With regard to my exaggerated respect for Marx, who has, as
you observe “been dead for almost 150 years,” you must remember that I am a
philosopher. We philosophers tend to think that although
Plato has been dead long enough for us to form an opinion about him, Hobbes is
scarcely cold in the ground after three centuries. Marx?
A newcomer, almost a contemporary.
Also, it does seem a trifle harsh to say “I think your time
would be better spent pointing to contemporaries who have advanced the analysis
and the argument” to someone who spent 9000 words reviewing Thomas Piketty’s
important book. Lordy, you probably
think me tediously stuck in the mud for harboring a fondness for the original Star Trek.
By the way, neither I nor Marx have any objections to
accumulations of capital. It is private
ownership of the capital collectively produced by generations of workers to
which we object. I am with you
whole-heartedly on the 100% inheritance tax for estates above, say, the
equivalent of a millennium of the median annual family income [which is to say,
estates above fifty million or so.]
As for “anonymous,” if I were having dinner with someone, I
would want to know my dinner companion’s name.
If I were playing a game of chess, I would want to know my opponent’s
name. If I were having sex, I would want
to know my partner’s name. Is it really outré to want to know with whom I am
having a conversation?
13 comments:
Professor Wolff. I do value your analysis. I got my degrees in "philosophy" but the world I was born into was "full up" with scholars so I went into the "trenches" and worked in high tech.
I agree that Plato is worthy of reading. But I have no love of Plato for his adulation of the elites (and his close connection with the Thirty Tyrants and his push for a "philosopher king". I wouldn't want to live in his "Republic" where art was banned and roles were based on a crude social theory of gold, silver, bronze, and iron "types" that you were born to or (sometimes) could be lifted up or pushed down because your "imperfect" birth.
Marx is worth reading despite his personal flaws.
It is well worth having scholars still digging around "explaining" and "appreciating" these historic figures. But I am impatient for the future and I believe the future hangs on new ideas (or at least old ones hammered into new shapes).
I certainly enjoy your wit and humour. I enjoy you anecdotes. I wouldn't be reading your stuff or pestering you with comments if I didn't find value in what you have to say. (Oh and I'm utterly amazed at your notes on past students. As one who taught high school for 2 years and can only vaguely remember a few names & faces from nearly 50 years ago, I stand in amazement at your careful records.)
As for anonymity... I have no problem playing chess with a machine or somebody I "meet" over the Internet and will never lay eyes on. I agree if I were to dine with somebody I would like the conversation to range widely and include personal details and a name. And as far as sex... well, let's just say I wouldn't be contemplating that until I certainly new a name and a whole lot more. I want a relationship before sex... but I'm "old fashioned".
Here's something of a bit of modern "anonymity" to cast your eyes upon...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWYdU5weIxc
That's San Francisco in our time of plague.
I certainly recommend that over watching the raft of Hollywood "contagion" films.
..off topic:
One reason I enjoy being a skeptic and reading widely among various "climate denier" sites is that they actually have intelligent discussions on topical items, e.g. on COVID-19:
https://judithcurry.com/2020/03/25/covid-19-updated-data-implies-that-uk-modelling-hugely-overestimates-the-expected-death-rates-from-infection/
This is from a site run by Judith Curry.
She was chairman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology but if you read this autobiographical bit you will see how the "global warming" fanatics drove her from her job:
https://judithcurry.com/2017/01/03/jc-in-transition/
I find her blog Climate Etc. worth reading:
She has given testimony before Congress on climate issues and she writes some very interesting articles:
https://judithcurry.com/2019/10/29/escape-from-model-land/
In our world of "open discussion" and "free expression" and "science", it is interesting how she is vilified with statements such as "Apparently Judith Curry has completed her transition to the Dark Side", viz.:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/curry-the-backstory#.XQo9rS2ZP6A
I was too young to be personally aware of the McCarthy era, but I had a junior high teacher who went unpaid while teaching for well over a decade for refusing to "swear allegiance" in order to hold his teaching job (both my parents went through the "formality" of swearing allegiance to retain their jobs despite having spent the WWII years in the military, but we all know that traitors and subversives flocked to "join up" while the real heroes like Trump never served because they were "too smart" for that).
Judith Curry is part of a 21st century McCarthy witch hunt carried out by the Democrats in service to the new shibboleth of "global warming":
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/climate-change-study-funding-raul-grijalva-115568
You say that philosopher's never abandon their old sages.
I say that the politically aware never forget the past and the repressions by the right and the left in their efforts to force their ideology upon us.
...off topic yet again!
Hope & despair.
This is a comment provoked by earlier hostile comments when I pointed toward optimism based on retroviral treatments and vaccines for treating COVID-19.
Here is an interesting article about the new COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Gilead Sciences:
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/25/gilead-sciences-coronavirus-drug/
The key bit for me:
“Gilead is notorious for price gouging,” said Rizvi. “Gilead holds the key to bringing down and ending both HIV and Hep-C epidemics, and in both cases, prices have played a real factor in our inability to stop both epidemics. And that’s terrifying.”
