"Decisive influence" is not the same as having identical positions. One doesn't have to be Karl Marx to be a marxist.
A decent person does not even bother to take marxist positions as his starting point, because he understands that all leftism is, bascially, an apology for violence of crowds towards individuals.
There's no reason to waste any time reading his blog any further.
This means that you are just a believer who does not want to see anything which contradicts your world view. If someone is thinking rationally, if some proposition has many pieces of supporting evidence and one (or a few) pieces of that evidence are shown to be invalid or weak, this does not automatically makes all other pieces of evidence invalid.
Obama's proposals are more redistributionist than Mccain's.
Yep, both are leftists. Different kinds, for sure.
As for egalitarian redistributionism, this is the essence of leftism. Because naked redistribution by force is easily recognized by anyone as plain robbery, there has to be a moral justification of such redistribution - which comes in a form of marxist class analysis, which relies on labor theory of value, from which Marx made conclusion that worker classes are exploited by capialists and entrepreneurs. This exploitation justfies the redistribution. As soon as you accept the fact that forced redistribution is morally acceptable, you have no choice but to follow the Marx's justification for it (nobody invented any other justification for it yet).
Since marxism is a foundation of all modern leftist thinking, any egalitarian redistributionist is a marxist. The fact that most modern leftists are too ignorant to know source of their own beliefs does not change that fact.
Fundamentally, the distinction between classical liberalism (and its derivations, including American founders' republicanism and modern-day libertarianism) and leftism is in the different understanding of equality - for leftists equality means equal (in some sense of "equal") material well-being, and for classical liberals equality means equal rights. These two positions are logically incompatible. You cannot have both at the same time (it follows from the fact that people are different - which was well understood by Lenin, hence the insistence of Soviet propaganda and education on "harmonically developed personae" and famous "we don't have irreplaceable people").
It's preposterous to say that that makes them either socialist or "in line with the program espoused in the Communist Manifesto".
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... by the way their European socialist brethren aren't that shy - they do call themselves socialists pretty unabashedly.
For someone so erudite, you have a curious lapse in your understanding of political philosophy.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-03 04:54 am (UTC)A decent person does not even bother to take marxist positions as his starting point, because he understands that all leftism is, bascially, an apology for violence of crowds towards individuals.
There's no reason to waste any time reading his blog any further.
This means that you are just a believer who does not want to see anything which contradicts your world view. If someone is thinking rationally, if some proposition has many pieces of supporting evidence and one (or a few) pieces of that evidence are shown to be invalid or weak, this does not automatically makes all other pieces of evidence invalid.
Obama's proposals are more redistributionist than Mccain's.
Yep, both are leftists. Different kinds, for sure.
As for egalitarian redistributionism, this is the essence of leftism. Because naked redistribution by force is easily recognized by anyone as plain robbery, there has to be a moral justification of such redistribution - which comes in a form of marxist class analysis, which relies on labor theory of value, from which Marx made conclusion that worker classes are exploited by capialists and entrepreneurs. This exploitation justfies the redistribution. As soon as you accept the fact that forced redistribution is morally acceptable, you have no choice but to follow the Marx's justification for it (nobody invented any other justification for it yet).
Since marxism is a foundation of all modern leftist thinking, any egalitarian redistributionist is a marxist. The fact that most modern leftists are too ignorant to know source of their own beliefs does not change that fact.
Fundamentally, the distinction between classical liberalism (and its derivations, including American founders' republicanism and modern-day libertarianism) and leftism is in the different understanding of equality - for leftists equality means equal (in some sense of "equal") material well-being, and for classical liberals equality means equal rights. These two positions are logically incompatible. You cannot have both at the same time (it follows from the fact that people are different - which was well understood by Lenin, hence the insistence of Soviet propaganda and education on "harmonically developed personae" and famous "we don't have irreplaceable people").
It's preposterous to say that that makes them either socialist or "in line with the program espoused in the Communist Manifesto".
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... by the way their European socialist brethren aren't that shy - they do call themselves socialists pretty unabashedly.
For someone so erudite, you have a curious lapse in your understanding of political philosophy.