Question on Marx and Engels

[Karl Marx's Camel]

On what points do you think Marx and Engels were wrong?

[Led Zeppelin]

Vanguard.

[The Feral Underclass]

Originally posted by Marxism-[email protected] 10 2005, 05:37 PM
Vanguard.
Marx and Engels never talk about a vanguard.

[Led Zeppelin]

Marx and Engels never talk about a vanguard.

Blanquism then.

[Entrails Konfetti]

The biggest mistake Marx and Engels made was spotting the first world to be the spearhead of global revolution.

The first-world working population doesn't really feel the exploitation directly as the third-world workers do.

If the nature of industrial-capitalism is monopolization,
the first world will end up crumbling when its more monopolised then it is now within one country, and when the third-world exploited countries rise up.

When the market is more centralized in the hands of fewer people,it will be easier to smash it.The third-world population will be even bigger and more spread out among the world.When the third-world overthrows the first-world land owners,the first-worlds market decreases and keeps decreasing, which will cause an economic depression in the first-world causing a deepening gap between rich and poor, and finally a revolution.

Even though this may not happen for many years, I still support third-world countries rising up against the first-world countries because it shortens the ties for capitalist-monopolization, and in the large view of things it brings the global revolution even sooner.

[Martin Blank]

Originally posted by EL [email protected] 10 2005, 01:03 PM
The biggest mistake Marx and Engels made was spotting the first world to be the spearhead of global revolution.
But much of this mistake, however, was conjunctural. That is, it was based on the tempo of events at the time they wrote the Communist Manifesto. I would suggest comrades read the preface to the Russian Edition for more about their view on revolution in what we might call the "Third World" today.

Miles

[NovelGentry]

I really think they failed in analyzing the new property relations that would give way to some of the productive consciousness the proletariat would feel under capitalism, with relation to how much they seemed to analyze that of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. Had they done this, although it may have been difficult to envision the changes in technology which would make it happen, then certainly we might have had a better understanding of when they thought revolution would occur.

[Martin Blank]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10 2005, 02:15 PM
I really think they failed in analyzing the new property relations that would give way to some of the productive consciousness the proletariat would feel under capitalism, with relation to how much they seemed to analyze that of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism. Had they done this, although it may have been difficult to envision the changes in technology which would make it happen, then certainly we might have had a better understanding of when they thought revolution would occur.
Marx did talk about this, in Capital.

Miles

[Reds]

Originally posted by EL [email protected] 10 2005, 05:03 PM
The biggest mistake Marx and Engels made was spotting the first world to be the spearhead of global revolution.

The first-world working population doesn't really feel the exploitation directly as the third-world workers do.

If the nature of industrial-capitalism is monopolization,
the first world will end up crumbling when its more monopolised then it is now within one country, and when the third-world exploited countries rise up.

When the market is more centralized in the hands of fewer people,it will be easier to smash it.The third-world population will be even bigger and more spread out among the world.When the third-world overthrows the first-world land owners,the first-worlds market decreases and keeps decreasing, which will cause an economic depression in the first-world causing a deepening gap between rich and poor, and finally a revolution.

Even though this may not happen for many years, I still support third-world countries rising up against the first-world countries because it shortens the ties for capitalist-monopolization, and in the large view of things it brings the global revolution even sooner.
But the first world nations controled the third world in marx`s time and with imperialsm this is still truein many cases today.

[workersunity]

I dont think they went wrong on anything substantial, they wrote for those times

[More Fire for the People]

What I don't like about Marx and Engels is that they didn't write for the common man, sure there work appeals to most people who have a High School education in modern days but it still doesn't catch the common mans fancy.

[Martin Blank]

Originally posted by Diego [email protected] 10 2005, 06:17 PM
What I don't like about Marx and Engels is that they didn't write for the common man, sure there work appeals to most people who have a High School education in modern days but it still doesn't catch the common mans fancy.
To a certain extent, this is true. But, two things need to be kept in mind:

1. There were times when, in fact, Marx and Engels did write "popular" pieces. For example, Marx's pamphlet, "The Heroes of the Exile", is a good piece of popular satire. Also, he did write a number of articles for the bourgeois press, and those were done in a more popular style.

