Comment by obstacle1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by obstacle1 | Hacker News Reader

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Your summarization of Marxism as an appeal to jealousy is a reductionist joke. Marxist doctrine wouldn't even recognize the legitimacy of ownership in the way you are describing, so the notion of striving for equal individual ownership of goods as a spark to action is nonsense.

Your link to The Gulag Archipelago as an expository on Marxist doctrine also reveals a complete ignorance of what Marxism even is, on a very basic level. The Gulag system was a pure product of Stalinism, which was an implementation of communism that directly rejected Marxist doctrine. Explicitly and directly. Communism is not stalinism is not bolshevisim is not marxism.

The turn to marxist criticism in humanities academia really has nothing to do with anyone wanting to lead a revolution or thinking they will overthrow capitalism or whatever. It is a reaction to lived experience that expresses itself in a particular mode of analysis.

"In the world around me, the economy is imploding and everyone is anxious and on edge and complaining about inequality. I think I'll interpret this novel through the lens of Marxist cultural criticism as a reflection of how I experience the world right now" is all that is going on.

> Your summarization of Marxism as an appeal to jealousy is a reductionist joke.

It's common sense. At best, people will support a system where wealth is distributed without regard to individual productivity if they think that they will get more out of it than they put in.

At worst, it's crab mentality: https://fee.org/articles/crabs-and-communists-how-envy-polit...

I'm no Marxist scholar but looking at Marxism's core ideals, particularly the idea of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," I can see that attempts to implement them will always result in atrocity.

Even Marx admitted that his new society would be born in blood and terror.

"The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm

>the notion of striving for equal individual ownership of goods as a spark to action is nonsense.

Well he didn't say that. But you would do well to remember that during the Russian Revolution and subsequent years, those who were somewhat prosperous among the peasantry were purged, punished, sent to Siberia because of their prosperity. Their prosperity meant they were capitalist oppressors, you see.

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