Rothbardian wrote:Marx was indeed a journalist. He was also involved with mining, and he took part in a number of investments. Like many ardent statists, Marx was an utter failure and it was after these failures that he decided voluntary markets were unfair and predatory.
Note: most people fail in business ventures. Many ardent libertarians are also terrible failures at business. Indeed, quite a lot of economists have no experience in the private sector. Including essentially the entire mainstream libertarian canon. Criticizing Marx for not being a factory worker is as stupid as criticizing Milton Friedman for not owning a business. And, let me say, this tangent about Marx's personal life stinks of personal attacks--it's not a useful approach to critiquing the actual Marxist position.
If you think I am of the opinion that discussing the man's past proves his arguments wrong, you are mistaken. Who Marx was as a person has no bearing on whether or not he was right or wrong. I do, however, feel that his background gives some indicators as to how he could manage to be so entirely wrong. He was speaking passionately of things he had no direct experience of.
Sort of like how Ludwig von Mises had no business commenting on the proper operation of firms in the private sector.. seeing as he had no direct experience within them. I mean, if we want to go down this road, we can pretty much exclude every economist with an academic background from having anything to say about economics, if we're going strictly by their direct personal experiences.
Marx never did a true day's work, and he never worked because his alternate was starvation.
... weren't you just earlier saying that he came from a family so wealthy he never had to work a day in his life?
This was a time when people were sticking their six year olds up chimneys just to survive, and here comes this man with his silver spoon to rant about the evils of profit motives and his labor theory of value. No, this doesn't mean anything Marx had to say was necessarily wrong, but at the same time, how seriously would you take a documentary about the black experience created by Mitt Romney?
How seriously can you take the medical opinion of a cardiologist who's never personally had heart disease? Obviously you get different perspectives between one who has and one who hasn't, but that does not make one more valid than the other. If nothing else, personal experience can create a personal bias that disrupts one's ability to rationally analyze a problem. People with a personal investment are afraid to rock the boat, so to speak.
Honestly I'm kind of surprised that you would think that a critique of capitalism ought to come from someone who finds capitalism personally beneficial. Obviously someone who is benefiting from capitalism has no incentive to analyze its problems.
For anyone not aware of the degree to which Marx was wrong, please bear in mind, Marx never intended his systems to be implemented.
He very certainly did mean for his ideas to be utilized; hence his involvement in the first international.
Marxism is a scientific analysis of society and according to Marx, communism would result inevitably from capitalism. The reason so many communist revolutions turned so bloody and violent is because it became apparent that capitalism would not turn communist on its own.
That's not apparent at all. Let us not forget that capitalism took centuries to gain supremacy in the first place; replacing it ought to take at least as long. And neither should we forget that what communist revolutions have taken place in states that would barely have qualified as capitalist to begin with. If communism is a stage of history, we're not there yet.
You can assess the value of a scientific argument based on it's predictive accuracy and this is just one of many scientific predictions in which Marx was flat out wrong.
You seem to be taking a fairly short-term view of things.
I can imagine he would be fun on a night out.
- By skinster
- By FiveofSwords