It's a miracle! No matter how many loaves and fishes of stupidity are distributed on the Internet, there are always more to find and hand out to the people for the nourishment of their laughter:
President Bush is one of the best presidents this nation will ever see. Thank God he had the courage and wisdom to know what to do after 9/11. I commend him for not commenting on Obama; more proof that he's a man of integrity unlike the Marxist. --Linda (March 18th, 2009 2:28 pm ET)(I had no idea Cheney was a Marxist. [/ snark].)
6 comments:
The more I search the internet, the more I blog with people, I keep coming up with the same idiocy: people accusing one another of being Marxists.
This upsets me because I'm a Marxist; not a fake one, but a real in the flesh one.
So, Mikhail, what key beliefs make you a "real" Marxist? Of course, I try to use the word with its traditional meaning, instead of slinging it around the way wingnuts do as a synonym for "evil bastard" (as they also do with fascist, socialist, Nazi, activist, gay, liberal, Democrat, ultra-liberal, leftist, etc.).
Even so, Marxism as inflicted on the world has a pretty poor record.
I'm sorry to provoke you like that.
It's just that in recent times I've been very angry with people around Marxism. I've been going around a lot of blogs, and most bloggers have very little understanding around what Marxism is.
They confuse it with: social-democracy, Stalinism, ultra-leftism, liberalism, even fascism.
And the moment I hear anyone talking about Marx, I immediatley jump into self-defence.
Oh, you didn't provoke me. It's the wingnuts who constantly provoke me.
But you might. What is it that you're defending in the word Marxism? So far you've told me what it isn't, not what it means to you.
Marxism is first of all the understanding that the system we are in - capitalism - is horribly flawed: billions of poor, homeless, famine, war, unemployed, those luckily enough to have a job must work until the grave just for subsistence.
For example, liberalism argues that we can win elections, capture the state, and reform the system to make it better. But Marxists realise that the system is flawed to it's very fundamentals, and no level of reform will ever fix it; the nature of capital itself, money and how money alters human behaviour, can never be utilised to fullfil human need.
The most important thing I want in the world is subsistence for all: no poverty, no famine and no wars. Once that's achieved, humans can get on with individual freedoms: intellegence, culture and achieving personal pleasures.
'True Marxism' is the believe that it is only the working class - the class that creates society's wealth - that has the power to bring about a system that has 100% human subsistence. Marxists want to achieve a point where one day the workers will rise up, take down capital (and anyone who is so obsessed with money, so greedy, that they'd rather die on their feet then let the workers rule) and create a better society and system: this system is commonly referred to as 'socialism'.
There are ideologies that call themselves Marxist even though they have nothing to do with the working class: Stalinism has a government controlled by bureaucrats; Castroism has the government run by guerilla militiamen; Maoism has the government run by peasant armies; they do not involve the working class: they are not Marxist.
No true Scotsman! You're excusing your ideology from account to the acts of its proponents. Even the Soviet Marxists (you'd say so-called Marxists) knew the working class needed a vanguard. There was no industrial state in China, so all they had was the peasantry to stand in for the workers - but how different is that, really, from Russia? Calling Castro (Fidel or Raul) a guerrilla militiaman doesn't show him not to be a communist.
The fetish of working class nobility is perhaps the linchpin foolishness of Marxism. They're people like everyone else, just as flawed and no better able to drive history forward.
Economy then liberty? History strongly suggests that it doesn't work that way, for sure not in an industrial state. The two must evolve in tandem.
Yes, I'm a liberal. I celebrate FDR's success at bending the U.S. away from communism. Yes, I believe reform is possible, though the time it was available to America may have - sadly - passed.
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