Calling all anti-marxists

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ah yes, we will civilly agree to disagree here, i feel. to me, inequality and coercion are the most pernicious aspects of any system of social organisation, and they are endemic in capitalism. everyone being modestly well off/moderately poor depending on your general outlook, would be a far more agreeable state of affairs for us all as far as i am concerned...

Eh, iunno. I used to play sports, the most complicated mental part of it is figuring out where the ball needs to go. Everything else is muscle memory.

But did you have the power of brian on your side

Yes you do need the power of your brian because the brain controles every function of the body that is why it takes brain power to do anything.

I don't know about you, but I don't have to consciously think "leg up leg down turn right leg up jump" etc... that just happens

The power of brian compels you!

The brian is sending signals to the body to make that happen

stop, I laugh too hard

HAHA okay ill stop

My main argument against Marxism isn't the common one. I think the main problem is that allowing excess wealth to accumulate in the hands of some is a necessary evil to some degree. I person of small or modest wealth may be able to come up with a good idea, but it takes people with deeper pockets to really transform the idea into reality. In a total Marxist system the only way an entrepreneur could get anything going is to petition the government for funding. In a mixed economy you have investors willing to pool their money towards things.

The problem I see with the current economy though is investors do not necessarily pool their wealth towards productive aims. This causes speculative bubbles which are nothing more than a collective non-consciously-conceived ponzi schemes that unjustly redistribute wealth to one class at the expense of another. When the bubble bursts the negative consequences fall disproportionately on working class people who had nothing to do with causing the situation in the first place. This is why I think pure unregulated capitalism is dangerous and immoral, even though I'm not a full-blown Marxist.

Karl Marx was a dirty, long-bearded hippie singing the International instead of Kumbaya, and instead of people all over the world getting all lovey-dovey, it was about revolution and smashing the bourgeois establishment through force of arms if need be. Same thing really. Marx's theory was flawed in that he expected whole societies to engage in violent revolution and afterwards all just get along and share with each other. WTF?

The collapse of the Soviet Union proved conclusively that communism doesn't work and that Marx was an idiot. What the Left just doesn't get is people want stuff, and they want to one-up their neighbors the Joneses. People are greedy, envious, selfish bastards, and capitalism exploits this fact of human nature while communism relies on some fantastic utopia that would take a brutal totalitarian regime to actualize. Capitalism is God ordained with Jesus Christ Himself being the first capitalist; communism, in contrast, is a godless, atheist ideology bent on crushing and perverting humanity's free will and replacing it with the will of a sadistic despot.

Some apologists for Marx like to say that the Bolshevism imagined by John Lenin was not real socialism and that something better could be implemented, preferring labels like "social 'democracy'" or "'democratic' socialism." Well, gag me with a spoon: Socialism is as a socialist does, and even if some nansy-pansy "center-left" Scandinavian or Western European hasn't brought in the Red Army and legions of faceless, Boba Fett-clone storm troops doesn't mean it isn't imminent when you put a f*ckin' bolshie pinko in charge. The UK's National Health and the Beeb, it's all just smoke and mirrors, my friends, and when the smoke clears, be ready for the gulags and famines! François Hollande of France's Socialist Party even looks like Father Joe Stalin! Tony Blair of the UK's "New" Labour would have thrown his political enemies away, lock and key, if it weren't for the marmish Queen scolding him.

At least outside the United States, the pinkos have the balls to say they're commies and socialists. Here, our pinkos cower behind the labels liberal and progressive. BS! Obviously our liberals have never read Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek, or else they'd know liberals believe in freedom, not some pinko welfare state; and real progressivism died in this country with good ole Teddy Roosevelt.

It's funny anyone even bothers to call themselves a Marxist anymore.

I'm probably the most staunch anticommunist on this site. Communism is, at best, an ideal sprung from the mind of a drug addled hippie, at worst, it's an evil institution that deserves to be reviled as much as fascism is. @#$% Karl Marx, and may he rot in hell forever.

Marx was enraged by some of the unjust effects of the capitalistic system. The capitalism you know and prefer is nothing like the capitalist system that existed in Marx time. It produced sweat shops, unsafe working conditions, a certain amount of ill health and even death. The capitalism we now enjoy is constrained by safety and health regulations that did not exist when Marx was alive. Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln were contemporaries.

Marx had a love-hate relation with capitalism. He was overwhelmed by the rapid technological progress produced by capitalism. He was appalled at the heartless treatment of children and workers before there were laws to deal with such extremes. Without laws to constrain capitalism it would be as brutal as any communist system.

ruveyn

Pretty much this. If I could do a chart here the Y Axis (vertical) would be growth and the X axis (horizontal) would be efficiency. As efficiency goes up so does growth or innovation of you prefer. However, human workers are not efficient nor practical. If possible all workers should be replaced with highly advanced virtual intelligences that can do the job better, at lower costs with less mistakes.

Efficiency is degrees of brutality, its why China is so effective because they are a little bit more brutal than competing countries. If the government decides to build huge new factory areas, with ports, airports and other infrastructure, the people who live in that area are more or less told to f**k off.

So, in shorts its a trade off between growth and accommodating the needs of human capital, regardless of the fact that human capital is something that seems to never run out since humans have shown themselves to breed until resources run out, then come up with new ways to get more resources so they can breed more.

It depends on goals I suppose. I'd love to see us colonize the moon and explore much more of space before I die, odds are I won't because of inefficient use of resources and general stupidity.

Sorry, "Think of the children!" is not a valid excuse to let the government start meddling in a free market. Human beings should be free to engage in the kinds of commercial relationships between each other they find fitting. There may be child labor going on in developing countries, but these children are still better off than without the benefice of capitalist exchange; otherwise, they and their families would be literally starving to death. Why not let the invisible hand of the free market decide what safe working conditions are and what a minimum wage should be instead of letting some Washington bureaucrat decide? Maybe what's not safe for one individual is perfectly safe for another, more skilled individual. The government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers.