Modern perceptions of Marx

Factual Questions
21

Yes, unfortunately.

That may be true. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a very bad man and a complete moron.

Here’s a few for you.

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.” :rolleyes:

“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”

Here he displays the fact that he never understood capitalism at all.

“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”

Here he displays the fact that he never undertsood anything about human nature or politics.

22

How the hell are those quotes “filthy lies?”

23

Actually that’s this one:

“Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love”

24

Are you honestly claiming that an accusation of men being adulterers is a “filthy lie?” Or that men saw prostitutes on a regular basis in the 19th century is a “filthy lie?” Or that servants were often taken advantage of sexually is a “filthy lie?”

25

Yeah, I have a hard time working up indignation over claims that middle-class marriage in Victorian England involved a significant amount of “hypocritically concealed” illegitimate sex.

No, I don’t think that middle-class Victorian marriage was actually, literally, a recognized form of universal polygamy. Nor do I think that when Jesus is quoted in Matthew as calling his audience a “brood of vipers”, he was speaking to a group of actual, literal, snakes. But there’s a difference between rhetorical exaggeration and a “filthy lie”, wouldn’t you say?

(Obligatory disclaimer to calm the anti-commie brigade: I don’t agree with Marx in general and do not endorse any Marxist or communist political systems. But that doesn’t mean the guy didn’t make any good points. I also think that many anti-Marx zealots of today tend to forget or ignore just how appalling some of the abuses of nineteenth-century capitalism could be. Marx saw a lot of barbarity under early-industrial dog-eat-dog capitalism that would not be tolerated in our modern mixed-economy welfare-state capitalist democracies.)

Then I got nothing, sorry. Hmm, now I’m curious about this poll too.

26

Just a quick reply.

Quoting Marx out of context is about as useful as quoting Jesus or Sartre or Kant or Nitzsche out of context. Taking a single statement that seem to be moronic by today’s standard and therefore trying to invalidate all thay said is dishonest.

Marx said a lot of stupid things, and a lot of brilliant things. Seeing that the revolution would first come to Russia in the 1850’s and that economic power would shift to the Pacific Rim at the same time leads me to think that Marx was very insightful.
Saying that the working class would raise up to form communes and get rid of the capitalists was naïve.

But that’s the thing about Marx. he was a philosopher, not an agitator. He looked at the world in the middle of the 19th century and postulated things, projected things and made educated guesses about what was to come. Most of the time he didn’t advocate anything, he just thought that extrapolating what hapened then, might lead to things later.

He, himself, didn’t want to live in a proletarian dictatorship.

People who haven’t read Marx, but get his sayings 2nd hand, are usually dismissive, but that’s just because they haven’t put his writing in context or read anything about the actual person.

A lot of truly horrible people have done a lot in the name of Marx during the 20th century. Marx would’ve been very upset at this and would’ve denounced it unequivocally.

A lot of the things he predicted have come true, though he didn’t foresee how the working class would rise to middle class and how it would be seduced by the trappings of materialism and consumerism.

So, again, do you have anything substantial that negates the theories of Marx or are you just trying to demonize te commie boogeyman?

27

The irony, of course, is that Francis Wheen makes a convincing argument that Marx himself had an illegitimate child.

28

No cite, but I’ve memories that he used to shag the maid

29

That’s what Wheen argues in his biography of Marx (which I’d reccomend, btw.) He argues, as have others, that Marx had an affair with his housekeeper, a woman named Helene Demuth, and that her son Freddy was fathered by Marx. This is based mainly on a letter by Louise Freyberger, who claimed to have been told by Engels. Of course, it all assumes that

  1. The letter isn’t a forgery

and

  1. She was telling the truth

and there’s room for doubt on both those things.

30

Forgive my ignorance, but I am interested in the following specific claim:

Does this mean the the Industrial revolution and the capitalist system that fueled it squeezed out the middle classes of the previous age, i.e. the artisans and skilled individual workers who made up the middle class of the previous century were reduced under 19th century capitalism to working in factories?

Also, what changes to capitalism–as understood by Marx–made it possible to create a large middle class?

31

To some extent, yes (although not all of them went into factories: some emigrated or became soldiers, for example). I’m not sure that one can really speak of pre-industrial artisan/yeoman groups as a “middle class” in modern terms; but whatever we call them, they did exist, and many of them did find their socioeconomic fortunes significantly depressed by the switch to an industrial/capitalist system.

Two examples from 18th-19th c. Britain that I can think of off the top of my head are handloom weavers and spinners who couldn’t compete with the new industrial textile mills, and small agriculturalists who were displaced by the enclosure of formerly communal lands for large-scale livestock farming.

32

The point to understand is that the very definition of middle class changed.

