My First Manifesto

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

In my spare time I've been trying to polish off some more classic writing. What with Occupy Wall Street being in the news so much it seemed a good time to take a look at the flipside of Capitalism. So I listened to a reading of the Communist Manifesto AKA the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Now let me share with you my thoughts.


Good:
* If you ever want a stinging refute of the downsides of capitalism you're not going to do much better.
* Marx and Engels do make it a point to say that not all wealthy people are bad and that some of them honestly will try and help working people. Would that some people today could keep this in mind.
* Says rights for women are good.
* Condemnation of child labor.
* Points out why unions are good.


Bad:
* Pretty in favor of *violent* revolution.
* Very worrisome take on whose property is okay to just take: more or less anyone the Communists think have too much.
* Freely admitting that "despotic" measures will have to be put in place for a time after a Communist revolution.
* A lot of "Germans are fuck ups" talk. Funny since Marx and Engels were German but seems very unneeded.


Sadly, it didn't really answer the thing I've never understood about Communism. Workers are usually the among the least educated people in a society. So if they're in charge who's going to make sure the trains run on time and all those other things vital to a society that require a good deal of education. Blast the bourgeoisie all you like, but even communists are going to need lawyers, diplomats, doctors and scientists and guess what rung of the social ladder most of them hang out on.

Comments

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Your clock is off again. :)

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

Damn Korean computer.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Blast the bourgeoisie all you like, but even communists are going to need lawyers, diplomats, doctors and scientists and guess what rung of the social ladder most of them hang out on.

It was my impression that the proletariat would be in charge, but these other groups and skill sets would continue to exist. So you could have the proletariat making up the direction of the government, and then the technocrats implementing their policy goals.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

But why would these guys want to take marching orders from the blue collar crowd?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

All power comes from the barrel of a gun...

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Except for nuclear.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Unless you're using the right gun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3Hg7Zu-eA).

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Sheer awesomeness!!

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Eh, Marx was actually very vague about what his system would actually look like if it succeeded. His idea was an attempt to take the generally utopian socialism of the early 19th Century and create a scientific framework for utopia to happen, the end result wound up with as much connection to reality as Objectivism.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

How many guys down at the steel mill do you really think you can turn into doctors?

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

Not many doctors would WANT to work in a steel mill. But if we're talking learn the other guy's job then I will put my $ on the doctors doing the better job.

why is being a surgeon more important than building bridges or computers?

Surgeon: saves dying people. Bridge builder: makes getting from A to B faster.

Are you really missing the math here?

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

like i said, it is all relative. you need surgeons like you need all of the other careers. in your hierarchy, surgeons are at the top while someone else may say something different.

Not sure I'd care to deal with someone who thinks roads and picking up trash are more important than lives. Yes, grunt work has to get done. But it getting done frees up people with higher abilities to do more advanced and specilized work. That's how we stopped the whole hunter-gatherer thing.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

You're more of an optimist than I am then.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

I would actually think a non-negligible amount.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

I disagree.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Why? You don't have to have magic powers to become a physician. People end up in low-level jobs for all sorts of reasons -- it sometimes has nothing to do with personal ability.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

And sometimes it does. We disagree on how often that sometimes is.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Not really. An education changes judgement, training is rote.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Not really (unless the teacher's bad or the subject is really basic.) Even the boring classes can teach you how to ask questions.

If you just get training, you need experience. If you get education... you still need experience, but it doesn't fill in the blanks as much.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Then it's not training by earlier poster's definition, which is that at the end you know how to do something.

Although I'm having a hard time thinking that your k-12 experience didn't teach you the underlying reasons for anything.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

...I'm not saying that every class should give you godlike powers of perception. Training is "wash your hands." Education is "your hands are likely to have germs, which could be viruses or bacteria. Here's why that's important..." and so on. All of which give you way more tools to deal with reality than just being trained to use hot water and soap.

I think I should probably suggest, next time you're that bored, to read the textbook. Sorry it was crap education, but it was still supposed to be education.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's oversimplified and refers to primary education. I had to head back that far to get the point across because other poster seemed to want to go there.

You can be trained to build a generator powered by water.

You can have experience that tells you the best points in the stream to put the generator.

If you have education, though, you can calculate the best point in the stream to put the generator.

And paramedics and EMTs turn things over to people who have more education but can't be everywhere at once, so...

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

That doesn't mean that they're able to do more, or that they're going to be able to move outside their specialty, or that they can save people that might have lived if they'd been closer to more resources. Or that they can move outside their specialty at all.

