He lived in his own fairyland utopia, that in reality never would work.

Some will always want to be "More equal than others."

They want their "Red Scare" propaganda back!

want to be 'more equal than others.' The question we as enlightened people must address, in my opinion, is how much inequality should we allow to exist. Also, it's true that Marx lived in his own fairyland utopia. As do I, as do you, and as does everyone. Regarding the suggestion that in reality it never would work. Neither does pure capitalism. I think most people who have picked up on Marx and contributed greatly to positive political and economic developments throughout the world recognize this, and are trying to improve upon the model. Certainly the utopian model can lead to disastrous effects. But genuine democratic socialistic practices can an do provide much better distribution of resources and great overall freedom and happiness in countries that try it in a progressive manner, with a human face. If you look at the recent statistics on the countries with the highest rates of self reported happiness and autonomy, they all practice elements of democratic socialism deriving from Marx, in ways that make profound meaningful impact on every person both economically and socially.

"The question we as enlightened people must address, in my opinion, is how much inequality should we allow to exist."

That is the question that has driven us from slaughtering each other with stones to reacting with patience, consideration, compassion, understanding, forgiveness and community. It is what inspired and drove all the greatest minds that our species has the ability to produce on our centuries old trudge towards liberty, freedom, democracy & brotherhood with all people.

Now, apparently, we have plateaued, we regress. De-evolution. All we experience today, daily, is a never ending series of smears on the legacies of those minds. By the most fiercely twisted, unenlightened and unethical minds our modern society can produce. The only thing I am sure of, is that it will get a lot worse. The only thing I'm unsure of, is if we will ever have the chance again to make it better.

Someone is going to act the predator, an excellent example being Charles and David Koch.

But I'm a realist.
Pure Marxism presupposes that humans can get past their base desires, completely.
And this is Marx's fantasy that can never come true.

They are a product of evolution and, however long and incremental it's taken them to evolve, they can change. If we are conscious enough we can also transcend our primitive instincts by conscious intent.

Technology also evolves and much faster than we do. There is a pattern through history of new economic systems evolving out of large leaps in technological innovation. I think we are nearing the next big leap. We just have to get past all the turmoil that comes with the collapsing of the old systems and the introduction of the new without falling backwards.

I think Marx basically admitted he thought the ideal technological innovation needed to fully usher in his socio-economical system hadn't developed yet and I agree. His ideas are still valid and a good answer to capitalism but they just arrived a little too early on the scene. Once the technological innovation has caught up, putting his theories into practice may prove more fruitful than they have been without the requisite technological advancements.

I highly doubt that. Rather his writings were brought about by the extreme poverty that was a reality for the overwhelming majority of people in Europe in his day. In fact many writers, socialist, anarchist or otherwise were just as passionate about bringing attention to and ending the severe poverty that the working class in his time lived in. Now one of the reasons why Socialism never set down roots here like it did in Europe is that for a lengthy period of time the American Working Class had opportunities that the European equivalent did not. Now while that was true to some extent because of our bill of rights. It was mostly because there was land that they could settle which placed them further away from the East which was at the mercy of markets on a level the west didn't see until later in the 19th century.

Now was Marx an ass ? Well one could certainly make that argument. More one than historical person who was obsessed with political and economic injustice had qualities that we might describe as being ass-like. Well ass-like in the sense that they were very curt, direct, and had little tolerance for what they saw as bullshit.

Like others have stated he certainly wasn't and isn't infallible.

As to more equal than others.... I think you fail to see how much that outlook simply reflects the logic of the time in which you were born.

Even now people of this era assume that we will always have people who have far more power, deservedly or not, than others and there is nothing we can do about that. I suppose that is true in the short term.

But in the long term, however you may wish to define it, nothing is set in stone.

This is one of the biggest weaknesses in those think capitalism is the best we can do. I'm sure plenty of people thought in the stone age that flint, chert, or obsidian tipped and bladed hunting tools were the best we would ever develop. They were of course wrong.

Now some maybe right in that Socialism will never overtake Capitalism. After all it's not as if it' inevitable. In fact if history is anything to go by chances are that what will end up relegating capitalism to the dust bin of dead Economic Systems is a technological breakthrough so game changing that it will quite literally alter what our society, and the relationships that make up our society, is based on down it's very core.

Though I'm sure some certainly are of the opinion that it is this technological breakthrough that will bring on a Socialism. Again this could be true as well. While modern intellectuals and analysts might be able to predict the short term with some level of accuracy the fact is the future is at best a cloudy haze in the distance.

Now I should state that will only be the case if our society does not experience a collapse. Again it's not as if it's inevitable that we will progress beyond the current material conditions in which we find ourselves. More than once have what are comparatively technologically advanced and complex societies collapsed in on themselves. This happens often because of resource depletion, environment devastation, or simply invasion by a much larger and more war-like group.

But all of this aside your claim that " He lived in his own fairyland utopia, that in reality never would work." I think shows an ignorance of Socialist Economic Models as a whole. Marx actually didn't talk as much about Socialism/Communism as you might think. He spent far more of his writing career criticizing what was considered orthodox economic theory in his day. In fact if you want a good study on 19th century capitalist economics as it was seen in Europe than Das Kapital is a good read.

Since Marx a host of different authors and theorists have emerged out of the Marxist Philosophical Tradition and many have espoused varying economic theories and models. Read some of them and I think you might change your tune.

People who make those kind of comments about Marx clearly know nothing about him. A lot of his work was studied in my sociology classes - as Marx is basically the father of Conflict theory. It goes a lot deeper than the "communism good rich people bad" that people attribute to him.

Both he and his wife Jenny were born into wealthy families. Both were well educated. Both had access to money. Especially Engels who left a $4.8 million fortune -- mostly to Marx's children. That was an enormous fortune in those days. If Child Protective Services existed back then they would have taken away the children. Their living quarters were filthy and four of the children died. They later had a housekeeper. Most people in poverty don't have housekeepers.

Most everything I had about read about Marx's living situation made it seem as if he had struggled financially through most of his adult life. I knew Engels helped him finance his publishing and his Wife's Parents sometimes gave them some money I didn't know they had a housekeeper or that they access to money like that.

Some deep intellectuals often overlook the practical world and just concentrate on their subject matter.

It's dry as dust and dense as depleted uranium but it's a fascinating read. His description of capital based economies was so spot on it's still being taught, although most universities won't alarm their big donors by properly attributing it.

You might want to dismiss him as "an ass," but his description of how capital works and the inherent flaws of its doing so is the best ever written.

He hardly lived in "his own fairyland Utopia." He lived under especially brutal capitalism, the kind Dickens also described in his works. Both were keen social observers. Marx tried to come up with something to fix it. Dickens only came up with long lost rich relatives surfacing.

nm

Das Kapital, one of the most boring books I have tried to read.

Likewise, I'm not going to slog through umpty volumes of Marx's writing, to know that every time governments are based on Marxism, they fail.

Due simply to human nature.

"Some are more equal than others."

because we know our media is controlled by the oligarchy in this country.

My off the cuff guess is that some in power realize the inequality and need for some redistribution before things get even worse (and are threatened with serious attempts at revolution). A second guess is that they will pretend to deal with the problem by offering raises in minimum wage. Other than that I don't see any serious change being proposed - this is simply the latest attempt to save capitalism as it destroys everything in its path.

That's my opinion too. Some are in favor of a few more crumbs for the proletariat. However, some (maybe most) are NOT in favor of even this little bit of compromise. Who will win amongst the capitalist power structure? And will a few more crumbs work this time? Stay tuned....

ALL of the modern day Marxists that I read and interact with, however, are students of history. And why not? Marxism IS called historical materialism after all. And history has shown that Marx was right about capitalism AND about the attempts to "regulate" it. So I know that a few more crumbs, if they're even forthcoming from the ruling class, won't be enough for most of these folks.

Will Marxism spread into the actual working class? That's actually the big question, not just a few thinkers on the left. The masses need to get on board and have their consciousness raised.

I love history and read it voraciously. I agree the masses should understand historical materialism better. It's not just a t-shirt or some evil boogeyman. It's a way of understanding how we can influence our present and our future in ways that will make all of our lives more meaningful and get up and stand up for our rights.

both you and TBF above. A few crumbs isn't going to do it, not when we factor in resource depletion, environmental destruction, and the sheer numbers of rapidly growing disenfranchised people in post-job society.

Soon I don't think we'll even have a functional 'working class', but rather 10's of millions of angry peasants who will split into religious, and nationalistic fascist factions, vs.revolutionary socialists, collectivists and anarchists.

that Lenin decreed (all power to the party that ruled in the name of the proletariat) turned into in eastern Europe. There was just a change of guard, especially in Russia, wherein the Party stepped into the shoes of the aristocracy and ruled accordingly.

That isn't to say progress stopped, it didn't, especially under Stalin. However the price in human lives over and above what the world wars had cost was staggering.

The reason it wasn't the Utopian ideal of the working class governing itself was simple: the Party wonks just didn't trust the people and often with very good reason.

