What's the deal with Karl Marx?

Question

How did he view politics and social class.

Answer 1

1. Marx, the human being: son of a Jewish family of many Rabbis, on both his parents' sides.

He was a strong-willed child, felt seriously about his mother's inferiority (she was an immigrant Jewess, unable to speak German well), and was not a happy camper re his father's masculinity and paternal qualities.

2. In graduate school, rather than working, he bullied his impoverished, widowed mother for beer money.

3. Marx adopted an illogical, anti-God attitude, partially related to his family's traditions, instead of the logically correct agnostic or "no evidence do I find" position. Rather seeking to justify his behavior, he decided God and morality were not good for it.

4. He wrote a mediocre Ph.D. thesis on a minor aspect of atomism. He then became a left-Hegelian, positing and presuming Matter has Godlike organizing and propelling qualities, in order to account for the order he saw in history. He began to deny philosophy as oppressive (perhaps for the same reasons he denied father, God, and religion).

5. He boiled everything down to Matter and materialism as outworking of its innate design and program. (Matter = God without moral authority, and Marx is Its Prophet, or head Intelligent One/Lawgiver--called the "Moses complex.")

6. This type of post hoc, ergo propter hoc curve-fitting to "whatever is" is so weak a scientism as to be unfalsifiable. K. Marx comes down from his mountain, hands "dialectical materialism" "laws" to the needy workers (and, btw, during bouts of drunkenness, his drinking comrades noted and wrote to others his marked disdain for the "f---ing communists," etc.).

7. His mother had the last word: "Karl should have made capital, not written it."

8. He was hired by the "League of the Just," a communist group led by Illuminati-trained theorists, tracing their ideology through an intermediate group to the Illuminati organized by the Jesuit professor Weishaupt in Bavaria in 1776, to provide footnoted factoids for their program, which is essentailly the abolition of private property, the abolition of marriage, the abolition of most authority (save for the leaders of this general group), the abolition of worship, etc.

9. Marx found human labor to add value, not too surprising a conclusion, and that the risk of capital was entitled to some reward (profit) for that investment per se, but that, over time, some capitalists had underpaid their workers, vis a vis value added, etc. (generally called the theory of surplus or added value).

10. From this trend, the pleonexic rich would grow richer, and the poor would get poorer (Biblical wisdom). However, as the poor were more and more technologically trained, they would become more "moral" and "fair," and would rise up and overthrow their plutocratic taskmasters ("class struggle").

11. Most of Marx' predictions have been falsified by history. Many of his lesser writings are kept in secret in Kremlin archives, as too embarrassing (the scholar Richard Wurmbrand was allowed, during a brief opening in history, access to such, and has written "Marx and Satan," a description of Marx' wilder and woolier writings, some of which are satanic in nature).

12. Later Marx wrote a milder prognosis, "The Critique of the Gotha Program," in which the more educated workers in Germany were seen as foreshadowing a more evolutionary, non-violent type of social justice.

13. Marxism is mostly a historical movement consigned to the ashheap of history. However, the attraction of Godless sensuality, the desire to take from others in the name of "social justice," the obvious plutocratic iniquities, the continuing workplace alienation, and other such elements continue to propel much leftist thinking.

14. As a science, the pseudo-science "marxism" is fairly irrelevant, even in the PRC.

15. A few relevant points: modern management has moved far beyond the crude plutocratic-worker model postulated by Marx. Rather, all have advanced in sophistication and education. Secondly, the increase of productivity has increased living standards far beyond those of the 19th century. In the West, the poor live better, in many ways, than did the rich of the 17th-19th centuries. Third, the specialization of labor has been just the opposite predicted by Marx, who naively (and incorrectly) believed that work would be increasingly interchangable, supposedly returning to the "simple happy communistic natives" fantasy model of Rousseau.

16. In place of the smart workers, we have a globalizing economy, which in turn is stabilizing much in the manner of the Chinese dynastic system: uptake of merit talent by e.g. Rhodes Scholars, and a political class which derives power both from plutocratic, corporate influence (e.g., "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" and "Secret History of the American Empire," Perkins), and from redistributing such wealth to the poor, via social-istic mechanisms. See also "The True Story of the Bilderberg Group," Daniel Estulin http://www.danielestulin.com for a good look at the plutocratic organizations, and "Red Cocaine," Joseph Douglass, Ph.D., for a well-documented example of the drug wars waged by the Soviets through Latin American drug cartels (such warfare was considered by the Soviet leadership to be the highest priority, and second in value only to a possible nuclear first strike against the U.S.).

17. Thus, there are many rather obvious points which marxism holds in common (no pun intended) with simple observation of history, but it is unable to claim either originality or scientific proof of much of significance and value. As a theory, Marx' thought is (and has been shown to be) seriously and fundamentally flawed, in many ways. However, the spirit of rebellion and war against the rich, the plutocratic oppression, is very linked to the marxian kvetch.

18. It is well to note http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills as documenting the gross excesses of World Communism, a serious totalitarian horror; "The Black Book of Communism," by leftist scholars Courtois, Werth, et al. is also worthwhile as a balance to the irrational exuberance of many psychologistic "infantile leftists," who make an hero-idol of a fourth-rate philosophy, much as do many with Nietzsche's third-rate philosophizing.

Answer 2

Elaborate a little and people might give you an answer.

[edit] Frederick M: Claiming that modern scholars dimiss Marx is more than a little disingenuous. Marx may have had little faith in liberal democratic amelioration, but no-one could say he was entirely wrong about that. What has liberal capitalism 'really' achieved? More output, more consumerism, more waste. At the very least Marx helped capitalism by shaking it awake with the warning that people would sooner or later no longer put up with its ways. In that way they have devised 1001 methods to tinker and pacify people.
It's easy to call people who don't like the orthodox system a malcontent.

Answer 3

Marx was a malcontent with a great capacity for work. He developed his analysis of capitalism and of capitalist society as having within it "the seeds of its own destruction."

To Marx, capitalism would heighten competition so much that the "bosses" would have to pay their workers less and less to remain competitive. This would lead to a revolt of the masses, and the beginning of a "classless" society - pure communism. Marx insisted that this process was inevitable.

Modern scholars dismiss Marx not only because his analysis proved to be wrong, but more so because he had argued "in bad faith." That is, he had his mind made up, and then fit the facts to meet his preconceptions. Historically, Marx is a curiosity, and an idea incarnate - the idea that the rich get rich by cheating the poor. Marx overlooked progress and liberal-democratic society entirely, and will forever remain an historical oddity.
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[edit] Warning Conservative Content!: - this reprint from 'Reason' magazine digests a British Dermatology journal article on Marx's famous boils. http://reason.com/blog/show/123243.html

Can reality be that... real? Consider one of Marx's most quotable quotes - "The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day." (but this dialectic of political economy and zits probably does not completely explain the well-known alienated teenager's infatuation with Marx.)

Answer 4

Karl Marx's grave is a communist plot!

Answer 5

One of the most influential political philosophers to have ever have been born.

The gears of capitalism are oiled with the blood of workers.

Answer 6

The father of Communism?

Answer 7

A guy with a good idea that got perverted and subverted by Lenin and Stalin.

Answer 8

There is no easy way to say this. Well, to put it bluntly... he's dead. I am sorry to have to be the one to break that to you.

Answer 9

He was a Communist. He didn't approve of America or its inhabitants. In his eyes we were the enemy.

Answer 10

He's one krazy mother f*****.