Journal smittyoneeach's Journal: Communist Manifesto Reading Club Part I 28
Rules:
1. This is a team effort. I'm doing this in conjunction with damn_registrars. I'm willing to give this tract more than a casual skim, but only if those at least posing as sympathizers with Marx & Engels are playing along. That is, I'll read this text, but not as an example of stupid human tricks, m'kay?
2. Participants shall capture the "next few" paragraphs, up to ~300 words or so, such that we're including and analyzing a small, but substantial, amount of material.
3. We'll endeavor to read this in the classically Platonic mode of dispassionate inquiry. Biases happen, but like spice in food, need not require every dish to be inedible. I'm not sympathetic toward the authors, but let's give them their due, not doo-doo.
4. Installments will be whenever, hopefully not at a frequency lower than weekly. No one is under any sort of obligation in any direction, but I'll start this. If the other half of the team turns out to be a dud, I will not accuse him of being out of character.
Manifesto of the Communist Party
A spectre is haunting Europe â" the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
"A spectre is haunting Europe. .
Marx starts off a bit 'tinfoil hat', but:
(a) this is not a boring academic text, and a ball-grabber is perfectly reasonable for an opener,
(b) there is no reason to doubt the assertion that the PTB were as keen then on stomping political expression as the IRS has done to the Tea Parties in our day.
(c) Bismarck's subsequent creation of the Social Welfare State in Germany is a tacit acknowledgment of the pressures at work.
"Where is the opposition. .
This is sort of like how capitalism is currently disparaged in academia and the media. There must always be an Other, no? Let me add that I'm noting this as a pattern, without supporting it. Because I'm more comfortable with the group/self dichotomy as the source of friction than I am with Us. vs. Them, which seems more subjective, and prone to manipulation by pointy-bearded losers down at the coffee shop.
Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master 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.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
"The history of all hitherto. .
I'm going to stipulate right here that the C.M. is NOT a full historical treatment. Thus, I'll provisionally accept this assertion. You kind of have to, or the exercise of reading further is dead in the water. That said, it's fair to say that Marx neither justifies this assertion here, nor points to elsewhere in his emissions that this wrenching course change in historical analysis is supported. Also, the science on this one isn't settled. Disbelief is officially suspended. I will henceforth use the acronym "DIOS" whenever reading C.M. and experiencing food arriving in my mouth from a non-standard direction.
"Freeman and slave. .
What bothers me about this enumeration is the attempt to sell the static nature of the societal org-chart. I'm just not sure the classes that Marx is alluding to were as statically compiled as he contends. Men rose and fell continually, their women with them. That "guild-master and journeyman" existed meant more of a career path than the master/servant relationship Marx wants it to.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society
Yeah? So? Among the bigger modern yawners is the Myth of the Noble Savage where there is an allusion to some Edenic golden age existence where the air was filled with "Let the Good Times Roll" by the Cars, and people were all swell to each other and stuff, prior to this pesky capitalism and the technology it breeds.
Well, put your money where your mouth is, say I. If you want to live an Old Order Amish then Be. My. Flipping. Guest. Just go do it. Knock your socks off. But don't sit there in the coffee shop, sipping a latte, bemoaning the weight of technology on your iPad, and expect other than contempt from me.
--
So, there you have it. Over to you damn_registrars.
not far enough (Score:1)
we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders
Even when you start with an uncomplicated arrangement, of society into a single order, some part of it has to have power over the rest, to maintain and enforce the rules of the society.
But people will always strive to live a more comfortable life. With a tap into the wealth of all, necessary to support governing operations, greed (the bad kind) eventually compounds until it manfests in the governing sector of the society granting more exclusive privileges to itself than the ones it started with that were n
Re: (Score:1)
Proper capitalism offers some negative feedback to purge the inevitable dead branches in the economic development tree.
Socialism and bureaucracy are all about interrupting that natural recycling function, so that the now undead branches can continue to leech economic vitality.
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe you meant to answer someone else, as I made no reference to a problem of scale. But on that topic of your link, of division of labor, I side with Karl Marx. Capitalism's "progressive" force towards never-ending greater and greater efficiencies, no matter how dehumanizing, is a major downside of this economic system that needs to be kept thoroughly in check. Capitalism should serve us, not the other way around.
And I have no idea what that other stuff means.
Re: (Score:1)
Technology necessarily complicates society. But the individual brain has just so much bandwidth available. Hence the specialization.
greater and greater efficiencies, no matter how dehumanizing, is a major downside of this economic system that needs to be kept thoroughly in check
So, who does the "[keeping] thoroughly in check"? The idea that Juan Valdez is getting hammered by Big Coffee down in South America: isn't that turned into "Fair Trade" advertising by competitors?
I'm not arguing some anarcho-libertarian burning of all regulation; rather, a minimal amount of regulation that balances social, envi
Re: (Score:1)
I wonder what technology you're thinking of that is too taxing on the human brain to be done by one person. Or what you're thinking is solved by people specializing more than we already are.
