Middle Class: Innocent in Class Warfare

Originally posted by JS357
I'm not sure about the distinction between legal and property ownership, but it probably doesn't matter because I think all forms of ownership are social conventions or agreements, and of course, ownership is had by those who are prepared to enforce their agreement against those who would disagree. This is not a negative or positive statement about ownership p ...[text shortened]... ownership confers, and who is eligible to be an owner, can be judged against moral standards.

Property rights ownership is not a social convention or agreement. To own a house in the Property Rights sense is to live in it and defend it yourself. It's not about "society".

Originally posted by Palynka
And they ALL decreased their net worth in 2009:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_billionaires_(2009)

How the stock market does that year is probably the most relevant variable in determining these guys net worth.

OK, you're right. I looked back at the money they had in 2000 and they were much richer back then. They haven't made any money yet. However I tell you if you have lots of liquid wealth, you can make a killing during a recession. As Warren Buffet once said about the latest recession...

"I feel like a sex addict in a whorehouse"[/i]

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
I don't understand your last sentence.

Looking back to the second post in this thread, I agree with it: "Class warfare is between [the] capitalist class and the laboring class. The distinction between the middle class and the poor is just a subdivision of the laboring class. It is a distinction the capitalist class is eager to accentuate in order to weaken the class consciousness of the laboring class as a whole. It is more difficult for a stratified working class to have a unified outlook, which, in turn, weakens their strength and makes them easier to keep in line."

So when I suggest people are missing the point, it is that these interminable debates about who might be slightly better off than their next door neighbour misses the point that all are conforming to roles assigned to them in Capitalism.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
Property rights ownership is not a social convention or agreement. To own a house in the Property Rights sense is to live in it and defend it yourself. It's not about "society".

Are you a one-man survivalist?

Originally posted by JS357
Are you a one-man survivalist?

No, I am well entrenched in my community. I have hookups or potential hookups with family, police, various ethnic criminal groups - this last one simply by virtue of being from the inner city and from the lower class, and not prejudiced.

However, when my neighborhood burned in 1992, the police weren't there to protect my home. My little old aunt was with her baseball bat, and so were ethnic Koreans with firearms. The residents. Those people whose interest in the property was more than simply as an "investment". People who lived there.

Originally posted by kmax87
So with all this noise about 2nd amendment rights, that would make Karl Marx a founding member of the Tea Party movement?

Needless to say, I don't have any idea what you're talking about.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
Then how come poor people keep getting shot by cops in defense of rich peoples' capital?

EDIT - E.g.

http://www.wsmv.com/news/26259026/detail.html

POSTED: 12:57 pm CST December 23, 2010
UPDATED: 12:19 am CST December 24, 2010

Police said Charles K. Glover, 37, robbed two Fifth Third banks on Thursday. One of the banks was on Donelson P ...[text shortened]... he scene, and he didn't have a gun, police said in a news release Thursday evening.

Austin, Texas, police say they arrested a high school student for robbing a Chase bank.

According to an affidavit, the student, 18-year-old Leticia Denova...

So, Americans. It's up to you. Are the Leticias of the world going to live lives like Charles Glover, gunned down in the street at the prime of their lives? How do you want to handle this? The iron fist is not the right approach. It is economically unsustainable for one thing. It's also immoral.

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
No, I am well entrenched in my community. I have hookups or potential hookups with family, police, various ethnic criminal groups - this last one simply by virtue of being from the inner city and from the lower class, and not prejudiced.

However, when my neighborhood burned in 1992, the police weren't there to protect my home. My little old aunt ...[text shortened]... se interest in the property was more than simply as an "investment". People who lived there.

OK, so at least, protection of property has something to do with your hookups in the community.

I don't know if you think I am speaking mainly of property as investment. I'm not.

