I've just saw one case on another forum where I met a nice ex-marxist that now believed in liberty and capitalism.
Leon Louw may be an example for that.
Early life Leon Louw was born in the town of Krugersdorp on 18 March 1948. After his mother died in his infancy, he was raised by relatives in Potchefstroom, where he attended preschool and started primary school. When his father remarried, he was moved to the new family home in Johannesburg where he completed primary school and attended secondary school. After matriculating, he studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand (1965–1968), after which he completed his BJuris degree through UNISA whilst serving legal articles at a law firm (1969–1970). At university, he became a Marxist and anti-apartheid activist. He studied the major works of Marx and other communist writers. As an activist participating in anti-apartheid demonstrations and underground meetings he often found himself at odds with the law and the police . He went on to work with Winnie Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders, and did courier work for the ANC . [edit]Activism Louw experienced a “philosophical shift” during his early twenties when he was an article clerk at one of South Africa’s leading law firms. His activist life took a new turn due to an event that changed his life and lead ultimately to the work he does now: “Every day I saw and occasionally patronised an old black lady who would sell fruit on the sidewalk outside our law offices. One day I saw the police kick her basket of fruit into the street, and chase her down around the corner where they caught and arrested her, They threw her violently into their police van, and drove off. I dropped what I was doing and followed. They took her took her to central Johannesburg police station where I spent the rest of the day trying to get her released”. Louw asked his employer to investigate the plight of informal black traders and to provide them with legal defence. After telling him that it was “none of their business”, his employer reluctantly allowed Louw to do pro-bono work for illegal street vendors, taxi operators and cottage industries. It was at this point that Louw first found himself questioning Marxism, especially its anti-business and anti-individual liberty dogma, which he would later abandon, by virtue of what he observed “in the real world”, as he puts it, and under the influence of a colleague who introduced him to Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Louw
Leon Louw was born in the town of Krugersdorp on 18 March 1948. After his mother died in his infancy, he was raised by relatives in Potchefstroom, where he attended preschool and started primary school. When his father remarried, he was moved to the new family home in Johannesburg where he completed primary school and attended secondary school. After matriculating, he studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand (1965–1968), after which he completed his BJuris degree through UNISA whilst serving legal articles at a law firm (1969–1970). At university, he became a Marxist and anti-apartheid activist. He studied the major works of Marx and other communist writers. As an activist participating in anti-apartheid demonstrations and underground meetings he often found himself at odds with the law and the police . He went on to work with Winnie Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders, and did courier work for the ANC .
Louw experienced a “philosophical shift” during his early twenties when he was an article clerk at one of South Africa’s leading law firms. His activist life took a new turn due to an event that changed his life and lead ultimately to the work he does now: “Every day I saw and occasionally patronised an old black lady who would sell fruit on the sidewalk outside our law offices. One day I saw the police kick her basket of fruit into the street, and chase her down around the corner where they caught and arrested her, They threw her violently into their police van, and drove off. I dropped what I was doing and followed. They took her took her to central Johannesburg police station where I spent the rest of the day trying to get her released”.
Louw asked his employer to investigate the plight of informal black traders and to provide them with legal defence. After telling him that it was “none of their business”, his employer reluctantly allowed Louw to do pro-bono work for illegal street vendors, taxi operators and cottage industries. It was at this point that Louw first found himself questioning Marxism, especially its anti-business and anti-individual liberty dogma, which he would later abandon, by virtue of what he observed “in the real world”, as he puts it, and under the influence of a colleague who introduced him to Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Louw
"...not to mention the importance of feminism in the ongoing and intentional destruction of all traditional mores, otherwise known as cultural Marxism."
So wanting to get rid of a patriarchal society is cultural marxism?
