"He forgets that he has only destroyed the fantastic and spectral form assumed by the idea of “Fatherland”, etc., in the brain of the “youth”, but that he has still not touched these ideas, insofar as they express actual relations."

Marx's Fetish of the real/actual/material shows in that quote. In fact Marx's entire critique of Stirner is based on his objectivist fetish. Contrast that to his critique of Feurbach where he does the opposite by throwing a social constructivist critique of Feurbach's "devine human" which is based on the devine god which Marx righfully sees as a reified spook. Unfortunately he does not follow his own advice in relation to his own idea of the real.

This ambiguity can be seen throughout Marx's work. It is quite tragic because it prevents him from being the trully great thinker he could have been.
He is at is best when he is waylaying capital in his social constructavist mode, he is at his worst when he talks about historical progression. The writings on india are but one tragic example. One side of his thinking can give you the Jacques Camattes of the world, the other can give you the Lenins and Stalins and Fidels(including the moron who posts here of course).

Today the phenomenologists and post-structuralists have gone on to enforce what people like Stirner set out to do(minus the cartesian subjective narcisism of course). Capitalism does not exist outside of the text, and can be deconstructed and destroyed as easily as it was created. It also helps to see things in terms of power as opposed to economics. The former being more open ended and contingent.

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Vigilante: Capitalism does not exist outside of the text, and can be deconstructed and destroyed as easily as it was created.

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Capital isn't simply an idea, not even "the" Idea. It's a social relation between people. It's those relations that Marx disentangles from other aspects of life, and draws attention to the social relations of production as key. This sounds like Margaret Thatcher saying that society doesn't exist.

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V:It also helps to see things in terms of power as opposed to economics. The former being more open ended and contingent.

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On his first point he is assuming that there is a dichotome between ideas and material to begin with.
What is capitalism but simply discourse in action.

On the next point he calls a contingent analysis of power "abstract". It is no more abstract then the logic of the universe itself which has no primary or exclusive ticker as post-einsteinian/heisenbergian discourse has shown. As various writers from the 60s onward have demonstrated, various phenomena including racism,sexism, anthropocentrism,the state and technology ect have a logic of their own everybit as significant as capitalism or anyother mode of production. There is a reciporical effect that all those mentioned give each other. And the reason historical materialism as Marx and company defined it should be rejected is because as I pointed out above, it is based on an unessesary dichotome between ideas and material reality. It is also a reflection of economic discourse which was dominating everything. For Marx and company, materialism was litterally economics. And economics is not even close to being everything in the realm of human phenomena.

[ 14 February 2006: Message edited by: Vigilante ]

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...unessesary dichotome between ideas and material reality

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They're just different aspects of being, of existence, of material and spiritual realities. Why should it bother you as unnecessary? What a strange sort of remark.

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For Marx and company, materialism was litterally economics. And economics is not even close to being everything in the realm of human phenomena.

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This is the same old same old mis-re-presentation that's been heard over and over again. It's still wrong. It's wrong because the entire philosophical and theoretical foundation of Marxism is in the great humanist tradition that enriched Germany's history; a tradition that included titans like Goethe, Schelling, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach and so on who can hardly be called primitive economic materialists. And Marx was a most outstanding student of that history and tradition to which he belonged. [Edited to add: Marx was the most outstanding student of history in history.]

[ 14 February 2006: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by Vigilante:
For those who've read Marx in any depth, you might notice that he never comes to definitive decision between social constructivism and objectivism. Take one of his rivals and fellow young hegelian Max Stirner, he was a full blown social constructivist who hailed the supremacy of the subject over the real as hegal defined it. While Marx was greatly influenced by Stirner's definitive work Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, he was not willing to fully accept the constructivist pro-agency message of "Saint Max". While he was not as into the real fetish as Hegal was, he still wanted to retain a certain ammount of it. In his definitive critique of capitalism, one of the biggest mistakes he makes is to try and make capitalism 'extra discoursive' and give it that real punch that Stirner would rightfully have seen as a spooky abstraction. Take this quote from him for example

"He forgets that he has only destroyed the fantastic and spectral form assumed by the idea of “Fatherland”, etc., in the brain of the “youth”, but that he has still not touched these ideas, insofar as they express actual relations."

Marx's Fetish of the real/actual/material shows in that quote. In fact Marx's entire critique of Stirner is based on his objectivist fetish. Contrast that to his critique of Feurbach where he does the opposite by throwing a social constructivist critique of Feurbach's "devine human" which is based on the devine god which Marx righfully sees as a reified spook. Unfortunately he does not follow his own advice in relation to his own idea of the real.

