marxism on wgn-fm

[Brad DeLong]

>Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>>I mean, at a certain point, the numbers game gets ridiculous. The 
>>body count of Stalinsim was unspeakable, and condemns it foreover. 
>>But Stalinism is gone. The body count of capitalism is higher and, 
>>since capitalism is still here, growing. If Stalinism was 
>>unacceptable because of its victims, why is capitalism acceptable 
>>despite its dead? That is a rhetorical question.
>
>In standard ideology, capitalism's deaths are aberrations or 
>excesses, departures from the liberal ideal, while Communism's 
>deaths emerge right from the pages of the Manifesto.
>
>Doug

Not exactly. All sane advocates of market economies recognize that 
they need social democratic control to correct for externalities, and 
a decent distribution of income. After all, to sort-of-paraphrase 
Lev, you may be interested in the market, but if you don't have any 
income then the market not interested in you (or your welfare, or 
your survival).

Hence we march under the banner of the other Karl (Polanyi, that is), 
attempting to correct aberrations, excesses, and departures from the 
liberal ideal.

Communism's deaths emerge... not right from the pages of the 
_Manifesto_--Karl was a democrat, after all--but from the pages of 
_What Is To Be Done?_. Vlad was no democrat.

If you had asked Karl what he thought about Vlad's political 
strategy, he'd probably have quoted something from the classics about 
the likely destructive consequences of attempting to permanently 
institutionalize the Jacobin dictatorship--perhaps Thucydides's 
chapter on the civil war in Corcyra...

Brad DeLong