Eruditorum Press

Beneath the stones, the beach; beneath the beach, Cthulhu

In My Dream I Quite Clearly Saw (Sleep No More)

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Jeez man most people just use a sleep blindfold

It’s November 14th, 2015. Adele is at number one with “Hello.” Fleur East, Wstrn, and Justin Bieber also chart, the latter with both “Sorry” and “What Do You Mean.” In news, a series of terrorist attacks take place in Paris including a mass shooting at the Bataclan theatre during an Eagles of Death Metal concert and a series of suicide bombings around the Stade de France during a match between France and Germany. The first storm named by the Met Office, the extratropical cyclone Abigail, hits Scotland, while a series of protests at the University of Missouri lead to the resignation of the president of the system.

On television, meanwhile, a distinctly unusual episode of Doctor Who. Sleep No More is not, by general acclamation, a classic. Even those inclined towards sympathy for Gatiss tend to focus their redemptive efforts elsewhere. And it’s easy enough to see why this might be. It’s a decidedly lumpy story with idiosyncratic pacing that never quite sells its stakes or offers a coherent account of its concept.  Character remains something of an afterthought for Gatiss, which is frustrating for Clara’s last straightforward adventure in a season that broadly underutilized her, and doubly so given that Gatiss has written flat-out great scenes for her in the past. But several of those things are just snooty ways of rephrasing “it was written by Mark Gatiss,” and the rest are products of the fact that it’s doing several other interesting things instead.

So having gently and lovingly placed The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion in the path of an oncoming bus, let’s do that other thing we periodically do and dust off an unpopular story to explain why it’s got more going on than you might think. Because while defending Sleep No More as an overlooked classic in a season with The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar, The Girl Who Died, The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion, Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent is probably a bit of a reach, slamming it as a bust is, or at least should be, just as ridiculous. This is a story that’s long on ambition, achieves no small part of it, and comes off as a lot more in step with its times than it might have appeared in late 2015. 

Let’s start with what this story is doing. Most obviously, it’s a found footage horror story. This is not ambitious in and of itself—it’s just another genre swipe of the sort that Doctor Who can at baseline be expected to do. But what’s interesting is that it’s a genre largely defined by technical concerns as opposed to content-based ones. There are a few constraints on what happens in a found footage horror story; it’s assumed that things will end with some destructive event that leaves the footage as the only remaining record of whatever happened, but past that there aren’t a ton of tropes that define the genre.…

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“One Of Us Is Yellow”: Doctor Fu Manchu and The Talons of Weng Chiang (Guest Post by Kate Orman)

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In light of recent controversies in and around Doctor Who Magazine about The Talons of Weng-Chiang, it is our pleasure to reprint Kate Orman’s essay from Lindy Orthia’s collection  Doctor Who and Race, which is, for my money, the best and most comprehensive take on the story’s racism out there, and something that absolutely needs to be seen by a wider audience. Massive thanks to both Kate and Lindy for agreeing to our republishing it.

“Maybe we wouldn’t get away with it these days.”

 – Philip Hinchcliffe[1]

Introduction

As a Chinese doctor who fan, I just want to say Talons of Weng Chiang was so horrible for me that I didn’t manage to finish watching it… Why did I even try to watch it, knowing there’re evil Chinese stereotypes? I should have known better. I love my show and it’s painful to watch.[2]

The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), a long-standing favourite, has only two real flaws in the eyes of Doctor Who fans: the casting of white actor John Bennett as Chinese villain Li H’Sen Chang, and an unconvincing giant rat. While the rat can be smiled at, the story’s use of ‘yellowface’ has to be explained away. Paradoxically, the intense moral opprobrium attached to calling something ‘racist’ helps to obscure the presence of racism. If racism is anathema, then when a story we cherish contains racially charged elements, we must show that it’s not really racist – and neither are we for loving it.

The rat and the yellowface are both forgiven by fans on the same grounds: the exigencies of seventies television production. Neither technology nor attitudes were as advanced then as they are now, and maybe Asian actors were rarer in those days.

