[KlassWar]

The man, again, had no direct experience of the lives of the people who's cause he was claiming to champion. Do you deny he lived his life as a wealthy failure, mooching off of Engels and his wife?

Yes, I do deny it.

Marx wasn't wealthy: He was born petty-bourgeois (or middle class), and he had no personal wealth or steady income to rely on. He didn't mooch off Engels: Friedrich Engels funded his comrade and associate's research. Engels' funding enabled Marx to produce important work that Engels wanted written very badly.

Considering how Kapital and the Communist Manifesto are striking pieces of political literature, giving birth to a whole new school of sociological analysis, Freddy Engels got a fair amount of bang for his buck.

[Soixante-Retard]

Friedrich Engels funded his comrade and associate's research. Engels' funding enabled Marx to produce important work that Engels wanted written very badly.

It sounds like Marx was Engels's wage slave. How ironic.

[KlassWar]

I don't think it's a fair assessment. Marx's works weren't written for-hire. Engels' funding of Marx's work is akin to a private research grant (and informal support between friends) than anything else.

Marx was a writer and an intellectual, more than qualified for a Sociology, Economics or Philosophy chair. However, Marx happened to be blacklisted from official academia (exiled, even) due to his revolutionary views. Engels was well-off, so he supported his blacklisted comrade.

Nothing to see there, move along .

[Soixante-Retard]

I find your apology for Marx hilarious. Marx just proves Milton Friedman's aphorism:

The great enemies of free enterprise are businessmen and intellectuals — businessmen because they want socialism for themselves and free enterprise for everyone else; intellectuals, because they want free enterprise for themselves and socialism for everyone else.

[Someone5]

Sexual differentiation is very easy to explain.

Sexual reproduction itself is much more difficult.

The costs on an individual organism to engage in sexual vs. asexual reproduction is huge. Consider the trouble to which sexually-reproducing organisms, from flowering plants to courting mammals go to reproduce. An asexually-reproducing mutant could use all the saved resources to dominate a local population group within just a few generations.

The advantages of sexual reproduction tend to be slow - to do with faster adaptation to changes, especially to parasites.

Yet sexual reproduction is all-but-universal. I find that puzzling.

Sexual reproduction dramatically expands genetic diversity; this is a tremendous adaptive advantage, albeit not immediately evident. Asexual reproduction results in copies of the original individual that might as well be a clone. This an extremely bad trait to have if that species is in an environment that changes rapidly... and rapidly changing environments are ubiquitous.

Your confusion might stem from an assumption that resources spent on courtship and mate selection are wasted relative to asexual reproductive methods... but that certainly isn't the case.

[Eran]

this is a tremendous adaptive advantage, albeit not immediately evident.

And this is my problem. In a population made of a mix of sexual and asexual breeders, the latter would be able to out-breed the former in just a few generations, well before the advantages of sexual reproduction have an opportunity to express themselves.

Your confusion might stem from an assumption that resources spent on courtship and mate selection are wasted relative to asexual reproductive methods... but that certainly isn't the case.

It is the case on the short-term. And my problem is in getting from the short-term to the long-term.

A mutant individual who chooses (or has the genes to) spend all their energy on asexual reproduction will have, other things being equal, many more descendants within 1-2 generations than a sibling who spends energy on finding a mate, courting, fighting other males, etc.

Within 5-10 generations, the descendants of that individual will dominate the local population. It is true that by then, the rapidly-reducing sexually-reproducing population would have "generated" a more successful specimen. By that point is moot if such specimen's parents have been out-competed by the genetically-inferior but reproductively-unstoppable descendants of the asexual mutant.

In a small population, it seems like asexual reproduction's short-term advantage may make the long-term advantage of sexual reproduction moot.

[Eauz]

How can writings about making it easier for the slave master to hire cheap slaves and providing slaves the choice between no work and work, even be considered "freedom"?

[The Immortal Goon]

I always think its funny when anti-socialists choose someone that worked for Trotsky's secretary, fought with the POUM, wrote that the worst thing a socialist regime could do was emulate capitalism, and called himself a socialist and wrote:

"the only regime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech is a Socialist regime...It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it. For perhaps ten years past I have had some grasp of the real nature of capitalist society. I have seen British imperialism at work in Burma, and I have seen something of the effects of poverty and unemployment in Britain. In so far as I have struggle against the system, it has been mainly by writing books which I hoped would influence the reading public. I shall continue to do that, of course, but at a moment like the present writing books is not enough. The tempo of events is quickening; the dangers which once seemed a generation distant are staring us in the face. One has got to be actively a Socialist, not merely sympathetic to Socialism, or one plays into the hands of our always-active enemies."

as a great anti-socialist.

