Wednesday, November 4, 2009

You can be a Marxist and not even know it

Some (perhaps most) U.S. farmers hate welfare. But, almost all of them receive it (only theirs has a different name; it's called "farm subsidies"). So, are farmers who hate welfare being hypocritical?

The answer is no, they're not, and that's because they're Marxists. Of course, none of them would call themselves a Marxist, and I'm sure most of them hate Marxism at least as much as they hate welfare. But nonetheless, they are, in that they subscribe to Marxist theory of value through labor. Most farm subsidies require extremely hard work to qualify for and this, probably, is why farmers don't perceive subsidies as welfare.

Of course, this isn't really about farmers. The old Marxist error of confusing input with output is very widespread, and probably derives from deep-seated intuitions: how can it be possible for hard work to not have value? I've met tons of people, many of them raging conservatives, who were Marxists in this particular respect.

1 comment:

  1. Would you quickly summarize the marxist error of confusing input with output?

    ReplyDelete