I think the fan discussion around Bennett’s casting misleads us. Even if, say, Burt Kwouk, Anthony Chinn, Robert Lee, Kristopher Kum, or Cecil Cheng[3] had been cast as Chang, it still wouldn’t have fixed Talons. The yellowface is only the most conspicuous component of a collection of contemptuous clichés in which Talons is involved – up to its epicanthic eyebrows!

 

The Devil Doctor

Jago:                 You mean to say the Celestial Chang was involved in all these Machiavellian machinations?

The Doctor:      Yes, up to his epicanthic eyebrows.

Hostile racial caricatures don’t just appear from thin air: they’re created for a reason. Politicians and the press may be trying to justify a war or scapegoat immigrants. However, the early twentieth century English novelist Arthur Sarsfield Ward, better known as Sax Rohmer, had a different reason: to make money. As his biographers note, “Conditions for launching a Chinese villain on the market were ideal […] The Boxer Rebellion had started off rumours of a Yellow Peril which had not yet died down. Recent events in Limehouse had again drawn public attention eastwards.”[4]

Drawing on the anti-Chinese stereotypes which had long been promoted by British newspapers, boys’ magazines[5], and politicians[6], Ward conjured up not the first but by far the most influential[7] Oriental criminal mastermind bent on world domination: Fu Manchu.…

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Guest Post: Introduction – A History of Video Game History

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I am on extended hiatus from posting on Eruditorum Press, but I wanted to use my platform here to share this wonderful and exciting new project from my good friend Ben Knaak. Ben’s been a guest on Pex Lives and he and I have done a few audio recordings of our own together that some readers might remember. Anyone who’s interested in video game criticism and/or Marxist history and philosophy, which is to say statistically all of you, should really enjoy this new series.

I’ll be crossposting content here as it becomes available to me, but please do consider following Ben’s new blog and YouTube channel. That should be all from me.

 

The Grande Armée presents the tattered Prussian colors to Napoleon.

 

Not a Country with an Army but an Army with a Country

 

The story of Video Game History™ (as distinct from the history of video games, which is of course a different subject) does not, in fact, begin with Sid Meier. Nor even with Francis Tresham, designer of the original Civilization board game that introduced the infamous “tech tree” to the world. No, the long, slow gestation of Video Game History™ predates not only the existence of video games, but of Charles Babbage’s original difference engine. To the extent that any one Great White Man is responsible, the creation of Video Game History™ comes down to one of the greatest and whitest of them all: this bullshit is all Napoleon’s fault.

On October 14th, 1806, Napoleon’s armies crushed the Prussians at the Battles of Jena and Auerstedt, effectively ending Prussia’s involvement in the War of the Fourth Coalition.  Their demoralized armies capitulated one by one, and less than two weeks later, Marshal Davout’s army entered Berlin. The Prussian aristocracy, which above all else tied its prestige to the success and discipline of its army, was stunned and humiliated.

They responded to this defeat with a complete and comprehensive overhaul of their military structure, bringing it more in line with the relatively more merit-based French system. Conscription was introduced, the officer corps was opened (for a time) to the middle class, a new war college was opened, and the highest leadership was reorganized into a new general staff, promotion to which would be based on merit. Emphasis was placed on the training of leadership, since they believed that this rather than the quality of the individual soldiers was what had won France the battle. The Prussian General Staff would convene to make plans for every possible contingency, devising first a broad objective to be accomplished which would be clear to all commanders involved. These plans would come to be called “Cases” – each military situation was like an academic problem to be solved. Or, if you like, a level to be beaten.

It was in this environment in the year 1812 that one of these Prussian officers, Lieutenant Georg Leopold von Reiswitz, compiled the original ruleset for a game that would come to be known simply as Kriegsspiel (literally “wargame”). It attracted little attention at first, but in the quiet postwar years, its popularity spread enormously among the officer class thanks to the promotional efforts of Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: UNIT Assembled

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It’s been nearly five years since I last wrote about Big Finish on this site. Much of this gap is due to the fact that it’s only fairly recently that Big Finish’s license was expanded to cover the new series, so there’s been pretty slim pickings post-McGann. But in 2015 Big Finish released their first Torchwood and UNIT audios, and since then new series-adjacent material has been a mainstay of their increasingly bloated line. To date there’s nothing that directly ties into the Capaldi era, but as all of Osgood’s stories and all but one of Kate Stewart’s have Capaldi in them, this seemed the line to check back in on the company with.

