Why Marx is Man of the Moment

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0717-28.htm

A penniless asylum seeker in London was vilified across two pages of the Daily Mail last week. No surprises there, perhaps - except that the villain in question has been dead since 1883. 'Marx the Monster' was the Mail's furious reaction to the news that thousands of Radio 4 listeners had chosen Karl Marx as their favorite thinker. 'His genocidal disciples include Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - and even Mugabe. So why has Karl Marx just been voted the greatest philosopher ever?'

The puzzlement is understandable. Fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, there appeared to be a general assumption that Marx was now an ex-parrot. He had kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil and been buried forever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need think about him - still less read him - ever again.

'What we are witnessing,' Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, 'is not just the ... passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution.'

[Maple]

1. Why would they blame Marx

for Stalin and Mao and Mugabe?

That's like blaming Jesus for the Inquistion and witchburnings and Cortez and the current Crusade.

I hardly think that's what either of them had in mind, but philosophies get twisted over time into things they were never meant to be.

[eallen]

7. Perhaps Jesus, if he existed, deserves some blame for those.

What drove the Inquisition was the notion that there really is a Heaven, and a True Belief, and that only by that True Belief can one achieve Heaven. Perhaps Jesus taught that. Perhaps he didn't. Paul did. Unlike Jesus, we know about Paul.

Ideologies get credit for their latent parts as well as the shining bait that their originators emphasize.

:hippie:

[Maple]

9. Jesus didn't say

anything about torturing and murdering entire populations in order to force them into belief.

I think you're reaching on this one.

[eallen]

13. No, of course not. But think.

Of what account is pain here on earth, which is finite, compared to the salvation or loss of a soul for all eternity? The logic is inexorable. That's the problem, once you admit fantasy into your worldview. It cannot be contained to where its effects are limited and sane, but flows into your reasoning on all matters of things, and turns them upside down. People today assume that the Inquisition's reasoning was false. But it wasn't. Given the worldview that the Church still holds, it is the reasons it gives for limiting its methods that ring hollow.

:evilgrin:

[belle]

31. The Inquisition's philosophy is very different from the canonical Jesus,

you know.

[eallen]

32. Contrary to Bush, the canonical Jesus didn't have much of a philosophy.

The gospels give some sacharine sayings and parables. Paul lays the outlines of a theology. Each sect, in their own fashion, fleshes in the rest, which is why Christian belief can run the gamut from Jerry Falwell to the Quakers.

[bemildred]

2. Hey, they had to bring back the class warfare stuff.

Grinding the faces of the poor all over the world, and now it's a big surprise that Marx is back in fashion? How do they think Marx got his start? If you want to be secure in the seats of power, do a good job.

[loudsue]

4. Wow! What a quote! I'm gonna use it in my sig line!!

What a novel idea!!

"If you want to be secure in the seats of power, do a good job."

[bemildred]

5. Seems obvious to me.

:hi:

[loudsue]

15. LOL! It's so obvious, that it gets lost, unless we keep repeating it!

:hug: That's the beauty of genius! Thanks!

:kick::kick::kick:

[prodigal_green]

3. Marx is buried in London

at Highgate cemetary. Relevant? Probably not, just fyi.

[evlbstrd]

6. Maybe it's because, if you actually read Marx

instead jerking knees over the so-called Communist dictatorships, you'll find that socialism ain't a bad idea.

[eallen]

8. Like many a physician, his analysis is better than his cure.

:evilgrin:

[evlbstrd]

10. The cure keeps getting contaminated.

[wli]

11. that is true; however

His actual methods don't withstand modern scrutiny, either.

[evlbstrd]

12. I actually prefer Michael Harrington's approach to socialism.

http://www.dsausa.org/dl/sum2k/12.html

[wli]

18. possibly, however

It really does seem to be a matter of "what works" and taking a salad bar approach to capitalism, socialism, and so on in the realm of fiscal policy.

Economics, though it be a social science, is a science. Ultimately, ideology must no longer be allowed to influence economics. In that context, mixed economies appear to be the most successful.

[Emendator]

19. I think you're right

about mixed economies. However, in order for things to work, production and growth must precede redistribution in importance.

[K-W]

22. Which parts of capitalism are good?

Things like markets, competition, supply and demand, etc are not capitalism and can be used by any economic theory without having to give credit to capitalism.

I think this mixed economy stuff misses the point of having an economy that serves the people versus an economy that serves wealth.

[wli]

24. interpreted in that fashion, basically none

[IrateCitizen]

25. Economics is hardly approached as a social science...

Especially when undertaken by people with a conservative bent. There is nary a social aspect to be found in their analyses. Rather, classical economics falls prey to the empiricism of the English and Scottish Enlightenment that spawned it, while shunning any sort of acknowledgement of a human element at work.

This was the basis of Marx's theories -- that the economy was a SOCIAL dynamic, not an empirical one. In fact, this is the basis of his concept of dialectical materialism, which meant simply that you could not understand a system by breaking down the parts and looking at them individually -- which is what classical economics tended to encourage -- but rather you had to come to understand the whole in order to see how the various parts of that whole interacted with one another.

Ideology will ALWAYS influence economics, just as it will influence anything and everything else. The problem we face is that one ideology -- market fundamentalism -- has gained the aura of some absolute truth while its polar opposite -- Marxism -- has been consigned to the dustbin by most establishment figures.

[wli]

27. the "conservatives" aren't using real economics

There is real economics and it's several cuts above the tripe the neocons are spewing. Not that I'd expect a neocon neanderthal to be capable of understanding the Malliavin calculus.

