Never read any, is it worth giving it a crack? I don't agree with communism (humans are too self-centered) but thought it might be a good idea to see what the fuss is about

Marx was very contradictory. You cannot argue that capitalism is destined to fail on its own and then state that active revolution is needed to bring about socioeconomic change. It is disingenuous and self-serving.

He was a putz.

He, like just about every other collectivist leader/figurehead, also was a total fucking hypocrite who practiced capitalist principals regarding his own substantial finances.

 ...and I do not even know where to fucking begin slapping you down for the implications of your statement regarding human beings being "too selfish" for communism to work, as if the flaw were in human nature, and not in a dehumanizing system of thought which has been the cause of more murder, oppression, manipulation, and catastrophe than any other force in human history.

FUCK.

Bah. Marx' works are notably not important in relation to his personal life. The Communist Manifesto loses none of its importance because its author was personally a hypocrite. Machiavelli may have had friends in whom he trusted, but that doesn't weaken the impact of Il Principe. Let's say Hitler's mom was Jewish. Would that lessen the historical significance of Mein Kampf? The Jesus freaks are always trying to discredit Darwin by pointing out that the man married his first cousin. These arguments are spurious.

None of these works are gospel, but they are all quite interesting from a historical perspective. If you want to know what all the fuss is about regarding Communism, an examination of the Communist Manifesto is de rigueur. Besides, that little tract is quite short. It shouldn't take long to read. I certainly wouldn't consider it time wasted.

I never said "don't read it", I just pointed out what little bullshit men Marx and his disciples are.

It was the "too selfish" remark that pissed me off.

But it's the truth. The reason things like anarchy or communism don't work is because they're based on the idea that human beings are going to do the "right" thing and serve the greater good before looking out for themselves. Selfish isn't necessarily a bad thing, you know.

No, it is not the truth, it is a bit of readily consumable, shallow-assed fortune cookie psuedo-intellectual drivel which has been widely propagated.

It's "truth" to the sort of amoral solipsists who argue that everything is relative and that all truth is therefore an illusion, and other such nonsense.

Marxism and the various other collectivist ideologies it has spawned are wrong on a fundamental level, having been formulated on false premises.

Their practice is fundamentally evil because it requires the enforcement of a collectivist framework upon an individualist species.

Whether it's socialism or communism, it declares that all who labor are to be the slaves of those who can or will not. It necessitates that loyalty to the State must supersede loyalty to friends, family, lovers, or religious faith, which is why left-ward political movements always seek to undermine all of these, making loyalty to party ideology the new god, one which can not tolerate competition (what did you think 1984 was about, the hazards of gambling amongst the lower classes?). It is why the artists, intellectuals, students, teachers, poets, philosophers, musicians, etc. that make up what Lenin called the "useful fools" which serve as the vanguard in the "progress" from capitalism to socialism, from socialism to communism, have always been amongst the first to be purged.

 When collectivism is applied to human beings, with their individual drives, passions, imaginations, their desires to make better lives for themselves and their progeny, it always creates two things:

1- Failure, such as the failure of the American mortgage market after decades of the government forcing banks to give out loans to those who had not a greater ability to repay the fucking things, but a greater perceived "need". Collectivism-fueled failure which is inevitably used as a justification for further collectivism, such Obama and the congressional Democrats recent actions which will ultimately serve to create further systematic failure, which will in turn be used as justification for further... Want to guess here? More "useful fools", doing usefully foolish things.

2- Ever increasing restrictions on personal and economic liberties as enforced by labor unions, pressure groups, and the state itself, because people who hear the wrong things on the radio or in the classroom might get ideas dangerous to the state, because people who bear arms or believe they have a right to defend themselves from robbers, rapists, and murders might get similar ideas about tax-collectors, inspectors, and legislators, because people who aren't kept leaping through hoops or sedated with welfare checks might wake up to what is being done to them, because if you make enough laws, enough ridiculous, hare-brained laws, every citizen becomes a criminal who can be controlled with threats of prosecution.

 And what do you do, when society finally becomes one big prison? When as in Cuba, China, North Korea, Cambodia, East Germany, the USSR, Baathist Iraq, etcetera the borders are closed off not to keep people out, but to keep them in? What do you do when there is no longer any semblance of liberty you can threaten to take away from those who rebel against being stripped of their humanity?







Fuck that apologist bullshit. It is nothing but moral and intellectual cowardice.

Or, in a word: "selfishness" has negative connotations, but "individualism" has been proven by Ayn Rand to be a virtue. To suggest that our failure to join together in collective utopia is a flaw of human nature is debatable. And Obama is also flawed.

Personally I think hardcore collectivism really only works on one level: the family. For the most part this subsumes friends, family, lovers, and religious faith. It works, and beyond that it's the best system available for humans. The proof is evolutionary as much as social. To extend the concept of "family" to all humans is impossible. That's the flaw in collectivism.

Family is made of individuals exercising individual loyalties. As I stated, this is one reason why marxists like Gramsci and Obama's buddy Ayers have always preached the destruction of the nuclear family (another is to destroy the means of transmitting cultural values).

There is certain degree of selfishness in all human actions, even in the giving of one's life for another whether ithat is through an act of heroic violence or dedicating your life to the betterment of your children. (And for that matter, do you think most college kids would lean so predictably left if it didn't make it easier for them to get layed?)

 The measure of virtue isn't whether there is any selfishness in what you do, but rather what you seek to gain and what you are willing to destroy to that end.

As far as I can recall Marx never actually endorsed forcing anyone's loyalties except perhaps in the short term. Even then I believe his favored method by which to exert pressure was economic. I think his theory was that Communism would be a harmonious collective expression of individual loyalties. This is naively simplistic or course, and it reduces the "short term" to a mere expression, however I think if the question were put to him he would have favored a peaceful and self-willed shift to Communism over a bloody mass-grave affair. I think it's a bit much to fold the viciousness of certain dictators into Marx' theory even if they used it as the political underpinning to their various revolutions. It's a mixing of cause and effect. Or perhaps more accurately a mixing of theory and practice. Certainly one should be aware of both sides of the coin, but let's not dismiss the thing without taking the time to understand it.

As for collegiate bias, everyone knows it's the liberal professors and the liberal media which are undermining the moral rectitude of the youth today. And let's not forget the hippie commune drug, marihuana.

Nothing you've posted refutes what I said. I'm not defending communism or suggesting that it's a good idea or that it could ever work. All I was saying was that expecting a concept like communism (or anarchy) to work on anything but the smallest scale is pointless, because it assumes that all human beings will act the way the philosophy expects them to act.

We're not disagreeing here, I just feel like it's a waste of time pointing out all the flaws in the execution of something like communism when it can be dismissed as a bad idea from the get-go.

What Si said.

Humans are selfish and prideful. I'm sure there are a bunch of real-world examples of people screwing up the potential of a utopia and I'm also sure that if you look into them enough you'll find they're based on ego and greed.

"Utopia? Yeah I'd like to OWN that!"

To answer the original question: If you're interested in reading about economics in general, then reading Marx is worth it.

The Communist Manifesto is a quick and pretty easy read. 

Das Kapital is on the whole more interesting, but a lot longer.

I've never read any of the anthologies.

It's pretty difficult to imagine speaking intelligently about modernity without including Marx's critique of capitalism and his notion of historical materialism. In a nutshell, historical materialism holds that the order of society is determined by material conditions, particularly in the distribution of scarce resources and the establishment of institutions of power like governments and religions. You needn't be a Bolshevik to recognize the significance of this method of interpreting history - which was (forgive me) revolutionary at the time he published it - and I would argue that it is an even greater contribution than Workers of the World Unite!

I prefer the Redneck Manifesto.