Dear antiseptic,

You are not doing a precis. You are taking one factor that you know about us and saying that is why we take the positions that we do. Human beings are more complex than that. Marx claimed we are motivated by our class position. That is true. However, to say that is our only motivation is not true. That is oversimpliflying, and that is what you have done.

One of my motivations is due to my Jewishness. I am also an American,an Australian, a democrat, a war veteran and a lot of other things. As a democrat I object to dictatorships whatever ideology supports them. I really don't care whether they are Marxist, fascist, authoritarian or what. Marx was a Jew hater. However, if his ideology had produced decent societies which gave equal rights to all and eliminated injustice then I would have to support those societies regardless of Marx's personal prejudices. Voltaire was also a Jew hater. However, his general philosophy advanced freedom. I do not condemn Voltaire. I condemn Marx.

However, I am a Jew. To ask me as Squeers did to look at Jew-hating bilge with a sympathetic eye is a bit much.

Anticeptic,
your "precis" of my position is wrong.

I haven't bothered replying to the last nonsense from Peter and davidf as it's like banging one's head against a wall, they both seem hopelessly beset by their isms; capitalism, rationalism, egotism...

btw, david, your statement that "The famine was not caused by the means of production being in the hands of the rulers. The famine was caused by blight hitting the potato monoculture which the Irish basic diet depended on. England could have relieved the Irish suffering by sending food and supplying the Irish with seed to grow other foodstuffs, but England didn’t" goes beautifully with your defence of nuking civilians because it obviated an invasion. The slightest research into the potato famine reveals that it was the result of far more complexity than merely the blight; it was the product of capitalism and colonial indifference.

Marx was decidedly not a bigot and, moreover, he was right about capitalism.

David, a precis is intended to try to capture the essential points in some larger piece of work. There are 20 pages in this thread: of course it's a simplification.

You have called Marx all sorts of things in this thread, mostly to do with his anti-semitism and that of regimes which purported to follow his dogmatic lead. Therefore, it's the take-home message from your stuff here. I'm not at all suggesting that it's the only thing to inform your views, but in this case I don't think your American, Australian or democrat hats are as important as your Jewish one. Fair enough

I agree with you that Marx doesn't offer any solutions. It's interesting to read, but not something to use as a model when it so easily lends itself to oligarchical control. Look at the horrible abuses of power being revealed within the Unions, which draw their inspiration directly from Marx,via Trotsky.

squeers, thanks for that. As always, a model of self-defensive minimalism. Yes, I know you "don't care what anyone thinks"...

Dear Squeers,

One can call a cow a horse, but it will remain a cow.

One can deny Marx is a bigot, but his words condemn him as nothing but a bigot. You have kept trying to wiggle out of the fact of his bigotry. You have written that he merely had the prejudices of his time. Then you claimed he was no more bigoted than the ordinary person of his time. Now you simply say he was not a bigot.

You keep switching your arguments.

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, Mininimise, minimise, minimise. Deny, deny, deny.

That's the way it goes. He remains a bigot who advocated tyranny.

Antiseptic,

I do care what you think and I realise my perspective is only one, though I do try to see things from the other's point of view (that's what Marx succeeded so well at doing), but you have to admit that your "precis" of not just mine, but Poirot's and Mollyduke's as well, was a tad insulting, and dare I say "minimilist"?

David,
I have conceded that Marx was probably unconsciously imbued with the prejudices of his day (as are we all), though I've also opined that that he was remarkably free oif prejudice compared with us and human history in general.
Marx was not a bigot and all you have adduced to the contrary is innuendo, with lots of adjectives to help it pass. Scholarly opinion is overwhelmingly of the opinion that On The Jewish Question is not bigoted and I agree with them.
The burden of proof lies with you to establish "your" prejudice as valid!

squeers, I'll accept that charge as fair. I'm also probably wrong, at least about mollydukes and possibly about poirot in regard to income, although not about education.

The point that I was trying to make was that you 3 seem to have a view of socialism as a necessity and capitalism as something that is dispensable. I can't see how that is in any way a sustainable argument, unless you can come up with some entirely new formulation of the relationships between people. I can't see how it is possible to sustain a large welfare state in the absence of a capitalist economic base. Once again, I'm happy to be corrected.

I quite like Peter Humes's case for a primary capitalism based on the individual, with corporations restricted to specific purposes as "companies" rather than as quasi-autonomous entities that have no limit to their longevity or their acquisition of both capital and political power. I'm not sure how you'd put that particular genie back in the bottle though.