Marx and the Serious Question of Private Property
Quotes from Marx interspersed with brief commentary:
"The property in the soil is the original source of all wealth, and has become the great problem upon the solution of which depends the future of the working class."
Though this point might seem simple, it's most certainly not in our day and age. People do not think that wealth proceeds from the earth, most people believe it proceeds from innovation, pure idealism, but such idealism would have no matter to bring its form into being without the earth.
"...the advocates of private property... have tried hard to disguise the primitive fact of conquest under the cloak of "Natural Right". If conquest constituted a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them."
At the time this was written it would have been exceedingly hard for humans to escape from the concept of "Natural Right," for that matter it still is. Marx makes light work of the error of the position. If conquest is equal to "Natural Right," then men merely need to overthrow the present land owners and re-establish themselves as the recipients of "Natural Right." Such a political method is known as barbarism. Tragic that men still cannot discern that conquest does not amount to justification or "Natural Right."
"In the progress of history the conquerors found it convenient to give to their original titles, derived from brute force, a sort of social standing through the instrumentality of laws imposed by themselves."
This is just as true today as it was in the past. The conqueror dictates the narrative, the language of normativity, but what he cannot see, is that this sets a boundary to the qualitative progress of society. Law then becomes a political ideology of control, as opposed to an agent of liberation. Marx was the most un-naive philosopher that ever existed.
"At last comes the philosopher and demonstrates that those laws imply and express the universal consent of mankind. If private property in land be indeed founded upon such an universal consent, it will evidently become extinct from the moment the majority of a society dissent from warranting it."
Here Marx is attacking the philosopher for creating a false metaphysics which justifies oppressive power structures. Producing a metaphysics which justifies tyranny, is the default trajectory of every thinker that remains ignorant of class distinctions. In other words, though he thinks himself to be laboring in the domain of liberty, through ignorance he is actually reinforcing the oppression of the status quo.
This is the most interesting citation:
"However, leaving aside the so-called "rights" of property, I assert that the economical development of society, the increase and concentration of people, the very circumstances that compel the capitalist farmer to apply to agriculture collective and organised labour, and to have recourse to machinery and similar contrivances, will more and more render the nationalisation of land a "Social Necessity", against which no amount of talk about the rights of property can be of any avail. The imperative wants of society will and must be satisfied, changes dictated by social necessity will work their own way, and sooner or later adapt legislation to their interests."
Marx's statement is already a fact. Social necessity has rendered the restructuring of private property absolutely imperative in order to meet the needs of society. But this is where it gets interesting, while Marx is assuredly correct, the question arises, even though serious changes are required, will necessity be enough to bring about an intelligent restructuring? The danger is that though the needs exist, a chain of power determines to defy these needs regardless of the ramifications.
* Marx, The Nationalization of the Land, Marx and Engles Collected Works Volume 23
[The second post, MARX AND THE SERIOUS QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY II, is contained on page 4 of the thread.]
"The property in the soil is the original source of all wealth, and has become the great problem upon the solution of which depends the future of the working class."
Though this point might seem simple, it's most certainly not in our day and age. People do not think that wealth proceeds from the earth, most people believe it proceeds from innovation, pure idealism, but such idealism would have no matter to bring its form into being without the earth.
"...the advocates of private property... have tried hard to disguise the primitive fact of conquest under the cloak of "Natural Right". If conquest constituted a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them."
At the time this was written it would have been exceedingly hard for humans to escape from the concept of "Natural Right," for that matter it still is. Marx makes light work of the error of the position. If conquest is equal to "Natural Right," then men merely need to overthrow the present land owners and re-establish themselves as the recipients of "Natural Right." Such a political method is known as barbarism. Tragic that men still cannot discern that conquest does not amount to justification or "Natural Right."
"In the progress of history the conquerors found it convenient to give to their original titles, derived from brute force, a sort of social standing through the instrumentality of laws imposed by themselves."
This is just as true today as it was in the past. The conqueror dictates the narrative, the language of normativity, but what he cannot see, is that this sets a boundary to the qualitative progress of society. Law then becomes a political ideology of control, as opposed to an agent of liberation. Marx was the most un-naive philosopher that ever existed.
"At last comes the philosopher and demonstrates that those laws imply and express the universal consent of mankind. If private property in land be indeed founded upon such an universal consent, it will evidently become extinct from the moment the majority of a society dissent from warranting it."
Here Marx is attacking the philosopher for creating a false metaphysics which justifies oppressive power structures. Producing a metaphysics which justifies tyranny, is the default trajectory of every thinker that remains ignorant of class distinctions. In other words, though he thinks himself to be laboring in the domain of liberty, through ignorance he is actually reinforcing the oppression of the status quo.
This is the most interesting citation:
"However, leaving aside the so-called "rights" of property, I assert that the economical development of society, the increase and concentration of people, the very circumstances that compel the capitalist farmer to apply to agriculture collective and organised labour, and to have recourse to machinery and similar contrivances, will more and more render the nationalisation of land a "Social Necessity", against which no amount of talk about the rights of property can be of any avail. The imperative wants of society will and must be satisfied, changes dictated by social necessity will work their own way, and sooner or later adapt legislation to their interests."
Marx's statement is already a fact. Social necessity has rendered the restructuring of private property absolutely imperative in order to meet the needs of society. But this is where it gets interesting, while Marx is assuredly correct, the question arises, even though serious changes are required, will necessity be enough to bring about an intelligent restructuring? The danger is that though the needs exist, a chain of power determines to defy these needs regardless of the ramifications.
* Marx, The Nationalization of the Land, Marx and Engles Collected Works Volume 23
[The second post, MARX AND THE SERIOUS QUESTION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY II, is contained on page 4 of the thread.]
Comments (309)
I don't necessarily disagree with any of this, but I think it all misses what is I think is the most important argument for private property, which is human nature.
People want to own stuff and owning stuff motivates them to take care of it. Take away private property and a lot of that motivation goes away.
There's no further need to justify private property in metaphysics or natural rights or any of that. If human nature is indeed such that private property is a key part of what motivates people, then theories that don't take that into account are doomed to fail in practice.
You may dispute that view on human nature off course, but ultimately it is an empirical claim and the evidence seems to be in favour of it.
Yes, and that is a bad situation too which will end up creating problems.
Maybe the conclusion of these two propositions taken together then is that the solution to a few owning everything, is not abolishing private property altogether, but retaining the idea of private property while also finding a way so that it doesn't end up in a few owning everything.
I suspect that the societal corrections will never even remotely resemble anything intelligent. There was societal restructuring that happened in France during the late 18th century...and societal restructuring that happened in Russia during the early 20th century. Neither was "intelligent"...both were torturous.
I think that is the way the restructuring or corrections have to occur.
We'll see...and probably sooner than most suspect.
Right now here in America, the wealthiest 1% owns 40% of the nations wealth. The bottom 80% (80%!!!) own only 7% of the wealth.
It is a social disaster waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, a decent percentage of the population sees this as a non-problem.
Not sure of what percentages would change those folk.
Would the top 1% owning 80% of the wealth finally make a difference to the indifferent?
I suspect not.
So the solution will probably be a variation of the French or Russian solutions mentioned above.
No my friend, what the evidence favors is that human personality structures are conditioned by 1) attachment systems and 2) quality and stability of environment, this includes food and shelter (the vital parts of the brain must develop and mature without trauma or nutrient deficiencies). There is no such thing as "human nature," (a psychological predisposition to which all humans are subject) this is a false metaphysics.
Anyhow, this thread is not about the myth of human nature, which fascism so desperately needs to hold onto in order to justify its primitive narrative of good versus evil.
It seems you are under the impression that Marx rejected private property. Where did you derive this idea? Can you provide a citation? Marx was against the unintelligibility of capitalist formations of private property -- because they don't make any sense when you think of them in terms of the well-being and needs of the species. Everyone is in need of space in order to live, capitalism negates this fact, segregates it and begins to use it as a tyranny, coercion-leverage.
If you think you have figured out the social world because you make use of the false metaphysical concept of "human nature..." all I can tell you is that you haven't even entered the room where the adults speak, you are in much need of a critical education.
The nationalization of property does not mean the abnegation of private property. Please read more carefully before you reply next time.
Really? Perhaps you could compare your OP with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
You are going to have to give a further exposition of your point if you want feedback. The way you cite me makes me think you have not understood my point? Provincialism is only a fragment of reality, one cannot ascertain the state of the world by looking through the lens of America. Further, the fact of needs does not imply a response, the needs do exist, you seem to be assuming that in order for social necessity to be an actual thing you must see some kind of response to it? If you want to cite Adam Smith in relation to this thread, by all means do it, a proper citation would only add to the discourse.
More than he knows for sure, Marx has extended commentary on Smith. The Libertarian, one-sided Adam Smith, the raving capitalist, seems to be the one that most people latch onto, because most people don't read.
So true. All this means is that serious intellectuals have much work to do. Ignorance is the mother of tyranny.
@ChatteringMonkey even if we accept the view of human nature you briefly alluded to, it isn't clear which type of property you mean. I think most of what you say is an argument for limited personal property but is not an argument that extends to ownership over means of production, for example.
@JerseyFlight Would it be correct to say that, on your view, Marx was a critic of ownership rights over means of production, but not over personal property (like a home, a television, etc.)?
I also really think we should bring out the criticism of the concept of 'human nature' into full focus. This is a concept that many people rely on when arguing, and it is not one that never is clearly defined. It is used to suit one's argument, usually.
I actually don't want to argue over Marx's orthodoxy, the world of Marxism is full of such banter. So to answer the question, at the same time moving beyond the question, the problem is that property is not intelligently distributed in light of a social awareness. No one is talking about abolishing private property, that is something close to what the Libertarian position amounts to, the intelligent suggestion is to make sure all humans have property. That property must be socialized is inevitable, but this will not make it realized. The inescapable needs of human life dictate that an advanced species would never neglect these needs, or leave them to the chaos of a system such as capitalism. An advanced species would know the needs HAVE to be met for one specific reason: individual quality is inescapably linked to social quality. (It's the difference between one Einstein every two thousand years, or the common cultivation of Einstein). A species cannot advance without species consciousness. So far as I know Marx was the first philosopher to ever comprehend this specifically.
I will clarify that I am not a Marxist. I do not believe in Marxist revolution, what I see in Marx is (astoundingly!) one of the greatest thinkers that ever lived.
You are correct, but it seems to me this needs to be the topic of another thread. Also, we are not guessing here. The Human-Nature-Metaphysicians have no ground to stand on apart from isolated and distorted historical images (these images prey on fear). Their position is exceedingly primitive, it has been entirely refuted by recent discoveries in psychology and neurobiology. There is no way around it without suppressing and ignoring concrete facts of being. They are desperate because much hinges on their cynical, negative metaphysics. Through this error they essentially justify barbarism. Every intellectual that uses words to make progress, as opposed to physical violence, must stand against this.
I don't get it, why do you post quotes that directly and without qualification attack the idea of private property if not to reject the idea of private property. What's you point then?
There's nothing metaphysical about humans having certain tendencies, it's an empirical claim, as I said. If you have spend for instance any time observing infants, that can hardly be said to be indoctrinated by culture already, you'd know that there is strong tendency to appropriate things for themselves. This is for the most part not something that culture imposes on us, it is in our genes.
Thinking in terms of well-being and what we need as a species, won't work if it doesn't align with what we want. Two different things. You need to work with what people want, otherwise it won't work, this is a very simple point.
And I'll say this once, if you continue the discussion in the same pompous vein, I'm done with it.
No need for this here: Quoting ChatteringMonkey
What separates humans from other primates is that we look to the adults to obtain information about ourselves and our environment. What a human is and will be depends upon his environment, and here we use the term in the broadest possible sense, both physical and psychological. What you are claiming is not empirical, it is a fiction, humans become what they are as their brain develops and passes through concrete experience structures (see Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self). You are asserting that humans come preset, this is a superstition left over from religion. "Human Nature" does not exist, human brains exist, and they are exceedingly sensitive, what your brain experiences and how it develops determines who you are and what you become. If you abuse a child, neglect him, he will grow up to abuse others, he will be selfish, there will be many problems. Humans are not born predisposed to the negative. This is a religious assertion, not a scientific fact.
It does to some extend, people are motivated to care for things they consider 'theirs'. What they consider theirs is a fluid concept to some extend, in the sense you can get them to care for things that are not actually their property, like a 'nation' or a 'sports team', but there needs to be some identification for them to care. And so, the argument does extend to the means of production insofar as someone needs to be motivated to put those means to good use.
This proves that you can't even enter the room to talk with the adults, and this is why: it is the most basic knowledge of sociology and social psychology that human wants can be artificially generated. This is what consumer culture is all about, generating artificial needs. One thing people should not do is listen to any advice you have on how to approach the problems of the world, because you have clearly manifest that you don't even comprehend the most basic parts of the system. I'm not trying to be mean, this is a problem if you want to converse with any kind of authority. If I was you I would return to education, specifically psychology and sociology. (If you want to learn how to think powerfully read Hegel and Marx, if you want to learn how to calculate and shift symbols across the page, devote your life to analytical philosophy).
Quoting JerseyFlight
I disagree, culture plays a part of course, I never said otherwise, but it seems hard to deny there are some basic tendencies that are hard to unlearn. Artificially created humans wants typically are created because they promise people social success, status etc... The specific iteration of objects we attach those desires to may differ, but the underlying desires that make people want those things are usually pretty similar.... in short will to power.
Once again, more of the dark ages brought into the present. Will power as you speak of it does not exist, your will is determined by your motivation and motivation is caused by a plurality of psychological and physical factors. You cannot tell a brain lacking grey matter to simply try harder! This is my last exchange with you. You need to educate yourself and stop trying to see what will stick. I wish you all the best. :)
Quoting JerseyFlight
Different things.
You just can't help yourself, can you? It's certainly clear what motivates you :-).
State or mob confiscation of land is barbarism of the highest order, no matter which cadre of intellectuals think the know how to do it best.
Can you tell me what this has to do with Marx? Of course we should all stand against this kind of Right Wing totalitarianism, fascism is dangerous no matter what name it uses. Marx knew that qualitative democracy was the only real solution to political tyranny. Not sure where you locate democracy in Mao, Stalin or Hitler?
Quoting NOS4A2
Marx already addressed this argument above. What you don't comprehend is that the criteria ("confiscation") actually puts you in a bind.
My people are Native, our land was confiscated from us, this game doesn't lead where you think (see Marx above).
I was more so speaking about Marx’s idea of the nationalization of land. Mao saw such a necessity, nationalized the land—a euphemism for the confiscation of property by force—and did so with the most ruthless efficiency. As it turns out, the nationalization of land does not make living on other people's labor a thing of the past. As it turns out, the nationalization of land never made the class distinctions disappear, and state brutality, starvation and murder became the order of the day.
With all due respect you're way out of your depths here. What you have brought are a bunch of false assumptions. When Marx speaks of nationalizing land, he is not speaking of putting it in the hands of a dictator, but in the democratic hands of the workers, not in the hands of a political party, but in the hands of the workers. You are falsely equating Right Wing dictatorships with Marxism, they are not the same.
Quoting NOS4A2
Unto whom was the land nationalized in the examples you cite? Were these democratic nationalizations? Further, you said, "state brutality," but in Marx's theory the state power was to be nothing more or nothing less than a democratic union of workers. The historical examples you are citing persecuted and exploited the workers, they did not empower them. What is more tragic, you don't comprehend that the tyranny you are referencing is Right Wing tyranny, fascism. It's what you get when individuals are put into power without a check on that power, it's what you get when individuals in power are allowed to execute any order they want and the people obey out of fear (see Arendt); it's what you get when you subvert democracy.
Either provide citations from Marx's work to back up your sweeping claims or humbly move on from this thread.
By the way, it's our normal practice to delete any response to a deleted post.
Carry on with the Marx :cool:
Indeed.What Marx defends is the socialization of the collective means of production, not referring to the private property of use goods. That is, factories, not handkerchiefs.
If there is a natural right to individual property -I doubt it very much- this right would be preserved by personal property. That is why the so-called socialist states had no problem signing Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that "Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others".
All states in the world have some limitations on the use of property. The perfect neoliberal state does not exist, thank God. Therefore, we can only discuss whether Marx's proposal of socialist limitations on private property was excessive or not. Natural rights have little to do here.
I don't know if it was excessive or not, but the alternative seems to me to be socialism or barbarism. Or worse, socialism or extinction. That's where we're going, I'm afraid.
1) I don't think you want to understand being
2) because you, perhaps rightly, feel that action is greater
3) you get no help that way
Mao was a devout Marxist who sought to bring about communism. It’s right there in everything he wrote. No need for the revisionism. He and his revolutionaries stole land, often by murder, struggle session or by sending them to labor camps, for this stated purpose: “to eliminate feudal, exploitative land ownership by landlords and implement peasant land ownership, so as to free the rural labor force, develop agricultural production, and open the way for the industrialization of New China.”. What is this but one example of “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”? the “violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie”?
But mostly I’m speaking about the concept of one class appropriating the land of another, the euphemism “nationalization”, which always brings about the contrary to Marx’s predictions.
I wouldn't be so sure. "He claimed to be a Marxist", it would be more correct.
Quoting NOS4A2
Liberal policies, too, have always led to the opposite of what they intended: destructive welfare for some and exploitation and war for others.
It seems that perversion is the fate of political theories on the road between them and their practices.
The problem is why and how.
About forcing something out of the bourgeoisie I would see no problem if what is taken out of it is its greed and power to exploit, its control of the instruments of justice and the perversion of democracy for the benefit of a minority.
True, that's not easy.
We have wave-particle duality theory and Douglas Hofstadter, and yet we can't find a way out of contradiction? Maybe atomist were right and there isn't real physical change. Just rearrangments. This is why I recommend Heidegger, just as a philosopher, and his views on pre-Socratics to Marxists. But eh yes Lenin had many philosophical texts to tempt them
Do you mean George Washington or David Ben Gurion (I guess)?
Quoting whollyrolling
As a description of what happened in China before and during the revolution I find it a bit simplistic and confusing.
Are you talking about the big landowners and warlords as innocent victims of communism? Or of the big international corporations that kept the Shanghai proletariat in misery?
Isn't it true that some layers of Chinese society benefited from collective ownership that they never had before?
These questions should be discussed at length.
I think the issue is Marx, not your stereotypes about communist revolution in China.
Ummm...just about every acre of land in America is stolen land. It has been fenced from person to person through the generations to the present.
Without land that was stolen...where would most Americans be?
I’ll take him at his word.
I think it’s better to bring people up than to pull people down. Perhaps it’s not the bourgeoisie that needs our attention.
Like how the employees of a business can’t just keep the profits of it for themselves and not give any to the owners without the owners showing up with armed police to do something about that? Or better still, how a tenant can’t just keep living where they are and not pay any money to the landlord without the landlord showing up with armed police to do something about that?
(My ideas of late have been getting bigger and bigger such that I struggle to put it all together. I have schizoaffective disorder and a smart friend of mine once said he thinks I got it from a botched attempt to be a genuis. Perhaps...)
The point is that what rightfully belongs to who may be questioned, and whatever answer is settled on is then enforced by violence, in any system.
Communists believe that the means of production are not in fact the rightful property of the people falsely called their owners, but rather of the people who live and work there, and that forcing people at gun point to pay business owners and land owners is a criminal theft in itself. They see their violence as justified defense against the crimes perpetrated by capitalists, just like you see the aforementioned police violence against workers and tenants who don’t pay up as justified defense against those supposed crimes.
Capital owners can easily avoid the violence of communist revolutionaries by just not extorting money from their workers and tenants, after all.
Because states are not communist. Communism is definitionally stateless. The states you’re talking about called their system “state capitalism”, which is elsewhere a synonym for fascism. They claimed to be using it as a steppingstone to create communism, but that clearly never happened.
Quoting whollyrolling
You may have a choice who you rent from, but you don’t have a choice to not rent at all — unless you’re already wealthy enough to own your own home. (Interest is just rent on money, so saying “you can always buy instead”, when you mean get a mortgage, is no rebuttal; you still have to pay someone else or GTFO, until you get rich enough).
Quoting whollyrolling
I’m glad you included that last point, but it undermines the “anyone” part entirely. Lots of people of merit work hard their whole lives and never escape poverty because they never got a lucky break, whilst others by luck of birth can screw up and slack off their whole lives and never worry about going broke.
Quoting whollyrolling
Rent-seeking and profit-seeking don’t feed or clothe anyone. Hard working people do. Rent and profit are just siphoned off the top of that value they create.
Quoting whollyrolling
I think you don’t understand at all what I’m promoting. It’s absolutely not Mao or Stalin.
Quoting whollyrolling
Try not paying rent and refusing to leave when evicted and resisting the eventual attempt to arrest you for refusing to leave. Try just continuing to live where you live without paying someone for that, and see if no violence ever comes to you. Why would anyone ever pay rent if they could just choose not to and face no consequences?
Quoting whollyrolling
I never said “not going to work”, I talked about not paying the business owner “his share”, the workers just keeping all the money they, the business, make for themselves. You said that’s theft. You think nobody’s going to get arrested for that “theft“, and that they can just ignore the attempts to arrest them without it coming to violence, from the police?
Answer my questions. All you are doing is asserting the same narrative over and over again. Please provide citations to back up your assertions. Please stop blaming Marx for Right Wing dictators and totalitarian political parties.
Bother, if I don't soon find intelligent life on this Forum I am departing to greener shores.
Tragically this seems true. It is also common sense: humans cannot exist without society. We can either approach this intelligently or play the private property game.
I thank you for your reply because it's in line with the original post. The question is, will the needs of humans actually force sanity and intelligence on the earth, or will tyranny lead to even greater extinction and suffering?
Those who think it's a matter of an American system versus the tyranny of the world... my god, what can one even say to such people, they are swimming in the coolaid. The common, uneducated man or woman, totally lacking class awareness, doesn't even have the tools to comprehend the status of their plight. Everything they think about reality is filtered through the culture that has administered it. They mistake these beliefs for original thoughts, they are no such thing. What's perhaps most frightening is that these are the very people who will usher in the next great catastrophe of Nationalist violence. Of course, they will not see it this way, they will see it as the good guys killing the bad guys, as the most righteous Nation defending itself from the error of all the rest, including its own citizens. As Adorno so aptly said, the world is always in danger of lapsing into barbarism, and this is something every intellectual must be concerned with.
Mao was a Marxist-Leninist communist by his own admission. Article one of the Chinese constitution clearly states that “The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.” I’m not sure where you get this right-wing stuff, but it’s purely ahistorical.
“We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts.”
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm
“We Communists never conceal our political views. Definitely and beyond all doubt, our future or maximum program is to carry China forward to socialism and communism. Both the name of our Party and our Marxist world outlook unequivocally point to this supreme ideal of the future, a future of incomparable brightness and splendor. ”
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm
The answer to the question “to whom was the land nationalized”, it was stolen from landlords and “rich peasants” and redistributed to the peasantry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Land_Reform
Unto whom was the land nationalized in the examples you cite? Were these democratic nationalizations?
Please give a citation where Marx's political theory validates the actions of Mao?
