His plans for how to address the shortcomings of capitalism are, um, flawed. But the analysis itself is incredibly insightful.

His example is a clock maker. At some point, a clock maker was a person who made every aspect of a clock. If we split the jobs up between someone making the cabinet, someone the clockwork, someone the face and hands etc, productivity will increase and more clocks can be made for less effort, and at higher quality. However it's not as fulfilling to create a component of a clock as it is to create the entire thing.

I think a better modern example is the building industry. Back in they day, people made their own houses - very labour intensively and not particularly well. But I wonder if there's much more rewarding and meaningful than literally building the house your family will live in?

With the the emergence of building as a trade, you get cheaper, higher quality houses. An individual builder still gets a ton of fulfillment knowing they built a house for someone they know to live in. As the trades become more and more specialized, there's less and less connection. Eventually you end up with someone working in a pre-fab factory making frames for a house they'll never see, for people they'll never meet.

It requires a level of comfort with abstraction to be OK with being so disconnected from actual outcomes. You either have to substitute in a secondary meaning ("I'm supporting my family") or be able to hold the whole picture in your head of how your job eventually contributes to an meaningful outcome.

Most people choose this system, when given a vote via democracy, even when they have to live under the power imbalance. For Marx to be right, you have to argue that these people are deluded somehow, which isn't particularly convincing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

Perhaps this feeling is less common than I thought?

Are you talking about American voting or something else? When’s the last time they’ve been realistically given this choice?

Even if your premise was true there’s a simpler explanation: after you enter this system it’s extremely hard to get out of it from within the system itself. No delusion required.

To pick one quote though "Marx thought that the capitalistic system would inevitably destroy itself." Not it hasn't - it's all bollocks basically and the aftershocks through Russia and the like still end up blowing up children's hospitals etc to this day. I don't think anyone in the last thousand years has been responsible for more suffering.

It sounds like you're referring to a book? Maybe you can clarify. I read Capital Vol 1 during COVID, and I've come to realize that, without being hyperbolic, I've encountered zero people with criticisms of Marx who have read what he's written.

It's commenting without reading the article on steroids and it frankly makes the critic look foolish because they fantasize about the books content and then attack their own fantasy and then claim they haven't done so. It's not difficult to read a book and then critique it. It's just wild that this had repeatedly failed to occur.

People don't seem capable of reading things they might disagree with, and seem unable to accept that anyone might write something that has parts that are right and parts that are wrong.

Psychs call this all or nothing approach, black and white thinking or splitting and it's a defense mechanism. I think we can do better.

There's a very simple way to prove my statement wrong by contrary evidence. Someone can simply read a book they might disagree with. I actively encourage it. If someone has the desire to voice their disagreement of a thing, the least they could do is be familiar enough with the thing to make a well-constructed and relevant critique. I actively encourage folks to be better critics.

Maybe if I went through the 1500 pages I'd find some justification... who knows. But on holiday in Cambodia looking at the thousands of skulls of the educated class executed in the name of Marxist ideas is enough to put me off the whole business.

And aside from the mass murder he seems so pompous intellectually.

>For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers. Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.

My problem with him is more those kind of ideas and the problems they have brought rather than him being a shithead or similar. I think you can probably have a more meaningful discussion of ideas that can be briefly stated so everyone knows what is being discussed than referencing 1500 page works where that is not so.

Even in a short paragraph like that you can see quite a lot of ideas, some of which have worked and some not. Like in the UK the 'working class' Labour party have just gained power so that bit's ok, but not much destroying capitalism going on because their voters don't want that. It's the revolution to topple capitalism and bring communism idea that hasn't tended to go very well.

So you're a fundamentalist, basically.

That was my point, stated much more clearly this time.

"Didya really mean to say that there's literally no one walking this Earth with meaningful criticisms of Marx who has in fact also read what he's written? "Without being hyperbolic", no less?" 'Cause it sounds like an awfully weird and authoritarian thing to say."

Inquiring minds want to know.

I find it hard to believe you're more of an authority over who've I've encounter than I am.

It's a really good example of the point I'm trying to make. Which is folks who dismiss Marx tend to conjure a fantasy and then dismiss that fantasy and then claim victory. Just take what I write at face value. I'm not trying to trick you or anything.

That's what you're saying now; initially you said something much stronger.

You keep trying to pivot away from that initial (and rather untenable) formulation, for some reason.