I'd like to see us instead being a craftsman society. Then maybe there'd be pride in quality. I'd rather things lasted and repairs were cheaper than a higher initial cost, vice cheap junk that we just throw away when it breaks. Capitalism on its own will make everything, and everyone, disposable. People ought to wat
Re: (Score:1)
Even if you understood the spectrum of engineering disciplines well enough to design everything (you don't), that wouldn't translate directly into the skill needed to construct it.
And even if you knew how to design, and even physically build, all of the individual components, that still doesn't translate into the management knowledge of how to orchestrate going from raw materials to floating airfield.
And even if you were enough of a raging ba
Re: (Score:1)
Fine, you can't do an aircraft carrier as a craftsman. But you can do it as craftsmen. Vice say how AFAIK auto assembly is typically done, for example where one guy is responsible for bolting in the right front seat, and that's all he does, all day long.
Wondering what this has to do with scaling the society in general, and in particular how it prevents or mitigates a class struggle from emerging.
(If I've been intruding, and you're really only interested in talking with DR about things under this topic, ju
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Holy crap, apparently it's a colloquialism for a large, sprawling set of freeway onramps and offramps! Now that I'm looking at the pattern, I think I know where a half "cloverleaf interchange" is in my area.
That's okay, we're never been on the same wavelength (like for example, doesn't it seem like this got strayed awfully far from what I was posting about, or what you journaled about in the first place?).
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Which is fine in social media, but it's also the case at my workplace!
Re: (Score:1)
Now we're getting somewhere. (Score:2)
(side note, if anyone knows a way to reply to a JE while seeing the JE text in the same window, please let me know. Any time I want to do this I have to open the JE in a separate window to get the text, which is a bit of a PITA)
I'm glad that you quoted the first chapter directly as
Re: (Score:1)
In regards to his statement of history being all about class struggles. What would you like to see in support of the argument? Conversely, if you consider it to be immediately garbage, what do you see that specifically disproves it so thoroughly?
I'm really distracted by the word "struggle". From Roman society, where Citizenship was a big deal (the Apostle Paul in Acts was an unremarkable example of the importance of such),
to India with its caste system,
to the New Testament with Philemon [blueletterbible.org] as a brief example,
the existence of classes was Completely. Usual.
Struggles were religious, ethnic, and tribal wayyyyy more than they were class-oriented. Or they involved guns, germs & steel [wikipedia.org], for a more recent, airy re-telling.
Can't fault Marx's panache, fo
This part is important (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
The 'oversimplification' charge, itself, is so obvious as to be a 'what difference does it make?' point. We can't expect Marx to be cramming a complete historical analysis into a manifesto. I have objected to the lack of at least a breadcrumb to point to more full analysis. Perhaps Das Kapital offers some more exposition.
Re: (Score:1)
But the notion that you cannot give the rest of the book an unprejudiced read because you notice the oversell aspect starts in the prologue is bollocks, I think that was my point at least.
I'm endeavoring to take this noise seriously. I'm actually surprised damn_registrars played along at all. I half thought it the whole thing merely a head trick to say: "Ha ha, made you dance."
Pfft (Score:1)
You live in a shark tank. In theory, communism is a misguided attempt to civilize it. In practice, it is simply a closed capitalist system like any other. Your capitalism makes no such pretense, and it comes with the illusion of being wide open, which of course is not true. Those governments are set up by the aristocrats that finance them (*cough* US rebels, and Russian communists). And they put up huge bureaucratic walls to suppress competition. You're basically on your own, and any attempt to protect your
Re: (Score:1)
Fair enough. Now: do you have the intellectual integrity to compare the instances of capitalism and Socialism, and talk about which one provides happier outcomes?
There is a theological point that, as a Christian, you should be capable of joy anywhere.
I think I'll work on capitalism and strive to minimize its inevitable corruption, but YMMV.
Re: (Score:1)
That totally depends on who you are, connections, social, status, etc. It is pointless to talk about which system is "better". There is only "qui bono". What is there to talk about? The biological mandate nullifies all differences. Big eats small.
There is a theological point that, as a Christian, you should be capable of joy anywhere.
There is also my point that you don't have to be Christian to be capable of joy. Apparently that is beyond your comprehension
Re: (Score:1)
It is pointless to talk about which system is "better".
The hell, you say. Did the USSR import grain from the US to feed itself, or vice-versa?
Did the Commies bail us out after the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
While I'm not going to accuse capitalism of being perfect, my contention is that it does a relatively better job of empowering human greatness.
Which is not to say that Commie infiltration is impotent, or incapable of destroying a good thing from the inside, as a glance at our tragically cratered academic system reveals.
Re: (Score:1)
Well, if you want to talk about execution, that's another matter entirely. To tell the truth, their system matches their mindset. I wouldn't expect much else from them. And you are still avoiding the subject of better for whom.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Did you ever hear me say the U.S.S.R didn't suck? But for everyone? No way... Those on the top had it every bit as good as any American. Again you are avoiding the basics.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Nope