'Men do not change, they unmask themselves' - Germaine de Stael
That would be kind of genocidal to get rid of all those people. It also depends on the exact meanings of those words. If feminism means kind of class struggle replacing men and women replacing bourgeousy and proletariat, then for sure that is a kind of cultural marxism. Generally cultural marxism is a deviant from the classical version of class struggle involving workers vs owners. It is transformed into something where the struggle is drawn into micro-relations in society which can take the form of children against parents, women vs men, minorities against majorities etc. In a sense it is also a struggle of values and aesthetics lust-fullfillment against personal restraint, promiscuity vs monogamy, egotism against loyalty, ugliness against beauty and the like. Cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School are perhaps a subject on its own.
How about
?
"That would be kind of genocidal to get rid of all those people. It also depends on the exact meanings of those words. If feminism means kind of class struggle replacing men and women replacing bourgeousy and proletariat, then for sure that is a kind of cultural marxism. "
I do not mean literally "wiping out" people who believe in a patriarchial society but instead believe in educating beyond it. A society of individuals, not gentials.
"Generally cultural marxism is a deviant from the classical version of class struggle involving workers vs owners. It is transformed into something where the struggle is drawn into micro-relations in society which can take the form of children against parents, women vs men, minorities against majorities etc. In a sense it is also a struggle of values and aesthetics lust-fullfillment against personal restraint, promiscuity vs monogamy, egotism against loyalty, ugliness against beauty and the like. "
Yes I know what marxism is. I posed the question because A.) I did not want to unjustly assume something about you and B.) I wanted you to think about it for a second hoping that you would realize that not everyone who is against patarichy is a marxist.
In a very important sense, libertarians and Marxists are very SIMILAR in their moral judgements. Or perhaps I should say communists or socialists insted of Marxists, reserving this term for the economic reasoning used by communists/socialists. So what do I meen by that? Well, think about it:
1. Both are strongly against privileges.
2. Both think that workers should be allowed to keep the full reward for their work.
Of course, communists and libertarians differ greatly on what is to be considered "privilege" and "full reward of their work". Communists refer to owners of the means of production as being privileged. They are likely to have been born in rich families, they may have had the "privilege" of being born cunning and unscrupuluous so that they ended up becoming rich by "exploiting" others, they may have been blessed by luck, something like that. Libertarians think of privileges in terms of special treatment by government. And while libertarians rage against heavy taxation, depriving people of part of their income, communists rage against capitalists who, according to Marxist economic theory, are depriving the workers of a large share of their income even before it ends up on the payslip. According to those with a Marxist view, taxing rich is not theft, since the rich have not earned their money, but merely extracted (stolen) it from the workers, so that the taxation is just a way of confiscating loot and giving it back to its true owners.
Any serious discussion between Marxists and libertarians should therefore focus on economic issues. The premise "the rich are rich because the poor are poor (and vice versa)" must be discussed seriously and patiently. It is held as an axiom too obvious to be questioned by Marxists and scorned at by liberarians. This is essentially a scientific question and can be setteled independently of moral positions. When discussing this topic, I usually repeat an argument against the theory of exploitation of one country by another used by Sowell in Basic Economics. He says that the most "exploited" nation in the world is........... the US! People invest constantly in the US for the sole purpose of extracting profits. The british financed the whole construction of the railway system, just like rich countries today are installing energy plants and mine industries in developing countries. Evidently, nothing of this made the US doomed to povery.
