Quote:
Originally Posted by kahljorn
That may be the case, but that isn't what Marx thought.
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Marx never mentions a totalitarian or authoritarian rule. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" doesn't sound as harsh and nasty when you figure that most people are proletarian; it just means a rule of the working people. We currently have a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". The "transitional period" mentioned there is Socialism. Marx doesn't actually coin the term, it was used later. Talking about not wanting a "Free state", he is talking about an unfetted state, a free market, a state or a government that rules the people with freedom, rather than the other way around. The state can't be free, it has to be run and ruled by the people that live in it. This in no way means that oh shit we have to live in a dystopian reality with no freedom. It's a state run by the dictatorship, a dictatorship of working people.
No, people don't get to choose their own job ("I want to be a pilot!") or live like a king... nobody is really promising that, are they? Money still exists and people can still die of hunger and preventable illness. There is still a huge difference between rich countries and poor countries. The point is to lessen these things over time by putting the means of production in the hands of a democratically run state, rather than private individuals.
As far as no unemployment goes, I am not going to download your link, but I guess it was pretty dumb to say "no unemloyment". I guess "officialy no unemployment" is closer. A group of ex-soviet citizens living in America is hardly a great basis for your study, but I can concede the point. You can have a massive city where everyone would be put to work, and then you could have a village where nobody had a job. You could have an East German town built around a tire factory where everyone had a job, and you could have a town built around a tin mine in Kazakhstan that just closed, and people would be out of work for months. I'd be pretty certain though, that it was easier to have and keep a job in the USSR than in the USA at the same time period. Especially since if you didn't deem yourself useful you would have just been conscripted into the army. Anyway, I retract my comment.
As far as "greed is hard wired into our brains and genes"... I would have thought that that argument would have died once scientific learning into DNA and the human genome became mainstream.