Defining gods.
Charles Fiterman
context, speaker and audience. One of the many colorful beings I don't
believe in is the word fairy who flits from word to word giving each a
stable correct meaning.
If we are discussing religion gods are objects of worship. Treated as
a god is a god. Stalin was a god. What makes me an atheist is that I
don't willingly serve or worship any.
I think gods are idols, made up things, puffed up madmen and
misunderstood natural phenomina. But this opinion is hardly nessisary
to be an atheist. If I was convinced divine Hadrian was perfectly sane
I'd change the list not worship Hadrian. If I found some religion that
worshiped the sun while holding perfectly reasonable opinions about
its nature I'd change the list not worship the sun. If some new sort
of god appeared not on the list I'd change the list.
If we are discussing physics gods are "Beings of great supernatural
power" the Homeric definition. When Anaxagorus said "Everything has a
natural explanation" he denied the gods.
While Anaxagorus' statement was perfectly good in 500 BC its not
acceptable today. It begs the question what's a natural explanation. I
prefer to say "I answer all questions about the universe by the
methods of science." This excludes the supernatural the way baseball
excludes touchdowns.
There are advantages to playing games by the rules and not steping
outside them. You get to play with other people. You don't spend your
life arguing over the rules you just made up.
The advantages to atheism are apparent with every newspaper. Look at
the stories about religious mobs, suicide bombers and child molesting
priests.
dug
> There are advantages to playing games by the rules and not steping
> outside them. You get to play with other people. You don't spend your
> life arguing over the rules you just made up.
Aw, c'mon. That's the fun part!
> The advantages to atheism are apparent with every newspaper. Look at
> the stories about religious mobs, suicide bombers and child molesting
> priests.
Serious point here: Universal atheism will NOT stop mobs, suicide
bombers, or child molesters. It will only change what we call them.
Keep your feet on the ground. Don't be so anxious to join a team.
--doug
chris
>I think gods are ... misunderstood natural phenomina.
There is research going on into the genetic underpinnings of
religiosity. It may well be that the gods are extensions of Jungian
archetypes in our subconscious minds.
See also:
http://www.neopax.com/asatru/gods/index.html
Chris
Charles Fiterman
>
> Serious point here: Universal atheism will NOT stop mobs, suicide
> bombers, or child molesters. It will only change what we call them.
>
> Keep your feet on the ground. Don't be so anxious to join a team.
If you want perfection stay in line for your pie in the sky when you
die. I guarantee you wont be disapointed.
If you want improvment do rational things. Brush your teeth, wash your
hands, look both ways before crossing streets, think rationally and
act on the basis of it. Looking both ways doesn't guarantee you wont
get squashed by a truck. A truck can fall out of an airplane and
squash you in bed but it does improve your odds. Not trusting your
child to a priest doesn't guarantee he wont be molested but it does
improve your odds.
Chung Tsu observed "People who involve themselves with the
supernatural are lucky when nothing happens. The wizard who calls up a
daemon is lucky when none arrives." Looking out at the world the Jews
weren't lucky, the Armenians weren't lucky, Moslems weren't lucky. If
you subtract oil revenues the entire Moslem world is less productive
than South Korea.
>
> --doug
John Secker
<www...@infionline.net> writes
>(Charles Fiterman) wrote:
>>I think gods are ... misunderstood natural phenomina.
>
>There is research going on into the genetic underpinnings of
>religiosity. It may well be that the gods are extensions of Jungian
>archetypes in our subconscious minds.
>
natural phenomena? Mine is (IMHO).
--
John Secker
dug
> If you want perfection stay in line for your pie in the sky when you
> die. I guarantee you wont be disapointed.
My point is that atheism won't buy you anything even close to utopia.
I doubt that it will improve your odds at all. That is not to imply
that theism will get you there either. It certainly hasn't yet.
IMHO, the transformation of the world can not be accomplished through
social institutions. Only personal transformation will change any of
this.
--doug
chris
>
>Are you suggesting that our minds (subconscious or otherwise) are NOT
>natural phenomena? Mine is (IMHO).
No, the suggestion is that the gods are not supernatural.
They are an invention of our minds to help us cope with the unknown or
uncontrollable. They are based on the subconscious Jungian archetypes
that are ingrained in our minds like any other animal instinct. The
research suggests that some of may be genetically more prone to
believe in gods than others.
Chris
Charles Fiterman
> I doubt that it will improve your odds at all. That is not to imply
> that theism will get you there either. It certainly hasn't yet.
By every statistical measure atheists are an advantaged minority. We
are the least likely to go in prison, the slowest to marry and the
least likely to divorce. Pick a social pathology and we have less of
it than anybody else.
Quite obviously atheism improves your odds.
nelson leith
Charles Fiterman wrote:
>>My point is that atheism won't buy you anything even close to utopia.
>>I doubt that it will improve your odds at all. That is not to imply
>>that theism will get you there either. It certainly hasn't yet.
>
>...Pick a social pathology and we have less of
> it than anybody else.
Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
atheists by definition? Achieving political power seems like a perfect
opportunity to test the social sanity of a philosophy. Looking around,
it's semi-commital, quasi-agnostic secularism seems to exhibit the most
sane behavior.
Charles Fiterman
> Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
> atheists by definition? Achieving political power seems like a perfect
> opportunity to test the social sanity of a philosophy. Looking around,
> it's semi-commital, quasi-agnostic secularism seems to exhibit the most
> sane behavior.
That was the combination of scientific atheism and emperor worship.
And its hardly a new combination, in Roman Impereal times every
important materialist philosopher served a divine emperor. Pliny in
addition to making marvelous observations of the natural world had
people killed for refusing to give prayer and libation to divine
Trajan. I doubt there has ever been a divine emperor without
materialists in his court.
Every religion has its own historical vices. Ours is go along to get
along. When government is sane and decent we are the best of neighbors
quiet and law abiding. When government goes mad we become the worst of
neighbors, quiet and law abiding.
The historical vices of emperor worship are well documented. Absolute
tyranny and murder on a grand scale. The combinition of atheism and
emperor worship is a disaster. Reason and obedience at the service of
absolute madness.
Chris Michael
"nelson leith" <Lei...@SPAMhawaii.rr.com> wrote in message
news:Gfdnb.53857$ZH4....@twister.socal.rr.com...
>
>
> Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
> atheists by definition?
No; atheists are atheists by defintion. Marxists are Marxists by definition.
> Achieving political power seems like a perfect
> opportunity to test the social sanity of a philosophy. Looking around,
> it's semi-commital, quasi-agnostic secularism seems to exhibit the most
> sane behavior.
>
LOL, yes, that certainly appears to be the case.
Tom Breton
> Charles Fiterman wrote:
> >>My point is that atheism won't buy you anything even close to utopia.
> >>I doubt that it will improve your odds at all. That is not to imply
> >>that theism will get you there either. It certainly hasn't yet.
> >
> >...Pick a social pathology and we have less of
> > it than anybody else.
>
> Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
> atheists by definition?
Yes.
But that sort of thing seems to engender a great deal of confusion for
Christians. Often they have trouble distinguishing even between
atheists, agnostics, Satanists, and followers of other religions (*).
Add in the fact that Marxists are technically atheists, and the
religious tendency to seize on tangential points and declare victory,
and many Christians leap to the conclusion that they can refute
atheism by way of refuting Marxism. 'Taint so.
The way I see it, it's only to be expected that a religion created ~de
novo~ in the modern age would not be theistic. This applies equally
well to Marxism, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Scient*l*gy, and
probably other modern religions (or ideologies, if you prefer).
Why so?
First, "the God hypothesis" had appeal in ancient times, when people
had no real idea what made the wind and rain and sun happen. Now it's
not so mystifying to most people. Old religions and their more recent
offshoots hold "the God hypothesis" for historical reasons. Religions
or ideologies of more recent vintage have no reason to take on that
baggage.
And secondly, the "market" for theism (as it were) is saturated by the
older religions and their various offshoots, who also have the
advantage that most of their social, ideological and theological
"infrastructure" (if you will) is already in place.
So ISTM Marxism's atheism has nothing at all to say about my atheism.
Of course, theism is only one mistake among many possible mistakes.
(*) For a particularly outrageous example, see
http://www.tencommandments.org/heathens.shtml:
"The best way to understand the nature of atheism is to
understand its author. satan is its author."
--
Tom Breton at panix.com, username tehom. http://www.panix.com/~tehom
Eric Pepke
> nelson leith <Lei...@SPAMhawaii.rr.com> writes:
> > Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
> > atheists by definition?
>
> Yes.
OK, let's back up a little bit. On what basis do you say that Marxists are
atheists *by definition*?
Marx said some things about religion. The most notable can be found
here: http://www3.baylor.edu:80/~Scott_Moore/texts/Marx_Opium.html
The most popular lines are these:
"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.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is
the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their
illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition
that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in
embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."
Now, inasmuch as one can ever make any sense ouf of Marx (which is
usually not much), what I get from this passage is that he is talking
about the social effects of religion, namely, its ability to distract
people from social problems or make everything seem all better
in spite of them. Much as opiates do not make pain go away, nor
do they correct the source of the pain (unless it's diarrhea); they
just change the brain's perception of pain, religion can change the
perception of an unpleasant world into something more easy to
deal with.
Even if one were to take Marx's comments as being opposed to
religion, what does that have to do with atheism? History is
spattered (probably literally in some cases) with people who
rejected religion but maintained theism. Conversely, there are
atheists who go to church because they enjoy the goodies (de
gustibus non disputandum est) but don't buy the central idea
of a god.
This is not to assert that it is impossible that many Marxists
are and have been atheists, but *by definition*?
Kirk Job-Sluder
> nelson leith <Lei...@SPAMhawaii.rr.com> writes:
>> Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
>> atheists by definition?
>
> religious tendency to seize on tangential points and declare victory,
> and many Christians leap to the conclusion that they can refute
> atheism by way of refuting Marxism. 'Taint so.
Actually, it is not a given that Marxists are atheists by definition.
Marxism has TENDED to be skeptical of religion because Marx viewed
religion as a safety valve that taught workers to tolerate their own
exploitation by focusing on rewards in the next life. However, Marxism
of sorts has found a home in many religious groups, including Liberation
Theology which argues that the Bible is a call for radical economic
change.
Basically, Marxism like any political philosophy has some people who are
atheists and some that are not. Arguing that Marxists are technically
athiests because Marx hated the Church is rather like arguing that
Republicans are technically Chistian because of Pat Robertson.
--
Kirk Job-Sluder
http://www.jobsluder.net/~kirk/
Malcolm
> religious tendency to seize on tangential points and declare victory,
> and many Christians leap to the conclusion that they can refute
> atheism by way of refuting Marxism. 'Taint so.
>
the twentieth century you wouldn't go far in atheist circles without making
contact with Marxist. The irony is that just about the only Marxist
sympathisers left are Catholic Liberation Theologians.
The failure of Comunism showed that there is no historical drive to rule by
the working class. However my thesis is that Marx was actually substantially
right, and the working class did take control in Britian, France and
Germany, but that the transition came about because of social dislocation
caused by wars between these states, not by internal revolution. Of course
history didn't stop there - as production moves to Third World countries
workers are beginning to lose the rights they once enjoyed.
You can refute a very important strand of atheism by refuting Marxism, but
of course that doesn't refute all atheist positions. The big difference I
see between the Soviet Communists and most American atheists is that the
Soviet Communists were trying to impose big changes on their societies
suddenly, whilst American atheists are trying to take an existing trend of
secualrisation to its logical conclusion.
Tom Breton
> Tom Breton <te...@panix.com> wrote in message news:<m3brrx82...@panix.com>...
>
> > nelson leith <Lei...@SPAMhawaii.rr.com> writes:
> > > Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
> > > atheists by definition?
> >
> > Yes.
>
> OK, let's back up a little bit. On what basis do you say that Marxists are
> atheists *by definition*?
You're asking me to resume Nelson's argument, which I assented to.
But I'm really not interested in splitting hairs about in exactly what
manner of implication Marxists are atheists. (Man, that was an
involved sentence) It's not interesting to me whether they are
atheists by definition, or by many people's definition but not yours,
or by preponderance of present facts, or by tradition, or however.
I suppose I could have written a long disclaimer about exactly which
aspect of Nelson's sentence I assented to, but "Yes" seems so much
briefer.
[Quoted for completeness, so I do not leave the impression that you
disputed that Marxists are largely atheists]
> This is not to assert that it is impossible that many Marxists
> are and have been atheists, but *by definition*?
>
--
Paul Filseth
> Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
> atheists by definition?
Not by definition -- there are lots of Christian Marxists. It's
a pretty popular combination in Central America. Christian Marxists
don't have a very high body count, though, by 20th century standards.
--
Paul Filseth Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only
To email, delete the x. proved it correct, not tried it. - Donald Knuth
Tony Dermody
> nelson leith wrote:
>
>> Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
>> atheists by definition?
>
> Yes.
Firstly, the generality of Marxists in the 20th century were
atheists, not just those who were involved in the slaughter of
millions. Also, some of the slaughter can be laid at the door of
persons who were neither Marxists nor atheists (i.e. Christians,
Muslims, Jews, agnostics, cynical careerists, etc.). In addition,
many of the slaughtered were Marxists.
Secondly, Marxists are not atheists by definition, but by
conviction (there are actually some followers of Marx who cling
on to religion, e.g. certain followers of Liberation Theology).
Marxists in general hold to a scientific view of the world, and
their atheism has its roots in this.
Thirdly, the only Marxist I have come across, who advocated what
seems to amount to mass slaughter, was Gregory Zinoviev, in 1918.
As far as I know, no Marxist, or anyone else at the time, took
his words seriously, or as more than rhetoric. Besides, Zinoviev
was initially an opponent of the October Revolution (on the
grounds that it would not succeed), and he kept changing sides in
the intrigues which took place as Lenin declined owing to
illness. In 1936 Zinoviev too fell in the slaughter.
> But that sort of thing seems to engender a great deal of confusion for
> Christians. Often they have trouble distinguishing even between
> atheists, agnostics, Satanists, and followers of other religions (*).
This sort of thing creates confusion for more than Christians.
But let us be careful not to tar all (or many) christians with
the one brush. Some Christians understand the world quite well,
and are more than capable of distinguishing between different
beliefs.
Committing slaughter is a human failing. People slaughter each
other on account of social causes arising from the human
condition, not because the humans doing the slaughter are
Marxists, or atheists, or Christians, or Muslims, or Germans, or
European colonists, or US Americans. Evil is a human potential,
which exists in the individual human heart; its parameters are
fixed by the human condition; the cause of its arousal is in
human society.
Humans need some kind of ideological justification for what they
are doing, and can easily adapt almost any existing philosophy to
this purpose. It is quite untenable to pretend that people
slaughter each other merely on account of being adherents of some
philosophy, or to malign a philosophical outlook by association
with bad deeds perpretrated by some with that outlook. All
catholics are not bad because some catholic is. Some Irish person
is not bad because because many Irish persons are.
The only modern political power that I know of, which perpetrated
mass slaughter, deliberately and with intent, as a key element in
its racist political programme, was Naziism. This was an entirely
capitalistic phenomenon, as well as being thoroughily and
cynically irreligious.
> Add in the fact that Marxists are technically atheists, and the
> religious tendency to seize on tangential points and declare victory,
> and many Christians leap to the conclusion that they can refute
> atheism by way of refuting Marxism. 'Taint so.
In the earlier paragraph, Marxists were atheists by definition.
Now they are 'technically atheists'. What in heaven's name is
that? Are Catholics 'technically Christians'? Are Christians
'technically theists'? Are Californians 'technically American'?
> The way I see it, it's only to be expected that a religion created ~de
> novo~ in the modern age would not be theistic. This applies equally
> well to Marxism, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Scient*l*gy, and
> probably other modern religions (or ideologies, if you prefer).
Religion without a god, I can understand. Buddhism doesn't have
one, and some new age fantasies don't. Scientology, I believ, is
a religion, but I don't know its attitude to gods. But fantasy is
fantasy, religious or not, and whether or not it postulates the
existence of gods.
But Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and feminism as religion,
is nonsense. Marxism is a philosophical system, or world view,
firmly grounded in science. It is a perception of the world in
much the same way that liberalism, utilitarianism or objectivism
are. Freudian psychoanalysis is a scientific theory and set of
clinical medical practices. Feminism is also a philosophical
basis for a world view. In what way are all these things
connected with religion?
> Why so?
>
> First, "the God hypothesis" had appeal in ancient times, when people
> had no real idea what made the wind and rain and sun happen. Now it's
> not so mystifying to most people. Old religions and their more recent
> offshoots hold "the God hypothesis" for historical reasons. Religions
> or ideologies of more recent vintage have no reason to take on that
> baggage.
>
> And secondly, the "market" for theism (as it were) is saturated by the
> older religions and their various offshoots, who also have the
> advantage that most of their social, ideological and theological
> "infrastructure" (if you will) is already in place.
>
> So ISTM Marxism's atheism has nothing at all to say about my atheism.
> Of course, theism is only one mistake among many possible mistakes.
Marxism might say that there was nothing much to say about your
atheism. Would Marxism be correct in that, if it did?
[snip]
--
Tony Dermody.
"Art is the science of feeling, science the art of knowing. We
must know to be able to do, but we must feel to know what to do".
(Christopher Caudwell: "Illusion and Reality"; 1937).
Tony Dermody
[snip]
> Marx said some things about religion. The most notable can be found
> here: http://www3.baylor.edu:80/~Scott_Moore/texts/Marx_Opium.html
Marx said a good deal about religion. So did Engels. This can be
seen by searching the Marxists Internet Archive which is at:
http://search.marxists.org/ . Marx was a philosophical
materialist, for whom nothing existed except the objective
material world. Matter was primary, and thought was a product of
highly organised matter. Marx contrasted this stance with
philosophical idealism, which sees mind as primary, opening the
door to belief in non-material phenomena. Marx sought the origins
of different belief systems in the interaction between humans and
the objective material world, and in the ways this objective
world is reflected in human thought.
> The most popular lines are these:
>
> "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.
>
> The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is
> the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their
> illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition
> that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in
> embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."
It's interesting that you give the key elements of the quotation,
and describe it as 'the most popular lines'. It has been my
experience that many (most?) people can repeat, and attribute to
Marx, the slightly incorrect assertion that 'Religion is the
opium of the people'. Few have seen or heard the longer and
correct quotation which you present.
However, there is a long, highly relevant, paragraph preceding
your quotation, which I give here for completeness:
[Begin Quotation]
The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion,
religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness
and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or
has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being
encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state,
society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted
world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion
is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic
compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point
d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn
complement, its universal source of consolation and
justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human
essence because the human essence has no true reality. The
struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against
the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.
[End Quotation]
The full article can be read at:
http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1844-DFJ/law.htm . It is
contained in Marx's 'Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's
Philisophy of Law', published in 1844.
> Now, inasmuch as one can ever make any sense ouf of Marx (which is
> usually not much), what I get from this passage is that he is talking
> about the social effects of religion, namely, its ability to distract
> people from social problems or make everything seem all better
> in spite of them. Much as opiates do not make pain go away, nor
> do they correct the source of the pain (unless it's diarrhea); they
> just change the brain's perception of pain, religion can change the
> perception of an unpleasant world into something more easy to
> deal with.
Now, I agree that reading Marx is often difficult. His style left
much to be desired, and since he wrote in German, the
translations often seem to make the heavy original even heavier.
But he does repay study. And he makes a great deal of sense, much
of which is still highly relevant today. No one who looks
objectively at the state of our world, who questions how it can
be as it is, and who sincerely and open-mindedly seeks answers,
can avoid a serious study of Marx's writing.
In my view the quotation above (including my additional
paragraph) is perhaps one of the most profound statements ever
made about religion.
You are correct to say he is talking about certain social effects
of religion (and I would add psychological and ideological
effects). But he is also talking about the religious effects of
society. And that is the key: humans make religion, and religion
is a product of an upside down society which needs an upside down
consciousness.
Reading that statement by Marx in full, there is no safe
intellectual hiding place, either for those who believe in God or
for those who believe in capitalism. I guess the implications
must be particularly uncomfortable for atheists who live in the
perverse, ideologicaly saturated atmosphere of the USA, judging
by the posts one sees from time to time on this newsgroup.
> Even if one were to take Marx's comments as being opposed to
> religion, what does that have to do with atheism? History is
> spattered (probably literally in some cases) with people who
> rejected religion but maintained theism. Conversely, there are
> atheists who go to church because they enjoy the goodies (de
> gustibus non disputandum est) but don't buy the central idea
> of a god.
So, how can one have any doubts that Marx was opposed to
religion? Surely you are not implying that perhaps Marx 'rejected
religion but maintained theism'?
And Marx's analysis has a great deal to do with atheism. Marx was
the one who first explained the social origins of religion in the
context of the historical development of society. No one disputes
this nowadays. If religion originates anywhere other than in
society, then atheism is a dead duck.
Personally, having grown up in the fervid, suffocating atmosphere
of holy, catholic Ireland in the 1950s, I was exposed to church
music, including Gregorian chant. I've retained a liking for it
(I also like negro spititual music, soul, and jazz, not to
mention folk, Irish traditional, and so forth). So, I sometimes
go into churches just to hear the music. That doesn't make me
religious, or a theist, any more than liking horses makes one
abandon modern, mechanical forms of transport.
John Secker
<mal...@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> writes
>
>Marxists are atheists,
No they are not, certainly not by definition. Marx was against religion,
which he saw as part of the ruling structure. I do not recall anything
in his writings which addressed the existence or otherwise of gods.
>You can refute a very important strand of atheism by refuting Marxism
Indeed? Go on then. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by either of
these concepts - how do you "refute" Marxism, and what is a "strand" of
atheism and how would you refute it? But I am sure I will understand
when you show me.
>, but
>of course that doesn't refute all atheist positions. The big difference I
>see between the Soviet Communists and most American atheists is that the
>Soviet Communists were trying to impose big changes on their societies
>suddenly, whilst American atheists are trying to take an existing trend of
>secualrisation to its logical conclusion.
