Your Exercise for Today

Your exercise for today is to

  1. Read Richard Ebeling’s post at the Foundation for Economic Education, “How Marx Got on the Wrong Side of History”. Here’s a snippet:

    Now in the twenty-first century, many of the readers of the trends of history are fearing the envelopment of parts of Europe by Islamic fundamentalism, or the rise of China as the new global power with a winning model of a form of authoritarian managed, crony capitalism, or the devolution of the United States under the pressures and forces of populist socialism, fiscal bankruptcy, and “progressive” political correctness. It does not have to happen that way.

    There is no “right side of history” in the Hegelian and Marxian sense. Those on the political left who, today, continue to use this rhetoric of right and wrong sides of history merely use an attractive catch phrase that gives them a feeling of possessing a moral high ground and that can easily intimidate those who are told that “progressive” policies – a kinder and gentler use of words than “socialism,” “collectivism,” “tyranny,” or “command” – represent progress.

  2. Relate that to Whig history, the belief that there is an inevitable progression to ever greater liberty and enlightenment.

There’s more than one way to be on the “wrong side of history” and one of them is to believe that history has a side. History is not determined by materialism as Marx would have had it or spiritualism or any other -ism. It isn’t determined at all.

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