Friday, April 15, 2011

In Praise of Marx by Terry Eagleton (The Chronicle of Higher Ed)

Not directly educational, but a good read by a brilliant author with an interesting comment on cooperatives:
[To] achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one's own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one's own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism. Socialism for Marx would be simply whatever set of institutions would allow this reciprocity to happen to the greatest possible extent. Think of the difference between a capitalist company, in which the majority work for the benefit of the few, and a socialist cooperative, in which my own participation in the project augments the welfare of all the others, and vice versa. This is not a question of some saintly self-sacrifice. The process is built into the structure of the institution.
Full text at: http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027/

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