Exploring (mostly Cultural) Marxism in today's Left

Nor was it ever Communist. For that matter, in modern times there has never been any actual Communist government (I'm having to exclude random communes tucked away somewhere).You see, Communism is a perfect system and in order to get that perfect system you need perfect people to populate it. People are not perfect, so they must be made to be perfect. In order to do that, you need the dictatorship of the proletariat (ie, the working class). All nations that tried to become Communist got stuck in that stage, in the dictatorship of the proletariat. And they could proceed no further than that.

I agree fully that we need to keep in mind the context of the times that Marx and Engels wrote in.The Industrial Revolution was a massively dehumanizing period. Remember the Luddites. They were weavers, skilled tradesmen who made a good living. They wove when they wanted to and could take time off when they wanted. It was a good life. Then the factories and the machines arrived that unskilled people could run. Their entire livelihood was being taken away from them. Sound familiar?Capitalism is a good economic system, in theory. But when allowed to run unchecked it can be mercilessly brutal. When the bottom line is all that matters, people get destroyed.There's a good example of that in modern times: Walmart. Their employees are chronically under-employed, precisely to keep them from getting any employee benefits. When you hire on, you are carefully trained in how to apply for welfare, because, even though you are working, you also have to be on welfare in order to just survive. That is all for the good of Walmart's bottom line. This is also a living example of how capitalism depends on socialism.A balance has to be reached.

A little context: I grew up and live in that little red dot of Orange County, Calif. My ex-wife and I were the only Democrats in our families and my once expressed her relief in meeting me and that I was a rarity, because almost every other guy she's met here was either a Republican or a Fundamentalist or both.Similarly, my one sister's husband grew up and remains a staunch Republican (and now they're fundamentalists as well). He has also been retired for about a decade. One day about six years ago, he suddenly declared out of the blue: "I've come to realize that the Republicans are not my friends."And yet a few years later, he was flabbergasted to hear that I had voted for Obama. Despite his awakening, he still could not imagine anybody not voting the Republicans in so that they could continue to work against retirees. And against the workers and the poor as well.It is an obvious fact that, if left unchecked, pure capitalism leads to horrific exploitation of the workers. The bottom line is all that counts when people are reduced to anonymous resources. And the pressure is really on for upper management from shareholders to show growth and profits for every single quarter. In that kind of environment, all that there is room for is extremely short-term planning and action at the expense of long-term planning and investment that could otherwise lead to far more beneficial growth and profit.There are basically two ways to increase profit: increase revenues or decrease expenses. The factor that you have direct control over is expenses. And the easiest ways to reduce expenses is to pay your employees less, provide them with fewer benefits including medical care, reduce or eliminate pension programs, eliminate their positions replacing them with much cheaper options (eg, out-sourcing overseas, automation).Of course, some would object that even management are human and possess compassion. Individually, yes, when faced with the realization that those other people are also humans. But not so much when those others are abstractions and it's your own management position, your own job, that depends on eliminating those positions or those benefits. I have worked for several companies with very nice people in management, but even they have to lay people off and it's never easy for them -- but then the more impersonal it becomes the easier it becomes.And what happens with those former workers is no longer the company's concern. That applies to the now-unemployed, the disabled, the retired. So whose concern should it be?caffeine pointed out in Message 23 that we need to keep Marx' writings within his historical context as skilled craftsmen earning decent livings were being replaced by unskilled factory workers operating machines the provided the skill. I voice agreement in Message 31 with the examples of the Luddites and Walmart.Consider this summary of an economic model. People make money and they spend money. When they spend money, stores make money and their management and employees make money, both of which results in more money being spent with the associated benefits to the stores. When stores make money, they order more product and manufacturers make more money. So manufacturers can expand production, hire more workers, and more people make money which they then spend to enable the growth of the entire economy allowing almost everybody to prosper.Now, consider the Republican wet dream. Reduce the amount of money that poor people can make and remove social safety nets from the workers including denying them medical care so that a single medical incident will remove them and everybody in their family from the working pool, while at the same time giving more and more money to the most wealthy. It's been tried, such as in Kansas, which is now raising taxes on the rich in order to climb out of the economic disaster they had placed themselves into.Give money to a poor person (or a retiree) and he will spend that money, which will in turn fuel growth in the economy. But a rich person is already spending all the money that he can. If you give him more money, he can't think of anything else to spend it on. Giving more money to a rich person keeps that money from getting spent and helping to grow the economy. Instead, he either hoards that extra money or else gambles it away in stock market speculation (not to be confused with actual capitalism, which at least produces something unlike speculation).And to reiterate, yes, we have tried the Republican economic model. Such as in Kansas. It fails miserably. Do not try it on the country!So then, either we give money to the people who need it to survive or we give it to the wealthy who have absolutely no need for it. If we give it to the people who need it, then they will spend it and help grow the economy. If we give it to the people who do not need it, then they will not spend it and the economy continues to go to shit.The choice should be obvious. Why do Republicans still have no clue?

So then you are saying that the Republicans are anti-Bible Satanists because they are so insistent of taking from the poor and giving to the rich?

I speak German, so I know something about these things.There are two different ways to pronounce "ch" depending on the kind of vowel that precedes it.One way of classifying vowels, the one that counts here, is by where in the mouth it's formed: front, center, or back. Also, German vowels are similar to Spanish, so please forget the English mispronunciation of the letter "i", which in English is a diphthong. The front vowels are i, e, , and . The back vowels are a, o, and u. The central vowel is the schwa, the unaccented vowel "uh", which sounds different in English, French, and German. We're only interested here in the front and back vowels.The German "ch" sound that most Americans think of is the voiceless dorso-velar fricative. It is formed in the back of the mouth by moving the back of the tongue ("dorso") close to the soft palate, the velum ("velar"), as you force air through ("fricative"). That one appears after back vowels as in "Bach", "ach!", "doch", "Buch". German has no voiced version of it, but I understand that Dutch does have one, as well as modern Greek, I think.The other German "ch" sound, the one you're talking about, is a voiceless fronto-palatal fricative -- ie, voiceless, formed farther forward in the mouth using the hard palate instead of the velum. It appears after front vowels as in "ich", "Becher", "Friedrich". To the untrained American English ear, it may sound similar to and American English "sh", but it's pronounced farther back in the mouth than the American English "sh". They are still noticeably different from each other.The "ch" can also come after a consonant, in which case I'm not sure about the rules. For example, "Mnchen", "manchmal", and "durch" all use the palatal "ch", but "Dolch" ("dagger" as in "Dolchsto", Ludendorff's infamous "stab in the back" excuse for having lost WWI) uses the velar.The voiceless pre-palatal fricative (German "sch") is a bit tighter and a bit more forward than the American English "sh", plus the lips protude more and are more rounded rather that just hanging there loose.The English "ch" is an entirely different beast altogether. It is not a single consonant sound like the others, but rather it's an [i]affricate/i, a combination of two consonants, in this case a stop ("t") and a fricative ("sh"). To form the English "ch", you start with a "t" and shift into an "sh". In German, that sound only comes from borrowed words and is written "tsch". The same in French where it's written "tch", which is the convention used to transcribe that sound from Russian in English as in the name, Tchaikovsky.

As I already told you in Message 177, because of the frontal vowel "i" it's the palatal "ch" instead of the velar. That is very close to the English "sh" sound, but not quite. Unfortunately, the reader appeared to have gotten closer the the English "sh" than he should have, but then just how good was his German?As my first Russian professor, who was from the linguistics department, explained it to us, you have a double-whammy at work there. Some monoglots (speakers of only one single language, and usually rather poorly at that) believe that there is something about the vocal apparatus of foreigners that allows them to make sounds that they, native English speakers, are biologically incapable of uttering. Complete and utter Bolshoi! ("bolshoi" means "big", but it sounds close enough to the English "bullshit". I even heard it used in a French movie, "Z" (the first week of its release in the USA it was still in French and subtitled)) .There is no biological difference between the vocal apparati of speakers of different languages. The difference is almost entirely in how the speakers of different languages use their vocal apparatus. Different sounds are produced differently. As we learn to speak a language, we learn to position and use our vocal apparatus differently according to that language. For example as I had explained, the "sh" ("sch" in German) sounds are basically the same, but their are formed differently and they sound a bit differently.The second whammy is in how we hear and process those sounds -- that was my Russian prof's main point in that lecture. For example, in a Southeast Asian language, you have a "p" that is a plosive and a "p" that is not. In English, compare the "p" in "pop" and in "stop". In "pop", the initial "p" is accompanied by an explosion of air, but in "stop" there is no such explosion. Now is time for a short digression.In linguistics, you have phonology which studies how particular sounds are made. And you have phonemics in which you study the sounds that make a difference in meaning within a particular language. In our exercises in phonemics, we worked with minimal pairs, word pairs with different meanings but differing by only one sound, like "mat" and "bat", both starting with a bilabial. In that Southeast Asian language, a plosive and an non-plosive "p" are phonemic while in English that phonological difference is only due to where that consonant is positioned within the word. In English if you used a non-plosive "p" instead of a plosive, you just sound funny, whereas in that Southeast Asian language nobody could understand what you were trying to say.So to put that second whammy differently, because of your knowledge of the language, you expect to hear certain sounds. When you are trying to listen to another language, you will hear sounds that you don't know, so you automatically try to associate them with sounds that you do already know.One of the problems that this creates for the foreign language learners is that they must not only learn how to produce all those new sounds, but they must also learn to hear those same new sounds.

Hijacking that thought to springboard a thought of my own. My apologies.This harks back to Phat's message, Message 115, where he expressed his personal concerns about his retirement and what very little hope the GOP can offer him. I replied with Message 144 in which I considered various economic factors. Basically, what it boiled down to was that in pure capitalistic terms what happens to the workers is not important. But the management levels of capitalism is staffed by humans with compassion, yet that compassion has to constantly work against pure capitalistic ideals.An idea I was wanting to work with was the idea of slavery versus pure capitalism.Capitalism. You run a factory. You hire workers. What investment in those workers do you have? No worker is an asset, because he can be replaced almost instantaneously. Somebody gets injured on the production line and there are dozens waiting outside your gates to replace him. What happens to an injured worker is that his co-workers deliver him to his front porch and the family has to figure out how to survive from that point on. Somebody reaches retirement age, so you replace him from the line waiting outside your gates; you owe nothing whatsoever to that worker loyal to you for several decades.How does that differ from slavery? With slavery, you literally own that person. That person is an asset. If that person is injured or gets sick, you need to see to it that he be healed. When he gets too old to work, you need to find some way to take care of him.Therefore, pure capitalism is worse than slavery.

True enough. But that can only work with the smaller companies where there is still a personal connection between the boss and the employees. So a worker has become disabled beyond the ability to ever work again. So who then maintains him/her from that point forward through the remaining decades of that individuals' life? If any company were to accept such a liability, then that would grossly reduce that company's ability to compete against its competitors. Therefore, according to capitalism, extending benefits to employees disabled in service to you would be detrimental to your economic model. And hence not allowed. That is that "socialist" system that you oppose so strongly. That you want to get rid of.

My own personal experience within the past decade (I am now 65). Emergency abdominal surgery for a perforated bowel, about $60,000. Blocked coronary arteries requiring three stents, about $81,000. Fortunately, my insurance through work covered most of that. Right now, I paid off my mortgage a couple years ago. That medical bill would have required a second mortgage. And it is trivial compared to really major medical bills.Mind you, I am myself very lucky. With an investment of merely 35 years of my life (military service), I have medical insurance for the rest of my life, albeit now married to Medicare, but now the out-of-pocket expenses are being covered by the military Tri-Care so I'm no longer paying anything except for Medicare B. My mortgage is paid off and Social Security plus my military pension will more than pay my monthly expenses so I should almost never have to draw from my 401K which has grown surprisingly large. It makes me wonder how civilians could possibly cope. Like the "leader of the free world." One report I heard is that he thought health insurance costs about $18 a month. A much later report is that all his staffers are constantly rolling their eyes at what a complete idiot he is.Please, don't get me started!

Faith, you are disabled. Seriously disabled. So disabled that you cannot even leave your domicile to travel to a library to research anything.How do you live? I would assume that you have medical issues. How are those being attended to?

Are you saying that you are totally socialist when it comes to yourself?Or are you denouncing the social safety net that you depend on and that's keeping you alive? Because where are your past employers giving you the money that you need long after you have had to have left them?

Also her examples of the practice of founding of hospitals and orphanages was Roman Catholic. Those Protestants are just a bunch of copy-cats who then falsely try to take all the credit.