Fundamentalist Marxism

Obviously, whenever you read a text which is thousands, or hundreds of years old -- or maybe even decades old when it comes to economics, or even years or months -- even if you rate the text very highly, you will also discard a lot. Because people -- some people, at least -- learn as time goes by.

Then there are fundamentalists: people who regard certain texts as perfect. Most well-known are religious fundamentalists, who are generally unbearable even to the other people in the same religion.

But Marxists are also accused of fundamentalism. I don't know whether it's true of most Marxists, but, Jesus, Lord from above -- so to speak -- it's true of a lot of them. There are a lot of dull-witted Marxists who spend what seems to be their entire lives denouncing anyone who claims to see any contradictions between what Marx wrote, and reality. 

And I don't think that Marx himself can be excused from blame for this. He uses terms like "inevitable" and "immutable" a lot.

It seems that people noticed this similarity to religious fundamentalism in Marx pretty early. In 1847 -- a year before the Communist Manifesto -- Marx published a "Communist Catechism," a satire of the questions and answers which children memorize in order to become members of the Catholic Church, but for Communists instead of Catholics. Ha-ha-ha, not as funny as you thought, Karl!

There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in what Marx wrote. There's a lot of worthwhile stuff in the Bible. There's also a certain amount of nonsense in both the Bible and in Marx. That in itself is unremarkable. Nobody's perfect. Compare the Bible and Marx to other writing done around the same times, and they're really not all that bad.

What is bad, and very unusual, in the case of the Bible and in the case of Marx, are the huge numbers of sheer idiots who cling fiercely, blindly, stupidly, to the worst parts.