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>"hundreds of millions of corpses" Except that those millions of corpses were not caused by Marx or his theories but by a flawed implementation of it by some p

by pikzen 12y ago

>"hundreds of millions of corpses" Except that those millions of corpses were not caused by Marx or his theories but by a flawed implementation of it by some power hungry dictators. In terms of tech, don't blame the spec if you didn't implement it correctly.

ende 12y ago
And when the same blue print produces the same horrorific implementation every time? At some point it has to be recognized when the flaw is with the architect.
cousin_it 12y ago
In Soviet Russia, the three main waves of repression were the Red Terror, the Collectivization, and the Great Purge. Only the last of those was caused by a power-hungry dictator, the first two were caused by committee leadership.
- canjobear 12y ago
  I'd dispute that the Red Terror and Collectivization were caused by committee leadership, since the authority of Lenin and Stalin was beyond question at those times respectively. But what is more disturbing is that these actions were unapologetically intended to be violent; the lives of "bourgeois" or "kulaks" were considered to matter not at all because of their "class". The ruling ideology was that certain classes were "bloodsuckers" unworthy of life. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like class to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they're in a certain class is extremely disturbing. It is not clear to me that this was a Bolshevik innovation rather than something that is latent in Marx.
  - scarmig 12y ago
    Two points: 1) It's true that there were uniquely powerful and dominant figures during both the Red Terror and the Collectivization. But those were people who genuinely had the support of the rest of the Party. Many of the other Bolshevik leaders were just as bad. In fact, Trotsky (the alternative on hand who usually plays the "if only the czar knew!" role to wishful leftists) was if anything worse, pushing for an immediate campaign of massive warfare and terrorism to be extended to other countries and being particularly brutal in putting down rebellions. 2) Thinkers trade in abstractions--thought is really just the application and generation of new abstractions. It's not clear to me that you can hold those thinkers responsible, though, when people proclaiming their ideology use their abstractions to ride roughshod over human rights (itself an abstraction...) Take Adam Smith, who's a secular saint in the Anglosphere. The liberal version of British imperialism embraced him and laissez-faire capitalism to justify actions that cost tens of millions of lives. E.g. the Irish famine, the Indian famines, arguably even the Opium Wars/Taiping Rebellion. A typical argument for not providing famine relief by the Indian Famine Commission: The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief [...] would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension. This variant of capitalist ideology was the deadliest in the world during its time, until variants of Marxism managed to blow that record away. I think you can just as easily say, "A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like property rights to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they lack property is extremely disturbing." It seems to me that the only ideologies out there with clean hands are the ones that only exist in people's heads. FTR, I think the healthiest approach is to reject all ideologies that pretend to be all-encompassing and use the analytical tools provided by them as needed. Epistemological, if not political, anarchism.
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    - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      A philosophy that reifies any idea to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they fit some category is extremely disturbing. With Marx/Lenin/Stalin, it was class. With capitalists, it was property rights. With Hitler, it was race. I'd say it's worth fighting for national defense, but not too many other things...
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Except that those millions of corpses were not caused by Marx or his theories but by a flawed implementation of it by some power hungry dictators. Leninist vanguardism, however much it may borrow language from Marx (mostly about abstract goals) and call itself "Marxist-Leninism" is not, in terms of concrete prescription (or even conditions in which it is designed to operate) anything like Marxism. > In terms of tech, don't blame the spec if you didn't implement it correctly. Those implementing Leninism and its descendants were working from a very different spec than Marx's work, not merely poorly implementing the spec.
- scarmig 12y ago
  The key take-away when thinking about Marx's role in Marxism, though, is that Marx didn't create much of any kind of a spec, good or bad. The main concrete proposals he had were pretty banal by today's standards, ideas like universal education, and he didn't say much about how to get there besides hand-waving revolution.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > The key take-away when thinking about Marx's role in Marxism, though, is that Marx didn't create much of any kind of a spec, good or bad. I disagree. > The main concrete proposals he had were pretty banal by today's standards, ideas like universal education Some of them are banal by today's standards because they have been pretty much universally adopted among modern mixed economies (many of which were the developed capitalist societies of Marx's today, to which his prescriptions applied.) > and he didn't say much about how to get there besides hand-waving revolution. The concrete proposals like the ones you are talking about in Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto were -- and were expressly stated to be -- the immediate first steps of the "how to get there" (with "there" being the goal state), and each of the concrete proposals was, IIRC, presented in the context of its specific function in moving toward the desired end state.
aminok 12y ago
Marxism is a flawed theory, so all implementations of it will be flawed. The capital owner is not committing wage theft when he hires an employee and makes a profit.
saiya-jin 12y ago
There is fundamental issue with spec - it cannot be implemented properly, because it completely ignores basic human "qualities" like greed, envy, paranoia, huge egos of power hungry control freaks on top of pyramide and so on. On paper it looks great of course, paper can handle a lot after all. Yes, we can keep trying, or we can learn from history. Wait... who does that? :)

by pikzen 12y ago

ende 12y ago

And when the same blue print produces the same horrorific implementation every time? At some point it has to be recognized when the flaw is with the architect.

