The Communist Manifesto and Capital are both good, but I personally think Marx's Inferno by William Clare Roberts is great.

Ironically, the very criticism you have of communism is their criticism of the bourgeoisie.

Now, I think I should go read my copy of The Wealth of Nations for balance…

A simple question: have you actually read Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto?

Going back a bit further, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

How is the world now so filled with people who are afraid of ideas? Have you run out of real problems to worry about? Or are you just too young and naive to realize that ideas aren't simply good and evil and that, alone, they don't cause people to do things? Nazism, for instance, came about because the people were being oppressed as a result of losing WWI and it was a rebellion against that oppression. It wouldn't work without the oppression. The idea itself is not the problem.

Please read the Communist Manifesto before you lambast it with an uninformed critique.

I would argue "workplaces should be democratic" (which is a very rudimentary one-sentence synopsis of Marxism) is only an addictive idea if you consider democracy to be addictive in the same manner. And maybe it is, but then you have to ask yourself -- is an idea being so good that it becomes addictive a bad thing?

To add a few more, Marx was 29 when he wrote the Communist Manifesto and Fidel Castro was 32 he successfully led the Cuban revolution.

Sure, that’s how non-Leninist socialists (including Marxists) see it. But the upthread claim was that the USSR did not use the term “socialist” but instead invented the term “communist” because it did not view its own system as socialist. In fact, the USSR used the pair of terms “socialist” and “communist” together in much the same pattern (if, arguably, a somewhat different understanding of the precise meaning of the two terms) as non-Leninist Marxists did (its worth noting that one of Marx’s well-known works, with Engels, was The Communist Manifesto.)

It was written about 170 years ago, so it'd make sense that the methods would no longer work now. Even if we count the inception of the Soviet Union as its first actual use, it was already pretty old to be relied upon as a manual.

The productivity gains I mentioned are a very important step in that direction. Capitalism and free markets work best on an economy saddled by scarcity, to the point many scarcities are engineered to extract labor from the scarcity gradients a bit like a Stirling engine extract mechanical work from a temperature gradient: you don't need an iPhone 12 (I know I don't) or a 64-core desktop (I could use one) and a lot of people will work so they can have the things they want, but not necessarily need. As the tangping prove, after you reach a certain level of abundance (a low one for them), capitalism ceases to be able to extract labor because the price of wanting more is too high for them.

These people who refuse to participate in this system are willing to live a materially constrained existence in exchange for more free time and a simpler life. I think we all could adopt a less radical position and still live with a little less and enjoy a life a little bit less complicated.

Edit: I'm sorry someone is down-voting you. While I'm not sure I get it yet I want to hear your side.

Consider the following: during the Žižek debate, it became clear that not only was the Communist Manifesto the only Marxist text he had read, but he could not accurately recall some of its main points. And it's a really short pamphlet! That means that Peterson had expounded at length on Marxism, made it a central point of his critique and philosophical brand, while having almost no knowledge or understanding of it. Even with the most charitable interpretation, that goes way beyond just occasionally making mistakes due to a discursive style.

Imagine a charismatic professor with a large audience and who has talked at length about the worth of various programming concepts. Now imagine that it turns out the professor can't pass Fizz Buzz. Following that, his fans defend him by saying that he's a captivating explainer who is only sometimes wrong, and that the size of his audience and fantastic delivery is proof of his worth as a leading expert on computer science and programming. Wouldn't that set off alarm bells in your mind?

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6412/eaas9899

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...

  1. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  2. The Beautifull Cassandra - Jane Austen
  3. The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe
  4. Aphorisms on Love and Hate - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
  5. How Much Land Does a Man Need? Leo Tolstoy
  6. The Great Fire of London - Samuel Pepys
  7. Socrates' Defence
  8. Circles of Hell - Dante
  9. Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime - Oscar Wilde
  10. The Night is Darkening Round Me - Emily Brontë

The author lumps together the effects of state capitalism (fascism) and economies of scale that apply to the partially free markets in the West.

Excessive regulations actually help G-MAFIA, so more of the same is unlikely to help.

The society doesn’t need anything. Individuals - some individuals - desire a different Internet or services, but are they willing and able to pay for it? 99% of them are not. So maybe they don’t really need it, after all.

A tiny minority of geeks use various niche decentralized Web projects. Those work, are free, etc but 99.999% of people don’t want to use them. They do not need them.

