While I can understand a dislike for Marxism, and certainly don’t advocate the system, the idea that intelligent people can’t advocate in the “real world” is ludicrous. It can happen, it does happen, and it likely will happen, because the basic ideas behind it are interesting, even if they’re flawed as hell. By arguing this, you simply ensure that anybody who is intelligent and who isn’t an “ivory tower academic” will immediately ignore any valid criticisms that you might make. There’s a reason that ad hominems are bad debating strategy.
C’mon, folks. Even an incredibly cursory examination of the “communism” of Russia will show that it has little to do with what Marx and Engels (or, for that matter, social democrats) were talking about. The fault can be laid squarely at the feet of Lenin, Plekhanov, and ol’ Stalin himself, who executed most of the communists of the revolution and wrote his own interpretation that he whimsically called “marxism/leninism”.
OTOH, Sam makes a good point about the inherent inefficiencies of command economies, although I’m skeptical that it can be applied universally to every aspect of any economy. Even elementary game theory can show situations where markets can fail, and Keynes did a pretty good job of showing that governments do have a role to play on a macroeconomic scale. Indeed, it’s funny that he brought up health care, because that’s one of the situations where market mechanisms are not necessarily a cut-and-dried solution. The sick are rarely dispassionate consumers. (Canada seems to get along ok with socialized medical insurance, and I don’t see a clamour for privatized health care in Europe.)
Msmith: If you really want the Marxian reason for eliminating capitalism, it’s because capitalists (according to Marx) don’t produce anything. The workers produce value by labouring on nature or on commodities that other workers have shaped through their labour. (The pencil, as an example: labour is spent on mining the graphite, growing and cutting down the wood, making the tools to cut the wood and graphite with, making the yellow paint to paint it with, cutting up the wood and graphite, assembling them together, and painting it… or on the machines that do it). The workers actually produce something of real value. The what does the capitalist do? He takes it, hires somebody who sells it, pays the workers a wage sufficient to keep them going for another day, and pockets the difference… without actually having produced a damned thing. He didn’t produce any value (under the Marxian system) because all value comes from labour. He just ripped off the difference between what he paid and what he charged. Therein lies the benefit: under the communist system, nobody is ripping off anybody else’s labour.
I don’t advocate this particular form of economics, but if you’re going to criticize Marxian political economy and insult everyone who actually subscribes to it, you might at least take the time to find out what it is first.
