As far as authors go, Karl Marx is on the top of my list.
Hello Dyana
I hope that you don't mind me asking you a rather personal question about your political persuasions but, what do you find so enthralling about Marxism?
I ask this in all sincerity. I'm neither strictly right-wing nor left-wing. I'm a bit of a political omnivore. I've switched party allegiances so many times over the years. My core values and beliefs are very solid, I simply have a difficult time finding a party that fits them.
Marx is for me good at identifying society's ills but very poor at proscribing an effective cure for them. As an example, he was absolutely correct about the injustices that liberal capitalism brought about; such as the concentration of property ownership in the hands of a minority clique of elite industrialists and the fact that unregulated capitalism results in the domination of the mass of workers (the proletariat) by the bourgeoisie.
However his conviction that the "salvific path" out of this benighted situation was the removal of property rights altogether has always struck me as not only imprudent but an unrealizable and chaotic recipe for societal breakdown.
Even worse, his reductionist and horrifyingly simplistic notion that all of human history is merely constituted of warfare between classes - is strikingly materialistic, violent and bereft of aesthetic merit to me compared with the much more psychological definition of human suffering offered by the Buddha, the founder of your faith.
The belief in the inevitability of class warfare - nay, its inherent
necessity as a means of bringing about the proletarian revolution - is completely anathema to my belief in harmony between people of different social backgrounds and classes within a social system that tries to eliminate the extremes of poverty and wealth without trying to annul entirely all divisions and grades. What's more it seems to deny the basic goodness of humanity and has no room for the spiritual.
Add into the mix his preliminary stage of "dictatorship of the proletariat" (a stage no Communist country has ever seemed to be able to move beyond to fulfil the Marxian vision) after the reigns of power fall into the working classes and I've completely lost him
How on earth is one eventually to "do away" with the state after common ownership and civic equality is initiated? Marxism, in practice, leads only to the totalitarian state.
Marx also seems to me rather "enclosed" in his 19th century worldview. He believed that the industrial revolution signified that machines would do away with productive human labour. That has not quite come to fruition in the way he envisioned, indeed modern industrial innovation in terms of machines - mostly pioneered in capitalist countries I might add - has richly benefitted humanity, despite its darker sides.
As a Buddhist, I'm also somewhat surprised that a philosophy so open to violence and strife in achieving its ends (warfare among classes, revolution etc. ) would be compatible with your religious beliefs. When have "violent revolutions" ever been better at bringing into being more humane societies when compared with gradual processes spanning many years and conducted largely in a peaceful manner? Compare the well-known examples of Martin Luther King and Malcom X - pacifist means vs violent means.
The more moderate Socialism of the early Labour Party in great Britain, on the other hand, under its founder Keir Hardie who believed strictly in following the democratic, parliamentary route and not in abolishing property altogether - that I can sympathise with.
Marxism, I truly have never understood the allure of. Can you assist me?
