Marx

Marx’ economical phenomenology implied “Man can not be trusted with power” but Marx the ideologue stated “we require that all men trust each other with power”.

Desire for wealth and power is human nature. So is desire to share and be fruitful. If you want to take the second and kill the first, you will represent the first and kill the second.

Economy can not be based on anything other than individuals.

Individuals do not exist in Marx’ universe. He thinks they do but he describes completely different entities. He did not understand the most basic thing about humanity and he didn’t think through the requirements of industry, among which is voluntary cooperation based on personal trust, something which was clearly demonstrated by his own production process under the auspices of Engels.

The plan that Marx set out for history needs to be seen in terms of the direct situation in which he found himself. Europe was already on the verge of revolution. Marx, through his adoption of the bizarre Hegel, gave the revolutionary impulse a psychedelic edge. And in this it was justified; only a raging madness of a billion men was able to produce the industrial pride that set the track of workmanship straight and brought all workers under control of a new scale economy; the Soviet Union invented space travel, it place man above Earth and thus conceived - and ultimately necessitated - Globalism. America is wholly reactionary in this respect; her strength lies in the homeland,which it has spent on behalf of Soviet type aspirations. (It’s not a coincidence that Marx and LSD found a happy wedding in the sixties and seventies.)

This is what bewilders me about Marx. A temporary dictatorship of the proletariat certainly sounds like an enormous amount of trust being invested in men with power. I’ve always thought of this as the most naive aspect of Marx’s theory, and now I know he was inconsistent too.

Not sure I get your connection between Marx and psychedelics/LSD, though.

It’s a rhetorical point to an extent, meant to illustrate and accentuate the type of mindset in which Marxism is able to thrive, which is the absolute opposite of a clear headed calm with a fixed purpose and definite means to accomplish it. It refers to the head-splitting powers of ardently believed contradictions.

I am fascinated by the subject and its numerous contradictions and reciprocally stimulating imperfections, under the grand arch of a poetically ironic will of which we can not yet see the horizon. Marxism is very much the language of the world.

humanarchy.net/forum/viewtop … f=67&t=404

and

humanarchy.net/forum/viewtop … =395#p1816

Wow, this may not be the right website to criticise Marx on. I just read the Marxist Utopia thread. Ive rarely seen more insanity and bigotry of the deprived crammed in one short topic.

White supremacist anti Marxism is a kind of Marxist feedback I had not yet inregrated in my theory. It is all still the logic of the underprivileged, the idea that because he has it bad, soeone elses happiness is evil. Its only now that the evil is placed with the one who has gained freedom (from"tradition" ahem) and the good is placed with he who would like very much to be given the authority to kill black people because someone was given his job, but isnt.

Someone isnt deemed inferior on ethical grounds but merely because he has acquired access to scarce goods.

Oh, there’s a fair bit of Marxists here as well as anti-Marxists plus a whole bunch who have no opinion. But what are you talking about, you’ve been here for ages.

I could sure use your insights over at the Reforming Democracy thread as Marxism and liberalism are topics that keep coming up there.

As for the current thread, it sounds as if what you’re saying is that Marxism holds up the hoped-for utopia of man to be seen for the impossible vision it is, especially when contrasted with the dystopia it creates in fact, and thereby extinguishes all hope from man. Is this in the ball park?

Ive been here for ages but the nerdraging wannabe vikings weren’t always here.

Qua ballpark, I can not actually decipher that sentence, but I don’t see any simple conclusions at hand - Marxism is essentially a riddle, because of its ultimately self contradicting logic. Marxism can be taken to mean anything by an individual, and it will always end up in conflict where it concerns group action. Hope always exists in all acts, but Marxism absolutizes hope and therefore brings about acts of religious frenzy and precludes a logical approach to man and his predicament; hope becomes a drug, it needs to be super-intense, it must feel like a virtual certainty for the Marxist to hold on to it.

