• Herzlich Willkommen!

    Nach der Schließung von inDiablo.de wurden die Inhalte und eure Accounts in dieses Forum konvertiert. Ihr könnt euch hier mit eurem alten Account weiterhin einloggen, müsst euch dafür allerdings über die "Passwort vergessen" Funktion ein neues Passwort setzen lassen.

    Solltet ihr keinen Zugriff mehr auf die mit eurem Account verknüpfte Emailadresse haben, so könnt ihr euch unter Angabe eures Accountnamens, eurer alten Emailadresse sowie eurer gewünschten neuen Emailadresse an einen Administrator wenden.

And now for something completely different...

*paranoid*
it seems your leading me ;)

guess what, i found this nice place without your help :p
 
Leech opened an OT Thread in our new forum so please feel free and visit us regularly. This thread here will be shifted to the clan forum soon so rather post in the new forum.
 
Seems our little Clan forum needs some advertising. So I opened a joke thread :D
 
Maybe we get more traffic in the english corner if we post some Tai Chi :D


Katze_kungfu.jpg
 
From time to time the english corner needs a reminder, so here it is :D

Sorry for spam :angel:
 
Does it need really?

Yesterday (or the day before?! do not know :D) I have found it without a reminder :cool:
 
There seems to be a bug in the users. Once they have occurred in the english corner they tend to forget about it sooner or later.

Have to fix that some time....
 
Thanks for the reminder. Although I am confronted with more than enough english on a daily basis. Right now i greatly rejoice in the writings of Smith and Marx and their views on the working class while writing a 10pp paper about that topic.... simply great.... :wand: And I would love to sleep at some point in my life.
 
Karl Marx? :ugly:

Couldn't you rather write about Karl May and his writings about the indian nation?
 
drago schrieb:
There seems to be a bug in the users. Once they have occurred in the english corner they tend to forget about it sooner or later.

Have to fix that some time....
Too bad that the only bugfix in my case would be to extend my day to at least 26 hours while cutting my sleep time to one third... Anyway, I'll try to drop in now and then. Time gets valuable when you have to work eight to five and to decide which of your several hobbies to prefer ;)
Decisions, decisions *mumbles and wades off*
 
there is definitely a shortage of hours in the day. I could use at least 4 more...

and about the paper i wrote. if anyone wants to read it ^^

--------------------
The people you're after are everyone you depend on. We do your laundry, cook your food and serve you dinner. We guard you while you sleep. We drive your ambulances. Do not fuck with us. - Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

In modern cinema, the character of Tyler Durden personifies many a socialist idea basically created by Smith and restructured by Marx. Treat the populace right, or the system will backfire. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx have greatly shaped and influenced modern thinking about economic and sociopolitical theory. The two showed interest in the greater good and progress of society, but at the same time diverged towards opposite poles. The theories of the godfather of modern economic theory Adam Smith expounded from an elitist, privileged viewpoint on how to keep the incapacitated working class under control as part of the greater machinery of the economy and society, with the all-powerful invisible hand of the market regulating everything in the long run for the greater good of everyone. This greater good’s end in the Marxist view, however, is not capitalism as Smith described it, but a socialist world with a working class that knows what it wants in a class-free and equal society. One might only imagine that these two would never get along well, but this assumption proves wrong after sufficient exploration of their works.

