SolarCross wrote:That you claim Star Destroyer is in denial of change occurring is bizarre, a strawman I guess.
I suppose it was too much to assume that you would have read Marx, or Trotsky explaining Marx. And why would you when Star Destroyer can tell you what to think about something you are determined to remain ignorant about?
You bring up the sex lives of Spartans and Inuit in the context of Star Destroyer's disapproval of Marx's schemes for the abolition of the family. So let's look at that.
Fine, I guess. Though, as virtually everyone has stated, the Manifesto is basically a little blurb that isn't going to get you very far without having read Marx before. But let's pretend that your reading of STAR DESTROYER makes up for your ignorance of the work of Marx and the work of Marxists.
Star Destroyer wrote:"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists." As well they should. It is a disgusting concept! Karl Marx believed that the family structure was inherently exploitative, with capitalists treating their wives and children as property and bequeathing their accumulated assets to their children (he saw the concept of inheritance as a horrible evil).
Star Destroyer, and I guess I can't underline this enough, seems to think that the family has never changed as an institution. Marx goes so far as to specify that he means the, "bourgeois family," as an institution.
Let's go back to my original example.
In ancient Sparta, the condition of the family was for the father to live in the barracks with his fellow soldiers--more than likely having sex with them--while his wife kept the land and stayed at home. The father was expected to show his cunning by leaving the barracks now and then and having coitus with his wife.
A child would then be produced. Were it to be found defective, it would be killed. If it were a girl, it would be brought up to be taken; a boy raised as a soldier. One of the lessons that the boy learns is service to the state, the more prominent story is a Spartan boy learning to be cunning by stealing his food. He does this at a market where he steals a fox. When he is caught, he keeps the fox under his cloak and argues about how he is not a thief as the fox chews through him and he dies. This is a valiant way to die.
The boy grows up, goes to the barracks, and the cycle continues.
Compare this with our 21st century Inuit in a fishing boat off of Juno. More than likely he lived in a Christinized household with a Western mentality. In grade school his buddies and him probably joked about how lame it would be to be gay. He made out with some girls, had sex with a few of them, and then needed to find a job. He started fishing in a boat where he doesn't have sex with the other fishermen for a few months out of the year so he can spend his time in the house he owns with the woman that he knocked up his first year of college.
The Spartan and the Inuit are not the same person here. They are not the same form of family.
Star Destroyer loses his shit at the thought of the bourgouis family being abolished because he does not understand that the Spartan family has been abolished. The Inuit traditional family has been abolished. The initial Christian communal family has been abolished.
Virtually only the bourgouis family remains.
Marx dares to say that a different economic system would produce a different family and laughs at his contemporaries clutching their pearls at such a revelation. Star Destroyer responds by clutching his pearls.
Keep in mind some of the specifics Marx was talking about. To his West, Marx saw families being broken up by slavery. In his midst, the wife and daughters were often reduced to prostitutes on the streets of London, Paris, or Berlin while the male children were sent to factories; and in the East they were under what remained of the feudal yolk.
One may say, rightly, that things have changed in the first world. True enough! And Marx goes so far as to expand on this point further in the manifesto, something that almost the entire chapter is spent on that Star Destroyer neglects to mention. My guess would be because he set out to right a totally-rad tract about how Marxism was mean and didn't read the entire piece first.
The point is that the institution of the family changes for a reason. This reason needs to be explored, understood, and then discussed. Star Destroyer refuses to acknowledge this. So we're left with him writing about a history without any notion of history.
His [Marx's] solution? Children should be raised by the state, marriage and inheritance should be eliminated, and noncommital sex should be the only form of relationship. The man was a lunatic, and most people don't even have any idea how extreme and unrealistic some of his views were, because they've never bothered to read his Manifesto.
Marx does not propose any of these things. One wonders of Star Destroyer bothered to read his Manifesto.
Star Destroyer wrote:Just like all of his other arguments, he starts with an incredible lie about capitalist society and then uses it to excuse himself for the obscenities of communism. In this case, he defends his attack on monogamous marriage by claiming that capitalists are incapable of being monogamous anyway! Now, this may be true in Hollywood, but there are lots of capitalists in the rest of the world who are monogamous.
To underline this point again and again--Star Destroyer is assuming that history does not exist and clearly does not understand Marxism.
He is writing about the bourgouis (which he is improperly defined before) using women as objects that they are alienated from. That is to say, as being objectified.
Let us just dispense with pointing out how all of Star Destroyer's rational is dependent upon his belief that nothing has ever changed in all of the history of mankind.
In Marx's time, it was common to have prostitutes. It was not uncommon for women of a certain (majority) class to be prostitutes. Some of the best sources for Asquith, for instance, are the memoirs of his mistresses. This is well enough known as to not really bare mentioning, but I suppose that since there is a firm delusion by Solar Cross and Star Destroyer that nothing has changed it must be acknowledged.
The idea was that a gentleman procreated with his wife, and fucked prostitutes for fun. These gentlemen were, more than likely, bourgeois. Hence, "Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes..."
"Oh!" You may declare, destroying your own premise and destroying Star Destryoer's entire article, "But that's not how things are today!"
True enough. But let us remember the Inuit fisherman having sex with multiple women throughout his life before knocking one up. And let us assume, as I know having grown up in a Northwest fishing town, that he has porn on the boat and at home. The woman in each of these cases has become an alienated object from both our 19th century gentleman and our Inuit fisherman.
As Marx notes:
Marx wrote:Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes – and the latter’s abomination is still greater – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head...I might ask the political economist: am I obeying economic laws if I make money by prostituting my body to the lust of another (in France, the factory workers call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the nth working hour, which is literally true), or if I sell my friend to the Moroccans [where they still had Christian slaves] (and the direct sale of men in the form of trade in conscripts, etc., occurs in all civilized countries)? His answer will be: your acts do not contravene my laws, but you find out what Cousin Morality and Cousin Religion have to say about it; the morality and religion of my political economy have no objection to make, but... But who should I believe, then? Political economy or morality? The morality of political economy is gain, labor and thrift, sobriety – and yet political economy promises to satisfy my needs. The political economy of morality is the wealth of a good conscience, of virtue, etc. But how can I be virtuous if I do not exist? And how can I have a good conscience if I am not conscious of anything? It is inherent in the very nature of estrangement that each sphere imposes upon me a different and contrary standard; one standard for morality, one for political economy, and so on. This is because each of them is a particular estrangement of man and each is centred upon one particular area of estranged essential activity: each is related in an estranged way to the other.
This is to say that the bourgeois relationship with sex and family still persists. And why should it not? The problem that Star Destroyer finds is that he has a sick feeling to the idea that people use prostitutes and alienate women (and men) from themselves and their means of production. And yet it was true, and remains true. A Marxist goes further than his feelings about it and attempts to explain it.
Marx wrote:[the bourgouis husbands] take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love.
Star Destroyer takes exception to this in the following way:
Star Destroyer wrote:Now, this may be true in Hollywood, but there are lots of capitalists in the rest of the world who are monogamous. In any case, after selling the fantastic lie that monogamy doesn't exist, he argues that we should forget about achieving this supposedly impossible goal and simply embrace "free love", a euphemistic term for unbridled hedonism and sexual promiscuity. As an aside, this idea resurfaced in the 1960's, with no more success: it produced a generation with a soaring divorce rate and disaffected children.
1. Let us assume that it is only true in Hollywood (it isn't). Certainly there is a reason for this. Star Destroyer, by saying nothing, now finds himself stuck in acknowledging a universal family morality as well as something that goes against it.
2. That fact that there are capitalists that are monogamous in no way addresses anything that Marx was attempting to say. Marx himself was monogamous, so far as we know. He hates the institution of prostitution, and he endlessly mocks utopians that didn't want to be monogamous:
Marx wrote:(1) in its initial form only a generalization and completion of that relation (of private property). As such, it appears in a dual form: on the one hand, the domination of material property bulks so large that it threatens to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by everyone as private property; it wants to abstract from talent, etc., by force. Physical, immediate possession is the only purpose of life nd existence as far as this communism is concerned; the category of worker is not abolished but extended to all men; the relation of private property remains the relation of the community to the world of things; ultimately, this movement to oppose universal private property to private property is expressed in bestial form – marriage (which is admittedly a form of exclusive private property) is counterposed to the community of women, where women become communal and common property. One might say that this idea of a community of women is the revealed secret of this as yet wholly crude and unthinking communism. Just as women are to go from marriage into general prostitution, so the whole world of wealth – i.e., the objective essence of man – is to make the transition from the relation of exclusive marriage with the private owner to the relation of universal prostitution with the community. This communism, inasmuch as it negates the personality of man in every sphere, is simply the logical expression of the private property which is this negation. Universal envy constituting itself as a power is the hidden form in which greed reasserts itself and satisfies itself, but in another way. The thoughts of every piece of private property as such are at least turned against richer private property in the form of envy and the desire to level everything down; hence these feelings in fact constitute the essence of competition. The crude communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to level down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited measure. How little this abolition of private property is a true appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor, unrefined man who has no needs and who has not yet even reached the stage of private property, let along gone beyond it.
(For crude communism) the community is simply a community of labor and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist. Both sides of the relation are raised to an unimaginary universality – labor as the condition in which everyone is placed and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.
Let me be clear here in addressing that Marx is not addressing his own morals about this, nor the morals he might think exist within his "scientific socialism," but the economic issues and how they affect morality.
Something Star Destroyer is having difficulty grasping, though it is expected of ten year olds.
3. Star Destroyer is completely incorrect in pointing out that Marx wants some kind of "free love." It never mentions that at all in the manifesto, this is something he is making up.
4. Star Destroyer seems to think that the Marxists took over in the 1960s. That your perverbial Don Draper was a Marxist, and that it somehow stopped or something. This is incorrect.
5. Tacitly, Star Destroyer assumes that it is no longer common to have multiple sexual partners. This is incorrect.
SolarCross wrote:To this you think the merest mention of spartans and inuit and the false claim by yourself that Star Destroyer is unaware that change occurs will be a huge distraction.
I had hoped that by underlining the fact that Spartans and the Inuit had different conceptions of the family I wouldn't need to spell this all out. I clearly overestimated by audience, though this should have been clear the moment someone brought up the great philosopher Star Destroyer.
Solar Cross wrote:My take is this:
The biology of human mating is fairly variable, humans bear some of the characteristics of harem keeping mammals such as gorillas and lions because the males of the species are larger and more aggressive than females. True monogamous species like very many species of bird tend to have males and females of the same size. Humans however only are very slightly prone to harem keeping because males are only 15% larger than females whereas for true harem keeping species the male is much larger than the female than this, so monogamy is the general trend for most of our species and always has been.
Thus mating laws and customs all across the world generally reflect this by coming down around the monogamous pattern though exceptions are possible sometimes to allow a limited kind of harem keeping for those males with conspiciously strong resources. The Muslims overtly allow for up to four wives while Christians, Buddhists, Hindus do not but may, somewhat extra legally, have a mistress on the side all the same.
Other animals don't make stuff and so tend to have exceedingly few possessions so consequently their mating does not tend to have much implication for property transfers. The more legal aspect of human mating which is generally called marriage evolved very particularly to provide a structure for managing property between the mating pair and their offspring. This much is probably the substance of Marx's objection to marriage as he does not want humans owning property. If humans contrary to their nature are not legally allowed to own property they will have a reduced need for for the legal institution of marriage. However "free love" will not be the consequence of reducing human status to that of an animal, for people will still be jealous of sexual rivals just as animals are.
I wish I could say that was as interesting as it was irrelevant.
Anyway, here you go.
The main issue remains that both Star Destroyer and yourself refuse to acknowledge that history moves, can't define Marxist terms, and seem intent in throwing in a bunch of stuff Marx never said.