This is kind of a change of subject, or a tangent. I've been reading about Bitcoin, the new currency invented by techno-libertarians that is supposed to free us all from government, banks, monopoly, etc. Decentralized money, put into the hands of the little guy by digital minting.
On their wiki last night I hopped over to the "Myths" page, where everything that drives me crazy about Libertarians is laid bare. The breezy dismissal of the Labor Theory of Value was my favorite hand-wave on a whole page of them.
Now, who doesn't hate monopolies, big banks, the tyranny of debt, the rentier subclass of the FIRE sector, all of it? We do share that frustration with them.
But I knock my head against the how of explaining that an economy doesn't exist in some discrete separate reality as an alternative to the "big" economy. Bitcoins are still in the world where the dollar exists, so it isn't replacing anything. People are still translating their bitcoins into dollar value to talk about how much money they have. There are so many holes in this project you could drive a truck through them.
Collectively this (and several other projects along these lins) is an idealist fallacy where Adam Smith is worshipped as the god of capitalism, and if all other capitalistic heresies can be eliminated then the righteous road back to "pure" capitalism which would avoid all the ills of monopoly, etc. Marxism just says "Science doesn't work that way." Realityville operates differently. There isn't some a priori plane where money pops out of the purely digital realm.
I think the differences flow from the split between idealism and materialism. A lot of people can see that there is a huge problem with the way we exist presently in society. The way we formulate a way to solve the problems tends to push us into different places on the political spectrum. I like Marxism because it puts into words things I had observed in life but never had a vocabulary for. I haven't figured out how to translate that into trying to talk to Libertarians, who seem to have experienced life differently than me, or perceive it differently?
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