Well studies over, got some resits to study for, need a distraction, this should do…
Maybe something productive will develop out of this..
May 22, 2007
May 22, 2007
Well studies over, got some resits to study for, need a distraction, this should do…
Maybe something productive will develop out of this..
June 27, 2007 at 2:09 pm
I think it is important to distinguish between Marx and Engels and various groups of people who claim to be Marxists.
To say that Marx “advances an idea that History is destined to go towards an order wherein injustice, inequality, etc will cease to be.” Is simply not true (as it is not rue of Lenin). If you read “The Communist Manifesto”, very early on, you will find the following passage:
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”.
Either one thing or the other. Many people who claim to be Marxists seem not to have read this (and many other passages). By the way, I think that it is true to say that the CM had no idea about the limits of possible “wealth” when it advocates that the, possibly triumphant, proletariat should increasing “the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” This is normal of a person writing in 1848, however it is interesting to point out that in later writings Marx shows a keen awareness of the limits of production (c.f. his scathing criticism at the beginning of “A critique of the Program of Gotha”).
To say that “Marxism has inherited a lot of its teaching from the preceding Judeo-Christian teachings” is wrong, in so far as Christian teachings did not normally seek primordially to transform the economic system (there are interesting exceptions), is question-begging in equating Marxist analysis/propaganda with “teaching” and would be true if it stated that Marxism developed within a Judeo-Christian society and is, as Marxism itself claims, influenced by the society in which it develops.
I suppose that the affirmation that “It is ‘common knowledge’ that Marxists have a hostile opinion towards religión” is based on a decontextualized quote, if you read the whole paragraph in “Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” you will find that Marx’s position was more nuanced:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”.
Throughout their writing, Marx and Engels are critical of petit bourgeois anti-clericalism and extremely wary of the workers’ party adopting such positions:
“Everyone should be able to attend his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in. But the Workers’ party ought, at any rate in this connection, to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois “freedom of conscience” is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion”.
I do sympathize with people who criticize dogmatic Marxism, but as Marx once said of such dogma “si cela c’est le marxisme, moi je ne suis pas marxiste•” (quoting from memory here, because I have to go).
By the way, don’t you think that insofar as none of our “beliefs” about every day life can be fully justified and as Cartesian hyperbolic doubt is impossible, you could use the argumentative structure to justify that everything is relgion?