A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the elimination of waste.
If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world consequences.
Of course ideas matter and have consequences. The mistake is to
identify them with individual responsibility. Do you blame Newton
every time a vase falls off a shelf?
Nevertheless, as an entity with mass Isaac Newton was complicit in contributing towards gravity’s tyrannical effects. In fact, his corpse continues to exert a gravitational pull to this day. /s
Karl Marx isn't responsible for anything that happened in the 20th century. People have individual responsibility for their actions, it doesn't matter where you got the idea from. Ascribing e.g. crimes of stalinism to Marx is actually terrible idea, it absolves the people who did these crimes of their own moral agency. Ideas do matter (as Gramsci has shown by example), but the moral responsibility is on the implementors.
But just out of curiosity, what exactly Marx said that you deem so dangerous? Can you show some quotes?
Well, we can start with this problematic statement. Taken to its literal conclusion, it's not surprising to think it could end up with mass graves. Granted, it originated from Mephistopheles, but Marx wasn't being poetic in his recitations.
I am not really interested in a bad faith debate. I take it you're quoting this passage:
The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité, fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for the moment, so that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: “All that exists deserves to perish.” [From Goethe’s Faust, Part One.]
Can you explain, in your interpretation, what was Marx trying to say?
Any accounting scheme which assigns Marx blame for the consequences of his poorer ideas, has to assign far more to "wise potentate" believers. Or even people who unironically use words like "wise potentate" at all.
> If ideas matter, then spectacularly bad ideas should have spectacularly bad real world consequences.
to me this seems to imply ideas don't matter, or we wouldn't be living in a market-oriented society. I suppose there's still room for global warming to demonstrate your point.
A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the elimination of waste.
If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world consequences.