A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn’t work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does. Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates), even though Republicans have much more faith in the free market.
There a lot of wrong with that paragraph. The main problem is that’s based on the lies. The lie that the political spectrum being well partitionated into left and right. After that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are Marxists the suggestion that they are is deeply flawed. In 2008 the Democrats outraised the Republicans. They got more money for corporate donors. In the election Obama had more economic professors as economic advisors than McCain who had a bunch of supply side advisors which happens to be a strain of thought not believed to represent the truth by mainstream economists.
In 2008 Berny Sanders isn’t raising money from corporate donors. On the other hand he supports the status quo enough to pledge to support Hillary Clinton should she be elected, even when people like Ralph Nader think that giving away a lot of power to influence change.
On thing that most economists agree on is that free trade is great. The leading Republican presidential candidate doesn’t believe in free trade. It was disgust in 1988 of how US politicians allow free access to US market to foreign actions and then talked that it the issue might motivate him to run for office in the future.
Lastly it was Marx who came up with the idea of seeing everything as a struggle of capitalism vs. marxism. It’s worth noting that you are advocating for marxist ideas.
A. People who believe that free competition between goods and companies will lead to high social utility are also likely to believe that free competition between ideas will lead to high social utility.
B. Capitalists have more faith in the free market than Marxists do.
C. Republicans have more faith in the free market than Democrats do.
Suppose B and C are true. If A is true, then we should find, all else being equal, that Marxists lie more than capitalists, and that Democrats lie more than Republicans.
I agree I should have worded my post differently, but I did not mean to imply that Democrats are Marxists, or share any traits with them. Only that they contrast with Republicans along the free-trade dimension in the same direction that Marxists contrast with “capitalists”.
People who believe that free competition between goods and companies will lead to high social utility are also likely to believe that free competition between ideas will lead to high social utility.
What evidence do you have for that claim to be true?
Capitalists have more faith in the free market than Marxists do.
That really depends on how you define the terms. Marx thought that free markets are really powerful. Powerful enough that change via democratic institutions is impossible and the only possible way to create systematic political change is through violent revolution.
C. Republicans have more faith in the free market than Democrats do.
That depends really on the issue and the people involved.
Trump thinks that the free market does work less well internationally than Clinton and has to free trade as currently practiced is bad for the US.
Republicans on the whole are more opposed to the act of sex being sold on the free market.
What evidence do you have for that claim to be true?
The comment, and the original statement in the post, which you are replying to, is the proposed evidence. I’m not setting forth A as evidence to prove something else; I’m setting forth other evidence in favor of A.
You’re right that Republicans aren’t pure libertarians. Here’s a poll saying that Democrats currently support free trade more than Republicans do.
Foreign trade shouldn’t be included for this purpose, however. “Belief in the free market” means believing that a free market maximizes social utility for everyone participating in the market. When considering foreign trade, a US politician isn’t considering utility for the world; they’re considering utility for the US. It is not inconsistent to believe that free markets maximize total utility, and also to believe that the US can benefit more (though necessarily at the expense of others) from restricted foreign trade than from free trade.
That’s not much different than saying that the 1% get a slice of the cake that’s too large and we need regulation, so that more wealth get’s distributed to the 99%.
That also still leaves the example of prostitution where more Demorcrats than Republicans are in favor of a free market.
Both Republicans and Democrats don’t have context independent views on free markets. It always depends on the case.
But if Marxists actually are out there struggling to overthrow capitalism, recognizing that is simply recognizing reality.
On of the tenets of Marxism is to see every conflict as the struggle between the capitalist class and the workers class. That’s wrong. There are a lot of conflicts that are not driven by the fight of the two classes.
Apart from that corporate Democrats that outraise Republicans simply aren’t Marxist in any meaningful sense.
The identity politics Democrats engage in is fundamentally Marxist. Plug in dichotomy, identify oppressor and oppressed end of the dichotomy, rinse, lather, repeat. Collectivism. Class consciousness, False consciousness.
Not marxists economically, but ideologically. And even while they’re not marxists economically, they are certainly anticapitalist, as most problems are attributed partially to capitalism, and the solutions to those problems are less capitalism and more government control of markets.
