I don’t know. I have an amateur understanding of him and his writings at best. I tried reading one of his books (I forget which one) once. I liked his ideas about history being a class struggle, but then he (and/or Engels) started writing about social engineering, which to me seemed really unrealistic. I’ve heard one of the traits of fascism iswriting off social engineering as an idiotic utopian fantasy. That was my impression of the social engineering I was being exposed to. Marx wrote his ideas long before we knew anything about psychology, sociology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, etc.
Having said that, I think Communism has been used as a boogie-man by people who stand to benefit from banana republics and corporate fascism. The abuses of people like Stalin, Mao, the Kim regime or Pol Pot definitely didn’t help. But communists did help nations escape from imperialism. Granted they sometimes just created new empires and dictatorships though.
For those in the know, why was Marx so sure that communism would come about in an industrialized society like the ones in western europe instead of rural agrarian societies like it did eventually develop in (China, Russia, southeast asia, various other nations, etc)?
Also was Marx really that radical compared to other writers of his time? The revolutions of 1848 occurred both as and before Marx wrote his books. I don’t see Marx’s ideas being too radical in an environment where something like that could happen in various nations. Was he just a mouthpiece for the frustrations of the time?
Another thing I don’t get is how was communism pro-nationalist in some nations but anti-nationalist in others? In places like the US or Chile communism seems like an anti-nationalist movement. In places like Vietnam it seemed pro-nationalist. Maybe it had to do with whether you felt your nation was a pawn of international forces or not.
His overall legacy is hard to judge. Communists get a bad rap in the US, but they did do a lot of good. Communists organizations offered a legal defense when the Scottsboro boys were falsely accused of rape as well as taking a stand against lynching. Communists played a role in starting the labor movement in the US, which gave us a higher standard of living. I’m sure there are other things they did that history has whitewashed.
Social Democracy is a nice middle ground. I see that movement growing in international momentum.
I think the Greeks, the Romans, not to mention the Jews and Muslims, would find your claims about “Christianity” being one of the pillars of the West quite stupid.
Lots of people could tell you that Marx wrote Das Kapital and some stuff on alienation of labor from product, and I’m one of them, and I don’t know much about Marx. Marx was not himself impressed with the Manifesto and stated he wasn’t a Marxist. The stuff on alienation is considered important philosophically and his observations in Das Kapital are considered his most important work.
That capitalism could be disasterously immoral and dehumanizing was pointed out by an earlier economic philosopher, one Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. Smith has been embraced by anti-Marxists, but his warnings largely ignored.
My university (UCLA) was overrun by Marxist teaching assistants when I was an undergraduate. As Marxists, the utterly despised my liberalism, which they considered more dangerous to the inevitability of history than conservatism. And for good reason. I’m an anti-socialist and anti-communist. But I will consider a policy or program on a piecemeal basis on its merits even if it could be fairly described as socialist or communist. Such as social security or universal health care. If something can work better being done by the government than private industry, I’m all for a genuine pilot project and when proven adopting widely. Like the post office. Much better than UPS or FedEx for efficiency to be run by the government. Or Universal Health Care (UHC) or Social Security. These have been shown to work quite well. Modern conservatism wants to make workers desperate and to die early as a supply of labor for industry. As a liberal I find that monstrous.
Why did communists hate your liberalism? I’ve heard in latin america some communists (decades ago) despised social democrats because they felt that the social democrats were helping the peasants get contented with crumbs when they could’ve had the whole cake. Was that what was going on in your situation, liberalism was considered a form of triangulation and appeasement?
Precisely. Us petty bourgeois are a great danger to their perfect plan for a perfect world. Never mind that every example of communism ever attempted has turned out to be a hideous tyranny, which they excuse as it wasn’t really a Marxist government. No shit. The most effective communist government ever is in China because they’ve combined the worst of communism and capitalism. Which would you rather have? Chinese style commie/capitalism, or Swedish socialism lite?
Aside from enormous philosophical contributions in his early writings, his discussions of surplus value and the labor theory of value are nothing if not seminal.
I’m pretty sure that Marx didn’t personally kill or direct the killing of anyone. Attaching responsibility for deaths done by fanatical followers to a harmless eccentric is a formula for lobotomizing all the intelligentsia. And Ayn Rand.
Not that Marx would care, being dead and all. But that kind of logic makes Adam Smith (the classical economic philosopher of the enlightenment, not the modern author) responsible for every industrial death and accident, impoverishment, mechanical war death etc. Smith was a harmless philosopher, just like Marx. Machiavelli may have written a manual on how to commit evil to gain power, but that doesn’t make Hitler and Stalin, his biggest fans, less than actual instigators. Vince Gilligan isn’t responsible for all the Walter White wannabes.
I think his greatest contribution is his emphasis on history as something deserving scientific study, rather than as most people before him had done, present history as a series of great men doing great deeds alone.
Marx didn’t invent that, though. Hegel had done it before him, and even Vico to an extent. As to the other question, I do think it’s fair to say that the people who died under Communism is part of Marx’s legacy. It’s not what Marx intended, and, like Second Stone, he didn’t kill anyone himself. But I think that’s a narrow way of looking at it. He was a writer and a theorist, and his writings and his theories led that stuff to occur. Certainly, if you say, as Lumpy said
“The biggest legacy of Marx today is that industrial societies have in fact reformed from the Dickensian/ robber baron capitalism of the 19th century- quite possibly as the result of conscious awareness of Marxist and Socialist doctrine.”
then you have to say that the deaths under Communism are also part of his legacy, because Marx didn’t himself reform any industrial societies either, just like he didn’t commit any of the Stalinist purges.
Saying Marx killed people because people read his books is like saying Jesus started the Crusades and all the religious wars in his name because of the Sermon on the Mount and its naivete. As for Marx being a real or pseudo-intellectual facade, I leave that to the academics and philosophers who have actually read his stuff, which I have not. It is my understanding from real intellectuals that Das Kapital is serious economic and philosophical exposition critiquing capitalism’s worst excesses. Unlike say, Atlas Shrugged, which is the straw man fantasy ramblings of a welfare queen hypocrite whose work in the best light possible is to strive persistently, hide in a secret valley with lots of servants and invent a fantasy steel while the world goes to hell.
The great evil done in the name of Marxist ideology and purity is not a warrant to commit great evil in the name of capitalist ideology and purity. Government is and should be of, by and for the people, not economics. Worship of any “ism” and converting thought under any coercion, physical, economic distress, or emotional is simply inhumane.
The great evil of Marxist governments that failed is that they were simply tyrannical in the forcing of their “ism”. Just like nationalism and imperialism can lead to great evil and horrific wars, or racism or religious or ethnic purity.
Marx failed to appreciate the fundamental contradiction in his beliefs. He said that capitalism was flawed because of the unbridgeable divide between the bosses and the workers - the bosses were unanswerable to the workers and shared no interests with them so the bosses would ruthlessly exploit the workers.
But Marx’s political system essentially duplicated this flaw. The Communist Party would in theory be running the country on behalf of the citizens. But in reality, you had the same imbalance of power. The Party was the bosses and the citizens were the workers. And like in its economic counterpart, the Party was unanswerable to the citizens and shared no interests with them so the Party would ruthlessly exploit the citizens. People like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao ended up committing the kinds of crimes Marx predicted corporate leaders would commit when they had enough power.