@prokofjev: supporters at this point in time are much more culpable, because we have decades of evidence as to the horrors ordinary people can be convinced to perform through the use of Marx's fundamental rhetoric.
Marx himself just had terrible ideas.
I'm sure if you repeat your ideas to yourself a couple more times the'll start to sound coherent. You have made replying to you pointless, some time ago actually. So hey, have a nice day.
Note that I'm not saying that Marx is a murderer, just that his famous ideas are bad (for reasons well-documented in the pages of history). I would rather not have him as an idol in popular media that I consume.
Oh so you're not calling him and people who disagree with you on his works mass murderers. As seen in previous posts.
"His famous ideas are bad" > You've won this round, can't argue with that.
Marxian economic theory deals a fair bit with how to handles surplus production, maybe he'll be an npc where you can trade extra resources for other stuff. Oh, videogames.
I don't know how many people talking about Marx have actually read Marx, because 98% of what he wrote was basic history, economics, and statistics. The Communist Manifesto was an early, radical work which Marx would later in life try to temper as he moved away from the idea of violent revolution as the only possibility for improving the life of the working class. Capital is basically just thousands of pages of wage and price analysis.And he literally wrote that taking his ideas as some kind of transcendent dogma without paying attention to the historical and cultural context of a nation, such as Russia, for example, would probably lead to disastrous results.
Marx was not an Marxist etc. But those small political parts of his work are important and should be discussed (although probably not here but hey, blame Ubisoft).
The 20th century saw 100 million people murdered by their own governments in an attempt to make Karl Marx's vision for the future a reality. I hope the game handles him appropriately.
That seems unnecessarily harsh on Dan. This is way below that level.
Holding Marx responsible for the crimes of Stalin & Mao & Hoxha & Pot makes as much sense as holding Adam Smith responsible for the crimes committed by capitalists throughout history, or Rousseau for the French Revolution & the bloodshed that followed. He was a philosopher, an economist & basically one of the creators of the field of sociology, not the leader of a genocidal regime. Marx I bet the OP has read barely a page of Marx, if that. If we use his logic then where does it stop? Do we go back to Hegel, whose ideas influenced a young Karl Marx? And then his predecessors in the German idealist movement, going back to Kant, one of the most influential names in modern western philosophy? And so on, right the way back to Socrates. It's absurd.
Just as the son cannot be held responsible for the sins of the father, so the father cannot be accountable for the sins of the son. Marx's ideas influenced lots of people who didn't lead genocidal regimes, there'd be no modern progressive social democracy without Marxism for starters.
Keep fighting the good fight, clearly this guy was a genius despite everything his influenced touched turning to shit. Defending the ideology of mass-murderers is always a good look.
Again, that's a great understanding of history and ideologies. Making grand claims based on nothing is always a good look.
We don't consider Archimedes great just because he did "great math" in some theoretical sense, we consider him great because his insight had a very positive effect on society. Correspondingly, we should also consider Marx terrible for the impact his contributions have had. It's not that complicated. The only reason you could want to dissociate him with the results of his ideals is because you aren't quite ready to abandon them as good ideas.
It is complicated actually, some of his ideas are good, some are bad, and both were used. The logic of your previous post states that because "great math" can be used and was used for mass murder therefore Archimedes was bad/evil etc.
The 20th century saw 100 million people murdered by their own governments in an attempt to make Karl Marx's vision for the future a reality. I hope the game handles him appropriately.
Also, Lenin's vision (Or really Stalins) was the one that took all the killing to make. Marx just said "Hey, pure-capitalism is inherently flawed and we should do something about it." But didn't specify how to go about doing that other than saying that the worker's would share the means of production and whatnot.
The Soviet Union was never truly marxist anyways. Marx is to the USSR what NIetzche was to Nazi Germany, he inspired them and they claimed lineage from him, but it was Russians and the Germans of the 20th century who perverted what was supposed to be a good thing for almost everyone. Marx was long dead by the time famines and purges started happening in the Russia.
I would agree with most of this, only I think Marx is at fault for a certain lack of imagination what his prescribed ideas could be turned into, and how ideologies could use them. Also I think his analysis of problems of capitalism is more relevant now than ever, but his ideas of correcting those problems are very naive and not very useful. (And it seems to me that because of the Cold War, US public has a limited knowledge of certain issues, specially Marxism, Stalinism, Bolshevism, Communism, Socialism which are all basically used as synonyms, and are Evil).
I'd recommend this talk from David Simon (creator of The Wire)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNttT7hDKsk
An American view of certain topics such as Marxism, but without the ignorance of the general US public on the subject (US+capitalism+religion>good communism+socialism+atheism>evil).
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