are attempting to outpace each other, in the absence of externally imposed safeguards, should give the rest of us even more cause for concern, given the potential for A.I. to do great harm to jobs, privacy and cybersecurity. Arms races without restrictions generally do not end well.
  • We believe the A.I. revolution could even usher in the dark prophecies envisioned by Karl Marx over a century ago. The German philosopher was convinced that capitalism naturally led to monopoly ownership over the “means of production” and that oligarchs would use their economic clout to run the political system and keep workers poor.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Literacy rates rose alongside industrialization, although those who decided what the newspapers printed and what people were allowed to say on the radio, and then on television, were hugely powerful. But with the rise of scientific knowledge and the spread of telecommunications came a time of multiple sources of information and many rival ways to process facts and reason out implications.
  • With the emergence of A.I., we are about to regress even further. Some of this has to do with the nature of the technology. Instead of assessing multiple sources, people are increasingly relying on the nascent technology to provide a singular, supposedly definitive answer.
  • This technology is in the hands of two companies that are philosophically rooted in the notion of “machine intelligence,” which emphasizes the ability of computers to outperform humans in specific activities.
  • This philosophy was naturally amplified by a recent (bad) economic idea that the singular objective of corporations should be to maximize short-term shareholder wealth.
  • Combined together, these ideas are cementing the notion that the most productive applications of A.I. replace humankind.
  • Congress needs to assert individual ownership rights over underlying data that is relied on to build A.I. systems
  • Fortunately, Marx was wrong about the 19th-century industrial age that he inhabited. Industries emerged much faster than he expected, and new firms disrupted the economic power structure. Countervailing social powers developed in the form of trade unions and genuine political representation for a broad swath of society.
  • History has repeatedly demonstrated that control over information is central to who has power and what they can do with it.
  • Generative A.I. requires even deeper pockets than textile factories and steel mills. As a result, most of its obvious opportunities have already fallen into the hands of Microsoft, with its market capitalization of $2.4 trillion, and Alphabet, worth $1.6 trillion.
  • At the same time, powers like trade unions have been weakened by 40 years of deregulation ideology (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, two Bushes and even Bill Clinton
  • For the same reason, the U.S. government’s ability to regulate anything larger than a kitten has withered. Extreme polarization and fear of killing the golden (donor) goose or undermining national security mean that most members of Congress would still rather look away.
  • To prevent data monopolies from ruining our lives, we need to mobilize effective countervailing power — and fast.
  • Today, those countervailing forces either don’t exist or are greatly weakened
  • Rather than machine intelligence, what we need is “machine usefulness,” which emphasizes the ability of computers to augment human capabilities. This would be a much more fruitful direction for increasing productivity. By empowering workers and reinforcing human decision making in the production process, it also would strengthen social forces that can stand up to big tech companies
  • We also need regulation that protects privacy and pushes back against surveillance capitalism, or the pervasive use of technology to monitor what we do
  • Finally, we need a graduated system for corporate taxes, so that tax rates are higher for companies when they make more profit in dollar terms
  • Our future should not be left in the hands of two powerful companies that build ever larger global empires based on using our collective data without scruple and without compensation.
Javier E

What Do Trump and Marx Have in Common? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • How was anger hijacked?
  • In its pure form, anger is a wonderful force of change.
  • Karl Marx was a Wutbürger. So were Montesquieu, William Wilberforce, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Globalization and its masters have capitalized on enormous pay gaps between West and East, at a huge profit for them, and huge cost to others.
  • Unfortunately, a lack of maturity and prudence today exists among not just the new populist class, but parts of the political establishment
  • . A growing number of voters are going into meltdown because they believe that politicians — and journalists — don’t see what they see.
  • Sadly, the leaders of today’s Wutbürger movements never grasped the difference between anger driven by righteousness and anger driven by hate.
  • The upper class has gained much more from the internationalization of trade and finances than the working class has, often in obscene ways.
  • Bankers get bonuses despite making idiotic decisions that trigger staggering losses.
  • Giant enterprises like Facebook or Apple pay minimal taxes, while blue-collar workers have to labor harder — even taking a second or third job — to maintain their standard of living.
  • In Germany a recent poll showed that only 14 percent of the citizens trusted the politicians. This is an alarming figure, in a country where faith in a progressive, democratic government has been a cornerstone of our postwar peace.
  • Amid their mutual finger-pointing, neither populist nor established parties acknowledge that both are squandering people’s anger, either by turning this anger into counterproductive hatred or by denouncing and dismissing it.
  • Mrs. Clinton has the chance to change, by leading a political establishment that examines and processes anger instead of merely producing and dismissing it
Javier E

