All pastes #2088459 Raw Edit

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#2088459 ·published 2011-10-09 19:39 UTC
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You don't seem to have actually analysed a lot of what you're criticising.

“They control all the wealth, the top 1% makes like 50% of all the wealth in the country.” This ladies and gentlemen is known as “Marxism"

1) The actual wealth distribution the last time I checked is that the top 1% have 42% of the financial wealth, 50% of the investment assets and (something which is incredibly underanalysed) only 5.4% of the debt. Also, trying to equalise wealth isn't Marxist. It's simply liberal or social democratic (take your choice of terms). Marxism, socialism and communism all involve the seizing of the means of production by the workers. Anything less is simply a more lefty form of capitalism.

"According to Karl Marx the world could be boiled down into two classes, the rich capitalists that controlled the world and the poor workers who suffered under them."

2) The basics of Marxism does revolve around the conflict between the working and ruling classes (proletariat and bourgeoisie) but the fuller analysis does go more in depth, taking into account more nuanced groups such as the petite bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat.

"The workers would then create a Utopian world, under what he called, Communism (not the historic kind, the brand of Communism that there is no government everyone works for everybody else…remember I said utopia)."

3) There are VERY few utopian communists. Communism isn't meant to better society, but it won't make society perfect. Regardless of how the economy is set up there will still be people wanting to take addiction forming drugs, people who will try to game the system for extra wealth, etc. Communism doesn't make a utopia, it merely makes utopia possible by removing the harm caused by capitalism.

"That we are being oppressed, by the rich, that our lives are somehow guided by some group of men who get together every week and discuss how to screw the poor man."

4) Marxism doesn't go into detail about specific capitalists going out of their way to hurt people. It's an analysis of the entire capitalist structure. To quote Marx "Here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests." 

As an example, the heads of major pharmaceutical companies don't sit around gloating about people dying of illness in the third world, they merely protect their patented medicine as a way of protecting their profits which results in cheap generic alternatives not being able to be bought and distributed by charities and other interested groups. It's not evil, it's just how capitalism works. The sad thing is that the result is exactly the same.

"People who follow Marx’s thought, never see this, they think strictly in terms of paper dollars."

5) This is so incredibly incorrect that I'm really going to have to call you out on what you said on twitter about having read Das Kapital. The very first chapter goes into the Labour Theory of Value and how the value of commodities is based on labour.

"Now to be fair there are some bad people out there, however Marx falls for the same economic fallacy which is the unseen actions of a government(s) polices."

6) I've got a few problems with this. One is that I'm not sure I accept what you're positing is a problem, the second and more major one is that I can't see how it applies. It's like saying that Darwin's theories on evolution don't apply because he didn't take into account Newton's laws of gravity. There seems to be no crossover which makes them applicable.

"This means we can see the poor getting paid low wages, (maybe those wages look low to us, but are high compared to the average standard of living in another country), but what we do not see is the price of goods they have to purchase. What if the prices on the items they need to buy are expensive, what if food prices are too high? Doesn’t that hurt the poor? More so if the currency that the workers have to use is fait or paper money with no gold or silver backing it, government then can then just print the amount it needs for whatever program they wish to install, this action of course causes inflation, which in a way is another form of taxation on the poor."

7) This again seems to have not much to do with Marxism, where in Communism goods are awarded as needed rather than based on how much currency someone has. I would also question it's validity as from what I've seen government intervention in food prices (to use your example) have generally been positive, while free market capitalism has ruined them. You can go right back to the 70's US intervention in the Southern Cone or you can go right to the modern day where speculator investment in food futures is causing a boom which is raising prices. Also not forget the wage repression that's been happening for the last forty years, which is an incredible burden on buying everyday goods like food and has only been solved with an increasing debt burden.

"When government prints money, the poorest of society are hit the hardest, since the rich have more options of avoiding inflation. How? Well the rich can put their money in gold, silver, oil, and other commodities, even in other fait currencies if they wish, while the poor are stuck in trading for goods and services through a beaten and inflated dollar."

8) Although I mentioned that governments printing money isn't really relevant, I thought I'd highlight this point because I think it runs parallel to a point worth making. You're completely correct about the rich's abilities to invest their money. This is one of the reasons it's better to have (in a capitalist or interim-socialist economy, not communist obviously) much greater wealth equality.

People without huge amounts of money spend their money more often and spend it within their country's economy. This gives it a much greater velocity and results in a higher GDP then the same amount of money in the hands of a very rich person.  It also has the effect of helping lots of people live better lives!

"Those who follow Marx, no matter to what degree, they miss the unseen actions; they see everything as black and white."

9) "There is no struggle except class struggle" as it were. I don't think this applies in the way you think and even in the way you're not thinking about it hasn't applied for many years. Marxists don't just believe in Communism vs Capitalism, we're well aware of the different forms capitalism can take. Hence the varying views on which type of Capitalism to push for (if at all) while fighting for communism. A few decades ago there were some Marxists groups that wouldn't get involve in anti-racism/anti-sexism work because they thought of it in a distraction, they viewed things in black or white in terms of them being economically related or not - but there's never been that general blindness in terms of parts of the government that you're referring to.

P.S. Smash the system, destroy patriarchy.