This ambiguity can be seen throughout Marx's work. It is quite tragic because it prevents him from being the trully great thinker he could have been.
He is at is best when he is waylaying capital in his social constructavist mode, he is at his worst when he talks about historical progression. The writings on india are but one tragic example. One side of his thinking can give you the Jacques Camattes of the world, the other can give you the Lenins and Stalins and Fidels(including the moron who posts here of course).

Today the phenomenologists and post-structuralists have gone on to enforce what people like Stirner set out to do(minus the cartesian subjective narcisism of course). Capitalism does not exist outside of the text, and can be deconstructed and destroyed as easily as it was created. It also helps to see things in terms of power as opposed to economics. The former being more open ended and contingent.

If Marx and that stream of thought had only overcome this. One must ask what if.

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Originally posted by Vigilante:
For Marx and company, materialism was litterally economics. And economics is not even close to being everything in the realm of human phenomena.

[ 14 February 2006: Message edited by: Vigilante ]

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You seem to be reading but not comprehending what it is you're reading, V. I never took you for being an authority on Marx, and I still don't. Never mind 'Capital' and the rest of Marx' writings, which apparently has given you cerebral wind burn, Marx and Engels essentially said that there is no economy.

It's not, "It's the economy, stupid." It's that there is no bloody economy. Marx' works were all encompassing as far as human endevours are concerned, and he never claimed to have completed his works. Marx was not a philosopher. He was a thinker and much more than you'll ever lay claim to.

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They're just different aspects of being, of existence, of material and spiritual realities. Why should it bother you as unnecessary? What a strange sort of remark.

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Well to start off I do not believe that spiritual and material are separate entiteis. They are both things we learn about throug discoursive relationships. If you take the opinion that 'a rock is just a rock' then I suppose that dichotome makes sense.

Anyway Fidel and Beltov are mistaken if they think that I am saying that Marx wanted to be the communist version of Adam Smith. I am well aware of his critique of political economomy. What I'm saying is while he did see it as a social construction, he also saw it in a partly objective sense. From this he looked at phenomena as being primarly predicated on the phenomena of economics. This led to a reification of theory and practace that many marxists to this day have not snapped out of. Inevitably you did have people in the name of Marx constructing economic theories. The fact that many adhere to the fetish of developement for example is part of the sad legacy of marx and that stream of thought's objectivist side. Fidel is of course a prototypical example of the worst case scenerio and what that side of marx's thought can do in the wrong hands. He does a far greater insult to Karl then I ever could.

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he is at his worst when he talks about historical progression.

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I think that's true, and I have a simpler explanation of that limitation. Marx was a "progressive" of his times and so presumed a fairly uncomplicated, straight-line history of progress, the latter being material in the first place, with social and cultural progress dependent upon development but also following that straight line upwards, ever upwards.

As a student of cultural and social history, I find that underlying assumption naive - well, wrong, actually - and from a political pov I would also say it is clearly ethnocentric, Eurocentric.

And it does tempt him to say some clunky things - the famous line, eg, about everything in history happening twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce - that's not wrong, exactly, but it is pretty superficial given the tradition he was working in, given the much more subtle reflections on historical cycles some of his predecessors had made.

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And it does tempt him to say some clunky things - the famous line, eg, about everything in history happening twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce - that's not wrong, exactly, but it is pretty superficial given the tradition he was working in, given the much more subtle reflections on historical cycles some of his predecessors had made. Here's the line in context...

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Skdadl:

I think Marx intended that line to be a casual observation about a particular political event, using a vaguely remembered line from Hegel as its premise. I don't think he was formulating any sort of theory of history.

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Hegel remarks somewhere

that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

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So you can see that Marx didn't even know where Hegel had supposedly written the "everything happens twice" line. I suspect he was just appropriating and ammending it for his own purposes, because he thought it an apt description of certain political events.

From the same website...

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History Repeats Itself?

Marx never believed that “history repeats itself,” but in a famous quote he said:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” [Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonapatre, Chapter 1.]

Marx makes similar points in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, and Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and in passing in his article, The House of Hohenzollern.

Possible sources in Hegel are The Philosophy of Right, §347 and The Philosophy of History, §32-33 though another version of this work published as Introduction to The Philosophy of History, published in 1837, said:

“A coup d’état is sanctioned as it were in the opinion of the people if it is repeated. Thus, Napoleon was defeated twice and twice the Bourbons were driven out. Through repetition, what at the beginning seemed to be merely accidental and possible, becomes real and established.”

but this is hardly the point being made by Marx. See The Philosophy of History, where Hegel contrasts Nature, where “there is nothing new under the Sun,” with History where there is always Development.

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One of the best summaries of historical materialism can be found in Georgi Plekhanov's The Development of the Monist View of History which makes it very clear what sort of an anti-dualism Marxism is. Plekhanov shows that Marx had just as healthy a disdain for eclectic dualistic twaddle as his theoretical mentor, Hegel, did. (Plekhanov wrote The Deveopment of the Monist View of History using the pseudonym N.Beltov. I'm happy to honour old Georgi by resurrecting his underground name. )

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...if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with their living conditions, if their "existence" does not in the least correspond to their "essence", then ...this is an unavoidable misfortune which must be borne quietly....The explanation that all such contradictions are inevitable abnormalities does not essentially differ from the consolation which the Blessed Mas Stirner offers to the discontented, saying that this contradiction is their own contradiction and this predicament their own predicament, whereupon they should either set their minds at ease, keep their disgust to themselves, or revolt against it in some fantastic way.

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(The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker, pp. 168-169.)

Console yourself with an unjust world. This is Saint Max's advice. Marx had much better advice that has stood the test of time. It is the undying advice of solidarity and internationalism and of struggle to make a better world. Marx rocks. At a time when German thinkers had demolished primitive religious beliefs and secularized the history of Christianity (see Strauss's bio of Jesus or Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity) Saint Max would have turned the clock back. Yea, right, Vigilante. Meet the new anarchist, same as the old one.

[ 15 February 2006: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by Vigilante:

Anyway Fidel and Beltov are mistaken if they think that I am saying that Marx wanted to be the communist version of Adam Smith. I am well aware of his critique of political economomy. What I'm saying is while he did see it as a social construction, he also saw it in a partly objective sense. From this he looked at phenomena as being primarly predicated on the phenomena of economics. This led to a reification of theory and practace that many marxists to this day have not snapped out of. Inevitably you did have people in the name of Marx constructing economic theories. The fact that many adhere to the fetish of developement for example is part of the sad legacy of marx and that stream of thought's objectivist side. Fidel is of course a prototypical example of the worst case scenerio and what that side of marx's thought can do in the wrong hands. He does a far greater insult to Karl then I ever could.

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Actually, I must extend an apology to V here. I've been rather rough on him, and rightfully so after some of the rants against Cuba, which to me, made no sense at all. I think you know why as well.

And I have to disagree with you wholeheartedly wrt to Marx' followers. Marx knew that the 'capitalists' were making an appeal to scientific reasoning on economics and moving quickly to "reify" those intellectual arguments for private property and economy by making them the law of the land. It was a war on the common good for the sake of the few. The future of your organic-anarchist derriere was at stake, too V. Intellectuals had decided that economics should be a scientific study in universities everywhere. And Smith's homo economicus was going to be the model human being acting within this new scientific area of study. Socialists like Karl Polanyi would later show that the science was deeply flawed and using Marx' theories to guide him. Polanyi realized that homo economicus was a farce, and that no one is driven to act by self-interest alone. Smith said that self-interest of the butcher and the baker would serve everyone's material needs. But enlightened thinkers began to realize that material needs do not define all of humanity. We're capable of more than self-interest. People have other innate motivations, like caring about others, philanthopy, civic mindedness and desires to work toward a common good. Todays socialists have come to realize that by ignoring the full range of human behaviours, those early Smithian economists were attempting to make the underlying mathematics behind their new science less complex. Less complex because to reduce human nature to a single motivational behaviour for the sake of juggling fewer equations would not only distort real human behaviour by rewarding only self-interest, it would distort economic results at the same time. Self-interest today is manfest as greed and vast inequalities in our economy. Lord Keynes, Baron of Tilton and fabian socialist is our connection with the past and Karl Marx. Everything wrong with our economy today can be traced to appalling greed. We have no free markets in clean air or water or affordable housing. It's not safe to walk certain neighborhoods in North and Central America because people have to sell their lives in order to live. Long live Karl Marx.

[ 15 February 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Rufus P: I do hope you're not going to construct Vigilante as representative of Anarchists, either in general or on babble in particular?

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Anyone who makes reference to Max Stirner approvingly must know that he was the virtual founder of anarchistic individualism.

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Marx was a "progressive" of his times and so presumed a fairly uncomplicated, straight-line history of progress, the latter being material in the first place, with social and cultural progress dependent upon development but also following that straight line upwards, ever upwards.

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Skadl it's been decades since I studied this so could you please refresh my memory (since I do not recall having *ever* read such a thing by Marx) where he said anything to this extent?

It seems to me that the very idea of a dialectic contradicts your statement.

[ 15 February 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

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VanLuke: It seems to me that the very idea of a dialectic contradicts your statement.

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Marx definitely inherited something akin to Hegel's Idea when he asserted the inevitability of a working class, socialist revolution, just as Hegel asserted his Idea that reason governs history. However, no serious Marxist today asserts that socialism is inevitable - just that it is necessary and possible. The new approach is more dialectical.

It seems to me that we're both saying the same thing (your comment about Hegel's Idea notwithstanding).

What I reacted to (and maybe I'm misinterpreting skadl, in which case I offer my apologies) is this caricature of Marx's thought (shared by many who call themselves Marxist) of inevitable stages in history. Rostow did it in his Stages of Economic Growth (claiming to be a critique of Marx, while copying a lot from him) and it was the reason why Marx wrote to some French contemporaries 'tout ce que je sais, c'est que je ne suis pas marxiste' after they had written to him stating why they thought of themselves as marxist.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
[QB]Stages, yes.

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I'd like to add that even that is more complex than appears at first sight. (I'm not saying you didn't know this, N. Beltov)

Note the fascination of Marx and Engels with the Mir (an ancient form of Russian co-operative) as a possible form of economic organisation after a succesful socialist revolution.

The Mir continued to exist in spite of Peter the Great's early form of state capitalism (cum feudalism).

I certainly don't pretend to speak for anarchists or anyone for that matter. However I have a suspicion that you have a very narrow view of what anarchism is and has been eptistomologically. Have you even heard of the insurrectionists or the green anarchists? Anarchism is not stuck in the 19th century as you seem to think.

Now to get to Beltov's assanine assumptions of Mad Max. His views here suggest to me that he has probably never read Kaspar in any depth whatsoever. If Stirner is so blasse about the conditions around him why does he tell the subject to be an insurrectionist against what ever dominates it? Why does he call for a union of egoists? Cetainly Stirner was no revolutionary in the 19th century sense, but with the instrumentalist mode of thought that constituted revolutionary discourse, I could not entirely blame him. The 1960s european backlash against Marxian dialectics which were sufficating the role of the subject is proof of his reservations, that and how revolutions turned out in practace. Also if post-structural discourse tell us anything it is that the idea of a revolution should not be localized in a symbolic sense. And Max's point about peoples suffering is their own is not wrong at all. Opression is as molecular as it is molar. Like revolution it cannot be localized in any spatial realm. Capitalism ticks not just because of the CEOs in high places, it goes on because EVERYONE is acting on the discourse at hand from the sewage worker to Conrad Black. If we are to be serious about losing those chains it is essential that we first see what an abstraction something like capitalism is. Beyond that we have to see the web of opression that we all put each other into in a multi-dimentional sense. The disposessed male worker might be beating the shit out of his wife and kids on one hand, and cockfighting on the other. As I said, all power and domination acts according to a text, and that text is perpetuated by all of us. Stirner saw this and people like Wilhelm Reich, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleaze have backed him up on that. As far as him being an individualist goes, he is certainly not one in the bougious sense(as marxist seem to perpetuate) As pointed obove, he did see the need for a union of egiosts. Besides anarchists have always tried to point out that there is not a dichotome between individual and social. What is social but a collection of unique ones. And in the area of revolution, revolt starts with you ultimately from the ground up. The agency of a revoltion on a mass scale should be one of individuals coming together, not enslaving themselves to any instrumentalist vision. Essentially it should be everyone for themselves.

Now if there is one thing to call Stirner out on it would be the narcistic nature of his subjectivity. I believe he bases the subect on Cartesian assumptions as opposed to say what Heiddeger did. If you accept the fact that existance precedes all, then you have to accept that you exist contingently with other existances.
Stirner assumes wrongfully that the subject is independant of this. Besides this kink in his thougt and maybe some other things, He more or less stands out for being one of the first people to seriously critique all fixiated ideologies, both human and godly.

Fidel has not really challenged what I said. He uses Karl Polyani, the tpye of person I am talking about. He basically tries to propose a counter-economics to the classics which basically comes down to reorganising capital and industry. And you have a misunderstanding of what Smith meant by self-interest. For him it did not essentially mean greed. It can mean greed, but it can also mean taking a bullet for your friend. If you observe the few remaining primitive societies you will see that self-interest is pretty raw. As long as their is equal access for everyone to have their own interest equally(as is more the case in small scale less complex societies)you will get the most egalitarian results.

Now onto the question of Marx and linear history, while he certainly was not deterministic, he was linear in outlook. He gave a tacid acceptance to what had come before leading up to capitalism, and he begruginly accepted that imperialism in certain areas was a good thing as it would lay the groundwork for the productive forces so his idea of communism would come out. Again it is that ugly objective side tugging. Michel Foucault critiques him well in The Archeology of Knowledge on this point. History is ultimately a multi-dimentional phenomena which is dialectic and chaotic, micro and macro in phenomena.

[ 15 February 2006: Message edited by: Vigilante ]

[ 15 February 2006: Message edited by: Vigilante ]

[ 15 February 2006: Message edited by: Vigilante ]

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If Stirner is so blasse about the conditions around him why does he tell the subject to be an insurrectionist against what ever dominates it?

