
Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist (2013) - zhte415
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
======
hownottowrite
"The sense of self-satisfaction from being feted by the high and mighty did
begin, on occasion, to creep up on me. And what a non-radical, ugly,
corruptive and corrosive sense it was.

My personal nadir came at an airport. Some moneyed outfit had invited me to
give a keynote speech on the European crisis and had forked out the ludicrous
sum necessary to buy me a first-class ticket. On my way back home, tired and
with several flights under my belt, I was making my way past the long queue of
economy passengers, to get to my gate. Suddenly I noticed, with horror, how
easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense that I was entitled to
bypass the hoi polloi. I realised how readily I could forget that which my
leftwing mind had always known: that nothing succeeds in reproducing itself
better than a false sense of entitlement."

Unfortunate that the most important thought was buried at the bottom.

~~~
tormeh
"Academic research has found that people’s susceptibility to flattery is
without limit and beyond satire. In a study published in 1997, B.J. Fogg and
Clifford Nass of Stanford University invited people to play a guessing game
with a computer, which gave them various types of feedback as they played.
Participants who received praise rated both the computer and themselves more
highly than those who did not—even those who had been warned beforehand that
the machine would compliment them regardless of how well they were doing. Yes,
even blatantly insincere, computer-generated flattery works."

From: [http://www.economist.com/news/business/21639500-being-
good-n...](http://www.economist.com/news/business/21639500-being-good-
networker-pays-offbut-it-requires-skill-well-shamelessness-network-effect)

And thus the winners of the system justify our inequality.

~~~
jerf
Incidentally, this goes a long way towards explaining Marx's popularity. His
philosophy flatters certain people, especially intellectuals, and tells them
what they want to hear. For this, much can apparently be forgiven, even such
minor details as "total nonfuctionality of the rest of his theories" and
"hundreds of millions of corpses". Such minor trifling details are not
important next to the fact that he says what many of us deeply, profoundly
_want to hear_.

And so the eternal and ever-desperate efforts by intellectuals to figure out
how to separate the things they want to hear from the bits of the theory that
are wrong. But, alas, I'm pretty sure they're inseparable.

~~~
pikzen
>"hundreds of millions of corpses"

Except that those millions of corpses were not caused by Marx or his theories
but by a flawed implementation of it by some power hungry dictators.

In terms of tech, don't blame the spec if you didn't implement it correctly.

~~~
cousin_it
In Soviet Russia, the three main waves of repression were the Red Terror, the
Collectivization, and the Great Purge. Only the last of those was caused by a
power-hungry dictator, the first two were caused by committee leadership.

~~~
canjobear
I'd dispute that the Red Terror and Collectivization were caused by committee
leadership, since the authority of Lenin and Stalin was beyond question at
those times respectively.

But what is more disturbing is that these actions were unapologetically
intended to be violent; the lives of "bourgeois" or "kulaks" were considered
to matter not at all because of their "class". The ruling ideology was that
certain classes were "bloodsuckers" unworthy of life. See for example
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order)

A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like class to the extent
that people's lives don't matter if they're in a certain class is extremely
disturbing. It is not clear to me that this was a Bolshevik innovation rather
than something that is latent in Marx.

~~~
scarmig
Two points:

1) It's true that there were uniquely powerful and dominant figures during
both the Red Terror and the Collectivization. But those were people who
genuinely had the support of the rest of the Party. Many of the other
Bolshevik leaders were just as bad. In fact, Trotsky (the alternative on hand
who usually plays the "if only the czar knew!" role to wishful leftists) was
if anything worse, pushing for an immediate campaign of massive warfare and
terrorism to be extended to other countries and being particularly brutal in
putting down rebellions.

2) Thinkers trade in abstractions--thought is really just the application and
generation of new abstractions. It's not clear to me that you can hold those
thinkers responsible, though, when people proclaiming their ideology use their
abstractions to ride roughshod over human rights (itself an abstraction...)

