Marxism

[DrZoidberg]

Another fun thing on Marx is that his theories are heavily influenced by Proudhon, an anarchist. Ie, if everyone is free to do whatever they want, they will all magically have the values I want and do the things I want. He became rudely aware of this flaw in his ideas when he became one of the founding fathers of the first socialist international, and the socialists had to agree on policy. To nobody's surprise there was instantly infighting and sectarian splits. Marx was domineering and anoying. Undoubtedly a genius. But not much of a politician. Useless at building a shared platform or consensus. A position in the market Marx had completely written out of Das Kapital, as unnessary parasites.

Considering that Marx had studied the French Revolution considerably, this is pretty remarkable. Since what happened in the First International is a copy of what happened in the National Convention.

 

[No Robots]

Another fun thing on Marx is that his theories are heavily influenced by Proudhon, an anarchist. Ie, if everyone is free to do whatever they want, they will all magically have the values I want and do the things I want. He became rudely aware of this flaw in his ideas when he became one of the founding fathers of the first socialist international, and the socialists had to agree on policy. To nobody's surprise there was instantly infighting and sectarian splits. Marx was domineering and anoying. Undoubtedly a genius. But not much of a politician. Useless at building a shared platform or consensus. A position in the market Marx had completely written out of Das Kapital, as unnessary parasites.

Considering that Marx had studied the French Revolution considerably, this is pretty remarkable. Since what happened in the First International is a copy of what happened in the National Convention.

Very nice. I don't understand this: "A position in the market Marx had completely written out of Das Kapital, as unnessary parasites."

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In 1948, the prevailing view of science was that very soon every major scientific discovery would have been done and the last technological innovation would have come. That Marx takes in as a premise. The rest of his theories are based on this axiom. And that makes his theories look dumb today. We often forget that Marx uniquely predicted the development of Europe, economically and socially, between 1850 to 1880 with astounding accuracy. He made his ages best analysis of social developments. That's what gave him the cache and allowed him to be as influencial as he was.

No. There's still the fact that he said that communism had to wait until a country had industrialized. Thus it's fundamentally based on stealing. Which implies that it's not capable of creating large things. In the real world factories are not static things even if there is no scientific progress. Things happen. My former employer was almost destroyed in a fire. Russia is fairly safe vs natural disasters but even then had the Tunguska object fallen 7 hours earlier the world would be a different place.

Just because he did accurately describe a lot of reality doesn't make his solutions worth anything.

2) Russian communism. When Lenin took power, he had a lot of his own ideas on what Marx surely must have meant. So he massaged Marx to fit the needs of the Russian communist party. Ie, to keep them in power and to help them concentrate power. He then spent considerable influence in spreading Russian communist ideas around the world, changing what Marxism means.

Today, when people have a go at communism they sound like atheists making fun at fundie Christians because they've found a flaw in the Bible. Marx's theories have plenty of flaws. But we don't judge any of the other philosophers on not being perfect. We think Aristotelian theories on science retarded. That doesn't mean we stop using Aristotelian logic. It's like people are so desperate to find flaws in Marx they forget the good stuff. And there's lots of it.

It's not that they've found one flaw. Rather, reality has shown it to be a disaster. Communism has been a major failure in every situation larger than where people know everyone. It's also an unstable situation if there is any change.

I also think that if the world runs out of scientific discoveries and technological innovation the idea that corporations will start gobbling eachother up until there's only one left, is more than just likely. We have lots of real life examples of exactly this happening in novel markets becoming mature markets. What saves humanity is technological innovation. But without that I think Marx will be correct. And when there's only one major corporation in the world, the workers rising up to sieze the means of production seems plausible.

Disagree--we can save ourselves with anti-trust laws.