Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (430851)	10/28/2008 1:48:42 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1573850

"Obama is indeed a Marxist" What leads you to this conclusion?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (430851)	10/28/2008 1:54:17 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573850

Obama is indeed a Marxist If I repeatedly misused silicon technology terms, I think you get annoyed over time. Well the same applies to me.........you repeatedly relate Obama to Marxism and that is incorrect. Here are some of the basic ideas of Marxism. To be a true Marxist, you have to absolve yourself of any belief in capitalism. That is not, I repeat, not true of Obama: Main ideas [of Marxism] The main ideas to come out of Marx and Engels' collective works include: Exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of paying workers less than the full value of their labour, in order to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit. This profit is not however moderated in terms of risk vs. return. Alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" ("Gattungswesen", usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). He believes that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour.[6] Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated. Base and superstructure: Marx and Engels use the “base-structure” metaphor to explain the idea that the totality of relations among people with regard to “the social production of their existence” forms the economic basis, on which arises a superstructure of political and legal institutions. To the base corresponds the social consciousness which includes religious, philosophical, and other main ideas. The base conditions both, the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production causes social revolutions, and the resulting change in the economic basis will sooner or later lead to the transformation of the superstructure.[7] For Marx, though, this relationship is not a one way process - it is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure in the first instance and remains the foundation of a form of social organization which then can act again upon both parts of the base-structure metaphor.[citation needed] The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one, not a distinction between actual entities "in the world".[citation needed] Class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the awareness, both of itself and of the social world around it, that a social class possess, and its capacity to act in its own rational interests based on this awareness. Thus class consciousness must be attained before the class may mount a successful revolution. Other methods of revolutionary action have been developed however, such as vanguardism. Ideology: Without offering a general definition for ideology[8], Marx on several instances has used the term to designate the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, “ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces”.[9] Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, as well as its ruling ideas, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. As Marx said famously in The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”.[10] Therefore the ideology of a society is of enormous importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor as capital ~ a degradation of human life).[citation needed] Historical materialism: Historical materialism was first articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies). Political economy: The term "political economy" originally meant the study of the conditions under which production was organized in the nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy, then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit that is the result of that activity. Political economy studies the means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests itself in economic activity. en.wikipedia.org