Was Marx Right? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The fall of communism discredited Marx’s political vision. But, as observers have wondered before, is his view of our economic future being validated?
Javier E

Marx Rises Again - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The taproot of agitation in 21st-century politics, this trend suggests, may indeed be a Marxian sense of everything solid melting into air. But what’s felt to be evaporating could turn out to be cultural identity — family and faith, sovereignty and community — much more than economic security.
  • somewhere in this pattern, perhaps, lies the beginnings of a  more ideologically complicated critique of modern capitalism — one that draws on cultural critics like Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch rather than just looking to material concerns, and considers the possibility that our system’s greatest problem might not be the fact that it lets the rich claim more money than everyone else. Rather, it might be that both capitalism and the welfare state tend to weaken forms of solidarity that give meaning to life for many people, while offering nothing but money in their place.
  • Piketty himself is a social democrat who abjures the Marxist label. But as his title suggests, he is out to rehabilitate and recast one of Marx’s key ideas: that so-called “free markets,” by their nature, tend to enrich the owners of capital at the expense of people who own less of it.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This idea seemed to be disproved in the 20th century, by the emergence of a prosperous, non-revolutionary working class. But Piketty argues that those developments were transitory, made possible mostly by the massive destruction of inherited capital during the long era of world war.
  • Absent another such disruption, he expects a world in which the returns to capital permanently outstrip  —  as they have recently  —  the returns to labor, and inequality rises far beyond even today’s levels
  • Combine this trend with slowing growth, and we face a future like the 19th-century past, in which vast inherited fortunes bestride the landscape while the middle class fractures, weakens, shrinks.
Javier E

