(no subject)

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

"Liberals, progressives, Socialists - they all get their philosophy from Marx, really."

I mean, who writes rubbish like this - and who believes it?
Some American dude on the internets, for a start, apparently - but looking at some of the stuff I see on video and on the internets coming in from across the pond, I thought that I would help y'all out here and explain about Marxism and Socialism and all that stuff that gets ppl confused.

But wait , some will say - you never went to university, you are not a professor of economics or something like that, so what gives you, Minto Grubb, the right to hold forth on Marxism?

Well, that's a fair question , I must admit. So let me answer...

Be honest, how many of you folks out there have ever opened up Das Kapital and tried to read it?
Well I have.

I say "Tried to read it", and I did try! But marx was not writing for me, he was writing for intellectuals. Seriously, I have read the bible from cover to cover, more than once , and read more than one translation. I have read Lord of the Rings, complete Shakespeare plays. it's not that I don't have the determination to get through a big book, it's just that Marx writes in a style that is not generally accessible to the Common Man. And men don't come more common than me.

Unlike Jesus Christ, who illustrated His teachings with practical examples, Marx wrote in a style that was theoretical and intellectual to the point where his ideas and tenets became the intellectual property of the bourguosie, and not the proletariat. whicch is a bit ironic, really - but his parent were both middle class, so waddaya expect, huh?

Anyway, I never learned about Marxism by reading Marx for myself - and nor did most people.
I read commentaries on Marxism that were sprinkled with direct quotes from his most famous work. See, Marx never wrote for the ages to come - he expected the Workers to rise up and overthrow capitalism in his own lifetime. And he died before Queen Victoria did! So, why is he that important?

Well, marx was certainly well educated - a product of a Middle Class home. he looked at the world that he lived in and figured out how it was working and where he saw it going. He lived at a time when the old agricultural society had just given way to industrial conditions. men and women no longer toiled to grow food by hand, the farm workers operated steam driven tractors and other machines.

And these machines were not made by hand, or built by trained craftsmen in their own workshops - Galileo may well have made his own telescope himself - but the astronomer of Marx's day would have owned one that was made by a machine operator who mass produced them in a factory.

And this shift from workers who tilled the land in return for protection from some knightly lord to workers who toiled merely for cash led to a lot of social unrest and ferment.

Hang on - where am I getting all this from, did someone ask? Well, my uncle was a Trades Unionist and a leading member of the british Communist Party, back in the day.
See, my dad may have been an alcoholic, but my mother's people were all from good, solid working class backgrounds. My maternal grandfather lived through the same era as Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell), Kier Hardy, 'Rab' Butler, Harold Wilson and Jimmy Reid. As a matter of fact, my uncles actually met some of those people.

And yes, Grandpa and Uncle Ron used to talk about politics and discuss that sort of thing , even with me - so what I get from it is a somewhat distilled form of Marxism. Not just what he said, but how his ideas panned out in the workplace, in the era I grew up in. Waht follows is a potted version - Marxism for beginners if you will.

Marx could clearly see that there was a difference between what a worker needed to survive and what a worker could actually produce. i mean , a man on a subsistence farm would grow enough wheat to make the flour that would make the loaves that saw him through the winter - just about!

However, the machines of the industrial era would allow men to sow and harvest a vast surplus, and this was sold for a profit. but, what was happening to all this profit?
Marx explained that the difference between what the worker needed , and what the worker actually produced, was what he called ' surplus labour'. now this led to more loaves on the shelf of the local store - but what was happening in Marx's day, and few realised , was that the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer.

We need to understand 'surplus value' to get why this was so. see, a worker may be paid a shilling a day to work in a field, say, or at a workbench. but in that day, the worker created goods that valued far more than that. the worker got a shilling , the employer got the rest, and paid the worker out of the surplus. the worker, therefore , could never buy back all the bread s/he made, or anything else. only some.

