It is interesting how Marx generates such extreme responses. If this had been about Hegel, or Feuerbach, or Durkheim, or Jung, we might not agree with everything those people said but most would allow they had made some contribution to their fields. But Marx? He has to be totally stamped on.

If Marx wasn't still relevant people wouldn't feel the need to do that.

So suppose Mary points a gun at Jack and demands he hands over some secret documents and he does. Then we would say that he didn’t do so “of his own free will” and we would not blame him. — tinman917

That would not make sense. If Jack had no free will, then why would Mary point the gun at him? We do not threaten rocks or trees with guns, because we do not think rocks and trees can make choices. If Mary threatens Jack it is because she thinks he can make a choice.

We can understand why Jack makes the particular choice he does, but that doesn't imply that he had no choice.

Members of a society can acquire ownership over the means of production by establishing small collectively owned yet independently operated cooperatives that, when working together as a network, can fulfil the same function of larger, corporate enterprises. — SnowyChainsaw

You cannot both be independent and also work as a network. The two pull in opposite directions. Yes, it would solve many problems if we could just combine the upside of both small scale and large scale enterprises, while avoiding the downside, but that is easier said than done!

I think the videos you link to show rather an idealistic view of pre-industrialised society (e.g. in the 2nd video). Rather than experiencing stability and independence, most small farms and enterprises lived permanently on the edge. The videos see industrialisation as being about the city, but the same thing was happening out in the countryside.

I would suggest you consider the Chinese experience. Industry (especially agriculture) was organised in communes and there was a lot of experimentation with the size and shape of those communes, and their degree of autonomy, with the object of keeping just the balance that you describe. So you need to say why your own version wouldn't end up following the same path as China.

So what? Palestinians and Jews have claims to this land because they live there and have lived there historically not because of their race and religion. — Baden

If I have a claim on some land I am asserting ownership. If my claim is because other people of the same race or religion as me have lived in that area 'historically', then my claim would be based on my race or religion.

The thread is about 'giving everyone back their land'. If the people who once lived there are dead, then that isn't possible. Not unless we believe in some form of tribal inheritance.

Both Palestinians and Jews have reasonable claims to the land in that area. — Baden

That isn't how we normally understand property rights. I don't have a 'reasonable claim' to somebody else's property because of my race or religion.

We shouldn't assume that the land was owned by whatever group happened to live there before it was taken over by others, such that they should be given it back. Freehold is very rare historically.

while considering the traditional idea of God's judgement — Philip

And what is that idea? It seems to me there are many ideas, some taking account of a God who knows in advance what we will do and others where God and man are understood differently. After all, it isn't as if no theists have spotted the problems until now.

To just engage with this unspecified 'traditional idea' is to engage with a straw man.

"The only thing you can be certain of is that you cannot be certain of anything" — Yadoula

I do not see the problem.

Two subjects; (1) the state of mind of 'you', which is differentiated from (2) 'anything' i.e. the external world, that what isn't you.

I can be certain about my own state of mind by means of introspection, but there is no similar means of obtaining certainty about the external world.

Conventionally, objectivity means that the property described is part of the object of thought, independent of the subject of thought. Objective properties may be either necessary or contingent. To say "the Earth is flat" is an objective statement, because the Earth is either flat or not, independent of the subject saying it. It is also a contingent property because it could logically be not flat (like round if you can imagine). Speaking about morality, I use the term "objective" in the conventional sense (notwithstanding the possibility that it can be necessary too, but this is besides the point). — Samuel Lacrampe

Our claim about the property of the object depends on a prior claim that the object exists, so it can have a property. 'The Earth is flat' could be objective only if we also claim that there exists such an object i.e. the Earth.

But 'exists' in what sense? If we say its properties are either necessary or contingent and that this can be determined 'logically', then that is to say they can be determined purely from the way we have defined the subject. The existence of Earth would only be the existence of that definition. To say a claim about the shape of the Earth was objective we would only mean it related to the way somebody uses the word 'Earth',

Normally, I do not think that claims about the Earth are understood that way. Rather they are empirical. That 'the Earth exists' is 'exists as a material object' So to say 'the Earth is flat' is to make a claim about phenomena.

But claims about the existence of Morality are not usually understood to be about a material object. So to say that a claim about Morality was 'objective' is not be like an 'objective' claim about the shape of the Earth. It would only be a claim about 'how people use that word Morality' or 'what I mean by Morality'.

