Marx’s fuzziness allows him to stand directly on the line between ruthless and revolutionary, but he makes sure to leave enough open to interpretation that you can’t tell whether he would have been expressly against the Gulag or understood it as a necessary transient evil in the course of industrializing a nation that jumped the [...]
Read more →Rousseau, the Better Brother If there is any (likeable) philosopher who might give Marx some love, it’s Rousseau. Where Rousseau believes we are determined by our culture, Marx says it is our class. The General Will, which Rousseau claims is for the “good of all”, may as well be for the good of the Party [...]
Read more →St. Augustine, the Spoiling Mother St. Augustine helped forge the primary Christian model as one of foregoing earthly pursuits in better interest of God. I believe his conception had a peculiar impact on the beginnings of Communism and public sentiment during the Bolshevik revolution. According to Pontuso, the Orthodox Church before the revolution “had given [...]
Read more →Plato, the Father at Odds Plato created the prototype for all political philosophy and suggested states with his Republic. For Marx to have even set out to write his considerations of political economy owed much to Plato’s groundbreaking, and that they both wrote works on ideal governments is at least one thing they share completely [...]
Read more →Some families are united through history by their influences and distortions on one another, and some men are born bastards apart from the prestige of their progenitorial design. If Karl Marx is the youngest child in a family of philosophers, then he rebels against father Plato; finds solace in the comfort of mother St. Augustine; [...]
Read more →Social determinism is a dangerous excuse for not trying. While it’s true that we are all born with the burden or gift of our respective histories, these histories alone cannot dictate success or failure. That is to say, the pre-conceptional past encourages making choices that we might consider more immediately viable, but it does not [...]
Read more →I just had a thought this morning: What if Job and not Adam had been the common natural father of humanity? In the Book of Job, Job loses everything but faith in God’s will. His wife even tempts him at one point to curse God, but he instead retreats to prayer to apologize to God [...]
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