Marx

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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It occurred to me last night that:
Marx arose in England as a result of the workers revolts. He gave them a fancy name. Then as Tom says, not much else happened in terms of English worker revolts.

Then a phase of parliamentary communist influence in capitalist Europe followed to make life for capitalist workers more tolerable (the mentioned “positive impact”).

Then Marx spread out to Asia, where he gave birth to modern China, the most massive capitalist dictatorship man has ever known.

Is Marx the antidote to worker revolt? Is he not in the majority of cases precisely the means whereby the workers, who are revolting, are put back into the system?
I am now suspecting the Marxist Dialectic works to this effect. To strengthen the capitalist state, to integrate the worker revolt as some kind of “product”.

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Your claim references the state of the lower classes today.

The conditions that people endure on this planet are nowhere near enlightenment, in any sense of the word.

I don’t need to read Marx to understand how detached your statement is from reality.

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  • “The proletariat has been enlightened - that’s an ironic Marx reference - and Capital has globalized.”

  • “I don’t need to read Marx to understand how detached your statement is from reality.”

Inform yourself about Marx and about irony. After that you may understand, perhaps, what an ironic Marx reference is.

Please don’t leech on my threads until you have organized your brain a bit. Your stupidity makes me want to laugh and vomit at once. Imagine that I would do that both in your face, that would be an appropriate response.

But get thee hence and learn what Marx meant with “enlightened proletariat” and also look up the word “irony”.

Enlighten yourself.

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=

I’m desperate for your insights like: “Desire for wealth and power is human nature”

But my mind is too confused to comprehend it.

I’m envious that such brilliance couldn’t originate from my own mind.

Love you, Jakob <3

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I know. This is the point about love that Jesus did not understand.
The love of the true lower class, the unclean, is always expressed as an attack; as vileness. After all it can only love that which is fundamentally beyond it - it has no self valuing apart from its self loathing. Negative existence, in a sense.

By that horrible law, which both Jesus and Marx were ignorant of, the revolutions found their true purpose - a politics of loathing, a gradual destruction of human values, a campaign against all self valuing that is not self loathing.

The bottom line, for Orb and anyone here who is not entirely ignorant of Marx, is that the Proletariat is not a proper class of people. Within the lower income classes exist noble and wretched people, and Marx choice of language gave the wretched as much “right” as the noble by which in this case I mean healthily selfvaluing, generous.

The scum of mankind knows no generosity as it is pure leech. Marx and Jesus gave spiritual and political licence to the leech. Ben JS is the product of this selfglorification of the leech. Because it produces nothing by its own devices, it considers all that does produce below itself - because it can not selfvalue in terms of generosity. It can only affirm wretchedness and decay, and this is what it seeks to make the world.

Another way to learn to comprehend VO. Contemplation of the negative existence of the leech, the terms of its existence and the effects of these terms on those that are engaged by means of them. Understand this and you will understand much of the 20th century.

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I did finish watching your vid and noted at some point, one of you remarked, I think it was Tom…

some Marxists argue that the ‘free’ health service is a victory for the proletariat, but isn’t it more realistic in relation to health to understand that the NHS is a means that benefits the bourgeoisie by ensuring that the workers remain well enough to work. Workers may understand their inequality but believe the system is fair. (false consciousness).

ETHICAL CONUNDRUMS
A question asked by the Guardian newspaper.

How should we define working class, middle class and upper class?

PAID by the week, rent your house - working class. Paid by the month, own your own house - middle class. Don’t have to work, inherited your house, plus estate - upper class.
Eric Robbie, Stroud, Glos.

THE difference between the classes is in their relationship with society’s institutions. The working classes do what the system sets out for them. The middle classes invent, operate and belong to the system. The upper classes tolerate the system but know the right people to speak to if they feel the need to bypass any part of it. The underclass (often overlooked) don’t have any relationship with the system at all. Similarly, for example, working-class attitudes on school are: “Keep your head down and your mouth shut - if they don’t notice you, then you can’t get into trouble.” Middle class on school: “Your school is there to help you learn, and teachers are there to answer your questions.” Upper class on school: “It’s a pity you have to spend your time with second-rate people but you’ll get the real lessons of life here, when you come home for the hols.”
J Nieman, Muswell Hill, London N10.

THE last two of these three terms are confusing. The important division is between working class and owning class. Members of the owning class own enough so that they do not have to work to stay alive, while members of the working class have to sell their work to survive. The point about the owning class is not that they are richer than the rest of us, but that they own the things that generate wealth without them having to work: essentially, land and buildings (giving them income from rent) and businesses (giving them income from the sale of goods or services). The only sure way to ensure your place in the owning class is to choose your parents carefully.
Raphael Salkie, Brighton.

