the idea that Marxism was constructed by Marx for personal gain and power is inexcusably idiotic. — Maw

Masterfully understated.

Just read Marx — Maw

I have. I can't find consistent definitions for any of the Marxist/Marxian concepts I've mentioned here and on the other thread. And it looks like nobody else can either. Believe me, I've asked university professors.

By the way, Capital is about economic theories, it doesn't say anything about the system Marx wanted to replace capitalism with. So, basically, nobody knows what Marx's revolutionary movement was trying to achieve.

In any case, it doesn't look like Marxism is a philosophy. Whatever it is, it isn't even logically consistent. Strange that it should take idiots like Kolakowski and others to notice that.

I have. — Apollodorus

Then quote the parts you take issue with. I don't see the point in objecting to an argument nobody is arguing with except yourself. Or if there are these other people, quote them as well.

I have no idea what you are trying to say.

Then quote the parts you take issue with. — Valentinus

“Socialists from Marx and Engels onwards have always held that with the establishment of Socialism the State will disappear”

The Withering Away of the State – From Marx to Stalin, Marxists Internet Archive

Withering away of the state, Wikipedia Article

Original German text in Marx-Engels Werke (MEW), Vol. 20, p. 262:

“An die Stelle der Regierung über Personen tritt die Verwaltung von Sachen und die Leitung von Produktionsprozessen. Der Staat wird nicht »abgeschafft«, er stirbt ab.

English translation in Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 23, p. 268:

“State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies out of itself: the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not "abolished", it withers away”

A state that assumes an administrative function can't "wither away"

The OP provides links to articles by historians discussing the inconsistency of concepts like "the withering away of the state". It isn't something that I've made up.

Well, the text written by Marx was addressed in your other thread, particularly by boethius.

The critics of Marx you assembled are only interested in the question of how a revolution plays out.
There is merit in struggling with what one rejects or finds interesting in his work. Your proposition that it was a rhetorical ruse at its very heart is odd. Such a point of view does not actually give one much leverage to oppose what one might object to.

If the guy was that flaky in your view, why bring him up at all?

If the guy was that flaky in your view, why bring him up at all? — Valentinus

It all began with threads like "Democracy vs Socialism" (started by others) where some comments seemed to suggest that socialism, including Marxism is some sort of panacea to all societal ills. In my view, which is supported by historians and other scholars, this is far from being the case. On the contrary, Marxism, in particular, has a lot of inconsistencies in many of its central theories and concepts.

As already stated, the question that I asked myself was "how is it possible that somebody who had a degree in philosophy, was very well-read and experienced in philosophical and political debate, developed a "political philosophy" that doesn't hold water?" Was this accident or intention? I think it is hard to argue that it was entirely accidental in view of the fact that as noted by historians like Adamiack and others, Marx and Engels sometimes deliberately used suggestive, ambiguous or misleading language that contradicts the claim that their system was "scientific".

I brought up the issue here because I wanted to find out what others think of the matter and because I thought that a philosophy forum would be more "philosophical" and less argumentative than one where people tend to discuss politics in a more partisan or biased way.

I agree that @boethius addressed one of the points I was making and I appreciate that he agreed with me. However, there are many other points which, when objectively addressed, might actually lead to the same conclusion. In which case the topic would be justified.

Marxist theory is contradictory. It fails.

Here are two contradictions in Marxist thinking:

1. Capitalism supposedly adversely affects the worker's relation to work.
(A) Capitalism supposedly deprives the worker of work by alienating him from labor through technology and industrialization, reducing his labor from skilled to unskilled. (B) Capitalism is thought to make the worker work more; this work is "exploitative" because, through it, surplus value is extracted from labor as capital; the worker must work more to retain the value that was lost from the extracted surplus and because more work is needed to recoup the lower wages from being an unskilled worker. Thus the worker is both deprived of labor and labors more due to capitalism.

2. The worker is allegedly exploited in capitalism.
This alleged exploitation is a result of: (A) the worker must work more. He must work more because his wages are less than if he were in control of the means of production (E.g. a shoemaker makes more than a shoe factory worker). For the worker, the cost of living goes up. Meanwhile (B) the worker is exploited because in order for the capitalist to profit, the capitalist must "extract surplus value" from the worker; in other words, to make a profit and be competitive, the capitalist must pay the worker less for the worker's labor, so that the cost of production is less. But if capitalism causes the cost of production to be less, than "exploitation of the worker" actually lowers the cost of living. Thus the alleged exploitation of the worker both reduces and increases the cost of living for the worker.

