SIMPLE COMMENTARY
The Reductionist Plague That Seized The World.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
-Karl Marx.
Hello reader, thank God it’s Friday (TGIF). I hope you had a curious working week and a productive one as well.
Today, I want to take you on a simple exercise in philosophy, logic, and argument formulation. As well as a simple commentary in ideology (communism).
The Plague: Communism
The text in italics is the opening statement of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It is upon this statement that the communist worldview builds. It is the peculiar lens through which Marx and all communists see the world. But what is wrong with it?
There is specifically one reason why the statement is a problem: it is reductionistic.
Reductionistic statements (or arguments in a wider sense) are statements that confuse the part of a whole statement as the whole statement. And this is not limited to statements. It is also a problem when identifying social problems and causes. As we see with Marx and Engels, they claim "that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." They do not allude that class struggles have been common through history, they proclaim that all history of existing societies is class struggles.
To show you in simple terms how that statement and those like it are reductionistic and ultimately false, let’s use the example of the body. Your body has different parts. Eyes, ears, nose, hands, legs, tongue, liver, kidney…of course you know the parts of your body. To be reductionistic is to assess your greatness as an athlete, and conclude that your legs are your body. “He is a fast runner with great legs. Hence, Emmanuel is a leg.” Ridiculous.
Reductionistic statement: “The eye is an important part of the body. So the eye is the body.”
To give Marx and Engels some credit, yes class struggles have been replete through history. At one point or another in history, the upper and lower classes have clashed and one of them always comes out on top. But does this mean that this is the foundation and most influential factor for all existing societies now and even in Karl Marx’s time? No. By this simple negation, it is a debilitating error and a disaster waiting to happen to establish a government and culture on this fragile classification of history. No wonder, communism has been horrific in nations where it has been used.
The statement is ultimately rendered false (even with its elements of truth) because it submits that the part is the whole. No it is not. The part is never the whole.
Because of this error between premise and conclusion, Marxism has produced catastrophic instruments of assessing society and culture. The extremely sharp binary that emerges from Marx’s theory of the oppressor and oppressed makes managing society a little harder to do. Now the oppressor and oppressed dichotomy has found use in areas like sex (feminism), race and gender (postmodernism), and economics (communism). The resultant effect has been the deletion of nuance from conversations, and frying people’s brains to think only in terms of binaries: ones and zeros.
I conclude with this. It is possible to get your observations and premises right and miss the inference. Marx and Engels made a lot of correct observations and analysis of capitalism. But when it came down to making a useful conclusion, they messed it up. It is slippery. And that, kids, is how you can mess up your work in philosophical inquisition. But then, we are not above mistakes. However, don't make your mistakes into a manifesto that boasts about how to change the world.
This is Busyminds, and this was an exercise in the reductionist plague that seized the world.
This picture is funny and sad. What do you think?
Read Monday Map: Casual sex here
See you around,
Jegdy.