Poor forced from the city's centre!

[redflag]

Am i alone in seeing if housing benefit is cut, and the poor are forced out of the cities, buy to let homes will go up for sale then the double dip recession (actually the third dip by my counting) will kill our housing market even more.

People act like only those who are out of work get housing benefit, and also that the poor or out of work don't deserve to have nice things and like like other human beings, getting really sick of it actually!

With is a "capitalist-lover"? It sounds like nigger-lover and Jew-lover.

It is hardly crime to not subscribe to failed ideologies. Your beloved Marx was an idiot who had little understanding of human nature and failed entirely to anticipate that people will just not work if there is nothing to gain, and that there will always be some people in power.

Most countries in Europe, for example, are capitalist but have extensive social coverage. Personally, I think this is a good thing. There has to be a good safety net and the most vulnerable need to be protected.

What we differ is possibly how we define this "most vulnerable" and what the aid should consist of.

Cote - spot on.
The dictum 'to each etc..' is a nice idea, but completely woolly - he might as well have said 'everybody be nice to each other' -Yes, indeed wouldn't it be good if wishing for something made it so...
'Each according to his means' would be okay if people who sit around on their fat arses watching Jeremy Kyle were prepared to 'give' what they can - surely they have some capacity for something, anything, more worthwhile but they don't need to bother because there are enoguh apologists for their futile parasitic existences.

I work, I earn a reasonable salary, I rent a flat I can afford. Why should I pay 30% of my income in tax so that someone else gets subsidised to live in a posher area than I could afford on what's left over when I've paid my bit?

Aged 31, I can't afford to buy. If capping housing benefit brings London house prices down, I might be able to buy a home by the time I'm, oh, 45 or so. Sorry, but if the changes take some of the distortion out of the London housing market I'm all for it.

Cote it is fine to differ from Marx in terms of economics and politics but to call him an idiot simply reflects badly on you. Hitler was a bad bad man but he was not an idiot.

MrsGhoul could you be a little more offensive to the unemployed and fat people?

I think you sum it up very succinctly pottinista.

I think many people have no objection to paying a hefty chunk of their earnings to support people who genuinely cannot support themselves. What they do object to, is paying a hefty chunk of their earnings to subsidise others to live in nicer areas, and in bigger houses. Homeowners have to limit their family to the size they can afford to house. If they lose their job, they have to sell up, downsize or move away. Why should people on HB not be expected to also have limits on the size of house they live in, and the area they live in?

I don't think Hitler was an idiot, either. A clever man but just very very wrong.

Marx, on the other hand, was an idiot. He has fundamentally misjudged human nature and based an entire treatise on a gross misunderstanding of fellow humans.

Saying so does not "reflect badly" on me, at all. Someone whose thought process produces such grossly off the mark and incorrect conclusions is an idiot by my understanding.

By the way, I have read both Marxism and Game Theory. The former is a fantasy. It is the latter that accurately explains and predicts how individuals and groups of people act.

"to live in nicer areas, and in bigger houses".

link please?

Now I know you know nothing Cote D'Azur - Hitler was deeply deeply stupid `(though I guess it depends how you define these things). I am a professor and this is one of my specialisms - along with Marx - who was formidably intelligent and had absolutely no theory of human nature- so there you are wrong. But this is stuff for another thread.

"their futile parasitic existences".

link please?

"sit around on their fat arses watching Jeremy Kyle"

link please?

Nice one beertricks!

Marx's theory of human nature

telsa, Professor of what?

lego I think they are her opinions so there won't be any links

Claig - did you bother to read to the second sentence of your Wiki link where it states - Marx does not have a theory of human nature as such- but a notion of Gattungswesen - something quite different. 'Human nature' means something immutable - humans are always greedy, it is in their nature to be competititive etc. Marx's theory, on the other hand, is that what you call human nature is historical, social, changes through time - that is to say, not a nature at all. So there - I am a professor! Boo sucks. And as if I would out myself.....

Yes you're right. Sorry, I apologise, it is more complex that the headline says. I didn't initially read it. It is an interesting subject. What were his views on evil and morality? it seems that he saw everything through the prism of self-actualisation which could only be fully achieved via a communist society. How does he explain evil and rich dilettantes whose behaviour is not constrained via a capitalist system?

Also, interested to know why you think that Hitler was stupid, given that he did manage to lead a country and, for a short time, conquer most of Europe, and nearly achieved what Napoleon failed to do, in conquering Russia.

Self-actualization is a good way of putting it. I am not sure he has a category of evil -but he does see perversions of spirit, sensibility stemming from the separations between people that alienation/commodity fetishism/social relations of exploitation establishes. I suppose 'evil' in the extreme sense is not business as usual for capitalism and so not an issue for Marx who is looking at the rationalising tendencies of capital's spread (though when it is - as under the nazis, a Marxist scholar such as Adorno, does see the need to reinclude it as category).

On Hitler's stupidity - I think to see the initial victories of the Nazis as his work is to subscribe to the great man theory of history - but history is a confluence of forces, chances, the working through of economic and technological logics in combination with conscious and collective human agency. But Hitler wasn't even a strategist in the manner of Napoleon - he was a failed artist, a wounded soldier, a nobody who made a good figurehead and could appear to be all things to all men - friend to capitalists who financed him and took a punt on him (as a useful tool in times of heightened class struggle in Germany), and he seemed to articulate the worries of the petty bourgeoisie and even some of the workers, who'd been flung into unemployment and looked for easy solutions (the Jews - ooh reminds me of some comments earlier in the thread! Who's to blame - the feckless low paid!). He was a puppet who took some acting lessons to improve his rhetoric - and he was surrounded by many other warriors and bureaucrats who devised policy. I mean this is a man who believed in the cosmic ice theory of the origins of the world - complete bonkers stuff and consulted astrologists.

I said Marx's understanding of human nature was deeply flawed. "Marx doesn't have a theory on human nature, I'm a professor" is not an answer to what I have said.

None of this has anything to do with this thread, but if you are going to insist on claiming authority in this subject based on your being a "professor" (of what?) I don't mind going into the specifics of how and why he was very wrong in his expectations of how humans live and act.

Thanks. I'd never heard of the cosmic ice theory.

CoteDAzur, I think you make a good point. How can you devise a political theory of how to structure human society, if you fail to address human nature and the motivations and objectives of human beings? Involved in this is morality and evil and a drive to power, and what is ethical, and what makes humans make their moral judgements. It seems to me that Marx has an a priori theory that communism is the best way to structure society and then tries to fit everything into that framework, and leaves out inconvenient factors such as human nature and morality etc.

LOl the thing I took exception to was your view that Marx was stupid, in my opinion a singularly stupid thing to say.

Telsa good posts. :)

Well said Octopus. And I think that the raising of the qualification age for a flat to 35 is a sign that working and non-working single people are to be crammed into single rooms and bedsits - meaning the landlords wil not drop their rents, just cram more people into flats and houses and maybe make more money.

As I understand it, Marx expected communism to be implemented in rich developed urban societies, that already had systems in place and had sufficent resources to give everyone an acceptable standard of living. Instead it has mainly been implemented in largly agrarian poor countries. So there has never been a chance to see how it would work in practice.