On the philosophical contradictions of Marxism

[zarus tathra]

Marxism has a lot of material flaws, and these material flaws are talked about at length, but very little is said about its cultural ones.

The flaw I want to talk about is the conflict between the notion of "eternal revolution" and the desire for identity that afflicted the movement. You can MAYBE have eternal revolution, and you can have fairly static identity, but you can't have both. The whole point of revolution is the dissolution of identity, if you try to resolve one's identity and at the same time carry out "eternal revolution," then you're going to have a paradox and run around in circles chasing a thing that can not exist even as an abstraction.

And that's what we saw in the Soviet Union. You had legions of "intellectuals" and "professional revolutionaries" spreading as much chaos as possible while clinging desperately, and I would say pathetically, to this or that Marxist turn of phrase. People were hungry for identity and "stability," and at the same time they were fighting constantly for "revolution." You can't have both, and in the end, they had neither.

[Solitary]

Sounds like the two Party system we have.  Divide and conquer. :roll:  Solitary

[zarus tathra]

I was talking to my roommate yesterday about his old job at a bank. He said that all the managers were "intrapreneurs" who were creating bullshit software projects so that they could keep their jobs. He wondered why the shareholders would tolerate this much bullshit instead of reducing everything down to like 1 mainframe and 10 programmers. Then I suggested that they created this culture of bullshit so that they could cover up their financial fraud, and he kind of had an "aha" moment right there. Obviously, that's probably the case with politics everywhere.