Is Marx Still Relevant?, Peter Singer, Project Syndicate.

In case you missed it in college (or didn’t understand it, like Robert), here is one more chance to try to understand Marx’s “materialization” of Hegel.

Bottom line concerning Marx’s legacy, according to Singer:  Marx was wrong to think that humans are not self-interested a-holes by nature and he was wrong to think that changing the economic system would result in unbounded productivity. But, to his credit, Marx linked ideas about religion and political institutions to the tools we use to satisfy our needs (and resulting economic structures) in a way that we all now take for granted. Pretty simple. But nice to hear one of the world’s most influential philosophers say it.

Seems to Robert that this is exactly like the way we talk about Freud (which Robert also does not understand). He was totally wrong about penis envy and he set us on a (destructive) side path that has taken 70 years to correct, but on the bright side, we now all know what “subconscious” means when criminal defense attorneys talk about it. Hurrah!