An excellent article. Thank you for bringing to my awareness this dark side of Marxism (after this, while I still think Karl was a wonderful guy, I'll have to admit he made mistakes!)
Where, however, I think it could use some "rounding out", and improvement, is if you revealed how the PMC, as this class and the corporate capitalist ruling class, colluded to conspire against the rising working class movement at the fin du XIXe siècle with their joint effort at building a "Progressive" movement in the U.S., and a "Corporatist" movement in Europe. These movements were designed as much or more to stave off the threat of working class socialism as they were to rein in the abuses of Robber Baron style corporate capitalism. They were based on blind faith in scientism and thus the technological idolatry/technocracy you discuss here."We don't need no stinkin' Social Democracy; we can elevate scientific experts to positions of 'regulatory' power, in whom all of society can place their blind faith that they will always do the right thing"--that was their real motive and ideology.
Thus while you are correct to claim that Marx and the utopian socialists had a hand in this blind idolatry, we can lay much of the blame on the PMC--whom you rightly see as the demographic basis for it today--themselves, over a century ago.
An excellent article. Thank you for bringing to my awareness this dark side of Marxism (after this, while I still think Karl was a wonderful guy, I'll have to admit he made mistakes!)
Where, however, I think it could use some "rounding out", and improvement, is if you revealed how the PMC, as this class and the corporate capitalist ruling class, colluded to conspire against the rising working class movement at the fin du XIXe siècle with their joint effort at building a "Progressive" movement in the U.S., and a "Corporatist" movement in Europe. These movements were designed as much or more to stave off the threat of working class socialism as they were to rein in the abuses of Robber Baron style corporate capitalism. They were based on blind faith in scientism and thus the technological idolatry/technocracy you discuss here."We don't need no stinkin' Social Democracy; we can elevate scientific experts to positions of 'regulatory' power, in whom all of society can place their blind faith that they will always do the right thing"--that was their real motive and ideology.
Thus while you are correct to claim that Marx and the utopian socialists had a hand in this blind idolatry, we can lay much of the blame on the PMC--whom you rightly see as the demographic basis for it today--themselves, over a century ago.