Class is a term that relates to an individual's relationship with the means of production in a society. The means of production is the capital property, of course, the businesses, the factories, productive agricultural land. This relationship is material, meaningful, and provides a precise description of class in society.

Class is not about whether you swing a hammer or use a Macbook.

Hacker News comments are not the appropriate place to learn or teach any of this, because quite frankly I'm tired.

The Communist Manifesto is twenty pages. It's available freely online. Yes, it's greatly simplified propaganda from the 19th century. That said, you should take an hour to read it, and then hit up Wikipedia, look for counter arguments, whatever, make up your own mind - once you do, see if you come back and believe that Krein knows much of anything at all.

Having spent a few years on the Fediverse, I've found that "the left" in the US consists mainly of book clubs and struggle sessions.

The book clubs just read and debate theory ad nauseum. They're a joke, and if you gave most of them an AR-15 they'd shoot themselves in the foot.

The struggle sessions look for people slightly less poorly off than themselves to bully. If they can't find a right-winger, they'll happily go after somebody who's only 99.999% on board with their program. Failing that, they'll pick one of their own at random, accuse them of insufficient ideological purity, and bully them. They're a joke, too, only not quite as funny as the book clubbers.

But one doesn't have to read much history to see that the prescribed methods offered for solving the problems laid out in The Communist Manifesto haven't been successful in any implementation tried in the 20th and 21st centuries.

At this point I consider any communist who doesn't admit the ideology's massive failures to be either ignorant, or disingenuous, because if someone actually wants to solve the problems with the capitalist system, they have to admit what has been tried and failed so far.

I do hope one day we'll find new solutions to the distribution problem that don't create other massive problems like we've seen, because the issues inherent in capitalism won't go away without acknowledging its failures either.

Capital is a doorstop, but I have heard that past chapter one which talks about the labor theory of value, the reading is much more breezy.

However, while some of these books are dense, even rural peasants have been able to read and metabolize these books, so don't despair!

We have schools in America, and while reading Mein Kampf added negligibly to my education, no one being able to do so would have subtracted significantly from it.

More to the point, reading Kapital and the Communist Manifesto added significantly to my education, though many people on the US would see them as at least as worthy of suppression as Mein Kampf (which I wouldn't even be able to know was a bad idea if they—or Mein Kampf—were suppressed.)

> For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current administration's questionable stance on human rights, racism and a plethora of other issues like climate change.

First, a cure-all doesn't stop you from getting sick, it just makes it so you can get better. So, there's not even an inconsistency there.

Second, no one here (and virtually no one anywhere) describes it as a cure-all. A necessary element of a healthy society, perhaps, but not by itself sufficient even as a cure, much less a prevention, of bad government.

I don't even see why it matters. I myself am not an expert on gravitational waves. If Neil Degrasse Tyson or Michio Kazu read a scientific paper by Rainer Weiss on gravitational waves and then break it down for me in layman's language, I don't see why that takes any shine off Weiss's Nobel prize.

As it is, Marx wrote some work for the public like the Communist Manifesto (although 170 years later where the names Metternich and Guizot are less familiar than Merkel and Macron, it may seem more obscure), as well as more dense works like Capital.

It's an silly argument - if Marx went over things lightly, his ideas would be more easily attacked and he would be called lightweight. If he writes densely and goes over each argument thoroughly to make it airtight he can be accused of being difficult for the layman to understand with light reading. I guess Marx preferred making his arguments more airtight than worrying about accusations of being a chore to read.

Things it called for include stuff now totally non-controversial: free school education for everyone; women not being the personal property of their husbands; that sort of thing.

Yes, there’s also stuff I can’t even comprehend well enough to either agree or disagree (it might have made sense to someone in 1848 but not to me), yet it is surprising how much of it is now “just the way things are” — even in nations which hate communism so much that mandatory private insurance is demonised as “socialist”.

Since you, and those who down-voted my posts, are so smart, please explain how Obama's attempts to increase state control over our energy, health care, economy, finance, and education are not Marxists ideals and leading us down that socialist path.

Please explain how Obama's blocking of domestic energy supplies via the assertion of government ownership and regulation over massive amounts of acreage isn't Marxist.

Please explain how Obama's maniacal zeal for progressive income taxes specifically targeting the rich is not Marxist.

Please explain how Obama's desire to reinstate estate taxes isn't Marxist.

