of paying for the BBC but only if I opt out of watching TV altogether. So unless I fund the BBC and its quasi-socialist programmes I can’t watch any others from any other company without the threat of a fine and a criminal record. I get CNN, Fox and many other news channels on my TV. If I had to pay for Fox before I could get the BBC supplied free I’d be just as dssatisfied.
As for the ‘get alife’ and stop complaining approach to people who hate the licence fee, I suppose if you lived in China it could always be pointed out to you that you are clothed, housed and fed, so why whine that the government restricts your freedom? Why do many people in the US need a gun, or defend their right to own one? If you don’t complain or act against political oppression it won’t go away.
As for the old ‘you have to pay for the NHS’ argument, I don’t mind paying for schools, hospitals, prisons, roads, defence and other necessry things. TV is not a necessity. Prior to the advent of electronic, wireless type broadcasting, news and information was a privately produced and distributed resource. The government was not involved. It’s about time Britain returned to that happy stae. The BBC is primarily a distributor of low-grade entertainment, with a politically biased ‘news’ service attached. No argument with that except that I don’t want to fund such a shabby organisation.
Your interpretations are immature. Violence is required to violate. It is impossible to bend the free and willful consent of a man without violence or deception.
But that assumes the relationship between Proletariat and Bourgeoisi is due to free will and willful consent. If it is mearly the oppression of the one by the other, then it need not be violence to remove that oppression. It is mearly the act of removing the coercion presant between the Bourgoisi and the Proles. It requires the removal of the Bourgoisi by turning them into Proletariats by removing the means of their coercion over others.
The Marxist might suppose the coercion is so obvious that any Bourgoisi would happily give up that coercion for the benifit of living in a coercion free society. Not that such a thing could ever be possible with a society made up of real human beings as opposed to hypothetical perfect people.
Even this society of hypothetical perfect people should prefer Capitalism over Marxism. Marx’s philosophy may have been influential, but it is populist garbage.
I don’t know for sure. Everyone being able to take pride in their work, and so enjoying their work rather than feeling it was a necessary chore. Everyone able to advance themselves spiritually and intellectually as far as they wished with complete intellectual freedom and no one going without what they need. Would make for a system preferable over the current state of affairs in any country I have heard of. Not that Marxism could ever hope to achieve those vaulted aims.
Actually, it assumes the opposite. The point is that Marxism does not stop the coercion between them, but merely transfers it from one party to the other. A free market is not free if it is coercive, since freedom is the absence of coercion.
The Marxist would see the relationship between factory owner and worker as a coercive relationship, and the fact that workers must work somewhere to survive makes this a compelling argument. Since wherever they work, a significant amount of the profit generated by their work will go to the owner of the place in which they work. A system where workers own their own part of their factory would then seem less coercive from this point of view. Of course it ignores the massive coercion used to releive owners of their ownership.
Well with ‘perfect’ people their would be plenty of people whoes one love in life would be working as a garbage collector. Cheese etc. would be produced according to what people liked best, through perfect communication from the consumer to the producers. Thus the system is doomed to fail in real life.
I am completely against Marxism in the real world. But I think it is important to try and understand why the ideals of Marxism can be persuasive to many, and how it is based initially in honourable ideals. Marxism isn’t economic Devil Worshipty, it isn’t bad for the sake of being bad, it is bad despite trying to be good.
You and I agree completely if we agree that the Marxist misinterprets the whole dynamic. I certainly agree that he sees things the way you describe. Labor is prostitution. It’s a service. What the Marxist DOESN’T understand is that in a noncoercive free market, the worker is free to become an owner if he has the wits and is willing to take the risk. Marxism has always impressed me as a philosophy intended to mitigate failure by eliminating success. It is conceptually bankrupt.
Only if the state perfectly reflects the wishes of the worker, and it is only effective if the worker contributes perfectly to the requirements of the state. Hence the ultimate failing of Communism in that the state becomes the ultimate tyranical and coercive owner entity, and the worker becomes the coerced slave of the state.
Ohh please. We’re forced to pay for a service, so why not use it? That’s missing the point though, isn’t it? If the television fee was not compulsory, would everyone who is forced to pay for it now do so in the form of subscription fees?
And pigs fly if we define “fly” to mean “wallow in mud”. Ownership is determined by who calls the shots with respect to the property in question. If the state doles it out, then the heads of state own it.
‘Forced’ - how? Is a television salesman holding a gun to your head?
(FWIW, I’ve lived without a television for substantial stretches, and no, I wasn’t alienated from modern life. In fact, the opposite was probably the case.)
Doesn’t anyone see a Monty Python sketch in all this?:
Eric Idle as a BBC interviewer: Hello and welcome once again to It’s Philosophy. Tonight our guest is Karl Marx. Tell me, Karl, the development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned by what other development?
Karl Marx: The development of the industrial bourgeoisie.
Eric Idle: Yes, it is indeed! Who won the English Football Cup in 1949?
Karl Marx: Uhuh, the workers control the means of production? The-the struggle of the urban proletariat?