(12-15-2024, 09:16 PM)TDOSS Wrote: The only people who even worry about Karl Marx anymore are conservatives. Most liberals have moved into a wanting a mixed model economy, stepping out of the old paradigm altogether.

It’s largely been this way since Keynes.

Marx is still highly influential, although I agree that conservatives typically overstate his impact on modern leftist policies. What the right calls "Marxism" is not Marxism in the original sense; it’s a mixed economy. I have studied progressive ideology for years, and while Marx was instrumental in creating a movement, his ideas are not really the gold standard. However, I probably have different reasons for this claim.

It's not the leftists that bother me; most of them are uninformed dreamers. It's the political rhetoricians and billionaires with a god complex who use these ideas to advance their own agendas. I can look at Elon Musk or Trump and see how they can game the system to create distinct advantages for themselves, yet most leftists deny that George Soros plays any role in the political landscape, even though he admits to playing god and has amassed his fortune in underhanded ways. Whether it's Jaime Diamond, or the Koch Brothers, or Soros, or Gates... it doesn't matter. they are playing a different game than us.

I believe billionaires use the cultural subversive tactics born out of social justice to enforce compliance. When you look at organizations like the WEF, you see a system that essentially divides the potential earnings among the companies fortunate enough to have gotten in early. They largely regulate competition through artificial barriers to entry and control of the means of production. They push a form of socialism onto the working class that ensures basic needs are met but also come with limitations that prevent people from achieving higher levels of success or upward mobility.

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