So to describe the Earth and Morality as both being 'objects of thought' is to blur a difference that makes all the difference.

Would it be fair to say then that academic philosophy has succumbed, or surrendered itself to the prevailing materialist paradigm/ethos -- using the descriptor 'materialist' in both its ontological and cultural sense -- just like most other academic pursuits, such that, once indoctrinated, there's no longer much leeway to be a so-called 'free thinker' outside that paradigmatic box, so to speak. — snowleopard

I don't know about succumbed. T'was ever thus. Things have been much worse; think about Heidegger's academic career. Or what passed for Soviet philosophy. I must say that from the outside US academia has always seemed highly conformist, you have to have the right political attitudes to get along. Of course, that doesn't seem so obvious if you share those attitudes yourself.

What I am saying is that if you drop out and join some hippy commune in the desert you will get just the same thing. As Homer Simpson explained; The code of the schoolyard, Marge! The rules that teach a boy to be a man. Let's see. Don't tattle. Always make fun of those different from you. Never say anything, unless you're sure everyone feels exactly the same way you do...

There is nothing special about academic philosophy. You could get a similar set of complaints from a schoolteacher, a policeman, a politician and everyone else. That while I am interested in making a difference, the rest of you are only interested in your careers or point scoring. That the rewards go to the well-connected and those who say what people want them to say, and not to original and courageous free thinkers (i.e. me). And so on.

Fortunately, there other branches of philosophy that help us reconcile ourselves with the unsatisfactory nature of the world in which we find ourselves.

And how does measuring a ruler with a ruler assume what is to be proven or demonstrated, which is the definition of circular reasoning? — Arkady

If we were just noting that 'ruler A is longer than ruler B' ' then we would not strictly be measuring because to measure is to apply an external standard, something that was neither A or B.

That A is longer than B is a fact, something determined empirically. The circularity would come in with our choice of external standard, because that standard is not a fact in the same way. To say ruler A is 'correct', whereas ruler B is 'too short', is an arbitrary choice. It is only true because we have all agreed that we will take ruler A as our standard, so it is a fact about human conventions. I think this can be called circular in the same way as the meaning of words is circular. 'Triangle' describes a certain shape. Why? Because we all agree that 'triangle' describes that shape.

I am not sure what to understand by 'circular reasoning'. I suppose that all reasoning is circular in that what counts as proof is something that follows the rules, but the rules themselves cannot be proved.

Again, if this process is so viciously circular, how do ruler manufacturers perform quality checks on their products if not by some measuring implement which has been calibrated in accordance with the standard of measurement? — Arkady

Ultimately they are comparing all one metre rulers with a standard metre ruler. But as Wittgenstein says, you cannot do a quality check on that standard metre. To do that would require another standard metre to compare the original standard metre against. And so on, So the standard metre is only 'accurate' because we have decided to take it as the standard for accuracy.

I would say there is a circularity in that but I do not know what to understand by 'viciously circular'.

The circularity in using a ruler to measure a ruler is that the standard is arbitrary. The official 1 metre ruler has been picked as the standard, but there is no reason why any other object might not have been chosen to be the standard for '1 metre'. It is 1 metre not because we have measured it, but because we say it is. Nor is it exactly the case that the official 1 metre ruler is the same as 1 metre. The 1 metre is abstract, it is pure length, a single dimension.

If I am trying to find a particular correlation, then this is not a problem. If I am trying to discover if I can fit object A into space B and the it can be done by comparing length then that will do. But that is a different process to describing something, to saying what something is, as we might want to do for 'consciousness'. Relating consciousness to some abstraction is not the same as saying what consciousness is, and the choice of which abstraction will be dictated by the observer.

In the case of consciousness, we might try to break it up into distinct parts like 'reasoning', 'perception', 'emotion', 'imagination' or whatever. But I do not think that we can clearly separate these things even in theory. Nor (in my experience) does my consciousness neatly shift from one mode to another. So we do not have even an arbitrary 'official standard' to work from.




.