Take Adam Smith, who's a secular saint in the Anglosphere. The liberal version
of British imperialism embraced him and laissez-faire capitalism to justify
actions that cost tens of millions of lives. E.g. the Irish famine, the Indian
famines, arguably even the Opium Wars/Taiping Rebellion. A typical argument
for not providing famine relief by the Indian Famine Commission:

 _The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief
[...] would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such
relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of
general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious
apprehension._

This variant of capitalist ideology was the deadliest in the world during its
time, until variants of Marxism managed to blow that record away. I think you
can just as easily say, "A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea
like property rights to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they
lack property is extremely disturbing."

It seems to me that the only ideologies out there with clean hands are the
ones that only exist in people's heads.

FTR, I think the healthiest approach is to reject all ideologies that pretend
to be all-encompassing and use the analytical tools provided by them as
needed. Epistemological, if not political, anarchism.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
A philosophy that reifies _any_ idea to the extent that people's lives don't
matter if they fit some category is extremely disturbing.

With Marx/Lenin/Stalin, it was class. With capitalists, it was property
rights. With Hitler, it was race.

I'd say it's worth fighting for national defense, but not too many other
things...

------
dandare
Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country
build on Marxist principles? Is it possible that Marx's theory is nonsense and
all the rich mixed-capitalism economies are right?

(Spoiler: I am from the former communist block.)

EDIT: (I hope you don't mind if I reply to everyone here in my original
comment.)

Philosophizing on what Marx meant by what he said is lot like Bible-reading
study. It is nice to speculate on what God meant when he said "You must kill
those who worship another god [Exodus 22:20]" but it is more important to know
how those killing in His name understood it. In our context, one look at
Syriza's economic programme should end all discussions on what Marx really
meant with the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Raising wages, employing
more people in the state sector, subventions, subsidies, free healthcare and
education along with stiffening the labour market, nationalisation of
industries and raising taxes up to 75%. That all obviously sponsored by new
loans once they successfully ditch their current debt.

That brings us bak to my original point: there is not a single example of
successful Marxist economy, regardless of what part of the Marxist wish-
thinking you embrace.

~~~
hurin
Marx was foremost an economist and philosopher not a revolutionary, his ideas
laid the basis for the later historical movements - but they shouldn't be
conflated with them, of course the actual historical events are much stronger
in cultural memory.

As for prosperity: I think quality of life is significantly worse now (25
years later) in all post-soviet bloc countries outside the EU. Although yes,
planned economies are very stifling towards innovation and individual
enterprise and apparently cannot compete very well with capitalist economies.

~~~
happyscrappy
So there is no example of Marxism working.

~~~
21echoes
no, there just _is no such thing as "Marxism"_ as a nation-state level policy.

Marx was a critic of capitalism, and did not propose any vision of how society
should be constructed beyond "workers should own the means of production"
(which, of course, has never been tried as a nation-state level policy, and
was not tried in the USSR, Mao's China, etc.).

for more:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marxs_diagnosis_of_capitalism_shouldnt_be/co7s35m)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Marx was a critic of capitalism, and did not propose any vision of how
> society should be constructed beyond "workers should own the means of
> production"

Marx -- mostly together with Engels -- actually proposed much more specific
policy proposals than "workers should own the means of production", in the
_Communist Manifesto_ and in other works.

------
pjc50
Marx really needs an intellectual salvage operation to rescue the sound
observations from the ruins of Marxism. His works highlight a number of
structural problems. In terms of solutions it's been a disaster, but the
failure of a solution does not mean the problem goes away.

For example,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall)
: includes observations on the effect of labour-saving innovation. This keeps
coming up again and again here in the context of e.g. self-driving cars.

See also this line from the middle of the article: "Both [communists and
social democrats], in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes)
failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead
of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising
concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of
freedom to the neoliberals."

~~~
jerf
"His works highlight a number of structural problems."

But that's not very valuable. "Identifying problems" is easy. Step outside and
point at something; you're probably pointing at a problem of some sort.

And we humans seem to be very susceptible to the argument

    
    
        1. I see a problem over there.
        2. I propose this solution.
        3. My solution must be correct because I identified the problem.
    