The Soviet Communists believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat
(or so they said). American atheists don't think there are any gods.
That seems a big difference to me.
--
John Secker
Kirk Job-Sluder
> Not by definition -- there are lots of Christian Marxists. It's
> a pretty popular combination in Central America. Christian Marxists
> don't have a very high body count, though, by 20th century standards.
The body-count game in regards to which religion or version of
non-religion is more bloody is a bit of a red herring to begin with.
If anything Christianity is so mutable that it demsonstrates how an
ideology can be used to justify the best behavior and the worst
behavior. Both Stalin and Pope Innocent (to pick two monsters from
different ideologies) used the call to spread "the truth" throughout the
world to unite deeply divided populations and gain political power.
Ultimately both were about land and money, the Church becoming a
dominant political and economic force in Europe, and "The Revolution" a
drive to transform an 18th century backwater into a 20th century
superpower at all costs.
Eric Pepke
> It's interesting that you give the key elements of the quotation,
> and describe it as 'the most popular lines'. It has been my
> experience that many (most?) people can repeat, and attribute to
> Marx, the slightly incorrect assertion that 'Religion is the
> opium of the people'.
I just took the best known line and worked back and forth one
paragraph to show some context.
> So, how can one have any doubts that Marx was opposed to
> religion? Surely you are not implying that perhaps Marx 'rejected
> religion but maintained theism'?
No; I'm saying that it doesn't really matter. Athism doesn't
necessarily follow from his criticism of religion. When someone
as meandering as Marx appears to to take great care to speak of
religion and avoid speaking of God, then I think it means
something.
Compare this with, say, Robert Ingersoll, an approximate
contemporary who made no bones about his atheism.
Whether Marx maintained theism or not, I don't see that he
made it anything like a central tenet of his criticism of
religion.
> And Marx's analysis has a great deal to do with atheism. Marx was
> the one who first explained the social origins of religion in the
> context of the historical development of society. No one disputes
> this nowadays. If religion originates anywhere other than in
> society, then atheism is a dead duck.
That is a necessary condition for atheism, but not a sufficient
one. If, as you say, no one disputes this, then those who do
not dispute it must include many theists.
John Secker
<pg...@lsil.com> writes
>nelson leith <Lei...@SPAMhawaii.rr.com> wrote:
>> Weren't the Marxists who slaughtered millions during the 20th Century
>> atheists by definition?
>
> Not by definition -- there are lots of Christian Marxists. It's
>a pretty popular combination in Central America. Christian Marxists
>don't have a very high body count, though, by 20th century standards.
>
--
John Secker
Malcolm
"John Secker" <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
>
> >Marxists are atheists,
>
> No they are not, certainly not by definition. Marx was against religion,
> which he saw as part of the ruling structure. I do not recall anything
> in his writings which addressed the existence or otherwise of gods.
>
might be right that technically Marx said nothing about the hypothetical
question of whether a god, unrevealed by any religion (because the religion
itself is mere superstructure on the economic base) could exist.
>
> Indeed? Go on then. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by
> either of these concepts - how do you "refute" Marxism, and what is a
> "strand" of atheism and how would you refute it? But I am sure I will
> understand when you show me.
>
part of the broader movement. For instance in British Conservatism there are
traditionalist (throne, altar, fox-hunting) strands, libertarian strands
(reduce government to the defence ministry, cut taxes and regulation), and
"One Nation Tory" strands (basically no different from the Labour party, but
without the extreme left fringe).
Now I could refute one of these strands, say libertarian Conservatism, by
showing that high taxes stimulate economic growth. (I'm not saying that high
taxes are a good thing, just that a hypothetical economist might show this).
This is fatal to the "government must cut taxes" line of argument, but of
course the Conservative party won't go out of existence. There are other
strands of Conservatism that don't rely on this idea.
Similarly, Marxism is a very important strand of atheism. It was probably
true that in the twentieth century a majority of atheists were also
Marxists. We can show that the predictions made by Marx about Western Europe
weren't fulfilled, and that the model of economic organisation advocated by
Marxists is very inefficient and repressive. This refutes Marxism, and
suggests that the "economic base, religious superstructure" analysis of
religion may be flawed. However by showing up the flaws in Marxism, we
haven't refuted every position held by every atheist in the world, just cut
away the philosophical basis for the beliefs of a large number of atheists.
>
Chris Michael
"Malcolm" <mal...@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:boij3i$a9m$1...@newsg4.svr.pol.co.uk...
>
> Most Marxists would say that atheism is an integral part of Marxism.
Which even if true, is a long way from being "atheists by definition".
Plenty of catholic priests think that fiddling with altar boys is an
integral part of religion, but that does not mean you can say catholics are
paedophiles by defintion.
>
> Similarly, Marxism is a very important strand of atheism.
It is not a strand of atheism, any more that a tomoatoe is a strand of Red.
Just because something has a property it does not mean it IS that property.
A tomatoe is red coloured, that does not make it a type of red. Marxism may
be atheist in nature, that does not make it a type of atheism.
> However by showing up the flaws in Marxism, we
> haven't refuted every position held by every atheist in the world, just
cut
> away the philosophical basis for the beliefs of a large number of
atheists.
No the philosiphical basis for the NON belieifs of a large number of
atheists has nothing to do with Marx and everthing to do with a child like
myth that has no evidence going for it and is abnoxious in its fictions.
Malcolm
"Chris Michael" <no...@m.pls> wrote in message
>
> > Most Marxists would say that atheism is an integral part of Marxism.
>
> Which even if true, is a long way from being "atheists by definition".
> Plenty of catholic priests think that fiddling with altar boys is an
> integral part of religion, but that does not mean you can say catholics
> are paedophiles by defintion.
>
paedophile priests, if any, would say that their actions are an integral
part of their religion.
> >
> > Similarly, Marxism is a very important strand of atheism.
>
> It is not a strand of atheism, any more that a tomoatoe is a strand of
> Red. Just because something has a property it does not mean it IS that
> property. A tomatoe is red coloured, that does not make it a type of
> red. Marxism may be atheist in nature, that does not make it a type of
> atheism.
>
However atheists are not an isolated group of individuals but talk to each
other, for instance in this forum, and share ideas with each other or reject
each other's ideas. That makes Marxism a strand of atheism. Red objects OTOH
have nothing in common except that they reflect light of a certain
wavelength.
>
> No the philosiphical basis for the NON belieifs of a large number of
> atheists has nothing to do with Marx and everthing to do with a child
> like myth that has no evidence going for it and is abnoxious in its
> fictions.
>
atheists are Marxists, I never said they were. However a majority of
atheists in the twentieth century, worldwide, were almost certainly
Marxists. Also a lot of non-Marxist atheists have probably been influenced
by Marx without being aware of it - it is hard to get away from a doctrine
that has been as successful as Marxism was until recently.
Tony Dermody
[snip]
> Most Marxists would say that atheism is an integral part of Marxism. You
> might be right that technically Marx said nothing about the hypothetical
> question of whether a god, unrevealed by any religion (because the religion
> itself is mere superstructure on the economic base) could exist.
What Marxists would say, I think, is that if one adopts a Marxist
philosophical position, then it is hard to escape the logical
conclusion that no god exists. They might add that a thoroughily
scientifically-based materialist philosophy is incompatible with
belief in the supernatural or in a non-material domain of some
kind.
I don't know where you get the idea that Marxists think that
religion is a 'mere superstructure on the economic base'. There
is nothing 'mere' about the superstructure. The categories of
base and superstructure are much more complex and richer than you
imply and are dialectically interconnected. The superstructure is
not some after-effect, some kind of an add-on to the economic
base, but a set of socially constructed mediations of the utmost
significance. And I can tell you now that Marxists no more
believe in a revealed God than in an unrevealed One.
And if Marx himself did not write very much about religion, his
colleague, Frederick Engels, more than made up fot it.
[snip]
> Similarly, Marxism is a very important strand of atheism. It was probably
> true that in the twentieth century a majority of atheists were also
> Marxists. We can show that the predictions made by Marx about Western Europe
> weren't fulfilled, and that the model of economic organisation advocated by
> Marxists is very inefficient and repressive. This refutes Marxism, and
> suggests that the "economic base, religious superstructure" analysis of
> religion may be flawed. However by showing up the flaws in Marxism, we
> haven't refuted every position held by every atheist in the world, just cut
> away the philosophical basis for the beliefs of a large number of atheists.
You contradict yourself here when you say that 'Marxism is a very
important strand of atheism'. You have already stated above that
'atheism is an integral part of Marxism'. Both statements cannot
be true.
I regret that I must ignore your facile claim to be able to
refute Marxism by showing that certain of Marx's predictions were
wrong and that the Marxist model of economic organisation is
inefficient and repressive. The business of finishing off Marx is
at at all so simple. This is not the newsgroup for an argument on
these aspects of Marxism, but if you are so inclined, then I
invite you to debate them with me on the newsgroup
soc.politics.marxism.
Tom Breton
I see a surprising amount of religious resistance to the idea that
refuting Marxism does nothing to refute atheism.
I can understand from a tactical point of view why theists want to
resist this. By rights, they are in the hopeless position of having
to provide good evidence for something false, but if they can drag
Marxism into it, they can bludgeon us with Stalin's mass murders and
Communism's abyssmal economic and humane failure, etc. I doubt
there's anyone here who wants to defend Marxism or Communist Russia.
It seems to me that once again, theists are projecting theistic ideas
onto atheism. Atheism is not a religion. It has no orthodoxy.
Marxism is not a schismatic branch of atheism. Marxism has its own
ideas. As it happens, that does not include the idea of theism (*).
So what? That's an issue to theists, but largely not an issue to
atheists who aren't Marxists.
Atheism is the absence of a specific belief that theists have. One
can lack this belief for many reasons. I lack it because it's an
unreasonable belief.
(*) Except in Liberation Theology, as was pointed out to me.
Eric Pepke
> Which even if true, is a long way from being "atheists by definition".
> Plenty of catholic priests think that fiddling with altar boys is an
> integral part of religion, but that does not mean you can say catholics are
> paedophiles by defintion.
Nor, as he tries elsewhere with atheism and Marxism, to say that
Catholicism is a branch of pedophilia.
Paul Filseth
> The only modern political power that I know of, which perpetrated
> mass slaughter, deliberately and with intent, as a key element in
> its racist political programme, was Naziism. This was an entirely
> capitalistic phenomenon,
That's the sort of absurdity that could only be believed by
one with no understanding, either of Naziism, or else of capitalism.
Since Marx wrote an awful lot about capitalism the presumption must
be for the latter. The Nazis seized private property, restrained
trade, had gangs of thugs shut down businesses they didn't like,
regulated everyone and his brother, and used the power of government
to enrich themselves and their friends and impoverish their opponents.
They promoted a collectivist, statist ideology of the Volk, in which
individuals' rights mattered not at all. They spread antisemitism
by playing on poor people's envy of the rich. And when they got
control of nations of "untermenschen", they brought back slavery.
These things are entirely uncapitalistic phenomena. The Nazi Party
was historically an outgrowth of a socialist outfit called the German
Workers' Party; and when the Nazis drifted away from socialism, what
they drifted toward was mercantilism, not capitalism.
> as well as being thoroughily and cynically irreligious.
The Nazis were deeply into occult mysticism. They outlawed
atheist organizations. Hitler thought he was doing the Lord's work.
Their religious views tended to be highly nonstandard but that doesn't
make them irreligious.
> Marxism is a philosophical system, or world view, firmly grounded in
> science.
That's a relief.
S.A.Joyce
"Malcolm" <mal...@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:boij3i$a9m$1...@newsg4.svr.pol.co.uk...
>
Only in the sense that Nazism is an important strand of Christianity.
Which is to say, not at all.
Now, the statement might be credibly made that "atheism is one of
several strands of Marxism," just as one could say that "Christianity is
one of several strands of Nazism," or "green is one of several strands
of plaid." But to try to turn any of these statements around, to
insinuate an inextricable linkage between "atheism and Marxism,"
"Christianity and Nazism," or "green and plaid," is to confuse the
issue. Not all plaids contain green, and not all greens are components
of plaids, etc.
Marxism proposes rejection of conventional religion, and its extreme
forms (Stalinism, Maoism) have oppressed both theistic and non-theistic
forms of religion. But on the other hand, atheism doesn't demand,
require, propose, suggest, imply, or even hint of Marxism--or anything
political or economic, for that matter. Atheism isn't inherently
Marxist or Randist, nor is it liberal or conservative, socialist or
libertarian, communist or capitalist. Atheism per se is simply a lack
of belief in popular superstition; it has *no* economic basis or
political agenda.
That's not to say that some political patterns aren't evident among
atheists. But these are due to other factors--social pressures,
education, worldview, etc.--not something inherent in atheism itself.
> It was probably
> true that in the twentieth century a majority of atheists were also
> Marxists.
Maybe, but I surely wouldn't bet on it. While there were certainly some
prominent people who were both Marxist and (nominally) atheist, there
were also many atheists who were not Marxist--Andrew Carnegie, Thomas
Edison, Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand, Mark Twain, to name but a handful.
FWIW, the only atheists I've known personally have *not* (to my
knowledge) been Marxists. Now, the atheists I've known personally are a
small, and maybe unrepresentative, sample. But to base an opinion upon
an equally unrepresentative sample of Marxists of exceptional notoriety
is equally risky. What the actual ratio of Marxists to non-Marxists has
been among ordinary atheists I couldn't say. What we can say with
certainty is that the popular notion of "atheist = Marxist" never was
anything but a myth, and that those who cling to it do so out of either
ignorance or malice.
> We can show that the predictions made by Marx about Western Europe
> weren't fulfilled, and that the model of economic organisation
advocated by
> Marxists is very inefficient and repressive. This refutes Marxism, and
> suggests that the "economic base, religious superstructure" analysis
of
> religion may be flawed. However by showing up the flaws in Marxism, we
> haven't refuted every position held by every atheist in the world,
just cut
> away the philosophical basis for the beliefs of a large number of
atheists.
We may concur that Marxism, as practiced by Soviet and Chinese regimes,
has been refuted, and that its practical failure has undermined the
philosophical basis of *Marxism.* This says nothing whatever about
atheism, any more than the defeat of Nazism says anything significant
about Christian belief.
--
=SAJ=
To reply, delete NOSPAM from address.
http://tangents.home.att.net/
Chris Michael
> >
> Marxists don't believe in gods (generally) so that makes them atheists.
Yes, but it doesn't make them atheists BY DEFNITION. The fact you snuck in
the (generally) suggests that you also realise it is not what defines
marxists.
> However atheists are not an isolated group of individuals but talk to each
> other, for instance in this forum, and share ideas with each other or
reject
> each other's ideas. That makes Marxism a strand of atheism. Red objects
OTOH
> have nothing in common except that they reflect light of a certain
> wavelength.
Atheists have nothing in common other than they do not beleive in god/s. My
analogy not only stands, but has been strengthened by the above.
> So the god you don't believe in is a Christian God?
I don't beleive in any of them. Being a Westerner I am most exposed to the
Xtian god so that is the one I think of when I am thinking of fictional
entitites. A
> Of course not all
> atheists are Marxists, I never said they were.
So what does "Marxists are atheists by definition mean". How can a property
be said to define some class of thing, but then not all instances of that
class have that property? "A quadrilateral shape has four straight sides by
defintion, but not all quadrilateral shapes have four sides". Doesn't work
does it.
> However a majority of
> atheists in the twentieth century, worldwide, were almost certainly
> Marxists.
Where do you make this stuff up from.
Malcolm
> important strand of atheism'. You have already stated above that
> 'atheism is an integral part of Marxism'. Both statements cannot
> be true.
>
Marxists. This is because Marxists believe in other things as well as an
absence of gods. Atheism is thus an integral part of Marxism, and Marxists
are a sub-set, or strand of atheists (because they communicate with other
atheists, maybe co-operate with them at times).
You're taking the metaphors "strand" and "part of" too literally. There is
no contradiction, because "atheism" means both "the doctrine that there are
no gods" and "the community of persons professing disbelief in gods, and the
set of doctrines which have in common a rejection of the existence of gods".
>
> I regret that I must ignore your facile claim to be able to
> refute Marxism by showing that certain of Marx's predictions were
> wrong and that the Marxist model of economic organisation is
> inefficient and repressive. The business of finishing off Marx is
> at at all so simple.
>
destroyed Marxism as a significant political force, but it doesn't mean that
everything Marx taught was wrong through and through.
Geoff McCaughan
> The Nazis seized private property, restrained trade, had gangs of thugs
> shut down businesses they didn't like, regulated everyone and his brother,
> and used the power of government to enrich themselves and their friends
> and impoverish their opponents.
[snip]
> These things are entirely uncapitalistic phenomena.
Which of the above has never been done by a capitalist government?
Geoff McCaughan
> Maybe, but I surely wouldn't bet on it. While there were certainly some
> prominent people who were both Marxist and (nominally) atheist, there
> were also many atheists who were not Marxist--Andrew Carnegie, Thomas
> Edison, Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand, Mark Twain, to name but a handful.
I expect he's going to reply along the lines of 'there were x zillion
Marxists in China and Russia', vastly outnumbering all atheists elsewhere.
The shortcomings of such a line of thought should be obvious.
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
>
>> The only modern political power that I know of, which perpetrated
>> mass slaughter, deliberately and with intent, as a key element in
>> its racist political programme, was Naziism. This was an entirely
>> capitalistic phenomenon,
>
> That's the sort of absurdity that could only be believed by
> one with no understanding, either of Naziism, or else of capitalism.
> Since Marx wrote an awful lot about capitalism the presumption must
> be for the latter.
I'm not certain which of my sentences above constitutes the
absurdity, or whether it's both taken together. I presume it's
the last sentence. My reason for this is twofold: (1) I doubt
that you disagree with the first sentence; and (2) in my
experience, certain defenders of the capital system get very
agitated when one asserts that naziism is a capitalist
phenomenon. They can even lose track of themselves, now and
again.
They don't like it at all to have to face the reality that their
favourite social metabolic system could possibly give rise to
such a monstrosity. They seem to prefer the mythology which says
that capitalism is all about the (protestant?) work ethic,
equality of opportunity, fair trade, free press, elections,
democracy, and the American dream.
However, I shan't get into all that, or the moderator will issue
a polite note about staying on topic and so forth. Besides, I'd
be here until Christmas if I were to expound a fraction of
marxist critique of the capital system.
> The Nazis seized private property, restrained
> trade, had gangs of thugs shut down businesses they didn't like,
> regulated everyone and his brother, and used the power of government
> to enrich themselves and their friends and impoverish their opponents.
> They promoted a collectivist, statist ideology of the Volk, in which
> individuals' rights mattered not at all. They spread antisemitism
> by playing on poor people's envy of the rich. And when they got
> control of nations of "untermenschen", they brought back slavery.
> These things are entirely uncapitalistic phenomena.
You were doing fairly well until the last sentence (except for
the tendency to hyperbole). The plain fact is that the Nazi's
established in Germany, in the 1930s, a corporate state, run in
the interests of big business, through its alliance with the
National Socialist German Workers' Party. I should have thought
that no one in their right mind would dispute that, but it seems
I'm wrong (see next statements).
> The Nazi Party
> was historically an outgrowth of a socialist outfit called the German
> Workers' Party; and when the Nazis drifted away from socialism, what
> they drifted toward was mercantilism, not capitalism.
The Werman Workers' Party (GWP) was anything but socialist. It
was founded in Munich, Bavaria in 1919, by Anton Drexler,
Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, and consisted of few lumpen
proletarians and impoverished middle classes and rentiers, ruined
by the inflation. It was theoretically confused and ignorant,
spouting pseudo-socialist phraseology, revanchist German
nationalism, racism, and anti-semitism.
Remember that he background to all this was the sorry state of
Germany (including Bavaria) wracked by inflation, economic
depression, high unemployment, and the effects of the
repatriations it was made to pay by the British and French
imperialists after the First World War.
Hitler had similar ideas to the GWP, but did not join the party
until encouraged to do so by his army superior. He was the 54th
person to join. The army wanted him to spy on the organisation,
thinking it was a radical revolutionary party.
Hitler brought several members of the army into the party,
including one of his commanding officers, Captain Ernst Roehm.
The arrival of Roehm was an important development as he had
access to the army political fund and was able to transfer some
of the money into the GWP. Hitler quickly joined the party's
executive committee and became responsible for propoganda.
In April 1920, Hitler advocated that the party should change its
name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP i.e.
the Nazi party). Hitler had always been hostile to socialist
ideas, especially those that involved racial or sexual equality.
However, socialism was a popular political philosophy in Germany
after the First World War (reflected, for instance, in the growth
in the German Social Democratic Party, the largest political
party in Germany).
Hitler, therefore redefined socialism by placing the word
'National' before it. He claimed he was only in favour of
equality for those who had German blood. He advocated that Jews
and other aliens should be denied rights of citizenship, and that
immigration of non-Germans should be brought to an end.
In February 1920, the NSDAP published its first programme which
became known as the "Twenty-Five Points". In the programme the
party rejected the terms of the Versailles Treaty and called for
the reunification of all German people. To reinforce their ideas
on nationalism, equal rights were only to be given to German
citizens. 'Foreigners' and 'aliens' would be denied these rights.
To appeal to the working class and socialists, the programme
included several measures that would redistribute income and war
profits, share profits in large industries, nationalise trusts,
increase old-age pensions, and provide free education.
Initially the NSDAP got no support from industry, being seen as
too left wing. Hitler was told this when he approached
industrialists for money for the party.
In an attempt to obtain financial contributions from
industrialists, Hitler wrote a pamphlet in 1927 entitled 'The
Road to Resurgence'. Only a small number of these pamphlets were
printed, being intended solely for the eyes of German
industrialists. The cynical reason that the pamphlet was kept
secret was that it would have upset Hitler's lumpen proletarian
supporters. Ihe pamphlet implied that the anti-capitalist
measures included in the original twenty-five points of the NSDAP
programme would not be implemented if Hitler gained power.
