I may get a little ranty here, but I am talking with a great deal of respect to people who have a lot of in-depth knowledge, and I will say things I cannot defend, so I’m asking for forgiveness in advance.
The reason a lot of people see Science as “true” is because it is so easily proven false. The ideas are as rigid as they are ridiculous. Several parts of physics, whether it be quantum entanglement (“if quantum mechanics is true then you can get quantum entanglement which is a completely ridiculous idea and can’t possibly be real”) or black holes (“if general relativity is real then you should see these black holes which are a completely ridiculous idea and can’t possibly exist”) were actually postulated to show how crazy wrong the science was supposed to be.
That’s how you sort out truth from fiction: Good truths are rigid and can break easily, and yet they do not. Bad “truths” bend to whatever observations actually take place, and make predictions which have no value, or can otherwise be interpreted later.
No offense, but economics for one thing, and everything you’ve written above, stinks of “bad truth”. This is one of the reasons why Pirates are supposed to be pragmatic, and shun all dogma: because we’re after the good truths.
Why are these things bad truths? Because they are very hard to test, and the things that are easy / possible to test ignore a huge amount of “reality”. Just look at the complexity behind a game as simple as the prisoner’s dilemma to see what I mean there: repetition plays a huge part, culture plays a huge part, the incentives play a huge part, to the extent that the lessons from the game itself is almost meaningless.
So it is with Marx and Marxism. It picks a simple thread from a complex world. If you’ve seen someone make a documentary and weave a reality by picking and choosing threads that tie to make a whole, you’ll see exactly the kind of reasoning you need to see Marx as being right or wrong. It’s all in the framing, and this is seen as being “OK”, because saying “yeah it’s really complicated” is a boring explanation, and people want easy results. Of course you do it in a documentary, but you shouldn’t mistake that for the truth.
But so far I’m just equivocating, strawmanning, and slippery-sloping, so here’s an example from what I gather you’re saying: Uber is making the bourgeois taxi industry more productive.
That’s bollocks. While it’s true there are rental black holes where people have gotten filthy rich by holding onto, say, taxi licenses, the taxi industry is tightly regulated to ensure people have efficient transport at reasonable cost, and everyone is treated fairly, from the customer to the taxi driver to the city and infrastructure. Getting this right is a balancing act which some countries do well at and some countries do badly at. You can tell when a taxi service is running efficiently and when fat cats are collecting rent.
Also, “communism” isn’t some theoretical thing. It exists in a very real form in many countries around the world, and the dynamic range of great to shit is as wide as it is for capitalism. Communism doesn’t guarantee you anything, you need to put the effort in, and conversely, if you put the effort in you can make any system work well and efficiently.
In the end, I see this kind of left-right posturing as comparing Holden against Ford, or Cylinder based engines against Wankel Rotaries, or LCD vs OLED. In the end that’s not what makes a product good. It’s hard work and good engineering.
Precisely. A choice quote is: “Technology is not good or evil. Nor is it Neutral”. It is important for us to be responsible for the technology that we create as a society.