what killed Marxism?

Originally posted by AMANNAMEDQUEST
Marxism, or what many people identify as Communism sounded like a great idea. That there was no class. Whats mine is yours and yours is mine. We all share the fruits of our labor. So what killed it?

Marxists.

No hard feeling hopefully

None at all.

Originally posted by InSpiteOf
Is it Irony?

No, IMO, it was pretty clear what the point of that post was.

Irony? Not very clear as there are many deluded people who do actually believe the capitilists governments make good foreign policy decisions

People choose what they are going to believe political, and I won't waste my effort trying to change minds. I'll give you a personal story, a book suggestion, and then leave it alone.

This was back in the winter of 1986. I was getting the chance to travel for the first time, and see communism up close. It was in Budapesht. I had a friend who was also an archaeology student.

He lived in an apartment I wasn't allowed to enter, as a tourist. Be he told about living in this huge, drab, Stalin-era housing high rise. The individual apartments didn't have thermostats, because that would be "capitalist." The management set the temperature for the whole housing bloc. Due to shortages of natural gas, the temp was set at just a few degrees above freezing. People were at risk of getting frostbite, even dying, inside their apartments.

So what the tenants did was to start leaving the door open on their oven. Instead of cooking anything, they'd just use the oven to heat the whole apartment. It was an even bigger use of natural gas than just letting people be warm would have been. And because it was collective housing, they couldn't cut the heat off to just one apartment, or to the heat but not the ovens.

What was the government's response? Admit the limits of collective living? Of course not. The government set up what they called "oven police." Who would make surprise inspections--they'd barge into your apartment, and check your oven to see if you were heating your apartment by wasting the people's gas.

So the people would make up a batch of dough. When the shout of "oven police" would come up through the ventilation shaft, or via a morse-code tap through the walls, everyone would throw the dough into the oven, and claim that they were legitimately baking bread.

So then the oven police were armed, and would lock the apartment down, and to swat-style raids to see if your oven was hot but your dough was cold. My friend said some people had been arrested and "disappeard" for the offense of faking baking.

And all in the name of collective living.

The book I suggest is one than no one ever reads any more, because it's about communism. It is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973 The Gulag Archipelago. While the theme is technically the system of Soviet prison camps for political criminals, Solzhenitsyn does an incredible job of describing life in a police state.

Not that it will change anyone's mind. But information at least lets you critique marxism (and maybe its opposite as well) from a knowing perspective.

All the best.

Originally posted by golddragnet

Irony? Not very clear as there are many deluded people who do actually believe the capitilists governments make good foreign policy decisions

I never said they make GOOD foriegn policy choices for the people. I simply said their choices are not misguided. Leaders dont blunder around is bascially what i said, implying that they have a very acurate overall picture and their actions and policies support THEIR overall picture.

They've just managed to get everyone to believe that THEIR interests share common ground with the PEOPLES interests.

EDIT TO ADD: I guess my recomended reading would be one of my favorites, Black shirts and Reds. By Michael Parenti. It is more distictively from a marxist POV but still a good read.

[edit on 13-2-2007 by InSpiteOf]

just a question

if capitalism is so amazing
then why do we have minimum wage laws, child labor laws, maternity leave lawes, etc preventing pure capitalism?

why do we have anti-monopoly laws if capitalism is so perfect?

here is the thing about marx
he didn't say that capitalism was BAD, he actually thought it was the best system up unti that point in history
one of his best points is the inherent corruption that takes place in a capitalist system

Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
just a question

if capitalism is so amazing
then why do we have minimum wage laws, child labor laws, maternity leave lawes, etc preventing pure capitalism?

why do we have anti-monopoly laws if capitalism is so perfect?

Those are products of democractic stuggle, not capitalism.

here is the thing about marx
he didn't say that capitalism was BAD, he actually thought it was the best system up unti that point in history
one of his best points is the inherent corruption that takes place in a capitalist system

IMO he had more love for socialism than capitalism. His critiques fall largely on democracit usrpation, the abuse of power, the potential abuse of power, and capital being accumulated in few and few hands.

truth , truth killed it , it is truth that kills most political systems since most are tissue of lies. political systems are for the most part made by the elite for the elite and the masses can have what ever they don't need or want. you can read all the political books you want and then look at the systems that are pro-ported to be based on them and see if you can recognize the reality from the ideal. Marx was no more of a genius than Jefferson or Plato or ... then you get Stalin or whoever and them... it's the nkvd or the cia or name your poison.

Stalin killed Marxism. Marx had a good idea, Lenin was implementing it quite well, although that can be argued. Trotsky had some really good ideas, most of which were trampled by Stalin. Stalin made his own bastardized brand of Communism. All others have followed in his arcane wake, further bastardizing Marxism (Castro being the exception). All representations of communism since have been in the form of Stalin/Maoism. Trotsky is greatly overlooked.

[edit on 14-2-2007 by Vilkata]