What Politician/Thinker from the "Other Side" Can "Your Side" Learn Most From?

[The Simpsons Cinematic Universe]

Hmm. Hard to say. Being a Marxist, I'd say Ludwig von Mises, Francis Fukuyama, John Maynard Keynes, and a lot of other "political mainstream" liberal capitalist thinkers. Those who would at the remains of the communist movement as a joke - and be correct to do so. There are two central ideas that I'm thinking of.

Firstly, Marxists and the far-left in general do need to see that the "movement" is indeed laughable - because there isn't a true movement. A select group of intellectuals can form a party, and can even be elected, but can't make a revolution. A central idea of the materialist conception of history (which some view far too rigidly) is that history is made by groups of people acting in their own collective interests. To quote Marx on this, "It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends."

Some Marxists waste their time pondering reform vs. revolution, without seeing that without a proletarian mass movement in existence, neither is viable as a means of bringing about the end of wage labor. Such a movement cannot be synthetically created, either. A quote from Vladimir Lenin is as follows - "Every revolution means a sharp turn in the lives of a vast number of people. Unless the time is ripe for such a turn, no real revolution can take place." A revolutionary movement will not come about until dire circumstances - which are almost inevitable, due to the very nature of the modern, international capitalist system - come about. Do I look forward to such circumstances? The answer is unequivocally no.

Following from that, is something that I'd take more from libertarian ideologues like Mises, Friedman, and Hayek, and to some extent, anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kroptokin. Marxists - especially after being involved in Marxism for a while - tend to have a bad case of tunnel vision in politics. Despite the nonexistence of a proletarian movement (see last section), they view everything in politics as a means to one end - the socialist mode of production. All bourgeois capitalist politics is viewed as meaningless, as if it were some sort of massive conspiracy theory to divert the attention of the proletariat from carrying out its own class interest. I simply don't agree with that view of things. Personal liberty is something that libertarian and anarchist thinkers hold in the utmost regard, and I see no reason why a Marxist cannot do the same in most conditions. The central I'm trying to convey in this paragraph is that Marxists should not be hesitant to advocate specific policies within the context of the capitalist system, even if these policies are unrelated to socialism. This seems a lot more obvious than it is among Marxists I've spoken to.