All nazis still alive to experience her loved Ayn Rand. 6 million + dead. Argument over.

Because Stalin was a paranoid, authoritarian, bloodthirsty freak, no company owner has ever fucked anyone over. A <u>is</u> a!

“The most powerful way to argue the affirmative is to compare the number of human beings murdered by the devotees of each.”

And the Holy Trinity wins by a fucking landslide.  Or is that not where we were going with this?

Using that standard, I await Goldbergs denunciation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They were killing people centuries before Karl Marx was born.

“Of course not. Murder is A-OK if you do it for Jeebus.”

Hmm.  What if you were only doing it for a pope?

What if I live on a riverboat that only travels on the mississippi… and I live off of fish and seaweed meaning I never have to go to shore… does that make me extra compliant with your philosophy or a blasphemer who deserves extra punishment? Or is it that kind of hairsplitting that causes exactly what you’re protesting here?

(it makes me a little sad that my first reaction was “wait, but what *if*...”, but I’m sure I’ll get over it)

Neither Marx nor Rand have much credibility these days.  They sailed on the good ship Loon some time ago.  The main difference is Marx used to have credibility.  It may have been wrong but it was not incoherent.  Randian Objectivism was more of a fad than a serious philosophy.

Jonah is a moron.

Magis, I’d say Marxism has some good critiques of capitalism, but the proposed “solutions” of Marxism are garbage and don’t work in the real world.

Is Jonah counting all the dead in Chile (Pinochet), Argentina (Galtieri), Iraq (Sadam) and other countries whose government was put in place by the CIA ?

“It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx.”

It ought to be less embarrassing to admit that Jonah Goldberg is one of the least powerful minds ever to litter our cultural landscape than it is to admit you actually gave Jonah a regular column in the LA Times…

He’s smoking something if he honestly thinks that unchecked Capitalism has never resulted in the deaths of people.

Ben D.:

I agree, what I was getting at was that as a cosmology it is no longer taken seriously.  It is still worth reading, especially as an exercise in historical philosophy. 

Randian Objectivism, OTOH, never present a cogent idea.  To the extent that it is true it is meaningless.  She certainly wasn’t the first one to believe that objects have a reality independent of thought and perception.  So what?  So, therefore we can discover it?  The problem lies in that we impose our perceptions on the reality at all time.  To wit:  One person sees a tree and sees an impediment to a development.  One person sees it and sees a giver of shade and a nesting place for birds.  Well, it is both.  What the reality of the tree doesn’t contain is the moral direction to leave it standing or cut it down.  Rand was a kook.

How many people the adherents of a philosophy kill has nothing to do with the coherence of the philosophy, not directly.

Marx, whether you agree with him or not, was at least a serious thinker who wrote thought-provoking works.  Ayn Rand wrote bad romance novels.  ‘Nuff said.

“Oh, and Jonah, your class privilege is showing.  Best to have a nice steaming cup of STFU because advocating for the divine right of capitalists to screw over the workers is a good way to ensure that you’ll be one of the first ones who gets put against the wall when the Revolution comes.”

I’d like to think that Jonah would be up against the wall, sooner or later, at least metaphorically, no matter what happens.  He’s not alone in earning that privilege, but he is certainly a great example of one particular kind corrosive wingnutism…

Is Jonah counting all the dead in Chile (Pinochet), Argentina (Galtieri), Iraq (Sadam) and other countries whose government was put in place by the CIA ?

How many of these can we tie to the Rethug admins, or St. Reagan himself?  This is a fun little game to see who will come in behind Jesus and Muhammad.

Thanks to the influence of Randians and conservative fellow travelers some 20,000 Americans die each year for want of health insurance. (The number would be astronomically larger were it not for Medicare - something that exists in spite of them.) There are ways to kill massive amounts of people other than shooting them. (Not even mentioning deaths from lack of effective government regulation of environment, occupational safety, etc.)

How many people who are saying Marx’s ‘solutions’ weren’t great actually read Marx? Answer: not a one, because Marx did not advocate for solutions. Das Kapital is entirely a factual examination of capitalism, coupled with an analysis/critique (which some may disagree with), but there is no political programme in there. There’s a reason why it’s usually called “Marxism-Leninism”. Most of the political programme was proposed by Lenin, not Marx, and in many ways it is completly antithetical to Marx’ views.

