[Craig] But it's not just the freedom to own property that Marx is against (thoughthis alone would be enough to disqualify him as a champion of freedom.)As the quotes from Marx's "Communist Manifesto" show, he was against: "representative government"...
[Arlo] Marx felt that _all_ government would disappear, and that local communes would govern collectively. [Craig] , "bourgeois competition", "bourgeois freedom of the press", "bourgeois legislation", "bourgeois liberty and equality","Free Trade',... [Arlo] All replaced by communist variants of the same (except legislation). There would be no competition, because you would not put your neighbor out of business (duplicating his trade) because he/she mattered to you, not simply your opportunistic and selfish desires. If he was doing poorly, others would help him do better, or help him orient to a different trade. The key thing to remember is that, for Marx, this was not imposed top-down. He firmly believed that this is the way people were by nature, and they acted selfishly only because of the great bourgeoise dupe that had been thrust upon them. [Craig] "individuality" (!), "culture" (!) and "law" (!). This is a little bit of translation and usage change here. "Individuality" is better translated as "individualism", which Marx used to describe selfish, anti-social, anti-communal behavior. With culture, Marx is referring to the commodity fetishism and nationalism that defines bourgeoise culture. Indeed, Marx believed that such artificial boundaries would just disappear because they would not be important to people. As for "law", with the abolition of property ownership, "law" would be returned to each local commune to decide and socially construct as it suited their own best interests. [Platt] To paraphrase Orwell in "1984", for Marx "Freedom is slavery". [Arlo] In your interpretation of the word, fair enough. Like I said, Marx denied that freedom equates to property. He saw this as just one so many myths thrust upon people by the mercantilist elite to enslave the population in a never ending cycle of commodity fetishism and property acquisition. You, I know, do synonomize freedom and property. A debate we started once before, but I don't recall where it ended. I found a good summarization of Marx's ideas on communism on Wikipedia. "According to the Marxist argument for communism, the main characteristic of human life in class society is alienation; and communism is desirable because it entails the full realization of human freedom.[7] Marx here follows Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in conceiving freedom not merely as an absence of restraints but as action with content. (McLean and McMillan, 2003) They believed that communism allowed people to do what they want, but also put humans in such conditions and such relations with one another that they would not wish to exploit, or have any need to." (Wikipedia) moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
