The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it”
Can you imagine if people had this approach to studying the natural world (okay, there are many who of course believe this about science), but if we did, we’d never get the scientific method.
It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people. A couple centuries of endless bourgeois propaganda really does a number on people’s willingness to even question or understand the political economy.
It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people
And that’s the really ironic thing! Liberal academics will call Marxism/historical-materialism “unfalsifiable” because we try to apply a class-based lens to understanding events while both modern economics and liberal political theory basically start and stop with the observation that humans are agents optimizing based on a set of preferences. Like okay, sure, humans are optimizing some utility objective, but that doesn’t tell you anything! You could say that about any action ever! Marxism is a structural analysis of why we hold the preferences we do, why we take the actions we do, and how those evolve with economic relations, technology, culture, etc. This is why we go much further than just hand-waving everything as being the result of good/bad people doing good/bad things.
Can you imagine if people had this approach to studying the natural world (okay, there are many who of course believe this about science), but if we did, we’d never get the scientific method.
It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people. A couple centuries of endless bourgeois propaganda really does a number on people’s willingness to even question or understand the political economy.
And that’s the really ironic thing! Liberal academics will call Marxism/historical-materialism “unfalsifiable” because we try to apply a class-based lens to understanding events while both modern economics and liberal political theory basically start and stop with the observation that humans are agents optimizing based on a set of preferences. Like okay, sure, humans are optimizing some utility objective, but that doesn’t tell you anything! You could say that about any action ever! Marxism is a structural analysis of why we hold the preferences we do, why we take the actions we do, and how those evolve with economic relations, technology, culture, etc. This is why we go much further than just hand-waving everything as being the result of good/bad people doing good/bad things.