I’d like to think that Jonah would be up against the wall, sooner or later, at least metaphorically, no matter what happens.

Hell, even if the teabaggers take over, Jonah is probably at the top of the list of the first purges…

The joke always was that Marx was right about capitalism and wrong about communism, and it’s still true.

Well, the trick is to whittle down your research group into the actual adherents.  Since everyone from Hitler to Whole Foods shoppers are staunchly dedicated to the philosophies of Karl Marx, we get to include every single dead soldier at Stalingrad as a casualty of Das Kapital.  And toss in Ted Bundy and Charles Manson and the Clintons (who murdered Vince Foster!) to the list because, hey, I’m sure they’ve all paid too much for groceries at some point.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Ayn Rand herself has been accused of being No True Scottsman when it comes to libertarianism, so even she does not qualify as a solid adherent of her own philosophy.  Since Randianism has never had anyone sufficiently conservative enough to adhere to it, we can conclude that it has never included any murderers within its ranks.  QED!

Of course, this is a lot like judging ice cream flavors by the number of pedophiles that like the taste.  After all, if the demographics break down 60/30/10 for Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry, we can safely conclude that the Cocoa Bean is responsible for untold numbers of violent crimes a year.

”...we can safely conclude that the Cocoa Bean is responsible for untold numbers of violent crimes a year.”

Just imagine the devastation caused by mint-chocolate-chip!  OMFG!  The horror!...

I assume Goldberg is not counting the millions killed in preventable famines in colonialist-controlled areas, since that would be inconvenient.  The Irish Potato Blight and the Bengali Famine each killed millions, and those are the ones we know about because they were in English-controlled areas.  Casting a gaze into Japanese colonial conquest of China or Belgian Congo . . . .

I don’t think anyone here is going to hold that the colonial powers were following Marx.

BlackBloc:

Das Kapital did not propose actions but the Manifesto did.

He’s smoking something if he honestly thinks that unchecked Capitalism has never resulted in the deaths of people.

Oh, come on, it’s not like actual people died in Bhopal or anything.

Just imagine the devastation caused by mint-chocolate-chip!  OMFG!  The horror!…

Scientists halted the study for ethical reasons.

Even most Randians are embarrassed to be influenced by Ayn Rand.  I went to college with one boy who read Rand and said that Objectivism has nothing to do with being objective.  I said, “Oh, kinda like how Scientology has nothing to do with science?”  He laughed and completely agreed.  2 years later I found out that he actually was an Objectivist, during the presidential campaigns.  I don’t know if he read the books and it took a few years for it to sink into his head, or if he always followed Rand and was just embarrassed to admit it.  Ranians don’t have to kill anyone to be completely and utterly embarrassed by their beliefs.

Neither Marx nor Rand have much credibility these days.  They sailed on the good ship Loon some time ago.  The main difference is Marx used to have credibility.  It may have been wrong but it was not incoherent.

Marx still has some credibility in US academia, especially at my undergrad* and I heard this was more the case of academia in Western Europe and elsewhere from some British and German scholars at a conference. 

Considering the recent recession, I’ve seen more postings for academic seminars/conferences on many campuses calling for a reassessment and possible application of Marx and Marxist ideas.

I don’t think anyone here is going to hold that the colonial powers were following Marx.

I didn’t think anyone would try to associate Whole Foods with Nazis on the grounds that Hitler was a self-described vegetarian.  And yet… here we are.

So, uh, what happened to the people who were originally on the North American continent when they ran up against Manifest Destiny again?

Given that Marx has been proven substantially correct and prescient about the failures of market capitalism that we’ve been experiencing in the US since about 1980, his reputation amongst people who actually know things about economics has been waxing.

Also, do we get to lay the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan at the feet of Republican conservatism?

Indirectly creating win-filled threads like this one will be a, yea, the only, redemptive feature Goldberg will be able to cite on any available Day of Judgement provided by any benign god one may come across.

Then again, even a malign god will likely find the fucker annoying and reward his evil with eternal steakknife sodomy.

The joke always was that Marx was right about capitalism and wrong about communism, and it’s still true.

My impressions from reading his writings regarding this was that he was extremely naive about how the dictatorship of the proletariat would naturally progress to the point where the state would become necessary and the state of that dictatorship will eventually wither away and then “True communism” would result. 

