Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2026 6:00 am
OK. Fair enough. I own more possessions and of higher quality than most individuals in the developing world do.
Yep. That's the point. Selective Socialism is merely Fabianism: one set of rules for the truly poor, and another, with elite status, for us and for the uber-wealthy.
Marx's concept of "property" is very broad...but not as broad as subsequent Neo-Marxists have made it. For them, "property" is not merely factories or computers and tennis racquets, it includes intellectual property, all resources, control of any means of production of humanity, such as media or symbolic value, and even what they now call "whiteness." Anything that affords what they call a "privilege" pretty much becomes "property" for them, and thus illegitimate, in their fevered imaginations.
...it appears that Marx believes "Bourgeois property" should be abolished. I'm not sure if he further distinguishes between "private property" and "bourgeois property". They almost seem equivalent in some passages; however, clearly, it has to be abolished according to Marx.
Now you've got it. And Neo-Marxists have reinterpreted Marx, making him out to refer today to a whole lot more than the basic Industrial Revolution fixtures that Marx himself knew. They'd call it "application," I'm sure.
So what do we all do now? Do any of us in the developed world deserve what we have
Well, "deserving" is a moral category. Materialism, as in Dialectical Materialism (Marxism) offers no grounds for belief in "deserving." Whatever is, simply is: and all of Marx's whining about it is actually incompatible with his own Materialism. There are no moral categories deducible from Materialism. If Materialism is true, then nobody ever "deserves" anything, and nobody can be deprived of a thing they can't possibly even have.
Paradoxically, Marxists always demand their program should go forward for pseudo-moral reasons, like "equality" or "fraternity" or "diversity" or "inclusion" or "fairness." But NONE of these categories can be deduced from Materialism. So either Marx is not actually believing his own Materialism, or he is without basis in his own worldview for the moral claims he attempts to impose on the world.
when it is created by people who cannot afford what they produce for us?
In come cases, that's true: for example, our Nike sneakers might be made in a factory in Thailand or China, by people who live on meager wages. But in a Materialist-Marxist world, one devoid of objective moral categories, on what basis is that to be criticized? There can be nothing "wrong" with such a situation if nothing can ever be objectively "wrong."
I mean, at face value, it seems scandalous
Why? You're a Socialist, aren't you? "Scandalous" is a category of moral condemnation. Are you condemning such a situation morally? If you are, you're not thinking like a Materialist, and hence, not like a Dialectical Materialist (Socialist). Remember that in Marxism, dialectical conflicts are said to be inevitable, a permanent feature of reality, and to require unrelenting, unceasing struggle. They aren't something one can condemn on moral grounds, because they're a universal feature of reality. There's no "other way" things could be, if Marxism were true.
You ask what's to be done. Good question. By the light of Marxism,
nothing is to be done about our moral situation: a perpetual class struggle, bitter, violent and interminable, is going to be with us always. It might as well be this one. But by the light of the Judaism and Christianity that Marx despised, much is to be done; for we live in a world that has objective moral principles woven through it, and what we do to others God will call us to account for. We are to be grateful for all we have, and be generous to those who have less -- but we are not to look at those who have more than we have with envy or covetousness, for we will answer for our greed, if we do that. So the rule should be peace and gratitude, charity and mercy, for both the poor and the rich have God as their Maker and Judge.
Pick your world, I guess.