Comment by leftyted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leftyted | Hacker News Reader

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> Aristotle and Marx have zero to do with it and the way people on HN bring super old classics in completely unrelated context is getting obnoxious.

The Greeks are the source for a lot of our language and a lot of how we think about the world. Marx turned much of that upside down.

It's fine if you don't agree with the idea of "intellectual heritage" (or the influence of that heritage). But I (and others) do, so clearly we're going to talk about it.

It seems, uh, strange to fail to notice Marx's influence in particular given what happened in the 20th century and what continues to happen in China. Furthermore, the idea of the government as an instrument of violence used by the ruling class (which is so common these days, on HN too) is clearly straight out of Marx.

> The private sphere is where the most severe abuse happens.

Certainly plenty of abuse happens in the private sphere. My original post was hasty.

My opinion is more complicated than "everyone is good in private". It's more like, at a certain point, "publicness" becomes a problem. And things that we can do in private (like goodness, love, and hatred) do not work in public. And yet we seem to be reaching for them anyway.

The geeks were not exactly experts in domestic violence and abuse. Not that it did not happened in their world, they did not really cared and victims had little options.

The greeks also used goverments as intruments of violence. Quite a lot actually, freedom was reserved for small minority of people. The goverment was used as instrument of violence long before Marx. Fuedalism, whether German or Russian was kept by violence.

Maybe the greeks are your source of how you think about world, but dont project it on rest of us when we are talking about abuse of people Greeks generally looked down at.

This isn't a question of idealizing people who lived thousands of years ago, it's just an observation about how ideas pass through the centuries. Also, philosophers who wrote thousands of years ago are relevant today. It's not like we've answered questions like "what is knowledge?" "what is good?" and so on.

I never said that "only since Marx" was the government an instrument of violence owned by the ruling class. I said that idea is a Marxian idea. And it is. Also, I never meant to imply that it's a wrong idea (I think it's wrong, but you don't have to).

The fact that you're mouthing ideas from Marx without even realizing it while denying the concept of intellectual heritage is stunning.

I did not mentioned not implied idealization. I said they are irrelevant to topic at hand.

Also, I think that you don't really know what Marx actually wrote. Nor do you know much about historical context surrounding Marx. Or Lenin and Stalin for that matter. Makes me think you likely dont have such a deep knowledge of Greeks either.

Aristotele is completely irrelevant to topic of domestic violence. So is topic of "what is knowledge".

"Mouthing ideas from Marx" is completely absurd mischaracterization of what I wrote. It is more of your manipulative attempt then an argument.

I at least have read Marx. The idea that the government is a tool of class warfare is distinctly Marxist, as he's the one that made an argument for why this is. This is why Marx advocates for the State, before it is dissolved, to be put into the control of the proletarian class, the do callee Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which isn't a dictatorship in the common sense of the word).

At least from what I read, I don't think that they were arguing that Marx wanted the State to be an instrument of violence, just that he observed that the state was an instrument of violence for the ruling class, and made a good argument for why it would always be unless class itself was abolished. I think that they were referring to this intepretation, which is also compatible with what you said.

While the government was essentially always the organ of violence of the ruling class, Marx is essentially the first one to make that idea. The idea of the State as an instrument of class warfare is a Marxist idea.

And indeed, the concept of ruling class and of class in general in the sociological sense of the world also comes from Marx.

As for the Greeks, while they of course had a violent State (as we've seen, all States are organs of violence), they didn't view the State that way. The conception of the private/public sphere that they were discussing distinctly comes from Greece.

The whole Marx and state violence somehow came to be mentioned as response to following:

> The private sphere is where the most severe abuse happens.

> It family where publicly charizmatic people stop trying to be charizmatic and start being abusive. Also, it is not rare, both private part and abuse part went up during lockdowns.

There was literally no mention of class warfare. And the fact also is, feudalism had whole philosophy of classes and keeping them in place too.

For that matter, John Brown said that slavery is war against own people (meaning blacks), so really, while exact rhetoric he used may be marxist, the general simple idea of conflict between classes of people is not.

But most importantly, it is completely unrelated to what I wrote.

That might indeed be unrelated to the very central point, but I'm going to be slightly pedantic since this HN anyways.

So, you might not realize this, but actually the modern view of feudalism as a class system arising from the need of one class to control various factors of production, thus necessitating class warfare, is also Marxist. Marx did not just write about capitalism, he was basically one of the first sociologists writ large.

The general idea that the purpose of the government is to assist in class conflict is 100% Marxist. In fact, the definition of class in the modern sense that allows class warfare as a concept to really make sense is also Marxist. Indeed, the Marxist idea of class warfare wasn't just to explain capitalism, but also as an analysis of history, it provided the insight as of why changes in systems of governments seem to coincide with major economic developments, and so the first example of class warfare according to Marx goes all the way back to the invention of agriculture.

I don't mean this in a derogatory way at all, Marx's definitions here are generally accepted to be true even today in social sciences in general. In fact, I generally agree with your point, that the private sphere is not inherently good and the public sphere not inherently bad.

It is not just unrelated to central point, it is unrelated to completely anything. Even domestic violence aside. And I still find the way HN started to bring up old Greeks lately all the time completely obnoxious (which is my another central point).

> It seems, uh, strange to fail to notice Marx's influence in particular given what happened in the 20th century and what continues to happen in China. Furthermore, the idea of the government as an instrument of violence used by the ruling class (which is so common these days, on HN too) is clearly straight out of Marx.

This is not even mentioning class warfare, biggest issue right now in China is that genocide they have. The origin of "class warfare" expression is not relevant to anything, that is just later attempt to move discussion toward different topic.

Second, they had "estates". Three estates system in French and four estates system in Russia. Those had different legal code, different rights, different justice system, different duties to people based on which group they were born into. We can completely avoid the word "class" or "class warfare". The violence between them did happened. They did thought about them as about groups and even legalized that.

We can talk about John Brown and slavery and still have group of slaveholders against slaves. He interpreted it as a war, but no one called it class war. In practical terms, as socioeconomic group of people being dominated or killed by other group of people, we really do not have to wait for Marx to start figuring this out. We can talk about French revolution and old regime, we can talk about slavery, we can talk about estates.

Even freaking Greeks had groups of people, which I will not call classes, dominating other groups of people doing a lot of violence to them. And we can see that even tho opinions of their slaves or women or non-citizen males are unavailable to us.

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