They aren't really even attempting economics, but rather are couching propaganda in economics-sounding terms. Witness the Laffer curve fiasco. They're not competing in free markets, their "competition" is contests of arms, rampant nepotism and cronyism, and outright corruption.

I suppose given all that it's fair to say that capitalism hasn't ever been tried either. Of course, "globalization" will bring us about as close to it as declaring Bush dictator.

[K-W]

33. Capitalism has been tried.

I think you are confusing terms. Capitalism was a name given to a preexisting system by those who studied it. Our current economy is industrial capitalism.

All of the weird theories that have sprung up about capitalism arent themselves capitalism. Capitalism is what we have and any attempt to project what we have, which is obviously flawed, into some utopian economic philosophy is going to create something just as loopy as what conservatives come up with.

[wli]

34. either way, I've no particular investment in either

If it keeps the economy functional and preserves some modicum of social/economic justice, I'm happy.

OTOH what these morons are doing is plunging us into a Second Great Depression.

[eallen]

14. Perhaps there is an aspect of the cure that leads to its contamination?

[evlbstrd]

16. Perhaps you should check this out:

http://www.dsausa.org/dsa.html

[K-W]

23. What aspect would that be? EOM

[K-W]

21. It wasnt meant to be a cure, it was a prediction.

The cure was labor organization, which I think we can all agree about.

The workers revolution leading to communism was literally what he thought was going to happen naturally. He never intended anyone sieze control of an undeveloped nation and try to create it.

[IndianaGreen]

17. 'Das Kapital Revisited'.

Don't you realize that all of the programs of the New Deal were socialists programs? Roosevelt prevented a Bolshevik revolution in this country by infusing enough socialism to prevent a social explosion. Now that Bush is giving us and the world unbridled capitalism, Marx becomes more relevant than ever.

If you have any doubts, consider this: Soviet women had more rights and political influence in 1922 than American women do in 2005. In 1922 there were no abortion restrictions in the Soviet Union. NONE!

What little we know of socialism is the anti-socialist propaganda we have all been fed since kindergarten!

What do you think is the REAL reason our free and democratic government does not want us to travel freely to Cuba?

In October 1997 the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported a conversation with an investment banker. 'The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,' the financier said. 'I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism.' His curiosity aroused, Cassidy read Marx for the first time. He found 'riveting passages about globalization, inequality, political corruption, monopolization, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence - issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realizing that they are walking in Marx's footsteps'.

Quoting the famous slogan coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 ('It's the economy, stupid'), Cassidy pointed out that 'Marx's own term for this theory was "the materialist conception of history", and it is now so widely accepted that analysts of all political views use it, like Carville, without any attribution.'

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0717-28.htm

[bpilgrim]

28. download PDF of eng. ver of CAPITAL here -> LINK

Das Kapital

psst... pass the word ;->

peace

[IrateCitizen]

20. How serendipitous. I'm currently taking a course on European socialism.

The problem is that most people who actively criticize Marx and socialism have never really read anything by Marx or other socialist thinkers of various stripes.

Marx was ridiculed by the bourgeoisie capitalists because many of his predictions did not come to pass in the time he allotted for them. For instance, in Evolutionary Socialism, Eduard Bernstein argued in favor of adopting a more gradualist approach to the implementation of socialism, because at the turn of the 20th century in Europe the middle classes were actually increasing in number and prosperity was hitting most people. Bernstein called for a "trade unionist" approach, although he didn't call it that, of working through existing parliamentary structures to secure better conditions for the proletariat.

But Georg Lukacs would scoff at such an approach in What is Orthodox Marxism?, because it betrayed the very nature of dialectical materialism, which underlayed all of Marx's theories (which was, in turn, derived from the works of Hegel). To someone like Lukacs, the dialectical materialism that Marx developed was based upon the realization that you could not break things down into parts and look at those parts separately in order to understand the whole -- rather, you had to understand the whole in order to understand how the parts interacted. In Marx's philosophy, this approach was necessary in history and economics. Marx defined economics as a SOCIAL phenomenon, rather than a material one, as exemplified in his works on the Fetishism of Commodities. Capitalism, OTOH, discusses economics in purely material terms without any real acknowledgement of the social dimension.

Such an approach is clear when you look at the big picture of classical economics. Conservative economists today (and even some liberal ones) treat things like pollution as "externalities". They treat labor as a simple commodity to be bought and sold, rather than as having a social dimension since the term "labor" is actually describing people.

This approach goes even further when you look at the works of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the middle of the 20th century. At the root of their critiques of American "culture" was the way in which everything was commoditized, and how those who controlled the distribution and sale of these commodities effectively controlled the reality of those who produced and consumed them. In this sense, American "culture" becomes nothing more than a self-feeding loop in which the proletariat is conditioned to consume under the assumption that the bourgeoisie will do his thinking for him.

The best part of this piece is the end of it, in which the author describes WHY Marx is suddenly relevant again. It is because of the quest for corporate hegemony that is acting like a virus on our communities, our ecosystems, and our daily lives -- turning EVERYTHING into a commodity, and creating a new global proletariat as industrialization spreads across the globe as the new corporate bourgeoisie roams in search of cheap, compliant labor and an absence of environmental regulation.

[bpilgrim]

26. Read "The Communist Manifesto" free, online -> LINK

The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
http://tinyurl.com/co5b8 (http://www.gutenberg.org)

peace

[patdem]

29. went there..downloaded..and now am on the fbi's wish list..

[bpilgrim]

30. we will bury them in data ;-)

even the corps can't keep up :evilgrin:

peace