He SURE wouldn't be the first (nor the last) to "spice up" his material to make it more ... marketable. I might, if I had any nearly good material in the first place.
It is no coincidence that ALL wealthy celebrities are not just woke, but loudly woke.
They have to be so their fans won't even think to wonder how wealthy. It would NEVER occur to any fan to wonder if their electric bill really is more than most people's mortgage.
So...
What if Lewis got converted and wanted everyone to see the real cause of poverty wasn't capitalism? It was their culture. Like the wealthy celebrity, he had to not just be a Marxist, he had to be loudly Marxist.
Rule of thumb: Anyone who describes themselves as a Marxist or worse yet "fervent Marxist", I heavily discount anything they say or write and not waste much time on reading their work. If you can be so magnificently wrong on this, it automatically calls into question your ability to think clearly about anything. Notice I am not saying that everything the say is necessarily wrong or worthless, only that with limited time to allocate across the ocean of papers and books and so on, I find the expected return on reading material by avowed Marxists to be very low.
I know some will say, in certain cases at least, we are forced to read this stuff if only to rebut it (for the millionth time) but there is enough out there to refer readers to on this topic (look it up!). And some will get consumption value at reading and rebutting.
Perhaps he was making up a good deal of his ethnographic interviews? I've lived among impoverished people, and I suspect he is.
He SURE wouldn't be the first (nor the last) to "spice up" his material to make it more ... marketable. I might, if I had any nearly good material in the first place.
Let's see, now ...
Should ethnographers conclude “these Puerto Ricans are just evil” or should they stick to ethnography?
It is no coincidence that ALL wealthy celebrities are not just woke, but loudly woke.
They have to be so their fans won't even think to wonder how wealthy. It would NEVER occur to any fan to wonder if their electric bill really is more than most people's mortgage.
So...
What if Lewis got converted and wanted everyone to see the real cause of poverty wasn't capitalism? It was their culture. Like the wealthy celebrity, he had to not just be a Marxist, he had to be loudly Marxist.
Henry George in Progress and Poverty gives a rather better analysis of how that culture of barbarism comes about.
Rule of thumb: Anyone who describes themselves as a Marxist or worse yet "fervent Marxist", I heavily discount anything they say or write and not waste much time on reading their work. If you can be so magnificently wrong on this, it automatically calls into question your ability to think clearly about anything. Notice I am not saying that everything the say is necessarily wrong or worthless, only that with limited time to allocate across the ocean of papers and books and so on, I find the expected return on reading material by avowed Marxists to be very low.
I know some will say, in certain cases at least, we are forced to read this stuff if only to rebut it (for the millionth time) but there is enough out there to refer readers to on this topic (look it up!). And some will get consumption value at reading and rebutting.