Marxist Love

... is an oxymoron. Dig this from Marxism and the Meaning of Materialism from the Socialist Worker website.

Karl Marx was a materialist--more than that, he was a historical materialist. Marxists, in order to establish their credentials in political arguments, frequently claim that they are giving a materialist analysis of a phenomenon. The claim that a materialist analysis is being provided both attests to the Marxist credentials of the argument, and validates the attitudes and actions that follow from that analysis...

Materialism for many people means two things: firstly, an obsession with material things (possessions, conspicuous wealth and consumption), and secondly, a rejection of theism (a belief in God and spirit) and acceptance of the view that the natural world of which we are part is all there is.

Marx's conception of the materialist theory of history has connections to both of these vernacular uses of the term. Marx believed that human beings were part of nature, not beings placed on Earth by God, although a belief in gods or God was itself a product of mankind's specific relationship to--and, indeed, alienation from--the nature of which they were part.

The remainder of the essay describes how to make things and distribute them. Where is love in all of that? Nowhere. Stuff is everything. Money and power are all. It's all about the production of stuff, ownership of stuff and the power to direct what stuff is made and where it goes.

Now here's the payoff.

For Marx, and of course Engels, the oppression of women in capitalism has its roots in the needs of the capitalist system to secure unpaid labor in families in order to maintain and replenish the labor force on whose exploitation the ruling class depends. It is not an intrinsic and essential feature of men that they oppress women. Nor are people identified as women at birth the only people to suffer from the oppression bred into the system by the need for unpaid labor to reproduce labor. For the real material oppression that the system requires then has its ideological expression not only in reactionary, misogynistic, sexist ideas about women compounded by the reification of women's bodies as commodities.

Even a woman's body is a commodity. Everything is a commodity. There is no room for either agape or eros in this, it's all about human ants toiling for the production of stuff under the guidance of wise overseers.

But that's not life, is it? Happiness is not connected to stuff. Once you can provide for yourself and your family and you've got a little left over to visit Dollywood and ride the roller coasters, you're just as happy as Bill Gates.

Materialism isn't love, either, is it? How many men go to work on road crews and have their paychecks deposited in joint accounts so they can oppress their wives and children? Their families aren't commodities, they are the loved ones he serves by giving his life to them. He would get more pleasure if he would smoke weed, watch porn and play video games, but instead he goes to work every day and gives most of his income to others.

Reality is made of love, not stuff. You can see that in the way people live and the choices they make.

If you search on Soviet Poster Woman, you find nothing but images like this. It's all stuff and no love. Is that life?