Marx and Dickens - random free form funk... yeah, it's all over da place.
I often rant about the people who are stuck worshiping the 19th Century Dutch recluse who lived in London. I tend to call them damnMarxists, one word. But the reality is that most Lefties are more accurately referred to as damn Dickens-Marxists.
Why? Because they are trapped in the observations of two men living in Britain, who were one year apart in age: Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. Karl Marx and Charles Dickens both observed a world that had only fifty years of rudimentary experience with industrial commerce. They were observers in the earliest years of industrial commerce.
When both men came of age in the 1830's there were no elevators to make skyscrapers, canals were just being built for transport, horse and wagon were the main mode of transport, bicycles hadn't been invented. Trains were virtually unknown as were any form of telegraph. England, particularly London, had no sewer system no bathing, no toilets and dentistry was done by barbers. Ships had sails, but only a few masts, since square riggers were yet to come, muskets were common as were swords and dueling. Department stores, fixed pricing, cash registers and the notion of doctors with clean hands were only to come in the last part of either man's life; after most of their writing had been done.Dickens described the lot of most people, not just poor, but most people in the foul smelling, illness bound London. It was miserable and Dickens saw the cause as industrial commerce. Karl Marx saw the same thing, with the additional cause in the rudiments of global trade. England and much of Europe were buying global supplies with the protection of armies and navies to maintain modest stability with local communities mostly in rebellion.
That is the world most lefties still see today. They see Dickens poverty all around them, they see Marx's elitist class analysis and labor theory of value based on mid-19th Century industrial commerce. Marx's and Dickens world had only the rudiments of technology, rudiments of international trade, no agricultural surpluses and no significant banking or capital markets...certainly no government regulation of contracts, labor law, health codes or anything else.
A Lefty view of the world is pretty much the way an angry 2 year old sees the world.
Charles Dickens and Karl Marx?A Christmas Carol, though? Did you know that Dickens and Marx were writing at the same time in the same city about the same thing, about the consequences of capitalism without a conscience? We know Dickens' vision through the narrative universe he created in stories like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Great Expectations-and perhaps most dearly of all, A Christmas Carol. I wonder if you have you ever thought of what A Christmas Carol is really all about? Or have you ever thought of it in relationship to Das Kapital, Marx's magnum opus?
Both Dickens and Marx observed the aches and pains, the groaning and suffering of an industrializing Europe-of the dissonance between the Scrooges and the Tiny Tims’ of this world. Both could see that capitalism without a conscience was a cultural dead-end that would lead the masses into alienation from each other and the world around. The one did so as an artist, with his finger-to-the-wind, sensing and feeling the direction of his moment, mid-19th century England; the other did so as a political philosopher, with his brilliant mind at work on the social and economic reasons for the cracks in the capitalist dream that led to such alienation.
To say it very plainly: over the next century-and-a-half, scores of millions lost their lives over the misreading of the human condition and history at the heart of Marx's critique, and the world as we know it has been radically and tragically affected by his misunderstanding the nature of vocation and therefore occupation, of what life is about and therefore what our lives are about. In the early 21st-century, there is almost global acknowledgement of this truth.
But when I was 20 I thought that Marx was very close to the truth. He had a passionate commitment to a just world; at least it seemed so to me in my young idealism. He had a comprehensive critique of the world, and of our place in it, and I desperately wanted that too. But as tempted as I was by him, eventually I was drawn even more so into a vision of the kingdom of God. When push-came-to-intellectual-shove, the vision of Jesus for the way life ought to be answered my questions and addressed my hopes more fully than did Marx's.
Like most folks, I wanted a way to see the world that made honest sense of the world. I yearned for the world to be the way it ought to be, and I knew that I needed a worldview that could make sense of what I saw and heard all around me, that could help me understand the hopes and heartaches of human beings that were increasingly part of my place in a pluralizing, globalizing world. In the end, Marx, and Mao were inadequate for that. In the end, their visions were lies of the most fundamental sort, offering a fiction about who we are and how we are to live.-----------------------------------------------When Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, he made a mistake. Instead of using a realist philosophy such as Thomism to ground his theory, Marx used Idealist Materialism. Following Hegel’s Idealist notion of the Dialectic of Absolute Spirit in History, Marx argued that History is based upon Idealist Dialectical Materialism. The problem with this of course is that Marx rejected Plato, the only idealist philosophy that ever works.
Instead Marx butchered idealism by juxtaposing it with materialism. Since the ideal cannot be real except in Platonism where the Immutable Platonic forms are Substantial, Marx was stuck with the idea that materialism is ideal. Everyone knows of course that the material universe is real not ideal. Thus a material tree is not a “Reified Concept” but instead is “concrete” or real.
