You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

gjm comments on Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: PhilGoetz 26 February 2016 06:38AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (96)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gjm 02 March 2016 12:48:45PM -1 points [-]

It seems worth distinguishing "has something in common with Marx's ideas" from "is fundamentally Marxist", especially as "Marxist" is a pretty inflammatory term because of the horrors perpetrated in the name of Marxism in the 20th century.

So, what are these ideas you're calling fundamentally Marxist? I think it comes down to this: "Sometimes one group of people has more power and resources than another, and acts in ways that harm the worse-off group. We should frame such situations in terms of conflict between the two groups, even though some people in the worse-off group may not see it that way."

I'm not sure I'd want to endorse those ideas, but they seem to me to fall far short of justifying the description as "fundamentally Marxist".

certainly anticapitalist

Advocating more regulation of markets is not at all the same thing as opposing capitalism. I think you are confusing capitalism with, I dunno, libertarianism or something.

Capitalism means having lots of privately owned industry and trade. Anyone who isn't advocating large-scale nationalization, or something more drastic than that, is not being anticapitalist in any useful sense.