What a weird piece. The heart of the argument seems to be that if one is to be a Marxist that one must be 1) poor, and 2) chaste and to be otherwise is hypocritical. Just state the point and be done with it.
I think part of it is the conservative (website states its ideological position) viewpoint that communism's goal is to put everyone in a state of shared suffering, whereas Engels likely wanted a world where everyone could share in his pleasures.
Engels viewed communism as a historic inevitability that would see the proletariat rise up and seize the means of production. Redistributing his family's wealth would not help accomplish that.
I feel like my govs laws over the past decade (one major party of which i know for sure is in bed with a major real estate development company) has allowed housing prices to grow way too quickly in a country where they're already too high and has disproportionately favoured landlords and scummy real estate agencies.
I think this is terrible for society and the younger generations.
If I was offered the option of becoming a landlord or the like and making good bank that way of this whole shitfest I'd gladly and quickly accept and on the other side donate some of the money to campaigning for a party against this mess.
Nobody would to come around and call me a hypocrite for that and expect me to think highly of them.
The Marxist position is not about 'equality' or wealth distribution, and there are at lease two pieces of work by Marx criticizing those concepts explicitly. Marxist thought is a critique of the production process of capital, and does not concern the wealth of individuals at all - Marx himself went to pains to distance himself from that interpretation of his work.
So I'm not sure where the presumption that a socialist must give away his wealth or live modestly comes from. Marx and Engels saw the first step of revolutionary activity being to understand and investigate, bit they were also part of various practical organisations such as the IWA, and the Manifesto was itself an on-the-nose propaganda document.
Why doesn't the Queen give away her throne for the good of her country? Because the boost to the economy from the tourism generated around it helps even more. As it turns out, we can imagine that the world would have been very different and the pair of theorists much less consequential had they spent their energies on philanthropy rather than burning the midnight oil at the British Library.
About as biased as a source you can find, considering this is from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute [1], a right-wing pressure group designed to spread propaganda in college campuses.
That's an odd way to describe human rights advocacy. Almost as disingenuous as describing a person who freely accepts a wage in exchange for providing a service as a "wage slave", or like Engels, decries private property while amassing a fortune in it.
It's odd to describe a person who freely accepts a lifetime of servitude in exchange for his live as a slave. They could have chosen death instead, after all.
Providing a service is not "servitude" in the context of 'slavery'.
As for working as an alternative to starving, as
Frédéric Bastiat wrote 170 years ago:
"Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd."
Respectfully to the moderators. I'm surprised this has decent comments given it is indeed an extraordinarily biased source and engages flagrant, extreme attacks on anything on the left.
I think that it serves to show how used the left-leaning crowd is to such baseless attacks and how patient they are.
As far as biased sources go, this one offers an interesting view and brings up the point made elsewhere, that the people who struggle daily to put food on the table may not have the bandwidth to think about global solutions to systemic problems.
Also, it prompts me to remind people that neither Engels nor Marx told anyone they should sell all their material possessions and give to the poor. That would be Jesus and it's surprising that they are so often confused.
Also, it prompts me to remind people that neither Engels nor Marx told anyone they should sell all their material possessions and give to the poor. That would be Jesus and it's surprising that they are so often confused.
Yep, that's a good point.
But ... the thing about this, the article raises things to think about in the reader. But the fact selection and the approach is essentially a standard hit piece. I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't know precisely the point you raise, that Marx and Engels didn't pretend to be Jesus. And the author is writing to other assuming that showing Engels as Hedonist will sink his appeal.
But yes, the actual facts are more interesting than OP intends. But, as someone who other contexts moderates discussion, I think this has the problem of setting a bad example. People start to ask: "If this 100% bad faith article results in good discussion, why can't we do more of it? Why can't I do it? Now everything from Turning Point USA and such is OK to post" etc.
Which is to say, you've gotten some benefits and you've paid some costs. The benefits are some OK but not extraordinary discussions of Marx and Engels, the costs are confusing your moderation policy. Even though I'm sympathetic to generally positive discussion of Engels, I don't think this is worth the cost. Just my rough calculation.
> If this 100% bad faith article results in good discussion, why can't we do more of it? Why can't I do it? Now everything from Turning Point USA and such is OK to post
That's a very good point.
It's not the article that is good. It's left-leaning HNers that are an amazing bunch that won't allow themselves to be baited by this.
The entire world was communist from the time cave paintings were drawn in France tens of thousands of years ago, to about 10000 years ago.
Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries. In the US, with two economic crises in the past decade, Covid at a peak, global warming, racial strife, riots on streets etc., I am not sure what is working in the real world with the economic system here.
How do you understand that the entire world was communist until 10,000 years ago?
The natural order of the world appears to more closely resemble capitalism via the "eat what you kill" philosophy.
I imagine you are imagining close-knit tribes that would share resources freely internally. If so, would you agree that tribe members that leech off of the tribe and don't contribute were likely expelled from the group?
We certainly all do seem to have this innate fear of being abandoned by our group, so I think it's fair to say that we're adapted to avoid this outcome.
Hey, could you please not use HN primarily for ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and I had to go back to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24212372 to find a post (a fine one!) that wasn't like that. That's a 20:1 ratio, which is definitely not the balance we're looking for here; the other way around would be more like it.
No, private property, which is a capitalist institution, has existed since prehistoric times, probably from even since before Homo Sapiens arose. Proto-property-rights are also observed in the Animal Kingdom, with principles like "first possession", where the first animal to the kill is less likely to give up the kill, and the second animal more likely to give it up, often governing animal interactions. In fact, game theory experiments demonstrate that observance of this proto-property principle reduces conflict among agents, so it's unsurprising that it's common among animal species.
Returning to humans, extant hunter gatherer groups observe property rights, both at a personal level, with their ownership of tools and clothes:
>>Moveable material property, such as tools, clothing, and valuables, is generally treated as individual property
And on the inter-tribal level, with tribes asserting exclusive control over the territory that they exploit.
Food sharing is common in hunterer gatherer societies, but almost all of it is intra-tribal, meaning to relatively close kin. Even within the tribe, such sharing is heavily biased by kin selection.
