Myth-Busting Marx - Fromm on Marx and Critique of the Gotha Programme
The point of this thread: Marx's vision of communism has been corrupted in various ways. Here I set about busting some of the more salient myths.
Please provide direct quotes from Marx or Fromm wherever possible.
Excerpts from Marx’s Concept of Man, by Erich Fromm, published in 1961. (Just a barebones intro.)
Available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/
“There is continuous reference to Marx and to Marxism in the press, in the speeches of politicians, in books and articles written by respectable social scientists and philosophers; yet with few exceptions, it seems that the politicians and newspapermen have never so much as glanced at a line written by Marx, and that the social scientists are satisfied with a minimal knowledge of Marx. Apparently they feel safe in acting as experts in this field, since nobody with power and status in the social research empire challenges their ignorant statements.”
“Marx’s philosophy, like much of existentialist thinking, represents a protest against man’s alienation, his loss of himself and his transformation into a thing.”
“Marx’s aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature.”
“How can it be, then, that Marx’s philosophy is so completely misunderstood and distorted into its opposite?...There are no properly acknowledged authorities who would insist on respect for the facts, for truth. Hence everybody feels entitled to talk about Marx without having read him...Another reason lies in the fact that the Russian Communists appropriated Marx’s theory and tried to convince the world that their practice and theory follow his ideas. Although the opposite is true, the West accepted their propagandistic claims…”
“...in fact, historical materialism is not at all a psychological theory; it claims that the way man produces determines his thinking and his desires, and not that his main desires are those for maximal material gain. Economy in this context refers not to a psychic drive, but to the mode of production…”
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
“...Marx, like Spinoza and later Freud, believed that most of what men consciously think is “false” consciousness, is ideology and rationalization; that the true mainsprings of man’s actions are unconscious to him...Only if false consciousness is transformed into true consciousness, that is, only if we are aware of reality, rather than distorting it by rationalizations and fictions, can we also become aware of our real and true human needs.”
Excerpts from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, published in 1844 and translated into English in 1961 as a part of Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man. (Again, just a barebones intro.)
Available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm (A 1959 translation. Quotes below are from the 1961 translation.)
“...we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity; that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus a restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and finally that the distinction between capitalist and landlord, and between agricultural laborer and industrial worker, must disappear and the whole of society divide into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.”
“...the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object…the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself…The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object.”
“What constitutes the alienation of labor?...the worker does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless.”
“...communism is already aware of being the reintegration of man, his return to himself, the supersession of man’s self-alienation.”
“Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, utilized in some way...Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses; the sense of having.”
“Communism is the positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation, and thus the real appropriation of human nature through and for man. It is, therefore, the return of man himself as a social, i.e., really human, being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development.”
Please provide direct quotes from Marx or Fromm wherever possible.
Excerpts from Marx’s Concept of Man, by Erich Fromm, published in 1961. (Just a barebones intro.)
Available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/
“There is continuous reference to Marx and to Marxism in the press, in the speeches of politicians, in books and articles written by respectable social scientists and philosophers; yet with few exceptions, it seems that the politicians and newspapermen have never so much as glanced at a line written by Marx, and that the social scientists are satisfied with a minimal knowledge of Marx. Apparently they feel safe in acting as experts in this field, since nobody with power and status in the social research empire challenges their ignorant statements.”
“Marx’s philosophy, like much of existentialist thinking, represents a protest against man’s alienation, his loss of himself and his transformation into a thing.”
“Marx’s aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature.”
“How can it be, then, that Marx’s philosophy is so completely misunderstood and distorted into its opposite?...There are no properly acknowledged authorities who would insist on respect for the facts, for truth. Hence everybody feels entitled to talk about Marx without having read him...Another reason lies in the fact that the Russian Communists appropriated Marx’s theory and tried to convince the world that their practice and theory follow his ideas. Although the opposite is true, the West accepted their propagandistic claims…”
“...in fact, historical materialism is not at all a psychological theory; it claims that the way man produces determines his thinking and his desires, and not that his main desires are those for maximal material gain. Economy in this context refers not to a psychic drive, but to the mode of production…”
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
“...Marx, like Spinoza and later Freud, believed that most of what men consciously think is “false” consciousness, is ideology and rationalization; that the true mainsprings of man’s actions are unconscious to him...Only if false consciousness is transformed into true consciousness, that is, only if we are aware of reality, rather than distorting it by rationalizations and fictions, can we also become aware of our real and true human needs.”
