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Karl Marx's philosophy can be usefully summed up as: economic equality is the only thing that matters.
I would follow the smart man who said that any political choice must reconcile individual liberty, equality or fairness, and efficiency. (Fascism could be summed up as: efficiency at achieving the desired end is the only thing that matters)
In that sense both Rand and Marx are equally interesting extreme thought experiments, and swallowing either one whole would be equally misguided, and being influenced by both as good examples of how not to think would be equally useful.
Of course Marx advocated violence for his "cause", so there's probably a reason for more direct deaths in his column, but that doesn't change the fact that I feel deeply embarrassed for anyone who uncritically accepts either Marxist or Randian dogmas as something desirable.
No, Ayn Rand's philosophy can be usefully summed up as: I got mine, F**k you.
I think its ironic that people who style themselves as "progressives" embrace 19th century ideas that were totally shown to be defective in the 20th century. But what is a "progressive" other than a Neanderthal with delusions of grandeur?
Rand, Hayek, Friedman, Mises, Burke, Smith, Hume, Locke, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Adams, etc.?
Not so much.
You can read all this for yourself. It's in Obama's memoir.
Working as an editor for a Wall Street financial newsletter covering the world of business and capitalist production ?
Working "behind enemy lines" to quote Obama's own words.
Once I came to my senses and realized that leftism was horribly wrong about things, I decided that the important thing isn't equalizing wealth. Instead, it is equalizing power. And when I looked at matters from this perspective, what a change of view I had. America came off looking pretty good, while the communist countries were (and still are) some of the worst offenders of all. I've often taunted other leftists by asking, "If Castro is so progressive, why hasn't he resigned so that a woman or a black could take over?" Of course, they have no response.
There's a lot more I could say, but the mass killings really says it all.
John Pepple
If that wasn't a joke, it was fighting words. I don't like it when people talk about obliteration.
"Marxist positions cannot be arrived at through reason..."
This is just false and betrays a deep lack of understanding of the nature of reason itself. Reason and reality may (and indeed have) proven many Marxist positions to be wrong, but that's a different thing altogether.
"Devotion to Marxist theory and dogma results solely from the existence of pre-existing psychological deficiences that remain unaddressed and manifest as neuroses unrecognized by the host, resulting in an external projection on others of what is wrong with themselves."
This is freudian through and through. Devotees of any dogma are quite like cult members, Randroids at least as much as Marxists. Both equally annoying. But this bit about psychological deficiencies manifesting as neuroses is freudian nonsense. There has been actual progress in cognitive neuroscience, and even some progress in understanding cultists and paranoiacs in the last 40 years or so. WRT cults, all are susceptible. Training in a hard science can help (somewhat), but in the right social environment even trained skeptical empiricists can be remade. The only psychological deficiencies at play are those inherent in human nature - which is to say the structure and function of the normal human brain.
What Freud has to do with it is that your entire 'analysis' of the Marxist's psychology is bs, and really nothing more than an ad hominem attack that is fallaciously 'justified' by reference to pseudoscience, and then used to call (hyperbolically, I'm sure, but still unacceptably) for violence. I was trying to gently point out the fallacious nature of your comment, but was obviously too opaque. Sorry about that.
Yes! Also, one should be more embarrassed to have been influenced by the Beatles than by Britney Spears.
I think here about interesting writers like Jerry Cohen, Sam Bowles, John Roemer, Pranab Bardhan, Jon Elster, Herb Gintis, and others who were undoubtedly 'affected' by Marx, but have made substantial contributions to, and interrogations of, our understanding of marginal effects, of the extended order, of self-ownership. It should not be embarrassing for them to say they've been influenced (positively/negatively) by Marx, they should just say it, and we can all move on.
When the taxation is done by duly elected representatives, it is a more bearable form of partial slavery, but still a partial slavery.
When the government uses the taxes to provide protection and to secure rights, then it is a necessary partial slavery, used to prevent some other force from imposing a worse form of slavery.
