You've got to love petty bourgeois intellectuals.
Peter Dorman on May 10
In a Marxian view of the world, the class structure of a given society generates a set of objective interests. Classes are constituted in part through their shared interests, and the ideological/purposive aspect pertains to becoming a class for itself and not just in itself. The role of ideas is to transform objective into perceived and then mobilizing interests.
That’s a rather deterministic conception of politics, to put it mildly. (...).
Marx’ theory of class interest is too schematic and incomplete even on its own terms.
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Peter Dorman on August 4, 2018 (lambasting Naomi Klein for her mushy -- his word, not mine -- political environmentalism)
What makes Jeff Bezos a capitalist is not his belief system but his ownership and deployment of capital. Capitalism is a system of institutions that give economic and political primacy to the possession and control of capital. There is no single metric that captures the effect that a capitalist context has on an issue like climate change, but the starting point is surely anticipated capital gains or losses from a given policy. (...)
What motivates Team Capital is not a shared philosophy, but the belief, probably justified, that really effective action would eat into the value of their investments. Fighting climate action is as rational for them as cutting an unnecessary production cost or cultivating a new, profitable market.
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One has to give Peter Dorman due credit: he really knows what it means to be "mobile qual piuma al vento". After Keynes set a very high standard by disowning free trade, it's hard to find someone embodying the "muta d'accento e di pensiero" motto better than Dorman.
The only thing that remains constant in his thought is that Marx is damned, for doing it and for not doing it.
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