Regarding rulers, isn't the point that all rulers are judged for accuracy against a standard ruler, but you cannot judge the standard ruler itself for accuracy. That the standard ruler is 1 metre long, or whatever, is not a fact, a piece of data about the world, but a convention of language. It is only 'accurate' because '1 metre' means 'the length of the standard ruler'. (Wittgenstein)

Basically, on this forum, as on almost every social media platform, there is an enormous amount of anti-Semitism. It is basic for the left to be anti-Semitic..., — LD Saunders

They are anti what might be called pro-Semitism, that is the idea that any people should be grouped according to their race or religion. Rather crudely, if somebody is opposed to the KKK it doesn't follow that they must be anti-white. And if one is opposed to the crazier manifestations of Zionism it doesn't follow that they are anti-Jewish.

If we were discussing racism and somebody claimed a distinct identity for the 'white race', or that God had given a piece of the earth to white South Africans, say, or the Aryans, we would (most of us) treat this as lunacy. But because Judaism is part of Christianity many are reluctant to say the same about the set of beliefs by which the Jews see themselves as distinct.

Perhaps the left tends to contain more atheists, or those who take a ecumenical view of religion. So when they see Jewish people celebrating their Jewishness (let alone making political claims based on their Jewishness) they are not sympathetic. They regard it all as self-serving superstition. They are anti-Semitic in the sense of regarding anyone who identifies themselves as 'Jewish' as just as deluded as somebody who regards themselves as a member of the Aryan Master Race, or whatever.

I haven't seen any stateless ethnic or religious group, with anything similar to the zionist agenda, emigrating to any of these places. — Πετροκότσυφας

Now you are just twisting your argument to score points. The issue was whether investment in unproductive areas could create a net benefit or whether development is always a zero sum game. That an area can only have a fixed economic output, so that any immigration must always deprive whoever is already there. Now it may be that the immigrants colonise the area and suppress the original population, but it need not necessarily be the case. And that was not how the Zionist project was originally imagined; it was meant to create a new kind of non-nationalistic state, hence the reference to a 'Switzerland' in my previous post. Right up until the end of the mandate there were attempts to build joint Jewish-Arab institutions, because the expectation was there would be a mixed state. Sadly, that wasn't what happened, but once again we only know that with hindsight.

Nah, I'm actually poor. Yet, for some reason, I know that the current resurgence of reactionary ideologies will end up in something bad if folk won't stop normilising them. Really, I'm no magician! — Πετροκότσυφας

I would say that what characterises reactionary ideologies is their simplistic portrayal of history; "All Jews have always been wicked. They are the source of all our problems." Or alternatively "All Arabs are evil and only want to kill Jews and anyone who sympathises with them must be an anti-Semite". I suggest a more nuanced picture, which is why I annoy both sides.

That's not an answer though. So was the rest of the planet. So is the rest of the planet. I don't see populations emigrating to Mongolia, Australia or Sahara. — Πετροκότσυφας

They do if investment can open opportunities for work. I would have thought Australia was a prime example.

Nah, that "there" is false. The Ottoman decree allowed Jews from Europe to settle anywhere in the empire, except... Palestine. And later prohibited even Ottoman Jews from buying land in Palestine. — Πετροκότσυφας

What is false; my saying that they wanted to be allowed to settle in Palestine or that there were already Jews in Palestine? That the Ottomans may not have been willing to take Zionist settlers does not contradict either of these. Other suggestions for Jewish settlements were Kenya and Argentina; once again the notion at the time was that it would be beneficial to these places.

Except that these quotes didn't have the benefit of hindsight, they were well known views based on the analysis of the situation. It seems like some people still avert their eyes. — Πετροκότσυφας

The hindsight is in your selection of those quotes, rather than quotes from the much larger mass of people who saw no point in a Jewish homeland - and some danger. Because we know what is going to happen it doesn't follow that people at the time knew it too. Now somebody like Herzl is considered an important figure because of the way things turned out. But in his own time his vision for a Jewish homeland was not something like modern Israel but what was satirised as 'an imbecile prospectus for a Jewish Switzerland on the instalment plan'. And for those that did give it consideration, is was often as somewhere to put Russian and Romanian Jewish refugees, to relieve their condition, rather than somewhere a middle-class German Jew would ever want to go. Real history is all mixed up; what we now see as a clear process was a collection of different people, all with their own assessments and plans, often talking a cross-purposes. Just like in normal life.

Or maybe it is you who expect a clear narrative and just ignore everything else. It seems quite obvious that were you living back then, you wouldn't have paid any attention to those who were actually right in their assessment. — Πετροκότσυφας

That's right! If I was living back in those times I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to those who were actually right in their assessment....because at that time I wouldn't have known that they were right. Just as if I had attended a meeting of a tiny right-wing fringe party in 1918 I would have probably failed to realise than one day one of the speakers would become dictator of Germany or that there would be a world war.

