Jimmy Wales wrote:
I have done a good deal more reading on their site, and
I find that
virtually none of their material even comes close to NPOV.
I disagree. There are a significant number of articles at the site which
are close to NPOV. Good examples are the biographies (for example, the
biography of Karl Marx himself is perfectly OK) and some historical articles
(eg. Great Leap Forward, which I have already put into Wikipedia with a few
changes and deletions).
It is of course correct that many, if not most of the articles in the
Encyclopedia of Marxism are not NPOV and are overtly Marxist. It is after
all their openly stated aim to create a reference work written from a
Marxist viewpoint. But we should not overlook the fact that among the
overtly political texts, unsuitable for Wikipedia, there are parts -
sometimes just paragraphs, sometimes whole articles - that are suitable for
Wikipedia with appropriate modification.
filled throughout with standard Marxist jargon -- which
is very out of
the mainstream and treated (properly!) by most economists in the same
way that astrology is treated by psychiatrists....
Again, I disagree. Marxism is certainly a minority view. However, there do
exist distinguished economists today who draw on Marxist ideas. Mainstream
sociology is also strongly influenced by Marxist though.
Take this section for example, from "Market
Socialism":
>Should the working class succeed in taking political power, capital
>would be abolished but there could be no question of simply
>'abolishing' the market. This would take time. However, the market
>inevitably generates inequality and the accumulation of capital, and
>even more seriously, commodity production and the day-to-day activity
>entailed in buying and selling oneself on the market is the very
>ground on which bourgeois ideology grows.
There are several unstated assumptions here that are
central to
Marxist dogma but which have no place in an NPOV presentation. For
example, it assumes that "should the working class succeed in taking
political power" the market *could* be abolished, but not "simply" --
it "would take time". That's dogma on the same scientific level as
phrenology.
I suppose we could try to work with this stuff by
prefacing everything
with "Marxists claim..." and ending it with "but virtually all
economists regard these Marxists as cranks."
Most modern economists would strongly disagree with Marxism, but I think it
would be unrepresentative and unnecessary to say that they would call them
cranks. Much more NPOV is just to say that marxist economics is a minority
point of view.
But that doesn't make
for a very useful article about "market socialism".
Why not? "Market socialism" is a term often (if not mostly) used by
Marxists, so Marxist views are relevant here. An article on market socialism
could certainly have some material like this, perhaps toned down and
condensed, under a heading of "Marxist views on market socialism".
Part of the usefulness of the Encyclopedia of Marxism is that it aims to
give an overview of Marxist thought without giving undue precedence to
particular schools of Marxist thought. So it's a useful source where we
want to say "this is what Marxists think" without quoting from one
individual's ideosyncratic opinion.
For the record, I personally strongly disagree with Marxism.
Tim (the Enchanter)
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