lucern
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Joined: 11/13/2004
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Interesting post, OP.
quote:
ORIGINAL: luckydog1
How could his mindset possibly have no impact on his views? That just makes no sense at all.
This should be acknowledged as truthful. It's easy to go too far, though, like this from the OP: "This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing."
Has anyone else read Marx's early writing on labor alienation? This is roughly the alienation of Marx's work. It has nothing to do with social isolation of individuals. Nothing. I suspect the author saw that this idea is used in his work and assumed what it meant. It really doesn't. That work is about the condition of labor relations as observed in the middle of the industrial revolution - where once people generally got to enjoy the fruits of their labor, factory work changes this. People constantly work at something that they won't keep or benefit from directly. Alienation in this context refers to an alienation of the worker's personal experience of labor and the products of it. Now, read what this blurb says again (and always be skeptical of the second-hand reporting of science). If that's what the original writer meant, Marx's boils, lesions and other maladies of the flesh have nothing to do with alienation in his writing. Most of Marx's social isolation and poverty in his life actually came from the reception of his ideas.
Which brings us to debate raised in this thread, about Marx's impact.
Luckydog - ask yourself what 'Marxism' entails. Is it governmental or intellectual? You'll find that there are Marxisms rather than a Marxism, and they're always philosophical or at least intellectual in nature. Why? Because aside from the Communist Manifesto, which was a (successful) attempt with Engels to write for a popular audience, the bulk of his writing had to do with social description and analysis. Whether writers believed his writings or were critical, the debates about society he sparked are the lasting impact of Marx himself.
For those who are dismissing a writer they haven't read...well...you know the risk involved in that: you're going off of second hand information at best. Marx is a 19th century colossus, writing at the cusp of the industrial revolution...essentially trying to work out a lot of new and complex problems all at once. He also wrote an early and still viable critique of capitalism, though his attitude towards things he doesn't like is polemic.
As an anthropologist in training, I can tell you that Marx remains important intellectually. Am I a Marxist, or do I even use Marx? Nope. Two words: historical determinism: you can't expect history to follow some pre-defined course. There are indefensible claims and frankly archaic understandings throughout the work. Gee, almost as if much of it had been written over 150 years ago. Then again, why do I know anything about Marx if I don't even use him? You have to understand Marx to understand social science literature because he's often there. People debate him. If you don't understand Marx, you won't understand them. If you don't understand them, you won't understand the people using their work. Nor will you understand entire branches or subdisciplines of some fields, who, because of their focus on the physical and social together, found Marx eminently useful.
And finally, it's worth extracting Marx from things he didn't actually do. Don't equate Marx with communism in practice - what he and Engels wrote was never enacted or, I'd argue, seriously attempted (not that I'd recommend it, mind you). Nothing in the Manifesto or his other writings indicates that an enormous statist empire should emerge with a totalitarian ruler and tiny permanent elite. That's actually specifically what Marx was worried about. If you work to understand how ideas actually get used for practical reasons you'll have gone a long way to understanding humanity.
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Karl Marx's erupting skin - 
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