Food sharing is often very reciprocal as well, with an expectation of a return in exchange for the 'gift'. This is also demonstrated to some extent experimentally:
Just a smaller scale version of private property, that is exactly what you would expect with smaller-scale society, and the form you would expect modern private property's pre-historic progenitor to take, before codes of law, and the scaling up of production with agricultural and then industrial-scale capital.
That is not correct, the term is used by all kinds of socialists. You may not care about the difference in general, but denying it is not helpful when discussing socialism. You're trying to refute the claim that private property (in the socialist sense) is problematic by defending private property (in the liberal sense), which doesn't make sense because these are two different concepts.
Before I address your point, I'll clarify that I want to use correct/standard definitions, not definitions only understood by small subsets of the population.
Now to your point: private property intended for personal use, which socialist ideology claims is not problematic, is the direct progenitor of private property used for other purposes, like earning an income for the owner from being rented out, or from being utilized in an enterprise that employs other people to operate the private property.
The differences between private property intended for personal use, and private property intended for business or commercial use, are completely superficial with respect to the basic principles that society operates on.
> No, private property, which is a capitalist institution
No, it hasn't. “Private property”, in the sense in which it is a defining institution of capitalism (ownership of the means of production by an individual as marketable property distinct from. ownership of or personal jurisdiction over land), requires the conceptual separation of individual property and public authority that is one of the characteristic features of the transition from pre-capitalist (specifically feudal in most of the West) to capitalist property relations. It is not something that universally existed from prehistoric times. You seem to be confusing the particular sense of “private property” associated with capitalism with the more generic concept of individual property, which is necessary to capitalism but not distinctly capitalist.
>>No, it hasn't. “Private property”, in the sense in which it is a defining institution of capitalism (ownership of the means of production by an individual as marketable property distinct from. ownership of or personal jurisdiction over land)
Modern capitalism's private property is based on exactly the same principle of exclusive control over a mass of matter as pre-modern society's private property. It is a more sophisticated version of it, that incorporates the advances of modern civilization to its enforcement and utilization, but that is to be expected with any institution as it evolves with the times.
>>requires the conceptual separation of individual property and public authority that is one of the characteristic features of the transition from pre-capitalist (specifically feudal in most of the West) to capitalist property relations.
> The entire world was communist from the time cave paintings were drawn in France tens of thousands of years ago, to about 10000 years ago.
No, it wasn't.
Some of it was vaguely communitarian in non-communist ways.
> Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries
Capitalism has been displaced by modern mixed economies as the dominant economic system of the developed world for close to a century. How long it was dominant is debatable because it's not really clear where to draw the line between pre-capitalist systems and emergent capitalist systems. I tend to say early capitalist systems were around 16th C,
Maybe. To me Communism has always been an utopia. A class less society where we all can indulge in different kinds of work and pleasure together with our equals in society. As Marx wrote, a society where you can "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic".
It might not be possible in the real world, but it's something to strive for.
Modern day communist leaders are no less depraved. For example, Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of the hip democratic socialist magazine, Jacobin, has recently tried to justify both the Berlin Wall and the killing of the defenseless Romanov children:
I have no idea about Sunkara's particular virtues or failings -- or what his actual case was regarding Romanov children -- but I can tell you that Dreher lives in a glass house on this front, having penned an incoherent yet enthusiastic jeremiad against coronavirus mitigation efforts earlier in the year and describing robust public efforts to preserve life as living under the power of fear/Satan.
Apparently he finds sacrifices of life in the cause of his values worthwhile while finding such sacrifices made on the basis of other people's values unacceptable. To use Dreher's rhetorical standards, that's just who he is, I suppose.
For the people who aren't as quick to catch on to the substance of the topic: personally I'd strongly agree that there are moral issues with any execution, and the execution of children more so. But there's also moral issues with monarchy, and what's your plan for putting a decisive end to one with the cultural momentum of hundreds of years behind it? If you're an American, the plan of those who birthed the present order sure involved violence and we've got a culture which doesn't merely ruefully acknowledge its necessity but actively celebrates revolution with quotes about the tree of liberty being watered with blood echoing in discourse down to the present moment. If folks like Dreher are going to be horrified at Sunkara's acceptance of violence, they should at least have the decency to be sobered by its acceptance at the foundations of their own culture.
But then again, that'd require the same higher level of thinking he failed to do in his coronavirus rantings earlier this year.
I don't know why he's some kind of big name in Christian thinking circles; as far as I can tell, there is nothing in any of the writing I've been exposed to that is remarkable for either its Christian or intellectual character, and his status on that front likely exists far more out of the desire for conservatives & Christians to tell themselves the story of how they have their thinkers rather than any serious interest in the work of either discipleship or philosophy.
If he dislikes Sunkara, then Sunkara has my favor to lose on that basis alone.
> "It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. That is why it is worth carrying out."
This citation of Oscar Wilde made me curious. It's from his essay The Soul of Man under Communism[1], which turns out to be a really good counterview to the article itself.
Wilde (who lived 500m from where I stand) was a nuanced user of absurdity. I think what made him stand out in his day actually was that fact.
He casually reflects on absurdities, contradiction, and their prerequisites rather than burying them. What Wilde is doing in this essay is giving credence to counterarguments, either between socialism and individualism or between socialism and his own, famously hedonistic character.
The tendency in his period was to argue for hermetically sealed worldviews. Marx's famously, and later Ayn Rand's are like type examples. These worldviews internally saw themselves as a complete and absolute understanding of history, sociology, economics... the Truth about people and society. They conceded nothing and admitted no external influences.
Wilde's essay is still read because it's one of the few which actually captures the real political/philosophical debate of his era. The ideals behind the ideology, the dangers of these going wrong.
He was a mighty intellectual, and if you want to understand why 19th socialism was what it was I think he's indispensable.
> They conceded nothing and admitted no external influences
In the case of Marx this is inaccurate. Indeed, in Das Kapital he develops the Labor theory of value [0] from earlier works of David Ricardo and ... Adam Smith.
Absolutely. I think you have me backwards. Marx's economics are a pretty straightforward response to Ricardo. He himself mostly alluded to Ricardo as "Bourgeois intellectuals," avoiding even naming him.
