HRS,

Thank you for your considered response.

With regard to your first point about violent revolution, the idea of which most people find concerning, it should be remembered that the current system is maintained by the use of violence, or the threat of violence. We are not conscious that it is, but if ordinary people rose up against capitalists, violence would be used to suppress them. Think about the use of force by the state in the USA during the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam movement.

Marxists certainly do not advocate violent revolution, however they recognize that during revolution, violence will be used against the masses, and therefore violence will be required to defend the individuals involved in the revolution, and protect the gains of the revolution. If, once the proletariat (i.e. about 95% of industrialized economies) decide they are going to take power into their own hands (i.e. democracy of the majority), the capitalists give it up freely, then there will be no need for violence – however there is slim chance of that.

In *Their Morals and Ours* Leon Trotsky pointed out that “history has different yardsticks for the cruelty” of the oppressed and the oppressor. “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”

It should also be noted that the (former) “greatest democracy in the world”, the USA, arose out of the bloodshed of the war of independence.

Which leads on to your second point about democracy. Marx and Engels certainly considered and studied bourgeois democracy, and proletariat democracy of the Paris Commune, which they considered to be the form socialist democracy would take:

“The-Commune-was-formed-of-the-municipal-councillors,-chosen-by-universal-suffrage-in-the-various-wards-of-the-town,-responsible-and-revocable-at-short-terms.-The-majority-of-its-members-were-naturally-workers,-or-acknowledged-representatives-of-the-working-class.-The-Commune-was-to-be-a-working,-not-a-parliamentary-body,-executive-and-legislative-at-the-same-time.”

Marx also considered that once class exploitation was eliminated, the State (as a tool of class domination), and democracy, would wither away because it would not be required in a classless society.

I'm almost out of words, so more later if you're up for it.

It is my understanding that Lenin, Stalin, Mao used some of the principles of marxism for their own ends. In fact they did not really practice the principles that they preached. Such as a classless society and equality.

As such Lenin, Stalin and Mao developed extremely oppressive regime's, you could be shot or imprisoned just being classd a dissident. Questioning or challangeing the ruling party was not allowed.

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/050521
Sometimes it seems the Gender Warriors will stop at nothing to get their way.

A number of years ago University of Delaware professor Suzanne Steinmetz published an article called the "The Battered Husband Syndrome." After culling the findings from five surveys on domestic violence, Steinmetz reached an unexpected conclusion: wives were just as likely as their husbands to kick, punch, stab, and otherwise physically aggress against their spouses.

Steinmetz's conclusion was so startling that she quickly became a media darling, appearing on the Phil Donahue show and having her work featured in a front-page story in Time magazine.

But the radical feminists were none-too-pleased with Steinmetz's revisionism, and they knew something had to be done. So they placed Steinmetz on their hit list.

The fem-thugs began by calling University of Delaware faculty members, deriding Steinmetz's work as "anti-feminist." Then they leveled threats against Steinmetz and her children. Sponsors of her speaking engagements started to receive threatening phone calls. Finally, a bomb threat was called in to a meeting where Steinmetz was scheduled to speak. [www.law.fsu.edu/journals/lawreview/downloads/304/kelly.pdf]

Bullying tactics like these may be acceptable in totalitarian states, but are an anathema to an open democracy that cherishes tolerance and freedom of speech.

Karl Marx maintained, workers in a capitalistic economic system become trapped in a vicious circle: the harder they work, the more resources in the natural world are appropriated for production, which leaves fewer resources for the workers to live on - in effect they become “wage slaves”. An alluring theory.

Marx’s forerunner, Jeremy Bentham, believed in "La Raison" as the ultimate test of value to society - culture, custom and tradition are not relevant to economic analysis. It is worth noting, many economists would separate economics from sociology on the basis of rational or irrational behaviour, where these terms are defined in the penumbra of utility theory - western cultural bias is certainly implicit in this theory. Utilitarians are credited with having created something that was new in literature... “namely, the shallowest of all conceivable philosophies of life that stands indeed in a position of irreconcilable antagonism to the rest of them.” (Schumpeter 1949:132-4).