It’s no secret to anyone who reads my social media that I’m hostile to Big Finish of late. But I haven’t really talked about that in long form. So instead of beating around the bush and coming to a conclusion that Big Finish is in much the same boat as the novel line in terms of its complete failure to do anything of worth with its license, let’s just start up front with the litany of problems this set has. Its hook is compelling enough—the surviving Pertwee-era actors (save for Fernanda Marlowe) team up with modern day UNIT to fight the Silurians. There are some problems baked into this, like that Benton and Yates are not exactly characters who bring a ton of, well, character to the table, with Benton’s main trait being an earnest masculinity and Yates’s being that he’s played by a rapist. But it’s a perfectly charming premise for what it is, and clearly the sort of thing Big Finish exists to do. 

It’s after the hook that the problems start mounting up. The four episodes of this are written by Matt Fitton and Guy Adams, who currently average about a story a month for Big Finish. Nothing about that is a good idea. Big Finish released, and I am astonished by this figure, a hundred and twenty-five separate Doctor Who audios that were an hour or longer in 2017. Fully 28% of these were by three authors, two of which were Fitton and Adams. Both halves of those statements are absurd. The creative case for making a hundred and twenty-three separate Doctor Who audios in a single year is non-existent. But to do so while so heavily centralizing the work among a small number of writers is simply appalling. Big Finish cycles in more new and first-time writers than their reputation would suggest, but the fact that they are engaging in such grotesque overproduction while continuing to maintain a “no unsolicited submissions” policy and leaning so hard on the same writers (another 39% are accounted for by just nine additional writers, meaning twelve writers are collectively responsible for two-thirds of their output) is the sort of thing that makes it very hard not to tip into outright Levineism and just call “evil.” Really, the only reason not to is that it’s better to save it for the fact that only ten of those hundred and twenty-five are by women, a majority of which are in the Torchwood line.…

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Fatherlands

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The Nazis won the war.  They invaded and colonised the Western consciousness.  They marched into, occupied, and restructured our heads.  They redrew the maps in our minds. They razed and rebuilt our perceptions.  They re-engineered our entire civilisation.  They purged the libraries of our brains of the books they didn’t like, and convinced many of us to burn those books, happily, with smiles on our faces, certain that in so doing we were fighting intolerance and tyranny.  They wrote new books, and we filled the shelves with them.  They rewrote our entire story, and we still live in their unfolding plot.

*

The counterfactual genre tends to imagine that, in a victorious Nazi state, the Holocaust would be a dark secret. 

In reality, if Germany had won, today the Holocaust would be known about in Germany. 

It would be part of public consciousness – a small part.  It would even be studied, talked about, theorised – by a few. 

The twenty-first century Nazi state would be perfunctorily apologetic, and claim moral superiority anyway.  Indeed, the ‘mistakes’ of the past would be one way in which that state, that society, comprehended and oriented its sense of its own moral superiority.

There would be sad films and TV dramas.  There would be sumptuous and melancholy documentaries.  They might begin with declarations that the war began with good intentions, started by men of good faith.  They might tell of how Rommel was a decent man.

There would be an industry devoted to it.  

Students in school might learn of it as a tragedy of the past.  Their teachers would stress the way it self-assembled, almost by accident.  They would stress the deadly Soviet threat. They would stress Stalin’s gulags.  They would stress the exigencies of war. They would stress that the leaders of Germany then were men ‘of their time’. 

And dissidents would use it to challenge their culture.  And centrists and conservatives within the Nazi state would charge that ‘the left’ talked about it too much.  They would prefer to efface it, and focus on the crimes of official enemies, always situating Germany as morally superior by default.  Those accused of talking about it ‘too much’ would be the “blame Germany first crowd”. The German public would learn, via a million conservative pundits and talking heads, the mantra that “the Jews killed their own people too”, and imagine that this meant something. 

