tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post2841057766933946674..comments2024-03-28T06:07:03.667-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: MY UNDERSTANDING OF MARX PART IVRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-70810577623901252482021-04-07T07:17:35.310-04:002021-04-07T07:17:35.310-04:00Professor Wolff, thank you for this brilliant seri...Professor Wolff, thank you for this brilliant series of essays. <br /><br />Would you agree that Marx's critique of capitalism employs a form of epistemic normativity (rather than moral or prudential or aesthetic normativity)? To clarify: it seems to me that on your account what is wrong with capitalism is that it obfuscates how things really work, and so the wrong is not that capitalism exploits or oppresses people, but that it does so while making it look as though everyone is a free and equal participant in the marketplace.<br /><br />Maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but anyway that's a thumbnail sketch of the sort of vaguely Marxist type of non-moralistic ideology critique I've been trying to develop of late. Were it to chime with your own views, I'd be quite encouraged.Enzo Rossihttp://enzorossi.netnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-1672447927442019082021-04-01T20:08:44.005-04:002021-04-01T20:08:44.005-04:00Judging from Chile, I'd say that neoliberal ...Judging from Chile, I'd say that neoliberal capitalism creates inequalities more than poverty. <br /><br />Fewer Chileans live in extreme poverty, in conditions like those of a Manchester slum as described above, than before Pinochet's neoliberal counter-revolution, which basically is still in effect today. While there are still shanty-towns where there is no electricity or running water, there are far fewer than there were when I arrived here in 1979. <br /><br />On the other hand, there are more billionaires and more multi-millionaires. There is a whole class or caste of people who live a first world life style: I don't know what percentage exactly, but 7% of children go to private school, which, given the sums charged by those schools, indicates that the parents belong to the economic, social and cultural elite.s. wallersteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17448905469871566228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-33381631539821525972021-04-01T19:54:38.882-04:002021-04-01T19:54:38.882-04:00P.s. Globally, levels of infant and child mortalit...P.s. Globally, levels of infant and child mortality have fallen significantly in the last quarter century or so, though they are still too high.<br /><br />As for Bangladesh, according to a recent NYT column by N. Kristof, who admittedly tends to look at the glass half full side, the country now has an average life expectancy of 72, almost all children complete elem. school, there are more girls than boys in high school, and number of children stunted by malnutrition has dropped by half since 1991. Still lots of problems, including in the textile industry.<br /><br />I've read a little bit about the Kibera slum in (or outside of) Nairobi. I certainly wouldn't want to live there, but if I were forced to a choice between the slums of Manchester or Liverpool in the 1840s and Kibera today, I'd probably take the latter. LFCnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-48722775549463420942021-04-01T19:05:09.382-04:002021-04-01T19:05:09.382-04:00@ Christopher Mulvaney
I don't really disagre...@ Christopher Mulvaney<br /><br />I don't really disagree substantially. In terms of access to water, for ex., things may be a bit better in the slums of Nairobi or Mumbai than in the Manchester of the 1840s, but I'm not an expert on this and won't push the point. LFChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13551197682770555147noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-35137422737546430312021-04-01T18:33:17.113-04:002021-04-01T18:33:17.113-04:00LFC
I seriously doubt that conditions that obtain ...LFC<br />I seriously doubt that conditions that obtain in the third world urban slums are any better than the slums in Birmingham, Eng., or NYC during the 1850’s. Capital has historically moved to where labor costs are the cheapest and countries will not tax them too much, and prevent unionization. The movement of capital in the U.S. is evident in how (70 or so years ago) industries centered in the Northeast began to move to the South, which had right to work laws. Shoemaking, furniture, and leather industries are the examples that spring to mind. Auto production moves to Mexico, bringing economic collapse to major cities like Cleveland, Akron, etc. The textile industry, after moving to the south, moved overseas and did not bring enlightened labor practices with them. Recall that there was a major fire in 2013 at a textile plant in Bangladesh that killed 112 workers, and 5 months later a building housing 5 garment making enterprises collapsed leaving 1,1,34 dead.. To put the textile fire in context, the famous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in NYC killed 146, and is one of the most deadly industrial accidents in our history. I would suggest that the working conditions today in the developing world as as bad or worse than 1850’s London or Birmingham.