what Marxism really is.....

Nonsense. Most startup business ventures fail.

google.com/search?q=most+st … e&ie=UTF-8

Now you look like an idiot, in addition to a madman.

That’s exactly what a revolution is!

FINALLY somebody here understands.

i was thinking more along the lines of learning a new trade
or acquiring marketable skills
but you can also beat people up and steal their shit too
that works sometimes

I don’t look like an idiot. If you know the laws and have no ethics … in America you have zero risk.

Trump is proof of this. He sucks at business. You can’t make that kind of money in New York at real estate back then unless you are mobbed up (his father)… trump is a mafia lackey. You can’t get out of bankruptcy 6 times with the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars and survive it unless you struck deals with the Russian mob etc…

I enjoy how you’re proved flatly wrong and you’re still not swayed.

It proves how disconnected you are from reality. Enjoyable, but only for so long. Time to move on.

First, both of those and Maoism and other forms of failed Marxism are referred to as Marxism, so the problem is your own failure in the OP to clarify what Marxism you are talking about. Second, Marx certainly intended it to be used as a political system and he failed to realize just how devastating the interaction of his ideas and real human beings was going to be. What the revolutions he claimed were necessary would lead to. His fine sounding ideas on paper, when they interacted with humans in real life led to horrible consequences. Third, you can’t write about the reforms of labor conditions in the OP - which are real world applications of his ideas - and make those a part of Marxism, then not accept the applications of Marx’s ideas at the large scale political level as not being part. He called for revolution. He said it would come and he explained how it would inevitably lead to, well, kinda utopian type stuff. He was wrong. But worse than that his assertions, and very confidently did he assert these things, led directly to the problems of Lenin Staliinism and Maosism and other horrors. IN some cases, often on smaller scales and wihtout revolutions, they also led to good things.

And now let’s look at your denial of dictatoriship…

remember the dictatorship of the proletariat!!!

He expected this to be a short term intermediate stage.

First, that’s hilariously naive of Marx and makes his ideas, in no small way, responsible for Lenin-Stalinism. How could he not know that people getting power tend to hold onto it.

The strong parts of his philosohpy are his critique of capitalism. The weak parts are his utopianism, call or prediction of revolution, and precisely what these things led to. And unfortunately the strenghs make the dangers much more dangerous. Because people see where he is right and so assume (a bad habit of humans) that he must be right about other things. And if you want to say that the dictatoriships that came were not quite what he meant, well, that just shows he had no idea how the classes would interact and what things would look like when the dust settled. He fucked up big time.

And you can’t just wave your hand, tell other people they are conflating, when Marxism as a term refers to what they are pointing out and also that Marx bears a lot of responsibility for what his naivte in certain matters led to. His ideas when believed in by humans, leads to all sorts of misery. Some of his ideas and core ones at that.

Gosh, let’s see how party Marxists might have felt justified by the master for atrocities.

IOW he was critical precisely of the kind of reformist labor conditions measures YOU focus on in the OP. Not that they are bad, per se, but that they miss the necessary revolution. Necessary in many nations. Some places Marx considered it possible that the transition might be bloodless, but most places he assumed and called for a necessary revolution. And Marxism, even in the restricted sense of what was first written about also has to include Engels, and he was not one to shy away from violence.

Here the wording is even more problematic. An economic system that is not also a political system. You can’t just separate those out. If the workers own production, that has to be enforced. The state cannot be an oligarchy, for example. It absolutely cannot be what is present in the US right now. The terms, yes, do highlight (rather than distinguish) aspects of systems, but they cannot be teased apart. Economics is politics and politics is economics. They are radically overlapping terms, with, yes, non-overlapping areas and with sometimes different foci even where they do overlap.

And then again, once you are calling for a violent revolution and saying that in some countries (and I am sure Marx would have thought those countries would require revolution, and then that a trasitional dictatorip and bloodshed were necessary, you can in fact blame Marxism for naively being part of the factors for what happened in those places. The state did not wither away. Revolutions get coopted by other classes. What Marx considered inevitable clearly was not. Economic systems require specific state systems and really physically, ideologically, practically overlap and are coterminal with them.

In a feudal system you cannot, for example, have the workers owning the land or all the means of production. If they did, it isn’t feudalism.

And look, I have sympathy for a defense of marx. The anti-communists only look at part of what he wrote and some of the effects. And he anti-communists have their own long list of atrocities specifically enacted to fight communism (or do the bidding of corporations or whatever): Indonesia, Vietnam, much of Latin America, where anti-communist ideologies justified supporting, actually carrying out all sorts of nightmares. 'And also the anti-communists never wanted anyone to figure out useful versions of both economic and political systems that were inspired by not fundamentalist in relation to Marx. They’ve crushed movements and leaders that even for a moment smelled like Marxists (and this includes people who were steadfast capitalists, liberals, and even leaders to the right who were against colonialism but were nowhere near Marixist but when nationalism or freedom from oppression was conflated with Marxism.) These people never want to look at what Marx got right. So, they focus on the worst consequences of his ideas, baby and bathwatering him. And also assume that the options are modern capitalism and Lenin Stalinism. Which is a handy mental denial to never have to notice the problems with modern capitalism.

damn, karpel
you sorta left nothing for me to do here

This in absolute buckets and so simple you could explain it to a child
As long you can live within your means and your means are perfectly legitimate that is all that matters
How much anyone else makes should not bother you in the slightest and so if it does then its a problem

I am relatively poor but have always lived within my means and could not care less how much someone else makes
You could be the richest man in the world and it would not bother me one iota for I would just not let it affect me

I absolutely refuse to be intimidated by telephone numbers so no amount of money will ever give me an erection
Now it is of course very useful but there is zero reason to actually worship it because that is entirely unnecessary

That would depend on the reason but personally I blame no one for my life
That is my responsibility and my responsibility alone so I own it absolutely

Rather than blame someone or something else for it I simply try to do the best I can
And so regardless of whether I succeed or fail it will be by my hand and no one elses

“if you were designing a machine, you don’t want any of this extra stuff pulling resources[…] the capitalist in this analysis was the extraneous part of this system”

i’d say that’s a faulty analysis
because machines don’t build themselves

the capitalist in this particular metaphor is the entity who brings the machine into existence
“he” is not extraneous, he is the inception of all that was formed under his strategy and brought to success
by the work of many, yes
but under his direction

if you think that position is extraneous
you may want to spend some time looking into the apparently infinite ways in which an enterprise can fail

but then, as some of our fellow kameraden have pointed out
marx placed his system as a step two, where capitalism is step one
so it wasn’t a faulty analysis

it was an admission that marxism is incapable of building itself
it just sets out to take the stuff that other people built
and then somehow keep it productive without any incentive toward individual excellence

Trump is feeling the heat. He has to figure out how to change the constitution as an executive so he doesn’t go to prison for obstruction of justice.

Once trump is a private citizen again, he no longer has a republican senate defending him.

Hel’ll do anything! He’s on record as saying (paraphrased but accurate), “why wouldn’t I take the most advantage of the laws as they’re written, it shows that I’m smart”

There’s a lot of people trying to change those laws Donald. Not exploiting them, but trying to change them.

made y’all a meme

This is weird because I always thought it was the proletariat and not the capitalist who is trying to seize the means of production. God this is all so confusing.


Both actually want the means of production because it represents economic power to them

Guh… so much ignorance.

Which is of course what this thread is all about.

I dunno what it is about the compulsion to publically assert opinion on a topic you know little about, yet somehow also feeling very strongly about it all the same, even when the whole thread is about calling out just that kind of behaviour…
So if the intention is to prove Peter’s point then very well done, I guess.

I mean, I understand that many people like to treat contentious issues like a football game - GO MY TEAM! THE OTHER TEAM SUCKS (for simplistic uninformed reason that misses the point #7194)!!

Whatever happened to scholarship, huh? Like actually assessing something impartially, and possessing the ability to rationally entertain more than just one side to a story, and even being able to evaluate material on its objective merits and flaws rather than immediately retreating to the stance you’d already made up your mind about before even doing any work whatsoever??

It seems like Karpel is the only person to criticise Marxism while actually applying his points to a reasonable degree of demonstrated knowledge on the subject, whilst also not overtly signalling some virtue of “loyalty” for or against it.
The only other people who demonstate some degree of knowledge on the subject are the ones who support it, but that’s to be expected. No need to harass people for knowing more than you do.


You don’t even need to have read Marx to know that the financial definition of profit is an employer’s company paying employees less than what they earn the company.
This is just fact, whether it’s Marx pointing out the obvious, or you worked it out by your clever old self.

The justification of an employer distributing the wealth that goes into “their” company in such a way is all this risk and noble bravery stuff, that they’re the ones so gracious as to employ workers who would otherwise be penniless, that they could still be contributing some kind of skilled work especially in the beginning stages of a company etc.

But you don’t even need to “agree” or “disagree” with this justification to note that there are arguments both for and against it, but more importantly than acknowledging that it’s not a simple evaluation, it is a FACT that employers who profit are getting more money than what they earned the company, when their employees are getting less money than what they earned the company - because this is the financial definition of profit. Whether or not so many attempts quickly end up with employees getting paid a bit at first even if the employer soon ends up failing and worse off than they started does not change this fact.

Is it okay for employers to do this, given what they contribute? Decide as you will, but it is not negotiable that they DO do it.

So to start from the premise that “it’s none of anyone’s business what an employers makes” just COMPLETELY misses this entire setup, simply to say that GIVEN an employer earns what they do, we ought not to interfere.
They already interfered !!! - just acknowledge this fact, whether you think it’s justified or not.

Are you against distribution of wealth? Well what about the implicit distribution of wealth performed by employers?
Is it the law that this is perfectly fine to do? Of course, but a thread about Marxism goes deeper than blindly saying “yes, Mr. law, I comply” - and you can either stay on this topic of Marxism or rattle off the same old tired points, which you’re just as tired as of saying as others are tired of hearing and having to correct.

Can this forum please demonstrate the slightest degree of sophistication higher than the embarrassment that is social media, and just acknowledge this FACT? Leave your prejudices and tribalism at the door for pity’s sake. Internet discussion on this topic is a fucking broken record, can we just for once get past the most base level of inanities?

Never work. There’d be bread lines for days and nobody would have any oil to burn their lamps. We’d obviously have to ration our rice, and since we’d be communicating through telegram and printed paper again, cooperation between cities and states would be slow and disorganized. And that’s just to name a few things. The idea is incredibly dangerous, dude. We’re far to technologically backward and underdeveloped to be able to govern such a system effectively.

Marx was inspired by reports of indigenous tribes that had no monetary system and no barter system. These tribes only live in geographically isolated parts of the world (islands, mountain tops)

Even the American three branches of government was borrowed from a native tribe (I think it was the Iroquois).

All these ‘revolutionary’ ideas were taken from exploration of the world by the Europeans.

The problem with these types of theories is that they don’t apply to a massive global community (now 8 billion people)…

America did ok for its time, not great, not perfect, just ok. And now the East is going to rise.

Does the East have inspiration from native tribes? Yes. Do they care? No. Just like the Americans didn’t care. Sure, these tribes were a backwards people, but nation states have not improved upon them.

The most democratic thing you can do with currency is to place a wage cap.

Human beings think that if they express an opinion strongly enough then it makes them look quite knowledgeable [ least to themselves ]
This has been going on for as long as we have existed and so predates Dunning Kruger by a couple of hundred thousand years give or take

I find it very easy to be non committal because my sense of detachment naturally inclines towards that state
I hold no absolute opinions about anything but equally do not demand the same of others - how they respond to a topic is none of my business
I therefore do not require everyone to be HAL9000 like but so long as I myself am not being emotional with any subject matter my job is done

What about HAL Pacino like?