Archives for posts with tag: Bully

What are the errors of Marxism?

Marxism is an ideology.
Ideologies don’t have errors, they are thought templates used to evaluate a certain situation and to determine what to do next. Ideologies are tools.
They can be used properly or improperly.
Sometimes, the best use for certain tools is to be left alone. Particularly when you understand they are useless. If you understand they are useless…
Hence it’s not Marxism which is full of errors, it’s the Marxists who are barking up the wrong tree.

If you really need to put your finger on something, if you need to point out a culprit, I give you Marx.
Yes, Karl Marx is your man.
His analysis was brilliant. His diagnostic was spot on.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
His cure – the mandate he gave to the “bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole”, and whom he called “communists” – was abysmal.

Which tells us Marx’s brilliant analysis wasn’t deep enough. He had noticed a series of facts but he had failed to notice the bigger picture. He had failed to see that all authoritarian regimes had failed. Under their own weight. Inevitably. And he had failed to notice that all democratic regimes had survived, and thrived, for as long as they had managed to preserve their democratic nature.

Hence the Marxist cure, communism, was stillborn.
A tool to be left alone.
The attempt to impose yet another authoritarian regime – with no matter how generous intentions – after the overwhelming experience of all other authoritarian regimes failing abysmally, is nothing but the compelling proof of social and historical blindness.

And why start this post by quoting Marx himself?
Because that quote is more than enough. More than enough proof for Marx being a bully.
It’s OK to ‘change the world’ if you own it. If it was yours…
But bearing in mind that there are other people living in the same world… wouldn’t it be nice to ask their opinion about the whole thing? About the changes you want to make? Which changes will dramatically affect the world they live in?!?
They are simpletons? Whose opinions are worthless? Because you said so yourself?

“The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

As I just said.
Bullly!!!

Why is this happening to me?

Because you’re alive, because of the previously made decisions and because of ‘hazard’.

You notice what’s happening around you – not necessarily to you, because you’re alive. A sensitive animal. And you try to make something out of it – to find meaning, because you are conscious. A conscious human being.

Everything around you – assuming you live in the civilized world, is man-made. The consequence of previously made decisions. The consequence of culture – string of accrued decisions, and the consequence of culturally influenced present day decisions. Decisions which are being made, by us, as we speak.

Your life, and everything in it, has been shaped by hazard.
You could have been born a slave somewhere a few centuries ago or you could have been born as the only child of Kim Il Sun.
You could have been born healthy – I hope you were, or you could have been the victim of a rare genetic abnormality.

We can’t, none of us, do anything about ‘hazard’.
We can’t change culture. But we can reinterpret it. Learn more from it than blindly following rules.
We can make better decisions.

And, for starters, we may decide to stop killing each-other. To stop hurting each-other. To stop bullying each-other.
NB. ‘Stop killing’ doesn’t mean give up defending ourselves. ‘Stop hurting’ doesn’t mean giving up.
‘Stop bullying’ doesn’t mean the bully has stopped bullying because the victim caved in.

What we really need to do is to stop all forms of aggression.

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Well… the fact that we’ll indeed never completely get rid of bullying shouldn’t stop us from trying.
As to what we should be teaching our children… How about both?
Standing up for themselves will teach them how many things are within their grasp and that some are indeed outside that grasp. It will also teach them that they need to try in order to determine which thing lies where.
Standing up for others will help them, all of them, live in a better world than we did. And that will be a world of victors, not victims. ‘Cause bullies don’t stand a chance if enough of us stand up when needed.

Wearing pink shirts and passing bylaws doesn’t turn us into victims. Refusal to stand up for someone else does. The bullies love that, they would just take us down one by one while the rest of us turn their heads ‘it’s not my business, let that pussy fend for himself’!

And yes, there is a second way by which we can become a society of victims. A short cut of the first one. Let somebody else take care of the situation. Instead of standing up ourselves, together, to let/expect somebody else do that for us.
That would be akin to inviting a bully to ‘take us under his wing’!