Additionally, since Marx rejected the existence of God in his political philosophy, idealist materialism soon came to be atheistic materialism. Atheistic materialism then supports the absurd philosophy of the science of Logical Positivism which was totally destroyed by Kant and Husserl. Communism will never work because its’ underlying reality premises are wrongheaded.---------------------------------------------
Marx, like his contemporary, Charles Dickens (?!?!?!?!?),formulated the idea of traditional communism at the peak of the industrial revolution. During which time things like labor unions, minimum wages, etc... had yet to come into existence. So theoretically the only way to provide justice for the proletarians was to overthrow the industrialists and form a new form of government-- communism. Keep in mind that Marx's intended communism to be used in advanced industrial nations, but the only countries that made use of communism were countries that were still stuck in the Middle Ages. Communism simply doesn't work the way Marx intended it because we live in a shitty world where the motto of "survival of the fittest" is engrained into the minds of everyone no matter where you live. Therefore the people who ultimately form the governments to these so-called communist countries, which would probably have Marx turning in his grave, realize the power they ultimately have and maybe will initially use it for the "good" of the nation but will ultimately use it for their own means.
Too often people confuse communism with socialism. Russia and other so-called communist regimes were Socialistic dictatorships. Cuba isn't communist...its controlled by a dictator. If you truly read Das Kapital, the difference would be crystal clear. Socialism is when the "government" controls the output of their national product. Actually, look at the USA GNP and you'll see over 35% of our economy is Socialistic...in that the government spends 35% on "social" programs. Socialism...Social security... pretty close. Communism in it's purest form is actually a simple thing. It's basic manner, according to the Founder of Communistic theory (Karl Marx) is this ...."From those who can....to those who need". This is found in close knit church groups and was prevalent in American Indian Society. The only reason communism does not work is BECAUSE of government interference's...such as Cuba, Chile, and USSR. There has never been a pure Communistic nation,,,only successful Socialist governments such as Sweden. Even Canada is successfully moving towards socialism with their socialized medicine, free education to its citizens, etc.
Communism seems to be most efficacious in smaller groups, say, tribes or cults less than a few hundred. without the individual contact, people begin to feel like they might be contributing more than their neighbor. so, they slow down. One of the biggest problems with Communism is that it inherently lacks a motivational mechanism. without drive, people just waste away. It seems to work in practice and in theory, on a small scale, because the effect of the "lazy" people is minimized. On large scale, though, the hard working people start out by counterbalancing the not-so-hard working people and as time goes on, they start working less. And the people before who were average workers work less, so the curve shifts and eventually you have a population where the majority of the people don't work very hard. People are very short sighted by nature, at least in Western Civilizations.
Working hard in the present sucks for the present, but benefits in the future. Working average in the present isn't so bad in the present, and is sort of mediocre in the future. Working below average in the present is awesome in the present, but catastrophic in the future.As a PERSONAL philosophical framework, I think that it's fine, even a bit noble to be a "small case c", Communist. Get a group of like-minded folks together, form a commune, and go for it. The Oneida Community (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community) lasted almost 38 years, until it declined due to succession woes ( see article).
Ultimately, You can debate all you want about Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism, but in the end, most everyone uses bits of all three. We are certainly a capitalist system, but we have socialist elements (Medicare, Social Security) and even institutions based on communistic structures (the prison system, the public school system, the military). The question, then, isn't why communism doesn't work as an economic system, but for what reasons the major communist regimes that we have known have failed.The chief factor is that too much decision-making rests in too few hands, and economic forces are curbed not by market demand (the natural force of capitalism) but by arbitrary policy. Price setting and fixing, and production levels of key commodities, are set by government, and they must work a very vast and complex machine (a national economy) and all its moving parts (supply chains, raw materials, labor pools, meteorological forces and surprises, political upheaval, etc.) manually.
The result can be devastating. During his Great Leap Forward, Chinese Communist chairman Mao Zedong tried to change his system in mid-stream to respond to market forces. He curtailed food growth by a huge cross-section of the Chinese agricultural economy and had them smelt pig iron in their yards in small forges. Not only was this method flawed, producing shoddy iron, but the next years after his program found China with not nearly enough to eat...and almost 78 million starved to death. This makes Mao the greatest mass murderer in history - Adolf got nuttin’' on hiz ass.
These kinds of problems occur when small groups try to arbitrarily manage market forces. Competition and free-market pricing tend to work much better, though no system is flawless or foolproof (as our current economic situation proves).
