Targets is a funny word. He embraced the communist party as embodying the working class movement. He lived in relative poverty, making a slight living from writing for newspapers. His writings were political and economic philosophy. He wrote the most famous political tract in history, The Communist Manifesto, which was intended for the broad public.
The real question is, can one be a philosopher and also an activist, and my impression is that marx was both.
The question I have for those espousing anti-communist or anti-marxist views is, what is your real target. For some, totalitarianism is the same as communism; for others, the idea that a working class should live under the thumb of an educated ruling class, called in the past the bourgeoisie, seems normal. For the former point, all I can say is that marx was not stalin, and to take it further, stalin and the Russian communist party and its successors, destroyed the value in the workers movement that put the communists in power. When people became disillusioned with the rigidities of the communist party, they turned to socialism and created socialist parties. Most intellectuals of the 1950s, outside of asia and africa, took that path. By the 1970s, it was hard to find communist intellectuals, unless they were engaged in revolutions or wars, like Vietnam or guinea-bissau.
For the latter point, I would say that you might read some pikkety to get an idea of an economic who challenges the unequal distribution of wealth that marks our times.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 7 May 2018 at 04:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
How many of the 99% of the working classes who were the target of Marx's activism had (and still has) access to Marx's writings? We're they really his targets?
Ayinka Agbetuyi
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
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From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 05/05/2018 14:20 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
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This kind of attack on marx is typical of the red scare anti-communist movement from the 19th century on through the 20th. derrida distinguished between marx and Marxism, or what the various movements made of marx. To equate a figure like stalin with Marxist thought is abusive of history. Stalin is responsible for Stalinism. That he came on the heels of a Marxist revolution doesn't mean that the totalitarian regime he engineering, the purges, the statism, the "revolution in one state," in short the repressive regime, had anything to do with an ideology that conceived of the state "withering away" as the bourgeoisie was converted—not slaughtered—to a class with higher consciousness.
Every one of the reproaches of Marxism is built on this false connection of authoritarian abuse. It really strikes me as a playground level of thought, and it always amazed me that my students would parrot the conflation of Marxist thought and anticommunist propaganda.
There is really a core to this that needs to be reasserted. Marx built his political activism on the idea of mobilizing the working classes, and attempting to put the interests of the working class, the 99% we'd say in this country, above those of the 1% who ruled and imposed their ideology on the rest of society. A simple notion that is replicated again and again. a simple notion of a just society, deflected by pieces like this wall st. editorial.
I don't think we should begin to accept it by acknowledging that the killings and dictatorships of regimes like cambodia's or china's embody the ideals or even ideas articulated by marx. The answer is not that Marxism is responsible for fewer deaths than the conquistadores, but that marx's ideals would run counter to such regimes that represented an abuse of marx's thought.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 4 May 2018 at 15:41
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>, usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Half of the population of Libya was killed by the Italians and one third of Namibia by the Germans.
Has anyone been able to count the dead in the Americas?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 4, 2018 3:16 PM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
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