Sinekein wrote:I don't think there is another country in the world where the words "blue collar" or "white collar" have more significance than the U.S., who are not exactly a communist regime.
I've never disputed the usefulness or aptness of some of the terminology he uses. Heck, I've referred to myself multiple times as "unapologetically petite bourgeoisie." But extracting terms from a particular political philosopher has never meant that their underlying argument is worthwhile (else virtually every Greek or Roman philosopher in the history of ever would have to be correct, even though many are wildly contradictory, because we've indiscriminately mined their works for terminology and aggressively adapted and changed their meaning over eons. Telos much? Logos? I promise Derrida doesn't mean the same thing by Logos that Thomas Aquinas means by it, let alone various ancient Greeks who themselves used it in contradictory ways).
Furthermore, I'm not really an expert on which of these terms even originated with Marx. Proto anarchism and socialism predates him by decades after-all so it's entirely possible (and probable) that he's in fact borrowing a lot of those words from other sources.
What's wrong with Marx are the solutions he proposes to solve the issues of capitalism - and that's what political regimes will rely on
But this (along with dialectical materialism) is literally the only thing that really separates Marx from earlier strains of socialism or from later species of psuedo-socialism like social democracy that fix a lot of the problems socialists brought up without throwing the baby out with the capitalist bathwater. Although his "solution" was aimed at the same point as all of the harebrained materialist utopianisms of the 19th century: the last stage of history, the Eden of pure propertyless, stateless egalitarianism or whatever, he was the one (so far as I know) who put forward that society would *require* the intermediary stage of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." That is, there would need to be a stage where the proletariat forcibly seizes the mechanisms of the government, not to abolish it, but to use its power to compel society to go in the direction it needed to go in, and only then could the government be abolished. And moreover, this is without any of the "affectations" of past systems that constrain arbitrary exercise of government power like natural rights which stinks of liberalism, which he condemns as its inseparable from capitalism, or the codes of antiquity (chivalric or Christian or whatever) because they are oppressive.
How is this anything but a recipe for a gulag state? For purges?
but his diagnostics on society and power dynamics tend to be extremely spot-on, if a bit dated by the evolution of technology and the occurrence of globalisation - but globalisation fits pretty much right in with Marx' class theories, the main difference being that now there is a geographical separation between the bourgeoisie/aristocracy and the workforce.
But it really isn't though, other than occasional moments of poetic profundity (some of which he bizarrely shares with Edmund Burke who is the father of modern conservatism). His diagnostic of power differentials in society in the later half of the 19th century is arguably spot on, but inasmuch as he justifies and situates that within a supposedly scientific framework of history (that is dialectical materialism) and uses that as an explanation for how we got to this moment and as a prediction of where things will go from here, he's wildly wrong. He actually commits the same stupid fallacy that his arguable arch nemeses (the Austrian school economists and their various neoliberal/con descendants) make which is to reduce all of human activity to economics and to shoehorn the explanation for everything through not just an economic filter, but an insanely overly simplistic economic filter devoid of actual data, statistics, or models. Though I'd argue that Marxism is actually much, much prescriptive than Austrian economics.
And there's no need for me to retype that big explanation I gave earlier to the inherent danger in the fact that it claims to be scientific and objective (in explicit comparison to all previous explanations which were irrational), but to summarize it means the "No True Scotsman" thing is baked into it from the beginning. Combine that with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the moral certitude and imperative and utopianism of socialism generally, and what results do you expect you will get when its implemented exactly?
Every other thing in Marxism is stuff he got from other people (Hegel as one prominent example, there's something of Rousseau in him as well). The thing that makes Marxism Marxism, the things that make it unique, are the very things that make it dangerous.
I mean, he theoretized class struggle
I don't know that he coined the whole concept of class struggle, but he certainly popularized class struggle as the be-all, end-all mother of all explanations for the nature of things, which as I've made clear in the rest of this is innovative, but insanely dangerous.