And today when I read the various stock market tips I am unable to tell who is actually right from the rest, which makes investment a chancy business. Yes, some of them will be right, but I do not know which. I will only know that in retrospect. If that isn't the case with you, you must be enormously rich, and I would have thought you would have had better places to spend your time than arguing on an internet discussion board..

So, you'd be able to define what under-developed/underpopulated means, to provide the corresponding sources which show that it was underdeveloped/underpopulated and also give an argument why it matters. Since it was Ottoman land, you couldn't just move there. — Πετροκότσυφας

You can tell it was underpopulated by the fact that it is now able to support a lot more people that it did at the time. Yes; it was Ottoman land which is why the early Zionists requested the Sultan's permission to settle there. There was nothing remarkable about that, there were already Jews living throughout the Empire as there had been for centuries.

Eastern Europe and the Islamic world was nowhere homogeneous; It is only that way now because we have had a long period of 'ethic cleansing'. So, for example a Greek city like Salonika could have a majority Jewish population, there were Greek cities in Turkey, Christian communities in Iraq...nobody yet has the idea that one geographical area has to have one ethnicity.

Your quotes refer to Eretz Israel and a far more ambitious plan to create a new nation with a Jewish majority. That was not yet a serious option; the idea that any Jew would want to go there was considered doubtful, let alone masses. You pick on these quotes with the benefit of hindsight, because we now know that is indeed what would happen, but that is not how it seemed at the time.

"Do you imagine that in the past people did what they did because they woke up one morning and thought 'Let's be evil'?". It seems like you imagine this exact thing in the case of Germans; one day they offer Jews a comfortable life, the next they slaughter them without anyone seeing it coming. — Πετροκότσυφας

If you had wanted to pick a nation where Jews were most emancipated, where they played a prominent part in cultural life, you would have picked Germany. During WW1 Germany could credibly appeal to American Jews that Germany was the side they should be supporting. The archetypal anti-Semitic nation was Russia (an ally of France and Britain).

And yes, in a few short years this changed absolutely. There are heart-rending stories of German Jews who waited too long to escape because they simply did not believe what was happening. Once again, because we know Hitler is coming we look into the past and pick out signals of that coming, but that is not how it seemed at the time.

Germany changed. Not because they decided to be evil but because when people get into difficulties they will follow the politician that gives them a simplistic explanation for their problems. People are like that, all people. The liberal reforms were just as real as Hitler, but they turned out to be fragile. And fortunately, so was the Nazi regime; Germany today is again a liberal country.

You expect a clear narrative from history, where the actors have fixed characters and you can prove and disprove things and detect clear lines of cause and effect. I don't. I see it as chaotic.

There was something of that notion in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, They were taking on unproductive land, so bringing it into production would benefit everyone.

This is laughable.
It's the same false argument used by white genocidal maniacs all over the world from South Africa to all the Americas. — charleton

No, it is the argument made by anyone who knows anything about farming. Land, particularly semi-desert is not valuable, at best in can be used for seasonal grazing. You have to invest in it before it becomes productive.

OK, the people who used to do the seasonal grazing may not see it that way, but it is a very poor living and you don't have to be a white genocidal maniac to argue that life is generally better for everyone in an economically developed country like the USA than the mountains of Afghanistan.

Yes, there is more to it than that, but my point is that you would not have to be a villain to have seen early Zionist immigration as being a potentially good thing.

But because of the nature of this thread it is impossible to accept ideas like that. You have to keep it simple. One side or the other has to be irredeemably evil. If we were discussing any other topic but Israel /Palestine we would see how irrational this is.

Well, it wasn't that romantic. Palestine was not empty and even those who at first managed to miss this fact, soon enough found out: — Πετροκότσυφας

I did not say it was empty, however it was considered under-developed and thus underpopulated, which indeed it was.

What you do not seem to be able to take on board is that Jewish settlements in Palestine were proposed long before the Holocaust. Nobody expected more than a handful of romantic religious idealists would ever want to leave their comfortable lives in places like Germany to go and live in the semi-desert. As your (unattributed) quote says; This is an infinitely graver difficulty than the stock anti-Zionist taunt that nobody would go to Palestine if we got it; which was indeed the mainstream attitude at the time. Nobody was offering Jerusalem and Palestine to the Jews; there were Jews already in those places, just as there were Christians, just as there had been for centuries, so why would a few more matter?

