Thanks for the kind and thoughtful reply.

I am considering enrolling in a course "Doing My Part" by The Dialogue Company. https://thedialoguecompany.com/products-all/intro-to-the-white-ally-toolkit-doing-your-part-to-dismantle-racism

I have written to them expressing interest and asking about accommodations for my communication difficulty. I hope this will be a good investment.

I read Marx's -The Communist Manifesto- as a teenager and was hooked. His critique of capitalism is excellent, and has gotten him many followers over the years. I still agree with this critique, so I guess that makes me a Marxist also.

However, my criticism of Marxism is that it is not a scientific or economic theory, but a philosophy that acts as if it were such. I use the word theory in the scientific sense rather than in the layperson's sense.

When a layperson uses the word 'theory" they usually mean a guess, something analogous to what a scientist means by the word "hypothesis." A hypothesis is a proposition whose truth value is unknown, and which one hopes to prove or disprove by investigation and experiment. For example, a layperson may say, "I have a theory that my boss is embezzling the payroll." The person may then investigate to prove or disprove this "theory." This is why some people discount evolution by saying it is "only a theory (guess)."

However, in science, a theory is an overarching idea that unifies a large amount of observations, data, and scientific fact. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin/evolution-today/what-is-a-theory

For example, gravitation, germs as a cause of disease, and evolution are all theories. Theories have several essential characteristics that qualify them to be called such. Some of these characteristics are predictive ability and refutability aka falsifiability.

Predictive ability means that the theory should accurately predict unknown outcomes of future experiments or events. For example, the theory of gravitation says that gravitational attraction is directly proportional to mass and inversely proportional to the square of distance. This can be experimentally verified and used in practical applications such as aerospace engineering. The germ theory says that many diseases are caused by germs, and can be prevented or treated by means such as sanitation, pro- and anti-biotics, vaccinations, etc. This is verified in everyday medical practice all over the world.

Falsifiability is an important characteristic that distinguishes valid scientific theory from pseudo scientific philosophies. For example, a believer in the Flat Earth "theory" will argue that any attempts to prove the earth to be spherical are just more attempts by "Them" to suppress the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#:~:text=In%20the%20philosophy%20of%20science,observe%20that%20black%20swans%20exist.

Here is where Marxism fails. It claims that a dictatorship by the proletariat will adequately address the flaws and failures of capitalism and will itself eventually "wither away." The failed Marxist states of the 20th century refute this prediction, yet Marxist proponents ignore these failures and claim that if Marxism were "done right" then its predictions would succeed. They are like Flat Earthers who insist on their beliefs despite all evidence to the contrary, and say that there is a conspiracy to hide the "truth" of the Earth's supposed flatness. They hope that if their practice is correct enough, then -this time- their Marxist practice will succeed in building a just and functional society even though this has never happened before.

This is why most universities no longer include Marxism in their economics departments, relegating it instead to their philosophy departments. Philosophies need only be internally consistent; they need not be falsifiable or have predictive abilities. This is why academia is full of contradictory philosophies which nevertheless enjoy equal footing as academic disciplines.

This, I believe, explains the insistence on purity of language and thought in the Left. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, just look at what happens in movement discussions when someone expresses a "counterrevolutionary" idea, or uses the wrong vocabulary. In leftist circles in the US, this leads to metaphorical "circular firing squads," that is, the discord and strife within and between people and organizations who supposedly have similar worldviews and goals. In the full-blown Marxist revolutions of the 20th century, this led to bloody purges, exiles, and deaths.

For an example, one need only look at the Left's response to Biden's victory over Trump. Our joy and plans over what to do with this moment are marred by arguments over who deserves the most credit and who does or does not have a right to celebrate. Claims that white folks have no right to celebrate because we supposedly come so late to the game particularly rankle me because I know that white abolitionists have been active for several hundred years, and I personally bear scars from my support of Civil rights as a small child during the Integration struggles of the '60's. These scars were inflicted not by angry mobs of strangers, but by my own father and grandfather. But I'm not supposed to say this ...

Marx is right, that capitalism has fatal flaws which cause immense human suffering. However, his remedy, a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, has never been proven successful. So if Marxist philosophy does not work in practice, what does?

In Europe they had to rebuild everything after WWII, and many countries developed mixed economies where some "luxury" goods are produced and distributed by a capitalism similar to ours; other "necessary" goods by a capitalism regulated not by profit motive but by consideration of what would produce the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. Still other goods, those which are absolutely essential to survival or quality of life (health care, housing, education, etc) are produced or regulated by government agencies which eschew the profit motive entirely. This has produced some of the highest standards of living and general happiness in the world.

I believe that we can and should establish such a system here, with unique characteristics derived from the insights and experiences of our highly diverse population. It would not necessarily look like the European models, because an increasing number of our people are not of European descent and would have their own ideas about how to do things based on their own survival experiences.

But it could work. The peoples across the pond put their heads together and figured out how to do it, from their own cultures and experiences. We can do the same.