North Korea also claims to be a Marxist country, but where is the democracy of the workers?
Does every country who claims to be Marxist, does this prove the country is Marxist?
Please give a citation from Marx where he says dictators should have authority over the people, where he says society should be ruled by dictators? Is that how communism works?
Oh, how about starting with the theories of Marx that makes him different from social democrats?
Like class struggle, the dictatorship of the Proletariat etc.
Quoting JerseyFlight
And how does that dictatorship work then? Seems historically that it has gone to one man to decide what the proletariat thinks.
It is a democratic system of workers. There is going to be power in any system, the question for Marx (and it is indeed an intelligent question) was which class would bring about the greatest emancipation of the species? Sadly, we have never had this kind of system in the history of the world. I for one do not believe a worker's revolution will bring about utopia, but this neither exhausts Marx or negates his value. You might actually try reading him and thinking about what he says.
Like I already said, it was given to the peasantry. No, they were not “democratic nationalizations”, which I think is a nonsense phrase. Since we’re asking for citations, whereabouts did Marx speak of “democratic nationalizations”?
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
“ The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm
“ The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm
And when has that democracy happened in reality?
Quoting JerseyFlight
Well, a lot of us who don't believe in communism and before didn't believe in marxism-leninism have had this as the genuine problem in the whole endeavour. NIce idea on paper, too bad you have human beings implementing these things. Once you give power of a dictatorship to anyone, the outcome is really bad. It simply changes people. In the end, killing your fellow human beings comes so easy.
In principle, it seems to me the world belongs to everyman, and everyman belongs to the world. So my private property deprives you and everyman of a portion of that "natural" heritage, and a debt is incurred by that privation. Let us call that debt "property tax". Property tax should bear some relation to rental value, such that there is little profit in depriving everyman of a property in order to rent the property to some man.
You misunderstand the way democracy works. However, one can sabotage democracy, exactly as we have done in America, by impoverishing and depriving the masses of education. One's vote is only as good as their ability to comprehend, to not be duped.
:up:
There is so much error and confusion here I do not think I can address all of it. This is the tragic fate of our time. Misinformation cannot be countered because it's easier and swifter to assert distortions than it is to refute them.
The land was controlled by the party and the supreme leader in every case you have cited. These were not democratic movements. The workers were neither free or in power. This is a serious point because it refutes your false, straw man, poisoning of the well, example. You are of course, free to deny it and believe what you want, but this will not make your belief accurate.
Quoting NOS4A2
With all due respect, the fact that you would even ask such a question can only prove that you haven't read Marx. His entire program was about the worker's emancipating themselves from a class system of oppression. This had nothing to do with dictators or new ruling class parties.
"The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relationships) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one's mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the State, etc. personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed within the relationships of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In a real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association." Marx, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook, D. Proletarians and Communism
"...the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State." ibid.
What you are doing is cherry picking from Marx. Such a procedure is not in line with intellectual honesty.
Quoting NOS4A2
You have here cited a quote you don't even comprehend. Marx was specifically asked about violence, I can't remember where exactly, there are 50 volumes, but his reply was, (paraphrase) "of course, we don't advocate violence, but the ruling class will not let us have democracy." And this is indeed the tragic truth of revolution. The rulers are desperate to hold onto power and will use violence to crush dissent. They will not allow democracy!
Quoting NOS4A2
Again another quote you don't understand, seriously taken out of context!
I cannot interact with you anymore on this topic. You are simply trying to validate what you already believe, this is known as confirmation bias. What you should be doing, if you were serious, is trying to learn what Marx actually said and taught, not simply trying to find cherry picked quotes to justify your position. I wish you all the best.
One thing i do like about Marx is he believed every citizen should be well armed. I believe one of several possible solutions for America is automated or semi-automated factories and they are collectively owned by the government. The People manage the government through their ownership of Assault rifles.
Got AR-15? Ammo is optional. Shotguns with blanks.....
Modern Combat is very often about publicity and propaganda. Notice how we haven't had a Civil War yet in the US. I agree quite abit with BLM but People aren't simple or atleast simple enough to use a Nuke. Most solutions don't completely solve a problem. If we can't have nuclear weapons that doesn't mean we shouldn't have any weapons. Actually if the government does have nuclear weapons that might be a reason for Liberals and Conservatives to have assault rifles. Alot of ethnic groups favor the public having Assault rifles. Marx agrees with me.
Counterrevolution deaths are attributable to Marx too because he started it! :lol:
:brow:
I don't understand why Marx should have predicted Pol Pot. Is preaching the the struggle against the exploitation of man by man leading straightforwardly to Stalinism? I don't see why.
How naive of you!
Quoting NOS4A2
This doesn't always work. What does " bring up Hitler" mean?
Quoting NOS4A2
Given that the bourgeoisie controls the economy, culture and the capitalist state apparatus, and given that capitalism is primarily responsible for how bad things are for many people, this is what matters.
Unless you care more about watching the herons fly over the lake in the fall.
But that's another order of things.
Are you talking about the Palestinians? Or Pinochet? Or about...
You describe a Dantean scene as if it happened in a Superman cartoon or a B series cold war movie. Why don't you talk about reality, which is bad enough without turning it into a comic book?
To see how things happened in Stalinism I suggest Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman or Kira Georgievna by Viktor Nekrassov. A "little" more serious than your comics.
If you employ this aggressive pamphlet tone it cannot be discussed. I don't know who you're trying to convince with that. Perhaps yourself.
Go out to the countries of the Third World and the suburbs and you will see the violence of capitalism. Ask yourself how much they paid the people who made your shirt. Who pays the elites who keep the scarce money from the extraction of raw materials at a bargain price?
Etc., etc.
Capitalist violence exists, but on the fringes of the system.
This is not addressed to you, really, but at those who believe that they live in a brave new world.
:clap:
What has Marx to do with democracy?
Marx isn't talking about democracy, especially not as an safety valve for society, but as a means for proletarian dictatorship in the class struggle. Proletarian dictatorship is a way to eradicate private property, the final goal for Marx. Marx doesn't give a shit about democracy, only if it furthers the exact cause of the proletariat:
(From The Principles of Communism)
How this happens Marx gives a very detailed map or theory and makes very specific how the prolertariat differs from slaves, serfs or handicraftsmen. And in the 20th Century Marxists followed his ideas slavishly. And it should be totally obvious to everybody that when Marx talks about class struggle, of the need of the Proletarian dictatorship, he obviously sees that not everybody will go along with the Proletariat, hence it really isn't about democracy and the rights of minorities that Marx is interested about.
It's very easy to predict this outcome.
It is as simple as when thinking to implement into reality Plato's ideal society, where people are divided into workers, soldiers and philosophy kings. You really are so naive to think that the class of the "philosopher kings" will be the most wise, virtuous and selfless and corruption can be rooted away by them living communally and modestly? What typically would happen that anybody having criticism about the "philosopher kings" will be put to the "worker" class while the friends and children of the "philosopher kings" will end up in the ruling class. Without any safety valves this will happen. And Karl Popper is quite right on blaming Plato on the rise of totalitarianism.
With Marx, we just simply start from the fact that many people are actually OK with the idea of private property / capitalism, so the reason for totalitarianism is obvious.
Hence it's absolutely no wonder at all that communist revolutions have collapsed into totalitarianism and one man rule. It is simply an intrinsic aspect of Marxism (and Marxism-Leninism). Marx starts from the belief that the change will extremely likely be violent, the change has to be done by force, so imagine how that comes out with actual people.
Right. He wasn't interested in minorities who exploit others. For him, a democracy that does not solve the problem of inequality, misery and hunger is not a true democracy. So is Athenian democracy, for example. The Marxists I knew spoke of "formal democracies". I don't know if the term is Marx's.
No, but Marx believed that if the working class provided itself with a system of internal democracy it could control its leaders. This was the theory of the workers' and soldiers' soviets that Lenin preached before he abandoned orthodox Marxism.
With the experience that history gives us, we know that didn't work. We may even have some explanation as to why.
But Marx did not have that experience and could afford to be somewhat more idealistic than we are.
The Republic of Plato's philosophers was something totally different. It didn't establish any elite control mechanism, because the wise were supposed to be good by nature. That doesn't hold up unless you look around.
Ah. We're not all as smart as you who can predict history very easily. Patent the method. You'll get rich.
I think I've already mentioned two examples. A very simple one is to ask yourself how much of the price of the T-shirt you have bought Made in East or America (South) reaches the worker who made it. Another is who makes peasant leaders disappear in Colombia.There are many examples like these that I have not taken from any anti-capitalist pamphlet. They are in the daily press.
Quoting whollyrolling
This is the lesson taught by the media that produce bourgeois propaganda. There's another way of looking at it:
We don't know what human nature is. But we do know that 1% of humanity controls 82% of the World''s wealth. We know that this minority and those who work for them control the major media and use politicians who are sympathetic to their bourgeois ideology to control the various political systems and their servants (pseudo-democracy included). (In jargon they are called lobbies or, straightforwardly, corruption). And we know that when there is some part of the planet that wants to get out of the script they organize a little war or a coup d'etat and depose the unruly.
This corrupt system provokes an abyss of daily violence that doesn't usually appear on Fox Channel, etc. There remains hunger, poverty, police repression and the deaths from our bombings. These are also consequences of the fact that 1% of humanity controls 82% of the world's wealth. Pass the translator through this news (don't be afraid it doesn't come from a dangerous communist pamphlet, but from a Christian NGO): https://www.europapress.es/internacional/noticia-ciento-poblacion-mundial-acapara-82-ciento-riqueza-20180122154309.html https://www.europapress.es/internacional/noticia-ciento-poblacion-mundial-acapara-82-ciento-riqueza-20180122154309.html
I'll tell you for your information that I haven't read the Communist press since I was a kid. Now I read all kinds of press (little TV), especially on the web, because that's where you can find alternative visions to the official one. The human rights NGOs that I collaborate with usually provide me with good information to untangle the neurons. I especially recommend the reports of Amnesty International. They are somewhat shy and do not say everything but they do put the facts on the table. Then you can think about them. If you want.
Make no mistake. I do not defend or promote Marxism.
Firstly because I'm not talking about Marxism but about Marx.
Second, because I haven't read one of his books in a long time. More than you can boast, I suppose, but not enough to analyze an author in depth.
Thirdly because I do not defend Marx, but attack the assumptions of reactionaries and bourgeoisie from which you do. It's not Marx I'm worried about. It's a thing of the past. It is you and those like you that concern me because you are driving the planet into the abyss in the name of a class ideology that condemns the majority of humanity to a life of submission, subsistence, or worse.
I understand myself criticizing Marx with a heterodox Marxist, a socialist, an anarchist or a left-wing liberal. Not with you.
I don't know if I've made myself clear. English is not my language. But I think I'm understood.
Wow. You must get up very early in the morning to gather all your own news, well done. Stirling effort.
Marx of course believed (or at least seemed to believe) that he didn't need to imagine possible outcomes or rank their probability. According to Marx, history has a fixed goal, the classless society, and it reaches that goal through stages which follow rationally from another. So, Marx did not believe any outcome other than the dictatorship of the proletariat leading to the classless society was possible.
I never said it was a democratic movement. In fact I said the opposite. My point was that the nationalization of property didn’t result in the conditions Marx predicted, that it often, even necessarily resulted in murder and plunder.
With all due respect, in the following quotes you cited nothing about “democratic nationalizations”, which was obviously a phrase you made up. There is no such thing as “democratic nationalizations” when it comes to appropriating someone’s property, and no amount of glittering generalities will change that.
The communist revolutions have led to despotism and terror, and have themselves crushed dissent with violence. The Velvet Revolution, on the other hand, was a revolution for democracy against communist rule, which was rightfully dismantled in favor of a parliamentary republic wherein they could hold their first democratic elections in half a century.
Responding to your error is exceedingly unpleasant. I only do it because I'm aware that many readers will not be able to discern your contradiction.
1) Admits his examples were not democratic movements. 2) Then goes on to use examples to blame Marx for these movements. Totally inconsistent, ignorant, contradiction.
Quoting NOS4A2
In what does democracy consist? In dictatorships? In ruling class minority parties? Last time I checked democracy is where the people rule themselves, not where they are ruled. Not sure why you assume that Marx must specifically make use of the term "Democratic Nationalism," in order to put forth this concept (which the quotes I provided demonstrate)? Your objection is one of mere formality and not even worthy of a reply. If you are claiming that Marx's idea of Nationalism is the same as Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it. I have clearly provided citations that show Marx talking about the workers liberating themselves from the State. You must answer the question with some kind of proof: what was Marx's idea of Nationalism?
Your ignorance here is off the charts, it is also unforgivable, it is the result of the most desperate attempt at confirmation bias.
If I had the power, I would in fact, ban you from this thread, you have been caught red handed, cherry picking, citing Marx out of context in total distortion, your entire contribution here is error, misinformation, mischaracterization and fallacy (guilt by association). Which merely proves that you are neither a serious thinker or a skilled thinker.
Quoting NOS4A2
This is correct, even if the revolutions started out as communist revolutions, which is very doubtful given the fact they were not spurred by advanced capitalist societies, they morphed into fascist movements. As I have repeatedly said, I do not believe that a workers revolution will bring about a utopia, I believe it will lead to more of the same violence. Nevertheless, when it comes to the next stage of social progress Marx cannot be ignored, his contribution, power and clarity of thought are simply too relevant.
Clearly we have a serious problem here: I agree and reject every Marxist dictator you have mention, I also reject the idea of a workers revolution, and yet I am not an anti-Marxist. Why? What's the difference between us? Am I just ignorant and deluded? Well, there is one serious difference, I HAVE ACTUALLY STUDIED THE IDEAS OF MARX, you clearly have not.
What class makes up the majority of society?
Yet democracy was only a tool for the proletariat, to get power. Others classes have to fall under the lead of the proletariat. This shows clearly how Marx isn't at all a democrat or believes in democracy. Marx or his followers do not believe that (liberal) democracy could be self correcting and fix many of the injustices. Neither was it acceptable to be a socialist who attempts to work within the system.
This can be seen from his views about how true communists differ from basically from other socialists. Marx divides them into the "Reactionary Socialists", who "for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists ", then the "Bourgeois Socialists", those who want "to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it" and the "Democratic Socialists", who "favor some of the same measures the communists advocate", but not as part of the transition to communism, but "as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society".
The first type of socialists Marx rejects because of many reasons, the second type Marx sees that "Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow." The third class are OK, if they "do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie".
How Marx views other socialists shows in my view clearly just how much Marx values "democracy".
And neither did the Communists that took up arms and were eager to kill the class enemy.
I think Marx was basically a Democrat as the whole idea was to gain political power through democratic means (or other means in non-democratic countries) to then push through rules that would put an end to class struggle by effectively abolishing class distinction. Once everyone is in the same class, democracy logically followed as both economic and political power would be vested in the same people and the democratic would no longer be marred by class struggle.
Communism was about the enfranchisement of everyone.
Pick a different word if you don't like it. The point is that the response is totally reasonable. Learning that dictators ruthlessly killed hundreds of millions of people... hatred and fear, disgust, contempt, are not irrational responses. In any case you will have to make a distinction between appropriate emotional response and inappropriate. You will also be forced to use a qualifying word.
Concise clarity here. I would encourage those who are objecting to stop trying construct strawmen and argue instead, why they disagree. 1) can we ever really abolish class distinctions? (Even if the answer is no, thought doesn't end there). So what can we do to lessen or correct the inequality caused by class distinctions? The capitalist answer is precisely what Marx critiqued, and we are seeing his criticisms play out more now than at any other time in human history.
2) Would democracy logically follow if class distinctions were abolished? Why or why not?
Quoting JerseyFlight
The middle class, which isn't the favorite class divide of Marx. A lot of those nasty bourgeoisie in that category.
(What rarely is mentioned is that the upper class has gotten bigger too:)
Looking at the theories of Karl Marx, it's quite strange to say that the whole idea was to gain political power through democratic means.
Good lord, you have got to be kidding me? I think you mean, the workers?
You're looking at the "middle income class". Marx doesn't divide classes up by their income; he divides them up by whether or not they own the means of production.
Almost everyone in every income class, except a tiny fraction of people at the very top, are in the "lower class" (proletariat) by Marx's reckoning, inasmuch as they do not own the means of production, they just sell their labor.
The only "upper class" on Marx's reckoning are those who own so much that they don't have to work.
There is in theory a tiny boundary layer (who Marx AFAIK doesn't recognize) of those who own exactly enough for their own needs and still have to work to cover their own consumption, neither living for free off the labor of others nor paying to borrow the capital of others. But capitalism makes that an extremely unstable position: once you're there, it's really easy to either work more or slack off and fall to one or the other side of that divide, and then capitalist forces take over (you have to start borrowing and working more to service that debt, or you can start lending out or hiring poorer people to do your work for you) and you fall quickly into one or the other class.
"To nationalise the land, in order to let it out in small plots to individuals or working men's societies, would, under a middle-class government, only engender a reckless competition among themselves and thus result in a progressive increase of "Rent" which, in its turn, would afford new facilities to the appropriators of feeding upon the producers."
Here Marx makes an argument as to why it won't work to partially nationalize property. Because it will retain the same divisive structure of competition.
[b]"I say on the contrary; the social movement will lead to this decision that the land can but be owned by the nation itself. To give up the soil to the hands of associated rural labourers, would be to surrender society to one exclusive class of producers.
"The nationalisation of land will work a complete change in the relations between labour and capital, and finally, do away with the capitalist form of production, whether industrial or rural. Then class distinctions and privileges will disappear together with the economical basis upon which they rest. To live on other people's labour will become a thing of the past. There will be no longer any government or state power, distinct from society itself! Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches of production, will gradually be organised in the most adequate manner. National centralisation of the means of production will become the national basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan. Such is the humanitarian goal to which the great economic movement of the 19th century is tending."[/b] Marx, The Nationalization of the Land, Marx and Engles Collected Works Volume 23
So this is the question, will the nationalization of land lead to a change in the organization and process of labor? Will it allow labor to emancipate itself from the system of capital? Will this then lead to the result of the nullification of class distinctions? (Perhaps, a more fitting question, which stands at the base of Marx's thought, is it even possible to have an advanced class society, must society advance beyond class in order to progress itself into higher stages of intelligence?) Will a society, without class, if such a thing can exist in economic terms, lead to the resolution of many of its social tensions and contradictions?
These are interesting and important questions, clearly humans are greatly affected by economic systems, especially when those systems hold vital goods hostage behind a wall of required activity. That we could not do better than the present inequality seems self-evidently false.
What is most clear, is that Marx understands something sweepingly vital, how society is organized matters to the quality of society itself. The process of this movement is also the movement that accounts for much of the psychological, even physical structure, of the individual.
Marx was a humanist. He was thinking in terms of species consciousness, which is far higher, and more responsible, than individual consciousness. I would argue that it constitutes the domain of adult thinkers.
Yeah i wasn't careful with my words. Have you seen the headlines. There has been an 8 fold increase in militias since 2008. I wasn't careful with my words. I know who Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis is.
citation needed
In the days of plantation-slavery a vast majority of slaves were content with their lives as slaves, one could not get them to resist or see its tyranny. You have uttered a point that doesn't comprehend itself.
So clearly Americans generally think things are economically worse than they should be... and in fact, things are actually much worse than they even think it is.
Source: Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It)
You could say that. But you can find interesting things as long as you know how to separate the straw from the grain. And complement it with other sources. Information demands effort, it doesn't come to you like manna.
Quoting whollyrolling
That's weird. I haven't seen those people you say. My sources are journalists and activists who are not among the 1% who benefit from exploitation.
Quoting whollyrolling
Quoting whollyrolling
I'm not interested in your character but in what you say. And there's nothing leftist in what you say.
Quoting whollyrolling
We are discussing that, because it is part of Marx's predictions about the evolution of capitalism. The worldwide concentration of capital is one of the few that has come true. Quoting whollyrolling
This is one of the classic excuses of the exploiter: I pay them a shitty salary, the working conditions are infamous, but they must thank me: I give them work. And I'm getting richer and richer. Everybody is happy, is it not?Quoting whollyrolling
Well, it looks like you do. In any case, the maquiladoras and other industries established in the third world by Western companies are an essential part of capitalism. It's global capitalism, you know. In many of the corrupt countries what keep the business going it is the local bourgeois class (capitalism) that benefits along with the transnational corporations. And they are democracies endorsed by the American Friend and the rest of the gang. Nowadays you have to present things with a good facade, even if they are as rotten as ever underneath. Ballots are made, they are put in ballot boxes and the usual ones with different collars win. That's nice and it quiets down some well-meaning critics. "The People want it." This is what Marx rightly - in this case - denounced .
Obviously. Marx was not a liberal Democrat. He thought that parliamentary democracy was an instrument in the hands of the bourgeois class and that other types of democracy must be sought that would put an end to exploitation. This is the alphabet of Marxism.
Quoting ssu
If one analyzes the role of European social democracy after Marx there is no doubt that he was right, from his assumptions.
Quoting ssu
Don't be melodramatic: Marx didn't want to "kill" an entire class. He wanted the bourgeois class to disappear as a class because it was living off the exploitation of humanity. In his opinion this would happen "naturally" when private ownership of the means of production disappears. But he did not think that the process would be very peaceful. The exploiters don't like to have their means of exploitation taken away from them and they have enough power to defend themselves violently. The way he had done it in Europe (France especially during the communes of 1848 and 1871) made this very clear.
Here is some truth and some errors that we can discuss calmly, if you want to do so.
You might try thinking about what David Mo is saying instead of blurting out a barrage of convictions.
There has long been a large sample of surveys that say that what happens in capitalist countries (including "democratic" ones) is not what people think it should be in terms of social justice.
The defenders of the system (who are usually the ones who benefit from it) often argue that social justice is at odds with freedom. Therefore, there must be more freedom (for the riches) than social justice (for the poor).
If the argument is not convincing, they move on to the next line of argument: democratic systems are not good, but everything else is worse.
If the argument is not convincing, they move on to the next phase: There is no alternative. Capitalist liberalism is a natural necessity. Scientific economy and so. Besides the defenders of the system are very strong and very violent: you cannot go against the rich. It is our destiny to be subject to them.
Apart from these arguments there is the subliminal propaganda exercised by a multitude of advertisements, films and series that show the delights of capitalism (Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas type) and the horror of non-capitalist systems (terrorists, bombs, dictatorships, pest...).This is one of the most important gaps in the Marxist theory of revolution.
With all this battery of resources it is not difficult to understand why the reformist (social democratic, for example) road has always been a failure (and here Marx was right too).
Why is the scarecrow of communism still being used when there are virtually no communists today? Why does it keep coming back to a 19th century thinker who's already quite old-fashioned?
I can think of only two possibilities:
1. To throw a smokescreen over the problems of capitalism.
2. Because Marx was right about a few basic points about capitalism.
They are not exclusive. There may be others I can't think of now, of course.