An educated and informed population is quite capable of governing itself. We're starting to go down the road of poor education and propaganda and infotainment instead of information. Whether they call themselves Communists or Natural Leaders Born to Wealth, the oligarchy remains much the same as it always was.

One wonders what Marx's ideal might have looked like, the power residing with the people who worked for a living while the bourgeois (we'd call them big money these days) sat out elections and were just carried along with the flow. Chances are that money would continue to find loopholes to exploit and pollute just about every system. It has certainly started to destroy ours.

and what the potential can be for socialists. I actually favor libertarian communism (look it up - so many people assume communism=fascism and that simply is wrong).

I think the closest we ever got to Marx's ideal was the Paris Commune but it was way before its time. It was a democracy that only lasted about 2 months because it was invaded from outside - but it most certainly was the type of self-governing many of us would favor.

Your last paragraph is very confusing to me - Marx never envisioned power residing with working people while those with money sat around. He envisioned a system in which all folks would have what they need (no one needs a house in each continent, private plane and yachts). If you think you can find that in his writings please clue me in because I've never seen it.

Think about it.

(current in his time AND current in ours) dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Or dictatorship of capital if that's more understandable.

Basically the term "dictatorship" as Marx used it, is what are the organizing principles of society and who takes the leadership role in society. Currently it's the bourgeoisie. Before that it was a society organized for and by feudal lords. The dictatorship of the proletariat is merely workers organizing society for themselves and NOT some group of "private property" owners of the means of production.

It lasted 3 years across a huge area. It only fell because their forces were outnumbered 6 to 1 and were completely drained of resources. If someone killed that bastard Franco world history may look quite different. There was no corrupt vanguard running the show, it was run by the people, for the people. It was perhaps one of the rare instances in human civilization where class consciousness ruled the day.

Marx did not have many solutions but his support of the vanguard put him squarely in Lenin's camp.

There was no reason for the party wonks to distrust the people, it was all a facade, ran by the top leaders because they were afraid that if the people had democratic action the vanguard would have been rendered useless and the ideas of Marxism would falter. This of course is false.

Trotskyites say that Marx's ideas were corrupted but there's really no evidence for that, you may read my journal if you want to know where I stand on Marx. Good ideas, generally incorrect when it came to actually achieving anything. One excuse is that Russia wasn't in the proper stage of capitalism to transition and that Marx's ideas were based on Germany. This excuse is objectively false.

I jokingly say I'm not a Marxist because I've actually read the books. However, his description of what was actually occurring plus his development of a new vocabulary for concepts that hadn't really been looked at before can't be ignored by any economic theorist. His study was just too good to ignore and much of it has stood the test of time, even if his ideas on how to fix it have not.

I also kicked and clawed my way through Rand. Marx was nourishing and stayed with me. Rand is just an ugly memory receding quickly in the rear view mirror of life.

Fourier, to an extent Rousseau, and my favorite, Proudhon.

Fourier in particular had an amazing view of the future, including feminism, homosexuality, and education (disavowed the industrial capitalist education method which infantalized children). Proudhon had a powerful message about property and his writing style is extremely inviting (even if you dislike his somewhat arrogant tone).

Otherwise Marx did and still does have a valid critique of capitalism. The only thing that still fails for me are his views on ground rent which the USSR and Cuba espouse. While rent is anti-socialist on its face.

and the anarchists can't get it together enough to mount any sort of defense against that counterrevolution.

I think it would be a shame to actually take power for workers and then lose it because there was no central plan for the transition.

They would stop dismantling the regulations put into effect the LAST time Marxism advanced in this country, reinstate Glass-Seagal and long-term unemployment benefits, and tax the Rich at 90% marginal rates, especially the hedge fund moguls like Romney, who aren't even close to sharing the load.

people on the street this and it took like 8 people before someone got it right. It's been my experience similar too to most communism is just = totalitarianism.

claiming exactly the same thing (marx/communism = totalitarianism).

listening to them speak i figure their only brush with it is through World History survey classes, where communism = Stalin.

worse than he was is rampant.

People put Red Army deaths during WW2 as part of his kill count. I shit you not here.

People put Red Army and White Army deaths during the the revolution as part of his kill count.

People put the killing of criminals, saboteurs, and revolutionaries/partisans as part of his kill count. Treason and murder are and were capital crimes in the US and other places back in the 1920s/1930s.

Overestimating in general.

Putting the Holodomor SOLELY on Stalin when it was naturally more complex than that (poor harvests, saboteurs/revolutionaries) - not that he wasn't a monster here or during the Great Purges.

