Marx anticipated many of the attempts by financial capitalists to make the system limp along while their victims organized. The greed of the individual could be managed by the rest of society so long as society could control the majority of the resources. One of his shortcomings was not anticipating the variety of degenerate forms of communism. (see below)
Lenin’s response was to take Marx’s claim that change was inevitable and use it as an excuse to force the issue with coercion since he considered the proletariat to be unqualified to decide for themselves. This was just a different hierarchy of oppression that only got worse with Stalin. The bureaucracy was supposed to keep anyone from acting on greed, but instead granted cover to those in power.
I don’t think they can ban coalitions of people coming to their houses at night with pitchforks and rifles and rope to settle this the way it will be inevitably settled
This is true, but they do cause enough harm to the offending corporation to give them and others second thoughts, which is useful.
I wonder if one could set up some kind of corporation or non-profit that could file thousands of simultaneous arbitration actions against these corporations? Set up something like the parking ticket app (can’t remember the name at the moment) to do intake, and hire some recent law school grads to file them…
@lloydcogliandro addresses your criticism of Marx rather well I think.
Have you actually READ much Marx? Because agree with him or not, you really should read him. He had some pretty keen insights that aren’t just about what he saw as the exploitation of capitalism.
IANAL, but I have to have some basic understanding of US contract law for work. That’s not how contracts work. Every contract stands on its own, unless it references prior contracts and both parties agree to the reference (and that practice is rare, because making sense of layers of referred contracts is a PITA; most just copy the relevant sections of the old contract and nullify it to avoid confusion).
If that’s WF’s argument, it’s full of shit. I can’t create a contract with a supplier that says they must provide their product for free, forge their signature, then argue that, because we had a prior contract that said they would sell me their product for $1000 and had their valid signature on it, that the new contract was valid. I wouldn’t just get laughed out of court, I would be charged with fraud.
here’s what i don’t understand: how can “arbitration” supersede criminal law?
there’s all this talk of donald trump, chase, wells fargo, fox news, bill o’reilly, harvey weinstein, roger ailes, etc. – rich white men – having had people sign “forced arbitration” and “non-disclosure agreements”; of these companies and people reaching settlements with people … but, how can you have all this when criminal laws have been violated?
not to be too hyperbolic, but is it suddenly okay somehow to murder a fellow employee, but get it all waived away because of arbitration? if not that, then why sexual assault? why stealing money?
Read him forty years ago and thought it was a good idea. But my simple mind only saw the end results of falling down and ending in a brutal dictatorship, (was a bit busy with family and work). Could only attribute it to greed of the individual, everyone wanting to be “special” or better than everyone else, or have something beyond the average (money, material goods, whatever). I guess that’s why I like Bernie and his democratic socialism. Some good ideas there that need to be explored.
I think we need to remove this case from the courts entirely. I signed an arbitration agreement as the the Chamber of Commerce saying they can only adjudicate these cases in a court of binding arbitration. I choose the location and the arbitrator. The Chamber of Commerce will have to represent itself since no lawyers are allowed in my courts.
You do realize that democratic socialism pulls at least some from marx’s work, right? It’s not Marx’s ideas that necessarily ended in a brutal dictatorship, it was human being using Marx as a fig leaf for authoritarianism.
Specifically to @dommerdoodle I find it useful to see Marx in a similar fashion as I do towards other foundational theorists of their fields- vital in illuminating the path forward in their era, despite the march itself proving them wrong about this or that hypothesis down the line. Of course some of the observations still hold even to this day, often the gist (i.e. Newton’s Laws, Evolution) is so damn close as to be useful to this day.
Before Marx, western classical econ was primarily utilitarian-derived rhetoric built largely on assumptions about human behavior that we now know to be, erm, well wrong, supported sparsely with functions no one has used for a long time. Marx was the first to make a systemic attempt to rationally analyze both the history and current state of economy (econ’s first scientist, if you will,) and IMO capitalist economic thought since is essentially one long defense against his findings.
Imagine if the academy of Physics black-balled Newton? Refused to teach his work, save for maybe a class period in a history course? That sounds absurd on its’ face. Or Geologists flat out ignoring Wegener? Yet for the most part that is exactly what the academy of Economics has done, steadfastly now over 100 years after Marx’s death.
