In a comment at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram quotes G. A. Cohen:
there is now no group in advanced industrial society which unites the four characteristics of: (1) being the producers on whom society depends, (2) being exploited, (3) being (with their families) the majority of society, and (4) being in dire need.
Cohen’s full essay here.
May 23, 2011
Entitled to an Opinion 
May 23, 2011 at 10:16 pm
Fascinating essay. It stands in stark contrast to those who call themselves Marxist over at Spiked Online. They believe that the greenism of current socialists is wrongheaded. This article is representative:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10532/
I’m beginning to see that in a broad, normative sense “neo-liberals” really are truer to orthodox Marxism than the likes of G.A. Cohen. Up and up with abundance and the downplay (or dismissal) of concern for gaia.
May 24, 2011 at 1:40 am
Hey TGGP, just want to share some blogosphere irony with you. My post, Steve’s comment. You might be the only audience who will get it:
http://www.inmalafide.com/blog/2011/05/21/taking-care-of-business-part-5-excerpt-from-a-screenplay-about-game/
May 25, 2011 at 12:18 am
The folks at Spiked don’t sound much like Marxists to me. They seem to have a lot more in common with the writers for Reason and (at its more contrarian) Slate. Although on the other hand Chris Dillow sometimes sounds similar. Maybe it’s a British thing.
Dirk, why me? Steve Pinker already wrote about name-cycles in a pretty popular book (possibly in a number of them).
May 26, 2011 at 9:57 am
Probably because 3) and 4) tend to be uncompatible in advanced industrial societies
May 26, 2011 at 10:05 am
Not a Marxist by any means, but the hordes of Chinese factory workers who make so many of the goods consumed in “advanced industrial societies” seem like they fit the bill. (Though maybe 4 isn’t true).
May 27, 2011 at 1:19 pm
There aren’t many people in ‘advanced societies’ who are in ‘dire need’, at least if that term is interpreted historically.
But then there never were that many people who fit the category, at least in absolute terms.
May 27, 2011 at 5:20 pm
No, I wasn’t referring to that. I thought you had been witness to some of the hostile exchanges i had with steve before they were deleted at MR. I suspect he thought i was a different dirk.
May 29, 2011 at 8:43 pm
Dirk, MR usually has pretty light moderation (I think those by the GWAR fan who hates Tyler and gays tend to stay up). Surprised yours were deleted. You also seemed to try starting shit about Sailer before he even said anything, which I also found odd.
June 6, 2011 at 5:08 am
I just read the G.A. Cohen essay (which is kind of great).
Cohen explains, inter alia, that one of the foundational principles of Marxism – a time of future abundance – is bullshit. (Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine has some awesome examples of communists attempting to instantiate this myth, with party workers constructing fake extra-yielding fields and parading giant vegetables before foreigners during the massive famines.)
I wonder if there is a capitalism that could survive such an admission?
December 27, 2011 at 10:10 pm
[…] check out the unemployment statistics in the 60s/70s when Gans wrote this book. A related post here. Gans, who is still writing at over 80 years of age, has an immediately recognizable left-wing […]