The identity politics Democrats engage in is fundamentally Marxist. Plug in dichotomy
To that extend the OP is a Marxist. He’s focusing on the dichomtomy.
Collectivism
Ideologically postmodernism leads to the acceptance that Black people can live in a Black community and don’t have to integrate into White society. Ideologically today’s left puts value on protecting native cultures and doesn’t believe in pushing modern Western cultural values on other societies.
That’s very much against Marx idea that everything is supposed to come together.
Today’s left considers that everybody is entitled to his own identity and there no need for individuals to integrate into the collective norms of identity. There’s no belief that there one correct identity and that if history finally advances to communism everybody will have that collective identity.
Diversity ideologically valued when Marx didn’t value it.
Seems to me that you and ChristianKl disagree on how many specific details can one remove from Marx and still call the result “fundamentally Marxist”. Specifically, whether you can remove “class struggle” and replace it with any “X struggle” (such as gender struggle or race struggle or otherkin vs non-kin struggle).
I suspect that you could both more or less agree that identity politics uses similar rhetorical tools as Marxism, only replacing class struggle with other values of X. And that the thing you disagree at is whether the rhetorical tools themselves should be called “Marxist”; because for you “Marxism” is in the rhetorical tools themselves, while for ChristianKl “Marxism” is the specific application of those tools to the class struggle.
Or I may be completely wrong here, but this was the first impression.
It seems worth distinguishing “has something in common with Marx’s ideas” from “is fundamentally Marxist”, especially as “Marxist” is a pretty inflammatory term because of the horrors perpetrated in the name of Marxism in the 20th century.
So, what are these ideas you’re calling fundamentally Marxist? I think it comes down to this: “Sometimes one group of people has more power and resources than another, and acts in ways that harm the worse-off group. We should frame such situations in terms of conflict between the two groups, even though some people in the worse-off group may not see it that way.”
I’m not sure I’d want to endorse those ideas, but they seem to me to fall far short of justifying the description as “fundamentally Marxist”.
certainly anticapitalist
Advocating more regulation of markets is not at all the same thing as opposing capitalism. I think you are confusing capitalism with, I dunno, libertarianism or something.
Capitalism means having lots of privately owned industry and trade. Anyone who isn’t advocating large-scale nationalization, or something more drastic than that, is not being anticapitalist in any useful sense.
There a lot of wrong with that paragraph. The main problem is that’s based on the lies. The lie that the political spectrum being well partitionated into left and right. After that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are Marxists the suggestion that they are is deeply flawed. In 2008 the Democrats outraised the Republicans. They got more money for corporate donors. In the election Obama had more economic professors as economic advisors than McCain who had a bunch of supply side advisors which happens to be a strain of thought not believed to represent the truth by mainstream economists.
In 2008 Berny Sanders isn’t raising money from corporate donors. On the other hand he supports the status quo enough to pledge to support Hillary Clinton should she be elected, even when people like Ralph Nader think that giving away a lot of power to influence change.
On thing that most economists agree on is that free trade is great. The leading Republican presidential candidate doesn’t believe in free trade. It was disgust in 1988 of how US politicians allow free access to US market to foreign actions and then talked that it the issue might motivate him to run for office in the future.
Lastly it was Marx who came up with the idea of seeing everything as a struggle of capitalism vs. marxism. It’s worth noting that you are advocating for marxist ideas.
A. People who believe that free competition between goods and companies will lead to high social utility are also likely to believe that free competition between ideas will lead to high social utility.
B. Capitalists have more faith in the free market than Marxists do.
C. Republicans have more faith in the free market than Democrats do.
Suppose B and C are true. If A is true, then we should find, all else being equal, that Marxists lie more than capitalists, and that Democrats lie more than Republicans.
I agree I should have worded my post differently, but I did not mean to imply that Democrats are Marxists, or share any traits with them. Only that they contrast with Republicans along the free-trade dimension in the same direction that Marxists contrast with “capitalists”.
What evidence do you have for that claim to be true?
That really depends on how you define the terms. Marx thought that free markets are really powerful. Powerful enough that change via democratic institutions is impossible and the only possible way to create systematic political change is through violent revolution.
