“Whine” was inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, a 1950s Beat poem that, for all its faults, at least had some gutsiness behind it. While howling represents a kind of rage and anger, whining captures what the pseudo-left does best: whining from the sidelines. Endless complaining because ‘things just keep going from bad to worse’ – as all the reactionary conservative old-timers have said since time immemorial. The footage accompanying the video was filmed during a visit to New York, and mostly shows W42nd Street and Upper New York Bay.
One of the major themes of my Marxist Economics Honours thesis was that most – actually all, except maybe me – Marxists suffer from the fatal flaw of insisting the extraction of surplus value is an incontovertible injustice; it isn’t.
If Marx/Engels were alive today, they would still be revolutionaries, but revolutionary entrepreunerial capitalists.
I hope this helps.
John Greenfield: “I hope this helps”
Not really. Capitalist entrepreneurship was the real thing during their time. Engels was a capitalist in Manchester during the 1860s and was delighted to get out of it at the age of 48.
See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/work/england/manchester/article_5.shtml
Also, a central feature of the “Scientific Socialism” espoused by Marx and Engels was precisely its rejection of ahistorical claims of “intcontrovertible injustice” such as “Property is Theft” by detailed demonstration that the extraction of surplus was a based on an exchange of equal values entirely consistent with the (bourgeois) concepts of morality espoused by its critics.
Instead of declaiming against capitalism from the standpoint of some “universal morality” outside the framework of the actual social system that provides the material basis for particular conceptions of morality, they traced the historical origins and consequences of a capitalist system including the fact that like all preceding systems it gives rise to its own grave diggers.
This is sufficiently notorious that it required “special warfare” such as the teaching of “Marxist Economics” in universities and award of honours theses to people completely ignorant of the subject in order to obliterate it.