Excerpts from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, published in 1844 and translated into English in 1961 as a part of Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man. (Again, just a barebones intro.)
Available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm (A 1959 translation. Quotes below are from the 1961 translation.)
“...we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity; that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus a restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and finally that the distinction between capitalist and landlord, and between agricultural laborer and industrial worker, must disappear and the whole of society divide into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.”
“...the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object…the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less he belongs to himself…The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object.”
“What constitutes the alienation of labor?...the worker does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless.”
“...communism is already aware of being the reintegration of man, his return to himself, the supersession of man’s self-alienation.”
“Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, utilized in some way...Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses; the sense of having.”
“Communism is the positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation, and thus the real appropriation of human nature through and for man. It is, therefore, the return of man himself as a social, i.e., really human, being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development.”
Comments (105)
If anyone out there is in the know with reference to Stalin's rhetorical distortions or has some insight or a reference - it would be sweet of you to share. :love:
The point of this thread: Marx's vision of communism has been corrupted in various ways. Here I set about busting some of the more salient myths.
If your question is in respect to the quotation from Lenin: Here we see Lenin himself assaying to bust a Marx myth.
Until you sort out the problem of forced production en total you have solved nothing but rearranging an already bad system (that is life itself requiring us to produce at all). Unless the aspect of "comply with this production system or die" is out of the equation, the problem is insoluble. Marx had the right notion that man is in chains, but his solution is a false one.. As long as man needs to produce, he will always be alienated in the sense that he must comply with the game of life where production is necessary or else die. He is exploited from the mere fact of his birth and being forced into the merry-go-round of the production-game to begin with.
Your view is tediously narrow. I work in long-term care, where I "produce" end-of-life care for needful elders. While it's at times back-breaking work, I don't feel alienated from the product or from myself or from my work.
Alienation isn't universal.
Unhappiness isn't universal. Maslow has documented that fact: peak and plateau experiences are latent in all of us.
Your record is skipping - why not shift the needle?
Again: What have you done to take responsibility for your unhappiness?
I said: Quoting schopenhauer1
You are not immune from this forced situation.
Imagine telling the proletariat. Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
So they are either exploited or not. If they are not, then your post is irrelevant. If they are, then in a sense, we all are by the conditions of life. That is to say, if universalized to all people, would we be able to get on without being forced to produce to survive? If the answer is no, something is a violation. That violation is the very forced nature of having to produce in the first place.
I'm sorry it's a broken record, but so is a lot of other ethical phenomena. It's all a part of the same, I'm afraid. "Workers unite!" (against what?).. "Forced existors unite!" (against what?). Same message, but instead of the economic sphere it is the actual problem at hand which is the level above.. the existential sphere, on which the economic sits atop.
If I don't give answers relating to the tired old dialectic you are looking for.. then sorry to disappoint your expectations of Marxism (what it really means) versus Capitalism and false notions of Marxism. That has never been done before..
You define 'alienation' as 'complying with the game of life.' That's not what 'alienation' means. QED.
Next, let's define 'red' as 'blue'. Fun.
Quoting Marx's theory of alienation wiki
Just replace bougeoisie with the conditions of life itself. You can throw a snarky fit all you want, but Marx or any other economic theory doesn't "solve" anything, because the problem is production itself. I can make a point that is a meta-analysis and not buy into the dialectic. That is an option here.
I never said it did. I'm just studying it. You have an agenda I'm not interested in. Cheers. :smile:
Exactly what you can't do against the agenda I speak of. Can't say, "not interested". Imagine if you had to debate me at least every workday for at least 8 hours a day.. But ok.. you have a choice not to... but then the meta-choice to not choose any choice doesn't exist. This is a violation. I dare say, being exploited, as someone (universalized to everyone) must be useful as a pre-condition.
Just did. QED.
Your perennial unhappiness is uninteresting. Take responsibility. Grow up. Or continue to live as a child.
What do you think an "unalienated worker" even looks like? You think office workers under the leadership of the "proletariat" and factory workers, and construction workers, and cleaners, and service workers, and all the rest will suddenly be more interesting, less angst, less of the slog of the work day?
Certainly there are things like providing basic safety nets, but that's just plain old liberalism. So what about it?
Or what? Kill yourself.. is the implication. Real fuckn moral.. Any better philosophy or just platitudes akin to something you get in a parenting magazine? Wah wah.. spank spank.. fuck off. Pretty soon you'll be wearing that orangutan suit like ole Banno..
