Marxist regimes are authoritarian and unaccountable. They lie about their achievements. They demand veneration and have a habit of putting up large posters around their countries telling us how marvellous they are. Exactly like the BBC in fact, except I didn’t have to send £126.50 to the Kremlin every year to stop the boys coming round to my house.
painter, if you want to start a new thread about the rights and wrongs of the TV licence, go ahead. But this debate is about why Karl Marx came top of a poll of philosophers. So far you have failed to convince me that 8400 Radio 4 listeners voted for Marx because of the way the BBC is funded. In fact you don’t seem to have made any connection between the two at all.
And surely there’s a difference between Karl Marx as a philosopher and Marxism/Communism as a 20th century system of government?
I have looked a little more into Karl Marx’s ideas. Since he considered why people were unhappy and how that might be fixed he was indeed a philosopher. He sems to have taken a reasonable idea (people are unhappy because they don’t feel pride in their work) and ran with it to what seems an idiotic or insane level. Dropping religion since people doing religion are not fighting the oppressive system and instead indulging in the Opium of the masses, and blaming all wrong on those who happen to own factories and the like. All pretty simplistic, as foolheaded as Libertarianism and twice as mistaken in its underlying ideas.
It also showed me that no country seems to have gotten anywhere near to being Marxist, they simply replaced oppressive owners with oppressive state ownership, and took away freedoms from the people rather than expanded and enhanced their freedoms. In a way like Libertarianism (and yet opposite) the system relies on people being essentially moral wise and selfless, a lovely ideal but doomed to failure when applied to real people.
Matt you say ‘But this debate is about why Karl Marx came top of a poll of philosophers’. Nearly true. Its about why Karl Marx came top of a BBC poll of philosophers. I just wanted to let people know just what kind of organisation the BBC is and I’ve given you a few links. Hopefully someone, somewhere will be a bit better informed about the BBC, or at least more curious about it.
If nothing else, Marx appears in chapter 27 of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. I am only on Chapter 21 so I don’t know what kind of treatment Marx gets from Russell, but he made the cut for the book at that time. Possibly it is so Russell can call him a poopyhead, like I said, I am not that far yet.
So far all you’ve done is made some vague allegations and drawn unsupported conclusions –
- The B.B.C. seeks to preserve its income from the licensing scheme => the B.B.C. is Marxist.
Do you understand that there might be other reasons for such an organisation to preserve such an income source? Do you understand that even the most virulent anti-communist organisation would not give up such an income source?
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The B.B.C. is Marxist => It supports repressive and brutal communist dictatorship forms of government
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The B.B.C. is Marxist => It jiggered the poll to make Marx come out on top.
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The B.B.C. is Marxist => Anyone who would participate in the poll is Marxist.
I don’t believe for one second that you or your family don’t ever consume a BBC product and even if by some miracle you don’t it makes no difference. I don’t have kids but I fund other’s educations etc etc. The BBC is another public resource which I’m only too pleased to pay for whether I directly consume or benefit or not, your shrill and unsupported accusations notwithstanding.
You don’t want to pay - get rid of your TV and radio and block all BBC web sites. And make sure you never watch any of the sky channels filled with BBC content, which is most of them. Or listen to any BBC supported orchestras or concert series or let your kids access free BBC learning support materials, programmes or web sites at school, now or in the future.
And I certainly hope you aren’t using NHS facilities, driving on roads, accessing public education or any other service that someone else has paid for involuntarily through taxation, because that would be hypocritical.
Jesus - all this carping about a measly £120 or whatever (2 months of Sky) - at least you can opt out. I can’t opt out of funding your education, your kids education and all the other public resources I don’t use, wars I don’t support etc etc.
If you don’t like the existence of organisations funded for the public good, fine, most of us do. We accept the need to fund things that are for the public good even if we don’t use them as much as others. It’s called ‘society’.
To rant on as if the BBC is some Marxist plot to steal our bodily fluids is simply preposterous. The BBC is a fine if flawed institution and its news reporting as good as you can reasonably expect. Compared to CNN and Fox it is Solomon in its objectivity.
Get some perspective for crying out loud.