The Warped Vision of "Anti-Racism" - Persuasion - 0 views

  • What kind of monster doesn’t support “anti-racism”? Who would put themselves on the other side of “social justice”? How could you be opposed to the notion of “racial equity”?
  • what began as a collective yen for racial equality—long overdue in our nation—has devolved into something dangerous that is actually undermining its own noble goals.
  • as high-minded as these ideas sound, they mark a shift away from the values they purport to represent—equality before the law; the consent of the governed; even democracy itself—and toward the opposite, with people ranked by immutable characteristics and ruled by a tiny elite.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • Those who disagree—most crucially, millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities—are excised from the public square.
  • The social-justice movement comes at the expense of justice; “anti-racism” ends up exacerbating racism.
  • How could this be? It’s difficult to stand against “social justice,” especially for those of us who are deeply concerned about inequality. We feel humility toward activists, writers and politicians who take up the language of racial justice, given how urgent the cause is.
  • The basis for today’s social-justice movement is a deep skepticism about liberal values like equality, justice and democracy. This is rooted in an academic discipline known as “critical race theory,” which takes elements from Hegel and Marx, along with postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida, to assemble a worldview that does not accept that equality can exist.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, and he was taking a victory lap through a German university town after defeating the Prussian army, when he happened to ride past a German philosopher with writer’s block, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
  • a key element of his work became associated with the concept of mastery and domination, of one man exerting his will over others.
  • Society, culture and history were produced in the back and forth, or “dialectic,” between the powerful and the powerless—the master-slave dialectic, as Hegel’s pairing became known in subsequent iterations.
  • When Marx articulated his thesis of class conflict as the basis for all modern social existence, he was—in the view of Jean-Paul Sartre among others—expanding on the master-slave dialectic.
  • And if history progressed through a changing cast of masters and slaves for Hegel, or class struggle for Marx, for critical race theorists and their “anti-racism” inheritors, it’s white people and people of color in a binary that gives one side all the power and the other side none.
  • Over time, three other key ideas were grafted onto the master-slave dialectic:
  • false consciousness
  • a belief that the ideals of a society mean less than do the exceptions to those ideals
  • and a commitment to undermining the grand narratives that a society relies upon.
  • “False consciousness” was an attempt by Marxists to explain why the working class wasn’t buying into their worldview.
  • It turns out that working-class people are often conservative, a fact that has never ceased to bedevil and infuriate educated leftists trying to impose their desire for revolution. Instead of trying to understand the preferences of the working class, Marxists asserted that the poor workers were merely deluded, in the grip of a “false consciousness,” instead of a revolutionary one.
  • You can see the concept of false consciousness—and the condescension that is its hallmark—everywhere in critical race theory.
  • Its proponents classify people of color who don’t have radical views on race or who vote Republican as the handmaidens of white supremacy;
  • The idea of false consciousness is everywhere in the work of Robin DiAngelo, a prominent proponent of “anti-racist” ideology whose book White Fragility has sold close to a million copies. DiAngelo contends that white people who cry when accused of being racists actually prove their bigotry via these “weaponized tears,” which she deems “white racial bullying.”
  • If a society claims as its foundation a narrative that some members are excluded from, then the true meaning of that narrative is found in the exception, rather than the rule.
  • Postmodernist philosophers added to this a mistrust of the ideals that society claims to be built on:
  • postmodernists argued that the explicit mores of a culture have no objective value, but are instead a way for one group to benefit at the expense of another.
  • From this perspective, the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to.
  • Instead, the Constitution is a document fundamental to denying rights to those deemed ineligible, and justifying the ownership of enslaved persons.
  • Your symbol of freedom and equality is nothing more than a tool of repression, postmodernists argue. Failures, even at the margins, expose the hypocrisy of the whole, and define it as a lie.
  • You can see this at work in The New York Times Magazine’s Pulitzer-prize winning “The 1619 Project,” which marks the year that the first African slave was brought to American shores.
  • argued that, while history teaches 1776 as the year of our nation’s founding, we should consider whether “the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619,” as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, put it in an introduction.
  • It can’t be that America was founded on values like equality and liberty and democracy that it imperfectly embodied and has subsequently strived to correct.
  • It must be that the true founding was slavery, its true nature revealed by this failure.
  • This is why the social-justice movement cannot recognize the huge gains that have been made in this nation on the question of race; if there is even one instance of racism left in America, it is proof again of this true nature.
  • As with America, some on the left find it impossible to see Israel as a flawed nation imperfectly striving toward the ideals of its founding. The occupation of the Palestinians can’t be a disastrous injustice. It must be that Israel’s foundation is defined by this injustice, that “Zionism is racism.”
  • the real threat here is not just mangled logic. It’s the erasure of the possibility of equality, of a common humanity, that requires we treat each other as equals before God and before the law.
  • Today’s progressive left, whose ideas have become prevalent in much of the American establishment that is now repeating its incantations, simply does not believe equality is possible, instead differentiating people by how much power they supposedly have, with no common humanity to call upon.
  • since the social-justice movement recognizes only power, every one of its proposals is designed not to create a more equal society, but to transfer power from oppressors to oppressed—while allowing those designated as victims to maintain claim to the status of oppressed.
  • Race is immutable, so it doesn’t matter how much real power a person of color wields; their race means they will never be anything but oppressed.
  • You might be wondering why this view, which erases equality and cites oppression as the root of everything, has mainstream appeal
  • It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
  • progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them.
  • This is not the way to a more equal society. We cannot right the wrongs of racial inequality—an urgent task—by erasing the ideal of equality
  • Nor can we allow the fact that equality has been unequally enforced throughout most of our history to provide an excuse to throw it away, and build a newly racialized America.
  • the clues are elsewhere. At first, one notices them like glitches in the matrix. Maybe you read an unorthodox remark on Twitter, and watch as its author is insulted in the cruelest terms by thousands of people, many with words like “social justice” or “diversity and inclusion” in their bios
Javier E

