Huh?
(Lots in there ... with which I agree AND disagree ... thanks for the flag, Sawdring!)
Get back to the future, baby ...
The Mayor of Moscow is leading a campaign to resurrect a monument to the founder of the feared Soviet Secret Police: Felix Dzherzhinsky. The City Planning Committee meets tomorrow to discuss the proposal. As NPR's Lawrence Sheets reports from Moscow, Russian liberals are up in arms over the plans to rehabilitate a man they see as a ruthless murderer.
within The Empire Strikes Back: Putin Cult Reaches New Levels
Just who are these 'anti-globalists'?
Do they mean these guys?
Who's Really Behind The Protest Curtain?
Academics and other public intellectuals usually believe they deserve more money and more power. Egalitarianism and utopianism on the Platonic model (philosphers will rule)are an easy sell in any college or university. Listen to the leftists carefully --they hate the bourgeois of which they are part because the non-intellectual bourgeois ordinarily liver better and happier than they. The intellectuals also don't understand capitalism in the sense the consumer is king and makes some rich who seemingly don't deserve it while leaving the "thinkers" only a modest salary.
It is truly odd, but we now have John Rawls, Dworkian and others telling us that radical utopian egalitarianism that doesn't recognize either innate ability or conscious effort as necessary considerations in their egalitarian dreams. Not only that, but since these values occurred by reason behind the "veil of ignorance" they are unequivocally true and not open to debate. They are givens in their egalitarian faith. Question these values and elicit rage which makes Hamlet's death wish like the happy chuckle of a freckle face boy.
What to do? Work, pray and hope for balanced and mature people to enter academia and to otherwise function as public intellectuals. No more leftist egalitarian religious true believing fanatics in positions of power!
My principal criticism of Marx is that, simply put, his model of how capitalism works was restricted to what he saw during the late stages of the industrial revolution in Germany - remember, the Manifesto dates from 1848. It is a model that is properly described as "descriptive," that is, a model that identifies and labels the various components and dynamics of the system it attempts to describe. One of those limitations, as mentioned, is its chronistic nature - Marx and his theories were very much children of their time. Another is Marx's profound misunderstanding of economics. A third is his rather unprofessional grasp of historiography. Let us discuss these.
As for Marx's temporal limitations, I think that much of his criticism of capitalism rests on the essentially exploitive basis of mid-19th-century Continental industrial structure. It incorporated a peasantry that had moved to the city seeking work in industry and was essentially otherwise uneducated and unable to pursue other means of support. This is his "proletariat," and this particular description of it was not the universal one that is so central to his theory, it was, in fact, a very skewed and limited view of the class that was to utilize industry to better itself into the class that he defined as parasitical, the "bourgeoisie," which he mistakenly assumed would wither away. In fact, it ended up subsuming the proletariat, and it used education and the formation of liquid assets that ended up indistinguishable from capital, to do so. Proof of this is seen in the fact that the "proletariat," now very definitely bourgeoisie, are the number one shareholders in U.S. industry through pension and mutual funds. Marx did not anticipate this - it would have run contrary to the basic exploitation which was so central to his model.
Second, Marx's understanding of economics was based on a flawed and thoroughly discredited base, his "labor theory of value," in which risk of investment was essentially discarded as a factor of return. This is the reason that Marxist economies are so profoundly kleptocratic in nature - this theory works fine as long as capital investment is already made and there's something already existing to redistribute. In its absence there is little incentive to invest and little surplus to invest even if there were an incentive. It gets worse, of course, in that Marxist economies are necessarily centrally-planned, a description of economics that is 180 degrees out from every model that had gone before. It was essentially theoretical, not descriptive, and here Marx begins to depart from the descriptive model into an entirely unjustivied "normative" one.
