bum wrote:
Marx no prophet? Think again and read the Communist Manifesto!

After the painful interlude of the ideologically distorted, somewhat "brief" 20th century in that Marx' interpretation of his teachers (Hegel's) system had failed pitifully, the bourgeois is the dominant life-form in today's world and takes a position akin to the one Marx had predicted earlier already! As of today the burger has conquered the world with his merchant ethics, his Ersatz [substitute] religious demeanour*, and his uncultured new-speak, inspired by Sex and the City-writers, management seminars and pseudo-scientific techno jargon- and strives to drench everything in non-ending falsity and shallow eclecticism.

Marx:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.[…]

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.[...]

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html

(And that image reeks of mediocrity and "common sense"-ical pointlessness, perverted change for the sake of change alone and contains emotional coldness, elbow thinking and self-centred egomania as well as a good portion of cynicism.)

Hegel who is also terribly out of vogue these days, even amongst the philosophers because all those leftists (ab)used him to death not too long ago, was not all that wrong in his assertions either, writing that history had "ended" with the fulfilment of the libertine (revolutionary) society namely modern bourgeois society. And he is right insofar as that we of today cannot even imagine any "better" or a more efficient and effective one while yet staying even half way realistic- today's system is the "non plus ultra" it seems and it is indeed very difficult to envision otherwise.

*(cf. marketing and "future" trends = prophecies and oracles; bio-industries and genetics = the need for immortality on the fundament of the Xtian mind body/dualism [AI; cyborgs, "consciousness" transference, transhumanism]; yet: everyone is as ignorant about the future today as they always have been- the only difference lies in varied expectations: in the past one expected the recurrence of the old and today the future is always uncertain.)

FreeRadical wrote:
You shame our region. This is perhaps the worst reading of Marx that I have ever encountered. I expect that you also believe that Nietzsche was an anti-Semite? Dear me. No one accepts Hegelianism because it's wrong.

bum wrote:
Its an artistic and creative reading of Marx. If one is not able to interpret past philosophers in the light of the present world one is incompetent as a seeker of truth IMO. Funnily I have even prefigured such an answer in my post by writing how "out of vogue Hegel is" nowadays.

But in fact you are right I myself also prefer to talk about Nietzsche anyway cause I like his philosophy much better than the one by the idealists. In Ns works there are both philosemitic and antisemitic statements but I think that it would be very narrow minded to reduce him to either in such an ideologically coloured fashion. Because in todays diction a term like anti semitic also presuposes some highly political inclination- and I, like Nietzsche, despise *all* modern politics because of their roots in the humanity defying Enlightnement Movement.

bum wrote:
Sorry, maybe that was not clear; of course I meant: "humanity-defying". The method I am using is one that was actually propagated by Nietzsche (and the French Moralists to an extent, too): namely the "Umwertung aller Werte", maybe the "inversion of all values" (?) in English. This is how it works: you simply look at the things that are- in "your"/this present age- considered as accepted as "good" and try to find their negative or bad sides (set them as bad)- in our times e.g. so called democratic political systems or parties.