cousin_it 12y ago

In Soviet Russia, the three main waves of repression were the Red Terror, the Collectivization, and the Great Purge. Only the last of those was caused by a power-hungry dictator, the first two were caused by committee leadership.

canjobear 12y ago
I'd dispute that the Red Terror and Collectivization were caused by committee leadership, since the authority of Lenin and Stalin was beyond question at those times respectively. But what is more disturbing is that these actions were unapologetically intended to be violent; the lives of "bourgeois" or "kulaks" were considered to matter not at all because of their "class". The ruling ideology was that certain classes were "bloodsuckers" unworthy of life. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like class to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they're in a certain class is extremely disturbing. It is not clear to me that this was a Bolshevik innovation rather than something that is latent in Marx.
- scarmig 12y ago
  Two points: 1) It's true that there were uniquely powerful and dominant figures during both the Red Terror and the Collectivization. But those were people who genuinely had the support of the rest of the Party. Many of the other Bolshevik leaders were just as bad. In fact, Trotsky (the alternative on hand who usually plays the "if only the czar knew!" role to wishful leftists) was if anything worse, pushing for an immediate campaign of massive warfare and terrorism to be extended to other countries and being particularly brutal in putting down rebellions. 2) Thinkers trade in abstractions--thought is really just the application and generation of new abstractions. It's not clear to me that you can hold those thinkers responsible, though, when people proclaiming their ideology use their abstractions to ride roughshod over human rights (itself an abstraction...) Take Adam Smith, who's a secular saint in the Anglosphere. The liberal version of British imperialism embraced him and laissez-faire capitalism to justify actions that cost tens of millions of lives. E.g. the Irish famine, the Indian famines, arguably even the Opium Wars/Taiping Rebellion. A typical argument for not providing famine relief by the Indian Famine Commission: The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief [...] would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension. This variant of capitalist ideology was the deadliest in the world during its time, until variants of Marxism managed to blow that record away. I think you can just as easily say, "A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like property rights to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they lack property is extremely disturbing." It seems to me that the only ideologies out there with clean hands are the ones that only exist in people's heads. FTR, I think the healthiest approach is to reject all ideologies that pretend to be all-encompassing and use the analytical tools provided by them as needed. Epistemological, if not political, anarchism.
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  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
    A philosophy that reifies any idea to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they fit some category is extremely disturbing. With Marx/Lenin/Stalin, it was class. With capitalists, it was property rights. With Hitler, it was race. I'd say it's worth fighting for national defense, but not too many other things...

dragonwriter 12y ago

> Except that those millions of corpses were not caused by Marx or his theories but by a flawed implementation of it by some power hungry dictators. Leninist vanguardism, however much it may borrow language from Marx (mostly about abstract goals) and call itself "Marxist-Leninism" is not, in terms of concrete prescription (or even conditions in which it is designed to operate) anything like Marxism. > In terms of tech, don't blame the spec if you didn't implement it correctly. Those implementing Leninism and its descendants were working from a very different spec than Marx's work, not merely poorly implementing the spec.

scarmig 12y ago
The key take-away when thinking about Marx's role in Marxism, though, is that Marx didn't create much of any kind of a spec, good or bad. The main concrete proposals he had were pretty banal by today's standards, ideas like universal education, and he didn't say much about how to get there besides hand-waving revolution.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The key take-away when thinking about Marx's role in Marxism, though, is that Marx didn't create much of any kind of a spec, good or bad. I disagree. > The main concrete proposals he had were pretty banal by today's standards, ideas like universal education Some of them are banal by today's standards because they have been pretty much universally adopted among modern mixed economies (many of which were the developed capitalist societies of Marx's today, to which his prescriptions applied.) > and he didn't say much about how to get there besides hand-waving revolution. The concrete proposals like the ones you are talking about in Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto were -- and were expressly stated to be -- the immediate first steps of the "how to get there" (with "there" being the goal state), and each of the concrete proposals was, IIRC, presented in the context of its specific function in moving toward the desired end state.

aminok 12y ago

Marxism is a flawed theory, so all implementations of it will be flawed. The capital owner is not committing wage theft when he hires an employee and makes a profit.

saiya-jin 12y ago

There is fundamental issue with spec - it cannot be implemented properly, because it completely ignores basic human "qualities" like greed, envy, paranoia, huge egos of power hungry control freaks on top of pyramide and so on. On paper it looks great of course, paper can handle a lot after all. Yes, we can keep trying, or we can learn from history. Wait... who does that? :)