Marx was right (1 Viewer)

[oh shit]

totally under-rated!

peace and socialism,
b x

 

[Latex lizzie]

Don't think so.

"isms" tend be a) unrealistic (sorry)

b) exclusive (the masses never understood it,only the intellectual types...)


Great Idea. But Marx being right? If he was that right it would work. But it doesn't . Power corrupts!


Anarchy now lets talk about that..what the fuck is that all about?

 

[billygannon]

Oh! I've just realised that I have a bit more power than I thought on this board.

Kind of like a KGB power.

 

[oh shit]

who said anything about "-isms"

fact is marx was talking about things that we take for granted today.

as for 'if he was right it would work' - there is no 'it'.
'the communist manifesto' is misleading. he wasn't that naive.
in fact he was probably the first postmodern thinker (what is postmodernism if not a form of marxist existentialism?)
marx is not equivalent to the socialism of the 20th century, and marx is not redundant. as i said, it's everywhere, in ideas and perspectives we now take for granted.

to me, your post proves my point. totally under-rated.

 

[Latex lizzie]

Oh! I've just realised that I have a bit more power than I thought on this board.

Kind of like a KGB power.

power corrupts!

anyways yeah, if there is no "it" what is "it"? nothing? s o we are talking about existentialism?

I'm loosing my religion. In the corner like.

 

[oh shit]

'it' is the writings of marx! seriously amazing. i must admit i'm new to it, thought i kinda knew what 'it' was, but then i realised that i only knew the 'it' that 'it' became, thanks to lenin and the politburo and so forth.

as a philosopher/analyst type thing he's great!

 

[Latex lizzie]

Agreed. I like the ideas and notions..but they have been (In my humble opinion) twisted to mean lots of other things over the years..communisim for one. That never flew. Bah. i have to say I don't know enough about this to have a proper discussion..but I do have a lovely book by mao that is a first edition translation at home..different but same.

 

[potlatch]

Marx's later writings were banned by the politburo for being anti-Marxist. Lukacs, too .

 

[Divil A Bit]

'it' is the writings of marx! seriously amazing. i must admit i'm new to it, thought i kinda knew what 'it' was, but then i realised that i only knew the 'it' that 'it' became, thanks to lenin and the politburo and so forth.

as a philosopher/analyst type thing he's great!

Just make sure you don't join the SWP. Then you'd be fucked.

 

[It Will Never Last]

I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER

I agree.

 

[Eddie Gorilla]

What a deadly fuckin' man.
Ah fuck it, I haven't a hope of getting to sleep now anyway, think I might watch A day At The Races or A Night At The Opera.
Ah yeah.

 

[oh shit]

weird timing

Why Marx is man of the moment

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]He had globalisation sussed 150 years ago[/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Francis Wheen
Sunday July 17, 2005
The Observer

[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]A penniless asylum seeker in London was vilified across two pages of the Daily Mail last week. No surprises there, perhaps - except that the villain in question has been dead since 1883. 'Marx the Monster' was the Mail's furious reaction to the news that thousands of Radio 4 listeners had chosen Karl Marx as their favourite thinker. 'His genocidal disciples include Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - and even Mugabe. So why has Karl Marx just been voted the greatest philosopher ever?'


The puzzlement is understandable. Fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, there appeared to be a general assumption that Marx was now an ex-parrot. He had kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil and been buried forever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need think about him - still less read him - ever again.

'What we are witnessing,' Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, 'is not just the ... passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution.'

But history soon returned with a vengeance. By August 1998, economic meltdown in Russia, currency collapses in Asia and market panic around the world prompted the Financial Times to wonder if we had moved 'from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade'. The article was headlined 'Das Kapital Revisited'.

Even those who gained most from the system began to question its viability. The billionaire speculator George Soros now warns that the herd instinct of capital-owners such as himself must be controlled before they trample everyone else underfoot. 'Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics,' he writes. 'The main reason why their dire predictions did not come true was because of countervailing political interventions in democratic countries. Unfortunately we are once again in danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from the lessons of history. This time the danger comes not from communism but from market fundamentalism.'