But anyway back to what you said, you are also correct on the rest. It's really messed up.

i'm old enough to have caught the tail end of some of that.

folks who are younger or haven't read as much about it don't realize that this country purged many socialists/communists with the Palmer Raids and McCarthyism. That is why we've lost so many gains of the socialists like Foster in the 1920's-30's. Instead we just have the stories, perpetuated by the owners in charge, that communism has to be statist/fascist.

If you start talking about something like the Paris Commune they have no clue because they didn't learn about it in history class.

Just my take on it. I'm just barely old enough to remember Reagan/Berlin Wall so I know the contempt many felt for the Russians in the 80s (and presumably before then) by the adults at the time. People my age and younger never really had reason to hate the Russians/Soviet Union.

I'm smack in the middle (closer to 50 than I'd like) ... I don't think it was so bad when I was growing up but my mom's generation (now in her 70s) really did hate the communists with a passion. Some of that had worn off by the time I was watching Reagan. But my generation kind of had it easier and was so focused on consumerism. I really hope your generation is able to do a better job. It's a tall order admittedly with the climate issues and globalism presenting new challenges.

in college, and went on to study political economy. It changed my life in a good way. Marx (and many brilliant economists who followed him) cared deeply about a better society for workers. The biggest problem with our economic, social, political system today is that too few people with power understand and appreciate Marxism and its refinements, and far too many believe every corrupt theory about money trickling down by lowering taxes on the rich. Marx famously said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but in today's narcissistic culture I think blind capitalistic worship is also a powerful & destructive opiate.

--effectively mitigating pain. Though of course not considering causes and cures for pain, which was what Marx was trying to say.

But Soviet style "Communism" was another matter entirely.

It's a really fun graphic novel style history book. As for current writers, Thomas Piketty's book is great but it's pretty heavy and long. There's no graphic novel of it yet. But you can peruse summaries of it on wiki and lots of places. Bear in mind there's a lot of different ways to incorporate this thought into your own frameworks. For example, the whole voting for the lesser of two evils versus don't vote for any bum is one fine example that is debated often here on DU. Though I call myself a democratic socialist, I also encourage voting for the candidate who is less of a bum than the other horrendous candidate. And putting up the most progressive possible candidate on every ballot. And voting for the most progressive possible candidate in every election. I know some of my democratic socialist friends here at DU disagree with me on this particular point.

to involve oneself in elections and the like - some good discussion here: http://www.isreview.org/issues/13/marxists_elections.shtml

Well, everyone can see why: Ronnie Reagan's unregulated Capitalism has finally fucked our country to death, not to mention the rest of the world. The ruthless Corporation owns the three branches of our government. What's a people to do? Get used to it? Ha! All suggestions on how to change the course of this ship should be on the table.

be saying or implying that are, or are no different from, Republicans, Teabaggers, Libertarians, Paulites, etc.

Of course, those people try their damndest to be to the right of Hillary, not to her left. (Which, sometimes means they have to work at it), much as New Democrats try their damndest to be to the right of traditional Democrats.

So, obviously, left is right and right is left. I don't know why I keep thinking that the right of the Democratic Party is actually a lot closer to the right than are traditional Democrats, because right is right and left is left. I'm just stubborn, I guess.

And not in the "I disagree with you so what you say makes no sense" way. But in the "what you just said is functionally no different from word salad" sort of way.

Problem is, it was never really all that good at coming up with a realistic solution to those problems.

Marx's diagnosis of the problem is spot on. But his prescription has some serious side effects.

and more modern economists are coming to similar diagnosis... some of them even work for the WH Economic Advisors. Now the prescriptions are different, but this inequality is now the talk of the town.

and it's true....throughout history

something like Das Kapital. That's the piece that missing from Marxist thought.

I would read it.

just sayin'

It just becomes fashionable from time to time to invoke him, despite history proved he offered zero working solutions.

His critique of course is quite sound, built on the work of much better solution based socialists, but his approach is totalitarian to the core.

Which I believe is NOT taught in many US colleges (British: Universities), you would understand that Marx was about the same as Adam Smith and as Ha-Joon Chang said, "there's no such thing as a free market"

Which is the natural state of capitalism. The concept of the free-market is a fabrication. It doesn't exist.

where you trade earned income for goods or services rendered. Not in some imaginary
utopia-ville.

Taking a dollar out of your wallet and using it to pay for some bread is not what constitutes the "free-market." You could just as easily align such an act with the stamping of a ration card for bread. Which is the action of taking the allotment which has been assigned to you by some other driving force.