I now understand what you meant. However with a quick search, you can find 14 references to Ricardo (granted, in the footnotes) just in Capital, part one, chapter one [0].
I think it's telling how most of the Smith and Ricardo followers celebrate how prescient they were, excluding the labor theory of value when they embrace marginalism [1] instead. I guess it must be more convenient for them.
While I would love quality discussion about politically charged issues like this, it seems like we can't manage to stay respectful. I think it might just be natural to follow suit with the divisive conversations happening in other forums.
What draws me to HN are the thoughtful, genuine discussions about topics around technology, science, and business. While not perfect, it often seems to dodge the political divisiveness and focus on common interest. I hope we can find a way to keep that spirit of camaraderie and shared interest.
The article itself is basically the same thing. It seems almost entirely fixed on describing Engels as a rich womanizer who secretly adored Christianity. It has a section about his life in Manchester that doesn't mention his life changing experience observing the slums and factories, and contains lines like
> “The middle orders must increasingly disappear until the world is divided into millionaires and paupers, into large landowners and poor farm labourers,” Engels wrote, in terms that might well have been appropriated by a Democratic presidential hopeful in 2020.
edit I looked up the quote, and it is Engels describing what he sees as the natural conclusion of the Industrial Revolution unless a total change of societal conditions occurred. Not something he was hoping happened or criticism of Britain enriching merchants as the article suggests.
If you haven’t already read The Communist Manifesto I highly recommend that you do, it’s super short and easy to understand. Even if you’re an anti-communist you should read it to get a better understanding of what communism is. There has been so much anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda for decades in the US that many people don’t even know the first thing about communism and socialism and will just shut their minds to any possibility that maybe communists and socialists are advocating for good, just, and equitable things.
I come from a culture that is comparatively pro-comunism, but my personal reaction to people promoting comunism is the same as when a religious person claims that their religion is based on love, understanding, and inclusion.
In the case of religion (whether or not I believe it is positive or negative) I know that there are many many dark corners that the "it is all about love" person is not talking about.
Same thing with comunism, I have known in my life people I would be slightly afraid to see holding power flying that banner and we all know what happened many times in history, and while this can be said of many ideology in my opinion the comunism cluster looks like it is trying to sweep the dust under the rug.
I am sure that there are a lot of people that are trying their best to rehabilitate comunism from the curse that Stalin and many many others have cast and I wish them the best of luck, but I do not think that their job is close to being done.
> Same thing with comunism, I have known in my life people I would be slightly afraid to see holding power flying that banner and we all know what happened many times in history, and while this can be said of many ideology in my opinion the comunism cluster looks like it is trying to sweep the dust under the rug.
Having spent much of my early twenties embedded with some of today's more prominent socialist activists in the US, I can tell you that behind closed doors the only subject that ever crossed their lips was "power".
It was enough to terrify me off of such thoughts and ideals. All these years later and I still wake up in a cold sweat at night having nightmares about the people I knew getting what they wanted.
Surely socialist activists are no closer to having any sort of power now than they did when you were in your twenties?
Also, would you mind to be a bit more specific about who these people are? In my experience Americans aren't particularly good at identifying what constitutes a socialist to the rest of the world.
Comunist are also quite bad at that, I have met moderate reasonable people under the comunism banner that were sorta ok with other people calling themselves stalinists.
For example for all the criticism that you can point against religion most religious communities openly and clearly oppose and denounce terrorism.
In my view comunism was never able to separate itselft from a revolutionary mindset, and so agitators and extremists were always (since Marx, at least) considered a planned and likely step.
The one thing I did take away though is neither economic system is good or bad. A good emulsion of both is the ideal. But one thing is certain, at least in my opinion. Both systems require violence to keep civil society in check. A standing military is a subtle threat by the state. Its hard to think about it. The state spends a lit of money on violence and projecting it. Why?
Funnily enough, there's also a whole lot of people spreading supposedly "communist" ideas who haven't read an inch of Marx and the likes.
They often tend to congregate towards campuses but sometimes you even got tenured professors who seem to only output such verbiage for the social benefit they gather from it (being seen as warrior of justice). The marxist narrative seems to be a social practice more than an established theory (and I get it, it's great to have a reason to gather under the same banner, I did this for some time).
On this topic, the pamphlet "Militancy: highest stage of alienation" offers some good points.
I live in France and many old classic 'marxianists' I know have come to despise the unread and uncultured new generation. Tell a young "marxist" what Das Kapital says of e.g. immigration and watch them decompose before your eyes...
Anyway, no judgement here, just a personal observation.
>Tell a young "marxist" what Das Kapital says of e.g. immigration and watch them decompose before your eyes... Anyway, no judgement here, just a personal observation.
Marx's view on immigration was largely that capitalists use it to pit the working class against itself, and that the nation state was a construct of capitalism. I'm curious why you think a Marxist would take an issue with that.
At least in the US self-proclaimed comunists are on the same side of those that want to completely decriminalize undocumented immigration and stop deportations (which arguably is almost exactly what capitalists want, an entire class of non-citizens ready to be exploited with less legal protections that they can point toward as a distraction).
The problem with comunism is not that it is a faulty ideology, but that even if you tried to start a reasonable organization about it you will be overrun by mindless ideologues.
I have to imagine US communists want those undocumented immigrants to gain citizenship too, putting them firmly opposed to the wishes of the capitalists. Many of them would also view immigrants as a reaction to capitalist influence on foreign policy, putting the two sides even further apart.
Let me guess: while you think it's awful that everyone hasn't read the Communist Manifesto, you fully support the deplatforming (or outright assaulting) of "fascists" (however broadly you construe them)?
Some people are violently opposed to communism/socialism because they were taught that was the right way. This is ideology.
Others, myself included, who have educated ourselves about the consequences of communism/socialism are violently opposed to it because we hold the consequences of communism/socialism to be of more significance than its high minded ideas about what is 'good'.
That is still ideological. You are choosing capitalism despite it’s incongruities, excesses, and consequences, because you find more significance in what it sees as ‘good’.
