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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (29293)	9/27/2006 4:09:46 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541354

Level them off by transferring their money to the poor, sure, so that they aren't so rich and the poor aren't so poor. Egalitarian, like E said. You are mixing the crucial degree of redistribution. Marx wasn't talking about a careful leveling down to an egalitarian level, he advocated taking away capital, in effect, and making it a publicly-owned good. Bye bye capitalists through expropriation. The goal of making them "not so rich" but leaving them intact as a class was not on the table. That's what the man talked about in his writings, whatever educational level one was exposed to them, if ever. Anything supposedly "rooted" in that philosophy shouldn't actually be a 90-degree tangent to the meaning of the word Marxism. That's like saying that someone who wants to scale back affirmative action is rooted in the old National Party in South Africa, IMHO, or a fan of Mein Kampf.

To: Lane3 who wrote (29293)	9/27/2006 5:53:44 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 541354

Level them off by transferring their money to the poor, sure, so that they aren't so rich and the poor aren't so poor. Egalitarian, like E said. We could argue as to whether that's a position that's the dominant one of the Dem party at the moment. I don't think so. And I'm wistful for a time when it was. But egalitarianism is not Marxism. Not even close. There is, of course, the debate, long, intricate, fascinating, and troubling as to what Marxism is. But even at the roughest of cuts through that debate egalitarianism is not Marxism. Minimally, Marxism is about class struggle. And politics is such an instrument of the rich that one must work against it or wait until history resolves the contradictions in favor of the working class. The egalitarians see politics, even in the degraded form we see it today, as an instrument of change. Different tradition. More that of social democracy, the welfare state crowd from both the US and Britian, etc.