This meant that more money ended up in the hands of the rich. Rich got richer, poor got poorer. Eventually, marx Argued, the poor would get so poor that they would be starving and would rise in revolt. they would take over the entire "means of production", meaning all the mills, all the mines and even the shops that sold the goods - all would end up being owned by the workers, who would make things they needed and not what the bosses told them to make and sell for profit.

Marx clearly understood economics and how economies worked. He explained how Capital related to Labour in terms that we still use today. he also explained the social effect of institutions like Family and Religion. people like Engels expanded on these ideas.

So why did Marx get it all so wrong? Why did Capitalism survie beyond Queen Victoria and Marx did not?

Me, I am a simple bloke, so I will put it in simple terms.
A farmer can put a harness on a horse and get the horse to do enough work to make more food than the horse needs to eat to stay alive and healthy.so, even if it literally "eats like a horse", a good farmer sees it worth his while, not just to buy a horse, but to LOOK AFTER IT!!!

And what Marx failed to see was 2 things
1) Enlightened Self Interest on the part of the Capitalists
2) Social Inertia on the part of the Working Class.

Both terms are ones I invented myself in order to explain things. maybe you know these principles by different names- but I never went to Uni. like marx , i had to work it all out myself.

Enlightened Self Interest. Ok, a farmer may buy a horse, work it to death, then go buy another. On the other hand, it is cheaper and more productive to buy a horse, keep it in tip top condition and get another one when it's old.

In like manner, a capitalist may get to thinking "maybe if I ensured my workers got decent housing and could buy enough food - maybe I could get more work out of them. Maybe if I got them to read and write , I could teach them more skills, get them to make higher priced commodities".

Historically speaking, people like Robert Owen in England and Alfred Krupps in germany actually did this.Krupps put in showers for the workers so they didn't have to go home in the sweaty overalls they had spent the day toiling in. He even provided the overalls. "I keep my workers happy" he said " in the long term, it is cheaper than paying spies to root out the agitators. coomunist agitators coming into my workplaces have a hard time finding men discontented enough to listen".

This ability of 'smart money' to read Marx's books and see where he was leading to was _part_ of the reason why Marx's 'Workers revolution' failed to pan out. It was in the bosses long term interests to see to it that the workers never got so desperate that they would rise in revolt.

The other was Social Inertia.
Ok - why did you get out of bed today? Why turn on the computer and read this?
Because you wanted something out of the experience?
If you are hungry enough, mybe when you are, you get up and fix breakfast. but then , if you are smart , you think about what happens when the fidge is empty. you plan ahead, you go shopping, get a job that pays enough to support your shopping habit and maybe allows enough over for buying a tv or radio.

Because, hey - you need more than just food and drink, right? but how much more? Do you just want to listen to music, or feel a real urge to write and perform some yourself? is it enough to come to a community like this, or do you feel a need to comment, or even write an OP?

To marx, it was all about the environment. If you were to ask *him* "Nature or Nurture, Herr Marx ?" he would have responded "Nurture , every time". For him, people were simply the products of Biological Evolution.

He theorised that if we gave people enough to eat, they would not steal food. he surmised that if we could create a "better society", we would eventually create "better" people.

Again, this is only my personal opinion here, but I think that he was wrong.
If you hand some people enough money that they only need to get out of bed to go to the fridge, and only go out of the house to buy food, that is all they will do.
Their whole life is a search for food, sex, thrills and sleep. they are little better than animals.

They never wonder how they got here or where ~they~ are going, and they certainly don't give a damn about anything or anyone else , unles they see a clear and immediate advantage for themselves in doing so.

My Mother's people were all from a poor working class family - but in the 60s, a lot of them went on to become skilled tradesmen, or emigrated and bettered themselves that way. My father, by contrast, started life with all the advantages that mother's people lacked and had to fight for. And yet he threw it all away.
He just could not be bothered.

As long as people like him were in the world, the workers would never rise en masse.
And when the bosses gave enough people enough colour tellies and holidays abroad - when they made it accessible and affordable by easy credit card payments, the workers allowed themselves to be bought off.