Hitler argued that capitalists had worked their way to the top
because they had the capacity to do so, and on that basis,
therefore, they had the right to lead. He claimed that national
socialism meant all people should do their best for society and
that it posed no threat to the wealth of the rich. Some
prosperous industrialists began to give donations to the Nazi
Party (though vast majority continued to support other parties,
especially the right-wing German Nationalist Peoples Party.
When Hitler and other Nazi leaders, with the utmost cynicism,
toured the country in the early 1930s, denouncing democracy and
calling for strong government, what they said depended very much
on the audience. In rural areas they promised tax cuts for
farmers and government action to protect food prices. In working
class areas they spoke of redistribution of wealth and attacked
the high profits and high food prices. When Hitler spoke to
industrialists, he concentrated on his plans to destroy communism
and to reduce the power of the trade union movement. The main
message was that Germany's economic recession was due to the
Treaty of Versailles. Other than refusing to pay reparations,
Hitler avoided explaining how he would improve the German
economy.
The Nazi's concern for workers is evident from Hitler's order in
1933, immediately on coming to power, to arrest the trade union
leaders. He then gave Robert Ley the task of forming the German
Labour Front to replace the now outlawed trade unions. Ley
confiscated union funds and used the money to fund the 'Strength
through Joy' programme. No such measures were taken against the
industrialists, who went on during the Nazi period to make
gigantic profits from the military build-uo and subsequent war.
They even got a bonus: confiscated Jewish businesses were given
to 'German' capitalists.
And we mustn't forget, must we, that it was prominent
industrialists who requested Paul von Hindenburg to appoint
Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933. Nor must we forget that the
same Paul von Hindenburg, with the support of senior military
officers and right-wing industrialists, earlier formed the
military-industrial dictatorship that held power until defeat in
the First World War was staring them in the face.
Thus in origin, support by industrialists, programme and practice
the Nazis were a phenomenon of the capital system.
>> as well as being thoroughily and cynically irreligious.
>
> The Nazis were deeply into occult mysticism. They outlawed
> atheist organizations. Hitler thought he was doing the Lord's work.
> Their religious views tended to be highly nonstandard but that doesn't
> make them irreligious.
Some Nazis were into the occult; some thought they were doing the
Lord's work; and most were confused and ignorant in philosophical
matters. However, I am talking about the Nazi movement, i.e. the
political organisation, programme, and party (the NSDAP).
The NSDAP promised religious freedom for all religions except
those which endangered the German race. Judaism was of course not
on this list. Neither were the Jehovah's Witnesses, who were
persecuted, not only because they refused to do military service,
but also because they refused to preach that the the Messiah,
whose imminent return they expected, was none other than Adolf
Hitler.
Hitler had ceased to practice christianity by the time he came to
power. He lacked the confidence to outlaw christianity, fearing
the organised power of the churches. Thus, in practice, the Nazis
cynically allowed those religions which were useful to them to
continue, and they manipulated them into acquiesence with Nazi
policy in so far as was possible. Leaders of the Protestant and
Catholic churches remained silent during this time. The main
religious opposition to Hitler came from a group of young pastors
led by Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoffer and Heinrich Gruber.
After he was imprisoned in Dachau, Martin Niemöller wrote a poem:
First they came for the Jews.
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out -
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
strider
> However by showing up the flaws in Marxism, we
> haven't refuted every position held by every atheist in the world, just cut
> away the philosophical basis for the beliefs of a large number of atheists.
>
Marx believed theism was untrue because he only believed in the
material world (scientific materialism). Please refute this claim to
refute Marx's atheism.
Please don't add to this claim to refute it. Marx believed other
things were a consequence of materialism, and most of those were
wrong. But Marx's atheism stems from his materialism. Marx did not
claim that god didn't exist because religion was superstructure. Marx
claimed that only the material world existed, hence there is no god.
He also felt this indicated religion was just superstructure
(imaterial to real social analysis). But one may accept that religion
is false, due for instance to scientific materialism, and that it
still has an effect because ideas (even bad ones) effect how people
act.
So again, prove materialism wrong.
Paavo P
>
> Only a minority of priests are paedophiles, and only a minority of
> paedophile priests, if any, would say that their actions are an integral
> part of their religion.
Yes, but it seems to be so that many churches (like other organizations)
which activly try to protect these criminals and harm the victims even more.
Jim F.
"Paul Filseth" <pg...@lsil.com> wrote in message
news:2003111110...@lsil.com...
>
> That's the sort of absurdity that could only be believed by
> one with no understanding, either of Naziism, or else of capitalism.
> Since Marx wrote an awful lot about capitalism the presumption must
> be for the latter. The Nazis seized private property, restrained
> trade, had gangs of thugs shut down businesses they didn't like,
> regulated everyone and his brother, and used the power of government
> to enrich themselves and their friends and impoverish their opponents.
And you're going to tell us that other capitalist governments
have never done such things? Here in the US, the Federal
government can and does seize the property and businesses
of those who have been accused of being drug dealers or
"terrorists". That doesn't mean that the US is not a capitalist
country nor that the US government is not a capitalist government.
And BTW statist ideologies that downplay concepts of individual
rights are not a phenomena confined to socialist countries. In
many capitalist countries one can find such ideologies which
are often supprtive of the forms of capitalism that exist in those
countries. This in Western Europe there have long existed
Christian Democratic parties which are certainly pro-capitalist
but which have tended to be supportive of an interventionist
state and have often embraced some form of communitarianism
in terms of ideology. Over in Singapore they have a government
which is very much committed to capitalism but which has little
use for notions of individual rights. Capitalism has over the
years proven to be quite compatible with a broad range of
ideologies. In principle almost any idology is acceptable as
long as it recognized the sacred rights of capitalists.
> They promoted a collectivist, statist ideology of the Volk, in which
> individuals' rights mattered not at all. They spread antisemitism
> by playing on poor people's envy of the rich. And when they got
> control of nations of "untermenschen", they brought back slavery.
> These things are entirely uncapitalistic phenomena.
Is slavery an entirely uncapitalistic phenomenon?
Here in the US, in the antebellum South, plantations were
operated as capitalist enterprises on a profit-and-loss basis.
Slaves themselves were treated as commodities to be bought
and sold in the market. In what sense was Southern slavery
not capitalist? It is true enough that this system eventually
came to be perceived as a barrier or impediment to the
development of an industrial capitalist economy in the US,
which is why the Northern industrial capital felt the necessity
of challenging the South's control over the Federal government,
which they successfully accomplished with the election of
Abraham Lincoln in 1860 which in turn precipated the
succession movement in the South and thus the Civil War.
However, none of that meant that Southern slavery was
not a capitalist phenomenon.
The Nazi Party
> was historically an outgrowth of a socialist outfit called the German
> Workers' Party; and when the Nazis drifted away from socialism, what
> they drifted toward was mercantilism, not capitalism.
As Tony Dermody pointed out in his response, the Nazis were
never really socialists but rather cynically used socialist rhetoric
to gain popular support. They acquired power with the backing
of the large industrialists in Germany, who of course would have
had no truck with a genunely socialist outfit.
Malcolm
"Geoff McCaughan" <geo...@spam.fqdn.com> wrote in message
>
> I expect he's going to reply along the lines of 'there were x zillion
> Marxists in China and Russia', vastly outnumbering all atheists
> elsewhere.
>
recently, were Marxists.
>
> The shortcomings of such a line of thought should be obvious.
>
important for any defence of theism, just as attacking Christianity (as an
important religion) is properly the concern of atheism. However it is only
one of the many arguments required, just as proving "the Jesus myth" would
do nothing to convince a Jew to be atheist.
Malcolm
"Chris Michael" <no...@m.pls> wrote in message
>
> > atheists are Marxists, I never said they were.
>
> So what does "Marxists are atheists by definition mean".
>
and all others evolved after the split from the chimpanzee".
Homo sapiens is therefore a hominid "by definition". Gorillas and
orang-utans are not "hominids". Homo erectus and Homo habilis are also
hominids, but are not homo sapiens.
Replace "homo sapiens" with "Marxist", "hominid" with "atheist" and you will
get the idea.
Chris Michael
> [snip]
> Which of the above has never been done by a capitalist government?
>
That's not really the point. No actual government fully lives up to the
ideololgy it is based on. Either pragmatism or corruption will necessitate
some departures from the philosophy it follows. Restrained trade, gangs of
thugs shutting down businesses etc. may all have at times occurred under
captialist regimes (as under any others no doubt), but that does not make
them features of the capitalist philosophy.
Chris Michael
"Tony Dermody" <tder...@iol.NODAMNJUNK.ie> wrote in message
news:1t2qhi2dey688.4h4be184o0gq$.dlg@40tude.net...
> They don't like it at all to have to face the reality that their
> favourite social metabolic system could possibly give rise to
> such a monstrosity. They seem to prefer the mythology which says
> that capitalism is all about the (protestant?) work ethic,
> equality of opportunity, fair trade, free press, elections,
> democracy, and the American dream.
>
I totally agree there are some downsides to capitalism. However all the
above are also aspects of capitalism. All forms of government have their
faults. Capitalism on the whole seems to be less odious than many other
forms.
> However, I shan't get into all that, or the moderator will issue
> a polite note about staying on topic and so forth. Besides, I'd
> be here until Christmas if I were to expound a fraction of
> marxist critique of the capital system.
>
etc...
Capitalism is secular, and it doesn't really care much about race. There is
no way any reasonable person would define Nazism as a form of capitalism.
That is even MORE ridiculous than when some capitalists label socialists as
communists. No matter how much history or biograhy you quote, you will not
demonstrate nazism is capitalism. Furthermore you fall foul of Godwin's law
of debate which states that as soon as one side likens the other side to
Nazis (which happens depressingly often), that accusing side loses the
debate by default.
David Wynne-Griffiths
from "Malcolm" <mal...@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> contains these words:
> Exactly, most Marxists are atheists, and most atheists, at least until very
> recently, were Marxists.
What total rubbish! In the UK there are plenty of atheists and very few
of them have ever been marxists.
--
~~~~~~~
Davidwg
~~~~~~~
Christopher A. Lee
<mal...@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
>"Geoff McCaughan" <geo...@spam.fqdn.com> wrote in message
>>
>> I expect he's going to reply along the lines of 'there were x zillion
>> Marxists in China and Russia', vastly outnumbering all atheists
>> elsewhere.
>>
>Exactly, most Marxists are atheists, and most atheists, at least until very
>recently, were Marxists.
Ignorant bullshit.
Most SOVIET atheists might have been Marxists, but neither implies the
other.
There were atheists before Marx.
>> The shortcomings of such a line of thought should be obvious.
>>
>It means that undermining the Marxist theory of religion is supremely
>important for any defence of theism, just as attacking Christianity (as an
>important religion) is properly the concern of atheism. However it is only
>one of the many arguments required, just as proving "the Jesus myth" would
>do nothing to convince a Jew to be atheist.
Meaningless. Marx's phrase about the opium of the people simply says
that it keeps the sheeple happy.
And "attacking christianity" is nothing to do with atheism. Most
atheists wouldn't give a flying fuck about Christianity or Christians
if they didn't force it where it is neither wanted nor needed. The
problem is that Christianity is an evangelising religion, which makes
its adherents go out of their way to rub it in everybody else's faces.
>
S.A.Joyce
>
> Exactly, most Marxists are atheists,
Granted. Just as most Nazis are Christians.
> and most atheists, at least until very
> recently, were Marxists.
Within the Communist Bloc perhaps. Outside it, atheism is independent
of Marxism. Atheism has its own foundation, unrelated to political or
economic ideology. Atheism existed long before Marxism was conceived;
and now long since Marxism has fallen into decay and discredit nearly
everywhere outside Eastern Asia, atheism continues to flourish in
modern, progressive societies--many of which have never been Marxist and
show no inclination to become so.
> It means that undermining the Marxist theory of religion is supremely
> important for any defence of theism,
Only where theism is attacked by Marxists. While religions (both
theistic and non-theistic) have elsewhere been brutally attacked and
oppressed by Marxist regimes, I doubt you'll find many Stalinists or
Maoists posting here in a.a.m. Here it's just evidence and reason, and
an occasional conjecture--not the Secret Police--against which religion
must defend itself.
> just as attacking Christianity (as an
> important religion) is properly the concern of atheism.
Here we go again: You're projecting typically theist attitudes and
behavior onto non-theists. Attacking religion may be the concern of a
few "crusading" atheists, but not of those comfortable and secure in
their disbelief. Most of us really do not give a damn what you believe
(though we'll happily engage you in debate if you seem to be itching for
it). We concede you the right to believe (or not) in accordance with
dictates of personal conscience, with neither interference nor
endorsement by the civil government. And we demand no more and no less
for ourselves, and for everyone else. Our main concern (as atheists) is
defending religious liberty from those who don't understand the
difference between it and religious tyranny. But we also enjoy a few
chuckles when an occasional true believer shows up to entertain us with
his ideas of why his favorite superstition (whichever one it happens to
be) is the only true and credible one. :o)
> However it is only
> one of the many arguments required, just as proving "the Jesus myth"
would
> do nothing to convince a Jew to be atheist.
Inasmuch as your audience here probably contains few (if any) Marxists,
it's hard to see how "undermining the Marxist theory of religion" is
"required." In the context of a.a.m., it appears more like tilting at
windmills. But if it gives you a thrill, hey, we don't mind watching.
Um... you don't mind if we call you "Don Malcolm," do you?
Geoff McCaughan
> "Geoff McCaughan" <geo...@spam.fqdn.com> wrote in message
>>
>> I expect he's going to reply along the lines of 'there were x zillion
>> Marxists in China and Russia', vastly outnumbering all atheists
>> elsewhere.
>>
> Exactly, most Marxists are atheists, and most atheists, at least until very
> recently, were Marxists.
Now you need to demonstrate that the number of Marxists in China and Russia
did indeed outnumber atheists elsewhere.
Note: Citizens of communists countries are not necessarily Marxists.
Got any figures?
Kirk Job-Sluder
> We could define "hominid" as "member of a group of organisms including man
> and all others evolved after the split from the chimpanzee".
> Homo sapiens is therefore a hominid "by definition". Gorillas and
> orang-utans are not "hominids". Homo erectus and Homo habilis are also
> hominids, but are not homo sapiens.
>
> Replace "homo sapiens" with "Marxist", "hominid" with "atheist" and you will
> get the idea.
The problem with this is what happens when you slice up the taxonomy by
a different set of features. For example, Anarcho-Communist
worker-owned communes have a lot in common with religious separatist
groups like the Shakers, the Rappites and the Amana colonies. Some
historians group Marxists with Robert Owen-style liberal socialism.
An evolutionary tree metaphor for human constructs such as ideologies
does not work.
--
Kirk Job-Sluder
http://www.jobsluder.net/~kirk/
Malcolm
http://www.religioustolerance.org/atheist1.htm
(a website sympathetic to atheists)
Estimates of the numbers of Atheists are hopelessly inaccurate:
According to the 2001 World Almanac, Atheists number: 121 million in Asia
56 million in the former USSR
23 million (3.5%) in Europe
2.7 million in Latin America
1.6 million (0.5%) in North America
0.4 million in Oceania
0.4 million in Africa 8
American Atheists claim that almost 30 million Americans are Atheists.
Asia is probably dominated by China. We see that the former USSR, Europe
(including Eastern Europe) and Asia dominate atheist numbers. This is still
true even if we accept the 30 million estimate for American atheists (using
more liberal criteria will also inflate the ex-Soviet and Chinese figures).
Here China's Communist Party membership
"Any Chinese who has reached the age of 18, accepts the Party's Program and
Constitution and is willing to join and work actively in one of the Party
organizations, carry out the Party's decisions and pay membership dues
regularly, may apply for membership of the CPC. Its membership increased
from 70 in 1921 to over 66 million in 2002."
http://www.chinatoday.com/org/cpc/
Here's the Soviet Communist party
"CPSU membership declined from about 19.5 million in 1988 to 15 million in
1991"
http://www.adherents.com/largecom/communist_parties.html
Overwhemingly, in the twentieth century atheism was a Marxist phenomenon.
Malcolm
"S.A.Joyce" <s.a....@NOSPAM.att.net> wrote in message
>
> Within the Communist Bloc perhaps. Outside it, atheism is
> independentof Marxism.
>
instance, was never Marxist, but it was still highly influenced by Marx's
ideas. Communists ruled a quarter of the word's population in the second
half of the twentieth century.
>
> Atheism has its own foundation, unrelated to political or
> economic ideology.
>
is unrelated to the political or economic status of the pupils? European
agnosticism unrelated to democracy and consumerist economic ideology?
>
> Atheism existed long before Marxism was conceived;
>
Greece and other cultures. However in the closing years of the eighteenth
century deism was much more common than atheism, but deism gradually became
atheism in the nineteenth century. Marx was active in the mid-nineteeth
century, and though he didn't invent atheism, you can say that Marxism and
mass atheism grew up together, and of course fed off each other.
>
> and now long since Marxism has fallen into decay and discredit nearly
> everywhere outside Eastern Asia, atheism continues to flourish in
> modern, progressive societies--many of which have never been
> Marxist and show no inclination to become so.
>
countries nationalised substantial sections of their economies. The United
States didn't do so. Interestingly, Christianity is far stronger in the USA
than in Western Europe.
John Secker
<geo...@spam.fqdn.com> writes
>
>Now you need to demonstrate that the number of Marxists in China and Russia
>did indeed outnumber atheists elsewhere.
>
>Note: Citizens of communists countries are not necessarily Marxists.
>
remotely wiped out in the USSR, and in many ways it was strengthened but
oppression. I am less familiar with the situation in China, but it seems
that Confucianism is alive and well, and the Falun Gong sect is strong
enough to cause the regime serious problems.
--
John Secker
Paul Filseth
> > The Nazis seized private property, restrained trade, had gangs of
> > thugs shut down businesses they didn't like, regulated everyone
> > and his brother, and used the power of government to enrich
> > themselves and their friends and impoverish their opponents.
>
> Which of the above has never been done by a capitalist government?
What's a "capitalist government"? I'd have thought it was by
definition one that doesn't do stuff like that. "Capitalism" means
your economic system is based on free trade and respect for private
property rights.
A government is a committee. Some people in government promote
capitalism and some oppose it. When a government does something
listed above, that means officials opposed to free trade and property
rights evidently gained the upper hand on that matter over officials
who favor them. It doesn't matter whether you choose to continue
labeling the government "capitalist" overall -- what the government
did in that case was not capitalistic. Calling Naziism a capitalistic
phenomenon is calling the air in a glass "water" on the grounds that
the glass is half-full.
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
>
>> They don't like it at all to have to face the reality that their
>> favourite social metabolic system could possibly give rise to
>> such a monstrosity. They seem to prefer the mythology which says
>> that capitalism is all about the (protestant?) work ethic,
>> equality of opportunity, fair trade, free press, elections,
>> democracy, and the American dream.
>>
> I totally agree there are some downsides to capitalism. However all the
> above are also aspects of capitalism. All forms of government have their
> faults. Capitalism on the whole seems to be less odious than many other
> forms.
I agree entirely that all forms of government have their
faults. However, the relative odiousness of capitalism does not
depend on the form of government, since capitalism can have many
types of government, ranging from those which are relatively
democratic to those of a dictatorial nature.
Nor was capitalism always 'odius'. In its early period of
development it was a progressive force.
>> However, I shan't get into all that, or the moderator will issue
>> a polite note about staying on topic and so forth. Besides, I'd
>> be here until Christmas if I were to expound a fraction of
>> marxist critique of the capital system.
>>
> etc...
>
> Capitalism is secular, and it doesn't really care much about race. There is
> no way any reasonable person would define Nazism as a form of capitalism.
I didn't define Nazism as a form of capitalism. It's not a matter
of definition. Capitalism has certain specific features in
practice, and if these features can be distinguished in the
practical manifestation of Nazism, then it's capitalist.
What I said was that Nazism was a 'capitalistic' phenomenon. I
regret that this may be imprecise. I would distinguish between
the 'capital system' in general, and 'capitalism' as a specific
instance of that. There are other possible forms of the capital
system, and Nazism may well be different enough to be counted as
manifestation of the capital system which is different from
capitalism. I haven't looked into it, so I can't say for sure,
but I strongly suspect that Nazism is in fact capitalist.
I understand capitalism in the way Marx did, though taking
account of developments in Marxist thought since. There are some
very interesting new ideas now emerging among Marxists since the
collapse of the countries of 'existing socialism', as Marxixts
generally used to call the USSR and its associated sattelite
sattes. Don't forget that the Marxist analysis of capitalism is
concerned primarily with economics: how does material production
and reproduction take place, and how is it mediated. I should be
glad to explore these issues, but I suspect we cannot do it on
alt.atheism.moderated since the discussion will take us into the
realm of economics and far from atheism.
The question whether capitalism is secular or not depends on the
state. Capitalism generates a certain type of state, but as far
as I can see it does not need to be secular. It can function
successfully while being religious. However, one of the first
demands of democracy, as capitalism developed in Europe, was for
the separation of church and state, and in Europe and the
Americas and elsewhere the state is generally secular, at least
in most of its practices.
In the Middle East and elsewhere, this is not the case in
general, though the very nature of the capitalist market,
especially nowadays the global market, does generate pressures
toward secularism.
> There is
> no way any reasonable person would define Nazism as a form of capitalism.
> That is even MORE ridiculous than when some capitalists label socialists as
> communists. No matter how much history or biograhy you quote, you will not
> demonstrate nazism is capitalism. Furthermore you fall foul of Godwin's law
> of debate which states that as soon as one side likens the other side to
> Nazis (which happens depressingly often), that accusing side loses the
> debate by default.
