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My wife is from Cuba, I've witnessed first hand what "applied" marxism creates, misery and strife. Let alone places like North Korea etc.. Honest question, how

by kenrikm 13y ago

My wife is from Cuba, I've witnessed first hand what "applied" marxism creates, misery and strife. Let alone places like North Korea etc.. Honest question, how do you cope with the reality vs the ideal?

wonderzombie 13y ago
Wait, do you actually think DPRK is actually communist? It reads far more like an autocracy to me. On the other hand, look at the rest of the industrialized world. Almost every industrialized nation has socialized medicine, social insurance/welfare, etc. You're trying to characterize it as a binary when it's a lot more like capitalism in that there's a lot of latitude.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> My wife is from Cuba, I've witnessed first hand what "applied" marxism creates, misery and strife. Let alone places like North Korea etc.. Honest question, how do you cope with the reality vs the ideal? IME, self-identified Marxists outside of countries run by Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships tend to view nominally "Marxist" Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships as having roughly the same relationship to Marxism as modern self-identified proponents of democracy outside of Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships have usually viewed nominally democratic Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships like the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" of having to democracy.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
A friend of mine calls this "The Horror". It is in the very application of Marxism that the whole thing falls to pieces. I think Marx was great at analysis, however he didn't understand work or the layers of design and engineering that lies behind the means of production. Also, he was a theorist whose ideas got applied while he was still tinkering with them and pretty much all of his ideas of how to solve the problems he had identified were pretty terrible. The economic questions he posed however, have still not been satisfactorily answered.
- ericd 13y ago
  I've heard Marx described as having been great at diagnosis, but terrible at prescription.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > I've heard Marx described as having been great at diagnosis, but terrible at prescription. Marx and Engels weren't all that bad at prescription -- a substantial portion of the 10 key concrete policies for "advanced countries" in the Communist Manifesto have been widely and successfully adopted in the modern, developed, "capitalist" world. Lenin's rewriting of Marx's program to a very different one, with notionally the same end state and, in many cases, similar near term policy changes to be applied in very different contexts, that was supposed to work in conditions which had neither the specific problems Marx's program was designed to address nor the foundations from which Marx's program was designed to address them, hasn't worked out very well, but that's a different issue.

by kenrikm 13y ago

wonderzombie 13y ago

Wait, do you actually think DPRK is actually communist? It reads far more like an autocracy to me. On the other hand, look at the rest of the industrialized world. Almost every industrialized nation has socialized medicine, social insurance/welfare, etc. You're trying to characterize it as a binary when it's a lot more like capitalism in that there's a lot of latitude.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> My wife is from Cuba, I've witnessed first hand what "applied" marxism creates, misery and strife. Let alone places like North Korea etc.. Honest question, how do you cope with the reality vs the ideal? IME, self-identified Marxists outside of countries run by Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships tend to view nominally "Marxist" Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships as having roughly the same relationship to Marxism as modern self-identified proponents of democracy outside of Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships have usually viewed nominally democratic Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships like the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" of having to democracy.

moocowduckquack 13y ago

A friend of mine calls this "The Horror". It is in the very application of Marxism that the whole thing falls to pieces. I think Marx was great at analysis, however he didn't understand work or the layers of design and engineering that lies behind the means of production. Also, he was a theorist whose ideas got applied while he was still tinkering with them and pretty much all of his ideas of how to solve the problems he had identified were pretty terrible. The economic questions he posed however, have still not been satisfactorily answered.

ericd 13y ago
I've heard Marx described as having been great at diagnosis, but terrible at prescription.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > I've heard Marx described as having been great at diagnosis, but terrible at prescription. Marx and Engels weren't all that bad at prescription -- a substantial portion of the 10 key concrete policies for "advanced countries" in the Communist Manifesto have been widely and successfully adopted in the modern, developed, "capitalist" world. Lenin's rewriting of Marx's program to a very different one, with notionally the same end state and, in many cases, similar near term policy changes to be applied in very different contexts, that was supposed to work in conditions which had neither the specific problems Marx's program was designed to address nor the foundations from which Marx's program was designed to address them, hasn't worked out very well, but that's a different issue.