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Originally Posted by Mosco Vito
Yes, Marx made a great contribution to the development of sociology, no doubt. The same Berdyaev (he was once a Marxist) all his life thought of Marx as a genius.
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I'm good with that
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mosco Vito
But I often see that the works of Marx make dogma, a "sacred cow".
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Halfway agree. Its something which is useful, but only to a point. Not "useful everywhere always" -- but useful where appropriate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mosco Vito
I prefer to look at the class struggle as simply one of the manifestations of the evil nature of man.
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Disagree there. The essence of the Marxist analysis of history is that "good and evil" are irrelevant; essentially Marx is the extension of Machiavelli to financial affairs: people will do what's "in their interest"-- its not because they're good or bad, its because if, say, you own property, you have one set of interests, if you don't-- then you have different interests.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mosco Vito
What do you think about the malthusianism/neo-malthusianism? Can this doctrines help to fight poverty?
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A different topic, really. I don't find it compelling for the most part. Malthus didn't foresee a world where it was so easy to produce food that the problem in the poorest nations is not starvation, its obesity.
Malthus seems to me far less relevant and interesting than Marx. In his
18th Brumaire Marx writes
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Originally Posted by Karl Marx
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
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just my two cents' worth, but this is really brilliant stuff. It still reads well, but when he wrote it, it was even more novel, more remarkable.