Please explain how Dodd-Frank wasn't a giant leap towards the centralization of the U.S.'s financial system into the hands of the federal government.

Please explain Obama's appointments of self-proclaimed Marxist Van Jones and his relationships with his mentor, and documented member of the Communist Party, Frank Marshall Davis, and the links of David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett to the Chicago Communist Party.

Instead of down-voting my posts, why not read The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, for yourself and see exactly how Obama's policies align with that document's 10 steps. No, we're not to the gulag stage yet, but that is certainly the path Obama has us on. Read and see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

Or Karl Marx's "The Communist Manifesto".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Manifesto

Both books have ideas which helped to bootstrap economic revolutions whose effects are felt to this day.

But in seriousness, I don't think there is one best book. But reading a bunch of books by/about very successful people, such as (but not limiting to) Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, Oprah Winfrey, and Warren Buffett will help you gain insights and different perspectives.

What I see is that the most successful people are well rounded. They have the ability to approach problems from many different angles.

Entrepreneurship is so much about personal interactions. One book which really helped me in learning to get along with people is Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

What has always confused me about this discussion about say, a left leaning bent at Facebook or whatever is that this has always been the norm in virtually every conservative place, which is like 90% of provincial small towns, from which all the liberal and creative people have to run away in the first place.

Yep it's called 'The Communist Manifesto' by Karl Marx. [1]

Further:

'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific' by Friedrich Engels [2]

and

'Wage Labour and Capital' by Karl Marx [3]

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/in...

[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...

I'm sorry, but what on earth are you reading? Ayn Rand was a rambling novelist, while Marx' Capital is a brilliant work of economic analysis. Parts of it are completely outdated, and some predictions proved drastically false, but it's nonetheless got some brilliant insights at its core. If you happen to be reading The Communist Manifesto, it's a political pamphlet for agitation and not a work of philosophy.

To have a bare minimum of an idea of what was Marx talking about, I'd recommend reading at least "Wage Labour and Capital". Judging from how many strawmans of Marx's take on Labour Theory of Value are out there, I'm fairly sure it can't be guessed from context.

I wonder, if the translation of a book is in the US public domain, does that imply that the original is also in the US public domain? I'm curious because as a native French speaker, I would love to see the original French books there too.

This is ridiculous. Not every matter of conversation - especially one so enormous as "what is the nature of law?" can be answered in an HN thread.

There's nothing wrong with reading a few thousand words of a crucial essay to educate yourself. That's what you need to do to be able to think clearly about big topics.

Reading the law will only just get you started. It makes sense to read The Federalist Papers, The Communist Manifesto, The Republic, and many other cornerstones of thinking about this instead of demanding that someone distill thousands of years of thought into a HN comment.

> My point is fact, and stands:

It isn't and doesn't. I asked you a simple question in my last comment that you haven't answered that, for your purposes, may well "make my point": What about a situation in which two different entities both claim to be the legitimate government? Or a society in which large numbers of people regard a government as illegitimate? Or who regard particular laws as beyond a purview which they recognize for government?

What then is "the law?" How many different places to you need to look to find this one law?

The problems with democracy that were described _still_ exist today. One can dislike communism and still acknowledge the criticisms of capitalism as valid and in need of address.

Communism was never actually executed true to the image. The state of the proleteriat was supposed to wither away - instead it became a dictatorship with secret police.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state

Insofar as there are obstacles to starting businesses, communes, etc, they are a result of interventions by the state that inhibit the free market, like permitting and licensing requirements, so the solution there is to go more toward a free market, not less.

>>Marx didn’t even defend it.

That's extremely disingenuous. He authored it. He titled it 'The Communist Manifesto', thus placing it at the center of his political platform.

Naxals are the followers of Mao, no doubt. But urban communits in general don't think highly of Mao at all. They only think of protesting and disobedience . They may have some overlapping causes.

Calling all communists as naxals is lazy and sloppy thinking.

Naxalites are a mix of goons and insurgents who loosely care about communist beliefs. They used to be most prevalent in lawless and hinterland areas,nowadays their influence is a lot less.

Source :- Briefly dated a communist.

Don't care about communism. But believe that if it has to be opposed,understand it.

But the fact is the term urban naxals is a meaningless pjeroative used against those who hold opinions different from the current Indian government.

It is even used against those who don't believe in communism at all.

The Communist Manifesto

Thomas Paine's Common Sense

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal

Each of these is shorter than 35k words. In fact, they're shorter than 35k words taken together.

