Marxism is...

[reinaert]

Marxism is...

 

[spud_meister]

Inevitable. Capitalism has gone further than Marx could have imagined, and started the path to it's own end via automation. Soon enough, the proletariat will no longer be able to sell their labour, and the bourgeoisie will be unable to profit, then the capitalist system will crumble.

 

[Nomad4Ever]

100% Satanic witchcraft. I am building my voodoo doll of Elon Musk as I type this.

 

[Nomad4Ever]

Inevitable. Capitalism has gone further than Marx could have imagined, and started the path to it's own end via automation. Soon enough, the proletariat will no longer be able to sell their labour, and the bourgeoisie will be unable to profit, then the capitalist system will crumble.

Or we could all die from climate change before that happens 🤷‍♂️

 

[uptower]

Many countries have adopted socialist policies and made them work. However those that went all the way have all failed. Marxism, in the sense that society will be completely transformed, is dead. China, The USSR, the Eastern Bloc - they all corrupted then abandoned it. As with any political ideology it won't survive a human touch intact.

 

[Juks]

For a country that really only has right wing politics (liberalism and conservatism, democrats and republicans) you are awfully occupied with Marx and socialism. It's the boogeyman.....

Has anyone read Marx?

 

[Peter King]

Marxism is...

In a perfect world with perfect people Marxism would be wonderful. One would chose for more hours working and a bigger house and other people would work less and have more free time with a smaller house or a less impressive car.

People would be happy with what they had and not be ruled by greed and eternally trying to one up your neighbor or your co-worker. In a perfect world people would be satisfied when they had everything their little heart desired and happy for others to have what their heart desired.

In a perfect world with perfect people. Fact is people are not perfect, we are never happy, we are greedy, jealous, envious, never OK with not one upping the Jones's. People and the world are as imperfect as can be. And that is why Marxism is a pipe dream.

Communist countries that claim to be Marxists are LIARS!!!!! They mostly banned religion because Marx said that in a perfect Marxist world there would not be a need for religion. Religion in his time was mostly geared towards the rich and towards keeping the simple common folks happy with their fate in life, no matter how miserable you were on earth, in heaven the reward would come for all your hard work and suffering. Business owners and the toffs were real happy with religion. They gave big sums to the church and the church would parrot the views of 19th century's elites, that suffering is good for the soul.

A Dutch comedian said (if I remember correctly) "If you give a priest some money he will talk for a while, if you give workers some money they will keep their mouths shut", which is what the world in Marx's time really was.

But Marx never meant banning religion, that is what the bastard commies did, oppress religion to make it look like Marx's visions ha been fulfilled. Which was bull crap, Marx's view was that when people where fully happy, they would no longer NEED religion to give the hope that after death the reward of the workers would be realized.

And government has no business being every business. It means no progress and no innovation, etc. etc. etc. The entire vision of Marx has one fatal flaw, it depended on us, humans and our good nature. Man was he stupid to believe that we would ever be the kind of humans necessary to make his system work. In that regard Marx was both a dreamer and a DUNCE.

 

[Monica33]

Marx was set up by his elite backers to fool the masses .
And they ( they) succeeded with a huge number of Gullibles .

Here is just a small excerpt from his background as uncovered by the world's leading sleuth Miles Mathis .


His father gave up Judaism, we are told, and became a Lutheran, although we must assume that was just a pose. He married a Jewish woman anyway, and although we are always told she was “semi-literate,” the more important fact is that she was connected to a family of very wealthy bankers and industrialists. This was the Philips family, which later started Philips electronics. Outside of the royals, the Philips were and still are the richest people in Belgium. [Marx's mother was actually a Pressburg, and it was her sister who married into the Philips family. However, the Pressburgs were also very wealthy Jewish merchants. If they hadn't been prominent they wouldn't have been able to marry into the Philips family. Their line in Holland was actually relatively new, and just a couple of generations earlier they had moved from Austria-Hungary, where they had also been wealthy and influential. Their extended family includes many bankers and—like Marx's family—rabbis. See the names Hartog, Isaacs, Barent-Cohen, and Brandeis. Yes, that Brandeis.]
I want to pause and circle that “semi-literate” tag we get whenever we read about Marx's mother. It is supposed to divert you from realizing who she really is. Being semi-literate implies she is from a lowclass family of scullery maids or something, when the truth is she is from a family of millionaires. They just trust you don't make the connection I did, going “so these millionaires are semi-literate?” I encourage you to make that connection, because it explains a lot. For a start, it explains why these super-wealthy families who now run the world care nothing for real art, literature, poetry, or music. They have destroyed all the old high arts and sciences, keeping only the lowly economics. The upper class they displaced—the real aristocrats—always honored art and artists. They scoured their domains —even the countryside and the towns of the poor—searching for the most talented artisans and artists. But the nouveau-riche industrialists killed that tradition, instead inserting their own talentless children into the all the artistic venues and jobs.

 

[tacomancer]

Slapstick comedy from the 1930s

 

[Jredbaron96]

For a country that really only has right wing politics (liberalism and conservatism, democrats and republicans) you are awfully occupied with Marx and socialism. It's the boogeyman.....

Has anyone read Marx?

I died about half way through Das Kapital.

People say Marx had a dry sense of humor, what they leave out is his writing was also bone dry.

 

[neil]

Slapstick comedy from the 1930s

🤯 Oh my goodness! This is the best explanation I have ever seen; now I understand it.

 

[XDU]

Marxism is...

Marxism is the application of labor theory of value to the relations of production to achieve a dictatorship of the proletariat. It does so by applying use value to concrete labor rather than exchange value to abstract labor in order to overcome commodity fetishism through the calculation of average utility via socially necessary labor time. (In the Trotskyite anti-Stalinist version, this also involves permanent revolution to overcome a deformed or degenerate workers state so bureaucrats don't revert the system back to state capitalism).