Are you calling on Godwin's Law to close this thread? In my
opinion that would be a retrograde step, since the nature of
capitalism, and its relation to such phenomena as atheism and
nazism is important to an understanding of the modern world. And
don't forget that the complex relationship of nazism and atheism
might even be traced back to Neitzsche. In any event, I did not
call anyone a nazi nor make any comparisons. We are on an
eminently sensible newsgroup, where the participants are mostly
capable debaters, and can pick out an ad hominem remark from
miles away.
So, I haven't lost the debate by default, since the debate on
this subthread is about the complexities of slaughter by
atheists, including the whole nexus of related problems
concerning slaughter under socialism, capitalism, and nazism. The
Nazis were slaughterers, whatever about their stature as
atheists. The question is whether they were a phenomenon of the
capital system. I answer in the affirmative. And I will argue it
out on any newsgroup you choose. How about soc.politics.marxism?
Forget Godwin if that's the best you can do with him. See:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/ .
Tony Dermody
> It means that undermining the Marxist theory of religion is supremely
> important for any defence of theism, just as attacking Christianity (as an
> important religion) is properly the concern of atheism. However it is only
> one of the many arguments required, just as proving "the Jesus myth" would
> do nothing to convince a Jew to be atheist.
The mind boggles at this sort of thing. Atheism is founded in
science and materialist philosophy, if it is founded anywhere.
Attacking Christianity per se has nothing to do with either the
defense or support of atheism. One criticises Christianity to
undermine the convictions of Christians.
All of which makes me wonder what you think the 'Marxist theory
of religion' is. Summarise it for me, and then undermine the
summary, and we'll set to it!
Tony Dermody
[snip]
> Here in the US, the Federal
> government can and does seize the property and businesses
> of those who have been accused of being drug dealers or
> "terrorists". That doesn't mean that the US is not a capitalist
> country nor that the US government is not a capitalist government.
Let's not forget that, early on in its development, capitalism
had to separate workers entirely from the means of production,
and also separate production from consumption. This process has
deep roots in history and was extraordinarily complex. The market
became not only the means by which production and consumption
were equated (though never without giving rise to the most severe
contradictions) but also the means by which money could be
exchanged for labour as a commodity, the labour being sold to the
capitalists by the workers themselves. Hence arose the most
efficient means that the world had ever seen, of seizing value
produced by others without giving anything in exchange.
Thus, all the accumulated value represented by money capital
today has been expropriated, by the personifications of capital,
from workers, down the years. Seizures of capitalist or other
property by states in modern times pale into almost complete
insignificance by comparison.
[snip]
> Is slavery an entirely uncapitalistic phenomenon?
> Here in the US, in the antebellum South, plantations were
> operated as capitalist enterprises on a profit-and-loss basis.
> Slaves themselves were treated as commodities to be bought
> and sold in the market. In what sense was Southern slavery
> not capitalist? It is true enough that this system eventually
> came to be perceived as a barrier or impediment to the
> development of an industrial capitalist economy in the US,
> which is why the Northern industrial capital felt the necessity
> of challenging the South's control over the Federal government,
> which they successfully accomplished with the election of
> Abraham Lincoln in 1860 which in turn precipated the
> succession movement in the South and thus the Civil War.
> However, none of that meant that Southern slavery was
> not a capitalist phenomenon.
I would quibble that, while the South exhibited many of the
characteristics of the capital system, the slavery itself was not
a capitalist phenomenon, but was an anomaly.
Don't forget that the extraction of surplus value from the slaves
was clear and visible: they worked part of the time to produce
the products to meet their own needs; the rest of the produce of
their working time was kept by the slave owner. However,
extraction of surplus value under capitalism is veiled by the
market, whereby labour is sold as a commodity at its own value,
the surplus value produced by the worker being held by the
capitalist or other personification of capital.
[snip]
Paul Filseth
> > The Nazis seized private property, restrained trade, had gangs of
> > thugs shut down businesses they didn't like, regulated everyone
> > and his brother, and used the power of government to enrich
> > themselves and their friends and impoverish their opponents.
>
> And you're going to tell us that other capitalist governments
> have never done such things? Here in the US, the Federal
> government can and does seize the property and businesses
> of those who have been accused of being drug dealers or
> "terrorists". That doesn't mean that the US is not a capitalist
> country nor that the US government is not a capitalist government.
Taking stuff from people planning to use it to blow up other
people's stuff is just normal pro-private-property law enforcement
and doesn't really pertain to what we're talking about here. If
the owners are innocent and the terrorism accusation is a sham just
to get their stuff, that's an anti-capitalist action. Seizing drug
dealers' stuff is anti-capitalist too. Now, if you want to total up
the US government's behavior, judge that their pro-capitalism actions
outweigh their anti-capitalism actions, and label them "a capitalist
government" on that basis, suit yourself. It's not on point. That
can't make their anti-capitalist actions "a capitalistic phenomenon".
They're one of the anti-capitalist phenomena we can expect to find in
a moderately capitalist, moderately anti-capitalist government. The
Nazis, on the other hand, didn't do a whole lot in moderation.
> And BTW statist ideologies that downplay concepts of individual
> rights are not a phenomena confined to socialist countries.
Who said they are? There are a lot more than two possible
economic systems. The Nazis weren't capitalists; that doesn't imply
they were socialists. They quite evidently weren't, except in their
early years.
> In many capitalist countries one can find such ideologies which
> are often supportive of the forms of capitalism that exist in those
> countries. This in Western Europe there have long existed
> Christian Democratic parties which are certainly pro-capitalist
> but which have tended to be supportive of an interventionist
> state
Everything comes in degrees; but to the extent that they favor
economic interventionism, protectionism, government industrial planning
and so forth, to that extent they're acting uncapitalistically. These
are mercantilistic phenomena.
> Over in Singapore they have a government which is very much committed
> to capitalism but which has little use for notions of individual
> rights.
The Singaporean government has plenty of use for notions of
individual *property* rights, which, like it or not, are individual
rights.
> Capitalism has over the years proven to be quite compatible with a
> broad range of ideologies. In principle almost any ideology is
> acceptable as long as it recognized the sacred rights of capitalists.
If by "capitalists" you mean "rich industrialists" rather than
"law-abiding people", then no. It's compatible with freedom; and it's
also compatible with an oppressive puritanical society that locks men
up for bedding other men. What it's not compatible with is taking
away all the Jews' stuff and giving it to government officials and
rich industrialists. If you want to talk about what's "sacred",
Carnegie summed it up: "Upon the sacredness of property civilization
itself depends -- the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in
the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to
his millions." That might possibly be self-serving and inequitable
to laborers, but what it *isn't* is *compatible with taking away a
laborer's hundred dollars*. Even if you take it away because he's a
Jew, or a political opponent, or just a guy with a hundred dollars
you want; and that's what the Nazis did.
> > And when they got control of nations of "untermenschen", they
> > brought back slavery. These things are entirely uncapitalistic
> > phenomena.
>
> Is slavery an entirely uncapitalistic phenomenon? Here in the US,
> in the antebellum South, plantations were operated as capitalist
> enterprises on a profit-and-loss basis.
Why were the enterprises capitalistic? Because you say so?
Capitalism is about voluntary economic arrangements and respect for
property rights. The plantations got their labor from non-volunteers.
And "voluntary" applies to enterprises as well as workers. That means
capitalist enterprises don't have to enter compulsory cartels -- they
get to compete if they want to. Plantations were legally barred from
hiring each other's workers away. If Toyota can't hire Ford workers
without Ford's permission, we don't have capitalism.
> Slaves themselves were treated as commodities to be bought and
> sold in the market. In what sense was Southern slavery not
> capitalist?
If you want to think of slaves as property rather than economy
participants, fine. The source of slaves was *kidnapping*. If people
are property, then slavers are thieves, slave traders are fences, and
slave owners are people who knowingly buy stolen property. They are
all *criminals*. None of them respect property rights. Slavery and
capitalism are as incompatible as two systems can be.
> It is true enough that this system eventually came to be perceived
> as a barrier or impediment to the development of an industrial
> capitalist economy in the US ... which in turn precipitated the
> succession movement in the South and thus the Civil War.
> However, none of that meant that Southern slavery was
> not a capitalist phenomenon.
Duh. *That's* not why slavery is anti-capitalist. Slavery is
anti-capitalist because it conflicts with free exchange and property
rights.
> > The Nazi Party was historically an outgrowth of a socialist outfit
> > called the German Workers' Party; and when the Nazis drifted away
> > from socialism, what they drifted toward was mercantilism, not
> > capitalism.
>
> As Tony Dermody pointed out in his response, the Nazis were never
> really socialists but rather cynically used socialist rhetoric
> to gain popular support.
Poppycock. It's entirely likely that Hitler was never really
a socialist -- he was a master at manipulating people, and what he
really cared about was race, not economics. But Hitler wasn't "the
Nazis". Who do you think the Nazis *were*? They were simply the
people Hitler gained the popular support of, the people who joined up
because they liked his rhetoric, the people the rhetoric was designed
to recruit. In other words, they were *socialists*. Here's the
economics portion of the so-called "Twenty-five Points", the original
manifesto of the Nazi Party, published in 1920 -- right after they
changed their name from the "German Workers' Party" to the "National
Socialist German Workers' Party". [I found this translation at
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/appendix_a.htm ]
10. It must be the first duty of each citizen of the State to work
with his mind or with his body. The activities of the individual
may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed
within the frame of the community and be for the general good.
We demand therefore:
11. Abolition of incomes unearned by work.
ABOLITION OF THE THRALDOM OF INTEREST
12. In view of the enormous sacrifice of life and property demanded
of a nation by every war, personal enrichment due to a war must
be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand therefore
ruthless confiscation of all war gains,
13. We demand nationalisation of all businesses which have been up
to the present formed into companies (Trusts).
14. We demand that the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared
out.
15. We demand extensive development of provision for old age.
16. We demand creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class,
immediate communalisation of wholesale business premises, and
their lease at a cheap rate to small traders, and that extreme
consideration shall be shown to all small purveyors to the State,
district authorities and smaller localities.
17. We demand land-reform suitable to our national requirements,
passing of a law for confiscation without compensation of land
for communal purposes; abolition of interest on land loans, and
prevention of all speculation in land.
18. We demand ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are
injurious to the common interest. Sordid criminals against the
nation, usurers, profiteers, etc. must be punished with death,
whatever their creed or race.
With a program like that, who the heck do you think is going to become
a Nazi in the early 20s? "Entirely capitalistic phenomenon"?!? How
can anyone take that nonsense seriously?
> They acquired power with the backing of the large industrialists in
> Germany, who of course would have had no truck with a genuinely
> socialist outfit.
Yeah, and? Just how many large industrialists do you think were
lining up to support them in 1920? They supported the Nazis in the
1930s, by which time Naziism was no longer socialist. Like I said,
the Nazis were an outgrowth of socialism that drifted away. They
didn't drift to capitalism. They drifted to mercantilism. Large
industrialists *love* mercantilism. They love it when government
stomps on their competitors' economic freedom and property rights.
When socialists call Nazis capitalists, that's no different from
Catholics calling Protestants atheists.
John Secker
<mal...@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> writes
>> Within the Communist Bloc perhaps. Outside it, atheism is
>> independentof Marxism.
>>
>You're underestimating the influence of Marx. The British Labour party, for
>instance, was never Marxist, but it was still highly influenced by Marx's
>ideas.
in the catfood tins. You seem obsessed both by Marxism and by its
magical ability to infect the minds of anyone who comes into contact
with it. The British Labour Party was also strongly influenced by
Christian Socialism, and the Marxist parties were separated from the
Labour Party very early on.
> Communists ruled a quarter of the word's population in the second
>half of the twentieth century.
>>
imagine that if someone lives in a totalitarian society dominated by
Communist ideology that this makes them 1) Marxist and 2) atheist.
People do not stop believing in their gods just because a government
tells them to, although it may well drive worship underground. Equally
people who join the ruling party in a dictatorship do not necessarily
share the ideology - they very often simply want power, safety or a job.
--
John Secker
ArWeGod
> >>My point is that atheism won't buy you anything even close to utopia.
> >>I doubt that it will improve your odds at all.
Life is just a dirty, nasty, unhealthy fact.
There is no reason. You are a fantastic mistake on the palette of a very
cruel existence based on the fact that if you can survive, you are fit to
survive. No help is forthcoming. In fact disaster is on it's way - ask the
Dinosaurs.
This will all become very self-evident, and religion will fail and fall,
when some creatures from another part of the Universe come to Earth and wipe
us out, "Just because we need this planet, sorry".
Think: "To Serve Mankind: the cookbook"
-ArWeGod
strider
>
> Everything comes in degrees; but to the extent that they favor
> economic interventionism, protectionism, government industrial planning
> and so forth, to that extent they're acting uncapitalistically. These
> are mercantilistic phenomena.
>
A minor quibble:
These things would only be mercantilism to the extent that they were
conducted in order to maximize the gold flowing into a country and
minimize the gold flowing out (or perhaps some similar modern idea
about trade balance and money). To the extent they are conducted for
reasons of social justice or market failures, they do not represent
mercantilism.
And a suggestion:
It might be worth defining what you mean by "capitalism." I take it
Paul means John Lock+Adam Smith, which is a perfectly plausible
definition, but it might make your differences more clear particularly
on the slavery issue.
strider
> Thirdly, the only Marxist I have come across, who advocated what
> seems to amount to mass slaughter, was Gregory Zinoviev, in 1918.
> As far as I know, no Marxist, or anyone else at the time, took
> his words seriously, or as more than rhetoric. Besides, Zinoviev
> was initially an opponent of the October Revolution (on the
> grounds that it would not succeed), and he kept changing sides in
> the intrigues which took place as Lenin declined owing to
> illness. In 1936 Zinoviev too fell in the slaughter.
Lenin advocated that Kulaks who resisted during the civil war
following the revolution be strung up as an example to the rest. I've
read the letter in which he makes this claim, but don't have an
adequate method to cite it. If you really really don't believe me, I
can try and find a way to get it to you.
I also don't see why Zonviev's changing sides really marks him as not
a Marxist. The Mensheviks (my spelling may be off) were against the
revolution and were very orthodox. There was an excellent case to be
made that a capitalist revolution needed to take place first in terms
of Marxist ideology before a communist revolution. Russia was
essentially a feudal society given Marxist terminology.
Of course I would never make the claim that being a Marxist=wanting
mass murder. Additionally, one can think Marx had important things to
say without accepting his entire philosophical structure.
> Committing slaughter is a human failing. People slaughter each
> other on account of social causes arising from the human
> condition, not because the humans doing the slaughter are
> Marxists, or atheists, or Christians, or Muslims, or Germans, or
> European colonists, or US Americans. Evil is a human potential,
> which exists in the individual human heart; its parameters are
> fixed by the human condition; the cause of its arousal is in
> human society.
>
> Humans need some kind of ideological justification for what they
> are doing, and can easily adapt almost any existing philosophy to
> this purpose. It is quite untenable to pretend that people
> slaughter each other merely on account of being adherents of some
> philosophy, or to malign a philosophical outlook by association
> with bad deeds perpretrated by some with that outlook. All
> catholics are not bad because some catholic is. Some Irish person
> is not bad because because many Irish persons are.
As I understand it you are arguing that human beings are prone to
murder. Ideology can be deployed to help this natural inclination.
However, it's a mistake to suppose ideology was the cause or a cause
of the murder.
I would argue that some ideologies are more prone to people behaving
in certain ways than others. This would include behavior along any
range from buying organic foods, to avoiding starbucks, to yelling
about political correctness, to self-immolation in order to protest
war, to mass murder. I do not define ideology is wrong ideas, but
rather a system of looking at the world. I would claim (and I'm
following someone else here) that the conception of Freedom propounded
by Marx makes it lean towards totalitarianism (I'm supporting Andrzej
Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom).
Note this argument is not a generalization from one or two cases to
all marxists. It's a claim about the nature of Marxism, about the
consequences of its points. I'd also like to point out that I'm by no
means a rabid libertarian capitalist. I like some things Marx said,
but not all.
Tony Dermody
> What's a "capitalist government"? I'd have thought it was by
> definition one that doesn't do stuff like that. "Capitalism" means
> your economic system is based on free trade and respect for private
> property rights.
I'm disappointed. Until now I would have thought that you had a
better understanding of the essence of the capitalist economic
system. Anyway, I'm going to take issue with your statement that
"Capitalism" means an economic system based on free trade and
respect for private property rights. Then I'll outline the
essential characteristics of the capitalist economic formation.
There's a lot more to it than just free trade and property rights
(I know these are merely the aspects you were discussing with
Geoff McCaughan, and that you probably do not reduce capitalism
to them). Early capitalism did not believe in free trade. And the
concept of private property, so beloved of the apologists for
capitalism, is a piece of mystification by which the original
meaning of property was perversely altered during the course of
history, so that it became identified with the 'thing' of
commodity production and exchange, and especially with the
institutionalised guarantee of capitalist reproduction [Marx:
Grundrisse:
http://www.marxists.org.uk/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/in
dex.htm . The full text on the changing notion of property is in
there somewhere, but I couldn't find it right now.]
Support for, or opposition to, free trade or private property
does not go to the essence of capitalism, but merely reflects the
overriding interests of certain sections of capital at any given
time. None of the foregoing of course is to deny the importance
of legal protection for what is understood nowadays as private
property, if the system is to function.
Also, a word about history. Capitalism has a long history. It
took at least four centuries to develop to its primitive stage,
and it has passed through several more developed stages since. It
may have further developmental stages to come, before it passes
away. Certain specific features of capitalism can be found in
earlier, pre-capitalist economic formations.
I suggest that the word 'capitalist' can be applied to any phase
of capital production which exhibits the following six
characteristics:
(1) Production for exchange is all-pervasive. Thus use-value is
mediated and dominated by exchange-value.
(2) Labour power is bought and sold as a commodity, just like any
other commodity.
(3) The drive for profit is the fundamental regulatory force of
production.
(4) The vital mechanism for the extraction of surplus value (the
radical separation of the means of production from the producers)
assumes an inherently economic form.
(5) The economically extracted surplus value is privately
appropriated by the members of the capitalist class.
(6) Following its own economic imperative of growth and
expansion, capital production tends toward global integration via
the intermediary of the world market, becoming a totally
interdependent worldwide system of economic domination and
subordination.
[See Mészarós, István: Beyond Capital - Towards a Theory of
Transition; Merlin Press, London; 1995; Page 630].
> A government is a committee. Some people in government promote
> capitalism and some oppose it. When a government does something
> listed above, that means officials opposed to free trade and property
> rights evidently gained the upper hand on that matter over officials
> who favor them. It doesn't matter whether you choose to continue
> labeling the government "capitalist" overall -- what the government
> did in that case was not capitalistic. Calling Naziism a capitalistic
> phenomenon is calling the air in a glass "water" on the grounds that
> the glass is half-full.
A government cannot be reduced to a mere committee,
notwithstanding that in some respects it is one. A government is
an organ of the state, and capitalism has its own form of state,
of which there are many varieties. The capitalist state arose
with capitalism itself, inextricably intertwined with it
historically, and embodies the necessary cohesive dimension of
its expansion-oriented and surplus-labour-extracting structural
imperative. The state is the comprehensive totalizing command
structure of capitalism. Its vital role is to secure and
safeguard the overall conditions for surplus labour extraction.
[See Mészarós, István ibid; Page 61].
Tony Dermody
[snip with abandon]
> Who do you think the Nazis *were*? They were simply the
> people Hitler gained the popular support of, the people who joined up
> because they liked his rhetoric, the people the rhetoric was designed
> to recruit. In other words, they were *socialists*.
This really won't do. The socialists were members of, or
supported, the Social Democratic Party or the Communist Party or
Trotskyist groups. The political programme of the Nazis was
anathema to socialists. While the differences which arose at the
time between the communists and the social democrats were
unforgivable (accusations of social fascism etc., for which, in
my view, the Communists must take the lions share of the blame),
it is also true that the communists and socialists were the most
principled and determined opponents of nazism.
Nor were nazis (or socialists or conservatives) 'simply people'
making up their minds neutrally and objectively. You cannot make
the economic and poliyical processes which determine peoples
views and actions disappear (Note: 'determine' is meant, not in a
primitive mechanical sense, but in the marxist dialectical,
reciprocal, interactive, dynamic sense).
> Here's the
> economics portion of the so-called "Twenty-five Points", the original
> manifesto of the Nazi Party, published in 1920 -- right after they
> changed their name from the "German Workers' Party" to the "National
> Socialist German Workers' Party".
I dealt with this at length in my post of 15/11/2003. [Quibble:
If I remember correctly the Twenty-five Points' was published in
January 1920, just before the name change in April 1920].
The real question is: How much of this confused economic
programme remained and was put into effect when the nazis came to
power in the 1930s? I dealt with that too in my earlier post.
[snip nazi pseudo-socialist economic program, just as was done by
Hitler in 1927]
> Yeah, and? Just how many large industrialists do you think were
> lining up to support them in 1920? They supported the Nazis in the
> 1930s, by which time Naziism was no longer socialist. Like I said,
> the Nazis were an outgrowth of socialism that drifted away. They
> didn't drift to capitalism. They drifted to mercantilism. Large
> industrialists *love* mercantilism. They love it when government
> stomps on their competitors' economic freedom and property rights.
> When socialists call Nazis capitalists, that's no different from
> Catholics calling Protestants atheists.
Mercantilism pre-dated capitalism. Merchant capital was the first
form of capital, and began to appear when commerce between
distant lands developed on a substantial scale, in ancient times.
However, until capitalism developed, production was predominantly
small scale for use, not for exchange. One of the progressive
things which capitalism did was to free production from the
constraints of immediate use and allow production for exchange on
a large scale, thus releasing the dynamism of the developing new
economic system and revealing the un-dreamed of forces of
production that lay hidden in social labour.
