[quote=Allan from Fallbrook][quote=Arraya]
What Marx did is accurately critique capitalism
Second, Russia was never communism. It would be more accurately described as state capitalism. Even Lenin admitted said this in later years.
Capital (and thus capitalism) is the social relation which necessitates and involves the selling of oneself to the market at market value as just another commodity. You cannot live within the system as we know it, without selling your self (labor) for a wage, which you then use to buy the things to subsist upon. Essentially, a middle-man was created and this middle-man began to siphon off greater and greater commissions and expanded with the increase in ownership capability bought through the new social relationship. This is now the ruling class see wall street and their minions politicians[/quote]
Arraya: While I appreciate that you cannot encapsulate Marxism in such a short writing, I think you also need to point out that most of it is more really applicable to Europe and not so much the U.S.
By the time the Revolutions of 1848 swept through Europe, the United States had already staged the Revolution and fought (and defeated) Great Britain twice. The things that Marx critiqued were front and center during those revolutions, including rule by divine right (absolutism), unfair/crippling working standards and the demands of Capital (as Marx defined it) for its deployment and use.
Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in his Recollections of the period that “society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror.”
I bring up the Revolutions of 1848 because they directly led to World War I, which not only swept away the various monarchies, duchies, etc, but led to the Russian Revolution. If we follow Marx’s line of thought and reasoning, he wasn’t focused on the “middle-man” you referenced (the “bourgeoisie”), but the Capital itself (personified by the “haute bourgeoisie”, like the Barings or the Rothschilds, but also the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, which needed access to the Capital in order to retain power). His focus was always on the Money and the Power, not the middle-man, whom he derided as nothing more than a tool for the Capital.[/quote]
Good points Allan. I agree his criticism were about Europe where things were very brutal for the proletariat. Which is why America was so popular for them to flee to. Many were essentially economic refugees with no hope in their home land, much like we see from the influx from Mexico. There are no virgin lands left and all resources concentrated in the hands of a few Nowhere left to run for economic refugees. Which are starting to mount in the first world. Technological unemployment, energy constraints, the natural cost cutting mechanisms of capital in a low to negative growth world, and population increases will only exacerbate this issue and bring Marx’s class struggle front and center., which really has been hidden in the first world for the past 70 years.
