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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> A more updated version would be that neoliberalism is the opiate of intellectuals.

The real opiate of the intellectuals is any system that gives you the belief that you've got things mostly figured out. Neo-liberalism definitely qualifies for some, but so does Marxism.

However, given the current state of things, there's probably more value to be had now from reading Marx than some venerable free market tract. Just don't let it go to your head.

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This is the thesis of Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." He argues, correctly I think, that you can find intellectual strands going back to Heraclitus and Plato which revolve around the idea of some "central force" or "law of history" that enables a thinker to predict the future. He says that the alternative and preferable society is a skeptical one that views history as a series of experiments and tries to infer what amount to rules of thumb rather than grand "world historical" theories or forces.

Oh sure, there's very serious problems with orthodox Marxism. It gets somewhat of a pass because all historical communist regimes have started far before capitalism had run its course (which even now it hasn't necessarily). However, the dictatorship of the proletariat is just something I cannot buy ever working out without the revolutionary vanguard just turning into the new masters.

This is a critique that left-anarchists have always had of Marxisms. However, Marxism also has a point that a complete economic overturning is impossible without force, necessitating a vanguard anyway. So, I don't think anyone can remotely say what comes after our economic system.

This is what I always wondered. Where does the claim to political legitimacy come from if force is required?

There's no such thing as political legitimacy, at least in terms of the philosophical concept existing in reality. Legitimacy in practice just means that there are not enough people opposed to a regime to take it down. It's just really a restatement of whether people have confidence that it won't collapse.

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