Comment by bestcoder69
2 years ago
Dude the other day he said "Automation is inductive proof that Marx is wrong"! A mistake you wouldn't make if you sniffed Marx's wikipedia page, let alone opened your eyes to read it.
pg deleted it and posted this response: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600122386346450944
(...after, hilariously, Matt Bruenig replied with a correction from ChatGPT - which is also deleted because he auto-deletes tweets.)
e: Reading the thread now, I love this reply from pg, who I've seen attack marxism, socialism, leftism, what-have-you, endlessly and smugly in the past:
> I freely admit I have only a superficial grasp of Marxist doctrine. I could no more debate the finer points of it with an actual Marxist than I could debate the finer points of church doctrine with a Jesuit. (Nor would I want to be able to do either.)
The finer points!!! Amazing. Something to keep in mind when the billionaires tell the ol' lefties to read econ 101!
That particular exchange really was one of the most embarrassing and ignorant ones I've seen on part of pg.
I hope he got a refund from the ghostwriter for that one.
Twitter now says paulg account suspended
Quoting the GP tweet to the one you linked:
> You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.
Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?
To start with, "don't deserve [...] because employees created all the value" is a straw man. Lots of other value Out There that they exploit that comes from other places than their employees' labor but also isn't "created" by the founder. Also lots of reasons people shouldn't be rich, whether or not they are founders and whether or not they "created" value.
Disagree that this is even the question. The role of "founder" is mostly tangential to the discussion - rather it's the "owner" that Marxists would argue don't deserve their wealth (and if it's the same person, you have to separate the roles in your head - the 'founder' role produce some irreplaceable value, while the 'owner' role is easily replaced.)
The fact that automation makes your firm exponentially more productive over time doesn't contradict Marx at all. That's just a premise he borrows from classical economics to then argue why that leads to bad stuff, in his view. It seems like maybe PG is taking issue with the labor theory of value or something? In which case... /shrug, that's ok, get in line with the rest of us?
What's really happening here though is PG isn't familiar with the discourse whatsoever, so he makes a weird scattered argument and smugly attributes some strawman opinion to Marxists, then gets mad at the reaction. Trying to make sense of it as if he knows what he's talking about just kinda leads to insanity.
e: I'm also not claiming to have some deep knowledge of Marxism at all... I've read like 1 or 2 chapters of Capital. It's just that, like I said above, you just have to have basic familiarity to realize PG speaks from his ass.