Tag: Marx

Happy Birthday (Belated)

I was writing and remembered that I should have posted something on 05May18……it was the birthday of Karl Marx.

Marx is an interesting individual….his thoughts with Engels had influenced so many activist and political tacticians that to ignore his contributions is just silly.  I know that there are many that do not like Marx because of his influence of Communist and to some Democrats…..but the truth is that NO self-respecting socialist/communist would every describe hi/her self as a Democrat…..and yet the mental midgets keep making the comparisons.  The funny thing I that Marx was right on many aspects of society and politics and yet the typical Rightie continues to ignore Marx’s contributions and blaming all liberal policies and ideas as somehow socialistic in nature+.

Like I said Saturday was the birthday of Karl Marx……

On May 5, 1818, in the southern German town of Trier, in the picturesque wine-growing region of the Moselle Valley, Karl Marx was born. At the time Trier was one-tenth the size it is today, with a population of around 12,000. According to one of Marx’s recent biographers, Jürgen Neffe, Trier is one of those towns where “although everyone doesn’t know everyone, many know a lot about many.”

Such provincial constraints were no match for Marx’s boundless intellectual enthusiasm. Rare were the radical thinkers of the major European capitals of his day that he either failed to meet or would fail to break with on theoretical grounds, including his German contemporaries Wilhelm Weitling and Bruno Bauer; the French “bourgeois socialist” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as Marx and Friedrich Engels would label him in their “Communist Manifesto”; and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin

In an op-ed in the The Week magazine there is a call to “normalize” Marx and his teachings…..I cannot wait for the freak out……

Happy birthday to Karl Marx, who was born 200 years ago on May 5. He was the most astute and influential critic of capitalism in history — and also the most misunderstood.

It is long since time that Marx re-joined the community of ordinary intellectuals, considered as neither the terrifying harbinger of social upheaval, nor a secular pope with the eternally correct description of all human society. He was a genius, but in the end, only another human scholar with a brilliant but incomplete perspective.

http://theweek.com/articles/770718/time-normalize-karl-marx

I await the debate.

The Real “Opiate Of The Masses”

For those who think this will be a diatribe on the value of Marx’s statement on religion….you would be mistaken.  While I appreciate a lot of the work of Karl Marx I will disagree with him on this one.    While my “opiate” has become a more or less modern phenom….who knows Marx might agree with me it he were alive today…..(wishful thinking on my part, no doubt)…….

My “opiate”, as I have mentioned, is not religion but rather consumerism.

That is right…YOU!  You buy then you have become an addict to the drug that corporate media has created……In capitalism, profit becomes the goal and consumers are considered a means to that end.  Thus the final goal is the creation of more and more consumers.

The conception of “consumer” is an illusion possible only once production and consumption have been alienated as apparently separate and independent processes.  Every act of consumption is equally an act of production, so the alienation of one from the other is a social construction.  Since wage-workers produce only to earn a living, and are alienated from their own labor, the illusion is created that their only real life is as a consumer.

Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School focused on the creation of a global consumer culture.  The mass media has created pop culture, Hollywood, and commercial TV which fuels mass consumption..this encourages celebrity worship, lifestyle worship and yes, Greed……

What can I say….back in the 1920’s, Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci made a very forward looking prediction….he said the the mass media would drive hegemony…..not bad considering that in his day newspapers and a bit of radio were considered mass media……he was saying the the mass media would drive politics, culture and yes, Greed!  Take a look at politics today.  Take a look at our so-called culture today.  It is all drive by the media.

The media drives our consumerism…..we are told what cars to buy, which credit card makes us whole, what political indoctrination we need and what is life all about…..the mass media controls all!

Ben Nicholson said…….”The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.”

There you have it…..consumerism is the “real” opiate of the masses………

The Ghost In The Machine

College of Political Knowledge

Today is Halloween, so I decided to inject a little “supernatural” into my post….something appropriate for the day…….

The machine is economics………and the ghost is….Marx.

For 3+ years we have been inundated with the visions of Marx…Obama is a Marxist….Dems are closet Marxists…….and as I have always pointed out the people making such accusations have NO idea what Marx was about other than their limited knowledge of some history from the days of the “Red Scare”…….to them, Marx was the founder of communism….which is true….but they do not know that Marx also wrote and economic study called Das Kapital with his friend and colleague, Engels…….

In 1867 the first volume of Das Kapital was published…….of course the whole volume was looked at from the economic theory of the day…..Labor theory…….

To make a long winded dissertation easier to understand….I will simplify some of the points that I think are pertinent……Marx made several predictions about capitalism….first, capitalism would spread worldwide and devour all other forms of economic processes…remember back in the 1860’s capitalism was not the all encompassing economic system….second, that it would bring about a techno revolution and finally, capitalism would eventually devour itself and bring its own demise….

Marx was very astute and his predictions have been spot on…..says the Professor Niall Ferguson, professor of political and financial history and no friend of Marxism, by the way,  “Marx’s insights into capitalism can still illuminate…Marx got one thing right. Behind the bubbles and busts of the capitalist system there is a class struggle; and that class struggle is the key to modern politics.”

For Marx, the defining characteristics of capitalism in his own time included “the centralisation of capital”, “the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers” and “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime”. In other words, says Ferguson, “widening inequality and globalisation”.  In Marx’s time looks a lot like our time, right?

Marx also said that capitalism would soon start concentrating wealth in the hands of a few and that the middle class would disappear and with all wealth in the hands of a few poverty increases.

Too bad that modern economists could not be as forward thinking as Marx had been,,,,So no matter the criticism, Marx is still the ghost in the machine….

The Self-Destruct Sequence

Kirk….admiral…..1A1

McCoy….ship’s doctor…..B1B

Scott..chief engineer……1B1

(computer replies)….self-destruct in 60 seconds

Okay, sorry, when I came up with the title that was the first thing that pop into my head…..I know my mind works in mysterious ways…..

We need to establish a few things…like what are free markets?  And what is capitalism?

The free market…….A market economy based on supply and demand with little or no government control. A completely free market is an idealized form of a market economy where buyers and sells are allowed to transact freely (i.e. buy/sell/trade) based on a mutual agreement on price without state intervention in the form of taxes, subsidies or regulation.

Now for capitalism……an economic system dedicated to production for profit and to the accumulation of value by private business firms. In the fully developed form of industrial capitalism, firms advance money to hire wage laborers and to buy means of production such as machinery and raw materials. If the firm can sell its products for a greater sum of value than that originally advanced, the firm grows and can advance more money for a new round of accumulation. Historically, the emergence of industrial capitalism depends upon the creation of three prerequisites for accumulation: initial sums of money (or credit), wage labor and means of production available for purchase, and markets in which products can be sold.

Those are a bit simplistic, but for this post and for a better understanding, they will do……..

There has been lots of opinions about the direction our economy is traveling free marketeers see this whole economic shake up as a good thing and others do not see it as something we should look forward to….a couple of years ago I wrote a post entitled, “Marx Was Right” and was not very popular at the time….read it here……http://t.co/IUnlAIJ

And since I posted that we have seen companies sitting on trillions and buying up their competition at record paces…..while sticking to the lie that they are not investing because of the uncertainty coming out of Washington…..yes, I believe this is a lie….they are buying up their competition so that when the government starts programs that will be more conducive for them….then they will have less competition and it will maximize their profits even more so than today….

It seems that I am NOT alone when I say that pure free markets and capitalism is self-destructing……watch this video from a couple of days ago……..http://t.co/q8994D5

So will capitalism self-destruct?  Just in case you were not paying attention…..in Marx own words…..

