Reply #3: Marx Overstates and Misdiagnoses [View All]

[rwenos]

The most perceptive thing I ever heard about Marx was from a professor of mine, who once said "Karl Marx was wildly optomistic about the rationality of human beings." I try to keep that in mind when Marx's ideas are advanced seriously.

The problem with the passage you quoted comes in the final paragraph. Marx hypothesizes that the bourgeoisie will always "destroy a mass of productive forces," and then inevitably "conquer new markets, and by the more thorought exploitation of the old ones . . . paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises."

Marx has left three gigantic things out of this seemingly-logical analysis. First, markets (even our semi-regulated ones) will generally favor good ideas over bad ones, thus sorting entrepreneurs into winners and losers. Second, new markets result when technology advances -- and boy do we live in an age of technology advances creating new markets! And third, his prediction that the failures of one or another economic enterprise will "pave the way for more extensive and destructive crises" -- although it fits with his mantra of historical materialism (this is the part that makes too much of our human rationality) -- is simply a shot in the dark, based on no evidence.

If you buy Marx's idea of historical materialism, his argument makes sense. But since the world has shown that idea pretty much to be nonesense, the rest of his analysis falls.