I’ll just mention something for Gaspode’s benefit, rather than quote his reply directly because this board is so felching SLOOOWWWWWW!
Because of the Gold Rush of 1848, primarily, San Francisco early became a major city and port. California was admitted to statehood long before many midwestern farm states, and expericenced significant growth in population and markets. In short, I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. developed on the coasts first, and then grew inward. So I can well imagine that someone in the 19th century might have foreseen the future importance of the West Coast.
Could 1859 be considered near the middle of the 19th Century?
That’s when Abe Lincoln met with Grenville Dodge in Council Bluffs, Iowa to investigate the area as the starting point for the transcontinental railroad to San Francisco.
I’m done reading, and a good read it was about The Life of Karl Marx . So, 120 years after his death, I’ll have to defend him. I picked up this book, because it was recommended by people I appreciate, as e.g. Nick Hornby. It was also short listed for the VW.H. Smith Literary Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Orwell Prize and the Silver Pen Award. I also found it interesting to read about the life of a man who so profoundly changed the history of the 20th century. Anyone remotely interested in politics should buy it today. It read almost like a suspense novel.
I also want to state that my view on economics/politics is totally capitalistic, and libertarian of a Heinlein type. However, I oppose the death penalty, think highly of gun control and am pro choice. That said, you now know, there are no hidden agendas.
Consider the 20th century and try to picture what it would be, without Marx. No USSR, no Red China, no revolutions/contra-revolutions in S. America with a left/right . Would we even have had a 2nd World War? How about the Space Race. Would JFK have served till ’68?
Or looking at it from a different angle: When would the voting franchise have been extended to women? How about eight hours working day? Americans may scorn Marxism/communism, but without them pushing the political envelope to the left, more moderate leftist, like the Democrats would probably have had a different agenda.
You don’t have to like Marx and his ideas, to realise that what he did thoroughly changed the history of almost the whole world. To debunk him, and say that he was “lousy” on economics, because his ideas don’t correspond to your own is using a pretty narrow mindset. Yes, many things where flawed, but then again, many things he said was right.
So… for a brief summary:
Marx was totally bourgeois. He came from a well educated Jewish family and married a noblewoman, Jenny, baronesse von Westphalen. Throughout his life, he was immensely proud of her heritage.
Since he didn’t make any money from his work, during his lifetime, he had to rely on handouts from family, sympathisers who where more well-to-do and mostly Friedrich Engels, who, during most of his life, work in the family business as an industrialist in cotton, often embezzling money to give to Marx.
Marx style of living contributed to his bad economy. He had to live on a good address, entertain in a manner fit for his class, see to it that his daughters where presentable for the fine private schools where he sent them, have a live-in-maid and a private secretary on staff. He was truly an armchair revolutionist.
He’s remembered for two works: The communist Manifesto (co-written with Engels) and Capital. He only finished the first volume of Capital during his lifetime. The other was published after his death, with Engels collecting his notes.
He wrote copious amounts, though. Everything from literary criticism, pamphlets and very entertaining books as attacks on other leftists in Europe. He wrote at least one book of 300 pages to slander one enemy, which no one would publish.
He was a true Mr. know-it-all, brilliant at scheming, good at debates and very intellectual in a bad sense. His ideas of about the proletariat were more in the lines of artisans (cabinet makers and tailors) than assembly line workers. He had utopian/naive ideas about the free men, that would come to live after the revolution, being able to work only for their own pleasure, as a shepherd in the morning and composer in the afternoon. But he didn’t envision everything state owned and controlled, other than as a short transition. His ideas where more in the lines of coöperatives.
Yes, he thought that revolution would come by on it’s own, without having to be pushed. In fact, he actually killed the first International, since he didn’t believe that it would do any fruitful work.
He also thought that the way to do this, was to raise the awareness of the working-class, through education. He was also thankful to capitalism for helping stamp out the last remains of feudalism.
So what was it that were so fearsome?
One was that he labelled himself communist. Communism had been around since before Marx started his working life. It was not seen with keen eyes by those in power. Nobody with power relinquishes it they can avoid it. Communists wanted to extend the franchise to the working class.
Marx extended this, by being the first to connect economics and sociology. The capitalist way, of hiring labour, was wrong, in his opinion. It alienated the working man from his product, since it he didn’t produce it for himself, but for someone else. In a way, one might see Marx as an advocate of everyone being self-employed.
