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Was Karl Marx a bad person?

Was Karl Marx a bad person?

  • Yes, he espoused evil beliefs intentionally

    Votes: 16 19.0%

  • No, he was just misguided, and possibly loony

    Votes: 27 32.1%

  • No, he was right

    Votes: 17 20.2%

  • IDK/Other

    Votes: 24 28.6%
  • Total voters
    84
How the heck can anyone on here know the answer to that...since no one on here knew him?

And what difference it makes makes no sense to me.

Good people have dumb ideas sometimes and bad people have good ideas sometimes.

How good or bad a person might be has nothing to do with what their views are of a particular thing.


This is like politics...people often seem less interested in where the candidates stand on issues and seem more interested on whether the candidates are 'good' people or not.

One should never give more or less weight to what someone says based on how 'nice' you think they are.
 
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PakPuk said:
Larger welfare state= more dependency+more immigration+more crime
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Someone's been ingesting far too much Fox News for their intellectual health. This type of drivel only happens after decades of concentrated class warfare --in less Leftist terms, your economic betters have spent a lot of money deluding you into thinking that there's a causal relationship between these things, when there aren't even correlations. I mean, in the case of the three statements that you've discussed, it's not even the case that the "facts" that you're talking about are true, let alone whether or not there's a causal relationship between them.
 
MadLib said:
Do you think Karl Marx was a bad person for devising Marxist-style communism?

I'm not endorsing his viewpoints with this thread, I'm just seeing what everyone's opinion is.
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Communism/Marxism as with many ideologies fails to take into account Human Nature and Frailties meaning that they are doomed to failure. Evil, do not know enough about the man to know if he was evil, misguided and naïve, absolutely.
 
rocket88 said:
I don't know about you, but I work to get things. If I don't get better things from working harder, why bother?
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How do you even quantify "working harder"? More physical effort? More hours? When the only person that really benefits is your boss
 
Gathomas88 said:
Put simply, he was a scumbag. He espoused a philosophy based principally upon violence in pursuit of wanton envy, dressed up in utopian blather.
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I'm to believe you think that the expansion of capitalism and the horrors that colonialism wrought upon Latin America, Africa, India, etc were non-violent

That's funny


Gathomas88 said:
He was also a rather supreme hypocrite, relying upon the benefits of his own relatively privileged upbringing, as well as generous donations from his more wealthy friends and followers, to sustain himself in a comfortable lifestyle while he either lounged about idle or went around preaching his lunacy.
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Marx was writing constantly. Does academic labor not count as labor? He was also poor more or less the entirety of his time in London
 
dimensionallava said:
Hasn't fox news been banned in the UK? lol either way pakpuk is a self proclaimed member of the nationalist front of britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(UK)

he's not just somebody's innocent grandpa whos been watching to much bill oreilly
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I disagree with your central thesis here, although the disagreement is largely academic. In UK, it's the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, etc rather than Fox News, but we're talking about change of name and some trivial policy differences. The function of these propaganda centers is the same: Support the establishment power by deluding people into voting against their own interests, or to paraphrase the worker's coalitions during the late 19th century called it, "Making a human being as stupid as you could possibly make a human being." That means, among other things in modern times, stoking up the flames over immigrants and increasing the fear of immigrants and the "other" in order to get them to irrationally vote for the interests of the wealthy classes.

What's the net result of that? UKIP, the BNP, and even further, things like the National Front who're openly fascist. But the job of these propaganda machines is always to stoke the flames of Rightwing populism. And there's only one form of Rightwing populism, which is fascism. Whether that's white nationalism, other racist ideologies, pro-Authoritarianism, the religious right and other theocratic tendencies, or whatever else happens to exist in the culture, the prevalence and persistence of these beliefs is due to the sustained class warfare (here, again, the upper class support for the propaganda machines) that is constantly being waged against the lower and middle-classes. Sure, these vile ideologies and cultural tendencies have existed or sometimes arise separately from propaganda, but like all good propagandists, these news organizations know how to keep the seething fear and hatred alive and well in these people, and to play it to maximum political effect.
 
Karl Marx did not advocate the institutions of the totalitarian dictatorships that were established in his name during the twentieth century. I am reasonably confident he would have disapproved of them. Nevertheless, because he did inspire them he cannot be considered completely innocent of them. During the twentieth century tens of millions of people were not killed in the name of Thomas Jefferson, or John Stuart Mill.

I believe that most of Marx's assertions were incorrect. The labor theory of value ignores the law of supply and demand. Bob Dylan has claimed that he composed "Blowin' in the Wind" in twelve minutes. After composing it it was an easy matter to record it. "Blowin' in the Wind" has created more value than any factory worker creates during his life time.

Historically there has been no inevitable progression from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism.

Feudalism is what happens when an urban civilization collapses. It happened in Greece from about 1100 BC to 800 BC, when the Mycenaean civilization collapsed. It has happened in China when a dynasty collapsed and was not immediately succeeded by a new dynasty. It was not inevitable that when the Western Roman Empire collapsed that collapse would be followed by the dark ages. The Western Roman Empire might have been immediately followed by an even higher civilization. It may not have collapsed at all, like the Eastern Roman Empire did not.

Karl Marx should have learned from the revival of slavery in the new world, that there was nothing inevitable about its passing.

