You'll find them in history departments and political science departments and in the occasional former-Marxist apostate but aside from that at best you're going to come across people who have read the Manifesto and there's every chance that the anti-communist indoctrination they've absorbed over their lifetime has clouded their interpretation of it.
I'm not saying that you have to agree with Marx to understand him but if you want to understand Marxism then you have to weigh it based on its internal arguments rather than projecting your own beliefs onto it.
The overwhelming majority of the vocal anti-communists I encounter are charlatans and blowhards, and the most tragic part about it is that, to people who have done the reading, it's painfully obvious and yet they'll be out there proclaiming that Marxists are "too afraid to debate them" and that the only response they get from Marxist is a dismissive "Read theory".
But there's another side to this story.
When you've actually done the reading, there are some very clear tells when a person hasn't even done the most basic reading themselves. This is the exact reason why they get told to read theory or they get dismissed and ridiculed; flat earthers get ridiculed by geologists and physicists because flat earthers don't take the science seriously so there's absolutely no reason why a scientist would take them seriously. But also, when you have a person who doesn't even grasp the very fundamentals or even the basic terms then it makes a discussions functionally impossible because the knowledgeable person is going to be tasked with interpreting what the ignorant person is attempting to say (rather than taking their words on face value), extrapolating out their argument from there, rebutting their argument (which, at any point, the ignorant person can deploy a motte-and-bailey tactic by claiming "that's not what I meant!!") making their own argument in a way that the message can be adequately conveyed across the barrier of scientific illiteracy, and all the while they also need to correct the ignorant person and educate them on their misconceptions and their gaps in knowledge while defending their own position.
Anyone who knows their stuff quickly becomes very dismissive of the arrogant attitude of a person who claims to know their shit when it's obvious that they don't because they've probably already tried playing a straight hand, as described above, and fast learned how impossible a task it is.
Here's a small example from something recently:
Show
So, on the face of this it seems pretty innocuous, right?
This comment was in response to a topic about Marxist-Leninists btw. To a person who knows the basics, there are some major tells in what this other person says.
A person who knows the basics understands that "Leninist" is a term that Trotskyists identify with. Marxist-Leninist is a term that "Stalinists" identify with. While they are both part of the philosophical tradition of Marxism and Leninism, to conflate the two is like confusing a Catholic with a Protestant; these are both part of the same religion and the same religious heritage however they are very much in opposition to one another.
A person who wants to be taken seriously when talking about Christianity must be able to know the difference between Catholics and Protestants, and there's no way that they'd accidentally confuse the two. In the same way, a person who can't tell the difference between a Leninist and a Marxist-Leninist is really tipping their hand by signalling that they don't know what they're talking about.
Now the next tell is "material analysis". That's what a person does in a lab with a microscope.
They are attempting to refer to "materialist analysis", which is analysis based in dialectical and/or historical materialism. Materialism -> Materialist. There's no mistaking this one. You wouldn't call someone "a Catholicism" because, if you are at all familiar with Christianity then you'd know that the term is "Catholic" and you wouldn't slip up on that. In the same way this applies to Marxism and the term "materialist".
Of course there's no way that I was going to teach this fool how to polish their arguments to better pass it off as if they're more knowledgeable than they are; if you don't take the subject matter seriously then you don't get taken seriously in my book, and this applies to the overwhelming majority of anti-communists in my experience.
Honestly it's extremely rare.
You'll find them in history departments and political science departments and in the occasional former-Marxist apostate but aside from that at best you're going to come across people who have read the Manifesto and there's every chance that the anti-communist indoctrination they've absorbed over their lifetime has clouded their interpretation of it.
I'm not saying that you have to agree with Marx to understand him but if you want to understand Marxism then you have to weigh it based on its internal arguments rather than projecting your own beliefs onto it.
The overwhelming majority of the vocal anti-communists I encounter are charlatans and blowhards, and the most tragic part about it is that, to people who have done the reading, it's painfully obvious and yet they'll be out there proclaiming that Marxists are "too afraid to debate them" and that the only response they get from Marxist is a dismissive "Read theory".
But there's another side to this story.
When you've actually done the reading, there are some very clear tells when a person hasn't even done the most basic reading themselves. This is the exact reason why they get told to read theory or they get dismissed and ridiculed; flat earthers get ridiculed by geologists and physicists because flat earthers don't take the science seriously so there's absolutely no reason why a scientist would take them seriously. But also, when you have a person who doesn't even grasp the very fundamentals or even the basic terms then it makes a discussions functionally impossible because the knowledgeable person is going to be tasked with interpreting what the ignorant person is attempting to say (rather than taking their words on face value), extrapolating out their argument from there, rebutting their argument (which, at any point, the ignorant person can deploy a motte-and-bailey tactic by claiming "that's not what I meant!!") making their own argument in a way that the message can be adequately conveyed across the barrier of scientific illiteracy, and all the while they also need to correct the ignorant person and educate them on their misconceptions and their gaps in knowledge while defending their own position.
Anyone who knows their stuff quickly becomes very dismissive of the arrogant attitude of a person who claims to know their shit when it's obvious that they don't because they've probably already tried playing a straight hand, as described above, and fast learned how impossible a task it is.
Here's a small example from something recently:
So, on the face of this it seems pretty innocuous, right?
This comment was in response to a topic about Marxist-Leninists btw. To a person who knows the basics, there are some major tells in what this other person says.
A person who knows the basics understands that "Leninist" is a term that Trotskyists identify with. Marxist-Leninist is a term that "Stalinists" identify with. While they are both part of the philosophical tradition of Marxism and Leninism, to conflate the two is like confusing a Catholic with a Protestant; these are both part of the same religion and the same religious heritage however they are very much in opposition to one another.
A person who wants to be taken seriously when talking about Christianity must be able to know the difference between Catholics and Protestants, and there's no way that they'd accidentally confuse the two. In the same way, a person who can't tell the difference between a Leninist and a Marxist-Leninist is really tipping their hand by signalling that they don't know what they're talking about.
Now the next tell is "material analysis". That's what a person does in a lab with a microscope.
They are attempting to refer to "materialist analysis", which is analysis based in dialectical and/or historical materialism. Materialism -> Materialist. There's no mistaking this one. You wouldn't call someone "a Catholicism" because, if you are at all familiar with Christianity then you'd know that the term is "Catholic" and you wouldn't slip up on that. In the same way this applies to Marxism and the term "materialist".
Of course there's no way that I was going to teach this fool how to polish their arguments to better pass it off as if they're more knowledgeable than they are; if you don't take the subject matter seriously then you don't get taken seriously in my book, and this applies to the overwhelming majority of anti-communists in my experience.
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