Karl Marx

21

[quote=“Turenne”]I’m not sure what your point is? What does Marx’s flawed methodology have to do with Stalin and Khmer Rouge? The former is irrelevent to those despots; the latter, at best, adopted policies that were a bastardization of Marx’s ideas, some of which were highly perceptive and impressive, and some of which made the mistake in assuming the future was predictable like some kind of mathematical equation.

Like most radical thinkers, his legacy is mixed, but not because some lunatics took a very simple, very strangled version of his ideas and used them to dominate and subjugate. Blame that on human nature, not Marx.[/quote]

Sorry Turenne, a bit rattled from drink today… that was just a bit of a general rant rather than posing a question/ reply to you… I guess what i am saying is that human nature is the reason why Marxism/Socialism will never work and not blaming Marx. Russia, china, cambodia may be extreme versions of his ideas but all caputre the basics… Violent revolution by the peasants in order to do away with property. Granted they were led by utter fucking mad men but any Marxist society will always throw up a group of people out to serve their own interets, its human nature. Therefore i think we can never be free in the way marx intended…

22

I feel its only fair to tell you that the above quote posted by Bandage is as close to what Marx wrote in Das Kapital as the lyrics of Katy Perrys I Kissed a Girl.

In short, its an interweb hoax.

23

I feel duped. I was told about it at lunch last week by a mate (same one who goes on all male dinners with ex-school pals) and he forwarded on the quote later that day. Do you have any more information on the hoax, MBB?

24

Just got sent this from a mate about the mail that was goung round. Hard to know how right this Megan McArdle chick is, but that Marx thing didnt sound right to me either.

Faux Marx
14 Jan 2009 01:43 pm

  • Megan McArdle

This quote is making the rounds of Wall Street.

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.

Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

It’s been fifteen years since I read Das Kapital, and I’m not sure how much I retained even when I was young and hale. But it immediately set off my fake alarms. First, because it doesn’t sound remotely like anything I remember Marx saying–his core thesis was that falling wages would immiserate the working class, not that they’d be done in by their overdrafts. Second, because I do remember Marx spending huge chunks of Das Kapital grousing about the inadequacy of the housing supply for the working class, in very tedious detail. (I now appreciate, as I didn’t then, how valuable this is as a historic record. But it’s quite something to wade through.) And third, because no one in 1870 imagined the working class having access to bank credit. Poor people might get some time from the landlord, or a few weeks at the butcher, or they might run arrears and pay on account, but they did not buy substantial goods on credit. The first mass extension of credit to people who did not own land was the boom in installment buying that came in the 1920s.

Also, at least as I recall it, socialism was supposed to come 'round through violent revolution of the starving proletariat, not bank nationalisation. But as I say, it has been a long time.

Also, the quote just doesn’t feel right–it doesn’t sound like Marx. I can’t put my finger on why, exactly, especially since I’ve only read Marx in translation. I can say that it feels, like most of these hoaxes, a little too a propos, as if Marx were writing from the CNN green room.

And indeed, searching all three volumes for “houses” and “homes”, which are a pretty straight one-to-one translation, yields nothing that sounds remotely like this.

Every time I see one of these things, I wonder. Who the hell makes them up? And why? What do you get from passing your mediocre musings off as the work of a long-dead revolutionary?

“Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn’t make me Madonna. Never will.” ~ Joan Cusack, Working Girl