-----Original Message----- From: Justin Schwartz [mailto:jkschw at hotmail.com] Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 9:52 AM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: RE: Scarcity
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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