Misquoting Marx

Socialism : Marxism

At a recent meeting, I was picked up by someone for getting the following quote the wrongway round:

[Communism is] an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

In fact, I hadn't, but my accuser thought it was

we shall have an association, in which the free development of all is the condition for the free development of each.

Not so much of a distinction, really, since they both mean roughly the same thing - and I myself had misquoted that same phrase myself for a few years (Oh, you can read it in situ in the Communist Manifesto - it was thought provoking to go back to that, I may have to comment further at some point).

The significance of Marx's formulation is that it places the individual before the collective, the collective is about solidarity with and the development of the individual.

The other way round could be consonant with utilitarianism. A seemingly egalitarian and attractive - even communistic - philosophy in which it purpoorts to treat each as one and only one. This is a lie, since it treats those ones as sums when it does its calculus of utility - the ethics of the accounts book - and decides that it is rational that some must suffer so that the rest may prosper.

That is the philosophy which socialism strikes at the heart of. Instead it affirms, to use a military metaphor, that the cavalry charges at the speed of the slowest horse - no one is to be left behind.

Contemplate that. That is my answer to Labour Sleaze, War on terror, and leftist calculus of deaths for anti-imperialism.

Each is to count as one, and is an end in themself.