No wonder the Revolution failed - any sane person hates the ukelele. 
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The countless collectivist movements that have walked in with the belief that economics is all political and that you can change the distribution of resources through political will and utterly failed are legion. Hell, I am not even talking about 20th century collectivist movements that failed miserably by walking in with the idea that economics is all political. This idea exists back into ancient times. How many times do you need to test an idea and fail within a generation before you accept that maybe economics has a couple more rules in there than just political dictations of where resources go? If you want to point to the greatest failing of Marx, it is the idea that you can just politically will a distribution of resources without terriblye consequences, despite the vast and unending historical evidence to the contrary.
Economics deserves its due. As much as it gets kicked around, it really has found a lot of good ways to not do something and it tends to prescribe against repeating those mistakes. It certainly isn’t terribly cohesive in ascribing positive action, but it can certainly give you a laundry list of things not to do, or at the very least tell you that you can do them, but that they will particular consequences. Economics will tell you that if there is a resource people want and you decide to put a price limit on it, unless it was a monopoly, you will unfailingly cause a shortage. You political force lower prices, but you will pay an economic price. The study of economics lets you understand that and make such decisions with eyes wide open.
Economics and political science are two very separate fields. Economics is the study of an ever changing system insanely complex system of resource distribution that humans have a had in. Political science is the proper field of study in determining how to interface and manipulate that system to bring about a better society. They are two vastly different things.
And of course, we’ll set aside the minor issue that overwhelmingly, the terrible consequences are what the ruling classes do to those trying to redistribute resources.
Also not worth discussing: the terrible consequences of establishing the uneven distribution of resources and the terrible consequences of maintaining the uneven distribution of resources.
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I used to agree with you. Then I bought my daughter one to play with because she wanted it —probably because it is pink and she was 4— and I wished she would show some interest in music. So then I learned a few chords just because it was there and actually it was fun and cheered me up to play it so now I have 5 of them of my own … They grow on you like that. So don’t try and play one if you want to stay “sane”.
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I’m not implying that a more even distribution of wealth is a bad thing. There is no doubt that massively uneven distributions of wealth are bad. The point is that taking action against it isn’t a simple political question as Marx believed. The simplistic idea that politics can force wealth distributions into something more even has been shown to be horribly wrong time and time again literally since ancient times. If you are operating on a structure big enough where the word “economy” means something, you can just will things egalitarian.
How you achieve a better wealth distribution certainly is a political problem, but the only answer to the problem is nasty, complex, and requires a deep understanding of economics. Marx’s mistake was in believing that you only need political will to change the economics. Economics just tries to understand how resources move around under certain rules. It tries to understand what happens when you change the rules in favor of one system or another. You need to understand economics as a separate non-political system before you can go muck with the internals.
Ditches in the ground are littered with the victims of people who thought that they could screw around with resource distribution armed with ideology and good intentions alone. People believing that Marx’s “insight” that economics is just politics is correct has literally killed tens (hundreds?) of millions people.
I’m not crapping on the guy. He had no idea the consequences, and he is a great historic social and economic thinker in the same way Freud or Aristotle were great thinkers, but like them, he was also horribly wrong on a lot of things. Stop holding him up like he is some economic nostradamus. He has essentially no insight in understanding and absolutely no prescriptive policies in modern world economics.
Well, first of all, I thought the originally linked article had a silly premise, since I don’t recall Marx making specific predictions about the course of future events, just general projections which would occasionally blur into cheerleading: capitalism would expand, crises would become more severe, the working class will “inevitably” revolt and initiate a social transformation. (Whether he actually meant it was inevitable, or whether it was “cheerleading” as I believe, has been a matter of debate.)
Second, I don’t think Marx argued that economics is just politics, nor that a communist revolution was simply an act of political will reshaping the economy. Among other criticisms, I’d say this is an example of an absence of dialectical thinking. An economic system and a political system have a dialectical relationship with each other, in which the economic system is the base and the political system is the superstructure – each can effect changes in the other, but the economic system is the dominant of the two.
