I’ve talked before about David Harvey’s excellent Marxist critique of our current economic crisis. HowTheWorldWorks presented a response video titled Crisis of Capitalism, The Critique. It is offensive in its ignorance or disingenuousness. Noscman1 then presented a response to that video titled “The Critique of the Crisis of Capitalism Critique by HowTheWorldWorks.” It is rather good and provides most of what you need to know about the HowTheWorldWorks video [Sadly, it is no longer available. -FM]
The main argument in the HowTheWorldWorks video is: Marxism bad; capitalism good. At least 50% of what he says is simply, “Well everyone agrees this is just wrong.” As noscman1 points out, it’s just all the people committed to HowTheWorldWorks’ ideology who believe that. If you are going to attack an argument, you really need to argue and not dismiss out of hand the argument.
There is one major point that noscman1 misses. HowTheWorldWorks contends that wages in the United States have increased substantially since 1980. Noscman1 counters this by saying that although wages have increased in the United States, they have not worldwide. This is not true. The problem with HowTheWorldWorks’ claim is first that these wages he presents are not in inflation adjusted dollars. More important, however, is that the wages given are averages. We all know that over the last 30 years there have been huge increases in total wealth. The point that those on the left make is that all those increases have gone to the wealthy. The middle and lower classes have seen very small (and even negative) wage growth.
Conservatism has weathered this financial crisis with a combination of arrogance and willful ignorance.