:salute:

I tend to agree, even though I understand what August was saying. In the case of Marx, his philosophies tended to mirror his personal "failings", thusly failing to create a separate identity. Frankly his economic and social structures really only seemed a misguided attempt at justifying his own squalor due to a system he could not excel in.

Frankly, I don't think we was in any way a genious. Anyone could as easily devise such a concept of a social structure in theory, and many educated individuals could have dressed it up just as pretty. The idea of equality was certainly not new to Marx - rather, he simply decided to add fantasy elements of human nature to allow for a theoretical equal existance.

That's not genious any more than your average fiction writer.

I'm not saying I'm an expert on Marx or I've read more than you (I am sure I have not), I have read enough to form my opinion & I guess it's just simply a matter of opinion. Marx dedicated all his life to a theory that is horses**t. It's like calling Mussolini a great strategist or something. There could be some joker who spent 40 years analyzing and forming a theory on how the world is flat,,, and that equals failure. To me, being as specatularly wrong as Marx was, is a good indication of how brilliant he was not. I'll give you this, he was completely devoted to his work and single-minded.

Agreed.

To expand, it was a theory that was based upon assumptions that, even at the time, were seen as flawed. Ultimately, he did nothing more than create a social construct based upon nothing more than wanting it to be true.

Wishful thinking is NOT brilliance.

I don't really have an opinion on Marx, Aramike, but to pull you up on one point (in a manner that echos the point you made on religion)...

I think that if someone can change the world, if only temporarily (and what change is not ultimately temporary?) through mere "wishful thinking" then that's a form of brilliance. If nothing else he did at least manage to tap into the wishful thinking of a great many people. Some (myself included) would argue that Jesus (for example) did the same thing, though with perhaps more success than Marx, depending on how you measure success.

To make the more general point, the world is what we make it. What is New York if not a towering collection of wishful thoughts? Your comment suggests to me that you underestimate the power of the human will.

NeonSamurai. You have a point, however just look at the first reponses as examples.
A definitive statement but wrong.
Everyone has a lot to learn , but in this instance it was himself that had to learn it.
An agreement with the mistake above, though with the redeeming feature that perhaps their knowledge was lacking.
well what can you say about that , wrong again and with no effort to find out if they were indeed correct ?

So when you say
you are correct. I prefer the gradual approach so poeple can find out for themselves. UnderseaLcpl made the firststeps but didn't look beyond Hackett to someone like longstreet, johnston or royall.

Yet what makes this tangent on the subject funny is that it essentialy stems from me calling the fundamentalist muslims backwards hicks and people objecting to the accuracy of that label for them.

Redneck is a state of mind:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27764

cheers:yeah:

Marx was not a genius in any philisophical way. What he was a genius at - was manipulation. He took a theory that was blantantly flawed, and sold it to people in such a way that they helped him increase his own personal power....

The theory was crackpot, the man himself was one of the consumate salesmen of his time, and thus, the outcome demonstrated a level of personal power genius.

Most leaders of history who failed for obvious reasons, Marx, Hitler, Napoleon, etc - were all brilliant in many things, and totally clueless in others.

I don't necessarily disagree, in a sense - but I suppose we must look at context. From my perspective, I took things to mean intellectual brilliance, and that's what I was referring to.

Even so, I understand the point you're making. But I still feel a disconnect between "brilliance" and "wishful thinking".

I'd ask you to define "intellectual brilliance" but it might head along a pointless tangent. I guess what's really bugging me here is I'm seeing people attacking this guy Marx (who TBH I know very little about) on a sort of "personal" level (e.g. he had a bad character, he had a poor intellect, he wasn't original, and so on) which is all rather beside the point AFAIC. He could have been an immoral, stupid, idea-stealing moron but none of that has any bearing on whether or not the ideas were good ideas or bad ideas. If people disagree with the ideas they should attack the ideas, not the man. Attacking the man is just cheap.

I'm not sure what you're reading because we've all mentioned that his ideas were, well, crap, based upon flawed logic and seemingly rooted in his character.

Is there any particular idea you want to see refuted?

As far as attacking the man himself is concerned, really I think that only goes so far as stating that his ridiculous ideas were rooted in an attempt to justify his behaviors.

I really don't think anyone has the time or inclination to do a point-by-point list of all the errors in Marx's ideas, so in summation, you'll just have to accept that people think his ideas were, well, stupid - at least as far as the term "Marxism" is applied.

I'll accept that some people think his ideas were stupid. ;)
I'm just pointing out that none of the people in this thread who fall into that category have justified their position with anything more than hot air. :O:
No, I don't want to debate any of his ideas. I don't even know what his ideas were. Didn't he invent communism or something? :88)

Generalizations of a man's view is not hot air. In any case, that's the whole debate, isn't it? Whether or not the man was brilliant...

And the reason for the lack of specifics is that it has been assumed that the participants of that debate on his brilliance are at least somewhat familiar with the man and his story.

In any case, the reason I don't see him as brilliant, beyond what I've already stated, is that his positions and ideas are typically based upon false axioms - in other words, the fact that his ideologies have since been utter failures, is further betrayed by that, if you looked at them at the time, those failures were completely predictable because they were based upon false premises.

Essentially, he pretty much attempted to describe human nature blatantly inaccurately or incompletely (ie "labor power"/transformative nature/commodity fetishism) in order to support his views.

So, he was a liar - and a cheater. And his ideas were based upon that. Hence why it is difficult to separate the man's character and his philosophies.

Simple solution. Send those that complain with radical motives back to their own country. Those that accept the lifestyle/laws of their new homeland are welcome anyone else can bugger off. Wouldn't that be an insult to the royal family?

The British are to soft.

You might be in trouble if that happened in the place where you live. ;)