

Einstein's Defense of  Socialism - lists
http://luxemburgist.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/einsteins-defense-of-socialism/

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NicuCalcea
I feel like you are all somehow far from the truth.

I live in Moldova, a state that appeared as a consequence of the Ribbentrop-
Molotov pact (also known as the Stalin-Hitler pact). We had the Communist
Party ruling our country until 2 years ago.

I've been talking to both Romanian (Fascist) and Russian (Soviet) soldiers,
and they all agree, both Nazism and Communism are socialistic regimes. I
strongly recommend "The Soviet Story", watching it might clear your views.

~~~
maxharris
[http://ia700107.us.archive.org/17/items/TheSovietStory/THE_S...](http://ia700107.us.archive.org/17/items/TheSovietStory/THE_SOVIET_STORY_512kb.mp4)

"The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must
give way." ... "They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust." - Karl Marx

Everyone should watch this movie - especially people that think that socialism
is a benign idea.

~~~
applicative
`maxharris` is either a moron or a liar, or more probably both. The first
fragment of this sentence is genuine Marx, writing for the New York Daily
Tribune, as a one-second search would have shown him. The second I cannot
find; it is certainly not in the same article, as the ellipsis fraudulently
suggests. If it exists the chances that it refers to a transition to
socialism, communism, or whatever Marx is supposed to have favored, are
certainly zero.

In the Daily Tribune article, Marx is discussing emigration (mostly to
America) from England, Ireland and Scotland, in the years around 1850, and the
gruesome commentary of English writers of the period.

The Economist, for example, he quotes as writing:

"The departure of the redundant part of the population of Ireland and the
Highlands of Scotland is an indispensable preliminary to every kind of
improvement. The revenue of Ireland has not suffered in any degree from the
famine of 1846-47, or from the emigration that has since taken place. On the
contrary, her net revenue amounted in 1851 to £4,281,999, being about £184,000
greater than in 1843"

I.e. they "regard ‘Net-Revenue’ as the Moloch to whom entire populations must
be sacrificed..." as Marx puts the view of the Ricardians.

The context can be found here on a website for true believers:
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/03/04.htm>

I don't see any easy way of search for ancient Economist articles, but I
notice that in the same year the American writer Carey quoted the same passage
as from "Economist, (London,) Feb. 12, 1853." in his book on the slave trade
<http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8000/pg8000.txt>

~~~
maxharris
So how do you deal with the following quote?

"The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the
earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire
reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward." - Friedrich Engels

A quick google search shows that this one is NOT hard to find:

<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm>

[http://books.google.com/books?id=Mdj3AXU2YEEC&pg=PA167&#...</a><p>Engels was
the co-founder of Marxism, and there is a great deal of evidence that the
Soviet Union murdered tens of millions of its own citizens. Given these facts,
any reasonable person will conclude that Marxism is an ideology that leads to
mass murder.

~~~
applicative
The quote from Engels (1820-1895) dates from 1849. But whatever the text may
mean, it would be absurd to claim that it is an expression of 'Marxism',
whatever in turn _that_ may mean. (I would have thought that Engels invented
"Marxism" -- about 30 years after writing this newspaper article.)

I don't care to defend Engels early middle or late, but this text doesn't have
the murder-favoring aspect you are pretending it does. It is a commentary on
ultra-complicated post-1848 politics; there is little here that wouldn't have
been accepted by an American observer of the time.

Interpretation is again helped by the preceding sentence (at a bare minimum)
which might be thought just as creepy: "The general war which will then break
out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound
nations, down to their very names."

The disappearance of a 'reactionary class' evidently means: the coming to a
social order in which that is not one of the classes. The disappearance of a
'dynasty' doesn't mean murder of the ruling family. The disappearance of
'nations' (Nationen) and 'peoples' (Voelker) is the same: not the destruction
of individuals, but the formation of some wider social unity, in which those
distinctions of Volk don't arise. It is like the disappearance of the
Confederacy.

The language Engels is employing is indeed ugly. But it is impossible to
believe that he or anyone in the mid 19th c. would be arguing for something in
the nature of genocide. They were simply too naive to envisage such a thing.

That the Soviet Union was a death machine that murdered millions is obvious.
It has nothing to do with the materials quoted, from Marx or Engels. The
question why you continue to fabricate connections is still open.

~~~
maxharris
<quote>The disappearance of a 'reactionary class' evidently means: the coming
to a social order in which that is not one of the classes. The disappearance
of a 'dynasty' doesn't mean murder of the ruling family. The disappearance of
'nations' (Nationen) and 'peoples' (Voelker) is the same: not the destruction
of individuals, but the formation of some wider social unity, in which those
distinctions of Volk don't arise. It is like the disappearance of the
Confederacy.</quote>

The only way to make people really disappear is to kill them or throw them
into a gulag. Why would a ruler go on supporting people that he wants to see
disappear? Marx and Engels spent their lives undermining _individual_ rights
("you have the right to be left alone, as long as you don't steal from, kill
or defraud other people"), which is the only thing that would have kept these
genocides from occuring.

I don't believe that this was some unforseeable connection. The bloody
language in Engels' writing makes more sense in this context.

Historical context does matter, but if you do it to the point where you can't
even judge anything in history as good or bad for people, you're just
following the current academic fad rather than thinking sensibly. This is
especially important when the ideas you're judging are still present in the
world around you, and when some aspect of history is still not properly
understood in most people's minds, as is the case with the history of
Communism.

~~~
applicative
"The only way to make people really disappear is to kill them or throw them
into a gulag."

But no one was suggesting making anyone disappear, least of all Engels. All
the myriad principalities and duchies of the German world are now gone, except
Liechtenstein & Co -- this is an example of what Engels is anticipating and
saying would be an 'advance' (he is thinking in this case of those of the
southern parts of the Austrian Empire) Those who wanted the unification of
Germany didn't want to kill off the people of Schleswig-Holstein! The
suggestion is an outrage! Every rational person in the period thought that (1)
a world full of petty duchies ruled by the church keeping peasants in
darkness, etc etc. was fated to go away and that (2) this would be good;
Americans, who were familiar with something better, would have been even more
emphatic than Engels. In claiming that the ideas here propounded are the
source of all evil, you are claiming that e.g. America is an example of this
evil.

The claim that Marx and Engels 'spent their lives undermining' individual
rights does not come with any evidence. Marx spent his life trying to write a
book about the inner nature of the so-called 'capitalistic mode of
production', of which he managed to finish one volume. It's a good read, you
should try it sometime. Incredibly funny for one thing. That it is somehow all
an argument against individual rights is a complete inversion of the actual
text. You are as usual employing Russian barbarism as an argument against
Marx.

You are in fact representing Stalinist propaganda. The idea the the Soviet
Union somehow realized something in Marx is pure Stalinism. Marx did nothing
appreciable except attempt an analysis -- true or false it matters not -- of
the present, specifically capitalistic form of life, without offering the
least suggestion for a possible replacement: "I am not writing recipes for the
cook-shops of the future". Every attempt to imagine a possible better future
society he sneers at as utopianism, Fourierism, Saint Simonism etc etc. The
only formula he has for the imagined replacement is "communism", i.e. people
living together and making their life together on the basis of thinking out
together how to live together and make their lives together -- an ancient
expression, another word for democracy -- and one admitting as many
interpretations, many of course corrupt.

~~~
maxharris
> The claim that Marx and Engels 'spent their lives undermining' individual
> rights does not come with any evidence.

From <http://faculty.washington.edu/wtalbott/phil332/trmarxII.htm>

"Note how much the early Marx is influenced by Hegel: (1) Individualism is a
problem to be overcome. (2) Emancipation is the goal, but of a species-being
not as an individual. Freedom is identified with the universal (844)."

"Private property "is the product of alienated labor, and ... it is the means
by which labor alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.""

The right to private property is an individual right. If someone is totally
deprived of the right to their property, they can't survive: take away
someone's food, clothes, home, bed, etc., and they're dead before long. This
happened _millions_ of times in the Soviet Union and in China, among other
places. You really can't go on pretending that Marx had nothing to do with it!

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OstiaAntica
Ironic that Einstein, writing in America after fleeing the horrors of national
socialism in Germany, still entertained notions of subjugating the individual
to the state.

~~~
kingkilr
Uhh, you know that the National Socialist Worker's Party didn't really have
anything to do with socialism?

~~~
TomOfTTB
I'm sorry but that just isn't correct. I'm absolutely not saying all
socialists are Nazis but the Nazi party was an extreme example of the
socialist philosophy. That philosophy being that the Government should use its
power to socially engineer a better world (the opposite of which being the
libertarian philosophy that the Government should exist to protect people
against social engineering by allowing them to do what they want even if those
actions are detrimental).

Obviously it's all a sliding scale but to say OstiaAntica is flat out wrong is
not accurate.

~~~
andyv
The Nazis were facists, which is to say that there was "private property", but
the state could tell you what you had to do with "your" property. In
socialism, the state owns the property. It's a distinction without much of a
difference, the main one being that socialism is a little more honest.

~~~
foljs
Spoken like a true 5 minute dabbler with an extremely cursory knowledge of the
topic at hand. Bravo!

Actually, the "state owning the property" is not a core idea of socialism --it
was only a "feature" of "really existing socialism", and even USSR had things
like the NEP. Except for the backward places where "really existing socialism"
developed, extremely few europeans (or american for that matter) socialists
believed that it was a proper socialism at all.

As in, there are several types of socialism. Things americans complain about
and deny as "socialism" (universal health care, for one), are proposed by even
right-wing parties in Europe.

I'm sorry, but a cursory glance at one book or a documentary, or something
heard from a friend of a friend, won't do. In order to intelligently discuss
matters of world politics one has to do a little research. And it would be
better if that research was impartial. Buy some books from both sides of the
argument, and from both sides of the atlantic (and even the pacific).

The average opinion even on this matters, even on a site like "Hacker News" is
often little better than what creationists know about evolution.

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plesn
Interesting, even though i'm not suprised knowing Einstein's affinity for
Spinoza : he must have carefully read Marx and other materialist philosophers.

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cma
The taboo is extremely strong here on Hacker News.

~~~
davidj
it is ironic that this site is dedicated to entrepreneurship, but is full of
people who are anti-capitalist and promote socialism.