Why fight for a better life tommorrow when you can relax and enjoy so much today?
If you want to know what killed off Marxism , it was probably the words
" I'm all right , Jack"

So, maybe it is right to say that ' everyone gets their philosophy from Marx'.
Marx said that the workers would rise up if and when enough of them were hungry enough to rebel. And the ruling classes saw to it that they didn't - or else they got so stupid and ineffectual that they suffered the fate of the Romanoffs.

Marx also said that that it would take the workers to liberate themselves and no one could do it for them. maybe the workers in many countries have said " i don't want that much hard work. i will get myself a semi in suburbia and let some other guy worry about keeping the business afloat and the country going."

Marx also predicted that there would be "a withering of the State"
So maybe, at some level, the rednecks who want a small a guvvermint and no taxes are in some sense, Marxists.

No - just kidding. marx did not advocate self employment, founding a small company in your garage and going on to turn it into something like Microsoft.

He saw a future where the workers owned everything that made the wealth of society.
and most people did not want the puff and sweat that this would entail.

Comments

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

@"Liberals, progressives, Socialists - they all get their philosophy from Marx, really."
I mean, who writes rubbish like this - and who believes it?@

I guess, he-she-they too have something from Karl Marx.
I have an idea of clap, but I would rather retain from sounding it out,
So I'd better stay politically correct.

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

Minto,
Sadly you have given more thought to the topic then many of the people who make the uninformed comparisons you point out.

There are a number of people who *regularly* believe and post tripe like that CONSTANTLY in certain forums - and you could safely bet they could *not* describe the difference between Socialism or Fascism.

These people don't seem to realize that many Capitalist countries used "Socialist" programs or Healthcare...but do it in a manner that promotes the country's self-interest (if they dont understand how Socialism and "self-interest" are **not** contrary then they aren't informed enough to comment).


Bottom line: These people do not want to know the truth. There is a "Nationalist" effect this propaganda is promoting, and why let truth get in the way of that?

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

PS: Wanna bet something will not only NOT understand how Socialist healthcare promotes self-interest in a Capitalist economy....

but will somehow think this is an endorsement of Socialism overall??


It's not what was said, and I even went out of my way to explain there is a difference....but who wants to bet the same people who dont even know what these systems mean or how they differ, will see this as an "endorsement"??

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

'These people don't seem to realize that many Capitalist countries...'

There doesn't exist a non-capitalist country in the world. There never has been. Even a country that declared itself to be non-capitalist was still capitalist. Capitalism is an inevitability; as certain as the rain falls from the sky. All you can do is still be capitalist but pretend as if you're not by eliminating some of the organs of a free market system. In truth there's only state abrogation of capitalism versus non-state.

So I find your statement about socialism in other countries to be meaningless.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Of course some of them lie and claim men like Otto von Bismarck were socialists by virtue of creating social welfare nets.

[gillen.livejournal.com]

Well there's five minutes of my life that I'll never have back.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Look under the cut at your own risk.
Beware, you may have to do some thinking ... :)

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

But that's true of all passing time, what's your point?

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

I find the arbitrary distinction between worker and the rich to be rather simplistic and thus in error. There is only those who utilize and those who don't. A rich person utilizing their funds and intelligence to coordinate the production of goods people desire for a price they desire is certainly beneficial to society. It benefits the workers who desire work (so they may have more goods) and it benefits consumers who desire the goods. A worker utilizing his talent to build, harvest, repair, etc creates a net good for society and/or for himself.

Only when you refuse to utilize resources to create do you harm society and yourself. Productive work as dictated by market demands is the best way to eliminate poverty. I don't buy the argument Marx put forth of a laborer ending up poorer than when he began.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Well, you never lived in Victorian England, so it ain't your fault, but let me take you through the sort of thing that marx could see on every street corner.

There were people in society who had money. They could invest this money and make more money than they started with.

And there were people who had inherited land. they could charge a rent , and make money that way.

