Dear Squeers,

You quoted Eagleton:

However, in his article Eagleton is at pains to urge that
"Almost all followers of Marx today reject the villainies of Stalin and Mao, while many non-Marxists would still vigorously defend the destruction of Dresden or Hiroshima. Modern capitalist nations are for the most part the fruit of a history of genocide, violence, and extermination every bit as abhorrent as the crimes of Communism. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears, and Marx was around to witness it. It is just that the system has been in business long enough for most of us to be oblivious of that fact".

That is more crapola. The villainies did not start with Stalin. Lenin organised the first gulags, the Cheka terror and the assault on the Kronstadt sailors who wanted him to keep the revolutionary promises. After Lenin took over he organised an election to give the stamp of legitimacy to his rule. It apparently was a free election, and the Social Revolutionaries got more votes than the Bolsheviks. So he turfed out the Constituent Assembly. An election was only good if he won. In 1921 after the Civil War was won and a free society could have been built, Lenin introduced censorship, and people like Kandinsky fled. The rot didn't start with Stalin. It started with Lenin. Communists like to promote the idea that the Bolshevik takeover was a good thing and was ruined by that nasty Stalin.

It was a tyranny from the beginning. Eagleton engages in a little gratuitous slap at non-Marxists. I have never heard anyone defend the bombing of Dresden. I have heard people defend Hiroshima as making an invasion unnecessary.

Capitalism certainly has been formed in blood and tears, and I want something better. Marxism is not better. Look at the masses fleeing the Marxist tyrannies. Very few go the other way. The masses know something that hasn't penetrated to Marxist intellectuals.

davidf,
I don't defend any of the evils perpetrated by corrupt regimes. The whole twentieth century is awash with blood and corpses derived from one ideology or another. You accuse Marx of being a bigot when a sympathetic reading of the text makes a nonsense of such claims--this is not just my opinion, and is well-nigh irrefutable!
I could argue far more plausibly that just as Germans could rationalise the Holocaust by seeing the Jews as sub-human, so the US could rationalise dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities because they were Asian. I doubt the decision to massacre civilians would have been taken so easily (or defended so blithely since!) if they'd been caucasian. The US remains today a deeply bigoted culture, notwithstanding the racial horrors its perpetrated and witnessed since. One would think the spectacle of the twentieth century would give pause, but intolerance is as rife as ever, and seemingly from every quarter, despite the PC!
There is nothing in Marx to paint him a bigot above the common or garden variety of his day, and certainly nothing to compare with the institutional bigotry that's dished out in your country today. By comparison Marx was a paragon, no wonder he remains a pariah!
But I really don't care about all these off-topic issues here, and it depresses me that prejudice still dominates debate--virtually every debate!
This thread is about Marx's prophetic view of capitalism. As you point out, he was a bourgeois himself, which makes what amounts to his self-criticism (criticism of his own culture) all the more inspiring, especially since precious few are capable of such "reflexivity" today. Marx suffered all his life for his convictions; we today, by comparison, have nothing to fear, yet we're incapable of looking at ourselves and our culture honestly. All criticism is dismissed or rationalised.
We are all at liberty to think as we choose. My conscience is clear that I choose, as far as is in my power, according to critical thinking, and not just ideology or inclination.

Dear Squeers,

You wrote: "There is nothing in Marx to paint him a bigot above the common or garden variety of his day, and certainly nothing to compare with the institutional bigotry that's dished out in your country today. By comparison Marx was a paragon, no wonder he remains a pariah!"

You may go on and on about Marx. I can read. I am not blind. I have read other things from that period. I don't accept bigotry from a supposed leader who has a goal of a better world even if it is only common variety bigotry.

Lessing, George Eliot, Nietzsche and other rose above the bigotry of their time, but the paragon didn't. He obviously is not a pariah. You are not alone in your regard for him. I think he should be a pariah.

I have been exposed to that sort of tactic before. Criticise Marx and the communists and one gets told how terrible the US is. The flaws in the US don't lessen the stench of Marx.

Yes, david, what you need to realise is that Poirot and Squeers really do think that the hundred million deaths at the hands of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Hitler (National Socialist German Workers Party), Saddam (Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party), and all the rest, are just some kind of strange coincidence.

They think it's nothing to do with the fact that these were all attempts to implement socialism. And the fact they all these attempts failed is also just some strange coincidence.

Fancy defending Marx after all that, no better than defending Hitler or Pol Pot.

Their method is to believe a theory riddled with illogic and self-contradictions in the first place, and then when these are pointed out, and they are completely at a loss to defend it in any rational terms or refute the critique, they just circle back and say "well I think it's relevant" without being able to give any reason but more of the same.

So it's a religion, and a very nasty violent religion at that.

Then when you call them on the fact that their entire belief system boils down to believing that aggressive violence is the basis of the good and fair society, you get this wide-eyed innocent act "What? Me? In favour of violence? Where did I ever say that?"

Yet these are the same fools who, a hundred years ago, would have been enthusiasts for the Bolsheviks. But at least the original power-hungry Bolsheviks had an exucse - they hadn't seen the disproofs in theory and in practice. Squeers and Poirot are morally and intellectually far worse than that.

The common flaw that invalidates all your criticisms of "capitalism" is that you fail to distinguish between outcomes of the private, versus outcomes of the governmental control of the means of production.

A classic example is Squeers recent equation of compulsory funding, compulsory attendance, compulsory curriculum and compulsory qualifications of *state* education as "free market".

That is the level of moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the arguments for using violence against human freedom, because that's what's in issue.

"Capitalism certainly has been formed in blood and tears..."

You're just as brainwashed as the Marxists.

What do you mean it's been formed in blood and tears?

And I bet you London to a brick that for every example you give you have either a) confused capitalism with the outcome of governmental action, a classic example of which is the GFC, or b) ignored the role of government in actively promoting the outcomes you criticise.

When I criticise socialism or interventionism, I at least can *correctly represent* what the belief system entails, from the point of view of its own advocates.

But the critics of capitalism cannot do that. All we ever get is fallacy after fallacy, straw man after misrepresentation, circularity after caricature, after Marxist slogan.

What blood and tears for gods sake?

Dear Peter Hume,

In England during the Industrial Revolution there were children of 7 working in the mines. Southern slaves were producing cotton for the mills of Manchester. People tossed off the land by the enclosure acts then had to take what they could get in the 'dark, satanic mills.' The Luddites fought back because they were starving as factory efficiency with new machines required fewer workers.

I have been writing my family history. My grandmother lived in Lithuania. The only employment in the area was a match factory. Her four brothers all worked there, and all died of sulphur poisoning.

Their fate was not unusual. Workers died building railroads, bridges and the other infrastructures of the industrial world.

It is not leftist propaganda that the Industrial Revolution was a time of sweat, tears and blood. It was fact for a lot of people.

Nineteenth century Marxism was the opium of many people. Its promises were as false as those of religion.

One of my uncles was a Bolshevik and was arrested by the czarist police. He managed to get out of Russia in 1921. After four years of Lenin he was no longer a Bolshevik. He then came to capitalist United States and had a good life thereafter dying at 98. He was going to a party and fell back on the bed dead & wearing full dress. He was all dressed up and ready to go.