Hangman wrote:Kevin Wahl wrote:Hangman wrote:Kevin Wahl wrote:Hangman wrote:Kevin Wahl wrote:George 'Hannibal' Peppard wrote:Kevin Wahl wrote:only good capitalist is a dead capitalist
*hates on business owners*
*starves after they all leave*
lol bro you got it backwards, it's the blood-sucking parasitic capitalist elite that would starve without the labor and dedication of the working class
Do all third-positionists use the same vocabulary as socialists?
do you even know what socialism is?
I don't think I ever
officially quit the CPUSA.
FYI you were about 5 years old at the time I joined.
to clarify - do you know the difference between marxism and socialism
The difference is purely academic.
What has that got to do with anything? I'm asking why third-positionists use the same definitions and vocabulary as Marxists/Leninists/Socialists/AnarchoSyndicalists/Communists/EveryKindOfRadicalLeftistsEver .
Socialism is a very broad term encompassing numerous economic ideologies both 'right' and 'left'. There is no single universal socialist 'vocabulary' like there is in Marxism (which is a subset of socialism). Historical figures as diverse as Adam Muller, Francis Parker Yockey, Thomas Carlyle, and Proudhon have all expressed 'socialist' views without indulging in the materialism of Marxist dialectic.
This excerpt by Nicholas Berdyaev is a nice outline of the beliefs about economy many Third Positionists share, although some would contest that by "Socialism" Berdyaev means "Marxism":
Socialism cannot be fought with "bourgeois ideas"; it is useless to set over against it the middle-class, democratic, capitalist society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It is precisely this bourgeois society that has bred Socialism and involved us in it. Socialism is flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood of Capitalism. They both belong in the same world; they are animated by a common spirit -- or rather, by a common negation of spirit.
Socialism has inherited the middle-class atheism of the capitalist nineteenth-century, which was, indeed, the most atheistical society known to history. It falsified the relation between man and man, and between man and physical nature. Its political economy corrupted the hierarchical organization of society and gave birth to economic materialism, which is an exact reflection of the actual state of that nineteenth-century civilization.
The life of the spirit became almost less than an accident, a speculative adaptation to less high things. The worship of Mammon instead of God is a characteristic of Socialism as well as of Capitalism.
Socialism is no longer an utopia or a dream; it is an objective threat, and a warning to Christians to show them unmistakably that they have not fulfilled the word of Christ, that they have in effect apostatized.
A basis is sometimes assigned to Capitalism by the statement that human nature is sinful and that sin cannot be got rid of by force, while the essence of Socialism is in the supposition that this nature is entirely good. But it is forgotten that the moment of history can come when the evil in human nature, namely, the sin in which it is involved, will have taken on a new shape.
It is the sinful part of our nature that begets Socialism. Capitalism, considered spiritually and morally, arose because human nature is prone to evil. But Socialism has arisen for exactly the same reason.
Apostasy from the Christian faith, abandonment of spiritual principles and disregard of the spiritual ends of life, must of necessity lead first to the stage called Capitalism and then to the stage called Socialism.
It follows clearly enough that we must begin to make our Christianity effectively read by a return to the life of the spirit, that a normal hierarchical harmony of life must be recovered, that that which is economic must be subordinated to that which is spiritual, that politics must be again confined within their proper limits.
Francis Parker Yockey also had similar things to say about the relation between Marxism and capitalism:
Marxism is an ideal. It does not take account of living ideas, but regards the world as a thing that can be planned on paper and then set up in actuality. Marx understood neither Socialism nor Capitalism as ethical world-outlooks. His understanding of both was purely economic, and thus a misunderstanding.
. . .
Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world-outlook. It is a way of thinking and feeling and living, and not a mere technique of economic planning which anyone can understand. It is primarily ethical and social and only secondarily economic. The economics of a nation is a reflection of the national soul, just as the way a man makes his living is a subordinate expression of his personality.
Capitalism is an expression of Individualism as a principle of life, the idea of every man for himself. It must be realized that this feeling is not universal-human, but only a certain stage of a certain culture, a stage that in all essentials passed away with the First World War, 1914-1919.
Socialism is also an ethical-social principle, and not an economic program of some kind. It is antithetical to the Individualism which produced Capitalism. Its self-evident, instinctive idea is: each man for all.
To Individualism as a Life-principle, it was obvious that each man in pursuing his own interests, was working or the good of all. To Socialism as a Life-principle, it is equally obvious that a man working for himself alone is ipso facto working against the good of all.
The ethical and social foundations of Marxism are capitalistic. It is the old Malthusian "struggle" again. Whereas to Hegel, the State was an Idea, an organism with harmony in its parts, to Malthus and Marx there was no State, but only a mass of self-interested individuals, groups, and classes. Capitalistically, all is economics. Self-interest means: economics. Marx differed on this plane in no way from the non-class-war theoreticians of capitalism - Mill, Ricardo, Paley, Spencer, Smith. To them all, Life was economics, not Culture. To them all, it was the war of group against group, class against class, individual against individual, whether they say so expressly or not. All believe in Free Trade, and want no "state interference" in economic matters. None of them regard society or State as an organism. Capitalistic thinkers found no ethical fault with destruction of groups and individuals by other groups and individuals, so long as the criminal law was not infringed. This was looked upon as, in a higher way, serving the good of all. Marxism is also capitalistic in this. Its ethics have superadded the Mosaic law of revenge, and the idea that the competitor is evil morally, as well as economically injurious.
Marxism imputed capitalistic impulses to the upper classes, and socialistic impulses to the lower classes. This was entirely gratuitous, for Marxism made an appeal to the capitalistic instincts of the lower classes. The upper classes are treated as the competitor who has cornered all the wealth, and the lower classes are invited to take it away from them. This is capitalism. Trade unions are purely capitalistic, distinguished from employers only by the different commodity they purvey. instead of an article, they sell human labor. Trade-unionism is simply a development of capitalistic economy, but it has nothing to do with Socialism, for it is simply self-interest. It pits the economic interest of the manual laborers against the economic interest of the employer and manager. It is simply Malthus in new company. It is still the old "struggle for existence," man against man, group against group, class against class, everyone against the State.