Then there were people who had no land, and not much money, but they went and got an expensive education. they used their skiills as doctors lawyers and teachers, whatever. And, they charged enough to pay for the education of their kids so they would also get to have a decent level of comfort when they left school.

BUT - at the bottom of the heap, there were the manual workers. they ha no skills to sell, no money to invest. just their time , and their puff and sweat. And that is all they had to bargain with. And they were exploited.

Now, the sort of society that you and I live in , sir, has little or no resemblance to Victorian England at the start of victoria's reign.

Today, a man such as myself, with no land, no money to invest and no real skills to offer can still send his children to school, still have a pension when he retires, and can join a Union to bargain for better pay and conditions.

If I were back in early Victorian England, i would have no vote, even. One had to be a man earning so much per year in order to even vote back then.

Of course there ~was~ a difference between the capitalist and the worker. All that the bosses did was see to it that workers got the right to vote, and let them vote in stuff like State Paid Education, and then State Health Care.

The workers got to the point where teachers and doctors could join unions and say that they were workers. And , yeah , even factory workers could read and write, so the definition of "Workers" got changed. But this is what I am saying - Marx never foresaw any of this.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Worked so well for Augusto Pinochet, did it?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

This could have used a good edit. For example:

But wait , some will say - you never went to university, you are not a professor of economics or something like that, so what gives you, Minto Grubb, the right to hold forth on Marxism?

This is seems to be some kind of pre-emptive defense against an ad hominem. Unnecessary, bad form and just adds words that detract from your main point.

He saw a future where the workers owned everything that made the wealth of society.
and most people did not want the puff and sweat that this would entail.

Assertion by brute force. You don't argue anywhere for the desirability of the outcome -- so the conclusion is rhetorically weak. Better to have quit while you were ahead.

My suggestion is that you craft your posts in Word, use spellcheck/grammarcheck, and limit yourself to 1000 words. That's less than half of your word-count here.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

ad hominem ... Assertion by brute force

Someone has been reading too much of the List of Logical Fallacies.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Well, I like the idea of going for less than 1,000 words.

However:-. You don't argue anywhere for the desirability of the outcome -- so the conclusion is rhetorically weak. Better to have quit while you were ahead.

I never intended to argue for any. I just wanted to sum up what Marx actually said:-

The manual workers had nothing but their toil to offer.
The Capitalist system depended on the Rate of Exploitation.
The workers could never buy back everything they made, so inevitably, the rich gained and the poor would get poorer, until they successfully rose up and overthrew the capitalists.

This leads to the question of why Capitalist society did not collapse, but the Soviet Union did.

Please note, I was never arguing for or against the desireability of any outcomes whatever. just trying to sum up what Marx said, what prediction he made and why *I* think he got it wrong.

Now, if you can see any factors that led to the survival of capitalism , please put them down.
Also, I have argued against intellectuals for longer than some people here have been alive. I can smell an ad hom coming from hear to breakfast, and I know how to bury one, thanks.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

"We need to understand 'surplus value' to get why this was so. see, a worker may be paid a shilling a day to work in a field, say, or at a workbench. but in that day, the worker created goods that valued far more than that. the worker got a shilling , the employer got the rest, and paid the worker out of the surplus. the worker, therefore , could never buy back all the bread s/he made, or anything else. only some."

And here is just one of the central fallacies of Marxism.

The reason the worker could never buy back all of the goods he produced is because he never could have produced a fraction of them without the assistance of the Capitalist.

Who took the risk and fronted the money to build the factory that multiplied the efficiency of the worker? Who had the reserves of capital necessary to buy the raw materials, pay for operations costs (including that workers salaries), and market the product BEFORE ever selling a single unit?

The reason why the Capitalist "takes a cut" of the laborers efforts is because he provides a very valuable service as well. The reason why he takes the biggest cut is because he takes all of the risks. If the product fails to sell the laborer is out of a job but has already been paid for all the work he did whether it generated any actual revenues or not, the capitalist on the other hand is on the hook for the bill and actually stands to loose something. The greater the risk the greater the rewards
should be.

"In like manner, a capitalist may get to thinking "maybe if I ensured my workers got decent housing and could buy enough food - maybe I could get more work out of them. Maybe if I got them to read and write , I could teach them more skills, get them to make higher priced commodities"."

This is certainly another thing that Marx missed. Half starved workers are nowhere near as productive as ones who are well fed and motivated to work. However you are massively understating how important the effect is. The most important asset any company has is it's employees and while it may have taken a couple of generations for "Capitalists" to realize this and even be a few who have still not learned this lesson 150 years later the overwhelming majority of companies have known it for generations.

Further there is another factor that you and Marx both missed. Working conditions and pay for employees have improved because they simply demanded it. Without accessing the police power of the state to compel workers to work a company cannot mistreat it's employees beyond a certain point because they will simply quit and find other employment. Even such abuses as Company store tactics can only work if government enforces the contracts.

While the workers ability to quit should he find working conditions or pay unsatisfactory does not give him equal power as the corporation in salary and working condition negotiations it gives him some. It is only in the more regulated socialist/Marxist economies where workers are required by law to work for certain corporations that they have no power at all.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It may have been one thing he missed, but it was reality prior to the reform movements of the late 19th Century. There was a good degree of truth to the criticisms of industrial capitalism used by the Slave Power, at least for the industrial capitalism that existed until the Progressive era. Child labor and brutal treatment of laborers were the norm then. In some ways the slaves had it easier because slaves did have to be fed and cared for. The early-model capitalist system was just as lethal and never bothered with feeding or caring for workers.

Of course the obvious rejoinders to these points about slavery were that slaves had no choice at all, never had any possibility of striking, had no legal, political, or social rights, and if they had families had the ever-present terror of their being separated.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

The reason the worker could never buy back all of the goods he produced is because he never could have produced a fraction of them without the assistance of the Capitalist.
Er, that does not follow, exactly. The Capitalist paid less than the full value of the goods - so the worker was paid a shilling for making maybe ten shillings worth of goods.

However, as you point out, the capitalist was putting up the money, taking the risk. The worker needed the Capitalist's investment. And this is a valid point that Marx never covered.
thank you for bringing it to the discussion.

Further there is another factor that you and Marx both missed. Working conditions and pay for employees have improved because they simply demanded it.

Yes! excellent. And not even Marx has got an excuse.
The fact is that the Tolpuddle Martys were Marx's contemporaries.

They took a pledge among themselves that they would not 'sell out' and work for a lower wage than ten shillings. they were proto Trades unionists, and their local leader , George Loveless was a Methodist preacher.

The Tollpuddle Martyrs were sentenced to transportation for demanding the right to negotiate for pay as a body. This right was upheld in English law and the sentence was repealed.
Again . marx failed to see the working man getting anywhere except by violent overthrow of the existing order.

The very idea that a judge would say to a rich landowner 'sorry - you can't do that', did not occur to marx, who put the workers in one corner and the police, courts and the bosses in the other, that the law would be impartially administered, and that laws would get passed that actually allowed workers certain rights and would protect them.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

"Marx explained that the difference between what the worker needed , and what the worker actually produced, was what he called ' surplus labour'. now this led to more loaves on the shelf of the local store - but what was happening in Marx's day, and few realised , was that the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer."

Here is another flaw in Marxism that you missed.

No, the poor did not get poorer.

EVERYBODY got richer just not at the same rate.

The poor got richer through 2 avenues. First, as deplorable as working conditions were in the factories of the day they were far better and far more lucrative than subsistence farming which was the only other options for the majority of those workers. Second, what money was provided by their wages went a lot further because prices were falling consistently as the laws of supply and demand came into play.

The important fact that Marx missed (and most progressives today continue to miss) is that Regardless of how much wealth was being concentrated into the hands of the rich those workers who just a generation or two ago would have been praying for a good harvest so they could have enough bread to get through the winter no longer had to worry about that. They may not have been able to buy all of the value they produced with their labor but they could buy far more value than their parents could just a generation or two earlier.