There have been countless alternatives proposed. If you're judging this based on consequences rather than ideology the decision to pick capitalism makes no sense. Something untested is the obvious choice
All: come on you guys, this is an interesting historical article full of fascinating detail. Please respond out of curiosity (if you have such a response) and keep the rote ideological sniping somewhere else. If you're responding generically to the word "communism", you're not functioning in the intended spirit of this site.
If you want to get into the intended groove, the way to do that is to relax a bit out of your habitual identification (pro-communist, anti-communist, whatever) and take pleasure in stuff you didn't know before. People, including Engels, Marx, you, and me, are complicated. They have interesting contradictions.
Currently reading his biography (he's the most famous person of my hometown :), good timing to see an article about him on HN!
Since Engels always was "the second Violine" (behind Marx), he could get away with a hedonistic lifestyle without endangering the communistic movement too much.
While many may describe him as a typical "Champagnersozialist", IMO in Manchester he realised that the right action of an individual is not enough to introduce a widespread change:
The owenism he experienced in Manchester was the proof (a socialist working class movement in England whose founder tried to establish good working conditions in his factories).
With this in mind, it was simply more effective for the movement to let Engels finance Marx even by running one of those capitalistic cotton factories they criticized & being financed by his family.
(Instead of directly rejecting any participation in the capitalistic lifestyle (including its hedonistic pleasures) and thus having no food on the table, which means that Marx could not have just worked on "Das Kapital").
TL;DR; by doing effective altruism benefitting the communist movement, he meant to help many more workers than by living by example.
Engels stole from his workers a special extra salary of 10 times the average just for his own entertainment purpose (self admittedly). He could have instead not stolen that money from his workers, live an extremely confortable life, and still finance Marx, just like Weinstein could have made pro feminist movies without raping women.
> Of course, Engels is far from the only example of the leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people
Yeah, it's kind of to be expected: theorists (firebrand or not) are for obvious reasons disproportionately of the intelligentsia, and under capitalism (or the modern mixed economy) even the proletarian intelligentsia (much less the petit and, even moreso, haut bourgeois intelligentsia) tend to be quite well off compared to the mass of the proletariat.
People who are expending all their energy dealing with the immediate struggle that capitalism imposes on the proletariat aren't developing models of the long-term problems and solutions.
Remember: he chose to assign himself an annual allowance for “entertainment” the size of 10 of his workers’ wages.
Could he have went with just 9 wages and bump the salary of his workers a bit? Probably. Could he have contributed it to the communist cause more to drive systemic change? Probably.
But he chose not to.
You cannot adhere to the labor theory of value and make such choices without either knowing that what you do is theft, or knowing that LTV is wrong.
> That’s not the same as living in excess while preaching solidarity.
Engels living in excess while preaching solidarity, you will note, is not the point I said was to be expected. Engels being one of many examples of the pattern “leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people”, was.
OTOH, Engels preached revolution against capitalism not financial solidarity within capitalism, and that the harm of capitalism was inherent its fundamental structure, not something that could be meaningfully mitigated or remediated by “good behavior” within the privileged classes while capitalism continued.
It's not surprising that opponents of his philosophy want to attack him with the ad hominem that he is a hypocrite; it's odd, though, to accuse him of being a hypocrite to a position that he and Marx condemned as a retrograde one which served to reinforce the capitalist order.
You are justifying Engel's being exploitative to his own workers, while he himself knew it was essentially theft, according to their own theories. What could justify such theft? Well, "entertainment". He didn't choose to send that money to the International to promote systemic change. Nonono, he willingly chose to spend it on his own pleasures to the detriment of the people working for him. At least according to his own theories. So either Engels himself was immoral, or communism doesn't have any moral superiority over capitalism. See, you can choose whether that argument is ad hominem or generally applicable. :D
This is the whole reason they needed a revolution. If communism was truly a superior form of economic organization, then it wouldn't matter if it was applied to whole societies or smaller groups. In other words, a company organized by communist principles would be more competitive than a company organized purely by naked capitalism. You can't get people on board in evolutionary manner, if you yourself can't get organized by these principles. If your own company can't be communist and survive, why would it work on a scale of a whole country or the whole world? This is why they needed it to be violent and irreversible. It's a massive swindle to get power and it was thought out.
It boggles my mind, that people devalue legitimate left thought by staning charlatans. But people also voted for Trump because he is "a man of the people", so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
> The same formula has been known to apply to those on the demotic right of the spectrum, too: the reader may have his or her own list of candidates for inclusion among the ranks of what could be called champagne populism.
False equivalence, since rightwing populists don't advocate wealth redistribution and preach egalitarianism.
This entire article focuses on the upbringing and bourgeoise conditions of Engels and Marx without making an actual point - I believe the goal is to expose some form of contradiction in these men thinking of the workers class struggles?
Truth is, there is none. It’s just that most of the thinking is done by people who are relatively well-off in life, everyone else is too busy “making a living”.
This essays comes across as a kind of trap that is oft seen regarding people who support changing a system:
1. If you benefit from the system, you are accused of being an idiot and/or hypocrite to support changing the system.
2. If you do not benefit from the system, you are accused of sour grapes or an outsider who doesn't know what they are talking about.
The first is the criticism of various socialists such as millionaire Bernie Sanders, millionaire and model Emily Ratajkowski (who supports more egalitarian economic systems as well as various gender issues surrounding modelling and taking female intellectuals seriously), and various other actors and musicians.
It then comes to no surprise that the essay is hosted on a site devoted to right wing^W^Wconvervative views.
> Filling the Void Left by Modern Higher Education. Too many college students feel isolated or attacked for questioning progressive orthodoxy and the ever-narrowing range of debate on campus.
Love to see anti intellectualism spread around HN, and again not surprised.
Hmm. When I looked at the previous HN articles from this site I found https://isi.org/modern-age/prophets-of-the-modern/, which struck me as the opposite of anti-intellectual. It's downright abstruse.
From an HN point of view, we care about article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... That's unavoidable on the internet, where the good stuff has to be picked out of rivers of bad and mediocre stuff. And actually if a good article comes from a bad source, that kind of makes it more interesting.