When a government is not representative, or when a government goes beyond its role in protecting and securing rights, the amount of partial slavery is increased, and the amount of freedom is decreased.
The United States already has too high a degree of partial slavery, and is proposing to increase that amount - to be like other nations. I hope we can reverse this trend, and advance toward more freedom.
Consider the prinicple: slavery is when a powerful entity forces a weaker entity to spend his or her time doing the bidding of the more powerful entity. In taxation, a powerful government forces a weak citizen to spend a portion of his or her time generating revenue for that government.
When this revenue is used to protect that citizen and secure his or her rights, such a practice is justifiable - to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.
When this revenue is used for other activities, however, the use of governmental power is very, very questionable. You might possibly have to pick some cotton to satisfy the IRS.
In its pure form, capitalism is two people coming to a voluntary agreement on the exchange of goods and services. They set the price, or the wage, or the barter. Replicate this billions of times, and you have the system - "voluntary" is the key word.
In its pure form, communism is two people looking to a central authority to tell them the terms and conditions for the exchange of goods and services. That central authority holds the power to set prices and wages, and to thus direct how people spend their time - another form of slavery.
Communism and slavery have a lot "in common". Marx did not, of course, mention this. The similarity doesn't lend itself to sparkling prose.
Check out "Slavery and Social Death" by Orlando Patterson.
That is wage slavery 101.
Syndicalism is two people coming together and saying "we are both required to work this machine and our work is required to create a thing of value so let's profit from the sale of it's value equally."
That's justice 101.
Really? That's rather like saying Ted Kaczinski (the Unabomber) was less of a terrorist than Tim McVeigh. It's morally untenable to say "well, the Unabomber is more acceptable because he only killed a handful of professors, whilc McVeigh blew up a building full of people."
And you wonder why Objectivism gets a bad name...it's stuff like this, Will. Cold, unfeeling, heartless.
that might make an apt description for herpes as well.
I do not call Stalin a Marxist. He was an authoritarian dictator who ruled by terror and fear, not according to a theory of economic equalization. Marxism was a facade, a convenient cover story to conceal his true intentions. Marx never advocated mass murder in order to accomplish his utopia; there is such a thing as a bloodless revolution. The atrocities were committed by power-mad individuals with no higher purpose than to preserve and extend their own power, just as has always been done throughout history.
Really now, you are equally as liable as every Objectivist in the death of every person whom you did not personally help.
And hey, it's not like Marx ever advocated dictatorship or ever said that the communist utopia can and should be accomplished by force in certain circumstances (can you imagine how embarrassing it'd be either of those were true?). But I think you're a little unfair to Stalin. He actually accomplished quite a bit of economic equalization -- you know, kill the rich people, destroy the sources of wealth, make everyone equally poor. What's not to love?
Personally, I find it odd that its so much more acceptable to be a communist than a nazi. Some nazis these days say, no we're not that kind of nazi, we're third-positionist Strasserites, but nobody's buying. I don't even think that kind of disavowal is necessary for communists. Zizek still calls himself a Stalinist, right?
Not that the doctrine is all that impressive: Marx's argument for the labour theory of value is fairly awful and the theory demonstrably false.
The best political astrology from the Fifth International article:
"I was pleased to hear the BBC utter the "C-word," [communism] but what I really wanted to know was whether intellectuals and academics could bring themselves, finally, again, to use the word confidently, that is, with insistence and without apology."
Yes, don't be afraid dear academics. No, remember G.A. Cohen! Yes, he of All Souls, the man who could wear a Stalin mask during office hours to try to get you to laugh at your insistence on historical fact. Never mind that, back to the Fifth International. Tell us about those brave Marxists:
"The speakers routinely erred on the side of contrition and caution. When Marx was cited, which was often, it was apologetically, rounded off with disavowals of dogmatism."
Oh, it's too bad they didn't have the courage, the moxie to unfurl the banner of the C-bomb. Those academic cowards! Communism, you hear me? Communism! Communism, communism!
For one man to believe that he found out exactly how the world works and that everyone else (theologians, philosophers, scientist, etc) was mistaken has to be close to the definition of insanity.