The question about privilege is more complex and cannot be setteled entirely by reason. It involves a vision of what man is. If a person is a soul that is suddenly crystalized out of the Brahman and randomly assigned a nationality, a social class, good parents or bad parents, inteligence or lack of it etc, then it may be natural to consider all innate differences as unfair, and in need of correction by society. Here, the way to argue is not by telling the Marxist that the rich kid who had thousands of oportunities "deserves" his wealth later in life whereas the working class kid who had to quit school and work at the age of 16 "deserves" what he's got. Here you need a very serious discussion of tradeoffs. That is, whether the attempt of having government trying to reduce these innate differences is actually likely to be favorable in the long run, and whether the costs in terms of freedom and spontaniety by imposing large government measures are worth to pay for it. No easy answers can be expected, which is probably the reason why this is a dividing factor even between libertarians. For example, some think that governmen should have nothing to do with education, wheres others (Friedman, for example) seem to think that education financed by government will increase competition and lead to a more prosperous society. This is also where geolibertarians differ from other liberarians in that they think that property rights do not apply to land. To me this is clearly a conflict of the view of children as being dropped out from the Brahman or being natural extentions of their parents. A similar problem arises when treating ethicitys and nationalities over long time periods. Are black americans "continuations" of slave trade who should be compensated for what was done to their ancestors? Or are they people that have been randomly assigned a colour and a nationality and have nothing more in common with their slave ancestors than they have with an eskimo or a mideaval Mongolian knight.
I used to be of a heavily progressivist mindset.
Andrew Cain:So wanting to get rid of a patriarchal society is cultural marxism?
I'll say again, I have no objection whatever to feminism insofar as its goal is to achieve equal rights for women: i.e. to change the law where the law permits violations of women's property rights. I applaud that. However, that is not the driving force behind modern feminism.
Feminism today takes oppression in the sense of J.S. Mill. Unequal pay is oppression, unequal bathroom facilities is oppression, the very existence of certain ideas is oppression, certain uses of language are oppression: i.e. all kinds of nonaggressive acts are considered oppression. Feminism is an expression of "liberalism (in the Millian sense)," the goal of which (contra classical liberalism) is to use the State to combat all these instances of alleged oppression. It does the same with race, with physical disabilities, with the poor, etc. Social justice, racial justice, economic justice, etc. Now, to the extent that advocates for all this actually believe their own claims, then they are only playing the role useful idiot in the plans of those individuals who do not believe this tripe, but need to propagate to destroy the existing culture so as to bring in a new socialist culture.
Feminism is one ideology among many which justify expansions of State power while undermining existing mores/institutions that might otherwise resist those expansions of State power. I tend to generally take a conspiratorial view of history, but it doesn't really matter. Whether there is conscious design or a random confluence of impersonal forces, this is occurring, and it's not something that lovers of liberty can condone.
I do not mean literally "wiping out" people who believe in a patriarchial society but instead believe in educating beyond it. A society of individuals, not genitals.
There is more to humans than this bland, simple undefined concept of "individuality". Individuals have genitals.
I was a socialist until the middle of university when I was surrounded by my fellow socialists. Then I got to see them duke it out with a libertarian professor (Well, I think he may have been more traditional right-wing but taught us libertarian philosophy and economics anyway). Listening to them go back and forth, while reading the likes of Mises and other classical liberals helped change my tune. I only recently turned more 'purist' libertarian recently after spending a number of years working in government and observing firsthand and learning Austrian Economics. Has been quite a journey of the mind and I hope more people who fancy themselves as marxists undertake it!
Minarchist's post about feminism got me to thinking. There are few things that make me more uncomfortable than seeing Marxist types who are also enthusiastic supporters of the Obama and the Democrats.
This is not because I believe "Obama is a Marxist" or some other nonsense that naive Tea Party people say. It's more the opposite; that I believe the Marxists themselves, at least the 'true' consistent ones that see their vision of society as opposed to authoritarianism (as many try to convince me) are so naive and unwillingly supporting a power structure that really doesn't give a fuck about what they want and laughs at them.
I think that has been what will always doom Marxism.
Reminds me of the whole 'court intellectual' thing; the progressive leftoid academic echosphere ends up perpetuating a system that is antithetical to what they most desire, yet is fueled, dependent on and powered by their intellectual and cultural influence.
This is why 'cognitive dissonance' is the word of the day and I will never tire of using it because god damn it's everywhere and all of us are guilty of it in some form.
Feminists and Marxists who have good intentions lead to tyrants ironically exploiting them for political gain.