Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[hiromichi]

What does "be put to a number" mean?

This view is then linked to the second most common objection to Marx and Marxism; that the belief in and the process of attaining this teleological endpoint led directly to the gulag, the Great Leap Forward, the Berlin Wall and Pol Pot's torture chambers. Marx, on this reading, is directly responsible for many millions of deaths and becomes one of the greatest, if not the greatest, mass murderers in history. It doesn't help much to counter that all previous and contemporary forms of social organisation have also caused and continue to cause millions of deaths through poverty, pillage, civil war, colonial imperialism, the accumulation of other people's wealth, genocide, pogroms, inquisitions, fascism etc. Marx has the disadvantage that his name can be put to a number, whereas the millions who have suffered and perished over the course of history to get us to the point we are now represent a sort of "vanishing mediator".
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Hiromichi

[pugachevV]

It means that those Marxist ideas have given rise to a number of deaths that can be calculated (put to a number), whereas the other causes cannot.

[hiromichi]

pugachevV:
I SEE. Thank you very much.
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Hiromichi