Even the bastardized shell of a free market present in a Mercantilist economy lifted millions out of poverty and took millions more from the brink of starvation to at least consistently getting enough to eat.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The obvious rejoinder is that most European states did not become democratic as we'd define the term until after World Wars I and II. Autocracy in some ways is a lot more powerful under capitalism than it is under communism. The main problem comes when industrial development is uneven, as with the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I think the simplest division between capitalism, communism, socialism, and fascism are as follows:

Capitalism is a belief in the ability of free labor to elevate people from poverty to the height of power and wealth. It has a Horatio Alger-ness about it. Capitalism also puts belief in an unregulated market and thus implies a belief in human nobility that is shared by the other three, but in the sense that humans are noble enough not to create a Hobbesian nightmare.

Socialism is the belief through democratic means of sharing the means of production by virtue of labor, as opposed to capital owning it. I would consider myself in a lot of ways as a socialist because in my view, labor has more right to its fruit than capital does. Capitalists have been all too willing to embrace dictatorships where societies with a strong working class have only done so once, and then it was within the boundaries of parliamentary regimes as opposed to overthrowing itself.

Communism is a belief in central planning governed by a dictatorship led by a vanguard in the interest of the working classes. Communism believes that all history is class struggle and that it is easiest to handle this by creating a plan for an entire economy to be met in terms of quotas. This has plenty of evident pitfalls, not least of which is that central planning has a much more logical trajectory to dictatorships than capitalism does (because like feudal lords capitalists like their states weak).

And Fascism is a belief in transcending class struggle altogether by means of mass violence, rooted in a concept of nation-statism. Where capitalism, socialism, and communism all see class struggle as self-evident if they all end up meeting it in different and entirely irreconcilable means, fascism rejects that and believes that violence can cleanse nations of the struggle between the classes. By virtue of tendencies to hierarchy that the Communist movements never have inherent to them it tends to lead most rapidly to dictatorships and large-scale wars of aggression.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Socialism is the belief through democratic means of sharing the means of production by virtue of labor, as opposed to capital owning it. I would consider myself in a lot of ways as a socialist because in my view, labor has more right to its fruit than capital does. Capitalists have been all too willing to embrace dictatorships where societies with a strong working class have only done so once, and then it was within the boundaries of parliamentary regimes as opposed to overthrowing itself.

Hmmm. I am really grateful to you for throwing these systems into sharp relief by writing more concisely than I can manage.

i especially want you to expand on the bit about Socialism.
i used to feel that State ownership was a good idea - or at lest, not a bad one. however, i then went out to work in private industries as well as state run enterprises , and began to realise that State run concerns were often shielded from the results of their own incompetance.A state business in britain back in the day was often inefficient, wasting time and money. you cannot guarantee a person a job to the point where they get paid regardless of how badly thy perform or how little that job is needed.

i therefore see Socialism now as framing legislation that protects society against the individual and the commercial corporation. Rather than owning the steel miill, the Socialist state should say how the steel mill should be run, in terms of health and safety, pay and conditions, etc.

and of course, a socialist governmen t should educate all it's citizens, as well as give them universal healthcare and a state pension .

But, tell me how you see the Socialist state putting its ideals into practice, please.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Most of my obections to Marxism have already been raised by yourself or in the comments by others so rather than rehash them here I'm just going to say excellent post.

I nominate for "Recommended" Tag.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Thank you.
Coming from someone I rate as an informed serious reader on this Forum, I take that as quite a compliment.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

What is wrong with Marx is what is wrong with other people who make predictions about the future. They look at current trends lines and extend them out as a straight lines into the future. The world doesn't work that way. Except in the very short term, nothing is a historic inevitability.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

So what do you see that Marx failed on?
Nobody had ever explained to me what went wrong - indeed, some people never admitted that marx ~was~ wrong.