That depends really on the issue and the people involved.
Trump thinks that the free market does work less well internationally than Clinton and has to free trade as currently practiced is bad for the US.
Republicans on the whole are more opposed to the act of sex being sold on the free market.
The comment, and the original statement in the post, which you are replying to, is the proposed evidence. I’m not setting forth A as evidence to prove something else; I’m setting forth other evidence in favor of A.
You’re right that Republicans aren’t pure libertarians. Here’s a poll saying that Democrats currently support free trade more than Republicans do.
Foreign trade shouldn’t be included for this purpose, however. “Belief in the free market” means believing that a free market maximizes social utility for everyone participating in the market. When considering foreign trade, a US politician isn’t considering utility for the world; they’re considering utility for the US. It is not inconsistent to believe that free markets maximize total utility, and also to believe that the US can benefit more (though necessarily at the expense of others) from restricted foreign trade than from free trade.
That’s not much different than saying that the 1% get a slice of the cake that’s too large and we need regulation, so that more wealth get’s distributed to the 99%.
That also still leaves the example of prostitution where more Demorcrats than Republicans are in favor of a free market.
Both Republicans and Democrats don’t have context independent views on free markets. It always depends on the case.
But if Marxists actually are out there struggling to overthrow capitalism, recognizing that is simply recognizing reality.
On of the tenets of Marxism is to see every conflict as the struggle between the capitalist class and the workers class. That’s wrong. There are a lot of conflicts that are not driven by the fight of the two classes.
Apart from that corporate Democrats that outraise Republicans simply aren’t Marxist in any meaningful sense.
The identity politics Democrats engage in is fundamentally Marxist. Plug in dichotomy, identify oppressor and oppressed end of the dichotomy, rinse, lather, repeat. Collectivism. Class consciousness, False consciousness.
Not marxists economically, but ideologically. And even while they’re not marxists economically, they are certainly anticapitalist, as most problems are attributed partially to capitalism, and the solutions to those problems are less capitalism and more government control of markets.
To that extend the OP is a Marxist. He’s focusing on the dichomtomy.
Ideologically postmodernism leads to the acceptance that Black people can live in a Black community and don’t have to integrate into White society. Ideologically today’s left puts value on protecting native cultures and doesn’t believe in pushing modern Western cultural values on other societies.
That’s very much against Marx idea that everything is supposed to come together.
Today’s left considers that everybody is entitled to his own identity and there no need for individuals to integrate into the collective norms of identity. There’s no belief that there one correct identity and that if history finally advances to communism everybody will have that collective identity.
Diversity ideologically valued when Marx didn’t value it.
Seems to me that you and ChristianKl disagree on how many specific details can one remove from Marx and still call the result “fundamentally Marxist”. Specifically, whether you can remove “class struggle” and replace it with any “X struggle” (such as gender struggle or race struggle or otherkin vs non-kin struggle).
I suspect that you could both more or less agree that identity politics uses similar rhetorical tools as Marxism, only replacing class struggle with other values of X. And that the thing you disagree at is whether the rhetorical tools themselves should be called “Marxist”; because for you “Marxism” is in the rhetorical tools themselves, while for ChristianKl “Marxism” is the specific application of those tools to the class struggle.
Or I may be completely wrong here, but this was the first impression.
It seems worth distinguishing “has something in common with Marx’s ideas” from “is fundamentally Marxist”, especially as “Marxist” is a pretty inflammatory term because of the horrors perpetrated in the name of Marxism in the 20th century.
So, what are these ideas you’re calling fundamentally Marxist? I think it comes down to this: “Sometimes one group of people has more power and resources than another, and acts in ways that harm the worse-off group. We should frame such situations in terms of conflict between the two groups, even though some people in the worse-off group may not see it that way.”
I’m not sure I’d want to endorse those ideas, but they seem to me to fall far short of justifying the description as “fundamentally Marxist”.
Advocating more regulation of markets is not at all the same thing as opposing capitalism. I think you are confusing capitalism with, I dunno, libertarianism or something.
Capitalism means having lots of privately owned industry and trade. Anyone who isn’t advocating large-scale nationalization, or something more drastic than that, is not being anticapitalist in any useful sense.