In October 1997 the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported a conversation with an investment banker. 'The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,' the financier said. 'I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism.' His curiosity aroused, Cassidy read Marx for the first time. He found 'riveting passages about globalisation, inequality, political corruption, monopolisation, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence - issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realising that they are walking in Marx's footsteps'.

Quoting the famous slogan coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 ('It's the economy, stupid'), Cassidy pointed out that 'Marx's own term for this theory was "the materialist conception of history", and it is now so widely accepted that analysts of all political views use it, like Carville, without any attribution.'

Like Molière's bourgeois gentleman who discovered to his amazement that for more than 40 years he had been speaking prose without knowing it, much of the Western bourgeoisie absorbed Marx's ideas without ever noticing. It was a belated reading of Marx in the 1990s that inspired the financial journalist James Buchan to write his brilliant study Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money (1997).

'Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances,' he wrote, 'and that changes in the ways things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory. It is largely through Marx, rather than political economy, that those notions have come down to us.'

Even the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, eager cheerleaders for turbo-capitalism, acknowledge the debt. 'As a prophet of socialism Marx may be kaput,' they wrote in A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation (2000), 'but as a prophet of the "universal interdependence of nations" as he called globalisation, he can still seem startlingly relevant.' Their greatest fear was that 'the more successful globalisation becomes the more it seems to whip up its own backlash' - or, as Marx himself said, that modern industry produces its own gravediggers.

The bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. 'Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,' he wrote in The Communist Manifesto.

Until quite recently most people in this country seemed to stay in the same job or institution throughout their working lives - but who does so now? As Marx put it: 'All that is solid melts into air.'

In his other great masterpiece, Das Kapital, he showed how all that is truly human becomes congealed into inanimate objects - commodities - which then acquire tremendous power and vigour, tyrannising the people who produce them.

The result of this week's BBC poll suggests that Marx's portrayal of the forces that govern our lives - and of the instability, alienation and exploitation they produce - still resonates, and can still bring the world into focus. Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, he may only now be emerging in his true significance. For all the anguished, uncomprehending howls from the right-wing press, Karl Marx could yet become the most influential thinker of the 21st century. · Francis Wheen's acclaimed biography Karl Marx is published by Fourth Estate [/font]

 

[pete]

Oh! I've just realised that I have a bit more power than I thought on this board.

Kind of like a KGB power.

shhh

 

[Jimmy Magee]

Which Marx should I read first?

edit: Don't say "all"

 

[broken arm]

marx was a bum

 

[oh shit]

Which Marx should I read first?

edit: Don't say "all"

i'd say 'the communist manifesto' which was kinda meant to be the starting point. also francis wheen's book is good. i've been advised to consult a guide while reading das kapital...!ninjaaaa

 

[hugh]

Francis Wheen's book about Marx is really good ....

Ah ... you just beat me to it

 

[Latex lizzie]

Francis Wheen
Sunday July 17, 2005
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1530250,00.html
BBC poll results here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/greatest_philosopher_vote_result.shtml

A penniless asylum seeker in London was vilified across two pages of the Daily Mail last week. No surprises there, perhaps - except that the villain in question has been dead since 1883. 'Marx the Monster' was the Mail's furious reaction to the news that thousands of Radio 4 listeners had chosen Karl Marx as their favourite thinker. 'His genocidal disciples include Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - and even Mugabe. So why has Karl Marx just been voted the greatest philosopher ever?'
The puzzlement is understandable. Fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, there appeared to be a general assumption that Marx was now an ex-parrot. He had kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil and been buried forever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need think about him - still less read him - ever again.

'What we are witnessing,' Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, 'is not just the ... passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution.'

