David S. : I > suppose you can qualify such concepts to be practically meaningless in > context, but do Marxists really want to do that? Do you want to take the > position that there will be serious conflict in utopia? How disappointing.
^^^ CB: How sarcastic (smile) Actually, Marx's partner, Engels, disappointed you in the late 1800's. He wrote a book with the very word "utopian" in the title: _Socialism: Utopian and Scientific_. There he explains that Marxism does not see socialism as utopian. There will be new contradictions , and persistence of old ones in scientific socialist society. For example, there will still be conflicts between parents/adults in children in raising them. Marxism does not predict that babies will stop crying in socialism. One might predict today that there will be a big contradiction with nature in the problem of replacing fossil fuels with a new main source(s) of energy. As raghu said, the aim is the end of class oppression and exploitation, poverty. Also, we can abolish war, male supremacy and racism. One reason we know we can do this, oh yes we can, is that war, male supremacy and class exploitation are not part of human nature, contra the various Social Darwinist ideas, because they weren't part of primitive communist societies that were the original human mode of existence for hundreds of thousands of years before class societies arose. That anthropology is part of the science underlying Engels' claim. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
