First of all, thank you for posting these lectures. I've seen all the Nietzsche lectures and those on Marx up until this one and it seems to me that Geuss is wearing exactly the same clothes in all of them. Is that a uniform for him? That's not a criticism: I'm simply trying to understand Geuss since I find him to be a fascinating figure and a brilliant thinker.
It's funny that you mentioned that. During the 70's Geuss taught philosophy in Princeton University and there's a pic in the faculty website where he has pretty much the same style.
@ Mac Smith It is unclear to this day ; does the payment of an amount of money give anyone ownership to something they did not make ? That NO person made ?
Completely missing the impact of population boom and scarcity in one hand and the human ingenuity on the other hand. Unfortunately uncritical rehearsal of Marx.
These awesome lectures are 10 years old! Raymond tries to picture Marx as he probably intended to be pictured, not through the eyes of "liberal ideologues" as he, Marx, apparently would have called them. Even with that in mind, the two examples, the footballer and the pianist, don't reflect the issue with what Marx took as private property. Let's tweak the pianist example like this. Let's suppose the person, let's call him Jack, makes pianos, not plays them. Let's assume he's really good at it and makes them in the backyard of his house, or in his living or sleeping room. Jack now has many customers and decided to hire Fulton and two other people to help him cope with the increasing demand. He pays them wages based on their skills. He names his piano-making factory and move to a larger place, as the number of pianos to make has increased. Now we can ask, what would have Marx called this? A private, capitalist corporation? Jack indeed takes the "profit" for himself and spend part of it to improve the tools and machineries, and plans to expand "his business". Now it's fair to ask, what's wrong with this? Let's also assume, Fulton had to choose between starvation and working for Jack, which would make him better off, he would make the ends meet and help his children. Something Karl Marx failed to do, working and helping his children. Raymond say Marx wasn't stupid. He was. And yes, in order to stop Jack from hiring people like Fulton, you need to impose a system of dictatorship. Disallow creativity, like making amazing pianos, disallow free exchange, which Raymond said Marx wasn't against. Marx also was extremely confused about the then market place. The Victorian time. He draw a fancy line between what he thought were "proletariats" and those he called "bourgeois capitalists". A sharp and clear line dividing something that only existed in his mind. Such lines could only be drawn by people with simplistic minds, or by stupid people.
The Flintoff saga is resolved the moment we adopt the Threefold Social Order that separates economy from the state & culture ; take money OUT of sport ; adding these two realms = business - gamefixing
How Marx stumbles because he failed to behold the Spirit of the worker from where springs all wealth. If money tries to reflect any other thing, it becomes fictitious like stocks&bonds..... Marx didn't know how to use the info presented to anyone who wants to try his hand at that fickle science of economics therefore you need a polymath and a seer like Rudolf Steiner.
