What do posters understand by "Marxism/Marxists"?

[mayfly13]

The term has often been used as an insult by some on the Right
and as a badge of honor by some on the Left.


I recently read some articles by people who consider themselves to be Marxists (most of them based in the UK) and I feel that their use of the term is different from how it is used in this forum.
And I feel that even in this forum, people have different takes on the term.

 

[pecksniff]

As some use it, it seems to mean anything incompatible with the platform of the Libertarian Party.

 

[WillJ8787]

As some use it, it seems to mean anything incompatible with the platform of the Libertarian Party.

Yes, I agree with this and this would apply to ideas like unemployment assistance, distribution of money via taxation, critical race theory...none of which have anything to do with Marxism.

Marxism is at its simplist....govt ownership of all for profit and not for profit entities. No private ownership.

It doesn't preclude individuals from becoming wealthy.

 

[CornusKousa]

Marxism is at its simplist....govt ownership of all for profit and not for profit entities. No private ownership.

It doesn't preclude individuals from becoming wealthy.

That's socialism in general, not Marxism specifically.

LOL....read some books and try again.

 

[pecksniff]

That's socialism in general, not Marxism specifically.

LOL....read some books and try again.

The socialist movement existed before Marx joined it -- and, IMO, would have been better off without all the pseudoscientific intellectual baggage Marx gave it.

 

[YDB95]

On the American right? It seems to mean anything short of hunting the homeless for sport.

 

[ll74]

The term has often been used as an insult by some on the Right
and as a badge of honor by some on the Left.


I recently read some articles by people who consider themselves to be Marxists (most of them based in the UK) and I feel that their use of the term is different from how it is used in this forum.
And I feel that even in this forum, people have different takes on the term.

Trumpies use it interchangeably to generalize their political opposition with whatever other word they have been told about. They do it to both minimize and generalize whoever they want to antagonize.....rarely is it even relevant to the discourse.

 

[pecksniff]

On the American right? It seems to mean anything short of hunting the homeless for sport.

That could be socialist, so long as the game are common property and not held on preserves where one could be arrested for poaching.

 

[pecksniff]

Trumpies use it interchangeably to generalize their political opposition with whatever other word they have been told about. They do it to both minimize and generalize whoever they want to antagonize.....rarely is it even relevant to the discourse.

The Marx who can be defined is not the true Marx.

 

[pecksniff]

In his 1940 essay "Inside the Whale" (which is mainly a review of Henry Miller's The Tropic of Cancer), George Orwell considered why it was that the British intelligentsia of his time were mostly leftist:

In 1930 the English Communist Party was a tiny, barely legal organization whose main activity was libelling the Labour Party. But by 1935 the face of Europe had changed, and left-wing politics changed with it. Hitler had risen to power and begun to rearm, the Russian five-year plans had succeeded, Russia had reappeared as a great military power. As Hitler’s three targets of attack were, to all appearances, Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R., the three countries were forced into a sort of uneasy rapprochement. This meant that the English or French Communist was obliged to become a good patriot and imperialist — that is, to defend the very things he had been attacking for the past fifteen years. The Comintern slogans suddenly faded from red to pink. ‘World revolution’ and ‘Social-Fascism’ gave way to ‘Defence of democracy’ and ‘Stop Hitler’. The years 1935-9 were the period of anti-Fascism and the Popular Front, the heyday of the Left Book Club, when red Duchesses and ‘broad-minded’ deans toured the battlefields of the Spanish war and Winston Churchill was the blue-eyed boy of the Daily Worker. Since then, of course, there has been yet another change of ‘line’. But what is important for my purpose is that it was during the ‘anti-Fascist’ phase that the younger English writers gravitated towards Communism.

The Fascism-democracy dogfight was no doubt an attraction in itself, but in any case their conversion was due at about that date. It was obvious that laissez-faire capitalism was finished and that there had got to be some kind of reconstruction; in the world of 1935 it was hardly possible to remain politically indifferent. But why did these young men turn towards anything so alien as Russian Communism? Why should writers be attracted by a form of socialism that makes mental honesty impossible? The explanation really lies in something that had already made itself felt before the slump and before Hitler: middle-class unemployment.