You're absolutely right about that and I think we can safely say that Marx was, in certain respects, not sane; further, I think we can draw the same conclusion regarding his supporters.
And it might interest you to know that I am so persuaded because I realize that it is myself (and not Marx or his supporters) who understands exactly how the world works (and that everyone else is mistaken). And, until now, I was "one up" on Marx in that, at least I didn't let everyone in on just how smart I am--nor will I in the future
(I'll just deny it, despite this piece of damning evidence. It works!--at least sometimes.)
Come on, William, that's a cheap shot. Anyway, I don't think you will ever be able to overcome the problem of reverse causality on the Marxism - Totalitarian death squad linkage. Marxists aren't going to change their minds because of the Soviet Union any more than you are going to believe that the current recession debunks libertarianism.
I think you've written before, and I agree, that the best argument against Marxism is that it's just a really bad way to think about how the world works. Bad in that it claims this thing, "class struggle," is really important when the concept of "class" ought to play almost no role in one's thinking about a modern economy. The right framework puts specialization, gains from trade, marginal thinking, and spontaneous order at the center, and understands class in terms of transactions costs and human capital (and even then, you can get pretty far without mentioning it). Another way I might say it is that cooperation, not conflict, is what makes the modern world, and Marxists don't understand that.
Why in the world would the failure of a central bank to keep a bubble that it caused from deflating reflect poorly on libertarianism? The Federal Reserve is not a free-market institution.
-jcr
Actually, Marxism, like Paul's doctrines that we call 'Christianity', can be assessed in different ways.
Use is not an unfair criterion for any doctrine that actively claims to have answers to normative questions about how humans _should_ live. Marx and Christianity both make such claims, so it's fair to ask how that worked out -- and no cheating about how there has never been a 'really' Christian or Marxist state, or how the bad stuff was just 'individual weakness' or 'bad apples', either.
Truth is a rather more difficult claim for metaphysical doctrines, though. Neither the Trinity nor the effect of class struggle in history are subject to empirical testing, since neither hypothesis is falsifiable. Though anti-Marxist economists have done their best, the abstraction of the category 'class' will always prevent a final refutation, just as the abstraction of say, the Holy Ghost, doesn't leave much room for falsification.
Internal coherence is a tempting criterion for evaluating metaphysical theories, but the history of both Christianity and Marxism show it to be elusive: the learned doctors of theology in both schools have found endless grounds for debate, with the intenstity of their arguments, as usual, inversely proportional to the significance of their disagreements. Moreover, madness is just as likely to be internally coherent as sanity, or more so, as the historical application of grand theories abundantly illustrates.
In short, when it comes to metaphysical theories, we're stuck with the fact that they will remain beyond rational evaluation. We can either accept that fact and the associated humility it involves, and cautiously observe how the world seems to work on the basis of testable hypotheses (making the most modest metaphysical assumptions possible) about the sort of things that are testable, and defensible induction and cautious narrative synthesis about things where hypotheses are not generally testable -- or we can give up and throw ourselves into the arms of faith.
And aside from the metaphysics, both Christianity and Marxism are doctrines whose intellectual history is fascinating and revealing about how humans make and use ideas -- and well worth studying, though not adopting, for that reason.
The coalescing fo p0ower to Rome in the early church only shows, again, how corrupt our nature is.
I suppose I could have made the point better. What I was trying to say is that the core of Christianity, that man is flawed, is reflected in reality. We see it everyday in the world around us. Marx's ideas are not reflected in reality. As you pointed out, Marx's ideas have been proven wrong over and over.
The concept that man is corrupt is clearly a Judeo-Christian idea -- not a Marxist one. I am not saying that the Founders were all Christians. I am saying they bought into the Christian principle that mankind is corrupt. They way our government was put together was to limit corrupt men oppressing the people. Marxism is the opposite. It trusts that man can perfect themselves to the point of creating a perfect society.
