Chomsky is a critic of US imperialism and blames the US for many of the ills of the world. Chomsky like Marx misses the essence. In setting up the class struggle Marx departed from critiquing the system. Capitalism is an economic system. In that as in any other economic system people will play various roles. That does not mean capitalists are the enemy. In past ages people thought of wolves as being evil. Now we recognise wolves as merely being the top predator in an ecosystem. Likewise capitalists per se are not evil but are merely the top predator in a competitive system playing a particular role.

If we adopt a different system they can no longer play that role since it doesn't exist. However, Marx set up an analogy to the religious battle between good and evil. This is theology not rational analysis. The Marxist states then had to seek out those to whom it could apply the label class enemy, and millions of corpses resulted.

Nations have evolved the nation-state system in which nations within their borders are pretty much supreme regarding national sovereignty unless a much more powerful entity such as the United States chooses to challenge a weaker nation state as the US did in Iraq. Chomsky the US for behaving pretty much the way in which one could expect the superpower to behave in a nation state system. He is blaming a wolf for being a wolf. That is akin to religious moralism. It would be a deeper and more challenging criticism to question the nation state system. The European community has already done so recognising that unbridled national sovereignty has resulted in two terrible wars in the last century.

It is unreasonable to expect those in charge of national governments to challenge the system under which they have power. The UN made of nation states cannot effect this. Can we limit national sovereignty? Can supernational institutions with power to enforce their decisions or other mechanisms do this?

"It is unreasonable to expect those in charge of national governments to challenge the system under which they have power."

Thinking of the recent election here, that is one of the biggest challenges for change particularly for parliamentary or electoral reform, where the prevailing system supports those at the top of the power pyramid.

We only have to see that tonight on Lateline with Julie Bishop spouting the same old stuff and no light bulb moment in recognising the significance of the election outcome. I believe Labor gets it more but still has a ways to go.

"Can we limit national sovereignty? Can supernational institutions with power to enforce their decisions or other mechanisms do this?"

They can and already do but it is not always so clear cut about who is actually pulling the strings. War is one way to enforce decisions on others. We are already limiting national severeignty on free trade issues expecting many to tow the FT line while competing on a tilted playing field (subsidies, cheap labour often at the poverty level - or working poor).

Trade sanctions are another mechanism used to reflect disappointment with another nation's policies or human rights practices but never seems to be an equal and fair assessment, with some of the worst players getting away scot free. (Usually on the basis of economic interests or fear of reprisal in more volatile areas)

I guess what I am arguing is that national sovereignty has always been a fragile state with much in the way of balancing and compromising for mutually agreed (or not so agreed) outcomes.

Dear David F.,

You ask can we limit national sovereignty?
Can supernational institutions with power to
enforce their decisions or other mechanisms
do this?

They can at least try. I'd like to give the
example of international peace-making.
The human population is spread among a series
of sovereign independent states - most of them
with their own armed forces - and so there is
a built-in potential for warfare whenever two
nations have conflicting interests. Before the
twentieth century, there were few institutionalized
ways for hostile nations to achieve peaceful
settlements. When negotiations took place, they often
occurred only after a war - for the purpose of agreeing
to a peace treaty that would specify the spoils of the
victor. Although the structure of international
peace-making is not perfect, it now offers infinitely
better prospects for helping nations to avoid war.

Two vital elements for international
peace-making are in place. The first is the
United Nations, which provides a forum for
world opinion and a mechanism for conflict
resolution. The second is a growing body of
international law that specifies the rights
and obligations that nations have toward one
another - particularly with respect to aggression.

Over the years, the United Nations have intervened
successfully in a number of wars (Korea, the Middle
East) and in several situations that might have led
to wars (Cuba, Berlin).

A major difficulty with international peace-making
of course is that compliance with the resolutions of the
UN and the rulings of the World Court are voluntary,
for no country is willing to surrender its sovereignty
to an international body. The UN is most effective
when the super powers are able to agree on a course of
action and mobilize their blocs to support it.

Even so, as I've stated on other threads the UN provides
an influential forum for world opinion, and, while it
does not always prevent war, it surely helps make it
less likely.

Come off it pelican,

The bureaucracy are the real powerful ones. The public service. As Sir Humphrey always used to say, governments come and go, but the public service will always be here.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10557

Underestimate them at your peril.

Dear Davidf,
for such a leaned man you seem bent on parading your wilful ignorance. Do you really think you do justice to the profound thought of both Marx and Chomsky in dismissing them both in one glib half-paragraph?
<In setting up the class struggle Marx departed from critiquing the system.>
Can you please substantiate this, flesh it out a little, or are we to take your word for it?
<Likewise capitalists per se are not evil but are merely the top predator in a competitive system playing a particular role.>
Marx's whole polemic was an immanent critique of the system. Capitalism is indeed an economic system, however according to Marx it is one vast abstraction, which stands in for the materialism it displaces and alienates us. The capitalists are not "evil" (can we leave Americanisations like this out of sensible debate?) or the "wolves", they are the dupes, more deprived of their humanity than anyone.
<If we adopt a different system they can no longer play that role since it doesn't exist. However, Marx set up an analogy to the religious battle between good and evil. This is theology not rational analysis.>
Balderdash! Once again, can you make sense of this fragment for me please? If you can mount any kind of rational defence (based on evidence and not prejudice) I'll be happy to debate it. That is, I will be happy to debate any criticism you have of Marx's actual thought, which is not to say I don't have reservations myself. So far, I haven't seen any evidence, on any thread, that you have the faintest idea what you're talking about.
Sorry to be offensive, but your diatribe is offensive and deserves harsh treatment.
Indeed, why the preamble?
I'll have something more considered to say later.

Dear Squeers,

Balderdash is really a Colonel Blimpish word. 350 words is neither a critique of the thought of Marx and Chomsky nor a diatribe.

I wrote this to start a discussion and am grateful to you for your part in it. I intend to write several articles based on the feedback I get from this thread and other material. One criticism I have of Marx is that he thought that the concept of individual rights were bourgeois and would be unnecessary in the state he envisioned. The corpses produced by the Marxist state were a product of Marx's blindness to the need for protection of people against state tyranny. I am going to write a critique of the Manifesto which will show it as the basis for Marxist tyranny.

"Crimes against Humanity" by Geoffrey Robertson deals with developments in human rights in the modern era. It is available in a cheap edition by Penguin. Please read the paragraph on p. 17 starting with "The next formidable critic of 'the rights of man' was Karl Marx."

If you were truly sorry to be offensive you would not be offensive. I feel no need to castigate you. At least you recognise that you are offensive, and for that I thank you.

It is not nice to call the opinions of others 'prejudice'. The implication is that your opinions are objective and well-founded. In that you are not unique.

Okay I'll play. Which bureacracies are those Houlley?

There are equally virulent versions in corporate organisations as public ones. Just look at the shenanigans with corporates in post and pre-war Iraq in relation to private contract arrangements - admittedley done with the support of the political machine who are either incompetent or corrupt.

You should know better - I never underestimate the power of the bureacracy. It is government that forms policies and bureacracies that implement them, sometimes politicians can influence where the budget is spent despite what you hear about the autonomy of departmental secretaries. Sometimes the bureacrats are guilty of funnelling money to the top end while the bottom end drowns in the cesspit that remains.

Wherever you find human beings you will sometimes find failings the trick is to ensure there are checks and balances reduce the impact of those failings. I have worked with enough empire builders in my time so you are preaching to the converted. But on a positive note you will somtimes also find inspiration, dedication and creativity just as in any walk of life.

Dear davidf,
You disposed of Chomsky and Marx in little more than 100 words, most of it hyperpole and none of it fair or substantial.
What you appear to fail to realise is that the concept of human rights is a false pillar of the capitalist system that would be redundant in the kind of utopia Marx postulated. To paraphrase Slavoj Zizek, thinking critically requires us to jetison our "social" paradigm (actually state and capital, bereft of social, or species existence) and discern the problem in the way that we perceive the problem; that is the "form" of the problem that we stupidly subscribe to.
Capitalism and its concomitant ideology is nothing if not dynamic. Zizek, published this month:
"What has happened in the latest stage of post-68 capitalism is that the economy itself—the logic of market and competition—has progressively imposed itself as the hegemonic ideology. In education, we are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the classical-bourgeois school isa: the school system is less and less the compulsory network, elevated above the market and organized directly by the state, bearer of enlightened values—liberty, equality, fraternity. On behalf of the sacred formula of ‘lower costs, higher efficiency’, it is progressively penetrated by different forms of ppp, or public–private partnership. In the organization and legitimization of power, too, the electoral system is increasingly conceived on the model of market competition: elections are like a commercial exchange where voters ‘buy’ the option that offers to do the job of maintaining social order, prosecuting crime, and so on, most efficiently.

On behalf of the same formula of ‘lower costs, higher efficiency’, functions once exclusive to the domain of state power, like running prisons, can be privatized; the military is no longer based on universal conscription, but composed of hired mercenaries. Even the state bureaucracy is no longer perceived as the Hegelian universal class, as is becoming evident in the case of Berlusconi. In today’s Italy, state power is directly exerted by the base bourgeois who ruthlessly and openly exploits it as a means to protect his personal interests."
cont..