2. Among those people who could read, the literary comprehension rate was much higher than it is today, including among workers. Why? Look at the popular literature of the day: Dickens, Shelley, Eliot, Mill, etc. These writers penned the fine literature we know today as popular reading for the masses back then. In this respect, Marx and Engels' writing styles don't look too out of place for their time.

Miles

[Entrails Konfetti]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2005, 01:55 PM
2. Among those people who could read, the literary comprehension rate was much higher than it is today, including among workers. Why? Look at the popular literature of the day: Dickens, Shelley, Eliot, Mill, etc. These writers penned the fine literature we know today as popular reading for the masses back then. In this respect, Marx and Engels' writing styles don't look too out of place for their time.


What I find interesting here, is that it seems the public and even private educations systems are getting worse; but at the same time technology is advancing. Toddlers can watch the coolest looking three-dimensional cartoons on t.v. , yet not learn a damned thing.

Is there some sort of conspiracy here ?

With myself included, it seems the youth of today have harder times stringing sentances together and interacting with what they read.

Reds

But the first world nations controled the third world in marx`s time and with imperialsm this is still truein many cases today.

True, true. That is still the case.

The ethos of the first-world and in changing at a slower-rate towards the attitude of capitalism today than the third-world, however, what I site as the biggest challenge for the first-world working-class is the technology of the state-security and the restrictive policy against the workers organizing movements.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying first world-world workers should accept the old order because it will eat itself, far from.
The worst thing the first-world workers can do is wait for the doomsday of capitalism, the best we can do as of now is spread information and ideas, and continue economic struggles.


Nice icon btw :D

[cph_shawarma]

Originally posted by Diego [email protected] 10 2005, 10:30 PM
What I don't like about Marx and Engels is that they didn't write for the common man, sure there work appeals to most people who have a High School education in modern days but it still doesn't catch the common mans fancy.
I resent this type of arguments. Why should they dumb down texts? Isn't the "common man" (whatever that is) capable of reading and learning. Of course there is no reason to write hard for the sake of writing hard. But difficult processes (as that of capital) demand difficult language, and seriously only the first chapter of Capital is very hard to understand. Once you've mastered that you can read the rest more easily (although not easy).

As Marx said in the preface to the french edition of Capital Vol. 1: "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

[Vanguard1917]

Why should they dumb down texts? Isn't the "common man" (whatever that is) capable of reading and learning. Of course there is no reason to write hard for the sake of writing hard. But difficult processes (as that of capital) demand difficult language,

Well said. I agree.

[Monty Cantsin]

i dont like some of Marx's stuff about how russia could by-pass capitalism, a kind of seperate path theory that he adopted latter on in life.

also his analysis of commodity use-value and utility sometimes coincide but then exludes some forms of values and thus comes off a bit 'positivist'.

philosophical i'm in agrence with Marx though somtimes during his critique of Feuerbach and Hegel he gets their views wrong but his conclution about what should replace it is spot on.

[RedStarMilitia]

to make the texts more simple would be degrading the potential of the common man, simple texts would class workers as simple people.
also, if the texts are hard to understand then when the "common man" finally interprets the meaning it will mean alot more. I see the texts as challenging, and i also agree that the style of writing of those days was in an older style.

[Hegemonicretribution]

I don't think where revolution was as off as when it would happen. I actually agree with Marx on his presumption that revolution should start in the first world.

His use of dialectics is really unecessary, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the ideas behind it, the use of them is almost a jump in his writing to me, and and less digestable than most of his writing.

[Vanguard1917]

His use of dialectics is really unecessary, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the ideas behind it, the use of them is almost a jump in his writing to me, and and less digestable than most of his writing.

What do you mean "most of his writings"? Are you trying to suggest that the "use of dialectics" in Marx is limited to just a few texts? All of Marx's major writings employ the dialectical method. Without such a clear dialectical understanding of society, Marx would never have made the discoveries that he made. You can't have Marxism without dialectics, and it doesn't matter whether you find it "digestable" or not. It's like saying saying, oh i like Isaac Newton but i don't like all his stuff about the laws of motion.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25 2005, 04:10 PM

His use of dialectics is really unecessary, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the ideas behind it, the use of them is almost a jump in his writing to me, and and less digestable than most of his writing.

What do you mean "most of his writings"? Are you trying to suggest that the "use of dialectics" in Marx is limited to just a few texts? All of Marx's major writings employ the dialectical method. Without such a clear dialectical understanding of society, Marx would never have made the discoveries that he made. You can't have Marxism without dialectics, and it doesn't matter whether you find it "digestable" or not. It's like saying saying, oh i like Isaac Newton but i don't like all his stuff about the laws of motion.
"Use" of dialectics? Bleh.
Marx analysed relationships in history which were dialectical, but his real insights, particularly into the functioning (and contridictions) of capitalism were, thankfully, divorced from that idealist remenant of German philosophy.
In his later works, Marx deals thankfully very little with all of that philosophical nonsense - Engles is the one who kept "pushing it".
Then again, I never really liked Engles very much. His work always seemed more . . . more believable as a fore-runner of leninism . . . meh.

[Severian]

Originally posted by Virgin Molotov [email protected] 25 2005, 01:27 PM
In his later works, Marx deals thankfully very little with all of that philosophical nonsense - Engles is the one who kept "pushing it"
That's nonsense. Whether Marx was writing about dialectics or not, his work used the dialectical method of logic.

That's what logical methods are for. You use them to think about other things.

Oh, and attempts to separate Marx and Engels politically are also nonsense. A lot of people have tried, especially social-democrats trying to take the revolutionary content out of Marx. But all these attempts run aground on the record of their writings and acts.

Just briefly, lemme point out that neither Marx nor Engels ever noticed any of the supposed important political differences that some later Marxologists claim to find. They quarreled and split with all kinds of people throughout their lives over all kinds of political disagreements, but never had anything like that kind of conflict with each other.

[Vanguard1917]

Marx analysed relationships in history which were dialectical, but his real insights, particularly into the functioning (and contridictions) of capitalism were, thankfully, divorced from that idealist remenant of German philosophy.

How do you think Marx could have have grasped the contradictions existing within capitalist society if it were not for his dialectical method? And didn't Marx call himself "the pupil of that mighty thinker" (i.e. Hegel) in the postface to the second edition of Capital, as late as 1873, defending Hegel against those that treat him as a "dead dog"?

Let me copy and paste it for you:

"The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire."

[Hegemonicretribution]

Originally posted by [email protected] 26 2005, 01:20 PM
How do you think Marx could have have grasped the contradictions existing within capitalist society if it were not for his dialectical method? And didn't Marx call himself "the pupil of that mighty thinker" (i.e. Hegel) in the postface to the second edition of Capital, as late as 1873, defending Hegel against those that treat him as a "dead dog"?


There is no arguing that Marx did rely on them, and the quote does not prove anything that isn't being agreed with, what is being discussed is whether or not Marx himself was right to bother with dialectics at all.

Marx grasped the contradictions in society as a social and political scientist. The writings of Marx are still important, and raise a hell of a lot of good points without reference to dialectics. Many people have gotten into Marx and read about dialectical materialism later. Some follow this, others think he digressed slightly. I as such am not against this work per se, but I don't think this method should be anywhere near as central as it has intended to be.

[Vanguard1917]

the quote does not prove anything that isn't being agreed with

The quote proves that Marx did not somehow abandon the dialectical method in his later years.


what is being discussed is whether or not Marx himself was right to bother with dialectics at all

OK, tell us why you think he shouldn't have "bothered with dialectics".


The writings of Marx are still important, and raise a hell of a lot of good points without reference to dialectics.

The dialectic is a method of thinking, method of logic. The dialectic itself was the subject of Marx's earlier writings on philosophy. But even when Marx focused his energies more on political economy and the workers struggle, the dialectic remained the method that Marx used to analyse society.


I don't think this method should be anywhere near as central as it has intended to be.

Why not?