"work-hardened bodies." Big words from a guy who never worked an honest day in his life, and borrowed from a business partner, the money needed to espouse this garbage. Unions might be the only thing positive that came from this man's ideals. The 100 million dead hardly justifies even the most effective and staunch union representation....
Hey! Thanks for the comment and call for introspection! I'm sure Marx would be overjoyed that people, nearly 200 years after his death, would still find his words so evocative.
However, I'd like to highlight what in your comment can be verified historically as true and what is a matter of conjecture or opinion; all in the Spirit of Marx's rigorous philosophical project!
What most unnerves me is this common belief that Marx never worked a day in his life. Simply untrue.
Marx did receive considerable patronage through his lifetime from his dear friend, Friedrich Engels, who inherited his father's textile industry. However, Marx was not without his own skills: he studied under GWF Hegel and received his PhD as well as his JD granting him the right to practice law as his father did; Marx, also, worked extensively as a journalist in his younger years, covering the politics of Europe and North Africa. Karl received the most financial assistance from Engels in his later years, when his health was steadily in decline and he had been blackballed in many job markets because of his politics.
Engels understood that Marx could contribute more to the world by focusing on completing his final work, Das Kapital, of which Engels completed the publication after Marx's death.
These questions of "unions" and "100s trillion dead" are still being determined and are still widely disputed among historians and the people who lived under regimes which called themselves "communist" or "socialist," as much as the same questions about the work of Adam Smith and Western Empire are, at present, hotly debated in our everyday life.
In the end, Truth will be exalted by the unending revolution of History. Men will live and work and die, and there will be still more men to be born, tear down what was built to start anew, and die themselves.
Thank you, again, for your comment. Keep thinking, keep doubting! And, in the spirit of the brotherhood of man, hope we can meet one day, whether in the fields or in the streets, to talk about how to improve what Marx said.
I suppose your right on conjecture on unions and 100 million or so deaths. But there has been good documentation of the gulag's etc...Solzhenitsyn being the foremost. So maybe it's ok to say mass deaths are bad. We can certainly say that Marx was a great contributor to these ideals? I think so.
Yes, gulags were as terrible as the American prison industry is today: this is fact through and through. Many, many people suffered torture and ultimately died in prison camps, just as they do today across the world.
However, there is no direct connection between Marx & his work and the gulags of the Soviet Union. In much the same way, there is no direct connection between Martin Luther and the genocide(s) committed by the British Crown. In fact, Marx would have abhorred the creation of Stalin's gulags. There is nothing in Marx's writing which could possibly justify the constraint of free association among the people and the harm, both individual and social, caused by emprisonment.
This is a classic example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (AKA, "correlation proves causation"). The fact that Marx's writings inspired men to kill other men or to lock them away in cages does not prove that Marx had the malicious intent many want to see in him.
The abuses of certain Soviet leaders do not stain Marx nor the ideas and concepts espoused in his writing. The sins of the sons are not the sins of the father.
Thank you, again, for your comment and continued call-to-introspection.
If youre interested in reading more about how Marxists have buried Marx, there is a great chapter from Cyril Smith's Marx at the Millenium posted over at Marxists.org
I'll have a look see at that!
At least I'm not the only one guilty of false comparisons. "Yes, gulags were as terrible as the American prison industry is today." Really? Prisoners are criminals in most cases, and are paid at least a meager wage for the victoria secret clothes they make. ;). Not only that but the prison industrial complex needs those men/women ALIVE. Forced labor camps and prison are very different things, not least of which is mortality rates...
While i find it hard to dis-associate Marx from the authoritarian tendencies, many using his doctrine, seem to adopt; you are right that the sins of the sons are not the sins of the father. It's terrible to see the only recent success of any countries attempt at socialism is Denmark. Which denies furiously that they are socialist at all. Which is strange, they say they are democratic w/socialist tendencies or something to that effect. But reject any claim that they run a socialist type government. Maybe they should evoke China's version in their defense. I hear the death toll is much lower these days.
Poor Marx....rolling in his grave. Somebodies version of socialism will prevail! Until then just stack the bodies over there. They are beginning to smell......
My comparison may on the surface seem false; I'll agree the history and purpose(s) of emprisonment are nothing but overly complicated and deliberately obscured in the public discourse. That said, the gulag is of the same class and type as the American prison industrial complex.
This is true. But, if I may problematize this differentiation from the gulags, I would like to highlight the similarities and contradictions:
This comment has already gone on a little long for my intention, so, to wrap up, I'd like to say that neither Denmark, nor Norway, nor USSR, nor PRC, or any other State apparatus have ever been socialist or communist in Marx's conception of those terms.
To put this in a somewhat logical syntax: "For all X-isms, X-tianity, X-eans, or X-ites, no X will be found." (I paraphrased this out of the chapter I linked to above.)
I like to think that Marx is no longer in his grave, that his wooden casket has been infiltrated by worms, and his body has gone from soap to compost to soil. I believe this is what happens to the bodies of those who die in prisons and come to rest in unmarked graves. Maybe, what you smell is the anguish of millions who died without ever being liberated, and, just maybe, the soil of the earth reeks of our cries for freedom....
Thanks again for making me do my homework. I'm enjoying this dialogue
Very good argument I'll follow. I like your style! ;)