Or even ex-marxists that went through a phase, or someone that studied it critically in depth?
I was quite shocked to run into a genuine true believer Marxist in the wild recently, as far as I can tell he seems to be one of the Fourth International / Everything after Trotsky wasn’t communism ones (eg no true scotsman types). Probably foolishly I challenged him expecting to get a rational explanation of his beliefs, but instead just got “HAHAHA you’re too ignorant to understand” followed by intellectual blather about marxist theorists that were not relevant to the questions I was asking, followed by blocking me. BTW this guy is in their 40’s not an edgy 19 year old.
So obviously I think the idea that you can’t criticise marxism if you haven’t read the entirety of Das Kapital and 2000 other pages of commentary is complete bollocks. My common sense arguments against Marxism are these:
• Transitioning to a communist society inevitably concentrates power in a few people without sufficient checks and balances, and inevitably due to human nature leads to an autocracy or dictatorship which is communist in name only ( or makes some lip service to improving the workers lives while really saving all the good stuff for the party elite)
• Empirically thats obvious from looking at 20th Century history, no nation managed to stay in this mythical pure communist state for more then five years, every single example turned into a dictatorship in which death camps and gulags were common rather than a rare exception.
• More empirical evidence: Every single communist state has had a black market selling imported or rare goods for hard foreign currency. If the state was meeting the needs of the people there would be no demand for the services of a black market.
• Central planning has failed every single time it’s been tried, hundreds of millions of selfish individuals making decisions to maximise their own benefit is more efficient at allocating resources than a central committee because economic systems are complex, chaotic and emergent so they can never be reliably controlled by conscious planning of an entity. Possibly strong AI might change this in the future but thats not the case now and thats not the argument I’ve heard true believers say anyway.
• Even if communism could be achieved without the system getting corrupted into a dictatorship it’s a flawed system that would improve the lives of workers less than capitalism tempered with democratic socialism. Inefficiencies of central planning can never be solved and can never compete with the efficiencies of a market economy. Furthermore due to human nature, workers will not work to their capacity based only on abstract ideals, and neither will managers, instead resorting to petty theft and corruption to enhance their lifestyles.
• Loss of profit motive for entrepreneurs / scientists is a massive blow to society, while the soviet union did achieve great advances in Aerospace and some fields of medicine they essentially made very little advances in integrated circuits compared to the western free markets. By the 1970’s the Soviet Union was so far behind in computer / IC design that catching up was not feasible. The improved automation that this allows then lead the capitalist nations to leap further ahead in productivity and living standards even for factory workers.
See, I bet they do have theoretical answers to the above and I’m genuinely interested in knowing what they are, but never found an actual Marxist willing to argue the above rather than just dismissing them as “trivial ignorant concerns”.
Now Democratic european style socialism with universal health care, good regulation of banks and subsidised education, I’m in favour of all those things which puts me pretty far left in most people’s books and capitalism is definitely flawed, but as they say its the worst possible system apart from all the other ones (which are worse).
Any one on here want to fly the red banner and defend Marxism?