The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal. But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion. Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two.
  • If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.
  • What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time.
  • She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society
  • Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.
  • she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society.
  • The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”
  • How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?
  • The problem, she proposed, was that contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around.
  • Egalitarians should agree about clear cases of blameless misfortune: the quadriplegic child, the cognitively impaired adult, the teen-ager born into poverty with junkie parents. But Anderson balked there, too. By categorizing people as lucky or unlucky, she argued, these egalitarians set up a moralizing hierarchy.
  • In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to.
  • By letting the lucky class go on reaping the market’s chancy rewards while asking others to concede inferior status in order to receive a drip-drip-drip of redistributive aid, these egalitarians were actually entrenching people’s status as superior or subordinate.
  • To the ugly and socially awkward: . . . Maybe you won’t be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
  • . To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. . . . Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. . . 
  • she imagined some citizens getting a state check and a bureaucratic letter:
  • This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions.
  • To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest).
  • Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences.
  • A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,”
  • Her first book, “Value in Ethics and Economics,” appeared that year, announcing one of her major projects: reconciling value (an amorphous ascription of worth that is a keystone of ethics and economics) with pluralism (the fact that people seem to value things in different ways).
  • Philosophers have often assumed that pluralistic value reflects human fuzziness—we’re loose, we’re confused, and we mix rational thought with sentimental responses.
  • She offered an “expressive” theory: in her view, each person’s values could be various because they were socially expressed, and thus shaped by the range of contexts and relationships at play in a life. Instead of positing value as a basic, abstract quality across society (the way “utility” functioned for economists), she saw value as something determined by the details of an individual’s history.
  • Like her idea of relational equality, this model resisted the temptation to flatten human variety toward a unifying standard. In doing so, it helped expand the realm of free and reasoned economic choice.
  • Anderson’s model unseated the premises of rational-choice theory, in which individuals invariably make utility-maximizing decisions, occasionally in heartless-seeming ways. It ran with, rather than against, moral intuition. Because values were plural, it was perfectly rational to choose to spend evenings with your family, say, and have guilt toward the people you left in the lurch at work.
  • The theory also pointed out the limits on free-market ideologies, such as libertarianism.
  • In ethics, it broke across old factional debates. The core idea “has been picked up on by people across quite a range of positions,” Peter Railton, one of Anderson’s longtime colleagues, says. “Kantians and consequentialists alike”—people who viewed morality in terms of duties and obligations, and those who measured the morality of actions by their effects in the world—“could look at it and see something important.”
  • Traditionally, the discipline is taught through a-priori thought—you start with basic principles and reason forward. Anderson, by contrast, sought to work empirically, using information gathered from the world, identifying problems to be solved not abstractly but through the experienced problems of real people.
  • “Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual,”
  • In 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asked Anderson to compose its entry on the moral philosophy of John Dewey, who helped carry pragmatist methods into the social realm. Dewey had an idea of democracy as a system of good habits that began in civil life. He was an anti-ideologue with an eye for pluralism.
  • She started working with historians, trying to hone her understanding of ideas by studying them in the context of their creation. Take Rousseau’s apparent support of direct democracy. It’s rarely mentioned that, at the moment when he made that argument, his home town of Geneva had been taken over by oligarchs who claimed to represent the public. Pragmatism said that an idea was an instrument, which naturally gave rise to such questions as: an instrument for what, and where, and when?
  • In “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Anderson had already started to drift away from what philosophers, following Rawls, call ideal theory, based on an end vision for a perfectly just society. As Anderson began a serious study of race in America, though, she found herself losing faith in that approach entirely.
  • Broadly, there’s a culturally right and a culturally left ideal theory for race and society. The rightist version calls for color blindness. Instead of making a fuss about skin and ethnicity, its advocates say, society should treat people as people, and let the best and the hardest working rise.
  • The leftist theory envisions identity communities: for once, give black people (or women, or members of other historically oppressed groups) the resources and opportunities they need, including, if they want it, civil infrastructure for themselves.
  • In “The Imperative of Integration,” published in 2010, Anderson tore apart both of these models. Sure, it might be nice to live in a color-blind society, she wrote, but that’s nothing like the one that exists.
  • But the case for self-segregation was also weak. Affinity groups provided welcome comfort, yet that wasn’t the same as power or equality, Anderson pointed out. And there was a goose-and-gander problem. Either you let only certain groups self-segregate (certifying their subordinate status) or you also permitted, say, white men to do it,
  • Anderson’s solution was “integration,” a concept that, especially in progressive circles, had been uncool since the late sixties. Integration, by her lights, meant mixing on the basis of equality.
  • in attending to these empirical findings over doctrine, she announced herself as a non-ideal theorist: a philosopher with no end vision of society. The approach recalls E. L. Doctorow’s description of driving at night: “You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
  • or others, though, a white woman making recommendations on race policy raised questions of perspective. She was engaging through a mostly white Anglo-American tradition. She worked from the premise that, because she drew on folders full of studies, the limits of her own perspective were not constraining.
  • Some philosophers of color welcomed the book. “She’s taking the need for racial justice seriously, and you could hardly find another white political philosopher over a period of decades doing that,”
  • Recently, Anderson changed the way she assigns undergraduate essays: instead of requiring students to argue a position and fend off objections, doubling down on their original beliefs, she asks them to discuss their position with someone who disagrees, and to explain how and why, if at all, the discussion changed their views.
  • The challenge of pluralism is the challenge of modern society: maintaining equality amid difference in a culture given to constant and unpredictable change.
  • Rather than fighting for the ascendancy of certain positions, Anderson suggests, citizens should fight to bolster healthy institutions and systems—those which insure that all views and experiences will be heard. Today’s righteous projects, after all, will inevitably seem fatuous and blinkered from the vantage of another age.
  • Smith saw the markets as an escape from that order. Their “most important” function, he explained, was to bring “liberty and security” to those “who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.”
  • Anderson zeroed in on Adam Smith, whose “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, is taken as a keystone of free-market ideology. At the time, English labor was subject to uncompensated apprenticeships, domestic servitude, and some measure of clerical dominion.
  • Smith, in other words, was an egalitarian. He had written “The Wealth of Nations” in no small part to be a solution to what we’d now call structural inequality—the intractable, compounding privileges of an arbitrary hierarchy.
  • It was a historical irony that, a century later, writers such as Marx pointed to the market as a structure of dominion over workers; in truth, Smith and Marx had shared a socioeconomic project. And yet Marx had not been wrong to trash Smith’s ideas, because, during the time between them, the world around Smith’s model had changed, and it was no longer a useful tool.
  • mages of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
  • Today, people still try to use, variously, both Smith’s and Marx’s tools on a different, postindustrial world:
  • The unnaturalness of this top-heavy arrangement, combined with growing evidence of power abuses, has given many people reason to believe that something is fishy about the structure of American equality. Socialist and anti-capitalist models are again in vogue.
  • Anderson offers a different corrective path. She thinks it’s fine for some people to earn more than others. If you’re a brilliant potter, and people want to pay you more than the next guy for your pottery, great!
  • The problem isn’t that talent and income are distributed in unequal parcels. The problem is that Jeff Bezos earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a minute, while Amazon warehouse employees, many talented and hardworking, have reportedly resorted to urinating in bottles in lieu of a bathroom break. That circumstance reflects some structure of hierarchical oppression. It is a rip in the democratic fabric, and it’s increasingly the norm.
  • Andersonism holds that we don’t have to give up on market society if we can recognize and correct for its limitations—it may even be our best hope, because it’s friendlier to pluralism than most alternatives are.
  • we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.
  • “You can see that, from about 1950 to 1970, the typical American’s wages kept up with productivity growth,” she said. Then, around 1974, she went on, hourly compensation stagnated. American wages have been effectively flat for the past few decades, with the gains of productivity increasingly going to shareholders and to salaries for big bosses.
  • What changed? Anderson rattled off a constellation of factors, from strengthened intellectual-property law to winnowed antitrust law. Financialization, deregulation. Plummeting taxes on capital alongside rising payroll taxes. Privatization, which exchanged modest public-sector salaries for C.E.O. paydays. She gazed into the audience and blinked. “So now we have to ask: What has been used to justify this rather dramatic shift of labor-share of income?”
  • It was no wonder that industrial-age thinking was riddled with contradictions: it reflected what Anderson called “the plutocratic reversal” of classical liberal ideas. Those perversely reversed ideas about freedom were the ones that found a home in U.S. policy, and, well, here we were.
Javier E

