Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #295

I recently watched a Lex Fridman podcast with Richard Wolff, a philosopher and Marxist economist and he made many of the same compelling points you are making: [this video] >It's really hard for me to see where the rigid conformity came from. Perhaps its from the concept of "equality of outcome", everyone is treated the same no matter what they do. >In other venues, we see rigid conformity tied to hierarchy (military, strict schools).. all venues that tend to have figurehead leaders, and disempowered individuals rather than collective empowerment. It's an interesting correlation, but within those organizations there does at least seem to be some elememts of meritocracy involved. Although, Stalin, Hitler, Mao etc. were all military based dictatorships who preached (though perhaps poorly practiced, or misinterpreted) Marxist ideas.

I think your understanding will improve if you view the content of this link as nothing but a scathing review of the book in question. I get the sense that your confusion comes from thinking that the linked article is trying to make points about the subject of the book, when really the point of the review is to trash the book as a waste of time (while recommending better options, linked throughout the review). For instance, when the reviewer states "Problems with style and pacing are problems of thinking", the primary intent is not to make some sort of generalized insight applicable to you, but instead to criticize Odell in particular as putting poorly styled, poorly paced, and poorly thought out lines on the page. If you read with this adversarial context in mind, you could imagine the critic's answer to "Why We Never Have Enough Time" to be "Because we have to waste our lives on our jobs -- mine right now being to write a review of a book I think is a waste of everyone's time." Catechesis is a term associated with the Catholic Church as a form of systematic instruction of a set of dogmatic, ideological beliefs. Denouncing Odell's book as "catechistic indexing" is a serious burn, connoting the sense of a group of religious followers shallowly regurgitating the same dogmatically accepted facts (with or without adequate exposition or even any understanding in the first place), in the style that a religious leader might conduct a catechistic question and answer session. The abs