Yes.
Well, I didn’t ignore your post, I just responded to some bits that seemed fundamental to the rest of what you said but wrong according to my understanding. I’m sorry if that offends, considering you’ve put effort into what I didn’t address and the subject matter is obviously troubling you.
Though I’m not interested in the KT-style name-play with the “Sil-ly” quip and the haughty trashing of Liberals as brain-dead by the way, so I hope you won’t mind if I ignore little hiccups of that sort.
What I am interested in is whether or not I can learn anything and maybe even teach anything.
So what I gather is I shouldn’t be using Google or Wikipedia, coz they’ve been appropriated by Liberals. Ok, well I know Google has been re-programmed to only show you what it thinks you might (ought to?) be interested in, and Wikipedia literally can be re-written by people with an agenda, but I’m not aware of anything more than that. I still use them as a guide, though not gospel - I am a thinking man, not a sponge.
Frankly, I prefer to just go by my own experience and reason anyway, rather than quarrel over facts about who said that and who did what. I think you can figure out the important things from the ground up, without getting bogged down with the unreliability of second-hand resources. That’s what I like trying to do anyway.
I’d honestly never heard the term Cultural Marxism before recently, so with Wikipedia and the like confirming what I thought, that gave me no more grounds to be any more suspicious - but regardless of that, it really has nothing to do with what I know about Marx. I don’t know everything about Marx, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t concerned with cultural matters, just economic ones.
But I gather that you’re trying to take the famous quote “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and apply it to cultural attitudes anyway. Fair enough.
So to compare this quote with your interpretation of “consuming per desire and producing per capacity, rather than consuming in accordance with merit”, I am to understand that you see no issue in “translating” the term need to desire, and that you would rather the word “merit” was included in the quote instead of this.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his desires” ought to be “From each according to his ability, to each according to his merits”, yes?
Whether or not this relates to Hillary Clinton doesn’t interest me, she’s a political nobody now anyway, but perhaps you saw her as a figurehead for a larger movement that is taking your amended Marx quote to an extreme - something like “From each according to his ability, to each according to whatever he wants to consume without boundary and regardless of what they deserve”.
But this is all groundwork to try and align our respective points in light of any misunderstanding that may have occurred.
I now see a couple of issues that sound like something that you would expect to see on a philosophy board:
Q1: What is the difference between want and need?
Q2: What is merit and how is it/ought it to be determined economically?
To start with Q2, immediately we see a subjective term: “merit” and we run into problems when trying to make something objective out of it. But I believe this was the whole point behind Marx’s quote “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” - this is meant to be a subjectively preferable definition of merit.
Do what you can to the best of your abilities, so that it may be shared out in such a way that everybody gets at least some socially respectable measure that hopefully fulfills at least their basic needs, so long as it is economically possible to do this.
- The shared-out part is what they “merit”, so long as they are doing what they can to the best of their abilities.
Forget that Marx said it, since you are clearly emotional about what you associate with him(!) - is this not a fair representation of merit?
Q1: I think wants and needs can both be taken to extremes where wants can be infinite and needs can be next to nothing, so long as it keeps you alive in some basic way. But I think I have somewhat covered what these terms ought to imply in my above attempt at Q2: wants and needs ought to have social context. There is a certain acceptable minimum that everyone in a society ought to have just by virtue of living in that society, just because it’s well within the capability of that society to provide it. Yes, they should be answering to the call of “From each according to his ability”, but frankly when societies get so good at providing things that people need (like much of the West) it really doesn’t matter if some people don’t. It’s not like they aren’t looked down upon anyway, but they’re still humans and they live in a rich society that can easily pick up their slack. Before that enrages you beyond rationality (I hope I’m not too late) frankly I think our economy is better off without the shitty people providing stuff to you. If somebody is absolutely dead-set on not contributing, they’re going to provide crappy stuff in a crappy way and bring everyone else down while they do it. Like I said, Western societies can easily pick up their slack if you just let them go home.
The problem is that, in a society that has particularly good visibility of all the different lifestyles that are possible within it, and where the available information shows that as society gets better and better it’s providing for some people far more than others - this isn’t going to sit well. By far, the wants/needs of the wealthiest of the wealthy are visibly being catered for at increasingly higher rates to the point of obscenity. Relatively, the vast majority see little to no increase over time in having their wants and needs catered for - in some cases it’s a decrease over time. It’s possible to keep these increases aligned across all levels of wealth, in line with the ability of our economy to provide better and better, but this isn’t happening, and we can all see it.
Do the taunted vast majority not merit some fairness in this regard? Are they being baited into a state of envy to try and “motivate” them to actually reach the heights of the very most wealthy that they’ll never reach? I think the answer to the former is no, because economic improvement relies on all contributing people, the vast majority of whom are not being remunerated in line with their merit. They are the ones contributing the most to the increase in economic prosperity simply by their numbers. Just because the wealthiest of the wealthy own it all (some document somewhere has their name on it, so what?), doesn’t mean they’re collectively contributing to the same extent as others who are reaping considerably less proportionately. Needs and wants can and ought to be adjusted accordingly. The answer to the latter is very probably.