To be clear, I don't support Marxism. I just realize that this pursuit of a stateless and classless society is a mockery of real analysis. Many opponents to Marxism oversimplify why Marxism is wrong in order to get away with being anti-intellectual in general. It's important to engage Marxism correctly to not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to civilization. Dialectic, scientific, and historical materialism deliberately contradict themselves to suggest an emergent helix theory of social progress. In reality, civilization advances from people concentrating their attention spans to a point of singularity to get things done and then control that concentration so it doesn't get lost when diffusing in all directions.

 

[XDU]

Slapstick comedy from the 1930s

To be fair, Marxism had some legitimate complaints which did lead to the Revolutions of 1848. The return of conservatism in the long 19th century after Napoleon's defeat reverted Europe back to aristocracy instead of advancing to meritocracy. Enlightenment died and its replacement with romanticism resulted in a lot of drama in which ordinary people had their dignity sacrificed just to empower those with compatible emotional instincts to entice others' emotional instincts.

The problem is Marxism didn't solve any of this. It tried to reduce it all down to economics, fiscal inequality, and class conflict. In reality, the problem was legal negligence that went along with aesthetic movements like what we later saw in the Kulturkampf during German unification, Art Nouveau and its connections with the Oxford Movement, and Fin de Siecle which inspired the French non-conformists.

 

[tacomancer]

To be fair, Marxism had some legitimate complaints which did lead to the Revolutions of 1848. The return of conservatism in the long 19th century after Napoleon's defeat reverted Europe back to aristocracy instead of advancing to meritocracy. Enlightenment died and its replacement with romanticism resulted in a lot of drama in which ordinary people had their dignity sacrificed just to empower those with compatible emotional instincts to entice others' emotional instincts.

The problem is Marxism didn't solve any of this. It tried to reduce it all down to economics, fiscal inequality, and class conflict. In reality, the problem was legal negligence that went along with aesthetic movements like what we later saw in the Kulturkampf during German unification, Art Nouveau and its connections with the Oxford Movement, and Fin de Siecle which inspired the French non-conformists.

"honk honk"
- Harpo Marx

 

[upsideguy]

Marxism is...

...so 20th century. It is largely a boogey-man to the right wing, hence an effective word for right-wing politicians to inner-stitch in speeches to heard their useful idiots.

Social democracy is NOT marxism. Keep in mind that all economies are hybrids. There is no communism, no socialism, no capitalism, but blends with elements of each. All societies are working on developing the winning formula consistent with their value systems.

 

[neil]

...sportin' a mullet:

 

[XDU]

"honk honk"
- Harpo Marx

I thought you were talking about Groucho to be fair.

 

[Juin]

Inevitable. Capitalism has gone further than Marx could have imagined, and started the path to it's own end via automation. Soon enough, the proletariat will no longer be able to sell their labour, and the bourgeoisie will be unable to profit, then the capitalist system will crumble.

Yours is an ideology in its own right. In want of a name. Automationism, a possible suggestion. But spud_meisterism, to give you proper credit.

 

[Juks]

I died about half way through Das Kapital.

People say Marx had a dry sense of humor, what they leave out is his writing was also bone dry.

I agree, but I give him some lenience. The society was in changing and al the economic theories where new and no comparisons were available. Most of his liberal contra parts has been proven wrong over time, so...

But his books takes some time to get through. I kept the interest up since so many things that we casual say he said, he didn't say and the other way around.

 

[XDU]

I agree, but I give him some lenience. The society was in changing and al the economic theories where new and no comparisons were available. Most of his liberal contra parts has been proven wrong over time, so...

But his books takes some time to get through. I kept the interest up since so many things that we casual say he said, he didn't say and the other way around.

To be fair, the dryness of a paradigm shouldn't have anything to do with whether it's right or wrong. If we're talking about how to seriously restructure society, then we should take it seriously. People who don't take ideas seriously deserve to be dismissed as the salt of the earth and expected to do dirty jobs. Hopefully, they'll learn to become serious over time, and when they do, we should honor them for doing honest labor.

This is probably the biggest problem with Marx's idea of class conflict. He doesn't realize how the working class deserves to be what it is. Unfortunately, many people in society have an addiction to drama. Those people deserve to be condemned among their own so they can shape up and stop being so dramatic.

The problem is society has flipped this upside down where serious people have become the salt of the earth while dramatic people rise to the top. It's created a situation where meritocracy gets moderately exploited. Marx recognized this as the labor aristocracy where work ethic is used to tease those with ingenuity, but only a little bit so they never really get to become successful.

 

[soylentgreen]

I died about half way through Das Kapital.

People say Marx had a dry sense of humor, what they leave out is his writing was also bone dry.

Really! Why are you an economics student or was that just the only title you could think of.
But you make a good point. Apart from the manifesto people do not know that marx talked about more than just economics.

 

[jpevans]

I haven't read Marx & prob'ly never will. What I know of it it was about income inequality & a theory to put workers in charge of their own labor. From what y'all have said on it & known history it was a theory exploited by power hungry persons for their own enrichment.

 

[Jredbaron96]

Really! Why are you an economics student or was that just the only title you could think of.
But you make a good point. Apart from the manifesto people do not know that marx talked about more than just economics.

I picked it up because they didn't have Wage Labor and Capital.

 

[radioman]

Marxism is...

.......... a term used to demonize any policy/person the GOP doesn't support.

 

[Felis Leo]

As a critique of private markets, Marxism can be valid. But only as a critique. When Marx goes from critique to actual alternative, the ultimate ideal of a classless, stateless society that somehow provides for the material needs of all its members is impracticable.