The Bad History Behind 'You Didn't Build That' - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • “Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s bu
  • ing power), to the current global average of $30 -- and much higher in developed nations
  • That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • the usual stories of utility maximization and optimal pricing “can’t explain the rise in the whole world’s (absolute) advantage from $3 to $30 a day, not to speak of $137 a day.”
  • McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ -- or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.
  • Most of “Bourgeois Dignity” is devoted to knocking down alternative explanations for the sudden and enormous escalation in living standards. In particular, McCloskey draws on the last half-century of economic-history scholarship to debunk what most people outside the field assume was the critical ingredient: savings and wealth accumulation. We might call this explanation “capital-ism.” Whether derived from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polyani, or, in a more-recent incarnation, Fernand Braudel, she argues, the emphasis on capital simply gets the facts wrong. It is empirically false.
  • savings rate of at least 12 percent, compared with no more than 10 percent to 20 percent in modern industrial economies. And, contrary to Weber’s story about a new Protestant Ethic, savings rates were roughly the same in Catholic and Protestant countries or, for that matter, in China.
  • Besides, as economic historians discovered in the 1960s, the economic takeoff didn’t actually require large amounts of capital. Early cotton mills, for instance, were relatively cheap to set up. “The source of the industrial investment required was short-term loans from merchants for inventories and longer- term loans from relative
  • What was different, she maintains, is how people thought about new ideas. Creative destruction became not only accepted but also encouraged, as did individual enterprise. “What
  • ade us rich,” she writes, “was a new rhetoric that was favorable to unbounded innovation, imaginatio
  • ness, persuasion, originality, with individual rewards often paid in a coin of honor or thankfuln
  • McCloskey’s book is not only a useful survey of how scholars answer the biggest question in economics: What causes growth? It is also a timely reminder that prosperity depends on more than effort or resources or infrastructure or good laws. Attitudes matter, too. You don’t build a wealthy society by deriding bourgeois enterprise -- or the people who take pride in it.
Javier E

