[lbo-talk] Was Marx right? A return to a world Marx would have known

[Gar Lipow]

For good analysis Dougs piece is the best But De Long's piece has its own
feature of interest.  Not the beginning which deals with a cartoon version
of Marx, but his conclusion. "The optimistic view is that our collective
ingenuity will create so many things for people to do that are so
attractive to the rich that they will pay through the nose for them and so
recreate a middle-class society. The pessimistic view is that some pieces
of (3) will be (a) mind-numbingly boring while (b) stubbornly impervious to
artificial intelligence, while (4) will remain limited and for the most
part poorly paid. In that case, our future is one of human beings chained
to desks and screens acting as numbed-mind cogs for Amazon Mechanical Turk,
forever.[1]"  If that was intended as a *defense* of today's capitalism it
is the weakest of weak sauce. Given that De Long is not brainless, my guess
ia that this is a concession that even if he disputes Marx's logic, he
acknowledges in today's world the correctness of his conclusions.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/03/30/was-marx-right/marx-was-blind-to-the-systems-ingenuity-and-ability-to-reinvent

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 7:07 AM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:


>
>
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> Includes a piece by Doug Henwood, also Brad DeLong.
>
>
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> http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/03/30/was-marx-right/a-return-to-a-world-marx-would-have-known
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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