There would be many ordinary Germans who would find the “constant” talk about it infuriating.  They would wave the banners of the SS as their “heritage” and denounce the “politically correct thought police” who wanted to “rewrite history”.

There might have been civil rights struggles in the Nazi state as it negotiated the late twentieth century, or early twenty-first, and eased itself out of outright totalitarianism, as a victorious state which didn’t need to stay on a permanent total war footing would probably have done.

Such struggles would have caused waves of statues to be erected.  There might even, by now, be controversy about those statues.…

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Power of the Book Relaunch

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Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the reissuing of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: Patrick Troughton, the second book in the TARDIS Eruditorum series, a sprawling history of modern Britain through the idiosyncratic yet productive lens of Doctor Who. As the name suggests, this volume covers the Patrick Troughton era, with essays on every televised story from The Power of the Daleks through The War Games, along with side jaunts into a myriad of spinoff media both contemporary and anachronistic, as well as essays on other cultural events such as You Only Live Twice, The Prisoner, Batman, and the Summer of Love. 

This newly released edition features rewritten essays on The Underwater Menace, The Enemy of the World, and The Web of Fear to reflect the ten previously missing episodes that have been recovered since the book’s initial publication in 2012, as well as an essay on the Telos novella Wonderland. There are also, in the paperback edition, various typesetting adjustments to bring its design up to the quality standards set by other Eruditorum Press books. 

The book is available at the following links in both paperback and DRM-free ebook editions. 

Amazon

Amazon UK

Smashwords (for non-Kindle e-readers)

If you’ve previously purchased the ebook through either Smashwords or Amazon you can upgrade to the new edition for free through the appropriate site. …

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Come Out Onto the Balcony and Wave a Tentacle (The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion)

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One of the things you notice a lot more when watching television as a girl is how fundamentally ludicrous a lot of characters’ “no makeup and looking slightly ratty” looks are. 

It’s October 31st, 2015. Adele has debuted at number one with “Hello,” just ahead of Justin Bieber’s also new to the charts “Sorry,” a situation that persists through both episodes of this story. Sam Smith, Ariana Grande, Mnek & Zara Larson, The Weeknd, and Drake also chart. In news, hundreds die in Pakistan and Afghanistan after a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, Paul Ryan becomes Speaker of the House of Representatives, and a Russian plane flying from Egypt to Saint Petersburg is blown up shortly after takeoff, killing 224.

One ought never look a gift coincidence in the mouth when doing psychochronography, so let’s start with the cliffhanger, in which the Doctor’s plane is shot down by a group consciously made to parallel ISIS. On the one hand this is an eerie coincidence, but it’s also the sort of thing that happens when you ostentatiously position your story to be rooted in current events. Comment not on the abyss, as I’m sure someone or other said once.

But we’ll circle around to the politics of this story in good time. Let’s start, in the spirit of cracked mirrors, with the actual split between the two halves. The Moffat-era two-parter structure, after all, is rooted in the idea that the second part should always begin somewhere different than where the first part left off, a rule fashioned after his experience with The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and his dissatisfaction with the feeling that the Doctor and company had just been in that basement for a really long time by the time the latter episode rolled around. And so now part twos begin by ostentatiously altering the premise of the story: UNIT shows up, we cut to Missy and Clara, the Doctor is a ghost now, or it’s just an entirely new story that shares a character with the previous one. So what’s the change that breaks the symmetry between part one and part two of this story? Clara obvs.

After all, you can’t do a Zygon story without someone important being a duplicate. The Doctor is the boring answer, the UNIT cast is all even duller, and so it has to be Clara, not least because Jenna Coleman has not to date gotten to do her obligatory villain turn. (Not every companion gets one, but they’re always a bit conspicuous by their absence.) So the big end-of-episode reveal for The Zygon Invasion (as distinct from the cliffhanger itself) is that Clara has been a Zygon all episode. Correspondingly, the big opening shift for The Zygon Inversion is her reinsertion into the narrative as the airplane shooting cliffhanger replays from her perspective. The ensuing showdown between Clara and her duplicate, Bonnie, is scintillating, not just because it’s Clara’s most extended hero moment all season, but because the underlying dynamic is so carefully worked out.…

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The Gateway Drug

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Paleolibertarianism was a consciously devised mutation of Austrian-influenced libertarianism, concocted by the late-20th century’s most prominent devotee of Austrian dogma, Murray Rothbard (and his fawning cohorts).  