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Yes, let's "be insurrectionists" against cloudy days and such. That's the sort of "insurrectionist" Stirner was.

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Why does he call for a union of egoists?

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Because everyone, in Stirner's view, ought to view others only as a means of achieving their own ends. His social ideal is precisely this "union". Stirner's book is an ode to selfishness. But I repeat myself.

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Also if post-structural discourse tell us anything it is that the idea of a revolution should not be localized in a symbolic sense. And Max's point about peoples suffering is their own is not wrong at all. Opression is as molecular as it is molar. Like revolution it cannot be localized in any spatial realm.

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What a steaming pile, and what an overblown excuse for inaction and indifference to others. I hope you're not paying a lot of money for someone to teach you this stuff.

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Now onto the question of Marx and linear history, while he certainly was not deterministic, he was linear in outlook. He gave a tacid acceptance to what had come before leading up to capitalism, and he begruginly accepted that imperialism in certain areas was a good thing as it would lay the groundwork for the productive forces so his idea of communism would come out.

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Since imperialism really only developed after Marx died, it's remarkable that he was able to accept it as you claim. And I didn't know Marx even believed in the afterlife. < snerk >

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History is ultimately a multi-dimentional phenomena which is dialectic and chaotic, micro and macro in phenomena.

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Stirner viewed history as a product of ideas and believed that social relations could be changed by "getting over" the dominant concepts. He was completely out of touch with actual social relations.

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Originally posted by Vigilante:
Fidel has not really challenged what I said. He uses Karl Polyani, the tpye of person I am talking about. He basically tries to propose a counter-economics to the classics which basically comes down to reorganising capital and industry. And you have a misunderstanding of what Smith meant by self-interest. For him it did not essentially mean greed. It can mean greed, but it can also mean taking a bullet for your friend. If you observe the few remaining primitive societies you will see that self-interest is pretty raw.

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I didn't say that Smith was able to foresee the appalling greed of ENRONg, World CON and Halliburton corporations. Smith actually expressed worry that businessmen of the same trade would collude with one another against the public and create false scarcity and price gouging.

But Smith's kind are now saying that the economy should be all encompassing in our daily lives to every extreme where it never was at any time in the history of people. "There is no such thing as society." - Maggie

Marx didn't approve of the whole coercive relationship between worker and parasite. ~(approximating Marx) "There is no such thing as economy,(stupid)"

And Polanyi pointed to the very unscientific aspect of the economic model based on a single human behaviour. He said that the economic results can only be distorted because the model is wrong.

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As long as their is equal access for everyone to have their own interest equally(as is more the case in small scale less complex societies)you will get the most egalitarian results.

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And what will anarchists do when fascists come to confiscate their land and arrest them for wanting to live free lives outside of fascist society, which would have meant pretty much everywhere had your Chiang Kai Chek defeated the Maoists and Hitler enslaved Russia and the world.
If you don't approve of Fidel, then what about Fulgencio Batista and his secret police?. Who sets the stage for your meak, organic subsistence existence ?. Don't you have to be able to imagine it before it can become real ?.

[ 16 February 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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As pointed obove, he did see the need for a union of egiosts. Besides anarchists have always tried to point out that there is not a dichotome between individual and social. What is social but a collection of unique ones. And in the area of revolution, revolt starts with you ultimately from the ground up. The agency of a revoltion on a mass scale should be one of individuals coming together, not enslaving themselves to any instrumentalist vision. Essentially it should be everyone for themselves.

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OK, so there is no contradiction between the individual and society because society is just the sum of some individuals! Have you never noticed the dynamics of groups of people? Is that some simple "sum"? Apparently, my remark about this sounding like the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, wasn't off base at all.

Every man for himself eh? We know what that leads to when one man starts out as a billionaire and another man starts out a pauper. This is the advice for people who have a head start on others and wish to ensure that things remain like that.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Every man for himself eh? We know what that leads to when one man starts out as a billionaire and another man starts out a pauper. This is the advice for people who have a head start on others and wish to ensure that things remain like that.

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From Wikipedia the following definition of imerialism:

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Imperialism is a policy of extending control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial conquest or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries. The term is often used to describe the policy of a country in maintaining colonies and dominance over distant lands, regardless of whether the country calls itself an empire.

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If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.

But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, since we have to deduce from them some especially important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.

Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

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Nor does it matter that the first thing the Leninist did was change the meaning of "Russia," and then renamed it the USSR so that it included half of Asia, as if by a twist of fate and by serindipidous good fortune it conformed to the contours of imperial Russia.