In the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto) (1848), Marx and Engels presented their so called ‘practical proposals’ for changing the world. Social history is nothing other than a record of past struggles between the bourgeoisie (most significant classes) and the proletariat, people who work for wages. The Manifesto declares the intention of communism to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to situate all political power in the proletariat instead. For Marxist feminists, women would be empowered in their own right as workers, instead of being subject to domination by male bourgeois. With the disappearance of the bourgeoisie as a class, there would no longer be a class society. As Engels later wrote, "The state is not abolished, it withers away." Carl Jung more aptly describes this transition, the " State drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society - the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy”...cont’d

cont'd..
Marx’s utopia in effect became oppressive,” the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." turned sour, particularly in Russia. Probably the greatest flaw in Marx's vision was his certainty that economic forces controlled history and flowed in only one inevitable direction.

Bentham's and so too Marx’s assumption that culture was irrelevant was reinforced in mid-century with the schism between Marxist and mainstream economics. Cultural relativity became Marxist analysis and mainstream economists adopted an increasingly positivist approach. The Benthamite tradition deeming culture irrelevant to economic behaviour is no longer valid in a mythic or multicultural domestic and international economy.

In our new economy, it is creative workers -- artists , scientists and entrepreneurs - who are the source of growth in National Income. This is lost on the primitive ideologue whose strange take on equality is to reduce all to a common denominator. Marx himself should have taken to heart his favourite motto: "Everything should be doubted."

Thank you relda, you seem to have summed things up pretty well.

Further to that, but on a different note - family - and an obvious influence on the feminist thinking of Betty Frieden, is the following discourse on family structures by Engels.

(Note - this is a fairly big document and not a quick read)

Frederick Engels 1884
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm

I believe the seeds of today's Family Law are sown right there in that document and hence the connection between Marx, Engels, socialist governments and second-wave feminism can be very easily put together to show how second-wave feminism came about.

The pieces of the puzzle fit together rather elegantly.

I seriously doubt the masses of feminist women and men, who bought the feminist package, had (or have) any idea of the roots of their own cause. Some do, but they don't like to talk openly about it much.

The vast majority of course are absolutely clueless that the motivator of feminism has absolutely nothing to do with freedom for women, but rather a political re-engineering of culture to replace traditional family (human relations) with state dependence. There are many in the Western world, who deeply believe this is for the better and they of course have a right to their beliefs. I have tolerance of their opinions, but unfortunately, like most isms, there's no place or tolerance for me in their grand plan. Everybody's got to be EQUAL - even me - whether I like it or not. Too bad I don't like being told how I MUST live my life. And besides, I quite like and respect traditional style families.

Relda, I take issue with much of what you have said however, due to word and post limitations, I will deal with a few points:

Firstly, your apparent conflation of Bentham’s utilitarianism with Marxism is either misinformed, or disingenuous. While not proclaiming intimate knowledge of Bentham’s philosophy, a cursory glance suggests that, ultimately, the success of Bentham’s philosophy rested on the necessity of those in power, or the bourgeoisie, to use reason to make ethical laws that would benefit the most people within the framework of capitalism i.e. reform capitalism. This is diametrically opposed to Marx’s conception that capitalism is an exploitive economic and social system which, being inherently “unethical” (although he probably wouldn’t use that word), is unable to be reformed. Further, Bentham was an idealist, while Marx was a materialist.

Secondly, your attempt to describe the concept of the withering away of the state, using Jung’s description of a return to primitive society “where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy” is also disingenuous.

Because they are related, I will also deal here with your comments “Marx’s assumption that culture was irrelevant” and “Cultural relativity became Marxist analysis”. What post-modern gobbledygook is this? Were did Marx say that culture was irrelevant, and in what context?

Technological progress and the growth of productive forces is at the heart of Marxist theory, and is nothing other than culture i.e. “culture is all that has been created, built, assimilated and achieved by man throughout the course of his history, in contrast with what has been given by nature” Leon Trotsky, Culture and Socialism. Marxist theory is therefore inextricably bound up with questions of culture. I can’t see how anyone who has seriously read what Marx has written could credibly suggest that he considered culture irrelevant.

Marx considered that it is technology, and the growth of productive forces, which drives “cultural” transformation, or progress, e.g. transforming feudal to bourgeois, or capitalist, society. Cont…