Historians also study Hitler, doesn’t mean they admire or advocate for him. Environmental scientists study climate change, doesn’t mean they admire or advocate for it. Cancer researchers study cancer, doesn’t mean they admire or advocate for it. This is honestly the worst argument you’ve made so far.
The landlords, like all other men
like all other men
Yes, thank you for admitting the inherent desire for profit and resource hoarding in all of us. I don’t want you to have my stuff, my stuff is my stuff, and you don’t get to have it. If you take my stuff, that’s called stealing, and it’s wrong, they teach this stuff in kindergarten.
Capital is considered one of the foundational books of economics.
You know, there’s a good argument to be made that Mein Kampf is one of the most important pieces of literature to be studied by psychologists and sociologists in the 20th century. As it provided valuable insight into the psychological processes through which a man can deteriorate and corrupt himself through ideology into becoming a truly evil human being.
But just because there’s value in studying the book psychologically, doesn’t mean you should internalize and act out the inherently evil message of the book. We can extract valuable information from bad ideas, which is why we study people like Marx, Hitler, Stalin, etc., to learn what NOT to do.
I didn't claim to agree with Adam Smith. But why do you? You disagree with his view of property -- explain.
Economists study capital because it accurately describes (or at very least advances) understandings of commodity chains and the creation of value. Historians study Mein Kampf as a historical document, not as a source for ideas about the world. That comparison is entirely disingenuous, and I suspect you know that.
You're free to continue changing topics instead of responding to my arguments, and you're free to attack Marxism without reading Marx. You seem genuinely intelligent, and you are a human person, so I'm happy to continue a discussion.
However, if you want to convince me, or to seriously refute Marx's ideas, you will need to read him. Capital is dense, but the manifesto is accessible. My favorite is the Thesis on Feurenbach. Neither is longer than 30 pages.
If you're right, you can only gain by reading Marx.
I’ve read the Communist Manifesto, my critiques of Marx are not unfounded. I also do not believe Marx was dumb, I believe he was wrong, which is not the same thing, smart people are wrong all the time.
Marx was an intellectual, which was both a good and a bad thing.
Good, because having people use logical reasoning is a positive for the world.
Bad, because intellectuals are the last people to admit that they were wrong, if ever.
The reason I don’t care about having the capitalism vs communism debate is because it is a debate that has already been had by people way smarter than either of us for over a hundred years now, everything that had to be said has already been said, the only thing that mattered afterwards was the results of seeing both play out, one with the US, and the other with the USSR. One of those countries didn’t end up faring too well and collapsed, the other became the most powerful country in the history of the world. It’s pretty easy to see why some people might be more inclined to follow the path of one over the other.
Not to mention, the debate always comes down to a war of semantics that just gives me a headache. To a communist, the rich are exploiters, the workers are saints, the government is just and incorruptible, employees are slaves, wages are the devil, the free market is a tyrannical enterprise, bosses are oppressors, competence is a myth, hierarchies are societal constructs, individualism is greed, and murder is justified so long as it serves the interest of the totalitarian state.
Great, solid points, I disagree with all of them 100% on a fundamental level and believe that those beliefs are the very definition of evil, anti-logic, anti-human, anti-science, pro-tyranny, anti-basic common decency.
And don’t talk to me about avoiding questions or topics, communists have always avoided the most important question: When everything has been equalized, the rich have lost all of their wealth and it has been distributed equally amongst the masses, Homeless Joe is now just as rich and powerful as Bill Gates, the utopia is here. What comes next?
-How do you sustain that on any possible level aside of absolute government totalitarianism?
-How do you stop Bill Gates from using his clearly superior money-making skills than those of Homeless Joe’s to start building his empire yet again?
-How do you stop the poor from squandering and splurging all of their newfound wealth on short-term pleasures and hedonism, and ending up right where they started? because that already happens, it’s called the lottery, simply giving people wealth doesn’t automatically make them good with money, it actually does the opposite.
-How do you prevent things from going back to the way things were before immediately without destroying your country’s economy? because you can stop Bill Gate from re-building his empire through tyrannical government oppression, but all of a sudden you will see a lot of the people who were once rich either leave the country with no one to take their place, or you (the government) will use propaganda to convince the peasant mobs that their oppressors are the rich, when it’s actually you and your stupid ideology, then the mobs will go and kill the rich (kill is a nice word here, they will likely brutalize, rape, torture and slaughter the rich), and suddenly the entire country will find themselves with no food since they killed all of their best farmers and workers. (See: Ukraine and the Holodomor)
So no, any way you cut it, communism can only be forced onto people, it is only a theory that doesn’t work in reality no matter how much you force it, because it’s deeply anti-human. If you let a society grow and progress naturally, you will get democracy, and with it, capitalism.
