“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Posts tagged marx
Posted 2 years ago
Marx does not advocate state ownership but some form of ownership vested in the collective laborer producing for the common good. How that form of ownership might come into being is established by turning Locke’s argument on the production of value against itself. Suppose, says Marx, a capitalist begins production with $1,000 in capital and in the first year manages to gain $200 surplus value from laborers mixing their labor with the land, and the capitalist then uses that surplus in personal consumption. Then, after five years, the $1,000 should belong to the collective laborers, since they are the ones who have mixed their labor with the land. The capitalist has consumed away all of his or her original capital. …the capitalists deserve to lose their rights, since they themselves have produced no value.
David Harvey, “The Future of the Commons,” Radical History Review, no.109, p. 105
Posted 2 years ago
I think [Marx] would take it for granted that elites are basically Marxist - they believe in class analysis, they believe in class struggle, and in a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. And they understand. They’re instinctive Marxists; they don’t have to read it.
Noam Chomsky
Posted 2 years ago
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Karl Marx (via adamquinn)
This is actually a Lenin quote, guys. It’s from State and Revolution.
Posted 2 years ago
The Controversy About Marx and Justice
The question is the more specific one: does Marx condemn capitalism in the light of any principle of justice?
I shall survey the case for thinking he does not and the case for thinking that he does; the textual evidence adduced and supporting argument put forth on behalf of each. Given the extent of the literature being surveyed — some three dozen items (all but one of which have appeared since 1970; and incidentally, of largely, indeed overwhelmingly, North American provenance, twenty-one of the twenty-four authors cited here either writing or hailing from that continent) — each case as I present it is a kind of composite. No one of its proponents necessarily makes use of all the texts and arguments I shall enumerate and they sometimes emphasize or formulate differently those that they do use in common. Still, I give what I hope is an accurate overall map of this dispute, before going on to venture my own judgement on it. The main body of the essay falls, therefore, into three parts. First, I review the texts and arguments put forward by those who deny that Marx condemned capitalism as unjust. Second, I review the texts and arguments put forward by those who claim he did so condemn it. I try in these two sections to present each case broadly as made, with a minimum of critical comment. Third, I then offer some conclusions, and argument in support of them.
Posted 3 years ago
It would add a nice dialectical twist to the future history of our period if it could be said that, around the time the post-Maoist Chinese took up shopping, the post-bubble Americans turned to studying Marx.
n+1 Magazine, “On Your Marx”
Posted 3 years ago
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.”
Posted 3 years ago
Marxism: An Extremely Brief Introduction
This was the first question on my midterm for History of Socialism & Communism. I think it answered the question, but may not be a suitable introduction to Marx’s thought for its length.
This blog has been retired.