Taking On Adam Smith (and Karl Marx) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The reason that postwar economies looked different — that inequality fell — was historical catastrophe. World War I, the Depression and World War II destroyed huge accumulations of private capital, especially in Europe. What the French call “les trentes glorieuses” — the roughly 30 postwar years of rapid economic growth and shrinking inequality — were a rebound. The American curve, of course, is less sharp, given that the fighting was elsewhere.
  • the professional and political assumption of the 1950s and 1960s, that inequality would stabilize and diminish on its own, proved to be an illusion. We are now back to a traditional pattern of returns on capital of 4 percent to 5 percent a year and rates of economic growth of around 1.5 percent a year.
  • So inequality has been quickly gathering pace, aided to some degree by the Reagan and Thatcher doctrines of tax cuts for the wealthy. “Trickle-down economics could have been true,” Mr. Piketty said simply. “It just happened to be wrong.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • His work is a challenge both to Marxism and laissez-faire economics, which “both count on pure economic forces for harmony or justice to prevail,” he said.
  • In 2012 the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation’s income, the highest total since 1928. The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent.
  • he accepts that his work is essentially political, and he is highly critical of the huge management salaries now in vogue, saying that “the idea that you need people making 10 million in compensation to work is pure ideology.”
  • Inequality by itself is acceptable, he says, to the extent it spurs individual initiative and wealth-generation that, with the aid of progressive taxation and other measures, helps makes everyone in society better off. “I have no problem with inequality as long as it is in the common interest,” he said.
  • But like the Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, he argues that extreme inequality “threatens our democratic institutions.” Democracy is not just one citizen, one vote, but a promise of equal opportunity.
  • “It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such extreme inequality” in income, he said, “and such extreme inequality in terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and information. One of the big lessons of the 20th century is that we don’t need 19th-century inequality to grow.”
  • that’s just where the capitalist world is heading again, he concludes.
  • He favors a progressive global tax on real wealth (minus debt), with the proceeds not handed to inefficient governments but redistributed to those with less capital.
kirkpatrickry

The strange death of Indian Communism | The Indian Express - 0 views

  • Few can imagine how unlikely this is. From the Fifties to the Seventies, there was serious debate on how imminent the Communist Revolution was in India. The future was red. Now of course no one takes Communists or even Communism seriously. The Soviet Union collapsed without anyone firing a shot. Leninism proved to be a delusion which could not survive the 20th century.
  • Why did Communism fail so abysmally? Marx had a fascination with Capitalism and admired its immense productive potential. He and Engels advertised the advent of globalisation in their youthful Communist Manifesto. His ideal of Socialism was timed for well after the maturity of Capitalism.
  • Communism’s luck continued and Capitalism suffered the Great Depression. It looked like the Revolution was imminent. Lenin had conflated Imperialism and Capitalism. This enhanced the appeal of Communism for the colonies. Stalin consigned millions to concentration camps but the idea that the Soviet Union was the hope of the world remained strong. Victory in the Second World War and then taking over Eastern European countries enhanced the reputation of the Soviet Union. China had its own Revolution which confirmed Lenin’s wisdom that the Communist revolution would start in the backward countries, not developed ones as Marx may have thought. India was supposed to be the next ripe fruit to fall. The CPI had blotted its copybook by supporting the British rulers during the war, as for them the fight was for defence of the Soviet Union. They denounced independence as illusory and launched a premature Revolution in Telangana. Stal
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • n thought India was not ready for a Revolution. So the Communists began to play the democracy game under orders waiting for the signal to revolt.
brookegoodman

