Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

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People still go to lectures - or find them on YouTube, download them from the web or torrents, etc. And the debates are as much "attended" and more - people just don't have to be physically there anymore. It's all right with Americans and thinking - it's just most of them don't turn their thinking towards government. Which is a blessing - it is brilliant minds who brought us the current financial crisis, for example, with their delusions about their ability to calculate risks and always stay on top of the game (check out Nassim Taleb about this). Mediocre people bring mediocre failures, brilliant people would bring spectacular - and catastrophic - ones. If a brilliant scientific theory fails, well, a couple of egos are brused, but nobody's hurt. If a brilliant political theory fails, millions die. Look what happened to marxism. They thought of themselves as political scientists building society on a rational scientific basis. No emotions, no stupid democratic politicking, just straightforward implementation of proper science. Worst nightmare of the century. I'd rather take the bumbling mediocrities in the government, thank you very much. I don't like them but at least they are less dangerous this way.

Except Marxism was extremely anti-intellectual. You didn't have scientists in positions of power, instead peasants became majors. Children of intellectuals were forbidden to attend universities and forced instead to work in the industry.

There's nothing marxist in what you describe. Maoist or Leninist, maybe. Then again that's the case for the description you responded to as well.

Really? Have you read Marx at all?

I think you are referring to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (I can not think about anything that fits your description in the Soviet history, for example) - but that has little to do with Marxism and does not follow from it. Of course, almost all communist regimes feature mass purges, especially at the beginning of their rule, but usually these purges are not specifically aimed at intellectuals but at "old elites" in order to destroy the existing power relationships and establish the new ones. I do not see anything specifically anti-intellectual in Marxist theory or practice.

You just got Marxism mixed up with the dictatorial regimes of the 20th century, such as the Soviet Union.

Please read the Communist Manifesto before you lambast it with an uninformed critique.

The Communist Manifesto leads directly to the "dictatorial regimes of the 20th century". The Communist Manifesto is not founded in any reality (psychological, political, economic), and as it is applied but fails to bring the promised benefits as it is completely ungrounded in reality, it also encourages the leaders to come to the conclusion that the only reason this can be is that the people aren't trying hard enough. This requires a stronger centralized rule to fix the problem and force the people to comply, but strengthening the centralized rule just causes more problems because centralized rule doesn't work, and it certainly doesn't work with the horrifyingly wrong Communist economic model. This causes yet more centralized power to be amassed and yet more crackdowns, until it crumbles under its own weight.

It's utterly predictable, mostly because we've seen so many try to apply it and fail in exactly the same way each time. We're well past the point where we can say the Communist Manifesto directly leads to dictatorial regimes. I will recant this statement when someone manages to apply it without turning into a dictatorial regime, but don't hold your breath for that.

You'll have to detail these applications because having studied 20th century history I haven't seen any countries implement anything that looks remotely socialist, except 1930s Barcelona.

Now were I disagree with Marxism is the advocation of the "Dictatorship of the proletariat" which I believe results in these state capitalist dictatorial regimes. I'm not an intellectual, don't take my work for it. Chomsky is a good source of information regarding the Soviet Union: http://youtu.be/K4Tq4VE8eHQ

This is called the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, and it's one of the sloppiest fallacies you can commit. It's astonishing how many people cling to it with regards to Marxism. The same thing can be said of anything. The Nazi regime wasn't really fascist. Obama isn't really a liberal. Bush wasn't really a conservative, etc, etc. All of those statements are true. And no true conservative would start a war of aggression. And no true Marxist would butcher millions.

In fact, the Soviets were constantly justifying their policies based on the writings of Marx and Lennon.

Based on Wikipedia's definition of this fallacy, I don't think your examples fit. From Wikipedia:

No true Scotsman is an informal logical fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule.

The key part is "without reference to any specific objective rule", which I don't think you're taking into account.

This isn't the case. Marx differs from other ideologies in that it was Karl Marx himself that wrote The Communist Manifesto.

I can't do the same for most other ideologies; there's no Conservative Manifesto as it were.

With that in mind we can take Marx's book and compare it against history in these countries. If you do this then you will come to the conclusion that these regimes were not Marxist and in fact not even close to socialism.

Here's the danger of making assumptions about people you don't know on the internet. As it happens, I not only read the manifesto, I was born and raised in the country that had the study of the discipline of "Scientific communism" a requirement for getting any higher education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_communism So I have a very good reason to assume that my background in both theory and practice of Marxist regimes is no less than yours. While one could have legitimate differences on the merits of teaching of Marx, it is obvious to any informed person that they were presented as the scientific basis for building new kind of society both in theory and in practice. Even if the theory was false and the practice made it degrade into dogmatic repetition of meaningless drivel, it was still presented as the scientific approach and meant to be so.

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