How I Am a Marxist | Hacker News Reader

How I Am a Marxist

sootyempiric.blogspot.com

A lot of Americans in particular and many people from the post-Soviet regions are inclined to disregard Marxism for ideological reasons, and often in response to the incredible oppression and mismanagement conducted in its name. But I think people who at least understand Marxism specifically and materialism in general gain some effective tools for reasoning about the world.

Think of the way that China has essentially de-industrialized America. To anyone with the thinnest understanding of Marxism, this is obviously the success of a decades-long, deliberate strategy to build power and a material advantage, by exploiting an innate weakness of finance-oriented management. But it's been conceptually and ideologically invisible to people who aren't thinking that way. Many people observing the "economic" effects end up searching for some kind of singular or complex "economic" cause, not understanding the whole process as a higher-order materialist project.

Marx gave us a great vocabulary to talk about issues. They're good to know.

The trouble is that his solutions sound meaningful and profound. Alas he failed to account the fact that humans are not perfectly good.

A good quarter of the world is not without millions of people who died when his solutions were forced on them at gunpoint.

This happened through thoroughly un-Marxist means so it's not clear what a Marxist interpretation offers that's better or more interesting than most other interpretations.

TLDR; Marxism is great if you ignore all the things Marxist countries have done.

Transform feudal countries into space powers in a few decades, eradicate illiteracy and homelessness appears good things for me.

You don't need Marxism to achieve any of those things.

And no murdering millions of your own citizens along the way, yay!!

Capitalism also developed murdering millions of their own citizens in bourgeois revolutions. Any drastic change in a society involves fight for power. Moralism is a bad tool to understand such dynamics in society.

All developed countries that became rich can be separated in four categories:

1) They had colonies in the past (or even have colonies in the present).

2) They have very little population and lots of natural resources.

3) They underwent a Marxist(-Leninist) revolution.

4) They were benefited by cold-war policies. Being neighbor of communist countries, these countries got external incentive to industrialize and become models for propaganda.

Cases 3 and 4 are linked to Marxist revolutions. Cases 2 are very special ones and cannot be generalized. Case 1 involves much more atrocities than a mere revolution in your own country, it involves invading and stealing other countries.

Historically illiterate nonsense.

What is historically wrong?

And if you do not need Marxism, where are all other success cases in the hundreds of countries in the world outside these cases? You know that we have almost 200 countries, only a small minority manage to develop themselves. What explain the incredible coincidence that we have a so small number of developed countries, all them only divided in that 4 cases? What explain that the only countries that manage to became competitor to major capitalist powers are countries like USSR and now China?

Not sure what your are smoking tbh.

When someone tells me they are a Marxist, my reaction is similar to when someone says they are a Nazi.

When someone tells me they react the way you do, my reaction is to assume they are an idiot.

Don't be a cunt.

HN elided the “how” at the start of the title, and I’ve failed to think of a better replacement. Open to suggestions

You can re-add it, HN title modifications are only applied at submission, not on edits.

I've re-howed it. Sorry.

Thank you for the how

I am physically and mentally capable of reading each of the words in this link, in sequence, and I understand every one of them having either learned them in school or from context at some point in my life.

And yet when I attempt to, an overwhelming feeling of stupidity envelopes me.

Yay, you're a marxist. Humanity will probably be dealing with your cult for centuries to come, but there is hope that someday medical science will be capable of curing you of that mental illness.

Your comment is not helpful. Ad hominem is not helpful. If you could refute anything written in the article, that would be helpful.

And yet, as unhelpful as it is, it's not responsible for mass murder in the tens of millions to hundreds of millions as Marxism and its apologists are responsible for.

It's a bizarre and catastrophically dangerous cult that humanity would do well to excise from its collective soul sooner rather than later.

>If you could refute anything written in the article,

Like the absurdly stupid "I think that labor has value all by itself" inanity that even grade schoolers can debunk? I could refute more, if I didn't feel the urgent need to vomit reading this garbage.

HN is so good at nuking all things political... but I guess commie stuff gets a pass?

You should read the article. Theres no point in all this huff about something you havent even read.

You should read some history.

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