What I find interesting is that it is a display of "capitalism" in all its sordid glory. The fact that resources are being rushed to fix a problem without all the mind-numbing "debates" such as those witnessed the past days in the US Senate over trying to come up with a relief bill that didn't have too much "pork" according to the Republicans and too much "crony giveaways" according to the Democrats. Private initiative/enterprise does not come with the bureaucracy of the US federal government (although large corporations have their own internal bureaucracies with the same dead hand).
The problem of modern society is to harness capitalism/free enterprise with a harness of social responsibility. This is tricky because the left goes off the cliff with "social justice" claims that tie all kinds of pet projects to issues of real basic justice and the right "builds walls" to prevent needed social change and prevent the voices of the people from being "counted". That is the mess called "democracy". It was brutal and ugly in ancient Greece and Rome prior to the empire. It is brutal and ugly today.
I have no solutions. I distrust anybody claiming a solution
But I know we need solutions.
And I trust that solutions will emerge as they have in the past which means usually "bottom up" (unless they are co-opted by some sociopath like a Huey Long who did good things for "the little people" until he got too full of himself and became a demagogue).
What I do have... critiques, opinions, ideas, hopes, visions, and encouragement for anybody who will step forward with their own ideas.
I like your web site professor Wolff because you remind me of relatives I had who were full of stories and wisdom and couldn't resist "sharing". I'm sure you were a marvelous teacher. And I'm so very glad that you get to continue via your blog to cast your pearls among us swine!
...yet more off topic comments:
James Fallows, a senior editor at the Atlantic, had a series of posts prior to Trump's election in which he documented the lies presented and how they were received. He called it a "time capsule" because he wanted to document what really happened so that history would not forget.
He his now doing the same with a series leading up to the 2020 election. The latest was an article on Trump and COVID-19 entitled "2020 Time Capsule #8: ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’":
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2020/03/2020-time-capsule-8-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel/608707/
...sorry! No disparaging comments about Marx.
But here is a site that has links to a number of Wolff video lectures on Kant...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS7aoxEiTRtuYjZQTsaAVqg
we all must "make do" with what is at hand in this plague season!
Anonymous, it seems you have only swine to cast among pearls. Three consecutive Commments on another's blog is the very height of indecency. It's not my place to say, but I would encourage you to confine your "critiques, opinions, ideas, hopes and visions" to the pig farms of inferior blogs.
I will take jgkess to heart and post a final "farewell" since I have found this site hostile to anything but rigid "orthodoxy" (I'm not claiming that professor Wollf is inhospitable, but his raft of "devotees" clearly are!)
I follow an economics site which, like many sites, is currently side-tracked with COVID-19 and he posts a graph of actual testing for COVID-15:
https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2020/03/march-25-update-us-covid-19-tests-per.html
What South Korea taught is that it takes tens of thousands of tests PER DAY! to get the epidemic under control. Sadly, the US failed to do this (as have many other western countries). We pay the price for our "dear leaders" and their blindness to fact & science.
...I now exit stage leftish to leave the floor for the TRUE BELIEVERS who are the commentariat of this site!
Well Professor, I have no problem telling you my name- but there ain't no way I'm having sex with you. So you can just forget about that. I enjoyed your piece on Marx though.
Oh- I'm not the anonymous prolific commenter from above. I wonder why a strong belief in 'free markets' (or even the idea that markets are generally free in the first place) doesn't count as ideology of a sort? Any ideas?
I don't know whether Jerry Brown is a real name or an Internet nom de plume, but the comment above made me laugh. So thanks for that.
I'm snickering at the idea of a reigning orthodoxy amongst Prof. Wolff's readers/commenters.
Anyway, if it is really true, good riddance to the hysterics of this current "anonymous".
Back to Marx being alive or not. From your blog on the gig economy, there was one sentence or phrase that is still ringing in my ears:
...Marx shows us in extraordinary detail the historical process, stretching over many centuries, by which ordinary men and women have been deprived of control over their means of production, their work processes, their tools, their laboring, their very bodies....
If that ain't relevant and alive I don't know what is. Here's my question: would it be fair to say, as does Richard Bernstein (somewhere, but I can't find the quote), that the essence of Marx, if there is an essence, is about process?
'you must remember that I am a philosopher'
I don't think I can approve of any American college professor saying this to students, or putting it on his business card, but I'm willing to try harder to indulge this if any Germans or French can be found to indulge this?
Thanks LFC. I laugh at most of my jokes but it is better when others laugh also. And what the heck- we can all use some humor in this very strange time. Most people call me Jerry but a few call me Jerome. Best wishes.
Why shouldn't a university professor of philosophy call him or herself a "philosopher"? It's like a biology professor calling him or her-self a "biologist".
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