Thirdly, Marx's grasp of historiography and its product, history, is severly limited by his insistence on its basis in class struggle. This isn't in itself a bad model of social dynamics, it is simply a severely limited descriptive model, quite incapable of being expanded into a normative model without encountering consequences that it absolutely did when it met the real world in the form of the Communist Bloc. The problem is threefold - first, that Marx depended on economics to describe class. Neomarxists have expanded this to the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexual preference these days, none of which have anything to do directly with Marx's original model, and for good reason - the latter is not a description of class structure that is valid outside his own time. (Nor, IMHO, is its successor). Second, Marx assumed that class was more important that individual characteristics in describing an individual's relation to society at large. Hence, it is more significant that a person is black, for instance, and hence disempowered ("alienated" was Marx's catchall) than it is that that person may be personally wealthy, and occupying a position of power. This, incidentally, is the basis for the claim that such a person, despite his being a judge wearing a thousand-dollar suit, can never be "racist" because he is "disempowered" - that description comes from his class and not his person. This is a huge weakness in Marxist social theory. Thirdly, Marx modeled class structure after the fairly rigid and unchanging German model of his time, when in fact the American version (even more so than its founder, the Englisn), incorporating a high level of class mobility and opportunity, was the model Western economics and society was to follow, even in Marx's native land.
There is more, much more, and I won't attempt to address it tonight. The upshot is that our present world isn't accidental, it is the result of the failure of a descriptive model to become normative, the failure of a theory to function in the real world because it is insufficiently complex to answer the complexities of the real world. Marx is wonderful to study, provocative, exciting, and very revealing. He is hell to live by.
Anyway, that's what I think.
actually, the strains of chiliasm run deep in marx, and the source is, as david horowitz notes, in judiasm.
MR. NIXON: What influenced you to join the Communist Party originally?MR. CHAMBERS: It is a very difficult question. As a student, I went to Europe. It was then shortly after the First World War. I found Germany in chaos, and partly occupied; northern France and parts of Belgium were smashed to pieces. It seemed to me that a crisis had been reached in western civilization which society was not able to solve by the usual means. I then began to look around for the unusual means. I first studied for a considerable time British Fabian socialism, and rejected it as unworkable in practice. I was then very much influenced by a book called Reflections on Violence, by Georges Sorel, a syndicalist, and shortly thereafter I came to the writings of Marx and Lenin. They seemed to me to explain the nature of the crisis, and what to do about it.
THE CHAIRMAN: Well, I can understand how a young man might join the Communist Party, but will you explain to us how a person who has made a real living in this country, a person with a large income, some of the witnesses we have had before this committee, over a period of time, what, in your mind, would influence them to join the party here in this country?
MR. CHAMBERS: The making of a good living does not necessarily blind a man to a critical period which he is passing through. Such people, in fact, may feel a special insecurity and anxiety. They seek a moral solution in a moral confusion. Marxism, Leninism offers an oversimplified explanation of the cuases and a program for action. The very vigor of the project particularly appeals to the more or less sheltered middle-class intellectuals, who feel that there the whole context of their lives has kept them away from the world of reality. I do not know whether I make this very clear, but I am trying to get at it. They feel a very natural concern, one might almost say a Christian concern, for underprivileged people. They feel a great intellectual concern at least, for recurring economic crises, the problem of war, which in our lifetime has assumed an atrocious proportion, and which always [weighs] on them. What shall I do? At that crossroads the evil thing, communism, lies in wait for [them with] a simple answer.
Marx talks about capital and labor but misses the profound influence of that which is more important than either, and permeates BOTH, and in fact is what sets us humans apart for the animals - human labor for example, might be no more important that the work of insects except that humans bring to bear their experience and skill in doing something - these of course are information.
Marx says NOTHING about these, of course, while Adam Smith centers his market theory on information, in explaining why one thing is more "valuable" than another: the person who is evaluating has information which affects this evaluation...
Marx does not, in my opinion, wear well with age. His description of class divisions misses a MAJOR point: the divisions are created in the mind of the beholder - those who wish to postulate the existence of those divisions may do so, but they could just have easily postulated that we are all one class, the class of human beings created equal and with inalienable rights.
Is the glass half empty of half full? The observer decides, but the most important thing is that the observer needs to realize that the way he sees it and interprets it is due to his decision.
I loath Marxism because it is what GENERATES class divisions, while claiming to DISCOVER class divisions.
What does he mean by dead labour(sic)? Is it what a FReeper could conceivably construe the phrase to mean in these days of government largesse and "involuntary contributions"? Not that those are recent things.