Will do.
Good, cause you would then have to answer what an unalienated worker looks like. I don't think you had a good answer anyways. Cause there is none.
— Marx- Grundrisse
"It is of course very simple to imagine that some powerful, physically dominant individual, after first having caught the animal, then catches humans in order to have them catch animals; in a word, uses human beings as another naturally occurring condition for his reproduction (whereby his own labour reduces itself to ruling) like any other natural creature. But such a notion is stupid – correct as it may be from the standpoint of some particular given clan or commune – because it proceeds from the development of isolated individuals. But human beings become individuals only through the process of history. He appears originally as a species-being [Gattungswesen], clan being, herd animal – although in no way whatever as a ???? ????????? [4] in the political sense. Exchange itself is a chief means of this individuation [Vereinzelung]. It makes the herd-like existence superfluous and dissolves it. Soon the matter [has] turned in such a way that as an individual he relates himself only to himself, while the means with which he posits himself as individual have become the making of his generality and commonness. In this community, the objective being of the individual as proprietor, say proprietor of land, is presupposed, and presupposed moreover under certain conditions which chain him to the community, or rather form a link in his chain. In bourgeois society, the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively; but the thing which stands opposite him has now become the true community [Gemeinwesen], [5] which he tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him."
The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.
It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species-life a means to his physical existence.
The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that species[-life] becomes for him a means.
Estranged labor turns thus:
(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.
(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.
In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.
The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.
Hence within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which he finds himself as a worker.
||XXV| We took our departure from a fact of political economy – the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labor. We have analyzed this concept – hence analyzing merely a fact of political economy.
Let us now see, further, how the concept of estranged, alienated labor must express and present itself in real life.
If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?
To a being other than myself.
Who is this being?
The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labor. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labor and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product to please these powers.
The alien being, to whom labor and the product of labor belongs, in whose service labor is done and for whose benefit the product of labor is provided, can only be man himself.
If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.
We must bear in mind the previous proposition that man’s relation to himself becomes for him objective and actual through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labor, his labor objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own activity as an unfree activity, then he treats it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man.
Every self-estrangement of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labor man not only creates his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers [in the manuscript Menschen (men) instead of Mächte (powers). – Ed.] that are alien and hostile to him; he also creates the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he creates his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he creates the domination of the person who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges his own activity from himself, so he confers upon the stranger an activity which is not his own.
We have until now considered this relationship only from the standpoint of the worker and later on we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.
Through estranged, alienated labor, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labor of a man alien to labor and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labor). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.
Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labor, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labor, of estranged life, of estranged man.
True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labor (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.
Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labor, and that on the other it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.
This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_the_Gotha_Programme#:~:text=The%20Critique%20of%20the%20Gotha,Engels%20were%20in%20close%20association.
It's refreshing to see such a humble confession - that you've never read a lick of Marx. This thread is here, in part, to educate silly-willies of your ilk. Enjoy!
https://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv2ch04.html
Hard not to see democracy itself demonized as a wicked piece of Jewish/Marxist insanity. Only geniuses are worth anything. The proles should know their place and lick shiny boots. Shiny shiny boots of leather.
And I smell a little 'but billionaires are job creators!" in there too. And what billionaire or macho real man from the Marlboro billboard, coughing up his last hoorah in Boomerville, could object to the denuded social Darwinism and ye old myth of the self-made Scrooge ?
Ha, right out of Atlas Shrugged. Illuminating parallel. Thanks for the quote.
My pleasure. Kind of nice to approach things sometimes through their demonizers.
And from some of the more questionable passages in Herr Nietzsche (who is great nevertheless overall.)
Do you blame Jesus for the zillion Christian atrocities - do you blame Jesus for the Westboro Baptist Church?
godhatesfags.com
Try reading the OP before you jump in with your reactionary nonsense.
...Clearly through such a twisted ideological lens that nothing of Marx's vision landed. In that sense - you haven't read a lick of Marx.
Try the links in the OP - and take off your Fox-News-colored glasses.
@jamal
Can you get this guy off this thread? His first post referenced Hitler and it's only gone downhill from there. Thank you!
A great thinker and iconoclast - but not a great man, to my view.
I confess I use a couple of passages from Zarathustra as a scapular. :wink:
That's okay, don't mind your deleting them. Thanks for stepping in. I'll do my best to hold my tongue in the future. (Not easy..........)
