the ongoings
In.My.Hed
By Luanne Kwon . June 1996
We live in times of 'historical underdosing' (as quipped by D. Coupland), simply -- where nothing much seems to happen. The observed resulting generation trends are apathy and the need for a cause to champion. These causes can be valid ones -- but it seems people tend to trade in their own personal beliefs for the momentary feeling of righteousness. Some become enveloped intheir activism to such an extent, that they begin to deny their own individuality, and in consequence, even the existence oftheir own past.
It all started out like this.
My sister came home as a proclaimed Socialist. I think she had forgotten that I had known her before the turn of events which led her to this political affiliation. Nevertheless, amazing what a semester of college can do to people. College trends turn people into hypocrits.
So, you want to fight for a cause, something, anything.
Firstly, you must realize is this -- hypocrisy is inevitable.
The Socialist's mantra is one of "collectivity of the working class." With Karl Marx as their 'intellectual' (and I do use this term lightly in regards to Marx) proponent, they view Capitalism as an oppresive and exploitive force which must be overthrown, to which reform is simply not adequate. However, specifically in my sister's case, it is Capitalism that has given opportunity to her father to emigrate to this country. It is Capitalism that allowed her father to start a business where there was none. It is Capitalism that allows her father to pay $30,000/year so that she can attend college. Her life has been a series of wants, which she has unduly received. What does she know of the working class? She obtained her first job at age 20 -- and not due to financial pressures. She has known no struggle.
So I wonder.
The International Socialist Organization has a website. So i http to it. The information posted there is spare, and what i notice is that they have no working plans -- no concrete solutions -- just a lot of repetitive babble about the unification of workers and the evils of Capitalism. But I could not find one sentence on the"how" their economic policies would work, or even what their economic policies are. A lot of generalization and theory. But nothing concrete.
Go figure.
I pick up some Marxist literature.
What socialists fail to take into account is the complexity ofpeople - of individuals. They oversimplify. Marx thought he had a scientific basis for socialism because social activity could be explained by the means of production and exchange. His 'scientific' basis for human exchange was what he used to distinguish himself from others, but Marx is not a man of science (It is worthy to note here that certain Nazi doctrines also claimed to be scientific, i.e. their "race-theory" to be more appealing). Darwin doesn't exist in socialist culture. How can one who propagates political theories which deny the existence of man's innate competitive nature be a man of science? In reality, Marx is a man of aesthetics. And in reality, Socialist theories will remain just that -- aesthetic concepts -- because socialism will simply not work. It has no practical applications. If a Socialist revolution did occur, they would be dumbfounded as to what to do. Confused at "how" they would put their principles in practice.
Marx was not interested in finding the truth, but more so with proclaiming it. He harboured an intense pessimistic view of the human condition and had a fascination for hatred and corruption as evidenced by his poetry and ultimately in his dramatized apocolyptic political writings. He was fond of quoting Mephistopheles' line from Goethe's Faust, "Everything that exists deserves to perish." Marx had reached his conclusions about humanity by the late 1840s, all that remained was for him to find the facts to substantiate them. Thusly, he worked backwards, by seeking the evidence which made it inevitable, rather than forward to it, working from objectively examined data. Marx was deskbound and spent his hours in libraries searching for the facts that would substantiate his claims. He was not interested in facts that were to be discovered by examing the world and people who live in it with his own eyes. History reveals that he has never stepped foot into a mill, factory, or any other industrial workplace in his whole life.
Marx and Engels both deliberately contrived and distorted facts to suit their needs. When Marx addressed the International Working Men's Association in 1864, he deliberately falsified W.E. Gladstone's Budget speech of 1863. The newspapers pointed out Marx' deliberate misquotation, but nonetheless, Marx ambivalent to the error, reproduced it in Capital. Other discrepancies and falsifications have been noted, wherein many quotations have been conveniently shortened by the removing of passages which would likely weigh against Marx' conclusions. Among many others, he is known to have falsified quotes by Adam Smith. Marx and Engels misrepresented the condition of the economy and politcis of their time, by knowingly ommitting the improvements which were brought into enforcement by the Factory Acts and other remedial legislation. Instead they relied on out-of-date material because current facts of their time did not support their case. Their primary sources were sometimes 5-40 years out of date. (Would youstill say he is a man of science?)
What's even more apalling is the hostility Marx harboured for his fellow revolutionaries who had "working-men" experience. It was in 1845 when Marx first met working men who had become politically conscious in London at the German Workers' Education Society. He did not like what he saw. These men were mostly skilled workers, watchmakers, laborers, their leader was a forester. They were self-educated, disciplined, anti-bohemian, and anxious to transform society by practical means. He is known to have viewed them with contempt and as "revolutionary cannon fodder." Marx always preferred to associate with middle class intellectuals like himself. When he and Engels created the Communist League and later the International, Marx deliberately made sure that working-class socialists were eliminated from any positions of influence. They merely sat in on committees as statutory proles. Some of Marx' most aggregious assaults were against men of the working class. One such famous incident is of William Weitling, where Marx subjected him to a trial before the Communist League in Brusells for "conducting an agitation without doctrine". Weitling, a poor tailor's apprentice had by sheer hard work and self-education won himself a large following among German workers. Here is a synopsis of the trial:
K. Marx stated "If you attempt to influence the workers, especiallythe German workers, without a body of doctrine and clear scientific ideas, then you are merely playing an empty and unscrupulous game of propaganda, leading inevitably to the setting up on the one hand of an inspired apostle and on the other of open mouthed donkeys listening to him." Weitling replied that he had not become a socialist to learn about doctrines manufactured in study; he spoke for actual working men and would not submit to the views of more theoriticians who were remote from the suffering world of real labour. This enraged Marx.
Many of Marx' epigrams and aphorisms were not of his own invention. I have catalogued some of them below:
"The workers have no country" -----Marat
"The workers have nothing to lose but their chains"----- Marat
"Religion is the opium of the people" ----- Heine
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" ----- Louis Blanc
"Workers of all countries, unite!" ----- Karl Schapper
He combined the sayings of others and represented them as those of his own, as evidenced by the last three sentences of the Manifesto:
"The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite!"
Marx was a failed academic. Embittered, he wanted to astonish theworld by founding a new philosophical school. Marx, unable to acquiece an academic post his whole career decided then to seek academic fame by what he saw as his sensational discovery of the fatal flaw in Hegel's method. However, he continued to accept Hegel's dialectic as the key to human understanding. Hegelian followers are in varying degrees anti-Semitic. Marx saw in Hegelian dicta the hatred of usury and moneylenders (which is directly related to his myriad of financial debts). In 1843, Bruno Bauer, the anti-Semitic leader of the Hegelian left demanded that all Jews abandon Judaism completely. Marx repliedby publishing an essay entitled 'On the Jewish Question' in 1844 which endorsed and shared Bruno Bauer's convictions. He wrote: 'Let us consider the real Jew. ..What, is the profane basis forJudaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the wordly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is the wordly god? Money." He claimed that Jews had corrupted the Christian and convinced him 'he had no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbors'. It is interesting to note here that Karl Marx is a descendent of rabbis and Talmudic scholars from both his mother's and father's side. Later on, Marx broadened the Jews to includethe bourgeois class as a whole. Ferdinand Lasalle, the first German labour organizer and social democrat was the victim of the most brutal racial sneers from Karl Marx: he was a 'Baron Itzig', 'the Jewish Nigger', 'a greasy Jew disguised under brilliantine and cheap jewels'. Marx wrote to Engels on July 30 1862 regarding Lasalle: 'It is now perfectly clear to me, he is descended from the Negroes who joined in Moses' flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father's side was crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid'. In Marx' Manifesto against Krieg. Marx who knew nothing about agriculture especially in the United States where Krieg had settled, denounced Krieg's proposal to give 160 acres of public land to each peasant. Marx claimed that peasants should be recruited by the promises of land, but once that the communist society was set up, the land should be collectively held, thus not individually. Proudhon, an anti-dogmatist wrote in rebuttal : 'For God's sake, after we have demolished all the (religious) dogmatism a-priori, let us not make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance'. Marx hated this line and accused Proudhon of 'infantilism' and 'gross ignorance'. Ironic, how it seems quite the opposite.
So. I've come to the conclusion that Marxism is for the very unrigorous mind,
At what cost do we trade economic equality for individuality?
Here's aquote which I find amusing --
"In a bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality."-Mark and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
What do you think?
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Concept Design and HTML coding by Luanne Kwon c.1996