Marx called religion the "opium of the people," though ironically his philosophy is entirely ressentiment-based, and it is ressentiment that functions as "opium" for the weak and disenfranchsed to this day; never actually producing anything positive for them (except psychological self-gratification), and being responsible for the myriad of humanitarian catastrophes that communism is well-known for.

What did Marx expect a dismissal of the spiritual world to result in, other than mass capitalism? It's the logical consequence.

In a further twist of irony, religion, for all its faults, is often the moral glue that binds vulnerable communities together. Without it, they fall apart in a negative spiral of crime and demoralization from which there is no escape.

So Marx, in addition to having the blood of tens of millions on his hands, did the poor of this world a gigantic disservice by inviting them into a cult of godless materialism - the very thing it purports to fight.

Marx called religion the "opium of the people," though ironically his philosophy is entirely ressentiment-based, and it is ressentiment that functions as "opium" for the weak and disenfranchsed to this day; — Tzeentch

I tried to disagree with this, but it's basically true.

I think it's just about possible to argue that the popularity of Marx's philosophy might have been partly based on ressentiment—and that actions by some of his adherents were motivated by it, e.g., in the violence of revolutionary movements—but not that his philosophy is itself based on it, since ressentiment, at least in Nietzsche's use of the term, includes not only projecting blame on to the stronger party but also and obversely celebrating or affirming one's own state of weakness. This is something Marx's philosophy does not do: it seeks to abolish the conditions of weakness.

It's also a bit perverse to claim that a philosophy that problematizes that which supporters of the status quo will tell you is unproblematic is providing any kind of comfort. Unless any kind of hope for change at all is an opium, in which case it's not much of an accusation.

Unless any kind of hope for change at all is an opium, in which case it's not much of an accusation. — Jamal

Sometimes I wonder if the earlier Marx went into the opium of hope later on as more revolutionary comments were made. His and Engel's theories at their core is just a form of psychohistory (The Foundation), in which they try to map out the dominos falling within the system of capitalism. But maybe Marx got fed up by people who didn't understand the theory to the point of calling for the demolish of capitalism as a revolutionary action. It's always been a point of conflict for those discussing Marx whether or not he actually called for action against capitalism or not, cherry picking his statements out of context to support either criticism or in support of his theories. Even to the point of blaming Marx for all the problems of communist nations building from his ideas. It all kind of supports the existentialist's ideas of how language shapes our reality, in which the entire being and legacy of Marx shifts depending on the way his words have been interpreted and decoded.

But I'm in the camp of looking at his theories in the form of decoding the cogs of capitalism, and I think there's no opium to be found there, only a form of scientific observation that's been lost in how to interpret language over a historical timeframe in which language have changed to give extremely different interpretative values.

And through the observation of the cogs of capitalism, I think it's very important to understand what Marx and Engel's was talking about, especially in a neoliberal era in which there's no ceiling to how much wealth billionaires can pool into their pockets.

Society is in a breaking point close to what Marx laid out; in which the divide between owners and workers is so large that we're beginning to speak of universal basic income and other strategies to mitigate the consequences of capitalism's progression.

The biggest lie or misconception that supporters of capitalism perpetuates, is that the wealthy will re-invest their wealth back into society. But in a globalized neoliberal capitalist economy, they rather pool their wealth into tax free hubs, like banks or investing in extreme architecture in places like Dubai and Qatar. The value and wealth becomes solidified monuments of gold and never trickle down to the very society that it fed from.

So what we're witnessing right now is the verification of Marx theories for what will eventually happen with capitalism. I'm not sure I want to call it late-stage capitalism because we don't know how far it will get, but we're starting to see problems rising up for the poor and low-income, and if the wealth and money doesn't start to trickle down back into society (preferably with higher tax for the wealthy since the neoliberal experiment proved to not work as people believed it would), we will eventually see a revolution, not by the will of Marx, but out of the desperation of the people, all along the line of what Marx and Engels theorized.

So I don't think there's any opium other than the trust in that society is a self-correcting organism. If one part feeds too much on the other, they will soon be devoured by the ones they put into starvation. Economy is humanity's simulation of evolution, and as such, an unbalanced eco-system will always self-correct in the end.