"Don't-be-melodramatic: Marx-didn't-want-to-kill-an-entire-class." This is just hilarious, you have me cracking up David. Sad that this even needs to be stated. Sane clarity in your exposition here. Also, the common sense of it, who would argue that it's acceptable to live off the exploitation of humanity? And yet this is the history of the world. Also sad that those who defend themselves, those who try to make a better life for themselves and their children are brutalized by those who exploit and want to keep their power. Any of the objectors on this thread would do good to study the history of the labor movement in America. Poor coal minors living in abject poverty tried to stand up for themselves, merely to give their children a better life. It wasn't greed! And what happened? The owners called in gun men from out of state and murdered the workers. The workers get blamed for violence when they try to form groups to defend themselves. Truly heartbreaking.
What you have here stated summarizes so very swiftly the way capitalist ideology functions. They often pretend to be champions of reason and truth, that is, until these virtues expose the brutalities and stupidities of their system, then they dismiss reason and begin to talk about pragmatism. I have experienced this first hand with libertarians. "If the argument is not convincing they move on to the next line of argument..." "There is no alternative... a natural necessity." That's just it, isn't it my friend, the same as all cult thinking, Nihilism, "the world will collapse if you reject our system."
If you're trying to claim a kind of genetic determinism, specifically social Darwinism, friend you have it all wrong. Your personality structure, which includes your ability for empathy and compassion, is not predetermined by your genetics. Sure, they play a role, but they are not the determining factor, the maturation environment of the human specimen, both physical and psychological, these are the determining factors. So this is how the argument actually goes, when capitalism deprives human beings of what they need to develop, when it induces environments of stress through poverty and economic coercion, these traumas retard the quality of human development. You cannot be part of an advanced species if you don't know how to cultivate healthy humans!
The way you get better humans is by raising them in healthy environments. This is not my mere opinion, see the work of Allan Schore.
Further, your objection, like so many other objections in this domain, begins with the false metaphysical assumption of the predestined evil of human nature.
There are plenty of communists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communist_parties
The history speaks for itself. So why would we shy away from criticism?
Quoting JerseyFlight
Exactly! But it's even worse because the defenders of capitalism play with two cards: neo-Darwinism and contractualism. When it suits them, they appeal to the contractualist card to show off capitalism's pacifying virtues (Steve Pinker). When things don't work out, they claim the competitive Darwinian basis of capitalism. What are we left with? Can we or can we not?
In any case, Marx spoke very little about post-revolutionary society, but he never said it would be the end of all competition among men. He simply said it would be the end of a special kind of capitalist competition--the competition between exploiters and exploited.
For God's sake! Apart from the Communist-Capitalist parties that are as Marxist as my aunt - well my aunt is quite a bit more than they are - the rest are just unimportant residues that fade away on their own. The world is capitalist, man. If you were afraid, you can relax.
And Marx puts on a pedestal a very specific type of labor, not having much thought to farmers or the self-employed, who can be indeed poor, but, as with farmers owning their small patch of land are theoretically totally different by the values of Marx (which can be seen clearly in the treatment of the so-called 'kulaks' and even here in Finland during the Red rebellion in 1918). The sharecropper or tenant farmer has the wrong ideas for Marx if he wants to own his land. Which again show the flaws in his theories that Marx as a city dweller didn't think so much.
A lot of those in the Bourgeoisie are what basically now belong to the middle class. Marx in his Communist Manifesto argues the following:
The priest sounds dubious here as belonging to what Marxists see as the intellectual Opium dealers from a bygone era (and Capitalism doesn't reject religion, just look at the US). The fact is that functioning capitalist societies have not impoverished the physician, the lawyer or even the man of science (with poets I don't know).
We have had a lot of experience of these "other democracies" and how democracy is killed by this method when there isn't actual representation of any others than those firm believers of the right cause. And this is why communism is so bad and has failed where social democracy has basically triumphed.
Quoting David Mo
How so?
All I have to do is to look at my conservative party in this country and how it supports the welfare state to see how successful the modern social democratic movement has been in Europe.
Quoting David Mo
:lol:
That's really funny, David. What do we call people who want a whole group of other people to disappear and then make statements like:
"Only by forcible overthrow" doesn't seem like this "disappearance" would be peaceful. Stop trying to make Marx some kind of benign social democrat when he clearly isn't one.
Marx wanted class distinction to disappear by adjusting social and economic rules in such a way everyone becomes part of the same class.
Also Marx wrote plenty about farmers actually. Even believing, towards the end of his life, that a communist revolution would me more likely in an agrarian society.
That’s nonsense. They may benefit from the current economic hegemony, like Marx and everyone here, but they spread the gospel of Marx wherever they go. Are you a Marxist?
Even if he's not I can assure you that you are a socialist, and would never pack up your goods and move to a purely capitalist country. American is actually the greatest socialist country that has ever existed on the face of the earth. This is not my opinion, this is an empirical fact. America redistributed 4.5 Trillion dollars into the stock market. And the Pentagon cannot account for a whopping 21 Trillion dollars! But you know, a medical system for your aging grandmother is too expensive, it could end up costing 1 Trillion dollars! America has engaged in more wealth redistribution than all the Marxist and Socialist countries combined!
This is just a shallow poisoning of the well, the fallacy of guilt by association as well as a stawman. Is anyone on this thread advocating or defending Maoism? I join you in celebrating the condemnation of his violent regime. Clearly then, we have a problem here. TRY INTERACTING WITH THE QUESTIONS I POSED IN THE SECOND PRIVATE PROPERTY POST (you can find it on pg4 of this thread).
Spot on friend. Tragic that so many have swallowed Pinker uncritically. There is a deeper social problem which I believe has to do with rational instrumentality and an outdated logic that has begun to function as an ideology. Do you have any ideas on how this could be countered?
You have to first know how to do it before you can perform it. What you are engaged in IS NOT criticism, it is simply a form of confirmation bias.
Yeah what could Marx, the most prominent political thinker in the 19th century, have to do with democracy, the most contemplated political idea of the 19th century.
Of course Marx wrote quite a bit on democracy; advocating and organizing the formation of class conscious proletariat classes and organizations, and a political form that would appear alien to most inhabitants of the 21st century, much less to those that lean economically conservative. Marx's rendition of democracy that would be of value to the proletarian class is Hegelian in concept: abolishing private property in order to socialize the benefits of productive property for the proletarian class to legitimately unite the universal (i.e. the form of government) with the particular (the interest of individuals or a class). Besides the fact that the proletarian (i.e. wage laborers) make up the majority of voting citizens it's curious that you think democracy dissolves into a literal dictatorship if a class conscious citizenry gains legitimate power and leverages it to further their own goals by reorganizing pre-existing property arrangements. In form, it's no different than a "capitalist dictatorship" furthering their own cause by destroying labor unions, overturning or blocking environmental regulations, etc.
Marx would be rolling in his grave over this stance. Socialism does not equal government intervention tout court.
Marx oscillated throughout his lifetime between violent insurrection and peaceful democratic regime change, often as a result of whatever was going on in Europe, but if you can't grapple with the fact that a 64-year-old man changed his mind here and there during the course of 40+ years of a highly intellectually active life than you demonstrably can't handle this thread
Here I am simply using the Neoliberal schema, thus reflected back in on itself.
It’s just not true that the US is a socialist country. The vast bulk of the means of production is privately owned.
This is true, but tragically his fallacious and emotional approach to this topic is probably the approach of most people, at least in America. I understand the position of the intellectual who sees himself above it, there is truth to it, but it is also a form of arrogance. The Left has been obliterated precisely because its repose to people like NOS4A2, has simply been to declare them ignorant. And no doubt they are, but the error, even though it is incredibly juvenile, must be refuted. Simply dismissing people like him leaves them with with the impression that they have a powerful argument that cannot be refuted. Tragic, and fallacious as it is, it leaves them with the impression that their negative stance is both comprehensive and true. It is simply not good enough for intellectuals to use an ad hominem, believing it gives them an excuse to evade their responsibility of refutation. No doubt, there is a time to walk away and leave ignorance to itself, precisely because it wastes time, but in this case, the very likely fact that NOS4A2's position is common, provides good grounds to refute it.
The claim "Human nature does not exist" has never made sense to me. All other animals come loaded with a range of characteristics that does not finally or totally define them. I do not accept the idea that humans, evolving along with other primates, have no characteristics arising from their genetic heritage (which is rooted far deeper than primate species).
Granted, our intellectual capabilities exceed other species--indeed, put us in a category by ourselves--as we like to remind ourselves quite often. But pliable intellect isn't all of human nature. There are also the powerful emotional properties of human beings which are malleable only to some extent. In all, the way we exist as physical beings owes much to our genetic inheritance--that is, our nature.
The mention of "human nature" seems to be a triggering event for some people. True enough, there are unhelpful doctrines out there that excuse a lot of bad behavior, like original sin, war-like human nature, unsatisfiable acquisitiveness, and so on and so forth. We can ditch original sin and like theories if it helps (though we humans seem to validate the doctrine that we are prone to error (and major error at that) a good share of the time).
Obviously, the environment in which we experience the world is a factor in our individual realities, apart from what we inherit. Environment and experience are important--no denying that.
Democracy is also perverted when it is controlled by a social group. If all the candidates for elections represent the interests of the industrial-military complex, as Eisenhower called it, and the possibilities of an alternative are blocked by the system, democracy is nothing but a sham. We elect the same people to do what others we have not elected demand of them. This is capitalist democracy, according to Marx. Was he right? In large part, I'm afraid.
Quoting ssu
You live in the Land of Cocaigne, surely. All the efforts of the conservative parties in Europe, especially since the fall of the communist bloc, are aimed at widening the gap between the rich and the poor, at degrade working conditions and at dismantling social services. To put it euphemistically, this is the neoliberal programme. According to reports from international bodies, this is exactly what is happening.
If ever there was anything that resembled the welfare state, it was due to the push of trade unions and left-wing parties -communist among others. As these have less and less strength, we are heading towards a wild capitalism if capitalism does not finish the planet first. This seems more likely.
Quoting ssu
If you don't read what the rest of us write, the debate becomes a Marx's dialog -- Groucho Marx,of course. I repeat:
Quoting David Mo
Correction: no private property, no classes. Not one or three. Marx believed that after a period of the dictatorship of the proletariat there would be no classes. This would imply the existence of the true unity among men -Humanity- which class division makes impossible. On how this would happen and what it would imply Marx was not very precise because he thought that this would not be the same history and he explained history.
If they defend capitalism, they can't be Marxists. It would be contradictory to everything Marx wrote and predicted. Whether or not they benefit from it is another matter. We're discussing whether Marx was right, not whether he was honest. Don't get off topic.
I denied that those parties that call themselves communist a) are communist (that is, to defend the communist revolution); b) have the slightest power to do so.
Quoting NOS4A2
Why do you want to know? Would anything happen if I was? I think you should know from what I've written. There are some things I think Marx was right about and some things I don't. Does that make me a Marxist?
And that will be so as long as the capitalists can leave them some of the crumbs from the feast. If there are no crumbs left, white-collar workers will pay the price also. In fact, the degradation of working conditions is reaching the social strata you mention. Not all lawyers and doctors are like those on TV shows. There are overworked ones too. And not a few.
What is characteristic of advanced capitalist society is that, unlike the 19th century, where wealth and poverty lived side by side, it has managed to conceal the sewers. As I said in another commentary, sewers are at the marginal limits of the system.
We can all move to them easily. They are poor neighbourhoods full of rubbish on the streets, shanty towns where illegal farm workers survive, semi-ruined housing buildings, immigrant concentrational camps in Greece or Italy. You don't have to go to Gambia to see something like the worst of Africa. But that is also hidden: we don't see slums on TV, we see places where bad people sell drugs until the good policeman arrives and... But we don't stop to think that drugs are the crust of poverty. Behind them is the wealth of the upper classes and the crumbs they leave for us subordinates.
I don't get the idea. Socialism equals equality and the US is one of the most unequal countries. 30% of Afro-American children live on the edge of poverty. That's not socialism, as far as I know.
Are you being ironic?
Ideas, lots of them. But you know what Marx said: enough of thinking about the world. Now we have to change it.
And there, certainly, things are not easy.
We have to follow moral impulses rather than effective ones.
I'd agree that it not as simple as saying human are X. But at the same time, even if it is complex, there is still something there. And I think that is important and fundamental, because any theory that doesn't jive with that something, whatever it is, isn't going to work. So it seems like a mistake to just ignore the whole issue, because it's complex.
Isn't it strange that I would be arguing this point, as a moral constructivist, against a moral objectivist ;-).
Only if you think moral objectivism has anything to say about what people do in fact value as part of "human nature", which it doesn't necessarily.
I'm not sure I follow, so you are saying that it is possible that all people happen to value the same things, but that that doesn't come from what kind of beings they are? Then how did they all come to value the same thing? I mean, how do you come to some objective morality then? I'm assuming here that you are not referring to God....
I don't mind, but this is probably a bit of a divergence from the thread.
Why not (for a sufficiently specific definition of x)?
It seems quite relevant. The argument against Marx is rarely "we don't want a fairer society", rather it is "such a system wouldn't/hasn't work(ed)". Since the system in question is one of governing and manipulating (or leaving free) human behaviour, it seems absolutely central to any assessment of it to question whether the assumptions about human behaviour are accurate.
I agree.
I don't understand the relationship.
If the gene for aggression exists you can't stop husbands from hitting women. Therefore, let's make gender violence be legal.
A bit strange logic, isn't it?
Yes. Very strange. For a start if a gene for aggression existed (it doesn't) why would that make us unable to prevent people from beating their wives? They cant beat their wives whilst in prison, gene or no gene.
More to the point though, if a gene for aggression existed (again, it really doesn't), then it would, without doubt influence our strategies for dealing with domestic violence. We might screen for such a gene, create therapies known to help, we'd look into the environmental conditions which trigger it and see if they could be minimised, we'd avoid costly strategies based only on removing purely negative environmental influences as a cause.
Marx's theories are social, political, and economic primarily. They're not legal. So if he says "situation x will bring about situation y" he's relying on assumptions about the responses of human beings to situation x. It's their behaviour which will (or will not) bring about situation y, and so his theory's success hinges entirely on whether those assumptions are right.
Marx's materialism is neither biological nor psychological. He thought that the laws of dialectics, which in nature were concretized in one way, in history were concretized in another. But his theory of history, as you well say, is primarily economistic, although it is dialectical and not mechanistic. That is why what men do in history is governed by the laws of history (mainly the class struggle) and not by Mandelian laws. In other words, human nature would be aggressive in one way in nature and in a different way in history, if it existed at all.
That said, politics and justice are superstructures that have much to do with the march of history. Although Marx was ultimately a determinist, the manner and rhythms with which one passes from one historical period to another depend largely on non-economic factors such as politics, culture, or law. This may not be important for the total march of history in the abstract, but for the men and women who live and suffer the particular vicissitudes of history it may be of vital importance that things happen sooner or later and in one way or another. It is our lives that count first and foremost, not the remote future of communist society that is not even visible on the horizon. That is why Marx urges the working classes to make revolution. For themselves.
All this assumes that, even if human nature exists and is violent, the impulse to exploit is like the abuse of women: it can be corrected and ultimately repressed. All that is needed is the will and the strength to do it. And that is a political and legal decision that only the working class in power can make.
This seems like an untenable position to defend in the face of what we know, because there are enough things that seem difficult, if not impossible to correct or implement.
Say for whatever reason, we want to forbid sexual intercourse between people... all the will and strength in the world wouldn't be able to repress that impulse.
The abolishion of alcohol maybe is a good example of something that they actually tried and failed to implement.
I can sum up other examples.... but the point is, it seems hard to deny that there are limits to what we can reasonably expect to work, because of what kind of beings we are. It's an open question as to what these limits are I think, but flat-out denying that there are any, and refusing to even consider the issue, seems like a glaring mistake to me.
Trying to draw a circle around who is or isn’t a Marxist or communist is a fools errand. If people call themselves Marxists or communists, however, it is a good indication that they are or are at least trying to be.
I thought the topic was Marx’s “The Nationalization of the Land”, which I said has been tried and failed to result in anything Marx predicted in that piece.
I was asking because I didn’t want to assume that you were.
Yet you said the “the greatest socialist country that has ever existed on the face of the earth”, which is the biggest load of shite anyone has ever written In this thread. You have refuted nothing, unfortunately, and have only solidified my belief in that I am reading pure wind.
No, I’m saying that moral objectivism isn’t the claim that everybody does value the same thing. It’s not the opposite of descriptive moral relativism, but of meta-ethical moral relativism.
Quoting Isaac
I meant “x” to stand in for a single word. If “x” can be some arbitrarily long compound phrase, then sure, that’s fine.
Quoting JerseyFlight
This is hard to refute. Earth elements can make anything from cities themselves to weapons and tools to defend them. Science and innovation has changed this some however. Beyond that you do need space or land to produce crops or raise livestock for food or other purposes. Let's not forget about the oceans or the beasts of the earth and sky now.
But what's some average Joe going to do with thousands of pounds of rock and ore? Either make stuff out of it or sell it. Which is what happens anyway. Granted these companies are ran by those lucky enough to have been born into a wealthy family and have large if not entire control over what's done with it, they usually have government contracts that mandate all or some of it's eventual use in exchange for certain permissions. Allegedly the argument is it adds to the GDP, helps the economy, and creates jobs and opportunity for all. Trickle down economics I suppose. What alternative is there and is it really better or even much different?
Quoting JerseyFlight
Unfortunately, ethics aside. Everyone is the majority lol. This idea would just create infighting for little to no reason other than greed or being jealous of your neighbor or fellow countryman simply because he has more. Basically most would say it wasn't taken from them but (obviously) for them. If anybody can join ie. become a citizen of a certain country regardless of race, religion, etc.- that really throws "conquest" out the window and into irrelevancy.
Quoting JerseyFlight
There are very few if any who weren't doing so under the order of their kingdom, empire, church, or some sort of ruling class. They were essentially foot soldiers.
Quoting JerseyFlight
You go door to door in any country that has buildings and infrastructure and survey "who wants to give up their house and belongings you toiled for" ... see how that turns out. Granted, the majority don't live in as nice houses as the wealthier minority, so it is plausible. But once examined with logic the fact remains, there are only a few "mansions" relative to normal houses. Who gets an upgrade? Not many. Who has to downgrade? Nobody knows. The average person, unless literally homeless, would probably not want to gamble with an adequate enough situation.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Only time will tell. Like someone I used to watch would say: "there's a war out for your mind."
That was, more or less, sarcastic. If “socialism” meant wealth redistribution, not just from those with the greatest means to those with the greatest needs but any kind of wealth redistribution, then America would be extremely “socialist” because it redistributes trillions of dollars all the time... just not toward the welfare of its people, but to wars and corporate bailouts etc.
That isn’t what “socialism” really means, but it is what anti-socialists seem to think it means, without realizing that therefore America is extremely “socialist”... just not in the way that actual socialists want it to be.
That’s fair if it was sarcastic. The word “socialism” is often used wrong in the US. This is not only true of anti-socialists, but of self-proclaimed socialists who point to the Nordic model as socialism, like Bernie Sanders for instance. I suppose then that “socialism” is either a term of abuse or praise (depending on whom it’s coming from) in the United States rather than an economic system. And it’s true, the US is a massive welfare state with astronomical levels of government spending.
That seems irrelevant, it would still be human nature. To respond in such-and -such a way in one situation and some other way in another. I don't see how it gets around the simple fact that it is human behaviour which causes all of the consequences Marx is expecting. You're faced either with seeing human behaviour as random, or if it has statistical trends, then you'll need to know what they are in order to make predictions about the outcomes of circumstance. It's really basic stuff, you have to know the properties of the model you're working with.
Quoting David Mo
And the will and strength would come from where, if not human nature? - Space? Aliens? God? Random chance?...
David Mo has already addressed these kind of fatalistic, all or nothing arguments, which seem to be the foundation of all cult-minded-thinking.
The level at which this reply is the result of what is administered, thus rendering its purveyor incapable of standing outside his own culturation, is disappointing to say the least. I do not know how one replies to this, not because it is so incredibly profound, but because it is so incredibly naive. So many countries are doing socially better than the United States (and surely that must be the whole point in establishing a government, to secure social quality). The question, "yeah, but what is there besides plantations and masters?" How does one communicate with this kind of artificial consciousness?
Please tell me I am living a nightmare from which I will soon awake. Sir, did you just assert that will and strength are a product of some notion of "human nature?" Do you know what drives your will? Do you know how your personality structure is formed? Do you know what neurological processes are necessary for high functionality? Do you know what happens to your brain if your attachment system is impaired as a child? What you are talking about does not exist. Humans are not predestined by some spiritual phantom which dictates their action and disposition. This is entirely superstitious and indefensible. Humans pass through psychological and physical environments and their quality is determined and shaped by these environments. Part of the genius of Marx is that he understood this at the most concrete level, that humans are filtered through a process of production, and this process, the organization of society, determines the outcomes of man's life and potential.
Yes, genes play a role, they can offer potential or the lack thereof, but environment is the earth that determines what genes will become and what genes will be triggered. Simply do more research on the topic. Humans have made quite a bit of advances in this area. One of the most interesting things about the advance of the social sciences is that none of them are reaching regressive conclusions, everything is flowing in the direction of the vital necessity of species consciousness. Because we know that the quality of individuals is determined by the quality of their social environment, this includes basic goods such as healthy food and clean water.
Even accepting what you say, does there not remain "an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way." (Theses On Feuerbach) ?
If your claim is that we cannot identify an essence that fully determines human actions, this is surely far from saying that there is no human nature at all.
Marx's theories are comprehensive, they span the species, there is massive and profound legal theory associated with Marx. He tried to think about the whole structure of society.
Yes there is research to prove this, but as I understand it, and I am not a neurobiologist, some of our ideas of innate cognitive modules are being challenged by empirical findings.
Quoting jamalrob
Yes, the two are different. The idea of human nature that I have discoursed against is a fiction. What we do know is that human's are not genetically determined, genes play a role but not independent of environment. By far the most important factor is the environment. What I accept about human nature is that humans are incredibly stupid creatures, the same premise one finds at the base of Nietzsche.
Load a human with all the genes you want, without the right, qualitative, social interaction, they will develop very poorly and very unintelligently. New findings in Neuroscience are claiming that action comes before perception, which is quite revolutionary.
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Superb qualification my friend! Pity, I really don't think the objectors will be able to comprehend it.
I don't think anybody, or at least I'm not, is arguing for capitalism as it is. This is just a strawman. The question is whether Marxism is a good alternative for capitalism, or if we should look for other solutions.
Another point I would want to make is that anthropological history is not necessarily relevant because the environmental factors are completely different now. One might for instance point to the more equalitarian societal structures of hunter-gatherers, but across the globe societies developed hierarchical and stratified societies independant of eachother as population grew larger after the agricultural revolution. I don't think that was some arbitrary fluke of history. It rather seems like it was a necessity to keep larger societies together.
So what historical systems are we actually talking about that would still be relevant in a highly technological world with billions of people?
Hmm... so, in the pursuit of identifying and disproving "fatalistic, all or nothing arguments" as well as "cult-minded-thinking" ... why does one person having more stuff than another person -- perhaps, rather hopefully, due to his or her efforts ie. the fruits of his or her labor -- have to automatically be "plantations and masters"?