Originally posted by rwingett
Socialists (many inspired by Marx) and labor unions did make great gains for the working class. The gains those people could have made, though, would have been greater, and longer lasting, if they hadn't listened to Marx at all. Here's why:

Marx, in disdaining 'utopian' socialism, advocated the seizure of political power and the implementation of the 'di ...[text shortened]... of itself, rather than being appropriated in perpetuity by a statist vanguard party.

Blaming Marx for other's decisions to create totalitarian states based on "vanguard parties" (a concept Marx criticized his entire life) is akin to blaming Robert Owen for the murderous nature of Charles Manson's community. Here's a good article showing that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant simply democratic rule by the workers (the majority in a capitalist state) in Marx's understanding: http://marxmyths.org/hal-draper/article2.htm

By the mid 1800's the die was cast; modern capitalist societies were in place and untold millions were struggling for their existence in squalid conditions to make a comparative few wealthy. Retiring to idyllic countryside communities was not an option for the urban working class. They either had to accept their condition or commit to struggle, armed if need be, to better it. Their sacrifices paved the way for vast improvements in social and working conditions, greater democracy, improved respect for political and social rights, etc. etc. etc. I do not regard these gains, paid for in blood in many, if not most cases, as trivial.

There was never any chance that a few quaint communities of the nature the utopian socialists put together would ever be anything but a curiosity. Yes, the struggle must continue and progress doesn't move in a straight, inexorable line. But as recent events in North Africa and before that in Eastern Europe show, the ruling classes' grip on power is far more tenuous in reality than it appears on the surface. In the West, the people could have fundamental change if they insisted on it. The greatest enemy is not ideology, but apathy and inertia.

Originally posted by Wajoma
Labor unions ride in on the back of greater wealth they sure don't create it. Want to put it to the test let them go to any desperately third world country and 'gain' the workers there a 38 hour working week, paid parental leave, 5 weeks vacation etc. All those great conditions come about in spite of unions, doesn't stop them cashing in on them and sucking i ...[text shortened]... all those knick knacky conditions the union claims kudos for come at a cost somewhere else.

Are you really so blinded by ideological fanaticism as to deny that unions negotiating for masses of workers aren't in a stronger bargaining position than the individual worker? Do you seriously deny that such unions were able to extract concessions from employers that would have otherwise been refused?

Originally posted by no1marauder
Blaming Marx for other's decisions to create totalitarian states based on "vanguard parties" (a concept Marx criticized his entire life) is akin to blaming Robert Owen for the murderous nature of Charles Manson's community. Here's a good article showing that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant simply democratic rule by the workers (the majority i ...[text shortened]... e if they insisted on it. The greatest enemy is not ideology, but apathy and inertia.

From the days of the First International, Marx represented the authoritarian wing of the socialist movement. Bakunin correctly predicted that if a Marxist party came to power its leaders would end up as bad as the ruling class they had fought against. And he was right. Lenin wasn't a corruption of Marxism. He was a direct outgrowth of the authoritarian trajectory that Marx had set socialism upon.

The Marxist strategy of appropriating state power, without first transforming the underlying society, had disastrous consequences. The authoritarian nature of Marxism, which had formerly been implicit, now became explicit as the Bolsheviks were obliged to suppress the inevitable counter-revolution. The people, having no experience in running their own affairs, were susceptible to the vanguardism of the communist party bureaucracy. The end result was a catastrophic disaster from which socialism is just now beginning to recover.

If the utopian socialist strategy of patiently transforming the base of society first had been followed, things would have been vastly different. For starters, by not aiming for state power you don't provoke an armed opposition which then requires authoritarian measures to successfully overcome. Secondly, by transforming society from the ground up, by the time the socialist model has become the dominant paradigm in society, the people will have had years of experience in running their own affairs. The Marxist model necessitates the continued maintenance of state power, while the 'utopian' model truly does allow for its gradual withering away.

If the vast amounts of money and effort that were wasted trying to make Marxism a success around that world had instead been put into building socialist communities, then they would have evolved into more than "idyllic countryside communities" in a relatively short time. They would have provided a concrete basis for continuing and lasting change.

--------------

As an additional point, your argument seems to have no coherent basis to it. You defend Marx on the one hand, but then all the gains you point to have nothing to do with Marxism. Winning greater workers' rights within a capitalist system is certainly not trivial, but it is not Marxism. Political changes in Africa and Eastern Europe are to be applauded, but they have nothing to do with Marxism. You seem to be saying that every progressive change can be traced back to Marx's influence, regardless of whether they have anything to do with his theories or not. I dispute that. The socialist movement would have been an agent for progressive change with or without Marx. The mutualists, the anarchists, the social democrats, they would have been agents for lasting progressive change, free from the authoritarian taint that is part and parcel of Marxism.

Originally posted by rwingett
From the days of the First International, Marx represented the authoritarian wing of the socialist movement. Bakunin correctly predicted that if a Marxist party came to power its leaders would end up as bad as the ruling class they had fought against. And he was right. Lenin wasn't a corruption of Marxism. He was a direct outgrowth of the authoritarian traj ...[text shortened]... rogressive change, free from the authoritarian taint that is part and parcel of Marxism.

Utter nonsense. Indeed, it was Bakunin he aspired to dictatorial power as Draper points out in the link I provided:

More to the point are the cases where Marx or Engels attacked efforts toward personal domination inside the working-class or socialist movement; the word ‘dictatorship’ was indeed apt to crop up in the denunciation. The two best cases in point are those of Bakunin and Lassalle, both seekers after personal dictatorship inside the movement, and both attacked for this reason by Marx or Engels. Bakunin’s schemes for a “Secret Dictatorship” of his coterie (in the name of anarchist “libertarianism,” of course) were the basis of the Bakuninists’ drive to take over the International from about 1869 on; and by that time Marx came to understand that “This Russian evidently wants to become dictator of the European working-class movement.” The International published a brochure written mainly by Engels and Lafargue, exposing “the organization of a secret society with the sole aim of subjecting the European workers’ movement to the secret dictatorship of a few adventurers ...” This brochure, for years derogated by unreliable historians, has been confirmed in all essential respects by the accumulation of evidence on Bakunin’s dictatorial aspirations.[21]

Anarchist fairy tales make good reading, but they have little to do with the reality of the struggle in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The capitalist State was in existence and the people were being oppressed; waiting for a few utopian communities to transform society was not an option (and it was and always will be a pipe dream). What had to be done was done to the greater benefit of society as a whole.

Marx's critique of capitalism was necessary fuel to the revolutionary and progressive fire. Marx himself was a primary agent of change and in the Manifesto and other writings he championed many of the reforms which became part and parcel of the liberal democratic state. It's hard to envision a "socialist" movement absent Marx and Engels.

Originally posted by no1marauder
Are you really so blinded by ideological fanaticism as to deny that unions negotiating for masses of workers aren't in a stronger bargaining position than the individual worker? Do you seriously deny that such unions were able to extract concessions from employers that would have otherwise been refused?

No
Yes

Originally posted by Wajoma
No
Yes

An amendment, although it should not be uneccessary as it's been said already. They may have 'extracted concessions' but those 'concessions' come at a cost somewhere else. eg, a 38 hour working week may come at the cost of a reduced hourly base rate, or a more negative example, longer smoko breaks etc may lead to an increased drive toward automation. The union struts around claiming to have 'won' a longer coffee break but what has actually happened is that a line has been crossed that now makes a completely automated warehouse system viable.

Originally posted by Wajoma
An amendment, although it should not be uneccessary as it's been said already. They may have 'extracted concessions' but those 'concessions' come at a cost somewhere else. eg, a 38 hour working week may come at the cost of a reduced hourly base rate, or a more negative example, longer smoko breaks etc may lead to an increased drive toward automation. The u at a line has been crossed that now makes a completely automated warehouse system viable.

Sometimes they do, and sometimes that cost is simply reduced profits for the company. It's true that unions have to pick their battles, but that does not mean that they do not have their uses.