When you push identity politics so hard you start rewriting and erasing Karl Marx's original Critique of the Gotha and...

Communistifesto is pretty catchy.

checked
Changes on such small scale like this appear often when translating between languages. I remember one story, which told about how biblical story about "wise man who built house on rock vs stupid man who built house on sand" had to swap "rock" with "sand" when translating to one African language, because it did not make sense for them in original.

The thing is user, I actually AGREE with the change, but these kinds of things can turn volatile pretty quick and next thing you know we're doing sentence redaction and biased footnotes on every page.

I think it should just be left alone, the base text should remain the same as it was written during Marx's time, and the adaptation to the modern era should occur OUTSIDE of the text, not WITHIN the text.

You say that like you're worrying these spergs have any tether to or control over reality.

It sounds very festive.

why do you care about these small things? your life must suck op

What a silly thing to be upset about, OP. This is not rewriting Marx, since the original Critique of the Gotha Program was in German, it is merely another translation. "To each according to his needs" - Do you really think that Marx envisioned a society where only men are catered to like that? Is there some recently found fragment of Marx I'm unaware of where it's written that he envisioned all sorts of marvelous machines powered by female slaves locked up inside of them, for the glory of the meninist gaytopia?

In German, nouns have a grammatical gender associated with them, which doesn't imply anything like in the sense when we talk about specific persons or animals. For instance, a table is "male", der Tisch, so when you say in German that one of its legs is defect, you refer to that as one of his legs. Revolution is "female" in German (and French and Spanish), without that having any profound conceptual meaning, just when you talk about it in German, you refer to it as her.

Der Mensch means the human (it can also mean humanity), so when you say "every human" in German you can say jeder Mensch or just jeder. It doesn't imply anything about gender in the sociological or biological sense. Likewise you can say die Person, meaning "the person", and talking about a person doing this or that, and then in a sentence right after that say jede without the Person written out after that, but implied by the context, and again there is no particular message specifically about men or women in that.

This

I know idpol, and a simple update of pronouns to be more inclusive to the entirety of the working class is not idpol.

yes it literally is

This. In german it's "Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen". While the grammatical gender is male, it could just as easily mean "every man" (which would be translated to "his") as it could mean "every human" (which would be translated to "their"). Both are valid translations, though "his" is the more literal translation since it would match the grammatical gender, but since English doesn't use the same grammatical system as German, it's not that important.

Just to add, every translation is a revision of the original work. Even a small change can completely change the meaning of a sentence, as this thread shows, and the translator has to constantly decide which interpretation is the correct one. That's why you get so many people who are adamant on reading, say, the bible in the original Greek or the Quran in Arabic, because that's the only way to read the unrevised work as it was originally written.

Implying the people in charge here are different.

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO XIR ABILITY TO EACH ACCORDING TO XIR'S NEEDS

r/anarchism is even worse friend
they literally think che was a fascist

It isn't a big change. He/his in English is both masculine and neuter. Even in Marx's time it was recognized that males and females were both exploited members of the proletariat. In modern parlance "They" has taken on both the singular and plural neuter and is used for subjects of indeterminate gender, such as a hypothetical worker under Communism.

It's literally fucking nothing.

5 star post tbh

lmao is Holla Forums really throwing a fit because someone changed "his" to "their" in a basic bitch quote? And then going on to claim that this is a slippery slope to revisionism? Please, fuck off. Idpollers may be revisionist but it isn't because they started by swapping pronouns.

Really.

it literally isn't though
excluding parts of the working class from a proletarian political movement because of their bullshit identities is idpol
though this changing words-shit is inconsequential in reality and does reek of idealism
Marx was very much about emancipation of humantiy as a whole, if his phrasing was translated into English as gender-neutral or not is completely irrelevant for the content

What happened to this place

The real problem here is that "their" is exclusively a third-person plural possessive pronoun. It looks and sounds absolutely fucking retarded to use it otherwise. For the love of Christ, stop butchering our poor English language.

How does this makes the left look bad, exactly? Oh, and it isn't retarded, there's a perfectly logical justification here so please, stop whining.

Except the altered quote is using it as a third person plural possessive pronoun; it just happens to also be gender neural too.

Also I'm not going to read a wall of text lecturing me about how Marx was an idiot for not thinking about liberals special feelings before he wrote some of the greatest works of economics and philosophy of the 19th century and how I need to feel bad for frustrating LGBTQ people because I care about abolishing capitalism and giving workers control of the means of production rather than making sure more gays and trans people can serve in the military and that rich trust fund baby liberal "leftists" don't get their feelings hurt because I don't give a shit if every little thing in the world and in the movement is adjusted to not hurt their feelings

Read this and correct your shitty fucking attitude or go back to reddit faggot.

MLs are literally clowns

No it's not, you moron. The singular noun is implied after "each." For example, you wouldn't say "from each *men*," but rather, "from each man."

user, it's better to be perfectly honest with ourselves in realizing that no revolution is going to happen in America.

Practice what you preach, man

>to, for, or by every one of a group
Unless there's only one man in existence, "each man" will be a plural subject. Consider:
"I would like an apple from each man" would be equivalent to "I would like an apple from each of them", if it was made clear beforehand that "them" referred to every man of interest i.e. each man.

