I more and more think you are a closet socialist.

Any post-Marxists itt?

Can someone explain commodity fetishism to me?

Its when you rub bars of gold all over yer junk

lol

Howard Zinn on Marx, an excerpt from "The Future of History" pg. 93-7, circa late 90's:

DB: In The Zinn Reader, you write, "Important to me as I was becoming conscious of the crucial question of class was to read Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto." 1998 marks the 150th anniversary of The Manifesto. There have been new editions and public meetings around this event. The question arises, Is Marx relevant today? If so, How?

Zinn: I decided to deal with the question of the relevance of Marx even before this 150th anniversary, to show how far in advance I am of the general culture. I decided to do that by writing a play about him. It's called Marx in Soho a one-person play, which I mentioned in a previous interview. To answer your question, the reason I wanted to do something about Marx is because I think he has important things to say.

There are some things that he said in the nineteenth century that turn out to be inadequate for an understanding of what the world is like today. Clearly, he could not anticipate so much of what has happened since then. Like a lot of people on the left, he had a foreshortened view of how long it would take for a socialist revolution to come about. There was a point where he and Engels thought the revolutions in Europe of 1848 would lead to workers' revolutions. They did not. They showed their disappointment.

So he did not really figure on capitalism's ability to survive and on the ingeniousness of the system in devising obstacles to revolution and its power in suppressing revolutionary movements and its ability to wean the working class and its consciousness away from the idea of revolutionary change. The U.S. is probably the primary illustration of that, and although Marx followed events in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century and was a correspondent for a while of the New York Tribune, he could not, and I don't know that anyone could, anticipate that the American system would be able to fend off revolutionary movements by a combination of tactics. I say "tactics" as if they were deliberate, but I think that probably it's not an accurate description to call them tactics. Let's say there are a number of developments in American capitalism that made it possible for the system to survive. One of them was the fact that capitalism in the U.S., drawing upon the enormous wealth of this country, was able to respond to workers' movements by giving concessions, respond to unionism by agreeing to raise wages and lower hours. There were a lot of struggles to force the system to do that, but they did that. The system responded to economic crises by reforms, as it did in the 1930s under the New Deal. In doing so, responding with more and more reforms, it created a more satisfied section of the working class which then was not ripe for a workers' revolution, and which has remained content with the system or, when it became discontented, did not become discontented with capitalism as a system but became discontented with specific manifestations of the system. Most working people in the U.S. do not see the problems they have as systemic, but as problems which are correctable by reforms. So the system, by having the wealth sufficient to distribute more goodies to sections of the working class and yet maintain huge profits for itself, has been able to sustain itself.

At the time of World War 1, W.E.B. Du Bois, certainly one of the most far-sighted of American intellectuals, saw that the American system was giving some rewards to its workers and was able to do this on the basis of its exploitation of people abroad. He saw the imperialism of World War 1, of the Western powers, and he saw that the Western powers, by drawing out the wealth of the Middle East and Latin America and Asia, was able thereby to give some small part of its profits to its own working class and therefore enlist that working class in a kind of national unity which then enabled them to call this working class to war and sustain that war.

As I said, Marx did not foresee this very sophisticated ability of capitalism to create a certain degree of satisfaction among just enough of the working class, certainly not all of the working class, but just enough to give it a buffer against revolution. There's a big difference between having a working class which is eighty percent of the population and is seething with anger at the system and a working class of which half has been given enough goodies to be content, leaving a minority in desperate poverty. The minority may be an important one, in the U.S. it may be forty million people who are in desperate circumstances without health care, with a high incidence of child mortality, but still not enough to make the kind of workers' revolution that Marx and Engels were hoping for.

