55 Comments
Jan 3, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby

Brilliant.

The Nazi hates the banker because he is a Jew, The communist hates the Jew because he is a banker.

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Jan 3, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby

Haven't read the whole thing yet but must comment first, because this is The Internet.

This cycle of essays is such a good idea. Thank you Helen and Lorenzo.

Now back to my duty to read.

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Jan 3, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby

Was just reading last night about Jacobinising of Italian nationalism into Fascism, so that struck a chord of recognition.

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Jan 3, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby

"A politics of anger attracts the angry. Especially frustrated lower-tier members of elites who are willing to burn down what exists to displace those above them. To displace the currently successful. A social pattern that Marx also exemplifies. This is very much social justice as moralised social strategy."

The nub of all of it.

This explains why many people are attracted to Marxist-Progressive politics. It certainly explains why I was, for a long time.

One is taught that Other People (rich people, straight people, capitalist people, have-more-stuff-and-friends people) are the reason for one's problems.

Those of us vulnerable to this kind of thinking take it and run with it.

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Jan 3, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby

Thanks for this re-look at our friend Marx. Had not thought how the Industrial Revolution caused a real shift in power dynamics. Commerce became much more important and merchants many more trade goods. Made a fairly simple society much more complex.

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Jan 4, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby

I think the love concept can be captured in three questions:

1. Do you love your spouse?

2. Do you you think your spouse is superior to all other spouses?

3. Are you a paranoid violent lunatic who sees shadows around every corner and murders everyone from people who totally definitely looked at your spouse funny to your spouse's own friends?

If you answer "yes", "no", "no", you understand civic nationalism. If you answer "yes", "yes", "yes", you understand fascism. If you answer "no", "yes", "yes", you understand Marxism.

One interesting aspect of Marxism is that while Marx believed that the working class was vital to socialism, he also believed that it would be the failed petit bourgeoise who actually lead the revolution, since according to Marx the working class was not sufficiently learned in his perfect scientific theory. I do not think he loved the working class.

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Jan 4, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby

Marxism is intelligent design for atheists -- a disastrously simplified misapprehension of the messy glory of evolution and human lives.

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You've undermined an otherwise excellent article by claiming that "The Nazi regime mostly mass slaughtered outside its heartland. " The Nazis settled for chasing the Jews out while they were weak, but the goal was always extermination. Going by U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum figures, German Jews were 3 times as likely to be murdered as French Jews (simply because the Nazis had *longer* to wreak evil in their homeland). The goal was 100%.

Higher death figures in Eastern Europe, yes - but not because it was outside the heartland, but because a higher proportion of the population was "untermenschen"

It is disturbing - and accurate - that compared to Marxism, even Fascism starts to look good; but let's not overplay that. Functionally they are part of the same movement. Hitler recruited largely from the Marxists; he boasts in Mein Kampf about Marxists sent to disrupt his rallies instead signing up as Nazis.

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Thanks for this. I was hoping to get an explicit answer to your title question. You've given a good enough takedown of Marxism, that we need an explanation for it's popularity.

Is your thesis that exists a class that looks to benefit from "vanguard captial" and is therefore a natural sucker?

(P.S. Vanguard Captial is a confusing term: https://investor.vanguard.com/corporate-portal/)

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"What marks the modern world is the mass application of energy to transport, communication and production."

I wonder is it not more accurate to say that what marks the modern world is the availability of an unusual store of heritage (fossil) energy that CAN be mass applied to transport, communication and production?

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Apr 16, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby

Apologies, because my last comment should have thanked you for a pair (so far) of interesting, and also challenging essays. You have written interestingly and engagingly, and also laid out many bones with which to pick.

I hope you will not find my bone picking too nitpicking, but rather, a bid to take part in the conversation you are clearly hoping to get going. :)

In any case there is this distinction you have introduced, that I am finding both interesting, and troublesome - in that one of the things is not like the other.

"As we have already noted, humans have three forms of status: dominance (status through fear), prestige (status through competence) and propriety (status through norm adherence)."

Adding prestige and propriety to dominance as ways to gain status is new to me, and thought provoking. On the other hand, the trouble that dominance presents to us (as, for example, in the ethnographies surveyed by Christopher Boehm, in one of the footnotes to your previous essay), is not about status, instead it is a bid to exert a controlling interest in the behaviour of another person.

It seems to me that you are actually setting up an argument to the effect that *dominance* (a controlling interest in the behaviour of others) can be exerted through prestige and/or propriety as well as through fear. However, a person's competence and/or a person's love of norms is not *of itself* a bid to exert control over others, whereas inducing fear in others has no other purpose (that I can think of).

Anyway, thank you for provoking thought.

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Apr 29, 2023·edited Apr 29, 2023

The expression 'capitalism' or 'Kapitalismus' is never employed in the corpus of Marx. This is a convenient test of ignorance of the theory, in terms of which most of the would-be critical sentences above cannot even be reformulated. No one who has read 20 pages of the corpus could possibly use this expression. There has by the way never been so poetic a Pindar of the capitalistic mode of production as Marx; the praise of this form you outline above is basically copy pasted from him.

That the Kremlin, a gruesome police apparatus ruling over a gigantic peasant society, was a disaster before and after it was cleverly taken over by a peculiar band of bank robbers and political gangsters run by Lenin from abroad, and is still a disaster today, is not surprising and has nothing to do with either 'capitalism' or 'Marxism'. The topics could not be more remote from one another, though wildly diverse interested parties are in a heated agreement on the immediate connection.

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Aug 5, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby

Astonished and delighted by your recognition of the importance of commerce, which I (and very few other economists) share. On its importance in understanding communism, see my talk on youtube "Why There is No Such Thing as Capitalism (or Communism)"

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Nov 2, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby

Marxists offer their followers utopia at the end of a difficult struggle. Postmodern critical theorists don’t even offer that. They claim that the world is a Manichean battle between oppressors and oppressed, but, when you read the fine print, they really see life as an endless war between oppressors and would be oppressors.

In their view, any constraints, even those imposed by nature, are oppressive. Any status quo will necessarily come with a set of formal and informal rules - that is, with constraints. Critical theorists argue that the rich and powerful who benefit from the status quo structure the rules to increase their wealth and power and to cement themselves in place. But any revolution will necessarily replace the existing status quo with a new one.

Once in power, the new oppressors are unlikely to allow a second revolution that would replace them with yet another set of oppressors. To that end, they will act to eliminate Critical Theory and all its corollaries because such ideas exist only to destroy what is. Some critical theorists understand the game; those who don't – the true believers, the useful idiots – will also be eliminated.

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Jan 1Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby

Marxism and its variants are basically cults of affirmation for the evil, idle, and inept

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Jan 15Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby

Great article. I will definitely read everything the author has on this topic.

More than forty years ago I studied Marxism. Even then it was possible to see that this was a failed theory.

But the fact is that even in Marx’s time this theory was outdated and primitive, as his contemporaries pointed out.

Once every ten years I look at the new Marxists and try to guess when they will end.

Never.

Marxism is a scam with three cups and a ball.

The crowd of spectators and tourists never ends. Even after they were deceived. Even after they realized that they had been deceived.

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