Sorry, 100 million dead bodies is more than enough to convince me that Marxism doesn't work.
Nope, not going to play that.
Edit:
At this stage, enough so-called "Marxist" governments have descended into slavery, starvation, and mass murder that the burden of proof should lie on those who advocate such governments, and that burden should be heavy indeed.
But nope, it's always "but that wasn't REAL Marxism".
After a century of trying, with dozens of attempts, it is quite clear that either those hellhole governments are "real Marxism" or, conversely, that "real Marxism" does not and cannot exist.
Otherwise someone would've gotten it right by now.
There has been real Marxism, though it's never been absolutely dominant in any society. Particularly, it has been a key driving force in replacing the system of Capitalism that 19th Century socialists identified and critiqued with the substantially different modern mixed economy as the dominant economic form of advanced societies, even though Marxists would claim that as far from a complete success, as the modern mixed economy is far from their desired end state.
Refusing to back up certain or all interpretations of an idea by no means amounts to NTS.
You're making a fallacy by saying that these problems you mention are core to Marxist thought. Modern Marxist philosophers are almost dedicated to finding flaws in 20th century Marxist implementations, and doing research on other models such as anarchism, post-left anarchism and technocracy.
Dismissing this research as "lol no true scotsman, not playing that" is incredibly ignorant and facile.
Nope. I recognize that "Marxist thought" doesn't specifically advocate such things.
Nonetheless, those things always happen.
So far the scorecard is about Murderous Hellhole: 100, Utopia:0.
Usually one only needs to be burned once or twice before deciding that touching a hot stove is a bad idea, even if that glowing burner does look really pretty.
You may be interested in anarchist writers, or Murray Bookchin.
Actually, defenders of capitalism, when confronted with problems attributed to it, frequently argue that the problems are "the State" or "crony capitalism", and that the problems would not exist with "real capitalism".
Of course, both the State and cronyism are features of the system for which the name "capitalism" was coined by its critics, but that doesn't stop the defenders of capitalism for saying that those are separate and opposed things to "real capitalism".
> And it made it common to die, kill and fight wars for money and resources.
That was common long before capitalism.
Where did Marx and Engels write about 100M dead bodies?
Sorry, not seeing your point here.
If Very Bad Things happen every time a particular idea is put into practice, it's a bad idea, regardless of whether the Very Bad Things were explicitly mentioned when the idea was put forth.
More to the point, where did Marx and Engels write about narrow vanguardism instead of broad class consciousness, bypassing capitalism rather than moving forward from it, or any of the other central points of Leninism, which (and not Marxism) is the common ideology shared by the people responsible for those 100 million dead bodies?
The only people trying to put Marxism, rather than Leninism, into effect have been in developed capitalist (and now, in part due to their efforts, post-capitalist mixed) economies.
> Capitalism (according to Marxist theory) can no longer sustain the living standards of the population due to its need to compensate for falling rates of profit by driving down wages, cutting social benefits and pursuing military aggression. The socialist system would succeed capitalism as humanity's mode of production through workers' revolution.
Do they mean that same capitalism that brings >1,000,000 Chinese people out poverty every month? Did Mao not try hard enough?
Newsflash, folks: we've had a few workers' revolutions. They're not all they're cracked up to be. Try talking to someone who lived through one of them.
The idea that by pointing to some successes, it justifies the whole system of appropriating labour for profit is utterly falacious and false. I hope you can see that it's not sound reasoning.
A system can have merits; Marx was very clear that Capitalism has various merits, especially over its predecessors. His idea was that there is a further reachable goal. You have made no effort to dismiss this other than by saying "what we have now is pretty ok".
>Try talking to someone who lived through one of them.
Why would their experience be relevant to reformulations in theory? To be clear, I'm not advocating for Soviet-style Communism.
No, they mean the dominant economic system of the developed West in the mid-19th through early-20th century (since replaced in the developed west by the modern mixed economy which is an unstable form with a danger of reverting back to capitalism because it retains central features of capitalism.)
What China has is a transitional form that is somewhere on the map between totalitarian centralization through a kind of neofeudalism (that relates to classical feudalism in the same what that Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist totalitarianism relates to monarchic absolutism) to something like capitalism. Which is certainly progress, just as Marx recognized that the transition from.feudalism to the kind of capitalism he and other contemporary socialist critiqued was progress.
But that it is progress from something worse earlier doesn't make it the ideal end state.
> Did Mao not try hard enough?
Mao tried quite hard at completely the wrong thing. Leninism and it's descendants abandoned key tenants of Marxism to create something that either (in the overly generous view) they thought could work in very different conditions than Marx addressed or (in the more cynical view) as served as convenient propaganda for authoritarian populism in the societies in which they operated.
Also, treating Marxism the way you suggest empowers the people who will use association with Marxism (which whether or not people who think Marxism had good ideas avoid the name, people who don't can still draw the connections) as an attack against an idea, leveraging the failure of Leninist societies to suggest that anything associated with Marxism is bad. So, no, I'll continue to point out that that involves not only the ad hominem fallacy, but also the fallacy of equivocation.
Giving in to people who are trying to cloud the meaning of words is the linguistic equivalent to negotiating with highjackers. You can do it, but you just make the job easier for the next highjacker.
I know it's a scary moment, where it feels like words have lost their meaning and insanity reigns, but that's just the zeitgeist. Words still mean things and that still had power.