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It is in this sense that [ in a 1524 pamphlet ] Thomas Munzer declares it intolerable

"that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free."

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.
..... Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.

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http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm

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...Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism.

Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society. [34]

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http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

Reactionary Socialism
Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism
Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats(1) against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution......

......In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

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Originally posted by aka Mycroft:
Marx's essay on the "Jewish Question" was an early work written before he became an "historical materialist" (ie before he became a "Marxist").

Also, the essay has to be understood in the context of German society in 1843 as well as the debates among Hegelians at the time. Marx was actually arguing in favour of Jewish emancipation against the arguments of another Hegelian (Bauer?) against emancipating the Jews. I suggest reading Hal Draper's Marx and the Economic-Jew stereotype

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"Marx's essay on the "Jewish Question" was an early work written before he became an "historical materialist" (ie before he became a "Marxist"). That's false, the classification and the word for it do not need to co-exist for either to exist and his later works do not make his previous works false: they are an addition to, not a subtraction from nor a detraction or renounciation. I am not sure what your worry is about that document.

"Marx was actually arguing in favour of Jewish emancipation...." Yes, I know, but he was not arguing for capitalizing Judaism but for the Judaic proletariat to revolt the perverted form of Judaism. Would this Hal Draper also speak of a Christian stereotype?....I shall follow the link you provided. Thank you.

[ 30 January 2005: Message edited by: LeftRight ]

quote:

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"Marx's essay on the "Jewish Question" was an early work written before he became an "historical materialist" (ie before he became a "Marxist"). That's false,

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Actually, it's true. Marx was 24 at the time, still in his Hegelian phase and hadn't yet developed the economic materialist theories later seen in works such as Wage Labour & Capital, the Communist Manifesto etc.

quote:

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Would this Hal Draper also speak of a Christian stereotype?

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You'd be better to read what Draper says first. The Jewish economic stereotype was a specific feature of German thought in the mid-nineteenth century. There is no corresponding economic "Christian stereotype" at the time so there's no reason for Draper to refer to one.

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That's false, the classification and the word for it do not need to co-exist for either to exist and his later works do not make his previous works false

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It does when it contradicts Marx' later theories.

[ 30 January 2005: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

quote:

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Originally posted by aka Mycroft:

It does when it contradicts Marx' later theories.

[ 30 January 2005: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

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quote:

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Frederick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

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III
[Historical Materialism]

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The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong 1), is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.

What is, then, the position of modern Socialism in this connection?

(snip)

[5] A few figures may serve to give an approximate idea of the enormous expansive force of the modern means of production, even under capitalist pressure. According to Mr. Giffen, the total wealth of Great Britain and Ireland amounted, in round numbers in

1814 to £ 2,200,000,000,
1865 to £ 6,100,000,000,
1875 to £ 8,500,000,000.

As an instance of the squandering of means of production and of products during a crisis, the total loss in the German iron industry alone, in the crisis of 1873-78, was given at the second German Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21, 1878), as 22,750,000 pounds.

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Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

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Note the author is Frederick Engles.....If you wish the full version for print out, please go to the URL (link) provided above.

[ 10 February 2005: Message edited by: LeftRight ]

quote:

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quote:"Marx's essay on the "Jewish Question" was an early work written before he became an "historical materialist" (ie before he became a "Marxist"). That's false,

Actually, it's true. Marx was 24 at the time, still in his Hegelian phase and hadn't yet developed the economic materialist theories later seen in works such as Wage Labour & Capital, the Communist Manifesto etc.

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quote:

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Frederick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

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II
[Dialectics]

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In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the 18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.

(snip)
An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit, the new German philosophy has worked. Kant began his career by resolving the stable Solar system of Newton and its eternal duration, after the famous initial impulse had once been given, into the result of a historical process, the formation of the Sun and all the planets out of a rotating, nebulous mass. From this, he at the same time drew the conclusion that, given this origin of the Solar system, its future death followed of necessity. His theory, half a century later, was established mathematically by Laplace, and half a century after that, the spectroscope proved the existence in space of such incandescent masses of gas in various stages of condensation.

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.

(snip)

Table of Contents

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You may note that the registered author is Frederick Engels.

[ 10 February 2005: Message edited by: LeftRight ]

It is easy to find an English or French version of this well-known quote - I like to point out "Die Menschen" (people) rather than "Man" "L'homme" make their own history... and Tradition weighing like an ALP on the brains of the living... love that image.
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LeftRight, stop posting such long passages. You've included the reference - if the person has no choice but to read it on line he or she will do so. I've already read that work - eons ago- but it is VERY hard to read such a long text on a computer screen.

It is easy to find an English or French version of this well-known quote - I like to point out "Die Menschen" (people) rather than "Man" "L'homme" make their own history... and Tradition weighing like an ALP on the brains of the living... love that image.
----
LeftRight, stop posting such long passages. You've included the reference - if the person has no choice but to read it on line he or she will do so. I've already read that work - eons ago- but it is VERY hard to read such a long text on a computer screen.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living."

