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It was founded by Marxists to fulfil Marxist dogma. Either Soviet Marxism was not as predictive of reality as it liked to pretend to be or it compromised itself
by nephihaha 11mo ago
It was founded by Marxists to fulfil Marxist dogma. Either Soviet Marxism was not as predictive of reality as it liked to pretend to be or it compromised itself. Any system which says "my way or the highway", and that it alone is scientific, is inevitably going to lead to lead to oppression in practice whether it's Marxist dogma or the subject of this article.
Yanis Varoufakis himself attended private school and his father in law was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. I'm sceptical about how much he knows about working class realities.
- saubeidl 11mo agoThat's a nice parallel to the article, which points out that the biggest fans of capitalism haven't managed to actually create their predicted free markets. Pure ideology.
- Hikikomori 11mo agoAnd when do something approaching free markets we get things like the Bengal and Irish famines.
- nephihaha 11mo agoBengal's famine occurred because British imperial government (not market forces) shifted food resources away to support the war effort. Ireland's famine occurred within a largely feudal system, and has been followed by massive land reforms within Ireland. It is arguable if either occurred due to "free market forces". For what it's worth, the massive famines in the USSR and PRC didn't take place due to free market forces either. The problem with the free market vs Marxism argument is that they are both materialist. These systems know the price of things and real value of nothing.
- saubeidl 11mo agoAt least in the context of the Irish famine, capitalist policies were a key driver: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43910575 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43910575
- nephihaha 11mo agoI cannot reply to the link in the Irish famine above. Very debatable if most of Ireland was "capitalist" at the time especially outside the cities. It was mostly feudal, with an anglicised (or effectively English) aristocracy and peasantry, operating in basically the same way that they had done in the Middle Ages.
- defrost 11mo agoFor the purposes of discussing the article, Yanis's grasp of working class realities is moot; his thesis is that: From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal state
- nephihaha 11mo agoI don't agree with that interpretation either. The USA is not very feudal at all, yet. I live in a country which is still partly feudal and was even more feudal when I was a child. Ordinary Americans often have a very different attitude to life, less deferent to government than more feudal countries, and more independent minded. It may well head towards technofeudalism, but I dispute that. With automation, the peasantry become dispensable to the ruling class and that isn't very feudal at all. Feudalism is a system where money and power flows upwards. In feudalism, the lords are dependent on the peasantry for food, goods and troops... Which is not the case when all these are provided by machines.