> I'm sorry to say it, but unfortunately for us all Marx is beginning to become more and more relevant, again ...
No, it's not. Marx's ideas is that there's a violent takeover of all property by everyone, and then the state controls everything. He theorized that after some time of this violent control by the revolutionaries, the need for the control would naturally dissipate and we'd live in a harmonious utopia.
This has now been tried, and didn't go like he predicted. In fact, it produced much worse outcomes for just about everyone involved, but especially the most skilled and industrious people.
If Google's deal is bad, save some of that large paycheck for a year or two, and then quit and take a go of it on your own. You can do that because you're free. Under Marxist systems, you're not free to disagree with the people.
You gotta be careful talking about Marx in rosy tones without noting how vastly terrible every implementation has been in real life. The banner of Marxism has done more harm in the last 100 years than just about anything else. It out-competes fascism by a drastic margin, which is really saying something.
And you were complaining about someone else's hyperbole in an earlier comment?
Socialism and Fascism (aka. Governmental control) are orthogonal - your economic model is independent of the government's control. In the Soviet Union you had both, in the US you have neither (although there's a lot more fascism these days). In most of Europe (eg. Sweden) there's socialism, but not a lot of fascism.
> And you were complaining about someone else's hyperbole in an earlier comment?
That's just it - people toss Marx's name around casually. I wonder if they've actually read his stuff? Or studied history? I can't find a semi-prominent ideology that's done anywhere near as much damage the last 100 years.
If you said, "Nazi ideology destroyed much of Europe and cost millions of lives," that's not hyperbole. If you go through and point the vast amounts of atrocity under communism, things like a full 1/3rd of the population being tortured to death in Cambodia under the Red Khmer ("Khmer Rouge" in French), the Cultural Revolution in China which killed three times as many people as the Holocaust, the massive armies of slave labor used in Russia... it's not hyperbole, that stuff all happened.
> your economic model is independent of the government's control.
This is not the generally agreed upon consensus of anyone - Marxist, free market, mainstream or alternative economics, political science, civics... I can't think of anyone that thinks that way.
> In most of Europe (eg. Sweden) there's socialism, but not a lot of fascism.
Sweden's a mostly free market country with welfare programs. That's not socialism, unless you've redefined socialism to mean "anything the government does," which doesn't seem right.
Denmark is the most socialist country in Europe, but:
(1) Most of that is the government-controlled energy industry.
(2) They have the second lowest growth rates in the developed world, and their model is in danger of collapsing if and when alternative energy obsoletes their energy deposits, unless they somehow stimulate entrepreneurship and growth in the state-owned system (which has never been successfully done).
Even then, it's a mixed economy, not pure socialism. The last pure socialist country left is North Korea. The next closest countries to the socialist model are probably Cuba and Libya.
And people toss the Soviet Union around casually as an example of how Socialism/Communism goes wrong, when it was largely Fascism to blame. North Korea a Communist country? In name only - it's actually a Fascist dictatorship.
Perhaps "independent of the government's control" is a poor choice of words, but you have totalitarian countries with both Capitalism and Communism, as well as relatively free ones with elements of Socialism and Capitalism. Are they pure Socialism? No, but then the US isn't pure Capitalism either. A system where the government allocates large chunks of the available capital is Socialist in my book.
Googling for "site:delong.typepad.com karl marx" will get you some succinct interpretations of Marx's very large body of thought from a professional who knows his stuff and has a perspective reasonably amenable to the average HNers.
No, it's not. Marx's ideas is that there's a violent takeover of all property by everyone, and then the state controls everything. He theorized that after some time of this violent control by the revolutionaries, the need for the control would naturally dissipate and we'd live in a harmonious utopia.
This has now been tried, and didn't go like he predicted. In fact, it produced much worse outcomes for just about everyone involved, but especially the most skilled and industrious people.
If Google's deal is bad, save some of that large paycheck for a year or two, and then quit and take a go of it on your own. You can do that because you're free. Under Marxist systems, you're not free to disagree with the people.
You gotta be careful talking about Marx in rosy tones without noting how vastly terrible every implementation has been in real life. The banner of Marxism has done more harm in the last 100 years than just about anything else. It out-competes fascism by a drastic margin, which is really saying something.