I hope that no one here refutes the simple capitalistic fact that most of us sell our labour for a paycheque. The only reason we have jobs, is because our employer is making more out of our workhours than we ourselves make. If I make €40.000 a year, the company has to make about €80.000 out of my work, to make it worth the trouble.
Marx thought that by eliminating the middle man, the capitalist, we could all make the same kind of money, produce the same commodity and everybody gets richer. With the [then] present system, the capitalist would get richer, while the working man got poorer.
Now of course, Microsoft could not be the company it is today, under that school of thought, so many has declared Marx outdated.
He predicted that, as capitalism matured, we would se periodic recessions, an overgrowing dependence on technology and the growth of huge quasi-monopolistic corporations, spreading all over the world, for new markets to exploit.
But hasn’t capitalism been good for us? (I think so. I think it’s the best way so far of spreading material wealth to the largest number of people). But at the same time, Marx was right, in saying that the gap between the labour force and the capitalists would continue to grow. It’s the very motive force behind capitalism. If a company makes a 20 per cent increase in surplus value, it will not hand that 20 per cent over to the workers (unless they own stock) in the form of a 20 percent raise. It will instead bank the money, enrich the owners or re-invest it and hire more people with the same wages.
This Marx predicted and it’s still fundamentally true.
Capital is totally unreadable, from what I gather. Marx could be witty and a pundit, when he wanted, but his magnum opus was his Victorian or gothic, shaggy dog novel (as is Tristam Shandy), mixing metaphors, hyperbole with science, predictions as vague as Nostradamus’ writings. Quoted out of context (and how many go to the original source? Not even I.) one can make a case for just about anything from* Capital*, as both his advocates and antagonists have done. Marx himself wrote: “…my writings is … an artistic whole…”
There is a text, much shorter – Value, Price and Profit – published in 1865, which condenses Capital to something one can grasp, but few seem to have read it. Capital is the way it is, because Marx wanted it to be an Intellectual Colossus.
I wrote a shorter post earlier (scroll up!) which led to some reply.
Yes, He missed the deadline with over 20 years. He was doing research at the British museum during those years. Hardly what I’d call “lack of research.”
Yes. See above.
The Crown Princess Victoria, daughter of the Queen, took an interest in Marx in 1879 and had an MP, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff (and isn’t that a name!), visit Marx, to find out if he was such a dangerous revolutionary. In his letter to the Crown Princess, after the encounter, he gives a very positive picture of Marx and retells some of his ‘lousy’ prophecies:
“He expected a great and not distant crash in Russia, starting with reforms from above and culminating the collapse of Tsarism. There would then be a revolt against the existing military system in Germany.”
[on forestalling revolutions, by spending less on armaments, thus easing tax burden]: “all sorts of fears and jealousies would make this impossible. The burden will grow worse and worse as science advances, for the improvement in arts of destruction will keep pace with it’s advance and every year more and more will be devoted to costly engines of war.”
I wrote that Marx saw a shift on economic power to the Pacific Rim.
This is totally geocentric. To say that the American west coast is the Pacific Rim is to narrow it down a tad too much.
Matthew C. Perry opened up Japan in 1854, in Edo bay. Hong Kong was just a harbour for opium, until 1898. For Marx to have a hunch about this shift in the mid 18th century is astonishing. The US had not established it self as a world power yet, and California had just become a state (Sept. 9 1850).
From what I can deduce, Marx says some brilliant things, and some utterly stupid. If you only look at the stupid things and then say that all he wrote was foolish, you make it too easy on yourself and you’re also ignoring a man who, as an individual, might be more responsible than any other individual, for shaping the 20th century.
Here’s an anecdote from my History of Economic Thought class in college:
One day in class, Eva Luna gets a bit bored and decides to actually ask a question about the days’ readings, which were on Marx (although not source text, more like college textbook condensed stuff. I know, I know, someday I’ll read the real thing.) The exchange went something like this:
Eva Luna: So if people were supposed to contribute according to their ability and take according to their needs, what’s to stop a lazy person from lying about ability and slacking off? What motivates most people to do a good job?
Nutty, but Pretty Sharp Professor (chuckling loudly to himself): Eva Luna, you said you’re spending a semester in Russia in the fall? [this was 1989] Well, you’ll see what I mean for yourself quite soon enough.