Capitalism was well developed by the time its crisis of over
production became so severe that the system had to resort to the
massive destruction of the First World War to resolve its
contradictions. Germany remained capitalist after the war. It was
in the dire economic conditions of capitalist Germany that the
nazis formed, and out of capitalist Germany thet they grew and
came to power. I cannot see that they changed fundamentally any
of the six characteristics of capitalism, outlined in my post of
26/11/2003 (in response to your post of 25/11/2003).
Large industrialists do not love mercantilism. Large industry
could not have developed during the mercantilist period since the
material prerequisites for it did not exist. Clearly, large
industry is a product of capitalism, and large industrialists
depend on all six characteristics being present.
All capitalists love to see their competitors fail, and from time
to time some sections of capital can gang up on other sections,
using the state as their instrument. But in general, both large
industry and finance capital are locked into the contradictions
of globalisation, which force them on the one hand to seek to
create a unified global free market, but on the other hand force
them to amalgamate and actively to strive (not drift) toward
oligopoly and monopoly.
Eric Pepke
> Life is just a dirty, nasty, unhealthy fact.
I like it.
Well, no, actually I don't, much of the time. But given that
it's there, you might as well do something with it.
Chris Michael
> According to the 2001 World Almanac, Atheists number: 121 million in
Asia
> 56 million in the former USSR
> 23 million (3.5%) in Europe
> 2.7 million in Latin America
> 1.6 million (0.5%) in North America
> 0.4 million in Oceania
> 0.4 million in Africa 8
>
These figures are rubbish. Most people don't know how or can't be bothered,
to fill out a census form properly. They see "Religion" and just put down
the religion of their birth. It doesn't mean they are religious. I have
seen
plenty of people describe themselves as Church Of England in forms just cos
it is the easiest thing to tick. The bar for what makes one religious is set
so stupidly low, that the figures are inflated enormously.
23 million atheists in Europe!!! There would be almost that in the UK, it
would mean only 1 in 2 people is atheist. If anything this is probably being
generous.
And Australia is officially an atheist country. Yet, with its 18 millions
(to add to all the others that make up Oceania), only 400 000 are atheist?
Come on be fair, back of the envelope calculations can show most of those
figures are nonsense. The Almanac will be telling me 1 in 2 men have had a
homosexual experience next.
Chris Michael
> Marx was active in the mid-nineteeth
> century, and though he didn't invent atheism, you can say that Marxism and
> mass atheism grew up together, and of course fed off each other.
You can say "wibble wibble pip poop". I am not sure there is much point in
doing that either though. Where do you dream this stuff up?
> In the second half of the twenieth century all the leading European
> countries nationalised substantial sections of their economies.
Twenieth? Are you developing an American accent? ;-)
> The United
> States didn't do so. Interestingly, Christianity is far stronger in the
USA
> than in Western Europe.
>
As a scientist, I hope you are not overly impressed with the above as being
strong evidence for your theory.
Chris Michael
>
> Are you calling on Godwin's Law to close this thread?
No, I was just introducing a bit of levity ;-) not something those on the
far left (or right for that matter) seem to like overly.
>In my
> opinion that would be a retrograde step, since the nature of
> capitalism, and its relation to such phenomena as atheism and
> nazism is important to an understanding of the modern world. And
> don't forget that the complex relationship of nazism and atheism
> might even be traced back to Neitzsche. In any event, I did not
> call anyone a nazi nor make any comparisons. We are on an
> eminently sensible newsgroup, where the participants are mostly
> capable debaters, and can pick out an ad hominem remark from
> miles away.
Enough already, I was only joking. I am not sure that there is any
relationship (complex or otherwise) between atheism and nazism though.
Anymore than there is a relationship between communism and atheism. (Unless
you use the word "relationship" in such a broad manner that it is a bit
pointless.)
> So, I haven't lost the debate by default,
No granted. Not by default but by being incorrect.
> The question is whether they were a phenomenon of the
> capital system. I answer in the affirmative. And I will argue it
> out on any newsgroup you choose. How about soc.politics.marxism?
I wouldn't dare subscribe to that NG. Probably Echelon would pick it up,
inform the CIA, and I will be on a hotlist ;-).
I am not sure how a group of people who wanted to exterminate another race
of people are a phenomenon of the capital system. FWIW Stalin killed more
people than Hitler. But let me guess, he wasn't a True Communist *(TM).
> Forget Godwin if that's the best you can do with him. See:
> http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/legends/godwin/ .
Like I said, just introduced for levity. I will read the link though, many
thanks.
Malcolm
> science and materialist philosophy, if it is founded anywhere.
>
It doesn't have anything to say about the supernatural itself, however.
>
> Attacking Christianity per se has nothing to do with either the
> defense or support of atheism. One criticises Christianity to
> undermine the convictions of Christians.
>
that is needed to prove atheism. Since it is difficult to prove a negative -
that no gods exist - it is necessary to do the next best thing and show that
various asserted gods do not exist. The Christian God is important because
of the number of adherents, and, I have argued, also because it is not true
that all religions make claims of similar value. Some are more credible than
others.
>
> All of which makes me wonder what you think the 'Marxist theory
> of religion' is. Summarise it for me, and then undermine the
> summary, and we'll set to it!
>
The theory is that societies go through set stages of development, driven by
changes in their economic structure. So ancient civilisations based on
slavery give way to feudalism, based on serfdom, which gives way to
capitalism, based on the ownership of machinery and factories, which is
overthrown by the oppressed workers who set up a socialist and later
Communist utopia.
The theory of religion is that. like all cultural phenomena, it is
"superstructure" over the economic base. It may differ in accidentals but
not in fundamentals. Marx was very struck by the similarity between the
Egyptian and Aztec pyramids. These sort of huge public works projects and
God-Kings were typical of the very earliest organised societies.
In the feudal period the Catholic church served the interests of the big
landowners. A feudal Lord didn't mind feasting the peasants every few weeks
as the church calendar demanded, since it kept them loyal, he didn't
alienate his land, and anyway the stored beer would otherwise just go to
waste. When we moved to capitalist production in the sixteenth century,
however, the merchant adventurer was expected to stump up his precious
working capital, hence the reformation, end of the free beer, and economic
virtues of modesty and prudence.
There's obviously something going for this theory, and there's some dispute
as to whether or not it is "scientific". One thing it has in common with
scientific theories is that it makes predictions. 150 years on, it can be
seen that these haven't been fulfiled - the socialist and communist stages
were tried, but failed to keep pace with the capitalist societies, and have
now been abandoned.
Since the central plank of the theory is defective, this casts doubt on
whether the analysis of religion can survive. In Britain there is definitely
something called "class consciousness", and Christian clergy have allowed
themselves to be used in advancing class interests, for example in the
compulsory Christianity of a British public school. However this isn't the
whole story or even the main story - the Christian church is so big and has
such a long history that the whole can to some extent correct local
aberrations. American episcopalians may ordain a gay bishop (refecting who's
class interests?) , but the African Christians will protest.
In particular, Christianity should not be seen solely in terms of friend or
enemy in the class struggle. The church's mission is broader than the
political.
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
>
>> Thirdly, the only Marxist I have come across, who advocated what
>> seems to amount to mass slaughter, was Gregory Zinoviev, in 1918.
>> As far as I know, no Marxist, or anyone else at the time, took
>> his words seriously, or as more than rhetoric. Besides, Zinoviev
>> was initially an opponent of the October Revolution (on the
>> grounds that it would not succeed), and he kept changing sides in
>> the intrigues which took place as Lenin declined owing to
>> illness. In 1936 Zinoviev too fell in the slaughter.
>
> Lenin advocated that Kulaks who resisted during the civil war
> following the revolution be strung up as an example to the rest. I've
> read the letter in which he makes this claim, but don't have an
> adequate method to cite it. If you really really don't believe me, I
> can try and find a way to get it to you.
This does not amount to advocating mass slaughter. It seems to me
to be a way of curbing the resistance by instilling fear.
Terrorism, I believe it's called by those on the receiving end.
And I suppose the perpetrators call it reprisal. I'm sure we
could quote plenty of examples of a similar nature made during
wars.
> I also don't see why Zonviev's changing sides really marks him as not
> a Marxist. The Mensheviks (my spelling may be off) were against the
> revolution and were very orthodox. There was an excellent case to be
> made that a capitalist revolution needed to take place first in terms
> of Marxist ideology before a communist revolution. Russia was
> essentially a feudal society given Marxist terminology.
I didn't say that Zinoviev was not a marxist - the opposite in
fact. But it did make him a non-revolutionary at the time.
The Mensheviks were not revolutionary in orientation, and to the
degree that they could be called marxist, were revisionist. The
reality is that they were reformist social democrats. I'm not
sure what marxist ideology is. I presume you use the term in its
loose meaning of ideas (at least that's what you say below).
However, in marxist terms ideology involves false consciousness.
In the marxist scheme of things marxism is about alalytical
methodology and a scientific approach to society. Marxist
methodology would not be tied by history or any overly rigid
theory, if an opportunity arose to skip a stage in social
development. Lenin saw that clearly, and was correct. I say that
even with the hindsight that the revolution went off the tracks
after ten years at most, and collapsed in on itself after seventy
years or so.
The tragedy was caused by a very complex set of factors early on,
including the failure of the revolutionary hopes for Western
Europe, the failure to revolutionise the authoritarian legacy
from pre-revolutionary Russia, the failure to democtatise the
production process, the failure to put workers in charge of
production, the failure to get started on the development of a
democratic method, suited to modern technology, of controlling
production, the growth of the authoritarian state, the failure to
break out of the clutches of the capital system, the rise of
facisim and serious external threats, and the rise of Stalinism.
The stark fact is that the Soviet state remained within the
capital system, though with political, rather than economic,
control of the extraction of surplus value, and with state
bureaucrats as personifications of capital. Production was
according to plan rather than primarily for exchange, but surplus
value continued to be extracted. While all this was not clear to
marxists until recently, it became patently obvious as the Soviet
system collapsed and the previous bureaucrats started the proces
of 'perestroika' (i.e. returning to capitalism) and quickly
emerged as the beginings of a new capitalist class.We all had a
blind spot because most made the decision to support the
principles of the October revolution in the interests of
humanity, and could not easily go back on that committment as
long as it was thought that the system would eventually
re-revolutionise itself. Certainly I was in that category to a
fair degree.
The lesson for humanity is that it is going to be much more
difficult than Marx or the early socialists thought to get rid of
capitalism. We clearly face a choice between socialism or
barbarism as Rosa Luxemburg observed. Our planet is wracked by
starvation, disease, poverty, ignorance, wars, pollution, climate
change, monstrous waste arising from the declining rate of usage,
gigantic production of unwanted products for the sole purpose of
maintaining the expansion of the capital system, including a
growing military industrial complex now spanning the world. All
of this is caused by capitalism, and no amount of ducking and
weaving by the apologists for caoitalism can hide it from anyone
who looks the world in the eye.
The point is not the failures of the three main attempts to end
capitalism and build a new free future for humanity (the Paris
Commune (1871), the October Revolution (1917), and the emergence
post World War II of further socialist formations. These may well
now be all (or almost all) gone, but labour and women still
confront systematic oppression by capital, and thinking people
are appalled by all this. They continue to try to change these
conditions. I, for one, don't think we've seen the last socialist
revolution, by a mile.
> Of course I would never make the claim that being a Marxist=wanting
> mass murder. Additionally, one can think Marx had important things to
> say without accepting his entire philosophical structure.
Precisely.
>> Committing slaughter is a human failing. People slaughter each
>> other on account of social causes arising from the human
>> condition, not because the humans doing the slaughter are
>> Marxists, or atheists, or Christians, or Muslims, or Germans, or
>> European colonists, or US Americans. Evil is a human potential,
>> which exists in the individual human heart; its parameters are
>> fixed by the human condition; the cause of its arousal is in
>> human society.
>>
>> Humans need some kind of ideological justification for what they
>> are doing, and can easily adapt almost any existing philosophy to
>> this purpose. It is quite untenable to pretend that people
>> slaughter each other merely on account of being adherents of some
>> philosophy, or to malign a philosophical outlook by association
>> with bad deeds perpretrated by some with that outlook. All
>> catholics are not bad because some catholic is. Some Irish person
>> is not bad because because many Irish persons are.
>
> As I understand it you are arguing that human beings are prone to
> murder. Ideology can be deployed to help this natural inclination.
> However, it's a mistake to suppose ideology was the cause or a cause
> of the murder.
I am not saying that humans are prone to murder. Quite the
contrary in fact. Humans can commit murder, even mass murder. But
of course human beings can also create great works, perform
heroic and altruistic deeds, and have babies. I don't think I
would say that they are 'prone' to do these things either (except
perhaps, in the latter case, to have sex).
The reasons people in general do good or bad things have to be
sought in their social conditions. There is a dialectical
relationship between individual personality traits, social
conditions, ideology, and a host of factors. But the determining
factors are to be found in social conditions. People eat one
another in primitive cannibal societies. People make scientific
discoveries in societies with a high level of scientific culture
and education. People commit mass murder in societies which have
developed searing social and economic contradictions.
> I would argue that some ideologies are more prone to people behaving
> in certain ways than others. This would include behavior along any
> range from buying organic foods, to avoiding starbucks, to yelling
> about political correctness, to self-immolation in order to protest
> war, to mass murder. I do not define ideology is wrong ideas, but
> rather a system of looking at the world. I would claim (and I'm
> following someone else here) that the conception of Freedom propounded
> by Marx makes it lean towards totalitarianism (I'm supporting Andrzej
> Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom).
And what is the conception of freedom propounded by Marx? I
haven't read anything by Andrzej Walicki, though I understand him
to be an apologist for the market system and capitalism. However,
I'll be interested to hear you expound his ideas and debate them
with me (see below).
> Note this argument is not a generalization from one or two cases to
> all marxists. It's a claim about the nature of Marxism, about the
> consequences of its points. I'd also like to point out that I'm by no
> means a rabid libertarian capitalist. I like some things Marx said,
> but not all.
Well, here's your chance to start a debate about Marx's notion of
freedom with me. However, I really think we should move it to
another newsgroup. How about soc.politics.marxism?
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
>
>> Are you calling on Godwin's Law to close this thread?
>
> No, I was just introducing a bit of levity ;-) not something those on the
> far left (or right for that matter) seem to like overly.
Perhaps I'm a thick mick - I didn't realise it was a joke. Maybe,
since I'm also a leftie, thick mick, you need to spell it out
with smilies, and explain it before the penny drops.
[snip]
> I am not sure that there is any
> relationship (complex or otherwise) between atheism and nazism though.
> Anymore than there is a relationship between communism and atheism. (Unless
> you use the word "relationship" in such a broad manner that it is a bit
> pointless.)
What exactly is a 'broad manner' of usage of the word
'relationship? Why is it pointless? Is it implied that there is a
'narrow' usage which is apt? If so, what is it, and what is the
point?
Neitzshe was an atheist, or at least irreligious. The nazis
(particularly Hitler), it seems, adopted some of Neitzsche's
thought and made it their own, e.g Nietzsche's concept of the
self, power, overcoming, eradicating slave morality as evil to
the true noble self, etc. There's probably enough there for a
doctoral thesis at least, on the relationship between nazism and
atheism. Throw in Heiddeger and you've got material for a book
and go at getting the chair of philosophy.
Marxism is like a gigantic crossword puzzle, but a dynamic
changing one: its coherence persists as it changes. There are
many connections therein between communism and atheism. For
instance, the question whether belief in God is warrantable is a
scientific question. The science concerned must examine the
natural world, society and history to come to terms with it.
Similarly, the question of how to create a rational and free mode
of existence for human beings is also a scientific question which
concerns the natural and social sciences. Communism is only a
(somewhat vague) idea of how such a mode of existence would look,
and a large part of the marxist project is to try to work out how
this might be achieved. To be communist is to be free. To be free
is to have shed illusions. God is an illusion.
See? There are relationships. And there's no need to be afraid of
ideas. I don't entirely blame people from the oppressive,
stultifying, ideological quagmire that is the USA, making a
fetish out of communism, socialism, atheism, and so forth. I
understand their intense need to distance themselves from any
association with Marx - they face ridicule at best and the
attentions of the new homeland security at worst.
Better, like the ostrich with its head in the sand, to think that
nothing is related to anything else.
Now, I know this is all a bit over the top. Erm.. maybe it's a
joke? Maybe, but I won't tell you whether it's a joke or not -
you'll have to decide. Below, however, is an atheist joke (the
Anthony mentioned is not me; I've been a happily married
beer-drinking, marxist, atheist, trade unionist, republican,
nationalist, internationalist, for 36 years). I have marked out
the joke so that it's easy to identify, but have refrained from
inserting smileys at the funny bit, because it just seemed too
much like the canned laughter dubbed on to certain US TV sitcoms,
so that even the dimmest know when to laugh.
Note the relationship between TV sitcoms and smileys. Ahem ...
the joke:
[Joke]
A young lady came home from a date, rather sad. She told her
mother, "Anthony proposed to me an hour ago." "Then why are you
so sad?" her mother asked. "Because he also told me he is an
atheist. Mom, he doesn't even believe there's a Hell." Her mother
replied, "Marry him anyway. Between the two of us, we'll show him
how wrong he is."
[End Joke]
strider
> Capitalism was well developed by the time its crisis of over
> production became so severe that the system had to resort to the
> massive destruction of the First World War to resolve its
> contradictions.
Would you mind expanding on this point? I don't see it as you explain
it here. What is capitalism? How does it develop "contradictions"?
What evidence do you have to assert a causal relationship between the
first world war and a "crisis of production"?
Gwar
On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Chris Michael wrote:
>> According to the 2001 World Almanac, Atheists number: 121 million in
>> Asia
>> 56 million in the former USSR
>> 23 million (3.5%) in Europe
>> 2.7 million in Latin America
>> 1.6 million (0.5%) in North America
>> 0.4 million in Oceania
>> 0.4 million in Africa 8
> These figures are rubbish. Most people ... see "Religion" and just put
> down the religion of their birth. It doesn't mean they are religious.
What difference does it make? Why fall for an appeal to popularity?
John Secker
<tder...@iol.NODAMNJUNK.ie> writes
>Let's not forget that, early on in its development, capitalism
>had to separate workers entirely from the means of production,
>and also separate production from consumption. This process has
>deep roots in history and was extraordinarily complex. The market
>became not only the means by which production and consumption
>were equated (though never without giving rise to the most severe
>contradictions) but also the means by which money could be
>exchanged for labour as a commodity, the labour being sold to the
>capitalists by the workers themselves. Hence arose the most
>efficient means that the world had ever seen, of seizing value
>produced by others without giving anything in exchange.
>
>Thus, all the accumulated value represented by money capital
>today has been expropriated, by the personifications of capital,
>from workers, down the years. Seizures of capitalist or other
>property by states in modern times pale into almost complete
>insignificance by comparison.
>
wrote stuff like this - I used to read the Morning Star occasionally,
about thirty years ago, and this is the sort of thing they used to
print. Let me ask - how do you distinguish the "personifications of
capitalism" from "workers"? Is it still by checking for the top hats
they all wear?
--
John Secker
John Secker
<tder...@iol.NODAMNJUNK.ie> writes
>Paul Filseth asked Geoff McCaughan:
>(5) The economically extracted surplus value is privately
>appropriated by the members of the capitalist class.
>
Hello! It's the top hats again. Presumably you need a 7th point (or
perhaps a 0th) which says that there is a "capitalist class" and then
defines it. Using this term without further exposition in a list of
items which purport to define "capitalism" sounds very like circular
reasoning to me.
--
John Secker
Luke Dunstan
"Chris Michael" <no...@m.pls> wrote in message
news:bq2c8n$klb$7...@news8.svr.pol.co.uk...
>
> These figures are rubbish. Most people don't know how or can't be
bothered,
> to fill out a census form properly. They see "Religion" and just put down
> the religion of their birth. It doesn't mean they are religious. I have
> seen
> plenty of people describe themselves as Church Of England in forms just
cos
> it is the easiest thing to tick. The bar for what makes one religious is
set
> so stupidly low, that the figures are inflated enormously.
>
> 23 million atheists in Europe!!! There would be almost that in the UK, it
> would mean only 1 in 2 people is atheist. If anything this is probably
being
> generous.
I agree that many people who are not religious will describe themselves as
Christian just because their parents and other relatives are nominally
Christian.
> And Australia is officially an atheist country. Yet, with its 18 millions
> (to add to all the others that make up Oceania), only 400 000 are atheist?
> Come on be fair, back of the envelope calculations can show most of those
> figures are nonsense. The Almanac will be telling me 1 in 2 men have had a
> homosexual experience next.
Even with the inaccuracies of the census, the number of people in Australia
with "no religion" is far more than that:
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/E989A36F23095A09CA256B350010B3FC?Open&Highlight=0,religion
In 1996 it was 16.6 % of the population, or about 2.9 million, a significant
increase from 12.9 % in 1991. Since 9 % didn't state their religion, the
numbers may be even higher.
Luke
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
[snip]
>>(5) The economically extracted surplus value is privately
>>appropriated by the members of the capitalist class.
>
> Hello! It's the top hats again. Presumably you need a 7th point (or
> perhaps a 0th) which says that there is a "capitalist class" and then
> defines it. Using this term without further exposition in a list of
> items which purport to define "capitalism" sounds very like circular
> reasoning to me.
Nothing circular at all. The meaning of all the terms used in my
list of characteristics exhibited by capitalism are presumed to
be understood (e.g. production, exchange, use-value, surplus
value, labour, profit, commodity, capital etc.) - and of course
class. If you don't understand them, all you have to do is ask.
Or read a reliable book on marxist economics.
Nor is there any 'definition' given. I merely gave István
Mészarós's list of the essential characteristics of capital
production under capitalism, in opposition to Paul Filseth's very
impoverished idea of what capitalism is about. I could have made
my own list, but I'm not an economics professor who spends his
time studying the thing in detail, and therefore I would probably
have left something out.
What are the top hats?
