Scarcity

[Justin Schwartz]

So, if I say Marx liked one thing in particular about capitalism, then it 
follows that he thought that capitalism was the greatest thing ever, and 
that I deny he was appalled by its excesses? That's an interesting 
hermeneutic principle: whoever says he likes anything about p likes 
everythinf about p. Hm. Never thought of that. --jks


>Justin wrote:
>
>  It is of course
>_profoundly_ anti-Marxist, for those of you who care about such things; 
>Marx
>praised capitalism for its creation of nrew wants and needs.
>
>Me:
>
>This oft cited claim that Marx thought capitalism was better than anything 
>that
>came before (really, that it is a necessary but cruel phase creating 
>conditions
>for social transformation) should be qualified with the recognition that 
>his and
>Engels' later studies of pre-capitalist formations may be seen as leading 
>to
>different conclusions that were never fully fleshed out.  In his intro to 
>the
>Formen, Hobsbawm notes that Marx "found himself increasingly appalled" by 
>the
>inhumanity of capitalism and that M and E "always admired the positive 
>social
>values embodied, in however backward form, in the primitive community" 
>leading
>them to a deeper study of the "backward" Russian Peasantry."  This does not
>imply advocating a return to a romanticized golden age of an early
>non-capitalist formation, but it does take some of the wind out of the 
>"Marx
>thought capitalism was the greatest thing ever."  See Stanley Diamond, 
>Peter
>Rigby, Walter Rodney.
>
>Mat

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