..cont:
Even the process of engaging in emotional relations is increasingly organized along the lines of a market relationship. Such a procedure relies on self-commodification: for internet dating or marriage agencies, prospective partners present themselves as commodities, listing their qualities and posting their photos. What is missing here is what Freud called der einzige Zug, that singular pull which instantly makes me like or dislike the other. Love is a choice that is experienced as necessity. At a certain point, one is overwhelmed by the feeling that one already is in love, and that one cannot do otherwise. By definition, therefore, comparing qualities of respective candidates, deciding with whom to fall in love, cannot be love. This is the reason why dating agencies are an anti-love device par excellence. What kind of shift in the functioning of ideology does this imply? When Althusser claims that ideology interpellates individuals into subjects, ‘individuals’ stand here for the living beings upon which ideological state apparatuses work, imposing upon them a network of micro-practices. By contrast, ‘subject’ is not a category of living being, of substance, but the outcome of these living beings being caught in the isadispositif, or mechanism; in a symbolic order. Quite logically, insofar as the economy is considered the sphere of non-ideology, this brave new world of global commodification considers itself post-ideological. The isas are, of course, still here; more than ever. Yet insofar as, in its self-perception, ideology is located in subjects, in contrast to pre-ideological individuals, this hegemony of the economic sphere cannot but appear as the absence of ideology. What this means is not that ideology simply ‘reflects’ the economy, as superstructure to its base. Rather, the economy functions here as an ideological model itself, so that we are fully justified in saying that it is operative as an isa—in contrast to ‘real’ economic life, which definitely does not follow the idealized liberal-market model."

I found a free link to the text I've recommended previously:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch01.htm
I strongly urge you to read it!
BTW, if anyone is blimpish, it's Geoffrey Robertson!!

Dear Squeers,

Thanks for that.
Just honing in on your points about the privatisation of functions that used to be the domain of the state. Naomi Klein in her book "The Shock Doctrine" provides a clear comparison between the two recent Iraqi conflicts in the ratio of private contractors (mercenaries) to traditional soldiers. She writes:
"During the first Gulf War in 1991, there was one contractor for every hundred soldiers. At the start of the 2003 Iraqi invasion, the ratio had jumped to one contractor for every ten soldiers. Three years into the U.S. occupation, the ratio had reached one to three. Less than a year later, with the occupation approaching its fourth year, there was one contractor for every 1.4 U.S. soldiers. But that figure only includes contractors working directly for the U.S. government, not for other coalition partners or the Iraqi government..."
Seems that there's much profit to be made in the theatre of war.

Dear Squeers,

You wrote: "What you appear to fail to realise is that the concept of human rights is a false pillar of the capitalist system that would be redundant in the kind of utopia Marx postulated. "

I am fully aware of Marx's view of human rights and don't buy it. I don't accept that human rights are a false pillar of capitalism. They are essential to a decent society. Social justice is also essential to a decent society.

As long as there are nations humans need protection against the power of the state. The mounds of corpses are a direct consequence of Marxist ideology.

Dear davidf,
a rather shrill rejoinder. And can you please stow the "corpses", their rhetorical effect has long since worn thin.

Nationalism is one of the bathetic illusions we hold on to. Ironically, while cultural distinctiveness means nothing more than the exchange rate, we go on kidding ourselves that it's deeper than that. It's not; nationalism is corporatism, nothing more. Anything that defines a human nation today is lost in the soup of imperial multi-culti. We are consumers, transcending all borders. Cultural predilections are fashion accessories. What can the US or Australia assert that's distinctive or culturally significant compared with their dispossessed indigenes? Nationalism/patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel--that's us.
<Chomsky [criticises?] the US for behaving pretty much the way in which one could expect the superpower to behave in a nation state system. He is blaming a wolf for being a wolf. That is akin to religious moralism.>
I don't know where to begin with this. The US is largely responsible for the state of "realism" the world finds itself trying to negotiate in. Indeed, on the subject of "corpses", what about the Japanese cities (not military targets), for starters, that it nuked? I'd say that set the agenda for international diplomacy for the foreseeable.
Chomsky tries to work with that extant 'reality'. Marx said the point of philosophy was not to understand our reality, but to change it!
Humans aren't good at voluntary change, so they just get dug in.
<It is unreasonable to expect those in charge of national governments to challenge the system under which they have power.>
They have power? I thought we were democracies; doesn't that mean collective power?
The UN is a lapdog, a convention of the system, a eunuch; it provides the rules for the only game in town.

Dear Squeers,

Corpses are not rhetoric. They are produced by human evil. Maybe they are rhetoric to you, but they were produced by an evil system.

The corpses that the Marxist evil produced stink as much as the corpses the fascist evil produced.

There is no justification or excuse for it. The end does not justify the means.

Dear David F.,
I've been thumbing through one of my books by Noam Chomsky titled "Hegemony or Survival", and I came to these lines:
(referring to America's military and economic dominance) "The imperial grand strategy asserts the right of the United States to undertake "preventive war" at will "preventive" - not preemptive.... but the use of military force to eliminate an imagined or invented threat...Some defenders of the strategy recognise that it runs roughshod over international law, but see no problem in that..."
Legal scholar, Michael Glennon wrote: "The grand attempt to subject "the rule of force to the rule of law" should be deposited in the trashcan of history".
Chomsky adds that: "Washington made it clear that it intends to do all it can to maintain preeminence...declaring that it would no longer be bound by the U.N charter's rules governing the use of force."
On the subject of "corpses", it would seem the strategy undertaken by the U.S. in Iraq (to select just one post-war intervention and atrocity) has provided its own example of the depraved negation of the value of human life and dignity - all wrapped up in a neat little bundle of altruism. I don't buy it at all.

Dear Poirot,

I don't buy it either. I agree with you and with Chomsky in what you have quoted. The US has disregarded international law and has made many corpses in so doing. In doing that it has shown the impotence of international law.

My point was not to excuse the US. In my introduction to this discussion I wrote, "Can we limit national sovereignty?" The Marxist tyrannies oppressed their own people. The United States has the power to roam all over the globe picking out its targets. In 1987 a meeting of ex-CIA men in Switzerland estimated that US supported death squads had murdered about 6,000,000 people. How many more have been murdered since then?

Is it possible to curb the power of the nation state to oppress internally and externally? Popular democratic governments are a danger to the world (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9631) is an essay I wrote for OLO which deals with the aggressive acts of the United States. I contrasted it with Myanmar which oppresses its people but is not a danger to world peace.

Can we limit the power of the nation-state to oppress internally and externally?

An independent judiciary and other guarantors of human rights can act to minimise internal oppression, but we have no workable mechanisms to prevent nation-states from external depredations. The Marxist states and other tyrannies got rid of or didn't have the mechanisms that would protect human rights internally. I would like to see all countries have such mechanisms. I would also like to see mechanisms developed to protect people and countries from operations of powerful national entities such as the United States.

Dear Poirot,
I also agree with Chomsky, and thank you for emphasising a point I was making with the Zizek quote. I see institutions like the UN as nothing more than international PC, put in place to appease activists and docile electorates alike in order to keep international capital flowing. So-called human rights are of exactly the same idealistic stamp, and observed in the breach. Wealthy countries have the money ten times over to fix the bulk of human rights issues, at least at the level of demand. Of course in reality it would never be permitted in terms of capital because it would not be conducive to profit (indeed we are already living beyond our welfare means in terms of profit margins and economic crises are likely to be ongoing until real oppression {austerity measures lol} is inevitably revived). But even were that hurdle surmountable, the problem of national sovereignty (a key ideological pillar but actually another abstraction) is a convenient prevarication that maintains human rights as inspirational but empty rhetoric. Indeed, human rights are a joke within national borders like Australia's or the US's, let alone outside them! All the national and international conventions are nothing more than patronage, greese for the wheels of capitalism.

Dear Davidf,
brother Squeers was clearly referring to 'your' rhetorical use of 'corpses' and not implying that corpses were less than hardcore reality. Indeed I would deign to say that Squeers agrees with your concerns, and acknowledges the 'evils' perpetrated in Marx's name. The only point of tension is your insistence that Marx was the architect. There are any number of books, old and knew, which compellingly reveal that every form of Marxism that has ever been realised was a gross distortion of his philosophy. Even Engels poorly understood Marx and was largely responsible for the distortions.
If you are going to maintain your stand, then we await propper evidence.

Dear Mitchell,

Squeers wrote: "What you appear to fail to realise is that the concept of human rights is a false pillar of the capitalist system that would be redundant in the kind of utopia Marx postulated."

I don't think any state can be trusted even a Marxist utopia. If it can oppress it will oppress.

Marx stressed his opposition to human rights in the Manifesto:

"By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism of confronting the political movement with the socialistic demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany."

He advocated getting rid of human rights as they would not be needed. The USSR and the other Marxist tyrannies did not have freedom of the press, liberty and equality. Marx called these human rights bourgeois,. They were eliminated, and there was nothing to protect people against arbitrary state power. He was the architect of tyranny.

In the Manifesto he also recommended:

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

That made even printing presses in private hands illegal.

He advocated tyranny and got tyranny.

I am writing an essay on the subject expanding the idea further..

Dear davidf,
You are completely wrong.
I suggest in your research for said article you analyse the Manifesto in context (the very passage you quote is precisely the criticism of form, the "Problem of the problem", that Zizek mentions above), as well as go beyond it; all the Marx texts are available on line. You might also look at the difference between Aristotelian metaphysics (which Marx, following Hegel, subscribed to) and the Humean metaphysics that underwrite our current rationalist paradigm, rendering Marx virtually inaccessible. This is the root problem.
If you persist in the current vein, including in your upcoming essay, patently uncomprehending and without substantive evidence, I (Squeers) will finally conclude that you are an obstinate fool and take no further part in trying to disabuse you.
You may then confabulate at your leisure

Dear Mitchell,

True believers of all stripes whether the belief is in religion, Marxism, astrology or something else try to explain things away. Marx does not mean what he says, and one who does not buy that is an obstinate fool. Many of the corpses were probably also obstinate fools.

Dear David F.

I don't believe there is likely to be a potent enough mechanism in any independent judiciary overseeing international moves to stop superpowers like the U.S. from waring on other countries.
Chomsky called the whole framework of international law "hot air".
The full quote from Michael Glennon continued to describe the impotence of international law as: "a convenient stance for one state able to adopt the new non-rules for its purposes, since it spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on means of violence and is forging new and dangerous paths in developing means of destruction, over near unanimous world opposition."

