On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: >>> IOW [in other words?] the basic Marxist premise, the labor vs capital >>> dialectic, is so dramatically over-simplified as to be inherently >>> inaccurate; it is a least a trilectic [??!??} of variables. Free market >>> competitive economics is as badly over-simplified in the opposite direction >>> often even worse in that it commonly becomes a uni-lectic, so to speak, >>> since vendor competition is only part of the value, itself, and nowhere >>> ever the be all and end all. << > > I guess this person is saying that Marx sees so-called "free market > competitive economics" as unrelentingly bad, presenting the mirror > image of the Chicago-school view that free markets and competition are > by nature totally good.
That is not how I read the above quoted comment. I read it as saying that the basic Marxist construct i.e. the labor vs capital dialectic is a gross oversimplification, and so is the "free-market theory" (whatever the latter refers to, let us say Adam Smith for the sake of discussion). I read the above comment as basically saying that both Marx and Smith violate Einstein's famous admonition that "things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". Marx and Smith are like two blind men groping an elephant; both contain very important insights, but then get carried away in insisting that they alone have perceived the true essence of the elephant. -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