(If you have a hard time believing that, because it is so obviously fallacious
when spelled out, start looking for it in political discussions. It is
_unbelievably_ rampant, so much so that it is almost invisible because it is
simply everywhere. As a bonus #4, "If you don't agree with my solution, you
must not care about the problem and you are therefore a bad person." _Also_
unbelievably rampant.)

We are not so hard pressed for the identification of problems that we need to
go looking at the writings of someone from over a hundred years ago with a
terrible track record of his ideas being implemented. We just need to use our
eyes for a minute or two.

 _Solutions_ , now, _those_ are hard. Based on how history has gone I do not
see Marx having much to offer us there.

"instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and
organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice,"

Well, of course they did. The reason why Marxism always decays into tyranny is
that it intrinsically requires liberal applications of force to even appear to
work, because it does not match how people function naturally. Free societies
don't look Marxist. Rational societies won't look Marxist. (Rational societies
would probably be incomprehensibly strange to us, honestly, and won't fit into
any of our preconceived notions. By _no_ means should this be interpreted as
even _remotely_ a claim that our current society is rational.... ha! No. Also
I appreciate the distinction between "free" and "rational".) Even if they
solve the "problems" that Marx identified, it won't be with his answers.

~~~
pjc50
I don't see so much of #3, but #4 is certainly rife, along with "I don't
accept any of the solutions so the problem must not exist" (qv global
warming).

The main reason for doing this would be to get good workable solution ideas
into and out of the left in the 21st century. Greece is in a state of uneven
collapse and there is a strong need to do _something_ to improve its situation
from that of debt-austerity. Varoufakis is one of the men on the spot trying
to find something that can actually be delivered with a good chance of
working. There are plenty of other places in the developed world where people
are experiencing deteriorating standards of living and lacking the political
capability to improve them. (Another idea worth incorporating is Sen's
"capability", which is freedom to do a thing plus the economic ability to do
it).

One should not overlook the amount of force deployed in the name of making
capitalism work either.

~~~
joslin01
Why is the parent being downvoted? As cool as it might be to side with Marx,
his solutions do and will always come up short.

The "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" is hardly a problem that needs
serious examining especially in this day and age. Our solution to this problem
was essentially inflation, and now we got ourselves in a bit of a mess because
all that inflated money isn't distributed equally and the wealthier get
wealthier as they're the closest to the new money. Most economists reject the
idea as a whole. How is it worth examining then? When you convince
professional economics to take it seriously, then what? What do you hope to
find with it? Or do you just like the sound of yourself pointing out problems?
-- this is what Jeff was basically saying.

Your second paragraph really has nothing to do with the rate of profit to
fall, and now we're onto Greece? You really think that reckless spending by a
government warrants a philosophical economic shift? No of course you don't
because you think it was all innocent -- oh sure Greece just ran out of money
one day and geez, it must be capitalism's fault!

There's economic downswings. This will always occur for a variety of reasons.
Marx's approaches are all way too heavy-handed. You cannot strip someone's
freedom and have them still care about their work, and Marx's approach nearly
always ends up here. He's given way too much credit as a good, rational
thinker for what I see as more just politically-rousing, pulling-on-your-
heart-strings social revolution kinda writing. Yes, there's a place for
compassion but it is not found in a _system_ and capitalism is a system.

Which brings me to my last point. Your note about not "overlooking the amount
of force deployed making capitalism work" is not fair because you're basically
equating rule makers with dictators. Capitalism can exist outside of the rule
markers in a completely free sense (that's not to say it will be operating
perfectly). End of the world happens. Me and my team of 100 people use gold to
indicate value and thus begin trading and building value. In Marx's
hypothetical scenario, he would probably start calling the shots and
complaining about the class struggle. One is a system that runs off of
people's free-will and desire for vanity and self-validation and all that. The
other is fancy-sounding system that boils down to "You do this. You do that.",
which fails the criteria of an autonomous system. Marx's solutions are thus
not autonomous and should be immediately rejected on this merit alone.

