It’s been almost a century and a half since Karl Marx’s death, and decades since the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. In the still nominally…View Post
Workers following muh "rational best interest" are the barrier to collective action (Marx failed to consider that employers could simply pay scabs more), not the "semi-conspiratorial, quasi-Freudian" concept of false consciousness
Crusaders weren't motivated by wealth and land because in practice they often lost money. Instead, they were motivated by a shift in Christianity towards militarism which was apparently completely random and unrelated to anyone's material interests.
Marx's theories of exploitation weren't empirically grounded. By contrast, neoliberal economists have proven that workers are only a little bit exploited, by comparing how much they're currently paid with how much they might get paid at a different position in the exact same economy (which is really their call so it's not really exploitation anyway).
Honestly that last one was wild. It feels like a magician's slight of hand more than anything. When you actually stop to look at it, like, obviously when Marx was talking about exploitation, he was talking about it on a systemic level, not as something that could be overcome by working for a different employer. But the way the author writes it you could almost miss that that's he's shifting the meaning like that.
What's your favorite part?
Workers following muh "rational best interest" are the barrier to collective action (Marx failed to consider that employers could simply pay scabs more), not the "semi-conspiratorial, quasi-Freudian" concept of false consciousness
Crusaders weren't motivated by wealth and land because in practice they often lost money. Instead, they were motivated by a shift in Christianity towards militarism which was apparently completely random and unrelated to anyone's material interests.
Marx's theories of exploitation weren't empirically grounded. By contrast, neoliberal economists have proven that workers are only a little bit exploited, by comparing how much they're currently paid with how much they might get paid at a different position in the exact same economy (which is really their call so it's not really exploitation anyway).
Honestly that last one was wild. It feels like a magician's slight of hand more than anything. When you actually stop to look at it, like, obviously when Marx was talking about exploitation, he was talking about it on a systemic level, not as something that could be overcome by working for a different employer. But the way the author writes it you could almost miss that that's he's shifting the meaning like that.
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That was a twist I wasn't expecting