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can get a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps scientific research, the arts, and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in. The debunking of Western civilization had reached its climax and ‘disillusionment’ was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline — anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the ‘thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. It was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Führer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour — all in one word, Stalin. God — Stalin. The devil — Hitler. Heaven — Moscow. Hell — Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the ‘Communism’ of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

 

[mayfly13]

I HAVEN'T read Marx.

But I read a literary analysis of Madame Bovary and The death of Ivan Ilitch,
viewed through the lens of Marx's theory of alienation.
----And I thought: Gosh, that's ME !! It wasn't My pathology that led to unhapiness after I emigrated, it was the shitty, cut-throat neoliberal system sprinkled with racism. And I'm not the only one, we're all trapped in a pathological, psychopathic system.

I also read Ashley Frawley.
((She's an accomplished Native Canadian sociologist who grew up in poverty and faced discrimination. Yet she Hates both Right and the Left, she finds both of them racist and elitist, one-overt, the other one-patronizing)).
----She likes Marx because, in her opinion, he said: "Wait a minute, we CAN'T pontificate on people without taking into account economics. Economics have a huge role in how people behave, stop pathologising them or demonizing them!"
Freud and neoliberals do exactly that: They are elitists who view people separately from their material conditions, which leads to disdain.

In saying that, neither Frawley nor the literary analysts know much about History/ Economics.




I don't expect people to listen to my ranting.
I'm just trying to stimulate discussions:
Please tell me YOUR philosophy of life vis a vis Marx's approach & stuff.

 

[mayfly13]

I HAVEN'T read Marx.

But I read a literary analysis of Madame Bovary and The death of Ivan Ilitch,
viewed through the lens of Marx's theory of alienation.
----And I thought: Gosh, that's ME !! It wasn't My pathology that led to unhapiness after I emigrated, it was the shitty, cut-throat neoliberal system sprinkled with racism. And I'm not the only one, we're all trapped in a pathological, psychopathic system.

I also read Ashley Frawley.
((She's an accomplished Native Canadian sociologist who grew up in poverty and faced discrimination. Yet she Hates both Right and the Left, she finds both of them racist and elitist, one-overt, the other one-patronizing)).
----She likes Marx because, in her opinion, he said: "Wait a minute, we CAN'T pontificate on people without taking into account economics. Economics have a huge role in how people behave, stop pathologising them or demonizing them!"
Freud and neoliberals do exactly that: They are elitists who view people separately from their material conditions, which leads to disdain.

In saying that, neither Frawley nor the literary analysts know much about History/ Economics.




I don't expect people to listen to my ranting.
I'm just trying to stimulate discussions:
Please tell YOUR philosophy of life vis a vis Marx's approach & stuff.

 

[mayfly13]

like this:

What was happening was the very rough initial phase of the Industrial Revolution, destroying the social safety nets of pre-industrial life, such as they were, and replacing them with nothing. It was easy to believe, then, that capitalism was simply reducing most people to wage-slavery. In fact, it's not difficult to believe now.

put Marx into a context.
Explains why he has so many good points and so many shitty ones.

 

[pecksniff]

I HAVEN'T read Marx.

But I read a literary analysis of Madame Bovary and The death of Ivan Ilitch,
viewed through the lens of Marx's theory of alienation.
----And I thought: Gosh, that's ME !! It wasn't My pathology that led to unhapiness after I emigrated, it was the shitty, cut-throat neoliberal system sprinkled with racism. And I'm not the only one, we're all trapped in a pathological, psychopathic system.

So where is there a better one?

 

[KeithD]

All I find meaningful to understand by Marxism is that, at best, it's a dormant philosophy that need not be given much thought and very little concern.

 

[mayfly13]

So where is there a better one?

don't quite understand your post.

I've read +++++ philosophy, sociology and social psychology,
and from that vantage point I have a romanticised, positive view of Marx.
He has this nice view that people aren't just instinctual shits who need 'to take responsibility for their flaws or sins', as the protestant-neoliberal culture sees them. He was the Nelson Mandela of psychology.

But there's also a dark side to Marx, which people who know History/Economics (I lack in that domain) constantly refer to.

