Kelley Walker wrote:
>
> their
> indictment of capitalism
There is a great surfeit of indictments of capitalism, and I truly wish that on mailists at least people would stop posting such indictments except as they are strictly subordinated to political or historical analysis. In part I quite agree with Doug that glee in economic bad news represents a lack of marxist conviction and/or understanding.
Bertell Ollman has made the point concisely:
After all, many thinkers, both before and after Marx, have drawn our attention to the less savory aspects of capitalist life, to its painful inequalities, irrational waste of people and resources, blatant biases on behalf of those who need help-least, sickening hypocrisies, and so on. Because capitalist schools and media generally avoid such facts, simply presenting them -- as Barrington Moore has pointed out -- carries the ring of radical exposure (Wolff, 1965, 61). Likewise, many socialists have accompanied their exposures with visions of a more humane social order with which they would replace the present one. But there is an important difference between radical exposure, with or without an alternative vision of the future, and scientific analysis; between getting the "facts" right and explaining them.
Ollman, _Dialectical Investigations_, pp. 2-3
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Carrol