But the article is equally a pretty good take-down of an absurd celebration of Marxism published today by the NYT.
Marxist philosopher Jason Barker has an op-ed in the New York Times celebrating Marxism, a philosophy, he claims, that has been proven entirely correct.
Marxist philosopher Jason Barker has an op-ed in the New York Times celebrating Marxism, a philosophy, he claims, that has been proven entirely correct.
After many celebratory words, Barker does briefly concede, 15 paragraphs in, that Marxism has run into a few snags translating its ideals into practice.
“The subsequent and troubled history of the Communist ‘states,’” he concedes, leaves “a great deal to be learned from their disasters, but their philosophical relevance remains doubtful, to say the least.”
It is philosophically irrelevant that every nation-state founded on Marxist philosophy almost immediately metastasized into a repressive tyranny, he breezily insists.
It is philosophically irrelevant that every nation-state founded on Marxist philosophy almost immediately metastasized into a repressive tyranny, he breezily insists.
Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the parties that ruled them all shared a common philosophy, and that this philosophy identified within their society an oppressor class whose political rights could and should be eliminated?
No, no, reply the Marxists.
All these real-world examples of governments attempting to actualize Marxist principles tell us nothing about Marxism.
The same process of abstracting away real-world failure can be seen in American conservatism.
Unlike right-of-center parties found in other countries, the American right has never accepted the basic legitimacy of the New Deal.
It has hysterically opposed every extension of government since the 1930s, and the failures of either their apocalyptic predictions to come true, or of right-wing politicians to roll back these dastardly extensions of federal power, have not inspired any wholesale rethinking of their creed.
Like any strain of fanaticism, American conservatism sustains itself on the premise that it has Never Been Tried.
Bareknuckle, low government capitalism was tried in the US right from the beginning, the only departure being slavery, abolished in 1865.
The experiment was at its peak in the Gilded Age, and so horrific were its results that it gave birth to the Progressive Movement and the construction, over many decades, of the regulatory and welfare states so hated by American conservatism.
. . . .
Decade after decade, they [conservatives] have attributed their failures to the fecklessness of their leaders.
Bareknuckle, low government capitalism was tried in the US right from the beginning, the only departure being slavery, abolished in 1865.
The experiment was at its peak in the Gilded Age, and so horrific were its results that it gave birth to the Progressive Movement and the construction, over many decades, of the regulatory and welfare states so hated by American conservatism.
. . . .
Decade after decade, they [conservatives] have attributed their failures to the fecklessness of their leaders.
It has never occurred to conservatives to question the viability of their absolutist free-market philosophy itself.
Conservatives continue to celebrate Ronald Reagan’s urgent warning in 1961 that the establishment of Medicare would lead first to the government telling doctors how many patients they could treat and where they would live, and ultimately to the total dissolution of freedom in the United States — “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
The moment of crisis of the welfare state never comes, but it simply moves further and further into the future.
The fact that conservative voters themselves have no interest in eliminating or even paring back Medicare is not factored into the equation.
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