Who is afraid of Karl Marx

[hauslern]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_QjgLIrEnc

Amusing video on scarying young students about Karl Marx.

[drumdude]

She seems like a lovely female Aussie version of Jordan Peterson!

[hauslern]

People are attempting to surpress difficult history subjects arguning it might upset children. I do not imagine the book At the Hands of Persons Unknown would be used in schools. It has photos of african americans hanging in trees while people including children watched.

In Australia we have our own stories of massacrees of indigenous folks.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/200 ... utal-truth

I notice the folks in Texas working on education curriculum want to avoid unsetting children by referring to "slavery" as "Involuntary relocation."

Shades of 1984.

[drumdude]

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/30 ... elocation/

“The topic of slavery is not currently addressed in the 2nd Grade curriculum; this work is meant to address that deficiency,” he said.

Stephanie Alvarez, a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and a member of the group, said she was did not attend the meetings when the language was crafted because of personal issues, but that the language was “extremely disturbing.” She would not comment any further because of her role in the work group, she said.

Part of the proposed social studies curriculum standards outlines that students should “compare journeys to America, including voluntary Irish immigration and involuntary relocation of African people during colonial times.”

Annette Gordon-Reed, a history professor at Harvard University, said using “involuntary relocation” to describe slavery threatens to blur out what actually occurred during that time in history. There is no reason to use the proposed language, she said.

“Young kids can grasp the concept of slavery and being kidnapped into it,” Gordon-Reed said. “The African slave trade is unlike anything that had or has happened, the numbers and distance.”

If language like what the group of Texas educators propose is accepted and taught to children, it means the country is moving in the wrong direction, she said.

“Tell children the truth. They can handle it,” she said.

Texas is in the process of developing a new curriculum for social studies, a process that happens about every decade to update what children should be learning in Texas’ 8,866 public schools.

The curriculum wanted to add slavery to the list of things which would be taught at the Year 2 level and was seeking a term that would be age appropriate for that age group. I think that's important context to that specific Texas instance.

[Chap]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_QjgLIrEnc

Amusing video on scarying young students about Karl Marx

I am not a Marxist. But unlike 99% of people who opine about Marxism on discussion boards, blogs, and in political discourse elsewhere, I do actually know something about Marxism, because (partly out of interest, and partly for professional reasons) I have read some of the works of Marx and Engels, and also of those who claimed to be applying and developing Marxism in political action, such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. I have also read a number of works by authors critical of Marxism, and on the whole I think that their criticisms are telling. So just to get it out of the way: I do not think that Marx's views are correct. (Of course, the things called 'Marx's views' developed and changed greatly during his lifetime.)

Having said that, I have to say that Marx attempted something quite new in its scope and ambitions - he wanted to start from the undisputed facts of the human drive to satisfy certain basic needs - food, shelter from the elements, and so on - and use that to explain how it came about that the 19th-century European human beings found themselves faced with the completely unprecedented structures of 19th-century industrial capitalism and mass factory labour. More than that, he sought to use the historical development of systems of production, distribution, and exchange in past centuries to explain the very different social economic and political systems developed by humanity from remote antiquity through the Middle Ages and up to his own time. Even more ambitiously he asked what the future developments of those productive forces may lead to by way of social, economic and political changes in the future. And, as anyone who looks into Marx's great work Capital will know, he did not just make up his ideas through some kind of ideological daydreaming, but did his best to base his conclusions on a great mass of historical and economic evidence.

He thought he had succeeded in doing so: one system of production gives you a particular kind of society, and as that develops society changes:

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

Karl Marx The Poverty of Philosophy Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy

The transition between one kind of society, based on one system of production to the next stage is in Marx's view, a 'revolution', involving the overthrow of one kind of society (defended by those whose power and riches are based on it) by those who have much to gain from moving to a different system. That had, said Marx, certainly happened in the case of the changes observable in England, where the urban bourgeoisie who benefitted from industrial capitalism had demanded and obtained unprecedented political rights, and had succeeded in overthrowing the aristocratic order that had dominated the country in previous centuries.

But what was going to happen next? Marx pointed to the fact that factory-based industrial capitalism had created an entirely new class: the highly organised and increasingly self-conscious mass of people who lived in the new and unprecedentedly large industrial cities, and worked in those factories. Those workers were beginning to see how the riches of those who own the factories were (in Marx's view) gained by paying the people who worked in the factories much less than their labour actually produced. In his view, it was highly likely that this new class of people would organise themselves as had the capitalists before them and forcibly re-order society into a form that benefited them by allowing them to appropriate the full fruits of their labour, rather than having what he called their "surplus value" siphoned off into the pockets of capitalists.

As we know, attempts to move to that kind of society through revolutionary action largely failed. And as we know more and more of how human society has developed through the ages, it has been possible to see the faults in Marx's view of the human past: he based his thoughts on what was known in the 19th century, and our understanding has greatly broadened and deepened since that time. But the fact remains that his work was an unprecedented attempt to construct a scientific understanding of what has been called "the motive power of history", and even if his conclusions were wrong one of the lasting legacies of the Marxist project has been the abandonment among serious historians of any view of history as explicable solely through the actions of "Great Men" or through "the Will of God". However history does work, it is certainly not so simple as that.

[Edited once for typo]

[hauslern]

What are your thoughts on the Nordic model? Reported the happiest countries. High taxes but many benefits.

[Chap]

What are your thoughts on the Nordic model? Reported the happiest countries. High taxes but many benefits.

In the context of the present thread, I'd simply say that the so-called 'Nordic Model' has very little to do with Karl Marx.

[Physics Guy]

On the street in Trier where Marx was born, the pedestrian crossing lights show little red or green silhouettes with Marx's famously bearded face, instead of the usual "walk" and "don't walk" symbols. It's not a joke—I've been there and seen them.

[Chap]

On the street in Trier where Marx was born, the pedestrian crossing lights show little red or green silhouettes with Marx's famously bearded face, instead of the usual "walk" and "don't walk" symbols. It's not a joke—I've been there and seen them.

Yup, it's for real:

[huckelberry]

She seems like a lovely female Aussie version of Jordan Peterson!

I thought the bit was trivial(babel of political propaganda) but it brought up next for me a mildly amusing Ted talk about David and Goliath.

I have mixed reactions to Jordan Peterson but he speaks ideas and is capable of being clear. I remain curious and uncertain to what degree his paranoia about Neo-Marxist is overblown or justified. He is concerned with different use of Marx than the sort of use of Marx Chap explains above.