Rothbardian wrote:As far as I can tell, we agree that Marx argued that the state would eventually end, and we agree that he never worked in his life. So I am not sure what the phantoms comment is about.
But it's precisely because you don't know what you're talking about that the facts you're trying to portray are either patently wrong or make no sense to bring up at all.
Rothbardian wrote:A prol revolution ending the government and 'the withering away of the state' are different ways of saying the same thing
This is not true. Ending government and, "the withering away of the state" are different. The interpretation of "the state" itself is extremely nuanced and important for interpreting Marx.
Lenin goes over a few interpretations popular amongst Marxists then and now. He, of course, discredits the ones that don't agree with his analysis—but they do the same if you're interested in looking them up.
Which brings us to the importance of knowing what Marxism even is...
Rothbardian wrote:I find it interesting that so much of left wing ideology comes from the upper class, yet is supposedly intended to champion the cause of the common worker. Keynes is also guilty of this. I find this sort of holier than thou, you're too stupid to find your own way in the dark so I'll do it for you reasoning condescending as a prol. The misguided ramblings and refusal to be consistent on anything is, to me, no more than can be expected from people who are writing about things they have no direct experience of.
It's more interesting that you think a materialist analysis of history based upon Hegalian understanding of dialectics should have come from a steel worker, or that the fact that it didn't somehow makes it not true. Do you discount gravity because Newton didn't push a broom? Is evolution wrong because Darwin wasn't in a factory? Why should dialectic materialism somehow wrong because Marx worked with paper (for a wage most of the time) instead of planting crops?
My guess is that you think this is a slamdunk argument because you have no idea what Marxism was—and that's certainly why you don't understand the difference between the government, the state, and the process of withering away of the state. Nor, I'm sure, do you understand how to interpret history in a dialectical-materialist way.
I'm honestly not saying that to gloat, I'm saying that because your arguments make absolutely no sense because of this. Marxism, as I've mentioned, is a form of analysis. Marx proposes a way to understand property, economics, the world system, history, and sociology amongst other things. He did not draft out a constitution or iron laws. This is why Lenin (for instance) as quoted above had to defend himself against various other people using the same analysis and they were doing the same against Lenin. There was, and is, no iron law or whip that Marx passed down—no more than Newton, Copernicus, or Darwin. Just like them, Marx got some things wrong even if his system of analysis was correct.
Now, there were people that got into political power that also badly interpreted Marx or used him to justify this or that. This is no different than fascists using Darwinist tenants like "survival of the fittest," or libertarians believing in gravity. You may not agree with the end result, but that does not necessarily mean that evolution doesn't occur because a Nazi mentioned it once or that we go flying through the air because libertarians stand on their feet.
Other things you try to draw from this misunderstanding of an argument are just completely wrong:
Rothbardian wrote:we agree that he never worked in his life.
This is not true. He was a journalist that made a wage from writing.
And this is why I asked you to cite something to back yourself up, which you failed to do. And you're not going to do, because understanding what you're talking about would undermine the libertarian newspeak your masters try to dull people with.
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