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From: janw@inmet.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Re: Health Care, Wonderful Market fo
Message-ID: <28200136@inmet.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Oct-85 06:22:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: inmet.28200136
Posted: Tue Oct  1 06:22:00 1985
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Nf-From: inmet!janw    Oct  1 06:22:00 1985


[mcgeer@ucbvax]
> I really don't know much about sociology, since the only college course on
> the subject that I attended began with the instructor saying that you had
> to be a Marxist to be a sociologist.  Well, that was that.  I didn't hear
> the rest of the lecture.  Marxism is like smallpox: the only thing you want to
> learn about it is how to stamp it out.  Anyway...

 Well... if you dipped deeper you might find some  truth  in  it.
There  is  Marxist  ideology;  there is also Marxist method - far
from infallible, but sometimes enlightening.

 Consider this: what is the basic tenet of Marxist sociology ? It is
that  ideology is an expression of class interest. Applied to statist
ideology, *including modern Marxism*, this reads : it  is the express-
ion  of self-interest of the New Class of bureaucracy and allied social
groups (of which your  jackass  instructor  was one of the lowliest
representatives). In other words: they play Good Shepherd, and they
*believe it*, but they are really out  to fleece you.
 Taxes are not collected  to  pay  for  "social  needs":  "social
needs"  are  discovered  to justify taxes. True or false, this is
what the Marxist method leads to.

 (The term "New Class" in the above sense was coined  by  Milovan
Djilas  in a book by the same title . The author is a  Marxist,
but ex-Communist ; he used to be the leading theoretician of Com-
munist Yugoslavia, then  became one of its convicts).

 Unfortunately, few Marxists read Marx; they don't  suspect,  for
instance, that the main propositions of the 1st volume of Das Ka-
pital (on which their whole case is built) are retracted  in  the
3d volume.

 Your smallpox comparison is uncannily apt: the vaccine  is  made
of the *same bug that causes the disease*.

		Jan Wasilewsky