When Tom Morello (RATM & Audioslave guitarist) is interviewed the tension between rich rockstar and firebrand anarchist usually provokes some sort of political exchange that ends in "if you're such a communist, why do you X?" To which, he normally responds "I live in capitalist... when the revolution comes..., I'll take part in however music works then."
I've seen him have this dialogue several times. My guess is that he's done it hundreds of times. That's the definition of the word "trite." The obvious champagne socialist firebrand dialogue has been had, in the same way, for generations now. Oscar Wilde. etc.
This article does mention "champagne populists" as a type example from the political right. The other obvious comparison is "champagne religion," preaching chaste poverty while indulging like epicurean hedonism.
Despite being trite, I think there genuinely is something to "if the shoe fits." Engels like other socialists & epicurean hedonists (eg chris hitchens) "get away" with church marriages or baptisms. It's hypocritical in theory but no one cares. Priests get away with greed, but not with hedonism. Hedonistic hypocrisy sticks to religion in a way that religious hypocrisy does not stick to epicureans & socialists. Neither wealth nor hedonism generally sticks to the "populist," but failure does.
Anyway... I do think that champagne shaped socialism in a negative way, personally. The position of Engels, Wilde and others pushed the ideas in certain directions. They tended to see communism as an indivisible. A slice of communism had no value... otherwise why not use their resources to create a slice of it themselves. Total revolution, or none at all. Seemingly unresolveable conflict at every turn breeds "singularity" thinking.
You can look at it as hypocrisy but in the end I have found this concept not so useful. It's more interesting to look at it as contradictions, complexity, and so on.
Hypocrisy is an interesting concept because of the self-contradiction in it. It's a word that is only ever applied to others, yet there is not one of us who isn't a hypocrite. Therefore the word is an instance of itself. The day I realized this, indignation about hypocrisy vanished for me—and it used to bug me a lot.
If you mean to say there are no people that consider themselves to be hypocrites, then I would have to disagree: there are plenty of people who try, fail, and continue to keep trying to not be hypocritical. However, if you mean to say that hypocrisy is something that we almost always hear about when someone applies it to another, then I understand what you are trying to say.
I think I also understand what you mean by choosing to look at things using the lens / identifying a person’s action as a contradiction as opposed to hypocritical in that the former is an observation and the latter is an observation and a judgment/conclusion that may or may not have the full context/complexity taken into account.
I mean that there are contradictions in all of us between our beliefs/concepts/judgments on the one hand, and the reality of how we live/behave/act, and treat others, on the other hand. In that sense we are all hypocrites—but the word 'hypocrite' is mainly used to condemn such contradictions in others. You're right that I shouldn't have said "only ever"—other usages exist—but they're secondary.
Another way of making this point about self-contradiction is to say that anger at others for being hypocritical is itself hypocritical.
Mind experiment: In the last paragraph of dang's top post replace "communism" witch "nazism" and "Engels" and "Marx" with "Hitler" and "Mussolini". How would you feel about it?
There are probably millions of people in the USA who barely escaped with their lives from vile communist regimes and yet the idea of communism is still entertained as some misunderstood noble thing. Until there will be "Nuremberg trials" equivalent for communism such ideas will unfortunately continue to propagate.
Best explanation about popularity of communism among American elites that I have come across read is extremely banal, under communism everything is about status and nothing is about value. People who create no value are naturally going after status.
> under communism everything is about status and nothing is about value
that is not quite correct: in socialist countries the elite had their own closed shops, a much higher salary and access to lots of material goods that mere workers just didn't have. These goodies were kept from the public eye, but most people knew about their existence, it was somewhat of an 'open secret'.
On the other hand, there are 40+ million U.S. citizens, of African origin, each with at least one ancestor at the bottom of the Atlantic due to the capitalist trans-Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved for four centuries, building capitalist America literally with their bodies as some of the first U.S. millionaires earned their millions from intercontinental human trafficking. There are roughly 5 million Indigenous U.S. citizens who were subjected to the continued oppression unleashed by an exploitive capitalist system. Can we talk about the 627,000 Vietnamese citizens brutally killed by the U.S. military during the Vietnam war? They didn't make it out alive.
What do you mean by: on the other hand? Are you saying that by not supporting communism one supports imperialism, slave trade and wars? And every time I write communism is bad, do I also have to put a disclaimer that a bunch of other ideologies are also bad? All the things you have enumerated have nothing to do with capitalism. Norway (or almost any other capitalistic country) is capitalistic and as far as I know it hasn't invaded or enslaved anyone for instance. You should also remember that the capitalistic north has defeated the feudalistic south (slave owners) in the civil war.
> Mind experiment: In the last paragraph of dang's top post replace "communism" witch "nazism" and "Engels" and "Marx" with "Hitler" and "Mussolini". How would you feel about it?
Similarly to how I react to replacing "communism" with "[economic] liberalism" and "Marx" with "Rand" and "Engels" with "the Chicago boys". Unsurprisingly, changing the words in a text changes its meaning.
> There are probably millions of people in the USA who barely escaped with their lives from vile communist regimes and yet the idea of communism is still entertained as some misunderstood noble thing. Until there will be "Nuremberg trials" equivalent for communism such ideas will unfortunately continue to propagate.
What do you think are the ideas of communism and of Marx and Engels in general?
Communism and nazism (national socialism) are two sides of the same coin. Both rooted in the same collectivist ideology where life on an individual is meaningless, always ready to be sacrificed for the "greater good". Both have a class of people who are undesirable (nacism: inferior people, communism: rich and educated) and need to be exterminated. Nazism left behind millions of dead people and communism tens of millions of dead people. I have no idea how you can compare economic liberalism to either communism or nazism.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadI think this is terrible for society and the younger generations.
If I was offered the option of becoming a landlord or the like and making good bank that way of this whole shitfest I'd gladly and quickly accept and on the other side donate some of the money to campaigning for a party against this mess. Nobody would to come around and call me a hypocrite for that and expect me to think highly of them.
So I'm not sure where the presumption that a socialist must give away his wealth or live modestly comes from. Marx and Engels saw the first step of revolutionary activity being to understand and investigate, bit they were also part of various practical organisations such as the IWA, and the Manifesto was itself an on-the-nose propaganda document.
