Bill Mitchell has just posted the first instalment in a two-part series on Marx and MMT. I was unaware of that while preparing the body of this post, but some of what follows bears incidentally on the topic. Bill Mitchell’s series is in response to a Marxist in the audience of one of his presentations who apparently claimed Marx’s theory as proof that government, through its spending, is powerless to do anything about employment in a capitalist economy. The unfortunate phenomena of some Marxists being more neoclassical than Austrian, and some others being more Austrian than neoclassical, are not new. It is unfortunate, from a Marxist perspective, because it leads, in practice (as opposed to fanciful aspiration), at best to uselessness and at worst to policy prescriptions that are more right wing than the proposals of the right wing....heteconomist
MMT and Embedded Marxian Value
Peter Cooper
4 comments:
Well, on some points, Marx was just plain wrong on money. Marxists fanatically followed his worst errors - his metallism, the usual backward history of money from metal standards to credit rather than vice versa. Such "socialists" governed Britain, France & Germany for some of the interwar years. Their rigid ideological support of budget balancing and sound finance had colossal and tragic effects in the real world: WWII.
The Allure of Marxism … And Why It’s a Mistake
Communist revolutions end badly, I believe, because they are based on faulty ideas. The problem is that Marxists misunderstand the source of capitalism’s social ills. It all goes back to Marx himself.
Marx pinned the ills of capitalism on private property. I think this was a mistake. The real cause of most social ills, I believe, is not private property. It’s hierarchy. Why? Because hierarchy concentrates power. And concentrated power is the despot’s best friend. Concentrated power, I believe, leads to social ills like totalitarianism, inequality, mass violence, and oppression. True, private property is intimately linked with hierarchy and power. But, as communist states demonstrated, we can have hierarchy without private property. This is Marx’s fatal error.
So here’s what goes wrong with communist revolutions. Distracted by private property, Marxist revolutionaries make the problem of hierarchy worse than it was under capitalism. They abolish private property, thinking this will solve the problems of capitalism. But to achieve their goals, Marxists create a vanguard party that eventually becomes a single-party state.
So in the name of creating a more just and equitable society, these revolutionaries concentrate power. They replace capitalist hierarchies with an even larger communist hierarchy. Yes, private property is gone. But the problems of hierarchy are even worse than before. It’s an ironic twist. Marxist revolutionaries aim for a socialist utopia. But what they get is a totalitarian nightmare. And it’s all because they focus on private property and neglect the problem of hierarchy.
The Allure of Marxism … And Why It’s a Mistake
On ”strasserism” and the decay of the left
The working class has been cancelled by the "left".
Paradox Ahmed…
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