Letters to the Editor
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jojo++
Oh, so now it's logical & sane to conflate Jesus with the entire Bible, and all of it's subsequent implementations?
No, not sane...silly. What is accomplished?
Tell me jojo, in an extrapolation of your view, what theory, thought or idea is not susceptible to a transformation into dogma? What great idea is not capable of both beneficial and detrimental implementations, sometimes concurrently?
How would you benchmark, measure or otherwise assess ideas, theories, and philosophies in this order?
What is the function of blame for you? What purpose does it serve? What benefit comes out of the assignment of blame for the theorist/thinker/philosopher?
Isn't your assertion, ironically, a bit tyrannical? I can see a world that operated this way as being one of absolute oppression and tyranny, or if just a fanciful statement, not worth asserting at all.
Which is it? or something else I haven't considered? (certainly possible)
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@jojo
So collectives exist but have no legal rights? How do you have a legal entity without rights and duties? Really, what you're saying is that organism do not have any social properties that their constituent cells lack. That is nonsense.
Collectives do not go to prison or get shot in the back of the head. Individual people do. When these are done unfairly, the rights violated are those of the *individual* not the right of the collective, which is an abstraction.
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@mona
I doubt Jews would consider being Jewish an asbstraction, and many similar examples could be cited. They were killed for their collective identity, not their individual status, even though, yes, each faced death individually.
From the other side, we give collectives rights individuals do not enjoy, especially in tax code and other civil legal code.
Try being a religion of one, and operating tax free.
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@kdwmson & jojo++
Actually, if you read Marx, you find that he is precisely the opposite of Plato; rather than positing eternal categories that make up the real and the sensuous world as degraded manifestations of those categories, Marx argues precisely the opposite, i.e. that the sensuous world is the real one and the categories abstractions we use to encapsulate our experience of it, and that these categories change as the organization of human society changes. Marx's and Plato's approaches cannot be more different.
Marx is, furthermore, amenable to a very libertarian interpretation even if he himself was caught up in the mores of his day. The same cannot be argued for Plato, who believed in the benevolent rule of educated elites, and only those elites. Echoing jillhr64, Marx's theories were never implemented. Lenin's were. Lenin came to power around 20 years after Marx was born, and a great deal had changed since then. Furthermore, most people understand Marx only through Der Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, which was a propganda tract and brief programmatic statement written in the 1840s; Marx himself acknowledges in later editions that much of the programmatic content of Der Manifest is outdated.
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@ kdwmson
My lack of charity is generally reserved for those who lack it themselves. In my judgment, Milton Friedman was just such a person. Good advice to bad men doesn't accurately describe his complicity in putting his theories at the disposal of monsters. He was the Edward Teller of economics, not the J. Robert Oppenheimer, let alone the Albert Einstein.
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@kdwwmson
All sorts of rights can be held collectively. Corporations collectively own property. Plaintiffs hold collective rights in class-action lawsuits. Fishery cooperatives hold collective harvest rights. Union members hold collective bargaining rights. Ranchers in open-range settings hold collective grazing rights. There are all sorts of meaningful rights that are not held on
Ephemeral, contractual rights. Those contrived for economic gain and benefit but which are not inalienable. But rights as against the state or depredation of criminals are individually held.
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@Mona
But collective can be broken up, their property confiscated, their members punished for being members of the collective, and so on.
Capitalism itself is successful because of its protection of collectives. Without the invention of the corporation, capitalism would simply have been another dreary variation on agricultural economics. It was the corporation that transformed market-based economics into the dominant global economic system - its ability to collectivize risk and benefit at the sub-state scale.
On Friedman: Friedman's advice to Pinochet is not at all analogous to giving Stalin advice on polio epidemics, or allowing trade with Cuba. Economic organization is the predominant element in social organization. A better analogy is giving advice to Mao on food distribution, and then wanting to have your hands clean.
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@jillhr64
Going beyond even a sense of collective identity held by the victims, many victims of state violence are victimized precisely because they belong to a particular collective in the perception of the leaders of that state; viz. state violence directed against workers in the 19th and 20th centuries, and against Civil Rights workers in the 1950s-1970s. The collective identities ascribed to these groups by their oppressors was not necessarily shared by the people making up the groups (although they did, of course, share a certain common identity). The victims of repressive violence are victimized precisely because of their belonging to a collective, however that collective may be constituted. This is where Libertarian analysis often fails; an injury to one is an injury to all.
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@ingsoc
So we are in agreement. Excellent.
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@Mona
So the right to free association is ephemeral and not inalienable?
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@IngSoc
Of course, you are right. But the deadly error was then positing these principles of transformation as themselves universal and real. The dialectic took on a religious connotation. Marx himself understood the danger - he knew he was born before the revolution, so to speak. And he himself tried to destroy all the organizations that he created during his lifetime as the clock ran out.
The problem is one of any all-encompassing, universalist explanation. They all tend toward authoritarianism when put in the hands of the practical man. They all have this flavor of pre-20th century thinking, that even when shying away from the Great Chain of Being, can't help but be put into those terms.