Never made any financial contributions, I assume OP means, completely missing the mark about Marx being anticapitalist. Ignoring the obvious: We still talk about Karl Marx, even make unprompted green text about him, proving a social contribution
Anon judges Karl
Submitted 1 week ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/7acd1dff-eef1-4bde-b408-28fd832160fc.jpeg
Comments
lyralycan@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
His books and writings are a contribution anyway. Plus he was already wealthy so idk if mooching off his family is accurate at all.
Dasus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
We still talk about Karl Marx, even make unprompted greentexts about him, proving a social contribution
Furthermore, you actually have the time to do something other than slave away to the bourgeoisie. Sure, you might not have a lot of it in your own experience, but child labour and 16 hour days were completely normal before Marx.
Marx had the idea the surplus value the capitalists are actually profiting off of is the commodity of the worker’s putting in time. I mean, he didn’t really consider it a commodity, just pointed out how capitalism commodifies human labour.
But yeah pretty much all trade unions and socialist parties owe their existence to Marx.
“Didn’t make any contributions” such ragebait
froufox@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
He didn’t oppose religion that much, definitely not in “a reddit atheist” way, opium has been commonly used in medicine as a painkiller those days: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 1 week ago
Tldr, he is saying religion is a human response to inhuman conditions.
Leviathan@fedinsfw.app 1 week ago
He was saying that people need someone to tell them on Sunday that working until you die for nothing is fine because it’ll all be great after you die. He made a strong argument for religion just being another capitalist tool that keeps the people in line, doped up just enough to work another week. Sure, if opiate addiction in response to abuse is human, then that’s pretty damn human.
He even argued that religion mirrors the hierarchical structures of the government it exists under, which is pretty spot on.
I never took his writing to be pro-religion.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 week ago
life has always been inhuman. religion has been around forever, so has oppression, violence, and hate.
teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Working a job is not neccessarily making a contribution to society, not a good contribution oftentimes to be sure.
He was also wealthy to begin with, as was Engels. But his books and writings are a contribution in any case even if he didn’t get rich off them as OP suggests here.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Difference is that redditors spread racist rhetoric on the internet and Marx wrote the book Americans burned on social media when Russia attacked Ukraine, tho he is German.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 week ago
And also Putin is arguably post fascist or ultraconservative, total opposite of communism. His favorite ideologue even called Ukraine and its language a “Leninist fabrication, to divide and conquer the Russian nation”.
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Marx wrote the book Americans burned on social media when Russia attacked Ukraine
That’s amazing. I personally heard someone mention that the Ukrainians just hated communism shortly after the invasion. It took me kind of by surprise and it was actually a little while later that I put two and two together and figured out they meant Russia.
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
You haven’t read his letters to Engles huh?
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Russia did though, before the revolution Russia was still mostly agrarian and way less developed then western europe. Under communism they developed faster then any other country up to that point and nearly caught up to the west.
People often compare the soviets to western europe and say they’re poor, but Russia was half a century behind the west before the revolution, and the revolution/ civil war caused even more destruction. A better comparison would be a country like Mexico which also was mostly agrarian and just finished a revolution in 1920. Compared to that the Soviet union did pretty well living standards wise.
Just look at there war performance , WWI Russia lost to Germany whose main focus was on the western front, WWII Russia was able to halt Germanies full force after they had conquered France and drive them back.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Lots of countries have done that dude. Had nothing to do with communism, so much as a leadership of the nation that was desperate to modernize due to fear of being invaded or falling into international irrelevancy.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
My comment was in reply to another one saying something along the lines of “Russia poor because communism”. So it was more about how communism can lead to development.
Either way though I would say its development was largely because of communism. The czarist regime faced similar pressures and didn’t develop like Russia did in the 30s
An even better comparison would be Poland which faced an even greater existential threat from its neighbors and didn’t industrialize as quickly. For example Poland built about 150 of there tp7 tanks in the interwar period while the Soviet union had around 25,000 tanks built before the war. Even accounting for the Soviet unions 5-6x population that’s still a lot more production capacity per capita.
The Soviet industrialization during the interwar period was unprecedented and relied on a command economy to force the peasants off the land and into the cities, at the cost of a famine that killed millions.
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Dead wrong as usual lol
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Millions of people starved to death under the Soviet Union. it sucked.
Also do you think Korea was some developed country at the beginning of the 20th century. They had it hard in WWII and the Korean war. How did SK become a developed country and North Korea remains a horrible place to live.
Perhaps central planning can be beneficial for a developing country, if you don’t get ideology brained and do stupid mistakes like the Soviet Union and China did which resulted in famines. But even then once you get past basic needs, socialism stagnates. Who determines what people “need”? What if the powers that be decide “the people need more tanks?”