In capitalist society the working-class continues to grow, and ownership over the means of production continually dwindles into fewer and fewer hands. One example of this is the stock market, where the finance banks emphasize that “all workers” can own a piece of various companies. In fact, through offering “ownership” of these companies to more people, financial oligarchies are able to gain greater control over these companies by diluting the ownership amongst an unorganized group while also extracting capital from this large group for further investment. For example, a bank need only own 10 or 15 percent of a certain company to have an enormous controlling interest over that company, so long as the vast majority of stocks in that company are owned by thousands and tens of thousands of different people, people who do not have the time to attend shareholder meetings and are not united and unorganized on how to exert control over the company. Furthermore in capitalist society, the value of labour increases while labourers continually receive a smaller portion of that value they create. The selling of labour itself is continually reduced from something that is sold on a monthly or yearly basis to something that is sold day by day, and hour by hour, piecemeal or in short term contracts. As a result, the income gap grows continually larger.

You may NOT appreciate Marx….but his criticism from over a hundred years ago….sounds pretty close to damn accurate.  Bullsh*t!  He was DEAD ON!  The Banksters are pushing the self-destruct sequence for capitalism….you know that economic theory they so love!

Marx Was Right!

Just wanted to let others know that there are other theories out there.

It was only yesterday that “free market” ideologues were dancing on Karl Marx’s grave with scornful shouts that “greed is good” and “TINA” — “there is no alternative” to capitalism. These fat men guffawed contemptuously at Marx’s warning that capitalism is built on wage exploitation, that workers never earn enough to buy back what they produce, creating “overproduction” and periodic crises — some deep and long — that can only be solved by socialism.

These ideologues cling to delusions that capitalism is the “best of all possible worlds,” blindness expressed as recently as two weeks ago by John McCain when he asserted that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

But just the other day, economist David Macke surveyed the financial collapse spreading like a thermonuclear chain reaction. Asked what was needed to stop the destruction he replied, “At the end of the day, if you socialize enough of the financial system, it has to work.” Suddenly “socialism” is needed to stave off catastrophe! And who is Macke? An economist for JPMorgan Chase, one of the world’s biggest transnational banks.

But Macke’s “socialism” bears no resemblance to Marx’s version, in which working people own the means of production, including banks, and operate them in working people’s interests. Macke would “socialize” bad debt, forcing working people to bear the burden of rescuing Wall Street. Profits would continue to flow into the coffers of the rich. Left behind would be millions who have lost their homes, their jobs and health care as well as their 401(k) retirement accounts.

We should demand that any bailout work for us.

A coalition led by leaders of major unions has laid out just that approach in “A Call for Common Sense.” Use the federal government’s bank equity, paid for with our tax dollars, to force Morgan Chase, CitiGroup, etc., to agree to a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Require the banks to invest in a “green” jobs program to jumpstart the economy and retool our nation’s factories, farms and infrastructure to sharply reduce greenhouse gases. Make the banks invest in rebuilding the Gulf Coast, especially New Orleans. Such a program is not socialism, but it is a step toward socialism’s democratic principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.”

Reprinted from the People’s Weekly World Newspaper.

Just thought I would give another perspective to the crisis that is engulfing the world as we speak.

Marx Gets Resurrected

Two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, communism’s founding father Karl Marx is back in vogue in eastern Germany, thanks to the global financial crisis. His 1867 critical analysis of capitalism, Das Kapital, has risen from the publishing graveyard to become an improbable best-seller for the academic publisher, Karl-Dietz-Verlag.

“Everyone thought there would never again be any demand for Das Kapital, the managing director, Joern Schue-trumpf said. He has sold 1,500 copies so far this year, triple the number sold in all of 2007 and a 100-fold increase since 1990. “Even bankers and managers are now reading Das Kapital to try to understand what they’ve been doing to us,” he added.

A recent survey found 52 per cent of eastern Germans believe the free market economy is “unsuitable” and 43 per cent said they wanted socialism rather than capitalism. Unemployment in the former communist east is 14 per cent, double western levels, and wages are significantly lower. Millions of jobs were lost after reunification.