When the going gets tough, Obama/Biden gets goingFollow

All this is a great way to explain Obama's economic plans.

Your faith in humanity is touching, Ari.

Goddammit gbaji, you heartless ***.

Ari went to all of that well thought out trouble to nicely and thoughtfully explain the entire damn thing and you just decide to be all "noooo I want to be a meanie poo poo head"

Yet Marxism is not an economic theory but a socio-political one. It touches on economics no more than any political theory must, and focuses mostly on the social position conferred by one's relationship to the mans of production.

Socialism and communism are admittedly descendants of Marxist thought (as well as having other influences), but Marxist regimes are rare, absolute, and usually quite brutal. Socialist countries, however, represent the vast majority of the western world, including our own society which has resembled a laissez-faire nation only in label and passing, superficial displays for nearly a century now.

*sigh*

All right then.



He was extremely specific. Historical materialism, was what he called it. Marx thought History followed a logical and irrepressible course. He didn't think it was a random set of events that came about coincidentally. He thought History could be seen a "scientific" process, from which "laws" could be deducted. It had an evolution, there were "stages", the process of reaching communism was extremely specific, and followed those "laws".



Only according to *you*. Not according to Marx, not according to anyone who knows anything about Marxism, and not according to any student of economics or philosophy. It's the same old gbaji trick of setting completely arbitrary parameters so that you can frame the problem so it fits whatever dumbass argument you're currently making.



No, his theories were about a ton of different things, most of which are pretty complicated for people who haven't properly studied philosophy.



I'd bet my right-hand that you have never read a single line from Marx. And that's the hand I **** with.

Actually, I take that back, you might've read out-of-context quotes. But seriously, let's not kid anyone here, you haven't read Marx.



No. There isn't even a "free market" according to Marx. The "free market" is rigged in favour of the rich who control the market forces. It's about the exploitation by those people who control market, of the people who are subjects of the market. Nothing in this is "free" according to Marx, it's engineered and set-up that way on purpose. Some people are "rich" because they control the forces, and some are "poor" because they are exploited and utilised by that first class of people.

To Marx, the "free market" is the equivalent of "divine rule" under feodalism: a convenient excuse to justify exploitation by one class of people over another.



Again, only according to you.

And even then, it's not accurate. Marx wasn't about redistributing wealth as much a putting the means to create wealth into the hands of the people who labour for it. It's not about wealth redistribution, it's about who controls the means of production.



Again, complete non-sense.That's like me saying "When Bush talks about using the military to be strong as a nation, he is using fascist ideology and is therefore a ****."

It's exactly the same. For Obama to "express a belief in Marxist ideology", he would have to say that he thinks the market is nothing more than the exploitation of the working classes by the modern-equivalent of the bourgeoisie, but that none of this matters because History will dictate that capitalism will collapse onto itself, and that from the rubbles the only choice available will be to create a society where everyone collectively owns everything, where private property barely exists, and where "class" will not exist anymore.

There's a gigantic difference between this, and Obama explaining, in simple terms and off-the-cuff, the principle of progressive taxation to a bleeding plumber.

There, happy now?



Edited, Oct 28th 2008 11:33pm by RedPhoenixxx

Holy fu'cking cow!!!










Ps. Why is it ok to 'spread the wealth' to Wall Street (for example) in the form of a VERY LARGE cheque, but when that wealth is spread about in the form of community programmes or new libraries in ****** neighbourhoods or new 'overhead projectors' in planetariums (**** you McCain) its Marxism.

Look. I'm not getting into a debate about Marxism and whatever, but why the fu'ck is a bit of wealth redistribution such a bad thing? The posse in Wall Street and wherever have been making cash hand over fist for years. When it all goes tits-up, they get a shedload of public cash thrown at them. Whilst I'm NOT in favor of endless handouts to lazy ***** who only get off the sofa to have another beer and a baby, I'm also not in favor of this rubbish about how tax-breaks for the wealthy result in a trickle-down for the poor.

Its bollox. If it worked that way, the gap between 'rich' and 'poor' wouldn't be widening so relentlessly.

Perhaps if Obama had said 'I'm not going to redistribute the wealth in the form of cash payments to welfare recipients, but I am planning on spreading the wealth around in the form of better roads hospitals and schools in the ******** areas' it would have gone down better.

But I imagine the Repubs would stil be wetting themselves over it (or that the next President is going to be a black moslem who pals around with terrorists lol), but at least they would clearly be seen as the selfish mean spirited gits that they are.

Its 4.30 in the afternoon here. And I'm at work (such as working in a public hospital can be construed as work. Its more like attending. (In fact if I had the choice over again, I'd be a beach attendant. I wouldn't have anything I had to do, except 'attend').

And yeah you must just be drunk.

Hahahahahahahaha, yeah sure. I totally believe you. You sat down and read The Capital and came up with this completely misconstrued interpretation of it.