First of all he completely missunderstands Stirner's idea of self-interest. Stirner in case you did not know was actually a communist(before the marxists came a diluted the word). He did actually believe in collective existance so much as it was not coherced.

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N.Beltov:
What a steaming pile, and what an overblown excuse for inaction and indifference to others. I hope you're not paying a lot of money for someone to teach you this stuff.

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Hardly innaction at all. What it means is you have to look at the fascism in you and your friends heads as much as you take on what dominates you. The opression that we find ourselves in is not a monolithic phenomena, but simply an individual on individual phenomena. It may seem complex and not as direct as say a robbery, but that is basically what it is.

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Since imperialism really only developed after Marx died, it's remarkable that he was able to accept it as you claim. And I didn't know Marx even believed in the afterlife. < snerk >

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You have read Marx on India right? In fact lets look at a quote from him, "We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism." Could this be not more clear? Again as I always say, the idea of progress is predicated on slavery being a step up. Marx gives a reluctant acceptance to this. This is the type of nonesense which was the root of how Vanguardists would treat indigenous peoples no doubt. The good marxian thinkers see past these inconsistancies, the bad ones, well...

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch16.htm

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Stirner viewed history as a product of ideas and believed that social relations could be changed by "getting over" the dominant concepts. He was completely out of touch with actual social relations.

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Technically history is a product of ideas. What you view as material is discourse in action. Nothing more nothing less. To believe otherwise is fairydust.You perpetuate a dichotome between ideas and "reality" that never needed to be. Marx himself was never fully clear on this in my view.

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There were some concepts that Stirner rejected, however. Concepts like: morality, justice, law, etc. were "phantasms" that should be discarded in order to "cleanse" individual consciousness.

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And so they should be. Anyone interested in an agency of anarchy and spontenuity should dispose of all that fixiated bullshit.

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Private property must be preserved because it is an expression of the unique character of the "I". There's lots more of this sort of drivel but what is the point? My fingers feel dirty just typing this crap.

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You really don't know shit about Stirner's concept of property do you.

"But my property is not a thing, since this has an existence independent of me; only my might is my own. Not this tree, but my might or control over it, is what is mine."

The owner and his/her property(as is the translation of the ego and its own)is him/herself.
Again are you even aware that Stirner was a communist? Take off the marxian only bineries and actually read the guy.

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OK, so there is no contradiction between the individual and society because society is just the sum of some individuals! Have you never noticed the dynamics of groups of people? Is that some simple "sum"? Apparently, my remark about this sounding like the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, wasn't off base at all.

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Cerainly there are dynamics, but does not change the fact that individuals are involved. The phenomena of subjegation may play itself out but it does not change that society is a collection of individuals. Also social has meant different things to different people in different times. Social can be anything from band/affinity to this mass society mess that we are in now. The former tends to allow and even incourage a greater amount of individuality then the latter. There is a reciprocity that is respected.

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Every man for himself eh? We know what that leads to when one man starts out as a billionaire and another man starts out a pauper. This is the advice for people who have a head start on others and wish to ensure that things remain like that.

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Every man for himself does not in anyway at all inherently mean opression. In terms of a revolutionary practace it is the thing to strive for as insurrectionist and post-leftist anarchists
have been trying to do.

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Fidel:
And what will anarchists do when fascists come to confiscate their land and arrest them for wanting to live free lives outside of fascist society, which would have meant pretty much everywhere had your Chiang Kai Chek defeated the Maoists and Hitler enslaved Russia and the world.
If you don't approve of Fidel, then what about Fulgencio Batista and his secret police?. Who sets the stage for your meak, organic subsistence existence ?. Don't you have to be able to imagine it before it can become real ?.

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There are actually letters of Stirner apparently where he declares himself such. Though he's not into the whole mantra of peace, justice, equality.

[ 16 February 2006: Message edited by: Vigilante ]

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V.i.gilanti: And so they should be.

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V: Stirner ...[was]not into the whole mantra of peace, justice, equality.

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Who would have thunk that the British Empire (or others) were not imperialist?

I'm not impressed by Lenin's definition nor by the export of the revolution on the tip of a bayonet that came out of his doctrine (or in any case followed his rule).

It didn't do the socialists a lot of good, did it? (Just look at the reactionary regimes in the formerly "communist" Soviet bloc.)

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VanLuke: Who would have thunk that the British Empire (or others) were not imperialist?

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Anyone that can distinguish one stage of capitalism from another. The Roman Empire wasn't an imperialist empire. It was an empire founded on slavery - an entirely different sort of empire.

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Of course, there are no right or wrong definitions just more or less helpful ones.

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Just because I'm not a religious follower of Lenin doesn't mean that I don't know that 'imperialism' and 'empire' share the same root.

