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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Reddit moment.
The right "fucking loves economics" the same way they say we "fucking love science".
They love it because even though neoclassical economics was discredited nearly a century ago during the Great Depression, it still lives on as conservatives’ understanding of what “economics” is. But all they do is argue from pseudo-psychological first principles like “people are always selfish” or “people always maximize their utility” and try and construct an entire reductive science around that, wholly unconstrained by empirical evidence. And that science conveniently fits in with their conservative political ideas like “giving poor people money will only be wasted”.
Meanwhile Marxian economics is the opposite. The idea isn’t to create “first principles” and try and determine everything from that. It’s overdeterministic. The point isn’t to be able to explain every aspect of the economy like why a basketball autographed by an NBA star is worth more a normal basketball when the socially necessary labor time of both is the same (we actually can, but that’s beside the point). Marxian economics tries to explain the broader trends like commodity production but is flexible enough and open to there being exceptions to the rules.
If you are involved with a real science like physics, you will understand why the first (conservative neoclassical economics) is not a science and the second (Marxian economics) is.
And they’ve replaced it with neoliberal economics, which is even wronger.
Marx wrote in Capital that basically entire classical economy since John Stuart Mill junior was reactionary intellectual masturbation focused on denying the LTV. And fast forward 150 years and it's exactly right, pre-Marx proponents of LTV are almost entirely forgotten and Marx is painted as literal Satan and anathema to all that is good and proper in economy, because they weren't able to silence his writings.
Weirdly enough I feel like physics and Marx should attract similar people. Physics is about discovering the fundamental laws underlying seemingly disparate phenomena. The average physicist gets a half chubb talking about the unification of electricity and magnetism as a single force. Why shouldn’t every physicist also read about commodity fetishism and the reproduction of an inverted ideology in which social relations between humans appear as relations among things? It’s beautifully elegant.