The system is not perfect. No worldly system is or will ever be, But someone who say happens to be a genius and excels at say mathematics or physics who from his efforts and endeavors could literally place their nation ahead of the pack, unrivaled in war and innovation, should earn/receive the same as someone who can barely change the oil in their car or its tires? I think this is the main sticking point that myself and many others would refer to whenever discussing arguments against capitalism. Essentially it devalues human ingenuity and I suppose even effort and integrity. Why do all that when I can just flip burgers and live the same life as someone who struggled and strived to achieve from day 1? I'm curious. Help me out here guy. Hey, if I'm mistaken I'm mistaken and should be able to be disproved, logically, rather quickly. To change things you have to influence people, otherwise nothing will ever happen and we'll all just age quietly in a pleasant yet irrelevant echo chamber.
There is a point that trade and capital have been a part of the human experience since prehistoric times.
On these grounds I would argue that trade and capital has never been systematized, and that “capitalism” was always an expression of human nature rather than a system someone invented and convinced people to act out.
Everything sounds good in your head and even on paper. Every man, woman, and child having a place to live, food to eat, water to drink, clean air- literally given everything you need to survive but nothing more. If you want to upgrade, move to a nicer location, get nice things, you work. And are rewarded accordingly. I think what people are either forgetting or not properly acknowledging is the fact that when Marx was born the world population was around one billion and today it has increased seven-fold surpassing seven billion, soon to be eight billion with no signs of slowing down whatsoever but instead increasing. As times change, what could have been paradise then could turn into Hell on Earth now. It would seem to be the only humane way to aggregate humanity toward a better and brighter tomorrow.
Could be wrong. Eager to be disproved if so. After all we've made unimaginable leaps in science, medicine, and agriculture... who really knows?
Trade probably, capital I doubt it, since we were mostly nomadic (so there was little use in 'owning' land) and there was no currency.
Capitalism maybe wasn't conceived top-down from scratch, but there were obviously people pushing for certain policies and laws that predominately favoured them... and ideologues looking to justify that after the fact. So expression of human nature is maybe a bit to strong, but I do take the general view that culture/ the political and economic systems we have, are never completely separate from quote unquote "human nature" interacting with a certain environment... and so not something you can just replace with any other set of ideas you might have.
That's not to say that there is no room for doing things in different ways, just that it is constrained by "human nature" and environment. The latter is the thing that I think will actually force us to adjust our systems in fundamental ways, because things have change so much over the last couple of decades... without the necessary change to the system. And that is a big part of the political crisis we are feeling all over the western world now I think.
With all due respect friend, you have much more educating to do. How do you think geniuses are made? Through genes? Where do you think people get skills and the ability for high function? You think people are just born this way? We'll they're not. Every human passes through a social system, the environments to which they are subject shape their individual quality. If you want more geniuses, which you already assume to be a good thing, then you need a more intelligent social structure. No advanced species would ever leave the cultivation of its progeny to chance. This is the main reason it would be an advanced species!
Quoting JerseyFlight
Quoting JerseyFlight
Quoting JerseyFlight
Quoting JerseyFlight
Quoting JerseyFlight
You know, you could stand a refresher course in attitude. I'm glad you have immersed yourself in difficult intellectual study. It's dirty work, but somebody has to do it. However, just because you have read much, studied hard, and have accumulated many theoretical insights doesn't prevent you from being a learned fool. I'm not saying you are a fool, learned or otherwise, mind you. I'm just suggesting that you could be--and you wouldn't necessarily know it. It could be that the environment in which you developed led brought you to an unfortunate amount of misplaced self-confidence.
Quoting David Mo
This statement may contain gobbledegook.
Quoting ssu
SSU: how do you define "worker"? Isn't a "worker" someone who is dependent on the wage he or she receives in exchange for labor? The wage, and the ability to labor, is everything to a worker.
A member of the bourgeoisie is not dependent on exchanging labor for a wage. God forbid! The bourgeoisie, at least as I understand it, owns the factory (or warehouse which Amazon rents) and receives the profit from the factory or rent. It isn't that the bourgeoisie do not expend mental and physical effort: some of them work their fingers to the bone, especially during the period of their 'original accumulation'. But if they are wealthy and still driving themselves, maybe they are merely suffering from OCD.
Granted, a lot of people (just about everybody, it seems like) think they are "middle class". Granted, some people occupy class-ambiguous positions. Is an Amazon, Target, Walmart, or Boeing upper-middle-management person really working class? I'm sure they don't think of themselves that way, and they may receive a fat enough benefit package to blur the factivity of their paycheck being tied to their ongoing performance of their work, or the profitability of their product area.
As for the American farmer, blessed be the small farmer with less than 250 acres and only 40 cows to milk, most of them are bourgeoisie. True, they may drive a tractor in the spring and a combine in the fall (both equipped with air conditioning, GPS, computer tracking recording how much corn, soy, or wheat was gathered from each square yard (square meter) of the field) which starting purchase price is around $500,000. Or probably they hire farm workers. But the bigger their land holding, the less likely is it that they are actually laboring in agriculture. What they are doing is much more a managerial function. Selling on the futures market, figuring the angles on government subsidies, deciding when and where to buy more land, and so on. If they have milk cows, it's likely that there are more than a thousand in their herd. Even superman would have trouble tending to the 4000 tits of 1000+ cows, let alone dealing with manure, feed, breeding, diseases, and so on.
But even the small family farmer may be quite well off, IF they own their land, IF it is good land, IF world demand for food is strong, and IF everyone else is not enjoying high yields. At least, on paper they may be worth quite a bit, even though they might have to liquidate the farm to see the cash value in hand.
I agree with this. The question is how do we go about preventing ourselves from becoming learned fools? "...wouldn't necessarily know it," what standards could we used to help prevent ourselves from deceiving ourselves?
:up:
Quoting JerseyFlight
Ask Sisyphus. When has it been different? Do you believe in Meliorism?
You keep telling people they don't belong in the same room as the adults. Well as a voice from the foyer, just what are you achieving in there that you can hand out so many dunce caps. You talk like a Headmaster. Is this the forum you want?
Last time I checked it wasn't faeries that invented agriculture, medicine and science.
These examples show that there are behaviors that are very difficult to eradicate. They do not prove that they are part of human nature. It may be due to cultural or social reasons. For example, since you quote it: alcoholism, which Western societies have been unable to control, has practically disappeared from many Muslim societies.
The thread does not refer to Marxists, but specifically to Marx.
True, the term Marxist, like almost all political terms, is quite ambiguous. But when someone claims to be a Christian, it's quite rare for him to be inspired by the Koran, isn't it? And communists who defend capitalism is a contradiction in terms. These are pretty obvious things. But conservative politicians want to put all communists in the same boat and attribute to them all the barbarities of some. This is very typical of political propaganda. This should be avoided in a serious discussion.
Quoting NOS4A2
Why? I don't care if you are conservative or liberal. After all, I'm not going out for a drink with you.
It is not irrelevant, because in one case one type of law will apply and in another case different laws will apply. Only if there are laws in history.
Quoting Isaac
According to Marx there is no need to go so far. The strength of a class to break its chains (to put it like a pamphlet of the time) would come from the relations between the forces of production and the relations of production. If under these conditions there is a strong and consistent workers' party, the revolution will take place. If there is not, we will have to wait for the next juncture. I would say that it is a game between necessity and chance.
This is the point! You have hit the mark!
Do you think? It may be my English that is very bad. Because the idea seems to me quite simple and understandable.
You mean like Sweden's recidivism rate for prisoners? You mean like the measurable success of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy? You mean like, Attachment Theory tracing many pathologies back to early childhood, thereby figuring out how to prevent these problems through the intelligent cultivation of healthy attachment relations?
This is a tragic and fallacious standard that assumes violence and cruelty merely arise from some fictional, metaphysical nature in man, when in reality, any horror we could cite would also have a sociological history that brought it into being. These things are not like asteroids hitting the earth (although even that has a causal history). What you have here articulated is basically Nihilism. It is in no way impressive to arrive at a false positive through the projection of a false negative.
With pleasure.
Everyone, including communists, agrees that people who make great contributions to society should be rewarded. But disagreements begin when two questions are asked: Why and how?
I will summarize the problem as to why:
Should they be rewarded because society owes them morally or as an incentive for their work?
As to how:
Should they be rewarded with material goods or is fame and honor enough?
If they are material goods, to what extent? What can these people demand without producing greater damage than the benefit they have contributed?
I don't know if the questions I ask are clearifying. I think that asking the right questions helps a lot. Do mine help?
NOTE: Your criticism of socialism suggests that capitalism is a sort of meritocracy. This is an untenable thesis. So what existing political system do you think is a meritocracy?
This is exactly the kind of gibberish you have been complaining about others posting
What you say doesn't help at all. It is absolutely unspecific.
By what force do those laws apply? The only actors in human history are humans and their environment. We either respond to that environment in a predictable way or we respond to that environment in a random way.
If we respond to that environment in a random way then no suggestions about how to effect human well-being should even be considered, we might as well toss a coin, manipulate the environment in random ways because our response to it is random and unpredictable. If this is the case then we might well institute what Marx suggests, his predictions might well be right, but if they were it would be by chance alone.
If, on the other hand, we respond to the environment in predictable ways then we can both predict the course of history, and we can make useful suggestions for how changes to our environment will have positive/negative impacts on us. Only in this second case is prediction and policy-making of any use.
In this second case, however, we have acknowledged that there is such a thing as human nature - the tendency to respond in some given way to some given environmental stimuli.
None of this is contradicted by the fact that one of those environmental stimuli we respond to is the actions of others, nor that one of those responses might be to learn/habituate a new, different, response. These are still themselves stimuli and responses, our malleability is still a facet of human nature (it could have been otherwise) and it has limits - themselves a facet of human nature.
If we are completely malleable without parameters, then there is no point in carrying out (or advocating) any policy over and above stoicism. We might as well simply train ourselves to be happy with the way things are, why bother trying to change them?
I think you're arguing against a point I'm not even making. It's very simple - any prediction about the response of human social groups to some environmental condition (including the activities of that social group, and including learning to respond differently) either presumes there is a 'nature' of such groups - a tendency to act in certain ways in response to certain stimuli - or it is left with no mechanism by which its current state is predictably transformed into the future state.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
I'm not clear about what you say in the first scenario. Anyway, Marx would point to the second assumption with the nuances I already made.
I'm not sure if he believed that there is such a thing as human nature. Engels did. But what he believed--Engels did--is that the laws of biology are not sufficient to explain human society and history. I think so too. That means that although history is made by men (hence their strength), they make it within the conditions and laws imposed by social structures. There is a famous text of the Theses on Feuerbach that says so and now I remember. There I could have reservations that some Marxists would accept and others would not. So I don't know if Marx would accept them.
Comparison: animal bodies are composed of atoms. Atoms are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, but I do not believe that the laws of evolution are those of quantum mechanics.
I hope the comparison is useful to you. But that's why appealing to human nature to justify capitalism doesn't make much sense. They are two different levels of reality.
On the combination between necessity and chance, according to Marx, I have already posted another comment recently.
Quoting David Mo
No one here is claiming that they are. The claim being contested is that there's no such thing as human nature, no statistical tendency to respond to stimuli in some given way (even if that is to alter one's subsequent response and even if part if those stimuli are the previous responses of other humans).
If you accept such a position you have to concede that the nature of this response is an empirical fact about humans, a fact which, if Marx were wrong about his assumptions of it, would render his theory wrong.
Marx needs to know how humans tend to behave to make the predictions he makes.
[quote=The Social System of Capitalism - Marx]Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour, and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are employed in producing new raw materials, new instruments of labour, and new means of subsistence. All these components of capital are created by labour, products of labour, accumulated labour. Accumulated labour that serves as a means to new production is capital. So say the economists.
What is a negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is worthy of the other.
A negro is a negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar.
In the process of production, human beings do not only enter into a relation with Nature. They produce only by working together in a specific manner and by reciprocally exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connexions and relations with one another, and only within these social connexions and relations does their connexion with Nature; i.e. production, take place.
These social relations between the producers , and the conditions under which they exchange their activities and share in the total act of production, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production. With the discovery of a new instrument of warfare, the fire-arm, the whole internal organization of the army was necessarily altered, the relations within which individuals compose an army and can act as an army were transformed, and the relation of different armies to one another was likewise changed.
The social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, are altered, transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, of the forces of production. The relations of production in their totality constitute what is called the social relations, society, and, moreover, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a unique and distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois (or capitalist) society, are such totalities of relations of production, each of which denotes a particular stage of development in the history of man-kind.
Capital also is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois relation of production, a relation of production of bourgeois society. The means of subsistence, the instruments of labour, the raw materials, of which capital consists - have they not been produced and accumulated under given social conditions, within definite social relations? Are they not employed for new production, under given social conditions, within definite social relations? And does not just this definite social character stamp the products which serve the new production as capital?
Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour, raw materials, not only of material products: it consists just as much of exchange values. All products of which it consists are commodities. Capital, consequently, is not only a sum of material products, it is a sum of commodities, of exchange values, of social magnitudes.
How then does a sum of commodities, of exchange values, become capital?
By the fact that, as an independent social power, i.e. as the power of a part of society, it preserves itself and multiplies by exchange with immediate, living labour power.
The existence of a class which possesses nothing but the ability to work is a necessary presupposition of capital.
It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labour over immediate living labour that transforms accumulated labour into capital.
Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labour serves living labour as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that living labour serves accumulated labour as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value.
What is it that takes place in the exchange between capitalist and wage-labourer?
The labourer receives means of subsistence in exchange for his labour-power; but the capitalist receives, in exchange for his means of subsistence, labour, the productive activity of the worker, the creative force by which the worker not only replaces what he consumes, but also gives to the accumulated labour a greater value than it previously possessed. The worker gets from the capitalist a portion of the existing means of subsistence. For what purpose do these means of subsistence serve him? For immediate consumption. But as soon as I consume the means of subsistence, they are irrevocably lost to me, unless I employ the time during which these means sustain my life in producing new means of subsistence, in creating by my labour new values in place of the values lost in consumption. but it is just this noble productive power that the worker surrenders to the capitalist in exchange for the means of subsistence received. Consequently, he has lost it for himself.
But does wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e. that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal, but a social, status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.[/quote]
Of critical note, Marx clearly defines "capital" as "means of production" (further precised as accumulated labour in relation to nature) under capitalism, as a real economic system, as it really actually exists when he is writing (capitalists really do employ labour at subsistence wages in a way that treats labour as another commodity required as input into production in industrial planning, and really do want the labourer to completely accept this role as a commodity as passively as possible).
Furthermore, his critique of "private property" (as understood when he is writing, as he clearly notes) is really that it is not personal property as the Bourgeois like to believe but only has value as part of a social system (i.e. maintained by laws, custom, force) in which capital can exploit labour, which is really society allowing accumulated labour of the past to exploit living labour of the present. This exploitation of living labour by privately owned accumulated property has no moral justification of why society should allow this.
For instance, the entire setup, despite being based on feudal conquest (just taking other's property which the capitalist, and capitalist sympathizer, condemns as immoral in principle; well, if we're talking about their property), the usual justification is, that's just "history" and we can ignore that because private property is better "managed" and so good for everyone (if there's an original sin of the how wealth is distributed in the beginning, well, we've certainly grown enough apples by now to take the cake).
Marx directly addresses these moral justifications for capitalism:
[quote=The Social System of Capitalism - Marx]
The labour of the superintendence and management will naturally be required wherever the direct process of production assumes the form of a combined social process, and does not rest on the isolated labour of independent producers. It has, however, a twofold character.
On the one hand, all work in which many individuals cooperate necessarily requires for the coordination and unity of the process a directing will, and functions which total activity of the workshop, similar to those of the conductor of an orchestra. This is a kind of productive labour which must be performed in every mode of cooperative production.
On the other hand, this labour of superintendence necessarily arises in all modes of production which are based on the antagonism between the worker as a direct producer and the owner of the means of production. The greater this antagonism the more important is the role played by superintendence. Hence it reaches its maximum in a slave system. But it is indispensable also under the capitalist mode of production, since the process of production is at the same time the process by which the capitalist consumes the labour power of the worker. In the same way, in despotic States, the labour of the superintendence and universal interference by the government comprises both the discharge of community affairs, the need for which arises in all societies, and the specific functions arising from the antagonism between the government and the mass of the people.
In the works of ancient writing, who have the slave system before their eyes, both sides of the labour of superintendence are as inseparably combined in theory as they were in practice. So it is, also, in the works of of the modern economists, who regard the capitalist mode of production as an absolute mode of production. On the other hand ... the apologists of the modern slave system know how to utilize the labour of superintendence to justify slavery just as well as the other economists use it to justify the wage system...
The labour of management and superintendence, not as a function resulting from the nature of all cooperative social labour, but as a consequence of the antagonism between the owner of the means of production and the owner of mere labour-power (whether this labour-power is bought by buying the labourer himself, as it is under the slave system, or whether the labourer himself sells his labour-power so that the process of production is the process by which capital consumes his labour-power), as a function resulting from the servitude of the direct producers, has often been quoted in justification of this relation of servitude itself. And exploitation, the appropriation of the unpaid labour of the others, has quite as often been represented as the reward justly due to the owner of capital for his labour ...
Now the wage-labourer, like the slave, must have a master who will put him to work and rule him. And once this relation of master and servant has been presupposed, it is quite proper to compel the wage-labourer to produce his own wages and also the wages of superintendence, a compensation for the labour of ruling and superintending him, 'a just compensation for his master in return for the labour and talents devoted to ruling him and making him useful to himself and society'.[/quote]
Marx was also aware that the positive justifications of the market (that "productivity is increasing" that "wealth is increasing" without any analysis as to the effect of this productivity on society and who is benefiting, that "whoever gets money through market relations" clearly deserves such money) is so inconsistent as to be caricature (there is no actual basis for what is the "market" other than what is convenient in moralizing justification for the status quo of power relations).
Marx is addressing here the justification for obviously wasted resources on frivolous luxuries of the rich (in terms of real needs of society we could possibly imagine) in that it creates busywork and keeps the whole system humming and buzzing. Clearly, the criminal is also creating such busywork and must therefore be as morally praiseworthy as the opulent captains of industry under such an argument.
But more can be said on this theme. Since this was written, to this day no proponent of "competition and personal success by accumulating money" has ever shown why crime isn't a coherent way to compete and pursue this happiness, if one has the skills for it and it's more profitable than other activities available; why the mobster really isn't just another businessman as he professes to be. I.e. only competition that reinforces the status quo is justifiable and any competition with the status quo (and real gain of wealth by all the poor; i.e. any actual competition between opposing interests) is condemnable: any labour that produces commodities (grain, iron, and paper to cigarettes, oil and pornography) is good regardless of what it is and what it's affect is on society and the environment, but any labour that doesn't produce commodities is bad regardless of what it is, the criminal in the above case is the extreme case, but also worth mentioning the labour of the union organizer to benefit a group of workers in pooling their negotiation power in mutual-collaboration under the right to associate with who you want (bad, bad, bad) or the labour of the political actor trying to change laws so workers can also benefit from accumulated labour and be less exploited as a baseline such as safety laws, overtime pay, minimum wage, health care, free higher education (bad! bad! bad! BAD!) and worst of all any research work into the sustainability of how commodities are produced generally (conspiracy I tell you!!).
But I will end here with this food for thought:
Of course. Marx's theory has been falsified in several of his main predictions -with Popper's permission.
Quoting Isaac
This is very vague. Marx needed to know how economic structures determine the behavior of social groups. Other aspects of human behavior are indifferent to his theory because they are meaningless.
Yes, I didn't mean to imply that Marx needed to know everything there is to know about human behaviour. It strikes me as odd that you phrase it that way around. That economic structures determine the behaviour of social groups. Economic structures themselves are passive, they merely exist, they don't themselves determine anything. It's the necessities and responses of human social groups to them which determines their behaviour. It's like saying the gold seam in a mountain determines the mine.
Not the same barbarities, just the same bad ideas. Besides, capitalists shouldn’t defend communists lest they lose ther capitalism membership, right?
Fair enough. I’ll assume you are.
Hard to know for sure from memory recall, but I don't think I have ever used the term "gibberish" on this forum, not that I'm opposed to it, I just don't think I've expressed myself this way. More to the point, what was it specifically in my reply that led you to classify it as "gibberish," aside from the obvious and emotional fact that you disagree with it?
What in God's name, how on earth did you arrive at this from David Mo's confession of substance? I'm dumbfounded. One assumes too much, that those who contribute to this forum, are suited to the very task to which they aspire. This is clearly not the case. It is sadly obvious that some participants exempt themselves from intelligent discourse, thereby making it necessary to ignore them.
My point was that values are multifaceted across history and are more often than not derived from alternative modes of production and the social relations that are organized around them (a point that Marx made as well). As such, contemporaries who claim that human nature is reducible to greed or competition is akin to a fish claiming that everything in under water. It's myopic.
Personally, I detest building or theorizing about a socio-economic system or a government based on some theory of human nature that's reducible to a specific state of mind or biologically-based interaction.
Not just detest, but this is positively dangerous. It literally creates a negative society. However, this is pretty much the structure of the American system, and most certainly the atmosphere of its politics. Thinkers and Humanists are frighteningly outnumbered. When I meet theorists like yourself I am always interested to know, what you think needs to happen in society, in order to move it in an intelligent direction?
Erm.. I mean I'm the first one to encourage skepticism of mainstream history but.. pretty sure at least most of it happened lol. Kinda graduates past the "theory" stage really. Besides, wasn't your boy Marx talking about something along the lines of "the people want what they want (feels natural, doesn't feel totalitarian/government enforced) and will fight (damage people and property) for it" or some bit?
Quoting JerseyFlight
Story of humanity. Not as bad today as it was before. You follow the law and don't attack people or property you won't get arrested/get a record and have your life ruined. Besides, do we really want all these geniuses running around trying to one-up each other? At least when average folk do it usually only one or a few people get hurt or worse. They do it, we'll probably end up with some doomsday devices that end up making nukes look like cherry bombs. Gotta look at the bright side of things.
I don't understand what you are saying here.
Allright, and I don't really care for building or theorizing about socio-economic systems based on any ideologically inspired dogma, which usually would include capitalist apologists and Marxists alike.
Not really a theory, mate. According to Marx as well it would seem...
Gibberish was a poor choice of words for your response, but it would appear that you are not opposed to using that term for responses you disapprove of. I was reacting emotionally because you completely missed and misunderstood the point and implication of the Meliorism remark and that is exactly what you accuse other posters of doing to you, and you do it in an almost pedantic way that is irritating.
You aren't going to leave this forum for greener pastures, you are having too much fun castigating the sophists.
The Meliorism reference was off topic anyway and is better suited for another day.
It seems hard to imagine the proletariat could possibly ever be a minority, as that would mean that a property-owning majority was somehow getting by on the labor of a minority. Hierarchy always seems to be a pyramid: it’s smaller at the top.
I guess maybe with technological advances it could be possible? E.g. about 5% of people today are engaged in the agricultural work that used to be 100% of the economy, so maybe somehow it could come to be that 95% of the people own 100% of the means of production and live off the labor of that remaining 5%?
Good point! My only doubt was as to the numbers of what might now qualify as the middle class.
This is no admission at all. What you are saying shows that you have not come here to discuss ideas but to attack people.
From what you have written it follows that you believe that Marxists are bad people, that the world is full of powerful communist parties and that your duty is to identify and "neutralize" them (intellectually, I suppose). This ideology has a classic name: anti-communism, and it was valid during the time of the Cold War. Today it is a scarecrow that the extreme right wields when it wants to inflame its bases. But it has little to do with the reality of really existing capitalism.
Assume what you want. But don't attribute to me what you assume.
Of course, it is the social groups that compete according to their needs and interests. But this conflict results in something that does not exactly correspond to any particular interest. Marx believed that it was possible to discover the laws governing this "impersonal" outcome of historical conflicts. In fact, he believed that his theory was a scientific explanation of the history of human conflict. According to him, it was the "impersonal" economy that ultimately determined human destinies. I don't know what you mean by "passive", but it was clear to him that it had its own laws and that it determined human behavior at the level of societies, even individually, in part.
I think the belief that historical materialism was a science is one of the weakest in Marx's theory.
It is a commonplace that the middle classes have expanded and the working class has diminished, compared to the time of Marx. But this has been achieved through the expansion of the false autonomous workers and by taking the centers of production to the countries of the Third World, among other things. In any case, it seems clear that the proletariat, in the classical sense, no longer has the strength it had at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.
It depends. Engels was a capitalist and defended communism.
You mean that there are no Marxists who defend capitalism as there are no pro-Stalin democrats. These are exclusive terms.
I see. Now I understand your reference to atoms and ecosystems which had been opaque before. You're saying that Marx claimed to know how social institutions worked as entities and so didn't need to know how their individual components worked? If so, then I think your atoms/ecosystems analogy is probably a good case in point of where I disagree. Many good ecologists may have little to no knowledge of atomic theory and this doesn't hamper their understanding of the ecosystem, but I'd guarantee you there's not a single ecologists who doesn't have a good working grasp of the biology of the plants and animals comprising their ecosystem. Those parameters will be crucial to the development of any theory in their field. Your atoms/ecosystems analogy is a good example of why reductionism fails, but it cannot be taken to assume that systems can be effectively studied and modelled without even understanding the limits imposed by the models of their immediate component systems.
I'd agree with you that the result of individual systems interacting can be something which is not itself reducible to the outputs of those systems, but it's a step too far to suggest that it is not in any way constrained by them. Modelling human social institutions without reference to the human imperatives that constitute them is sloppy at best, regardless of the clear fact that the resultant institutions will be more complex than the constituent objectives.
Perfect. That means that each "field" or level of knowledge uses the "parameters" that are useful for its study. And history or sociology has its own, which are not those of nuclear physics or biology.
The concept of human nature may be useful - if it is - in the field of anthropology or psychology. But not in the field of history or sociology. No historian now comes to my mind who explains the fall of the Roman Empire on the basis of the immutable laws of human nature. No modern historian, of course.
Speaking of responsibility and stuff is all great but have a look at the reality: Often when it comes to wages the business argument is "We could produce much cheaper in china". If then this gets serious maybe even politics step in to "save jobs" and everything gets "fine and dandy". For you, that is, as it is not the "evil chinese" but the "poor chinese" who would work for a much lower wage and whose work now gets forced to an even lower price.
But this is not about prices. Marx is talking about principles. With an economy based on trade-values you would still need to work all day even with the technological means of the StarTrek-universe where everything could be made from thin-air by replicators. Despite nobody wants or needs a trade-value in first place.
Have had much work, so I haven't had the time to respond or follow the discussion.
It's not at all curious what I'm talking about. It's one of the most important aspects in a democracy that especially taken into consideration usually with a constitution, the constitution that specifically protects the rights of the minority from the will of the majority. It is absolutely no coincidence, but inherent to the ideology that communist revolutions have brought a totalitarian system when implemented in reality. Protection of the rights of minorities is something that marxism is fundamentally opposed. It see's just this "rights" as a vessel for the enemies of proletariat. It doesn't believe that liberal democracies can actually do something about the social problems that the new system has brought about, but that is what actually has happened. And of course, a lot of people are against the abolition of private property, so the conflict is inherent.
Quoting Maw
Well, this thread is about Marx, not Marxism, so I guess we are a bit stuck in the 19th Century. But of course I acknowledge that modern marxism isn't the same the movement was 150 years ago (or so).
Quoting Bitter Crank
Well, technically many CEO's and managers are "workers". They might have some bonus-system, but usually they aren't "owners" of the corporations, but hired hands. The ultra successful entrepreneur or family business are quite rare these days. Or would you consider high ranking officers, army generals, as "workers"?
Quoting Bitter Crank
And what's the problem with that? I consider myself middle class.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Actually, the farmer is the perfect example of how problematic the class divide in Marxism is. Yes, the ordinary farmer might be even a millionaire if he sold everything, but then he or she would have nothing else than a fat bank account. Otherwise he or she might earn actually very little, so little that the job at McDonalds might give equivalent or better income. Yet if the farmer is a land owner, he or she is the root problem of everything to classic Marxism.
Industrialization has finally come to agriculture, but that may be a subject for a different thread.
Not in my country, basically.
This country has truly eradicated large scale rural povetry that there was in the 19th Century. It doesn't have shanty towns or people living on the streets in tents.
But that didn't happen because of marxism. Had my country gone the same way as the Soviet Union went in 1918, it would have been far poorer now (or simply part of the Soviet Union and now perhaps in a similar situation as the Baltic States).
~Karl Marx
You are talking about a very special minority, are you? In general "rights" indicate conflicts which get settled in the form of rights by the governing body. What would be rights if all were free? Rights are no values-in-themselves.
Quoting ssu
I associated that with Rosseau (On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind)
You are living in delusion. The reason there is not more homelessness and poverty, and soon their will be, is ONLY because of social programs that exist to help the poor (and these are not even close to adequate). Further, I can't remember who, a study was done a few years back, maybe someone on this thread knows the reference?, that found the poverty in the United States to be comparable to third world countries. You live in a delusion friend, and have been refuted many times over on this thread.
To be fair, homelessness and frigid, subzero cold don't mix together too well.
I've heard good things about Finland though. Knew someone from there. Cool dude. Smart too.
You can’t just look at the income difference, you need to look at the expenses too. Someone who owns no land and works at McDonalds sees the vast majority of their income go to just paying someone else to live on their land. The farm owner has no such expense, and also has a job that they can’t be fired from because they own it.
What country are you speaking, please?
You may be interested to know that at the time of declaring the end of the communist system at the end of 1991, what was known in liberal countries as "poverty" (i.e. having a lifestyle that would cost about $180 a month in a developed country, or less) was not even 5% of the Soviet population, and that because it had grown in the last five years. In the best moment of the Union it was less than 2%. The "misery" (people without housing, in street situation, without basic access to food and minimum means, etc.) practically did not exist.
The problems of the USSR were of a different nature.
See also this statistic from the World Bank: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BVqXxaXIAAArOk1.jpg
Curious.
That's what you have in the Nordic countries.
Quoting JerseyFlight
There is a saying that the US is the richest Third World country in the World.
Quoting JerseyFlight
You are the one living in a delusion and painting your own fantasies. Starting from thinking that I'm an American.
Quoting David Mo
Finland.
Quoting David Mo
Did you visit the Soviet Union?
I did.
Lived with a family for a short while in Moscow. Also shortly visited East Germany. Met some Soviets through my parents, who were scientists.
Soviet Union wasn't North Korea, but still it wasn't open. The economy wasn't great. The Soviet system did suck, the people, that first were totally silent about politics (thanks to the totalitarian system) then opened up after Glasnost and Perestroika, and what did they have to say? That the whole system was bullshit. That nobody believed in it. That it was doomed. And so it was.
We of course in the West didn't believe that, especially the leftist politicians, and thought it would just limp on. It didn't. It utterly collapsed with only people like Vladimir Putin crying after for the system. Or perhaps now the young leftists who don't have any clue about the reality of the socialist experiment, but can be dashingly radical by thinking the Soviet Union was cool.
At least old leftists here like BitterCrank know how it was... and of course people like him were totally politically incorrect leftists during the time when Marxism-Leninism was an official ideology in the World (if I remember correctly a discussion we had some years ago about the subject).
(Btw, Guess you believe in all Chinese statistic too. Or North Korean?)
I have never heard of "barbarism" ever as a political method. Maybe it's in use, I don't know, in some schools of political history or political economy. Would you please be so kind as to point at the source where "barbarism" is defined, as quoated by you?
You make a Strawman argument. Marx said, "original source", and you equate it to "all sources", then you point out how the quote by Marx was wrong. No, it was not wrong. Your interpretation (which is pretty hard to do, seeing that Marx's text was written in such clear, plain English) was wrong. This was a big mistake on your part as a careful reader.
I don't want to delve much further into your argument. If you use all kinds of fallacious arguments, and you take yourself seriously based on them, I am not interested in what you have to say.
Italics my addition.
You apparently can't see he is describing the status quo, and establishes the observance of a universal truth. He does not give it moral support or any sort of reinforcement. What you claim is equivalent to Newton morally supporting and reinforcing the notion of justified gravity and gravitational force. That's my impression, anyhow.
You seem to try to apply a twist to every quote you bring up. To your disadvantage, Marx was a clear thinker and an effective communicator. To your advantage there are a huge number of people who will support your opinions, because of social-emotional pre-condemnation of anything Marx has ever written.
Finally you make two good points. The chain of power is presented in an uprising or revolution. And you fear that the restructuring won't be intelligent... that is a very rational and valid fear. Restructuring may very well be done unintelligently. Both these notions don't contradict Marx's text.
No, it wasn't "great", whatever "great" is. I haven't been in the USSR, but I have been in Hungary and Cuba. At my host's house, a university professor, they didn't have a shower head. Not because they couldn't afford it, but because there was not in the store. But here we were talking about poverty. Not the level of consumption.
I also had the opportunity to talk with Romanian, Moldovan, and Russian friends who migrated to Western Europe after the fall of the wall. They ratify the World Bank's figures. I do not have my figures very up-to-date, but twenty years later capitalist Russia had not reached the life expectancy that existed in the USSR. And life expectancy is a very significant indicator.
I am not praising the USSR. It was contemptible in almost everything. I'm saying that you have to see things without the blinkers of propaganda. Neither that of one side, nor that of the other.
Finland? You have chosen a really exceptional country. A model not very exportable. Like Iceland.
Do you think that the World Bank's statistics are false? Is it sold to the communists?
The World Bank does not give poverty figures for North Korea. China had a poverty rate of 7% a few years ago according WB.
Yes, and the typical issue is that if in our criticism of our own society we are harsh and objective, we then tend to not treat other societies in the same way and even find excuses for them...typically some conspiracy theory of some sort.
Quoting David Mo
Oh they could afford it, but there wasn't any in store?
Well, that sounds exactly what happens when there isn't a market mechanism in a planned economy. It's a prime example of why and how the system sucked. In a socialist planned economy prices don't reflect supply and demand and thus don't relay information or create incentives. Prices and wages are controlled and typically create huge imbalances with high demand and low supply.
Quoting David Mo
When it came to the Soviet Union?
Very likely.
The World Bank didn't have any ability to gather statistics inside the country. And did the Soviet Union lie in it's statistics? Yes, apparently to the highest level. This was the problem especially with agriculture. I remember when the breadlines started in the last years of the Soviet Union when I was in Moscow. The Muscovite family was used to "luxury items" like soap etc. being rare on the shelves, but once the shortages came to bread, they were very worried.
Quoting David Mo
I think it's not so exceptional. Many West European countries are quite the same. And the closest example to the US is of course Canada. The real issue is how to find the golden road between the public and private sectors, how you get the best mix of public and private, between state programs like the various welfare programs and then leave to the market mechanism what it can handle the best. And avoid corruption or poor oligopoly competition. That's where the real discussion should be.
But then of course, we can start with the classic ideas of Marx and keep the discourse quite theoretical.
I don't know how these numbers were calculated. It would be impossible to do a comparison with other countries based on money income, because Soviet currency was nonconvertible and incomes and living expenses were not distributed as they would be in a market economy. No direct comparison with US or Western Europe would be accurate because of how different life was in the Soviet Union.
That disparity went both ways. Some basic foodstuffs like bread were heavily subsidized and distributed, so that as long as you were not institutionalized and had even a tiny income, you were unlikely to literally starve to death. But for all that, most people spent most of their income on food, clothing and other necessities. A Russian-made TV set could cost more than a month's wages.
Cars were not affordable for most people, but then people were not very mobile (in part due to artificial restrictions), and public infrastructure was built with the lack of personal transportation in mind. And if you were determined to buy a car, you would have to wait for years to get one, giving you time to save.
Average savings were just a few percent, but most people in the later period were guaranteed a pension at retirement. Medicine was nominally free, but gratuities in the form of presents or cash payments were common.
State-provided housing - for those who had it - was cheap. But if you were in a situation where you had to rent privately (and illegally), housing would be very expensive. Homelessness "did not exist" officially - indeed, it was criminalized. That doesn't mean it didn't exist in reality though, it just wasn't obvious to outsiders (not in the closing decades of the regime, when it was more image-conscious). And those who were not technically homeless sometimes lived all their lives in cramped, barely livable barracks and hostels.
It is a false assertion that claims barbarism must be advocated as a formal political method in order to be a procedure of praxis. If you must know, fascism is equivalent. The methods utilized cannot be distinguished from barbarism, in fact, they may even be worse insofar as they make use of systematic violence through official channels. Much of my thinking on this topic has been influenced by the work of Adorno. I would challenge you to think about the shallowness of your objection, as it is one of mere formality.
Hard to follow you here. Not sure what you're talking about?
Quoting god must be atheist
You merely re-state my point. I don't understand what point you are trying to make? My comments were meant to be the beginning of a discourse not a finality. Here you merely show that you comprehend the point, which means it can now be discussed. As for contradicting Marx, this was neither my point or my intention. Nevertheless, fundamental Marxism is incredibly naive (but I must say) its naivety is nothing compared to capitalism. Romanticizing the quality of the masses is a huge mistake. Life does not end after such a realization, theory must figure out how intelligence can proceed. We can either be the dupes of our time or we can use thought to resist.
I've been down this road before. Conversations with people who considered themselves authorities on politics because they lived in a Right-Wing-Fascist-Dictatorship. I do not defend or advocate the Right-Wing fascist system of the Soviet Union. The only thing you can mean when you say Leftists have no clue, is exactly what I have been repeatedly pointing out, a workers revolt is not necessarily going to create a better system, thinking it will is delusion. There are many factors that come into play, pre-revolutionary factors as well as post-revolutionary factors. You seem to think you have settled the matter, but all you have really done is manifest that your theoretical position is driven by emotion. All the problems of class and society remain, how do you propose we approach these problems? How do you propose we go about making a better society, where human quality doesn't hinge on exploitation?
???
If you start arguing that the Soviet Union was a Right-Wing-Fascist-Dictatorship, terms and definitions have no meaning for you.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Contrasting how political ideologies have worked historically in the real world isn't driven by emotion.
Quoting JerseyFlight
A good start would not to put one historical political theorist on a pedestal for worship. It would be good to look at what has worked and why...and what has failed. Only then one is ready to think how to improve things in the present.
Quoting JerseyFlight
How does the society improve and how has it improved? By many ways, but let's try to stick to the topic of this thread here.
I don't have the direct quote, but I think that even Marx said that the proletariat could go the other way, from not going for a revolution, but simply ending up demanding better wages from the capitalists.
Well, that's what the labour movement and trade unions generally did in the West: the implementation of labour laws, increase in pay and the improvement working conditions. The lower classes didn't fall into despair, on the contrary, absolute povetry was decreased. Liberal democracies could do something to correct the problems that the industrial revolution had created. Up to some point, at least. And these corrections were generally universally accepted by both the left and right, usually through the political system in nation states.
As the era of globalization changed a gear up, these accomplishments came into danger as labour competition became global. One billion Chinese suddenly coming to the market had to have a huge impact and the aspect of the issue being international, global, meant that the labour movement organized usually at the national level didn't have an answer to this. Hence the transfer of jobs from the rich countries to places were labour was more cheap.
I think perhaps from the viewpoint of Marxism, the lack of response to globalization from the international labour movement is the problem. And just why this difficult is obvious: if globalization has erased jobs in Western industrial countries, it has created them in the Third World. I'm not a leftie, but in this question I think we could find some common ground.
I care little about your formalism or anyone elses. The Soviet Union was a Right-Wing-Dictatorship presided over by Joseph Stalin. Just like all good Right-Wing ideology the Leader was allowed to unilaterally make the rules and issue executive orders without a democratic check on his power.
However, because your entire argument is based on the straw-man of the Soviet Union, no doubt you need to define it to fit your argument. Too bad that in reality it was a Right-Wing-Dictatorship.
Quoting ssu
Once again, you merely prove that you don't live in reality. Humans are exactly driven by emotion, which is why their world is driven by emotion. The problem with the world isn't the fact that we have too many dispassionate thinkers, but that the human world is full of passions.
Quoting ssu
I think this is indeed a good place to start.
Quoting ssu
By worked I assume you mean the cultivation of some kind of social quality, how do you measure it? This is important because your criteria will determine whether or not your standard is actually addressing the issues, suppressing them, or possibly even creating them?
Quoting ssu
Labor struggles are never pretty. These are resistance movements. Why wouldn't you try to target the imbalances of power and possession that account for these struggles in the first place? You are already confessing to poor conditions, how did these conditions come about? No labor struggle has ever abolished "absolute poverty." Further, your analysis doesn't even take into consideration the whole notion of the activity of work itself.
So you admit that Liberal Democracies could do something to correct the problem, where was the democracy in the Soviet Union? And if it wasn't there how could the people address their social problems?
Quoting ssu
There is no empirical reality to this at all. Labor struggles are hard fought. Those who own the land and have wealth do not want to give up their power.
Quoting ssu
Clearly you see this as bad thing. But this is how capitalism works, maybe you don't like capitalism? How should we go about solving this problem when it is created by the very axioms of the capitalist system?
Quoting ssu
Hard to see how we are even on the same page here? What you are talking about is called a race to the bottom. Your analysis doesn't even make contact with the power structure of the system. It simply reproduces the social consciousness into which it was born. How can you change a system you don't even comprehend?
The World Bank has teams of researchers who analyze the data provided by the country. When they are unclear or do not correspond to parallel reports, they discard statements. This is the case with North Korea and other countries. In other cases, forgeries have been discovered. For example, I recall the case of Fujimori and the poverty rates in Peru. Or bad practices by WB officials themselves have been detected. I now remember the self-criticism for having manipulated statistics against Ms. Bachelet when she was president of Chile.
The World Bank had no interest in making things easier for communist regimes. As critics of the WB (I remember Joseph Stiglitz in particular) have pointed out, the WB is a very conservative institution, working in tune with the conservative trend in the world economy. It is very surprising that you accuse it of functioning as a front for communist regimes.
In general, within the natural reserves, the data of the WB can be considered as the most reliable or less dubious that can be contemplated. They are used by right-wing and centrist economists. And sometimes of the left. The comment on poverty in the USSR came from a conservative economics magazine.
What doesn't make sense is for you to become a radical skeptic just because the available data don't encourage your phobias. That's pure Trumpism.
Yes, Finland is a very special case. It is at the top of all social rankings. It does not seem that its recipe for success is exportable or that there has been a general spread of success in the world.
A good parallel indicator is the activity of social assistance NGOs. For example:
By the way, the news refers to Finland.
I was talking about poverty. You of consumption.
Incidentally, I find it funny that one criticism of the USSR is that housing was expensive or that some health care had to be paid for. That's not supposed to happen in London or New York? Don't the clochards of Paris exist?
If you are trying to prove that the Communist Paradise did not exist, go to another one. I already know that. But don't sell me the Capitalist Paradise in return. I don't believe it either.
Indeed you don't.
Quoting JerseyFlight
I guess we aren't. With utterly crazy statements from you like the one above it isn't surprising.
One can either pretend that reality is a definition or one can look at the actual attributes of reality itself. It doesn't matter what you or I say about the Soviet Union, what matters is what the Soviet Union actually was. Did democracy exist in the Soviet Union? Did Stalin have power? Were there any democratic checks on his power?
I'm saying that there weren't those checks, not even after Stalin, even if the totalitarian system became more "humane" by changing the labour camps to mental institutions.
Yet it is simply pure dishonesty and flagrant denial from you to try think that the teachings of Karl Marx had nothing to do with a society that had as it's state ideology Marxism-Leninism and that you try to call the Soviet Union a "right-wing dictatorship". I guess "right-wing" is just a swearword for you, so perhaps you could call Stalin a nazi too.
Sometimes the dictatorship of Stalin is said to be where the Soviet Union lost it's cause. Yet it is simply ignorance to try uphold the fallacy of Soviet Union being a possible success "if not for Stalin". Stalin, the great scapegoat. How many times have I heard "if not Stalin" ...how benign the system would have been under Lenin. This thinking totally disregards the intrinsic problems of Marx's ideology, which do inherently lead to a totalitarian system.
Mikhail Bakunin saw this flaw well in the ideas of Karl Marx and writes in Marxism, Freedom and the State:
Bakunin was right far before the Soviet Union was formed on the new ruling class in the "classless society" which would rely on armed force. That the same thing happened in China and in many other places where communists took over, which says something about the ideology of Marx.
It has as much to do with Marx's teachings of a democratic society ordered by workers as North Korea. This is one of the great dangers and tragedies of Marxism, it is so easily hi-jacked by dictators. It is actually your own fallacy, people think the name is equivalent to the substance. I have already provided citations on this thread that clearly demonstrate that Marx did not teach a political system of state dictatorship. He is not responsible for Stalin. Dictators will use whatever ideology they can to come into power.
I did not merely try to call the Soviet Union a Right-Wing-Dictatorship, in actual practice that's what it was. You don't like this fact because it refutes your strawman argument.
Quoting ssu
He was not a Nazi but he was in the exact same political position as Hitler, they both had absolute power without democratic checks on that power.
Quoting ssu
No one on this thread has done this that I am aware of. This is certainly not my argument. This is another strawman. You are very ignorant about Marx's political philosophy. The whole idea of taking a peasant society (nearly feudalistic) and artificially thrusting it into communism is a joke. In Marx's theory the contradictions of advanced capitalism lead to the conclusions of communism. Society must advance through a series of organic stages, this is required to produce the social consciousness necessary to communism. I would again like to here state, I am not a Marxist, and I most certainly do not advocate Marxist revolution, I am merely trying to swiftly educate you on Marx's position.
Quoting ssu
I agree with this, but for reasons very different from your strawman formation.
What a great Bakunin quote. I wish I knew the full context but I agree with what he said here. The difference is that you think this simply settles the matter, and Marx is quickly disposed of, but this is not the case. I see problems, but I am not sure I have ever encountered a more species-intelligent-thinker. One cannot think about material life and ignore Marx, even those who try end up in the same place. He simply thought about society in concrete terms, unshackled from the errors of idealism.