Vladimir Lenin - Biography, Policies & Tomb - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was a Russian communist revolutionary and head of the Bolshevik Party who rose to prominence during the Russian Revolution of 1917, one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The bloody upheaval marked the end of the oppressive Romanov dynasty and centuries of imperial rule in Russia. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party, making Lenin leader of the Soviet Union, the world’s first communist state.  
  • Later that year, 17-year-old Lenin—still known as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov—was expelled from Kazan Imperial University, where he was studying law, for taking part in an illegal student protest. After his expulsion, Lenin immersed himself in radical political literature, including the writings of German philosopher and socialist Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital.
  • Lenin later moved to Germany and then Switzerland, where he met other European Marxists. During this time, he adopted the pseudonym Lenin and established the Bolshevik Party.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Lenin advocated for Russian defeat in World War I, arguing that it would hasten the political revolution he desired. It was during this time that he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) in which he argued that war was the natural result of international capitalism.
  • When Lenin returned home to Russia in April 1917, the Russian Revolution was already beginning. Strikes over food shortages in March had forced the abdication of the inept Czar Nicholas II, ending centuries of imperial rule.
  • Lenin, aware of the leadership vacuum plaguing Russia, decided to seize power. He secretly organized factory workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors into Red Guards—a volunteer paramilitary force. On November 7 and 8, 1917, Red Guards captured Provisional Government buildings in a bloodless coup d’état.
  • The Bolshevik Revolution plunged Russia into a three-year civil war. The Red Army—backed by Lenin’s newly formed Russian Communist Party—fought the White Army, a loose coalition of monarchists, capitalists and supporters of democratic socialism.
  • As the economy deteriorated during the Russian Civil War, Lenin used the Cheka to silence political opposition, both from his opponents and challengers within his own political party.
  • After the assassination attempt, the Cheka instituted a period known as the Red Terror, a campaign of mass executions against supporters of the czarist regime, Russia’s upper classes and any socialists who weren’t loyal to Lenin’s Communist Party.
  • About a million people braved the cold Russian winter to stand in line for hours before paying their respects to Lenin, who was lying in state at the House of Trade Unions in Moscow.
Javier E

Stalin's Long Shadow - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Although Russians know more about Stalin’s crimes than they did ever before, many politicians and historians want to pull him out of the shadows and celebrate him for his role in the industrialization of the young Soviet state and the victory over Nazi Germany.
  • For the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conducted another Stalin poll. It found that Stalin is the uncontested No.1 on the Russians’ list of great historical figures, ahead of Lenin, Marx and Peter the Great. In 1989, only 12 percent of Russians felt that way. Today it’s 50 percent.
  • In 1994, 27 percent of Russians had a positive view of Stalin. In 2011 it was 45 percent. Fifty percent of the respondents thought that Stalin was a wise leader who brought might and prosperity to the Soviet Union. Yet at the same time, 68 percent agreed that he was a cruel tyrant guilty of the death of millions of innocent citizens. Sixty percent also said it was more important that under his leadership the Soviet people won World War II.
Javier E

Bhaskar Sunkara, Editor of Jacobin Magazine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • in 2009, during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University, Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.
  • “I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21,” he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful.”
  • Since its debut in September 2010 it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from two New York publishers.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Jacobin’s success, he said, springs from the highly cohesive politics of the four co-editors he has recruited and their shared commitment to advancing a critique of liber
  • alism that is free of obscurantist academic theory or “cheap hooks.”
  • it was a packed Jacobin-organized panel on the Occupy movement, held in a downtown Manhattan bookstore three weeks after the protests began in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, that really put the magazine on the map, drawing attention from Politico and Glenn Beck.
  • the magazine was also attracting attention from more established figures on the left, who saw it as raising fundamental questions that had been off the table since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • Mr. Sunkara, the son of middle-class South Asian immigrants who was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school, traces his politics less to experience than to reading. In seventh grade a stray reference in an introduction to “Animal Farm” sent him to Trotsky’s own writings. By his freshman year of college he was editing a blog for Democratic Socialists of America and writing for Dissent.
Javier E