Dear David F.

Just read your last post - I'm a bit confused as to why you believe Marx (or anybody) would write or say things that they do not mean?

Dear Poirot,

I think Marx said just what he meant to say in the Manifesto. I think true believers try to explain it away. That's what I made out of Mitchell's post. I was supposed to read something that would explain that Marx meant something else than what he said. I think Marx was a brilliant man who had a precise command of the language.

Marx recommended:

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

That would make even printing presses in private hands illegal. I have no reason to think he didn't mean it.

Marx also recommended confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels.

I have come to Australia from the US. The US has confiscated nothing and even sends my Social Security. Fortunately they don't follow Marx's recommendation.

Marx advocated tyranny and got tyranny.

True believers want to explain it away.

Dear Poirot,

I don't see any mechanism powerful enough to stop the depredations of a superpower, either. Any solution must get rid of national sovereignty, and I don't see how we are going to do that. The point I wish to make is that the US is acting in more or less the same way any superpower in that position would behave. The problem is not the United States. The problem is the nation state system which generates superpowers.

Dear David F.

I think "nation states" are something that derive instinctively from fundamental human behaviour. We have and will continue to organize ourselves into groups, nations, etc because we follow a holon-like method of arrangement - as does everything. There will always be a superpower of sorts (and when one degenerates, another will follow)
Man is brutish when it comes to territory and resources. He swerves from his enlightenment and reverts to aggression for gain.
Don't know the answer there.

You cannot get a more shocking revelation of an Ideological doctrine other than that of what exists in the Quran, But Yes we do, that tells you to liquidate your dissenters ; and they did so , and in Abundance; I wonder who said that when his Doctrine was fund out to be an utter Fraud , ; and that was ?
But he gave it an epithet of Scientific ; that sounds a better than confabulated steaming pile of manure, for dung beetles to consume.

Dear Poirot,

To call something as complex and temporal as the current nation state instinctive gives instinct more of a role than it actually has. The nation state in its present form is a modern construction. European-style bureaucracy is an eighteenth century development. Prussia had the first modern bureaucracy. England in the eighteenth century did not have a standing army. Until the eighteenth century almost all nations were controlled by royal dynasties.

The first army made up of conscripts from the general population was Napoleon's. He had his many victories partially because he had the manpower. He was fighting nations whose armies were made of mercenaries and warrior classes.

In one sense the nation state is rapidly becoming obsolete. At this time many corporations are larger than a hundred of the smaller nation states.

We may even develop controls for the nation states and find that corporate entities have become a greater problem. They can shift headquarters from nation to nation and even supply their own armed forces.

Even the most brilliant and perceptive analyst cannot predict the future. By the time an analysis of the current socio-economic conditions is made it is obsolete.

Dear Davidf, I am not a "true believer", howevermuch it might suit you to portray me that way.

Davidf: <Even the most brilliant and perceptive analyst cannot predict the future. By the time an analysis of the current socio-economic conditions is made it is obsolete.>

I refer you to the following links, especially the first. Marx's economic predictions have proved scarily accurate!

http://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/congreso/moseley_10abr03.pdf

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_didn%27t_Marx%27s_predictions_occur

Dear Squeers,

I did not call you a true believer or refer to you as a true believer. You are not the only person on this thread who has taken issue with me.

When you accused me of referring to you before when I referred to a Marxist I was referring to Max Watts who has had an operation today for cancer. I do not know how it came out. I hope he is ok.

This time my reference to a true believer was not referring to you. Please believe me. I spend a good deal of time not thinking of you at all.

I argue with a good many people. Join the queue. I wish you well.

Dear Squeers,

Thank you for the links.
Just wanted to pick up on your point that: "Anything that defines a human nation today is lost in the soup of imperial multi-culti. We are consumers, transcending all boundaries."
I agree with that sentiment. In fact it seems that the imperial design is a at least a two-pronged arrangement, with the WTO, World Bank and IMF on the one hand working at the behest of giant corporations and barrier-free trade to ensure access to new markets - while on the other hand, the reigning super-power (in addition to its close involvement with the above financial institutions) does what it has to do militarily to ensure access to resources.
Seems a complicated web of control and manipulation is the key to globalised capitalism.

Dear Squeers,

You mentioned references where I could look up Marx's economic predictions.

His economic predictions seem spot on.

I have maintained that he was a bigot whose recommendations for the state resulted in tyranny and murder.

I do not fault his credentials as an analyst of capitalism. As an analyst of economic trends he was great.

As a decent human being he was not great.

.

Dear David F.,

.

Passing from theory to practice, whatever the domain, is a perilous journey. There are many obstacles and potholes along the bumpy road to the final product which can end up quite different from the original idea or design.

If given the opportunity, the authors themselves often scrap their ideas as soon as they realise they have made a mistake or overlooked some important factor or unexpected outcome.

History records that Marx was a sociologist. He studied the social, political, economical and religious aspects of society in the western world. He was undoubtedly the most important sociologist of his time. His ideas affected the lives of more than half of humanity in the twentieth century.

Some of his closest friends participated actively in various revolutionary mouvements. Marx did not, apart from expressing revolutionary ideas in his writings.

Karl Marx died on 14 March 1883 and was buried in England shortly thereafter. It seems difficult to uphold that there are valid grounds for declaring him responsible for the atrocities committed more than thirty years later by the communists both during and after the October Bolshevic revolution of 1917 in Russia.

At most, it could, perhaps, be argued that Karl Marx, the theoretical sociologist, was to the innocent victims of communism, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist, was to the innocent victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Whilst scientists and all those in other fields of research receive full credit for their origninal publications, society does not usually hold them liable for the practical applications of their findings and ideas, however devastating they may be.

Also, as you indicated on another thread, David: "We must differentiate between mere advocacy of actions and actual planning and carrying out of actions".

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10725&page=8

... which prompted my question: "Does this principle not apply to Karl Marx ?"

... and you subsequently confirmed:

"Dear Banjo,

I apologise for not responding to you before this. Of course it applies to Karl Marx."

Naturally, I would welcome any further comments you may feel pertinent.

.

I am not sure that a Theology of thought and ideas that is in truth a False Theory, that of which within itself a compilation of contradictions and self imposed Paradoxes in defining its own interpretation, devoid of logic or any reasoning - stemming back to Hegel.
It is tantamount to describing in philosophical and pathological terms ;
A piece of Faeces as an Individual entity of immense stature and of Natural beauty only worthy of existence by a supreme being to be its creator; that ought to gain its own Autonomy in a world of the Usury and exploiters, of whom by their own evolutionary means will pass off into the history writings of The Naturally Ordained laws.
To Ussher in the naturaly ordained age of Faeces free of the blow flys and other exploiters.

Now wonder why the world is dysfunctional and bankrupt to a point where Anarchism looks Attractive
And that is about it Banjo.

Dear Banjo,

Karl Marx is not guilty of the actions that people committed in his name. However, those actions were a logical outgrowth of his philosophy. In a free society people have the freedom to advocate anything without penalty no matter how noxious. There is the risk that these views will be followed.

Squeers wrote: "What you appear to fail to realise is that the concept of human rights is a false pillar of the capitalist system that would be redundant in the kind of utopia Marx postulated."

I realise that Marx opposed human rights for that reason, but I have no obligation to accept Marx's reasoning. Marx thought that amelioration of the human condition under capitalism would put off the socialist revolution and therefore would be harmful. He could oppose free speech as it would be a means of letting off steam and therefore help to preserve capitalism.

Marxism incorporated a messianic belief in the socialist revolution as curing the ills of society due to capitalism. Anything that would put off the revolution should be opposed.

In Germany during the Weimar period communists opposed Nazism but also opposed the social democrats and called them 'social fascists'. They preferred Nazi triumph over social democratic reforms as Nazism would reveal the ugly face of capitalism and cause the workers to rise in the socialist revolution which would make everything peachy dandy. The reality is that the Germans got Nazism, and it took a horrible war to get rid of it.

Lenin saw no need for human rights as it was just a roadblock in the transition to the eventual classless society. The result was a one party state with concentration camps (the first gulags were set up several months after Lenin came to power.) and all the paraphernalia of repression that non-Marxist totalitarian states had. This was a direct result of Marx's philosophy.

I have a different philosophy. You make things worse they get worse. You make things better they get better. I don't believe in messianism whether in Marxist or any other form. Human rights make any society more bearable.

Dear Banjo,
sorry if you bought that book and here it is free online.

Dear David F,
<I did not call you a true believer or refer to you as a true believer. You are not the only person on this thread who has taken issue with me.>

a misunderstanding on my part once again (who else had taken issue?), sorry about that. Why on earth would I think you were alluding to me when you mentioned "true believers". Being a narcissist I'm devastated, btw, that your every conscious thought is not dedicated to moi.

I have no desire to sanctify Karl Marx; he was no doubt as flawed as the rest of us. I'd be interested to know what your definition of a "decent human being" is btw--to be such in our world is surely more a privilege than an accomplishment? I defend Marx's thought because it is incredibly rare in seeing, genuinely, outside the square.
The fact that you can describe our system as "a free society" is testament to your ideological incarceration. Marx did not, of course, "oppose human rights", they is precisely what he was fighting for (emphasis on "human")!
To paraphrase an "actual" modern scholar (more than just opinionated), Marx sought to reclaim the human realm from the form of exchange value. The exchange of commodities, "which provides the free trader vulgaris with his views, his concepts and the standards by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour" is "a very Eden of the innate rights of Man. It is the exclusive realm of freedom, equality, property and Bentham" (this is irony in case you failed to notice).
The rest of your post, defaming 'Marxism' has my blessing.
What are 'human rights' in a world oblivious of them?

