Ep 62 MacIntyre vs Marx. Why the left will fail on its own terms.

The mindcrime liberty show discusses  MacIntyre and his book After Virtue. In After Virtue MacIntyre outlines an argument which ends up as one of the best  arguments against Marxism and the left generally.  If the current society, which most Marxists and leftists reside in ie the "West," is so impoverished, wretched and terrible as so many Marxists and leftists claim it is and full of various "isms" and "problematic" historical persons and institutions how will a better society emerge out of this impoverished mess which they claim the existing west is? One can dispute who is and isn't in the west but some phenomena like that clearly exists.   The third wordlist might be able to make an argument or some uncontacted group but those groups are increasingly far between.  Certain "western" ideas have went almost everywhere including some form of Marxism which itself a "western" idea.   Marx, Hegel, Kant and Engels are all they themselves are part of historical Western civilization for better or worse. Most Marxists interpret these kinds of arguments as "ad hominem" but if most of them are part of the managerial class then why would they be the ones to actually do it?   They either can claim that the current society and its past isn't as bad as they claim it is or they become as described by MacIntyre  the spectre of "pessimistic Marxists" and in a sense as MacIntyre describes ceases to be a Marxist.  "Conservative" socialists are no socialists at all!  If one is skeptical of man or the society writ large  one in  some sense cannot advocate a utopian poltiical program because one doesn't think there is actually a "tolerable" poltiical institution.   Anarchism of some variety might exist as a tolerable political institution but the contents of said anarchism will be disputed and to bring in another point which MacIntyre makes there is no way to actually determine which argument is "correct" other than of course naked power (a la Nietzche).   Although MacIntyre  is no "anarcho capitalist" or right libertarian he does use Robert Nozick as an equal to John Rawls in one of the later chapters of After Virtue.  Capitalism, even in its corrupted form which Murray Rothbard wouldn't recognize as being such, does exist in some diluted way or another and of course the enemies of it clearly describe the existing society as such.  Capitalism (ie private property, family and competition between firms and the "anarchy" of production) is one of the central elements of the West and fits what Thomas Sowell describes the constrained or tragic view which is very much skeptical of "progress."   Finally in a related point MacIntyre makes, which most Marxists interpret as ad hominem,  is with respect to virtues themselves and how to be a "better person." If one is going to build a better society one is going to need virtuous and courageous persons and for the most part Marxists undermine the virtues or are outright skeptical of them promising a society free from want and pain.