That was the attitude at the time. After Hitler it is hard for us to imagine a time when it was seriously argued that the spiritual home of Judaism was Germany, or where it was not uncommon for Jews to convert on the grounds that all the worlds religions were merging into one anyway, as reason replaces superstitious elements, but that was the case.

But I get the impression nobody is interested in history, except as ammunition for one side or the other. And where something doesn't fit our preconceptions we close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears.

The partition of Cyprus was not 'Imperial', unless you consider all partitions are by definition Imperial.

Go ahead and cite to us a single work by a leading university, like Oxford, that supports your Jew-hating claim that Hitler supported Zionism? — LD Saunders

My answer is that Hitler was a populist politician. When he saw a tactical political advantage he would support emigration to Palestine, or other places. But did he 'support Zionism' in the sense that he wanted to help Jews? Of course not. It was a money-extraction scheme combined with what we now call 'spin'. So yes, you can find papers (Haavara Agreement) that can be interpreted as supporting Zionism, but there is no reason to assume they were sincere. As later became evident, Hitler never felt bound to honour his written undertakings.

Attempts to morally justify or excuse what was clearly wrong then and now, won’t wash either. — CuddlyHedgehog

No, it was not 'clearly wrong' then. Do you imagine that in the past people did what they did because they woke up one morning and thought 'Let's be evil'?

I would like to hope I could have been magically born with modern sensibilities, but I have to face the fact that if I had been born in another place and at another time I would probably have seen nothing wrong with slavery, or the subordination of women. And I doubt if you would have either. If you cannot get your head around the fact that people see things differently to you then you will never understand either the past or the present, let alone have any hope of making things better.

As to my 'attempting to morally justify or excuse', if you look about six posts down on the previous page you will see what my own opinion is of Israel. But I do not believe I should try to support my opinion by falsifying history. People wrote about the moral justification for taking land in Palestine and I gave my opinion about how that was seen at the time, bearing in mind that nobody then imagined it would involve any more than a handful of people.

So if Somalis landed on English shores, that happen to be unoccupied at the time, they can start working on them to make them more productive for everyone's benefit, right? With such mentality, no wonder the old english imperialists felt entitled to help themselves to anything that crossed their path. — CuddlyHedgehog

The example of colonisation that everyone had in mind was America. An endless frontier of land that could be brought under cultivation. To bring in some philosophy, this is a feature of Locke, it is the explanation of why you should obey the rules of your existing state - because if you don't like them everyone has the option of moving to the new world. Similarly it underlies the notion of property. One has a right to ownership of land because it is only your input of labour that gives land a value.

I'm saying that there was a reflection of this idea in the early Jewish settlements. That they would be creating something new, rather than taking away what somebody else owned. But obviously very few people were expected to want to take this up, any more than most people today would want to leave their homes and jobs to join a pioneering hippy commune in the desert. That is why everyone was relaxed about the idea of a few Jewish settlements in Palestine. They did not know the Holocaust was coming.

Yes, people saw things differently in the past. It is enjoyable to re-tell history as a simple story of goodies and baddies but that is not how it seemed to the people involved then, and nor is helpful when trying to understand the situation today.

What is different about Israel are the occupied/controlled territories. If they were annexed then the people living in them should have equal rights to Israelis. If they are not annexed then Israel should not build settlements there. But they are kept in limbo; a situation where Israel can exploit the land and people without giving them rights and this seems a throwback to the worst forms of colonialism. Like colonialism it seems underpinned by the notion that Israelis and Palestinians are not equal as humans. The very idea of Israel, a state being 'for' one particular religion or race is out of step with most modern thinking. In other words, Israel is an unapologetic assertion of social/political attitudes we would reject.

I think that is why Israel arouses such passions. Other states may do worse things, including persecute minorities, but as long as our own nations support Israel people feel they have lost the moral high ground.

(I am trying answer a specific question here that is often asked; Why Israel gets so much attention, especially from the liberal/left, when objectively other nations do worse things?)

Nobody lands on the shore, discovers people already present, and says, "Oh, look, Jack. See, there are people already living here. That means we must leave so as not to disturb them. They were here first, and they deserve to remain the only residents here." — Bitter Crank

I think that what happens is that they land on shore and see a lot of unoccupied land. Land is not an asset as such, it has to be worked to become productive, so there would be no notion that the new arrivals were depriving anyone of anything.