Why doesn't the Queen give away her throne for the good of her country? Because the boost to the economy from the tourism generated around it helps even more. As it turns out, we can imagine that the world would have been very different and the pair of theorists much less consequential had they spent their energies on philanthropy rather than burning the midnight oil at the British Library.
Systems change over personal change.
Engels was born into a rich capitalist family. Him giving it all away does nothing to change the underlying systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercollegiate_Studies_Instit...
That's an odd way to describe human rights advocacy. Almost as disingenuous as describing a person who freely accepts a wage in exchange for providing a service as a "wage slave", or like Engels, decries private property while amassing a fortune in it.
/s
As for working as an alternative to starving, as Frédéric Bastiat wrote 170 years ago:
"Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd."
Seriously.
As far as biased sources go, this one offers an interesting view and brings up the point made elsewhere, that the people who struggle daily to put food on the table may not have the bandwidth to think about global solutions to systemic problems.
Also, it prompts me to remind people that neither Engels nor Marx told anyone they should sell all their material possessions and give to the poor. That would be Jesus and it's surprising that they are so often confused.
Yep, that's a good point.
But ... the thing about this, the article raises things to think about in the reader. But the fact selection and the approach is essentially a standard hit piece. I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't know precisely the point you raise, that Marx and Engels didn't pretend to be Jesus. And the author is writing to other assuming that showing Engels as Hedonist will sink his appeal.
But yes, the actual facts are more interesting than OP intends. But, as someone who other contexts moderates discussion, I think this has the problem of setting a bad example. People start to ask: "If this 100% bad faith article results in good discussion, why can't we do more of it? Why can't I do it? Now everything from Turning Point USA and such is OK to post" etc.
Which is to say, you've gotten some benefits and you've paid some costs. The benefits are some OK but not extraordinary discussions of Marx and Engels, the costs are confusing your moderation policy. Even though I'm sympathetic to generally positive discussion of Engels, I don't think this is worth the cost. Just my rough calculation.
That's a very good point.
It's not the article that is good. It's left-leaning HNers that are an amazing bunch that won't allow themselves to be baited by this.
Yeah... That was a bit self-serving.
In 2020 it should be understood that abstractions (and models) are fundamentally different from what we call real world.
Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries. In the US, with two economic crises in the past decade, Covid at a peak, global warming, racial strife, riots on streets etc., I am not sure what is working in the real world with the economic system here.
The natural order of the world appears to more closely resemble capitalism via the "eat what you kill" philosophy.
I imagine you are imagining close-knit tribes that would share resources freely internally. If so, would you agree that tribe members that leech off of the tribe and don't contribute were likely expelled from the group?
We certainly all do seem to have this innate fear of being abandoned by our group, so I think it's fair to say that we're adapted to avoid this outcome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Returning to humans, extant hunter gatherer groups observe property rights, both at a personal level, with their ownership of tools and clothes:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2999363/
>>Moveable material property, such as tools, clothing, and valuables, is generally treated as individual property
And on the inter-tribal level, with tribes asserting exclusive control over the territory that they exploit.
Food sharing is common in hunterer gatherer societies, but almost all of it is intra-tribal, meaning to relatively close kin. Even within the tribe, such sharing is heavily biased by kin selection.
Food sharing is often very reciprocal as well, with an expectation of a return in exchange for the 'gift'. This is also demonstrated to some extent experimentally:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2930
The term "personal property" is mostly used by Marxists.
Now to your point: private property intended for personal use, which socialist ideology claims is not problematic, is the direct progenitor of private property used for other purposes, like earning an income for the owner from being rented out, or from being utilized in an enterprise that employs other people to operate the private property.
The differences between private property intended for personal use, and private property intended for business or commercial use, are completely superficial with respect to the basic principles that society operates on.
No, it hasn't. “Private property”, in the sense in which it is a defining institution of capitalism (ownership of the means of production by an individual as marketable property distinct from. ownership of or personal jurisdiction over land), requires the conceptual separation of individual property and public authority that is one of the characteristic features of the transition from pre-capitalist (specifically feudal in most of the West) to capitalist property relations. It is not something that universally existed from prehistoric times. You seem to be confusing the particular sense of “private property” associated with capitalism with the more generic concept of individual property, which is necessary to capitalism but not distinctly capitalist.
Modern capitalism's private property is based on exactly the same principle of exclusive control over a mass of matter as pre-modern society's private property. It is a more sophisticated version of it, that incorporates the advances of modern civilization to its enforcement and utilization, but that is to be expected with any institution as it evolves with the times.
>>requires the conceptual separation of individual property and public authority that is one of the characteristic features of the transition from pre-capitalist (specifically feudal in most of the West) to capitalist property relations.
I don't know what this means. Can you elaborate?
No, it wasn't.
Some of it was vaguely communitarian in non-communist ways.
> Whereas capitalism has only existed as the predominant economic system anywhere for a few centuries
Capitalism has been displaced by modern mixed economies as the dominant economic system of the developed world for close to a century. How long it was dominant is debatable because it's not really clear where to draw the line between pre-capitalist systems and emergent capitalist systems. I tend to say early capitalist systems were around 16th C,
It might not be possible in the real world, but it's something to strive for.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/child-killing...
Apparently he finds sacrifices of life in the cause of his values worthwhile while finding such sacrifices made on the basis of other people's values unacceptable. To use Dreher's rhetorical standards, that's just who he is, I suppose.
For the people who aren't as quick to catch on to the substance of the topic: personally I'd strongly agree that there are moral issues with any execution, and the execution of children more so. But there's also moral issues with monarchy, and what's your plan for putting a decisive end to one with the cultural momentum of hundreds of years behind it? If you're an American, the plan of those who birthed the present order sure involved violence and we've got a culture which doesn't merely ruefully acknowledge its necessity but actively celebrates revolution with quotes about the tree of liberty being watered with blood echoing in discourse down to the present moment. If folks like Dreher are going to be horrified at Sunkara's acceptance of violence, they should at least have the decency to be sobered by its acceptance at the foundations of their own culture.