Marx and Dickens - random free form funk... yeah, it's all over da place.
I often rant about the people who are stuck worshiping the 19th Century Dutch recluse who lived in London. I tend to call them damnMarxists, one word. But the reality is that most Lefties are more accurately referred to as damn Dickens-Marxists.
Why? Because they are trapped in the observations of two men living in Britain, who were one year apart in age: Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. Karl Marx and Charles Dickens both observed a world that had only fifty years of rudimentary experience with industrial commerce. They were observers in the earliest years of industrial commerce.
When both men came of age in the 1830's there were no elevators to make skyscrapers, canals were just being built for transport, horse and wagon were the main mode of transport, bicycles hadn't been invented. Trains were virtually unknown as were any form of telegraph. England, particularly London, had no sewer system no bathing, no toilets and dentistry was done by barbers. Ships had sails, but only a few masts, since square riggers were yet to come, muskets were common as were swords and dueling. Department stores, fixed pricing, cash registers and the notion of doctors with clean hands were only to come in the last part of either man's life; after most of their writing had been done.
Dickens described the lot of most people, not just poor, but most people in the foul smelling, illness bound London. It was miserable and Dickens saw the cause as industrial commerce. Karl Marx saw the same thing, with the additional cause in the rudiments of global trade. England and much of Europe were buying global supplies with the protection of armies and navies to maintain modest stability with local communities mostly in rebellion.
That is the world most lefties still see today. They see Dickens poverty all around them, they see Marx's elitist class analysis and labor theory of value based on mid-19th Century industrial commerce. Marx's and Dickens world had only the rudiments of technology, rudiments of international trade, no agricultural surpluses and no significant banking or capital markets...certainly no government regulation of contracts, labor law, health codes or anything else.
A Lefty view of the world is pretty much the way an angry 2 year old sees the world.
Charles Dickens and Karl Marx?
A Christmas Carol, though? Did you know that Dickens and Marx were writing at the same time in the same city about the same thing, about the consequences of capitalism without a conscience? We know Dickens' vision through the narrative universe he created in stories like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Great Expectations-and perhaps most dearly of all, A Christmas Carol. I wonder if you have you ever thought of what A Christmas Carol is really all about? Or have you ever thought of it in relationship to Das Kapital, Marx's magnum opus?
Both Dickens and Marx observed the aches and pains, the groaning and suffering of an industrializing Europe-of the dissonance between the Scrooges and the Tiny Tims’ of this world. Both could see that capitalism without a conscience was a cultural dead-end that would lead the masses into alienation from each other and the world around. The one did so as an artist, with his finger-to-the-wind, sensing and feeling the direction of his moment, mid-19th century England; the other did so as a political philosopher, with his brilliant mind at work on the social and economic reasons for the cracks in the capitalist dream that led to such alienation.
To say it very plainly: over the next century-and-a-half, scores of millions lost their lives over the misreading of the human condition and history at the heart of Marx's critique, and the world as we know it has been radically and tragically affected by his misunderstanding the nature of vocation and therefore occupation, of what life is about and therefore what our lives are about. In the early 21st-century, there is almost global acknowledgement of this truth.
But when I was 20 I thought that Marx was very close to the truth. He had a passionate commitment to a just world; at least it seemed so to me in my young idealism. He had a comprehensive critique of the world, and of our place in it, and I desperately wanted that too. But as tempted as I was by him, eventually I was drawn even more so into a vision of the kingdom of God. When push-came-to-intellectual-shove, the vision of Jesus for the way life ought to be answered my questions and addressed my hopes more fully than did Marx's.
Like most folks, I wanted a way to see the world that made honest sense of the world. I yearned for the world to be the way it ought to be, and I knew that I needed a worldview that could make sense of what I saw and heard all around me, that could help me understand the hopes and heartaches of human beings that were increasingly part of my place in a pluralizing, globalizing world. In the end, Marx, and Mao were inadequate for that. In the end, their visions were lies of the most fundamental sort, offering a fiction about who we are and how we are to live.
-----------------------------------------------
When Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, he made a mistake. Instead of using a realist philosophy such as Thomism to ground his theory, Marx used Idealist Materialism. Following Hegel’s Idealist notion of the Dialectic of Absolute Spirit in History, Marx argued that History is based upon Idealist Dialectical Materialism. The problem with this of course is that Marx rejected Plato, the only idealist philosophy that ever works.
Instead Marx butchered idealism by juxtaposing it with materialism. Since the ideal cannot be real except in Platonism where the Immutable Platonic forms are Substantial, Marx was stuck with the idea that materialism is ideal. Everyone knows of course that the material universe is real not ideal. Thus a material tree is not a “Reified Concept” but instead is “concrete” or real.
