[dorlomin]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoZp177HDJ8

This is a lecture by a very un-Marxists thinker about Marx. It is not hostile on the basis of ideology but is not supportive of the conclusions. It is by a well known anthropologist.

Usefull for people who wish to spend an hour understanding what Marx did think and not what his followers or detractors wanted him to have said.

(the rest of the lectures are worth it)

[dorlomin]

It's too bad the sound is so awful. I'd like to follow the lectures.

Great pity, I found the quality ok. The series is pretty interesting espcially the lectures on Max Weber and Adam Smith. Its a great over view of the breadth of economic thinking.

But this one has better sound quality. Its pro Marxists (I am very much not a Marxist), its by the famous geographer David Harvey discussing the Marxist analysis of escaping the current crisis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQb0fth ... re=related

Not recomending the solution but I think its pretty worthwhile to listen to thinking that is coming at a different angles. Gives us new tools for looking at problems.

[dorlomin]

I will try dig out some Popper or something on Popper later as a counter to the Marx, certainly found his critiques a lot more compelling than Hayek.

[RedStateGreen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoZp177HDJ8

This is a lecture by a very un-Marxists thinker about Marx. It is not hostile on the basis of ideology but is not supportive of the conclusions. It is by a well known anthropologist.

Usefull for people who wish to spend an hour understanding what Marx did think and not what his followers or detractors wanted him to have said.

(the rest of the lectures are worth it)

Nice lecture, thanks for posting it.

[PrestonSturges]

I will try dig out some Popper or something on Popper later as a counter to the Marx, certainly found his critiques a lot more compelling than Hayek.

Good man, you beat me to it!

Marxists absolutely HATE Popper (so do Fascists).

Popper said the societies go through cycles of anti-intellectualism.

The Marxists are determinists - they see history as always bending in their direction, so the more disruption they can cause the faster they will get to their promised land. To be fair, everyone is a determinist about something, and disagreeing over what is "inevitable" can surely lead to violence.

Popper described this belief in "destiny" or "God's will" as some sort of final destination as a fixture of authoritarianism, either left or right.

Hayek looks more and more foolish as the decades pass because everything for him was a big slippery slope fallacy. State funded child care meant death camps were right around the corner !

Hayek was a Nobel Prize winning economist who made a complete fool of himself dabbling in sociology and then becoming an intellectual apologist for Pinochet.

Most wingnuts know Hayek from "The Road to Serfdom" as it was condensed by Readers Digest, as well as an anti-union comic book. But Hayek also wrote a nice political piece titled "Why I Am Not A Conservative."

[PrestonSturges]

I would suggest Poppers "The Open Society and Its Enemies....Vol. 2 Hegel and Marx."

the funny thing is that Hayek and Popper were best friends, and Popper considered Hayek one of his main influences. Popper was much stronger than Hayek in understanding sociology, where Hayek was pretty much a jackass.

George Soros was one of Popper's graduate students, and Soros uses Popper's "Open Society" phrase. It's not clear if Soros ever met Hayek.

WIngnuts like to imagine that Hayek and Soros are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they are practically cousins.

[Plantagenet]

"Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."
----Karl Popper on socialism

[PrestonSturges]

It is always the myth of the lost tribal paradise, the hysterical refusal to carry the cross of civilization.

-Karl Popper hopping out of his time machine in 1962 to warn about the Tea Party

[careinke]

I would suggest Poppers "The Open Society and Its Enemies....Vol. 2 Hegel and Marx."

the funny thing is that Hayek and Popper were best friends, and Popper considered Hayek one of his main influences. Popper was much stronger than Hayek in understanding sociology, where Hayek was pretty much a jackass.

George Soros was one of Popper's graduate students, and Soros uses Popper's "Open Society" phrase. It's not clear if Soros ever met Hayek.

WIngnuts like to imagine that Hayek and Soros are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they are practically cousins.

Is this the Billionare, convicted insider trader, Soros?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 62696.html

[PrestonSturges]

I would suggest Poppers "The Open Society and Its Enemies....Vol. 2 Hegel and Marx."

the funny thing is that Hayek and Popper were best friends, and Popper considered Hayek one of his main influences. Popper was much stronger than Hayek in understanding sociology, where Hayek was pretty much a jackass.