I think that effective, useful Socialism or worker-action existed well before Marx, but Marx hijacked these movements and turned them into a mystic school. As I have said elsewhere this might have been required a s a catalyst back then, but it also worked as a dirty bomb thrown amidst fragile minds and subtler systems of ethics.

Marx… what was his role?

Marx was the one whom the syllogicians put up to mislead the anti-capitalism backlash, mislead by the typical method. They thought, this trend (anti-capitalism backlash) is unstoppable, why not use our “fuehrer” (Marx, then) mechanism to mislead it as much as possible.

And in that sense Marx was comparable to Jim Jones*.

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones

White supremacy is a term invented by the far left and used to demean and control white working class thinkers when they point out the contradictions and lies inherent in the liberal program of multiracialism. A program, ironically, driven by capitalism and hence an example of why cultural Marxism - itself a movement composed of disaffected, white liberals, Greens and hippies originating in the ideas of disaffected Jews (the Frankfurt School) - is merely another arm of capital.

Racism is a no brainer, as generations of the West’s greatest minds have observed, but whose ideas have been wiped from the history books and are not debated. The idea that it originates in feelings of envy or jealousy, as you suggest, is another way the far left has of belittling the anger the white working class feels as its physical community comes under attack from the biological other and its history and traditions are overlooked and destroyed.

Marx himself was a secular Jew, who was also an alcoholic. His home life was similar to that of a vagrant. So it is confusing why you do not apply the same emotional logic to him as you do to the motivations of the so called envious underprivileged.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz3eOb6Yl1s[/youtube]

How is this a riddle?

This desire needn’t be directed towards the detriment of others.

We can empower our society and increase our society’s power - As we are part of society, we’re also helping ourselves.

The society we live in today is a product of cooperation. No one man could build the intellectual or physical structures we have today.

Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, it also wasn’t built singlehandedly.

I don’t?

Have you read this thread at all?

Then why did Marx insist it should? He reserved the ‘right to wealth’ for a specific class of people. I.e. ‘those who have no wealth’.
The rest could go fuck themselves and be justly butchered by the tens of millions because they happened to be on the wrong side of history.

Given that Rome was not Marxist, this is a strange point to make here. Marx hardly invented collective labor, In fact he explicitly condemned it as a production process and focussed only on the workers recompense. A miser of cosmic influence. What has been built by the Liberated Proletariat? I think absolutely nothing. All things of value are still produced by hard work that the company can afford to pay for.

As ethical and positive as the concept of a workers union is in principle, demands of unions too powerful for their own good did a good part in bringing western economies to their knees.

It seems to me that Marx did not have any proper solutions, but served only as an inspirator for the disenfranchised and gave anyone regarding himself as such a carte blanche for violence.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm2NqZO_GUM[/youtube]

I’m not especially proud of myself in this talk, but I do think we get some interesting things said.

The real protest today should be against advancing capitalism, against the ruining of the masses, people being dispossessed of their homes, jobs, lives, literally being given over to the capitalist to be fleeced and plundered. It is absurd to assume the role of a prophet who believes he has discovered a new medicine prepared by an unqualified person, (especially one that is not considered effective), for the salvation of mankind, this particularly coming from a bourgeois would be reformist. Poverty and helplessness creates a mass of hate and resentment, (and for quite a few the skill in achieving one’s end by deceit is almost mandatory just to survive), but with no real strength to defeat the “landlords”.

It is one thing to work as a laborer in your summer vacation, but entirely different when it is your permanent job, year after year. Today factory worker’s jobs are in peril, they too are becoming obsolete, being replaced by robots on the assembly line. Had a chuckle at the remark, working in a “prestige factory”, Mercedes for example, one could take pride in his work, because it was a high value product. I think toilet paper is a high value product, as you become patently aware, when that roll has run out. That remark reeks of snobbery. Don’t you think the employer would use this and pay less simply for the “privilege” of working there. Keep the people uneducated and you keep the people ignorant and the capitalist retains the power.

