http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#5
> they operate only in the defense of the capitalist system. ravi's
> objection to "dryness" is precisely the longing of the isolated
> bourgeois individual for warmth and human company.
And I am definitely looking in the wrong place, am I not? ;-)
> Moralism seems to
> cater to that longing - but instead is another version of the heart of
> the heartless world, the opium of the unclear leftist.
Well yeah, not all stomachs can tolerate Milton. Funny to see you disparage "moralism" and talk about "heartless world"s at the same time. But no worries. I am content to be a muddle-headed sentimentalist.
I didn't call it dryness... I called it "dry ... formalism". The difference is obvious, no?
>
> Put antoher way, ravi follows Rousseau rather than Marx
That's probably true, but mostly because:
> - as the
> Hungarian philosopher, Gáspár Miklós Tamás, argues in "Telling the
> truth
> about class":
>
this is (to me <-- and that's an important point) parseable:
> ******The main difference between Rousseau and Marx is that Rousseau
> seeks to replace (stratified, hierarchical, dominated) society with
> the
> people (a purely egalitarian and culturally self-sustaining, closed
> community),
while this is not:
> while Marx does not want to 'replace' society by
> annihilating 'rule' and the ruling class as such, but believes that
> capitalism (one specific kind of society) might end in a way in which
> one of its fundamental classes, the proletariat, would abolish itself
> and thereby abolish capitalism itself. It is implied (it is
> sous-entendu) that the moral motive for such a self-abolition is the
> intolerable, abject condition of the proletariat.
Of course if "sous-entendu" is your thing, I urge you to press on! Frankly, the rest of the stuff (snipped by me) sounds like something out of Heidegger. Perhaps Chris D can set me right.
In a sense "you guys" (and the old man himself, as described in the quoted section below from the URL above) frequently jump from an apparent hard-nosed analysis to moral sentimentalism and such ("inner identity" etc), while dismissing the rest of us as some sort of hippies.
> Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is,
> once more, from G.A. Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that
> capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was
> unjust. In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have
> perfect knowledge of his own mind. In his explicit reflections on
> the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view.
> But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never
> in explicit language. Such an interpretation is bound to be
> controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts.
>
> Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought
> capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought
> that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live. Here
> points made in his early writings remain present throughout his
> writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of
> alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty,
> overwork and lack of fulfillment and freedom. People do not relate
> to each other as humans should.
>
> Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not? In the
> absence of any special reason to argue otherwise, it simply seems
> obvious that Marx's critique is a moral one. Capitalism impedes
> human flourishing.
>
And more (which also relates to "dry formalism"):
> Communism clearly advances human flourishing, in Marx's view. The
> only reason for denying that, in Marx's vision, it would amount to a
> good society is a theoretical antipathy to the word ‘good’. And here
> the main point is that, in Marx's view, communism would not be
> brought about by high-minded benefactors of humanity. Quite possibly
> his determination to retain this point of difference between himself
> and the Utopian socialists led him to disparage the importance of
> morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical
> necessity.
--ravi