I grew up living in council houses, I went to the local comprehensive and now I am a groundworker for a building firm. I get paid weekly and I live in rented accomodation. This should, in most peoples’ opinion, make me Working Class. However, I am well educated, well read and enjoy classical music and fine art. I speak with what would be called a “posh” accent and I have a double-barrelled surname. Indeed, all my fellow builders consider me to be Upper Middle Class (and therefore not one of them). This shows me how utterly pointless defining people by Class is.
Douglas Mitchell-Burns, Gillingham

If you can walk into work in the morning and be told your labour will no longer be paid for, so you are out of a job AND have no other meaningful way to get money to live off then you are working class. You may have been under the impression you are middle class, because of education, participation on managing institutions and systems, because you have disposable income, liking classical music, etc. But the bottom line is no means of survival but the job you are employed to do, then you are functionally working class!!!
Val Knight, Brighton East Sussex

I was born in the slums of Derptown, but I dont work for anyone, I use my brain to make money, I answer to no one and I own my own house. What class am I? Top Class. Human race is pathetic with its class systems. Society is a house of cards and we are all just animals on an insignificant rock.
derp derpington, derptown derpland

Which one do you consider yourself to be FC?

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The human race is pathetic with its class systems?  Marxism gave us this class system, it is Marxism that is pathetic.  Prior to, people divided themselves along religious lines, or national lines, or family lines, or if they did have to think of themselves as economic creatures, they divided themselves up according to vocation (see distributivism).
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K: and how do you place the Indian caste system into your little classification system?

Kropotkin

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I get the idea she was paraphrasing Smears.
But surely he, in this characterization, falls outside all the described classes.

=== to which class do I belong? By these criteria you give I belong both to working class and to middle class. Then, I do not see the world in terms of class-struggle at all. I certainly do not aspire to elevate myself by means of some ideological condemnation of ‘unfairness’.

Besides I absolutely do not believe in the myth of impenetrable walls between classes.

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For a time I thought Marxsism was fun. mayday, the waving of red flags and chanting May Day koans. That is until I learned that Marx was a lost soul who needed to find his own place in some kind of system. Then , I had to go to a party where some friend dropped acid into my cock tale, and then I had second thoughts about him. As far as leeche’s are concerned, however, all that can be said, that we are all leeches until we learn to get along, and destructure our tendency to control the perceived weaker, thereby elevating our own self assesment. LSD a would have been good for Nixon, at a time of gross civil unrest about the Vietnam war, and all the body bags shipped back to Arlington National Cemetery, the contents of which were mostly boys barely out of high school. Nixon did not take the bait,so he became an expediency and outed for the jerk he was led to be perceived. Marxism became a slogan for i said so’s who shifted ground from strategy to fault finding, to compensate for the red baiting a generation back, to show the world, hey we live in a free, self determined society. It’'s thoroughly modern, a perfectly synched self determination. May Day was fun, long live Rakosi.

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Uccisore wrote:

What are the classes into which Marx (basically a materialist philosophy largely based on hatred of religion in general and Christianity in particular) places the inhabitants of capitalist society? In Capital, he says that in developed capitalist society there is only a capitalist and a proletarian class. Historically there has always been division in society, there was a slave society, a Feudal Society, a bourgeois society and the suffering of the poor and the oppressed, has always shown them as victims, rarely as fighters. What begins as a mistaken assessment of the possibility of struggle becomes a real obstacle to unleashing such struggle, an academic way of dismissing any possibility of struggle, but let us not forget also that class struggle certainly is not the only form of struggle in society, race and gender related oppression and struggle are some of the foremost examples of struggle that is not based on class.

It cannot be denied that what is happening today is a restructuring of the workforce and where will this lead? Will private property in the means of production become non existent, will it be used in common by the producing class, marking the dissolution of all classes, as the means and products of labour would not be private property any longer. There are certainly changes ahead and changes the world has never experienced before, perhaps a New World Order, something the Democrats want, what the Republicans want, what the liberals want, what the counter culture wants, …what the people don’t want.

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The classless society of the Proletariat.

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I am more concerned with the preservation of some of our natural conditions. Sea life is dying out fast.

I am paid by the hour, like anyone. But I consider the judicial apparatus to be the only upper class there is. All money revolves around the competition of the highest offices of government. “Justice” alway trumps even money. Be it in crime or the state, there shall be retribution. An eye for an eye was once a mild law.

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Actually I was striving to point out how difficult it is today to define working class, middle class and upper class.

Class is less visible than it once was, easy access to credit has successfully blurred class distinctions, most people can afford to have the latest smart phone, take overseas holidays, drive the latest model car, all this seems to make class irrelevent. In shows like Downton Abbey, class in this world is a simple matter of upstairs/downstairs, but class has always been more complex than this view would suggest.

As the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued in his book Distinction, class – and the reproduction of class – has as much to do with your tastes, the way you speak and conduct yourself as it has to do with income levels.

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An American/European financial elite of immense wealth and power, controls the politicians, the courts, the educational institutions, the food, the natural resources, the foreign policies, the economies and the money of most nations.

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baudrillard considers the new aristocracy measured in light of production and consumption of irrelevant gift exchanges, not based on functional determinants, but those which signal worth of a self description in light of a self defined simulacra.

This can be attested to allusiins, not too subtle to car models titles as Chrysler Monarch, Chevy Imperial, Buick Regal, Chrysler La Baron, etc the old horse drawn carriage symbolizing levels of social signification and organization.

