5 Feb 2024 7:11 am
(PART II OF V)
In reaction to my post of 30 Jan 2024, 5:20 am (this thread's post #269), Cannonpointer wrote: "Then, your (and Marx's) program is no program. It's a wish list. It's a set of contingencies wistfully desired and unlikely ever to be met, in which several extremely difficult-to-achieve ends - each one eye-rollingly unlikely as a stand-alone - would all have to align in a proper orbit around an as-yet-unnamed star to produce a paradise dreamt up in a state of intellectual ecstasy."
Again, there's no program beyond the imperative need for a socially owned and democratically administered means of production in its totality. Again, Marxism isn't a dogma. It's a guide to revolutionary action. And nothing in this thread's 269th post indicates anything constituting a wish list. Marx never delineated what a socialist society would look like beyond a socially owned and democratically commanded means of production, and there's no changing that.
Cannonpointer: "I would add that the fundamental nature of man would also have to be remade in the image of a saint for Marxism's ends to be met."
I'm not going to rehash humankind's fundamental nature. Cannonpointer believes it to be grounded in hierarchies, racism, xenophobia, and other social pathologies, and that's where I'll leave the matter.
Cannonpointer: "I believe the prayers of dervishes are as substantial as the dogmas of Marxists - and history certainly seems to align with my view. You may argue that the capitalists are writing history - but that argument would be an admission of the failure of Marxist dreamers. If their dogmas had borne fruit in the century and a half since the Marxists' inception, they would be writing the histories."
Cannonpointer may and will continue to insist that Marxism is dogmatic, as capitalist culture has conditioned him to do, but it isn't so.
Cannonpointer: "I put Marxism alongside Peak Oil and Climate Pseudo-science in its relevance to anything relevant. You may accuse me of being too simple-minded to understand what I dismiss. But if it requires a bigger brain than mine to understand it, it will require bigger brains than mine to implement it and to guard it against the base and perverse nature of man, which gave us capitalism in the first place. And THAT, sir, bespeaks hierarchies. Hierarchies within hierarchies. Hierarchies are like turtles all the way down."
What gave us capitalism was the efforts of revolutionaries. The same holds for socialism, where it's been implemented and maintained by people of all levels of intelligence. It's been partially implemented in fully industrialized capitalist societies like the US in that the production side of capitalism has already been socialized. Think about it. Workers of all levels of intelligence already collectively run all industries. But we don't own and control any industries, and therein lies the problem. The intelligence of individual workers is immaterial.
Cannonpointer: "Your claims that German workers were unhappy flies in the face of virtually every history I have seen. Over and over, westerners have been told that the German people did NOT feel exploited and that they adored Hitler."
I haven't claimed that German workers were unhappy during the Nazis' rule. In response to, I believe, LowIQTrash, I wrote something to the effect that a majority of Germany's workers were happy with Hitler, at least until they began to be bombed to death.
http://www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf
(END OF PART II)