In the midst of reading his points, my mind was screaming “Did you really believe any group of people would so willingly and freely give up power when they’ve seized it and had a taste of the kind with practically no effective checks unless compelled to by force or other forms of coercion?” Boggles the mind when one does even a cursory examination of world history.

exholt,

I wonder how much of that was Engels.  I remember reading his piece, “On the origins of family, private property, and the state” and thinking there was some good stuff about the relationship between “the family,” systems of domination, and material (re)production, and then he goes off on this almost mystical path about how The Family would wither away under communism, but that heterosexual pair-bonding would naturally occur and flourish everywhere.

Most of the Manifesto is pure Engel. The rest is critique of the other socialist schools around at the time, and most of it is right on the money too… and I’m saying that as a fervent Bakuninist.

I think actually Goldberg may be right here - however it’s not that Randists are any less bloodthirsty -just nobody has allowed them anywhere near that kind of power and they are too blindingly stupid to seize it on their own.

I think the reason many conservatives are ambivalent about Rand is her staunch atheism. It didn’t help her cause any when Wm F Buckley basically “Read her out” of the conservative movement in the 1950’s with a scathing review of “Atlas Shrugged” by Whittaker Chambers that he published in his then-new National Review magazine. So, right off the bat, you either sided with Buckley, or with Rand, and Buckley, a Catholic, was a lot more palatable to mainstream conservatives. As a result, Rand is sort of a “Ghost” figure within the modern conservative movement - highly influential, but rarely acknowledged.

professorfate: Other than Allan Greenspan and half the people in the former Bush administration, you mean?

“How many people the adherents of a philosophy kill has nothing to do with the coherence of the philosophy, not directly.”

Well, in fairness to Rand, her philosophy was hardly incoherent, indeed, it is a model of clarity. That it is wrong in many areas doesn’t mean it isn’t clearly spelled out and easy to understand. In any event, I don’t think the original point had to do with coherence, but morality.

“Well, in fairness to Rand, her philosophy was hardly incoherent, indeed, it is a model of clarity.”

...although the length of Atlas Shrugged belies that statements, let’s go with it.

The issue of incoherence isn’t so much with her writing as it is in the huge disparity between her view of the world and what she thought it should be, and reality.  She literally did not seem to inhabit the same universe as the rest of us.

You can complain about Marx all you want, but the man had an interesting set of (devestatingly accurate) observations about Capitalism. 

In contrast, Rand seems to be writing science fiction about another species of being only slightly related to Homo Sapiens, occupying a planet that is only vaguely reminiscent of Earth and yet is convinced, and tries to convince us, that it is revealed truth…

That’s the stupidest thing ever written, until Jonah Goldberg writes something else. (Copyright Roy Edroso.)

Neither Marx nor Rand have much credibility these days.  They sailed on the good ship Loon some time ago.  The main difference is Marx used to have credibility.

The other point is that Marx’s critique of capital, labour and social relations has enough of an intellectual foundation to allow re-evaluations of that foundation that have little in common with Stalin, Mao or even Marx’s own opinions about nineteenth-century society. (As Linnaeus says at #18.) The recently-departed G.A. Cohen is a good example of someone who did just that.

Ayn Rand belongs to the history of publishing. And cults. And teen sociology.

Bakuninist?  Wow, you and Noam?  One more proof of diversity in the Panda Universe.

And one could argue that Rand had ” an interesting set of (devestatingly accurate) observations about” Marxism. As a philosopher, she was overrated (by her followers), but as a critic, she was top notch. And of course, her work was fiction. Even she admitted her characters were unrealistic. She, of course, never went Galt herself, nor did she seem to advocate doing so here in the real world.

I put Rand in the same general category as Orwell. Both issued dire warnings about the effects of a totalitarian collectivist state, the only main difference is the State crushed Orwell’s heroes, whereas in Rand’s world, they prevailed. That she had some silly (and unrealistic) ideas doesn’t diminish her influence.

”...but as a critic, she was top notch.”

