Karl Marx, You Were Wrong

[EasyAce]

But campus diehards still make a case for him
By Ben Shapiro
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/karl-marx-legacy-millions-murdered-enslaved-in-poverty/

This week marks the birthday of one of history’s worst human beings, Karl Marx. Just because Marx’s philosophy would lead directly to the deaths of 100 million human beings over the course of a century, the imprisonment of tens of millions more in gulags and reeducation camps from Russia to China to Vietnam to Cambodia to North Korea, and the oppression of hundreds of millions more hasn’t dissuaded those on the modern Western left from embracing Marx’s bloody legacy. Realizing, however, that embracing Communism itself might alienate those who remember the Berlin Wall, today’s Marxists rally instead for identity politics. In the pages of the New York Times — the same newspaper that in the past two years has run opinion pieces endorsing Communism’s impact on female empowerment and female sexual activity and its inspirational effects on Americans — Kyung Hee University associate professor of philosophy Jason Barker celebrated Marx’s birthday, writing, “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!”

What, exactly, was Marx right about?

He wasn’t right about economics — his theory of economics is tripe. He wasn’t right about history unfolding as a glorious Hegelian progression toward a socialist utopia either. But according to Baker, he was right about one thing: The dispossessed of the world would unite to change human nature by changing the system of oppression under which they lived. Marx, says Baker, was right about class exploitation — the rich exploiting the poor. But it’s in the guise of victim groups based on race and sex that Marx’s dialectic finds its true apotheosis . . .

. . . Instead of a revolution of the proletariat, then, Marxism now seeks a revolution of the victims — the various groups of dispossessed who feel that the system has been stacked against them. And it is far easier to unite such groups around intersectional themes than it is to unite them around income disparity . . . And while advocates of Marxism today disown the Stalinists and the Maoists and the Castro regime and Venezuela and North Korea, all of those nations thought they were fulfilling Marx’s dream, too. That’s because they were. There is no new human nature on the horizon; human beings aren’t defined purely by the system under which they live. Only a system that makes room for our all-too-human flaws, that counterbalances failings with consequences and selfishness with non-aggression, can channel those flaws into something useful . . .

[Slide Rule]

But campus diehards still make a case for him
By Ben Shapiro
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/karl-marx-legacy-millions-murdered-enslaved-in-poverty/

Nice to see National Review say something useful.

A few years back I cancelled my 25 year subscription.
That following their canning of Derbyshire.

Wrote NR a Nastygram.

:) :)