@HoraceGreenley No, you've been given a perfectly workable definition. You just hate it because it's not what your uncledaddy and your sistermama told you it was.
You write just like Marx. You go on and on and on and never make any sense. Marx was an idiot who never supported his family, through his domestic servant out of the house after he impregnated her and died a fool.
Sho me one example where the “state has withered away”
Marxist are dilettantes who can’t make it on their own and imagine a Marxist state where they become the commissar of poetry and interpretive dance and it falls to others to muck out the stables. 🤣
Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator on [i]Das Kapital[/i], received a first hand education in capitalism through his family's textile factories and based his philosophy on his observations of the Manchester slums and the wretchedness of the working class. His philosophy was rather more empirical and less utopian than say that of Adam Smith. Modern capitalism would be even more unbearable without his contribution to the labour movement.
@SunshineGirl Hmmmmm ... it's odd that so many people flocked from the farmlands to become part of this "wretchedness of the working class". It's so interesting that the capitalist societies are the ones illegal immigrants risk their lives trying to enter.
Why do so many flee socialist and marxist societies to become so "wretched"? I guess it will always be a great mystery. 🤔
@irishmolly72 They often had no choice. The Agrarian Revolution replaced jobs in rural areas with mechanisation. Increasing specialisation in secondary industries such as textile and leather manufacturing destroyed small scale cottage operations and concentrated jobs in urban areas.
The top five originating countries for 'irregular migration' (not even HM government is ridiculous enough to describe it as 'illegal') to the UK are Iraq, Iran, Eritrea, Syria and Afghanistan. Although some of their ruling parties may have left wing revolutionary heritage, the principal reasons for large scale migration are civil war, violence and intimidation, which in the case of at least four are the consequence of wider geopolitical events and external interference in domestic affairs.
@SunshineGirl [quote]The Agrarian Revolution replaced jobs in rural areas with mechanisation. Increasing specialisation in secondary industries such as textile and leather manufacturing destroyed small scale cottage operations and concentrated jobs in urban areas.[/quote]
This phenomenon of course brought much higher levels of wealth to the urban areas, or people wouldn't have migrated to there. No one had a gun to their heads. They were making rational decisions, and standards of living improved all around.
This is such an impressive post and the responses to it also prove the main premise correct,
It's to be expected that most people here haven't read Marx (I think Helen and Count are the exceptions) but the stock responses have been to ignore the arguments made about Marx's theories and lean back to the lazy strawman understandings.
Nothing in your post defended 'communist' Russia. Anyone whose ever read Marx knows that 99% of his work was an economic and historical analysis of capitalism, with the flaws and contradictions within it. True to form, people have said that 'Marxist economics' is a theory of how to make the state control people etc. If they don't have time to read the source material, they could have engaged with what you actually said, but then that would be harder.
You mentioned Rubin and Peterson and how they are grifters. Absolutely. They rely on the fact that their audience will never fact-check them or bother with the source material, which is why they think that Marxism and postmodernism are the same and that postmodernism is a conspiracy to divide people with identity politics. 🤣
It's telling people what they want to hear and selling people what they want to buy. It doesn't need to be true, it just needs to feel like it is. An actual postmodernist would say something about that!
One of the very natures of conservatism as a social movement is that it says that whatever we have now, or more specifically, whatever we're trying to move from, is human nature. They did it with monarchs too.
It's why conservatism isn't really an ideology, it's a social force. You can use different words to describe the actual current beliefs of conservatives in their various camps.
Actually Mussolini was a chieftain of the Italian Socialist party, before WW I. He wasn't really a Marxist though. The articles he wrote for the [i]Avanti[/i] (of which he was editor-in-chief!) are more inspired by Nietzsche's [i]Lebensphilosophie[/i] than Marxian analytical thinking. A bit like Jack London, in my opinion.
@Roundandroundwego "Communist fascist"??? Please stop with the buzzwords . Why do right wingers resort to ad hominem attacks when their ideologies are being challenged?
@Peaceandnamaste they're opposites. Nobody is a communist fascist. But we gotta accept that as Murkan talk for "don't negotiate, we kill whomever we like".
I’ll only say one thing: The standard of living in capitalist countries is FAR higher than in Communist countries. Even recently capitalist and formerly communist countries have benefitted greatly and grown greatly after going capitalist. Even China is communist in the spirit of its people, but its economy is very much capitalist.
The world would be a better place had Karl Marx not been born, tbh
@Gloomy Yep. When you compare countries at the same economic level a socialist system has been proven to provide a higher standard of living by all metrics.
That is why people arguing in favor of capitalism pull stunts like comparing the economy of the USA to Laos.
@Gloomy Other economic systems are worse at all these things. You focus on your perspective of the perceived shortcomings of capitalism because you live in that system.
Other places with other systems are far worse. You just don't perceive it because you don't live there.
@HoraceGreenley Not just mine they are observable. There are barely any systems outside of global capitalism these days and don't try to make the argument China is communist because it clearly isn't.
They know. They lie about what they understand. It's time to get a winning strategy and stop playing their game. You cannot wake a man who is only pretending to sleep.
@Caballero Thanks for the meme. I'll now change parties to republican and embrace predatory capitalism, but I'm confused...fascism is RW sooo... how does that work?
I would not want communism even if it were possible, and I also don’t think it is possible. I think it’s inherently utopian and I am opposed to utopian visions of society.
Marxism is an interesting theory about value and human motivation but I don’t ascribe to it.
@Human1000 I don’t think Communism will happen anytime in the near future either but Socialism is definitely a promising alternative when not done dogmaticly.