"Sein" can be translated as his/its/their depending on the context you dumb stupid idiot

Before I read your wonderful text you've provided me, tell me what Id-pol is, because I get the feeling that changing a pronoun in a quote is not the same kind of "idpol" the pic is discussing.

people use singular their all the time you guys are just being whiny

k

The only reason we got tied up is because you can't handle someone preferring "them" from a translated quote where "them" would be just as valid as "he". Also, this is an imageboard, not a bastion of revolution. In any other circumstance I'd agree.
I don't think anyone claimed this. Please refrain from strawmanning.

Singular they/their is a thing, the English language has been shit as far back as the Norman invasion my man, English is an amalgamation of all other languages at this point

All it takes is one bit of historical context to understand when they speak of a person in a situation of sorts, they resorted to speaking in a male view. Common due to how little female authors there are. Couldn't we argue that is sexist for a male to arrange his sentences with the female view in mind, even though he is not female himself?

My favorite is when Stirner speaks of love in a male/male context.
Shall we go ahead and remove the male from this? Stirner never wrote excplicitly about homosexuality, due to instant censorship. With such a radical Xirok that "condones" everything from murder to incest, Stirner could understand the plight of two men in love.
Stirner never identifies the Unique as male or female, but always speaks from a male perspective due to being a male. Just as he never spoke of the old man, for he was not one yet.

Except "each" is, evidently, not behaving as an adverb here. It is a pronoun. There's a fucking preposition in front of it for God's sake. dictionary.com:

each
pronoun
2.
every one individually; each one:

In your example, each is still acting as a pronoun, and it is still singular. Replace "each" in "each of them" with "one."

Real talk r/socialism is run by a small clique of teenagers. It promotes the same tired red liberalism that the left has been pushing since the wall fell.

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Yes, but not in formal writing…

The biggest problem with this is the fact that it is an outright attempt to rewrite history to fit modern language. While this change is minor, it can easily get out of control and is (obviously) Orwellian.

Out of principle, I cannot support this.

Alright, fair enough

should it be ifesta with an A for women? or maybe

Communist
ifestx

?

HAVE THE GAYS GONE TOO FAR?!?

newsflash: they have

So would you take issue with "From each according to one's ability, to each according to one's need" if someone preferred it?

All the good posters left and were replaced with people from reddit. Rather than adapting to the imageboard culture, those redditors continued to adhere to fairly mainstream mild-idpol attitudes. It was obvious Holla Forums had fallen victim to the eternal september ever since AntiFa became more popular than opposition to capitalism.

Honestly it would be more surprising if Holla Forums managed to avoid the pitfalls that have ruined every other leftist organization. The board was always vulnerable to being co-opted because most of the users refused to take a hard anti-idpol stance. It was always a more nuanced, "well, idpol is bad, but…," leaving the door open for every red-liberal to claim that their particular brand of feminism isn't idpol.

Fuck off nazbols.

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Naturally. In hindsight, my suggestion above was not quite right, as I misread his argument. In this sentence, as per the definition I gave above, substitute "each one" or "every one individually" for "each" and commit to "his" or "her" for the possessive pronoun. In my papers I often write "his/her" in this situation. Of course, it's still retarded to tamper with the sentence to begin with.

I used to unironically support lgbt, sure that crowd was always well represented on 4chan and that experience kind of normalised the alternative lifestyle community(tm) for me, but things have changed over the years. And i often find myself wandering if they 'have gone too far', maybe there is a thing such as too much gay rights. For example, it's evident most 'trans people' are just doing it because its trendy, they're jumping on the next hipster bandwagon.

This thread is pointless. Both translations are equally revisionist

What a dumb thing to be bothered about. is right

And with context to the present, you need to be aware that colloquially, "they/them/their" is accepted as a singular pronoun. So yeah, is right, but the individual in the OP isn't writing a formal paper, nor are they denying that the original used "his". If they were writing a formal text and used the second quote, then of course, that would be poor writing practices on their part (although, arguably for only a grammar error as pointed out, assuming >>2211707's justification is correct).

That said, I think it's clear that the subcontext of the image is that the poster preferred it for informal purposes.

Personally I draw a huge distinction between supporting the rights of LGBTBNPetc people and supporting the actions of LGBT advocacy groups. The former is an undeniably good cause which increases freedom without causing any harm, while the latter is pure authoritarianism and identity politics.

I mean technically the English version isn't the original

I substitute every pronount to Xir in my mind because it pleases my ego

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You're referencing an accidental and largely unavoidable change, not a deliberate and politically motivated one. Point is, it doesn't matter fundamentally if the change is small, it sets a precedent of revisionism that is wholly unnecessary and will only ever be used to justify larger revisions in the future.

Except the original translation is already a revision. All translations are revisions of the original work. The only way to avoid revisionism is by reading the original work in German. It's been mentioned several times itt that the original quote is just as open to be translated as "his" as it is "their". Any translator is gonna have to make a decision in how to translate it, and in doing so he's revising Marx's work.
People are literally arguing over which revision of Marx's text they prefer. If you want to be non-revisionist, learn German.

So just to be sure you Anglos are throwing a hissyfit that someone wants to create an alternative translation from the original german?

No you retard, using the male pronouns for both male and female is normal in West germanic languages.

All of the revisionist niggers who support changing century old text for present day motivations are absolute opportunists who can not dream for a moment of what a socialist action is.

To hell with you and your trashcan ideology.

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das get!!!