A world without money? Everything is free?

[BawanaRik]

Yet, and please feel the total and absolute respect for your opinion that I have when I say this, that is where it always ends up.

I've worked with many people who slipped out from the Iron Curtain. My wife endured Mao and his "methods". My Father had to do "cleanup" as part of "Free World Tour" Uncle Sam provided for him in the earlier half of the last century. He had tales to tell about Germany.

Please talk to someone who has endured this. Before they're all gone. And maybe us with them.

Originally Posted by king_biscuit

I'm not a marxist, just an old political theory student, but the final evolution/stage of marxism (which is what that video linked to this thread describes), is not totalitarianism.

[BawanaRik]

What was that book, Lord of the Flies? I believe.

Originally Posted by Lonesomedave

well, i'll grant you that we can never find such a society living or in the past, where humans have lived like this...but we can observe chimp behavior, and it is pretty much that the strong take whatever they want and the weak make do with the leftovers...if there are any.

[king_biscuit]

Originally Posted by BawanaRik

Yet, and please feel the total and absolute respect for your opinion that I have when I say this, that is where it always ends up.

I've worked with many people who slipped out from the Iron Curtain. My wife endured Mao and his "methods". My Father had to do "cleanup" as part of "Free World Tour" Uncle Sam provided for him in the earlier half of the last century. He had tales to tell about Germany.

Please talk to someone who has endured this. Before they're all gone. And maybe us with them.

I totally respect and have compassion for anyone who is mistreated, and I have talked to people who endured those kinds of things. Again, I am not saying it has worked or would ever work when put into practice, but the final stage of Marxism is not totalitarian, and those situations you described above are not Marxism.

[king_biscuit]

Originally Posted by BawanaRik

What was that book, Lord of the Flies? I believe.

Even those kids were not born on that island and they carried with them some of the things they learned in a proper society. What we got from that book is the author's opinion of human nature. For another and different view of human nature see Russell's "Why I'm Not a Christian"; he didn't think much of Marx either btw

[UncleFluffy]

Originally Posted by king_biscuit

I never stated that Marxism would succeed, only that it hasn't failed because we have never had a viable movement

I never thought you were championing communism, but was trying to suggest that "a viable movement" (of Marxism) is meaningless in the same way "a real unicorn" is.

Originally Posted by king_biscuit

(to say that Marxism failed and as evidence point to the Soviet Union, China, N. Korea, etc., is clearly wrong)

Why is it "clearly wrong" ?

I'd agree that none of those countries were Marxist as per the theory, but doesn't that suggest that the Marxist ideal is unattainable?

There's a difference between saying "this building you designed then built fell down" and "the building you designed can't be built" ... but in practice it doesn't really matter. (Except to the people caught in the collapse, of course...)

[onosson]

Originally Posted by king_biscuit

4) No one can do more than guess at the real nature of humans

Do you believe that there are "natures" that we can know more about, beyond guessing, aside from "human nature"?

[king_biscuit]

Originally Posted by UncleFluffy

I'd agree that none of those countries were Marxist as per the theory, but doesn't that suggest that the Marxist ideal is unattainable?

Whether Marxism as defined by Marx and Engels is attainable is neither proven nor disproven by what happened in the Soviet Union or those other 20th century dictatorships. In fact Marx would likely say the US is closer to communism than post monarchy Russia which at the time was basically a feudal society. Without being too presumptuous, I feel I can speak for Marx (again ) on this point and state that the isms don't jump straight from feudalism to communism!

[king_biscuit]

Originally Posted by onosson

Do you believe that there are "natures" that we can know more about, beyond guessing, aside from "human nature"?

You will have to ask a more specific question than that.

[king_biscuit]

The better argument against Marxism is not what happened in the Soviet Union, or the lack of a clear movement to date, but rather its internal inconsistency. Marx believed in a dialectic whereby material circumstances controlled ideas, and as the material circumstances changed so did the dominant idea. This is a deterministic metaphysical philosophy which presupposes a programed universe (too bad Marx didn't have a Laplacian Demon or maybe he could have sorted this out!). However, in its final stage of evolution, utopian communism would not include this dialectic interplay, but Marx never really explains how we go from being economically determined to utopian freewill. That is the real problem with Marxism.

[onosson]

Originally Posted by king_biscuit

You will have to ask a more specific question than that.

You stated that we can only guess at human nature - is this because you believe we can do no more than guess at the true nature of anything, or is human nature a special case? And if it is, why?

[king_biscuit]

Originally Posted by onosson

You stated that we can only guess at human nature - is this because you believe we can do no more than guess at the true nature of anything, or is human nature a special case? And if it is, why?

You tell me how it can be measured? Other than that we are guessing, and we can find real world examples of all kinds of people as we have already discussed -- if you want to use that as evidence, which of the examples is the real human nature? Do you want to use statistics (as illogical as that would be)? What about anything not in the first standard deviation or what about the outliers?

[king_biscuit]

Onosson, we could get at human nature through an idealistic philosophy like Christianity or Platonism (we would learn that the essential purpose or nature on an acorn is to become an oak, and that of humanity is to know the difference between right and wrong and through the soul strive to do the right), but I don't think that is what most people really have in mind when they discuss human nature, and none of these faith based tenets we could agree upon would be falsifiable, verifiable, parsimonious, or any other number of things we require these days as good men of science

[onosson]

I guess I'm comfortable with not having to have a narrow definition of something's "nature". I guess the problem really lies with that term - what are we talking about when we say "the nature" of something, be it human beings or whatever?

[96tbird]

Here's the definition of human nature: Mother Teresa --- Joseph Stalin. Fools errand to nail it down. It's somewhere in the middle in general, using generalities based on the behavior of the general public in societies. Rationalization is our hallmark in the animal kingdom but we will always carry the skull smashing wild monkey genetics deep in our DNA. It's like the blue eye gene, in some people those genes express themselves and rationality has to control the pronounced urges those people feel when in different stress situations.