{"id":20530,"date":"2013-06-04T07:33:33","date_gmt":"2013-06-04T11:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20530"},"modified":"2016-09-29T10:53:58","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T14:53:58","slug":"marx-for-the-modern-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/04\/marx-for-the-modern-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Marx for the modern era"},"content":{"rendered":"

A case for finding the proper modern interpretation of the works of Karl Marx<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The first view (held mostly by its detractors) is that Marxism is little more than the politics of resentment<\/em><\/strong> \u2014 a philosophical justification for the hatred of success by those who failed to achieve it. The politics of resentment offers three different methods for bringing its program of economic jealousy to fruition: Under socialism<\/strong>, the unsuccessful use the power of government to forcibly extract wealth and possessions from the successful, bit by bit until there is nothing left; under the more extreme communism<\/strong>, the very notion of wealth or success is eliminated entirely, and anyone who seeks individual achievement is punished or eliminated; and finally under anarchy<\/strong>, freelance predators would be allowed to steal or destroy any existing wealth or possessions with no interference from the state. Marx himself saw pure communism as the ultimate goal, with socialism as a necessary precursor, and perhaps just an occasional dash of anarchy to ignite the revolutionary fires.<\/p>\n

But there is another, more intriguing and less noxious, view of Marxist thought that gets less attention these days because its anachronistic roots in the Industrial Revolution seemingly render it somewhat irrelevant to modern economics. Marx posited that factory workers should own the factory themselves and profit from its output, since they\u2019e the ones actually doing the work \u2014 and the wealthy fat cat \u201ccapitalists\u201d should be booted out of the director\u2019s office since they don\u2019t really do anything except profit from other people\u2019s labor. Marx generalized this notion to \u201cThe workers should control the means of production,\u201d and then extended it further to a national scale by declaring that the overall government itself should be \u201ca dictatorship of the proletariat,\u201d with \u201cproletariat\u201d defined in this context as \u201csomeone who actually works for a living.\u201d The problem with this theory in the 21st century is that very few people actually work in factories anymore due to exponential improvements in automation and efficiency, and fewer still produce handicrafts, and the vast majority of American \u201cworkers\u201d these days don\u2019t actually create anything tangible. Even so, there is an attractive populist rationality to this aspect of Marxism that appeals to everyone\u2019s sense of fairness \u2014 even to those who staunchly reject the rest of communist theory. Those who do the work should reap the benefits and control the system; hard to argue with that.<\/p>\n

Although the \u201cfactory\u201d is no longer the basic building block of the American economy, Marx\u2019s notion that \u201cThe workers should control the means of production\u201d can be rescued and made freshly relevant if it is re-interpreted in a contemporary American context.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A case for finding the proper modern interpretation of the works of Karl Marx: The first view (held mostly by its detractors) is that Marxism is little more than the politics of resentment \u2014 a philosophical justification for the hatred of success by those who failed to achieve it. The politics of resentment offers three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,53,13],"tags":[780,622,95,1076,261],"class_list":["post-20530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-politics","category-usa","tag-communism","tag-ideology","tag-jobs","tag-karlmarx","tag-management"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5l8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20530"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36015,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530\/revisions\/36015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}