Now Marx certainly didn’t need to be saved by sophomoric post-modernists; indeed, Marx didn’t need to be saved at all. On two central issues, Marx was far more right than any of his critics: first, that the long-term tendency of capitalist societies is towards immiseration of the majority (the post-WWII illusion of upward mobility for the “middle classes” will soon be revealed for the anomaly it was); and second, that capitalist societies produce moral and political ideologies that serve to justify the dominance of the capitalist class. Marx had three faults, to be sure: one was that he took Hegel seriously; another was that he wasn’t a very good fortune teller, so wildly over-estimated the pace of capitalist development; and a third is that he had no account of individual psychology, of the kind Nietzsche and Freud provide
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 05:03:19 +0000