one person, one vote, racial and gender equality, and social responsibility
Those may have been things that Marx wanted, or that marxists have talked about, but they aren't something with any particular connection to marxism, not even the idealist marxist vision (and certainly not communism as it has occurred in the real world when attempted on a large scale).
An argument based on simularities or shared ideas, is more often used as a negative to bash somone ("Politician X supported law Y, Hitler passed a law similar to Y, therefor Politician X is like Hitler", or to use an example I posted about on SI, "The Khymer Rouge used waterboarding, Bush ordered a few cases of waterboarding", therefore Bush is like the Khymer Rouge), but it can also be used more positively, and be just as inaccurate or irrelevant.
The important issues are the distinctive significant factors. For marxism, even the idealist vision of marxism/communism, those aren't "one person one vote" (that would be a distinctive feature of democracy), or racial and gender equality, or social responsbility. The distinctive and important ideas are things like
- a view of history based on or strongly connected to the idea of class struggle
- a belief that the ultimate interests of workers best match those of humanity in general
- belief in the labor theory of value
- a belief that "production relations" constitute the most decisive type of relation for society
- a belief in the idea that getting more value of of workers than the value of what they are paid is unjust or unfair exploitation
- the desire for a classless stateless society (which was supposed to follow after the "dictatorship of the proletariat") |
