Hi, Gary.
You say you are against "Marxism."
I'm against collapsed economies and dead people, so sure.
How do you define "Marxism,"
Like Marx did. As I was saying to P., I have
Das Kapital and
The Communist Manifesto right here, on my desk.
Do you define it as the belief that workers should NOT be exploited by the super-rich?
That's a very old and simplistic idea, so no. Even Marx
himself was not that simplistic.
Do you define it as believing that production and social institutions should be run democratically and not for the benefit of the few?
That's what Marxists sometimes say they believe, but it's belied by the way Marxism always does business. In reality, what you end up with is a very, very elite group of "Party" folks who have every privilege and all the power, and under them a whole bunch of hapless "proles" who suffer like dogs under the tyranny of the elite. So they never end up running "production" and "social institutions" for "the benefit of" the many; rather, its' a worse form of exploitation than the one it claims to cure.
Going Marxist is the equivalent of giving yourself cancer in hopes of curing your headache.
Do you prefer hierarchical institutions?
Hierarchy is inevitable. But there's no reason it's "institutional" at all. Hierarchy is merely a product of different talents, abilities and skills. To hate hierarchy is to hate excellence of any kind. It's a very toxic viewpoint, really.
Worse still, the only way to banish hierarchy from society is to impose totalitarian limitations on people's skills, talents, abilities and even their hard work.
Did you ever read the short story "Harrison Bergeron," by Vonnegut? It's totally brilliant, and illustrates this very, very well. Here:
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBerg ... n_djvu.txt
Or are you more against Marx's notions of a "revolution"
Revolutions kill people.
and so-called "dictatorship" of the proletariat?
I'm against dictatorship of the anybody.
I would think Marx's predictions concerning the future are certainly suspect,
Absolutely. And that's no small problem, Gary. Because Marxism absolutely depends on Marxist historicism and the Hegelian idea that "history" has its own trajectory and teleology toward the better, that will happen automatically if we just smash the present (through revolution). If history actually has no such automatic trajectory and teleology, and you smash the present, then what happens is nothing but chaos and death.
Of course, that's a mad idea...and it really gets people killed.
however, his analysis of capitalism's behavior seems to me to be his more valuable contribution.
He really didn't understand Capitalism at all. He thought that the "proletariat" was a stable thing that you could talk about as a single entity, that the "bourgeoisie" was the final great Satan, and the conditions he saw in the Industrial Revolution were bound to be universal. He thought that all history was about "class struggle," which it never was, of course..."class" was only ever one of many categories that have been important in history, and often it was not at all important. He thought Atheism was not only necessary but good, and that human beings "self-actualize through praxis," which isn't true either.
Of course, none of that was true. Classes are not stable categories: people move in and out of them. Industrialization is now being undone by technological replacement -- how many factory jobs do you see around these days? And the bourgeoisie turned out the the largest group, the commercial middle class. Moreover, his "revolution" was going to happen in feudal Russia, but was not even going to come close to happening in England, where he thought it was sure to happen.
The guy was just wrong, about Capitalism and about most everything else. And the world he described isn't even the world we live in today.
