Marxism, good, bad, both?

No, every time I've debated Marxism with you, you've shown you have a woeful misunderstanding of the LTV. That's why I'm pretty sure you haven't read Capital. I think you're a pompous bluffer and you got called.

What makes you think that?

Stalin lived like a tsar, far removed from the average working class. Whilst millions were starving in the Ukraine and millions more toiling away in heavy industry he was holidaying in a dacha in Crimea. Mao likewise used Marxism as a pretext to concentrate power in his own hands- just look at what horror he wrought with his disastrous Great Leap Forward. 40 million dead. Hardly in accordance to what Marx proposed. Both of the above purged their respective societies of millions of people who dared challenge them.

Yes, yes, but concentrating power in a few hands never bodes well. And by necessity, it must be concentrated in a few hands: the proletariat as a whole cannot rule collectively, it just isn't possible. Someone amongst them must, usually somebody who isn't a proletariat at all, as history has shown. Look at Lenin, hardly your typical proletariat was he? Descended from aristocracy no less.

But it is evidence that it hasn't happened yet. So sure, in a sense, it's possible capitalism might collapse, like how I might win the lottery; there's just no particular reason to believe it will.

Lenin was Marxist-Leninist, not a Marxist. Marx never called for a vanguard party (presumably what you are referring to by a 'few hands?') and certainly never called for a single man to run the show. Why isn't it possible for the proletariat to rule collectively?That is the only possible way of administrating a community of freely associated individuals.

How can every worker be a politician? How can you have a true democracy unless a variety of different interests/classes are represented? When you collectivize property, who actually gets it? This was the enduring problem in the Soviet Union: the structural necessity of hierarchy and a division of labour in the economy (which can never be rewarded equally).

One of the main problems in the Soviet Union was that the Bolsheviks talked about democracy and collective ownership but did not practice it. They exerted central top down control over the soviets, instead of implementing a bottom up federation. A better example of collectivisation would be the Spanish revolution.

Collective ownership is a contradiction in terms because nobody personally owns anything. All it really means is complete government control, and property falls under the administration of some central government agency or other. Marxism in practice IS central top down dictatorship, it can be no other way.

Collective ownership is a contradiction in terms because nobody personally owns anything.

Good, bad or both? None of them. Irrelevant and outdated. What the hell is this even doing in the philosophy section?


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How so?

No body ever even mentions Marxism anymore in Philosophy. It has long been known to rest on arbitrary empirical assumptions and completely unverifiable claims.

Bad.

Because Marxist theories of the progression of History are complete rubbish.

Also bad because it sees human beings as something to be moulded and shaped to fit a view held by a small group of people who see themselves as "enlightened".

Further bad because it promotes violence and tyranny in the name of a cause. The idea that the end justifies the means is one of the most dangerous there is. So many atrocities have been committed because of this way of thinking. No outcome is ever separate from the input. No abstract concept of equality is worth outright class warfare and slaughter and the destruction of society and the brutal oppression of all opposition.

Go on...

Who said you had to have collective ownership of everything? Just means of production.

Yes, things that are collectively owned aren't individually owned. What's hard to understand about that?

No not at all. The workers can own together. That's how co-ops work. It doesn't have to mean government control at all. Why should it? Did collectivised farms and industry in Spain have government control? There's a long history of worker's control or autogestion, in Europe.