What are your stands on

When it was first conceived, it had a great potential to function very well. Unfortunately, it has few built-in mechanisms against being hijacked by greedy and corrupt regimes, like it happened in the Soviet Union and China.

Nowadays, most people treat it as an anacronism, others as an utopian lifestyle that could have been benificial to mankind, but would not function in practice because it cannot defend itself from being abused.

Elements from it could, however, be incorporated into a more realistic concept, which would have better chances of surviving, but under another name, since Marxism is too much associated with totalitarianism to have a common appeal today, IMO.

So true. But when human rights issues are concerned, democratic values are to be preferred, regardless of capitalism and private/corporate greed. I would rather live in such a society than one that is controlled by a totalitarian religious or secular "ism".

I am afraid that IMO the whole ideology of Marxism is so vague that it covers almost anything.

It has become little more than either an insult or a kind of totem pole for those who dislike capitalism.

Even in its heyday it was fundamentally flawed by the Hegelianism at its source.

To Karl Marx the current condition of the United States would have been an interesting study case and quite possibly living proof of some of his assertions.


In Karl Marx's view, the dynamic of capital would eventually impoverish the working class and thereby create the social conditions for a revolution. Private ownership over the means of production and distribution is seen as creating a dependence of non-owning classes on the ruling class, and ultimately as a source of restriction of human freedom.

Source: Boundless. “The Marxist Critique of Capitalism.” Boundless Sociology. Boundless, 21 Jul. 2015. Retrieved 20 Feb. 2016 from www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/boundless-sociology-textbook/economy-16/economic-systems-118/the-marxist-critique-of-capitalism-657-2427/

Marxism, like all belief systems, tends to be reductionist. It tends to force facts and individuals to fit in with its theory.

Numerous evasions and sophistries have been employed ever since its inception.

Marx was supported for most of his life by Engels who was a factory manager (and thus, in Marxist theory, an exploiter of the workers.)

There is also a large degree of contradiction in Marx and Engels (let alone their disciples) with in particular a radical disconnect between 'early' and 'late' Marx.

Both Marx and Engels were rigidly wedding to a view of history in which the development of material progress was the sole determining factor of human history.

That view, even at the time it was formulated, was false to the facts.

And Marx was a vicious racist who expressed his racism in highly anal vocabulary.

Now very few regimes espousing Marxism have ever been voted in and out of power peacefully. Kerala in India is one of the few.

But from the time of Lenin onwards Marxism in power has been forced to maintain itself through fear and tyranny.

Whether that is an inherent weakness of the philosophy is arguable; other revolutionaries such as Bakunin and Kropotkin believed that it was while others such as Bernstein and Webb saw it as an accidental excrescence and believed that a wholly social democratic form of Marxism could be implemented.

But there is no doubt that the practice of Marxism has shown vicious brutality, millions of deaths, the Gulags, fostering a climate of fear and oppression and a culture of corruption where bribery and 'blat' matter and without which the wheels cannot turn at all.

When the Nazis - of all people! - invaded the Soviet Union they were initially welcomed as LIBERATORS. The people soon changed their mind but the fact that they felt that at all shows how utterly indefensible from any moral standpoint Stalin's rule was.

I think one of the failings of Marxism is it rejects religion, a big mistake I think. you end up with human "gods", not a good idea!

It always puzzled me as Christianity seems to have a communist theme to it.

But what about the believes? Just reject what they think? I don't see that as an answer...plus it would never happen. At least not here on Earth.