So Marx didn't see that kind of development. I think he also did not see, and this was pointed out by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran when they wrote their post-World War 2, post-Marxist analysis of capitalism that the economic crisis that Marxists expected to happen after the end of World War 2 did not take place because of the militarization of capitalism. A kind of military Keynesianism was in operation, where by spending a huge amount of money on military contracts, the government was creating employment and was giving shots of "drugs," in the long run poisonous but in the short run sustaining the system. Baran and Sweezy saw this militarization as one of the ways in which capitalism was able to survive. And Marx did not really foresee that.

On the other hand, there were analyses that Marx made of the capitalist system which turn out to be very, very true, and very perceptive. Probably the most obvious one is the increasing concentration and centralization of capital on a worldwide scale. What we talk about now as the global economy, as globalization, Marx had foreseen. He saw the world becoming more and more interconnected economically. He saw the corporations turning into megacorporations and the mergers and the possession of the material resources of the world becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Very often it's said Marx talked about the immiseration of the proletariat and the concomitant increasing wealth of the upper classes, the polarization of wealth and poverty. And very often it's said that Marx was wrong about this. We haven't had this. In the U.S. it doesn't look that clear because of this large middle class which is not at one pole or the other. But if you look at it on a worldwide scale, world capitalism has moved exactly in that direction. If you take the wealth of the rich countries as against the wealth of the poor countries, and especially if you take the wealth of the upper income brackets in the rich countries against the ninety percent of the people in the poor countries, you have a polarization of wealth which is more stark than it was in the nineteenth century.

DB: So in terms of looking at and understanding political economy, there is much that is relevant in Marx's analyses.

Zinn: I think his analysis of capitalism remains very relevant, and his perception that the profit motive was ruinous for the human race remains, I think, a great insight. We see that the drive of corporations for profit is done at the expense of human beings all over the world. One of the things Marx pointed out was that once money was introduced into the world economy, the pursuit of wealth became infinite. It was no longer a matter of material possessions, of land, as it was in feudal times, now there was no longer a limit to the accumulation of wealth once money was introduced. This endless pursuit of money has led to all sorts of dangerous and evil developments, because the pursuit of money has led chemical companies to pollute the air and water, has led arms manufactures to create monstrous weapons of destruction without regard to how they will be used or against whom they will be used. His analysis of the evils of the profit motive for production I think is more true now than it ever was.

DB: Those who trumpet the virtues of capitalism point out that the USSR appropriated Marx and his name and the good name of socialism. Since the Soviet Union collapsed in disarray both Marx's analyses and a socialist political philosophy are therefore discredited.

Zinn: That's what's being said. Marxism would only be discredited if indeed the Soviet Union had created the kind of society that Marx and Engels foresaw as a socialist society, and then collapsed. But when Marx and Engels talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat, they had a very special conception of what that meant. It meant that the majority of the people, the working class, would be in charge of the society. They did not mean by dictatorship of the proletariat that a political party would represent itself as total spokesperson for the working class. In fact, not only would a political party not be the spokesman, but certainly not a central committee, certainly not a Politburo, certainly not one person. That kind of dictatorship was not envisioned by Marx and Engels when they talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In fact, at one point, Marx was talking about the Paris Commune of 1871 and the remarkably democratic character of the Paris Commune, the communards, the people who gathered and legislated, made decisions in the context of endless daily, hourly, twenty-four-hours-a-day discussions in the streets of Paris by the people of Paris. Marx talked about those remarkable several months when democracy flourished in Paris, the Paris Commune. He said, You want to know what I mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat? Look at the Paris Commune. The Soviet Union certainly did not follow that. And when Marx talked about what a socialist society would look like, he certainly did not expect that a socialist society would set up gulags, would imprison dissidents and shoot not just capitalists, but fellow revolutionaries, as was done in both the Soviet Union and in China. So the police state and the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union were very foreign to Marx and Engels. They saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a temporary phenomenon during which the socialist character of society would become more and more communal, more and more democratic, and that the state, as they said, would become less and less necessary. Marx and Engels talked in The Communist Manifesto about their aim being the free development of the individual.