Ahem, LeftRight? I'll have to close this thread and/or edit your posts if you keep on like this. I would prefer that you edit your own posts to shorten them substantially and retain the weblinks.

Ta very much.

quote:

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Originally posted by LeftRight:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm

You may note that the registered author is Frederick Engels.

[ 10 February 2005: Message edited by: LeftRight ]

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A new German phlosophy on the one hand, a new German ideology on the other.

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C. German or “True” Socialism
The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of “Practical Reason” in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.

(snip)
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.(3)

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section C

As for the petty bourgeois and fascism, see here for Marxist theories of fascism:

Towards a Marxist Theory of Fascism

Dave Renton, 1997

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Originally posted by lagatta:
Fidel, I certainly agree with you about the complicity of US and other capitalists (and a lot of Brit aristocrats etc) with the various fascist regimes. However you seem to be misinterpreting what Mussolini meant by "corporate" power. Indeed fascism set out to crush the workers' movement (duh!) but their ideology was to replace adversarial trade unions with "corporations" of employers and workers in a sector, reminiscent of medieval guilds.

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I realize that the Duce coined the term, fascism. At least I think he did. And Franco did his part by executing hundreds of coal miners, and Hitler was "their" choice to stop the spread of communism into the west. I know that the misdeeds of the fascists are denounced on occasion. But "economic fascism" carried on through to this day, I believe. There are clever people I know who didn't realize that private banking and industry carried on in Nazi Germany as if nothing was wrong at the time. And today, people see nothing wrong with corporate lobbying of elected officials and federal contracts going to pay for "ghost" ad campaigns and rebuilding contracts in Iraq, a country that has suffered massive loss of human life and destruction since 1991.

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I hope it is evident I'm not clearing that up to defend Mussolini, who well deserved to be hung up by a meathook. But I am a bit of a "language Nazi", anti-fascist though I am.

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Originally posted by The Other Todd:
He was talking about the "True Socialists" as the ideological "talking heads" for the petty bourgeois of Germany; you really should have left in that stuff you cut out.

As for the petty bourgeois and fascism, see here for Marxist theories of fascism:

Towards a Marxist Theory of Fascism

Dave Renton, 1997

http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/old/old3.html

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Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862

A Treaty Against the Slave Trade

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Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 202;
Written: on May 18, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, May 22, 1862.

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Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude (of the others).

Feuerbach’s great achievement is:

(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned;

(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, positively based on itself.

Feuerbach explains the Hegelian dialectic (and thereby justifies starting out from the positive facts which we know by the senses) as follows:

Hegel sets out from the estrangement of substance (in logic, from the infinite, abstractly universal) – from the absolute and fixed abstraction; which means, put in a popular way, that he sets out from religion and theology.

Secondly, he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular (philosophy, annulment of religion and theology).

Thirdly, he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite – restoration of religion and theology.

Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself – as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself.

[ 22 February 2005: Message edited by: Surferosad ]

quote:

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Originally posted by The Other Todd:
Do you have some point you're trying to make?

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"...The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

quote:

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The International Workingmen's Association 1864

Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America
Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams
January 28, 1865 [A]

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Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Basgen;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

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Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

18 Greek Street, Soho.

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Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

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It is a case of describing the dull reciprocal pressure of all social spheres one on another, a general inactive ill-humor, a limitedness which recognizes itself as much as it mistakes itself, within the frame of government system which, living on the preservation of all wretchedness, is itself nothing but wretchedness in office.

What a sight! This infinitely proceeding division of society into the most manifold races opposed to one another by petty antipathies, uneasy consciences, and brutal mediocrity, and which, precisely because of their reciprocal ambiguous and distrustful attitude, are all, without exception although with various formalities, treated by their rulers as conceded existences. And they must recognize and acknowledge as a concession of heaven the very fact that they are mastered, ruled, possessed! And, on the other side, are the rulers themselves, whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number!

Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in a hand-to-hand fight, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him.

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In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm

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The worker is the subjective manifestation of the fact that capital is man wholly lost to himself, just as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact that labour is man lost to himself. But the worker has the misfortune to be a living capital, and therefore an indigent capital, one which loses its interest, and hence its livelihood, every moment it is not working. The value of the worker as capital rises according to demand and supply, and physically too his existence, his life, was and is looked upon as a supply of a commodity like any other. The worker produces capital, capital produces him — hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle. To the man who is nothing more than a worker — and to him as a worker — his human qualities only exist insofar as they exist for capital alien to him. Because man and capital are alien, foreign to each other, however, and thus stand in an indifferent, external and accidental relationship to each other, it is inevitable that this foreignness should also appear as something real. As soon, therefore, as it occurs to capital (whether from necessity or caprice) no longer to be for the worker, he himself is no longer for himself: he has no work, hence no wages, and since he has no existence as a human being but only as a worker, he can go and bury himself, starve to death, etc. The worker exists as a worker only when he exists for himself as capital; and he exists as capital only when some capital exists for him. The existence of capital is his existence, his life; as it determines the tenor of his life in a manner indifferent to him.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/second.htm

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