But history soon returned with a vengeance. By August 1998, economic meltdown in Russia, currency collapses in Asia and market panic around the world prompted the Financial Times to wonder if we had moved 'from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade'. The article was headlined 'Das Kapital Revisited'.

Even those who gained most from the system began to question its viability. The billionaire speculator George Soros now warns that the herd instinct of capital-owners such as himself must be controlled before they trample everyone else underfoot. 'Marx and Engels gave a very good analysis of the capitalist system 150 years ago, better in some ways, I must say, than the equilibrium theory of classical economics,' he writes. 'The main reason why their dire predictions did not come true was because of countervailing political interventions in democratic countries. Unfortunately we are once again in danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from the lessons of history. This time the danger comes not from communism but from market fundamentalism.'

In October 1997 the business correspondent of the New Yorker, John Cassidy, reported a conversation with an investment banker. 'The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,' the financier said. 'I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism.' His curiosity aroused, Cassidy read Marx for the first time. He found 'riveting passages about globalisation, inequality, political corruption, monopolisation, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence - issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realising that they are walking in Marx's footsteps'.

Quoting the famous slogan coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 ('It's the economy, stupid'), Cassidy pointed out that 'Marx's own term for this theory was "the materialist conception of history", and it is now so widely accepted that analysts of all political views use it, like Carville, without any attribution.'

Like Molière's bourgeois gentleman who discovered to his amazement that for more than 40 years he had been speaking prose without knowing it, much of the Western bourgeoisie absorbed Marx's ideas without ever noticing. It was a belated reading of Marx in the 1990s that inspired the financial journalist James Buchan to write his brilliant study Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money (1997).

'Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances,' he wrote, 'and that changes in the ways things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory. It is largely through Marx, rather than political economy, that those notions have come down to us.'

Even the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, eager cheerleaders for turbo-capitalism, acknowledge the debt. 'As a prophet of socialism Marx may be kaput,' they wrote in A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation (2000), 'but as a prophet of the "universal interdependence of nations" as he called globalisation, he can still seem startlingly relevant.' Their greatest fear was that 'the more successful globalisation becomes the more it seems to whip up its own backlash' - or, as Marx himself said, that modern industry produces its own gravediggers.

The bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. 'Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,' he wrote in The Communist Manifesto.

Until quite recently most people in this country seemed to stay in the same job or institution throughout their working lives - but who does so now? As Marx put it: 'All that is solid melts into air.'

In his other great masterpiece, Das Kapital, he showed how all that is truly human becomes congealed into inanimate objects - commodities - which then acquire tremendous power and vigour, tyrannising the people who produce them.

The result of this week's BBC poll suggests that Marx's portrayal of the forces that govern our lives - and of the instability, alienation and exploitation they produce - still resonates, and can still bring the world into focus. Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, he may only now be emerging in his true significance. For all the anguished, uncomprehending howls from the right-wing press, Karl Marx could yet become the most influential thinker of the 21st century.

· Francis Wheen's acclaimed biography Karl Marx is published by Fourth Estate

 

[Bag'o'cans]

Which Marx should I read first?

edit: Don't say "all"

That "....... for beginners" series is pretty good for a light read.

 

[Jimmy 2 Times]

Im a fan of Marx - I still think the famous quote from The Communist Manifesto is one of the greatest call to arms of all time - "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite". William Wallace should have said it.
I read a book a couple of years ago that was quite persuasive in its argument for capitalism. Specifically one chart in the book shows how the amount of people below the poverty line, globally, has decreased significantly since capitalism sat at the head of the table.
Its worth checking out in order to balance the argument - Johan Norberg "In defence of global capitalism" - hes also a really good speaker if the opportunity ever arises.
Im not be any means convinced of what he says but its so easy these days to just check out anti-capitalist literature.

I find that if youre working in a shit job for shit money and you start reading Marx, its hard not to start thinking about kicking some stuff round the place or throwing things out windows. Though that could be just work in general.