Marxism
"An internal conflict occurs inside the middle class. How can you turn it into a conflict that will be interesting from a Marxist point of view?"
"Remember that a conflict shall be in the service of the society."
This is an assignment that I have to do, but seriously I don't know how to start, please help..........
Hi
First I think to understand what Marxism is about.
Do you understand Marxism?
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
This may refer to the petit-bourgeoisie. If you mention the petit-bourgeoisie you will maybe get an extra point. The petit-bourgeosie (basically the lower middle class) were conflicted because they often lived in the same communities as the proletariat, but had similar economic interests as the bourgoisie. For example, they did not want private property abolished, or inheritance tax imposed, or the minimum wage to be increased because they may have employees of their own. The petit-bourgeosie included small business owners such as shop-keepers and people like factory foremen, who worked on the behalf of the owners. A foreman would have come from a working class background, but would strive to increase productivity for the owners by making sure the other emloyees worked as hard as they could.
You could also mention the Quakers. Prominent Quakers set up factories. They were industrialists rather than aristocrats, so upper middle class rather than upper class. They employed thousands of the working class. Sometimes they did not pay them particularly well, but they were paternalistic to their employees. For example, Bournville built a small village for their workers. In Reading, the big Quaker employers were Huntley and Palmer, who made biscuits. Their employees were not paid particularly well, but were employed for life, being moved to easier jobs as thet grew older. They all tended to live in a area called New Town, where everyone knew each other. Quakers were tea-total so there were not many pubs around the estates they had built, although there were temperance houses.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
Marxism is an ideology that led to the slaughter of millions
"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." --- Winston Churchill, Winner of Nobel Prize of Literature
Well, not quite. Marxism, as conceived by Marx, is just a historical and economic methodology. Marx himself in his political activity was mostly a labour activist and supporter of democratic socialism, two movements that did a lot of good for most people in the West. Marxism as a method to understand social change has never harmed anyone. Socialist International was also an early advocate of women's rights.Originally Posted by Mason Pringle
The degree to which the atrocities committed by Marxist-Leninist can be attributed to Marxism itself is debatable. Marx never really articulated a political mission, he was just a historian, sociologist, and economist. Strictly speaking, neither Democratic Socialists or Marxist-Leninists are Marxists, they just draw on different elements of Marxist thought. If one is going to blame Marx for the communists, then they also have to credit him for workers' rights and the social welfare state.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
It is important to point that any ideology that does not agree with the majority has the power to go sour.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
Sorry, but you quite clearly don't know anything about Marxism. I think it is a struggle to find any philosophical world-view that was not taken up and pursued in an absurd way by inferior minds and your comment is no more accurate or less frivolous than attributing the calamities of national socialism to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, or even Plato, Hegel, and others.
I just don't think it even debatable, mostly because of the reasons you go on to explain. Marx never proposed Socialism as some kind of Utopian ideal: he saw the emergence of socialism as an inevitable outcome of the progress of history, which he thought would arise naturally in developed countries, not to be imposed on some rural serfdom. Marx never placed himself on the side of the proletariat for ethical reasons, or as a result of injustice, but because he saw their victory as the necessary outcome of the process of dialectical determinism.
And, in all honesty, he was pretty close to getting it right: we live in remarkably socialised society (considering our history), and this has been a result of class struggle. What Marx got wrong was his inability to anticipate the adaptability of capitalism, which allowed the workers to gain enough to be appeased within the system through trade unionising etc. If this had not happened there undoubtedly would have been a greater number of revolutions.
Most of what went wrong with Marx was a result of him building on Ricardian economics anyway (which held a pretty strong consensus at the time), so you might as well blame him for the slaughter of millions to if you're going to take that view point.
Who cares about the degree. Nationalism killed millions upon millions, Fascism killed millions, Capitalism still kills millions, Tribalism killed millions, Feudalism killed millions. Why do we even make this distinction anymore. Quite frankly all dominant ideologies taken to extreme have the power to kill millions.
Now, who is counting how many communism perhaps saved. I would say also the number is in the millions. Think of all the people before the Maoist era who had a life expectancy of less than 30. Now, are we going to attribute their development and modernization to Mao? Maybe, but it seems hard to argue, the same way communism facilitates atrocities that are human but neither starts them or directly encourages them.
Christianity is an ideology that led to the slaughter of millions.
Easy game this
Marxists managed it quicker. Count em up . Anyway Marxism as a practical philosophy is deader than his Highgate headstone. Hip hip hurrah!
Well put. another cheer for the people
Once again: not Marxists.
So commie states aren't Marxist? Yeah right! Not only Marxist but bloody failures.
You are so wrong on so many levels. Marxism as an ideology and train of thought is more alive than ever. I am yet to meet a modern historian who has not totally been shaped by marxist modes of thought. Even if you are not a Communist, marxism has still probably shaped most academic and academic thinking people's mentalities.
As for killing faster, not really. China, for instance, has suffered much bigger deaths due both to foreign invasion, famine, Christianity, western Culture, Nationalism and Capitalism, let alone cronyism and authoritarianism.
Well I have met many non-Marxists. The stunted intellectuals you refer to are well represented by the late (Good choice Eric) Hobsbawm and a nasty piece of work he was. It seems to have escaped your notice that the last twenty to thirty years has seen the wholesale abandonment and destruction of Marxist governance which ruled many states by terror for two generations. Perhaps China is playing footsie with capitalism in order to extend the shelf life of its one-party crony state but that will fail and pop will go that mob. No doubt you would point to Cuba as a country where single party terror has worked wonders for literacy - not impressed pal. In desperation you might point to North Korea but that for its population is a prison. People always want to run away from Marxist states. Why?
Answer. Because they are stagnant and brutal.
I certainly do not venerate small "intellectual" elites who absorb Marxist holy thought and say they are on the side of progress. Piss off is the reaction of a working man to that nonsense. In all Marxist states the worker is reduced to a slave. In all Marxist states there is a little gang of elitists running the show for their own benefit.
If you point to non-Marxist states as having some features of Marxist states as somehow evidence for the health of Marxism this only emphasises the cloud-cuckoo nature of your beliefs. Having communal health systems for example can be achieved by nations that have no Marxist influence whatsoever on their political thinkers (I know there are millions in Yankeedoodledom who find that a hard fact to grasp). Marxism is a discredited political/social philosophy of the twentieth century's era of social catastrophe.
Last edited by qimissung; 01-06-2013 at 09:07 PM.
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