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Marxism is...

Marxism is...

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Felis Leo said:
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.
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Felis, can you point to which work Marx wrote to define an ultimate ideal?
 
Felis Leo said:
Marxism 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.
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So far it has been impractical, but advancements in technology (eg robotics) could change this, so I don't think it's impracticable. Regardless, in order for it to happen, it requires solutions, not critiques (as you point out very well).
 
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jpevans said:
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.
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The nomenklatura and the appartchiks of the party bureaucracies ossified into their familiar forms not from 'power madness' but rather in reaction to British, American and French efforts to return China, Vietnam, Russia, Cuba, etc back to the control of their landed or gangster overlords.

Stalin, Castro and Mao were authoritarians, certainly. And the critiques of their regimes offered by other Marxists (Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Goldman et al) were valid and timely, but it is too simple by degrees to reduce the revolutionary stall to power hunger.

The West, collectively, poured untold bodies and treasure into counterrevolution, and this forced the much poorer and less capitalized Marxist governments into defensive industrialization and armament.
 
It's a species of potato that tastes bad, isn't it? Often gets a fungus?
 
XDU said:
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.
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I don't agree. There is no right or wrong in politics. It is different views, interests, intentions and goals.


With that said, I don't agree to anything you say, escpecially not the second paragraph. Your third papragraph I don't even understand what you are on about, so I can't tell if I agree or not (probably not)
 
Felis Leo said:
I would argue that the Communist Manifesto lays out the bare framework ultimate ideal. It does not flesh it out, necessarily.
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Marx was a materialist, not an idealist. Anyone who argues he advocated an ideal has never read what he wrote.
 
Juks said:
I don't agree. There is no right or wrong in politics. It is different views, interests, intentions and goals.


With that said, I don't agree to anything you say, escpecially not the second paragraph. Your third papragraph I don't even understand what you are on about, so I can't tell if I agree or not (probably not)
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I'm using right or wrong in general terms there. Even if you believe it's all relative, the dryness of a publication isn't a good measure for determining what it's relative to. People can publish dry things on purpose to avoid attracting people who are only going to try to use them.

The working class is the working class because it doesn't get this. Its obsession with being attracted to what's useful results in it getting manipulated by exciting publications. This is why commodity fetishism works. The working class treats others as the objects which are produced. If a publication is exciting, then the author is exciting. If a publication is dry, then the author is dry.

The working class doesn't get how exciting authors can have dry publications, and dry authors can have exciting publications. This is where drama happens, and meritocracy is used to correct this drama.

The problem is this drama has not been corrected. Dry people who have exciting publications have gotten to the top, and exciting people with dry publications have fallen to the bottom. The working class insists on believing exciting publications must come from exciting people and vice versa, so it continues to fall for the act.
 
Juks said:
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?
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No one who uses "Marxism" as a boogeyman cares what it actually is/was, and while they might have read it, they're still going to mislead others by misusing that information.
 
Marxism is to das kapital like Adam smith is to the wealth of nations.
 
Felis Leo said:
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.
Click to expand...
He also tends to view profit differently than most folks. To Marx, profit was an extraction of surplus value.
 
reinaert said:
Marxism is...
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reinaert said:
... a political/economic theory of how things work. Right in some of its predictions (workers did unite) and wrong in others. I see it as going hand in hand with some of Adam Smith's philosophy of self-interest, but also as well hopelessly idealistic in its implications for how to deal with capitalism. Both work, both don't. The trick is to understand their contradictions so as to retain some of the emphasis on production that is characteristic of capitalism and that of distribution that is characteristic of socialism.
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reinaert said:
The nomenklatura and the appartchiks of the party bureaucracies ossified into their familiar forms not from 'power madness' but rather in reaction to British, American and French efforts to return China, Vietnam, Russia, Cuba, etc back to the control of their landed or gangster overlords.

Stalin, Castro and Mao were authoritarians, certainly. And the critiques of their regimes offered by other Marxists (Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Goldman et al) were valid and timely, but it is too simple by degrees to reduce the revolutionary stall to power hunger.

The West, collectively, poured untold bodies and treasure into counterrevolution, and this forced the much poorer and less capitalized Marxist governments into defensive industrialization and armament.
Click to expand...
I would say Stalin was the most paranoid of them all, the countries he wanted to invade kinda reeks of a sour grapes general who couldnt stand being outdone by Trotsky in Poland. Early Stalin’s leadership was….. well pretty piss poor. I do not believe Russia’s pre-WW II invasions really exemplify what you are stating.
 
radioman said:
.......... a term used to demonize any policy/person the GOP doesn't support.
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Nah, Marxism is an old hand term (cf. the Wall Street Journal calling Pope Paul VI encyclical "warmed over Marxism," a term they would likely apply to the Sermon on the Mount). The current epithet-of-art from the right is "socialism."
 
bomberfox said:
I would say Stalin was the most paranoid of them all, the countries he wanted to invade kinda reeks of a sour grapes general who couldnt stand being outdone by Trotsky in Poland. Early Stalin’s leadership was….. well pretty piss poor. I do not believe Russia’s pre-WW II invasions really exemplify what you are stating.
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Not directly, no. Esp. not against the Makhnovists. But, generally, the Comintern's policy was reactive and defensive. Would a non-Stalinist path-dependence look substantially different? Hard to say, but I don't think so.
 
Felis Leo said:
I would argue that the Communist Manifesto lays out the bare framework ultimate ideal. It does not flesh it out, necessarily.
Click to expand...
That is certainly a fairly standard read, but it kind of misses that the Manifesto was a political and practical program only within capitalized European countries. Marx's materialism is quite pragmatic, which is why he and Engels understood that the Manifesto's program would be really difficult to implement in the US (despite Skousenist conspiract theories that have flourished for nearly 3/4 of a century).
 
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reinaert said:
That is certainly a fairly standard read, but it kind of misses that the Manifesto was a political and practical program only within capitalized European countries. Marx's materialism is quite pragmatic, which is why he and Engels understood that the Manifesto's program would be really difficult to implement in the US (despite Skousenist conspiract theories that have flourished for nearly 3/4 of a century).
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It's worse than that. If you study John Dewey, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce who were the forefathers of pragmatism, you will find out they were self-admitted socialists.

Whenever a conservative makes an appeal to pragmatism to oppose socialism, you know you're dealing with someone who doesn't have a clue what they're talking about. This is why Trumpers are lunatics. They're "pragmatic" anti-socialists which means they're Manchurian candidates. They're unwitting subversives who are facilitating the worker's revolution.
 
Marxism is a failed concept.

Most systems are flawed, from one degree to another, due to the imperfect nature of humans.
Waters that are too pure, have no fish.
 
grip said:
Marxism is a failed concept.

Most systems are flawed, from one degree to another, due to the imperfect nature of humans.
Waters that are too pure, have no fish.
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How can a concept fail? (This question is not asked sardonically.)
 
grip said:
Marxism is a failed concept.

Most systems are flawed, from one degree to another, due to the imperfect nature of humans.
Waters that are too pure, have no fish.
Click to expand...
The idea of human imperfection only has value in comparison and relation to a conviction that there exists a knowable standard of perfection.

Paradoxically - or seemingly so, at first and cursory glance - the claim of imperfection reveals a faith in the knowably perfect, which, if it is knowable, is therefore achievable.

All appeals to human imperfection are therefore appeals toward perfectability.


 
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