Way to know nothing about George Orwell. Reinterpreting him as a fervent capitalist because be opposed Stalin is the most Orwellian thing ever done.

[Soixante-Retard]

What I consider the greatest virtue of Orwell is that he was fervently anti-totalitarian.

[The Immortal Goon]

Fair enough, but he saw capitalism as totalitarian. Really, no capitalist goes around talking about Rosa Luxemberg as a hero to them-though she was an opponent to forms of Bolshevism and a socialist.

[Eran]

How can writings about making it easier for the slave master to hire cheap slaves and providing slaves the choice between no work and work, even be considered "freedom"?

Slaves aren't "hired". They are bought. And people with a choice of whether to work or not aren't slaves. It is true that government oppression can empty supposed "freedom" from much of its meaning. But private employers prevented (by government or otherwise) from initiating force against their employees are not in the same position.

[Soixante-Retard]

[Orwell] saw capitalism as totalitarian.

Did he now? Can you source anything from Orwell to support this, specifically mentioning or suggesting capitalism (which first needs to be defined) as totalitarian?

If Communism is abolition of private property, and Capitalism is Communism's negation, viz. support of private property, then for Orwell to see Capitalism as totalitarian he would have to see private property as totalitarian. Would he not? Which raises the question, did he see private property as totalitarian?

[The Immortal Goon]

Did he now? Can you source anything from Orwell to support this, specifically mentioning or suggesting capitalism (which first needs to be defined) as totalitarian?

If the heavy handed symbolism of the pigs becoming bad guys because they acted like capitalists (something the government sponsored cartoon movies have conveniently cut out), then there's also his views of things in the general:

I became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and negrlected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.

The notion that industrialism must end in monopoly, and that monopoly must imply tyrany, is not a startling one

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industiral society...[D]uring the final phase of capitalism roughly between 1920 and 1940[,] [t]he economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity...the probnlem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real welath of the world. Goods must be produced, but they need not be distributed.

As mentioned, he simply wasn't a Stalinists—most socialists aren't.

[N]othing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russian is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.

Thus it's no mystery he fought with the POUM in Spain and worked for Trotsky's secretary, Andres Nin. While this would be a puzzling crazy thing to explain if you said that Orwell loved capitalism, it makes perfect sense and is logical if you accept that Orwell was correct when he described himself as a socialist.

If Communism is abolition of private property, and Capitalism is Communism's negation, viz. support of private property, then for Orwell to see Capitalism as totalitarian he would have to see private property as totalitarian. Would he not? Which raises the question, did he see private property as totalitarian?

He seems to have liked the idea of a more primitive capitalism, but saw it as something that would inherently become more corrupt and totalitarian. The cure was, indeed, to crush private property.

What were Orwell's political opinions? Orwell was a revolutionary Socialist. That is, he hoped that there would be a Socialist revolution in England, and, as he said more than once, if violence was necessary, violence there should be. "I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood," he wrote in "My Country Right or Left," in 1940. And a year later, in "The Lion and the Unicorn," "It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. . . . Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place." Orwell had concluded long before that capitalism had failed unambiguously, and he never changed his opinion. He thought that Hitler's military success on the Continent proved once and for all the superiority of a planned economy. "It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption," he wrote. "The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them."
A Socialist England, as Orwell described it, would be a classless society with virtually no private property. The State would own everything, and would require "that nobody shall live without working." Orwell thought that perhaps fifteen acres of land, "at the very most," might be permitted, presumably to allow subsistence farming, but that there would be no ownership of land in town areas. Incomes would be equalized, so that the highest income would never be greater than ten times the lowest. Above that, the tax rate should be a hundred per cent. The House of Lords would be abolished, though Orwell thought that the monarchy might be preserved. (Everybody would drink at the same pub, presumably, but one of the blokes would get to wear a crown.) As for its foreign policy: a Socialist state "will not have the smallest scruple about attacking hostile neutrals or stirring up native rebellions in enemy colonies."

[cicero91]

A bit influenced by Ludwig de Mises.

[Rothbardian]

Stefan Molyneux just won the liberty inspiration awards, anyone bring him up yet? He won ahead of Ron Paul and Tom Woods.