Marx
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Another piece on AI notices that it will destroy capitalism itself
Here; the key bit: The closer you look, the more you see doom loops everywhere. Journalists, for example, used to publish work under the assumption that online platforms would drive readership to them. But now, tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini simply summarize their articles without sending readers to their sites, sparking a crisis that…
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Reichenbach on ethics
A propos this, philosopher Johannes Steizinger calls my attention to this remark of Hans Reichenbach’s in The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (p. 297): Whoever wants to study ethics, therefore, should not go to the philosopher; he should live in the community of a group where life is made vivid by competing volitions, be it the…
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On some of the oddities of being a philosophical scholar working on Marx
Marx did have a doctoral degree in philosophy (he wrote a dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus), and was for a period of time under the influence of Hegel (the decisive account of his break with Hegel is this one). But by the late 1840s, his approach to theory and intellectual work was wholly different. What…
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On the current “polycrisis” confronting wealthy capitalist democracies
Like the American Randall Collins, the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck is a keen observer of the current situation, without too many illusions, and with a plausible analytical framework. An excerpt: Under an increasingly undemocratic capitalism, the countries of the rich world all confront a similar bundle of crises that have sprung up more or less…
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Bureaucracy, capitalism, AI, and climate change
Reader Howard Berman called my attention awhile ago to this fascinating essay by sociologist Randall Collins, which I recommend to everyone looking for some informed “big picture” analyses of what we face. He makes many astute observations: for example, that LLMs produce “not a human-like intelligence at all but a statistical memory bank which estimates…
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The declining “labor share” of income
A central forecast of Marx’s was that capitalism would produce technological innovations that would displace human labor, gradually immiserating those who have only their labor power to sell. Marx thought this would happen much sooner than it actually has, but it has started to happen. We discussed this in Chapter IV of our Marx, including,…
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This is encouraging: majority of Americans want to redistribute wealth from AI companies to society
Let’s hope it happens, but this will require the prudent wing of the ruling class, i.e., the Democrats, to ‘betray’ the (short-term) interests of their class, much as FDR did. (As some readers will know, FDR was regularly accused of being a traitor to his class, whereas in reality he saved them from extinction.)
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Some hopeful trends in America
The Financial Times has always represented the prudent wing of the capitalist class, unlike the imprudent wing that has overwhelmed the Republican Party in America. This piece by one of its regular opinion columnists (who is quite scathing about Trump et al., but knows which class he represents) is revealing: When they go low, we…
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No more Marx or Spinoza in the secondary school philosophy curriculum in Italy…
…but students will read Gentile, the philosopher of fascism.
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The historian Sven Beckert appears to be confused about “capitalism”
That’s the upshot of this long and interesting review of Beckert’s most recent book by the political theorist Corey Robin. I’ve not read Beckert’s book, but welcome comments from those who know more about this topic. Please do not comment unless you have read Beckert’s book or read Robin’s review.
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The problem for parents in America is that “America hates people”
Yes, indeed, a nice takedown of a bit of sociological idealism in the NYT: The article mentioned that policymakers need to focus on supporting parents, but in equal weight, if not more so, was the argument that America’s culture of parenting was the problem. Having raised kids for 18 years in the United States and…
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Social science papers may lean “liberal”…
…but they do not lean “left,” and it would be nice if journalists were a little more careful about this. One entire social science discipline leans anti-left (i.e., pro-capitalist), while others may, at best, tend to be liberal in the parochial American sense. If only the social sciences really leaned left, we’d learn a lot…
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Economists (i.e., adherents of the failed empirical science of neoclassical economics) “once dismissed the AI job threat”…
…but now they don’t. As ideologists for capitalism, they, of course, had to resist the idea that AI would expose how little interest capitalist modes of production have in wage laborers–blue collar workers learned this decades ago, but now white collar workers are being lined up at the firing line. As I said in a…
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Most cited Anglophone philosophical books on Marx since WWII (according to Google Scholar) (CORRECTED)
I focus on English-language books mainly by philosophers, or that are obviously philosophically-minded. Totals are rounded to the nearest 100, and only books with at least 500 citations are listed. I could not find on Google Scholar Allen Wood’s Karl Marx in the Routledge “Arguments of the Philosophers” series, which would surely have made the…
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Edwards & Leiter, Marx book, redux
I learned from Routledge that in a little over a year, the book has now sold about 1,900 copies, including over 1,700 in paperback. The latter number is especially gratifying, since hardly any reviews have yet appeared (the most visible one was Choice), which suggests word-of-mouth has been favorable. Thank you to all readers!
Then my question is how many of ordinary mathematicians also qualify as artists of their profession…