[FoRK] Special Circumstances

[Luis Villa]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Kevin Elliott <k-elliott at wiu.edu> wrote:
>
>  In many ways that world does look like the end state envisioned by Marx.
> But the only way to get there is to reduce the cost of everything down to
> zero.  At that point why bother with money/ownership/etc?  If somebody needs
> something, they should have it.  It's not like anybody loses.

Which I think is Banks' point.

>  The mistake of communism isn't in it's goal- who wouldn't want to live in a
> world where they could have everything they want for nothing.  The problem
> is assuming that centrally managing resources and decisions is a sensible
> way to get there.

Or to frame it another way: the mistake of Russian-style communism may
have been to try to impose a political structure that might make sense
in a post-scarcity world on a world with scarcity.

Along those lines, I suggest reading 'Marx's Revenge', by Desai, whose
thesis is that Marx would have found modern globalizing capitalists to
be completely in line with his thinking on economic-historical change.

Luis