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I had this very dimwitted and short-sighted view of Marx and Marxism. First of all the notion that Marx was this madman, who emphatically saw the Rich as evil and the poor as the good was a view I held since high school. How I ended up thinking this way I cannot tell you.

You see I thought, and without a factual bases that Karl Marx, German and Jewish, was somehow Russian and of Mongolian ancestry. Can you believe that? Now that I know the truth I cannot understand how I could have perceived something so remote from the truth as this.

You might say what does it matter now. In today's society Marx, or Marxism has little to do with how we view or define the State as a whole, i.e. what is good for each individual who makes up the State.

You might further pose the argument that Marxism is about over-throwing the government, a coup d’état, to dispossess the wealth of the Rich and to set up a government with the authority to distribute the politically and revolutionary seized possessions, to the poor.

This government you would state, is a government that would control everything. The banks, factories, land, military, power to start wars, run of the prisons, and allocation of the wealth among the people. In fact, the government in this form appears to be either a forerunner to democracy, or a crude form of direct democracy itself, but in all likelihood nothing more than pure Totalitarianism.

I could not refute one word of this, if this were your invective. However, and to the contrary, I would have to debate you on the issue of Marx's reasons for such anti-Capitalist philosophical bashing's.

A Jewish female once told me, in a discussion about Marx and Socialism, that his philosophy in the modern world of today was dead, and that, no one today gives a darn anymore about his insubstantial viewpoints. They probably did not during his lifetime either. She said.

What I picked up on was that she held the same weak, shallow view of the man as I had. She had an overview of the philosopher and that is all. The thought of, how could I make her see that this was all wrong, when I myself, though intuitively knew there was something fundamentally important being left out about this free thinker, was beyond my present skills at the time.

After doing research on the Internet at Wikipedia and other reliable databases including the public library, I begin to put the truth about Marx together, who turned out to be nothing like the one I thought I knew.

In the first place Marx was a Humanist. An Atheist true, but a humanist above all. His argument that the Rich exploited the poor was not wholly correct but not wholly incorrect. On the whole the Rich did exploit the poor, but due to, and for reasons of, material wealth only. And definitely not because they were brutes or intrinsically evil.

Since they possessed the wealth they felt it was their political and moral right to demand veneration from the less fortunate, because they were supplying the money to give the poor any opportunity to share in the different divisions of Labor created by their desire to invest in capital goods for production.

This practice, in and of itself is not immoral. But Marx would argue that the wage per worker is always less than sufficient to sustain an individual who sells his labor in the open market place. He would further assert that there has to be some type of intervention needed to see that the poor, who is incapable of protecting themselves from such unilateral manipulation by the wealthy, get a chance to benefit overall from his only commodity, his labor.

This does not sound like a fanatic, quite the contrary. When I learned this I wondered why I had been lied to about this philosopher's vision for the poor. Though I do not agree with Stalinist or Leninism, I do believe that Socialism, though in my opinion is not in the least the hegemony I would like to be a part of, nonetheless it does attempt to improve the means of egalitarianism. But somehow, falls short of the task.

Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx's teacher taught him the fundamental principles of the History of philosophy. A right Hegelian, and conservative, Marx conflated German philosophy, French politics and British economics with his own concepts of materialism, plus concepts of the Dialectic process acquired from his former teacher Friedrich Hegel, and developed Communism.

Communism to many people is a scary word, but in reality is only a euphemism for egalitarianism. When Adolph Hitler, Lenin and Stalin picked up both Hegel and Marx's ideas, instead of putting them to good use, which would have been in the best interest of their Regimes, they used them both for their own self interest, and for the immoral purpose of social control.

The fundamental idea of Hegelianism held that due to the dialectic process, which Hegel said was nothing more than the desire of the Mind, Geist, to be free, if I can be interpretive here, was a metaphysical objective for people and not a physical one.

The physical account of Hegel's dialectic process was orchestrated by Marx. He decried Hegel's short-sightedness for not applying these principles to the poor peasant and his economic deprivations. He believed that somehow they, the processes, applied more to corporeal reality than to the transcendental world, and thus he wrote Das Kapital.

These structural binaries or social-conflicts; thesis, antithesis and synthesis throughout history were the polar forces leading toward a dialectical process of ultimate resolve and freedom, they believed. They were sure human society would reach, in time, the highest level of social achievement, that of pure peace of mind.

Okay, so what is your point? You may be wondering. Just this, neither Hegel nor Marx's desire to envision, idealistically, a better more just system of government is by today's standards not improbable, as it would have been under their system of government during their time. We can achieve it, however, but by way of Democracy rather than Communism.

What we need is for the newly elected President in 2008 to commit themselves to a conflict-free society. That means better race relations. The reduction of invidious practices by employers. More federally controlled housing laws. Bipartisan leadership to set a standard for the state and local governments, who normally rely on the Tenth Amendment, state’s rights, to off-set any laws, implemented on Capital Hill, they consider counterintuitive. If we can spend billions of dollars to clean up the ozone we can use some of that money to clean up our minds. In effect, a more cohesive society makes for a stronger nation.

Wesley McCants
http://www.globalbabbler.com (Editor/Web Administrator)