When it comes to rewriting history, Pat Gunning is well behind front-runner
Sarah Palin, but he's closing the gap when he writes that "The racists
(who?) argued (when? Where?) that thought is determined by race (how
defined?)." 

It's hard to disentangle racism from classism, along with ethnocentrism and
sectarianism. Not only hard, but probably misleading and counterproductive.
Thus Malthus and his sympathizers (like Arthur Young and Nassau Senior)
faulted the lower classes for breeding, but their lower classes were to some
extent Irish and Catholic and rent-paying, as discerned and mocked in
Swift's "Modest Proposal", and confirmed in English heartless and fumbling
reaction to the Great Famine. Others were slaves of African descent. 

In the later 19th Century the flood of cheap grain from various new world
frontiers put Malthus on the back burner, so eugenics took his place, with
its overt racism, blended of course with classism. This continued clear up
until Kaiser Wilhelm's Teutonism and Hitler's Aryanism discredited applied
eugenics. This smooth transition is brilliantly expounded in a chapter of
Dr. George Miller's 2000 book, On Fairness and Efficiency. Our profession's
warm embrace of Vilfredo Pareto indicates an underlying academic sympathy
for ideas of this orientation.

Mason Gaffney

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of michael perelman
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 3:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Polylogism in Marxist

I might be tempted to respond to this proposition if I could make
sense of it.  The problem may be that we people here in Chico have our
own logic.

By the way, I would like to learn where Marx said anything as
simplistic as thought is determined by class interest -- as if he
precluded other influences.

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 12:53 PM, Pat Gunning <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> How is this related to Marx? My answer is that Marx believed that thought
is
> determined by class interest and that the economics of Smith was bourgeois
> economics. See the reference below. How is Marxism related to racism?  The
> racists argued that thought is determined by race.



-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA
95929

530 898 5321
fax 530 898 5901
http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com