Quote:
Originally Posted by Mosco Vito
Communists of many countries saw Marxism not as a theory, but as a tool to change the negative reality, the key component of which was the poverty of the masses.
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Blaming Marx -- who never ran anything-- for the failings of communists in power is a bit like blaming Freud for every dumb thing that folks did that somehow was attributed to psychoanalytic theory.
They're both men whose ideas advance our understanding of the world in important ways, bu they're not prophets; its pointless to blame them for not being.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mosco Vito
I mentioned Malthus as a thinker who called for control over the population. His main idea was developed. For example, the Italian philosopher Julius Evola wrote:
Overpopulation exacerbates the problem of unemployment, just as inevitable (due to their very nature) intensification of production processes leading to increased economic obsession, the further enslavement of man, the reduction of free area... Zombart rightly believed that the decline in the population could be one of the few means to inflict a fatal blow to large capitalism.
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I think that's irrelevant and provably wrong from historical examples. We've had precipitous declines in population in the past -- economic historians view the Black Death as having given rise to capitalism, because labor shortages created money wages in place of serfdom.
And as for today, you can see population falling rapidly in advanced industrial nations like Japan (and soon Korea and China) without changing the economic system in any way.
So its off base in the 13th century and its wrong in the 21st century too.
In general, you can't trust vague philosophers ruminating on the end of capitalism . . . its just pointless. The world has adopted markets, of different flavors in China than the US, Germany and Chile-- but with the exception of a few desperate states like Venezuela and North Korea, there's really no place that tries to replace the market with state control for allocating capital.