Poor deluded Romans. Or for that matter the Inca, both of whom are referred to by most historians as having had an empire.

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some agreed-upon definitions

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And commonly accepted definitons are normally found in dictionaries, not political treatises.

imperialism

n 1: a policy of extending your rule over foreign countries
2: a political orientation that advocates imperial interests 3: any instance of aggressive extension of authority

Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

Btw substituting the Communist Party for the working class makes Lenin a revisionist of Marx.

edited to add the above definition from an on-line dictionary and make some stylistic changes

[ 16 February 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

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... There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before. I do not allude to European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism, by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette[107]. This is no distinctive feature of British Colonial rule, but only an imitation of the Dutch, and so much so that in order to characterise the working of the British East India Company, it is sufficient to literally repeat what Sir Stamford Raffles, the English Governor of Java, said of the old Dutch East India Company:

“The Dutch Company, actuated solely by the spirit of gain, and viewing their [Javan] subjects, with less regard or consideration than a West India planter formerly viewed a gang upon his estate, because the latter had paid the purchase money of human property, which the other had not, employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of contribution, the last dregs of their labor, and thus aggravated the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous Government, by working it with all the practised ingenuity of politicians, and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders.”

All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history. ...

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http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm

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Beltov:
Neither, it seems, are you.

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Originally posted by Vigilante:

The practical thing to do is to shrink the war machine(which precedes the state)back to its localized contextual nonstatist beginings. From this we should construct a world where if there are to be wars ,let them be to preserve abundance and multiplicity and not to enforce scarcity and centralized power.

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Toward the end, wealthy Roman's didn't wanna pay their taxes to keep soldiers from poverty. Soldiers eventually became little more than bribed hirelings of the barbarians. We can see the beginnings of this as some of the former Latin American and Caribbean mercenaries are deciding that private security contractors aren't paying them enough to be in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another case of private enterprise skimming taxpayer handouts at the expense of empire. The Brits couldn't justify military presence in India to maintain private property and lifestyles of a few colonialists. At some point they become too sure of themselves. Eventually, the dominos will fall.

[ 16 February 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Another example of this would be "dialectics". I defy you to come up with an understanding that is at all coherent from the crap in most dictionaries. You've got to look elsewhere.

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Originally posted by VanLuke:
Apparently Marx didn't share this definition of 'imperialism' either. Although he didn't use that exact word...

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It fell to Lenin, after Marx's death, to provide the Marxist analysis of international monopoly capitalism, which he called imperialism, to which I alluded. It doesn't seem unreasonable, in a discussion about the philosophy of Marx, to use the standard Marxist definition of imperialism, in preference to something that comes out of a bourgeois dictionary, or some meaningless reduction like "ruling others" = imperialism. Otherwise Lenin could have saved himself a lot of trouble just by getting you to write the Coles Notes version for him.

So it's no surprise that Marx never used the word imperialism, much less tried to define it.

Like Lenin, Marx often referred to "empires," but they were never equated to imperialism in the sense that Lenin elaborated the term. There's a lot more to imperialism than just conquering other countries and treating their inhabitants like dirt. It's not an epithet or a slogan, it's a technical term that has very specific meaning and many different connotations. That's how Lenin used the term imperialism. Of course, people who don't know what imperialism means (because they haven't read Lenin) think it's just some kind of all-purpose term you use to "dis" nasty people that are mean to other people. Marxism is a bit more complex than just a collection of insults.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
It's very clear that "imperialism" is defined as (typically) derogatory or insulting. Now look at Lenin's definition. What you see is a collection of facts and observations about how capitalism has developed and how it works. For Lenin, it's a scientific term. For the overwhelming majority of (anti-communist) dictionaries, it's an term of opprobrium. And that's a fairy typical description of virtually all and any terms that have been developed by Marxists, including Marx himself. What Marxists mean is transformed into some "ethical" cricticism of capitalism.

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Marxism is a bit more complex than just a collection of insults.

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I defy you to come up with an understanding that is at all coherent from the crap in most dictionaries.

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wrote N. Beltov.

I never did among other things because it's impossible.

But it was you who insisted (rightfully) on the necessity of commonly agreed upon definitons, or at least roughly.

But that's precisely why there are dictionairies. And even there you often get a whole range of meanings,

Not even to count slang. When your mother speaks of a pussy it's a four legged furry little lovable animal. In slang it may mean something totally different.

What I meant to say is that Russell is saying that *logically* there is no such thing as a true or false defintion.

Read the delightfully short and easy to read book sometime. You might like it.

I like his style.

Philosphy of Language

Karl's Mangnum Opus remained unfinshed and first Engles published 2 volumes in manuscript because he could not finish it. (Marx had sruggled ten years with this.) Then Kautsky who knew the handwriting even less (I've seen Marx's hadwriting and believe me it's like a Pharmacist's or M.D.'s) Kautsky edited the other essential parts, (Theories of Surplus Values).

