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Brad Delong linked to this, quoting parts of points 1 & 2. I commented there, taking issue issue with point 1 which I believe is anachronistic. Rather than copy and paste the whole comment, I have linked to it. Briefly, Marx initially used class struggle in a positive, not normative, sense, identifying it as the driving force of history ever since classes existed in human society. Obviously then, any progress by the proletariat required it to engage in class struggle, esp. as universal human rights existed exactly nowhere when Marx was writing, certainly not in England, where, e.g., the franchise was restricted to relatively affluent males.
Thanks for your comment. In response, Marx used class struggle in both positive and normative senses. “Workers of the world unite” is a normative slogan, and there are many other similar normative claims in Marx.
The fact that universal human rights were not acknowledged in practice in the 19th century is of course valid. But it is also irrelevant to my argument. The point is that, by backing one class over another, Marx wanted to rid one class of its rights. In other words, class dictatorship involves the denial of universal rights. In practice, once rights are denied as universal, then they are at risk for everyone.
I get the impression that you are comparing Marxism to modern liberal democracy as it likes to see itself, not to the existing aristocratic structure in place at the time. I’d suggest that ‘class war’ is just an inversion of the divine right of kings used to justify rule and atrocity, rather than a novel development, and a step forwards given that the rights of the majority were centered. The struggle was not class dictatorship vs. universal rights, it was class dictatorship of a tiny elite vs. class dictatorship of a majority.
For the second point- you rightly note that concentration of economic power requires massive amounts of repression and coercion. I would challenge the idea that concentrating it in the hands of the state vs. private hands matters at all to that conclusion.
Thank you for your comment. I do not explicitly make the comparisons you mention. I do not think that ‘”class war” is just an inversion of the divine right of kings’. Marx generally avoided appeals to rights, so Marxism cannot be ‘just an inversion’ of another claim concerning rights. Marx supported the proletariat in the class struggle because he believed that it had a historical destiny to rule. He also rejected the notion of universal rights and supported the removal of rights from the bourgeoisie – that’s the key point.
Regarding your second point, unfortunately economic power is concentrated in the hands of a small minority in all capitalist countries today. There is also some repression and coercion, but it is not ‘massive’, and it is nowhere the scale that it was under Soviet Russia or Mao’s China. That is primarily because private ownership entails some distribution of power beyond the state, which is the principal apparatus of coercion.
To pursue the analogy, should say, “Jesus Christ never advocated the persecution of heretics” or some such.
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