[Wikipedia-l] More on marxists.org

Jimmy Wales jwales at bomis.com
Fri Aug 16 15:49:43 UTC 2002


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.  It's
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.

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."  But that doesn't make
for a very useful article about "market socialism".

--Jimbo



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