<p>@Vanagandr the implication you made wasn’t that PEOPLE tend not to think for themselves, but that YOUNG people tend not to think for themselves while older people DO. I would agree that people in general do not think for themselves, but it’s offensive to claim that this condition exists solely in the realm of youth.</p>
<p>And yes, I get the joke lmao, I was half-asleep when I wrote that. I had a World Philosophers on Death course last Fall, Unit II was based on Marxism and how twisted our funeral system is, one of the readings was a really mind-screwy 1950s-esk type “Buy Moxie” kind of explaination of the embalming/preserving process and all the little tiny details to make the person look as if they were “just sleeping” so we wouldn’t have to witness the true face of death. The second reading was Marx himself making an argument how when we get a job (such as Watchmaker) we can basically be defined by that, we become that Watch. When we get paid for it, the guy who pays us takes that Watch away and in a sense, takes away our identity by doing so, in trade for a slip of paper. Essentially boiling down to the fetishization of “buying” things (and our funeral system) and the “in the end, it’s just paper money, plastic cards, and metal coins, until we put our faith into the system” argument. It was a lot more complicated than I’m making it but it’s been a long LOOONG year since Unit 2 so I can only remember the key details (that and i don’t feel like running into my room to the filing folder to reference my notes).</p>
<p>Now you attack implications…my, aren’t we grasping at straws?</p>
<p>I said first that young people tend to be moronic and most of them are lacking in ideas. I derive that from observation; you lot are predisposed toward feeble-mindedness. A search of this forum will prove my point. That does not imply that older people think for themselves; they never entered the equation until the second post. There, I specified that people young and old generally do not think for themselves. Had I said ‘younger people are more moronic’ or perhaps made a direct comparison, you would have a point, but I did not, ergo your argument is bunk.</p>
<p>As by your post’s criterion I did not say something offensive, I shall fix that:
Itachirumon keeps horse manure between his ears, and when he opens his mouth, his words attract flies.</p>
-Vanagandr’s latest post.
Look buddy, you’re not writing your senior thesis right here right now. You don’t need to write in third person, you don’t need to use words like ancillary (and yes I know what it means but it’s not necessary here), and we all know nobody actually talks like that (and if you do you have more serious problems) so don’t write like that on an anonymous online forum.</p>
<p>Most people on the internet often want of courteous English and grammar, and the way he writes is fine. He has a very dry and robotic view of the world, as it seems, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that is how he actually speaks.</p>
<p>Secondly, his posts are very logically thought out and explained unlike most people on this forum. His sarcastic insult proves a point that people just get angry of what he says, but he isn’t rude to anyone himself. </p>
<p>I really don’t know what you’re so annoyed with. He’s one of the few collected, if slightly anti-social, people on CC.</p>
<p>Marx didn’t preach in “leading” revolutions at all. The revolution that Marx thought would come was one that would happen spontaneously as society evolved, not imposed by a small group of elites or by some conspiracy.</p>
<p>Most of the so-called Marxism preached on college campuses is just some variant of 20th-century barracks communism, which Marx would (and did) disapprove of.</p>
<p>Regarding the post you quoted in the above post: the first paragraph and part of the second was in second person as I was addressing the poster directly. Part of second paragraph was in third person as I use that case when speaking in a generic basis. </p>
<p>I had to laugh at whoever said “our most decorated professor in political science hates Marxism and dismisses whoever supports it with unmasked disdain”.</p>
<p>People try to get up on a soapbox and dismiss Marxism, yet they do so from the most underdeveloped positions. There is much more to Marxism than the idea of a worker’s state. Marxism is a political philosophy based in dialectical materialism, which is a school of thought that is wholly opposite to all philosophies that say that the individual is the highest “knowable” entity (like existentialism). I won’t get into it all here, but for those who aren’t on the fast track to a total Applebee’s and middle management existence, I’d recommend George Novack’s ‘Understanding History’ as an excellent and accessible introduction to the theoretical underpinnings of Marxism as a political philosophy.</p>
<p>Also, if you think Obama has anything to do with Marxism, you are hilariously mistaken.</p>
<p>Well, it didn’t. In Eastern Europe we live with the bloody consequences every day. Half of my class lives with the idea that the Russians are “awesome” and want communism back. However, their position does not allow them to know what real communism means nor what kind of political atmosphere they want. Still their parents teach them to respect the Great Bolsheviks-our bloody comrades. That does not mean they fully understand it. No, they just want to be cool before their peer, teachers and families.</p>
<p>The creation of Marxism was very important. It injected a new form of political thought that would create our modern left-wing/right-wing political spectrum. Before Marxism, there was hardly this spectrum and when it was relevant it was Republicans v. Monarchists. Over the course of the years, people critiqued his ideas for being too radical or just not the best hitting the mark, and then those ideas were critiqued in a similar fashion, etc. If it were not for Marx, Europe in its present form would not exist. Nor would America. Though not directly Socialist, FDR in his New Deal did pull some influence from social democratic ideas of the time.</p>
<p>And please no say Obama or any Democrat is Marxist. That simply isn’t true. The furthest left in the party are modern day Social Democrats, who believe in welfare state Capitalism. Note the Capitalism. They are still Capitalist.</p>
<p>HeliDigest, where did you learn political history? Socialism and communism most certainly did exist before Marx, and Marx himself died in obscurity. It wasn’t until later that his ideas were bastardized by Lenin and turned into something that Marx wouldn’t recognize.</p>
<p>Thomas Sowell’s “Marxism: Philosophy and Economics” is a great interpretation of Marx. It is not a critique of Marxism or a defense of Marxism, but just a book that tells you what Marxian economics and philosophy were all about.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, a lot of people who are today enamored with Marx have no idea that–while Marx based his economic analysis of what he called capitalism on the prevailing classical economic theory of his day, and while his analysis makes perfect sense given the axioms he starts with–economics greatly surpassed him by the time he died thanks to the marginal revolution. His economics were utterly discredited in every way by economists before Russia fell to the Bolsheviks, however brilliantly they may have been put together. People who never studied economics in their life will often say that Marx predicted this or that economic crisis, that he was “right about some things,” or that he was the first economist to talk about business cycles. None of these things are true. Marx laid out specifically, step-by-step, how he thought capitalism would evolve into socialism. And that evolution was the brilliantly deduced logical conclusion to his own economic philosophy and axioms, but that evolution has never happened, anywhere. His axioms were wrong. Economies don’t work the way he thought they did. Prices and wages never underwent the types of shocks that he predicted. There has never been a recession which fit the Marxian mold. And he wasn’t the first economist to discuss business cycles. Being half-way in the classical economics school of thought, there was a lot he <em>was</em> right about. Both he and Engels knew their econ 101. They knew that price ceilings resulted in shortages, price floors resulted in surpluses, they knew international trade was beneficial, etc. They knew all of that stuff. So when somebody says “Marx was right about some things,” I say, “Yes, he was right about those things that all other economists of that era already taught.” But as for his own original ideas, however intelligent he was (and he had a first-rate brain), they were wrong.</p>
<p>Now, his philosophy, which is entangled with his economics but which can be embraced without embracing Marxian economics or politics, is still up for debate but being a Christian I disagree with it.</p>