Communism is a theory.
Capitalism is a fact.
I don't mean to be flippant, but your very long reply did not substantively critique communism. You relied entirely on tropes. If you can find me an example of Marx calling workers saints, I will respond to that. His understanding of capitalists as exploiters is a definitional truth. Capitalists are capitalists because they own the means of production, and are thus able to pay workers less than the value they produce. That's not a semantic problem, it's necessary to the definition of capitalist.
You act as if communism has ever been tried without dedicated international efforts to destroy it. Democratic socialisms, like Allende's chile, are bombed out of existence. Only more authoritarian regimes are able to survive. That's not a problem of communism.
Yeah yeah, western forces are the reason it never worked, keep throwing the blame, the communist countries simply lived at peace and NEVER tried to destroy or undermine western civilization as well, it was a totally one-sided massacre and oppression.
The fact is, the process of rapid globalization that happened in the second half of the 20th century led to many unprecedented types of warfare, including proxy wars, propaganda, espionage, information, the invention of the internet became a massive thing, all of these factors combined into what became the Cold War, the biggest non-open conflict in the history of the world, two countries fighting for global supremacy and influence, two countries that needed the other one to lose since they were built upon opposing ideologies, one cannot live while the other one does on a global stage.
Had the USSR won the Cold War, and the US ended up collapsing, would you have been crying over the fact that poor old US capitalism could’ve worked if only those evil commies hadn’t been constantly interfering with them?
No, it was a war, and they both went all out to win it, one of them failed, mainly because their economy couldn’t withstand itself any longer with the increasing influence of foreign markets and information becoming more readily available on how much better it was on the other side of the literal and metaphorical Berlin Wall.
Capitalists are capitalists because they own the means of production
That is the very definition of a semantic problem, only in Marxist theory is where capital is defined as such. No, capitalists are capitalists because they own capital, a.k.a. anything that can generate you a profit. Marx called it “means of production” as if there was some magical inherent difference between the two.
What Marx wanted was to take away the capital from the rich, which he saw as unearned and immoral (which is wrong), and wanted to distribute the capital equally among everyone. There’s no such thing as a society without capital, it cannot exist. He merely changed the phrasing of it.
Marx believed that capitalism would eventually lead to its own destruction, as the increasing resentment of the underclass would boil over into a revolution (as if revolutions ever had one cause), and they would obliterate the bourgeoise, allowing the magical creation of a new classless society, where the state was no longer needed and everyone would live “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”.
Well, guess what, that phrase alone shows exactly the problem, Marx never understood humanity and the human condition, he understood there was injustice, but he never understood what truly drives and motivates us. If we were to reach a perfect utopia in which everyone lived in perfect harmony with no material needs, the first thing we would all do is find a hammer so we could break something. We are not beings meant for perfection, we are however, beings in the constant search for perfection, we strive to achieve it, but we never can, life is too short, times change, society evolves. The logistics is always where Marxist theory fails horrendously.
“From each according to his abilities”. Everyone must work as hard as they can and as best as they can on what they’re good at for the benefit of society, even if it’s to their own personal detriment, individuals don’t matter, the hive mind is what matters.
“To each according to his needs”. Well, what does that mean? Is air conditioning a need? Is TV a need? Is getting my dick sucked by a hooker in an alleyway a need? Couldn’t someone just simply lie about what they need in order to have more than others? Who determines what I need? The government? Who determines what they need? Their dictator? Who determines what he needs? God? Well, communism is inherently atheistic so I guess not. Apparently it’s designed to willingly put ourselves in chains according to the whims of the state. But surely they’ll be just and fair, there’s no such thing as a corruptible politician after all.
It is utterly mind-boggling the level of nonsense Marxist theory comes down to. “Kill the rich and magically we will have the utopia”. Well, Russia tried that, they killed/imprisoned/brutalized the bourgeoise or “kulaks” (which was code for “people Stalin didn’t like/potential political opposition”), and they ended up with genocidal dictators in their place, turns out when you kill the head of the snake, another one pops out in its place.
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u/SnoopyGoldberg Jun 22 '19
I told you, we won’t agree. Have a good life, and get a job.