Once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity and people have some disposable income, it’s better to have a system that allows people to choose to do what they want with that income. Socialism fails at that point.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There were famines before the Soviet Union. That’s kind of how things worked before modern industrial agriculture.
As for Korea… just think about it for 30 seconds… I’ll give you time…
…ok: South Korea was allied with the US, which helped rebuild it and became a trading partner. North Korea is an enemy of the US and has spent it’s entire existence being blockaded and provoked by the world’s largest superpower. Gee, why might they have had different economic outcomes?
As for the central planning point: idk. That’s something to figure out. It’s not even really the important part of socialism/communism. The important part is making sure the state can’t be taken over by a ruling class. Capitalism absolutely can’t keep capitalists from taking over the state. Whatever we should do, we don’t get to choose until we get the government in the hands of the people.
huey_m@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity and people have some disposable income, it’s better to have a system that allows people to choose to do what they want with that income. Socialism fails at that point.
Just to be clear capitalism and markets aren’t equivocal. Market socialism is a thing.
Socialism is a really big umbrella term… similar to “democracy” there are a bunch of different ways to actually apply it. State socialism is only one scheme for it/
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 week ago
A lot of modern-day critique of communist regimes like Stalin’s are critiqued in a way that the problems they had are not only unique to communism, but were due to it. My great-grandfather was jailed into a gulag due to arrest quotas and being at the wrong place in 1956 in Hungary. By 2013, he was instructed to stop mentioning the arrest quotas by the NGO he used to volunteer to (due to “future US presidents might want to use them”), and that he’d get money if he made up a lie that would make it seem like he was arrested for being a conservative christian or something like that.
Dasus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
A better comparison would be a country like Mexico
A better comparison would be Finland, which was literally a part of Russia.
We kept market economy. Russia didn’t.
Capitalism sucks, but so do planned economies. Socialist market economies are the thing.
Also WWII Russia won by having tons of disposable troops to toss at any enemy position. Not because their economy was magnificent.
Russia also was unable to take Finland, despite us having way worse military equipment and way less people.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Finland was much more industrialized, urbanized and developed then the rest of Russia prior to 1917. It was barely even part of Russia as it was mostly autonomous with its own parliament. So it’s not as good of a comparison.
Russia didn’t win the war solely through manpower. They had just as much of a man power advantage in WWI and still lost because they’re industry was shit. Without Stalin’s obsession with increasing steel and war production, heavily mechanized battles like the battle of kursk would’ve been lost.
IDK if that meme is outdated or fabricated but the current wiki page shows way less casualties on the Soviet side and more even strength in man power. Even then it shows the lopsided Soviet industrial capacity with how many tanks and planes they had. They were wasted on a war in terrain that would’ve been difficult without snow, and even more so with.
Yeah the soviets weren’t able to fully conquer finland but they did get a lot of there demands and a good chunk of territory. If the war had dragged out longer and the snow thawed then finland probably wouldn’t have been able to hold them off for much longer in conventional war, though a guerilla campaign would probably be effective.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Bold words from a 4chan chud
MutantTailThing@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Anon is right on the Marx.
Juice@midwest.social 1 week ago
if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label “atheism” (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people.
–Karl Marx, Letter to August Ruge, 1842
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
If religion is the opiate of the people, then communism is the heroin of the people.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Communism is the heroine? :3 :3
king_comrade@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You’d be able to insult communism better if you spent even a little bit of time actually reading about it. Have a crack mate, it’s not too hard.
Rubanski@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Lol gottem
jpreston2005@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Sometimes the better at thinking you are, the less sense working for others makes. The less sense spending time doing bullshit makes. The less sense spending time away from loved ones makes. I dunno, bro just needed a UBI
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yes, and I think me arguing “meet people where they are” or “speak to be understood” better fits what you’re saying than the guy digging his heels in over the definition of liberal
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 1 week ago
He analyzed capitalism (and religion), and his model predicted regular worsening crises when the market couldn’t expand further, leading to its eventual abolition.
He was employed as a journalist and published books on history and economics.
I swear libs just make stuff up that sounds right and then believe the shit they fantasized
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 week ago
> post made by 4chan user
> lib
Pick one.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Lemmites just be spouting buzzwords at this point.
Calfpupa@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Why when both are accurate
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The funny thing is that communism is technically an evolution of actual liberalism, and tankies look a lot less down on conservatives because of conservatism’s “muh tradishun” lifestyle marketing.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 week ago
nobody cares about facts or details. they only care about marx = communism.
he was a better economist than he was a political theorist.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Why would you say he’s a bad political theorist? If we measure the success of a political theory by its ability to take, hold and exercise power Marxism is one of the most successful political ideologies in the world.
Or are you doubting it’s accuracy more then its success?
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I agree, but these are not liberals. Don’t let the far-right to have the word “liberalism”! They’re conservatives or right-libertarians at best, and outright fascists at worst.