Monday, January 25, 2010

Paradoxes of the Marxian Belief System

There are several. Here are four; please feel free to add more.


1. "The People must rule" - and because we know what the People want better than they know themselves (i.e., because they're stupid), we are justified in taking power in Their name and governing against Them whenever necessary.

2. "The People are innately good" - and this is why the People must be tricked and coerced and forced into Doing the Right Thing and never allowed to have Their own selfish petty-bourgeois way.

3. "We love the People" - as an abstraction, that is, not as individuals; in fact socialists are notorious for their antisocial, unmannerly, boorish behavior toward flesh-and-blood human beings.

4. "The capitalist system is inherently doomed to collapse" - but because it never quite seems to do so fast or furiously enough, we need to help it along with Cloward and Piven strategies, designed to overwhelm and crash the system with impossible demands.