Tony Dermody
When I visit the UK, I look forward to reading the Morning Star,
though I sometimes get it in Dublin also. They still print
philosophical or economic stuff now and again. Of course I also
read The Guardian, so I'm a fully qualified pinko. I guess our
friends in the USA won't know what we're talking about here, but
I suppose they'll get the gist of it.
Distinguishing capitalists from workers is easy in economic
terms. Capitalists own and control the means of production, and
are entitled to some surplus value from production, based on this
ownership. Workers do not own or control means of production and
have to sell their labour power to make a living. They produce
the surplus value, but are not entitled to any of it, because
they do not own the means of production. The complexities of
ownership of pension funds, insurance funds, and so forth do not
change this picture fundamentally.
You will be glad to know that I get a kick out of irritating the
complacent, self-deceiving bourgeois, by reminding them that the
fundamentals of capitalism are still the same as when Marx wrote
the Grundrisse, even if the problems that the system creates for
humanity have gotten much worse.
The question at issue here is not one to be smothered by cynicism
or sidelined by charicature. It is too important and pressing. It
is this: In the light of the enormous problems besetting our
planet and its people, how do we create conditions of life for
all human beings which are consonant with human potentials and
human dignity?
As a critique of capitalism, marxism is unequalled in its
penetrative power. As a theory of how to get from capitalism to a
post-capitalist formation, it has left a good deal to be desired.
However, that is a journey humanity must make, and it is only
marxists who are studying the question. For some 80 years the
organisations of the working class and socialist organisations
have been on the defensive, not only owing the failure of
revolution in Western Europe, and later, the problems in the
former USSR, China, and other communist states, but chiefly
because of the unexpected ability of capitalism to displace its
contradictions, largely by way of imperialism and globalisation
of market forces.
You should take up the reading of marxist and socialist
literature again, because the movement is on the defensive no
longer. You will see that it is moving quickly to the offensive
in the face of the current structural crisis of capitalism, which
has been growing since the 1970s, and is global in nature. The
third wave of socialist struggle has started. You ain't seen
nothin' yet.
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
>
>> Capitalism was well developed by the time its crisis of over
>> production became so severe that the system had to resort to the
>> massive destruction of the First World War to resolve its
>> contradictions.
>
> Would you mind expanding on this point? I don't see it as you explain
> it here. What is capitalism? How does it develop "contradictions"?
> What evidence do you have to assert a causal relationship between the
> first world war and a "crisis of production"?
Let me begin by saying that I didn't mean to give the impression
that it was a crisis of over production which caused the war
directly. Well before the turn of the century, capitalism had
begun to displace crises of over-production by expanding
production into the colonies. In fact it was the struggle for
colonies which was the direct cause of the First World War,
though over-production is still a huge problem for the system,
even today.
However, I don't know where to begin to answer your questions. If
you are not familiar with marxist ideas, then you will have to
read up on marxist theory, especially economic theory. This is
not something you can do overnight.
A very good outline of marxist theory can be found in:
"Dialectical Materialism - An Introduction', Volumes 1-3, by
Maurice Cornforth. All three volumes are published by Lawrence &
Wishart, London, First Published 1954; SBN 85315 360, SBN 85315
361 SBN 85315 362. This is very readable, but still hard work.
A good basic economic textbook, written from a Marxist
perspective, is "Political Economy" by John Eaton [International
Publishers, New York; 1966; ISBN 0-7178-0157-8]. This is
reasonably hard going.
A more general, and easier, read is "Marxism: A Living Science"
by Kenneth Neil Cameron; International Publishers, New York; 2nd
edition 1993, ISBN 0-7178-0707-X.
A short articel on the causes of First Workd war is online at:
http://www.marxists.de/imperial/modworld/imperial.htm .
The best read on the causes of the First World war is Lenin's
'Imperialism ¡V the Highest Stage of Capitalism'. Some of this is
dated now, but it is still the best early description of
imperialism.
All (almost all?) the marxist classics, and much more, are online
at: http://www.marxists.org.uk/ .
Finally, capitalism is the global economic system of today. It
has a long history of development through several stages to its
present state. Read Marx himself on this. Visit the web
page:http://www.marxists.org.uk/subject/students/index.htm . You
will find several different strands of marxisn here.
The idea of 'Contradiction' is a dialectical one (don't confuse
it with its meaning in logic). The system is riven with
contradictions, e,g. between production and need (allegedly
mediated by the market), between the global market and the
national states, between capital and labour, between advanced
developed countries and backward underdeveloped countries (uneven
development), to name but four.
Geoff McCaughan
> In article <zd6qhy4eds1y.1t...@40tude.net>, Tony Dermody
> <tder...@iol.NODAMNJUNK.ie> writes
>>Paul Filseth asked Geoff McCaughan:
>>(5) The economically extracted surplus value is privately
>>appropriated by the members of the capitalist class.
I've been travelling, and my ISP has a very short retention time for this
newsgroup. I see evidence here of conversations that have passed by in my
absence, so if anyone was waiting for an answer, I'm not ignoring you, I
just didn't see the question.
strider
critiques about atheism, Marx, mass murder and totalitarianism appear
fairly regularly on this group. Atheists tend to claim that religion
and Marxism are both suited to totalitarianism, the latter
independently of atheism. I feel this argument supports part of that
claim.
Tony Dermody <tder...@iol.NODAMNJUNK.ie> wrote in message news:<1bc2ihnodp99c.1...@40tude.net>...
> This does not amount to advocating mass slaughter. It seems to me
> to be a way of curbing the resistance by instilling fear.
> Terrorism, I believe it's called by those on the receiving end.
> And I suppose the perpetrators call it reprisal. I'm sure we
> could quote plenty of examples of a similar nature made during
> wars.
We could find plenty of slaughters in history. I'm not sure of the
distinction you are driving at. After all, when Stalin later starved
these same Kulaks to death he was doing so because they were resisting
the (objectively good) interests of the people (as he, and other
Marxists saw them). Is your distinction because there was a war? Lets
be clear, Lenin advocated that a large number of peasants (petit
bourgeoisie) be murdered and saved as an example to the rest. This
sounds like mass murder, and a tendency in that direction to me.
> I am not saying that humans are prone to murder. Quite the
> contrary in fact. Humans can commit murder, even mass murder. But
> of course human beings can also create great works, perform
> heroic and altruistic deeds, and have babies. I don't think I
> would say that they are 'prone' to do these things either (except
> perhaps, in the latter case, to have sex).
>
> The reasons people in general do good or bad things have to be
> sought in their social conditions. There is a dialectical
> relationship between individual personality traits, social
> conditions, ideology, and a host of factors. But the determining
> factors are to be found in social conditions. People eat one
> another in primitive cannibal societies. People make scientific
> discoveries in societies with a high level of scientific culture
> and education. People commit mass murder in societies which have
> developed searing social and economic contradictions.
>
I disagree. Ideas have power, and are not merely determined by social
or economics circumstances. People will burn themselves, blow
themselves and others up, kill their families, rape, pillage, devote
their life to helping the poor, work in soup kitchens, and be
wonderful, all for the sake of ideas. While social and economic
circumstances play a role, it is not a crudely deterministic one.
> And what is the conception of freedom propounded by Marx? I
> haven't read anything by Andrzej Walicki, though I understand him
> to be an apologist for the market system and capitalism. However,
> I'll be interested to hear you expound his ideas and debate them
> with me (see below).
This is going to be a short positive description that will probably
miss a few key points, then an accurate negative description. Freedom
in Marx is the freedom to align labor and production with reason (as
opposed, in the capitalist case to the slavish order of economic
interest, exploitation and capital accumulation) and become the
species being. Freedom is found in a state in the future, which Marx
felt would be reached as capitalism imploded and communism supplanted
it. What's more important for Walicki is what this is NOT. It's not a
notion of guaranteed individual rights. Freedom, rather than a set of
liberal the government can't do X's, is conceived as the resultant of
a future social order.
Totalitarianism comes into play because the goal of a communist
regime, conceived of as trying to BUILD communism not as actually
existing in it (as opposed to how a regime or lack there of existing
within communism might act), can justify infringement on what Lockean
liberals might think of as the natural rights of man for the purpose
of future freedom. IE, individuals can be neglected for the greater
good of the creation of the communist state. Marx produces an ideology
that (at least until actual communism is reached) legitimates state
power checked only by the extent to which it is understood as
promoting the development of the communist society. That is to say,
proper Marxist progression, has a TOTAL monopoly on legitimacy apart
from individual rights or alternate conceptions of legitimate
government.
This is not a knockdown argument against communism. You can reply that
the problem with Russian communism was that they failed to properly
calculate what was necessary to produce the Kingdom of Freedom. I
cannot logically invalidate this claim; nor do I claim to (nor does
Walicki). In essence you can argue that my obsession with natural
rights is useless, and that proper communism is better.
I would make the empirical claim that regimes that have no notion of
individual rights and are obsessed with their own correctness tend to
have their power (intentionally or unintentionally, ie as a result of
interest or ideology) abused by those in a position to wield it.
Walicki thinks a vaguely Lockean notion (not Rousseauian) of freedom
is necessary to guard against the excesses of totalitarianism.
Here Walicki and I part ways, but I do agree that he seems to have
proved his case that Marxism was a central factor in Russian
totalitarianism and seems to have conceptions embedded deep in its
philosophy amenable (though far from uniqeuely amenable) to
totalitarian order. I'm not a Lockean, and I think there are other
ways to guard against totalitarianism.
Finally, calling Walicki and "apologist" for capitalism is like me
calling you an apologist for communism. It's unfair, beside the point,
and in this case incorrect. Walicki isn't interested in defending
Smith as much as he is in attacking Marx. He's not apologizing, he is
criticizing.
> Well, here's your chance to start a debate about Marx's notion of
> freedom with me. However, I really think we should move it to
> another newsgroup. How about soc.politics.marxism?
Feel free to post this over to that news group. I can't guarantee I
will follow the discussion. You can also e-mail me off this news
group.
Paavo P
>
> This is a common fallacy, to attack deism and imagine that one has done
all
> that is needed to prove atheism. Since it is difficult to prove a
negative -
> that no gods exist - it is necessary to do the next best thing and show
that
> various asserted gods do not exist. The Christian God is important because
> of the number of adherents, and, I have argued, also because it is not
true
> that all religions make claims of similar value. Some are more credible
than
> others.
Shouldn't it be other way. If someone is suggesting that such things as gods
exist, they should prove this, otherwise it cannot be taken as true.
Otherwise you could claim anything and else should prove it wrong.
Chris Michael
I never called you a thick mick. Your self deprecation implicity puts words
in my mouth. I try not to get personal on NG, most people on here seem
honourable enough, and not agreeing with them doesn't commit me to disliking
them.
> What exactly is a 'broad manner' of usage of the word
> 'relationship?
Well, inasmuch as communism, atheism, nazism are all products of human
thought they are related. I am not convinced there are any many narrower
relationships.
> Why is it pointless?
Because over broad terms are ripe for equivocation, especially on this NG
;-). (See later for defense of smileys)
> Is it implied that there is a 'narrow' usage which is apt?
No, but I would hope there is, otherwise we are back to talking about over
broad relationships such as "they all end in -ism", or "they are all
beleifs" or some such,
> If so, what is it, and what is the point?
There isn't a narrow relationship that I can see, so there is not much point
in talking about communism and atheism together.
> See? There are relationships.
> Better, like the ostrich with its head in the sand, to think that
> nothing is related to anything else.
If anyone has any meaningful relationships between atheism and communism,
or atheism and Nazism I would be pleased to hear them. I suspect however
they are no meaningful relationships. And the more words used to try and
create one, the more tenuous that relationship must be.
I take it back you do have a sense of humour. Good joke. ;-)
On the subject of emoticons ;-). I used to be a bit snobby about them as
well. However, I have found in email and the like, that quite often without
the benefit of one, the tone of the comment could be mistaken. I do not see
them as canned laughter (which infect british shitcoms as well). It is a
conventional wisdom that only 7% of what one says is used when people make
opinions about others (The exact figure may be wrong - and being
conventional
wisdom probably is - but I think you see where I am going with this). In
email, I lose the benefit of 93% of my expressive capabilities. If I can get
some of this back by sprinkling smileys, then I consider the reduced
misunderstandings more important than the fact that to some I appear like a
net newbie. So in summary I would say:
;-P .
(Tounge in cheek and blowing a raspberry at your attititude towards smileys)
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
>
>> The mind boggles at this sort of thing. Atheism is founded in
>> science and materialist philosophy, if it is founded anywhere.
>>
> Science can show that a particular religious claim (eg Noah's Ark) is false.
> It doesn't have anything to say about the supernatural itself, however.
I'm not sure at all what science can demonstrate about Noah's Ark
or indeed whether that is altogether a religious claim. Science,
however, can question the supernatural. It can say: Demonstrate
something supernatural in controlled conditions, so that we can
have a good look at it. It can examine history and formulate a
materialist theory concerning the origin and development of
religion. And so on. This is how a foundation for atheism is laid
down.
There is a tendency evident in this newsgroup and in other
philosophical newsgroups that I have read, for certain
correspondents to reduce science to some bare skeleton of itself.
This seems to be done in deference to some, usually unstated,
project which seeks in vain for some absolute grounding for
theory and method. Well, it cannot be done.
I'm not for a minute attributing these characteristics to you,
but your statement above does give me cause for concern. It seems
to fit in with a view which only allows science to make
particular statements in its own domain, but won't allow it to
generalise to the world at large. When I see such views, I get
the impression that many people seem to have been exposed to a
one-sided perspective on the philosophy of science, perhaps
including a smattering of post-modernism or logical positivism,
and who, as a result, pick up on something like Karl Popper's
doctrine of falsifiability as the foundation upon which to rest
science. Science, for them, becomes stunted and weak, of little
use as a tool for understanding the world.
There are other more materialist traditions with a far more
robust view of science. These traditions know that justification
is not something to be done merely in the head, but also out in
the hard material world of practice. For them the mind is not
separated artificially from the body; knowing cannot proceed in
isolation, in an ivory tower, separated from the world. To know
the world is to engage with it, to experience it, to change it.
These traditions reject the formalist, individualist,
particularist, passivist model of knowledge in favour of a more
historicist, social, contextualist, activist model. [See for
instance: Helena Sheehan: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science -
A Critical History; Volume 1, The First Hundred Years; Humanities
Press, New York; 1985; ISBN 0-391-02998-3 (v. 1)]. See also my
posts to this newsgroup in January and February 2001, in the
thread 'Science... as the security blanket?', to find more in
this theme.
>> Attacking Christianity per se has nothing to do with either the
>> defense or support of atheism. One criticises Christianity to
>> undermine the convictions of Christians.
>>
> This is a common fallacy, to attack deism and imagine that one has done all
> that is needed to prove atheism. Since it is difficult to prove a negative -
> that no gods exist - it is necessary to do the next best thing and show that
> various asserted gods do not exist. The Christian God is important because
> of the number of adherents, and, I have argued, also because it is not true
> that all religions make claims of similar value. Some are more credible than
> others.
I hope I understand you correctly here. I am not at all arguing
that attacking deism is enough to prove atheism (or that the
critique of religion is in itself enough to establish a
foundation for atheism).
You are correct that it's impossible to prove the non-existence
of God. But we atheists can become good Popperians and ask our
opponents to falsify the statement that 'there is no God' in
controlled conditions. If there is a God then that should be easy
enough to falsify.
However, when we have developed a materialist critique of
religion and when we note that the statement that there is no God
has not been falsified, we have begun to establish a sound basis
for atheism. Add in a sprinkling of modern cosmology, mix it with
the evidence for biological evolution, and leave to simmer for a
while. Finally, develop an understanding of the history of
science and a flexible, modern, open, active philosophy of
science, and we are well on our way to a demonstration that
atheism is a far better thing than religion. Finally, apply a
scientific, historicist approach to the understanding of society,
and we'll make a complete marxist out of you.
>> All of which makes me wonder what you think the 'Marxist theory
>> of religion' is. Summarise it for me, and then undermine the
>> summary, and we'll set to it!
>
> I don't claim to be a great expert on Marx.
> The theory is that societies go through set stages of development, driven by
> changes in their economic structure. So ancient civilisations based on
> slavery give way to feudalism, based on serfdom, which gives way to
> capitalism, based on the ownership of machinery and factories, which is
> overthrown by the oppressed workers who set up a socialist and later
> Communist utopia.
> The theory of religion is that. like all cultural phenomena, it is
> "superstructure" over the economic base. It may differ in accidentals but
> not in fundamentals. Marx was very struck by the similarity between the
> Egyptian and Aztec pyramids. These sort of huge public works projects and
> God-Kings were typical of the very earliest organised societies.
> In the feudal period the Catholic church served the interests of the big
> landowners. A feudal Lord didn't mind feasting the peasants every few weeks
> as the church calendar demanded, since it kept them loyal, he didn't
> alienate his land, and anyway the stored beer would otherwise just go to
> waste. When we moved to capitalist production in the sixteenth century,
> however, the merchant adventurer was expected to stump up his precious
> working capital, hence the reformation, end of the free beer, and economic
> virtues of modesty and prudence.
I suppose I should be magnanimous and give you credit for getting
the thing summed up so well in such a short paragraph. So, well
done!
However, your summary also suffers from many of the
misconceptions which appear from time to time in popular (and
generally inaccurate and anti-marxist) short readers in the
subject. So there is much there that I would more than quibble
about, e.g. that development is driven by changes in structure,
that slavery gave way to feudalism (a very common
misunderstanding attributable to Marx himself), that religion is
(reducible to) superstructure, that capital production began in
the sixteenth century, and all of that stuff about merchant
adventurers (which I presume is somehow connected to primitive
capital accumulation).
> There's obviously something going for this theory, and there's some dispute
> as to whether or not it is "scientific". One thing it has in common with
> scientific theories is that it makes predictions. 150 years on, it can be
> seen that these haven't been fulfiled - the socialist and communist stages
> were tried, but failed to keep pace with the capitalist societies, and have
> now been abandoned.
Marx would not have agreed, nor do the bulk of marxist writers
from Marx to Mészáros, nor do I, that science can be reduced to
prediction. This is especially true of social science, and
presents even greater difficulties when applied to marxist
predictions, because the only laboratory available is history,
and the time scales are so extended.
Marx made many predictions, some of which were wrong. Others
cannot be demonstrated yet, because capitalism has been able to
make temporary corrections to some of its contradictions, or has
managed to de-fuse or diffuse them, displacing them in geography
or in time, by way of developments which Marx had not been able
to foresee. A few, however, have held up well, and I suspect
these are very uncomfortable indeed for the apologists of
capitalism. He predicted that labour would constantly struggle
against capital and that there would be periodic attempts to
overthrow the system. This struggle is evident everywhere and
there have been perhaps three phases of socialist revolution in
recent history, whereby socialist or communist formations have
arisen and failed several times in the past 150 years.
The first failure was the Paris Commune in 1871, which occurred
during Marx's lifetime, and which influenced him greatly. The
Commune lasted for two months before being crushed with appalling
violence, much greater than in the French Revolution, by
Versailles troops, to the great relief of the European
bourgeoisie. This attempt of course was put into effect by people
who would not have described themselves as Marxist.
The next failure was the Soviet Union, which lasted for 72 years,
before succumbing under the twin problems of hostile encirclement
and its own internal deficiencies.
The third phase included the revolution in China and the
establishment of the Eastern European socialist states, formed
after the Second World War, under the patronage of the Soviet
Union. I would also include the Asian experiments such as China,
Korea, and Vietnam in this phase. The Eastern European
post-capitalist formations failed for similar reasons to the
Soviet Union. I guess the jury is still out on the survival of
the Asian formations, if they can be considered socialist at all
at this stage (I don't think they ever were). There were numerous
other local experiments in socialism which lasted for short
periods of time and which also were eradicated by capitalist
state repression (e.g. the Limerick Soviet, in Ireland in 1919).
And of course Cuba (third phase) still stands defiant after 40
years of subversion and illegal blockade by the imperial USA
(though Cuba suffers from much the same internal problems which
brought the Soviet Union down).
All of these countries formed post-capitalist formations but
never succeeded in advancing to socialism for various reasons.
But they do demonstrate that Marx clearly got that prediction
right. What he actually foresaw was perhaps several generations
of struggle and failures before the revolution was a success.
> Since the central plank of the theory is defective, this casts doubt on
> whether the analysis of religion can survive. In Britain there is definitely
> something called "class consciousness", and Christian clergy have allowed
> themselves to be used in advancing class interests, for example in the
> compulsory Christianity of a British public school. However this isn't the
> whole story or even the main story - the Christian church is so big and has
> such a long history that the whole can to some extent correct local
> aberrations. American episcopalians may ordain a gay bishop (refecting who's
> class interests?) , but the African Christians will protest.
The central plank of Marxism has not failed, and even if it had,
this would in no way cast doubt, as far as I can see, on the
marxist view of religion. Now that you mention it, what is the
central plank of marxism?
Where does class consciousness come into all this? What is the
connection between episcopalian ordination of homosexuals and
class? I don't know whose class interest this sort of thing
reflects. Who says it does represent the interests of some class?
As for religion in general, the question is not some direct
connection to class interest, but that modern religion is a
product of class society. The ruling class has used organised
religion and religious ideas as means of social control, but of
course they may do this under the guise that religion is good for
the ruled. And both the rulers and the ruled may believe it. In
addition, of course, the oppressed have recoures to religion to
ease their pain (the opium effect). What marxist postulated a
direct link between class interest and every religous belief or
act?
> In particular, Christianity should not be seen solely in terms of friend or
> enemy in the class struggle. The church's mission is broader than the
> political.
The Church's mission is to save your immortal soul from the
perverse depravity of your foul corrupted nature and the
onslaughts of the devil. The high clerics believe that, and so do
the believers. The fact that religion and that sort of codswallop
is a product of history and false consciousness is another
matter. Here's Marx himself, from the Introduction to the
'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law' (see:
http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1844-DFJ/law.htm ).
[Begin Quotation]
To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to
demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions
about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a
state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion
is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the
halo of which is religion.