Much as the traditional anti-BBC screeds and the facile “UK elite is all lefties” nonsense is fun, it does rather seem that quite a few people here are eagerly taking an internet poll at face value. So keen are some to write off their favourite bogeymen as Marxist that they practically fall over themselves in crediting the poll with absolute validity. Never mind that voting was in no way restricted to listeners of the show, nor even to internet users in the UK, let alone some self-defining “elite”*. It might be nice, before slapping labels on ill-defined groups on the basis of one easily-gamed popularity contest, to ascertain exactly who voted in the poll, how many times, and what the poll is actually representative of.
As usual, the not-notably-lefty Economist injects a touch of sanity. Far be it from me to suggest that their late-in-the-day tactical voting candidate, Hume, is considerably higher in the poll than pure name recognition would otherwise dictate…
*Incidentally, one would think an elite so toffee-nosed as Blake endearingly portrays for us would consider this sort of poll to be alarmingly plebeian, and steer well clear. But we shan’t let that distract us from connect-the-dots sociology.
I guess my problem is that I have a hard time thinking of dialectical materialism, or any causal theory of history, as being part of philosophy; it belongs in the realm of political science. In modern usage “philosophy” is generally understood to encompass logic, ethics, aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics – and dialectical materialism is irrelevant to all of them. (Its application by some critics to art history does not make it actually relevant to aesthetics in any philosophical sense.) Most glaringly for a politically relevant belief-system, it makes no contributions to ethics. E.g., if Marx had come up with some reasoned ethical argument for the position that the people, collectively, have the right to own and control the means of production, collectively, that would have been a valuable contribution to philosophy; but so far as I know he never did, he simply assumed it.
Even if we accept that one of the hats Marx wore was “philosopher,” I have a hard time thinking of him as the greatest philosopher. Surely Plato, Aristotle, Hume and Kant are all greater pure philosophers than Marx.
While Marx’s economic thought–and I agree with BrainGlutton that Marx was more of an economist and political theorist than a philosopher–was influential, if that’s what were going by then surely Locke and Smith are just as influential as Marx, if not more so.
Locke is usually included in any list of Western “philosophers” but Smith is not – probably because Locke’s work encompassed epistemology as well as political theory.
Locke, Smith, oh yes mention them in the same breath as Marx! Ludicrous. Marx was a monster who’s preachings helped release legions of devils and many tens of millions of people were done to death as a consequence. Many tens of millions tortured. Thought itself turned upside down and inside-out and wrong way round. Humanity warped and twisted beyond belief.
As to the BBC and Marx, it is of course daft to think of it as a ‘Marxist conspiracy’. It is not daft to think that it is socialist organisation which has over the years shown many many programmes that display great sympathy with Marx and Marxists. Ha, fellow travellers indeed.
This is an outrage which I am forced to confess makes the injustice of the licence fee a nothing.
Oh, give me a break. Marx himself did all those things? On this line of logic Jesus of Nazareth was a great monster. Look at all the killings done in his name.
You can’t separate Marx’s thought into philosophy and political economy etc. All branches of the same tree. Marx was significant because he believed philospohy wasn’t just about explaining but changing, providing the tools for analysing and acting. Praxis. And in this, in that his thought provided the tools that dominated politics for a century, and affected the lives of billions, he has a claim to being the greatest. Which doesn’t mean ‘best’ or ‘most cuddly’ or whatever the hell it is that has got people’s pants in a twist.
Locke and Smith were just cheerleaders by comparison. If you people don’t like the choice you should have voted instead of complaining after the event.
so Hegel isn’t a philosopher then? Your hard time notwithstanding of course dialectical materialism is a philosophy.
But Marx called for violence, insisting that anihilation of the proletariat was a prerequisite for economic justice.
So by your understanding of Marx, he was calling for the physical liquidation of the working class? Is this a whoosh? Annihilation in Marx does not mean ‘physical annihilation’. It’s all part and parcel of the working of the dialectic. Besides, nothing says philosophy can’t argue for violence.
WARNING: boring Marxist stuff life is too short to bother understanding ahead.
I meant the bourgeoisie, of course.
“Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.” — The Manifesto of the Communist Party
Cites gone out of fashion have they? And also does not refer to killing.
T
To argue that Marx was talking about the physical killing of classes of people is simply preposterously uninformed ignorance, your out of context, no cite provided snippets notwithstanding, and regardless of what monsters like Mao and Stalin got up to in his ostensible name in the next century.