Dear Squeers,

Of course I was referring to Mitchell not to you. He mentioned that he considered me an obstinate fool apparently if I did not wind up seeing things the way he did. Read the exchanges. I do not like to engage in name calling with you or anybody else. I referred to him as a true believer. That is much milder than calling one an obstinate fool. I don't go in for that kind of slanging.

Karl Marx was many things - an economic theorist, a journalist, a classical scholar, a historiographer, a social theorist, a humanitarian and a bigot.

As an economic theorist he did much of value. As a journalist he wrote well and coined some great aphorisms. As a classical scholar he was erudite, As a historigrapher he was incompetent. As a social theorist he made some good points. As a humanitarian he wore blinders seeing the oppression of the working class and ignoring other oppression. As a bigot he did not rise above the prejudices of his time.

Like most of us he was a mixture. In my opinion his work resulted in much more harm than good. We differ.

.

Dear All-, David F. and Squeers,

.

Karl Marx is a closed book. He wrote the final chapter more than a century ago. We all read it but our critiques do not concord. That is not unusual.

Perhaps the difference is not to be found in the author or his book but in us, the readers. Each of us is a unique mixture of personal experiences and sensitivities which orient our individual perspectives.

As it seems we are all honest, we have no difficulty agreeing on the facts. We even manage to accord much of our analysis. We play the same notes but somehow come up with a different tune.

Perhaps we play them differently: "con forza" for one, "con sordina" for another and "con affetto" for the third.

That produces a lively debate but it sounds a little out of tune.

Though Karl Marx was a brilliant sociologist, his analysis of the social strata was, consciously or unconsciously, incomplete and his conception of the ideal society has so far proven, in most applications, to be utopian and unsustainable.

I suggest that what David sees as Marx's bigotry and intolerence was simply the expression of his outrage, indignation and revolt at the flagrant social injustices of which he, his family and the majority of humanity were victims. It was this outrage, indignation and revolt that altered his vision so much that it became bipolar, Manichean and distorted.

He saw no middle class. Grey disappeared. Everything became either black or white. His positions were chiseled in rock and he turned extremely authoritarian.

Marx was totally destitute. In that he differed radically from the future communist nomenclatura. One of his sons died of hunger. He was fighting for survival. Faced with the intolerable, he became intolerant.

Marx aspired to a better world in which a privileged minority no longer dominated, enslaved and exploited the majority of mankind. He wanted them to shake off the yoke and set themselves free.

His noble ideas were misappropriated by a bunch of ruthless opportunists who used them in order to realise their personal ambitions.

.

Dear Banjo,

Marx suffered during his life. Some people can suffer and transcend that suffering. Marx was not one who could.

You see the Marxist view as becoming bipolar, Manichean and distorted. Such a view yielded an expected result.

An ideology built on class hatred is no more noble than one built on race or religious hatred.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest of the crew essentially followed Marx's prescription.

The corpses were a logical outcome of Marxism.

Advocating a philosophy based on hate and supporting a state with no limits led to a more terrible yoke than capitalism. The tyrants followed the prescription.

The corpses were no accident.

Dear Banjo,
I agree wholeheartedly with the first eloquent half of your post; beautifully put.
But I disagree in equal measure with some of the rest. That his vision "became bipolar, Manichean and distorted" for instance, though I don't have time to take this to task now.

"He saw no middle class"? The rising bourgeoisie was the middle class, as self-seeking and exploitative then as it is today--only today it has perfected the mantle of respectability it has contrived since the beginning and forms a thoroughly complacent majority in wealthy countries.
"Grey disappeared. Everything became either black or white. His positions were chiseled in rock and he turned extremely authoritarian."
If you have the time, I'd be interested to know how you arrived at these conclusions.
I'm researching and writing about Marx at the moment and will try to put a small section up for debate when I can.

Dear Banjo,
just to add, Marx is not a "closed book", he remains relevant as ever, more so! His whole critique was of capitalism, which it is now a far greater obscenity than it was even then. We still need Marx, not as doctrine or to put faith in as a guru, but to help us to open our eyes and see the appalling human world capitalism has created.

.

Dear David F.,

.

"Marx suffered during his life. Some people can suffer and transcend that suffering. Marx was not one who could".

I don't know about you David, but I am no superman either.

"You see the Marxist view as becoming bipolar, Manichean and distorted. Such a view yielded an expected result".

Marx was an intellectual, a sociologist and a journalist. The "expected result" which was, indeed, "yielded" was that his mania permeated his writings. As Marx never put his ideas ino practice, that was as far as it got so far as he is concerned.

"An ideology built on class hatred is no more noble than one built on race or religious hatred".

True, but that does not apply to Marx. He did not build an "idiology on class hatred". Those whom I refer to as "a bunch of ruthless opportunists" built class hatred on Marx's idiologies. There is absolutely no obligation to indulge in "class hatred" in order to apply Marx's idiologies. The existing class structure was the result of the application of capitalism. There was no manifestation of "class hatred" when capitalism was installed.

"Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest of the crew essentially followed Marx's prescription".

"Marx's prescription" indicated "what" not "how". The "bunch" decided that, free of any possible influence of Marx whether through his writings or orally as he was more than thirty years dead when they made those decisions.

"The corpses were a logical outcome of Marxism"

They were a "logical outcome" of the Marxism practiced by the "bunch". We have no way of knowing how Marx would have practiced Marxism. His life indicates he was a quiet, peaceful man and a good father. He was not aggressive and is not known to have caused harm to anyone.

"The corpses were no accident".

No, but to quote one of my favourite authors on this thread: "Karl Marx is not guilty of the actions that people committed in his name".

.

Dear Banjo,

The way a person acts to his family and acquaintances has little to do with his public acts. I think George W Bush is kind to his family and well liked by his acquaintances. He might be a good neighbour. Yet he lied his country into war and is responsible for possibly a million deaths.

I agree with Squeers. Marx's ideas live on. Right now I'm going to bed with a book and listen to Joplin's rags.

Good night. The banjoes are playing.

.

Dear Squeers,

.

I am sure I have no lessons to give either you or David F. regarding Marx. My interest is not that of a connoisseur, but that of a dilettant.

I simply offer myself here as a sparring partner in the hope that some of your's and David's science may rub off on me.

From my point of view (not formal studies), the bipolarity and Manicheism of Marx permeates his writings and leaves me with the impression he observed the social strata through this prism, thus obtaining what I consider to be a distorted image of reality.

He seems to have been so bent on having his theories accepted that he either brushed aside or downplayed anything that did not fit with the image he had in mind.

He looked at the middle classes but chose to ignore them considering they would gradually disappear. He wanted to keep it simple: the strata was polarising into two classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The others were not to be considered.

Of course, by the time the "bunch of ruthless opportunists" came on the scene, the middle classes had grown quite considerably, contrary to Marx's predictions.

You remarked:

["Grey disappeared. Everything became either black or white. His positions were chiseled in rock and he turned extremely authoritarian."
If you have the time, I'd be interested to know how you arrived at these conclusions]

I have in mind, in particular, the confrontation between Marx and Bakunin during the meeting in London of the International Workers Association (the so-called First International) which resulted in the exclusion of Bakunin from that organisation.

Ann Robertson's article sheds some light on this aspect of Marx's personality:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/bio/robertson-ann.htm

.

.

Dear David F.,

.

I have it from the horse's mouth that it was not George (dubya) Bush who decided all that. It was God:

George (dubya), was quoted as having confided to the Texas evangelist, James Robinson: “I feel like God wants me to run for President … I know it won’t be easy for me or my family, but God wants me to do it”. He subsequently declared to Abu Mazen, the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister: “God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam [Hussein], which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East”.

So who said the United States had a secular government ?

.

Dear Squeers and George F.,

.

Marx is dead. His ideas do not live on. They have turned to stone for eternity.

We are the ones who live on, at least for a little while. If we like, we can make Marx's ideas ours and do with them as we wish. It is our ideas that live on, not his.

Like just about all our other ideas, we will have inherited them, adopted them, copied them, or stolen them from someone else. In this case, Marx.

But whatever we do with the ideas we will have received from Marx, it has absolutely no effect on his ideas.

.

Dear Banjo,

From the information I have the Scandinavian capitalist societies are the most decent societies on earth. They combine freedom with economic security and are great places to live.

A hundred years ago they were not great places to live, and people left those countries to come to the US and Australia. Since then there have been changes in those countries, and they are attracting people from other places who want to live there.

There is not one capitalism. There are many different capitalist societies, and some are horribly exploitive. However, some are wonderful.

It seems more sensible to me to try to emulate the capitalist societies that are good places to live rather than get rid of capitalism - the good with the bad.

David f: <There is not one capitalism. There are many different capitalist societies, and some are horribly exploitive. However, some are wonderful.>

Daer david F,
if only that were true:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/510

Capitalist welfare is unsustainable, it's as simple as that, unless the source of wealth that pays for it is inexhaustible. Australia's mining industry is likely to keep us lucky for a while yet, for instance, but it will run out, or demand will dry up, probably because of the cost (in energy) of extraction. But then our "glut" (let's not bandy words by calling it prosperity) is paid for by the forced ascetics of the future. We are "the future eaters" after all, economically as much as ecologically.
Neither is it true that there is more than one capitalism, at least not in the long run. To begin with, the fact that capitalism's dynamic is endless growth (in a closed system! It blows my mind that the scientists, mathematicians and other serious thinkers I communicate with don't object to this startling equation!), it follows that the system must go global, as of course it has, with no respect for national borders or western hubris (our 'glorious' culture will be as infamous for its 'achievements' as Ancient Rome's one day---look at what they achieved, but at what cost!
We treat capitalism like a deity that mustn't be questioned; the least equivocation makes one a Greenie, lefty, communist, collectivist bludger. Pure unthinking hegemonic ideology! And the PH's and AGIR's of the world think they're so deep! lol.

