No he wasn’t. Proven worldwide, no form of government exists without corruption. Some are more vulnerable to that than others. One thing capitalism does do is to acknowledge the human drive in human self-interest. Effort is rewarded. Things are built. Economies flourish.
There is no communal system that can even come close. Yes capitalism has flaws. The solution to that, unfortunately is NOT government regulation.
A “form” of government cannot be corrupted since it’s an abstract conceptualisation. It can either be valid or invalid. But if you mean no government can be immune from corruption then that is clearly untrue. Government is man up of individuals who choose to form the characters they have and the behaviours their practise. Corruption is a volitional act of choice to behave immorally on principle and there’s nothing in humans or in people who choose to become politicians that automatically makes them corrupt.
That is the purest of bullshit. You are saying corruption is a choice and that is clearly untrue. "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Your premise, "volitional act of choice" is the ridiculous hope that communism, or socialism, could work. They cannot work, they will never work because you cannot find one leader, much less five or six, who will be honest enough to serve without self-enrichment. Place an open chest of gold before you with no count and nobody looking, tell me you won't put some of it in your pocket, and more tomorrow. I repeat, NO government is immune from corruption. Period.
The problem with capitalism as historically practiced is not of course with the general idea of an individual's property right to the fruits of his labor; it's that there has never been any philosophically disciplined identification of what should and should not count as "property."
A simple historical example was "property in slaves." Another example is "property in arbitrary land claims" (as opposed to Lockean Proviso-based land ownership). But there are actually many more insidious examples of corrupt ideas of property, which then naturally lead to Marxian blowback against the idea of a free market, and the Left-leaning population is more sensitive to such underlying injustice than the Right (though they lack the intellectual tools to identify the real problem.)
I'm sorry, but Marx was not "utopian" as you describe. For one thing, he did not believe in the elimination of all inequality, even in the long term. In March 1875, he wrote:
"'The elimination of all social and political inequality,'...is a most dubious expression. As between one country, one province and even one place and another, living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated. The living conditions of Alpine dwellers will always be different from those of the plainsmen. The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept deriving from the old 'liberty, equality, fraternity,' a concept which was justified in that, in its own time and place, it signified a phase of development, but which, like all the one-sided ideas of earlier socialist schools, ought now to be superseded..."
If you want to convince people you have to speak on many levels. A lot of Marx is regime, some is rhetoric/a lot is rhetoric. Marx was a fan of Lincoln. Lincoln was simple: Slavery="You work, I eat". I am still stuck seeing aspets in Tocqueville. But when folks call "liberty, equality, fraternity" one-sided they can't count. In fact my criticism of Thompson on Tocqueville is that it is not simply liberty and equality. But liberty equality and fraternity plus the geography.
Thompson is right that no one reads Das Capital. One it is boring, two it is a bold attempt at a restatement of Capitalism. No one reads restatements or CFR's either...
When Marx says one sided he means one sided. A lot of the recrimination of which he is supposedly the patron saint, is not really brought to life by him. He does not found anger, sickness, poverty. One could say that the plaintiffs bar sells victimhood and also that it is one sided. So Mad Dawg Law which fights the insurance companies or a corporation that puts talc or lead in product x,y,z...maybe that is one sided scientific Marxism. Marx in terms of being the proximate or even efficient cause of these movements might reject responsibility(praise/blame). Marx is somewhere between the plaintiffs bar, and journalist. But Marx holds that he is not himself outside of Nature...So while the impartial spectator sits back, Marx interacts...One need not observe a lion eating a sheep, if one feels compelled to fight off the lion one may do so and still record the incident. It ends up being a stance/attitude on relation torwards objectivity.
No he wasn’t. Proven worldwide, no form of government exists without corruption. Some are more vulnerable to that than others. One thing capitalism does do is to acknowledge the human drive in human self-interest. Effort is rewarded. Things are built. Economies flourish.
There is no communal system that can even come close. Yes capitalism has flaws. The solution to that, unfortunately is NOT government regulation.
A “form” of government cannot be corrupted since it’s an abstract conceptualisation. It can either be valid or invalid. But if you mean no government can be immune from corruption then that is clearly untrue. Government is man up of individuals who choose to form the characters they have and the behaviours their practise. Corruption is a volitional act of choice to behave immorally on principle and there’s nothing in humans or in people who choose to become politicians that automatically makes them corrupt.
That is the purest of bullshit. You are saying corruption is a choice and that is clearly untrue. "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Your premise, "volitional act of choice" is the ridiculous hope that communism, or socialism, could work. They cannot work, they will never work because you cannot find one leader, much less five or six, who will be honest enough to serve without self-enrichment. Place an open chest of gold before you with no count and nobody looking, tell me you won't put some of it in your pocket, and more tomorrow. I repeat, NO government is immune from corruption. Period.
The problem with capitalism as historically practiced is not of course with the general idea of an individual's property right to the fruits of his labor; it's that there has never been any philosophically disciplined identification of what should and should not count as "property."
A simple historical example was "property in slaves." Another example is "property in arbitrary land claims" (as opposed to Lockean Proviso-based land ownership). But there are actually many more insidious examples of corrupt ideas of property, which then naturally lead to Marxian blowback against the idea of a free market, and the Left-leaning population is more sensitive to such underlying injustice than the Right (though they lack the intellectual tools to identify the real problem.)
Interesting.
I'm sorry, but Marx was not "utopian" as you describe. For one thing, he did not believe in the elimination of all inequality, even in the long term. In March 1875, he wrote:
"'The elimination of all social and political inequality,'...is a most dubious expression. As between one country, one province and even one place and another, living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated. The living conditions of Alpine dwellers will always be different from those of the plainsmen. The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept deriving from the old 'liberty, equality, fraternity,' a concept which was justified in that, in its own time and place, it signified a phase of development, but which, like all the one-sided ideas of earlier socialist schools, ought now to be superseded..."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm
If you want to convince people you have to speak on many levels. A lot of Marx is regime, some is rhetoric/a lot is rhetoric. Marx was a fan of Lincoln. Lincoln was simple: Slavery="You work, I eat". I am still stuck seeing aspets in Tocqueville. But when folks call "liberty, equality, fraternity" one-sided they can't count. In fact my criticism of Thompson on Tocqueville is that it is not simply liberty and equality. But liberty equality and fraternity plus the geography.
Thompson is right that no one reads Das Capital. One it is boring, two it is a bold attempt at a restatement of Capitalism. No one reads restatements or CFR's either...
When Marx says one sided he means one sided. A lot of the recrimination of which he is supposedly the patron saint, is not really brought to life by him. He does not found anger, sickness, poverty. One could say that the plaintiffs bar sells victimhood and also that it is one sided. So Mad Dawg Law which fights the insurance companies or a corporation that puts talc or lead in product x,y,z...maybe that is one sided scientific Marxism. Marx in terms of being the proximate or even efficient cause of these movements might reject responsibility(praise/blame). Marx is somewhere between the plaintiffs bar, and journalist. But Marx holds that he is not himself outside of Nature...So while the impartial spectator sits back, Marx interacts...One need not observe a lion eating a sheep, if one feels compelled to fight off the lion one may do so and still record the incident. It ends up being a stance/attitude on relation torwards objectivity.