From: yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken)
Newsgroups: sci.econ
Subject: Re: Wage Slavery (Was: BIG LIE about the market)
Date: 7 Apr 92 13:45:44 GMT
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In article <1992Apr5.182340.6518@newshost.anu.edu.au> cmf851@huxley.anu.edu.au (Albert Langer) writes:
>Marx and Engels wrote relatively little against capitalism and overtly
>bourgeois philosophers and economists. Most of their polemics were
>aimed at pseudo socialists, and especially against such intellectual
>elitist positions that substitute the "enlightened" for the mass
>action of ordinary working people. Indeed the history of Marxism
>is basically a history of struggle against such positions - from the
>early Sismondists right through Bakunin's Anarchism to Lin Piao and
>Teng Hsiao-ping. The fact that the other side is never finally

How funny to see this ridiculous canard again. Bakunin's polemic against
Marx in "God and the State" seems positively prescient in these decades
after the rise and fall of the Cheka and the collapse of the "scientific"
socialists of the Kremlin. Contrary to common misconceptions, Marx and
Engels deserve a place in history as prophets of industrial capitalism right
up alongside Mills. Like good upper class Victorian gentlemen, all three of
these fellows were quite enthusiatic about the "rationality" of the
industrial/military system which was, in their time, looting the colonies,
poisoning the environment, and imposing a drab regimentation on the labor
force. Engels hymm to the factory sytem, where, as on a ship, the workers
subordinated their will to the iron will of the captain is indicative of 
the class prejudices and mechanistic thinking which we can find all over
the writings of Marx and Engels and their followers. Marx and Engels 
hope that the machine of industrial capitalism would create a class
of militant proletarians has proven to be as  vain as Mills hope that
the rigid distinction between capitalists and employees would  be replaced
by an economy in which all persons were both workers and investors. 

>If you really want to find out what Marx thought rather than what your 
>professors thought of him I still say you should start with the Manifesto.

Actually, if you want to read something interesting by Marx, try the
"Class war in France". Marx was at his most lucid when discussing concrete
events, and at his least lucid when attempting to refute those who had the
temerity to disagree with him. Even so, try re-reading the Manifesto, and 
see where M&E explictly discuss the "freedom" of property. That Mises never
attempted to confront this point only emphasizes the intellectual bankruptcy
of his works. 

"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in
your existing society, private property is already done away with for
9/10ths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its
non-existence in the hands of those 9/10ths. You reproach us, therefore,
with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition
for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense
majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property.
Precisely so; that is just what we intended.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money
or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the
moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois
property, into capital, from that moment you say, individuality vanishes.
...
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of
society, all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the
labour of others by such appropriation."

M&E Communist Manifesto


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yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu