Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mionhe 633 days ago
This kind of argument seems to always pop up in this context.

There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.

Of those 17 attempts, every one has ended up creating extreme poverty for the masses. Every one has led to massive amounts of death and abject misery. Every one has led to a dictator that sees his people as just cogs in a machine, easily replaced.

No matter how great Marx's system is (and having seen the aftermath personally of one of those attempts to enact it, I'm inclined to think that his system of thinking is semi-articulate garbage), it's obvious that we can't do what he prescribed and get the results he claimed we would.

Frankly, the part where all of the power temporarily concentrates before redistribution is the problem area: no one can withstand the temptation to just keep it.

Or possibly they never intended to let it go in the first place.

2 comments

> There have been 17 attempts that I'm aware of to create a government based off of the ideals that Marx preached.

What does Marx say in the Communist Manifesto?

"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."

This is what Marx said, what his ideals were. A political fight in a country with the developed proletariat of the Ruhr Valley - Germany. What he can be judged by is what he said.

Marx said a precondition for his ideals would be the conditions the Ruhr Valley and Germany had. So if attempts made without the ingredients he stated failed, then Marx's ideals are shown to be correct. Your examples prove Marx was right.

There are far more than 17 capitalist countries which meet every criteria you've listed as an evil of Communism.