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Then Shieldmaiden, we roughly agree.
My conviction has gradually grown to be that without Marx, it would not have been this easy for the financial industrial warcomplex to gain such near absolute control of the masses.

The point I am carefully touching on is that it is the absence of aristocracy that made this possible. This is a subtle moral view, nothing like how you seem to imagine me to think. Believe me or not but I suffer of being crudely misunderstood. I believe obfuscation of intent is what got humanity in the worst of situations.

I dont know you well enough to judge if you’re likely to reason with me here, or if you will simply judge me for advocating a term you consider to represent an evil. If the latter I will know I have an ideologue in you and not a student of ethics. The two are antithetical in philosophy.

The death of aristocracy must almost by law of nature result in oligarchy. As can be understood by a short clear mental analysis; ‘The people’ have no positive and actual means to control the world. The group as such is simply not coherent in any practical sense.

I see this as our predicament. The world absolutely requires a form of aristocracy to combat the economic nihilism.
But no one wants the responsibilities of an aristocracy anymore, and yet every one wants to feel like an aristocrat.

Little do they know of the obligations that once accompanied that title.

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One remaining form albeit in the garb of a pseudo disintegration, is the simulacra of the form over content aesthetic principle. this last bastion, from which Kierkegaard forms a VO , an existential suicide into the abyss, as it were preferable to the total loss of faith, has reached the level of the metaphor. the highest symbolism , art as a form of masochism, at least, serves the purpose of avoiding the actual suicide of Camus. It becomes plausible to withstand the metamorphosis of monarchy to the visions of the proletariat, none of whom have the insight Marx attributed them with. That attribution was geared to send a message to the politically naive Russions, and not to the politically clever, instead of the British
workers, whose unions of labor, were far more privy to withstand simple cliches and forewardly less subtle pronouncements. Where once were guilds, the symbolic luster of the products of entrepreneurial skills still gleamed some measure of pride in unique and solitarily significant insight.

ironically, it is the symbol of the power of the Brit Royalty, which still,mex excises an aura of depth, which offers some hope of avoiding an abyss where the positive aspects of singular depth my offer another

Quick solution, as in the Bastille of theaters of cruelty, where anti hero Artaud can bask in the glorious edification of pain.

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I do not judge you, I may not agree with all you have to say and I think it would be hypocritical of me to nod my head like a “boopy doll” if my thoughts were in another direction, but that does not mean I do not agree with you in other respects. The difficulty I had initially with what you were proposing in your vid discussion, was there were times that a point arose, you obviously disagreed, but were reluctant to follow through, or were too polite, it came across as being “led” rather than “stating”.

You obviously have a great passion for this subject and I thought I could have gleaned far more from you if you had been forthcoming in your discussion. You see the problem I have here is that there seems to be a conundrum of sorts regarding Marx. For example, the most spectacular aspect of Nazism was its antisemitis and the following passage from Marx could have easily emanated from Hitler.

“Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time… We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry”.

“Myth” of impenetrable walls, sits easily in Western society, but having thought about this more deeply, consider the rich-poor divide in China, even though wage income in China’s cities is growing substantially, the rich-poor gap is extremely wide. Today workers around the world are burdened by joblessness, DEBT and stagnant incomes which only underlines Marx’s critique of capitalism, that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive. One cannot dismiss this easily, but that’s not to say Marx was entirely correct, as his “dictatorship of the proletariat” didn’t quite work out as planned.

The next industrial revolution will probably come from Japan. Workers powereless, becoming obsolete, against an army of thousands of robots, working 24/7, without a break, something Marx could never have envisaged.

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I’ve been following this thread for a while. At first I didn’t really want to post, for a few reasons. This subject really transcends (but also incorporates) what is often taken under the branch of philosophy because it deals with current and contingent circumstance, and calls for an assessment of the present historical moment. Besides that, the discussion around Marxism, communism, capitalism, etc. is wrought with prejudices, which is okay, but it will really take a strong will to keep one’s bearings tight and continue to discuss the subject philosophically.

As a preliminary, though I am not very familiar with Marx’s writing, judging by his historical impact as well as influence on other scholars and philosophers I am familiar with, despite the fact that Marx began with a predetermined prejudice, his analysis did open up a new way of looking at the world and assessing it which in any case is eminently philosophical so I would laud him at least for that.

I would like to begin my contributing by quoting some news articles for contemplation and saving commentary on them for further discussion.

I picked the above article because it is written from the first hand perspective of a worker in the west, so I thought it would be an interesting tid bit. The comments at the bottom are interesting, quite a few share little or no sympathy with the writer of the article. I think some of them are worth considering for philosophical purposes as well as assessing ideological positions today. Here are a couple of interesting comments:

I hope that will help contribute something to the discussion. As a closing remark, I would tentatively say that the labour sector would be wise not to expect anything given to them and would do better to attempt to organize for themselves new modes of living, which would not be without difficulty and risk. I think it is partly the work of philosophy to examine how people live and ask questions like “what is the best way to live?”. My hope is that, with a philosophical discussion, answers to that question could be contributed to here.