In Russian, Chinese, and other totalitarian regimes the model followed was the centuries long despotism of the preceding regimes, and the character of the people who led the respective revolutions. There is not too much that is admirable in Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, et al.
Because it was buried in its own little grave of the bureaucratized, stale, moldy Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and capitalist repression, the democratic model of American socialism faded into oblivion. De Leon, Debs, and others held that democratic processes (union organizing, political campaigning, education, voting, legislation, etc.) were the route that should be pursued to socialism. It was tried in the early 20th century.
Did it succeed? No, obviously. Why not? It was repressed the same way that unions were repressed: long campaigns of negative propaganda, laws blocking organizing activity, covert infiltration and disruption, and so forth. The democratic model remains, however, and option where democratic life occurs. Socialist prospects in the United States? Poor to DOA.
Thanks for the thoughtful post.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Makes you wonder why Rightists are always sounding the socialism siren. We're already too socialist for the bulk of the upper-class to super-rich.
"By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts — but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively."
- Fromm, The Sane Society, p.120 Sect.C.2.b "Alienation”
"We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them."
- Fromm, The Sane Society p.134 Sect.C.2.b "Alienation”
We need to investigate why and how good ideas fail.
Marxism, it seems, in but a coupla years, spawns dictators (cults of personality). The Supreme Leader lives, if you notice, a capitalist life, amassing wealth like how entrepreneurs in capitalist societies are allowed to. The rest - ordinary folk - are prohibited from engaging in any private enterprise.
So much kindness and humanity in Fromm's writings - along with some novel and illuminating psychology. I was a bit astonished to discover that Fromm and the Frankfurts have been demonized by the right as purveyors of an insidious form of cultural Marxism. I can only suppose it's the anti-capitalist iconoclasm that gets their goat. And the general challenge to the political and cultural status quo. As if it's not obvious to anyone with eyes to see that our society has gone insane.
Might as well blame Jesus for the ostentation of the Catholic church and for all the little boys molested by the Pope's meiny. It's the same kind of link - of social visionary to the momentum of corruptive opportunism.
This thread is an attempt to take a look at Marx's actual words - in the hope that it will give us a clearer picture of how profoundly his vision has been corrupted.
Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme is said to provide a clear picture of how Marx would have liked to see his vision put into action. I hope to take a close look at it soon. It's online here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
That said, I'll always be a student of Marxism and never a master.
If you can find some justification for a cultic Supreme Leader in Marx's words, I'm all ears.
I think that's spot on.
Sad that their ideology commits them to overlooking the profound humanity of a thinker like Fromm.
The banality of [ultra-conservatism]...
I'm not well-versed in Marxism to formulate a sensible reply to your question. All I can say is there's a link between Marxism and totalitarianism. Is it just an accident, a question of circumstances, or is Marx's ideology deeply flawed?
That's the big question here.
:snicker: Well, I recall someone telling me that accidents are to be expected and there's nothing interesting going on unless, he said, it always happens at the same spot!
I'm not convinced that we can say Marx's ideology is deeply flawed given that those totalitarian, ostensibly 'communist' states didn't actually follow Marx.
I would say there is something inherently dangerous in the aftermath of any social/political revolution, whether it be Communism, Fascism, secular or religious. What does Zizek say again? 'The biggest problem with revolution is the morning after.' Human nature and power play have a habit of hijacking and distorting the fidelity of theory.
Quoting Tom Storm
"What I'm interested in is the morning after. That is to say: The measure of a successful...revolution is... how will ordinary people feel the morning after when things return to normal? Here our fantasies reach a limit."
Zizek
https://youtu.be/Z_4cjK0Lb9Q. About two minutes in.
The Declaration of the Right to be Guillotined.
An Arab spring with a Muslim Brotherhood winter.
Strange fruit from an Eden seed.
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root... And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Stage 1:
Stage 2:
A summary: https://marcellomusto.org/marxs-ethnological-notebooks/
He also, apparently, did a lot of ecological research in the period between the publication of the first volume of Capital and his death. But I don't believe those notes have been (widely) published yet as I can't find them.
"Corrupted" and also amended. Some of his criticisms of capitalism have not aged well but some others have.
I think it is clear his main criticism of capitalism was in fact wrong. He predicted that capitalism would lead to an increase in poverty. In his time it is quite easy to see why he would think this, but he was simply proven wrong by history on this main point.
