I honestly feel like Smith gets a real bad rap from undereducated progressives. He would also have hated what the United States has morphed into, and I'm sure he's spinning in his grave over people using his economic theories as justifications for pure laissez-faire capitalism. "The Invisible Hand of the Market" that conservatives use to justify trickle-down economics and often attribute to him isn't even really his, it's from a batshit insane later guy called Paul Samuelson! Smith only referred to it in the context of international investments, never this idea that "domestic corporations will always do what is good for the public."

I don't agree with everything in Wealth of Nations, but it seems a lot of people just dismiss Smith completely out of hand. We should talk about him just like we talk about Marx, his work is not useless nor trivial.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Amusingly, people who promote capitalism have clearly never read Smith either. Marx wasn't a departure from Smith, he built directly on the work Smith started. Smith talked about division of labour, and Marx initially used the same term before he started calling it socialized labour. I suspect if most people in the west read Smith today, they'd label him a communist. Consider the following Smith quote as an example:

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.

[–] eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

i've never heard of this guy; do you know where i can find his work?

[–] bonsai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 days ago

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300

[–] Objection@lemmy.ml 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Imo classical economists were generally more clear-sighted and honest than modern ones. Of course they had their biases and perspective based on their class (and their audience), but at that point economics was so poorly understood that theorists were legitimately trying to figure stuff out, moreso than trying to produce propaganda. Of course, the industrial proletariat and threat of socialism wasn't really present yet either, so the class conflict was more about new money bourgeois vs old money aristocrats and landlords.

Marx and Smith are a lot more similar than most people think, because Marx was writing in the context of various economic assumptions that come from Smith, such as the labor theory of value, which is usually attributed to Marx but actually comes from Smith.

The thing about Smith though is that his writing style was very dry and repetitive so nobody actually reads him, at best, they might read abridged versions which cut out any inconvenient parts like that. So he just kinda became known as the capitalism guy and is thrown in the same category as Ayn Rand.

[–] Andrzej3K@hexbear.net 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yeah a lot of effort has been put into presenting socialism/anarchism/Marxism as a reaction against humanistic liberalism (Stephen Pinker perfected this narrative), but the reality is that they are a development of it, and I do think we need to regain that sense of continuity somehow

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Yep, I think that "cut a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is in the same vein. I understand where it's coming from, but I feel like instead of alienating people who self-identify as liberals we need to point out that liberalism is self-contradictory (private ownership of capital is eventually incompatible with equality before law, democracy and liberty in general). So, when times get tough (because of centralization of capital and thus power in the hands of few, combined with lobbying/bribes/regulatory capture) liberals will have to choose one or the other - those who choose private ownership are fascists, and those who choose liberty are communists. I don't have a good catchphrase to encompass that idea, though.