Leyla Shen wrote:Oh, I rather think it means quite a bit more. Seems to me that it means you are eager to wield your womanhood and victimhood as a weapon. :)
Bzzt. Wrong again.
Oh, my sincerest apologies, milady, I didn't mean to give you vapours.
Yes, you touched my “moron-meter” nerve. It’s highly sensitive to moronism
You must be suffering from a vast array of autoimmune reactions then.
Yeah, girlie, it's because I say so. i say things like: "Labor theory of value is monumentally wrong" and "Planned economy cannot possibly work because the global economic optimization problem is computationally intractable, and furthermore creates a vast fertile ground for corruption". Additionally, Marx's view of the relationship between capital and labor has proven to be totally, utterly incorrect -- where he saw exploitation spiraling out of control, reality has proven that free market delivers a better life even to proletarians themselves than the planned economies possibly could.*
Ah, I see. What a surprise! Wait, I’m not really surprised.
And yet unable to address my specific criticisms of Marx.
OK. Since you allude to such an indubitable understanding of Marx, apparently via this experience alone
Speaking of morons...
I never said or implied that my understanding of Marx comes from experience alone. My point was that, unlike you, I have
both the theoretic familiarity with marxism,
and the practical experience of living under its consequences.
show me the money; tell me what you mean by “planned economy,”:
I don't have to. Marx never got very specific about exactly how he wanted planned economy to work, he was just unhappy with how the capitalism and free market were working out. My point, however, is that it
doesn't matter how the planned economy is implemented. As long as you don't have a situation where the individual incentives of economic agents align with the economic incentives of their agencies, you will have an economy which cannot be 'solved' at a local level -- and thus necessarily the task of economic planning is pushed to an intermediate or higher levels, where is it not solvable efficiently.
Marx criticized the capitalist ownership of the means of production, but it is in fact exactly such ownership which makes an
efficient economy possible. Yes, this means that sole proprietorship is the only truly efficient capitalization institution, and joint-stock corporation is not. The latter is an unfortunate compromise between efficiency and size -- sole proprietorships generally simply cannot raise sufficient capital to be big players.
Yeah, nice try. But, no worries—let me humour you, phallus brain. I wouldn’t want you to go all flaccid on me, now.
Of course, milady. We wouldn't want to you have a hysteric, would we?
Dictatorship of the proletariat (seizure of power by the working class [the working class being specifically the exploited class under capitalism]) has been tried, but the question is: where?
Catalonia and Makhnovschina, the only two anarcho-syndicalist societies in human history AFAIK (though in Makhnovschina it was more of a proletarian/peasant dictatorship, not just proletariat's). However, neither one was Marxist, and neither one managed to survive for more than 3 years, showcasing the
other vulnerability of socialism.
BTW, I bet dollars to donuts that you didn't know about Makhnovschina.
In Russia there was a revolution. There was social and economic chaos, but what eventuated from it is neither the same as revolution nor does it necessarily qualify as the apparently elusive “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Of course not. It simply qualifies as one of the two inevitable outcomes of an attempt at such a dictatorship -- it either falls for being a giant with the feet of clay, like Catalonia and Makhnovschina did, or it becomes totalitarian state.
When you grow up, you just might understand why that is the case.
1) Did what manifested from the revolution actually qualify as dictatorship of the proletariat, and 2) on the basis of what understanding of Marx himself (and I mean just Marx, not Stalin—not even Lenin) are YOU calling it Marxism?
(1) it was one of the two inevitable outcomes of such dictatorships, and (2) just because Marx didn't understand the implications of his own analysis, doesn't make it my fault. History shows that marxist theory, as stated,
cannot be implemented, and any attempts will lead either to failure or to totalitarianism. Therefore, to reject the available historical experiences as not 'real marxism' is disingenuous hackery -- something you are quite good at. It's a no-true-scotsman fallacy.
It's like Heinlein had quipped: "
If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill! How hard? Hard enough to make it run uphill of course!"
“From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.” –Marxism
A fine principle in theory, but a completely impractical one, precisely because it doesn't align one's individual incentives with one's social role. Capitalist economy has one major advantage -- it
works, and it works effectively and efficiently.
“Supply creates its own demand.”—Capitalism
(1) This is a
misquotation, dummy, and a misrepresentation of Say's law. (2) As stated, it is the basis of supply-side economics, which is to real economics as astrology is to astronomy.
When you get a clue about economics, dimwit, let me know, OK?
I think the proletarians suffering from the current global economic crisis might beg to differ (not to mention the economic impact of national debt in third world countries).
Yeah, people who ignore facts tend to say this sort of thing a lot.
How much profit do you think was made by trading debt? And do you seriously mean to tell me that Marx’s idea that capitalism culminates in a smaller, wealthier socio-economic class has been proven wrong in reality?
of course. Our society, instead of being a pyramid with a few vastly wealthy capitalists at the top and equally vast impoverished proletarian masses at the bottom, is diamond-shaped with the vast and pretty well-off middle-class. By Marx's definition, I am a proletarian -- I don't own my means of production, even the computer I type on belong to my company. I am my company's CTO, with a house, two cars, four kids, retirement savings, etc. Not bad for a proletarian, eh?
You don’t even touch on the man’s reasoning and you expect anyone to take you seriously (aside from the likes of brokenhead who, of course, clearly hasn’t read Marx at all) despite your failure to address even the most fundamental reasoning on, for example, the relationship between the worker and the means of production—especially someone who has read and thought about Marx's ideas?
Why don't you be specific about what it is exactly you want me to address?