13 Comments
Nov 13Liked by Dave Greene

The crazy thing about Marxism and all modern ideologies is how its principles of a mechanistic universe is just accepted as true without argument. Once you dispel this fiction it all falls apart which is why all modern ideas progressive liberalism, communism, libertarianism all fail and lead to garbage societies. The world simply isn’t mechanistic

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I've encountered very few "principled Marxists" who will even mention the LTV, much less make some sort of serious intellectual defense of it. The "ideology" isn't that complicated in practice. People just want free shit. Any reason to be given handouts will always be popular.

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author

The wayward sheep must be brought home

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The materialist philosophies, rather than admit their ideas never close, continually extend their framework out forever. By refusing to just settle on a simple teleological "good" they must push it off into the distant "elsewhere," where they assure us it really exists, and it is definitely objective, even if we aren't close enough yet to see the material facts which make it objective or to really even define what it is.

I think this is why they so often end up being utopian in character. They still need a motivating "why" to get us to go along with their plan, but without a simple "good" to pursue, they have to postulate a theoretical perfect state, and the reaching of that perfect state becomes the "good". Being directionally toward utopia becomes the telos of the materialist.

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I think the better way to think of it is that Marxism creates a new religion; one able to create a new telos based supposedly on science and reasoning, whose underlying flaws no one dares criticize in fear of being branded a heretic. It matters not what they actually believe in, they just join the Church of Marx (hallowed be his name) and under it they justify all the moralistic views they embrace. A modern day Napoleonic Cult of Reason - it always runs back to the French Revolution in the end. For me, it really does prove that Man has a God shaped hole, that he will eventually fill.

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Dave, "It is unhelpful to mix your somewhat defensible moral claims with bad science"

Dave translated, "Why do you throw dirt in my eyes during our fencing match"

My favorite is conservatives trying to disprove climate change science when the more important framing is who gets the tax dollars for maintaining and improving civilizational infrastructure

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author

Ok… fair… sort of

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It could of course be argued that the "triumph" of the Orange Jesus (aka Donald Trump) is the ultimate demonstration/manifestation of the mechanical world view, or what some writers including Paul Kingsnorth describe as the Dark Machine or the "cathedral". In his recent posting Paul openly states that this is indeed the case.

Trump is of course a religiously and culturally illiterate barbarian - a life long in-your-face-sinner on steroids!

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An argument between competing teleologies would at least be honest. Because we're not supposed to admit to teleology, we're locked in an endless argument over what to measure and how.

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exactly

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I don’t think the labor theory of value is necessary for Marxism‘s central point, and I would say that Marxism may have something important to add to economics. So I wish Marxists would ditch the labor theory of value and try to model class conflict within modern economic theory. As I understand it, Marxism's central claims could be phrased as:

1. The employer’s/capitalist‘s interest to keep labor costs low and the employee‘s/worker‘s interest in high wages are at odds with each other.

2. State power can significantly influence the bargaining power of either side, so both sides have an interest in gaining control of the state.

3. Capitalists need workers not only as employees but also as consumers, so they need there to be workers, but workers don’t need capitalists, because they could manage labor allocation and use of the means of production through other means like central planning or cooperatives.

Depending on the extend one agrees or disagrees with these premises a communist revolution can be anywhere from impossible to inevitable (to be clear, I think 3. is probably not true and that there may be some issues with 1. as well). But it doesn't say if such a revolution would be good or bad. There could be a hypothetical Communist who thinks a revolution would be an ethical disaster, but joins the communist party anyways because they are convinced the revolution is coming and want to protect themselves. Or the less hypothetical reverse of that position "Communism sounds good in theory (=is morally desirable), but doesn't work in practice (=has false beliefs about economic processes)." Since (Neo-)Classical also often has implicit assumptions, for example "material abundance is good", making moral questions of economic issues more explicit also makes sense. But both Marxism and (Neo-)Classical Economics make some moral and some mechanistic claims, which can and should be discussed seperately.

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The Good News: There's a long-standing Christian set of theories about these problems, which are rooted in teleological good. Re-Christianize society, and it can re-emerge to take primacy.

The Bad News: Movements are mostly the sum of the people they attract, and only secondarily their ideas. Many of the same people attracted to Marxism would witch to the Christian theories if that's what their societies offered, while seriously penalizing Marxism. So Marxism is much less of a threat, but absent effective internal gatekeeping the people in question will drag the replacement doctrines of justice to similar places - all because of who and what they ARE.

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Unfortunately, I don't think the Marxists will rethink their frame.

Still, praying for them to change is something I do.

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