11-10-2009, 03:49 AM
Quote:Marx was probably the most misunderstood philosophers of that era, so much so that at one point he declared in response to French revolutionaries, "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist". I don't believe Marx would have been a supporter of the Soviet model, or its meager shadow in Cuba.I don't think Marx was particularly misunderstood. The Communist Manifesto is quite clear - Marx favoured revolutions, dictatorship of the proletariat, the whole nine yards. Certainly he envisioned something more broadly based, perhaps more along the lines of the abortive German revolutions of the 1920s, but it seems clear to me that he would have approved of the Russian and Cuban revolutions. At least, he seemed to advocate revolutions quite like them.
That he found the appropriation of his name by particular French revolutionaries to be distasteful when he was in the middle of an argument with them is hardly a demonstration that he was widely misunderstood, or that he did not advocate the philosophy widely attached to his name.
Quote:Capitalism goes back to that point at which the first person decided to trade to another the first bauble for something the other "owned".I think it's a little more modern than that. Ownership is a much more fundamental concept than capitalism - what I have may be for personal use, but if it does not represent value that I can put towards the creation of future wealth, then it's not capital in any meaningful sense. Certainly if there is no capital, there is no capitalism - and I would say that capitalism represents the mature flowering of capital as a major social force, rather than just the existence of any capital at all.
-Jester