On the labour/production side a technology seems to be creating wider income gaps. For the winners it is a lever with which to create more wealth. For others, they are competing with machines and poor countries (enabled by technology to work with rich ones) for work.

On the product consumption side, the gap is pretty small. The cheap netbook that almost anyone in Europe or the US can afford is not much different (in price or performance) from the one used by a billionaire. No matter how rich you are, you can't get a better smartphone than the models you can see in any bus. Even the low end (50-$100) smartphones are getting decent. I expect smartphones to be as ubiquitous as dumb ones soon, that means the gap between rich British & bangladeshi (measured in smartphone wealth) is plummeting.

Who knows what future waves of technology will look like, especially medical technology.

I think the appropriate response is keep an open mind and see where stuff takes us. Don't bind your thinking to past paradigms. Go read the Communist Manifesto. Realize how it is a product of its time, the industrial revolution. It takes a lot of contortion to try understanding the world by that paradigm. For Adam Smith, technological efficiency was about making pins.

It has “problematic” works like Huckleberry Finn, Satanic Diaries and To Kill a Mockingbird.

It has works written by known racists such as HP Lovecraft, TS Elliot, Roald Dahl, Dr Seuss and Kingsley Amis.

It has hard copies of dangerous films that have been memoyholed by Prime and Netflix like Gone With The Wind and The Jazz Singer. It may also have DVDs that have been produced, directed and acted in by vile, cancelled individuals like Kevin Spacey, Louise CK, Harvey Weinstein, or Mel Gibson.

Good God, it might even have a copy of the Jenna in blackface episode from the third season of 30 Rock. I am clutching my pearls and getting the vapors just thinking about it.

Well, at least most of them are really short.

This is quite the end game of capitalism, isn't it?

Individuals do not matter, capital does. Given that corporations have capital, they're the ones who matter. People, especially the disadvantaged ones who lack capital, are not important. Justice means the service of capital. If we agree to that, we'd see that this "new" system is not that unusual. If you have unfettered capitalism, you give up all other values to capital, including individual justice.

I have actually read and thought about the Communist Manifesto quite a lot, but not the later works you cited. I'll add them to my reading list.

The biggest problem I have with classical Marxism is that it presupposes a sort of material capital that can be accumulated. While there are certain sectors in which "assets" in the traditional sense, whether physical ones like timber, rental real estate, etc. or the softer "intellectual property" play a dominant role, this doesn't seem to be what's driving the world forward today.

I think "reputationism", or maybe "Hollywood capitalism", is a better descriptor for how Hollywood or SV work today. Witness the sky-high compensation of CEOs, athletes, actors, real estate developers, financiers, and others whose reputations give them access to opportunities most traditional "labor" can only dream of. In fact, if you read Piketty, he makes the point that capital's share of income relative to labor has actually decreased in the past decades, even as very highly compensated labor's share has skyrocketed.

The real enemy, IMO, is "empty suits" with no skin in the game (borrowing from Taleb) - people like analysts, non-founding CEOs, private equity/VC managers who commit only 5% of the capital of their funds, and others in positions of "heads I win, tails you lose". I really admire people who stick to their beliefs and bet with their own money/credibility (like this http://longbets.org/362/) - I have much less respect for the guys blabbing on CNBC every day who just talk, talk, talk.

Among my age cohort (29), most of my peers have received an élite education, and this included a study of Hegel, Marx, Adam Smith, Kropotkin, Lenin, Trotsky, Deleuze, etc. Nearly all of us identify as socialists of varying stripes (syndicalists, trade unionists, communists, anarchists, and so on)

Nearly everyone I've interacted with who has espoused similar views to yourself has in fact never read even the introductory text of socialism, and this ignorance leads to debate in bad faith.

In the interest of meeting the debate on its own terms, you should have at least read an introductory pamphlet presented by your opponent. We have of course, The Communist Manifesto. It's a 20 page propaganda pamphlet that has been translated for over a century now into every language, and is of course freely available on the internet. You should be able to get through it in a few hours.

You may be surprised to find that your strawmen do not exist.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...

Steampunk romanticizes totalitarianism? Huh?

Near as I can tell, steampunk is about a certain aesthetic, one where machines are intuitively understandable. Most people can understand, at least in principle, how a device made of gears and pistons works. On the other hand, genetics and semiconductors are simply magic.

