• ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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    3 days ago

    Amusingly, people who promote capitalism have clearly never read Smith either. Marx wasn’t a departure from Smith, he built directly on the work Smith started. Smith talked about division of labour, and Marx initially used the same term before he started calling it socialized labour. I suspect if most people in the west read Smith today, they’d label him a communist. Consider the following Smith quote as an example:

    In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.