Marxism is not generally my focus on this blog, but given that we’re spending a week on Marx in one of my grad school courses, I hope the reader will allow me to indulge myself in some further thoughts on Marx in addition to those I offered earlier in the week. After this, I’m moving on–there should be no more Marx for a while. I had a new thought today that I didn’t have several days ago, one that identifies a key contradiction in Marx’s work that I previously overlooked.
Tag: Capitalism
Deepening the Critique of Marxism
I found myself in another lecture on Marxism yesterday. Why do I say “another”? I did a cursory search of my own website and found that just shy of a year ago, I was responding to a lecture about Marxism on this blog. In that piece, my focus was primarily a criticism of the solutions Marx and the Marxists offer. Specifically, I was objecting to the Marxist belief that it is possible for people to be socially rewired so as to become more altruistic or otherwise capable of working hard without a scale of variant material incentives. Rereading that argument, I found myself agreeing, but I also found my critique had deepened, that there was somewhat more to it than I said last year. That’s what I’d like to develop today.
A Stark Response
Recently I made an argument that the minimum wage should rise. In that argument, I sought to refute some of the things fellow blogger Rick Stark said to the contrary. Stark has done me the great honour of a thorough two part response. It demands answer–either I must concede his expanded, larger argument, or I must explain where I differ with it. Having read both posts in their entirety, I find myself still unconvinced. Here’s why.
Rise of the Machines: The Robot Economy of the Future
My attention has been drawn to a rather interesting phenomenon by Paul Krugman–that of a gradual shift in the distribution of wealth from labour to capital. As a percentage of the economic total, workers are earning less and less over time, and more and more of our output is landing in the hands of people who own capital–the land, the buildings, the tools, the machines that make things tick. This has interesting implications, and, if I might be permitted to speculate today, those implications may demand changes in how we view what we produce.
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The State’s Role in Investment and Innovation
It is often said that the state spends money inefficiently–or at least, less efficiently than the private sector spends it. The old Hamiltonian argument, in favour of the state as an investor, an engine of growth, technological development, and innovation, often falls on deaf ears as the opposition points to Solyndra, the “crony capitalism” of investment centred states like France or Japan, and so on down the line. Today, I would like to challenge this dismissal for being much too flippant and much too anti-historical.
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Benjamin Studebaker 