Oh really?  Enlighten us, please…

BTW, there were and are people who worship the ideas of L. Ron Hubbard, hang on every word he spoke or wrote, have devoted their lives to his “teachings”, and have set up and maintain institutions to promote him and his ideas, just like Rand.  However, that isn’t proof that he really was some kind of philosophical/psychological/behavioral/scientific/religious savant…

Let’s see, the foundational philosophies of the Republican party are corporatism combined with nationalism and virulent racism (a combination also known as fascism, except we aren’t allowed to call it that because Cheney hasn’t actually built concentration camps).  Fascism seems to have a rather bloody record, if I recall correctly, something about a huge war that engulfed most of the world, tens of millions dead.  They then leaven it with a not-so-healthy dose of fundamentalist religious fanaticism, surely that hasn’t been responsible for any bloodshed, right?  We have no history of religious war, oppression or other violence, right?  And then they garnish with some anti government fanaticism.  How many died in the Civil War again, and all of the trouble it spawned?  Yeah, Republican philosophy is all rainbows and butterflies and cotton candy.

“Both issued dire warnings about the effects of a totalitarian collectivist state”

Where in one case, “totalitarian collectivist state” meant “the police are watching you every day, history is constantly censored and revised, and if you step out of line a cage full or rats will be clamped to your face” and in the other “totalitarian collectivist state” meant “even geniuses have to pay their taxes, and if you’re an architect your clients have final say on what gets built.”

I call myself a Marxist mainly because I’ve read some fascinating late-20th century economic works grounded in Marxist economic concepts, and these eventually led me to read Capital which is still very applicable to current events; I was first reading it during the early Nineties depression and now I’ve lived through three downturns (and one fairly spectacular boom) with Marx as tour guide to the market’s antics. Plus of course I can make a lot more sense of the cycles I lived through before and those throughout the history of capitalism (going back to say the 1820s, in their classically capitalist form). I think Marx’s approach to economics is valid in the sense that the Darwinian paradigm of evolution via natural selection or the Newtonian frame of a mechanical universe governed by matter interacting via universal forces are; both of these have been much refined in detail yet still overarch their respective disciplines.

The difference is, Marxism does include a call to action; it is pretty much impossible to assimilate Marx’s analytical approach without internalizing the idea that capitalism is at best a stage in human development, and lingering in that stage unnecessarily long entails measurable and substantial human suffering. And no, Marx isn’t much help in guiding a post-capitalist society away from the obvious pitfalls of any sort of “dictatorship,” even one of the proletariat—and he certainly was naive in believing that just because a party came to power via the working classes, that it would therefore always act in that class’s best interest—still less the general interest of humanity as a whole.

I wonder how much of that was Engels.

Whether it was mostly Engels or not, Marx did sign off on it. 

And unfortunately, its application by their ideological successors has caused many to experience the disquieting phenomenon of exchanging one harsh tyranny for another sometimes more efficient ruthless one as the case of the former Soviet Union and Maoist China has shown.  In the latter case, my physics prof great-aunt, her agricultural research scientist husband, and their children had front-row seats for the first 3 decades before they were finally able to emigrate to the US after the Cultural Revolution ended in the late 1970’s. 

To be fair, a large part of this has also to do with the fact latent powerhungry tendencies tend to exist in a critical mass of humanity independent of Marx or Engels…..one good reason why giving any group of people unchecked power like that associated with dictatorship is never a good idea…whether it happens to be Marxist, Fascist, or anything else…

Sure.  Let us consider conservatism in terms of the trail of soul-dead victims that it leaves behind.

Marx does contain a call to action, but it’s pretty clear that he thought the whole revolution thing would happen only after capitalism had reached its fullest flowering (for better or worse) and gone into decadence. It was Lenin’s (kinda self-serving) idea that you could impose the dictatorship of the proletariat by force in a mostly agrarian and feudal country, thus going directly from first attempts at crawling to the olympic triple jump.

If wonder if the real reason everybody stopped defined-benefit pension plans was so that the workers wouldn’t in fact own the means of production…

I don’t think Lyndon LaRouche has killed anyone. At least, not too many people. Nevertheless, I do not consider his movement to be a valid or worthwhile political philosophy.

Considering the recent recession, I’ve seen more postings for academic seminars/conferences on many campuses calling for a reassessment and possible application of Marx and Marxist ideas.

Hey, if Marxism didn’t get anywhere in the U.S. during the Great Depression, when the world was a lot less secure and the USSR was roaring, it’s not going to go anywhere now.

