meatcleaver
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aswad
This is a very superficial analysis.
What Marx describes is another stage in human social evolution. The rest is what most consider to be the central element of his work, and indeed he did devote a lot of time and effort to it, but the real quantum leap is the notion of an organism in which individuals are cells in the proverbial machine of society. Corporate personhood is a microcosm of that, in a way, and gives a taste of some of the inherent problems of Marxism (though you start to notice some of them with the move to socialism, as well). Marx is seeing the almost inevitable collapse of nobility and obsoletion of quality. Fighting Marxism is extremely difficult, and you can only win the battles, not the war, but staving it off indefinitely is also the only thing unequivocally worth dying for to any human being whose right to live I would acknowledge.
The simplistic idea that it's somehow only a matter of the good of mutually beneficial socioeconomic relations (including welfare) as touted by well meaning people on the left, or the poison of communism and collectivism as touted by fearful people on the right, is selling short the horror that is Marxism on every point, and devaluing the useful, desireable things Marx realized in the course of his work (and, those, I have been advocating here). You can't refute Marx. You can only comprehend him well enough to know he has described the final enemy of humanity and then you can try to come up with ways to deal with that.
Hopefully, if we're ever on the verge of moving on to what Marx predicted, a timely world war will occur to blast us back to the Stone Age and thereby prevent it.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
Aswad. You have obviously not read Marx or undertood what he wrote if you have. Over 95% of what he wrote was an analysis of capitalism, which he pretty much hits capitalism on the head.
As for his political writings, let me make it clear with a quote from Marx ´I am not a Marxist´. He said that about himself, meaning his thoughts are not an ideology carved in stone, his work is never done because for that he would have to stop thinking. Considering the working conditions at the time Marx & Engels were writing, Marx´s political thoughts were not in the least extreme. The average life expectancy in urban workers was down to thirty, food was contaminated by traders, slum landlords charged extortionate rents and hours at work were long, brutal and dangerous. Manchester had three cesspits for 300,000 people. One thing Marx didn´t realise, is that brutal red toothed capitalism and the aristocracy would retreat with the rise of the left and it is thanks to the left that we have decent homes and education and decent medical care for everyone. Well, in western Europe anyway. I don´t know how Obama´s modest health reforms are doing though I hear they are laughably called socialist or communists by idiots on the right.
What has given Marx a bad name is that many rebel and Guerilla groups called themselves Marxist to define themselves against ther hated capitalist enemy while it appears, hardly any read any Marx whatsoever. The point was they were against the oppressive imperialism of the west and to rally followers, they needed a badge and Marxism conveniently fitted because it scared western leaders. Ho Chi Min was more a nationalist than a communist, something the British Prime Minister recognised when he refused Johnson´s request to send British troops to Vietnam, saying it was a colonial war. Most Marxist groups have been more nationalist than Communist, Marxism is just a badge of convenience like ´democracy´ is a badge of convenience for western capitalism but if you stop for a secoind and analyse western capitalism, if you have an open mind, you realise it is nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with corporate capitalist control.
< Message edited by meatcleaver -- 11/28/2012 1:09:18 AM >
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