Wiki has a nice concise definition of the petit bourgeoisie:

This class has existed since the beginnings of civilization, where civilization implies villages and cities with specialized workers rather than tribal groups who are self-sufficient as a whole.

However, they were historically a minute fraction of the population. The vast majority of people were farmers, serfs, slaves, peons or the like, or were factory workers or had other low-level physical jobs like mine workers, dock laborers, etc.

They did not patronize the shops of the petit bourgeoisie. They bought minimal amounts of subsistence products from locals who were about as bad off as they were.

Whether or not it is technically true, Henry Ford is usually credited with the notion that by raising factory workers pay sufficiently he could create a new market for his goods. That is the beginning of the modern notion of the middle class: factory workers and physical laborers who nonetheless can share in the consumer society and use goods that are essentially indistinguishable from the modern day versions of the petit bourgeoisie. This has caused the middle class, at least in the U.S. but also in most of the western world, to go from a small single-digit percentage of the population to 80% or more of the population.

This is the world we take for granted today, but it did not emerge, even in the U.S., until after WWII. There was a real working class, and real poverty in this country, through the Depression, which is why so many people were hysterical about Communism. Although some real poverty persists, it is localized and small in percentage. Our workers are not going to revolt against their boats and summer homes and big screen plasmas.

Marx could not have foreseen something that did not occur until after his death. Socialism in a hundred forms was thought to be the only cure, even in the U.S.

Did the industrial revolution disrupt earlier forms of production? Certainly. Production is in a continual ferment and older forms are always being disrupted by the new. That’s the outrage over outsourcing. But old-style artisans were a tiny slice of the population and the economy. And many of these could adapt to the new forms. Cottage industries thrived even in the face of large industrial factories, and the growing wealth of the population as a whole created a greater demand for luxury items. Some people were hurt, some became better off. But this is a truism for everything, everywhere, at every time. The industrial revolution accelerated the process but still took a full century or more to percolate through the entire economy. Nobody can see a century out and nobody can wait a century for change when it is needed.

33

Thx Exapno Mapcase; I’ve really learned something here.

Essentially, the petit-bourgeous/middle class of pre-industrial Europe was very small; the Industrial Revolution probably didn’t reduce their numbers as much as it changed the rules under which one could be a part of this class.

Industrialization also had the effect of exposing that the lower classes “rely entirely on the sale of their labor-power for survival”, and so the system perpetuated poverty. This (probably just in part) led to Marx’ critique of capitalism.

The modern middle class–developed long after Marx’ death–was completely different from what constituted the middle class of old; because physical laborers were eventually paid more, they could enjoy the same standard of living as the petit-bourgeous middle class, and the two then become indistinguishable as one middle-class.

I have to say I read Das Kapital when I was much younger, and like most young men probably understood it quite poorly and only in the hindsight of revolutionary history. i appreciate the historical context, and think I understand it at least a little better now. Yet anoter reason I subscribe to these boards…

34

I understand your well put points but isn’t that an apologists view of Marx? It is hard not to fault someone for failing to foresee something when his entire self-assumed role was to predict how the world needed to change and what the end result would be. If you take away powers of foretelling trends and reading the real world then someone like that is writing based on nothing other than self-indulgent fantasy.

35

But we’ve also got to distinguish between Marx’s concept of the feudal economy and the capitalist economy. The “haute bourgeoisie” were very different people than the feudal aristocrats of old. They were the ones who destroyed the feudal system and created the proletariat.

In a feudal economy you have the parasitic aristocrats, who operated pretty much exactly the same way Tony Soprano and his crew operate. Then you had a tiny “middle class” of townsmen, men at arms, artisans, clergy, merchants, and so forth. And then you had a vast number of subsistance farmers, who could either be serfs or slaves who work fields owned by aristocrats, or freeholders. In the feudal system, all wealth comes from control over land ownership, and merchants and bankers and such are believed to make money through cheating somehow, if you bought a good for a low price and sold it for a high price, you either cheated the person you bought from or cheated the person you sold to, or both. Transport of goods over long distances is generally impossible, because every feudal aristocrat would demand tolls to cross his land. For example, every bend of the Rhine river had a castle, and each castle would stop each river boat and demand a toll. Which means that there was no way to make a profit trading along the Rhine river, which meant there were no traders along the Rhine river.

Except centralizing states started to put an end to such practices. The king would get his taste of course, but the local aristos would be cut out. And then we see the flowering of capitalism in Europe, and the idea of the king as the guardian of liberty for the common people…he protected them against the local aristos. Kings favored the bourgeois merchants over the aristos/bandits, and the merchants/bourgeois/burgers/townsmen supported the kings because centralized rule meant trade was possible.