[End Quotation]
Paul Filseth
> > Everything comes in degrees; but to the extent that they favor
> > economic interventionism, protectionism, government industrial
> > planning and so forth, to that extent they're acting
> > uncapitalistically. These are mercantilistic phenomena.
>
> A minor quibble:
> These things would only be mercantilism to the extent that they were
> conducted in order to maximize the gold flowing into a country and
> minimize the gold flowing out (or perhaps some similar modern idea
> about trade balance and money). To the extent they are conducted for
> reasons of social justice or market failures, they do not represent
> mercantilism.
That's fair. I was of course not talking about trying to get
gold, but rather some similar modern idea. If I'm using "mercantilism"
wrong, what's the right word for analogous behavior in modern states?
In any event, I suspect I consider a wider variety of ideas similar
to pre-capitalistic mercantilism than you may. The old mercantilists
didn't want inflow of gold because it was pretty, or a positive trade
balance because they were anal-retentive about accounting. Rulers
wanted these things because they perceived them as enhancing the power
of the state, particularly with respect to other states. That's the
same reason a number of modern countries, most famously Germany and
Japan, have followed the above economic policies. And I'm cynical
enough to suspect that even when governments talk about social justice
and market failure, that's window dressing. What they want is power,
and they adopt policies they think will help them get it. Bush's
steel tariffs are a classic example. If the point of a policy is to
force citizens to make money for the state and its supporters rather
than let them make money for themselves, I think "mercantilism" is a
good word for it. YMMV.
> And a suggestion:
> It might be worth defining what you mean by "capitalism." I take it
> Paul means John Locke+Adam Smith, which is a perfectly plausible
> definition, but it might make your differences more clear particularly
> on the slavery issue.
Specifically, Adam Smith. Locke actually defended slavery. He
had a lame argument derived from "Just War" theory, and as far as I
could tell, didn't explain either why a slave raid qualifies as a just
war, or why you don't have to let POWs go home when the war is over.
--
Paul Filseth Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only
To email, delete the x. proved it correct, not tried it. - Donald Knuth
strider
> Let me begin by saying that I didn't mean to give the impression
> that it was a crisis of over production which caused the war
> directly.
Good. That would be simplistic.
> Well before the turn of the century, capitalism had
> begun to displace crises of over-production by expanding
> production into the colonies.
Europe was expanding production into the colonies well before the 20th
century. Please quantify, explain, and justify the conditions for
overproduction. Then demonstrate how Europe met those conditions.
> In fact it was the struggle for
> colonies which was the direct cause of the First World War,
> though over-production is still a huge problem for the system,
> even today.
Imperialist struggles were certainly part of the cause of World War I.
I would disagree that they are merely about "overproduction." You also
seem to neglect nationalism as a force. Both Marxist and non-Marxist
scholars have been interested in the phenomenon. See for example Eric
Hobsbawn Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Benedict Anderson
Imagined Communities, Ernest Gellner Nations and Nationalism.
> However, I don't know where to begin to answer your questions. If
> you are not familiar with marxist ideas, then you will have to
> read up on marxist theory, especially economic theory. This is
> not something you can do overnight.
Luckily, I am familiar with Marxist historical methodology. I want you
to explain and justify your claims. My ignorance should be no
impedence to this.
> A good basic economic textbook, written from a Marxist
> perspective, is "Political Economy" by John Eaton [International
> Publishers, New York; 1966; ISBN 0-7178-0157-8]. This is
> reasonably hard going.
Marxist historians more recently have moved away from a *stricly*
Marxist framework. I think the most influential would probably be E.P.
Thompson. By reading him you may get some idea about where I'm coming
from in the ideas vs. economy debate. His big book is The Making of
the English Working Class, but I would recomend his journal article
"The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" in
Past And Present No. 50. (Feb., 1971), pp. 76-136.
> A short articel on the causes of First Workd war is online at:
> http://www.marxists.de/imperial/modworld/imperial.htm .
Now we are getting somewhere. You are citing material to back up your
claim.
> The best read on the causes of the First World war is Lenin's
> 'Imperialism ¡V the Highest Stage of Capitalism'. Some of this is
> dated now, but it is still the best early description of
> imperialism.
My goodness, Lenin? He's a smart Marxist, but don't you think he's
writing from a somewhat impassioned and interested perspective to be
giving is a good history?
> Finally, capitalism is the global economic system of today. It
> has a long history of development through several stages to its
> present state. Read Marx himself on this. Visit the web
> page:http://www.marxists.org.uk/subject/students/index.htm . You
> will find several different strands of marxisn here.
Marx wrote this stuff more than a hundred years ago. I would argue
it's at least worth reading some of the other social theorists and
historians that came after him Max Weber, Clifford Geertz, Franz
Fanon, Marshal Sahlins, Emile Durkheim, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph
Schumpeter, Carlo Ginzburg, the list goes on and on... These thinkers
are part of the reason Marxist historians like the previously cited
Thompson and Hobsbawm have refined and redirected Marx.
> The idea of 'Contradiction' is a dialectical one (don't confuse
> it with its meaning in logic).
> The system is riven with
> contradictions, e,g. between production and need (allegedly
> mediated by the market), between the global market and the
> national states, between capital and labour, between advanced
> developed countries and backward underdeveloped countries (uneven
> development), to name but four.
Yes yes yes, and Marx had ideas about how these contradictions played
out over history, ending in communism. But we aren't there. The
prophesy failed, and while Marx has provided some invaluable tools for
doing history, his dialectics appears to be too simplistic to predict
or explain the actual unfolding of history. Contingency, culture, and
geography are just a few factors that appear to have played imense
roles in events like WWI, but can not be fully explained by reading
Marx.
John Secker
<mal...@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> writes
>This is a common fallacy, to attack deism and imagine that one has done all
>that is needed to prove atheism. Since it is difficult to prove a negative -
>that no gods exist - it is necessary to do the next best thing and show that
>various asserted gods do not exist. The Christian God is important because
>of the number of adherents, and, I have argued, also because it is not true
>that all religions make claims of similar value. Some are more credible than
>others.
But we are discussing why atheists behave in a certain way. As you are
surely aware by now, every atheist disagrees with you - indeed this
should be obvious. Atheists do not think that Christianity is any more
(or less) "credible" than any of the other superstition systems. We are
atheists, so we don't think any of them are credible. Duh! So whatever
makes atheists attack Christianity disproportionately, it is not its
unmatched "credibility". It seems blindingly obvious that atheists in
the West - which is what almost all of us are - attack Christianity
because it is by far the dominant and most prevalent religion in the
West. Not much point in saying that Odin doesn't exist, since everyone
around you will agree.
--
John Secker
John Secker
<tder...@iol.NODAMNJUNK.ie> writes
>Distinguishing capitalists from workers is easy in economic
>terms. Capitalists own and control the means of production, and
>are entitled to some surplus value from production, based on this
>ownership. Workers do not own or control means of production and
>have to sell their labour power to make a living. They produce
>the surplus value, but are not entitled to any of it, because
>they do not own the means of production. The complexities of
>ownership of pension funds, insurance funds, and so forth do not
>change this picture fundamentally.
>
distinguish capitalists from workers? You dismiss pension and insurance
funds as making no difference, but in fact the ownership of the majority
of the "means of production" if in the hands of such funds, not bloated
individuals with large personal holdings and top hats. I am a salaried
worker who is not entitled to any of the surplus value generated by my
labour (I hold no shares in the company I work for). However I also have
a modest portfolio of shares in a number of other companies, and I have
two pension funds which now amount to about twice my gross annual salary
- most of which is invested in shares. And I AM entitled to my cut from
the surplus generated by the workers in all those companies. So am I a
worker, or a capitalist, or some hybrid of both? This is the problem
with your simplistic analysis, and the reason why I keep asking about
top hats. In Marx's day only a tiny number of people owned any capital
assets or had a share in any company. In modern western society the vast
majority of adults are also investors, directly or indirectly. So any
analysis which includes the proposition that there are two disjoint and
opposed classes - "capitalists" and "workers" - is simply wrong.
--
John Secker
Chris Michael
"Gwar" <xe...@xor.qua> wrote in message
news:Pine.BSF.4.31.0311272351020.87002-100000@localhost...
>
> What difference does it make? Why fall for an appeal to popularity?
>
You are absolutely right of course but I have given up on trying to explain
the fallacy of the appeal to authority or popularity to Malcom. His posts
are made almost exculsively of "so and so wrote", "such and such beleived".
However I often see these kind of figures quoted for religion and I just
don't buy them, so I couldn't resist the chance to vent my spleen.
S.A.Joyce
news:bq3cks$dg0$3...@newsg3.svr.pol.co.uk...
>
done all
> that is needed to prove atheism. Since it is difficult to prove a
negative -
> that no gods exist - it is necessary to do the next best thing and
show that
> various asserted gods do not exist.
I am truly puzzled as to why you repeatedly get your feet tangled in
this notion that atheism is all about trying to prove the non-existence
of gods. Sir, for as long as you have been posting in this n.g., it
would seem that by now you ought to have become aware that this is
utterly absurd. Surely you must realize that continuing to trumpet such
misinformation, especially to an audience having ample first-hand
experience to the contrary, tends to destroy any shred of credibility
you might hope to preserve.
Indeed, at this point I confess I am beginning to wonder seriously,
whether you are in earnest about being Christian, or are instead on a
mission to discredit Christianity as the pursuit of people who cannot
perceive ideas accurately or evaluate them rationally. If that is
indeed your purpose, then I congratulate you on your cleverness. But if
not, then you are doing both yourself and your cause a disservice, and
perhaps you'll allow me to suggest a change of strategy.
To begin, please try to get (and keep) the basic ideas straight: For
the umpteenth time, atheism is *not* about proof or knowledge; it is
about unbelief and disbelief. Except for a small, fanatical faction,
virtually all atheists fully understand this. So if you entertain any
hope of impressing them, you must understand it, too, despite your
preference that it were otherwise. As to deism and theism, they are
*not* about proof or knowledge either; in the final analysis, they are
about belief. Atheists (perhaps especially those who had been religious
at some point) understand this, too—though some believers evidently do
not.
These ideas are straightforward and uncomplicated, and have been posted
often. They should be familiar to anyone who has participated here for
long, and are fundamental to cogent discussion. If any long-time a.a.m.
poster demonstrates that he does not comprehend them, then his ability
to assimilate simple information is necessarily called into question,
and his credibility compromised. Until this basic difficulty is cleared
up, it would seem futile to tackle more complex issues with any
realistic hope of distinguishing fact from fancy and enjoying a
meaningful exchange.
> The Christian God is important because
> of the number of adherents,
In the same sense that the Islamic Allah is important for the same
reason—which is to say that the idea is enormously influential,
irrespective of whether it is true or false, beneficial or detrimental.
> and, I have argued, also because it is not true
> that all religions make claims of similar value. Some are more
credible than
> others.
FWIW, it has been my experience that the *more incredible* claims a
discipline (religious, political, or otherwise) makes, the *less
credible* the discipline is.
--
=SAJ=
To reply, delete NOSPAM from address.
http://tangents.home.att.net/
Malcolm
"John Secker" <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
>
> However I also have a modest portfolio of shares in a number of other
> companies, and I have two pension funds which now amount to about
> twice my gross annual salary - most of which is invested in shares.
>
the education invested in your at school and university, and then experience
gained working. This is in a sense capital, and it enables you to earn far
more than the five pounds an hour you would get a MacDonald's.
Malcolm
> surely aware by now, every atheist disagrees with you - indeed this
> should be obvious. Atheists do not think that Christianity is any more
> (or less) "credible" than any of the other superstition systems. We are
> atheists, so we don't think any of them are credible. Duh!
>
distinguish "a credible theory" from "a theory that I happen to personally
agree with". Hence the idea that there is no difference between Christianity
and the tooth fairy.
Jim F.
> In article <5w3zighpzvbh.d...@40tude.net>, Tony Dermody
> <tder...@iol.NODAMNJUNK.ie> writes
> >Distinguishing capitalists from workers is easy in economic
> >terms. Capitalists own and control the means of production, and
> >are entitled to some surplus value from production, based on this
> >ownership. Workers do not own or control means of production and
> >have to sell their labour power to make a living. They produce
> >the surplus value, but are not entitled to any of it, because
> >they do not own the means of production. The complexities of
> >ownership of pension funds, insurance funds, and so forth do not
> >change this picture fundamentally.
> >
> Sorry, you don't get away that easily. I will ask again, how do you
> distinguish capitalists from workers? You dismiss pension and insurance
> funds as making no difference, but in fact the ownership of the majority
> of the "means of production" if in the hands of such funds, not bloated
> individuals with large personal holdings and top hats. I am a salaried
> worker who is not entitled to any of the surplus value generated by my
> labour (I hold no shares in the company I work for). However I also have
> a modest portfolio of shares in a number of other companies, and I have
> two pension funds which now amount to about twice my gross annual salary
> - most of which is invested in shares. And I AM entitled to my cut from
> the surplus generated by the workers in all those companies. So am I a
> worker, or a capitalist, or some hybrid of both?
I think that for most purposes you would qualify as being a worker.
Depending
upon the purpose at hand, I think that most Marxists would argue that
to qualify as a capitalist you would have to derive most of your income
from the ownership of capital assets. Therefore, by your own account
you would be classified as a worker.
Now I think you have stumbled into an important point when you
point out that concerning pension and insurance funds legally
constitute the majority of the ownership of the means of
production. This suggests that an important issue for future
labor struggles will be the securing of control over those
pension funds and insurance funds by the workers from
which those funds derive their sustenance.
>This is the problem
> with your simplistic analysis, and the reason why I keep asking about
> top hats. In Marx's day only a tiny number of people owned any capital
> assets or had a share in any company. In modern western society the vast
> majority of adults are also investors, directly or indirectly.
First of all, as far as being direct investors are concerned, I don't
think it has ever been the case that the vast majority of adults
were ever stockholders. The statistics that I have
seen suggest that at the height of the bull market, perhaps as
much as fifty percent of US adults did own shares, which
represented a big jump from the estimated 20 percent
who were shareholders back in 1995. However, most
of these new shareholders subsequently fled the stock market
after the bull market became a bear market in 2001. In
any case though most of these shareholders owned at
most just a few shares and more often than not those
shares were in the companies that they were working
at. In other words most of these people became
shareholders in the first place, more often than not,
by virtue of the 401K plans offered by their employers.
And even when we count in all those people who are
indirect shareholders by virtue of their participation
in pension funds or other investment funds, we
are not talking about people who could qualify
for classification as "top hats." Most of these
people are not in a position where they can
make any sort of living where they do not
have to sell their labor power in the market.
> So any
> analysis which includes the proposition that there are two disjoint and
> opposed classes - "capitalists" and "workers" - is simply wrong.
If you are suggesting that Marxists deny the existence of strata
that fall in between capitalists and workers, then you are most
certainly in error. Marx & Engels certainly wrote about what
they referred to as the "petit bourgeoisie" that is the class of
people such as small businessmen, peasants, independent
professionals (i.e. doctors and lawyers),
and independent artisans who own small amounts of capital,
and thereby able to avoid having to sell their labor power
directly to capital like other workers. Such people may
have sufficient capital to be able to hire small number of
workers.
Since the days of Marx & Engels, Marxists have identified
the emergence of new intermediate strata in addition to
or in place of the old petit bourgeosie such as the managers
of the large corporations, and of professional workers,
who may be highly compensated by their corporate employers.
There is quite a considerable literature on these strata written
by Marxist authors, covering their roles in the economic
order, their political allegiences and consciousness etc.
So I don't think it is fair to say that Marxists have neglected
them or denied their existence. Nevertheless, I do think
it is fair to say that Marxists see the antagonism between
capitalists and workers as the central dynamic underlying
the political evolution of capitalism.
Jim F.
> --
> John Secker
>
Eric Pepke
> On the subject of emoticons ;-). I used to be a bit snobby about them as
> well. However, I have found in email and the like, that quite often without
> the benefit of one, the tone of the comment could be mistaken. I do not see
> them as canned laughter (which infect british shitcoms as well). It is a
> conventional wisdom that only 7% of what one says is used when people make
> opinions about others (The exact figure may be wrong - and being
> conventional
> wisdom probably is - but I think you see where I am going with this).
To get technical here, the 7% figure is about the information content
of speech, which is not surprising, as an awful lot of the information
content conveys the identity of the speaker.
Igtheist
> Distinguishing capitalists from workers is easy in economic
> terms.
Despite the "just so" stories of Marx there is no such easy division
of capitalists and workers. Marx was wrong about a lot of things.
He was the quintessential economic idiot.
To get a clearer picture of what capital is you can think of capital
as being tools. Instead of Capitalism you can call our social
structure Toolism.
Tools are produced from savings. The savings are produced by
consuming less than one produces through ones labor. That savings is
used to produce tools that allow the owner to be even more productive.
Let me tell a just so story that gets the actuality across a little
better.
Suppose we're islanders. You are a lazy bastard who chases women for
half the day and only fish enough to feed yourself and perhaps pay
your whores. I am industrious and worked a full day, drying and
saving my extra catch. This extra catch is my capital. It allows
me the luxury of working on a method of production that is more round
about but more efficient. I use those fish to feed myself while I
invent a new way to catch fish, the net. After spending a month
producing the net I now catch even more fish. In fact, I can't work
constantly so I hire other people to use my net. Now this is
voluntary. They could choose not to. However they can pay them
twice the amount of fish they normally produce per hour and keep the
remainder of the catch for myself. Some of them wisely decide to use
their extra income to invest in nets of their own. They do this
perhaps to provide for themselves in their old age. This being a kind
of pension. You, however, decide to work even less hours and spend
your free time chasing women and agitating against me for improving
society (which you claim is some kind of theft of your labor). You
agitate to forcibly steal my extra production to provide for your old
age and for the multitudes of bastard children you produce. Now tell
me again how I am the moral inferior here? Why just because you
content to fish as little as possible and I was wise enough work hard,
to save, and to increase the productivity of the entire community.
To make Marx's mistake crystal clear to you I will explain his mistake
in one other fashion. Marx creates a false dicotomy. He has
split the world into two groups of people "The Capitalists" and "The
workers". He then says that all goods come from "The workers"
including all capital. Therefore by definition "The capitalists" are
parasites since they never produced anything. However this false
dicotomy is not true. People play both role and to differing
degrees throughout their lives. For the most part capitalists were
laborers or obtained their capital in legal ways such as inheritance.
Sure there are people who steal to get their captital. This is true
of both the rich and the poor. However, I think it best for this
issue to be ajudicated by the courts on an individual basis. It
isn't just to decide that anybody who has money didn't earn it and
then to appropriate that money.
This stupid fallacy is at the heart of much anti-American sentiment.
Since Americans in comparison to the rest of the world are wealthy
there is the assumption we got to that position by stealing the
efforts of workers. This is not the case. The reason we got
where we are is because we had a policy of not stealing the capital of
those individuals who practiced thrift. Thus the capital base could
grow to the level where the average Joe made a good living.
If you check the facts you will find that in a society the amount of
free capital per person is what determines the standard of living for
the vast majority.
In short Marxism is based on economic fallacies and a system
guaranteed to produce unjust results because it pigeon holes the
worthy with the unworthy. It also impoverishes any country that takes
it's lessons seriously.
Chris Michael
"Paul Filseth" <pg...@lsil.com> wrote in message
news:2003120410...@lsil.com...
> Specifically, Adam Smith. Locke actually defended slavery. He
> had a lame argument derived from "Just War" theory, and as far as I
> could tell, didn't explain either why a slave raid qualifies as a just
> war, or why you don't have to let POWs go home when the war is over.
Maybe they were "illegal combatants".
Chris Michael
"John Secker" <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:ZMhOwuAbs8z$Ewe$@secker.demon.co.uk...
> the surplus generated by the workers in all those companies. So am I a
> worker, or a capitalist, or some hybrid of both?
In commy speak I guess "you are a class traitor and you'll be the first
against the wall come the revolution". ;-)
George Dance
> >
> > No they are not, certainly not by definition. Marx was against religion,
> > which he saw as part of the ruling structure. I do not recall anything
> > in his writings which addressed the existence or otherwise of gods.
> >
> Most Marxists would say that atheism is an integral part of Marxism. You
> might be right that technically Marx said nothing about the hypothetical
> question of whether a god, unrevealed by any religion (because the religion
> itself is mere superstructure on the economic base) could exist.
John Secker did not actually say that Marx said nothing about the
existence of gods; only that he couldn't recall anywhere that Marx
did.
In any case, Marx certainly did address that question in his doctrinal
dissertation, /The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean
Philosophy of Nature/, in which he asserted that belief in the
existence of gods was contrary to human reason:
“The confession of Prometheus:
In simple words, I hate the pack of gods
[Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound]
is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and
earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the
highest divinity. It will have none other beside.... Prometheus is
the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical
calendar.”
[Draft of a New Preface]
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/foreword.htm>
“Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is
unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination. Come
with your gods into a country where other gods are worshipped, and you
will be shown to suffer from fantasies and abstractions. And justly
so. He who would have brought a Wendic god to the ancient Greeks would
have found the proof of this god's non-existence. Indeed, for the
Greeks he did not exist. /That which a particular country is for
particular alien gods, the country of reason is for God in general, a
region in which he ceases to exist./” [emphasis in original]
Fragment from the Appendix
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/appendix.htm>
snip
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
>
> I think this discussion is still relevant to this news group, because
> critiques about atheism, Marx, mass murder and totalitarianism appear
> fairly regularly on this group. Atheists tend to claim that religion
> and Marxism are both suited to totalitarianism, the latter
> independently of atheism. I feel this argument supports part of that
> claim.
I've no objection to keeping the discussion to this newsgroup, as
long as the moderator does not think it is getting too far away
from atheism.
>> This does not amount to advocating mass slaughter. It seems to me
>> to be a way of curbing the resistance by instilling fear.
>> Terrorism, I believe it's called by those on the receiving end.
