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Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

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Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#41

Post by CryptoPunk »

interpenetrate wrote: post #22
CryptoPunk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's go over this again. I stated: >Value is subjective. If I value my free time at $20 an hour, and you value my labor at $40 an hour, we will be able to come to an agreement where you pay me $30 an hour, and we will both benefit according to our subjective perception of value. You responded with: >This is the price, not value. Value is the benefit provided to an economic agent from a good or service, whereas price…

>The overlooking of the value that their capital provided is a classic oversight of Marxists. this fundamental concept is called constant capital and it is of course introduced in the opening chapters of capital vol 1

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Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#42

Post by claudiawerner »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #12
interpenetrate wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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>He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.

Regardless of what you think of Marx's economics (and it seems you haven't thought much about it, since modern Marxist economists have improved some of ideas and rejected others), it is totally incorrect to say he was economically illiterate. Marx had an encyclopedic knowledge of political economy, and all his predecessors, including Smith, Ricardo, Say, Bailey, J.S. Mill, etc. - that much is visible through his notes and published works.

>This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.

Marx effectively writes about this in Capital.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#43

Post by claudiawerner »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #40
interpenetrate wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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>I don't need to read the entire corpus of Marxist literature to conclude that Marxian economics is quackery.

You do have to read about modern Marxist economic replies to objections over a century old. The likes of Guglielmo Carcheidi, Kliman and Freeman, and even non-Marxist economists sympathetic to Marx answer many of these problems.

>Claiming automation would reduce wages is a basic fallacy that economic laymen believe in.

This is not strictly the claim that Marx makes, and this claim you attribute to him only comes from a particular logical view of Marx rather than his own logic.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#44

Post by claudiawerner »

barry-cotter wrote: post #38
pjc50 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that the Red Terror was brutal. What is less obviously true is the newness. It happened in the revolution directly following Russia's collapse in the First World War; a time of food shortages and massive, unnecessary casualties there as a result of incompetent and careless leadership. If they had learned brutality, they had learned it from the Tsar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana

This doesn’t give the Communists anywhere near enough credit for their own depravity or the energy and vigor they put into the suffering of their enemies. I do not recall the Tsarist regime using rape (in order of seniority) as a weapon of terror, or pouring molten lead down the throats of anyone like the Communists did to priests, or rolling Tsarist officers down hills in barrels studded with nails on the inside. Th…

>The Communists made the Tsarist regime look like rank amateurs in terror, they weren’t even trying in comparison

There is a certain danger in this sort of thinking which seeks to compare levels of terror quantitatively with disregard to their qualitative effects and purposes. The Bolsheviks are guilty of many evils, but not for the same reasons or purposes as the Tsar. Remember that Tsarist Russia didn't only operate on cases of immediate violence, it used structural ones too. Structural violence is well understood today.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#45

Post by twic »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #2

Calling Trotsky an intellectual is pretty macabre. The man personally ordered the execution of numerous prisoners of war and civilians. He was a major advocate of the "Red Terror", which introduced new levels of brutality to Soviet political culture that set norms for decades to come. His intellectualism consisted of little more than inflammatory classist conspiracy theories, hate propaganda against the properties cl…

The article doesn't call Trotsky an intellectual. Here's the paragraph:

> In Mexico, President Lázaro Cárdenas — one of the most popular leaders in twentieth-century history — had turned his country into a haven for persecuted intellectuals: after the fall of the Spanish Republic, he offered political asylum to thousands of refugees, and Mexico received a massive influx of artists, poets, academics, and philosophers who played a crucial role in postwar culture. In a world threatened by the rise of fascism, Cárdenas opened his nation’s doors to socialists and fellow travelers of all kinds. Leon Trotsky accepted Cárdenas’s invitation and settled in Mexico City in 1937.

It says that Cárdenas did two things: firstly, after the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, he took in "artists, poets, academics, and philosophers", and secondly, in the face of fascism, he took in "socialists and fellow travelers", including Trotsky, who arrived in 1937. It's the artists, poets, academics, and philosophers fleeing Franco who were the persecuted intellectuals.

As a result, your comment and the subthread hanging off it are null and void.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#46

Post by deogeo »

Moonshooter wrote: post #17
CryptoPunk wrote: post #2

Calling Trotsky an intellectual is pretty macabre. The man personally ordered the execution of numerous prisoners of war and civilians. He was a major advocate of the "Red Terror", which introduced new levels of brutality to Soviet political culture that set norms for decades to come. His intellectualism consisted of little more than inflammatory classist conspiracy theories, hate propaganda against the properties cl…

This seems like dangerous glorification of intellectualism. The intellectual communities of the world are not inherently moral because of their intellect. That even intelligent people can commit heignous acts is one of the oldest tropes of the 1940s (with good reason). I might just be misunderstanding your points, in which case I apologise, but what you've discussed don't seem to actually relate to whether or not Tro…

I think the GP meant that describing Trotsky as primarily an intellectual, and omitting his other activities, amounts to lying through omission.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#47

Post by [deleted] »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #41
interpenetrate wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The overlooking of the value that their capital provided is a classic oversight of Marxists. this fundamental concept is called constant capital and it is of course introduced in the opening chapters of capital vol 1

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#48

Post by dang »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #2

Calling Trotsky an intellectual is pretty macabre. The man personally ordered the execution of numerous prisoners of war and civilians. He was a major advocate of the "Red Terror", which introduced new levels of brutality to Soviet political culture that set norms for decades to come. His intellectualism consisted of little more than inflammatory classist conspiracy theories, hate propaganda against the properties cl…

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological battle. The resulting threads are predictable and boring. We've had to ask you not to start flamewars on HN before. If you keep doing this, we are going to have to ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Intellectuals are no better than anyone else, and often worse, so this ridiculous flamewar started with a non sequitur anyhow.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#49

Post by dang »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #41
interpenetrate wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The overlooking of the value that their capital provided is a classic oversight of Marxists. this fundamental concept is called constant capital and it is of course introduced in the opening chapters of capital vol 1

[flagged]

Please stop, and please keep ideological flamewar off HN in the future, regardless of what Marx was wrong about.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#50

Post by dang »

interpenetrate wrote: post #9
CryptoPunk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit isn't surplus value generated by the worker that has been appropriated by the employer. Value is not an objective property that employers are attaining for below its true value to earn a profit. Value is subjective. If I value my free time at $20 an hour, and you value my labor at $40 an hour, we will be able to come to an agreement where you pay me $30 an hour, and we will both benefit according to our subjec…

[flagged]

Please keep ideological flamewar well away from HN. These inevitably repetitive and angry discussions are the last thing we want here. Worse, they are destructive of the thoughtful, curious conversations we do want here, so we have little choice but to ban accounts that post like this repeatedly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful.
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