My advice? Look for the light yourself. Find out what's not working in the
current system. Strategize. Plan. Execute. Marx just isn't relevant anymore
and, again, should be rejected on that merit alone. I'm all for learning from
history and taking away important lessons -- relevant or irrelevant -- but
Marx's economic principles are quite literally irrelevant. They have NO
relevance with how we operate today. The solution is therefore INCREDIBLY
RADICAL, which as we programmers should know, runs the greatest risk! This is
why I reject Marx. It's nothing personal against him or because I have some
capitalist agenda. I just think we can do better with what we got and should
focus on that.

~~~
pjc50
"overlooking the amount of force deployed making capitalism work"

I was referring to force that has been deployed in the name of capitalism, not
hypotheticals. Things ranging from US's for-profit prison system with its
unusually large number of prisoners to the United Fruit Company.
Capitalism+colonialism in particular has a terrible record.

Yes, Marxism and Marxists as currently prevalent need to _really_ examine
their failure record and revise accordingly. Capitalism _as a political
practice_ also needs to stop disclaiming responsibility for its casualties. In
neither case is it helpful to make arguments about how it might be come the
revolution/after the end of the world, because in both cases people make
unreasonable claims about how things might work.

------
unicornporn
This made me think of a reddit comment[1] about an article I read recently.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marxs_diagnosis_of_capitalism_shouldnt_be/co7s35m)

------
skilesare
This article has some great stuff in it. I've been putting together some
answers to some of these questions and it is currently very 'amateurish'. My
economic training doesn't go much past Micro and Macro Undergrad courses and
I'm to the point where I need some professional direction.

There are probably some economics PHDs floating around this thread, and if you
like talking about this stuff and would be willing to critique the stuff I've
put together, ping me @afat.

------
return0
As someone who voted for his party (mostly for anti-corruption reasons), i
think he was the worst choice for finance minister. I never understood what
his (so called modest) proposal was in any way since it was always hidden in a
nebulous universe of words that in the end amounted to nothing substantial.
This article is equally vague. I know he 's a media darling, but he 's too
narcissistic and argumentative to be taken seriously.

~~~
rjsw
Seen from the outside, he seems an ideal person to me to be the finance
minister. The issue is whether Greece can get a bit of runway to let it deal
with the corruption problems or whether it should just be confined to the
modern equivalent of the workhouse.

------
jkot
As someone from post-soviet country I find this bit offensive. Something like
'how I become erratic Nacist' and bunch of hogwash how modern nacism can learn
from mistakes of the past.

