Jaime’s Reviews > The Naked Communist > Status Update

Skousen writes in a way that discourages the reader to do research for themselves. IF his critique had any merit he would ENCOURAGE the reader to do research for themselves, because he would have the confidence that his critique is strong even against the direct comparison to actual Marxist writings.
Skousen also makes the reader think that by agreeing with him and not thinking for themselves about the points he presented that the reader is smarter than any Marxist could ever be. He also regularly writes in a way that makes Marx and Engels (educated intellectual people btw) appear as though they are nothing more than dumb dreamers who only act out of insecurities.
Furthermore Skousen presents his own opinion as facts and dosent use any sources to credit his claims. Whenever he uses quotes he tries to misconstrue them or in one instance he even used a quote that never existed in the first place, anyone who is familiar with Marxist theory could directly point that out to you, and I’m sorry to say that but how do people actually believe that that quote is real?
Skousen regularly claims that “historians and economics agree” on something or that “even Marxists themself agree on this” without using any quotation or source. Once again a baseless claim and personally I wouldn’t believe anything this man is trying to convince you of.

Now the structure of his chapters:
He starts off by throwing a lot of communist theory at you, and sometimes mixing in his own opinion to already create a negative bias in the reader.
Then he lists off all the “fallacies” (which most of them are just misinterpretations of Marx) and constantly repeats himself. I found this to be a very manipulative structure. By the time the reader, who hasn’t read Marx or is at familiar with his theories and who only learned them in this book, gets to fallacy 6 they have already forgotten the theory that Skousen is criticising. Skousen knows this and uses this for his advantage. He starts misinterpreting Marx and tries to play off his misinterpretation as fact. This ties into the way Skousen is trying to discourage the reader of reading theory for themselves.
He wrote 24 fallacies. Of which a lot of them were pointless repetitions, just to make the chapter longer, just to create a more negative bias in the reader.