Those (short term) "wonderful" capitalisms you mention still exploit foreign labour, not to mention an increasingly wretched planet!
..And I haven't mentioned the "human" cost.

.

Dear David and Squeers,

.

The financial crisis hurricane that swept through Europe on its way from America blew most of that November 2005 Brussels Journal economic data out the window.

In terms of economic freedom, according to the most recent Heritage Foundation index published by the Wall Street Journal, their ratings were as follows:

Year 2008:

Denmark 11
Finland 16
Sweden 27
Norway 34

As regards individual freedoms, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index 2008, their ratings were as follows:

Sweden 1
Norway 2
Denmark 5
Finland 6

The average of the two rating values produces the following results:

Denmark 8
Finland 11
Sweden 14
Norway 18

It is interesting to compare these averages to the averages for:

New Zealand 6.5
Australia 7
USA 11.5
UK 15.5

For memory, there are roughly 200 sovereign states in the world.

All this, of course, must be taken with a pinch of salt.

I, personally, have a soft spot for the Netherlands (average rank 8.5). It is a great place to live, centrally located, nice open people, nice weather, more "practical" freedom than any other country in Europe (abortions, euthanasia, drugs, quality judicial system, etc.).

Nothing is perfect, of course. It is a "capitalist" country. But the day we find something better, you can bet your boots the Dutch will be the first to implement it. Holland, or the Netherlands if you like, must surely rank as one of the most maturely civilised countries in the world.

.

Dear Squeers,

I agree. We must live sustainably on our finite planet. However, many things are blamed on capitalism which have nothing to do with capitalism. The Marxist countries have had a horrible environmental record. The United States had a dust bowl in the thirties which they got rid of by such methods as taking fragile areas out of agricultural production and planting vetch to stabilize the soil. Khruschchev later put areas of the USSR into agricultural production and caused dust bowls. I have seen our local Trotskyites wear badges saying "Capitalism Pollutes". They can be talked to, and I mentioned some of the environmental disasters of the communist countries such as the Three Gorges Dam. They had never really questioned. Alienation in our society is another thing blamed on capitalism which Marx wrote about. It is a consequence of modern industrial organisation regardless of the ownership of the means of production.

I think it is quite possible to live sustainably under capitalism of the Scandinavian type - not of the Australian or US type.

Democratic capitalist countries with a concern for human rights and a good welfare system are the best societies we have. They are not the be-all and end-all, and better societies may be developed. However, the Marxist societies have been massive failures in many regards. They have been great successes in corpse production.

I share Banjo's feeling for the Netherlands. I have spent much time there as I worked for Philips in the US and used to go to the Netherlands to work out new designs and test systems and devices. One time I got sick, and the hotel called a doctor. He came to the hotel and treated me. The bill was about three American dollars since he was subsidised by the government. He told me he had an American girl friend who wanted him to come live in the United States. Even though doctors could make much more money in the US and had more status he preferred to stay where he was because he thought Dutch society was a very decent one.

After Indonesia became independent many Indonesians chose to live in the country of their former colonial master. It is a very good place to live.

My uncle was a Bolshevik in czarist Russia and was arrested by the police for revolutionary activity. My father brought him and other members of the family to the United States in 1921. After four years of Lenin he was no longer a Bolshevik and lived until he was 98.

It is a characteristic of some humans to go at it with redoubled effort when something doesn't work. I have no reason to think that the Marxist societies would be any better if Marx's recipes were tried with a different cast of characters.

Dear Banjo and davidf,
Neither of you seems to have a problem with the "startling equation" I mention above.
I agree that the democratic socialist states are the healthiest and happiest we have, in fact I have praised them myself on OLO, responding commensurately with the more reactionary opinions I was encountering.
But that doesn't alter the fact that these "fools' utopias" are unsustainable. Like any capitalist system they are based on endless growth in a closed system, and that system is the planet. Which means that the happy Danes and co enjoy their lifestyles at the expense of those (people, resources, biosphere) they remotely exploit. How, exactly, is it "quite possible to live sustainably under capitalism of the Scandinavian type"? The only real difference between us and them is welfare, and less economic segregation. While admirable, again this is unsustainable in a finite world of competitive free markets and diminishing profits! So can you both please address your Panglossian views and tell me, what is the good of a free society (still based on exploitation) that cannot be sustained? Do we live for the moment?
One of the reasons the US attained superpower status was by minimising welfare, wage-labour and working conditions (including leave); this helped finance massive state infrastructure that is now unwieldy and unsustainable. The US is headed for a fatal fall but will, I believe, lash out at its rivals first (as some of the generals wanted to at the climax of WW2). The socialist democracies put their money into social welfare, engendering more genuine and humane entrepreneurial innovation, but even this can't last in a dog-eat-dog world.
Once again, I am not defending or recommending communism. I'm criticising the fatal disease, capitalism.
North Korea is one of the most despicable regimes imaginable and offends me deeply, but it is in fact the obverse image (in miniature) of the US. Where the US has developed its grotesque proportions by ideology (internal and global), NK's might is that of a hideous dwarf; self-contained, despised and oppressive.
Like Richard the Third, Kim ill-Sung only wants for deplomacy.

Dear Squeers,

We agree that endless growth under a closed system is unsustainable.

That is true regardless of who controls the modes of production.

Socialism is no more concerned with sustainability than capitalism. They merely are different kinds of unsustainable economic systems.

It is a problem which has become more pressing as the population and the exploitation of the world's resources expand.

To the best of my knowledge Marx never dealt with that problem since it had not surfaced to most consciousness at that time.

Some people were aware of the extinction of species and other results of unsustainability, but most were not.

In "Moby Dick" Melville speculated on the possible extinction of the whale.

Industrialised societies produced by the industrial revolution exacerbated the problem.

On a finite planet no species can grow without limit.

If a species does not control its numbers eventually there will be a catastrophe which will control its numbers.

We agree there is a problem. I see it as a consequence of our uncontrolled growth and exploitation of the earth.

In order to solve it if it can be solved by attacking it rationally we must control it by those who make political and economic decisions being aware of the sustainable consequences of those decisions.

So far the lack of awareness of such consequences seems greater to me in the societies supposedly based on Marxist theory.

What relevance does Marx have to the problem?

Dear DavidF,
Any social system that operates under capitalism must by definition be unsustainable, including so-called communist/socialist states, which are oxymoronic in any case within global capitalism. Notwithstanding corruption, any state that has tried to adopt such a model, since Marx, has had to do so within a hostile and competitive global environment. No country can insulate itself against capitalism, which, as I say, transcends all borders. China tried to(again) under Mau Zedong and so did the USSR. Both failed, as have all the others, but they were harassed on all sides and unable to match the productivity of their ideological enemy. Even Marx is often in awe of the productivity, and concomitant power, of capitalist dynamics. The failed socialist states do double duty by exemplifying the superiority of capitalism, morally and economically, with their failure. Yet they were never an alternative ideology, but a contradictory one, a threat, and they were dealt with accordingly. So far as Marx was concerned, the idea was never production for its own sake, to amass wealth; rather, production/labour was, beyond mere utility, humanity's creative/species expression (uniquely, we are creative beings, we transcend nature with art and craft), its earthly habitat. That is the means of production capitalism harnessed and commodified! Under the prevailing conditions, capitalist supremacy, rogue states had to compete, and not against friendly rivals. Western ideology conveniently has it that the failure was due to "immoral", "evil" "atheist" (one wonders at the need for hyperbole) systems, or else it was irredeemable human nature. Such human nature is after all on show and merely mundane under capitalist dispensations. Whether this is true, that nature has created innately creative/aesthetic/productive beings, who are also vicious and obsessively self seeking, or that these distortions are the product of a vicious system, is a moot point. Was the failure of socialist states due to human corruption, or was corruption due to the worldly pressures brought to bare?
Incidentally, can you see how Christianity serves the system, as moral counterweight?
Marx did foresee environmental degradation, and remains the most compelling critic, by far, of our decadent system.

Dear Squeers,

I am an atheist. I believe in neither God nor Satan. I do not believe that we can put all the ills of the world on Satan or capitalism nor do I believe Marx or anybody else for that matter is wise enough to tell us how to remedy the ills of the world. Like other species and all life on earth we will eventually become extinct, and that will be an end to it.

Meanwhile I will do what I can to meet the problems of the day and enjoy what life I have.

I feel you are a decent sort and a deeply religious person. I am a flawed human being and a skeptic.

I wish you well.

Well thank you for the thoughtful response, DavidF. You must have agonised for hours and I'm deeply grateful. Sorry to say I am not the "deeply religious person" you take me for, and you are not the thoughtful person I took you for. Such is life.

Dear Banjo,
thanks for the link, I shall think it over and get back to you.

Dear Squeers,

I am sorry for my sarcasm.

I don't think the Marxist systems failed due to the pressure of capitalism. I think they failed because they were rotten from the beginning.

I don't think we agree enough to continue on this subject.

.

Dear Squeers,

.

I confirm my association by telepathy with David in his reply to your observation:

"To begin with, the fact that capitalism's dynamic is endless growth (in a closed system! It blows my mind that the scientists, mathematicians and other serious thinkers I communicate with don't object to this startling equation!), ..."

With David's permission (which, thankfully, I just received by telepathy), I would add that unlike the proverbial captain stoically saluting as his ship slowly sinks to the bottom of the ocean, the smart "capitalists" (the cream of the cream) will have already found an alternative means of transport long before the accident will have occurred.

Capitalism is simply a means, not an end in itself. Also, I don't know if you have noticed, but some people are born survivors. It is not just all luck.

So the order of the day it is capitalism. The "capitalists" will thrash that one to death and then jump off before it is too late. Let's keep our eyes peeled. They might already be doing just that or, at least, quietly preparing their "alternatve means of transport".