But do not be mistaken, this guy is not stupid and probably can negotiate
better deal for Greece.

~~~
tomp
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the problem with Soviet Union Communism,
not Marxism (like the problem with Hitler wasn't nationalistic politics in
general, but Nazism in particular)?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the problem with Soviet Union Communism,
> not Marxism

"Communism" was the name of the system Marx advocated (the title of his work
with Engels is _The Communist Manifesto_.)

Now, Soviet Communism is distinct from Marx's Communism in that it is based in
Leninist vanguardism, which still _calls_ itself Marxist, but radically
departs from Marxism in a number of ways, both in terms of understood
preconditions and program, in order to address the fact that Russia was _not_
an developed capitalist society of the type Marx's theory was based in.

------
tjradcliffe
His analysis points to the fundamental flaw in Marxism while not just ignoring
but praising it: it rests on the notion that "binary oppositions" completely
dominate world history and social dynamics. Class struggle, class opposition,
is what defines left-wing thinking.

He's not wrong that Marx relied on manufacturing a sense of "binary
oppositions" to drive his cartoon of history, but while such a story is great
for creating drama it does a demonstrably, repeated, empirically terrible job
as a way of either understanding history or changing the world, unless by
"changing the world" you mean "changing the world into one vast prison camp".

It is far too easy to pass from benign academic twaddle about "binary
oppositions" to "us vs them" to "you're either with us or against us... and we
get to say which you are, not you." Marxism is _made_ for the power-mad,
precisely because of this obsession with the "binary oppositions" Varoufakis
is so enamoured of.

The insistence that "binary oppositions" dominate history does strongly inform
the labour theory of value, but the analysis is transparently false. Labour
_is_ special because human beings have a special place in any political
economy, simply because there wouldn't be one without us. But the "binary
opposition" he sees as being unique to labour is nonsense, and this would be
obvious if the role of "binary oppositions" in his theory didn't serve as a
major distraction to analysis.

Consider for a moment the "binary opposition" between electricity's value-
creating potential that can never be quantified in advance, and electricity as
a quantity that can be sold for a price. A kWhr that goes into a supercomputer
to calculate the optimal shape of a machine part creates value of a kind and
in amounts that is utterly unlike a kWhr that goes into driving a washing
machine at a laundromat.

This is precisely the "binary opposition" that Varoufakis touts as being
unique to labour. It is nothing of the kind. It was nothing of the kind in the
days when a lump of coal could be used to heat a pauper's hut or fire a steel
mill. All economic inputs have both an unquantifiable-in-advance value-
creating capacity and a market value.

Humans are fascinated by conflict. Present us with a conflict and it will grab
our limited attention, leaving very little over to ask, "Hey, all this sound
and fury is kind of signifying nothing."

This is the most important role of "binary oppositions" in Marxism (and its
bastard step-child, post-modernist literary analysis.) It uses this simple
flaw in our attentional structure to allow people to smuggle claims that would
otherwise be obviously false right under our noses.

Do capital and labour have somewhat different interests? Sure. Do they have
many interests that are also shared, based on their common nature of human
beings? Absolutely. This is not a binary opposition. This is an argument for a
democratic clearing house where differences are aired and decisions made.
There needs to be eternal vigilance that one side or the other (mostly the
other) doesn't gain undue influence in such a place, but the false belief that
the world is dominated by black-and-white "binary oppositions" is completely
unhelpful in this enterprise. It sheds no light on our legitimate differences,
and trying to fix things up later on by talking about "intersectionality" is a
poor patch on a broken analysis.

We are not a set of 1's and 0's in binary opposition to each other, some with
the bit flipped to "labour", some to "capital". We are human beings, full of
contradictions far more complex and diverse than this ridiculous scientistic
reductionism can possibly encompass.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Consider for a moment the "binary opposition" between electricity's value-
> creating potential that can never be quantified in advance, and electricity
> as a quantity that can be sold for a price. A kWhr that goes into a
> supercomputer to calculate the optimal shape of a machine part creates value
> of a kind and in amounts that is utterly unlike a kWhr that goes into
> driving a washing machine at a laundromat.

In fact, that's true of everything in a market economy. Everything I buy has
more value to me than its market price (otherwise I wouldn't buy it).

------
RodericDay
I'm going to reproduce a an r/philosophy reply, since I think it fits well

\---

[http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marx...](http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marxs_diagnosis_of_capitalism_shouldnt_be/)

I'm a doctoral student in philosophy, who focuses on Marx and Marxism. It's
the only subject I feel confident speaking on with some degree of authority. I
do want to point out that those who see this article as starting from an
erroneous point of view are correct. There's several clarifications that
should be made if one is going to understand Marx (and I emphasize understand,
not support – not that supporting Marx’s work is good/bad in and of itself).

First: The constant idea that Marx can be tied to the dungeon regimes of the
20th century is untenable. Of the tens of thousands of pages and approximately
50 volumes of collected works of Marx, at most 5 pages spell out what
socialist society should or ought to look like. There's many reasons why Marx
thought a discussion of what a future society should look like is a dubious
endeavor. To summarize them curtly, imagine an ancient Athenian trying to
envision wall street, it’s very dubious they could. The material and social
conditions they are in limit and structure the thoughts they can have, ipso
facto to envision a blue print for socialism is rather futile. Within those 5
pages though, none of them say anything about death camps, non-democratic
institutions, cults of personality, or STATE based economies as the ultimate
