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| Except I think that Marx's basic philosophy of human nature is wrong at its core. |
Please don't be offended when I say how confident I am that you fundamentally misunderstand Marx's theory of human nature.
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| The fact that so few people climb to self-actualization shows |
This is irrelevant.
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| that Marx's concepts are a unachievable utopia. |
This does not follow. It's also quite the strawman. Marx was not a utopian and, in fact, was expressly anti-utopian. Hell, half the point of 'Das Kapital' was to offer an analytic basis for socialism to keep it from being so watered down by utopians (and mutualists and certain anarchists).
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| Hell, we can barely get people to acknowledge UBI as a concept, because too much of society (especially American society) |
Acknowledge? That's such a low bar that I'll dismiss most of this as hyperbole. But as for the rest, please don't be offended when I say how confident I am that you simply aren't aware of the long, long, long history of American socialism.
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| is rooted in Hobbesian beliefs. |
I've often wondered how fast the ol' Monster of Malmesbury is spinning in his grave to have his entire life's work reduced to a mere seven words that largely misrepresent him.
I'll take your point, though. American has a long tradition of individualism that is, of course, orthogonal to forms of collectivism like socialism. But if you understand Marx at all, his argument is that cultures change (duh) because human nature evolves (wow!) which is precisely why any arguments about the current state of human nature are more than missing the point.
Further, it's best to understand the manifesto as a product of its moment, especially in contrast to the towering pile of his later works. When the 1848 revolutions were crushed, it cemented for Marx (who was never much of a revolutionary to begin with) that certain things simply couldn't be forced. Two decades later, when 'Das Kapital' is published, Marx has settled on the argument that the contradictions of capitalism would eventually (and necessarily) produce socialism -- but it was as a prediction of the distant future, not a call to arms.
And now note some of the steps required to get all the way to pure communism. For starters, pure communism is stateless, so an obvious prerequisite is the so-called 'withering of the state'. You think people are ready right now for anarchy? Well congrats, Marx didn't think so either. First the state has to adopt socialism to address the contradictions of capitalism (and to prevent it from grinding against democracy) and then those social institutions water out of the state so we can have the 'withering of the state'. This process can only happen as people (i.e. voters) increase their social consciousness -- meaning that their nature changes and the polity along with it.
So, how does one go about disproving Marx? It's rather tough. You can attack the validity of his arguments (and by "validity", I mean validity) but you can't adjudge the truth of his conclusion because it's a prediction of the unspecified future. If you want an analogue, consider the axiomatic nature of Austrian economics and witness how Hayek attempted to create formalism for his economics just as Marx did for his. Both systems are overly deductive, weak on empirical evidence, and generally lacking falsifiable conclusions -- in short: not that scientific. So that is the main problem, not some Reader's Digest claptrap about "greed" or "jealousy" or "utopia".
Post Edited by HarryPlax @ 29th Mar 2018 12:11 PM |
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