What Tim suggested on this vid

“Maintain the wealth, but make it a bit nicer for the people at the bottom.”

How? A fair wage?

What Jakob suggests

“Companies cease to exist because of union actions”.

Do they? Are you suggesting people are too greedy, asking for a wage, in line with the living standards, but don’t expect more as any rebellion may close down the plant.

Almost akin to the effrontery of Oliver Twist asking “Please sir, I want some more”?

youtube.com/watch?v=sZrgxHvNNUc

Apply and work in a factory for a few years and buy that little cottage in the countryside, with a cat and a dog.

An impossibility.

The intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails, I am practising moral self-perfection could not possibly understand either the working-class movement or its struggle.

Perhaps I will endeavor to finish watching the vid, some other time.

This goes to show that you know nothing about the production process of Mercedes (parts produced by aggregates of family companies throughout the countryside, thorough education required, solid pay, definitely more than I make now), and have not really listened. Besides that your ideological opening directly contradicts your real life contempt for the efforts of humans to have a better life.

I do have my doubts about the validity of philosophical podcasts - the spoken word is even more easily and liberally misinterpreted than the written.

A car is a “pseudo-elegant heap of tin” (to quote James Baldwin) and you are a victim of consumerism.

My contempt is for your perceived materialistic values and is an insult to the working class.

You said it. Indeed most Marxists are bourgeoise snobs.

I have (crudely) bourgeois and (extremely) snobbish qualities but then I do not pretend that the worker is the only justification of labor.
Have you ever driven a car? Was it worth it? Would you rather build a car or do nothing? Would you rather get paid and have colleagues than not? All honest questions, with personal answers. Some people are like this, some like that.

The point of the Marxist talk is that he was a catalyst in a time when Europe was still producing things, and when conditions were actually demanding, and workers could a ask for a raise and a free saturday. Now they already have all that, and it is not nearly as physically demanding, so there is no incentive and no dignity to the endeavor. The proletariat has been enlightened - that’s an ironic Marx reference - and Capital has globalized.

Concerning Unions: it is a fact that in some nations the unions are made out of bourgeois snobs who look down even on something like automobile production (while of course not objecting to being driven), something no worker would ever understand, and drive companies into the ground simply because they have been entitled to this power. When something is enabled, it usually happens.

Jakob wrote:

Do you?

and you agreed.

and with this in mind, my curiosity was aroused by this remark.

“We rounded off by looking at the positive impact Marxism has had”.

I haven’t read Marx, so I’ve no idea if you misrepresent him.

I care primarily for ideas, not personalities.

As the video said, he apparently wanted to remove all class divisions.

Thus, any ‘right to wealth’ would be a step towards the ideal - alleviating the injustice committed against the poor.

I have no idea how accurate this is.

What I will say is this:

If a small group creates and hordes advantage, and uses this advantage to enslave the majority, the majority have just cause to revolt.

That’s not to say they ought butcher the privileged, but if the privileged directly inhibit the majority, the majority have to work with what they’ve got.

If it means violence, unfortunately, that may happen.

To enslave another is not innocence. It makes one responsible.

You made a point about ‘human nature’.

I’m saying even if our nature is as you describe it, that needn’t inhibit our capacity to work cooperatively.

That the individual has good reason to cooperate, regardless of their competency.

That the greatest things our species have, could never have existed if we were isolated.

==

You’re deluded.

In Marxist terms, yes. I am not proletariat, neither a class of wealth. And thus my behaviors and motions through life are somewhat characterized as bourgeoise - as are most here who are not bottom barrel working class. I suppose being on the internet is quite bourgeoise

As for snobbism - perhaps not so much snobbery as just a form of elitism.

But at heart I am much more drawn to working class people than what goes for aristocracy - at least in Northern Europe.

But then, I suppose, you did not “endeavor to finish watching the video”.

Marxism has had, as we talk about, positive impact in some western European parliamentary democracies.