You will think me a philistine, but I confess I have not read most of the Moore to which you refer here to support your point. I have read WATCHMAN and V FOR VENDETTA, a number of issues of PROMETHEA (before I gave up in disappointment), all of his SWAMP THING run, KILLING JOKE, a few others.
What I have read of him supports what you say so clearly that I will take your word for the rest. What you are saying fits with what I know.
So Moore is not an anarchist except in the sense that all "fellow-travelers" are anarchists. Whether they know it or not, they are proposing a break down of law and order. Totalitarian states are not shocking merely because of their stifling cruel laws, but are also shocking for their lawlessness.
I do unfortunately see his treatment of superheroes in WATCHMAN and KILLING JOKE as part and parcel of the spirit of Moloch, by which I mean, not that Moore wants to throw children into the furnace, but merely that he wants them not to have heroes. He is setting about demeaning & disintegrating, the concept of the super-hero. I am not sure if I could re-read these words with any enjoyment these days, since I regard the degradation of childhood joys to be a vile practice. I will not repeat here my heated comments about LOST GIRLS.
You and I might have to disagree respectfully only on one small point. The Marxian economic analysis is not brilliant: far from it. It is a mass of unoriginal errors and old theories that were dismissed by serious thinkers before Marx took pen to paper.
His only contribution to socialism was to make the claim that polylogism, the inability of the human mind to grasp the logic of minds in other economic circumstances, rendered it impossible and unscientific to criticize the proposed socialist commonwealth. In other words, his only contribution to the debate was a sophomoric trick, an ad Hominem maneuver to silence criticism of his unworkable ideas.
The other basics, such as the labor theory of value (first proposed by Adam Smith, by the bye), had been discussed and exploded by serious economists previously.
The rest of the analysis relies on a simple confusion of an economic category for a social class. An economic category is an analytical tool, existing in thought only. If I work for my brother during the week, and on weekends run an auto-repair shop, and hire a handyman, and invest my savings in the stock market, I am at once a proletarian, a wage-earner, a bourgeoisie, a capitalist, an employer. The Marxist analysis of my "class" would be nonsense: there is no necessary identity of interests with the auto shop owner next door, or with other wage-earners.
The iron law of wages has no support in logic or in history. If market forces inevitably drive wages to the point of bare subsistence for the wage-earner, why does not return on investment drive returns to the bare subsistence level for the investor?
The idea of alienation of labor is not even an economic idea, it is merely a poetic expression, a word-fetish.
The idea of material dialectic makes nonsense of Hegel, and nonsense of economics--one cannot debate with an robotic entity whose non-mind is programmed by the tools of production in his environment, for debate implies reasoning.
The idea of class consciousness and false consciousness are religious ideas, pure mysticism.
The description of feudalism is ahistorical, painfully naive.
Far from being insightful or brilliant, Marx is an embarrassment compared to any real economist. His theory is not theory at all, but a prophecy, conveniently vague enough that any facts can be twisted to suit and confirm it. History will consider him a Jewish heresiarch, the founder of rival religion. His work resembles the Qabala or the Book of Revelations more than it does Wealth of Nations.
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Persuasive
Date: 2006-11-03 05:51 pm (UTC)What I have read of him supports what you say so clearly that I will take your word for the rest. What you are saying fits with what I know.
So Moore is not an anarchist except in the sense that all "fellow-travelers" are anarchists. Whether they know it or not, they are proposing a break down of law and order. Totalitarian states are not shocking merely because of their stifling cruel laws, but are also shocking for their lawlessness.
I do unfortunately see his treatment of superheroes in WATCHMAN and KILLING JOKE as part and parcel of the spirit of Moloch, by which I mean, not that Moore wants to throw children into the furnace, but merely that he wants them not to have heroes. He is setting about demeaning & disintegrating, the concept of the super-hero. I am not sure if I could re-read these words with any enjoyment these days, since I regard the degradation of childhood joys to be a vile practice. I will not repeat here my heated comments about LOST GIRLS.
You and I might have to disagree respectfully only on one small point. The Marxian economic analysis is not brilliant: far from it. It is a mass of unoriginal errors and old theories that were dismissed by serious thinkers before Marx took pen to paper.
His only contribution to socialism was to make the claim that polylogism, the inability of the human mind to grasp the logic of minds in other economic circumstances, rendered it impossible and unscientific to criticize the proposed socialist commonwealth. In other words, his only contribution to the debate was a sophomoric trick, an ad Hominem maneuver to silence criticism of his unworkable ideas.
The other basics, such as the labor theory of value (first proposed by Adam Smith, by the bye), had been discussed and exploded by serious economists previously.
The rest of the analysis relies on a simple confusion of an economic category for a social class. An economic category is an analytical tool, existing in thought only. If I work for my brother during the week, and on weekends run an auto-repair shop, and hire a handyman, and invest my savings in the stock market, I am at once a proletarian, a wage-earner, a bourgeoisie, a capitalist, an employer. The Marxist analysis of my "class" would be nonsense: there is no necessary identity of interests with the auto shop owner next door, or with other wage-earners.
The iron law of wages has no support in logic or in history. If market forces inevitably drive wages to the point of bare subsistence for the wage-earner, why does not return on investment drive returns to the bare subsistence level for the investor?
The idea of alienation of labor is not even an economic idea, it is merely a poetic expression, a word-fetish.
The idea of material dialectic makes nonsense of Hegel, and nonsense of economics--one cannot debate with an robotic entity whose non-mind is programmed by the tools of production in his environment, for debate implies reasoning.
The idea of class consciousness and false consciousness are religious ideas, pure mysticism.
The description of feudalism is ahistorical, painfully naive.
Far from being insightful or brilliant, Marx is an embarrassment compared to any real economist. His theory is not theory at all, but a prophecy, conveniently vague enough that any facts can be twisted to suit and confirm it. History will consider him a Jewish heresiarch, the founder of rival religion. His work resembles the Qabala or the Book of Revelations more than it does Wealth of Nations.