That said, many of his subordinate criticisms of capitalism have yet to be resolved.
It is probably worth listening to what someone said about Lenin here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TK9c-caEcw
It aged very well actually. You should read up on his ideas on technological and geographical displacement (to the perifere) as well as displacement in time. Profit seeking runs on externalising costs. The burdens on the perifery and future generations are huge and even in contemporary western society most people are significantly in debt for the majority of their lives.
That is not to say he pointed out valid issues with capitalism. I do not believe any one in history has ever been proven correct in every prediction that they made - and even those that were correct are seldom so for valid reasons.
Patience is key here. In my opinion, the current middle class will indeed get sucked down into poverty. Just give it a bit more time.
Charles Dickens made the very same kind of predictions too. It is completely understandable given the socio-politcal climate of their times. It just didn't pan out as they expected.
And again, all that aside, Marx certainly pointed out problems with the economic system that are worthy of examination today. I am not simply dismissing every criticism he had of capitalism.
It generally does happen.
Two social classes always exist.
The ruling mafia, by virtue of its power, will always top the income ladder. It does not matter how you organize society because there will always be a ruling class, and political power will always translate into money.
There will also always be a bottom to society, if only for geometrical reasons. It will also always accumulate lots of people.
Concerning the size of any class in the middle, hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times.
Women go in tandem. Replace "good men" by "virtuous women", and "weak men" by "promiscuous women" ("hoeflation").
Furthermore, for political reasons, it is necessary that the ruling elite plunders the middle class and shares (some of) the loot with the bottom class.
Of course, the ruling oligarchy will never plunder themselves for that purpose. Hence, "let's tax the rich" is an utmost laughable slogan, but the populace always seems stupid enough to believe it.
The middle class is busy becoming poor at the moment. That is the point in the cycle that we are currently at.
EDIT: and there's also something to be said for relative poverty, where growth in GDP ends up mostly in the pocket of a limited few. An effect that has severely increased in the past decades as well.
Western "material progress" has largely been run on the exploitation of people in the perifery and exploitation of nature (also locally but more so in the perifery).
In other words, there are more roads that will lead to "communism", in this case the Mir as the fulcrum for social regeneration.
EDIT: Capital was very eurocentric, the 20 years after its publication, Marx studied a lot of anthropology and ecology, which resulted in him abandoning a strict productivist belief.
Redistribution is never from the (truly) rich to the poor. The ruling mafia will never use its power to redistribute away from itself. That is just a political fairy tale.
Redistribution always takes place from the middle class to the poor. Redistribution does not help the middle class at all. On the contrary, it burdens the middle class to no end. It impoverishes the middle class. Progressive taxation only targets the middle class. It will never, ever affect the ruling oligarchy itself.
If you have wealth but no political power -- no matter how much wealth -- then you are just middle class, and then you are one step away from becoming poor. You are just waiting for the moment at which the ruling oligarchy singles you out and mercilessly plunders your possessions, some of which they will give to the poor, but most of which they will use to enrich themselves.
Power always translates into money. Lack of power always translates into losing your money.
It did not happen. If you cannot admit this simple truth then there is nothing to discuss.
He has yet to be proven right about where a communist revolution would occur too. Where they did occur did not fit into his vision at all.
You are probably too impatient. A century or two is nothing in the history of mankind.
The ruling oligarchy has always owned and controlled the means of production. The feudal lords owned pretty much all the land.
While the middle class owns quite a few of the businesses, it does not have the political power to protect their ownership from the ruling mafia.
How is that supposed to keep flying?
That system is clearly unstable.
The ruling mafia systematically confiscates excess wealth and excess income from those who do not have the political power to keep them at bay.
It is pretty much a law of nature that the ruling mafia will come for what you have. It is an ongoing process. It is just a question of time before they will catch up with you.
Therefore, I agree with Marx. The middle class is just a temporary anomaly.
GL
I personally think that Marx misunderstood who exactly was going to benefit from the revolution. He argued that the proletariat would. Of course, the proletariat wouldn't. It was the new ruling mafia that would.
His analysis still made quite a bit of sense.
The new middle-class factory owners were not a realistic replacement for the erstwhile feudal lords. They did not have the political power. Therefore, they didn't stand a chance. The ruling mafia were simply going to stomp them into oblivion, and they did.
You cannot just separate political power from ownership of the means of production.
