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To Die For The People

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In the latter decades of the eighteenth century, three great revolutions took place. In America, a colony achieved independence. In Britain, the industrial revolution turned an empire into a world market system based on the capitalist mode of production. In France, oppressed classes rose and destroyed an oppressor class. The currents generated by these revolutions […]

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Understanding Marxism 7

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“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” – Karl Marx In the closing parts of this essay, we look at Marx’s and Marxists’ suggestions of solutions for the problems of capitalism’s inadequacies. Marx himself said and wrote little about the future beyond capitalism. He didn’t […]

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Understanding Marxism 6

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“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.” – Karl Marx Another remarkable quality of Marx’s and many Marxists’ analyses, besides specific insights drawn from their surplus-focused analysis, is their attention to […]

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Understanding Marxism 5

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“As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.” – Karl Marx We turn next to the distribution of capitalist […]

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Understanding Marxism 4

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“As in private life one dif erentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.” […]

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Understanding Marxism 3

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“The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” – Karl Marx A major part of Marx’s contribution was in economics. He was a broadly engaged and educated European intellectual of his time when […]

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Understanding Marxism 2

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“The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general.” – Karl Marx What motivated Karl Marx, as a young man growing up in the middle of 19th century Europe, to become a critic of capitalism? The answer is partly the American and French revolutions of the late […]

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Understanding Marxism 1

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“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” – Karl Marx We offer this essay now because of the power and usefulness today of Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economic system. Capitalism has spread since Marx’s time to become today’s global system. Along the way, it changed in many ways. […]

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See the Hostility Behind the Friendly Façade

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We like to think of ourselves as relatively peaceful and agreeable members of society. We are social animals to the core, and we need to convince ourselves that we are loyal to and cooperative with the communities we belong to. But on occasion, all of us have acted in ways that go against this self-opinion. […]