The results speak for themselves. So far show that Christianity head and shoulders above the rest. The United States still enjoys the most freedoms and the most religious tolerance of any nation in the world.
As far as whether Christianity is true: Assuming there is a God and God is just, then we are in big trouble on judgment day. We all have lied, coveted, taken something that doesn't belong to us (value doesn't matter), lusted, and hated. Christianity is true because if we are judged, we come up short. For God to be just *and* kind at the same time, we need someone to pay the fine that we could never pay. That fine-payer is Jesus.
So we can ignore whatever extra metaphysical nitpicking there is about specific Christian beliefs because none of the major propositions fundamental to the religion are justifiable.
What can we say about Marxism? For one, the labor theory of value seems hopeless, so that's a huge nail in its coffin. Second, the current state of capitalistic societies doesn't seem to be leading to a rejection of private property in the near or distant future. A major prediction of Marxism seems to be false. Finally, theories of history in general are quite difficult to evaluate since we can't run controlled experiments on the past. This gives us a prima facie reason not to accept any theory of history, and since we already have points against Marxism, we can safely reject it.
So there are good reasons to reject both based on non-metaphysical criterion. And neither of these make any reference to the use of the idea by adherents. Mentioning such use would not strengthen the case against either doctrine.
Marxism makes more easily falsifiable claims. And falsified they are. Class never existed in the forms observed by Marx until shortly before his time, his historical observations were akin to finding historical parallels with the writings of Nostradamus, his labor theory of value is mathematically disprovable, his predictions (macroeconomic, microeconomic, and political) have been false, and just to pile on as Will did, its adherents have killed orders of magnitude more people than Christianity in less than a tenth of the latter's existence.
The Human Dialectic of Absolute Premises: Christianity and Marxism
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=b...
Conservatives clearly oppose radical change in every way. What was more radical then our own Revolution against the King of England? I would question on whose side the conservative would have taken?
An Open society is always open to improvement because knowledge is never completed but always ongoing. The scientific philosopher Karl Popper said; “I hold that orthodoxy is the death of knowledge, since the growth of knowledge depends entirely on the existence of disagreement.” A Closed society claims to certain knowledge and ultimate truth leading to the attempted imposition of one version of reality. Such a society is closed to freedom of thought. In contrast, in an open society each citizen needs to engage in critical thinking, which requires freedom of thought and expression and the cultural and legal institutions that can facilitate this. Democracies are examples of the "open society", whereas totalitarian dictatorships, theocracy, and autocratic monarchies are examples of the "closed society".
A half-wit like Mark Levin states that "our principles are tried and true. They've been tried for centuries". Yet again, Democracy as we know it only began at the time of the ratification of the constitution. So what philosophy is he talking about that preceded democracy? Certainly it wasn't something that our founders sought to replicate. Levin hits the main problem with conservatism. He states that we can't salute a philosophy that is antithetical to our history (that's a subjective view that can't be falsified and could be debated forever) or to our BELIEF SYSTEM. And that is where the problem lies. Conservatism is by Levin's own admission, a belief system. But being so it can never demonstrate itself as being true. It's an ideology actually formalized by Russell Kirk who provided 6 canons that conservatives follow. Canons? How....ecclesiastical of him. Conservatism today has taken on the mantle of a religious cult. Is it possible that an ideology created by fallable men, could be wrong? How can such an idea not contain the possibility of error?
Levin describes the president for example in a negative light as an ideologue. Yet he writes a book and calls it the manifesto for conservatism? How much more ideological can you get? How is that not the work of an committed ideologue. The very thing he accuses the president of being?
From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives always holding onto the institutions that provide them with their comfort at the expense of those beneath them.
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. The ideologue, Mark Levin has no interest in democracy. His only interest is a return to an aristocratic society of Lords and serfs.
I like this test. If you find that decisive, should one be more embarrassed at being influenced by Karl Marx or Jesus Christ? You can be damn sure devotees of the latter have more blood on their hands.
http://bit.ly/atheism-murder
The essay you link to makes a false comparison. It compares the murders done specifically in the name of religion with the murders that happened under odious regimes led by atheists.
