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Jester:
Leaving aside for a minute the really unbelievable idea that seems to be implied here: that we somehow have a 'classless' society now
I don't think anything I've said implies anything of the kind. I'd be inclined to say that classes have multiplied. Although it's also true that in much of the world the social and economic divisions between classes are blurred by new ways of working and new notions of social groups.
somewhat answering your criticism of Marx's eurocentricism: is it not the case that the class system that Marx described working within a nation now works on a global scale?
Only up to a point, I think. It seems to me that the relationships between nations and their economies, and the internal relationships between classes in devloping nations as a consequence of the injection of industrial tech into agricultural societies, are more complicated than that. It also strikes me that in Marx' work, the Proletariat are the heros, they are the legitimate ruling class. However, since the nations of the world are developing at varying speeds, it appears that there is liable to be a peasant agricultural underclass - something which rather undermines the moral standing of the Proletariat. Unless, of course, the timescale of Marx' work is so long that all agriculture is industrialised - something which is perhaps neither possible, nor environmentally, nor even sociopsychologically desirable (kerching $10 word).
Incidentally, what do you call an educated, politically-aware peasant-agriculturalist?
Marx version of Socialism is emphatically industrial (even as we talk about moving to a post-industrial world) - the alternative, I suppose, would be a more technologised and socially evolved version of primitive agricultural socialism.
I'm drifting...
Right.
creation:
Only an idiot would say that Marx’s economic theory is defunct and inapplicable in modern economic terms.
I'm saying it, and I'm not an idiot. If it makes any difference to you, I hold a Political Science degree from what is arguably one of the best universities in the world. Which doesn't, of course, mean that I'm right. It just means that if I'm wrong, it's not because I'm stupid.
You'll note, incidentally, that almost no one here wants to talk about the former USSR as a socialist state. You're behind the curve there.
Taking another perspective, It was responsible for converting a feudal state into an industrial nation, and later to become the second most powerful state in the world.
Russia was never truly feudal. It was - and in many ways, incidentally, remains - an Absolutist state. In Feudalism, there is a web of rights and responsibilities between vassls and overlords. Absolutism, also called Despotism, is rather different. The power of the monarch is unchecked by any constitution or law.
It seems to me that Lenin and Stalin et al were simply Tsars - Despots - by another name, in which case Despotism was responsible for converting a peasant-agricultural state into an industrial one capable of building a nuclear and conventional war-machine to rival that of the US. There was never, however, a social transformation to match the infrastructural one.
(So you can either take the credit for the industrial miracle of Stalin's years and deal with the opprobium heaped on wicked Uncle Joe, or ditch them both. Peronsally, I'd chose the latter course, especially since it turns out the industrial miracle was rather shaky.)
Western colonialism wiped out entire races, took over other lands by force, and enslaved races for a few generations.
Yes, indeed, and this is why Western Colonialism is now considered bad. These monstrosities are not cheques paid into some kind of bank account of blame on which other ideologies can then draw as if they were in ethical credit: "Hey, we've still killed a few hundred thousand less than the Belgians! We can afford a few more dissidents before we've done anything wrong!"
I would like to hear from one of you, why it is no longer applicable to modern economics
That's what quite a lot of this thread is about. I've already accepted that the simple Marxian distinction between those who own the means of production and those who are forced to supply labour is a functional enough tool as far as it goes. I'm not confident, however, that it isn't too blunt for the more bizarre and complex modern world. I'm also a bit boggled by the idea that this equation constitutes 'Marxism'; to me, that name implies several other concepts which are more troubling. Since Kamandi and others seem fairly happy to ditch some of these - such as Historical Materialism - we're now exploring where the edges of the discussion are: what is left of Marxism that is useful, powerful, and descriptive?
The proletariat are no longer the simple workers within a state, now they are global, the capital being powerful multinational companies, who globalise (capitalise) the workers through high profit margins, by expending their skills for a far cheaper wage than they can afford in their host nations.
Define 'Proletariat', please. Does it include a global peasantry? If so, how? If not, why not? Is this Proletariat matured, maturing, or is it merely a working class under Capitalism, devoid of class awareness? And since you're so keen to talk about bloodbaths: will there be revolution in the violent sense, or is it possible to avoid that? And if it's not possible to avoid it, what makes you think that a society born of violence can be (relatively) devoid of force-based relations thereafter?
In the west the old concept of materialism is ripe, people work and work, and spend the rest of the time in leisure time watching programmes and reading material in how to gain more material.
Materialism is a component of Marxism, in the sense that Marxism is an ideology which derives its strength from an analysis of economic relationships, rather than from an appeal to a deity or a non-physical world - although it's also possible that Marx, in asserting creativity as the distinguishing mark of the human species, and drawing from this the notion that the alienation of the worker from the product of his labour is a profound violation, engages with a notion of morality which is probably not strictly Materialist.
I suspect you mean the rather more tawdry version of materialism meaning 'caring only for consumer goods and money'. You might want to be clear about that, though.
In mentioning Alienation and Creativity, I've reminded myself of one of the aspects of Marxism which troubles me most: it seems uninterested in offering a theory of individual action or allowing individuals to chose their allegiances; it does not appear to acknowledge moral accountings which have no economic basis. I don't believe that any system of political change is complete without such a notion.
(It also occurs to me, incidentally, that some of my musings on the nature of creativity and copyright draw on Marx' work: the suggestion I made of copyright infringement being an attack on a fictive prosthesis, re-drafting the work as an alien object while it is still effectively connected to the originator, seems to have roots in the idea of alienation described by Marx. You can find the article here, though I find it somewhat embarrassing in some ways now.) |
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