re: #102 William Barnett-Lewis

The pity is that potentially useful & educational material like

will be lost in the noise from the far more idiotic and useless bits I deleted.

I probably wouldn’t agree with the presenters at these either but they, at least, could have the potential for an interesting discussion about understanding the economic foundations of the present and what can be done to reform them.

Marx is an excellent writer, a massively good thinker. His critique of capitalism is extremely incisive, to the point, and accurate, spanning both the economic standpoint and the sociological. There are some failures of prediction—he didn’t account, basically, for technological change except that of automation—but overall, the critique is still unanswered: He showed that capitalism would increase wealth disparity to the point that workers had barely enough money to do more than ‘reproduce the class’—meaning that, for example, middle class workers may be able to send their kids to college, but not to gain a capital foothold.

He has largely been proved true in his critique of capitalism. Which is also not nearly as harsh as the average person thinks. Marx saw capitalism as a huge improvement over the past, where a lack of production kept most people in subsistence farming, or indentured farming if they were productive beyond sustenance. He has no problem with capitalism developing, and he feels that the capitalist is just as ‘alienated’ as the worker, that their life may be physically better but they lack satisfying connection with their work.

I disagree with him somewhat in this alienation, in that I think that alienation extends far beyond our relationship to our work and that socialist or communist societies, even economically ideal ones, would still potentially have lots of alienation. If, for example, we had economic socialism but still has crazy religious anti-gay shit going on, gay people would still be alienated by being treated as second-class citizens, etc.

Marx’s (and Engels’) idea of communism is far, far weaker than his critique of capitalism. This is partially because it’s a proposition for something new and untested, and partially because he thought the relationship to work was vastly more important than everything else and so that’s how they envision communism.

People usually fail to separate the critique from Communism; they’re entirely separable. And the former, the critique, is one of the best academic achievements in history.