According to BIT's standard, you would have to attribute virtually every war/political/bad governance death by any Christian-led nation of the last 2000 years as "death by Christianity". I'm sure that would generate quite an impressive number as well.
The point is that Marx's ideas concentrate power centrally, leading to tyrannies. The causation is in the demand that all power be placed in the hands of a few in "stewardship" for the people. Once has happened tynary must be the outcome.
Anyone can come up with a lovely theory, if it can't be applied without leading to mass murder then what is the point?
Actually, Marx's ideas are agnostic as to the concentration of power, and in a certain light are rather hostile to it. Lenin's revision of the Marxist canon is another matter. The problem with Marx (well, one of the major ones, anyway) is that he was a terrible psychologist/sociologist: he failed to account for the iron law of oligarchy (though said law had not yet been formulated, so blaming Marx for failing to do so is a little unfair, but only a little). Ayn Rand, on the other hand, was just an idiot. Charismatic, but deeply, deeply stupid. A much better question is Marx or Hayek. Both did great work in economics, though Hayek's has proven substantially correct where Marx's has, well, not. Both wrote embarrassingly terrible 'public' tracts (Road to Serfdom and the Manifesto respectively). Both had their blind spots (if you don't think there's a class war going on, you haven't been paying attention to the capture of the government by the finance 'industry' over the last 15-20 years). Both should be part of the intellectual baggage of any educated person interested in politics and/or socio-economics. Rand doesn't even rate.
Should we take into account that the so-called Christian examples (the crusades, Salem witch trials) took place prior to 1900, most in a time when everyone was pretty much killing everyone else? Where as Marxists were killing people by the million when huge swaths of the world were fairly calm.
And, this is nit-picky, but I highly doubt the death toll could really be higher. WAY lowballing the death count of the Holodomor ALONE brings us to 2M for Marx. Nearly 400 years of the Spanish Inquisition and the count is in the hundreds of thousands.
Finally, even if the death toll were the same or even close, remember that Marx was born less than 200 years ago. Christianity has has ten times as long to really rack up the numbers and from what I can tell it isn't even close.
Moreover, "everyone was pretty much killing everyone else"seems to be, sadly, a constant in human history (with local increases and decreases, to be sure). Rates of both local/internal and large-scale/intercommunity violence do vary a lot, but I can't see there being much of a long-term trend, just a lot of noise. That doesn't mean we shouldn't attend carefully to palces and times when such violence was lower, and when it was higher -- maybe we can figure out the conditions that make 'low' more likely! -- but I don't think your suggestion works for distinguishing Christianity from Marxism.
My point was when the Crusades or the Inquisition or many of these famous examples of Christian violence were happening the perpetrators were not acting outside of world-wide social norms. Examples of large scale war, torture and political violence exist in every culture and religion from before and after Christianity. These people happen to be (nominally) Christian, but they were not acting significantly different than contemporary non-Christians in any way I can tell.
The great and small killers of Marx, however, were acting significantly different than contemporary non-Marxists. Who else was holding a cultural revolution at the same time as Mao? What non-Marxist nation was rounding up intellectuals for slaughter during Pol Pots reign.
Now, one could of course make the point that these people are not truly Marxist, but then I would be forced to contend that the religious killers were not truly Christians.
Sorry to belabor this, it is just that I have heard these twin arguments of "Marxism is wonderful, in theory" and "[insert religion X] is responsible for more deaths than Communism" so many times and they both just seems so redonkulous when thought about seriously.
10% of NHS patients admitted to hospital “suffer some form of harm”
A committee of MPs has called for urgent action on patient safety in the NHS. The Health Committee said services “are not safe enough yet.” Chairman of the Committee, Kevin Barron MP, said:
"Reviews of patients’ case notes indicates that in the NHS and in other healthcare systems as many as 10% of patients admitted to hospital suffer some form of harm, much of which is avoidable.
[Citation Needed]
This claim was never made.
On the other hand, Rand would have championed the rise of neoliberalism
A) Who cares.
