Scarcity

[Justin Schwartz]

Chill the flame bait. I wasn't being sarcastic. I wasn't being childish. I 
was making a strong statement. I backed it up with textual argument. You say 
Marx was "moving away" from the position you thereby admit that he held. So 
you admit that he held it. That is a sufficient reply. Personally, I don't 
care whether a position is Marxist myself. It's not a title I claim. --jks


>You said that the Sahlins position (and presumably similar ones) is
>"_profoundly_ anti-Marxist". That is a strong statement. Instead of 
>childish
>sarcasm, why don't you just reply to the argument that Marx was 
>increasingly
>moving in a direction that would seem to make your position overstated?  
>Mat
>
>-----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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