But then again, that'd require the same higher level of thinking he failed to do in his coronavirus rantings earlier this year.
I don't know why he's some kind of big name in Christian thinking circles; as far as I can tell, there is nothing in any of the writing I've been exposed to that is remarkable for either its Christian or intellectual character, and his status on that front likely exists far more out of the desire for conservatives & Christians to tell themselves the story of how they have their thinkers rather than any serious interest in the work of either discipleship or philosophy.
If he dislikes Sunkara, then Sunkara has my favor to lose on that basis alone.
This citation of Oscar Wilde made me curious. It's from his essay The Soul of Man under Communism[1], which turns out to be a really good counterview to the article itself.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...
He casually reflects on absurdities, contradiction, and their prerequisites rather than burying them. What Wilde is doing in this essay is giving credence to counterarguments, either between socialism and individualism or between socialism and his own, famously hedonistic character.
The tendency in his period was to argue for hermetically sealed worldviews. Marx's famously, and later Ayn Rand's are like type examples. These worldviews internally saw themselves as a complete and absolute understanding of history, sociology, economics... the Truth about people and society. They conceded nothing and admitted no external influences.
Wilde's essay is still read because it's one of the few which actually captures the real political/philosophical debate of his era. The ideals behind the ideology, the dangers of these going wrong.
He was a mighty intellectual, and if you want to understand why 19th socialism was what it was I think he's indispensable.
In the case of Marx this is inaccurate. Indeed, in Das Kapital he develops the Labor theory of value [0] from earlier works of David Ricardo and ... Adam Smith.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
I think it's telling how most of the Smith and Ricardo followers celebrate how prescient they were, excluding the labor theory of value when they embrace marginalism [1] instead. I guess it must be more convenient for them.
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics#Margina...
What draws me to HN are the thoughtful, genuine discussions about topics around technology, science, and business. While not perfect, it often seems to dodge the political divisiveness and focus on common interest. I hope we can find a way to keep that spirit of camaraderie and shared interest.
> “The middle orders must increasingly disappear until the world is divided into millionaires and paupers, into large landowners and poor farm labourers,” Engels wrote, in terms that might well have been appropriated by a Democratic presidential hopeful in 2020.
edit I looked up the quote, and it is Engels describing what he sees as the natural conclusion of the Industrial Revolution unless a total change of societal conditions occurred. Not something he was hoping happened or criticism of Britain enriching merchants as the article suggests.
In the case of religion (whether or not I believe it is positive or negative) I know that there are many many dark corners that the "it is all about love" person is not talking about.
Same thing with comunism, I have known in my life people I would be slightly afraid to see holding power flying that banner and we all know what happened many times in history, and while this can be said of many ideology in my opinion the comunism cluster looks like it is trying to sweep the dust under the rug.
I am sure that there are a lot of people that are trying their best to rehabilitate comunism from the curse that Stalin and many many others have cast and I wish them the best of luck, but I do not think that their job is close to being done.
Having spent much of my early twenties embedded with some of today's more prominent socialist activists in the US, I can tell you that behind closed doors the only subject that ever crossed their lips was "power".
It was enough to terrify me off of such thoughts and ideals. All these years later and I still wake up in a cold sweat at night having nightmares about the people I knew getting what they wanted.
Also, would you mind to be a bit more specific about who these people are? In my experience Americans aren't particularly good at identifying what constitutes a socialist to the rest of the world.
For example for all the criticism that you can point against religion most religious communities openly and clearly oppose and denounce terrorism.
In my view comunism was never able to separate itselft from a revolutionary mindset, and so agitators and extremists were always (since Marx, at least) considered a planned and likely step.
So you talked to politicians?
I live in France and many old classic 'marxianists' I know have come to despise the unread and uncultured new generation. Tell a young "marxist" what Das Kapital says of e.g. immigration and watch them decompose before your eyes... Anyway, no judgement here, just a personal observation.
Marx's view on immigration was largely that capitalists use it to pit the working class against itself, and that the nation state was a construct of capitalism. I'm curious why you think a Marxist would take an issue with that.
The problem with comunism is not that it is a faulty ideology, but that even if you tried to start a reasonable organization about it you will be overrun by mindless ideologues.
Pretending to be non-ideological is disingenuous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to get into the intended groove, the way to do that is to relax a bit out of your habitual identification (pro-communist, anti-communist, whatever) and take pleasure in stuff you didn't know before. People, including Engels, Marx, you, and me, are complicated. They have interesting contradictions.
Since Engels always was "the second Violine" (behind Marx), he could get away with a hedonistic lifestyle without endangering the communistic movement too much. While many may describe him as a typical "Champagnersozialist", IMO in Manchester he realised that the right action of an individual is not enough to introduce a widespread change: The owenism he experienced in Manchester was the proof (a socialist working class movement in England whose founder tried to establish good working conditions in his factories).
With this in mind, it was simply more effective for the movement to let Engels finance Marx even by running one of those capitalistic cotton factories they criticized & being financed by his family. (Instead of directly rejecting any participation in the capitalistic lifestyle (including its hedonistic pleasures) and thus having no food on the table, which means that Marx could not have just worked on "Das Kapital").
TL;DR; by doing effective altruism benefitting the communist movement, he meant to help many more workers than by living by example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Lanark
Yeah, it's kind of to be expected: theorists (firebrand or not) are for obvious reasons disproportionately of the intelligentsia, and under capitalism (or the modern mixed economy) even the proletarian intelligentsia (much less the petit and, even moreso, haut bourgeois intelligentsia) tend to be quite well off compared to the mass of the proletariat.
People who are expending all their energy dealing with the immediate struggle that capitalism imposes on the proletariat aren't developing models of the long-term problems and solutions.
Remember: he chose to assign himself an annual allowance for “entertainment” the size of 10 of his workers’ wages.
Could he have went with just 9 wages and bump the salary of his workers a bit? Probably. Could he have contributed it to the communist cause more to drive systemic change? Probably.
But he chose not to.
You cannot adhere to the labor theory of value and make such choices without either knowing that what you do is theft, or knowing that LTV is wrong.
