@thedeprogram I’m a baby socialist just getting into the literature and your back episodes. Question though: what would you say we should think of modern socialists like Piketty and Wolff?
@thedeprogram I’m a baby socialist just getting into the literature and your back episodes. Question though: what would you say we should think of modern socialists like Piketty and Wolff?
Is Piketty a socialist? I’m 90% sure he opens Capital in the a Twenty first Century with the claim that because the advanced capitalist states haven’t yet had a revolution, Marx was wrong. It’s to be expected of a French public intellectual, I suppose, but this demonstrates a severe misunderstanding of Marx(ism). His book is still worth reading.
Wolff is great. His analysis is often spot on. His ‘solutions’ can be very liberal but I think he’s trying to bridge a gap and shift the narrative. I think he’s a lot more radical than he sometimes appears. He knows that if he can find a way of appearing ‘reasonable’, he can get people to be open to the facts and narrative he’s sharing. And if people accept those facts and that narrative, they will eventually be amenable to Marxism. The co-op thing is by-the-by; Marxism leads all honest people to revolutionary thought.
I can personally attest that Wolff’s “Let’s Talk About Socialism” helped open me up to the idea of it. Though I think he also softens it to a somewhat misleading degree at times, IIRC. Don’t know anything about Piketty.