Responses to Austrian School critiques

[Unclebananahead]

These Austrian School types seem to be crawling all over You Tube like some sort of infestation. A number of videos and comments seem to be directed at regurgitating old 'Misean' and 'Hayekist' anti-Marxist screeds. What I would like, are some Marxist responses dissecting and refuting the foregoing.

Here's just one example of the sort of stuff I'm referring to.

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[REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL]

Generally I think "Fuck off" works best. :thumbup1:

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

It's the old Böhm-Bawerk routine (B-B was the Austrian economist who started it all):

1) Concede that "Marx had a few good ideas."
2) Proceed to misrepresent those ideas.
3) Demonstrate that the ideas you just misrepresented are nonsense.
4) Bring out Marx's actual ideas as if they were your own.

You may, if you wish, skip steps 1) and 4).:lol:

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

It seems from what I've read that Austrians

(1) ignore systemic assumptions that underpin the system,
(2) seem to reduce "human nature" to something very specific
(3) seem oblivious to the inevitability of political and economic sectors from corrupting each other
(4) presupposes a system of proprietary exchange

Basically, the biggest thing is to deny exploitation, as this guy does, one needs to presuppose that the divisions which lead people to become a worker or an employer are "just", and that it is the same for workers to compete with each other and have employers compete with each other. Competition becomes a value in itself.

For instance, his justification in why workers accept wage labour for a particular wage is naive. He leaves out the fact that a labourer is often poor or has a tiny personal social safety net. Hence, the desperation of workers at the bottom keeps down wages. It's easy for someone with a huge wage working in a German university to reduce the worker's decisions to the immediate phenomenon of "wage sale," and then expand that decision to all workers.

[Demogorgon]

The Austrian School is based on a priori dogmatics. Challenge them for something stronger than "because I say so".

[Dimentio]

For instance, his justification in why workers accept wage labour for a particular wage is naive. He leaves out the fact that a labourer is often poor or has a tiny personal social safety net. Hence, the desperation of workers at the bottom keeps down wages. It's easy for someone with a huge wage working in a German university to reduce the worker's decisions to the immediate phenomenon of "wage sale," and then expand that decision to all workers.

http://blog.mises.org/4460/scrooge-defended/

[Savage]

We go on about these guys a lot (and we're just about the only thing that they go on about) because of how anti-thetical their positions are to ours, but honestly I think that generally they're a group that can be ignored. The Libertarians constitute a vast minority in the American (the only country in which they are at all 'prominent') capitalist camp, and they will never win favor with the American Bourgeoisie because of their idealistic concept of the market.

lol at v
http://blog.mises.org/4460/scrooge-defended/

I believe they have defended other fictitious characters such as Mr Burns in the past. I suppose some pity should go to anyone that considers the world to have been socialist for the past 100 years.

[Amphictyonis]

Tell them you're Valdor the superior sent by Ayn Rand from the underworld into the video game BioShock in order to infest the inerwebs with dweebs who know fuck all of anything!


But seriously in my experience they go after the LTV quite frequently in order to "disprove" exploitation . This is because most of them still live with their parents and have never had the experience (empiricism isnt big with these guys) of having to continually bust ass just to hardly survive. Most of them haven't even read Marx only the Misian critique of Marx. They also have a break with reality and theory, their 'theoretical' system of capitalism could never in actuality exist. Capitalism cannot exist without a state. Tell them to explain their version of primitive accumulation and the rise of the modern state then post their reply in here :) One of the first steps to get them to see reality is to get them to see capitalism, in any form, cannot exist without a state (subjugation by force).