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That’s not the same as living in excess while preaching solidarity.

by jevgeni 6y ago

jiofih 6y ago
Last time I checked communism was not a charity or religion.
- jevgeni 6y ago
  Absolutely. That’s the whole point. Remember: he chose to assign himself an annual allowance for “entertainment” the size of 10 of his workers’ wages. Could he have went with just 9 wages and bump the salary of his workers a bit? Probably. Could he have contributed it to the communist cause more to drive systemic change? Probably. But he chose not to. You cannot adhere to the labor theory of value and make such choices without either knowing that what you do is theft, or knowing that LTV is wrong.
- averros 6y ago
  Yep, it's a death cult. Murdered around 200 million people in the 20th century.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> That’s not the same as living in excess while preaching solidarity. Engels living in excess while preaching solidarity, you will note, is not the point I said was to be expected. Engels being one of many examples of the pattern “leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people”, was. OTOH, Engels preached revolution against capitalism not financial solidarity within capitalism, and that the harm of capitalism was inherent its fundamental structure, not something that could be meaningfully mitigated or remediated by “good behavior” within the privileged classes while capitalism continued. It's not surprising that opponents of his philosophy want to attack him with the ad hominem that he is a hypocrite; it's odd, though, to accuse him of being a hypocrite to a position that he and Marx condemned as a retrograde one which served to reinforce the capitalist order.
- jevgeni 6y ago
  Still not the same as living in excess, though. You are justifying Engel's being exploitative to his own workers, while he himself knew it was essentially theft, according to their own theories. What could justify such theft? Well, "entertainment". He didn't choose to send that money to the International to promote systemic change. Nonono, he willingly chose to spend it on his own pleasures to the detriment of the people working for him. At least according to his own theories. So either Engels himself was immoral, or communism doesn't have any moral superiority over capitalism. See, you can choose whether that argument is ad hominem or generally applicable. :D This is the whole reason they needed a revolution. If communism was truly a superior form of economic organization, then it wouldn't matter if it was applied to whole societies or smaller groups. In other words, a company organized by communist principles would be more competitive than a company organized purely by naked capitalism. You can't get people on board in evolutionary manner, if you yourself can't get organized by these principles. If your own company can't be communist and survive, why would it work on a scale of a whole country or the whole world? This is why they needed it to be violent and irreversible. It's a massive swindle to get power and it was thought out. It boggles my mind, that people devalue legitimate left thought by staning charlatans. But people also voted for Trump because he is "a man of the people", so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

That’s not the same as living in excess while preaching solidarity.

jiofih 6y ago

Last time I checked communism was not a charity or religion.

jevgeni 6y ago
Absolutely. That’s the whole point. Remember: he chose to assign himself an annual allowance for “entertainment” the size of 10 of his workers’ wages. Could he have went with just 9 wages and bump the salary of his workers a bit? Probably. Could he have contributed it to the communist cause more to drive systemic change? Probably. But he chose not to. You cannot adhere to the labor theory of value and make such choices without either knowing that what you do is theft, or knowing that LTV is wrong.
averros 6y ago
Yep, it's a death cult. Murdered around 200 million people in the 20th century.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> That’s not the same as living in excess while preaching solidarity. Engels living in excess while preaching solidarity, you will note, is not the point I said was to be expected. Engels being one of many examples of the pattern “leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people”, was. OTOH, Engels preached revolution against capitalism not financial solidarity within capitalism, and that the harm of capitalism was inherent its fundamental structure, not something that could be meaningfully mitigated or remediated by “good behavior” within the privileged classes while capitalism continued. It's not surprising that opponents of his philosophy want to attack him with the ad hominem that he is a hypocrite; it's odd, though, to accuse him of being a hypocrite to a position that he and Marx condemned as a retrograde one which served to reinforce the capitalist order.

jevgeni 6y ago
Still not the same as living in excess, though. You are justifying Engel's being exploitative to his own workers, while he himself knew it was essentially theft, according to their own theories. What could justify such theft? Well, "entertainment". He didn't choose to send that money to the International to promote systemic change. Nonono, he willingly chose to spend it on his own pleasures to the detriment of the people working for him. At least according to his own theories. So either Engels himself was immoral, or communism doesn't have any moral superiority over capitalism. See, you can choose whether that argument is ad hominem or generally applicable. :D This is the whole reason they needed a revolution. If communism was truly a superior form of economic organization, then it wouldn't matter if it was applied to whole societies or smaller groups. In other words, a company organized by communist principles would be more competitive than a company organized purely by naked capitalism. You can't get people on board in evolutionary manner, if you yourself can't get organized by these principles. If your own company can't be communist and survive, why would it work on a scale of a whole country or the whole world? This is why they needed it to be violent and irreversible. It's a massive swindle to get power and it was thought out. It boggles my mind, that people devalue legitimate left thought by staning charlatans. But people also voted for Trump because he is "a man of the people", so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.