Asoka89
17th March 2008, 02:56
Lately I have been delving into much of Marx's pre-manifesto work, in particular Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm)
I think his writings on identity and alienated labor, the worker "mortifies his body and ruins his mind, he feels himself only outside his work", he "his labor is therefore not free but coerced" and even if we work to boost standards and wages it will be nothing but a better life or "salary for a slave" laids out the need for revolution and not reform, that the whole system is rotten and that democracy needs to be extended to the economic sphere
Marx's discussion of "crude, mindless communist" is also important, he talks about how "private property has made us so stupid that an object is only ours when we have it", he also (referring to marriage though but can be applied elsewhere) that the only other alternative to marriage and love in its conventional forms would be "universal prostitution", where we were all property of one another, this is tyranny and even more so undesirable.
This view in Marx's words, "negates the personality of man in every sphere..." , he goes on to talk about primitiveness of their beliefs and how they want man to go back to a time of less needs, which he saids is unnatural simplicity and regression.
Now a lot of thinkers think that Marx did not actually meet Parisian radicals living in communes in the 1840s or in whatever setting he said he met them, they think that they are characters, devices of Marx to express his point that bad communists who he calls "thoughtless" think they are being noble, but they are not being noble at all. They are forgetting about self-awareness and self-empowerment that is at the core of real socialism.
Through self-realization, love and human interaction in a scope we cannot have in capitalism, socialism will be realized.
I think that Marx's early writings are a rejection of Bureaucratic Collectivist governments like early State-Capitalists one and one that espouses worker-control of their destiny, non-conformity and self-realization as a mode of group empowerment.
I'm still reading though some of his early works like this one, but I think that Marx the philospher has a lot to offer us and I think that the dicotomy between the "mature" and the "immature" Marx is a false one, the same ideas are in the Manifesto and Capital its just buried a bit deeper under materialist examinations of capitalism (Marx the economist).
Thoughts on these early writings and lessons it gives to Revolutionary Marxists (and anyone else in the Rev. Left)? Why separate this humanism from Marxism?
I think his writings on identity and alienated labor, the worker "mortifies his body and ruins his mind, he feels himself only outside his work", he "his labor is therefore not free but coerced" and even if we work to boost standards and wages it will be nothing but a better life or "salary for a slave" laids out the need for revolution and not reform, that the whole system is rotten and that democracy needs to be extended to the economic sphere
Marx's discussion of "crude, mindless communist" is also important, he talks about how "private property has made us so stupid that an object is only ours when we have it", he also (referring to marriage though but can be applied elsewhere) that the only other alternative to marriage and love in its conventional forms would be "universal prostitution", where we were all property of one another, this is tyranny and even more so undesirable.
This view in Marx's words, "negates the personality of man in every sphere..." , he goes on to talk about primitiveness of their beliefs and how they want man to go back to a time of less needs, which he saids is unnatural simplicity and regression.
Now a lot of thinkers think that Marx did not actually meet Parisian radicals living in communes in the 1840s or in whatever setting he said he met them, they think that they are characters, devices of Marx to express his point that bad communists who he calls "thoughtless" think they are being noble, but they are not being noble at all. They are forgetting about self-awareness and self-empowerment that is at the core of real socialism.
Through self-realization, love and human interaction in a scope we cannot have in capitalism, socialism will be realized.
I think that Marx's early writings are a rejection of Bureaucratic Collectivist governments like early State-Capitalists one and one that espouses worker-control of their destiny, non-conformity and self-realization as a mode of group empowerment.
I'm still reading though some of his early works like this one, but I think that Marx the philospher has a lot to offer us and I think that the dicotomy between the "mature" and the "immature" Marx is a false one, the same ideas are in the Manifesto and Capital its just buried a bit deeper under materialist examinations of capitalism (Marx the economist).
Thoughts on these early writings and lessons it gives to Revolutionary Marxists (and anyone else in the Rev. Left)? Why separate this humanism from Marxism?