My understanding is that the way Marx understood this playing out is that capitalism would concentrate larger numbers of workers, and given the need and the opportunity, workers would organize themselves to resist capitalism. Sufficiently organized, and with sufficiently developed strategic vision, they would be able to exert increasing power at the point of production, with strikes, factory takeovers, and so forth. Their political power is based upon their economic power, and the conquest of factories would enable the conquest of the state. Not that this would actually occur in a discrete series of steps, of course. And as I recall, Marx said that he expected this to be a process that would take an indefinitely long time, with inevitable setbacks and reversals.
The Bolsheviks assumed that Russia was not economically developed enough to sustain socialism, and their plan was to hold power until there was a revolution in Germany, and thereafter in other economically advanced countries, who could help bail out Russia. Obviously, that’s not how things worked out, and the Bolsheviks were pretty freaked out when the attempts at revolution in Germany in 1918-19 and 1924 failed. It was some years later, after Stalin had outmaneuvered and killed off most of the old Bolsheviks, that they started talking about “socialism in one country”, and that political will was sufficient to achieve economic transformation. In the 1930s, Trotsky argued that only a political revolution was necessary in Russia, as workers were already in position to control the economy through the soviets – which was exceptionally poor reasoning on Trotsky’s part, in my opinion.
I do think the Bolsheviks overestimated the efficacy of seizing control of the state, but I don’t think they ever flatly posited that politics trumped economics.
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Didn’t Dick Powell play John Kennedy, Lincoln’s police bodyguard on a train? Spoooooky.
I can’t believe that no one else has said this yet, but when I saw the headline, I was really hoping that it was referring to some predictions made by Groucho, Harpo, Chico, or Zeppo.
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Isn’t that basically how Lysenkoism worked?
You do realize that for a substantial fraction of the world’s English-speaking population, the h in historian is silent? Ditto “herb.” In that case, the words start with a vowel sound, and “an” is the correct indefinite article to use.
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Hmmmm… Would pronouncing the word as istorian actually be proper English though? I checked a few online dictionaries and their pronunciation guides all voiced the “h.”
Of course. It has been proper for a very long time, just like “a historian” has been. Proper grammar varies with dialect, too.
http://www.englishforums.com/English/AHistorianOrAnHistorian/hqzzw/post.htm
But this guy agrees with you:
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No one seems to agree, from what I can see–meaning a quick look on google. If I had it handy, I’d look in strunk and white, but I don’t.
But you know… it gives people the opportunity to look smart, so I guess I’ll take one for the team and be wrong on this one. Whatever.
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Good luck. Both Marx and Hegel can be a slog, honestly, but if you really want to understand this stuff, it’s always best to go back to the original. I struggle with the notion of the dialectical too. It’s pretty tough to figure our what they mean… the distance from us to them doesn’t help.
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I have to totally agree here. When I got my first one, I sort of felt silly… it was like, man this is cheesy, but then I strum it (very poorly, I might add) and bam, I feel better. Right now I’m listening to the Magnetic fields song, Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing, and it’s putting me in a better mood. And songs like this:
Man what a gorgeous song…Ukulele forever!!!
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This is only true if your shut your eyes really tightly, stick your fingers in your ears, and scream “la la la I’m not listening and the economy in which I participate is truly a capitalist one!” In reality, the economy has been a pretty rich mix of capitalist and socialist methods of allocation since the 1930’s in the US, longer elsewhere.
Earlier you remarked that capitalism has beaten all challengers and made itself a resilient system. It did so by co-opting socialism. Marx probably could have predicted this too. Thesis: Capitalism. Antithesis: Socialism. Synthesis: What we have now.
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Except when it’s done so successfully.
Early 1900’s – almost no middle class, huge lower class, tiny upper class. Mid 1900’s – huge middle class. Small lower class. Tiny upper class. Reason: socialist policies of the 1930’s and '40’s.
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well, once we have New Men who will respect the political will of the vanguard, everything will work fine.