I believe that there is an inevitable trend in which the ruling oligarchs will own all the excess wealth and control all the means of production.
You will own nothing.
They will own everything.
That is the only truly stable situation.
Therefore, you could as well cut the process short, let the ruling mafia take over all the businesses, and let them have complete communist power and control.
Modern capitalism amounts to endlessly beating around the bush, with feeble attempts to delay and deny the inevitable. The feudal lords will come back. They will own and control everything, because that is simply human nature.
I am in the process of reading this currently and it may serve you well to have a browse of it.
I am currently reading several works covering the broader topic of society. If you have any suggestions for me too would be very much appreciated. I try to cover subjects from as many unique perspectives as I can.
Thanks
The ruling mafia wants more power. Welcome to the real world.
The feudal lords are a good example of how society really works. In comparison, the bourgeoisie is just a silly joke. Where are the swords of the bourgeoisie to justify any political power?
How naive!
Plato also sounds naive. Stalin was a great mafioso because he was originally a petty criminal. Stalin profoundly understood the tentacles of power.
The children of mafioso are not necessarily successful mafioso. That is indeed why the ruling mafia does not necessarily perpetuate itself along inherited blood lines.
Giving the state, i.e. the ruling mafia, control over education is indeed a recipe for disaster.
The idea that philosophers would be effective rulers, is laughable. Even petty criminals are more effective mafioso. A ruler may have to elbow his way to the top. You don't get there by using philosophy. You get there by gunning down your competitors.
So, Stalin would elbow his way all the way to the top just to give up his power when he got there? How naive. Popper is right about Marx and the gullibility of his views.
There are obviously more nuances than in the Wiki entry.
He offers some opposition to what you seem to be sketching out as inevitable. Reading the introduction should give you a reasonable outline of this with the distinction of an Open Society and Closed Society and how in our civilised state we are caught between harking for some form of primitive Closed Societal tribalism or transferring this paradigm into rational society by recreating a 'magical' scheme that results in tyranny (authoritarianism).
In terms of naivety I am fairly sure Popper would frame your position as naive due to a clinging to historicism.
Either way, it is an interesting read whether you agree or not. Will help you to either fortify your opinions with a more rational opposing line of argumentation, or perhaps question some assumptions you consider to be fundamental.
No reading suggestions for me?
Note:
Quoting Tarskian
That was over two millennia ago. Keep the context in mind.
I am not necessarily a historicist, even though I certainly acknowledge the importance of history.
I have a very simplistic view on politics. At the top, you have the ruling mafia. At the bottom, you have the populace. I cannot imagine a society without either. I acknowledge the existence of both but I do not trust either.
I have read the entire Incerto series by Nassim Taleb. In the meanwhile, the man has become quite controversial.
But then again, I enjoyed reading "Black Swan. Impact of the highly improbable.", "Antifragile. Things that benefit from disorder.", "Fooled by randomness", and "Skin in the game".
Nassim Taleb is good at debunking.
Still, Taleb should stay away from Twitter. His flame wars are embarrassing.
I like reading books that cynically debunk mainstream views. I would never read a book that advocates for direct liberal democracy. I would only read a book that completely and utterly debunks it.
Democracy is rule by the mob. I will never endorse it.
This is precisely what Popper is looking at. He seems to view this as a remnant of Closed Society carried on in Open Society. Something akin to harking back to a "Golden Age" where some magnificent Ruler held sway over society.
Quoting Tarskian
Ah! Heard of the Black Swan idea before. Looks interesting.
Quoting Tarskian
If that is how you see Democracy then who would ever disagree with that? Mob rule is not exactly an enticing idea :)
Like every single ideology it has its uses but also its limitations. Popper does not offer a solution only seems intent on pointing out the reason for the problems - that is Reason itself. The cat is out of the bag now so we just have to sit back and see how things play out.
I have had the feeling that we are living through a very significant revolution right now (on the scale of the creation of civilization) but like many a blind sage I am probably completely wrong because the more I come to learn about everything the less certain I am about anything. Undoubtedly every person in every age felt some kind of severe revolutionary movement on the immediate horizon.
I am a digital nomad slash nomad capitalist.
A country is to me just an alternative jurisdiction competing with 200+ other ones. I have no stake in any particular one. I do not vote in any particular one. I just go where I am treated best.
So, if one particular country decides to start a severe revolutionary movement, I do not see how it would affect me personally. I do not understand how people can identify so much with one particular ruling mafia, i.e. one country's jurisdiction.