Come to think of it, Cuba is the only country I can think of that went Communist not as a result, directly or indirectlly, of a world war’s aftermath. There’s something to the hoary saying—Marxism is great until you try to put it into practice.

If we’re judging the value of ideas by how many people are killed by followers, can someone do the math quick on whether Al-Queda or, um “Bushism”, is better?

Cause I’m pretty sure Jonah just switched sides in the Middle Eastern wars.

Bakuninist?  Wow, you and Noam?  One more proof of diversity in the Panda Universe.

The joke is that there’s no such thing as a Bakuninist. Anarchists tend to name their belief systems on descriptive terms (anarcha-feminist, anarcho-syndicalist, anarcho-communist) rather than by the name of their patron saints, unlike the various Marxoids.

As an anarchocommunist, it would be more accurate to call me a Kropotkinist, maybe even a Makhnoist. It would still be a bit inaccurate, since we believe in the leadership of ideas not of people.

Hey, if Marxism didn’t get anywhere in the U.S. during the Great Depression, when the world was a lot less secure and the USSR was roaring, it’s not going to go anywhere now.

That’s a little bit like saying “If Catharism didn’t get anywhere in Europe…”. The reason why Marxism failed in the US was because it was stomped on, stigmatised and suppressed just as hard as was compatible with a kabuki play of free expression in a democratic country.

Hey, if Marxism didn’t get anywhere in the U.S. during the Great Depression, when the world was a lot less secure and the USSR was roaring, it’s not going to go anywhere now.

The mix of suppression in the wake of the Red scare of the interwar period like the Palmer Raids combined with FDR’s decision to implement Keynesian economic policies such as the New Deal played critical parts in dampening appeal of Marxist uprisings in the US back then.  The fact such suppression of Marxist/Communist sympathizers by the FBI in this period shows how serious of a threat the US government and ruling elite perceived them to be…..

Come to think of it, Cuba is the only country I can think of that went Communist not as a result, directly or indirectlly, of a world war’s aftermath.

You can add Nicaragua, Angola, and Mozambique to that list.

By identical reasoning, it ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by L. Ron Hubbard than by Paul of Tarsus.  But, obviously, it’s not.

Comment #359: LR on 08/25 at 11:21 PM

Or, you know, I could acknowledge that I’m not a little island of meaning all to my own and that I actually exist in a culture of shared meaning that influences all the semantics inside my head.

Nobody has said otherwise.  The problem is that you and others are discounting the possibility of using radically different languages in private contexts.

Sacundim, your English-Spanish analogy is bogus. If you speak Spanish at home, that’s not changing the fact that you’d have to speak English to interact with the wider society, OR the fact that your Spanish in the home will be influenced by your use of English in the outside world. You’d probably end up with Spanglish, in fact, and I know this from personal experience as a Latino.

The point of the example wasn’t that somebody can choose to speak only Spanish in the USA.  The point of the example was precisely that despite the fact that you pretty much have to speak English outside the home, you still can choose to speak Spanish inside the home.

People can choose not to speak Spanglish.  One of my best friends is a translator and interpreter, he’s very deliberately trained himself never to speak Spanglish, not even off the job.

Why is it visually hot to dump a load of fluid that is commonly considered dirty onto the face, which is considered an indicator of personal identity?

The “semen is dirty” idea has been very nicely discussed here.  But again, the point is that no matter what the common opinion is, the participants can privately agree on not thinking semen to be dirty, and there will be nobody there to monitor or enforce compliance with general opinion.

“Oh really?  Enlighten us, please…”

Well, even her strongest foes would be hard pressed to deny her influence. Last I checked. “Atlas Shrugged” was #30 on Amazon.com’s best seller list, not bad for a 50 year old novel that runs over a thousand pages. But anyway, my point was that she was probably the most effective critic of collectivism in its various forms who ever lived. That’s pretty hard for anyone to deny.

“Where in one case, “totalitarian collectivist state” meant “the police are watching you every day, history is constantly censored and revised, and if you step out of line a cage full or rats will be clamped to your face” and in the other “totalitarian collectivist state” meant “even geniuses have to pay their taxes, and if you’re an architect your clients have final say on what gets built.”  “

Well, not quite. One was a story of futile rebellion against a totalitarian state that was fully formed, the other a tale of successful rebellion against one that was in the process of developing.