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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   28246 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Now this is nothing new, the draft version of the famous Communist Manifesto was called Confession of Faith.

Also I think that Marxism can actually be saved if viewed under the lenses of earlier works by Marx, especially The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. For instance this passage:

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

and later

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

See, the ultimate product of labor is not a commodity or service, it is the worker itself and through him the whole society. The proletariat embarks on the project of producing The New Soviet man, that is the true valuable product. This is something that machines or animals or slaves or even wage laborers cannot do, because animals and machines are ontologically incapable of such a thing while slaves and workers are alienated from their labor by capitalists. In fact capitalists themselves are alienated from their own labor, working on communist project would help them. You see, seizing the means of production and creating socialist society is only intermediary step before free proletariat finishes the project and abolishes private property by recreating and transforming the man itself into a new social species-being (so called socialist "humanizing"), it is only then that the communism will finally be successfully tried. In the meantime we have to prepare grounds for attempt number 49.

See, the Marxist faith restored all it takes is just a little bit of New Age sounding quackery, welcome to 19th century German philosophy. You can forward this to the OP, they can thank me later.

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