How do they even benefit from that?
I consider the following statement to be the most manipulative bullshit ever pronounced on the face of this earth:
“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. John F. Kennedy”
Seriously? WTF!?
Some people even volunteer to die in foreign lands for their ruling mafia. I cannot imagine any decision more stupid than that. The ruling mafia does not give a flying fart about you. Never have. Never will. So, why would you?
I agree with everything here pretty much except the view that there is a "ruling mafia". I do not believe most of what happens in the political sphere is directed by any upper echelon of society. Things just move along and some people claim ownership of the resulting milieu if it adheres to their ideology.
I have not quite processed let alone regurgitated something taken from Adam Smith. The 'Invisible-Hand' but kind of find something intriguing about how Nozick reformed the idea little.
When I look at economics in general I am more interested in the distribution and scarcity of ideas and aesthetic sensibilities than focusing so intently on commodities.
I believe that there is always someone who is going to benefit from what they do, because otherwise, they wouldn't do it. Seriously, otherwise they would not lift a finger.
They are in the business of making money from what they have, i.e. political power.
Everybody is incessantly monetizing whatever they can make money from. So, why wouldn't they?
So, whatever they say or do, I safely assume that there is always someone who will cash in handsomely and somehow do fifty-fifty with them. It is usually not even particularly hard to figure out on whom they are busy showering political profits.
The ruling oligarchy is a mafia. Always have been. Always will be.
For example, why did Britain start a war with the Ottoman empire in 1914? Certainly not because they liked their Russian so-called "allies" so much. That was just a convenient excuse. They wanted war with the Ottomans because someone was going to benefit handsomely from that conflict. The human cannon fodder from the colonies and the dominions certainly did not die for nothing in Gallipoli.
A nuanced view is possible, like the following from Allen Wood, philosopher and scholar of German Idealism:
It's a great book, by the way.
He reinterpreted Feuerbach and Hegel into an original eschatology and ontology based around materialism, along with a few ideas of his own (and for history, there exist Marxist historians -- I'm not sure I'd say he's a historian, but a theorist of history, which gets suspiciously close to philosophy) -- the synthesis isn't always pretty, but I think it's appropriate to call Marx a philosopher first and foremost, at least in the vein of Nietzsche's notion of a philosopher as tablet-breaker: even philosophy changes meaning in Marx, in my estimation -- or, at least, the good kind, which does more than reinterpret the world. (though that could be read as a break from philosophy, I generally see it as a change in the notion of what constitutes good philosophy)
Quoting Deleted user
And what are the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, chopped liver?
His blend of the classical economists was a very philosophical endeavor in that he was digging into their ideas and developing them at the philosophical level when economists had long moved on, at least by my understanding from a book i read, from the likes of the Ricardian Socialists, and even Adam Smith!
But those "classical" economic concepts are the ideas he's developing. He does it alongside documentation, which is why I think he calls his project "scientific" -- there's some empirical substantiation to the trends he's describing when he looks at the laws and arguments of the time.
What I think makes his project particularly acute now is neoliberalism basically resurrecting classical economics, so the development of those ideas fits since the attack on the Keynesian "fix". The class of owners had children who thought to themselves "we can extract more surplus value", and didn't care how they got there. Much as Marx describes the bourgeoisie as ruthless extractors.
One of the things here is scope: the "workers" need not be in our nation, or those we traditionally consider workers. The proletariat is defined as that group of workers who 1) voluntarily trade their labor in a system of exchange, 2) are paid just enough to survive and reproduce the next generation of workers for the capitalist system.
At least as I'd reduce it. Marx's works -- and Marxism overall, which is even richer than Marx -- I like to joke it's the Materialist's Talmudic scripts which can be argued forever.
But I don't think that's bad. I think it's a feature of a thinker constantly developing while attempting to understand a problem from classical economics: Where does wealth come from? Why does capital generate wealth? -- which is combined with a humanistic desire to liberate humanity from their shackles : "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains."
And even more I'd say that Marx's conception of philosophy is revolutionary. This is the part that connects him to, at least as I understand him, the likes of Plato: the health of the city is the primary concern. And so he goes on to describe the city....
He claimed his work was scientific.
I see Capital as an attempt at a scientific description of wealth generation for the purposes of the workers to be able to organize and effect change for the better from this description: if a worker believes that wealth is generated by individual hard work and that the firm will reward them for their individual hard work then they'll engage in the firm in an individualistic manner. If a worker understands that the firm is there to exploit labor-power, no matter where you land in the firm, then the worker will engage in the firm in a collective manner.