goal of society. They consistently advocate for the full development and
realization of the best aspect of our capacities and nature (e.g., ‘the
freedom and development of each is contingent upon the freedom and development
of all’). Now one could ask what about the famous quote "dictatorship of the
proletariat." It is important to note that in the mid 19th century context
dictatorship did not mean exactly what it means today. It meant who has power
in the state. So Marx would say we presently live in the dictatorship of the
capitalist class (even if the state is prima facie democratic, that class has
monopoly power of the state – I don’t think this point is contested by anyone
that follows campaign donations and its connection to voting patterns by
representatives). Marx wanted the workers to have power over the state, but in
a democratic fashion (hence his praise of the paris commune). When asked what
does dictatorship of the proletariat mean, Marx and Engels responded, look at
the Paris commune, that is what we mean (Marx later went to affirm that it
also meant equal voting rights for all races and genders). I say all this to
indicate that Marx is a critical philosopher of capitalism; he is not a
philosopher of socialism. And the few things he did write on socialism are
anathema to anything tantamount to the USSR, Pol Pot, Mao's China, etc.

Second: Socialism is NOT - according to Marx - state based regulation and
social programs. This is a common misconception. People argue that social
security and Medicare are SOCIALIST (or that the USSR was socialist), they are
in fact SOCIAL programs in a CAPITALIST society. Their existence is predicated
upon revenues and taxes of people employed in a capitalist social relation.
Socialism, according to Marx (and many other 19th century and early 20th
century theorists) is workers ownership of the means of production. That means
the same people that work in the workplace, own it democratically. So,
McDonalds for instance would not be run by a board of directors that is
divorced from the day to day management and running of the store. Instead the
same people that work there, democratically run the workplace (read Richard
Wolff’s Democracy at Work for a good defense of why this system is both viable
and just – there are hundreds of successful institutions like this, Wikipedia
Mondragon if you’re interested). Democracy prevents monopoly ownership of the
means of production. Part of the reason Marx does not thing welfare liberalism
(e.g., a capitalist society with strong social programs) is viable in the
long-term is due to various contradictions and negative tendencies in
capitalism. If value is created in production, and surplus value must be
created and reproduced in the capitalist system to fuel its growth and
development, then it follows that taxes and welfare programs are a leech on
that value. What is good for capitalism in the long term (i.e., maximum
surplus value) is bad for the working class, what is good for the working
class (share of surplus value going back to them in higher wages or better
social programs) is bad for capitalism in the long term. This seems rather
obvious now; the system is prone for local and large scale crises. It's also
important to note that this definition of socialism, that Marx used, is
antithetical to the state-capitalist (socialist in name only) regimes of
Stalin, Mao, etc. Those were non-democratic, authoritarian regimes, where the
workplace was run by bureaucrats and non-democratically elected state
officials. Thus not socialist, and not indicative of the possible
failure/success of socialism.

Third, and finally: the comments on human behavior are rather confused. If one
looked at a slave society we could make all kinds of ‘natural human behavior
claims’ (notice the author says its human behavior to watch TV – tell that to
a hunter gatherer) that are now obviously false. E.g., it’s just human
behavior to shackle people; it’s just human behavior/nature that X race is
illiterate, dumb, feckless, etc. It’s just human behavior for one
race/class/gender to be subservient, and for one race/class/gender to be
dominant and hold leadership traits. What needs to be pointed out is that
certain institutions and social relations bring out the good and bad in human
behavior. They stunt, inhibit, or foster, our capacities. Some institutions
and relations make us better, some make us worse. So it’s foolish to read off
from a particular society with all its unique and historical nuance, timeless
truths about human behavior. Are twenty-first century Americans addicted to
their property and possessive? Yes. Were ancient Greeks polytheistic believing
the gods were tantamount to humans?Yes. Were X race of people in a position of
servitude by Y oppressors? Yes. Does that mean these are timeless traits of
all humans at all times? That's a rather impossible claim to be certain of.
And in many instances demonstrably false (e.g., basically every race based
claim in human history by oppressors is later shown to be false). According to
Marx and Engels, we should foster and develop institutions and relations that
express what's best in us, but if we maintain the mindset that we already know
everything there is to know about human behavior and nature, and all future
projects at amending and improving such things are futile, we are supporting
an impossible to defend position (as philosophers and rational thinkers that's
no good). Marx knew this very well. Hence why he ends Volume III of capital
with the claim:

“In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is
determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very
nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just
as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and
reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social
formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development
this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the
same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase.
Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated
producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it
under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind
forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and
under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature”

Overall this is a rather bad article. If one wants to understand Marx, just
read Marx. Even if you don’t agree with him, and don’t want to support his
ideas, the only way to be sure of what he said is to read him yourself. It’s
only fair – and actually quite liberal and open minded – if one is going to
live in a capitalist society to read its best proponents, and also its best
critics. Marx is the latter.

