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He flip flopped about a lot of things through this life e.g religion. One thing I never understood from The Communist Manifesto, was how did Marx not realise t

He flip flopped about a lot of things through this life e.g religion. One thing I never understood from The Communist Manifesto, was how did Marx not realise that what he was describing about the commune and communal living was exactly the same conditions described under surfdom but having the State taking place of a Lord.

vidarh 6y ago
I don't remember him describing 'the commune' in the Communist Manifesto at all, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. Overall Marx wrote very little about what he expected a communist society would look like, and almost none of it is in the Communist Manifesto, which is much more focused on immediate political goals and relations to long extinct other political movements. How you have gotten the notion that Marx supported the continuing existence of a state, or a strong state of any form, I'm also unsure of, as he firmly argued the state becomes superfluous in a classless society, and otherwise regularly argued against a centralized state even in the shorter term. E.g. in his works on the Paris Commune he criticized the communards for not going further in destroying the state, and expressed support for the proposed loose federation of communes in its stead. And in Critique of the Gotha Programme, he skewered the forerunner of Germany's SPD for proposing state run public education, and pointed to the model then employed (1872) in the US as a preferable model to giving the state control over education. (He also argued for an armed working class for it to protect itself against oppression - in many ways he was more closely aligned with US politics than with the various 'socialist' states)
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  Hmm... weird. You’re right, it wasn’t described in The Communist Manifesto . Maybe I’m mixing up my sources (it’s definitely not in Das Kapital), but I remembering him describe the commune where nobody owns property anymore, and the relationship between parent and child no longer exists - i.e children sleep e.g 50 to a room and are cared for by the commune and no longer the parents
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Marx has to my knowledge never written anything remotely like that. Even well after Marx speculating about the specifics of future organisation of society was generally seen as un-Marxist and utopian. But this has echoes to me of Marx words on the bourgeois view on women, which he ridicules in the Communist Manifesto by claiming that some of them saw that communists wanted to remove private property and assumed that meant sharing women too, because they saw women as an economic asset, while of course he argued for no such thing. Engels went further than Marx in speculating about future societal structure, but he too to my knowledge only went as far as suggesting that society would have a responsibility for childcare. A statement that's easy to misconstrue into suggesting society take over responsibility overall vs. a responsibility for e.g. providing nursery options and school spaces. The idea of Marx arguing for children to be cared for by the commune in any case sounds like projection of the same kind as with women in seeing children as property where a statement about responsibility becomes a statement of ownership. Notably it is mostly rich people who think they have the right to treat children as property that can be shipped off to boarding school without a say in the matter.
    - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
      Thanks for that. I was eagerly waiting for a reply :) Ok, looks like I’ll have to have a second parse of Communist Manifesto. I’m not sure where I got that info from then... but could have sworn I did a few double takes while going through Communist Manifesto because of these thoughts. Weird. > claiming that some of them saw that communists wanted to remove private property Apart from your woman comment from above, isn’t the removal of private property one of the primary aims of The Communist Manifesto? Seems fitting given his experience with property law that he began to hate the concept of it. Also, sorry... I don’t have anyone really to bounce my questions off on about this topic :)

vidarh 6y ago

I don't remember him describing 'the commune' in the Communist Manifesto at all, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. Overall Marx wrote very little about what he expected a communist society would look like, and almost none of it is in the Communist Manifesto, which is much more focused on immediate political goals and relations to long extinct other political movements. How you have gotten the notion that Marx supported the continuing existence of a state, or a strong state of any form, I'm also unsure of, as he firmly argued the state becomes superfluous in a classless society, and otherwise regularly argued against a centralized state even in the shorter term. E.g. in his works on the Paris Commune he criticized the communards for not going further in destroying the state, and expressed support for the proposed loose federation of communes in its stead. And in Critique of the Gotha Programme, he skewered the forerunner of Germany's SPD for proposing state run public education, and pointed to the model then employed (1872) in the US as a preferable model to giving the state control over education. (He also argued for an armed working class for it to protect itself against oppression - in many ways he was more closely aligned with US politics than with the various 'socialist' states)

alfiedotwtf 6y ago
Hmm... weird. You’re right, it wasn’t described in The Communist Manifesto . Maybe I’m mixing up my sources (it’s definitely not in Das Kapital), but I remembering him describe the commune where nobody owns property anymore, and the relationship between parent and child no longer exists - i.e children sleep e.g 50 to a room and are cared for by the commune and no longer the parents
- vidarh 6y ago
  Marx has to my knowledge never written anything remotely like that. Even well after Marx speculating about the specifics of future organisation of society was generally seen as un-Marxist and utopian. But this has echoes to me of Marx words on the bourgeois view on women, which he ridicules in the Communist Manifesto by claiming that some of them saw that communists wanted to remove private property and assumed that meant sharing women too, because they saw women as an economic asset, while of course he argued for no such thing. Engels went further than Marx in speculating about future societal structure, but he too to my knowledge only went as far as suggesting that society would have a responsibility for childcare. A statement that's easy to misconstrue into suggesting society take over responsibility overall vs. a responsibility for e.g. providing nursery options and school spaces. The idea of Marx arguing for children to be cared for by the commune in any case sounds like projection of the same kind as with women in seeing children as property where a statement about responsibility becomes a statement of ownership. Notably it is mostly rich people who think they have the right to treat children as property that can be shipped off to boarding school without a say in the matter.
  - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
    Thanks for that. I was eagerly waiting for a reply :) Ok, looks like I’ll have to have a second parse of Communist Manifesto. I’m not sure where I got that info from then... but could have sworn I did a few double takes while going through Communist Manifesto because of these thoughts. Weird. > claiming that some of them saw that communists wanted to remove private property Apart from your woman comment from above, isn’t the removal of private property one of the primary aims of The Communist Manifesto? Seems fitting given his experience with property law that he began to hate the concept of it. Also, sorry... I don’t have anyone really to bounce my questions off on about this topic :)