From the high language and the style that Smith uses, we can deduce that his target audience would be well-read and educated members of the academia and ruling levels. The people that shape the future and make decisions in politics and industries are the ones that Smith wants to reach with his attempt to prevent mistakes in treatment of the lower – but necessary – classes. According to his opus, The Wealth of Nations, “the merchants knew perfectly in what manner it enriched themselves.[…] But to know in what manner in enriched the country, was no part of their business” (Smith, p. 461), and the politicians are too distant from the problems of the lower classes. While Smith’s top-down view of the workers clearly implies that he considers them mere cogs in the economic machine, he nevertheless respects them greatly, warning not to mistreat them or deny them education. In order for his system to work, the cooperation of the working class is required, although this cooperation consists largely of everyone being selfish and working for one’s own benefit. Smith believes that if everybody following this will achieve the greatest benefit for society. He also perceives the lower class worker as having no conception of the greater picture, and consequently unable to make an informed judgment of it. The idea is that the average worker does not know what is good for him since he only functions on his microeconomic level; he therefore needs to be stripped of any bearing on important decisions, thus becoming incapacitated and depersonalized, estranged from his own individuality. This is also emphasized by the division of labor resulting in dull and monotonous factory work that the lower class workers face every day, dulling the workers so as to separate them from what they produce and what they are, a concept that Marx greatly criticizes in his ‘Estranged Labor’. For Smith and his impersonal elitist view on the facts, his ideas seem almost benign and generous, but turn out to be entirely selfish from the factory owners’ point of view. He pictures the accommodation of even “the frugal peasant exceeds that of many an African king.” (Smith, p. 13) In terms of wages, an important factor for Smith, the worker needs security for his family. For the merchant, the next generation of workers will be vital for his business, and “poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavorable to the rearing of children” (Smith, p. 90). We know that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable” (Smith, p. 90), so the worker needs to be paid more that his actual work is worth, but not too much since workmen are very apt to overwork themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years” (Smith, p. 93). This would also be detrimental to productivity in the long run. According to Smith people are to be kept happy and at least basically educated to keep their spirits high and prevent “mental mutilation, deformity, and wretchedness” (Smith, p. 845) that could cause more problems, like fractions and the growth of religious cults with the depreciation of the individual in the anonymous urban areas that came with the industrial revolution. Hence a close observation from the government is required in order to keep the peace. Without education and at least a basic understanding that the state’s actions are for the benefit of everyone, even the poorest factory worker of the state would reach a critical point. The people would even lose their limited judgment of what is good for them, and the control could slip from the authorities towards the mob, which needs to be prevented in order to keep the capitalist, benefit-oriented system running. In order to keep the worker content with his situation, he needs to be given the idea that he is influential to the government, which in reality he is not. His theory includes basic school programs and distractions like carnivals in order to keep the people satisfy, saying, “the more they are instructed, the less liable they are to the delusion of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders” (Smith, p. 846). Smith holds his working class in a constant stage of hope for better times, times that won’t actually come for them, but that will still keep them from mutiny and riots. This further supports the impression that workers are strictly necessary for the greater good and progress for the capitalist society that is run by the intention of the greatest profits for all, but that the worker is just a controlled means to a necessary end: the absolute economic machinery. Even with his concepts of family welfare, his ideas stay mostly impersonal. Millions of deaths in a different country from a drought are in the long run nothing but a dent, a temporary setback that will be rectified by the invisible hand’s re-regulation of the market. While giving the working class respect through the admission that they can be dangerous to the structure of capitalism if not treated right, he retains a strictly professional perspective, mainly exploring figures and economic solutions. All the concessions made for the workers have the final purpose of keeping productivity high, thus maximizing annual production in the capitalist system of which the workers are a major part; however, they stand a solemn, incapacitated, and guided means to an end which promises progress for better times. Through the invisible hand of the market, as well as men’s tendency to act in a selfish manner, a state of maximum productivity for society was supposed to be achieved. Unfortunately yet unsurprisingly, Smith never mentioned what this end will be for the working class, merely suggesting a “continuous progress” with the invisible hand taking care of everything in the long run. John Maynard Keynes points out the drawback of relying on the invisible hand: “in the long run, we are all dead.” What Smith did not see was the rapid technological development that came along with the industrial revolution and the political changes in the 19th century that gave rise to socialist movements and an increased political power of the lower classes, along with the strong dichotomy that built between lower and higher classes. The compositions that built upon Smith’s theories – powerfully rejecting a majority of them whilst adding further steps in sociopolitical progression – were Karl Marx’s socialist/communist writings.

Marx did not strictly oppose everything that Smith wrote. Writing Das Kapital about one hundred years later, Marx saw the results of Smith’s theory and the sociopolitical consequences that followed. Whereas many people in modern times think that Smith and Marx deviate entirely in mindsets, I must express my wholehearted disagreement. Marx opposes many of Smith’s concepts, but also builds on them, trying to solve the problems that arose in the post-Smith era. What Smith feared and hoped to prevent with education and distraction happened regardless. The division of labor intensified the problems of the working class, leading to an estrangement of labor owing mostly to the capitalists’ upholding of profit maximization. This is best explored in Marxist theory in passages pertaining to the exploitation of the workforce with the fetishism of commodities. The fetishism of commodities is the transposition of social relations onto material goods. Marx explicitly connects this to the capitalist system when he states that “the fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character that produces them” (Marx, Das Kapital, p. 321). According to Marx’s theory, the fetishism of commodities results in the misapprehension that a good’s exchange value is intrinsic to the commodity as a material object. The fetishism of commodities illustrates not only the alienation of man from his labor, and thereby the depersonalization of his existence as a producing part of society, but also the alienation of man from other men. While Smith’s theories aim towards a maximal productivity, Marx does not agree with such conclusions, pointing out that the wealth creates a dichotomy of wealth. While the division of labor clearly increases absolute productivity and total wealth inside the system, it is the mainly the rich who benefit, whereas the workers do not gain from the increase of profits for which they labored; this is reflected in his claims that “we presupposed private property… from political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all” (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). Marx remarks on the slow deterioration of the working class due to this constant bipolar movement away from another, which he sees as “clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economical revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production” (Marx, Das Kapital, p. 338). We may observe that the workers’ problems addressed in Marx’s theories arose in the early times of capitalism and its long-term detrimental effect on the working class. Nonetheless, the issue is not the misdistribution of profits, so more money for the workers will not solve anything. The estrangement of labor and the little influence of policy is the real problem that the Marxist illustration of the workforce faces.

