“I say, if we grant Marxists their basic premises (that material conditions determine social relationships, and that history has a teleology), their conclusions don’t seem so crazy. What prevents us from jumping on board is our experience to the contrary.”
I say it's irrational to grant Marxists their basic premises since they lack a fundamental understanding of basic human nature, and therefore all their theories must inevitably result in failure, both theoretically and experientially. It amuses me that some cannot predict the inevitable failure of socialist theory by logical means alone.
Locke and Mises had it right and could have saved millions of lives and unmeasurable suffering if they had been believed before socialists launched their horrible experiment on the world.
What do you call people who still believe socialism can work after it has been proved a failure every time it has been tried? Are they still being rational?
I’m not a logician, but I believe that it is possible to start from a false premise and reach a false conclusion, and still follow all the rules. I refer you back to Hume’s fork: on one side lie logic truths, on the other side lie empirical truths. The former are deomnstrable, and the latter are not.
“I say it’s irrational to grant Marxists their basic premises”
Rationality does not depend on experience (except insofar as our rationality derives from our brains, which evolved over time, but that’s another argument). 2+2=4 with or without reference to life outside mathematics.
“What do you call people who still believe socialism can work after it has been proved a failure every time it has been tried?”
Mises maintained, time and again, that his economics was true whether or not it could be demonstrated by history. He wanted his theories to be a priori ture, or not ture at all.
Besides, any Marxist worth his salt will tell you that the reason the Soviet Union failed was because Russia had not reached the critical point of industrial development. And when you ask him why there have not been socialist revolutions in England and the U.S., for instance, he’ll tel you, “Just wait.”
It is not possible to argue with such a person; not because they are irrational, but because their rationality is locked in a closed system.