My friend used to say that he feels bad for the guy who invented the ski mask. He just wanted to keep peoples faces warm while they ski, but people took his invention and used it 99% of the time for robberies. 😂
I just see Marx as an idiot who invented a terrible tool.
God this take is even more illiterate than the Black Book Baby Brigade's accusation that Marx personally killed at least 1000000000000000000005 people. Sure he wasn't a seer, but he wasn't a mere economic theorist either. He was a revolutionary, and he was a incisive observer of the social developments during his lifetime. All your Libertarian "theorists" were primarily concerned with creating ever more elaborate justifications for a system they were precluded from seriously examining but you read the Marx wiki article and your takeaway is "yeah he just didn't know what he was talking about" like good God you dullard read a fucking book.
Maybe a 'political philosophy' that boils down to "I just want to be able to own everything including other people with no real restrictions besides capital" doesn't attract the best or the brightest individuals
It hardly needs to, as political leadership contests don't select for intelligence.
At the end of the day, the capitalist class has crushed the proletariat in no small part by being more brutish than the most bloodthirsty Gonzalite. We don't staff the military and the police academies with a handful of 60-year-old chess masters. We stuff it with a bunch of trigger-happy thumb-head 19-year-olds.
It's funny to see liberals/libertarians occasionally do to Marx what Lenin talked about in the first paragraph of State and Revolution. They're still doing it. They're defanging him and trying to make him this well-meaning doofus who just didn't understand what he was saying, didn't know what would happen with his works. He just wanted to write philosophy and have a utopia where people shared? Except, no, like you said Marx was a revolutionary. He was intimately involved with the First International, he was helping organize local revolutionary cadres and labor unions, he was writing policy outlines for communist parties throughout Europe. The guy meant what he wrote. The Communist Manifesto was written somewhat in response to the Paris revolts of 1848, a revolt which Marx believed didn't go far enough. He criticized the revolutionaries for failing to capture the state, which eventually neutered them.
He wasn't just some naive utopian, Marx knew exactly what was gonna happen in a socialist revolution
God this take is even more illiterate than the Black Book Baby Brigade's accusation that Marx personally killed at least 1000000000000000000005 people. Sure he wasn't a seer, but he wasn't a mere economic theorist either. He was a revolutionary, and he was a incisive observer of the social developments during his lifetime. All your Libertarian "theorists" were primarily concerned with creating ever more elaborate justifications for a system they were precluded from seriously examining but you read the Marx wiki article and your takeaway is "yeah he just didn't know what he was talking about" like good God you dullard read a fucking book.
Maybe a 'political philosophy' that boils down to "I just want to be able to own everything including other people with no real restrictions besides capital" doesn't attract the best or the brightest individuals
:curious-marx:
It hardly needs to, as political leadership contests don't select for intelligence.
At the end of the day, the capitalist class has crushed the proletariat in no small part by being more brutish than the most bloodthirsty Gonzalite. We don't staff the military and the police academies with a handful of 60-year-old chess masters. We stuff it with a bunch of trigger-happy thumb-head 19-year-olds.
It's funny to see liberals/libertarians occasionally do to Marx what Lenin talked about in the first paragraph of State and Revolution. They're still doing it. They're defanging him and trying to make him this well-meaning doofus who just didn't understand what he was saying, didn't know what would happen with his works. He just wanted to write philosophy and have a utopia where people shared? Except, no, like you said Marx was a revolutionary. He was intimately involved with the First International, he was helping organize local revolutionary cadres and labor unions, he was writing policy outlines for communist parties throughout Europe. The guy meant what he wrote. The Communist Manifesto was written somewhat in response to the Paris revolts of 1848, a revolt which Marx believed didn't go far enough. He criticized the revolutionaries for failing to capture the state, which eventually neutered them.
He wasn't just some naive utopian, Marx knew exactly what was gonna happen in a socialist revolution