/liberty/ - Liberty

Please r8 mine.

also calcium

Marxism is a bankrupt ideology from the ground up. Hegelian dialectics offers no explanation grounded in formal logic for the transition from one form to another; it is merely a phenomenological framework for the way in which concepts evolve. Contradictions inherent in any proposition lead to the creation of a counter-proposition; both of these are then subsumed into the synthesis. Marx and his contemporaries' recasting of dialectics as a law of material nature and a tool with analytical power (diamat) provides the foundations of an ideology which claims that history is a procession of modes of production which are transformed as other modes come into conflict with them and that society is a 'superstructure' rising out of this.

Observing current and historical social structures or analyzing human psychology or using logic (game theory) as ways to create theories with predictive power is, from the Marxist perspective, invalid because the paradigm is subject to periodic and complete transformation; diamat therefore dismisses the entire field of economic theory in its current empiricist form as being part of the superstructure.

The fundamental problem with this view is that a dialectical model has no predictive power by design. In the words of Kołakowski in Main Currents of Marxism, "[It] consists partly of truisms with no specific Marxist content, partly of philosophical dogmas, partly of nonsense, and partly of statements that could be any of these things depending on how they are interpreted." You can only recognize conflict and transformation after the fact, and no direction towards which society moves is implied. Marxists assert that everything moves in the direction of increasing complexity (a claim that comes dangerously close to denying entropy exists), but no adequate explanation of why this is the case or a definition of what complexity is in the social sense are provided.

After creating diamat, Marx then hilariously spun around at gale-force speeds to begin making empirically falsifiable claims: that society has always been composed of rigid, stratified classes (a claim pulled entirely from thin air and patently untrue; see hunter-gatherer societies, which have been the most common way for humans to organize themselves historically) and that we will someday transcend this and reach a classless society, that relationships between classes are inherently exploitative, that what causes modes of production to change is specifically class conflict, his labour theory of value and so on. These theories are what have led to the disastrous economic and social policies implemented by Marxists and their descendants, but when this is pointed out empirically Marxists revert to diamat and claim that such analyses of Marxist systems are impossible because Marxism is based on dialectics (well, the smarter ones do this; most just trot out the tired meme of not true socialism).

In short, Marxism consists of two contradictory pillars failing to mesh together; dialectical materialism and a number of disparate empirical claims which lead to very dangerous political implications. By suggesting that classes are rigid and unchanging, Marxists create an 'us' and 'them'. By claiming that the relationship between classes is inherently exploitative, they create the justification for aggression against the oppressive 'them'.