Economic Determinism

There's this post on Breakthrough Gen Blog from June that I found today that is good, although I don't get the title. It's on Marx and why leftists have been so negative lately.

But Marx was different than the later critical theorists because in addition to a critical viewpoint he espoused a modernization theory known as economic determinism. Economic determinism holds that the political, social, and cultural products of a society are products of its economic structure. According to this theory, it is foolish to try to change society through new forms of art or new political alliance, because these are epiphenomenal occurrences, caused at the root by the economic reality underneath them. In its most extreme form, economic determinism posits total determinism: we can do nothing to change the fates of our societies, and, for Marx, their eventual transition for communism.

What is interesting is that my parents (and consensus amongst many mainland Chinese) is that Communism in China failed because Mao tried to skip the natural development of the economy and capitalism to go directly to communism. To them, it proved that Marx was right about economic determinism.

Now, the Breakthrough Institute is promoting again the idea that people are most generous if they are themselves well-off and thus environmentalism needs to work towards improving people's lives. This is also interesting because mainland China right now is probably much more receptive to this idea than the American public. They can immediately and intuitively grasp it whereas it's going to take some time for the American public and especially the traditional environmentalists to come around.