[lit-ideas] Re: Chomsky
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2011 05:06:45 -0800 (PST)
Thank you Donal. Later in the day yesterday I had a real world discussion
about this very link with someone who had studied Marx, was quite the Marxian
in fact. We had a difference of opinion in that I learned (and I had known
this, but never saw the bigger picture), that Marx's principles (and presumably
Chomsky's) applied/apply only to capitalism in cities. The horrific
exploitation that went on in the countryside of slaves and serfs was not
addressed by Marx at all because that exploitation doesn't fall under the
rubric of capitalism. Marx was writing in reaction to Adam Smith's appraisal
of the industrial revolution (Adam Smith was vehemently against slavery as a
bad economic foundation). Slaves/serfs are an economic system unto themselves,
and because slavery is about food (as well as other growable things; what's
more important than food?), the countryside is ignored by Marx. I was shocked
at that to say the least. BTW, slavery
never went away; it's alive and well today in the sugar industry and the sex
industry. Still, Marx lived in the city, and the exploitation in cities in
Marx's time was as bad as in the countryside; workers were referred to as wage
slaves and they were in fact slaves except they got paid to buy just enough
food to keep from dying.
As far as Hayek predicting in the 30's about the SU's economic system
collapsing, economists are stopped clocks basically. They're bound to be right
on occasion, if in fact he was right. Even the Chicago School, so popular for
so long, has now been intellectually discredited, even if politically they're
eternally popular because they serve the interests of the 1%. Adam Smith would
have been appalled at Friedman. Hayek is a free market capitalist; the problem
is that there is no such thing as a free market and never has been in the
history of the world. The U.S.'s biggest corporations are subsidized up to
their ears (they are legal people after all) with taxpayer money and tax
breaks. The banks were bailed out like irresponsible teenagers of the worst
kind. Corporations trade extremely unfairly; they eliminate competition, which
is the very foundation of capitalism. The biggest corporations, as discussed
before, pay no taxes at all; if
anything, one might say they tax the government. So Hayek needs to be taken
with a grain of salt. Keynes is a bit more reality based in that the
government is the spender of last resort; FDR stimulated the economy in the
30's, and of course WWII was a huge stimulus package. Unfortunately,
government today is indistinguishable from corporations except in name. FDR is
reviled by the 1% and they've been rolling back his reforms for decades.
I think your point that 'isms' are ruined by humans is the bottom line. If
history has proven anything, it's that isms are but a convenient excuse for
meaningless destruction, to use Carl Sagan's words. I came across a
discussion (I think I may read the book), who described a study designed to
find out how much of our behavior is influenced by stimuli on the periphery of
our awareness. They took a bunch of people and ostensibly had them play video
games, while computers next to them had screen savers with dollar bills and
other money symbols. They found that the people who sat next to the computers
with the money screen savers tested more selfishly in all areas. For example,
those people placed chairs farther apart when asked to set up conversational
groupings. One can only wonder what Wall Street's mind-bending immersion in
money does in terms of the meaningless selfishness of the 1% against everyone
else. I think if history proves
anything, it's that humans are hopeless. In that context Marx makes a lot of
sense.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, here's a Keynes/Hayek video. It's unfairly
skewed toward Hayek in my opinion. Fun though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
Andy
From:Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 6:36 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Chomsky
From:Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
Andy wrote
Chomsky is brilliant, even on Harvest Festival Day. Here's a talk by him from
1989, which puts into perspective socialism and the Soviet Union, and why the
two are mutually exclusive. He mentions Germany as the most advanced
capitalist country of Lenin's time but doesn't mention what Germany became in
the 30's. Given that history doesn't repeat itself but does rhyme, this talk
against the backdrop of the Occupy movement has a certain eerieness to it in my
opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI&feature=relmfu
>Thanks, but I gave at the office.>
And Larry has just eaten thanks.
On a more serious note, where is going Chomsky going with the
'Leninism-was-corrupt-deviation-from-Marxism' thesis? Even if we accept this
thesis, how does it get round the point that Marxism was always liable to be
corrupted this way, and not simply because opportunists would wear its
clothing: Marxism's philosophical foundations are much too naive about how
power corrupts [Marx treats political power as if it were simply akin to a
force in physics] and about the need for restraints on the use of power; and
its historicism [evident here in the somewhat blind adherence to the idea that
the revolution must start in Germany] is much too blind to the value of the
individual to guard against the gulag and the horrors of 'collectivism'
[including the genocide justified in the name of 'collectivism'] . That's even
before we move onto Marxist economics and its flaws that are so deep that Hayek
(no historicist) predicted in the 1930s that the Soviet economy
would, if run on the lines of Marxist economics, eventually run itself into
the ground - as, we know, this eventually happened and was perhaps the central
reason for the collapse of the Soviet system.
More specifically what would Chomsky make of Popper's The Open Society, a book
that Magee says is such that no rational person could read it and still remain
a Marxist?
Donal
England
Other related posts:
