Monday, March 28, 2011
Was Marx Right?
My liberal/left readers will enjoy Was Marx Right? It's Not Too Late to Ask by Terry Eagleton in Commonweal magazine (hope the link works for you). "Commonweal is an independent journal of opinion edited by lay Catholics."
Europeans & Canadians do not want to do away with their state-guaranteed medical benefits - there are a variety of national health services, every nation manages them differently. Western Europeans - people & businesses - do not suffer the anxieties over medical care that afflict Americans. They are healthier than us even when their lifestyles aren't as healthy. When you hear a middle class Canadian or Brit gripe about health care, invite them to America & listen to th answer you get: "No way!" They know we're bad. Brag all you want about Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan, but chances are, if that's the top-of-line care for your special illness, you'll have to mortgage the house & live in hotel, all the while pleading with your insurance provider over out-of-group specialists & uncovered tests, A few years ago a friend of mine came down from Vermont to be treated for a rare, life-threatening illness. He was treated, went back to Vermont, & died.
"Socialism" is menacing word in America that we tend to think of as meaning a monolithic political philosophy of oppressive government when it in fact has many variants. Marxism is an obscenity. So nobody wants to be a socialist or a marxist. But we desperately need the hope of community solutions, the empowerment of the weak & powerless (like when only white, male property owners could vote, or one was taxed to vote, or forced to submit to "literacy tests" with questions even the questioners could not answer, or one was a woman & a constitutional amendment was required to extend the vote to females.
Unions were considered communistic. Didn't help that some of the early ones were. But the great growth of unionism occurred when unions pulled away from the ideologues & concentrated on building a better lifestyle for workers; a living wage, safer working conditions, health care, more leisure time, & after WWII a house in the suburbs & a more comfortable retirement than Social Security alone could provide.
The proof of the success of unionism was that unionized workers earned more than nonunion workers in the same jobs. So forcing unions to accept wages & benefits that are the same as non-union workers will be the death blow to organized labor.Or will it? Perhaps the "sleeping giant" is not the Tea Party, but unionized workers, their families, friends, allies, & all those who wish they could organize a union at their workplaces.
I have more notes on this. Maybe tomorrow's blog.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
What made Marxism seem implausible, then, was not that capitalism had changed its spots. The case was exactly the opposite. It was the fact that as far as the system went, it was business as usual but even more so. Ironically, then, what helped beat back Marxism also lent a kind of credence to its claims. It was thrust to the margins because the social order it confronted, far from growing more moderate and benign, waxed more ruthless and extreme than it had been before. And this made the Marxist critique of it all the more pertinent. On a global scale, capital was more concentrated and predatory than ever, and the working class had actually increased in size. It was becoming possible to imagine a future in which the megarich took shelter in their armed and gated communities, while a billion or so slum dwellers were encircled in their fetid hovels by watchtowers and barbed wire.It's a lengthy article & drags on a bit. But the important point is that Marx (who was not Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Kim Jong Il) offered up the most comprehensive, intelligent critique of unfettered exploitative capitalism, & the failure of botched, bloody, imperialistic, totalitarian regimes that would have dismayed Marx himself does not invalidate the use of Marx & socialism to examine & critique the inequities of wealth & income in America. America needs wealth redistributed downward, & by downward I mean to the middle & working classes, because the poor depend on the economic expansion of these classes in order to move up into them. For "safety nets," government programs are far more reliable than largesse of wealthy people or religious groups.
Europeans & Canadians do not want to do away with their state-guaranteed medical benefits - there are a variety of national health services, every nation manages them differently. Western Europeans - people & businesses - do not suffer the anxieties over medical care that afflict Americans. They are healthier than us even when their lifestyles aren't as healthy. When you hear a middle class Canadian or Brit gripe about health care, invite them to America & listen to th answer you get: "No way!" They know we're bad. Brag all you want about Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan, but chances are, if that's the top-of-line care for your special illness, you'll have to mortgage the house & live in hotel, all the while pleading with your insurance provider over out-of-group specialists & uncovered tests, A few years ago a friend of mine came down from Vermont to be treated for a rare, life-threatening illness. He was treated, went back to Vermont, & died.
"Socialism" is menacing word in America that we tend to think of as meaning a monolithic political philosophy of oppressive government when it in fact has many variants. Marxism is an obscenity. So nobody wants to be a socialist or a marxist. But we desperately need the hope of community solutions, the empowerment of the weak & powerless (like when only white, male property owners could vote, or one was taxed to vote, or forced to submit to "literacy tests" with questions even the questioners could not answer, or one was a woman & a constitutional amendment was required to extend the vote to females.
Unions were considered communistic. Didn't help that some of the early ones were. But the great growth of unionism occurred when unions pulled away from the ideologues & concentrated on building a better lifestyle for workers; a living wage, safer working conditions, health care, more leisure time, & after WWII a house in the suburbs & a more comfortable retirement than Social Security alone could provide.
The proof of the success of unionism was that unionized workers earned more than nonunion workers in the same jobs. So forcing unions to accept wages & benefits that are the same as non-union workers will be the death blow to organized labor.Or will it? Perhaps the "sleeping giant" is not the Tea Party, but unionized workers, their families, friends, allies, & all those who wish they could organize a union at their workplaces.
I have more notes on this. Maybe tomorrow's blog.
Labels: bully pulpit, in the news, justice, what I'm reading
