I'm guessing there is some "debunking communism" website out there (or maybe some dumbass's YouTube channel) that mentioned "the noble savage" because you keep returning to that despite it having nothing to do with communism.
It does. Marx's understanding of history relies on it as "primitive communism" which has everything to do with Rousseau's nonsensical theories.
Also, a savage own being favored by philosophers, that group known for disinterest in facts and truth.
Well, many of them these days don't believe objective truth exists at all. Also, philosophy doesn't deal with facts as you claim it does, it deals primarily with abstract ideas.
If you want disciplines with low levels of academic standards, economics and "criminology" are the first two that would come to mind. There are entire schools of economics completely divorced from any real world data, and criminology is a mix of just-so stories and pseudoscience.
"English and Music majors are more qualified to know the merits of an economic theory than people who study economics!"
This is you. I thought you lefties were all about expertise?
Makes total sense "we shouldn't let people starve" is basically the equivalent of "kill all the untermenschen".
Oh, communists made a lot of people starve to death, often as a specific tool of genocide and elimination of political rivals. And yes, communism has "kill all the bougies" baked into it, extending even to those members of the working class more successful and productive than the rest (see: kulaks).
So a few things, first off, what has been tried is one very specific model of communism that differs significantly from original recipe Marxism (Stalinism is extra crispy, I think Trotsky was honey barbecue, but I'd have to reread The Revolution Betrayed to be sure.)
And then you say that Venezuela which has cratered hilariously under Chavez and Maduro is "democratic socialism", not communism.
Essentially all communist governments that survived for any appreciable length of time were associated with the Soviet Union. there is a reason for that.
Because Soviet largesse and military support to help repress the population artificially kept them up.
Socialist governments without Soviet backing got couped by western powers, who put some piece of shit like Pinochet in power to rape and torture people.
Allende was couped because he tried to throw Chile's constitution in the trash and rule as a dictator as his socialist ideas destroyed the economy. And he was unquestionably backed by the Soviets through Cuba (this was in large part why the US wanted him gone).
And in the late 40s and early 50s the British Labour Party unquestionably put into place economic and social policies inspired by socialism. Why wasn't there a CIA-backed coup in Britain against them?
Also, the two largest countries in which this mode of communism were attempted were basket cases.
Why, I wonder?
Tsarist Russia was so bad that the conditions of the peasants shocked Black Americans in the 1900s. Imagine how fucked up things had to be.
Things were actually on the up-and-up before WW1, and the country had a democratic government under Kerensky before the Bolsheviks launched their coup. The real source of unrest in Russia was the war, which Russia had lost and yet Kerensky failed to end.
They were also among the most technologically backwards countries in Europe.
Russia was also industrialising so rapidly that Germany estimated it couldn't win a war with Russia past 1917. The Tsarist system would have gotten to the same point at the same time without millions of deaths.
or had the liberals and conservatives join with the fascists to oppose them.
Weimar Germany certainly wasn't stable - and the opposite happened there, the communists allied with the fascists to bring down the democratic government.
So no, people aren't going to abandon one of the few real alternatives to our broken, immoral system because a superficially similar system failed to make two absolute wrecks of countries functional.
Everywhere you try socialism, you get totalitarianism, economic collapse, and mass deaths. That's a "broken and immoral" system if there was one.
I'm not really a Marxist, though some elements of Marxian economics are super important.
They aren't, Marx's economic theories were nonsense as I've shown.
But they are in no way like Nazis. Believe me, I've interacted enough with both to know the difference.
100 million dead disagree. This idea that communism is inherently pure as the driven snow is absurd.
The early Christians lived in something very close to the end goal of communism, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Yes, they shared everything at Pentecost because they were lots of out-of-towners who had newly converted and they needed support. Later on in the NT we find Christians following lives similar to that of most Romans (as the archaeological evidence confirms), not dwelling in private property-less communes (monastic life itself comes about in the 4th century, starting in Egypt).
You're literally pushing one Bible passage against the entire rest of the NT and the secular historical evidence in describing how early Christians lived.
What Marx did was lay out a model for a transition from capitalist society to communism
"Rise up in a revolution and massacre the middle-class to install a totalitarian dictatorship that will magically disappear as soon as it gets big enough".
and spell out the underlying economic and political forces the made socialism necessary.
Which don't exist, because Marx believed capital (including human capital) was a lie invented by the evil bougies to enslave the workers and that profit represented a theft of the workers' labor, which has been debunked multiple times.
He completely revolutionized economics
Hahahaha nobody but his cult actually believes this.
Marxist economics was assessed as lacking relevance in 1988 by
Robert Solow, who criticized the
New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics for over-sampling articles on Marxist themes, giving a "false impression of the state of play" in the economics profession. Solow stated that "Marx was an important and influential thinker, and Marxism has been a doctrine with intellectual and practical influence. The fact is, however, that most serious English-speaking economists regard Marxist economics as an irrelevant dead end."
[29]
According to
George Stigler, "[e]conomists working in the Marxian-Sraffian tradition represent a small minority of modern economists, and that their writings have virtually no impact upon the professional work of most economists in major English-language universities."
[30]
Also wasn't economics all pie-in-the-sky speculation of no real value a few paragraphs ago?
and laid out am extremely influential philosophy of history, but that is sort of secondary.
Yes, his cult believe the prophecy he set out for them that they're inevitably going to conquer the world ... no matter how many times it fails to come true or what contortions they have to make to explain him away.
Your claim he wanted some regression to cottage industry is just incorrect.
Later Marxists do, as a result of the pretzels they've twisted themselves into and their distortion of Marx's own teachings in the attempt to explain away the lack of world revolution.
I have in fact volunteered in my church's food ministry.
You should be doing more of that, instead of pushing an ideology that'll lead to more starvation.
It made the injustice of the system that lets billionaires profit from the work of the poor,
This is literally you over on the far right of that picture. The idea that billionaires just laze back and do nothing all day while watching peons work for them is a myth, similar to the idea that their money just sits there all day like Smaug's treasure. Not to mention that even if you were to strip the billionaires of all their wealth, you wouldn't be able to give more than a few hundred to each lower-class individual ... and then there would be nothing left to loot. You're like the peasants who killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
while outlawing the feeding of the hungry.
Now you're literally claiming that soup kitchens are illegal in America and the rest of the "capitalist world". I kinda doubt that.
This is all while the USSR treated unemployment and homelessness as crimes BTW, and furthermore literally put in its constitution that those who couldn't work wouldn't eat. Not to mention when in Ukraine they literally sent soldiers to the homes of starving peasants to confiscate the pittance they had left.
www.cnn.com
