Krugman on Marx

Mark Jones Jones_M at netcomuk.co.uk
Fri Aug 14 03:38:27 PDT 1998


Doyle Saylor wrote:


> Let us see ...Marx was writing about economics, and the bible is about
> religion. Brad postulates that Marx was writing religion.

Doyle, You have to understand about Brad deLong: he is so utterly benighted that he actually believes that capital is a thing. This syndrome is a proper subject of Greek myth [getting lost in labyrinths, mistaking pieces of stone and driftwood for deities and vice versa, deities being the materialisation of archaic social relations] or of psychotherapy, but not discussions about value. Andrew Kliman has the opposite problem, which however results in the same anti-working class politics and general intellectual chauvinism: Kliman knows all about value, and he got tenure finding out. This sort of fate is so destructive to one's peace of mind that it's no wonder at all that traumatised Trots (there are dozens of these redundant academics around the place, probably hundreds) are in the grip of political phobias and run like rabbits from real struggle, while frothing sententiously about the 'evils of stalinism'. It was Jerry Levy -- he is the template they cut the others from -- who first made me realise that I am a stalinist - I'd always routinely denounced stalinism but he's the kind of person who'd make you admit to infanticide just to be different. I'm grateful to him for outing me, actually.

Mark



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