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Originally Posted by corporatejay
How isn't marxism a legitimate political philosophy? It's literally one of the foundations of modern social science and extremely important. It bothers me that campus has effectively become a neo-marxist hot bed (i.e. it's the only tool in the toolbox so everything looks like a nail) but to suggest it's not a valuable tool in examining social hierarchies and systems is dishonest.
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I didn't suggest that. I suggested that it shouldn't be defended as a viable political philosophy. Here is what the article says.
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Calling Marxism, a respectable political and philosophical tradition, “murderous” conflates it with the perversion of those ideas in Stalinist Russia and elsewhere where they were. That is like calling Christianity a murderous ideology because of the blood that was shed in its name during the Inquisition, the Crusades and the great wars of Europe. That is ridiculous.
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Those two things are not remotely comparable. There are clear examples of Marxist politics in modern goverments. They inevitably end badly. There is no large scale example in modern history of a Christian theocracy - not even close, in spite of obvious pandering to Christians throughout the 20th century. Moreover, Christianity is a religion first, not a political philosophy. It's a bad analogy.
My objection is to the writer suggesting that Marxism was simply perverted in every instance in which it was enacted in the 20th century, and its
pure form, is completely viable if only it could be tried somewhere. I think that's wrong, and hopelessly naive.