I think we all agree that Marx’s vision of communism has never been put into practice, and that most attempts kind of achieved the opposite of the original idea in the end.
no. it's not a coincidence that following Marx' vision of communism always ends up in genocide and starvation. it has been predicted when he first wrote about it, it has been observed live, and there are now documentaries and history books about it.
as an analogy, what if brute's vision was the following:
all humans murder and kill each other relentlessly -> all humans are happy
the vision sure sounds nice, but there's no way to get to the vision from the strategies and methods recommended. how often does niemand want to try reaching brute's vision?
Marxian Communism has never been tried, because there never was such a thing. Marx listed all the Evil's in the world, and tied them to capitalism. His Solution was to stop doing Capitalism, and let the World Spirit sort it all out.
Cute. Let me know when the world spirit runs for office.
Marx spent his life moving around, and changing his name, because he was dodging creditors. If that's one's idea of financial wisdom, well, it's likely to be a simple plan to achieve.
Though, give the old fraud his due, he never seemed short of young ladies to share his utopian fantasies with.
Personally, I am fine with Communism. It just doesn't scale beyond very small, tight knit groups. As a personal philosophy, it's fine. As a governing system, well the results are already in.
When communism has been attempted to be implemented in the past it has failed. Perhaps those failure points can be resolved and it would work. Even though capitalism has worked out relatively well, in practice it has flaws too in my opinion, maybe those can be fixed too.
Sure, the flock as a whole is protected by the Shepherd. But individual sheep interacting with shepherds get sheared, slaughtered, and/or schtupped. This doesn't seem to be a healthy relationship.
One of the main take-aways from Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" is that we already are handing control over to the robots. For instance, all marketing on the internet has to be written to appeal to the "taste" of the Google search algorithms as well as any intended human audience. Also, I am currently engaged in a very frustrating* email correspondence with Amazon, and I suspect that what is going on is some AI is looking for key words coming in from my end. So, I finally just typed "Are you a robot?" and, as of yet, have received no reply.
*And, no, I do not babble on or use too many analogies when engaged in business dealings. My communications were very direct and polite, until I suspected non-human.
I think we all agree that Marx’s vision of communism has never been put into practice
Yes, but this is a silly thing to say because there is no realistic set of global circumstances that would be a precursor to communism as Marx described.
Marx was applying a Hegelian view of history - thesis/antithesis/synthesis to economics. It's dialectic reasoning governed by an undefinable, but acknowledged metaphysic i.e. we know something out there exists (noumena), we just don't have the ability to access it (phenomenon). It accounts for a heteronomous control, but depersonalizes it and leaves it outside human ability to access this. This was the doing of Kant who ironically was trying to protect Christianity by philosophizing such a construct.
That being said, if you don't believe that reality is grounded in such a manner, then it provides an explanation why Marxism/Communism will inevitably fail, not because Marx himself was a POS or the people implementing the system were POS'S. Failure of a thought system cannot be based on ad hominem issues because then every thought system fails because people use it for different means than it was intended. But, if you believe the metaphysical/philosophical underpinnings of it is not true, than it explains why it has and will inevitably fail.
IMHO, Marx was wrong from the get go, and was/is doomed to fail based on erroneous (really absent) views of human nature and his understanding of the world, metaphysically speaking. It also explained why there are deep divisions between Marxists on these very important issues.
@Jason I agree, but I wonder if it is easier to teach people about why these axioms are flawed or that centralized control is not sustainable since every node in the network is subject to entropy and information asymmetry.
Well, I would suggest that Mises was correct based on the observation that I highly doubt any centralized planning commission would have the forethought to produce Size 4x Adult Sponge-Bob Fleece Christmas Theme Footy Pajamas.
Mises argument wasn't that you couldn't have the forethought to produce those pyjamas, rather that you couldn't value them correctly. I'm saying that perhaps we have the computational ability to do that now.