You ask:

"Incidentally, can you see how Christianity serves the system, as moral counterweight?"

Not just Christianity. I see that as a function of all religions.

.

.

Dear David F.,

.

"I have no reason to think that the Marxist societies would be any better if Marx's recipes were tried with a different cast of characters".

What amazes me is that such a small number of elite can control the totality of humanity. How can that be? Why do the billions accept without a whimper? Are they so happy with their lives?

Perhaps Marx got it wrong somewhere along the way, but perhaps it can be fixed.

Speaking of "Marxist societies" you observe:

"I think they failed because they were rotten from the beginning".
"They have been great successes in corpse production".

To assist me in my reflection, I was wondering if you actually drew up a (preliminary) balance sheet of the amount of rot and the number of corpses produced by the two main political and economic regimes, marxism and capitalism, since their advent?

Also, in relation to your recent exchange with Squeers, with due respect to your stature and seniority, I take the liberty of posting here the follwing phrase of Hegel:

“Since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is finished and done with anyone who does not agree; he only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself. In other words, he tramples underfoot the roots of humanity. For it is in the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.”

.

Dear Banjo,

Hegel's quote contains: "For it is in the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.”

The above is consistent with Hegel's view of freedom. I see it as a recipe for tyranny. Hegel saw freedom as humanity working together as an organic whole in agreement on its eventual goal. The logical consequence of such a view is that the dissenter is an outcast. There is no room in such a society for the person who disagrees with the dominant paradigm.

My view of freedom is different. We don't have to be in agreement. We have to find ways of living together even though we may have different goals and aspirations. Squeers, you and I have different views and we don’t have to be in agreement.

Hegel's view of freedom was undemocratic. He saw society as developing in various stages. He was influenced by Joachim of Fiore who saw society in three stages the stage of the father: Edenic peace, the stage of the son: human conflict, and the stage of the Holy Ghost: the millennium. Hegel also saw society in stages reaching an apotheosis. His apotheosis was the Prussian state.

The followers of Hegel divided into right Hegelians who were predominantly German nationalists and left Hegelians the most prominent being Marx.

Marx’s three stage version of Joachim was primitive communism in an economy of scarcity, class struggle and the advent of capitalism, advanced communism in an economy of plenty.

The followers of the left Hegelians and the right Hegelians produced a great number of corpses and produced more corpses as they met on the battlefields of eastern Europe in WW2.

Hegel’s philosophy is consistent with the statist philosophies of Marxism and fascism. The state will wither away when human kind is in agreement as there is no necessity for it. Conformity reigns supreme.

There should be room for both Squeers and me.

Better Locke and bagel
Than lox and Hegel

Dear Banjo,
I like the quote from Hegel.
Enlightenment thought is of course a dialectic. Kant rationalised Hume, Hegel idealised Kant, and Marx materialised Hegel. Hegel's "human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds" is a perfect illustration of the latter. In fact, the only real difference between Hegel and Marx is that the former predicates humanity as pure spirit. Marx's materialism is poorly understood, indeed it is not materialism in the sense we have of it today, which is an empty materialism. For Marx, human nature consists in species-being rather than spirit, and the community of minds extends to an organic community of adaptive and aesthetic (or natural) creativity. Such production is Man's adaptive response to material conditions. Where Marx is tricky (and not dissimilar to Hegel), is humanity's creations (mental as well as physical) are ideally extensions of his being, indeed all is 'homologous'. Hegel and Marx work from Aristotelian rather than Humean metaphysics; the former is a philosophy of 'substance' and the latter, abstraction. Ironically, Humean metaphysics underwrite the modern natural sciences; that is, it objectifies, or 'alienates' phenomena which is ‘materialistically’ the media of Man's existence. According to Marx “we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence”.
Our lives under utilitarianism and capitalism are alienated, pointless and barren. That's one reason why religion is a permanent fixture.
Sorry, shouldn't have picked on Christianity above

.

Dear David F.,

.

"Hegel saw freedom as humanity working together as an organic whole in agreement on its eventual goal. I see it as a recipe for tyranny".

I rather see it as a long term prophesy. I think he was looking at the big picture of mankind, saw where we had come from and tried to imagine where we would finally end up if we continued in the same direction.

You indicate:

"The logical consequence of such a view is that the dissenter is an outcast. There is no room in such a society for the person who disagrees with the dominant paradigm".

In my view, to harbor a different opinion from that of society is the personal decision of a particular individual. Society does not "outcast" the dissenter. The dissenter refuses to follow society.

"The state will wither away when human kind is in agreement as there is no necessity for it. Conformity reigns supreme".

I think Hegel is probably right, in the long term, the State will "wither away" or play a much less dominant role in society than it does today.

Since we separated from our common ancestor with the apes 5 to 7 million years ago we gradually straightened our backs, lost most of our body hair and embarked on an evolutionary process from matter to mind and from family, tribe and society to individual. We are not there yet and still have a long way to go.

If and when this evolutionary process is completed, I would not expect the final result to be that of "conformity". Quite the contrary, I imagine that the individual will have attained a maximum of autonomy and originality.

"There should be room for both Squeers and me".

Well if there's not, David, I could probably put you both up for a few days in my place.

.

.

Dear Squeers,

.

Thank you very much for your very interesting and all too brief course on the philosophy of Hegel.

I must confess that I was pretty ignorant of his ideas before I began to participate in these discussions with you and David and really appreciate all that you have both taught me, or should I say, helped me to teach myself.

In these conditions, learning is a delight.

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Dear David f.

Have you read Arthur Koestler"s "The Ghost in the Machine"?
It explores many things, but concentrates on hierarchies and the relativity and ambiguity of the terms "part" and "whole". He coined the word "holon" to mean something that was at the same time both a part and and a whole.
He explores how man operates in being at once a complete system in himself and, at the same time, a smaller part of a wider system in his communal role.

Dear Friends,

As friends I include all of you. I took a day off as I was getting over excited and was feeling hostility to some of you.

Banjo wrote referring to Hegel:

"I rather see it as a long term prophesy. I think he was looking at the big picture of mankind, saw where we had come from and tried to imagine where we would finally end up if we continued in the same direction."

Hegel saw the Prussian state as a goal attained but also saw beyond that. I don't know that anyone can see a big picture of mankind although many have made such big pictures. I distrust grand narratives of history. With the best will in the world we cannot know accurately what happened in the past, and we form our picture of the future based on the society we would like to see. The existence of the Soviet Union has a tremendous effect on the history of the twentieth century, but I don't think Lenin a month before the Bolshevik coup though that he and his supporters could take it over. I also think that Gorbachev thought he could reform communism and had no idea he was contributing to a process that would result in the end of the Soviet Union. Marx, Joachim and others who have created such narratives could have been quite brilliant, but we simply don't keep going in the same direction. What we can do is to try to identify problems and solve them with the means at hand. That's the only means we have.

The grand narratives share certain characteristics. They generally have some apotheosis at the end - the eventual classless society (Marx), the triumph of liberal capitalism (Fukuyama), the Prussian state (Hegel), the second coming of Christ (Christianity), the thousand year Reich (Nazism) whatever. They generally are Manichaean in seeing some enemy that is working against reaching that goal. Hegel and Fukuyama apparently thought the goal had been achieved, but they may have changed that point of view later. Excuse me for making a narrative of narratives.

continued

continued

The class enemy, restrictions on trade, the race enemy, the enemies of the Prussian state, Satan, the Jew are respectively what the builders of those narratives saw as enemies. The authors of the grand narratives see the side they identify with as good, and they see the enemy of that side as evil. Unfortunately real live human beings are seen as representing the enemy so they make corpses of them. If they can rid the world of the enemy they will live in millennial peace. Dichotomies of good and evil are useful in rousing people to fight a war. In other areas such as making peace they are not so good.

Anyhow that's what I think of Hegel's and similar prophesies.

I think the main problem we have at the moment is that we are destroying the capacity of the planet to support human life. It possibly cannot continue to support human life in the numbers we have now. However, it is not a problem except to us. If we are reduced greatly in numbers or become extinct the world will continue to exist until the predicted heat death. Predictions based on physical theory I accept. I just don't accept the predictions of makers of grand narratives.

Not only do we make unreal dichotomies we treat abstractions as real. One abstraction I regard as pernicious is the ‘will of the people’. I think Rousseau thought that one up.

The ‘will of the people’ may be expressed by a fuehrer, a vanguard class or other subset of humanity. In democratic countries ‘community standards’ can serve to set limits for artistic or other expression. Those who are defined as counter to the will can be sent to re-education or concentration camps, deprived of livelihood or simply killed.

Enough of my rant. I’m retiring to bed which is a low rant district.

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Dear David F.,

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Gosh, you should take a day off more often.

That was a very relaxed and informative post. It strikes me, nevertheless as something of a paradox that you write:

"If we are reduced greatly in numbers or become extinct the world will continue to exist until the predicted heat death. Predictions based on physical theory I accept. I just don't accept the predictions of makers of grand narratives".

I just read on a fairly reputable web site that astronomers predict the "heat death" you refer to as being due to occur in roughly 5 billion years time. That's a mighty long time, David.

I doubt that Hegel had that sort of time frame in mind. But then again, I guess if he predicted the sun would rise tomorrow you would probably still prefer to put your money on the astronomers.

Who said religion ? Did you say religion?

Have a great day, David and welcome back.