Steampunk celebrates the visible, and the particular era being described simply happens to coincide with that stage of technological development.

It's at least as fair as it is to call Leninism Marxist.

> Marx didn't really advocate anything in particular in terms of economic organization.

Yes, he did.

> Leninism was able to fill the void in the way that it did.

Leninism didn't fill a void, it made deliberate changes to apply to very different conditions those addresses by Marx’s writing (which addressed mature capitalist societies and where he saw that they should go next to resolve problems he saw as inherent to their system.)

> but he didn't really present an alternative.

Yes, he did, though Marx was very big on path dependency, so his recommendations were more specific when directed at more specific conditions. Capital is pretty pure critique of the then-status-quo, The Communist Manifesto has a fairly broad program, but narrower and less-well-known works like the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, Programme of the French Workers Party have quite specific policy proposals.

> viable threat of authoritarianism is coming from the opposite side

This is nothing more than whataboutism. There's authoritarians on both sides. They're both just as dangerous in the end-game. In Canada, it's the left mainly. In the US, there's highly vocal, and influential to public opinion, left wing authoritarians. In Canada lefty authoritarianism isn't just a fringe, it's mainstream. This is true in a lot of places too. I'm not sure why some folks insist on downplaying the risk of authoritarianism when it comes from the left as opposed to the right. Both kill just as many people, one just uses gas where the other uses starvation.

On the other hand, I think its important to recognize that the mainstream of academic architecture does not reject his work, and continues to reject, in the main, the works of people like Jacobs and Alexander.

So, yes, perhaps we should still read some of his stuff (a lot of it is pretentious nonsense, in my opinion) but only with a proper understanding of what his aesthetic lead to.

* John Locke's Two Treatises of Government - It's political philosophy but it's hard to understand Classical Liberalism without having read some Locke.

* Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations - He and Locke are the two main guys to read for a solid start on Classical Liberalism, which is completely different than modern political liberalism. It's like having two features in an app with nearly the same name. Confusing as fuck.

* E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - This book will shift your perspective, useful to avoid becoming an a mindless advocate for one school of thought or another.

* Marx is a tough one as Capital is massive and unreadable and The Communist Manifesto is a propaganda pamphlet but I think you need to at least find some articles that summarize the basics.

* Keynes and Hayek - This hip hop battle is a decent start:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
then read Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

* Milton Friedman's - Yes, read Capitalism and Freedom. I hesitated to include it as the guy's so good at making the case that it can turn you into a market advocate bot. Please resist that.

Can someone help me on this, is there a book balance Hayek and a book to balance Friedman? I'm sorry but Keynes doesn't do it for me. Look at the difference in titles between Hayek and Keynes. It's hard to motivate to read the Keynes book but nobody ever has trouble reading Hayek.

I see a lot of these ideas come up on HN a lot. What I don't like so much is when someone becomes an advocate for a particular ism. To me, all isms are rubbish. All of them. Understand but do not become a shill for an ideology.

Yeah, that's the norm here, sadly. You can post a list of 20 books and if one of them is by Rand, your post will be down-voted into oblivion. It's almost like some people have this Pavlovian reaction when they see Rand's name.

I mean, I get that not everyone appreciates her works, and that's fine and totally understandable. "Different strokes" and all that. But the zeal with which her haters go on the attack is a bit strange.

2. Rand makes some points that some people need to learn, even if I don't buy her whole worldview.

Exactly. This is the same reason that I have copies of Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto and Mao's Little Red Book on my shelf waiting to be read. I don't have to agree with a work to find benefit in reading it. Quite the opposite... I believe that if I'm going to argue against something, I should probably have a reasonable understanding of it. And I prefer to go to primary sources than rely on secondhand commentary.

Yes, we speak of robots and AI now and the rate at which jobs are destroyed has certainly surpassed the rate at which new jobs get created, but the means of production being in the hands of the few (the bourgeoisie), along with automation, these have been happening ever since the dawn of the industrial age and is what animated Karl Marx.

Read "The Communist Manifesto", it will ring a bell.

But all this has given us communism, with disastrous results. And yeah, there are always people arguing that communism wasn't "implemented right", which is what you get with any rotten theories.

So what I'm proposing is:

(1) awareness that these arguments are essentially Marxism and

(2) be prepared to defend them by coming up with a theory for why it could work this time.