Engels living in excess while preaching solidarity, you will note, is not the point I said was to be expected. Engels being one of many examples of the pattern “leftist firebrand whose inherited wealth insulated him from the struggles of ordinary working people”, was.
OTOH, Engels preached revolution against capitalism not financial solidarity within capitalism, and that the harm of capitalism was inherent its fundamental structure, not something that could be meaningfully mitigated or remediated by “good behavior” within the privileged classes while capitalism continued.
It's not surprising that opponents of his philosophy want to attack him with the ad hominem that he is a hypocrite; it's odd, though, to accuse him of being a hypocrite to a position that he and Marx condemned as a retrograde one which served to reinforce the capitalist order.
You are justifying Engel's being exploitative to his own workers, while he himself knew it was essentially theft, according to their own theories. What could justify such theft? Well, "entertainment". He didn't choose to send that money to the International to promote systemic change. Nonono, he willingly chose to spend it on his own pleasures to the detriment of the people working for him. At least according to his own theories. So either Engels himself was immoral, or communism doesn't have any moral superiority over capitalism. See, you can choose whether that argument is ad hominem or generally applicable. :D
This is the whole reason they needed a revolution. If communism was truly a superior form of economic organization, then it wouldn't matter if it was applied to whole societies or smaller groups. In other words, a company organized by communist principles would be more competitive than a company organized purely by naked capitalism. You can't get people on board in evolutionary manner, if you yourself can't get organized by these principles. If your own company can't be communist and survive, why would it work on a scale of a whole country or the whole world? This is why they needed it to be violent and irreversible. It's a massive swindle to get power and it was thought out.
It boggles my mind, that people devalue legitimate left thought by staning charlatans. But people also voted for Trump because he is "a man of the people", so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
False equivalence, since rightwing populists don't advocate wealth redistribution and preach egalitarianism.
In their view.
Truth is, there is none. It’s just that most of the thinking is done by people who are relatively well-off in life, everyone else is too busy “making a living”.
1. If you benefit from the system, you are accused of being an idiot and/or hypocrite to support changing the system.
2. If you do not benefit from the system, you are accused of sour grapes or an outsider who doesn't know what they are talking about.
The first is the criticism of various socialists such as millionaire Bernie Sanders, millionaire and model Emily Ratajkowski (who supports more egalitarian economic systems as well as various gender issues surrounding modelling and taking female intellectuals seriously), and various other actors and musicians.
It then comes to no surprise that the essay is hosted on a site devoted to right wing^W^Wconvervative views.
> Filling the Void Left by Modern Higher Education. Too many college students feel isolated or attacked for questioning progressive orthodoxy and the ever-narrowing range of debate on campus.
Love to see anti intellectualism spread around HN, and again not surprised.
Edit: oh, I see, this publication is basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Age_(periodical), which was founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Kirk. This is a well-known strain of highbrow paleoconservative intellectualism in the US. It's fine not to like it, of course, but anti-intellectual it definitely is not.
From an HN point of view, we care about article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... That's unavoidable on the internet, where the good stuff has to be picked out of rivers of bad and mediocre stuff. And actually if a good article comes from a bad source, that kind of makes it more interesting.
I've seen him have this dialogue several times. My guess is that he's done it hundreds of times. That's the definition of the word "trite." The obvious champagne socialist firebrand dialogue has been had, in the same way, for generations now. Oscar Wilde. etc.
This article does mention "champagne populists" as a type example from the political right. The other obvious comparison is "champagne religion," preaching chaste poverty while indulging like epicurean hedonism.
Despite being trite, I think there genuinely is something to "if the shoe fits." Engels like other socialists & epicurean hedonists (eg chris hitchens) "get away" with church marriages or baptisms. It's hypocritical in theory but no one cares. Priests get away with greed, but not with hedonism. Hedonistic hypocrisy sticks to religion in a way that religious hypocrisy does not stick to epicureans & socialists. Neither wealth nor hedonism generally sticks to the "populist," but failure does.
Anyway... I do think that champagne shaped socialism in a negative way, personally. The position of Engels, Wilde and others pushed the ideas in certain directions. They tended to see communism as an indivisible. A slice of communism had no value... otherwise why not use their resources to create a slice of it themselves. Total revolution, or none at all. Seemingly unresolveable conflict at every turn breeds "singularity" thinking.
Hypocrisy is an interesting concept because of the self-contradiction in it. It's a word that is only ever applied to others, yet there is not one of us who isn't a hypocrite. Therefore the word is an instance of itself. The day I realized this, indignation about hypocrisy vanished for me—and it used to bug me a lot.
[0] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/hypocrisy (Lexico powered by Oxford)
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypocrisy
If you mean to say there are no people that consider themselves to be hypocrites, then I would have to disagree: there are plenty of people who try, fail, and continue to keep trying to not be hypocritical. However, if you mean to say that hypocrisy is something that we almost always hear about when someone applies it to another, then I understand what you are trying to say.
I think I also understand what you mean by choosing to look at things using the lens / identifying a person’s action as a contradiction as opposed to hypocritical in that the former is an observation and the latter is an observation and a judgment/conclusion that may or may not have the full context/complexity taken into account.
Another way of making this point about self-contradiction is to say that anger at others for being hypocritical is itself hypocritical.
There are probably millions of people in the USA who barely escaped with their lives from vile communist regimes and yet the idea of communism is still entertained as some misunderstood noble thing. Until there will be "Nuremberg trials" equivalent for communism such ideas will unfortunately continue to propagate.
that is not quite correct: in socialist countries the elite had their own closed shops, a much higher salary and access to lots of material goods that mere workers just didn't have. These goodies were kept from the public eye, but most people knew about their existence, it was somewhat of an 'open secret'.
Similarly to how I react to replacing "communism" with "[economic] liberalism" and "Marx" with "Rand" and "Engels" with "the Chicago boys". Unsurprisingly, changing the words in a text changes its meaning.
> There are probably millions of people in the USA who barely escaped with their lives from vile communist regimes and yet the idea of communism is still entertained as some misunderstood noble thing. Until there will be "Nuremberg trials" equivalent for communism such ideas will unfortunately continue to propagate.
What do you think are the ideas of communism and of Marx and Engels in general?