Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being." -- Marx, quoted in Bertell Ollman, Alienation , p. 48 The above, of course, is pretty much the exact position Satan is depicted as adopting in Paradise Lost : he cannot stand the fact that he himself is not God, and decides it is "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n." Even from a materialist perspective, Marx's position makes little sense: shouldn't we instead recognize that we are "just another animal," "a small bit of a vast universe," and not a "supreme being"? If materialism were true, making a god of man is surely an absurd proposition! Marx is, indeed, a genius, full of keen insights into social situations and historical developments. And this explains his lasting...

Mises held that labor is (almost) always something to be avoided in life, that it has disutility , and that the only point of it is to be able to purchase consumer goods. Interestingly, he recognized an exception: himself. He didn't dislike his work; in fact, he lived for it. So he created a separate category of human being to explain this: the creative genius . But the truth about labor is that life is incomplete without it: everyone needs meaningful work in their life: "As a former Marxist, his analysis always held labor, particularly when self-directed or done voluntarily in cooperation with others, in high esteem because of the ethic of responsibility it produced. Work wasn’t, or shouldn’t be, just a means to put food on the table or a roof over your head. Rather it provided meaning, dignity, and moral instruction, something not found by repeating mind-numbing tasks over and over at someone else’s direction."

Since I first had to teach Marx in a history of thought class, I have come to appreciate him much more. His writings are full of interesting insights, and many of the critiques of him turn out to be critiques of a strawman. Marx is far better than I had thought! So it was with great interest today that I went to a lecture by a Marxist on the Marxist theory of value: maybe there were gems in there I had missed as well. No: the Marxist theory of value is far worse than I had suspected. The notion that only living labor can produce surplus value appears to be based on sheer assertion and definition. It seems to me could create an equally sound theory of value for my ideology of "Celticism": I define surplus value as something that is only produced by living Irishmen (and women... let's not be ethnocentric and sexist!), value which is then expropriated from them by the exploitative non-Irish. If you ask me, "So, industries that employ lots of Irish show the highes...

From Chapter XVII of Theories of Surplus Value : But the crisis is precisely the phase of disturbance and interruption of the process of reproduction. And this disturbance cannot be explained by the fact that it does not occur in those times when there is no crisis. There is no doubt that no one "will continually produce a commodity for which there is no demand," but no one is talking about such an absurd hypothesis. Nor has it anything to do with the problem. The immediate purpose of capitalist production is not “the possession of other goods”, but the appropriation of value, of money, of abstract wealth... Money is not only "the medium by which the exchange is effected," but at the same time the medium by which the exchange of product with product is divided into two acts, which are independent of each other, and separate in time and space... That only particular commodities, and not all kinds of commodities, can form “a glut in the market” and that th...

"[Moving from the abstract to the concrete] is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [ Anschauung ] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought... For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, livi...

Stephen M. Walt gives us a good example here : Here's the basic structure of the situation. If you're a politically ambitious commander like Petraeus, you want good advice. But you also want to make sure that you and your decisions are portrayed in a positive light. So you invite some well-connected civilians to visit your operation, and you make sure you select people who aren't known for being critical of the war and who will be easy to co-opt if need be. And when the consultants come to visit for a few days or weeks, you make sure they receive briefings that give the impression things are going well even if they are not. Next, consider how this looks from the consultants' perspective. If you're an inside-the-Beltway think-tanker (and especially if you're someone who depends on soft money), it's a big deal to be invited to go to Afghanistan or Iraq and advise the commander. It makes you look more important to your colleagues, your boss, and your boa...

I'm reading a review of Capital, the State, and the Monetary Mode of Power in The Review of Political Economy , and I am really struck by how similar the Marxist view of credit creation is to that of the 100%-reservists: basically, it is a way of bestowing claims to goods upon certain (undeserving) people. This certainly is not an argument against either the Marxist or Rothbardian view... in fact, some people might be encouraged that someone arrived at the same finish line from a different starting point. But I wonder how many people in either camp are aware of this similar conclusion?

Well, at least if you are taking my course on The Great Transformation they are: 1) Describe the division of labor. What does Adam Smith see as its advantages? What are some possible disadvantagtes? 2) What is the idea of dialectics as developed by Hegel? How did Karl Marx apply the idea to history? How did feudalism trasition into capitalism in this view? 3) How does Max Weber characterize the spirit of capitalism? Specifically, how is it different from the traditional attitude towards economic life? How did Lutheranism and Calvinism contribute to that change?

It was very interesting to me to hear the explanation given by a prominent Rothbardian for the persistence of "statist" beliefs: it is because the state pays intellectuals to make the case for its existence, and they then spread those ideas to the populace: Plato and Hobbes were just paid off, or they would have been anarchists. The funny thing is that, as with the Marxists, this analysis does not apply to them : I'm sure the fellow does not believe that he just holds Rothbardian ideas because he gets paid to do so, despite the fact he does get paid to do so.