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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Reading that paragraph made me cringe, as it's such a basic misunderstanding of Marxism that it's the kind of thing you'd expect to read in a freshman essay written the night before after the student skimmed the first 10 lines of the Wikipedia article for "marxism" in a drunken stupor.

Fortunately the rest of the article is pretty good, and shows that the author has actually read Marx a tiny bit. Which makes the presence of the first paragraph even more confusing.

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The first paragraph is probably intended to establish the author as somebody who isn't crazy.

The disconnect between the majority beliefs about Marxism and its actual contents (as well as the beliefs of those who actually follow in Marx's footsteps today) is gigantic. I perfectly understand that the author felt they needed some way to bridge that gap without turning the vast majority of readers away at first sight.

Ridiculing the parts of Marxism that are thought ridiculous by people who only know the popular view of Marxism was a very purposeful technique the author used to convince such people that the author is just as skeptical as they are, so that they could get people to read their (really great, I think) article about the parts of Marx' ideas that fewer people (at least Americans) are aware of.

It worked really well on me!

I get the impression that the author wanted to dispense with all of the usual preconceptions about Marxism right at the beginning, to inoculate the essay against the reflexive prejudice people tend to have about Marx.

It's probably wise to head off the common misconceptions and deal with common rebuttals up front. Otherwise the first comment on this would be "Oh yeah! Well we can't be happy if we don't even own our own wedding rings (for example)"

You're certainly correct, he invents ideas, puts them in Marx's mouth, then knocks them down.

Then for good measure he invents ideas, puts them in Marx's mouth and builds them up.

When Marx wrote about alienation he was writing about having no choice but to spend seventy hours a week performing repetitive tasks to order in a factory owned and run for someone else's benefit, not the existential angst generated by musing over whether it would be more fun being an architect than designing ads for garden furniture.

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