~~~
unicornporn
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9067911)

~~~
RodericDay
You should reproduce the text in the body, and I'll delete mine. It's way too
unassuming as it is, I didn't even think of clicking on it!

------
aminok
Greece is doomed with pontificating populists like Varoufakis, who are ever
eager to take the path of least resistance and pin the blame on an unpopular
minority, leading the government.

------
alvarosm
So he wants to be a Marxist but he can't reconcile that with the economic
facts he's learned, because Marxism is completely wrong. Too bad. We don't
need to read his painful and boring rant.

~~~
venomsnake
Marxism is pretty spot on as theory of development of capitalism.

~~~
aminok
Marxism holds that the capital owner commits "wage theft" against the employee
everytime he profits. It's sophomoric, flawed logic for edgy teens.

------
gadders
I believe it was Margaret Thatcher that said "The problem with Socialism is
that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Yanis should feel right at home in Greece, seeing as essentially they have run
out of money from Germany.

~~~
aminok
Edgy teens love people who rail against logic, conventional wisdom and the
established way of doing things, so Yanis should have a lot of fans in the
West, just as Chavez did, just before he set Venezuela on a course for
economic ruin, and doomed millions of its people to years of lost opportunity
and economic chaos.

------
ilaksh
We should learn from history. Marx didnt have alll of the answers. The problem
to solve is how to get diversity and freedom with integration and efficiency
at the same time. I think the trick to this starts with a contemprary all-
encompassing knowledge management system. Contemporary in that, for example,
it is not tied to hierarchical ontologies, which we may need to upgrade
knowledgment to avoid that.

------
jevgeni
The most deliciously ironic thing is that the main Marx's grief with
capitalism - the fact that the workers didn't own the means of production (or
"capital") - was rectified exactly by the modern financial capitalism today's
left love to bash.

If you take a look at blue chip companies (and I bet a lot of midcaps as well)
a huge amount of their shares, often way over 50%, is owned by their
employees. This fact doesn't necessarily help sell Che Guevara t-shirts or
help your populist party win elections, though.

~~~
karmacondon
This is only kind of true. Much of the > 50% of shares that are owned by
employees are owned by executives and former executives. Think about how
equity is distributed at any startup. The average "worker" still doesn't own
the means of production or capital. Definitely not by Marx's definition of
ownership, and not by the common usage of the term in our day either.

Points for political snark, though.

~~~
jevgeni
I think this is dependent on the age of the company. Last one I've looked at
was SocGen - an old French bank. 90% of their shares are owned by employees
and I think somewhere around 7% by executives.

I can easily imagine that a just IPO'ed company would have a vastly different
shareholder structure, though.

~~~
mikeyouse
I just Googled SocGen's ownership and it looks like the employees own more
like 7.5% of the company, and I'm assuming there's a power law in place where
the C-Level execs own a vast majority of that bit too..

[http://www.societegenerale.com/en/measuring-our-
performance/...](http://www.societegenerale.com/en/measuring-our-
performance/information-and-publications/share-capital)

~~~
jevgeni
Well, I'm clearly misinformed.

I thought that maybe my source meant the relative size of non-public shares,
but even then it's ca. 49% employee ownership.

Yeah, sorry for that. I stand corrected.

