Insightful Comment on The Venus Project's Marxist Redux

Mises Community
Jan. 31, 2011

"What strikes me about the zeitgeist movement - Frescoism would probably be a better term - is how it's essentially a further development of Marxism, in that it attempts to resolve the flaws that were left in Marxist-Leninist theory. (And maybe contributions by later Marxist thinkers, I'm no expert on Marxism.) Marxism, as it stands today, has certain flaws, which lessen it's appeal. Although the zeitgeist people swear up and down that they aren't Marxists, their theories are all clever rephrasings of Marxist clichés. And what they added addresses flaws in Marxist theory. For example Marxism proposed that central planning - scientific socialism - would eliminate scarcity. That assumption allowed for all sorts of wacky conclusions because it avoided the very problem of economics: how to make trade-offs between different goods. There is no need to pay for stuff, if you can have everything for free. The Marxists just never really explained how exactly this superabundance would come about. Frescoism proposes a solution... robots! How will central planning be more efficient than free enterprise? We automate everything! It's obviously a nonsensical solution to anyone with a minimum of economic education, but rhetorically it resolves that flaw. Now the theorists can come up with all sorts of explanations of why centrally planned automation will be more efficient than free enterprise. And scientific socialism is revived for another attempt." - EmperorNero, Mises Community Forum












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