Thread by @delong

@wwwojtekk You asked: <github.com/braddelong/pub…>

Marx the economist was among the very first to recognize that the fever-fits of financial crisis and depression that afflict modern market economies were not a passing phase or something that could be easily cured, but rather a deep... 1/

@wwwojtekk ...disability of the system.... However, I don't think that his theory of business cycles and financial crises holds up.... Marx the economist was among the very first to get the industrial revolution right: to understand what it meant for human possibilities and the human... 2/

@wwwojtekk ... destiny in a sense that people like Adam Smith did not.... Karl Marx was among the very first to see that the industrial revolution was giving us the statues of Daedalus, the tripods of Hephaestus, looms that weave and lyres that play by themselves--and thus opens the... 3/

@wwwojtekk ... possibility of a society in which we people can be lovers of wisdom without being supported by the labor of a mass of illiterate, brutalized, half-starved, and overworked slaves. Something close to utopia is within our grasp. Marx the economist got a lot about the... 4/

@wwwojtekk ... economic history of the development of modern capitalism in England right—not everything, but he is still very much worth grappling with as an economic historian of 1500-1850. Most important, I think, are his observations that the benefits of industrialization do take... 5/

@wwwojtekk ... a long time—generations—to kick in, while the costs of redistributions and power grabs in the interest of market efficiency and the politically-powerful rising mercantile classes kick in immediately. You have to take seriously the idea that the industrial revolution... 6/

@wwwojtekk ... did not make most or even many people better off right away.... Standards of living do rise eventually from industrialization—but that can undercut the cultures and networks of suppliers that make the choice of a petit-bourgeois lifestyle sustainable... 7/

@wwwojtekk ...Now on to the three bads: 1. Marx believed that capital is not a complement to but a substitute for labor. Thus technological progress and capital accumulation that raise average labor productivity also lower the working-class wage. Hence the market system simply...

@wwwojtekk could not deliver a good or half-good society but only a combination of obscene luxury and mass poverty. This is an empirical question. Marx's belief seems to me to be simply wrong.
could never deliver a good or half-good society but only a combination of obscene luxury... 9/

@wwwojtekk ... and mass poverty. This is an empirical question. Marx's belief seems to me to be simply wrong. 2. Marx the economist did not like the society of the cash nexus. He believed that a system that reduced people to some form of prostitution—working for wages and wages 10/

@wwwojtekk alone—was bad. He saw a society growing in which worked for money, and their real life began only when the five o’clock whistle blows—and saw such an economy as an insult, delivering low utility, and also sociologically and psychologically unsustainable in the long run... 11/

@wwwojtekk ...Instead, he thought, people should view their jobs as expressions of their species-being: ways to gain honor or professions that they were born or designed to do or as ways to serve their fellow humans. Here, I think, Marx mistook the effects of capitalism for the... 12/

@wwwojtekk ... effects of poverty. The demand for a world in which people do things for each other purely out of beneficence rather than out of interest and incentives leads you down a very dangerous road, for societies that try to abolish the cash nexus in favor of public-spirited... 13/

@wwwojtekk ... benevolence do not wind up in their happy place. We neoliberal economists shrug our shoulders and say that we are in favor of a market economy but not of a market society, and that there is no reason why people cannot find jobs they like or insist on differentials that... 14/

@wwwojtekk ... compensate them for jobs they don’t. 3. Marx believed that the capitalist market economy was incapable of delivering an acceptable distribution of income for anything but the briefest of historical intervals. As best as I can see, he was pushed to that position by... 15/

@wwwojtekk ...watching the French Second Republic of 1848-1851, where the ruling class comes to prefer a charismatic mountebank for a dictator—“Napoleon III”—over a democracy because dictatorship promises to safeguard their property in a way that democracy will not. Hence Marx saw... 16/

@wwwojtekk ...political democracy as only surviving for as long as the rulers could pull the wool over the workers’ eyes, and then collapsing.... “Incapable” is surely too strong. Beveridgism or Myrdalism—social democracy, progressive income taxes, a very large and well-established... 17/

@wwwojtekk ... safety net, public education to a high standard, channels for upward mobility, and all the panoply of the twentieth-century socialdemocratic mixed-economy democratic state can banish all Marx’s fears that capitalist prosperity must be accompanied by great inequality... 18/

@wwwojtekk ... and great misery. If it can be sustained.

The good things that Marx was able to think must, I believe, be credited to his own account—to his thoughtfulness, his industry, his intelligence, and his desperate desire to try to get things right. The bad things have... 19/

@wwwojtekk ...I believe, two of his intellectual origins: Marx's beginnings in German philosophy, and... Manchester. 20/END