Libertarianism today draws on several sources.  Ayn Rand is the best known, but the more influential is arguably Murray Rothbard.  (Rothbard’s attitude to Rand fluctuated.)  Rand is more influential for her ‘ideas’.  Rand is more accessible, despite putting up a superficial show of intellectualism.  Rothbard is harder to get a handle on.  Unlike Rand, he is a genuine intellectual – which is often a question of how one couches ideas rather than the ideas themselves.  And he develops.  And he writes long, involved, serious articles (though they get less serious-minded as he gets older).  I would argue that his influence is less in actual ideas and more in the surrounding spheres of aesthetics/style and tactics/strategy.  After all, in fusing libertarianism with conservatism to create paleolibertarianism, the libertarians consciously submerged certain libertarian ideas.  What succeeded – from the libertarian point of view – was arguably less the fusion than the style: the strategic attempt to use populist reactionary politics to further the ends of liberal economics.

Paleolibertarianism aimed to promote the relatively unpopular extreme free-market dogmas of libertarianism by joining them tactically to America’s powerful trends of post-60s reaction.  It succeeded to a great extent.  It pandered to, and (as far as possible) absorbed, extreme American cultural conservatism, racism, sexism, etc.  It took a powerful place in the ecology of American reaction.  It fed on the discontents of neoliberalism, and US imperialism, to achieve a quasi-rebellious presence in the mainstream of US politics, most of all in the person of Ron Paul.

We’ve talked about Ron Paul in previous instalments, and mentioned the publication under his name, or at least his ‘brand’, of infamous racist newsletters.  People familiar with the content of those newsletters will have been unsurprised by Paul’s recent slip up on Twitter, when he explained the troubles of modern America with a cartoon which featured racist caricatures of various ethnicities (Jew, African American, etc) uniting to punch Uncle Sam with one massive fist made of ‘Cultural Marxism’.

 

 

Some libertarians have defended Paul over the years, but others have denounced him, asserting that the contents of the newsletters is paleoconservative rather than libertarian, and that it has no connection to the great pantheon of libertarian thinkers.  There is certainly some truth to this.  Our own Daniel Harper has suggested to me, in discussion, that Paul is actually not a libertarian but rather a paleoconservative (if, I’d say, an eccentric one) with an opposition to federal regulation rather than regulation per se.  So, he’s maybe ideologically inclined towards a ‘states’ rights’ perspective which paleolibertarianism has, in my view, tended to flirt with opportunistically.  Paul, of course, formally rejects the contents of his own newsletters and new tweets.  But then a great many racists these days formally claim to not be racists.  (I often wonder if the people citing that fake Churchill quote about “the fascists of the future… call[ing] themselves anti-fascists” have ever listened to the leading lights of today’s fascist movement steadfastly and indignantly deny that they are fascists.) …

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A Rather Egotistical Young Lady (The Woman Who Lived)

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Me takes poorly to the Doctor’s “Varys is a mermaid” theory.

It’s October 24th, 2015. KDA with Tinie Tempah and Katy B are at number one with “Turn the Music Louder (Rumble).” One Direction and Sleepy Tom & Diplo enter the top ten, while Bieber, The Weeknd, Drake, and Ellie Goulding are still around. In news, Hurricane Patricia, the most intense tropical storm ever to hit the western hemisphere and the second most intense ever, strikes Mexico and deals nearly half a billion dollars in damage. The Tories change rules to weaken the power of Scottish MPs by ruling that laws affecting only England must have a majority vote of English MPs. Hillary Clinton spends eight hours testifying in front of the Benghazi Committee, while Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb both drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination. 

