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Huemer mentions Marx as an example of someone whose politically motivated actions broadly led to more harm than good over time, in his view. One can swap in Sta

Huemer mentions Marx as an example of someone whose politically motivated actions broadly led to more harm than good over time, in his view. One can swap in Stalin or Mao, for their Cultural and Russian Revolutions which both killed many hundreds of thousands, or some living memory political actor like George W. Bush or the 9/11 airplane hijackers themselves for their political actions inciting and stoking the flames of the War on Terror, which killed some 3 million in its own right. The paper condemns all of these people for their part in mass murder, and thinks the world would have probably been a better place if they did nothing at all.

SequoiaHope 3y ago
Marx doesn’t fit in to this group. All he did of consequence was write books. Stalin, Mao, and George W Bush all directly or indirectly ordered the murder of millions. Marx just wrote theory which only when misapplied by a violent state led to suffering. Marx never killed anyone! It seems to me to be a gross intellectual error to conflate Marx with mass murderers. Marx’s theories were popular among revolutionaries at the time of Lenin’s rise and he took advantage of that appeal when he styled himself a Marxist. But even then he created his own theories we call Marxist-Leninism, so called because they are not based purely on Marx. To say Marx played any real part in mass murder is like saying the Nasis were socialists because they put “socialist” in their name - intellectually vacant. I implore you - do not put so much stock in the writing of someone who has led you down this path! There are better answers out there without these gross errors.