anticap
29th April 2010, 10:39
Would anyone care to attempt to boil each of the following down to a single sentence or phrase?
Marxism
Leninism
Trotskyism
Stalinism
Maoism
...any others that I've omitted, which you feel are important.
Don't say it can't be done: Marx and Engels summed up communism as "abolition of private property (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm)" (by which they meant "bourgeois property," by which they meant private ownership of the "instruments of production"). Conversely, Mises condensed classical liberalism (by which he meant [I]laissez-faire capitalism) into a single word: "property (http://mises.org/liberal/ch1sec1.asp)" (by which he meant "private ownership of the means of production"). Any concept can be treated in this way; it's only a matter of how much explanatory or contextual material you're willing to mercilessly hack away.
Think of Glyn Hughes's Squashed Philosophers (http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/), but far more austere even than his "very squashed" versions.
Marxism
Leninism
Trotskyism
Stalinism
Maoism
...any others that I've omitted, which you feel are important.
Don't say it can't be done: Marx and Engels summed up communism as "abolition of private property (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm)" (by which they meant "bourgeois property," by which they meant private ownership of the "instruments of production"). Conversely, Mises condensed classical liberalism (by which he meant [I]laissez-faire capitalism) into a single word: "property (http://mises.org/liberal/ch1sec1.asp)" (by which he meant "private ownership of the means of production"). Any concept can be treated in this way; it's only a matter of how much explanatory or contextual material you're willing to mercilessly hack away.
Think of Glyn Hughes's Squashed Philosophers (http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/), but far more austere even than his "very squashed" versions.