Actually, now that I think about it, it could be quite likely you did just that.

If it wasn't for the fact that the only people who have read The Capital are philosphy professors at universities, and even then they haven't read the whole of it. It's the driest book in the history of books. It's so dry that Marx himself couldn't be bothered to finish *writing* it. He had to get someone else to do it. Not only that, but Marx only saw the publication of the first volume of The Capital. The others were added after his death, a collage of his notes and drafts. He was a complex character who saw himself as mixture of as scientist and an artist. The most clever professors of philosophy have spent their lifetimes arguing about the meaning of Marx's work and its interpretation. It's vastly more complicated than sitting down one evening, reading the Communist Manifesto, and thinking "Ok, I *got* Marx". I hate to sound pedantic, but you can't *get* Marx from reading his books only, unless you've studied philosophy to a very high level. Or if you do, you'll get a dumbed-down simplified version where you think the whole point of his work is "wealth redistribution".

The Capital makes War and Peace look like an infomercial pamphlet. So yeah, spare me the ******** please.

We could argue about *our* interpretation of what we've read about Marx, but "your own analysis"? Give me a break...



It's not. "Reducing the gap between the rich and the poor" isn't essentially a Marxist philosophy. Do you have any idea of the number of thinkers and writers who wrote about this concept before Marx? Marx didn't live in a bubble seperated from History, he came from a tradition of leftist thinkers who argued the basics of this: Saint-Simon, Proudhon, Fournier, etc... We can go back even further and link this to the French Revolution, the first real realisation of a desire to redress wealth inequality. Some would even argue that Chrsistianity was the first socialist manifesto: the poorest will go to heaven first, greed is sin, charity is necessary, etc...

You think of "wealth redistribution" and you think of Marx because you're slightly clueless as to the history of the Left. What distinguished Marx was not that he was the first, or the most eloquent, in talking about wealth redistribution. Lots of others did it before him, in clearer and more potent language. Read up on the Chartists in Paris. On Robert Owen. On the Commune. Wealth redistribution, income redistribution, the struggle of the class system, all of this predates Marx.

What made Marx stand out from the rest was his "scientific" analysis of History, the philosophical concepts behind this view, and the implications that this had for the future power of the proletariat. His most potent argument, that which made him what he is today, was the clear and detailed explanation of how capitalism would consume itself, and the "scientific" inevitability of the triumph of the proletariat. This is what makes someone a "Marxist", a belief that History has a specific, unavoidable course, that will in the ened result in the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of a new ruling class, the proletariat.

Now, take a deep breath, and tell me: Do you really think Obama is a Marxist?



No, you have a "leftist" view of economics. You believe in an equalitarian society. You believe in socialism. It can be a ton of things, but the belief that one should tax the rich more heavily than the poor isn't Marxist, anymore than the belief that the state needs a strong military is "fascist".

I'm not going to got rhough each line of your post because it would take me a day, and I'm supposed to be doing *some* work today. So I'll finish on this:



Not only is this an incredibly naive over-simplification of Marxist theory, it's completely false.

Redistribution of wealth, in one form or another, is a tenet of pretty much *all* economic theories: capitalist and socialist. The "how" and the "why" you redistribute the wealth both matter equally in distinguishing economic theories. Marx certainly didn't believe you should "redistribute of wealth for the sake of redistributing the wealth". Not in a million years. In fact, he doesn't even mention "wealth", but "capital", and even then it's distinguished between "constant capital" and "variable capital". His doctrine wasn't about redistributing the "variable capital", it was about *the way in which the capitalist system works*, which will lead inevitably to a new economic system.

Marx didn't favour progressive taxation. He didn't think the "capitalist" should pay the "workers" more. He didn't think that capitalists should spread the variable capital equally amongst workers, or that governments should force them to do so. He thought that one class exploited the other, and that this exploitation would lead to over-production, deflation, an hungry and angry lower-class that had become an "army of surplus labour workforce", and that these factors combined together would lead to the collapse of capitalism, and the emergence of a new system.

What you are trying to do is to reduce Marx to a simple and common economic/social/political/philophical principle. "Wealth redistribution to cut the gap between the rich and poor" is simply not Marxism. It's a "social market economy" principle. It's a basic leftist principle. It is a Christian argument. It's a million things, but it's not what made Karl Marx Karl Marx.

Obama is as much of a Marxist as George Bush is a fascist.

The problem with Gbaji is that his "own analysis" usually redefines whatever he is discussing in order to pigeon-hole it into his own ideology, usually leaving the actual truth about the concept somewhere back at a crossroads near Albuquerque scratching its head and wondering if it should take a left.

I haven't read Marx, but I HAVE read enough of Gbaji's bullsh'it to know that once he's stamped it as his "own analysis" then what he is discussing has at best only a nodding acquaintance with what Marx actually meant.

I mean, we are talking about the guy whose "own analysis" of rape excludes any act which doesn't leave bruises, are we not?