Eventually you get factories, global trade, industrialization, and so on, and the aristocrats are pretty much screwed by this. Their entire class was founded on the notion that working, buying and selling were for chumps, to do such things marked you as a peasant. A real man didn’t work, he fought. And what did he fight over? Land. Every peasant produces a tiny amount over what they need to survive, and this amount is collected and sent up the feudal chain, exactly like rank and file mafiosi collecting protection money from businesses, giving their boss a cut, who gives his boss a cut, all the way up to Marlon Brando. Working was the mark of a sucker, STEALING was the way a real man operated.

So, industrialization and trade and finance ruined these parasites, because they couldn’t profit from trade without engaging in trade. Eventually the old middle class of merchants becomes the new upper class. And NOW you can have urban proletarians, before this no such thing existed, they were rural peasants before. You can’t have proletarians without factories for them to work in. So according to Marxist theory, while peasants were exploited by the aristocrats, the proletarians were exploited by the capitalists. Note that we still have this idea that if you buy a good or service for one price, and sell that good or service for another price, you’ve somehow engaged in malfeasance. Buying a proletarian’s labor for your factory, buying raw materials, and selling the finished products for more than the price of wages and materials? You’ve somehow stolen surplus value.

36

Well, not quite; Marx’s contribution was at least as much his diagnosis of existing problems and analysis of how they got that way as his predictions of what would happen in the future. But you’re right that to the extent he saw his work as deliberately forecasting future changes in society and political structures, he bears full responsibility for the extent to which he got his forecast wrong.

37

Or, as one of my professors pointed out, Marx correctly identified the problem-but his solution was bullshit.

38

You’re getting into realms of philosophy.

Aristotle’s notions guided science for a couple of thousand years. I understand that he knew that dolphins gave live birth, which is pretty amazing, but the rest of his worldview held back understanding for centuries, mostly through the influence of people that latched onto his views long after he died.

That’s pretty much the same as what happened with Marx. Do we blame both of them for that?

I’d say no. You can blame the south for the Civil War because both sides had an equal understanding of the effects of slavery and the south consciously took the wrong side. But when nobody on any side understands even what the problem is?

To me Marx was writing at a time equivalent to that of evolution before Darwin. There were certainly precursors that we can now point to and say were right and who guided Darwin’s thoughts. Before 1859, though, there was a muddle. Before the 20th century there were precursors to capitalist thinking that we can point to, but no good theory of industrialization or class formation. Everybody was flailing around looking for solid ground.

Does that make me an apologist for Marx?

That’s hallucinatory. Describing what history was really like, shorn of the ignorance and the disinformation that propagandists like those in this thread even have piled on it, is nothing of the sort. It is the enemy of understanding and the befriending of ignorance to attack anyone who attempts to clarify ideological history. Yet it is largely those people who have written the popular discourse on Marx. That’s why so many people are ignorant and proud of their ignorance.

Your first post in this thread was an example of that propagandistic attack. Try as you might you won’t succeed in tarring me, or as portraying me as anything but what I am, a clear-eyed lover of real and not ideologically-stained history.

39

In fact, capitalism creates the working class. It tends to destroy the middle class.

The fact that most working people in the US fancy themselves “middle class” doesn’t make it so. The vast majority are working class.

40

All right, but what makes someone working class as opposed to middle class?

Is a doctor working class or middle class? After all, most doctors, however wealthy, make most of their money not from investments but from seeing patients. They work for a living.

Do you mean to say that “middle class” means people who operate small businesses? Say, a lawyer who hangs out a shingle or a doctor with a private practice or the owner of a coffee stand are middle class, while a lawyer who works for a big firm, a doctor who works for a hospital, and the guy who makes espresso drinks but doesn’t own his own shop are working class?

It kind of puts the idea of “class” in question, though, doesn’t it? What makes these people different “classes”? What does it mean to be part of a class of people, but no one knows what class you’re part of? Is this just false consciousness, that the doctor who works for a hospital shares a class interest with the ditchdiggers and apple pickers whether he knows it or not, and the doctor in private practice shares a class interest with Warran Buffet whether he knows it or not?

Owning “the means of production” is kind of sketchy, when “the means of production” can consist of special knowledge and training. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, computer guys might work for hire, but if they lose their job they still don’t lose their knowledge and credentials. And so in what way is a “middle class” doctor different than a “working class” plumber?

And then, what makes one “upper class”? Are you upper class if your income doesn’t come from wages but from investments? One of my friend’s parents were schoolteachers. They’re hillbillies, really, who fought their way into college to get a teaching certificate, and who pinched pennies to an insane degree, saved money, and bought houses that they now rent out. They are now retired, and all their income is from rental property. So…what “class” are they? Working class? Middle class? Upper class?