Cause this disconnect between the whole crashing global economy thing and the rising stock market is real frickin weird my guys

  • Kestrel [comrade/them]
    1·
    4 years ago

    The Dig podcast had leftist economist (yes that's a real thing apparently) Yanis Varoufakis on where he talks about how this is the decoupling of financialized capitalism from the capitalist economy, how it is unprecedented and what it might mean. Good listen if you have the time.

      • Will2Live [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        wasn't marx literally an economist (among other things)

        • Nagarjuna [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          He considered his project to be a critique of "political economy" (the economics of the time), but to do that critique he had to become an expert in it, so functionally yes, technically no.

          • mayor_pete_buttigieg [she/her]
            ·
            4 years ago

            I mean if I write a book about how the theory of evolution is wrong doesn't that still make me a biologist?

            In the early USSR there was a big doctrinal fight about the specific theory of evolution that would be accepted. I bet I could convince people here not to believe in modern evolutionary biology by telling them Stalin didn't agree with it.

            • star_wraith [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Sort of. This one is tricky because people do that to make themselves seem like experts when they're not. Good example is Anne Applebaum. She is a journalist with no academic history credentials. But she puts herself out there as a historian. Her work is insanely biased garbage about the gulags and Ukrainian famine. Actual academic historians who themselves are no fans of communism have pointed out the errors in her work - errors that wouldn't be there if she had actual training as a historian or even just less biased. But that doesn't stop the media from using her as the "historical expert" on the Soviet Union.

                • star_wraith [he/him]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  Going off my memory... Applebaum sets out to show that A) Stalin intentionally starved the Ukrainians, and B) communist ideology was also a big part of the famine and is something intrinsic in it.

                  Actual historians dismiss A completely. Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton historian, wrote the definitive work on Stalin. He is most definitely not a pro-communist or pro-Stalin. But he and other real historians reject this idea of an "intentional" famine, it's completely nonsensical and there's not really an evidence for it.

                  Point B is also not among the scholarly consensus about the famine. Basically, most actual historians boil it down to some combination of factors: environmental, the general impact of mechanization and industrialization, how the USSR specifically implemented these reforms, and the Kulaks destroying things intentionally. How much emphasis you place on each factor depends on which historian you're talking to. I think most cite the environmental factors as very significant. I do think there's certainly some blame re: how the Soviets implemented collectivization, but frankly I think history shows the processes of agricultural mechanization and industrialization is brutal. The USSR and China both did in a few years what capitalist economies did over many decades. But importantly, I don't think most historians regard the famine as some broad indictment of communism, as Applebaum does. Certainly the fact that there weren't really any significant famines afterward in the USSR or China would lend credence to that this was more trying to squeeze all these important changes into a narrow timeframe.

                  The beef with Applebaum is she clearly knew the story she wanted to tell and then tried to build the evidence around that. If you want to go after consensus opinions of actual historians fine, but you're probably just going to embarrass yourself as Applebaum did. Don't pretend your hit piece is actual scholarship. Of course journalists can write on history. Barbara Tuchmann is the gold standard for this. But importantly, Tuchmann wasn't trying to prove her own views. She was a real journalist and approached he job as a retelling the real histories. This was the opposite approach of Applebaum.

            • Nagarjuna [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              If you did it as a biologist, sure. Marx's perspective was wider than the field of political economy though. Like, for example Lature commented on a lot of science, and was proficient in it, but is usually recognized as a philosopher / anthropologist and not a scientist.

              Marx is usually read as philosophy, but he would have rejected that, arguing that philosophers only reflect on the world, whereas he was both reflecting on the world and changing it in a dialectical process.

              He would have wanted to be called a scientific socialist and not a philosopher.

    • lib_0000429384 [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Thanks. Link for lazy:

      https://media.blubrry.com/thedig/content.blubrry.com/thedig/The_Dig-EP_269-Varoufakis.mp3

    • BDE [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I listened to it yesterday. Good stuff. He also pointed out that he wasn't confident that what comes after capitalism will be better.

    • the_minority_retort [he/him, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      The Dig is incredible. Daniel’s questions are amazingly-well posed and meaningful, drawing out the essence of leftist thought from the interviewees.