While capitalism is the goal for Smith, Marx only considers it a waypoint on the path to socialism. According to him, “the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians” (Marx, Manifesto, p. 479), with estrangement of labor and the extreme profit orientation. Everything will soon crumble and fall, thus making space for a new and better system that promises a class-free society and equality in the labors benefits, thus revoking the results of the estrangement of labor that developed during the capitalist era. By Marxist theory, socialism is the only true end, and all that is happening just serves as a means in order to achieve it. In terms of capitalism, Marx remarks that it creates such inequality that the system will create a state of intense crisis by itself, but will then crash by the force of the workers in a socialist struggle against the capitalist class – in summation, that “the state as we know it cannot survive” (Marx, German Ideology, p.161). The capitalist tendency in the 19th century and the dialectic materialism thereof stand as the historical base for this argument. At some point, no new markets will be available, and the needed progression for Smith’s system of keeping the workers happy will collapse. This is the point where the proletarians seize power. Marx considers the worker not simply as the base of exploited and alienated direct production of wealth. He considers each as a social wealth demonstrating enrichment in personality, and additionally as a satisfaction of pleasures and needs arising with a regained pride in his work and production. For Marx, the worker is the essential part of society. As Tyler Durden put, the workers are the people on whom everybody else depends, the people that run everything in the background. They might not make political decisions, but they hold the true power in the state. With the proletarians of the world united, no government would stand a chance against the gathered mass of determined people. Smith saw possible problems with the working class rising if mistreated, and this is where Marx builds his proletarian power structure. The productive power of the society comes from the working class; therefore, the power should come from the same people that hold the annual productivity of labor – “the wealth of nations”, as Smith put it. Where Smith saw different classes, Marx sees a class struggle, but taking the proletarian class’ consciousness into account, he is not concerned about the workers as individuals and their hierarchic position in society, wanting one equal level for all. Even trade unions do not establish the balance of power that Marx desires, since they are still a part of the capitalist system, and the only possibility for worker-driven change within that system. The notion of worker individuality propels Marx to place the laborer in a situation diametrically opposed to the role Smith’s writings would have him play. In Marx’s eyes, the proletarian knows exactly what is good for him, and his voice should be heard and respected, forming the base of general decision making on an equal representation basis. From a Marxist perspective, the progression towards a socialist system is by dialectic materialism inevitable. The collapse of the great capitalist system, therefore, was required to create a situation of extreme crisis, in turn essential for sparking the proletariat’s realization of power, and eventually, a reshaping of the system in its entirety. Where Smith saw the general population as an instrument for effecting perfect capitalism, Marx builds upon the mistakes that showed from a century of capitalism and envisions this system as progress towards a socialist system where the worker in no longer dehumanized in the fetishism of commodities, but connected to his production again with the political significance that he deserves. The people hold the power; they just need to realize it and combine their strength. As Marx put it, “proletarians of this world, unite!”

When we, armed with the theories of the two great minds, reflect once more upon the Fight Club quote, we observe that in today’s world Smith’s world still has not collapsed as Marx predicted it, and that the world’s socialism has not yet been installed. Countries like Russia, where the monarchic capitalist system was overthrown and exchanged with a socialist or communist regime, only managed to base their policy on a rough approximation of socialism. The peasant state consequently experienced the worst of both worlds; the workers still wielded no power, and furthermore, they suffered this lack of agency without real property and under constant oppression from above. It appears that no country has yet realized a true socialist system, and maybe mankind is simply not made to be leveled equal. For Smith, the orientation towards the personal benefit was key to societies’ success, whereas for Marx, societies’ success would result in personal benefit. It appears, though, that mankind does not strictly trust its society, preferring instead to be self-oriented. The estranged labor theory is still present, just adjusted to our times. The new estranged workers are sitting in call centers and banking towers. Large salaries do not help them, since they have no time to spend their money. They have again become slaves to the system. Proletarians of the world united would still wield power of change if they actually united, but Smith’s concept of selfishness in times of outsourcing overpowers the idea of greater socialist good. Realization of Marx’s dream will probably have to wait a little longer.

-------------
(c) Riven 2008
 
Not in this thread, but anywhere else!

Wait, proven myself wrong.

Simon
 
If smebody wants to talk about Diablo 3 rumors in english but without registration at blizzard you could open a thread in the english corner. Link is in my signature
 
I searched for the english subboard and found it and I#d read that's cancelled. That's really hard, but was the feedback really that low?
 
Yes, it was. If there had been some folks visiting the Forum on a regluar base, say once a week, I would have kept it open, but the visits were to rare.
 
That's really sad. I thought this would get be more popular. So far, do you think that the release from Diablo 3 would change this situation? Maybe possivble that the staff supports this idea with, don't know, any announcement on this board or mainpage. Especially in the trade-section it should be announced - there are most of foreigns, I think.
 
Zurück
Oben