Marx

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but perhaps the answer is Ernest Mandel and 'Late Capitalism'?

That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Das Kapital has nothing to do with “relating” to the proletarian Class

yeah okay guy

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm

marx inspired massive working class movements across the globe that shook the foundations of capitalism. the project failed; the experiments in almost every nation were catastrophic; but his problem was never that he was marginal. he did change the world.

you don't say. he still failed in his project, if you haven't noticed. my point is his remarkable privilege and engels even more remarkable privilege played a role in that failure. somehow that keeps getting brushed aside in marxist studies, probably because studying marx at an advanced level is mostly the province of the privileged. see, for example, the frankfurt school

marx lived in poverty for most of his life.

also i'm not sure marxist academics are all that privileged, given that most of them are toiling away in precarious adjust jobs in humanities and social science departments

al gore flies on planes

marx lived in poverty for most of his life.

tell that to his london housekeeper

i've never had a housekeeper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helene_Demuth

qualmsley proves his point about "the moral of" Das Kapital by quoting a completely different work by Marx? that seems... misguided.

Marx set about to accomplish two major goals. One was to analyze capitalism, especially its inherent faults and internal contradictions, and the other was to replace it with something he conceived would be better. Das Kapital was his most complete attempt to accomplish the first goal. He definitely engaged in other activities and wrote many other treatises pursuant to the second goal. Scrambling everything together into one mess is just sloppy. Das Kapital stands on its own merits or mistakes, but it was never about 'relating to' the proletariat.

das kapital was never finished. who knows how marx would have ended it

and that proves?

i think there has been criticism of marx from feminists especially. the salient point with helene demuth wasn't that he employed her as a domestic worker--that was vastly more common in the 1800s and not a marker of wealth, really--but that he fathered a child with her.

marx was a bad husband and father. he didn't work which made his family suffer in poverty in london. there are plenty of defects in his character. i would be more comfortable pointing to those specifically than this vague broadside about how "privileged" he was or wasn't, which seems irrelevant

Das Kapital was actually going to end: "And therefore if you add up all of these units of labor power you get...wait, WTF, Capitalism is good now?"

I don't even know if it's fair to call the Soviet Union a "failure" -- it lasted nearly 80 years and industrialized and modernized huge swaths of agrarian Russia.. It was perhaps not the model of what we would want a society to look like, but neither was Tsarist Russia.

Better than you can say for many regimes, including some liberal/capitalist ones.

i'll call it a failure without reservation. the regime stalin created was at least a betrayal of the hopes of the petersburg soviet that seized power in 1917

it should be measured against its own claims, i think, not against some external marker. the form of life that was created was dull and bureacratic at best and, at its worst, marked by like, constant terror and assaults on the truth. it was nothing like a free association of free people

I think that's fair.

It should also be measured against what came before and after - compared to Tsarist Russia and post-Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union was a success. Some of its greatest failings need to also be contextualized in terms of the hostility of Western powers (from the Civil War) and trauma of the world wars. We can criticize their heavy hand in Eastern Europe as quasi-imperialist but it wasn't just an idle conversation among the western powers to immediately launch an attack on the USSR.

Measured against its claims and what a socialist state could be, the Soviet Union was a failure.

qualmsley's probably funding those stupid GOP with a hammer and sickle billboards

(you should also apply those standards to every other state... like the US)

Yes, there's that whole issue of capitalist interference in socialist and communist countries, which I think is important to recognize, because those countries probably would have been more successful otherwise. But OTOH it is/was a fact of the real world that communism and socialism had to compete with other ideologies. Capitalism out-competed them, at least in the historical short run, probably because it was more productive. That hyper-productivity may not be good for humanity in the long run, but it was certainly good for creating a military superpower that no one could keep up with without going bankrupt.

i think forced collectivization was a failure. a moral failure, and a failure for the socialist project because it blackened the reputation of socialism for generations. so the way stalin tried to establish socialism--if that's what he really wanted to do; i read parts of kotkin's bio and he argues that it indeed was--then he failed in a very serious way.

(you should also apply those standards to every other state... like the US)

― louise ck (milo z)

do i have a history of defending the united states that i don't know about?

Slow down with the defensiveness, did I say you did?

Stalin isn't the entire story of the Soviet Union, of course.

Ive been listening to Richard Wolff’s talk here this evening, which I quite like, given in Spring 2016. Provides a great overview to history and Marxist theory

http://www.youtube.com/v?=a1WUKahMm1s

hmmm, the link doesn't seem to be working (for me at least), and he has several videos on there. what's the title?

qualmsley's probably funding those stupid GOP with a hammer and sickle billboards

thesis 1: marx was german not russian iirc. thesis 2: i love marx but he wasn't perfect. thesis 3: i forget

KM, kingfish might mean this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L33Hhs0zv8

Oops, I formatted the link wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1WUKahMm1s

jesus fucking christ

qualmsley i hope you were smashed because jesus fucking christ

fanboys itt

Marx' economic theory may have been important and the result of thorough, original work, but surely his political ideas were m/l unfounded?

if anything they've held up better

class conflict as historical model showing a lot fewer cracks these days than, say, newtonian mechanics

yeah I was more thinking about his ideas abt communism

newtonian mechanics et al can be proven/disproven tbf

great name for a local auto-repair business though!

LOL

thesis 4: you're damn right i was smashed; sundays are for symposia. thesis 5: jesus fucking christ was a socialist in an impoverished traveling commune way before germany was even a thing, who was tortured and killed young for his beliefs, unlike karl, who died in his study at his desk almost twice as old as jesus on golgotha. thesis 6: all philosophy is a footnote to plato*. thesis 7: pass me the bloody mary mix you parcel of euthyphros. thesis 8: pounds table. thesis 9: >burp< thesis 10: impoverished children of the world unite!

*and achilleus was the first class warrior; fuck agamemnon

julius caesar was writing about germania pre jesus

i'm not sure that citing Jesus as a positive force for anti-capitalist values instead of Marx is borne out much by the entire fucking history of the world

marx is a positive force for anti-capitalist values, one of the most dynamic who ever lived! but he wasn't perfect! lost in scapegoating and piling on me for some reason is my original point that growing up as privileged as he did might handicap one rhetorically later on in life in the project of arresting a tide of capitalism that has seen the biggest gap between rich and poor in recorded human history here in the old US of A in the here and now under donald fucking trump and rupert fucking murdoch

I wrote in an essay once* "marxists believe that..." and then quoted something from the communist manifesto. and my tutor scrawled double underlined "marxists do NOT believe this!!" ... so I'm still basically unsure about what Marxism actually is, and the more I read the less clear I get.

(*It was just before I switched from a Social Sciences to a maths degree. )

Wait, how privileged do you think he was?

as a straight white male im not touching that, trevor

way more than anyone i grew up around, frederik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Marx

How was he limited do you think? What part of his analysis would have been different if he was working class?