What is the force I am speaking to? It is the self-interest of the ruling class. Capital is produced by the worker, is taken away, and an allotment of this capital is gifted back to the worker for his or her effort. Therefore, what constitutes the price of goods and services and the value of labor, in the form of wages, is the ruling class itself. That is fundamentally not what is dictated according to "free-market" philosophy.

led to the inhalation of millions of people. Read the history

Be specific.

Again, please be specific.

Not to mention the loss of life under Mao, Pol Pot, Castro etc.
Please read up on the subject before responding. No offense meant.

(Also, assuming I don't know anything about the Soviet modernization or gulags or famines or show trials or exiles or assassinations would be a very serious miscalculation on your part.)

Please continue...

"Taking a dollar out of your wallet and using it to pay for some bread is not what constitutes the "free-market." You could just as easily align such an act with the stamping of a ration card for bread. Which is the action of taking the allotment which has been assigned to you by some other driving force. "

What is the force I am speaking to? It is the self-interest of the ruling class. Capital is produced by the worker, is taken away, and an allotment of this capital is gifted back to the worker for his or her effort. Therefore, what constitutes the price of goods and services and the value of labor, in the form of wages, is the ruling class itself. That is fundamentally not what is dictated according to "free-market" philosophy."

I'm sorry but this reads exactly like what the egg headed professors at Smith College tried to pass off as
"economics". The collective mentality is what lead to all of those deaths. I never trust an ideology that has to be enforced at the end of a gun.

You've never actually responded to that request.

Those ideologies that you espoused in your post are the "ideas" that led to many deaths.
Certainly that is clear enough. I would like an explanation. I lost distant family members to those insane pograms.

There is a fundamental difference between the conditions of an argument, the argument itself and that argument's conclusion.

In pure logic, you draw a conclusion from a proof. The proof is made up of conditions or conditionals which act as a logical chain leading to the conclusion. Conditional proof posits that the conclusion (the consequent) necessarily follows the conditions (antecedent) if the conditions are true. Which means that IF the conditionals are true, and the argument is valid, THEN the conclusion is true. This is the classic "if/then" proof which you undoubtedly first learned about in grade school.

In inductive reasoning, the argument structure is very similar but probability is introduced.

If A, then very likely B.
A
Very likely B


What you're saying is that my argument (or the idea contained within it), which follows the conditionals, is very likely responsible for the deaths of millions. You yourself are making an assertion in the form of a proof. What I'm asking you to do is show me your own proof with the conditionals, the argument and the conclusion, so that I can understand exactly what it is that you think my argument contains that is responsible for the deaths of millions.

Does this make sense?

You just don't want to admit you don't know what you're talking about.

and Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. Thne you'll understand.

the Duck Dynasty asshole.

the ideologues, there is interesting and useful material from the Marxian tradition

The Communist Manifesto is political rhetoric from a century and a half ago. Das Kapital is abstract economic theory that the majority of people won't find helpful

Marx himself is out-of-date because he writes in the early industrial revolution and the mechanisms of industrial capitalism have evolved somewhat since the time he wrote. It would have been much harder in Marx's era, with slower and less reliable international communication and transport, for example, to imagine that the sectors of the industrial proletariat might be concentrated in Asian garment factories or Mexican maquiladoras or Chinese electronic sweatshops -- and so the issue of international working class solidarity has a different character today than it could have had in Marx's era; similarly, such innovations as movies, radios, television, and the internet have somewhat changed the dynamics of mass-manipulation of consciousness from Marx's time

But Marx's method for political and social analysis is still quite usable, though all his own texts concern a long-vanished world

His really excellent idea is class-analysis: he wants to discover the different economic interest groups in a society and to try to understand where the actual interests lie, as well as the rhetoric that arises as they pursue their interests -- or fail to understand their actual interests. The method includes examining in detail not only the actual economic status of various groups but the various false explanations social groups and their representatives give for their stances, deliberately obscurantist or as a result of naive thinking, and the effects of local culture and history on the rhetoric. The objective is to unmask the mechanisms of oppression and to empower the oppressed by providing analytical understandings of actual circumstances

What remains of great interest is the possibility of fusing such detailed analysis to concrete organizing work

And quite quickly. Once we have zero or near zero employment, the distribution of wealth will be extremely important.

they'll red-bait those considerably more conservative than she ever was. When Ann Coulter says that the Democrats are like Stalin, she doesn't really make any exceptions.

They're all so predictable and their replies are unintentionally funny. The newest member of their club is a real prize, I'm finding her posts particularly amusing.

Ye gods.

This place is going to eat her alive.

Chances are excellent she won't notice.