> Eva Durant wrote:
>
> >> Free markets were a utopia before Karl Marx was born.
> >> They will always be a utopia, no more realizable than "perfect communism".
> >
> >Lucky then, that Marx was never teaching or researching any such
> >concept...
>
> Quite the contrary, Marx was an outspoken critic of bourgeois utopian
> socialism. In fact, that was one of his major contributions to political
> theory. It's called historical materialism.
>
but above you linked Marx and the idea of "perfect communism",
without that further qualification.
...
> Planning with democracy SOUNDS LIKE a good ideal, but then so does the free
> market. It is the distinction between this ideal and the actual conditions
> of life that make such turns of phrase "ideological".
>
In that case any plan to change the old to a new is "ideological".
However, it is evidenced that "free market" even in its best possible
freest form cannot work in fulfilling universal human needs.
What is your argument against democratic planning - besides it
being "ideological"?
> If there is no "third way", it is only because there was no First way nor
> Second way. There are rather as many different ways as human vulnerability,
> ingenuity and endurance can invent. Utopian socialism and the fetishism of
> the commodity (which Marx saw as the core of classical bourgeois economics)
> erected barriers to understanding and changing society.
>
I thought we were talking about the economy. It is either privately,
thus undemocratically controlled, or not. This is one aspect that is
quite unfuzzy... This is not fetishism - this relationship gives the
fundamental character to a society, whether we like it or not,
whether Marx found out about this or someone else - as it happens,
it were Smith and Ricardo and the classical english political
economy... Like Darwin, Marx just happened to put that 2 and 2
together the data that was already discovered by others.
Eva
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