George Soros was one of Popper's graduate students, and Soros uses Popper's "Open Society" phrase. It's not clear if Soros ever met Hayek.

WIngnuts like to imagine that Hayek and Soros are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they are practically cousins.

Is this the Billionare, convicted insider trader, Soros?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 62696.html

Yep, he's the guy that Francis Fukuyama, former intellectual hero of the neocons and author of the "The End Of History" (1992) described as one of the best examples of effectively promoting democracy as compared to failures of the neocons Bush doctrine.

I mean seriously, why do you think the right has such an obsessive hatred of Soros?

Like I said, he's hardly a born enemy of Hayek.

[dorlomin]

----Karl Popper on socialism

Popper was refering to the Marxian idea of socialism. That is a post capitalist society. I am unaware of his criticisms of things like unemployment welfare and state pensions that today are characterised as socialism or at least part of social democratic systems.

Whats your take on what he meant?

[PrestonSturges]

It's off topic, but Popper's "The Open Society vol 2" has an absolutely mind blowing description of selling the authoritarian Great Man and preemptive war through the use of propaganda that reads like the script from the run-up to the Iraq war.

If someone had written it in 2005, people would have said "sour grapes," but he wrote it in 1962.

[dorlomin]

George Soros was one of Popper's graduate students, and Soros uses Popper's "Open Society" phrase. It's not clear if Soros ever met Hayek.

Aye there is him pumping money into Solidarity in Poland and other prodemocracy movements in the East. What a bastard.

[PrestonSturges]

"Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."
----Karl Popper on socialism

As a Social Democrat Jew who fled the Nazis, you would probably call Popper a "socialist."

[dorlomin]

It's off topic, but Popper's "The Open Society vol 2" has an absolutely mind blowing description of selling the authoritarian Great Man and preemptive war through the use of propaganda that reads like the script from the run-up to the Iraq war.

If someone had written it in 2005, people would have said "sour grapes," but he wrote it in 1962.

Well in 62 he had some pretty larger than life examples in the recent past.

That said I used to joke to people that the best thing in the mainstream media about the Gulf War as Frank Herberts Dune.

[careinke]

I mean seriously, why do you think the right has such an obsessive hatred of Soros?

For the same reason the Left hates the Koch brothers? They are rich, and use their money to advance their ideas.

[Plantagenet]

----Karl Popper on socialism

Popper was refering to the Marxian idea of socialism. That is a post capitalist society. I am unaware of his criticisms of things like unemployment welfare and state pensions that today are characterised as socialism or at least part of social democratic systems.

Whats your take on what he meant?

1. Actually Popper was referring not to the "Marxian idea" but to the actual states produced by socialists in eastern Europe, China, Albania, North Korea etc. Thats why he said "Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."
----Karl Popper on socialism

2. You are evidently confusing social welfare and pension programs with socialism. They are quite different things. Old age pensions, for instance, originated in Bismark's capitalist Germany. This isn't unusual---generous social welfare programs require wealthy societies which tend to be those with healthy capitalist economies. The reductions in social welfare programs being forced on Greece, Spain and Portugal right now are occuring under socialist goverments---because their economies are too weak to support the generous programs without expensive borrowing.

When Popper said "socialism" he meant socialism, i.e. state control of the means of production.

[dorlomin]

2. You are evidently confusing social welfare and pension programs with socialism.

I was clarifying what you meant by it. I have very often seen the word 'socialism' used to mean many different things.

I have no quibble with your use of the quote in the context you have provided.

Although if you really want to be bored to death and lose any will to live you can take up the idea that those states were socialists with a dyed in the wool Marxists, they will bleed your ears with long winded explanations that they were 'state capitalism'.

To be fair they have a bit of a point, those states were just gangsters grabbing both the political and economic power for themselves under the banner of liberating the worker. Pretty much what your quote from Popper was saying.

[Plantagenet]

As a Social Democrat Jew who fled the Nazis.... Popper a "socialist."

You are either intellectually dishonest or extremely ignorant about what Popper stood for.

Popper wasn't a socialist---he spent his entire life fighting against national socialism, international socialism, and every other kind of socialism and totalitarianism. Popper frequently made clear his opposition to socialism and the claims of socialists that socialism was a panacea to solve all the economic problems of capitalism. For instance, Popper said:

"The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous." Karl Popper