[tim333]

What do you mean by "criticizes Marx on his own terms"? What terms are those? A problem I have is there are hundreds of pages of stuff he wrote so he's hard to pin down. Not a fan myself. He seems to do a lot of taking everyday life and splitting the people into classes who should fight each other which was then ceased upon but unpleasant people to cause 100m + deaths and much suffering. Also much of the basic content seems crap to me but it's hard to pin the arguments amongst the endless waffle.

To pick one quote though "Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably destroy itself." Not it hasn't - it's all bollocks basically and the aftershocks through Russia and the like still end up blowing up children's hospitals etc to this day. I don't think anyone in the last thousand years has been responsible for more suffering.

[kelseyfrog]

> A problem I have is there are hundreds of pages of stuff he wrote so he's hard to pin down.

It sounds like you're referring to a book? Maybe you can clarify. I read Capital Vol 1 during COVID, and I've come to realize that, without being hyperbolic, I've encountered zero people with criticisms of Marx who have read what he's written.

It's commenting without reading the article on steroids and it frankly makes the critic look foolish because they fantasize about the books content and then attack their own fantasy and then claim they haven't done so. It's not difficult to read a book and then critique it. It's just wild that this had repeatedly failed to occur.

People don't seem capable of reading things they might disagree with, and seem unable to accept that anyone might write something that has parts that are right and parts that are wrong.

Psychs call this all or nothing approach, black and white thinking or splitting and it's a defense mechanism. I think we can do better.

There's a very simple way to prove my statement wrong by contrary evidence. Someone can simply read a book they might disagree with. I actively encourage it. If someone has the desire to voice their disagreement of a thing, the least they could do is be familiar enough with the thing to make a well-constructed and relevant critique. I actively encourage folks to be better critics.

[tim333]

Well it's true I haven't read much of Marx. Glancing at Amazon the combined capital 1-3 is 1392 pages and the Communist Manifesto 176 pages and god knows what else he's knocked out and I don't much like his stuff I have read so I can't be bothered to plow through that. But when you get statements like the capitalistic system will inevitably destroy itself that seem obviously rubbish it makes me ok disliking his stuff in the same way I can dislike say Hitler without having read his book. I mean capitalism does have issues like increasing inequality but that can be dealt with democratically by taxing the rich rather than overthrowing the "capitalist class" and having the resulting nightmares seen in Russia, China, N Korea etc.

Maybe if I went through the 1500 pages I'd find some justification... who knows. But on holiday in Cambodia looking at the thousands of skulls of the educated class executed in the name of Marxist ideas is enough to put me off the whole business.

And aside from the mass murder he seems so pompous intellectually.

[thiagoharry]

I never read Nietzche. Because of this, I refrain to criticize Nietzsche, or making assumptions about the meaning of ideas that I do not fully understand.

[kelseyfrog]

Reversing this, if I said to you, "I think Adam Smith was a shithead, so capitalism is wrong, and his ideas are directly responsible for wars of imperialism, and resource control," I'd expect you to not really see how that's relevant to the ideas contained in Wealth of Nations.

[tim333]

I get that but you can kind of go off a summary of their ideas. In Marx case you have stuff like (from Wikipedia):

>For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers. Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.

My problem with him is more those kind of ideas and the problems they have brought rather than him being a shithead or similar. I think you can probably have a more meaningful discussion of ideas that can be briefly stated so everyone knows what is being discussed than referencing 1500 page works where that is not so.

Even in a short paragraph like that you can see quite a lot of ideas, some of which have worked and some not. Like in the UK the 'working class' Labour party have just gained power so that bit's ok, but not much destroying capitalism going on because their voters don't want that. It's the revolution to topple capitalism and bring communism idea that hasn't tended to go very well.

[racional]

I've encountered zero people with criticisms of Marx who have read what he's written.

So you're a fundamentalist, basically.

[kelseyfrog]

Just to clarify, What's the point you think I'm trying to make?

[racional]

That no one who has read Marx can have significant criticisms of his work.

[kelseyfrog]

There is a certain legitimacy that comes with reading a work one wants to criticize, no?

[racional]

But that wasn't what you said.