Talk:Critique of political economy

Contemporary critique of political economy

I question the value of this new section. It begins by stating the opinion of two people who are not WP:notable (they don't have articles) and neither is the journal (Crisis and Critique) from which the citation is drawn. Quite honestly, if I saw this as the first section of any article, I would not bother to read further because I would anticipate that it could only be a WP:POV polemic. Is there any convincing reason to retain it? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 15:58, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

The nature of the topic is polemical in one sense, the critics of political economy claim that economists are, to express myself less eloquently than usual, more or less "Full of shit". It's fine by me if you remove it/edit it beyond recognition or move it. Do whatever you think makes the article better, I don't own it, the people do, until Wikipedia somehow becomes commodified.

I would be very happy if you could find some more relevant examples. The translation issue is rather bad.

Thanks for your contribution. Moved it away for now since you thought that it was bad. Pauloroboto (talk) 22:40, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Pauloroboto (talk) 16:35, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

SPECIFICO

Hi! Could you perhaps try to explain in a bit more detail what you claim is wrong with the edit so that I can look into it? Thanks. @SPECIFICO: Pauloroboto (talk) 08:42, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

I've given you links to the policies and guidelines that apply to the text I removed. Please read those and then review your edits to see why each part was removed. You should not be reinserting your text without explaining why you feel they are justified and policy-complaint here on the talk page. You should not be demanding that other editors, in one instance me, present extensive analysis of the problems with your edits. The WP:ONUS and WP:BURDEN are on the editor seeking to generate consensus for inclusion. Without such consensus the text must remain out of the articles. Please undo your recent re-re-insertion of your text and seek the approval or advice of other editors here on the talk page. You can also use WP:RSN WP:NPOVN and other site-wide pages to solicit comment from other editors. Again, please follow these methods and remove the text that I reverted until you gain consensus. SPECIFICO talk 19:46, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your extensive explanation.

I'll continue working with the article to make sure it gets even better. Thank you for helping me in this process.

Pauloroboto (talk) 15:35, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Not cool to remove the article improvement template. The are designed to solicit help from additional editors who will be notified. SPECIFICO talk 16:17, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi! : )

Did you read my edit summary?

I think that it sounds great that others can take a look at it, that way I don't have to guess what you deem POV. Since no motivation was provided I was under the impression that I was in my right to remove it after I took at look at it and changed what I thought could be improved.

By the way it would be great if you could tell me what it means that the article needs to be updated and how I could fix it.

Thank you for your efforts towards improving this article.

Pauloroboto (talk) 16:30, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

SPECIFICO pt.2

Hi again SPECIFICO. I note that you have not been keen on responding on the talk page.

If you want to try to communicate, please confirm that I've understood what your issue is here.

This time you object to a series of edit which primarily includes more information regarding contemporary critique of political economy.

• You claim that "These edits need to be presented for discussion on the talk page.".

• You also claim that "They (These edits) make the written English less intelligible and take the article farther from NPOV.

• You've also claimed that "Content needs to reflect the WP:WEIGHT of mainstream reliable sources on the subject of the page"

I claim:

• That these do in fact not need to be presented for discussion on the talk page as far as I'm aware. See WP:BOLD

• My English is hardly perfect, but neither is the English of the average ******** citizen who can't seem to distinguish between their and they're.

Perfectionism is hardly a good reason to revert. Please see WP:DOREVERT, WP:DONTREVERT, WP:BADREVERT as well as WP:PARTR. I'd hate to call into question if you really want to improve the article, but when you opt out of doing simple changes to improve the progress of the article, that kind of makes me wonder. Regarding NPOV: I have a hard time seeing what's not neutral, but I'm very happy to strive towards further objectivity.

• Regarding sources, It would be great if you could claim what you deem is wrong. I use mostly use academic sources, and sources from specialized magazines dealing with the topic at hand. The context here matters. See for example WP:RSCONTEXT and WP:BIASED.

I'd really agree that these sources would be inadequate if I was writing on the topic of what some person in sports is doing in her private life, but that isn't the case here, I use sources regarding the topic which I am writing about.

Pauloroboto (talk) 17:45, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Move the article to Critique of political economy

Hello.

Marxian critique of political economy is a large section of the page, that's for sure. But where Ruskins critique of political economy is to be seen as Marxian, that is something I would like to have explained for me. We can for sure branch the article out if it expands to the degree that a main page is needed and other pages can have summaries on the page, but I hardly think we are there yet. This so called solution wasn't great in my opinion. Please respond and or revert the change.

