Death by capitalism (the meme thread)

[vulcanlogician]

Marx' biggest problem is that he had no understanding of human nature.  Trump's biggest problem is that he is a greedy piece of shit.

I would agree that Marx had some shortcomings in his understanding. He saw an economy too much as something that ran like a machine, and didn't factor in the greediness and power hungriness of individuals (and their ability to circumvent a fair and just system).

While I do consider myself a Marxist, I'm more a proponent of Marx's earlier ideas... those aimed at diminishing wage exploitation and worker alienation. At this point he was still very much a classic liberal who believed in a democratic-republican system of government. 

His later philosophy (IMO) became high on its own petard, reducing everything to the "science" of the Hegelian dialectic (or more precisely, "dialectical materialism"). His later philosophy seemed to forget that there were human beings in that shuffle, and made way too many assumptions as far as human nature was concerned. For instance, he thought that human greed would disappear when capitalism was overturned because "there would no longer be a need for it." Um... no... humans are greedy assholes, no matter what system they exist within.