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Dear DavidF,
yes thanks for that considered argument, some of which I agree with, but some I think highly debatable.
In spite of Banjo's generous comments earlier, I'm no expert on Hegel, or even Marx, though I know more of Marx than Hegel.
Postmodernism has been defined as disillusionment with grand narratives and their basis in some form or other of universal truth. Such disillusionment also lies behind much modern intellectual disillusionment with Marx's historical materialism.
But I cannot emphasise too much that this is based on yet another misunderstanding. Marx's meta-narrative is only historical in terms of prevailing historical conditions. They are, according to Marx "laws which are valid only for a given historical development". Indeed, Marx accused Smith and co of feigning a transhistorical scope to their laws of economics---which were "mystified by the economists into a supposed law of nature" (of human nature!). Marx's law of falling profit, for instance, was an "expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population which are historically valid within that particular sphere". Marx's so-called grand narrative was nothing of the kind, his idea of the 'progress' of human 'societies' were logically 'forecast' to culminate in conditions peculiar to their respective dynamics. That is why predicted communism was 'not' an item of faith, but of logic and optimism. Marx was, above all else, a materialist and did not romanticise grand narratives for humanity.
While we tend to disagree on some of these matters, DavidF, I would emphasis that I have no final stand to defend, apart from scepticism (though neither do I retreat into relativism).
Quotations above are from Marx and can be found in context online.

Dear Poirot,

I have not read "The Ghost of the Machine". I read "The Thirteenth Tribe" and "The God that Failed." Arthur Koestler wrote the former and contributed to the latter. After I read the latter I thought Koestler was an intelligent fool.

You wrote: "He [Koestler] explores how man operates in being at once a complete system in himself and, at the same time, a smaller part of a wider system in his communal role."

Our society is greatly influenced by Christianity. Christianity has created the dichotomy between individual salvation which can be achieved apart from the rest of humanity or the social gospel in which one serves Christ by working to make the community better.

Such a dichotomy exists in neither Islam nor Judaism. One is simply part of the community, and salvation which does not involve being part of the community does not exist. There is a Jewish saying to the effect that if you kill a man you have destroyed a universe. You are part of the community, and you have dignity in yourself. For a Jew or Muslim there is no dichotomy. I am influenced by that to think little of any society that does not see individual human rights as necessary and important.

Dear Banjo,

I am aware of the distance in time of the expected heat death. Any times of human development are tiny compared to that. That's why I mentioned both. Even in that small frame time we cannot predict the future so any long range prediction is fantasy.

Dear Squeers,

You wrote: "Our lives under utilitarianism and capitalism are alienated, pointless and barren." That sounds to me like an echo of runner's lament, "We are all sinners."

I have the feeling your life is not at all “alienated, pointless and barren." I enjoy your use of language and your erudition, and I feel you must enjoy it also. You have mentioned on another thread your children and your concern for the nonsense they get in school. I know you enjoy reading the insights of Marx. Your statement seems debatable.

Dear David f.,

I don't believe that Koestler in "The Ghost in the Machine" was advocating individuality over community, but pointing out that everything exists as a component of hierarchical order....and he deals with much more in the book than just the human condition.

Dear Poirot,

Heirarchical order is a human idea. Taxonomic classifications, charts of military and corporate hierarchies, critical classifications of literary genres and values and many other items are placed in hierarchical order by humans. However, their existence is independent of the hierarchical order imposed by humans.

Murray Bookchin in "The Ecology of Freedom" finds original sin in our society in the development of hierarchy. He is a former Marxist and has constructed a narrative in which hierarchy replaces private property as the cause of the Fall.

If I run across Koestler's book in the library I will look at it. He is an entertaining writer.

I do not have a good feeling about Koestler. One reason is that he apparently persuaded his wife to commit suicide with him. I think that is a tremendous exhibition of selfishness. When I go I do not want to take anyone with me especially someone I hold dear.

Dear David f.

Hierarchical order may be a human idea, however, I think it contains some merit. Who can deny all the substructures that depend on a more complex over-structure for their existence....cells - organs - body...or planets - solar systems - galaxies, etc.
I'm not qualified to get into this to any great extent, but Koestler's theory seemed to make a lot of sense - and he wasn't just referring to the material realm - he also included things like language structure too.
Interesting!

Dear DavidF,
I made that comment in the context of what preceded it. However, I stand by it. We put on a brave face and try to make the most of our lives, and we kid ourselves we're happy with the shallow and scripted existence we're forced to lead under the capitalist system. But the statistics on suicide, depression, violence and antisocial behaviour etc. tell a different story. Of course we trace all these ills to individuals and try to treat, council and punish them accordingly, (while religion offers hope in God's love and the next world) putting it all down to human nature, and never thinking to criticise the system that propagates such "human nature".It's quite bizarre really. Mobs like beyond blue are so intent on treating the diseased individual, rather than the culture. Great for the pharmaceutical industry! I have to pinch myself sometimes to make sure I'm not dreaming, and that people really do accept and accord guilt and blame so readily among themselves rather than attributing the blame to a chronically dysfunctional society. As if their isn't ample evidence that we are cultural animals and all drink from the same well, or that the results of so-called "happiness indexes" vary from culture to culture, or that particular maladies are peculiar to particular demographics.

I'm very fortunate in being resilient against the "disease," having long tempered myself with philosophy and humour, which seldom fail me. I only wish I could help the culture my kids have to grow up in, rather than having to steel them.

My statements are definitely debatable, but its a pleasure being contradicted and forced to think :-)

Dear Squeers,

I'm probably coming in a bit late on the thread with this, but I found a passage by Ivan Illich which touches on Aristotle's philosophy.

He wrote: "Aristotle had already discovered that "making and doing" are different, so different, in fact, that one never includes the other. "For neither is acting a way of making - nor making a way of truly acting. Architecture is a way of making...of bringing something into being whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing. Making has always an end other than itself....Perfection in making is art, perfection in acting is virtue". The word Aristotle used for making was "poesis", and the word he employed for doing was "praxis"...Modern technology has increased the ability of man to relinquish the "making" of things to machines and his potential time for "acting" has increased. "Making" the necessities of life has ceased to take up his time. Unemployment is the result of this modernization: it is the idleness of a man for whom there is nothing to "make"and who does not know what to "do" - that is how to "act".

.

Dear David F.,

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You wrote to Poirot:

"Heirarchical order is a human idea".

I enjoy watching BBC Nature documentries on TV and am constantly amazed at the hierarchial order observed by many wild biological species in their natural habitat, whether it be within a particular family or group of the same species or among different species when they all seek the same objective.

This is striking when it comes to who sits down for the first course after the slaying of a prey. Nobody has to be told who gets the first ration, who gets the second and the third and so on ...

The male and female roles are also clearly defined and respected, the queen and the labourers etc., without any need for army, police or judicial system.

They all seem to instinctively obey, unwritten natural laws.

What makes you think "hierarchial order is a human idea" ?

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Dear Banjo,

Actually, I was really answering David's post before mine in agreeing that humans have worked out that things seemed to be arranged in hierarchical order - didn't put it well. What I meant was that we have an "idea" of how it works.

I have another quote from Illich which seems to lay out quite clearly the dilemma facing modern man in his ability to feel connected : "Traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language,and architecture and work and religion and family were consistent with one another,mutually explanatory and reinforcing. To grow into one implied a growth into the others.

Sorry Banjo - didn't read that properly that you were addressing David f....will be interesting to read his response.

Dear Banjo,

A hierarchy is a human construct. Hierarchies are defined by relationships. Humans select the relationships by which to define the hierarchy.

In the example you gave in order of eating you chose to make a hierarchy of who gets served in order of their serving. However, one could as well have chosen to construct the hierarchy by starting with those who get served last or are least powerful.

When Jesus announced that the meek shall inherit the earth or Marx referred to the dictatorship of the proletariat they were defining their relationships on which to base a hierarchy. It was using a relationship different from the way others defined the hierarchy.

Let us consider a simple ecosystem. Grass grows. Rabbits eat the grass. Fox eats the rabbits. We can construct hierarchies on a number of relationships. We can put who eats who at the top. That puts the fox on top as the top predator who eats the rabbit who eats the grass. However we can also rank the chain by which entity is the most independent of the others. Grass can grow without rabbit or fox. Rabbit can eat grass and survive without fox. Fox needs rabbit and grass. In other words the rabbit is a parasite to the grass, and the fox is a parasite on a parasite.

We can look at the same system and create a hierarchy by the criterion of which entity does more to spread the ecosystem. The rabbit in producing waste pellets which distribute seed and fertilise ground is the first in that hierarchy. Next comes the grass.

In nature there are roles that different entities fill. However, humans recognise those roles and form hierarchies based on the relationships implicit in those roles.

That intellectual process forms the hierarchy.

Dear Squeers,

You wrote: "We put on a brave face and try to make the most of our lives, and we kid ourselves we're happy with the shallow and scripted existence we're forced to lead under the capitalist system. But the statistics on suicide, depression, violence and antisocial behaviour etc. tell a different story."

I think you're equating an industrialised mechanised society with a capitalist society. They are not the same thing.

I don't have the statistics for depression, alcoholism, violence, suicide and other indicators of societal malaise, but I doubt that they would be essentially different in an industrialised mechanised non-capitalist society.

The USSR was an attempt to form a non-capitalist society, and it was non-capitalist. When I was at the University of Pennsylvania a group of five or six of us used to meet for lunch once a week. One of us was a Soviet Engineer who was studying management methods and expected to go back after the completion of his course.

One of the problems the management in his factory had to deal with was sabotage. It apparently did not have any organised political agenda behind it but seemed to be due to dissatisfaction of workers with the system. The management tried to cope by changing conditions so as to make life more interesting for the workers. One thing he mentioned that apparently worked for a while was to repaint the cafeteria.

A factory is a factory. An apartment house is an apartment house. A corporation is a corporation whether it is controlled by Rockefeller or the Soviet state. Getting shikkered because you feel life is crap is because your life is crap.

Our world is becoming more and more mechanised. As it does it means there is more division of labor. With more division of labor the average person has a more circumscribed life.

Thoreau said, "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." He was right.

