2020-02-12
23 分钟For more information and full transcripts of the podcast, check out philosophisethis.org.
For updates about new episodes, check out Instagram at philosophisethispodcast, all one word, on X at I am Stephen West.
Be well, and I hope you love the show today.
So all the way back in the late 19th century,
shortly after the work of Marx, shortly after the economic changes associated with the Industrial Revolution,
there were several groups of thinkers that began to create what would eventually become an all-out movement towards centralization,
the central planning of economies.
Let me explain what central planning is by explaining why the thinkers felt compelled to start a movement in the first place.
So in the late 19th century, the Western world was primarily made up by market economies.
People like Marx and several others come along and start throwing around critiques of capitalist market economies.
They create enormous inequality, they lead to the alienation of the worker,
they fragment economic efforts and create waste
because people can be engaged in so many different incompatible tasks at once.
But not the least of these criticisms was the claim that these market economies, based on a flaw in design,
inexorably lead to massive ebbs and flows within the market, booms and crashes,
crashes that end up negatively impacting the lives of potential billions.
The late 19th century was rife with thinkers looking for replacements for market economies and waiting for their inevitable demise.
Well, time went by and along came August of 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression, global economic collapse.
And it seemed to many of these thinkers that this was the day of reckoning for capitalist market-based systems.
This was Marx's prophecy finally coming true.