Rand and Marx

[holy king]

you silly english kanigget.

 

[knez]

Marx. He actually contributed a lot to social science. Just because people took his ideas the wrong way or credited him with their own machinations doesn't mean we shouldn't learn from his works.

Coud one of you communists actually list those contributions so we can laugh at them?

 

[_random_]

Coud one of you communists actually list those contributions so we can laugh at them?

Hygro isn't one of the communists.

 

[Quackers]

Didn't Marx advocate the introduction of a EuroRouble?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Communism: First man into space, invented Tetris, greatest ever Chess player.

USA: Invented cosmetic surgery for bigger boobs.

 

[innonimatu]

Marx created a well-constructed, fairly self-consistent philosophical interpretation of the world. His problem was that he took too much confidence in the practicality of his work, not that the work itself is not good by the standard of philosophy. It's phenomenal, in fact. Marx is right up there with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel.

Yes, and good philosophy shouldn't be wasted. Good for Marx that he tried his best to apply it!

 

[pi-r8]

Coud one of you communists actually list those contributions so we can laugh at them?

The dialectic is a pretty neat idea, and it doesn't really have anything to do with politics.

On topic, I think a lot of Rand's ideas are just the worst sort of Marxism (not Marx) but with communism and capitalism reversed.

 

[Alassius]

"The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races." (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 29, 1849)
"What is the Jew's foundation in our world? Material necessity, private advantage.
"What was the essential foundation of the Jewish religion? Practical needs, egotism." (Ibid, p. 40)

I've no idea about the first one, but the second and the third seem to be different translations of a line from part II of On The Jewish Question:

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Marx didn't hold any grudge against race. He thought the bad nature of human, such as greed, was caused by external corruption, not imprinted in your genetics. He was bashing those external influences here. This follows in the same article:

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society.

Yes, and good philosophy shouldn't be wasted. Good for Marx that he tried his best to apply it!

Philosophy is a loose interpretation of the world. Things like dialectics cannot have the precise predictive power of science. Marx was wrong in thinking his theory was as good as physics. He thought he made a precise, incontrovertible, and deterministic prediction of the world, then he tried to force it to happen, as if that prediction was meant to be a blueprint to work upon. What he really made was an exceedingly vague picture that did not go much further than "we'll all live happily ever after". And his blueprint was mostly a list of things to abolish, based on the argument - the validity of which he did not explore - that if you abolish all the bad things, you'll only get good things. Turned out, if you abolish a list of bad things, people invent new, worse ways of being bad.

 

[Blue Emu]

Marx had a much more impressive beard than Ms. Rand. Although... in the tonsorial department, they are both put to shame by Gorodovikov or Tirpitz.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Coud one of you communists actually list those contributions so we can laugh at them?

Class analysis.

 

[zjintz]

Coud one of you communists actually list those contributions so we can laugh at them?

The greatest Marx's contribution was the explanation of where the profit of a company comes from.

EDIT: I'm not communist.

 

[innonimatu]

But he was wrong! All profit comes from the worthy labo^H^H^H^Hvision of the onwer-CEO of the company! All the other workers are only leeches. The Great Rand showed us that!


pfew... I nearly wrote an ugly word up there!

 

[amadeus]

Except Marx was wrong.

 

[katipunero]

ayn rand propped her so called grand philosophical treatise in fiction. she purposefully drew and painted an empty world where the social interstices are stretched wide and far apart just so she can make the loony case that each individual has more than enough, perhaps illimitable space to flap about and to do anything without consequence. her works glorified stereotypes and romanticized clinical anti-social personality behavior. she made everything look that rape and destructive arson were justified if a person was talented enough.

 

[Perfection]

communism: First man into space, invented tetris, greatest ever chess player.

Usa: Invented cosmetic surgery for bigger boobs.

USA #1

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Except Marx was wrong.

Well that does it. I'm convinced.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Is it April Fools already?

I don't think the two should be mentioned in the same sentence. Marx changed the world. Rand caused someone to scrawl "Who is John Galt" on the wall of the Wall Street subway station. While humorous, it was hardly monumental.

 

[Ergo Sum]

Coincidentally we're reading Marx in my current Sociology class which has the purpose of educating us about the foundations of sociology (the thinkers being Durkheim, Marx and Weber fwiw). So I'll do my best to summarize some salient contributions of his:
1. One idea is that Marx's economic analysis expresses a fundamental, basic outlook on the social world, i.e. that economic forces control the development of culture and society. There's not a great way to disprove this but it is still a hugely credited notion within the social sciences.
2. Class analysis has played a big part in politics but a huge part in sociological studies of communities, societies, cities, etc. A more recent name for this has been the 'conflict approach' which conceives of societies/communities/internet forums working together in class-based stratifications against other groups.
3. Marx talks at length about the relationship between class and the means of production which played a huge role in the development of political economy and, to a lesser extent, the development of economics. Marxian economics, while rejected by many remained one step in the development of modern economic orthodoxy.
4. Marx and Engels' provided one of the earliest and most influential accounts of industrialization and the effects of urbanization, i.e. the entire gesellschaft - gemeinschaft business and the huge amount of literature on the subject since. Their ideas about the city and its development prefaced Tonnies, Durkheim, Wirth, Park, basically every urban sociologist on the planet.

So regardless of the validity of his ideas, Marx's work contributed in no small way to the development of economics, political science, helped birth sociology, produced significant works in German philosophical tradition, and inspired most of the 20th century's far-left movements. In intellectual and political terms, Marx is up there with the biggest names there are, and it's a shame he's being compared to a hack like Rand.

 

[Ajidica]

As long as we are on the topic of Marx, how much influence did Malthus's 'dismal science' predictions and the Utopian Socialists have on him?

 

[History_Buff]

Marx was wrong, but along the way he hit on some very interesting points.

Rand was a psychopath, doting on another psychopath.