(A trauma nurse messed up my treatment, possibly endangered others, and put herself at risk because she had no. Idea. What. She. Was. Doing but thought she did, having been trained to react to every situation like it was an emergency, and not having the background knowledge to realize she needed to get someone else. I am sure special forces medics are solid awesome, but I don't want them helping me unless I happen to become exactly the case they know how to handle.)

Something may not necessarily need a calculation. If you have a few good sites for the generator, you can get power. If you're educated enough to know how to find the best site, you can get better results.

There's not much I can say to your last statement that's not unnecessary or snarky. It's that kind of statement.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Uh? That means that person can move on to other things they've been trained to do within the job they originally joined. It doesn't mean that they can even diagnose as accurately as someone who's been to medical school. And I'd also need to know if they treated animals for the same injuries as they treat people... and I'd really like to know their rate of success compared to a vet.

The army is a bit different in general because they can't afford to wait for the same candidates, and they don't get the same numbers, as they would if they tried to match education to jobs. I'm sure they do very well, but there are consequences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) when someone doesn't get the full background.

And meaning no disrespect, I'm not sure you're stepping outside the army (and its framework, focus on utility, and limitations) to consider this.

*Ignoring that the equipment wasn't the same thing that people in the field use, and treating me outside a hospital would have killed me despite anything they could do.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Which illnesses? They aren't broad-spectrum because they're not educated to know everything about medicine; they're not educated for that because there isn't time and they only need to know as much as they have to in order to keep everyone alive and on their feet. And again, I'm not knocking that; I am saying that's the difference between training and educating, right there. Training only takes you so far. Education shows you where you really are, where the things are that you don't know, and lets you know where to start when something new comes up.



Oooookay.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

I wasn't saying there are people who know everything; I'm trying to get across the idea that the medics can't even diagnose as many things as someone who's studied how many possible causes of illness there are and had a chance to start looking at the body of knowledge.

I'll clarify. How are you supposed to know how much you don't know if you've only been trained in what you have to know?

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Sorry about stray footnote, I edited that sentence.

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

A trauma nurse messed up my treatment, possibly endangered others, and put herself at risk because she had no. Idea. What. She. Was. Doing but thought she did

This happens with people who receive "education" (per your definition) as well, which apparently nursing school doesn't qualify for. It's sort of a human thing.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Eh. At least she probably couldn't have killed herself with it.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

...you did mean that training doesn't teach you to do anything?

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

On your last point, Marx really failed.

He would argue in other places that essentially leisure time would be spread between the classes and because of that, leisure activities such as education and rhetoric also would.

As Jane Austen was already writing the intellectual equivalent of The Days of Lives only with less moral characters (really, you fall in love with someone you cannot stand after seeing how big their house is?), he should have seen that the masses always seek opiates.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Marx's greatest failure was his assumption that the state was inevitably withering away and that there was no danger the state might wind up stronger after everything that had come before it. Given the continual turmoil of Marx's own lifetime and how unremittingly vile the capitalism of Dickens' time was, his conclusions were perfectly valid....for the early 19th Century. Unfortunately starting in the late 19th Century things went completely differently.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Having read Marx's works they are an excellent indictment of the capitalist system of his time, which had absolutely no restraints on the brutality and savagery inherent in it. Whether or not Marx would have approved of what Lenin did with his ideas and Stalin's magnification of Lenin's ideas is a different matter. Marx lived in the period of absolute monarchies and when conservatism was identified with said absolute dynastic monarchies and considered nationalism left-wing extremism. His ideas started to lose relevance when the concept of nationalist absolutism showed up, and by the 20th Century their relevance was all but dead. The welfare state had killed that relevance where it appeared.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Marx wrote most of his stuff in Victorian London. It helps to have an appreciation of the social structure of the time.

Law (and by extension, political office), medicine, and the military were the only refuges of the gentleman, since to take a wage from another was seen as a sign of want and therefore desperation. Things were even worse in other countries; in Voltaire's time, the gentry didn't pay taxes. If they were to deign accept money for work, they would be taxed, since they would no longer be noble (by definition). Austen writes of gentlemen who were forced into highway robbery rather than take employment and besmirch the family name.

Even today, law firms don't "hire" employee lawyers, they take on "associates." Doctors don't "work" for a hospital; they are "independent contractors" with private "practices." The word "practice" itself describes the professions not as cash cows (though that they are) but as hobbies worthy of a gentleman's pursuit.

Science was also a gray area, though Coleridge didn't coin the term "scientist" until 1833 and it didn't really catch on until much later. Darwin considered himself a "naturalist," one who studies nature.

Because these professions were rife with the gentle classes, and because these gentle folk owned land that was worked by the underclasses, Marx held a pretty dim view of them.