Pauloroboto (talk) 14:14, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

I've now moved the article since SPECIFICO refuses to engage in any discussion.

Sadly this has meant that some edits from another user got lost in the process, hopefully we can work to implement the edits.

Pauloroboto (talk) 14:25, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Please note that this page has been discussed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk#Critique_of_political_economy_-_apparently_needs_to_be_updated

Since I didn't receive any Ping I missed one response.

Pauloroboto (talk) 15:19, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Opinions wanted

There has been a lot of back and forth on this page. It would be great to get some input from some people who is not biased in regards to the topic. Thanks for any assistance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pauloroboto (talk • contribs) 14:33, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

"Critique of political economy" is the most well-known name for this key philosophical concept, and it is not exclusively a Marxist branch of thought, so SPECIFICO was wrong to move the page and certainly wrong to move it without discussion. I've also removed the maintenance tags because I am yet to see a coherent explanation of what the problem is, and without that the tags have no meaning and are not actionable. SPECIFICO's claim There's nothing subjective about the NPOV issue. It's straightforward. is quite the non-explanation, and there is little serious talk page engagement by them.

Many of SPECIFICO's reverts are impossible to follow, such as this most recent one where they revert (among several other things) the explanation of why Baudrillard disagreed with Marx's critique of political economy with the edit summary "UNDUE, OR", neither of which seem to apply to the well-sourced quotation that was added. Rather, the restored text "Baudrillard views Marx critique of political economy as a failure" is quite emotionally loaded but has not as much factual content.

However, I do take issue with Pauloroboto's addition of a History section here, as it is much more of an essay-like style than Wikipedia should be: we want summary style and don't like making connections that are not made explicit by other authors. This issue can be found too in their creation of a section that should be more succinctly called "Contemporary scholarship" (or similar), removed by SPECIFICO here. The parenthetical "In terms of intellectual history, this type of observation can be traced back to ..." is original research, as this is a comparison by Pauloroboto between Engels and Ankarloo that references only Engels' original text.

Large additions or improvements to articles do not need talk page discussion beforehand; rather, SPECIFICO should have given detailed explanation upon removal or contestation of the removal. However, I agree that the major content should stay removed for now (per my explanations above). I would reinstate the Baudrillard quote, and if Pauloroboto is keen to continue their work then I would suggest that they make another attempt at something simple (say, summarising a couple of modern scholars writing explicitly on critique of political economy in a couple of sentences each) that doesn't fall afoul of the previous problems: everything you say has to be directly attributable to a reliable source. — Bilorv (talk) 00:03, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

In 2022, it is not a key philosophical concept in mainstream thinking nor in mainstream economics. It has more relevance to current academic sociology, but there is no question that it is a Marxist/Marxian viewpoint and our readers need to be informed of its orientation. Most of the links in this page go to pages with the Marxian infobox. The page move mitigates the ridiculously blatant POV Fork created by the title and some of the sloppy conflation of critique with critic in this article. SPECIFICO talk 01:47, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm afraid these evidence-lacking assertions are just repetitions of claims you've made elsewhere, not a genuine engagement with my comments. Ruskin was not a Marxist (he was utopian). Moreover, Marxism is a mainstream branch in academia, covered in most philosophy and economics degrees. Over the course of my undergraduate degree at Oxford, which was in neither subject, I nonetheless knew personally at least three professors who were informed by Marxist economics. As one of the professors explained to me, the key difference between Marxist and classical economics is in whether you start off with the commodity (Marxism) or the individual (classical). And of course, much economics that is neither purely classical nor purely Marxist will borrow from one of these two approaches.

I think the lead should mention the role that critique of political economy has in Marxism, as this is the single most influential branch of CoPE in history, but your claim seems to be that hosting an article at the most common name for a topic (which most learned readers should associate with Marxism themselves) is somehow disguising its contents.

Additionally, Wikipedia aims to take a roughly time-independent view on topics, so something that was significant in the 18th century is still just as worthy a topic to write about as something significant in the 21st century. Articles on philosophies like Georgism that are long past their peak following do not have to justify their existence with some sort of commentary that they are no longer taken seriously in mainstream academia. Not that this is true of Marxism.