Absolutely true in most cases. Same goes for U.S. Government employees (of which I used to be one, but got sick of having to cover for slackers). But that’s a rant for another day. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
It is one of the oldest tricks in the book to claim that your side has an inevitability to it. Marx said it, Monarchs said it, current pro-market capitalists say it… everyone wants to be on the side of natural order, and everyone has misled themselves to thinking that being on the side of natural order corresponds most to their conception of freedom, choice, and compassion, which seems so downright contradictory that I can’t even begin to understand it.
I don’t know whether or not there is a natural order, some inevitable and teleological force that will guide mankind into some unstoppable juggernaut of social reform. Extreme pessimism would tell us that each tried and true government thus far has failed, so there is no reason to think that subsequent ones will last, much like every scientitific theory before has been succeeded by a newer, better theory, so there is no reason to believe that any theory we have now is actually correct. I don’t necessarily subscribe to this view, but it at least doesn’t try to win you over by telling you you have no choice but to liev by the inevitable rule of whomever.
As to Marx’s specific flaws, I think that he required—like most ideological persons—that man be an animal with specific wants and needs and an inherent nature. Proclaiming this axiomatically does much to support any particular “inevitable” conclusion (and sometimes almost begs the question, though I don’t think Marx did this). But it rather seems that man isn’t any particular “way” anywhere. He survives and reproduces in all sorts of environments. So long as this is so, there is no inevitable force. And so long as we view anything that would actively destroy arbitrary environments as unfair, cruel, and so on, then every unstoppable force meets an immovable wall.
I’m going to stay away from the realistic application of communism, as I already dredged through that one a couple months ago, and it was thoroughly exhausing.
About what Marx believed, and how he saw communism as promoting the general welfare, I can comment on.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” (Manifesto).
He (and I) see history as a never ending cycle of rich people exploiting the poor for their own interests, or rich people influencing or controlling the government to maximize their profits (and consequently denying poor people the opportunity for a wholesome, enjoyable, fulfilling life). Conversely, the poor have consistently struggled against this, and for the betterment of their own lives.
If you are someone who believes that poor people are poor because they are lazy, and not because of the grand power scheme oppressing them, then you are likely to dismiss that. If you look at history carefully, and see things like government troops slaughtering protesters who are fighting for an 8 hour work day and minimum wage at the behest of corporations, then you may agree with this.
Alienated labor. This comes from his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.” Labor is alienated because “the worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity.” Basically, most people do not do what they want to do. We are forced into our work b/c of economic necessity, and thus it is alienated labor.
Also, workers are alienated from the products of their labor as well, as most often workers are working to produce something for someone else, and not for themselves. Furthermore, the general atmosphere in capitalism is one of competition and isolation, rather than cooperation and association. We are alienated from eachother too, as we often times have to work against one another. And of course, because capitalism thrives on working in cities (usually in very non-pastoral environments), workers are also alienated from nature.
So… in capitalism, we are alienated from our work (in most cases- some are lucky enough to do what they love), we are alienated from other people, we are alienated from the products we work for, and we are alienated from nature. Marx sees this as the root of which most of our modern problems stem from. We grapple with our alienation, and often times we lose.
Marx was against the death penalty. (Thanks to Howard Zinn for this quote, he took it from an article Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune):
“Is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones.”
I’ll stop there. But, I’d like to counter all of those who I know are thinking or saying, “idealistic theory, not practical, etc.”
This is a quote from Maxim Gorky, a Russian writer. (Thanks again to Zinn for the quote)
“I find that social idealism is most necessary precisely in an era of revolution…Without the participation of this idealism, a revolution- and all of life- would turn into a dry, arithmetical problem of distributing material wealth, a problem the solution of which demands blind cruelty and streams of blood, a problem which, arousing savage instincts, kills man’s social spirit, as we shall see in our time.”
I’d like the record to show that Marx was a sympathetic, caring, compassionate humanist. He believed in communism because of his disgust at the treatment of workers (the vast majority of people) in his time.
If he were alive today, he would probably fall in to the category of “hippie.” Non-violent, caring, interested in the goodwill of all people and appalled at the violence of the rich and the State. (No) thanks to the Soviet Union, most people think of Marx as some cold, calculating, tyrant, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Soviet Union has given communism a bad name, as the Soviet Union bastardized communism into a state every bit as facist as the US. Boo Soviet Union! Yea Marx!