Just as there was nothing inevitable about the change from pure communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism, so is there nothing inevitable about the change from capitalism to socialism to communism.

Dialectical materialism is mythology. It is an atheist deity that is supposed to change things that have not been changed.

Marx's most important mistake was to assume that loyalties of class are more powerful than loyalties of race, nation, and ethnicity. Most of the time for most people it is the other way around. The writings of Marx cannot explain the First World War, and the fact that factory workers in each belligerent country enthusiastically supported their countries. They cannot explain the rise of the Fascist and Nazi movements. They cannot explain the fact that from the end of the Civil War to the 1960's white blue collar workers in the South would rather join the Klu Klux Klan than a labor union. They cannot explain the fact that in the United States white blue collar workers have become a Republican constituency that is important to Republican electoral victories.

In two respects Marx was right: the natural tendency of capitalism is to accumulate wealth at the top; partly because of this capitalist economies experience increasingly destructive economic downturns.

In the United States Keynesian economic policies countered these tendencies and led to the creation of the largest and richest middle class in history. Since the Reagan administration Keynesian economic policies have been scaled back. The tendencies are again emerging.
 
MadLib said:
Do you think Karl Marx was a bad person for devising Marxist-style communism?

I'm not endorsing his viewpoints with this thread, I'm just seeing what everyone's opinion is.
Click to expand...

He promoted manifestly false ideas about the nature of reality and human society. That makes him vicious, objectively.
 
MadLib said:
Do you think Karl Marx was a bad person for devising Marxist-style communism?

I'm not endorsing his viewpoints with this thread, I'm just seeing what everyone's opinion is.
Click to expand...
I believe he was sincere in his beliefs, he was just wrong.
 
MadLib said:
Do you think Karl Marx was a bad person for devising Marxist-style communism?

I'm not endorsing his viewpoints with this thread, I'm just seeing what everyone's opinion is.
Click to expand...

Of course not.

He was an academic, not a cruel dictator like those who killed in his name.
 
instagramsci said:
I'm to believe you think that the expansion of capitalism and the horrors that colonialism wrought upon Latin America, Africa, India, etc were non-violent

That's funny
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Communism is an entire political philosophy built around the premise that the poor should rise up and kill anyone who has more than they do and steal their belongings, because it will somehow result in Utopia just because some stinky 19th Century kook who was never able to successfully hold a job said so.

It's no contest, I'm afraid. Marxism can basically only result in horror and oppression if followed as intended.

Marx was writing constantly. Does academic labor not count as labor? He was also poor more or less the entirety of his time in London
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The man married a wealthy aristocrat, and was constantly borrowing money from Engels to subsidize his - pretty damn far from spartan - lifestyle. He reportedly even took writing jobs for newspapers, only to pass off articles written by Engels as his own so he could avoid having to do any actual work.

The man was, for all intents and purposes, a filthy lazy mooching hobo with some supremely whacked out and self-righteous ideas.

I guess it turns out that all the crazy homeless guys on street corners passing out homemade manifestos have more in common with their idol than they might have imagined. :lamo
 
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MadLib said:
Do you think Karl Marx was a bad person for devising Marxist-style communism?

I'm not endorsing his viewpoints with this thread, I'm just seeing what everyone's opinion is.
Click to expand...

In some ways, just like most other human beings are a mix of motivations. Many of his criticisms were valid, but his solutions were just as ridiculous as any other ideologies are. He was at least intelligent enough to recognized that the works of Carl Menger and other economists in that vein pretty much obsoleted his own theories and gave up on his. Engels is another animal altogether, and it was Engels who wrote vols. II and III of Das Kapital, and who deliberately faked much of the math in it; he had a vested interest in keeping the myth going. Marx wanted to be the 'anti-Hegel' sophist, and like all sophists was as much wrapped up in his own ego and celebrity as he was genuine intellectual discourse, not unusual for philosophers in general. I voted IDK/other, as I didn't know him personally. I see him more as a bourgeois armchair cynic than wantonly 'evil', i.e. a perpetual middle class teenager.
 
Fledermaus said:
It what?

There are many facets to Marx's research.

For example...

Do you disagree with the concept of Praxis?
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I'm familiar with Marxism.
 
Fledermaus said:
Not Marxism... Marx's research.

Obviously not.

Say no more.
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I'm generally not a believer in conspiracy theories whereby some great thinker's work was cooped by men of ill intent into something completely different. By their fruits and all.
 
Oberon said:
In some ways, just like most other human beings are a mix of motivations. Many of his criticisms were valid, but his solutions were just as ridiculous as any other ideologies are. He was at least intelligent enough to recognized that the works of Carl Menger and other economists in that vein pretty much obsoleted his own theories and gave up on his. Engels is another animal altogether, and it was Engels who wrote vols. II and III of Das Kapital, and who deliberately faked much of the math in it; he had a vested interest in keeping the myth going. Marx wanted to be the 'anti-Hegel' sophist, and like all sophists was as much wrapped up in his own ego and celebrity as he was genuine intellectual discourse, not unusual for philosophers in general. I voted IDK/other, as I didn't know him personally. I see him more as a bourgeois armchair cynic than wantonly 'evil', i.e. a perpetual middle class teenager.
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Well said.
 
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