I enjoyed reading this post; thank you for writing it. LessWrong has an allergy to basically every category Marx is a member of—“armchair” philosophers, socialist theorists, pop humanities idols—in my view, all entirely unjustified.
To be fair here, Marx was kind of way overoptimistic about what could be achieved with central economic planning in the 20th century, because it way overestimated how far machines/robots could go, and also this part where he says communist countries don’t need a plan because the natural laws would favor communism, which was bullshit.
[...] Marx was philosophically opposed, as a matter of principle, to any planning about the structure of communist governments or economies. He would come out and say it was irresponsible to talk about how communist governments and economies will work. He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord. There might be some very light planning, a couple of discussions, but these would just be epiphenomena of the governing historical laws working themselves out.
To be fair here, Marx was kind of way overoptimistic about what could be achieved with central economic planning in the 20th century, because it way overestimated how far machines/robots could go, and also this part where he says communist countries don’t need a plan because the natural laws would favor communism, which was bullshit.
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