• Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    What's your favorite part?

    • Workers following muh "rational best interest" are the barrier to collective action (Marx failed to consider that employers could simply pay scabs more), not the "semi-conspiratorial, quasi-Freudian" concept of false consciousness

    • Crusaders weren't motivated by wealth and land because in practice they often lost money. Instead, they were motivated by a shift in Christianity towards militarism which was apparently completely random and unrelated to anyone's material interests.

    • Marx's theories of exploitation weren't empirically grounded. By contrast, neoliberal economists have proven that workers are only a little bit exploited, by comparing how much they're currently paid with how much they might get paid at a different position in the exact same economy (which is really their call so it's not really exploitation anyway).

    Honestly that last one was wild. It feels like a magician's slight of hand more than anything. When you actually stop to look at it, like, obviously when Marx was talking about exploitation, he was talking about it on a systemic level, not as something that could be overcome by working for a different employer. But the way the author writes it you could almost miss that that's he's shifting the meaning like that.