I hope to outlive such crap as rock music and sitcoms, but that is what many people want. One can blame it on capitalism. You do. I don’t.

Dear Poirot,
thanks for the wonderful material you've posted on this thread. I knew of Ivan Illych, but not of Ivan Illich. I've had a look at a little of his thought online. It strikes me that writers like he and Erich Fromm seem idealistic and naive when read in the cynical context of our "end of history", and what Raymond Williams called our "negative freedoms" (freedom from constraint--but with no viable alternative life to be had).

Dear DavidF,
I am not "equating an industrialised mechanised society with a capitalist society", although arguably only under capitalism is commodity fetishism, production and diversification brought to such a pitch that all the world's resources, animal, mineral and vegetable, are manically processed, along with the means of production (who are also harnessed as rabid consumers, like farm animals being fed their own sh!t) to service the God of growth.
One inconsistency between the young and the old Marx is that he had to compromise is ideal of humanity dispersed among its labours according to strengths, and adopt a more realistic view of minimising drudge work and maximising leisure for more congenial activities. Most of us no longer have any idea of such "activities", and so praxis is dismissed as pie in the sky. Anyway, diversions are provided for us in abundance.

Btw, having spent many years in factories, I can assure you that sabotage, go slow production, etc. are common practices.

We will have to disagree; there is no question in my mind but that capitalism is the villain--indeed the grim reaper.

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Dear David F.,

.

You raise a question of semantics. I understand "hierarchy" as not just any order but an order of prioritization.

You replied:

"In the example you gave in order of eating you chose to make a hierarchy of who gets served in order of their serving. However, one could as well have chosen to construct the hierarchy by starting with those who get served last or are least powerful".

The hierarchial "order of eating" exists independently of me. I did not lay the table nor did I choose who should eat first. The order of prioritization was determined by nature, not me.

Perhaps (though it remains to be demonstrated) we have an intellectual agility the other biological species do not have, enabling us to memorise the "chain of order" and recite it backwards.

Is it this intellectual agility which you attribute exclusively to human beings ? Are you referring to a theoretical, intellectual hierarchy (or prioritization) which you esteem man alone is capable of inventing ?

From a practical point of view (reality as opposed to intellectualization), I do not see how the hierarchy of "the order of eating" can be modified. How could the ants, as the last to be served, lick the bones of the carcass before the flesh of the slain animal has been removed by all the other members of the biological hierarchy in their respective sequential order of eating ?

When Jesus said: "the last shall be first", I do not think he was referring to the ants. They would have no chance penetrating the hide of wild buffalo. It's lions first, then all sorts of scavangers according to size and ferocity until the way is clear for the ants to lick the bones.

By the same token, simply reciting the hierarchy backwards, starting with "the ants lick the bones", cannot be deemed as changing the hierarchy. The hierarchy is a fixed structure, determined by nature, and remains unchanged.

It is a bit like turning a painting upside down. The painting remains unchanged whichever way we look at it.

.

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Fascinating subject.

Quoting a little more from Koestler:

"If we look at any form of social organisation with some degree of coherence and stability, from insect state to Pentagon, we shall find that it is hierarchically ordered. The same is true for the structure of living organisms and their ways of functioning...and it is equally true of the processes of becoming, phylogeny, ontogeny, and the acquisition of knowledge.
A "part", as we general use the word, means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, a "whole" is considered as something complete in itself. But "wholes" and "parts" in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere. What we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in an ascending order of complexity; sub-wholes...in speech...phonemes, words, phrases are wholes in their own right, but parts of a larger unit, so are cells, tissues organs families, clans, tribes...."

Koestler, then, is prioritising the hierachical order as one of ascending complexity.

Dear Banjo,

I think there is a danger in making too close an analogy between the behaviour of non-human and human species. It is true there animals in some groups which have greater status than other animals. However, to go on to see that as a rigid hierarchy with all ranks defined analogous to lieutenants, sergeants and privates I think is unjustified. Animals recognise those animals with more power or status.

I have been watching Meerkat Manor on TV. It is a camera record of a group of meerkats living in the Kalahari desert. The head female produces all the young and usually manages to get rid of any other females who become pregnant.

However, I see hierarchy as the cause of many of our problems. Those who have power abuse it. Human rights included and exercised in law is a protection against abuse of power.

When I was in the army our commander ordered us to line up after evening mess. Then we were marched to a Baptist church where there was a revival meeting going on. We sat through it and then were marched back to barracks. Most of us resented it very much. Our commander had the right to order us into battle. He did not have the right to order us into a revival meeting. Somebody must have got to him as there were no more instances of that type.

However, that was an example of the abuse of power of a person in a hierarchy to those lower in a hierachy.

Dear David f.

"Animals recognise those animals with more power or status".

It seems to me that humans also recognise humans with more power or status - which is probably connected to the survival of the communal group.
How can it be denied that human societies arrange themselves into a hierarchy? Every human society, from caveman to capitalist, regardless of the "system" does this. It is just one of the hierarchical constructs that affect humans.
Can you give me an example of a human society that does not arrange itself into a hierarchy - including communism?

Dear Poirot,

Certainly all human societies organise themselves into hierarchies.

There are two types of hierarchy. One type is called functional. The other is line.

A functional hierarchy is one set up to achieve a certain task such as building a bridge, producing artefacts etc. Once the task is completed that type of hierarchy dissolves. If the task is a continuing one the leadership is periodically changed.

The other type of hierarchy is the line hierarchy where there is a devolution of authority from top to bottom, and there is no connection with a particular task. All governments whether democratic, authoritarian or whatever are example of line hierarchies.

Political anarchism is an attempt to get rid of the second type of hierarchy. Anarchists are capable of organising in armies, modes of production, schools etc. However they reject governmental hierarchy.

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Dear David & Poirot,

.

The world would be a better place if all debate could become dialectic, but I guess that is utopic.

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Dear Banjo,

If we were talking about it would be atopic. Maybe it is.

Dear Banjo,

The reason I don't debate in dialectic fashion is that somebody might think I was making fun of their dialect.

Dear David f.,

Koestler talks of hierarchy as not so much linear, but more like an inverted tree branching downward - (I promise this is my last Koestler quote - but he explains it so well)

"We find such tree diagrams of hierarchic organization applied to the most varied fields: genealogical tables; the classification of animals and plants; the evolutionist's "tree of Life"; charts indicating the branching structures of government departments or industrial enterprises; physiological charts of the nervous system, and of the circulation of the blood. The word "hierarchy" is of ecclesiastical origin and is often wrongly used to refer to order of rank--the rungs of a ladder, so to speak. I shall use it to refer not to a ladder but to the tree-like structure of a system, branching into sub-systems,...."

One would imagine that although anarchists are interested in dispensing with the dominating hierarchic edifice of government, that they would themselves be forced to adopt and adhere to a similar hierarchical structure if they were to successfully undertake any of the organisational roles you mentioned.

Dear Poirot,

Thank you for telling about Koestler's book. The ladder structure has been used to describe evolution. It is a consequence of seeing evolution as a series of improvements eventually leading to humans.

Anarchists in forming armies, factories and other structures have incorporated hierarchical structures. "Homage to Catalonia" by Orwell tells about it.

I will look for "Ghost in the Machine". You have made it sound interesting.

Banjo:
<The world would be a better place if all debate could become dialectic, but I guess that is utopic.>

An interesting thought; indeed, you said a mouthful!
I've spent ages trying to come to terms with Hegel's criticism of Newton---and by implication his criticism of empiricism contra a priori judgement. Dialectics is anthropocentric; it doesn't posit nature as at a remove from human cognition, but intimately entwined with it. While empiricism distrusts the data and seeks to objectify phenomena, subjecting it to methodological analysis (for some obscure reason, if anyone wants to explain it to me?), thereby laundering mere sense perception of it. The latter approach is the bulwark of the modern philosophy of science--which finds itself in a cosy-rational (indeed symbiotic) relationship with liberal political economy (the church, you know, never lost sight of its saving mission, all through the decadent years. Neither has science, even after Hiroshima and Auschwitz). No wonder Hegel was the pariah of philosophical modernism for over 100 years! and has only just emerged among a flotsam of technological iconography on a calm (stagnant) and complacent sea. I wonder if technocracy will be as hard to unseat as theocracy was..

Dear all who are still on this thresd,

I will be 85 on October 31. I would like to meet anybody who lives or will be in the Brisbane area during the month. It would be a birthday gift to me to meet the live people who have voiced their opinions.

Dear David f.,

Nice thought...alas, I'm on the other side of the continent. Hope you have a good birthday, though.

Dear DavidF,
Congratulations on attaining that age and still being so engaged and energetic (I read on another thread that you're undertaking an historical novel (the idea sounds fascinating). The only way to be, of course.
I called Brisbane home for many years and now live not far away, so am a possibility. I'll wait to hear more details.

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Dear David F.,

.

Yes I noticed you are more inclined to debate than dialectic, though your sense of humour indicates that the debate is not closed.

I must confess I am tempted to jump on a plane to come and meet you and Squeers. I have much sympathy for both of you. Unfortunately, that would not be at all reasonable. I am not alone in life and have obligations at this time here in Paris.

What I can do, however, is to lift a corner of the veil of my intimacy, on this thread, by indicating that the reason I was absent yesterday is that I was momentarily distracted whilst posting an article on OLO entitled "Heavenly Bliss and Earthly Woes".

The original article, which I wrote last year, was over seven thousand words long and I cut it back to 1 200 words for OLO. As much of the detail got lost in the exercise, the result, I must confess, was not entirely satisfactory. But is it ever ?

Anyway, I, in turn, invite all here to feel free to contact me, whoever I may be, or, should I say, whichever name you prefer to call me.

And to you, David, I wish the best birthday you could ever dream of.

Squeers,

I appreciate your thoughts on dialectics and empiricism. Thank you.

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