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Karl Marx in 3 minutes

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#2
Syne Offline
Socialism has never and will never work. Those who lead the revolution will never create the jobs the rich they usurped did, leading to widespread poverty for all but those revolutionary leaders now become the new elite. And when you threaten the new elite, you get lined up against the wall and shot.

Those who do not learn from history...
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#3
C C Offline
(Oct 11, 2021 08:23 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Concise overview of Karl Marx's major concepts and his thesis of socialism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBYf2uvj408

VIDEO: "... finally we can still easily imagine socialism working so updated where for example each Walmart is collectively owned by all of its employees who have a percentage of the capital it produces based on the labor they put into it they can make an app for that do sum up..."


Except that the idea of employee [stock] ownership dates back to Founding Fathers of the US, not Marx. (History of Employee Ownership)

Capitalism evolves, and the rise of ESO is linked not only to gradual developments over the decades, but emerging business practicalities:

"The popularity of employee-owned companies is growing these days since it brings substantial benefits to the company by boosting the overall performance of the company, bringing tax benefits, and securing employee’s retirement security- to name a few. However, like any other issue, an employee-owned company has its disadvantages too. If you’re thinking about starting or working at an employee-owned company it’s important to understand the pros and cons it has to offer, which we will take a deeper look in this article." --8 Pros and Cons of Employee-owned Companies


In contrast, Marxism champions violent revolution (as the video itself mentions). Like the French Revolution and its Jacobin club that are one of Marxism's intellectual ancestors.

The aftermath (sudden transition) of which pretty much guarantees what history has repeatedly demonstrated: That the Party itself then becomes the new oppressor, filling the vacuum left by the deposed system, with universal impoverishment ensuing.

China has overcome its original inefficaciousness by adopting capitalism (mixed economy) and becoming parasitic upon it in the same way as fascism. (Private companies that swear allegiance to the state benefit, those with roguish tendencies receive opposite treatment.) Rounding out its transition from communism (lingering in name only) to fascism is China's intense nationalism and persecution of minorities within its borders.

In Western Europe and the Anglophone world, the ideology of Marxism only evolves with respect to whom the oppressor is in its social hierarchies framework, that gets blamed for the ills of society.

Such has drifted from the original focus on an economic class of devils (the bourgeois) to the general social justice consciousness of the '60s and early '70s (New Left) with its many exploiters, to the current, narrow racial context of an oppressor (i.e., white people) -- now even borrowing the "privilege" attribution of the old aristocracy that the mobs of the French Revolution revolted against:

"Exposing and dismantling the usually invisible privileges of white people is a related major focus of critical race scholarship." --(Harvard) Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory (CRT) was officially organized in 1989 [...] though its intellectual origins go back much farther, to the 1960s and ’70s. Its immediate precursor was the critical legal studies (CLS) movement -- CLS, an offshoot of Marxist-oriented critical theory, may also be viewed as a radicalization of early 20th-century legal realism... -- (Britannica) Critical Race Theory


Lest pure "liberalism" continue to be erroneously conflated with the Left, CRT is no friend to the former, only a grudging temporary ally at best:

Like CLS scholars, critical race theorists believed that political liberalism was incapable of adequately addressing fundamental problems of injustice in American society ... because its emphasis on the equitable treatment under the law of all races (“colour blindness”) rendered it capable of recognizing only the most overt and obvious racist practices, not those that were relatively indirect, subtle, or systemic. [Unsurprisingly, the "color blindness" of liberalism is not a good thing from the Left's perspective.] Liberalism was also faulted for mistakenly presupposing the apolitical nature of judicial decision-making and for taking a self-consciously incremental or reformist approach that prolonged unjust social arrangements and afforded opportunities for retrenchment and backsliding through administrative delays and conservative legal challenges. -- (Britannica) Critical Race Theory


VIDEO: "Karl Marx is most famous as the main thinker behind socialism and communism, and his text Das Kapital is revered word worldwide.."


"Revered" is correct. Essentially the cognitive bible of most intellectuals and researchers as far as an interpretative background theory for social philosophy and social science contexts go. A lot was learned from the opportunistic offshoots of Christianity, with respect to using altruism slash "good causes" and a choice enemy/demon to arouse the passions of the population. The para-religious nature of Marxism especially exemplified here:

George Bernard Shaw: I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in England. I am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate me? Not a bit of it.

I have begged again and again to be taken to the bosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the Super-Proletarians of all lands should unite. I have pointed out that the German Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its Congresses for the last ten years except the things I told them to do ten years before, and that its path is white with the bones of the Socialist superstitions I and my fellow Fabians have slain. Useless. They do not care a rap whether I am a Socialist or not.

All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?"

Hastening in my innocence to clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten times as much of economics and a hundred times as much of practical administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despised modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of like passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider it one of the most important books of the nineteenth century because of its power of changing the minds of those who read it...

...in spite of its unsound capitalist economics, its parade of quotations from books which the author had either not read or not understood, its affectation of algebraic formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientific treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when any book that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible. In those days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; and nobody would listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had to call itself "scientific," and predict the date of the revolution, as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic laws."

To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any word of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the scandal of my heresy damaged them more than my support aided them; and I found myself an outcast from German Social-Democracy at the moment when, thanks to Trebitsch, the German bourgeoisie and nobility began to smile on me, seduced by the pleasure of playing with fire, and perhaps by Agnes Sorma's acting as Candida.

Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of chains...
--The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring


The influence on the academic community, of Antonio Gramsci's developmental refinements:

Cultural hegemony has philosophically influenced Eurocommunism, the social sciences, and the activist politics of socially liberal and progressive politicians. The analytic discourse of cultural hegemony is important to research and synthesis in anthropology, political science, sociology, and cultural studies; in education, cultural hegemony developed critical pedagogy, by which the root causes of political and social discontent can be identified, and so resolved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_h..._influence

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#4
Syne Offline
(Oct 12, 2021 09:47 PM)C C Wrote: In Western Europe and the Anglophone world, the ideology of Marxism only evolves with respect to whom the oppressor is in its social hierarchies framework, that gets blamed for the ills of society.

Including Nazi Germany blaming the Jews.
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