Karl Marx was a contemporary of Charles Dickens - both lived in London in the mid to late 1800s. If you had lived in the situation he was in, you would understand why Mr. Marx made the suggestions he made. Is there anything in the writings of value in the present? Yes, his 8 hour workday was suggested partly to reduce the industrial accidents, if I understand correctly. He recommended 8 hours to sleep, 8 hours to work and 8 hours to use as you wish. He wanted people to be able to live fulfilled lives.
A long and fulfilling life requires some resources and reasonable duration. Back then many in England died of cold or disease - life expectancy was 40 to 45 years. There are still parts of the US and UK where people die for avoidable reasons. But do not think many the charlatans of the Democrat have any plans to make the lives of homeless people, or the mentally disturbed or deficient or veterans better or that victims of violence will benefit from defunding the police. America does not need a left, it needs universal healthcare and the existing charities do pretty well it has to be said with the rest. We do need also to help marriages to be stable, and to help young mothers.
What we don't need is the modern Democratic Party and it's need to constantly go to war, claiming that it is helping poor people in the country we bomb. All that 'help' we gave South Vietnam got 4 million of them killed, and a lot maimed or dosed with dioxin. And right now that help has got 600,000 Ukrainians killed all for a vain promise of the right to join NATO, which most of them didn't want anyway. Just voting blue or red isn't enough, the overall framing narrative is often deceptive. Look at what is actually happening, not at what they tell you is happening.
The 1789 use of the term 'Left' was for a more equal distribution of wealth and capital, and against inherited privilege. The US present day use of the term 'Left' appears to mean 'progressive', in other words, change. And it is become evident that means throwing away everything that worked and replacing it with a feudal system run by Obama, Clinton, Biden, Blinken Etc. Cabal.
No problem with your post other than the fact you avoided the EVILS of Marxism and what it does to the individual as well as the family unit With the collective held supreme in all instances. That concept is very dangerous and the left constantly promotes it. At first very subtle, as it picks up steam. They control media and public education. What more could they want?
Yes, the left could have value by changing our insane for-profit medical system to something different but they don't seem too keen on doing that, just on starting wars. The True Left did have value in England because in 1948 the country was bankrupt, having got involved in a lot of wars, they are still in debt to the US for WW1, and most of the population were too poor to pay for medical treatment. As it happens the single payer system is far simpler than the 904 health insurance company Etc. Etc. US disaster area, it wins not because it is ideologically better but because the alternative we are running is impractical. .
I don't agree with Karl Marx, but can understand some of his suggestions because his was a time of desperate problems that seemed to need some kind of solutions. The solutions were already in existence in the United States because the government was in some cases, selling off farm land in 1/4 of a square mile purchases. Everyone got the same, no one could buy two. That was fair distribution similar to socialism in only that way, and it was in the US more than a hundred years ago. It was on a macroscopic level, not the govt coming in and saying 'we will destroy society and take all your money'. And the first land ownership in the USSR was happening around that time, but then some bureaucrats changed the system, so in some of the early days of socialism, the feudal serfs became land owners. But that didn't last. What makes the present world politics so complicated, there are real forces behind the scenes, and they don't match up with national boundaries. What the core Democrats are trying to sell right now as socialism is murder, theft, sexual immorality, chaos, and the feudal system.
The Bidens, Clintons, Bushes, the oligarchs, are claiming to be true help everyone socialists but it's a lie, they are only out to help themselves.
If you go back to 1789 'Left' was for more equal distribution of wealth so that is a lower Gini Coefficient in terms of statistics. Complete equality would have a Gini Coefficient of zero. The extreme Right in economic terms would mean a greater disparity of wealth and at the far extreme a Gini Coefficient of One, mathematically, but usually expressed as 100 percent or as simply 100. With this quantitative concept of left and right, most people prefer a setting after some disputation, of between 30 and 40. Common sense wins.
Morally and ethically the 'left path' refers to the forbidden, while the 'right path' is the right way to live. So that is how I get confused. In terms of economics I'm somewhere in the middle but in moral and ethical terms I'm on the right.
Dr Jordan Peterson wrote one book: 12 Rules for Life - an antidote to chaos followed by another book Beyond Order - 12 More Rules for Life Real life is like that, apparently. Though I'm mainly trying to make order from chaos, the opposite is sometimes necessary such as after the Protestant Reformation, the Puritans went too far and whitewashed churches, which made them boring. The Baroque movement was going in the opposite direction and producing complexity.
Basically the American left's proclivity for throwing away order and meaning is excessive, and their tendency to go to war is even worse. Perhaps modern day Russia is too regimented. Take a look at Britain where the homeless don't even have cardboard boxes to live in. Here in the US the homeless have proper camping gear, tents, and bicycles. I think the US has to move more in the direction of order. Trump is far better than Biden. But then it would be good to mix in some Stein if possible...
On Feb 24 2022 the Russian Federation moved in forces to protect Donetsk. People need to refresh their memories, or just build time machines and go back and watch the war unfold.
Even if true, Donetsk is in Ukraine. Not Russia's problem or concern. That would be the equivalent of US invading Mexico because of ex-pats getting into the trouble on the Mexican side. What Russia should have done is offer asylum for anyone wanting to leave Ukraine (again assuming your implied narrative is true, which I don't believe it is).
By 'True Left' I mean the left I knew in Britain many years ago of a somewhat less inequal wealth, not the Left of the US Democratic Party of destroy everything. And I'm very happy with Elon Musk's wealth because it is money he has made by making things more efficient, and that is the benefit of having a difference in wealth between people or communities that it points the way to a more efficient way of doing things and benefits everyone. What Elon Musk is doing is the whole point in having economic inequality. He is making more progress than most of NASA made getting to the moon. His rockets are efficient and reusable, he has put up lots of satellites. And he is risking his own money with each big high risk innovation.
