Marx was not a philosophical liberal, unlike, e.g., J.S. Mill. He was a distinguished critic of liberalism. That is different from whether he was a harsh polemicist. One may be an anti-liberal philosophically but a gentle-manly/-womanly/civil interlocutor, Marx was not.
Like Dinsdale in Monty Python's Piranha Brothers:
***************
Interviewer: I've been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.
Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.
Interviewer: But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor.
Stig: (pause) Oh yeah, he did that.
Interviewer: Why?
Stig: Well he had to, didn't he? I mean there was nothing else he could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law.
Interviewer: What had you done?
Stig: Er... well he didn't tell me that, but he gave me his word that it was the case, and that's good enough for me with old Dinsy. I mean, he didn't *want* to nail my head to the floor. I had to insist. He wanted to let me off. He'd do anything for you, Dinsdale would.
Interviewer: And you don't bear him a grudge?
Stig: A grudge! Old Dinsy. He was a real darling.
Interviewer: I understand he also nailed your wife's head to a coffee table. Isn't that true Mrs O' Tracy?
Mrs O' Tracy: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Stig: Well he did do that, yeah. He was a hard man. Vicious but fair.
*******************
and more like Doug Piranha: (no relation)
************
2nd Interviewer: Doug?
Vercotti: Doug (takes a drink) Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I've seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.
2nd Interviewer: What did he do?
Vercotti: He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious.
**********
And he did those things. Some self-styled liberals do do, Mises. Nozick. Marx was usually effective in his invective.
How, he tended to disperse these talents on the fools and the wise men alike, as the rain falleth on the the just and the unjust.It would be more accurate to say that Marx did not brook disagreement that he did not suffer fools. (Proudhon was no fool, nor was Mill.)
Politically he seems to have thought that ridicule, mockery, and abuse were effective weapons to dispose of opposition, maybe be was right.
And since he was a master of the German language (he's really very funny in a bitter sort of way) and the recipient of really first rate classical education (nothing like reading Martial, Tacitus, Juvenal, Apuleius, etc. if you want to learn the art of abuse), and had a bad temper, maybe those carbuncles, he was a formidable opponent.
--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Chris Doss
>
> Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com:
>
> Says who? You? Carrol? The Marx who wasn't a
> Marxist?
> Where do you
> guys get the cojones to issue proclamations like
> this?
>
> --
>
> It's from Lenin's little-known pamphlet "Thinking:
> an
> Infantile Leftwing Disorder." :)
>
> ^^^^^^
>
> CB: You should hear the names Marx called people,
> like philistines,
> fishblood petty bouorgeois. Read _Capital_ and
> you'll see Marx was tougher
> than Lenin on people.
>
> You guys are just as authoritarian in claiming to
> represent Marx. You
> misrepresent him when you pretend he was a liberal.
> He was very strict and
> rigorous, harsh on many. Check out his
> characterizations of Proudhoun. Check
> out the way Engels talks about Duhring.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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