B) If she would have preferred neo-liberalism to Marxism that would have made her "correct". Ditto for Karl.
18,000 people die in each year from lack of health insurance.
The spurious nature of this claim aside, you are right about one thing, societies dealing with abject poverty usually are not too concerned with wonky details about the provision of insurance.
"Lack of health insurance" as "cause of death?" C'mon, man wha'd'areye, nuts hangin' out the window?
Why would one judge an intellectual based on the actions of her 'devotees'?
Historically, many more people have identified as Marxists than as 'Randites'. So--even if the underlying attribute were agreed to be a rational basis upon which to rank quality--your claim would have the persuasiveness of 'there are fewer people suffering from cancer in North Dakota than in Japan.'
Search for books, keywords "Karl Marx" on amazon.com: 49307 results
Search for books, keywords "Ayn Rand" on amazon.de: 120 results.
"Ayn Rand" on Amazon.com: 6,066 results
It would be nice if someone who obviously dislikes Rand and her ideas could say something substantial about her - showing some passing familiarity with her work, since understanding would be far too much to ask - rather than simply saying she was "deeply stupid", a "hack", "crude", or any of the other standard dismissive insults.
It's enough to convince me that the people who express the deepest dislike for her are the ones whose objection rests on a refusal to engage their intellect, lest they find they can't answer her.
"... but adults realize that Rand wrote crude fantasies that are simply not applicable to real life."
"Adults" and "I" are not interchangeable, sad sack.
So you've read it in the original German? (sorry, couldn't resist)
I find Marx's view that society is a dichotomous struggle between two "classes" to be as grossly simplistic as Rand's struggle between the producers and looters, or whatever she called them. Even if you believe that Marx was a great philosopher and Rand was a hack, in light of the last century how can you possibly defend the ideas of the former over the latter?
I think both are over rated. Sweeping narrative history is simplistic and avoids true / deep study of various cultures. It's infected some modern social sciences (such as sociology) to the point of making them useless (including the 'education' and degree associated with it). They're just all biased opinions thrown out as something more than that....
I would love to hear what Robin Hanson would have to say.
Of course, it is probably one of the great failures of the 20th century that it took a few million corpses to agree on the first, and then we couldn't even decide on the second, even after a few million more bodies.
It strikes me that this is a Marxist-influenced perception!
1) Pinochet's Chile: 2,279
2) Lancet's account of excess death's in Iraq due to invasion (equating Rand's philosophy with the neo-liberal ideals ostensibly underpinning the invasion): 654,965
3) Plus however many eventually die 'seasteading.'
Marx thought that as capitalism had replaced feudalism with a new mode of production, which was more productive and efficient, the same thing would happen to produce a replacement for capitalism. In the end, as the workers were impoverished (when capitalists drove down wages) and the number of capitalists dwindled (as competition was replaced by larger and larger monopolies), the capitalists would end up with no one to sell their goods to and nothing to do with the capital derived from their profits. This would produce increasingly severe credit and banking crises, until the proletariat would easily tip over the whole rotten structure and replace it with a classless society.
Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. [Capital, Vol. I, p.837, Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, 1906, translation by Edward Aveling, quoted by Thomas Sowell, On Classical Economics, Yale, 2006, p.170]
Already in this we find the essence of the fallacy of Marxist economics. Marx believes that as the dialectic of history evolves new modes of production, greater productivity and greater wealth will be created, ultimately eliminating the need for alienated and exploited labor. However, there is not a variable in Marxist value theory to account for greater productivity. If labor (or "socialy necessary" labor) creates value, then a greater quantity of labor will create greater value, but only in quantity, not in kind. More labor for pyramid building just builds more pyramids. Thus, some other variable is involved besides labor. In fact, that is capital. Labor intensive production gives way to capital intensive production, and greater capital means great productivity, not just in quantity, but in kind. But Marx does not believe that capital exists, which is why capitalism is called "capitalism." This means that Marxism cannot explain increased productivity. And then Marxism also contains another trend disparaging to productivity as such. Jack London, less well remembered now as a communist than as an author, said that a worker who is more productive than others "is already a scab," i.e. a strike breaker. Thus, the view seems to be than increases in producitivity are part of the exploitation of labor. (from friesian.com)
1) It's intellectually lazy to oppose Ayn Rand to Karl Marx as though those two are the poles of a single one-dimensional spectrum. The only reason Marx is still used in opposition to capitalism is because socialism doesn't have a widely-recognized poster-boy.