On television, meanwhile, the two-part structure of the season begins to break down with an episode by a completely different writer than its nominal part one. Let’s set aside my decision to cover them separately, which is really a decision about how many words I think I can spend on them and not about them per se. The consensus appears to be to treat these as separate stories—Doctor Who Magazine offered them separate previews (unlike Heaven Sent and Hell Bent), and they seem to consistently be listed separately, but they’re certainly more connected to each other than Utopia is with The Sound of Drums, and The Girl Who Died ends with a clear “to be continued” that presents this as part two. Indeed, to an audience untrained in the Doctor Who fandom art of obsessively following writer credits, it’s difficult to imagine that this would not be viewed as the third two-parter in a row. 

Speaking of writerly readings, it is with this episode, in his penultimate season, that Moffat finally addresses the embarrassing problem that his writing teams are consistently all male. This is a tricky needle to thread. “The first female Doctor Who writer in more than seven years” is not something to celebrate in 2015 so much as something to be actively ashamed of. For whatever it’s worth, Moffat recognized that and repeatedly acknowledged that it was a problem, but, well, it still took this long. Still, on the bright side, we have Catherine Tregenna, she of the actually good Torchwood episodes. Her hire for this appears to have been something of a specialist hire—she noted that she never really felt like Doctor Who was a good fit for her, but was specifically pitched writing about an immortal woman and agreed that she could do well with that, which was an obvious conclusion to anyone who’s seen Out of Time or Captain Jack Harkness.

The resulting story is an odd one. For large swaths it’s effectively a two-hander between Capaldi and Williams, which is one of those ideas that’s self-evidently going to work with an even remotely competent script, a bar Tregenna clears by several miles.…

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Summing Up, Part 1

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As we know, the Austrian School is – but is not limited to – a heterodox branch of bourgeois economics.  It is, however, founded upon a more-or-less explicitly political project.  And this project continues to animate its zombie, and its zombified victims, infected by its bite.  But then the Austrians’ iteration of the new (in the 1870s) bourgeois economic doctrine of marginalism was always a political project, even in its dry theoretical basis. 

Marginalism itself arose as a way to escape the increasing obviousness of the fact that capital exploits labour.  This was a necessary project as capital spread across the globe.  It took the conscious form of an attempt to address genuine weaknesses in the classical labour theory of value.  These weaknesses were interpreted as evidence that the theory needed to be discarded precisely because the class position/alignment of the theoreticians addressing the issue pushed them towards a view of value which did not derive from labour.  It became an even more necessary project after the Paris Commune scared the shit out of the bourgeoisie. 

The Austrian School, in the person of Menger, helped create marginalism.  But it continued to exist as a distinct trend within marginalism because of the nature of Menger’s iteration of marginalist ideas – namely his rejection of mathematics; vociferous and foundational opposition to what was called the ‘Historical School’, basing himself on “general laws” and “typical phenomena” rather than historical specifics – which he passed down to a succession of thinkers which formed the Austrian tradition.  For contingent historical reasons (the intellectual climate of fin de siècle Austria, the existence of Austro-Marxism, etc), the Austrian marginalists were the ones who concerned themselves most especially with attacks on Marx in particular and socialism in general.  They made the political (i.e. class) aspects of marginalism relatively explicit, at least in terms of what they attacked.  The Austrian trend within marginalism was the most consciously ideological.  This approach is inherently ideological.  Bohm-Bawerk develops Menger in direct response to Marx, and this as a result of combat with Austro-Marxism.  But the emphasis on the subjective and the general is political in itself.  It is based on a class position, and on interests.

I think there is a question as to what extent the Austrian School actually exists in any coherent form rather than as a broad tendency or aesthetic, with its opposition to Marx and socialism as its most important markers.  There are delineable basic intellectual principles, but even they tend to be quite flexible.  Thinkers within the Austrian tradition will disagree about many things, some of them quite fundamental.  This is worth mentioning because it can cause trouble as one generalises – which one needs to do unless one is engaged in a detailed account.  What is true of one ‘Austrian’ is not true of another.  The Austrian School has a built-in defence mechanism which makes it hard to take aim at: it doesn’t really exist.  That’s a somewhat cheeky and overstated way of saying that its members believe all sorts of things, many of which are contradictory, some at a fundamental level.…

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