Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Neo-Marxism is a good diagnosis but a bad prescription

Meanwhile I still disagree with major parts of Neo-Marxism, I think highly of its huge improvement from the infant Marxism.

The advantage of Neo-Marxism is that it does not contradict the market mechanism to destroy capitalism: It focuses on reforming capitalism unlike the original Marxism and Marx-Leninism. Neo-Marxism detaches its theory from political construction and the mainstream socialism, and it is far more flexible than any old Marxism.

For example, Antonio Gramsci is the founder of the European Union ideal, and the EU still keeps the attitude to adapt it to the market mechanism (I.e. Remaining capitalism). Do you know that many libertarians adapted Neo-Marxist theory to criticise the state-capitalism monopolised by national government, bureaucracy, and a few number of humongous enterprises?



Nonetheless, I cannot be convinced by Neo-Marxism for many reasons.

In terms of socio-economics, it still sticks to the pure materialism to analyse both the market mechanism and sociological aspects. In addition, its economic theory is not yet updated from a very classical model i.e. It is a pure simple microeconomics without any advanced modern quantitative analyses.

In terms of ethics, the problem of all sorts of Marxism are based on Hegelian ethics and cosmology which regard that the moral code is universal, the future is always better and the past is always worse, the Western world is always advanced from the rest, and hugely ignores the significance of rational egoism driving the market mechanism. All kinds of Marxism are way too idealistic, hypocritic, ignoring the interests of the others as retarded savages, too optimistic about future and over-estimate human-beings, and eventually forcing altruism to individuals.

Furthermore, I am really sceptical about Neo-Marxist globalisation concept. There is a huge possibility that Neo-Marxist idea of federalising the entire would be bad as much as what the Communists attempted to do in during the Cold War if were to be established. Although I support Globalisation, I would like to avoid all idealistic moral-universalist continental European ethics. When we establish some global institute, it is safer to adapt more ethically flexible theories such as those of Hobbes (Useful to analyse political diplomatic geometry in the world), Rousseau (His cultural comparison theory is way far fairer than Hegel=Marx), and Keynes (The person who established the WB and the IMF!)



Any way, Neo-Marxism is a useful tool as a "Diagnosis" to diagnose how individuals and institutions (Never use such a word like "Society"!) are structured, but is a poor or even wrong tool as a "prescription" to cure/reform/operate=revolt the structure.

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