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meatcleaver -> RE: Communism (7/1/2008 5:15:05 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: slaveboyforyou
Karl Marx never worked a day in his life. He leeched off of other people; most notably his friend Fredrich Engles. Marx's family lived in poverty, and three of his seven children never survived to adulthood. He was a lazy, fat member of the very bourgeois he railed against in his writings. The poverty of his own family didn't compel him to join the ranks of the working class, but it didn't stop him from spending the little money he had on luxuries. He was a hypocrite of the worst kind.
Communism is an unworkable idea that operates in opposition to human nature. The only way it can be implemented is through force, and we saw how that worked out in the 20th Century. Twenty-million plus dead in the Soviet Union under Stalin, probably close to 50 million dead during the Chinese famine, two-million plus murdered by the Khmer Rouge, and on and on.
You can say that about just any intellectual you care to mention from Archimedes to the present. Currently most intellectuals are paid for by the tax payer or by educational establishments where most money comes from the state of benefactors, one could say they leech from them. I think you will find that Frederick Engels probably wouldn't say Marx leeched off him since he encouraged Marx in his writings.
Stalinism and Chineese communism and the Khmer Rouge have about as much to do with communism as Hitler had to do with christianity. Since Marx was a philosopher, it is nothing to do with him should someone claim to follow his ideas since he has no control over them just as Jesus has no control of idiot christian fundementalists or Mohammad has no control over idiot mulim fundementalists. However much of European social welfare and unversal healthcare is based on the thinking of Marx and Engels and much more. It is not about ideology because Marx wasn't an ideologist, it is about considering his ideas and applying them practically and that has to do with the people applying his ideas and not Marx himself.
As Marx said 'I am not a Marxist', simply because he was a thinker and he never stopped thinking. However one has to view his writings and communist manifesto with the backdrop of rampant laisez faire capitalism going unchecked. People dying in European cities in pandemic numbers due to hunger, desease, long hours, poor sanitation, no health and safety, due to rampant profiteering, corruption and outright theft by the rich and politically powerful. The average life span of a workingclass male in an industrial society was around 30. That is the background revolutions are made of and in which communist ideas were formulated.
One shouldn't forget, contemporary western European societies are capitalist-socialist/communist hybrids, to a lesser extent, even the USA is.
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