To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that relates Marxism with today’s Opioid crisis. What is focused on is Clark’s analysis of Marx and Marxism. this appeared in Heidelblog
The characterization of Marxism, which is the collective thoughts of Marx and his followers, is overly simplistic in Clark's article. For while we could accuse Marx of pursuing a failed eschatology, the same is not true for all of his followers. In fact, Marx's failure is simply a response to many of his correct observations about the de facto Capitalism of his day. His observations about Capitalism were factually based. And even though we have a different form of Capitalism today as what existed during Marx's time, many of his observations still ring true for us. In particular, that, generally speaking, workers are counted as disposable objects of profit in the Capitalist system. And this view of workers is described in another way by Martin Luther King Jr. (see http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm ):
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Clark's reaction to Marx and Marxism has the same fault as Marx's reaction to Capitalism, both throw the baby out with the bathwater. Unfortunate for Clark's views, people follow Marx to various degrees and thus offer partial solutions to the current problems we face. In addition, if Clark believes that neither Marx nor any other non-capitalist have anything to offer that could improve today's Capitalism, then he has implied that today's capitalism has provided a relative utopia and thus Clark would exhibit some of the same faults that others who promote utopias exhibit.
Though I am not going to comment on everything Clark wrote here, I will say that if he really remembered Marx well, he would realize that what Lenin instituted in the Soviet Union was not Marxism, it was bourgeoisie dictatorship. Says who? Says Lenin's contemporary and fellow socialist, Rosa Luxemburg (see https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm ):
The basic error of the Lenin-Trotsky theory is that they too, just like Kautsky, oppose dictatorship to democracy. “Dictatorship or democracy” is the way the question is put by Bolsheviks and Kautsky alike. The latter naturally decides in favor of “democracy,” that is, of bourgeois democracy, precisely because he opposes it to the alternative of the socialist revolution. Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favor of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favor of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favor of dictatorship on the bourgeois model. They are two opposite poles, both alike being far removed from a genuine socialist policy...
“We have never been idol-worshippers of formal democracy.” All that that really means is: We have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom – not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy – not to eliminate democracy altogether.
But socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished.
One should read Marx's On The Jewish Question to see whether it is Luxemburg or Lenin, who actually belonged to a bourgeoisie class, who best represents Marx:
Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property owner has become the legislator for the property owner? The property qualification for the suffrage is the last political form of giving recognition to private property.
Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.
Certainly, there are basic teachings of Marx that must be rejected by all Christians: his belief in a utopia on earth, his materialism, and his reliance on class dictatorship--the proletariat dictatorship. And yet, if one takes his abolition of religion and property to mean that there is no privileged group based on religion and economic class in society, then Marx has much more to contribute to our political and economic approaches than what any religiously conservative Christian I know of has. Perhaps the best, though not without error, criticisms of Marx come from Martin Luther King Jr (see pg 92ff from http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminars/aahistory/Pilgrimage.pdf ). But in his criticism of Marx, King levels an equal salvo at Capitalism as he did against Marxism because of its reliance on materialism.
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April 2,
To Joe Carter and his blogpost citing the work of law professor Ozan Varol Varol claims that democracy can be undone by allowing government to regulate the media while neglecting to note how democracy can be undone by having fewer companies own media outlets. This appeared in the Acton blog.
Carter and Varol make the typical conservative error in examining the relationship between power and the public sector. He assumes that power can only be consolidated in the public sector.. And the evidence they are citing contradicts that assumption. For they say, without showing an ounce of concern, that 90% of the media is controlled by 6 companies.
Don't Carter and Varol know the distinction between power and governmental authority. Not all who have governmental authority have power. And the converse is just as true. Just think how much power those 6 companies have because of their control over most of the media. And the effects of corporate power on control of the media was well examined by Chomsky and Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent. For in that study, Chomsky and Herman documented how our news is often filtered according to the business interests of the corporate owners. And those interests revolve around making advertising dollars more effective and efficient as well as what stories best serve the interests of the corporate owners. Chomsky has multiple times commented on how the self-censorship of media outlets done to serve the interests of the media's corporate owners can rival the government censorship practiced in authoritarian states. And there are fewer corporate owners of media now than when they published their study.
It's not that Carter and Varol don't have a point, they do especially with our current President. It is that they are blind to the consolidation of power in the private sector that can come from having media being dominated by so few companies. And when government is a working democracy, then it well represents its people to competing foreign and domestic interests. And what Carter Varol have failed to see is that corporations can wield much power and work against the best interests of the people in its pursuit of ever increasing profits for themselves..
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April 3
To John Horvat and his blogpost that blames our federal debt on the state being too involved by providing social safety net programs for those in need. Here he states that such programs are a result of the state interfering with other institutions, such as the family and Church, that were to guide people and provide assistance and guidance for them. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
Horvat's view of the problem of national debt is flawed. For he doesn't first examine federal spending and, especially, who is benefiting the most from federal spending. Rather, he blames federal debt on its social safety net spending without, again, examining who is benefiting the most from federal spending.
Thus, Horvat doesn't look at military aid given to other nations. For if he had, he would realize that those in the military industrial complex benefit the most from such aid. For our military aid to other nations does not come in the form of a check, but in hardware produced by businesses in the military industrial complex. Nor does he look at America's military budget and see how much that might contribute to the debt. If he had, he would realize that those in the military industrial complex benefit the most from defense budgets. Nor does he consider how laws preventing Medicare from negotiating prices of pharmaceuticals or that Obamacare first benefited the Health Insurance and Health Care industries. because of how the Affordable Care Act was written.
Instead, while blaming social safety nets, he includes Social Security which is not only self-supported and thus does not add to the National Debt, but has lent more to finance that debt than any other source including China. Similarly, part of Medicare is also self supportive and thus does not to the federal government's debt.
In short, America's corporations are the prime beneficiaries of our National Debt and Horvat, instead their role in increasing the National Debt, reduces all blame for that debt on social safety net programs and on those who rely them. Why? Because such programs causes people to rely more on the government than Horvat thinks is good. It also because as people rely more on the government, they rely less on the Church. And the part of his blaming social safety net programs only is due to a turf battle between his beliefs about how much the state should be involved in people's lives vs the Church.
In the meantime, his subsidiary philosophy is not being usurped by government assistance programs. Instead, our maximize profits economic system has made families more dependent on the government for survival. That system makes workers into disposable objects of prophet as, for many them, their jobs are taken away by either foreign workers or machines.
By only blaming the state's social safety net programs and those who rely on them for the federal debt problem, Horvat has distracted our attention from the real beneficiaries of federal debt and has, instead, scapegoated government assistance programs as well as their beneficiaries in order to promote his subsidiary ideology.
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