Some Ideas just never die
I am reading an interesting history of Science Fiction, which correctly ties the growth of the genre into the changes in world view accompanying the Industrial Revolution, when I run across this odd monstrosity of a sentence, where the author describes the Industrial Revolution as: “Under industrial capitalism, vast numbers of people were soon spending their lives working for a handful of capitalists who owned everything the people produced, including the factories, coal mines, railroads, and ships. Not only were the workers thus alienated from the means of production and their own products, but they also found themselves increasingly alienated from nature, from each other, and from their own essence as creative beings.”
Sound familiar? That is straight from DAS KAPITAL by Marx. The thought contains three basic errors
(1) for a theory of scientific socialism, Marx makes a large assertions that have no support whatever in economics or any other science. Suppose a skeptic demanded proof that working in factories, mines, or shipping alienated labor more than the pre-Capitalist methods of mining and shipping? Where the slaves in the Athenian silver mines somehow connected to their labor in a fashion that the Welsh Coal miners of 1798 were not? Are serfs, who produce is reeved from them by their lords and barons, somehow at one with nature in a way that a man working for Henry Ford was not?
This is an idea that could only spread among folk who never did farm work.
(2) The idea that a handful of men did or were destined to control the market is ahistorical. The Industrial revolution opened the rights and privileges of the possessing classes up to men of ability born in any race or station. Compared to previous political economic structures, the number of the possessing group grew, rather than diminished.
(3) When someone starts talking about the alienation of the essence of creative beings, he is uttering a dogma of religion, not talking about economics. Economics deals with real market phenomena in the real world, things like interest rates, not unproved and improvable speculations about essential creative alienation or other argle-bargle. Economics is a science, like geometry, and deals with defined matters.
I doubt if any ideas have been as entirely discredited and humiliated as the flimsy theories of Marx. He is not an economist, but a heresiarch, the prophet of a new an intellectual form of religion, complete with mystical worship of the material dialect forces of history, and promises of a messianic age wherein all the children of Adam will live in the Garden of Delight, free from the disutility of labor, the law of supply and demand, and the scarsity of goods, free, indeed, from all the realities discovered by the dismal science.
Maybe Phlogeston theory has been debunked as entirely. So why does one continue to run across people who take such ideas seriously?
Because heresies never die.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