>> And I suppose the perpetrators call it reprisal. I'm sure we
>> could quote plenty of examples of a similar nature made during
>> wars.
>
> We could find plenty of slaughters in history. I'm not sure of the
> distinction you are driving at. After all, when Stalin later starved
> these same Kulaks to death he was doing so because they were resisting
> the (objectively good) interests of the people (as he, and other
> Marxists saw them). Is your distinction because there was a war? Lets
> be clear, Lenin advocated that a large number of peasants (petit
> bourgeoisie) be murdered and saved as an example to the rest. This
> sounds like mass murder, and a tendency in that direction to me.
There is a difference in the kinds of measures which might be
justified in peace and war. After the revolution, the young USSR
was invaded by fourteen countries and had to endure a civil war.
All I am saying is that measures advocated by Lenin during the
wars has to be seen in that light.
In addition, there is the wider moral question which runs to the
motivations of the protagonists. The imperial armies wanted
plunder, and, perhaps more importantly, to nip in the bud the
attempt by the Russian workers and peasants to subvert the power
of capital. The white armies supported the landlords and
capitalists against the poor peasants and workers. The red armies
stood with the poor peasants and workers against the the vile
conditions which oppressed them.
Perhaps you will be good enough to justify your assertion that
'Lenin advocated that a large number of peasants (petit
bourgeoisie) be murdered'. It's not believable as it stands. You
will need a quotation and source to rescue it, so that it can be
independently checked.
Are you equating the peasants and the petit bourgeoisie?
>> I am not saying that humans are prone to murder. Quite the
>> contrary in fact. Humans can commit murder, even mass murder. But
>> of course human beings can also create great works, perform
>> heroic and altruistic deeds, and have babies. I don't think I
>> would say that they are 'prone' to do these things either (except
>> perhaps, in the latter case, to have sex).
>>
>> The reasons people in general do good or bad things have to be
>> sought in their social conditions. There is a dialectical
>> relationship between individual personality traits, social
>> conditions, ideology, and a host of factors. But the determining
>> factors are to be found in social conditions. People eat one
>> another in primitive cannibal societies. People make scientific
>> discoveries in societies with a high level of scientific culture
>> and education. People commit mass murder in societies which have
>> developed searing social and economic contradictions.
>
> I disagree. Ideas have power, and are not merely determined by social
> or economics circumstances. People will burn themselves, blow
> themselves and others up, kill their families, rape, pillage, devote
> their life to helping the poor, work in soup kitchens, and be
> wonderful, all for the sake of ideas. While social and economic
> circumstances play a role, it is not a crudely deterministic one.
Who denies that ideas have power, or asserts that they are
'merely' determined by social and economic circumstances? Who
claims that social and economic circumstances are crudely
deterministic of ideas?
You have just expressed disagreement with my statements without
addressing the content of the statements. You then make
assertions which are very wide indeed of anything I have said.
Perhaps you would address the substance of my arguments.
>> And what is the conception of freedom propounded by Marx? I
>> haven't read anything by Andrzej Walicki, though I understand him
>> to be an apologist for the market system and capitalism. However,
>> I'll be interested to hear you expound his ideas and debate them
>> with me (see below).
>
> This is going to be a short positive description that will probably
> miss a few key points, then an accurate negative description. Freedom
> in Marx is the freedom to align labor and production with reason (as
> opposed, in the capitalist case to the slavish order of economic
> interest, exploitation and capital accumulation) and become the
> species being. Freedom is found in a state in the future, which Marx
> felt would be reached as capitalism imploded and communism supplanted
> it. What's more important for Walicki is what this is NOT. It's not a
> notion of guaranteed individual rights. Freedom, rather than a set of
> liberal the government can't do X's, is conceived as the resultant of
> a future social order.
You are attributing to Marx a circular definition: Freedom is
freedom. However, I agree that one (and only one) aspect of
freedom is the realignment of the production process with reason
(i.e. with need, as determined by human decision). Were this to
be done, then human beings through their conscious labour,
directed towards the satisfaction of need, would become the
species being. But of course it's more than that. Marx did not
consider freedom in the abstract, but in real life, in
development, in conjunction with necessity. Freedom is bound up
both with understanding necessity and in being able to act to
change the world.
Also, freedom for humanity was a developing phenomenon (i.e.
developing historically, in practice in real life, and developing
as a concept, according as real life conditions changed). Thus,
there was no ideal freedom in the future, but a freedom to be
developed and shaped as time went by. Marx did not expect
communism to be established immediately upon the 'implosion' of
capitalism, but to be forged in a developmental process over
perhaps generetions of time with many setbacks.
If what you say above is Walicki's contention, then it is a
complete red herring. Questions of human rights and the powers of
governments are something to be thrashed out during the process
of history and are an entirely different (though perhaps related)
subject. To contrast Marx's (philosophical) ideas on freedom with
human rights (political) platforms is a diversion, designed no
doubt to lay down a foundation for the entirely spurious notion
that Marxism is 'suited to totalitarianism'.
> Totalitarianism comes into play because the goal of a communist
> regime, conceived of as trying to BUILD communism not as actually
> existing in it (as opposed to how a regime or lack there of existing
> within communism might act), can justify infringement on what Lockean
> liberals might think of as the natural rights of man for the purpose
> of future freedom. IE, individuals can be neglected for the greater
> good of the creation of the communist state. Marx produces an ideology
> that (at least until actual communism is reached) legitimates state
> power checked only by the extent to which it is understood as
> promoting the development of the communist society. That is to say,
> proper Marxist progression, has a TOTAL monopoly on legitimacy apart
> from individual rights or alternate conceptions of legitimate
> government.
Your first sentence is unreadable, and I cannot make real sense
of it. However, there is Marx no question of the absolute power
of the state being aligned against the rights of individuals, in
the pursuit of some greater good, either in the building of
socialism or communism, or at any stage of that process. If you
want to argue about the various repressions which occurred in the
USSR, or elsewhere, during the post-capitalist regimes, then
fine, we'll argue about that and its causes. But it's an entirely
different matter if you want to claim that all that sort of
repression is inherent, from the beginning, in Marx's thought.
You will have to quote chapter and verse. It cannot be done by
arguing about what Marxism is not.
> This is not a knockdown argument against communism. You can reply that
> the problem with Russian communism was that they failed to properly
> calculate what was necessary to produce the Kingdom of Freedom. I
> cannot logically invalidate this claim; nor do I claim to (nor does
> Walicki). In essence you can argue that my obsession with natural
> rights is useless, and that proper communism is better.
I do not claim that 'the problem with Russian communism was that
they failed to properly calculate what was necessary to produce
the Kingdom of Freedom'. Apart altogether from the adverse
value-laden terminology, there was a lot more to it than
calculation.
> I would make the empirical claim that regimes that have no notion of
> individual rights and are obsessed with their own correctness tend to
> have their power (intentionally or unintentionally, ie as a result of
> interest or ideology) abused by those in a position to wield it.
> Walicki thinks a vaguely Lockean notion (not Rousseauian) of freedom
> is necessary to guard against the excesses of totalitarianism.
Regimes are regimes. Marx's ideas are Marx's ideas. Marx's
methods can be easily applied to any regime you care to mention,
to penetrate to its real causes and effects. The post-capitalist
regimes of 'existing socialism' were determined in the final
analysis by real material causes and not by ideas, important as
the ideas may be. In fact, I wold argue that the ideas concerned,
were in themselves determined by the same material causes. None
of this is to be re-interpreted as a denial of the reciprocal
effects of ideas on the management of the material causes.
> Here Walicki and I part ways, but I do agree that he seems to have
> proved his case that Marxism was a central factor in Russian
> totalitarianism and seems to have conceptions embedded deep in its
> philosophy amenable (though far from uniqeuely amenable) to
> totalitarian order. I'm not a Lockean, and I think there are other
> ways to guard against totalitarianism.
One thing is for sure, and that's that I'm not going to rush out
and buy Walicki's book, on the basis of this sort of stuff. If
Walicki has something to say along these lines then say it
(quoting Walicki or not, as you prefer). Then I'll tackle it.
Until you 'prove the case' all over again, I'll not tilt at
windmills.
> Finally, calling Walicki and "apologist" for capitalism is like me
> calling you an apologist for communism. It's unfair, beside the point,
> and in this case incorrect. Walicki isn't interested in defending
> Smith as much as he is in attacking Marx. He's not apologizing, he is
> criticizing.
I am an apologist for communism. As a general statement about
opponents of Marx, it is true to say that to attack Marx is to
defend capitalism, though of coures this would bot be true for a
particular argument. Walicki, it seems to me from what you say,
is a believer in capitalism.
>> Well, here's your chance to start a debate about Marx's notion of
>> freedom with me. However, I really think we should move it to
>> another newsgroup. How about soc.politics.marxism?
>
> Feel free to post this over to that news group. I can't guarantee I
> will follow the discussion. You can also e-mail me off this news
> group.
I suppose we'll stick it out here as long as possible.
Tony Dermody
> Tony Dermody wrote:
[snip]
>> Well before the turn of the century, capitalism had
>> begun to displace crises of over-production by expanding
>> production into the colonies.
>
> Europe was expanding production into the colonies well before the 20th
> century. Please quantify, explain, and justify the conditions for
> overproduction. Then demonstrate how Europe met those conditions.
Why?
There is a story, perhaps from the 'Ragged Trousered
Philanthropist' by Robert Tressell (I may need to be corrected on
this), which sums up capitalist overproduction during the 1800s.
A coalminer's child asks its mother: 'Mammy, why are we so cold'?
She replies 'Child, beacause we have no coal for the fire'. 'And
why have we no coal'? the child enquires. The mother responds
'Because Daddy has no work'. So the child asks 'Why has Daddy no
work'? The reply: 'Becaues there is too much coal'. Such was the
nature of the various capitalist crises which continued to
afflict the system until the 1930s. See for instance: The
Gundrisse by Karl Marx; Notebook IV; online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.
htm . See also Capital Volume III.
>> In fact it was the struggle for
>> colonies which was the direct cause of the First World War,
>> though over-production is still a huge problem for the system,
>> even today.
>
> Imperialist struggles were certainly part of the cause of World War I.
> I would disagree that they are merely about "overproduction." You also
> seem to neglect nationalism as a force. Both Marxist and non-Marxist
> scholars have been interested in the phenomenon. See for example Eric
> Hobsbawn Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Benedict Anderson
> Imagined Communities, Ernest Gellner Nations and Nationalism.
If you want to inject other important considerations such as
nationalism into the conversation please do so. However, there is
nothing in my contributions which imply that I 'neglect'
nationalism, ot that the First World war was 'merely' about
overproduction. Nevertheless, without imperial rivalry there
would have been no war.
>> However, I don't know where to begin to answer your questions. If
>> you are not familiar with marxist ideas, then you will have to
>> read up on marxist theory, especially economic theory. This is
>> not something you can do overnight.
>
> Luckily, I am familiar with Marxist historical methodology. I want you
> to explain and justify your claims. My ignorance should be no
> impedence to this.
Then stop fooling around with me and quote and address my
statements. You asked, in your post of 02/12/2003:
[Begin Quotation]
Would you mind expanding on this point? I don't see it as you
explain it here. What is capitalism? How does it develop
"contradictions"? What evidence do you have to assert a causal
relationship between the first world war and a "crisis of
production"?
[End Quotation]
This does not look like the question of somebody familiar with
marxism. I suggested some sources I thought would be useful to
some one who really wished to understand the questions. But you
appear to be playing silly games.
>> A good basic economic textbook, written from a Marxist
>> perspective, is "Political Economy" by John Eaton [International
>> Publishers, New York; 1966; ISBN 0-7178-0157-8]. This is
>> reasonably hard going.
>
> Marxist historians more recently have moved away from a *stricly*
> Marxist framework. I think the most influential would probably be E.P.
> Thompson. By reading him you may get some idea about where I'm coming
> from in the ideas vs. economy debate. His big book is The Making of
> the English Working Class, but I would recomend his journal article
> "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" in
> Past And Present No. 50. (Feb., 1971), pp. 76-136.
If you have something to say, then say it, or I'll reference the
entire British Library back to you.
[snip]
>> The best read on the causes of the First World war is Lenin's
>> 'Imperialism – the Highest Stage of Capitalism'. Some of this is
>> dated now, but it is still the best early description of
>> imperialism.
>
> My goodness, Lenin? He's a smart Marxist, but don't you think he's
> writing from a somewhat impassioned and interested perspective to be
> giving is a good history?
He wrote impassioned polemics, certainly. Nevertheless,
'Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism' is a sober
analysis.
But why is an interested perspective unsuitable for good history?
I suggest that all historical narrative is partisan. Social truth
is partisan. We should not make a fetish out of having a
completely evenhanded approach to the various factions on any
given question. A well balanced view is indeed necessary; but
one should not forget that the ultimate objective is to grasp the
truth.
In social matters, truth is complex and difficult to discern. It
requires a moral beacon to illuminate the issues, and the issues
themselves are partisan.
A distinction should be made between objectivity and neutrality.
It is perfectly possible to be both objective and engaged, and it
is much better to be engaged, and to enable the reader to
perceive the character of that engagement, than to assume a
stance of apparent, but false, indifference and detachment.
Discussions between contributors on ant debate will be most
successful when they are balanced and objective, when they
highlight many and varied perspectives on social reality, when
they demonstrate a moral underpinning, and when they are fully
and openly engaged in establishing social truth.
Ultimately, however, all the many perspectives which there are on
social reality, can be reduced in essence to two: the view of
those who have power, and the view of those who are oppressed by
the powerful. Social truth demands that a stand be taken on the
side of the oppressed, to change their condition.
Hence, truth is partisan.
Now, if you disagree with these statements, then construct an
argument against them. Don't give a reference, except as a
back-up or source for an original argument.
>> Finally, capitalism is the global economic system of today. It
>> has a long history of development through several stages to its
>> present state. Read Marx himself on this. Visit the web
>> page:http://www.marxists.org.uk/subject/students/index.htm . You
>> will find several different strands of marxisn here.
>
> Marx wrote this stuff more than a hundred years ago. I would argue
> it's at least worth reading some of the other social theorists and
> historians that came after him Max Weber, Clifford Geertz, Franz
> Fanon, Marshal Sahlins, Emile Durkheim, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph
> Schumpeter, Carlo Ginzburg, the list goes on and on... These thinkers
> are part of the reason Marxist historians like the previously cited
> Thompson and Hobsbawm have refined and redirected Marx.
More games. Address the substantive arguments. I might even
include the Library of Congress.
>> The idea of 'Contradiction' is a dialectical one (don't confuse
>> it with its meaning in logic). The system is riven with
>> contradictions, e,g. between production and need (allegedly
>> mediated by the market), between the global market and the
>> national states, between capital and labour, between advanced
>> developed countries and backward underdeveloped countries (uneven
>> development), to name but four.
>
> Yes yes yes, and Marx had ideas about how these contradictions played
> out over history, ending in communism. But we aren't there. The
> prophesy failed, and while Marx has provided some invaluable tools for
> doing history, his dialectics appears to be too simplistic to predict
> or explain the actual unfolding of history. Contingency, culture, and
> geography are just a few factors that appear to have played imense
> roles in events like WWI, but can not be fully explained by reading
> Marx.
Impatience with Marx himself or with more modern marxist ideas
will not make the ideas disappear. You must argue out your case.
What prophesy failed? Did Marx deny the influence of contingency,
culture, and geography? What has all this to do with the meaning
of 'contradiction' or with the actual contradictions of
capitalism?
David Wynne-Griffiths
from "Malcolm" <mal...@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> contains these words:
> Most atheists on this ng don't have the intellectual equipment to
> distinguish "a credible theory" from "a theory that I happen to personally
> agree with". Hence the idea that there is no difference between Christianity
> and the tooth fairy.
What is remotely credible about the Jesus myth? and where is the
credible evidence to support it?
--
~~~~~~~
Davidwg
~~~~~~~
strider
> strider wrote:
>
> > Europe was expanding production into the colonies well before the 20th
> > century. Please quantify, explain, and justify the conditions for
> > overproduction. Then demonstrate how Europe met those conditions.
>
> Why?
To prove your argument. You said: "Capitalism was well developed by
the time its crisis of over production became so severe that the
system had to resort to the massive destruction of the First World War
to resolve its contradictions."
I'm asking you to prove this claim. So far, you seem very good at
demonstrating how foolish I am, but less good at justifying this
claim.
> [cut, cut]Such was the
> nature of the various capitalist crises which continued to
> afflict the system until the 1930s. See for instance: The
> Gundrisse by Karl Marx; Notebook IV; online at:
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.
> htm . See also Capital Volume III.
This is not evidence about the first world war. It's a citation to
Karl Marx. Unless Marx had a magic crystal it seems unlikely specific
information about the war is found in those volumes. I've read
capital, and don't remember any discussion of WWI in there.
> If you want to inject other important considerations such as
> nationalism into the conversation please do so. However, there is
> nothing in my contributions which imply that I 'neglect'
> nationalism, ot that the First World war was 'merely' about
> overproduction. Nevertheless, without imperial rivalry there
> would have been no war.
Yes you do neglect nationalism. You said the capitalist system had to
cause WWI to resolve a crisis in overproduction. I'm saying the rise
of nationalism as well as imperial squabbles (which had lots to do
with greed, but little to do with overproduction) caused the first
world war. By understanding nationalism, you would understand the
extent to which the war was caused by ideas.
Without nationalism there would have been no war.
Since you made the original claim, you have to distinguish yours from
mine and prove it (burden of evidence).
> Then stop fooling around with me and quote and address my
> statements. You asked, in your post of 02/12/2003:
I'm not fooling around. You made a claim. I asked you to back it up.
You have not done so.
> This does not look like the question of somebody familiar with
> marxism. I suggested some sources I thought would be useful to
> some one who really wished to understand the questions. But you
> appear to be playing silly games.
I'm not playing games. I know what Marxists often say, but not all
Marxists think of Marx the same way. I wanted you to explain yourself,
and ground your argument in evidence.
> If you have something to say, then say it, or I'll reference the
> entire British Library back to you.
OK. E.P. Thompson remarks that despite our vast anthropoligical
knowledge about how cultural reality informs the patterns of everyday
life, for some reason when looking at Europeans these human beings
normally embedded in a complex web of meaning turn into narrowly
conceived rational maximizers. He then discusses how a moral economy
informed grain riots in early modern Britain. A moral economy, is an
economy which runs partially on ideas of what a fair price is. Riots
were an accepted aspect of society, part of a mutually understood
world of meaning, where peasants rioted under specific circumstances
not simply reducible to hunger. In the Making of the English Working
Class, he discusses the creation of the English Working Class,
similarly as not just a process of realized self-interest flowing from
the nature of the means of production, but as a created identity found
in worker's minds.
The point is that explaining historical events in a strict marxist
fashion (WWI=crisis of overproduction) neglects a vast segment of
causality.
>
> He wrote impassioned polemics, certainly. Nevertheless,
> 'Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism' is a sober
> analysis.
Mind explaining it, rather than just citing it?
> But why is an interested perspective unsuitable for good history?
> I suggest that all historical narrative is partisan. Social truth
> is partisan. We should not make a fetish out of having a
> completely evenhanded approach to the various factions on any
> given question. A well balanced view is indeed necessary; but
> one should not forget that the ultimate objective is to grasp the
> truth.
None of this logically follows. Because objectivity is impossible it
does not follow that one should not strive for it.
> In social matters, truth is complex and difficult to discern. It
> requires a moral beacon to illuminate the issues, and the issues
> themselves are partisan.
This isn't an argument. It's an assertion that morality is required to
make sense of the social.
> A distinction should be made between objectivity and neutrality.
> It is perfectly possible to be both objective and engaged, and it
> is much better to be engaged, and to enable the reader to
> perceive the character of that engagement, than to assume a
> stance of apparent, but false, indifference and detachment.
You say there is a distinction, but then you don't define it.
> Discussions between contributors on ant debate will be most
> successful when they are balanced and objective, when they
> highlight many and varied perspectives on social reality, when
> they demonstrate a moral underpinning, and when they are fully
> and openly engaged in establishing social truth.
Ok, so being partisan might be a problem then?
> Ultimately, however, all the many perspectives which there are on
> social reality, can be reduced in essence to two: the view of
> those who have power, and the view of those who are oppressed by
> the powerful. Social truth demands that a stand be taken on the
> side of the oppressed, to change their condition.
Blind assertion.
> Hence, truth is partisan.
Supposed conclusion to an argument which does not exist.
> Now, if you disagree with these statements, then construct an
> argument against them. Don't give a reference, except as a
> back-up or source for an original argument.
Your process to "truth is partisan" is beside the point, and also
doesn't display the properties of sound reasoning. Perhaps you have
misunderstood something here. I'm asking *you* to *prove* your claim.
I cited materials as suggestions. I'm not an expert on WWI, but you
are claiming to be. I'm still waiting for *your* argument. More
references to Marx don't count, unless he specifically discusses the
first World War.
Also I find it ironic that you are so upset with my citing of sources.
I did this in response to your decision to just cite Lenin, web page
of short Marxist essays, and some books without explaining how they
prove your argument.
> More games. Address the substantive arguments. I might even
> include the Library of Congress.
You are yet to provide one. I still recommend you read that literature
for your own edification. You seem interested in the social sciences,
I think you should explore them.
> Impatience with Marx himself or with more modern marxist ideas
> will not make the ideas disappear. You must argue out your case.
Nothing will make Marx disappear. I wouldn't want him to. He has
provided valuable insights.
> What prophesy failed?
Marxist history had an end, communism. We aren't there.
> Did Marx deny the influence of contingency,
> culture, and geography?
Yes. If those things are important it no longer is clear the Marxist
telos of history will be reached.
> What has all this to do with the meaning
> of 'contradiction' or with the actual contradictions of
> capitalism?
Welp, I'm apparently under the deluded impression you are going to
justify your statements about WWI. So, how you conduct history has a
lot to do with that.