4 ms·

“Isonomia is the liberal’s bet that Kant is right, and Marx is wrong.”

2 points by brandonlc 3y ago

rhelz 3y ago
So many articles like this just presuppose that since capitalism hasn't collapsed in the way Marx predicted, so we should all just quit worrying and love the market. The problem is that global capitalism did collapse, and does collapse, every 10 years or so. 2008, dot-com crash, Black Monday, et etc.... Every 10 years the whole world has to come together and bail it back out again. Socialism triumphed; its just socialism for the 1% and capitalism for everybody else.
- jfengel 3y ago
  "Socialism for the 1%" isn't socialism. It's just kleptocracy. Marx didn't just predict that capitalism would intermittently collapse. Even standard Keynesian theory predicts that. Marx predicted that in industrialized countries, wealth inequality would reinforce itself so that it became absolute. Since they own the "means of production" that everybody else requires to work, they keep all of the profits. Eventually, the workers would become tired of subsistence wages, and revolt. They would seize those "means of production" together and share the profits more equally. That "eventually" makes the theory unfalsifiable, but still not entirely useless. We've taken a lot of pains to avoid the fate Marx predicted: social security, medicare, unemployment insurance, WIC, etc. Marx predicts that those won't suffice, and we can't say if that's true or not, but there have been profound positive effects already. If Marx is right in the long term than all of that is just delaying the inevitable. That's debatable.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > That "eventually" makes the theory unfalsifiable, but still not entirely useless. We've taken a lot of pains to avoid the fate Marx predicted: social security, medicare, unemployment insurance, WIC, etc. Whether those steps were to prevent it or not is..disputable. While the exact steps taken in the transitiom from 19th C capitalism to the dominant modern mixed economy weren't exactly the same, a number of them (perhaps unsurprising, since they were in many cases championed by people inspired by Marx) mirror elements of the immediate program Marx lays out for the German Communists in the Communist Manifesto. Its true that the dominant modern Marxist take is that the transition to the general transition to the modern mixed economy is essentially a liberal salve to keep the working class calm while preserving capitalism, but it can also be viewed as capitalism having reached a point of sufficient stress that it, as predicted, triggered the beginning of the systemic revolution (which may be proceeding slower than Marxists prefer, but if one looks at past revolutions in dominant economic systems, not necessarily unusually slowly.)

2 points by brandonlc 3y ago

So many articles like this just presuppose that since capitalism hasn't collapsed in the way Marx predicted, so we should all just quit worrying and love the market. The problem is that global capitalism did collapse, and does collapse, every 10 years or so. 2008, dot-com crash, Black Monday, et etc.... Every 10 years the whole world has to come together and bail it back out again. Socialism triumphed; its just socialism for the 1% and capitalism for everybody else.

jfengel 3y ago
"Socialism for the 1%" isn't socialism. It's just kleptocracy. Marx didn't just predict that capitalism would intermittently collapse. Even standard Keynesian theory predicts that. Marx predicted that in industrialized countries, wealth inequality would reinforce itself so that it became absolute. Since they own the "means of production" that everybody else requires to work, they keep all of the profits. Eventually, the workers would become tired of subsistence wages, and revolt. They would seize those "means of production" together and share the profits more equally. That "eventually" makes the theory unfalsifiable, but still not entirely useless. We've taken a lot of pains to avoid the fate Marx predicted: social security, medicare, unemployment insurance, WIC, etc. Marx predicts that those won't suffice, and we can't say if that's true or not, but there have been profound positive effects already. If Marx is right in the long term than all of that is just delaying the inevitable. That's debatable.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > That "eventually" makes the theory unfalsifiable, but still not entirely useless. We've taken a lot of pains to avoid the fate Marx predicted: social security, medicare, unemployment insurance, WIC, etc. Whether those steps were to prevent it or not is..disputable. While the exact steps taken in the transitiom from 19th C capitalism to the dominant modern mixed economy weren't exactly the same, a number of them (perhaps unsurprising, since they were in many cases championed by people inspired by Marx) mirror elements of the immediate program Marx lays out for the German Communists in the Communist Manifesto. Its true that the dominant modern Marxist take is that the transition to the general transition to the modern mixed economy is essentially a liberal salve to keep the working class calm while preserving capitalism, but it can also be viewed as capitalism having reached a point of sufficient stress that it, as predicted, triggered the beginning of the systemic revolution (which may be proceeding slower than Marxists prefer, but if one looks at past revolutions in dominant economic systems, not necessarily unusually slowly.)