I don't expect consistency in 56 or 62, or so, volumes (I once had the Dietz ed and unfortunatianely sold it)

Furthermore, have you ever seen facscimiles of Marx's hsnd writing? It's in an ancient German script (of which I hava a bit of understanding). Of course Engels knew it bette than anybody else but read his observations about his if you don't beleive me.

Secondly the theory of labour value *crucial* to Marx's over all conclusions about the 'scientific' cetainty that there will be a revolution of the proletariat is not worth the paper it's written on. It's not even Marxs invention. (Ricardo and others)

The point was that you questioned my definiton and I thought Russell knew a lot more about logic than you and I together.

I don't believe in stages and read a lot about this when I was a graduate student.

Marx is a fascinating thinker, the most sohpisticated social scientist (don't like that term) in the West.

I'm not some religious believer in Marx but draw many aspirations and much understanding of the world from him.

I haven't read any Lenin, only a bit about Lenin. I don't believe in party leadership so why read more?

Sorry I totally disagree except that it came about because Beltov spoke of common defintions (which of corse we need, at least roughly corresponding onrs).

That's not the point.

The point is that this thread is about Marx. If it had said "Marxism" I wouldn't have joined in. because I haven't read a lot of Marxists.

But I did read a lot of Marx and Engels including a lot of their letters and - I repeat - this thread is about Marx not Lenin.

Furthermore, there is no science in the social sciences. You can't perform any controled experiments and all human departments of study have to be isolated. (Even in the natural sciences if I'm not mistaken, e.g. physics vs chemistry).

I'm here to exchange intelligent opinions not religious dogma of nay brand. I'm an agnosti and didn't know we all had to accept Lenin's dogma over commonly accepted defintions in the dictionary.

Never mind that scientific bullshit.

You rejected that definition, as is your right. Unfortunately, you were unable to come up with any reasonable alternative.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
I don't think we'll be discussing Marx much longer anyway, if we can't even agree that the labour theory of value is perhaps Marx's greatest contribution to economics and is definitely the only theory of value that makes sense in a capitalist economy.[/QB]

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Well he didn't even invent it. Go and read him himself.

But you're right *we* won't be discussing Marx much longer because it's pointless.

And don't twist the sequence please. Beltov said there wans'any imeperilaism during Marx's time, to which *I * offered a defintion and then etc etc etc.

I reall don't give a damn how you define it and Lenin's defintiion doesn't even apply to latter day capitalism.

It's physical as well as financial capital that's at work.

But what the hell do I care what Marx or Lenin are *alleged* to have said with never ending arguments among "Marxists" waht St Karl or Illich really meant.

Bullshit! They didn't have a look into the future * and said so themselves*.

Anyway, since I am not a Marxist (although I have learned a lot from Marx), who am I to tell you what the proper definiton of imerpialism is *for Marxists*.

The rest of us rely on dictionaries as Beltov justifiedly lectured me, though I had never claimed otherwise.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
I don't think we'll be discussing Marx much longer anyway, if we can't even agree that the labour theory of value is perhaps Marx's greatest contribution to economics and is definitely the only theory of value that makes sense in a capitalist economy.[/QB]

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
the labour theory of value is perhaps Marx's greatest contribution to economics and is definitely the only theory of value that makes sense in a capitalist economy.[/QB]

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If this is so explain why machine operators at the oil sands plants make 75,000 a year and a hospital cleaner (who according to Marx doesn't even contribute 'value'; only found in agriculture, manufacture and - maybe - some public works) makes 12,000 while it should be the other way around given the respective composition of variable and constant capital?

Tell me too if it makes any sense to aggregate all labour from hospital cleaners to GM assembly line workers and how you arrive at the value of labour power (necessary to deduce surplus value)?
I don't think you have actually read Das Kapital Vol 1 to 3, never mind Critique of Political Economy and Theories of Surplus Value. Marx considered them all part of one work. He only finished 2 out of these 7 and left the other behind in manuscript form.

Above all tell me what the function of the labour theory of value is? What does it explain with respect to the real world? Prices? Hardly. Profits? No as it should be the same rate across industries.

I don't think you can explain these and empty rhetoric isn't going to cut the grade. It's just propaganda.

Btw the Physiocrates (and even Aristotle)developed rudimentary labour theories of value. Smith and Ricardo definitely had more elaborate ones. So much for Marx's greatest contribution. Whether you like it or not *as economist* Marx fits quite well into the classical school *to some extent*. But that you could find out only by analysis not empty rhetoric and personal attacks for questioning that there was no imperialism before monopoly capitalism.