There was something of that notion in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, They were taking on unproductive land, so bringing it into production would benefit everyone.

Of course, this idea dates from a period when it was assumed that Jewish immigration to Israel would only ever involve a tiny number of idealists.

. At the moment everyone is corkscrewed around with language. For example, true does not equal fact. — tim wood

It is also confused because Robert Peters originally had two threads on the same subject, one of which seems to have been deleted.

There seems to be some significance in that we are asked for a FACT, i.e. that he is not talking about the word 'fact' as it is usually used. What is meant remains unclear, pending the return of Mr Peters.

There is no 'truth in truth' just as there is no 'colour in colour' or 'number in number'. That is because just as 'colour' is not the name of a colour, and 'number' is not a particular number, 'truth' is not itself a proposition.

I think the 'concept of irrefutability' is unclear. For example, does it mean 'to disprove'? If that was the case, then to prove a FACT false would be to assert its negation as a FACT. If I can successfully refute X, then I can assert 'not-X' as a FACT. If there are no possible examples of FACTS then there are no possible examples of refutations - and vice-versa.

So I cannot give you any examples of FACTS because what you understand by FACT contains a self-contradiction.

'True' is a description of a proposition. Without being attached to a proposition the word 'true' doesn't assert anything, so if what you mean by 'FACT' is 'true' then I agree there is no such thing.

Justice is defined as: equality in treatment among all men. — Samuel Lacrampe

Meaning equal punishments, but also that everyone lives in equal circumstances? That there is no occasion for 'moral accident'? Because otherwise we would be punishing an act of theft by a starving person the same way as an act of theft by a greedy one.

Mercy is part of the Golden Rule in that we would like others to extend the same understanding to us, because we can imagine circumstances where we might also act the same way. This is incorporated in justice systems, for example we do not have a single crime of killing with a single punishment, but a variety of crimes that reflect intention and circumstance, and also some defenses (insanity, self-defence) that admit the act but excuse it from punishment.

To put it another way, Nazis have often featured in this thread. We would like to think that if we had been born a German in the same epoch as Hitler and the others we would have not gone along with the Nazis. However the chances are that we would. Born earlier we would probably have seen nothing wrong with slavery, or beating wives, either. It is only the 'moral luck' of having been born later that means we do not share the guilt for such things.

As I said before a lot of Religious Organisations are in the process of being replaced by more modern notions of what is an agreeable set of morals. — SnowyChainsaw

If morals are a matter of whatever a particular society finds 'agreeable', then there is no reason to assume that the new set are an improvement on the old. There is also no reason why just because some people find them agreeable that everyone has to feel the same way. In other words, it reduces the meaning of 'moral' to 'what I happen to feel like today'.

If that isn't the intention, if we are saying that modern attitudes to slavery or homosexuality or whatever are an improvement on what has gone before, then we must believe that morality has a stronger meaning. That if a group feels it is OK to persecute homosexuals that their finding it 'agreeable' is not enough. That they are wrong. That morality is a fact, not a feeling.

But morality isn't 'modern', it isn't scientific, it isn't a fact. To treat it as if it was a fact is to believe in the existence of something that is not an object to science. How is that different from a religious belief?

To put it another way, you follow something you call 'liberal ideology' and others follow something they call 'religious ideology'. Neither is any more rational than the other - but at least the religious ideology is a bit more thought-through in that they realise the problem, they see the need to posit a metaphysical reason behind morality.

n fact it's the other way round from what you say: Marxism is a plain old possible explanation for verifiable, noticeable bad things happening, not an identification of bad things happening that nobody ever noticed before. Very good: but what's the test? In what way could it be a wrong possible explanation? — gurugeorge

Marxism describes what is happening, but if we describe anything we are doing so from a state of detachment; the implication is that things might be otherwise. What is special about Marx is that he doesn't accept any particular set of economic relationships as being somehow the natural state of affairs; things have changed in the past and can therefore change again. Famously: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

So the fundamental argument against Marx would be that we have reached the end of history.

Since nobody else has mentioned it, I'd remark that in the olden days gender was something words had; masculine, feminine and (in some languages) neuter. The modern meaning seems to date from 1963. So its not surprising we should be unsure what it means; whenever you get a new word various factions will fight over ownership.

