Re: Interview with Karl Marx

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- soula avramidis <soulaavramidis2002@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
>
> this Karl Marx is tame, domesticated and suitable
> for a western audience so much so that he could be
> in few years a candidate for the pentagon cabal.

Don't be silly. Just because he's not your sort of PC
firebrand doesn't make someone a sellout. Actually I
thought this was a very clever and rather accurate
picture of Marx, working from his actual views and
prejudices. He despised explicit moralizing. He look
the long view. He hated the parties of his time,
including the ones he worked with. He was ruthlessly
unsentimental.


> i like the way he demeaned Slavs; there was a
> definite flirt with the third Reich there.

The real Karl Marx had a low view of Slavs, although
he revised that towards the end of his life. It is,
morever, an instance, of Whosiz Law, mentioned in
another post on the list today, to drag in the Nazis;
a clear indication that rational discussion just
stopped. Just because Marx had racial prejudices, and
he he surely did, doesn't mean that he was a
proto-Nazi. Most people with such prejudices are not
Nazis.


> that democratic centralism and Hegel are simple
> anomalies unrelated to his thought is rather
> strange.

Although I think the anti-Hegelian view is wrong it
has a respectable pedigree. Althusser madea  career
out of arguing that MArx was no Hegelian.

Democratic centralsim is not an expression or a
concept that occurs in Marx. He has almost no
discussion about the nature of the party, betond
saying thatthe Communists impose no sectarian
principles on the workers' movement.

>
> what is really dangerous is when Marx ceases to be
> the nemesis of western culture and thought. attempts
> to bring him into mainstream simply like any other
> well meaning saint whose thoughts could not be
> practiced is the ultimate idealist trap.

Heaven forbid that anyone should learn from him; he
must be maintained as the Other, The Enemy. Any
acknowledgement that Marx was part of western
civilization must lead to prostration before the
bourgeoisie. To . . . gasp . . . bourgeois liberalism.
Of course I am a bourgeois liberal myself.

>
> Marx is alive in the struggle that will bring down
> imperialism and will never be incorporated willy
> nilly into classical zestern thought.
> the very thought is appaulling

Odd, them that Engels saw Marx has realizing the ends
of classical German philosophy, and insisted that most
of the elements of his thought were not original,
including the importance of class, the centrality of
the economy, the law of value, etc.

Sorry, Soula, what's left of Marxism are elements of a
pretty good theory of capitalism, a  theory that is
firmly rooted in the classical Western Enlightement
tradition. Lenin was right about this when he talked
about the three sources of Marxism: French socialism,
English (Scottish) political economy, and German
philosophy. The movementw ith the red banners and the
hammers and sickles and the marchinhg workers --
that's over. I am as sorry about it as you, but Marx
was never one for sentiment,a nd he would discourage
self-deception. He would not have wanted you to be a
"Marxist" either, a  term he never used. Engels
either.

jks

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