I think it is important when analysing Marx and the problem of private property, that the issue of communism, as a means of resolving the issue through collective ownership not be conflated with the problem. The problem of communisms are not really relevant to today and dealing with the issue of private property. Could we agree that we are not going to be seeing a return to the approach of aiming for collective ownership?
The issues are still pertinent today, of course, we can agree, actually it's worse than ever. Amazon as an example, is such an efficient producer and that has destroyed so many livelihoods and we know it's only going to get worse. The control over the means of mass efficiency are going to end up in the hands of fewer and fewer people because of ever-increasing efficiency.
I don't see a way to address the disease but it is possible to mitigate the damage by wealth redistribution and I think that has become what we're resigned to. Either wealth redistribution will occur in equal measure to the destruction caused or we will end up in a dystopia. That and limiting the profiteering by creating appropriate rights and protections for workers.
What kind of "intelligent restructuring" are you looking to discuss?
Quoting ssu
This is simply propaganda. Hitler emerged out of a liberal capitalist system, supported by capitalists, but it seems pretty clear you would not hold this against liberal capitalism but would argue that Hitler presented a different ideology that was able to emerge out of liberal capitalism, sure, but has nothing to do with liberal capitalism. Likewise, there was still a "market" in Nazi Germany, are you proposing that this fact is condemnation of all market theorist (from Smith to Keynes)?
If the answer is obviously no, as that's a ridiculous argument, so too is the idea the actions of Stalin somehow condemn the ideas of Marx to such a degree that it can be just assumed without even needing to know anything about Marx and what he wrote (which you obviously don't).
Likewise, can we assume all the genocides and slavery committed by European empires would be 'simply pure dishonesty and flagrant denial from you to try think that the teachings of' Jesus "had nothing to do with a society that had as it's state ideology' Christianity? That we need not even bother reading what Jesus had to say to know he was pro-genocide, pro-crusades and pro-slavery because nominal Christian empires did such things? They're calling themselves not just Christians but the literal body of Christ with a pope representing the word of God not just saying crusades and conquest is cool, but indeed demanding it happen.
Do you only bring this kind of argument against Marxism, but wouldn't against market theorists or Christianity, but rather in those contexts view it as pure idiocy?
Or, are do you share the same opinion as nearly all good-faith interlocutors both for liberal-capitalism and socialism, whatever brand, that things can go wrong. Markets and liberal institutions can and do fail leading to totalitarianism, which both liberal-capitalists and socialists can agree is a bad thing. Likewise, socialist revolutions against totalitarianism (or are you defending Tsarists Russia as a bastion of freedom?) can and do go wrong resulting in as bad or worse totalitarianism, which both liberal-capitalists and socialists can agree is a bad thing.
Quoting ssu
You shouldn't quote Mikhail Bakunin if you have no idea what he was about and what was his basis of disagreement with Marx.
Bakunin believed Marx favoured totalitarianism because Marx didn't believe you could just wipe clean all state institutions and things turn out ok (a la. Pol Pot). Marx believed that getting piecemeal victories like working hours, worker protections was a good thing in itself but also actions through which the working class learns how "to do politics" and gain confidence. Bakunin believed simply wiping out the state and all state institutions, would bring society back to a natural community based tribalism and that humans naturally and spontaneously didn't fight or exploit each other absent the state.
Go research the Bakunin-Marx disagreement and come back and defend Bakunin.
Likewise, Marx viewed the Paris commune (direct democracy) extremely favourably and the first appearance of "workers managing their own affairs"; if he wanted a totalitarian state run by nominal Marxists theorists he would have said so both in his writing and through explicit, or at least implied, criticism of the Paris commune.
Bakunin's argument for Marxism leads to totalitarianism was basically that Marx recognized you're still going to need all the skills that exist in Bourgeois institutions and people for society to function, you can't just wipe the slate clean; hence, the revolution towards a classless society can't be achieved in one fell swoop of annihilating the state but is a complicated process of workers learning things and learning to work together to achieve goals (like working hours and mines not collapsing on them all the time due to under-investments - i.e. unprofitable outlays - in safety).
Marx was pretty moderate and argued to kick Bakunin out of the International not because Marx was a totalitarian that wanted all the power, but because he didn't believe in Bakunin's program of bringing down states through intrigue (i.e. assassinating government officials). Marx didn't advocate assassinating government officials to bring down the state, but rather gaining political power through organized worker actions like strikes.
Essentially the reasons Marx viewed workers as a revolutionary class is because you needed knowledge to work in a factory, innovate, and for a capitalist economy to functions, and so capitalists could not but help providing this education. Slaves was not a revolutionary class because it was predicated on keeping the slaves as ignorant as possible (in thousands of years of slavery no slave rebellion revolutionized slaving societies); rather, it's the bourgeoisie that are the revolutionary class against slave based society because they discover more efficient means of production that are incompatible with slaves (skilled manufacturing - which at first seems compatible with slave based resource extraction elsewhere, but eventually gets so efficient you can use skilled manufacturing techniques to extract resources also, so - why not? both on efficiency grounds, ethical grounds that the slaves aren't "practically needed" as well as on economic motivational grounds of selling capital equipment in the resource extraction market, resulting in a contradiction in the system resolved by the Bourgeoisie overthrowing the state and implementing liberal capitalism).
Marx does not "hate on the bourgeoisie", as propagandists like Peterson like to believe, but genuinely views slavery as worse than wage-labour and is happy the Bourgeoisie developed to a position of wealth and power to be able to overturn the slavery/serfdom (which, despite thousands of years of many slaves being motivated to overturn slavery, did not manage to do; racists would say it is because the slaves ere just weak and inferior, but to Marx it is due to the slave system both keeping slaves as ignorant as possible within a true totalitarianism of controlling almost every aspect of a slaves life; i.e. the means of production, doing all difficult tasks by brute force, in a slave economy kept slavery stable, and it required material changes in the economy, not simply the thought that slavery maybe bad, to result in a tangible revolution against slavery).
However, an antagonistic class separation remains in liberal capitalism (at first simply based on the end state of feudalism of who ends up owning the land and factories etc. when feudalism stops but gets worse and worse because capital accumulates in fewer and fewer hands) which is, largely speaking, a large proportion of people (having gained no wealth under feudalism, being slaves or serfs) have only their labour to sell in the new system and a smaller proportion of people effectively own all the means of production and therefore dictate the terms and conditions of when, how and to what purposes labourers can produce and therefore survive. The owners of the means of production, Marx does not care if you call them "capitalists" or not, have an enormous negotiating advantage in being able to use the immediate survival of workers as a bargaining chip. However, unlike slaves, workers are not entirely powerless as, although the owners of the means of production can threaten the worker's survival, the workers can threaten the owner's profits (all slave owning society's acted immediately, ruthlessly and as a community to put down any slave rebellion, breaking their spirit or just killing them all, as they could just get new slaves and it was obvious to them any real rights or any real better conditions for slaves would just lead to more slave rebellions) whereas such methods are not available in a liberal capitalist society and capitalists cannot depend on the goodwill of other capitalists, out of community bonds, to keep them in business (i.e. individual capitalists are motivated to negotiate a settlement to a strike by making real concessions, whereas slave owners were quite aware that slavery is only possible with complete and total subjugation of the slave and any real concession impossible; that if a slave owner needed to "put down" his entire crop of slaves to avoid any real concession, that's what he would do and he'd be helped out by other slave owners to get rolling again, by each plantation sparing a few slaves and no-interest loans to buy new slaves, in thanks for "doing what needs to be done", as it's clear to all the slave owners that no individual slave owner must genuinely fear breaking and killing slaves with the slightest hint of defiance regardless of the cost).
Why liberal capitalists hate Marx so much, even if he's thankful for them ending feudal modes of slavery, is because he points out that workers who have no means of production are not the "ideal of the shop-keep owner or the feudal black-smith" that owns their means of production, but are easily exploited in a structure that is akin to slavery. The economic heart of slavery is that the slave does produces for their own replacement (whether survival of the slave or then just kidnapping a new slave, whatever is more profitable) and the different between this substance value the slave produces and the total value is the profit that the slave owner pockets.
Liberal capitalist theory is adamant, indeed ferociously convinced, that a similar structure does not happen in liberal capitalist economies, that everyone gets their fair shake: that market forces are natural forces and therefore moral (as all natural forces cannot, by definition be immoral; it makes no sense to call a river or a thunderstorm or our feeling of hunger when we have not eaten "immoral"). Marx's critique of capital makes basically 3 arguments: 1. commodity production is not a natural thing; projecting it into the past makes no sense, feudal society was not a capitalist society and even less so clan, tribal and family society can be viewed somehow as natural capitalism at work 2. commodity production alienates workers from their environment and each other due to not producing for their own needs as a creative force in their own life but 3. commodity production inherently drives wages to subsistence levels and so workers do not ultimately benefit from increases in productive efficiency (productivity can increase 100 fold and yet workers are still tired and have precarious lives without real wealth; i.e. capitalist production does not naturally lead to everyone becoming capitalists and both working to produce and owning things, real security, but maintains the division between the haves and the have nots; on occasion a havenot can move to being part of the haves, but this doesn't change anything structurally speaking) 4. the economic and social problems commodity production creates leads to both a world market, as tapping into new markets and new labour pools is always the easiest resolution to capitalism's woes, and also leads to recurring crisis, the woes themselves.
There is many things to criticize in Marx, but he has a fairly coherent outlook on history that can be engaged with if you were interested in engaging with other ideas on a philosophy forum. When history professors talk about the "revolution of the printing press" they are putting forth a materialist conception of history. Likewise, when historians attribute feudal society as a result of technologies in warfare (the night of the samurai being the ultimate weapon of war and so easily setting themselves up as rulers) rather than because people just so happened happened to think feudalism was a good idea for centuries over large areas of the globe that had little interaction except the transmission of technology, again this is an idea of Marx (previous to Marx, it was essentially assumed power centers were the result of "superior people" and that political changes where the result of intellectual debate as such; someone "came up with arguments for liberalism, these arguments were good and so feudalism started to fall apart unable to defend itself on an intellectual level"), such historians are describing historical materialism as Marx does.
Marx does not deny that ideas also affect history, just notes that that they too must be produced, and in each epoch the ruling ideas just so happen to be the ideas supporting the rule of the ruling class: for thousands of years the divine rights of Emperors and Kings is a super credible, central political idea, and somehow as soon as feudal aristocracy is overturned the idea is laughable.
Of course, things change, for Marx this means that there must be a group that, within the old system, has, due to real changes to the economy that the system creates, gains enough power to start producing their own ideas. Slaves never developed a revolutionary theory of how to practically defeat their slave-owners (despite being very much convinced slavery was bad and motivated to become not-slaves), they were not a revolutionary class (not because they are "inferior people" or less morally relevant, but because the slave system never developed in a direction where slaves achieved the means of production of ideas to become a revolutionary class; slave owners were very careful to keep slaves in the conditions necessary for slavery; hence, why it's often said slavery "became obsolete", but if we ask ourselves why slavery could not innovate or integrate innovations elsewhere: Marx's idea of history is a good explanation: educating slaves to be skilled workers is simply incompatible with slavery).
However, merchants and manufacturers (who lived in burgs, and so people simply started calling them "bourgeois", who were not feudal lords (and, just like today the economic structure can permit some of us, but not all of us to work our way to having real capital, the feudal system could only give titles to some of the bourgeoisie and not all of them; resulting in dissatisfaction for every rich man left behind) - these men created the revolutionary ideas of liberalism that feudal rights had no natural or otherwise justifiable basis ... but, being rich men, just so happened to keep the idea that property rights, concerning their own property claims, did have natural or otherwise justifiable basis. They recognized that without aristocracy the only alternative to totalitarianism (incompatible with their property claims) was democracy, but were very conscious that there are more poor than rich and so needed to carefully craft a form of democracy in which the poor could not gain real power over property rights; hence, constitutional protections of property are based, not on democracy that people can vote for what is who's property if they want, but rather on the idea that their is a natural right to property and therefore there must be an independent judiciary (independent from what? from democracy) that sorts out property claims and the complicated contractual disputes that arise out of them.
Quoting Marx - quotes lifted from this essay by Ann Robertson, The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict
*Note that at the time propaganda just meant spreading one's ideas, it did not get a manipulative connotation until WW1, when it started to mean accusing one's opponent of eating babies.
Anyways, it's pretty clear that Marx viewed democracy favourably and that revolutionary changes can be brought about through democracy; he doesn't say "we need to organize the working class, participate in democracy as best we can ... but then Pounce! when the bourgeoisie least expect it and setup a despotic dictatorship of enlightened revolutionaries"; which is basically what Marx is accusing Bakunin of doing.
If you were interested in history, you'd know, or could quickly find out, that nearly all achievements made by labour (hours, safety, right to unionize, free education, universal healthcare, etc.) was advanced by communist, anarchist and labour movements; no gains were spontaneously tossed to the workers by the owners of the corporations; you may say "well of course! why would they; it's in their interest to pay the workers as little as possible and do as little for the workers conditions as possible, unless it happens also to be profitable", but then what is even such an argument other than that Marx was obviously right, that the market does not naturally protect workers via mysterious forces of balance and that therefore workers will need to organize politically for their own interests (if the capitalist is "good" even when opposing what we today agree is good - unions, working hours, etc. - then how are the workers bad in actually achieving them? More specifically, actually achieving those things through unions and so on while calling themselves Marxists; simply because Lenin and Stalin ultimately failed with Bukanin's strategy of taking over the state with "100 people, privileged representatives of the revolutionary idea" you dismiss the achievements of Marxists in democratic processes elsewhere?). That many of the organizations that lead these battles were directly descended from organizations Marx was involved in, or influenced by Marx's ideas, or then obviously very similar ideas, leading to the welfare state, is a history that you may be interested in: though we can't assign all the credit to Marx, we can't assign any credit to large owners of capital who were the opposition at every step, nor any of the credit to liberal economists decrying political action as "inefficient" because any state interference in the market will be bad for everyone.
Welfare state's, such as Finland, have massive levels of interference in the market both in regulation of what you can do with property as well as how you are able to treat and manage employees, along with direct government management, over 50% of GDP, of the economy, including direct state ownership of strategically important corporations. Oh, and they have healthy and powerful unions and "social" or even "socialist" parties since decades.
Are you arguing the welfare state is incompatible with Marx's ideas? Or just coming from totally different conception of society?
Likewise, the problems that welfare state's still nevertheless have, are these, to you, totally unintelligible in a Marxist framework. Would you argue that the problem of depression in Finland has nothing to do with alienation people feel as producers of commodities (or managers of producers somewhere down the line of commodities)? Would you argue the problems of sustainability for welfare states, both within and as a part of the global ecosystem, have nothing to do with the world-market's internal logic of requiring ever more commodity production; with any hick-up in commodity production and consumption creating an economic crisis?
Of course, Marx did not know the future (nor even very well the past), so there's a lot of things missing in Marx's theory, but you'll need to actually read Marx and demonstrate how his ideas are simply irrelevant (that there simply "is no class antagonism between workers and owners") or how, despite promoting participation in democracy and unions as the basis for revolutionary activity (Marx uses revolution to describe profound structural changes, not only violence; for instance, he views capitalism as constantly revolutionizing, "disrupting" in today's lingo, economic relations through innovation, and that the original revolutionary power of the bourgeoisie due, not to violence, but simply being able to organize produciton in a better way than serfdom and slavery), nonetheless has crafted some sort of secret linguistic virus that leads his readers to inevitably want totalitarian central planning, or something along those lines.
Essentially the entire world left views the welfare state of the Nordics, Switzerland and co. as obviously superior to "freer" forms of capitalism and obviously a better and more robust system than the Soviet Union. Where people on the left mention positives of the soviet system it's to contrast with the results of free market experimentation on post-Soviet Russia, that led directly to mob rule (as in gangsta) within a decade, lower life expectancy and the very predicable wide-ranging support for a strongman that can at least contain mob rule (granted, by fighting as dirty). People who get deep into this issue, argue that soviet democratic reformism (which Gorbachev was a nominal supporter of) could have led to a welfare state type system rather than total economic collapse under the brilliant advice of Washington consensus economists; obviously that didn't happen, but the end result being bad is neither an argument for the Soviet Union nor an argument for the free market policies that were tested out in post-Soviet Russia.
Welfare state policies being obviously superior to post-Soviet economic liberalism, is not an argument for free-market capitalism. Welfare states are obviously a mix of liberal capitalism and socialist (including Marxist socialism) ideas; refusing to engage with the Marxist roots of the welfare state (that you enjoy the benefits of!), which, again, aren't the only roots, simply because "Soviets bad" is to simply choose to live in ignorance of history. The welfare state is simply not an "achievement of capitalism, of what the market can do when it is left to it's natural inclinations"; the productive template is the achievement of capitalism (though, relatively quickly, with massive state subsidy in all sorts of areas to keep that original template dynamic going; just as must in the USA through warfare spending as European countries spending on things like healthcare, education and research of all kinds, notably CERN), but nearly all the things we can point to that make working life more secure and healthy (i.e. actually benefiting from this productive template) is due to "socialist agitation".
Although this seems to be the case, I would argue that Marx is fundamentally right that class divisions cannot be maintained indefinitely, that simply redistributing wealth cannot be the end goal as it can't be maintained. A great argument for this is the incredibly high tax rate in the US during and post-WWII, if this was a stable state of affairs then this sort of policy simply would have "won" and not been reversed (just as once American revolutionaries defeated the English, the new state of affairs was stable, they simply "won" and there was little possibility for King George to reverse things) ... yet, as you note, wealth disparity is worse than ever (not simply within capitalist history, but you need to go back to things like Genghis Khan and Egyptian pharaohs to find comparable wealth disparity levels).
However, I would agree with you that the "communist revolution" as conceived by Marx (i.e. factory workers unionizing, striking and taking over democracy) is impossible today as you suggest. I would also argue that Marx's idea of "worker revolution" could only have ever given us the welfare state, basically because large scale capitalist production which Marx was witnessing the emergence of requires a state to manage and normal people simply don't understand it well enough for effective management (and, I would argue, can't understand it, as it simply takes too much time, being so far removed from everyday life, to do so; not that conservatives or pro-capitalist parties understand it better, but each fails in turn to accomplish managerial goals and is forced to let the other "give it a try"); so, through unionizing and party politics, such as Marx suggests, the workers can gain benefits in some states, as we see in the Nordic model, but these are neither global, due to capital being able to cross borders and simply find conditions suitable for labour exploitation (if not existing, then engendering "race to the bottom" inter-government competition), nor really adequate in themselves (welfare states clearly still have problems). Conditions which, regardless of worker protection and benefits in some places, give rise to Googles and Amazons and Apples and Facebook and other billionaires that clearly have incredible influence along with the collection of previous top-dog industrial-corporations such as Boeing, that are of course still around.
There is an alternative to this economic vision of large scale corporations, which is local living. The psychological argument that "it's in people's nature is to want the commodities that only large corporations provide to enjoy in the obviously superior urban culture" is irrelevant if such a state of affairs is simply not sustainable. If we have to live more locally, do more for ourselves and our neighbors, this is as impossible to imagine without also effectively owning the means of this local production as it is impossible to imagine workers effectively owning the means of production of an Amazon or Apple. Small is Beautiful makes the purely economic case that such a revolution is possible starting in the poor regions of the world.
In this case, you are simply creating your own fantasy. In the Real World Soviet Union is considered socialist and leftist. Sorry.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Right, Marx is on the pedestal. I thought it would be so with you.
Quoting JerseyFlight
So you do agree with the criticism that Bakunin makes of Marx? Interesting.
If you want to see the whole work, it is here. The quote was from chapter 3.
Goodness friend, what a rigorous and relevant reply. Thank you for taking the time to write it. It stands as a testament to accurate information and a tough beat-down of misinformation. I don't know enough about the conflict between Marx and Bukunin. There should be a saying, when it comes to Marxism there is too much to know.
This needs to be stated and clarified: ssu has been thoroughly refuted at this point. Of course, he is free to prop himself up on the basis of empty ego and groundless self assertion, but the repeated replies on this thread have been quite devastating in pointing out his hypocrisy and contradiction. Insisting that one's emotional view is the proper one will not make it so.
Quoting ssu
The content of being is not a matter for formal definitions. America was considered a "free country" through it was steeped and born in slavery. What matters are the actual functions and form of political systems.
Quoting boethius
Well, I too find it as a ridiculous argument. If not Stalin, then some other. In the end all Proletarian dictatorships have become true dictatorships, if they have lasted long enough.
Quoting boethius
As this accusation will be hurled at anyone criticizing Marx, I have referred to what Marx has written.
Quoting boethius
What a strawman. Of course not
As if I wouldn't criticize the Church when there would be reason to do so. Surely you can criticize the Catholic Church for the crusades, but even better critique is simply what justifications people have used from the Holy Bible for the at-the-time society with things like from the Romans 13:1
Somehow Christians in liberal democracies and even in monarchies have gotten past this.
Quoting boethius
Another strawman.
The fact is that an anarchist like Bakunin can clearly tell the errors in Marx's thinking. What his own proposals and his thinking are is totally a different matter. And being an anarchist, I do think I'll find there things that I disagree with. Here Bakunin makes the clear case as likely do many other, but likely anybody else than a leftist criticizing Marx would be totally irrelevant. Otherwise I don't have to "defend" Bakunin. In hindsight many philosophers have been correct on some issues and wrong in others. It is as simple as that. And btw, you didn't say anything about this criticism that was objected against Marx.
Quoting boethius
Liberal capitalist theory? What is liberal capitalist theory? Having studied economics, I don't recall this kind of theory. Perhaps be more specific just who you are talking about.
Quoting boethius
Seems you don't even read what I wrote, because I did refer to this above in the discussion.
Quoting boethius
Not all trade unions are Marxists. There obviously are Marxist unions, but a lot aren't. Just like Marx isn't the only socialist around.
Quoting boethius
Any credit? Trade unions were legalized in the UK when Karl Marx was six years old. And the reason why a brilliant philosopher like Marx got things so wrong, that the revolution didn't happen in the UK or Germany, is exactly because the state and the capitalists did do concessions and the Western States could do something about the inequalities brought on with the industrial revolution (and with earlier ones too).
Quoting boethius
What I'm arguing is that the modern welfare state was an answer to many issues that Marx pointed out and it didn't eradicate capitalism and private property. It has worked somewhat well.
And those societies that really did try to implement Marxist theory had lousy economic performance.
Quoting boethius
I have no idea what you are implying with "people feeling alienation as producers of commodities". Finnish economy is a small export oriented economy with an ageing population, which is hard hit during global recessions (like this one), which naturally present a problem for the welfare state as taxes ought to pay for the system.
Quoting boethius
Ideas of Marx aren't irrelevant, especially how much influence he has had on the World stage, but the main point was the reality of how the system works, how the government would work and how all the various experiments with Marxism have been a bit of a disappointment.