The thread is 'What exactly is communism?' As my contribution I'm suggesting that when Marx used the word it was a reference to medieval communes. It could not have been a reference to social arrangements that did not come about until long after he was dead.

Regarding the history lesson, we are discussing what 'communism' is. I'm saying that if somebody had looked up the word in a dictionary when Marx was writing they would have found references to medieval communes, since neither the Soviet Union nor hippies existed yet. Since a commune was a collective organisation of people like peasants or craft workers and Marx was advocating a collective organisation of people like peasants or craft workers that would have made sense.

If they had instead understood it to mean what you say, 'a system that transformed European warlords into aristocrats' how would that have made sense? Marx was not suggesting the workers unite for the purpose of establishing an aristocracy.

You write: Point is: the Marxist vision was global in scale. It was supposed to unfold naturally and organically. I would disagree. It could not be global because change would be provoked by the crisis in capitalism, but this would only come about in advanced capitalist societies.

As I wrote before, Marx himself was a political refugee and his work is full of studies of failed revolutions, from the middle ages, the French Revolution, 1848, the Paris Commune etc. He is under no illusion it will simply unfold. What distinguishes Marxism from other movements is the expectation of reaction; the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is required because it is assumed the revolution will be instantly under threat. There were movements that thought that the system would gradually reform itself, without the need for revolution, but Marx disagreed.

They paid warlord/aristocrats for protection. That is not Marxism. Marxism is a passive wait for history to reveal its purpose. — frank

What they did was to establish themselves within the feudal system. A commune took on the role of a person, like a lord, in the same way as a company today takes on a legal personality. Like everyone else they were part of a system; they had rights and duties.

Remember Marx is from a medieval city which would have had strong guilds. It was part of the Holy Roman Empire which was itself a sort of commune.

It is no good reading Marx as if he is a twentieth century, let alone a modern writer. It is absurd to try to understand what he meant by communism by looking at regimes that only came into existence around 40 years after his death.

And Marx was under no illusion that all you had to do was await history to do its stuff. He wrote numerous studies of failed revolutions. To say capitalism was unstable because it contained inherent contradictions did not imply that it must inevitably be replaced by communism. People had to make it happen.

Surely this can't be what people had in mind by "communism". — Purple Pond

What people who read Marx (long before 1917) presumably had in mind were medieval communes. Groups of peasants, or tradesmen, or the inhabitants of a town or parish, forming associations to protect themselves. That is fundamentally Marxism; that an individual will always be weak within an economic system; that they need to realise their collective strength.

I think fascism can only be understood as a reaction to communism. It is not really an ideology. So a basic point in communism is that people are divided by their role in the economy; workers, small businesses, big businesses etc. So, your identity is essentially economic. Fascism seeks to present an alternative to this by saying your identity is essentially racial, or national, or religious.

That is why it is hard to pin down fascism. It might consist of a deeply conservative religious culture, or it might be modernizing and atheist. The only thing in common is hostility to communism.

But I think it does have to have that us-and-them element. If you are hostile to communism but avoid creating some substitute for the class-struggle, then you couldn't call that fascism. But all politicians are tempted to play that card, to find an enemy, because it is such an effective message. So there is always that tendency.

It seems to be the case that more men than women suffer from forms of autism. Must we insist that this cannot be the case? That the apparent inequality must be the result of some socially conditioned bias when measuring autism in men and women. Or, if there is a genuine difference, it must be the result of the way boys and girls are nurtured.

Likewise, men make up by far the majority of criminals. Until prisons are 50:50 men and women, should we assume the police and courts are discriminating against men?

Personally, I have no problem with the idea that some traits may be more common in one sex than the other. If this is so it may also be that the unusual obsessive traits that can make for career progress and exceptional earnings in some fields may be commoner amongst men than women.

Accepting such differences would not mean it is rational to assume that every man is autistic, criminal, or a CEO. But it would mean that we should not assume all statistical evidence of inequality between the sexes must be the result of sex discrimination.

Does the moon truly not exist if we do not observe it? What constitutes as evidence of existence and truth? — MTravers

That suggests that the moon does exist, if we are observing it.

But the way in which things exist when we are observing them involves us, the nature of our senses. For example, that I see the moon as a certain colour is a function of my eyes and my brain, not the moon in itself.

So, if I am not looking at the moon, it certainly does not exist, not in the same way it does when I am looking at it.