The Soviet Union and other countries that have called themselves Marxist and have established police states acted in a way very, very contrary, I believe, to the spirit of Marx's ideas. So that when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, and it happened with other countries in Eastern Europe, I personally did not feel this as a sign that socialism was therefore discredited. To me it was always a bastard form of socialism, one that couldn't even be called socialism. Actually, I was very glad that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union you could no longer associate the Soviet Union with socialism, you could no longer say, This is a place where socialism exists. To me it seemed that now the air could be cleared and that we could begin to think of socialism for instance as it was thought of in the early part of the century in the U.S., before the Soviet Union existed, when the Socialist Party in the U.S. was a powerful force, when its candidate for President got close to a million votes. You had socialist newspapers all over the country read probably by several million people. At the time the I.W.W, the Industrial Workers of the World, was a very powerful force in organizing strikes and struggles around the country.

To me it is very interesting that socialism in this country was at its most influential before a Soviet Union existed. Because then the people could, without the imposition of some foreign, distorted example, take a look at the ideas of socialism. It made a lot of sense to them. They could see Eugene Debs and Mother Jones and Emma Goldman and Jack London and Lincoln Steffens and see obviously admirable people in the U.S. who had turned to socialism because they saw what capitalism was doing to people. Socialism at that time represented a simple common-sense idea, that you take the wealth of the country and try to use it in a rational and humane way.

Not read all the thread; not going to. But in reply to this post: Who says its a Utopia?

That, to me, is the fundamental problem with all collectivist ideoligies, be it Communism or Islam: "One man's meat is another man's poison", as the saying goes.

I am not really sure what was my stance back then. But yes socialism sucks, my main cause in this thread was defending Marx from some dumb allegations, but he clearly was a terrible human being - not sure what that has to do with Islam though.

Can you explain why socialism sucks? I would like to hear your input.

lol at Marx being a terrible human being.

Any serious discussion about communism has to involve the smurfs imo:



Smurfs = communist?

Well I was saying that Communism and Islam are happy bed fellows because they are both highly collectivist political movements. Thats why I think uber-leftists are at pains to apologize for brutal Islamic regimes and muslim violence all the time. Also radical leftism and Islam also have an "Internationalist" flavour, which they find common cause over.

Who said religion was the opiate of the masses I wonder. Yea highly rationalistic atheist world view has tons in common with irrational religious one.

Man transcendent in Man is the antithesis of the Islamic project.

You win the prize.

I found Marx dreary to read until I read The Communist Manifesto, which really comes to life. It doesn't take long to read, either.

At least communists have principles. Capitalists don't.

He was writing letters hoping for the death of his inheritance-uncle.

He did not care for his children. He was highly dependent on Engels. And yes - he was anti-semitic.

State socialism sucks because it is based on force and murder. If you advocate libertarian-socialism well whatever have fun educating people

What principles?

What are you talking about? Stalin's principles?

Taking away property is not a principle it is a crime.

Communists believe on principle there is a higher purpose to life than one's own individual interests. Capitalists don't. That is all I am saying. The rightness or wrongness of the actions of communists is a separate issue for discussion.


edit:

Question 1 : What is Communism?
Answer : Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

Principles of Communism by Frederick Engels

this is very true

I believe that everyone should decide what his "higher purpose" is, as long as he does not harm others. Communists however believe that they can force people to live after their doctrine.

Liberation of the proletariat - sure but what are proletarians nowadays?

By what means are they supposed to be "liberated" ?

It sound cool and all but at the end it means force and violence.

I mean, disagree with this class warfare theory all you want (it is certainly flawed), but it's not like Marx wanted individuals to sacrifice themselves at the public alter. The Manifesto is replete with allusions to the loss of individuality, spiritual degeneration, and alienation. Communism is supposed to be a path to a more perfect self-fulfillment.

You will fit perfectly with the ethos of this forum

At least they have a doctrine.

In how far is that a good thing?

well if you don't have principles how can you have integrity?

say what you like about the tenets of national socialism dude at least it's an ethos.