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Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

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Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#51

Post by modo_mario »

fvdessen wrote: post #12
aaron-santos wrote: post #2

What a weird piece. The heart of the argument seems to be that if one is to be a Marxist that one must be 1) poor, and 2) chaste and to be otherwise is hypocritical. Just state the point and be done with it.

How is it not hypocritical to argue for equality and wealth redistribution and at the same time hoard wealth for yourself ?

I feel like my govs laws over the past decade (one major party of which i know for sure is in bed with a major real estate development company) has allowed housing prices to grow way too quickly in a country where they're already too high and has disproportionately favoured landlords and scummy real estate agencies.

I think this is terrible for society and the younger generations.

If I was offered the option of becoming a landlord or the like and making good bank that way of this whole shitfest I'd gladly and quickly accept and on the other side donate some of the money to campaigning for a party against this mess. Nobody would to come around and call me a hypocrite for that and expect me to think highly of them.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#52

Post by claudiawerner »

fvdessen wrote: post #12
aaron-santos wrote: post #2

What a weird piece. The heart of the argument seems to be that if one is to be a Marxist that one must be 1) poor, and 2) chaste and to be otherwise is hypocritical. Just state the point and be done with it.

How is it not hypocritical to argue for equality and wealth redistribution and at the same time hoard wealth for yourself ?

The Marxist position is not about 'equality' or wealth distribution, and there are at lease two pieces of work by Marx criticizing those concepts explicitly. Marxist thought is a critique of the production process of capital, and does not concern the wealth of individuals at all - Marx himself went to pains to distance himself from that interpretation of his work.

So I'm not sure where the presumption that a socialist must give away his wealth or live modestly comes from. Marx and Engels saw the first step of revolutionary activity being to understand and investigate, bit they were also part of various practical organisations such as the IWA, and the Manifesto was itself an on-the-nose propaganda document.

Why doesn't the Queen give away her throne for the good of her country? Because the boost to the economy from the tourism generated around it helps even more. As it turns out, we can imagine that the world would have been very different and the pair of theorists much less consequential had they spent their energies on philanthropy rather than burning the midnight oil at the British Library.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#53

Post by anoncake »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #38
ChomskyNormal4m wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world was communist from the time cave paintings were drawn in France tens of thousands of years ago, to about 10000 years ago. Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries. In the US, with two economic crises in the past decade, Covid at a peak, global warming, racial strife, riots on streets etc., I am not sure what is working in the real world with…

No, private property, which is a capitalist institution, has existed since prehistoric times, probably from even since before Homo Sapiens arose. Proto-property-rights are also observed in the Animal Kingdom, with principles like "first possession", where the first animal to the kill is less likely to give up the kill, and the second animal more likely to give it up, often governing animal interactions. In fact, game…

What you are describing is not private property, but personal property.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#54

Post by fnord123 »

throwaway11236 wrote: post #41

> The same formula has been known to apply to those on the demotic right of the spectrum, too: the reader may have his or her own list of candidates for inclusion among the ranks of what could be called champagne populism. False equivalence, since rightwing populists don't advocate wealth redistribution and preach egalitarianism.

They do advocate wealth redistribution: redistributing it to the wealthy.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#55

Post by [deleted] »

alberto_ol wrote: post #46
noodles_nomore wrote: post #18

> "It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. That is why it is worth carrying out." This citation of Oscar Wilde made me curious. It's from his essay The Soul of Man under Communism[1], which turns out to be a really good counterview to the article itself. [1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...

I think it's "the soul of man under socialism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_Under_Socialis...

[deleted]

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#56

Post by dragonwriter »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #38
ChomskyNormal4m wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world was communist from the time cave paintings were drawn in France tens of thousands of years ago, to about 10000 years ago. Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries. In the US, with two economic crises in the past decade, Covid at a peak, global warming, racial strife, riots on streets etc., I am not sure what is working in the real world with…

No, private property, which is a capitalist institution, has existed since prehistoric times, probably from even since before Homo Sapiens arose. Proto-property-rights are also observed in the Animal Kingdom, with principles like "first possession", where the first animal to the kill is less likely to give up the kill, and the second animal more likely to give it up, often governing animal interactions. In fact, game…

> No, private property, which is a capitalist institution

No, it hasn't. “Private property”, in the sense in which it is a defining institution of capitalism (ownership of the means of production by an individual as marketable property distinct from. ownership of or personal jurisdiction over land), requires the conceptual separation of individual property and public authority that is one of the characteristic features of the transition from pre-capitalist (specifically feudal in most of the West) to capitalist property relations. It is not something that universally existed from prehistoric times. You seem to be confusing the particular sense of “private property” associated with capitalism with the more generic concept of individual property, which is necessary to capitalism but not distinctly capitalist.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#57

Post by afiori »

gitrog wrote: post #45
busterarm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same thing with comunism, I have known in my life people I would be slightly afraid to see holding power flying that banner and we all know what happened many times in history, and while this can be said of many ideology in my opinion the comunism cluster looks like it is trying to sweep the dust under the rug. Having spent much of my early twenties embedded with some of today's more prominent socialist activists i…

Surely socialist activists are no closer to having any sort of power now than they did when you were in your twenties? Also, would you mind to be a bit more specific about who these people are? In my experience Americans aren't particularly good at identifying what constitutes a socialist to the rest of the world.

Comunist are also quite bad at that, I have met moderate reasonable people under the comunism banner that were sorta ok with other people calling themselves stalinists.

For example for all the criticism that you can point against religion most religious communities openly and clearly oppose and denounce terrorism.

In my view comunism was never able to separate itselft from a revolutionary mindset, and so agitators and extremists were always (since Marx, at least) considered a planned and likely step.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#58

Post by jiofih »

This entire article focuses on the upbringing and bourgeoise conditions of Engels and Marx without making an actual point - I believe the goal is to expose some form of contradiction in these men thinking of the workers class struggles?

Truth is, there is none. It’s just that most of the thinking is done by people who are relatively well-off in life, everyone else is too busy “making a living”.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#59

Post by boomboomsubban »

syl_sau wrote: post #37
telaelit wrote: post #28

If you haven’t already read The Communist Manifesto I highly recommend that you do, it’s super short and easy to understand. Even if you’re an anti-communist you should read it to get a better understanding of what communism is. There has been so much anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades in the US that many people don’t even know the first thing about communism and socialism and will just shut the…

Funnily enough, there's also a whole lot of people spreading supposedly "communist" ideas who haven't read an inch of Marx and the likes. They often tend to congregate towards campuses but sometimes you even got tenured professors who seem to only output such verbiage for the social benefit they gather from it (being seen as warrior of justice). The marxist narrative seems to be a social practice more than an establi…

>Tell a young "marxist" what Das Kapital says of e.g. immigration and watch them decompose before your eyes... Anyway, no judgement here, just a personal observation.

Marx's view on immigration was largely that capitalists use it to pit the working class against itself, and that the nation state was a construct of capitalism. I'm curious why you think a Marxist would take an issue with that.

Re: Engels: The Communist as Hedonist

#60

Post by jiofih »

jevgeni wrote: post #48
dragonwriter wrote: post #39

> Of course, Engels is far from the only example of the leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people Yeah, it's kind of to be expected: theorists (firebrand or not) are for obvious reasons disproportionately of the intelligentsia, and under capitalism (or the modern mixed economy) even the proletarian intelligentsia (much less the petit and, even moreso, haut bo…

That’s not the same as living in excess while preaching solidarity.

Last time I checked communism was not a charity or religion.
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