Unemployment, and so on

[Jester]

"Marxism is outdated at best". Wrong. As long as there is class struggle, poverty, social injustice, and a capitalistic war machine, Marxist theory WILL be relevant and discussed. This is a fact, I dont see how its even up for debate. Dialectical Materialism, like it or not, is a legitimate philosophy that deserves attention and consideration.

(You declare your opinion as fact quite often. I'm not sure that word means what you think it does.)

I am more than happy to discuss Marxism. I am also more than happy to discuss the divine right of kings. But simply because something is discussed, doesn't mean we should be taking it seriously as a political program. There is a substantial group interested in Theocracy as a mode of governance. Should we spend our days taking seriously their belief that the power of Christ (or, Allah, or whatever deity) will solve our social ills? I think not.

Dialectical materialism is Marxism's worst mistake, the part that turns a vague but plausible analysis of history and social conditions into a pseudoscience. With a century and a half of new social science, archaeology, anthropology, economics, and history, we know far more than Marx did. His view of the past, while sweeping and interesting for its time, is wrong in all sorts of ways. Class is a remarkably poor predictor of historical change, and what little we do see, is surprisingly unrelated to the objective relationship to the means of production. The history of society is, by and large, not the history of class struggle. Societies do not progress through neat stages, and even if they did, Marx's view is Eurocentric to the extreme. Other cultures do not share European organizational principles, or European social norms; Marxist historians must therefore either abandon or compromise the framework, or shoehorn everything into an outdated model. History did not happen the way he said it did, and if he can't even manage predicting the past, what chance does he have of the future?

But I'll tell you what. Let us keep the status quo intact for the sake of proving me wrong. Lets stay on the same course we currently are, and keep making the corporations more powerful, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and start up as many wars on so-called terrorism as we can. And continue to keep hoping and praying for change to come. When humanity is done wiping itself out in the process, and the environment is all but wrecked, I can sit back, laugh, and say "told you so" from the grave. I just hope the elites know that eventually, they will run out of proletariat labor to maximize utility off of after we are all thrown away like a bunch of inkless ball point pens, and put in the ground. That assembly line conveyor belt will stop eventually though, and they will join us soon enough. Guess it matters not, we all gotta go one day anyway. Cheers.

No, I'll tell you what. Let's not bother discussing actual ideas or evidence. Instead, let's cackle maniacally about how those who disagree with us are leading the world to an inevitable apocalypse, and fantasize about ourselves laughing ironically from beyond the grave.

That's much better.

-Jester