So say the revisionists of Marxist theory. Philosophy is merely the explanation/rationalization of past events. Philosophy will cease exist when the private life and the public life culminate into a singularity.
Lenin was the key instigator in organizing the Bolsheviks in Petrograd.
I could quote plenty of bloodthirsty statements from liberal bourgeois revolutionaries, “tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots” etc. - but it would serve about as little purpose to this discussion as your enlightened contribution.
Excellent.
I don’t believe the latter was ever under question. It still confers no sole blame - the Bolsheviks were a party.
That is absolutely true - but it is a mistake to conflate the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism with its actual formation of policy.
A closer reading of the CoGP IV would have yielded this particular gem - “Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it”.
It is a mistake to connect theory to practice?
Yes, the individual realizing that the private sphere is in tune with the public sphere. That our interests as private individuals are really public interests. The state itself being the midwife of such realizations since, according to Hegel, it represents the culmination of collective interests. Marx opposed Hegel on the idea that there is tension between private interest and public [ state ] interests.
It is a mistake to argue that the philosophical arguments advanced by Marx in 1875 should determine the political policies adopted by Trotsky in 1905, or Lenin in 1917. We could start a separate thread about the development of Marxism from Hegelian thought, unless that would be off-topic in this forum. I think it is a fascinating subject.
Why? The economic base of the superstructure hasn’t change therefore a near copy of the superstructure is still intact or at least you have yet to show that it isn’t and it is not as if Marx’s arguments are relative to a specific decade. They are relative to specific economical epochs but Marx, Trotsky and ourselves still live under the ‘capitalist’ epoch.
Are you then arguing that economic systems cannot themselves change and develop throughout the course of their existences? Beyond that tangent, how do you think Marx’s dialectical materialist characterizations influenced, let us say, Trotsky’s policy as Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet in 1905?
When Trotsky had to decide whether or not to support an armed demonstration in Petrograd, in memory of workers killed throughout the fighting since Bloody Sunday, do you really think he flipped through Marx to divine whether his decision would truly negate the contradiction inherent in the class-system of society, and by doing so cause the synthesis of personal and social interests in a glorious collective revolution?
No - he made a political decision, based on political considerations, and the demonstration remained peaceful.
It is just as erroneous to argue that Marx’s ideas hold absolutely for Marxists as it would be for me to argue that Adam Smith’s ideas bind capitalists in a similar manner.
I guess, that is a way of saying that some worker council runs the state on behalf of the worker.
According to some Marxists, yep.
iskrabronstein,
Did Karl Marx believe that communism was a good thing or a bad thing?
I don’t think anyone is arguing that, and even if they are it is irrelevent, as this thread is specificaly about Marx himself.
Marx’s approach to socialist policy is distinguished, as several posters have previously noticed, by a lack of appeal to traditional value judgments. The reasons for this are twofold - in stressing the ostensibly scientific, rather than moral rationale behind socialist politics, Marx sought to distinguish himself from Proudhonism and Christian Socialism in Britain. The second reason for Marx’s appeal to relational values like justice and equity rather than absolute moral principles like good or evil stems from Marx’s historical materialism - e.g., if the moral values of society are simply the distilled ideas of the ruling class, then the value judgments of that society are necessarily subject to their class-consciousness. In such an analysis, good and evil are variable according to the disposition of power in a society - justice and equity, however, are more concrete because of their relational content.
The Poverty of Philosophy (1885) contains most of these ideas.
Add. - Marx would obviously argue it to be a good thing for the proletariat and a bad thing for the bourgeoisie.
So, it would be a bad thing for Karl Marx, since he was bourgeoisie.
Then why did Marx advocate communism? Aren’t the bourgeoisie supposed to act in their self-interest?
This actually exemplifies Marx’s reason for avoiding those very value judgments - if you accept the existence of antagonistic class interests, then you necessarily reject the existence of a universal morality.
You most likely well know that Marx defined class not by economic or cultural status, but by relationship to the means of production. I do not think Marx considered it a contradiction for a bourgeois to express socialist sentiments - that is, after all, what moderate European social democracy was.
What about Engles? He was an exploiting capitalist who owned factories. How could a bourgeois understand proletariat logic and favor proletariat sentiments? That would go directly against his own interests, which violates Marx’s theory of class consciousness.
I think you’ll find that the majority of the focus on class consciousness as a deterministic factor in personal development comes from Stalinism. Marx viewed class consciousness as a continually shifting tableau of opinion and policy, made concrete and definite only by the historical experience and perspective of its constituents. It is a collective consciousness, one that can influence people but not determine them entirely.
No that is actual incorrect. At the beginning Marx did believe that history is determined to develop along the lines of alienation and class consciousness would be a product of such alienation. It was only Engels who tried to downplay the determinist nature of Marx’s theory because the 1848 revolution didn’t pan out and neither did the Paris Commune which was largely a Proudhonist revolt. All the while immiseration was supposed to be transpiring and yet the worker never experienced such high standards of living in human history. It was only then that Engels started changing his tune by saying that it is not their [ Marx and himself ] that people took the theory to such an extreme and that economic class conflict is the source of historical events if it cannot be explained by anything else.
You’re mischaracterizing my argument. I never argued that Marx was not deterministic in his economic or social analysis - I stated, correctly, that the idea of class origin determining personal characteristics was largely of Stalinist origin, being developed as a cudgel to use against “petit-bourgeois” Trotskyists and Bukharinists during the years after Lenin’s death. It was taken up by Mao in order to accomplish a similar process within the Chinese Revolution.
If you’re going to insinuate that I don’t know my own doctrine, at least do me the favor of making sure we’re talking about the same thing.