Marxism Never Died, It Just Went Underground

[GloryofGreece]

Capitalism is an economic theory that works well with Jeffersonian Liberty, which is the true opposite of Marxism.

Liberty doen’t even require democracy, that’s just the best fit because everyone’s vote is equal, but a lottery to choose leaders would fit liberty too as long as it was unbiased.

Marxism has absorbed the Women’s movement; it has absorbed the Civil Rights movement; it has absorbed Globalism. My god, it has become The Matriarchy, taking fully half of all females. It has got to be the biggest movement in the world; bigger than religion, bigger than liberalism, bigger even than freedom.

ok, so here's where the problem lies: you have a huge group of people that hate capitalism (they still have iphones and shit but they hate the idea of someone working hard and achieving stuff), but capitalism doesn't hate them. It still views them as potential customers of its products and services. In theory, capitalism is supposed to cut across racial, religious, and ideological lines to make money, and avoid value judgments. Well, in order to attract these customers it needs to appeal to their ideas. It needs to have an old white man break into the woman's house for the ADT commercial, and have a black customer service representative man the phone when the alarm goes off. It needs to have a token gay character storyline on every tv show. It needs to create rainbow colored candy to commemorate the Pulse victims, and deny services to any person who will alienate a potential market they can tap into (minorities, women, trans people, gays, etc.). Its pretty obvious how the government can limit liberty, but in the private sector society can apply quite a bit of pressure too. Even though in the long run I think this shit will hurt business, most businesses are cheering this stuff on, because they cannot afford to think longterm. How do you fix that?

Great summary.
You fix it as much as you can by removing money as your highest value.

[Speaker to Animals]

I think people should stop using the terms capitalism and free markets synonomoysly. Capitalism has as a feature markets skewed towards freedom, but that does not mean the only economic system that possesses that feature is capitalism.

[heydaralon]

Hot take

Marx was not a bad guy. Spoiled jew maybe. He was more of an intellectual diletante with ideas about how the post industrial age was going to unfold with not even radical critiques of systems of capitalism which at the time was never meant to be a core ideology but just a scientific system. You may have had other people seize his ideas, undoubtedly popular at the time, and use them to further their own ends, (like Hitler,) but Marx never intended his theories to become radical eschatologies.

If I'm wrong on any of this impression I have, let me know.

I think Marx wanted to have his cake and eat it too. He developed many theories that borrowed heavily from Positivism, but he often denounced the actions of political radicals during his time and called much of their work that was derivative on his, "Positivist shit." In so much as he was a Jew, he was a very self-loathing one. His work "On the Jewish Question" basically explores the problem with a society and religious tolerance (hint: he didn't like Jews or capitalism or Christians). What's weird about Marx though is his own secular religion also borrowed heavily and directly from Christian preachers. Engels viewed Thomas Müntzer who was a Reformation preacher and peasant leader in Germany as being the father of the idea of Communism. Müntzer's rebellion against both Catholics and Protestants of power (like Luther) led Engels to explain how Müntzer's Kingdom of God just meant no class differences, no private property, and no state that worked against the interests of the people. To me that is as radical as it can get. In light of that, I do not remotely view Marxism as a scientific system. From the get go, it used a bunch of Christian and religious myths as its foundation.

There have been a lot of people in academia who have attempted to distance Marx from what came after him in the 20th century, but all those societies were something Marx would have immediately recognized, and they all implemented his principles. And they all sucked. The best stuff on Marx is the biased Cold War stuff written by Western Academics. Isaiah Berlin, Lezek Kolakowski all hated Marx and had ideological reasons for doing so but their criticisms were more honest than many academics today who try to pull a "no true Scotsman" about Marx and the Communist societies that crashed and burned after him.

[Speaker to Animals]

As far as the OP, I think we ought to distinguish the various idelogical manifestations of Marxism with the actual social and moral degeneracy that it really is. All civilizations tend to degenerate in cycles. People create ostensible rationalizations for it according to their circumstances in that time and place, but they really are just degenerating into more primitive people.

If you look at the late Roman republic, there existed many analogs to Marxism: Catalan Revolt, Grachii brother's revolt, Marian reforms, even Clodius becoming a pleb and driving the masses into a frenzy while wearing his fake worker's tunic. While that was not ideologically Marxism, in reality it was the same kind of social rot and moral decline.

It is not so much that Marxists are these masterminds that can go underground like Hydra and infect the institutions, in my opinion, but that the social and moral decline makes it possible for people like democrats to expand their power.

[heydaralon]

I think people should stop using the terms capitalism and free markets synonomoysly. Capitalism has as a feature markets skewed towards freedom, but that does not mean the only economic system that possesses that feature is capitalism.

Well, Communist societies certainly used the Free Global Market when it suited them, especially when it came to importing and exporting grain to feed the starving masses.

[Speaker to Animals]

I think people should stop using the terms capitalism and free markets synonomoysly. Capitalism has as a feature markets skewed towards freedom, but that does not mean the only economic system that possesses that feature is capitalism.

Well, Communist societies certainly used the Free Global Market when it suited them, especially when it came to importing and exporting grain to feed the starving masses.

In general, free market simply means you are totally free to engage in whatever economic activity you'd like. So if there is a sudden demand for purple dildos, you do not have to ask permission to start fabricating purple dildos. Then you are free to set prices however you like, and consumers are free to purchase (or decline) your purple dildos.

In the medieval period, markets were strictly controlled by the aristocracy. You had to ask for permission to engage in some business, and received permission if it benefited your local landlord.

[heydaralon]

I think people should stop using the terms capitalism and free markets synonomoysly. Capitalism has as a feature markets skewed towards freedom, but that does not mean the only economic system that possesses that feature is capitalism.

Well, Communist societies certainly used the Free Global Market when it suited them, especially when it came to importing and exporting grain to feed the starving masses.

In general, free market simply means you are totally free to engage in whatever economic activity you'd like. So if there is a sudden demand for purple dildos, you do not have to ask permission to start fabricating purple dildos. Then you are free to set prices however you like, and consumers are free to purchase (or decline) your purple dildos.

In the medieval period, markets were strictly controlled by the aristocracy. You had to ask for permission to engage in some business, and received permission if it benefited your local landlord.

back then, the dildos would have been made out of ox horn and dyed purple using mollusks.

Are you super familiar with the Hanseatic league? I think it is pretty wild how we now have a Westphalian political system with the nation state as the default governed entity, and free trade capitalism as the default economic system. It did not have to be that way. Without the Christian religious wars, we could have ended up with something like the league, a group of guilds in towns who were trading with one another and others. Maybe a set up like that would go against some of your views on the merchant class, but it is interesting to think about. I don't know how much different or better a guild is than a union for deciding economic activity, but for the most part guilds seem more interested in calling people out of shoddy work and actually making good products.

[Speaker to Animals]

I do not oppose a merchant class's existence at all. I think it is healthy to have one.

What I oppose is rule by merchants. I do not think the merchant class should retain political power at all.

Political power should only be wielded by the military class with the consent of the property owners. The warriors actually carry out the political will, risking their lives in the process, and the property owners have to financially support the political will. Everything beyond that is bullshit. If you aren't paying for it, and you aren't fighting for it, then just go home and worry about something else.

[heydaralon]

I do not oppose a merchant class's existence at all. I think it is healthy to have one.

What I oppose is rule by merchants. I do not think the merchant class should retain political power at all.

Political power should only be wielded by the military class with the consent of the property owners. The warriors actually carry out the political will, risking their lives in the process, and the property owners have to financially support the political will. Everything beyond that is bullshit. If you aren't paying for it, and you aren't fighting for it, then just go home and worry about something else.

To use your example earlier with the dildos and the Feudal lord, do you feel that he represented the interests of the population better than a merchant? To play Devil's advocate, at least the Merchant accumulated wealth by being good at a trade or being savvy at business, whereas the lord got there because his father was a lord. Merchants' interests are often diametrically opposed to the rest of a society's, but for most of history, most lords and rulers had a tenuous connection to those they ruled over.

[heydaralon]

I'm a History teacher at a public school in the mid Atlantic. Have mercy on my soul.

Are you able to have the kind of conversations with your colleagues that you have on the forum with us? I remember having 2 really good history teachers in high school and one good govt teacher. Even they were pretty embittered with their jobs and did not have much faith in the schools to fix these problems. I graduated about a decade ago. Nothing I have seen in the news has led me to think the schools have gotten better since then.