<br /><br />Slums are recreated wherever capital goes, it seems. I saw a report on Nairobi recently which has enormous slums where there is no electricity, sanitation, potable water, little to no health care, etc. And since we are still in pandemic mode, the primary concern of epidemiologists is that these types of slum conditions, which apply in virtually all developing countries, will be the source of the mutation of one or more viruses that produces the next pandemic. <br />Christopher J. Mulvaney, Ph.D.https://www.blogger.com/profile/15817420454023465228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-83332696090136519972021-04-01T16:52:07.845-04:002021-04-01T16:52:07.845-04:00LFC, the conditions you describe are horrific. Pe...LFC, the conditions you describe are horrific. Perhaps they were rationalized as the only expected outcome possible per that other 18th century economist Malthus. I don't know. Sure seems like the theories of many economists have been used to explain away injustices for many years though. Dismal science indeed.Jerry Brownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16571572049627552805noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-37337325624392066182021-04-01T16:19:06.325-04:002021-04-01T16:19:06.325-04:00If one lived in Britain in, say, the 1840s or '...If one lived in Britain in, say, the 1840s or '50s, only a decade or two before Marx published Capital vol.1, all one would have had to do to see the flaws of capitalism was go to Manchester or Liverpool or London and note the horrific, almost indescribable conditions of the urban slums. (Engels wrote a whole book about Manchester, of course.) Unless one believed, as some did (or professed to do), that these conditions were an inevitable accompaniment to "progress," it would have been obvious that something was awry.<br /><br />Conditions were at least as bad as -- and in certain respects almost certainly worse than -- conditions in urban slums in the 'developing world' today. Whole families crammed into a single room with little light or ventilation, no sanitation, and, most likely, no source of clean water. Unprocessed waste flowed through the streets, "creating monstrous enlargements of the disease-breeding conditions which had prevailed in towns since the Middle Ages." (R.D. Altick, <i>Victorian People and Ideas</i>, p.44) In the mid 19th cent., "half of London...got its drinking water from a reach of the Thames into which two hundred sewers flowed." (Ibid.) Cholera killed some 16,000 people in England and Wales in 1832, and roughly the same number in London alone in 1849. "One out of every two babies born in the towns died before the age of five." (ibid., p.45) Then there were the working conditions in the factories and mines, only rather slowly addressed by legislation. It wouldn't have been necessary to read a single word of Marx's analysis of capitalism to realize that something was wrong (which is not to say that one would have grasped the underlying causes).LFCnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-11731509195587384262021-04-01T13:19:23.824-04:002021-04-01T13:19:23.824-04:00Maybe the people you know don't want to live i...Maybe the people you know don't want to live in the house Marx aims for, but here in Chile one of the leading candidate for November's presidential election is Daniel Jadue, Communist mayor of Recolecta ( the Santiago metropolitan region is divided into different municipalities, one of them being Recolecta) and an avowed Marxist. I wouldn't bet on him being elected nor would I bet on him not being elected: still he has as much support in the polls as any other candidate on the right, center or left. And in a month more Iraci Hassler, another Communist and Marxist, is likely to be elected mayor of Santiago, the old downtown in the large metropolitan and where I myself live.<br /><br />Do Jadue and Hassler plan to nationalize the corner grocery store and do away with capitalism in a year? No, but they are to the left of Bernie Sanders and their final goal is socialism, seen as a longterm project. s. wallersteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17448905469871566228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-25036797964220845822021-04-01T12:26:28.959-04:002021-04-01T12:26:28.959-04:00Maybe, Howie, Marx isn't building a house? May...Maybe, Howie, Marx isn't building a house? Maybe--or so I gather from this series of commentaries on Marx--he was saying something like "Here's the house you imagine you live in and here are the fundamentally dangerous structural flaws in your actual house that you should be aware of?"Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-83224678146118041342021-04-01T11:43:11.347-04:002021-04-01T11:43:11.347-04:00Dear Professor Wolff:
To say capitalism is nothin...Dear Professor Wolff:<br /><br />To say capitalism is nothing but an exploitative ruse pulled on the workers seems like a bunch of bunk. There are people smarter than me and as smart as you who have critiqued your orthodoxy and they are as ethical as are you.<br />But granted your analysis is true for the sake of argument: a church, physical actual church is an actual building, not just a Disney Land Potemkin village; whereas I don't see anybody who likes living in the house that Marx built.<br />I mean as Biggie says you cursed it but rehearsed it, but repeating your catechism over and over again, even if clothed in clever analogy and ironclad logic doesn't make it so.<br />Capitalism is a house that people actually can live in (just ask Biden, who I think would agree with me) and not just the straw man you make it out to be- whereas I don't see anyone who wants to live in the house that Marx builtHowiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12474061778220524205noreply@blogger.com