It is disappointing that you are continuing to edit war without a serious rationale. — Bilorv (talk) 12:58, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Bilorv I will get back to this comment of yours and hope to address it soon enough. Pauloroboto (talk) 13:18, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your contribution Bilorv. I've made changes which I hope will improve the page, there is now a section on contemporary scholarship. Pauloroboto (talk) 11:55, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello Specifico. I am happy that we are engaging on the talk page once again. To keep it brief: I don't see anything strange in that there is links to pages that mentions Karl Marx on a page of a topic which Marx has contributed to.

I also think that this could be relevant to sociology, but it's also relevant to philosophers as well as heterodox economists. So I don't really see where you going with that point. Do you want to clarify it? Also see how I've added the tag sociology previously to cater to this demand of yours.

You claim that it is not a key concept in mainstream economics, which is fair enough because it's antithetical to what those who critique political economy view as narrow economic thinking. So that's no surprise. Regarding that you feel that it isn't a key concept in mainstream thinking, let's say that's the case. Does that mean that it is not noteworthy? No. Multiple philosophers that are widely recognized engage in this topic. In my opinion we can leave this and discuss how we improve the content.

If you think you can provide a clearer formulation so that people doesn't confuse those engaged in critique of political economy with people who e.g critique some income tax bracket I'd think it would be great if you could write that. Since you think it's so sloppy it would probably be really easy for you to do.

Please tell me if you feel that I have not interpreted your position correctly.

Thank you for your contribution. Pauloroboto (talk) 13:08, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

One point, Pauloroboto, on your most recent changes: can we have a citation to the book and page number (in any edition) for the Fisher quote? — Bilorv (talk) 15:22, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Most certainly Bilorv I'll fix it ASAP. Pauloroboto (talk) 15:50, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

“See Talk page; comment won’t fit here ….” [in the edit-summary field”]

   I altered several wordings in the hope of correctly guessing which words were mischosen, bcz of crazy Yank usages that mean something different from what a European’s logical first guess would suggest. Some Europeans, or Yanks, may have better insights than mine, as to what nuance of meaning the colleague *really* had in mind.
—173.162.211.85 (talk) 01:06, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Alright. Thank you for your edit. 173.162.211.85 Pauloroboto (talk) 16:13, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

SPECIFICO pt.3

Hi again SPECIFICO!

You've improved the language somewhat, thanks for that. You're now making me aware of this rule regarding that I have to spend time writing summaries. May you point me to where this rule is and how it applies? I don't have any disputes. I'm simply trying to improve articles on Wikipedia. All changes I make have the intention to improve. I think it would be great if what's published on the page is related to the topic and isn't misleading, like the current version. Please clarify what you feel is incomprehensible so that we can make further improvements.

Thank you for your time.

Pauloroboto (talk) 15:29, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi again SPECIFICO!

Due to your lack of response, I have continued working on some improvements to your edit in the meantime. If you feel that this version is outrageous in any way shape or form you may for sure reverse it as usual.

However I hope that this is not the case, since I have tried to improve the text to make it: a) correspond to the sourced material. b) have the language improvements you made as intact as possible.

I hope that you would want to to cooperate with me if you want to improve the language in the page further, something that is hopefully very likely since we both seem to value this topic.

And thank you again for your improvement of the language that you've already made to this page! Pauloroboto (talk) 12:18, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi again SPECIFICO, as you may easily understand, I can't get any consensus on the talk page, if you don't even use the talk page. Pauloroboto (talk) 22:39, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Bad introduction section

The introductions section asserts without any critical sense what the critics of economics believe, for instance that "the economy" is a recent cultural invention. This is a manifestly outrageous claim, since economics simply describes subsistence systems, and humans have always had a subsistence system. I am afraid this page needs to include some criticisms of itself in order to become more relevant.Gandalf 1892 (talk) 19:18, 1 April 2022 (UTC)

This page is some sort of neo-Marxist POV, but it is not clearly descibed as such. See the article and talk page histories.

Regarding the swift removal of a version which I think clearly is an improvement

Hi!

I would be happy to discuss why you have reverted my edit, but to vaguely claim that some supposed edits are challenged, while previously having provided a edit which strictly speaking provides the user with misinformation does not seem very constructive in my humble opinion. Hence, I think it would be good for both of us if you clearly stated your case here.

I can start in stating that I deem parts of your edit as either very severe misunderstandings (or in the worst case, intentional disinformation) regarding what these authors actually claim.

I deem some of the changes you did to the language to be of worth. Thanks very much for that!

@SPECIFICO Pauloroboto (talk) 08:49, 21 July 2022 (UTC)