That's my goal, to ignite a discussion around these contradictions.

 

[pecksniff]

don't quite understand your post.

Serious question -- are there countries where the system is not so neoliberal and pathological and psychopathic?

 

[pecksniff]

But there's also a dark side to Marx, which people who know History/Economics (I lack in that domain) constantly refer to.

The dark side has two aspects: Marx himself, with his dogmatic certainty, who notoriously would never speak in any venue where he would be seriously challenged; and the actions of people who thought they were implementing his ideas.

 

[CornusKousa]

The socialist movement existed before Marx joined it -- and, IMO, would have been better off without all the pseudoscientific intellectual baggage Marx gave it.

But without that "intellectual" bullshit and obfuscation around it to hide the overt short sightedness of it all..... nobody would have bought it.

Everyone would see right through the scam.

Serious question -- are there countries where the system is not so neoliberal and pathological and psychopathic?

Serious question, how are you a socialist, one of the most brutally authoritarian and mass murder happy political ideologies around, going to call neo-liberalism pathological and psychopathic???

 

[Champakian]

Marx wasn't even economist enough to cogently lay out his belief system.



I think that this is why so many latched on to his manifesto,
it was mainly a Mad-Libs fill-in-the blanks document...

 

[Champakian]

I HAVEN'T read Marx.

But I read a literary analysis of Madame Bovary and The death of Ivan Ilitch,
viewed through the lens of Marx's theory of alienation.
----And I thought: Gosh, that's ME !! It wasn't My pathology that led to unhapiness after I emigrated, it was the shitty, cut-throat neoliberal system sprinkled with racism. And I'm not the only one, we're all trapped in a pathological, psychopathic system.

I also read Ashley Frawley.
((She's an accomplished Native Canadian sociologist who grew up in poverty and faced discrimination. Yet she Hates both Right and the Left, she finds both of them racist and elitist, one-overt, the other one-patronizing)).
----She likes Marx because, in her opinion, he said: "Wait a minute, we CAN'T pontificate on people without taking into account economics. Economics have a huge role in how people behave, stop pathologising them or demonizing them!"
Freud and neoliberals do exactly that: They are elitists who view people separately from their material conditions, which leads to disdain.

In saying that, neither Frawley nor the literary analysts know much about History/ Economics.




I don't expect people to listen to my ranting.
I'm just trying to stimulate discussions:
Please tell YOUR philosophy of life vis a vis Marx's approach & stuff.

I suggest you read some of Ludwig Elder von Mises' brutal takedowns of Marx.

 

[Earthlyone]

Marxist theory has gotten to be a little bit like the Bible/Koran, in that people put their own interpretations on it.

 

[WillJ8787]

That's socialism in general, not Marxism specifically.

LOL....read some books and try again.

Incorrect as usual...but who is counting.

 

[JohnnySavage]

"Marxism" as it's understood today has little to do with the writings of Marx. Marx was a social philosopher and his writings addressed economics only as an aspect of society. He didn't advocate for anything, he simply believed that communism is the natural maturing of capitalism.

 

[WillJ8787]

The term has often been used as an insult by some on the Right
and as a badge of honor by some on the Left.


I recently read some articles by people who consider themselves to be Marxists (most of them based in the UK) and I feel that their use of the term is different from how it is used in this forum.
And I feel that even in this forum, people have different takes on the term.

Marxism - a economic theory(Dialectic Materialism) to understand the relationship between the Proletariat (workers) and the Bourgeoisie (owners of Capital).

Socialism - the first step towards Communism, govt ownership of Capital(Means of production)....private ownership isn't not allowed.

Communism - abolishment of unequal systems(economic) to individual and equal ownership of Capital. The divide between rich and poor is purposefully eliminated doing away with economic classes(Proletariat and Bourgeoisie).

Source:http://www.wesleyanarcadia.com/fall...een-social-democracy-and-democratic-socialism

Communism has never been realized anywhere.
Socialism has been realized to varying degrees, some failures and also some not so.
Capitalism, depending on what form one is talking about has caring degrees of success, but pure Capitalism has never been achieved,.just like Communism.

Social Democracies seem to be the future, as they keep a Capitalist structure in their economics but with limits and checks.