Additionally, since Marx rejected the existence of God in his political philosophy, idealist materialism soon came to be atheistic materialism. Atheistic materialism then supports the absurd philosophy of the science of Logical Positivism which was totally destroyed by Kant and Husserl. Communism will never work because its’ underlying reality premises are wrongheaded.
---------------------------------------------
Marx, like his contemporary, Charles Dickens (?!?!?!?!?),formulated the idea of traditional communism at the peak of the industrial revolution. During which time things like labor unions, minimum wages, etc... had yet to come into existence. So theoretically the only way to provide justice for the proletarians was to overthrow the industrialists and form a new form of government-- communism. Keep in mind that Marx's intended communism to be used in advanced industrial nations, but the only countries that made use of communism were countries that were still stuck in the Middle Ages. Communism simply doesn't work the way Marx intended it because we live in a shitty world where the motto of "survival of the fittest" is engrained into the minds of everyone no matter where you live. Therefore the people who ultimately form the governments to these so-called communist countries, which would probably have Marx turning in his grave, realize the power they ultimately have and maybe will initially use it for the "good" of the nation but will ultimately use it for their own means.
Too often people confuse communism with socialism. Russia and other so-called communist regimes were Socialistic dictatorships. Cuba isn't communist...its controlled by a dictator. If you truly read Das Kapital, the difference would be crystal clear. Socialism is when the "government" controls the output of their national product. Actually, look at the USA GNP and you'll see over 35% of our economy is Socialistic...in that the government spends 35% on "social" programs. Socialism...Social security... pretty close. Communism in it's purest form is actually a simple thing. It's basic manner, according to the Founder of Communistic theory (Karl Marx) is this ...."From those who can....to those who need". This is found in close knit church groups and was prevalent in American Indian Society. The only reason communism does not work is BECAUSE of government interference's...such as Cuba, Chile, and USSR. There has never been a pure Communistic nation,,,only successful Socialist governments such as Sweden. Even Canada is successfully moving towards socialism with their socialized medicine, free education to its citizens, etc.
Communism seems to be most efficacious in smaller groups, say, tribes or cults less than a few hundred. without the individual contact, people begin to feel like they might be contributing more than their neighbor. so, they slow down. One of the biggest problems with Communism is that it inherently lacks a motivational mechanism. without drive, people just waste away. It seems to work in practice and in theory, on a small scale, because the effect of the "lazy" people is minimized. On large scale, though, the hard working people start out by counterbalancing the not-so-hard working people and as time goes on, they start working less. And the people before who were average workers work less, so the curve shifts and eventually you have a population where the majority of the people don't work very hard. People are very short sighted by nature, at least in Western Civilizations.
Working hard in the present sucks for the present, but benefits in the future. Working average in the present isn't so bad in the present, and is sort of mediocre in the future. Working below average in the present is awesome in the present, but catastrophic in the future.
As a PERSONAL philosophical framework, I think that it's fine, even a bit noble to be a "small case c", Communist. Get a group of like-minded folks together, form a commune, and go for it. The Oneida Community (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community) lasted almost 38 years, until it declined due to succession woes ( see article).
Ultimately, You can debate all you want about Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism, but in the end, most everyone uses bits of all three. We are certainly a capitalist system, but we have socialist elements (Medicare, Social Security) and even institutions based on communistic structures (the prison system, the public school system, the military). The question, then, isn't why communism doesn't work as an economic system, but for what reasons the major communist regimes that we have known have failed.
The chief factor is that too much decision-making rests in too few hands, and economic forces are curbed not by market demand (the natural force of capitalism) but by arbitrary policy. Price setting and fixing, and production levels of key commodities, are set by government, and they must work a very vast and complex machine (a national economy) and all its moving parts (supply chains, raw materials, labor pools, meteorological forces and surprises, political upheaval, etc.) manually.
The result can be devastating. During his Great Leap Forward, Chinese Communist chairman Mao Zedong tried to change his system in mid-stream to respond to market forces. He curtailed food growth by a huge cross-section of the Chinese agricultural economy and had them smelt pig iron in their yards in small forges. Not only was this method flawed, producing shoddy iron, but the next years after his program found China with not nearly enough to eat...and almost 78 million starved to death. This makes Mao the greatest mass murderer in history - Adolf got nuttin’' on hiz ass.
These kinds of problems occur when small groups try to arbitrarily manage market forces. Competition and free-market pricing tend to work much better, though no system is flawless or foolproof (as our current economic situation proves).
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