Quoting boethius
If you would refer to "socialist roots" of the welfare state I could agree with that, but you insist using "Marxist roots". As a person who has gotten a masters in economic history from the university, I do beg to differ here, because this simply isn't true in the historical perspective. You simply have to make a difference between social democracy and the Marxist-Leninist communists of the 20th Century as this divide was huge during the Cold War. Simply put it, not all "socialism" is Marxism and especially with the history of the Nordic countries, Marxists and Marxism hasn't been the driving force behind the welfare state but social democrats and usually the social democratic parties and ideological figure behind were people like Gunnar Myrdal. And of course, the programs were accepted and furthered by right wing parties too.
Great answer, which tells just how open you are to open discussion.
Oh, ad hominems! Great.
And btw, it's Bakunin, not Bukunin.
Did you even read what I wrote?
So, to be clear, you attach the genocides and slavery of "Christendom" to the teachings of Christ? If not, it seems the exact same argument structure.
Quoting ssu
Well if it's just a question of time, then why not bring Stalinism back and see what happens?
Why not give Stalinism thousands of years of leeway?
I'll engage with your other comments if you're able to resolve this problem.
Quoting boethius
Just as Jesus Christ obviously doesn't talk anything that would justify a crusade, I don't.
It will be clear to all careful readers that you are not comprehending your own inconsistencies and errors. This discourse did not go well for you, namely because you sought to leverage a strawman. I honestly don't see what's left in your position that can even qualify as a valid objection. It has been thoroughly exposed and refuted.
Your argument is that we can judge what Marx wrote based on what Stalin did. That's what you literally say:
Quoting ssu
Or at least, your only evidence so far that "Marx's ideology, which do inherently lead to totalitarian system" is the Soviet Union.
Quoting ssu
Ok, so if what Christians do is not necessarily a good reflection of what Christ talked about, you do agree, after all, that what Stalin did may not be a good reflection on what Marx talked about?
Or, do you really not see what's going on here?
Let me put it this way.
What communist revolution has ended up being a democracy?
I am sure that Marx did want direct democracy, and as you said, was all for things like the Paris Commune, but that is the whole point. How to do it? And where is that democracy, if people want to have private property or otherwise go and "betray" the class struggle? Why the government and all the planning ended up as it did? The theory needs that strong centralized government. That's the whole point of the anarchist Bakunin critique of the Marxist state starting from things like: "reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes".
When you say the class system is not sustainable - do you mean morally, politically, economically?
When we look at Amazon, we see a company utterly destroying local businesses that cannot compete and this has been happening since the industrial revolution. If mass production could be competed with by "local living" then why has this happened and what's going to happen differently?
Soon Amazon is going to have driverless trucks, increased automation across the board and they will be so affordable, convenient and just all-around great for consumers, who can compete? So the trajectory for the destruction of the lone person making a chair, the lone person owning a shop and the small business, it's all being destroyed and it's going to keep getting worse.
Automation is going to replace millions of workers and whoever owns the automation is going to be exceedingly rich and not having to pay any workers - unions and such won't cut it anymore.
Besides wealth redistribution, we could examine a model such as how Singapore dealt with land, forced acquisition by the government and perhaps in the future we will see the US government somehow force Amazon to sell them their company. I don't know but wealth redistribution seems to be the only thing that can be looked at right now.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Quoting JerseyFlight
This is the closest you come to explaining how the Soviet Union was right-wing. Something like this: a government or state is right-wing if it is undemocratic or totalitarian, or is run by a dictator. The Soviet Union was such a state, therefore it was right-wing.
The problem here is that this is not what right-wing politics is, assuming the conventional understanding of the term, which seems still to apply usefully despite shifts in usage. The politically right is conservative or reactionary: it seeks to preserve existing social hierarchies, or reintroduce past hierarchies. It argues that such a preservation or return is necessary, because those hierarchies are based on what is in some sense natural, and that attempts to improve on them or get rid of them are doomed to failure and chaos. "Right wing" is thus importantly ideological, i.e., it's not just about methods of governance.
It could be argued that the Soviet state was conservative in many ways, because it feared change and strenuously protected the privileges of the political elite. But the purpose of this conservatism, certainly for Stalin, really was to preserve the gains of the revolution by any means possible, and consolidate socialism. They really did think they were on the way to communism, although there was growing scepticism about this in the last few decades of the Soviet Union, when no such progress was evident. But even then, in the eighties, a man could rise to the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party who was a committed Leninist and believer in the communist future of the Soviet Union (of course, in the course of events he came to realize how naive he had been).
There's another way that the Soviet Union and Stalin might be characterized as right-wing: the targeting of ethnic minorities, e.g., the deportation of the Chechens, Kalmyks, Balkars, Tatars, and many others, and what became something like official anti-Semitism by the time Stalin died (a policy that was quickly reversed). I think this characterization is fair, but again it has to be balanced against the wider aims and in this case Stalin's paranoid handling of the war.
What I think we can say is that to the extent to which the Soviet Union was conservative or even reactionary (as with Great Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism), it was so in the conscious service of a Left-wing cause, which by any standard makes it quite different from a right-wing state.
Many Marxists don't like to admit it, but Stalin was a committed Bolshevik, communist, and Marxist, popular in the party for his ability to get things done and absolutely dedicated to the cause. Even if many fellow-Bolsheviks, including Lenin himself, thought he was a bit rough and dangerous, he was one of them. And he felt this too: he was not a charlatan, using the Party and the apparatus of Terror to set himself up as dictator--this is a cartoon-like but sadly still popular Trotskyist fantasy--but had grown up in the Party and worshipped Lenin and his aims.
It was the apparatus of government, secret police, and the ruthless elimination of opposition that had developed in the revolutionary and Civil War period that Stalin inherited and extended.
After 1945, he did come to enjoy his role, and became a more self-conscious dictator, but until then he had seen himself to a large degree as a party worker sacrificing himself for the cause. Incidentally, this seems to demonstrate, better than the image of him as a dictator, the dangers of radical politics (note that I'm not condemning radical politics as such but appealing for self-awareness).
It's worth looking at what the Soviet state, and Stalin in particular, actually did when gaining and maintaining power (which they did genuinely believe was a dictatorship of the proletariat). Aside from merely maintaining power, all of their positive efforts were aimed at smashing capitalism and the remnants of feudalism and destroying the class structure, which in effect meant not only the confiscation of private property but also the literal destruction of the people of certain classes: the urban bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie, and the small landowners among the peasantry. As it happened, of course, the ordinary proletariat and peasantry suffered too, through starvation, terror, and compulsion. The fascists did not attempt any such fundamental reordering of Italian or German social and economic relations, because they had vastly different aims, a vastly different ideology.
There's probably much more to discuss but I'll leave it there.
Please note that I'm not here arguing that Marx can be blamed for all of that. I haven't made up my mind how to think about that question.
EDIT: you mentioned Arendt, but the importance of the term totalitarian is surely that left and right can both take on this character in practice, that totalitarianism is a tendency beyond left and right.
In this context I mean ecological sustainability.
Quoting Judaka
The usual answer is that the industrial revolution depended on the enclosure movement of kicking peasants off the land. Bourgeois economic theory both condemns Feudal definitions of ownership (serfs and estates etc.) but takes for granted the good Lords had a right to kick everyone off the land.
Likewise, bourgeois economic theory takes for granted that "urban culture" is superior to "rural culture" and the movement to the cities is just a natural cultural evolution to a better place. However, if we look closely, most people that have emigrated to cities over in the industrial revolution went to slums and horrifying working conditions and were clearly better off as peasants.
A peasant is not compatible with the capitalist mode of production, as peasants can produce food for themselves by gardening, build their own houses, make their own chairs and baskets etc. (of course, by "rural living" here I do not mean agribusiness that turns the land into a substrate for maximum commodity production, such "farms" and the illegal immigrants that work on them is not an example of peasant life and organization, of course with many terms and conditions on the "Lords" land, that existed in feudal times).
Therefore, we come to the question of efficiency for what? Efficient at living? or efficient at producing as many commodities as possible? Way more commodities than anyone needs.
In other words, in a narrow perspective, large industrial production seems efficient as it has massive throughput, but in a wider perspective it is inefficient in terms sustainable use of raw materials as well as inefficient in terms of producing "what people need" (rather than simply "producing as much as possible"; the dreaded overproduction).
We have seen since the industrial revolution how overproduction is absorbed: war, planned obsolescence, growing the population (at first a happy side-affect of medicine, and later by a policy of immigration), manipulative marketing and debt.
Bourgeois economics assumes people need to consume commodities all the time, that this is a natural thing to happen, but if we look closely at peasants of the past (as well as people who happen or choose to be in similar circumstances today - of course they don't call themselves peasants, but "homesteaders") such peasant economics naturally invites capital investment. Rural dwellers buy tools to do things for themselves; it's simply cheaper and quicker to learn basic maintenance and fabrication skills than hire someone for every task. Any food grown locally is far cheaper than food that needs to be picked, stored, transported (to multiple locations); any food waste is composted (without the re-centralization transport problem) simply because that's the easiest thing to do and the benefits are obvious. The idea of regular consumption has obvious immediate negatives since shops are not just down the road, and if one needs to (pay) to go someone regularly to get stuff, the question naturally arises whether there's some investment that can replace this commodity (i.e. planting some apple trees and making one's own apple juice).
Why this doesn't happen (in the West) is not an economic question, but the "who owns the land" question. In the West today if we talk about "gardening" and "fishing" the assumption is that we're talking about wealthy people that garden and fish for fun, not to save money; likewise, if we talk about "skiing" we assume we're talking about wealthy people skiing for fun, not a convenient rural transport winter technology. So, the question arises that if the wealthy are constantly playing at being peasants for fun, shouldn't we just organize society so that everyone can do these things both to have fun and save money: that we make our rural landscapes like the idyllic beautiful places where the rich go for vacation, just that people happen to also live there?
So, much more can be said why such a "return to the land" is more efficient in terms of resource allocation: that it's easy to garden in bio-diversity based way that's good for nature whereas it's hard to produce commodities with the same methods ("things" aren't produced in sufficient quantities at the same place to warrant the capital investments in sorting, packaging, storing and transport technology; such food is only fit to be picked and eaten, or stored in jars; totally useless to the capitalist system), that with more people living in such a way a network effect of trade occurs making it even more efficient (local artisan production displaces imported commodities), that lowering transport of commodities and commuting means both lowering the cost of living but also lowering the cost of transport infrastructure (which can still there, but with radically less throughput, it is much less costly and less environmentally damaging), and new means of production (3D printing, CNC machining etc.) constantly reduce the scale in which precision manufacturing is economically possible (further reducing the need of importing commodities), and also that communication technology would still allow lot's of existing jobs today to be done at-distance and further increase foreign exchange of the community.
The problem is of course land ownership. Since the industrial revolution to now, land consolidation to remove communities living on the land to turn land from living spaces to substrate for commodity production, has been a violent affair (first through enclosures, second through arranging to financially ruin small farm and other peasant-like people, and third through letting natural disasters, like drought, and economic disasters do the dirty business without anyone needing to pay attention, as well as constantly flooding rural places with subsidized commodities, whether as the go-to market entry tactic or as well as state subsidy of capitalism in general, to ruin the local economies and increase commodity reliance), we don't see this much in the West anymore, as the process is largely complete.
Technologically speaking, it's easy to go out into the country-side, look at agribusiness desserts and draw up a technical plan to make small houses, forest gardens and permaculture, water management systems or rain capture and contouring, renewable energy systems, etc. Worse, it's easy to go to the suburbs and conclude that the same resources could support much more people and vibrant communities.
Why this doesn't happen is buying this land is expensive and the people who's life would improve don't have that kind of money. Indeed, not only do they not have that kind of money, but they are in debt and the kind of idyllic living described above assumes one does not need to maximize commodity production to keep up with debt repayments (that everyone one does in this sort of decentralized community living arrangements is not just to save money, but for fun, for community team building, as exercise of the body and mind; it saves money too, but does not maximize the kind of commodity production that is needed to payoff debts; only wage labour provides those circumstances for most people, and barely so as it may still take decades of full tilt, at the the psychological limits of commodity production to maybe payoff a few debts for most people).
Of course, society could simply cancel all debts, take the land from agribusiness and setup homesteaders with the tools and materials to live in an obviously ecologically superior way that is good for everyone, and can still produce more food for the whole of society (forest gardens and other forms of permacutlure are more productive than mono-culture fields, even on agribusiness own terms of pound per acre, but the comparison almost can't even be made if water and fossil inputs and nutrients per acre as output is used, not to mention biodiversity and regional ecological resilience tree transpiration and roots provides is included in the analysis).
Society does not even need an excuse to take agribusiness land (could just say "we don't give a shit about investor complaints; other people can win the "battle of ideas" if they put in the effort, there's no metaphysical basis to put some ideas of limits for the winning") but if it wanted and excuse it could say "the promise that privately owned land by profit maximizing capital would preserve the land for everyone must now be a promise kept; we will analyse everyone's land, and anyone that did not accomplish this preservation of the value on the land of biodiversity and soil nutrients forfeits their land as part of a retroactive social contract based on the same precedence that our precious bankers retroactively pardon themselves for financial crimes now and again" or then just use imminent domain and pay the land-owners in a currency in the process of collapse (imminent domain laws do not preclude ecological necessity as a basis for land appropriation; maybe they will in the near future, but society could simply choose to not give a shit about that anyways).
This isn't happening anytime soon, in the West, but there are places in the world where people aren't currently trapped in commodity production maximizing infrastructure, often still own their land as a community, and so everything I describe above is simply an immediate improvement of their tool-set, quality of life, foreign exchange, and local environment that they still feel intuitively and obviously dependent on, and improving the means of this kind of peasant production is relatively easily advanced through cooperation between those communities and western hippies who have a bit of capital, a "proper" education required for systems analysis to be sure things are actually better and not worse, and a fevered dream (that's from the malaria though, also a solvable problem).
As climate change, resource depletion, moves in the "great game", disrupt our global industrial commodity throughput device, more and more places will essentially drop out of capitalism regardless of whether the propaganda people jealously guard tells them it's a good thing or not, and what I describe above will become the only game in town. Of course, people may choose to play the game of raiding other towns down the dusty road of entitlement instead; time will tell us who wins.
""Right wing" is thus importantly ideological, i.e., it's not just about methods of governance."
I do not agree with this. Hard to see how political ideology does not contain premises regarding governance? This seems like drawing an artificial line. The methods of Right wing governance are literally in the direction of monarchy. While conservatives in America give lip service to democracy, they do everything in their power to abolish it, which is consistent with totalitarian methods of rule.
"But the purpose of this conservatism, certainly for Stalin, really was to preserve the gains of the revolution by any means possible, and consolidate socialism."
For me this is another problem. Socialism is not the same as communism. Further, it honestly matters little what ideology a political party or leader claims to be advocating, what matters are the authoritarian or democratic actions carried out by the party or leader. It is too naive as I see it, to take, for example, North Korea at its word that it's goal is to make a society for the workers. This is just the ideology that the totalitarian system uses to hold onto its power and increase its power.
"What I think we can say is that to the extent to which the Soviet Union was conservative or even reactionary (as with Great Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism), it was so in the conscious service of a Left-wing cause, which by any standard makes it quite different from a right-wing state."
It's exceedingly hard to sustain this premise in contrast to Marx's radical humanist philosophy of freedom. I again would not argue that a nation or state is characterized by its creed but by its political action. This is quite an important point because it's one of the ways people seem to be duped into totalitarian systems in the first place. The logic then goes, "as long as we have the right creed there will be freedom," and yet an administration shreds the actual democratic checks on political power, this is a large problem indeed.
Eric Fromm writing directly on this topic said the following, "The Russians believe that they represent socialism because they talk in terms of Marxist ideology, and they do not recognize how similar their system is to the most developed form of capitalism. We in the West believe that we represent the system of individualism, private initiative, and humanistic ethics, because we hold on to our ideology, and we do not see that our institutions are, in fact, in many ways becoming more and more similar to the hated system of communism. We believe that the essence of the Russian system is that the individual is subservient to the State, and hence that he has no freedom. But we do not recognize that in Western society the individual is becoming more and more subservient to the economic machine, to the big corporation, to public opinion. We do not recognize that the individual, confronted with giant enterprises, giant government, giant trade unions, is afraid of freedom, has no faith in his own strength, and seeks shelter by identifying with these giants." May Man Prevail? pg.84-85, Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1961
"Many Marxists don't like to admit it, but Stalin was a committed Bolshevik, communist, and Marxist, popular in the party for his ability to get things done and absolutely dedicated to the cause."
Marx did not advocate the implementation of a massive bureaucratic system. When we here speak of "the cause," it is doubtful we are talking about Marx's political humanism.
"Incidentally, this seems to demonstrate, better than the image of him as a dictator, the dangers of radical politics..."
I agree with you. This is the reason I am not a Marxist. My approach to the problem is not ideological or romanticized. However, radical politics are neither Left or Right, they are mindless! It is quite frightening to realize that the thinker is caught between emotional political extremes.The mindless from the Left is just as dangerous as the mindlessness from the Right. But in all of this I still see a lesser of two evils. (However, if we are talking radical revolutions then this lesser option is off the table). If totalitarianism has taught us anything, it is that we must always pay attention to the sabotage of democracy. It would not have been possible for Hitler or Stalin to do what they did if there were democratic checks on their power. This is one reason why American conservatism is so dangerous, it doesn't respect democratic procedure, it tries to circumvent it, deny its valid authority, and where it can, destroy it.
"Aside from merely maintaining power, all of their positive efforts were aimed at smashing capitalism and the remnants of feudalism and destroying the class structure, which in effect meant not only the confiscation of private property but also the literal destruction of the people of certain classes..."
It was a disastrous social experiment. However, the Soviet Union was a state capitalist welfare system.
Concluding with Fromm:
[b]"The question whether the Soviet system is a socialist system has been answered in the negative. We have concluded that it is a state managerialism, using the most advanced methods of total monopolization, centralization, mass manipulation, and moving slowly from exercising this
manipulation by violence to exercising it by mass suggestion. It is, while resembling socialism in certain economic features, its very contradiction in a social and human sense, and is actually converging with the trends of the most advanced capitalistic countries..."[/b] Ibid.
Most excellent question here, and the real point is that capitalist culture only asks this question from the basis of the profit motive. Instrumentalism = tyranny through efficiency, negation of the question of life.
Quoting boethius
Overproduction is likely a concept that (skeptical) readers on this thread are not familiar with. I have never thought about it in terms of its absorption (reconciliation of the contradiction). This is most accurate. It is a kind of hidden danger in capitalism, a contradiction that emerges from its production process.
Quoting boethius
A most interesting question. As you well know, acclimating to this idea is exceedingly hard for those of us who grow up in commodity driven societies. There is so much work to be done in the realm of education. However, what is most interesting, if a model could be successful in this direction, which is exceedingly problematic, given the fact that it would still exist as a bubble subjected to the market forces of capital, then I am probe to think it would catch on. People are starting to taste the real sting of capitalism's tyranny of economic coercion.
I want to interact with more of what you said but I don't have time. Thank you for taking the time to explain things, it's obvious that you are well educated in Marxist thought and political theory in general. I look forward to more interaction.
Quoting JerseyFlight
You seem to have ignored the word "just". Was this a mistake?
Generally, your entire response is based on either (1) ignoring the definition of right-wing that I gave, quoted above, or (2) implicitly holding that the Soviet Union satisfied that definition. You seem to want to argue that authoritarianism is always right-wing, so I can see why you want to go for (1). But I don't see how you can just ignore the definition: if you disagree with it or think it's useless, then I think you should say so explicitly. Same for (2).
I conceded that the Soviet Union sometimes had a conservative and even reactionary character, but argued that the self-consciousness of the regime as a socialist one on the way to communism and the government's actions to destroy the old social structure and institute a completely new one, show that the the Soviet Union cannot be called right-wing.
Would you claim that Lenin and the original Bolsheviks were also right-wing? They were certainly authoritarian. They dissolved the Constituent Assembly and banned competing parties--without the support of the soviets--when the Socialist Revolutionaries, not they, won the election. They set up the Cheka to spread terror and destroy opposition from the left and right. They hoped this would be a temporary state of affairs, but they were willing to sanction the most horrendous atrocities as means to the end of communism. The Soviet authorities continued to think like that until the Union fell apart.
They were Marxists. You seem to be under the impression that to be a Marxist is to be merely a faithful follower of Marx, but this is not what it meant to be a Marxist in the early twentieth century. Marxism was a tradition that grew largely out of Engels' interpretation of Marx, and the latter's humanism was not well-known at the time (much of Marx's work remained unpublished).
But still, they were Left-wing. Here is Engels, arguing against the anti-authoritarians in the socialist movement:
[quote=Engels, On Authority]Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
If you wish to say that radical undemocratic politics is bad per se, and that politics is like a circle on which extreme left and extreme right meet, then I can respect that, but to label this meeting-point as right-wing is merely tendentious: if the circle of politics is true, then the meeting-point can be either left or right.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Absolutely, I agree.
And I agree with the last quotation from Fromm, that the Soviet Union was "state managerialism". This didn't make it right-wing or fascist, though I agree that it was totalitarian, in the 1930s perhaps the most thorough totalitarianism that has ever existed.
Quoting jamalrob
And the lack of democratic checks is the basic problem. Why I argue it's an inherent problem is because Marx has an agenda, communism, and an singular agent, the proletariat, which makes democracy just a tool to get to communism and to eradicate capitalism. So what about those who don't think this way? What democracy is for them? What is the role of consensus? What if too many people want to stray off from the project?
This is the way that authoritarianism creeps into the cause when theory hits the road. Marx anticipates a clash with the old regime, even if he hopes things being peaceful, but this more violent confrontational path comes to be the roadmap for marxist parties. Yet is there a road map to get to direct democracy?
I do not remember if it is in The 18th of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or in The Class Struggles in France (I can look it up), Marx qualifies the dictatorship as the "worst possible political regime". With such an assumption it is not surprising that he tried to qualify the phase of 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as a class dictatorship against class. In the terms of the first Lenin or Trotsky, "a workers' democracy". Consequently, they launched the slogan of 'all power to the soviets', against the Duma, considered a bourgeois chamber.
Why did the slogan remain a slogan? There are a hundred theories about this. A social and political analysis is necessary.
Yet democracy isn't a safety valve for Marx, which people do agree with here, but a battle to be won, just as centralization is the means for the scientific planning to replace the market mechanism. As is written in the Communist Manifesto:
And direct democracy? I guess for the bolsheviks it was the soviet councils and "to soviet" was the answer to the question of democracy. And they surely understood the problem of this and put their hopes on education, on new generations creating the New Soviet Man (and woman), who would have as a trait selfless collectivism. What then Aleksandr Zinovyev later depicted as the outcome of this Homo Sovieticus was something else.
That is true, but Marx left little written about the form of that dictatorship of the proletariat. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party he speaks of a dictatorship concerning the means and relations of production only. In The Civil War in France Marx had praised the participatory structure of the French Commune of 1871.
It seems to follow that he was thinking of some form of workers' participation in the power of the state.
