MDG: Anyway, I've got news for you: as Lark pointed out in another post, you'll never get rid of all inequality. You'll never have perfection. From one wage slave to another, you'd better face the facts that human existence will be wrought with inequality and brutality and all those other things people deplore. The best we can do is minimize, as much as possible, the bad.MDG: Stating the facts of the situation is not the same as declaring one's support for those facts. Right now it's raining and cold outside; I don't like it, but them's the facts. I hope you see the difference.
Chuck: What a dodge! You didn't just say 'inequality' exists, you said INEQUALITY WILL ALWAYS EXIST! Look REAL HARD at your first paragraph on this page. Please remember, 'inequality' means the existence of social classes to Marxists. What evidence do you have for the permanence of social classes? (I smell a lame 'human nature' argument brewing). And your last sentence in the same paragraph is an out of hand dismissal of socialist revolution - sounds like more LIBERAL PREACHING to me. You don't like inequality but you only want to "minimize" it? Sounds like tacit support to me. And who said anything about 'perfection'?
: : Chuck: I'm talking about the abolition of social classes. Marx and Lenin were very clear about 'inequality' and how it will remain for some time as a defect AFTER CAPITALISM IS OVERTHROWN (i.e. the first stage of communism). Consider Marx in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme":
: :
: : But one man is superior to another physically or mentally
: : and so supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor
: : for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must
: : be defined by its duration and intensity, otherwise it
: : ceases to be a standard of measurement. This EQUAL
: : right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recog-
: : nises no class differences, because everyone is a
: : worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises
: : unequal individual endowment and thus productive
: : capacity as natural priveleges .... with an equal
: : output, and hence an equal share in the social con-
: : sumption fund, one will in fact receive more than
: : another, one will be richer than another, and so
: : on. To avoid these defects, right, instead of being
: : equal, would have to be unequal. (International
: : Publishers, p.8, 1986)
: : Or consider Lenin in "State and Revolution":
: : ... the mere conversion of the means of production
: : into the common property of the whole of society
: : ("Socialism" in the generally accepted sense of the
: : word) DOES NOT REMOVE the defects of distribution
: : and inequality of "bourgeois right" which CONTINUE
: : TO RULE as long as the products are divided "accor-
: : ding to work performed." .... We cannot imagine that,
: : having overthrown capitalism, people will at once
: : learn to work for society WITHOUT ANY STANDARD OF
: : RIGHT; indeed, the abolition of capitalism DOES NOT
: : IMMEDIATELY LAY the economic foundations for SUCH a
: : change. (International Publishers, pp.77-8, 1985)
Chuck: So your suggestion that Marxists are utopians when it comes to inequality has no merit.
MDG: Being rather blissfully ignorant of Marxist theory, I'm sure I never said that Marxists were utopians with regard to inequality. Now, allow me to educate you with a superior form of Marxism:
Chuck: I said you 'suggested' it. When you said: "you'll never get rid of all inequality .... you'd better face the facts that human existence will be wrought with inequality ..." you unknowingly (or knowingly) threw the revolutionary Marxist project out the window - i.e. you dissmissed communism as an impossibility.
