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If we are going to start tallying the body counts of economic ideologies, I think you will find capitalism and its inherent imperialism to be very much in the lead.
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The Opium of the Intellectuals
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#22If you’re reading this, run. There is no value in these comments.
Maybe you could explain why each comment doesn't have value by, I don't know, responding to them instead of a blanket statement encouraging the brigading of every single comment in this thread (which is what's happening, given the almost universal amount of grey appearing in this thread)
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#23"Alexander Dolgun's story: An American in the Gulag" is another great book showing how brutal life can be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Dolgun "The Soviet Story" is a 2008 documentary film about Soviet Communism and Soviet-German collaboration before 1941. It highlights the Great Purge as well as the Great Famine, Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Katyn massacre, Gestapo–NKVD collaboration, Soviet mass deportations…
I've not read The Opium of the Intellectuals , but was it talking about postwar French Marxism or Soviet Leninism/Stalinism?
Aron explodes the three "myths" of radical thought: the Left, the Revolution, and the Proletariat. Each of these ideas, Aron shows, are ideological, mystifying rather than illuminating. He also provides a fascinating sociology of intellectual life and a powerful critique of historical determinism in the classically restrained prose for which he is justly famous.
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's obvious you don't know anything about Marx because you are contrasting "top down rules" (allegedly communism) to a "decentralized" capitalism. Even a cursory reading of Marx would dispel both mistakes.
In Marx's own time, he was one of the main people who split the workers movement between his own ideas (his form of Communism) and the anarchist ideas of Bakunin or of Proudhon. People saw the authoritarian prospects of his work in his own time. They all want the same thing - a world without hierarchy. Though it's a great irony that one method relies on hierarchies to try to achieve a "stateless, classless society" M…
Even by this ill-informed left-com critique, Marx and Bukunin both share a vision of a stateless, classless society based on free association and a practical end to resource scarcity. Not "top down rules" as the original poster simplistically described.
As for "dictatorship", it's easy to find out for yourself that this state of society is massively more democratic than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we live under in capitalist democracies.
In Soviet Russia, the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e. the period immediately after the October revolution, not the Stalinist bureaucracy) was obviously necessary to win the civil war against foreign-backed counter revolutionaries. If the Red army lost the civil war, Russia would have been ruled by the fascist Black Hundreds.
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#25I think The Grand Scheme is the opiate of the intellectuals, and some regimes are friendlier to such schemes than others. If you have a set of top down rules that require your will to be imposed on others, a flatter hierarchy is a bug. A decentralized system like free market capitalism allows many tyrants to flourish, but petty ones in comparison. You want a central authoritarian who can materialize your wishes. Whet…
It's obvious you don't know anything about Marx because you are contrasting "top down rules" (allegedly communism) to a "decentralized" capitalism. Even a cursory reading of Marx would dispel both mistakes.
It’s sad how it’s acceptable amongst Marxist fans that a no true Scotsman is a valid response.
If all it takes is “a cursory reading”, then you should certainly be able to provide a short summary and enlighten the capitalist slaves.
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#26A more updated version would be that neoliberalism is the opiate of intellectuals. Much (but certainly not all) of Marxism has held up rather well in retrospect (especially teh critique of capitalism), especially in the conditions we face in 2020.
> A more updated version would be that neoliberalism is the opiate of intellectuals. The real opiate of the intellectuals is any system that gives you the belief that you've got things mostly figured out. Neo-liberalism definitely qualifies for some, but so does Marxism. However, given the current state of things, there's probably more value to be had now from reading Marx than some venerable free market tract. Just…
This is the thesis of Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." He argues, correctly I think, that you can find intellectual strands going back to Heraclitus and Plato which revolve around the idea of some "central force" or "law of history" that enables a thinker to predict the future. He says that the alternative and preferable society is a skeptical one that views history as a series of experiments and tries to infer what amount to rules of thumb rather than grand "world historical" theories or forces.
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh sure, there's very serious problems with orthodox Marxism. It gets somewhat of a pass because all historical communist regimes have started far before capitalism had run its course (which even now it hasn't necessarily). However, the dictatorship of the proletariat is just something I cannot buy ever working out without the revolutionary vanguard just turning into the new masters. This is a critique that left-anar…
This is what I always wondered. Where does the claim to political legitimacy come from if force is required?
There's no such thing as political legitimacy, at least in terms of the philosophical concept existing in reality. Legitimacy in practice just means that there are not enough people opposed to a regime to take it down. It's just really a restatement of whether people have confidence that it won't collapse.
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we are going to start tallying the body counts of economic ideologies, I think you will find capitalism and its inherent imperialism to be very much in the lead.
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Winston Churchill. Also, Iraq was allied with the US and other capitalist interests and had effectively a crony-capitalist economy.
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's obvious you don't know anything about Marx because you are contrasting "top down rules" (allegedly communism) to a "decentralized" capitalism. Even a cursory reading of Marx would dispel both mistakes.
It’s sad how it’s acceptable amongst Marxist fans that a no true Scotsman is a valid response. If all it takes is “a cursory reading”, then you should certainly be able to provide a short summary and enlighten the capitalist slaves.
"no true scottsman" is irrelevant at the level of the philosophy of Marx/Engels. Communism is a stateless, classless society where mass productive capacity allows for the maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" can prevail. Such a society has never existed, and the so-called communist governments of the USSR and CCP bear no resemblance to it. If you want to criticize Marx, you have to actually criticize his ideas, not some paper-thin kindergarten response that misunderstands both Marxism and Capitalism.
It should be obvious that Capitalism is not a "decentralized" system. It is consolidated in the firm through monopoly, it is consolidated in the state via coercive bodies like the military and the police, and it is consolidated in finance which to a large extent plans the international economy. The Ron Paul idea of competitive free markets has never been real, and capitalists themselves would be the first to destroy it.
Re: The Opium of the Intellectuals
#30If you’re reading this, run. There is no value in these comments.
Maybe you could explain why each comment doesn't have value by, I don't know, responding to them instead of a blanket statement encouraging the brigading of every single comment in this thread (which is what's happening, given the almost universal amount of grey appearing in this thread)
Certain topics, combined with the (relatively) low bar in order to comment, and an intellectually dishonest approach that drive-by commenters may take, make HN a very poor place for such topics (as you noted, given the amount of 'grey').
For those who have not yet been exposed to a particular topic that has those characteristics, such a warning is prudent, and appreciated.
Whether it's even possible to have constructive discussions on some topics on the wider Internet at all, remains to be seen.