Nevertheless, all politicians should have the knowledge of culture, of philosophy which is the root of culture before playing on the international stage and make intervention of human right in other countries and cultures, in my own opinion.
As a system of government, communism is dead or dying. As a system of ideas, its future looks secure.
WHEN Soviet communism fell apart towards the end of the 20th century, nobody could say that it had failed on a technicality. For decades past, in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, any allusion to the avowed aims of communist doctrine—equality, freedom from exploitation, true justice—had provoked only bitter laughter. Finally, when the monuments were torn down, statues of Karl Marx were defaced as contemptuously as those of Lenin and Stalin.Karl Marx was defaced because communism, which Lenin who followed Marx picked up and built the government was done in Europe, where people's freedom, democracy, humanity were rooted and have been the subjects for thousands years. Contrary to the Western values, Eastern values, which are Hinduism, Confucianism for examples. Norms, values, moralities in the East nowadays still can be seen to have had a lot of effect from Confucianism. People, I believe should follow the society where they are living, with some of the values of the society they have the root. But those who keep the root I don't think get along with the environment they are living. It is self-struggle to keep the best of values from different cultures. Confucianism, after all are a few values which can be exchanged or altered if we found other values better.
Marx and communism could have been used as socialism once the world seeks equality. But that is an ideal condition. Marx and communism can be indeed, applied to China, Vietnam, Asian countries where people are born and are raised to follow the rules.
People in the West, their judgment not impaired by having lived in the system Marx inspired, mostly came to a more dispassionate view. Marx had been misunderstood, they tended to feel. The communism of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was a perversion of his thought. What happened in those benighted lands would have appalled Marx as much as it appals us. It has no bearing on the validity of his ideas.
Because people in the West, from Socrates time have a different view of learning, teaching and acknowledge the world. Socrates taught people by putting questions to them and make them realize themselves that they did not know a thing. To him, a true insight can only be gained by the individual. Again, values should come from the true self and that individual's insight once he/she has the ability to know what's right and what's wrong. The insight do not need to come from the society (but since it's not easy at all to know what are right or wrong, a lot choose to follow social norms.) However, especially in developed society, when every one has their own values, should the following be necessity after the individual has gained education, knowledge and perception to make decisions and bear responsibility for that?
(P.S: Socrates himself was a true philosopher to know that he knew nothing.)
Indeed, it is suggested, Marx was right about a good many things—about a lot of what is wrong with capitalism, for instance, about globalisation and international markets, about the business cycle, about the way economics shapes ideas. Marx was prescient; that word keeps coming up.
Adam Smith, one might say, stands in relation to liberal capitalism, a comparatively successful economic order, roughly where Marx stands in relation to socialism. Smith is way out in front—interesting, given that Marx saw himself as an economist first and foremost. Elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities, the reverse is true. Smith is rarely seen, as you might expect, though in fact there is far more in Smith than just economics; whereas from Marx and his expositors and disciples it seems there is no escape. It is the breadth of Marx's continuing influence, especially as contrasted with his strange irrelevance to modern economics, that is so arresting.
Still, four things seem crucial, and most of the rest follows from these. First, Marx believed that societies follow laws of motion simple and all-encompassing enough to make long-range prediction fruitful. Second, he believed that these laws are exclusively economic in character: what shapes society, the only thing that shapes society, is the “material forces of production”. Third, he believed that these laws must invariably express themselves, until the end of history, as a bitter struggle of class against class. Fourth, he believed that at the end of history, classes and the state (whose sole purpose is to represent the interests of the ruling class) must dissolve to yield a heaven on earth.
View of an philosopher. The first point perhaps shows that Marx was a person who had a fixed view about things or in another word, had vision toward things which can happen. The second views shows him as a materialist. The third view: class struggle which will remain for a long time in human history. 4th view: idealism which is the purpose of philosophy, seeking something eternal.
Aspects of his thought do impress. However, his assorted sayings about the reach of the global market—a favourite proof that “Marx was prescient”—are not in fact the best examples. The 19th century was an era of globalisation, and Marx was only one of very many who noticed. The accelerating global integration of the past 30 years merely resumes a trend that was vigorously in place during Marx's lifetime, and which was subsequently interrupted in 1914.
Marx's ability of foreseeing the future in economics, capitalism.
Marx was much more original in envisaging the awesome productive power of capitalism. He saw that capitalism would spur innovation to a hitherto-unimagined degree. He was right that giant corporations would come to dominate the world's industries (though not quite in the way he meant). He rightly underlined the importance of economic cycles (though his accounts of their causes and consequences were wrong).
... the things Marx most deplored: private property, liberal political rights and the market.
The core idea that economic structure determines everything has been especially pernicious. According to this view, the right to private property, for instance, exists only because it serves bourgeois relations of production. The same can be said for every other right or civil liberty one finds in society. The idea that such rights have a deeper moral underpinning is an illusion. Morality itself is an illusion, just another weapon of the ruling class.
But property right has been proved to be necessary for development. Refer to Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand.
... Never ask what a painter, playwright, architect or philosopher thought he was doing. You know before you even glance at his work what he was really doing: shoring up the ruling class.
Marxist thinking is also deeply Utopian—another influential trait. The “Communist Manifesto”, despite the title, was not a programme for government: it was a programme for gaining power, or rather for watching knowledgeably as power fell into one's hands.
He did once say this much: “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity...society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, herdsman or critic.”
Again, would people who are very fixed often like to be so spontaneous?
And anti-globalists have inherited more from Marx besides this. Note the self-righteous anger, the violent rhetoric, the willing resort to actual violence (in response to the “violence” of the other side), the demonisation of big business, the division of the world into exploiters and victims, the contempt for piecemeal reform, the zeal for activism, the impatience with democracy, the disdain for liberal “rights” and “freedoms”, the suspicion of compromise, the presumption of hypocrisy (or childish naivety) in arguments that defend the market order.
Anti-globalism has been aptly described as a secular religion. So is Marxism: a creed complete with prophet, sacred texts and the promise of a heaven shrouded in mystery. Marx was not a scientist, as he claimed. He founded a faith. The economic and political systems he inspired are dead or dying. But his religion is a broad church, and lives on.
Religion remains eternal, which ppl who have faced a lot of changed or they themselves change a lot do need.
