Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
I think most people would say that's like being in favor of students reporting their own test scores, but being against cheating. You have to show that the two aren't intrinsically tied together before you can excuse marx.

I've never studied marxism so
I would tend to agree with you here, this is (one) of the fundamental flaws of Marxism. He has to rely on a single class to break the class structure, and hope the workers do not simply serve their own interests as the nobility and then the bourgeoisie did.

Although I suppose it could be argued in return that the workers would have formed the overwhelming majority of the people, and so their own good is synonymous with that of the state. I think the real issue is that socialist states have never emerged from the sort of revolution that Marx envisaged. They ended up with a small number of elites and a very top-down system. Even in Russia, the Bolsheviks came to establish this ruling elite due to their own nature as a small, elite organisation (the Mensheviks were more in line with Marx IMO, the Bolsheviks were too impatient and didn't represent the workers, since Russia lacker a strong proletariat anyway).

If Marx really got his workers revolution, and the socialist government was structured from the bottom-up, then I suppose it could work.

But in the end class struggle didn't matter that much to the workers, they were more concerned with how superior their own race was to everyone else's, and ensured a fun 20th century for us all.