Diderot, an American Exemplar? Bien Sûr - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Rare are the writers whose legacy has shifted as dramatically as Diderot’s. When he died in 1784, at age 70, the vast majority of his short stories, novels and philosophical works lay hidden away in trunks. He was remembered primarily for two things: coediting the world’s first comprehensive encyclopedia, a project to which he contributed an astonishing 10,000 articles, and being a scandalous freethinker and atheist.
  • Armed with both hindsight and access to his unpublished writings, we now know a different Diderot. By the 19th century, the writer’s “discovered” texts began inspiring the likes of Goethe, Hegel and Nietzsche. Marx cited him as his favorite writer — twice. Freud, too, was a great fan.
  • Readers today never fail to be amazed by Diderot’s willingness to confront both the unconscionable and the uncomfortable, often embracing subject matter that his contemporaries fled. He vehemently condemned the enslavement of Africans (and gave a philosophical voice to the slave); he challenged his era’s views on religious celibacy and forced vocations (in a tear-jerking pseudo-memoir of a sexually abused nun); and he entertained the possibility that his cherished materialism denied us free will (in his novel “Jacques the Fatalist”).
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • An ardent empiricist, Diderot also took pride in questioning his own beliefs. In “Rameau’s Nephew,” Diderot gave life to a character who assailed the author’s deep-rooted humanism. One of the most memorable eccentrics in all of literature, the hedonistic protagonist preached the beauty of evil, the joys of social parasitism and the right to be a self-seeking individual.
Javier E

marxist thought - 0 views

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
Javier E

World's eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50% | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The world’s eight richest billionaires control the same wealth between them as the poorest half of the globe’s population
  • , Oxfam said it was “beyond grotesque” that a handful of rich men headed by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates are worth $426bn (£350bn), equivalent to the wealth of 3.6 billion people.
  • The development charity called for a new economic model to reverse an inequality trend that it said helped to explain Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Oxfam blamed rising inequality on aggressive wage restraint, tax dodging and the squeezing of producers by companies, adding that businesses were too focused on delivering ever-higher returns to wealthy owners and top executives.
  • The World Economic Forum (WEF) said last week that rising inequality and social polarisation posed two of the biggest risks to the global economy in 2017 and could result in the rolling back of globalisation.
  • Oxfam said the world’s poorest 50% owned the same in assets as the $426bn owned by a group headed by Gates, Amancio Ortega, the founder of the Spanish fashion chain Zara, and Warren Buffett, the renowned investor and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.
  • The others are Carlos Slim Helú: the Mexican telecoms tycoon and owner of conglomerate Grupo Carso; Jeff Bezos: the founder of Amazon; Mark Zuckerberg: the founder of Facebook; Larry Ellison, chief executive of US tech firm Oracle; and Michael Bloomberg; a former mayor of New York and founder and owner of the Bloomberg news and financial information service.
  • “While one in nine people on the planet will go to bed hungry tonight, a small handful of billionaires have so much wealth they would need several lifetimes to spend it. The fact that a super-rich elite are able to prosper at the expense of the rest of us at home and overseas shows how warped our economy has become.”
  • Last year, Oxfam said the world’s 62 richest billionaires were as wealthy as half the world’s population. However, the number has dropped to eight in 2017 because new information shows that poverty in China and India is worse than previously thought
  • The body that organises the Davos event said rising inequality was not an “iron law of capitalism”, but a matter of making the right policy choices.
  • The WEF report found that 51% of the 103 countries for which data was available saw their inclusive development index scores decline over the past five years, “attesting to the legitimacy of public concern and the challenge facing policymakers regarding the difficulty of translating economic growth into broad social progress”.
  • the vast majority of people in the bottom half of the world’s population were facing a daily struggle to survive, with 70% of them living in low-income countries.
  • “From Brexit to the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a worrying rise in racism and the widespread disillusionment with mainstream politics, there are increasing signs that more and more people in rich countries are no longer willing to tolerate the status quo,” the report said.
  • the WEF released its own inclusive growth and development report in which it said median income had fallen by an average of 2.4% between 2008 and 2013 across 26 advanced nations.
  • The Oxfam report added that since 2015 the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet. It said that over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1tn to their heirs – a sum larger than the annual GDP of India, a country with 1.3 billion people. Between 1988 and 2011 the incomes of the poorest 10% increased by just $65, while the incomes of the richest 1% grew by $11,800 – 182 times as much.
  • Oxfam called for fundamental change to ensure that economies worked for everyone, not just “a privileged few”.
1 - 20 of 47 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page