If we add The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist into the mix, we get the idea that the working man , through electing a Parliamentary Labour Party ( as the aforementoned book advocated), then we see that reform , and not revolution , was the way to go.
in fact, as has been discussed before in here - the odds of having a successful uprising in the days when everyone had muskets was fine - that's how the Americans won their independence. but to try using sidearms against a modern army with Armour, artilliery and air power at its disposal would be suicidal.

The original communists

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The cult of Marxist-Leninism tends to attract people who are angry with the vicious brutality of the world in which they were reared. I find such folks to be rather out of touch with the context in which Marx, Engels, and Lenin wrote their work. They come across as religious fanatics and fundamentalist revolutionaries who interpret what they read with an idee fixe that differs little from that of their Christian fundamentalist counterparts.

Engels pays tribute to the contribution of Wilhelm Weitling to the original communists from whom Marx sprang. Weitling was part of a larger group of radicals whose literary base was far broader than the narrow stream of Marxian dogmatism. The breadth of this literature is very much like the broad stream of philosophic literature that the Church banned and which was available to ascetics such as Jesus the Nazarene.

[thies.livejournal.com]

I made it as far in Das Kapital as in Mein Kampf. Unlike the latter I still intend to read all of Das Kapital at some point. I think this answers an initial potentially rethoric question of your post. But shortly after that I was hit with a case of "too long, didn't read" as your post kinda turned into the long winded diatribe which had me put both of the initially mentioned books down.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

So, you start with the assertion that Progressives, Liberals, and Socialists are not fundamentally based on Marx, and then go on to not show it. What's the point of that intro then? And your post is kind of rambling along and not terribly coherent.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

and then go on to not show it.

The real core of Marxism is that capitalism , as an economic system , is unstable. it is doomed, either it will collapse under it's own weight, or the workers will be reduced to near starvation under it and rise in revolt.

Now, you can take the side issues, like the 'withering of the state' and claim that because you believe in that, or that someone else does, that such a belief equals ' marxism'.

Er - no. Marx's analysis of society must be taken into context. it seems so to me, but you dispute it if you wish.

Now, Socialists believe in doing things ' for the common good', but this does not automatically mean that the ' good' way to do things is through the State run collective. i would argue, as a socialist, that one can do as much good for the workers through a mixed economy. In fact, I would prefer a mixed economy as a model for society.

Sorry you did not find it coherent. Someone else has nominated it for ' recommended'. I guess you can't please everyone.

[ofbg.livejournal.com]

"I never learned about Marxism by reading Marx---I read commentaries on Marxism"

It really matters not what Marx intended or when he died. What matters is the principles he espoused that are now being and have been adopted, at least in part, by most western governments including the US.

Below are the links to the manifesto in four sections, from Avalon Law at Yale.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/manone.asp

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/mantwo.asp

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/manthree.asp

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/manfour.asp

I'll speak only to the principles adopted, in whole or in part by the US in it's version of incremental socialism, my definition of which is where the government takes money from those that earn it and gives it to those who do not earn it.

Near the bottom of 'mantwo' are listed the 10 means for the destruction of capitalism; "The proletariat will use its political supremacy top wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie"'

From the list, these have been enacted in whole or in part:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. (by regulation in the US

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.

Please read the thing guys & gals! When I was in high school (class of 1960), a written book report was required on the manifesto in the first semester of senior history and another on Hitlers Mein Kampf in the second, under the premise that if you don't know your enemy, you are poorly prepared to resist him..

The progression of the adoption of #10 above may be why that kind of study is no longer done.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance...


6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. (by regulation in the US

I had no idea that this sort of thing has happened in the USA.

do you mean that inheritance is taxed, or that it has been abolished? Central banks, yes, that is commonplace , but nationalised transport? you have that in the USA? tell me more!

As I said, marx did not envisage political reform . he as strictly in favour of revolution.
the capitalists, seeing the danger of revolution , quickly instituted reform to keep the workers in their place. it certainly worked.