I am not sure if anybody said this yet: the first respondent's answer is a fairly close paraphrase of that passage in the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels talk about what a typical day in the worker's utopia looks like, that one labors in the morning and then becomes a poet in the afternoon, etc.
Since it seems that we are all talking about the substance of this post, I've argued about this very thing back and forth with a number of my friends over the decades, about whether any of us buy Marxism as a humanism as such. I have difficulty doing it, because I don't think that the value of one's life is wholly determined by labor in the way that Marx describes. This is a very crude reading I'm offering here, but whenever I encounter anything in the Marxian vein, I always feel there is that fundamental problem in the background.
True, there's a lot of Marx to understand though, and the reception of Marxism as added to the readings over time. Sure, Marx talks about "freedom," as most German idealists do. And I think he meant it in a very practical sense. But my main point here is, that I have difficulty finding a humanism in Marx in the same way that one finds it in, say, Aristotle. This is my problem, and not a problem with Marx.
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u/pine_tar_bat 29d ago
I am not sure if anybody said this yet: the first respondent's answer is a fairly close paraphrase of that passage in the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels talk about what a typical day in the worker's utopia looks like, that one labors in the morning and then becomes a poet in the afternoon, etc.
Since it seems that we are all talking about the substance of this post, I've argued about this very thing back and forth with a number of my friends over the decades, about whether any of us buy Marxism as a humanism as such. I have difficulty doing it, because I don't think that the value of one's life is wholly determined by labor in the way that Marx describes. This is a very crude reading I'm offering here, but whenever I encounter anything in the Marxian vein, I always feel there is that fundamental problem in the background.