This left the door open to different interpretations within Marxism. The most immediate, that of Frederick Engels in A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891: "If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat".
You see that things are far from being settled as you think.
This really depends on how we construct the left-right spectrum. In its earliest form, the left was for the liberty and equality of the commoners, against the authority and hierarchy of the aristocrats. By that construction, authoritarianism is inherently right-wing.
Since then, largely due to Marx and the backlash to him and the propaganda wars waged by both sides, it’s become common to construct the left as being for equality at the expense of liberty and the right as being for liberty at the expense of equality.
Splitting the difference between the original and Cold War era notions of left and right, we’ve now often got a notion of the left being for equality and the right being for hierarchy, with authoritarian and libertarian strands within each.
As as libertarian socialist, I stand by the original notion of left and right, with the left being for both liberty and equality and the right being opposite both, because I think you can’t sacrifice one for the other, as both laissez faire capitalism and soviet state socialism have shown. A lack of equality breeds a kind of authority (as in laissez faire capitalism, where the rich have all the political power), and a lack of liberty breeds a kind of hierarchy (as in soviet state socialism, where the politically powerful live richer lives than the rest). So either authority or hierarchy are inherently right-wing, even if the purveyors of it also claim to support the complement left-wing value too.
The "right-wing" during the French revolution was where the conscientious defenders of the constitution sat. Don't think that the supporters of the Ancien Régime sat there during the French Revolution.
Liberalism from the Age of Enlightenment was against absolute monarchy, divine rights of kings, hereditary privilege, state religion, the mercantilist policies, royal monopolies and other barriers to trade, and promoted representative democracy and the rule of law and free trade. Adam Smith is hardly a leftist philosopher, just as the American experiment isn't either a leftist endeavor.
Yes, and liberalism was considered a leftist endeavor, until the redefinition of left and right post Marx. The original socialists and the original libertarians were the libertarian socialists, the true heirs to classical liberalism. Both those who said inequality was an acceptable cost for “liberty” and those who said authoritarianism was an acceptable cost for “equality” are deviations from the original left/liberal cause.
Yes.
"Generally, your entire response is based on either (1) ignoring the definition of right-wing that I gave, quoted above, or (2) implicitly holding that the Soviet Union satisfied that definition."
Are you sure this is what I'm doing, because it seems to me I'm making an empirical argument that legitimately bypasses the presumption of formal authority?
The real question is why this is an invalid or inferior way to approach the topic?
I follow Fromm on this,
[b]"The question of the socialist character of the Soviet Union can be
decided only by making a comparison between Marx’s vision of socialism and the reality of the Soviet system."[/b] Ibid. pg.68
However, that being said, I think there is a large school of thought associated with your position, and that I am most certainly in the minority (this does not make my position false). I think most people would say that the Soviet Union was a form of Leftist-totalitarianism. I do not accept this for several reasons, the Soviet Union functioned like a monarchy under Stalin, which is the preferred system of Right wing politics; the system was hostile to libertarian freedom, there was no democracy. These are serious empirical considerations that do much to support my premise.
"I conceded that the Soviet Union sometimes had a conservative and even reactionary character, but argued that the self-consciousness of the regime as a socialist one on the way to communism and the government's actions to destroy the old social structure and institute a completely new one, show that the the Soviet Union cannot be called right-wing."
I am not sure, maybe you can cite some concrete actions that Stalin and the party took that legitimately moved the Soviet Union in the direction of a democratic, liberal society? I do not see this.
"Would you claim that Lenin and the original Bolsheviks were also right-wing?"
Yes, I think so. All I have to go by here is their actions. Lenin is a hard figure, not as hard as Stalin, but difficult because he was exceedingly intelligent. It should be noted that one cannot move a society into communism, as Lenin tried to do, this is not the way it works. Communism is not an ideology in this sense, Marx understood it to be an organic development that would emerge from the contradictions of capitalism. Lenin departed from this and embraced state revolution, he was going to bring communism to the earth through the forces of a capitalist state. (The quote you cited proves this).
Tragically when it comes to revolution one usually only hears one side of the story. The ruling class is desperate to hold onto its power, they will do anything to keep it. This means, when the people peacefully gather to democratically change the system, to resist exploitation, the rulers respond with violence in order to suppress the resistance, this leads to counter-violence. But the real problem is that the rulers will not yield to democracy! I think this is probably the most serious problem of revolution because it sparks so much violence.
"They were Marxists. You seem to be under the impression that to be a Marxist is to be merely a faithful follower of Marx, but this is not what it meant to be a Marxist in the early twentieth century."
That they used elements of Marx's thought to secure their power and justify oppression and tyranny, I do not deny, but the Soviet Union can no more be called a Marxist society than can North Korea. I am under the impression that Marxism is not state tyranny, not a monarchy, aristocracy, not state capitalism, but the democratic emancipation and empowerment of the working class by the working class itself. The question is whether this is possible, but even more so, if it is, would this really result in a better society? One thing is for sure, the working class is the concrete agent of all human progress. There is no way to get around this because it is the class that produces everything.
"A Revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is."
I think Lenin is wrong about this, I think counter-revolution is probably the most authoritarian thing there is.
"If you wish to say that radical undemocratic politics is bad per se, and that politics is like a circle on which extreme left and extreme right meet, then I can respect that, but to label this meeting-point as right-wing is merely tendentious: if the circle of politics is true, then the meeting-point can be either left or right."
What we label the Soviet Union depends on its policies and actions, form and system of government.
However, it seems to me you are searching for some kind of admission on my part regarding the existence of Left-wing extremism*, well, what I can tell you is that as a matter of empirical fact, this is a very small threat and usually takes the form of isolated actors targeting infrastructures of power:
"Most left-wing terrorist groups that had operated in the 1970s and 1980s disappeared by the mid-1990s. One exception was the Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N), which lasted until 2002. Since then, left-wing terrorism has been minor compared with other forms, and is mostly carried out by insurgent groups in the developing world."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism
The very serious threat to our species comes from the Right, it has always come from the Right. One can only play with this fire for so long.
"In roleplaying situations, authoritarians tend to seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive instead of cooperative. In a study by Altemeyer, 68 authoritarians played a three-hour simulation of the Earth's future entitled the Global Change Game. Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war. By the end of the high RWA game, the entire population of the earth was declared dead." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism
"That Marx’s idea was deformed and corrupted into its very opposite, both by the Communists and by the capitalist opponents of socialism, is a remarkable—though by no means unique—example of man’s capacity for distortion and irrationality. However, in order to understand whether the Soviet Union and China represent Marxist socialism, and what might be expected from truly socialist societies, it is important that we have an idea of what Marxism means. That Marx himself would not have considered the Soviet Union or China a socialist state follows from the following statement: “This [vulgar] communism, which negates the personality of man in every sphere, is only the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which re-establishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property are at least directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level; so that this envy and leveling in fact constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and leveling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.” Ibid. Fromm pg.73-74
* I am open to it, but cannot confess to it in the case of the Soviet Union because it is such a violent antithesis of Marx's position.
However (and this can function in reply to @JerseyFlight as well), if we're going to carry on using "Left" and "Right", we need some way to make sense of what has happened since the Assemblée nationale in those terms. I believe we can see a Leftist authoritarianism even just a couple of years later, in the form of the Committee of Public Safety and the Reign of Terror--but I'm on firmer ground with Russia: the Russian Civil War was fought by the Bolshevik Red Army against (1) those who wanted to restore the monarchy or the traditional hierarchy; (2) those who wanted a liberal democratic capitalist society; and (3) other socialists. How are we going to talk about this? Leaving aside (3) (Lenin characterized these socialists as ultra-leftists suffering from an "infantile disorder"), the war can surely be said to have been between the Bolshevik Left and the monarchist or liberal Right, even though the Bolsheviks were authoritarian. I mean, I'm open to other ways of seeing these conflicts, but I'm not convinced that Left-Right can be just done away with (not that you're arguing for that position).
So I think we have to take account of what self-consciously Leftist movements have actually done since the early days of the French Revolution, when the Left had not yet gained the power to make fundamental changes to society, and why they did it. So we need to look at means and ends. To me, if the conscious desired end of a political movement or party is liberty and equality, then this makes it Left-wing.
Quoting Pfhorrest
And yet we seemingly can't stop talking about Left and Right even when referring to political movements that are for liberty more than equality or vice versa. I think it's easily resolved in the way I suggested above, by saying that politics aiming at equality and liberty that nevertheless uses authority as a means to these ends is Left-wing. Accordingly, the early Soviet Union was Left-wing (and how much it became Right-wing later is debatable and complicated). I think this matters more than it might seem to.
As it happens, I think it does an injustice to the richness of conservative thought as well, but I'm not here to defend conservatism: the conservatives can do that themselves.
*I'm not accusing you of this @Pfhorrest
It can indeed become a blindness, ideological. It seems a bit too one sided and suspect simply to claim that all the tyranny in the world proceeds from the Right, and I would certainly not claim this. I think the present Left is quite dangerous (not as dangerous as the Right), but dangerous nonetheless. Guilt by identity is indeed a fallacy. I try to do my best to carefully think through things as dispassionately as I can. I would certainly not identify with the Left movement in America, of course, I am even further away from the Right, they truly frighten me because their first recourse is essentially violence. They seem to think strength can solve anything, and yet it is intelligence that accounts for the quality of life.
That was 18th century liberalism. Later, liberalism has become the doctrine that accepts any junk dictatorship as long as it allows capital to do business. What matters to the new (?) liberal is the market, and if that requires a police state in order to eliminate a few thousand opponents, it does not make him sick. (Pinochet, Videla, etc.)
So there is a conclusion:
There cannot be a true liberalism that does not defend the conditions of equality that make possible the real exercise of freedom. That is why some liberals (Mill) ended up convinced that there can be no liberalism without socialism. I subscribe to this opinion.
What counts is that no one spits out blood so that another can live better. (Atahualpa Yupanqui) And we will talk about the greater or lesser intelligence later.
What I actually referred to was the Soviet government's conscious aims, and its actions to destroy the monarchy and the old social hierarchy. The whole point was to say that even without moving in a more "democratic, liberal" direction, it was Left wing. I mentioned...
Quoting jamalrob
Anyway, to answer your question it might be fun to look at the things the Soviet government did that together make it hard to characterize it as anything close to fascism, or anything like the hierarchy that had existed before the revolution:
In this list I've mixed up policies that were introduced at different times, I'm very aware that several of them were later reversed, especially under Stalin, and I'm not even saying that they were all unreservedly good or true to their stated ideals in practice. I think you're right that Stalinism in particular was very far from being progressive, and you're right that democracy and liberty were lacking. But to simply label the Soviet Union as a fascist tyranny just won't do.
@ssu Before you rush to tell me that, for example, the Soviet Union's support of anti-colonial movements was cynical and strategic, or that their socioeconomic changes in the countryside led to the starvation of millions, or that Stalin wasn't very nice to the Finns: yes, I know all that. It's not the point.
Actually the 19th Century was when liberalism had it's major successes. Yet once the objectives had been achieved, classic liberalism became part of what is now part of conservatism.
Have to say a lot of references to Stalin from many people here.
Yet the Soviet Union lasted after Stalin for nearly 40 years. Surely when Nikita Khrushchev came into power the Russian Civil War was ancient history and the Communist Party was firmly in control. Krushchev denounced Stalin, relaxed the repression and cencorship in an era which is called the "Krushchev Thaw".
Wouldn't that have been the perfect moment to have this democratic Marxism as surely Khrushchev was a confident marxist-leninist?
Communism is not an ideology. One cannot force it to come about, if Marx is correct the contradictions of capitalism will lead to it.
More to the point, the desperation of this strawman is unrelenting. You have attacked, attacked, attacked the Soviet Union and tried to assign it to every person you disagree with on this thread. The challenge for you is to get serious, try interacting with the ideas of Marx!
What liberal objectives had been achieved?
I'm not sure. I've been arguing against the idea that the Soviet Union was a Right wing or fascist tyranny, and I think you're on my side in that debate. Otherwise, maybe you want to suggest that the Soviet Union was both Left-wing/Marxist, and had no potential to become democratic. Well, I agree with that. Or perhaps you want to say that democratic Marxism is an oxymoron. You might be right about that too, in some sense.
But, taking your last question seriously, here's the way I see it. The thinking of the party at that time was that there could be no democracy or true communism in the Soviet Union until western Europe and the rest of the world had their own proletarian revolutions, or rather Soviet-style, Soviet-dominated Communist rule for mutual security. Before that happened, democratization wasn't on the cards. Krushchev denounced Stalin and eased up on the repression because he wanted to be the one to do what everyone knew had to be done to ensure the country's survival. He was very far from being a democrat or humanitarian.
The challenge for you is to understand that Marxism-Leninism has something to do with Marxism and that Marx did have influence on history. Hence we indeed can reflect how the theory has worked in reality.
And then of course we could start talking about another country, quite sidelined from this discussion btw, where it's present leader gives a speech about Karl Marx in 2018 with the following quote:
But if I would start talk about this country above and their belief in Marxism, likely you, JerseyFlight, would disregard it and not even think of them as true Marxist. Yet in my view the above quote comes from person that holds dear Marx in a way he could be argued to be a Marxist.
Many.
Starting from things like representative democracy and universal suffrage, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the ending of mercantilism and feudalism. Or starting from things like a conservative will not say that the monarch has supreme power because he or she is anointed by God and because the Bible says so.
Nope, your present day conservative will utter something that 18th and 19th Century liberalism fought for and won. And as a conservative, guess that fight was long ago.
Yes. We really have to stick to the real definitions as otherwise they become just derogatory adjectives without any clear meaning.
Quoting jamalrob
Had it the potential? It is actually a good question. "No potential" might be too narrow minded. Remember that Western economists were indeed worried of Soviet Union, led by Khrushchev, really passing the US. Sputnik did dent that feeling of American technological superiority.
Quoting jamalrob
And are Marxist-Leninists humanitarians and democrats? Let's remember that Khrushchev did face a Stalinist opposition and faced a challenge with the Hungarian uprising. The historical fact is, if a country has had a totalitarian system and that then is tried to do away with, you do have to have all that bread and butter to keep the people happy. Just giving people a voice but not anything else is destined to create trouble.
In a way this question can be put to the present with modern day China. The Communists are in power and yes, they have transformed their country. The did get the economy going (and of course, sacrificed a lot in doing so). As I above showed to JerseyFlight, the Chinese leaders do have a lot of good to say about Marx, so much that they actually sound like Marxists. Even if the economic system is more closer to classic fascism than theoretical marxism.
The thing is that once people take to heart an ideology, they take it literally. How Marx said it is considered truth by some, not useful views that one can the use to mold something else at the present. That's the problem with ideologies: the hard-core believers try to dominate the discourse and accuse others of being sell-outs.
None of that had been achieved in the 19th century, as you said, but in a very limited and formal way.Cf. the strong criticism of Engels and Dostoevsky from the left and from the right. Even in the twenty-first century, these ideals cannot be said to have really triumphed. Unless you consider the standards of Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey to be sufficient. Or do you consider them to be fulfilled in the United States of America?
What really happened is that the liberals - a few exceptions aside - became conservative as soon as they got a sufficient dose of market freedom. The rest was left ad calendas graecas or to the mercy of rhetoric and propaganda.
As the President (counselor) said, "It's the economy, stupid!" He would know what he was saying, wouldn't he?
The Chinese leaders are not Marxists, nor do they have a moustache. They long ago gave up Marxist rhetoric for pure capitalism. In other words, they are as Marxist as Putin is a Democrat. Or less so.
The comparison with fascism is superficial. They have in common that they are capitalist police states and state interventionism in the economy. So does nationalism. Some comparison can be made, as long as it is not attributed to Marx, whose basic theory was the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and workers' internationalism. That is, quite the contrary.
Apparently not, just look at the speech from Xi Jingping. So quoting Marx and Engels is giving up Marxist rhetoric?
Quoting David Mo
Well, A. James Gregor thought otherwise of fascism as "a variant of classical Marxism", but as I've argued here that Stalin was a leftist dictator, I'll go with the mainstream definition of fascism being right wing. Here are some definitions:
As obviously China is OK with the capitalist market economy, the Chinese Communist Party still controls quite largely the economy through the five year plans (now 13. is going) and huge like the projects as the "One Road, One belt initiative" started in 2013. In free market capitalist societies there isn't anything like that.
It is rhetorical. Because they limit themselves to generalities and avoid entering into the fundamental concepts of Marx's thought, which would leave them with their asses in the air, as they say in my country. For them Marx is a fetish. This usually happens with almost all religions and ideologies. I also know many democrats who are only democrats in name.
Quoting ssu
You can play with words as much as you want. The socialization of the goods of production or the dictatorship of the proletariat were the devil for the fascists. That's why they fought and fought violently. Quoting ssu
These characteristics serve the Chinese regime, Mussolini's fascism and all dictatorships that have always existed. To talk seriously about fascism, we need to refine it a little more.
They did try, didn't work, then changed things.
But do you imply that the Chinese Communist Party wasn't before Marxist?
Or does this mean that Marx is beyond criticism to Marxists? Marxists really put him on a pedestal for worship with anyone straying of the path of wisdom is a heretic?
On the first question I do not have enough information about the history of the Chinese Communist Party. I am talking about the current Chinese Communist Party.
On the other questions: I believe that the criticism of Marx is perfectly legitimate. I have raised some in this forum.
But you confuse criticizing Marx with saying that you are following Marx's theory when you are not following it. In any case, I know Marxists who do not put Marx on a pedestal. They simply think that he was fundamentally right. That's why they consider themselves Marxists.
Ummm....Ok. :smirk:
In my view thinking a philosopher/economist was fundamentally right is the definition of putting him on a pedestal.
Then the world is full of pedestals.
Seriously, it is very different to say "I think X is right" than to say "X is infallible in everything he says or does".
:up:
Come on, let's be honest here. ssu, you are something of an anti-Marx fanatic, and you don't comprehend the first thing about his philosophy. Even professors who disagree with Marx recognize his genius. With you it's all poison of the well.
The problem with this is that it is impossible to believe that equality and liberty can ever be imposed by any authority.
The irony is that the Left mostly masquerades as the bringers of freedom and equality by virtue of the guiding hand of beneficent authority, and the Right portray themselves as the deniers of any authority in the name of freedom and equality, and in both cases what is really going on in practice is the pernicious imposition of authority by corrupt power.
The authority of the left pretends to be just and beneficent and the authority of the right pretends not to exist. The only hope for humanity seems to be the enlightenment of the masses. I hope for that but do not expect it.
In my opinion this is precisely the concrete aim of revolution. It is not the binding together or workers to form a dictatorship, but quite simply, the broadest possible expansion of social education. Education is the necessary pre-revolutionary work of a quality revolution. So there is a serious question that we are confronted with as thinkers, how do we do this? How do we maximize the power of our own lives in the direction of expanding education? We already know this is the great need, the question then becomes how to realize it in the most comprehensive and qualitative terms possible?
However, this question drives us back to the question of property, of space, which is required to produce qualitative existence. Education presupposes material factors in order to achieve quality, without these basic needs it will fail. There are serious questions here, not just question of abstract theory, but questions of praxis.
I agree that the salient question is not one of theory, but praxis. How, in a world where power seems to be always in the hands of those who control material resources, or what stands in for them, do we convince those in control, to relinquish some control, and give back to society sufficient of their wealth to enable the adequate education of all?
The other problem is that this is not the only problem. Overpopulation and overuse and abuse of resources, and in general the seemingly almost universal view of the world (not to mention people) as resource, is looking more and more like an emergency.
This question is exactly direct to the issue. Tragic that the class structure makes it so we have to petition those in power in one form or another. This has to stand as an argument against such a system's intelligence. Very difficult is it to see how such organization would be the result of an advanced species, as it amounts to self-negation. The situation is truly dire, millions live in poverty, technology and land are horded and leveraged against the well being and freedom of other humans. This is tyranny.
The question you ask is a live one... how do we approach those in power? We need space to live! We need access to the earth! Private property negates man's ability to meet these needs.
This is right, however the very existence of all those billions has been made possible by the most energy dense resource there is: fossil fuel. The developed countries have given just enough to the so-called 'Third World' to gratify corrupt leaders who allow their lands to be bled dry, and their subjects to be held in thrall as slave labour wherever it is economically viable (i.e. profitable).
And there are other tyrannies, the one which is most neglected being the tyranny of our species over other species, and the tyrannous pollution and destruction of wild habitats everywhere.
I can see no practicable strategies that could be deployed quickly enough to save enough of the biosphere to enable our current civilization to continue. Proper education of everyone would obviously be a huge step forward, and would likely reverse the trend towards growing populations, but even if it could be brought about, I fear its effects would be too slow in reaching fruition to sufficiently protect the biosphere and with it, humanity's present system.
All species will overuse resources if they can, to their own detriment and even local demise. We have become a global species, and if we overuse resources there is nowhere else to go. To be honest I see little possibility other than humanity's return to gatherer/ hunter and/or simple agrarian life following an enormous reduction of population and complete breakdown of our present systems. How long that will take is anybody's guess, although it's hard for me to imagine it being much more than a century.
Interesting that rational and empirical analysis of the situation brings us to a state of resignation. Like Adorno I am a kind of rational romantic, which simply means I believe in the power of thought.
Quoting Janus
I believe this takes us in the direction of a philosophy of the future. That is just it, learning is too damn slow. Thought must construct a way to speed up this process, we don't have any other choice. As far as I see it, this makes scholasticism its own ideology. The question is no longer how to educate, no longer, how to communicate, but how to do it swiftly while minimizing the loss of quality. The more minds combine together to solve this problem the more success is likely to be achieved. My thinking has been in this direction for quite some time now.
Humans want to turn to computers to turn themselves into computers, but I do not see this as a solution, large quantities of information is not the same as quality thought.
I don't see it as resignation. I "hope for the best and prepare for the worst". I also believe in the power of thought, although not so much in a "mind over matter" sense. So, I think thought is ultimately constrained by actuality. I'd be willing to lend my resources to any strategy for the betterment of human life if I was convinced it had a more than even chance of success. Following that maxim, I would never consider entering politics, for example.
If one had the energy, the right kind of intelligence and the disposable funds to start, I think making a fortune in the financial markets, where no one is directly exploited, and then giving it all back to society in the most effective ways would be one of the most likely successful strategies. Personally I don't possess the talent or the nerve for that, though.
"Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.
"Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property.
"The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property.
"The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.
"Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.
"Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.
"When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need — the practical expression of necessity — is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today." Marx, The Holy Family, Chapter IV “Critical Criticism” As the Tranquillity of Knowledge, Or “Critical Criticism” As Herr Edgar
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm#4.4
What Marx has stated here is truly heartbreaking. He did not invent the proletariat class, it is a symptom of the capitalist organization of society. And as a symptom it imposes restrictions and limitations on that class.
What is most interesting is when Marx says, "When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary."
This class is not an elite class, Marx recognizes it because the social and economic conditions under which it is forced to live and develop impoverishes its quality and potential. He says this class must negate itself not proliferate itself. This is almost too much to bear.
"It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do."
This is so damn tragic upon reading it I nearly cried.