I challenge anyone who wishes to defend this article, on the following grounds.

1.
Are you saying that the enormous abuses that happened in the 20th century under self-professed attempts to implement Marxism, for example in Russia and China - tens of millions of people starved to death - that these are all some kind of strange coincidence? Nothing to do with the socialist project of attempting public ownership of the means of production?

2.
If the only distinction between the Marxism you condemn, and the Marxism you defend is "over-centralisation" then: what is the rational criterion by which you distinguish over-centralisation from under-centralisation?

3.
If that criterion is to be in the unilateral discretion of the State, how is that any improvement on the original problem, as conceived by you?

4.
If the purpose, or means, of the project to realise socialism, is public ownership of the means of production, and since according to Marx, labour is the means of production par excellence, how do you avoid the conclusion that the state has a presumptive right to ownership of everyone's labour? Why is this not a slave philosophy? And you think it's just a coincidence that it turned out an abusive and totalitarian doctrine? How could it be anything else?

5.
What of human action do you think the state does *not* have a right to control?

6.
If government has some kind of presumptive competence or superiority at economising - allocating scarce resources to their most valued ends - as social democratic Marxism assumes - then why isn't total government power over all production - totalitarianism - justified?

7.
I have never seen any Marxist
a) understand
b) represent, or
c) answer
Mises' complete demolition of your confused, garbled, self-contradictory, anti-rational, economically illiterate belief system, in his essay "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth".
http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf

Can you?

This is a bit hard to take. Marxism is a left code word which has justifiable bad press. This is a weak attempt to sanitise the word and what it means. The left under any name oppose our Australian democracy and as for the socialist left, well their tactics clearly define their ideology, look at the comments:

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/will_kevin_rudd_be_likewise_asked_to_denounce_this_disgusting_abuse/

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/naughty_children_whod_be_safe_in_a_world_led_by_such_haters/

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/this_horrific_abuse_of_abbott_must_end_but_where_is_the_left_that_cried_ove/

Note the Marxists are well represented at the above 'rally'.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/no_one_hates_here_like_the_left_and_its_dangerous/

Now, there is nothing more that I would like then to have a good argument about the left, because that is what the Marxists are. So I hope the author can rush to defend the maggots and their attitudes I have linked to because they are all of his ilk.

SpinDoc - What are you talking about? I am open about my politics. You infer my writing 'reveals something' about me. Well, what is that??

If you want to now where I stand then consider this:

I've been interested in Marxism since being a teenage student; Over the years I've been influenced by libertarian and social democratic Marxism. But I have a number of criticisms as well. For instance - some Marxists are hard materialists and determinists. Others think that ethics is secondary to 'the objective reality of class struggle' and socialist transition. I don't fall into either of those camps. In that sense I admit to being a 'Revisionist' - but still very much a liberal socialist.

I am also influenced by radical social liberalism - and want to read Rawls in depth one day; as well as the early British social liberals. From liberalism I take a passion for pluralism and freedom. And as a democrat I believe in expanding and deepening democracy for greater participation from the ground up.

Finally I don't talk about it that much (partly because I cop so much flak when I do so) , but I have been a non-denominational Christian for most of my life. This is more important to me than most people realise. It also partly explains why I try and engage with conservatives about what compassionate and liberal conservatism could mean - for instance the example of the Christian Democrats in 1950s Germany.

BTW - The anti-protest laws in Victoria quite possibly herald a new era of repression - It reminds me of the Bjelke Petersen days in Queensland.

I find all of these arguments re who did what and why, prior to the INEVITABLE collapse of the Iron Curtain to be quite tedious.

None of which provide any useful grist for the mill in helping anyone to understand the humanly created world of the "21st century".

Stalin, Mao and all of the rest of the brutal communists dictators were primarily and only psycho-paths.
Marxist theory had very little, if anything, to do with their applied politics of repression and brutality. They would have done exactly the same thing to their people whatever the overall circumstances of their countries at the time.

Just as the klepto-maniac and even genocidal rulers and/or dictators in Africa, and in both Central and South America have done - and Marcos too in the Philippines.

And what about all the never-ending European slaughters prior to the Russian revolution? And the horrors of European colonialism and imperialism. All of which were perpetrated by dreadfully sane Christians, more often than not with the active encouragement of the Christian ecclesiastical establishments of their time and place.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel13.html

And what about the state of the world altogether since the end of the second world war, the collapse of communism, and especially the last 2 or 3 decades. This site provides thorough-going resources re who the real villains are and were. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com

And who created the now permanent military-industrial-complex, ot The Complex (see Nick Turse) and the permanent warfare state. http://www.tomdispatch.com

And who created the situation, or the politics of cruelty as described by Naomi Klein in her truth-telling book The Shock Doctrine?
And here too: http://www.logosjournal.com/hammer_kellner

Not many Marxists to be found in the villains (and their crimes) to be found in the above 4 references!

Meanwhile in my opinion Marxist inspired theorists provide easily the best analysis of the state of the world in 2014. People like David Harvey and Mike Davis for instance. Or those associated with Counterpunch, and Logos Journal as per the above reference.

Tristan

Nice try. Since your argument re Marxism revolves around it's origins it is disingenious of you to ignore the origins of the Party Hilter used to achieve his aims.

The Nazi party was originally and always the National SOCIALIST Party of Germany. Hitler and his cohort were always socialist. They did control the means of production in Germany as well as individual development.

The Nazi origins were marxist and as I said it was easily corrupted and manipulated. Why don't you get that? It is pretty simple really.

“There have been totalitarian capitalist countries like NAZI germany and Mussolinis Italy.”

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." --Adolf Hitler
Speech of May 1, 1927.

http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/

Yebiga, you know, don’t you, that “Nazi” is short for “national socialist”. National SOCIALIST, get it?

Hitler did not believe in “capitalism” – meaning a system of private ownership of the means of production, with economic decisions – ie how to allocate scarce resources to their most valued ends – based on individual liberty and private property.

His system was based on the idea that government control of the means of production would replace capitalism with a better system – in a word, socialism.

The only exception is that, seeing the “international socialism” of the Bolsheviks had produced mass starvation and economic chaos, the Nazis thought they would have a “new improved” version. The means of production would remain in *nominally* private hands, but subject to the State’s absolute prerogative to override any and every decision. Like you and Tristan, he stood for the right of the State to thorough-going control of any and every aspect of production: wages, prices, interest, supply, demand, the supply of money, the supply and conditions of credi, education, infrastructure, primary, sco0ndary, tertiary industry, motherhood, sexual relations, you name it.

It was thus
a) totalitarian
b) socialist, and
c) indistingiuishable, as concerns economic policy, from what Tristan is defending, and from what you have tried but failed to defend here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16018&page=0 , and here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16031&page=0

We can prove this another way. Tristan, Yebiga, please Google “Hitler economic policy” and let us know any one that you do *not* agree with.