Mal12345
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He's yet to be proven wrong about that, its part of what makes him popular with Wall St.
Proletariat v. Bourgeois, it's that simple. And it's not my job to prove Marx wrong, it's your job to prove him right. There is no procedure for proving a negative. His statement "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production" is left unproven, and even if true, he doesn't state what that nature will be under various material conditions. For example, one could say that "capitalism makes men greedy," but even if true, the postulate is not predictable of individuals, and "men" is best left in the general, collective sense of "some or most men."
Perhaps Marx should have been speaking for himself, since the only individual nature he could really know was himself.
Human nature is too complex to be that predictable, especially where he refers to individuals. It HAS been proven that group behavior is predictable.
I read an interesting but sad report from Communist Russia. It said that an experiment - an evil, immoral experiment, by the way - was conducted on a group of children. From the time they were born, they were taught to live the collective lifestyle. The result - a classroom full of kids that did nothing but rock back and forth in perfect unison all day long.
The Commies got what they wanted: perfect human beings or perfect little robots; either way, they were perfectly adapted to the material conditions of their upbringing. Not that it's what they literally wanted, but they got out exactly what they put into the experiment, only they couldn't predict it until it happened.
Communists don't understand human nature. Marx didn't understand human nature. They think they do. Thus they conducted immoral experiments on little human lives, and a generation of children was destroyed.
I'd also say that your representation of Marx and Marxism was totally mistaken, for one there were concepts about earning wealth and creation of wealth, they had been around for some time and had been tested, Marx's criticism of economics, which is fair and still stands, was that it had ceased to be any kind of scientific investigation and had become an ideology to serve special interests, which it is.
I don't believe there is a perfect socio-economic system. The problem I have with both Marx and Rand is that they presented their ideas as absolutes. That's a problem with most philosophers.
Marx, unlike Rand, focused on alienation (this was a tactic favorable to Existentialists). Neither Marx nor Rand were in favor of alienation, but both of their philosophies produced it nonetheless. Marx focused on science, but he had no science or experimental evidence to prove that capitalist economics produced alienated individuals. His focus on science was therefore a sham. But when experiments are introduced, somehow the result is always failure. And there's never any reason to judge Marxism itself a failure, they simply try again, and again, and again, producing more and more failures, destroying more and more generations of human beings in the process.
If alienation of individuals is bad, then how does focusing on collectives reduce alienation? How does forcing millions of peasant farmers into communal farms reduce alienation? How does taking away a people's independence reduce alienation? Marxism cannot answer these questions. It dogmatically asserts that it can happen, because human nature is infinitely malleable to its purposes. But what if human nature is not infinitely malleable?
Objectivism is not the alternative to both socialism and corporatism, whatever its theoretical underpinnings may be any objectivist policy or reform or change begins frim the here and now and consequently will only ever serve to strengthen actual existing corporatism and financial power.
Objectivism promotes laissez-faire capitalism with limited government - what is now technically termed "minarchism." The minarchist mentality suppresses powers of state in an effort to unleash human intellectual capacity and achievement. What you are seeing today is not laissez-faire capitalism, but a collusion between powers, both corporate and political. It's not always a friendly alliance, but it is a destructive one, and quite anti-Objectivist, hardly a product of Objectivist rationale.
I dont believe that American people or emigrees to the states, or anyone at all pretty much in the world today, wants socialism or is voting for it, socialism has become nothing what so ever besides a prejorative term used by conservatives and capitalists.
What people want, I believe, are specific fixes to market failures, such as those associated with the delivery of health services, they also are not pleased by the power of finance or monopolists, that's what's wrong with corporations to most people in welfare-capitalism BTW as most companies or agencies public or private are run and structured the same way (ie managerialism prevails), to make a lie of popular sovereignty or democratic will. That's not socialism, not by a country mile. Its not even necessarily a mixed economy in any sense of that idea, ie either mixed industries and limited financial sector or mixed public and private market share in the economy, and a mixed economy is not socialism either, not by a country mile.
GDH Cole attacked the idea of creeping nationalisation/state ownership of firms in the economy and welfare were anything remotely like socialism a long, long time ago but no one was listening, certainly not free marketeers like Hayek whose ignorance of socialism was so great that he was capable of dedicating the road to serfdom to "socialists of all parties".
I didn't say that socialism was the predominant system in today's America. But I agree that emigrees don't "want" socialism, they want a free 'meal ticket.' If that's allegedly what socialism provides to the majority, and a meal ticket is what they want, then democracy determines that socialism will eventually be the prevailing doctrine.