Monday, October 16, 2006

How Collectivism still survives

A nice little observation by Rothbard:

I do not believe it an accident that Karl Marx is considered one of the great hermeneuticians. This century has seen a series of devastating setbacks to Marxism, to its pretensions to "scientific truth," and to its theoretical propositions as well as to its empirical assertions and predictions. If Marxism has been riddled both in theory and in practice, then what can Marxian cultists fall back on? It seems to me that hermeneutics fits very well into an era that we might, following a Marxian gambit about capitalism, call "late Marxism" or Marxism-in-decline. Marxism is not true and is not science, but so what? The hermeneuticians tell us that nothing is objectively true, and therefore that all views and propositions are subjective, relative to the whims and feelings of each individual.
In short, Marxists and other opponents of the successful, wealthy societies in the world cannot resort to reason and logic anymore. They are forced to rely on a kind of "philosophy" that denies truth, facts, correct, wrong, true and false. They must rely on a state of mind that refuses to be wrong - and right! For them, "A" is not necessarily "A" if someone claims that "A" is "B".

I wonder if me claiming I have lots of money actually makes it be so, or if objective, physical reality is still among us somewhere?

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