3 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Suggestions for undergrad readings regarding economics and ethics?
I think you had some really interesting stuff on there, and I just wanted to add a bit to it, I am however sad that Marx is taught that way (although I assume you were a student, so you didn't have much control over that).
At the moment I am at a university in the US, and it is simply amazing to me how much resistance to Marx there still exists in academic circles in the US. I knew beforehand that there is a certain prejudice against Marx in this country, but i just didn't expect it to extend to the academic fields he is a part of.
The times I have seen Marx being taught, he is almost exclusively taught as a critique of capitalism. It completely defeats the point of including him in my eyes. In essence, I believe the strongest criticism Marx presents against capitalism is the development of a political philosophy that is closely tied to economy, but rests on different views about human values. The point is how strongly those views resonate with our intuitions. If you don't understand his system of thought, then his criticism of capitalism seems hollow and perhaps easily defeated.
His real strength in my eyes is not his direct criticism of capitalism, but his attempt to present a different system, thus shining a light on the assumptions behind capitalism which have been almost dogmatically accepted in many english-speaking countries and universities.
By presenting Marx the way he is presented at the moment, you take the biggest challenger to these assumptions and reduce him to the criticism that sits within the assumptions, and I think that traps a lot of students within that capitalist framework as they go forward.
That is why I think Das Kapital is especially worth reading for students in the US, and I would urge any professor or teacher considering including Marx to spend that extra little bit of time on him, because it is so valuable for students to be able to step out of that box and look at it from the outside.
Comment by blckn at 04/12/2013 at 23:39 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I don't think our prof did a bad job of presenting Marx, he uses Marx's consideration of options other than capitalism and Marx's alternative human values in his own arguments for the welfare state. The class gave me quite a bit of appreciation for Marx.
If anything I'd say that class made me much more sympathetic to socialist views. I think our prof made a point to try to be balanced in the readings (we even read some Rand) and not push anything too hard on us.