A few questions

[Wubbaz]

Hey there RevLeft,

I approach you once again due to some questions that have recently sprung into my mind. These are very varied questions, but I hope you can answer them.

1. What was Marx' view on freedom? I assume he was opposed to the liberal sense of freedom (i.e, I am free to do whatever I want to aslong as it does not limit the freedom of others). What did he write on this subject?

2. Is there any place you can find statistics and data regarding world poverty, hunger etc., that is well-updated?

3. What is primitive accumulation? Is it, for example, when a capitalist nation colonizes a foreign country and appropriates it's natural wealth?

Thank you very much in advance :)

[Die Rote Fahne]

Hey there RevLeft,

I approach you once again due to some questions that have recently sprung into my mind. These are very varied questions, but I hope you can answer them.

1. What was Marx' view on freedom? I assume he was opposed to the liberal sense of freedom (i.e, I am free to do whatever I want to aslong as it does not limit the freedom of others). What did he write on this subject?

2. Is there any place you can find statistics and data regarding world poverty, hunger etc., that is well-updated?

3. What is primitive accumulation? Is it, for example, when a capitalist nation colonizes a foreign country and appropriates it's natural wealth?

Thank you very much in advance :)
1. The Marxist, Dialectical Materialist views, on freedom would be the idea that "rights" are non-existent metaphysical formulae.

2. Not sure. Possibly the UN website?

3. Read "Capital Vol. 1".

[Caj]

2. Inequality.org seems like a good place to start...

[Astarte]

Hey there RevLeft,

I approach you once again due to some questions that have recently sprung into my mind. These are very varied questions, but I hope you can answer them.

1. What was Marx' view on freedom? I assume he was opposed to the liberal sense of freedom (i.e, I am free to do whatever I want to aslong as it does not limit the freedom of others). What did he write on this subject?

2. Is there any place you can find statistics and data regarding world poverty, hunger etc., that is well-updated?

3. What is primitive accumulation? Is it, for example, when a capitalist nation colonizes a foreign country and appropriates it's natural wealth?

Thank you very much in advance :)

1. I would say a classless, stateless society free of alienation and marginalization would be Marx's view on freedom, which is the same as communism itself.

3. Primitive accumulation, to my understanding, though I could be wrong, is meant by Marx as pre-capitalist accumulations of wealth - that is capital which is not used to own means of production and buy labor power. For example in Imperial China often times members of the Imperial bureaucracy would receive land enfeoffments and usually so many taels of silver and gold. The official who received this "capital" did nothing with it though, often only increasing this "primitive accumulation" via imperial taxes, in cash or kind. He had no illusions of starting some kind of capitalistic "enterprise" with the capital, thus it stays "pre-capitalist", or "primitive accumulation". Really I feel it is too vague of a blanket term and the class systems of the ancient world really need to, even still, be more closely examined in a Marxian method.

[caramelpence]

What was Marx' view on freedom? I assume he was opposed to the liberal sense of freedom (i.e, I am free to do whatever I want to aslong as it does not limit the freedom of others). What did he write on this subject?

By way of secondary material, you might be interested in this (http://books.google.com/books?id=vaM9AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false), which is a sustained study of the place of freedom in Marx's thought. The thrust of Marx's conception of freedom as put forward in texts like On the Jewish Question (as well as other texts, like the 1844 Manuscripts, where Marx provides an ethical basis for the communist project and considers the condition of man under class society) is that political emancipation alone, in the form of the granting of legal rights, is not sufficient to guarantee human beings meaningful freedom, and that the dominance of legal rights is indicative of a society in which human beings confront each other as isolated monads who feel the need to continually guard themselves against the hostile encroachments of others. A free society for Marx would be one in which humans no longer have to resort to the device of rights to ensure the protection of their interests, their essential interests being understood as the development of their creative and active faculties in order to attain a vision of human flourishing. In this way, there is a close link between Marx's views on freedom and his understanding of human nature, the latter being broadly Aristotelian in nature, and Marx sees the attainment of freedom as dependent on the overcoming of alienation.

[Apoi_Viitor]

2. http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats