When checking in on him today I found the recent post hoping that the 21st Century is not a Red Century as the 20th was. Posts about Marx and marxism attract very predictable comments, but there were a few worth your while if you want to go over. I liked georgesdelatour's* response, largely new to me.
Communism is the bad idea who’s time has come again. We’re all going to have to waste bandwidth re-learning the jargon.A couple of points worth mentioning in any debate with a Communist:
(1) (from Leszek Kolakowski’s “Main Currents of Marxism”, p290):
“It is clear, however, that Marx was determined to find in capitalism a relentless tendency to degrade the worker, and that he resisted facts which indicated that the worker was getting better off. Bertram Wolfe has pointed out that in the first edition of Capital various statistics are brought down to 1865 or 1866, but those for the movement of wages stop at 1850; in the second edition (1873) the statistics are brought up to date, again with the exception of those on wages, which had failed to bear out the impoverishment theory. This is a rare but important case of disingenuousness in Marx’s treatment of factual data.”
(2) It’s worth trying to track down Michael Bakunin’s critique of the Communist Manifesto, written in 1869. Bakunin predicts what a society will turn out like if it actually tries to implement all Ten Points of the Communist Manifesto, and his prediction is scarily close to the USSR in the 1930s. If Bakunin could see this danger before Lenin and Stalin were born, it undermines the argument that the horrors of 20th century Communism had nothing to do with Marx’s ideas.
Farther down, readers may chuckle over the preening and name-dropping of Commentter/Seinundzeit.
* I did not get the reference, but after looking it up, liked it.
5 comments:
Marxist thought bakes it’s problem into its analysis. If all of history is to be analyzed as oppression by the owners of the means of production against the non-owners, then the outcome of any analysis will be just that. Any cases of helping the non-owners will be explained away.
The same is true of third wave feminism (all history is exploitation of women by the patriarchy) and critical race theory like the 1619 project. It’s baked in; counter examples are not allowed.
*its obviously. Damn these computers that think they are smarter than we.
"I go over and visit Razib Khan's "Gene Expression" at times. He holds the distinction of having been kicked to the curb by both the NY Times and Psychology Today shortly after starting to write for each, because they think this geneticist from Bangladesh is racist and sexist. He has a podcast "The Insight" about current genetic and genetic/anthropological/prehistorical research. Very smart, very thorough, and lots of fun." I know nothing, NOTHING, about Kahn, but having the NYT and Psychology Today against him is all, ALL, I need to know about him.
As I keep saying, I despise, detest, and distrust the NYT (and the WaPoo and the other media, too!)
"This is a rare but important case of disingenuousness in Marx’s treatment of factual data.” I trust that NO ONE is surprised by this.
Grim..."f all of history is to be analyzed as oppression by the owners of the means of production against the non-owners, then the outcome of any analysis will be just that. Any cases of helping the non-owners will be explained away. The same is true of third wave feminism (all history is exploitation of women by the patriarchy) and critical race theory like the 1619 project. It’s baked in; counter examples are not allowed."
Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist, explained this phenomenon well:
"A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian's prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you ourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history...In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system's rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.
The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emotional hothouse...The trained, "closed-minded" theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his "open-minded" adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself."
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