In his constant defense of “communism”. I use the quote marks because the communism he defends is somehow both inspired by real-world Marxism and at the same time has nothing to do with what people inspired by Marxism actually did.
I should start a series of threads about the African slave trade. Meaning not what actually happened when Africans were carried across the Atlantic to the Western hemisphere, but the utopian version in which under the tutorage of benevolent Europeans a harmonious mutually beneficial society was created. You know, real slavery, not the corrupted version.
Isn’t this typical among Marx fans, at least at the internet message-board level? The theory is wondrous and perfect and nobody has ever put it into practice? It doesn’t even count if they tried and failed - nobody has ever put it into practice.
That statement that nobody has ever put true Marxist socioeconomic theory into practice–despite the supposed fantastical benefits it promises to deliver and the diverse array of attempted implementations–would seem to substantiate the practical unworkability of Marxism as a functioning system. And that the most workable and enduring forms have all evovled into some flavor of market-oriented quasi-liberal socialism (notwithstanding the Peoples Republic of China’s evolution into some monsterous hybrid of labor exploitation with rampant profiteering crossed with a nepotistic, autocratic, repressive government) argues for kind of democratic humanistic socialism as being the ultimate meeting ground for modern industrial and post-industrial nations.
In other words, stop just talking about making dinner, go back into the kitchen and start making sausage.
God, I hate Marxists. Yes, Marx and Engels had some good, if tedious, ideas, and I am glad that some of them have been used to improve the lives of many people, but it was far from a practical roadmap. But their fanboys? Oy gevalt! Stupid, obsessive, blind to reality, unaware of how the world of 1850 differs from today, and utterly impractical. They, like religious fanatics and libertarians, are convinced that there is a single solution to our woes. Marx, though, might have grudgingly (he did everything grudgingly, it seems) admitted that the labor and management system VW tried to bring to that plant in Tennessee was kinda cool.
OTOH, it was fun to go to Boy Scout meetings with a copy of The Communist Manifesto sticking out of my back pocket to get a rise out of our scoutmaster, a “legendary special agent” of the FBI. I was always a troll.
I’m a huge fan of Marx. Especially Night at the Opera. How he got in my pajamas I’ll never know!
Karl, the forgotten Marx brother, had a talent for carefully observing what was going on. He took Adam Smith’s criticisms of what could go wrong with capitalism and noted in great deal that these things indeed did happen and in detail how. His Rx for the solution was another disease that was worse.
Karl Marx fanboys are almost as bad as Ayn Rand fanboys. Both are worse than people who speak Klingon.
There are uncounted sociopolitical systems that are wondrous on paper, and would work perfectly in the real world as long as all those subject to it carefully read that paper and abide by all the written and unwritten rules.
Which is why our equally wondrous - if messy and occasionally blindly unfair - system persists, and displaces all such experiments: because it works with messy, smelly, unkind, conniving, self-centered, grasping real people in the mix and yet is better than nearly all of those polluting participants.
But yes, Cthulhu take all those who have read the dream books and can’t shut up about them until they’ve spent enough time in the real world to realize why they are dreams.
I thought this would be an expression of disbelief that someone could be a fan of Steely Dan, and was prepared to lend anecdotal support, having once known one.
That was an argument I tried on him once. I pointed out that billions of self-professed Marxists had tried to make a Marxist system work in the real world and, by SDF’s own declaration, had not achieved true Marxism. I said this was overwhelming evidence that Marxism couldn’t work in the real world. His response was that the theory was fine and could be put into effect and all people needed to do was try it. Which was a unconvincing rebuttal to my argument that several billion people had tried it and failed to produce the result SDF claimed was easy to produce.
That’s when I stopped arguing with Steely Dan Fan. From now on when I feel like arguing with some political theorists, I’m sticking with libertarians and objectivists.
We used to have a pretty hard core Marxist on here whose username I won’t mention who, when I asked “well, okay, so what if real life evidence proves Marx was wrong?” came right out and said Marx was infallible. Not just right, not accurate; perfect. Infallible. Marx could never be wrong, ever.
To a simpleton, their philosopher of choice, be it Marx or Rand, is a God.