I also have a question for you. Do we only call people Marxists once we're all properties of the state, residing in gulags, or dead? Or, do we see the slow movements in that direction early on and stop them? I personally prefer the latter.

"Elite theory" in political science and sociology is closely related, e.g.: https://www.britannica.com/topic/elite-theory, which has a history going back to ancient Greece. U. Delaware's polsci department has an intro to this in the US context: https://www1.udel.edu/htr/Psc105/Texts/power.html , and there's also this article by a prof at USCS: https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/class_domination.html

Much of Chomsky's writing is concerned with such topics, e.g. https://truthout.org/articles/us-guardian-elite-rulers-date-... , which makes the point that the notion of an elite guardian class goes back to the founding of the US, and it in turn was based on ideas inherited from monarchies.

A couple of others of Chomsky's are https://chomsky.info/199606__/ or https://chomsky.info/20141202/ . These are just examples which deal with particular mechanisms of control which are used by elites to achieve outcomes in their favor.

Marx and Engels are relevant here also. Here's the opening sentence of Chapter I of the Communist Manifesto (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m... ):

> "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

It goes on to discuss power structures in various types of historical society.

There's lots more out there - is there any particular aspect you're interested in?

To try and argue it is not "True Capitalism" is just BS, and lets you get out of justifying anything you say. "oh I only meant Pure Capitalism, so whatever you say doesn't apply to that" --- It is complete True Scotsman, regardless how much you don't like it.

Freedoms have very little to do with capitalism. It is about private ownership vs government ownership. The right/privilege of ownership doesn't have to apply to everyone either (and thus isn't really a 'freedom'), it can simply apply to a select few (non-government) and you are still practicing capitalism.

> You don't seem to have read my comments for comprehension though, so it's not surprising that you're getting hung up here...

Would you like me to also point out it's a rhetorical fallacy to attack the person making the argument rather than the the argument.

This is a little bit harsh on Peterson because a lot of Marxists themselves haven't read Marx. You could say that the intellectual history of marxism (at least in the second half of the 20th century) is comprised of a large majority of "marxists" who haven't read his works and a small minority who have done so and who at least have a general idea of what marxism really is about (if it matters I do believe that Žižek has indeed read Marx and he knows what he's talking about).

I find this a curious objection to Marx, as if anything a major part of Marxist thinking around class struggle is about how to stimulate the working classes to stop silently accepting the hand they've been dealt and organize to rise up and demand more and to compete against the bourgeoisie the same way Marx describes the bourgeoisie as having outcompeted feudalism. A large part of the problem for the working classes, according to Marx, is that they buy into the capitalist idea that people are paid what they deserve, rather than what the capitalist can get away with.

Furthermore, Marx spent quite a bit of time praising capitalist competition, as an absolutely essential pre-requisite to create the economic efficiency required to make socialism viable. The first chapter of the Communist Manifesto for example, starts as a homage to the advances brought about by capitalism, and first towards the end does it turn to criticism of where capitalism was going.

I can't do the same for most other ideologies; there's no Conservative Manifesto as it were.

With that in mind we can take Marx's book and compare it against history in these countries. If you do this then you will come to the conclusion that these regimes were not Marxist and in fact not even close to socialism.

I know have an ipad and I found that my reading habits again. I'm reading medium-short non fiction. Stuff I can dip in and out of. Yesterday it was 4 Hour Body, Sun Tze & The Communist Manifesto. If I'm reading for an hour I will read a dozen or two pages from 3-4 different things.

Medium changes things. Remote employment has pros and cons (for both parties) but it is not the same thing. It's harder (or at least different) to develop employees, build a culture, produce ideas from multiple minds.

Jefferson was 33 when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed when he was 39. Marx published The Communist Manifesto when he was 30.

Seriously, this list could go on for ages. Dismissing the perspective of youth is as indicative of an ignorance of history as youthful naivete.

The usefulness of Continental Philosophy could consist in insight into moral, political, and social problems, but providing insight to a few specialists is not much use in those fields, especially not in democratic societies. Looking back on the history of moral and social change in the United States, I don't see such philosophies playing a major role. The thinkers who have made a difference have written for a general audience and in a much more accessible style. (Karl Marx and Das Kapital would seem to be an exception, but he and his evangelists wrote plenty of accessible interpretations of his ideas. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is a brief, readable, and rousing document.) If Continental Philosophers want to justify their existence, they should point to some benefit that their work enables, instead of just complaining that nobody understands it.