2) A lot of annoying self-described "Marxists" tend to use ridiculous jargon in everyday discussion. Yes, its dumb, and these people probably also think that "Stalin didn't practice REAL communism."
3) Marxist criticism (to be distinguished from Marxists) is alive and well and is an interesting lens through which to view your capitalist utopias. It's less a political view than a sociological or cultural one.
4) Marx made some devastating errors, but he was nevertheless a brilliant man with ideas that revolutionized thought. This is why he is widely studied, not because of communism. Is it possible a person can have some good ideas and some bad ideas, or does a bad idea cancel out all the good ones? In your case, an idea you happen to disagree with cancels out everything else. That's what makes people narrow.
Above all, Marxism nowadays is method of criticism. Whether a method of criticism is "true" or not is debatable. Is the scientific method 'true'? At best, Marxism is outdated. Plato is also outdated, and his 'Republic' would be frowned upon and probably characterized as totalitarianism, by today's standards, but we still find his work useful and insightful.
I think you're looking to argue with someone who will defend Communism, which I can't do. I will defend socialism-lite (capitalism tempered by government regulation) against libertarianism, but don't pretend Obama's socialism-lite, or socialism in general, has anything whatsoever to do with communism, Marx or Marxism. It doesn't.
I recommend reading the first volume of Das Kapital if you want to get a real sense of Marx's ideas, and to what sort of culture he was applying these ideas to.
Communism has no market. Socialism has an active market. Compare, say, Finland, and the old Soviet or communist-Asia countries. What similarities do you see? They're completely, totally different. No comparison.
As I said, you guys are intellectually lazy. The real world isn't either/or, however neat it looks on paper.
This is the single worst point I've ever seen you make on this blog, Will--a rare blunder. I agree 100% that cleaving to Marxism ought to be embarrassing, but there are way better ways to judge a thinker than by looking at who flies the same banner. If you thought (rightly) it was unfair to judge Megan's politics by her parents, then I'd think you could see the hysteria of judging a thinker by their intellectual siblings. If someone killed a union leader and claimed to be a devotee of Hayek or Friedman, would that have *any* standing at all on how respectable it is to be a libertarian?
Those with power seek to expand or extend their power at the expense of those without power.
A simple reality. We see it every day with politicians and captains of industry, with influence peddling, with biased media, and taxes wages and war.
Rand has not been very influential in the realm of politics, philosophy, or cultural analysis. You don't see Libertarian internationals. There hasn't been any dictator who tried to use Rand as ideological cover (Marxism was nowhere as deadly as Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism by the way).
Marx wasn't completely wrong and he certainly was revolutionary (as in shockingly original) in his thinking. He's the intellectual godfather of modern socialism. Ayn Rand was just a derivative Nietzschean Lockean not widely known outside of certain political circles.
The most powerful way to argue the affirmative is to compare the number of human beings murdered by the devotees of each."
Here is a good debate proposition: It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ashlee Simpson than Ayn Rand
The most powerful way to argue the affirmative is to compare the number of human beings murdered by the devotees of each.
Clearly Ashlee Simpson comes out on the top in this debate
Here is a good debate proposition: It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Michael Vick than Ayn Rand
The most powerful way to argue the affirmative is to compare the number of human beings murdered by the devotees of each.
Michael Vick wins this one.
Wait a second...this is a really stupid debate...
Confirmation bias is just that easy and natural for all of us.
Points to William, Gavin Sullivan, Michael Drake, dfstearns, Groucho Engels, and fatsteve for calling out this blunder.