[redwoolf]

Marxism is more a critique of capitalism than it is a theory of communism. Marx wasn't interested in prescribing "recipes for cook shops of the future." Economics isn't a field that studies things the way they are in the same sense that physics is the study of the way things are. Just because you lack the imagination to envision a different economic ordering doesn't mean that the ideology is moronic or that those of us who are students of Marx lack the brain power to understand basic economics.

[d33lio]

A "critique" that seems to have never really "worked yet" or burned itself out every time?

I don't lack the imagination, I have more than enough evidence to indicate that "centralizing the means of production" and taking the notion of individuality away from citizens is a half baked idea at best. With the best example being my family that fled Slovakia.

It's ironic that immigrants from derelict marxist nations seem to champion capitalism, and yet jaded privileged white people seem to champion marxism... Maybe we should just have marxist agitators trade places with economic refugees?

[dragonwriter]

> A "critique" that seems to have never really "worked yet" or burned itself out every time?

You've probably been duped by Leninist propaganda into mistaking Leninism and its descendants for Marxism (and, moreover, apparently the sole actual Marxism.) Leninism is, at best, a radical revision of Marxism in a attempt to erase the prerequisite for a developed capitalist economy with broad working class class consciousness.

The actual place Marxism, and not radical revisions like Leninism and its descendants, has had an effect is throughout the advanced Western states where capitalism -- the late-19th Century system critiqued by Marx -- was universally dominant, where it formed the core energizing various movements against that system, including particularly the labor movements, resulting in the replacement of the capitalist system Marx critiqued and the emergence and then dominance of the modern mixed economy, which while certainly not the end-state Marxism was directed at is clearly comprised of steps in the direction Marx called for.

[redwoolf]

You seem to be confusing Marxism with Totalitarianism. A common mistake.

[AnimalMuppet]

Would you consider "The Communist Manifesto" to be part of Marxism? If not, why not?

And if yes, well, it ends by calling for the "forcible [presumably violent] overthrow of all existing social conditions". That has, in practice, resulted in totalitarianism every time it's been tried.

Now, you could say that there's a lot more to Marxism than that. And you'd be right. But "forcible overthow" is inherently part of it. And as long as it is, a bunch of us aren't willing to even touch the whole package, because we see it as having a bomb in it.

[kleer001]

Marxism only works with Totalitarianism.