Some individuals really are so good that they can "shoot past" the rest, though I think it's a bit selfish. But for the rest of us his description points out a knowledge he loved, but a knowledge from the standpoint of the bronze souled people.
According to modern standards, it means that Marx would have experimentally tested his hypothesis.
It is thanks to people like Marx that Karl Popper finally investigated what the term "scientific" means:
It is the investigation into why Marx' work is not scientific that led to the modern epistemology of science. Marx' work is one of the canonical counterexamples.
These benefits predictable started concentrating in the hands of the apparatchiks of the Soviet Union.
Political power always concentrates in the hands of the few in power, i.e. the ruling mafia. Political power always translates into accumulating economic benefits for the ones who have it. All excess income and excess wealth will end up exactly there. So, Marx successfully replaced the bourgeoisie by the apparatchiks of the communist State.
A democracy still has a ruling oligarchy. Political power still concentrates in the hands of the few in power. The ruling mafia still ends up with the excess income and excess wealth.
It is not possible to change the inevitable geometry of society. A society has a top where the political power is located. A society has a bottom with a restless, gullible, and eminently manipulable populace.
It is an illusion to believe that the voting circus will make any difference to that.
I am not interested in improving anything.
I simply go where I am treated best.
I vote with my feet instead.
I do not choose to stay in any of the so-called democracies of the West. In all practical terms, everything else turns out to work much better for me. Vietnam is supposedly an autocracy. Well, I would choose Vietnam any day over any of the so-called democracies in the EU or North America.
Seriously, I do not care if a country is an "autocracy" or not. If I get treated better over there, then that country is better for me. There are currently around 40+ million digital nomads, and growing, and pretty much none of us choose to stay in the so-called western democracies.
Quoting Benkei
Yeah -- at present I think that's so. The economy ought have more democratic means of making decisions to include all stakeholders in a negotiation.
Marx definitely claimed science for his socialism, but I don't think it's a "worse" thing because he was in that era when it looked like science could solve it all: He's 1 generation after August Comte, and Hegel's philosophy emphasizes itself as scientific -- it's just in what we'd call the "old" way of saying "scientific" because it's an organized body of knowledge, whereas Marx seems to straddle these two ways of thinking of science. Sometimes it's an organized body of knowledge, and sometimes it predicts the stages of history ala August Comte's Positivism.
I very much disagree with the "stages" view as mistaken historiography/sociology -- though think there's something about the industrial revolution and the rise of the shop-owners over the Lords and church that is hard to understand, where Marx gives a good explanation for it: they acquired means of producing wealth greater than the lords and formed coalitions to increase their influence, as humans do when they can, and things proceeded from there.
But I think Capital describes capitalism from the perspective of the worker in the most scientific manner thus far at least. Economics after Marx shy away from production-centric theories of value, while explicitly ignoring all the things Marx says about exchange in order to focus in on what those economists care about: Markets, firms, profits, etc.
There's also the fact that Marx and Engels were using the term Wissenschaft, which is broader than science as commonly understood in English today. They meant that their socialism was systematic, not merely Utopian. They certainly didn't mean to equate it with empirical sciences.
Although you're probably right, @Moliere, that they were attempting to reach beyond that older sense of science to something modern.
The term "democracy", "rule by the people", is in and of itself already nonsensical because in reality a country is always "ruled by the oligarchy".
This is a matter of simple geometry.
There is always a hierarchical top to society where all the political power accumulates, and therefore, also pretty much all the wealth.
Efforts to make the populace believe in the always-fake democracy are very bad for the people that they are supposed to serve. You are just bamboozling them a bit more.
It is simply not possible to prevent the concentration of political power and therefore of wealth.
In the Penguin edition of Capital, v1 introduction (page 12 for the viewers at home):
Going back to something to remind myself here -- I've seen Capital, v1 described as Newton's laws of motion for capitalism before, and the quote here gives a limitation to that expression in that Newton was aiming to be universal, but Marx's description is limited to Capitalism.
But still law-like, in that new scientific sense, like Newton. (I generally consider the currently accepted sciences as the new scientific sense: The scholastics had an organized body of knowledge, but Descartes wanted to talk about The World, which Newton's text is similar in that regard of trying to "explain it all")